wetranscripts | Entries tagged with world building

Writing Excuses 19.09: LIVE Recording - Rituals, Rites, and Traditions

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-09-live-recording-rituals-rites-and-traditions

Key Points: Rituals, rites, and traditions: making beliefs tangible as practices. Building the rites helps you discover a little about your characters, about what they believe, and helps make them more real. Incorporating them into our fiction makes characters more believable, realistic, vibrant, and tangible. Births, weddings, and funerals are what make a culture work. Do you work from culture to tradition or ritual, or start with the ritual, and then work out the culture? Start with an existing culture, but add elements and tweak it. Start with the premise of the story world, and then think about the implications of that. When you're working from a real culture, what can you take or not? Be respectful. Don't dip your quill in somebody's blood. Use characters, individuals, who are resistant, lack understanding, or are trying to understand as buffers for the culture. Rituals, rites, and traditions can do so much heavy lifting for you. One takeaway? Show how communities come together. Remember that rituals, rites, and traditions reflect how people relate to the world, community, and each other. During revision, go for depth, and work out the rituals. Remember that rituals and traditions are not just something that other cultures have, we have them too!

[Season 19, Episode 09]

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

[Season 19, Episode 09]

[Erin] This is Writing Excuses. Rituals, rites, and traditions.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Fonda] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Erin] We are going to talk today about tradition. We're going to be talking about what happens when you take beliefs in a world and make them tangible by turning them into practices. This happens in our real world, and it often happens in our fiction. I'm wondering how do you all do that? Have you done it, are you interested in doing it, how do you tackle it?

[Mahtab] It would absolutely… I think it is definitely a very important, I would say, a part for worldbuilding, because that is how people… Like, first of all, when you develop rites or any kind of rituals, which is… And I'm talking my experience when… Which is what I did for my novel Valley of the Rats. I built up these traditions and these rites that the people in the village go through. That was actually how I discovered a little bit more about my people. It's what they believe. It makes them a little bit more real. And, it was an aspect of worldbuilding, which made it really interesting.

[Fonda] Same. I love incorporating rituals, rites, and traditions into my worldbuilding. If you think about our own daily lives, we go through the world performing a whole series of rituals, rites, and traditions, many of which we're somewhat unconscious of. Right? Everything from our day-to-day practices of holding the door open for another person to the order in which your family members talk when they're gathered together to big scale traditions like our holidays and our societal values and principles, like, those all feed so much into our day-to-day lives that, to the extent that we can incorporate them into our fiction, it will make our fictional worlds that much more believable, that much more realistic, and that much more vibrant and tangible.

[DongWon] Yeah. One of my clients once told me, Kate [Ballahide] said that the 3 things you need to define a culture are births, weddings, and funerals. If you have those 3 parts of a person's life, you have a strong understanding of what makes that culture work. Because, when I think about worldbuilding, I think less about material physical things that make up that world and more about what are the rules that define this society. Right? That's important to people, what are the taboos that you can't break. So those 3 points of how do we treat a new life, how do we celebrate 2 people coming together, and then how do we honor a loss, I think are the things that we really communicate to the audience this is what our characters value, this is what they aspire to, and this is what they're afraid of.

[Erin] I'm curious, does it come that way for all of you? Like, is it something where you decide here's the value, here's the culture, I'm going to create this tradition or ritual? Or are you like, I want to make this really cool ritual, I will figure out the culture that would make it happen? Is it always the same way for you, or one or the other?

[Mahtab] I'm always… Because a lot of my stories have been set in India, I take that… The culture that's currently exists as the starting point, but then I will try and add a few fantasy elements, or I'll try and switch it around a little bit, and go against people's norms of beliefs and just try and make it a little bit more interesting. And, because I love scary stories and horror, I will add a horror element to it as well, which is… Most people are not going to, but the main thing is that I want some kind of a reaction from the reader. So I will take something that's existing, and then I try and tweak it. I think sometimes, you know what, when you take something existing and tweak it, not only are you showing differences between what people believe, but sometimes you can even show similarities between different cultures or different beliefs and different people. So it's a good way to play with things and play with the character and the world, and I love doing that.

[Fonda] I start with the premise of my story world. Which, for me, involves some speculative element. Then I go through the thought exercise of what are the implications that that entails for the society and for the individuals that navigate that world. So, the example of the Green Bone saga, I have a coded East Asian society, but there's a speculative element that doesn't exist in our world. Which is this magic jade that confers powers. So an entire society has been developed around this one resource and there's a whole culture that is grounded around the practices and traditions and beliefs surrounding this speculative element that I've introduced into the world. So I couldn't just go and wholesale take an East Asian culture and then transplant it into my story world, I had to create this hybridized world where I was cueing certain rites and rituals and traditions that readers would pick up on as being East Asian in origin, but then just weaving it together with my own imagination based around what kind of world I wanted to create around the speculative element. The more that you can get down to that microlevel of even the things like the idioms, the sayings that people have, the day-to-day interactions that they have around the speculative element and the rich… Religious aspects, the spiritual aspects, social aspects… Hopefully, if I've done my job right, it will feel like a very grounded place that's been built from the starting principles.

[Erin] I feel like you've hit on two really, really exciting things. One is, I think, a question people often have when they're working from something that's real. They're working from a real culture, is, what can you take and when can you not take? This is something that I've thought about. I've used rituals that come from basically conjure, like, folk magic, that come from, like, a black American folk magic tradition, and I don't want to depict closed practices, which are basically practices only meant, rituals and rites that are only meant to be done by the group themselves. If you're not in the group, like, don't do it, and you'll know if you are. I think, number one, I don't want to be disrespectful. Number 2, I actually don't want a bunch of folk magic practitioners mad at me. They were like… That's not a good group to have on your bad side. So I think that is something that I thought about, is, what is the essence of what's going through? I think that's what you're talking about. What is the core value that is underlying that tradition, which is the thing that that tradition is meant to do. Or what was it originally developed to do. Then, how can I develop it in a different way? What if this same objective was expressed differently? What if it had a different practice, but the same underlying goal? So I think a lot about that in, like, trying to avoid doing things that just seem like I'm kind of using somebody else's closed practices or, as I like to say it sometimes, dipping my quill in somebody's blood. Which is not a good thing unless that's what your story is about.

[DongWon] That is such an evocative image. I love that.

[Yeah. Chuckles.]

[Mahtab] I think one thing that we must remember whenever you do… Whenever you're writing something like this, is be respectful. Like, make sure that if, one, there is no misappropriation of someone else's traditions or practices. Use your own, something that you have, but whatever you change it into, whatever you tweak it into, make sure that it's respectful. If there is a fantasy element or a speculative element to it, that's fine, but try to make sure that you're not offending anyone by just making it so egregious that it's like it's wow, but it's really, really bad. So, just respect. Keep that in mind.

[DongWon] I think one of the things that can really help there is, especially in fiction, we're seeing these rites and rituals and traditions through an individual's perspective. Individuals have an imperfect understanding of the traditions that they're embedded in. Right? Nobody fully understands why it is that we do this ritual on this day, or why we honor this tradition in this way. So, having a character that is resistant to it, or doesn't quite understand it, or is trying to understand, I think are great ways to build a little bit of a buffer between the culture that you are referencing, that blood that you're dipping your quill in, and what's actually on the page. When you grounded in someone's specific experience, I think that does a lot to add that texture and that subjectivity that makes it feel less like you're just picking something up wholesale from someone else's culture, even from your own culture. Right? So, just remember that as people are experiencing all of these things that we're talking about, you're writing it through characters, you're writing through individuals embedded in that culture. I don't know, my experience is a lot of, like, trying to understand how my culture works, both as an American and coming with… My parents coming from Korea, there's, like, all these different things that I'm trying to puzzle out all the time and trying to get them to fit together. So I think letting that be felt in how your characters experience these moments can be a really thrilling way to go about it.

[Fonda] One of the things I love about incorporating rituals, rites, and traditions in fiction, in worldbuilding, is that they do so much heavy lifting for you. You don't need to have pages of exposition when you can show your characters living their day-to-day lives and going through the traditions of their society. It just provides this natural in, where you can very seamlessly include the exposition that you need to. For example, if I was to write a story set in the United States of America and it was for an extraterrestrial audience, rather than explaining the origin of this country and how it came to be and etc., etc., I could have my characters celebrate the 4th of July. There's an automatic in for me to, through the traditions of the society, give a bit of background on where… The origins of the society and how people celebrate it. So, think about that when you are doing your world building. Can you have, as much as possible, these grounded day-to-day experiences of your characters that give you this automatic in, where you don't have to make an awkward cut to explain something about your world?

[Erin] Which is a perfect time for a tradition of our own, to pause, so that we can have our little break, and so, traditionally, this would be the time for the thing of the week.

[Fonda] Our thing of the week is a debut fantasy novel called Shanghai Immortal by A. Y. Chao. It is a very action-packed, funny book, that takes place in a Chinese underworld that resembles 1920s Shanghai, and I especially recommend the audiobook that was narrated by Mei Mei Macleod. The reason why I've chosen this is the book of the week is because it is a great example of how one author took rituals, rites, and traditions from our own world and shaped it for a fantasy world. For example, in our world in Chinese tradition, there is the ritual of burning offerings for ancestors, and in Shanghai Immortal, some of these offerings show up in the underworld in very unexpected ways. So, like the lucky ro… Joss roosters that get burned in our world end up just over populating the underworld…

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] And there are roosters running amok everywhere and there's a disaster. Shanghai Immortal by A. Y. Chao.

[Erin] Now that we're back from the break, I'm going to break from tradition in a little bit, and actually, we're going to do a quick wrap up section because we are on a ship right now and they are telling us that they want this room for secret rituals of their own. So, if you… We can go down, starting with DongWon, what is the one thing that you wish people knew when they were writing rites or rituals or traditions? One take away, what would it be?

[DongWon] [garbled]

[chuckles]

[DongWon] I think the thing that I wish people would really bring to it is really showing how communities come together. I think these are… The opportunities to make your characters feel embedded in a specific place and a specific group of people. Often times, when we see these scenes, it feels very individualistic, we're so focused on that person's emotions emotional experience going through it. But a thing that I often feel is missing in stories is a greater sense of a wider cast of characters, even if we're not seeing them all as individual POVs. That feeling of community, that feeling of connections, I think these ritual moments are such an ideal place to get that in and, often times, people can be very focused on the isolating experience of the character in those moments.

[Fonda] I would say that remember that at its core, rituals, rites, and traditions reflect how people relate to the world, to the community, and to each other. When you incorporate them into your fiction, they are an incredible opportunity to not just world build on a macro level, but also on a micro level, and weave in really tangible details, like food. Food is a part of so many of our rites and rituals and traditions. Dress. Is there special dress associated with certain occasions and traditions in your society? Money. Entertainment. So many of your world building blocks can be put together through the lens of the rites, rituals, and traditions of your fictional world.

[Mahtab] What I would say is try… And the first time that you're writing it, you may not know how many or what kinds of rites or rituals or traditions you want to, but I think during the revision is when you really need to figure out if you have too many strands, too many things going on, how you can roll a couple of things into one another and deepen your plot and deepen some of the things that you put in there, rather than widen it. Just give it some… Like, I would say during the revision process, go for depth, and really work those traditions out or rituals out, whatever it is that you want to work on. But narrow them down and just really work them out. I hope I'm making myself clear.

[Erin] You are. What I would say is to remember that rituals and traditions are not just things that other people have. I think sometimes we can think of rituals as that is a different culture has this ritual or tradition, but I'm just doing things because I am. But there are so many traditions that we have, like holding the door open or moving to the other side of the elevator or even blowing out the candles on a birthday cake is a ritual that exists in the birthday celebrations in America that may not exist everywhere.

[Erin] With that, I have the homework for you. Which is to pick a ritual or tradition that you are accustomed to or familiar with and make it the center of a fictional scene. You can change its meaning, you can change its impact, but keep the actual actions of the ritual or tradition the same.

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

[Mary Robinette] Hey, writer. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Let us know. We love hearing about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.49: Bodies Are Magical

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/12/04/17-49-bodies-are-magical/

Key points: There's a common trope where a disability becomes a superpower. This also often makes the character super useful. And depersonalizes them, too. Be careful of plot relevant abilities. Write your people as people. Do your world building so that your characters can have agency without their abilities becoming a plot point.

MICE: In a milieu story, often people will have someone live in somebody else's body or have a temporary disability, which makes the disability exotic and the person non-human. Idea stories often focus on "What's wrong with this person?" This often reveals an invisible disability, and shows that we are better people for knowing about it. It also makes the person non-human, again. Character stories often mean the person is trying to solve themselves, and focus on dissatisfaction with self. Very inhuman! Event stories often start with a diagnosis that disrupts the status quo, and looks for a cure that either restores the status quo or sets a new status quo. Q.E.D., try to avoid making the disability a plot point, a driver for the story.

Superhero comics often focus on what happens when A and B fight. This is not a good model for exploring abilities or other characteristics.

Final summations:

Chelsea: As speculative writers, try to imagine environments that remove barriers for people with disabilities.

Fran: If you have a disability, or acquire one, write your experience, write your story.

[Season 17, Episode 49]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Bodies Are Magical.

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Fran] I'm Fran.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Today, we're going to be talking about bodies are magical. This is the thing where someone with a disability, suddenly, that disability becomes a superpower. Which is not necessarily the way things work.

[Nope, nope, nope]

[Mary Robinette] As we've discussed, there are times when the modifications that you have in the ways you've adapted, that those can be useful, but the disability itself… The classic one that people point at is, of course, Daredevil. Where losing his eyesight gives him magical powers on multiple axes, because all of his other senses have become heightened.

[Fran] Elsa Sjunneson, who we've talked about before, with her book Being Seen, but also online in different essays, has some great breakdowns of the Daredevil problem, by the way. You can Google those, they're amazing, we should probably have a link to that. [Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] But it is a very, very common trope that you'll see. Sometimes it's also a thing that people will do as a form of overkill. That they're like, "Oh, I don't want the person with the disability to be weak, so I'm going to give them these extra things."

[Chelsea] What I find is that when you have that character with the disability who has the disability, but then they have something that makes them super extra ultra powerful, it also conveniently makes them super extra useful to the narrator and other characters. It de-persons them in a lot of cases.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Fran] Plot relevant disability and plot relevant superpowers both have that same icky feel to them. One of the things that I tend to do is I have a lot of disabled characters in my fiction, but people don't notice them, because they're doing things on the page like protagonizing and antagonizing and making things and breaking things. Their disability doesn't necessarily have to jive with that or be part of the plot, it's just part of who they are. Having that sort of superpower that's utterly convenient to the plot or, unfortunately, sometimes the disability that is plot relevant, really does… It de-personalizes, like Chelsea was saying. What we have been talking about this entire series is seeing people as people and writing people as people and finding places for empathy rather than any other approach towards writing people.

[Mary Robinette] So, these things, let's unpack what we mean about it not being a plot point. What we're talking about is, like, it will absolutely affect the way the character moves through the world. Just the same way that the fact that I am 5'7" affects the way I move through the world. Fran is…

[Fran] 4'10".

[Mary Robinette] 4'10" and one of the things…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That she said to me when we saw each other in person for the first time is that one of the nice things about masks for her was that she could no longer see people's nose hair.

[Fran] Please, please trim. Anyway…

[Mary Robinette] But that is… Like, that's not a plot point. As Howard…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Strokes his mustache. That is a mustache. But the point is, like, that affects the way we move through the world. We see different things, we experience different things, but it is, someone's nose hair or lack thereof is not, like, a plot point. I hope. I mean, maybe. Go for it. If you feel the urge.

[Howard] To use an example that is perhaps less abled in nature, someone with very long hair on a windy day without a hairband, the hair gets in their face. That doesn't mean they're Rapunzel.

[No]

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Fran] On the other hand, just to use the height thing for a different reason, one thing that impacts me directly is when I'm at a stand up cocktail party. Most of the conversation happens directly over my head. I will miss things because people are talking above me. If I have everyone sit down, which I tend to do, then everybody's talking out my level, which is, like, the same thing with Zoom. It was great. Except that people now insist on coming up to me and saying, "I had no idea you were so little. You seemed so…" They want to use the word normal. I'm glad that they stop themselves. I'm really proud of people who stop themselves from using that word. But the aspect of… Like, Zoom is a great leveler for lots of people, but not for others. None of these things are necessarily a plot point, but you can use them as a way to express how you move through the world.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, an example of this… Turning this height thing into a superpower…

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] Would be… A superpower plot point, would be that if Fran is at a cocktail party and discovers a special clue that only she could discover because she happens to be the right height to look under the table without anyone…

[Fran] Exactly the right height.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly the right height. That's the kind of thing where… I can hear people going, "But sometimes you do need a character who's smaller." It's like, yes. But that can't be their only purpose in the plot. That can't be… Like, every time there's a problem, it's like, "Let's get the small person in."

[Howard] A bomb could also be discovered by the horrible creeper who has a mirror taped to his shoe.

[Fran] Eew! Okay. Eew.

[Mary Robinette] Thanks for that, Howard. Thank you.

[Fran] I'm uncomfortable now.

[Howard] I'm sorry. Hey. You know what. I'm 5'6". I traveled a lot on business. It really did feel like a superpower that I could be comfortable flying coach.

[Mary Robinette] I mean… Those chairs. But at the same time, those… The headrests on those chairs are not built for someone with a short torso.

[Chuckles]

[Fran] To go back to the phrasing that you used, Mary Robinette, where you said, "But you sometimes need someone who is smaller as a character." That idea of, "Oh, I need a person who is like this so that the plot can do X," has… There are points at which that thought process is useful, but when you are constructing fully rounded characters without bias, taking a look at why you feel like you need them for this is an interesting exercise in self examination.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Let's take a moment and pause for the book of the week, and then I… When we come back, we have more to say about this. Our book of the week is…

[Fran] Is not a book!

[Howard] Not a book.

[Mary Robinette] It is not a book, it is something that Fran has been wanting to talk about the entire time we've been recording.

[Fran] Yep. This is the TV series Killjoys. It came on the air in 2015, 2016, and ran for three or four seasons. A couple of those seasons get a little nebulous and a little weird, but then it brought itself back. What I want to talk about with Killjoys is that the premise in definitely season two, especially with an episode called Dutch and the Real Girl, is sort of what we've been talking about. This is an episode with a character who has been hack modded into something where her arm is a gun. But, also, she's got lots of other mods and things, and there is a whole discussion in there about being human, but also having a different role to play in both the series and in society. One of the things that I love about Killjoys, and there's a lot to love about Killjoys… It's got some cyberpunk elements. Victoria Modesta, the model that I mentioned with the prism for one of her legs, is in the show as a special guest for season two. The hack mods are part of a marginalized community group that is a long running theme through this show, Killjoys. One of the things that Killjoys did with this is they hired actual disabled people to play the hack mods. So you've got this amazing… I think Killjoys hired more disabled people to play roles on the show then all of Hollywood at that point. It was amazing to see. It's fantastic to see these actors operating with just the plot points that they have, playing lots of different characters. It's a great show. Especially Dutch and the Real Girl, that's one of my favorite episodes of all time.

[Mary Robinette] So. This is Killjoys, which apparently everyone needs to go watch. As you were talking

[garbled]

[Fran] It was actually produced in Canada, as many good things are. It did run for five seasons, started 2015. Hannah John-Kamen plays the lead in that. She's also in the second Antman as Ghost. So she's all over the place.

[Howard] Cool.

[Mary Robinette] As you were talking about that, I'm going to take us a little bit off topic and then bring us back. The… You made me think about discovery. I'm doing a rewatch of parts of it, but in season two, there's some good disability wrapped in that. There's just [background characters]… Just, like, you're watching and somebody just rolls through in a chair, there's… It's really great. None of these are main characters. None of these are main characters, and also, when you look at the bridge, it has steps just built into it.

[Fran] Yep.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So this is a world in which…

[Fran] Also, all of the chairs are fixed. So that character that rolls by can never actually sit at the bridge.

[Mary Robinette] Yep. Yep. That's a great point which I had not thought about.

[Mary Robinette] So part of what we're talking about here when were thinking about bodies are magical and not being plot points, is also, like, the world building that you're doing so that your character can move through this world. So that whatever it is that you have, however you have designed this character, that they can have agency in this story without becoming a plot point. So. I do want to dive in a little bit into what I talk about, about what I mean personally when I'm talking about having it become a plot point. People who are longtime listeners know me and my fondness for talking about the MICE quotient. So, here, the MICE quotient is this organizational structure, right. So, in a milieu story, it begins when you enter a place, and ends when you leave it. Often what you'll see is that you'll see someone have a character… They want to explore disability by having someone live in somebody else's body or they'll have a disability that is a temporary disability. That, basically has the problem of making that disability exotic and it's very, very othering. The idea structure which begins when you ask a question and ends when you answer it is like, "What is wrong with that person?" That's another plot point that you can see… Sometimes see where people will have someone who has like an invisible disability and it's all about, "Oh, now we discover it. Oh, we're better people because we know the answer to this question now."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Again, it's othering because it becomes… That person's the character. Character stories begin when the character is unhappy with their role, some aspect of themselves, and it ends when the character becomes happy with the role, which then means that they are having to… The problem that they are trying to solve is themselves. Which is, again, it is setting a very specific form of normal and having somebody be dissatisfied with who they are. As a plot point, that can be, again, very othering. Then, events begins with a disruption of the status quo, which is often diagnosis. It ends with restoration of the status quo, or the establishment of a new status quo, which means that you're always looking at a cure.

[Howard] Can I just say that I love that in a minute and a half, you've taken the MICE quotient and used it to explain how to do everything wrong.

[Mary Robinette] Yep. Yep.

[Howard] This is beautiful.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. Thank you. So this is why when you've got a character with a disability, you actually don't want it to be a plot point. You don't want it to be a driver, because if you do… Or, if you do, you have to know that that is the story that you're telling. You're telling one of those versions of stories. You don't want to do it. If you're going to do it, you don't want to do it unintentionally, for certain. But if you want a character and you don't want them to be like, "Hello. I have this magical superpower. I am here because I am useful." Then, it needs to be decoupled from the plot and just affect the way they move through the world. Which is different than these are the story questions that we're trying to solve and answer.

[Howard] It's… While we are chewing on that amazing deconstruction, which I'm again going to say that I love, it's worth pointing out that a lot of where we see disability as superpower done wrong is in comics. One of the tropes of comics, and you see this in especially the ensemble MCU movies, is that at some point there is an idea milieu element which is what happens when Hulk and Thor fight? What happens when Thor and Iron Man fight? What happens when Iron Man and Capt. America fight? Comic book writers… This trope, everybody at some point has to fight everybody else, that is not a great model in which to explore ability, disability, age, old age, youth, whatever, because it is going to be inherently othering for a large portion of the audience.

[Fran] This is where I get to shout out to Marieke Nijkamp who wrote the Oracle Code, which is the story of Barbara Gordon. It's a graphic novel. It was published in 2020, before the rest of things happened. It's fantastic. Marieke is an amazing advocate for disability and disabled writers. Just wonderful to talk about. But if you get a chance to check out The Oracle Code, it is worth your time and does exactly the opposite of what Howard is talking about.

[Howard] To be sure, or to be clear, I say comics. What I mean is the superhero genre. Obviously, comics are a medium which can be used to tell all kinds of stories.

[Mary Robinette] Well, we are approaching the end of our time together. So, before we go into our homework, I just want to check to see if Chelsea or Fran, as our guests for this series, if either of you have any big takeaways that you want our listeners to carry with them before we give them their homework.

[Chelsea] I mean, I think the thing that I've been talking about mostly in all of these episodes is how very much I want us as speculative writers to take the opportunity to imagine environments that are… That basically take away barriers to people with disabilities. Because they're… Well, I'm just going to be opinionated about this… Designed properly.

[Fran] I'm going to direct my comments to those listeners who have a disability, as well as those who may, in the future, have a disability, and just say, "Write your experience. Write your story. In whatever way you want to tell it. If you have the opportunity to reach for empathy, go for it." This is a really important thing, but find… Finding ways to put your story down is actually a wonderful way to just feel present in a way that doesn't mean you're educating people, it's just you're telling a story, you're doing a thing. It's… Please, please write. I would love to see everything you write.

[Mary Robinette] Well, with that, we come to our homework. For your homework assignment, we've had this conversation that at some point, everyone is going to be disabled. So, look at your cast of characters for your work in progress and decide what disabilities your characters have. Some of them will be visible. Some of them will be in visible. Some of them will be things that the characters themselves don't recognize as a disability. Decide what those are, and then make sure that none of them are a plot point. That these are characters who just get to exist and have adventures the same way all of the other characters do. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.19: As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/05/10/15-19-as-you-know-this-episode-is-about-exposition/

Key Points: As you know, Bob, maid-and-butler dialogue is all about exposition, and not very convincing. The good news is that at least you're thinking about exposition. Levels? First, dialogue is more fun to read than an infodump. Second, natural dialogue, not exposition dummies. Third! Too much dialogue, using it for everything. Answer? Symbols! Make sure your scenes have a plot movement as well as dialogue. Only tell the reader what they need to know, and tie it to conflict and character. Context! Be careful not to add actions and beats to every line of dialogue. Write your dialogue outward from the point. Why are these people having this conversation? All conversation is combat, is conflict. Focus on the details of what each character wants and notices. Use the person coming into the conversation late to fast-track exposition. How do you add description and exposition? Write five sentences, then pare it down. Try emulating screenwriting, setting the scene with just enough for a director or artist to know what to do, what the mood needs to be. Consider spatial intimacy. You don't paint an entire city, you paint one room, one street. You may build an entire house and decorate it, but give the reader just a glimpse, enough for them to infer the rest from the reflection off your iceberg.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 19.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're Bob.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm not Bob.

[Laughter]

[Howard] As you know, Howard…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Sorry. That's the classic, as you know, Bob. The maid-and-butler dialogue where two people talk about a thing that both of them already understand, but they talk about it so they can exposite to the reader. So, fair reader, listener, if you didn't get the joke…

[Dan] Don't do that.

[Howard] Yeah, don't do that. If you didn't get the joke, now you do.

[Victoria] Can we talk about how meta it is that you just like explained the entire show?

[Laughter]

[Howard] Expositioned it… Expositioned it. Well, because it's… Never mind.

[Brandon] It's actually kind of nice to see in my students. As you know, Bob, or whatever, I call it maid-and-butler dialogue, it's nice to see in one way because they're at least thinking about exposition, right? Like, your first level up is when you realize dialogue is just way more fun to read than a big infodump. So I'll put this into dialogue. But then, your next level up is realizing that dialogue needs to feel natural and you need to construct a scene in such a way that the dialogue feels like it's coming from real people rather than exposition dummies there to give the exposition.

[Dan] If you want to see this done wrong, CSI Miami was shocking sometimes at the level that two forensic scientists would sit there and recite textbooks at each other while looking at a body or whatever.

[Brandon] Now, most of our questions, or most of our episodes this year are coming from questions from readers. There's actually a really… Readers? Listeners. There's a really great question starting this off, which is the next level up moment. This listener says, "I've noticed that a lot of my scenes are little more than conversations, typically with other actions used to set in a secondary capacity, if at all. Back story, plot revelations, growth, all shown through conversations." I'm going to assume this character… This read…

[Howard] This listener.

[Brandon] This listener, noticing that, is not writing maid-and-butler dialogue. They're writing good dialogue, but they're noticing, I'm doing… Making my dialogue do a ton of heavy lifting on this. I've noticed this in my own writing as well. So it's something that I worry about.

[Dan] So, this is something that can be handled really well with symbols. I don't mean symbolism in the AP English sense. I mean that you assign a visible thing or an action to a thing. The really obvious one is Luke, you've turned off your targeting computer. Right? We don't have to come out and say Luke has learned that he needs to use the Force. Because he turns off his targeting computer, and everyone goes, "Oh. Okay, I understand what this means. They establish that earlier. With the blast shield down, I can't even see. How am I supposed to fight? We get that same thing, reversed. Another really beautiful one is actually in the movie Toy Story where the first scene is we're going to spy on the little boy's birthday party and see what the new present is. It's all… Woody's in charge, and he's doing this thing, and he wants to make sure he maintains his position as the favorite toy. The final scene is that exact scene re-done, but now he has a friend. Now he's with Buzz, and they're partners. So without coming out and saying, "I have learned the value of other people and that friendship is important and I don't have to be the favorite toy to be valued," we get all of that through the use of this really stark visual symbol that just relays it to us.

[Victoria] Two things. I personally feel like this is a plot problem. I feel like this is a reflection, if the only purpose of your scene is this dialogue, then you need to separate out the verbal content of the conversation from what you're trying to accomplish in a plot sense of the scene. If the only forward movement in the scene is through the dialogue, then I think your scene is not working as a holistic scene, moving the overarching plot forward as well. I come from the anime school of worldbuilding. The anime school of worldbuilding states, basically, we do not infodump because we don't tell you anything except what you need to know going in. Everything that you learn, be it dialogue or exposition, is tied to conflict and character. So when I see scenes like this when I'm teaching or when I'm reviewing for people, and I see these large chunks of conversation, then that starts to happen in a vacuum in my mind. They're just hovering there in space. So I start to ask those authors, those writers, to start separating out the two lines, almost as if you're making a song, and you would separate the musical instruments or separate the lines and say, "What else is this scene accomplishing?" Because the nice thing about conversation, the beautiful thing about dialogue, it can happen in a context and then some. You get twice as much out of your scenes when there's a physical underlying context to the scene as well as a conversational context.

[Brandon] Let me ask you this, though. One of the things that I've just started becoming may be hyperaware of, too aware of, is that people using non-dialogue beats and actions and things in order to replace writing better dialogue.

[Howard] Well…

[Brandon] It gets really bothersome when I see my students and every line of dialogue is modified by a sentence saying what they're doing. They've learned that if someone slams their coffee cup down, it helps add an exclamation point. So every character with every beat is doing something.

[Victoria] But that is the equivalent of somebody thinking that they're revising by moving commas around. That is not actually fixing the motion of the scene, right? Those are crutches of the scene. So I actually think it's a lot better, I'll advise students to create a block of the scene and then a block of dialogue. Like, work us between the two. I actually think that a paragraph of the scene bracketing the dialogue is a lot more efficient than slicing up your bracketing scenes as notes throughout the dialogue.

[Brandon] I tend to agree with that as well. I like it, personally, with reading when you go into dialogue, the dialogue has been tightly worked so that it just gets across emotions and things without… With as very little outside the dialogue is possible, and then you transition back into motion and…

[Victoria] It also comes down… I know this is a tangential thing that relates to this, but let's talk about dialogue for a moment. Because I'm shocked by how many people think that when you write dialogue, you begin at the beginning and you go to the end. When, like, the truth is most conversations have a point. So when I write dialogue, I build outward from the point. What is the thing that the two or three or four people engaged in this conversation are trying to get to? I think when you build out from the point, instead of the hello, hello, goodbye, goodbye of it, then you start to understand why they're having the conversation. Really, like, we don't have conversations in a void. We have conversations in a context. So often when I see a lot of dialogue happening, a lot of information being conveyed this way, I start to wonder why there's an absence of context. Sometimes the context can replace some of the dialogue. Absolutely, it's a balance that you find in the writing. Like so many things that we talk about, you learn the right balance by doing it wrong and by doing it right. But I think… I mean, this is the time where you have to remember that all writers are readers. Find the things that really work. Find the good examples of it, and study them, the way that you would study anything.

[Howard] I think it's important to recognize that… And I use this as a punchline in a Schlock Mercenary strip a decade ago. Good Lord. The punchline was, "Captain, all conversation is combat."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The Captain's response is along the lines of I think I'm going to enjoy it a lot more now. The idea that we converse because there is a… There are competing ideas, and at the end of the conversation, those ideas will have changed in status. At a almost theological level, the religion of the sharing of information, conversation is conflict.

[Victoria] Absolutely.

[Howard] Even if we agree, there is conflict here, because if there wasn't conflict, we wouldn't need to talk. So, as you know, Bob, is broken because there is no conflict, there's no reason for me to tell you what you know. But, if I'm saying a thing… If I'm trying to explain a piece of worldbuilding to someone who doesn't know it, the disagreement… The conflict there is not I am providing information that you need. The more interesting conflict is I'm providing information that you don't believe, and you're now going to refuse or refute. It becomes an argument. You layer that atop character conflict, atop other things, and suddenly… I will read page after page after page of that, because it can be fun.

[Victoria] I think the pointedness of exposition is important. Either the fact that in dialogue, no two people come together to have the same conversation. We each come to a conversation with an idea that we want to convey to the other. So often, what's the interesting part of dialogue is when we miss each other in the conversation, when each of us is trying to basically have a monologue to the other one, and we have to have that collision point. I also, on the character building exposition side of it, I feel strongly that… This so often gets put into first person, but when you think about writing, regardless of whether your writing third person or first person or second person, you are writing a perspective. Every single character will notice different things. Every single character that you write is moving through their world and their environment differently. They see the world differently, they have different philosophies, and they're going to notice different things. So often, unless you're writing a purely omniscient world, you can tie the details of the things that we notice, of the things that we perceive that are relevant, to the attention of the character that you are writing about. So remembering that each of us has a bias, a way of moving through the world, each of the characters that you write is going to perceive different things about the world around them. Honing it into those details can help it from feeling infodumpy, can help the exposition from feeling it doesn't serve a point.

[Howard] One of my favorite stupid tricks is the person… We have this happen all the time, all of us. Someone walks into the room late and tries to join the conversation, but they don't know what's been said yet. Everybody is now instantly mad. "We just covered this!" "Yeah, but I wasn't here." "Why do we care that you know?" "I care that I know."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] One, there's comedy inherent in it because we've all been there, we've all been annoyed, and we are now watching the lessening in status of the person that we would like to see drop. One of my… One of the rules of comedy. But the other thing is, it allows you now to fast-track the exposition and give them the equivalent of the as you know, Bob, in a way that has conflict just running… Just oozing off of it.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week.

[Dan] Book of the week, this week. One of my very favorite things in the entire universe is…

[Howard] Me?

[Dan] When… Well, you're related to it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] When Writing Excuses listeners, students at our retreat, people who listen to the podcast, come to me and show me their book that they wrote and have published. Like, that is just… Makes me so happy. That happened recently. Suyi Davies Okungbowa, who is one of our scholarship winners for the 2019 cruise, has got a fantasy book published. It is called David Mogo Godhunter. He gave me a copy. It's super, super good. It's basically the Dresden Files if it took place in Lagos, Nigeria. About a guy who is hunting fallen gods for a wizard. It's really good stuff. Really well written. He is presenting a very new, unique world that he does a great job of exposing that information to us. So… It applies to our episode as well.

[Brandon] Title and author, one more time?

[Dan] David Mogo Godhunter. The author is Suyi Davies Okungbowa.

[Brandon] All right. So, the other question we have for this week is about adding description. How do you add description when it doesn't come easily? How do you find the balance between worldbuilding and exposition?

[Victoria] I am one of those people that believe you write five sentences, and then you ask yourself if one sentence will do the same amount of work. That's not to say that you should underwrite. I think you're totally fine to overwrite. But I usually believe that if you take a paragraph to describe anything, and then you ask yourself if every sentence in that paragraph is pulling the same amount of weight, you can usually get it down to one or two very powerful sentences. I think sometimes, especially in the fantasy tradition, we think more is more. Sometimes, more is more. But usually… I come from a poetry background. So, usually, what I think is especially in moments where we're truly setting up world, where the exposition and the description is not actively engaged with any one thing, with conflict, with character, with anything, but we feel the need to set the scene, that in that case, less can be more, when it is done pointedly.

[Howard] I think that the tradition of writing… When I say tradition, the form, the syntax of writing for the screen and writing for comics, where at some point, you are telling the director, you are telling the cameraman, you're telling the artist what to do. As the writer, there is a line you don't want to cross, where you may have told them too much. Yet, there's also this point where all you've given them is a white room full of people talking and they don't have anything to work with. When I talk about writing comic scripts, often what I will focus on, and this is useful for writing other things, is colors and moods and shapes. I'll say, "Establishing shot, longshot, super desaturated background to show distance, trees in the foreground, characters in the immediate foreground, brightly lit, whatever." That establishes a mood, where we are close up on the characters and they are in a huge space. Well, if I were to write this in prose, obviously I wouldn't write it that way. But I would want to talk about the tree that is nearest. I would want to mention that we can see for miles. It feels like we can see to the end of the world. Something poetic that establishes this same feeling of huge space with people in it up close. So, it may be that an exercise for description is to look at screenplays and the way they handle some of these scenes, and then look at how you would write it in prose to accomplish the mood. Rather than to say these are all of the millions of things that were in that picture.

[Victoria] So, this kind of comes back, for me, to the idea of spatial intimacy. Right? You cannot paint an entire city. Not in any way that a person can keep in their mind. But you can paint a room or a street in that city. I have this theory that there are two kinds of fantasy authors. There are… Or really any genre authors. There are authors who build you an entire house, decorate every room of that house, then give you as the reader the key to that house. You now get to explore every room. If you don't see it, it doesn't exist there. That's like the Tolkein philosophy, right? Then there are authors who build the entire house, decorate the entire house, and instead of giving the reader the key, they leave one curtain open. What you can essentially see then is one room, perhaps an open doorway, a hall beyond, and you're given just enough details to be able to infer the house beyond. I think that when you're writing fantasy or something where you feel like there's a lot of room for description, remembering that a few key details instead can have that iceberg philosophy, can show you and be reflective of an entire world.

[Brandon] Absolutely. I like to go back… Going back to what you said earlier and kind of tying this all together, if your worry… One of your worries is you're doing too much conversation, a few of those very well described tight… Like… This is when one paragraph is better than 17. A really, really like curious paragraph that gives you that window, that gives you that drape, that shows you… And brings you right in there is a wonderful powerful balance to some of these dialogues.

[Victoria] Absolutely.

[Brandon] We are out of time on the podcast today. I am going to give you some homework. What I want you to do is I want you to take a favorite piece of media of yours, whether it's a book, a television show, a movie. I'm going to use Star Wars for this example because it's pretty universal, a lot of people have seen it. I want you than to make a list of all the worldbuilding elements that are necessary to understand Star Wars. Right? To understand how that movie, how that world works, how that society works. Then, once you've got that done, I want you to watch the movie, read the book, the show again, and see at what pace the creators of that media put all of those things in. So you can get a sense for how somebody else is doing it, how they are using their learning curve and their description and their exposition to give that information to you. So, have fun doing that. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.10: Magic Systems

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/10/14-10-magic-systems/

Key points: How do you go about designing magic for a book or story? With younger readers, you can get away with a softer magic system. I drew on Indian mythology, but then change or craft it to fit. Hard = rules, crunchy. Soft = more free-form, less description. Take something from mythology or folklore, and turn it into a system. Think about what the readers are looking for -- wish fulfillment, fun, aspirational geewhiz. They want escapism, a world of new experiences, but where they can still identify with the problems and conflicts. Don't forget the flipside, the speculative what if and social exploration. Why do we like favorite magic systems? Essentially giant puzzles. A visual component to the magic. The immediate combination of "it would be cool to do this" and "Oh, wow, the implications are really frightening." Surprising, yet inevitable fulfilling of promises. Collecting plot coupons! Knowing what it would be like to experience or confront the magic.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 10.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Magic Systems.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard. Why are you laughing?

[Mahtab] And I'm Mahtab.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I'm laughing because she copied our vocal intonation.

[Laughter]

[Dan] It was really funny.

[Howard] Okay. You know what I do when I'm traveling in a foreign country? I start to sound like them. We are aliens and… Welcome, Mahtab.

[Laughter]

[Dan] [garbled cool aliens house]

[laughter]

[Howard] One of my alien powers is to invent magic systems.

[Dan] Ooo… Talk about that.

[Howard] Did that bring us back on topic, Brandon?

[Brandon] Yes, it did. Before we started this, Howard looked at me and said, "Brandon, you're not going to just talk this whole time, are you?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Because you could.

[Brandon] We decided together…

[Dan] Probably what the listeners want. Tough.

[Brandon] No, it's… We… I have written a bunch of essays on magic systems. We're not going to touch on the things in those essays. Because we've covered them in episodes of Writing Excuses, I've talked about them at length. Instead, we're going to kind of talk to the side of them. So if you want to read those essays, Sanderson's Laws, you can go find them. You can read them. Instead, I want to ask… I'm going to start with Mahtab. How did you go about designing the magic in The Third Eye or in any of the stories you've worked on?

[Mahtab] Well, first of all, because I'm writing for middle grade, I do not need to have too many hard facts or go at extreme length in terms of describing the system. I think you can… With younger readers, you can get away with doing a softer magic system, where… So one of the influences that I had was the Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That was one of my absolute favorite novels that I read. Things are not really explained. When Aslan sacrifices himself to save Edmund, and then he dies, and he's on this Stone Table which breaks, and that is some deep magic related to Christianity and sacrifice. I didn't know all of that. I totally didn't understand. But, I mean, I felt that wonder when he came back alive, and the kids went back with him. So, as far as mine, when I was writing The Third Eye, I drew a lot on Indian mythology. So one of the… Well, the main character's Tara, who is a young child, but the mean villain is Zarku, who is an evil character and he hypnotizes people with his third eye, which I borrowed directly from the god Shiva, who has a third eye. Except that Shiva uses it to burn evil things, whereas I actually gave that quality to my evil protagonist, who could hypnotize people and make them do things. I had a couple of really gruesome scenes which kids kind of love and the parents hated. Which is fine by me, as long as they picked up the book to read.

[Howard] But, you know what, that's the mark of a really good book for kids.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Kids love it, and their parents hate it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You've done society a great service.

[Mahtab] Thank you. That's actually the one book that won the Silver Birch, which is a reading program in Ontario, and it kind of kick started my career. I was really happy about that. So I drew a lot on Indian mythology. Even when Tara has to solve problems, she prays to Lord Ganesh and she has… Lord Ganesh is supposed to have a helper in the form of a little mouse. That is what comes to save her. So, my magic system was soft, but it was based a lot on drawing from Indian mythology, and then kind of changing or crafting it to suit the story.

[Howard] It's worth pointing out that next week we're going to talk about magic without rules. So…

[Dan] That's kind of what we mean by hard and soft.

[Brandon] Right.

[Dan] She was throwing those terms around. If it has a lot of rules and is very crunchy, that's a hard. If it's more free-form…

[Brandon] Yeah. There is sometimes this sense, like, when I start talking about these, people assume that I don't like soft magic systems. You'll be disabused of that next week.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I really like a good soft magic system. I like magic in all its different varieties, and what it does in stories.

[Brandon] So let's talk about building… You said you reached into Indian mythology to get a lot of your ideas. I do this too. A lot of my ideas for magic systems will come from something from mythology, or something that… Like, I love the idea of spontaneous genesis, right? That things get… They used to believe that frogs were born out of mud, because you always find frogs around mud. That idea is so cool…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And so interesting. A lot of my magic systems are born out of me looking back at some sort of folklore or myth, and then saying, "Well, can I make that into a system?"

[Dan] One of the things that I have started to value more and more, every time I try to write magic, is the idea of wish fulfillment. That what readers are really looking for, even though they don't always admit this, especially adults, is magic that is fun, that they would want to use. I think that's one of the major reasons that Harry Potter has been so successful, is because everybody wants to go to Hogwarts, everybody wants to be using those cool spells. So while there's certainly a place for magic that requires sacrifice or that causes pain or something like that, I think there's a lot of aspirational geewhiz in fantasy, where the reader wants to be able to go, "Oh, I want to write a dragon. I want to use all these metals and then fly through the sky. I want to be able to do that. That looks awesome."

[Brandon] That comes into something I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is the draw of fantasy. What is it? How is that maybe different from some other genres? I hadn't even really put this together, but if you look at like movies, some of the big ones, what is the difference between the superhero movies and Star Wars? Star Wars is a lot more fantasy, right? Even though it's got science-fiction trappings. You see with Star Wars, people… They don't necessarily just dress up as the characters in the movies. They go get their own Storm Troopers costume and become a Storm Trooper and things like this. I saw this a lot in The Wheel of Time fandom, that people didn't necessarily when they would do costumes, not necessarily want to be one of the characters. Sometimes they would, but often they would want to put themselves into the setting, and dress themselves like a character and come up with a persona from that world. That's a very kind of distinctive thing, I think, for fantasy.

[Dan] It really is.

[Mahtab] It's a lot to do with escapism. I mean, most people who read fantasy, they're just so bored with… Well, bored or whatever. They just want to go into a whole new world, be the characters, live with them, experience totally new things that they wouldn't, and then they kind of come back to their lives. For me, science fiction and fantasy is exactly that. Just getting out into a different world, yet being able to identify with the problems, with the conflicts that the characters face, so that there is something that I can feel, I mean, it should be something that I feel is relatable to me. But it's still… It's a whole new world.

[Howard] Well, there's a flipside to that, which is the speculative fiction aspect of fantasy and science fiction. At risk of calling the elephant in the room an elephant, Brandon's Steelheart takes the social concept of absolute power corrupts absolutely and wraps that… Or maps that onto a superhero universe, and asks us the question, and it's a socially important question, what happens if there are superpowers and absolute power corrupts absolutely? That question, whether or not there's escapism involved, it's a fascinating read for the social reasons. I think that's kind of the other half of magic systems. We talk about wish fulfillment, we talk about escapism, but we also talk about how the ability to obey a different set of rules, a set of rules that are not the laws of physics as we understand them, but are themselves rules, how will that change us as people? If it doesn't change us as people, how will it change our relationships with other people? That's… So that was really deep and maybe way to crunchy, but…

[Dan] No, that's something that a lot of urban fantasies in particular get into. The TV show called Lost Girl, The Dresden Files series, they both get very heavily into that idea. The Magicians, as well. If you have all of this power, and can get away with stuff, you're going to start getting away with stuff, which I think adds another really cool dimension to the magic system, is there are people who use it well and there are people who don't. People who use it for evil.

[Brandon] Let's stop, and our book of the week is actually The Third Eye. So, will you tell us about it?

[Mahtab] Absolutely. This is actually the very first novel that I wrote. I think I sweated blood and tears over it. It's about a young girl, Tara, who slowly… I mean, she is living in this village with her father and her stepmother, and slowly, as the story progresses… There's a new healer in town who has got three eyes and just about everyone's enamored with him, but she's the only one who can see behind that façade of his and realize that he's evil. The story is about her journey in trying to find her grandfather, who's the only other person who's kind of strong… You could call him a Dumbledore kind of thing. Who is strong enough to fight Zarku and defeat him. But throughout the journey, what I try and do is take away the entire support system, so that eventually, Tara is just relying on herself, and a little bit off the soft magic system based on Hindu mythology that I talked about earlier, to try and defeat Zarku.

[Brandon] It's a delightful book.

[Mahtab] Thank you.

[Brandon] I'm really enjoying it, although I will tell you, I did not expect it to be as much of a horror book as it is.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That's not where I thought I was going.

[Howard] Brandon loves it, his parents do not.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It is genuinely creepy in a lot of places in a really delightful way.

[Mahtab] It's a different horror. I was just telling Dan on the way here, saying I'm delving back into horror, but, yeah, there are some very graphic, gruesome scenes which I really enjoyed writing. I often get teachers saying, "What were you thinking?" But then, it's like, the kids like it, and there isn't anything else that shouldn't be in there, so let them enjoy it.

[Brandon] All right. Let's ask you guys, favorite magic systems in books or films that you've experienced, and kind of why? What made this magic system work? What made you enjoy the story?

[Dan] Well, at the risk of over inflating Brandon's ego…

[Howard] It's now an inflatable elephant in the room.

[Laughter]

[Dan] The… I love the Mistborn magic system, but for two very specific reasons. First of all, they're essentially giant puzzle games. Where, here's all of the pieces. You know how these work. How are they going to solve the problem at the end of the book? For me, reading any of the Mistborn novels is essentially just a cool puzzle to solve. Okay, this guy can do… Here's, in the Alloy of Law series, here's the girl who only has the one weird power that she doesn't think is of any use, she likes slows time down or something. How is that going to be valuable, because you know it is? I love ciphering those puzzles.

[Brandon] They are slightly Asimov Laws of Robotics books, stories.

[Dan] Exactly.

[Brandon] Where you set up several laws, and then you show they're not working or that there's a hole in them somewhere, what are we not understanding? Then you kind of put it together at the end.

[Dan] That's not what every magic system has to do, and shouldn't. There needs to be variety. But I like those for that reason. One of the others, though, and this is another one of the rules that I've kind of set for myself as I develop my own, is that magic should have a visual component to it. I always used to try to make magic very mental, very cerebral. I think a lot of aspiring fantasy writers do the same. But adding that visual element… So again, back to Mistborn, you've got things as simple as being able to pull or push on metal, and you don't need a visual component, but you added the blue lines. The blue lines bear so much weight in these stories, and they serve such a powerful function, even though it's a very simple thing. Because that gives us a sense of what it looks like, and what it would feel like to do it, and it helps us understand what's going on. Just because of these dumb little blue lines.

[Brandon] I love magic systems where, when you start reading it, you both see why it would be so cool to have this magic and also, are instantly worried and frightened about the implications of it. Right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] A great example of that is our former professor, Dave Wolverton's Runelords series, in which you can take someone's strength and brand it onto yourself with a branding iron, and that person loses their strength and you have it. You're twice as strong. But now, you have this person that you need to take care of, because if someone can get to them and kill them, you lose your magic strength. The social implications of that are just staggering. The moment you read it, you realize, "Oh, man. This changes society in some really dark ways." He goes there.

[Dan] Yeah. He follows through on the ramifications. Like, every evil thing that you think as you're contemplating that, he comes… He deals with at some point or another. It's a really great example of how to show the effects of magic, and how to show a society shaped by magic.

[Brandon] How fantasy can, as Mahtab was saying, can take some our world element and in some ways by exaggerating it really kind of bore down into that issue. Like with the Runelords, the fact that the strong become stronger and the weak become more and more subject to the strong, is really well exemplified in that story, to ways that make, I think, you start to realize this is kind of how our society works, and that's an ugly underbelly to it.

[Howard] Deadbeat by Jim Butcher. The… I suppose I'll just spoil it, because…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Do it.

[Howard] That's what we're here for and it's an old book. The name of the book is both a reference to our detective, our wizard, Harry Dresden, who is kind of a deadbeat, and this idea that necromancy works best when you have a rhythm to which all of the dead are marching. I don't remember the exact details, but the older the bones are, the more powerful a thing you can raise. We end up with a guy dressed like a one-man band drummer riding a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton through town. It is surprising, yet inevitable. It fulfills all of the promises of necromancy as he set it forth. It was a lot of fun. I mean… Undead dinosaur, you can't go wrong with that.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Any other favorites?

[Mahtab] I have one which is… I read it a few years ago. But, The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper. Where Will Stanton, on his 12th birthday, realizes he's one of the Old Ones, and he has to collect these six symbols of… I think they're called the Champions of Light, which is… Is to circles made of wood and bronze and iron, fire, water. Then that… He has to collect it, it makes a powerful object, then he repels the Dark with it. But it's just so beautifully written. It's kind of a coming-of-age, a fantasy, there's wild magic, high magic, but it's really, really good. The Dark Is Rising, Susan Cooper.

[Dan] I also wanted to mention, just to have like a really soft magic system in here, the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. I love the magic as he presents it there. Because there's maybe one or two rules, and I don't know anyone who could name them off the top of their heads, but it has a distinct flavor to it. Like, there's no… We don't know what the rules are governing it, but we absolutely know what it feels like. We absolutely know what it would be like to experience or confront the magic that we find in those books. I loved the way he pulled that off.

[Brandon] All right. So, I've also got our homework for this week. Now, next week we're going to be talking about soft magic systems. What I would like you to do is kind of… Make you take some sort of soft magic system that you've read about or you've loved. The example we came up with was… Is Gandalf. Gandalf's very soft. We never know what Gandalf can do, specifically, we just know he's awesome. Well, I want you to take a soft magic system, and apply rules to it. Give Gandalf rules. Take a soft magic system you have written and give it rules. Flip it on its head, and see how the magic works differently if you explain exactly how it works and have it work according to those rules. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.46: The Unsexy Side of Space, with Bart Smith and Ben Hewett

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/11/18/13-46-the-unsexy-side-of-space-with-bart-smith-and-ben-hewett/

Key points: NASA is more than just astronauts and rocket scientists. Someone has to deal with money and the logistics of making things happen. Procurement and budget and legal are there to help the technical people get the job done, quickly and as painlessly as possible. One thing that is frustrating is seeing NASA portrayed as inefficient just because it is a government organization. NASA innovation? Consider wearing a ThinkPad on your head as a hat for VR. Or how about doing water aerobics in the neutral buoyancy lab?

[Transcription note: I may have mixed up Bart and Ben here and there in the transcript. My apologies if I got the two of you confused.]

[Mary] Season 13, Episode 46.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, The Unsexy Side of Space, with Bart Smith and Ben Hewett.

[Mary] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.

[Dan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] Joining us, we have NASA employees extraordinaire Bart Smith and Ben Hewett. Bart, would you introduce yourself for us?

[Bart] Sure. I'm Bart Smith. It's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me today. I've been with NASA for almost 10 years. I'm a budget analyst. So I help with numbers and funding and financing and all sorts of fun stuff. Just to make sure that we can keep the program going.

[Ben] My name is Benjamin Hewett, and I've been with NASA for about 28 days longer than Bart.

[Laughter]

[Ben] Which means I know more than he does.

[Laughter]

[Ben] I started in the same organization, and the chief financial officer's office. That's redundant, I know. I now work in flight ops, in their business office.

[Mary] Which is really exciting. So, for me, one of the reasons that we wanted to have you guys on is that… When we're talking about space, everybody thinks about the astronauts and the people who… And the rocket scientists. But. NASA's supported by a huge organization, and a big part of it is dealing with money and the logistics of making things happen. So why don't we start off by having you guys tell us a little bit about what it is you do? Which is the unsexy side of space, but the absolutely necessary side of space.

[Bart] Sure. I'll start. So as I mentioned, I do budget. So we just make sure we work with a lot of our technical counterparts, our scientists, our engineers, and yes, even astronauts, to make sure that we are funding our operations appropriately. Some of those operations are exciting, right? Are rocket ships and science experiments. Then, some of them are not so exciting. We gotta make sure that the bathrooms work, that the roads are good, and that we pay for security at the front gate. So my specific role is to just work at Johnson Space Center to make sure that all of our funding sources are going to the right places and making sure that we're spending dollars appropriately. So if we spend them appropriately, then the mission goes forward. If we're not spending them appropriately, then we're doing something wrong. So my main role is to make sure that we're not doing anything wrong.

[Mary] So, Ben has said that you do things wrong frequently. So, Ben, what does…

[Laughter]

[Ben] So there is an inherent conflict, obviously, between the technical side of the house, who wants the best of everything… We call that gold plating… And the budget and procurement side of the house, whose job it is to keep those people in check so that we have affordable programs. And how well the procurement side of the house actually does that… You hear jokes about that frequently, and the cost of a hammer. So, case in point, we've been working on a procurement where we're trying to get stuff done, and the procurement guys or budget guys are coming in and saying, "Well, you should try this contract mechanism." I'm in the middle because I'm in the business office. The technical guys are like, "No, no. We know this contract. We can get it done. We can get it done fast. We like these people." So that conflict is kind of where you get that friendly frenemy interplay.

[Mary] I was talking with someone from a different branch of NASA who I will not name because they were talking some smack…

[Laughter]

[Mary] They were talking about ordering business cards. That just the process of ordering business cards was incredibly complicated because, as a government agency, you have to have everything bid on. Is it that kind of thing, kind of all the way down the line?

[Ben] So one of my favorite contracts that we've just done is a multi-award. Which basically means we've gone through, we've found acceptable vendors in several different work category types. So rather than having like a two year long RFI/RFP process, you can streamline that a little bit.

[Mary] Sorry. You are from NASA, and you've just used acronyms.

[Ben] Request for Information, Request for Proposal.

[Mary] Thank you.

[Ben] It's a method of getting bids back. With the multi-award, because the vendors are preapproved, we can turn around some of that stuff in three or four days. We had… For our aircraft for our guppy, we had… We have these shipping fixtures so that we can fly the crew module two different areas of the United States where different pieces of work are being done. They have these… What's called the chain block, which is basically a tiedown for the crew module. We were able to turn that around in just a couple of days, and get it… Get heavy aluminum drilled to precision and get it done. So yes, procuring is difficult. There are mechanisms that we have. But that's actually the importance of having a good support staff, and having people who are tenacious enough to talk to the technical team and say, "No, no. You really want to look at this particular procurement strategy, because it can save you money and time."

[Mary] And then you can spend that money someplace else.

[Bart] Right. I think that's a great… One of the greatest secrets of our organization is that we are there to actually help our technical people. A lot of our technical folks look at us and say, "Oh, procurement and budget and legal. They're all impediments to me getting my job done." But at the end of the day, if you have that great support staff, folks who are trying to help our technical folks get the job done, then they can… Then we can get it done really quickly. Our goal is to help them get the job done as quickly and as painlessly as possible, while following those regulations.

[Howard] The way budgeting was described to me is that the inconvenience of not immediately being able to buy something today is the price you pay for being able to buy things at all a year from now.

[Ben] Agreed. Agreed. Because there's so many processes in place to track where all those dollars go. Because every dollar that we spend is taxpayer dollars. So it's important that we're accountable not only to our technical management, but also to the taxpayers who fund us. If we aren't good stewards of our funds, then we'll see those drop in the future.

[Howard] This episode… Getting us to NASA to record things involved some due diligence and making sure that tax money was not being spent on things that it shouldn't be spent on.

[Ben] Precisely.

[Bart] We sent…

[Mary] To be clear, we did fund ourselves coming here, but tax money is being spent to give us a tour and to provide the facility.

[Bart] But that's the same… We would do for schools and…

[Mary] Exactly.

[Bart] Visitors and Justin Bieber and One Direction and all the other people who have… Who are stakeholders, who are tax…

[Howard] They cover their hotel and their meals, and you take care of them while they are on the campus.

[Bart] Because that's good for space and science. If people from the community are involved and participating.

[Mary] So, I am curious about… This is one of my favorite questions to ask people when they have an area of expertise that I do not, because it's very useful as a writer. What are the things that make you want to flip the table?

[Dan] When you see them depicted in media wrong.

[Chuckles]

[Oh]

[Bart] Ben asked me this question a couple weeks ago…

[Dan] [garbled]

[Bart] And I sent… It actually took me a week to write this email, because I wanted to get it right. Because there are some things that are challenging. I mean, that maybe aren't realistic. Maybe things that the popular culture believes that aren't necessarily true. I think the biggest thing is that, yes, is a support organization, we are trying to move the mission forward, that we aren't just impediments, but we are here to help as well.

[Ben] You can actually say the part about… Well.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I keep waiting for something where my table is being thrown. Throw my table, Bart.

[Bart] So one of my biggest things is that NASA, as a government organization, is just really inefficient, right? Like, NASA can't get anything done. I read a book several months ago that actually made light of this, where an artifact came out of space and some private citizens wanted to investigate it. So NASA commissioned a study to do a study to review a study to review some proposals to think about visiting… Or procuring some engines to visit this artifact, right? It was… Yes, it was very funny, and I did chuckle. But a little part of me was a little bit frustrated, because it does feel like sometimes the public… Sometimes authors view NASA as inefficient, and other organizations out there can maybe do it better. As a part of NASA, I feel like we do things pretty good.

[Howard] Realistically, if there's an artifact from aliens that is in space, and the procurement office knows about it, all of the little hurdles involved in getting your business cards printed…

[Bart] That's correct.

[Howard] Are just going to go away until you've got the artifact.

[Ben] You wouldn't believe how fast you can get a procurement through if the Center Director or the head of NASA wants it done.

[Howard] Let's break a moment for our book of the week. Dan, do you have that for us?

[Dan] I do have that. So, one of the things that I've been thinking… Because we just went through a tour of NASA, and we saw all these things.

[Mary] All these really cool space things.

[Dan] Amazing things. We passed a door that we didn't even get to go in that said, "Wearable Robotics Laboratory." I'm like, "That's the greatest door I've ever seen in my life." But anyway, at every point in the tour, I was reminded that NASA is a group of people using science to solve problems and working together. Which is what I loved so much about the Apollo 13 movie. It's what I love about Star Trek. And it's what I love about The Martian by Andy Weir. That is a group of people using… Coming together to solve a problem with science.

[Bart] So, yeah…

[Ben] You've talked… The name of the episode, The Unsexy Side of Space, that's something that I really enjoyed about The Martian, and I think a lot of people in the industry did, because he doesn't just talk about Mark Watney. There's a part in the book where I'm starting to get bored with the whole potato farmer thing, and he switches… He must've had a good editor or something. He switches to talking about what's going on back at the Johnson Space Center. You get this sense here are all these people. Legal is involved. HR is involved. Public Affairs is involved. There's a lady who's looking at the satellite images that's involved. Not only is it just NASA, at the Johnson Space Center, but they pull in real characters, real people who real… They feel like this is a person I know. In fact, the joke was for a long time, "Hey, did he talk to you before he wrote this book?"

[Laughter]

[Ben] "Who does this character look like to you?" Hands down, there were a number of characters in that book where people would identify somebody currently in the… In a role. That's what I liked about that book is he's done due diligence to the unsexy side of space. He's talked about people in a way that makes them come alive.

[Bart] You see the full picture. I think that's the brilliance of it, is you see the full picture. It's not just a one or two dimensional book, but you see from beginning to end how everything has to work together to bring Mark Watney home.

[Ben] It doesn't… It talks about the length of time for procuring a rocket, right? You can't just go and build a rocket. So he talks about, well, they get one from the Chinese. That doesn't work out. Then the astronauts themselves come up with a solution to solve the problem. But it's a very… Very lucid in terms of how things actually operate.

[Howard] I've said before that The Martian… And I'm standing by this stake I've pounded into the ground. The Martian is the finest hard science fiction novel ever written. Because it does great hard science fiction in a way that I am willing to sit and listen… Read about how to make oxygen out of hydrazine, and I care.

[Ben] And not just blow yourself up.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That was amazing to me.

[Bart] I did want to say, so, Andy Weir was here and did a presentation. One of the most… I got to ask him a question, right? I asked him, "What came first, the characters or the problems, the technical problems?" He kind of grinned. He's like, "Oh, the technical problems." This is why it's the greatest… According to you. Because he figured out what can break. Here's the mission architecture. Here are all the pieces that I've put in place. What can break? Now I'm going to break…

[Howard] And he knocked dominoes down in increasing order of disaster. Oh, yeah.

[Ben] Then he comes back and says, "Oh, I need a character who can handle this." Then he feels in the character so that the character works with the technical breakages. That… So I liked that book as well. It's fun to read

[Dan] As a total side note, I have to say that at a convention, I don't know which one, I assume San Diego Comic Con, Andy Weir was in the green room with the two writers behind The Expanse series. They are both fans of each other's work, and decided that canonically, they exist in the same universe.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Yeah.

[Howard] I would read that book. I would read that book.

[Dan] So, anyway.

[Garbled]

[Mary] So. So while we're talking about the unsexy side of space, I mean, there's nothing… So there's a lot of stuff about procurement and things that are going to be consistent from organization to organization. We're talking about space, though. Are there things about your jobs that you feel like are unique to NASA culture and NASA situations? To the fact that you are shooting people into space on giant bombs?

[Ben] I have… So we did a procurement recently where… You have to test for ammonia, for example. So you have this device called a Dräger chipset measurement system. Basically, what it does is it sniffs the air to see if there's ammonia or other chemicals present. You can put a chip in it and it will come up with readings. So you can actually do training on the ground. We have that on the stations, right? I don't think a lot of people understand this, but you… There are scenarios that come up that you wouldn't expect or that the little chips that have ammonia in them don't represent. So what are technical community said was, "Hey, we want to train our astronauts on these different scenarios, but they need to train on a unit that feels and looks and acts like a normal unit." So one of the coolest things that we did is we basically paid a company to hack into the back of this thing, add a chip and add a wireless interface so that our instructors can goof the system, so one astronaut gets a reading that's like, "Oh, my gosh. All right. Facemasks, everybody dive for the airlock." Kind of thing. It's not that dramatic, but…

[Howard] Let me take apart this piece of hardware and make it lie to the user via Bluetooth.

[Ben] And then switch it back, so it's not lying, halfway through the process.

[Howard] Wow.

[Ben] And it reverts to… But that's incredibly useful for somebody who's going to have the training here on Earth, and if they just do one or two run-throughs, it's not going to stick with them. So what you want is you do the training here on Earth, and then six months later, there up and they gotta handle this thing and it has to look and feel exactly like it did on Earth and behave in very functional ways.

[Howard] What is… Bart, what does a workday look like?

[Bart] Probably a little bit less exciting than you would think. You get indoors…

[Howard] I'm already thinking it's not very exciting.

[Laughter]

[Bart] So you might be right.

[Laughter]

[Bart] The fact of the matter is we don't come in and play with cool toys or get to mess around with the robots every day. You come in and…

[Howard] Not as a budget analyst.

[Bart] Not as a budget. Maybe the robotics do, but not as a budget analyst. You come in, you have a boss, so you have a set of tasks for… A set of responsibilities that you do, you have your email that you check and that you respond to, you answer lots of questions. So a lot of what I view as my role is… Quite frankly, I do a lot of customer service, right? We get calls from engineers, we get calls from scientists who are like, "I need to purchase this," or "I need to spend some money."

[Ben] Or why am I $400,000 over this month?

[Bart] Correct.

[Ben] Oh, because all your people from last month billed this month and didn't bill last month.

[Bart] Right. So there's an element of you come in and you help people. Again, like I said, it's about helping the mission move forward. The best way we can do that is to make sure that our technical folks aren't too bogged down in the minutia of financial tracking and how to purchase something. When they do start to get bogged down in those areas, to make sure that we're there as a resource.

[Howard] So, when your phone rings, it is, "Procurement, I have a problem."

[Laughter]

[Bart] Right. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I should rename my office Houston, right? To make it work. But, yes. Quite frankly… Or, "I have a question." Sometimes it's not quite to the problem stage, it's the "I'm about to do something. How do I avoid it a problem?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] How do I create a problem?

[Ben] So, early in my career, when I was still working for the OCSO. This is a little bit embarrassing, but I'm going to share it, because I like embarrassing myself. But I'd been on the job for probably six months, and I got put in a program office. Which is a place you never put a rookie budget analyst. But they were having trouble hiring people, and I was a sharp up-and-comer. Top of my class kind of thing.

[Bart] Is that what they told you?

[Laughter]

[Ben] That's what they told me, Bart.

[Mary] So you just didn't back away when they ask for volunteers fast enough?

[Ben] Yeah. Yeah, I know. So I was in charge of looking over two budgets. Both about $25 million. We had a program manager who was always giving away money. It was like… Yeah, fund that research, fund that research, fund that research. My boss was like, "Ben, you gotta hide some money from this guy."

[Laughter]

[Ben] So we… Because something's going to break, and then he's not going to have the money to solve it. So we did that, very judiciously. We get into a budget meeting. It's this program manager and all of his direct reports, right? He's like, "Ben, what's this line right here?" I was like, "Oh, we use that to fund research." Pretty soon… He just kept digging. "But what research? What are we doing with that?" Pretty soon, all of his direct reports are just laughing, because they know what's going on. They know that that's his slush fund, that he supposed to hide from everybody else and keep in case there's an emergency. He totally blew his own cover.

[Laughter]

[Ben] My boss is kicking me under the table. He's like, "You… You… Really blew it." Then afterwards, he laughed and he was like, "No. It was fine. He had that coming to him." But…

[Laughter]

[Ben] That's a little bit of a story of kind of the unsexy side of space.

[Howard] It's a heist novel now.

[Mary] But actually, that circles back to something that we were talking about when we were talking about with The Martian, about lining up the dominoes and just knocking them down. Are there things that you can spot when you're doing budget analyst… Analysis or when you're doing procurement, are there things that you can… Problems that you can spot before they happen? Just by the way things line up?

[Bart] Absolutely. So one of the biggest things we do is we, as Ben mentioned, we track things. People put a plan in, and then we status to that plan. If you're blowing your budget, if you're 50% over budget, early on we can, of course, flag our technical people and say, "You're going to blow your budget if you don't slow down, or if you don't find an additional funding source."

[Ben] Why are these costs coming in right now? What, what… Oh, we just… We needed some extra support for X, Y, and Z. Then you can take that and say, "Well. Okay, here's the long term ramifications of taking that outside instead of handling it in-house." Because we have vendors, we have contractors that do work for us. In fact, NASA's 85% private sector, and only 15% civil service. Or you can take somebody that's already paid for. If they can do that work, then technically they're not sitting around. So those are some things that Bart would look at in a month-to-month budget analysis.

[Bart] We also get policies from the government that come in, and they say, "Hey, you have to conform to X, Y, and Z." Quite frankly, sometimes Congress passes these regulations and they don't see the real world impact. So we take a lot of those and we translate into what that means for our engineers.

[Ben] Or the real world impact isn't as important to them as the policy that they're enacting.

[Bart] So it's figuring out those as early as possible. If you can figure those out before it's implemented, than that of course can save you a lot of pain and innocent heartache.

[Howard] These are things that show up in… For want of a better term… A spreadsheet? You push the graph function and you can see very clearly, "Oh. You've made yourself go faster, and now you don't have enough fuel to decelerate and land."

[Ben] And you're explaining in a way that people… One thing. Spotting issues. So, in the business office, one of my jobs is evaluating the responses that we get from bidders, and kind of performing the translation from what the technical staff wants to… Like I'm a words and communications guy… To what the budget analysts and the procurement people need. When you have a skilled procurement official on your source board, and you're getting these bids in, they will save you years of time. I've had experiences where we've had a less experienced procurement official who has to go to someone higher than them to ask questions and to kind of keep things moving. Unfortunately, sometimes mistakes are made that then cost a lot of time. Then you maybe have to slip the mission, because this contract isn't awarded when it needs to be awarded.

[Mary] When you say slip the mission, just because it's jargon, I want to make sure that people know what it means.

[Ben] So your schedule… In other words, we were going to fly this flight in September, now we have to fly it in December, because we didn't get the landing gear hinges that you needed.

[Howard] Well, in some cases, when you slip the window, for things like the Juno mission, your window doesn't happen again… Doesn't open again for years, because of the positions of things.

[Ben] Two, 10, 15 years down the road. Yeah.

[Dan] All right. I've got a different question for you. Actually, Ben and I, in college we both worked on the Leading Edge magazine. Very briefly we were there together. Which was a small press science fiction magazine run by students that… One of the reasons that that was such a valuable experience for me is because we didn't have any money. So it taught us the business side of publishing in addition to the creative side. So, I want to ask, is there a similar analog for you, where the lack of resources or the inability to get exactly what you want actually improves your innovation or the creativity of the space center?

[Bart] I think so. Absolutely. NASA gets $19 billion a year, which sounds like a lot of money, but it's less than half of a percent of the federal budget. So in the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot. So that's one of the functions I do is that we take these very limited resources, and we work with our engineers and scientists to determine the best ways to spend those resources. Sometimes that means you invent this brand-new technology to be able to accomplish something. Sometimes it means you buy something right off the shelf and modify it. So…

[Ben] And don't pay $30,000 for an engineer to go design it. If you've already got something that works. It meets the minimum criteria, rather than…

[Howard] That thing we saw in the virtual reality lab today, which is…

[Mary] So cool.

[Howard] Well, we turned a laptop upside down. We strapped a pair of goggles to it. Then we wrote software that would let you do VR while wearing a ThinkPad on your head. As a hat.

[Laughter]

[Mary] In space, so you didn't have to deal with the gravity.

[Howard] In space.

[Mary] Because that was the way they needed to solve VR when VR goggles were not a thing you could just get.

[Ben] One other piece of innovation that my office has been a little bit involved in that's been interesting is what unique capacity do we have where we do not compete with the private sector, but… So, we have a big pool. The neutral buoyancy lab. It is a unique facility. Well, is it used 100% capacity? Well, yes, we use it efficiently. We're always training. But there are sections of that pool that aren't being used. So we have had commercial partners come in and say we will pay some of the rent for this facility and we will… We'll give you money for that. That makes NASA's dollars go farther because they're offsetting our costs.

[Howard] So, on Tuesday mornings, there's water aerobics.

[Laughter]

[Ben] I will bring that up at our next staff meeting.

[Howard] I have done enough damage to NASA already. We are out of time. I hate to cut it short.

[Howard] Ben, do you have a writing prompt for us?

[Ben] Absolutely. My writing prompt for you is write a story about when a budget analyst and a procurement intern actually helped.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, fantasy.

[Laughter]

[Ben] You clearly weren't listening.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.44: Alien Characters

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/11/04/13-44-alien-characters/

Key points: Don't just model your aliens on a human civilization, because context matters! Start with landscape and geography, and create characters from that, or start with characters and figure out what kind of environment would create them. How does the medium you use to portray your alien portray this? How does being alien affect their point of view, their communications? How does their communications affect their lives? Completely alien motivations? Shelter, reproduction, and food drive humans and aliens. But which side of the road do you drive on? Often, even very alien things can be related to something in our society, to make it understandable. What is their motivation? Don't use the sense of wonder as a bludgeon! If you throw in something confusing, that is a promise to the reader that you will use it, and fulfill the promise. Look for the moment when the alien and the human reach understanding, and let the reader get it, too. After your metamorphosis, you may not even remember your own name!

( In the liner notes... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Alien Characters.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And…

[Howard] Everybody was expecting me to be an alien.

[Brandon] Yeah, we all thought you'd say, "I'm Howard," in Klingon.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Alien characters. So. One of the nice things about kind of having a science fiction/fantasy themed podcast, even if not all of our topics are specifically about that, is we can occasionally dig into something like this. How do you write from the viewpoint of a race who has never existed and is supposed to seem very, very strange to the person experiencing the narrative?

[Mary] So, first of all, let me suggest that you do not base them on a human civilization. Because human civilizations exist with context that is specific to the world around them. The aliens would have grown up in a completely different context. You can certainly take patterns that people go through, but just taking and saying, "These are my…" Like Dune. I mean, Dune are humans. But still, these are my pseudo-Arabic kind of desert people…

[Howard] Yeah, these are my bug people who are all like Roman Centurions.

[Brandon] Well, I'm going to say that's very natural for us to do, because human creativity is recombining things we haven't seen. We're going to suggest that you push a different direction and combine different things.

[Mary] Well, the problem is that if you aren't thinking about the context, you can go terribly sideways. So what I do say… Suggest is that you first look at… I mean, you can go a couple of different ways. I say first… You can either begin with the kind of landscape and geography, and create the characters from that, or, you can begin with the kind of character that you want and then backfill to the environment that created that.

[Brandon] Okay. So.

[Howard] Ultimately the question that needs to be asked first is how is this alien… What is the medium by which you are going to portray this alien to the person consuming your medium? I get to draw pictures. So I can do things that people who are writing prose can't do. If all you have is words, then one of the tools that you are going to have to look very closely at is, how does being this kind of alien affect the way their point of view would be described? How does it affect the way they speak, if they are able to speak in the language that your other characters speak? Because as a writer, words of the tool that you have to describe that.

[Dan] That's where I wanted to go, because that's how I always start, is with the form of communications specifically. How is this… Because that's what the character's going to be doing throughout the story, is communicating in some form. How are they going to do that? So as an example, in the Partials series, the Partials themselves, I gave them a pheromonal communications system. They can speak, but they can also communicate through scents and these other things. That changed absolutely everything about their society, the more I followed the ramifications of that. Of how they would interact with each other, of how the humans would perceive them, of how they would perceive the humans, of all of the problems that would arise when they try to talk to each other and are obviously missing obvious cues. So, starting with that form of communication, for me, is incredibly helpful.

[Brandon] So, let me ask you guys this. How do you write a character whose motivations are completely alien?

[Mary] There are, I think, some motivations that are consistent that you can actually pull into the aliens. That are consistent with humans. I think most creatures will have a priority on shelter, reproduction, and food. And, at a very base level, that is what drives all of us. So you can look at how that then affects the aliens. So I had… I wrote a story called The Bride Replete which was all aliens all the time. I did not have a human viewpoint character, humans just don't exist. For that, looking at, okay, so if reproduction is important, then how does the… What is this society reproductive structure look like? What does the family unit look like for this? Once you get that, then it becomes much easier to extrapolate based on… Or to convey it in a way that will make sense to a human reader.

[Brandon] Okay. So, but…

[Howard] That's…

[Brandon] My question. That's great. My question, though, is how would you write one that didn't have one of those motivations? Completely alien motivations?

[Howard] Coming up with the motivation is often difficult. Let me describe the motivation that we don't think of as alien, but which probably looks pretty alien if you pull away all of the indicators. That is, I want to be on the left-hand side on the freeway. So I can go faster. There is this tendency that we want to be on the left. Why? Because there's these rules of the road that have nothing to do with our biology. If you have an alien, who as part of their socialization, they want their eye line to be lower than yours. The way that this interaction is going to take place… Why do they keep getting on the ground? Why are they lying down? Why does… Why do these things keep happening? Why is the physical positioning changing in ways that… If there are human characters, they don't understand.

[Mary] But see… The wanting to be on the left side absolutely does have to do with our biology, because it's a holdover from that's the side that your sword was on. Because most people were right-handed.

[Howard] Well, except in England and South Africa, it's exactly reversed.

[Brandon] I'm going to cap this one. I think the point that perhaps is salient here is even in your description of that, you can find something to relate in our society that you can tie it to. Is that the idea? Take something that seems completely un-relatable at the beginning, but over time, kind of relate it to something that the reader's going to understand?

[Mary] I guess… What I… My point was… Is that if you're talking about an alien that has a completely alien motivation, that, for me, that motivation is still going to be rooted in one of those three things at some point going back to it. You can use that as the line with which to communicate it to the reader. So, if my alien motivation is needing to be on the… Needing to have the lower eye level, well, why does that exist? Is it… Is that a shelter strategy? Is that a reproduction strategy? Is that a food strategy? Where does that come from? Then, that informs a lot of the… Why they make those choices, even if it's a holdover.

[Brandon] I think that's very cool. Of course, it makes me, as a writer, want to say, I want to find something that's not related to…

[Garbled]

[Mary] Absolutely.

[Brandon] A challenge. When we hear that. All right. I think that's where I'm going. But I want to… But, yeah. I think that this is one way…

[Howard] I'm interested… Oh, go ahead, Dan.

[Dan] So, I'm thinking of two example specifically, and both of them hinge around the idea of how that motivation is presented. The first one is kind of a cheat. In the movie Arrival, because you're not actually getting a viewpoint from the aliens, the entire story really hinges around, "Well, what is their motivation in the first place?" So they can have something that is incredibly alien, and the humans are all just trying to figure it out. Are they benevolent? Well, why would aliens be benevolent? It's hard for some people to even conceive of that. One of the other examples I'm thinking of was actually a piece of War Machine fiction written from the point of view of an incredibly basically evil race of people. What made it so well done is that the entire story was written from within that moral framework. So, when all the viewpoints you were getting took as granted that these are the principles by which obviously we should all be living our lives, then it started to make an incredible kind of internal sense.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] One of the examples that I like to look at is from the second of James P. Hogan's Giants novels. There's a… The planetary ecology… They evolved in such a way that nothing could eat anything else except plants. All of the animals developed the we are toxic strategy to where evolutionarily, it becomes so expensive to try and be something that ate other animals that it was a planet full of vegetarians. The artwork that they created… I say the artwork. Actual pictures of the world made no sense to us because it looked like a children's book because it was so brightly colored. So this is one of those cases where something that we would expect as a given… I mean, whether or not that's actually practical. Something that we would expect as a given had been ripped out and all of these aliens were now suddenly very, very alien. War? Eating meat? Completely… Completely not part of their psychology.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Dan, you're going to tell us about Blood Rose Rebellion?

[Dan] Blood Rose Rebellion. Which, for the most part, does not actually have any real alien characters in it. It's by Rosalind Eaves. It's historical fantasy. It starts in a version of 1800s London where magic is real, and is purely the domain of the upper class. Our main character is a teenage debutante who's ready to come out into society and can't because she does not have magic. So the parents are embarrassed and they end up shipping her off to Budapest to live with Grandma, where polite society won't know that they have this non-magical daughter. Then she gets involved with one of Hungary's many rebellions. It is one of the most beautifully written YA anythings that I have ever read.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Dan] Incredibly cool. For… To hit our topic a little bit, there are some weird magical creatures that keep kind of slipping into our world. Although we don't get to know them well, they're really just fascinating and gorgeously described.

[Brandon] Now we also… When we were brainstorming for this, we wanted to promote this book because we love it. Because we thought it was awesome. But we… Mary came up with a story that the rest of us hadn't heard of that…

[Mary] Yes.

[Brandon] If you want to read something really alien.

[Mary] This is Love Is Never Still by Rachel Swirsky. It's available at Uncanny Magazine. So if you just go there and type in Love Is Never Still, it'll pop right up. This is the Pygmalion story. So the sculptor who creates Galatea, the sculpture, and comes to life. It's told from like 20 different viewpoints, including Summer the season.

[Brandon] The season has a viewpoint?

[Mary] Yeah. The pedestal that she stands on has a viewpoint. She has a viewpoint while she's still a piece of marble. The hearth god's hammer has a viewpoint. It's just… It's amazingly complex and varied and just a great example of this alien viewpoint thing.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Dan] And where can people find that?

[Mary] Uncanny Magazine.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Mary] Dot com.

[Brandon] So, one of the things that I see happening when using alien characters is the writer's specifically choosing one aspect of their culture that is just going to confuse the reader intentionally. I kind of thought of this as using a sense of wonder as a bludgeon.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Something that you're not even going to make your story about or explain. It's just look at how bizarre this is. Have you ever done that? Is… Like what are the advantages of that? As a writer, I would think… Because everyone's just staring at me as they think… I think the danger would be when you put something like that in a story, you're going to assume that it's going to take like a Left Hand of Darkness turn or something like that. The thing that is at first confusing or different is eventually going to become a major story point or character motive or things like this.

[Howard] It's a promise. It's a promise to the reader when you open with that. You gotta have a reason for it. I don't know what promise necessarily you're making, but if your story's going to be a success, the reader at the end has to feel like you've fulfilled on that promise. I don't like doing it that way. I think I've done it before. Where I've just drawn something weird because I thought weird would be fun. Mostly it was annoying, and I realized I haven't justified this in a way that's entertaining me.

[Mary] I think it does depend on how it's positioned in the story. If it's positioned in a way that you're making the reader go, "Why is that?" And then you bring it up again, and they're still going, "Why is that?" They're going to feel like that's a promise. If you just bring it up once and it's a piece of tonal color and it's like in mid-paragraph, so in a position of non-importance, they're probably just going to accept it and move on. So I do think it depends on a little bit of that.

[Howard] One of my favorite alien cultures of my own is the Oafa, who are the hydrogen bag… That look like blimps. Their language, once they've learned Gal-Standard, their language is full of wind metaphors and flavor metaphors. Boy, did I have to go to the thesaurus to pull this stuff up. But, as I was writing dialogue between the cultural liaison and the multi-million-year-old librarian, at one point the Oafa librarian says to the liaison, "You've been breathing the air of the poets," because she has made a wind metaphor that works. That moment, when you have a character moment like that, where the alien and the human have come to an understanding, and the reader gets it, the reader feels awesome. That's what I was aiming for. Not sense of wonder, but just sense of being included, sense of being part of that relationship.

[Mary] I had a story in which my characters… The species was based on kind of like the lifecycle of a butterfly. So they spend an incredibly long time as a caterpillar, and then they transform, and then they're this beautiful, beautiful creature. So in this society, the young, the larva state, is the state that gets all the work done. Because when they go through the transformation, metamorphosis, when they come out on the other side, their memories are totally scrambled. So the adult state is your retirement. Because of that, they have built this whole system around memory and have hired documentarians to come in and document their life so when they come out of the cocoon, they can try to remember things. So one of the things that I was playing with in the beginning of the story is that question of why are you documenting things? Then realizing, "Oh, this is what's at stake." That you will come out and not know your own family.

[Brandon] Wow. Sounds cool. What's the name of this story?

[Mary] I can't remember the name of my own story.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That's funny, because [garbled]

[Dan] So go out, readers…

[Mary]'s Well, I wrote down the name of the other one, The Bride Replete. But I forgot I had… I forgot about this one. Yeah, the Bride Replete was basically what happened… I know…

[Brandon] We'll put it in the liner notes.

[Mary] I'll put it in.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and do our homework. Howard, you had homework for us?

[Howard] Yes. As I said at the beginning of the episode, the tool that you have is a writer in order to convey alienness is words. Most frequently, that is going to come up in the way someone speaks. If you are familiar with doge-speak, which is the Shiba Inu meme…

[Dan] Which you might know as doggy speak…

[Howard] Doggy speak.

[Dan] Because there are competing pronunciations.

[Howard] Take that language. You can look up grammar rules for that language. It's recognizable, even without a picture of a dog under it. Take the rules of that language, and take dialogue from one of your characters and turn it into that. An example here, and I'm just going to read two lines of it, of someone having done this to Shakespeare. What light? So breaks. Such East! Very sun. Wow, Juliet.

[Laughter]

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.41: Fixing Character Problems, Part II

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/10/14/13-41-fixing-character-problems-part-ii/

Key points: Fixing broken characters, part II! When a story just stops, you may need to spend more time developing the characters before hand. When a story stops, check either the character building or the world building. Sometimes you may need to add another character to bring out another side of a character. Sometimes brokenness shows up when outlining. Without a sense of the character, you can't write (or outline) the scene. Look at the blanks, that may be where your story is. Put the plot aside, and focus on who the character is and why this is a problem. Sometimes, with a big cast and many storylines, you may need to map them out, and combine characters. Sometimes, just lean into the prose. Ignore the story issues, structure, character, or plot, and just lean into the prose. Sometimes you just unravel part of the story, then crotchet or knit it back together again.

( Here comes the words! )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Fixing Character Problems, Part II.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Brandon] And we have broken characters. How do we fix'em?

[Eee!]

[Brandon] This is part II. We talked about this previously with the other podcasting team. I really want to get Amal and Maurice's thoughts on what they do when a character just isn't working. Have you ever had a character, when you get done with your piece, or even midway through it, that you know the character isn't working?

[Maurice] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Okay. Podcast over.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] It's happened a couple of different ways. I remember early on I had a story, it was a young woman, and I was very much in her head, story's going along just fine, and then I killed off her husband. Then the story stopped. I'm just like, "Yeah, but what do you do next? What…" Nothing. Nothing came after that. That was like the first time when a… I started filing away the whole idea of, you know what, I have to spend more time developing these characters before hand, because… Like I said, this was early in my career, so I hadn't quite reached that whole let's spend weeks with the character and really get to know them, because I hadn't done all that work, that back work yet. I didn't realize that back work still needed to be done. That's actually become my big hint is the work isn't done because the story stops. So either I haven't done enough character building at that point, or I haven't done enough world building. Because sometimes the story stops because I haven't developed the character… The world as a character enough, and the story stops.

[Brandon] Okay. So with you, when the story stops… Is this most of the time, if you've got a problem, it's a need to go back and I have not spent enough time with the characters?

[Maurice] Yeah. Usually that's the case. But there was a time when it was pointed out to me that a character wasn't working for me. That was, ironically, with The Usual Suspects, my middle grade novel. The editor wrote back, and among the editor notes, they were like, "You do know that… I love your main character. But he always has a hard edge to him. He's always hard. That works when he's in the school situation, but he becomes almost one note because he's always doing that." So, her suggestion was, why don't you add another character to bring out his softer side? So I ended up…

[Mary] A foil? Ingenious.

[Maurice] Right. A foil.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] In this case, the foil was a little sister. Because he would act one way at school with his defenses up, but around his little sister, he can't help but lower his guards around her. That brought a whole new dimension to the character, and a whole new… Basically, a whole new arc to the story. I was just like… I was so pleased by the time it was done, going in and inserting those scenes of the two of them interacting. I was like, "All right, maybe editors aren't the enemy."

[Laughter]

[Amal] So, in my case, because I mostly write short fiction, I find that… The identifying the brokenness of a character almost always happens at the outlining stage. I say outlining, I don't act… I mean, my… The way that I tend to write is very slowly, but then my final draft… My first draft is usually very close to my final draft. So there's a lot of that time that spent kind of figuring out the story, before I start actually diving into prose. It's usually at that stage that I'll see a yeah, this character is just not… Like, I mean, if I don't have the sense of the character, I just can't write the scene. So it hasn't yet happened for me that I've written a whole draft of something and been like, "Mm, that character's actually not working. I need to do something." But the problems that I'll encounter as I'm trying to do it are usually dependent on whether or not the character has come out of the needs of the plot or whether the plot as come from the character, the idea of the character. So that a story I've mentioned before, Madeleine, where with the kind of like memory flashback hallucination thing, that was the idea that I wanted to play with. It actually came out with… I wanted to write… I thought to myself, I want to write a time travel story where the way that you time travel is through sense memory, is through like being triggered through your senses, and it's an involuntary thing, and you're literally traveling through time. It was as I was trying to work out the implications of what that meant, that I decided actually, I think what I want to do is tell a story more about someone experiencing this. So it's less a high concept thing, and more about the experience of memory. I had to sort of keep zooming in on that idea until I had a character, and even then, when I figured, okay, well, so this is the character, I know that her mother had Alzheimer's, but… But what else? Those blanks were where the story ended up living. The way that I ended up fixing that was basically just by… By putting the plot aside completely and thinking like, "Well, who is she? Why is it a problem that this is happening?" Like, all these other things came out. Like, she's really, really lonely in the wake of having tended to a parent in the last stages of a really terrible illness. She's… Her friends have more or less abandoned her, because they can't deal with how terrible that pain is… How sustained and terrible that pain is. Like, all of those things, they kind of just came together.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary] So, I'm curious. You both talked about like the story stops, or looking for the story and kind of the space and putting the plot aside. Are there symptoms that tend to… That you've now learned that oh, when the story is breaking in this particular way, this is the kind of fix that I usually end up applying to it?

[Maurice] One of them, one of the fixes happened with my urban fantasy series, because again, I had that big sprawling cast, and again, part of the issue was I had all these different storylines I was trying to track. Then I didn't realize until actually I was starting to map some of them out, there was like, "Okay, some of these just stop and go nowhere." I would introduce something that I would never pick up ever again. So what I ended up doing was, and it helped… It actually solved another problem in the book, which was I had so many characters in the book that what I ended up doing was combining characters, which (a) cut down the sum of the characters and (b) it allowed for some character growth and whole arcs at that point.

[Amal] For me, what I've realized I do, to the point where now I design workshops around this, is that I feel like the break or the problem happens because I'm trying too hard in one direction. What I end up doing is leaning into the prose. Like, this is going to sound weird and super inside baseball-y, I guess, but what I end up doing is because I also write poetry and I tell all my students that I feel like there's a day brain and a night brain for poetry, which is a concept that I first heard articulated by my friend [garbled]. But, similarly to the way that when you sing, you use different parts of your brain than when you speak, so that if you have speech impediments with your speech, you might not have them if you sing, I find that if I'm really, really focused on a lot of prose… Like, a lot of story issue stuff, structure or character or plot, if I let myself just lean into the prose that I'm writing and let my poetry brain take over, then I can sometimes just jump over the skip in the record or the scratch in the record rather, and just move into something else and keep going. So that definitely happened in this story. And I… It's weird. I can't definitely remember what the line was. I just remember very, very clearly that there was a line where I was like, "I have no idea where I'm going with this," and I just tried to follow the poetry logic of the line. It took me somewhere unexpected, and into a different metaphor, and then suddenly everything just kind of fell into place for the character.

[Mary] I will let you guys know a thing, because I do… I didn't have that language for it, lean into the prose, but like you can spot this in my fiction. If you see my character doing an activity, thinking about what it is that they are… How am I going to solve this problem, and Jane is like working with glamour and how is she going to solve this relationship thing? And then she's like, "Aha!" And she puts the glamour down and goes away. That is me freewriting…

[Amal] Huh.

[Mary] To try to figure out a plot problem with my character.

[Amal] Huh.

[Mary] That I'm like I can't get her from this point to this point. I can't get her over this decision hump. What is the thing that she needs to do? I'll usually go back and trim that sucker down, and sometimes I'll pull it out altogether, but one of the things that I have found is that I do like lean into the prose, that I will freewrite as my character and I will give her an activity that she's doing while she's trying to figure it out.

[Brandon] This is really interesting to me. It's going to be a slight tangent, but it kind of plays into a theory I have, where… When I was younger and when I was becoming a writer, I always imagined writing as more of a craft. It's like you are building something brick by brick by brick and whatnot, and the more I've been a writer, the more I realize it's more a performance art.

[Mary] Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] You go over something over and over, at least for me, I'm a planner, over and over in my head. I practice it, I practice certain skills, and then I sit down, and it's like, "Blam." This thing happens, and then I'm left with this thing. Now I'm going to cultivate it, but the actual creating of the story, it's like doing a play where this is performance night. Then I get to go back and revise it. It's this really weird shift that's happened in my brain, the more I've become a writer, which is an odd shift for someone who is kind of an outliner, like me. That always kind of saw it brick by brick.

[Mary] I mean, this is a thing that I think I talked about in my very first episode with Writing Excuses, before I was a full-time cast member. That my training as a puppeteer was to break techniques apart so that when you got into the art of it, you worked thinking about the technique anymore, you could just do the performance. I think that that's a thing that early career writers, we're still thinking about all of the technique. So when you're trying to figure out a character problem, it's… Like a character problem can lie in so many different aspects of character. It can be a motivation issue, it can be a back story issue, it can be a goal issue, it can be the personality issue, that the character's personality doesn't fit with the thing you need them to do. Learning to identify where these problems lie is difficult. Once you figure that out, a lot of it does become very intuitive.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Book of the week is actually The Only Harmless Great Thing.

[Amal] Oh. Yes. Oh, my gosh, I love this so much. The Only Harmless Great Thing is a Tor.com novella by Brooke Bolander. It's amazing. It's about… Oh, it's about… Ostensibly, it's about the fact that during wartime on Coney Island, they started teaching elephants to use paintbrushes so that they could paint, I think, what was it, clocks with radium or something like that. So they basically offloaded the extremely dangerous and terrible task of interacting with radium onto elephants, because they could survive longer than the underprivileged women who had been doing it until that point. So it's about this woman who is teaching this elephant how to do this at first. But it's a narrative. It's also broken up by a kind of… It's an alternate future sort of where those events took place. So imagine an alternate future from that same actual real thing that happened, but it's intercut with elephant folklore, like folklore that elephants have with mythologies that elephants have, so it imagines that elephants have this storytelling tradition that reaches back to the mammoths, and that they have incorporated this incident into their own mythology. So it's this beautiful, beautiful defamiliarization of a bunch… It's doing so much stuff that I could go on and on about, but the thing that struck me was that because Tor.com also put out novellas about other megafauna and alternate histories, which are Sarah Gailey's River of Teeth and The Taste of Marrow. Those are like rollicking heist novels, novellas. So because Brooke Bolander's stuff that I've read up until this point has been very fast-paced, very… Like, just like… I think it's like… Whiskey is the way I talk about it, it's like knocking whiskey back, is like what Bolander's stuff…

[Mary] Why would you do that?

[Amal] I know. Well, when it's hard and you're angry and you want the burn, like there's… Right. So. But, so that's what I was expecting from this. I knew it would be difficult and full of unhappy things, but I still expected it to be what I think of as a Bolander story. Instead, it's slow. It's like… It's like sipping that whiskey. It's like a slow, long pour of something. The voices are so distinct and so sustained and it's just beautiful. Like the… Being in the mammoth space and that kind of like elephant mythology voice, just forces you to slow down, and really appreciate everything beautiful that's going on in the prose. It's absolutely wonderful. It comes… Yeah. It came out in January. So…

[Brandon] Awesome. So let me throw a question at you guys that I threw at the other podcasters, which is, is there a time where you pushed yourself on a character that maybe was giving you trouble, or that when you were outlining, you were like, "This is going to be a little bit tough," that was rewarding? That you're glad you did?

[Mm… Hum.]

[Amal] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary] This is exactly how we all answered it.

[Laughter]

[Amal] I'm trying to think of an exclusively character instance. Because the one that I want to use is the character in The Truth about Owls, who is a girl named Annise. Anisa, rather. I made that mistake. Anyways, she… Like initially when I… This kind of plays into some of the things that we were talking about in other episodes. Initially, I was going to have her be Indian, and I had wanted the story to be about gender, and I was going to explore those things through the Blodeuwedd story, which is a Welsh story about a woman made of flowers who gets turned into an owl. I had like all these important structural things I wanted to do. Then I realized I couldn't do any of them, because I had no idea who this character was if she was Indian. Like, I had no access to the things that I wanted to talk about. I had like some thought processes for why I had wanted that, but it was insufficient. This discouraged me to the point where I just didn't want to write the story. I literally wrote to the editors and went, "You know what, I just don't think I can do this. I'm sorry. I'm going to back out early while it doesn't have a problem." The editors, Julia Rios in particular, went, "But, we really want a story from you. Can you not just tell this story, like through backgrounds that you're more familiar with?" I ended up making this character Middle Eastern instead. I ended up making her of Lebanese extraction, and everything fell into place. Every single thing that fell into place, I fought. Basically. Because I did not... I was like, "Okay. She's going to be… Her family is from Lebanon, but I really don't want to write a story about war, so I'm… I'm… No. I'm just not going to do that part." Then I realized that the time constraints that I had chosen set it squarely in the time when Lebanon was being bombarded by Israel in 2006. I was like, "Crap." Okay. So. Well, I'm going to put her in this other part of Lebanon, where she won't have experienced any of that, because most of the bombing was on Beirut. I put her in Rayak, which is my mom's village, which is a place that I spent time in. Then did a tiny bit of research and realized the only other airfield in Lebanon is in Rayak…

[Laughter]

[Amal] It also got bombed. I was like, "Oh, God. There's just no escaping this. I'm going to write this stupid war into this story, and I didn't want it to be about any of this." But as soon as I made those decisions, then the writing came out, and it all sort of happened. Every difficulty, everything that was like, "No, like I just, I didn't want to do this." As soon as I decided to like, "Fuck it. Fine, I will do it." It ended up working out.

[Maurice] So, I already talked a little bit about the process of writing a middle grade. That would have been one example. I can give two examples that all revolve around the same issue. The issue was agency. So one… I'll give one example where I fixed the problem in one example where it kind of slipped by all of us. Which was an interesting experience. So my… The story that I have with Uncanny Magazine, Ache of Home. I'd sent the story in, they loved the story. They were just like, "Yeah, but that ending. You know, your main character, she doesn't seem to have enough agency in solving the problem. Is there a way that…" We need to fix that, basically. So they gave me some notes. So it basically involved going back and… Actually, whenever I think about fixing character problems, I have this visual view, like when you're, I know, [garbled]

[laughter]

[Mary] You're looking very frightened right now.

[Maurice] But, like you were crocheting the other day or something, and just the whole idea of just… You sat there, and you'd be like, "And now we're going to unravel."

[Mary] Oh, yeah.

[Amal] Oh. Yeah.

[Maurice] That's what the process was like. I was like, "Okay, now I'm going to unravel the last third of my story."

[Mary] I'm so glad that you said that, because that was… That's a thing that as an early career writer, when you're fixing character problems, one of the most liberating things for me was realizing that I could just pull a giant chunk of text out and write a different chunk of text and it cost nothing.

[Maurice] Not a thing.

[Mary] It's like the thing I enjoy personally about writing is writing, so… It was like… My husband said this. He was watching me pull a bunch of crochet out, and he's like, "But… But… You did all of that work." I'm like, "Yeah. But I get to crochet again."

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Right. Right.

[Mary] Like, I'm still getting to crochet.

[Maurice] Yep. So, when I unraveled, and then I got to re-knit it back together. The re-knitting, for me, it just looked like… In a lot of ways, it was just a matter of reordering and reprioritizing, just doing a series of just little shifts here and there. Ultimately, that's all it took, was just some little shifts here and there. I'm like, "The story was already there. I just had to bring it out a little bit more." Now, the one that slipped by a lot of us was with Buffalo Soldier of all things. It isn't a major critique or anything, it was just one review that said, "Loved Buffalo Soldier. Loved the world building. Loved all these aspects of it. It's just that the child that the main character's protecting has no agency, and is little more than a damsel in distress." That's one of those things that just kind of haunted me. Well, it's just like… Hum, that one slipped by me. I get where… Because the whole story started with the whole image of… My nephew's on the autism spectrum, and is like the worst hide-and-seek player ever. Because like we'll play in teams, and like me and him will go hide. Like, as soon as someone goes, "Hey! Where's Orion?" He doesn't want you to be worried about him, so he'll jump out of the bushes. "Here I am!" You are awful at this game.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] So, the whole premise of this story revolved around the idea of like trying to play… It was basically a chase novel with a child whose like, "Hey. You know what, why are we hiding?" But it was one of those things where it was like, Mm... He doesn't… While he drives the story, I missed the fact that he doesn't really have a lot of agency in the story. So it's one of those things where it's like lesson learned. I will keep that in mind for… If I come back to write more of this, that problem will be fixed.

[Brandon] Well, I'm going to stop us here. This has been really good. I'm glad that we did this, this kind of one-two punch on this topic. I have some homework for you guys. It actually relates to some things Maurice and Amal were talking about. I'm… I find that often the way to fix a character problem is to add or subtract a character. So I want you to take one of your characters from a story you've written, and I want you to split them into two people. See what happens with those two people interact. Then, in another story, I want you to try combining, for a scene, two characters that have been the same person… Or two different people for a while, combine them into one and see how that scene plays out with a character combined, with two characters combined. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.37: What Writers Get Wrong, with JY Yang

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/09/16/13-37-what-writers-get-wrong-with-j-y-yang/

Key points: "There's no one way to be non-binary or gender nonconforming." Don't just drop non-binary pronouns into a story without thinking about how gender plays out in those societies. This relates to your self, your core identity. To do justice to gender it should permeate every aspect of the book. We have been socialized to put people in boxes, but maybe it is a spectrum. Although these are all artificial distinctions. Beware of equating gender to specific markers. It's not just presentation. Gender is identity. You may know internally that you are not one of these, but not actually say it in public. How does the character relate to the world? Part of the challenge is that our language does not offer good ways to describe yourself beyond "I don't fit in the boxes you've created" to pronouns and adjectives and whatever.

( Out of the boxes... )

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Aliette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Aliette] I'm Aliette.

[Howard] And I'm going to get it wrong again.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's okay, we rely on you for that service. We have with us special guest, JY Yang. JY, tell us about yourself.

[JY] Hello. My name is JY Yang, and I am a writer of short fiction and slightly not so short fiction. So I have two novellas from tor.com publishing that are out in September, The Red Threads of Fortune and The Black Tides of Heaven, which are secondary world science fantasy. I tend to write a lot of epic fantasy now, but I actually really love science fiction. I used to write a lot of like cyberpunky-ish stuff.

[Dan] Awesome. Well, that's cool. Okay, so this is one of our what do writers get wrong episodes, which we love to do. Mary? Tell us about this. What are we doing?

[Mary] So, with these episodes, again, what we're trying to do is present you with people who have different life experiences than the core podcasters do, as a way of helping you begin to think about different characters that you can start to incorporate. So instead of telling you stuff and showing you stuff, we're getting an expert in to kind of talk about their life experience. But we want to be clear that these people that we bring on are not speaking for the entire culture. They're not… culture is not a monolith, and everybody has multiple facets. For instance, JY has multiple facets. What are some of yours?

[JY] Okay, I have… I'm going to say that I love learning languages. But the only language I've kind of successfully managed to get like a [garbled] level of reading language is Swedish. I like whales. And I am a non-binary queer person.

[Mary] So, with all of these facets, which one are we going to focus on?

[JY] I'm going to talk about, I think, being non-binary and generally some [what] gender nonconforming.

[Mary] Okay. So that means what do people get wrong about non-binary and gender nonconforming?

[JY] Okay. I have to start off with a caveat emptor in that I have not actually identified or even thought of myself as non-binary for a very long time. I'm 34, I think. Yes. I am 34 years old, and until I was 33, I basically thought I was a cis woman. Interestingly enough, I think it was the process of writing my novellas in which I kind of realized that these non-binary characters that I'm creating, they're kind of actually me, in the sense that that's the way I sort of relate or don't relate to gender. So, that's my caveat. That… Don't take my words for gospel. Particularly because I hang out with a lot of like non-binary friends, and we all have very different pathways to discovering that we're non-binary. A lot of us are still questioning. We don't have one way to sort of relate to our gender. So I think that you can't really say, "Oh, no, this is exactly what people get wrong about things." Because there's no one way to be non-binary or gender nonconforming. One thing that I think that I can say that actually bothers me when I read about non-binary characters is that people who write characters who use non-binary pronouns, like they/them, em, and… It's kind of just dropped into the story, and people are like, "Oh, look, I have a non-binary character and they use they/them pronouns." But I don't really get a sense of how El's gender plays out in those societies. It just feels like, oh, the only thing about being non-binary is that you use different pronouns, which… It's a lot more than that. It's something that goes to… Well, the way I feel is that it's something that relates very strongly to… Your self, like core identity. I think gender is something that is very, very cultural. It's pretty much embedded very deeply in every culture there is. No matter how this is expressed, you don't have a culture in which gender doesn't matter at all. Not on this planet. Likely, if you have halfway humanoid characters, it's not… It's going to be a thing. So. Yeah, I think that the sense… What bothers me about these characters is that they're sort of dropped into a world, but I don't see… I don't get a sense from the world that gender is something that the author kind of thought about in great depth.

[Dan] So, is there a counterexample that you could give of maybe an author who did their research, who does portray it accurately? What are those differences? What are the signs that, "Oh, yeah, this person knows what they're talking about?"

[JY] Okay. So I'm going to… I think that… In a way I think… The best thing I think can probably do is to sort of read sort of like non-binary writers who write like non-binary characters with sort of like different gender things. Okay. I think like, for example, Ann Leckie, who is not non-binary, and who, as far as I know, is a woman, but she… Like, her Ancillary Justice novels. I'm pretty sure that was the name for the series, which I'm completely forgetting right now, but you know what I'm talking about.

[Laughter]

[JY] I think it's interesting because she basically embedded gender very deeply in her books, in her system. That's something that sort of like permeates every aspect of the book if you know what I'm talking about. That is, I think, that is the kind of depth of thought, I think, that if you really sort of like wanted to do justice to gender. That sounds really strange when I say it out loud.

[Chuckles]

[JY] But, like, it's not just something that's sort of a gloss put on top of a world.

[Mary] One of the things about being people is that we have socialized to put people into boxes. There's a very interesting study that… I'm going to circle back to gender, I promise… About color. That shows that the words that we have for color come into the language at the point when we can create that color. They come in a very predictable pattern, except for Egypt, which gets the word blue way before everybody else does because of lapis lazuli. So this is why in Homer's The Odyssey, there is no… The ocean is the wine-dark sea. The word blue never occurs. So this study shows that if you do not have the word for a color, you actually lumped the color into a different color category. They did… They showed this video of some people in a society that… A tribal society that… Here on earth, this is not secondary world, this is real world stuff. That has a very simplified color structure, compared to what we think of as a color structure. So things are all in the kind of greens and browns and reds and blacks. They show them a wheel, and they don't have the word for blue, specifically. They show them a wheel of swatches, and they're all green except for one that is blue. They're like, "Which one is different?" They look at the wheel and they guess and they point at different ones. To me, it's very obvious which one is blue. Then they show them a wheel of this gray green thing and like, "Which one is different?" They all, unerringly, without hesitating, point to the same square. To me it looks completely the same. It's because they're using different boxes. So I think, and this is where we circle back to gender, so I think that one of the things that has happened to us is that we have been trained in 2017 to put people into only one of two boxes. So we're at this generational shift where we are learning that there are other boxes, and that really, we shouldn't actually be looking up boxes, because, just like color, there is a spectrum. But that these are all artificial distinctions that we are making.

[Dan] I'm… Okay. I'm going to… Before we carry on, we need to pause for our book of the week. So, tell us about the book of the week.

[JY] Okay, the book of the week is actually… I'm going to cheat, because it's actually two books. But they're short books. So, like, if you combined them, they're kind of like one book.

[No no no no no]

[Howard] Our readers, our listeners, have never complained when we've given them more than one thing to read.

[Laughter]

[JY] Okay. So… The books of the week are my Tensorate novellas, the first two of the series, which comes out from Tor.com publishing in September. They're called The Red… Oh, God, I always get the… The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune. They're basically set in a secondary world setting, which is sort of heavily influenced by Asian culture. I have like them swearing in like [Hokien] which is kind of my parents language. It is a world where there is magic that is based on stuff like the five elements which I've kind of like sneakily used as five different sorts of like energy in terms of physics. But everyone has the potential to use magic, but learning how to use it is very difficult and it is very much restricted to people in power, people with privilege. So the two novellas are each centered on one of a pair of twins who are born to the supreme ruler of the dominant empire. Their names are Mokoya and Akeha, and the two novellas kind of like sort of tell the story of how they rebel against their mother, and break away from their family and sort of join the resistance to their mother's terrible rule.

[Dan] Awesome. That is The Black Tides…

[Garbled]

[Dan] Oh. Sorry, go ahead.

[Aliette] I want it this week.

[Laughter]

[Aliette] I read them and they're really, really excellent books, and like, they've got this really, really awesome world building. And like the gender and the whole coming to your own gender… Like, oh my God.

[Garbled]

[Howard] JY said these are coming out in September, and you're using the future tense. But, by the time this episode is aired, fair listener, they are already available to you. If… they're going to be up on Tor.com, is that?

[JY] Yeah. You can… Tor.com publishing. You can probably get them on Amazon and Barnes & Noble…

[Howard] We will provide links to them, so you can just go get'em.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Howard] No waiting.

[Dan] The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune.

[JY] Yes. Yes yes yes.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Awesome. By JY Yang.

[JY] I wrote these. I should know… But sometimes, I'm like, "Mmmm…"

[Dan] Okay. Cool. So. This is a question we've asked a lot of our what do people get wrong guests that I would love to ask. What are some of the clichés of an incorrectly expressed nonconforming gender identity that you see? When people do it wrong, what stands out is obviously wrong?

[JY] Okay, so this is not, I think, specific to just non-binary, but a gender nonconforming, in which I do see every now and then, like cis authors kind of equating gender to sort of very specific markers of desire like sexuality or like liking skirts makes you more feminine and liking pants like makes you more masculine. I think it's a lot more complicated than that. As… I think I have my non-binary friends who are very, very feminine, they present themselves very femininely, but they don't identify as being a woman. A woman. Wow. [Laughter] And… Yeah, I think that's one of the things where I think you really have to sort of consider like gender is a social construct. And feeling that you're of a certain gender may not necessarily correlate to how you break out of the boxes that society wants to put you in. Like, you're a particular gender, you have to present yourself in this, this, this, and this way. I think gender is a lot more than likes surface gloss that says… Presentation in a sense is very much superficial. I think… I feel like gender is an… It's an identity. It's something that you can't really define, you can't really put into words why you feel this way, but… You just know that it's right for you. I think that's a reason also why a lot of likely non-binary people I know are still trying to sort of like figure themselves out and how they relate to society in terms of their gender presentation, and they have some days in which they want to present more femininely and some days in which they want to present more non-femininely… Masculinely [chuckles] I'm a writer, I'm good at words. I'm sure.

[Mary] Let me ask a… Use myself as a useful representative example, and ask a really specific question. So, I have a book that set in 1952, and I have a character in it that my intention is that they are non-binary. But it's 1952, and that language doesn't exist yet. What markers would you put in that book that would make you recognize the character as representing you?

[JY] Hum. That's a very good question. I think that there has to be a certain, I think… Well, it depends on whether… Okay, I think it depends on a number of things, because you can be sort of like internally I know that I'm not one of these, but you don't actually ever say it in public. So I don't know if they're closeted non-binary or it's actually addressed in the book, because I haven't read it, I'm sorry.

[Mary] That's okay, the book isn't out yet, you couldn't have read it.

[JY] Oh, that's good. I didn't know that. But… So in a sense that I think you have to be very clear on what the character themselves, how they relate to the world. I think like specifically because like I think in the 1950s, like gender was a very… I think that the strictures of gender were… Especially in America, were a lot more constricted than they are now. So in order to sort of like say, "Hey, I don't fit into these boxes," you have to have an active sort of rebelling against that. It's like, well, I know that these boxes are here, but I think that these boxes suck. Even if they can't sort of articulate that, it's because I don't belong to either gender. The boxes that exist right now… They have to be like, "No, these boxes make me feel uncomfortable." And even if they don't understand why, it's just like, "I don't like them. And I refuse… Or don't refuse." But, yeah, that sort of discomfort with the binary has to be there.

[Howard] The challenge that Mary has is merely a slightly exacerbated version of the one that English writers have in general, which is that our language does not offer you good ways to describe yourself in a way that is clear to everyone else. It's one thing to say, "I don't fit in the boxes you've created." It's another thing entirely to say, "This is how I represent," and to be able to do that with one set of pronouns and one set of adjectives and whatever. We just don't have those tools.

[Aliette] I mean, we do have languages that have… Finnish, right, for instance…

[Garbled]

[Aliette] Has no pronouns. At the opposite end of the spectrum, French genders everything, so, like, the non-binary community in France is like, "We need to do like all the word endings," and like it's how do we do this? We need to create this third like nonspecific non-masculine non-feminine gender for everything.

[JY] Yeah. I think in Swedish, they actually sort of… They actively did that. They introduced a third gender-neutral pronoun that some people I know… I don't want this in our language, but I like that they actively… The people who are… More or less in charge of the language are actively saying, "Yes, we are going to do this." Which I wish like there was something similar in English, because, yeah, I still get blowback on like using they/them pronouns in English. They're like, "No, it's not grammatical." I'm like, "Mrrr…"

[Mary] Well, actually…

[Laughter]

[Mary] Yeah, I was going to say.

[JY] It's been going on for like four or five centuries at the very least. Right?

[Mary] Jane Austen could do this. You can too.

[Dan] Okay. So this has been a great conversation, but we are out of time. JY, do you have some homework you can give us?

[JY] Okay. Yes, I do have some homework. That homework is to read two non-binary writers who I love a lot. Their names are A. Merc Rustad and Rose Lemberg. So Merc has a collection that's just out called… I think he… Do You Want to Be a Robot and 21 Stories… Something like that. I'll give you the name of the thing and then you can put it up. [So You Want to Be a Robot and Other Stories]

[Dan] We'll put that up on the website.

[JY] They are an amazing short story writer. Then there's Rose Lemberg. They write the Bird books, which is a series of short stories, and there's a novella that's just out this year with Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Both Rose and Merc right beautiful, evocative, poetic stories that are so full of imagination. The great thing is that they kind of worked very nuanced gender systems into them. But… These are… That's not actually like the point of the story. The point of the story is not to talk about gender, it's about characters falling in love, having wants, having desires, having needs. So, if you want to see how people do it, those are great examples.

[Dan] That is perfect.

[JY] It's neat stories. You will love them.

[Dan] That's exactly what we need. So, thank you very much. Thank you, JY, for being on the show.

[JY] Thank you for having me.

[Dan] This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 11.5: Writing and World Building for Role-Playing Games

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/01/31/11-05-writing-and-world-building-for-role-playing-games/

Key Points: Writing an RPG is not writing a story or novel. Start with what does a player do in your game? Next, what do 3 to 6 players do sitting at a table, adventuring and telling stories? What do you want the characters to do? What is the reward system? Then, what needs to be in the book to play the game? How does someone who picks up the book learn to play the game and about your world? Who is going to read this book, play this RPG? Think about multiple types of character creation. Think about giving the players a road to learning, from small basic things they can do on up. Consider including a sample session, both to teach mechanics and show what it's like to play in this world. What's the reward? Other people getting excited and playing in your world. Mini-tasking, little chunks that you can get done! Chocolate is always good. Watching everybody else doing the hard parts!

( Roll for initiative? )

[Howard] Michelle, can you send our listeners home with a writing prompt?
[Michelle] Sure. So, think about what a player does in your game, or a character, right? Not Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, but the guy who works in the cantina and he's cleaning up after everybody. Drill down to find one person who's not your heroic character, and write that.
[Howard] Outstanding. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: plaintive

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 7.3: Fauna and Flora

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/01/15/writing-excuses-7-3-fauna-and-flora/

Key Points: If it's the right kind of story, do what's awesome and don't worry about what's scientific or realistic. But do think about whether there's some way this could evolve. Think about what would happen. Balance empathy, awesome, and all. Consider hanging a lantern on it! Don't forget the story!
( Is that a monster in your pocket? )
[Mary] Wait, why don't we... We could actually make that our writing prompt.
[Brandon] We could. Let's do that. Writing prompt. Excellent writing prompt, Mary. Let's send people... We're going to pick one region. Just do some world building on your own. Focus on the flora and fauna. Less on the sentient life. But include it. But look at the base plants and the base animals that would exist in this ecological region, in our weird world here.
[Mary] Since this is a shared world, go ahead and post it in the comments.
( Excustoria? )

Current Mood: fumbling

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 7.2: World Building Flora and Fauna

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/01/08/writing-excuses-7-2-world-building-flora-and-fauna/

Key Points: Use descriptive names. Realistic evolutionary biology versus that's cool. You don't have to explain everything. Consider water, wood, other finite resources. Consider food. And what about lifecycles? And don't forget weather! Work animals build civilization. Another resource is extinct animals.
( the hip bone connected to the... )
[Dan] No, I don't. I'm hiding it very well. What I want you to do is take...
[Snoring]
[Dan] Thank you, Howard. Take an animal that is... Because I was just talking about this... A horrible pack animal. Take a pig. Then devise a culture where someone has actually trained pigs to plow fields, and to move all this stuff, and how does that work when your only pack animal is a wild boar... Or a domesticated boar?
( leg bone, leg bone connected to the... )

Current Mood: systemic

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 6.13: World Building Communications Technology

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/08/28/writing-excuses-6-13-world-building-communications-technology/

Key Points: Consider communications technology when you are planning your stories, as background, as part of the narrative structure, as a part of the conflicts. Don't ignore it, and don't assume that it will always be the way you think of it. Avoid lazy storytelling and idiot plotting. No matter what genre you are writing, speed and availability of communications affects plot. Consider disabling the technology to add complications. Mainly, consider communications, and how it affects your plot, don't just assume something. Oh, and remember Napoleon's giant semaphore robots.
( smoke signals, semaphores, and flags? )
[Howard] Okay. The fax machine. We're starting with a fax machine as the basis.
[Dan] The fax machine, by the way, was posited by Jules Vern [inaudible]
[Howard] That's awesome. So the principle behind the fax machine was we are sending a text message via cell phone networks. Take this communications technology, and instead of faxing things, you are now sending physical objects.
[Dan] Like 3-D printers?
[Howard] Yeah, like 3-D printers. The fax machine as a 3-D printer as a starting point for a short story.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: racing

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Writing Excuses 5.39: Filking and writing music with Tom Smith

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/05/29/writing-excuses-5-39-filking-and-writing-music-with-tom-smith/

Key points: music is a part of world building. What is the song about? Can you imagine people singing it? Filk is the music of the science fiction and fantasy community. Filk is everywhere!
( picking and strumming )
And that's why that damn shrinkwrap
is so tough on the packages
you find in the store.

[Howard] Ladies and gentlemen. Tom Smith. Thank you, Tom, you are brilliant. Fair listener, you're out of excuses.
[Brandon] Now go sing.

Current Mood: hustle

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 16: Breaking the Fourth Wall

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/04/25/writing-excuses-4-16-breaking-the-fourth-wall/

Key points: Breaking the fourth wall is a term from theater, when an actor addresses the audience (who were behind the invisible fourth wall). Narrators can have knowledge that characters can't, and address the reader, without breaking the characters or story in quite the same way. Anything that reminds the reader that this is a book breaks (or at least bends) the fourth wall. Once is too many, but the writer has to hit the happy medium if they are going to break the fourth wall.
( What about theater in the round? )
[Brandon] All right. I'm going to force Isaac to give us a writing prompt.
[Isaac] Awesome. I was thinking about these different cultures. In the Philippines, one of their kind of pseudo-cusswords is [they san anok nun pating? Roughly?] which means, "son of a shark!" So your writing prompt is to write a story where somebody is really a son of a shark and breaks the fourth wall which happens to be the glass wall at an aquarium.
[Howard] But no lava girl.
[Brandon] But no lava girl. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: whiffling

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[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 28: World Building Political Correctness. [Note: later in the podcast, they changed the name]

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/12/06/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-28-world-building-gender-roles/

Key points: Writing gender issues is hugely challenging. Be wary of 21st-century sociological conventions in anachronistic settings, but be aware that readers may have trouble empathizing with very different thinking and sensibilities. Subtle changes are more easily believable than huge changes. World building -- is it important to the plot or characters? If not, don't overdo it. Recognize that you may have a blind spot regarding gender issues -- write your story your way, then listen to your alpha readers, and address their concerns.
( bickering and snickering... )
[Brandon] All right. Let's go ahead and give a writing prompt. I'll make myself... oh, you're pointing at Dan. Howard chose you. Dan, you're going to have to do it.
[Howard] Dan is scowling at me.
[Dan] OK then. All right. You are writing a future society, a future military, where the only people allowed in the military are homosexual and you need a good explanation of why.
[Brandon] That's an excellent writing prompt. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: anachronistic

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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode One: World Building History

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/06/01/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-1-world-building-history/

Key points: You don't have to write a history book, you need to create the illusion that the history exists. You need to know which parts of the history are important to your story. Small details can give historical rounding and fullness. You can't spell history without spelling story, too. People like to believe that there are causes in history, but beware monocausationalism -- everything has multiple causes. Pay attention to the reason you are worldbuilding history -- and if it isn't adding to the story, stop. Write your story -- then look for points of conflict and worldbuild there, or as you stumble across important parts, worldbuild those. It's always okay to go back and fix it.
( moments on the tides of history )
[Howard] Writing prompt. There's a war. You're writing a historical paragraph about a war that has five distinct causes. Come up with all five and justify them.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. We are done, you are out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: unspelled
Current Music: I'm Already There, Lonestar

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Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 18: World Building Governments

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/02/08/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-18-world-building-governments/

Key points: Monarchies put a face on the government, and may simplify the plot, since it is easier to vilify one person or relate to them. Science fiction often uses loosely tied states because travel delays make it likely. When you are world building, why do you want political intrigue in your book? Exaggerate. Where are the conflicts in the government? Where does the power come from? The more the reader knows about how things work, the more the protagonist can use those rules to solve problems. What can common citizens do, or not do? Take two steps away.
( mukluks )
[Brandon] All right. You have your Writing Prompt. Unfortunately, you need to write a government run by colon cleansers.
[Dan] That is correct. Let's change it for more creativity. Start with the colon cleansers concept, and then remove it two steps away.
[Howard] Oh, there's poo everywhere.
[Brandon] I didn't do this. This wasn't my fault. This is been Writing Excuses. I'm sorry.

Current Mood: working

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Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 16: World Building -- Non-Human Races

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/01/25/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-16-non-human-races/

Key points: nonhuman races add a sense of wonder to the setting. Don't just borrow Tolkien-esque races. Brandon will almost always focus mostly on humans, maybe. Avoid making an important characteristic a defining theme. Even nonhuman races are individuals. What do they want?
( the script )
[Brandon] The writing prompt is to write...
[Howard] Create a believable alien and write something from his perspective.
[Brandon] There you go.
[Dan] Perfect.

Current Mood: wonda
Current Music: Redneck Woman, Gretchen Wilson

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Writing Excuses Episode 32: Talking Exposition with Patrick Rothfuss

from http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/09/15/writing-excuses-episodes-32-talking-exposition-with-patrick-rothfuss/

Key points: don't start with info dumps. Avoid essays, police artist sketches, thesis statements, repeating. Use three good details, and characters in action. Toss readers into the world, and move the story and the characters forward. Arguments are good. Make every sentence do more than one thing. Give your readers a little tease, then wait. Make the exposition a payoff instead of an entry price.
( to da dump, to da dump, to da dump, dump, dump )
Take one thing that's unimportant and explain the heck out of it. Take something else that is very important and don't explain it all.

Current Mood: croggled
Current Music: In Color, Jamey Johnson

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Writing Excuses Episode 27: World-Building Religion

[Note: this is not about a religion building a world, this is about writers who are building a fictional world and the role of religion in that. Just in case anyone is having trouble parsing the title. Fictional World Building: Religion?]

Key points: what you believe informs your writing, but your story should turn around what your characters believe. Religion belongs in world building because it is a human motivation. Talking about religion may offend some people, but putting pen to paper also may offend some people. Do your world building around sources of conflict. How will you use it in your story?
( Details )
Writing prompt: develop a religion where people worship something that no one would ever worship in our world. And it can't be silly.

Current Mood: deflated
Current Music: Believe, Brooks & Dunn

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

December 2025

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Page Summary

mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.09: LIVE Recording - Rituals, Rites, and Traditions
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.49: Bodies Are Magical
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.19: As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.10: Magic Systems
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.46: The Unsexy Side of Space, with Bart Smith and Ben Hewett
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.44: Alien Characters
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.41: Fixing Character Problems, Part II
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.37: What Writers Get Wrong, with JY Yang
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.5: Writing and World Building for Role-Playing Games
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.3: Fauna and Flora
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.2: World Building Flora and Fauna
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 6.13: World Building Communications Technology
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.39: Filking and writing music with Tom Smith
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 16: Breaking the Fourth Wall
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 28: World Building Gender Roles
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Three Episode One: World Building History
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 18: World Building Governments
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 16: World Building -- Non-Human Races
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Episode 32: Talking Exposition with Patrick Rothfuss
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Episode 27: World-Building Religion

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with world building

Writing Excuses 19.09: LIVE Recording - Rituals, Rites, and Traditions

Writing Excuses 17.49: Bodies Are Magical

Writing Excuses 15.19: As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition

Writing Excuses 14.10: Magic Systems

Writing Excuses 13.46: The Unsexy Side of Space, with Bart Smith and Ben Hewett

Writing Excuses 13.44: Alien Characters

Writing Excuses 13.41: Fixing Character Problems, Part II

Writing Excuses 13.37: What Writers Get Wrong, with JY Yang

Writing Excuses 11.5: Writing and World Building for Role-Playing Games

Writing Excuses 7.3: Fauna and Flora

Writing Excuses 7.2: World Building Flora and Fauna

Writing Excuses 6.13: World Building Communications Technology

Writing Excuses 5.39: Filking and writing music with Tom Smith

Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 16: Breaking the Fourth Wall

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 28: World Building Gender Roles

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode One: World Building History

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 18: World Building Governments

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 16: World Building -- Non-Human Races

Writing Excuses Episode 32: Talking Exposition with Patrick Rothfuss

Writing Excuses Episode 27: World-Building Religion

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December 2025

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