Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 19, Episode 24]

 

[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 24]

 

[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

 

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

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

 

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

[Arkady] Yeah.

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[DongWon] Right.

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[DongWon] Right.

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

[Arkady] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled] particularly deep, but…

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

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

[Arkady] [garbled] turnip space sandwich.

[Laughter]

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

 

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

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

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

[DongWon] Thank you so much.

 

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

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

[Chuckles]

[lovely]

 

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[DongWon] Hum... Yeah.

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

[Arkady] In Memory specifically, or anywhere?

[Erin] Ummm...

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

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] So I can see that being…

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

[DongWon] [garbled that] would have been…

[Arkady] But, all my God.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

[DongWon] Yep.

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

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

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

[Arkady] Yeah.

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-48-nanowrimo-week-5-writing-endings 

 

Key points: How do you wrap up your novel? What makes a satisfying ending? Make sure the parentheses are closed. But how do you decide what to resolve, and what to leave open? Endings let the characters and your reads feel everything that has happened. Give the readers the same grounding that you did at the beginning. Where, who, why, how. Restate the core thematic elements of the story. Give us the aftermath. How do you leave the door cracked for a follow-on, and still give a satisfying ending? Remember, life is messy, and your character may not achieve all their goals. Leave some things unanswered. Think about how you want your reader to feel, and make sure that is the last beat, but leave other questions hanging. End with a success that leaves something else to try. Revision! Not for NaNoWriMo, but when you reach the end, you know what questions you should have been asking, and you may need to go back and set it up right. Go ahead and try different endings! Nowhere near the end? Write yourself some notes about what you want the ending to be.

 

[Season 18, Episode 48]

 

[DongWon] Hello, writers. Whether you're doing NaNoWriMo, editing your newest project, or just desperately trying to keep up with your TBR pile, it's hard to find the time to plan and cook healthy and nutritious meals to keep you energized on these jampacked days. So, I'm here to tell you about Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service. They can help you fool's [one word fuel up fast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with chef prepared, dietitian approved, ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. You'll save time, eat well, and stay on track with one less excuse to keep you from writing. This November, get Factor and enjoy eating well without the hassle. Simply choose your meals and enjoy fresh, flavor-pack deliveries right to your door. Ready in just 2 minutes, no prep and no mess. Had to factormeals.com/WX50 and use code WX50 to get 50% off. That's code WX50 at factormeals.com/WX50 to get 50% off.

 

[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 18, Episode 48]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 5, Welcome to the End.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

 

[Mary Robinette] Congratulations. You have made it to week 5. For those of you who are still writing, and all of you should be, because we believe in you, you are now trying to wrap this thing up. Listen, if you lost steam, you don't have to have 50,000 words. This is about just moving forward. You can save this episode and listen to it when you're ready. But we're going to be talking about how to wrap up your novel. So, what are some things, like when you are thinking about moving towards a satisfying ending? What are some of the elements that you think about as, hmmm, this feels good?

[DongWon] It's funny. I have an issue, editorially, in thinking about endings. I have such a bias towards openings and the beginnings of books, and all like getting into the story and asking all these big questions, but I sometimes forget to think about how important the ending is. So I've made it a real focus for myself in the past few years to really pay attention and really care about how a book ends and how we're moving on from the story, emotionally. Right? There are so many very famous authors, very successful authors, who are notoriously bad at endings. Where the book just kind of stops. Right? So I think we criticize those endings, but there's a way in which maybe we can think about endings as a broader category than just making sure there's a long denouement, where everything is fully wrapped up. But, overall, I think making sure those parentheses are closed, that we were kind of talking about last week, as we were talking about starting to get to the climactic beats and making sure certain things are tied up. But how do you prioritize what are the things that you want to close off, what are the things that you want to leave your reader with a real sense of resolution on, and what are questions you want to leave open?

[Erin] I think endings are difficult because they're quiet. In some ways. Not all. But there's a moment where everything you've been doing sort of resonates in the room. It's like the moment after a concert ends, when you can still hear the mild echo of the music in the air. There's something like really beautiful about that. But also frightening in the stillness. Because it's sort of you don't have the candy bar scenes that we were talking about last week to like distract you, you're really sort of left with you and the word. I think that's why a lot of times I'll say, for me, I had a real tendency to like just try to murder everyone…

[Chuckles]

 

[Erin] At the end, because then there's no one left to be in the quiet and in the stillness. I could just be like, "The end. They're dead." But I actually have found out that… Somebody told me once that it's like landing a punch. When you punch someone, you want to actually let that impact happen. If you punch someone, and then go to black, you never really see them feel it. And that endings are the moment where actually your characters get to feel everything that has happened. As frightening as it is, it's really important to also give your reader an ability to feel what has happened at the end or throughout the course of the book.

[Dan] Yeah. I love the way that The Wire ends. As much as I think season 5 went wildly off the rails, that final moment, you've got McNulty driving down the highway with a person. He stops, and he gets out of his car, and he just stares at the city for a while. Then we get a chance to see, like, what is each one of these people doing, and we get to see McNulty thinking about it and digesting it and processing it. Then he gets back in his car and he drives away. Giving your characters the chance to process what has happened and what they've gone through gives your readers that same chance. Rather than just yanking out the rug and saying, "Thanks for reading my book. Imagine for yourself what happens next."

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I had a lot of problems with when I started the switch from short fiction to novels is that I would in my novels the short story pacing. That I would stick the landing and I would be out. Because novels are about immersion. I wasn't giving my readers time to absorb this. The dénouement that we talk about sometimes. So what I've started realizing is that I need to give them the same things that I gave them at the beginning of the book. I need to ground them, because my character is in a different emotional place. They're often in a different physical place. So I find that if I start thinking about it with the why, where, who, and how that we talked about at the beginning, that I can… I know more of the elements that I need to include. It's like it helps me ground my readers. Like, who is my character now? Who have they become over the course of this journey? What physical actions are they doing in this scene that conveys that to the reader? Where are we? Like, how is the status quo changed? Like, what does the environment tell me about this new landscape, and, like, why is it important? So these are the things that I will be thinking about. Like, we're talking about the very, very last piece of it. But it's that looking back at the beginning for my answers to what we're talking about at the end. Some of it is what Dan was talking about in the previous episode of the inverse thing, or, you've heard me talk about it with nesting code. But that's what I start thinking about, is easing them out and kind of very similar pacing to how I brought them in. If it was a fast opening, that I'm going to give them a faster paced close. If it was a thoughtful opening, that's going to tell me something about the pacing at the end. So, sometimes I'm looking at mirroring that kind of pacing that I had at the beginning, sometimes I'm looking at doing an inversion, because it's saying something about the changes that have happened across the course of the novel.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. Sort of building off of that idea, I think there's sometimes… One of my favorite types of endings that I've run into that I think kind of plays into this is when the last scenes are just a restatement of the core thematic elements of the story that you've just experienced. Right? So I think going to your Wire example, McNulty, looking at the city of Baltimore at the end is just a statement about what this whole show was about, what this 5 season project was, was we did a portrait of Baltimore, and now we're looking at it and reflecting on the journey that we went on. One of my very, very favorite endings to a TV show, finished last year, was Better Call Saul. Which, I don't want to quite spoil it, but the way that it ends is such a statement of what is important in the show. Right? Why did we spend all of this time with Saul as he went on this whole journey? It's making really clear, crystal-clear in some ways, the importance that love has in that story and what he stands for and what is important to him and who he wants to be. That is all restated in the final episode in this really beautiful, elegaic way. So I think when you're looking at your ending, it's almost a little bit like writing an essay in college, where you start with you state your theme. You explain how you're going to say your theme. That's kind of the opening to your story. Then you get to the business of explaining all the things. At the end, you're like, "Here's my conclusion. In this story, we discover that love is real." You know what I mean? There's a very simple, boiled down version of how you end the story that can look like that, that I think can be simple and impactful. I'm thinking about your punch example. There's a thing in Hong Kong cinema where you will actually see the punch 3 times. Right? You'll see the blow land, and then it'll cut to the slow mold impact of like you can see how it's affecting the person who got it, then it'll cut back to the wide angle and you'll see them jump backwards or fall down or whatever it is. So you see these 3 different beats and 3 angles on the same strike. That's the thing that makes it feel so impactful to the audience of, like… It can also seem corny when it's done certain ways, but, so often, it happens very quickly, you don't even really see what's happening, you just see boop, boop, boop. And you realize that that guy just got crushed in that moment, he got hit so hard. You can feel his ribs breaking, in that moment. Right? I think letting it sink in in that way and being a little obvious in your ending is not a bad way to go.

[Dan] If you've ever watched a GIF of like a disaster, someone falling down, something collapsing, and it ends right as soon is the disaster happens, and you're like, "But wait, I wanted to watch it land. I wanted to watch it fall. I wanted to look at the rubble for a minute." That's what we're talking about, that sense of, yes, you've seen the big thing, but you didn't really get a look at the aftermath, that's what really is satisfying about it.

[Mary Robinette] We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about some of the other tools you can use to make that disaster really satisfying.

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, writers. Welcome to week 5. How are you doing? I wanted to share something with you. I wrote my first published novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, during NaNoWriMo. I also wrote multiple unpublished novels during NaNoWriMo. I've won Nano and I've had years where I could not hit that 50,000 words. So as you enter this last week, I want you to remember that every word you've written this month has been a victory. Because the journey is the thing. By writing, you are learning to write. You're learning to set goals. You are learning about your writing process and what works for you. Whether you wrote 50,000 words or 5000 words this month, you are a writer.

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. Now we're back from our break, and we're going to talk about kind of the messiness of it all. I think you had something you wanted to say?

[DongWon] Yeah. I had a thought as we were talking about all this, where we've talked about closing things out and leaving things on this very resonent ending. I think that can be really important. In the categories that most of us work in, there's a lot of series writing, a lot of people writing trilogies, a lot of people writing ongoing series, and a lot of people are doing quote unquote standalones with series potential. So, one of the things I would love to hear your thoughts on a little bit is, how do you leave that door cracked open? How do you give the satisfying ending, make a book feel like a book, even if it's middle of a trilogy? Right? Make the audience feel like I went on a journey, this had a conclusion. I feel good about where we're ending. And still have more questions to be asked. Have… They want more story, they want to spend more time with these characters. What do you do to leave that door cracked open?

[Mary Robinette] The trick that I've found is that life is messy, and that I don't have to give my character all of their goals. When you read a book and the character achieves all of their goals, those are the ones that feel too tight. So sometimes I don't… It's not so much that it's a cliffhanger, it's that I have deliberately left something unanswered, knowing that that can be a problem for later. But I think about… To give that sense of satisfaction, I think about how I want my reader to feel. When I'm looking at nesting things at the end, I try to make sure that whatever solution, whatever goal thing lines up with the emotional feeling I want my reader to have, that that's kind of the last beat I land on. That's the thing that gives it the sense of closure as a standalone, while the other questions that are still hanging there are available if I want to use them for future books. So, like in Calculating Stars, Elma achieves her goal of going to the moon. Right? But I don't answer your questions about what it's like when she gets there. I don't answer your questions about what the next steps are. I leave all of that open. Her conflict with Parker is still a conflict with Parker. Like, that's not a solved problem. So I have all of that to play with when I come back to the subsequent books. Then… This is outside of the scope of NaNoWriMo, but when I am looking at my next book, I look at my solution to the first one, and that becomes my problem for the 2nd book.

[Erin] Yeah, I was thinking about the fact that we've talked a lot about try-fail cycles. Generally, a novel ends on a success. I mean, it can end on a failure, but I think it has some sort of emotional closure. But, it feels to me like it's a success that leaves something else to try. That thing that you're trying becomes the thing that happens in the next book. So that's sort of like… So there's a finishing, but there's something more.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Dan] This is such a horrible thing to bring up the last week of NaNoWriMo, but a lot of what makes a lot of this work is the revision process. Knowing that, okay, we've reached this point. Now we need to go back and set it up right. Getting to the end, having satisfying answers, really means you need to make sure what questions you're asking. In the Fellowship of the Ring, for example, that first book ends with the Fellowship breaking and everyone splintering off into different places, and yet it does feel conclusive, because Tolkien made sure that the question asked at the beginning, is Frodo constantly wondering am I leading people into danger? Can I really live with the fact that I am corrupting everyone around me? So, leaving the group behind and setting off on his own with Sam, that is a victory for that specific question. So it feels, okay, this feels very natural. We've asked this question, we've answered it, obviously there's other problems, but we've concluded this part of the story.

[Mary Robinette] But this is why we… When we talk about you have to keep writing and finish, this is why. Because you don't know always what questions you want to set up at the beginning until you're getting to the end. It's… Like, when I was an art major, I would see people… I mean, I did it myself. Where you would draw the perfect hand and the perfect arm and the perfect shoulder, and then you would step back and the entire figure was entirely out of proportion. Because you work thinking about the entire picture. So with novels, like, one of the things that you can be doing for yourself during this last week is coming to an agreement with yourself about, oh, this is what I want the book to be. Like, these are the… And if it doesn't match what you started, that's okay. You have a new understanding of it. You can go back and fix everything that you did earlier later.

[Erin] I would say one other way to do that is if you want… If you liked what you had at the beginning, and you feel like you've gotten away from it because that also happens is something that I like to do right before, when I've done Nano, like, right before I get into the last bits is to actually tell myself out loud, or actually to be honest, tell my cats out loud…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] The story so far. Like, not every single thing, but, like, what I can remember of the story. I find that what I go to, like, the things that I choose to explain are the things that have continued to stick with me about the story that I'm telling. So I may have forgotten one subplot or one character, but, like, when I go to say, like, the Fellowship of the Ring, which I wrote during Nano… No…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Wow. It is about X, like, that's what gets to the core of it for me. Then I can say, if that's the core, then what's the ending that works for that core? Then, like Mary Robinette was saying, go back and fix the rest in post-, as they say in the movie business.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, truly, when working with clients on projects, the things that usually change the most our beginnings and endings. Right? Often in tandem. If the last act isn't quite working, then you'll find the roots of those problems in the first act. Middles always… I mean, every part needs revision, but the middle tends to be a little bit more defined from the jump, and then really… It really is about asking questions and answering them. So if the answers are wrong, then maybe the questions are wrong, and vice versa. So, this is again, this is NaNoWriMo. If you're not feeling super great about your ending, that's totally fine. Right? We're not… No one's expecting you to have the perfect answer to the question you didn't even know you were asking on day one, because it's been a crazy month. You've made it this far. Right?

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that will also catch you here is that you're like, "I don't know how to solve this. My character has to solve this thing and I don't know how to solve it." You feel like you're locked in because of everything that you've written up to this point. But your… When the book is out in the world and you're letting other people read it, they never have to see this draft of it.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] So you can always go back and just say, "You know what? They could have solve this the entire time, if they had only been able to tesseract spiders into the building with bees."

[Laughter]

[Erin] I knew it!

[Mary Robinette] "But I didn't introduce the ability to tesseract earlier. So, I'm just going to say that they can do it, and I'm going to make a note to myself that I have to establish that when I go back and do my revisions." So just go ahead and give yourself the tools that you need and fix it in post-.

 

[Dan] Well, one of the great things about writing and NaNoWriMo does this perfectly is you can try different endings. This is what I said about free writing in the beginning. If you get to the end and you think, "Well, maybe this would work as an ending. Maybe this is a good solution to the problem." Write it. If it doesn't work, don't delete it. Try something else. Right that. I know that for a lot of you, that is so painful, me telling you to write a bunch of extra words that are not going to be in the final manuscript. Well, guess what. That's most of this job.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah. I had a project recently where 500,000 words were written that went into the trash that will never see the light of day, for the 150,000 that got published. Right? Sometimes that's what happens. Right? I think one of the best lessons about NaNoWriMo is there's no such thing as a wasted word. Everything that you put down to paper got you to this point. It helps you realize that these extra scenes need to be written, even if the older scenes also had to be put in a drawer somewhere. All that was useful work. All that was the work that got you to understand what your book really is and make your book the best version of it it could be. So I hope you're hearing us talk about revision and not feeling discouraged. Instead, be excited that you now have clarity about what it is you're trying to accomplish with your book, even if it's just a little bit. Even if you have one degree more…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I hope you don't have to write 500,000 words…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] To the 150 that got published. That's not great. We all felt not great about that. But also, we all felt great about the book that was there at the end, and so proud and so happy about the work we did on it.

[Dan] Well, the same thing that I said earlier about endings, making sure that you're asking the right questions to provide a satisfying answer, apply that to your life! Apply that to the process. Apply that to NaNoWriMo. Don't necessarily think of this as I'm going to end November with one awesome book. Think of it as I'm going to end November having learned how to write a book. Then, even if the ending is weird or there's bits in the middle that are clunky and awkward, that's okay. You learned how to write a book.

[Mary Robinette] Just briefly, I want to speak to the people who are like, "Hey, you know what, I'm coming up on 50,000 words, but I'm nowhere near the end of my book."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's fine. You can… We're talking about things in proportion right now.

[DongWon] Totally.

[Mary Robinette] You're totally fine. Don't worry about it. You don't need to have, like, the ending. You just need to hold on to what you're aiming for.

[Erin] Yeah. You can… You may want to take a break. You may say, like, writing 50,000 words in a month was a lot, so even though I don't have the ending like I want to get there. This is when you could leave yourself lots of fun notes in brackets, like, "And here's the part where they figured out the meaning of love," and, like, "Here's where he defuses that bomb filled with spider bees."

[Laughter]

[Erin] Right? Then you can come back and your future self will have the problem of figuring that out. But I hope the main thing that your future self takes away from it is you wrote stuff that did not exist at the beginning of this month and it exists and only you could have written it.

[Mary Robinette] That's right. So we're going to give you some homework. This is, again, a way to help you just keep moving forward. Especially those of you who are like nowhere near the ending and you're just like, "I gotta keep going. I've just gotta keep going."

 

[Mary Robinette] Here's your homework. Gift your character with your insecurity. Brainstorm about what should happen next in the voice of the character as they're facing the challenges in the scene. Because your character doesn't know what's going on either. So all of that and just be part of your character development, and the brainstorming process may get you closer. It also will just get you words on the page, which is very useful. You may wind up cutting it later, but after you hit 50,000 words.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. Good luck. You're out of excuses.

 

[DongWon] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We are now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, to ask any question that is on your mind.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/04/03/17-14-structuring-for-disordered-or-order-less-reading-order/

 

Key Points: Stories or structures that can be read out of order? That ignore or bypass a specific order to events? Being able to read books in a series, or sections in a book, out of order, and it still works. Television episodes often do this. Although books usually still have to build. Fixup novels do this. Often there is a frame that explains why the story is told this way. Webcomics demand that each installment is understandable and rewarding enough that people want to find more. Series often require that readers be able to start with any of the books. Different characters and big time jumps can help readers with this. Make sure that at the beginning of the story or episode, the character has earned the reader's/viewer's trust, belief, admiration.

 

[Season 17, Episode 14]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring for Disordered or Order-less Reading Order.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes or so long.

[Peng] Because you may or may not be in a hurry.

[Howard] And I'm not allowed to write episode titles anymore.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I suppose I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I could be Peng.

[Howard] I'm Howard. I'm out of zoomer.

[Dan] I demand that you may or may not be Howard.

[Howard] Is that in order?

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] Disordered or orderless reading order.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] There are books that can be read out of order. There are stories, structures that demand a specific order to events, and structures that ignore that or just bypass it. Peng, what do we mean by this? What are we talking about with orderless reading order?

[Peng] Well, there are a couple of different ways that I think we can take this. I would say that it's one of the… It's a rarer structure for sure. Because we, as readers, especially Western readers, have been conditioned to expect that you start at the beginning of the book you finish at the end of the book, or the series. So, when we say flexible orders of reading, we could mean something like reading the books in a series out of order, or, if you got books that are… Have multiple sections, you might be able to read the sections out of order. But it's basically a story in which you can read all of the pieces either in the order that's suggested by the book or in whatever order you choose and it still has to work.

[Dan] Yeah. I think it is funny that we talk about this as a rare style of storytelling. Because within books it definitely is, but that's how television was for decades. Right? Modern detective stories, something like The Killing, you have to watch those in order because there's a very large serialized story being told. But go back to the 80s. You can watch any Magnum, PI, episode out of order with no context whatsoever, and still understand what's going on. So I… It's definitely a style of storytelling that we are culturally familiar with, just not really in our prose, in our books.

[Peng] Well, I think the main difference between TV shows like that, where every episode is its own thing and you can just watch any out of order, and books that are trying to do this is that with those TV shows, they're not necessarily building towards any kind of greater narrative. It's just every self-contained episode is a half-hour of entertainment, and that's that. Whereas books that can be read out of order, or they have some kind of a flexible order of reading to them, it doesn't matter what order you do choose to read it in, it still has to build in a way that these TV shows don't necessarily. So I think that is the greatest difficulty of this form, but also a really rewarding aspect of it. Because it is very hard to pull off.

[Mary Robinette] It's a… I think it's a structure that we did… We have seen perhaps a little bit more in a type called the fixup novel. Which is where an author takes… The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, is a prime example of this. It was a collection of short stories. He put them together, then added some interstitial material to kind of stitch it together. But you can really pick up The Martian Chronicles and read a chapter without reading the rest of the book, and it's fine. There are other examples of those. Most of the ones that I'm coming up with are in the fixup novel category, which is really a collection of short stories that are masquerading as a novel. But there's one that I… I haven't tried reading it non-sequentially, but The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Ward, I think you could read it non-sequentially and still get the overwhelming sense of loss that she builds towards.

[Peng] Does that book… Does it give you instructions to read it in any order you want, or is it just something…

[Mary Robinette] No, no. It's just something that I'm thinking about as I'm thinking about it. It's not a fixup novel. It's just… It is… When I read it, I was like, "Oh, this is not a three act structure or any of the other structures." Yeah, but there's no instructions that you should read it out of sequence. There are books that tell you you can read it out of sequence?

[Peng] Yeah, so there's… Oh, go ahead.

[Dan] I was just going to say I'm familiar with one called Second Paradigm by Peter Wacks that's a time travel novel that every chapter can be read out of order and the story still makes sense.

[Wow]

[Dan] You could just open it up to a random chapter, read to the end, start at the beginning and wraparound. You could read the chapters in random order, and it all still works. It's really a brilliantly constructed story.

[Peng] That's really, I think, that's another really good point to call out about this structure is that because it is not so standard, a lot of times you… The story that you're working on, it might require some kind of a frame to give your story a reason for being told that way. So, out of order or in any way and order you want to read. It sounds like the book that you just named does that, because it is a book about time travel. So the jumping, like the book itself is conscious that it can be read in that way because it is about time travel. So it provides, like, a really good reason or frame for it to exist that way.

 

[Howard] When we think about this in terms of a physical novel where you're paging through in order to read, it's often difficult to imagine, well, why would I not just go to the next page? Why would I just open it up and start in the middle? My… And I'm going to use these words completely non-ironically… Magnum opus, Schlock Mercenary, the webcomic which ran for 20 years and you can still read at schlockmercenary.com. On any given day, if you went to schlockmercenary.com, the strip that is up in front of you is the very latest event in the story. I had to make sure as I was telling the story that every installment was comprehensible enough and rewarding enough that someone would click a button that says take me to the beginning of this chapter. Take me to the beginning of this book. Just throw me to a random location in the archives and let me see if I like it. We had all of those buttons. In fact, when we put the random archive button up, I got all kinds of feedback from people who said, "You're a monster. I click that button and then I look up and I've been reading for two hours. How did you do that?" Well, I guess I didn't build the story to be read in any order, I read the story… I built the story to make sure that the first element you see, no matter where you see it, is an invitation to go find more in whatever order you care to.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have a thought on that, but I'm going to wait until after we talk about the book of the week.

 

[Peng] Ah, okay. I've got the book of the week. It's Crossings by Alex Landragin. This is one of the… This is a pretty intense example, I think, of a book with a flexible order of reading. So I'm going to try to describe it. It's… The frame of the book is… It starts in Paris, during the Nazi occupation. It's introduced by a German Jewish bookbinder who stumbles across a manuscript called Crossings, which is the title of the book itself that you're about to read. Crossings is made up of three stories. One is a ghost story written by the poet, Charles Baudelaire, I think. The second one is a second noir romance about a man who falls in love with a woman who… She draws him into this dangerous hunt for a real manuscript that might have supernatural powers. Then the third is this memoir of a woman who claims that she has been alive for seven generations or something like that. But the really innovative thing about this book, Crossings, is that after you read that introduction by the German Jewish bookbinder who says, "I found this book, Crossings, and it contains three stories," is that he gives you the option to either read it straight through, so you just read one story after the other and then get to the end, or you can alternate back and forth between the stories according to directions he gives you in the book until you end up uncovering the reason that all of these stories are together. So if you choose to follow his direction, you end up bouncing back and forth like, I don't know, 12, 15 times between all these stories, working your way through all three at once until you get to the end. It's… I mean, it's just so innovative, so creative, so unique. It's really… It's worth reading because it is amazing how each story can build on its own if you read them one at a time or when you read all three of them together, they build up to something larger, even though you were going in a really different order.

[Dan] That's so cool.

[Mary Robinette] It's like…

[Dan] I love that.

[Mary Robinette] That is really cool. I'm like, that's like a grown-up literary choose your own adventure.

[Peng] Yeah, it is a little bit like that. It's…

 

[Howard] When we put together the 70 Maxims collection, there's an annotated version of it that's an in-world artifact where the book has been in the possession of four different people. They've all made their own notes in the margins. I had a spreadsheet that tracked the chronological order in which the people had the book, and the chronological order of the events that they are making notes about. But none of my spreadsheet is actually in that book. So you are holding in artifact that has a very nonlinear, very read it in any order sorts of stories written in, no lie, the handwriting of my children and a neighbor kid and Sandra in order to capture that effect. It is structurally super weird. No, it's not how I would want to tell a mystery story, but I love what we ended up making.

 

[Dan] Cool. So that was Crossings by Alex Landragin.

[Howard] Oh, sorry, I interrupted the book of the week, didn't I?

[Dan] No, everyone interrupted the book of the week. But it was super innovative and fascinating. That's okay. But. Mary Robinette, you had something you wanted to say?

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So what Howard was talking about, about how he had to make sure that when a reader lands on a new strip, that it was comprehensible and also part of a build. That is something that… For those of you who are like, "Uh-oh, nonlinear. I can't even… Uh-uh." Which is, honestly, where my brain lands when I'm thinking about this. But it is something that I think about when I'm thinking about plotting novels in a series. Because I really genuinely want anyone to be able to pick up one of my novel as their starting point. But that means that I have to think about all of the previous books as prequels. Even though I didn't write them as a prequel, I have to think about having them function as a prequel in case someone comes into the series at a different point. So I think that even if you decide that you don't want to structure an individual story or novel in this kind of read it in any sequence way, learning some of the tools can help you with your… With the overall thing. Like, The Lady Astronauts universe started with a story… The way a lot of people come into it is The Lady Astronaut of Mars, which is set years after The Calculating Stars, but it was the first thing I wrote. So people will ask me, "What order should I read this in?" I'm like, "It honestly doesn't matter." You can read… You can go Lady Astronaut of Mars, Calculating Stars, Relentless Moon, Fated Sky or you can go Calculating Stars, Fated Sky, Relentless Moon, Lady Astronaut of Mars. It doesn't matter. But it took a lot of… It's basically me making decisions about what things I want to hold as an emotional… A piece of emotional oomph. And what things I don't mind being backstory. As soon as I decide that they are backstory, that means that I no longer think of them as something that I want to avoid being spoiled.

[Peng] That's a really good point about that the most important thing if you're going to approach a book or a series with… By giving it a flexible reading order, would be to hold like the emotional resonances or the theme as the most important thing, whereas the plot might not be. So I was wondering, I was going to ask you, because you said one of your books takes place 60 years after the one that comes before it, even though you wrote it first. Would you say that if you're going to attempt something like this, that having a different character for every story or having bigger time jumps between them might be a way to allow for greater flexibility, because readers might be more forgiving if the character's going to change or if there is a big time jump versus feeling like they need to go in order if it's the same character the whole time or the time jump isn't very big in between?

[Mary Robinette] That sounds right to me.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like…

[Dan] It sounds…

[Mary Robinette] I mean…

[Dan] Yeah, it sounds good, although I… In my cyberpunk series, the Cherry Dog books, the Mirador books, I specifically intended them all to be episodes and you could read them in any order. But they all take place relatively at the same time. The… I was kind of specifically aping the TV model. Right? Where the characters are all the same age, they kind of exist in a timeless space. That seemed to work fairly well.

 

[Howard] One of the things that I keep in mind is the principle of whether or not a character has earned the reader's or the viewer's love and belief at a given point in the beginning of the story. As an example, the very first episode, for me, the very first episode of The Mandelorian, the Mandelorian earns the right to be awesome without a training montage or anything. He just… He earns the right to be awesome. The first episode of The Book of Bobba Fett, Bobba Fett does not earn the right to be awesome. All he has is the name Bobba Fett and the legacy of a bazillion Star Wars things. If the first episode of The Book of Bobba Fett is your introduction to Bobba Fett, I had to ask myself, "Why am I interested in who this character is?" So that dichotomy, for me, if there's the possibility that books are going to be picked up out of order and one of my characters needs to do something that requires the earned trust, the earned belief, the earned admiration of the reader, I have to put something in there for them to earn it. It can be another character saying, "Hey, Bobba, would you mind terribly being awesome for a moment? We need you..." And then Bobba does it, and now the reader's onboard because the other character was on board. So those kinds of tricks… Every time I started a new Schlock Mercenary book… Eh, from about book 10 to about book 20, I kept that in mind. Who are my characters going to be, how do I make them earn this early on?

[Dan] I think that's probably the reason that every James Bond movie starts with the last scene of a previous one we have never seen before. Because right off the bat, they're establishing, okay, this is who the character is. This is why you like him. He is awesome. Now we're going to tell a story.

 

[Dan] Mary Robinette, you have our homework this week.

[Mary Robinette] I do. I actually have two homeworks for you. Because I recognize that one of them may break your brain. So, depending on how your brain works. So I'm going to give you a choice. You can do both if you want. So. Look at your current work in progress. Are there pieces of backstory that you could unpack into a sequel? For instance, as I mentioned, Calculating Stars is a prequel to Lady Astronaut of Mars. It's basically me unpacking her backstory. So is there a story that's in there for you? The second one, and this is the one that may break some of you. Take your current work in progress. Make a copy of it.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So that you can do this safely. If you're using Scrivener, this is going to be easy. Otherwise, however you want to do it, shuffle it. Shuffle it, and then see what bridging pieces you need to put in, what elements you need to add in to make it still make sense in that new order.

[Peng] My brain broke because that was so exciting.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Peng] I'll go do that one now.

[Dan] Okay. I am excited to hear, dear listener, from those of you who attempt this shuffling thing. Because I think it could be really fascinating. So. This…

[Mary Robinette] I'm…

[Dan] Yes?

[Mary Robinette] I am going to say that this came as an exercise because of a real-life incident that I had in which my cats played across the notecards… Played a game of tag across the notecards that I was using to plot my book. When I picked them back up, I was like, "Huh. That's actually a more interesting order."

[Chuckles]

[Peng] Cats are geniuses.

[Dan] Let your cats plot your books, I guess, is…

[Howard] That's the next [garbled]

[Dan] A take away you should not have from this episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/02/13/17-7-dissecting-influence/

 

Key points: Dissecting influence, aka learning from the things that inspire you. Find what you love, then take it apart and figure out how it works. What do you need to do to practice that? Look for commonalities, themes that call to you. Approach your self corrections with a generous heart. Pull feelings from your inspirations, and feed them into your work. Trust your voice. To avoid being too strongly influenced, go adjacent. Remember, no one can do me like me. Do your research ahead of time, and let it settle.

 

[Season 17, Episode 7]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Dissecting Influence.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart. 

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

 

[Howard] This episode was pitched to us by one of our guest hosts, Megan Lloyd. Megan, take it away. What are we talking about?

[Megan] Today, we are talking about dissecting influence, which is, how do you learn from the things that inspire you. You've seen the masters of their craft create masterpieces. You want to make one of your own. What are some tips and tricks to studying how other people do the thing?

[Howard] Part of the problem is that I don't get to see them make the thing. I get to see the thing.

[Laughter. This is true.]

[Howard] It's… I mentioned this in the expectations intensive. I talk about the Dirk Gently TV show. I don't know what that writers' room looked like. I don't know what the outline looked like. But it has… It is incredibly influential to me, because of the way all of the things connect. I want to be able to build that. But I don't get to watch it being built. So how do I learn? Tell me, Meg, how do I learn from it?

[Megan] So, you've got to take the thing and you literally have to dissect it, cut it open and take all the little pieces out and you have to break it down into little bits and find out, okay, why do I like this is much as I do. While you can't see them make the thing, you may have to reverse engineer it a bit yourself. Because, I believe how they would make it and how you would make it would be very different, but you're coming to the same purpose. So, I come at this, I'm both a writer and an artist, working in the animation industry, so a lot of the references, a lot of the work that I like to look at is other visual art. So I look at something and be like, "What do I love about this? Do I love the thin line art, or do I love how they depicted the light?" A lot of what I do is, in my sketchbooks, I also write out lists of things I like and what do I need to do to practice doing this thing.

[Sandra] One thing that's coming to mind for me… Back when I was coming back into being a creative person, after a very fallow period, I kind of stopped writing when my kids were little for about nine or 10 years because I was fullbore mothering instead of being a writer. As I was coming back to creativity, I discovered a hunger for visual inspiration. Which was exactly when Pinterest launched. So I was doing Pinterest boards. They've reconfigured now, and Pinterest no longer works for me in the same way. But I was just collecting images. I was just listing… I like this, I like this, I like this. The fascinating thing about having it collected all into one space is that then I could suddenly see patterns. I could see that so many of the images I liked had an implied journey in them. A boat about to launch, a path through a wood. I realized, oh, wow, here I am trying to launch a creative career and I'm being drawn to images with an implied journey. You could pull the same thing with… If you take a look and say, "Well, I love this show, and I love the show, and I love this show. What do these shows have in common?" One of the things that I discovered I really love is a sense of comradery and found family. So you can discover what are the themes that call to you. Then, once you know what… That helps you begin to decipher why do I like this thing, what is it that draws me. Then, how can I then make sure I pull those themes into my own work.

[Megan] Yeah, I think that's a… Aggregation of themes is really helpful. I know that I definitely use that as my compass when I'm looking like… About when I want to make stuff is like first gut instinct, oh, my gosh, I love this, it resonates with me. How does it work? Sometimes, I think that like being outside of the writers' room and things like that can be a benefit in that way. Because if you're with the person, sometimes… There is a certain level where you need someone, like a mentor, or you need mentor text or things like that. But there's a point where it's not helpful, because you just do what they say without knowing why, without knowing how it connects. You're just following instructions. Versus, like opening the guts of something and, like, rummaging inside. I mean, like, "Ahah. I see. This connects to this, which makes this happen." Like, with characterization, looking at… Or with worldbuilding, like Avatar The Last Airbender, I will always bring it up, because I love it. One of my favorite things is Katara bloodbending. That was such a genius extension of how the world works, and it resonated with me so powerfully because it did the thing that I love. I dissected it, and was like, "What is it that… Why do I love Katara bloodbending so much?" I realized because it was going a step deeper, answering questions they hadn't answered before about how waterbending works. Like, yeah, there's water in blood. We've seen Katara bend her own sweat before. We've seen her bend the water out of a cloud. Like, how does that apply? It's not that we didn't talk about it before. Like, the medium was hiding it or anything. It's that we hadn't gone into it. We had… No one had asked that question before in the world at that point. I… That's why I learned like going deeper with your magic system can be very satisfying. Especially to people who have been following something and become fans of it. Whether… They started to ask themselves questions like that. It's like addressing what people might want to write fan fiction about. You're like, "Yeah. That exists. Right? Aren't you excited?" You're like, "Oh, my goodness, I am."

[Sandra] I can't remember, is Toph's metal bending before the bloodbending or after? Because it's like, one, they fold into. It's like, again, both going deeper. Well, if Toph can metal bend, then Katara can bloodbend. So you've set things up.

[Megan] It's before, because that's Toph's… That's the culmination of her storyline in the Earth book. Because Got, water, earth, and fire. Then Katara learns from a displaced water tribe woman in the Fire Nation.

[Yup. Yeah.]

[Sandra] But again, it's going deeper both times. I love it.

 

[Howard] The salient point here is not that worldbuilding by extrapolation, extension, logical conclusion is how you should world build. The salient point here is that is a thing that you loved about Avatar, so now that you know you love it, you can pick that influence apart and you can see how you want to apply that principle into your own work.

[Kaela] Yes. It's, in fact, something that inspired that principle, being able to go deeper like that, that I pulled out of Avatar the Last Airbender or something, that I'm using in the sequels to Cece Rios and The Desert of Souls.

[Howard] Cool.

[Kaela] So… Great application.

 

[Megan] To jump ahead into how do you implement this in your own work with the same level of love and interest that you take something that you love that inspires you and being able to break it down. What do I like about it? What do I not care for? Being able to approach your own work from a… I don't want to say scholarly or clinical, because honestly, we love what we do, but being able to search your own work for places it could improve without knocking yourself down as you do it. So instead of critiquing your own work, but just trying to go through and like plus and improve your own work. So always approach your self corrections with a generous heart.

[Sandra] I love… I think it's very, very easy, because the world teaches us that we should be humble and we should not toot our own horn or whatever. It's very easy to approach your own work, and, like, apologize for it is you're talking about it. I instead love it when I see creators who are just like super excited. Fanfic writers tend to be really, really good about this, because there really, really super excited about this cool thing, and they just let themselves be excited. So… When you… If you can carry that from your inspiration you're talking about. You're inspired by this thing because it excites you or it makes you cry or whatever, and if you let yourself have those same emotions about your own work, that's a beautiful way of carrying the influences and expressing them again.

[Megan] One of the reasons why I like to use the simile of dissection and study is the goal is not to plagiarize someone. The goal is not to trace someone's art to learn how to draw, or retype someone's book to learn how to write. But it's to find the familial similarities between what you love and what you do, and try to put the creative juice in your brain to think up new ways to implement your own skills.

[Sandra] Yeah. It's like you said, reverse engineering to figure out the principles that they use that you can then use. Like, if you know… It's… So you figure out the rules on a very personal level of how and why something works so that you can then use it to your advantage.

 

[Howard] I think, coming back to the worldbuilding example, I think that's why this is so important, because we talked about extrapolation in worldbuilding on Writing Excuses before. Okay? That is a principle that you can lift out of Writing Excuses and probably any number of books on writing and worldbuilding and whatever else. But if you dissect the things that have influenced you and you find that as a thing you love, now that's a principle you own. Not just something somebody has written down for you.

 

[Howard] Let's have a thing of the week. What's our thing of the week?

[Megan] I'm suggesting the thing of the week this week, which is one of my favorite things. It is the YouTube account called Sakuga which will be in the liner notes, but I'll spell it out here. Hobbes Sakuga. This YouTube channel is a collection of the very best cuts of hand-drawn animation compiled into category specific videos. So, like, 20 minutes of just special effects hand-drawn animation or sword fighting animation or dramatic character acting. Usually, when I'm stuck on a specific thing, I'll just sit and watch, well, how did 20 other of the world's greatest masters accomplish it. It gets me… Gets the brain moving and the juices flowing, and it helps me when I go back to my own drawing board.

 

[Sandra] This is a thing that comes very, very naturally to like dancers or musicians, the idea that you just need to go through the motions over and over until you create a muscle memory. You can do the same thing as a writer or artist too. Because you have to draw things over and over. But, writers, you can also create that in your own head. So if you need to write a love scene, maybe go watch some love scenes to get your head into that space. Pull that feeling from your inspiration, so that you can then feed it into your own work. That sometimes creates an anxiety, the influence, like, oh, no, I'm copying. But that's where you trust your own voice, because every dancer can tell you that even though you're practicing over and over and over the steps the choreographer gave you, each performance becomes different. Becomes your own as you do the dance.

[Megan] Well, it's like the difference between strawberries and jam, right? Like, yeah, you're watching strawberries, but you can turn it into jam. You turn it into something else by boiling over it, by stewing over it, by making it into something new. Now, it still tastes like strawberries… It's still romance.

[Yup]

[Megan] But it has turned into something new, because it's… You have delivered it in a new way. You've done it thoughtfully by having boiled on it and stewed on it. Strange metaphor, but it was the first one I thought of.

[It's okay. Chuckles.]

[Howard] Now I want strawberry jam.

[Chuckles]

 

[Howard] How do we deal with anxiety of influence in light of this? Because I know there have been times when I was worried… I would not watch something because I would worry… I worried that it would influence me and I'd find something in it that I liked and that thing would just flat out end up in my own work. How do we avoid that?

[Sandra] For me, go adjacent. If you are writing an action scene and you're worried that if you watch kung fu movies, you will port it directly across, is there some other way that action is expressed where you can get into an action headspace without being so directly… My example is not working.

[Howard] Let me state the problem differently. I didn't watch Firefly on TV because I felt like it was too much like what I was already doing. Therefore, I just wasn't allowed to watch it. It would influence me. Same with Cowboy Bebop. People kept telling me, "Oh, you should watch this. I know you'd love it because Schlock Mercenary is so cool." I'm like, "I don't want to love it. It will undo me, influence me. Go away, stop telling me about cool stuff that is similar to what I'm doing." So the question is how do I avoid that? How do I get to have Firefly and Cowboy Bebop in my life?

[Megan] So, I have a little mantra that I tell myself. It's, "No one can do me like me." Where even though there may be similar elements, when you see the work as a whole with the different theming, the different staging, like Sandra says going adjacent, that… We write for a world that loves what we write. I'm sorry, that wasn't phrased very well, but… We are writing in our genres for genre savvy people. So, I think people may say, "Oh. Another story about an orphaned wizard named Harry? I'm not even going to pick up the Dresden Files. I know this story." You can share elements with different things. But it's the whole of it that makes it your work.

[Sandra] Well, also, if you're writing, for example, space opera, and the only other… You only consume one other space opera, the risk of you porting visibly from one thing to another… But if you have filled your head with 10 or 20 or 30 space operas and then let them all settled before you sit to write, they turn into a stew…

[Garbled jam]

[Sandra] The likelihood that you will steal specific bits becomes less. Because, Howard, your head was full of space opera already. It's just you didn't want to refresh specifically… I don't know. I don't think you're necessarily wrong for deciding to avoid those things at that time.

[Howard] I was a much happier person with Firefly when it got canceled before I'd even started it.

[Laughter]

[Sandra] But, I mean, listen to your instincts. Because if your instinct says that's not the thing for me to be watching right now, maybe it isn't.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Kaela] I would say that I am not careful about that at all. I'm not careful about any of those things at all. Mostly because I love doing my own riff on things like purposefully. But I will say when I was younger and when I was starting out, I avoided it more because I knew I was more impressionable because I didn't have a strong sense of my own voice or how I wanted to do a thing. So, then, I would just… I would make sure I wasn't writing something at the same time as reading something like it or watching something like it. I still read and watch all of those things, but I'd make sure it wasn't at the same time. Because I was very impressionable.

[Megan] Oh, yeah. That's something I want to piggyback off of is when I'm doing a specific project, I'll do all of my research ahead of time. So I'll read two or three similar books before I write one of my novels or I watch a few similar movies before I start boarding a specific scene. But once I do my initial research, unless I'm completely up against a wall and I don't know what else to do, I'll eat jam on toast instead of going to pick more strawberries from that point on out.

[Howard] Now I want toast too!

[Laughter]

[garbled words]

[Howard] Oh, no.

[Megan] But it's the best metaphor.

[Chuckles]

 

[Howard] Working quite well. Hey, it's… We're 18 and a half minutes in here. Is it time for homework, Meg?

[Megan] It's time for homework. I bet if you been listening to our episode, you might have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to ask you to do. For homework this week, take a slice of something that inspires you. Books, movies, art. Break down a list of the specific elements you find appealing.

[Howard] A slice of something, and of course it's toast.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Or thick with jam. Thank you everybody. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/12/12/16-50-worldbuilding-finale-making-deliberate-choices/

 

Key points: Making thoughtful, deliberate choices in worldbuilding, along with cool and fun stuff. Think about how your speculative elements reinforce plot, character, and theme. Don't just fall back on the familiar, make sure you have a good reason for including it. Pick your time and cultural analogues. Interrogate your defaults. Be aware that the defaults, the cliches, the trope elements carry a kitchen sink full of implications. Balance what you are borrowing from real world analogues with what you are building from the ground up. Make sure you keep the kernel of cool in your writing, even while you make all these deliberate choices. Look for your armored bears! 

 

[Season 16, Episode 50]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding Finale: Making Deliberate Choices.

[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 have been talking about worldbuilding for seven weeks now. Now, here in the eighth episode, we're very excited to kind of tie this all up with what we hope is a very intelligent bow. What do we mean, Fonda, by making deliberate choices?

[Fonda] So, what I hope I've done over the course of the eight weeks that we've been talking about worldbuilding is encourage listeners to really examine why we worldbuild and how we worldbuild and how it serves the story in ways that are not just it's cool and fun to worldbuild, but are actually really thoughtful and deliberate. I have often taught writing classes, workshops, at different conventions and venues, and sometimes early career writers will submit work, and very frequently I see them fall back on worlds and speculative elements that are familiar and that are default. Because we've seen and absorbed them so much before. Like medieval European analog, or a magic school. Fantasy races like elves and orcs and so on. Those are all perfectly fine magic worlds, but what I really would like to encourage writers to do is to ask yourselves well, why am I making worldbuilding choices, and what are those speculative elements that I'm including because they really reinforce plot and character and theme? Why am I choosing something as opposed to I'm just falling back on something that I feel comfortable with or that I've seen other people use before.

[Dan] This is something that I talk about a lot, the idea that a cliché is not bad because it's familiar, it's bad because it's thoughtless. All of these elements that we see so often repeated like elves and orcs and magic schools and things like that, they're not flawed things you should never put in your story. You just need to be sure you're putting them in for the right reasons. That you have… You're not just using them because they're familiar and you don't want to think about it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's that… The metric of "Write what feels good. See how it moves you." is useless because… Not completely useless. But it's a… It's very wiggly wobbly, because frequently something feels good because it's familiar. When we're talking about right reasons, it's again, that's a wiggly wobbly thing, because different stories have different reasons and different this is right. So there's not… It's not as… It's not an easy metric to go by. So what you want to make sure you're doing is that you're doing it deliberately and with intention. It's the intentionality that we've been talking about for the past several weeks.

 

[Fonda] Yeah. I especially want to encourage people to think about what time, and what cultural analogues they're choosing to use and why. I, earlier on in the master class, in the previous week, I talked about my aesthetic reasons for wanting to write the Green Bone saga in a latter half of the 20th century analog. There's also a thematic reason why I did that, because one of the big themes in that series is the tension between a very old culture and tradition with all the forces of modernity and globalization and the conflicts that are inherent there. So I chose a time period that is uncommon in epic fantasy, because it reinforced a theme that I wanted to be at the front and center of the whole trilogy. So, just think about, like, what is it that you're trying to do with that story, that you want to leave with the reader, and bring that into your worldbuilding choices.

[Mary Robinette] There's a thing that we talk about a lot when were talking about a default character. We've talked about this in previous episodes, the unspoken default, and that in modern-day America at this time that we are recording, that's a 30-year-old white man. People will say, "But, why have your character be… Be… I don't know… Be a woman? Why can't you just…?" The question that I find myself asking is, like, I'll go ahead and put down whatever my defaults are. Then I'll go back and interrogate them. That also includes where I'm setting it. So why am I setting it here? What does that buy me? Because I'm going to be spending a lot to build this place, spending a lot of words. So what am I buying with that? Is there a reason that I'm doing it here? Sometimes that reason is this is a place that I'm comfortable, and I'm going to be doing something more challenging in some other part of the novel. That's not a ridiculous reason to set something someplace that you're familiar. Especially if you don't enjoy research. But it is a deliberate choice at that point. You're making it on purpose instead of just falling into it by accident.

[Howard] Now, one of the things to be aware of as well with the defaults… The defaults, the clichés, the trope-tastic elements, whatever those may be, is that… Its kitchen sink effect. They don't all fit. If you put all of the things that you love from various Western themed fantasy stories into one story, and then begin exploring the implications of any of them, actually being thoughtful about them, they will crowd some of the other ones out. They… It doesn't all work together. It's one of the reasons why highly derivative stuff feels so flat, because it feels like, "Oh, you just painted a Disney version of Tolkien as a backdrop for characters to act against. The dragons would be eating the sheep. This doesn't make sense."

 

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to pause us here…

[Dan] Let's pause here…

[Mary Robinette] To talk about the book of the week. Because it's actually right on point for this. It's Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. It's inspired by pre-Columbian Americas. It is, at its heart, an epic fantasy full of the kind of political machinations and prophecies that you get from other epic fantasies. But she's made deliberate choices to pull from a different mold, from a different palette than most of the epic fantasies that you read. Because of that, she's got access to all of these different areas, different intersections of politics and culture that's rich and thematicly give these additional layers that… So she's buying a lot. It's not just, "Oh, cool. This is a different setting. That's neat." Thematically, narratively, there's so much richness to this world. She's able to… She's doing one of the things that we talked about in a previous episode by having her POV characters come from very different worlds and different cultures. Some of them are outsider characters. I think, actually, all of her POV characters are outsider characters in one way or another. Your able to get this really broad, rich, just gloriously textured landscape that the characters are moving across. It's a beautiful book. It's one of the Hugo finalists this year. As we record this, it's still just a finalist. But who… It's so good I would not be at all surprised to see this one walk home with the rocketship.

[Dan] Cool. That is Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse.

 

[Dan] Now, Fonda, let's get back to something that you mentioned earlier. You talked about making deliberate choices about what kinds of real-world cultural analogues to… That may or may not show up in your story and in your worldbuilding. So let's talk about that a little bit. Without getting into a massive discussion of appropriation. Let's just set a baseline, do your research and be respectful. Talk about this idea of real-world cultural analogues.

[Fonda] Yeah. One of the choices that I want all writers to consider is how much, when you're creating your world, how much are you importing from the real world versus building from the ground up? Maybe I can illustrate this best with the example of this term Asian fantasy. So my books, the Green Bone saga often get described as Asian fantasy. Which is a term that I can understand the usefulness of this term from a marketing perspective, but I am not fond of it. Because it is used as an umbrella term to encompass a lot of things that are potentially very different, completely different types of stories. As an example, let me contrast a few books. There's a new novel, She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. It is a story set in ancient China, and it is based on a real historical figure, the founder of the Ming Dynasty. It obviously changes some things about our real history by re-imaging the identity of this very real person. So that is borrowing a lot from our real world, and then telling a story within it. Then you have The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K. S. Villoso which is set in a secondary world that is very reminiscent of the Philippines. K is from the Philippines and the story is a secondary world that is like if the Philippines had not been colonized. So you have very strong cultural cues, including what the characters eat, the way they dress, that say that this is inspired by the Philippines. On the other hand, you have my series, the Green Bone saga, which is in a secondary world that is not based on any one specific Asian nation, because I wanted the story to be in a place where there was this magic element, and it was this isolated culture that was on an island. So the fact that there is magic Jade would have influenced their entire development. It could not simply be Japan or Taiwan with the serial numbers rubbed off. Like, it had to be its own thing. So that influenced my worldbuilding choices, and I made really deliberate decisions when I was writing the story not to use words that tied it to specific places. I never use adobo or sushi or dim sum. Like, I never use words that would make you think that this is based on a specific place. So that's an example of three books that fall, from a marketing standpoint, under the same term, but have made very different worldbuilding choices in service of different narratives.

[Dan] And are going to appeal to very different audiences.

[Howard] When I think of worldbuilding, I'm often… And the clichés, I often force myself to question the boundary states that I've created around given terms, like… The example I'll use here, what does it mean when a place is crowded? My house has, I think, 2500 square feet, and there's five people living in it. There are people who would say that that's crowded. But I spent some time reading up on and looking at pictures of Kowleen free city, which was in the… In this area between two political entities. It was essentially 60,000 people or 40,000 people living in a space the size of a… The footprint of a football stadium. That… Was crowded. It was literally one of the most crowded places on earth. I looked at that and realized, okay, the boundaries that I've got in my mind for crowded are light years away from that, whatever that is. I perform these interrogations anytime I'm creating something to make sure that I haven't used the word like crowded to mean something that it doesn't really mean.

 

[Dan] Now, as we talk about making these deliberate choices, whether they are for narrative or aesthetic or thematic reasons, we don't want to lose the idea that your worldbuilding should still be cool. That there should still be awesome stuff that makes us want to love that book or wish we could live there. So, how can we do that? Fonda, give us some homework along these lines.

[Fonda] Yeah. I… To your point, I want to kind of bring the whole master class back around to, like, why do worldbuilding? We've talked this entire time around how it should support your narrative, your plot, your characters. It all should work together seamlessly and be this perfectly balanced three-legged stool. But I want to come back to the fact that many of us worldbuild because it's really fun. When you are a novelist, and you're going to devote years to a project, and spend so much time in this world, you need… There needs to be something about it that is so compelling to you that you'd rather spend time in this fictional world in front of your computer than out in the real one. So I often ask writing students, "What are your armored bears?" I'm… I point them to Philip Pullman's Dark Materials series. Right? That is a series that has really meaty themes. I mean, it is interrogating organized religion and oppression and some pretty meaty stuff. But what do we… What is on the cover of the book? What is on the movie poster? It's the armored bear. Because armored bears are just really freaking cool.

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] So that is my cool theory of literature, that you've got all this awesome worldbuilding that ideally just support your narrative and does so much heavy lifting and is meaty and rich and nuanced and full of texture. But there has to be that kernel of cool that just draws your reader in, draws you in, and keeps you there.

 

[Fonda] So, my homework for the week, and to close out this master class, is I want you to consider for your own work, what is your armored bear? What element of the story your writing right now makes you most excited to worldbuild and why?

[Dan] Sounds good. We would… At least I would love to hear what some of you come up with. This is a really great way to end this. So, thank you, Fonda, so much. This has been an absolutely wonderful master class. I've learned a lot. I hope the listeners have as well. So, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/02/28/16-9-crossing-the-revenue-streams/

 

Key Points: Successful artists have lots of different eggs in lots of different baskets, earning money from many different revenue streams. First. look at other ways to write fiction besides just selling your stories. E.g., sometimes a publisher will pitch a series to you. Look for ways to avoid the pigeonhole, get new audiences, and work with new publishers. Watch for anthologies, and write to a theme! Tie-in fiction can help. Gaming companies need fiction, too. Balance new skills and audience versus money, money, money. Try to learn something, to grow your audience or as a writer, when you take on new projects. Second, consider ways to make money from writing you have already done. T-shirts, coins, merchandise. In-universe artifacts. How much work do you have to do to make money off it, and how much profit is there in it? Consider Kickstarter. Keep looking for other opportunities.

 

[16, 9]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Crossing Revenue Streams.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're going to need more than one stream.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] So, one of the things that I think is common to every successful artist that I know of is that they have lots of different eggs in lots of different baskets. They are earning money from a lot of different revenue streams. So we want to talk about that is the final class in Brandon's intensive course on career planning and business information. So, Brandon, take it away. What do people need to know about multiple revenue streams? Why is this an important part of an author's career?

[Brandon] So, you need to find a way to make money off of your writing. This is the… This is what you're going to have to do. This is what… If you want to go pro. You don't… You don't have to, but, if you're looking at this as a business, one of the things you should be looking at is, how can I make money at this? The obvious answer is sell a book. However, for at least most authors I know, once you sell a book, you want to go full-time, you probably should go full-time to make a living at your writing, but you probably can't earn enough off of that book to go full-time yet. Indeed, even if you're a newer aspiring writer who's selling short stories and things like that, or maybe you're… Maybe you're a longtime writer who selling short stories. You are going to need to find a way to make a living or at least you're going to want to find a way to make more money off of your stories. So, this is ways to make money with your writing that aren't necessarily the obvious ways of you write your book, you sell your book, you get money for it. We're going to talk about all sorts of other types of revenue streams you can have as a writer to keep yourself going during those maybe lean years.

[Dan] So, I told the story to Howard last week, but when I went years ago to my 20th high school reunion, they did the little games, like who has the most kids and who's done this and who traveled the farthest and all that kind of thing that you do at a reunion. The question who has held the most jobs since graduating high school, most people were on like four or five. Except for me, the professional author, and my friend who became a professional filmmaker. We both tied with 14. That's not even counting all the freelance work that I do. So artists really need to hustle to pay all those bills.

[Brandon] Yup. So one of the first things we want to talk about here is other ways to be writing stories that aren't maybe necessarily the write a book or you write a story, whatever you want to write, and sell it. There are job opportunities that are still writing fiction in the area you want to be in that you can get. I wanted to have Dan talk to us about it, because Dan had the experience of a series that was pitched by a publisher to him, right?

[Dan] Yeah. This is actually… Not a lot of people know this, but that's where Partials came from. The publisher came to me, two editors, Jordan Brown and [Ruta Remus] at HarperCollins. They had an idea for a really great kind of post-apocalyptic dystopia YA series, and were looking for an author who fitted. So they actually brought that idea to me. It was not something I had considered doing, because at the time, everything I had written was horror, but number one, I really welcomed the opportunity to jump into something very, very different as a way of making sure I didn't pigeonhole myself as the serial killer guy. For a number of reasons. That's not the identity I was looking for. But number two, this was a chance for me to build inroads to a brand-new audience I had not yet been reaching, to a brand-new publisher that I had never worked before, to do just a lot of new frontiers. I really saw it at the time as a brand-new revenue stream. Then, when that whole YA career kind of crumbled in let's say 2014, that's the same… I used that same strategy again, let's find a brand-new audience and build a brand-new revenue stream, which is how I got into middle grade.

[Brandon] This happens a lot with anthologies, also. People will ask you if you want to be a part of an anthology or it'll go around in the community that an anthology is being made on this topic and they're accepting proposals or submissions. Once you become part of the community, you can get… Watch some of these forums or these newsletters or these things like that. This comes into the networking that we talked about in a previous week. But anthologies can be a good way to make money off of your writing other than just I'm writing a story and submitting it, you can write to a theme.

[Dan] Yeah. Tie-in fiction has also been really helpful for me. My only Hugo nomination for prose… For a pros category has come from tie-in fiction. Now, this can be hard. I've got a friend who rights Star Trek novels, and I was kind of grilling him for how can I get into this, because I'm a huge Star Trek geek. He basically said you have to wait for one of the rest of us to die.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So these established properties can be hard to break into. But what I have done is I've made some pretty good contacts with gaming companies. I've written for Privateer Press, I've written for several others. The one that I've just finished is a Kickstarter for a board game called Cult of the Deep. They came to me and they said, "Hey, we're coming out with this thing. It's horror. We want to have some fiction built so that we can use it as part of the Kickstarter. Will you write it for us?" So always being open for and looking for these opportunities to write other stuff has been super helpful to me.

[Erin] I think that...

[Dan] Go ahead.

[Erin] I think that's something… It's really interesting, because it's a trade-off. So I do a lot of freelance writing work, some game stuff, I've done some writing for, like, Paizo, and I write for Zombies, Run!, the running app. So, things here and there. But what's… The balance is figuring out what is adding to your skill as a writer or expanding your audience, and what is just like I like money, money is fun.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So, whenever actually a project comes to me, I play Say No to This from Hamilton, and I… A picture of my freelance client is like the woman saying, "I should say no, but I will always say yes." But I've actually had to say no to projects, because they are far enough off from what I'm doing that I'm like, "I'm not going to learn anything, I'm not going to grow either my audience or as a writer," which, I think either one of those are a good reason to do extra stuff in addition to the money.

 

[Brandon] so, the second big thing I wanted to cover is ways to make money off of writing you've already done that isn't necessarily writing prose. The reason I want to talk about this is because Howard is a genius at this. He has had to make his whole career off of monetizing something that people aren't paying for. Howard, what can you tell us about how to monetize things that are free, or get extra money out of something that you're charging a little bit for?

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm… Okay, I'm laughing because, on the one hand, yes, the comic is available for free and we have all kinds… I say the comic. Schlock Mercenary, available to be read by you, fair reader, at no charge at schlockmercenary.com. Yes, it's free, and we sell T-shirts and coins and whatever else, but most of the merchandise that… The most profitable merchandise we sell is book collections of the comic. So a lot of what I'm doing is getting enough people hooked on the book that they want to own it in print. But there are things that the comic created, there are things that it built, that lent themselves really well to being an independent revenue stream. So that even if you didn't want a print collection of the comic strip, maybe you wanted this other thing.

 

[Dan] Awesome. So, can you tell us about our book of the week, which happens, very cleverly, to tie right into this?

[Howard] Why, yes I can. We created The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries, which is a sort of coffee-table book of very, very bad advice. Malevolent canon. It's often referred to in-universe. I've been making fun of the Stephen Covey, the seven habits thing. Then, years and years and years ago, Stephen Covey started going after anybody who was saying the seven habits of anything. Basically saying, cease-and-desist, don't do that anymore. We went ahead and did a retcon in Schlock Mercenary and started referring to them as maxims, and there aren't seven of them, there are 70 of them. Then I realized, you know, I might be able to make stuff out of this. So we made some twelve-month calendars. Well, print calendars aren't as big a thing as they were 15 years ago. So, about five years ago, we released the Seventy Maxims book, which we created as an in-universe artifact in Schlock Mercenary, and we did it as part of the Schlock Mercenary role-playing game called Planet Mercenary, which is itself a whole nother thing that is not the comic. The Planet Mercenary role-playing game paid the bills all by itself for like two and a half years. That is the best thing we've ever made. I mean, except for the comic. Which makes this topical.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The fun thing about the Planet Mercenary book is that my whole approach to it from the word go was, boy, it sure would be nice if I could make money off of my world book notes that I have to refer to all the time. I still refer to the Planet Mercenary PDF all the time. But, the book of the week, The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. It is a lovely little coffee-table book that's great for starting conversations about things you should never ever do, please.

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] Now, one of the things that I love about this book, and specifically about the plan that caused its creation, is I've always compared your maxims to Star Trek's Rules of Acquisition for the Ferengi. You made a decision that they did not make, and maybe this ties back to our art versus business discussion. You were able, because you eventually ended that list and codified everything in it, you were able to publish it. Star Trek has never done that. They're missing out on a big chunk of change. They could have, at the height of DS 9, sold copies of the Rules of Acquisition, hand over fist. They decided not to, presumably because they liked the flexibility of not having codified the entire list. But these are the kind of decisions that, as creators, we need to make. Do I want to leave this open? Could I turn this into something that I can sell? It's a really smart tactic.

[Howard] Let me look at… Let me talk about Paramount's decision, there. Back in 2006, Robert Khoo, who was the business guy for Penny Arcade comics. He's the reason there's a Penny Arcade Expo. Robert Khoo said, "No single source should ever be more than 60% of the revenue that you take in." Now, he was talking to an audience of self-employed, self-publishing web cartoonists. He was talking about things like Google ads and books in print and T-shirts and whatever else. But the advice really stuck to me, stuck with me, and it was super salient three, four years ago, when Google ads cut me off, and I realized, "Oh, no. That's a big chunk of my revenue." That's… Well, it's about 10 or 15% of my overall revenue. That did not end my life. Because we had multiple revenue streams. So the operating principle here is don't have anything that you're just super dependent on. With Paramount, making a book of the Rules of Acquisition, the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, would have meant devoting a writer to the process of compiling that and making it special and wonderful. Ultimately, it never would have generated more than chump change, if you will, compared to the business that they were in, which is making a TV show. So they made a business decision to leave… I mean, what would have been for me, hundreds of thousands of dollars, to leave that on the table. But hundreds of thousands of dollars, that's… That gets like four episodes shot.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] It's not very significant. So the decision about revenue streams hinges, for me, heavily in part on how much work do I need to do in order to make money off of this, and how much profit is there in the thing that I'm making. I love books, because they don't cost a lot to make, if I don't factor all of the time involved in writing them, but we can sell them… The profit margin is large on the physical merchandise. But for a print-on-demand T-shirt, the margin is very small. If my limited market of people is all busy buying print-on-demand T-shirts, I'm actually not making as much money as I would be if I could convince them all to buy copies of The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries.

 

[Brandon] One of the things…

[Dan] [inaudible… Should all…]

[Brandon] That's interesting here to talk about is this idea that there are, once you are lucky enough to be getting fans and keeping them, there are people among them who want to give you more money then… They want to support your work. I remember when this first began with me. I actually got an email from someone who said, "Hey, can I just send you a bunch of money? I happen to just be very well-off and I want to just send you a tip." I'm like, "Really? You just are offering to send me money?" People like to support artists. So, having some of these extra products that you can sell is a good way to go. It does require time. Dan was the first writer I knew personally who made T-shirts. I know that T-shirts are… T-shirts are one of the harder things to do because you have to carry them in multiple sizes and they are just a… There's a saturated market of cool nerd T-shirts out there. So making a dent and being… Selling those is hard. But they are a nice… Like, one thing that we need that Paramount… Paramount needs it on a different scale. We need multiple revenue streams, in that if something collapses, we aren't destroyed by. When Borders went out of business, this was a big deal. Right? It's possible that other sources like that will just banish. So, even if T-shirts are a small amount of your business, knowing that you have that extra revenue stream can be very comforting. About three years ago, maybe, Howard came to me and I was talking about the leatherbounds that we do. The leatherbounds are one of the things I wanted to bring up here. I am in a privileged position in that I have a big enough audience to support a luxury product like this. I was talking about it, and Howard said, "Brandon, you need to do a Kickstarter on these." I'm like, "Why?" He's like, "Oh, Kickstarter has a lot more tools you can use. You can generate a lot more interest by offering rewards to people. Trust me, do a Kickstarter." I had never done one before. I went to my team and said, "Howard says we should do a Kickstarter, and Howard is the smartest person I know about this sort of stuff. So let's do a Kickstarter." Last summer we made almost $8 million on a Kickstarter.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] And…

[Howard] I got a free book.

[Brandon] And Howard got a free book. This… It was true. It was bigger than the money we made… The peace of mind knowing that we could now self-publishing any of my books if the publishing industry went belly up or something happened at Tor. That piece of mind is enormous, knowing that I have another way to reach my fans. Now, granted, it's through someone else's platform. That is scary. The fact that if Kickstarter went away, I can't sell them on my website as effectively as I can through Kickstarter. But it gives me someone other than Amazon, because the rest of my life is controlled by Amazon. 80% of my books are sold through this one store that if Jeff Bezos decides he doesn't like me and says, "Pull Brandon's books," then my career collapses. Well, not anymore, because I have learned how to sell my books through Kickstarter if I need to because of Howard.

[Dan] Fantastic. Good job, Howard. Yeah. So, this has been a really good discussion. I hope that what our audience takes away from this more than anything else is that you need to be looking for these other opportunities. Regardless of what those might be, and regardless of how big they are. I could never in my wildest dreams make $8 million self-publishing something the way Brandon does, but I do have lots of other work that I do, and lots of other little streams of revenue. So, even the little stuff helps and is valuable. You need to look for opportunities to do that. So, thank you very much for listening to this episode.

 

[Dan] Let's have our final piece of homework from Howard.

[Howard] Okay. I want you to look at… Identify the places where you are getting money. They may be checks from a publisher, they may be checks from Amazon, they might be… I don't know where you are getting money from. But identify each of those as a revenue stream. Then identify… Write it down… What is the activity that you are performing that is generating that revenue. If it's ad revenue on your website, then the activity is not necessarily writing, it's publishing things to the web. So, establish a framework for where the money is currently coming from. Now, start looking at the ideas, the concepts, the conceits, the whatever that are in your work that could be turned into other things that might make you money. Maybe it's a T-shirt, maybe it's a commemorative Christmas ornament. Maybe it's a… Maybe it's a flag that goes on the back of a pickup truck. I don't know. But make a list of the possible places that the ideas, the concepts, the conceits in your work could be turned into other merchandise.

[Dan] Fantastic. All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.