Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-34-grants-and-fellowships 

 

Key points: Grants, fellowships, residencies. 3 types. Fellowship, Money to support your work. Project fellowship, money for a specific project. Residencies, go somewhere and write. Alone or in a community. Who's paying? Governments, foundations, individuals. 4th type, prizes! What do you have to apply? It depends, but the core is usually a writing sample (25 pages). Also a personal artistic statement. How do you research these opportunities? Check Creative Capitol and Philanthropy News Digest. It's a long timeline! Impact. Who are you as an artist?

 

[Season 19, Episode 34]

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 19, Episode 34]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Grants and Fellowships.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] And I'm DongWon.

 

[DongWon] So we wanted to do an episode talking about how to get grants and how to get fellowships. We've been getting a lot of questions on our Patreon about this over time. Erin has mentioned this on the podcast a couple times. And it's a thing that I think about a lot. Unfortunately, not as informed about it as I would like to be. So this is a little bit of us grilling Erin about how to do this. But because of what I do and the friendships I have, I know a lot of people in the literary world as well. Right? Who do more literary fiction. I've noticed that many of them seem to sustain themselves going from residency to residency, going from fellowship to fellowship. They're being able to fund their creative work through a lot of money that's coming through arts organizations, from the government, from a variety of sources. So... I've never seen science fiction writers applying for these fellowships, even though clearly they would be able to get them. Until I met Erin, who's very good at this. Every time I talk to Erin, she's off in Alaska or some other beautiful location writing in a cabin, because somebody is sponsoring her to be there and to do that work. So, I was hoping you'd tell us a little bit more about the grants and fellowships ecosystem and how to do your research and how to start applying for some of these.

[Erin] Sure.  Well, let me start by sort of d… Grants and fellowships is like a kind of broad term for this whole ecosystem of get money from people for being art…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Doing art. Whatever. I think… I tend to think of them as having sort of three… There's three main types. One is where people give you money, a fellowship, that's just about supporting the work you've done so far. So, this is the type of thing where they're like, "Send us your writing. You're a great writer. We just want to give you money to continue to produce art." There is no… You don't have to give it to us. You don't have to, like, turn it over. You could, literally, like sit and stare at the wall. We just want to make sure that you don't have to spend time working or doing other things. We will just give you that money generally. That is honestly, the best kind…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] There are people who do that. Then, you've got your project fellowship, project grant. That's where you go to somebody and say, "I'm going to write this book," or "I'm going to do this short story collection. Please give me money for this specific purpose." They usually then expect you to then deliver that thing. They want you to have the book or the short story collection or some explanation of what you did with the time, if you don't give it back to them. Then, the third is residencies, which is when you go stay somewhere. Sometimes, usually, ideally on somebody else's dime or for free. There are residencies that you can pay for, and it's like you get a discounted rate. So, it's like you can go stay in the south of France for like 300 dollars a week which is much less than you would normally spend to stay there. Basically, residencies are a wide variety. Sometimes, it's like you alone in the Mojave Desert. I literally just saw an application for that yesterday. Just in a hut. I hope you like yourself. You just…

[DongWon] I'm gonna get that one. That sounds like my dream, to sit in the desert by myself. No one bothers me.

[Erin] Exactly. Then there are the ones that you do where you're in a community. Like, I was in Alaska for a few months ago for Storyknife, which is one where you go up to Homer, Alaska. It's for women and women identified writers. Each person is in a cabin, and there's six of you at a time. You get fed, which is lovely. So that you just focus on the writing. Often, residencies don't ask you to produce something specific. Occasionally, they want to see your work. But a lot of times, they just want to put you in a location where you're away from your life and your normal responsibilities and you can just go and write. So those are the kinds of things that you can get.

 

[DongWon] Who is giving you money to do these things? Who's paying for this?

[Erin] It really depends. So's sometimes it's the government. As we like to say. The government has money for creativity because a country, city, state, province without art is not as cool, and people want their jurisdiction to be cool. So they put some money into arts funding. So what they will do is they will say you have to have lived in this state. So, like, there is usually a residency requirement. You can't get in a van and just drive from state to state taking their arts money. I mean, that would be great, but you can't. Instead, usually, you have to live there for anywhere from a year to five years, depending on the place. Then, you say, "I have been doing so much to enrich the artistic life of insert your location here. Please give me money so that I may continue to do so." So, sometimes it's the government of wherever you are. Then, sometimes, it's foundations of people who just love the arts. People who have made it in the arts and want to like pay it forward to the next generation. And they will want to give you all the money.

[Mary Robinette] My mom was an arts administrator. That was one of the big things that she did was fundraising. Mostly for grants, but also in order to be able to give fellowships to people. So they were getting money from the government, from things like the National Endowment for the Arts. But also from a lot of individual donors as well. Individual donors will sometimes then also set up their own little programs. Because either they are genuinely philanthropic or they need a tax break. Giving to the arts is one of the ways you can do that.

[DongWon] If you watch a lot of PBS programming, you'll see a lot of names that will come up in these spheres over and over again. Certain foundations, certain arts organizations, and certain private donors give a lot to support the arts in this country. If it sounds crazy that the government will give you money to make art, please know that this is a recent change in that that has become less common now than it used to be. The NEA used to be a really amazing sponsor of a lot of artists, both visual arts and written arts in the country for decades and decades. Right? It was an important part of how our government operated and how we made great art in the country. Many, many countries overseas… I know if you're in the UK, if you're in other parts of Western Europe, there's just an enormous amount of funding available for creatives who are trying to make art, and that the government will sponsor you to do that. So, that still exists in this country. It is not as robust as it once was, but that doesn't mean it's gone away. Getting any money has become a little bit more difficult over the past few administrations, but it's still out there.

[Mary Robinette] Well, these organizations, the ones that give you the fellowships or the grants, kind of exist to serve as a bridge between people who are creating the arts and the fancy people who have the money. Because, like, I can't go to a fancy person and say, "Hello. You need to do this." But I can go to an organization, and that organization has a fundraiser whose job is to go to places to get money from fancy people.

[Erin] Also, whose job it is to, like, evaluate. Because maybe you're like, "I want to give money to great writers," but you're like, "I don't really have time."

[DongWon] Yup.

[Erin] "To determine which… Who those great writers are, and I don't want to just give to the three people I know. So, I'm going to give money to an organization that has, like, a panel of people who will judge the writing," and that actually is probably a good segue into, like, what do you even have to do?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] What are these people asking for?

[DongWon] Well, before we make that [jump] though, I wanted to point out there's a fourth category, which is prizes. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[DongWon] These organizations also run awards, usually annually, of who are the best writers? Who's making the best work in this area, in this category, in this identity group? Whatever it is. There's plenty of organizations, and those often have money attached to those prizes as well. So, that's another thing you can look out for to submit your name for certain prizes, either locally or nationally, whatever it is.

[Erin] That is very true. It's funny, because I've gotten prizes, but in my mind I still think of them as [garbled chips] so I always forget that it's an actual thing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Poetry is also a field that has a lot of prizes, so including speculative poetry, so, for my spec poetry people out there, there are a lot of poetry prizes where they actually publish your poetry, and then they also often give you money.

[DongWon] It is, unfortunately, the primary way to get a collection published these days is to win a prize. It is very hard to publish a collection of poetry through a press directly. Most poetry presses are funded in some way, and are picking what their publishing through these prizes.

[Erin] The funny thing is, I know that a little bit because of going to residencies. Which is… This could run plug for sort of group residencies which are lovely, is that a lot of times they go across genres. So there's not really like many like speculative fiction only residencies. But I was in residency with poets and then with literary fiction and with people who write essays and do academic writing. So you learn a lot about other kinds of writing. Then you can use it to kind of inform your own creative life. Which is one reason that I absolutely love it. And… Is it time for the book?

[DongWon] It's a little early, but we could do it

.

[Erin] No. We will not break. Instead, we will talk… Just take a second to talk a little bit about what do people actually ask you for when you're going for a fellowship? It really depends. I actually keep shockingly no one a whole table that has all of, like, what each person needs. But… A lot of times, a writing sample is going to be the core of what you have to give. So you're going to have to give your best 20 pages, 25 pages is usually the limit of what you're going to have to do. Which, luckily, is about the length maybe of a short story. Or, if you used to submitting your novel, you're used to sending… It's like, here, this is my great work, that's the same type of thing that you can actually send on to a grant or to a fellowship to let them know this is who I am, this is what I like.

[DongWon] So, when you're submitting a query, we always say first 10 pages. Right? When you're doing a grant application, does it have to be the first 10 pages, or should it be a selection somewhere else that you think is particularly… Like, what are they looking for in that case? Do you know?

[Erin] They're looking for something that's going to make them go, "Wow, this is great writing." So I think that it can be a section from anywhere in your novel. You can even, like, give a little bit of an explanation of where it comes from. But if it's really contextual, if you have, like, a piece where it's like you really have to have read the first 50 pages to truly understand the genius of this moment, I would not send that…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because they're not going to do it.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] So you really want something that's going to grab people, almost the same way that when you pick something for a reading, you really want to pick something that kind of starts strong, brings people in, and ends at a really great point where people are thinking, "Oh, I'm really wondering what happens next," or "I feel like I've had a really satisfying experience." So that they're like, "Oh, I got this great bite-size sample of this person's work, and I just want them to produce a thousand more bites, and I will pay them for that."

[Mary Robinette] All right. Let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll talk about some of the more nuts and bolts of this process.

[Erin] Let's do it.

 

[Shawn] Hey, it's Shawn Nelson, founder and CEO of Love Sack and host of the Let Me Save You 25 Years podcast. Curious how successful people really made it? Tune in to hear from guests like Travis Mills, a true American hero, and Nate Chexits, cofounder of Rone. We dive deep into their stories and lessons that shape them, so you can skip the trial and error and get straight to the good stuff. You can find me wherever you get your podcasts. That's Let Me Save You 25 Years with Shawn Nelson. Listen now.

 

[Mary Robinette] This week, I want to tell you about a nonfiction book called Extreme Economies by Richard Davies. This book looks at what happens to economies at the margins of the modern world due to circumstances ranging from tsunamis to incarceration to the world's first digital state. Davies challenges conventional economic thinking, offering a glimpse into how extreme circumstances molds societies. For writers seeking inspiration, but who are scared of economics, this is an easy and engaging read. I highly recommend extreme Income Economies by Richard Davies.

 

[DongWon] Okay. Now that we're coming back from the break, I have a question for you, Erin, which is how do you begin to research these organizations? How do you know what's out there and what's your process look like to build your incredible spreadsheet that I know you have?

[Erin] I will tell you that, but before I do, I just wanted to note that the… Sadly, the writing sample alone is not the only thing that you may have to do if you are applying. The other thing is a personal statement. Now this is… Can be terrifying for people. This is where you try to sum up you are as a writer, as an artist, in a page that will really go along with your writing sample, ideally two things that complement each other. Like, in your personal statement, you don't want to be, like, "I use comedy to really like_the hilarity of life." Then it's like a story about eight ducks dying.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] That's… In a not funny way. So there's like… You want the two things to sort of complement each other.

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Erin] And create like a really nice picture of who you are. We can talk a little bit about techniques about that later. But, how I research them is I believe in really cheating off of other people's work. Not when I write, but when I apply for things. There are some great organizations. We're going to make a resource heavy liner notes for this, so that you can have all the links and apply to all the things. But, Creative Capitol is a place that gives money to experimental artists. But something they also do is they actually publish every two months here are opportunities coming up for artists and writers to get money from people who are not us. So they do that. Philanthropy News Digest sends out RFP lists, like, these are places you can send proposals to, and under arts, they have a lot of the big residencies and arts places that you can get money from.

[DongWon] An RFP is a request for proposal.

[Erin] Yes. Sorry, I used to work in funding…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So, this is how I found out about a lot of this stuff. So, yeah, Philanthropy News Digest has stuff. There is a person, a lovely person named Felicia, I can't remember her last name, who sends out every other week opportunities for people, both jobs and fellowships, for something which I cannot remember the name of. But she's a lovely person, and we'll put her newsletter in the notes as well. There's a lot of people who are out there compiling these lists for you and just sending them out to you. The main thing is just keeping track of what you want to do, what can you do, and when are the deadlines. I will say that a lot of… For some reason, especially on the residency side of things, there's a big deadline usually in March and October. These tend to be the seasons, like, September October, and like February March, when a lot of people want stuff at the same time, so it's good to sort of think about that and try to be as ready for it as you can be.

[DongWon] That's pegged to the reporting schedules that they have to give back to the NEA because they're… If they're getting money from the federal government, they need to tell the government, "Hey, we fulfilled our grants." Right? So, generally, they're taking those applications so that they can report back, "Yes, we've given out X dollars." Right? So when you're looking at applying for these things, keep in mind that they want you to apply. They need you to apply. Otherwise, they have to give that money back to the government, and they don't want to do that. Right? Because that's also a part of their operating expenses. So they are very eager for you to apply. They want you to do that. So, I'm really encouraging you to take this very seriously and throw your hat in the ring.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things to also recognize about this is that there's an extremely long… There's a long timeline.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So this is also one of the things when I was applying for grants when we were doing theater… Puppet theater, that you're applying for a grant now for a show that you're going to do in two years often, there was this really long cycle. Frequently people… I will see people in science fiction and fantasy who are just trying to get a grant for, like a convention. They're like, "We're going to do something next week." I'm like, "No. There's no window there."

[Erin] Even with project proposals, for the ones that will say, like, "I want to get money to, like, write my short story collection," I wouldn't say, "and I've got 10 of the 12 stories done today." Because by the time they give you the grant, they figure you're done. A lot of times, what you're pitching them is the project after the one you're currently working on. But you can pitch it like a dream, like they're not actually going to hold you to it, and be like, "You didn't put this specific element in." It's really about painting a picture of what it is that you do think that you would like to write. What could you do if you had unlimited resources, what could you do if you had time to do it? Then, just put that dream on paper. Because a lot of what you're trying to do… Like, I know, guys… I know you all like grants and fellowships can sound really dry. But what you're doing is you are building a dream of what you wish your creative life could be and then giving that dream to somebody else, selling it to someone else, and saying invested in my dream. Dream this with me. So what you want to be doing when you're writing up these things is saying, like, "It's not just I want to write a story about a robot. It's that I want to explore the way that robots really make us understand our humanity in a different way." That's something that moves me and it's something that should move you. So that even if I wrote a different story, you know that it's coming out of this place that's really exciting and really makes you think differently about the world.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that grant givers will often be looking for is what I call impact. Which is, what are the ripple effects from giving this grant to someone? So, if it's like we can give this grant to this person and it's going to make their life better. That's great. But if there's someone who's writing caliber is the same and you can see, oh, this is going to have these ripple effects where it's going to affect these different communities, that person is going to weight higher, because they have more impact. That… Because they do have a limited amount of money, so they want the most impact for the dollar.

[Erin] It can be a little scary. Because I think we're used to thinking about the next story and the next book and not thinking about you as like a product and you as an artist. I actually think whether or not you apply to a grant or fellowship, it's really nice to think about what are you doing? Like, look at the stories that you've written, the things that interest you, the media you're looking at. What is it about storytelling, the way that you tell stories, that's different than everybody else? What is it that draws your eye?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Or that would draw other people to you? I think that's a beautiful thing that you get a chance to do in an artistic is to think about self that way.

[DongWon]. Totally. It's really interesting, because for publishing, we don't ask for an artist statement, we don't ask for that kind of personal statement. But it's what I'm looking for, it's what I'm trying to figure out when I'm reading your query, when I'm reading your work, is what your whole deal? Why are you doing this? Right? That's an important question for me is understanding what is your impact? Why are you trying to do this? Right? So, learning to articulate that in an explicit way will help you communicate that when you are approaching the publishing process. Because that's a big part of your story. So much of publishing well is being good at telling your story in addition to here's what the book is. Right? So, learning to pitch pitch yourself for the grants process is very similar to learning to pitch yourself for the publishing process.

[Erin] And for the convention process. I was thinking, like, the other time that your asked to write a paragraph of who you are and what you can talk about is a lot of times if you're trying to be part of a convention. They'll ask you for, like, what could you speak about, like, where should we put you on panels? Being able to do that in a compelling way can help you get selected for panels and for things. [DongWon] Absolutely.

[Erin] Which is just a great part, if that's something that your into in your career.

 

[DongWon] So what are some red flags to look for when you're looking at considering applying for a grant, or especially applying for a residence what are things that make you go, "Oh. Maybe not this one." Right? Or maybe they've all gone well? Right? Maybe this isn't a big concern as much as it can be when you're trying to find an agent or a publisher. Right? But I have to imagine not all arts organizations are created equal. Right?

[Erin] See, I would say… First of all, just like know yourself a little bit. Like, I don't know that I want to spend three months in the Mojave Desert alone. And applying for things just because they're there is, like, not the best. You can always challenge yourself, but if you're like, "I don't know how I would do with solitude in a residency." Maybe apply for a one week alone residency and see how it goes. Or spend a week in your house alone without talking to anybody, and say, "Did that work for me?"

[Chuckles]

[Erin] There's one residency that I'm afraid of called Back to Basics in Finland where for two months, you just hang out and you're not allowed to use your phone or Wi-Fi at all. I know many people…

[DongWon] I'll see you guys in two months.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Who are like, "Yes." I'm like, "Nah. I think I'd want to check my email."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like… I can't even imagine you without constant access.

[Erin] Exactly. So part of it's like know the type of experiences that you want to have. I think one of the things that can happen, same thing with publishing, is you're so used to asking. You want to ask, that when somebody says yes, you think I've got to go. But sometimes it's like, no, you don't.

[DongWon, Mary Robinette chorus] Yeah.

[Erin] So, I also Google it, I try to look at, like, other people who have gone. Do they seem depressed after? [Garbled]

[chuckles]

[Erin] Afterwards, other Instagram pictures, are through a sad filter? But what does it look like to be there? Is it something that seems reputable? Is it… Are you going to be alone or with other people? What are they asking you for? Is there money involved that you have to turn over? Then, also trying to find them through reputable places. I'll also list in the liner notes, there's like an alliance of residential programs that kind of is like an overshooting body of a lot of these organizations. So they sometimes know, like… Somebody writes you an email, like, "I've got a cabin, come stay for free." Check, maybe, if they're on that…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Ax murderer? Or philanthropist?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Hard to tell sometimes.

[Erin] [garbled] same coin. So, check to see if they're on the list, or if anybody else has ever done it that you know. That's also a way to tell, by the way… Sorry for the slight ramble… If you qualify. Because sometimes they use confusing language. For example, early career artist. There's a fellowship out of Princeton and one out of Radcliffe where they basically give you 90,000 dollars and a year to just be an artist. Sounds great. It's for early career. But, if you look at who's gotten it, it's like so and so, who's on their third book. Which is still early, but, like, maybe not as early as you might have thought.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] When you went to apply. So it's nice to see who's gotten it, what kind of writing they're doing to see are you falling into sort of the realm of what the other people are doing. You can throw as many applications as you'd like in, and a lot of them are now waiving their application fees if you don't have money for. But I think it's always good to like line up your application with the general idea of what they're looking for, which I think is really a good thing to do.

 

[Mary Robinette] I do actually want to mention application fees, because that can be another red flag. If you look at their funding model and they're not getting any funding from outside sources and it's all coming from application fees that's a scam and do not apply for it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] An application fee, in and of itself, is not a red flag. Because there is administrative expenses, and, honestly, sometimes people have application fees just to keep people from applying. It's a form of gatekeeping so that they are not inundated. It's like, oh, are you serious about this or are you just filling it out because it's a form on the Internet? So… But, if their funding model has no donors, if there's no… Like, they don't have any other income source, uh uh. Or if the amount of prize that they're going to award is like… Look at the ratio between how big the fee is… It's like you have to pay 100 dollars to apply for this prize, and we're going to give out a 500 dollar prize.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Scam.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] Yeah.

 

[DongWon] What is your best experience with this process? Right? Whether it was a grant or a prize or a residency. What was the thing that when you think about it, you're like, yeah, this was worth it, I loved doing this?

[Erin]It's hard, because… Honestly, in all truth, they're all great. I love money from everyone. Thank you.

[chuckles]

[Erin] Don't hate me, people who aren't mentioned. But I think that the residential experiences that I've had, one at Hedgebrook and one at Storyknife, have been amazing. Hedgebrook is just off Whidbey Island near Seattle. Storyknife is in Alaska. I think for me, there's something amazing about being in a community with other writers in a really… I mean, there's no expectations and they also feed you. Like, the food alone is a good reason to go.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But I think it's also a way to get away from your life and also say to yourself, "I a writer," in a very concrete way. I think you can get a grant, or fellowship, or a prize, and it's amazing. But there's something about living the I am a writer life with other people and saying, like, "Oh, we're all creatives living together," and talking about the things that you're interested in. I mean, it's the same reason I love Writing Excuses, getting a chance to talk about writing with other people who are knowledgeable and smart and amazing, and also for food.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So that is… I mean, those have been standouts for me. I will say, like, I'm going to just acknowledge right now that there's a lot of privilege in being able to take that time away from your life and participate in a residency. Some of them are a week or two weeks, a month. There are some that are whole years long, if you really want to get away from your life. So it's not for everyone and everyone can't do it. But, for me, it's been really beneficial and I would say that if you get money from someone and you might be able to create your own residency, like, for yourself, maybe you could get a grant or a fellowship, and then say, what I'm going to do is rent a cheap AirB&B…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In my town or… And then get away and, like, use that to get a babysitter so that I can write at this period of time. So I do think there's something nice about taking those types of opportunities and using them to, say, "I am a writer and I write."

[DongWon] Thank you so much for explaining all this to us, walking us through the process. That has been really helpful for me, just understanding a little bit more. But… Before we go, I believe you have a little bit of homework for our listeners?

 

[Erin] I do have some homework. It's not going to be a shock. I want you to write a personal artistic statement. Just a paragraph of who you are as an artist. Actually, I'm just going to throw this out there without getting permission from anyone like our producer. But, I would love to see some of these. Like, if you all want to share with us on social media or through our Patreon, like, share who you are as an artist and let us celebrate you and celebrate the artist that you are and the artist that you will continue to be.

[DongWon] I would love to see those. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Me, too. I'm like, "Oh, let's put some of those in the newsletter."

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] All right. Thank you so much.

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 18, Episode 35]

 

[1:30 minutes advertising, almost inaudible]

 

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

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[DongWon] Exactly.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Howard] I think my alignment is lawful lazy…

[Laughter]

 

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] Character is destiny, you know.

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

[Laughter]

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/10/11/15-41-researching-the-fck-out-of-things-with-cory-doctorow/

 

Key Points: When you don't know the facts, tag it with FCK for later fact checking. Do layered research, and check later. Watch out for Wikipedia click holes! Texture detail or plot related? Use FCK for internal consistency checks. Beware research procrastination. How little research can you do? For locations, use the Internet. Use "modified" to get the reader to help fill in. One hard-core, 100% true detail can support a lot of vagueness. How much research do you need to do? It depends on how you cover it.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 41.

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Researching the FCK Out Of Things, with Cory Doctorow.

[Piper] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Cory] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Howard] I'm wondering what FCK stands for.

[Cory] And I'm Cory.

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. So, how do you research things?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] A couple of us write things that are based in some form of reality, not Howard. I know, he's making a face at me.

[Howard] Nonono, that's totally fair. I've… Let me just say that I love the term FCK, which means fact check, and the idea that you can just be hammering away on a manuscript and realize I don't know the facts here, and just say FCK and keep going.

[Mary Robinette] So this is a concept that I use a lot, which is I do layered research. The first thing is that when I am writing something, I tend to gravitate towards things that I am already excited about. So I tend to have a general knowledge of the thing that I am writing about. I will make a short thumbnail sketch of the thing. Then I do slightly more targeted research as I begin to drill into it, and then more targeted research. Then, as I'm writing, if I hit something I don't know, I hit a squ… I just do a square bracket and throw in a descriptor of what is supposed to be there, and then keep going, like [And then the captain said jargon as he handled the thingie that you used to control a ship] and all of that's in square brackets. Cory, you said you use FCK.

[Cory] Yeah. It's an old journalism thing. There's two useful journalism bits. One is TK for to come. That's for a thing that you need to go out and get later. FCK is fact check. The Brooklyn Bridge, all 819 FCK feet of it, would be fact check. TK would be like if there's a quote to, or a thing that you're waiting to look up or what have you. I think, for me, the great benefit of it is not merely that it reminds me to go and look stuff up, it's that it avoids the temptation to engage in what I call writing-related program activity.

[Chuckles]

[Cory] Which is writing adjacent Wikipedia click holes.

[Piper] I do that. Or I used to do that. Or I won't do that after this podcast.

[Cory] It's like, you're… If you're like me, and riven with imposter syndrome and self-doubt, as you work, there's a part of your brain that's just going, "You're screwing this up. Just stop." When you give it an excuse, too, like, go down the Wikipedia click hole, it is going to grab the tiller, and it is going to like take you so deep into that swamp… It was a hole, now it's a swamp… That you will just never find your way out again. Or at least not until your next writing session. So, this is a way to keep going. I guess there are some exceptions where it comes to a… Where you really just can't proceed unless you know an answer.

[Mary Robinette] I find that this method works great for me when it's a texture detail. But if it's plot level, then it's a terrible idea. Because I have written scenes… I'm like, "What about this?" And have written scenes and built novels around something that was wrong, and the thing comes apart. I just recently critiqued a manuscript, and the person had not done their homework. On a plot level. It wasn't the… Like, the details, that wasn't the problem.

[Cory] Right.

[Mary Robinette] It was the things that they had wrong affected the plot. So this is… I'm…

[Cory] I hear y'a.

[Mary Robinette] It's…

[Piper] It's another case of it depends.

 

[Cory] Well, okay. Let me try and square that circle. So, first of all, the other thing that it's really good for is internal plot consistency. Like, if you can't remember…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Cory] Whether they still have the pen. You try to… If you write FCK, make sure they still have the pen. Then you can go back and back shadow your foreshadowing. But… The… For me, the research starts with not an idea, but with the world as it exists in the world. Because I write Science Fiction for the most part, and it's mostly futuristic, mostly near future. I, like you, am non-consensually eyeball banged by headlines all day long. They make me anxious and sad. For the longest time, now 20 years, I have done this thing that sounds like Gollum with indigestion, I've been a blogger.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Borp…

[Piper] I was waiting for you to do that.

[Cory] The thing that blogging, for me, does is it is a way to be reflective instead of reflexive about all the fragmentary ideas that cross my transom. What I do is I block out time every day, and I take all those things as they fly over my transom, and I make sense of them to the extent that I can. I talk about where they fit, how I'm thinking about them, and so on. It has this ancillary benefit that it becomes a thing that other people want to read that is separate from my novels, and makes them interested in my work, and so on. But I would do it if no one read it, first of all for my mental health. Right? Like, it is how I organize narratives about things that are going on in the world, and helps me feel like I have some mastery over it. But also, there's a powerfully mnemonic element to gathering these things and explaining them for notional strangers that differs from a commonplace book. When you write in a commonplace book, you can cheat. Right? You can make these notes that when you go back to them, you have no idea what you meant. But for a notional stranger, you have to be more thoroughgoing. Then you end up with a subconscious that's just kind of like a supersaturated solution of fragmentary story ideas that are banging together and they nucleated and they crystallize into often like semi full-blown novels and short stories and essays and speeches and whatnot. So now you've already done the research. Right? You're already cruising along, the foundational premise, you already know about, because you chased it because it was in your feeds. Right? That's where the story grew out of.

[Mary Robinette] That's very much what I do. It's like why did I write about space? Because I was already reading and thinking about space. Why did I write about Jane Austen era magic? Because I was already reading and thinking about Jane Austen era magic. I have done stuff that's set in a period or a time or dealing with something where I'm like, "Oh, this would be really interesting," and I have to chase it is I don't know anything about it. There I find that I have to do more reading, but the reading is very much to give me that kind of foundational feel of it. It's very organic. I often will read in parallel to writing whatever it is, because it's still just continuing to feed and churn in my mind.

[Piper] I think when I was… Oh!

[Howard] I was going to tell a joke in Schlock Mercenary that involved drawing our solar system millions of years ago. I realized that the age of Saturn's rings would determine whether or not I was going to draw them. I really liked this joke I was going to tell. I can't remember it, which means…

[Cory] It wasn't that funny.

[Howard] It really wasn't that good. But I burnt two hours reading the research and realized they are probably young, but not enough people are convinced that I can get away with drawing Saturn without rings or with proto-rings without making the fans angry, and I don't have the time for that crap. I don't have the time for that crap was the result of two hours of research. But that is a thing that happens, and that was a case where I knew I can't do this without doing the research upfront. There are lots of cases where I'm getting ready to draw a panel, and I realize I need reference art for this. Get Ref is the penciling that goes in that panel, and I set it aside until I got time to get the reference art.

[Piper] I think one of the dangers, though, that we look into… Because we've talked a lot about when it's absolutely needed and absolutely a point, especially when it has to do with plot, or how the plot comes together. But some of the dangers, particularly for those of us who do have imposter syndrome, is that it becomes… Research becomes a form of procrastination, because you justify that you're doing writerly things. Right? You're doing writerly things. It's to improve your book. It's there to prove the veracity of your storyline, add to the plausibility, all the things. Therefore, you've spent hours procrastinating when you actually should be writing the thing. You have a whole bunch of facts that you have checked, but you have not written any further scenes or chapters in your book. You have to make a judgment call as to how important this is to your ultimate storyline.

[Howard] It's the writer's version of $10,000 worth of legit business expense lunches with people, which theoretically would contribute to the bottom line, but the bottom line is not supporting $10,000 worth of lunch.

 

[Mary Robinette] Exactly. I want to approach this from a different way, but let's first pause and talk about our book of the week.

[Cory] Sure. I want to talk about Annalee Newitz latest book. It's called The Future of Another Timeline. It's a time travel story. It's a world in which there are these great regoliths, these huge stone monuments, that if you hit them with mallets in the right way, you go back in time.

[Chuckles]

[Cory] If you're lucky, there's someone there who's got mallets that can send you forward in time again. There are all these protocols, as you can imagine, and there's historical researchers and people do stuff around it. But, men's rights advocates are trying to end feminism. There's a group of feminist time travelers who are trying to head them off at the pass.

[Laughter]

[Cory] It's built around the punk scene in Orange County in the 80s. Now, Annalee Newitz was a poke in Orange County in the 80s. You want to talk verisimilitude and bad… I want to say… Crappy dudes. That's not the word I usually use. Terrible dudes in the punk scene in Orange County in 1980, boy, she's got their number. They say write what you know, and Annalee Newitz knows what a time traveler… Time traveling feminist from the 1980s in the Orange County punk scene would be up to. They're great books. They're really fun. They called them… The secret cabal is called the Daughters of Harriet for the first African-American senator, Harriet Tubman. Boy, is it a lot of fun, and, like, it's madcap in places. There's chase scenes. It's great.

[Piper] I kind of wonder what the mallets look like.

[Cory] Well, they're diff… When you get very far back in time, they get very different, too.

[Mary Robinette] And you'll have to read the book to find out. That book was…

[Cory] The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz.

[Howard] Which, as of this recording, isn't out yet, but… As of this listening, has been out for almost a year. So…

[Whee!]

[Howard] Your timeline…

[Cory] Time traveler.

[Howard] Your timeline has this book in its past.

[Cory] Although someone is coming back in time to stop me from promoting this feminist time travel novel.

[Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] We will keep the mallet away.

 

[Mary Robinette] So the thing that I want to say is we keep talking about how much research do you want to do, but I think actually the question that most writers should ask is how little research can you do?

[Cory] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] so, like, if you're doing location research, do you have to go there? How little research can you do you want to use a relocation in the real world? Opinions? I mean, it has not hurt the Dresden books.

[Laughter]

[Cory] Right. I have a stupid writer trick that is not location based. So you talk about location, and then I want to get in a stupid writer trick.

[Piper] There's never any stupid tricks. It's just the trick.

[Cory] No, I mean like David Letterman's sense. It's delightful.

[Piper] So, I once talked about how much I enjoyed finding a location and soaking it in, to be able to add to my book. Like, I will literally walk around and be like, "I see a story," and start writing it. But I also travel 475 to 80% of my time as part of my day job. Not everyone can travel that way. Not everyone has an expense account for that kind of thing. Also, not everyone wants to travel for various reasons. So, how do you research it? One of the answers to you is the fact that we have this wonderful thing called the Internet, and the Internet, particularly certain platforms like Google maps, actually allow you to not just check something out geographically, not just look at something from a sky level view, satellite map wise, but you can actually look at street-level things. Then you can even research further. There are YouTube videos out there, so you can hear what a place sounds like. One of the recent things that Mackey did with me was take me to a location which, again, we had the lucking us of the fact that we could go to this location. When I took video as reference, I recorded it with sound. Other things are, you write about the place you live in now, or you write about the place that you're visiting now, you take advantage of that, and save that in notes for when you might use it in a future book. But mostly, I really like the fact that the Internet is there for that. You can actually call out. Like, I had a friend who was traveling to a place, and she took pictures for me, and she gave me her impressions of the feel of the place and the people that were there, and the taste of the water out of the tap, which was disgusting.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] Those were cool, like, things that you could capture and put in the book to make it feel like it is actually that thing.

[Cory] If you do have a yen to travel, though, it should be noted that any place you go to research a book, if you're going to generate taxable income from it, becomes a tax deduction.

[Piper] Oh, yes.

[Cory] So, this is very nice. I've written a lot of fiction about scuba diving, as it turns out.

[Chuckles]

[Cory] The… My stupid writer trick I got from James McDonald. He is a gun person, and I am not a gun person. I'm a Canadian who's naturalized British, and I know nothing about guns. But I'll tell you his top tip was anytime you put a gun in your book, people are going to find errors. Because people who like guns like to find errors in the way that guns are treated literately. However, if you put the word modified before you insert the name of the gun, a modified Walter PPK, not only will they forgive you any errors that you've made, they will tie themselves in knots thinking of which modifications you had in mind to make that gun work. They will create elaborate theories. The further they have to reach to make that gun do what you need it to do, the more satisfied they will be with your amazing gun foo.

[Laughter]

[Cory] And the cool gun modification you came up with to make that gun work. It is my favorite super writer trick. I think it applies to other things that people [inaudible]

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Howard] A modified Saturn five.

[Right. Laughter.]

[Mary Robinette] Like, I have so many modified rockets in my… That is… Like, I have used a similar trick. My trick is to drop one piece of knowledge that is absolutely hard-core, completely 100% true, and then be vague about everything else. They assume that I've done my research.

[Cory] Yeah. It's a Douglas Adams tell.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yeah.

[Piper] I will say that modified works for recipes, friends, so if you have food… Food reflecting your character building in your books, modified recipes, you have readers for life because they want that recipe.

[Cory] Yeah, software too. Just like, if you want to make your character like a bad ass super nerd, have them download the source code, modify it, and recompile it. Now it does anything!

[Hooray!]

[Mary Robinette] So these are handy ways. Basically, the answer to the question is, how little research do you need to do? Very little sometimes if you have a way to cover it. The… I think that we're going to wrap it up here. There's some other topics we could talk about in terms of research, but I feel like we've given you some good meaty tools to dig in with.

 

[Mary Robinette] So let's go ahead and give them some homework assignment. Piper, I think you have that.

[Piper] I do. Actually, it has to do with my little tip. So, often we want to research by going to a place that will be our setting. So we want to go in person and get a feel for the place. But that's not always feasible, due to cost, due to timing, what have you. Maybe it's not even safe to go. So, go onto the Internet, friends, and research a place. Not just for the geographic location detail. But for the feel of the place. What it's like for people walking in the streets or not. For what it looks like at street-level, or if there's no streets at all, and even how it sounds. Bonus if you can get actual details about taste and scent from first-person accounts.

[Howard] You know what's a fun way to find first-person accounts? Go to your location, Google your location, discord, Pokémon go…

[Cory] [garbled]

[Howard] Find the Pokémon go community in that location. The things that they have to say about wandering around. So many fun facts.

[Cory] I thought you were going to say Yelp reviews.

[Piper] No. No. Ingress. Pokémon go. Harry Potter. All by the same company. All gathering all that data. Friends. Have fun with that.

[Mary Robinette] So, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write and research. And write.

 

[Cory] Can we take a moment to appreciate the sunset?

[Mary Robinette] We can.

[Howard] I'm facing the wrong direction, then, so I will play the part of the listener who didn't get to see it.

[Mary Robinette] I'll give you the word picture if you want, Howard.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Beyond the reflections of my balcony window lies the smooth ocean that is wine dark. Above it, the rosy colored fingers of dusk creep across as the ocean undulates gently.

[Cory] There's some trees out there, too.

[Mary Robinette] There are no trees.

[Cory] Yeah, there's a little island out there.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, is there really?

[Piper] Land ho!

[Cory] Oh, no, sorry, it's clouds. False horizon.

[Mary Robinette] But you didn't know that, listeners, did you?

[Piper] No.

[Cory] The magic of radio.

[Howard] You're out of excuses. Use the Internet to pretend to visit a place.

[Mary Robinette] Secretly, we're in a basement.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/09/20/15-38-depicting-religions-that-are-not-your-own/

 

Key points: Mainstream religion, historic religion, made up religion? Widespread? In the open or hidden? Beware of exoticizing and making them evil. Respect their beliefs. Research, practitioners and texts. Try to get into the head of someone who believes that. Understand it and respect it. Don't just default your characters, think about how they see their relationship to the cosmos. Religion also sets morals, ideals, ethics. Do they practice it, or do they just live in a culture where it is practiced? How does the religion stand in the community?

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 38.

[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, Depicting Religions That Are Not Your Own.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Tempest] Because you're busy.

[Nisi] And we're not that smart. Clearly.

[Laughter]

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Nisi] I'm Nisi.

[Tempest] And I'm Tempest.

[Tempest] And I called it.

[Laughter]

[Tempest] [garbled] gonna miss this one up.

[Dan] That's okay. Because they are busy.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's why they're in a hurry.

[Laughter]

[unclear] They're so busy, that's why they're in a hurry.

[Dan] It's still accurate.

[Tempest] It's all true.

[Unclear] Oh. Okay.

 

[Dan] Okay. So we went back and forth on this one as to exactly how we wanted to title it, and we like… Depicting religions that are not your own.

[Piper] Right. But really, because this is a writing the other episode, it's also going to be about depicting religions that are not necessarily mainstream ones. Or at least not mainstream ones…

[Dan] Where you live.

[Piper] Where you live, right. So, for us, our context is mainly Western and American. But for… In other places, that context may be different. But for whatever context you're in, there's some things that are important to remember when depicting religion. That includes, like, a living religion, a religion that maybe people have worshiped in the past but may not be worshiped at this time, and, I think, a little bit about religions that we make up. Because a lot of the religions that are come up with in worldbuilding, some of the same problems with inventing religions comes up in depicting religions that are not your own.

[Tempest] A lot of the time when you're building your own religion, you're not just creating it out of thin air, you're building it from factors and events that you have drawn from other religions. Religions, as you were saying, that are living religions or religions that are no longer being practiced but that perhaps have contributed somehow importantly to a living religion.

[Nisi] Exactly.

[Piper] So we're here with Nisi Shawl, again, who is the co-author of the Writing the Other text and the person who came up with the idea for the seminar that became the text. One of the reasons why I especially wanted to talk to you about this is because you practice a religion that is not a mainstream religion here in America, but is a religion that often ends up in fiction depicted badly.

[Nisi] Yes. Well, I've been thinking about whether it was a mainstream religion or not. I would have to say it's not familiar, but it is widespread. Because my religion is Ifa, and it is related to Santeria,Vodun, Lucumi... Which is very widespread in Brazil. So there are a lot of practitioners of my particular religion. The thing is that they may not be out in the open about it, and that you may not know that you're hanging out with someone that practices this religion. Actually, I remember I got on the bus once and I was talking with someone I know about whether or not we could keep up with our religious duties when one of us was suffering from a broken arm. Then my friend got off, and the bus driver started singing one of our sacred songs. It was an Ifa bus driver. So, you never know. So I would say that person was a practitioner, but not out in the open. They weren't like wearing regalia for it or anything like that. When it comes to the depiction, my least favorite is the movie Angel Heart with Lisa Bonet. Yeah. It was supposedly taking place within New Orleans. There are like people with like goat eyes, it was like all this devil stuff. I'm thinking, "This is Christianity. This has nothing to do with anything that I have ever experienced." When I think of good depictions, I immediately think of… First of all, I think of Tananarive Due's Good House. Because that is a horror novel, and the temptation often in horror novels is to exoticize the other and make them evil. She did not do that with my religion. She had problems going on that people were trying to solve with my religion. Thank you, Tananarive.

 

[Piper] So, of the good examples that you can think of, what are some of the other hallmarks of what makes them good? You mentioned not exoticizing or making the religious practitioners the evil ones.

[Nisi] Respect. And research. Respect in that often people are trying to think of my religion as magic, and trying to play it down, lessen it, belittle it, because it's unfamiliar to them. They would classify it as magic rather than religion. So to flip that, I would say respecting any kind of traditional practice and realizing that what is magic to some people's religion to other people. So there's that. Doing research and finding out from practitioners as well as from texts, how things actually went. In the bad example that I keep thinking of, they have people sacrificing babies, they have people like stabbing pins in dolls. Nah.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Nisi] You could just go to a very open ceremony and you would not find any of that going on. You would think, "Oh, well, maybe they're just hiding that from me."

[Chuckles]

[Nisi] No.

[They're not doing all that.]

[Nisi] No.

 

[Piper] I'm going to pause us and ask you for the book of the week.

[Nisi] Oh. Okay. My book of the week is an anthology that I edited that came out in 2019. It's called New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color. 17 stories from writers of many different racial and ethnic backgrounds. From as many places around the globe as I could get.

[Piper, Tempest] Awesome.

[Thank you chorus]

 

[Dan] Cool. I wanted to ask you a question really quick. The… A lot of what you're talking about, Nisi, is this idea of letting… Treating that religion on its own terms, rather than trying to see it and therefore portray it through the lens of your own beliefs. I think we see that a lot. Especially here in the West, which is very, very predominantly Christian and all of these other things that come along with that. So, if somebody wants to present a religion, whether it is a real-world one or just one they've invented for their own fantasy novel, what are some good ways that they can kind of break out of that mindset they grew up with and really see that new religion for what it is rather than some… I don't know, altered version of Christianity or of whatever else it is?

[Nisi] That is really hard. That is what separates a writer from someone who's just kind of fooling around with words.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Well said.

[Nisi] I mean, I myself have tried to do this in my own work. I was very conscious of doing it with Christianity, actually. Because that is not my tradition. Actually, I was taken to a Christian church as a child, but my mother told me we just go to this place because people will talk about us bad if we don't. So I had a basis of skepticism to work from. So I had to write a missionary woman in Everfair, and I had to make sure that I was respectful of her take on things. I think if I can do that, then anybody else that wants to be taken seriously can try.

[Tempest] I think though… What I find interesting is that with religion, that's the one that I have noted that our students have the most resistance to, in part because of there being so much emotionality bound up in religion and religious choices. You say to them, like, you need to get into the head of the African-American woman if you're going to write her. Okay. You need to get into the head of the deaf person if you're going to write them. Okay. You need to get into the head of a person who believes this about angels. They're like, "Yeah, but that's not true."

[Laughter]

[Tempest] But they're… But that's wrong. You're like, "You can… I'm not telling you that you have to believe what your character believes about angels." But you need to understand why your character and people like them believe what they do and respect that in order to then depict that in a respectful way. But it just seems like that's one of the places where people catch, that makes, like, this particular identity category different from the others that we talk about.

[Nisi] I think so. I think another thing came to mind when you were talking about our student, is that we have a spreadsheet of characteristics, traits for different characters in a book. You have students fill this out. They almost always leave the religion column blank. They have not thought about are their characters atheists, are they agnostics, are they practicing Buddhists, what are they? They just… They deliberately, or more likely, unconsciously, don't think about how their characters see their relationship with the whole cosmos.

[Right]

[Piper] I would actually challenge that a little. Not a lot, but a little. In the fact that I think that sometimes, rather than not think about it, they default. Well, of course, it would be this way. There's nothing other or different about what I have in mind for this character when it comes to this topic. So they default. Right? Because there's so much about thinking about religion that also sets your morals and your ethics and your ideals. There's so much that's ingrained, that when a person is developing their character, if they leave religion blank, they're defaulting to the set of morals and ideals and ethics that may have been established. They may not recognize or they may compartmentalize, but it is bound up, often, in your religion. Right? There are certain tenets, or there are certain values that, unless they're atheists or unless they're completely agnostic in some way, deliberately so, they're unconsciously defaulting to the religion they're most familiar with whether they technically practice. Right? Because there's a difference between being a Christian and living in a Christian culture, and the defaults that come with living in a Christian culture. Like, in America, we live in a Christian culture, not because, like, everyone is Christian, but because Christmas is a federal holiday.

[Yeah]

[Piper] Like, that's an artifact of the fact that we live in a Christian culture. Like, so Christmas is a national… Or a federal holiday. Like Rosh Hashanah isn't. But then I always think about the fact that when I lived in New York City, the New York City school system, Jewish high holidays were days off from school. That was a reflection of how much there is a Jewish culture in New York City, and how much that has to be respected because of the fact that it's a large community. You can't just ignore their high holidays, so they get incorporated. But that's one example in one place. I don't know of other places that have that. But I'm sure there are, I just don't know about them. It was a thing that I keyed on to specifically because it was so very different from what I was used to growing up.

[Nisi] Yeah, I agree. I think that that brings us to another point that's really important in representing a religion that's not your own. That is to think of how that religion stands in the community that your writing about. Is it like the majority religion in that community? Is it a minority religion? Are there sects? Are there different kinds of… Is there a historical curve to it? To the practice of this particular religion? Are there insiders and outsiders, orthodoxies, heretics? So you definitely have to think about that in depicting my religion or a religion that you make up or any religion that is not familiar to you as your own.

 

[Piper] Exactly. That actually brings us to our homework for this week. Which is that I want you to choose an aspect of culture that ties in with religion. My favorite example of this is how do people in your culture deal with those who have died. What do they do with the bodies? What kind of ceremonies are done around them? Whether you are writing and what we will call mimetic fiction, present-day America, whether you're writing in a secondary world fantasy, sit down and write 500 words about what happens when a person dies, what happens to their body, what happens to their soul, according to the religious or cultural values, and how does that play out with people in the family, in the town, in the immediate area.

[Dan] All right. That's really cool.

[Laughter]

[Piper] Okay. Well. All of you. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/07/05/15-27-alternate-history-with-eric-flint/

 

Key points: Alternate history makes a change to real history, and explores the ramifications. One kind involves a time travel element, while another just makes a change. It takes research, and people will complain about details. One trick, use locations that were later destroyed. Use historical characters where possible. Also, crowd source your expertise! Think about how to use thoughts and actions of historical people rather than modern thinking and behavior. You may want to use old attitudes to tell a story. But, be aware that your audience may not like those attitudes. Time travelers may help you here. Also, pick the right historical period, and characters.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 27.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Alternate History, with Eric Flint.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guest star, Eric Flint. Thank you for coming on the podcast with us.

[Eric] You're welcome.

[Brandon] We're also recording live at SpikeCon.

[Applause]

 

[Brandon] So, Eric, you are one of the established masters of alternate history. We're really excited to have you on the podcast about it with us. Just in case there is someone listening who doesn't know what alternate history is, how would you define the sub genre of alternate history?

[Eric] Basically, the author makes some kind of change in real history, and then follows what the ramifications of it might be. You can broadly break it into two parts. There's a lot of alternate history also involves a time travel element.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Eric] Where you take somebody in the modern world and put them back in older times. But then there's a different kind of alternate history, what you might consider pure alternate history, where there's no time travel element at all, where the author just makes a change in something. It can be something very minor. But something that's going to have a cascading effect. I've written both types.

[Brandon] So, that sounds to me really hard.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Because I write epic fantasy. No one can tell me I got my history wrong, that I… But it feels like if you pick a time that people have studied a lot, say World War II or something like that, and you say, "Well, this battle changed and I'm going to explore the ramifications of what happens all the way into the future if that one battle was fought differently." It sounds like you have to do a lot of research and listen to a lot of people grumble that you got it wrong.

[Eric] I make it a point… I have not, and have no intention of ever writing an alternate history set in World War II, the Civil War, the Napoleonic era, where there are a jillion reenactors and fanatics who will go berserk over every little goddamned jot and tittle [garbled]

[laughter]

[Eric] "No, those uniforms only had three buttons…"

[Laughter]

[Howard] Well, your problem is that historians, they will let you know when you're wrong, but the reenactors…

[Eric] No, no, no.

[Howard] They'll come to your house.

[Eric] Well, what really drives you nuts is that the issues they're going to give you a hard time about, who in the hell cares? I mean, they really don't have hardly anything to do with the story. My biggest series, Ring of Fire series, is set in the middle of the 30 Years War in central Europe in the 17th century. There are, in the United States, exactly one group of reenactors of the 30 Years War. I made it a point to get on good terms with them a long time ago.

[Chuckles]

[Eric] Yeah, it is a lot of work. Whenever I'm… At least when I'm starting an alternate history series. It gets easier if you go along, as you go along. But whenever I'm early on in an alternate history book, I have to budget about twice as much time as I do for pretty much any other kind of novel. The only other kind of novel I've ever done that requires that kind of research is hard SF. Yeah, there are plenty of times when I envy dirty rotten fantasy writers like you…

[Chuckles]

[Eric] Because you can just wing it.

[Laughter]

[Eric] I mean, you do have to be consistent and care… I mean, there's actually quite a bit of work goes into it, but it's not the kind of…

[Brandon] No. I've… Most of my career, I wrote just in secondary world fantasies that I'd made up. The first time I even touched our world, I made sure to make it post apocalyptic. Cities that had suffered in Norma's disasters that had changed the landscape, the physical landscape. I still got things wrong and got complaints about… I took Chicago and I changed it to steel and blew up most of it and I created an underground and most of it takes place in the underground. Still, people were like, "You know what, that street actually doesn't intersect there."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'm like, "Uh. Man. You'd think that I could change the world enough that I could…" But it is… It's difficult. How do you… What's your go-to method for research?

 

[Eric] Well, all right. There are some tricks I use. When Andrew Dennis and I wrote 1634: The Galileo Affair which is part of the Ring of Fire series, and takes place mostly in Venice. Every single important location except the Piazza de San Marco and the Doge's Palace, which are quite well-known and you can visit them. But every other location that figure in the novel, we situated somewhere in Venice that got destroyed later. So, Mussolini razed it and put up a railroad station in one case, and I've forgotten everything else. So there's nothing left for anybody to go and prove that we're wrong. It's far enough back, there's not enough of a historical record.

[Howard] So, you're like time travelers trying to hide your tracks…

[Eric] Yeah.

[Howard] By putting your activities where something's going to wipe it out.

[Chuckles]

[Eric] It's not just [garbled]. Another thing I will do, I like to use historical characters if at all possible. But what I try to do is… One of the major characters in the Ring of Fire series is a Danish prince, Prince Ulrich. He existed. I mean, he was a real Prince of Denmark. But in real history, he was murdered at the age of 22. Very mysterious episode. So he died at the age of 22. Well, prove me wrong as to how he…

[Chuckles]

[Eric] Evolved afterwards. So I try to find people that were young. In one way or another. It's hard for somebody to… They can second-guess me, but, it's like, "Prove it."

[Brandon] Right.

[Eric] There's a lot of that. No matter how you slice it, though, you're still a lot… Actually, in terms of writing excuses, the two things I tell people there's the biggest and most dangerous forms of procrastination are research and worldbuilding. Because you can do that forever. At a certain point, you just have to say, "Enough!" And start writing a book. Then, yeah, a lot of times, you'll have to go back into more research and do stuff. There's no way around it, there's a lot of work. It gets easier if it's a big long series, the farther you go. Because the farther you get from the breakpoint, as we call it, the more possibilities open up.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop and talk about our book of the week, which is the first book in the Ring of Fire series.

[Eric] All right.

[Brandon] Will you tell us a little bit about it?

[Eric] Yeah. The premise of the whole Ring of Fire series… The first novel is called 1632… It's a very simple premise. There's a cosmic accident that's caused by basically irresponsible behavior on the part of a very powerful alien species, who enjoy manipulating space-time, and what amounts to a fragment of their art hits the earth and causes a transposition in time and place of a whole town in northern West Virginia in modern times. Modern times being the year 2000, which is when I wrote the book. A town… About a 6 mile diameter… I mean, the whole physical area is transposed, not just the people. So that this town materializes in the middle of Germany, in an area of Germany called Thuringia, which used to be southern East Germany, in the middle of the 30 Years War. They just boom, they show up, and there they are. That's the MacGuffin, I mean, that's the premise. That's the only premise. I… It's a three-page premise. I don't spend… It's really let's get on with the story. Take my word for it that this happened. Yeah, I know it's crazy, but who cares.

[Chuckles]

[Eric] We'll go from there. What the whole series is about is how this town of 3500 modern Americans… The impact that this has on the world in general, particularly Europe in the middle of what was probably the most destructive war in European history, at least since the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire. It's also a very fascinating period in history. From there, the series has sprawled out all over the place. There are seven novels that I call the mainline, that sort of run in the center of this series, followed… They depict the main characters and the main actions that happen. But then there are all kinds of side stories that branch off from there. Some become pretty major storylines in their own right. I believe we're up to about 24 novels published by Baen Books. Then, in addition, starting about two years ago, we launched our own publishing house, which we call Ring of Fire Press, which… We have a booth in the dealers' room if you want to drop by. We're publishing our own stuff set in the series. It also has a magazine called the Grantville Gazette that's been in operation professionally for about 12 years now.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Eric] [garbled] done really well.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] If you guys don't know about this whole thing, go research it. Because it is one of the most fascinating like emergent storytelling cultures in science fiction fantasy that these novel started. The people loved reading them, started talking about them, and creating forums. Out of that grew a magazine which has fiction that is kind of members of the community are writing that is all canon about this town, and they know all the people who are in it because it's a somewhat small town and just what they're doing. They'll be like, "We need to get rubber? How do we get rubber? Well, we need to write a story about somebody going…" All of these things… It is really… The network around the 1632 books is just fascinating to me.

 

[Howard] Well, that's the thing that I would like to ask, with regard to alternate history and the research that needs to be done, how much of that in the last 10 years have you been able to crowd source? Have you been able to go out to members of the community and…

[Eric] I was crowdsourcing it right from… When I wrote the first book, I talked to Jim Baen and we set up a special conference in Baen Bar's discussion area devoted to that book. I said to people, "I'm going to need help writing this, because all kinds of… The kind of research I have to do is impossible for one people to do." It's like, "What can you do with modern engines?" So a lot of it was technical. The basic rule I followed, with one exception, was that I used the real town of Mannington, West Virginia, as the model for the town of Grantville. The only big exception is I moved the power plant, which, in the real world, exists in another town called Grant town about 15 miles away. I moved it because I really needed a power plant.

[Chuckles]

[Eric] But that's the only thing I cheated on. So the basic rule, that's been true ever since, is if it's in Mannington, you can put it in Grantville, if it's not in Mannington, you can't. That's the rule. People spend a ton of time, believe me, researching what is and isn't in Mannington.

[Brandon] Do people in the actual town know about this?

[Eric] Yeah.

[Brandon] Do they get tired of…

[Chuckles]

[Eric] We haven't been out there in quite a while. The first… Four years now, going back, I don't know, close to 20 years, the fans of the series hold an annual convention. It's being held here this year. WesterCon is hosting it. The first five years we held it in West Virginia. We couldn't hold it in Mannington, because Mannington doesn't have a motel. That's how small a town it is. So we held it in a larger town of Fairmont, population about 30,000. We did that for five years in a row. But at that point… There would always be new people coming every year, but about at least two thirds of the people had gotten to be regulars. They came up to me and said, "You know, Eric, there's only so many times you can visit a town of 3500 people." I mean…

[Laughter]

[Eric] So… Which is fair enough. So what we started doing after that, Conestoga in Tulsa was the first one that did it. We'll go to a convention and ask them if they're willing to host us. What they get is maybe 50 people showing up who wouldn't otherwise show up. We do all the organizing and tracks and everything else. But basically, it means we don't have to organize a convention because somebody else is already done it.

 

[Brandon] So, kind of getting back to how to write alternate history. I'm actually going to pitch this at Dan first. I know you haven't done true alternate history, but you've done cousin genres.

[Dan] I've done secret history.

[Brandon] You've done secret history, you've also done historical fantasy. So, my big question is, how much do you worry about getting the thoughts, mannerisms, and actions of the historical people right when you're writing a story like this? I preface this by saying when I write epic fantasy, I generally am not trying to write… This is my mode… People who acted and thought like people did in the Middle Ages. I get away from this because I'm writing secondary world fantasies, generally with magical technology that would really place people more post-Renaissance and things like that. But really, they're thinking more along… If not contemporary, modern lines for thought processes. How much do you worry about this?

[Eric] Oh, a lot.

[Dan] I actually…

[Eric] Oh, I'm sorry, Dan. Go ahead.

[Brandon] We'll go to Dan first, and then we'll…

[Dan] I love this question, because I actually got into kind of a big ongoing argument with my editor and copy editor on my Cold War book, which, by the time this airs, will already be out. It's called Ghost Station. Straight historical, not alternate or anything. Set in 1961. Part of the plot hinges on the inherent sexism of the era. That there are two different places where people miss obvious clues because they assume that the bad guy is a man. Which is not to say that the bad guy is not a man, but… I'm trying to do this without spoilers. Anyway, that sexism was important. The editor and the copy editor were both trying to impose more modern sensibilities on this. Changing just kind of some of the minor language. In a place where I would say man, they would want to change it to person. Just in a couple of places, saying, "You know, we kind of want to be more sensitive about this." If it was in narrative, I let it slide. If it was ever in dialogue, I'm like, "No. The fact that this person has this attitude, the plot hinges on it. We have to keep that attitude there." So, it does matter. I think if you're using it on purpose to tell a particular story, you want to have those old attitudes and you want to have those older kind of more antiquated personalities. If you're not, then sure, go ahead, because obviously it's a hot button issue, if everyone who worked on the book kept trying to change it.

[Brandon] I know that when I read Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, like, the way that she made people feel, I don't know, I'm not an expert in that period, but they felt like they were from the period. It really was a big selling point for the book for me. Eric, do you… How much do you worry about this?

 

[Eric] It's… Oh, you worry about it a lot. I mean, it's kind of at the center of what you do. Because if the book isn't historically plausible, it's not going to work as a story. You have to realize that people in the past do not necessarily think the same way, or behave the same way, they do today. There are various ways that I have found to deal… By the way, the issue may involve, at a purely practical level, is that if your audience is so repelled by your heroes, it's awfully hard to sell a book. To give an ill… Unless it was written 2500 years ago. Then, people will give it a pass. But, to give an instance, the Odyssey, the hero Odysseus, the very first thing he does after Troy, they're sailing down and he says, "Oh, there's a village there." And they stop, rob and plunder it. These are the good guys. Okay? There're two… There are several things you can do. One of them is that if you introduce a time travel element and people from the… Our time, then at least you've got a binocular view of what's happening. So you can be depicting the attitudes of people of the time, but you're also depicting how modern people are looking at it. The other is to pick an historical period… One of the reasons I picked the 30 Years War is that that world was not that different from ours. It was different, but it wasn't like ancient Greece, or Ming China. It wasn't that different. The same was true, even more so, with the series I'm doing set in Jacksonian America. Then what I did was went looking for the right character. I needed a Southern character, an effective political leader, whose attitudes would be at least okay for the modern audience. I was lucky, because such a person actually existed. That was Sam Houston. Sam Houston's attitudes on race were not the same as modern people, but awfully close. He was partly raised by Cherokees, so he's very friendly to Indians. He was asked once by Alexis de Tocqueville what he thought about the capabilities of the different races of North America. He said, "Well, there's no question the Indians are equal to Whites." He said, "Blacks are considered to be childish… Childlike and inferior, but nobody ever gives them a chance to do anything, so how can you really know what they're capable of or not?" That's an attitude that a modern audience, okay, they can go with that. Then, I think the other major character is a Northern Irish radical of the time. He's not exactly got modern attitudes, but they're a lot closer. It's a real issue, though. I mean, because you have to do it in a way that's going to be plausible all the way around. So far, I've been able to put off. But there are some areas of history I would just stay away from.

[Brandon] Right. Probably good advice there.

[Eric] Well, unless I could put a time travel thing in it, but other than that, I'd just stay away from it.

 

[Brandon] We are out of time. I want to thank our audience at SpikeCon.

[Yay. Applause.]

[Brandon] I want to thank Eric. Do you have, by chance, a writing prompt you can give to our audience?

[Eric] A writing prompt?

[Brandon] Yes.

[Eric] When you're… Writing takes a lot of intellectual and emotional energy. It really does. It's hard to get started at the beginning of the day. Wherever that day may be for you. I found two things help. I plot ahead of time. Which I strongly recommend, because one advantage to having a well-developed plot is I don't have to sit down in the morning and say, "Gee, what am I going to write about today?" I can look at the damn plot and say, "Okay. Here's where I am." But the second thing is just write. Write a sentence. Just get a sentence down on paper and keep writing. If it turns out that sentence didn't work out right, you can always scrap it later. But start writing, because once you do that, you've kind of gotten into the story. The story itself will kind of pull you into it. But it really is kind of hard to do it. It's kind of like jumping into a pool of ice cold water. It's like the only way to do it is just do it. That's about… That's what I do every day.

[Brandon] Thanks for the advice. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/10/20/14-42-alternate-history/

 

Key points: Worldbuilding alternate history stories? First, an alternate history is extrapolation of what would have happened if something different had happened at some cusp point. Often set some years after the breaking point. There are also stories where the world is basically the same plus X (e.g., magic). Extrapolation? Use the patterns! Worldbuilding, and research, for both types involves much the same approach, a broad view, an inciting incident, and thinking about what are the ripples and ramifications from that. There is also historical fantasy, which is grounded in the real world, plus an addition. It's somewhat like the question of time travel stories, of how resilient the time line is. Does crushing one butterfly change everything, or do even major changes (such as the addition of magic) have ripples, but leave things mostly the same? When some of your readers may know more about something than you do -- be willing to let it go and be wrong. Focus on telling the story, not being right. Talk to the experts! If you don't know the answer to something, don't put it in the story. Use a character who is not an expert, so even if they get it wrong, the reader can say, "Of course." Have your character show they are competent with something you do know, then handwave past the other things. Be aware, common knowledge may insist that you have made up things in your alternate history, even if they are actual real things. Also, just because this wardrobe or furnishing is this year's best, does not mean everyone has it! Most people have older items in their house!

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 42.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Alternate History.

[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] We have a really fun topic today. We are going to talk about how to worldbuild your alternate history stories. Mary, what is an alternate history?

[Mary Robinette] Well, an alternate history is where you take a cusp point in real… Like, you go back and you look at actual history and then you pick a cusp point and then you extrapolate what things would have looked like if a different thing had happened.

[Brandon] Okay. So usually the alternate history is taking place some years after this breaking point, this cusp point as you called it. How do you do that? Like, how do you guess what would happen?

[Mary Robinette] Well, as the person who writes alternate history… The thing is that history goes through patterns all the time. We… There are certain things that are fairly predictable, like the way people respond to certain stimulus, the way we respond to certain events. So what you do is just kind of look at the way those patterns shape when the different thing happens. For instance, we know that there's a kind of 20 year cycle in fashion. So if something happens where there's a cusp point, then fashion is going to go through a predictable change between veneration of the artifice and one of the natural. So you can kind of look at those things. We know that people react to Empire in predictable ways. We know that people react to oppression in predictable ways. That there are patterns there. So you can apply those. Like, a cusp point that I never got to exploit, but was really fascinated by, was the Prince Regent's daughter died in childbirth bearing a male son. A male son. Well done, Mary. A male heir. Queen Victoria was born in response to that. There was a race to produce another child, because Princess Charlotte was the only option at that point. Had she survived, and the pregnancy was survivable… The doctor, her obstetrician, refused to use forceps. If he had used forceps, chances are she actually would have survived that childbirth and the sun would have, too. The British Empire would have looked totally different. Completely, completely different. So that's an interesting cusp point, where you can sit there and go, "Well, we know how we reacted when Queen Victoria took the throne. What happens if we map that on to something that happens earlier?"

 

[Brandon] Now, I've heard people who talk about alternate history, kind of, maybe this is an artificial distinction, but make a distinction between books that are trying to explore what would have happened, like you say, on these cusp points, and books where one thing about our world is different, and instead of trying to go all the way back and extrapolate, you're writing a story where our world is basically the same plus X.

[Mary Robinette] Like Naomi Novik's…

[Brandon] Yeah. His Majesty's Dragon.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Like the Glamorous Histories.

[Brandon] Exactly. So do you see these as a real distinction? Are they approach… Worldbuilding approached in different ways?

[Mary Robinette] I think the worldbuilding is actually approached in exactly the same way.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] You're looking at the ramifications and ripples. The inciting incident is different.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] In both case… In one case, it's an action, a cusp point. In the other, it's the… And now we have magic.

[Brandon] Right. Do you make kind of… I remember you talking about Glamorous Histories where… Something along the lines, I'm going to put words in your mouth, you can change it. But it was something along the lines of you were not interested in the butterfly flaps its wings and so America is suddenly communist. You're not looking at "Oh. If humans had magic way back when, I'm not looking at now 2000 years later that we have completely different nations." But some people might be writing history that way. I don't know.

[Howard] I think of these… I do draw a dichotomy. There is the event-based, the trigger-based, the cusp-based alternate histories, and then there are alternate histories which I think of more as parallel alternates.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] Where the events that we know all kind of happened, but they happened and magic was running along parallel to it. What we are exploring in some cases is… I think of the Glamorous Histories in this regard… How would the Napoleonic wars have fallen out had there been magic? Yet we still win the… I say we. The French don't win the Napoleonic wars.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] In the Glamorous Histories.

[Mary Robinette] I think this is one of the reasons that we have the useful other term, historical fantasy.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] So what I write are… With the Glamorous Histories, are historical fantasy, which is very similar to an alternate history in that it's as much grounded in real world as possible, with this… But it has this addition. Calculating Stars, on the other hand, is a straight up alternate history. Things happen differently, but I'm not violating real-world in any way, shape, or form.

 

[Brandon] Okay. So, how have you specifically done research for say the Glamorous Histories or the Calculating Stars or Ghost Talkers?

[Mary Robinette] It's… It's, honestly, not any different from the way I do research for anything else. I start with a broad overview to kind of get a sense of the world. Then I start thinking about how things shift. With the Glamorous Histories, in particular, with my addition of magic, I didn't want to shift the world very far, so I was very careful when I was constructing the world that I… That's choices I made did not shift the world too far when I was constructing the magic. So, for me, the distinction is less about the kind of research I do and more about the ways in which I'm applying it. It specifically the way I'm dealing with the worldbuilding based on that research.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Margaret] It feels almost like you're dealing with the effects of what… How do you see the timeline, and the resiliency of the timeline, if you were telling a time travel story. Whereas, do you believe, that… Is it a time travel where you crush a butterfly and everything changes, or is it a belief that the timeline is basically resilient, but if you go back in the past and make changes, you'll see some ripple effects, but it's not going to send us careening off into left field.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with the Glamorous Histories, with the insertion of magic into the world, everybody has magic. Every nation, every people on the planet, have magic. So that's… That doesn't shift power dynamics at all. The fact that every… Because I gave it to everybody. If I had just given it to one nation, that would have shifted power dynamics. That would have been a very different story.

 

[Brandon] So, kind of a more general question. How do you approach writing about something, like, for instance, World War I, where you know a certain percentage of your audience is going to know way more about the topic than you will?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Howard, you run into this, I think, with Schlock Mercenary with the… You are very good at the sciencey parts, but I'm sure many of your audience are better at the sciencey parts.

[Howard] [sigh] At some point, I just have to be willing to let go. Because I'm more interested in telling a story than in being right. That's… I found that that's a healthy attitude in a lot of cases. It's not that I don't need to be right. It's that I can say, "Oh, yeah, got that wrong." But I'm going to continue to tell the story that I'm telling, because I'm enjoying telling it, and people are enjoying reading it. If I find a way to work better science into it, I will. The trickier bits to recover from if I've gotten it wrong are when I've misrepresented an existing culture in ways that future extrapolation don't account for. Specifically, in my case, the interactions between officers and grunts. The whole military culture. I've been fortunate in that I've stuck the landing several times just by having talked to the right people and gotten a sense for… Through being an old guy… A sense for how people react to other people. Because a lot of those things translated straight across.

[Mary Robinette] I think the talking to the right people is really key for a lot of this. Like, I basically went out and said, "I need World War I people to read this thing." With Calculating Stars, I'm like, "I need astronauts." I mean, I just want to hang out with astronauts, too, but I need rocket scientists, I need fighter pilots, I need… Asking the right people to talk to you. But the other thing is if you don't know the answer to something, don't bring it up in the story. Like, this is one of the things that makes me look like I really know what I'm talking about. In Calculating Stars, I very carefully never talk… Never tell you how much that meteor weighs.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] I never tell you how big that thing is. We did research… There's a range that I am comfortable with it being within that range. But I am not going to get specific about it, because the moment I'm specific about it, that opens the possibility that I am wrong.

[Brandon] Yeah, we talk about this a lot, particularly in fantasy, that sometimes it is better to leave these things unsaid, because sometimes when you start down that path and start explaining, you work yourself into making it harder for the reader to suspend disbelief. One tool I also have found in this area, and I think I mentioned before on the podcast, is if it's an area about which I know I'm not an expert and I know some of my readers are, I will generally take the perspective or viewpoint for that given chapter of a character who is not an expert. Who can be cabbage head. When they describe things wrong, the reader, who are my experts, can believably let themselves suspend disbelief and say, "Well, Kaladin just doesn't know a lot about horses. Yeah, he got that wrong. He obvious… He talks about not knowing a lot about horses."

[Margaret] One of the things that I've hit before when I'm working on a television show. One of the shows where I worked as a writer's assistant was called The Unusuals. It was a cop show that took place in New York City. So, there are a lot of cop shows that take place in New York City. So the audience is familiar with them. We had police consultants that we talked to about things. One of the first things, one of the first cops we talked to said, "You guys know that there's no such thing as an APB?" The All Points Bulletin is not a thing that the New York police use. If you put out what we think of when we think of an APB, it is called a Finest Bulletin.

[Mary Robinette] Huh!

[Margaret] Because like TV…

[Howard] You're contacting all of New York's finest.

[Margaret] New York's finest. That's what it's called. We're there, and we're like, "Okay, this is accurate." If somebody mentions a Finest Bulletin in dialogue, we're going to have to stop and explain to everyone in the audience what we mean. Whereas, if we say, "We're going to put out an APB on the suspect," everyone watching knows what it is and we're going to roll ahead with it.

[Howard] Elementary handled it a little differently the first couple of times they introduced that. It was… You need to put the word out. I'll put out a Finest Bulletin. Then they just called it that. I see the decision going either way.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Our book of the week is The Yiddish Policeman's Union.

[Margaret] Yes. The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon. Which is… It's funny, when it came up, I don't think of it as an alternate history book, but it absolutely is. It takes place in an alternate version of our world where Jewish refugees during World War II, instead of settling eventually in what was then Palestine, are in Sitka, Alaska. This was based on actual historical research in… There's this worldwide refugee crisis. Everyone's trying to figure out where. One of the proposals somebody floated in the day was, well, we could send them to Alaska. Who's up there? A lot of native Alaskans, but… Leaving that aside, as I'm sure they did at the time. So it takes place in a world where Sitka is this bustling Yiddish-language city, and you are following this intricate mystery which ends up tying into the politics of how everyone wound up in Alaska in the first place. One of the things that was so delightful to me reading this is, especially as an American Jew, seeing the ways it was both the same and different, the relationship that American Jews had with Sitka that you see American Jews having with Israel. That was really kind of cool and often funny.

[Brandon] I believe it won that Hugo, didn't it?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. It won basically everything.

[Brandon] Everything that it could win.

 

[Brandon] Mary, before we jumped to [garbled] I saw you scribbling notes furiously.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things is slightly off-topic of alternate history, but… Which is how to handle it when your character is actually an expert about something that you are not, and you're trying to deal with that in the alternate history. I'll very quickly brush past this, which is that you have your character demonstrate competence on something that you do understand. Then, the reader believes that the character understands it.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] So they will grant you when you handwave past other things that you have thought it through.

[Brandon] That's awesome.

[Mary Robinette] I use that trick all the time, because Elma is a mathematician and my math skills do not exist. The other thing that I was going to say is that one of the biggest problems with writing alternate history, like the all finest, is fighting common knowledge. There are things that people think they know because of the media that they have already absorbed. So when you go into the alternate history, sometimes you put something in there that is not actually a deviation and people will totally think it is. Like, so, Andy Weir read Calculating Stars, and was on a podcast talking about how he loved my alternate history touch of NACA, which is the NACA, the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics, which was a real organization that predated NASA. This is someone who knows aerospace. But because common knowledge is so hard-core about NASA, NASA, NASA, NASA, it's a thing that he just missed. Similarly, when I was writing the book, I was… I had… My beta readers were going, "Wow. I love this alternate history where there are women of color in the computer room." I'm like, "These are based on actual real women." But Hidden Figures wasn't out yet. As soon Hidden Figures came out, those… That commentary totally went away. This is the thing that you have to fight when you're doing an alternate history is… Is that line between how much do I want to shift the reader's awareness and how much do I just want to tell this story and… It is an alternate history, so maybe the common knowledge thing is the way things happened.

[Howard] I was on a panel talking about how right do you need to get things. Somebody brought up the use of Chinese as swearing in the Firefly series. They loved how this was used to represent a melding of Western culture and Eastern culture. The linguist on the panel said, "But they got it all wrong. There's no way that these people would be speaking in Western intonations and then would correctly inflect the Chinese profanity. There's no way they'd get the pitches right."

[Margaret] They should have crappier Chinese accents?

[Howard] They should have crappier Chinese accents. He's absolutely right. Except if they had done crappy Chinese accents, the rest of us would have seen it as a slur on Chinese. So…

[Margaret] Or laziness on the part of…

[Howard] Laziness on the part of the actors. So, I'm happy that they decided to be wrong in their extrapolation of…

[Brandon] There's a pretty good YouTube series called History Buffs which takes a look at historical movies and kind of goes down what they got wrong. But one of the reasons I like it is because about on half of those, they'd say, "I agree with this change. By doing this, you are actually emphasizing this part of history which is a real part that didn't happen during this time or didn't happen this way, but when you presented for audiences, you make this tweak and get the right effect so that they actually learn the history even though it's technically wrong." Once in a while, I think that's what you do.

[Mary Robinette] When you were talking about going back and looking at movies and things that got things wrong or right… One of the things that I want to talk about when we're talking about alternate histories is actually fashion. This is a thing that I see people get wrong all the time. It's not, "Oh, your fashion is wrong, how dare you?" The problem is that when people do the research, they look at it and say, "Okay. This book is set in 1893. What were people wearing in 1893?" But if you look at your own wardrobe, you have clothes in your wardrobe that are at least 20 years old. Sometimes more. We are all nodding. If someone is wearing everything that is from that year, if there home is decorated in only things from that year, then either that is an enormous wealth display, or something has gone terribly wrong in their life, because they've had to replace everything that they own. Either way, you are making a character statement, and you are making it by accident, because of your research patterns.

[Brandon] That's really cool. There is a very good tip. 

 

[Brandon] I'm going to have to cut us here and give you guys some homework. The homework I want you to write is I want you to do an alternate history of an event in your life. We've been talking about macroscopic scale, changes to historical events and nations. I want you to just look back at something that's happened in your life and write that event as if it could have happened differently. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

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

 

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 28.

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

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

 

[Brandon] We are going to talk about weapons!

[Dan] Yay!

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

 

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

 

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

[Laughter]

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

[Dan] That's fantastic.

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

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

 

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

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

[Chuckles]

 

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

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

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

[How old are you?]

[Howard] He was born in 1899.

[Chuckles]

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

 

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

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

 

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

[Howard] I never have.

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/07/14-27-natural-setting-as-conflict/

 

Key points: Person versus nature, setting, environment! Adventure based on survival, disaster, endemic. Start with research! You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. In person versus nature, nature serves the function of the antagonist, stopping the protagonist from achieving some goal. There are often plateaus of goals for the protagonist to achieve. Sometimes nature is a time bomb. You can also use person versus nature as one arc or subplot in a story. Person versus nature, especially in science fiction, often has a sense of wonder reveal as the resolution. So it's a mystery story, a puzzle box story. Setting is more interesting when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Person versus nature, in MICE terms, is a milieu story, with the goal of getting out of the milieu, or at least navigating and surviving it. So, what does the setting throw up as barriers that block that? Especially unanticipated consequences of decisions that the character makes. Often there are anthropomorphized elements, too. What does the character or the setting want, need, and get? Start with entry into the milieu, end with exit from the milieu, and add in lots of complications in the middle.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 27.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Natural Setting As Conflict.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] And we're in conflict with our environment.

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[Howard] I don't think you should do the joke.

[Dan] We are in Houston. It's so humid and hot.

[Brandon] Yeah, we are.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, sweetness. It's so cute that you think it's humid outside.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm just… Oh, poor bunny.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] We, on the podcast, have rarely done anything where we've dealt with person versus setting. In specific, setting as natural setting, natural… Meaning, these are adventure stories that are survival based, disaster based, or even endemic based. These sorts of things. We're going to talk about how to do that, how to approach making this type of story. You guys have any starting out pointers when you're going to create a person versus setting story?

[Dan] Yes. Do your research. Because, in my experience, the more research you do, the cooler your story is going to get. Because you… Even if you think you know how to survive in a particular environment or overcome a particular disaster, the more you learn about the things that could go wrong and the various solutions that already exist to solve them, will suggest a thousand cooler things you hadn't thought of yet.

[Howard] I… Years and years ago, I think I watched one episode early in the season of Survivor. I watched that for 10 minutes and thought, "Okay. It is taking them way too long to invent stuff that I learned how to make in Boy Scouts. There's got to be a reason why these people don't know how to do that." Because when I was 10 years old… Well, 13 years old, it made perfect sense. I only had to be shown half of this before I figured out, "Oh. Well, obviously, this is the other half." If you're doing person versus nature, you have to be smarter as a writer… You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. Because the Boy Scout is going to be pretty disappointed if the story starts and they feel like, "Oh. I've got this."

[Mary Robinette] I think, also, for me, one of the things about the person versus nature is that the nature is serving the function of your antagonist. So that means that your protagonist has to have a goal that the nature is stopping them from achieving.

[Brandon] That's a very good point.

[Mary Robinette] That's something that a lot of people leave out. That's why frequently they wind up being very flat. So, a lot of times, it is a character driven goal or some other aspect, but it's the nature that is keeping them from doing that.

[Dan] One thing I see a lot in nature survival stories is that the protagonist's goal is allowed to change more frequently and more completely than normal. Because they achieve plateaus of, "Well, now I've got the shelter built. Okay, I can move on to another goal now."

[Howard] I want to point out that it's… When we think of person versus nature, we very often default to survival. But you can absolutely have a person versus nature story where the big conflict is I am trying to go up the hillside, and come back down with the perfect Christmas tree. The mountain doesn't want to let me do that. The mountain isn't trying to kill me. The mountain's trying to ruin Christmas.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Would you call Calculating Stars, even though I know there are some villainous characters in it, would you call this a person versus nature story in some ways?

[Mary Robinette] Certainly part one is. I mean, I've… I'm killing the planet, so yes. But part one is very much we have to get out of nature. After that, it is… Most of the major conflicts are coming from societal problems. Where you're having trouble convincing people that in fact the climate is changing on the planet.

[Brandon] Right. But there's also this sense of we have to overcome this thing together as a species. I wonder if that could be put in that same category?

[Mary Robinette] I think it can. Because it… This is one of the things that when you're introducing it into your story… I said that it serves the function of as… Excuse me, of an antagonist, that it's preventing your character from achieving a goal. But the other thing that it can do, which is why I hesitated with Calculating Stars, is it's not so much serving the function of an antagonist. It's a time bomb.

[Brandon] Right. Yeah, that's true.

[Mary Robinette] That's what it's doing. It is providing goals. It's actually allowing people to break hurdles. So I don't know that in… That's in part two of the book, I don't know that it serves the function…

[Howard] Well, what you've raised is… I don't love a novel length pure person versus nature story because that's a long time to wrestle with nature. That said, I loved The Martian.

[Mary Robinette] I was going to cite Isle of the Blue Dolphins.

[Howard] Yeah. I haven't read that one, but I loved The Martian. But it is absolutely useful and beautiful to work person versus nature as one of your big arcs. Knowing how person versus nature works, and knowing how to do it correctly, means that if you're using some sort of formula for timing the delivery of emotional punches, you know how to time these things.

 

[Brandon] Can I put you on the spot and ask for any tips along those lines? What makes these stories tick? Why do we love them? What are some of those beats? Dan's already mentioned one, reassessing of goals, as you achieve smaller and smaller… Larger and larger goals, I should say. You start off saying, "I am helpless. I am going to die. Well, at least I'll do this thing. Well, since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing. Since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing." Then, it just escalates to the point that you believe that they can survive in this.

[Dan] Then they build a radio out of coconuts.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] In a science fiction setting…

[Mary Robinette] Gilligan!

[Howard] Often the… Yeah. Was it Gilligan who built that, or was it the Professor?

[Mary Robinette] The Professor. It's always the Professor [garbled who's building things?]

[Howard] I was pretty sure I saw transistor tubes in there somewhere.

[Dan] Those are also made of coconuts.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Coconut glass.

[Mary Robinette] Everything that you need, you just pull out of that ship.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It was the most amazing… Anyway, your point being, Howard?

 

[Howard] Yeah. The point being, when you are doing person versus nature in science fiction, often the resolution is not oh, I learned how to make a structure out of sticks, the solution is some sort of sense of wonder reveal about how this alien environment really works. That moment… If you've planned that, what you've written isn't what we classically think of as a person versus nature story. What you've written is a mystery story, in which we're being a detective and we're solving a problem. Then you wrap that around a story in which characters are in conflict and the solving of the mystery… It could be a time bomb, it could be a puzzle box type story, but… I do think of these things as name dropping the formulas as I'm building them, because that allows me to very quickly picture what it is I want to do. Then, when I have that picture, I start mapping character names onto it and moving things around. I'm writing a longform serial where I already have a whole lot of established pieces. Coming up with a story and then very quickly mapping a bunch of characters on it… The mapping the characters onto it is often the easiest part. It's coming up with what is that fun reveal? One of the ones I'm working with right now in the Schlock Mercenary universe is Fermi's Paradox. Which is fascinating to think of as person versus nature, because nature here is, and the mystery as it stands, Galactic civilizations have been wiping themselves out every few million years and we do not know why. Is it an enemy? Is it something natur… It's a mystery. It is a reveal. It's fun. If I can stick the landing, I'm going to make so much money.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's really what person versus nature is all about. It's about the money that you're…

[Howard] I want to get out of these woods as a millionaire.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Dan, you have our book of the week this week.

[Dan] Our book of the week this week is what I consider one of the classic man versus nature survival stories. It's called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. It's Newberry winning young adult novel. It's about a kid who gets for his birthday a hatchet and throws it in his suitcase and hops on the little Cessna that's going to take him to visit his dad on an oilfield in the Canadian wilderness. Part way there, the pilot has a heart attack and dies, and the kid has to do his best to land the plane in a lake and then survive as long as he can in the middle of nowhere. He's the only character. It's all about him doing his best to survive. It's really… Everything we've been talking about in its purest little young adult form. It's a fantastic book. Very short and easy to read, and awesome.

[Howard] Boy versus nature.

[Dan] I'm going to recommend one more, though.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Dan] We're getting two book of the weeks for the price of one.

[Mary Robinette] Whoo!

[Dan] Ryan North, the guy who does dinosaur comics. He's got a brand-new book out called How to Invent Everything.

[Brandon] Oh, I really want to read that.

[Dan] He sells this, he promotes this as kind of like a cheat sheet for time travelers. If you end up stuck in the past for whatever reason, and have this book with you, you will be able to invent electricity and penicillin and everything you need to make a civilization work. So, as a resource for writers who want to be able to describe characters doing this stuff, it's a really good resource.

[Brandon] Yeah, I think it's… He has this poster that I've seen for years, that is… Hang this poster in your Time Machine, that has all the little tips you would need. It's done jokingly, and he's adapted that now into an entire book.

[Dan] Expanded it into a full book.

 

[Brandon] Let's… On the topic here, Mary talked about setting as antagonist. Let's dig into this idea a little bit more. How do you go about making your setting an interesting antagonist? How do you go about having a story that perhaps has no villain other than survival, or… Yeah?

[Dan] One of the principles that I teach in my How to Scare People class is that something familiar becomes unfamiliar. That's one of the basic premises of a horror story. It's also exactly what's going on in survival and disaster stories. Something like the Poseidon Adventure. It's a cruise ship, we know what a cruise ship is like. Now it's upside down. So we recognize everything, but it's also weird and new at the same time. That gives us that sense of horror, and that sense of unknown. Even though we still kind of understand what's going on.

[Mary Robinette] That's exactly why the upside down is disturbing in Stranger Things. Huh. Interesting.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Surprising no one, for me, one of the tricks on making it an effective antagonist goes back to the MICE quotient, which is… It is often a straight up milieu story. So, for me, the thing is, again, you got a character goal, there's the character goal of… Whatever their emotional character goal is, but then there's also the goal of I want to get out of this place. I need to navigate this place. So, finding the environmental setting things that can throw up barriers, that challenge your character's competence, and that are, often, I think, most effectively a result of a choice that they have made. So it's like, well, we've got fire ants coming at us. So, in order to stop them, we're going to flood this area to keep them from coming in. But now, having flooded it…

[Howard] Oh, no. Oh, no.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Islands of swimming fire ants are a thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Yeah. This is a film. So it's this unanticipated consequence that makes things worse. I think that's often one of the ways that you can ratchet up the tension and something that a good antagonist does, is they react.

[Brandon] All right. And escalating. That's like… That's a very good point. Making it worse and worse and worse, even as our protagonist is leveling up in what they're able to accomplish.

[Dan] A lot of survival stories also have… Not, they don't have villains, but you can see anthropomorphized elements of the environment that function as a villain. You mentioned Island of the Blue Dolphins earlier. She's got this rivalry, so to speak, with an octopus. She knows, she's scared to death of this octopus, but she knows at some point she's going to have to dive down into that part of the reef, or she's not going to have enough to eat. So it's building this thing up as a villain over the course of the story until you get a showdown. You get a similar thing in the movie Castaway with his tooth. I'm going to do my best to survive here, but sooner or later, I'm going to have to confront that tooth. It's going to be a showdown.

[Brandon] Howard, earlier you mentioned something I thought was very interesting, which is using person versus nature as a subtheme in a story, which you pointed out, you like a little bit better sometimes. Any tips on keeping this as a subtheme or as a secondary plot cycle?

[Howard] The book, Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park, the character of Dr. Malcolm is… He is the personification of chaos. Chaos is the person versus… Is nature in person versus nature. Malcolm tells us we have a complex system and things are going to go wrong in unexpected ways and they are going to amplify each other and things are going to get worse. By giving voice to that, when it happens, it doesn't feel like, oh, the author just picked the worst possible thing to happen and it happened. It feels like a natural consequence because now we can understand chaos theory. That is layered on top of a corporate espionage plot where it was corporate espionage that caused all these things… That we like to think caused all these things to go wrong at the beginning. But when you stand back and look at the book, you know, well, if it hadn't been corporate espionage, it would have been something else. So having a character who gives voice to the nature without actually being on nature's side can be useful.

[Mary Robinette] Something that you said made me actually think of Lord of the Flies, which definitely begins as person versus nature. One of the things that happens over the course of that, as the boys achieve goals… It's like, okay, we've created shelter, we've created fire, and all of those things, is that the antagonist shifts from being the island to being the boys… The society of the boys themselves. I think that that's something that you can actually do. Something that we see when we have human antagonists, that a lot of times on antagonist will shift. It's not the antagonist that you thought it was the entire time, it's something else. So I think that's something that you can play with with your worldbuilding and your… The setting as…

[Howard] It's an echoing of the principle… The story begins and there's a thing that our main character wants. There's a thing that our main character actually needs. And there is a thing that, in the course of the story, the main character's actually going to get. Often, these are three different things. If you treat nature, the antagonist, the same way, the want, need, get being different things, there's this twist as we discover it doesn't matter what nature wanted, this is what nature needed… And this is what actually happened.

 

[Brandon] Mary, you've got some homework for us.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is, we're going to take the milieu MICE thread concept. Which is that a story begins when you enter a place in a milieu story, and it ends when you exit the place. All of the conflicts are things that stop from getting out, they stop you from navigating. They are things that get in your way of achieving that exit strategy. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick a milieu. Pick a setting. Just pick your starting point, this is a character entering. Pick your exit point, that's the character leaving. Then brainstorm about 20 things that are going to get in the way of your character exiting the place. Then, I want you to pick your five favorites and rank them in an escalating order of difficulty. So this is just a structure exercise. If you wind up with something that sounds fun, you can write it. But really, what I want you to do is think about a way to build that setting as antagonist, and that setting is getting in your way.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/08/05/13-31-learning-to-listen-as-a-writer/

 

Key points: Write what you know? Extrapolate from what you know? Learn lots of things? Make sure you know before you write? Hemingway: if I write a story every day based on one thing I know, I will never run out of ideas. But how do you incorporate people and things you see around you? Often unconsciously, without knowing where I picked it up? Sometimes very consciously, write it down! Warnings? Sometimes. Often the attitude more than the exact words. Concepts! Pay attention or listen? Spend less time talking than listening, especially when it's something you don't understand. Watch for commonality or overlap. Let the other person tell you what they want to talk about. Release forms? No. A contract for expert knowledge. Be careful when you put people you know in your work. Try to make them not recognizably similar to specific people. Beware of using someone's personal experience as is. Nonfiction research? Watch for common experiences. Borrow an incident, but make the context and characters different. Do pause, and check. Cribbing reactions, probably not good. Borrowing incidents or events, probably okay. Do look for and celebrate differences, which are what make characters pop out and be unique.

 

 

[Brandon] Awesome. Dan, you're going to give us some homework.

[Dan] Yes. We talked earlier in the episode about interviewing people. So we want you to do that. It might be a good idea to use a clipboard, just so you have something that makes you look a little more like an official interviewer, and a little less like a weirdo in a grocery store. But find somebody that you don't know, out in the world, and just ask them if you can take a few moments and just interview them quickly. Ask about their lives, ask about what they do, their job, learn something you didn't know before about a person that you've never met.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/07/15/13-28-what-writers-get-wrong-with-wildstyle/

 

Key points: In describing hip-hop production, writers often forget there is an artist-producer relationship. The producer/engineer picks the beats, composes the music, mixes it, makes the artist sound the way you hear them. Artists and producers dabble in different areas in the music. In hip-hop, artists do the lyrical work, the rhyming. The producer/engineer composes the beats, the melody. There's a collaborative interplay in the best relationships. Sometimes the artists ask for a certain kind of music, sometimes the producer/engineer composes something and thinks it would be perfect for someone. How do you make it real? Focus on the relationship between the producer and the artist. Twitter beefing, jealousy, and producers trying to steal artists? What makes a producer wild? Artists who know everything, who want to tell the producer how to do the composition and engineering. 

 

 

[Brandon] Thank you so much, Wildstyle, for being on the podcast with us. Did you have homework, or a writing prompt, for our listeners?

[Wildstyle] I would say, if you haven't seen the movie Get On Up, to watch it, because that's… That gives an interesting dynamics of some of the things that… Not hip-hop, but hip-hop was founded on that… How artists have this tension with their producers and their management and everything else about the sound. I think that would help the writing and understand how hip-hop producers…

[Howard] If I can echo that, which we don't usually do during the writing prompt. But the things that you are describing, it is impossible to write these things well without listening, without hearing the music, and learning to put into your ears and kind of into your heart, the sorts of things that you're describing happening in the studio. That movie's a… Movie's really smart.

[Wildstyle] Yeah, it is. It is. I would recommend everybody watch that if they're interested in writing about hip-hop or music in general.

[Brandon] All right. Well, thank you so much. And thank you to our audience.

[Applause]

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