wetranscripts | Entries tagged with science fiction

Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-38-an-interview-with-charlie-jane-anders

Key points: A sequel? Backburner. Multiple POV and omniscient POV. Hidden narrators. The book grows up with the characters. Whimsy! Humor. Silly, noir, goofy! Pair humor with other stuff. Scientists and witches, lasers and spell books. One zany trope is entertaining and fun, 3,000... overload and boring. Add emotion and relationship. Fill the silence with active listening. Beat-by-beat plot? Many iterations. Little bits of information...

[Season 20, Episode 38]

[unknown] I swear, Detective, I was nowhere near the Polo Lounge on the night my poor darling husband Charles was murdered. I was on a Who Dun It mystery cruise with my assistant, Dudley, a darling boy. You, too, can join us on our next deadly cruise, February 6, 2026, seven nights out of Los Angeles on the Navigator of the Seas. Call now, if you dare, 317-457-6150 or go to whodunitcruises.com.

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

[Season 20, Episode 38]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] And I'm DongWon.

[Mary Robinette] And we're very excited to have a special guest, Charlie Jane Anders, joining us today.

[Charlie Jane] Hi.

[Mary Robinette] So, for those of you who've been listening along, we've been doing a deep dive into Charlie Jane's book, All the Birds in the Sky. And we're excited to have her here with us to talk about process, and to talk about tone, and some of the other really cool narrative tricks that she was using when we're…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When playing with this book. And I think it… It turns out this is fairly timely, since you're working on a sequel right now.

[Charlie Jane] I mean, it's kind of on the back burner at the moment, but I wrote about 30,000 words of a sequel, and people who preordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster… By the time you listen to this, they will have gotten a PDF with the sequel plus some deleted stuff from All the Birds. But it's… I wrote about 30,000 words, and I kind of… I have to kind of stop and think about it. So, that's on the back burner. I have other projects I'm probably going to work on first. But that's… I've written a chunk of a sequel.

[Mary Robinette] Amazing. [Garbled]

[DongWon] Interesting. I mean… We're such huge fans of the first book, and it's been such a delight talking about it in the past few weeks here.

[Charlie Jane] That's awesome.

[DongWon] So, I'm very excited for any news about a sequel when it comes around.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. Eventually.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] At some point, there will be a sequel.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is… I feel like this kind of conversation is probably actually really reassuring to new writers, who are like, oh. Oh, I'm not the only one who does 30,000 words of a novel and then has to sit there and go huh.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, I promised… Like, I decided to promise people who preordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster this thing as a preorder reward. And so I always kind of knew I was going to, like… Just because I was having fun playing around with writing a sequel. And so I was like I know I have enough of an idea of what I'm doing to get that much done. I mean, originally, it was going to be 10,000, and it just kind of ballooned to 30,000. Because, that was just the section I was writing got to be that long. But… Yeah. I mean, it's going to be… I think the rest of that book is going to be a lot of work, and I'm going to have to… I'll wait until I'm at the point where I like feel like I've got some breathing room and can really slow down.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, do you want to talk about the… Some of the work that you did with the first novel?

[Charlie Jane] Sure.

[Mary Robinette] Because… There were a bunch of things that we were very excited about. When we picked it, one of the reasons I was particularly excited about it was because you were using more than one POV…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And because you were tipping into omniscient POV. It's something that we don't see used a lot. But I felt that you were using it very effectively to kind of move the reader around the story that takes place over decades.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean… It's interesting. Like, I kind of felt like I was being a little rebellious, kind of dipping into omniscient POV with that book. Like… And I didn't do it that much. I did it here and there, like, there are versions of it where it gets much more omniscient, and, like, I go much deeper into that omniscient thing. Like I'm just much more leaning into that. But I… I feel like it worked. Really, I thought it worked pretty well sparingly. Like, I thought doing it, like, once in a while, was really like fun, and if I tried to push it, it might have gotten… I don't know. I was aware that a lot of people have issues with omniscient POV. I think for reasons that are kind of misguided.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] But I think they think that omniscient narrator is going to just like literally be omniscient and, like, just tell you everything that's going on. Which I don't think has ever been the case with omniscient narrators.

[DongWon] Right.

[Charlie Jane] Like, they don't… Like, there's always a degree of, like, selectiveness in what the omniscient narrator tells you and how intrusive it is. Like, even going back to when it was more ubiquitous. But, yeah, I mean… There's a scene in All the Birds in the Sky which I'm sure you all have already talked about, where Lawrence and Patricia are sitting under the escalator at the mall…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Charlie Jane] And they're looking at the shoes of the people who go by and they're trying to guess who these people are based on their shoes, and then the narrator comes in and says that the last person that they guessed, they actually guessed right and he is an assassin. He's actually… Wants to kill them. And, like, that was, like, I was like, oh, this is going to be the part where everybody's going to throw the book across the room and quit reading. And instead, I don't know how many people have come up to me at this point and said that's their favorite moment in the book or that's when they got hooked. Which is so funny. Because I was like… I almost cut it out, I was like, oh, my God, this is gonna make people stop reading the book. It's gonna like… It's gonna destroy the book. So, for me, to just like throw that in. And I just… I felt like it was a fun playful thing. And I think the playfulness was an important thing with the omniscient narrator in general. And I did feel like there's a lot of choices I made in that book where I was kind of giving a middle finger…

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] To people on the Internet who were saying you can't do X, Y, and Z, and I was just like I'm going to do all those things because [garbled]

[laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think there's, like, a very, very vocal and very small minority of readers who get very fixated on POV and get very rigid about what the rules of POV are and how they can be deployed and I think you're exactly right, that there is such a sense of play to the way you use the POV here that makes it such a delightful reading experience. I can totally see why people… I mean, that moment jumped out at me too. It's such a great little moment, and so deftly sliding from one perspective to another, and then opening up more of the world. And I want to go back to something that you were saying about having an omniscient narrator not really being quote unquote omniscient. They're not a character in the book, but the narrator still has a perspective. How do you think about POV when you're not grounded in a particular character then?

[Charlie Jane] I mean, I think that like I said, most of the time we are grounded in a particular character, and I think if you do omniscient narration, it does kinda become a character in the book at some point. And, like… I've read, like, three or four novels published in the past year, and I'm… I think of the title of one of them off the top of my head, but I don't know… It's kind of a spoiler, so I don't even know if I should say the one that I think of the title of. But I've read, like, a few books in the past year where the narrator appears to be omniscient, and then at a certain point, like, halfway through the book, you find out it's actually a character who just knows a lot of stuff and is narrating all this stuff from there vantage point of like… And, like, that's a trick that I see people do lately, of, like, oh, you think it's an omniscient narrator, but it's actually Fred. Who, Fred, knows a lot of stuff and just hasn't introduced themself yet. Just kind of like hiding who they are from you until a certain point in the book. And, obviously, I feel like it's been out for long enough that, like, The Scent of Bright Doors. You don't find out who the narrator is until almost the end of the book.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Like, I feel like that's a trend right now, the hidden narrator. The narrator who is actually… He's a specific viewpoint, but we don't know until we get to almost the end [garbled]

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Charlie Jane] Sorry.

[DongWon] Every single time, I find that really delightful and enjoyable. So… Maybe I'm part of the trend here.

[Charlie Jane] I've always [garbled] Yeah. Like, I feel like it could get overdone at some point. Maybe we'll be like, okay, enough of the hidden narrator. Like… I definitely… I think, yeah. I really like that. But I also think that's a sneaky way to do an omniscient narrator without doing an omniscient narrator. Like, have a narrator who just by virtue of being some kind of supernatural entity or a person who just is in a privileged position has a degree of what appears to be omniscient, and then is like, ha ha ha. And there's probably a version of All the Birds where it turns out that it's narrated by Peregrine, the AI, and like… I made various attempts to adapt the book for screen a few years ago, and one of the things I toyed with was, like, maybe for me to have a narrator speak up occasionally. It could be Peregrine, the AI, as narrator [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Because Peregrine does have this privileged viewpoint. But I actually like having an omniscient narrator that's just an omniscient narrator. But I think… Like, I very much came up… Like, one of the traditions that kind of influences me is the tradition of, like, loosely, like, Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut, who at least when I was young, they were compared a lot. In fact, how I got into Kurt Vonnegut is people kept comparing Douglas Adams to him, and they're obviously [garbled] in some ways, but they do have that kind of… They do have a narrator who is chatty and over shares and kind of like… Often will kind of intrude on the story in various ways. And I love that. I think it's really fun and funny, and I think we've lost something by not… Like, I think it's… There… It's not just that there's a minority of readers who don't like omniscient narration, there also are just busybodies who give writing advice with a little perspective where there like, these are the things you must never do, and, like… And those people… They're… I'm sure they're lovely people, but they should shut the hell up.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] Or learn to be less prescriptive, really. But, yeah, I like the playfulness, I like the… I think when you're writing… But to return to your question, DongWon, because I didn't really answer it. When you have… When you're not in a particular character's POV, I think it really helps if the narrator has, like, maybe not opinions necessarily, but, like, they are telling you information that is relevant to the story in a way that is kind of like commenting on the story from a particular, like… They're giving you perspective and often it's perspective that the characters are not aware of or that is not quite like within the confines of what people in the scene know. And so the narrators sneakily giving you little extra pieces of information. And so I like a mischievous narrator, I guess.

[DongWon] Do you see that as your perspective or do you see that as something external again, like, is it another layer in between you and the text?

[Charlie Jane] It's a little bit of both, I guess. I mean, it's not me me…

[DongWon] Right.

[Charlie Jane] It's not like me being, like, hi, is Charlie Jane, I'm going to tell you stuff. But it is kind of… It is my kind of… Obviously, everything in the story come from me in the end, of course, as always is the case. I think it's a viewpoint that is kind of closer to authorial than that of any other characters, I guess, is what I would say. But it's still not the authorial viewpoint, necessarily. And, like, you can have a narrator who is wrong about stuff. Or you can have a narrator who provides misleading information or… I feel like a part of why people don't like omniscient narrators is because they think it's just going to, like, spoil the story, or, like, tell you too much, and, like, omniscient narrators can actually mess with you in various ways and give you… Like, give you more perspective, but also maybe tell you stuff that's actually going to lead you astray. Or whatever. Or… I don't know. Um.. Yyeah.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I liked about the way you were using the omniscient narrator, for me, specifically, was the way you were using it to shape tone. Because in the first part of the book, when they are little, it takes on this kind of swami British, like, children's fantasy novel. Or children's… And then as we move, the omniscient narrator… There's a continuity of tone, but also, the narration style ages up very subtly each time we go. So that when we get to them as adults, we get very few intrusions of the omniscient narrator. They just appear at just, I think, very key points, because the rest of the time, it is stylistically more like an quote adult novel. Which is either… Which tends to be, in science fiction and fantasy, tight third person. Were you doing conscious decisions about that sort of pushing or pulling or was it just sort of happening in revisions?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, I like the idea that the book kind of grows up with the characters. That was something I thought a lot about, for sure, and I thought… I mean, I dialed it way back, like, in the earlier drafts, like, the first couple chapters, like, the opening Patricia chapter was written in a much more fairytale style. Like, almost, Once upon a time, there were two sisters. It wasn't quite that, but it was pretty close to that. And people were like this is too hard. Like… It's too jarring. That transition from, like, straight up fairytale, like, kind of to something more grown-up. I also, like, when I had the more fairytale stuff in the beginning, the omniscient narrator was going to be much more front and center, because I was going to start out with, like, two girls in the woods, and, like, it's very fairytale and… But Roberta was going to grow up to be a serial killer. And, like, just kind of throw in pieces of information that would just let you know on page 1 that this is not that story. And in the end, I cut that, because I ended up not going quite that far into fairytale land and it felt intrusive to just start throwing spoilers at you on page 1. But… And actually, Roberta is not really a serial killer in the final draft. She's just… She has killed someone, but there was extenuating circumstances. He kind of deserved it. But, yeah. I mean… But the tone kind of evolving was something that I really struggled with. And, in general, the level of whimsy was something that I really struggled with. Like, I didn't want it to go too far into whimsy and in fact in my subsequent works, I really kind of moved away from whimsy a little bit, because I felt like I… It… That can kind of take over and it can become, like, the exclusion of, like, character and emotion and stuff. Like, I feel like I had to pare back the whimsy a lot in order to make the characters feel fully… Like, fully realized and emotional and make their relationship feel as real as it needed to and… So there was a lot more kind of… For lack of a better word, twee kind of whimsical cuteness in the first draft, and I really dialed it way back, and, like, only kept the stuff that felt like it really belonged.

[Mary Robinette] Well, why don't we go ahead and take our break, and when we come back, let's talk about how we make decisions about humor and whimsy.

[Mary Robinette] And as part of our break, Charlie Jane, I think you're going to tell us about your newest book?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. Thank you. So, my newest book, which came out on August nineteenth, is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's got a lot of that sort of quirky whimsical tone as well. It does get a little darker and sadder in places. It is about a young trans woman who is a PhD student in English literature, but more importantly, she's a witch. And her mother, Serena, has been depressed and kind of hiding from the world for several years since some really bad stuff happened. And Serena [Janie?] decides the way to bring her mother back to the world and kind of help her mother kind of embrace life is to teach her mother how to do magic. Which, magic being magic, has some unpredictable results, and magic is kind of a mirror for, like, your desires and your sense of self in this book. And so, not surprisingly, Janie's mother comes to use it very differently than Janie does, and that leads to a lot of interesting mother-daughter conflict. But there's also, just, like, a lot of cozy queer vibes and occasional upsetting stuff, mixed with a lot of cozy queer vibes and, like, queer activism of the 1990s and the 1730s as, like, we get flashbacks about Janie's mom when she was a young woman, and also Janie is researching queers of the eighteenth century. Which turns out there was a lot of them.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] So, yeah, it's about kind of queer survival and queer joy and healing and forgiveness and learning to understand your mother as a human being rather than as just, like, this icon from your childhood.

[Mary Robinette] It sounds so good. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on that.

[Charlie Jane] Yay.

[DongWon] [garbled] That sounds really amazing, and just what we need.

[Charlie Jane] Well, thank you.

[Mary Robinette] Let me remind you, that is Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders.

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[Mary Robinette] All right. Now we're back from our break, and we are going to talk about how to make decisions about whimsy and humor, and where to place it, and how much to dial it up or down, and it's a fun, but complicated, subject sometimes. When you were working on All the Birds in the Sky, did you know going in that you wanted it to have that sort of whimsical tone or was that a discovery as you were writing it?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah, I mean, I think from the jump, it was a very whimsical novel. And, like, I was writing a different novel… Like, what happened is, backing up slightly. I had an urban fantasy novel that was a kind of noir like paranormal detective… Not quite detective, but paranormal investigator type novel, in the kind of vein of, like, Jim Butcher or Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels, or the Octave… The October Daye novels. Like, that kind of stuff. And it was like… We're talking 2011. I was working on this urban fantasy noir book, and I was walking in the park, and this idea about a witch and a mad scientist just kind of bonked me on the head. And I had to go write down a bunch of stuff about it. And so I feel like every project I write, I kind of approached differently. The urban fantasy novel also is very silly in places. It had a lot of very silly stuff, but it also had that more noir tone. So I always knew that this was going to be more whimsical. And I always knew that this was going to be more of a fun, kind of almost goofy, novel. And, like I said earlier drafts were much goofier. And I feel like, as a writer, I am someone… At least I have been someone to whom goofy humor comes really naturally. Like, my first attempts at writing science fiction and fantasy were just pure zany comedy with, like, ridiculous premises and, like,… Just like the silliest stuff I could come up with, and they weren't very good. They didn't have… The characters are one-dimensional. Often, they just ended, like they would just, like, oh…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And that's the… Story's over now. Go home, folks. Nothing to see here. Oh, you wanted resolution. Oh, well, too bad.

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] But, yeah. No, I was really good at goofy, zany humor, and it… Basically, I would say that the course of, like mo… The first, like, I don't know how many years of my career, from, like, when I started writing fiction seriously to All the Birds in the Sky, I was learning to kind of… Learning to pair humor with other stuff. And eventually kind of dial back the humor, because I got the feeling… And I got feedback from people that the humor was… That I was like sacrificing character and emotion for the sake of humor and that… And so now, I think, I am… When I use humor, it's something that I… Is an intentional thing that I put in intentionally. But originally, it was just like the automatic thing that I always did. And then I would add character and story and plot and stuff on top of that [garbled] or under that or whatever. And I think that… I mean, there's a version of All the Birds… Like, in my very, very first crack at All the Birds in the Sky, it was going to be just like complete, like, campy comedy of like scientists and witches battling it out with, like, lasers versus, like, spell books versus, like wizar… Like, ghosts and goblins and vampires and aliens and everybody's just like… There's like every silly trope from both genres, just like bursting out all over the place. And that would have been actually very boring. Because one zany trope is entertaining and fun, 3,000 zany tropes is just like…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] It just becomes… It just… Yeah. It just becomes, like, overload and it's boring and… Functionally, they all start to feel the same. Like, an elf and an alien are not that different, unless you put a lot of effort in making them different.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And so, yeah, and so I realized that I really wanted this to be… And I had just written Six Months, Three Days, my short story that [garbled] attention, which was very focused on the relationship and was more emotional. And so I was like, I want to bring that energy to it. And so it was really like challenging myself to have that kind of whimsical humor, but also that emotion and that kind of feeling of, like, being… Especially the main part of the novel, when they're growing up, being in their twenties, and just, like, getting what you always wanted, but it's still kind of sucks.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And, like, you're finally in the city and getting to like have an awesome life, kind of, but life still kind of sucks.

[Mary Robinette] You also have to be an adult.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Charlie Jane] Like, yeah. Being an adult is just… Yeah. Anyway. And so, yeah, and I feel like I really tried to have more of the humor come out of character, and I'll give a very specific example that I think I've probably touched on before. There's a moment in the book where Lawrence is starting to, like… His relationship with his girlfriend Serafina is unraveling, like, they are just… Things are not working out between them. And there is a moment where the narrator… Like, they just run out of things to say to each other, and Lawrence is trying so hard to be, like, a good boyfriend, and it's actually self sabotaging as he's just over… He's trying too hard. And there's a moment in an earlier draft, where the narrator said… Says, Lawrence tried to fill the silence with active listening.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] Which I thought was a [garbled] line, because, like, you can't do active listening if, like, nobody's talking. Right? And then I was like, you know what? That's the narrator coming in and telling us that Lawrence is a chump. What if it is Lawrence reflecting to himself, I wish I could fill the silence with active listening. Or I am… Or just realizing, in his own mind, that he is trying to do this thing that's impossible. Then it's got pathos as well as humor…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Because it's Lawrence realizing, oh, I'm screwing up. This is like… This thing I'm trying to do is not working.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And by changing… Just changing, like, three words, from, like, the narrator, like, standing above and, like, looking at Lawrence and laughing at him to Lawrence kind of realizing ruefully, kind of laughing at himself, but also realizing that he is… He's messing up, and that this is not working. That just made it… It was still funny, I think, but it was funny in a different way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And so that was a lightbulb moment for me, of just, like, oh, the humor can actually come from within the characters, and the characters can be part… They can be in on the joke to some extent, or if we are going to make fun of them, we can at least respect their perspective in some way. Kind of. I don't know.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I really love hearing you talk about that, because I can see now that you've pointed it out all the ways in which you've implemented that throughout the book. Right? I mean, there's about six different tones in the book. Because you have the fantasy side, the science fiction side, and then you have the three different age categories. Right? And I can sort of see that… You talk about the early version as being very whimsical, and there's certain whimsy in play in the book, but I don't think of that as my primary reaction to it in a lot of ways. Right? Like, that original concept you had of, like, laser guns versus spell books, big explosive battle. That kind of makes it into the book, but when it does, it's quite scary and really upsetting, actually.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[DongWon] I mean, like, we watch a witch die, pretty horribly, like on screen someone who's been really interesting and compelling. God, I love the way her magic works in the book, too.

[Charlie Jane] Oh.

[DongWon] But then I can sort of see where you start with this idea of, like, oh, here's the fun big concept, but then adding that character depth to it. You don't lose the crazy energy of it, because it's still a bunch of witches fighting a bunch of scientists with guns, and there's something about that that's so delightful and exciting and strange. But then it's like grounded in this very deep way that lets you get out the core issues of how to be a person, how to be in community, how to be a partner to somebody. Right? All of those things that, to me, were so resonant with my experiences of growing up in a city, of trying to figure out how to be in a community with people, and all of that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Likewise, I feel like this book has so much heart to it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And it really is about people just trying to connect and to be the best version of themselves, while they are… Have been influenced by someone…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Else's idea of what the best version of themself looks like. And I love watching them unpack the layers, but using the humor as this kind of scalpel to sort of… It's like, aha! That's funny, but now I'm going to make you hurt just a little bit more.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] It's not just a spoonful of sugar. Right? But there is a little bit of that, like, that candy coating that gets us into the meat of the story a little bit. And it's interesting, because you can… I think both are failure states in terms of only being whimsy and only being lightness, and then only being darkness and grittiness. Right? Like, I think I've seen both cases where you lose the core message of what the author's trying to get at, if it's just, like, overwhelming violence and horror and upset versus overwhelming just charm and whimsy and… Both are hard to dig your sort of, like, teeth into. Right? To continue with food metaphors here. It's hard to get into the body of it sometimes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because, like, if you look at this book on a beat-by-beat plot basis, it's very dark and grim.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah, I guess so.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like two different kids who were… Who dealt with very different forms of abuse from neglect.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean…

[Mary Robinette] And then the… And increasing, like, escalating bullying, escape to places in which they experience different kinds of bullying. They have a brief… They both get a brief heyday of everything seems to be going well. But then they're both in relationships that are not the right relationships. And then the world ends.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's like… It's pretty…

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Bleak. But it doesn't feel bleak while you're reading it. I mean, a couple of places that it does, but it is [garbled]

[DongWon] Only in moments that feel very, very intentional that we feel…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That, as we feel that heaviness before heading into the next sort of emotional beat. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Well, like the whole sequence with the hot pepper sauce.

[Charlie Jane] Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] That was so… I mean that… I think I went into Roald Dahl mode a little bit, like Roald Dahl…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] Books was like stories that I read when I was a kid, of, like, people being really kind of tortured…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] By adults, or by each other, and, like… I don't know. I… Yeah, I didn't realize how intense some of those childhood scenes were until people told me, dude, that was like… That was really a lot. And this is the thing, I… With every book I write, like, I don't know… Like I just… I don't know until I… Until it's out in the world or until beta readers read it. There's some parts where there like oh, this is funny, and other people are like, that's really horrifying…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] And I'm like, oh. Okay. Like I just… I don't know if that's because I'm a terrible person or if it's just because it's really hard to tell sometimes when you're inside a story.

[Mary Robinette] It's hard to tell.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. God.

[DongWon] When you're inside it… And then… I think it's also sometimes what community you're in. You know what I mean?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[DongWon] And if you're surrounded by a lot of people who've been through a lot, then what is baseline funny in those circles can sometimes not travel well and certain other communities.

[Charlie Jane] That's very true. Yeah. And like… Yeah… I mean, I think this book was just me throwing everything out there and just being like I'm just going to do all of it and see what I can get away with, kind of.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Can I ask you… You said there's one version where it's like this, and there's one version where it's like that. Do you know how many versions or drafts you went through to find this book?

[Charlie Jane] I mean…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] For that… For… When… I'm going to send people… When, I'm hopefully by the time you hear this, we'll have sent people the PDF of bonus material. I had to… Like, one of the things that I did was grab deleted scenes that were like… Scenes that almost made it into the book, like, they got very close, but they were cut for link reasons. But also, there's a whole… Like, I'm calling it an alternate ending. It's like I feel a little bit bigger than that. It's like a whole other, like, version of the climax with a lot of stuff leading up to it that was different. And I… So the other day, I was looking back through the draft folder and I have things labeled, like, sixth draft, seventh draft, but it's very arbitrary.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] What you consider a draft, what you consider… What's just another pass. But it definitely went through, even before I got an agent and made changes for the agent and then made changes… Went through editing with Tor. It had already gone through a bunch of different versions before that, for sure. Like it had already gone through multiple iterations. And, like, there were versions that were very different. Like people who get that PDF are going to be like, whoa. This book was going to be much weirder. Like, I had forgotten quite how weird it was going to be. Like the… There was a very different version where, like, the climax is very different. And the plot is much more elaborate. Like, I think I dealt… I pared back the plot a lot to try to reach something that was more kind of… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well. Speaking of paring things back, okay, it is probably time for us to pare back to our homework. Did you have some homework for our fair listeners?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, since we've been talking about tone and like having a narrator that kind of like pokes… Like, intrudes into the scene a little bit with, like, little touches of omniscient, I thought… Think it would be fun is take a scene that you've already written and, just like add, like, five or six narrative asides that are providing information that the characters couldn't possibly know in the scene. Just like little bits of information. It doesn't have to be, like, major reveals, it could just be, like, oh, and by the way, this guy ran over someone's dog and nobody knew, and he got away with it, or something like… Just little bits of information that there's no way that anybody… Any of the characters, other than maybe the character we're revealing a secret of, could have known. Or, unbeknownst to these characters, three blocks away, this was happening. I don't know. But make it at least relevant to the scene, not just like… Not… Not just like complete like random information, but stuff that's, like, relevant to the scene and hopefully adds, like, a little bit of humor, but also, just kind of a different perspective, a different way of thinking about what's happening in the scene.

[DongWon] I love that.

[Charlie Jane] And just see how that looks, see if… What it does to that scene.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's great homework.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.24: An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-24-an-interview-on-worldbuilding-with-arkady-martine

Key points: Deep historical roots, in Byzantine history. Medieval empires. Did the novel come from the research, or as you were working on a fiction project, did you just reach for the things you knew? Was it a challenge to blend elements from two different cultures? How do you know when you've done enough research? Complexity of history versus complexity of worldbuilding? How do you keep track of all that stuff? How often do you find yourself looking stuff up, or does writing it down once mean it stays in your head? How do you take that research and make it come alive for the reader? You tie character and theme together, and connect it with worldbuilding. Are your characters a lens on a thematic element, or is it scene-by-scene? Is there an example of someone with a different set of lenses that impacts what they see and how you portray the world? Was the novel always from Mahit's point of view, or did that come partway through writing?

[transcriptionist apology: Arkady seemed to be talking in a metallic echo chamber, which I found difficult to understand in some spots.]

[Season 19, Episode 24]

[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] With us this week we have a very special guest. We've spent the last month talking about A Memory Called Empire. I'm very pleased that we were able to get the author, my friend and also client, Arkady Martine, to join us today to talk about her experience with writing the book, how she thinks about worldbuilding, and some ot the stuff that went into it. So, Arkady, welcome to the podcast.

[Arkady] Hi. I'm so glad to be here.

[DongWon] So, obviously, I love the book and I loved it from the very first time I… It came across my desk. One of the things that really stands out to us is all of the dense, intricate, and complex worldbuilding that you put into this novel. Right? Science fiction/fantasy kind of lives and dies on the worldbuilding a lot of the time. But this one felt very distinct and unique and special. I wanted to hear a little bit of where all that comes from. I know you have, like, deep academic roots as well, in history, and… I would love just to hear from you about where the origins of this novel were for you when it comes to the cultures and societies you decided to put in it.

[Arkady] Oh, yeah. Okay. Great question. So… Things not to do when you have a [garbled] in medieval history in Sweden. Write a book about the same things that you are working on in your [garbled] instead of writing the academic book that might have gotten you tenure.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] So I kind of did that. Which is all to say that I am trained as a Byzantine historian with a specialization in the eleventh century sort of eastern frontier. Armenia, Byzantine, are two different Arabic speaking kingdoms. I'm super interested in diplomacy and letter writing and empires and frontiers, and I spent like a decade of my life doing that professionally as an academic. It's a curious thing about being an academic, where you're not really supposed to get emotionally involved with what you're working on. At least, not in how you write it. I have always been emotionally compelled by that whole suite of subjects. I've also always written science fiction and fantasy. So, there was a point, like, the summer after I finished my dissertation where, for complex reasons, I was living in Phoenix for three months. Which I don't exactly recommend, those three months being Jun, July, and August in Phoenix. Yeah, I decided that I clearly needed another enormous project. That was getting kind of annoying that I was one of those people who had never successfully written a novel. So, clearly, I was going to try that. Having just put down the 250 page nonfiction thing I had written.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] What came out of that was trying to figure out a way to work on and work through all of that fascination with Empire and assimilation and medieval frontiers and frontiers in general. And, like, seeing it through a science fictional lens. And then some stuff that I had always been fascinated by and had written some very juvenile early attempts at novels. Like, what happens if you have the ghost of the person who used to have your job in your head?

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] The first version I ever tried to write was actually fantasy. That did not go well. It did not last. You may recognize a bit of it. But, anyway, that got in there too. So, Byzantium, the medieval Empire in general, that's the deep basis. I pulled a ton of little cultural events out of that. The poetry contests in my writing come from that. The dilemma of the succession crisis comes from that. I kind of started with, like, the succession crisis at Heracles in the, like, six hundreds and then it went… It doesn't follow. But it starts there. So I've used a lot of historical plot to inspire my plot.

[DongWon] Do you think that came from… You were studying this, you are interested in it, you are avoiding writing your nonfiction about it…

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] So, did the impulse to write this novel come from that research and that knowledge, or as you were working on a fiction project, did you just instinctively reach to the things that you knew? Like, was there a chicken or an egg there?

[Arkady] I feel like 60 percent egg, 40 percent base. I really knew I wanted to write about the scenarios that I had encountered in my research. Not a historical novel where I would, like, tell those stories. But, then where I found myself imagining the emotional impact of living through and experiencing historical events I had been studying. You can either write a historical book or you can just take that question and use what I love science fiction for, which is sort of expand it, explore it, it really up close to it. Then, as I was writing, because it took me a while to write the book. I had never done this successfully before. The longest thing I had ever written before Memory was, like, for Asimov's. So it took me about three years. I did find myself reaching for tools I knew. Those tools were sometimes things like, "Oh, right, I want to do political poetry contests, because I love them. I think they're very cool. I need something like that here." But there was a point also where I deliberately didn't make those choices, where I reached for other tools instead of the instinctive ones on purpose. I do want to mention, before we get away from, like, direct historical inspiration that Teixcalaan is not Byzantine in space, exactly. That's on purpose. Because if I had done Byzantines in space, I would have needed a monotheistic religion. I really didn't want to write a book about that. That's not this book. Someday, I'll write a book about God. But it's not going to be this one.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] I had too much going on. So I needed to get away from this kind of mono-ism, like one Emperor, one God, one, like, line through history, like this [detelogy?] that's in Byzantine texts. So, I was like, okay, I need a different source of completely outside of the kind of monotheistic Western traditions. I ended up being deeply interested in another very complex, very colorful, and quite simultaneous imperial power, which is the [Mehico?]. I pulled a lot of inspiration from [Mehico], the Aztecs in English, and the way that that Empire did assimilation and all of its cultural tags. Because I didn't want my readers to feel like… Well, I knew that my readers were probably going to think that space Byzantium was just space Rome.

[DongWon] Right.

[Arkady] Because that's the instinctive thing. I also wanted to make things weirder than just [people one?]. So, I, like, I very much deliberately combined cultural myths.

[DongWon] I mean, I guess what you're saying is that you didn't want to write a historical novel. Right? You wanted different aspects in there. So… Was it a challenge to find a way to pull different elements from two different histories, two different cultures, and blend them, or was it a pretty straightforward process of, like, oh, the names are coming from here, the religion's coming from here, the poetry battles are coming from here?

[Arkady] It felt pretty organic, except for the languages. Which I made some pretty stark choices early on. Because in my early drafts, I was using a lot more Greek in, like, the backdrop of the Teixcalaanli language. It just did not work. I'm not a con lang person. Like, I don't do this for real. Like some people who come up with vocabularies. No. But I am a person who unfortunately spent a while taking historical linguistics courses and I care about phonology. So, everyone had to sound like it went together and sound culturally appropriate when I use, like, [poems?] and metaphors. But, aside from the religion choices, which is probably where I had this moment of, okay, I'm going for a more Mesoamerican feel, it was pretty organic. That's partially because a lot of medieval empires actually work in very similar ways. So there's more commonality than you expect. Secondly, because I'm absolutely working off of my own aesthetic sense, like, the things I wanted to have. I love flowers. I don't think we do enough in science fiction in general, like, everything is all chrome and steel and glass. It's all very like iPhone. I find this boring. I like flowers, I like declaration, I like weird architecture. I like a kind of [Romanticism?] to my science fiction. All of that led me very easily to meso American cultures, which I have not spent a decade of my life immersed in the study of meso American cultures, I have, and am still doing a ton of research there as well. So…

[DongWon] I mean, obviously this question doesn't apply to the Byzantine component's so much, because of how much you did there, but, like, when you're doing research on meso American culture, on [Mehico] and like these ancient empires, how do you find the line of, like, this is enough research? I need to stop researching, and start writing. Like, was that a difficult balance for you or did you just sort of naturally find that flow?

[Arkady] Well, this is why I don't write historicals. Because if I wrote a historical, I would have to be able to re-create a depth of field in my [garbled] bank that matches what we actually know. When I'm working in science fiction, I do a lot on… I don't want to say just on vibes, because that's not enough. But I do a lot on defaults, I do a lot on in… If I'm pulling this kind of influence that got me interested in, like, sacrifice rituals. Why do people do that? I don't need to reproduce the argument of what scholars have come up with about why people use sacrifice rituals to accomplish political things in a particular culture. What I do need to do is understand that myself, and get a feel for it, so I get my characters to reproduce that feeling for my audience.

[Erin] Yeah. I'm curious. You were talking about the difference between, basically, the complexity of actual history and the complexity of worldbuilding. Which is, I think, naturally just less complex, because there's only so much you can bring in. I wondered, are there areas where you felt like you decided to go, like, for more complexity versus, like, more of a… More vibes? How did that intersect with the story that you were trying to tell?

[Arkady] So, the places I ended up with complexity that I hadn't originally planned to do are where the story that I was writing demanded that I knew things that never went on the page. This meant that I had… Several. Several lists of, like, okay, how does the government work? Who works in what department? How are they related? What is their history? When did they develop? None of that needs to be on the page for the story I was telling. All of that needed to be in my head so that I didn't contradict myself, and so that at some point, hopefully, some of the political intrigues stuff resolved into understandable lines of action. I did a similar thing in Desolation when I was trying to work out how the Teixcalaanli army worked and how people were promoted and how they work through it and like how… Just like the practicalities. I did a lot of, I guess what I would think of as traditional worldbuilding for that. Where I sat down and was like, "Okay. There are this many regions. Why are they called regions? Because I don't want to deal with coming up with another name for them."

[Laughter]

[Arkady] "How do you become commander of a region? What happens when you retire? What happens with training? Do people swap jobs? Do people swap, like, different parts of the military? Like, if you are a fighter pilot, are you always a fighter pilot? Or could you end up, like, a logistics officer?" All of that stuff I thought about on purpose, and sort of like brainstormed to myself and wrote down so I didn't end up making up something else later on impulse. But in terms of some of the other places where it looks like I did that, like, on the poetry contests, all of that was pretty much it should feel like this and I know there are historical examples where this worked. So I can do it.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] It's so interesting. It almost sounds like… Sorry, it almost sounds like the things that you were more emotionally tied to, you didn't feel as much the need to, like, research is the things that were like, intellectually… You know what I mean, like, you love the poetry contests, so, like, you knew how they needed to feel and didn't need to do as much, like, notetaking. Maybe I'm wrong there, but…

[Arkady] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled] particularly deep, but…

[Arkady] There's a hidden thing, which is that I had already done the research. I just didn't do it for this project. I didn't do it [garbled] I knew it already. Although I think something like a poetry contest is like anything that becomes more plot or aesthetic or theme. You can kind of, like, let it exist on its own without having to justify it. You can just decide that's true. Then the question… The worldbuilding question to ask afterwards is given that this is true, what else is true? What else must be true? That's actually how I do a lot of worldbuilding, like, when I'm doing it on purpose. Like, there's a ton of edible flowers in [pig plot?]. That was a… I think, this is cool moment. But in response to that, I thought a great deal about how do these people get their food? What kind of cultural signifiers are there between eating plants and eating animals? That got more interesting for me because I have characters from place were eating luxurious food is commonplace and others from a place where eating luxurious food is exceedingly rare, if it ever happens at all, and eating animals is weird, because where would you get a whole animal just to eat it?

[DongWon] I love that moment of her horror at watching somebody eat something that was cut from the side of a cow. Right? Like, just like this idea of…

[Arkady] [garbled] turnip space sandwich.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] [garbled] more… Oh, that scene is an absolute delight. I want to dig into some of the more mechanical things about how you take that amount of worldbuilding and make it feel felt and relevant to the characters. But before we dig into that, let's go ahead and take a quick break.

[Arkady] My thing of the week is a relatively new novel by Paz Pardo called The Shamshine Blind which I just finished reading this past weekend, actually. It is a kind of classical noir, but with a deeply exciting science-fiction premise. The premise is during the Falklands war… So the war over the Falkland Islands off of Argentina, between Argentina and the UK, the Argentinians came up with a method to kind of by spraying this special powder on people, they can feel emotions. Those emotions are actually, like, weapons of mass destruction. This changes the whole course of history. The book is set 30 years after that, so it's all part of the backdrop of the world. It is… I love noir and I love, like, noir detectives and how broken down and brutalized they are by the world. Having that incredible twist and having the entire noir be rooted in is this character going to feel emotions that are hers or is she always going to rely on thinking that emotions are something that are externally imposed, like, took all of the stuff that we love about noir and made it both incredibly thematically obvious and incredibly thematically hidden, and also just incredible.

[DongWon] It's a great pull for an episode on worldbuilding, because it… The worldbuilding… It ties into the central question of noir, which is this really shut down emotionally unavailable hero, and then, it's like all the world is about these big emotions. I think that's super cool.

[Arkady] I loved it. I think you all should read it.

[DongWon] Thank you so much.

[Erin] All right. We are back. Before we get into sort of the nitty-gritty of the mechanical tools, I have a nitty-gritty process question which is you mentioned all these things that you documented and thought about, and I'm kind of curious, like, how did you actually keep track of all that? Like, how did you actually know what you had investigated and what needed to be investigated as you were doing your research?

[Arkady] So… I'm not anybody's poster child for how to do this in a sensible way. I have a Word document labeled what is everyone's motivation? That was an editing artifact, but I still only have a Word document labeled The Teixcalaanli Military which is just everything I ever thought of, but didn't really go on a page about the Teixcalaanli military. In terms of like research research, when I wanted to go find out about something, I basically used a lot of the same methods that I've always used for doing academic or policy work, which is I have a physical notebook and a pen, and I underline things in a document that I'm reading, or take notes and mark page numbers. That just… I just have a million of those. But I didn't do a ton of that. At any point. For Memory and Desolation. Some of the things that like look a little bit more like I must do research questions, like, some of the biology stuff in book 2… And I know you guys haven't talked about book 2, but there's, like, weird alien biology in book 2 that matters. A lot of that involved medical textbooks and like zoology textbooks. I didn't exactly take notes so much as, like, stick post it's all over them. I'm not actually organized. Except the lady inside my own head.

[Chuckles]

[lovely]

[DongWon] I love the simplicity of that process. I love just having Word documents that are like this is about this topic, and I know I reference it. How often do you find yourself going back to, like, those underlined passages or marked passages? Like, how often do you find yourself having to look stuff up? Or was just the act of writing down the military structure enough that it stayed in your brain when you needed to call it up?

[Arkady] The big structure stayed. Right. I understand it, I could explain it right now. Although I haven't written about it directly for a couple of years. But the thing that I always have to go back to is if I have named something, I have to write down what I named it. This can even sometimes extend two characters who actually have speaking parts. The number of times I've called… Well, the guy in chapter 3. That guy.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] But especially if I've done cool names, like names of spaceships, names of continents, names of planets, all that has to get written down somewhere because I will forget it and I will make up a new cool thing. And confuse people, including myself.

[DongWon] Suddenly you just have 10 cool things, 10 cool planets you didn't need, you know.

[Arkady] Yeah. Or you've named absolutely everybody in book 2 the number sign 2 and then a word starting with steam and you hadn't noticed.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] Intel you did the dramatis personae at the end.

[DongWon] Hum... Yeah.

[Erin] I often wonder how… This may be the question we were getting at before we went to break, which is, so you've got all of this stuff. Because I find sometimes people do a lot of research and they know a lot of stuff, but then it's hard to, like, translate it into making the overall come alive. Which your world absolutely does. So how do you take all these things that you know, and then, like, make it exciting and juicy and wonderful for all of us readers?

[Arkady] It's character work which is to say it's theme. I know that sounds weird, but they are, for me, very, very close. The things that I want to show the reader, I'm going to show them through either a close point of view with a character or through a deliberately selected broader point of view, like an omniscient, or one of the more fun ones, like second person or like an unreliable person narrator who's telling you a story. So the secret of… The voice is always going to point out specific things about the world. Those are choices that I'm making that guide the reader's like mental eye, I guess. What do I want the reader to notice? Because the reader doesn't need to know what research I did in 99 percent of the cases. I mean, I love footnotes, but most of the time, fiction doesn't need them. The reader has to want to come along with me, so I need to give them a reason to keep looking in the direction I'm pointing. That's usually the inside of the character's head. Why is that character looking at the thing? Why do we need to know? Or, it's a POV voice that is also pointing something out to the reader, that it's doing a frame. I'm a very structure and theme oriented writer. I like playing games. The Teixcalaan books are actually pretty straightforward for me. They go in one direction, and while most of the characters are unreliable, they're not unreliable on purpose. They're trying to tell you what they see. In a way, that directness let me do more with the world. Because I'm not ever letting or making the character voice, or the authorial voice, deliberately misdirect the reader. So the reader is… If I tell the reader to look at something, like, look at these buildings, look at this edible flour, look at all the strange clothes people are wearing for a reason that are political, I'm telling them that because it's story important or character important or creates a sense of thematic community. That keeps the reader with me, even when I'm doing a bunch of fancy footwork.

[DongWon] You immediately tie character and theme together. Right? You're also underlining the way that worldbuilding and theme are connected. When you're thinking of a character, are you thinking of, like, them being your lens on a specific thematic element, and therefore a specific worldbuilding element? Or is it more scene by scene, oh, this is a good time for Mahit to illustrate this aspect of assimilation or how language works or… Like, are you looking at it on like a very granular level or are you starting at a very high level of, like, this character's about assimilation, this character's about succession, this character's about whatever it happens to be?

[Arkady] Well, they're all about assimilation and they're all about succession. But some of them… Well…

[DongWon] I picked the broadest ones, I'm sorry.

[Arkady] Sorry. Mahit is in some ways… I suppose I'm glad I set this only in her point of view, except for little tiny interludes in the whole book. The whole first book. Because she has a very narrow thematic lands that… And that lens has a very wide scope. Her lens is she is… She is from the border and she wants to be assimilated if that means something different than what it does. That sounds complex, but it's actually kind of like a pretty focused thematic lands. But that touches practically everything she sees. So I just pick that up whenever I need it and pulled back to it whenever I want to sort of ground the reader in it. It also lets me show off all the world because Mahit loves it. But it's also new to her. It also is going to make her think and be uncomfortable. So I get to do all those things while I'm showing the reader what I've made, and all, hopefully, stay with me, because they care about how she is seeing what she's seeing.

[Erin] I love what you said about the, like, the width and the depth of the lens the thematic lands and the character lens. I'm wondering if there's an example that comes to mind for you of somebody who has a very different set of lenses and how that impacts the way they see and you portray the world? If that makes sense.

[Arkady] In Memory specifically, or anywhere?

[Erin] Ummm...

[DongWon] I mean, I think you can talk about Desolation if you wanted. I mean, our readers won't be as familiar with it, so be a little bit more careful about spoilers, but, like… That's one that has more POVs.

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] So I can see that being…

[Arkady] It's easier to talk about in Desolation, but I think it might be more interesting to think about it in Memory. Because… Well, there's one scene in Memory that I desperately wanted to write in someone's point of view that wasn't Mahit. I didn't do it. I actually didn't even let myself do it for fun, because it would have not… It would have ruined it for me if I had done it, like, the way that I [garbled view it like the squibs in your id?] for me, which is… So, the poisoning scene, the aftermath of the poisoning scene, with the flower and the hallway and 19 Ads and Mahit. I wanted so much to write that from 19 Ads's point of view and it would have ruined the book. The book does not work when you do that.

[DongWon] [garbled that] would have been…

[Arkady] But, all my God.

[DongWon] That doesn't… I do want to see it, though.

[Arkady] But that scene played through my head from her point of view, and I kind of like had to write it deliberately. Like react against that instinct. 19 Ads has a very different lens. [Garbled] 19 ads That's lens is actually… Well, in Memory is about dealing with being in charge and being deep middle-aged and also grief. Also, like, deliberately not making choices that you might have made before. Like, not repeating your own mistakes. That's what she's thinking about all the time. Which [garbled] making new mistakes, which is always fun. But the way that she approaches that scene is from a position of a lot of knowledge and a lot of power and also a position of incredible amounts of emotional stress. Which [garbled] the book, you have figured out why she's under that much emotional stress, because it very nearly is the [garbled] commit murder again and doesn't and then has to deal with it. Like, also, there's like a different sense about sex and desire and death. So that scene would have been completely fun from her point of view. But very different. Thematically very different. It would have pulled the thematic lands of the book to be about questions of rulership rather than questions of assimilation. Like, what do you oh people? What do you oh people when you have power? Which is, like, one of my favorite questions in the world to write about. It's a lot more there in Desolation, like, on the surface. In part, that's because of who else gets point of view in Desolation. But it is an undercurrent in Memory. Where the question of okay, who has power? What can you do now? What responsibilities do you have? Can you abdicate them? Those questions are there for Mahit, but they're underground.

[DongWon] When you conceived of the novel, was it always from Mahit's perspective? Like, where you always intending it to be from the perspective of this outsider whose new to this place who loves this place. Like, she has, you're right, that super wide lens, but also all of that depth. Which is almost like very impossible to get in a certain way. Did she come to you at the beginning or was that a thing that arose part way through to solve a problem?

[Arkady] She was there from the beginning. The question I had about midway through writing was whether I was going to add anybody else. I thought about that a lot. It would have been a very different kind of book had I, because, structurally… At least the very first draft of Memory is a information control spy novel, which means that the audience and the characters… Main character, should find out about what's going on at approximately the same time. The questions about what is happening in the world are hyper dependent on who knows what. If I added more people, I could have shown a lot more things, but it would have been a novel that wasn't about what does Mahit know and when does she know it. It would… That would not have been the plot driver that allowed me to move the story forward. So I thought about it a lot, and I did not do it, because… In part, because I was absolutely terrified of what that would do. Remember that I had never written a whole novel before. It seemed difficult enough to deal with one person, and also to try to, like, go back and layer in more people. I also thought about that in some of the revisions that I considered. Essentially, voted against it, except for very, very small bits, the interludes are not, in fact, in tight third like everything else. The interludes are in a kind of omniscient third on purpose. Because of…

[DongWon] Those were a late, late addition, right?

[Arkady] Oh, yeah. Like, not the first revision I did, which got me the manuscript that I submitted to you, DongWon.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Arkady] But the… I think, like, maybe not even the first revision I did for my editor. Might have been there, might have been the second one when I realized I had accidentally… I needed a second person.

[DongWon] I think it was in the first or second revision. Yeah.

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Arkady] I collapsed too much motivation into one character and needed him to be two people. I still think I probably could have ended up with three people, but it was getting hard to get them all on stage.

[DongWon] Yeah. It's already a big book.

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] Amazing. Thank you so much. I believe you have some homework for us as well?

[Arkady] I do. So this is a prompt about worldbuilding through observation. I actually, to my delight, I think there's set it up as a conversation. It is using the character in the story that you are currently working on, could be your main character or somebody else, look at the nearest building you can see out your window and describe it from their point of view. What does that say about the world that you are in and the world that they are in?

[DongWon] I love that. I love returning to that idea of the lens and the few focus and all of that. Arkady, thank you so much for joining us. This conversation was an absolute delight.

[Arkady] It was super fun. Thank you for having me.

[DongWon] With that, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.03: An Interview with Erin Roberts

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-03-an-interview-with-erin-roberts/

Key Points: Erin Roberts. Working nonprofit communications, then science fiction, fantasy, and horror. MFA! Short stories, and beyond. Telling stories about the way the world is, and the way it could be. The black experience in the American South. Game writing, letting people play in your world. It's all storytelling and worldbuilding. Getting paid? Be scrappy. Check out grants, residencies, and scholarships. Look at projects for creative nurturing, setting you up for the future, and it pays well. Love the work you do.

[Season 18, Episode 3]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] An Interview with Erin Roberts.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] 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.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] So today we are talking with Erin Roberts. We're going to find out a little bit more about her background and where she comes from and the perspective that she's bringing to the podcast. So let… I kind of wanted to start with you've said that you're kind of the early-stage writer here among the five of us, and you're bringing that perspective to the podcast. So let's just dive right in. Where did you get your start? What was the thing that brought you to writing as a serious thing that you were pursuing?

[Erin] Great questions. So I often think of myself as a little bit of a late bloomer, because I was just going about my life, living, working the nonprofit field, doing my thing. In New York, there's the Gotham Writers Center. They were having a class on writing science fiction and fantasy in person, which was like the first time they'd had it in person ever. I decided to take the class, and had a really great professor who just… Was actually, "You're not bad at this. Like, you might want to look into this some more, like this writing thing. It could work out for you." Which is why I love teaching, and why I think teaching is so important, because you just need somebody to kind of believe in you and say, "Like, this could work." So that was not that many years ago. I think it was 2014. So, 2014, 2015. I had not been doing any writing or other than in the margins of my notebooks during boring work meetings. So I just decided to mainline writing. Basically, like think of me with an IV with writing [garbled] coming into it. So I went off to Odyssey writing workshop, I went and got an MFA, I listened to Writing Excuses podcasts…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I did everything that I could to just try to learn about it. But I really kind of came sort of out of nowhere in my life and decided to take this kind of radical shift.

[DongWon] That's such an exciting transition. When… What was your first sale? Like, how long did it take you to get to that first professional sale?

[Erin] My first sale was in… I think it was 2016. It was actually while I was at the MFA program, which was great because it forced me to write all the time because I had to turn in things to my professors or they would beat me.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Not really. They… So I was turning in things all the time and working on stories. I think actually the first story I sold, Wolfy Things, was something I wrote during Odyssey, and then reworked a bit during my MFA, and then sold to PodCastle. Go, PodCastle. Just really… It was just like a couple of years for that to happen. Then I just kept writing and had a few more sales. I had a few things out in 2018. Then blah blah blah pandemic. I've been doing a few other things with my time as well, but I continue to love and work in the short story form.

[DongWon] Was that the first place you had submitted to or had you submitted to several places before you got there? Like, how long did it take you from the time that you're like, "I think this is good enough to send out," to it ending up on PodCastle?

[Erin] That one took… It took a little bit of a journey. It went around the world. You know that old song? "Been around the world, and I, I, I, I can't find my baby." It's like that, but with short stories. So, I think it was maybe the 10th or 11th, it took a while for that one to sell. That's how it goes a lot of the time.

[Mary Robinette] I was wondering, because you talked about the MFA. I know that you're a science fiction, fantasy, sometimes horror. I always hear people talking about how difficult it is to do science fiction and fantasy in an MFA program. Did you have any pushback? Is that where you started? Like, what was that like?

[Erin] I specifically picked the Stone Coast MFA program because they are science fiction and fantasy, horror, friendly. I will say that from the time that I went to the MFA program, which was like 2017 2018 to now, programs in general have become much more friendly to speculative fiction. I see that now as somebody who teaches at a university, the people that they're looking for as professors, the classes that they're offering. I think people were like, "it was a fad. It'll go away." Then they were like, "It didn't go away, and our students are going to write it. So we might as well bring people on who know about it, and who don't turn up their noses at it." So I think we're actually coming into a really rich, amazing hero for learning about speculative fiction in an MFA program, if that's the thing that you want to do.

[Howard] Okay. So, in 1999, my next-door neighbor had just gotten out of medical school and started an OB/GYN practice at age 45.

[Mary Robinette] I cannot wait to see where this segue goes.

[Howard] He had no idea… He'd been a gym coach…

[Erin] [garbled to me]

[Howard] A collegiate gym coach, and then decided, "No, this isn't what I want to do with my life." It was super inspiring to me. I quit my day job doing software middle management to become a cartoonist. I've seen in my own life that there's a huge effect on my writing that comes from all that stuff that happened before hand. So the question for you… Yes, you say you came to writing late. There's nothing wrong with that. You frontloaded with all of this information, all of this life experience. How has that colored, how has that altered, how has that affected the things that you create?

[Erin] Oo, I love that question. In part because I don't really know. I think it's something that… It's something good to think about more. I think it's something we all could think about more. Because you are you. Sort of like if your face changes every day, you don't notice it. It's when you go and you look at someone else and they're like, "Oh, my gosh, your face has shifted." How this is happened, I don't know. But you see yourself differently than other people see you. So the experiences I've had to me are just the experiences that I've had. But I've had a lot of fun times. Like I… There are things that I've learned in working the nonprofit sector, in working in the social justice philanthropy, this really… That really impacted the way that I think about how writing can create positive change in the world, the ways in which we see the world. One of the things that you learn a lot when you work in nonprofits, and I worked in nonprofit communications, is that there are well-worn paths that we have in our thinking a lot of the time. Part of what you try to do when you're in my job is to shift that path a little bit, and say, "Hey, you know, the world could be a little different if we go this different way." Writing can do that, fiction writing does that as well. Every piece of fiction is telling some sort of story about the world, the way it is, the way it could be. I think that having thought about that differently outside of the fiction world really helped me think differently about how fiction does that as well.

[DongWon] Great. Let's take a break for a second to talk about the thing of the week, and we will be right back with more from Erin Roberts about how to build a career and how to build a life in the writing world.

[Erin] All right. Our thing of the week is Dungeons & Dragons, y'all. It is Journeys through the Radiant Citadel which is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure book. It's a compilation of different adventures, including one written by me, yours truly, Erin Roberts, that's about horror and Southern Gothic and black folks. But what's really important and exciting about this book is in thinking about the different perspectives that we all bring to the table in the way that it shapes the world's that we create, Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is a D&D book, an official out from the Wizards of the Coast D&D book that was written entirely by people of color. Bringing our own lived experiences and perspectives to the page and saying, medieval European fantasy, awesome. But what else can I bring to the table? For me, it was what can I bring about the black experience in the American South. For other folks, it was what can I bring from Mexico. From other folks, it was all around the world. So people were really bringing themselves to the table and saying, "Play in our world. Experience our adventures. Just have a good old time, in a D&D way." So, it's Journeys through the Radiant Citadel, and it's out from Wizards of the Coast.

[Dan] All right. So I have a question for you. As someone who has also worked in the gaming industry, I'm really fascinated to hear about your game writing. How did you get into that? What are your plans for it in the future? Do you see yourself as primarily a game writer, primarily a fiction writer who does games? Tell us about that aspect of your career.

[Erin] Sure. I'll start with the second part first, which is that I think of myself as a storyteller. Really, what it's about is figuring out what's the best venue to tell each story. So there are times when you want to control the story, you want to know exactly how the person is moving through it. That's what prose is great for. That's where you're trying to control everything from where somebody takes a breath to what they think of the characters. Not always successfully, but that's a little bit of the dream. In game writing, you're letting people play a little bit in your world. Part of it is creating a backdrop for other people to tell their stories. So it's just a very different type of storytelling. But it's all storytelling, and it's all worldbuilding, which is one of my favorite parts of just storytelling as a whole, and why I've always liked science fiction and fantasy and horror. For me, I got involved because a very kind person, I told them I really wanted to do some game writing. Ajit George, an amazing game writer himself, he passed my name to a few folks, and then I wrote for them and they were like, "Come back and write more. And write more, and write more." Because as… If you're ever a freelancer or someone working in a field like that, getting the first job is hard, getting the second job is harder, and the third is the hardest. Because that's where you really have to prove that you've got your mettle, and that like it wasn't a complete fluke. So I will continue working and going forward and doing more game writing and doing more storytelling in all forms.

[DongWon] That's amazing, and that kind of segues into a thing that I'm wondering about. Because I'm a literary agent. My concern is how do we get people paid for the creative work that they do. Right? You've mentioned some creative sale… Or professional sales. Doing the game writing. What does that look like for you in terms of putting together a sustainable life that is centered around your storytelling, around your writing?

[Erin] I'm a scrappy, scrappy girl. So I'm all about making sure that I get paid, no matter where it comes from. One thing that I think we could all be is a little bit scrappier, actually. Obviously in… One of the great things about speculative fiction is that people are generally paid, especially in the short story world, which they aren't in other genres. But like I've gotten my local jurisdiction to give me grants. Like, I'm a big fan of grants, of residencies, of scholarships. There is money out in the world for people who… They're just like, "We want you to write more. We want to support that." A lot of times, they're not even getting as many applications as they could. So I'm taking all the money. I'm going to just ruin my life here by telling other people to like look and see what's available in your area. Even if you take the money out of my pocket, I want other folks to have it as well. But I've used grants, I've used freelance jobs, game writing pays. It's doing a little bit of everything to balance it out. One of my favorite things when I'm trying to decide what I want to do next and take on a project is something I saw recently on Twitter that apparently Dolly Parton says, which is to decide it's got to do two of the following three things. One, it nurtures you creatively. Two, it sets you up for the future. And three, it pays well. So if it does two of those three, definitely consider it. If it does all three, you probably want to do it if you can. Also, I would say, if you can like keep your own health and sleep at night and have relationships with other people. But those are the things that kind of I think about. But money is definitely one of them. So, get scrappy.

[DongWon] That is such fantastic advice. I love that so much. I just want to add one last note, just to tag onto that, is I so wish more science fiction and fantasy writers knew about the grants, knew about how to apply for residencies. It's a thing that's incredibly common in the literary world. I've seen writers really build a whole life for themselves, even before publishing their first story, even before publishing their first book. Really, just do some searching, learn how to write a grant application, learn how to apply for residencies. See what's out there, and there's a ton of opportunities to help you figure out how to build a life that is centered on writing that isn't necessarily about directly getting paid for the fiction that you're putting on the page.

[Howard] Okay. So, Erin, I don't know that I've got the dates right here, but sometime between 2010 and 2014, something happened where you went from doing the thing, or doing all the things, you were doing many things, and you decided, "Hey, I think I want to be a writer." What was it about writing that appealed to you? I mean, was it something you read? What planted the hook? What was it that so gigged you out of what you were doing before and pulled you into this horrible world we all live in now?

[Erin] Well, I'll tell you a secret about myself first. Which is that I love most things that I do. I think a lot of folks, there's this theory that you sort of have like your soul sucking regular life jobs and things, and then like your creative amazingness. I loved my work in the nonprofit field, and there's another version of me who's doing that now. But what I loved about it was the ability to… I love puzzles. I love the puzzle of figuring out how to take the story that's in your head and put it on the page. I just finished working on a story and I… There's the thing that happens where you're working on a sentence and you realize, "I've got it. Oh, my gosh, this thing is in my head, it now came out, and it came out the perfect way that it was supposed to." To me, there's magic in that. In really being able to… Who knows where it's happening in your brainstem, but that process is something that's so magical. Trying to capture that magic, even on the days when I want to like shred everything I've ever written, is part of what keeps me going and keeps me motivated from day to day.

[Mary Robinette] I love that so much. It's something that I think is unfashionable, the idea that we love what we do. The fiction of the "oh, the angst… Oh, it's so hard, my writing, my craft. I suffer for it." We never hear the "I love what I do. Look at that, I wrote something good." So, I'm delighted to hear that that is part of what guides you.

[Erin] Absolutely.

[DongWon] Yeah. For me, it's always like I think writers are their own best advocates. No one's going to fight better or more clearly or more cogently then you will. I think that starts with loving what you do and loving your work. Erin, it's just such a delight to hear you talk about that and about that aspect of it.

[DongWon] So, Erin, I believe you have our homework for us this week.

[Erin] I do. This has been an amazing time, because it's gotten me to think about what's brought me to where I am. So the homework is to think about what's brought you to where you are. When you write, when you read, you bring a bit of yourself to the table. So write down what are three things that have happened in your life that you loved as a storytelling conceit. It could be anything from the real world to the imaginary, that you think you carry with you and that you bring to the page. Either when you're reading or when you're writing.

[Mary Robinette] That's wonderful homework. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.01: Twenty Twenty-Three, By Way of Introduction

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-01-twenty-twenty-three-by-way-of-introduction/

Key Points: Where is everyone? Mary Robinette is now a mid-career writer, focusing on science fiction and fantasy, with a heaping teaspoon of theater background as an influence. DongWon is a literary agent, who has worked as an editor, and brings the industry perspective, along with a deep interest in craft. Erin is an early career writer, in various formats, including tabletop role-playing games and audio narratives. She also is a teacher. Dan is starting to work as the vice president of narrative in Brandon Sanderson's company. Howard is a cartoonist who hasn't been cartooning for a while, and is finishing up the Schlock Mercenary 20 year run, and doesn't know what comes next. So, metaphorically, everyone re-introduced themselves, and there's a lot of reinventing going on! Stay tuned to see what happens next!

[Season 18, Episode 1]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Twenty Twenty-Three, By Way of Introduction.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] 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.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Welcome to 2023. This is our very first episode of the New Year, and of our new cast and format. We decided that it was time, after so many years, a decade and a half, to shake things up. So, let's start first by giving a fond and loving farewell to our founding and now emeritus member, Brandon Sanderson. He's been kind of unofficially stepped away from this show for a while now. He still comes in for a few episodes a year. He has now moved on to other things. So, farewell, Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. He's been very supportive about the transition and about welcoming our two new hosts.

[Dan] Yeah. So we've got two brand-new core hosts this year. We're going to spend the whole 15 minutes introducing all five of us, actually, but DongWon and Erin, welcome to the show. New core hosts, new Writing Excuses wonderful people. We're happy to have you.

[DongWon] Thank you. I'm super happy to be here.

[Mary Robinette] I really wish that we had done this while we were on the cruise ship so you could hear the thunderous applause in the background. You can just imagine it though. Because we did introduce them to our… To the people on the… Who come on the Writing Excuses workshop and cruise. Who know both DongWon and Erin very well, since they been with us for several years on those.

[Yes]

[Mary Robinette] So part of what we realized was that with Brandon stepping away, we were looking at wanting to expand the cast, and we also were like we would like people who are younger than we are…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But who also have different perspectives than we do. Who are at different places in their careers or who are coming at it from a different angle. So…

[Howard] By way of clarification, when Dan said we want to introduce you to our new hosts this year, it is not our new hosts for this year, it is our new hosts, as of this year.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Howard] This is not just 2023. This is time immemorial…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Until something terrible happens or you quit, both of which are kind of the same thing.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] We are bound to this forever.

[Mary Robinette] That's right.

[Dan] So, DongWon and Erin, as Mary Robinette said, they been with us on the event side for years now. DongWon's been on almost every cruise we've done. Which is wonderful. Erin has, for the last couple years, been helping us run all of the events. We're incredibly excited to have all of them now core hosts on microphone. Going forward, it's going to be cool. So what we want to do with this episode is introduce them in more detail, but also kind of reintroduce all five of us. What do we bring to the table, what kinds of things are you going to hear from us throughout the year, where we are in our career, what kind of things we're working on, what skills we're trying to develop. So let's take some time to dig into that. I would actually love to start with Mary Robinette. Tell us what you're doing and what kinds of things you are working on and what perspectives you're going to bring to us this year.

[Mary Robinette] So when I started the podcast… And this is part of why we wanted to kind of reintroduce ourselves… I was a very early career writer. I am now a decade into my career. More than that, actually. That's alarming. Anyway, I have 10 books out in the world. 10 novels. A children's book, two short story collections. I am a professional puppeteer and a voice actor. So the… My views on writing have shifted. There's a lot of things that… About the way the industry has changed since I came in that I'm excited to talk about. Also, as I have been moving through my writing process, I'm constantly having to… The shape of my imposter syndrome shifts. It never completely goes away, but the battles that I'm fighting are different each time. So you're going to get to hear from me a lot of stuff about what it's like to be a mid career writer. You're going to get to hear about the differences between writing science fiction and fantasy. You're going to get to hear about how my theater background influences the way I approach writing.

[Howard] Briefly, I'd like to take a moment and say that in our episode pie, Season Three, Episode 14, Mary Robinette came on as a guest and took principles of puppetry as they applied to writers. The whole episode, Dan and Brandon and I were just floored. Jaws dropped, being school. In that moment, the first thing we learned was, wow, it would be cool if Mary Robinette could always be with us. We didn't make that change for another couple of seasons. The second thing that we realized, kind of belatedly, is, wow, other people's perspectives can be just mind blowing, just based on a simple change to background. Sure, we're all trying to write, but we're all so danged different. Mary taught us that.

[Yay]

[Dan] Let's also point out as you were enumerating the accolades of your resume, Mary Robinette, you failed to mention that in the time since you started on our show, you have won pretty much every award this industry offers.

[Mary Robinette] Oh! Um…

[Laughter]

[Dan] You're incredibly accomplished successful and wonderful writer. So…

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. That's right. I should probably say that. I do have four Hugo awards, a Locus, a Nebula, and… Yes. I do that. Let's talk about DongWon.

[DongWon] Hi. I'm DongWon Song. I've guested on a number of podcasts in the past, so some of you have heard me before. I'm a literary agent by trade. I've been in the traditional publishing industry since 2005, so 17 years now, which is terrifying. Pretty much my entire adult career has been in this business. I've been an agent for seven of those years. I've worked as an editor at a big five house, I've worked in a digital publishing startup, so I have a pretty wide range of perspective. Really what I'm bringing to the podcast is a little unsurprisingly that industry perspective. I can speak to what's going on on the bookselling side, on the publishing side, what agents are looking for. Really coming at it from a perspective of not just how the writing process happens, but what happens once that gets into the hand of the industry. What are the business perspectives around that? Right? I'm someone who cares very deeply about craft, and I love talking about craft as well, but I can sort of blend that with that other perspective and bring in a little bit of context of what's happening out there on the business end of things. I really love talking about these issues. I love sort of educating people on how the business works. I love teaching craft things as well. So this is a true delight for me.

[Dan] That's great. Can I ask you for a very quick resume? When you were an editor, what kind of books people might have heard of that you worked on? Now, as an agent, who do you represent? Just so people can kind of place you in the industry.

[DongWon] Yeah. When I was an editor, I was an editor at Orbit, so I've done science fiction and fantasy primarily my whole career. As an editor, I acquired and published the first two books in The Expanse series, by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the name James S. A. Corey. I published the Mira Grant books, the Feed series, under the name Mira Grant. I'm sorry, that's Seanan McGuire writing under the name Mira Grant. I've worked with Walter Jon Williams, Greg Bear, a really wide range of writers doing science fiction and fantasy in different forms. Now, as a literary agent, I do primarily science fiction and fantasy, but I also do middle grade and YA and some graphic novels as well. On the science fiction and fantasy side, I work with Sarah Gailey, Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone. So they did This Is How You Lose the Time War. I've worked with Dan Scott Lynch, who is obviously a very well-known fantasy author. Arkady Martine, who has won two Hugos for her first two novels. On the young adult and middle grade side, I work with Mark Oshiro, who is co-authoring the next Rick Riordan book. Carlos Hernandez who has two really lovely little grades out from the Rick Riordan Presents line. On the graphic novel side, I work with Harmony Becker who has a memoir out by the name of Himawara House and Shing Yin Khon who has a wonderful graphic novel by the name of The Legend of Auntie Po for which they won an Eisner and were nominated for a National Book Award.

[Dan] Awesome. Cool. Thank you very much. Very excited to have you here. We are going to take a break for our thing of the week. When we come back, we will hear from Erin.

[Mary Robinette] I want to talk about The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson. I have been a fan of the Mistborn series since the moment I discovered them. It's really exciting to watch the ways Brandon keeps evolving this world. So many times when you go into a fantasy world, it's like one era and there is very little that changes. This goes through a huge evolution in the way the magic system works, in the way the characters work, and it is… I find these books so exciting. So, The Lost Metal just came out. It's the fourth and final book in the Wax and Wanes series, which is the second era of Mistborn. I recommend starting if you have… You can actually just jump in with the Wax and Wane books, but it's also really a lot of fun to go through the whole journey. I realize that I am telling you to read seven books, and I'm comfortable with that. I know what you're familiar with when you think of Brandon Sanderson. These are short for him. So I highly encourage you to pick up The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson.

[Dan] All right. Thank you very much. Now, Erin. We're so excited to have you with us. Tell us about yourself.

[Erin] So, I have to say, after these first couple of introductions, I feel like the person on the Star Trek show that's there to make the audience feel like they can relate to humans.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So I… Which is a nice way to say that I'm sort of taking the 10 years ago Mary Robinette early career writer kind of slot… Plot… Slot. I don't know what that is. Or perspective, and bringing that to the table. So I am an early career writer. I've had a few short stories published in places like Asimov's and Clarke's World and The Dark. I also like to say that I get around a bit. Which is to say that I like to write in a few different formats. I also write for tabletop role-playing games. So I have had my work in Dungeons and Dragons official books, and Pathfinder, Starfinder, all those kinds of fun tabletop games. I've also written interactive fiction. I've written for audio narrative… The audio narrative thing, Zombies Run. If you know it, you know it. If you don't…

[Mary Robinette] I love Zombies Run so much.

[Erin] So, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Very fun being chased by zombies.

[Erin], I guess, and try out different things and see what kind of writing works in what kind of setting. I also love teaching. I teach at the University of Texas at Austin and warp the minds of the next generation. Now I'm here to do the same to you.

[Mary Robinette] The first time I saw Erin teach, I was like, "Oh. Oh, you're really good." It was… So I should also… I also want to say that Erin first came on the Writing Excuses cruise as a scholarship recipient.

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] We have basically been impressed by her since we met her. So I'm really excited. Every time we talk, I'm like, "Oh, that's really smart." So, no pressure. No pressure at all.

[Erin] It ends here.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, well, because we're not that smart. Sorry about that. We have done that to your career.

[Dan] We're going to ruin everything now. Awesome. Erin, so excited to have you here. Thank you also for the Star Trek reference in your introduction. Back when Howard and I had a Twitch D & D show, we spun it off into a Twitch Star Trek show, and Erin was our captain on that. So… DongWon also. Actually, Mary Robinette, you're the only one that was never a cast member on our Twitch show. Sorry.

[Mary Robinette] You never invited me, so…

[Dan] I know. We should have.

[Mary Robinette] I guess I know where I stand now. Thanks.

[Dan] We'll have to resurrect that whole thing. Anyway, let's…

[Erin] You can be a Tribble.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] [squeak]

[Dan] All right. So it is my turn now. I also am… I have… I'm in the middle of a big career transition. About a month and a half ago, I started working full time as the vice president of narrative in Brandon Sanderson's company. So a lot of people are wondering what that means. What it mostly means is that I'm doing the same thing I used to be doing, I'm just getting paid slightly better for it now.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I'm still writing books. I am only a year or two further into my career than Mary Robinette is. I think I have 19 books published. What I'm doing right now is mostly audio. The last several years, the Zero G series was audio originals which I wrote as scripts rather than as prose. Those I did eventually put into kind of prose format for e-book and print books, and you can find those out. Audible original Ghost Station was my brief and unsuccessful foray into historical fiction.

[I loved it]

[Dan] I'm a huge fan of that, and I tried to write one. I really like the book. All 12 people that have read the book really liked it. But it's my least successful by far.

[Mary Robinette] It's really good.

[Dan] Thank you. What I'm doing right now is I am still doing some of my own books. I'm working on a middle grade fantasy. I'm working on another YA horror series, but I'm also writing a bunch of Brandon collaborations. Our first one is called Dark One. Actually, the first thing you'll be able to read from that or listen to is another audio series. It's called Dark One Forgotten. I don't know exactly when that is launching. Sometime this month allegedly. But then eventually down the road I will be doing a Cosmere series, and lots of other things. It's been a very different experience for me to be doing. First of all, having a… What essentially is a day job again where I go to an office and I have coworkers. I haven't had that in about 15 years and it's very strange. But, yeah, I'm seeing a different side of the publishing industry. A kind of lower mid list author who is now working with the most successful fantasy author in the world, and seeing things from many different sides at once. So that's what you're going to get from me this year.

[Howard] Now it's my turn.

[Dan] Yes.

[Howard] I'd just like to start by saying, "Erin, get off my lawn." You're not the one who is the every person, the human being. That's been my job forever.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I'm the not that smart. I was the not that smart for like five years and I still am. Not that smart. I'm a cartoonist. I say that with the joking self-confidence of I haven't really done any cartooning in quite a while. Because my… And I'm going to use these words absolutely unironically… My magnum opus, the Schlock Mercenary web comic, ran for 20 years with… Daily, without missing a day, and is now complete. For the next year, we're focusing on getting the last of the books into print, which is a project that I'm up to my eyeballs in, with my wife and collaborator and co-conspirator, Sandra Tayler. When that's done, I'm not sure what comes next. I don't know. What do I bring to the show? Based on what I've heard from listeners who come up to me at Gen Con and say, "Wait. Wait. I recognize that voice. Is Howard Tayler somewhere in this booth?" I think, "What the heck? How is that how someone's rec… Can you not read? My name is in 1 foot tall letters right behind my head."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They come up and say, "Thank you so much for recasting these incredible things that everybody else says in dumb words that I get." Mwah, okay. They're not dumb words, they're words that I get. If I'm a one trick pony, the trick is a metaphor. I look for ways to take the tools that I'm always learning from our cohosts, from our guests, and trying to cast them in ways that I can actually wrap my head around them and use them. The operating question obviously is will I actually use them? What will I use them for? What is coming next? I don't have answers to those questions right now.

[Mary Robinette] But we will all discover those together.

[Yay]

[Mary Robinette] Thanks, Howard. Since you didn't actually say your name. That was Howard Tayler.

[Dan] So, that is what you've got coming from us in the year to come. This episode has gone long because we wanted to make sure that you are getting a good introduction to us. Our format for the year is going to be kind of similar to this. We are going to take the time to dig into specific works and specific ideas that each of the cast members has. Then, let them teach us. Then, bounce new ideas around. We think you're really going to like it. So, stay tuned for the rest of the year. This is going to be awesome.

[Mary Robinette] So, along those lines, one of the things that we're going to be doing is we're going to be taking a work in using it as the spine of a series of episodes that explore ideas. So you can think of this year as having a certain aspect of book club. The first book that were going to be looking at is in February. That's… We're going to be doing a deep dive on my novel The Spare Man. That's going to be full of spoilers. Just want to be very, very clear about this. That we are going to… I am going to spoil the heck out of this book as we talk about the choices that I made and how. Then we'll use that to talk about how you can use tension, how you structure murder mysteries. There's going to be a lot of things that are going to come out of that, using it as an example. So, before you get to February, listen or read The Thin Man… The Spare Man by me, Mary Robinette Kowal. Then we'll give you warnings about what the other books are well in advance so that you can be prepared for those. It's not always going to be a book, don't worry. Sometimes it'll be a short story, sometimes it'll be something on the internets that we are like let's dig into this.

[Mary Robinette] All right. Now, homework?

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] For your homework, as you've noticed, we have all been talking about who we are. Several of us, and the series, are talking about how we're reinventing. What I want you to do is I want you to look at your work. This is the beginning of a new year. Look at your work, look at your process, look at where you want to be. Think about an aspect that you want to reinvent. You don't have to reinvent everything. But, just one thing that you're like, "I want to try something different, I want to try something new." This is your opportunity to do that, so write that down. Then put it someplace where you can look at it every now and then, like this is a thing I'm going to try. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic

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

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

[Season 16, Episode 18]

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

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Amal] And we're all fantastic.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, we are.

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[chuckles]

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Howard] That's the dialogue.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Right.

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Dan] Yeah.

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

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

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

[Howard] Have we done the homework yet?

[Amal, Mary Robinette] No.

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

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Thank you.

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

Lone amid the café’s cheer,

Sad of heart am I to-night;

Dolefully I drink my beer,

But no single line I write.

There’s the wretched rent to pay,

Yet I glower at pen and ink:

Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray,

It is later than you think!

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

Parsley is gharsley.

[Laughter]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Amal] Beautiful.

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

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

If a body is what you want,

then here is bone and gristle and flesh.

Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,

the aorta’s opened valves, the leap

thought makes at the synaptic gap.

Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,

that inexorable flight, that insane puncture

into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish

what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,

here is where I complete the word you bring

hissing through the air, here is where I moan

the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering

my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have

inside of me, each twist of the round

spun deeper, because here, Bullet,

[Whoof]

here is where the world ends, every time.

[Amal] Wow.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.47: Worldbuilding Science Fiction, with Cory Doctorow

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/11/22/15-47-worldbuilding-science-fiction-with-cory-doctorow/

Key points: Extrapolating to make futuristic parables? Think of a throat swab, one factor to focus on. Take one technology or phenomenon and build a world around it. Enduring issues are that we only know how to make one kind of computer, and that encryption works, so computers are colonizing everything. Or consider organ transplants from something like pigs. Take a single point and follow logical causal chains and branches to see where it goes. What about worldbuilding for stories set in the present? For example, romance writers need to think through their setting, even a small town. Worldbuilding gives you opportunities for conflict and to add depth to characters. Don't forget economics! What do people do, what are their jobs?

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 47.

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding Science Fiction, 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 Howard.

[Cory] And I'm Cory.

[Mary Robinette] So, we're talking about worldbuilding and science fiction. Most of the time, when we talk about worldbuilding, it's very fantasy oriented. But worldbuilding is actually something that you need to do, regardless of what kind of fiction you're writing. Since Cory writes science fiction and is… often near future, just around the corner science fiction, the worldbuilding that he does has to tie pretty tightly to what's going on in the real world. So how do you get there, how do you extrapolate?

[Cory] Yeah. So extrapolating is a good word for it, because I like to be really clear that it's never predicting. Right? There's nothing more fatalistic than the idea that we can predict the future, because one thing I believe, and that kind of animates me, is that we can change the future based on the choices that we make. So I like to feel like futuristic parables are a good way to understand the present, but they only work as parables if they feel plausibly futuristic. There are some good cheap tricks for that. I often analogize near future SF to going to the doctor to get your throat swabbed. Right? The doctor goes… The doctor takes a swab of your throat, she puts it in a petri dish, she gives it 72 hours. What she's got then is not an accurate model of your body. She has this, like, usefully inaccurate model of your body. Where she's taken one fact of your body she wants to use to understand a factor that is otherwise drowned out by the noise of the thousand other processes going on in your body. She's reified it so it's the one fact in this little world in a bottle. As science fiction writers, we can reach into the world and we can take a technology or a phenomenon and we can build a world around it in which that is… Has a centrality that isn't… It isn't predictive, because there would be all the confounding factors that would go into it. But by elevating it to this like… To the center of a narrative, we can equip the readers to understand the subtle effects of that technology as we're living in it now. Which gives them a benchmark to understand it in the future. It becomes a kind of emotional architect's fly through of a 3D model of what it would be like if… As this technology becomes more significant, more important.

[Howard] Worldbuilding strep.

[Cory] Yeah. Well, exactly. So, drones are never going to be the only important thing in our world, but drones are going to have a big important effect on our world. You could write a drone story where drones had a centrality that would let you think through some of those issues and let… Give readers a vocabulary for comparing the world that they're in to it, in the same way that we can say that mass surveillance is Orwellian. You might be able to say that it's Robinette-Kowalian, or Doctorow-vian, or whatever. For Drake-ian. If you found the right narrative and hooked it up the right way. So that diagnostic tool, that kind of predicting the present for me is a really useful way to think about science fiction and its role in the world.

[Howard] I bought some solar powered sidewalk lamps at Walmart for like five bucks. Opened them up and realized they had AA rechargeable batteries in them. What I had was a six dollar solar powered AA battery charger.

[Cory] Right.

[Howard] It forced me to rethink every post-apocalyptic thing I had ever read, because, now, boy, the lights aren't going off until I run out of rechargeable batteries.

[Cory] Right.

[Howard] Because… And I'm not likely to run out of those soon, if it's like a zombie post-apocalypse. This kind of extrapolation is so much fun, because we are living through some fun tipping points. The tipping point of solar and renewable, tipping points of surveillance sue-valence drone technology. Extrapolating these things just 20 years forward is fun.

[Cory] Yeah. I also want to say that if you want to give your work an enduring legacy, if you want to make it continue to feel realistic in the future or at least salient in the future, one really good way to do that is to understand that computer science theory is actually pretty static. Computer engineering is a very fast moving field, but the theory on which it's built is pretty static. Like, since the war years, we've known how to build really one kind of computer. It's the Turing complete computer, that can run every program that we can conceive of. Now, this has been a huge boon, because it means that if you can make computers faster and smaller, then any program you can think of can run on them. It means that computers colonize everything. The device that you're listening to this on is a computer. The house that you're in maybe a computer at this point, in the sense that if you took the computers out, the house might become uninhabitable. If you have a pacemaker, you have a computer in your body. Your car is definitely a computer if it was made in the last 10 years, and you trust your body to it. It whisks you down the road at 80 miles an hour. 5 miles an hour if you live in Los Angeles.

[Chuckles]

[Cory] That computer design, the one computer that can run every program, also has this major downside, which is we don't know how to not make it run undesirable programs. Right? We don't know how to not make it run programs that pirate copyrighted works, and we don't know how to not make it run programs that are malicious, and we don't know how to not make it run programs that are… We don't want criminals to have access to like encryption technology. There's this move now to restrict access to encryption technology, so that criminals can't have conversations in secret, and it's somewhat of a moot question, because you might say, "In this country, we don't let you run that program." But how do you stop people from downloading that program and running it on their computer? We don't know how to make a computer that can't run the program period. We don't know how to make an iPhone that can't run software that's not blessed by Apple. So this is a really interesting point, because our closest approximation is the Apple solution, which is a program that has spyware running on it that checks to see whether you're doing something that the manufacturer disapproves of. If you try to do it, it says, "I can't let you do that, Dave." So that fact, that's a really important fact that like plays out in our policy all the time. Then a related fact that I alluded to is that we know how to make encryption that works and we know how to make encryption that doesn't work. What we don't know how to make is encryption that works only when we need it to stop working.

[Gasp]

[Cory] Right? Like, when criminals use it. Like, we keep trying. It is a catastrophic failure, because encryption is how we make sure that the firmware update in your pacemaker doesn't kill you in your boots. If we say, well, we're going to ban working encryption, then what we really say is that we're going to make it so that we can't validate the payloads that we send to your pacemaker to make sure that it's getting new firmware.

[Howard] We can keep criminals from conspiring, we can't keep them from killing you with the thing in your chest.

[Cory] Right. Indeed, they will continue to conspire.

[Howard] Right.

[Cory] So, both of these facts, and then the third fact about technology is that governments are really struggling to come to grips with both of these two other facts, that encryption works and that we only know how to make one kind of computer. They will not cease to struggle with it because computers are colonizing every category of device, which means that they're central to every policy problem we have. Which means that they'll keep making this mistake. If you make any one of or all three of those facts central to your fiction, it will continue to be a parable about all the bad things going on in our world, unfortunately, for the entire foreseeable future. That means that you can have a book like Little Brother, the novel of mine that I'm really best known for, that I wrote in 2006, that continues to be cited as an incredibly, like, gripping futuristic salient tale that has something to tell us about our present day only because it has this techno-realistic element to it.

[Piper] You can also take a look at science from another aspect as well. That's from medicine, which you touched on with pacemakers. But you think about what we can do with DNA at this stage. For a while there, we wouldn't… The main basis for why the FDA wouldn't allow organ transplants and organs to be grown in something like porcine, like pigs, was because pigs had a retrovirus that could potentially be transferable to humans, which was… Would be terrible, considering the timeframe and what it could do. But now we have the ability, now, in today's day and age, to adjust their genetic makeup and composition to eradicate that virus in that string of pigs. Therefore, making it safe. We do now… There's a company that does it, that grows kidneys in pigs and have gotten to successful transplants in primates, and has proposed to potentially go to successful transplants for humans. Which could change the lives of people who are on the list waiting for kidneys. Now that doesn't take that much more in terms of steps forward to imagining what that kind of science, that kind of medicine, can do to change the near future. Or, if we play with the zombie apocalypse, because at least one of my series has done that, we look at vaccines, like, BSE is a major thing that I do in my day job, or not do. But that's related to what I look at in terms of data in my day job keep it safe. It's bovine spongiform encephalitis. It is nontransferable to humans. But. What if it became transferable? What if that virus became transferable? You have zombies now. You have people with brains that look like Swiss cheese when you take a cut of it. So…

[Howard] Delicious, delicious Swiss cheese.

[Cory] I mean, we have [garbled cases of it?] already, right? That's the human form of it, but it's thankfully, very, very rare.

[Piper] Very rare. But still, it's not that far in the future, when you can see the zombie apocalypse coming out of that.

[Mary Robinette] What you're basically talking about here is taking a single point and following logical causal chain to see where it goes and the branching effects as you move forward. In many ways, what you're talking about is treating technology like a magic system.

[Cory] Sure. And not trying to… Yes, it's good to have lots of texture in their other technologies, but not trying to play Nostradamus.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yes.

[Cory] Instead, trying to make a little parable.

[Mary Robinette] Well, let's go ahead and pause here for the book of the week.

[Cory] Sure.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of yours.

[Cory] Yeah. I wrote… The most worldbuilding-ish novel I wrote, I think, is called Walkaway. It's the one with the fewest of what Karl Schroeder calls the Backless Maiden, from the Arthurian legend of the knight who meets the beautiful maiden, but she never shows her back to him, and then she steps in front of the fireplace and the fire flickers through her eyes and he realizes she has no back. That's really so much of our fiction doesn't have a back to it. Walkaway I really thought a lot about what was going on behind the scenes. It's an optimistic disaster novel. A utopian disaster novel. It's about people being good to each other in times of crisis and working to rebuild. It's not a world in which there are good people and bad people. It's a world in which there are people who think the world is made up of good people and bad people and people who think that the world is made up of people who think that there are good people and bad people and people like themselves who know that most people are just a mixed bag of goodness and badness, and that incentives and structures and exigencies determine whether we're good or bad at any given moment, and who are trying to make a world that brings out the good in everyone. It's full of people doing things like using drones to find our bridge in blighted climate wracked badlands and then using software to figure out what kind of fully automated luxury communist resorts they can build out of garbage and then moving into them and then reveling in how cool it is until weird oligarchs come along and say, "Hey, that's my garbage." Then they walk away and find some more garbage in another blighted brownfield site to build on. This is kind of their journey. It goes well until they have a shot at practical immortality, which they acquire from scientists from the oligarch classes who decide that they're not going to be complicit in speciating the human race into infinitely prolonged plutocrats and mayflies disappearing in the rearview mirror, which is the rest of us. They steal the fire from the gods, bring it to us so that we can be immortal too, and when rich people realize that they're going to have to spend the rest of eternity with us, they cease to see these walkaway communities as like cute bohemias that they can steal fashion and art from, and instead, bring out the hellfire missiles. That's when it kind of all gets interesting and kicks off.

[Mary Robinette] So, it's a simple novel?

[Cory] Yeah. It's got a lot of moving parts, that book, for sure.

[Mary Robinette] It's a really fantastic audiobook, I have to say.

[Cory] That's very kind of you.

[Mary Robinette] It's very good. I'm very picky about my audiobooks.

[Cory] I produced the audiobook myself. The readers are spectacular. The bulk of it is carried by Amber Benson from Buffy. But also we have Wil Wheaton on it and Mirron Willis and Gabrielle de Cuir and a guest appearance by Amanda Palmer. It's really a terrific audiobook.

[Mary Robinette] So that's Walkaway by Cory Doctorow.

[Mary Robinette] So, let's talk about worldbuilding for stories that are set in the present, because this is a thing that I think a lot of people overlook. They forget that you have to establish a world for people in the real world. Especially if you're tweaking things a little bit. Whether that's adding a single technological element to your present day or just even establishing a world within a closed ecosystem, like a high school or a corporate structure that doesn't actually exist. So what are some of the ways that you think about worldbuilding when you're used to… Doing something in the present day?

[Piper] I will say, and this is kind of a dangerous thing, but I will say that romance writers get a lot that we don't have to do worldbuilding. Because…

[Mary Robinette] That's not true.

[Piper] Exactly. Particularly contemporary or romantic suspense romance writers, because of the fact that it is set in the modern-day or contemporary times. But we do. One of the best worldbuilding that I can think of right off the top of my head is the Lucky Harbor series by Jill Shalvis because it is a small town. It is a made-up small town in the Pacific Northwest. It feels so real that you think the town is there. The people are real, the bed-and-breakfast is real, you go into town, the diner is real, and buildings feel real. You almost have a mental map in your head of where everything is. That's because the worldbuilding is done so very well by that author. Because the author took the time to think about where this was going to be, what the weather was going to be, even what the highway would be like driving up to it, and how long it would take to walk down to the bed-and-breakfast. That is one of the key points. And what the actual focal points around the town were that built up over the course of all the books in the series. The series itself is successful, but it's going to like, I could be wrong, but I think it's around 9 to 12 books. That's pretty amazing for a contemporary romance to have the kind of worldbuilding where people… You think you know where, like, the Ferris wheel is, you think you know where the pier is, you think you know where the boat is docked that they hanky-panky'ed in, in this book, and then the tree that they fell out of that the person broke their leg in.

[Mary Robinette] The thing is that this kind of worldbuilding gives you opportunities for conflict, it gives you opportunities to add depth to the characters, it's not actually just worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding. It definitely makes things feel more real and gives the reader some… A way to ground… I read a novel for professional reasons that I can't recommend and so I'm not going to name, in which all of the love interests were retired baseball players. Like…

[Cory] That narrows it down.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. In a small town. I'm like, the economics of being retired baseball players in small towns, and they were all people who had been forcibly retired. So… But none of them had other jobs. It was like, how does that…

[Howard] This sounds paranormal.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It does, and it was not.

[Cory] It's the "how do the friends afford that apartment in New York" problem.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly that problem. Which is why the worldbuilding… It's like… The only one who had a job was a barrista, as far as we can… I mean, technically, the others had jobs, but it was…

[Howard] The… I talked about it in other contexts, the CBS Elementary, the Sherlock Holmes show, is set in present-day New York, but the worldbuilding… There's the massive criminal organization run by Moriarity. There's the massive business organization run by Morland Holmes. These elements, there are callbacks to these things throughout it. The precinct, the officers, the judges, the brownstone that Holmes lives in, all of these details have been overlaid on a New York that feels very real to me, who doesn't live in New York. But the series gets good reviews from people who do live in New York. They've managed to blend location research with some fun worldbuilding and some fun callbacks to the Conan Doyle Holmes from…

[Cory] My favorite example of contemporary science fiction worldbuilding is William Gibson's Pattern Recognition trilogy. These are science fiction novel that were set about two years before they came out. So a science fiction novel set in 2000…

[Howard] Oh, wow.

[Cory] 2003 that came out in 2005, that sort of thing. They are science fiction novels about people, particularly New Yorkers, after 9/11, living true the rise of the surveillance state. A lot of the characters are spooks, and a lot of the characters are sort of spook adjacent or in the crosshairs of spooks. It's about people living through a moment of absolute technological upheaval. What he does is he approaches it, this thing that had happened in our recent past, he approaches it as though it were a great technological upheaval that people were living through, which we had. But it had been just long enough that we'd become adapted to it. The shock of them was just spectacular. It reminds me of my favorite Brian Eno aphorism. Brian Eno has this thing called the deck of oblique strategies that he used when he was recording Roxy Music and a bunch of other bands, which were these like gnomic aphorisms that you would draw out of a deck of cards and he would make everyone try and do it. My favorite one is be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before. There's so many times where this comes up, when I'm thinking about how you might try something new. Gibson wrote futuristic science fiction about the recent past. He was the first person not to set futuristic science fiction in the future. It was great.

[Piper] Every one of us has our mouths dropped open right now. Yeah, the faces that we have in the room.

[Cory] Brian Eno was a smart guy.

[Piper] Yeah.

[Cory] Came up with the Windows 95 chime.

[Mary Robinette] Really?

[Cory] Yeah. He made the start of music for Windows 95.

[Mary Robinette] I had no idea.

[Mary Robinette] Well, on that note, [hum...] let's go ahead…

[Cory] I think you mean [huuh...]

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. Let's go ahead and give our fair listeners a homework assignment. Cory?

[Cory] Sure. One of the things that's often missing from worldbuilding is economics. I think it was Steven Bruce that observed that you can always tell if a Marxist has written your fantasy novel because the ratio of vassals to lords is right. I wrote a novel about gift economics. Gift economics are economies in which things are not given on a reciprocal basis, that's barter. Things are given with no expectation of return. We've just lived through a kind of forty-year social experiment in making everything transactional. Where there is no such thing as society and greed is good and selfishness produces pretty near optimal outcomes. It's hard not to reciprocate. But if you think through the things in your life that are nonreciprocal, you'll find that some of the most important things in your life are nonreciprocal, right? Like, you came out and said to your partner, "Look, the only reason I'm married to you is that I expect that when the day comes and I can't wait my own ass, that you're going to do it for me in thanks for all the times I brought you a cup of coffee," that you would be a kind of human monster. Right? Make a list of 10 things in your life that are purely nonreciprocal, that you do only for the pleasure of giving something to someone else, the intrinsic pleasure of giving something to someone else.

[Mary Robinette] That is a great homework assignment. With that, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/01/19/15-03-self-publishing/

Key points: There's money in self publishing! But it takes marketing to get it. Try Kindle Unlimited and get your page reads up! Pay attention to visibility. Your craft needs to hold people's attention, and keep them reading. Romance has a lot of voracious readers, but there are niches for horror, fantasy, mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, all kinds of stories. Look at what readers want to read! Take advice from people who know what they are doing. Interact with your readers. Make sure that when readers start to read your book, they keep reading it! You can write to the market, and still write from your heart and write well. Have fun!

[Transcriptionist note: I tried to sort out who is talking, but I may have mislabeled some parts. Apologies in advance for any mistakes in attribution.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Three.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Self Publishing.

[Nandi] 15 minutes long.

[Victorine] Because you're in a hurry.

[Tamie] And we're not that smart.

[Bridget] But we are all self published.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Nandi] I'm Nandi. [Nandi Taylor]

[Victorine] I'm Victorine. [Victorine Lieske]

[Tamie] I'm Tamie. [Tamie Dearen]

[Bridget] And I'm Bridget. [Bridget E. Baker]

[Howard] We are all, in point of fact, self published. We are also all on stage at WXR 19 on Liberty of the Seas in the Gulf of Mexico. Give it up for us, live audience.

[Whoo! Applause!]

[Howard] Thank you so much. This is been great fun for me, and it's been a huge learning experience for me. As longtime listeners of Writing Excuses are probably aware, I make my living by giving away the comic strip for free online, and then selling books, selling ad space, doing Patreon subscriptions, whatever else. Yes, that is a full-time living. When I say I make a living, that's… Sandra making it into money. I just hide in the studio and draw pictures and write. It's a joint project. It is not independent, it is very codependent. It is a very two-person project. It is a model which I'm very familiar with. But a couple of days ago, in the Olive or Twist Lounge up on deck 15 in the rear, I was talking to Bridget about Kindle Unlimited and self-publishing. As part of this episode, we're going to drop some numbers. Bridget, drop some numbers on us. How are you doing with self-publishing?

[Bridget] So I published my first book last September, right before the Writing Excuses cruise that I went on. So I started, put my book out, and shortly after that, came on this cruise and had very few numbers to share. In one year, I put out seven other books, so I have a total of eight books out. I only made about $5,000 in the first four months. Then I've made about 89,000 since then. So, slow start, but as you start to get your books out and you learn marketing and you understand how to make the book that you had more visible, then you can earn a significantly higher amount of money.

[Howard] 89 plus 5 is… 94.

[Bridget] Yeah, 94 grand. That's my total author income so far.

[Howard] That's a solid number.

[Bridget] For my first year.

[Howard] That's a very solid number for a first year. Victorine, how are you doing?

[Victorine] Well, I hit the jackpot with my first book. Because it hit the New York Times bestseller list. I would say the first probably three years of self-publishing, I made about $40,000 a year. Just with one or two books. Then I took a little time off, so I made some less money for a couple of years. Then I started really studying the market, and publishing books directly to a certain market. So, since then, I've been able to make about $50-$80,000 a year. I'm really close to hitting that over six-figure thing now. So, I'm hoping to do that soon.

[Howard] Tamie?

[Tamie] I've been publishing since 2013. But it was really just a lark when I started. Actually, my kids published my book for me as a surprise for Christmas. So I really wasn't serious about it, other than I just kept publishing them. Wasn't really writing to market until I actually encountered Victorine and the Writing Gals. Got some good advice. Since I've been following that, I went from… I was probably making 30, $35,000 a year, and I just had my first $10,000 net month. So I'm pretty excited about that.

[Howard] That is amazing. Nandi? How are things going for you? Because I… Think you… When we talked a little bit in the preshow, you're counting things a little differently?

[Nandi] Yes. The way I self publish is a little bit different. I'm actually published on Wattpad, which is a story sharing website. So the jury's kind of out on how much money I'm going to make through this. Right now, it's a nice goose egg, but that is going to change. Because my story did pretty well on Wattpad, and it was actually picked by Wattpad books. So while it was on there, it gained me about a million reads and 25,000 followers. So it's being published through Wattpad books in January of 2020. It'll also go… The Wattpad version will go behind a paywall once the story is published.

[Howard] The distinction there between reads and follows seems like it might be an important one. Because one of those numbers is way larger than the other one.

[Nandi] Yes.

[Howard] Make sure I understand this right. Reads is the number of times the book was accessed and read?

[Nandi] Yes.

[Howard] Follows is the people who have… What? Subscribed to you?

[Nandi] Exactly. Yes. Wattpad works a lot like a social media site. I almost like to call it like a YouTube for books.

[Howard] Cool. Is there a similar sort of metric for Amazon, for what you're doing? Victorine? Tamie?

[Victorine] When you're published on Amazon, you sign up for their Kindle Select, which means you agree to only publish on Amazon platform, they put your book in what's called Kindle Unlimited. Then, people can read your book… It's kind of like Netflix for books. They can sign up for this program and they can read it for free, if they pay the program the monthly fee. So we get paid per page read through that program. So if you have a lot of pages read, it can really add up to quite a bit of money.

[Howard] Bridget, I think you were doing the same thing, weren't you?

[Bridget] Yeah, I did the same thing. What happened is when I first started, all my friends that I had met had told me, "Oh, we make most of our money off of page reads." I think the only people who bought my first book were like my friends. So I had a lot of sales, but no page reads, because I didn't have visibility. So I had to start learning techniques for gaining visibility. Then, my page reads went up dramatically. Now, I probably get about two thirds of my revenue is from page reads. The thing I think that's interesting about page reads is that you can slap up a book that's lousy, and you will get no page reads. Because people can check it out, read the first couple of pages, say, "Oh, this book is junk," and check it back in. So your book needs to be in there, but it also needs to be good enough that it holds people's attention and that they want to read your other books. Then, depending on the length of the book, you can make $0.20 you can make 2.50. If it's really long, you'll get paid more because they're reading more pages.

[Howard] Victorine? Oh, sorry. Tamie. I'm… [vuogh] so many people at this table that it's terrifying me.

[Tamie] Yeah. One difference with me is because I have… Some of my books are not exclusive to Amazon. So they are not in the Kindle Unlimited program. So I have one series that is five books, and the first book is actually Permafree, which means that I have made it free on Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and those platforms. Then Amazon has price matched as free. Because you cannot set your price free on Amazon. So Amazon has price matched it as free. So that one is out there. Anyone can read it. Usually stays… I think right now it's in the 700s in free books on Amazon. It usually stays up above 1000. Then, people hopefully will buy the rest of the books in the series and read them. If they actually read the book. A lot of people just download free books and don't even read them. But you get a certain percentage of readthrough on there. Then the rest of my… Probably most of my money still comes from page reads.

[Howard] Okay. A couple of terms that I want to make sure we're understanding. Wide means?

[Tamie] Means published in other places besides Amazon.

[Howard] Okay.

[Tamie] So, wide means that I'm published on those other channels. By the way, if… When Victorine made the New York Times bestseller list, her books were wide. You can't make a bestseller list without publishing on all those channels

[Howard] Let's pause for a moment for the book of the week. Somebody was going to pitch a book to us.

[Tamie] Okay. Yes. I'll just recommend the last good book that I read by an indie author named Emma St. Claire. It's called The Billionaire's Secret Heir. It's a really fun book. I don't know if you like billionaire romance stories, but this one is a clean, or what we call a sweet romance, meaning that there isn't any sex in it. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have any heat. It's a… They really are attracted to each other, but it's a book that people who object to reading sex and their books would enjoy this book. It's a cute idea, but the man and his wife were unable to have children and had used a surrogate mother to have a child. Then, many years later, I think his wife had passed away and the child is like seven years old, and he ends up meeting the girl who was the surrogate mother. She becomes the nanny, and you can just guess what happens. But it's a really sweet book.

[Howard] I want to address the potential… Elephant in the room might not be the right term. I get the feeling that there's a lot of romance in the genres that you guys are working within.

[Victorine] Yep. Yup.

[Bridget] I think in part that's because you're dealing… The three of us are all, at least to some extent, in Kindle Unlimited, and…

[Howard] When you say three of us…

[Bridget] I'm sorry, I'm…

[Howard] Bridget, Victorine, and Tamie.

[Bridget] Correct. That's right. So, Kindle Unlimited specifically has a lot of people who subscribe who like romance. I think in part that's because a lot of people who read romance tend to be voracious readers. So, paying 10 or $12 a book, if you're reading two books a day, gets cost prohibitive. Cost prohibitive in a hurry. So they tend to sign up for Kindle Unlimited. That means that you get a lot of immediate audience who are interested in reading your books if you're in that genre. So I write about half romance and half young adult. My romance is a much easier sell on Kindle Unlimited. I mean, obviously, it's not technically a sale, because they're just downloading it and reading it. But those get way more page reads for way lower ads spent. Whereas I get a lot more sales in paperback and in e-book on my young adult than on my romances. I almost sell no paperbacks in romance, but I sell a lot in YA.

[Nandi] I'll piggyback on that. The trend is the same on Wattpad as well. You will see a lot of romance. You'll see a lot of books titled things like The Bad Boy and the Nerd, or The Billionaire, or the Gangster's Girlfriend and things like that. They tend to do really well. Kind of for the same reason, voracious readers like to read things at low cost. In this case, free. But, that said, I would encourage anyone who is looking for feedback or who wants to share their story to post on Wattpad regardless of what you write because, as long as you put it up there, there are niches for horror, fantasy, things like this. If you look, you can find them.

[Howard] I want to pose that question to all of you for our listeners. If they want to make a living on Kindle Unlimited or if they want to make a living e-books going wide, does it have to be a romance? Do you have to write seven books a year?

[Bridget] No, definitely not. I know authors who are writing in many different genres. They probably need to be genre fiction rather than literary fiction or middle grade. Those are the two that really struggle with self-publishing. But I know authors who write mysteries, who write thrillers, who write science fiction, who write fantasy. All of them six-figure plus authors. Doing really, really well in that field. My suggestion would be to go on Amazon and look at the top selling indie books in whatever genre you write in and you're passionate in. Pick up those books. Pick up five of them, and read them. Look at the commonalities between… This is what the reader wants to read. So, if you can look at what readers want to read and you can write in that space, you can do very well as an indie author.

[Howard] We often caution our listeners against writing to the market. But with Kindle Unlimited, I have this sense that the market changes daily. A new book can come out and spike the list and you can pick it up and read it and understand what the market is consuming right now. Which is… You could be pretty agile in your production. Bridget, you said that you did some research about marketing and positioning your books and things like that. We don't have a whole lot of time. Do you have some secrets you can share with us?

[Bridget] So, I don't know if this is a secret per se, but my number one advice is even when it's hard to take, take advice from the people who know what they're doing. So, Victorine is sitting right here with me, and I'll tell you that when I put out my very first romance, I said, "I don't care what everybody's telling me, I just follow my heart." I got a photo shoot of a normal-looking couple because I said, "All these romances have models on the cover. I want normal-looking people on mine." I put it out, and nobody bought it. I had like 10 friends reach out and say, "Your cover's horrible." I'm like, "What do you know? People want regular people." It turns out they don't.

[Chuckles]

[Bridget] So I had to change my cover, which meant I paid for a cover twice, and I paid for a photographer that I didn't need, because I ended up using stock photos. So that's just one example. But there are people in the indie community who, if you go find some groups, they are very willing to help you. Victorine is one of them, who is like, "Bridget, this cover's not good. I know, because I'm a cover designer, and also I make a lot of money on my books. You need to change it." It wasn't until I listened to that advice that I did not want to listen to that I started to get progress and traction with the marketing end. You've got to have your book branded right. You've got to have something that hits the market, because even though it's always changing, there are things that you can look at and say, "Oo, this is working," or "this isn't." The great thing about indie is you can change it. So I had that cover that did crappy for a month, and I changed it. My book went whoosh! Straight up! After I got a better cover on it. So there is… The neat thing about indie is you don't just put it out there and your publisher bought 50,000 copies. Too bad. You can put it out there and say, "Ho, this didn't work. Let's try changing my title." If you own the ISBN, you go change your title, you give it to Amazon, Bam. You've got a new title, a new cover, it's rebranded, and all of a sudden it can do dramatically better. So listen to the advice, even if you think you're smart, you're probably not at the beginning.

[Victorine] Find a group of authors that know what they're doing, right? I'm part of a Facebook group called The Writing Gals. We give tons of advice. Just… When people ask questions, we tell them what to do in order to be successful. Because we want to give back, because we have been very successful at doing this.

[Howard] I'm looking right at Nandi. What've you got for us?

[Nandi] Well, in terms of… I'd like to give kind of advice on not necessarily secrets or tips, but one thing that was really useful to me on Wattpad specifically is that you can interact with your readers directly. I will do things like actually ask them questions, chapter by chapter. Whose side are you on? What do you think about this? I actually took that information and incorporated it into my edits. So it's kind of a unique and amazing thing, is that I'm literally in my readers' heads as I'm writing. It can be a benefit and a downfall. I mean, you don't want to tailor your book too much to what readers think, but it can be a really cool thing that most readers don't have access to.

[Howard] At risk of plugging the Writing Excuses retreat again, this morning… Was it this morning? I can't even remember what day it is. Dongwon taught a class on the first two pages and the hooks. How important is that kind of thing for you in this market?

[Bridget] Fantastically important. You have to be as good or better than any other choices they have out there. On Amazon, there's billions of books they can choose from, so your craft has to be on point. Definitely, people will look… Pick up a book and look at the first couple of pages. They have to be excellent.

[Victorine] In fact, I good friend who told me straight up when I asked her to join my street team that she doesn't have time to read. So I said, "That's fine, no problem." A couple of days later, she contacted me and said, "I saw your book on Amazon, and I just read the sample pages," that they let you read for free. I had already offered her a free book, guys. "I just read the sample pages and I could not put them down. So can I have that free book?" Then she plugged me on her group, which is like a deals page. I sold like 580 copies of my book that day. It was just because my sample pages were good enough that they drew her in, and she wanted to read it. Someone who doesn't read. If your sample pages… If your first two pages are crap, you're not going to sell your book. You're not going to get page reads.

[Tamie] I want to say something about writing to market. I think when Victorine first was talking about it, I was a little bit put off by the idea, because I'm an author and I have things in my heart and I don't want to compromise myself for money. Right? But you can write from your heart and write well. You don't have to put down your standards, you can still get your message out there. Like, I have a billionaire romance series, which, you think is pretty corny, but my particular series is based on a group of men who met when they were teenagers at a camp for kids with disabilities. So each one of my heroes, even though they are billionaires and they do happen to have six packs and are really good looking, they also happen to have disabilities. Which I felt like was just underrepresented in romance books. So you can still do that and still make money and reach out to people while writing to market.

[Nandi] Absolutely. I would cosign that. My book deals with a character who is… Has a similar background to mine, which is Caribbean and kind of West African culture. I wasn't sure how it would do on Wattpad. To my surprise and delight, it's done really well. A lot of people have connected with my character. I think self-publishing and online publishing are great ways to kind of prove certain conceptions about what sells wrong and get your story out there.

[Howard] Last question. We've talked a lot about business, we've talked a lot about agility and market and whatever else. Are you all still having fun?

[Nandi?] Absolutely.

[Howard] They're nodding. For those of you lacking the video feed, everybody's nodding.

[Victorine] When I first decided to go indie, there was a lady named Elaina Johnson, who sat down and spent her entire lunch talking to me because I had an agent and was insistent that I needed to go traditional. She basically said, "Why haven't you ever considered indie? You've been pursuing traditional for a long time, through a variety of frustrating obstacles." I said, "Well, I write YA and people that are indie don't do well with YA." She's like, "Well, they may not do quite as well as romance, but why don't you try both? You might actually like writing romance." I said, "Phtp. Like writing romance?" Well, all of my YA has a romantic subplot, so I don't know why I was so obtrusive that I didn't see that, but I now write both. I do a YA series during the course of the year and a romance series. So I put out several of each. I like the romance as much as I like the YA. So I am still having a lot of… I mean, I'm writing what I want to write, and I don't have to argue with my agent about whether or not it's something that someone will buy. Because I can put it up, and then people buy it. So…

[Nandi] I'm having a blast. I'm on a writing cruise, and I get to write the whole thing off.

[Garble]

[Tamie] I would say, on my day job… I'm a dentist. I've said before, but honestly, if I just wanted to make money, I would just work a lot of hours at the office and make money. So, I write because I love to write. If it wasn't fun, I'd quit.

[Nandi] Yep. Absolutely. Actually, I started listening to this podcast in 2014, and I told myself, "Okay. One day I'm going to be on this podcast."

[Cheers]

[Nandi] Thank you. Thanks to the… Taking the chance of putting myself up online, now here I am today plugging my first debut book on the Writing Excuses podcast in this, the year of our Lord 2019. So…

[Howard] Nandi, you're doing a great job, and I promise you right now, I'm actually more nervous than you are.

[Howard] Who's got our homework?

[Bridget] That's me. That's Bridget. So, Tamie just explained that she's a dentist. I'm actually a lawyer as my day job, I guess. Although I'm not doing as much. But I did a couple of podcasts for the Writing Gals, you can look them up on author taxes. Your homework is this, no matter where you are in your writing journey, you need to start thinking about how to be smart about the business of writing. That involves teaching yourself through the podcasts that I did that are way too long and way too detailed, or go out and do the research yourself. Talk to a CPA and start finding out what things you can deduct. There are two main ways you can deduct them, but I think that is beyond the scope of this. Start keeping track of those expenses. Whether you're going to deduct them annually or whether you're going to roll them altogether as startup costs when you first start making money, either way, you need to start getting your ducks in a row, so that when it becomes money for you, like $94,000 in a year, you know how to get it down so that you don't pay the IRS a third of that.

[Howard] Okay. Before I say that we're out of excuses, I would like to acknowledge the presence of the Writing Excuses cruise audience.

[Whoo! Applause.]

[Howard] We've had a great time out here. I haven't done very much writing. But I know that some of us have written like 40,000 words while on a ship. We're not going to name drop anybody. I'm just going to say, fair listener, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.51: A Farewell to Worldbuilding

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/22/14-51-a-farewell-to-worldbuilding/

Key Points: Wrapping up the year of worldbuilding, what are some good examples? Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Annihilation. Amberlough. The One Ring role-playing game. Larry Niven's Known Space. Elder Scrolls Online Lore Master, Lawrence Schick, and lore from an unreliable narrator. What about pet peeves? Star Trek: Discovery breaking the worldbuilding with new technology without thinking about ramifications. People who have pet peeves about worldbuilding about the wrong things. Let the worldbuilding flow from the story, don't hit us over the head with it. People who don't think about interconnectedness and ramifications. Big mistakes in worldbuilding? Forgetting bicycles! Seven lady astronauts, but only six names.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 51.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, A Farewell to Worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] It is the end of another year. You are all done worldbuilding, and never have to do it again.

[Yay!]

[Ha ha ha]

[Dan] It's about time.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] No, this is the episode… we're just kind of wrap things up with a bow on it and talk about anything we think we might have missed. My first question, though, to you will be, "What are your favorite examples of worldbuilding through all pieces of media?" Is there just anything that you really love? Something you saw or read recently that you thought had fantastic worldbuilding? I'll go ahead and start. We're about a year out from it now, but when we were recording, we were recording this quite ahead of time. A few months ago, I saw the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I loved it. It is one of my favorite movies of all time already. Part of it was the just fantastic use of worldbuilding. You would think a cross-dimension plot where you have to deal with the fact that there are alternate realities… I've tried to write these, they're very hard… Would be difficult. You would think that introducing multiple brand-new characters would be difficult. They just knocked it out of the park. They used the things that visual mediums can use that really make me annoyed and mad, because I can't do it.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] To have a really distinctive… Yeah, I'm looking at Howard. A really distinctive visual style that accentuates your worldbuilding in interesting ways. If you haven't seen the movie…

[Howard] Having the opportunity to say this where I can actually go on the record and say this… To this point, pre-Spider-Verse, Marvel and many other companies have shown us what a super hero movie could be. Marvel finally came around and showed us what a comic book movie could be.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Howard] They used tools that we've seen them touch on before.

[Brandon] The old Ang Lee Hulk tried to do it.

[Howard] Ang Lee Hulk tried to do it. The… 24 actually flirted with it a little bit. The fact that the gradients around a flashlight used halftone beads to suggest that the flashlight was itself shining on a cob…

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Howard] I got chills all the way through.

[Brandon] It was amazing.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] The way they used sound effects with the visual… Writing out the words, which you would think would be cheesy. You would think it would be like the old Batman TV show. It wasn't at any moment cheesy. It accentuated the story in really fascinating ways. Great worldbuilding.

[Dan] That's awesome. One of my favorites from this year was the movie Annihilation. I've not read the VanderMeer book that it's based on. But what really struck for me, what really hit home and clicked, was the way that the worldbuilding of the Shimmer… The premise is that there is this weird alien effect called the Shimmer. People go into it and they get lost. So this group of women scientists go in, and they… The world they encounter is so unique and complete unto itself, yet also perfectly engineered to expose and challenge all of the problems that they have as characters. I have never seen such a brilliant marriage of character arc and world as in the movie Annihilation. It's really just so well done.

[Mary Robinette] I talk about this book a fair bit, which is Lara Elena Donnelly's Amberlough. The worldbuilding that she's done in that, it just… It feels like a real historical place. It's small details. Like, the stuff that she does with gender, there are young women who dress in suits and they're called Razors. They're called Razors because they shave their heads. The cigarettes are… They're not called fags, they're called straights. Just small touches. It's so good. She swears she didn't do that one on purpose. I'm like, "You're lying to me."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's just small things all the way through. A marriage of three people is called an old marriage. Because it's in an older style. It… These lovely things. Because it also normalizes it in a different way. It's just… Oh, it's such graceful details kind of all the way through. Multiple cultures with… She uses language and sentence structure to communicate that. It's so good.

[Dan] I'm actually going to mention another one on a totally different angle here. This year, I encountered a role-playing game called The One Ring. Which is obviously based on Lord of the Rings. So it's not that it created its world, but it translated Tolkien's world, Tolkien's Middle Earth into the mechanics of the game beautifully. Like, the way that Tolkien's book… Your ability to have or instill hope is even more important than your ability to kill a monster. I've never seen that done in a game. The One Ring captures it just flawlessly.

[Howard] I've got two examples. One of them is Larry Niven's Known Space. Which was my introduction to multi-book sci-fi worldbuilding. I'd read Lord of the Rings prior to that. But this was the first time I'd seen it in science fiction and the reason I love it is that it was used for short story after short story. It started to feel like home. Then, as an adult, I picked up a collection from Niven, and one of the things that was in there was an outline for a novel that totally destroys Known Space and says, "I'm done with it." Because he, and I think, Jerry Pournelle had talked about how many holes there were in his worldbuilding, and he just wanted to burn the whole thing down. He had this outline and then came up with the idea for Ringworld and put Ringworld in Known Space. His publisher said, "Ringworld's doing really well. You're not allowed to burn anything down, my friend."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I love that. Because he took a thing which, yeah, the more I look at it, the more broken it is. It's broken in a lot of ways. And yet… For telling the stories that he wanted to tell, it continues to work. The other example, Elder Scrolls Online has a… Had a lore master, Lawrence Schick, whose job it was to take all of the Bethesda games, all of the Bethesda Elder Scrolls games and have a consistent lore within this MMO. The first thing he discovered is you guys have not been consistent. So he made one ironclad rule, which is, every single piece of lore we present to players is presented from the perspective of someone in-world who is an unreliable narrator. That is the only possible out that we have for this mess. What's fun is that as a writer, I can see this, as I consume the in-game lore and I love it. He just retired from doing Elder Scrolls Online. Which I assume means they have somebody waiting in the wings to do their lore. That is the sort of job which, if I were not currently making a living on my own IP, I would love.

[Brandon] Let's stop and do a book of the week. Dan, you're going to tell us about…

[Dan] Yeah. I want to tell you about Sakura: Intellectual Property. This… I'm going to talk a little bit more about the story behind this. I'm going to do it very quickly, don't worry. A very good friend of mine named Zach Hill passed away a couple years ago. Out of the blue, he was about 35 years old. Had a heart attack at work, no one saw it coming. He's a very good author. He was about halfway through this cyberpunk book called Sakura about a heavy metal rockstar android who gets hacked and turned into an assassin. So a couple of other local authors who are also good friends of his picked up the banner, finished that book, and it's out now. You can read it. 100% of the proceeds go to Zack's widow. None of it goes to the other people that helped finish the project and publish the book. It is a really cool cyberpunk. She is a heavy metal singer, and every chapter begins with a playlist where they will list three, four, five heavy metal songs that pertain in some emotional way to the chapter. It's really fun and very cool, and like I said, for a good cause and a good guy.

[Brandon] All right. So, back side of this podcast. Any worldbuilding pet peeves you have? That we haven't had a chance… Oh, Dan's…

[Dan] [laughter] Let's talk about Star Trek.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Dan] No.

[Mary Robinette] [laughter] And the angry letters begin immediately.

[Dan] Yeah. So. I mean, I don't want to turn this into a gigantic rant about Star Trek: Discovery, but I'm going to turn it into a small rant about Star Trek: Discovery.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I don't want to, but…

[Dan] But I also very much want to.

[Mary Robinette] [chuckles]

[Dan] One of the issues that Star Trek started running into as soon as it was kind of resurrected by the Abrams movies and then again for Star Trek: Discovery is the current creators, the current bearers of the flag, are so obsessed with the idea of Star Trek's past, and yet they continue to put in technologies that break the worldbuilding into a thousand billion pieces. There's no way to fix those. Someone like JJ Abrams, that is not what he is concerned about. He is trying to tell a very cool story. Continuity is a secondary, if not tertiary, concern. But things like in Star Trek: Discovery, which is not Abrams at all, it's CBS, they have a drive that will basically let a starship teleport across the galaxy. That breaks the world so hard. It's very hard… I, even if you ignore the rest of the series and you're looking only at Star Trek: Discovery by itself, that technology breaks everything. They do not consider it, and they do not deal with the ramifications. I would be fascinated by a story that took the I can teleport anywhere in the universe technology and actually treated it like a real thing. They just use it as an excuse to go wherever they want to go. So… [Aaargh!]

[Brandon] So, my pet peeve is kind of along similar lines in that I feel like people who have pet peeves about worldbuilding have pet peeves about the wrong things.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] You have a pet peeve about the right sort of thing.

[Dan] Oh, thank you. Thank you for that caveat.

[Brandon] When people complain about worldbuilding that was done intentionally and is in service of the story. My big example from this season is World of Hats. It is a legit complaint that taking a planet and making it a monoculture is, in some ways, bad worldbuilding. But it was good worldbuilding for the stories they wanted to tell in the given episodes of Star Trek that that trope came from. Obviously, there are things to consider about this and stuff like that. But when someone complains about Star Wars and says, "Oh, it has a nice planet in the desert planet and a this planet… That's obviously just terrible worldbuilding." I say, "That is really good worldbuilding for Star Wars. That is what they're trying to do."

[Dan] It fulfilled the purpose that they are trying to get across.

[Brandon] It's not lazy, it's not bad, it is simply the type of storytelling that they want to do. Anytime we start saying… Giving a value judgment that this type of worldbuilding is great, and this type of worldbuilding should never be used… I mean, all you're doing is locking cool tools in a closet and saying, "No, you can't touch these. You can't use that circular saw anymore. Because we've decided that that one is good for no project whatsoever." So, that's my pet peeve.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Howard] That circular saw is in the closet because of the number of fingers it's maimed. It has nothing to do with its use. Well. It has everything to do with how people use it…

[Laughter]

[Howard] It has nothing to do with how useful it is.

[Howard] Boy, pet peeves?

[Brandon] You aren't required to have one. You can just be…

[Dan] I can just keep talking about Star Trek if you want.

[Howard] We've gathered that.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Fundamentally, for me, I want the worldbuilding to flow from the story. A movie trailer that begins with, "In a world…" That's okay. Because you've got two minutes to tell me… Movie trailer. But when your movie begins, "In a world…" I'm sad. I just let it… Let me discover it. Let me discover it. I think part of this is that Hollywood hadn't figured it out yet. They've got better. They've realized that people who come to these movies want to have that experience. But it's still… Every time it happens, it just makes me so sad.

[Brandon] You know what I think it is? This is just me guessing, but I think a lot of the stories that start with these things in the movies, it's because some studio exec got the movie and said, "I don't understand this," or "The audience will not understand this. Add a voiceover at the beginning that explains the entire story and maybe a little animatic or something like this in order to explain what our movie is, because everyone's going to be lost." Almost always those ruin it.

[Howard] So, in translating my pet peeve… You're mapping my pet peeve onto rich dude missing clues ruins things for other people. You're not wrong.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. No, that is a… I have a pet peeve about that just outside of stories. So, for me, it's when people don't think about the interconnectedness of stuff. I get so annoyed when there is a piece of technology that shows up in one place and has no ramifications on anything else. Or when a character has knowledge… Like Hunger Games. This is not technology, but it was… I just couldn't get past it. The… So, first of all, there's the economics of Hunger Games which makes no sense at all. But the other thing was that she has all of this knowledge of botanical things and plants and things. Then she gets transported across the country, and all of it applies to this entirely new ecosystem. I'm like, "No, that's not how that works. That's not how that works, and also, blackberries don't grow on bushes, they grow on brambles." But I'm fine…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I totally have no problems.

[Brandon] There's an old cover from the silver age of comic books where it's a young Batman and young Superman as kids…

[Oh, my gosh. Laughter.]

[Brandon] Looking at Batman's… Superman's Time Machine thing, where he's showing and saying, "Hey, look in the future, I'll become Superman and you'll become Batman and we'll be best friends." Every person who looks at that cover says, "You know what would be a good use for being able to look in the future at your friend's future is to tell him his parents get murdered in a little while in an alleyway. Maybe you could use it to solve crimes, Superman. Instead of saying look, we're going to be best buddies."

[Brandon] All right. We have ranted enough. Last question. Any big mistakes you've made in worldbuilding in a story that you would do differently now if you could change it.

[Dan] Okay. So. In the Partials universe, I wrote the entire thing and I did all this stuff. How are they going to get electricity to power their stuff? Are they going to be able to use cars? What are they going to have to do? The… one time that I really need them to get a generator started after the gas has already gelled… After the book was published, and I'd come up with all these different transportation workarounds, somebody said, "Why don't they ever ride bikes?"

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, yeah, I kind of forgot the really easy, ever present transportation system that does not require animal power or electricity or gas.

[Brandon] I told you before that I put bikes into the last Steelheart book specifically because you had had that frustration when you had published. I'm like, "Oh, I could put them in."

[Dan] I can do it now. [Garbled]

[Howard] This bike rider's for you, Dan.

[Brandon] There's a scene where they ride bicycles specifically because I heard you complaining that you hadn't managed to do that. I'm like, "Wow, thanks for failing, Dan, so that I won't." Anything else you guys got?

[Mary Robinette I can tell you a continuity error.

[Brandon] Oh, let's hear it.

[Mary Robinette] I told you about this before.

[Brandon] Oh, yeah. It's great.

[Mary Robinette] This is… So, this is one of those things where you do all of the re… You think it through and still you manage to make a mistake. It gets past your editor, your proofreaders, your beta readers. It gets past apparently all of my fans up to this point. Welcome to my world.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] In the Lady Astronaut book, I talk about the seven original astronauts. The Artemis Seven. I thought about that. There's seven men, and then we have the seven women astronauts to match the seven men. So I'm working on the new book, and I needed to have all seven women there. I'm writing down the names, and I can only come up with six of them.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] There are only six women.

[Brandon] Somehow we all missed it. I hadn't…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] completely.

[Dan] Oh, wow.

[Brandon] They're called… You mentioned seven women in the room, but you only named six of them. Repeatedly.

[Mary Robinette] Yup.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] Oh, that's so great.

[Brandon] Someone…

[Dan] It's because they left an extra plate at the table for when Isaiah shows up.

[Howard] Someone's bad at math, which is unfortunate.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right. They're saying that they're all being hired as computers, but my main character's forte is math. She's like, "There are four American women, and three…" I'm like, "Nope. There's three American women."

[Dan [Well, clearly, there's another one who's just very quiet.

[Mary Robinette] And she has the same name as one of the other characters. That's why sometimes one of them… Sometimes it's Betty, and sometimes it's Renée. It's two different people they're talking about the entire time.

[Dan] That makes perfect sense.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I sat there and I stared at it. I can't… There's no fix.

[Brandon] That's the best one I've…

[Mary Robinette] There's no fix at all.

[Brandon] Ever heard of. I… We all do this…

[Dan] That's so great.

[Brandon] But that's the most amazing one.

[Dan] What you do now is you run like a campaign. "Who is the seventh Lady astronaut?"

[Howard] Actually, the Artemis Sven.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's a typo!

[Laughter]

[Brandon] All right.

[Dan] This is clearly six lady astronauts are worth seven male astronauts.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes, exactly.

[Brandon] I'm going to wrap this up. Thank you, everyone, for listening. There will be an episode next week. It will be a wildcard. So we are done with the topic of worldbuilding. Next year, we're actually going to come back with a new… Slightly new format that we're going to do for a few years. Because we've done a good job these last five years of really kind of tackling our kind of master class on writing.

[Howard] We all think we've done a good job, anyway.

[Brandon] We like to think we've done a good job. Starting with Write a Novel, then the Elemental Genres, then we've done Plot, Setting, and Character. So we're going to take a different approach on it next year, so… Show up in two weeks and we will tell you how were going to do that. For now, we're giving you no homework. Because, enjoy the holidays, and enjoy the end of the year. Get some writing done, or just relax.

[Mary Robinette] Or, if you want to buy a gift for someone, I'll just point out that the Writing Excuses Cruise is open for registration.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go have a nice holiday.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.45: Economics

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/11/10/14-45-economics/

Key points: Economics in worldbuilding? The science of human behavior between ends and scarce means with alternate uses. Not just money! Time, trade... Incentives and motivation. Remember, everyone doesn't have all the information! Don't spend too much time on value, worry about what people do for a living and why. Fantastic scarce resources make good fantasy books! As writers, ask what makes an interesting extrapolation by changing our culture in some way. Don't just think of currency. Most of the economics of science fiction and fantasy don't work if you look too close. So... handwave, and give the reader a chance to suspend their disbelief. You get one bye, one freebie, and you can earn more by explaining something in detail, by showing you are trustworthy.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 45.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Economics.

[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] This is a really hard one to not be that smart on…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Because there are a lot of very smart economists out there. We have touched on economics a lot in various podcasts in the past. We want to talk about how, as a writer, you consider economics in your worldbuilding, specifically. So, can we… Let's get a kind of a foundation here. What do we mean by this, what do we mean by economics? The more I study economics, the more I realize that economists see everything as economies, which is basically how every discipline is when you really drill into it. I was talking to a friend who studies math. He's like, "Oh, math is really philosophy, which is really the existence of everything, so math is everything." Well, economics is everything.

[Dan] When all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like economics.

[Mahtab] I have a really good definition.

[Brandon] Okay, go.

[Mahtab] By Lionel Charles Robbins, who is a British economist, and this was in the 1930s. But he said… He defined economics as the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternate uses.

[Brandon] That's really good.

[Mahtab] I found that was really good, because if you have alternate uses, that's where the economics comes in.

[Howard] I like that, because when you talk about economy, most people think money. When you say the word money, somebody in the room is going to remember that time is money. Well, time is a scarce resource. The economy of I am going to spend time on a thing so you don't have to spend time on a thing, so you're going to spend time on a thing so I don't have to spend time on it. Then the two of us are going to trade things. Now somehow, we've each gotten more than if we tried to spend all of our time on one thing. That is the whole market of buying things with real money that only exist in video games. Somebody spent 20 hours playing for it, and now they sell it to you. Now you have it without having spent the time.

[Brandon] Because you spent your time doing something at which you are really good, and therefore got paid for that, and spent a fraction of that on someone else's time doing something at which they are very good.

[Dan] I love in your definition, it talks about…

[Mahtab] Not mine, but it's the good one.

[Dan] Whoever. I remember your name and not his. I love that it talks about different resources with alternate uses. Because wood, for example, if the only thing we used wood for was to build a house, then it wouldn't be wood, it would just be house points. You have to accrue enough house points, and then you have a house. But wood can also be used for weapons. Wood can also be lit on fire, make fires and things. So…

[Howard] You burn your house points! What?

[Brandon] It can also be a beautiful thing as a tree that we enjoy.

[Dan] Yeah. [Garbled] preserve the forest. So when you start thinking about not just that I need to accrue enough points to make this thing, but how am I going to spend these points because there's so many different things to spend them on.

[Brandon] I really like, in economics, the study of incentives. Specifically, how human beings are motivated by different things. These points, how different points motivate people in different ways and how we can be motivated by different levels of points in different areas. That is all really interesting to me. I think it plays into storytelling really well, because the economics of how a character value something versus how someone else in the team or an antagonist values that thing is great, ripe for storytelling opportunities.

[Howard] The place where I think worldbuilding falls flat on economics is if you try and make it all logical in ways that all of the players are acting as if they have all of the information. Fundamentally… A great example is the Pentagon paying $1200 for a hammer. Where does a $1200 hammer come from? Well, in part, it can come from the guy who's building the spreadsheet, and he's told, "Look, we're charging $1 million for this thing. Add up all the stuff." He gets to the end, and he's like, "Ugh. I'm $1200 short. But they require everything to be line item. I'm just going to raise the price of a hammer." Okay? It's not a $1200 hammer. It's $1200 of the guy building the spreadsheet not caring and knowing that nobody's going to read this until it's too late. Then they'll be making fun of the Pentagon, instead of the subcontractor.

[Brandon] So, as you're building a fantasy or science fiction culture, do you spend time on the economics? Like, the raw economics, the monetary system? How do you decide how much things are worth in your cultures that you are worldbuilding?

[Dan] I don't spend a ton of time on value, so much as figuring out what people do and why. So, like, what do you do for a living? Is it important that this is a community of farmers or of ranchers or of fishermen or of whatever it's going to be. Because then that tells me something economically about the society and about their standard of living and so on. It doesn't matter to me as much how much a meal costs as knowing where their money comes from.

[Brandon] I really like fantastical resources in fantasy books. We're going to do an entire podcast on that in a couple of weeks. I like tying my economics to something that is scarce in a fantasy world that we just don't even have in our world. Because then it lets me start asking these questions about well, how would they value this thing? How would we value this thing if we had it? If someone could actually cast a spell and make something materialize, what does that do to the value of the thing, or the value of the person who can make that thing? Those things, in fantasy, are part of what draws me to fantasy, is that we can ask these questions that can't really be asked in the real world because it's just impossible.

[Howard] A classic example is the Dungeons & Dragons spell, Continual Light, which I think had a thousand gold piece material cost. But… Guys… It's continual light. For a thousand gold pieces, you could make a light that will never go out. We're going to find enough thousand gold pieces that in five or six generations, nobody needs candles. So, by the time we've gotten to this point, yeah, your economy… Your economy is not centering around how do we find light. There may be other things that are scarce, but light isn't one of them.

[Brandon] It's easy to kind of make fun of games, sometimes. Because they're building their system to play a game. But you are writers, listeners. So, you… Your job is not to ask what makes a good game. Your job is to ask what's going to make an interesting extrapolation by changing our culture in some interesting way.

[Dan] I was working on a fantasy setting several years ago in which I wanted to have magic essentially just be energy. Like, wizards could channel energy. I realized, as I got deeper and deeper into it, that there was no use for a wizard that outweighed the value of just plugging them into a power station somewhere. Which is a cool story idea on its own, and if that's the direction you want to go, that's awesome. But taking the time to think about these things helps you get a sense of what… Like Howard was saying, what the scarcity really is, what the economy really looks like with this thing you've invented.

[Brandon] There's a famous SMBC [Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal], the web comic, that postulates that the greatest good Superman could do if he really exists would be just to run really fast on a treadmill or push a thing to generate boundless electricity for the world. It takes that to ridiculous lengths. But it does make you think. "Huh. You know, rather than saving people, if Superman were pushing a turbine, it actually would do greater good for the world."

[Howard] I think it was Terry Pratchett who… There was a dwarven artifact which is a pair of rectangular blocks which one of them rotates in relation to the other and you cannot stop them from doing that. So what you do is you fix one end of the block into the mountain and then start building gear step-down systems attached to the other end of the block because you haven't… It's not turning very fast, but nothing can stop it. So all of the dwarven industry around this artifact was centered around how can we build enough gears so that everything is driven by this one miraculous thing. I loved the economy of that. It's… You only have one Superman. Well, how do we build the turbine the most efficiently so one Superman can do enough running?

[Brandon] Speaking of Pratchett, you have our book?

[Howard] The book of the week. Making Money by Terry Pratchett. This is the second Moist von Lipshwitz [Lipwig] book. In Going Postal, Lord Vetinari takes our hero, Moist, and puts him in charge of the postal system. Moist manages to turn stamps into a currency. In Making Money, Lord Vetinari approaches Moist and says, "Good job creating a currency. Now I need you to create a currency." And puts him in charge of the Ankh-Morpork mint. It really is a delightful… Pratchett writes social satire. It is not just a satirization of banks and commerce and economy. But it's a satirization of humanity. It's Pratchett at his…

[Brandon] It's brilliant.

[Howard] Pratchett at his best.

[Brandon] My favorite books in the entirety of Discworld are Making Money and Going Postal, so… Can't recommend it enough. They are wonderful.

[Brandon] Mahtab, you had something you wanted to add.

[Mahtab] Economics, most people don't… Even in science fiction and fantasy, they don't concentrate too much on it. One, because it's… The jargon that is used for it can be a little bit boring and sometimes intimidating. So most people tend not to. One is because of the fact that it is… in the fantasy genre, people are willing to suspend their disbelief, rather than if it was a nonfiction where you have to get all your rules right. But I found this really interesting essay or article on Medium.com which was between Jo Lindsay Walton, who's the editor of the Economic Science Fiction and Fantasy Database. He had... He's mentioned that as far as economics go, sometimes we only think of hard currency or something that's monetary. But there can be so many other economies that are based on a non-currency medium. So, that's something to think about. And that's a really interesting essay. If anyone wants to read about it and just get some more ideas, it's on Medium.com, The Economics of Science Fiction.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Mahtab] Very interesting article.

[Brandon] That kind of segues into the next question I wanted to ask, which is, sometimes the economics of science fiction and fantasy just don't make any sense. They really just don't. The one that Howard and I were chatting about before the podcast is the economics of space invasions. A lot of times, if you look at the cost-to-benefit ratio for moving the ships through the galaxy, which is a really big place, the amount of energy expended that it doesn't make any sense. A lot of shipping, intergalactic shipping, just wouldn't make any sense. Most science fiction books and movies just wouldn't work. Fantasy is even worse at this, right? We like to have great vast enormous battles that are very awesome and epic. Yet, the economic system that would have to be in place to feed these forces and make this actually work just… Everything collapses if you start asking the hard questions. So my question for you is how do you approach this in your stories? Where do you handwave, where do you not handwave? How do you do this right so it won't kick people out? How do you maybe do it wrong that you've seen?

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So in my cyberpunk series, Mirador series, I was trying to create the story that I wanted to tell. That had the certain elements that I wanted to tell. That included the conceit that everybody has a computer installed in their head, and that there are drones that can do essentially everything for us. That, economically, falls apart so fast. Especially because I wanted to make sure that this world also included poverty. So how can all of these poor people have this incredible technology unless it is incredibly cheap, at which point then why is anyone poor? Like, there's a lot of things that start to fall apart. I kind of had to do the handwaving, and get to the point where I was able to come up with a couple of excuses. For example, well, people are poor because drones do all the thing, so nobody has jobs anymore, but, on the other hand, energy is essentially free because we have all this incredible solar technology and… Constructing as much of a house of cards as I could. Then saying, "What's that over there? Don't look any closer, because this will fall apart." But I needed to be this way in order to tell the story that is exciting to me to tell.

[Brandon] By its nature, science fiction and fantasy is going to fall apart. Almost all of it. Because we are doing things that can't be done. By definition, that is what leads us to sci-fi fantasy. Barring some of the really intense hard science fictions where they are postulating a few years into the future, things that they think we will do, and then we do. Every fantasy book breaks the laws of thermodynamics, just tosses them out the window. As a writer, my job is to make it so that you don't feel like you have to toss everything out the window when you read the book, that I give you that opportunity to suspend your disbelief. But that also varies very much on genre. A lot of the middle grade books that I'll read… They don't care about that and they don't need to. They shouldn't have to, because the story is not about that.

[Mahtab] The thing is if you got really bogged down with making the economics work, the story would not work. For us as storytellers, the main thing is I have to make the story work. But I have to make sure that the reader believes what I'm saying. Which basically means making sure that they have confidence in me and my writing. So I would do that with some other techniques, and then rely on making sure that they trust me enough to kind of skim past if my economics is not solid. Because…

[Howard] Previously this season, we've talked about the concept of you get one bye. You get one freebie that the audience is just going to let you have. Boy, economics is a great place to spend that.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] One of the tricks for me is the concept of scarcity, which was mentioned in the quote that you gave us earlier, Mahtab. In the Schlock Mercenary universe, it really would be regarded by most people as a post-scarcity economy. Yet, even in post-scarcity, there are things that are scarce. Time is scarce. Locations can only exist once. A unique location is, by definition, scarce. There's only one of it. So in your fantasy setting, in your science fiction setting, no matter what you have being provided for people, if time and real estate are things that still function the way they function for us, you can have poverty, you can have wealth you can have economics. Because those things are going to trade… Change hands in some way.

[Dan] Now, to extend that metaphor a little further of you get one bye, you can earn yourself more byes. By doing what Mahtab was talking about last month, of I'm going to explain this one thing in detail, and then you're going to trust me. Then, that's going to allow me to fudge two or three extra things that I wouldn't have been able to get away with otherwise.

[Brandon] Good writing can earn you a ton of byes. I would agree with that.

[Dan] So there is an economy of economies.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and end this here. Mahtab, you were going to give us a writing prompt?

[Mahtab] Yes. So, just kind of going further on what I mentioned earlier, develop a moneyless economy, where something is paid for without hard currency. It could be gift-based, honor-based, barter-based, but describe how that economy would work and what are the advantages and disadvantages of that economy would be.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.32: Worldbuilding Gender Roles

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/08/11/worldbuilding-gender-roles/

Key points: How do you worldbuild different gender roles for science fiction and fantasy stories? Start by recognizing that most fiction has a clearly defined binary, male and female. But... Until you have words and categories, you may have trouble perceiving things. Blue, or nonbinary genders. Try reading some things written by different genders. Listen to conversations. Avoid simply reversing roles. Beware exoticizing, objectifying, or fetishizing the unfamiliar. First, do no harm. Don't use changes in gender roles or identity as sprinkles on your sundae. Have you built a society, have you considered the effects, the ramifications? Remember story purpose, and ask yourself if removing this piece will break your purpose for writing the story. Sometimes background affects how we perceive foreground elements, too.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 32.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Gender Roles.

[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're talking about how to worldbuild gender roles. How to approach this topic, which can be a little tricky. You can veer into some problematic areas in this direction. So we want to touch this very carefully, but very sincerely, and talk about how you might go about worldbuilding different gender roles for your science fiction and fantasy stories.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the first things that I think we should acknowledge is that most of us have grown up reading fiction with a very clearly defined binary, male and female. There's some fiction, like Sheri Tepper's Gate to Women's Country or The Left Hand of Darkness where there are things that are being played with. But as we become more aware in the 21st century, we realize that gender is a spectrum. I'm going to use an analogy here that is a visually-based analogy. So bear with me. There's… I listen to Radio Lab and they had this episode on color.

[Margaret] I remember the show.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. This is amazing. The question was why doesn't the word blue appear in Homer's… In the Odyssey, or the Iliad? It's the wine dark sea. The answer is because the word blue doesn't exist yet. At all. There's just no word for blue. It's such a basic color that it's difficult for us to imagine a world in which the word blue doesn't exist. What becomes more difficult to grasp is that the reason it doesn't exist yet is because people weren't perceiving that color as blue. It turns out that when you start analyzing all of the languages, that the order in which words come into the language for color relates to when we begin to be able to reproduce them. So everybody starts off with kind of red and black and white and kind of…

[Margaret] Brown.

[Mary Robinette] And kind of a brownish-green and a greenish-brown. So, anyway. So, they reference this video which I then went and tracked down, where they talked to a tribal people who still do not have the word for blue. Show them this color wheel. To my eye, it's like all of these greens that are exactly the same green and one blue that is very, very clearly blue. They're like, "Which square is different?" Everyone sits down and goes, "Um, that one?" and points to the bottom right or "This one?" And points to the upper left. "That one?" It's like getting the one that is totally blue is totally by chance. Then they show them another wheel which, to my eye, is all this kind of olive green all the way around. They say, "Which one is different?" They all go, "That one." With no hesitation at all, to a square that, to me, looks identical to the others. What they have discovered through all of this is that once you have a word for something, that you're able to define that and put things in that category. Until then, you don't see it. What I've realized is that gender is basically the same thing. We've got… We talk about a spectrum. But it's really kind of an umbrella. It's sort of messy. But there's no… The delineations are delineations that we have created because of language. So what's happening now is that because language has expanded, we have more things we can talk about. Which means that when you are approaching that in your fiction, that starting with a binary is very limiting, and not necessarily as interesting and representative as you can be with your fiction.

[Brandon] Well, where would you go… Where someone's starting off with this, what would you suggest? They're just like, "All right, I don't want to represent a binary, I want to do something that is exploring this direction." Where do you go?

[Howard] The simplest path for me was reading things that are written by genders that are not me and that perceive and describe genders differently. My first experience with this not gender who isn't me was David Brin's Glory Season in which he reverses the gender roles that I was familiar with, and does so for biological reasons. I look at that now and I'm able to say oh, he is… He's still making assumptions about the biological determination of gender roles, which is in and of itself inherently problematic in our culture, but by reversing things, he allowed me to see… He helped me to see things completely differently. That was my first step. Are there things that you guys have read that do this well?

[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that I found was pronoun.is. This actually came up very recently for me, 'cause I was helping… There's a game that I very much enjoy, and they had set up a binary and then realized that they shouldn't have and were trying to figure out… To course correct. So they wanted some non-binary pronouns. Pronoun.is deals with non-binary pronouns. That's a very useful thing to look at. The other things that I find are looking at Tumblr's and watching people talk about their own lived experience. Own voices? #ownvoices is also very useful. So if you do #ownvoices and #nonbinary, those two things will bring up conversations that you can listen to. It is important, I want to say, that you're listening and not inserting yourself into conversations when you're first trying to kind of understand stuff. But those are places where you can kind of watch people interact. Most of the information that I know has come from people who have been very patient with me to explain things. Which is not the best way to learn things, because it involves emotional labor on someone else's part. Which is why I suggest doing some listening before you sit down and start asking questions.

[Margaret] Doing your basic research to get the 101 questions.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Margaret] Before you do your more advanced field research, in a way. I think it's… It's one of those things where if you're setting out to tell a story, and you deliberately don't want to replicate gender roles as they are found in whatever your home culture is. For everyone at this table, gender roles in…

[Mary Robinette] 21st-century America.

[Margaret] 21st-century America.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, 21st-century white America.

[Margaret] White America, yeah. If you're trying to break away from whatever feels home, normal to you, I think the point that Mary has really made, and what Brandon started us out with is, the temptation is like, "Well, I'll take what we have and I'll flop it. Men will stay home and raise children, and women won't." But right there, you've just replicated the binary and turned it on its head. Taking the opportunity to step into… To put yourself… As we were saying in the earlier episode, into sort of our unknown unknowns. It's not just the opposite of what we have. It's probably closer to your normal then you might want to think it is. What's 90° different from your normal?

[Howard] You have to start somewhere. As I said, talking about the Brin novel, which was thankfully a little more complex than simply reversing it. It was pretty cool what he did. But you acknowledge that there is a first step. Then you want to do more research, and as Mary has said and as I would reiterate over and over and over again, listen to people and listen nonjudgmentally.

[Yeah]

[Howard] Listen to their experience and try to understand how their experiences different from yours, and why their experiences different than yours. Not whether their experiences good or bad in relation to yours.

[Margaret] Yeah. I do want to stress, when I say your normal, I'm using your normal… Because it is subjective, whatever normal is to you.

[Brandon] I'm not sure if I have the language to even ask this question correctly, but is there a danger in exoticizing the unfamiliar and then going that direction and falling into clichés and tropes?

[Chorus yes]

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. Which is why it's important to do the research and to understand why you're making the choices and also to know… This is why I recommend listening in on Tumblr or Twitter conversations, because this is where people are going to complain about times that they have been objectified or fetishized or exoticized. Where people are, just like doing things that are harmful. That's where people will be complaining about it. Where your least likely to see some of the complaining in a published work, partly just because it's gonna necessarily be behind the times. It's not ideal, but it is useful.

[Margaret] I think that… going into recording this episode, that we were a little sort of all kind of sidling up to this topic a bit. In part, some of that probably comes from the fact that the four of us at this table, we have what, from a classical standpoint, is, we have a good gender balance at this table. But we do all identified as either male or female, as far as I'm aware.

[Howard] We recognize that the entire topic is inherently fraught.

[Yes]

[Howard] Because of how deeply it affects everyone, and how, to borrow a phrase from Mary, how if we write things incorrectly, it's not just that we offend, it's that by reinforcing a stereotype, we can do harm.

[Yeah]

[Howard] I like that. I like the stated goal that as we write things, we want to represent things well, I want to tell a story that is interesting, but above all, I don't want to hurt anyone by telling it wrong.

[Margaret] I think, you don't want to use changes in gender roles or changes in gender identity… You don't want to use that as the sprinkles on top of your sundae.

[Brandon] I was just about to kind of ask that question. Actually, because…

[Margaret] I'll make this exciting, by having five genders! It's like…

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Then I'll have hopefully an interesting question along those lines.

[Mary Robinette] So, the book of the week is Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. This is really… So, first of all, it's a good book and you should just read it. But the main character is a robot… Is a cyborg. In the net… No, it's a robot. The character has a brain, a human brain, that does some visual processing. That's the only thing that the brain does. There are no memories attached to it, there's nothing. The character gets to choose what pronoun is being used. Most people, because it's this in normal battle robot, use he at the beginning. Someone asks, "Is that what you want?" The robot realizes, "Oh. Actually, I can choose that." By choosing she part way through the novel, it changes the relationship that she has with the other main character. It's very interesting and an interesting exploration of the fact that as humans, we desperately want to put things into boxes. Like, a robot has no need of a gender at all. A robot is a robot. But our need to do that, and then the perceptions that we have about the role that that robot then fulfills based on the gender assignment… Or assigning the gender based on roles. It's very interesting what that does, the things that happen to your brain, especially when the gender switch happens. Or the pronoun switch happens. Because… Robot, there is no gender.

[Margaret] Robots.

[Mary Robinette] When the pronoun switch happens. So, it's a wonderful book. It's also just… Let's say there's a lot of ecological terrorism and stuff going on. There's lots of rollicking adventure and explosions. So it's not just hello, gender studies.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Mary Robinette] It's really good.

[Brandon] That sounds fascinating.

[Margaret] It reminds me a little bit of… There's a thread in some of the later books in the Parasitology trilogy by Mira Grant where… Spoilers if anybody hasn't read these… Intelligent tapeworms are basically taking over their human hosts. They're tapeworms. Tapeworms do not have a binary gender. There is one of these characters who does not identify with the gender of their current human host. There's another tapeworm who's like, "What is your problem with this? You are a tapeworm. You shouldn't be identifying as male or female and being bothered by whether or not that matches the human body you are in."

[Brandon] So I have a question for you. We're going to try this out, we'll see if this works. I am writing a science fiction book which has alien races who don't reproduce or view reproduction in the way that humans do. So I'm going to say what I'm doing here, and I'm going to ask you to point out directions I could go that would be bad or directions I could go that would be good.

[Mary Robinette] It's only 15 minutes long, Brandon.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yes, I know.

[Mary Robinette] People are in a hurry.

[Brandon] We'll see if this works. If it doesn't work…

[Howard] I'm definitely not that smart.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] You guys won't even hear this.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, umm… All right. So what I'm writing right now is an alien species where their sexes are Lefts and Rights. They are Left and they are Right. A Left and a Right will combine together and create a new trial personality, that, if they end up liking, and their family ends up liking, they will give birth to that person who will have the memories of those, of that event of being this person for a while. If it is not, they will break the coupling, and it will not. So, for a period of several months, they are one individual together as one. Walking around and interacting, accessing some of the memory and knowledge of the two parents. I have humans interacting with this and really struggling to wrap their brains around it. Where could I go wrong? How would you approach something like this? Any suggestions for me?

[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean, the obvious question is what happens when two Lefts are compatible?

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Like…

[Howard] No. Two Lefts are compatible. Right?

[Brandon] Was that two… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Howard] Who's on first. Sorry.

[Margaret] It's… In a weird way, when you describe it to me, it almost doesn't feel like a stand-in for gender or the biological sexes. It's… You have two halves that are coming together and potentially creating a third being, but it seems like it's not necessarily reading as reproduction, unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.

[Garbled]

[Brandon] I intended it to be their reproductive cycle. This is how they… This is how new individuals are born. [Garbled]

[Howard] So the two of them combine, and if they decide that they like what has been created here…

[Brandon] They will split and a baby will be born.

[Howard] Okay. That… The newborn… How do we determine if it's Left or Right? Is that random, is that…

[Brandon] I think that is random.

[Howard] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Which… Does the newborn come out of the Left or the Right?

[Brandon] I think they both have…

[Mary Robinette] They have to connect…

[Brandon] Yes.

[Margaret] Is it… Just like what… I don't want to ask biologic sort of plumbing related questions here, but why is there a difference between Lefts and Rights?

[Brandon] Lefts and Rights… Hum. Um. Maybe because I'm just going with a binary because I'm used to it?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] Would be my guess. I did want, when this individual is made, you can tell that there's… They are larger than a normal individual and they have…

[Howard] There's a seam.

[Brandon] There's a seam. I'm probably shading… the only sexual dimorphism, if that's the right term you would have, as kind of a red shade and a blue shade, so that we have kind of this alien different skin color that is kind of a trope in science fiction that I'm trying to play with.

[Margaret] But, I mean, why not have it be being and being, like Mary said, two beings are designated as Right, but why shouldn't they be compatible, or why not have red, blue, yellow, green, aqua? Sort of like, oh, an orange and an aqua have gotten together.

[Brandon] I would say my reasoning for that, and it's totally possible I could have bad reasoning in this. My reasoning for that is it's a lot to take in in a YA novel, and I need to build on some foundations of quick conversation. I'm introducing like eight alien species in this book, so it felt simpler to say they have two sexes that are not anything like the two sexes you are used to.

[Mary Robinette] I guess the thing is as you're talking about it, I'm like, "But why did they have sexes? At all?" Like, why isn't it just these things combine and…

[Howard] The term you may want is the term that we use in chemistry. You have left-handed and right-handed sugars. They're isomers.

[Brandon] So, let me ask you this. Is it wrong for me to want that? Just because, in the worldbuilding, that is what I like?

[Mary Robinette] It's not wrong, but it feels like you're defaulting it. That there are more interesting options. That's really… Like, I don't hear anything, as you're talking, going, oh, there's a real problem there. What I hear is that it's not as interesting as I think you could be, and I don't think it would take that many more words.

[Howard] I think the interest is going to stem from how the humans react to what they're seeing. Because the humans are going to be our stand-ins for our interaction with this. If there are difficult questions that you want to ask, about how humans… About this, about our understanding about how this alien culture works, about how their rules may be different whether they're a Left or a Right isomer… I'm already writing your book for you by giving you the word. The way the humans react, I think, is where you can get into the most trouble, because if you have somebody, and you almost certainly will, who is passing judgment, the way in which the narrative treats that person is going to tell the reader how they should feel about non-binary genders. About genders that are different from them.

[Margaret] Well, also, if you have two categories, and in order to have reproduction, two dissimilar categories, individuals of two dissimilar categories get together and create a third, it's going to… I mean, if I were reading that cold, that to me would read as an allegory or an analogy of a gender binary. It's sort of the… It's the thing that eats grass and has long ears and a fluffy tail, goes around and hops. Even if it's on an alien planet, it's kind of a rabbit.

Mary Robinette] I feel like that's kind of what is happening for me is that it still feels like you have a gender binary.

[Brandon] Is it okay, though? Like… I guess okay is the wrong term. If that's the direction I want to explore…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just… I think where I would… What I would say, and this is why I asked what happens if there are two Lefts that want to get together, is the assumption that everyone is comfortable in the body that they are born into?

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Which is not the case. It's not the case with humans. It's often… I don't understand why it would be the case with an alien species. We know that…

[Margaret] Not to mention it assumes everyone is… Wishes to be compatible with somebody of the opposite handedness.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Then I'm like, the other parts of my worldbuilding stuff are going, well, obviously… I assume that you are able to do more when you are coupled because there must be an additional advantage there. So therefore is there an advantage to being coupled, and do you have difficulty getting work when you are uncoupled? So these are the questions that I'm like… What happens, and what is the incentive to uncouple? If everybody likes this, this individual? Is it that you can only have the child if you uncouple? Like, what are the… There's a lot of societal ramifications that are inherent in this that I'm…

[Howard] No, it's… A concept that gets explored in science fiction a lot is the alien race that shows up and the idea of war or the idea of lying is completely alien to them. A society, a race in which gender… I don't know what the word would be… Where you're not happy with the body you've been born into or created into. A society in which that never happens would be very alien to us. Our interactions with those people, especially the interaction of someone who isn't happy with the body they have, and is interacting with these folks, that could be interesting to explore. That path is fraught because you don't want to say, "See, these aliens are better than us, because they're just happy the way they're born." That's not the message you want to send at all.

[Mary Robinette] Also, I don't think that that would actually be… Like, I find that implausible. Anyway.

[Margaret] That's a planet of hats.

[Mary Robinette] It's a planet of hats. I mean, just because it's… When you look at the behavior of… Granted, these are fictional creatures, but when you look at… Margaret already said it better, it's a planet of hats if everybody's comfortable.

[Brandon] Like, when it's… One of the difficulties… I'll say difficulties you run into when doing this is you can do anything. The question… Like, when you say why can't it just be to individuals of any sort couple, I could totally do that. Absolutely. So I have to ask myself why am I not, or why do I want to do it this other way. This is the question when… we come into like is it sprinkles. Right? Is it sprinkles on your cake? When are you just adding these things to add flavor and is that… Can simply be reductive of the way that people see the world and using them to exoticize your story. Which is a dangerous path to go down. But at the same time, science fiction's job, in my opinion, is to start asking some of these questions and say, "Reader, what if we encountered something like this? How do we respond to it?" And this sort of thing. So it's really an interesting sort of tangled problem that is important to approach. Asking yourself where is it a sprinkle, where is it actually part of your story. Where would you say that line is and… Probably not a line, but that continuum. How do you go one way rather than the other?

[Margaret] To me, I feel like… And not to swerve away from the question here, but I think it is a question that's difficult to answer in the abstract. Because it depends on the story you're telling. There's one thing when you're constructing a story specifically to explore or make a statement about the role of gender in our society or potentially in alien society. But that's also… It doesn't mean that any story that has humans or aliens with other than binary gender has to be a story about that. Every story with a queer person doesn't have to be about the struggles and agonies of being queer. Sometimes it's just happening and you're saving the world and it doesn't really matter.

[Mary Robinette] For me, the line… When I see it done badly, it's that they've added this thing and it has absolutely no impact on the society at all. Where the world maps exactly the same. It's like, "No, of course. Women are in charge. This is totally a matriarchy." And yet, our great leaders are all men. All of the courtship rituals are still the man coming to the woman and proposing. It's like, no, if the women are in charge…

[Margaret] All the female characters are really obsessed with the men.

[Mary Robinette] These are… So if there's no effect, that's when I feel like it's just a sprinkle. When I say effect, what I mean is not that it becomes a major plot point, as Margaret was saying. But that it affects the way the character moves through the world. The example that I've used in previous podcasts is I'm 5 foot seven, my husband is 5' 11. So that very small difference between us affects the way we move through the world, in that when we go to get cereal down, he can just reach out and get it. I sometimes have to get a footstool or stand on my toes. It's a small detail. But it does affect the way you move through the world. As someone who is white and a cis woman, I don't ever have to do any defense about when I go to the store, about where I'm shopping. I don't have to do any thinking about what bathroom I use. Never will I have to think about those things. So that affects the way I move through the world. I think that if you have… If you've introduced genders, that there will be people who have opinions about these genders. The gender roles. It's going to affect the way the character moves through the world, if you have actually constructed a society around it. If you haven't, again, it doesn't have to be the plot point, but if you haven't done that, then it is just sprinkles.

[Howard] There is story purpose, where your purpose in writing the story is broken if this piece is removed. I come back to that a lot. Is there a story purpose for this thing that I'm including? There's the concept of the way a background color affects how you perceive the foreground color. You can put things in your story that exist so that we perceive the actual elements differently. Then it's not just background. It's background that influences our perception. That's a… It's complicated to think about, it's easier to picture with one of those optical illusion things with the grays or whatever. But that model works well for me, because sometimes I will say a thing and realize, oh, it's just a background. It doesn't matter to the story. Except its existence makes the story tell differently. Does that make sense?

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Yeah. When Mary was talking, sort of going back to the effect that it has, and I think that also ties to people… Whatever the gender spectrum looks like in the world you're creating, people will have opinions about it. That said, if everybody's opinions aligned to the opinions that you would expect to run into in our 21st century American white society, you probably haven't thought through the ramifications so much. If this is what everyone has grown up with, why is everybody acting like men are in charge… Men are real men, women are real women, people who are neither real men or real women are kind of the auxiliary floating off in the background someplace. That's the place… That's something to be worried about, I think.

[Brandon] All right. This has been really interesting. I hope this has been helpful to our listeners. Mary, you're going to give us some homework.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, I'm going to send you to a spreadsheet we have used before. Which is a spreadsheet about axes of power. We'll link to this in the liner notes. Basically, what I want you to do is take a look at your characters, taking a look at their gender, and think about the axes of power. Like, which is the dominant gender, which is the subordinate gender, where do things line up on that spectrum? So, for instance, in 21st century America, a cis man, which is a man who was born into a male body or with male genitalia. So, a cis man is at the top. He's the dominant. Cis women are farther down. When you get down to the lower end of the spectrum, we have non-binary, trans men, trans women, in terms of the power that they're able to exert in society and the dangers that they encounter just living in the world. So what I want you to do is I want you to take this idea and look at the characters that you have in your story and decide whether or not you are sticking with the default or if you are shifting it. Whichever choice you make, just do it deliberately. Don't do it by accident. That's all I ask. But, as an exercise, break out of your defaults.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.30: Eating Your Way to BetterWorldbuilding

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/28/14-30-eating-your-way-to-better-worldbuilding/

Key points: Food, immigrants, culture, and eating are an obsession for many of us. Immigrants bring their food and adapt, but they also lock it in time. Eating is a sense of home. Beware the tendency to either have enormous feasts or stew in epic fantasies. Food and eating are central metaphors, that you can use to share things about a character. Watch out for rabbit starvation! Food has history, food comes from places. To get it right, make sure the food matters to a character, with a memory, and why that's important. Avoid the soup stone and stew, that we just ate, scene. Make sure the descriptions of food are nourishing, that they have a purpose, not just intestine stuffing. Meals should have meaning. Meals should also tell us something about the world. Think about the production behind the food. Watch out for mush or pills in the future! Give us Klingon foods, but as a good experience, something to try. Make it palatable.

[Transcription note: My apologies, but I have almost certainly confused Piper and Amal at some points in this transcript. Also, some phrases, such as what Amal's father calls intestine stuffing, are rough guesses, since I couldn't figure out the actual phrase.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 30.

[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, and Eating Your Way to Better Worldbuilding.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Piper] I'm Piper J. Drake.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice Broaddus.

[Piper] You're laughing.

[Maurice] I'm already laughing. That is correct.

[Piper] This is going to be so much fun. Okay. So. Along the lines of our title, which is Eating Your Way to Better Worldbuilding. Dongwon, I'm going to totally put you on the spot.

[Dongwon] So I really like to talk about food. If you've ever met me, I do it pretty much incessantly.

[Piper] Me, too!

[Dongwon] It's an obsession. I think it's an obsession for pretty much all of us. One of the reasons I like to talk about that is, in particular, I come from an immigrant family. Both my parents are immigrants, and food is one of the main ways I relate to culture. Both the culture that my parents came from, the culture of the South where I was raised and went to school, and, I live in New York City, which is where I get to interface with so many different cultures, primarily through eating the many, many delicious things that they make. I love to see this reflected in fiction, and not just the world that we exist in in our own bodies.

[Amal] Fun fact. I decided that Dongwon should be my agent based on the fact that he talked about food in really specific ways. In addition to his many other very fine qualities, like, he is in fact a really good agent. I had been stalking him on Twitter for a while in part because he telegraphed all of these recipes that he was doing and stuff. But there was one moment in particular where we were having our first kind of tentative conversation of do we want to work together, and he gave me this really amazing, mind blowing insight into the ways in which like, immigrants bring their food to new places. Which, I mean, I can say it right now, I think it's germane to the conversation. So I'm used to thinking about immigrants moving around the world and bringing their food with them in the way that that food changes is dependent on the available ingredients, right? So you can't find the stuff that you used to make your food back home, so you adapt and use different things. What Dongwon pointed out was that's not the only variable in the food changing. The other variable is time. In that when immigrants come, their food becomes kind of time locked in the moment when they immigrated. So that different waves of immigration can have very different foods. That you might… For instance, my family emigrated from Lebanon. The food that I am used to thinking of as Lebanese food might be very different from the food that I now find in Lebanon, because cuisines are constantly changing and adapting and so on, but there's a kind of time lock that happens to it in place. I'd never thought of this before, and because Dongwon clearly was thinking along lines that were just revelatory to me in the way that I think about food and culture and the way I move through the world and inheritance and all sorts of stuff, I was like, "Yeah. This guy here. [Garbled, inaudible].

[Piper] My mind is currently blown right now, because my parents are from Thailand, and what I grew up thinking of as Thai cooking, or just home cooking, is very, very different from what you would find in Thailand now. For example, there's plenty of people who've been linking me on social media, like Facebook, on the rolled icecream dealio? I never encountered that is a child going… In Thailand, when I was there in the summers. So I was like, "I have no idea what this thing is." They're like, "You should. It's from Thailand." I'm like, "Huhuhu. I would love to try it. But it was never there when I was a kid."

[Dongwon] Koreans have recently discovered cheese, and they are so excited about it. It's on everything right now. I find it horrifying. I don't think it goes with Korean flavors at all. But you go to Korea and they're eating it on everything. Whereas for me, the food that I think of as Korean food is like New York Korean food. Which is a very specific region and time and all those things combined.

[Maurice] So, I have a kind of complicated family structure. So, I was born in London, my mother's born in Jamaica, my father's born here in the States. So we have these three sort of cultures that always sort of clashed every Sunday afternoon, because we would always have family dinners together. So we'd always have to have food that represented each culture as we came to sit down for family meals. Which is great if you ever came over to our house to eat, because all of a sudden you have this big smorgasbord of food to choose from. But for us, eating became this centering element. So eating for us was always a sense of home. Which then, as before, becomes really interesting in my personal family, since I'm married interracially. I'm also the main cook in the family, due to some of my own early mistakes in the relationship.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Again, me and my wife are fine.

[Maurice] But in our first year of marriage, she had it in her head, this is what an ideal marriage would look like. So she would… I'd come home, she'd make these meals, and the meals would be waiting for me. Then I decided to make a joke. This was a solid joke. I swear this was… I came… I said, "Hey, honey…"

[Dongwon] You're so stressed right now.

[Piper?] I know. We're making him plaintive.

[Maurice] I said, "Hey, your cooking could be considered a hate crime."

[Gasps!]

[Piper?] Why would you say that?

[Maurice] In my head, this sounded like such a solid joke.

[Why is it a joke?]

[Piper] Dongwon has fallen off the table.

[Amal?] [Garbled where was…]

[Maurice] [garbled] Should have provided better instruction and waved me off of this one. So, for the next 13 years, I became the main cook in the family.

[Dongwon] Sounds like just desserts.

[Ooooh!]

[Maurice] There we go.

[Yeah, that happens.]

[Piper] I think we should document this for posterity. Dongwon Song made a pun.

[Dongwon] Right. I'm very tired.

[Oooo. We forgive you.]

[Maurice] But it's actually worked out great across the board because I'm a foodie person. I love food. As demonstrated during the course of this trip. I love food. It has allowed me to just experiment with things, and to provide different tastes, even though I know my children aren't going to be on board with this, but it provides a touch point for me and my wife, it provides a touch point for when my family comes to visit. Learning all these different dishes in order to create a sense of home for whenever anyone comes to visit our house.

[Piper] Speaking of a sense of home, so, one of the things that reviewers have called out in some of my books obviously is the fact that I have a tendency to mention food, and that they should never read my books without having had a meal first, or they will immediately go out and eat. But one of the things that I brought up, and a reviewer really, really felt close to, was in Absolute Trust, Sophie tends to share her foods with her friends. She is Korean American. She's just saying, "You know what, this is an untraditional meal. This is just an amalgamation of all my comfort foods." She's sharing them. What it really started to click with, with the reviewer, was that growing up she didn't, or was hesitant to, share her foods with friends because friends thought it was weird, or it smelled weird, or it was pungent when you brought it into school or brought it into work. Is that something that you've seen, in books in particular, and you think it should be shared more often? Is that something good, bad? What do you think?

[Amal] I mean, I'm reminded of different podcasts… Is it okay to mention other podcasts on the podcast?

[Piper] Yeah, I think so.

[Amal] There was a podcast…

[Piper] We have the nod.

[Amal] Yeah. There was… Sadly, it's sort of on hiatus now, but there was a podcast called Rocket Talk on Tor.com that Justin Landon did and he would often interview people. I'm pretty sure it was Rocket Talk. There was a conversation about foods and epic novels, and how bored the… I can't remember who else was on the podcast now, but they were talking about how boring it was to have feasts described. Like, the registers of food and epic fantasies seemed to either be enormous feast or stew.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] It was just like this ubiquitous stew everywhere. I just feel like that's always a missed opportunity. Like all of the things that we're talking about, like, there are so many things that you do with food, with eating. Like feeding and eating are such central metaphors. So, why not use it to share everything about a character? Like, the fact that you couldn't when you worry growing up and now you want to, because it's where all of these deep tense anxieties of your soul are centered.

[Dongwon] Well, when I think about those feast scenes in fiction, I actually quite like scenes where people eat food, and I like these feast scenes because they're often an opportunity to see a lot of characters interact, and people love descriptions of food. Where I have a problem is, this is where my nerdiness gets away with me, because there'll be a very Western oriented fantasy, in a medieval setting, and everyone's eating potatoes. I'm like, "Those didn't exist in Europe at that point in time. Those are a New World ingredient." Or, they're on the road on some grand epic adventure hunting through the wilderness, and they stopped to make a stew which takes hours and hours to make when using resources that they probably have at the time. Or they're only eating rabbits. Here's an interesting fact that I really love is there's a thing called rabbit starvation that's what happened to trappers.

[What?]

[Dongwon] If you only eat rabbits, it takes more calories to burn the meat than it gives you.

[Piper] They're like celery?

[Amal?] Because they're lean.

[Dongwon] They're like celery.

[Piper] Like, rabbits are celery.

[Dongwon] Rabbits are so lean.

[Amal] But wait. Were they actually eating the eyes, because that is a really good calorie source?

[Dongwon] Maybe they should have been eating the rabbit eyes. This I don't actually know. But there's not enough of the proteins in there to have the enzymes for you to digest the meat properly. So you will actually starve to death if all you eat is rabbits. So every time Samwise Gamgee shows up with a brace of rabbits and potatoes, I get mad.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] It's pedantic, but to me, it's really important because food has history. Food comes from places. Food reflects things about the way we move through the world. So until we explored the New World and brought potatoes to Europe, that was an ingredient that we didn't have. If your world has potatoes in it, that means there is sea exploration in a way. That implies a whole nother depth to your world that you may not have considered if it's not there initially.

[Maurice] All right. Hang on. One more time. What was the question? I do this a lot.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] So I was asking about whether or not… Or how you felt about including the sharing of food, especially if it's your character's home cooking, and what kind of thoughts or memories they evoke?

[Maurice] Well, there's a couple, 'cause like even on this trip, I've been reflecting on different sort of food memories that we have. So, like at one point, I felt the need, I have to have some beans and rice, and I had to have some plantains. These are foods that I took for granted when my mom fixed them every week. But now, I just was like, "Oh, no. I feel the need to have them." But on the flipside, there are foods I want no part of. Like, one of them was aki and salt fish, because my mom would make that every Saturday morning. It has this older that would fill the house. The whole idea of being embarrassed or having to share that, I'm like I can't have my friends over, spend the night, because my mom's going to fix aki and salt fish, and it's going to stink up the whole house. What are they going to think about me? The same thing with chitlins, 'cause…

[Laughter]

[Piper?] Chitlins? But they nomee. They so nomee…

[Maurice] Sure. Yeah. But see, I was also so scarred early on because there was one time when my grandmother was fixing chitlins and then…

[Amal?] What are chitlins?

[Maurice] What are chitlins?

[Amal?] I don't know what chitlins are.

[Piper] Let's just say they're innards.

[Amal] They're what?

[Dongwon] Or large intestines.

[Amal] Oh. Okay.

[Dongwon] Or small intestines? I get confused.

[Piper] They are part of the intestines and you will find out that Piper will eat very, very… Well, let's just say that there are very few things in this world that I won't eat.

[Maurice] Right. But when my grandmother was cleaning them… Because you have to clean them first. It produces a sort of… I don't know… There was a sheen to her hands and a stink to the process. Then she would be like, "Come give grandma a hug!"

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Put me off on entire… Yes. So things happened.

[Amal] Testicular sheen feels like a term now in my head, which I didn't ever…

[Piper] Intestinal?

[Amal] Intestinal, not testicular.

[Piper] Sorry. You said intestinal, and I heard testicular.

[Dongwon] Those are Rocky Mountain oysters. [Garbled]

[Piper] Rocky Mountain oysters, different food type.

[Amal] Sorry.

[Piper] But on that note, let's go to the book of the week.

[Laughter]

[Piper] So. The book of the week just happens to be a cookbook.

[Amal] Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Piper] We're trying to talk about…

[Laughter]

[Piper] If I could stop laughing. We're going to talk about A Feast of Ice and Fire, the official Game of Thrones companion cookbook. This is by… And I apologize, they're not here to correct me on name pronunciation, so I may mess this up. Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sarian Lehrer, I believe. The reason why I recommend this is because I really have a lot of great memories associated with this cookbook. I probably got this cookbook before I really watched Game of Thrones and really read the book. But the thing I loved about it was that it not only has recipes that are historically accurate or recipes from their historical research, but it has a contemporary adjustment, I guess you could say. A remake of the same recipe, so you have the two options. What was kind of funny as I was going through it was I actually preferred the historical preparation and presentation more than I like the modern. So it's just a really cool cookbook to go through. It does have a foreword by George RR Martin. But I think really I was more focused on the food, because the food looks fantastic, has pictures, etc. They talk about the historical research behind the recipes.

[Dongwon] So, when we think about food in fiction, what are the things that are hallmarks for you of when somebody gets it right, in terms of including food? A different dish, or a cultural dish, in presenting either an alien race or a fictional fantasy culture or something along those lines?

[Piper] How do they get it right?

[Dongwon] Or where they go off the rails?

[Piper] Oh, gosh, I gotta go first on this?

[Laughter]

[Piper] How they… Like, hallmarks of how they get it right is when it matters to a character. Because that's why you remember a particular dish. Whether it's a good memory or a bad memory, it matters to a character, and I want to know why. Not just what's in the dish, but what is it about the cooking of it, is it a communal cooking effort, is it for a particular purpose, does it bring together memories? I mean, Maurice shared that awesome memory of… About the preparation on Saturday nights for Sunday morning. Like, that kind of thing is a fantastic memory and it's character building and it's worldbuilding. It tells you about culture, it tells you about everything from the large to the detailed. I think that that's a fantastic way to do it. One of the things that I don't like is when somebody's like, "So, we got a soup stone and we got some wild onions and we threw some protein in there and it makes this delicious stew. Hooray." Then why did… Like, how did that do anything for character building or plot, except show that they ate?

[Amal] There's an expression that my dad uses for when food is just basically adequate and it's just… It's fine. He says [hash ris and thron?] Which is relevant to what we were just talking about, because it just translates literally to intestine stuffing.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] So I feel like there's… Yeah, that's right.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] I'm recovering from that moment. But I think it applies to this. Like, are the descriptions of food in your book [hash ris and thron?] or are they actually nourishing? Are they something that is providing something in the narrative that is going to serve a purpose? By purpose here, I don't mean plot mechanics, although that would be awesome. I would love to read a book where the plot hinged on food. Like, that would be great. But more just what you were describing there. But, like I remember this one seen in a book that I don't like very much. There's… It's An Ocean at the End of the Lane. I don't like that book very much. But there's a moment in that book where… The main character's a little boy, and he has been eating terrible food, like the kind of cold porridge grimy badness sort of thing. He's suddenly in this home where he's given warm toasted bread and butter and jam. The memory of the description of this book that lingers with me is going from cold gray darkness to warm golden light. Even though I don't like the book very much, that one thing about the book has totally stayed with me because it was this experience of food locked to all the other experiences that the character is having and the experience the character had, this joy, and this unbelievable almost painful simplicity, was enormous.

[Maurice] So there's a couple different things. One, I like the ritual of food. From the moment of preparation to how it's presented and how it's consumed. For me, there's a ritual about it. The more that there's a ritual, the more that the meal has meaning, I love when I read scenes like that. But the other thing, for me, in terms of worldbuilding is what does the food say about the world itself. So, like, for me, I have trouble dieting, for example, because whenever I diet, as soon my belly grumbles from trying to cut down on calories, what triggers is I have a lack of food, I don't know when I'll have my next meal. I have all of these… It's like a poverty throwback to when we lived much more food insecure, growing up wise. So it becomes… So it's almost like diets for me trigger that, so then it almost has the opposite effect, which is I must eat now, so I can feel like I'm secure in having a meal again. So I say all that because I love it when stories reflect upon that in the greater world. So we have these meals… All right. So if we have this huge rich banquet of food. All right, so we're obviously living in a wealthy culture. If we are having food of opportunity, that says something else about the culture. I love those little shadings, and when people bring that out in their work.

[Amal] [inaudible. Something?] I want to highlight too that we almost never think about in terms of food. So we're talking a lot about where food comes from, its provenance, and of reflecting that in worldbuilding. I don't think we tend to think about food production very much. This is a hole that I would love to help fill for everyone by recommending a Twitter account and a podcast. Dr. Sarah Taber on Twitter is someone who absolutely everyone should follow. She's magnificent. She has a podcast called Farm to Taber which is great, a great title.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] She works… I mean, she has worked on a farm, she's worked in the agricultural industry in the United States, but she has a wonderful sense of where food production and food standards intersect with worldbuilding. So, where… For instance, why is it that in some places you raise cattle instead of raising crops? Well, perhaps it's because in those places, all… It's too arid to actually grow crops that sustain human beings, and the only vegetation that is edible is edible by animals. So you get your cattle to eat the rough terrible things that you can't actually digest, and then you eat the cattle. There is a logic to it. There is a kind of food management aspect to it. But I have… Like, it blew my mind to start thinking about… I never had thought about it before. So it's, I think, part and parcel of thinking about things like empire and colonialism and all this stuff that we think about just on the regular… All of us obviously all think about that on a regular…

[Piper] We do.

[Dongwon] And class and power and privilege…

[Amal] And class and power and privilege. Thinking about food production can often be… Like, I just got… A missing link in the ways in which we talk about these things. So she's a great place to start.

[Dongwon] It's a truly brilliant podcast, I cannot recommend highly enough. It's one of my sort of top three right now.

[Maurice] One of the things… You mentioned going off the rails. I'm not excited for the future.

[Ooh. Ha ha ha.]

[Maurice] 'Cause people don't eat well in the future. I mean, all the food seems to be like this weird mush type thing that people are eating, or like we get pills, like that's what I have to look forward to?

[Dongwon] Well, I think about two things in terms of like food in science fiction. On the one end, you have Star Trek, right? Where you sort of have replicators, and they're just reproducing various sort of Western-style foods. Then you have the way that Klingon food is presented…

[Ha!]

[Dongwon] This is the thing that bothers me, because it's very one-dimensional. Klingons are presented as this violent species, and therefore they eat violent foods. So the food is living, it's bugs, it's worms, it moves. It's played for the sense of horror from the Federation officers who have to go to diplomatic dinners with Klingons or whatever it is. Except in this one really beautiful moment in Deep Space Nine that I really liked which is why Deep Space Nine is the only Star Trek I really like. You can all yell at me later.

[Laughter]

[Piper] Actually, I see fists being shaken in the audience.

[Dongwon] Exactly. Then, there's this beat where Dr. Bashir takes a date to this Klingon food stall, and it's just presented as this delightful moment that they share their love of Klingon food. He's just slurping up worms…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] And it's just like really… It's played for laughs in some ways, but it's also this really endearing sense of like, "Oh. This is a guy who's lived in a multicultural environment. He's lived in a place where Klingons lived, learn to eat their food, and can order in their language, and just loves doing it." It just, to me, I was like, "Oh. He's a New Yorker, right? This is what we do…"

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] We go down to the [garbled ballfields?] and order food or we go to the food courts or whatever it is and you order the thing that you're excited to try and the thing that you know how to order. I find that to be two different models of the way in which we can look at food from other cultures and food in the future. The Expanse also does this really well. They have done a great job of not only mingling languages, but then mingling cuisines and then giving them new names, right? So you get a sense that Martians eat a certain way, the Belters eat a certain way, and those things are… They often talk about how they're like, things that sound horrible in some ways. That they're like yeast products, or they're grown in space environments. But then you can feel the cultural roots of how they're using those products, those soy products and yeast products, whatever it is. So food in the future can be depressing, but I think if we apply our imagination a little bit more and make it rooted in the cultures of who's actually going to space, and if we make sure that the futures we envision aren't just white Americans going into space, then maybe the food will be a little bit more pilatable.

[Maurice] Palatable.

[Dongwon] Palatable.

[Piper] Yea, food.

[Amal] Street food? What will we call street food once it hits space?

[Piper] We'll have to have space streets.

[Amal] Space streets?

[Piper] Space street food. Space markets?

[Amal] Yeah.

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Space markets]

[Amal] I have two quick recs on food in space. Two things that came to mind were my favorite thing that Alan Moore ever wrote called The Ballad of Halo Jones. It's an amazing book, it's one of his very early things. There is a really cool food thing that I will get into later. But the other one is Max Gladstone has a book coming out next year called Empress of Forever. Is that the title now? Yes. Empress of Forever, and there's a lot of culture hopping there. In every one, it feels like there's an introduction based in food and rooted in hospitality and cultural exchange and stuff like that. It is the future, probably. It's space.

[Dongwon] It definitely is future.

[Amal] It's definitely the future. Yes. It's really great.

[Piper] Okay. So we've talked a lot… I'm very hungry now… About eating your way to a better worldbuilding. So, now, it's time to talk about homework. Dongwon?

[Dongwon] So, the homework is, I would like you all to imagine a fictional meal. Imagine a meal at your character's eating in a fantasy world, or in a science fictional world. Describe the history of that meal. What does it mean to the family who is eating it? Where do the ingredients come from? What are the cultures that led to it? Then write a sort of mini story that just tracks the way this particular meal came together, and what things came about because of certain cultures or certain ingredients or certain availability, certain restrictions, led to that particular meal happening for those particular characters at that moment.

[Piper] Okay. Then… Wait, there's a thought.

[Amal] No, no.

[Piper] You didn't have a thought.

[Amal] No, I didn't.

[Piper] I don't remember how to finish.

[Amal] This has been Writing Excuses… Sorry, I just…

[Laughter]

[garbled]

[Amal] You're the one doing it.

[Piper] I don't know…

[Amal] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write. That was the thing. You can [inaudible]

[Piper] Now go write.

[Laughter]

[Piper] All right, we're done.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/02/10/14-6-fantasy-and-science-fiction-races/

Key points: Worldbuilding fantasy and science fiction races. [Avoid the pitfall of othering your alien races, coding them using characteristics of Earth races and people. See the May 26 episode coming up on Writing the Other.] Realize that to an alien, e.g. Sgt. Schlock, everyone else is an alien. Your aliens need to function as people that can tell the story. You may take shortcuts or compromises. Think about "How does this alien see the world differently than other people, and is that important to the story?" They need to feel alien, but not incomprehensible and not just some aspect of humanity. Remember, to aliens, humanity is all one race. How do you make your aliens relatable to the readers? Your protagonist can try to figure it out and react to it. Explain what is important to the alien, and then show them trying to achieve that goal or overcome that obstacle. That process is easy to relate to. When is a horse a horse, and when is it a zyloplick? (a.k.a. Don't call a rabbit a smeerp.) Treat your races as full cultures, and treat your not-a-horse the same way. Think about the consequences of the differences. Let us taste grass, and experience a sense of wonder with the wind in our nostrils. Force yourself to not let your races be one note. Beware of coming up with races to fill a role in your story, and then not putting in the work to fill out their culture. "How is this going to change the way they interact?" You need to know the rules and the reasons behind them, to make them feel like real people, but you don't need to dump all that information on the readers.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Six.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Fantasy and Science Fiction Races.

[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] And I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] We are going to be talking about worldbuilding fantasy and science fiction races. Before we dive into this episode, I wanted to bring up a potential pitfall in dealing with this. That is, very naturally, as you write, you are going to other your alien races. In so doing, by making them different from yourself, you are probably going to start to naturally code them by giving them characteristics that are very similar to Earth races and Earth people. You can see this famously in George Lucas's prequel trilogy about the Star Wars, where he takes the person who is the merchant and he codes this person by the way he speaks and the way he looks as Jewish. This is dangerous, and it is something you're going to naturally do. Because of the biases you have, because of the world we live in. We have an entire episode coming up in May, on May 26, where we talk about this. Dan and Tempest talk about Writing the Other and kind of a giving permission… Giving yourself permission to do this, even though you will probably get it wrong sometimes. We think it is important to be trying to reach and stretch.

[Dan] Exactly. It is more important… Obviously, you need to do it right, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Put in the work, do your effort, we've got a huge slate of Writing the Other podcasts this season and we'll let those episodes cover this. Right now, we're going to move on and just talk about cool fantasy and science fiction races.

[Brandon] Yep. So, taking that huge can of worms and setting it to the side as a real issue that you should be thinking about and researching about, we're going to turn slightly the other direction and just talk about building fantasy and science fiction races. I kind of want to put you on the spot, Howard.

[Howard] That's just fine.

[Brandon] Because I love…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Your science fiction races. This is something you are really, really good at.

[Howard] I am…

[Brandon] How?

[Howard] Flattered and terrified. A large part of this grows out of the realization early on that calling… For anybody to call Sgt. Schlock, the amorphous… The carbosilicate amorph… Anybody calling him an alien is… Well, they are alien to him. There are other aliens. At one point, I made the joke where some… "Schlock, don't you have any alien superpowers?" He's like, "You guys are all aliens. Do you have any alien superpowers?" That's the easy version of that joke, and I never get to tell it again. What I had to wrap my head around is that I need all these aliens to function as people that can tell the story in a way that I don't have to use a lot of words, because I'm a cartoonist.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I have to take some shortcuts. I have to give them all eyebrows. The Uniocs, the guys with the great big one eye, have two eyebrows. Why? Because I need two eyebrows.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They don't need two eyebrows. I do. So there are compromises that I have made. But fundamentally what I am trying to do every time I introduce an alien… My first thought is not, "What cool superpowers does this alien have?" It is, "How does this alien see the world differently than other people, and is that important to the story?" As I've been working on prose, Dragons of Damaxuri, which is… It was my nano project in 2018, and I didn't finish it, because it needs more than 50,000 words…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I didn't get to 50,000. It needs more than 28,000 words. But that book, every time I mentioned an alien, I realized I don't have any pictures to work with. I have to give the reader enough so that when we mention that this is an alien, when they do something, they feel alien without feeling incomprehensible and without feeling like I've just mapped them onto some aspect of humanity. Fundamentally, with the alien races, from that standpoint, humanity is all one race.

[Brandon] Right.

[Howard] People of color, people of… Whatever. We're all one race.

[Mahtab] Howard, that's something very interesting that you mentioned, because you said you need the two eyebrows, especially because you have to show them. Now, that just makes me think about what if I just wanted to make an alien a blob of… An amoebic substance? But then, how would I make them relatable to the readers? Like, it's kind of a… Two sides of the coin. You want to make an alien not like a human being. He could have three or four arms, they could have five legs, but you have a head, you have a body, so that the readers can relate to it. But if you did not, and if you just had it made into a blob, then how do you show expression or… Well, it won't be illustrated, but… That's what I always wonder. What if I wanted to make something so weird that no one's ever seen it before, but then how do they relate to it?

[Howard] The trick that I'm using in Dragons of Damaxuri… And it's comedy. So I can freewheel a little bit. My point of view character is an artificial intelligence who has a physical avatar body, and who wants to fit in and wants to understand people and recognizes that everybody has a body language. So periodically an alien will do something with its ears, or it will take the two eyes on stalks and look at each other. Which I took from Larry Niven. But any alien with eyes on stalks is going to do that. Lou, the protagonist, she either knows what it means or she doesn't know what it means or she's guessing. She knows that it's important. So as I'm describing these things, these are becoming people who feel things and who do things that mean things. Our protagonist is trying to figure it out and trying to react to it.

[Dan] An author who did very alien aliens very well was Ursula K Le Guin. One of the things that she did in several of her stories and books was… She would present these incredibly bizarre things that we almost don't know how to relate to them, but she would explain what was important to them, and then we would watch them try to achieve that goal or overcome that obstacle. That process is incredibly relatable. So even though we don't necessarily understand who they are or where they're coming from, we know what it's like to try to get something that you want. We know what it's like to lose something that you love. So those aspects can still come out.

[Mahtab] Yeah. I think that's a good point.

[Brandon] Next week, we'll delve into this a little bit more…

[Howard] How weird is too weird.

[Brandon] Because our topic is how weird is too weird. But I did want to talk about this idea a little bit, about… Like, for instance, one thing in my writing group that a friend of mine always will point out is he hates it in books when they use something that's not a horse to be a horse.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Now, personally, I kind of like that, right? But where do you guys fall on this? When do you just call a horse a horse, when do you call a horse a zyloplick, which is what they ride on this planet, and in all ways it is a horse, except it's got scales.

[Dan] Well, see, for me, that comes down to a lot of the same issues of… Not just animals, but the races themselves. I remember, in our old writing class with Dave Wolverton, one of the things he said about kind of the standard Tolkien-esque fantasy is that what we said at the beginning, elves and dwarves and orcs and stuff, are really just kind of Earth cultures super-otherized. How much more interesting is it to just treat them as full cultures? So they're not just every dwarf is Gimli and has a Scottish accent and an axe, but maybe they like really spicy food. Maybe they have all these other massive facets to their culture that real cultures have that fantasy cultures sometimes don't because they're based on stereotypes. So with the horse, it's the same thing. If the horse doesn't do anything different than a normal horse, just call it a horse. But if it has scales, does that mean it's also a lizard? Does that mean that it's cold-blooded and you have to have a completely different kind of stable? Like, there's a lot of interesting roads you can go down if you want to look at that kind of stuff.

[Howard] The movie Avatar…

[Mahtab] That's just… Yes.

[Howard] Had…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The horses…

[Mahtab] Direhorse.

[Howard] Except it wasn't a horse because… Because…

[Dan] You plugged yourself into it.

[Howard] You plugged yourself into it. The place where, for me, that fell short was I wanted him to be experiencing some of what the horse is experiencing, because now it's not a horse. Now, he's got the wind in his nostrils, and I'm going to taste grass. This is so… Now, there's a reason for that connection to… Now it's got sense of wonder for me.

[Brandon] Book of the week this week is Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen. Grand Master of SFWA, Jane Yolen, one of my favorite writers of all time. I recently reread this book to do a piece on it for Tor.com. I love this book. It was one of the very first fantasy books I ever read as a kid, and a lot of the stuff in this book went completely over my head.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But it was my first boy and his dragon story. Which, there are a lot of classic kid and dragon stories, but this one is wonderful. It's about a young man who is a slave, who works for a wealthy man who owns dragons that fight in pits. They're basically cockfights with dragons. As a kid, this was just awesome. Reading it as an adult, I'm like, "Wow, this is… This is really uncomfortable."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] In ways she obviously wanted it to be. Because these are inten… Intelligent creatures that they are raising to fight, and the young man, his way to get freedom is he's going to steal an egg, which in this culture, you're kind of allowed to do. They won't really talk about it, but if someone is… Like, grabs an egg and raises it themselves, they all kind of think that's a cool thing, and you can get away with it if you can actually make it happen. Which very rarely would it ever happen. He has the dream of doing this, and he actually gets an egg, a young dragon, and starts raising it. But the story is about how he's going to have to raise it to go fight to the death for him to have a chance at freedom, and his growing bond with it as he realizes it really is intelligent. A beautiful story. Kind of a brutal story. Both whimsical and realistic at the same time. Which is really an interesting mix, but Jane is very good at that. So I recommend Dragon's Blood to you. If you've never read it, it's a wonderful book.

[Brandon] I want to bring us back to this concept that Dan was talking about. Because I find one of the things that is most difficult, but most satisfying, about worldbuilding races is forcing myself to not let my races be one note. This is really… It takes a lot of work. Because very naturally, and I think this is partially for shorthand reasons, it's also for bias reasons, but it's also… It's very natural for us to go and watch a movie and the movie has only an hour and a half to show us something, so it shows us this fantasy race, and it's like, "These are humans, but they have no emotions." Or, "These are humans, but they don't get metaphor." That works really well as a cool shorthand in a film. But as we are writing and we have more time to spend on these races and cultures, I think it's really important to make them more than one note. How do you do this? It is really, I think, very difficult.

[Mahtab] I think Ursula Guin did that in The Left Hand of Darkness when she did the andro… Yuck, I can't even figure that word, but androgynous races. I think that was a really cool way to deal with… Not making them male or female or… Just exploring that entirely different way of doing it and the relationship between Estravan and Genly Ai, who came in… I thought that was very cool. So, just to take away the gender and do it in that way, I thought that was pretty well done.

[Brandon] Yeah. Left Hand of Darkness is a masterwork in how to do this right.

[Dan] I suspect that some of the problems that we have in kind of making our fantasy and science fiction races feel rounded, is because we come up with them to fill a role in our story first. Then we realize it's too much work to also give them all of this cultural baggage that is very different and very nonhuman. So we're just like, "Well, they're… It's just a Wookie. He's just like the quiet mechanic who never talks and is very hairy." So if you force yourself to do it, to actually go in and say, "Well, how is this going to change the way they interact?" This is something Howard has recently done with the… I can't remember the names of any of the aliens. But there's the ones with four arms.

[Howard] The Fobottr.

[Dan] Yes. You kind of recently… I don't know if ret-conned is the right word, but you defined more solidly how they interact and the way that they require groups… I just thought that was really interesting, because all of a sudden, they were more interesting and they were distinctly different from the humans.

[Howard] Part of what I did…

[Dan] In a measurable way.

[Howard] Part of what I did when I designed them and when I designed their culture, I gave them a history that involved a diaspora… Diaspora? I don't know how to say that word. I know how to read that word. They were scattered. They have traveling merchant clans, warrior clans, whatever. Their culture is not monoculture. Sometimes when they connect with people of their own kind who have done a better job of preserving their original culture, there is conflict. Your naming conventions are all wrong. Why… None of that made it into the story, but all of that made it into my notes. What it let me do, and it's a silly thing… What it let me do was have characters whose names didn't fit the pattern of everybody else. I knew that there was a rule behind it. I knew it fit.

[Dan] Well, I think maybe the big lesson for the rea… For our listeners, then, is reading the comic, it's not a treatise on Fobottr… How do you say it? Culture.

[Howard] Fobottr.

[Dan] But I could tell very clearly the strip at which oh, Howard's changed the way this… He's defined this culture all of a sudden. They feel like real people. Even though you're not going out of your way to dump all the information on us.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and wrap it up here. Mahtab, you were going to give us some homework?

[Mahtab] Yes. Take one major historical incident that occurred on Earth and set it in space, with an alien race or races.

[Dan] Cool.

[Brandon] Awesome. I'm very curious to hear what you guys… Or read what you guys come up with. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.B1: Bonus Episode – Elephants and Death, with Lawrence Schoen

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/08/22/13-b1-bonus-episode-elephants-and-death-with-lawrence-schoen/

Key Points: (no tusks). Elephants and death? In particular, uplifted elephants and death. Exploring the human condition through things that are not human is at the core of science fiction. With anthropomorphic animals, you get aliens plus we are already familiar with them. Then add in animal society. Why does Schlock Mercenary have elephants? Because everyone agrees uplifting the African elephant was a mistake. Whack-a-mole is hard because prairie dogs are precognitive. Animal behavior and alien behavior gives stories traction for exploring human attributes. When characters stop being animals and become people, that's great. Because humanity doesn't care what flesh it's wearing or what the DNA looks like. We are complex patterns of organized information, and that information shouldn't vanish just because the meat we are wearing has gone bad. What if you had foreknowledge that this is the last thing I will make? What if you knew this was your last day, your last week? Remember the saying, "Live today like it was your last." What does that mean? "Wait. I haven't..."

( Don't make the animals hungry... )

[Mary] Season 13.

[Howard] Our patrons, over at patreon.com/writing excuses, have made it possible for us to record more than just 52 episodes in a single calendar year. This episode is one of those bonus episodes. Thank you, patrons, for making this possible. Thank you, listeners, for joining us, and if you'd like to become a patron, I already gave you the URL.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses. Elephants and Death, with Lawrence Schoen.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] And with us, we have my beloved roommate for this convention...

[Oooo]

[Dan] At GenCon, Lawrence Schoen. Lawrence, tell us about yourself.

[Lawrence] Oh, wow. I wear lots of different hats. And that… I never wear hats. I am a cognitive psychologist. I'm a hypnotherapist specializing in authors' issues. I'm the founder and director of the Klingon Language Institute. A small press publisher, and oh, yeah, when there's time, I write novels.

[Dan] Awesome. Thank you for coming.

[Dan] We are not going to talk about any of those things.

[Sweet]

[Dan] We're going to talk about elephants and death. The reason that we have this is because when we were discussing topics, I was really excited about uplift, and they were really excited to talk about death, because I'm the one who writes about death, and they're the two that write about uplift. So…

[Chuckling in the distance]

[Dan] Both of you have uplifted elephants featured prominently in your science fiction.

[Lawrence] That's true.

[Dan] Why?

[Lawrence] The fact that you ask that question means that no answer I give you would be satisfactory.

[Chuckles]

[Lawrence] Because elephants are just cool, and they are fun to write, and they were the protagonists of the novel, so… I ran with that. But the novel's all about death, as well, so it's… I am the bridge between the two of you.

[Howard] He's very much… The Barsk novel. I loved it. Is… It's a great exploration of the psychology of death. The elephants… The Phant, as you called them...

[Lawrence] Fant.

[Howard] Fant.

[Lawrence] Because they have their own writing system, which I did a typeface of. It's the Fant font.

[Howard] Oh.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Okay. You get one of those, and that was it.

[Lawrence] It's a live show. I figured…

[Dan] Now you guys know exactly what it's like to be his roommate.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But the exploration of that through what is essentially an alien is… That is at the core of all that is science fiction. We are able to explore the human condition through things that are not human in ways that we probably couldn't if we were writing about humans.

[Lawrence] This is the fun thing about writing about anthropomorphic animals, because you get all the great things you get when you write about aliens, but we already know them. So I get to draw in various things that an ethologist would have… Does research on like elephant societal structures and then just… Oh, and they're intelligent, so instead of… In regular elephant… In regular? The kind we have, females and children all wander around together in like large family units, and when male elephants reach maturity, they go off on their own, as like wild bachelors. We have this in Barsk. So if you're a realtor on Barsk, there are these enormous family homes, and all these little tiny one-bedroom apartments.

[Howard] Bachelor pads.

[Lawrence] Bachelor pads. And the men keep moving around, they never stay in one place very, very long, because they have to keep moving. They will travel to other islands, and on and on like this. The womenfolk are there, raising… So it's… I always think of it as that line from Gilbert and Sullivan, "And we are his sisters and his cousins and his aunts." Obviously, your listeners need to listen to HMS Pinafore more.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] It just changes the whole way you approach society.

[Howard] I recently watched Zootopia, and in the special features on Zootopia, the guys talked about going out to Africa and watching animals. Their design for the characters in the film completely changed after seeing this, because they were doing exactly what you're describing. They would take the groups… Instead of, "Oh, here's a giraffe and here's an elephant and here's a lion… Giraffe, elephant, lion, antelope, whatever," they started grouping them the way they would group in the wild. It was kind of brilliant and beautiful. And it informed… I love watching the special features. It informed the story from there. My elephants… Dan asked why'd you guys put elephants in… Was a terrible, terrible mistake.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I told a joke... I've been to Africa. On the safari, they warned us the most dangerous animal out here is not man, because none of you have guns. The most dangerous animal out here is the bull African elephant. Do not make it angry because that's the only thing here that can kill us while we're in the car. They have terrible tempers. I mean, you piss them off and they're all over you. So I told a joke about uplift. We've uplifted this, and this, and this. And the one thing everyone could agree on was that uplifting the African elephant was a mistake. My readers… I did not realize at the time, my readers felt like I'd made a promise to them that there were going to be elephants in the comic. Heh.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Drawing… The scale between a human being and elephant is pretty dramatic.

[Yes]

[Howard] Putting them all in the same panel took a lot of really annoying work.

[Lawrence] I've always appreciated that extra of effort you've put into them. I've noticed those strips seem far and few between. But I always appreciated that.

[Howard] I haven't gone to the lengths that you've gone to in order to incorporate elephant culture, because if there's anything worse than drawing one elephant, it's drawing 10.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] Well, let me give you another example of the same…

[Dan] Fighting in a circus.

[Howard] Fighting in a circus.

[Laughter] Fighting in a circus.

[Howard] What a terrible idea that was.

[Lawrence] And then the gravity shuts off. But… Barsk is… I mean, Barsk is the name of the planet where the elephants live, but it's the galaxy full of over 100 uplifted races. Species. It's another example of drawing on real animal behavior. There's a scene where one of our villains goes to meet a bunch of prairie dogs, who happened to be precognitive. They're all in a…

[Precognitive]

[Lawrence] As they are.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's why whack-a-mole is so hard.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] He goes to see them and he enters the antechamber and one is waiting. He says, "Oh. You're waiting for me because you knew I was coming because you're precognitive." He says, "No. One of us is always here." Because prairie dogs always leave a sentry at every opening to a prairie dog colony. If you know that about prairie dogs, you go, "Oh, I get it. That's…" If you don't, you just say, "Oh, well. Schoen's too clever for his own good," and then you move on.

[Howard] And away you go. The animal behavior stuff, the alien behavior stuff, exploring human attributes through this, I think, is where, for me, stories in general really… That's where they get traction. When I see a piece of myself…

[Lawrence] The thing I like best when people tell me about their experience of Barsk is when they tell me they reached the point where they… The characters, the protagonists and so forth, stopped being elephants, that they became people for them. That's Yes! Because the humanity behind a character doesn't care what flesh it's wearing, doesn't care what the DNA looks like. That's where I was going with all of this, and that's why one of the themes about the book is things like intolerance and so forth. But we haven't gotten to death.

[Dan] Well, that's okay, because we're going to pause right now and you're going to tell us about Barsk. Not that we haven't been hearing about it for seven minutes, but… Give us the quick pitch. It is Barsk: The Elephant's Graveyard. Tell us about the book.

[Lawrence] I will give you the quick pitch, because my wife wrote this… Helped me write this. She insists I do this every time. So. Prophecy. Intolerance. Loyalty. Conspiracy. Friendship. A drug for speaking to the dead. Also, elephants in space.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Howard] I'm in. Well, I mean, I already read it, but I'm in again.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] I will sell you another copy.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, that is Barsk, by Lawrence Schoen.

[Howard] Barsk: The Elephant's Graveyard by Lawrence Schoen.

[Dan] By Lawrence Schoen. Go pick it up.

[Howard] Is it available on Audible yet?

[Lawrence] It is. The Audible… There is… If I can sneak in a quick thing about the Audible.

[Sure]

[Lawrence] So I mentioned… I know there's no rule…

[Dan] You got an actual elephant to read the…

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] Even better. Even better. You said we weren't going to talk about some of the other [garbled... hassleware?], but I have all of these people who follow me because of my work with Klingon, but they don't want to read my fiction. Because it's not Klingon fiction. So I reached out to an actor I knew, J. G. Hertzler, who portrayed Martok, Admiral Martok on Deep Space Nine.

[Dan] He's got the best frigging voice in the show.

[Lawrence] He's got the best… But he's never done audiobooks before. He recorded the audio for Barsk. It is beyond brilliant. I'm thinking this is going to be a whole new future career for John. I want my percentage.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] Or at least I want him to do the next book.

[Dan] All right. So let's get back into this. It is not just Barsk, it is Barsk: The Elephant's Graveyard.

[Lawrence] There's a colon in there.

[Dan] So death is a key part of this. How so?

[Lawrence] The MacGuffin there is that there is this drug that only… That is derived from a plant that only grows on Barsk, and certain people, under the influence of this drug, discover they can perceive a new subatomic particle. A subatomic particle of memory and personality. We all give these particles off every day we live. When we die, they disperse. If you use this drug, you can pull them back. When you have enough of them, that person materializes in front of you, and you can converse with him or her. This is the latest instantiation of this in my fiction. I just don't like death. I don't like the idea that death is the end of us. So in Barsk, the idea is we are all complex patterns of organized information. That information doesn't… Shouldn't vanish just because the meat we're wearing has gone bad. The parallel I like to give is you look up in the night sky and you're seeing the light from stars that don't exist anymore. But that information is still coming toward us. We happen to have eyes that allow us to perceive that. What we lack at the moment, arguably, is either sensory apparatus or hardware that lets us perceive the information each of us… That is each of our lives. So, the premise behind this drug is that it gives us that ability. Then we're off and running.

[Dan] That's awesome.

[Howard] The exploration of death from the eyes of someone who is uncomfortable with it, as most of us should be, I don't know how much of you saw when I was reading the book, but I saw a whole lot of me. There's a character in the very beginning… The point at which I knew you'd written a wonderful book was the scene where someone is carving. He knows it's the last work of art he's going to perform and it's not for him. It's for… I don't know what it's for. As an artist, the idea that at some point I'm going to make the last thing I make is a little terrifying. The idea that you might be given foreknowledge, you might know this is the last thing that I am going to make, and it is only for me. I wept during that. Because as an artist, and as writers, we want our works to outlive us, and I think we want to be read after we're gone.

[Lawrence] Part of the conceit of the title is on Barsk, when your death is approaching, you wake up one morning and go, "Oh!" And you have a destination in your mind. There is an island that you set sail to. Nobody knows where it is until it is time to go. If you… You won't tell anybody, because it's… They don't need to know yet.

[Howard] You're not dying.

[Lawrence] You're not dying. You don't tell anybody you're going, you just pack up and go. This is in the very first chapter. I think it begins with Rüsul. Rüsul went to meet his death. So he's in this weird state of his life is over, and he hasn't gotten to the island yet.

[Howard] He's not dead.

[Lawrence] He's not dead. But he is dead in that his life is past, his life is behind him. He's not physically dead. In his mind, he's filled out all the forms, he's said his goodbyes to the people he needs to say goodbye to, he took the things he wanted to take with him on his voyage, he's packed for the trip, and he knows where he has to go. Minor, minor spoiler is that the bad guys, who are basically everybody else in the galaxy because they want the drug that grows on Barsk, and they don't want to have to deal with the elephants anymore…

[Howard] They don't want to pay for it.

[Lawrence] They show up and they abduct him because no one's going to come looking for him, because he's dead. And we're off and running.

[Howard] The thought there, and I want to extrapolate this a little bit broader, because this appears through fiction all the time, how do you behave if you know that this is your last day? How do you behave if you know that this is your last week? I was in my 20s and somebody said, "Live today like it was your last." What's that really mean?

[Dan] That's when I just start breaking things.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] It's no accountability. Well, it's… No. I mean, that's the first reaction. I'm going to get drunk, I'm going to get laid, maybe at the same time, and all these things. Black tar heroin, and whatever you want.

[Dan] Whatever I want?

[Lawrence] Whatever you want.

[Dan] StarCraft landing party.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] Okay.

[Howard] This is your roommate, Dan.

[Lawrence] There you go. He's been sleeping with one eye open. But then you look at your life and you say, "But that's not me." I've actually had this conversation with other people. They said, "No. If I know it's my last day, I'm… Maybe I won't go to work. But I'll spend the day with my wife, and I'll take the kids to the zoo…" Ironically enough.

[Chuckles]

[Lawrence] Or "I'll go walk on the beach," or I'll make peace with myself. What are the things that I never got to do that I meant to do? And I'm okay with that.

[Howard] I remember a line in one of the VorKosigan novels where Miles gets shot in the chest and dies.

[Lawrence] He does.

[Howard] The last thoughts are, "Wait. I haven't…" And then it's done.

[Lawrence] Absolutely.

[Howard] That terrified me because I do not want that to be my last thought. Wait, I haven't…

[Lawrence] This goes back to… What's the poem? "When I have fears that I may cease to be before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain…" They burned that into me in high school, and it's like, "No. That can't be a thing. I have books to write, and I'm of questionable health." I'm thinking, "Man, this sucks. I gotta quit the day jobs so I can write more books. But then I'll die, because I don't have food or a house or…

[Giggling]

[Lawrence] So, there is this compromise we play. But no, I have things to do, I have stories to tell. I just had my birthday last week, so it's like my mortality has been brought to my awareness again. It's like Whahahaha!

[Howard] That's what birthdays are for.

[Lawrence] That's what birthdays are for.

[Howard] Dan, are we morbid enough yet? I…

[Dan] Well, I think we need to take this cheerful tone and end the podcast on it. Because our time is up. Ironically.

[Howard] Oh, my.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] Well, when you're out of time…

[Howard] You get one, and that was it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So. Give us a really quick writing prompt.

[Lawrence] Okay. Come up with a method for immortality, and then convince your protagonist not to use it.

[Dan] Very cool. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go…

[Write.]

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] I'm glad they didn't say die.

[Laughter]

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.52: Cross-Genres as Gateways

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/12/24/12-52-cross-genres-as-gateways/

Key Points: Cross-genre books can be gateways to get readers to read in new genres. People who don't read a genre often pretend it is monolithic, because the iconic stories in a genre do so well. But each genre has blends and hybrids and explorations of new directions and interesting things! Romance is the genre that other genres like to pick on. Set aside the notion that some genre is untouchable, start with an open mind. Young adult used to be not segregated by genre. Most Americans think comic books are all superhero stories. Gateway cross-genre books are fun! Give readers more possibilities for reading and enjoying. Listen to Season 16... no, make that 11! Elemental genres let you mix the concepts. But don't just do windowdressing, or paint on the walls, build your genres in so they can't be easily separated. Cross-genre stories can help reluctant readers find what they love. So mix it up! Science fiction, fantasy, romance, horror, mystery... cross the genres and build gateways into new and fascinating world! The familiar, and the strange.
( Crossgenres and hopscotch? )

[Brandon] I am going to close us out with a writing prompt. Our writing prompt is I want you to write a story where one of the characters thinks they're in a different genre from what the story actually is. They think they're in a story from a different genre. How does it go? This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 11.48: Elemental Issue Q&A, with DongWon Song

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/11/27/11-48-elemental-issue-qa-with-DongWon-song/

Q&A Summary
Q: Can only certain people tackle certain issues in their stories?
A: Yes. Imagination and empathy let you project yourself into someone's experience, imagine it, and render it. The farther away, the harder. No. Maybe you can, but should you? Consider the cost.
Q: Science fiction seems to excel in making issue stories engaging by changing the context a little bit. Why does this seem to work better?
A: Science fiction and fantasy, puppetry, anything that lets you look at the issue from one step outside the real world, from an angle, let's the audience look at things in a different way, see connections, and draw their own conclusions. Science fiction and fantasy lets you make a metaphor to attack an issue from a different direction. Without instant triggers, your audience can hear the whole discussion.
Q: Do you have any tools for handling these issues in the context of short fiction?
A: The same tools. Represent multiple points of view, let the character be wrong sometimes. Attach it to a different main driver. Don't answer the questions, let the reader think about them.
Q: How do you make sure you research the issue enough, while not paralyzing yourself with high expectations to do it justice?
A: Break your research into two parts. In part one, learn what you can to tell an honest story. In part two, get readers who know the issue to let you know what you need to fix.
Q: How do you avoid accidentally including an issue that you didn't notice in your writing?
A: You probably will accidentally include issues in your writing. Good alpha and beta readers, and learn to say I was wrong. Recognize that your first reaction is based on the culture you grew up in, while your second reaction is who you want to be. Consider hiring a sensitivity reader.
Q: How do I write a perspective I don't agree with convincingly, without convincing my readers that I'm not on the side of the argument?
A: Empathy and imagination let you embody that position in a person. That's not you, that's the character. Make sure there are people in the text calling them on it, and examples in the text of the problems with it. Hang a lantern on it.
Q: How do you write about an issue deeply personal to you without turning it into a look-at-me sob story? But still retaining accuracy and emotion behind the issue?
A: Show the positive aspects too. Gallows humor can help. Also, metaphor, to transform the situation.
( So many words... )

[Brandon] I think we are going to go ahead and call it there. Dan, you have some homework for us.
[Dan] Yes. So. We've been talking about issue for a month. Next month, we are going to talk about ensemble. So your homework this week is to kind of bridge those. You're going to take an issue and create an ensemble out of it. Take an issue that you haven't dealt with yet in any of the previous homework that we've given you. Gun rights. Or price gouging in pharmacology. Something that you haven't talked about yet. Then examine as many sides of that as you can. Create a cast of characters who each espouse a different viewpoint on that issue. So that you have a large ensemble cast. Next month, we'll talk about ensembles.
[Brandon] All right. Thank you, DongWon.
[DongWon] Thank you for having me.
[Brandon] Thank you, Writing Excuses cruise members.
[Applause. Whoo!]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: chilled

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Writing Excuses 11.31: Futurism, with Trina Marie Phillips

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/07/31/11-31-futurism-with-trina-marie-phillips/

Key Points: Futurism and science fiction are two sides of the same coin, but futurism needs to be rooted in believable fact. Futurism usually looks 10, 20, 50 or 100 years out. Realistic projections in useful ways. Lots of SF is not waiting for the technology to be developed, just for the strike point that makes it happen, often funding. To go beyond projecting a single tech, you have to look at ecosystems, and how society adopts to change. Also, think of leapfrogging. Most writers don't think far enough ahead. Technology is widely available. Part of futurism is using storytelling to show why companies should invest in projects, by showing them what the outcomes are likely to be.

( When tomorrow is today... )
[Brandon] Trina, would you be able to give us a writing prompt?
[Trina] How about we have everyone try to write… Pick a city, anywhere in the world, and write what you think it will look like in the year 2045.
[Brandon] Excellent.
[Mary] That's awesome.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: aching fingers

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Writing Excuses 11.15: The Environment, with L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/04/10/11-15-the-environment-with-l-e-modessit-jr/

Key Points: Environment, climate, underlies everything. Its effects, pollution, can change the whole structure of a culture. Beware the city in the desert -- how does it get water and food? "Everything we do in any society is an interconnected ecology." Think about the ramifications of the environment on technology, economy, class structure, etc. Think about what the environment allows, and what it prevents. Consider the distribution of minerals and resources in different regions. Even the stars and their influence on navigation are worth a look!

( Smog, frogs, and other irritations... )
[Brandon] Well, I'm going to have to call it here, because we are running out of time. I want to thank our audience here at Life, the Universe, and Everything.
[Whoa! Applause.]
[Brandon] I want to thank L. E. Modesitt, Jr. I actually have some homework for us. This is a classic Brandon Sanderson style homework pitch for you. I want you to come up with a fantasy fuel… Not fantasy football, fantasy fuel. Some sort of fuel system in a fantasy world that has some extreme, but unintended, consequences on the environment people live in. I don't want you to go with the standard ones that we've had in our world that we've dealt with. I want it to be something weird and bizarre that… Burning this fantasy fuel makes one in 100 children turn into a demon. Or something like this.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Like I want something interesting for your story based around the thing they find in the environment that they can use for fuel. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

[Mary] 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

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Writing Excuses 7.30: Microcasting, Again.

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/07/22/writing-excuses-7-30-micocasting-again/

The questions:
1. How do you deal with bad reviews?
2. How can you apply the laws of magic to science in science fiction?
3. How can you keep tension high without exhausting the reader?
4. What do you do when you've made your manuscript as good as you know how, and you don't know how to fix anything to make it better?
5. How do you create suspension of disbelief in your readers?
6. How do you deal with annoying fans?
( and the answers... )
[Brandon] All right. I'm going to go ahead and give us a writing prompt. It's going to be the story of the writer and her alien fan who is just basically impossible to escape, because the alien's morphology or biology or whatever it is, whatever it is about them, makes it impossible for you to get away from them.
[Dan] Okay.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: swinging on a star

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Writing Excuses 5.15: Steampunk with Scott Westerfeld

from http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/12/05/writing-excuses-5-15-steampunk-with-scott-westerfeld/

Key points: Steampunk is Victorian science fiction, extrapolated without restriction to current notions of possibility. It's also very tactile. Fashions and manners and brass and chrome and leather. Plus flamethrowers. Not just a literary genre. To write Steampunk, start with alternate history world building, and add other technologies -- crazy weird stuff. The familiar and the strange. Do your research, but don't bury the characters and the story under the world. "If it's not fun, you're doing it wrong." Cherie Priest.
( Under the steam robot clanking... )
[Howard] Final piece of advice for us, Scott? For writers who want to embrace the steamy punkiness of the Victorian era?
[Brandon] Or just any writing advice?
[Scott] Well, I'll quote Cherie Priest. "If it's not fun, you're doing it wrong."
[Brandon] Writing prompt is Tesla is President. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: clank

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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode Eight: What Star Trek Did Right

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/07/20/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-8-what-star-trek-did-right/

Key points: If you are going to twist a genre or bend expectations for a surprise, do it early. Character climaxes resonate with audiences. A cabbage head character, a Watson, a naive person can help readers learn. Use hooks to help readers identify the characters, but character development to help them identify with them. Characters in conflict with themselves can be fascinating. Paired arcs can cross and support each other. A prosaic setting can help non-science-fiction readers get oriented fast. Use the setting to provide subtle hints to the passage of time. Spock is not a rooster.
( Behind the crossed spaceships )
[Just the writing prompt]
[Howard] I don't want to give people a Star Trek writing prompt. No, that's good. Start with iconic Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Start with those iconic characters and then make them your own characters with their own justifications. Spock cannot be an elf... or a rooster. Now you're out of excuses. Go write.

Current Mood: antiqued

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

January 2026

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.24: An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.03: An Interview with Erin Roberts
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.01: Twenty Twenty-Three, By Way of Introduction
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.47: Worldbuilding Science Fiction, with Cory Doctorow
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.51: A Farewell to Worldbuilding
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.45: Economics
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.32: Worldbuilding Gender Roles
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.30: Eating Your Way to BetterWorldbuilding
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.B1: Bonus Episode – Elephants and Death, with Lawrence Schoen
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.52: Cross-Genres as Gateways
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.48: Elemental Issue Q&A, with DongWon Song
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.31: Futurism, with Trina Marie Phillips
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.15: The Environment, with L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.30: Microcasting, Again.
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.15: Steampunk with Scott Westerfeld
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Three Episode Eight: What Star Trek Did Right

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with science fiction

Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders

Writing Excuses 19.24: An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine

Writing Excuses 18.03: An Interview with Erin Roberts

Writing Excuses 18.01: Twenty Twenty-Three, By Way of Introduction

Writing Excuses 16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic

Writing Excuses 15.47: Worldbuilding Science Fiction, with Cory Doctorow

Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing

Writing Excuses 14.51: A Farewell to Worldbuilding

Writing Excuses 14.45: Economics

Writing Excuses 14.32: Worldbuilding Gender Roles

Writing Excuses 14.30: Eating Your Way to BetterWorldbuilding

Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races

Writing Excuses 13.B1: Bonus Episode – Elephants and Death, with Lawrence Schoen

Writing Excuses 12.52: Cross-Genres as Gateways

Writing Excuses 11.48: Elemental Issue Q&A, with DongWon Song

Writing Excuses 11.31: Futurism, with Trina Marie Phillips

Writing Excuses 11.15: The Environment, with L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

Writing Excuses 7.30: Microcasting, Again.

Writing Excuses 5.15: Steampunk with Scott Westerfeld

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode Eight: What Star Trek Did Right

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