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Writing Excuses 20.43: An Interview with Dr. Tara Lepore on Paleontology

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-43-an-interview-with-dr-tara-lepore-on-paleontology

Key points: Paleontology is more than just dinosaurs. Mammal teeth have a neonatal line formed during birth. What is paleontology? Lots of stuff! The study of life on Earth and how it came to be, the evolution of life. Integrative more than boundaries. What do you get tired of answering? Indiana Jones was an archeologist, and Ross from Friends was a paleontologist, but so were others! What can paleontology tell us? It's like a time machine. Deep time! Snowball Earth! For more information, try your local museum or library.

[Season 20, Episode 43]

[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 43]

[Erin] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] An interview with Dr. Tara Lepore on paleontology.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Howard] And we're joined by paleontologist and newly minted Doctor Tara Lepore.

[Tara] Hey, everybody. How's it going?

[Howard] We are so excited to have you here. Because we all have so many questions. I'm going to lead with the big one. Are you in the feathers or not feathers camp?

[Chuckles]

[Tara] Oh, you're cutting it deep, right off the bat. Yeah. Full disclosure, the last 5 years of my paleontology work have been on mammals. But, as a velociraptor fan and also reader of many papers on feathers, I'm in the feathers camp. I'm in the... There's a lot of evidence for feathers. But not all dinosaurs probably had feathers. Yeah. So kick it off with the feather stuff. That's what I have to say about that.

[Howard] I gotta say, we're all... I say we are all. I'm a 56-year-old dude, and so my introduction to dinosaurs was kind of... On the one hand was Dinotopia, and on the other hand was Jurassic Park. So we're either going to ride them like horses or they're going to eat us like we are livestock. And... But we all were fascinated by them, we loved them, and the look on your face, for those who are not benefiting from the video feed, tells me paleontology is actually a lot more than just dinosaurs, Howard.

[Tara] Yeah. Although I will say, full disclosure, as a kid, I watched Dino Riders. Which is another show about riding on top of dinosaurs that have lasers attached to their heads.

[Chuckles]

[Tara] So... Big fan, and we could talk about Beast Wars, the Transformers with animals, they're top epic. But there is, Howard, a lot more to do with paleontology than just dinosaurs. I'm happy to talk more about that. And as I alluded to, just a few minutes ago, I've been diving into the world of fossil and modern mammals and mammal evolution. Yeah, so we can zoom way out and talk about all the good stuff.

[Howard] Okay. One of my favorite questions to ask an expert on anything is... And I'm going to tee up mammals... What's the most interesting thing you've learned about paleontological mammals recently?

[Tara] Oh, yeah. So, part of my PhD dissertation research had to do with looking inside mammal teeth. So slicing them up. These were deceased mammals, mostly modern mammals I asked very nicely. And so I was looking at all kinds of modern mammal teeth, looking for evidence of birth, so there's actually like a little line that we can call like a birth certificate, a line called the neonatal line, like a neonate. And it forms in all the teeth that are forming during the birth transition in humans. And some friends of mine, some colleagues, came out with a study looking at not just modern mammals, not just humans, but looking at one of the oldest mammals that has this evidence marker of what we would think of today as a placental mammal birth. So the kind of birth that humans have, with the placenta. And the mammal had this line, this neonatal line, inside its teeth, and it was from just after the end of the age of dinosaurs. Which makes sense, because mammals at that time would have been what we call placental mammals today. There were also examples of marsupials, at least early ones, and monotremes, early ones. But I think it's so cool because we can zoom in inside of teeth and look at the chemistry and the structure inside teeth, we can kind of connect our own history of birth as like human beings to some of the earliest mammals. And I would love to see where that line of work goes, like, looking at the mammals that were around during the time of dinosaurs. So, birth certificates inside our mouths connecting us to all mammals and mammal evolution. I think it's super, super cool.

[Howard] That is... That is I mean...

[Tara] Yes.

[Howard] Fascinating and mind blowing. The idea that we have a... There's a bone structure in our mouths that says, yeah, you didn't come from an egg. You came from a uterus. And you're saying that that shows that placental birth for mammals is 60 to 65 million years old.

[Tara] At least. And then there's a whole boatload of other pieces of evidence that we can look at in the skeleton of mammals and also in some of the genes that have to do with, like, egg yolk and why don't humans have egg yolk, but we have other stuff that's yolk-y or amniotic at least and all these other kind of pieces of evidence that come along with being a mammal. But looking inside the teeth is one really cool way that we can kind of get a better sense of where we came from and also what mammals were doing back in the time of dinosaurs. So I'm super psyched about that kind of stuff.

[Howard] That is so cool.

[Erin] One of the things that I really love about this is... Thinking about, if I said, like, all the information... this is a misstatement of what you said, but like all the information about you is in your teeth. That sounds like something that is very science fictional. You know what I mean? And so what I think is really cool about looking at these, like, these types of scientific studies, are you can extrapolate pieces from those. So even if you aren't writing about dinosaurs specifically, or ancient mammals, there's something really cool in the way that you're studying it that I could take that piece of information and put it in a story as some really interesting fact that I then build an entire world or species around. And... So I just think that's cool. But also, I just have a question, as somebody who does not know much. I'll be honest. Like, I am the, like, paleontological newbie, I guess, of the group. Which is, like, what then does make something paleontology? Is it about the time period it is, is it about the type of creature? Are there any things where like we will refuse to study bugs? Like, what is it that makes something within your realm?

[Tara] Yeah. Totally, Erin, that's a great question. And it's one that we get a lot also in the kind of world of outreach and education as paleontologists. So, my training is specifically in what I would call vertebrate paleontology, where I work really specifically on vertebrates. I worked on everything within that from mammals and mammal teeth to dinosaur footprints and trackways to even... And this is a great party conversation starter, but... Dinosaur poop. Droppings, fossils known as coprolites.

[Chuckles]

[Tara] So, really, a lot of stuff can fall within vertebrate paleontology. But to get to your question, paleontology is the study of all life on Earth and how it came to be as we understand it today. So the evolution of life on Earth. It could be involving bacteria, plants, fungi, all kinds of vertebrates, invertebrates, shelled... All kinds of shelled organisms. So there's a ton of stuff within paleontology that really is united by the study of the evolution of life on Earth.

[Howard] It sounds... And I could be too freely mixing of my disciplines here, but it sounds like paleontology without organic chemistry, paleontology without geology, paleontology without astrophysics stops being complete paleontology. Because if you don't know how to tell, for instance, that an asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula, then a lot of your fossils don't make sense, and you don't have the whole story. How... How is the wrong way to start that question. Do you guys draw like discreet lines... You. You are a geologist, not a paleontologist. Go to your rock room.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Stay away from my bones.

[Tara] I do have a rock room. No, I wish I did, actually. The program that I came from and the way I was trained throughout different parts of my career is to think of what I do as integrative. I did my PhD in an integrative biology department. And you mentioned geology, and often people will need to learn a lot about geology and rocks, as well as biology and the study of life, to do different kinds of paleontological work. That being said, I'm also a really big kind of supporter of thinking across what we might traditionally call boundaries between different disciplines. I think we really learn a lot when we talk to the people who do organic chemistry or we talk to the people who are studying insects, maybe that are alive today. In my line of work, I did quite a bit of cross talk with people who look at modern mammals and modern mammal birth, because that also helped me understand a little bit more about the landscape of how mammals are born today and what do we know about them and what is their parental kind of care and things like that. Sometimes in our scientific communities, we will have different conferences that can kind of push people into that silo effect, where we'll go to a geological society meeting or a paleontology meeting or vertebrate paleontology over here. But I also think that we have a lot to gain by breaking down those kinds of silos. So, yes, some structure exists, but I think we have a lot more fun and do a lot more interesting things when we have spaces where people can talk together. And not just as scientists, but as people who do all kinds of different types of work. Some of the best people I know in paleontology have come from really wide-ranging backgrounds. I have a really good friend who had an English degree as their first degree. And I really feel like we need to open up more spaces for that kind of stuff. Because it's all about telling stories. Stories about Earth and life and everything that's relevant to us today. So I think we benefit from a wide range of backgrounds.

[Howard] That's... That's amazing. And as writers, we kind of have to be interdisciplinary. As Erin pointed out, oh, now that I know this thing about mammal teeth, I can invent a thing about these alien jaw bones or whatever and use it to inform my story. And Erin doesn't need to be a paleontologist. And I don't need to be an astrophysicist. But we need to know that those disciplines exist, and we need to... Like, the way English steals from other languages, we need to steal from all the other disciplines in order to do the things that we want to do. I think it was Terry Pratchett who said English doesn't borrow from other languages, it follows them down dark alleys and mugs them, and then goes through their pockets for loose grammar.

[laughter]

[Howard] But, yeah, the idea that we don't want these silos. getting an English degree is fine if you just want to know how English works. But if you want to actually write stories about interesting things, you have to learn all the interesting things. And learning all the interesting things brings us to a nice spot to pause.

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[Tara] So, we want to give a shout out to the University of California Museum of Paleontology. Or UCMP. And UCMP is a museum that I just finished up my graduate work at, and it is based at the University of California, Berkeley. And they have an amazing website ucmp.berkeley.edu. And this is a really great one-stop shop if you want to go on there and check out what it's like to be a paleontologist. They also have really great resources on understanding evolution and understanding science, which is really widely accessed by a lot of teachers and other educators, and there are a number of blog posts that are also written on the UCMP website that were written by grad students, myself included. But I also just want to give a shout out for everybody who shared their really great research through these blog posts so if you click on the UCMP website, you'll find a link for blog posts. And, yeah, I think it's a really great resource in general on that website. Just for people who want to learn more about paleontology.

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[Howard] We're back. Tara, I have a question for you, and it's a scary one. What's the question that you get tired of answering?

[Tara] Oh, man. I'm getting tired just thinking about it.

[Chuckles]

[Tara] So I want to preface all of this with I would never get mad or upset or push somebody away or be like, no, you don't know what you're talking about. But I kind of grit my teeth a little bit when people try to relate what I do as a paleontologist and they say something like, oh, yeah, I really love Indiana Jones too, or, I absolutely can relate to that because of Ross from Friends. and I feel like we're doing society as a whole a disservice because Indiana Jones, for better or worse, was supposed to be an archaeologist, and I think that's also an important distinction that we can make in our conversation about, like, that difference. and Ross from Friends, I mean if you even watched Friends or know that Ross, the character, was a paleontologist, if that's our only touch point for paleontology, and people are skipping right over, like, I don't know, Ellie Sattler, Ellen Grants, any of the other fictional people from the movies, then I think we're just missing out. And so, yeah, it makes me grit my teeth a little.

[Erin] What... It's funny, that gives me an idea for a question, which is a lot of that's about stories, that we were talking a little bit earlier about how paleontology helps you tell these really interesting stories about the way that the Earth existed in all the... The thing that you said earlier that I'm not going to remember or do credit to. But these other stories have sort of taken the focus, it's like, this is what paleontology is. So a question I have is what are some of the stories about our world, about beings and creatures on it, that paleontology is able to tell in a way that no other field can?

[Tara] Yeah. That's a really good question, because I think paleontology and other ways of looking at the natural world, different kinds of sciences and also social sciences, we unite all of these ways of thinking. Paleontology as situated in that context gives us like the next best thing to a time machine. And I really think that that's a powerful way that people can not only connect to paleontology as a concept, as a science, but to think about why it matters, and what can paleontology tell us about the story of life on Earth. Which is really our story as human beings. And, of course, there's a whole field too that has to do with human history and human evolution and things like that, related to paleontology. Some might say that there's a lot of overlap, but that would be things like paleoanthropology, for example, the study of ancient humans. And often those folks will work with people who are more expertise in other types of life besides humans. So, yeah, I think having the ability to look back into what we might call deep time, not just the time frame of human lifespans or human history, but deep time that goes into thousands and millions and even billions of years. Way back before humans were around. I think paleontology is a really cool kind of vector for us to do that. And it's a big reason why I think it also captures a lot of people's imaginations. Like, paleontology can help us learn about what life was like before any people were here.

[Howard] I love the concept... Just the idea, the mental framework that the words deep time create. Just this idea that the stories that we're able to tell from history, the stories we're able to tell from deep history... We have writings that are 5,000 years old or whatever. Those are shallow time. Those are back when the moon was still in basically the same orbit it's in now. One of my favorite deep time stories is, oh, yeah, y'all, the moon was a planet that slammed into Earth and spat back out and there was a whole ring around Earth for a long time. I say a long time, I don't know how long the ring lasted, but Earth was a hot, miserable place for a long time and the moon was really close and it's been moving away. And I love that story. I can't remember which... There was some show I watched where they've gone back in time and someone looked up at the sky and was like, the Moon is too close. Oh, crap.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] We went back further than we were supposed to. Because if I can see that the Moon is bigger, actually bigger, not on the horizon, optical illusion bigger, then we overshot. So, yeah, I love deep time. And I want to re-ask Erin's question, do you have a favorite deep time story? I've already told you, mine's the Moon. Do you have one?

[Tara] Oh, wow. So deep time, thinking about all the things that have happened to and on this planet that I'm aware of, and there are many more that I'm not aware of. My mind immediately goes to how the planet has changed and, Howard, you mentioned how the Moon was formed and Earth was changed. It was a hot molten mass for so many millions and millions of years. I like thinking about how Earth has changed, how it went through a period called Snowball Earth, where at least there's good evidence that for several million years, the Earth was an ice ball planet and not entirely inhospitable to life, but very different from what we would think of it today.

[Howard] Not friendly to sunbathers.

[Chuckles]

[Tara] Exactly. I'm sure there was great snowshoeing. But, yeah... And then my area of thinking about this often comes back to the animals and plants and the interesting kind of creatures that, number one, we have evidence of in the fossil record but, number two, this is sort of like... Not so much my favorite part of deep time, but something I love thinking about is what are the creatures that probably existed but never became fossilized? Or if they did, we haven't found them yet? So I love thinking about the huge diverse array of life on Earth that we know of from the fossil record and how imperfect and incomplete that fossil record is. And it just is such an imaginative and creative thing. Not just as a scientist, which I think can be a really creative endeavor, but as somebody who likes to think about stories and wonder what else was here? So, yeah. I think that kind of stuff is really cool to think about.

[Erin] Yeah. And I think the... One of the things that I love about that is how many possibilities it opens up. Again, not just for the thing that it is, but for the things that we can imagine. If you think about, okay, I'm writing a story that's... We're going to go to an ice planet. Finding out that there was a snowball Earth, like, there's actually a thing you could study looking back that could help you create a planet a million years away or in a fantastical landscape that has no human intervention, based on that. So I'm wondering, like, if we wanted to get more of these stories, I mean we could keep you here for hours and we wish we could, but, like, what are some other resources that, like, we could go to in addition to the one you shared at the break? Are there other places to start when we're looking for this kind of information to inspire us to create interesting stories?

[Tara] Yeah. So I think that there are a whole number of different museums around the country and around the world that are doing really cool work, both online and in person. Trying to share these kinds of stories with the public and maybe with people who aren't always tapped into the, say, paleontology realm or maybe really interested in it, but they don't know where to start. So I think that a really great just general shout out is, if you have a local museum, even if it's really small, try checking them out. And you can also search for, like, what we would call accredited museums through the American Association of Museums, the AAM. So that's just another place where if you're like, I don't know if this museum is telling me the truth or what's going on or what is truth? Ah! Existential crisis. But, yeah, there are a number of really great museums that you can visit, and I'm a big fan of local museums. I got my start in paleontology as a volunteer just going to my local museum, and I think that made a huge impact on my life. And this sounds really old school, but just honestly the library, because a librarian or somebody that you can talk to and say, hey, what resources do you have on this? I really like the idea of just touching base with those kinds of folks. For me, a lot of that was something that I had really the privilege to access through the PhD program and I could talk with people. But I also really want to shout out, like, check out your local library, talk to your local museum. If you don't have a local museum, look for a website of one in the biggest city near you period and uhm yeah. I think that's what I would probably highlight the most.

[Howard] I love librarians. I mean, they're like the original interdisciplinarians because... They're not... They're literally not allowed to put a book on the shelf unless they've read it. So they've read all the books. And this fact that I just made up now...

[laughter]

[Tara][garbled] true?

[laughter]

[Howard] I'm so sorry. I'm a terrible person.

[Tara][garbled] librarians[garbled]

[so many years in solitude]

[Howard] But librarians get asked all of the questions all of the time, and, yeah, they're a brilliant resource. Well, gosh, we could just keep talking, and asking, and talking, and sharing. I love this, but at some point, we have to send everybody home with some homework. Tara? Do you have some homework for our listeners?

[Tara] Yeah. So I would love for the listeners to think about if you have some way of making deep time, this concept of deep time, within the millions and maybe billions of years, relevant to your upcoming or current writing project. So, maybe pick three ways that deep time could be interwoven into what you're currently working on, whether that's a fantasy, with what kind of fossils could have been on that planet, or maybe it's as simple as how deep time and fossils and the Earth are relevant to your memoir. So, yeah, pick three things and see what comes up this next few weeks and enjoy. I hope it's an interesting exercise.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/30/16-22-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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.19: Intro to Roleplaying Games

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/09/16-19-intro-to-roleplaying-games/

Key Points: A roleplaying game allows you to inhabit a persona (play a character) and live their life for the course of the game. The outcome of a roleplaying game, the course of the game, is not necessarily predetermined. When you're writing for a roleplaying game, you're writing a story, but someone else is writing the protagonist. You have to balance predestination, the writer as the invisible hand of fate, with free will, the characters' choices. You're turning a novel into an amusement park. Writing a tabletop roleplaying game is balancing between all games are physics simulations and all roleplaying games are improvisational theater. It has to be fun. Situations need multiple successful resolutions, a large possibility space. Game masters curate the experience the players want to have. The illusion of choice, or curating real choices? The choices need to be entertaining. A good visual model of narrative flow for tabletop roleplaying games is a pachinko machine. Pet peeves? Dead ends. Only one type for a gender. Long read-aloud sections. Other people telling me how my character feels. Game master versus players.

[Season 16, Episode 19]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[James] Intro to Roleplaying Games.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Cassandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[James] I'm James.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are very excited to be introducing for you all another one of our intensive courses for the year. This one is about game writing and interactive fiction. So we've got two really incredible guests who are both experts in this field. They're going to be teaching us all about it for the next eight episodes. So, James and Cassandra, introduce yourselves. Let us know who you are.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra. I used to work in Ubisoft Montréal. I've worked on games like Hyperscape. I've also done indie work for titles like Fallen London, Sunless Skies, Wasteland 3, and I've done a little bit of tabletop work for D&D and World of Darkness. James?

[James] I'm James L. Sutter. I'm mostly on the tabletop side. I'm the co-creator of the Pathfinder and the Starfinder roleplaying games. But I've also done a little bit of videogame work. So, between us, we're hoping to cover everything folks want to know.

[Dan] Cool.

[Cassandra] [garbled… saying that]

[James] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] We are very excited to have you with us. Mary Robinette and Howard and I also have a little bit, a tiny fraction, of game work, so at least we kind of know what we're talking about. But let's jump into this. Cassandra, our topic this week is intro to roleplaying games. What… Where do you want to start us?

[Cassandra] Well, let's go back to, like, the bare basics of this, the very simplest definition of it. A roleplaying game is essentially a game that allows you to inhabit a persona and sort of live out its life throughout the course of the game. In other words, you could be Bob the accountant in your daily life, but in a roleplaying game, you might be Somarian the Elf. What differentiates a roleplaying game from, say, an action game or an adventure game is that the outcome is not necessarily predetermined. There are ways to get to the end, but in between you have side quests with different possibilities, different ways they might go. It might end horrendously in an ending you might not have been expecting, kind of like real life. There are also inventories, there are stat-based systems, and, depending on what you're talking about, whether it is a AAA type or a tabletop game, those stats might come into play differently. It's something that I think James might be very good at discussing.

[James] Yeah. Well, especially because in tabletop roleplaying games, you have to do a lot of stuff on the fly potentially, because the nice thing about it is that in something like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder, every… Your characters can do literally anything. That's the blessing, but also the curse. Because if you're running the game, you need to be able to account for all of that. So the thing to remember, when you're writing for a roleplaying game type thing is that you're writing a story, but someone else is writing the protagonist. So you've got this balancing act, because it's your job to make the story go where it needs to go, but it's the players job to make everything makes sense, make sense for their characters, to make sure the protagonist is doing what they think the character should do. Usually, you're playing with multiple characters at a time. So it's that question of how do you guide the players through choices that feel meaningful an independent and sensible for the character they've chosen to inhabit, but also is guiding them along the right general story path. So, I'm curious, Cass, what do you feel like are some good examples of that?

[Cassandra] At least in AAA games, I think Mass Effect might probably be one of the easiest examples to look at. Because you have the paragon and you have the renegade route. Even though you are still giving the player freedom of choice to go and do whatever they want, once you have it categorized as, all right, this is light side work and this is dark side work, you kind of teach them to go along the path that you need them to go towards to fit the conclusion without ever feeling like you're holding them on a leash. It's all about balancing predestination and free will. You are absolutely the invisible hand of fate.

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] Although occasionally you need to be a little bit less invisible, otherwise the players are just going to go off the rails. But what I think really is very interesting about writing for roleplaying games, especially, is that if you're transitioning from like say novel writing, you… Well, at least I did. I had the trouble of constantly wanting to make things linear. I expected the players would want to go a certain direction, they would need to follow the beats that I'd given them. But the trick about roleplaying games and designing them is you're giving them a setting, you're giving them a sandbox, you might be giving them a little bit of a map, like a toolkit, some directions on what to do, and you're kind of hoping that they will go in that direction. It is not necessarily true. To reuse a metaphor about novels, it's kind of like turning your novel into an amusement park, and then setting the boundaries along with it. But what's it like, doing similar things for, let's say, tabletop games, because it's so much more open ended with the game master's and so on? With video games, you have all those things preset by design, by audio, by the visuals… Man. I don't think those terms do exist with tabletop games.

[Howard] Years and years ago, 15 years ago, Steve Jackson said to me, "All games are physics simulations." That stuck with me. I keep coming back to it and asking, "Well, wait. This game isn't a… No, at some level, this is a physics simulation." The second one, and I can't remember who told this to me, "All roleplaying games are improvisational theater."

[Yeah]

[Howard] Talking about tabletop roleplaying games as improvisational theater. So, for me, writing or playing or game mastering a tabletop roleplaying game is a balancing act between this is a physics simulation and this is improvisational theater. I say improvisational theater rather than improvisational storytelling because we know we want the storytelling to happen, but the theater aspect is what suggests that this has to be entertaining rather than just narratively… Functional narrative. I want it to be fun.

[James] Yeah. I use that improv example a lot when trying to explain roleplaying games to folks. I often say, like, the game master, who's sort of running the show, is kind of like the director. Then, all of the players are like actors, each inhabiting a character. So you create a character and then sort of go through the story that the director's running, trying to just act as your character would act. Everybody's kind of building off of each other. That's what creates this loose fun story that can go in different directions. I think that one of the things about that is, like Cass was saying, you gotta be careful not to be too linear in your story. You want to make sure that situations allow for multiple successful resolutions. Right? Like, you want to think about… Even if you thought… Your first thought is, "Well, they'll fight their way through this situation." You also want to be ready for them to talk their way through the situation, or trick somebody, or cause a distraction. Really considering the whole possibility space, that's what you're creating as a game writer is sort of these situations. Yeah, Mary?

[Mary Robinette] So, something that occurred to me as you were talking is one of my favorite DMs, I'm going to do a shout out to David Spears, but he said something about roleplaying that I really… It resonates with me a lot, which was that as a DM, he felt like what he was responsible for was curating the experience his players wanted to have.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] For me, that made more sense than the improvisational theater director metaphor, because the director is trying to execute their own vision, and a curator is trying to shape it for the people, for the viewer. So, for me, it often feels more like that there's a certain amount of second person… Or interactive theater. That there is this path and that on one hand, you can do a thing which I used to do in theater all the time which is that you can give the audience the illusion of choice.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] On the other hand, you can say, "Okay. No, you do actually have a choice, and I will go with you on this journey and I will curate this." I feel like those are two different modes of roleplay.

[Cassandra] Definitely. I think…

[James] Yeah. I think they're both crucial. Right, Cass?

[Cassandra] They are, definitely. Sorry, I think Dan was going to say something. I saw a finger there.

[Dan] I… Yeah, I wanted to jump in with this illusion of choice. Two of the best pieces of advice I ever got when I first started writing for roleplaying games was, first of all, somebody said that as you're controlling this story, as you're presenting the options, you can… If the characters come to a two roads diverge in a yellow wood kind of situation, and you need them to get to a castle, either road is going to lead to the castle. But they get to choose which one they're going to go down. That's kind of a blunt force illusion of choice. But then what you can do is add on to that, and present… Just make sure that the choices that you're offering are entertaining. This is something that game master's can fall into accidentally, where they make a choice they don't want the players to make and they present it as being really interesting or entertaining, and then they're stuck and they have to improvise something. But when you're writing that, if you are presenting a scenario, you can just kind of fill it with a lot of interesting toys to play with that… And then the players are going to immediately latch onto the ones that are exciting to them. If they see there's a giant fruit cart in the middle of the street, then they might think, "Oh, we could turn that over," or we could do whatever. If you make sure to put interesting characters into the space, that will lure them into talking to them. If you make sure to include a bunch of security cameras, then they will think, "Oh, we might need to sneak around or find a way to disable those." Giving them interesting choices instead of just choices is a good way of guiding them.

[Howard] If you ever wanted a physical model, a visual representation of storytelling, good storytelling narrative flow, for tabletop roleplaying games, it's the pachinko machine.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The balls can bounce left or right, but they always go down. The balls cannot escape the machine. They start at the top, but then there are little decisions along the way. At the end, yeah, there's multiple possible places the ball could land. Tracy Hickman described this as narrative bumper pool. At any point, you have choices. But all of the choices are leading us in this direction, rather than in the open-ended, the world keeps getting bigger as my players running any possible direction.

[Cassandra] Oh, that makes me think of the first Walking Dead game, honestly. Which I think is a really good example of how that illusion of choice and that use of linearity just kind of worked… I remember articles just exploding after people started playing the game, because people were so infuriated that… With how they never really had a choice at all. The game would tell you that characters remembered what you did. It would set it up so that emotional resonance between one choice or another was just so harrowing. But, let's say a character you decided not to helping one situation, you would eventually see them later. They would play a role in another set piece. But the thing that struck me most with that game, and how it implements that illusion of choice, is the ending. I think the game has been out long enough that a spoiler is fine.

[Go for it]

[Cassandra] Essentially, the end, you have this 10-year-old girl seeing her surrogate father slowly transform into a zombie. You find yourself with two choices, and they're both incredibly horrible. One, you leave. Like, you run, you go as far as you can from this person you cannot save. Or you shoot him in the head. Mechanically speaking, none of this matters. The poor guy still dies. But the fact that this was presented to you with so much emotional weight. Like Dan was saying, like, these are toys. Very morbid [garbled] toys, but these are toys on each other side of the road. If you present things that are interesting and resonant enough with the player, it doesn't matter that they know they're still going to one ending.

[James] I think the big thing about that is that the choices need to be tied to the player. Right? Like in the example you just gave, both of those are things that really… Like, you're making the call to drive the story. I think that's something people often run into when they're not used to running a game is it's really tempting to make the players not the main characters. You'll have that GM insertion character, the like helpful nonplayer character, the sidekick, who just happens to be better than the players in all these different ways. The player tries to go one way, and they grab them and steer them back on course. Like, you can do a little bit of that, but you really always want to make sure that your choices are being made by the players and that they feel significant to the characters.

[Cassandra] We're all NPC scenario life, there's no reason to continue being one in a game.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's brilliant, and a little sad. But I love it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I want to interrupt here. I have let this discussion go on maybe a little longer than I should, because we should have paused several minutes ago for our book of the week.

[Oh, no]

[Dan] Or our game of the week is how we're going to do it during this intensive course. I believe our game of the week this time comes from James.

[James] Yeah. So the game of the week is going to be the Starfinder roleplaying game, which I was the original creative director on. That's all about… It's a classic pen-and-paper roleplaying game. It's all about space wizards and laser ninjas. It's science fantasy, so you can kind of do everything from Alien to Star Wars to Fifth Element, whatever sort of story you want to tell. If you want to be a lizard with a grenade launcher or a bug priest of the death goddess, do whatever you want. But I wanted to bring this one up because there's both the tabletop version that you can go find, and also there is an Alexa version, an audio single player version of the game that I got to write that is free that people can, if you have an Amazon Alexa device, you can just say, "Alexa, play Starfinder." I'm sure I just turned on a whole bunch of people's right now.

[Laughter]

[James] But I have no regrets. You should play the game, because it's produced by Audible Studios and has a full cast and it's really fun.

[Dan] Well, as of this recording, just yesterday or the day before, you want a bunch of awards for that, didn't you?

[James] Yeah, we won some nice industry awards. I think like best voice experience and best developers. So, yeah, it's really a fun kind of a new medium. So it was nice to be able to bring this game that I love in tabletop into a voice version that people can play without having a group. You can just be playing it by yourself in your kitchen while you're making dinner.

[Dan] Cool.

[James] Well, thank you.

[Howard] My first experience with the Starfinder tabletop roleplaying game book was opening it up and literally removing the pages so that I could use them as references, because I was illustrating the Munchkin Starfinder cards for Steve Jackson Games.

[Right]

[Howard] It was easier to have the pages of the book all over the couch and the floor in front of me.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Then to have to pick up the book when I was drawing. I felt a little bad about it. But not bad enough to not do it. I got another copy of the book for me, anyway. So…

[Dan] Oh, man.

[James] Officially forgiven.

[Dan] Well, I love this, and thank you for using this is our first game of the week, because I think it's a great illustration of the fact that these… This is viable writing, like freelance or career employment opportunities. This is not just us talking about games because we love games. This is a job that people have, that people win awards for, that people get paid for. So, that's kind of why we're doing this whole class, is those writers who want to focus on games or on interactive… You know that it's a real thing and that it can be made to work.

[Dan] Anyway, we have gone a little over time, but I want to… This is our first episode of the course, so let's take a little bit of extra time. Because I know that Cass and James want to talk a little bit about pet peeves in roleplaying games.

[Mary Robinette] I was going to say, if we don't get to talk about pet peeves, I will…

[Laughter]

[James] Yeah. Absolutely. We should open this up to everybody. Maybe, Cass, you want to go first, but I'm sure that everybody here has something they've seen before that they feel like, "Oh. Never do that."

[Cassandra] Dead ends. I loathe… I grew up with the Sierra games, I grew up with King's Quest, and never lost my absolute hatred for how the game would just stop if say you looked at the mouse at the wrong instant. With roleplaying games, I feel like… I guess it should be failure, but the consequences should be interesting. It should be fun to die. It should be fun to see your kingdom crumble away. Just so you know you can see, like, an octopus kingdom rise up from the ashes of it. What about everyone else? What are your pet peeves in roleplaying games?

[Mary Robinette] Mine is… So, I played D&D all through high school. And one of the things that was frustrating is that in this game in which I'm supposed to have all of these choices about who I can inhabit, there were all of these different body types, and just forms for male characters. All of the women were this single, very sexy, scantily clad type. Like, everybody had exactly the same model body. As a highschooler who was already dealing with all of the body insecurities, that was… It was like, "But what if I don't want to wear a metal bikini?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, for me, it's writers who are not thinking about all of the different types of people who want to play a game and therefore shut them out.

[James] Yeah. Absolutely. I feel like that diversity of choices can also be a thing, like people… Even if folks go, "Oh, okay. I need to make sure that I cater to people in terms of what their character looks like." You also have to remember to cater to all the different sorts of decisions that people might want to make. So, question your own things about like which characters get romantic subplots. Is it just the characters that you personally would be interested in? If that's the case, then you're making a mistake. Right? You need to remember that you are not your only audience.

[Dan] Yeah. I think Mass Effect, which Cass mentioned earlier, is a good example of doing that right. Because most of the characters are romancible, regardless of gender, regardless of species, regardless of anything else, and you can really kind of curate your own story that way as you go through it. Because they took the time to add in all of that extra choice. One thing that is a pet peeve of mine, I always used to think that I hated big read-aloud sections in roleplaying game campaigns, and then once I started writing them, I realized I actually like read-alouds, I just don't like long ones. If something goes on for more than a paragraph, it, in my opinion, might be a little too long. I remember I played a D&D campaign with James, and it begins with almost a full page of here, let me read you this gargantuan introduction. We were all just laughing by the end of it, because we couldn't even remember how it started. It was so long. Take the time… Use read-alouds to get across a mood or an ambience or to get across a really great character beat that you really want to be in there. But then, step back and let the game master and the players kind of tell their own story.

[Mary Robinette] That's right. I forgot that it's game master these days. I'm so old.

[Laughter]

[Howard] My own least favorite is, and this is a sin that can be committed by the game master or by other players. I don't like other people at the table telling me how my character feels about something.

[Oh, yeah]

[Howard] Don't… No. You describe what happens and give me the opportunity to react. Because that's why I'm at the table.

[James] I'd also just throw out, also, especially in tabletop where there is the game master and the players, there can sometimes be a feeling that it's the game master versus the players. Like we were saying before, like, that's never the case. Your job as game master is to make sure everybody there has a good time. That's the goal, right? So you want to… You don't want to be so easy that your players never feel fit… Never fear failure. Because that reduces tension. But you're also not trying to kill off your characters. It's not the characters versus you as the manifestation of their story. So, the number one thing is just make sure that everybody's having fun. Similarly, don't allow players to be jerks under the guise of, "Well, that's what my character would do." We're all still there to have fun and tell a story.

[Dan] Cass, what were you going to say?

[Cassandra] Oh. No. I was just going to say that autonomy is just, like, the imperative in this situation. Having jerks try to force their ideas on you, that pushes against a player's autonomy. Similarly, telling a player exactly how they feel… Nope. No. Those are just pet peeves of mine, too. I'm just sighing about them in the very short amount of time we have left on an episode that's already run over…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Yeah. We do need to be done now.

[Laughter]

[Dan] But I believe we have some homework.

[James] Yeah. So, homework hopefully will be pretty easy and fun for folks. I just want you to spend some time playing a roleplaying game. That can be a videogame, that can be tabletop. But, play a roleplaying game and take note of what's fun and what's not.

[Dan] Awesome. That sounds great. Okay. Thank you very much for listening to our episode. We are going to keep talking about game writing for the next seven weeks. We hope to see you again. Thank you very much. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.26: Taking the Chance, with David Weber

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/06/28/15-26-taking-the-chance-with-david-weber/

Key points: Taking the chance, taking risks, is the only way to be successful. "He who will not risk cannot win." To succeed, take the risk of failing. If you don't submit, you can't make a sale. Be a storyteller. At some point, it will turn into work. Keep going. When you can't get the platonic ideal book on the page, what do you do? Write the damn book. Learn from it. Characterization is critical. You have to be you. Write the story that interests you. Choose your verbs wisely. Never bury dialogue inside a paragraph. Sentences are what you build books out of. Characters are what stories are about, sentences are how you tell the story. Get those two things right.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, episode 26.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Taking the Chance, with David Weber.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guest star, David Weber. Thank you so much for being on the podcast with us.

[David] Thank you for inviting me.

[Brandon] David Weber is one of the best-selling science fiction writers of all time, so we are super excited to have him. We are alive again at SpikeCon.

[Whoo! Applause!]

[Brandon] So, this topic was one that you suggested, David. The idea of taking the chance, meaning taking risks with your writing. What made you want to do this topic?

[David] Well, it's not just taking risks with your writing once you're an established writer. I cannot tell you how many people I've encountered who I think could have been successful writers, except that they were afraid to take the chance of failing at something that they had dreamed about. I could have been published easily 10 years earlier than I was if I hadn't kept finding excuses to do other things instead. That means I've been publishing for 30 years and I've lost a third of the time that I could have been published at this point. I mentioned in the preshow when I was talking to our hosts that there's a quote from John Paul Jones which has become increasingly important to me over the years, and it has nothing to do with not giving up the ship. But Jones said that, "It seems to be a law inflexible unto itself that he who will not risk cannot win." So if you don't take the risk of failing as a writer, you can never succeed as a writer. So you're sitting there, and you have this dream that says I could be a writer. Perhaps you could. But if you keep saying I could be a writer long enough, one day you wake up and it's turned into I could have been a writer, but the opportunity is gone now. Okay? So if you want to write, you have got to take the chance of being rejected, and possibly being rejected over and over again, until you find the right first reader, the right publisher that says, "Oh. I could do this." Okay? You have to remember while you're doing this, you control, or writers in general control a resource that publishers have to have. Publishers exist to publish. That means they need things to publish. Which means that they are constantly on the lookout for things to publish. Yes, they get a lot of dreck and there's… the first readers pile is the slush pile, and people read it and they go, "Oh, my God." I actually know of one book that was submitted on brown paper written in purple crayon. Okay? You don't get read when you do that kind of submission. But if you don't submit, you cannot possibly make a sale. I cannot emphasize… Over emphasize how important it is to be willing to do that. The other thing that I think you need to bear in mind is you can learn to write better with editorial support and with the practice. You can learn to write better. But what you have to be to make it work in this business is a storyteller. You have to have that bug. You can increase the skill with which you exercise that need to be a storyteller. But that's a critical element. If you don't feel that inside, if you don't feel the story that needs… That's growing that needs to come out, then you don't need to try and be an author. Because you're going to be fighting your own nature the entire time that you're trying to write a story. Unless that is what it is your nature to be. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, storytellers have to tell stories. That's certainly true in my case.

[Brandon] Howard, you had something you wanted to say?

[Howard] Yeah. I was just going to… I like the John Paul Jones quote. We've had the opportunity to visit NASA a couple of times. They have that famous slogan, failure is not an option. Because there are times at which, boy, you just… You can't allow yourself to fail. I created a maxim within my own universe, which is "Failure is not an option. It's mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do."

[David] Yeah.

[Howard] The idea there… I mean, that doesn't get you past the John Paul Jones quote, which is that you have to take that chance in the first place. But I am always reminding myself that I am going to fail. It's just gonna happen. All I get to choose is whether or not I learn from it and whether I let myself quit.

[David] Well, NASA's failure is not an option stands on the shoulders of every single thing they did that failed as they were doing the engineering, when they were developing…

[Howard] They blew up so many rockets.

[Laughter]

[David] Absolutely. Okay? Failure is not an option means that ultimately we must succeed. It doesn't mean that we won't have the occasional catastrophe along the way. That we won't have Columbia. That we won't have…

[Dan] But, to your point about the whole premise of this episode, if NASA had never done anything that could have failed, they never would have gotten into orbit, they never would have gotten on the moon.

[David] Exactly.

[Dan] They had to be willing to take those risks and screw up horribly in order to achieve what they eventually have achieved.

[David] That's absolutely true. It's… Okay. No task worth doing springs fully blown and fully performed from the brow of Zeus. Okay? You have to go out there and make it work. All right? Now, most of the successful writers that I know would write whether anyone was buying their work or not. We have to do it. That's part of that storytelling bug that I was talking about. Okay? Whether we're writing for our own entertainment, our family's entertainment, or just because, my God, it's 2 o'clock in the morning, I can't sleep, I gotta do some more writing, we write. If you don't have that kind of… Robert Asprin once said, and Robert and I did not necessarily see together on all things…

[Laughter]

[David] But he said, "Successful authors are like rats. If we don't wear our fingers down on the keyboard every day, our fangs grow through our brains and kill us.

[Laughter]

[David] Okay? It's still a valid metaphor, even though I use voice recognition software when I write now. But it's true. If you… I have this need to be crafting stories. Okay? Now, for the last year or so, I haven't been, and that's because I face planted into a cement floor in Atlanta the day before Dragon Con and gave myself a concussion, broke my nose into places, stitches inside my mouth, the whole 9 yards. It has taken me effectively a year to recover from the concussion status to where I am once again really writing. Okay? It's been a real trial for me and for people who were expecting books from me and everything else, but sometimes, the need to tell stories is sort of temporarily stymied by the fact that, you know what, my brain's not working.

[Howard] One of the first things that I learned about… I'm a web cartoonist, and one of the first things I learned in this regard was when I still had a day job, early 2000's, we would take… I was in the software industry. We'd take two weeks off around Christmas, because kind of the whole industry wound down. For that two weeks, I told myself my Christmas present to me is that I'm going to pretend I'm a cartoonist full-time. I'm just going to do this. I would tell my plan to people. They're like, "You're going to pretend to have a job over Christmas?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "Okay, one, you're a broken human, and, two, what does your family think?" What I found is those are some of my fondest memories of this. Yeah. Storyteller gotta stug… Gotta story tell."

[David] There comes a time, in a given project or whatever, where it turns into work. Where you have to drive yourself to it. You have to do that. I have, in every book, I have what I call the chapter. That's the point at which I say, "This entire book is dreck. What was I thinking? Oh, my God, I can't get this to come together." The only thing that I can do is just keep grinding it out and saying, "Boy, this is sucky." Okay, that kind of thing? Then, when I get to the final edit, I can't identify the chapter.

[Howard] I was going to say, you've refined your process to the point that only happens for one chapter doing a project?

[Laughter]

[David] No, that's… Pretty much, yeah. You know. It's this kind of thing.

[Howard] Winning.

[David] Yeah.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and… Let's stop for a book of the week, then we'll get back to it.

[David] Okay.

[Brandon] You have our book, or books of the week, this week.

[David] I have two. One is The Gordian Protocol, which came out in May, with Jacob Holo. Who is a BMW engineer in an alternate universe. I think that our backgrounds, the synergy was really, really good. He's got three or four self published novels out. This will be his first traditionally published novel. Is his first traditionally published novel. This was not one of the two I was thinking about, but he has just handed me the draft of the Valkyrie Protocol, which is the sequel. It's pretty much ready to go. We have to wait for him to get a hiatus in that real-life job to do a little tweaking that I pointed out to him. The other book that I've just handed in is the sequel to Out Of the Dark, which, yes, is the one with vampires in it. This one is rather cleverly titled Into the Light. I did it with Chris Kennedy, of the Four Horsemen universe and whatnot. He was my co-author on it. I'm really pleased with the way that it worked out. The vampires are a little flamboozled when they begin finding out some things about their own past and their own existence that neither they nor the earlier writers who didn't like the vampires didn't know. Okay? For… I won't go any deeper into it than that. But suffice it to say, that Vlad Tepes was a tiny bit mistaken about exactly how and what he became when he became it.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Brandon] This topic's very interesting to me, because I work with a lot of aspiring writers. I teach at the University, and of course the podcast, and things like this. Looking back at myself when I was first making the choice to start writing, one of the things that I think holds back new writers, and I've kind of found some language that I can describe this more recently, is that, for me, there was this beautiful book I imagine somewhere out in the aether, right? It was like the Platonic ideal of a book. As, having read for many years, and sitting down to write the first time, it was like I knew this book was out there, but then my crude fingers could not get that book on the page. It was really frustrating to me. Because it felt like… It wasn't fear that I think stopped me, it was this sense that I was taking something beautiful and I was making it something flawed and terrible, because my skill wasn't good enough. I've found multiple other aspiring writers that kind of have this same attitude that… Less fear, more like, I guess I must not have done enough worldbuilding or I must not have thought it through enough, because this beautiful story, I just can't make it come out on the page.

[David] Well, that's…

[Brandon] So, I guess my question to you is strategies for writers who are having trouble making that transition, taking that chance, giving themselves permission to fail. What are some strategies that people could use to do that?

[David] Write the damn book.

[Laughter]

[David] And when you're done, if it's not what you thought you were going to come up with, file it under this was a learning experience, these are the things that I can see that I did wrong. Do those right in the next book. I have an entire file cabinet at home that has probably 300 short stories in it, that were written solely because they were things that I wanted to play with as a writer. How was I going to describe this? How was I going to handle this bit of characterization? You… Basically, this is one of the crafts that the only way you can learn to do it is to do it. There's not a credential program somewhere that is going to say, "Okay. Now you have a diploma. You'll go out there and be a successful writer." Okay? There are all kinds of courses that you can take and training that you can seek that will help you, give you tools that you might not have otherwise. But there's nobody out there who can teach you how to be a writer. Anybody who says we will teach you how to be a writer is taking your money. Okay? Because what they can do is they can teach you how they are a writer. They can teach you how these three guys over here are writers. They can't teach you how you're a writer. Okay? Characterization. Characterization is a critical component of any story you're going to tell. How do you build a character? Okay? One of the things that I do when I'm doing writing workshops is I rollup a character from one of the role-playing game series. I tell my students, I say, "Okay, this is the character that you have. This is the age, this is the gender, everything else. Go home, and between now and the next session, write me an explanation for why this character exists with these skills, these abilities, these disabilities." They frequently turn it into what is actually a very good short story. Okay? In getting out who this character is. That's the kind of thing that you have to be able to build on your own. I can give you that assignment, and tell you to go home and do it. But I can't say to you, the first way that you should do it is by doing thus and so, because the best that you could learn from that is how I do it. What makes a writer succeed is that writer's voice. You can take exactly the same story, the exact same plot, even the exact same characters by name. Okay? And have two different writers do the story. You have two totally different stories. Okay?

[Brandon] Absolutely.

[David] One of them is going to be the way that you tell the story, and one of them is going to be the way that somebody else tells the story. What makes you a successful writer is your voice finding its audience. You cannot do that trying to be someone else. You have to be you.

[Dan] Yeah. I… Finding that voice of your own is critical and it is difficult. I like to think about this in terms of Ender's Game. Because they had the kids in the Battle School, and they would fight against each other. Then there's this really critical scene towards the end of it, where Bean stands up in the lunch room and says, "Guys. We are doing the same strategies over and over and over. We will never learn anything new until we give ourselves the freedom to fail." That's when they kind of throw out the whole competition system and they say, "Okay. We're going to try this, and it probably will be awful, but we'll learn something from it.

[David] Yeah.

[Dan] So I imagine someone out there listening to this podcast thinking, lack of risk-taking is not my problem, I've tried everything I can think of. It's… I'm just not selling anything. Maybe what you need to do is something ridiculous. Maybe you need to change genre. Maybe you need to try something new. Maybe you need to put that big golden book that Brandon was talking about, that idealized thing that you have in mind, put that on a shelf and write something different.

[David] Okay. Let me tell you one of the most critical things that you should bear in mind as a writer. Write the story that interests you. They say, write what you know. Well, I don't know anybody who's been a starship captain. Okay? I'm sorry, there just aren't too many of them around for me to go interview, that kind of thing. But if there's a type of story that is especially suited to you, that you enjoy reading, etc. Point number one, you're not unique. That means there are other people who enjoy reading that same sort of story. It may not be what's currently hot. But publishers don't necessarily look for what's currently hot. They look for what they expect to be durable. Some publishers do. They want to push you into writing whatever is selling right now. Avoid them. Okay? I'm sorry. But you should. Okay? Now, if they say, "We'll pay you a stack of money to write it," then you can say to yourself, "Okay. They'll pay me a stack of money. I'll get some practice writing, and then I'll be able to go do what I want to do." But, point number one, if you like it, other people will like it. Point number two is if you like it, you will write it better than something you are writing that you feel that you have to write in order to be hot, in order to sell your work. Okay? Point number three is publishers are constantly looking for things to publish. Now, some publishers, for whatever combination of reasons, have blinders on or at least blinkers. Okay? Maybe, it's like, I don't agree with the political philosophy in that book. There's all kinds of idiosyncratic factors that can come into play. But the bottom line is publishers need stuff to publish. Keith Laumer once said that there's not the great unsold novel. There's only the great unwritten novel. Because if you write it, and it is good and you submit it long enough, you will sell it because publishers are looking for things to publish. The editor who discovered Thomas Wolfe… Thomas Wolfe had been rejected about eight or nine dozen times. Okay? Then this guy found… Discovered Thomas Wolfe and made his entire career out of the fact that he was the guy who discovered Thomas Wolfe. He was asked by another editor at one point. The guy said, "I read the first quarter of a million words, and it sucked. Where did you realize…?" He said, "About word 300,000."

[Hmm, hmm, hmm.]

[David] Okay? What I'm saying to you is that eventually, if what you have done is publishable, it will find a buyer. Sometimes, even if what you've done isn't punishable… Publishable. Punishable? There was…

[Laughter]

[David] I've read some horrible books before. But even if what you've written in its current form isn't publishable, sometimes you'll get that little comment back that will tell you why it wasn't. More often than not, you'll get a form letter that says, "I'm sorry. It doesn't really meet our needs at this moment. Etc., etc." But sometimes you'll get that little flicker of a response, and you go, "Oh!" Now, I've been doing this… I've supported myself as a writer since I was 17. I'm 67 this year. So I've been writing… I've been earning my living pushing words around for 50 years. Okay? I've been a published novelist for… Well, we sold the first… I sold the first book in April 1989. So this is the 30th year since I sold the first book. In the course of that time, I like to think I've learned a few things. Okay? There are some very simple things that an author… Okay. For example. Any aspiring writer should realize that the most important word in any sentence is the verb. Choose your verbs wisely. Don't say, "He came quickly to his feet." Say, "He leapt to his feet. He jerked to his feet. He jerked upright." Okay? Never use an -ing verb when you can avoid it, unless you want the voice of what you're writing to be passive. All right? Never bury dialogue inside a paragraph. If there's dialogue in a paragraph, start the paragraph with the dialogue and arrange the internal mechanics to make that work. Okay? Don't worry about choppy paragraphs. Worry about where you want to direct the reader's eye. You're setting the cadence, you're creating the rhythm. Maybe you need short choppy sentences and paragraphs at this point. Maybe you need one line paragraphs for emphasis. Okay? Maybe the one line paragraph that you need is, "In the world blew up." Okay? Because you're in the middle of a combat situation, there's a missile incoming, the character you're writing about doesn't know it. There's combat chatter, they're saying, "We're under fire," the character's turning around. Then the world blew up. As a separate paragraph. So think about those sorts of things when you're writing. That's not a question of my telling you to write in my voice. Because these are things that any writer can profit from, in the way that they construct and craft sentences, and sentences are what you build books out of.

[Brandon] We could probably sit here for another hour and listen to this.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Because these are excellent points. But we are out of time. I want to thank our audience at SpikeCon. Thank you guys.

[Applause]

[Brandon] I want to thank Mr. Weber for coming on the podcast.

[Brandon] Do you have a writing prompt you can give to our listeners?

[David] A writing prompt?

[Brandon] Yes.

[David] Something to do. I would say, go home and create a character. Okay? Not one that you set out to build because this is going to go in your story. But give yourself the assignment of taking a character that you didn't create because you rolled it up or whatever. Then, build in your worldbuilding bible, in your tech bible, whatever, build why that character is who that character is. Because stories are about characters. If the character is not interesting to the reader, the story will go nowhere. If the character is not interesting to you, and understood by you, you will not be able to communicate it to the reader. Your characters will still, if you do this long enough, the characters will evolve in the storytelling, and they should. So, as the life experience of that character is shared with your readers in multiple books, you have to understand how that character changes and incorporate it. Characters are what stories are about. Sentences are how you tell the story. Get those two things right, and the story will usually succeed. A weak story that is well told will succeed, where a strong story that is weakly told fails.

[Brandon] Awesome. I don't know that we could put it better than that. So, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.24: Keeping It Fresh, with Jim Butcher

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/06/14/15-24-keeping-it-fresh-with-jim-butcher/

Key points: How do you keep a series fresh? Do you reinvent the story? Try to write a story that is just a little bit more than you think you can do. Force yourself to stretch. Do you focus on specific things to improve in each book, or do you tackle different styles of stories? Some of it is different styles, but the basic skeleton of each story is the same. How do you write ongoing stories about a changing character, without losing what people love about them? Start with what is going to change in this book, and work backwards from that. Craft is fundamental. How do you use different genres to keep your career fresh? Different genres offer different opportunities. It's fun to try different characters, different arrangements, different stories.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 24.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Keeping It Fresh, with Jim Butcher.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guest star, Jim Butcher.

[Yay! Applause]

[Jim] Hello.

[Brandon] Jim Butcher, many many time best-selling author of many many awesome books. We are super happy to have you on the podcast, Jim.

[Jim] Thank you very much.

[Howard] We're recording here live at NASFIC Spikecon in Layton, Utah.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Howard] So that was the audience noise that you heard. Thank you, live audience.

[Applause]

[Brandon] All right. So, keeping it fresh.

[Dan] I love that this sounds like an after school special from the 80s about rapping. [wrapping?]

[Brandon] Yep.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Yep. Well, it would probably be an after school special about something important that would have rapping in it incidentally.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] Done by people who look like us.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Jim, we decided to talk about this because you have one of the longest-running series in science fiction and fantasy going right now. Some of the latest books and last books in the series are some of the best. So I consider you an expert at keeping a series fresh. It's something that's very kind of near to my heart because I am writing book 4 of a very big series right now.

[Jim] Of course.

[Brandon] That's kind of in my head. So I guess my first question to you is how do you keep the Dresden Files so fresh? How do you keep reinventing the story?

[Jim] To me, I don't think I'm reinventing… It doesn't seem to me that I'm reinventing anything. When I do a Dresden Files story… I kind of had the general shape of the whole thing in mind when I got started. So, I mean, I got to plan it all out. So I would know, well, okay, this is this. This is what's going to happen in this part of the story. This is going to be the book about necromancers. This is going to be the one about… This is going to be the personal one where he gets an apprentice, and stuff like that. So, I mean, I had the plan going from the get go. So, in a lot of ways, it doesn't seem like it's particularly fresh to me. I think the real thing that keeps the books being interesting and involving and longer and longer is that I keep trying to write the story that I'm not sure I'm skilled enough to write. When I plan the story, any time when I sit down and I get set to, where I'm here's how I'm going to do the dramatic action, here's how I'm going to do the personal tensions, and stuff like that, I always try and plan the story just a little bit more than I think I can readily do. So that when I'm going forward, I'm never sure I'm going to be able to get the story done the way I wanted to do. As a result, I think that makes you keep growing as a writer.

[Brandon] Forcing yourself to stretch.

[Jim] Sure. Sure. You keep trying to reach a little bit further than you've done before. As long as you can do that, you can keep improving. I think that's kind of the meta-strategy that sort of has the side effect of making the series more fresh and interesting as you go along.

[Howard] It's the self-contained version of the yes I can principle.

[You suffer like that, yeah]

[Howard] Mr. Taylor, can you draw an entire Munchkin deck in a month? Yes I can!

[Jim] Right, right.

[Howard] I'm going to have to figure out how to do that. I stretched from it, and I'm super glad I took on the project. But the correct answer was I don't think so, but I want to.

[Chuckles]

[Jim] Right. Yeah. Something like that.

[Brandon] Do you ever take a book… I ask this, because it's something that I do… And say, "You know, in this specific book, I'm going to work on this one thing. This is something that I don't know, that I want to learn to do better." Like, I'm going to work on my humor in this book. Or I'm going to work on my interpersonal relationships or things. Do you take it that specifically, or is it more just here's a style of story I've never done before?

[Jim] A lot of it is here's a style of story that I've never done before, because I'll change it around. But, on the other hand, the Dresden Files, I mean, the basic skeleton of every story is the same. Somebody's up to something, Harry Dresden starts poking around in it, and then things go crazy. I mean, that's how you write it. But as far as the… As far as focusing specifically on areas of my writing, not so much. I mean, I just sort of figure that as long as I'm trying to cover the entire range of human experience, or at least as much of it as I can within the books that have purple haired fairies and stuff like that. That as long as I'm trying to include all that experience, it's going to force me to grow in other ways and in ways I wasn't expecting. So I'll be writing along, and occasionally I write a scene and I'm like, "Man, the humor was really good in that scene. What did I do?" I'll have to stop and go back and think about this as I was producing it, how did I get that result. Other times, I'll just write a long, going, "Wow, I did not expect this to be this soul crushingly intense emotional scene." But it worked out there. Then I have to stop and figure out, "Well, why did it work out there?" Occasionally, I can't explain it. I do a lot of writing by instinct. Once I get going and I'm actually doing it, I'll trust my instincts pretty firmly. If they start taking me in a direction, it's like, "Yeah, I'll go that way. Let's see what happens." I mean, the worst thing that can happen is that you write something that wasn't quite right, and you delete it, and you do it again.

[Brandon] Dan, you kind of had… Not kind of, you had to do this with the John Cleaver books, right?

[Dan] Yeah. Six books in that series.

[Brandon] How did you keep those fresh? The second third from the first third, or how were you looking at each book and trying to do something different?

[Dan] The big problem for me that I kept tackling with each new book and with each new trilogy was this is an ongoing story about a character changing. How can I show that he is different than he was, while still being recognizably the same person that everyone loves from… If you read the first book, you love the character for certain reasons. I need to advance him, but I can't throw away all the things that people love about that. So, I kind of focused on character arcs. What is he going… How is he going to change in this one? What is going to be different at the end of this book than at the start? Then, kind of work backwards from there. I'm curious to know, I wanted to ask about Harry Dresden with the same thing. How do you… Because he does change, he does grow. But he is always intrinsically himself. Do you think about that consciously, or does that just come very natural to you?

[Jim] For the most part, it comes naturally. There's some things where I'll stop and look at and I'll go, "Now wait a minute." If I've just had Dresden take some given action and I'll think, "Well, that's not necessarily in character for him. So why is he doing something different?" A lot of times, I'll be writing along and the beta readers… The way I operate is I'll write a chapter and then the chapter goes off to my beta readers while I'm working on the next one. Then I start getting feedback from them, to hear about what they thought about the previous chapter. A lot of times, I'll come across something, the beta readers will be like, "This is really out of character for that character." They'll list specific reasons why. I mean, I've got beta readers who'll be like, "Well, in this book on this page in this paragraph…"

[Chuckles]

[Jim] Then I've gotta go, "Okay. They're right. That is out of character for what I've established." So why… Do I need to change it or do I need to explain why it's different? Depending on how much room is left in the book… I love exploring why is it different. Have Dresden show up later and talk to that character and be like, "What's up?" Try and find out what's going on in their life and so on. Characters change as they go along. But at the same time, the core stuff… I don't know, I think holding onto the core character is as much about craft as it is about psychology. By the time you're… By the time you've gotten your language established of which language it's used for which character, whether you're talking about tags and traits, or just their personal dialogue. By the time you've done that, it establishes a very very firm picture in the reader's mind if you keep it consistent. The longer you go, the more firm that picture is. So in that sense, the long series is really on my side. It's much easier to manipulate you guys when you let me do it for a long time.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I want to take a moment and call our listeners attention to a couple of things you just said. On the one hand, you said, "Oh, I do a lot of this by instinct." Which feels very pantsy, very discovery writery. But what you just said about craft, when you talk about the craft of the dialogue, of a character's language… We've done probably a dozen or more episodes where we've drilled down on that. How with one line of dialogue, the reader should be able to tell which character is speaking, without any other tags. How do you make that happen? What I want to illustrate here, just by calling this out, is that when you say instinct, I think part of what you mean is that you know that craft enough that you've stopped needing to think about it when you're writing Dresden's dialogue. It is just there.

[Jim] Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, yeah. That's the whole point of craft. The whole point of craft is the wood worker at his bench who knows his tools so well he doesn't need to think about using them, he doesn't need to think about how they're going to be employed or even where they are. He just reaches out and picks up his T-square and goes to work. That's the foundation of what you've got to be if you want to be a professional writer. You've got to have your craft down well enough that your brain is free to do these other things. Like, to be able to suggest to you, hey, maybe this character needs to have this sort of revelatory scene right here, so that we know more about who they are. Then, when you go back later, once you're going back and you're brushing up the stuff after you've gotten it written, then you can go back later and go, "Well, you know what, I really need to establish this character a little bit better, more firmly, if he's going to have that big a role late in the book. I need to have him hit harder early on." Stuff like that. Which is why I've got to do that right now. I got Marcone doing big stuff at the end of this story, but his introduction is a little bit soft. Even though he's got a much larger presence in the overall series, there's going to be some people that pick up this book and it'll be the first book they've read in the series. So that means, just from… Purely from the craft standpoint, I got to go back and make sure he's got a good entrance that is going to be commensurate with his role in the story.

[Howard] He's gotta be in the establishing shot…

[Jim] Yeah.

[Howard] And he's gotta be front and center.

[Jim] Exactly. He's gotta be there. So that's one of the things I'm working on. That I've got all that to do before the manuscript goes off to the editor, but… But, yeah, the craft is indispensable. I can't think of anything… I mean, when I first started learning about writing craft, I hated the whole idea. I hated the entire concept. My teachers told me so many things that I just didn't like, and I sat there, all huffy about it. Because my teacher would say things like, "The business of writing is the business of manipulating people's emotions." It's like, "That sounds awful." But she's right.

[Chuckles]

[Jim] When you're a writer and you can write characters and you can make people laugh when you want them to laugh and you can make them cry when you want them to cry and support who you want them to support and hate who you want them to hate, that's a good story. That's the story everybody wants to read. Oh, I hate this guy. What's he doing next?

[Laughter]

[Jim] That's… To do that, that's the entire point of writing craft. That is why it exists, to help me manipulate your emotions.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop and do a promo, and talk about our book of the week, which is The Aeronaut's Windlass.

[Jim] Okay.

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

[Jim] The Aeronaut's Windlass is a steam punk series. I told my editor I wanted to make it a… I wanted the genre name on it to be steam opera. She's like, "Well, you can't make up your own genres." I'm like, "Watch me!"

[Laughter]

[Jim] But essentially, it's a story that's set in a world that's very hostile to human life. So humanity exists inside these enormous towers called spires. The only way the spires are connected is by airships. So all trade, all military stuff, all travel, it all happens by airships because the surface is just… It's a green hell, and you don't want to go there, so we'll be there next book.

[Laughter]

[Jim] But… So, it's a really… It's a fun series, because you've got all these spires, so you've got all these human cultures that are evolving entirely separate from one another, so you can get in… You can get just all kinds of crazy nonsense, which is so much fun. I mean, it's… In a way, I'm just riffing off the Odyssey here, going from island to island, adventure to adventure. But that's what we're doing in the Cinder Spires. So the characters are… There's an air ship captain, there's a privateer so we've got a pirate, and there's an heir of one of the wealthier and more influential houses, so we've got a princess. There's a girl who can talk to cats, so… That's her big thing is she talks to cats. The cats are smart. The cats can… The cats understand, I mean, they understand humans, except when they don't want to.

[Chuckles]

[Jim] I mean…

[Howard] So, cats.

[Jim] Cats, yeah. So then we've got a cat who's a prince of his people and he's just such a jerk and everybody loves him. I don't get that. But [garbled]

[Howard] What's the series? What's the series name?

[Jim] The series is the Cinder Spires.

[Howard] The Cinder Spires.

[Jim] The spires are all made of these giant… This ancient black stone that is all but indestructible and nobody knows where it came from.

[Howard] And the genre is steam opera.

[Jim] Steam H-opera. Yeah.

[Brandon] I've read the first book and it was one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had in a while. They're just… It's a wonderful book. So you guys should all read it.

[Jim] Yes, you should. Everyone.

[Laughter, applause]

[Brandon] We went really long on the front of the podcast, so we are almost out of time. But I do want to touch on one other concept, which will tie into this idea of what we just talked about. You are mostly known for writing urban fantasy, even though I know that that's not where you started in your pre-writing career, your prepublication career. You've since published your epic fantasy, and you've now got steam opera.

[Jim] Right.

[Brandon] Like, how do you approach different genres in keeping your own career fresh?

[Jim] Going to the different genres is a lot of fun, because, I mean, really, you get to play with different toys, and you get to arrange them very differently, and you get to tell slightly different stories based on which… What is strong in the various genres. I just took out… I've got like half of my first science fiction done, that's been done. I did that like 10 years ago. I stopped writing that book with my poor science-fiction character… He had just ejected from his ship whose core was about to explode in a decaying orbit over the moon with a solar flare coming on. He's been there for like 10 years.

[Laughter]

[Jim] I'll have to get back to that one someday. That was sort of Men in Black meets X-Men on the moon. So that was a lot of fun, too. But, yeah, when you get to go to the different genres and you get to make the different characters and you get to build the wild new stuff that you… It's like, wow, I really wish I could do this in the Dresden Files, but really, laser beams are not really a thing there. Laser pistols are not really a thing there. Oooh, but in science fiction, I can totally do this. But the different genres, they just offer you different opportunities. I mean, at the end of the day, you're still working with humans, and humans are always the same thing. I mean, it doesn't matter at what point in history you go to, human nature remains the same. So… It's just fun to take humans and plop them into weird situations and see how they react. That… just erase this part, okay. I'm starting to sound like a psychopath at this point.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I know, drop people in, poke them with a stick, see what happens.

[Jim] Sure, sure.

[Brandon] That's storytelling, right there.

[Jim] Sticks. Yes.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] We are out of time. I want to thank our audience, Spikecon.

[Applause]

[Brandon] I want to thank Jim for being on the podcast. Do you by chance have a writing prompt you can throw at our audience?

[Jim] A writing prompt?

[Brandon] Yes.

[Jim] Let me think here. [Pause] Yeah. Something we didn't know was intelligent has been intelligent all along. Go.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Dan] Nice.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.26: Character Relationships

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/07/01/13-26-character-relationships/

Key points: Beyond the character arc, with characters changing and developing, other characters get involved. That's where character relationships come in. Some people plan them in advance, while other people discover them in the writing. Leave yourself wiggle room, and when you find two characters that work well together, let them show you great scenes and better stories. Try the Kowal relationship axes: mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers. Mind: intelligence. Money: what is money for, and what are your goals? Morals: what's right and wrong? Manners: what's polite? Monogamy: hot, burning kisses? What is our relationship? The Marx Brothers: what's funny, and what's not! Alignment makes compatibility, differences create friction points, tension points. Another tool is position power versus personal power. How can you introduce backstory in a relationship quickly? A shared in-joke. Free indirect speech, aka internal monologue, reflecting on the relationship. Final question: the relationship after HEA! How do you write that? The classic romantic arc is a character arc, from I am dissatisfied with being alone to they hook up. After that, don't break the relationship, use an event arc, with something disrupting the status quo. External conflicts plus friction in the Kowal relationship axes equals story! Don't just strut like a hawk, scratch for your own worms.

( Putting words on the outline... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Character Relationships.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] All right. So, we know what our characters… They have a big arc, and they're changing, and they're developing. Now other people are going to start interfering with that. Helping or hindering it. We're going to talk about character relationships. This is something that I do a lot ahead of time. But I know that Dan, for instance, just kind of… Often they…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Mess each other up and you see what happens.

[Dan] Sometimes. I do a mix of both. I like to plan out in advance when I know, for example, that I'm going to have a group of friends. I want to know how they all interact with each other. But very frequently, and in fact the book that came out earlier this year, Active Memory, turned into a father-daughter book. Not because I planned it that way, but because as I was writing the other two in the series, that relationship became more and more interesting every time the father came on screen. So by midway through the third book, I'm like, "Okay, you know what?"

[Laughter]

[Dan] "We're just going to focus on this, and we're going to do it right."

[Brandon] I would say… I mean, I joke about being a heavy outliner, but this is one of the places, no matter how much you outline, you have to have wiggle room for. When your characters are quote unquote on screen together and you find that you write them with great chemistry, that they are working… When those two characters are on screen, you have a better scene than when either of them are apart, you know that something is going on there, and you need to be willing to run with that and explore it. You want to write the scenes that are best. You want the characters to give you the opportunity to write better stories.

[Mary] This is one of those things that we're always talking about, that writing is a spectrum from outlining to discovery writing. This is one of the areas that I also tend to discovery write a lot. But I also have a tool that I use when I need to… Like, when I know that I'm going to need these two characters to fight, but I don't want it to be a stupid fight. Because… Oh, I see this all the time, where the characters are fighting and I'm like, "Why are you fighting? You're fighting… There's no…" Or conversely, the characters who really do not get along at all, and then suddenly wind up in bed together. I'm like, "What? You've got nothing in common." So allow me to introduce you to something that I call the Kowal relationship axes.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary] It's actually named after my mother-in-law, who used it as dating advice to my husband… Or to her son. I realized that it actually works incredibly well for describing the ways we interact with not just a romantic partner but kind of for everybody. So the idea is that there are six axes along which relationships exist. The more closely you are aligned on any one of these, the more compatible you are. The farther apart, the less compatible. It… The sliders don't have to be very far off. So those are mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers.

[Laughter]

[Mary] I will grant that my husband added the Marx Brothers after he realized… After we were married, that I had never seen…

[Laughter]

[Mary] We'll start backwards and work our way up. Marx Brothers basically represents that you have the same sense of humor.

[Brandon] Right. You laugh at the same thing.

[Mary] It's a very simple one. Monogamy is not that you're both monogamous, but that you have the same idea of what the relationship is. I mean, you've experienced the thing where someone thinks that you are BFFs, and you're like, "I kind of vaguely know you from work…" It's really super uncomfortable. So it's just you have to have… She labeled that one as hot burning kisses, which is better for the romantic stuff.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So they weren't all iterative?

[Mary] No.

[Brandon] When she… You being a writer have…

[Mary] Well, it was actually… The first four were alliterative, and then…

[Brandon] Then, hot burning kisses.

[Mary] Then hot burning kisses.

[Dan] Then hot burning kisses. Which, to be fair, can stand alone.

[Mary] It's true. So, manners mean that you have the same idea of what is polite… What is… And what is not. Morals are different from manners. Morals is your sense of what is right and wrong in the world. So you can have morals that are in close alignment and manners that are wildly off, or the other way around. I mean, that's often why you know someone on the Internet who's a terrible person on the Internet, and you meet them in real life and they're so nice. It's because your manners are really closely aligned, while your morals are wildly off. Money is that you have the same sense of what money is for, and the same goals towards money. It doesn't actually necessarily mean that you have the same amount of money, but that…

[Brandon] For swimming through in your giant money vault, obviously.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That's what you do with it.

[Mary] Yes. Obviously. Mind is that you have comparable degrees of intelligence. What's interesting about this is that they really do not have to be very far off. So you can have people that are compatible. Like, the upper ends of all of these sliders in terms of their compatibility, but even just a little bit off… Those are the points where the friction is going to happen. What that does for you if you know that, if you know the places that they're a little bit farther… A little bit off, it tells you what the fight is going to be about.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] The… Why would you even say that?

[Mary] Yes.

[Howard] That surprise… We are so like each other, and yet you just… That thing.

[Dan] Yeah. The… Using those, some of them being close together can also be a good reason why the characters stick together, even though the others are far apart. I mean, the Lethal Weapon franchise is almost entirely founded on the idea that their morals are completely aligned and their manners are wildly 100% off.

[Mary] They have very similar… They're also lined up on mind and they're also… At the beginning… What's, I think is interesting is that they are in agreement on what their relationship is. Which is that we don't like each other.

[Brandon] I work alone.

[Mary] Yes. For both of them. Their understanding of what the relationship is evolves together. So those sliders move in the same…

[Howard] I have a much simpler tool that I deploy much differently, which is the two scales of power. Position power and personal power. In an employer-employee relationship, the employer has position power over the employee. But a very, very charismatic, intelligent, effusive employee has gobs of personal power, and without even trying, can undermine an employer who doesn't have any personal power. In fact, you see this a lot in workplaces, in all kinds of relationships. Where someone assumes that their personal power grants them position, or assumes that their position power grants them… For instance, friendship with everyone under them. I pay close attention to this in Schlock Mercenary, because the military organizations that make up so many… Or that encompass so many of the relationships in the books are inherently about position power, and there's a wide array of differing personal powers in there. I need to make sure… We talked about manners. Something that you would say to a fellow grunt is not something that you would say to an officer. That… That dichotomy, I have to keep track of that, because if I get it wrong, it knocks people out of the story.

[Dan] I had… I worked in an office, and was there for the moment when the guy with all the position power realized that he didn't have any personal power.

[Mary] Oh, hohoho.

[Dan] The office became unlivable. It was fascinating to watch that. That has just given me the dialogue to describe what happened.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which, Mary, you have a book coming out!

[Mary] Yes. I have two books coming out, actually. I have a duology, The Lady Astronaut of Mars. Book one is called The Calculating Stars. That's coming out this month. Actually, has just come out last week. The sequel, The Fated Sky, is coming out in August, at the end of the month. The set up for the first book is basically, it begins about two minutes before an asteroid slams into Washington, DC, in 1952, wiping out… It's actually the Chesapeake Bay, because it turns out that a water strike is way worse than a land strike. But it kicks off the space program hard and fast and internationally, with 1952 technology. So the first book is push to the moon, and second book is push to Mars. It's a woman-centered cast, because I've got a lot of… Because it's 1952, all of the women who are in Hidden Figures, all of those computers? Not only are they computers at that point, but historically speaking, a lot of them were also left over WASPs, Women Auxiliary Service Pilots from World War II. So you have a lot of people who are lighter than men, better able to handle gravitational blood pressure shifts, and who are walking computers.

[Brandon] It's out, it's awesome, I've read it, it's great. You guys should all go read it.

[Mary] So one of the exciting things for me about this book also is that I had astronauts reading it, and we are actually going to be at NASA and do a project-in-depth about The Calculating Stars, which is the first book in the series, in two weeks. Although we will have done it already… It's time travel, don't worry about it. So this gives you two weeks to read the book before we get to NASA. Go ahead. Three… Two… One… Lift off!

[Rumbling]

[laughter]

[Howard] Was I supposed to make a rocket noise?

[Mary] No.

[Howard] Oh.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] That was a terrible joke.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I was waiting to see. Is she going to say lift off? Or are we not going to do that? Nope, she did it.

[Brandon] Either way, there will be massive spoilers for Mary's book in two weeks, so you should read it now.

[Brandon] Let's… Let me ask you guys another question about relationships. One of my favorite things in books and in film and whatever is when you get two characters who minutes after interacting, you can read in their interactions an extensive history that they don't have to tell you point by point by point, which is boring. Characters who just… You can read their relationship in moments. How do you write this? Any tips, any tricks?

[Mary] An in-joke. Just one. You don't have to do a lot. But an in-joke, like if two characters are talking and one of them is like, "Oh, yeah, like the time with the pumpkin."

[Chuckles]

[Mary] You don't have to do anything more than that.

[Dan] You said you wouldn't bring that up, Mary.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Sorry.

[Brandon] They did that in the Dirk Pitt movie, and it worked really well, to kick off the fact that these two characters have been in lots of crazy hijinks together.

[Dan] A story that does this really, really well is Sneakers. Because there's that whole little group of misfits and people, and one of the great things they do is the character Mother, who is always bringing up weird conspiracy theories. The first time he does that, Sidney Poitier, who's the ex-CIA guy, he reacts before he starts the story. I mean, he starts the story, and before he has a chance to get to the weird stuff, he's already rolling his eyes. You immediately know, "Oh, they do this all the time."

[Laughter]

[Dan] They have this very specific relationship to conspiracies in government, and it tells so much in the timing of his reaction.

[Brandon] That's awesome. Yeah.

[Howard] The Rocket and Groot scene where we are introduced to them in Guardians of the Galaxy… Groot's only dialogue is "I am Groot," where Groot is drinking out of the fountain, and we establish very, very quickly that the relationship between these two is kind of father-son and kind of boss-employer and kind of brains and brawn, and yet there is something woven in there that we just don't know, but it's there.

[Mary] I think that the thing with that is not just the in-jokes, but also, tying into what Dan was talking about, that... the characters' reaction to each other. So this is a place that you can use one of the tools we talked about when we were talking about character voice, which is that indirect… That free indirect speech, where the character's internal monologue can be a little bit about their relationship. "Oh, no, no, no, not this story again."

[Brandon] You see this in relationship… Romantic relationships a lot. Someone walks on screen, in a movie or television show, and you know instantly that those two characters have a history, a relationship. Often times it's that they're extremely cold to one another, which we read as, "Oh, something happened in the past between those two." I would say, less is more, in a lot of these instances.

[Brandon] Now, different topic. I wanted to make sure we asked you, Mary. You had an entire series where two characters went through a classic romance relationship, and then multiple books afterward where many people would have just stopped the series. In most movies and things, they just stop at the point where the first book ended. You wrote wonderful, awesome books about a different kind of relationship in some ways.

[Mary] So… Why, thank you. So, anyone who's married knows that you can actually be in a committed, happy relationship… Anyone who's in a committed, happy relationship, whether or not you're… You can be in this wonderful relationship, and there's still conflict. But the conflict is external. So the way I actually structured that… Okay. It took me a while to figure out. So I tend to think about the MICE quotient a lot. What I realized was that a romantic arc is structured as a character arc. The character is dissatisfied with an aspect of self, and then… That is, "I am alone." Then they hook up. That what happens when you… For the most part is that when people attempt to write relationships later, what they do is they're still writing a character arc, but once you're in a relationship, that couple is now a single unit, and you have to treat them as a single unit. So when you have the "I am dissatisfied with an aspect of self," that means that it's all about an internal conflict between the couple. So what I did was I treated it like an event arc instead, where they were totally happy with each other, but any event arc is when something disrupts their status quo. So I made sure that all of the conflicts that were hitting them were external conflicts, and then used the Kowal relationship axes to talk about how that friction expressed itself between them.

[Brandon] I would say that one of the reasons I like this is, it's a pet peeve of mine… Maybe that's the wrong term… That when the two characters hook up, the story is done. Which it's totally not.

[Howard] Or we have to make them break up so we can put them back together.

[Mary] That drives me crazy.

[Brandon] It's the sort of thing that I feel like, as storytellers, sometimes we internalize this thing which is a complete lie. Sometimes the best stories, in fact often the best stories, are when the reader's personally invested in both characters and personally invested in this relationship, which only happens once they are together. It's the same sort of thing in a different way that happens with Mistborn, this trilogy. If you haven't read it, the story that I originally wanted to tell was how do you keep an empire together after you've conquered it? When you're the Rebels and you've blown up the Death Star and taken over, and none of you have any experience in leading an empire or whatever, a republic, how do you make that happen? It's gotta be way harder than blowing something up, keeping it together. That's what made me initially start working on the series. With relationships, keeping together a relationship, I wouldn't say maybe it's harder, but in some ways it is, right? Because you have to work on it every day. The initial euphoria is gone, and something deeper is growing and building, but that's way more interesting.

[Dan] There's a beautiful quote from the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, in the fourth one, where the kid just wants to go off and be a hero. One of the witches says to him, "It's easy for the chicken to strut like a hawk. But let's see him scratch for his own worms." I always think that… That is such a more interesting story to tell, is how do you actually live rather than do this one cool thing and then be done.

[Mary] I think that it's also important to note that this is… This thing you're talking about of working on a relationship is not just a romantic relationship. Like, if you've met someone at a con or just school or… And they've moved away, it's difficult. You have to work constantly to maintain that level of friendship. It doesn't just take care of itself. I think that that's one of the things that you can do when… As a conflict point, as a tension point, is not the we want to break up, but we want to hang out and there are things getting between us. That's the other secret that I used in the Glamorous Histories is that I gave them, both characters, the same basic objective in addition to the same basic relationship objective, which was they wanted to get offscreen to a fade to black scene.

[Laughter]

[Mary] All they wanted… It's like, we really want to do a fade to black scene right now, but we're being attacked by pirates.

[Brandon] I would say… You mentioned friends kind of growing apart just because you're no longer in the same social circles. If that's happening to you, start a podcast with your friends…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Then you get to see them and hang out with them.

[Brandon] We're actually out of time. Mary, you're going to give us some homework.

[Mary] Yes. So take the elements of the Kowal relationship axes. Look at your characters. Decide where their friction points are. I want you to just pick two of them. Don't pick all of them, if you want them to be friends. Decide why they're that way. It's not enough to say they're… They have different manners. Like one of them is from the south, one is from Hawaii, which is…

[Laughter]

[Mary] [garbled] and I. But pick two, decide why, and then give them an external conflict and let the friction express itself.

[Howard] Can you rattle off the axes again?

[Mary] Yes. They are also in the liner notes. Mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, Marx Brothers.

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

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Writing Excuses 7.9: Micro-Casting

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/02/26/writing-excuses-7-9-microcasting/

Key points:

-- What do you do if you don't like any of your characters? Write a different book OR change the character so you do like them.
-- How do you keep your plot on track? Outline. Decide what you are going to accomplish.
-- Real names of places or pseudonyms? How well do you know the setting?
-- How do you fix plot holes? A big Band-Aid, trowel, and spackle. Figure out what's missing, and fill in the hole.
-- How do you know when to abandon a story? Finish it first. Are you retreading old ground? Is the book not up to your standard? Is it something you wouldn't want to read?
-- How do you make sure answers to mysteries are satisfying? Write backwards. Make sure the answer fulfills the promises you made. Make your red herrings interesting too.
-- What are amateurish language-level mistakes? Repeating the same adverb frequently. Overusing adverbs. Interrobang. Repetitive sentence structure. Excessive passive voice. Avoiding said.
-- What should a scene consist of? Setting, character, plot. A problem and resolution. One or more objectives. Something that cannot be accomplished in another scene. Watch for the can of scenic worms to be opened on a scene construction podcast someday!
-- What kind of bacon is best? Streaky bacon, fakin' bacon, samgyeopsal, smoked bacon underneath real maple syrup, rouladen, and tempeh.
-- Why is Schlock, a pile of poo, likable? Most of the time, he's expressing himself. That turns him into a person.
( And for more details, press here! )
[Brandon] All right. We're going to use one of these as our writing prompt. How about this one? Do blog post and D & D play-by-post game posts count for nanowrimo? So in other words, do blog posts count for nanowrimo? So, you are going to do a narrative blog post. We'll just use this guy's thing. As your writing prompt, I want you to write a blog post in character for one of your characters, if they had a blog. Okay?
[Dan] Okay.
[Brandon] All right. This is been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: detailed

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Writing Excuses 6.24: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/11/13/writing-excuses-6-24-from-the-ridiculous-to-the-sublime/

Key Points: It's exciting and interesting to take a ridiculous, over-the-top idea and humanize it, to bring out the characters and story in a realistic way. Put people in incredible situations! Give your story a real core of emotion. For example, when a superhuman character looks at someone they are saving and realizes that they can never go back to that life. "You can do almost anything ridiculous as long as you go back to the core of emotion."

To flesh out the completely ridiculous premise, try "How could this possible have happened?" and "What are the ramifications?" Use the 1000 why's. Why is it like this, and how did we get here? Also, look at how it affects the richest and poorest person in society. Also, try "given this, what does the character want? Why?" Finally, look for the conflict. Where are all the points of friction?
( Over-the-top and into fiction! )
[Andrew] Sure. How about a story about a character who discovers that there's a pill out there that gives you the powers of a god?
[Mary] And you can pick the god.
[Andrew] You can pick the god, but it comes in pill form.
( Much frivolity ensued... )
[Howard] All right. Fair listener, you are out of excuses. Go write.

Current Mood: sore throat

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Writing Excuses 5.15: Steampunk with Scott Westerfeld

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

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

Current Mood: clank

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Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 15: Visual Components of Storytelling

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/04/18/writing-excuses-4-15-visual-compenents-of-storytelling/

Key Points: Cohesive? Lazy shortcuts and a dash of signature elements. Lots of cool stuff, but find a way to connect them together. Underlying commonalities, like the circle template. The design of the book, maps, cover art, and other visual elements are a kind of prelude to the book, that can help set the feeling before you start reading.
( on the sketchpad )
[Howard] OK, writing prompt. First a little bit of backstory. I had Brook West design ship plans for the Integrity which was the ship that Tagon's Toughs ended up acquiring. In designing the ship plans, we arrived at some really fun anomalies where if you were to shut off the gravity, the water would suddenly flow through the ship and make a huge mess. I got a lot of mileage out of that. So your writing prompt, in order to be visual, sit down and draw yourself a spaceship. Draw some interesting bits of a spaceship. Sketch, skritch it out, whatever. Draw something, and then find interesting aspects about what you drew and work them into the story.
[Brandon] All right. This has been writing excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: ketchup
Current Music: Great Balls of Fire by Jerry Lee Lewis

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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 22: Idea to Story

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/10/25/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-22-idea-to-story/

Key Points: To turn an idea into a story: Look for the points of conflict. Look for the boundaries -- what kind of story is this? Consider plot, setting, characters. What is the ending? How will you resolve the story? Look for characters who are in pain. Check old ideas that didn't get used yet. Brainstorm interesting ideas -- set pieces, events, twists, interesting stuff.
( the nuts and bolts )
[Brandon] We're out of time. But let's go ahead and give you the writing prompt which is the same idea that we used at the beginning.
[Howard] Insects have in some way evolved defenses against all of the poisons that we use to kill them and many of the chemicals that would work to just kill anything because they have somehow developed magic.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: nodding

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Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 19: Do creative writing classes help?

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/02/16/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-19-do-creative-writing-classes-help/

Key points: creative writing classes, panels at conventions, books on creative writing -- they can all be useful, but you have to want to learn. Learn about the business, learn to be accountable for your own productivity. Ask yourself -- without the magic, without the robots, without the fantastic elements, is there still a story here? The range of human ability that we are born with is miniscule compared to the range of human accomplishments, what you can do. Listen to suggestions, and don't be afraid to rework your writing from the ground up. You can learn, but you gotta really try.
( the class lecture )
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. Your writing prompt is...
[Dan] Write a story about a golfing metaphor.
[Brandon] Thanks for listening.

Current Mood: enthused
Current Music: I Love This Bar, Toby Keith

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Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 12: Theme

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/12/28/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-12-theme/

Key Points: If plot is the skeleton of your story, theme is the soul you stick inside it. Them is what the story is about. Theme may grow out of characters, out of their conflicts. Theme may direct your research. Don't let theme overshadow your story and characters.
( the discourse of the three wise men? )
[Brandon] Writing Prompt?
[Dan] I did the last one.
[Brandon] Write a story with no theme. Whatsoever. That means nothing. Howard said it's not possible, prove him wrong.
[Howard] That's good. Give us a short story that's meaningless. What have we wrought?

Current Mood: thick-soled?
Current Music: She's In Love With The Boy, Trisha Yearwood

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

December 2025

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21	22	23	24	25	26	27
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Page Summary

mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.43: An Interview with Dr. Tara Lepore on Paleontology
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.19: Intro to Roleplaying Games
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.26: Taking the Chance, with David Weber
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.24: Keeping It Fresh, with Jim Butcher
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.26: Character Relationships
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.9: Micro-Casting
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 6.24: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.15: Steampunk with Scott Westerfeld
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 15: Visual Components of Storytelling
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 22: Idea to Story
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 19: Do creative writing classes help?
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 12: Theme

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with story

Writing Excuses 20.43: An Interview with Dr. Tara Lepore on Paleontology

Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces

Writing Excuses 16.19: Intro to Roleplaying Games

Writing Excuses 15.26: Taking the Chance, with David Weber

Writing Excuses 15.24: Keeping It Fresh, with Jim Butcher

Writing Excuses 13.26: Character Relationships

Writing Excuses 7.9: Micro-Casting

Writing Excuses 6.24: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

Writing Excuses 5.15: Steampunk with Scott Westerfeld

Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 15: Visual Components of Storytelling

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 22: Idea to Story

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 19: Do creative writing classes help?

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 12: Theme

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December 2025

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