wetranscripts | Entries tagged with world builder's disease

Writing Excuses 20.20: The Lens of Where and When

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-20-the-lens-of-where-and-when

Key Points: Where and when, aka setting, or worldbuilding. What are societal constraints and conventions that you can use? How are your characters shaped by the world they are in? What nitty-gritty details of daily life are going to show up in your work? Where does the poop go? Where do place and setting hit person? What has the character experienced? Meaningful details make a world become vivid. Make your characters interact with the world. How do you build a setting that can change, without breaking? Sometimes you do upend it, and write about the consequences of that. Or you can keep the definitive parts, and change things around that. What happens after the glorious revolution can make a really interesting story.

[Season 20, Episode 20]

[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is your opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

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[Season 20, Episode 20]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Dan] The Lens of Where and When.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] Today we're going to talk about where and when, and we're going to talk about setting. How you view and use setting. And in speculative fiction, we often call this worldbuilding. But once you've finished building the world, how do you capture it on the page? How do you convey that world, and how, most importantly, does that world change the things that you're writing and change the way that you're telling the story? What does it really mean for a setting to be vivid, or a world to feel deep, or a place to feel lived-in? And so I want to throw this question out first, how does the setting, how does the place where the story takes place, change what you are writing and how you write it?

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that this is a thing that I play with a lot because I'm writing secondary world fiction sometimes and sometimes I'm writing alternate history, and they offer me different choices. We've talked before about how sometimes when you're writing something that's an alternate history, when we had C. L. Clark on last season, that there is a tension that comes from this, from the audience's awareness of the setting. And that you can use that to change the way the audience is thinking about the story. And you can also use it as a way of focusing in on the story, the story that you're trying to tell. So I find that when I'm trying to set a story, that one of the things I'm looking for are kind of sort of the landscape things that I use. Some of it is that, with time in particular… Yeah, time in particular, I'm looking for the societal constraints and conventions that I use. If it's a time of war, that's going to be a very different story than a time of peace. So those are things that I look at for how I support some of the other choices that I've already made.

[Erin] I think, for me, there sort of two things. One is that characters are shaped by the world they live in. And I think this is sometimes where, not to go back and think… Bring trad character into it, but I think it's really important. Because I think sometimes, because worldbuilding can be so exciting in speculative fiction, like, we can go really ham on, like, thinking of, like, every really interesting thing and how the sewer system works and, like, how the magic system works without thinking about, like, what does it actually mean for, like, John Jane Doe walking down the street, and, like, what that means in terms of what do they encounter. What systems are there? How do they get from place to place? Where are the tensions that they're getting in their everyday life? What's easy for them that we would find hard? What's hard for them that we might find easy? So, I think the first thing I think about a lot is, like, where… How does the place sort of weigh… We talked about weight earlier this season… How does the place weigh on the characters in both a good and bad way? How do they feel it? How do they live in?

[Dan] Yeah. And that's such an important thing to think about, when you're worldbuilding, because when we are doing worldbuilding, I know there's often a tendency to think about the really broad kind of Tolkien-esque kind of things. Like, this is a world that has elves, and they live in trees, and whatever you're trying to do. Whereas the nitty-gritty kind of daily life details are often the ones that are going to show up in your work so much more than that. How do they get around in this city that lives… They live in trees? Do they have public transportation? Do they just have to walk everywhere? Do they have any kind of…

[Mary Robinette] Like the puppet [garbled] you gotta go get that.

[Erin] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Dan] What is going on here? And I remember when I was breaking in, there was this huge push to think about economy. And every time I would go to a convention, there would be some worldbuilding panel where they were like, you have to think about where all of the food comes from and where all the money comes from. And, yes, I think that that's a useful thing to think about. But, for me, I agree with you, Erin, that so much of it comes down to character and what is going to affect these characters. And, yes, if there is no food around or if food is scarce, that's something that's going to weigh on them heavily. But if there's always food and they don't have to think about it, then maybe it's never going to come up in your story.

[Erin] Yeah, I think… And, I think I also… I often find, like, those systems questions, like, do you get so, like, taken away from the people. Like, people always ask, like, where does the poop go? A question we should always ask…

[Laughter]

[Erin] About our stories, truly. But, like, that's somewhat interesting, but if you're, like, so and so, like, they have a poop shooter system that, like, uses hollow vines to shoot it out of the trees. Like…

[Laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] elves.

[Dan] This is why Tolkien never got into it.

[Laughter]

[Erin] But Legolas was, like, well, like, that attracts, like, rodents, that attracts weird things to the trees, so, like, whose job is it, like, who's actually down there, like, sweeping up at the bottom, like, of, like, where the poop shooter goes out?

[Dan] Cleaning up…

[Erin] That is…

[Dan] Pneumatic vines.

[Erin] The pneumatic vine cleaner.

[Dan] Legolas! There's rats in the pneumatics again!

[Erin] Like, there are 10 more… 10 times more stories about Legolas, the pneumatic cleaner, and, like, whatever's happening there then there are, like, to me, then the big systemic questions. So, it's like when place and setting, like, hit person, that's when, for me, the sweet spot is, for sure.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and I will often use that when I'm having trouble finding traction on a thing. Where I've got the general idea, but I'm like… What am I going to do with this? I don't always go sequentially. Sometimes I start with character, but sometimes, I'm like I don't know who this story is about. And I will look at place for who is available to me. And I look across the socioeconomic spectrum, who are the people that are the poorest people of society, who are the poop cleaners down at the bottom? Maybe it's a high status job, who knows?

[Erin] I like that. It's Legolas' duty.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] That's why he's got to have the braids, to keep…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Oh, my God.

[Erin] Sorry, listeners.

[Dan] So. At the risk of getting us back on track…

[No, no]

[Dan] Let's talk a little bit more about time, about the when half of this where and when, because if you are writing historical fiction, if you are writing something set in our world, I think it becomes very natural to think about time. But if you are writing something about outer space, if you're writing something about… Set in a completely different world altogether, then there's… Time still matters. Like you were saying, is this a time of war or is this a time of peace? Is this a time of intellectual Renaissance? Is this a time of whatever it is? There's a lot of those when questions we can still ask.

[Mary Robinette] And it's also, I think, for me, one of the things that's fun to play with with when is also when in the characters life is this? What are the things that they have experienced? Knowing a little bit about their history, that's… That history is part of the when of the character. And, again, with the character, but it does affect the way the story is told. If you know that it is after a traumatic event for… In a time of war, chances are that this character has experienced traumatic events. What are those, how do they affect the story? Also, time of day can make a huge impact on a story. A scene that is set at noon can often read very differently than one that's set at midnight. Hello. Let us meet at noon…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] For our romantic tryst that no one will know is happening.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Like…

[Erin] And that… But that's interesting, because it immediately makes me think, well, what kind of world… Like, if I want to have that, if I want a tryst at high noon, but no one knows it's happening, what does that say about the way time is viewed and used in that world in a way that's different from ours? Is it, like, the sun is so hot that it's, like, so dangerous to go out during noon because your eyes will melt out of your face, and so, therefore, like, it is dangerous and difficult and that's why this is the time to meet? So I think it's sometimes fun to, like… Time is something I think is hard for us to get away from in some ways, but a lot of times, even when we create new worlds, they're still like working 9 to 5, like, in some ways, they're still doing everything during the day and sleeping at night, because that's the way we do. But, like, is that always the case? What about a place where there is no night, or there is no day? All of that kind of stuff.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm working on a short story right now, as we record this, where my character winds up in a world that… Cave systems, it's all like phosphorus and fungi, and I'm like, do they have day night cycles? Like, when is sleeping happening? How do they tell the passage of time? How do they tell seasons? I'm just finishing working on Martian Contingency. And I think I have probably complained about this multiple times, that I have so many regrets because I decided to structure it around calendar, but there's the Earth calendar and then there's the Martian calendar, and Martian days are 39 minutes longer than Earth days. So, when do we celebrate holidays? Do we keep them with what's going on at home, do we celebrate them at a new time based on the cycles on Mars? And also your living underground, so your idea of day night cycles are based on the very few people who are going out on the surface. And it's like… It becomes this whole cascading thing where the when of the story affects, like, every decision that I made and also it kind of hits a point… It's not arbitrary, but it's… It offers opportunities to be in flux and reveal something about people, because of the way they are making… They are interfacing with time.

[Dan] And speaking of time, this is the time when we are going to pause for a moment.

[Dan] All right. So we are back. And I would like to ask you one of the other questions that we posed at the very beginning. What does it mean for a setting to be vivid? How does a setting come alive?

[Erin] I have an answer to this, I think, that actually comes back to time as well. So, a couple of years ago, I got the opportunity to write for the Pathfinder Lost Omens travel section. And I was actually in charge of the time and calendar section, and got to think about how different cultures within this really big world of Golarion, which is the Pathfinder world, how different cultures actually dealt with time. So as I was thinking about it, I thought a lot about how we… When we decide to mark an occasion, when we decide to measure our world in a particular way, there's usually a reason for it. Sometimes it's an arbitrary Emperor, as in our month system. But it can be much more meaningful. So I think worlds feel vivid when things that we choose to put in them have meaning. Like, have a… Have, like, a real meaning to them. And so, like, for example, I think, working with goblins, and I decided that they actually measure times by the length of songs and campfires. And so everything… I like that, because I was like fire is so visceral, like, how long… And they really know, like, how long this fire will burn, and they have, like… It's something that they all kind of can figure out, like, really quickly, and they know how long this song lasts. So there like, okay, we're going to sing this long song, and by the time that's the end, we will… It will have been an hour or three hours. And you get to a point where you could sing it in your mind. And you don't actually have to sing that song out loud. And what I like about that is that it's details. So I think worlds become vivid when you have details and those details have meanings that resonate with the world and make sense for it.

[Dan] Yeah. Well, and I would add further that your story needs to take advantage of those details. If that's something that we can only learn about reading the appendix, then it didn't necessarily affect the story in any way.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Whereas if your characters are kind of constantly singing that song to themselves in the background, that that's how they talk about time and they say, "Wait for me here, I'll be back in two songs of whatever," then that matters, and it does bring it to life.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing about that is that it is an interaction with the world. One of the things that I see people do frequently when they… They have world builder's disease, is that they can describe a world, they can use all of these beautiful pieces of language to tell you about the trees and the vines in the poop shooters and all of this, like, gloriously visceral language, but no one interacts with it. And so the story can become static. For me, the thing about the where and the when is that it is a thing that is inhabited. Like, time passes. I know that my animals can tell time, because if I'm late with their meal, they definitely let me know. So they have an awareness of time. But it is that interaction with the time. It is the this is a thing that supposed to happen. So when I'm thinking about it, I am thinking about how is my character interacting with it? The thing that you were talking about, the being back in two songs. That's an interaction with it. What are the other ways my character is interacting with the world? And that, for me, is how I make it vivid. By making it a lived in place.

[Erin] And I also think, challenging the world that you've built. I think sometimes we're reluctant because we spent all this time building, like, a beautiful house of cards and you don't want to blow on it. But that's when things get interesting. So I was thinking about the measuring time by fire, and, like, what happens in a typhoon? When you really needed to measure it, and the fire goes out unexpectedly. Like, then what happens? Like, and that probably happens at a crucial moment of conflict. So, I like to set up a world, and then by… If you can knock over parts of the world and the world still stands, I think, for some reason, that feels more lived in and more vivid. Because there are many things in our world that don't make sense for that fall apart and we still keep going. So when things are too perfect and everything lines up to well, sometimes it also feels like very… Like a doll's house that's, like, really pretty, but like it doesn't feel like… It feels like dolls are living in there instead of, like, people in these stories.

[Dan] Yeah. Well, and that's a big question that I often think about with worldbuilding, especially with a series or, like you were talking about with Pathfinder, some kind of ongoing setting that kind of more or less needs to remain static. You want your characters to be able to affect the world. You want things to be able to change. But you still want to be able to tell more stories in there. How can you build a setting like this that has intriguing when's and why's and you're able to mess with it without completely upending it and breaking it? So that book 2 takes place in a different setting altogether?

[Mary Robinette] I think it's… I think, first of all, that you actually can upend it and have book to take place in a different setting. So that's an option. But if you don't want to do that, then you think about, for me, the things that define the world as this is the place. And you can break the things around it, but there are still definitive things. So, if I'm telling a story that set in Mississippi and I dry up the Mississippi River, it has become fundamentally a different place. So I think of the Mississippi River as being a fundamental piece of the Mississippi, and I affect a lot of things around it. But I make a decision ahead of time, I'm not going to touch that. That said, it can be really interesting when you fundamentally break the thing. Sometimes the thing that is the defining characteristic is the people that are in it. But people are shaped by environment. It's all linked together.

[Erin] I also think that sometimes you… [Garbled] I think it's hard to break a world in some ways. Like… Fortunately or unfortunately, one thing that I often like grate at a little bit in fantasy is, like, when it's like we killed the king, and we get a new king, and, like, that definitely fixed all the things that that king was doing.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] It's like systems are very ingrained, and so I think one way to do it is to have somebody… Like, the system of the world doesn't change, but a person's understanding of it does. The way that they try to change it in their corner does. And then actually seeing the implications of change. Because a lot of times, after the curtain goes down on book 1, and the person's like we have done the glorious Revolution, it's like but all the things that you learned, all the ways that the place has weighed on you, will change the way that your revolution runs and what you do next and how easy it is for you to fall into the trap of becoming the world that you wished to break. And I think that is, like, such a… And that, to me, is a really interesting story…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Where it's like the world persists even if I try to change it.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's the thing. It's that there's logical causal chains. It's like this follows that, this happens because of that. You actually made me think of, also, Mistborn. When you hit the end of book one, it is… I remember thinking, how do you write a sequel in this? Because they've done all the things, and the world is fundamentally different. And book 2 is very much like, oh, now the world is fundamentally different. What are the consequences of that? And…

[Dan] Yeah. The… Mistborn is a great example. It's one of the ones that I always go to when I'm working with game writers and saying, "How do you end this?" This is a problem I have right now, because I'm working on the Mistborn RPG. Wendy you set your game if you have so many different points, and his series is filled with points that completely redefine what the setting is. So many people think of Mistborn as, well, there are these grand balls in this kind of dark industrial city where terrible things happen, and people sneak around in the mist. And that is one of the seven books. And then that setting changes, and you move on to the next one. And if you want to maintain, you come up with that one cool idea that you think is great and you want to maintain that over the course of several books, maybe don't kill the Lord Ruler at the end of the first one. But if you do want to explore that concept of change and explore the world is different, then, yeah, it's okay to do that.

[Erin] I know we're running low on time ourselves, but this actually reminds me of an answer to your earlier question about what does time mean? Which is also, like, where does the actual world itself… Where does the city or the country or the universe view itself in a timescale? Do you know what I mean? Are we year one of a generation shift or year 1000? Like, we usually set ourselves against something. Are we the end of an era, the beginning, the saw he middle of an empire? And, really thinking about, like, where does your actual setting take place, like, timewise? Like, what is their image? Where does it start? Where did their causal chain start of their society and are they the first link, the middle, or the end? Because, I think, that actually… Like, dying empires have some similarities, even though they die in different ways. And so do new revolutions have similarities, even if they're very different in their goals and what they do, because there's something about newness and there's something about, like, stagnation that can actually… That are a thing of time that has nothing to do with and everything to do with the actual setting that you're building.

[Dan] Absolutely. We are going to end this episode now with some homework, which is this.

[Dan] Take something that you have written in which the setting matters. A scene that takes place in a certain party or setting or location, a building, whatever it is. And then rewrite it in a completely different setting and see what kind of changes that suggests to the characters or forces into the story.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 20.02: Q&A Aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise, with Mark Oshiro and Kate McKean

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-02-qa-aboard-the-writing-excuses-cruise-with-mark-oshiro-and-kate-mckean/

Questions and Answers:

Q: How do you know when a character is taking up so much space in your book that they need to die and maybe never come back?

A: Is the character redundant? Is the character related to the general themes? Does the character fit the tone of the book? Is this a more interesting character, so I need to make them the star? If you take the character out, does it affect the story? Are they filling a role that nothing else fills? Is this a protagonist, main character, or hero?

Q: If the story is very plot focused, how can you make it more character focused?

A: Who is the most interesting person for this plot to happen to? Why is this character staying in this plot? What ability do they have to participate in this plot? Why is this character unsuited to solve this problem?

Q: Say you have some cool thing that doesn't quite fit the story. How do you decide whether to rip it out or find a way to shoehorn it in?

A: Is it going to baffle readers? Save it for a later opportunity. Can it do some other things? Don't buy cool solar powered lights for your garden path if you don't have a garden path. Does it fit with the characters?

Q: What are some strategies for finding the motivation to work on something that has a deadline when there are other fun things to do instead?

A: Money. Fear. Think about what you will lose if you don't finish it. Don't trade what you want most for what you want at the moment. Reward yourself with joy. Break it into small pieces, and use checkboxes. Think about why you don't want to do this. Write the ending first, and then use it to remind yourself where you are going.

Q: When do you call a manuscript done?

A: Everything can be made better. Can this be more of the thing that I want it to be? Art is never finished, only abandoned. Realize that there is a lot of refinement afer the point where you say it's done. First, is there a little voice saying, "Chapter 3 is really weird?" Second, make it hard for the editor to say no. You get more than one chance.

[Season 20, Episode 02]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] Q&A on a ship.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And we are joined by Mark Oshiro and Kate McKean here on Navigator of the Seas. Hey, Mark, tell us about yourself real quick.

[Mark] Hello everyone. I am a young adult, middle grade author of some books that I've won some awards and been on some lists and I'm trying to pet every dog in the world.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Short and to the point. Kate! Tell us about yourself.

[Kate] My name is Kate McKean. I'm a literary agent at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, and I'm very excited to be here.

[Howard] Well, we're excited to have you. And our students here at WXR right on the Navigator have been excited all week to learn from you guys. This has been awesome. But they still have some questions. So, let's turn it over to our students and have someone ask a question.

[Someone] Well. How do you know when a character is taking up so much space in your book that they need to die and possibly never have been in your book at all?

[Howard] Restating the question, how do you know when a character is taking so much space in your book that they need to die and maybe never come back?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things I look at is… The same things that I look at… I evaluate the character in many of the same ways that I evaluate a line. Is it redundant? Is the character doing things that other characters are doing? Is the character related to the general themes? Does the character fit the tone of the book? Those are the things that… It's the same kind of metric. But you're just applying it to a different sort of experience.

[Dan] There's a… One of the things that I do in this case and in many other cases, any time the outline goes off track, is ask myself, do I need to get this back on track or is this a better track than I had in the first place? It could be that the character's taking up so much space precisely because you love them and they are more interesting than what anything else is going on. So you might need to just retool a little bit and let them be the star.

[Mary Robinette] Also, then, in some cases, where those two guys should be one guy. And you can just give all of that stuff to one guy, and then cut but you don't need.

[Mark] Yeah. Any instance I've ever had, where I've had to completely excise a character, the question became, if I take this character out, does it actually affect the story? If the answer is no, bye. Goodbye. Throw them overboard.

[Laughter]

[Mark] To fit the metaphor where we are. Please don't throw anyone overboard.

[Kate] No crimes.

[Mark] No crimes. No crimes on this ship.

[Erin] I actually… It's funny, because I was just thinking about the other side of that, which is it's possible that the reason that this character is taking up so much space is that they're filling a role in the story that there's nothing else there to fill. Like, they're the one who is advancing the story, at a time where no one else has that plot information. They're the one representing the characters back story, because there's nobody else to talk about. So maybe the answer could be that you could either add other characters, give part of what that character is doing to other characters, or figure out if there's a way that this story can hold it. Because you don't want to, like, knock out the supporting wall of your house, because you don't like it, and then be like, oh, no, it all fell down.

[Howard] I come back to the tripartite definition, the protagonist, the main character, and the hero. Who can all be the same person, but they can also be three different people. If someone is taking up a huge amount of page space in a story, and they are not fulfilling the role of protagonist or hero or main character, then I am well off outline, I'm now writing a different story, and it's time to figure out which story this character actually fits in.

[Someone] So, if you're writing a new book, and your plots tend to be very plot focused, what are some tricks to making the book more character focused?

[Howard] Restating. So, if you're writing a book, and the story is very plot focused, what are some tricks to making it more character focused?

[Mark] A question I ask myself, actually, because I'm also an outline or as well, is, very early on in my process of developing an idea, is who is the most interesting person for this plot to happen to? Instead of just creating a character whatnot, think of possible… Not just possible conflicts, but, like, what's a contrast? What's a very interesting contrast of this happening to a specific person? That often can help me find a way into a much more character driven story, still within the very plot heavy story.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I… Similar to Mark, but one of the things that I will specifically look for within that is why the character can't just nope out of the plot. So that, for me, then means that being on that plot fulfills a lack, a hole in the character, it's doing something for them. That can usually allow me to find out what it is that they're missing, what it is they're lacking, that they can be on a journey for, separately from the plot, but that the plot is intersecting with, and that that's part of why they're moving forward.

[Kate] Exactly. Like, if they are on the plot because it fell in their lap, it is… They can easily nope out of it. But they have to want to be there for a complex reason. If the reason is too simple, you can make it more complex and that will deepen their… At least that character.

[Erin] I also sometimes think about what is the… What is it about this character that gives them the ability… Not only the desire, but the ability to participate in this plot. What is it that lets them take the action that moves this plot forward, and what is that rooted in? What is it that they're bringing with them to the plot that makes them an interesting person to be advancing it forward? Then, for that interesting thing, what's a way that you can work in… Somewhere where we see that area of interest outside of the plot? Where can we see it on some… In a side scene, or something else that's not necessarily plot focused?

[Mary Robinette] You just reminded me of something that… One of the other tools that I'll use is to look at the character and ask why are they uniquely unsuited to solve this problem? That, again, opens up a lot of tension and just… A lot of juicy, juicy stuff.

[Someone] So, say you have some really cool, awesome worldbuilding thing that you wanted in your story, but it just doesn't quite do it. How would you balance just ripping it out and just saving it for another story versus trying to find an excuse or a place to fit that into the story?

[Kate] Does it pass the smell test? So, if you're trying to shoehorn it in there, and you can find a way to make it work, but you're the only one who recognizes why that works, the reader's going to be like, "What? Why? Huh? Where?" So you're better off saving it for something else, which is an opportunity. You have this cool thing, you get to use it later. Not that you don't, like, use it now.

[Mary Robinette] I had this thing in Martian Contingency that I was extremely stubborn about. Which is that in the real world, when you're looking at time on Mars versus Earth, you use Sol for Mars, and Earth… Day for Earth. That's so that people who are talking back and forth can tell whether they're talking about next Sol or tomorrow. Because they're not lined up. I was extremely stubborn about including this. People were not getting it. But it did a bunch of things. It helped… I actually needed it, technically, to be able to talk about those two concepts. It also did, like, this is a really cool worldbuilding thing that actually did a bunch of heavy lifting. But it was so hard to explain to people. So I took an opportunity and I took another scene that was a little bit flat, and used that seem to just explain it to the readers as a point of conflict between two characters. So it was… It… Looking for what else can this do. If it's doing only one thing, you probably save it for the… Look, everybody, here are my extras. Here's my acknowledgments, which is where the Mars speed of sound went, because I couldn't fit it into the book.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I think…

[Mary Robinette] It's different.

[Howard] I think about that one time I was shopping and saw some just really cool solar powered garden path lights. I was like, oh, these are amazing. They're so neat. I mean, you can program the… I don't actually have a garden path. This is one of those situations where no matter how cool it is, it doesn't belong in my yard, because it's just going to end up as, like, a fairy ring or something. See, that would have been awesome.

[Dan] see, that would have been amazing.

[Howard] Oh, well.

[Dan] For me, this comes back to character. Which is kind of what Howard was just saying. Howard, as a character, had no plausible interaction with a garden path. So there was no point in putting extra time and effort into one. Because one didn't exist. If my characters can plausibly interact with and be harmed by and make interesting decisions about the cool thing that I'm struggling to include, then it will be fairly easy to include. Whereas if it's just some neat bit of worldbuilding that I made up that doesn't actually affect the characters in any way, then, yeah, it needs to go.

[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We're off… [Background noise... Friend?] As you can probably hear my cat say, we've got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You'll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

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[Someone] What are some strategies you have for finding the willpower for finishing a project that you have a deadline on, so you have to finish it? But you don't want to work on it, you've got another cool thing… [Garbled]

[Howard] What are some strategies for finding the motivation to work on something that has a deadline, but there's… There are other fun things to do instead?

[Mary Robinette] Money.

[Unknown] Spite.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Fear.

[Laughter]

[Dan] They're very primal urges here.

[Mary Robinette] Do you want to give them actual useful information, Erin?

[Erin] I'll try. I don't know. But I think part of it is not thinking of it as motivation. You know what I mean? Because I think there are certain things in life we just do because we have to. But because writing is so personal, sometimes you think, like, I will always write when, like, the moment is there and when I want to. But as somebody who does a lot of deadline work, ultimately, it's about… It is a little bit about fear. Like, I'll lose this… I will lose this next opportunity to write something cool if I burn this bridge by never getting back to this person when I said I would. I will lose the money that I was going to receive from this project. But part of it is thinking, like, I don't actually need to be motivated to work, you just have to work to work. If that makes sense.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Sometimes it is just putting down one sentence and saying that's all I'm going to do for today, but at least it gives yourself a small goal to get through that doesn't require motivation, just action.

[Howard] There's an aphorism that I come back to all the time that I think applies to just adulting in general. It is, don't trade what you want most for what you want at the moment. I come back to that all the time. In my doing this thing now because it's just what I want to do now or am I doing it now because it's leading me to what I really, really want.

[Mary Robinette] I have a similar thing, which is what gift can I give to my future self? But the other piece that I will say is that one of the tools that I use is coming from dog training. We're having… We're working with a dog trainer on Guppy and while I said money, the fact is that my dog gets a form of payment for doing the things. It's a joyful form of payment. So, for me, the thing that I have to do… That… I shouldn't say that I have to do. The thing that I've found that is most effective… I can force myself to work. But that just makes work worse. It makes me resent it, and it starts to bleed over into the writing that I'm doing for fun, when I'm having to force myself to write. So, if I can make it more joyful, that helps. One of the things that you do with dog training is you do a lot of small sessions. So I will break things into smaller pieces. I will give myself ticky boxes, because the joy of watching a ticky box turn green is like… Um… Like… It should not be that effective. It makes me mad that it is.

[Howard] Our episode spreadsheets… I went to great trouble to program our episode spreadsheets so that all the little checkboxes are red until you check them, and then they turn green. That gives us joy every time we finished recording.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, for me, it's like oh, when I finish this, then I get to do the next piece of it. And I get to cross something off. Like, I have literally given myself gold stars before.

[Kate] I have also done that. And I love a checkbox that I can physically do…

[Chuckles]

[Kate] What I do is turn it around and say why do I not want to do this? What am I scared of? If I'm scared to take the next step on this project, or I don't know what scene I'm writing next, or when I… I have to do the big edit when I finish this task. So when I… Even just say, like, I don't want to do this because I don't know what I'm doing after. Saying it out loud makes it less scary. It doesn't mean that the actual fear goes away, but you're like, oh, I'm just afraid. Great. That's easy to be afraid.

[Dan] That's so much better than the technique I got from dog training, is I wear a shock collar.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Then, anytime I get off of the main document, it buzzes me. Don't actually do that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You actually need a different trainer.

[Laughter]

[Mark] If I can add to this too. I… A thing… So I do actually something before I'm drafting. Some of you have heard me speak about this. Which is it's very important that when I'm about to start a book, I know how it ends. And I want to be absolutely unhinged and feral about that ending. Because then when I'm in those moments where I'm stuck, I will actually turn to the end, because I actually write my final scenes, final line first, and remind myself, like, that's where I'm going. Which often sort of related to you will help me figure out, subconsciously, why am I stuck in this moment? Why does this moment feel unmotivating? I will also say if you do just really require motivation, often, for me, it's I want to get this done so I can go to the shiny new object over here and work on the other thing that is also making me slightly feral and unhinged.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. Sorry. One last last thing which is, like, what I love about all of these different answers is I think what they remind me is we're also different in the ways we handle this. I think one way that's good is how have you ever forced yourself in your life to do anything else? Like, if you are like I always… When I don't want to go to a party, make… Say, I can get a pizza on the way home, then maybe you're, like, reward, like, focused. If you're somebody who… Like, whatever the thing is that works for you in other areas of your life can also sometimes be repurposed for your writing life.

[Someone] When do you call a manuscript done, because it seems like you could be stuck in each [garbled step of the process?]

[Howard] You had me at when do you call a manuscript done.

[Mary Robinette] So, here's the thing. Everything can be made better. There is not anything in the world that can't be made better. I think if… Some people have heard me talk about this when we've been doing office Hours where you've come to me for one-on-one. So I know I've said this multiple times on the ship. When you're… If you talk to someone who worked on the Princess Bride, which is a perfect film, I am certain that they would say, "If I would've just had one more day." So, for me, the question is not can this be better, but can this be more of the thing that I wanted to be. Like, if I got a chair, if you look at the chair, listener, that you are sitting in right now. There's probably a scuff on it. Could you fix that scuff? Yes. Would it make it more of a chair? Would it make it more useful, would it make it better for you? No. So, when the thing is doing what you wanted to do, then it is done. Can you make it better? Yes. But you don't have to.

[Howard] I think it was Picasso who said, "Art is never finished, only abandoned." And I have taken that as a gospel truth. I never finish anything, I decide to abandon it. Which is very emotionally liberating.

[Dan] Yeah. One thing that I did not realize when I was very early career, when I was still trying to break in, is how much refinement there still is to do after that point when it is done. Right? The agent is going to help you make it better. Your editor is going to help you make it better. The copy editor, the proofreader, like every step of the process will continue that refinement. It doesn't need to be completely perfect. It never will be. But it's good to remember this is good enough right now, and there's a whole army of people that's going to help me make it better later.

[Kate] I did two kind of litmus tests, both as a writer and as an agent. The first thing I do is I ask myself, whether it's my book or somebody else's, is there, like, this little voice in the back of your head going, "Chapter 3 is really weird." The quieter it is, the more I need to go back and look at chapter 3 or whatever part. The loud voice that's saying, "This is horrible and you're a blah blah blah blah blah." That's not your intuition, that's just fear and anxiety and all those things. It's the tiny little bit, like, yeah, this scene doesn't make that much sense. Then you go back and fix that one. When I'm in… When I have my agent hat on, and I'm editing a client's manuscript, my goal is to make it really hard for the editor to say no. But that goal is not make it perfect and ready to go to the printer. Because that's not my job and I don't have the power nor the time to do that. But when I look at a manuscript and say, okay, well, the beginning's a little slow. That might derail an editor. Let's fix that. Let's address that, and then not worry about some hand wavy things in the middle. Because by the time they get there, they're invested and they'll want to know the end.

[Mark] Most of the time, I'm teaching to young kids who haven't written at all, or very interested in it, have never even finished a short story. So a lot of their questions are around, like, well, how do I know it's done? Like, when do I know? Is it just writing The End? Which, often times, I'm like, yeah. Actually, yes. Then you're done. It's done. But I also like to talk to them about how those of us, especially here in the States, we have been raised in a system in which we are taught you have one chance. Right? You write an essay, you take a test, you get a grade. The end. That's it. So they often approach writing the same way. I see adults then struggling with that in adulthood, of I only have one chance to do this. So I love how all of us can sort of dispel the notion of, like, the thing you're writing is… You don't have one chance. It's not you write this manuscript, it's done, and that's the only chance you're ever going to get. So, for me, at least with my process, I know a manuscript is done initially, just when I reach that ending point that I've already written. It's done. Then I can give it to my agent. I can start having conversations with my editor. Then, even then, as it goes through developmental edits, line edits, and then we all get down to pass pages, where we're reading the proof of your pages. For me, I know it's done when I can read long periods of the book without stopping and going, oh, this doesn't make sense, something here is tripping me up. That's when I'm like, it's done. Maybe five or six things over the course of a whole novel, I'm like, I don't know if I landed this. But if it's very few of them, then I'm like, this is done. Like, I can let this go. Or abandon it, to use that language.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The UK edition of Shades of Milk and Honey is three chapters longer, and 5000 words longer, than the US edition. Because they made the mistake of asking me, "Is there anything you'd like to change?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You made the mistake of answering.

[Erin] I think that just shows the power of time. Because I will sometimes abandon, whether temporarily or permanently, a story because I'm like, I am not where I need to be at in order to make this any better. Like, I have done… All that I'm doing now is… I… Always call it like shuffling, is on the Titanic. All I'm doing is making very minute changes. Nothing is changing at the core. Because if there's something wrong at the core, I cannot figure out how to change it now. Sometimes I send it out anyway, and it's like, I hope that the editor at the magazine is, like, oh, actually it is this, or, you were wrong, it's fine. I accepted it. Then I'm like, oh, well, maybe that was all in my head. But sometimes, it is years later, I'm like, oh, I could have written this different, better story, but the story I wrote was fine for the writer I was at that moment. I think it sometimes nice to, like, acknowledge who you are and what you can do now, and worry about what your future self can do later.

[Howard] So you freeze the document in your trunk cryogenically until you've developed the technology to really fix it.

[Howard] We've got time for one more question. No we don't. We do not have time for any more questions. What we have time for is homework.

[Mary Robinette] We're going to give you the same homework that we are giving the participants in the Writing Excuses workshop here on the Navigator of the Seas that is the daily challenge. Asked and answered. Ask someone a question about writing. Either to learn more about what they're working on or to work through a project of your own.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.44: World and Character Part One: All Your Characters Are Biased

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/10/31/16-44-world-and-character-part-1-all-your-characters-are-biased/

Key Points: You only need to create the world your characters live in. Point of view is the great determiner of worldbuilding. Focus on what the character cares about. You may do it in layers, working out plot specific ones ahead of time, but decorative ones when a scene needs them.

[Season 16, Episode 44]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses. World and Character Part One: All Your Characters Are Biased.

[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] I am… This is quite a bold statement in our title. All your characters are biased. Fonda, what do you mean by that?

[Fonda] Well, often times, writers have to do… When they're doing worldbuilding, they get asked the question, "How do you do it all, like, how do you create a whole 'nother world?" That just seems like such an overwhelming, daunting, gargantuan task. My answer to that question is it is less daunting than you think. Because you don't actually need to create the entire world. You only need to create the world that your characters live in. Because none of us have a complete view of the world. We all live in our different worlds, and those worlds are determined by everything from our family background, our class, race, gender, culture, occupation, our position in our family, all these different factors create the world that we live in. Someone else may be inhabiting a world that is entirely foreign to us. So I like to think of the world and your character's view of the world like the analogy of the blind men and the elephant. Probably everyone has heard of this analogy, but if you have not, it's the idea that there's blind men feeling an elephant, and the one who standing near the trunk is like, "The elephant is like a tree," and someone else near the… No, the person standing near the leg thinks the elephant is like a tree. The person holding the trunk is like, "The elephant is like a snake." Everyone has a different mental image of what the elephant is because they are only experiencing their section of the elephant. This applies to characters in a world as well. That is why point of view is truly the great determiner of worldbuilding. You first need to understand who your character is and what their place in the world is and what the story is around them. That determines your worldbuilding needs.

[Howard] I just realized that I want to retell that story from the point of view of the elephant who has now decided human beings are all ignorant.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] And they grope me all the time.

[Howard] And stop touching me!

[Dan] I think this is a really fascinating way to look at worldbuilding. Honestly, one of the things that I really love about the Green Bone saga as a great example of worldbuilding is the way that you were able to show the different cultures. There are the people who live in Jade City, and then there are the other people, the Kekonese who live in Espenia who are the same but also fundamentally different at the same time, because they see the world in different ways. Knowing then that point of view is, as you said, the great determiner of worldbuilding, how do you bring that across in your writing?

[Fonda] Yeah. So, a good example of this is actually my debut novel, Zero Boxer. So it takes place in the future in which the inner solar system has been colonized. There is a political conflict that is occurring between Earth and Mars. There are issues involving genetic engineering and whether or not that should be legal or illegal. But that doesn't actually matter all that much to the protagonist, because he is an athlete, and he's competing in the sport of zero gravity prize fighting. So the world, for him, revolves around athletic competition. So as a worldbuilding, as a world builder, what I needed to focus on were all the details of his life as an athlete. That included things like his supplement routine, his exercise routine, is training, all the, like, details of how those fights happen in zero gravity. All the stuff involving like Earth and Mars and like the tech in the future and how spaceships work, like we didn't need to know how the drive of the spaceship worked. Because that is not something that he cared about, he just needed to get from one competition to the next. So, of course, he gets on a spaceship and he moves through time, but for him, what was most important to the story were those details of his day-to-day life. So a lot of the other stuff is kind of just sort of hinted at, or implied in the background. It is… Still feels like it supports and it exists, but I didn't need to go deep into all that stuff. Where I needed to go deep was in the areas the character cared about. One of the benefits… That was a single point of view story, but one of the benefits of having a multi point of view story, which I had in the Green Bone saga, was each of the different characters then has their own priorities and their own experiences and circumstances, so you get a more fully fleshed out and developed world because you are seeing characters who have different views of it. It's like putting all those blind men who are touching the elephant into a room and they're all drawing out their own little section and slowly the whole elephant comes into view.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The way I think of this is about the decisions that I'm making about the things that my character interacts with. Which are the things that you're talking about. The supplement routine… In Green Bone saga, we learn a lot when we go to the school. We learn a lot more things because we're in the POV of someone who inhabits that… That's a good way… Like, when you're trying to figure out, "Well, what do I have to do when I'm trying to…" How do I… When you're facing decision paralysis. It's like, "What is your character going to interact with?" So when I'm doing my worldbuilding, I'll do like… You've heard me talk about doing this in layers. Well, I'll think about the sort of broad layers that my… That I know that my character is going to interact with. But a lot of the specific details, like the supplement routine, I don't think about that until I get to… I mean, I don't have a character with a supplement routine, but were I writing it, I would not work that supplement routine out until I hit a scene where I was like, "Oh, my character absolutely is going to have supplements here and I need to know what they are." But otherwise, I don't sit down and work it out. I tend to think of it as sort of there are… The ones that I need to work out ahead of time are the plot specific ones, the ones that are going to shape the way the plot works. Then there are other ones that are kind of what I think of as the decorative ones that are the ones that affect the way maybe my character interacts with the plot. But doesn't necessarily shift the course of the plot.

[Dan] Let's pause here for our book of the week. Which is, actually, you, Mary Robinette. You were going to tell us about Craft in the Real World.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses is a craft book. Normally we're giving you fiction to read, but I actually think that every writer should read this book. It's looking at the biases that we bring to fiction based on the ways that we… The fiction that we have read and the societies that we move through. You think, "Really? Biases? Do we have them?" One of the examples that he gives in this book is how we've all been taught not to… When we do dialogue tags, to do like said or asked, and not to do things like inquired or queried. He says the problem is if someone grows up in another culture and they are taught to write… That queried is the invisible one. So they are always like, "my character queried, queried my character." If they come to a writing workshop in a culture that is an ask culture, and they write queried, everybody in that workshop is going to be like, "Why do you keep using this word? Go with the invisible word." One of the things he talks about is how ESL writers will often read something like written by a native English speaker and be like, "Why do they keep reusing the same word? Why do they keep reusing said? Don't they know any other words?" It's about the inherent worldview that they're approaching their writing with. So this is, I think, a great book to read in general, and specifically a good book to read when you're thinking about the biases that your character is carrying, because a lot of those biases are biases that they're inheriting from you as the writer.

[Dan] That's awesome. So that is Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses.

[Dan] A lot of what we've been talking about reminds me of a funny thing that a creative writing professor showed us one time where someone had taken a story set in the modern day, but written in the style of Isaac Asimov. Where he is explaining the technology behind everything that he encounters…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Including wooden doors and door knobs…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] And automobiles and all of this stuff. Which, in a science fiction book, we kind of accept as well, yes, you need to explain to us how this door opened by itself, but putting it into the real world really gave it that context of, "Well, duh, we don't need to know this. Why does this character feel it important to tell us about how a car turns on when you turn the key?" That's a lot of what you're talking about here, where the point of view that we're getting the world through is going to change what details about the world we get. I find that a really valuable perspective.

[Fonda] Yeah. I think that if you think about the genre of dystopian fiction, dystopia is a point of view. So if you rewrote the Hunger Games from the point of view of a middle class to upper class person living in the capitol, it would be a completely different story. I mean, they would be, "Who are these district 12 rebels? Insurgents, insurrectionists, who are here to destroy society?" So if you take that perspective of, like, everyone is living in their own world and there are people in our world who are living in very dystopian situations, every… If you decide you're going to tell a story about a… let's say a fictional city that you have made up. Is that story being told from the point of view of someone who has power and is privileged or somebody who is living in the sewer system? Those lead you to completely different stories. Neither one is correct. There's no right or wrong in terms of which perspective that you decide to write about. But that choice is going to fundamentally drive your world building needs. There is a minor character in the Green Bone saga who's the most hated character in that trilogy. But he plays a really valuable role from the perspective of the narrative because he is outside of the system that all the other main characters inhabit. Now, 90% of the time, you are spending time with the characters in this one family that they are very entrenched in their world and their culture. There is this one minor character who is not. Every time you step out into his point of view, you get a very different view of the world.

[Dan] Is that Bero?

[Fonda] It is.

[Dan] I actually love that character.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I do too.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] This is, I think, a super important thing to bring up. Because I worry that some of our listeners are hearing us talk about this perspective driven world building, and finding it limiting. Really, this is an opportunity for you to expand your world in whatever direction you need it to go. One of the problems world builders have, we call this world building disease, where fantasy writers and science fiction writers, we just craft this enormous gargantuan world, and most of it, we don't actually need to put into the book. This is how you can put some of that into the book. If there's a part of your world building you find especially compelling or interesting, but your main plot doesn't necessarily focus on it, you can add in a side character who does or a subplot of some kind that will interact with it. That is how you can get that cool thing you're excited about into the book.

[Mary Robinette] Or you can write a short story that is set in the same world if you don't want to have story bloat.

[Dan] Yeah. [Garbled]

[Howard] One of the things that I fall back on all the time is the unreliable narrator. This is not the unreliable narrator of literary fiction where do I believe what this person is… No. This is the person who just says something in order to fill us in about some world details and I, the author, do not know whether they are right or wrong. I only know that they think they're right, and I might be wrong when I first wrote that dialogue for them. I'll find out later. This principle, the unreliable narrator, the… Oh, I forget his name, he was the story bible guy for Elder Scrolls Online from 2014 through I think almost 2020. He looked at the old Elder Scrolls games and was like, "Oh, no. Your stories are so inconsistent. You contradict your… Well, I have a solution. The solution is nobody says anything about the world except through the eyes of a character who might be wrong, might be right. Tada! Everything has now resolved itself. How old is the city? Eh, the city's about 500 years old. No, the city is 750 years old. No, the city is 2000 years old. It's built on another city that was built on another city that was… They're all right or they're all wrong." It doesn't matter, and it makes the world building so much easier when I let go of that and just allow myself to make mistakes, but my characters take the blame.

[Dan] Well, that is going to lead us right into our homework. Fonda, what homework do we have today?

[Fonda] I would like your listeners to take a favorite story of yours and reimagine it from a different point of view. Take a side character, a non-POV character, and imagine how your world building needs would be different if it was told from someone else's point of view. So, as an example, let's say you wanted to tell the story of Harry Potter from the point of view of the Minister of Magic. So what different world building needs would you need, would you have as a result of that story being told from a completely different perspective?

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.8: Worldbuilding Q&A #1

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/02/24/14-8-worldbuilding-qa-1/

Q&A Summary:

Q: What cultural stuff do you need to know throughout the writing process?

A; What are the axes of power in the world. Economic status, social hierarchies, which ones will your character intersect with in the story. What cultural stuff do I need to make the world feel real? What cultural stuff drives the conflict in my story? What cultural stuff impacts the characters to give them character arcs? Specificity! What practices are embodied in your story, where did they come from, why are they used? What is likely to come up, what do I need to think about to make it interesting and varied.

Q: When worldbuilding religion, I often find that portions of the fictional religions have overlapped with real world religions. How do you treat those overlaps with respect, especially when problems with the in-world religion are part of the story's conflict?

A: Being a real-world religious person with a deep and abiding respect for the multiple sides. Multiple viewpoints wherever possible. Tell somebody's specific story, not a story about a class of people.

Q: For your worldbuilding, how much do you have figured out before you start your first draft, and how much do you discover later as you write?

A: It depends. Do it in layers, a broad overview, then dig in where needed, with research in the recesses of your imagination. Frontload where possible, but go back and patch and connect, too.

Q: Much like how it can be bad if you introduce key characters too late in the narrative, such as the last one third, what would you say is the threshold where you should have introduced all major worldbuilding elements? Halfway or something else, and does it change based on genre or intended audience?

A: Tie the new worldbuilding elements to character conflict and development, and you can keep doing it. Introduce the new elements slightly before they matter. Introduce the element for a different reason.

Q: I was wondering how do you ensure the world comes through as a character of its own?

A: It doesn't always have to be a character, sometimes it's just an important setting. Name it, then give it a personality. How does the POV character interact with the environment? Is it an antagonist, or a sidekick? Give the world scene time of its own. Look at how the setting influences plot and character decisions. Pay attention to the language you use to describe the environment.

Q: When worldbuilding in science fiction or fantasy, how much change to terminology is too much? For example, a new calendar system, units of measurement, or currency?

A: Some worldbuilding elements are more easily grokked than others. Hemi-deca blerks! What do you want to say about the culture?

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Eight.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding, Questions and Answers.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Howard] And you have questions. By you, I'm speaking to the you in the audience of WXR 2018 attendees before me.

[Whoo! Applause]

[Howard] This episode was recorded live on a ship in the Caribbean. We're pretty in love with this model. It's a lot of fun.

[Mary Robinette] This… I really like the way we have built our world, I have to say.

[Laughter]

[as…]

[Dan] Although technically, we're in the Gulf of Mexico, not the Caribbean. Just pointing out the errors in your worldbuilding. Consistency is key.

[Howard] We're on the water, and it's pretty.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That piece of the worldbuilding is all I actually need to know. Which is often the case with worldbuilding.

[Howard] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] But the nice thing about this is that we have a live audience, which means that we can go to them for questions. Shall we start with your first one, or do you have other things to do?

[Howard] Nononono. That's just great.

[Christopher] Hello, my name is Christopher Adkins. What cultural stuff do you need to know throughout the writing process?

[Dan] Cultural stuff?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I like to think about are what the axes of power are for the world? Because those are going to affect the way my character moves through the world. The economic status, social hierarchies, those are the things that I think about. I only think about the ones that are… My character's going to intersect with in the story. So in short fiction, I'm likely to kind of think about the axes of power. But probably only a couple of them are going to come into play in the story. So there's only going to be… Those are going to be the ones that I will really define.

[Howard] I… The things that I need to know about cultural stuff upfront is do I need cultural stuff in order for the world I am building to feel real? Do I need cultural stuff in order for there to be conflict that drives my story? And, do I need there to be cultural stuff that impacts my characters in ways that gives them character arcs? I approach it first from narrative. From there, there's a bazillion stuff I'll end up needing to know.

[Dongwon] I'll just say, specificity is really important in building culture. Often times, if you're modeling a real-world culture, what you want to do is make sure that you have specific practices that are embodied in your work. But also make sure you know where those come from and why they're used, right? Where I see this going off the rails a lot of times is they'll take a practice without understanding the role it plays in the society, and therefore undermine the purpose of that practice or end up saying something insulting about it by accident. So what you want to do is do your homework, pick something very specific, and then figure out how to transform it so that it fits your world without being in direct contradiction to the purpose and the point of that practice in the first place.

[Dan] Before I start to write, I will come up… I will think about the things that are most likely to come up that I will need to describe on-the-fly, and I will kind of prep them in advance. So when I wrote my cyberpunk series, I had a whole list of technologies and companies that made them. When I… In the fantasy that I'm currently writing, I figured out, well, in this country, these are the kinds of foods they eat and the kinds of jobs they have. Just because then… If I don't do that, I know that everyone is going to be a lumberjack eating stew.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So having something ready to go, so I can be more interesting and more varied, helps me a lot.

[Howard] Hearty stew.

[Dan] Yes. With crusty bread.

[Mary Robinette] By contrast, I don't do that at all. I will square bracket it when I get to it, and then invent it on the spot. But I am lazier than Dan is.

[Howard] I find that difficult to believe, but let's go to our next question.

[Laughter]

[Xander] Hi, my name is Zander Hacking. When worldbuilding religion, I often find that portions of the fictional religions have overlapped with real world religions. How do you treat those overlaps with respect, especially when problems with the in-world religion are part of the story's conflict?

[Mary Robinette] That's a good question.

[Dan] That's a really good question.

[Yeah]

[Howard] I have a question. Is Zander Hacking your real name, because if I tried to use that name in a book, no one would believe it.

[Xander] It's actually Alexander Hacking, but that's way too much effort.

[Howard] It's still too awesome to be real.

[Dan] I can say it, but Mary Robinette wouldn't.

[Howard] Honestly, one of the things that helps me…

[Dan] You just said you were lazier than me.

[Mary Robinette] [Tee-hee-hee]

[Howard] One of the things that helps me a lot with regard to writing fictional religions and paying respect to real-world religions is being a real-world religious person who has a deep and abiding respect for the varying epistemologies that exist in the world. I believe that I can learn things by faith, by scriptural study, by revelation, and I believe that I can learn things in no other way than through science. It's a weird fence to sit on. Not always comfortable. But it's one I'm on. So anytime I'm writing about a religion, I'm writing it from this inherent understanding that there are multiple sides to what is going on.

[Mary Robinette] I think the multiple sides is a really good point. I try to remember to represent multiple viewpoints where possible. Because we all… Even people within the same denomination, going to the same church and the same building, will have different relationships with faith. So I tried to make sure that that is represented in the page, that it is not a monolith. I also try to remember that things are interwoven, that nothing exists by itself. So making sure that I'm thinking about the way it stretches out into the other parts of the culture is, I think, one of the ways I can be respectful and also make it feel more organic.

[Dongwon] To build off of Mary's thing a little bit, when you have that fictionalized religion, it is probably… Has a real-world analog, but the thing to remember is you're not telling a story about that entire religion. You're telling a story about a person who intersects and lives within that culture or that experience. So don't think of it… Where you'll get in trouble is when you're trying to tell a story about the whole class of people as opposed to telling about somebody's specific story. That person has a place, they were raised a certain way, they have certain feelings about the religion in which they exist. Those are not going to be 100% representative of the monolith of the organization, right? So remember you're talking about an individual. Invest them with as much specificity and as much physicality as you can. Then that will help you make sure that you're articulating a perspective and an experience, rather than saying… Or rather than criticizing the whole group or criticizing a real-world religion in that way.

[Gail] My name is Gail. For your worldbuilding, how much do you have figured out before you start your first draft, and how much do you discover later as you write?

[Mary Robinette] I vary a lot, depending on what it is that I'm writing. I often treat worldbuilding when I'm doing something that's completely made up the same way I treat historical stuff. Which is that I think about it in layers. I kind of get a broad overview, and then will dig in. It's just that the research that I'm doing is in the recesses of my own imagination. But I… Sometimes I get very, very specific, and other times I write into it… I discovery write my way in, and then hit something that's an odd juxtaposition, and try and figure out why it's that way. For me, it depends on the story.

[Dan] I like to frontload things, as I said before. But, because I like to do that, I have noticed how often I go back, which is every single story, every single book. I'm still going back and patching holes and making things connect that didn't connect before. So it's really just kind of a half-and-half mix, almost, I would say, for me.

[Dongwon] I recently had a conversation with a client who was in the early stages of developing a project. I asked him about it, and he took a deep breath and paused and said, "Well, at the beginning of time…"

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] I was like, "Oh, this is going to be a long conversation." I think what Mary said is very valuable, that it varies a lot project to project, even for one writer. Sometimes, you will need to start at the beginning of time and build up your whole cosmology, and sometimes, you can just jump right in and figure out things on the fly. So I think it depends.

[Howard] With the early Schlock Mercenary books, I was making up the worldbuilding as I went on a weekly basis. With the one that I'm working on right now, book 18, the piece that I already know is that Galactic civilizations come and go in cycles. There are lacuna during which there is no Galactic civilization for millions of years. What I don't know is exactly how many of those there have been, and what were the characteristics of each of those, and what was the trigger event that ended each of those. Those pieces I am definitely discovery writing as I go. So when you ask the question, well, at the beginning of time… I'm working my way backwards to that.

[Laughter]

[Cooper] Hey, my name's Cooper. Much like how it can be bad if you introduce key characters too late in the narrative, such as the last one third, what would you say is the threshold where you should have introduced all major worldbuilding elements? Halfway or something else, and does it change based on genre or intended audience?

[Dongwon] I would say I think this is more flexible than most people think it is. The best piece of worldbuilding I've seen in recent media is the TV show Stephen Universe, which, at every major turning point in the show, has completely upended my understanding of the world and the cosmology of that series. The reason it never feels like a problem is they always tie it to character conflict. Every time they introduce a new worldbuilding element, one of the major characters is having some personal crisis or some personal conflict that ties directly to the thing that they're introducing. So when you meet more of the Gems or when you meet the Diamonds or whatever it is, it always feels like a character development, and therefore you can add more to the world as you go without disrupting that, if you keep it really grounded in how the characters are experiencing that and how they feel about the world around them.

[Dan] I try to make sure to introduce new character elements or new worldbuilding elements, I mean, slightly before they matter. So that when they show up, they don't feel like, "Oh, Dan needed to explain this thing, so he changed the way horses work," or whatever. But I'll tell you a couple chapters earlier how horses are different, and then it will matter a couple chapters later. So if I'm always… The worldbuilding's always a couple steps ahead of the story itself. Then you could introduce something all the way at the end of the book, and it would still feel natural, because we'll know about it before it matters.

[Mary Robinette] I do that, but sometimes… Often, the way I'm doing that is that I will use it at the point that it matters, and then go back and find spots…

[Dan] And fill it in. Exactly.

[Howard] Doctor Who is kind of a delightful mix mash of doing it in many different ways, and sometimes a way in which they do it is exactly right, and sometimes the way in which they did it… I find it very dissatisfying. There have been episodes where there is a new reveal about world technology, world whatever, that happens after the Doctor has announced it is important. Often, I find that unsatisfying, but sometimes it's just beautiful, because it wasn't the point. The point was something else. The point of this is… Doctor Who is good lesson material for learning a lot of these things…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And also, there are reasons in which to do it in lots of different ways, and they can all work.

[Dan] That's a good point to bring up, is that in those instances where it works really well, it's often because it… That element was introduced for a different reason. So the reader is not saying, "Oh, look at this very telegraphed this-is-going-to-be-important." It's already important, but for something else. So you're serving two purposes at once.

[Howard] Let's pause for a book of the week.

[Amal] The book of the week is…

[Howard] Oh, go ahead and introduce yourself.

[Amal] Hello, my name is [Amal Massad?]. I am giving you the book of the week. So the book of the week is Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver. It is a development of a short story that she first wrote in an anthology called The Starlit Wood. It's a fantastic reclamation of the Rumpelstiltskin story from a Jewish perspective, because Rumpelstiltskin is a famously anti-Semitic folktale. So what she has instead is this absolutely fantastic reversal, where she has a Jewish money lender who is a woman who gains a reputation for being able to transform silver into gold through the practice of her skill. This attracts the attention of these really scary fairies called the Staryk Knights. They decide that they want to test her. So it's this fantastic reversal where the supernatural element is taking the role of the king in the original story, and it's in this really wonderful world that she develops with a… Draw… Inspired by a lot of Eastern European folklore and stuff. The worldbuilding in it is tremendous. It's got this fantastic rumination on capital and labor and transaction and that sort of thing. But it's also full of female friendships. If you read Uprooted and thought I really liked that book, but I wish there had been more women in it being even more friends, you should definitely read Spinning Silver. Because it's so great.

[Howard] Thank you, Amal. That was Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. Now we have our next question.

[Cory] Hello. My name is Cory. I was wondering how do you ensure the world comes through as a character of its own?

[Pause]

[Mary Robinette] Wow, that's such a good question that we're all sitting here going, "How do you do that?"

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Well, I'm actually sitting here wondering if I do that. There's a lot of works that I can think of, books and movies, where yes, the setting is a character, to the point that New York is really a character in my story has become a cliché and a trope. I don't know if it needs to be every time though. Sometimes, the setting can just be important to the characters without being a character it self.

[Howard] At risk of telegraphing some of our episodes on marketing and career building, if your setting is an important marketing point… For instance, Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere. Being able to say, "This is a Cosmere book," is going to sell the book into an audience that would have been reluctant to pick it up if it hadn't been a Cosmere book. So having a name for it, so that it kind of becomes its own character, is useful. That's reverse engineering it. I've named it, therefore it must have a personality.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But I think that when you do have a book where you want the terr… Or a short story where you want the environment, the worldbuilding, to be a character… I mean, naming it helps, but giving it a personality is, I think, really hitting it on the nose there. It is, for me, the times that I do that, it is about the way the character, my POV character, is interacting with the environment. The environment will take on the role, somewhat, of an antagonist, sometimes. Or somewhat of a co-partner. A sidekick. Depending on what relationship my character has with the environment. So I will look at pla… Ways that the worldbuilding can be a barrier. I will look at places where the worldbuilding can be a help. More specifically, I look at my character's relationship with that, and how they feel and think about it. That's, for me, how I can make it, rather than just a place they inhabit, another… A character that's on the page, a personality. The other thing that I'll say is that I'm much more likely… When I do this myself or when I've… I notice it when I read other people's… To give space for the world without my character in it. So it's as if it gets its own scene time, own stage time.

[Dongwon] One way I think about it is, does your setting have agency? Right? That doesn't mean it's necessarily conscious, but is it influencing the plot decisions and the character decisions? Design spaces are incredibly important. We are all currently on a cruise ship, which is extremely deliberately designed space, designed to promote certain kinds of interaction, and certain kinds of movement. When you become aware of how you're being moved through the ship, and why you will walk across on certain decks and not on other decks, you can sort of start to see how the setting can shape the plot of your story. When… That's why cities often become this sort of character role in a story like that, especially in… Heist stories often have that as well. The Bellagio in Oceans 11 becomes a character, because the physical attributes of that building become very important in determining how the characters will move through it and accomplish their goals or won't accomplish their goals. So if your setting is influencing plot, if it's influencing character decisions, then it will itself start to feel like a character, in, I think, a really exciting way.

[Mary Robinette] Along those lines, I think one of the things is to pay attention to the language that you're using to describe it. So when we're talking about it, it having a personality, New York's a great ex… Is the example that everyone returns to, that it's gritty, it's stark. Those… The vocabulary that people use to describe those settings is very different than the vocabulary that one would use to describe Disneyland.

[Yep]

[Mary Robinette] So, paying attention to that…

[Dan] Not the way I do it.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] YES.

[Laughter]

[I have questions now. I have so many questions.]

[Howard] Well, there's this…

[Dan] We should all go to Disneyland together.

[Howard] There goes our Disney sponsorship.

[Dongwon] I would recommend you all start listening to the podcast 99% Invisible. I apologize for pushing another podcast. But if you want to really understand how design spaces influence character and plot decisions, than that is a great place to start.

[Andrew] Hello, my name is Andrew. When worldbuilding in science fiction or fantasy, how much change to terminology is too much? For example, a new calendar system, units of measurement, or currency?

[Howard] [Bwoosh! Oh, wow.]

[Mary Robinette] This is something I struggle with.

[Dan] Oh, yeah. Some of those…

[Howard] So very fraught.

[Dan] Some of those are easier to talk about than others. Units of measurement, for example… If I don't understand what a blerk is, then telling me that the city is five blerks away doesn't really tell me anything. Whereas I don't need to know how much money a blerk is worth if you say the bowl of soup is worth five blerks, then I kind of get a sense of it. So there's… different kinds of worldbuilding elements are much more easily grokkable than others.

[Howard] So the distance to the city is a soup?

[Dan] Yes. How far away is the city? Well, about the cost of a bowl of soup.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Or a hemi-deca blerk.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But actually… The thing is…

[Dan] Did you just well, actually us?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] No. I but actually'd you. Which seems more appropriate.

[Dan] Okay. There we go.

[Mary Robinette] The thing is that when we are talking about units of measurement… This is where I look at whether or not I need to shift it. I look at whether or not there is an underpinning that has shifted. So are units of measurement are things like… There's the… If we have an Imperial inch, that tells you that there's an empire. If you don't have an empire, then having something that weighs an Imperial inch is not a useful thing. So I will sometimes look at that, at whether or not there is something in the unit of measurement that doesn't fit with the world. The months, for instance. August, September, October. Those… That implies that there was a Rome. So I'm much more likely to shift something like that then I am worrying about whether or not I need to have something weigh… The five feet tall versus five blerks tall.

[Dan] I love how something can weigh an inch and also weigh five feet tall.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] I love this. And also the city is five blerks away.

[Howard] It's about soup height.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] About soup height.

[Dan] We're getting into so many like really… I almost wonder if we need to can of worms this, which we haven't even done in years. Because even the October, September thing, there's an entire school of thought in fantasy that the book was written in its own language, but it's been translated into English. So we just are calling it October, because then our readers can understand it. There's a lot of worldbuilding elements like that, that some portions of your audience are going to care about deeply, and others are just going to gloss right over and go, "Okay. That's fine."

[Dongwon] It's really a question about what are you trying to say about your culture. Because the choice of a foot versus a meter says something about the culture that you live in. Does it come from somebody who's trying to scientifically impose a unit of measurement, or is it, "Oh, my foot is roughly that large, right?" That tells you a lot about the history of that culture, what they prioritize and what's important to them. Names of the months are the same thing. Those come from specific places. So when you're making those choices of choosing to invent a new system, that better be a very relevant piece of worldbuilding and a really important concept for how this culture operates. You want to pick things that are very close to your central metaphor that drives the book that you are writing, and make sure that you're picking new invented terms that have histories and meaning for very good reasons. Be very… You can only change so many things before people start going, "I don't know what all these words are." So be very deliberate about which ones you invent new words for, is my advice.

[Mary Robinette] The thing that I'm just going to add on to that is that if you want to avoid using August… If you decide that that doesn't fit into your world, it's not that you have to invent a new month. You just need to not refer to the month. Like, oh, summer vacation is in August. It's like, no, summer vacation is in summer. That kind of thing is often an easier thing for your reader to grok than actually doing inventions.

[Howard] Our mastering engineer, Alex, has very carefully edited out all audible sounds of dismay as we had to cut off the questions because we're out of time. So my notes here say that your homework is toss something to Mary.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's right. So, we've had a number of different questions come up. I'm going to leave you with the most difficult one. Which is, what do you do about time in your universe? So what I want you to do is you're just going to think about calendars. You're going to think about in your world, what are the things that change, what are the markers? Is this a culture that marks things by the moon? What if there are two moons? How does that influence what their calendar system looks like? I'm not asking you to actually put this into your story, but I just wanted to take time and think about how the culture and your worldbuilding deals and measures time.

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

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 7.12: Writing the Omniscient Viewpoint

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/03/18/writing-excuses-7-12-writing-the-omniscient-viewpoint/

Key Points: Omniscient viewpoint, with a narrator who can see all the action and knows all the thoughts of the characters, is hard to get right, compared to limited and first-person. Readers don't expect it. Cinematic omniscient, or third person cinematic, uses a camera as a narrator. Another type is the storyteller, with someone telling you this story. This lets the narrator talk to the reader, while not necessarily letting the characters know. It's a good way to condense information. Another type is the occasional zoom-out, such as establishing shots. There is a distinction between narrators with a strong voice and neutral omniscient narrators. When writing omniscient, be careful of the temptation to indulge in world builders' infodumping. The main advantage of occasional zoom-outs is that you don't always have to have a character see everything. The final type of omniscient is pure omniscient, which may lead to head hopping if done wrong. It must be very clear who is thinking what, but this can be very strong. This kind of omniscient lets you dig deeply into several characters and cover a lot of information in a single scene.
( Ignore the man behind the curtains! )
[Brandon] Yeah. Give them writing prompts.
[Howard] Okay. I'm actually going to give two. Writing prompt number one. Stick a scene in between two third person limited scenes, where an omniscient narrator delivers information that isn't available to any of your POV characters. The second writing prompt is pull off this Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility thing. Have two characters carrying on a dialogue in which what is being communicated with the words is out of sync with what each of the characters is thinking.
[Brandon] Okay. Excellent. You are out of excuses. Thanks for listening. Now go write.

Current Mood: all-seeing

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 7.11: More Microcasting

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/03/11/writing-excuses-7-11-more-microcasting/

Key Points:

1. Should you mix genres or not?
2. How do you avoid world builder's disease?
3. Tips for nanowrimo?
4. Before getting published, how do you get followers to your website or blog?
5. How do you create subplots?
6. What did you learn last year?
7. How do you stay motivated?
( microcasting is like miniature incantations? )
[Brandon] So it was Bill Housely on twitter. He says, "A lone woman who runs an orbital refueling port makes first contact when some desperate aliens stop by for fuel."
[Dan] Awesome.
[Brandon] That's a great writing prompt.
[Dan] Bill Housely, you're our favorite listener, today.
[Brandon] So that's your writing prompt. Go for it. Thank you all. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: millicasting?

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.20: The Lens of Where and When
mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.02: Q&A Aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise, with Mark Oshiro and Kate McKean
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.44: World and Character Part One: All Your Characters Are Biased
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.8: Worldbuilding Q&A #1
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.12: Writing the Omniscient Viewpoint
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Writing Excuses Transcripts

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Writing Excuses 20.20: The Lens of Where and When

Writing Excuses 20.02: Q&A Aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise, with Mark Oshiro and Kate McKean

Writing Excuses 16.44: World and Character Part One: All Your Characters Are Biased

Writing Excuses 14.8: Worldbuilding Q&A #1

Writing Excuses 7.12: Writing the Omniscient Viewpoint

Writing Excuses 7.11: More Microcasting

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