Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-46-an-interview-on-structure-with-n-k-jemisin 

 

Key points: What was your process? I wrote an outline that laid out the three plot line structure, the opening with an overview of the world, and that there would be a cliffhanger ending. Then I write test chapters. It started to flow. But about halfway, I decided it was trash. Devi talked me down. Structure and process are intertwined. Deep and close reading. I wrote the majority of Essun first, then started working on the other two. I fixed a lot in revision. I seeded in a lot from the beginning, then took out a lot in revisions. Starting with too much is an easier edit. Epic fantasy wants certain things. What if we have a complex magic that is indistinguishable from technology? The restoration tradition in epic fantasy is  a manifestation of privilege. I wanted to explore oppression. I do write certain scenes while cackling deep in my chest. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 46]

 

[Howard] I have three be a better writer tips. The first, write. The second, read. The third, get together with other writers. That third one can be tricky, but we've got you covered. At the Writing Excuses retreats, we offer classes, one-on-one sessions, and assorted activities to inspire, motivate, and recharge writers just like you. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats

 

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

 

[Season 19, Episode 46]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] An Interview on Structure with N. K. Jemisin

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

 

[DongWon] We are incredibly excited to have a guest with us today. As the title implies, we have interview… We are interviewing N. K. Jemisin as we are finishing our section talking about The Fifth Season. Nora is truly one of my favorite authors working in the genre today…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think an absolute powerhouse when it comes to sort of redefining what fantasy is right now. Not to overstate it right at the head into us. But, we are incredibly excited to have you here and to start diving into some of the topics we've been talking about when it comes to The Fifth Season. So, welcome.

[Nora] Thank you very much. I'm N. K. Jemisin. Welcome. Thank you for welcoming me to this podcast.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] You are also the sweetest person in the world [garbled for having?] said that. Thank you.

 

[DongWon] Very, very happy to, and I promise it's only true things. But… Let's dive right into it. So, as we've been talking about Fifth Season, we really focused on the structure of this book, with sort of the three point of views that you eventually realize is all one character, just split across time. I was always entranced by how this book is put together. It feels like an intricate puzzle box. Yet, as we were chatting before we headed into this recording, this episode, you mentioned that you don't do a lot of planning ahead of time. So, what does the process look like for you to put together this thing that, as a reader, feels quite complex? But to you, was an organic process?

[Nora] Um. There is some structure involved. I wrote an outline that sort of basically laid out the three plot line structure, the sort of opening, which would be sort of an overview of the world, just to kind of introduce people to the planet as a character. And that there would be a cliffhanger ending. That… All of that, I knew up front. My initial thought was that the story was going to be third person, very traditional telling, present tense… I mean, sorry, past tense, third person. Nothing sort of experimental or unusual there. But I always write test chapters. The test chapters, I will just simply start writing. Like, I'm spitballing and, I'm trying to see what voice feels best, what makes it flow, what makes it have the right energy. So I will try it over and over again, in some cases, from the different POVs, different tones, different voices. For some reason, I found myself drawn to this bizarre part third person, part second person, present tense-y… Almost… It increasingly felt like I was trying to write poetry. And I suck at poetry. So, I attempted multiple times to write poetry, only to realize I'm entirely too literal a person to do that. But here I am, I'm pulling the hollow man, even though I'm only E. E. Cummings, I'm like… All of a sudden, all of the poetry I've ever read in my life is starting to speak to me and wants me to acknowledge that flow, that energy. It was a truly instinctive… Like, this just feels right. So I started writing. It started to flow well. I was like, this is ins… This is bizarre. I've never really written anything this… Just experimental, I guess. For lack of a better description. I've never written anything this off the beaten trail. I don't know if it's right. But it feels right, so I'm going to keep going. Then, of course, I hit a point about like halfway through the book, where I suddenly decided that this is the worst thing I've ever written, I can't believe I've written this much, I need to stop right now. Devi Pillai, my then editor, editor at Orbit books, had already given me… Had already offered me a three book contract, and I had happily signed it and happily gotten the advance. At that point, I was like, this… I've never written anything like this, I can't keep doing this. This is going to make people think that I'm the worst writer in the world. So I called up Devi, I was like, I want to stop doing this book, I'm going to change this back to a single book contract. I think I was crying. Devi was like the editorial equivalent of hey, Nora. Have a Snickers. You always want to quit your novels when you haven't eaten. So… Basically, she told me to sit down and relax. So, around the same time, a bunch of friends of mine dragged me out for a intervention.

[Laughter]

[Nora] A very drunk intervention. Over mimosas, they were like, Nora, this may hurt. So…

[DongWon] Stop reading Modern Miss poets and get back to reading your poets. But…

[Laughter]

[Nora] Anyway. So we're segueing over from talking about structure. I'm sorry. But that was basically how I wrote it.

[Howard] Yeah, but see, that's… Structure and process are so intimately intertwined. I mean, when we talk about structure with each other, when we talk to writers about structure, it is in part of a… It is as part of a discussion on process. You have a structure that you are originally working with, and then you realize… You get to the middle of the book, as I think almost all of us do, and decide that we're wrong, we've always been wrong, we hate writing, and we're done.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That is a structural moment. That is a moment where you go back and you look at what you're doing and you eat the Snickers and you have drinks with friends at the intervention, and then you go back, and, I assume, at some point realize…

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Howard] Oh, my goodness, the second person is actually teeing up a wonderful reveal. And… [Garbled] I don't know when that moment was…

[Nora] Yeah.

[Howard] But your reveal was brilliant.

[Nora] Well, the reveal… So I knew at the beginning that all three perspectives were the same person. That was a given. I knew that my primary perspective needed to be Essun. That Essun was the person whose story I was ultimately telling. They're all Essun, but that was…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] The focus that I wanted to keep. So I found myself seeding in hints into Essun's POV… I put hints into all three of them on purpose. Because I am an evil writer, and…

[Chuckles]

[Nora] I cackle while I throw in little hints. I'm like Did you notice this one?

[DongWon] Yep.

[Nora] But, uh...

[DongWon] Going back in a reread, it is such a delight to pick out all those little moments of, like, oh, diabolical.

[Nora] Isn't it?

[DongWon] That she was giving us this… I remember noticing stuff in the introduction of Essun that, like, leads to that understanding later. I was just like God damn.

 

[Nora] Yeah. Yeah. Those are my favorite kinds of books to read. The books where, when you are really… Where you enjoy the first read through enough that you're willing to go back and reread it and catch all the little stuff. So that is… I don't expect anybody necessarily to pick up on it the first time around. But, deep and close reading are… Deep and close reading is something that I want readers to do with me. It is what I love to do myself with good writing. So I want to reward that with here's a blanket which she mentions in one chapter that you're not going to see again tell like six chapters later. But, little things like that. So, um… But, yeah. I knew from the very beginning that it was going to be all three people in the same perspective. I did write Essun's part first. Because I felt like I needed to know where she was going and where she was going to end up in order to write the other two. But then the other two, I kind of flipped back and forth between Damaya and… Oh, God. Wow.

[DongWon] Syonite.

[Nora] Syonite. Wow. Wow. Okay. Coffee… I don't have enough in me. Sorry.

[DongWon] Always. Yeah, I was really curious about the order in which this was written. Because part of me was like, did she write just sequentially, chapter 1, Chapter 2, chapter 3, altering the perspectives? But hearing that you wrote one of the POVs first, and that then enabled you to write the other two… Which makes sense. Because Essun is like the spine of the novel in some… So many ways. Her story's like carries us through as we start to understand the other perspectives and the history that she's had up until this point.

[Nora] Yeah, I wrote the majority of Essun first. Because I needed to have her lodged in my head. Then I started kind of working on the other two, and inserted some earlier chapters. But I reached a point where I was basically alternating between the POVs as I wrote. It just felt better that way. In fact, in some cases, I was deliberately… Like, when I was writing about Damaya, I would have just written a segment in which Essun went through some terrible hell, and I wanted to seed in a parallel to that that Damaya has to go through. Or that Syonite has to go through. I had to actually kind of stop that, because it was a little too obvious. In the revisions, I fixed it, I think. But…

[DongWon] Interesting.

[Nora] Yeah. But that is how it got written.

 

[DongWon] I mean, we spent a whole episode talking about parallelism in this book. Right? Your use of parallelism in the different character arcs, but also over time. Right? Starting with the child death and ending with a child death. Starting… You'll have one beat that then is replicated across all three stories at different points in time. Which, like, set up so many sort of like thematic resonances. It was almost like… Like the magic system, you were setting up these different resonances that were coming at us from different angles, which, like, built to something, but felt quite powerful. When you're setting up those parallels… I mean, you were saying that once you started alternating, you saw them coming in, and then you sort of shifted them around or cut back on them in edits. When you're seeding like, these clues, in as well that you kind of mentioned, was that planned at the beginning or did you find yourself layering that kind of stuff in later? Because I think… I love that we're talking about process so much, because I think these are the questions people have when they see something beautifully structured, they're like, how in hell do you do that? Because you can't think of all these things when you're outlining or when you're doing your first drafts sometimes.

[Nora] Right. Right. The majority of the parallels and the hints and things like that, I seeded in from the beginning. I took out a lot. I am not a subtle person. I am a… I am a person that throws bricks at the heads of my readers. I have to stop sometimes, because I need to be more subtle than I naturally am. So revisions are my favorite. Revisions are when I'm like, oh. Oh, that's way too… Let's turn that brushstroke into a dab. Let's turn that brick to the head into a pebble to the head. Or whatever. So I removed a lot of really obvious stuff. Honestly, it still felt too obvious to me. But then I ran it through some beta readers and that helped a lot. Because things that scream obviousness to me are far more subtle in other people's eyes, I think. So…

[Howard] Yeah. Yeah. It's a little bit like… I don't know if you've ever performed stage magic, but it's a little bit like being the magician and knowing which hand you palmed the coin into. Being able to see from your angle, yes, I have a fake fingertip on this finger. It's often very difficult to step out of that point of view… Like, man, everybody's going to see this. I can see it. It's obvious.

[Nora] Yeah.

[Howard] No. Nobody's going to see it. You're moving your hands fast, and you've written this well. I feel like there's an instinctive element here, that sometimes we have to go back and remember. When I wrote this the first time, my instinct was to do this. I've cleaned it up in revisions, and I haven't broken it. That's the thing I think we're always afraid of, is that we'll break something in revising.

[Nora] No, I have always loved revisions. Revisions are my favorite part of writing. Writing raw is actually my least favorite part. I am good at that part. Like, the flow… Once I really kind of get into the zone, I… If I'm listening to my characters the right way, then they are speaking and the story is writing itself. At least at a certain point. But there are two huge problems. One, I have a terrible memory. So I will write the same scenes, or the same kinds of scenes, beats, over and over and over again. Because I don't… especially when I'm on deadline, I don't have time to go back and reread the entire book, and I forget that I put in some particular beat, and then I do it again, and I do it again. So that sucks. Because each writing session is about anywhere from like 1500 to 3000 words a day, and by the time I get to the point where I am doing page 100, I will have forgotten what's on page 25. So that's one problem. But the other problem is that the urge to be subtle feels coy to me. I've always preferred just being straightforward. I've always preferred just saying what I mean. The problem is that it's a good idea to be subtle sometimes. It's a good idea to kind of let the story speak for itself, the action or the setting or whatever speak for itself. I've got to get myself out of the way of that. I have sort of a… I'm told that this is a typical neuro-diverse person behavior. I don't know if that's true. I'm still adjusting to realizing that I have been ADHD my whole life, and had no idea until relatively recently. Yet, when I look back, I'm like, "How did I not know?" So… Anyway.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] But, um… So I'm…

[DongWon] We've all been there.

[Nora] Yeah. So I'm told that is sort of common for folks with ADHD to just repeat themselves over and over again trying to be more clear each time in the hopes that they can get across what they're trying to say if they're just clear enough. If they just say it slowly or carefully enough. As a writer, I'm especially prone to that. Because I'm like if I just write it exactly the right way, they'll all get it, and it'll be obvious, and then I won't need to do it again. And, no, that's not how anybody works. So…

[Chuckles]

[Nora] That's not how I work. I don't even know why I expect that of other people. So I have to kind of get myself out of the way. I have to stop my urge to explain and explain and explain. That is what revisions let me fix.

 

[DongWon] That said, if you're going to err on the side, I think erring on being straightforward over being coy is so powerful. Right? There's so many times I read a book that is just with holding so much back that I'm like there's nothing keeping me here. You've kept so much back that I am just straight up bored. Right? So I think the instinct of just telling the reader stuff up front, I think, does so much to keep us engaged. And then, I love this idea that in edits, you're like, oh, I gotta pull back a little bit. I gotta hold a few things back, I'm telling them too much. Right? I think starting with too much and pulling back is always an easier edit than starting with… Like, underwriting is harder to edit for then overwriting. Right?

[Nora] [garbled]

[DongWon] Not to say that you're overwriting.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] Yeah. I'm not sure. I've never underwritten. I've always overwritten.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] But the overwriting is a problem in and of itself, though.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] Because past a certain point, I find underwriting coy. Overwriting is condescending. It is patronizing to your audience. It is assuming that your audience lacks the intelligence to figure out simple stuff.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] [garbled] subtle stuff. So… That's not what's in my head, but that's how it feels when it comes across. So I have to keep that in mind too.

[DongWon] It's all trust.

[Nora] So there is a sweet spot. Yeah. There is a sweet spot.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] And there is a trust factor, and you have to remember that your trust factor changes as you proceed through the book.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] You start out at the very beginning, your audience does not necessarily trust you at all, especially when you're hitting them with second person and a bunch of other weirdness. Then, past a certain point, though, you can start to be very, very delicate with your brushstrokes. I tend to still slap on the paint. But I… Revisions are where I thin it all. To beat a metaphor to death.

[DongWon] Well.

[Laughter]

[Nora] I'm sorry.

[DongWon] No, you're doing it, that's great. Speaking of overwriting, we are running a little bit long here. So, let's go ahead and take a quick break.

[Nora] Sure.

 

[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[Nora] So, yeah. My thing of the week right now is the videogame Alan Wake II. I have gotten very into the Remedy connected universe, I think is what they're calling it. Alan Wake is the sequel to the game Alan Wake. It is companion to a game called Control which one lots of awards last year. Alan Wake II one lots of awards. These are writers games, I think. Because they are games that are heavy into sort of exploring the artistic mindset, among other things. But, also, the paranoia that revisions are to writers. Are you making the story better or are you dragging the story to hell? And is the story driving you to hell? So are you actually putting in… Breadcrumbing your ideas early or is an eldritch abomination slowly dragging your story into a terrible place? So, Alan Wake II is a game about a writer who is literally trapped in his own novel. There are other characters involved. There are other plot elements to it. But, as a writer, writing this… Playing this incredibly meta-fictional game, it has been absolutely fascinating for me to realize (A) how writing looks to other people. How writers look to other people. That's been a little actually intimidating. Because you realize Alan's coming across to pretty much everyone that meets him as just being absolutely bat shit. And there's something wrong with the guy and everybody can see it. I'm like, oh, is that how… Is that how we seem?

[Chuckles]

[Nora] Oh, good to know. But then you also see things like the author's characters getting revenge on him. [Garbled lot in common] But it's been a delight to play. And I'm actually super excited because next week sometime, the latest DLC, The Red Caps, drops. So I cannot wait for a chance to play that. So…

[DongWon] We've been talking about doing a bonus episode talking about Alan Wake and…

[Nora] Oh, really.

[DongWon] I think now we have to do that, and we have to have you back to do a deep dive with us.

[Nora] Sure. I would be… Absolutely.

[DongWon] On why this game is so brilliant. So. But thank you so much.

[Nora] Yeah. Absolutely.

 

[DongWon] Welcome back. So, so far we've done a wonderful dive into your process and how you think about the structure of these books, what that looks like as you develop it. I want to take a zoom out a little bit and take a little bit of a step back, because one thing I was thinking about is… This might be my publisher perspective coming in. Right? Of this book is very much marketed and sold as epic fantasy. Right? It's very much fitting in that category. One of the things that I think is so interesting about it is it feels very fresh and contemporary. It's not surprising to me that you were like thinking about modernists as you were writing. There's so much about it like the rupture of technology is sort of modernity coming into this book in a certain way. It feels very contemporary, it feels of non-genre fiction in terms of the structure. But when you look at all the elements, it's literally wizards going to a magical school with magic crystals and things like that. Right? Like, especially the first book has so many of the trappings of classic fantasy brought into it. So, epic fantasy can have a really rigid structural drive. Right? It wants third person omniscient. It wants prophecy. It wants multi POV, like all of this stuff. Were you actually thinking about the category as you were conceiving and drafting this novel, or were you just like I'm going to do my own thing? And did you feel a tension with that tradition at all?

[Nora] I definitely felt tension with the… I always feel tension with the epic fantasy tradition. I take very much to heart your statement that epic fantasy wants certain things. I find myself hearing those calls for certain things and saying, "No. Fuck you, epic fantasy. I'm not giving you what you want."

[Chuckles]

[Nora] I have spent probably the bulk of my career fighting with epic fantasy. Because I see such potential in that subgenre. It is… Like, why are we fixated on middle European epics, on that as epic? Why aren't we looking at Gilgamesh? Why aren't we writing about [San Diego?] Why aren't we writing about all these different cultural traditions instead of just a few? Why aren't we exploring science fictional landscapes? There's no reason why you can't have magic in space? And things like that. So I do not like the rigidity of any genre. I react badly when I'm told that the way to a particular kind of genre is only X, Y, Z. I'm like, well, what about X, Y, A? So that is how my head works. So, yes, I very much was like I'm going to put a lot of science fiction in this. Then, somewhere in… I think the two… This is a little spoiler. But, somewhere in the two, I gave a name to the force that is being used, and it is not orogeny, it is magic. And I'm just… I just did that to [garbled fool with the audience]

[chuckles]

[Nora] [garbled] because I am an evil writer as I said.

[DongWon] Because at that point, the book was becoming more science fictional, was becoming more science fiction in terms of its logics and technologies, and then that you're throwing out us, like, no. This is magic. It's such a lovely little tension there, yeah.

[Nora] Well, I mean, there's a particular thing that I was doing which is that… I believe it's Clarke's Law, is any sufficiently complex magic is indistinguishable from science fiction… No. The other way around. Any…

[Howard] Any sufficiently complex technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[Nora] Thank you.

[DongWon] There we go.

[Nora] The inverse of that, I think, is the Girl Genius law, which is the same thing. Any sufficiently complex magic is indistinguishable from technology. And I really wanted to play with that. What if we have magic so complex, so structured, still incomprehensible, still at its core something that you cannot fully grasp or at least not easily, and not necessarily reproducible, not necessarily all of the things that are science. But what if it's magic, it looks and sounds and tastes like science. At what point do you start to treat it as a science? At what point is it just science, it's just got a weird name. I really just wanted to play with that. I did not want it to become a clear answer, I wanted it to be ambiguous to the end. Because… Again, this is a bit of a spoiler for later in the series, but the initial stage of the story, where you realize how structured orogeny is, much, much later in the story you find that another civilization went even further with the structure. They got into literally the ability to do some miraculous things with it. They scienced it to death and then drag the world with them. So I really just wanted to explore that aspect of it. It's magic, but can you science it too much? Is there a point where you have dragged it so far that it has a different core?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] It's different in its nature, ultimately.

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Nora] Yeah. That was the idea.

 

[DongWon] Well, like, one thing I think about a lot is… I think about Tolkein a lot. I love those books, I love the story. It's very meaningful to me. But the thing that always strikes me when I go back to Tolkien is how mournful it is. It's very sad. Everyone's always just singing songs about how the world used to be better. Right? I think so much of epic fantasy derives from that origin point of this… What is ultimately a restoration fantasy. Right? It's we need to bring the old ways back…

[Nora] Right.

[DongWon] And the world was better before and we live in this fallen time. So, so much of what we think of as classic epic fantasy… Obviously there are departures, this is not the whole genre. But much of the core of the genre, much of its most successful elements tend to be this urge to bring something back that once was. Right?

[Nora] Yeah.

[DongWon] If I'm… Had a couple cocktails and you catch me at the right moment in an expansive mode, what I will say is that I think the dominant mood of epic fantasy is nostalgia. Right? I think nostalgia is the thing that drives a lot of it. That is not The Fifth Season. Fifth Season explicitly starts with this statement of Fuck restoration.

[Nora] Yeah.

[DongWon] Restoration doesn't work.

[Nora] Yeah.

[DongWon] We can't do that. It starts with the breaking of the world. I mean, I just wandered off into a whole thesis statement about where fantasy is, but I'm curious, like, was that something that resonates with how you think about this book or were… Was that not even in your mind as you're trying to distinguish yourself from that tension between the what epic fantasy wants versus what you wanted to do?

[Nora] That is always a tension in my mind. I, like I said, one of the things that I… I have been fighting against that tradition within epic fantasy and other traditions within epic fantasy in my whole career. Epic fantasy has so much farther that it can go. And it is… The adherence of so many writers to that nostalgic theme limits it. I think that that's not necessarily a thing that they can help. I think that that is a manifestation of privilege. You want to get back to the world as it was if the world as it was is good for you. If the world as it was was a shithole, you have no need to go back to what used to be. You would not want to go back to what… In fact, you're going to fight the quote unquote heroes of the story, you're going to be an antihero and try and move on to something different, instead of returning to what was. So a lot of my fiction tends to explore these themes. Because some of it… It's pretty obvious, I think, in The Fifth Season that I'm channeling slavery. And I wanted to explore a lot of different kinds of oppression within it. I was exploring closetedness among queer people, I was exploring disabled people who had been treated as useless at varying points, I was exploring a lot of different stuff. I wanted to kind of teach one sort of unified theory of all these folks for whom the old world was bad, are going to see the potential in change. They may or may not pursue that potential. But they see it. And there's no reason for me to pretend that tension isn't there. So, yeah, in the case of… For example, in the case of Essun, I deliberately contrasted her against Alibaster. Alibaster is the reformist. Essun, for the bulk of the book, is the centrist. Who is the status quo defender, survivor, etc. one of these people… Both of them see the potential for change. One of them is just simply not willing to put in the effort that is necessary to make that happen and the stuff for it that would be necessary to make that happen. And the other is further along on his particular path towards reform, basically. I deliberately contrasted them, because I wanted to show… I don't believe that there is… I mentioned earlier that I think that that nostalgic exploration tends to be associated with privilege. For people who are coming from marginalized identities, there's different ways of reacting to that same thing. I don't believe that there's any one way of doing it in a privileged way, and I don't believe there's one way of doing… Of reacting to oppression as a marginalized person. But I wanted to show different perspectives on… Excuse me. If you are seeing the world as it is and you see that it could be better, what do you do? So, yeah, I guess it's the centrist versus the progressive, if you want to look at it that way.

[DongWon] Yeah. It's really interesting. I was just having a conversation with a cis white male author about epic fantasy. I kind of said something similar to what I said here about, like, me, even as a kid, reading epic fantasy, feeling a sense of golden nostalgia, of a thing I would never have access to. His response was initially [garbled] he didn't quite have that experience when he read it. He felt more of the potential of adventure. I was like, oh, is this just the experience of reading this while marginalized? Right? Like, as a person of color, as a queer person, of, like, oh. These adventures aren't for me. I will never get to be Taron. I will never get to be whoever a major epic fantasy hero is. It's really interesting… And I think part of why Fifth Season did speak to me so much was I was like, oh. This is from the perspective of deeply marginalized people who are being subjected to active, awful oppression. Right? It's why the scene of the Guardian breaking Damaya's hand will just, like, live in my brain forever in the worst and best ways. So… But I would love to shift away from sort of looking back a little bit at the traditions and talk about how you move forward. You've written a whole nother series since then, and… What lessons did you take away from the experience of writing these books. Obviously, they came out to great acclaim. You've won Hugos for every single entry in the series. What did you… How did this shift how you approach writing fantasy going forward and what… How you think about structure going forward? To return to the original topic, like, what were the lessons that you took away from this experience?

[Nora] Um.

[DongWon] That's a very easy to answer question.

[Ha ha ha ha]

[Nora] I think I have relaxed a little. I'm not as angry at the genre, because I said my piece. I… I… Like I said, I spent a long period of time kind of railing against the traditions of epic fantasy, frustrated by the potential that I saw that just seemed to be being squandered. I would read… I'm not going to name any particular books, but I would read an epic fantasy series and see how much more interesting it could have been if they'd decided not to restore the king to power. If they decided why don't we try democracy. I know that, like Game of Thrones, kind of went and nudged about ha, ha, ha, democracy? We're not going for that silly idea. Why would we try that? I know that there have been others engagements with that idea, and, epic fantasy as a general thing has mostly kind of laughed at the concept of applying all these modernists… All these modern ways of thinking to the story. But you aren't bound by the ways that medieval people actually thought. You are writing to a modern audience, you are a modern person yourself. You cannot think like a true medieval person. So why pretend? Why let your biases about the medieval era impact how you actually write about the medieval Europe versus how people in the medieval era might have themselves actually thought. There's a lot of potential within the genre, and I spent a long time just kind of pushing at it and trying to say, look, we can do more. We can go here, we can go there. Let's try it. Why isn't anybody else trying this? There were people… There are people who are. I don't want to pretend that I am the only writer that is doing something weird.

[DongWon] No. But I do think you kicked the door in. You know what I mean? Like, I think people were doing that, but I think you opened a door in a way… Forcefully in a way that made it easier for people to follow.

[Nora] Good.

 

[Howard] Using the door metaphor, when Tolkien published Lord of the Rings, he threw open a door into something that at the time was being called romantic fantasy or fantasy romance or something. They didn't even have a word for it.

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] He had a goal which was to create a sort of fictional mythos for Great Britain, and we all walked through that door.

[Nora] Yeah.

[Howard] We all walked through that door and ended up with that POV, ended up with that point of view, ended up with that perspective. And now when I think about worldbuilding, I have to kick myself a little bit and say, no. You're worldbuilding. You're building a secondary world thing. You do not have to adhere to the rules of feudalism or medievalism or Roman or bronzed technol… Just do what speculative fiction does best and speculate!

[Nora] That's… You raise a really good point. What Tolkien did, in creating that mythos, I think bunches of readers read the Lord of the Rings, saw what he did, and were to… And their take away was we can do medieval Europe better. Their take away was not we can do a mythos in whatever thing that we want to do. We can make up our own mythos in any direction that we want to spent. I think that there's a number of reasons why that sort of lockstep thinking kicked in. I mean, obviously, you wanted to make imitations for commercial reasons. Because when you look at Lord of the Rings, and you think, what makes it worthy of all this money and all these movies and all this other stuff, you're going to go for the most obvious imitations. I grew up in the eighties, where there were Tolkien imitators every fricking where…

[Chuckles]

[Nora] And literally called the genre or the subgenre of Tolkien clones.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] And…

[DongWon] I grew up on those. They were candy to me. I loved them [garbled]

[Nora] They were candy to me. I was like 10 years old. Then I hit 15 and I was like I am so sick of medieval…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] Europe once again. And I would have reached a point… I did reach a point where it was just sort of like, oh, my God. How many times can they do the same shift over and over and over again? And I think that that is probably what informs my writing…

[Chuckles]

[Nora] As an artist, is my 15-year-old, no, I am tired of this. So, yeah, I think that that's really what it kind of boils down to. But what Tolkien did was take something that he cared about…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] And take it in and create a riff on it. I wanted to take something I cared about and riff on it. And I don't care about the same things that a British professor who's born in South Africa and went through World War I… One? Two?

[DongWon] Two.

[Howard] One.

[DongWon] One.

[Nora] One. I don't think about the same things, I don't have the same interests, I'm not going there. Among other things, what interested me was American history, Black history. I inserted a theme from an actual thing that happened, the Margaret Garner incident at the end of the book. You people have read the book, the first book, so Syonite killing her child at the end rather than letting her child return to slavery is based on a true event for those that did not know. Based on the actual real life of a woman named Margaret Garner who escaped slavery with her children. Something went wrong, slave catchers were closing in, she began to kill her children rather than let them go to… Go back into slavery. It was one of the incidents that galvanized the abolitionist movement, because people were beginning to… People were basically like slavery is so bad that a mother would kill her own children rather than let them suffer it. Because at the time, the marketing for slavery on the part of the slaveholders was, oh, it's fine. We treat them beautifully. Because they're an investment. We would never mistreat them. It doesn't make any sense for us to mistreat them… Didididi… All of that. So that was one of the prime… Not primary, but that was one of the thematic ways that people pushed back. I wanted to insert all of that. I wanted to riff on American history. We are a country with so many sins to our name. We are a country that cannot really function without putting someone in a position of suffering. I wanted to think more about that, basically.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] So I did the same thing that an old British guy did, but I did it from the perspective of a younger black woman. Black American.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, to me, it felt like his reference point was postwar Britain, and you moved the reference point to being 21st century America. Right?

[Nora] Yeah. Yeah.

[DongWon] One of the things I love about Fifth Season was, to me, it felt… When reading it, I felt so clearly to be to be… If not entirely about it, at least in conversation with the experience of being black in America. Right? But, nothing was mapping allegorically one-to-one. It wasn't like, oh. These are the black people, these are the white people, these are blah blah blah blah blah. It wasn't, like, mapping to specific things, but it all felt so densely and richly of the experience. Right? But a part I didn't know about the individual event that you mentioned that you were referring at the end, which is very powerful and very upsetting. But, yeah…

 

[Nora] What I wanted to explore was oppression. Not specifically…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] Racism, not specifically sexism, not specifically… I was not exploring a specific oppression. I was not exploring a specific manifestation of oppression. I read about suffragism in the UK and Australia. I read about the aboriginal resistance to Australian colonization. I read about Mallory resistance. I mean, I was reading as much as I could about how people in the world pushed back against colonizers and what happens to societies that are colonized, and how it warps those societies, how it warps the people in them. And I wanted to explore the themes and not dry history. So that's why it doesn't map. I didn't want it to map.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] I didn't want it to be… This was not me trying to work through the specifics of my own life or the specifics of American history. This was me working through what is it to be oppressed. Period.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Nora] Um… And I tried to do it in a way that paid respect to all of the marginalized people whose histories and stories I read. I don't know that I succeeded.

[DongWon] I… From my experience, you did succeed very well. I found a lot to personally identify with from where I come from. For someone who is afraid of being too obvious or… Worried about a kind of didactivism, I think you succeeded in creating something very specific and very subtle and very universal all at the same time.

[Howard] I am fond of saying that there are books that are factual and there are books that are true. And you wrote a true book.

[Nora] Well, thank you. Wow.

[Howard] I come from… It's middle-aged white dude. I do not come from any of the marginalized spaces, and I read a true story about what it meant to be marginalized, what it meant to be oppressed, what it meant to try to reshape the world when a marginalized person finds themselves with the power to do some reshaping. It was a true story for me and I loved every minute of it. Except for the parts where I was mad at you, and crying.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] Yes. Okay. Um…  Yeah, okay, I mean I… Writers are evil.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Nora] I am an especially evil writer. I admit it. I accept it. This is a thing that I have learned to own about myself.

[Chuckles]

[Nora] I do write certain scenes while cackling deep in my chest. Like, I'm killing a character and I'm like people are going to hate this. Hehehehe.

[DongWon] Make them suffer.

[Nora] Yes… Your tears. I am sometimes like that. I try not to be like that, but… In real life, I am very much… I try very hard to be a nice person. I… Everybody's got their own inner bitchiness, of course, but… And sometimes outer. But I try to be a nice person. I am very much a people pleaser and so forth. But in my deepest soul, I am a sadist. [Garbled] writers are.

[DongWon] And we are deeply grateful for it.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] So… Nora, thank you so much for joining us. This conversation was truly wonderful. It was a real delight to be able to dig into some of the thematic elements and structural elements of this book with you. Thank you for writing it.

[Nora] [garbled] I thought so too.

[DongWon] Thank you for joining us here.

[Howard] Do we have some homework?

[DongWon] Yeah.

 

[Nora] Yes. In keeping with me being interested in video games lately, I've also been replaying Mass Effect, the Mass Effect series.

[DongWon] For your sins.

[Nora] Sorry?

[DongWon] For your sins.

[Nora] Always. So, what I would like to ask people to do is to imagine that they are in a game like Mass Effect where they are presented with three different attitude-oriented choices. Let's call them paragon, and the renegade, and neutral. So, take your current work in progress, take your protagonist to date, assuming that you have one, and flog them through those attitudinal flavored choices. What happens if you continue the story with your character having done the diplomatic and polite and nice thing? What happens if you have your character snap and just be super done with everything and say the stuff that they probably shouldn't say, but it's effective? What happens if your character tries to punt on either of these choices, when they really needed to be giving a more strong response? Just run it in your head and see how that affects your plot structure. I don't know if that…

[DongWon] That's fantastic. Thank you so much. That sounds like a really delightful exercise.

[Nora] Okay.

[DongWon] Nora, thank you so much again for joining us. We… It was such a delight to have you here.

[Nora] Thank you very much. It was a delight to be here.

 

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

 

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help? There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-22-technology-and-identity-a-close-reading-on-worldbuilding 

 

Key points: Technology of identity, how identity works in the story and in your work! What is your concept of you, and of other people as individuals? Imago technology, ancestral personal knowledge. The cloud hook. The city AI or algorithmic intelligence. Gee whiz, what a cool technology versus technology tied to and integrated with character and theme. Think about what you want to communicate in your book, what are the themes, and how does the technology tie into that. Remember that different characters will have different perspectives on the technology. Take an idea, and then push it, consider variations on it. What kind of complications, stories, problems, and recipes does it create? What happens when it goes wrong, when it fails, when it is abused, when the protections slip?

 

[Season 19, Episode 22]

 

[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 19, Episode 22]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Worldbuilding, Technology and Identity

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Howard] We are talking about A Memory Called Empire. During this close read, we're exploring the technology of identity and how identity enters into the story and how these things, most importantly, really, will enter into your own work. I would like to lead with one of my favorite moments in the book. Gonna paraphrase a little bit, and then read a line. They're talking about the imago technology on Lsel Station, where someone else's memories, multiple generations of someone else's, can be embedded in you. You have these people, these identities, as voices in your head, for lack of a better term. Someone asks the protagonist, Mahit, "Are you Yskandr or are you Mahit?" After a bit of navelgazing, Mahit says, "How wide is the Teixcalaanli concept of you?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I love that question. Ask yourself, fair listener, how wide is your concept of yourself? How wide is your concept of another person as an individual? Because when we start talking about technological modifications to our minds, and it is entirely possible that you are holding in early generation of one of those in the form of your smart phone, the question of what do we mean by you, what do I mean by me, becomes super fun to explore. Arkady Martine does a brilliant job of it.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to just briefly pause, because I realize that we've been so embedded in this book that we actually are using imago as if it's an everyday term.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Imago is basically, it's a small machine that nestles in the base of a person's head and it carries the memory of their predecessors. The id… Some of that memory is personality, and they're matched with someone who has a similar personality. The idea is that you get… It's like having a mentor that just goes with you everywhere. One of the things that I love about this, and this idea of you, that you're talking about, is that they have very clear ideas of what an appropriate use of this technology is. That you are trying… The people who pick someone to be added to this imago line… So you may have, like, 14 generations of people giving you their advice and wisdom. But each one becomes… They integrate. So… They spend a year integrating so that they're working altogether. They're carefully selected so that they have similar personalities. There are also these very clear ideas of what is appropriate use for this and what is taboo or gross. It's… It is a lovely piece of worldbuilding. Because the other thing that happens is that then we see what the Teixcalaanli reaction to the imago is, that they find it quite appalling that you would modify yourself in any way, shape, or form. But then their ideas of what to do with it are, in turn, appalling to the L… The…

[DongWon] People of Lsel.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Lsel.

 

[DongWon] I think it's been pretty clear, my lens on reading this book has come up over the course of this close reading series, has been one where I'm really thinking about this in terms of Empire and immigration and assimilation. Right? One of the things I love about the idea of the imago is it is about generational knowledge. It's about a connection to your ancestors. On Lsel, that's literalized. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The things you learn from the people who came before you is literally embedded in your body. Right? What we see in this book is Mahit arrives at the heart of the Empire, immediately is severed from that ancestral knowledge through a traumatic event. Like, literally, we have generational trauma happen inside her head. Then she loses access to the knowledge of her forebears. It just is this really rich metaphor of the knowledge that we carry with us, the knowledge that comes from our predecessors, what happens when we don't have access to that inside the heart of an empire that wants to erase us, and is horrified by the idea that you would carry that with you. Right? It's a memory called Empire. But the thing is that, because the Empire wants to erase your memory, it wants to erase the memory that connects you to your own people, and to your own culture. All of that is embedded in the idea of this technology. So, how expansive is the definition of you? Does it include your ancestors? Or is it just you, the person who is here now? Boy, would Teixcalaan like to say that it's just you that's here now.

 

[Erin] Yeah. What I love about this is all of this has to… What Arkady Martine has to do is establish what this is really early on, before the trauma happens, before all the reaction to it happens. I think we need to feel sympathetic towards its existence, that imago is generally good, that we're sort of on the side of Mahit having this. I was thinking about sort of a line, someone's really early on. I'm going to read them… I'm not going to read them. But in the very beginning, she… They're making their way through the city and Three Seagrass starts, like, whispering a poem.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] Then, like in the back of Mahit's mind, Yskandr's also, like, the imago voice is also whispering the poem. She finds it really, really assuring. I think what is great about that is we've all been out of place at some point in our lives, right, so this is a completely, like, a world we don't know, but it centers us in an experience that we're familiar with. We are out of place, we're looking for something that will make us feel comfortable, and in this case, it's his voice in the back of our head, it's this memory, this generational memory, that makes Mahit feel comfortable. I think that makes us feel this is a comforting thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Getting this ripped away is going to be bad, is going to be traumatic. The ability to do that worldbuilding really early on, I think, is just one of the great strengths of this.

 

[Howard] There are two other technologies that enter into this discussion. The first of those two is, for me, the obvious symmetry, the cloud hook that the Teixcalaanli use. When I think, from my other outsider standpoint, of how the Teixcalaanli react to the imago technology, I look at the cloud hook and think, "You hypocrites!"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Because if the cloud hook is not a voice in your head, I don't know what else is. Like, if your smart phone had an AI in it and knew the kinds of things that you always needed to look for and presented you with that information… Oh, wait. That already happens.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Well, the AI is explicitly malfunctioning. Right? It's explicitly attacking people, or marking people as inappropriate who theoretically aren't.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Who haven't done anything that violates…

 

[Howard] That's the second piece of the technology, which is the fact that the city itself has AI, or at least algorithmic intelligence, mimicry, going on in it, which has biases, and as we find out in the story, some of those biases are perhaps a little more deliberate in a little more malicious than perhaps they should be. When I think of the cloud hook, I'm reminded of a change that I have seen in my lifetime, which I sum up in the question, "Who is that one guy in that one movie?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] We do not have that argument anymore. Any… Unless we explicitly lay down rules and say, "No, no, no. Don't pick up your phone. Where have we seen that actor before? Not the main actor, the other actor, yeah, the guy who just died. Him. Who's that? Uh…"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] But… Now, Sandra and I do this all the time. We'll pick up our phones. The moment we get the answer, the other movie comes flooding back to us.. Our phones have already changed who we are, in that they have changed the sorts of information that we have readily available to us. In this story, the way the cloud hook… We have people severed from their cloud hooks, people severed from their imagos. Looking at the way they cope is plot important. And it's handled much more effectively than all of those movie scenes where somebody holds their phone up and says, "Oh, no. I have no bars."

[DongWon] Right. Well, it's also the cloud hook is connected to citizenship. Right? The way that imago is Mahit's connection to her people, the cloud hook says you are or are not a citizen. Only citizens can have cloud hooks. You literally can't open doors without it. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Like, you are so considered alien, so disregarded by Teixcalaanli's society, that without this thing that marks you, without this technology that connects you to the AI that runs the city and all of these different things, you aren't a person. Right? So identity and technology get so blurry in all these different directions at the same time. Which I think is such a fascinating way to build out this world.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, I just want to share with you the language that she uses the first time she introduces the cloud hook.

 

Over her left eye, she wore a cloud hook, a glass eyepiece full of the ceaseless obscuring flow of the Imperial information network.

 

That ceaseless obscuring flow does so much beautiful lifting. This is a really good example of using point of view for Mahit's… Mahit's experience of what that's like. Ceaseless. It's that going back to that ceaseless…

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] At the beginning, that opening line. Ceaseless obscuring flow, and Imperial information network. It is an impersonal thing. It is something that is part of connecting you and making you even more of a cog in the Empire, versus what she carries, which is the imago, which is a person and their experience.

[Howard] Well, we are not ceaseless. We need a quick lacuna for a thing of the week.

 

[Erin] I love watching documentaries. Because I think they tell us so much about the world around us, that we can then use in the worldbuilding that we're doing when we're building new things. So I'm recommending the documentary series Rotten which is this deep dive into the food supply chain on Netflix. Each episode focuses on a different food. There's garlic, there's chocolate, there's avocado. Just in general, I always recommend watching documentaries and thinking about how does… How does their world work? How do their systems work? Then, how can you just basically steal from that for the thing that you're writing next. In particular, I love the avocado production episode of this particular series. It really made me think about how changing complexity or changing the demand for a technology or magic or food in one area can affect something somewhere completely across the world. So, check that out, it is Rotten on Netflix.

 

[Howard] Welcome back. Let's talk about how you as writers can use some of these concepts we've talked about as tools in your own work. Because who are you and what does technology mean are questions that have been at the root of science fiction since its very inception.

[DongWon] Well, there's such a big difference between geewhiz, what a cool technology, and introducing technology that is closely tied to and integrated with character and theme. Right? So, the imago ties so closely to who Mahit is as a person. Then, as Mary Robinette was talking about before the break, how the cloud hook connects to the thematic ideas of what makes up an empire. Right? So when you're thinking about what technologies do I want to introduce into my world, think not only about how do these affect material things in this space, but also, what are you trying to communicate with your book, what are the important thematics, and how does the technology speak to that?

[Erin] Yeah. I would… You took the words right out of my mouth.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But I've got new ones. Which is that also I think it's about perspective on technology. Thinking about that ceaselessness, the voice in the head… The imago is also ceaseless, but Mahit would never see it that way. So one thing to think about is that not everyone in your story will have the same perspective on the same technology. Something that could be a cool exercise, for example, would be to look at one big piece of technology in your world, and have three different people from three different points in your story, or three different perspectives, view that technology. How would they describe it? That gives you a better sort of 360 view of what it is beyond just what it does.

 

[DongWon] Well, then we see the Empire's idea of what you could do with an imago, which is this sort of extractive and way of extending their power of, like, oh, this could be a way for us to live forever. It's not about honoring your heritage, not about connecting with your ancestors. It's about hijacking future generations. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So, again, we see this perversion of the technology. We've lived in Mahit's head long enough by the time we discover that that we understand how horrifying this concept is, and why. Also, what deals Yskandr made to get to the point, to protect his station, how far he was willing to go to protect his culture, but what does it mean if they forget the core thing that makes them them?

 

[Howard] We've talked a lot in… Over the last 15 years? How long have we been doing this?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] About the importance of extrapolation of whatever your cool idea is. One of the things that's really challenging for us, in many cases, is to accurately or at least effectively imagine what life would be like with a thing. As I was thinking about the imago, I realized that I had an analog in my own life. Every book that I have read and loved enough to reread has become a set of voices in my head that affect how I answer certain kinds of questions. It may shape the phrasing. It may shape the way I think about the problem. It may shape my… Just my opinion out right. Leaning me in one direction or another. Books, and this is why some people find them so scary, books create biases. So, for me as a writer, I am able to look at imago technology and say, "Hum. Maybe this is like reading the same book hundred times so that that is now a voice in my head." Now I have that in my toolbox as a way to think about this.

[DongWon] Every scene that we read last year… Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, I had this experience of I don't know whether I read it at such a formative age that that book imprinted on me so I now think the same things or if I loved that book because I thought this way and then I read the book. I don't know where I end and the book begins. That is such a wonderful experience to have with the work that means something to you. And how… Again, I don't know whether she shaped my worldview or I found something that just so perfectly matches how I see things. I think that's such a great experience that we can have with art in this way and with the stories that we live with and the cultures that we come up in. Again, like, the imago is a reflection of that in really interesting ways.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that she says when she… Early in the book, "He behaved exactly like an imago ought to behave, a repository of instinctive and automatic skill that Mahit hadn't had time to acquire for herself." I'm like, yeah, I would love that.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, I would love having that in my life. I think that that's, again, one of the world building things that she's doing with this is that she is trying to make this comfortable for us. She is using familiar experiences that… Uncomfortable situations that we've been in. It's like, yeah, I would love to have that. That's one of the ways that she makes this technology feel familiar to us, is by tying it to familiar experiences that we have had. He knew when to duck through doorways that were built for people who were shorter than she was. It's like, that's… That kind of instinctiveness of which fork do I use? I don't know. Where you quietly watch the people around you. If you've just got someone in the back of your head who just… Will you take it right now? I don't know what's going on.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled Ember loss] of that, I think.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] There's a phrase that I've been seeing more and more online, we're losing recipes. Which is the theory that, like cultural things are not being passed down to new generations, and the idea that you can, like, lose those recipes when you lose… If the imago's not working or if it's lost or…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Corrupted is… I think that's something. For me, that felt really resonant, and therefore, I felt… I was like, "Yes. This technology could prevent something that I see as something that could happen in the real world."

 

[Howard] One of the critical story points… Spoiler alert, but guys, you've had a month. Please. We can't say enough about how much you need to read this beautiful book. One of the critical story points is that Mahit's imago is 15 years out of date. So the person, the voice that she has in her head, is not the person who died on the job she's going out to replace. He is the person who might under one set of circumstances, become that person. Later in the story, she gets both of them in her head. I love that fulfillment of the promise in that this is not something that the… Lsel ever would have done. They would have seen this as just awful. No, don't do that. It's dangerous. It'll make you sick. Also, it's immoral. There are probably taboos against it. Of necessity, she does it and you have three people in one brain at once. A young version and an old version of the same person arguing with one another as arbitrated by the person whose body they're in.

[DongWon] On a technical level, I think one thing that Arkady does that is essential to the example is you can take one core idea. Right? What if you had connections to information? Then instantiate it in the imago, and then keep pushing on that idea over the course of the book. Finding new iterations. Okay, what if it's outside your body? The cloud hook. What if it breaks, and then you have the first issue with Yskandr. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] What if you had two of them? Then, later in the book… Just… It really is one idea that carries through the whole book that she keeps fiddling with.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's also a point deeper in the book where she talks about imago technology as it appears in bad daytime drama.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Where someone is… Someone has taken the imago of their lover and carries it around with them, but their personalities aren't compatible, so that they fracture and then they're both lost. It's like, yeah, that's exactly what we as writers would do. She's like, yeah, this is an idea that a writer would have, but a society can't sustain that, so it's not the way society works. The imago who shows up to the widow… To their widow. It's like, oh, yeah, that's really messed up. We don't do that.

[Howard] Horribly inappropriate. No, we don't do that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Totally inappropriate. So that's… That is, I think, something that can be fun for you when you're doing your writing is to think about how the storytellers in your world are thinking about the technology…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That you have, or the geewhiz, the magic, whatever it is. Like, how do they… How do people who fundamentally don't understand how it works describe it to other people?

 

[Howard] The meta gets so thick when you begin considering that much science fiction is cautionary. We should avoid going down this route. But in your cautionary tale, you're talking about this technology, are there cautionary tales in that universe? That these people didn't pay attention to? Oh, no.

[Erin] I love that these are all facets, like DongWon was saying, of the same idea. I remember being cautioned once earlier in my sort of writing life about just throwing something new in, when you feel like you've run out of ideas, or you feel like you've run out of plot. You think, I'll add something even more to the world.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Like, not only is there an imago, but there's zombies. I don't know, something that will…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Add the drama. But, actually, the truer, more resonant drama, is often seeing how the same thing can be viewed differently, can cause new complications, can create its own stories, can create its own problems and recipes. I think that is really where worldbuilding becomes so rich.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled]

[DongWon] That's the difference between going wide and going deep. Right?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] But worldbuilding is wide because you get a sense of all these things, but she communicates that wideness primarily by digging really deep into certain specific channels. Right? This technology, the way the poetry works, the way names work. She picks these specific lanes and then just digs and digs and digs until oil is found there. Right?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Like… It's really thrilling to watch.

[Howard] One of the tools that… As we wrap up, one of the tools that you've got in your toolbox already is asking yourself, "And what happens when it goes wrong? What happens when the technology fails, when the technology is abused, when the protections slip?" One of the most terrifying movie moments for young me was Robocop, when Ed 209 says, "You have 15 seconds to comply." The guy drops the gun. And then Ed 209 says, "You have 10 seconds to comply." You realize, oh, that robots not working right. Oh, a very, very bad thing is going to happen.

[DongWon] Yeah.

 

[Howard] Let's wrap this up with some homework for you. I want you to think about… Do some brainstorming, some spitballing. Come up with three technologies or magical approaches that would raise questions about what it means to be you. About what it means to be an individual. About… You can be talking about a soul or a whatever. Three examples. Then take one of those and have two characters write a scene where two characters argue about it.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/12/05/16-49-magic-and-technology-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/

 

Key points: Magic and technology are often mentioned as parts of worldbuilding for speculative fiction stories. They are tools. Not inherently good or bad, it is how the author uses them that creates the interest, tension, and story. You should use them for a purpose. Either magic or advanced technology can be used to advance your plot. Set the ground rules, then remain consistent and follow those rules. Do remember that resources are never evenly distributed and accessed. People who have daily access are likely to consider it technology, while less common access makes it magic. Remember that all your characters are biased, and their view of the world is incomplete, so pay attention to your character's relationship with the magic or tech. Think about what your character does not know or misunderstands about the magic or tech. Try to avoid the "just like our world but with X" fallacy. Remember the ripple effects of even small changes. 

 

[Season 16, Episode 49]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Magic and Technology: Two Sides of the Same Coin.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] We're going to talk about magic and technology. We could come up with all kinds of fun little quotes about how they're related to each other. But... Tell us about them, Fonda. How are they related to each other?

[Fonda] I like talking about them together and in a sort of special separate episode because they are mentioned as such huge parts of worldbuilding when it comes to speculative fiction stories. I think of them as tools. They're both tools. They're tools in two different aspects. The first being that they're not inherently good or bad, right? I mean, you have a tool, you could use a knife to free a hostage, you could use it to cut steak, you could stab someone with it, and it's what people choose to do…

[Howard] Those are all three the same activity. Sorry, keep going.

[Fonda] Howard, I'm a little worried, but I will continue.

[Dan] [garbled] stab Howard.

[Fonda] So, what people decide to do with that tool is where the interest, where the tension, where the story lies. They're also both tools in the sense that if you create them, it is for a purpose, and if they're in the story, they need to be there for a reason and they ought to be used. So I think of them as serving similar narrative functions. It's one reason why I move very easily between writing science fiction and writing fantasy. Because, regardless of whether you are employing magic or you're employing advanced technology that doesn't exist as we know it today, you can do similar things with them in order to advance your plot. The thing to keep in mind is that in either of those cases, you establish the ground rules for your magic and your tech, and remain consistent and follow them.

 

[Dan] Now, I'm going to say this because I know that one or more of our listeners out there is thinking this right now. What if I invent a magic that is inherently good or bad? An example that comes to mind is the Reckoner series by Brandon, where having superpowers is inherently corruptive and makes you into a bad person because of the nature of the magic. That is to Fonda's second point, a narrative tool, and the way that the author has chosen to use it. So, yes, don't think of these as limits or us telling you that you can or can't do something. Just be aware that you are making choices, and that you are using these tools for a specific outcome.

[Fonda] Yeah. That's a good example of doing something different with the idea of dark magic. Right? Like, often times in fantasy, you have this term dark magic. I always want to sort of dissect that a little bit and ask, "Well, okay, what makes it dark? Is it the people who use it? A tendency to do dark things, or is it used primarily by a certain type of person, or it has been used to do terrible things in the past and so now it has connotations of being evil?" So I think if you pull that apart and tease it apart a little bit, you can find more nuance and more angles to approach something that is sometimes taken for granted, like dark magic.

[Dan] That's very cool.

 

[Fonda] Another thing that I want to say about magic and tech is that there is no human resource in our world that is ever evenly distributed or accessed. Right? We have cell phones in the hands of pretty much everybody that… Who you see on the street, but there are places in our world where people don't have running water. So they're… An easy way to make your fantasy or science fiction world seem simplistic is to give the impression that the world doesn't have any of the same problems that we do, and everyone views the magic and the tech in the same way and has equal access to it. Because, we talked about making our worlds feel real. A world where everyone has magic and the magic is limitless and it's equally accessed feels not only difficult to believe but has less conflict and is inherently less interesting.

[Mary Robinette] I think, to your point about magic and technology being two sides of the same coin, because people are pattern seeking creatures, we treat them the same. Like, we have… We'll say… There are magic spells in our real world. Like, if you need a bus to come, you will walk away from a bus stop. It's a very simple magic system, but it works every single time. If you need to invoke rain, leave the house without an umbrella. It's a very… It's again, a simple magic system. But these are the ways that we interpret the world and the ways that we use things. Electricity is a magic system. Some people understand it deeply and can get it to do really cool things. The rest of us just apply the work that someone else already did. One of the reasons…

[Howard] There's a group of people in the middle who are dead.

[Mary Robinette] There is a group of people in the middle.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But there are people in modern-day America who do not have a good relationship with electricity, who think that it is related to many of the modern evils, and so want to limit its use. There's a number of different places where you can find that being reality. It's my parents were born in the same year, in the same city. My dad got an electric train when he was seven at a time that my mom was living in a house with a dirt floor that did not have electricity in the house at all. So, when we're talking about the things that are uneven, it's not just along one axis. It's along multiple different axes that people have uneven relationships to whatever this, whether it's magic or technology.

 

[Dan] I want to pause here in the middle to do our book of the week, which I get to talk about this time. It is David Mogo Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa. He is a Nigerian fantasy author. This book, it was his first published one, takes place in a post-apocalyptic Lagos, Nigeria, where magic and technology have kind of been combined together. Which is why I thought it would be fun for this one. The apocalypse in the book was that the thousands of gods that kind of live in the spirit world have collapsed into earth, and Lagos is this kind of semi-livable wasteland where these gods and their magic powers are just kind of there, and sometimes they cause good things to happen, and sometimes they just cause more entropic reactions of things falling apart or ceasing to work. David Mogo, the Godhunter of the title, he can go around and kind of collect these things and trap them and use them for different things. The villain also is trying to use the gods for various purposes. So it's a really fascinating book, not only at the culture that he develops for this kind of ruined Lagos, but also the way that magic is used in the way that technology is used by the characters in the book. That's David Mogo Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa.

 

[Mary Robinette] It's a great book. It's really… It's well worth reading. But a book that you made me think of is God Engines by John Scalzi, in which the literal engines of spaceships are gods that have been harnessed as power sources. So again, both magic and technology. I think that's kind of the thing for me is whatever… Anyone who is interacting with it on a daily basis is going to view it as technology. Anyone who is not interacting with it on a daily basis is going to view it as magic, regardless of what it is.

[Fonda] I love stories that combine magic and tech. There's something about them that is so catnip to me.

[Howard] Yeah. There was an Iain Banks story, novel, Against a Dark Background, I think was the name, where it's a science fiction adventure with a MacGuffin, and the MacGuffin is called the lazy gun. All we know about the lazy gun is that if you point it at someone and pull the trigger, they will die, and the larger the group of people you point the trigger at… You point at when you pull the trigger, the more likely it is that you're just going to get a big boring explosion. Also, if you turn it upside down, it's 3 pounds heavier. That's all we know about it. Those elements never get explored. We never try and throw the gun to someone and have it turn over midair and end up heavier when it… It's… It functions in the story like a magical artifact. In that regard, in a science fiction story, it's a worldbuilding tool that tells us we've forgotten a lot. Somebody built something that we no longer know how to build. There are a lot of other things in the story that are your typical sort of science-fiction things that work the way you expect a science fiction thing to work. They have some rules and then those rules get exploited in order to use the thing in a heroic way. Huzzah. But when we get our hands on the gun, we're not actually answering questions about the gun. We're shooting it in order to get away with it and then the story ends. I was actually very satisfied that it left me with this puzzle, and this idea that in a technology and pseudo-magic story, there were elements that wouldn't be explained.

[Fonda] Yeah. I have a magic element in my trilogy, but I never call it magic. Back to Mary Robinette's point, that the people who interact with something on a daily basis don't think of it as magic. Characters don't think of this thing as magic. They would never call it magic. It's just a natural part of their world. We talked way back in episode two of this master class, all your characters are biased and have an incomplete view of the world, like the blind men and the elephant. When you are writing a world with magic or advanced tech, that principle of all your characters are biased is one to keep in mind really strongly, because what does your character have access to? What is their relationship to the magic and the tech? So you need to answer for yourself, well, who controls this technology or this magic? Who benefits? What's the power structure around it? What is possible to do with it? Do you need training? Do you need a license? Do you need someone to vouch for you? Are you born to it? Like, what are all the sort of social structures and rules, inherent rules, around the magic or technology? Then, where does your character fit? What do they see? How do they interact? Because they're not going to have the complete view. Your char… People are going to have very different opinions about magic and tech, just like they do in our world.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the fun exercises that I play with sometimes is also what do your characters not know or misunderstand about the technology. I have a friend who's an astrophysicist. She was recently asked to explain… Like, a reporter called and was like, "Can you explain, we've got some questions from children, why is the speed of light what it is?" She's like, "Nobody knows that."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] "That's the speed of light." He's like, "Why did the Big Bang happen?" She's like, "First of all, the Big Bang is not actually what happened, probably. Second, no one was there. We've got theoretical models, but how am I supposed to… You want me to explain that to a five-year-old?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But at a certain point, it doesn't matter how much you know about something, you're still going to run up against something that you don't know. Like, parachutes. We don't actually know how parachutes work. Like, not enough to be able to design better parachutes by any method other than building them and tearing them.

 

[Dan] So, while we are talking about this idea, this giving context to the magic and the technology, let's talk about some of the… I guess one of the main problems that I see with a lot of aspiring writers is the kind of just like our world but with X kind of fallacy, where everything is identical, except something has changed.

[Mary Robinette] You mean like Jane Austen with magic?

[Dan] Yeah. Which is… No. That's a good one to bring up. Because I've had long conversations with you about how you designed the magic in the world so that they could compliment each other without either one breaking the other one in half. Whereas there are a lot of things we see… The Netflix movie Bright did not do that, and it was trying to use our modern world essentially unchanged except that orcs and fairies and elves and stuff are real and everyone's known about them for hundreds if not thousands of years. Which doesn't work. There's a lot of things fundamental to even just the naming conventions of Southern California where the story takes place would be different if the Catholic Church had been destroyed or altered by the presence of fairy magic, right? So, talk to us a little bit about that, that kind of ripple effect about changing one aspect of a world can change everything else.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the examples that I cite sometimes, or think about sometimes, is that in Valor and Vanity… So, glamour, which is the magic system, is basically… It's an illusionary form of magic. In my mind, and this is why I'm like magic is technology, in my mind, what they're doing is manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum. But they're only manipulating the waveforms. Glamour is just waves, not particles. This is my own brain. Obviously, that does not actually work. Just FYI, glamour is not real.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Despite some of the letters I have received. So… But, the… There is a point at which I was having them do a form of glamour, and I'm like, wait, if you do that, they will have invented telephones in 1817. That changes everything. I had to go back in and layer in a little bit about having glamour droop down to the earth. Like, I basically went back and looked at the things that I already laid, and thought, which tool can I use to explain why this won't work? In order to keep it from being… From accidentally having this ripple effect. So I was constantly doing this back and forth to layer things in to keep it from changing the world too much. Because I wanted the power dynamics to stay the same. I also made the decision that glamour was equally distributed, so that what you get instead is the differences between… That's not the power difference between countries. The power difference remains the same… Related to many of the effects that happen in our world. Whereas, if I had said, "Ah. This is…" Which I did with Ghost Talkers. Their understanding of ghost was something that was very British-centric. But quite recent, and a carefully guarded secret. So, if the world of Ghost Talkers, which is set in World War I, if that had continued past that book, the outcome of World War I, the… Like, I was going to have to start changing every battle going forward, because of those decisions that I made.

 

[Dan] That's awesome. Well, it is on this subject, in fact, that we have our homework. So, Fonda, tell us our homework.

[Fonda] Yeah. This ties very closely to what Mary Robinette was talking about, which is thinking about the ripple effects and the second, third, fourth order effects that adding a speculative fiction element to your world would result in. So I want you to think of one just thing that you would change about our world and come up with as many aspects of the world that would be different from our own as a result. So, let's say, children have night vision, or, dogs can talk. Just one little thing. Do a brainstorm of how that would affect everything that you can think of in sort of our society daily life. After you've done that for a little while, mark one or two that could be the seed for an interesting conflict or an interesting story.

[Dan] Sounds great. Well, this is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/11/17/14-46-unusual-resources/

 

Key Points: How do you take a fantastical resource and use it to power magic or technology, or somehow interact and change the world? What are the ramifications, how does it affect the economy, the social conventions? Pay attention to scarcity. Consider seed corn, and how do we bootstrap things. How do you assign value to a fantastical resource? Pattern it on real-world things, relative scarcity. How much labor is need to produce it? Relate it to food. Use orders of magnitude. Do you worry about a fantastical resource breaking supply and demand or economy? Yes, but... ignore it, and tell the story! Do think about supply and demand, but tell the story first. Don't forget Realism vs. the Rule-of-Cool!

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 46.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Unusual Resources.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm out of air.

[Brandon] Howard, you're our unusual resource.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Peculiar resource, at any rate.

 

[Brandon] This is a very common trope of science fiction and fantasy, where you make a fantastical resource of some sort, that can either be a MacGuffin to power your magic or your technology, or in other ways interact and change the world. So we're going to talk about worldbuilding these. How we have come up with them when we've used them, what we think works and what we think doesn't work? Obviously, my favorite, which I've talked about a lot, is the spice from Dune which kind of when I read that as a teenager changed my whole perspective on economics in science fiction and fantasy. You can see that reverberating through a lot of the books I write. Where I really, really like it when my magic has some sort of connection to an economic resource in some way. Most obviously, in Mistborn where people use rare metals to do magic. So… But even in Stormlight… This comes directly from Dune, this idea that magic has… Or the resource has an effect on the world other than just the magic. If you haven't read the Stormlight books, people collect magical power in little pieces of gemstone inside of glass, and then use that to light their houses or to power their magic. What have you guys done? Why have you made the choices you have, and how has it worked?

[Mary Robinette] So I did this in a science fiction short story that I have on a colony world. It's called Salt of the Earth. It's a planet that is very low in salt. Which is something that people actually need. So it becomes… There's entire industries around reclaiming salt. When you go to a funeral, one of the things that you do is you've got tissues and you catch the tears under your eyes and put them in an offering thing, so the family can reclaim the salt that you have shed on their behalf.

[Brandon] Why did I not write this story?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I love salt, for those who don't know. I salt everything. Man, that is really [garbled]

[Howard] Probably because it just would have depressed you. That level of shortage.

[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that I was thinking about like what are the ramifications of having this thing that's absolutely necessary for survival, but is incredibly rare on this planet. How does that affect all of the social conventions, how does that affect the economy? The main character's family is from a salt-rich family. So these are the things that you kind of look at. It's in some ways not that different from the economics of Dune, because that's how scarcity works.

[Brandon] How did… What inspired that? Where… What made you start this story?

[Mary Robinette] Honestly, I was taking Orson Scott Card's Literary Boot Camp. Which was a great camp, all other things aside. He had us do five story seeds, one of which was a story seed based on research. I went in… He told us to go into the bookstore and find a nonfiction book. There was a book called Salt.

[Brandon] It's quite actually a famous one, if it's the same one.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So one of the things that then happens to me in the real world is I start noticing all of the things from when salt was a precious resource. Like Salzburg. It's like, "Oh, right. Salzburg is Salt City. Oh, yeah."

 

[Margaret] A project that I worked on recently is the new Netflix series coming in 2019. Or perhaps already arrived in 2019. Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, which of course ties to the original, Dark Crystal, the film made by the Jim Henson company and Jim Henson. Where really that entire story ends up revolving around the resource of essence, which is the life force of Gelflings, which the Skeksis decide they want, they need, it's what's keeping them young…

[Brandon] It makes them young.

[Margaret] And alive and it's like, "Aha! We've already destroyed our planet, but we can pretend we didn't if we suck the life out of Gelflings or Podlings." That just traumatized an entire generation of young people who went to see that film not knowing what they were in for.

[Brandon] Traumatized some of us, the rest of us, it turned into fantasy or science fiction novelists who think it's cool.

[Mary Robinette] And then some of us became puppeteers.

[Margaret] Traumatized and inspired are not mutually exclusive conditions. But yeah, that was a really interesting thing to look at, because there is definitely that ecological side. As we're told, the Skeksis have really done a number on Thra.

 

[Brandon] By the time this comes out, this episode, hopefully your series will have released.

[Margaret] Yes.

[Brandon] So we're going to make that our book of the week, is go watch Dark Crystal: Age of…

[Margaret] Age of Resistance.

[Brandon] If it's not out for some reason by now, then go watch the original, because it's fantastic.

[Mary Robinette] It is fantastic.

[Margaret] It's very exciting.

[Howard] In multiple definitions of the word.

[Brandon] Definitions of fantastic.

 

[Brandon] Howard, fantastical resources?

[Howard] The one that leaps to mind is the post-transuranics in the Schlock Mercenary universe. I took the concept of islands of stability, and, as other science fiction writers have done, postulated islands of super stability with massive nucleus elements, and then said that if you want to build a power plant that converts neutronium into energy in a way that gives you artificial gravity cheaply, you really have to build the whole powerplant out of post-transuranics. The best way to create post-transuranics is to have a really high density power source, like one built out of post-transuranics. So I built a system whereby the corn and the seed corn are incredibly… Well, I mean, they're obviously related, but there is very much a resource divide here. A lot of the story, especially here in the final couple of years of the story, asks the question, "Where did we bootstrap this stuff? If it's so difficult to make, unless you already have it, who made it the first time?" It's a fun question to ask, it's a fun question to answer… No, I'm not going to tell you the answer here. But it's tied into the Fermi paradox. Why haven't we seen aliens yet? Why, in the science-fiction universe that I've created, aren't people asking, "Why wasn't the galaxy already colonized a billion years ago? 2 billion years ago?" All of it came down to looking at the economics of this resource and what happens when it's fought for.

[Brandon] One of my favorite other things you've done with fantastical resources is kind of a different take on it. You have a person who got cloned several hundred thousand times, and made… You basically…

[Howard] 900 million times.

[Brandon] 900 million times.

[Howard] 900 million Gavs.

[Brandon] So, suddenly, a very unique and scarce resource, maybe not super valuable, but still… Is suddenly… You have 900 million of them. Which is a really interesting change in a little subtle way… Of course, in a very large way.

[Howard] The economic impact… The real life person upon whom Gav was originally based, Darren Bleuel, loves Guinness. You cannot feed the existing supply… You cannot make 900 million Guinness lovers happy…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] With the existing supply of Guinness. Some'pins gotta give.

 

[Brandon] So let me ask this question of you guys. How do you value a fantastical resource? How do you decide what its value in the economics of your story is going to be? You've made it up wholesale…

[Mary Robinette] I tend to pattern it based on real-world things. So I look at the relative scarcity of the thing. When we're talking about a resource… So far, we've been talking about things where it's the item itself is scarce, but there's also the labor involved. So sometimes, something is a scarce resource because it is difficult to produce or refine. Sometimes it's because there's just not… It doesn't exist very much. But either way, what that tells me begins to tell me is how difficult it is and how expensive it is. So aluminum is a good example.

[Brandon] Yeah. It's a great example.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Because aluminum used to be super, super expensive to refine.

[Brandon] I think we've mentioned it on the podcast before, like, Napoleon had his gold plates, his platinum plates, and then his aluminum plates.

[Garbled]

[Margaret] Which were oh, super fancy.

[Mary Robinette] The top of the Washington Monument has an aluminum cap on it that the ladies of Washington DC fund raised for to put this amazingly precious thing up. Now it's like I wrap my leftovers in aluminum. Because we've solved that problem. So… But what that shows me is the way something is treated when it is precious. It goes… It's something that we layer on things to say this is special. We reserve it for special occasions.

[Brandon] Right. Aluminum's a really interesting one, because aluminum is a way more useful metal in most cases than gold. You might say, "Oh, well. Something is valuable because it's really useful." But gold, a lot of times in a lot of cultures, wasn't that useful. It was pretty, but it was not a useful metal. So different cultures have treated it differently based on who wants it and how badly they want it.

[Mary Robinette] And whether they have it in their ground.

[Brandon] Yeah. Go ahead.

[Margaret] I was about to say, another interesting variant on that is you look at a resource like diamonds. Which are not actually that rare, but they have value, because value has been attributed to them, and because there's a monopoly on the global supply.

[Howard] Well, there's a monopoly on the global supply of natural diamonds.

[Margaret] That's true.

[Howard] We now have the technology to very, very easily make really, really useful and pretty… If you stick impurities in them… Diamonds. But the money generated by the original landowning diamond folk has been used to influence…

[Margaret] The market itself.

[Howard] Influence the market so that you can't make a diamond ring out of something that came out of a press.

[Margaret] But I feel like I occasionally do see that in fantasy stories, where you'll have the very precious resource or magic is very tightly controlled because it is very valuable. The Trill symbionts kind of fall into this mode, as well. Then you discover it is more common than we thought.

[Brandon] One of the things…

[Margaret] What happens to the people in power then?

[Brandon] That I did which was kind of a little bit of… I wouldn't call it a cheat, but when I was looking at how to value things in the Stormlight Archive, I made it so that you could use this magic, the light that you collect in the crystals, to make food. Then I was able to price how much the food was. Of course, not everyone can do this, so there are other market supply things. But in an economy that can one-to-one translate this stuff to food, I can then value or price how much the gemstones and things go for, because of the amount of grain it creates.

 

[Howard] I look at orders of magnitude. The model I use is sock, shoe, bicycle, car, airplane. Where… Whatever my universe needs that are analogs for those, how much of this resource is required for each of those things. I use orders of magnitude because I don't need to hit it on the nose, I just need to be in the right neighborhood, so… There should be something between airplane and car, I know, but…

[Margaret] As valuable as it needs to be for the story.

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing about this also is the narrative that attaches to the thing. So if we attach a narrative, like a shoe… You say shoe, bicycle? Okay. I have seen shoes that are priced more than any bicycle.

[Howard] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] That is because of the narrative that is attached to them. Because of the… And because of the scarcity. The Dutch tulip craze is a fine example of a resource that exists because of narrative. Because people have this love of tulips, and they venerate the tulip, and all of this. Then…

[Howard] There are automobiles that cost more than private planes.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And there are automobiles that cost less than bicycles.

[Margaret] Thank goodness a commodity bubble like that could never happen again!

[Chuckles] [Whew!]

 

[Brandon] So how about this? What do you do in your story… Have you ever worried about breaking things like basic supply-demand or breaking your economy of your story with a fantastical resource, just completely in half?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes, I do worry about that.

[Howard] I live in terror of that.

[Margaret] I don't know if this applies, but it's a funny anecdote that I would like to share. I was… In my D&D campaign, at one point, the characters had undergone a five-year gap. So we're all coming back together. It's like, characters are bringing each other gifts. My character had had two kids since anyone had seen her. So one of the magic using characters is like, "Okay." Magic is new in this world. People are just figuring out how to make magic items. She's like, "Prestidigitation is a very low-level spell. I could put this on a diaper. Oh, like, we have self-prestidigitating diapers!" Then we started thinking, like, "Why are we adventuring? Why aren't we just billionaires making self-prestidigitating diapers? And chamber pots? Why are there sewers in our world anymore, because clearly, this is just what everyone could do?"

[Howard] No matter how expensive the spell Continual Light is, if the spell exists, the candle makers are out of business forever.

[Mary Robinette] This was ex… I had this problem in Glamorous Histories. It's why the glamour does not cast actual light. Because then it stops being an alternate history and starts being… Or a historical fantasy and starts being something completely different… Because why candles? Why fireplaces? Why any of those? None of those things would ever exist.

[Brandon] Perpetual energy. Yeah.

[Margaret] We were all there around the table, and one guy looks like, "Yep. No, that's true, and we're going to totally ignore it and move on with our adventure now."

[Brandon] Let's add the suggestion that using game mechanics… If you played a lot of video games or pen-and-paper role-playing games, they are built to be fun. Not economically sound. So just keep in mind the different goals of the medium.

[Mary Robinette] It does depend on the game, but by and large, you cannot… You do have to think about supply and demand.

[Brandon] At some point, you do have to, with your story, do what Howard said last month, which is at some point I'm just I want to tell a story rather than be right. Rather than writing an economic simulation in book form, I want to tell a story. So that is a line to walk.

[Howard] In the Planet Mercenary book, in the sidebar comments, someone says almost exactly that.

[Brandon] Yeah. Well, we will have talked…

[Howard] "There's the abstraction of economics. You abstracted this to the point that the economics aren't even real." Somebody else said, "That's because we wanted them to play a game, not figure out that they're not being paid enough."

[Margaret] it's… I think Star Trek does this with the idea that the Federation… Nobody uses money, nobody gets paid, and yet we have this gold pressed latinum economy going on, and why can't you replicate it? Everyone's like, "Yeah. No." We can technobabble around it. For the most part, we just kind of hand wave past, as if we know what we're about.

 

[Brandon] I'm going to have to wrap us up. If you're really interested in more of this, two weeks ago we did a podcast, Realism Versus Rule-Of-Cool. Which I'm sure was really, really a great podcast.

[Laughter]

[Howard] It will have been amazing.

[Mary Robinette] It will have been amazing.

 

[Brandon] Let's do our homework. Howard, you have our homework.

[Howard] Yes. Take something common. Super common. Maybe you've got a lot of it, maybe lots of people have a lot of it. Something that is super common. Now, make it super valuable. Maybe it's super rare. Maybe it's superpowered. But now, whatever it is, it's like the gold standard. It's like currency. Then, write about how your life, the lives of the people around you, change as a result of this common thing now being either incredibly rare or incredibly valuable. Or both.

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

 

[Brandon] I'm sorry if you dislike the fact that I used wholesale instead of whole cloth. If you've already written your comment in the comments section before finishing the podcast, I still love you.