Writing Excuses 20.22: The Lens of Time

Jun. 3rd, 2025 04:05 pm
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.22: The Lens of Time 
 
 
Key Points: Time! Setting? Day versus night? The when of the character? Anticipation and flashbacks, expectations and disappointments. Magnified moments. What is the character noticing? Order or sequence of time. Time as an extension of setting. Associations with time of day. Personal physical cycles! Conveying passage of time. Children, other changes. Sensory details, obligations. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 22]
 
[DongWon] Between drafting your new novel, building your lore bible, or meeting with your critique group, who has time to stress about website security? As a writer, your website is your digital face to the world that lets people know about your work and where they can find it. Securing your website means less stress about anyone disrupting that important outlet. Kinsta offers managed hosting for WordPress with lightning fast load times, enterprise grade security, and 24/7 human only customer support. They're available in multiple languages and ready to assist regardless of site complexity. It's complete peace of mind knowing your WordPress site is always secure, online, and performing at its best. Kinsta provides enterprise grade security and is one of the few hosting providers for WordPress with SOC2 and other certifications that guarantee the highest level of security for your website. And Kinsta customers can experience up to 200 percent faster sites by simply moving their WordPress sites to the platform. They even have a user-friendly custom dashboard called MyKinsta that makes managing your site or multiple sites a breeze. And if you're moving from another host, they offer unlimited expert led migrations to ensure a smooth transition, so you won't experience any downtime. Ready to experience Kinsta's hosting for yourself? Get your first month free when you sign up at kinsta.com today. It's a perfect opportunity to see why Kinsta is trusted by thousands of businesses worldwide to power their websites. Visit kinsta.com to get this limited time offer for new customers on selected plans. Don't miss out. Get started for free today.
 
[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 22]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses.
[Mary Robinette] The Lens of Time.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] And this is Dr. Who.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, we've been talking about these different lenses that you can look at a story through. We're looking at the idea of where and when, and time is one of the big lenses. You don't have to be working on a historical piece of fiction to be thinking about time. All stories move through time, even if it's only for a moment. So we're going to be talking about time as your setting. The differences between a story that's set during the day versus at night, or even a scene or a moment. We're going to be talking about how you can use time to your advantage. Not so much in a structural way, but more in that sense of controlling the reader's experience of the story and the character and the setting.
[Erin] We are going to be doing that.
[Dan] Love it.
[Erin] And we're starting now.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] When you are sitting down to think about a story, I know, Erin, that you often start with a voice and that you are very much thinking about the character. How much is the character... At that stage, are you thinking about the when of the character?
[Erin] I think a lot... So. I saw a very interesting tweet a long time ago that said that one of the ways you can upgrade your craft is to move time in the story. To actually use anticipation and flashbacks… Not necessarily, like, an entire flashback, but just what is your character coming from? What are they looking back to? What are they looking forward to? And, like, playing with that in the story. That in truth, and in our own lives, we rarely just move forward in time. We're often thinking about, like, our expectations, which is our vision of the future, and our disappointments, which is our reckoning with the past. And so, a lot of times, I really think about how my characters are reckoning with the time they are in in their own times. And, like, also the time that the world around them is in. Are they in sync? Like, are they moving forward in a world that's moving forward with them? Do they want to hold back in a world that they're like they love tradition, but the world wants progress? And then, looking at that as a source of tension in the story, between the way that they're dealing with time and the way the story and the world is.
[Mary Robinette] I love this idea of looking at where they are in time and using that anticipation as a source of tension. That… You're making me think of something that I just did a brief reread of which is in Dune, which is the fight between Paul Atriedes and Jamis, when he has to, like, "Hello! No, here I am! The Chosen One." And what's interesting in that scene is the way Frank Herbert plays with time. It's happening at a particular point in Paul's life and… Where he's a young man, he's approaching a point where he is going to kill for the first time. That is a threshold, that is a time threshold. That's going to be a marker. Before he killed, and after he killed. That's how his world is going to divide. But the other thing that he does in that is that he does these very small flashbacks to before he is in this thing, where he's thinking about my training taught me this. And all of that is setting up this anticipation of the ways the scene can go wrong, the ways that it can potentially go right, but mostly the ways it can go wrong. It's looking at the… That he's been trained in this one particular way, to go very slow against the shield, and that he keeps making the same mistake over and over again because of his training. And so you've got this contrast of this… His knowledge… His history compared with the future that he's aiming for and this anticipation of all the possible paths for which it can go wrong, which is, I think, one of the great things that you can play with with time, is the… Is letting the reader know, oh, there's more than one path for this. There's more than one path, there's more than one way that this can go wrong. You don't know which of those possible futures you're going to land in.
 
[Dan] Yeah. One of the other things going on in that scene is… That also plays with time is what my seventh grade English teacher always used to call a magnified moment. Where it's really an exchange of blows that takes probably ultimately maybe 30 seconds. I think in the movie, it was drawn out to 40 or 45 seconds. But it's still very short. Whereas the actual excerpt is two or three pages worth of material. Because every single second, every single step, every single move of the blade is given this momentous weight. And so it is expanding things out and magnifying every little moment that takes place into this huge, kind of glorious, thing.
[Erin] I love that… I was thinking about, like, fight scenes and love scenes are two of the ones in which the time in which it's taking on the page and the time it was probably taking in the life of the characters are so different. I'm curious, like, how like… Like, how do you make that moment… Like, how do you make it slow down and not fade as it feels momentous? But not slow down so much that people are, like, wow, I've been on three chapters of the same, like, sword cut, and, like, I wish they would do it already…
[Laughter]
[Erin] [garbled] is it just, like, let… Like, how do you, like, actually make time slow and speed within something?
[Mary Robinette] I think that there's two pieces that you're playing with. One is the character's awareness of time, and the other is the actual amount of time that it takes the reader to experience it. So, one of the things that happens in the example that we were just using is 2 to 3 pages takes several minutes to read. And… Unless they are listening to some [garbled] to speed.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But it is that reader experience of it will slow it down. Sometimes when something is slow down in ways you don't want it to be… Fight scenes that are slow in ways that are not helping the story… It is because you're taking too long to get us through it. Likewise, you can speed things up by compressing it so that the reader's actual experience of reading it is shorter. Like, physically shorter. But then there's also what the character is noticing. Sometimes you can create a sense of, oh, this took forever, by lingering on the character's experience, feeling all of the things that they feel. The kinds of things that I've been thinking about lately are what they're noticing, where they feel it in their body. It's not that you have to hit all of these beats, but that each time, you hit one of those, you are having the character live that moment again. So if I have my character picking up a sword, and the first thing that happens is that we describe what the sword looks like, and then the next thing is the character experiences the physicality of picking it up. The weight of it, the heft, the balance. We've now experienced that sword twice. If we think about, this was the sword my father gave me, that's a third time that we're experiencing it. If we think… If we cut through the air, if we try some simple bl… Strikes with it, that's a fourth time that we're experiencing it. But all of those are things that probably happen almost immediately for the character. So, those are ways to slow it down, but also to be conscious that sometimes you don't want to slow it down, and you want to just pick one of those, the one that is most distinct to the character, the one that is most demonstrative of this specific moment in time.
 
[Erin] I think that's interesting, because that's making me think about ordering a lot. Which, like, ordering is a function of time… Or whatever. Sure, I'm going to say it is. Ordering is a function of time because I said so.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I think it is.
[Erin] Yeah. But I'm thinking, like, let's say that the character ends by slicing somebody in half. I don't know if this is what happens, but… This is what happens. Then I'm wondering, that, if it's like, if you pick up the sword, sliced the person in half, then notice the weight of it, then think about that it's the fact that it's the sword that your father gave you, it's a completely different emotional experience…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Than if you do all of that before you hit. So, thinking about, like, what order things happen in is really interesting. I also just really love that there are certain things you can do in prose that are difficult to do in other forms. Which is that… Like, I always think people in the world of my character probably find them very annoying because every time they say a line of dialogue, they then think for, like, a long period.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Half a paragraph of deep thought. Return line. Which is, like, an interesting… And we can talk at some other time about dialogue and how not to lose the reader when you, like, have long periods of, like, epic thought in between dialogue. But in real life, that would be quite irritating, unless you think very quickly. But in a story, the reader does want to know what's going on in the character's mind. And so they're willing to, like, pause with you for a moment. Because what they're gaining in that moment of time as a reader is worth the pause in the reality timeline of the story itself.
[Mary Robinette] I think, on that, why don't we pause for a moment?
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I am really enjoying about this conversation is that we're talking about using time in so many different ways. We're talking about the sequencing of a story and how that can change… Just when a character has a reaction. We're talking about using time as a way of… As an extension of setting. And I'd love to actually dig into that part of it just a little more, the idea of time as an extension of setting. I think I've talked about this more on a previous episode, but one of my favorite scenes that taught me so much was from Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey where we get a character going into a room and describing it… First, her experience of it, her interactions with it, when she arrives in the middle of the night and it is fulfilling all of her Gothic fantasy dreams. And then, the next morning, when she gets up, and discovers that the terrifying scratching sound is actually a rosebush that's beautiful outside the window. And that the secret locked cabinet that had a role of enciphered paper in it is actually not actually locked. It was open, she had accidentally locked it, and the enciphered paper is actually a literal laundry list. She just couldn't read it because it was dark. But the… How the literal time can cause the character to experience a place and the reader to experience a place in a different way, which gives you essentially two settings for the price of one.
[Erin] Absolutely. Because we associate certain times of day, I think, with certain things. Like, night and danger often go together. Which is interesting, too, because if you with… If there's a character who's like, not feeling steady in their bones, until the sun goes down, then that's an interesting… That's something different, and what does that mean about the character? What does that say about them? But I often think about, like, I experience my own body differently walking around based a little bit on time of day.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] You know what I mean? It's like I am more… Because it feels like you don't have the 360 view in the same way at night. And so I am more conscious of who's around me in the distance. And those are all thoughts that I'm having, and that a character can be having as a way… So then what do they notice? Because we all… The dangers that we view are reflections of our own mentality. And so, the dangers that you view in the night are going to be different than the dangers I view in the night. And so thinking about that, then, that's a great opportunity to maybe get to what are your character's fears? Or what is your character's fearlessness? Where do they feel comfortable? When do they not? When do they feel ill-at-ease? And I think all of those are, like, great moments, I think especially… I think that's especially great when you're trying to get something done clockwise. Like, I need to have the character go to the grocery store…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Because it's like, really important later on that they've been there. But it's not interesting at all, so, like… But, if it's all of a sudden, they're going and, it's, like, they've got to go in the middle of the night… Or they need to go out in the day, but they hate their appearance. Then, how does that time actually make something mundane more interesting so that you can hide the plot work that you're doing that will then become more interesting later.
 
[Dan] Yeah. And I think a lot of kind of personal physical cycles can go into this as well. Healthwise is what I'm thinking of, since developing depression and on the particular meds that I'm on right now, I am so much better in the mornings and in the afternoons than I am in the evening. And by the time we get to dinner time, there's just not much of me left. And so I will experience the world and people will experience me in very different ways based on what time of day it is as well.
 
[Mary Robinette] It is interesting how much we are shaped by time. And yet it is also one of those things that I think is hard to convey to readers. Like, the passage of time. The way in which someone is different in the morning then in the evening. One of the questions that I'll hear people ask is, like, how do I let people know that time has passed? If…
[Dan] Yeah. I asked Fonda Lee this question a while ago, because I think she does such a brilliant job of it in the Greenbones saga. With the first book takes about a year, the second about five years, and the third book covers 20, 25 years of time. And how do you convey that so well? One of the little tricks she pointed out was that she made sure to always talk about the children as soon as possible after a time jump, because if the kid that was toddling around and barely verbal last time is suddenly doing his school homework, well, then you know that a certain amount of time has passed. And it became a really interesting shorthand for me to go back and look through the books and go, oh, yeah. She does do that every time there's a time jump.
[Laughter]
[Dan] She starts talking about the kids early on. Because they will change more than the adults will, and so it makes it more obvious that time has gone by.
[Mary Robinette] I think that actually interestingly ties back into what we were talking about for where… How much can you change a place and still have it be recognizable. And, like, how much can you change a time… When you're changing time, what are the pieces? If you don't have the option to have children, if it is just moving day to night, what are the pieces that change, and those are the things that you flag. Like, kids change a lot, but buildings don't change that much. If you're going day to night, the light through the window changes a lot even if nothing else in the room does.
[Dan] Yeah. The temperature could change, the sounds that your hearing outside, whether there's suddenly crickets or something else, that you could… There's a lot of sensory details that you can mention that will immediately clue you in to the passage of time.
[Erin] I also think obligations change over time. Like, from day to night, if you're in a sort of traditional, like, work during the day is the, like… One of the reasons a lot of times writers write late at night and early in the morning is because those are times that people feel that the obligations of life had yet to like come tug on them. And so it's, like, is it quiet in some ways, not just the quiet of the actual room, but the quiet of, like, no one demanding things from you and nobody is needing things from you in this moment.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but… Interestingly, that has been one of the things that has been disruptive for me at this… And I've recognized the symptoms before I say it… That's one of the things that's been disruptive for me about teaching my cat to talk…
[Laughter]
[Erin] There are many, but that's…
[Mary Robinette] Is that her diurnal cycle is not the same as a human's. So she sleeps during the middle of the day, and then, at night, when I am starting to wind down, when, normally, before this, I would have been able to have quiet, because the rest of the world has quieted, that's when she's like, let's play! Let's have zoomies together! Let's use this button board thing and let me mash on it and talk to you. So I have… Like, I'm finding that now I'm starting to write during the middle of the day, which has never been a writing time for me. Because then those obligations, which is this, are quiet.
[Dan] I need to write when my cat shuts up.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, my God. I love her so much, but choices were made.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] What I love about that is, like, you're not going to get your cat to not be dire… Like, you can have some stern talks, but I don't think it's going to work. And so, also thinking about, like, what are the things… Like, children's growth, like a school day, like, what are the things that keep… That are unchangeable by your character, no matter what they do in the world?
[Mary Robinette] The inevitabilities.
[Erin] These are the inevitabilities of time. At the beginning of the day, they'll have to do this. At the end of the day, they'll have to do that. I was reading Babel…
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Erin] By R. F. Kuang and it's all about school. Like, it's a schoolbook, for at least the portion then I'm in. And so there's a lot about the school year, and, like, the passage of time in a school year, which the characters are going through so much internally, but there's still, like, they have to hit the external, go to this class, be in this place, do this thing by this time. And, I think, we sometimes forget or ignore or get used to the strictures of time in our lives. But maybe we should not do that for our character's lives, and think about how we can use that as an opportunity for tension or fun.
[Mary Robinette] That is a fantastic example of great time passage and using time as setting and time to manipulate character. Speaking of time, it is time for us to give you some homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] And it's a really simple one this time. It's similar to the one that we gave you at the beginning of this, looking at the lens of when and where. And this is just I want you to change the time at which a scene takes place. If you've got a scene that's set during the day, what happens when you move it to the night? What changes? If it's set in the spring, what happens if you move it to the fall? You don't have to make all of the changes, but, what happens if you change the time in which that scene takes place?
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.21: The Lens of Context

May. 28th, 2025 06:26 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.21: The Lens of Context 
 
 
Key points: Context, worldbuilding, and setting! How do you know what you really need for your story? What will my character interact with? What does the plot need? The 8 gems of Rohisla! Where do you want to create emotion or conflict? Tie worldbuilding to character conflict. Think about the cost of this piece of worldbuilding. Think about implications! In prose, suggesting a broader context is okay, but in gamewriting, people get irritated if there's nothing behind the door. For GM's, don't build more world than you need. Think about what the reader needs to tell the story in collaboration with you. What if you have a context, but no story? First, what can go wrong and who is affected by it? What were you interested in when you built that context? Try a mashup, borrow a character from somewhere else and shove them into this context. Play with unspoken or hidden context!
 
[Season 20, Episode 21]
 
[DongWon] Wouldn't it be so nice if you could outline your novel, organize your worldbuilding, write your book, format your ebook, and publish it on the same website? You're in luck. Camprie is the all-in-one platform for authors, offering both a full-featured writing software and KDP-style publishing, but with 80% royalties and none of the predatory practices you're stuck with with a few other competitors. Campfire's tools feature versatile panels that make creating characters as simple as moving notecards around a corkboard only much more organized, convenient, and without the inherent dangers of working with thumbtacks. Its wide range of tools include templates for creating settings, a magic system builder, and more. All of which are connected to a word processor that makes it easy to reference your notes as you write. When you're ready, publish your book on Campfire's e-book shop and include artwork, worldbuilding notes, short stories, and more for readers who want to explore your setting in more detail. Try Campfire today at campfirewriting.com and bring your book to life.
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of…
 
[DongWon] Between drafting your new novel, building your lore bible, or meeting with your critique group, who has time to stress about website security? As a writer, your website is your digital face to the world that lets people know about your work and where they can find it. Securing your website means less stress about anyone disrupting that important outlet. Kinsta offers managed hosting for WordPress with lightning fast load times, enterprise grade security, and 24/7 human only customer support. They're available in multiple languages and ready to assist regardless of site complexity. It's complete peace of mind knowing your WordPress site is always secure, online, and performing at its best. Kinsta provides enterprise grade security and is one of the few hosting providers for WordPress with SOC2 and other certifications that guarantee the highest level of security for your website. And Kinsta customers can experience up to 200 percent faster sites by simply moving their WordPress sites to the platform. They even have a user-friendly custom dashboard called MyKinsta that makes managing your site or multiple sites a breeze. And if you're moving from another host, they offer unlimited expert led migrations to ensure a smooth transition, so you won't experience any downtime. Ready to experience Kinsta's hosting for yourself? Get your first month free when you sign up at kinsta.com today. It's a perfect opportunity to see why Kinsta is trusted by thousands of businesses worldwide to power their websites. Visit kinsta.com to get this limited time offer for new customers on selected plans. Don't miss out. Get started for free today.
 
[Mary Robinette] 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 21]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] The lens of context. 
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Erin] And this is our first sort of episode now that we've introduced the lens of where and when. I thought the very… The very next thing we needed to do is actually talk about creating context in a story. And what I mean by this is that when you are worldbuilding, especially if you're doing science fiction and fantasy, you can create, like, so much world. You can create all the where's, all the when's, especially in science fiction and fantasy. So how do you figure out what the… How do you figure out, like, what actually is needed for your story? How do you use the world and the setting to create the context in which your story is going to succeed as opposed to sort of just everything you could possibly know about that setting?
[Mary Robinette] I tend to think about things that my character is going to interact with. So I tend to break things into details that are plot specific in that there is a plot event that's going to happen around it, there's a piece of worldbuilding, something is going to happen at the… With the gems of [Releasia?] So we actually really need to know what those gems are.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I love that it changes every time you say it.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I have no idea what you said [garbled]
[Howard] For context, in a previous episode, we created… And by we, I mean Erin…
[Laughter]
[Erin] The eight gems of Rohisla.
[Chorus: Rohisla!]
[Dan] How can you not remember the important…
[DongWon] That was like the 13 gems of Rho…
[Dan] Context?
[Laughter]
[Howard] Okay, you know what? Let's… I just want to talk about this for a moment, because as… From the standpoint of a humorist, I want to be able to tell jokes in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, where I'm not making fun of sci-fi or fantasy. And so what I establish is a context in which a thing is funny. The gems of Rohisla thing is making fun of the fact that we can't keep track of Erin's worldbuilding.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to write it down…
[Howard] And that's…
[Mary Robinette] So that I can remember it in the future.
 
[Howard] And the best example I can come up with is the one where… And I've used this in my humor classes… Where the puppeteer alien and the Kzin alien are talking about where human's sense of humor comes from. And the puppeteer is an herbivore, the Kzin is a carnivore, and the Kzin says, "I think that humor is an interrupted defense mechanism." And the puppeteer says, "Humans are insane. No sane creature would interrupt a defense mechanism." And knowing that the puppeteer is an herbivore just makes that funnier, because they're like sheep. Why would you interrupt a defense mechanism? But you have to have the context for that joke to play. And so, for me, the decision on building context is where do I want to be able to tell jokes. And that's… At one layer of obstruction up, where do I want to be able to create emotion? Where do I want to be able to create conflict? Where do I want to be able to create a platform that has no railings?
[DongWon] Ultimately, context only matters if it's giving context to something. Right? If you're just giving me context for the sake of having it, I'm not going to remember it. The reason we can't remember the eight gems of Revisla is that it's not tied to anything, other than the fact that we find this word funny for some reason. And it's… Which is why when I talk about how do you introduce worldbuilding, I always say to tie worldbuilding to character conflict. If a piece of information about how the world works is connected to something that the character wants, needs, or has at stakes, or is afraid of, then that is going to make it so that it's memorable. Right? And that can be as simple as children get report cards, when your eight-year-old MC goes home, there's going to be a report card waiting for him, and he doesn't want his parents to find out what it is. Now the piece of worldbuilding that's important and relevant, which is report cards, matters. Right? That could also be children are executed when they turned nine.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] That's going to be an important part of worldbuilding…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Unless they have all eight gems of Rohis…
[Laughter]
[Howard] They were report cards [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] They just sort them into the poop chute.
[DongWon] Exactly. But all I'm saying is that… I think [Steven Universe Show] does this incredibly well. Where you start with a very simple premise and end up at the end of that show with an incredibly massive space operatic level of worldbuilding and scope. And the way they get there is that at each element that they're introducing to that worldbuilding, they're tying it to a very specific character in their conflict.
 
[Mary Robinette] And one of the problems that I think writers run into is figuring out what pieces they're actually going to need. And, for me, it comes down to the cost of it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] How many words am I going to have to spend on it to make the reader understand it? For instance, you all do not need, in order to understand this podcast, you all do not need to know that we are sitting in a hotel room. You don't need to know the order that we are sitting, which chair type people are, that Marshall stands when he is engineering and looks like a DJ. Actually, you do need to know it, it's pretty awesome. You don't need to know any of that to understand, but sometimes we get so excited because we thought these things through that we will put them down on the page, forgetting that it doesn't actually carry any story burden.
[Howard] And worse still, we put these things down on the page, forgetting that any context that is co-… That is made up of information that could be in any way relevant is going to suggest… Is going to have implications. Things that can grow out of it. I think of… And the books and the movies did just fine, so it's okay for me to complain… Hunger Games. The idea that a Battle Royale has become a central societal point post some sort of apocalypse suggests a huge measure of historical worldbuilding that I was never satisfied with the presentation of. And so the story fell apart for me. And I'm not saying that these stories are bad, because clearly they did just fine. But as a writer, I try to make sure that I'm not going to put anything into the context that I have to explain away later because it suggests something that makes my story hard to grab.
 
[Erin] This actually reminds me of something I learned when I was moving between prose and game writing. So, a lot of times in a short story especially, if you want to make your world feel like it has more depth, you will… You can include detail that suggests a broader context than this story has time for. So you could say, like, we met while searching for the eight gems of Rohisla, and you're not… That's not what the story is about, and it gives… And the context that matters is, like, this is my relationship with the character. So you've provided a relationship context, but not a world context. And yet, knowing it, makes you feel like there's a bigger world out there. In game writing, if you do that, people'd be like, in our next mission, we should go collect those gems, and, like, you have not written anything…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] For the GM, or if it's a videogame, like, there's nothing behind that door. And so then, players get frustrated, because there like, why did you create a context that I can't explore?
[Howard] You now need help from the eight GM's of Rohisla.
[Erin] Oh, wow.
[Howard] Oh… [Garbled]
[laughter]
[Erin] But I think that that's something that, like, even in fiction, you can do. It's like you really have to be careful, like…
[Yeah]
[Erin] You don't want it to make it seem like the more interesting story is happening outside of the page that the reader is being forced to follow.
 
[DongWon] A piece of advice that I give to new GM's is don't build more world than you need. Right? And, like, if I am starting a new campaign setting, if none of my characters are playing a paladin or a [garbled] or somebody who intersects with religion, I'm not writing down what that pantheon is. I'm not going to sit here spending six hours making up 12 gods for this world if nobody here is religious. You know what I mean? And it's just like religion isn't a major component of the story. We don't need to know all the details of it. We can be pretty vague about it. And then, when you stumble into a situation that requires that, that's when you build it out. Right? And so a little bit of, like, a… You build the track right ahead of the train. Right? You're building it as you cross. And you don't need to have every single piece of this imagined out… Maybe have some idea of where that might be going. But think about, what are your characters interested in? Right? If you have somebody who is a merchant, then, yes, you're going to need to understand the economics of it. If your characters are children, no, you don't need to understand where the grain is being shipped from. You know what I mean?
[Howard] You brushed up against here the concept of just-in-time manufacturing, which became a huge market force in the 30 years leading up to the pandemic of 2020. At which point, we broke enough supply chains that everybody looked at just-in-time manufacturing and said, oh, no. This doesn't work anymore. And I loved how, as somebody who world builds, I was able to look at something that seemed very sensible and suddenly see circumstances in which it completely fell apart, because now I understood, in a way I just hadn't understood before, the way things are inextricably related.
[Mary Robinette] You'll hear a lot of times people talking about worldbuilding as there's an iceberg, but you only need the tip of the iceberg. And then there's an implication that you actually need to build the entire iceberg. For me, it's like if I am telling a story in which Titanic runs into the iceberg, yeah, I need to know that there's this mass under there. But if I'm telling a story about some fishermen who are going nowhere near the iceberg, I don't need to know it's there. When I was building puppets, I would build the armature that needed to be in underneath in order to hold their clothes up. That I would have where their bodies were… Like, the joints would be in the right place. Everything that caused the puppet to move in a way that was believable. But I wouldn't build the muscles, because they… The audience would never see them. They were not anatomically correct, except sometimes, when I was trolling on another puppeteer…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] There, it had a point. Right?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It had a purpose. So, for me, what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about it is where do I want to put the effort, but where also do I want the reader to put the effort. Because the reason you don't have puppets be anatomically correct and you try to eliminate all of that stuff is every piece of that adds weight that then the puppeteer has to carry. And because your reader is actively building that story with you, every piece of context that you give them gives them a narrative weight that they have to carry. It's a memory that they have to hold onto. So if you use the context to direct their attention, to give them the tools to tell the story that you want to tell, to tell that in collaboration with you, you're going to have, I think, a more successful story. Do you need to know how things move? Yes, if it's in relation to something else.
[Howard] When I look at Fawzi bear, I think of him as being fluffy all the way through. I don't think of your hand in him. I just think… I mean, the surface of Fawzi bear, the way he moves… He's a big fluffy bear. And so the piece that you didn't build, because you couldn't, because there's no room for your hand, is a piece that I go ahead and imagine for you.
[Erin] And on that beautiful metaphor, we're going to take a short break.
 
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[Erin] So the question that I have, now that we're back, is, we've sort of been presuming in our first half that you know the story that you want to tell, and you can then shape the context around that story. What if you've just been worldbuilding in worldbuilding and worldbuilding and you've got all context, and you're not sure, like, where the story is in there? Are there any tools that you can use to actually figure out how to use that context as a lens and not just a landscape?
[Mary Robinette] I have a worksheet we've shared with readers before that I will use when I find myself in this position. It hasn't happened to me a lot, but every now and then, I have an idea and I have the world for it, but I have no idea what the story is. Because most of the time, I do have a character in mind. So I go through an exercise to figure out what kind of things that can go wrong and who can be affected by it. So I will list a list of 20 people who can be in that world, looking at the socio-economic spectrum. I will look at power structures. I will look for those things to look for where things can hurt. Which is not that every story has to be about pain and hurt, but that is usually a place to find a stake and defined someone who has a reason to want to change something. Whether it is something about themselves or something about the larger world. So those are things that I will look for is who has a reason to activate and…
[Howard] Just asking the question is often enough to end up with a character or an entire story. When I look at a magic system or a technology system, one of the first questions I ask is if it's valuable, can it be stolen, can it be smuggled, can it be counterfeited? Just asking the question is enough that suddenly a whole smuggling ring pops into my head, and now I have a story. A whole counterfeiting ring, and now I have a heist or whatever. So, asking the questions about, as Mary Robinette said, asking about the pain points is often the easiest starting point.
[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, one place to start… I think this is kind of tying into what Mary Robinette's saying, is take a look at the worldbuilding you've created. If you've done a ton of worldbuilding, you've done a lot of creating that context, and you're looking for a story to have that context within, then you can look… What you're looking for is what are you interested in. What you're looking for is why am I writing this story? And you will have focused on different parts of the worldbuilding over others. Say you are focused on the religion and spirituality of this world. Say you're focused on the history and mythology, the prophecies, the economics, the technology. Whatever those things are, figure out which one you were drawn to and build on that. Right? Like, this can be Mistborn's magic system. This can be the history and poetry of Lord of the Rings. This can be the Galactic politics of Star Trek. Right? Each of these are pulling the audience, and pulling you, as the creator, in different directions. And that can give you a starting point of what do you want to have your characters interacting with.
 
[Mary Robinette] I sometimes will… When I'm having trouble with this kind of thing, one of the other things that I'll do is the mashup. Where I'm like, okay, here's this context that's really interesting, this world. What happens if I remove a character from another context and drop them into this one? This is essentially fanfiction, which I think is a glorious thing. But this is a way to have your fanfiction jollies and still get paid for it. Which is that you take a character that you love from another world, you drop them into this context. They're gonna change because of the new context. Obviously, you're going to rename them, but the social circles that they have, all of those things, how do they react? How are they moving through this world? Sometimes I will… Sometimes it's not from another piece of IP, it's… I have this character that has come into my head that I haven't been able to find the world for them, and I just shove them into this context to see kind of… Thought experiment about what happens. And often the contrasts between the two will give me opportunities that I wouldn't have had when I was just, like, single-handedly… Or single-mindedly focused on one thing.
[Erin] Yeah. I think a lot of times… I've been thinking about this in a slightly different way, because of the game writing I've been doing, which is that, while you don't want to create contexts that, like, lead the person down the wrong path, creating game hooks when you are creating a setting is a big thing that people do in tabletops. So you'll write about a world and you'll create little pieces, like little bits of discontent, little pieces of things that the GM can, like, use if they want to, then create a whole story in a place that you haven't written it for them, you've just suggested it. I think of those as, like, the but-also's. Like, if you describe a great place, there's always somebody who'd be like, oh, but also… Like, oh, have you thought about that? Or think about, like, who in your setting would write the Twitter thread that's like…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Hold on to your butts. You think that, like, X thing is great? Like, about this context? Like, here's 15 things that are horrific. Like…
[DongWon] [garbled] Twitter? It's just a horrifying thing to introduce.
[Laughter]
[Howard] You know what? Coming back to the eight gems of Rohisla, you put them into your game, and then in the little sidebar for game hooks, it says, "Actually, six of the gems of Rohisla are genuine and two of them are counterfeits." And now we know that there's a story here that the players might be able to interact with.
 
[Mary Robinette] There's another thing that I think is kind of fun to play with, which is unspoken context. Where you, the writer, are aware of something and it is affecting the way you move… Everything happens in the story, but you don't necessarily need the reader to know it. For instance, when we recorded these episodes, we recorded them out of sequence. So the episode that you just listen to, we made a ton of jokes about poop chutes. But we were recording it on Navigator of the Seas and DongWon was not with us. In our timeline, the thing that we just recorded was an episode that you heard weeks ago about the eight gems of Rohisla, and we're all present for that. So it's shaping the way we are moving through. So sometimes it can be fun, actually, to have that little piece of that iceberg, you don't need the whole iceberg there, but just a little piece of the iceberg that is affecting the way characters interact with each other. And it's not that you have to make sure that the reader understands it. Like, I did not need to pause and explain this, you would have been fine without that. But it does affect the story. And so sometimes I will play with that. Like, offstage, these two were totally getting it on, and it's affecting small things, but I don't need the reader to understand it. I don't need to do a side quest to go watch the sexy fun time scene.
[Erin] Well, that is fun.
[Mary Robinette] It is.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I do think it's delightful that our context episode is the one riddled with inside jokes.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Dan] We didn't do this on purpose.
[DongWon] Half of them, I'm not getting, because I missed the cruise.
[Mary Robinette] There's a whole thing about trees and poop chutes and Legolas, like, scooping poop at the bottom, because that's where all his… It's…
[DongWon] Okay.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] All right.
[Erin] [garbled] context.
[DongWon] Without this context, actually.
[Erin] It gets away from us. It's time to give homework and move onto a new one.
 
[Erin] So, now we have the homework for you, which is, I'd like you to take a context, some piece of worldbuilding that you've done, and come up with three different narratives that you could write that use that context. Then, separately, I want you to take a narrative that you've written and come up with three new contexts in which that narrative would succeed.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.20: The Lens of Where and When

May. 22nd, 2025 06:53 pm
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Writing Excuses 20.20: The Lens of Where and When 
 
 
Key Points: Where and when, aka setting, or worldbuilding. What are societal constraints and conventions that you can use?  How are your characters shaped by the world they are in? What nitty-gritty details of daily life are going to show up in your work? Where does the poop go? Where do place and setting hit person? What has the character experienced? Meaningful details make a world become vivid. Make your characters interact with the world. How do you build a setting that can change, without breaking? Sometimes you do upend it, and write about the consequences of that. Or you can keep the definitive parts, and change things around that. What happens after the glorious revolution can make a really interesting story.
 
[Season 20, Episode 20]
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is your opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[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 20]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Dan] The Lens of Where and When.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
 
[Dan] Today we're going to talk about where and when, and we're going to talk about setting. How you view and use setting. And in speculative fiction, we often call this worldbuilding. But once you've finished building the world, how do you capture it on the page? How do you convey that world, and how, most importantly, does that world change the things that you're writing and change the way that you're telling the story? What does it really mean for a setting to be vivid, or a world to feel deep, or a place to feel lived-in? And so I want to throw this question out first, how does the setting, how does the place where the story takes place, change what you are writing and how you write it?
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that this is a thing that I play with a lot because I'm writing secondary world fiction sometimes and sometimes I'm writing alternate history, and they offer me different choices. We've talked before about how sometimes when you're writing something that's an alternate history, when we had C. L. Clark on last season, that there is a tension that comes from this, from the audience's awareness of the setting. And that you can use that to change the way the audience is thinking about the story. And you can also use it as a way of focusing in on the story, the story that you're trying to tell. So I find that when I'm trying to set a story, that one of the things I'm looking for are kind of sort of the landscape things that I use. Some of it is that, with time in particular… Yeah, time in particular, I'm looking for the societal constraints and conventions that I use. If it's a time of war, that's going to be a very different story than a time of peace. So those are things that I look at for how I support some of the other choices that I've already made.
[Erin] I think, for me, there sort of two things. One is that characters are shaped by the world they live in. And I think this is sometimes where, not to go back and think… Bring trad character into it, but I think it's really important. Because I think sometimes, because worldbuilding can be so exciting in speculative fiction, like, we can go really ham on, like, thinking of, like, every really interesting thing and how the sewer system works and, like, how the magic system works without thinking about, like, what does it actually mean for, like, John Jane Doe walking down the street, and, like, what that means in terms of what do they encounter. What systems are there? How do they get from place to place? Where are the tensions that they're getting in their everyday life? What's easy for them that we would find hard? What's hard for them that we might find easy? So, I think the first thing I think about a lot is, like, where… How does the place sort of weigh… We talked about weight earlier this season… How does the place weigh on the characters in both a good and bad way? How do they feel it? How do they live in?
 
[Dan] Yeah. And that's such an important thing to think about, when you're worldbuilding, because when we are doing worldbuilding, I know there's often a tendency to think about the really broad kind of Tolkien-esque kind of things. Like, this is a world that has elves, and they live in trees, and whatever you're trying to do. Whereas the nitty-gritty kind of daily life details are often the ones that are going to show up in your work so much more than that. How do they get around in this city that lives… They live in trees? Do they have public transportation? Do they just have to walk everywhere? Do they have any kind of…
[Mary Robinette] Like the puppet [garbled] you gotta go get that.
[Erin] Yes.
[Laughter]
[Dan] What is going on here? And I remember when I was breaking in, there was this huge push to think about economy. And every time I would go to a convention, there would be some worldbuilding panel where they were like, you have to think about where all of the food comes from and where all the money comes from. And, yes, I think that that's a useful thing to think about. But, for me, I agree with you, Erin, that so much of it comes down to character and what is going to affect these characters. And, yes, if there is no food around or if food is scarce, that's something that's going to weigh on them heavily. But if there's always food and they don't have to think about it, then maybe it's never going to come up in your story.
 
[Erin] Yeah, I think… And, I think I also… I often find, like, those systems questions, like, do you get so, like, taken away from the people. Like, people always ask, like, where does the poop go? A question we should always ask…
[Laughter]
[Erin] About our stories, truly. But, like, that's somewhat interesting, but if you're, like, so and so, like, they have a poop shooter system that, like, uses hollow vines to shoot it out of the trees. Like…
[Laughter]
[Erin] [garbled] elves.
[Dan] This is why Tolkien never got into it.
[Laughter]
[Erin] But Legolas was, like, well, like, that attracts, like, rodents, that attracts weird things to the trees, so, like, whose job is it, like, who's actually down there, like, sweeping up at the bottom, like, of, like, where the poop shooter goes out?
[Dan] Cleaning up…
[Erin] That is…
[Dan] Pneumatic vines.
[Erin] The pneumatic vine cleaner.
[Dan] Legolas! There's rats in the pneumatics again!
[Erin] Like, there are 10 more… 10 times more stories about Legolas, the pneumatic cleaner, and, like, whatever's happening there then there are, like, to me, then the big systemic questions. So, it's like when place and setting, like, hit person, that's when, for me, the sweet spot is, for sure.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and I will often use that when I'm having trouble finding traction on a thing. Where I've got the general idea, but I'm like… What am I going to do with this? I don't always go sequentially. Sometimes I start with character, but sometimes, I'm like I don't know who this story is about. And I will look at place for who is available to me. And I look across the socioeconomic spectrum, who are the people that are the poorest people of society, who are the poop cleaners down at the bottom? Maybe it's a high status job, who knows?
[Erin] I like that. It's Legolas' duty.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] That's why he's got to have the braids, to keep…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Oh, my God.
[Erin] Sorry, listeners.
 
[Dan] So. At the risk of getting us back on track…
[No, no]
[Dan] Let's talk a little bit more about time, about the when half of this where and when, because if you are writing historical fiction, if you are writing something set in our world, I think it becomes very natural to think about time. But if you are writing something about outer space, if you're writing something about… Set in a completely different world altogether, then there's… Time still matters. Like you were saying, is this a time of war or is this a time of peace? Is this a time of intellectual Renaissance? Is this a time of whatever it is? There's a lot of those when questions we can still ask.
 
[Mary Robinette] And it's also, I think, for me, one of the things that's fun to play with with when is also when in the characters life is this? What are the things that they have experienced? Knowing a little bit about their history, that's… That history is part of the when of the character. And, again, with the character, but it does affect the way the story is told. If you know that it is after a traumatic event for… In a time of war, chances are that this character has experienced traumatic events. What are those, how do they affect the story? Also, time of day can make a huge impact on a story. A scene that is set at noon can often read very differently than one that's set at midnight. Hello. Let us meet at noon…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] For our romantic tryst that no one will know is happening.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Like…
[Erin] And that… But that's interesting, because it immediately makes me think, well, what kind of world… Like, if I want to have that, if I want a tryst at high noon, but no one knows it's happening, what does that say about the way time is viewed and used in that world in a way that's different from ours? Is it, like, the sun is so hot that it's, like, so dangerous to go out during noon because your eyes will melt out of your face, and so, therefore, like, it is dangerous and difficult and that's why this is the time to meet? So I think it's sometimes fun to, like… Time is something I think is hard for us to get away from in some ways, but a lot of times, even when we create new worlds, they're still like working 9 to 5, like, in some ways, they're still doing everything during the day and sleeping at night, because that's the way we do. But, like, is that always the case? What about a place where there is no night, or there is no day? All of that kind of stuff.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm working on a short story right now, as we record this, where my character winds up in a world that… Cave systems, it's all like phosphorus and fungi, and I'm like, do they have day night cycles? Like, when is sleeping happening? How do they tell the passage of time? How do they tell seasons? I'm just finishing working on Martian Contingency. And I think I have probably complained about this multiple times, that I have so many regrets because I decided to structure it around calendar, but there's the Earth calendar and then there's the Martian calendar, and Martian days are 39 minutes longer than Earth days. So, when do we celebrate holidays? Do we keep them with what's going on at home, do we celebrate them at a new time based on the cycles on Mars? And also your living underground, so your idea of day night cycles are based on the very few people who are going out on the surface. And it's like… It becomes this whole cascading thing where the when of the story affects, like, every decision that I made and also it kind of hits a point… It's not arbitrary, but it's… It offers opportunities to be in flux and reveal something about people, because of the way they are making… They are interfacing with time.
[Dan] And speaking of time, this is the time when we are going to pause for a moment.
 
[Dan] All right. So we are back. And I would like to ask you one of the other questions that we posed at the very beginning. What does it mean for a setting to be vivid? How does a setting come alive?
[Erin] I have an answer to this, I think, that actually comes back to time as well. So, a couple of years ago, I got the opportunity to write for the Pathfinder Lost Omens travel section. And I was actually in charge of the time and calendar section, and got to think about how different cultures within this really big world of Golarion, which is the Pathfinder world, how different cultures actually dealt with time. So as I was thinking about it, I thought a lot about how we… When we decide to mark an occasion, when we decide to measure our world in a particular way, there's usually a reason for it. Sometimes it's an arbitrary Emperor, as in our month system. But it can be much more meaningful. So I think worlds feel vivid when things that we choose to put in them have meaning. Like, have a… Have, like, a real meaning to them. And so, like, for example, I think, working with goblins, and I decided that they actually measure times by the length of songs and campfires. And so everything… I like that, because I was like fire is so visceral, like, how long… And they really know, like, how long this fire will burn, and they have, like… It's something that they all kind of can figure out, like, really quickly, and they know how long this song lasts. So there like, okay, we're going to sing this long song, and by the time that's the end, we will… It will have been an hour or three hours. And you get to a point where you could sing it in your mind. And you don't actually have to sing that song out loud. And what I like about that is that it's details. So I think worlds become vivid when you have details and those details have meanings that resonate with the world and make sense for it.
[Dan] Yeah. Well, and I would add further that your story needs to take advantage of those details. If that's something that we can only learn about reading the appendix, then it didn't necessarily affect the story in any way.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Whereas if your characters are kind of constantly singing that song to themselves in the background, that that's how they talk about time and they say, "Wait for me here, I'll be back in two songs of whatever," then that matters, and it does bring it to life.
[Mary Robinette] The other thing about that is that it is an interaction with the world. One of the things that I see people do frequently when they… They have world builder's disease, is that they can describe a world, they can use all of these beautiful pieces of language to tell you about the trees and the vines in the poop shooters and all of this, like, gloriously visceral language, but no one interacts with it. And so the story can become static. For me, the thing about the where and the when is that it is a thing that is inhabited. Like, time passes. I know that my animals can tell time, because if I'm late with their meal, they definitely let me know. So they have an awareness of time. But it is that interaction with the time. It is the this is a thing that supposed to happen. So when I'm thinking about it, I am thinking about how is my character interacting with it? The thing that you were talking about, the being back in two songs. That's an interaction with it. What are the other ways my character is interacting with the world? And that, for me, is how I make it vivid. By making it a lived in place.
[Erin] And I also think, challenging the world that you've built. I think sometimes we're reluctant because we spent all this time building, like, a beautiful house of cards and you don't want to blow on it. But that's when things get interesting. So I was thinking about the measuring time by fire, and, like, what happens in a typhoon? When you really needed to measure it, and the fire goes out unexpectedly. Like, then what happens? Like, and that probably happens at a crucial moment of conflict. So, I like to set up a world, and then by… If you can knock over parts of the world and the world still stands, I think, for some reason, that feels more lived in and more vivid. Because there are many things in our world that don't make sense for that fall apart and we still keep going. So when things are too perfect and everything lines up to well, sometimes it also feels like very… Like a doll's house that's, like, really pretty, but like it doesn't feel like… It feels like dolls are living in there instead of, like, people in these stories.
 
[Dan] Yeah. Well, and that's a big question that I often think about with worldbuilding, especially with a series or, like you were talking about with Pathfinder, some kind of ongoing setting that kind of more or less needs to remain static. You want your characters to be able to affect the world. You want things to be able to change. But you still want to be able to tell more stories in there. How can you build a setting like this that has intriguing when's and why's and you're able to mess with it without completely upending it and breaking it? So that book 2 takes place in a different setting altogether?
[Mary Robinette] I think it's… I think, first of all, that you actually can upend it and have book to take place in a different setting. So that's an option. But if you don't want to do that, then you think about, for me, the things that define the world as this is the place. And you can break the things around it, but there are still definitive things. So, if I'm telling a story that set in Mississippi and I dry up the Mississippi River, it has become fundamentally a different place. So I think of the Mississippi River as being a fundamental piece of the Mississippi, and I affect a lot of things around it. But I make a decision ahead of time, I'm not going to touch that. That said, it can be really interesting when you fundamentally break the thing. Sometimes the thing that is the defining characteristic is the people that are in it. But people are shaped by environment. It's all linked together.
 
[Erin] I also think that sometimes you… [Garbled] I think it's hard to break a world in some ways. Like… Fortunately or unfortunately, one thing that I often like grate at a little bit in fantasy is, like, when it's like we killed the king, and we get a new king, and, like, that definitely fixed all the things that that king was doing.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] It's like systems are very ingrained, and so I think one way to do it is to have somebody… Like, the system of the world doesn't change, but a person's understanding of it does. The way that they try to change it in their corner does. And then actually seeing the implications of change. Because a lot of times, after the curtain goes down on book 1, and the person's like we have done the glorious Revolution, it's like but all the things that you learned, all the ways that the place has weighed on you, will change the way that your revolution runs and what you do next and how easy it is for you to fall into the trap of becoming the world that you wished to break. And I think that is, like, such a… And that, to me, is a really interesting story…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Where it's like the world persists even if I try to change it.
[Mary Robinette] I think that's the thing. It's that there's logical causal chains. It's like this follows that, this happens because of that. You actually made me think of, also, Mistborn. When you hit the end of book one, it is… I remember thinking, how do you write a sequel in this? Because they've done all the things, and the world is fundamentally different. And book 2 is very much like, oh, now the world is fundamentally different. What are the consequences of that? And…
[Dan] Yeah. The… Mistborn is a great example. It's one of the ones that I always go to when I'm working with game writers and saying, "How do you end this?" This is a problem I have right now, because I'm working on the Mistborn RPG. Wendy you set your game if you have so many different points, and his series is filled with points that completely redefine what the setting is. So many people think of Mistborn as, well, there are these grand balls in this kind of dark industrial city where terrible things happen, and people sneak around in the mist. And that is one of the seven books. And then that setting changes, and you move on to the next one. And if you want to maintain, you come up with that one cool idea that you think is great and you want to maintain that over the course of several books, maybe don't kill the Lord Ruler at the end of the first one. But if you do want to explore that concept of change and explore the world is different, then, yeah, it's okay to do that.
[Erin] I know we're running low on time ourselves, but this actually reminds me of an answer to your earlier question about what does time mean? Which is also, like, where does the actual world itself… Where does the city or the country or the universe view itself in a timescale? Do you know what I mean? Are we year one of a generation shift or year 1000? Like, we usually set ourselves against something. Are we the end of an era, the beginning, the saw he middle of an empire? And, really thinking about, like, where does your actual setting take place, like, timewise? Like, what is their image? Where does it start? Where did their causal chain start of their society and are they the first link, the middle, or the end? Because, I think, that actually… Like, dying empires have some similarities, even though they die in different ways. And so do new revolutions have similarities, even if they're very different in their goals and what they do, because there's something about newness and there's something about, like, stagnation that can actually… That are a thing of time that has nothing to do with and everything to do with the actual setting that you're building.
[Dan] Absolutely. We are going to end this episode now with some homework, which is this.
 
[Dan] Take something that you have written in which the setting matters. A scene that takes place in a certain party or setting or location, a building, whatever it is. And then rewrite it in a completely different setting and see what kind of changes that suggests to the characters or forces into the story.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.44: NaNoWriMo Week 1 - Getting Started

Nov. 2nd, 2023 05:48 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
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Writing Excuses 18.44: NaNoWriMo Week 1 - Getting Started
 
 
Key Points: NaNoWriMo, writing 50,000 words. How do you get started? Writing your opening? Meet the characters and set promises for the readers. Confidence and authority, voice! And information! Promises to me, to motivate me! Voice, character, or setting. Voice driven or action driven? Hook the reader! Write a little, then ask what excites me about that. Do some freewriting, meet the character or setting or voice, before starting. [If you don't start, you can't finish.] Give readers reasons to care, to connect. Think about who, what, when, where, why, and how. Breadcrumbs, not infodumps! Character stakes, what is at risk. Where are we, who are we with, and what genre is this? Within 13 lines, what is the character's goal? Remember, Nano is a time to play, to try out things. Dive in!
 
[Season 18, Episode 44]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 1 - Getting Started.
[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.
 
[Mary Robinette] We're going to be talking about National Novel Writing Month. All month, in fact. For those of you who haven't participated in this, National Novel Writing Month is a month-long challenge in the month of November, where you attempt to write a novel or 50,000 words, depending on how you want to define that. So what we're going to be talking about is what you need to do in order to try to have something that's vaguely coherent at the end of the month. These are tools that you can use the rest of the time when you're working on novels or short stories, but we're going to talk this week about getting started.
[Pause]
[Erin] So, how do we do that?
[Laughter]
[Erin] I mean, it's like…
[Mary Robinette] Surely, someone else will start talking now?
[Erin] That's often the problem…
 
[Dan] Getting started is hard.
[Mary Robinette] Getting started is hard. So, in getting started, what we're talking about on day one is that you're going to be writing your opening. This is where you meet your characters and you set promises for your readers. So we're going to be talking about both stuff that you need to establish, but the order in which you establish things is very much up to you. So, what do you all find are some, like, consistent things that make an opening, like, that first page?
[DongWon] I personally really love openings. They are my favorite part of the book. As a literary agent, I'm mostly looking at openings as I'm going through queries and new projects and things like that. So, for me, the thing I'm looking for in that first page, in those opening sections, is a sense that the author knows what they're doing, and they're going to take me on a journey that I'm excited to go on with them. Right? So, projecting a certain amount of confidence and a certain amount of authority in those opening pages are really important. Some of the best tools to do this is with your actual voice. The words that you're using and the sentence structure that you have is a great way to bring readers in and project that kind of confidence that you are going to be telling us a story that we're going to be excited to read. That can be everything from word choice to sentence structure to a kind of musicality and rhythm that you have in those opening sentences. But that really needs to be balanced with all of the information that you need to give to your readers. Right? It can't all just be voice-y beautiful prose, you also need to be communicating a ton of information in those opening pages.
[Howard] I'm a sucker for a good first line. It can take a long time to write a first line that you're happy with. Often, the first week of NaNoWriMo is not a great time to grind on that.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Howard] Caveat. If the first line is good enough to excite me, the first line might be good enough to continue to excite you. So, I always try and fill my first page with things that are not just promises to the readers, but are promises to me, to get me motivated, to remind me how much fun this story's going to be.
[DongWon] Right. This is Nano. You're not here to make perfect prose, you're not here to make sure everything's super refined and edited to perfection, you're here to get words on the page. Right? So, I'm telling you this as ways to think about what your goals are for the opening, but don't stress about anything that I'm saying right now.
[Dan] Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned voice. Voice is one of the 3 things that I try to do in an opening. You don't need to do all of these 3. Really, your goal is to hook the reader and get them interested. The way I think about it, you can do that with a really great interesting voice, or with a compelling character, or with a fascinating world or setting. One of those 3 is going to grab that reader in the want to learn more about it and come on in. If you can do all 3, that's even better, but…
[DongWon] Yeah, you can only do…
[Dan] Do one of the 3.
[DongWon] Some combo of those. Right? It's not going to be pure voice. If it was pure voice, then they're like, "What is this story about? I'm out." If it… But you want to have character in their. It's sort of like you're readjusting the levels to sort of fit the story you're trying to tell.
[Mary Robinette] So, I find that what you're talking about, I see as kind of 2 different paths into a story. That you can have something that's kind of voice driven, where the voices doing all of the lifting and carrying, or you can have something that's action driven, where the character is in the middle of doing something. That… There's overlap between those 2 things. Like, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, nobody is doing anything. It's all voice driven. Whereas, if you look at the beginning of Ghost Talkers, using my own novel, that begins with a character saying, "The Germans were flanking us at Delville Wood when I died." Ginger Stuyvesant was sitting with the spirit circle… I don't remember the rest of my actual lines…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But she's in the middle of doing something. But it is that hook, that both of these have different ways of hooking the reader and pulling them in.
 
[Erin] I would say that you may not know which of these you're doing because it is Nano and you're just trying to figure it out. So one thing that I find really fun during Nano is to write a little bit of a beginning and then go like, "What could this be? What excites me about it? Like, what about the voice that I've just written is really interesting? What about the action that's happening is really intriguing?" It's a great way later in the month if you get stuck to go back and look at what are 2 or 3 things that I was really excited about, like Howard said, right at the start, that can continue to motivate me when I'm not sure, like, where I went or how the story has taken a twist or a turn.
[Dan] Well. One thing that I do, and I've talked about this on the show before, but I still do it, and I still think it's valuable, is I will do free writing before I start a book. I will write some dialogue, let a character talk for a couple of pages. Or I will describe the world. I will describe my favorite aspects of the world, the part of the setting that gets me excited. I will try to write something and nail down a tone of voice, or find a weird turn of phrase. Never intending to actually use any of this in the novel, but just to kind of get me into the right headspace so I can hit the ground running when the actual writing starts.
[Mary Robinette] I do something similar, that I will often do a couple of exploratory attempts. Sometimes I am planning for it to be the first chapter, but it's just me saying, "What is this? What is going on here?" Much like Erin does, also. It's just like is there something here that excites me? For those of you who are doing NaNoWriMo seriously, all of these exploratory attempts count towards your total word count.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Save them. No writing is wasted.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things about Nano is that it really teaches you that no writing is wasted. When we come back from our break, what were going to be talking about are some of the pieces of information that you're going to need to pass to your reader. But, right now, let's take a brief break.
 
[Mary Robinette] NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and it's time to start planning. If you're aiming for 1600 words a day, it's easy to de-prioritize eating. But you need to keep the brain fueled. During Nano, I turn to meal kits. Hello Fresh makes whipping up a home-cooked meal a nice break from writing with quick and easy options, including their 15 minute meals. With everything pre-proportioned and delivered right to your door every week, it takes way less time than it takes to get a delivery. I find that stepping away from the keyboard to cook gives my brain time to rest. I love that with Hello Fresh, I can plan my meals for the month before NaNoWriMo begins, and then, I can save all of my decision-making for the story. With so many in season ingredients, you'll taste all the freshness of fall in every bite of Hello Fresh chef crafted recipes. Produce travels from the farm to your door for peak freshness you can taste. Go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use the code 50WX for 50% off plus free shipping! Yeah, that's right. 50WX, 50 for 50% off and WX for Writing eXcuses. We are terrible with puns. Just visit hellofresh.com/50WX and try America's number one meal kit.
 
[Howard] It's the first week of NaNoWriMo. It is time to get started. I'm going to throw a couple of aphorisms at you. You must be present to win. You miss 100% of the pitches you don't swing at. [Sigh] If you don't start, you'll never get to finish. I speak as someone who has never actually won at NaNoWriMo. I've started it several times. I think one time, I actually got 30,000 words in on a project. But I've never actually completed something that I would consider to be a first draft of a novel during NaNoWriMo. Do I feel bad about it? No. Do I feel in the least bit conflicted about encouraging you to start NaNoWriMo? Absolutely not. I am giving you permission to start and maybe fail. Because that happens to the best of us. I don't want to suggest that I'm the best of us. There are way better than me who have failed at NaNoWriMo. But you miss 100% of the pitches you don't swing at. Sit down at the keyboard and write something. Let the words flow, or let the words don't flow. Because until you try it, you won't know whether or not you can do it. [Sigh] I've heard it said that the limitations that affect most people are what they believe their limitations to be, rather than what their limitations actually are. So, whether or not you think you can finish NaNoWriMo, I think you should start.
 
[Mary Robinette] Right. So. Now that we're back, what I'd like us to talk about is some of the information that you want to try to get to the reader early, early in your novel or short story. One of the reasons you want to do that is that part of the promises in all of those things is that you're giving the reader reasons to care and to connect. Readers are desperately trying to ground themselves at the beginning, and they will grab hold of any piece of information that you give them and begin to build a world. So you want to make sure that you are giving them information in order to build that world in their head.
[DongWon] One of the biggest mistakes I see in openings is not giving enough information. Right? A lack of information density can make for an opening that feels incredibly slow. It's just not pulling me into the world. It's not giving me information about the character and not giving me a sense of what the shape of the story is going to be. So, the way I always talk about opening pages is I want them to be like a layer cake. Right? Where there's so much stuff put into those opening pages that are giving me a sense of world and character and all these things. So one way to do that is to kind of play with your voice a little bit and play with time and interiority and perspective to be able to give us lots of different pieces of information from lots of different angles as quickly as possible.
[Erin] Sometimes I actually like to think about this is literally the who, what, when, where, why, and how. Like, these are the things that your reader's going to want to know in the beginning. You don't have to give them all in one sentence. Though, if you can, that's exciting. But, really, I like to think about when am I answering like, who. Who is this happening to? What. Like, what is actually going on at this moment? When and where is our setting. Like, when and where are we? Then, for why and how, how is a lot of tone. Like, how is this story going to be told? Is this humor, is this a light touch, is this like dark and foreboding? Like, how is the story being told? Why is a little bit of sort of the if there's any theme that I want to put in there, that I want to seed early on. Sometimes, I'll actually go through the pages of a story and be like when our each of these elements clear? If one is clear very, very far down, then, am I doing that for a reason? If I'm not, can I bring it up, and at least suggest what's going on so that it doesn't feel missing?
[Howard] On that point, or to that point, I love the idea of descriptions as being either additive or corrective. I see corrective as inherently problematic. If I've given you some description, you're going to start building independently of me continuing to write things. If I lead you in one direction and you keep running in that direction, but that's not what is actually happening, the next piece of description I give you is corrective instead of additive. Every time you do that, you are breaking a trust with the reader. Now, in a humor novel, you can absolutely get away with it. In fact, it's a fantastic technique. But, I started thinking about it in this way, where, yes, I want to order things, the who, what, when, where, why, but I also want to make sure that if I start people down a path, I don't let them run far enough that I have to correct my description later.
[Dan] I think it's important to point out… We don't want to freak you out with this thought that you have to explain everything in your first couple of pages. That's not what we're talking about. Think of it as providing evidence of what's going on, rather than providing us answers for what's going on. You don't need to explain your entire magic system, for example. But you do need to give us the information that pertains to the scene itself. If your first scene is a fight between wizards, then, yeah, we need to understand some of the magic system. If it's not, you can just drop hints here and there, give us some breadcrumbs, and explain the rest of it later.
[DongWon] One thing I always say is that I need character stakes in the opening scene, I need some sense of, like, what's at risk here. The other thing I always say is these can be lies.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] This goes a little counter to what Howard was saying, but this doesn't have to be your main character's biggest problem. This can be a minor set of stakes that they need to get through for this scene, that will then lead them into bigger inciting incidents. Right? So, I need a sense of the shape of the story. Don't feel pressured to communicate your whole novel to me in this moment. I just need a story, a subplot, a little something for me to chew on that's going to pull me into the rest of the book.
[Howard] Coming back to additive versus corrective real quick. If you tell me someone is desperately trying to get a hold of someone else, but can't, and you don't tell me why, I… Well, if you tell me because my cell phone has no charge, then you grounded me in the 21st-century. If you tell me that I can't get to a pay phone, whatever, then you grounded me maybe a couple decades earlier. Or smoke signals or whatever. I need to know if we're in Civil War era or 21st century fairly early on with the descriptions end up being very, very corrective when you deliver them.
[DongWon] This brings me to one another point is to be a little careful of metaphor in these opening pages. Because everything… I don't know anything about your world, so sometimes somebody… I'll run [inaudible into fantasy?] where somebody puts a metaphor in and I'll think, "Oh, literally, people are fish in this world." Not they were like a fish in this moment.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] You know what I mean? You can take stuff that is completely wild because I am… It's all open skies for me. I don't know what it is I'm engaging with yet. So, those metaphors can be taken incredibly literally in those opening pages. So, something to be a little careful about.
[Mary Robinette] I… I… I'm going to give like some metrics for a really mechanical way to do this. For people who like rules and are feeling freaked out. I want to be really clear that this is exercise stuff, this is not books must be written this way. But if you're like, "I don't know, this is too much." Using Erin's idea of who, what, where, why, I do something very similar. That is, I try to make sure that my character's… My readers know where we are, who we're with, and something about the genre or mood. I count when as part of the where. I try to do that within the first 3 sentences. So that I'm just like giving… And it's not that… When I say who, it's not that you have to know my character's entire back story. It's just giving a little bit of an idea of whose eyes we're going to be looking through, who we're going to be connecting to. Then, within the first 13 lines, I try to make sure that we know something about my character's goal. The reason I say the first 13 lines is an entirely mechanical and mercenary thing, which is that it's about the first half page of a manuscript, and that's about how long you have to hook an agent or an editor when they are in the slush pile. So if you can give them something that your reader… Your character wants. To DongWon's point, it doesn't have to be the big thing, but something that's, like, somehow thematically linked. Like, if we're going to be on a big quest later, they're just looking for the remote control right now. But something that they want.
[Erin] Let's say 2 things about that. One is that I think those small things, like looking for the remote control, build the trust that Howard was talking about earlier. You show that, like, I'm going to show you something and I'm going to deliver on it. Then you don't have to deliver on it as quickly the next time, because you've built that trust. But also, to be like a chaos gremlin…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Like, in opposition of what you're saying, I also feel like one of the things that's nice about Nano, it's, like, a time to play around and find out what…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Surely.
[Erin] And find out what happens if you break all these rules. Do you want to write 50,000 words where no one knows where they are the entire time, including the reader? Hey, go for it. You may find out that you've discovered a new way of writing fiction, or you may find out that it's confusing and you need to go back and add that in. But this is a great time too, like, play around with what you're doing and how you're doing it.
[Mary Robinette] I actually completely agree with that. So we're in great shape. And, I think, that we've set you up to begin your first nano day. Hopefully. So, dive in. All of the words you count write.… All of the words you write count! Now, we're going to give you a little bit of homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, your homework assignment is that I want you to write 2 different openings. The first one is going to be more action driven, where your character is doing a thing. The 2nd one is going to be voice driven, where you are ruminating on something and kind of just exploring voice. You may wind up using neither of these, both of them count. You can do them in any order you want. But explore 2 different ways of opening that novel.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Mary Robinette] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We're now offering an introductory tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.37: Mandatory Failure

Sep. 13th, 2023 05:28 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
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Writing Excuses 18.37: Mandatory Failure
 
 
Key Points: Deep dive into Mandatory Failure, book 18 of the Schlock Mercenary mega-arc. Book 1 of the three-book finale! Start with an explosion, due to enemy action that continues through the last three books. This book focuses on a refugee crisis that the mercenaries are dragged into help resolve. Setting up a big galaxy event, with a logistics problem? Big problems matter when you see the effect in small places. People growing up and stepping up. How should we behave in a crisis? The world's worst apology. A comedic tool, cascading failure. Emotional for you, the writer, versus emotional for the reader? Check your alpha reader, crit partner, or reasonable facsimile. Do figure out what level of feedback you need. Authentic emotion versus manufactured emotion? Balance emotion and craft. Mandatory failure -- you are going to fail. But don't let that stop you.
 
[Season 18, Episode 37]
 
[1:30 minutes inaudible advertising Hello Fresh]
 
[1:51]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive, Mandatory Failure.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Howard] We have reached that point in this eight episode miniseries where we're actually doing the deep dive part and diving into the books. Mandatory Failure is the 18th Schlock Mercenary story and is book 1 of what I structured as a sort of a three book finale to the 20 book mega-arc. So that's really the way I think of it, or the way I thought of it. Yes, it's the 18th book in a thing, but it is the first book in a trilogy that will end in a big way the fellow cast members here have just read it, and I'm sure have bazillions of questions for me. I'm anxious to not be able to answer them.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I'll just start. The question that I have actually comes from what you just said, which is knowing that this… You meant this to be its own sort of self-contained thing within the larger. How did you decide where to start? To make it a satisfying beginning for the trilogy?
[Howard] I gave it a prologue with an explosion, and the explosion in the prologue was an explosion… It was enemy action, and it is enemy action that continues throughout the trilogy. But in this case, it sets off a very specific local series of events that this book focuses on. So the fact that the enemy action… We have non-baryonic entities, the Pa'anuri in the Andromeda galaxy, and, oh, no, they have actually developed a weapon that lets them fire plasma through hyperspace and destroy targets kind of at will, and there's nothing we can do about it. That drives the next three books. That is… They have a plan, and that drives the next three books. But for this book, the first thing that they hit creates a disaster, creates a refugee crisis, and our heroes, the mercenaries, get dragged in to… It's not very mercenary-ish, they get dragged into help the refugees.
[Mary Robinette] They were voluntold, I mean, really.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] They were voluntold.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Well, I mean, they were voluntold, and the way… It was fun to create it that way. One of the mercenaries is related to someone who's there on the scene, and because of the weird and very very racist laws in place in that system, they couldn't hire outside help unless they were related to somebody who lived there. So she makes a call to her sister, and her sister talks to the CO, and off we go, as mercenaries that nobody wants to have.
 
[DongWon] It's such an interesting, almost counter-intuitive plot decision that you made because you know that you're setting up this big galaxy event. Where you start is an entire volume that's really focused on a logistics problem in a very specific area of how do we deal with all of these corpses, I guess. They're kind of corpses.
[Howard] Yeah.
[DongWon] So much of that initial section is taken up with the mechanical logistics. How do we harvest them? How do we bring them back? How do we feed them? Then, also the political problem of how do we make this… How do we not start three wars or whatever it is, by doing this thing? You know you want to get to point C. What made you decide to spend so much time in this very narrow slice? That is not a critique, I think it works beautifully, but…
[Howard] It was a lesson that I learned early on, which is big problems don't matter until you see the effect in small places. Famine? Yes, that's a disaster. Me being hungry? Is an F-ing catastrophe. So that's… I wanted to drill as far down as I could. Having refugees begin waking up before we're ready for them and wonder where their family members are. That is extremely poignant, extremely relevant to millions of people on the planet Earth right now. It was difficult for me to write because it was so raw. But by doing it that way, when I blow up more and more things later on, you can extrapolate. People have already felt it in the small space, and now they can project it on the big screen, and I make you feel even worse. As an author, that's kind of how we think. What can I do to make you feel worse than you feel right now.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You did a good job of that.
[Howard] Thank you.
 
[Mary Robinette] Really, I like that… Like, one of the things that I want to just draw attention to is that… DongWon, you mentioned a number of different things that you're doing with that, but you're also doing like you've got these character arcs that are also happening for multiple different characters. So you set up this thing with Peri where she is pretending to be in charge and is like trying to figure out the balance of where power is. What is too much, what is comfortable? That's again reflecting like this larger power struggle that's going on.
[Howard] Well, it's one of the themes, one of the quiet themes which were actually going to try and reflect in the cover art. These books aren't in print yet. Book 17 features Capt. Tagon on the front cover, front and center, there really aren't any other characters there. Books 18, 19, and 20 will feature other characters in the center positions, and Capt. Tagon's picture gets smaller with each volume. Because part of what is happening here, and maybe this is the parent in me, is that his company is… These people are growing up. These people are stepping up. Having a corporal need to take charge and actually boss people around as if she is a flag officer, that's kind of huge.
[DongWon] It really effectively set up the narrative rhyming, or the thematic rhyming we're going to see over the next three volumes of who gets to have power, who should have power, and who takes power. Right? Over and over again, we see entities, people, taking control who shouldn't, people trying to resist that, people getting control when they deserve it. I don't know. You keep asking this question from all these different angles in each of these different scenarios. What I love about this disaster and the logistics is A, it sets up sort of the moral stakes in a certain way, of like this is how people should behave, this trying to care for each other in this type of crisis, which then when things go off the rails in the future, it gives us that grounding. But also really sets up this understanding of thinking about power, thinking about authority, in these ways, because we get to see the characters thinking about it in a very explicit on page way.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the other things along these lines that I also thought was really lovely in the first book is how that question of power dynamics is playing out, not just in the hierarchical nature of the ship, but also in the marriage, the Foxworthy. Like, the scene where he realizes that he has… Where he's trying to apologize to his wife for casting a shadow, and then he's like, "No, wait. That's wrong because that's still centering me."
[DongWon] The world's worst apology.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Such a bad apology. So bad. But it's also the kind of thing that you encounter in real life, and again, it's that becoming aware that you have power, that you have been exercising in ways that you really should not have.
[Howard] When we come back from the break, I want to talk about why that apology was so important. Why that was one of the most difficult scenes I've ever written.
 
[Erin] I am so excited to talk about Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. Which is one of those novels that I think lots of people are talking about and I came to it late. My main question was why did I not read this sooner. So, it's a book, it's a historical fiction novel, that follows the descendents of one woman who has two children, one of whom marries the governor in Ghana, in present-day Ghana, and basically helps to oversee a slave castle, and the other one who is one of the slaves sent over to America. It basically continues to track their families. So each chapter, you go one generation down as you see what happens to the half of the family that remained in Africa and the half of the family that went through slavery all the way down to the present day. I'll warn you, it's a bit brutal at times, it does not shrink away from its subject matter. But it's beautifully written, and each individual descendents story is just this wonderful sort of short story life experience that really puts you in the mindset of the character as she tells this amazing historical fiction tale. So, again, that's Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
 
[Howard] So. I'm going to go ahead and confess, full confession here. When Kevin apologizes to Elf, I wrote and rewrote and rewrote that. I must have broken down into tears half a dozen times while doing it. Because I kept trying to tap into that relationship and into the experiences of someone who knows he has unjustly but accidentally exercised power over someone else, is preventing them from becoming what they could be, and wants to fix it, but the very act of trying to fix it is itself an exercise of power. Wading through that… It was fun to write, in that… DongWon, you said worst apology ever. Clumsiest apology ever.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] But the whole time I was writing it, I could tell that for Elf, it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever received because it was so genuine.
[DongWon] Well, that's a wonderful end to the scene, [garbled] of the scene of her tearing up. It just shows how much it landed, even though we, as the reader, have that… The comedy in the scene is him trying to explain this thing that is so… He keeps, like, apologizing for the thing he just said in the scene. Right?
[Howard] It's… That is a comedic tool, the cascading failure… The cascading failure where it's…
[DongWon] The mandatory failure.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I love that tool. But here's the thing. When I was writing it, I knew that part of what I was creating was a character moment that made this Kevin precious, and I was about to kill him, and he would never come back. Elf would forever have this memory of something her husband had done for her, and even if we are able to restore her husband from a backup, that backup doesn't include this data. As she says later in the story… Schlock says, "The doctor can bring him back." She says, "I want the one who apologized."
[DongWon] It's a heartbreaking moment.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's so… Yeah. It's like…
[Howard] I had been waiting… No lie. I had been waiting five books for the opportunity to put paid on that… This promise that, hey, just because I've introduced a form of immortality doesn't mean death is cheap.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Doesn't mean there's no cost to it. I think it was book 13 where Schlock dies and they try and bring him back from bits they can find and end up having to restore him from backup. We actually had a conversation in a Writing Excuses retreat, and I remember the cast staring at me kind of wide-eyed like, "You know what you've done?" My response then was, "I think I know what I've done. I… You're making it sound worse than I thought it really was. Maybe I should pay more attention."
[Laughter]
[Howard] Yeah, it took me five books to find the point where I could really turn the screws on the poor reader.
 
[Erin] I was thinking about what you just said about writing the apology itself and how it made you feel. I often hear people talk about I was crying… I know I wrote this, and it was working because I was crying while I was writing it. It never happens to me because I'm cold inside.
[Laughter]
[Erin] But I'm wondering…
[Howard] Yeah, just dead inside.
[Erin] Chaotic dead inside. But I'm wondering, how do you know in that situation, like, if what you are writing is emotionally landing for you versus emotionally landing for the reader? Because I think you got in the place you needed to in the end, but, like, how do you separate the you who's experiencing it from the you who's trying to craft it?
[Howard] I have a cheat that is not available to anyone else. I'd been using it for a decade by the time I got there. I would write the scripts, and then I would hand them to Sandra, and I would watch Sandra read. I could see… I mean, I learned… I mean, I already knew a lot of the body language and the things… Micro expressions and whatever else. We've been married now, as of this recording session, we are coming up on 30 years of marriage. This is someone I'm very, very close to. I would watch her read. I watched her read this scene, and she teared up and she giggled, and she teared up and she giggled. Then she handed it back to me and said, "I want pictures." I knew, okay, this one's right. This one is right. I could not have created the Schlock Mercenary that I did without Sandra as the pre-alpha feedback loop. Because many times I would hand her a script and should look at it and she'd say, "Okay. Yeah, no, I think with a picture…" I would snatch it from her and say, "Stop! Just stop talking. I can tell it's wrong because you have confusion and there should be no confusion at this point. The words should be enough." I'd storm off to my office and I'd make it better. Then I'd bring it back, and she would look at it and say, "Oh, yeah. Okay. Yes. Now I…" So…
[DongWon] I will say, you say this is not available to other people. But it is, maybe not in the exact form like…
[Mary Robinette] Sandra is not available.
[DongWon] [garbled a third of your marriage is not available]
[Howard] You can't have my Sandra. No.
[DongWon] But people… You can have a beta reader. You can have a crit partner. You can have a collaborator in some ways. I think having those people in your life that you can rely on to be early readers or even people just to bounce ideas off of. That… I mean, that is available to people in certain ways.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I've heard it called an ideal reader, which is that you think about the person that you want, that you are writing for. So, like, I with the Lady Astronaut books in particular in writing for [Alessandra?] and I'm looking for the moment where she is like… Where I'm like, "Oh, she's going to hate this so much. She's going to be so mad at me." I'm like, "Yes!" That's what I'm writing for is a lot of times is will it provoke that? It gives me a way to kind of AB test things in my own brain even before I commit them to the page by thinking about how the person is likely to react to it.
[Howard] I actually struggle when I'm submitting things to writing groups because when I get their responses, it's already been filtered. No. I wanted to watch your eyes while you read. I wanted to watch everything happen so that I knew… So that's… It's difficult to find.
[DongWon] That is too much feedback for some people. Right? For some people that is to intensive of a process to feel that disappointment immediately in that way, to filter is necessary. So, no for yourself, as you're figuring out who your crit partner is, who to work with, what writing groups to work with, what level of feedback you need.
[Howard] But coming back to Erin's question, I could not know that I got things right until I checked it with Sandra. That one especially, because it's a relationship between a man and a woman, and he's famous and she's not, and draw whatever parallels there you care to, I really needed to make sure that it worked. Once I had her approval, I knew that it did.
[DongWon] It felt like a very personal authentic moment. I felt a realness in that scene as I read it, but I think that comes through very well.
 
[Erin] Yeah. I think… A secondary question, I think, that was lurking beneath my question, is authentic emotion versus manufactured emotion. Because I think sometimes… Like, for example, when I'm not being cold and dead inside, I might cry at like a Hallmark movie when the music swells, but I don't think that's… That's just like I can feel the thing working on me. You know what I mean? It doesn't feel like it comes from a genuine place, it comes from like all the things that are happening around it that are telling me to react in a specific way. Like, when the music changes in a horror movie, it might not be scary, but the thing is telling you is scary. There's a difference between that and when the emotion is genuine and it's coming from a real place. Being able to tell the difference between when you're writing a more surface, and there's room for all levels… But when you're writing a more surface level emotion, and when you're really getting to the heart of things, I think can be really difficult because they both feel emotional.
[Mary Robinette] So the… I hear what you're saying, and the reason I'm over here making faces that if we had a video feed, the viewers would be like, "Ooo, what's going on there?" is because i think that when… I think that… For a long time, I would say, "Oh, yes, you can feel it." That there's this idea, but there are some people who don't have those reactions. Like, when I'm writing with depression, I am strictly crafting my way through that, and I know from experience that the reader cannot tell. Then, people with varying forms of autism often don't have the same kinds of reactions, so it's much like telling someone that you have to read your work aloud in order to know whether or not it flows, which is not a process that's going to work for a deaf writer.
[DongWon] It's just another tool in the set. Right?
[Mary Robinette] It's another tool.
[DongWon] Being able…
[Mary Robinette] It's a tool that can't… I understand what you're…
[Erin] Let me just… My question is actually less about the emotion and more about the craft, though. What I'm saying is you can fool yourself into thinking you are writing something because you are putting all the emotions into it on a surface level. How do you ensure that the craft under it is doing the emotional work needed so that you may be making yourself cry on a surface level, but in fact, you're not getting to something else because you are… It sounds right, if that makes sense…
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] But it is not right. So it's actually the opposite.
[DongWon] That is tricky. Especially the things that are so raw in a way that's… It's so intense of an emotional place that there's not enough craft on it to make it legible to me or connect to me. Sometimes it just feels… I'm so inside someone else's experience that I'm like, "I don't know how to take this in or respond to it." So you always need that balance. Right? You always need to… The score has to be right, the lighting has to be right, all these different things. Right? I think what's so interesting about this conversation is we're seeing that it really is finding that balance point between something that feels very true to you, and something that is rooted in however many years of craft you apply to it. You've got to that moment, Howard, not just by tapping into the emotion of it, but also you've been drawing these characters for years and years and years.
[Howard] Oh. So much, so much craft.
[DongWon] You know how to hone a joke. You know how to do this. And you edit it and reworked it and all those things.
[Howard] So much craft. There was… Gosh, eight years ago, I don't know exactly. I was asked to narrate a Christmas program. The way it had been written was very we are going to tell the congregation how they should feel. I objected to that on several levels. But the uppermost level was my writer brain. It was like, "No. No. We can do this so much better." So I asked them permission. I said, "Can I rework some of this? I think I can trim it a little bit and make it a little smoother. Do you mind?" "Okay, fine." I took all of the tell statements out of it and reframed everything in ways that encourage people to begin imagining feelings for themselves without telling them to do that. The response from the person who created it was, "Ah! Can I have this? Can this be the new edition of… Can I just use these?" I'm like, "Fine. It is my gift to you." It was all craft. It was all craft. It was very much the toolbox of I'm just going to remove all of the statements that tell you how you should feel, and include characters feelings.
 
[DongWon] Can we talk about the title real quick? This idea of mandatory failure. The reason it… Your comments made me think of it was, so much of learning craft, so much of learning how to do all these things, is simply like doing it over and over again. Right? You have to learn by doing. Now, the reason I love this title and I love this idea is inherently you are going to be failing, especially at the early stages, to do the thing that you're trying to do. To access that emotional state, to set the stage properly to execute on all these different emotional levels. Failure is not just part of the process. It is a mandatory piece for success. Or at least that's how I'm interpreting what you said.
[Howard] No, that's exactly right. The quote… And the quote grew out of a subversion of the NASA statement. Failure is not an option. Which is a way of saying this is too important to make any mistakes on. This is the piece we absolutely have to get right. But so many people misuse that and say failure is not an option all the time. I subverted it. Failure is not an option, it's mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Howard] That is my favorite of the 70 maxims. It is maxim 70. It's where the series ends. Putting in here nicely set up for me… I mean, it's sort of a theme in my own life. I'm going to have to fail at stuff over and over and over again in order to get it right. These characters are going to have to fail at stuff over and over and over again before they get it right. In this book, in the next book, and in the trilogy that wraps things up. Speaking of wrapping things up, we should homework.
 
[DongWon] Our homework this week is going to be a writing prompt for you. So what we would like you to do is imagine a major disaster has just occurred. Write a scene directly in the aftermath of this incident.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Howard] This episode was made possible by our amazing Patreon supporters. To support this podcast and get exclusive access to Q&A's, livestreams, and bonus content, visit the link in our show notes or go to patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.48: Believable Worlds Part 2: Creating Texture

Dec. 2nd, 2021 05:46 pm
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Writing Excuses 16.48: Believable Worlds Part 2: Creating Texture
 
 
Key points: Similarity, specificity, and selective depth help you create texture in your world. Help give the sense that your world is lived in, that the characters are interacting with it. Let them move through their world in their daily lives, just like you do. Put conversations in different places. Along with the purpose of your scenes, consider the activity, what the characters are doing in that scene. Don't just think about big things, think about what people do in their daily lives. Give your characters strong opinions. Remember that a little goes a long way.
 
[Season 16, Episode 48]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Believable Worlds Part 2: Creating Texture.
[Fonda] 15 minutes long.
[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Fonda] I'm Fonda.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] All right. So we are still talking about believable worlds. Last week was the illusion of real, and this week we're going to talk about creating texture. What is texture in a story in worldbuilding?
[Fonda] Well, this really is a continuation of what we talked about last week, because a lot of the things that we mentioned, similarity, specificity, selective depth, help you create texture in the world. When I say texture, I mean the sense that your world is lived in. That is not just sort of a stage backdrop to your characters, but that your characters are interacting with that world. One of the ways that I try to make this happen in my stories is to have the characters move through their world in their daily lives, the way we move through ours. School, religion, shopping, daily transactions that you make, transportation, getting from one place to another. If you can do this while also advancing the plot, you will do a lot of worldbuilding in the background in a way that feels very organic. So if you have characters who need to have important meetings and they need to meet with other characters to exchange information, or to have confrontations and to have different things going on from a plot level, one of the best ways to world build is just to have those conversations happen out in the world in different places. So don't have them all happening in the headquarters or in whatever, in their home. Like, have them get out there. I have a scene in which… It's a very tense situation, and it's this confrontation with the two characters, but it happens in a temple. So you get to see the temple and get a sense of what religion is like in this world and the fact that one character bows in the temple but the other does not also tells you something about the characters. I also have a scene where two characters meet at a sporting event. So, those are… That's a way to have the world move by almost like you would in film. Where of… In film, things are happening and there's so much of the world building that is in the background with the costumes and the sets and all that, and you're not paying attention to it, but you're absorbing it. You can do the same thing as a prose writer.
[Howard] Yeah. A couple of examples that leap to mind. The used universe of the first Star Wars film in 1977 which so influenced the genre. This was the idea that things get dirty. Even spaceships got dirty. They were used, and they had dents and scuffs and scrapes and whatever else. When Ridley Scott produced Aliens, he called that look Trucking in Space. It was very informative to us, and it let us feel like we were living there. Contrast that with when Lucas shot the prequels, so many of the sets were designed it just as green screen that a great many of the scenes were a pair of characters carrying on a conversation while walking down a hallway in which they interact with nothing. Even though they then built lavish whatever's around them, it felt stale. So, for us as authors, having people conversing in a temple, having people at a sporting event, where the conversation, the scene requires interaction with what is around them, that's crucial.
[Mary Robinette] There is actually an industry shorthand called touch the puppets.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Which sounds different. But it is exactly this. That when you have three-dimensional figures that the actors, the human actors, can interact with the puppet actors, and it feels very real. Whereas when you have CG characters, there's often no interaction. So it feels like they're existing in two different worlds. One of the things that I do when I'm plotting is that I will write down purpose of scene, which is my narrative intention for the scene, but then I'll write down activity. The activity is the thing that the characters are doing in that scene, which often has nothing to do with the purpose of the scene. So if they are plotting… It's like we're going to plot this heist. They're doing it over… While cooking a spaghetti dinner. The thing that does for me is it makes the world richer, but it also allows me to introduce micro tensions, because that's… There can be things that are going wrong in the scene, like the water starts to boil over. Which can mask the fact that they're just exchanging information in prepping for something. But it also, again, has that texture of making the world feel more real, because small things go wrong in day-to-day life. Like, in one of the episodes that we recorded previously, we had to start over because outside the booth, my cat had knocked over the cat feeder and had, like, jumped in it. If we had left that, this would have felt so very real.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] We removed our vital worldbuilding details. This is one of the benefits that novels have over a lot of other mediums, in that you're essentially unconstrained by budget or time. If you're making a movie or a TV show, then, yeah, you probably only have a handful of scenic locations that you can use in your story. If you are writing a novel, you can have as many as you want. You can have that meeting take place at a temple or a sporting event, because you don't have to pay extra to get a whole sports arena into your book. You just put it in there.
[Howard] I remember my first iPhone. It was expensive, and at one point I cracked the screen and could not just run out and replace it. See item 1. It was expensive. For a while, finger swiping across the screen, there was a texture as I ran my finger across the crack. It was the texture of regret for having dropped it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] It was the texture of need for not having enough money. I felt it every time I use the phone. Okay? That was a little tiny rib feeling under one finger. Those kinds of details will give you way more insight into your characters than you just got into me.
 
[Dan] All right. So, our book of the week this week is one that does this so, so well. Releasing this week into the world, we're so excited, Fonda, tell us about your book.
[Fonda] I guess I should mention that I have a book coming out this week.
[Chuckles]
[Fonda] So, I am finishing off the Green Bone saga with Jade Legacy, which is the third and final book. It is coming out November 30th in the U. S., December 2nd in the U. K. and internationally. It is… I've described the green bone Green Bone saga as an epic urban fantasy Asian inspired gangster family saga. That's probably as succinct as I've ever been in describing it. But it is about… It takes place in a modern era Metropolis, and one in which there is a resource, magic Jade, which endows certain people with very cool abilities. It is the story of two clans in conflict. I'm just super excited to bring the story to a close. It has been a long journey and I'm glad I got to come on here and talk to you guys about it.
[Dan] Well, thank you very much. The Green Bone saga is one of my very favorite fantasy series ever. So excited for Jade Legacy to come out. So, the first one is called Jade City, the second Jade War, and then this new one, Jade Legacy. So if you're unfamiliar with it, start at the beginning.
[Mary Robinette] They are so good. They are so, so good.
[Dan] If you like… If you have been waiting so eagerly, like the rest of us… Mary Robinette, you're a cover quote on it, aren't you?
[Mary Robinette] I am. I say that it's like your favorite wire work film crossed with The Godfather. It's just… But it's so good. Such, just beautiful intimate portraits of people. I just love it a lot. Also magic.
[Dan] Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee. Go buy it right now.
 
[Dan] Anyway, back into our world building and creating texture. What are some of the elements that are often overlooked when we are trying to create texture in a world?
[Fonda] So there are… There's many that people don't automatically think of, because they think worldbuilding, and they think lineage of Kings and government and geography and so on. But things that are very much a part of our own world, like pop culture and entertainment. What are people doing for fun? Fashion trends. Schooling or education. Fitness. Sports. We mentioned food earlier in this master class. Religious life. Daily commerce. These are all… Just sort of think about how you go through your day and the ways you interact with the world. Are you doing that in your fantasy world?
[Dan] Yeah. The… So I play a lot of role-playing games, and one of my favorites is Warhammer Fantasy, which is set in kind of a low magic, fake magic Europe. That world always feels much more real and grounded to me than most of the D&D settings, even though I love them as well. I was trying to figure out why. What about that feels more real? It's this concept of texture. The idea that any given Warhammer Fantasy supplement in describing the world is also going to have a sidebar that tells you about the specific names of all the pub games that they play in the taverns, or they won't just be food, they'll have names for this type of meat pie or something like that, to just add extra specificity, like we talked about last week. But then also kind of give those context, so it's not just we're in a pub, but we're in a pub playing this game of dice which is called this because of this, and the last guy who played it lost in his name is still carved into the table and things like that.
[Mary Robinette] The other… With those things, the pub food, games, all of that, give your characters strong opinions about something. Like that's… And maybe give them a foil who has a counter opinion. Again, it can give you micro tension within a scene, but it can make things feel more real if it's like he hears the sound of the arcade game and it haunts him because he broke up with his teenage girlfriend and lost the top score and has never been able to reclaim it. I don't know. I'm making things up wildly.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But… Because I was…
[Dan] It's a good writing prompt.
[Howard] The smell…
[Mary Robinette] That's where I was going.
[Howard] The smell of a dresser drawer, that at one point had mothballs in it, but hasn't for probably decades, is the smell that will always bring me back to me being 12 years old and visiting my grandmother's house for the first time. That's… But most people will smell that and think, "Oh, how do you… You haven't gotten the mothball smell out of that drawer, have you?" That's not the reaction I have.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm sorry… I'm… Weirdly, I'm going to wind up quoting Hemingway, which I did not expect to do in this episode.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But this goes back to something that Fonda was talking about much earlier about similarities, that you can look for similarities in these specific details. Everyone has heard the write what you know Hemingway quote. I'm going to take a moment to read the… Like, the length… The actual quote. Because it actually gets to what we're talking about here. So… It's not what most people think it is. "You see, I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of actual life across. Not to just depict life or criticize it, but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful, you can't believe in it. Write about what you know, and write truly, and tell them all where they can place it. Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study about. Whatever success I have had has been through writing what I know about." So you know what it is to really like the taste of something. You can give that sensation to your character with a thing that is specific to that world. You can have someone in that world… Or a type of music that you know intimately what it is like to love as a fan. You can attach that to a new type of music that you have made up for this world. That's going to make it feel specific and real and textural and grounded.
[Fonda] Yeah. I definitely think that that phrase write what you know gets misunderstood a lot, and that really, what you're talking about, Mary Robinette, is writing what you know on a deeper level, on an emotional experiential level. Taking that and applying it to new contexts in your fictional world. One thing I want to say to all the readers here is a little goes a long way. Like, we may be giving you the impression that you have to just now all of a sudden just over describe everything and fill it with nuance and context. But that's not necessarily true. You want to pick your places. Show those moments, those glimpses that imply that the whole world has that same texture. I use the example of, like, the Hollywood back lot tour. Where I went to Hollywood studios… Or Universal Studios, and you take the little tram, and the streets on this back lot look so real. Like, down to the bubblegum that's stuck on the railing or the chipped paint on the windowsill. It's entirely convincing. Then you turn the corner, and, like, it's just held up by like boards. There's no building behind it. It's just the front. But what you do show has texture and feels very real and lived in. The reader or the audience fills in all the rest for you.
 
[Dan] Awesome. All right. So, what is our homework for this week?
[Fonda] I would like readers… Listeners to go and take a character that they have in the project that they're working on and free write your character with a day off. Have them just spend it doing what they would do on a day off. Where do they go, what do they see, how do they get around? What interactions do they have? After this exercise, see if you can't find a few cool details that you learned in the process of this free writing that you can use in the background of your main story.
[Dan] Awesome. Well. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.35: What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient?

Sep. 1st, 2021 12:02 pm
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Writing Excuses 16.35: What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient?
 
 
Key Points: What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient? Milieu, inquiry, character, and event. Milieu stories are driven by place, beginning when a character enters a place and end when they exit. The conflicts keep the character from leaving. Inquiry stories begin with a question and end when the character answers it. The conflicts keep the character from answering the question. Character stories start with "Who am I?" and end with recognition of self. The conflicts focus on blocking change. Event stories are action, starting with disruption, and ending with return to normal or establishing a new normal. The conflicts are all about blocking that restoration. Most stories have multiple threads, nested like Matryoshka dolls. The M.I.C.E. Quotient can help you decide what to include or remove, by identifying what kind of thread you are working on. The M.I.C.E. Quotient originated with Orson Scott Card, although his idea element has been renamed inquiry. Almost all stories, from short stories to novels, have multiple threads, involving several M.I.C.E. elements.
 
[Season 16, Episode 35]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, deep dive into the M.I.C.E. Quotient, episode one, What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient?
[C. L.] 15 minutes long.
[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.
[Mary Robinette] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[C. L.] I'm C. L.
[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.
[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.
 
[Dan] We are very excited to have you here. This is the start of another eight episode master class. We're going to have Mary Robinette teaching us all about the M.I.C.E. Quotient. This is something she's an absolute expert on. We're very excited. Before we get into this, let's get some quick introductions. We've got two incredible guest hosts with us this time around. C. L. Polk and Charlotte Forfieh. C. L.… C, can you introduce yourself?
[C. L.] Hi. I'm C. L. Polk. I write fantasy novels. I wrote a trilogy called the Kingston Cycle. I have a standalone book called The Midnight Bargain. I had a short story read on LeVar Burton Reads.
[Dan] [Oooo] That's awesome.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Dan] Well, we're excited to have you. Thank you very much for being on the show. Charlotte, how about you? Tell us about yourself.
[Charlotte] Hi. Hi, everyone. My name's Charlotte Forfieh. I'm coming to you out of the UK. I'm an emerging writer. I've written a few short stories and had them published. I'm currently grappling with a novel.
[Mary Robinette] I invited both C. L. and Charlotte to join us for this for related reasons. We've all… All three of us have had long conversations about the M.I.C.E. Quotient. But C approaches writing in different ways than I do. It's been interesting… I subscribe to their Patreon and it's been interesting to watch the way they talk about writing. It's really cool. Highly recommended. Charlotte is early career, but actually has formal education in writing, which I do not, and is one of my mentees and is actively working on her first novel using the M.I.C.E. Quotient. Some of the conversations that we were having around that also made me think, you know, this would be useful, I think, to a lot of the… You, listeners, because one of the things that happens with Dan and I is that we've been doing this for long enough that we forget sometimes about the things that are hard at the beginning. We also shorthand so much that frequently it's like, well, obviously. Obviously you're doing that. Everyone's like, "Uh, excuse me. Um, that? What is that?"
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] So, with all of that, here's how this is going to go. We're going to do an overview of the M.I.C.E. Quotient today. You're going to hear a lot of me talking today. Then, in the subsequent weeks, we're going to take each individual element of the M.I.C.E. Quotient and look at it, do a deep dive into it, and then we'll look at how you can use these tools. 
 
So, I should probably explain what the M.I.C.E. Quotient is. The M.I.C.E. Quotient is an organizational theory. It's an acronym. It stands for milieu, inquiry, character, and event. Longtime listeners will have heard me talk about it is the MACE Quotient, because there was a time when I was experimenting with using Ask-Answer for the inquiry. But I realized that in podcast it frequently sounded like I was saying Ass Cancer, which was not helpful…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] As a descriptive phrase. So, inquiry. It turns out that you can pretty much explain every story, fiction and nonfiction, through this fairly simple organizational theory. I'm going to talk about this through the lens of fiction, but it is everywhere. So, stories are made of these four elements. They're mixed in different proportions. Milieus, inquiries, characters, and events. These elements can help determine where a story starts and stops and the kinds of conflicts your characters face. 
 
So, for instance, milieu stories are driven by place. These stories begin when a character enters a place and they end when they exit. So, things like Gulliver's Travels, Around the World in 80 Days, are classic examples. The neat thing is that if you know where a milieu story ends, this also tells you what sort of conflicts go in the middle, because your job as an author is to figure out what your story needs to do and then systematically deny them the solution. So, milieu conflicts end when your character exits the place. That means that the conflicts are all about keeping the character from leaving. So these are things like struggling to exit, trying to survive, and attempting to navigate. That's milieu.
 
Inquiry stories are driven by questions. They began when a character has a question and they end when they answer it. It's a super complicated structure. So, mystery stories, classic inquiry stories. Like Sherlock Holmes, Poirot. For an inquiry conflict, your goal is to keep your character from answering the question. They're lied to, they can't understand the answer, the answers lead to dead ends, so many red herrings. These are inquiry conflicts.
 
Character stories are pretty much driven by angst. In the simplest form, they began when a character's unhappy, they end when they are happy. But the real start of a character story is when a character says, "Who am I?" and it ends when they're like, "Oh. This is who I am." They begin with this shift in identity, the self identity, and they end when that character solidifies their self-definition. So, coming-of-age stories, romances. The big thing there with conflicts, your character's trying to change, stop them. Don't let them break out of their roles. Fill them with self loathing. Have the change backfire. I'm not really a writer. I mean, that's a character story, right?
 
Event stories are driven by action. These began when the status quo is disrupted. So when normal breaks. They end when it's restored or there's a new status quo. Yes, everyone dies does count as a new status quo so this is disaster stories, like Inferno, Deep Impact. By this point, you probably understand the drill. You do not let your character restore the status quo. You get fight scenes, chase scenes, explosions. They try to set things right. It has unintended consequences. Just being mean. Like, that is your literal job as an author.
 
Now, it is easy to confuse character stories and event stories. Character stories are about internal conflicts. I'll never be popular. Event stories are about external conflicts. Oh, no, an asteroid is coming at the Earth.
 
So that's what the individual M.I.C.E. elements look like. We are going to do a deep dive into each one of those. But as we do that, I'm just going to go ahead and flag for you to think about, that you almost never see single thread stories. Most stories are made up of multiple threads. Because, honestly, the single thread stories tend to be really dull. So, how do you do it? Think about nesting code. For those of you who have ever done any HTML, if I just say nesting code, you understand what is happening. You'd have milieu, inquiry, inquiry, milieu. For those of you who've never done any HTML, think of it like unpacking a box from IKEA. You open the box… Or just a toy chest. You open the box, and you pull out all of your inquiry toys, and you're going to play with those. Inside that box, there's another smaller box that is made up of character. You pull that box out and open it and you pull out all of your character toys. You play with those toys. Then, at the end, you pack them back into the box. In order to get the boxes to nest neatly, you have to put the character toys back into their box, put it back inside the inquiry box, and then put those toys away. Otherwise you will never be able to return it to IKEA.
 
So, to use a concrete example, Wizard of Oz is a beautifully nested story. It begins with a character story. Dorothy is dissatisfied with her role as a Kansas farm girl. Then we open an event. Tornado! Then we open the milieu, Welcome to Oz. Then we get the inquiry. What do the ruby slippers do? We get to the end of the story, the movie, and then Glinda says, "Oh. The ruby slippers will carry you home. Oo…oo…oo." Which, honestly, she could have said at the beginning. But that closes the inquiry. Dorothy leaves Oz, which closes the milieu. She returns to Kansas, where everything is fine, which closes the event. Then, Dorothy says, "I didn't need to go looking any farther for adventure than my own backyard," which closes character.
 
So when you have stories that feel like the endings fizzle out or the ones that feel like they end and then end again and end again. Two Towers, I'm looking at you. This is often because the nesting code is broken. So, what we're going to be talking about is how to understand what each piece of the nesting code does so that you know which toys you're pulling out, and which ones you're going to use, and how to put them back.
 
So, there is my big overview. Now we're going to talk a bit as a group, after I've just blathered for quite a while.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] Should we pause for book of the week before we talk as a group?
[Dan] Yes, we should. You've kind of already covered the book of the week. Why don't you tell us about the Wizard of Oz?
[Mary Robinette] [laughter] Why? Why, yes, thank you, I will. I'm going to recommend the Wizard of Oz as my book of the week. This is the film version. One of the things… It's a film that comes on frequently in the US. But in my childhood, with broadcast television, when you only had three channels, when it came on, you watched it because it was on. I have watched it as an adult. It is beautifully nested. It is fun. To my surprise, it's actually quite funny when you watch it. There's a lot of jokes in it. I got to see it broad… Broadcast. I got to see it screened on the big screen with a full auditorium [in the before times]. I was amazed that it is really very much a comedy. When you think about it, this makes sense because all of the… The scarecrow, the cowardly lion, and the tin man all came out of vaudeville and were noted comedians and song and dance people of their day. So, it's good. It's like worth watching again. Then, we're going to give you homework about it. But that's the thing I'm going to recommend watching this week.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] It is maybe beside your point of M.I.C.E. Quotient, but I will also say, the Wizard of Oz has entered English vocabulary to a Shakespearean degree. It gets quoted by people who don't even realize they're quoting it. Because it has so many incredible lines of dialogue that have just kind of become part of the fabric of how our brains communicate.
[Mary Robinette] Are you a good witch or a bad witch?
[Chuckles]
 
[Dan] So, I have a question for you to kick off this conversation. What do we do if we are not really a planner or an outliner? How can we still use M.I.C.E. Quotient stuff?
[Mary Robinette] I'm so glad you asked. Yeah, so this is one of the places where I actually think the M.I.C.E. Quotient shines. If you are writing instinctively, and you're going along and you hit a point, you're like, "Oh, no. I don't know what happens next." The thing that the M.I.C.E. Quotient is really good at is it's not talking to you about pacing, it's not talking to you about like how things… Like, the moment by moment structure. What it's really good at is helping you make decisions about what to leave in and what to take out. So if you're paralyzed by choice, what you can do is look at what you've already got happening. So if you're sitting there and you're thinking, okay, my character is trapped in this room and I need to get them out. Oh, I'm in a milieu. This is a milieu. Okay. What are the things that can go wrong related to trying to get out of the room? Then you can find your way out that way. Where you run into problems and you get story bloat, which is one of the things that can frequently happen to someone who is pantsing, is that you're like, okay, my character's trapped in a room and I need to ramp up the tension. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have their sister call them and ask them why they aren't at… Why they're not at the wedding yet. Why they're late to the wedding. Okay, but now you just introduced this whole wedding thing that you have to close down, and, that's a character thread, because now they feel like a bad sister, and that's terrible. So it can help you make that choice about what things you want to… What toys you want to play with in that moment.
[Dan] Awesome.
[C. L.] Very nice.
[Charlotte] Choose your can of worms carefully. 
 
[Charlotte] I have a couple of questions, actually. Where did the M.I.C.E. Quotient come from, because the first time I heard of it was on Writing Excuses and now I'm on Writing Excuses talking about it.
[Mary Robinette] Right. So, I learned it from Orson Scott Card, when I took his Literary  Boot Camp. He and I do not see politically eye to eye at all. But he was a gifted teacher and he had a book called How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, which included the M.I.C.E. Quotient in it. I have done some tweaking and expanding. In the original, inquiry was called idea, which was confusing. What he meant was that a character was trying to chase down an idea. But it began when you asked a question and you ended when it answered it. So I renamed it to ask-answer and then inquiry.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I think the nesting code thing is me. I'm not sure about that, though.
 
[Charlotte] Okay. Thank you. My other question is there's a rumor going around… I mean, you've already said that M.I.C.E. stories have more than one element, but there's a rumor that I've seen in more than one place that a short story has one thread, a novella has more than one, maybe two, and a novel has two plus, maybe three or four. Is that right?
[Mary Robinette] So, no. I mean, yes and no. It is extremely rare to see something that only has one. You'll see that in flash. But most of the time what you have is, you have what I call kind of a major and a minor, or a light frame with short stories. The thing is that all of those elements are present. What you're looking at is which ones are pulling you all the way through the story. So if you think about the thread as a piece of elastic and you stretch that piece of elastic out. That, you're putting tension on that. The reader is holding on until that elastic releases. When it releases, you get this cathartic burst. So the more pieces of elastic you pull on, kind of the more strength you need to stretch that, and the more cathartic bursts you're going to get. But in a short story, you don't necessarily have enough room to tie on each of those pieces of elastic. So what you have is… Like, this moment right now is an inquiry thread within a larger thing. Arguably, Writing Excuses is frequently all about inquiry. But you'll… If a character is asking a question within a scene, and it's not an inquiry story, then asking it and then getting the answer, that is a very tiny M.I.C.E. thread that's happening within it. Whether or not you want to let it become a driver and be something that you maintain and sustain all the way through, that's the thing that adds the length. So anything that you're trying to sustain all the way through, those are the things that add length to the story. Which is why you almost never see more than one or two. I see, usually, that there's… Most short stories have two. 
 
Wait, wait. I think we've just been joined by a tiny cat. Yes, there is a tiny cat who's just joined us.
[Inaudible little tiny cat]
[Mary Robinette] If you hear a small mrrp sound, that is Felix. So, anyway. So, that's basically it. A novel can have 50 bajillion of them. But every time you add one, it kind of has the potential to make the thing half again as long, because you're… Every scene that you're sustaining it in, you're having to spend words to sustain it.
[Charlotte] Right, thank you.
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. So, we should wrap this episode up. It was long this time and mostly me talking. The next… The rest of them will involve other people way more. But, as it happens, I'm going to talk just a tiny bit more to give you your homework. Which is to actually watch Wizard of Oz, but what I want you to do is I want you to watch it with a piece of paper and I want you to track the M.I.C.E. elements. So you're going to be using M, I, C, E. What you're going to be looking at when you're watching it is when the elements open, when it closes, but you're also going to look for the smaller elements within it. For instance, when Dorothy gets to the witch's castle, she has to go into the castle and back out of it. So that is a milieu within the larger milieu of Oz. So, just track when she's keeping them alive… When things are being kept alive. The initial disruption of reminding us that things have been disturbed. So track them through, and see what you learn from doing that.
[Dan] Awesome. Well, thank you very much. I know that we all have lots more things we want to say, but that's what the other seven episodes are for. So join us again next week when we're going to dig really deep into milieu. Until then, you are out of excuses. Now. Go. Write.
 

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Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces

Jun. 3rd, 2021 05:43 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
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Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces
 
 
Key Points: Scenes and set pieces? Start with setting, challenge, adversaries, rewards, and story development. Setting? Wow factor and tactical implications. Environments let players get creative. Challenge? Variety, and catering to different players. Sneak, battle, talk? Unique elements. Make your challenges hinge on character abilities, not player abilities. Adversaries. Introduce bad guys early, and make things personal. Give them distinct abilities. What's their motivation? In prose, we often challenge characters outside their area of expertise, but in games, we usually challenge players in their skill sets. Rewards, or consequences, and story development. Rewards, gear, show the reader they are making progress. Story development. Make sure characters have incentives to do the encounters, and that there are stakes. Think about how a scene pushes things forward. What are the ramification, what are the potential callbacks?
 
[Season 16, Episode 22]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Cassandra] Scenes and Set Pieces.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[James] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[James] I'm James.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We are talking about scenes and set pieces today. We've got a lot to cover, so were just going to jump right into it. James? Get us started.
[James] Yeah. So when I'm designing an encounter or a scene or whatever you want to call it, I like to break it up into several different categories. So I like to think about the setting, the challenge, the adversaries, the rewards, and also story development. So we're going to hit each of those in turn. I just want to start off with, so, for setting, Cass… Oh, Mary Robinette?
[Mary Robinette] I just want to say… I just want to jump in real fast and say all of the prose writers have been riding along with this because they're interested and curious about it. This episode in particular has stuff that directly applies to what you do. Because every point that we're about to hit is something that you should be thinking about in your prose scenes as well.
 
[Setting]
[James] Yeah. I mean, I definitely think, Cass and I both write fiction as well and I'm sure we probably bring everything we've said in this class to those as well. But, so I want to just right now with Cass, when you're designing the setting for a scene or an encounter, what do you think about?
[Cassandra] Well, there are two things, primarily. The wow factor and the tactical implications of your environment. The wow factor can be a whole bunch of things. With video games, in particular, it's all about the visuals, it is all about the audio, and it's also about cinematography. You can have the best graphics in the world, you can have the best music, but if it's a very static kind of thing, or it's just a character walking in, it's not going to work out for everyone. It's also about individual imaginative [garbled]. In prose, for example, it could be things like how things smell, how things taste, texture. But in games, it can also be about emotional beats. My favorite example of that is Persona 5. When you start the game, you are midway through a heist. There are people with shadow faces leading you on through it. You're running through it. It's great and everything, but it's not terribly impactful because it's weird. However, at the climax of the game, after you have everything explained to you, you actually revisit that first place with the exact same parameters. It's suddenly so much more powerful, because you just had 40 hours of context drilled into your head. Well, we've come to the tactical side, since most of my design goes through actual designers. I'm curious about how you develop them into the RPGs, James?
[James] Yeah. So, in a game like Pathfinder or Dungeons & Dragons or Starfinder that's all about more or less killing things and taking their stuff, or occasionally other variations on that, environments can be really important to the design of scenes, especially combats, because it allows the characters to get really creative. It allows… And it makes, frankly, things seem more interesting than just fighting skeletons in a blank room over and over again. When you add an environment, suddenly the players have a lot more things they can work with. So, for instance, you get the players coming up with all these interesting ideas where they'll go, "Okay, if I tie the badminton net to the goat, and then I scare the goat with the airhorn, then they'll run up the end." Like, players are really creative. You want to give them props to do stuff  with. So that's where I feel like the environment can really be handy. Which… Oh, Dan, did you want to jump in?
[Dan] Yeah, I was just going to say that this is a lesson that I learned watching Star Wars movies, actually. Because the first time I played a tabletop wargame about spaceships, I very quickly realized that it's super boring. Because there's no terrain in space. So there isn't really an environment to interact with. It's the absolute epitome of an empty room. Then you watch the Star Wars movies and realize, "Oh, this space battle, they're running through a trench. This one, they're dodging asteroids. This one, they're flying through debris. This one, there's the big giant shield and it's all about which side of the shield are you on, and is it going to be brought down in time." There's always some kind of dynamic interactive element to make those encounters more interesting.
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things about the setting that I just wanted to get in here for prose writers, is that the same thing is true. Like, when you're thinking about the setting, how is your character going to use that setting? How is it going to play into the overall arc of the story?
 
[Challenge]
[James] That brings us right into the second one, which is talking about the type of challenge. I really like variety, like you were saying. I really want to mixup the enemy types with the types of challenges. So it just doesn't become wave after wave. Thinking about challenges that cater to the different character types and player types. Because some people are going to want to sneak, some people are going to want to battle their way through. Mary Robinette's probably going to want to make friends with them if they're giant apple trolls, like from last episode.
[Laughter]
[James] So, you want to make sure that there's sort of something for everybody. But, Cass, what do you think about?
[Cassandra] Well, the balance is definitely one of the most necessary things. But I think it's also important to focus on the elements that make your game unique. If your game is all about a character with an energy whip, create challenges that explore every possible use of that whip. Let her swing across chasms, electrocuting things, retrieving objects… I remember Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I picked up this weird Taser-like ability, and my favorite thing to do would be to knock out people and just very gently, like, fill the water full of electricity to watch them very gently buzz to death.
[Laughter]
[Cassandra] In an RPG, you should always…
[Mary Robinette] Very gentle.
[Cassandra] Be sure that your challenges hinge on character abilities and not just player abilities. The players who spent points building a detective should have an easier time solving mysteries. Even if the player playing the barbarian is naturally better at puzzles.
[James] That's so important. I feel like I've absolutely been in that game where I'm the wizard with the 18 intelligence, but I'm naturally just terrible at most puzzles compared to the people I play with. So it'll be the barbarian being like, "No, it's this and this and this."
[Chuckles]
[James] I'm like, "Dude. You shouldn't know that, and I should."
[Dan] Yeah. The first time that I wrote, it was actually an adventure for Starfinder, typically the game writing that I have done has been in much more narrative systems. Starfinder is much more of a crunchy numbers-based thing. So, the main comment that the editor sent back after I submitted the first draft was, "Dan. Players like to roll dice."
[Yeah. Laughter]
[Dan] I realized that I had not really given them any skill checks. It was all based on just kind of interaction. You can ask these questions and learn this information and then you know where to go. He's like, "No. There's like 20 skills in this game. You haven't used any of them. They put points into those skills and they like to roll dice. Give them a chance to do what they're good at."
[Cassandra] That sort of reminds me, I think, of my favorite tabletop RPG story that is in [garbled]. There was a comment going around a few years ago, of this group of Avengers trying to fight, I think, this Orc Lord. Everyone was kind of dropping over dead and it was just terrible and they were all going to lose. There was this one dude left. He was like, "Okay. What? Screw it. My character has like really high charm. I am going to try to seduce the Orc Lord." He rolled a natural 20.
[Chuckles]
[Cassandra] There was just this long pause. He was like, "You know what, I am going to go for it. I am going to declare my love and just stop the war." He kept rolling natural 20s. By the end of the game, his character was leading this Orc Warlord home and going like, "Mom, this is my new husband."
[James] See, that's what I love about tabletop role-playing games. Because in a videogame, maybe you spend the resources to build out that possibility, even though it's a very, very faint possibility. But in a tabletop role-playing game, you can just change on the fly and go with that. I think that's really one of the things that has kept games like Dungeons & Dragons alive in the era of video games.
[Mary Robinette]. If you been listening to all of these things, the variety of challenges that your character faces in prose is as important as it is in a game. You don't want a character who's constantly just fighting things. You want a character who's having to solve the things in different ways. Often in ways that do not play to their skill sets. That's what often will make an interesting challenge in prose.
 
[Adversaries]
[James] Actually, that's a great segue into talking about adversaries. So, I think it's really important when you're thinking about the adversaries in your encounter, you want to introduce any big bad guys early and give players a reason to care. You want to make things personal. So, yeah, what do you folks do in terms of trying to establish a good adversary?
[Cassandra] You want to give them a few distinct abilities that strongly point towards who they are and what they are, and possibly, at least for me, have at least one encounter that completely cements their personality. I think a good example of this is Borderlands and Handsome Jack. Very early on, you meet him and you kind of get a sense of exactly who he is and why you should absolutely hate him. These things need to be done quickly. I think if you're designing a tabletop role-playing game, these parameters have to be set very clearly as well. Because players have the whole game to learn how to use a complex character effectively. A game master who is looking at your notes, he only has minutes. I'm curious about what people have done in regards to that [garbled]
[Howard] Yeah.
[Cassandra] Adversaries.
[Howard] For my own part, the word adversary is hugely informative here. If you run across something, somebody, some animal, whatever, and it just wants to kill you, that's not an adversary. That's just obstacle, it's an enemy. An adversary that I'm going to care about? Well, look, the party and I, we are trying to build a bridge across the street. But the Otter King has decided that there shall be no bridge across the stream, and he takes issue with our entire project, sabotaging us at every turn. But if we don't build the bridge, our eventual plan to unify the clans on both sides of… You see where I'm going?
[James] I romance the Otter King.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Yes. Please. Romance the Otter King, because everybody loves otters. Ultimately, if… For the adversary to feel real, and for us to feel invested, they have to be working logically and passionately and investedly in something that runs counter to what we're trying to do.
[James] I just want to throw out that in my current Starfinder game, I have a player who is literally playing an otter marriage counselor. That's her whole deal. She's incredibly effective. It's… We've talked our way through half the encounters.
[Mary Robinette] So, the thing with adversaries, we been talking about and around, comes back to a thing that I bring from theater for you prose writers. What's my motivation? The Otter King? Like, sure, the Otter King wants to stop you from building the bridge, but why do they want to stop you from building the bridge? That why can make your adversary often significantly more interesting. So think about what that motivation is.
[James] One other thing I want to throw out before we go to our game of the week is that something Cass had said about keeping abilities narrow. This is especially important in tabletop role-playing games, and which I always tell people who are designing new monsters or new adversaries is that really, you're only… If you're not going to use an ability in the first couple rounds of combat, that's often all that an enemy is on stage for. So you don't want to build an enemy with a dozen different abilities if they're only ever going to use three of them. Because that just makes it harder for the game master to process quickly. So pick a couple of things and that'll both let the GM know how to run them and let the PCs know how to fight them.
 
[James] But, let's pause for our book of the week.
[Mary Robinette] So, book of the week, or game of the week, is Shadow Point Observatory. Which is a game for Oculus Quest 2. It's a puzzle game. But I picked it up because it's beautiful. It's about observatories, which are totally my jam. You're trying to solve this thing where this young girl has been ripped out of time. It's the character that you're going in and you're trying to figure out how to restore her to her time. But because she's been ripped out of time, every time you encounter her, each layer of the puzzle, she gets older and older. It takes decades in her… For her for you to figure this out. There's this one point… It's a spoiler, but this is also like… The kind of excruciating thing that they're doing. Because you're in this beautiful environment, and she begs you not to leave. You're like, "But I have to go, because I have to finish solving these puzzles in order to bring you back." It's so painful to walk away from her. It's just… It's really nicely done. I liked it a lot. My dad likes it too. So. Shadow Point Observatory. Highly recommended.
 
[Dan] Super cool. Before we move on to the next thing, I cannot get this thing out of my head that Mary Robinette said earlier, when we were talking about challenges. She said that for prose, it is often, and I would say usually, really important to challenge the character in something that is not their area of expertise. Which is the exact opposite of what we were saying about game writing. Where often you want to let people do what they are good at. I think that that's a really key thing to bring out, that in games, the players want to excel. They want to have a chance to use their powers. They want to show how awesome they are. In fiction, we often kind of… We want to let our characters demonstrate their awesomeness, but we also want to force them to be weak and to overcome those weaknesses. Which, I think, is a really interesting dichotomy.
[James] Well, it's important to remember that when you're doing a game, you're designing for a range of characters, often in a role-playing game. You don't necessarily know which one you're getting. So you want to make sure that the challenge you design is hard enough to challenge the person who specializes in that particular type of challenge, so that it's a satisfying thing, but they can succeed. But it still needs to be beatable by characters who aren't specialized in that. So you want to make sure that you are accommodating for all of the above.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Even… In both cases, I think, the thing that will happen is the thing that happens in real life, which is that whatever tools you bring to the table, whether it's your characters bringing it to the table in prose or in games, they're going to solve it with the tools that they have on hand. So, just because the challenges and set up for them to be like this is the… The character who in prose who walks into the room and is like, "Oh, there's a lot of people here that I'm supposed to shoot at and I can't… I don't actually know how to use a gun. But I'm very good at sneaking." So they do this… They use the skills, even though the challenge in front of them is set up for them to fail.
[Howard] I want to do a quick call back to something Cassandra said two or three episodes ago about choices yielding consequences. The reward being consequences. I don't mind failing a challenge in a role-playing game, provided the failure isn't, "Oop. Wawawawawa. Game over. Start again." If the challenge going back to the Otter King… I failed to talk to the Otter King, now we have to fight the entire otter tribe. Well, that's a sad failure, because I don't want to fight the otters, I want to befriend the otters. If you build the challenges in such a way that the failures alter the choices we can make, then failure isn't catastrophic. I feel like in role-playing games, failure should be fun.
[James] Yeah.
 
[Rewards]
[Mary Robinette] I feel like that is a natural segue to talking about rewards as part of the consequences.
[James] Yeah. Absolutely. Rewards, and even putting rewards and story development together. Because in many ways, like you were just saying, there kinds of the same thing. The rewards, the consequences, and the development, all fall into the same category. So how do you all handle that?
[Cassandra] Very carefully. Because I feel like…
[Chuckles]
[Cassandra] The entire feel of a player's experience can be ruined, honestly, if they end up with, let's say equipment that is meant for them in the end dungeon. Now, for some players, again, I am a power player, I am happiest when I can just bulldoze through things. It makes me laugh. But for other players, it just takes away the enjoyment, because all the challenges are gone. The environment, the varieties you build in the consequences, they no longer matter if one strike of the sword is enough to stop an adversary cold. So you do not want to end up with a character that is overpowered. Similarly, it's important to track the rewards, because an underpowered character is just going to be miserable. The grind isn't fun when you're dedicating a few hours of your life to fun.
[Mary Robinette] The thing that I think about in prose is that the rewards are part of the way of letting the reader know that you're making progress. It's not just about the gear that you pick up, but that yes, this slog is worth it. Because it's really easy in prose, we talk a lot about yes-but, no-and, and making things worse for the character, and it's really easy to forget the importance of the yes, which is the reward. Even if there is a consequence for that reward. It's still that forward momentum, that forward progress, is still important to think about.
[Howard] One of the mechanics we built into Planet Mercenary, if players embrace in character their failures, they get role-play points. You can spend the role-play points to boost die rolls, to reroll dies, to reroll dice, to… There's all kinds of uses for them we didn't put limitations per game around on how you spent these. One of the players in one of the play tests I ran, to my great joy, figured this out, so that when we got to the point where it's time to defuse the nuclear weapon, he has accrued all of his role played failures and plays this stuff and Bam! The weapon is defused. Nothing about that felt steamroll-y. Everything felt earned. Because he had done such a good job of owning all of the earlier failures.
[Dan] That's great. One thing about rewards, when we're talking about gear, I keep talking about Star Wars and I apologize for that. I don't know why that's the example that leaps to my mind. But when you're talking about giving overpowered gear to a character too early, Luke Skywalker gets his lightsaber like 20 minutes into the first movie. That's the best weapon in the game, so to speak. But what's fascinating about it is that he… The reward is not the gear. It's his own skill with it. We have to get into the middle section of the second movie before he really learns how to use it. It's not until the end of the third movie that he gets it into a full-blown lightsaber battle where he gets to show off all his skills. So sometimes rewards are… It can be really valuable to give someone the crazy equipment early on, and then just let them learn how to use it.
 
[Story Development]
[Cassandra] Last of all, one you really do need to consider is how story development ties in with encounters they are creating. Make sure that your characters are incentivized to actually do the encounters. Make sure there are stakes. They don't need to be big stakes, however. Assassin's Creed Valhalla had this one [cat] that you could find and [stick, take] to your boat. It was a completely separate, quiet quest. Mechanically, it did nothing. It's just a decorative item. But, good Lord, it's also a kitty that you can have on your Viking boat for the rest of the game. James, do you have anything to add on that point before we run away [garbled]?
[James] Yeah. You want to think about how does a given scene push things forward. What are the ramifications? What elements do you want to tag for future reference, so that, as we said before, you can call back to something? What can the outcomes of this scene lead to later so that when, three scenes down the road, somebody calls back to a thing you just did, you've laid the groundwork for that?
 
[Mary Robinette] You all had homework for us, I think?
[Cassandra] We did. We would like you to design an encounter for a game that you've enjoyed, getting all of the factors that we mentioned. Setting, challenge, adversaries, rewards, and story development.
[Dan] Wonderful. Well, thank you very much. This is been a long, but I think, really fantastic episode. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.47: Worldbuilding Science Fiction, with Cory Doctorow

Nov. 25th, 2020 10:12 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 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.
 

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Writing Excuses 15.15: Dialog

Apr. 15th, 2020 11:23 am
mbarker: (Me typing?)
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Writing Excuses 15.15: Dialog
 
 
Key Points: First question: If all your dialog scenes turn into logic-based debates, is that a problem? Yes. One scene like that, okay. Lots? Not so good. Make sure your scenes have two goals, a physical goal and a conversational goal. Logic-based debate sounds like a conflict of ideas, competing ideas. Sometimes you should have other kinds of conversations. Don't forget that most decisions are emotional, not logical. As an exercise, try removing every third line of dialog. Then add bridging material. Do all your character voices sound the same? Manipulate pacing, accent, and attitude for different voices. Punctuation, sentence structure and word choice, and how the person feels. Learn to use punctuation, experiment with m-dashes, colons, semicolons, commas, and ellipses. Second question: How can I create more variety in my dialogue scenes? Move the scene to another interesting setting. Give them two goals, a physical goal and a verbal/emotional goal. Think about the reader's reward. Think about the authorial intent, why do you need this scene, and the character's intention, what are they trying to accomplish?
 
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Dialog.
[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 having a conversation with my friends, Brandon, Mary Robinette, and Dan.
 
[Brandon] We are once again using your questions to sculpt these specific episodes. While the title is very generic, Dialog, there's a specific aspect of dialog you're asking questions about. Here is the first question. Most of my dialog seems to end up being… Turning into logic-based debates between whatever characters are in the room. Is this a problem?
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] There are times… I shouldn't say that. If it's all of your scenes are turning into that, that's a problem. Having a scene that's like that, that's not a problem. So there's a bunch of things that you can do to address that. One of them is to make sure that there's… If you give two goals in the room, one is a physical goal and the other is a conversational goal, that's immediately going to cause things to shift for the [garbled]
[Brandon] Yeah. Agreed. Now, going back to your first point, Mary Robinette, it's not necessarily a problem unless it's all the time. What this means is, having different scenes feel different is part of what makes a book work. Having some of your dialog scenes that read like Aaron Sorkin dialog, where it's just like back-and-forth, snap, snap, snap, snap, snap, is great. It can be really exciting, it can yank you through a scene really quick, it can make you smile, it can make you just have a blast. But if every page is only that, it starts to, like anything in writing,…
[Dan] It can be exhausting.
[Brandon] Yeah. It gets exhausting.
 
[Howard] Let's open up for a moment and look at the logic-based debate between two characters. Fundamentally, what you have there, it sounds like, is a conflict of ideas, and that is what… If that's what every scene is ending up being, then every scene in which you have dialog, the conflict is competing ideas. There is… If we categorize the types of conversation people have, one type of conversation that can be very dramatic is the one where one person is trying to tell a story without revealing a key secret, and the other person is trying to learn the key secret and doesn't care about the story. They're… Now they're not arguing, but there is tension, there is conflict.
[Dan] The fact that this is a logic-based debate also potentially highlights another issue which is that most people make decisions based on emotion, rather than on logic. I used to work in advertising and marketing, and that was our hallmark. People think they make decisions based on logic…
[Laughter]
[Dan] But at the end of the day, it comes down to whatever emotional connection they have forged between themselves and the solution. So making… If your characters are being very careful to plan out exactly the best possible course of action or determine in steady debate who is right and who is wrong, most conversations in the real world don't go that way. Some do. But most of them are a lot more emotional than that.
 
[Mary Robinette] There's a trick that I have, for when I discover that I have accidentally written one of those things. Aside from the introducing physical conflict. This is to go through… This is a totally mechanical exercise that's super fun. I go through and I remove every third line of dialog, because one of the things that happens when you're conversing with someone that you're familiar with is that you'll jump ahead. You'll see where they're heading and you'll jump to the next point. So when you pull out every third line of dialog… I want to be really clear. This is an exercise, this doesn't work for everything.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But when you do it, what happens is that those natural jumps ahead begin to happen. You do have to put in some bridging material to cover them. But it gets really interesting, and often has a more naturalistic flow. It compresses the scene, too.
 
[Brandon] One of the worries I have from this question is, again, if everything is a logic-based debate, I worry about character voices all sounding the same. One of the things I look for as a reader that really makes scenes work for me is when there's a lot of variety to motivations, to how people approach a conversation. Dan mentioned this, a lot of people make decisions based on emotions. Having somebody think that they're logic-based, but there really emotional, facing someone who is very logic-based, or someone who's front about their emotions is often a more interesting scene than a platonic debate or a Socratic debate about here is… Are the logical points that I'm making. Often times, that's just really boring to read, because we want to see the character's investment in this.
 
[Mary Robinette] There are some tricks to changing the nature of a character voice that I learned from doing audiobook narration. There are five things that make a character voice in audio. Pitch, placement, pacing, accent, and attitude. Pitch and placement, you can't do a darn thing with on the page except refer to them. Pacing, accent, and attitude are absolutely things you can manipulate. The length of time… So, pacing, you control with punctuation. How long the sentences are, where you put the commas, whether or not a character gets commas. Someone who speaks in a run-on sentence is going to have a very different feel than someone who has lots of short sentences. Accent is the sentence structure and the word choice. So if you take a training phrase, like, "What did you say?" That is serving to say, "I want you to tell me more." It can take a lot of different forms, but a British nanny is going to say, "Pardon me, Dearie?" And a drill sergeant is going to say, "What do you say, maggot!"
[Brandon] [uh-hu]
[Mary Robinette] So, looking at the word choice and sentence structure. Then, the attitude is what the person… How the person feels. Again, that changes the word choices that we make. It changes our pacing. So looking at your use of punctuation, and your word choice, and sentence structure, is a great way to shift the language of your characters.
 
[Brandon] So, one of the things I noticed teaching my classes at the University over these last years, is that a lot of my students aren't very fluent with punctuation. Now, these are high-level students. It's usually… To get in my class, there's 15 slots, and we usually have 100 or more applications, and we picket based solely on how good are these… The sample chapters that they sent. So these are high-level amateur writers. I just assumed because they are high-level amateur writers that if they're not using certain punctuation structures, they've made a stylistic decision. Right? It's okay not to like m-dashes, for instance.
[Mary Robinette] Sure.
[Brandon] I love them. Other people are like, "You know what, I don't like this punctuation, it becomes a crutch, whatever." Totally all right. But I started to mention to people, like, "Hey, this might use an m-dash. I know you probably aren't stylistically interested in them, but you might want to experiment." They're like, "An m-dash?" I realized a lot of high-level writing student get there by practicing a ton, but they aren't using all the tools because they haven't been able to figure out how to take those boring, dry English major classes…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] And apply them to actually writing stories. Using m-dashes, colons, semicolons, commas, ellipses in your dialog… That's like something that's vital to me, in order to make it feel right. I'm realizing more and more a lot of my students don't use it just because they've never been… Had those tools explained as potential tools for controlling how the reader reads a scene.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. That is The Lost Future of Pepperharrow.
[Mary Robinette] By Natasha Pulley. I love this book. The first book is The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. I had enough time in between reading that one and when I got The Lost Future of Pepperharrow that I think that you can actually read this as a standalone. Obviously, there are some nuances. But, basically. The main character is a composer and a synesthete. He has synesthesia. It's set in Victorian England. There's another character who is clairvoyant. It's this whole interesting thing of, like, what is free will, what are the choices that you make, and then there's a clockwork octopus that steals socks. It's just beautifully, beautifully written.
[Howard] That actually explains a lot.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So many things. So beautifully written. I love these books with abandon. One of the other things that I also love is that there's a little girl character whose name is Six. She is… to a modern eye, she's probably autistic. But they don't have the word and the people just accept that this is who she is. They don't try to make her be someone else. She's just allowed to live her life, and there's no like "We're going to cure her" subplot or anything like that. It's just characters who are fascinating. I just love these books a lot. I'm going to ramble about them for days. The Lost Future of Pepperharrow. One of the reasons that I actually wanted to bring this up with dialog is that much of It takes place in Japan, where people are speaking Japanese. She has made the choice to render it in slang that is class linked to Victorian England, because the character who is interpreting it is a Victorian. So when someone is lower-class, in his head, he hears them as Cockney. Because…
[Brandon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] It's so good. It's really interesting.
[Brandon] Awesome. The Lost Future of Pepperharrow.
 
[Brandon] All right. So, the second question we have for this week is what can I do to create more variety in my dialog structure, or in my dialog scenes? One of the things you can do is something that I love to do. When I notice one of these scenes… Sometimes I just keep it, right? My dialog scene is working. Sometimes I'm like I have had too many scenes like this. These are the equivalents… I've talked about this a little bit on the podcast before. In movies, you will occasionally have scenes where two characters walk down a hallway, stop, and then there's a shot, reverse shot, as they have a conversation, then they walk a little further down the hallway, then they stop, and there's a shot, reverse shot, and then they walk a little further, and then shot, reverse shot. These scenes are okay, but they're kind of the cinematic version of sometimes you just need to summarize in your book. They're the sort of things that you don't want to have to use unless it's the exact right tool at the exact right time. They're a little bit lazy, and they're a little bit boring. In books, sometimes you have these scenes of dialog where you're like, "I just need to get this information across. I know I need to get it across. I don't want to do it as a big infodump. So I'm going to have characters have a conversation about it and do my best to not make it feel maid and butler." I have found most of the time, if I can move that scene into some other interesting setting… Let me give you an example from Oathbringer. I had one of these. It was boring.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] It was one of the worst scenes in the book. I just threw it away. I instead had a character… I'm like, "Who is this character? What is happening?" Well, it's Dalinar. He is a warlord who is kind of repentant and becoming a different person, but he kind of wants to hold on to the fact that I'm a tough warrior. So he goes down and he wants to do some wrestling, right? It's this whole thing, I'm going to go recapture some of my youth. He just gets trounced by these younger men. In the meantime, his wife shows up and says, "We were supposed to have a meeting. We're going to talk about this." He's like, "Do it right now." It was during the wrestling match. You would think that this doesn't work, but it worked perfectly, because I was able to over… To give the subtext of he's trying to capture his youth without ever saying it. With the things she's saying representing his new life that he's supposed to be getting better at instead of going trying to recapture his youth. The scene just played wonderfully in this setting where he's getting pinned by these younger men.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] That are feeling kind of embarrassed that they're taking their king and basically just… He can't do it anymore. Just changing that scene… When I ran that one through the writing group, one of my writing group members said, "Wow. This is the best scene in the whole sequence. The whole sequence of chapters." It started as the worst one. So just kind of giving some more flavor to the scene can be really handy.
 
[Mary Robinette] That gets back to one of the things we were talking about ahead of… At the early thing, was giving them two different goals, the physical goal and the verbal emotional goal. Sometimes those two things are vastly… They just are fighting themselves. That sounds like so much fun.
 
[Howard] I think in terms a lot of what is the reader's reward for having read this chapter or this scene or whatever. I mean, the scene has a purpose, and in some cases the purpose is, "Oh, I gotta do a bunch of exposition so that I can do a bunch of plot later." The scene's purpose is not the reward. One of the purposes should be a reward of some sort. Some page-turn-y bit. Taking the shot versus shot example… Or the whole hallway walking scene. One, yes, those are terribly lazy. But if in that scene, we are traversing a space between two very interesting spaces, and we arrive someplace where the camera opens up onto something wondrous, and the conversation stops because we are now in a new place looking at something interesting… Well, now that whole thing was justified because we set up pacing for an eye candy. Whatever.
[Brandon] Agreed. I love some of those things.
[Howard] I always think about it in terms of what's the reward for the reader? If there isn't one, what can I put in?
 
[Mary Robinette] You said something that made me think of a thing which is that when you are looking at these scenes, they actually serve two functions. There's the authorial intent, the reason you, the author, need that book… That scene in there. But then there's the character intention. Every time we're talking, we're speaking for a reason. There's something that we are trying to accomplish. Sometimes it's I want to look clever, sometimes I want to get information, sometimes it's I want to prevent someone… It's… There's a purpose behind that. So if you can think about exactly why the character is saying that, and you make sure that that is present in the scene… It's not a scene that's just, "Hello, here is my authorial intent."
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Yeah, that's what I wanted to mention as well, because when we start scenes, we often think about what our goal as the writer is, what is this scene intended to accomplish. Making sure that you know what their goals are… Not only does it provide more characterization like that, but usually what it does is it brings a lot of imbalance into the scene. People want to have a different conversation than the person they're talking to wants to have. Or, you will have a power imbalance, where one character is trying to convince their teenager or their employee or something to do something, like, "I don't want to be a part of this conversation at all." Or just a child talking to an adult and not being treated seriously. Those imbalances, wherever they come from and however they manifest, can add a lot of texture in there as well.
[Brandon] All right. That was a really good conversation about dialog.
[Dan] Hey!
 
[Brandon] Look at that. Let's go ahead and go to our homework, which Mary Robinette is going to give to us.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So, what I want you to do is I want you to take a scene with dialog. This can be a scene from something that's already written or something that… A published thing or something that you've written. I want you to remove all of the description from it. So that you're just left with dialog. Then I want you to do that thing I mentioned earlier, I want you to remove every third line of dialog. Put the context back in and use body language and internal motivation, where the character is thinking. Build bridging things in there so that the scene now flows, with those pieces of dialog missing.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.35: What You Leave Out

Sep. 4th, 2019 11:09 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.35: What You Leave Out
 
 
Key Points: Worldbuilding an iceberg? Just build the tip of the iceberg, and make readers think the rest of it is there, too. Build what's needed for verisimilitude. Figure out where your scenes are set, then figure out what that looks like and how it works. What are you going to be using the most? What will my characters be directly interacting with? Give the reader information in ways that asks questions, instead of answers them. Use relationships to other events, rather than exact times. Leave it out, if it doesn't help the story. Think about what the book is, then do the research. Do you need to show the event happening or can you just tell the reader that the event happened and had an outcome? Sometimes, you don't want to go there. Postpone that decision until you need it! Be aware of the uncanny valley of worldbuilding -- far off, skip the details, it's okay, we got the broad strokes. Too close, too many details, and suddenly readers start asking questions. Don't fall into that valley! Watch out for the super-detailed realistic piece that makes everything else look fake. Focus on what you actually need to keep the story from falling apart. Avoid worldbuilding details that would ruin the story.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 35.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, What You Leave Out.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Pause]
[Howard] That probably wasn't what I was supposed to leave out, but go ahead.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] We all just sat there, going, "What is he? Oh!"
[Mary Robinette] And you are?
[Dan] I'm Dan, I guess.
[Howard] And I'm Howard. And unapologetic.
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] All right. What you leave out.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled not amused]
[Brandon] So when I teach my students about this topic, one of the things I mention is when I was a newer writer, one of the things I got told frequently is that you want to, in worldbuilding, worldbuild a ton. But not put all of it in. Put enough of it in that the reader… You're indicating to the reader that it's like an iceberg, right? You can see the tip and you can see that there is so much more beneath. The more I became a published writer, the more I worked in it, the more I realized that that was… not a fantasy, but perhaps people in the business making it sound a little more grandiose than it is. Because most people I know do not worldbuild the entire iceberg and then show you the tip. What they do is they worldbuild the tip, and then they find a way to worldbuild a hollow iceberg that makes you think that there is the rest…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Underneath there. The goal in worldbuilding is not to do everything, just to do as little as you can and still look like you've done everything.
[Howard] Two nights ago, I was watching the special features for the movie Deepwater Horizon, for that film. They built an 85% scale oil rig over a little 3 foot deep pond. The reason they did it was so that when the actors were outside up high, shooting scenes, the actors are reacting as if they are outside and up high. They could have done the whole thing green screen, but they didn't. They needed that level of verisimilitude. Then there was this point where the VFX guy said, "So, we didn't actually build the whole oil rig. We only built the front." You see this scene where the helicopter is coming in and the camera has panned around the oil rig and it is just… Like 25%, 20% of the oil rig. Then the VFX says, "This is what we had to build," and throws all the other stuff in. After hearing how much time they spent building 20% of the oil rig for verisimilitude, the peace that they needed, this iceberg thing totally makes sense. Build the piece that's required for verisimilitude. Drill all the way down on that. Then fix the rest in post.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] So, how do we apply this to our worldbuilding? What do you guys do when you are worldbuilding? How do you give this indication that there's more underneath there? How do you decide what to leave out of your story? How do you decide what not to worldbuild?
[Dan] So, following along with this set building metaphor here, I remember reading an early interview with Gene Roddenberry when they were doing the original Star Trek series. He said that he wanted to have an engine room, and they weren't going to build him one, until he put that scene into the pilot episode. He's like, "Look, well, we have to have a scene here. I'm sorry, there's no way around it." So they gave him an engineering. What I do when I'm building my worlds and planning my books is I figure out, "Well, where are my scenes set? Where do I want those scenes to be set?" Am I going to be talking enough about main engineering, for example, that I need to figure out what it looks like and where it is and how it works, or is my story going to focus on some other thing? So they didn't build the entire, or even 20%, of the Starship Enterprise. They built a bridge and an engineering room and a transporter room, and that's kind of it. Maybe some hallways. Because that's where they knew their story was going to take place. So I try to figure out what am I focusing on, what am I going to be using the most, and that's what I focus on.
[Mary Robinette] I'm very much the same way. I really only worry about the things that my characters are going to be directly interacting with. I want to make sure that I understand enough of how they interact, of how it works, so that the interaction makes sense. But, like, when we move through our daily life, we interact with a lot of stuff that… There's a number of houses that you passed on the street and you have no idea what's in those houses. But they're still houses. You go to Disneyland. You don't actually know what it takes to make Disneyland work. It's just the front facing stuff. So one of the things that I do is that I think about the pieces that my character is going to have that direct interaction with, like you were talking about. One of the ones that I find works really well our past events. Referring to things… Usually these are things that I have no idea of what they actually are. But instead of saying, "Well, this happened in 1457." Like, I don't actually want to figure out how long ago a thing happened. I don't know. So I'll say, "Well, it happened during the… Right after the battle of the seven red armies." Everyone's like, "Oh, well, the battle of the seven red armies."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Clearly, she spent all of this time thinking about that. What that's done is it saved me from actually working out a timeline. Because I've… Now I can place the battle of the seven red armies anywhere I need to be.
[Dan] One of the things that that suggests to me is that you have given them the information in a way that asks more questions rather than answers them. That gives a gre… I mean, we know when it took place, but we know it based on a relation to an event rather than an exact number of years. In the audience's mind, it's not answering the question so much as it's saying, "Don't worry, I've got this. Also, here's something else to worry about."
 
[Brandon] Have you ever spent a lot of time in your worldbuilding before writing or during writing a story and then decided to leave that out of the story?
[Mary Robinette] Absolutely.
[Brandon] When, why, and what made you make that decision?
[Mary Robinette] In the Glamorous Histories, for Without a Summer, I spent a great deal of time figuring out how Parliament worked in relationship to glamour, and what laws were being passed and not passed, and got into the novel and realized that that entire plot structure was completely irrelevant. I like knew… I had spent all of this research on this one particular historical figure who never appears in the novel now. It was basically, it just didn't help the book. Chucked it. It was one of the things that made me realize that I really need to think about what the book is and then do the research. I will say that I approach my research now the same way that I… I mean, I approach my worldbuilding the same way that I approach my research, which is that all do like these broad strokes, but I only really drill down on the stuff that I actually need to.
[Brandon] I spent a lot of time in the Stormlight Archive before I was writing it, working on the writing systems. The glyphs that they were going to draw and things like this. I left that all out because once I actually wrote the book and I looked back at the stuff I'd done, I realized I'm not an artist.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Beyond that, I'm not an expert in languages and… I just hired that out. So I took all the stuff I did… I didn't even give it to them. Because I'm like, "You know what, I'm going to use the text that I've written in the book." I'm going to give this to the artist and I'm going to say, "What would you imagine this to be?" Isaac came up with stuff that was waaay better than any of the stuff that I had come up with. It kind of taught me, also, that maybe I should spend my effort where I know I'm going to be using it in the story, and then I can, after the fact, I can hire some of these things out.
[Dan] Brandon, you and I just did this yesterday, actually, on the project we're collaborating on. The Apocalypse Guard. We've been wrestling with this book for months now, and yesterday made the decision that kind of the main thing we need to do to fix it is to axe one of the magic systems.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Dan] It was something very cool that we considered foundational to the story, but now that we're looking at the book in its current form, it's kind of beside the point.
[Brandon] It's also the thing that is causing the biggest problem with the story, because where the story is spiraling out of control are all these scenes where I spent lengthy amounts of time talking about the worldbuilding and the history. Scenes that Dan cut out a lot of when he did his revision.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] But the effect of it's still there. It's leading to this big confusing ending where I have… Do what I do, tie all these worldbuilding elements together. But in ways that were cool for those worldbuilding elements and don't really work for the story.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Brandon] It's a point where we have to cut out… One of the things that is my signature is a magic system. Granted, we have multiples. So it's still going to be cool. But it's going to be a way better book if we just streamline.
[Howard] My approach here is often to ask where the line is between show versus tell. There are times in the story where it's absolutely required for the reader, because it's fun, because there's emotional content, whatever, to show an event happening. Then there are times when all the reader needs is to know that the event happened and there was an outcome. So entire scenes will vanish from the writing, because what I needed to do, with the story needed, was for somebody to say, "Battle was fought. So-and-so won." "Oh, really, that sounds terrible." And off we go with the core story.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.
[Mary Robinette] All right. So our book of the week is Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder. I got to read this, an arc of it. It is fantastic. This is near future. It's an Internet of Things. A young woman discovers that her father has been murdered. She thinks. Everyone else thinks that it was a… Just an accident. Then people start coming after her. How do you disappear when everything is connected? So it's really, really cool. It feels like he has thought of everything. But the stuff that we're actually seeing is just the stuff that she interacts with directly. It's great worldbuilding, great characterization. I mean, it's a really good book. It also happens to illustrate some of these points.
[Brandon] Excellent. That was Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder.
 
[Brandon] So, we've talked about worldbuilding elements that we cut out. Are there ever things that you have decided even before you launch into the book, you're like, "I'm just not going to touch that. I'm not going to go that direction with the worldbuilding." Things that you just… Why have you done this?
[Mary Robinette] Oh, like in the Lady Astronaut books, I very carefully do not talk about what the rocket engine is that is driving this ship to Mars. I like really carefully do not talk about that. Because of the amount of research that I was going to have to do. But also, my character is not a rocket engineer. Right? She pilots things. She needs to know how to pilot things, and she does math. So, she needs to do those things. But I did not need to know how the rocket engine worked. And as soon as I worked on figuring that out, that was going to lock me into certain decisions. Like, if I decide that it is atomic oxygen, that locks me into one line of technology. If I decide that it is nuclear, that locks me into another line of technology. Because I don't know what subsequent books are going to need, I decided to not make that decision and to leave room for it to be any of those things, and just… I establish some trust with the reader early on, so that I can just… Like, just get in there and…
[Brandon] You know…
[Mary Robinette] It's like, they're going to Mars. Obviously, they've solved how they get there.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] I had a conversation with this… About this same topic with a writer that I know… That we were kind of brainstorming on some worldbuilding and things. The way I presented it as there's like an uncanny valley of worldbuilding where at a certain point, it's far off, and you're leaving out the right details from what we're doing so that nobody starts to question really how it works. Like, if you don't do enough, people are confused and you start to lose them. You do the right amount, and people are willing to take your word on it. They suspend their disbelief, they accept the worldbuilding, it feels really logical to them, you've got the couple of corner cases that they would assume. Then there's a stage where you start explaining it so much that the rational part of their brain kicks in and says, "Well, wait a minute. This and this and this and this," and you start to hit this sort of uncanny valley where suddenly you lose them. They aren't willing to suspend their disbelief anymore. That can be a really fine balance to walk.
[Mary Robinette] We have this problem in theater, with… All the time. Where you've got a set, and if you go very minimalist with it, you're asking the audience to be engaged. You go too minimalist with some shows, and everything falls apart. But if you've got like a set where everything looks really nice, and then there's this one piece that is hyper realistic, everything else in the story feels just awful. Beauty and the Beast, the animation… When they had… That was the first stuff of the computer animation…
[Dan] They introduced CG in the ballroom scene.
[Mary Robinette] The ballroom scene looks… It looks wrong, because it is more rendered than everything else. Then everything else starts to look false.
[Dan] I did a black box production of Assassins in college. It was all just super minimal sets, but we had a super realistic like rolltop desk, and it just… It looked terrible. Because it made the rest of the show looked terrible.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of my favorite pieces of set design that I ever did… This is a side tangent, but a good example. A friend of mine called me on a… On Monday and said, "We had a reading this weekend and are set designer did not show up with the set. I have just found out that she has skipped town with all of the money which she has spent on drugs. We open on Friday. Help me. I have $75."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So I'm like, "Okay." We sat down and we talked about what are the things that have to be on stage or the show will fall apart. It was a tree, the moon, and a wall. That was basically it. So I bought some foamcore, and I got some paint, and I did this dry brush minimalist New Yorker style thing of a tree, a moon, and the wall. I think I gave him a chair, too. As a bonus.
[Dan] 'Cause you're a benevolent god.
[Howard] You had eight dollars left.
[Mary Robinette] I still had eight dollars. I had to get paid out of that $75, you know. So I… But we stripped it down to what you actually need or the show will fall apart. When the review came out, it raved about the minimalist design and delicate ethereal touches of the set. Meanwhile, in the program, I am listed as scene proctologist, because I pulled that set out of my ass.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So, point being, just look at the worldbuilding details that you need to keep the show from falling apart.
[Dan] Well, it can also be helpful to look at the worldbuilding details that would ruin things. When I did my cyberpunk series, I specifically avoided artificial intelligence. There's algorithms, there's swarm intelligence, but there is no self-aware thing because that is a singularity that I was not prepared to deal with. So, that's not in the story, it's not a possible technology in that world.
 
[Brandon] This story of Mary Robinette's actually leads us really well into our homework. Which Howard is going to give us.
[Howard] Yup. I want you to take your worldbuilding slider and I want you to pull it all the way to zero for one of your chapters. Take a chapter that's got some worldbuilding exposition in it, that's got some cues about what's going on in your world that are deepening things, and pull all those out. Leave yourself with zero worldbuilding. Have a look at that chapter and see which elements of the story fail and which elements of the story still work. This is not so that you can tell yourself that you don't need to worldbuild. This is so you can tell yourself… What the…
[Dan] I need a tree and a moon and a wall…
[Howard] I need a tree and a moon and a wall, and I will give myself a chair.
[Mary Robinette] As a bonus, in the liner notes, I'm going to give you a copy of the first scene of Shades of Milk and Honey in which I have done this exercise. So I have stripped out everything that I identified as exposition. I have to say, that scene is a mess.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.33: Writing Imperfect Worlds

Aug. 21st, 2019 10:22 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.33: Writing Imperfect Worlds
 
 
Key points: Writing a setting where underlying ideas aren't what you believe? Imperfect, flawed worlds, with cultural ideas or norms that you don't agree with? We write these to help understand the imperfections of our world and how to solve them. Popular genre, with a flawed, imperfect society that is clearly unfair as the big bad guy. Take an imperfection in our world and push it. If you are writing historicals, beware of telling the reader that "this is okay." You might try to lampshade it, to have the protagonist stand against the prevailing attitudes. But they need to have spots where they are ignorant or unaware, which they confront. Fiction about imperfect worlds can give us a script, a lens, that we can use in the real world. When writing stories in a historical period or fantasy world, don't just pretend that problems weren't there, don't rewrite history by ignoring the issues. Instead, be aware of the unjust imbalances, the ramifications, the external costs. To write a character who is a realistic product of a society with biases we would consider reprehensible, make sure to include someone who can call them on their bullshit. Give the reprehensible traits real consequences. Think through why they have these beliefs or opinions. Don't give the protagonist a pass on their imperfect views just because they are the protagonist.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 33.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Imperfect Worlds.
[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] And I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] I'm going to ask you, how do you write a setting in which the pervasive ideas, cultural ideas or cultural norms, are not ones that you think should be?
[Mary Robinette] That's basically my entire existence with every piece of fiction I write because I am a woman in modern-day America.
[Laughter]
[Howard] You said imperfect. Any piece of nonfiction is inherently going to be the writing of an imperfect world. I would say that the question you're asking is more along the lines of writing deeply flawed worlds.
[Brandon] Yes.
[Howard] In order to help us… And I guess this isn't part of your question, it'd be part of my answer… You write these in order to help us better understand the imperfections of our own world and how we might go about solving them.
[Margaret] Well, I think we've seen a lot of popularity of this genre in recent world… In recent years. I mean, what else is something like The Hunger Games? They've created this deeply flawed, imperfect society that is clearly unfair. It exists to give Katniss something that's worth fighting against. It's… There's that… You're setting up a big bad guy and there's no bigger bad guy than society.
[Mary Robinette] Handmaid's Tale is another good example. A lot of times what you're looking at here is taking an imperfection in our world and pushing it, when you're creating a science fictional society. I write a lot of historical stuff, which is going into areas where… Like the 1950s, Jim Crow is still very much a thing. The Glamorous Histories. Regency England, which we all love, is built on a base of slavery. So these are things that… One of the challenges is writing it in such a way that it doesn't tell the reader this is okay and valorizes it.
[Brandon] Right.
[Margaret] I know one time when Madman was coming out, I think it was like season one or season two, and I watched a couple of episodes. I'm like, "Hey, mom, have you ever watched Madman?" Her response was, "No, thank you. I lived it." I had… It's not necessarily the imperfect world. Eh, it is not relevant. I need not cite this example.
 
[Brandon] Right. Okay. So, I would say the first thing that I have tried when I did this is kind of lampshade it. It can be difficult because I think your first instinct is to have your protagonist be the person who is not as sexist or racist or ist as the culture around them. Which, to be perfectly honest, I'm okay with picking up a story and then reading it and being like, "Oh." Because there were people, even back in Regency times, who were like, "This is not okay."
[Mary Robinette] The anti-… The whole abolitionist movement there.
[Brandon] That is certainly one approach to it, and I actually kind of appreciate, like, Mary, that you walk that line. I would say a lot of times your protagonists are several steps further along than the average person, but they are… They still have blind spots that they end up usually getting confronted by in the story. So it's not this perfect character who has no problems, but at the same time, it makes me sympathetic towards the character because at least they have the blinders a little bit further open. It kind of makes me think, "You know, I probably still have my blinders on to an extent."
[Mary Robinette] In fact, you're doing that right now, with blinder and blind as a pejorative term.
[Brandon] Okay. Yeah. Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Which is one of those things that I have worked very hard to train out of my own vocabulary, and talk about spots where I'm ignorant. Spots where I have lack of knowledge or lack of awareness. But it is… It's very easy when you're writing these to trip up on stuff that society has imprinted you with. So one of the fun things about doing this, one of the reasons to do that, is to interrogate these things and to look at them and sort of hold them up to the lens and use science fiction and fantasy to tip them to the side.
[Margaret] For me, where I hit the line is where I'm reading a book… Because sometimes it's fun to read books that take place in worlds that are not like ours. That's why we read fantasy and science fiction. Sometimes it's even fun to read stories in a pseudo-medieval setting where gender equity is stepped back from where it is today, shall we say? For me, where I reach the line is where I start to feel as if I've started to read a Prussian porn. It's like this was just written to talk about oh, how terrible it was to be X in X time, or in this scenario. I love Bujold's The Curse of Chalion books. It's like there is a lot of sexism and allusion to sexual violence in those. It's not explicit, but there is this kind of threat of your main character being a woman, there's stuff that she is worried about. For me, that doesn't cross the line. Everyone places their lines in different places where there comfortable reading, but it's not a story that's about like, "Oh, no, I'm going out into the world. What's going to happen to me now?"
 
[Howard] In the… Around 2015, the Schlock Mercenary installments, our cast finds a giant, abandoned station if you will, world-sized, that makes them incredibly wealthy. In the 2018-2019 installments, the original inhabitants turn out to never have left and they want their stuff back. Yes, you can take a step back and look at this and say, "Oh, my gosh, this is exactly like what would happen if the indigenous peoples of the Americas or Australia or wherever rose up and demanded all of their land back. What would we do?" Well, it's not exactly like that. But having the protagonist deal with it in a way that says, "You know what, they're right. This isn't my stuff. It's their stuff. Not a whole lot I can do about that." We now have an enormous debt, which is part of our plot problem. The story is not about returning things to indigenous peoples. The story is about we made an enormous budgeting mistake and now we have problems to solve. It's fun to write and having a protagonist who recognizes, "Oh. Somebody lives here. Actually still does live here." And immediately said, "Well, okay. That's…"
 
[Mary Robinette] A lot of times what I think fiction is doing, and especially when we're dealing with imperfect worlds, is it's giving us a script that we can use and take into the real world. One of the things that I do that is actually the opposite of writing imperfect world is that I tend to write happily committed married couples. I do that because I so rarely see it in fiction. I see a lot of people who have taken their social cues from these narratives about men who are stalkers and men who are abusive. It's like that's not the relationship that you should be aiming for. So when you deal with an imperfect world and you have a character who is coming to grips with their own imperfections, it gives the reader a script and a lens with which to interrogate their own stuff. I know that I… That's certainly one of the things, the side effects, that happens when I read. It is one of the things that I think fiction and science fiction and fantasy particularly do very well.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is actually Mary's book.
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I've been talking a lot, but I'll talk some more. So, The Fated Sky is the second book in my Lady Astronaut series. The reason I suggested this book for the book of the week is because it is set in the 1950s. It is set in the heart of the civil rights era. It is dealing with a lot of the problems that are inherent in the world at that time. My main character, Elma, is not actually a completely reliable narrator. It's first person narration. There's another character who has been her antagonist for the entire book. As this book unfolds, we find that as she is interrogating her assumptions, that… And he is interrogating his, that there is… There's actually more common ground than either of them thought. But the big thing for me with this is the idea of the narratives that we bring into relationships. That when we are describing our relationships to someone else, it's like, "Oh. I hate him, he hates me." That's the narrative. That's part of what happens with an imperfect world is that it's built by people who come with their own narratives that they're applying to just stuff that happens.
[Brandon] I haven't read the second one yet, but I've read the first one. The first one deals with the same sort of thing, and I loved it.
[Mary Robinette] Thank you.
[Brandon] It is one of those… It was just really, really interesting and fun to read, and eye-opening at the same time.
[Mary Robinette] I suppose I should mention that this is a book about going to Mars in the 1950s when women are the computers because we don't… Haven't miniaturized computers yet.
[Margaret] But with punchcards.
[Mary Robinette] With punchcards.
[Brandon] It's an alternate history.
[Mary Robinette] An alternate history. And imperfect… There is an entire chapter that is nothing but clean… Zero G toilet repair.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Selling point.
[Howard] Do you use the word milk dud?
[Mary Robinette] No, but we do talk about satellites in orbit.
[Howard] Okay.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] So. Veering back…
[Laughter]
[Margaret] I'm just remembering all of the rocketry euphemisms in the first book. I'm like, what euphemism?
 
[Brandon] What do you guys… Do you have an opinion on stories that are set in a historical period or in a fantasy world that just tries to pretend the problem was never there? Meaning people who want to write a steampunk story and just say, "You know what, we're going to write an alternate history version where this isn't an issue." Or people who write a fantasy novel, where they say, "You know what, in my world, racism just isn't an issue. We're not going to deal with it."
[Mary Robinette] The thing is… There are parts of me that love these optimistic visions of the world. I think when you're doing steampunk and doing that, you actually have to move it to a different world. You can't just erase history. That is deeply problematic. It's taking a lot of people's pain and going, "Ah, I just don't want to deal with your pain, so I'm not going to. I'm not going to acknowledge that you've been hurt. I'm just going to… Goggles, dresses, and overalls! Whee!"
[Brandon] Right. Can I… I don't want to… But this is… This is something that is very natural to start doing, and is a place where you might end up having to confront some of your biases because natural human instinct is, "Oh, I'll make it better. Isn't it just better…"
[Margaret] If that never happened?
[Brandon] If that never happened?
[Mary Robinette] While, yes, that would be… It did happen. The other thing that I would say has just slipped out of my head, so, Margaret, you talk, since you had a thing you wanted to say.
[Margaret] I was saying that I don't want to say that you can… It's like, "Oh." I think a trap that one can fall into in, say, steampunk or historical period, and you know that racism was a problem or sexism was a problem, but you don't want to deal with that. The way to not deal with not dealing with that is to not have, say, any characters of color in your book, so that lets you ignore racism.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Margaret] That's a bad way of dealing with that.
[Mary Robinette] Don't do that.
[Margaret] I mean, clearly, if you're doing steampunk, you're creating an alternate history. There were not giant rail lines of flying zeppelins. I don't even know why you'd have a rail line if you were flying, but… 
[Mary Robinette] But still… 
[Margaret] Whatever, it wasn't there. But if that's the only thing you've changed, and everybody is also still white and upper-class and… Who is shoveling coal and how are we thinking about this?
[Mary Robinette] That, for me, is the thing that… Unfortunately, as a species, we tend to just always other people. If we're not going to do it along race lines or gender lines, we're going to find something else. There is always, unfortunately, going to be oppression. I wish that that were not the case, but I find it difficult to believe that there wouldn't be some form of oppression. So when you decide that it's like, "You know what, I'm not going to have racism." But there will still be some other… It's like there's something, unfortunately, is going to fill that gap. There's going to be…
[Howard] There needs to be an unjust imbalance somewhere.
[Mary Robinette] There's going to be ramifications of that choice.
[Margaret] It's ignoring the fact that this lifestyle was made possible because of an oppressed underclass.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Honestly, folks, and this is uncomfortable truth to hear, it's still the case.
[Margaret] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Like, the majority of the wealth in the world is in the United States, and even if you are poor, there are people in the world who are supporting your lifestyle who have it worse than you.
[Howard] There's a concept that super useful for trying to understand the unjust imbalances. Marginalizations. That is the concept of an external cost. If you want to write a flawed society, think about what the external cost is. A good example of external cost is secondhand smoke. I want to smoke. Yes, it cost me something, and it also makes everyone around me uncomfortable, and it changes the smell of the room, and that one's kind of obvious. What if the cigarette smoker couldn't get cancer, and there is no primary cost for them? Suddenly, we have an unjust imbalance that's really unjust. So look at external costs, and as you are creating your society, your secondary world fantasy, your far-flung future, ask yourself who benefits from the external cost and who is paying the external cost unjustly.
 
[Brandon] So, last question along this topic. You want to write a protagonist who is a product of their society, and therefore has certain biases that we would consider reprehensible. You don't want to… Say you're writing a historical novel. You want to be realistic, although sometimes realism is used as an excuse for things, as we've talked about before. But you want to… You want to be realistic. You don't want this character to be villainous, but you also want them to be a product of their society. Any tips?
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I do is to always have someone that can comment or call them on their bullshit.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Mary Robinette] Because that's one of the ways that you can let the reader know that this character is reprehensible, but that you are not giving approval to that. Because there's a difference between the character being reprehensible and the text saying that that reprehensible trait is a good and positive thing. So having someone who can call them on it, having there be consequences for the reprehensible traits, these are things that I think can help when you're doing that. The other aspect of that is trying to understand why the character has those opinions. Sometimes it's just the way they were raised and imprinted and they have no idea that those things are false or bad or problematic. Sometimes it's… More frequently, when you're dealing with forms of oppression, there is a sense of safety that has been challenged in some way, and that they think, by maintaining this particular status quo, that they will maintain their own security. Or that they will lose something if the status quo shifts. So if you think about the why's of their choices and their opinions, that's going to help you have a character that isn't just "I have this terr… I'm evil." Yeah, evilness is evil.
[Margaret] I'm thinking also if you have a protagonist who is a product of an imperfect society, and being a product, you want to be able to say, "Well, yes, they probably hold some of these imperfect views." What I would be careful of is making sure, since I'll probably have other characters of the society who probably have similar views who are villains, making sure I'm not giving my protagonist a pass on their imperfect views just because they happen to be the protagonist.
[Brandon] That's a very good point. Yeah.
[Margaret] It's like, "He's a great guy, so it's okay that…" That's where I think it can get really sticky.
 
[Brandon] Yeah. I'm going to give us our homework today. Your homework's actually to take a character who is either in some media form or someone you have written who is a wish fulfillment character. This is a character for whom things have gone really well. Things might be easy. They're at the top of their power structure. Even though they might be facing very hard external problems in the form of slaying a dragon or rising to the head of their company or something like this, there are certainly obstacles to them, they are in a position where they're able to command a lot of weight of authority and privilege. Take that character, and move them to the bottom of a different power structure or put them in a place where suddenly those things no longer exist for them. See where that story goes. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.31: Cultural Setting As Conflict

Aug. 9th, 2019 01:17 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.31: Cultural Setting As Conflict
 
 
Key Points: To some extent, every story has some aspect of characters in conflict with their setting. Consider conflict as either a desire to move or resistance to being moved. Also, I don't like the way this is built, and I want to change it. A.k.a, ideals in conflict with reality. Immigrants are automatically in cultural conflict. Children of immigrants, growing up, face a challenge between what their parents want and what the culture around them teaches. Nobody represents 100% of their culture, we are all slightly in conflict. But don't use this as the main conflict, use it to make the characters more well-rounded. Start with a character in friction with their society, then let the main plot smash into them. Cultural conflict may not drive a story, but it often grounds us in the character. One story archetype is the person who doesn't fit saves society. Consider sensory writing -- what senses show the conflict of character and culture? What are the standard conversational moves that the character doesn't know? Casual or respect? Use conflict with your culture to add layers to the plot and enrich your story.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 31.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Cultural Setting As Conflict.
[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] Cultural setting as conflict. A little preface here. This is using my definitions for worldbuilding. I define physical worldbuilding as all this stuff that exists if human beings or sapient races weren't around, and cultural setting is all the stuff that they create. I think I announced that last month, too. But just so you know, when I say cultural setting for this particular podcast, we're talking about all of this. Religion, linguistics, economics, all of this stuff. We want to talk about how to put your characters in conflict with their setting, and with their culture. Obviously, this is one of the great ways to tell a story. In fact, I think every story that I write has some aspect of a character in conflict with their setting.
[Howard] I think the easiest place to start with this is to look at the conflict as either a desire to move or a resistance against being moved. For instance, if you are a member of the wealthy class, you do not want wealth to be redistributed, because that is moving you into a different place. If you are impoverished, perhaps you want to move into a different class. Those two work within whatever framework of the culture may exist. I mean, whether it's economic or gender or racial or multi-species or whatever. I want to move or someone is trying to move me, is one of the easiest ways to define the conflict. The other big one is I don't like the way this is built. I want to change it so that everybody can move. Or nobody has to move. Or something.
[Brandon] Right. Putting your ideals in conflict with the actual reality of the system.
[Mahtab] You know what, the very fact… Just from personal experience, the very fact that I'm an immigrant in Canada is straightaway a cultural conflict. Because there are certain things that I'm used to doing in India, there are certain traditions that we follow, certain norms. But take that out and put me in a North American setting or a Canadian setting, and all of a sudden, I want to follow certain things, but I cannot. So, I mean, just… For example, I love cooking Indian food. When I first came to Canada and the winters were cold, I would cook with the doors closed. I would be smelling like a day-old samosa. Maybe a week-old samosa. Then you'd go out into the world and you would have people just kind of… I was nose blind, but people would wonder, "Does she not know what she smells like?"
[Howard] What is that smell?
[Mahtab] It took me a while. I mean, I had to get onto an elevator with someone who was a lot more fragrant than I was till it hit me. So, the fact is, I can still cook Indian food, but even in the midst of an Ontario winter, I have to have all the doors and all the windows open… Not the doors. All the windows open, proper ventilation, and then… So it's just like… The fact is that you can have conflict if you just take someone who's used to following a certain cultural norm, put them in a different setting, and that's it. Also, with kids growing up. When, especially, the kids are young, the parents are not very well educated or not very well integrated into a certain culture. They are still holding to the old norms, whereas the kids who are growing up are now influenced by the culture they are growing up in. They are treading a very fine line between what should I follow, because this is what my parents want, and this is what my friends and teachers and everyone are doing. It can be huge. I mean, I've seen a lot of teens go through a lot of anguish because of that.
[Dan] There was a really cool movie a couple years ago, and I can never remember the title of anything. Sorry. That was about a group of Korean American teenagers, all of them first-generation Americans, who went to like a cultural summer camp. Their Korean families are like, "You need to know about our culture from back in the old country, so you're all going to go to this thing." It was just fascinating to watch that whole dynamic play out as they were trying to embrace their roots while also staying true to who they had become. There is a lot of cool compelling stuff that can be pulled out of this.
[Brandon] Is it called Seoul Searching?
[Dan] Yes.
[Brandon] I just googled it for you.
[Dan] Seoul Searching, Seoul being the pun. Ha ha ha.
 
[Brandon] I… It's interesting to think about this, because nobody 100% represents all aspects of their culture. None of us do. Which is this weird thing to think about, in that there is this nebulous sort of culture, right? Whichever set of culture… Religious culture or whatever. Society. There's nobody that is that thing. We are all not aligned exactly to everything in that culture. So we're all going to be slightly in conflict with our culture. There's not a person who isn't. We're just going to be in conflict with it in different ways. I think as writers, sometimes, we want to make this the main conflict of the story. Sometimes it's appropriate to do so. Sometimes this is what our story is about. But I think in every story, these sorts of things are what's… Are the sorts of things that are going to make your characters become well-rounded and feel real. People often ask me, "How do I make well-rounded characters?" Our kind of cliché but true response is don't write them to a role in a story, write them as they are and make the story kind of come along and make things messy for them. I think this is one of the ways you indicate this is these characters are going to be having friction with their society and culture, even before whatever the main plot of your story is comes along and smashes into them.
[Howard] It's not uncommon… I say it's not uncommon. I can't actually think of any examples off the top of my head. But you have a protagonist whose motivation is I want to fit in with my family. Or I want to get a promotion. It's very cultural, but then they are thrown into an adventure that has nothing to do with fitting in with their family or getting a promotion. At the end of the adventure, they have changed or their family have changed or the corporation has changed, and they have the thing that they need. So the cultural conflict there is not necessarily what's driving the story, but it's what's grounding us in the character.
[Dan] One of the books that I talked about last month, A Memory Called Empire. Like I said, it's a political story and it's a murder mystery, but the main character is an ambassador from one tiny nation who has gone to this massive Empire. What's fascinating about her attempt to fit in is that she loves their culture. So it's specifically kind of has this subplot in there of you're the big evil empire that's trying to consume my little nation, but I love your art, I love your stories that you tell, and I watch your TV shows all the time. It added a really interesting dimension of that cultural conflict.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and do our book of the week.
[Mahtab] Right. So, the book of the week that I'd like to recommend is one that has been written by yours truly. It's called Mission Mumbai. This is a story of a friendship between two boys. One of them is an Indian, Rohit Lal, one of them is an American, Dylan Moore. They have a friendship that is based on their love of reading fantasy novels. But it's a very fragile friendship. When they take a trip to India, that is when they realize that there is a certain amount of jealousy involved. Their friendship is not as strong as they expected it to be. But one of the reasons that I love having written this story is that I take someone from a North American culture and put him into the Indian culture. Which is just as alien as having gone to a totally different place. I give both the boys certain problems. It's only when… Their friendship is stretched really, really thin, and it's only when both the boys decide to put aside their own issues and help one another is when their friendship becomes a lot stronger. So it's a coming-of-age, it's a friendship, it's a loyalty story. But it's also a fun way of exploring India from your own room.
[Howard] Less expensive than plane tickets.
[Mahtab] Absolutely.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Howard] That's Mission Mumbai.
 
[Brandon] For this podcast's second half, let's kind of try to drill into the why… Or the hows. The nitty-gritty details of how to use conflict with culture as plots in your stories. I'll give an example. Oftentimes, I notice that in films and in books, one of the things you do at the beginning is show the character not fitting in as a method of showing what their kind of arc is going to be. They're the person that doesn't fit into their society. Taking classic Disney movies, if we look at Mulan. Mulan doesn't start with her out sword fighting. It starts with her not fitting into the society of gender roles and the marriage rituals and things that she's expected to participate in as a way to reinforce that she's kind of outside her culture. So that when she leaves to go do something very different from what someone in her situation would do, you believe that she would do this. Because she obviously doesn't quite fit in. Then, the whole story is about this idea of the person who doesn't fit in being the one who saves the society. You see this used a ton. It's a really great story archetype. It's used in Dragonlance, it's used in a lot of different stories. It's one of those ways you use someone in conflict with their setting in a small way to inform your entire story.
 
[Howard] We talk about sensory writing quite a bit. Mahtab, you described the way you smell when you've been cooking. The smells of things, the colors of things. When you're uncomfortable with a culture, if you've been dropped someplace where you are not comfortable, which of your senses are uncomfortable? Which… Where are you feeling the conflict? Is it because it's too loud? Is it because it's too quiet? Is it because it doesn't smell like you want it to smell? Is it because the flavor of the food that makes you comfortable just isn't available anywhere? Is it because you're one of those people who is genetically unable to appreciate cilantro? Because there's a group of people for whom cilantro is just terrible. These sorts of… And Indian food, which I love, and I love cilantro too, has lots of cilantro in it. So you got this whole class of people who are genetically unable to appreciate the thing that you cook, Mahtab. Those senses are a great way to ground us in a character's fitting in or not fitting in. How much you love the smell? How much you love the color? How it feels like being embraced to all your senses?
[Mahtab] One of the things that I also felt or experienced when I came here is that there is a whole unspoken language which is just by looks and gestures, and some things that are… I mean, just to give an example. Whenever you start a conversation, now, I'm not saying that it's not done in India, but over here you discuss the weather a lot. In India, all you have is rain and heat.
[Chuckles]
[Mahtab] So you really do not open a conversation with, "Oh, we're having a really nice day today." So when I was doing sales and I was on calls, I would be like, "Hello. I'm calling from so-and-so and just wanted to talk to you about XYZ." I was told, "Nonono. You're supposed to talk about the weather," and this and a TV series going on or something. Or a little bit of the news. So, the thing is that in terms of making the story or the character a little bit more layered, it's not just the sensory, which is very, very important. But it's also the unspoken stuff that the… The norms that the culture that you're in follows, which is not quite what you do. So there are lots of clues that you have to pick up which are not… Sometimes, may be told to you, but sometimes you just have to observe. It took me at least a few years of observing, or being corrected or being told that this is what you're supposed to be doing. Again, I had no idea about time zones. I remember calling someone at 6 o'clock in the morning from the East Coast to the West Coast…
[Chuckles]
[Mahtab] I'm like, "Hi." He says, "Do you know it's 6 o'clock?" I'm like, "Why did you pick up the phone, then?"
[Laughter]
[Brandon] When I went to Korea for the first time, the thing I kept getting in trouble with is, Americans can be very casual with how they give things to one another. Which is nothing… Something I hadn't ever thought about. But, in Korea, a lot of people expect you… If you're going to give something… Just, like, if you say, "Hey, pass me a roll," that you're going to hand it and present it to them as a gift, with two hands.
[Mahtab] Two hands, yes.
[Dan] Two?
[Brandon] Two hands, and kind of respectfully. Whereas Americans, we'd be like, "Hey. Roll!" I did that to someone. They're like… I'm like, "Hey. Roll!" And threw it. They were like hugely offended. This was a teenager my age, but that is just not something you do in that culture. It was one of those things I had to really get used to. The kind of casualness versus respectfulness.
[Howard] I have to remember not to ask anybody to pass me the bread in Nebraska.
[Garbled] [without having my eyes open. Boom!]
 
[Dan] Just throw it at you. The Asian market where I shop, even the receipt. They will pull it out. They'll rip it off the thing. Fold it, and hand it to you with two hands. Because that is how you're supposed to do it. One of my very favorite cultural stories is a TV show called The Americans. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. It's Soviet spies, sleeper agents, living in the United States in the 1980s. So every episode has like an espionage story, but the overall story it's telling is how do these people who are like trained, practically brainwashed to hate America, how do they live and fit in and look and act like Americans.
[Howard] I grew up during the 80s. I would not want the job…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Of fitting in in the 80s. Oh, man.
[Dan] It's just a really compelling thing. They're doing a lot of the stuff that we're talking about. Where they will confront situations where they would do something the way it would be normal to them. Obviously, they have been trained in American culture, but it comes off wrong. Or they react the wrong way to something and they have to remember, "Oh, no. I'm American. I have to treat this like an American, not like a Russian." It's just really, really interesting, and really well done.
[Howard] There are a lot of cultural dialect sorts of things, whether it's jargon or just dialect things. In the UK, just now means immediately prior. What was that noise? A bookcase fell over just now. In South Africa, just now means really soon, about to happen. Yes… Not really soon, but kind of soon. I'll be there just now. I'm on my way, I'll be there just now. Are you in a hurry? Okay, fine, I'll be there now now. Okay, I like now now as a construct. When I first heard it, I thought, "Well, that's brilliant. That's a great way to say ASAP." But these sorts of things, if you don't… I don't want to crossover too much into the language discussion we'll be having later. But there have been a lot of times, especially online, where all participate in an online chat about a game and realize, "There is a jargon here." Somebody just threw a string of characters, and they are very clearly making a request, and I do not know how to respond, because there's like six acronyms in there.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] And I don't know what any of them stand for.
[Mahtab] I would just like to say here that conflict with your culture is important, but don't make that the focal point of your story. Just use that to flavor it, to add layers to the plot which would make it richer. But don't make that the focus of the story. Because that would be too kind of clichéd or stereotyped, and you're just going to end up going a very predictable path. But use that to just enrich the narrative.
 
[Brandon] So, we're out of time on this, but we will come back later in the year and do an episode on worldbuilding culture and mores, so you can look forward to that. I have our homework this week. I'm quite tickled with this one. I want you to clone yourself and make an entire planet of clones of you. I want you to decide what the culture would be like if everyone on the planet were you. Then, I want you to create a trading post with this planet where people off world who are not you have to trade with you and what they have to go through in order to make trade deals with an entire planet of you.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] There's going to be a war, and my planet's going to get wiped clean…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Very, very quickly.
[Dan] The galaxy will decide we can't let this planet hang around any longer.
[Howard] Nope.
[Mahtab] I am going to try that prompt.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. 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
mbarker: (Me typing?)
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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 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"

Apr. 30th, 2019 10:10 pm
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Writing Excuses 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/04/28/14-17-its-like-car-talk-meets-welcome-to-nightvale/


Key points: Comp titles, or comparative titles, are titles that a book reminds you of. Who is this book for? E.g., a pitch like X in space. Or traditionally two books, with your book in the overlap. Not the sum or combination, but the intersection. Comp titles early in the writing process can help you refine your book. Comp titles can define genre and category. Think about the elemental genres. Comp titles can help identify your audience and target a market. Consider the set dressing and structure when picking your comp titles. Comp titles is not just A meets B, you can say which elements you are referring to. You can also throw in a wrench with a third element to give it a twist. Be aware that readers may not understand the shorthand of comp titles. Use comp titles as the base of longer explanations. Comp titles are a clarifying exercise, to help identify the core elements of your story. Beware the comp titles that have been overused, like Harry Potter.


[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 17.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale."

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] And I'm Dongwon.


[Howard] We are talking about comp-titles. Those things that you cite when you are trying to describe the thing that you've created in terms of other people's stuff. Dongwon is back with us this week. Dongwon, in your line of work, agenting, you use comp-titles kind of a lot.

[Dongwon] Comp titles is how we think about the universe. So, comp titles are, just for clarification, it means comparative title. So any time you're talking about any given book, what you're usually doing in the back of your head, if you're a publishing professional, is automatically coming up with the one to two to three titles that this book reminds you of. Part of the reason you're doing that is, in publishing, one of the main questions is who is this book for. The way we talk about that is we use other books as a proxy. So if your book is like Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, then that tells you something about who this book is for and, hopefully, how many copies it's going to sell.

[Dan] Yeah. I just sold... at time of recording, I have just sold a middle grade to Audible, based almost entirely on the pitch, Home Alone in Space.

[Dongwon] Hell, yes.

[Dan] That is working everywhere. The editor's taking that around the company and says, "Hey, can I get some resources?" "For what?" "Home Alone in Space." "Yes. Here's all the money that you need." So a really good comp title can have incredible value.

[Mary Robinette] That is basically how I sold my first novel. It was Jane Austen with magic. Then I also have Thin Man in Space.

[Dan] Which I've wanted to read for so long.


[Dongwon] I will point out that every example of a comp title that we've given so far has been one book with an extra element. That is one way to do a comp title. But most traditionally, what you really want to do is have two different books. In the Venn diagram, the overlap between book A and book B is where your book lives. Right? So, the ones that we've been giving so far can be really useful just to give a feel for what the book's going to read like, but it's not telling enough yet about who this book is for in terms of the audience. That's sort of an interesting gradation that you'll see [garbled]

[Howard] The first time I ever had to come up with a comp title for my work, I was making a pitch to a media guy who, of course, never got back to me because that's the way a lot of these things work at Comic Cons. I described Schlock Mercenary as it's like Babylon 5 meets Bloom County. Babylon 5, science fiction that pays attention to story, science fiction that remains consistent. Bloom County, comic strip with short serial elements.

[Mary Robinette] So in that, is Schlock Bill the cat?

[Laughter]

[Howard] If you pay close attention, both Schlock and Bill the cat have mismatched eyeball sizes.

[Ooo!]

[Howard] So the answer to your question is not no.

[Laughter]

[Howard] My work is not just highly derivative...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It is markedly and easily identifiably derivative.

[Dongwon] We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

[Dan] Yeah.


[Mary Robinette] Which is one of the things that I think is interesting about comp titles is that... I find that when I come up with the comp titles early in my process that it also helps me sort of refine what it is that I'm working on. That sometimes it's like, "Oh, yeah. This is an element out of that Venn diagram." So as we're going through this, I kind of want to talk about what we mean by the Venn diagram of where the two books overlap. You're the one who introduced me to this idea, Dongwon, so I'm going to put you on the spot and make you explain it.

[Dongwon] So the Venn diagram is really useful. I think the way people think a lot about A plus B is they tend to think that it's the combination, it's the full territory defined by book A plus book B. That's the wrong way to think about it. What you're doing is, you're looking at the narrow overlap between those two books. One of the reasons this is really useful in pitching, for example, is it does a lot of the work to define genre and what category your book is before you start telling people the details of your book. So if you start saying that it's Star Wars meets Jurassic Park, then you already know that this is for someone who likes dinosaurs and laser swords, right? It's not... The combination of those two things, it's you're putting the laser swords into a park full of dinosaurs or something to that effect.

[Howard] It's also worth calling back to our... Oh, was it Season 11, Elemental Genres? Calling back to the Elemental Genres. Let's talk about Star Wars and Jurassic Park. It will not always reverse engineer this way, but if you are talking about Jurassic Park because there are cool monsters and it is a horror story in which there is a sense of wonder, and you're talking about Star Wars because Campbellian monomyth and swords. Then, if those are the elements in your story, Star Wars meets Jurassic Park is a great way to say which elemental genres you are using. But it could also be dogfighting spaceships meets biological technology that hasn't actually gone wrong...

[Dongwon] I'm now picturing raptors learning how to use X-wings. It's a really delightful image.

[Mary Robinette] I would totally agree the heck out of that.

[Dongwon] There you go.


[Dan] Now Mary mentioned, Mary Robinette mentioned earlier the... That it's often a very good idea to come up with this comp title, this comparison early in your process. One of the reasons that that can help is it can help you identify your audience and it can help you target your market a little better. I sold my YA cyberpunk to the editor, to the publisher, using "This is Veronica Mars meets Bladerunner." Which is great, but he's my age. It very quickly became obvious as we started figuring out how to market this in the YA market that when we sold this six years ago, there were no good well-known cyberpunk properties for teenagers. We tried everything we could think of. Today it would be easy. Because we have... There's a new Bladerunner movie that's been very recent, there's all these other cyberpunk things that are popping up. We've... I use it now, I usually pitch it as Overwatch. But six years ago, if I'd taken the time to think about it, I could have identified maybe... Maybe there isn't a slot in the market for this. Which is what turned out to be. It was a very poor seller because the market... I was maybe two or three years before the market was ready.

[Dongwon] And yet… Sorry.

[Howard] I just… I wanted to pause for a moment for a book of the week, because that sounded like a nice point to transition. Except Dongwon had a thought and I didn't want to step on it.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] I'll say my thought really quick. Dan has stumbled on, I think, one of the reasons why publishing can be a very conservative business sometimes. It's one of the flaws in the system. It's how we think about things, but it's one of the issues is if there isn't a prior example that's been successful, it's very hard to do something that is very new and very different from what has come before. Now there will be breakout moments when that thing happens, and you get to do this big new thing. But often times, there are a number of books that preceded it that didn't get traction. Often, when somebody says, "Oh, this is a brand-new genre," that's not actually true. That work has been happening, it just hasn't been selling particularly well.

[Howard] Well, that's kind of a down note to talk about a book that we want to [inaudible]

[laughter, yeah]

[Dan] A positive spin on that particular thought is that my kind of tepid reaction to cyberpunk actually paved the way for the new Blade Runner movie to be a big success.

[Chuckles exactly]

[Dan] That's where I'm going to go with this.

[Dongwon] You provided a lovely steppingstone.


[Howard] Who's talking about Arkady Martine's book?

[Dongwon] I believe that is me. So, our book of the week is Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. It's a brand-new space opera that's just out from Tor Books. The comp titles that I'm using for this book would be that it is John McQuarrrie meets Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. It is a political murder mystery set in the heart of a future massive galaxy-spanning empire. A young diplomat is sent to the heart of this empire because her predecessor, she discovers, has been murdered. She needs to prevent her tiny nation from being annexed by this empire. It's a really wonderful fraught political thriller full of massive world building and a very sort of complex view of how people interact and how empires work which is where the Ann Leckie part comes in. It's a wonderful read, and I hope you all enjoy it very much.

[Howard] Outstanding. That was A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine?

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Howard] Available now?

[Dongwon] It should be available now.

[Howard] Should be. Because we record these things in advance…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And our listeners never get tired of us talking about this weird time travel thing that we do.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, according to some of our listeners, they really do get tired of it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Will cut all this out.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] It is absolutely available now.


[Mary Robinette] Yes. So one thing that I wanted to kind of circle back to about when we're talking about the comp titles and how to pick one is that there's kind of two things that you're looking at. One is the set dressing of the thing. The other is the structure of the thing. So the set dressing are things like Jurassic Park, if we think of Jurassic Park and the set dressing of that, we think of dinosaurs, we think of a park. But the structure of Jurassic Park is thriller and horror. So when you're picking your comp titles, I think it's imp… I think that it's worthwhile making sure that you're trying to find a comp title that has both axes in alignment with what you're picking. Otherwise, if you're like, it's like Jurassic Park, but it's all gentle and soft. Unless your other comp title brings the gentle and soft into it, you're going to wind up sending a false message [garbled]

[Howard] It's like Jurassic Park meets Gummi Bears.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Then I think people… But see…

[Dan] Ooo, yeah.

[Dongwon] Then your raptors are just bouncing around the park. That's [unsettling, upsetting]

[Dan] I'm digging that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but that…

[Howard] That sounds just delicious.

[Mary Robinette] That could be like the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man version of…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] rampaging Gummi bears.


[Dongwon] One thing to point out when talking about comp titles is you don't have to just say it's like A Meets B, right? You can say different things about it, right? So you can say it's the voice of A and the world building of B. Or you can say it's the plot of this meets this set dressing element. An example I just gave for the Arkady Martine, John McQuarrie is providing the elemental genre, it's a thriller, it's a political thriller. Then Ancillary Justice is providing voice and setting, more than anything else. One I talk about a lot is Marina Lostetter's Noumenon, which is… I talk about it as an Arthur C. Clarke big idea story as told by Octavia Butler. So it gives you this is old school big idea science-fiction, but told with this contemporary voice that has a cultural focus.

[Dan] Yeah. Another thing you can do is add a third element to throw in a twist. My Partials series, we marketed that as this is The Stand meets Battlestar Galactica, starring Hermione Granger. That third element can kind of be the wrench that helps the other two twist around.

[Dongwon] Dan is very good at this game. I'll point that out.

[Laughter]



[Howard] I'd like to take a moment and leash this just a little bit. Because in my experience, I'm excited to hear if it's at all universal, the comp title tool does not work well with large bodies of readers. If I go to the customer and tell them this is like Star Wars meets Jurassic Park, they do not have necessarily the vocabulary, the syntax, to know that I'm not saying the nostalgia you have from Star Wars and the nostalgia you have from Jurassic Park, you're going to get both of those in this book. When I've seen people try and pitch their books in that way, often hand selling, it feels fraught. Whereas if you're having a conversation with an agent or a publisher or an editor or a bookseller, they speak that language and they know exactly what you're doing.

[Mary Robinette] I think that you're right that if you do a shorthand, if you just toss it out just as those two comp titles to the average reader, they don't have the insider shorthand. But I also think that if you use those as the basis of a longer sentence, that it is very, very useful. It's one of the things that… With the… The way I talk about Calculating Stars to readers is I say, "So, it's 1952. Slam an asteroid into the Earth, kicking off the space race very early when women are still computers. So it's kind of like Hidden Figures meets Deep Impact." They're like, "Oh! Oh, sign me up for that."

[Howard] See, that is a… For me, that is a perfect pitch. Except not… Perfect pitch has a different…

[Laughter]

[Howard] It is an outstanding elevator pitch for a book because it goes very, very quickly, and at the end, you have planted a hook. That, for me, is one of the most important parts about these comp titles is that it's supposed to give you a bunch of information, but also invite you to ask a question. Which is, Hidden Figures meets Deep Impact, how bad does it get?

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing is that I'm also focusing… Using that initial sentence, I am telling the reader which parts of the comp titles to focus on. So I do… It's like you have to decide what is important and why you picked that comp title, and then set it up when you're talking to a reader.

[Dongwon] Also, the comp titles are really a clarifying exercise. It helps you to focus on what are the core elements of your story that you want to be telling to other people about the book that you've written. So, once you have your comp titles in mind, all of your copy, your longer pitch, that can descend from that. So even if you don't end up using the actual comparative titles when you're talking to a reader, if you meet them on the street or in a bookshop or whatever it is, you still have in your head the target audience in mind that is shaped by those overlapping properties.

[Howard] Dongwon, I think that's a great place to phase into our homework, except Dan's telling me he wants to say something.

[Dan] There's one important thing I want to point out before we leave comp titles.

[Howard] Go.

[Dan] Which is in line with thinking about your audience. Especially when you are pitching this, when you are presenting this to an agent or an editor, keep in mind that they have already heard four bazillion of these. So don't use the really obvious ones. Don't use Star Wars, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones. Because they've seen those so many times.

[Dongwon] Well, the thing I want to add to that, just a little bit of clarification about why those are bad, is because the comp title's a proxy for the audience. So if you say Harry Potter, what you're saying is my book is for every human who's ever existed on the planet.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] That's not useful information. It made plot wise be correct or it may have elements that are correct. So you can cherry pick an element, you can say starring Hermoine Granger just because that's good shorthand for a character. But you can't use Harry Potter as a comp because it doesn't tell me anything useful. You're only… Your Venn diagram is a circle of the human population.

[Howard] I think that that's probably the places in which I've seen the hand selling fail. Because if you tell me it's Harry Potter meets Jurassic Park, I don't believe you.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's not the result that you wanted.


[Howard] We have homework.

[Mary Robinette] Your homework is to come up with six comp titles. Now, what I'm going to recommend is that you take some work in progress and you come up with three comp titles that are from works in progress, and that you come up with three additional ones that are for work that you have not written but you just think would be a cool combination. Literally, the Thin Man in Space, which we have just sold to Tor at the time of this recording, that began as a comp title. I had the comp title before I had anything else. So, six comp titles. Three for existing works to help you clarify what you're working on, and three as an initial brainstorming for something that you might want to write.

[Howard] Once you've got those three that you might want to write… [Garbled may be planted]

[Dongwon] [garbled]

[Howard] It may be time to write it.

[Mary Robinette] In fact, you may be out of excuses. Now go write.



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Writing Excuses 14.16: Your Setting is a Telegraph

Apr. 23rd, 2019 04:42 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
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Writing Excuses 14.16: Your Setting is a Telegraph
 
 
Key points: Setting can be used to quickly telegraph the kind of story they are reading, the tone and mood. E.g., a prologue can establish the tone of the entire story. Specific, concrete details can help. Don't forget the Stooges' Law, a coconut cream pie on the mantle in the first act means by the end of the third act, someone will get hit in the face with it. Screenwriting has the opening shot, with a visual setting. Where a meeting is happening, what they're doing, where the events are happening can do a lot to indicate the type of story. If you have a tonal shift, before telegraphing it, consider whether the surprise of the unexpected shift is part of your point or not. When you finish a book, you may need to revise the first chapter and fine-tune the setting to get the tone right. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 16.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Your Setting is a Telegraph.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] Howard, when we were preparing this, you gave us the title. So why don't you explain what you mean by Your Setting is a Telegraph.
[Howard] it comes from the term telegraphing the punch, telegraphing the punchline, telegraphing the joke, whatever. Which is often used negatively. But here we mean your setting is going to telegraph to the reader very, very quickly… You're going to communicate to the reader very, very quickly what kind of a story they're reading. Are they reading a comedy, are they reading military sci-fi, are they reading a puzzle story about alien archaeology, all of those sorts of mood things can be established by your setting, and can actually be established very, very quickly when you introduce them to your setting.
[Brandon] Yeah. You can always, of course, establish these other ways, as well. Through word choice, through what your character is doing, through situation, but this… We're talking about world building this year, and we want to really talk about how to use your descriptions, your settings, or where people are, or things like this to give an immediate and powerful indication of the tone of your story. A lot of times, one of the big questions I get from students is, "Should I use a prologue or should I not?" Which is one of those loaded questions, which is… What kind of juice do you want? Right?
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Should I have a drink of juice or not? Do you like juice? Is it breakfast? Do you want a prologue? Well, one of the reasons you might want a prologue is if you are having trouble with your first chapter establishing the tone of the entire story, then you can use your prologue to do this. Now that's of course dangerous because maybe you need to look at that first chapter and learn how to maybe make that one, but it is one of the things you can do, is… I often use the Wheel of Time as an example of this. In the beginning of the Wheel of Time, in chapter 1, the first few pages take place with the young man on a farm with his father. It's a little bit creepy because he keeps seeing shadows, but that's not a real indication of tone. If you were taking those opening scenes as a promise, it might be, "Oh, this is going to be a pastoral, perhaps horror." So Robert Jordan has a prologue where a madman is wandering through a burning castle, screaming for his dead wife and children, who are at his feet and he can't see them. Things are on fire, and there's been a big war, and it's like, "All right. We're in the middle of a giant war drama with some psychological elements." So that early introduction of tone is very important to set the tone for the entire series. How can we do this? What suggestions do you have to our listeners?
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that if you are specific and concrete with your choices in the beginning, that this does a lot. So, like if I am writing military SF, then having a hand cannon says we're going to be shooting some things. If I'm doing a comedy, then in very broad terms, if there's a coconut cream pie there, we know that at some point… It's the Stooges' law, that if there is a coconut cream pie on the mantle, then by the end of the third act, someone is going to get hit in the face with it. These are the things that happen that can communicate tone to the reader, because we latch onto these concrete details.
[Howard] Well, it's important to recognize that the version of Chekhov's law that Chekhov actually said, which is if you want to fire a gun in act three, you need to show it on the mantle in act one. If you want to hit somebody with a coconut cream pie, you have to show us a coconut cream pie on the mantle in act one, so that we know that this is a story in which there can be a pie fight.
 
[Margaret] I think it's interesting in the difference between fiction and what I'm thinking in terms of screenwriting, because it's your opening shot. Right? It's very hard to avoid establishing setting, because the visual is right there. In screenplay format, the first thing you say is this an interior or an exterior? What is our setting? Is it day or is it night? That's the first thing somebody reading after fade in is going to encounter in a script. In fiction, you have a little more freedom in there. Like, if you're starting with a character, but it's remembering to put the character in a place, because you can get so much lifting done, as you say, in terms of tone by where you're meeting somebody, what they're doing, where these events are happening. A conversation that happens in a diner is different than a conversation that happens in a car that's speeding towards a cliff or in a prison visiting area. All of those start you on three very different types of stories.
[Howard] If I have a science fiction… An opening science-fiction shot that is in the science-fiction equivalent of a mausoleum with data-encoded corpsicles or whatever, and that is what I am describing, the reader has a pretty clear indication that life and the ending thereof is going to be one of the thematic focuses of this story.
[Brandon] One of my favorite episodes of Firefly is the one that starts with Mal in the desert naked. Opening shot.
[Mary Robinette] That's one of my favorites, too.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] That shot indicates wacky hijinks are going to occur. Not just him, desert, naked, but his pose, the way he's talking. He's not, like, lying there, dying of thirst, crawling through the desert. He's like, "Huh." Just one shot. He says something, but you wouldn't even need to. You know that you are going to chuckle and wacky hijinks ensue. I really like this.
[Margaret] Things have gone rapidly out of his control over the course of this episode.
[Brandon] I love when stories can do that.
[Mary Robinette] I think, actually, one of the things about that is that you've got the specific concrete detail, but you also have the character's relationship to that detail. So, one of the examples that I think of is the difference between Star Wars and Space Balls. Both of them say this is science-fiction and they both have the same opening shot, which is ginormous ships scrolling through. But Space Balls, it goes on so long that it becomes comical. That tells you, "Oh, no no no. This…"
[Brandon] You're going to laugh.
[Mary Robinette] You're going to laugh all the way through this.
[Howard] Then there's a bumper sticker on…
[Mary Robinette] There's a bumper sticker.
[Howard] On the back of the spaceship.
[Mary Robinette] Just in case you missed how long it was going on.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is Terminal Alliance.
[Howard] Yes. Terminal Alliance by Jim Hines. My family, we bought this book twice. I was on my way back from Cedar City, with Kellianna and I put on the audiobook of Terminal Alliance so we could listen to it. We got home and she said, "Are you going to listen to this in your office while you draw?" I said, "Maybe. But I'm not working yet." She said, "Well, I want to keep going, and the reader is too slow. So do we have a copy of this book in print?" So we bought it in print. No regrets. No regrets. It's a comedy about space janitors and zombie apocalypse. You know, that's kind of all you need to know. If I say space janitors and zombie apocalypse, you have enough setting that I've telegraphed to you the tone of this thing from my friend Jim that you're really going to enjoy.
[Mary Robinette] I'm just going to second that I enjoyed the heck out of this book, too.
[Howard] I think the cover was a Dan Dos Santos. I'm not sure. I love the cover. I love the cover.
 
[Brandon] So, kind of riffing off that, Howard, how do you indicate that there are comedic elements in your stories, and how do you indicate sometimes… Sometimes, Schlock Mercenary gets very serious. I feel like you use setting to distinguish these two quite well.
[Howard] There's… Well, first of all, I need to establish that if you're reading Schlock Mercenary and have been reading it for a while, if there isn't a punchline or if things happen and there are no repercussions, there is no serious side of it, you'll feel like I've broken some rules. That's… We've talked in previous episodes about budget. So I have this currency that I have spent to get you to this point. That said, I try to begin every book with some sort of establishing shot, that will tell us this is science-fiction. I'm going to end the strip with a punchline, which, because of the beat, beat, punchline format of things will tell you very quickly we're going to tell a lot of jokes. But I like to establish the scope of the story. In the most recent… I say most recent. When book 19 launched, I did a joke about prologues. We had a prologue in which an alien spaceship is flying and they're saying, "There's a star system ahead, do we need to change course?" "No, we're going to fly through their cloud… Comet cloud, we should be fine." "But anything…" "We're big. Anything we nudge, those inner planets are going to have to deal with." "Sure, they're going to have to deal with it, but it just means millions of years." 8 million years later, we have a little velociraptor with a telescope who looks kind of like Leonardo da Vinci, if he were a feathered velociraptor talking to another velociraptor who also has a similar sort of da Vinci-ish look who is building something. He's saying, "Huh. How soon can your flying machine be ready?" That has told us this is going to be a tragic story about the ends of civilization, but you're going to laugh.
[Brandon] Excellent.
[Howard] That was a very long-winded…
[Brandon] No, that's great.
[Howard] Approach to it, but... I also made so much fun of prologues, and I was thinking of you the whole time.
[Brandon] Thank you very much. I'll have you know that… 
[Margaret] I wanted to giggle at your description, but I didn't want to mess up the audio.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I've restrained myself, and most of my books only have two now.
[Wha!]
[Brandon] Way of Kings has four prologues.
[Mary Robinette] I know. I know. I'm just… I'm amazed at your restraint.
 
[Brandon] Yes. All right. So. Building off of that, let's say you want to shift tones in your story, you know you're going to do it. You're going to be writing a comedic story that is going to get serious, or you're going at it the other way, you're going to write a serious story but you know you're going to have some comedic elements. How do you indicate that from the beginning? Do you need to indicate that from the beginning?
[Howard] I think the second part of that question is the more important bit. If the surprise that people experience with a tonal shift that they weren't expecting is your point, then you don't need to telegraph it. If, however, you don't want to alienate them… You know there's a tonal shift, and you don't want to alienate them, then you do need to telegraph it.
[Brandon] Okay. I would absolutely agree with that. Though, we're talking specifically about using setting. Right? The methods of using setting. So, let's in our last few minutes here, let's give a few tips. What are things you've done using your setting to indicate your tone?
[Mary Robinette] So, I did this in Calculating Stars. Calculating Stars opens with a couple in the Poconos, and they're having sexy fun times. Then I slam a meteor into the earth.
[Brandon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] So… What I did with that, and I made very, very deliberate choices in that first page. The opening line is "Do you remember where you were when the meteor struck?" That tells you this is going to be a disaster story. Then, the
is "I was in the mountains with Nathaniel, and we were stargazing, by which I mean sex."
[Brandon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] Which gets a laugh. It tells you… Having those two things back to back tells you about the setting that we're in… And, granted, I'm doing this in narration. It is a first-person character. But I'm using the setting there to tell you what this is going to be about. That you can expect a story in which we're dealing with relationships, we're dealing with disaster, and that there's going to be some comedy. It's not going to be disaster all the way down.
 
[Brandon] I often have trouble with first chapters. Not starting them. I've talked about this before in the podcast, though, that when I get done with the book, I feel like my first chapter no longer belongs with the book that I ended up writing. This is coming from someone who architects and outlines a ton. That first chapter, getting that tone right, can be a big deal for just kind of establishing how the whole story's going to play out. I had to do this just with my most recent book, that will have just come out at this point about six months ago. Skyward. Where I wrote the first chapter, I even did readings from it. At the end, it was just not right. Even though when I rewrote it, it was basically the same events happening. I needed to make… They live in a cavern system underground, I needed to make the caverns a little more claustrophobic. I needed to make the stepping on the surface for the first time more full of wonder, because the idea of we as a people are escaping the caverns and getting into the skies, that's the point of the story. It just… I find finishing my book and then going back and saying, "What was my book's tone really about?" And "How can I hit this metaphorically in the first chapter?"
[Mary Robinette] I think that that's a really good point, that… For me, a lot of times, it's about going back in and finessing the specific physical details of the space. I have a story called Cerbo in Vitra ujo which is one of the true horror stories that I've written. When I wrote it initially, it read like it was going to be a teen drama. What I had to go back in and do was bring out… Even though I didn't move the location, I shifted the… They're in a conservatory on a space station, so there's all of these plants around. But I made sure that there is like a broken rose, that there is a diseased rose. That there are elements there that are unsettling in order to indicate that that's where we were going. It was about going back and adjusting the setting to match the tone.
 
[Brandon] So, our homework plays right into this idea. Which you have for us, Mary?
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is I want you to write an opening. It can be taking an opening of something that you're already working on or just starting from scratch. But I want you to write the first half page. In that first half page, I want you to hit three specific concrete details. I'm picking three as an arbitrary number, because I want you to actually really dig into this. But I watch to pick three specific concrete details that telegraph setting… That telegraph the tone. That telegraph what the mood is. These details are obviously your setting. So I want you to do that. Then I want you to write it again and telegraph a different mood.
[Brandon] Use, maybe, even the same dialogue, but use the setting to indicate a different tone. All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.05: Viewpoint As Worldbuilding

Feb. 6th, 2019 10:32 am
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.05: Viewpoint As Worldbuilding
 
 
Key Points: Worldbuilding using character viewpoint? How do you integrate setting into your characters?  Start with the way the character interacts with the world, both physically and emotionally. Use actions and dialogue to show us assumptions and attitudes, how things work, without lengthy info dumps. Use two or more characters with different backgrounds or opinions, different viewpoints, to give the reader information about the thing, about the characters, and about the unreliable viewpoint. One way to use viewpoint to intersect with worldbuilding is in the way characters describe other characters. The same character seen through the eyes of two different characters can be very different. Think about how the character's voice directs the narrative versus keeping the narrative safe and trustworthy. First person, the character runs everything. Third person, you need to balance. Some voice, some straight narration. To make your worldbuilding richer, think about what people swear by, who makes what jokes, and how your character interacts with the environment. A room with marble floors comes to life when heels clack across it.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Five.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Viewpoint As 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] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] One of my personal favorite topics… Perhaps even hobby horses, is to talk about how to worldbuild by using character viewpoint. I love it when books do this. In fact, it is one of the things that when I pick up a book, if the first chapter does, the first page does, I know I'm going to have a good time, at least with that character. I really like it. I want to talk about how we do it. So, how do you make setting an integrated part of your characters?
[Mary Robinette] I think a lot of it is the way the character interacts with it, not just physically, but also emotionally. That... the weight that things carry. So, using Jane Austen as an example, someone can… Like, two characters can look at each other, and that's no big deal. But when Austen handles it, she gives you that emotional weight. It's like she… And I'm thinking specifically in Persuasion, there's this scene when Capt. Wentworth pulls a small child off of Anne Elliott's back, and there's a moment where he's touching her. The emotional weight of that tells you, as a modern reader, that oh, there is no touching. This is… There is a lot going on between these two. It is… It gives you all of these layers of detail, while just being a physical interaction in the world. So that's the kind of thing that I find very interesting.
[Dan] One, very similar to that, is in Age of Innocence, when he takes her glove off. It is so steamy, and it's just a glove. But it tells you so much about the world and what it's like and the rules they have to follow.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, you do that. It's actually one of the things I enjoy in the Stormlight, is the safe hand.
[Brandon] Right. Right. The safe hand came from… So, for those who aren't familiar. Society has eroticized the bare left hand of women. This has all kinds of social implications, and all kinds of… People always want to ask me, they want to say, "Why?" They often come to me, "Why, why is this?" I can answer. From, like, I… In the worldbuilding, the past, well, there were these events and these influential writings that happened, and then there was some institutionalized sexism that insp… But really, the answer is, "Why? Because that's how their culture is."
[Laughter]
[Brandon] That's how they see things. It's not why because they are like, "Well, when my great…" No. They're just like, "This is how my culture is." Then that culture becoming a big part of how people see the world is the sort of thing that I just love.
[Dan] You just look at all the different cultures on Earth today and the cultural assumptions that we carry and assume are common to the entire human race. Then you go to another country, and it's… They've never even heard of it before. You realize that we do this all the time.
 
[Howard] Last season, we had an episode on confronting the default, in which we talked about exactly that. When I wrote, I think it was Scrap Ante for Privateer Press, they wanted me to develop a character for them… Develop an existing character. They wanted me to give a POV to a character who was a mechanic… And this, they've got game fic… They've got game stuff surrounding this guy already. Who is a mechanic, and he needed to sound like a mechanic, and they wanted to talk a little bit about how these things work. Then it needed to not be boring. So I created a mystery in which someone is sabotaging a Warjack, and in as lean writing as I could, I have this mechanic digging in and finding out that somebody has swapped a part that looks like another part, and he has names for all of these, and he's rattling them off the way a mechanic would. In the course of writing this, I started lifting names and altering them a little bit from actual steam engines and diesel engines and whatever else. When I sent it into the Privateer Press guys, Doug, who's the chief worldbuilder, read it and said, "you have done something that I have been terrified to do forever." Which is explain how these things work.
[Laughter]
[Howard] They loved it. It read like a fun story, and it was all POV. It was not, "Oh, this is how the magic flows through the whatever." It's just a guy fixing a thing and looking for a problem, and then determining that somebody had sabotaged this to kill him.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Dan] So. An example from one of my books. In the Partials series, one of the things that I wanted to play with for the worldbuilding was the generational divide. People who remember life before the apocalypse and the kids who have grown up in a post-apocalyptic world. So I had the chance then to start with two or three chapters entirely from this teenage point of view, just describing a normal world. She didn't think it was scary, she wasn't constantly concerned with the things that they had lost. Then, we finally get to a meeting with adults, and they spend their whole time bemoaning how rustic everything is. Just the difference between their attitudes immediately tells you a lot about the world and the society.
 
[Brandon] Yeah. That's one of the things I like the most is when you can take two different characters and describe the same thing, the same event, or the same cultural mores, and then, with those two contrasting opinions, the reader is given a bunch of information. They are, number one, told about the thing. Right? You're getting the worldbuilding. But you're, number two, told about the characters. You're told what they find important and valuable, or what they notice. But, number three, you're also told viewpoint is untrustworthy.
[Dan] Yes.
[Brandon] Which is a really important thing with these sorts of stories.
[Dan] That can make it very difficult. If you want to do that, that's something that you might need to refine and polish quite a bit, because your readers of the first or second draft might say, "Oh, you've got an inconsistency here." No, I don't. You need to look at who is saying it, and maybe I need to finesse this a little bit so that that is more clear.
[Howard] The number of times I have taken an inconvenient fact about the Schlock Mercenary universe and backtracked it to determine who said it…
[Laughter]
[Howard] And then ascertained, "Oh. That person is actually allowed to be wrong about this." Did the narrator ever… Nope! Narrator didn't… Did a footnote ever… Nope! Oh, this is awesome.
[Laughter]
[Howard] This is awesome. I am off the hook.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have… There's a timeline problem in the Lady Astronaut universe. Because when I wrote the novelette, I was just like, "Eh, it's a one-off." I wrote it. I didn't do a lot of worldbuilding. Basically, when I got into doing the actual hard-core how long does it take to get people into space when you're kickstarting a space program… I'm like, "Oh. Elma's just wrong."
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] About some of her memories. She's just conflating them.
[Dan] Just misremembering.
[Mary Robinette] Just misremembering.
[Brandon] I run into this a lot. But it is nice to establish viewpoints that are untrustworthy for this sort of reason.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So a book that I'm reading right now that's doing a really interesting job of this shifting viewpoint is Semiosis by Sue Burke. It's a multigenerational novel. So you will move forward like an entire generation, and it's a colony world. So the first generation are the first people on the planet. Then the next generation are kids who've grown up there. The way they view their parents versus… The worldbuilding is fascinating, because… They're… You see how they're shifting and how the culture is shifting to adapt to the place that they're living. It's really, really interesting. It's all POV that's doing it.
[Brandon] Now, that is not our book of the week, but it would be a good book for people to read.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Brandon] Dan actually has our book of the week.
[Dan] Yeah. The book of the week actually hits this topic perfectly. It is Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. Which is a YA fantasy. Big secondary world fantasy set in a world inspired by Africa. What's fascinating about it… Many things are fascinating about it. But pertinent to this discussion, there are three viewpoint characters. It's a world where magic has been stolen. No one can do it anymore. The people who used to be able to do it are an oppressed class. So one of our viewpoints is one of these kind of former mage people. Then we have a princess who has been sheltered her entire life and runs away from home. Then we have her brother who is struggling with the King's policies. So they all have completely different ideas about what the world should look like and what it does look like and how they want to change it. It's really fascinating to see the interplay of those viewpoints as you go through.
[Brandon] Excellent. That is Children of Blood and Bone. I was on a panel with her, and she was really interesting. Had some really cool things to say about magic. So I anticipate it being a great book. Emily really liked it.
[Dan] Yes. She describes the book as Black Panther but with magic.
[Brandon] She does.
 
[Brandon] Now, one of my favorite ways to use viewpoint in worldbuilding, to intersect them, is by the way the characters describe other characters.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Uhuh.
[Brandon] I first picked up on this as a young person reading The Wheel of Time, where… And I'm not going to be able to quote these exactly. I'm sorry, Wheel of Time fans, but you have one character who would describe someone and say, "Wow. They look like they spend most of their day at the forge." Then another character describes the same person and says something along the lines of "Wow. If you beat that person at cards, leave early. Because otherwise, they'll jump you in the back alley." Those two descriptions are both "This is a tough, intimidating person." But seen through the eyes of two very different characters. I love this sort of thing. Description. Now, my question for you guys is, do you ever worry about the blend of… When you're in narrative, how much you're going to let the character's voice direct the narrative and how much you're not?
[Mary Robinette] It does depend on whether… Which voice you're using. Are you using first person, or are you using tight third? Because first person, all over the place. It's no problem. But with tight third… With third person, it is a tricky line. Because what I find is that the… Unless it is very obviously voice-y, that the reader will interpret that as being safe and trustworthy. So I tend to try to be fairly honest when I'm doing narration that is less flavored than when I'm doing something that… If I'm doing free indirect speech, I try to… That's… I try to reserve the perceptions for those.
[Brandon] Yeah. I always kind of go back and forth on this, because, of course, Robert Jordan did very much a lot of tight thirds. There would be these moments where it felt like it was right in their head, and other times when the narrator was speaking. He balanced it really well. I'm always a little scared about that. Because you do want the narrator, the non-present narrative, to be trustworthy. But you want the viewpoint of the character to maybe not be.
[Mary Robinette] Sometimes it's a thing that you can do… I was just reading The Killing of Kings by Howard Andrew Jones. It's not… At the time of recording, it is not yet out. But one of the things that he does is there is this character who's constantly… Male character who's constantly looking at women with a very male gaze. Like, constantly looking at boobs and ass. Just all the time. Then will say things like, "I don't understand why this woman doesn't like me."
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Right. Right.
[Howard] Wow.
[Mary Robinette] "It's like she's always so cold and distant. There's always a piece of furniture between us." I'm like, "Yep. Yes, there is. Absolutely, yes, there is." But it is… It's deftly handled, because he is staying absolutely true to the character's point of view. But by giving us very obvious physicality and recognizable body language from the other character, he's telling us how this behavior is actually perceived in the world.
[Brandon] Later in the year, we're going to do an entire week on writing imperfect worlds. Or imperfect characters. With… Using topics like this, not validating but acknowledging that some people are like this. We will cover that. It's going to be in a few months, but we are going to get to that. That is one of the… That's like Using Viewpoint and Character Level 501.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Being able to pull off some of this stuff.
 
[Brandon] Before we go out, any tips for writers on making their sentences, particularly their worldbuilding sentences, do more than one thing at once?
[Howard] What do these people swear by? I love that. My favorite examples of this currently are from the various different NPCs in the ESO world, where they swear by different gods. They are consistent in the way this works. It adds a measure of depth. Because some of them will swear by those gods, and somebody who is from the same culture will never utter those words. You can now tell that those two people are actually different. That's not the sort of thing that you expect to see… Well, if you grew up with video games. It's not the sort of thing that you expect to see in a videogame. But videogame writing has progressed to the point that we are expecting that level of worldbuilding, especially in dialogue that has to be read by an actor in a way that sounds conversational and believable.
[Dan] Very similar to that, and I'm starting to notice this more as I read… In the current science fiction that I'm reading, is what our people allowed to make jokes about. Which jokes can come from which species in the space station? And things like that.
[Mary Robinette] I would say, for me, the tip that I would hand to our listeners is to make sure that your character is interacting with their environment. Which is where I started us, but I'm going to give a really concrete example. Like, I can describe a room and say, "The room had marble floors, tall vaulted ceilings, and green velvet curtains." That tells you what the room looks like. But if I say, "My character's heels clacked across the marble floor as she strode to the window. The velvet was soft against her skin as she pushed the curtains back." You know so much more about the character and the world. So you're getting both things at the same time. I think that's going to make it feel richer to the reader, as well.
 
[Brandon] Awesome. Howard, you've got some homework for us.
[Howard] I do. This is the from-within, from-without episode, the Buck Rogers, Wilma Deering, the Twoflower, Rincewind. Take a character who is alien to the culture or the setting that you are writing within. But obviously has a reason to be there. Describe things from their point of view. Now describe those same things from the point of view of a native. Somebody who's grown up there, who's been there, who is familiar with it.
[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 13.42: Writing Excuses Talks to an Astronaut, with Special Guest Kjell Lindgren

Oct. 25th, 2018 11:21 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 13.42: Writing Excuses Talks to an Astronaut, with Special Guest Kjell Lindgren 
 
 
Key points: Vertigo in space, and vertigo on landing. Depends on the individual, but keep your head very still, avoid any type of acceleration. Beware the fluid shift. What about giraffes in space, doing the zero-gravity giraffe? Why play bagpipes in space? Consider expeditionary behavior. Get yourself squared away, then help your crewmates. "In that environment, we don't have the luxury of not getting along." Be aware that movement and the physics of space are different -- no hard right turns without touching anything, okay? Also, there are plenty of real risks about living in space, you don't need to inject drama. To make it real, do your research and add little details, like the right menu.
 
( Giraffes in space? Whare? )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Excuses Talks to an Astronaut, with Kjell Lindgren.
[Howard] 15 minutes long.
[Mary] Because you're in a hurry.
[Dan] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Brandon] We're all out of order.
[Dan] We're not sitting in the right order.
[Brandon] We're all kind of mixed up.
[Dan] Our brains only work in a very specific order.
[Laughter]
[Dan] We're outside of mission parameters.
[Brandon] And, once again, I'm warning you guys. I'm sick. So…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] But I didn't want to miss out on this.
[Mary] But there's an astronaut.
[Brandon] Astronaut. Right. We once again have our friend, Kjell Lindgren.
[Kjell] And thank you so much for having me. I'm a big fan of Writing Excuses, and so it is amazing to be a part of the conversation.
[Howard] We got that on tape!
[Laughter]
[Howard] [inaudible, garbled]
[Dan] Going on the end of every episode now.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary] So, I have a ton of astronaut questions I've been wanting to ask you. So I'm afraid that this is going to be just a please tell us all the things, Kjell.
[Laughter]
[Kjell] I'm happy to share.
[Mary] Okay. So. You've talked about the vertigo in space. People… Like, that's all over the NASA website, people talk about that. But when you come back to earth, and you have vertigo again. How much is that like benign positional vertigo or is it completely in its own class of…
[Kjell] Yeah. So, when we say vertigo, I think that people have different interpretations of what that means. Dizziness, lightheadedness, actual spinning. I have a colleague that upon arriving in space, so right at the main engine cut off, after that third stage cut off, and now you are officially in weightlessness, felt like they were basically doing backflips.
[Mary] Wow.
[Kjell] So their… And just had this sensation… And I'm motioning with my hands, and I realize that the listeners can't…
[Chuckles]
[Kjell] See that, but… Essentially, felt like they were flipping backwards just constantly. They were able to get over that. I did not feel vertiginous, I did not have dizziness at all when I… Once I arrived on orbit. So after landing, there again, it really depends on the individual. Some people will feel vertiginous, things will be spinning. For me, if I kept my head very still, I actually felt fine. It is any type of acceleration. So tilting my head forward, pitching my head forward, or turning my head side to side very quickly, the sensation I would receive was far out of proportion to the movement that my head would make. So I could really get my kind of gyros spinning with very quick head movements. In particular, if I pitched my head forward, I would have fallen over. So you will see, if you look very closely at the astronauts that have just landed, so… What we're doing now, of course, is landing in the Soyuz space capsule. They carry them… They'll pull them out of the capsule, they'll put them on a lawn chair, put them on the ground. If you watch very closely, they'll keep their head… Most will keep their heads very still. So if somebody talks to them, they'll kind of look over at them…
[Laughter]
[Kjell] And smile, but they keep their head very still. We know this. So if you were feeling pretty good, you will actually move your head around a lot, because that gets you credit from your buddies, that your colleagues are like, "Man, he's doing great. Look at how he's moving his head around."
[Laughter]
[Mary] And you're like, "I am in a lawn chair."
[Laughter]
[Kjell] Exactly. So. Again, it really is up to the individual, their individual response. One of the… I mean, just very surreal experience that I had prior to launch, we had a… Before we leave Star City to [Bikaner?], we have a departure breakfast. Kind of a ceremonial toast to the crew that's departing for their launch. So all of the cosmonauts that live there in Star City will come to wish the crew farewell. So this… Let's see, it's Leonov, the first person ever to do a spacewalk. He is at the departure breakfast, and he gathers our crew together to just give us some tips and tricks as we're getting ready to fly. He said, "If you start to feel sick when you get onto orbit, just keep your head very still. Just don't move your head around." I just kind of took this picture in my brain of I'm getting flight advice from Alexey Leonov.
[Chuckles]
[Kjell] I mean, this is…
[Mary] That's amazing.
[Kjell] Very, very surreal.
 
[Brandon] You were telling us earlier, at lunch you were talking about the fact that when you first get up there, you get flu-like symptoms, because your blood, which is used to being pulled down by gravity, just kind of floods your whole body.
[Kjell] Yeah. Yeah, so we call this a fluid shift. So when you stand up on Earth, your blood… Gravity pulls it down into your legs, and we have physiologic mechanisms that are constantly working to keep the blood up at your brain, perfusing your brain. So your muscles are squeezing on the veins to push the blood up, your heart might beat a little bit faster when you first stand up, and all those mechanisms continue to work in weightlessness, but there's no gravity pulling that blood. It's not counteracting anything. So what that results in is this net shift of fluid up into your head and chest. So your face… Your head feels very full, you feel congested. If you look at your legs, they look incredibly skinny, and we call those bird legs. That's a part of, I think, this space adaptation syndrome of space motion sickness. But that fluid shift persists, really, kind of persists throughout the mission.
[Howard] That's why there are no giraffes in space. Because their heads would just explode.
[Laughter]
[Kjell] You know what… So I worked in a cardio… The space physiology laboratory. It used to be at NASA Ames Research Center. The giraffe is one of the animals that we looked… Giraffes and snakes that climb trees are animals that we looked at to try and understand how, like in a giraffe, that changes that hydrostatic column. When it bends down to drink, I mean…
[Howard] That's what I'm talking about, the amount of heart… pressure…
[Kjell] Absolutely.
[Howard] You gotta do to get blood up into that head. You put a giraffe in orbit, he hits freefall, and just [explosion sound].
[Laughter]
[Mary] Yeah, but the thing he was saying is when the giraffe puts their head down, that that shifts.
[Kjell] That almost gets you to the point where… Yeah. Now you're only dealing with the giraffe's innate blood pressure, but the fact now the hydrostatic column is actually increasing pressure down. So what mechanisms, intrinsic mechanisms, are there to prevent the giraffe's head from exploding when it bends down to take a drink?
[Laughter]
[Dan] So Howard's [telling a dumb joke]
[Kjell] I didn't think I'd be talking about… 
[Dan] About a giraffe exploding, and you saying, "No, that's actually a real thing."
[Laughter]
[Dan] That's my favorite thing that's happened today.
[Howard] Can you give me a little more credit than that? Because… 
[Mary] No. No, we cannot.
[Howard] All right. Fine.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.
[Howard] Yes, please.
[Brandon] I'm going to do our book of the week. I think it's a very appropriate one. We're going to do R is for Rocket, by Ray Bradbury.
[Mary] Oh, yeah.
[Brandon] Which we haven't ever done, and it's my favorite Ray Bradbury collection. If you haven't read any Ray Bradbury, you're missing out. R Is for Rocket has my single favorite Ray Bradbury story of all time, Frost and Fire, in it. Which is about a planet where people live seven days. But it's also got A Sound of Thunder, which is his most… Second most famous probably short story. It's got The Long Rain, which is… It's got so many great things. It's just awesome. And it's fun, because, I mean, it was written in the 60s, right? In the 50s and 60s, and looking at space travel through the eyes of someone living back then and comparing it to now, I think it's just fine. I actually recently read a bunch of Bradbury stories. It's just delightful. I absolutely love reading that period.
[Howard] I remember reading A Sound of Thunder in high school, and really, really liking it, while at the same time being very, very disturbed by it.
[Brandon] Oh, it's… 
[Howard] It's a fun story.
[Brandon] Point of… 
[Howard] That's what it's for.
 
[Brandon] Let's go back to questions for an astronaut.
[Mary] Yeah. Okay. So I ask this question anytime someone says, "I would like to learn how to play bagpipes."
[Laughter]
[Mary] Why? Why would you like to learn to play bagpipes? Specifically, why did you think, "You know what, I'm going into space. I think I'll learn to play bagpipes in space."
[Kjell] Well, I grew up in England, from… I spent from my third grade until my freshman year in England, for the first four years near London, and then three years in Cambridge. I just… I fell in love with the bagpipes while living over there. I remember my parents taking us to a military tattoo, essentially a parade, and the pipes ushering in this parade.
[Mary] They're good outdoors.
[Kjell] Yes. Yes, they are good for the outdoors. I have always wanted to learn how to play the bagpipes. I thought… I'm not sure what I was thinking.
[Laughter]
[Kjell] But I thought it would be fun to play the bagpipes on the International Space Station. So we get a small personal allotment [garbled]
[Dan] Did any of the other people on the space station agree with [garbled]
[Kjell] None of them got to weigh in on this decision. The commander did not know I was going to have them up there until I was like, "Hey, Scott? Do you mind if I play the bagpipes?" I don't know if I even asked him. I think I started playing and…
[Dan] The commander's like, "Everyone, meet the new guy. His name is Kjell. And he brought bagpipes."
[Laughter]
[Mary] To an enclosed space that you cannot leave without a rocketship.
[Kjell] Yes. You cannot leave. Although you might be forced to leave.
[Chuckles]
[Kjell] So, to… I'm going to take a little bit of credit here. I found the absolute furthest place away from crew quarters to practice. So that was in one of our storage modules, and started practicing.
[Howard] Is that the one where the lighting is on the wrong side?
[Kjell] No, different one, different one.
[Howard] Oh, okay.
[Kjell] But I would poke my head out to see if anybody was like…
[Chuckles]
[Kjell] Reacting. And then started to normalize a little bit, and just was playing in various modules. Then, later on, asked Scott and Kimiya both, very pointedly, "Hey, does this bother you? Is this okay?" Scott said… You know what, actually, he grew up in New Jersey, it reminded him of firefighters playing when he was growing up. So it was a little… Probably not as well played, but a picture of home for him, during the one year mission. So… Then, Kimiya, honestly, is such a great guy. So easy to get along with, that even if it was the worst thing ever for him to listen to me playing the bagpipes, he would not admit to it, and he would just say, "Oh, no, it's fine."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] There is something to be…
[Kjell] So I have very supportive roommates.
[Howard] There is something to be said for being so willing to get along with other people that if those bagpipes make you happy, they make me happy. That is, there's something to that.
 
[Kjell] There absolutely is, and I think it's one of… Especially for long-duration spaceflight, it is one of the most important things that we bring with us as a crew member, and that is what we describe as expeditionary behavior. That is, first step, get yourself squared away. To be competent at doing the things that you need to do to be successful. To start working on time, to be efficient. So that then, you have enough bandwidth to help your crewmates. So you're squared away, and now the focus of your day is what can I do make his life better today? Scott's life, and Kimiya's life better today? What can I do? If we are all thinking that way, you just get along. Part of that is also what things do I do that irritate other people? I want to retract those friction points. What are the things that maybe he does that irritate me? I just I figure out ways to remove myself from that situation or do something differently, or, if we absolutely have to, have the conversation about hey, when I am practicing robotic arm operations, I'd really appreciate it if you weren't playing the bagpipes.
[Laughter]
[Howard] On the end of the robotic arm.
[Laughter]
[Kjell] So, it's really interesting. Right before my mission, I was thinking I'm going to spend six months in an enclosed space with the same-ish five people. We did have a small crew change out… In the middle of the mission, but… The same people. For that entire time. I thought I really wonder how this is going to go? I mean, is this… Are we going to… Are there going to be any issues? It was three months into the mission before I even thought about it again. Everybody just… Particularly in our crew, and I know other crews are like this, just work really hard to take care of each other to get along. So that ultimately, we can have a successful mission, and a productive mission.
[Howard] One of the ways I've heard it described, a guy I met on an Air Force Base who had been on submarines, was in that environment, we don't have the luxury of not getting along.
[Kjell] That's true. I mean, if you want to be successful…
[Mary] [garbled] the Internet.
[Laughter]
[Kjell] You have to get along, you have to figure out what is it that we need to do? Otherwise, the mission will not be successful. That is, as professionals up there, with the investment that our respective nations have made…
[Dan] Oh, God.
[Kjell] We cannot afford to not be successful.
[Howard] I'm being paid way too much to be a jerk.
[Laughter]
 
[Dan] Okay. I have a question for you. This is a question we typically ask on our What Do Writers Get Wrong episodes, but I'm curious, so I'm going to ask it anyway. What have you seen in media, in a book or a movie, a depiction of astronauts that you just think is… Just bugs you to death, and what else have you seen that you really loved, that they got something really right.
[Kjell] Wow. So, books are difficult, because a lot of… I think what really strikes me is movement in space and the physics of space. That really isn't depicted in a book. They talk about getting from one place to another. What's very jarring for me is seeing people floating through a capsule or through a space station… And it's not that I'm thinking about hey, Newton's third law of gravity. It's that just did not look right. It's somebody that's floating straight, and then all of a sudden, takes a hard right turn floating…
[Dan] Without touching anything.
[Kjell] Without grabbing anything or holding onto anything. Just immediately, it's like, "Okay, that was very weird." So it's things like that. Just the physics that I think become very second nature on orbit that you really have to think about if you have never been in that environment. I think that is viscerally what strikes me. I think from a storyline, the generation of drama from things that really don't need to be dramatic, when there are other things about living in space and operating in that environment. I mean, there are any number of things that can kill us at any time…
[Laughter]
[Kjell] And to come up with something goofy when…
[Chuckles]
[Kjell] It's vacuum. It's cold.
[Laughter]
[Kjell] Vacuum out there, people. I mean…
[Mary] There's plenty there.
[Kjell] I mean, yeah. There's plenty of risk there. So I think that those are things that kind of…
[Howard] Please don't add death to my job in new ways.
[Laughter]
[Kjell] Exactly.
[Howard] I already have a very long list of deaths.
 
[Dan] So, can you give us some examples of people who, or artists, that you feel have done a really good job?
[Kjell] You know what, I really enjoyed reading Andy Weir's The Martian. As a crew, it was really cool. We got to watch that movie before it was released to the public. We got to watch it on the space station.
[Laughter]
[Kjell] We got to watch this movie, and I really enjoyed the book. We got to watch it in space. So…
[Mary] I'm sure that some place, Andy Weir is going, "They watched my movie in space!"
[Laughter]
[Mary] That's what I would do.
[Howard] My head is doing the zero gravity giraffe right now.
[Laughter]
[Dan] We have a good writing prompt.
[Laughter]
[Kjell] There was… There were things about that that showed clearly they had done their research. There were things that nobody else would have caught that just resonated with us during that movie. One of them was when the main character, when Mark Watney is looking through everybody's stuff to look for food. So as he is pulling out the food and going through the menus, he's listing like beef stroganoff and chicken teriyaki and rice pilaf. So I'm watching him do that, and then I look at our food pantry right over here, and that's our… Those are… That's stuff from our menu.
[Laughter]
[Kjell] I'm like, "Oh, my gosh. That's our menu." So just little details that really nobody else would have noticed that just make a story like that more real.
[Mary] That's fantastic.
 
[Brandon] Well, I think we are out of time. Do you really want to do that as our writing prompt, Dan?
[Laughter]
[Mary] Zero gravity giraffe.
[Dan] The zero gravity giraffe? So Howard said a phrase, "I'm doing the zero gravity giraffe." Find your own interpretation of what that means, and write a story about it.
[Brandon] Kjell, thank you very much for your time.
[Kjell] Well, thank you for having me.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 11.19: Fashion for Writers, with Rebecca McKinney

May. 12th, 2016 03:19 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.19: Fashion for Writers, with Rebecca McKinney

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/05/08/11-19-fashion-for-writers-with-rebecca-mckinney/

Key Points: Mistakes writers make about clothing? Jokes are only funny if they are right, so get the words right! Know what you are talking about. Make sure that different people describe clothing different ways. Think about the economy of clothing in your books! How does clothing link to the economy, environment, technology, even labor. Describing clothing should move the story forward, by describing something important about the person. To learn about clothing, try books about sewing or costumes. Try Pinterest. To worldbuild clothing, think about materials, technology, and adoption. What is fancy? What do people do at home, and what is expensive?
( Get out your scissors, needle and thread... )

[Brandon] We are out of time.
[Rebecca] Sorry.
[Mary] No, this was great.
[Brandon] No, this has been fantastic. This has been a really useful episode. We really appreciate you coming on, Rebecca.
[Rebecca] Oh, stop, I'm blushing.
[Brandon] And, Rebecca, you're going to give us some homework.
[Rebecca] Yes. I think that you should describe the same outfit from two different points of view, and how does that person see them, and why?
[Brandon] Excellent. Thank you to our studio audience.
[Whoo! Applause.]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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