Writing Excuses 14.47: Writing Characters With Physical Disabilities

Nov. 27th, 2019 11:14 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 14.47: Writing Characters With Physical Disabilities
 
 
Key Points: Should the otherness be the focus of the book or not? Which way is richer? It depends. Most people don't really know disabled people. The world is not accessible. How do you write about this? Use your imagination, feel the embodied sensations. Consider different kinds of disability and mobility aids. Compare it to things you know, such as getting over the flu is like the fatigue of using crutches or pushing a stroller is like using a wheelchair. Pay attention to the physical environment and embodiment. How do you include full, rounded characters, including sensuality, in your books? Think simple, practical things. Mechanics. When a wheelchair user goes to a club, they are talking to people's belt buckles. So sympathetic characters will sit down, to talk to them on the level. Go to primary sources, but be circumspect and polite. Books about becoming disabled versus I have always been disabled? The real question is are they integrated with it now, are they comfortable with it as it is now, not when they changed. Small kids, a wheelchair, crutches... take them into that restaurant.
 
[Transcriptionist note: I suspect I have mislabeled Piper and Tempest at times in this transcript. My apologies, but I could not tell by listening who was talking.]
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 47.
[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Characters With Physical Disabilities.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Nicola] Because you're in a hurry.
[Tempest] And we're not that smart.
[Piper] I'm Piper.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Nicola] I'm Nicola.
[Tempest] I'm Tempest.
 
[Tempest] Today we have a special guest joining us for our special episode on writing the other, author Nicola Griffith. Who is one of my favorite authors, and I'm so glad that she had the chance to join us today. I'm going to give you a chance to just tell us a little bit about yourself as an author.
[Nicola] I write novels, mostly. Occasionally short stories, but they're rare for me. I prefer to focus at length, because I get a bee in my bonnet about something, I'd like to explore it.
[Tempest] What do you get a bee in your bonnet about mostly?
[Nicola] Norming the other.
[Tempest] Okay.
[Nicola] That's kind of what I do, and it's in fact what I wrote my PhD thesis on, too.
[Tempest] Oh, sweet. So, in your work, have you tackled writing characters with physical disabilities that are the same or similar to the physical challenges that you have experienced in your life?
[Nicola] The only novel I've actually written from the perspective of a woman with disabilities is my most recent book, So Lucky. It's the only novel where I have written a character where I ignore her difference. All my other books, the main characters are queer, but that's not the focus of the book. But So Lucky, my most recent novel, it's about becoming disabled, and how that changes one's view of life.
[Interesting]
 
[Tempest] Do you feel as though, in your work and the work of people that you admire, it's more of a richness to just have a character who has an otherness and that's not the focus of the book, or is it, I guess I want to say, richer if that is the focus? Because I know that that's a lot the conversation around like whether or not when writing characters who are the other in mainstream society, or the other to you, whether it should be about that or whether they should just be that, and the book be about something else.
[Nicola] I think it really depends. For me, in terms of queerness, I always wanted to just have a world with queer people in it, and to just… I don't walk around thinking, "[gasp] My name's Nicola. I'm a woman. I'm queer."
[Chuckles]
[Nicola] I just go through life. I just assume the world is how it is. To me, that's what I want a character to do. But the difference for me was that I really, really wanted to talk about becoming disabled. So I had to address disability very specifically.
 
[Tempest] That makes sense. So when others… Other people, other writers are writing characters who have physical disabilities, what are the things that you see when it's done well that you wish you saw more of, and the kind of stuff that you put in your work that you want to model for other writers writing these types of characters?
[Nicola] I have to say, I'm a bit stumped at that, because I think there is very, very, very little good fiction with characters with physical disabilities. Because disability fiction is at the stage where queer fiction was I think about 60 years ago, honestly. It's still at the stage of a lot of kind of coming out fiction.
[Tempest] Okay. That makes sense.
[Nicola] People are very used to queer people now. It's much more acceptable. Still, not that many people really know disabled people. I mean, we literally don't get out much. It's… The world is not an accessible place. So it used to be that five years ago, you couldn't really get to conventions very easily. Now, science fiction conventions are brilliantly organized, mostly. So people know more disabled people, so you don't have to educate people to quite the degree that you do about queerness.
[Okay]
[Nicola] But, so for someone who uses a wheelchair, it is… A lot of people don't really understand. They'll say, "Oh, yeah, my house is completely accessible. Well, it's just a small step."
[Laughter]
[Nicola] They don't get it. So I felt the need to write my most recent book with a lot of this stuff in it, to say, "No, here's what accessible actually means in fictional terms."
[Dan] Yeah. That's so important. I grew up… My mom's in a wheelchair. I thought I knew these things. I'd grown up with them. Then, recently became lactose intolerant, and went to a Mexican restaurant without my Lactaid. That redefined accessibility for me in a way that I thought I already had internalized, and I hadn't. Suddenly, I was confronted with this entire restaurant that I couldn't access, that I couldn't use. It was very eye-opening.
 
[Dan] So, one of the things we like to do in this series is talk to people about how to write something from an experience that is not their own. We love own voices, we want people to write about their own experiences, but also, we would love people who may be don't have a physical disability to include more of that in their fiction. What is… What are some things that they can do to do that research and to do that homework and to get that right?
[Nicola] The best way is to actually use your imagination. By that, I mean actually feel the embodied sensations. So imagine you are walking into a restaurant… Imagine you just had the flu, and you're recovering from flu. So I'm trying to imagine… For example, if you're using crutches, because there are a huge spectrum of disabilities and mobility aids. So imagine someone on crutches. Their problem is not so much steps, although that is a problem. It's fatigue. So a way to imagine that is to think, "Okay, how do I feel when I just had flu? I'm weak as a kitten!" You need to think about spaces. Then, if you think, for a wheelchair user, I don't know how many people listening have kids, but imagine what it was like you had a small person in a stroller. What's accessible? What's not? I can only imagine if you are someone who has epilepsy. Again, to use the exercise of going into a restaurant, if you are the kind of person who has grand mal seizures, perhaps what you look at is the floor. Most people with physical disabilities will think of the floor. Is it shiny? Is it slippy? Does it have steps? Is it steep? Is it… Does it tilt? If you fall down, when you have a seizure, will you hurt your head? So it's very much about the physical environment and embodiment. So, yeah, think about bodies.
[Thank you]
[Dan] That's great.
 
[Piper] I think I'm going to stop us for the book of the week. I believe you have the book of the week for us, which is So Lucky. Could you tell us a bit about it?
[Nicola] So Lucky is a short novel about a woman called Mara, who is one of those type A, angry people who's on top of her world. She's married, she's got a fantastic job, she loves her work. Then, in the space of a week, she is divorced by her wife, diagnosed with MS, and loses her job. As you can imagine, that makes her a little unhappy. So the whole novel is about that, and it is about how she deals with monsters, human and otherwise.
[Piper] That sounds impactful. Thank you.
 
[Piper] So, for the next question, I would like to give you one of my own. It's referring back to something you had said earlier in our discussion. When it comes to living their lives, I was wondering what advice you would give authors who want to include people with disabilities, especially particularly mobility disabilities, who are not only living their best lives, their experiencing happiness, sadness, they're taking challenging lives and they're going after their goals? But also, they're living very full lives relationship-wise and perhaps even exploring sensuality. I think that sometimes that's erased, or people don't want to think about that. But that is a part of life sometimes. Could you talk a little bit about that for authors who want to include characters like that in their books?
[Nicola] Sure. Just imagine an ordinary person and how they might want to have sex sitting down or on a bed. You don't… If you're a wheelchair user, you can't have sex standing against a wall, for example. There are some very, very simple practical things. But that's all it is, is simple practical things. Just think about… Again, think about the body. Think about the mechanics of the thing. Then there's things like, well, if you are the kind of person who picks people up in clubs, you go to a club and you're going to be talking to people's belt buckles.
[Chuckles]
[Nicola] Which alters the conversation a little. So, if you want to write a sympathetic character who's nondisabled, you can have them immediately see someone in a wheelchair and think, "Okay. I'm going to sit down, so that I can speak to them on a level." So, I suppose, it depends if you want your other characters to be good guys or bad guys. How sensitive are they to this stuff? Am I making sense?
[Tempest] Absolutely. I think that that's really helpful. Not only because there are things that people can do to kind of see eye-to-eye, shall we say? But also considerations from a physical perspective and the mechanics of… Are there any resources that you could recommend for researching the mechanics, or… Because I know that that would be another popular question.
[Nicola] Actually, no, I can't think of anything. But I will think about it. Then, if I find something, I'll post it on my website. But right now, offhand, no, I can't. I'm sorry.
[Piper] No, no. Posting it on your website would be wonderful, because then your website would be the reference.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Yeah. One resource that is always valuable, although you need to be very circumspect and very polite, obviously, when asking, is just going to primary sources. Talking to people who have disabilities, and saying, "Well, are you willing to answer a few questions? Can I ask you what your life is like?" Maybe don't jump straight into the sex question with a stranger, obviously.
[Chuckles]
[Hi. You don't know me…]
[I was not the one who said that.]
[Laughter]
[I specifically said at the right moment.]
[Laughter]
[Dan] But, yes. Like I said, my mom grew up… My mom's in a wheelchair, and she is always happy to describe her experiences to people that she is comfortable with. So, making friends and asking them questions is a great way to do a lot of this research.
[Nicola] Yes. And, like everything else, it's a question of degree. So, certainly queer people, people of color, people in wheelchairs, get a little tired of being information dispensing machines. But if you are going to ask us to dispense information, perhaps you could do something for us.
[Dan] Absolutely.
[Tempest] Always pay your [substitute?] readers.
[Chuckles]
[Piper] For those of you who can't see us in the room, because this is a podcast, there's a whole lot of nodding going on around here.
[Laughter]
[Tempest] It's always a big thing.
 
[Piper] One very quick question before we end. So, you said that with So Lucky, you wanted to write a novel about someone who becomes disabled. But I know that also there are some activists, author activists, who talk about how a lot of narratives about people who become physically disabled, it's about them becoming it. Like, they weren't before, they were able-bodied before, and then somewhere during the course of the story, they become disabled. But there's not a lot of fiction about people who were born with a disability that meant they would always have to be in a wheelchair. How do you feel about sort of the balance of those types of stories? Do you think that basically, like, any representation is good, or do you agree that, like, there should be more stories about people who were born with a disability and have always lived with it?
[Nicola] I personally long for stories about disabled people the way I write stories about queer people. Which is just a thing. I actually don't mind one way or the other. I don't have a preference about whether or not someone's always been disabled. It's more a question of are they integrated with it now? That's what I would like. Moving forward, that's what I'll be writing. The book I'm working on now, which is a sequel to Hild, it has disabled people in it. It's very interesting trying to figure out what the world would be like in the seventh century for people with disabilities.
[Tempest] Awesome. Well, thank you very much for joining us. We very much appreciate it.
[Nicola] It was my pleasure.
[Dan] Thank you.
 
[Piper] At this point, thank you. We do have the homework to give our listeners. So, would you mind please giving us our homework?
[Nicola] Sure. I want to go back to various points in today's interview where I talked about the Italian restaurant. I use this a lot with my students. You can use it for almost any situation. It's all about what it means to be the character in their own body. So. Someone is going into an Italian restaurant. What do they see? What do they notice? How do they feel, and why? I'm going to give you an example. So, for example, a guy who's just been queer bashed, he would go in there and he would be really nervous around men with loud voices. For example. Or a woman with a small child might be looking for sharp objects. A lot of fancy Italian restaurants, they have those big open flames. Big open kitchens. A woman with small kids would be like, "Oh, I don't think this is the right place for us." So, someone in a wheelchair will see different things. Someone on crutches will see different things. So that would be your prompt. Put yourself in your character's body. Take them into that restaurant. See what happens.
[Piper] Thank you.
[Tempest] Awesome.
[Piper] Well, there you have it, everyone. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict

Jul. 10th, 2019 09:45 am
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Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict
 
 
Key points: Person versus nature, setting, environment! Adventure based on survival, disaster, endemic. Start with research! You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. In person versus nature, nature serves the function of the antagonist, stopping the protagonist from achieving some goal. There are often plateaus of goals for the protagonist to achieve. Sometimes nature is a time bomb. You can also use person versus nature as one arc or subplot in a story. Person versus nature, especially in science fiction, often has a sense of wonder reveal as the resolution. So it's a mystery story, a puzzle box story. Setting is more interesting when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Person versus nature, in MICE terms, is a milieu story, with the goal of getting out of the milieu, or at least navigating and surviving it. So, what does the setting throw up as barriers that block that? Especially unanticipated consequences of decisions that the character makes. Often there are anthropomorphized elements, too. What does the character or the setting want, need, and get? Start with entry into the milieu, end with exit from the milieu, and add in lots of complications in the middle.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 27.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Natural Setting As Conflict.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] And we're in conflict with our environment.
[Chuckles]
[garbled]
[Howard] I don't think you should do the joke.
[Dan] We are in Houston. It's so humid and hot.
[Brandon] Yeah, we are.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, sweetness. It's so cute that you think it's humid outside.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I'm just… Oh, poor bunny.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] We, on the podcast, have rarely done anything where we've dealt with person versus setting. In specific, setting as natural setting, natural… Meaning, these are adventure stories that are survival based, disaster based, or even endemic based. These sorts of things. We're going to talk about how to do that, how to approach making this type of story. You guys have any starting out pointers when you're going to create a person versus setting story?
[Dan] Yes. Do your research. Because, in my experience, the more research you do, the cooler your story is going to get. Because you… Even if you think you know how to survive in a particular environment or overcome a particular disaster, the more you learn about the things that could go wrong and the various solutions that already exist to solve them, will suggest a thousand cooler things you hadn't thought of yet.
[Howard] I… Years and years ago, I think I watched one episode early in the season of Survivor. I watched that for 10 minutes and thought, "Okay. It is taking them way too long to invent stuff that I learned how to make in Boy Scouts. There's got to be a reason why these people don't know how to do that." Because when I was 10 years old… Well, 13 years old, it made perfect sense. I only had to be shown half of this before I figured out, "Oh. Well, obviously, this is the other half." If you're doing person versus nature, you have to be smarter as a writer… You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. Because the Boy Scout is going to be pretty disappointed if the story starts and they feel like, "Oh. I've got this."
[Mary Robinette] I think, also, for me, one of the things about the person versus nature is that the nature is serving the function of your antagonist. So that means that your protagonist has to have a goal that the nature is stopping them from achieving.
[Brandon] That's a very good point.
[Mary Robinette] That's something that a lot of people leave out. That's why frequently they wind up being very flat. So, a lot of times, it is a character driven goal or some other aspect, but it's the nature that is keeping them from doing that.
[Dan] One thing I see a lot in nature survival stories is that the protagonist's goal is allowed to change more frequently and more completely than normal. Because they achieve plateaus of, "Well, now I've got the shelter built. Okay, I can move on to another goal now."
[Howard] I want to point out that it's… When we think of person versus nature, we very often default to survival. But you can absolutely have a person versus nature story where the big conflict is I am trying to go up the hillside, and come back down with the perfect Christmas tree. The mountain doesn't want to let me do that. The mountain isn't trying to kill me. The mountain's trying to ruin Christmas.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Would you call Calculating Stars, even though I know there are some villainous characters in it, would you call this a person versus nature story in some ways?
[Mary Robinette] Certainly part one is. I mean, I've… I'm killing the planet, so yes. But part one is very much we have to get out of nature. After that, it is… Most of the major conflicts are coming from societal problems. Where you're having trouble convincing people that in fact the climate is changing on the planet.
[Brandon] Right. But there's also this sense of we have to overcome this thing together as a species. I wonder if that could be put in that same category?
[Mary Robinette] I think it can. Because it… This is one of the things that when you're introducing it into your story… I said that it serves the function of as… Excuse me, of an antagonist, that it's preventing your character from achieving a goal. But the other thing that it can do, which is why I hesitated with Calculating Stars, is it's not so much serving the function of an antagonist. It's a time bomb.
[Brandon] Right. Yeah, that's true.
[Mary Robinette] That's what it's doing. It is providing goals. It's actually allowing people to break hurdles. So I don't know that in… That's in part two of the book, I don't know that it serves the function…
[Howard] Well, what you've raised is… I don't love a novel length pure person versus nature story because that's a long time to wrestle with nature. That said, I loved The Martian.
[Mary Robinette] I was going to cite Isle of the Blue Dolphins.
[Howard] Yeah. I haven't read that one, but I loved The Martian. But it is absolutely useful and beautiful to work person versus nature as one of your big arcs. Knowing how person versus nature works, and knowing how to do it correctly, means that if you're using some sort of formula for timing the delivery of emotional punches, you know how to time these things.
 
[Brandon] Can I put you on the spot and ask for any tips along those lines? What makes these stories tick? Why do we love them? What are some of those beats? Dan's already mentioned one, reassessing of goals, as you achieve smaller and smaller… Larger and larger goals, I should say. You start off saying, "I am helpless. I am going to die. Well, at least I'll do this thing. Well, since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing. Since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing." Then, it just escalates to the point that you believe that they can survive in this.
[Dan] Then they build a radio out of coconuts.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] In a science fiction setting…
[Mary Robinette] Gilligan!
[Howard] Often the… Yeah. Was it Gilligan who built that, or was it the Professor?
[Mary Robinette] The Professor. It's always the Professor [garbled who's building things?]
[Howard] I was pretty sure I saw transistor tubes in there somewhere.
[Dan] Those are also made of coconuts.
[Howard] Yeah.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Coconut glass.
[Mary Robinette] Everything that you need, you just pull out of that ship.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It was the most amazing… Anyway, your point being, Howard?
 
[Howard] Yeah. The point being, when you are doing person versus nature in science fiction, often the resolution is not oh, I learned how to make a structure out of sticks, the solution is some sort of sense of wonder reveal about how this alien environment really works. That moment… If you've planned that, what you've written isn't what we classically think of as a person versus nature story. What you've written is a mystery story, in which we're being a detective and we're solving a problem. Then you wrap that around a story in which characters are in conflict and the solving of the mystery… It could be a time bomb, it could be a puzzle box type story, but… I do think of these things as name dropping the formulas as I'm building them, because that allows me to very quickly picture what it is I want to do. Then, when I have that picture, I start mapping character names onto it and moving things around. I'm writing a longform serial where I already have a whole lot of established pieces. Coming up with a story and then very quickly mapping a bunch of characters on it… The mapping the characters onto it is often the easiest part. It's coming up with what is that fun reveal? One of the ones I'm working with right now in the Schlock Mercenary universe is Fermi's Paradox. Which is fascinating to think of as person versus nature, because nature here is, and the mystery as it stands, Galactic civilizations have been wiping themselves out every few million years and we do not know why. Is it an enemy? Is it something natur… It's a mystery. It is a reveal. It's fun. If I can stick the landing, I'm going to make so much money.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That's really what person versus nature is all about. It's about the money that you're…
[Howard] I want to get out of these woods as a millionaire.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Dan, you have our book of the week this week.
[Dan] Our book of the week this week is what I consider one of the classic man versus nature survival stories. It's called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. It's Newberry winning young adult novel. It's about a kid who gets for his birthday a hatchet and throws it in his suitcase and hops on the little Cessna that's going to take him to visit his dad on an oilfield in the Canadian wilderness. Part way there, the pilot has a heart attack and dies, and the kid has to do his best to land the plane in a lake and then survive as long as he can in the middle of nowhere. He's the only character. It's all about him doing his best to survive. It's really… Everything we've been talking about in its purest little young adult form. It's a fantastic book. Very short and easy to read, and awesome.
[Howard] Boy versus nature.
[Dan] I'm going to recommend one more, though.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Dan] We're getting two book of the weeks for the price of one.
[Mary Robinette] Whoo!
[Dan] Ryan North, the guy who does dinosaur comics. He's got a brand-new book out called How to Invent Everything.
[Brandon] Oh, I really want to read that.
[Dan] He sells this, he promotes this as kind of like a cheat sheet for time travelers. If you end up stuck in the past for whatever reason, and have this book with you, you will be able to invent electricity and penicillin and everything you need to make a civilization work. So, as a resource for writers who want to be able to describe characters doing this stuff, it's a really good resource.
[Brandon] Yeah, I think it's… He has this poster that I've seen for years, that is… Hang this poster in your Time Machine, that has all the little tips you would need. It's done jokingly, and he's adapted that now into an entire book.
[Dan] Expanded it into a full book.
 
[Brandon] Let's… On the topic here, Mary talked about setting as antagonist. Let's dig into this idea a little bit more. How do you go about making your setting an interesting antagonist? How do you go about having a story that perhaps has no villain other than survival, or… Yeah?
[Dan] One of the principles that I teach in my How to Scare People class is that something familiar becomes unfamiliar. That's one of the basic premises of a horror story. It's also exactly what's going on in survival and disaster stories. Something like the Poseidon Adventure. It's a cruise ship, we know what a cruise ship is like. Now it's upside down. So we recognize everything, but it's also weird and new at the same time. That gives us that sense of horror, and that sense of unknown. Even though we still kind of understand what's going on.
[Mary Robinette] That's exactly why the upside down is disturbing in Stranger Things. Huh. Interesting.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Surprising no one, for me, one of the tricks on making it an effective antagonist goes back to the MICE quotient, which is… It is often a straight up milieu story. So, for me, the thing is, again, you got a character goal, there's the character goal of… Whatever their emotional character goal is, but then there's also the goal of I want to get out of this place. I need to navigate this place. So, finding the environmental setting things that can throw up barriers, that challenge your character's competence, and that are, often, I think, most effectively a result of a choice that they have made. So it's like, well, we've got fire ants coming at us. So, in order to stop them, we're going to flood this area to keep them from coming in. But now, having flooded it…
[Howard] Oh, no. Oh, no.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Islands of swimming fire ants are a thing.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Yeah. This is a film. So it's this unanticipated consequence that makes things worse. I think that's often one of the ways that you can ratchet up the tension and something that a good antagonist does, is they react.
[Brandon] All right. And escalating. That's like… That's a very good point. Making it worse and worse and worse, even as our protagonist is leveling up in what they're able to accomplish.
[Dan] A lot of survival stories also have… Not, they don't have villains, but you can see anthropomorphized elements of the environment that function as a villain. You mentioned Island of the Blue Dolphins earlier. She's got this rivalry, so to speak, with an octopus. She knows, she's scared to death of this octopus, but she knows at some point she's going to have to dive down into that part of the reef, or she's not going to have enough to eat. So it's building this thing up as a villain over the course of the story until you get a showdown. You get a similar thing in the movie Castaway with his tooth. I'm going to do my best to survive here, but sooner or later, I'm going to have to confront that tooth. It's going to be a showdown.
[Brandon] Howard, earlier you mentioned something I thought was very interesting, which is using person versus nature as a subtheme in a story, which you pointed out, you like a little bit better sometimes. Any tips on keeping this as a subtheme or as a secondary plot cycle?
[Howard] The book, Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park, the character of Dr. Malcolm is… He is the personification of chaos. Chaos is the person versus… Is nature in person versus nature. Malcolm tells us we have a complex system and things are going to go wrong in unexpected ways and they are going to amplify each other and things are going to get worse. By giving voice to that, when it happens, it doesn't feel like, oh, the author just picked the worst possible thing to happen and it happened. It feels like a natural consequence because now we can understand chaos theory. That is layered on top of a corporate espionage plot where it was corporate espionage that caused all these things… That we like to think caused all these things to go wrong at the beginning. But when you stand back and look at the book, you know, well, if it hadn't been corporate espionage, it would have been something else. So having a character who gives voice to the nature without actually being on nature's side can be useful.
[Mary Robinette] Something that you said made me actually think of Lord of the Flies, which definitely begins as person versus nature. One of the things that happens over the course of that, as the boys achieve goals… It's like, okay, we've created shelter, we've created fire, and all of those things, is that the antagonist shifts from being the island to being the boys… The society of the boys themselves. I think that that's something that you can actually do. Something that we see when we have human antagonists, that a lot of times on antagonist will shift. It's not the antagonist that you thought it was the entire time, it's something else. So I think that's something that you can play with with your worldbuilding and your… The setting as…
[Howard] It's an echoing of the principle… The story begins and there's a thing that our main character wants. There's a thing that our main character actually needs. And there is a thing that, in the course of the story, the main character's actually going to get. Often, these are three different things. If you treat nature, the antagonist, the same way, the want, need, get being different things, there's this twist as we discover it doesn't matter what nature wanted, this is what nature needed… And this is what actually happened.
 
[Brandon] Mary, you've got some homework for us.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is, we're going to take the milieu MICE thread concept. Which is that a story begins when you enter a place in a milieu story, and it ends when you exit the place. All of the conflicts are things that stop from getting out, they stop you from navigating. They are things that get in your way of achieving that exit strategy. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick a milieu. Pick a setting. Just pick your starting point, this is a character entering. Pick your exit point, that's the character leaving. Then brainstorm about 20 things that are going to get in the way of your character exiting the place. Then, I want you to pick your five favorites and rank them in an escalating order of difficulty. So this is just a structure exercise. If you wind up with something that sounds fun, you can write it. But really, what I want you to do is think about a way to build that setting as antagonist, and that setting is getting in your way.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.02: Geography and Biomes

Jan. 16th, 2019 11:38 am
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Writing Excuses 14.02: Geography and Biomes
 
 
Key points: Where do you start when you are worldbuilding geography or a world? What do I need the geography to do? Sense of wonder is different than mystery. Start with the familiar, with components that you know really well. That gives you authenticity. The familiar can be immersive for the reader. What kind of geography suits the story? Then dig into the ramifications of that. Biomes can help you build a world. Biomes are kind of packaged ecosystems. Pay attention to transitions, too! Be aware, the map is not the territory. Go out and look at the actual landscape if you can!
 
[Mary] Season 14, Episode Two.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Geography and Biomes.
[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] Mahtab, thank you so much for coming and being on the podcast with us.
[Mahtab] Thank you for having me.
[Brandon] Will you tell us a little bit about yourself?
[Mahtab] All right. Well, first of all, let me start with my name. It means moon… In Persian, it means moon light, and I was named by my grandmother. I have done everything from hotel management to credit card sales to IT sales and writing is actually my fourth career. I think I'm going to stick with this one. I absolutely love writing. Science fiction, fantasy… Though I have written fantasy before, in my Tara trilogy, trying to work on science fiction. I'm just looking forward to continuing writing for as long as I live.
[Brandon] We're super excited to have you. Mahtab is going to be helping us on the second week of the month episodes…
[Dan] All year long.
[Brandon] This year. So you'll be able to hear a lot from her.
 
[Brandon] We're talking geography and biomes this year. I figured starting off worldbuilding, we would start right at the fundamental, the actual geography of the worlds that we create.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] So I want to ask you guys, where do you start when you're building geography, when you're building a world, what's your start point?
[Howard] I ask myself… And I'm going to go back to elemental genres… I ask myself what I need the geography to do.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] If I need sense of wonder, that is a very different geography than if I need… Then if I'm writing a mystery and the geography is factoring into the mystery. In large measure, that is because if I want sense of wonder, I have to break out the wordsmithing, and I have to talk about the colors in the sights and the smells and the feeling of the air and all of these things in a way that's very different than if I want it to be puzzling.
[Brandon] Yeah. I've seen a lot of sense of wonder in your writing. Give me an example of geography you might use if you were doing the mystery, instead?
[Howard] [breath] Uh.
[Brandon] Put you on the spot?
[Howard] No, no no no. That's fine. I'm writing, right now, a novel set on a desert planet which has a thriving atmosphere, even though there is nothing growing on the surface.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] Part of that mystery is… Everybody's afraid to go outside, and you don't go outside because it's radioactive. There's not enough… There's not enough electromagnetic field. The science behind this says if you go outside, you will eventually die of cancer. Why is there an atmosphere? So you have this fear of being outside, and this puzzle about what is it underground that keeps pumping fresh oxygen to us, that keeps drawing carbon dioxide in? That puzzle is central to the whole book.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Howard] But there's also going to be sense of wonder in there, because [garbled they all does]
 
[Dan] I do a very similar thing, actually. I will look at what I need the world, what I need the geography to accomplish. In the middle grade that I'm writing right now, I was trying to figure out… They have… It's science fiction and they've arrived at a brand-new planet. So I looked at the outline and realized that the actual function… Like, the size of the continents, what their land around it is like, wasn't as important as like the physics of the world. I wanted to have very low gravity, I wanted to have very high density in the atmosphere… Things like that, in order to make certain things work.
[Brandon] Can you tell us what any of those are without giving spoilers, or… Just curious.
[Dan] Yeah, well. This is actually the sequel to Zero G, which is my big middle grade audiobook. In that one, they are going to a planet and it all takes place in zero or microgravity. You can fly, basically. I wanted to have a similar feeling in the second book. So I actually talked to a bunch of physicists. We came up with a combination of gravity and atmospheric pressure and things that would basically allow you to fly on muscle power. Then, looking at that, realized, "Oh, well, okay, if the atmosphere is dense enough to provide buoyancy, it's also going to be narcotic." So how can we work around that? Basically, producing an environment in which the little middle grade protagonists could have a lot of fun and do a lot of cool things. Making sure that I had the atmosphere chemically composed so that it would be narcotic rather than poisonous. So that it would make you kind of loopy and giggly, rather than kill you, was very important for the middle grade, as well. Whereas if I'm doing the fantasy series that I'm trying to write, that isn't as important. What I need is different kingdoms that can be at war with each other. Why are they at war with each other? Well, there's a geographical answer to that, as well.
 
[Mahtab] When I started writing, I wanted something that was more familiar to me, so at least my first four novels are set in India. I just feel that because every component of a story, whether it's setting or character or plot or pacing, everything has to work together. It would be easy if new writers, at least especially for me, to start with one component that I knew really, really well. So, which is why… I mean, I don't have to spend too much time, all I have to do is close my eyes and I can imagine myself in India, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the touch, tastes, everything. That is why… That is one component that's kind of taken care of. As you progress towards getting better at writing, at making sure that everything works, then, I think, you can start working on fantasy lands where you do need to do a bit of research, go to experts that could probably tell you a little bit more about that. I mean, you could probably put some more effort into the geography. So, for me, I like to start with the familiar. In fact, the next novel that I'm going to be working on is set on Mars. Now, that's a little bit difficult to try and figure out what the place is going to be like.
[Chuckles]
[Mahtab] You have to rely on lots of stuff. So I like to start with the familiar, and then moved to something that's made up.
[Howard] There's so much to be said for the familiar as something that is immersive for the reader. The sugar sand beaches in Sarasota, Florida, where I grew up. Some details. One, when you walk barefoot in that sand, it's hard. It pushes out of the way. You end up taking different kinds of steps. You sort of do this shuffle step. The humidity is cloying. Every time I've stepped off a plane in Florida, I've taken one breath and realized [sniff] "Oh, that's right. Oh, that." Then… And this is something that people often don't think of. We get on those beautiful white beaches, you can have a snow blindness from the glare. These are all things that I've experienced, and I know well enough that I can write about them when I am talking about a desert. Because they all fit just well enough that I can leverage that.
 
[Brandon] When you were writing about India, were you picking a specific city that you knew or were you creating a made up one?
[Mahtab] It was made up. I mean, the little town of Morni in northern India was made up. But everything else, it's like the foods or the smells or the cultures and the customs of the people, that was… I mean, I've lived in India. So I know. Then, of course, you could tweak a little bit, but it started out with a familiar base of what it is like, and then I kind of changed it around. I put a lot of Indian mythology in it. Which kind of added a bit more texture and flavor to the story. So, yeah, I mean… Of course, India is vast. It's got lots of languages, cultures, so what happens in North India doesn't happen in South India, but the fact is that you… Because it was a made up little town, I could add bits and pieces and still get that authenticity in the narrative.
[Howard] I recently watched a documentary about the monsoon season in southern India and the way it shapes whether all over the globe. It was utterly fascinating. The documentary… You look at the towns, the villages, the communities in that area, and how… Yeah, they really have two times of the year. Which is monsoon, and everything else.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for the book of the week.
[Howard] Oh. Yes. I have a history book for you, written by my friend, Myke Cole. It's called Legion versus Phalanx. It's his first history book, and I am absolutely in love with the voice that he uses for teaching us history. Specifically, teaching us about the Roman Legion and the Greek, the Hellenistic, Phalanx, and how those two related. The fundamental question is well, who would win? We all think we know the answer. Well, the Romans would win because…
[Dan] They did.
[Howard] That's who would win because they did. But the why behind that is kind of the meat of the book. Myke takes all kinds of angles in discussing this, including… And that's why I want to do that one this week… Including geography. One of the fascinating facts is that the Roman Legion can turn more quickly than a Phalanx can. So if you're fighting on the flat, maybe it's a level… Pardon the pun… Playing field. But the moment there are hills, or trees or whatever, the Legion has an advantage. That's just scratching the surface. The book is awesome, I think you'll love it. Myke Cole, Legion Versus Phalanx.
 
[Brandon] Dan, you said something earlier that relates to this idea, with Legion versus Phalanx. Where you said if you're designing a fantasy world, you would take the geography into account for developing the politics, the governments, the systems. Talk a little bit more about that. How would you do that?
[Dan] Well. Um. In this particular instance… This is the book I've been working on for a long time, and it still is not out, and may never be. But I needed… the premise is that the fantasy world is also a reality show that people from other planets watch. One of the main shows that got everyone's attention was this kind of ongoing War of the Roses style thing. Where there was the constantly moving border. You look historically at the War of the Roses between the French and the English, and the definition of what is French and what is English changed constantly, and who was who and who was in charge. So I wanted to create the kind of geography that would (A) give you something to fight over. Some kind of resource or power that made that land worth a multi-generational war. But that also allowed for that kind of fluid border and fluid national identity. So that the people could… We used to belong to this, but now we belong to this, because that King won the last war. Which is different than just I want to have two kingdoms fighting. In my case, I ended up giving them a religious component. There was a religious lake that was central to the religion shared by both of these kingdoms. So they were kind of fighting over that, Dome of the Rock style. We want to make sure that this belongs to us, because it is very important, and not to those other terrible people on the other side of the border. Then figuring out, well, okay, this is therefore the kind of place that has a lake. What does that signify about the surrounding area? I love thinking about it in these terms because then, once I have a premise, I can spin that out. What are the ramifications of that? What is this lake used for? If it's religious, do they fish it or is it off-limits? How is that going to affect the culture? Are they going to be a fishing culture or not? All of those questions can be answered as you follow yourself down the rabbit hole.
 
[Brandon] I want to touch briefly on the idea of biomes. Next week, we will come back and talk about a fun concept called world of hats. This is where…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Sometimes a planet will express only one idea. We'll talk about that next week. But I want to talk about the idea of different biomes in your stories. Because specifically, when I started to really get into worldbuilding geography, there was so much to learn. In any of these topics we'll be talking about this year, we could spend an entire year's podcasts just on geography. As a newbie coming into it, I often felt as a fantasy author, I needed to have working knowledge of so many different things, it sometimes felt overwhelming. When I started to learn about the idea of how biomes interact and why they are where they are, that helped me to start to be able to build some of these fantasy worlds and kind of make some sort of short hands. So, what are biomes? What do I mean by that? How does that shorthand help?
[Dan] A biome is kind of like… This is a generalization that a bio scientist would be upset with. But it's kind of like the ecosystem. It's kind of like, say, well, this is a desert biome versus a tundra versus a jungle versus a forest, whatever. It's a really good thing to think about, especially if you're writing fantasy. Because we come from such a strong kind of overpowering tradition of medieval European fantasy that everyone tends to have the rolling hills and forest biome, with maybe some snowy mountain peaks where the barbarians live.
[Howard] I've got a great example of that. I've recently been reading up on the Judean wilderness. There is a word that they have in Arabic, wadi, which is a dry riverbed. Our word for it in English is dry riverbed. In English, you say this because it's something that… Your river broke. It's not… The river doesn't exist anymore. Something went wrong. In Arabic, it is a word for a feature of the landscape. So you have the geography directly impacting the language. What's interesting is Guadalcanal and Guadalajara get their names from Arabic, wādī al-qanāl and wādī al-ḥijārah are the original names of those places. So in reading this, I quickly realized that Arabic geography, Arabic peninsula geography was influencing language and place names where there really weren't that many dry riverbeds. Really cool stuff.
[Mahtab] The other thing one also has to remember is that you… When you're also thinking of biomes, you just do not have hills, and then you have a desert, and then… There's a lot of gradual transition from one to the other, so think of the hybrids as well. Like, the mountains rolling into foothills into some kind of a desert land and then into the river or the seashore or something like that. So don't just think when you're building a biome or when you're thinking of your geography or landscape that, okay, it's just gotta have mountains, it's gotta have this. Try and do a gradual transition. That's why sometimes it's necessary to know a lot of stuff and then combine it together to see what is necessary and where your city or your town or your protagonists are located.
[Dan] Yeah. That's a really good point to make, especially because, not only are we very heavily influenced by old European fantasy, but also by Star Wars. So we do tend to have this concept of, "Oh, well, this is the snow planet, and this is the desert planet." Those transitional areas are not only more common, but they're much more interesting. Utah is a desert, and we have a big, nasty Salt Lake. But what that Salt Lake also provides is an incredible saltmarsh wetland that's one of the coolest bird preserves in the country. That often gets forgotten, because we're just kind of broad brushed is a desert. So when you do your research and figure out what all these transitional states are, there's a lot of cool stuff in them.
[Mahtab] That could actually inform your story or your character or could be a point of… Plot point, conflict, what have you. So you gotta research that.
[Howard] There's a quote from Robert De Niro… Actually, I had to look this up. The movie, Ronin, 1998. They're doing this tactical map on a whiteboard and talking about this plan. De Niro says, "The map is not the territory." They all go out and look at it, and everything changes as they realize that these sightlines are not two dimensional, this is… For me, having the whiteboard translate to an actual landscape, I realized, "Oh. All these fantasy maps that I love drawing, which was a thing that I loved drawing in 1998, are not the territory. I'm going to have to go outside to get a feel for this."
 
[Brandon] Let's wrap it up here. Mahtab, you have homework for us.
[Mahtab] Yes, I do. Normally, when we start describing geography or describing a setting, we tend to rely mostly on our sense of sight. So the homework for you today is when you… Take your setting, your fantasy world, whatever it is. Take out the sight. Out of it. Just describe it using sounds, smells, tastes, and feels. No sight. So, for example, if it was a blind person who was describing a setting, how would you do that? That's… Yeah, that's your homework.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.44: Alien Characters

Nov. 7th, 2018 11:26 am
mbarker: (Burp)
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Writing Excuses 13.44: Alien Characters
 
 
Key points: Don't just model your aliens on a human civilization, because context matters! Start with landscape and geography, and create characters from that, or start with characters and figure out what kind of environment would create them. How does the medium you use to portray your alien portray this? How does being alien affect their point of view, their communications? How does their communications affect their lives? Completely alien motivations? Shelter, reproduction, and food drive humans and aliens. But which side of the road do you drive on? Often, even very alien things can be related to something in our society, to make it understandable. What is their motivation? Don't use the sense of wonder as a bludgeon! If you throw in something confusing, that is a promise to the reader that you will use it, and fulfill the promise. Look for the moment when the alien and the human reach understanding, and let the reader get it, too. After your metamorphosis, you may not even remember your own name!
 
( In the liner notes... )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Alien Characters.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Brandon] And…
[Howard] Everybody was expecting me to be an alien.
[Brandon] Yeah, we all thought you'd say, "I'm Howard," in Klingon.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Alien characters. So. One of the nice things about kind of having a science fiction/fantasy themed podcast, even if not all of our topics are specifically about that, is we can occasionally dig into something like this. How do you write from the viewpoint of a race who has never existed and is supposed to seem very, very strange to the person experiencing the narrative?
[Mary] So, first of all, let me suggest that you do not base them on a human civilization. Because human civilizations exist with context that is specific to the world around them. The aliens would have grown up in a completely different context. You can certainly take patterns that people go through, but just taking and saying, "These are my…" Like Dune. I mean, Dune are humans. But still, these are my pseudo-Arabic kind of desert people…
[Howard] Yeah, these are my bug people who are all like Roman Centurions.
[Brandon] Well, I'm going to say that's very natural for us to do, because human creativity is recombining things we haven't seen. We're going to suggest that you push a different direction and combine different things.
[Mary] Well, the problem is that if you aren't thinking about the context, you can go terribly sideways. So what I do say… Suggest is that you first look at… I mean, you can go a couple of different ways. I say first… You can either begin with the kind of landscape and geography, and create the characters from that, or, you can begin with the kind of character that you want and then backfill to the environment that created that.
[Brandon] Okay. So.
[Howard] Ultimately the question that needs to be asked first is how is this alien… What is the medium by which you are going to portray this alien to the person consuming your medium? I get to draw pictures. So I can do things that people who are writing prose can't do. If all you have is words, then one of the tools that you are going to have to look very closely at is, how does being this kind of alien affect the way their point of view would be described? How does it affect the way they speak, if they are able to speak in the language that your other characters speak? Because as a writer, words of the tool that you have to describe that.
[Dan] That's where I wanted to go, because that's how I always start, is with the form of communications specifically. How is this… Because that's what the character's going to be doing throughout the story, is communicating in some form. How are they going to do that? So as an example, in the Partials series, the Partials themselves, I gave them a pheromonal communications system. They can speak, but they can also communicate through scents and these other things. That changed absolutely everything about their society, the more I followed the ramifications of that. Of how they would interact with each other, of how the humans would perceive them, of how they would perceive the humans, of all of the problems that would arise when they try to talk to each other and are obviously missing obvious cues. So, starting with that form of communication, for me, is incredibly helpful.
 
[Brandon] So, let me ask you guys this. How do you write a character whose motivations are completely alien?
[Mary] There are, I think, some motivations that are consistent that you can actually pull into the aliens. That are consistent with humans. I think most creatures will have a priority on shelter, reproduction, and food. And, at a very base level, that is what drives all of us. So you can look at how that then affects the aliens. So I had… I wrote a story called The Bride Replete which was all aliens all the time. I did not have a human viewpoint character, humans just don't exist. For that, looking at, okay, so if reproduction is important, then how does the… What is this society reproductive structure look like? What does the family unit look like for this? Once you get that, then it becomes much easier to extrapolate based on… Or to convey it in a way that will make sense to a human reader.
[Brandon] Okay. So, but…
[Howard] That's…
[Brandon] My question. That's great. My question, though, is how would you write one that didn't have one of those motivations? Completely alien motivations?
[Howard] Coming up with the motivation is often difficult. Let me describe the motivation that we don't think of as alien, but which probably looks pretty alien if you pull away all of the indicators. That is, I want to be on the left-hand side on the freeway. So I can go faster. There is this tendency that we want to be on the left. Why? Because there's these rules of the road that have nothing to do with our biology. If you have an alien, who as part of their socialization, they want their eye line to be lower than yours. The way that this interaction is going to take place… Why do they keep getting on the ground? Why are they lying down? Why does… Why do these things keep happening? Why is the physical positioning changing in ways that… If there are human characters, they don't understand.
[Mary] But see… The wanting to be on the left side absolutely does have to do with our biology, because it's a holdover from that's the side that your sword was on. Because most people were right-handed.
[Howard] Well, except in England and South Africa, it's exactly reversed.
 
[Brandon] I'm going to cap this one. I think the point that perhaps is salient here is even in your description of that, you can find something to relate in our society that you can tie it to. Is that the idea? Take something that seems completely un-relatable at the beginning, but over time, kind of relate it to something that the reader's going to understand?
[Mary] I guess… What I… My point was… Is that if you're talking about an alien that has a completely alien motivation, that, for me, that motivation is still going to be rooted in one of those three things at some point going back to it. You can use that as the line with which to communicate it to the reader. So, if my alien motivation is needing to be on the… Needing to have the lower eye level, well, why does that exist? Is it… Is that a shelter strategy? Is that a reproduction strategy? Is that a food strategy? Where does that come from? Then, that informs a lot of the… Why they make those choices, even if it's a holdover.
[Brandon] I think that's very cool. Of course, it makes me, as a writer, want to say, I want to find something that's not related to…
[Garbled]
[Mary] Absolutely.
[Brandon] A challenge. When we hear that. All right. I think that's where I'm going. But I want to… But, yeah. I think that this is one way…
[Howard] I'm interested… Oh, go ahead, Dan.
[Dan] So, I'm thinking of two example specifically, and both of them hinge around the idea of how that motivation is presented. The first one is kind of a cheat. In the movie Arrival, because you're not actually getting a viewpoint from the aliens, the entire story really hinges around, "Well, what is their motivation in the first place?" So they can have something that is incredibly alien, and the humans are all just trying to figure it out. Are they benevolent? Well, why would aliens be benevolent? It's hard for some people to even conceive of that. One of the other examples I'm thinking of was actually a piece of War Machine fiction written from the point of view of an incredibly basically evil race of people. What made it so well done is that the entire story was written from within that moral framework. So, when all the viewpoints you were getting took as granted that these are the principles by which obviously we should all be living our lives, then it started to make an incredible kind of internal sense.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] One of the examples that I like to look at is from the second of James P. Hogan's Giants novels. There's a… The planetary ecology… They evolved in such a way that nothing could eat anything else except plants. All of the animals developed the we are toxic strategy to where evolutionarily, it becomes so expensive to try and be something that ate other animals that it was a planet full of vegetarians. The artwork that they created… I say the artwork. Actual pictures of the world made no sense to us because it looked like a children's book because it was so brightly colored. So this is one of those cases where something that we would expect as a given… I mean, whether or not that's actually practical. Something that we would expect as a given had been ripped out and all of these aliens were now suddenly very, very alien. War? Eating meat? Completely… Completely not part of their psychology.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Dan, you're going to tell us about Blood Rose Rebellion?
[Dan] Blood Rose Rebellion. Which, for the most part, does not actually have any real alien characters in it. It's by Rosalind Eaves. It's historical fantasy. It starts in a version of 1800s London where magic is real, and is purely the domain of the upper class. Our main character is a teenage debutante who's ready to come out into society and can't because she does not have magic. So the parents are embarrassed and they end up shipping her off to Budapest to live with Grandma, where polite society won't know that they have this non-magical daughter. Then she gets involved with one of Hungary's many rebellions. It is one of the most beautifully written YA anythings that I have ever read.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Dan] Incredibly cool. For… To hit our topic a little bit, there are some weird magical creatures that keep kind of slipping into our world. Although we don't get to know them well, they're really just fascinating and gorgeously described.
[Brandon] Now we also… When we were brainstorming for this, we wanted to promote this book because we love it. Because we thought it was awesome. But we… Mary came up with a story that the rest of us hadn't heard of that…
[Mary] Yes.
[Brandon] If you want to read something really alien.
[Mary] This is Love Is Never Still by Rachel Swirsky. It's available at Uncanny Magazine. So if you just go there and type in Love Is Never Still, it'll pop right up. This is the Pygmalion story. So the sculptor who creates Galatea, the sculpture, and comes to life. It's told from like 20 different viewpoints, including Summer the season.
[Brandon] The season has a viewpoint?
[Mary] Yeah. The pedestal that she stands on has a viewpoint. She has a viewpoint while she's still a piece of marble. The hearth god's hammer has a viewpoint. It's just… It's amazingly complex and varied and just a great example of this alien viewpoint thing.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Dan] And where can people find that?
[Mary] Uncanny Magazine.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Mary] Dot com.
 
[Brandon] So, one of the things that I see happening when using alien characters is the writer's specifically choosing one aspect of their culture that is just going to confuse the reader intentionally. I kind of thought of this as using a sense of wonder as a bludgeon.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Something that you're not even going to make your story about or explain. It's just look at how bizarre this is. Have you ever done that? Is… Like what are the advantages of that? As a writer, I would think… Because everyone's just staring at me as they think… I think the danger would be when you put something like that in a story, you're going to assume that it's going to take like a Left Hand of Darkness turn or something like that. The thing that is at first confusing or different is eventually going to become a major story point or character motive or things like this.
[Howard] It's a promise. It's a promise to the reader when you open with that. You gotta have a reason for it. I don't know what promise necessarily you're making, but if your story's going to be a success, the reader at the end has to feel like you've fulfilled on that promise. I don't like doing it that way. I think I've done it before. Where I've just drawn something weird because I thought weird would be fun. Mostly it was annoying, and I realized I haven't justified this in a way that's entertaining me.
[Mary] I think it does depend on how it's positioned in the story. If it's positioned in a way that you're making the reader go, "Why is that?" And then you bring it up again, and they're still going, "Why is that?" They're going to feel like that's a promise. If you just bring it up once and it's a piece of tonal color and it's like in mid-paragraph, so in a position of non-importance, they're probably just going to accept it and move on. So I do think it depends on a little bit of that.
 
[Howard] One of my favorite alien cultures of my own is the Oafa, who are the hydrogen bag… That look like blimps. Their language, once they've learned Gal-Standard, their language is full of wind metaphors and flavor metaphors. Boy, did I have to go to the thesaurus to pull this stuff up. But, as I was writing dialogue between the cultural liaison and the multi-million-year-old librarian, at one point the Oafa librarian says to the liaison, "You've been breathing the air of the poets," because she has made a wind metaphor that works. That moment, when you have a character moment like that, where the alien and the human have come to an understanding, and the reader gets it, the reader feels awesome. That's what I was aiming for. Not sense of wonder, but just sense of being included, sense of being part of that relationship.
[Mary] I had a story in which my characters… The species was based on kind of like the lifecycle of a butterfly. So they spend an incredibly long time as a caterpillar, and then they transform, and then they're this beautiful, beautiful creature. So in this society, the young, the larva state, is the state that gets all the work done. Because when they go through the transformation, metamorphosis, when they come out on the other side, their memories are totally scrambled. So the adult state is your retirement. Because of that, they have built this whole system around memory and have hired documentarians to come in and document their life so when they come out of the cocoon, they can try to remember things. So one of the things that I was playing with in the beginning of the story is that question of why are you documenting things? Then realizing, "Oh, this is what's at stake." That you will come out and not know your own family.
[Brandon] Wow. Sounds cool. What's the name of this story?
[Mary] I can't remember the name of my own story.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] That's funny, because [garbled]
[Dan] So go out, readers…
[Mary]'s Well, I wrote down the name of the other one, The Bride Replete. But I forgot I had… I forgot about this one. Yeah, the Bride Replete was basically what happened… I know…
[Brandon] We'll put it in the liner notes.
[Mary] I'll put it in.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and do our homework. Howard, you had homework for us?
[Howard] Yes. As I said at the beginning of the episode, the tool that you have is a writer in order to convey alienness is words. Most frequently, that is going to come up in the way someone speaks. If you are familiar with doge-speak, which is the Shiba Inu meme…
[Dan] Which you might know as doggy speak…
[Howard] Doggy speak.
[Dan] Because there are competing pronunciations.
[Howard] Take that language. You can look up grammar rules for that language. It's recognizable, even without a picture of a dog under it. Take the rules of that language, and take dialogue from one of your characters and turn it into that. An example here, and I'm just going to read two lines of it, of someone having done this to Shakespeare. What light? So breaks. Such East! Very sun. Wow, Juliet.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 11.9: Q&A on the Element of Wonder

Mar. 2nd, 2016 10:04 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.9: Q&A on the Element of Wonder

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/02/28/11-09-qa-on-the-element-of-wonder/

Q&A Summary:
Q: It's pretty clear that you can create wonder through magic, superpowers, crazy sci-fi stuff (trademark), etc. but in more realistic fiction, what are some ways or examples of creating wonder?
A: True love. Every character has something different they find wonderful. Share that with the reader, looking at someone you love, a spectacular sunset, the Grand Canyon. Emotional wonder. Capture the character's reactions!
Q: What are some ways that you can incorporate a sense of wonder within a well-explained world or magic system? If it's not going to be wondrous to the characters to use this, how can you still make it wondrous to the reader?
A: Expand a moment, just linger on it. Vocabulary. Give the reader a true sense of size. Look for someone who is experiencing awe, and remind the world-weary character of it. Just because you're used to something doesn't mean it isn't wonderful! Juxtapose the reader's wonder with the characters' casualness.
Q: How do you avoid getting boring when you show a character in awe of what they're experiencing?
A: Show something wondrous, then show something else wondrous. Engage many senses.
Q: How do you give a sense of wonder about gods that are also slaves?
A: See N. K. Jemison The 100,000 Kingdoms.
Q: There are known steps to dealing with loss. Anger, denial, grief, acceptance. Are there steps in wonder? Excitement, discovery, fear, boredom, question mark, or is it self-sustaining?
A: Disbelief. Awe. Attempt at understanding. Internalization of the awe.
Q: Does wonder come more from the style of prose, the pace of the plot, or the type of setting and its description? Is whimsy connected to wonder in some way?
A: Yes. Can be, but whimsy is not necessary. Like caramel and dessert.
Q: How should you, or should you at all, foreshadow wonder?
A: Wonder does need setup, but also surprise and discovery. Contrast wonder with normal. Often there's a buildup, or escalation, of wonder.

( Over the rainbow... )

[Brandon] All right. It is time to break for our homework. But first, I would really like to thank Gama for being on the podcast with us.
[Gama] Well, thank you for having me. It's great.
[Brandon] Everyone should check out his books. I'd like to thank the audience here at LTUE.
[Whoo!]
[Brandon] One woman is so excited to clap, that she dropped her laptop.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] I am going to give the homework here. One of the questions talked about… In fact, several of them took different tax on this, which is how can you have someone who is world-weary and knows a lot about the world still experience a sense of wonder? What I want you to do is try to do this contrast. Have a character who is not necessarily in awe of some aspect of the world, and find a way, in a story or scene, that you can evoke a sense of awe in the reader. Whether by doing what I talked about, harkening back to the character's first experience, or just having them blow it off, but the reader says, "Wait! This is awesome." This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[Whoo!]
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Writing Excuses 11.6: The Element of Wonder

Feb. 9th, 2016 01:10 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.6: The Element of Wonder

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/02/07/11-06-the-element-of-wonder/

Key Points: Sensawonda? Oh, sense of wonder! A 15 story tall ship! A giant promenade in the middle of the ocean? An aft balcony, with a new sunrise and location every morning! New, strange, and amazing. That's so cool. How do you get there? A spaceship the size of a moon. "That's no moon." Context, the POV reaction, the reader reaction. Direct the reader's attention with the character's attention. Basking in the moment of awe. Give the character, and the reader, time. Foreshadow (aka context) and then reveal. Pacing. Don't rush, let the character's attention linger on it, walk through the fine details, enjoy it. The sense of wonder isn't always big, sometimes it's something tiny. Also, there's a sense of engagement, of wish fulfillment, with the sense of wonder. It's not just wonderful, we get to do something with it!

( Fireworks, sunsets, glory! )

[Brandon] We are out of time with this one. So we want to give you some homework.
[Dan] All right. Your homework today is that you are going to apply a sense of wonder to something for us. But we want you to do it with something that is relatively small and ordinary. Something maybe just by your desk, something in your house as you look around. Spot an object, and then describe it in such a way that the reader will get a sense of wonder.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 16: World Building -- Non-Human Races

Feb. 9th, 2011 05:28 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 16: World Building -- Non-Human Races

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/01/25/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-16-non-human-races/

Key points: nonhuman races add a sense of wonder to the setting. Don't just borrow Tolkien-esque races. Brandon will almost always focus mostly on humans, maybe. Avoid making an important characteristic a defining theme. Even nonhuman races are individuals. What do they want?
( the script )
[Brandon] The writing prompt is to write...
[Howard] Create a believable alien and write something from his perspective.
[Brandon] There you go.
[Dan] Perfect.
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