Writing Excuses 15.45: Worldbuilding Fantasy, with Patrick Rothfuss

Nov. 16th, 2020 09:56 am
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 15.45: Worldbuilding Fantasy, with Patrick Rothfuss
 
 
Key Points: Timeless urban fantasy? Set in our world, but with magic, monsters, or some other wonder. How do you make it timeless, avoid pinning it down so that in a couple decades, it's irrelevant? Make the world close, but obviously different. Pull back a little, the phone is not the plot. Dodge it! Magic and tech don't mix. Use ubiquitous references. Write about things you know and enjoy. Focus on things that are always important, to make the story timeless, even if it is set in time. Write the story you want to write, don't borrow trouble from the future. Focus on the hidden world. Go ahead and tell us exactly what time it is. How do you make an interesting secondary world fantasy without a magic system? History, politics, relationships. Wonder! The place as character. Exploring a strange world. The numinous and wonder. Think about why you want to do a secondary world? What does it buy you? What does making it an urban fantasy in this world buy you? Focus on the things you are passionate about. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 45.
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Fantasy Worldbuilding, with Patrick Rothfuss.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Howard] 'cause you're in a hurry.
[Pat] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Pat] And I'm Pat.
[Dan] We have Pat Rothfuss with us once again. We are super excited to have you back, especially for this podcast.
 
[Dan] We're going to talk about fantasy worldbuilding. We've got some fascinating listener questions. The first one's actually about urban fantasy. How do you create timeless urban fantasy? I'm just going to read this person's question, because I think they phrase it really well. Stories set in fantasy worlds or distant futures don't have to deal with cell phone upgrades, but I can't write a story about magical teens from Baltimore without giving away the exact year by how they use their phones, laptops, tablets, etc. and by the music they listen to." So, someone's writing urban fantasies, something set in our world, but with magic or monsters or whatever it is. How do you make that timeless, how do you not pin it down to such a specific time that it eventually is no longer relevant?
[Pat] I will say, this is one of the great joys of writing secondary fantasy, is, like, my world gets to stand, like, separate from time. It doesn't end up dated like science fiction or urban fantasy. But what I've seen interesting is like the movie It Follows. I've seen this done more in movies than I've noticed it in urban fantasy. But in It Follows this is have you seen that one? Horror movie? Like, if you have sex with somebody… Oops, sorry, spoilers. If you have sex with somebody, a demon follows you.
[Mmmm]
[Dan] It's really good.
[Pat] It's very good. Better than my awful summary…
[Laughter]
[Pat] Depict it. This is why I don't do ad copy. But what's amazing about the worldbuilding there is, like, you don't know when it is. Like, one of them kind of has a cell phone but it's in like a weird clamshell. It has, like, a videophone in the top half. Sort of like a flip phone. It's… The world that is depicted is deliberately not this world, but obviously still pretty close to this world. Because of that, any discrepancies, like, or logistical inconsistencies don't necessarily damage the verisimilitude of things, which is a marvelous trick that you can do visually very easily.
[Howard] I think, coming back to the original question, you want to make something timeless, to my mind what you're saying is, "I want people in 20 years to be able to read this and to enjoy it without thinking that, oh, the technology changes of the last 20 years make this story irrelevant."
[Pat] Right.
[Howard] I don't know that the problem is as big as the person asking the question is making it out to be. I think you can tell a timeless story… I think if the teens in Baltimore are using phones and you describe them using phones in the way we use phones, and then pull back just a little bit. You don't need to tell us what apps is one running or what memes they were looking at or which version of the phone it was or which jailbreaking whatever they needed to do. The phone is not the plot. If the phone is the plot, then you're writing something that's an urban fantasy tech thriller and you kind of need to pin it down. But in this case, you don't need to pin it down. So, they can have iPhones.
[Pat] I would also say somebody who, in my opinion, does this very well is Jim Butcher. He dodges it. First off, cell phones are sort of off the map, because he very cleverly instituted that magic makes cell phones not work well.
[Dan] Technology in general.
[Pat] But, more important, as relevant to this question, he does not reference pop culture that is not ubiquitous. There's references to Star Wars and Burger King and stuff like that. I don't know how much he did it intentionally, or if it just was intuitive, but, like, he doesn't talk about that local diner.
[Mary Robinette] Well, he's also talking about his favorite restaurant, which is Burger King.
[Pat] Right.
[Mary Robinette] So… I'm saying this partly because I don't think that he's doing it intentionally, but he is writing things that he knows and enjoys. That's one of the ways that you can make something timeless is by talking about the things that you know and enjoy. In 20 years, are either of those things going to be in the public consciousness? Who knows? Like Charles de Lint, if you want to look at timeless urban fantasy… Charles de Lint is one of the first people who was really writing urban fantasy. We still read Charles de Lint. There's no effort to make that anything else. If you go even farther back than that, then we have Charles Dickens who was… I mean, Christmas Carol was urban fantasy.
[Mmm]
[Mary Robinette] It is unquestionably… The term hadn't been invented yet, but it is a fantasy set in a city, the city is a character, it is urban fantasy. It's timeless because of the story, not because it isn't pinned into a time.
[Pat] That is a real… I think that really deflates the entire underlying fear behind the question. It is set in time, but is a timeless story because it focuses on things that are always important, like character, whatever. I also, like, A Fine and Private Place is… Or, honestly, a newer one, that more people maybe have read, The Graveyard Book. People will read that for a 100 years. It is not… I think maybe what they may be touching on, though, is, like, how do I write something that is set in this world and have people in 15 years not be baffled. Because, like, here's an example. Did anybody read the Spellsinger books?
[Mary Robinette] No.
[Pat] Alan Dean Foster wrote a series called Spellsinger.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah. I did. Yes.
[Pat] It rocked my world as a kid. But now I think of going back to them, and I'm like, those were all modern day at the time rock 'n' roll lyrics that I kind of knew just because I listen to the radio. I think they are absolutely opaque these days.
[Howard] Yeah. They may be incomprehensible to a modern audience.
[Mary Robinette] but I think they'll play differently to a modern audience. But things that are old, they just play differently. Like, Jane Austen is filled… Granted, not writing urban fantasy, but still. Filled with references. Again, Christmas Carol is filled with references to things that are important in the contemporary world. But they play differently to us now.
[Pat] Well, I'll also say some things are timeless and some things do get stale. Like, weirdly stale. I think, like, I don't know if you can… Star Trek probably isn't going to go stale. But, I don't know… In some ways, that's the peril of the genre. Like…
 
[Howard] I want to take a step back on this question a little bit. Because the fear that it won't be timeless... boy, if you want your things to still be read 20 years from now, you may never write another word.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Really. Because, I mean, we've been comparing you to Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and there's so many things in here that will be… Write the story that you want to write, and don't borrow trouble from the future.
[Pat] I think that is good… I'm just… To kind of contextualize that, I remember working on my book… It's the year 1999, and there was talk about The Lord of the Rings movie coming out. It was big news. Ooh, Lord of the Rings. I'm like, "These movies are going to be awful. It's going to ruin the public perception of fantasy. I need to get my novel out before that happens, and this huge gargantuan train wreck pulls the rug out from underneath, like, my thing." So, like, I was speculating on the future in a not unreasonable, but utterly unuseful way. I'm glad I didn't waste too much time worrying about that.
 
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to mention two other urban fantasies that I think handle this question in another way. Harry Potter is an urban fantasy. One of the ways that that gets around the problem or the perceived problem is that most of our time is spent in the hidden world. Were not actually interacting that much with the contemporary world. So, like, the… Harry Potter, any of those books could play today. Because the people in the wizard and world don't use cell phones. They don't use the same technologies that we use. The other one is the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire. Those, the way she handles it is, at the beginning of each chapter, she gives you a date. She's like, "I am going to pin it." She just leans in and is like, "No. This is exactly when this is happening." So I think you can play it either way and that it's not a problem if you're pinned into a time, that people will still continue to read it. I just narrated book 13, and she puts out one a year. So people have been reading these books for 13 years. The beginning books, there are not cell phones. But that first book still plays.
[Dan] Yeah. I think, just to reiterate, as long as you got really great characters that we love and a plot that we care about, a lot of these other concerns are going to fade away.
 
[Dan] So, let's actually… Our book of the week is, in fact, a timeless urban fantasy. Pat, you were going to tell us about Something Wicked This Way Comes.
[Pat] It is… I don't know if it's my favorite book, but it's going to always probably be in my top three. It's amazing. I think it might be Bradbury's best book. I recently rere… I loved it before I was a father. Reading it as a father. Whoo, boy. Get ready to cry. Not that I'm a hard target these days in terms of things that make me weepy. It is so good. The language is beautiful and timeless is a perfect word for it. Despite the fact that there is, like, a traveling carnival. It is a great… I would think that would be a master class. Read that book and see how beautifully it depicts this world that you can still engage with. Now, that said, you will also probably see things and be like, "Hold on. What is a sideshow?" There are certain cultural predispositions that, like, we are lacking and that I imagine a 20-year-old would be lacking even more than I am. Because he's writing before my time, too. But nevertheless, the concepts… This is about being a child, being a father, feeling out of place. There's a traveling lightning rod salesman. Like, there are no traveling salesmen anymore. Like, there are no… Like, who thinks of a lightning rod anymore? But, nevertheless, this is a beautiful book.
[Dan] Awesome. Thank you very much.
 
[Dan] So, we've got another question to talk about in the second half of our episode. Which is creating a secondary world fantasy that is compelling and exciting, but does not necessarily have or rely on a magic system. How do you make that world cool, without leaning on the magic system to do that work for you?
[Mary Robinette] Can we talk about Amberlough by Elena Donnelly?
[Dan] Yes, we can.
[Mary Robinette] And also Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner. Both of these books, neither of them… There is no magic in them at all, anywhere. Both of these books… What we've done is, we've just stepped to the side of the real world. They both look at actual history and file the serial numbers off. What they're looking at are the patterns of real history. In many ways, there are… In some ways, they feel almost like alternate history. Not… An alternate history rather than a secondary world. Because what they're doing is they're looking at the politics. They're looking at the relationships. Guy Gavriel Kay, I also find…
[Dan] I was going to mention him.
[Mary Robinette] Does much of the same thing. That there's not a magic system. Not really… Well, it depends on…
[Dan] It depends on which one.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But… Oh, shoot. I've just lost the name of the novel I was going to mention. You know the one I'm talking about, that doesn't… There's not really a magic system.
[Dan] Most of them. I don't know…
[Howard] Sailing to Sarantium is the one that I…
[Mary Robinette] That's the one, yes.
[Dan] Yeah. The… A follow-up he did, that's set in that same world, is called Children of Earth and Sky, which is actually my favorite of his. There is no magic to speak of, except for one sequence that last for maybe about a third of the book, where there is a ghost, following somebody around. He doesn't bother explaining how this works, because that's not the point. The story is not about the magic, and to some degree, it's not even about the ghost. It's what is the relationship between that ghost and the person that the ghost is talking to. The rest of it is, like you say, all politics and fascinating cultural details and how are these two cultures clashing against each other. That's what draws you in.
[Howard] I'm… My approach to secondary worlds… If you've ever taken a tour of say, the Grand Canyon, if you ever stood on a seashore… I got to stand on the shore of the North Sea when 50 mile an hour winds were blasting sand around and everybody's telling me, "You're an idiot. You're supposed to be inside when it does this. What's wrong with the American?" Well, the answer is, "I have never been sandblasted by icy sand on the shores of the North Sea before. This is amazing and kind of horrifying. And I'm going back inside now." There is no magic in. But there's a ton of wonder. When I build worlds… Okay, the worlds I build are usually for science fiction, I want interesting geography. I want geography that is built around conflict, I want geography that shows us that this world has a history, and that this world is a changing, dynamic place. And, boy, you set a fantasy, you build an epic fantasy in a secondary world whose geography is inherently problematic…
[Mary Robinette] I'm glad you said that, because it reminded me of a thing that I love about these books, but also one of the things that plays in with urban fantasy, which is that the place is a character. With a really compelling secondary world fantasy, the place is a character. Which is one of the things that I like in your books, so much, is that the college is a character.
[Pat] I was going to say, "Really?" But, really, the University is absolutely… It is deep enough to feel real.
[Mary Robinette] And although there's magic, that's not…
[Pat] I would actually argue that there's, depending on how semantic we want to get here, I would argue that most of what happens in the University isn't magic. Anymore than, like, you could tell the story of a young boy who goes to MIT and learns about superconductors. I mean, it's fantastic. Like, hydrofluoric acid. Like, do you know about it? If you touch it, it is absorbed through your skin and eats all the calcium out of your bones and kills you while you're in excruciating pain. That's just in this world. Like, most of sympathy and sigaldry is pretty much thermodynamics. Most of alchemy, I mean, you could argue, but there's a sliding scale between pretty much science and then all the way over to naming. Naming is natural magic. I would say if you're making a secondary world, and you don't want to have a magic system, I would warn you, you might be really niche and unappealing to a broad market, like a couple of these other books I'm about to mention. Like, Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. Because, like, read those first two Game of Thrones books, there's no magic. Like, a dude just pours alcohol on a sword and lights it, like, that's the only… It's, like, somebody knows about a dragon once. Also, a dude who lit his sword on fire just by burning it. That's the only magic. In The Lord of the Rings, yeah, there's Gandalf. He doesn't do magic. He's putting cones on fire. He, like, talks loud, and, like, flaps his coat about. It's… I mean, yeah, he does do some magic, but to claim that there is a magic system? There's not.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Pat] At the end of the book, he's like, oh, yeah, the funking flame of Anor. Yeah, the third Elven ring. But, like, that's not a magic system. It's kind of a prop.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] Yeah. The… I'm sorry, I lost my train of thought.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It's like… You're right, there is no magic system.
[Pat] I would actually like to… I'm sorry to interrupt, but I would like to say, there is a difference between. Because these days, what you touched on is, what is the joy of secondary world fantasy? The joy there, one of the joys that is available to you, is the joy of exploration of a strange world. One of the things you can explore in that strange world is language. Culture. Geography. Technology.
[Dan] Food?
[Pat] Food. Magic. You could actually have magic as a subclass of technology in this breakdown. Because, like what the Taoist alchemists were doing in China might as well… I mean, you can call that magic or tech… Hell, Newton. What Newton was doing historically, it's like, eh, [horse of peace], like, maybe alchemy, maybe science. Kind of, he did both. Newton was an alchemist, by the way. Frightening.
[Laughter]
[Pat] But, magic is just a thing that you're… You have the opportunity to explore in a certain way if there's a system. Brandon creates a system, and one of the joys is learning the permutations of it. But you can have magic in a world and not have an explicit system and have it just be something that exists without exploring.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Pat] I think some things that you see there… There's a book by David Keck, In the Eye of Heaven. It was the secondary world dark ages fantasy that was written with prose like an impressionist painting. There… I mean, there were gods in it that were also kind of real, and dark things in the forest. Is that magic? Is that a magic system? Is Catholicism a magic system? Yeah, we could go way down the rabbit hole semantically here.
[Howard] But the… When we make this dividing line between urban fantasy and epic fantasy, I think the dividing line might actually be the word magic. Because with urban fantasy, you have people in the world who don't believe that these things are possible. Then, when they see elves, they're like, "Hum, well, magic." Okay. But in the worlds that Brandon creates, everybody's just kind of… They recognize that these are just physical principles. The word magic, as we use it to mean, oh, no, that breaks all the rules, it's magic. In a lot of these big secondary world epic fantasies, even if you're using that word, what you're really talking about is you've created a world whose rules are…
[Pat] You used the term wondrous earlier. I think on the spectrum, I… When I talk… Because I talk a lot about fantasy worldbuilding and magic systems, I think there's a spectrum. On one end of it, you end up with the scientific, and the joy of that is exploration and comprehension of the system within which the characters can be clever, and therefore the reader can enjoy their cleverness. On the other, far end, of the spectrum, you have the numinous. That is where wonder lives. There's not a lot of wonder in my… In the University about sympathy. It's clever. Over in the numinous, you have all wonder. Honestly, the numinous is where Lord of the Rings lives. There is a system, but it is implicit, not explicit.
[Mary Robinette] That's like some of it N. K. Jemisin's work.
[Pat] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Where she wants that numinous quality, and it… One of the things that I find interesting is that because people are pattern seeking creatures…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] We will attempt to find a magic system even when there isn't one. That's one of the things that you… I think you can play with when you're doing your world building, is whether or not you have a magic system. You often have characters who think that there is magic or characters who think that there is not… And characters who are wrong about both states.
[Pat] Right.
 
[Mary Robinette] That's a thing that can be fun to play with. I think one of the questions that I would ask you, dear listeners, when you're thinking about writing a secondary world, is thinking about why you want to go to a secondary world?
[Pat] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Why do you not want to set this in earth? What is that buying you? What do you buy by keeping it in earth, in this world and having an urban fantasy or something that is… I mean, you can have an urban fantasy that's secondary world. But what do you get by choosing those locations, what do those things buy you?
[Pat] I would love to say one of the things, because I've thought about this a fair amount, one of the choices you're making when you do that… If you set something in this world, the benefit you get is that everyone lives here and if you say Paris, you're done. You don't have to describe Paris, they'll go the Eiffel Tower, baguettes, there's people with berets and mimes.
[Chuckles]
[Pat] But that's also the problem, is that some people, like me, even though I've been to Paris, will go, "Oh, yeah. Paris. Mimes and baguettes." Whereas really Paris is… That's an awful way of thinking of Paris.
[Mary Robinette] Except the baguettes are really good.
[Chuckles]
[Pat] So that's… It's a double-edged sword, where you don't have to do as much work to describe… Like, what a car is. Or, like, how the dollar works. Or, like, a lot of those things. The problem is that everyone will come to the table with a different understanding of those things. Which means you're writing to many different complex audiences all at once, which can make your life a hell. The hell that you experience writing secondary world fantasy and doing the worldbuilding there is that you start from zero. If I make something, I'm kind of beholden to my audience to explain it. That means world, culture, geography, magic, religion, past religion, mythology, folklore, where the rivers come from. Like, you could… I mean, you can kill yourself going down every single rabbit hole, which is why it's better to focus on certain elements and make those the focus of the world that you're revealing. Those elements should be, in my opinion, the things that you are passionate about and that you feel love towards. Tolkien made his, as he referred to it, his silly fairy language, and he was into mythology and folklore. So all of Middle Earth is built around language, mythology, the Eddas, and folklore. But that's just because… That's what… That was his jam. If you are into like, stamp collecting and butterflies and… I don't know, scuba diving, like, turn that into… I would read that secondary fantasy.
[Chuckles]
[Pat] That would be awesome.
[Howard] Stamps are going to get sticky fast.
[Pat] C, there's conflict built right into the world.
[Dan] Perfect. Awesome. So, we do need to end. We could talk about this for a while. Thank you, huge thank you to Pat for being on here to talk about this for us.
 
[Dan] Pat, do you have homework for us?
[Pat] One of the things that I notice sometimes in worldbuilding, whether it be urban fantasy or whether it be secondary world fantasy, is people feeling the need to do everything and a bag of chips different and new and strange. Whereas the truth is, if you were to change just one thing in the world, and then follow the permutations logically through the culture… So, like, for example, what if a meteor hit the United States at a certain point in history? Like, well, how might that change things?
[Mary Robinette] I don't know. I've never thought about it.
[Dan] Someone really ought to write a book about that. I bet it would win a Hugo.
[Howard] It would take quite a bit of calculating.
[Yeah]
[Howard] Sorry.
[Dan] Oh, you just ruined it.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] My stars.
[Pat] The Difference Engine is a good example of that. It's, like, what if they hadn't given up on this really old first version of a computer? So, what I would recommend is, think of a thing, and maybe it might be easiest to do this in this world, but, here's my example, is assume that suddenly not even all of alchemy is real, just one piece. They find out how to turn lead into gold. What does this do in this world? The obvious answer is that it does a bunch of really interesting things to and economies, but not as much as you might think, because we haven't been on the gold standard in years. We exist in a fiat currency. So, actually, the US currency doesn't take, but a bunch of people's mutual funds do. So, like conserv… Like, blue-chip stocks are fucked. So, like a lot of rich people lose a ton of money, but that's very basic. Like, the fact is, computers suddenly get very fast and become more efficient. Suddenly, communities that are centering around copper mining collapse, because copper isn't worth nearly as much, because gold is a much better conductor. But even that is very basic. Like, what else would happen with this one change. You can go three levels deep, four levels deep, until you end up with huge social change. You end up, probably, with a rise of a huge class of people who can perform this alchemy. Like, those people are a power. Those people might become the target of governments. Like, is this suddenly a new value trade, or is this owned by corporations? All of those permutations are what make your story and worldbuilding interesting. So I would say, pick one thing that might… Pick one thing. Then experiment with how you would permute it in this world.
[Dan] Awesome. That's fantastic homework. So, do that, and you are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.21: Writing about Children with Shannon and Dean Hale

May. 27th, 2020 11:14 am
mbarker: (Burp)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 15.21: Writing about Children with Shannon and Dean Hale
 
 
Key Points: Writing about children can be difficult, and you may stray into caricature. How do you avoid making fun of them? First, don't just transcribe what kids actually say. Try to give the sense of being children without hitting the reader over the head, especially in dialogue. Children focus on different things than adults. If you add grammatical issues, be sparing. Kids are sometimes overly precise, applying a rule everywhere. Why are you writing about a child, focus on the bits that enrich the story. Looking at the world as a child does can let you portray the fresh wonder of the world. The life experience, and stakes, are very different for children. When the protagonist is a child, or a teen, the stakes rise, and the tension, too. Consider kids as foreign visitors, trying to avoid faux pas. Teenagers are spies in adult country! Teens are not little adults, they are trying to figure out the transition from child to adult. Don't minimize their feelings. To write about kids or teens, you need to respect them. Pay attention to what is important for the story, and the relationships, how other characters react to what the children say and do. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 21.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing about Children.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Shannon] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Brandon] And we have special guests, Shannon and Dean Hale.
[Shannon] Hello!
[Dean] Hi. I'm Dean.
[Shannon] And I'm Shannon.
[Brandon] Thanks, you guys, for coming on the podcast with us.
[Shannon] Yeah, it's great.
[Dean] Thank you.
 
[Brandon] You're going to tell us how to write about children.
[Shannon] Okay, let's do it.
[Dean] Awesome.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] So, this has been surprisingly hard when I've done it. I'm never sure if I'm going too far and it's straying into caricature. Like, I can usually tell for an adult when I've gone too far in a vernacular or a voice or things like this. When you're approaching writing about children, how do you keep away from making it… It almost seems silly to me. Does that make sense? Like, I'm making fun of them rather than actually writing like them.
[Shannon] It's actually… I've written… Where I've taken direct transcrip… Directly transcribed what my children have said, and tried to put it into a story. Our editors are always like, "That's too extreme."
[Dean] Nobody would be like that.
[Shannon] "No one talks like that. Come on!"
[Dean] What are these, monsters?
[Shannon] So you can't actually… Actually, I did write what I thought was a humorous slice of life story about our four-year-old twins. The editor legitimately thought it was a horror story.
[Laughter]
[Shannon] I was very… The notes were very confused. I was like, "Why is she saying… Why is she reacting…" Then, finally, she referred to it as a house of hell. I was like, "Oh, she thought it was a horror story. That's just our everyday."
[Chuckles]
[Shannon] But it is… You can't do exactly what kids do. Just like… But it's true with any characters. Dialogue would be really boring if we just transcribed what people actually say. So you have to get the sense that they're a child without hitting the reader over the head. Particularly in dialogue.
 
[Mary Robinette] What are some of the markers in dialogue that you find for believable child language? Is it a difference in vocabulary, sentence structure, con…
[Shannon] You know… First of all, I would say children are very observant about things that adults don't care about. So for… Just what they talk about is going to be different. That can be so much fun. What does this kid… What are they interested in, what would they notice? So there are these non sequiturs that just kind of pop up. It's a great thing for humor. I would say also, just as with any character, if you want to have like grammatical issues for the kid, pick like one or two and stick with those. Don't hit the reader over the head with, like, weird grammar things constantly. Just have that consistency be for that character. Just like you would for an adult character who might have a certain quirk with the way they speak. You don't… You wouldn't do it every single sentence because it gets to be too much.
[Mary Robinette] When I was doing the puppet theater, we were often… I mean, the protagonist was always a child. One of the things that I found was that… Also, going into schools a lot, was that kids tended to be overly precise sometimes. That they would have learned a rule and they wouldn't actually have any nuance about how the rule was applied.
[Brandon] I've noticed this in my children. This is absolutely true for almost all kids I've met. That they… You tell them something. They want that to be the way the world works. They now understand the world. Then, when you immediately violate it, because of the wiggle room we give ourselves, they call you on it. I remember when my… He was only like three or four. We had talked about certain words that we don't say. Then we went to a Disney movie and they said like one word that was like this. Then, later on, that kid was describing the movie to my father… His grandpa… And said, "Don't go see that movie, grandpa. It is filthy."
[Laughter]
[Brandon] It's like a Pixar movie, right? I'm like, "Oh. Okay. Yeah."
[Shannon] I actually wrote a chapter book that was based on our twins, and really tried to be true to what it felt like to be that age. My… I sent it to someone who didn't know it was about these twins. My response was that the character was unlikable and nobody would be interested in this child.
[Laughter]
[Dean] Your children are unlikable and no one is interested in them.
[Mary Robinette] She's also living in a hell house.
[Dean] Right.
[Shannon] But it can be too much. You don't… Like, too much reality, nobody wants. So what do… Why a child? Why are you writing about a child, first of all? What are they bringing to it? So you focus on those little quirks, those little bits that can just enrich a story.
[Dean] The best part for me about writing from… As a child, because that's kind of where I go, is get into that headspace, is just looking at the world in a different way. It makes the story somehow more interesting. It's like that quote from… Was it GK Chesterton? That's about the dragon and the… I can't remember how it goes, but the idea that…
[Shannon] That… The quote you're talking about is GK Chesterton says that fantasy doesn't tell you if dragons exist. Fantasy shows you that dragons can be defeated. I think you're thinking of a different quote.
[Dean] No, I am… I'm thinking of the door one. That there's a…
[Shannon] Oh… Yes. So… Like a kid of 10…
[Dean] Go, quote.
[Shannon] Is interested in reading a story that says, "Tommy opened the door and saw a dragon." A kid of four is interested to read a story that says, "Tommy opened a door."
[Dean] It's finding…
[Shannon] Everything is still so new.
[Dean] Finding the wonder in those things that are sort of rote and old is… For… As a writer, is awesome. I mean, you can be able to kind of get that reinvigorated look at something from the other side.
[Dan] Yeah, that's what I did with Zero G, which was the middle grade that I put out. The plot is… I always pitch it as Home Alone in Space, but really, it's Die Hard in space with a 12-year-old. It's Die Hard if John McClane were super interested in how fun it was to jump around in antigravity, right? Like, that's his focus. He's always either trying to have fun or he's hiding from bad guys. Because those are the cool things that a kid is going to care about in that situation.
[Shannon] Yes.
 
[Brandon] So, when we were talking about this ahead of time, you mentioned the stakes are really different for children in life, which really struck me. Can you expand upon that? How are stakes different for children? How does that influence writing about them?
[Shannon] Children don't have the same… Well, life experience. But, just, they don't have as much in their toolbox. They don't understand how things work, they don't have the confidence, they don't have experience, they don't have a credit card, you know, they don't have… So when they're put in a situation, it's going to be totally different than if an adult were in it. You can get so much tension by having the protagonist be a kid. And a teen as well. Also, even if the main character isn't a child, if you insert a child into a situation, the stakes go through the roof. Immediately. Oh, we've got to save these people. Yeah, let's do that. Oh, and there's a three-year-old about to fall off the bridge. [OOOOH!] I mean, it just…
[Dean] We did that with Squirrel Girl. Like, we were like, "We need more tension here."
[Shannon] Let's add a baby.
[Dean] Yes.
[Laughter]
[Dean] That's exactly what we did.
[Shannon] She's not just saving the day, she's saving a specific baby. Suddenly, it's like, "Yes, we need to do this immediately." I was… We were just watching Adventures in Babysitting last night with our kids. I was trying to explain to them, because I'm a nerdy writer mom that's explaining story to my children in the middle of a movie…
[Dean] Mom, we're watching.
[Shannon] I know. But, I'm like, "Do you understand why…"
[Dean] Pause.
[Shannon] If this was about adults, it wouldn't matter, because…
[Dean] Can we watch it now, Mom?
[Shannon] They've got a credit card, they can just get a new tire. But, added to the fact that all these things are happening, is the fact that they can't let their parents know. They can't make the most logical easiest way… Choice to get out of this situation because they can't let their parents know. An adult wouldn't have that same situation. So, the stakes are higher, the tension's higher, and then [you opt] for fun.
 
[Mary Robinette] Sorry, it just occurred to me… One of the things that I often say, like, when I'm talking about kids is that… What you said, that they just lack experience. But I think of them as foreign visitors. Like, when you come… When you go to a foreign country, what you want is someone to explain what the rules are so that you don't make any social faux pas. So, like, when I go into… When we would go into schools doing school visits with the puppets, the mob mentality was the thing you kind of had to fight. Because they would… Like, if one kid did it, everyone would assume that that was the thing you should do. But it occurs to me that teenagers are actually like spies who have come into adult country and don't want anyone to know…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] That they're from the outside or child land. So they're desperately trying to not get caught is still being children.
[Shannon] Yes. Oh, teens are… I love writing about teens. I think a mistake a lot of writers make is they don't want… First of all, they don't want to be annoying. They don't want their character to be annoying. So they just make them into adults. They say they're 16, but they really just behave like adults. They're missing so much great story matter there. What matters to a teenager? What are they going through in their lives? But in addition to the science fiction adventure or whatever you're writing, you've also got that element of this is a person trying to figure out… Navigate that transition from child to adult. That's really interesting.
[Dean] I think one of the things that we do as adults, or at least that I do, is tend to believe or to minimize the feelings of the kids, or minimize the experience.
[Right]
[Dean] To believe here they are going through this thing that… [Adolescence?] Oh, that's ridiculous. How is that difficult? But if I go into writing it that way, it rings weird. But the kids are feeling with the same intensity or more than we would if we were put in… If we were plucked out of our familiar environment and put into an environment where we don't know what the rules are.
[Mary Robinette] It's stressful.
[Shannon] That's a good point, that you have to absolute… When you're writing about kids or teens, you absolutely have to respect children and teenagers. You can't…
[Dean] It can be hard.
[Shannon] It will come off as false if you go in thinking and judging them and being like annoyed with them and wanting to just make them older. Come in respecting their point of view or it will be false.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Dean, you're going to tell us about The Princess In Black.
[Dean] The Princess In Black is a phenomenal…
[Shannon] Phenomenal.
[Laughter]
[Dean] Yes, it's a… Let me see if I think of another word that you can say. No, it… What's the type of book that we are calling it? It's like transitional chapter book about a g… Princess Magnolia who is a princess and loves being a princess and walks around in pretty dresses. But when the monster alarm rings, she becomes the princess in black, and puts on a black costume and goes out and fights evil. As a superhero would. There are many books in the series, some of them…
[Shannon] There are seven so far. Yes.
[Dean] Oh, and if… Wait…
[Shannon] [Gorgeously?] illustrated by LeUyen Pham.
[Dean] How close are we to Easter? We're past Easter. Because I was going to recommend, there's a hungry bunny horde book if you're celebrating Lagomorph Liberation or some other kind of…
[Chuckles]
[Dean] Day.
[Shannon] [A bunny horde book] belongs in every Easter basket.
[Dean] That's true. That's true. So, The Princess In Black by Shannon and Dean Hale. Illustrated by…
[Shannon and Dean] LeUyen Pham.
[Dean] Something…
[Brandon] We love these books in our household. My sons just went straight through the whole series eagerly, so… They're fantastic.
[Shannon] Yay. Thank you.
[Dean] More coming.
[Dan] I purposely did not tell my children that I was hanging out with you guys today because they would have just blown a gasket. So.
 
[Shannon] I have to tell a quick story. One time I… My son borrowed a bunch of books from a friend. Several of them were Sanderson books. We were going out to dinner with the Sanderson's, so I brought my son's friend's books with us and he signed them to this guy. When I returned them, I was like, "Hey, just FYI, I saw Brandon Sanderson, so we just had him sign your books to you." He said, "Hold on a second." He ran upstairs, he ran back down, with all seven Harry Potter books and said, "Would you like to borrow these?"
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I'll sign them.
[Shannon] That's not going to happen. But only because… Also, talking about Princess in Black in terms of writing about children, these kinds of books… There's lots of different ways to write about children. In some of them, we like get inside a kid's head and show the world how they're seeing it. In other ones, like Princess in Black, it's purely wish fulfillment fun. There are no adults in this world. So we're not showing children by comparison to what they're not. We are just having kids in adventures. So the way they talk and the way they experience things is a very different style than in some of our other books.
 
[Brandon] I want to circle back to this what you said before about respecting children as you're writing about them. Because I find this is a hard line to walk sometimes, because some of the things my children do, as we've talked about, you just can't put on the page. Like my children, I think all children, are basically sociopaths for a large part of their…
[Narcissistic sociopaths. Yup.]
[Brandon] Getting that across, getting across… Like, I love my 10-year-old. He's awesome. But he will not accept that the world is not the way he wants it to be. If we say, "You have to do this." He says, "No." We say, "But if you don't, your teacher said this." "No, she didn't."
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Right? I'm like, "No, we have a piece of paper here." He's like, "She didn't say that. It doesn't say that." He won't accept it, it's right there. Like, evidence means nothing to my 10-year-old, right?
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Because he says it's not. So, how do you do things like this in a story about children, but also respect them and not act like they're… There's this fine line between talking down or treating down and also presenting how they are. That line can be really tough for me sometimes.
[Shannon] Yeah. It is a really fine line. Honestly, if we really wrote children exactly as they are in movies and books, nobody would like those characters at all.
[Dean] They just really aren't likable.
[Shannon] But we love them in real life.
[Dean] Yes.
[Shannon] But you just can't show that.
[Dean] [garbled… The paranoids aren't there… The paranoia…]
[Chuckles]
[Shannon] It's insane. So you have to show the bits… We're always asking ourselves, what's most important for this story? So, what matters about this story? Then characters in service of this story. Also, I mean, I think the… I'm sure you guys have talked about this many times. The heart, the foundation of every single story, no matter the genre, is relationships.
[Dean] Relationships. Oh, yeah.
[Shannon] Relationships between characters is all that matters, ultimately. Everything else is set dressing. So how the other characters react to the children is equally important to what the children say and do.
[Brandon] That's a really good point, thinking about it. Like, that's another dynamic that changes your perspective. Asking what the stakes are, asking what are the relationships, how does the child view the relationships with those around them? Which is going to be very different, but still very intense and important than the way I view the relationships.
[Dan] Well, those relationships… I love what you said about that being the most important thing. To talk about my own middle grade series again, the second one, Dragon Planet, I had this fantastic plot built, of how he was going to go out and explore this brand-new planet and there were dragons on it and all this stuff. I'm like, "This is still so boring."
[Chuckles]
[Dan] "Why is this Dragon book so boring?" Then just added in the little character arc was that the little boy is trying to get his dad to think of him as a scientist. All of a sudden, all of the stakes were there because that relationship was in place.
[Mary Robinette] I mean, I think of examples of stories where… That do not have relationships. But all of the ones that I get really excited about, like, the ones that I read for… Certainly, I think if you have characters on the page, that if they are not having relationships, there is a problem.
[Shannon] I mean any relationship, not just romantic, but any kind of connection…
[Mary Robinette] No no.
[Shannon] Between other characters.
[Mary Robinette] I just… There's… This is a total digression, but there's a story that I love that has no characters on the page at all. So…
[Brandon] Once in a while.
[Mary Robinette] Once in a while. Once in a while, you can do it.
[Shannon] Any rule can be broken.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. But one of the things that I was thinking about with the honoring of the children is that… What I've found is that when I try to remember like specific incidents from my own childhood, rather than looking at the outside of the children… From an outside observer point of view, that it is often a lot easier for me to have them move through the world in a way that makes emotional sense.
[Shannon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] There was something that someone said when they were… It was at an assembly. Like an art exhibit opening, and someone had brought their infant, and the infant cried. You could hear a couple people in the audience make a dismissive sound. But the speaker said, "I am so glad that you brought your child, because we've all been that child. We have all cried." It was just like, "Yes, yes. We have all cried." It's a good reminder that everyone can enjoy art.
[Shannon] Some of us have been the mom who desperately needs to get out of the house. But I can't leave without the baby.
[Brandon] Didn't you take the twins on tour with you?
[Shannon] I took my kids everywhere. Yeah. The twins, specifically, came when we shot the movie Austenland in England. So they were there for seven weeks with me.
[Brandon] On set?
[Shannon] Well, you know.
[Dean] When they let you on the set.
[Shannon] Yeah.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] All right. We're out of time on this episode. It's been awesome. Shannon, you're going to give us some homework.
[Shannon] Yes. So we talked about how the stakes change when you've got a young protagonist. So find a storybook or a movie that is about adults, and conceive of it as instead to be about a teenager or a child. Just write a paragraph about how that plot would change. What would… How would the heart of the story change if everything that happened in the book still happens, but it happens with and to a child?
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.11: Magic without Rules

Mar. 20th, 2019 11:09 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.11: Magic without Rules
 
 
Key Points: Magic without rules, soft magic, numinous magic -- what does it mean for the reader and the story? At least the characters don't know the rules. Mysterious, scary, we don't know what will happen! Sometimes it isn't important to understand the rules. The story is about something else besides the mechanics. Handwavium! Sometimes there is internal logic, but it is not explained. Other times, the magic does not appear to have internal logic. This creates wonder and awe. Also, a sense of dread. It also saves pages and explanations! Save your infodump equity. As yourself, does the reader really need to know how this works? Be aware, people and characters will try to find patterns or rules, but you as writer can show that they don't work consistently.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 11.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Magic without Rules.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] We are going to be talking about non-rule-based magic systems in this podcast. The title is actually a little bit contentious…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] I wanted to call it soft magic. If you Google soft magic, you will mostly find me…
[Yeah]
[Brandon] Defining soft magic this way. It is a term… Lots of people like to use the term soft fantasy to mean different things. So we're just going to say magic without rules. This is the definition we're looking at.
[Howard] In terms… Talking about the term for a moment. Magic without rules gives us a nice level of specificity for why we are doing anything with magic, what it means to the reader, what it means for the story. Provided we understand what we mean by the words magic, without, and rules.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah. One of the other terms that you will hear for talking about this kind of concept is numinous magic. Which is, again, magic in which the rules are not delineated.
[Brandon] Now, this doesn't necessarily mean there are no rules. It can mean you're just writing a story and there are no rules. Basically, when we talk about rule-based magic system, non-rule-based magic system, the idea is that the characters don't know necessarily. Like, they are not… A rule-based magic system is often… The story is about or involves the characters coming to understand, manipulate, and use and control the world around them. That's…
 
[Howard] It's best understood, Brandon, through the example you use when you illustrate Sanderson's First Law. The One Ring is hard magic. We know what happens when you put it on, we know how to break it, we know that nobody is able to willfully throw it into the lava.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Howard] Gandalf is soft magic. Or Gandalf is a rule-less magic. There are no rules. We don't know what Gandalf can do. Wizards are mysterious and scary, we don't know what's going to happen with the Balrog, we don't know if he can wave his staff and make the bad guys go away. He's a wizard.
[Brandon] Yep. Of course, there are Tolkien fans out there listening right now who are like, "No, no. I can list off the powers of a wizard." That's fine. That's from appendix material, you've dug into it. We're just talking about the general effect on the characters, specifically hear the hobbits. Or the reader not really knowing and not needing to know.
[Mary Robinette] That is the thing that I was going to say, is that when we're talking about this, it's okay to not have rules unless it is important to the story for the character to under… For the reader to understand. But when we're talking about rule-ba… Magic in which there are no rules, we're talking about a story in which it's not important to understand the rules.
[Brandon] Yes. Exactly. In fact, the goal of the story is that you don't.
[Howard] Or where it is important to not have a full understanding of how this works.
[Mary Robinette] Or just that it's not important. You just don't need to know.
 
[Margaret] The story is about something other than the mechanics of how this works.
[Brandon] Exactly. Some of these… Sometimes, like, it's for ambiance reasons, but, Margaret, you just reminded me, there's lots of times that if you take one step into the explaining the magic realm, suddenly you are raising a whole host of questions, that if you don't address and answer can really make the story feel off. If you never take that first step, if you tell the reader from the get-go, "No, this is not relevant. Accept it." This is your bye as we talked about last month, and then go forward. Your story is free to focus on this other thing, without getting caught in the weeds of having to explain this level of magic and this level of magic and this magic stone and that sort of thing.
[Howard] The science fiction concept here is handwavium. This is not the… I'm waving my hand like these are not the droids you're looking for. Except it's this is not the physics you're looking for. Below a certain point, we're not going to go into the physics, we're not gonna talk about the neutrino output of this, we're just going to let this slide, because the moment we commit to math at that level, everything starts to unravel and we're no longer telling the story we want to tell.
 
[Mary Robinette] Well, like… One of the examples that I actually think of is King Arthur. Like, how exactly does that sword stay in the stone? Like, how does it know? Is there… Is it a DNA test? Like, what is the rule system for keeping the sword in the stone and identifying the one true king? We don't know, we don't care.
[Brandon] Right. The one…
[Margaret] I was thinking, as we were talking, of the water that falls on you from nowhere. Nobody knows where the water comes from, it just falls on you when you lie. It's never explained, and we never want to know how it's explained, because that's not what it's about.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Why does Pinocchio's nose grow? [I don't know]
[Margaret] it just does.
[Mary Robinette] He lied.
 
[Brandon] Now, I do also want us to say, when we're talking about this, there is a distinction, to me, between… There's several different ways to do this. One is to have internal logic and never explain it, which is where we're getting here. But there is another way, which is magic that doesn't seem to have internal logic. Which can be really cool. This is the magic that you not only don't understand how it works, you don't understand what the consequences will be if you use this magic. A classic example of this would be like the monkey's paw, where you are given some little bit of information. Hey, this thing will grant you wishes. But the wishes… you'll have no understanding of the consequences. Often, they will go far beyond your expectations. Where the story becomes less about the magic or even what the magic can do, it becomes about the terrible things that happen when you can use forces you can't comprehend.
[Howard] For me, the whole… The story… The point of the story of the monkey's paw is attempting to understand the rules by which this thing works is going to result in you being betrayed even worse by your use of this thing. The more conditions you try to place on it, the more disastrous this will be.
 
[Brandon] So, why would you write a story like this? What are some of the things you gain from it?
[Mary Robinette] Often, you gain a sense of wonder. A lot of times when we do start putting rules in, it makes something feel mundane and ordinary. Sometimes, what you want is something that is numinous, that there is a sense of wonder, a sense of awe to it. So one of the things that you can do is to take some of the explanation away, and just let this magical thing happen.
[Brandon] Okay. I would say a sense of wonder can also be replaced by a sense of dread.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Brandon] They can go very hand in hand. This is one of the things I see from really great rule-less magic systems sometimes is that the main character feels so small. They are presented with a world in which like… Howard, you were telling a story about a gun?
[Howard] The lazy gun. The… I quoted… Referenced Iain Banks last month. I'm going to do it again. Iain Banks, Against A Dark Background. The whole story is… It's a MacGuffin story. We're trying to find the lazy gun. The only things we know about the lazy gun are if you turn it upside down, it weighs about 3 pounds more, and, if you point it at something and pull the trigger, whatever you've pointed it at, will die. The method of death, at one point, it gets fired and a monster mouth appears out of nowhere and munches the guy in half and he's dead. The result, for me, I'm going to come back to Mary with the sense of wonder, the numinous magic concept. It's a MacGuffin whose rules we don't need to understand. What's important is that the fact that no one understands it and the fact that it is so magical and powerful, now everybody wants it. That's what drives the story. It's the wanting of the thing, it has nothing to do with how the thing works.
[Brandon] I love that example of… If you pull the trigger, you expect them to explode. But something comes out of another dimension and eats them… It leaves you with a sense of… Again, this is something beyond my comprehension currently. I have no idea how this thing is working. That's scary. This is… This whole kind of eldritch Lovecraftian idea that we are actually very small is a really interesting and frightening emotion that fiction can evoke.
 
[Margaret] I think the other thing that you get when you have magic without set rules, is, just in terms of resource allocation, which we were talking about last month, the page weight or the word count that you're not using for explaining how magic works or for having characters who are masters of it. You get to apply it to other things. If that's not what your story is about, even if you worked out the rules for how magic works, your story might not need it.
[Brandon] Right. That's a really good point, because one thing when newer writers are talking about info don't send things like this, one thing they don't seem to get, and it's been hard for me to explain sometimes, is that when a reader is really curious about something, you gain infodump equity. Right? That as soon as you start to infodump on something there really interested in, then that paragraph kind of blurs away and the world comes to them. That same paragraph describing something else might be really frustrating to them. That's often whether you've used your cues correctly, leading them to questions and curiosity, whether… I read a lot of books where I'm really interested in this world element they brought up, and instead I get an infodump on a different one.
[Oh, yeah]
[Brandon] Oh, I get so bored so quickly. Or I'm really interested in this character's conflict and we stopped for the worldbuilding infodump. You gotta put these in places… 
[Margaret] You gotta prime the pump for us.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I say, and I think this gets to the heart of what Margaret was talking about with the focus, that you can buy time basically, is that unless this… That the… Unless the information… This is true for all exposition, but in less it affects why we care about something, unless it affects our understanding of what the character wants or if it affects… If it doesn't affect our understanding of how they will achieve their goal, we don't… The reader doesn't actually need to know it. A lot of times, people are like, "Well, let me explain my magic system." Like, do we actually need to know? Do I actually need to know how the spaceship works? That's kind of one of the other things that you can do when you're looking at this soft magic, is… It's like I know that when I pick up my phone, I can take pictures with it and occasionally make phone calls. I can tell you well, it works with a computer inside. That's about as far as I can go. I think that you can do that with magic, too.
[Howard] I'm reminded of the… I think it was a comedy clip about the airline attendant telling everybody to turn their devices off.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] They're arguing with her about the devices. She finally collapses and says, "Okay, look, people. Airplanes are magic. We don't know how it works."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] "You guys just need to turn that stuff off, because if you break the magic, we fall out of the sky."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] It's kind of beautiful, because honestly, that's sort of how all of us feel about airplanes.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I see a dichotomy here in the magic without rules, and it is that there is magic without rules that the reader can see, and there is magic that is explicitly… There is an absence of rules so that what the reader sees is an inconsistency, or an absence of any sorts of sense. The lazy gun is that inconsistency. I don't know… Well, there is one consistency. It's going to kill you. But beyond that, I don't see any rules to it.
[Brandon] Very, very infrequently do you write a magic with no rules. It can happen. But usually, if were talking about magic without rules, it's magic where the characters can't… Don't understand usually what will happen, or at least the consequences of what they're using.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for the book of the week, though, which is actually Bookburners.
[Margaret] It is. Bookburners is… It's going to sound like television when I talk about it, because we discuss it in terms of season and episodes, but it is a series of novelettes that are released in e-book and audio form. Written by Max Gladstone, Mur Lafferty, Andrea Phillips, Brian Francis Slattery, and also by me. We chose Bookburners for this particular episode, because this is a series about a group that works for a black budget arm of the Vatican, charged with keeping encroaching magic, which seems to be coming more and more into our world, and it is their job to try to hold back the tide and keep it out. The justification that the organization that they work for has always given for this is the fact that we have no idea how this works. Anybody who has ever tried to use magic constructively or productively ends up being like a toddler with a machine gun. Things go wrong very, very quickly. It is Season Four is out now. Season Five will be released episodically at some point this summer. You get to see over the arc how well they do that job, and how they have to change their attitudes towards how magic is.
[Howard] By way of clarification, when you say this summer, summer of…
[Margaret] 2019. Thank you.
 
[Brandon] So let me ask you, specifically, Margaret, how did you go about writing a story where the magic doesn't have rules? Or, if it… How did you do this?
[Margaret] It started out… Because we are writing it collectively and we're sort of building on things and we're building the characters, it did start… There was a certain amount of okay, try weird things, and if it seemed to fit the right tone for the broad strokes of what we thought magic would do, all right, we'll go with it. In the first season, Mur did an episode where you have a restaurant kitchen that is made out of meat, where people are cutting pieces off the walls and frying it to their customers and everyone is obsessed with this one restaurant in Scotland. We have episodes where an entire apartment… This is one of Brian's episodes. It transforms into this strange mutant… Mutable magical landscape, and a guy opens the wrong book and gets kind of sucked into it, and becomes part of his apartment. As we went forward, we were like, "Okay. If this is what we have established…" Eventually, we reached the point where it's like, "Okay. Let's come up with some guidelines," as the story is progressing and our arc plot is going on. What is actually going on behind the scenes, and what do we think is the cause of what they call the rising tide?
[Brandon] Okay. So you kind of just like… You're discovery writing and kind of doing that classic discovery writing thing, where you're waiting to see what connections the kind of group hive mind comes up with that you will then push forward with.
[Margaret] There is a certain amount of building the bridge as you are crossing the river going on, yeah.
[Brandon] That's awesome. What about the rest of you? How do you write something… Now, I have a lot of trouble with this. I'll be perfectly frank. Writing something where I don't start explaining the rules… I just, ah… I don't do that very often. If I do, it doesn't go very well. So, how do you approach it?
[Howard] Well, I don't outline the rules, but I generate the rules.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] We're going to talk about constructed languages at some point. I created a language because I needed a code in which someone knew what the code meant and knew how to find a thing and it needed to feel like this is a thing that will actually work. It needed to feel as if there was a consistency behind it. But I absolutely didn't have time to explain all of the things that went into it. Pages and pages of numerology creation went into two lines of dialogue. That's what happens when I try to build magic without rules.
[Mary Robinette] So what I find is that… Like, I've got a story that's coming out in the last… Or that came out in the last issue of Shimmer. It is ruleless magic. Except there are a couple of things that we know. That you don't want to make Gramma say something three times. What I find with the ruleless magic, when I work with it, is that because people are pattern seeking creatures, that even if the magic, even if I just free write the magic and things are just weird and stuff just happens, that the characters within that world are still going to try to find patterns to it, and that there's usually one thing that they will still kind of hang onto. So, like we all know that if you walk away from a bus stop, the bus will come. If there is a chance of rain and you leave the house without your umbrella, it will definitely rain on you. Absolutely, 100%. We know this. Even though that is clearly not actually how this magic system on Earth works. Nora Jemisen's 100,000 Kingdoms, the magic is a written form of magic. So we know that, but the rest of it is clueless. So what I tend to do is say, "Well, people are going to try to apply stuff to this. They're just wrong, so it doesn't work consistently, because it is a rule that they have put on it in a desperate attempt to understand it.
 
[Brandon] I like that idea a lot. That's very helpful. In fact, I think I'm going to assign homework along those lines. Because I've been thinking, take a story that has… That you've worked on or that you been planning that has a very rule-based magic. Where you think you know the rules. Have the rules all go wrong intentionally. Like, you have control of the story, but have the characters realize they don't know the rules, and deal with the ramifications of that.
[Mary Robinette] While you're working on that, I'm going to tell you a secret. There are rules in the Glamorous Histories that Jane and Vincent are completely wrong about.
[Brandon] Awesome. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 11.9: Q&A on the Element of Wonder

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

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

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

( Over the rainbow... )

[Brandon] All right. It is time to break for our homework. But first, I would really like to thank Gama for being on the podcast with us.
[Gama] Well, thank you for having me. It's great.
[Brandon] Everyone should check out his books. I'd like to thank the audience here at LTUE.
[Whoo!]
[Brandon] One woman is so excited to clap, that she dropped her laptop.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] I am going to give the homework here. One of the questions talked about… In fact, several of them took different tax on this, which is how can you have someone who is world-weary and knows a lot about the world still experience a sense of wonder? What I want you to do is try to do this contrast. Have a character who is not necessarily in awe of some aspect of the world, and find a way, in a story or scene, that you can evoke a sense of awe in the reader. Whether by doing what I talked about, harkening back to the character's first experience, or just having them blow it off, but the reader says, "Wait! This is awesome." This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[Whoo!]
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Writing Excuses 11.8: Wonder As a Subgenre

Feb. 24th, 2016 12:48 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.8: Wonder As a Subgenre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/02/21/11-08-wonder-as-a-subgenre/

Key points: Wonder as subplot. Often the first half is exploring amazing, wonderful new things, while the main plot is building for the second half. Mash up waiting for the next wonder with something else. Put awesome things in! Make a list, order them, and write. Beware taking them out of order, kung fu on a train goes before the nuclear explosion, not afterwards. Use set pieces, major scenes. Make your buildup fit. Foreshadowing is important. Sense of wonder, strangeness, newness, and reactions. Make sure the character can be awed -- sometimes a naive viewpoint character can help (eh, Watson?). But when Sherlock is surprised, you know it is amazing. Don't just do set pieces, fill in the corners with amazing candy wrappers, too. Even small moments of wonder can be very useful. Build the progression -- something new, something strange and unexpected, and then amazement. Booger-flavored candy? Consider timebombs, plot tokens that foreshadow you've got this many coming. Apprentice plot, travelogue, whenever you set up promises of wonders to come and then pay them off, it can be good. Be careful that your subgenre doesn't take over the story, though. Use little pockets, layers, flourishes of wonder, not a distraction but an accent, just an Easter egg for the reader to enjoy now and then.

( A drop of sunshine, a sparkle of dew, a firework display, bright and shiny! )
[Brandon] We actually are out of time on this. This has been a fantastic podcast. But we're actually going to give you some homework.
[Dan] All right. Your homework this week is that we want you to do this. We want you to actually take a story that you're working on, that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with a sense of wonder, and apply a sense of wonder to some aspect of it. Somebody walks into a room and sees something amazing. Or walks out into the city street and sees something amazing. Write a paragraph or two where your character experiences a sense of wonder.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 11.3: Layering the Elemental Genres

Jan. 21st, 2016 11:47 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.3: Layering the Elemental Genres

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/01/17/11-03-layering-the-elemental-genres/

Key points: Borrow elemental genres (ideas, emotions) from other stories and inject them into your stories as subplots, character arcs, or mashups. Layer your elemental genres to create sequels that are the same, but different. Let each character's arc be a different elemental genre. You can use design elements, set dressing, to keep the story together, and mix-and-match elemental genres underneath that to tell different stories. Check your underpinnings -- what is the feeling you like? Drill down into the elemental genre behind the design elements. Turn your wall into a trench, or darkness, or... with a great unknown hidden behind it.

( Is there icing in between the layers? )
[Brandon] We're going to leave you with some homework. Mary's got the homework for us, and it relates to the homework we gave you last time.
[Mary] All right. So last time we asked you to identify the major driving emotion of the story that you are interested in working on. What I want you to do now is I want you to think of a contrasting emotion. So essentially what you're doing is you're creating a foil plot, a foil emotion for your primary emotion. Because this is going to allow you to showcase ever... Or do a contrast between the darkness of one and the happy emotions of the other. So think about not the design elements, but think about the emotional elements and think about... You don't have to worry about our proprietary vocabulary yet. I just want you to identify the emotion that you want to elicit in yourself if you were hacking your brain.
[Brandon] Now by this point, we will have all 11 of the ideas we've come up with put on our website and we will post them such... We will put them in a place that they are easy to find each week, if you want to come glance over them again. As you can tell from this episode, we're still getting used to this terminology ourselves.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Hopefully, across the course of the year, we'll all start really using the same terminology. This is the purpose...
[Howard] I'm going to put a stake in the ground and say that by the end of the season, we will have altered some of the terminology and changed the list, because it just makes more sense.
[Mary] Yep. You guys will probably be better versed in it that we will, because we just talked about it once.
[Brandon] All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 11.1: Introduction to Elemental Genre

Jan. 6th, 2016 01:14 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.1: Introduction to Elemental Genre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/01/03/writing-excuses-11-1-introduction-to-elemental-genre/

Key Points: Season 11 is going to be different! Elemental genres. Each month, expect the first week to be an elemental drill down, second week to be a wild card, third week to be using the elemental genre in subplots, and the fourth week will be Q&A. Elemental genres are the things that make you read, the emotional resonance that drives a story. Not bookshelf genres, but elemental genres. The 11 elemental genres planned are wonder, idea, adventure, horror, mystery, thriller, humor, relationship, drama, issue, and ensemble. This is a framework for talking about what makes readers turn the page and have emotional responses, not a hard-and-fast set of categories or rules. Elemental genres let you mix-and-match underneath the veneer of the bookshelf categories.
( Underneath the veneer, they found elemental genres! )
[Brandon] But I am going to give you some homework today. Your homework is actually to take some of the films and books that you love, and I want you to try and drill down to... You don't have to really define the elemental genre, because we haven't defined all of these for you yet. But what I really want you to do is start looking at what the emotional impact of that story is. What the people who made the story are doing to you. How they're hacking your brain. Try to relate... Try to strip away the veneer and dig down at it for yourself. Pick three of those, books and films that you love, and see if you can do it. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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