Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 20, Episode 20]

 

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

 

[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 20, Episode 20]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Dan] The Lens of Where and When.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

[Erin] Yes.

[Laughter]

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

 

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

[Laughter]

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

[Laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] elves.

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

[Laughter]

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

[Dan] Cleaning up…

[Erin] That is…

[Dan] Pneumatic vines.

[Erin] The pneumatic vine cleaner.

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Oh, my God.

[Erin] Sorry, listeners.

 

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

[No, no]

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

 

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Like…

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-40-an-interview-on-tension-with-p-djeli-clark 

 

Key Points: Multiple influences. Make it a people story. Food is an unsung hero of worldbuilding. People live in color. Relax with a meal, then a monster comes. Fight scenes in places that shouldn't have fights, like schools, hospitals, playground, kitchens. Clues and seeds in the beginning, then bring them out later. Tell a story that sings to people and can change them. Write something for yourself. Absurdity, trauma, and horror. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 40]

 

[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 40]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] An Interview on Tension with P. Djèlí Clark

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] Today, we are joined by our special guest, P. Djèlí Clark. We hope that you've been reading along and listening as we've been talking about this phenomenal book, Ring Shout. We've brought him on to talk to us about the ways in which he tortured us through the tension. Phenderson, do you want to introduce yourself to our audience?

[Phenderson] Sure thing. Thanks for having me here. I'm Phenderson Djèlí Clark, people probably know me as P. Djèlí Clark. I write stuff. Mostly science fiction when I can. Apart from my day job, where I'm an academic historian. So, this is how I attempt to let off steam. Thanks for having me.

 

[Mary Robinette] Thank you so much. So this was… I've talked about this with the listeners before, that this was a really difficult read for me, because you do crank up the tension quite a bit. There's a number of scenes that we will… We will discuss. But one of the things that I'm wondering about, when you sat down to work on this, were you thinking about, like, the historical era, or were you thinking about how can I make people super uncomfortable? Like, what kind of…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What drove you?

[Phenderson] Yeah, that's a great question. I think perhaps a little bit of both, one subconsciously, one consciously. Certainly, I was thinking about the historical era. As I said, I'm an academic historian, and one of the classes I teach is Slavery in Film. So I've gotten to know Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith, the 1915 film where the Klan are heroes, quite well. I was trying to figure out a way to bring that story to people in the genre I love. So, Ring Shout came about from that central focus, as well as, as we can talk about, a lot of other little interesting ideas from ex-slave narratives that I've read, from stories that I've liked when I was younger, people may catch some Miss Whoozits, Miss Whatzits, what have you, from A Wrinkle in Time, down to the aesthetics of Beyonce's Formation Review.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Phenderson] There were multiple inspirations that I threw into this big pot of gumbo and hoped that it would work.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Erin] Absolutely. I love that. Like… I will say, I did not catch all of that, or most of it, probably. But I remember when I… The Birth of a Nation comes really early, and I was like, "Oh. Oh, I see what he's doing. He did this thing, he did this other thing, it's and he puts them together into this thing." It really made me feel good. It made me feel like, okay, like, all the time that I've spent, like, watching like, sad narrative slavery [garbled twenties] and all those eyes on the pride where my parents were saying, like, it's all [garbled] like, paying off, which I thought it was a really, really fun thing. But I have to wonder, like, does that… I mean, does it ever feel like too much? Do you ever feel like I'm trying to juggle all these influences and not get overwhelmed by them?

[Phenderson] it's Well, yeah. When I was… To answer your question, when I was doing this, when I finished it, I was, like, well, this is a mess. I was like, this is just way too much going on here. I want to just throw some space aliens in here while I'm at it. Right? There's just so much going on. I didn't know if this thing would work. I always say, as writers, sometimes you create something that… I didn't have a full genre for it. I was like, this is all over the place. I didn't know how it would be received. I was pleasantly surprised. Shocked, even, at times, that you guys liked this. Okay. Great. So, it's one of these things where you take scotch tape and you put together this giant thing, you don't know if it's going to work, and it did. I don't even know if I could re-create it again. Because it was such a in the moment type of creation.

[Howard] Say, you're looking at your editor, you're like, "Wait. You took a heat gun to the scotch tape? No, are we supposed to fix that?"

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] So, I have to ask this question, did you still feel like it was a mess when it went to print?

[Phenderson] Again, luckily, so many people had read it and given it all these great… I was like, "Oh. It worked. Pshew." I guess what I was going for worked. I was so surprised, I still am surprised, at how many people like it. How much it's liked. All the countries that people have read it. When it was something that I wrote kind of as a stopgap. For my first novel. [Garbled] remember, hey, this guy's a writer.

[Howard] Okay. I'm here to tell you that whatever that gap was…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] You stopped it.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] It is well and truly stopped.

[Phenderson] So it worked. I'm happy. Right? I… Certainly, anything, I think, of any writer, you certainly have these deeper meetings. But I didn't know if anybody would get them. Like, Erin was saying. I didn't know if people would be able to latch onto those things. People really did. I'm just grateful.

 

[Mary Robinette] That was one of the things that we talked about when we were… Earlier, when we were discussing the idea of the narrative versus contextual tension. That there's the tension that happens on the page in the story, and then there's the tension that the reader brings to it, the contextual tension, that the reader brings to it by what they know about history…

[Phenderson] Right.

[Mary Robinette] And what they know about the larger world. You do a really good job, I think, of making sure that there is narrative tension there even for people who do not have a deep understanding of the contextual tension. I think that's why it works when you go to another country that is not as familiar with the history of American slavery and oppression. Were you thinking about that? Like… When you were structuring scenes, that you were like, oh, I need to make sure that there's something here for people who are a little clueless?

[Phenderson] I wish I was doing that consciously.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] I mean… I could hold forth and have a very long discussion, like Max Gladstone on how things work. I wish that I had, like… That I had that ability. But really so much of my writing is from the fact that I love reading, I love listening to storytellers, I come… My mother was an excellent storyteller. My mother could give you directions and it was riveting.

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] Right? She would build up tension… You're like, oh, man, I got it, which Lane I'm supposed to switch into. That's amazing. So I think I've brought some of that to this. It's just… I mean, I want to tell the largest story. Like you said, about ideas of oppression, about being in slavery and everything else, but I also want to make it a people story. I wanted the characters to shine. I wanted it to have their own lived experiences and how I would imagine people dealing with everyday life. Having a love life. Not getting along with the people in your little monster fighting group. How you would butt heads with people that you have to work with. I wanted to bring all of that to the story as well. In some ways, to make it more human, so people could relate to it. Also, to show that in the midst of this oppression, people still go to a juke joint. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] People still talk about sex and all these other things in life. That it's not just fighting the oppression, it's people living their lives. I wanted to make sure I got that across as well.

[Erin] Oh, my God. I…

[Howard] There was a lot of joy in that book for me.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] I… Gosh, I can't remember which scene it was. I remember which scene it wasn't. It wasn't the scene in the butcher shop.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my God [garbled]

[Howard] But there was a scene where I literally had to go make some jambalaya. Because you made me hungry for…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] The food of my people.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] For some of that deep South cooking.

[Phenderson] Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think food is one of the unsung heroes of worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] There's a way that I think food can evoke things. I've been in moods before where people like show a plate and I can hear people behind me going, "Mmm. Mmm."

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] I heard someone's stomach growl once in a film. I think it was in the movie Soul Food. Somebody's stomach growled in reaction. You know what I'm talking about, Erin, when they show that one plate…

[Erin] Yes.

[Phenderson] And I'm like… They're like, "Mmm. Mmm." I always thought it was ironic, though, the very plot of this movie is that food kills. Anyway.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] People do love their food. So I think there's a way that… I'm glad you said that, that… I know that… I think I know the scene you're talking about, like, when they're sitting down to eat. Because I just wanted to show that that communal experience of eating and enjoying these things after having a hard-fought battle… What's better than sitting down… Like, in the first Avengers movie. You go and you have some [garbled]. Right? There's something about that that is just very real. I… So, yeah. I think food is the unsung hero. I tell that to writers all the time. Don't neglect your food.

[Erin] If the food is bad, that tells you something too.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] You get out there, with [garbled vibration] plate after [garbled]

[laughter]

[Erin] It's not a good thing.

[Phenderson] Exactly.

 

[Erin] [garbled] When you were talking about oppression versus the real life, it may be think of one of my favorite things to do is to look at old black-and-white photos where they actually colorize it. Because I think people forget, like, people were living in color. You know what I mean? Like, well, instead they like put them on the wall, like they're not…

[Phenderson] Yes.

[Erin] Real. When you see them, like, I just think I saw one the other day, I think it was like Martin Luther King looking…

[Phenderson] Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott?

[Erin] Yes!

[Phenderson] They've re-announced it. People are like, "Whoo, they was fly." [Garbled]

[Erin] It was…

[Phenderson] Did you think they dressed in black and white? I think that's so true, is a historian, how people think of the past. It's hard sometimes for people to think of the past as these were people. Right? All of these events were happening, but they were still people, living their lives, bickering, getting along, joking. They were just people, and yes, they dressed in color. They matched the things. [Garbled] it was just, I guess, my gray drab suit. My other drab suit, now. No. It was… But there is something about that, how it brings it to life. I'm so glad you brought that up. I saw that effect in this. [Garbled] I understand that. It's still… It's something human about seeing those colors that makes you understand, like, yeah, these are people.

 

[Howard] When you… Coming back to tension for a moment, being able to sit down to a meal. That's a relief. That is a…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] Relaxing thing. If you let your leader… Your leader? Your reader relax…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] Into some food that they are imagining and you're describing it and they're getting the smells and the tastes…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] And the sounds and all that. And then you spring a monster on them later. It's going to be even sharper. It's going to work even better.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] I loved that. I don't know if you were doing it deliberately, but as I had gone upstairs eating the jambalaya, I was thinking, I may have walked into a trap here.

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] I may have walked right into a trap. I'm letting my guard down. Something terrible's going to happen very next.

[Phenderson] Yeah. I think that's good points you're making. I don't even know if I do it deliberately, but I think, like, I'll tell you, there's some stories I read and there's so much action and, like, do people stop and go to the bathroom? Right, you gotta stop someplace. Give me a pause. Right? I'm really big into if I'm reading a story, I want to pause. I want people to [garbled] I want people to stop. I think… It's okay if they don't have a big scene, I want a pause. Nothing like that communal, like you said, this way that people let their guard down when they're eating, especially if they feel they're in a safe place here for people. Then there's also still a time… That was my time to let people… For Sadie and Maurice to still have their little bickering bit. All right? But also to show that they're closer than people know. Right? Also, the juke joint, right? I could have easily made this a weird mean girls thing where they just don't get along, but I wanted to show that, no, underneath all that, they absolutely love each other. Right? That Sadie will tear down this world for Maurice even if they also bicker. I think there were those scenes that allowed me to do that. I really liked it… Like I… When I started the story, for instance, starting there, that conversation. I didn't worry, because you know we're taught, like, oh, the story should start. Don't have them… Don't have people in conversation. I was like, no, I want this conversation. I want this convo in the very beginning to start the story off. I thought there I could build a little tension between this group, and then the tension explodes, and, oh, there's a monster.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] Right. Shows up. Yes!

[Erin] I also think in real life, I think we talked about this on the episode, like, we all are much more, like, going to have tension in our conversations than because monsters attack us. Like, that's a kind of tension we understand. Like… I don't know what you all do in your spare time…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Erin] But, in general, so it's like it feels so real, and then you're like and it goes to 11. It's sort of… I was thinking about, Howard, what you said about the food. When you read a food scene, it's like your nose opens up. Like you suddenly think about how things smell. Then, if the next thing you smell is like monster, like, you are… You're taking that in with a soul whiff, you know. Because you're in that moment.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] You're ready for it, and all your senses are already being engaged, versus, like, sometimes when you know tension is happening. As a reader, like, you'll tense up. Your hands will curl, you won't take in full breaths because you're in the moment. So I kind of like the idea that there's enough slowdown, that we're just chillin', laying back, and then [crunch].

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I… It's one of my favorite things also that… The… Making the reader feel like, oh, no, you're safe now. Everything's all fine. All fine… Then very not. Very, very not. I actually… Since we were talking about that first scene, I had a question as well. That kind of… I been thinking about it while I was reading it, but then when Howard said, oh, no, this is a trap… There are potential narrative traps as a writer in some of this… In some of the things… Any time we're writing. One of the things that I was… When I was reading it, I was waiting for the parade to turn on them. Because that's something that I would have seen in cinema or…

[Phenderson] Right.

[Mary Robinette] In the hands of another writer. You take us a very different place.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] With, hello monsters, and then going into the warehouse, which, like, is full and should not be full, and, like… So you keep ratcheting up the tension, but you avoid the obvious one. Did you avoid that because you were just not interested in writing it, because it was a little bit of a trap, or… I realize that's asking someone to tell us… Tell us what you were thinking when you were writing this however many years it is after you wrote the book is like monumentally unfair, and yet I'm still asking.

[Phenderson] Well, you know, as a writer, it's also like a ret con. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Like, people are always asking you to figure out why you did the thing you did. I end up coming up with an answer, and I'm like, "Is that true? Or am I…"

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] Just [garbled] like, am I imagining that was what I was thinking at the time? So, I know that's interesting that you say that, that you thought the crowd was going to turn on them. Right? Because they're in this dangerous place, that certainly was a Klan march. Right? So I don't think I ever thought of the crowd turning on them. I knew that they were going to be doing something away from what most people could see, only because what they have to do is so wild that everyone can't see this. Right? It has to be like this is the secret underground world. Like Blade. Like, nobody knows I'm fighting vampires. Right? This is what I do. This is the… What does he say in the movie? There's the candy coated world, and there's the one underneath. Right? I wanted to get that idea of, like, there's this underneath world that most people are simply unaware of. For that, to me, it had to happen away from the main crowd. It had to happen away from the main block of people for them to be able to have this open warfare. So, yeah. The warehouse came to me, I mean, this is where I literally had a… I've been to Macon, Georgia, but I had a map and I had a warehouse that was actually there. That's from an actual warehouse. It was… I have photos of it. It was actually used to house cotton. So it gave me the… It gave me something from the landscape to look down upon. Then I would be, like, I want a fight in a warehouse. That's a great thought. All right. So I like having fights in places that you just shouldn't be having fights in, right? Like in schools, hospitals, warehouses. It's just like that's not what this is for. But this is what we're going to going to turn it into. [Garbled] So, yeah. That's how that came about.

[Mary Robinette] That's fantastic. Now I'm sitting here going what is for having battles in…?

[Erin] I was just like… I was like playgrounds, playgrounds are really…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] That's a top place.

[Phenderson] Some of the best fight scenes, right?

[Howard] There really isn't a good place to have [garbled] battles

[Phenderson] If you like Star Wars, like, they're constantly having fight scenes in industrial centers. Hey, we're working here. [Garbled] with light sabers running around. They're just trying to get this work done.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] [garbled] around, causing problems.

[Howard] We are on a space station. If you break that, everyone dies.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Does ownership know what you guys are doing right now?

[Mary Robinette] Right. Every time there's a battle, a fight scene, that runs through a kitchen and the cooks just keep on cooking while they're going through…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I'm like, what? How does that…

[Phenderson] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] Table 17 needs…

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] They're more scared of the chefs than they are… 

[Phenderson] Yeah, they are.

[Howard] [garbled]

[Phenderson] Basically.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of interrupting things when fights come running through, we're going to interrupt right here and be back in just a minute to talk a little bit more about tension.

 

[DongWon] This episode of Writing Excuses is sponsored in part by Acorn. Money can be a difficult topic for writers and creative professionals. It's not like earning a regular paycheck that comes in at reliable intervals. It requires more careful planning to make sure that that advance covers you not just this year, but set you up for the future as well. Learning to invest and be smart with your money takes time and research, and it's easy to put that off in favor of short-term goals. I encourage all the writers I work with to read up on the options out there and do their homework to figure out what makes sense for them. Acorn makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing in your future. You don't need a lot of money or expertise to invest with Acorn. In fact, you can get started with just your spare change. Acorn recommends an expert-built portfolio that fits you and your money goals. Then automatically invests your money for you. Head to acorn.com/wx or download the Acorn app to start saving and investing in your future today. [Lots garbled]

 

[Phenderson] My thing of the week is… I am always late on TV shows. I say this to everybody. We live in a golden era of television. There's more fantastic TV that has ever existed in my lifetime. I no longer have to choose between the A-Team, Knight Rider, and Auto Man. That was like a weird show about a guy who turned into a car. Very ridiculous. In the eighties, eighties was a wild time. But now there's so much TV. But I'm always late. So what I've decided to watch this week is something that came out in 2019. It's a series, a short series, called The Terror. It is on Netflix. It's about these two British ships, the Erebus and I think it's the Terror, trying to find a way to the Northwest passage, and, whoo boy, these strange things begin to happen. I've long wanted to watch this film, then it went away. Now, thanks to the magic of Netflix, it's returned. I'm able to watch it. When this is over, I'm going to enjoy another episode. As I do constantly. So, yeah. That's my thing. Some of you have seen it. If you haven't, The Terror. Watch it at night.

[Erin] No.

[Mary Robinette] Making mental notes, do not take Phenderson's advice.

[Laughter]

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. So. Here we are, back on the other side. The heroes have fought their way through our kitchen, and we have to talk about some more ingredients of tension. So, I was so pleased with myself for that metaphor, it's not really great.

[Phenderson] We love it. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. I appreciate you. Some of the other things that we talked about were things like anticipation and resolution. There's a bunch of stuff that you set up early on that then has a nice payoff later. For instance, talking about the film that's going to be on Stone Mountain. You talk about that right at the beginning of the book, and then it comes back and plays… It continues to play a larger and larger role as we move through the book. Did you always have, like, and we're gonna go to Stone Mountain?

[Phenderson] Yeah. I always knew we were going to Stone Mountain. We were always going to Stone Mountain, because part of the origin of this entire thing is the fact that in real life, the second Klan has its origins on Stone Mountain. Right? And literally is created after D. W. Griffith releases Birth of a Nation in 1915, which is where the Klan arose. By this time, the first Klan is mostly died out, because they got what they wanted. They've taken over… They've instituted Jim Crow. The second Klan comes about really based on the film. The film so inspires this guy, Al Simmons, in Georgia that he decides to create the second Klan. The second Klan now has… It's still hates black people, but it has a larger enemies list. Now it doesn't like Catholics, it doesn't like German immigrants. It really doesn't like Jews. In fact is the killing of Leo Frank, the murder of Leo Frank is very much tied up with the second Klan being born in Georgia. He goes to Stone Mountain and they do a ritual. The ritual is based heavily on the film, the Birth of a Nation.

[Mary Robinette] Wow.

[Phenderson]'s It would almost… I mean, the group is not a terror group. It would almost be funny to call the movie Klan. Because the way they do many of the rituals they do are based more on the film Birth of a Nation than the first Klan that comes about. Right? This second Klan, of course, is much more massive. Where is the first Klan was maybe tens of thousands, this Klan rises to some four and a half million. Where is the first Klan was mostly in the South, and also in California where they're harassing the Chinese, the second Klan is everywhere. It swallows up the Midwest. It's in Maine, it's in Connecticut. It's everywhere. They're running people for office. They're not even wearing masks, because everyone can be a member of the Klan. Right? So I always knew I was going to Stone Mountain. Because Stone Mountain was that symbol. To this day, Stone Mountain is still a place where Klan and white supremacists meet. It has these giant reliefs on their, actually, of Confederate generals like Lee and others. Right? So it's still this place, this tension. So I always knew I wanted to go there, and, yeah, I definitely seeded it in the beginning. Because I'm a believer that if you give somebody something late in the story, I want to see it later on, but don't just put it there. I like people… I like to give people clues so that they can know that it's coming. Like, when I first saw M. Night Shyamalan… What's the movie with Bruce Willis? In the…

[Howard] Sixth Sense.

[Phenderson] Sixth Sense. I love the fact that when we figure it out, we're like, oh, the clues were always there. Right? We just saw it differently. So I like to make certain that I've seeded things so that when they do happen, people aren't like, whoa, what are you doing on Stone Mountain? I want them to get these little hints before, and then take them back now. See, I gotta do it, I'm an academic historian, so if you ask me things, I have to plug the history.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] I was right there with you. I spent a lot of time in Atlanta, and as you were talking, I was thinking about a friend of mine who was… Went to Atlanta for a job and was picked up by his boss at the airport. His boss took him, the first stop they made on the way from the airport to the job was at Stone Mountain.

[Phenderson] Okay. It's good that people go. It's beautiful scenery.

[Mary Robinette] Well, yeah. Contextually, a little more challenging when the person who's showing up for the job is a young black man and it's an older white guy who takes him there.

[Phenderson] It's not the best place. Especially if you know the history of, like… Why are we here?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, those are questions that are still being asked.

 

[Howard] So, one of the things that I love the most about Ring Shout… I'm a middle-aged white dude who grew up in Florida. I have zero childhood knowledge of the history that you're talking about. That was all completely obscured from me. I… It's just been the last 10 years that I've been looking back and realizing, oh, wow. I know nothing. Well. Less than 50 percent of what was happening in that time. In that area. The way you wrote the novel, I was able just contextually to tell immediately, okay, this is P. Djèlí Clark creating fiction and this is P. Djèlí Clark telling me history.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] That dance that you did between the fantastic that you wove through your story in order to create a mythos that was brilliant and wonderful and horrific and full of scary meat versus…

[Mary Robinette] Still mad about that.

[Howard] Versus the history which is… I am ashamed for not knowing it sooner. But that dance you did was wonderful. I loved the book for that.

[Phenderson] Well, thank you. Unfortunately, in Florida, they're trying to make it so that people will not know about these things.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] I just think that there is this way that I think you're hitting on the head, there are these aspects of American history that just aren't spoken of. I think about when HBO re-did Watchmen and they decided to do it from a perspective of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa, Oklahoma is something that I've known about since I was a kid, because in black spaces, it's just talked about. Even if people don't know everything, they've heard of black Wall Street. They know what happened there. People just bring it up. My parents are from the Caribbean. So they didn't come here and tell like the late sixties, early seventies. They knew about it. I heard about it in a barbershop somewhere. This is just something I knew. But most people, even the show runner for that show. He was a 40 something-year-old black male. He had never heard of it. Right? Until, like a few years before. It fascinated him. He went to look for it. Therefore he knew he had to put this into the film. That night that it premiered, I think Google almost broke because people were googling what is Tulsa Oklahoma? What happened there? Now it's just become something that everyone knows, but there is this way that there are a lot of things that the national narrative doesn't like to talk about. That doesn't make us feel good. So these kind of things become knowledge to like a few people where it's just known in the black community, like this thing happened, but in the larger community, it's just completely unheard of. So, yeah, I wrote… Part of what I was doing as the historian in me, I'm trying to bring these things out by using fiction. Right? What inspired me, for a lot of this, what inspired the story, were actually the ex-slave narratives taken from the last generation of enslaved people who were living in the 1920s continuing into the 1930s, during the depression, the WPA narratives. They talk about this first Klan. They described them as monsters. When I first… I was like, whoa. That's amazing. Now they know they're not monsters. But they're using this notion of describing the Klan as haints, saying that they have horns, that they could drink tons of water, do these supernatural acts, that they have chains, and they would blacken their faces I always had this idea that the using this idea of storytelling to talk about the trauma that they were faced with. Right? Turning these people… Who they knew who they were. They're like, yeah, that's Judge so and so. I know who he is. He owned me, or I worked for him. But he dresses up and he comes and he terrorizes us. What better way to talk about your trauma then using horror? Which is what the scholar Kinitra Brooks, she always says this is what horror is. Right? It's about us trying to find a way to talk about trauma. So, all this to say, I took my cue from these former slaves using folklore to talk about this history, and saying, what if I did that as well. It was just me trying to… Constantly trying to make it not get to historical, so that people like, oh, no, it's history, I'm running away. But yet, imbuing it with the fiction enough to keep people there in the story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think you just did a great job of walking that line. I also enjoy writing historical fiction.

[Phenderson] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] The tension…

[Phenderson] Very well.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. The tension that you can put on things by inviting the reader into…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I feel like when you use real history, you are making space for the reader, because your engaging their curiosity.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] In a way that is harder, I think with some other forms of fiction. One of the things…

[Erin] Oh, sorry.

[Mary Robinette] That you did…

 

[Howard] This might be a little on the nose, but I feel like our listeners at this point really need to be able to draw a line between the way Birth of a Nation as a medium, as a story, was so incredibly destructive… I mean, it was very influential on culture, but it was very, very destructive. And the stories that we tell now that attempt to correct that can be so corrective. Writing is important, and getting it right is important. Telling a story that will sing to people and can change them is important. This is a good work that you did, that we want to do. It is a good work.

[Phenderson] Thank you. Thank you. That's great to hear. I mean, so much of… Yeah, I can't say I didn't write this in a sense of this is a corrective or for my own catharsis. You know? People hunting Klan members? Yeah, it's cathartic. So, thank you, that's great to hear. I… Like I said, when I say I wrote this with the idea that a few people might like it, I still had this idea this is what I want people to get from it, and that people come away with this notion of it's a corrective, but also this… Giving them this inspiration to go, I want to find out more. As a historian. Of course, I want you to find out more, I want you to be able to look and say, oh, wow. This was a real part of history. This is a fictional part, like you said, these things actually happened. So, thank you very much. That's… You make me want to go write.

[Erin] Please do.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Please do write more. One of the things that I just wanted to draw a line under that Phenderson is talking about that Howard has mentioned is that Phenderson wrote this for himself. We talked about the idea of writing for… Of having a story that's written for an in group, a group that has a shared common experience. Then, knowing that people who are outgroup are also going to read it and engage with it. I want you to understand… I want you to bear in mind that this is something that he wrote for himself, and it is… When you are sitting down to write something, the thing that you can do to make it most true and most interesting is to write something for yourself.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] I think not be apologetic about it. You know what I mean? I think that there are… The world will tell you, like, oh, you need to approach this really carefully and you need to… It's not to say that you can just do whatever you want, but, especially when you're talking about things that are about what you know, what you grew up with, and things that your family talked about, things that are part of your history. I think it's what I really liked about this book is that it's bold. You know what I mean? It's not shirking from engaging the past. It's going all the way in. This is going to… I'm going to take a complete 90 degrees turn here for no reason other than I can.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Don't try to stop me! Which is that I also think tone is so interesting and important, because one of the things I always… I was about to say one of the things I always loved about the Klan, not an actual thing, but…

[Laughter]

[Erin] My favorite part is that one of the things that undercut them was when comic books started mocking them, that actually it was these are ridiculous people who took hate in the weird movie and decided to like cosplay evil. When that was being made fun of by like old-school comics, they were like, oh, we can't recruit as much because it turns out that our stuff… Like, we aren't able to get the recruitment. It's not scary anymore.

[Phenderson] Right.

[Erin] It just feels silly. So I think there's so many different tones, and I'm curious, like, what made you decide to go, like, all the way on horror? Because there's something ridiculous about it, but also something horrifying.

[Phenderson] Yeah. I thought that's a great… That's interesting. Thinking about recent happenings in politics, the notion that when you can make hatemongers and fascists, you make them feel weird and simply laugh at them, how much power does that rob from them? Right? The fact that you can do that. So that's an interesting point that you're making their. In this case, again, I was taking my cue so much from those ex-slave… To a great… You're… I mean, I should point this out, that I first read those narratives when I was doing a Masters degree. 10 years before I would sit down to write Ring Shout. Those ideas, I was introduced to those ideas there, I was introduced to the night doctor in those narratives. I kind of sat… I know, like I said, I want to do something with this. I didn't know what. So, it took me 10 years before I was, like, okay, I'm ready to actually approach this. So I want to say that I was really trying to honor… The fact that they gave me these wonderful ideas and trying to be truthful to it. Yeah, like, so much of it was I wanted to show the horror of it. Some of it's also absurd. Right? Like Butcher Clyde is absurd. But he's also terrible. I wanted to have that bridge between absurdities, but also it's frightening. Right? I just wanted to get that down. The notion that, you know, there's a point where Nana Jean says, like, "The Klan members we haven't turned yet," and she calls them, like fools. Right? I wanted to get this idea that they're dressing up and they're clowns. They're fools…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Right? But if they let that hate consume them, they can become this monstrous danger, that can destroy others. But she says of the ones who aren't, she just says, they're fools. Right? She said… She makes this distinction between the fools are the ones who turned. But I wanted to get that across. Yeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Again, you just… I think you walked those lines really nicely. On the subject of the narratives, the slave narratives, you've got a bunch of the sections that are transliterated from the Gullah.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And… I loved… Like, I got… They're just so juicy, and I love them all. But I'm looking at notation 25 in particular, the shout Eve and Adam tell about them to that wicked snake and the fruit from the forbidden tree. That one, it's interesting to me the way it is talking about the shout and how you wind up using the shout later. So I'm curious again, like, having… There's so many decisions that go into making these kinds of interludes. There is the where you place it. There's the content. There's the tone of it. There is the… Like… How many of these are you jumping straight off of something that you had read, how many of them are you are completely riffing on your own? Tell us… I don't have a question there, I just want you to talk about them.

[Phenderson] Well, thank you. Because I don't get asked about [garbled] those parts are so important to me, because I thought they set the tone for each chapter, they set… They were able to say so much in their… In between interludes. I actually pulled a lot of that from, first of all, I looked at actual shouts. I wanted to know what the shouts were about. So each one is pulled from an actual different shout. I thought the shouts were so fascinating because I said this is philosophy. People are giving phil… And I even have something in their where somebody says how many intellectual philosophers were lost to the droning work of slavery, and so forth. How many did you lose? How many minds that could have thought up these fascinating things? I thought when I was… So I… There were the shouts themselves, and I read people who were interpreting the shouts. Some of these were Lomax and others who were first doing interviews. Later there are books that talk about shouts where people say, well, this is what the shout is about. As I'm listening to people, I'm like, this is philosophical. They're talking about how humans think about themselves and their place in the universe and how… It was all of that. Right? It's as deep as Kant and anybody else. That's what I wanted to get across here in these shouts by… So some of it comes from quotes that I've read, and I'm also adding my own take to it, and my own riffing of it, and trying to give an interpretation, but trying to let their voices come through there. I have this transliterated because if anybody noticed that supposed to be [garbled] not memory for name… Our favorite Jewish radical who's a member of the monster fighting crew. If anybody knows, those are her initials, she is the one who supposedly a hero throughout this. So I'm putting a little bit in there. I kind of have her as a Lomax or something, like, using that the way that they would write about what they saw. So it's a bit of that. But, yeah, each one was important, each one was supposed to be kind of linked to the chapter that was coming. And you should know that I also had little quotes that I wanted from the slave narratives themselves, direct quotes. They ended up having to go, because I think, like you said, if people were like, okay. You have the interludes, then you have the little narrative parts…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Phenderson] Of the chapter, it's too much. So it was one of those things, okay, it hurt, but I had to cut them all out. But I kept one. That is in the very… In my acknowledgments. The one about Oma. It was like the Klan came into her house and she whooped them one at a time. That's an actual quote. I love that. Because here she's talking about her mama's like… I mean, just fantastical that her mother's just… It's so Paul Bunyan, John Henry. Klan members came in, I'm home with the baby, I'm just beating each Klan member one at a time. I said, that's… I have to have… I have to keep this quote in here. So there were a lot of quotes like that, I wanted to get these voices of these ex-slaves. But I definitely kept that one about Ma. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Awesome.

[Erin] I love the way you were thinking about… As you were talking about the shouts in the stories and the narratives, because so much of the way I took some of this actual story is that it's about the stories we tell ourselves.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] It's about the stories we allow ourselves to tell, the ones that we hold back, the ones we are afraid of, the ones we should fear. So, so much of it being rooted in you wanting to tell people's stories.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] I think is just really cool and deep and like an extra level, knowing that that was part of what went into it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. When you said that the shouts were philosophy and about thinking about their place in the universe, I'm like, that is what this entire book is, Maurice trying to figure out her place in the universe.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, well done.

 

[Howard] This episode is titled discussing tension, and the real tension I'm seeing here is your tension that is relieved by writing this book.

[Phenderson] In some ways, yeah.

[Howard] So, this was done and it was out and you told that story.

[Phenderson] I wrote this book in a few weeks because it was one of those things you know, as writers, you have this idea. I pitched the idea months before. It was due, like, in August. I hadn't written a thing. This is when I had the idea in my head. I'd been percolating this story for several years. But I just hadn't let it flow out. When it flowed out, like, I think it was like two or three weeks, I just wrote it. Let's get it all out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, this is where one writer says to another in a friendly collegial way, "You ass hole."

[Phenderson] Thank you.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] There's something, again…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] wrote this award-winning book in just a couple of weeks.

[Phenderson] [garbled] The idea for it, like I'd taken this stuff like a decade before. It was sometime around… I would say around 2015 or so, I really started thinking about it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] I was on a fellowship. My last fellowship. I was working on my dissertation in Indiana, Pennsylvania, literally nowhere Pennsylvania. My wife came to visit me one time there, when she was living in DC. She's like, "I'm not going back again." I saw tractor pulls and people chasing greased pigs at a fair.

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] Okay, at a fair. So I would drive almost every weekend back to DC, several hour drive. I'd be driving through this misty mountain, I don't know if anybody listens to Old Gods of Appalachia, but it was that. Right? I was… So, while I'm driving, I'm listening to some shouts. I'm listening to these songs sometimes I'm just imagining. So there was a way where some of my built-up tension, I had so much of it in me, that when it came out, it just all poured out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Because it was something I'd been spinning with for so long that when I finally came to write it, I could just write it.

[Howard] So what I'm hearing is if you want to write a book in three weeks, think the book for a decade.

[Erin] Oh, yeah, that works.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely.

[Erin] I find that reassuring. There are several things I've been thinking about for a decade, so, like, I feel like any day now…

[Mary Robinette] I mean, I have… I've had things that I've had to sit on for a while. That's a question that we get a lot from listeners or early career writers who are like, "I have this idea, but I don't know if I'll be able to do it justice." I'm like, it's okay to sit on it.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's okay to sit on it and think about it and noodle on it until…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And write other things while you're leveling up.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of leveling up, and writing other things, I think it's time for us to give some homework. Phenderson, I think you have homework for us?

 

[Phenderson] Yes. If anyone is really interested in building tension and storytelling over a short amount of time, I have something that you can go watch. If you seen it already, go to Netflix, I want you to find somebody else's Netflix if you need to, and I want you to watch Midnight Mass. I want you to watch a show that builds so many different areas of tension that by the time it all hits, you will have realized I haven't slept in 12 hours watching this show. And you are a balled up knot of tension watching and trying to figure out what's going to happen next. It's an amazing show. Midnight Mass if you haven't seen it yet. By Howard's face, Howard has seen it.

[Howard] That's awesome homework.

 

[Howard] You're out of excuses. Now go turn into a balled up knot.

[chuckles]

 

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

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-21-language-as-a-tool-a-close-reading-on-worldbuilding 

 

Key points: Using language as a tool. In Teixcalaan, planet, city, and Empire are all the same word. It's all ours. Outlanders, barbarians, foreigners, not us! Teixcalaanli naming. Aztec-ish. Arkady does not use the word meme. A bomb in the cafe? Make your worldbuilding do multiple different things.

 

[Season 19, Episode 21]

 

[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.

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we've talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we'd revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com

 

[Season 19, Episode 21]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Worldbuilding: Language as a Tool

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette..

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[DongWon] So, this week, continuing our close reading series on Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, I wanted to dig into three very specific sections over the course of this book. Last week, we focused heavily on the opening. Here, I want to talk about how Arkady uses language as a tool. Both how she phrases things, or word choices, but also the way in which she uses the language of this culture, and then… Well, the culture of this culture, the literature, the poetry, the pop-culture, to communicate certain really important concepts about the book. So, the first one I really want to drill down on is on page 19, as she approaches the city. We touched on this very briefly last time. But there's a moment where Yskandr, her imago in her head, says, <the world>, and he says it in Teixcalaanli. So the quote here is

 

He said it in the Teixcalaan language, which made it a tautology: the word for "world" and the word for the "city" were the same, as was the word for "Empire." It was impossible to specify, especially in the high imperial dialect. One had to note the context.

 

This is such a fascinating idea to me. This communicates so much about this culture. I found, when I read this book for the first time, that sentence was dripping with menace for me. That was one of the scariest sentences in this book. Because the idea that this culture sees themselves as so important that their city is a tautology for the entire empire is fascinating. This is all ours. Right? Going back to last episode, we talked about how they were looking at the star chart, and there's this moment where they're like, "All the tiny pinpricks of light. That's ours." Then we see this concept not just in how they think about it, but embedded into the language. Because of the way language works, they can not think about it another way. There's no way for them to linguistically communicate the difference between us and our Empire. They are the Empire, in the most fundamental hardwired ways into their culture.

[Howard] As an extension of this… I don't remember specific examples from the book, but there's this idea that words like human and people and other are defined in such a way that if you are not Teixcalaanli, you might not qualify as human. Just based on the word that gets used. You might not qualify as people. The inherent othering of everybody who is not a member of the Empire is also dripping with menace.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's one of the things that I marked, is that there… This happens with a lot of languages, that the word that they have for her, someone who is from outside the Empire, is barbarian. That's… Barbarian, alien. There's a point deeper in the book where someone corrects and says, "foreigner." It was like, "No, no, no. That's not the right… That's not the language that we use. We say foreigner." But it made me think of… In Icelandic, the word for foreigner is utlander, which is literally outlander. Someone who's not from here. My family will say, "us folks." To mean anyone who is connected to our family or friends. Like, us folks. This demarcation that she does in her worldbuilding with this… By identifying you're either part of the Empire or you are less than human, is like… The way that the language is structured is so… Such really yummy worldbuilding.

[Howard] There's an aspect of this we're going to touch on in an episode I'll be driving shortly, which is the line where she says, "What do you mean by us?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "What do you mean by we?"

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] "What do you mean by me?" We come back to that all the time as we are having arguments about grouping and alliance and identity. And it is delicious to me. So delicious.

[DongWon] Well, there's that moment, also fairly early on in the book, where they end up playing a little game where they each have to tell a truth when asked about it, and Three Seagrass is forced to admit that she likes aliens.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And it is treated as this perversion, it's treated as this embarrassing fact, of like, "Oh, my God. I can't believe you like that." I don't know what the comparison is in our culture, but you can feel… When you establish culture in this way, when you establish language in this way, then, suddenly, the idea of liking on alien does suddenly feel perverse. You can suddenly see how inside this culture, if they don't even have a word that isn't exclusionary, that of course, it would be strange to want to be close to somebody that is not us.

 

[Dan] Yeah. You mentioned Three Seagrass. That's one of the really cool language things I want to get into, is the naming conventions that they use in this culture. Three Seagrass is kind of sort of a main character. But everyone has a name kind of like that. Arkady goes and explains, like, that they use a number and then they use a word. My favorite name, and I can't remember exactly, but it was Seventeen All Terrain Vehicle… Thirty-six?

[Howard] Thirty-Six! Thirty-six.

[Dan] Thirty-six. There it is.

[DongWon] All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle.

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] This is one of my favorite parts of this book. It is a line that made me laugh so hard when I first read it.

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] And it's also a very emotionally significant line for me, because one of the things this book is about is about the concept of assimilation. Right? Names are very fraught when you are a child of immigrants or when you are an immigrant to another culture. Names become a very difficult, fraught topic. Right?

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] I'm unusual among my peers because I use a Korean name. I don't use an Americanized name. Most of the other Koreans I know, or other Asian Americans in general, have names that are very typical, usually very Judeo-Christian names, picked out of a baby book or picked from the Bible. I don't have that. Well, I do have one. I'm not telling you what it is, because I hate it more than anything. But I do have un-American name. My brother has an American name. We both used our Korean style names. That choice has been one that has been an ongoing challenge for me over the course of my life, because my name, unfortunately, also happens to sound like a famous character from literature. So I get one joke every single time I introduce myself to a new person. That is repeated over and over again. I also have a thing where I cannot quite pronounce my name correctly. You'll hear me say it in a mostly Americanized way on the show, which is DongWon, which is how I, for years and years, introduced myself to white Americans. I have recently been shifting a little bit to something closer to the Korean pronunciation, which is more like [done one]. That has been a shift I've been trying to make. It's kind of hard to do. Because I'm used to saying it in a certain way. But all of this is to say that names are so important, because they identify you in the culture. They can be exclusionary, and they can be an invitation in. So, this idea that this person came to this culture and named themselves Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle, which is hilarious to us as the audience, but it is also hilarious to the people in the culture. The line that comes after that is:

 

A revelation that produced in Mahit and Three Seagrass a kind of stunned silence.

 

[Chuckles]

 

"No one would actually name a child that," Three Seagrass complained after a moment. He has no taste.

 

[DongWon] This idea of taste is so important, because this is clearly someone who wasn't born to this culture. They identify that immediately. This person has desperately reached for something that sounds right to them, and they're like, "Well, that's a number, and that's a noun." But it's an absurd noun.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] And it's the wrong kind of number.

[Howard] For English speakers, there is an unwritten… Mostly… Rule about adjective order. We can tell when adjectives are in the wrong order. You will often see people string together adjectives in instruction manuals or whatever, and you realize, "Oh. Oh, you didn't get the memo about the way adjectives are supposed to work." The fake AP stylebook said, "Adjectives should be listed in increasing awesomeness. The blue Italian rocket-propelled monkey-piloted motorcycle." I've always laughed at that, because it follows both rules. I was reminded of that by Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle. Three Seagrass is given pause because, oh, that's technically right, but you ran afoul…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Of a very different rule.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[DongWon] And another worldbuilding bit is communicated in this. Right? Because the names are one of the striking things. Soon as you meet Three Seagrass, soon as you meet Twelve Azalea, Six Direction, all these people, we get the sense of like, "Wow. What a weird way to name people." Right? Like, from our perspective, as the reader, it feels alien and cool. This joke is an opportunity for the author to say, "Okay. Here's what's going on. Here's how this works."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] "You pick a number, you pick a noun, these kinds of nouns are good, these kinds of numbers are good." Like, you get a sense… It's an opportunity for her to just stop and tell us. Going back to show, don't tell, this is her way of saying, "I'm going to take a break here. I'm going to explain what is going on with these. So that you experience the delight of running into them the first time. We're far enough into the book that I can slow down and tell you what's going on here."

[Mary Robinette] Just to talk about the specific mechanics of one of the things that Arkady is doing with this. She's… When she slows down and explains it, she is also making it about something else. She's making it about a bonding moment between these two characters, and she's also using… There's a flash… Brief flashback that Mahit has where she remembers vividly part of her early language training on Lsel when her entire class had been encouraged to make up Teixcalaanli names to call themselves while they were learning to speak. She picked Nine Orchid because it was the heroine of her favorite book. It… She… So she's having this moment where she's explaining it to us, and it's a tell moment. Because she's like, "This is how these lang… These words… These names work." But she's also masking it by having it be… Doing some loadbearing on character. Doing loadbearing on history. She's having this moment do multiple different things. So when you have something like this that you need to explain to your reader, look at the different things it can be doing, so that it's not just, week, let me stop the story.

[DongWon] Yep. Exactly.

[Howard] I… To me, this got a pass because I laughed at the name.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Any time you can make me laugh, that page had a reward. Thank you for making me read it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I will also say the other thing that happens for me is that because she slows down here, when… Much deeper in the book, when Six Helicopter…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Comes in, we know that his name is also absurd. So, we are in the joke…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] With everybody else who's having that moment.

[DongWon] Well, again, all of this speaks to the core thematics of the book. These… It's a funny moment, it's a character moment, it's all these things, but it's also a moment that is about Empire and how it works. The thing that she talks about in terms of the flashback is a thing that if you go to an Asian country there in a language school, they're all picking American names. Right? In South Asia, in Korea, in Japan, China, they're going to pick an American name so that they have that thing, in the same way that Mahit picks Nine Orchid.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] To be her Teixcalaanli name. She's reflecting all these real-world themes, routing it in things that are familiar to us, so that we understand what Empire means and how that works in our world. On that note, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to keep unpacking some of these very specific examples of language.

 

[Mary Robinette] The Gilded Age on Max is the latest offering from Julian Fellowes, best known for Downton Abbey. This is set in 1882 in New York City among the ultra-wealthy. It's got social battles between new money and the established social crowd. It looks at class and race, and also just straight up romance. I'll be honest, the plots are not surprising, but they are somehow still captivating and moving. Sometimes I get a little mad when I'm crying, because I could see it coming, but I was still excited to get there. It's a good example of why formulas can work. Also, the costumes… If you are at all into fashion and history, the costumes are exhaustively researched and are often replica of extant downs or paintings. Check out The Gilded Age for a lot of very pretty, pretty clothes.

 

[Dan] All right. So, one thing that I wanted to talk about here is another neat trick that Arkady is using. The culture is kind of sort of… Well, at least linguistically, has a lot of Aztec influence in it.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Dan] Teixcalaan is an overtly Aztec-ish word. One of the reasons that I suspect she may have made that decision is precisely because the words are hard to pronounce. Right? Teixcalaan, which would be [Taishkalan] in actual Aztec, I think it was an overt purposeful choice to pronounce it more westernized than that, just to kind of continue the theme of cross culture stuff. That's the name of the Empire, and the name of the city, and the name of the planet. Something that comes from Teixcalaan is Teixcalaanli. The word for a person who is from Teixcalaan or the people from there is Teixcalaanlitzlim. You get these words and you kind of stumble over them. I think that that's on purpose. As a way of really hitting home, this is different. This is outside of your realm of experience. This is outside of your comfort zone. You are trying to assimilate these very difficult linguistic concepts. It also signals to the reader that language matters. Like, I am going to make you figure out how to say Teixcalaanlitzlim, and you're going to do it and that is going to let you know to pay close attention to the language, because it is worth this effort.

[DongWon] She's doing a thing where she manages to make the reader feel the subjectivity of what it is to be an immigrant. Right? She forces the reader into the position of being a foreigner to a culture. Which, I think we talked about audience surrogates earlier. But this is such, like, a grounded way, and such a material way to make that felt. The way she does that is by introducing a con lang in some ways. Right? A constructed language in some ways. We don't get all of it, but we get some parts of it. And introducing culture. The poetry, the epic poems, the different refrains. Even when we get a couplet that is an epithet for a person. Right? When Nine Ads appears… Nineteen Ads? Or Nine Ads?

[Mary Robinette] Nineteen Ads.

[DongWon] Nineteen. There's that beautiful epithet that she has about the edge shine of a knife.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? What a remarkable striking moment, and, wow, did that establish a character…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Immediately. Like, to be referred to poetically as the edge shine of a knife.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] How terrifying that person has to be.

 

[Howard] One of the things that she never did, Arkady never did, was use the word meme. The Teixcalaan… Teixcalaanli culture is, especially with the poetry, is inherently memetic.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Howard] All the time, people will make references, will say things, and Mahit realizes, "Oh, that last thing is a line from this poem about the buildings, and so what you're saying is not just thing but also referencing a building." That idea comes back over and over. We see it in our own culture as people will make pop-culture references. Oh, I understand that joke.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] And everybody is now on board. I loved that she did it and was frankly amazed that she did it without ever using the word meme.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think that's a great comparison. As someone who's chronically online, I'm capable of having a conversation with my friends that is impenetrable to an outsider, based on the number of memes and references that we're making. 

 

[DongWon] I want to show how this is used in the text in a way that I found particularly fascinating. This is another one of my very favorite moments. It's from page 86, for those of you who have the print edition. This is when the bomb in the café goes off, which Howard mentioned a couple episodes ago. So…

 

She knew the Teixcalaanli word for explosions, a centerpiece of military poetry, usually adorned with adjectives like "shattering" or "fire-flowered," but now she learned, by extrapolation from the shouting, the one for "bomb." It was a short word. You could scream it very loudly. She figured it out because it was the word people were screaming when they weren't screaming help.

 

I am obsessed with this paragraph.

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] It is so powerful, it is so upsetting. It communicates the true horror of what has just happened to her and the people around her, and it tells us so much about Mahit as well. Her first thing is to go to this cerebral abstraction…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] She retreats into academic thought and poetry before she returns to the word that they're screaming when they're not screaming help. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Also that there is a genre of military poetry.

[DongWon] Yes! Exactly. So in the way that Howard is talking about, this sort of memetic way of having culture, the word for explosion is part of that. Right? There are beautiful poems about fire-flowered explosions, but nobody talks about bombs.

[Dan] Well, it… That's another that goes back to our conversation about scale and the concept of how close are you to the subject that you're talking about. Because from far away, you can talk about a fire-flowered explosion and it sounds really cool. But when you're down there on the street, surrounded by rubble and smoke, it is a bomb. You need a word you can scream loudly.

[Howard] You are lying on the ground thinking, "Ah, I learned a new word."

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Also, who would teach you the word bomb to go on a diplomatic mission?

[Mary Robinette] No.

[DongWon] You don't need to know that.

[Mary Robinette] It reminds me briefly of when I was learning Icelandic, I initially was doing… Learn… Yes, I speak Icelandic a little bit. But there were two texts that I had a choice from. One of which taught me phrases like, "Where is the train station?" There are no train stations in Iceland.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] There is no circumstance under which you would need to be able to say, "Where is the train station?" in Icelandic because you would have to be someplace else, where… Like, there aren't Icelandic speakers outside of Iceland except in Minnesota.

[DongWon] This is that damn Duo Lingua owl trying to convince me that I just need to know how to say, "the cat is under the pizza tables."

[Mary Robinette] Yes. But one of the other books, one of the… In the first or second chapter, one of the words that you learned was decapitation.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I was like, "This person has read Icelandic epics."

[DongWon] Yes.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That, for me, is one of the things about these, is, like… The things that… The other thing that is in this is, like, what is valorized?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] What is valorized? A bomb is not valorized. Explosions, yes, but explosions from starships that are… And warheads that are coming down. But not a handmade bomb in a café.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] That's not a valorous experience.

[Dan] Well, correct me if I'm misremembering, because it has been a few years since I have read this, other than skimming it for these episodes. The… Don't they come back later and propagandize this explosion a little bit, this bomb? And just the language that they use to talk about it changes. It isn't a bomb anymore. It's a fire-flowered explosion. They're using it for political purposes by changing the words they use to describe it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. They're taking it from being common to being elevated.

[Yeah. Right!]

[DongWon] So, again, this is one of the these moments where so many layers of the story and character and world are in this. Right? So, just to recap in some ways, she's again explaining culture, how the culture works by starting on this poetic way, explaining the stakes of the book, because, hey. Mahit could get blown up. Her life is at risk. Right? She's communicating a different kind of risk than we've seen before. Up until now it's been political, it's been words. Bombs are in play now. Right? She's lying trapped under rubble while the person she came to meet is… Her blood is dripping on her face. It's a visceral terrifying moment. But, more than anything else, she's using this moment to communicate such fear and helplessness and pain. The way this shifts into this such an emotional place by the end of it, with, that, like, the word people are screaming. Right? Like, it's so grounding, and it's so scary, and it's so upsetting to communicate what violence actually is. That establishes the themes of the book, of we can talk about it at this abstract level, but the reality is this, and don't forget that.

 

[Howard] One of the first things that I try to do when I'm in a new place with a new language is learn how humor works. So that I might reach that high bar of being able to tell a joke. The moment that I was hoping for in this book… Quietly, but hoping nonetheless, with all of Mahit's appreciation of poetry and Three Seagrass's standing as an actual poet, I thought, "Wow. If that was me, the real horror would be what if I have to write a poem?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The stand up and cheer moment for me in this book was Mahit and Three Seagrass have to write a poem upon which their life literally depends.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] I love that so much, and the language aspect of the book supported it in a way…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That… I stood up and cheered.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Worldbuilding is storytelling.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. She does a really great job of… One of the things for you, reader, when you're thinking about this is how many different ways can you use a piece of worldbuilding? So she's using language to do multiple different things. Which is part of why when we talk about muscular writing, that's what we're talking about, is having it do more than one thing.

[Howard] This is such a big flex.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Such a big flex.

[DongWon] I think we'll leave it on that.

 

[DongWon] I have a little bit of homework for you. I would like for you to write a scene that describes a fictional piece of literature. Whether it's a poem, a song, a story, comic book, that means something to the people in the story that you are telling.

 

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Do you like stars? I do. Maybe you would like to put up a constellation of stars by rating us on Apple Podcasts. Hello. Yes, we're talking about ratings, not astronomy. But, a 5 star review can help us by creating a navigational beacon for new writers like you to find their way to Writing Excuses. So. Rate us on Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice.

 

[Mary Robinette] Let's talk about Rude Tales of Magic. In this improvised narrative role-playing podcast, join artists, writers, and comedians from Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, Marvel Comics, and more as they fight and fumble their way across the madcap and exceedingly rude fantasy wasteland of Cordelia. Branson Reese and his jesters retinue, Christopher Hastings, Carlin Menardo, Tim Platt, Joe Laporte, and Ali Fisher, star is a group of unlikely survivors. Specifically, a talking crow, a Lich in a wig, a bubbly faun, a Sasquatch punk, and a [teefling?] hunk. This group must solve the mystery of Polaris University vanishment and return balance and higher education to their world. It's going to be very hard and very, very rude. Subscribe to Rude Tales of Magic on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-10-introducing-our-close-reading-series

 

Key Points: Close reading, so you have concrete examples of how these techniques work. There will be spoilers! Voice, worldbuilding, character, tension, and structure (see the liner notes for the novels, novellas, and short stories). Close reading gives us a shared language and shared examples to talk about craft. Close reading? Open the book with a question in mind. Read it for fun, then go back and look for examples of a specific technique, and look at the context. Reconnect with the joy of writing, reading, and great fiction. Find your own examples, too!

 

[Season 19, Episode 10]

 

[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 10]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Introducing our close reading series.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] I have a confession. Which is that we are actually recording the introduction to our close reading series after we've recorded most of the close reading series…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because, honestly, we wanted to get a sense of what this was going to be like. It's our first time doing this, and, I'll be honest, even as a teacher, when I hear the words close reading sometimes I think boring class, it's going to feel like going to a bad college class all over again. But I think it's been really fun.

[Mary Robinette] This is been some of the most fun that I've had doing episodes. One of the things that people talk about in our previous episodes when we been trying to give examples of things is that we often reach for film and television because we feel like there's a higher likelihood that you will have seen the thing and that you'll have read a particular work. With this, because what we've done is we've picked 5 books… Actually, 2 books, 2 novellas, and a collect… A bunch of short stories, so that you can read along with it. But we're doing all the heavy lifting. We've done the close reading and we're using these to tell you kind of how these techniques work, with very concrete examples.

[Howard] We're also leaning all the way into this and reading directly from the text during the episodes. Which is, to my mind, critical for helping you understand what it is that we love and what we see in the words that we read.

 

[DongWon] Because, as Howard said, we're going to be quoting from the text, you don't necessarily have to have read all of it before hopping in with us, but do be aware that we are not holding back on spoilers. Because we want to talk about the structure, we want to talk about how certain things unfold, so we will be referencing elements of the plot and the story from throughout the entire book. So if you hate spoilers, then read along with us. If you don't have time, don't stress about it, we're going to walk you through it.

[Dan] Well, also, not for nothing, we picked really great works that we love. You're going to want to read these anyway. So if you can, definitely read at least part of them. I think you should read all of them. You'll get a lot out of it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That thing where people will say, "Okay, spoiler alert," and you know to plug your ears or whatever stuff… We didn't even bother with that. We just sort of… The spoilers are scattered, like.

[Dan] It's all spoilers all the time.

[DongWon] We tend to focus on the first half of the book just naturally and how we're talking about it. But, yeah, absolutely, be prepared.

 

[Erin] Okay, so we should probably talk a little bit about how we got here in the first place. It started with, I think, DongWon, it was you and I and maybe even Mary Robinette, we were all scheming on the cruise…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] We had nothing to do during a lunch, and we said, "Let's start scheming and plotting, and figure out how we can bring like these really interesting close readings in a really cool way to the listeners." Is that… Do you remember it that way?

[DongWon] I remember it being not so much nothing to do during lunch, rather than season 19 curriculum meeting…

[Laughter] [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] It was a nice lunch, too.

[Dan] It was a great lunch. Halfway through the curriculum meeting, you remembered that it was supposed to be a curriculum meeting.

[DongWon] Yeah. You were eavesdropping on us, clearly.

[Laughter]

 

[Mary Robinette] But the thing that really is like so often when I'm talking about a technique, it would be easier if I had a sentence that I could show it to you with and we've got those. What we wanted to do was not just pick books, but pick topics that were going to be useful to you. So, we've got the season broken down into 5 topics, each of which has a representative work that is tied to it. So we're going to be starting the season with voice…

[DongWon] Starting with voice, yes.

[Erin] That makes sense for a podcast.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] We recorded these out of sequence, which is part of why I was like, it was voice, right? Voice, interestingly enough, was How to Lose the Time War, which is just ironic, considering the out of sequence nature of our recording schedule.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] I think we're winning the time war.

[Dan] That's true. We organized the time war joke that we made.

[Mary Robinette] There we go.

[Dan] We set this up in advance where, like, someone's going to make a time war joke. That was it, folks.

[Mary Robinette] There we go. That's the only time war joke you're going to get.

[Dan] That's all you get.

[Mary Robinette] We will have done this several times.

[Laughter]

 

[DongWon] So, we're starting with voice, and then we're going into worldbuilding after that, reading Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. Then we're going to do character, using C. L. Clark's short stories. There'll be a list of these in the liner notes. Then we are going to do tension with P. Djeli Clark's Ring Shout. Then, finally, we're going to talk about structure using N. K. Jemison's The Fifth Season.

[Mary Robinette] We've tried to set this up so that you've got novellas, you have plenty of time to read it, because it's a shorter thing. Then we go to a novel, so you've got a little more time. Then you get a breather, because we do some short stories. Then novella, and you have a lot of time before you have to read N. K. Jemison's Fifth Season. So we're thinking about 2 things. One is your actual reading time. The other thing that we're thinking about is a little bit of the arc of how you think about a story. Thinking about a story as driven by voice versus thinking about a story as driven by structure. You can start either place, but often the structure is something that you refine at the end during the editing process. So we're hoping that you'll be able to use these tools all the way through the year on the works that you're writing yourself.

[Howard] Just to be perfectly clear, Arkady Martine's Memory Called Empire does a bazillion things well, including worldbuilding. We're focusing on the worldbuilding. Don't go thinking that it doesn't have amazing voice, or amazing characterization, or brilliantly executed tension. All of the stories that we picked could have served as examples for any of the topics that we covered. We just picked the ones that we did because, to us, that's what seems to fit.

[DongWon] Trying to pick titles that fit the topics was incredibly difficult.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Right? Like…

[Erin] I was going to say, one of my favorite things was our little [tetra see] trying to figure out…

[DongWon] Oh, my God.

[Erin] Well, this could be this, but also that.

[DongWon] Yeah. Howard's exactly right, some of these move from category to category. Right? Where we were, like, okay. Maybe we should do Fifth Season for voice or tension or all these different things, and ended up settling on structure and sort of why we picked one versus another is maybe slightly arbitrary. There are certain focuses. Time War is a very voice-y book, so it felt like it fit really well there, even though the structure of it is also really fascinating, the character work is fascinating. So, don't take any of these as being completely silo, but it was what have we really loved, what's in the genre that's exciting right now, that does at least address in a core way one of these topics.

[Dan] So, it's worth pointing out as well that these kind of close reading series are very specific. Talking about worldbuilding with A Memory Called Empire, it is not a broad and generic talk about worldbuilding in general, it is how did Arkady Martine use worldbuilding in this book for this purpose. The same thing with voice in Time War, and all of the other series that we're doing. I think that that actually ended up, at least for me, being a lot more interesting than trying to cover all of worldbuilding in 6 episodes.

[DongWon] One thing I really loved about this project was… You heard us do deep dives before. We've gone in depth on projects, but those have always been our own projects. Those tend to be from a holistic angle of talking about one of Mary Robinette's books, or, all last year, you heard us go through Erin's short stories, Howard's last couple volumes, all these different things. So, being able to focus in a really laserlike way on a single topic on a single book, using a handful of lines or quotes from passages, really let us dig into the topic in a really mechanical way that, for me, at least, was one of the most fun I've ever had on this show.

[Howard] You say dig. 30 years ago… The math gets fuzzy… When I was studying music history and form and analysis, one of the things that are professor said was, "Imagine yourself as a… You want to find out what's under the ground. Do you want to dig a thousand one foot holes or one thousand foot hole?" Then he said, "For our purposes in this class, we're going to dig only ten 10 foot holes and then one 900 foot hole. We're going to do a little survey work, and then we're going to drill way down on one thing. In the past here with Writing Excuses, a lot of times, we've taken the… A 100 ten foot hole approach. Now we're going mining.

[Erin] Actually, I think this is… We're about to go to a break. When we come back, I want to talk about how do you do close reading well. Because we've been talking about it, I want to make sure that you're prepped for what you need to do or what you might want to do when we start this series.

 

[Dan] Hi. This week, our thing of the week is a role-playing game called Shinobigami. This is a role-playing game written and published in Japan, translated into English. One of the reasons I love it and the reason I'm recommending it is because it is so interesting to see a role-playing game from a completely different culture. One of the things that stands out as different, in Western role-playing games, we tend to avoid any kind of player versus player conflict or combat. This game is entirely about player versus player combat. As the name implies, Shinobigami, everyone is a ninja of some kind in modern Japan, and you are fighting each other. Trying to accomplish secret quests or secret missions at the expense of the other players. It's a lot of fun, it's way different from what you may have ever played before. It's great. Check it out. That again is called Shinobigami.

 

[Erin] So, how do you close read? What does this mean?

[DongWon] I wanted to toss this one to you, actually, because…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] You're the one who, among all of us, is the one who's actively teaching in a classroom environment. Right? You're teaching writing to students. Do you use these techniques? Do you do close reading examples in class, or… How does that structure work for you?

[Erin] Just when I thought I'd gotten away with it.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So, I do use… A lot of what we do, what I do when I teach is to give the students let's all read this story, let's all read this book. So that we all have a common thing we're talking about. I find it to be very helpful because when you want to give an example later, when you're reading somebody else's story and you're like, "Oh. Oh. I really like the way you built tension like…" And you reach for an example, if everyone is speaking the same language and everyone has read the same story, we can make those references really quickly. It basically creates a little environment, a little community for the classroom, which we're going to kind of replicate here where everyone's speaking the same language, everyone knows what we're talking about, and therefore it makes it just so much easier to reference things and talk about craft.

[Dan] Well, not just easier. But it allows us to go, as Howard's metaphor was saying, much deeper than we normally would because we don't have to cover a lot of the basic stuff. We don't have to start each sentence by saying, "Well. In How to Lose the Time War, we…" Because that's understood. We have more time to get into the real meat of each of the stories.

[Howard] For me, the secret to close reading was opening the book with the question already in mind for me. The question might have been when do… When does the… It's a very specific, very detailed very 400 level question. When does the likability slider for characters move in this book? I would just ask myself that question before I started reading. I would find phrases and it would resonate with me and I'd realize, "Oh, that's where that thing happens."

[Mary Robinette] So, the way I often approach it, because I will often do close readings when I'm trying to learn a new technique. So I brought some of that to this, when we were working on this project, that I will… I'll go ahead and just read it for funsies. With a question in mind. But then I go back and I kind of open it a little at random or 2 things that I remember, but I think, "Okay. I want to go through and I want to look for…" Say, with Time War. I want to go through it and look for places where they're using cadence, where they're using the rhythm of the language. So I'll skim through the book, looking for an example of that. Then, this part is for me really important, I will read the whole page, I will look at the context of how that thing is being used. Because none of these examples, you're going to hear us read an isolated sentence, but none of these sentences exist in isolation and the connective tissue is the part that's really, really fun. So it's quite possible for you to just read the book for funsies. Then, you'll hear us say a sentence, and you go find that sentence in the book, and just read the stuff around it. It's also possible for you to not read the book, wait for us to say something, and just go read it and be like, "Well, I don't have anything else, but I can see how even on this page, this technique is working." It'll be techniques like pitch… No, not pitch. It'll be techniques like cadence, or something like sentence structure, word choice…

[DongWon] Punctuation.

[Mary Robinette] Punctuation. Or, when we get into talking about character, we're talking about things like ability or role and really unpacking those that you can look at in context, to see how they work, and how they work over a span of pages.

 

[DongWon] One thing for me, there's a hazard of my job where I spend so much time reading manuscripts. Right? Reading client work, going over drafts, editing, that sometimes it can get a little mechanical for me. Where I end up so in the weeds, and kind of like, "Oh, I've got to get through X number of manuscripts by the end of this month, to stay on top of things." So, being able to do this, where we got to dig into these books and dig into certain passages in a very specific way, kind of really reminded me how much I love writing. Like, there was such a joyful conversation to be like, "Oh, it is so cool that in this paragraph they did this. Look how they did this thing, and how that's going to have consequences later," and, I hope that that also works for some of our audience, too, that sometimes when you're writing, it can be easy to lose sight of what matters. This is a way to sort of reconnect with the joy of writing and reading and experiencing great fiction.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We didn't want to call this book club, but in some ways…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It's kind of like…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Being in a book club with the entire Writing Excuses audience. In fact, this is also a good time to let you know that our Patreon has a Discord attached to it. If you want to come in, the Discord is brand-new. But, if you want to come in and yell about these books with people who have also read them, we have a space for you to do that.

[Howard] I'd just like to put a pin in the fact that coming up with the term close reading…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] As opposed to book club was way more painful for me than picking the books.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Picking the books is easy. But coming up with a 2 word name, that's misery.

 

[Erin] Yes. I would say, going back to the idea of the joy of the reading, like, I love the idea of like reading with a question in mind or really being very intentional about it. But I'll be honest, like when I give my students things to read, I'm not asking them to do much other than read it. Then, when we come back in class, we ask questions that get to why it's working. So, something I like to do sometimes when I'm reading a book is read it, and then think, what are the 3 things I would tell someone about this book that I either loved or hated. Because, look, you may be like these are the worst 5 books that we have… I have ever read. I hate them all. I hope not, because we enjoy them. But you learn something either way. You learn something… It's like you learn something from the people you dislike, just like you learn something from the people you like.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Erin] About the way you relate.

[DongWon] More from a book that you hate then you will from a book that you love. Because you can sort of see in contrast the things that they are doing that you don't like, but you can start to understand the techniques as a result.

[Erin] Exactly. You can ask yourself why. So, if it's the 3 things you love or hate, it's, well, I hated the character. Well, why did I hate that character? Usually, it's like something they did, or something that happened in the text. Then you can say, "When did I know that happened?" Like, if I hated them because of the fact that they stabbed 6 kittens, when did that happen? What was it about that kitten stabbing that like, really made it horrible. Sorry, kittens.

[Dan] Made it so different from my other kitten stabbings that I loved in the past?

[Mary Robinette] A John Cleaver book.

[Howard] Being able to ask yourself and come up with an answer why you don't like something is… That's an exciting ride. I well remember the movie Legion which a lot of other people thought I would love. But the loser guy who gets everybody killed is named Howard…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And his wife is named Sandra. That's a dumb movie, I hate it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Another really valuable thing on this topic is if you hate one of these books, this gives you the opportunity to see what other people saw in it that you didn't. It's okay to hate books. I hate so many books. But, as an author, especially as a working author who wants to make this a career, it's important to understand what the market likes, what people who are not me are looking for in a book.

[Erin] It's also great to see the variety of opinions. Because some people will love it, some people hate it, some people will be in different. I think sometimes as writers we think there's some objective measure that this book is good and everyone loves it and this book is bad and everybody hates it. But any book, like the book that you love the most, is somebody else's least favorite. The book that your least favorite is somebody's most loved book. I think seeing that variety of opinion helps you realize that, like, in your own work, you don't have to meet some mythical standard. You just have to try to use these techniques that were talking about as best you can, and put it out there, and find the audience of people who will love your work.

[DongWon] All that said, we hope you love these books. Because we love these books.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] It's okay if you don't. We get it.

[Dan] I doubt they hate them.

[Laughter]

 

[DongWon] But one of the reasons we hope you love it is we're going to also be talking to some of the creators behind these books and doing interview episodes at the end of each series where we get to interrogate them. Hey, how did you do this thing? How did you think about these things? I am so looking forward to those conversations, because I think it's going to be really fun to pick the brains of some of the most talented people in this space and talk about these big ideas.

[Howard] These authors will be more excited about those episodes if we use the word interview instead of interrogate.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] No. Interrogate the writers.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] What I'm looking forward to with those is where we say, "Oh, I really love it when you did XYZ," and they're like, "Hmm, I'm glad you noticed that."

[Laughter]

[Howard] I am so happy that work for you.

[Erin] Why did you… Why do you think I did…

[DongWon] I think it's something you might have been on the other end of once or twice.

 

[Mary Robinette] One thing that I'm going to say, this is not your homework, but just something I want you to think about as you are listening to these episodes all year is that we're going to be citing examples. But the examples that we cite are not the only examples of each technique in the book. So, one of the ways that you can enhance your own understanding is go and find your own examples. Then, find someone to share that example with. Because that's going to really help you cement the techniques that we're talking about in your own brain. Then you can take it to your work and see if you can use it there. Which is what we're really hoping. That's the reason we're doing these close reads is we're hoping it will help you level up your own writing.

[Erin] That sounded like the homework. But it wasn't!

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It was not. I know. That's why I said this is not the homework, but…

[Erin] That was great. I wish I'd come up with that.

 

[Erin] This homework is, like, super complicated, too. So… One thing, we talked about these 5 things that we're going to be thinking about. Voice, worldbuilding, character, tension, and structure. So, I want you to take a scene from a work that you love or from your own work and create… Pick a different crayon color or colored pencil for each of those things and underline where you think it's happening within the scene. So, underline all the cool voice places, underline all the different worldbuilding in a different color, and just take a look at the pallette that you've created for yourself. Because we're going to be talking about all of these things, and they can be found in all of these works. It's a good way to remind yourself of all the ways that these techniques come together on the page.

[DongWon] I love that so much.

 

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

 

[Howard] Hey, podcast lovers. Do you know that you can upgrade your experience here with our ad-free tier on Patreon? Head over to patreon.com/writingexcuses to enjoy an ad-free oasis as well as access to our virtual Discord community where you can talk to your fellow writers.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-35-organizing-your-writing-or-managing-the-mega-arc

 

Key points: Tools to keep big projects in line. Use string to align things! Simple tools can manage big things. Airtable, a database. Track character names, places, what you've done, what you mean to do. Find things that you are missing! E.g., over using one gender, or personality traits or alignments. Tracking helps you recognize patterns, and be intentional about them. Obsidian, a digital whiteboard for visual layouts, and automatic linking, a kind of mind map of connections. Wikidpad, use tools that work for you, that seem intuitive. Use find to see if you have already written something, so it is canon, and a collection of useful links. Measure twice, cut once, or relative measurement. Think about monetizing your references or research results. Worldbuilding, prep work, pre-writing is not wasted work if it works for you and your project. Spreadsheets and other pre-writing can tell you what you care about, what's important to you. The beginning needs to introduce the important characters, and the end needs to resolve or answer questions asked at the beginning of the book. What is the big story? Who are the specific characters in this book? 

 

[Season 18, Episode 35]

 

[1:30 minutes advertising, almost inaudible]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Managing the Mega-Arc.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Howard] This week, we're going to talk about big projects and the tools we use in order to keep them in line. I'm reminded of the… I can't remember who it was who was making such a big deal about how the stones and the pyramids were laid out in perfect straight lines, and someone else pointed out that, "Dude, they had string." You pull the string straight and, boy, you got a straight edge right there. You can just line these things up. There are some very simple tools that we can use to manage really big things. So I'm going to pitch this to the rest of the cast. What is your string?

[DongWon] Hey, Erin, do you want to talk about airtable?

[Erin] [chuckles] I do want to talk about airtable. So, I will say first that while airtable is actually free to use, I am not being a shill for airtable. Any sort of database or way of tracking things can work. It's just the one that I really love, because it has a really great fun way of looking on the screen that works for me. But what I like to do is a lot for my game writing projects is to track things like character names, places, what I've done, what I mean to do. One of the reasons that I really like tracking is actually maybe for a different reason than other people do. I use tracking a lot of the time, and I use airtable, which is, like, I set up this database and I'll list like every character I've ever mentioned. Every place that's ever shown up in this particular game, is to find places… To find the things that I'm missing about myself. So, for example, if I track all of my characters and their genders, I may find that I overly skew one way or the other in terms of gendering characters. If I then add in a little bit about their personality traits or alignments in like a D&D or TP RPG world, I may find, for example, that I love chaotic good women, which I do, because I am one. So I… And that I make all men evil, because they… No, just kidding.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Those types of things we often miss in our own work, the patterns that we're creating. I think that a lot of times when you create patterns, and you're not intentional about them, that's when you can replicate bad things in the world that we don't necessarily want to put on the page. So, for me, tracking is a way to keep things straight, to learn that I love names that start with the letter K, and that I can't make everybody's name a two syllable K name…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Because eventually it will be very difficult to keep them apart.

[DongWon] I don't know. World of Karen seems pretty terrifying.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Wow. That's actually a bad theme park. The World of Karens.

[Howard] That feels very much like the string metaphor I led with. You stretch that string out, and if one of the bricks is sticking just a little to one side, oh, you can see, oh, that is so clearly a thing I've done wrong. Let's fix it.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] I also do a spreadsheet for similar reasons about my internal biases. But then I also… The thing that I started doing, and this gets to the… Over the course of a long series. I originally was putting in the characters ages. But, in the Lady Astronaut books, I just finished writing book four, which takes place 17 years after the first book. So when a character, a new character enters the world, I'm like, "Okay. So I just wrote down their age, but their age in what year?" So now I write down what year they were born in instead, which makes it much easier to track. I still have to do math. But it makes it much easier to figure out, like, where they are in relationship to the other characters in the book and how old they are as the story progresses.

 

[DongWon] Going back to tools specifically, Erin mentioned the airtable is a database, which is technically true, but also makes it sound very scary. Functionally, when you're interacting with it, it is a series of linked spreadsheets is kind of what it looks like, that you can make it show your information in various ways. It is an incredibly powerful tool. It's a very cool tool, and one that I highly recommend playing around with and exploring a little bit. If you want something that's slightly less hierarchical for… I use this a lot for my games. I use a tool called Notions… Or, sorry, not Notions. I use Obsidian which is sort of like a series of linked text documents. But the reason I really like it is it has two features. One, it has a digital whiteboard version, so you can sort of lay stuff out visually. The other is it automatically links different documents together. If you mention something in one document, it'll give you a sort of a mind map, so you can sort of see how things are connected and clustered and it gives you a really useful way to be like, "Okay, this location, these characters, these plot points are all linked in this way." So you can find connections, or see where you didn't draw a line that you need to. So a lot of these tools are just different ways to visualize all the information that's in your head in a really structured way that can give you more insight into what it is you're trying to accomplish.

 

[Howard] Often we resist tools that have a learning curve at the front of them. You look at a tool, you're like, "Oh, I'd… I don't want to have to learn how to program a database. I don't want to have to learn how to format a spreadsheet." The very first planning tool that I really used for Schlock Mercenary was a standalone wiki software called Wikidpad. Wiki D Pad. I always pronounced it Wikidpad because it never occurred to me that the developer was making a fun pun and calling it wicked pad. I loved it because while I was typing, by doing just a couple of keystrokes at the beginning and end of a name, it automatically turned that name into a link for a new page. So I could just right and by doing whatever those little blips were, I don't know if it was double pipes or whatever, by doing those at the beginning of the thing, I was making a note to myself that says I'm going to expand on this later. Then I go back on it and click it, and boom! Up comes a blank page and I could start writing again. The desktop version, the only me version of the Schlock Mercenary wiki, was born. We talked about it in an early episode of Writing Excuses. I'm not here to pitch Wikidpad to you. I'm saying the tool that's going to work for you might be the tool that is the most intuitive. Maybe that's sticky notes on the wall, maybe that's a clipboard.

 

[Mary Robinette] So the two… Like, you'll hear people talking about needing to build their worldbuilding bible and things like that. Yes, I use a spreadsheet to track my characters ages, I use things like eon timeline to track the big over… Making sure that I've actually allotted them enough time to get from point A to point B. But most of my worldbuilding, I don… My two organizational methods are the find function…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So that I can look for it in something that I have already written. Because if it's not in the document, it is not canon, and I can change it. Then, my Scrivener, I have a section that's called useful links and I just dropped the links in randomly. Like when… After I've researched something, I will drop a link into what I've researched. The reason that I'm bringing this up is that I know a lot of people who feel like they have to create this very detailed document before they can start writing. I am here to tell you that if you are chaotic neutral about your organization, or chaotic evil as my case may be, you don't actually have to… What Howard said earlier about using the tool that works for you to solve the problem that you need to be solved. All I need to solve with my links is if someone says, "Where did you get that?" that I have someplace where I have it saved.

[Howard] I think my alignment is lawful lazy…

[Laughter]

 

[DongWon] In woodworking, which is another one of my hobbies, permitting me to pull extended metaphors from my hobbies, there's two ways… There's the old saying that if you're a carpenter, you measure twice and cut once. There's a whole different school of thought to that. Right? So in this case, measure twice, cut once, is very much like I'm cutting this to this exact dimension, it is going to be this size, and I've planned it all out, and you've built a cut list of like 15 different things that are exact measurements and you have to follow that to a T. If you screw up, your whole project is going to be off. Right? That is how I think of very much this, like, worldbuilding document where you're pre-building all these things in a very detailed way. There's another mode of thinking that I find more useful. It's a very traditional method called relative measurement. Right? You have a board. You are now going to mark that board in ratio to the next thing you want to make. Right? So if you have a drawer back, then that is the size of your drawer, you're going to cut your drawer front in a way that matches the size of that. It doesn't matter how big it is. You don't need to know that it's 9 inches and three quarters. You just need to know it's this size, I'm marking it to be the same as that size. So you can do that with all your joinery and all of your pieces, and you have a thing at the end that is very beautiful and very proportional that fits the design that you wanted, but you're doing it all relative to each other rather than trying to impose this top-down hierarchy on it. So if you approached your organization that way, I think for a lot of people, I think it can be much more intuitive and fluid, and sort of takes some of the stress off, of having to figure all these things out before hand.

[Howard] My own woodworking mantra is I've cut this three times and it's still too short.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Then you just cut the other board to be short enough that it fits.

[Howard] Exactly. When we returned from our break, I'm going to talk about turning my planning tools into money.

 

[Mary Robinette] I want to talk to you about Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. This book… Like, I started recommending this book before I finished it, which is unusual for me. He imagines a future where the sea levels have risen, as they're going to. That's not really imagining the future, but one of the things he's looking at is whether or not octopi… podes can be sapient. He's got that layered on with the way AI might manage fishing vessels. Like, there's all of these different layers, and it's heavily, heavily researched. All of the characters are also scientists at the top of their game. So the amount of research that he had to do was huge. But it feels pretty effortless on the page. So if you want to look at, like, what the end result of some of these tools that were talking about are, and you want just a really good read, it's very thought-provoking. I highly recommend Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler.

 

[Howard] Probably the single most profitable thing Sandra and I put together for Schlock Mercenary was the Planet Mercenary role-playing game. I have a PDF of the Planet Mercenary role-playing game on my desktop that I refer to all the time so that I can get my worldbuilding details right. It's totally fair to write a 300,000 page role-playing book and expect to make money off of it and then to refer to it yourself. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. As I joked in a previous episode, between the words schlock and mercenary, which word suggests I wouldn't do something like that?

[Mary Robinette] So I've done a similar thing, which is not the role-playing game, but one of the things that I've done to monetize my research is that I have a bookshop.org, so I have on that bookshop.org, I have a list of… The bibliography that I have for the books that I used to research my stuff. It's there for two reasons. One, it makes an easy reference for me. Two, people are always asking me, like, where can I go to get information like this. Then, because it's through bookshop.org, I actually get an affiliate kickback from that. It's not that you have to do this thing, but one of the things that you will be doing as a writer is looking for multiple income streams.

[DongWon] Just one thing in general I want to remind you is that there's no such thing as throwaway work in writing. Right? It may be frustrating to feel like you've written however many words in worldbuilding and prep work and pre-writing, 50,000 words, whatever. That all goes into building up your internal understanding of this world in the way that you may need it, so that that work is going to go into the book that you're writing. Right? Words that you write and throw away just because they're not ending up on the final printed page doesn't mean that they were worthless. It just was what the project required. Right? Not every book will require that. Maybe that's something you do for your first book. Maybe it's something you find you need to do for your seventh book. Right? But I love framing, like, being able to take the pre-work you're doing and make it work for you in other ways. I think that's an absolutely brilliant way. I think writers yeah… Look for ways to monetize that work you're doing. Look for other income streams. But also don't feel like you're wasting time by doing these things. Yes, sometimes for some people it's a mode of procrastination, but I just encourage people really, like, if that's your process, that's your process. Lean into it. Find ways to make that work for you, and don't beat yourself up just because that doesn't end up on the printed page.

[Howard] One of my favorite outgrowths of the research was I had a spreadsheet for when people were born. I realized that two of my main characters were from the same area, had the same life… About the same life span, and may have been sitting on different sides of the same war. I had never explored that. An entire story and the whole bunch of character data came out of one moment where I looked at a spreadsheet and went, "Huh."

[Erin] Yeah. I think something else that spreadsheets can do, and, granted, I love them more than I should, is it teaches you what you care about. So a lot of the process of making a spreadsheet is trial and error. So you decide, I'm going to make a spreadsheet today. You're like, "Oh, put all the character names down," or something very easy. You're like, "I'm going to track their age." Then you're like, "Oh, no, that's wrong, because my thing goes through time. Actually, I need to track their date of birth." That tells you something about the way you view the story, the timescale that you're working on. If you keep going back to your spreadsheet and being like, "Oh, this spreadsheet is not working because it doesn't tell me X." That means X is important. Number one, figure out if there's a way to add it to your spreadsheet. Number two, like, that should be, then, something… If that's important to you, then it's something important to the story, and you should see is that actually coming through. That thing that you keep thinking about. So, I think that a lot of times what tools do is they force you to take the wide creative universe that you're working in and put it into some sort of structural mode. Even if it's just like I've made power points of stories before, being like random things I mentioned that I should get back to. They don't have a lot of form to them, but it's a way of putting it somewhere on paper, put it in some sort of box, even if it's just a box that I'm going to rifle through later to see if there's something really interesting that I can use to inspire myself going forward.

[DongWon] Aabria Iyengar has this brilliant worldbuilding question that she uses that is, "What is the lie that the people of your world believe in?" Right? The questions you're asking and putting into your spreadsheet can be so thematic and so creative and so generative that… Yes, you want the biographical details, when was this character born, who knows who, what are the connections. But also, going to Howard's example of here are two people on opposite sides of the war, what lies were each of those characters told? Right? What things do those characters believe and how is that going to drive story down the line? The way that... These tools are storytelling tools. They sound cold and mechanical when you say, "It's a spreadsheet. It's a database." But I think from that you can find such rich narrative hooks and chase your own interests, as Erin was just saying. You list the things that you are interested in. Sometimes you will be like, "This is boring. I'm not interested in this part of this world, or the set of characters, or this question," because when you're making a spreadsheet you are asking a question, and I think that is a really useful way to think about these things as you approach it.

[Howard] In structuring Schlock Mercenary, I realized on around I think book 5 or six, I realized that every book needed to stand alone. Because it needed to be a salable product without someone having to buy the earlier books. That may sound crassly commercial, and that's because it is. It would have been a terrible business decision to tell people, "Oh, you have to start with my very first thing that I ever did before you can read this thing that I'm super proud of." The solution… I mean, it should be obvious, I need to make sure that the beginning of every book introduces the characters who are going to be important, and that the end of the book resolves questions, answers questions that were asked by those characters at the beginning of the book. That started going into my planning spreadsheets very early on. I would have some cells for this is the plot, this is the big story. Then I would have columns and cells for the specific characters that this book was tracking. I had people come to me later and say, "You know, I always thought that Schlock was the main character, but he's almost never the main character in the stories." Yes. Yes, I'm so glad you noticed that. That's how we're supposed to say that, right, Mary Robinette?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Yeah, I'm so glad you noticed that. He's very rarely the protagonist. Because he very rarely gets an arc that tracks things. I realized on about book 17, book 18, I realized that I needed to return to Schlock for the finale. So the ending that I had originally envisioned, the big solution, the big resolution to the plot that I had originally envisioned and that I had in my spreadsheets needed to have more Schlock in it. I went back to, and this is going to sound funny, I went back to an old forum post from like 2003 where someone said, "Yeah, the answer to a lot of these stories is just Schlock eats it." I looked at that and thought, "You know, I bet that'll work."

[DongWon] Character is destiny, you know.

[Howard] I bet that'll work. It felt so… It was one of those moments… Again, it grows right out of staring out the spreadsheet and realizing there's this pattern and there's this missing piece of this pattern, and I have to fill it with this character. I took my proposal for the changed ending to my brother and said, "This is what I'd like to try." His response was, "Oh, my gosh, that's genius. How long have you been planning this?" I'm like, "30 minutes."

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm so glad you noticed. Speaking of 30 minutes, we don't want to run for a full 30 minutes. So, let's wrap this up with some homework. Erin?

 

[Erin] So we have talked about a few different tools today. Sometimes I think about tools as hammers in search of a nail. So the homework is for you to actually find what are the nails within whatever story that you're working on? What are the things that you can or could track within your story? What I would challenge you to do is find three different things that your story could be tracking, whether those are informational, thematic, character driven, emotional. Write down what those are. Maybe a few examples of what those could be. If it's birthdays, right down five characters birthdays. If it's theme, write down what five characters are thinking about thematically. Then start looking at what are some tools that could actually help you take those nails and build something really cool out of them.

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

 

[Howard] We are now offering an interactive tier on our Patreon found at patreon.com/writingexcuses called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-33-deep-dive-the-schlock-mercenary-finale 

 

Key points: Schlock Mercenary, a daily webcomic from June 2000 to July 2020. Why a daily web comic? Because Howard imagined it as a newspaper comic. Buck Rogers and Bloom County! Big save the universe plots and characters that we love with their own arcs. How do you balance those? Like a bumblebee, keep flapping!  The guiding principle of Schlock Mercenary is there has to be a punchline. Worldbuilding, character work, and the punchline. An outline to hit the ending? If you find yourself diverging, you may need to redo the outline. The drumbeat of the daily strip versus the graphic novel format. Humor and context. 

 

[Season 18, Episode 33]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive Prep: The Schlock Mercenary Finale.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm on the spot for this episode. Also, I think, for the seven episodes that follow.

 

[Howard] We're going to talk about... We're going to talk about finishing big things. And building big things. And... Um... Oh, boy, Schlock Mercenary ran from June of 2000 to July of 2020. Daily webcomic. Wrapping it up was one of the most difficult and one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. I feel like a discussion of how I did it and why I did the things that I did could lead us into all sorts of interesting and wonderful places with regards to the things that we've worked on, the things that you might be working on, things we love, things that maybe weren't done so well. There's so much to cover, so much to cover when we talk about wrapping up big things.

[DongWon] Before we dive into the end, I'd love to rewind a little bit and talk about the beginning. So, I think to understand how you wrap this up, I would love to understand first, why did you make it a daily web comic? Like, what were the things that drew you to that format? And, like, what was… What did that… How did that wire your brain in a certain way to think about how to structure things when you're putting content out on such a regular cadence?

[Howard] The enormous power of the default. When I began writing Schlock Mercenary, I imagined it as a newspaper comic. I submitted it to a couple of syndicates and was told in both cases, "This is not what we're looking for." I don't blame them. I'm actually quite happy that it didn't get picked up. But I… Up until that point, I really only imagined a comic strip as being a daily thing in newspaper format. I mean, the default was so powerful that I literally didn't imagine other things. Why does Schlock Mercenary look the way it does? Because in 2000, Howard really didn't know very much about what was possible with the web.

[DongWon] I mean, you were starting in an era when I think a lot of web comics were like that. Right? They were all coming out of this model of newspaper strips. They all were very episodic, very serialized. Then, over time, I think we saw a lot of these like daily gag comics suddenly start to develop meta-plot and structure and like these huge events that sort of overtaking them. Was that something you knew that you wanted to do when you started Schlock or were you starting with more of a gag of the week structure? And then, suddenly realized, oh, there's plot here. There's story here. There's worldbuilding in a bigger, more complex way.

[Howard] My two biggest influences going in on this were a great big book of collected Buck Rogers comics I had from the… I want to say 1940s. It might have been the 1930s. Newspaper comics. Where it was definitely long form, and there was some Monday reminder of what we were doing Saturday, cliffhanger. There was some of that going on. But I got the feeling that back then the newspapers just assumed, no, everybody's onboard. They're just picking up this paper and Buck Rogers is what they're reading. We own this audience. It was very streamlined storytelling. And Bloom County. Which did gag of the day sorts of things, but they would string together themes. There was one where, during the Iran-Contra scandal, the Oliver North stand in was an alien puppy dog that was just big eyes and cute and he's there on trial and no one can prosecute, no one can come down on him, because he's a cute puppy, look at him. Look, oh, look at what his antenna do. So we got a week of those gags, and then we move on. I thought, "Well, I could tell a longform story that does this thematic sort of thing on a weekly basis, and plot arcs will probably last about a month." I was wrong. Plot arcs, I found, lasted about a year to a year and a half. It wasn't until about two years in that I realized I had sort of the makings of a mega arc. I did not know where it was going to go. But I knew where it was going to start. It was going to start with some of the injustices that were created by monopolies and by top-heavy power structures and whatever else. Because those are great things to make fun of, but the more I made fun of them, the more I thought, "Man. I want to topple these. What happens if I topple all of them at once?"

 

[Mary Robinette] At what point in the process did you know the end that you were writing towards?

[Howard] That wasn't until around book 10. That wasn't until around book 10.

[Mary Robinette] For the listeners who have not experienced it, how many books are there?

[Howard] 20. Yeah, right about the time… Right around book 10, I thought, "Yeah. I could finish this in five more books."

[Ha ha ha!]

[Howard] I could wrap this up in five more books.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Howard] And then I started noodling… I was just having so much fun with… I would

the thing and realize, "No, I haven't finished exploring this. There are more jokes to be told, there's more character development, there's… Oh. It's now been another 18 months. I'm on book 12 and I'm literally no closer to the conclusion I've envisioned than I was 18 months ago." But, yeah, right around book 10, I think it was book 3… The first book's called The Tub of Happiness. The second book, The Teraport Wars. Teraport wars is the one where we start seeing the grand Galactic whatever. Then, book 3 was Under New Management. Book 4, the Blackness Between was where I introduced dark matter as something that could have complex structures and life with desires that conflict with ours. Goals that bring us into conflict. Spoiler alert everyone. That's the piece right there which I think aired in 05, 06… That was the piece that ultimately needed to be resolved by book 20.

[Mary Robinette] Since you said the word spoiler, I do just want to let new listeners know that when we do these deep dives, that we go full spoiler. So we encourage you to read the material that has been linked to in the liner notes. Because later you're going to get all the spoilers.

[Howard] The good news is even if we spoil the big ending for you, there are so many beautiful moments… Yeah, I'm blowing my own horn here a little bit…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But as I read in preparation for this, I wrote this. Obviously, I know how it goes. I loved rereading it. I just had so much fun with the characters and with their individual plot resolutions. That was something that I learned fairly early on, which is, yeah, you can have a save the universe plot. But if we don't have characters that we love who have their own desires and their own plot arcs and their own disasters and their own recoveries from those disasters, the end of the universe doesn't really feel like it matters.

 

[Erin] You've mentioned a couple of elements, like the characters and all these things that go into it. How did you sort of decide in day-to-day when to devote time to the larger arc, when to devote time to an individual character moment or a great line? How did you balance that out over the course of one day going into the next?

[Howard] That. Feels. Like. The. That feels like the bumblebee and the laws of aerodynamics question. Because, very often I would stare at what was happening on the page and I would say I feel like I planned this. I feel like I did all of this on purpose. But I don't know how I'm doing it. Sandra is standing there next to me and saying, "Yeah. It's the bumblebee and the law of aerodynamics." Law of aerodynamics does not explain how a bumblebee flies. Bumblebee's job, keep flapping. So she would, right there, she said, "That's fine, honey. Keep flapping."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Since then, I have learned, one, the laws of turbulence in gases and liquids very nicely explain how a bumblebee stays aloft. It amounts to keep flapping. Two, I have become much more conversant with the sorts of tools I was unconsciously using. One of those tools was a prioritization of what is important… What is most important to have happen. For me, the most important, the guiding principle of Schlock Mercenary is there has to be a punchline. People have to be getting a reward for reading the strip today. So I would often begin with do I have a structure that is going to have a punchline at the end? There's a question that often gets asked, how do you know whose point of view to follow? The answer is I follow the character who is in the most pain. Because that's often going to be the most interesting. For me, it was, yeah, the character who's in the most pain is the most likely to be the one where there's going to be a good joke. But that's also… I'd rephrase the question. Who's going to be able to tell the best joke? We should pause for a thing of the week, and we'll come back in a moment.

 

[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week, when we talk about very long-running series that have come to a conclusion, is a series of books by James S. A. Corey that is collectively known as The Expanse. Several of the books were adapted into a TV show as well. But the entire book series runs nine volumes, and wrapped up a couple years ago. It covers an enormous amount of territory, both in terms of story, character, and world. It starts very focused in our solar system, it's a big space opera. Then it continues to expand and grow in these leaps and starts that are endlessly fascinating and have endless complications with the characters. It jumps around in time as well as in space. I personally think that those two authors who cowrote the series stick the landing beautifully. It is worth going through the journey for all nine volumes that does a beautiful job of managing to balance the big ideas, the politics, and the individual character journeys. I adore these books. I'm very biased. I got the opportunity to work on the first couple of them. But watching where they ran with the thing from there all the way to the finish line was a thing of beauty, and I highly recommend everybody check out The Expanse books.

 

[Howard] I would like to return to the question Erin asked.

[DongWon] I have a thought on that actually.

[Howard] Oh. Go ahead.

[DongWon] If you don't mind me jumping in. It's more of a compliment than a thought, actually. One of the things that I thought that you do beautifully in this is really balancing three different toolkits you're using. I could see how you do that in a daily way. Right? I was reading these as a big block, not as a daily strip, but you have… The three tools I'm seeing in your kit here is, one, you have the world building, which gives you all this like big ideas stuff. Right? Whether that's dark matter being sent in, whether that's a civilization structured around this idea, whether it's like these digital heavens spaces that people get teleported into. You have all these high concepts that are sort of driving the metanarrative that's thematic. Then you have deep character work and relationship work that is driving the minute to minute plot of the story that keeps things flowing in such interesting ways and interesting dynamics and people are making choices rooted in who they are. But then you have the third tool in your kit, and this is what a lot of people don't have, which is, as you were talking about, the need for the punchline. So, on a daily basis, you have a structure of we need to get to that joke. So you're able to rely on the motivation of the joke, the guiding rails that you're on because of the character work you've done, and then the overall target, which is these huge intellectual world building structures. I think those three things operating in sync, almost in tension with each other a little bit, just… I can see it like laser targeting you towards that finale that you're getting towards. It was really fun to watch that unfold.

[Howard] Thank you. That's… It took me a long time to figure out that was kind of how I was doing it. One of the things I found out… And this is returning to Erin's question of how did you select which pieces you were working on. I realized that the way I had been creating individual strips and individual story arcs was not going to work for creating the ending. I needed to outline my way all the way to the very end with some big structures so that I could start aiming things. Otherwise I was going to ramble. I mean, the ramble was fun. We'll talk a little bit about in a future episode about that. But…

[DongWon] When did you realize you needed to do those outlines?

[Howard] Putting a year on it, that would have been 2015, 2016. I knew that I needed it and I wanted each of the last books to be about a year of comics. So it was…

[DongWon] So you're like two or three volumes before…

[Howard] Late 2017 is when I'd… When I was committed… When I actually started the last of the three books. That was… The way I structured it was I wanted to treat the ending as a trilogy. I want the first book of the trilogy to set up the final conflict and to bring all of the characters and put them in good… Get all the pieces on the chessboard and end us in a way… End that book in a way that feels triumphant but also propagates a disaster into the next book. That structure served me really well. If I'd tried to do it in five books, if I'd tried to do it in one book, I don't think I could have pulled it off.

 

[Erin] I feel like I hear people a lot coming to this realization, who are writing longer works, where they're like, "I started out, and I was just doing a thing. Then, outlines came upon me, and it turned out I needed them." I'm curious, how did that change… Did it change your process at all? Did it make it easier? Was there anything that was more difficult once you realized that you had to do that for the ending?

[Howard] For my own part, and I begin with that phrase because I don't want to force discovery writers into the same path that I was in. For my own fart…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Fart.

[That's it for… Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] I mean, you were talking about the gaseous nature…

[Howard] For my own part, I felt very… It felt very precarious to me. I was very worried that by outlining these things, I was going to break a portion of my process and wasn't going to be able to follow through. Fortunately, I was, at the time, hanging out with some really strong writers of outline and fiction in short form and longform and whatever else. I count their friendship and their examples and their instruction is critical pieces of getting me passed the fear of the precarious and into the understanding of Howard, you've got the toolbox. You've figured out that it's turbulence that makes the bumblebee fly. Now flap that direction, and it's going to work.

[DongWon] How much did you stick to the outline?

[Howard] The bigger part… The biggest part of the outline, I stuck to it. Five nines as accuracy. I know this book will feature this cast, this book will feature that cast, last book will have people split up and they come back together. So, at that level, yeah, very, very accurately. At a lower level, there was a place in the second book where I realized I had diverged wildly from what I'd originally imagined, but I really loved where it was going. So I sat down and re-outlined things and was pleased by with what… Where that went.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I've definitely done that too. I'm partway through a book and I'm like, "Oh. I'm going to do a different thing than I'd outlined." One of the things that I was struck by was the difference between the way it reads when you're reading it as a single strip versus the way you're reading it on… When you're reading it in graphic novel format. I wond… I've heard you talk a little bit about this in the past, about the way you think about it. I was wondering if you could unpack that for us now, the way you're thinking about…

[Howard] Sure. It's… The way I think about it is it was a horrible, horrible compromise. I worry still about people who read it in the longform. That's because the pacing of reading one strip a week… The pacing of panel panel panel punchline panel is very, very… It's like a drumbeat. When you read the whole thing as a graphic novel, it's the cognitive equivalent of just a constant pounding that I'll admit was not necessarily pleasant for me. But the pacing here is weird. I keep pausing for punchlines. Why am I doing that? Oh, because that's how this was constructed. That's just what it is.

[Mary Robinette] So what's interesting for me is I have a different experience. So when I read it… When I'm clicking through and read it strip, strip, strip, I get the beat, beat, punchline, beat, beat, punchline. But when I'm reading it as a full-page, as a graphic novel, the size of the jokes vary, and the other thing that happens is that I start to have… I start to carry context with me across the things. One of the things, like, that is so difficult about humor is that so much of it is contextually based. When you're writing something where you need to land a punchline, you've only got the context for those two or three previous panels. But when you're doing it longform, a lot of the… You're able to have a lot of the jokes that are landing for me bigger, because I'm carrying context through the whole thing, than when I'm doing it in an individual beat. For me, that was an instructive thing when I'm going back to my own stuff, which is in a completely different form that I can… To think about the way context is carrying across and having the jokes that are… Where the context only needs to be like one line before, but then also the ones where there's like a page off, that you've been setting up for pages and pages.

[Howard] Yeah. That was always difficult for me because, I knew, on any given day, the way the Schlock Mercenary website was built is when you arrive at the website, the most current strip is there. So I always wanted the most current strip to give you enough context that when you got to the last panel, there was a reward. Maybe you didn't need the whole joke, but you needed some of it. But if you went back and read more, then obviously there would be more.

[DongWon] Well, that's what I really love about using humor in this way, in the rhythm of that humor being at the end of every strip. Then you have the longer Sunday strips or whatever it is. But that rhythm… Because humor is fundamentally… Or not maybe fundamentally, but often about changing the context of information you have. Right? You're given information, the punchline is the abrupt recontextualization of the information you have to see it from another angle. Which, when you're trying to get your readers to absorb an enormous amount of complex worldbuilding it's such a useful tool. So the end of every four or five panels, I was getting not just the information that was given to me in a complex way, but then you would have an opportunity to tell me, "Here's the important thing you need to take away from this." It was like gathering the executive summary at the end of every strip in the form of a punchline, which really helped me absorb all the stuff that I was looking at. Because it's quite dense. Right? But it's... 20 volumes of complex military science fiction worldbuilding means there's a lot of information that you need to be having in your brain as context for why is this character making this choice, why is this civilization invading X, Y, Z. So the humor and that rhythm of the daily joke, I think, was an enormously beneficial tool for you in being able to deliver that in a way that if you had just done a straight graphic novel may have been incredibly dense, like Alan Moore style, like what am I looking at at this point? So I think that structure actually was… Ended up being a really beautiful tool in your kit

[Howard] Well, thank you. I… I'm admittedly self-conscious about it. The very first Schlock Mercenary book, Tub of Happiness, the only reason it got printed was that Sandra said, "Honey, people want to give us money for it. We can just put it in print." I'm like, "I can't even look at those strips and lay them out. They're so awful. I want to redraw them." She said, "Then don't look at them. I will lay out the book and we will sell it. Because I would like to eat." So there is a huge measure in my heart, there's this huge measure of it is what it is. Compromises were made. Which of the words between Schlock and Mercenary says that I won't sell out my art in order to feed my family?

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Howard, if you didn't grow between volume 1 and volume 20, I think I'd be more concerned than you looking back at volume 1 and being concerned.

[Howard] Yeah. But, yeah, I love the perspectives that y'all are bringing to how you're reading it. One of the things that we're going to cover in a later episode is writing endings and how, from about book 10, I was laying the groundwork for what I knew was going to be the resolution to the conflict. I kept that piece. But I ended up being wrong about what the real satisfying piece of the resolution was. That, to me, feels like a great place to end the episode.

[Mary Robinette] Maybe we should actually do homework before we end.

 

[Howard] You know what? Let's do some homework about ending things. You may have seen on YouTube there's a little series called How It Should Have Ended. Where they take a movie and then they give you an ending that actually makes more sense. The one that leaps to mind immediately is using the eagles to fly the ring to Mordor. Take a thing that you love. Something that you've really enjoyed. Try to write a new ending for it. Something maybe that makes more sense to you, or that maybe it fits your head canon better, or you would just be happier with. But outline a new ending for somebody else's thing that you love.

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

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-04-an-interview-with-dan-wells/

 

Key points: A key to worldbuilding is overexplaining something unimportant, and underexplaining something that is very important. Let the reader know there are details in the margins. Buy Dan bacon tchotchkes. We are all still learning. Forget the dumb stuff. Writing audio can ruin you. Interacting with coworkers can be hard. Balancing careers and family is tricky.

 

[Season 18, Episode 4]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] An Interview With Dan Wells.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] I am excited to be leading off questions for one of our Writing Excuses OGs, Dan Wells. I think this is such an amazing time to be chatting with you because you talked a little bit in our very first opener of this year about how you're going through some changes and new things are happening in your career. But, before I talk about that, I'm kind of curious to take a look back. You've been on the show for years, and you've given so much advice. I'm curious if there's anything that you carry with you, that OG Dan Wells has said that you would absolutely agree with 100% now, even though life is different.

[Dan] Something that I said in the early days of the show?

[Erin] Yeah.

[Garbled… Boy, I… Oh…]

[DongWon] Defend yourself, Dan Wells.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You know, Dan, when you thought that the show was so diverse because you had a science fiction writer, a horror writer, and a cartoon… A fantasy writer, a cartoonist and a… Yeah, that.

[Dan] Back when we had three different genres represented and thought that counted as this amazingly diverse group of three Mormon white guys?

[Chuckles]

[Dan] What do I [garbled] think held up?

[Erin] Yeah.

[Dan] Oh, boy. A lot of… It's a good question, because when we pitch the show to people now, I tell them… I usually tell them start in season 10. Don't listen to the early stuff, because it's not great. That's mostly the audio. We did say some intelligent things on occasion in those early seasons. We're just much better produced now than we used to be. But I… One bit of advice that I still go back to, and I said this on a very early episode. It's been referenced a few times, and I still believe it's true, is that kind of for me, one of the keys of worldbuilding is to over explain something that isn't important, and then to under explain something that is very important. The combination of those two things helps a world… A fantasy world or a science fiction environment feel a lot more real and lived in, because you know that there are details in the margins. Rather than just the two things that you need in order to understand the story.

 

[Erin] That's awesome. Well, now, of course, I have to ask the other question, which is what piece of advice would you go fight OG Dan Wells over these days?

[DongWon] Tell him he's wrong and a fool?

[Erin] Exactly.

[Howard] I've got the easy answer here. I remember during our first season when I had books in print and Brandon had books in print and you didn't, when we were plugging things, you just told people to buy you bacon.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I haven't heard you say that in at least a decade.

[Dan] I'm sorry. You're going to have to say that again. My Internet glitched and you froze and I didn't hear what the actual piece of advice was.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Okay. Sorry. The actual piece of advice was Dan doesn't have anything in print, so just go buy him some bacon.

[Dan] Yes. For years, in fact I think still today, on our website that is woefully out of date, it has links to everybody's web store, and for me it just has links to an Amazon wish list full of bacon related tchotchkes.

[Howard] I am quite sure we've changed that, but now I need to go look.

[Dan] So when we started the show, we had… Brandon was the one who put it all together. He was the one who organized things and who kind of managed the episodes. They brought in Howard to be the famous one, because at the time, he was far more well read than any of the rest of us. They brought in me to be the funny one. Today, Brandon's the famous one, and Howard's the funny one, and I don't know what my job is. But you notice, no one's job was to be the smart one. Which is why we brought Mary Robinette onto the show a couple seasons later. So… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Then I'm like, "Puppets!"

[Chuckles]

[All right. I know…]

 

[Howard] I feel like I undercut the question. OG Dan, did he give any bad advice that you want to step in and correct?

[Dan] [garbled I thought I] dodged that question by making jokes about other unrelated things.

[DongWon] I'm seeing a lot of tap dancing.

[Dan] Oh, boy.

[Howard] Into the fire, Mr. Wells.

[Dan] What I'm going to say, and this is an honest answer as well as a cheat, is that anything incredibly wrong I may have said those early episodes, I don't remember because I have moved past it as an artist. So… I don't listen to those old episodes anymore. I hope none of you do either, I'm sure that I've said many wrong things. I continue to say many wrong things. Because we are always still learning. So… I just forget about the dumb stuff I did and put my behind in the past.

[Erin] Good advice for us all.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I do have to say that I mostly remember actually, from my early days in it, that you were the smart one. That Brandon would come up with these giant, giant theories that was like really, really interesting. Then you would be like, "But here's how we can use it." I'd be like, "Oh. Oh. We could use that theory."

[Dan] Oh. There's a practical side to this art, huh?

[Erin] Well, I'm wondering… Oh, no, go ahead, Mary Robinette.

 

[Mary Robinette] No. What I… But kind of jumping off of that, like one of the things, since you do… You said that you were always growing as an artist. Like, is there something recent that was a discovery that you're excited about?

[Dan] That I am excited about? I think I've… Have I told you the story about how writing audio ruined me? I think I've told you this. Let me tell a very brief version of it. I doing a lot of Brandon Sanderson collaborations right now. I turned in the first draft of a book called Dark One early in the year. He read it and he sent back notes. The first thing he said was, "This is awesome. Can I hire you as a vice president in my company?" So clearly he liked it. But then all of his actual criticisms were you're not describing what people look like. You're not describing what locations look like. Nobody does anything while they talk, they just stand there and talk to each other. I thought to myself, "That's terrible. I used to be really good at those things. What happened?" Then I realized, "Oh. The only things I've published for the last three solid years have been audio scripts." In which there is no narrator, you don't describe what things look like, and people just stand and talk to each other.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So it has been an interesting process for me, after three or four years of writing nothing but audio scripts, to be coming back into traditional prose and novels, and kind of real learning from the ground up how narration works, how description works. It's been fun to see those kind of with fresh eyes and think to myself, "Okay, I can remember how I used to do them. But now I think I've learned some new things about how to do them." Being able to introduce characters, for example. I would like to believe that I am better at doing that through voice than I used to be. Which is an interesting thing to say, because voice is the entire strength of the John Cleaver series. But my… I have learned that there are tricks of dialogue that can say a lot of things that I used to rely on narration to say. So, being able to meld the two different styles, audio and prose, back into a cohesive whole is really changing the way that I approached everything that I do.

[DongWon] That is so cool, and it's such a lesson to, I think, so many writers of every now and then, you gotta break it down to fundamentals. Right? You got a look at the first skills you learned and refocus on them and reintegrate them into the new things that you've learned. So, I kind of love hearing about where you are in your process of having learned all these new skills and now taking that and recontextualizing it back into your original process. Yeah. That's [garbled a credit]

 

[Erin] Yeah. I think that now is a perfect time to pause for our thing of the week. When we come back, we'll find out how Dan will conquer the world in the future.

[Dan] All right. So, our thing of the week is a Dan Wells audio script I writing for a videogame called Moon Breaker. This is produced by a company called Unknown Worlds. It's a miniatures wargame, tabletop style, but done entirely on your computer. The game is great. I have a lot of fun playing through the beta. Now it's in early access, so you can get on Steam and try it out as well. But they made the interesting decision to reveal their story through audio dramas that are connected to but separate from the game. You don't play through the story like a traditional role-playing game. You just listen to the story in these kind of radio drama style things. So I've been writing those. I just turned in episode five. I believe the first three episodes are available. They're available on Spotify and Apple podcast. Whatever podcast system you listen to probably has these. You don't even need to buy the game to listen to them. They're half-hour episodes of space opera. They have been a lot of fun to write. They've done such a great job in their end of creating characters, and then just kind of gave me an absolutely unbelievable amount of freedom to basically be the showrunner of my own TV show that you listen to instead of watch. So, Moon Breaker. Everyone go listen to it. It's awesome.

 

[Erin] To touchback now on something that DongWon said before we went to the break about process, I'm curious. Mary Robinette asked about new discoveries. Are there any new challenges, other than being ruined by audio, that you're sort of finding as you move into the new things that you're doing?

[Dan] Well, the new thing that I'm doing, for anyone who didn't listen to our first episode of the year, is that I am vice president of Brandon's company. I'm the vice president of narrative. Which essentially means that I am the other author voice in his large company that at this point has several dozen employees and does all kinds of things. So my job is to write all the books he doesn't have time to write, which is crazy when you realize that he wrote four books accidentally a couple years ago. This year, in 23, those are all going to be coming out. He has six books releasing this year. One of which, called Dark One Forgotten, is an audio series that I collaborated on. The others are all him. So, moving into that, I haven't had a full-time job working for somebody else in 15 years. I've been just on my own, doing my own stuff. So as ridiculous as this sounds, it has been a very hard transition for me to have coworkers again. The normal kind of aspects of working a real job, like deadlines and so on, I deal with those anyway. But the fact that I now am kind of beholden to another group of people, and that I interact with them in the course of my job, is very unfamiliar to me. I used to do it. This is such a dumb thing to complain about, because that's how everyone with a real job works all the time. But for me, I've conditioned myself so completely to this kind of solitary author life where I sit in my home office and I do my own thing and I set my own schedule. Now I have to interact with other people. Which is not exclusively bad. There's a lot of wonderful upsides to it. I love having a team of excited professionals, and I can take them an idea and say, "Hey, let's do this cool story idea. What have you got?" Then I get thrown art resources and production resources and all of these other things. It's really exciting to have all of these other people to play with. But it has been a big transition, to not subconsciously avoid everyone I interact with, because that's what the self-employed author introvert wants to do.

[Howard] I think it's important to note here when Erin sent us off on our thing of the week break, she said we would talk about how you're going to take over the world. It's worth pointing out in this moment that you can't take over the world without learning to work with other people.

[Dan] Yeah. I mean, I suppose we could point to a couple of examples of people who have taken over the world alone, but… No. Most people have an organization and… Yeah. Working with people is great. A lot of what I'm working on right now, I'm not at liberty to discuss. There are secret things going on back screen of Dragon Steel that you will find out soon. There's a very cool story project that I'm working on for the Dragon Steel convention that happens at the end of this year in November. You won't know what those are until you show up at the con. Or, one day later, when someone who showed up at the con puts it on Reddit. But it's really fun to… I mean, basically, I've been given the keys to an incredibly large and exciting entertainment company. Brandon's primary instruction to me has been, "Here's all these tools. Here's all these characters. Here's all these worlds. Do something awesome with them that people will enjoy." I love that.

 

[DongWon] Is this shaping how you think about your interactions with publishers, with audio publishers, with film and TV companies? You've had a lot of interactions with different types of publishers in entertainment businesses from the creator end. Now you find yourself embedded within one, although in a specific context. Is that shaping sort of how you think about those experiences, or how you want to conduct those experiences in the future for yourself?

[Dan] To some extent, yes. We are still in the early transition. Right? I have only been working with Brandon for about a mon… Two months at this point. I guess this will air in… By the time this airs, it will be three or so. So I'm still trying to get my feet under me in terms of scheduling. By which I mean, everything I'm working on right now is a Dragon Steel or Cosmere project. I have not yet had time to get back to my own stuff. I have two books that I'm in the process of working on, one that I'm writing, one that I'm revising, that are pure Dan Wells. Once I figure out my schedule and my calendar and I know how to fit my own projects in on top of all the Dragon Steel projects, then, yes, absolutely. I have a completely different concept in my head of how to pitch those to the world, of what to try to do with them, of how to try to do it. Being able to kind of see this massive entertainment company from the inside has given me… I mean, not necessarily context, but just best practices that I had never considered before. Ways of approaching entertainment, ways of thinking about how to sell stories to the world that are… Yeah, are absolutely changing the way that I approach my own work.

[DongWon] That's really cool.

[Mary Robinette] I am very excited to hear the things that you can share with us about what you learn over this process. Especially, I realized as you were talking, that so many of the questions we get from listeners are things about the work/life balance, and that you now have a very different work/life balance than you did. Because you're balancing two different creative careers.

[Dan] Yeah. For the… All of 2020 through 20… Most of 2022, so about three years, most of my career was not just in audio script, but also in streaming. I had a Twitch show. At one point, two different Twitch shows that I did. I was a professional game master. Basically, cut all of that out in order to make time for Dragon Steel. So now I'm in the position of trying to figure out, like I said, where to fit in my own stuff, but also how to make sure that I'm still a dad. How do I make sure that I'm still a husband, give time to my family? In some ways, that's easier now, because I don't spend every single evening of the week playing D&D with people online. So I get to do less of that and more family. But now the Dan's own projects are falling behind. I need to figure out where to fit them in again. Yeah. So, there's going to be a lot of discovery over the course of this year as a figure out what I'm doing and how to do it well.

 

[Erin] I can't wait to hear more about it, but in the meantime, I think it's time for our homework. Dan, you've got it?

[Dan] I do have it. So I want to go back to that kind of ruined by audio concept that I had earlier, and make you think about that. Take something that you're working on, or, even if you don't have a work in progress right now, take a scene that you love from a book that you love. Rip one of the scenes out of it. Then rip out all of the narration. No narration whatsoever. So it is pure dialogue. Then take a look at that and figure out what you have to do, what kind of changes you have to make to the dialogue in order to communicate as much of that narration as possible without just infodumping everything and having characters describe themselves in the mirror and so on and so on. So it is a tricky thing to do. But I believe in you.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/04/24/17-17-writing-in-the-public-domain/

 

Key Points: So, what's in the public domain that you can use? Make sure what you are using is in the original work, not created by the media. What's public domain? Anything older than 96 years. You get to use an established universe, and you can bring out lesser-known aspects and characters. Retelling is fine! Remember, writing builds on shared understanding. Twists play off audience expectations.

 

[Season 17, Episode 17]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Writing in the Public Domain.

[Brandon] 15 minutes long.

[Gama] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Gama] And I'm Gama.

 

[Dan] We are here at LTUE…

[Cheers]

[Dan] Very excited to be here, recording live in front of our home court science fiction fantasy conference. We have Gama Martinez with us. Gama, you've been a friend of ours forever. We're so excited to have you on the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

[Gama] I am a writer, obviously. A runner, a diver, I dive with sharks all the time…

[Dan] What?

[Gama] Yeah, I volunteer at the aquarium. I dive with tickling shark tanks.

[Dan] Okay. I thought you just like broke into the aquarium.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] This is the Loveland Living Planet Aquarium?

[Gama] Yeah.

[Brandon] Cool. I didn't know that that was you.

[Dan] Yeah, I didn't know… Well, we're not going to talk about the other thing. We'll just talk about sharks.

[Laughter]

 

[Dan] No. You pitched this, and I think it's a fascinating idea. Because the public domain at this point does include a lot of really cool stories, fiction, characters, all of this cultural background that we might be very familiar with that is actually totally legal to just tell your own stories about. You are publishing a book about…

[Gama] It is called God of Neverland. It's set 20 years after Peter Pan, where Michael Darling asked to return to Neverland to help save Peter Pan.

[Dan] That's cool.

[Brandon] It's very cool. I have read it. I got an early copy. It is… You're even kind of… The worldbuilding's really cool. Because it's, like, Peter Pan, you find out very early in the book, is, like, this ancient God, a trickster God, that Peter Pan is just one of his incarnations.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It delves into mythology and things. It's really cool.

[Gama] So, yeah, in Celtic mythology there is a God called Maponos who is an eternal child, and is a personification of youth. So I'm like, "Oh, that's perfect."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yeah. I thought that connection was just awesome. It propelled me through the whole book, just that single idea, landed so well for me. The book is great, too. It's not just that idea.

[Dan] So, Peter Pan and Celtic mythology are both public domain.

[Gama] Yes.

 

[Dan] If somebody wants to write with public domain characters, such as Peter Pan, what are some considerations that they need to take?

[Gama] The big thing to be careful of is that what you are using is part of the original work, and not something created by Disney or another movie company. The third book in this series, for instance, is going to be based in Oz. But what a lot of people don't realize is that the ruby slippers were not in the original book. They were silver. They were put… They were made ruby in the movie because they were just doing color movies and red popped out more. So, I can't use ruby slippers because that's not public domain, even though the Wizard of Oz is.

[Brandon] Yeah, it's really odd was Sherlock Holmes, right? Because the estate of Sherlock Holmes has somewhat successfully proven that certain elements from Sherlock Holmes are not in the public domain, even though early stories of Sherlock Holmes are in the public domain. So, they'll like sue if the friendship between Sherlock and Watson is as it's represented later in the books instead of as it is early in the books. Which is really an interesting distinction that is a little intimidating, I think.

[Gama] Yeah.

 

[Dan] So, is there an easy way of learning this stuff, or is it just do your research?

[Gama] Anything before 96 years from now is public domain. There's some gray area between…

[Dan] Before 96 years from now?

[Gama] Well, 96 years…

[Dan] Anything older than 96 years?

[Gama] Yeah, that's exactly it.

[Dan] Okay. So, for example, what are some Peter Pan things that I'd probably assume are original, but are actually Disney creations?

[Gama] The crocodile's name is Tick-Tock.

[Dan] Okay.

[Gama] That is not in the book. The crocodile is not named in the original. Obviously, a lot of the songs.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I assume all of the song.

[Laughter]

[Dan] None of them were original in Barrie. What about, like, aspects of the lost boys? They all… Did they all dress up like squirrels and stuff in the original?

[Gama] No, they didn't. Now that you mention it, no, they didn't.

[Dan] Oh, okay.

[Gama] They were just boys who had… In the book, they had fallen out of their cribs. The reason they were only boys is that girls were too smart for that.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Oh! Okay. As the father of three of each, I agree.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's absolutely correct.

 

[Brandon] This topic's going to grow increasingly relevant in the coming years. Because so far the Sonny Bono act, which extended copyright, has not been re-extended. I don't know if it's actually called the Sonny Bono act…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But that act that was… That extended copyright protections in the 90s. Everyone is expecting Disney to fight to re-extend it. So far, they haven't. They were a big motivator behind it happening in the 90s. So, for instance, Batman and Superman are going to be entering the public domain within the next 10 years or so. If this doesn't… If something doesn't happen. Right now, the people who are watching this are saying if Disney's not going to join this fight, then it's going to happen. Which means that you will be able to write Superman stories if you want. But this can only be the issues of Superman containing elements from the ones that were the first year that Superman was out, and then, the next year, the next set of issues will enter the public domain and certain other things will enter. So it's going to get real interesting about 10 years from now when there are unlicensed Batman and Superman movies that start getting released.

[Gama] Right. Originally, Superman couldn't fly.

[Brandon] Uh-huh.

[Gama] He could leap tall buildings in a single bound.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yeah. No, that's legit. A lot of the villains, the iconic villains, will not enter because originally Superman was not fighting Lex Luther, he was fighting generic 20's mobsters. So it's going to be a real interesting thing when that starts happening.

 

[Dan] Yeah. I can't recall the specific outlets right now. We'll try to find this for the liner notes. But there are… I have seen announcements come through almost every year of, "Hey. These are all the things that are going to enter public domain this year." 96 years ago is not very long ago in terms of our cultural history and our pop culture. I mean, was 96 years ago? 20 something… 20… Bleah, I can't do math, I'm a writer.

[Brandon] Yeah. It would be the 20s.

[Dan] 28? Yeah, the 1920s. So we're going to start getting all kinds of… Like, it's only another decade or so before we get Captain America.

 

[Brandon] Entering this year is Winnie the Pooh. A. A. Milne.

[Dan] Winnie the Pooh. Everyone get out there. Be first on the Winnie the Pooh train.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That's the big one. But there is an Agatha Christie novel entering the public domain. There is some Faulkner and some Hemingway entering the public domain. Not as big franchises there as perhaps Winnie the Pooh, but…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But kind of interesting to see these things now that that expansion has run its course.

[Dan] People have been waiting for William Faulkner to enter the public domain…

[Brandon] Yeah, my William Faulkner…

[Dan] With bated breath.

[Brandon] As I Lay Dying cinematic universe…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Is up and ready to go. Just various people in their caskets, monologing about their deaths.

[Dan] Okay. So you were just reading us a list you were scrolling through your phone. Where did you look that up, so our listeners can look it up?

[Brandon] I googled "entering the public domain in 2022" and took the first hit.

[Dan] Oh. Well, there you go. That's…

[Gama] So that means it's actually already in it, because all the stuff goes in when the year starts. So Winnie the Pooh is public domain now.

[Dan] Winnie the Pooh is already out. Jump on it.

[Brandon] Don't quote us on that. Go get a second source, because it was a five second Google for me.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So if you write it and then you get sued because you're a year early because this list said it will enter next year and I just didn't read that, you can't blame me.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Well, you can, but I will dispute that.

[Dan] Yeah. The audio evidence that he has told you this is there.

 

[Dan] Gama. You're our book of the week. So, once again, tell us not only about your Peter Pan book, but where people can find it.

[Gama] God of Neverland would be in all book stores. It's being released by Harper. Like I said, it's 20 years after the original Peter Pan. The audiobook is by Simon Vance, which I am really excited about.

[Brandon] It… If you're looking for [tones], again, I read it and really liked it. It has about a mystery thriller feel to it. It's like lots of interesting sort of detective-ish things. Detective adjacent, would you say, Gama? It's not really a detective story.

[Gama] Right. Yeah.

[Brandon] But thriller-esque.

[Gama] Yeah, definitely.

[Brandon] Sort of feel. Very fast-paced, very seat of your… On the edge of your seats sort of stuff.

 

[Dan] Cool. All right. So, let me ask another question then. What is the value of… Maybe this is super obvious. What is the value of using a public domain character or setting rather than just making everything up on your own?

[Gama] You have a whole established universe to play with, and then you can find the lesser-known aspects of the story and bring those out. Unlike writing media tie-ins, you don't have to get permission for that. So, like I said, you have this really big expanded universe. There is one thing that's like in the epigraph of Peter Pan, it talks about a little old lady with a crooked nose and a house. She becomes a major character. You can expand on little-known parts of stories that everyone knows about.

[Dan] That's very cool. This would also, I assume, include retelling, right?

[Gama] Oh, absolutely.

[Dan] That you could do "This is Peter Pan, but it's cyberpunk in the future, and it's all gritty, and everyone dies."

 

[Brandon] It's interesting for you to ask this question, because narrative… When we are writing stories, we are always building on a shared understanding. Even if it's just a shared understanding of story structure and things like this. A lot of what we do as writers to make things feel fresh and original is we are in some ways twisting that structure. We are playing off of audience expectations. You can't have a twist in a book if the audience isn't expecting something else to happen. That's the definition of a twist. Because of that, anytime you have something shared in a narrative with the reader that you can expect they will understand, you can play with it. Gama does an excellent job with this in his book. It's one of the reasons we like… Like, when someone gives you a pitch, "It's this, but 20 years later and with this twist," you're building on that shared narrative. That is just really fun. That's the way that we make interesting twists and interesting takes. Like, even when I will pitch Mistborn, I'll say, "Oh, Mistborn is a cross between My Fair Lady and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That's the pitch I used to give when people knew Crouching Tiger a little bit better, right? Because it was new. It's a ninja story. My Fair Lady, the ninja story. That works because you know My Fair Lady. You're like, "Oh. My Fair Lady, but with magical ninjas." That is just a cool twist. It's a cool take. It lets you give these really efficient pitches.

[Dan] That's awesome. Cool. Well, Gama, we have really loved having you on the show.

[Gama] I was glad to be here.

 

[Dan] We've been so organized the last several years that we haven't had the opportunity to do what I'm about to do. Which is, with no warning whatsoever, say, "Gama, what's our homework this week?"

[Gama] Your homework is to find something entering the public domain and write a story about it.

[Dan] There we go. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, as is Winnie the Pooh. Now go write.

[Laughter]

 

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 16, Episode 50]

 

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

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

[Dan] Let's pause here…

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

 

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

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/11/28/16-48-believable-worlds-part-2-creating-texture/

 

Key points: Similarity, specificity, and selective depth help you create texture in your world. Help give the sense that your world is lived in, that the characters are interacting with it. Let them move through their world in their daily lives, just like you do. Put conversations in different places. Along with the purpose of your scenes, consider the activity, what the characters are doing in that scene. Don't just think about big things, think about what people do in their daily lives. Give your characters strong opinions. Remember that a little goes a long way.

 

[Season 16, Episode 48]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Believable Worlds Part 2: Creating Texture.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] All right. So we are still talking about believable worlds. Last week was the illusion of real, and this week we're going to talk about creating texture. What is texture in a story in worldbuilding?

[Fonda] Well, this really is a continuation of what we talked about last week, because a lot of the things that we mentioned, similarity, specificity, selective depth, help you create texture in the world. When I say texture, I mean the sense that your world is lived in. That is not just sort of a stage backdrop to your characters, but that your characters are interacting with that world. One of the ways that I try to make this happen in my stories is to have the characters move through their world in their daily lives, the way we move through ours. School, religion, shopping, daily transactions that you make, transportation, getting from one place to another. If you can do this while also advancing the plot, you will do a lot of worldbuilding in the background in a way that feels very organic. So if you have characters who need to have important meetings and they need to meet with other characters to exchange information, or to have confrontations and to have different things going on from a plot level, one of the best ways to world build is just to have those conversations happen out in the world in different places. So don't have them all happening in the headquarters or in whatever, in their home. Like, have them get out there. I have a scene in which… It's a very tense situation, and it's this confrontation with the two characters, but it happens in a temple. So you get to see the temple and get a sense of what religion is like in this world and the fact that one character bows in the temple but the other does not also tells you something about the characters. I also have a scene where two characters meet at a sporting event. So, those are… That's a way to have the world move by almost like you would in film. Where of… In film, things are happening and there's so much of the world building that is in the background with the costumes and the sets and all that, and you're not paying attention to it, but you're absorbing it. You can do the same thing as a prose writer.

[Howard] Yeah. A couple of examples that leap to mind. The used universe of the first Star Wars film in 1977 which so influenced the genre. This was the idea that things get dirty. Even spaceships got dirty. They were used, and they had dents and scuffs and scrapes and whatever else. When Ridley Scott produced Aliens, he called that look Trucking in Space. It was very informative to us, and it let us feel like we were living there. Contrast that with when Lucas shot the prequels, so many of the sets were designed it just as green screen that a great many of the scenes were a pair of characters carrying on a conversation while walking down a hallway in which they interact with nothing. Even though they then built lavish whatever's around them, it felt stale. So, for us as authors, having people conversing in a temple, having people at a sporting event, where the conversation, the scene requires interaction with what is around them, that's crucial.

[Mary Robinette] There is actually an industry shorthand called touch the puppets.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Which sounds different. But it is exactly this. That when you have three-dimensional figures that the actors, the human actors, can interact with the puppet actors, and it feels very real. Whereas when you have CG characters, there's often no interaction. So it feels like they're existing in two different worlds. One of the things that I do when I'm plotting is that I will write down purpose of scene, which is my narrative intention for the scene, but then I'll write down activity. The activity is the thing that the characters are doing in that scene, which often has nothing to do with the purpose of the scene. So if they are plotting… It's like we're going to plot this heist. They're doing it over… While cooking a spaghetti dinner. The thing that does for me is it makes the world richer, but it also allows me to introduce micro tensions, because that's… There can be things that are going wrong in the scene, like the water starts to boil over. Which can mask the fact that they're just exchanging information in prepping for something. But it also, again, has that texture of making the world feel more real, because small things go wrong in day-to-day life. Like, in one of the episodes that we recorded previously, we had to start over because outside the booth, my cat had knocked over the cat feeder and had, like, jumped in it. If we had left that, this would have felt so very real.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] We removed our vital worldbuilding details. This is one of the benefits that novels have over a lot of other mediums, in that you're essentially unconstrained by budget or time. If you're making a movie or a TV show, then, yeah, you probably only have a handful of scenic locations that you can use in your story. If you are writing a novel, you can have as many as you want. You can have that meeting take place at a temple or a sporting event, because you don't have to pay extra to get a whole sports arena into your book. You just put it in there.

[Howard] I remember my first iPhone. It was expensive, and at one point I cracked the screen and could not just run out and replace it. See item 1. It was expensive. For a while, finger swiping across the screen, there was a texture as I ran my finger across the crack. It was the texture of regret for having dropped it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It was the texture of need for not having enough money. I felt it every time I use the phone. Okay? That was a little tiny rib feeling under one finger. Those kinds of details will give you way more insight into your characters than you just got into me.

 

[Dan] All right. So, our book of the week this week is one that does this so, so well. Releasing this week into the world, we're so excited, Fonda, tell us about your book.

[Fonda] I guess I should mention that I have a book coming out this week.

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] So, I am finishing off the Green Bone saga with Jade Legacy, which is the third and final book. It is coming out November 30th in the U. S., December 2nd in the U. K. and internationally. It is… I've described the green bone Green Bone saga as an epic urban fantasy Asian inspired gangster family saga. That's probably as succinct as I've ever been in describing it. But it is about… It takes place in a modern era Metropolis, and one in which there is a resource, magic Jade, which endows certain people with very cool abilities. It is the story of two clans in conflict. I'm just super excited to bring the story to a close. It has been a long journey and I'm glad I got to come on here and talk to you guys about it.

[Dan] Well, thank you very much. The Green Bone saga is one of my very favorite fantasy series ever. So excited for Jade Legacy to come out. So, the first one is called Jade City, the second Jade War, and then this new one, Jade Legacy. So if you're unfamiliar with it, start at the beginning.

[Mary Robinette] They are so good. They are so, so good.

[Dan] If you like… If you have been waiting so eagerly, like the rest of us… Mary Robinette, you're a cover quote on it, aren't you?

[Mary Robinette] I am. I say that it's like your favorite wire work film crossed with The Godfather. It's just… But it's so good. Such, just beautiful intimate portraits of people. I just love it a lot. Also magic.

[Dan] Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee. Go buy it right now.

 

[Dan] Anyway, back into our world building and creating texture. What are some of the elements that are often overlooked when we are trying to create texture in a world?

[Fonda] So there are… There's many that people don't automatically think of, because they think worldbuilding, and they think lineage of Kings and government and geography and so on. But things that are very much a part of our own world, like pop culture and entertainment. What are people doing for fun? Fashion trends. Schooling or education. Fitness. Sports. We mentioned food earlier in this master class. Religious life. Daily commerce. These are all… Just sort of think about how you go through your day and the ways you interact with the world. Are you doing that in your fantasy world?

[Dan] Yeah. The… So I play a lot of role-playing games, and one of my favorites is Warhammer Fantasy, which is set in kind of a low magic, fake magic Europe. That world always feels much more real and grounded to me than most of the D&D settings, even though I love them as well. I was trying to figure out why. What about that feels more real? It's this concept of texture. The idea that any given Warhammer Fantasy supplement in describing the world is also going to have a sidebar that tells you about the specific names of all the pub games that they play in the taverns, or they won't just be food, they'll have names for this type of meat pie or something like that, to just add extra specificity, like we talked about last week. But then also kind of give those context, so it's not just we're in a pub, but we're in a pub playing this game of dice which is called this because of this, and the last guy who played it lost in his name is still carved into the table and things like that.

[Mary Robinette] The other… With those things, the pub food, games, all of that, give your characters strong opinions about something. Like that's… And maybe give them a foil who has a counter opinion. Again, it can give you micro tension within a scene, but it can make things feel more real if it's like he hears the sound of the arcade game and it haunts him because he broke up with his teenage girlfriend and lost the top score and has never been able to reclaim it. I don't know. I'm making things up wildly.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But… Because I was…

[Dan] It's a good writing prompt.

[Howard] The smell…

[Mary Robinette] That's where I was going.

[Howard] The smell of a dresser drawer, that at one point had mothballs in it, but hasn't for probably decades, is the smell that will always bring me back to me being 12 years old and visiting my grandmother's house for the first time. That's… But most people will smell that and think, "Oh, how do you… You haven't gotten the mothball smell out of that drawer, have you?" That's not the reaction I have.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm sorry… I'm… Weirdly, I'm going to wind up quoting Hemingway, which I did not expect to do in this episode.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But this goes back to something that Fonda was talking about much earlier about similarities, that you can look for similarities in these specific details. Everyone has heard the write what you know Hemingway quote. I'm going to take a moment to read the… Like, the length… The actual quote. Because it actually gets to what we're talking about here. So… It's not what most people think it is. "You see, I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of actual life across. Not to just depict life or criticize it, but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful, you can't believe in it. Write about what you know, and write truly, and tell them all where they can place it. Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study about. Whatever success I have had has been through writing what I know about." So you know what it is to really like the taste of something. You can give that sensation to your character with a thing that is specific to that world. You can have someone in that world… Or a type of music that you know intimately what it is like to love as a fan. You can attach that to a new type of music that you have made up for this world. That's going to make it feel specific and real and textural and grounded.

[Fonda] Yeah. I definitely think that that phrase write what you know gets misunderstood a lot, and that really, what you're talking about, Mary Robinette, is writing what you know on a deeper level, on an emotional experiential level. Taking that and applying it to new contexts in your fictional world. One thing I want to say to all the readers here is a little goes a long way. Like, we may be giving you the impression that you have to just now all of a sudden just over describe everything and fill it with nuance and context. But that's not necessarily true. You want to pick your places. Show those moments, those glimpses that imply that the whole world has that same texture. I use the example of, like, the Hollywood back lot tour. Where I went to Hollywood studios… Or Universal Studios, and you take the little tram, and the streets on this back lot look so real. Like, down to the bubblegum that's stuck on the railing or the chipped paint on the windowsill. It's entirely convincing. Then you turn the corner, and, like, it's just held up by like boards. There's no building behind it. It's just the front. But what you do show has texture and feels very real and lived in. The reader or the audience fills in all the rest for you.

 

[Dan] Awesome. All right. So, what is our homework for this week?

[Fonda] I would like readers… Listeners to go and take a character that they have in the project that they're working on and free write your character with a day off. Have them just spend it doing what they would do on a day off. Where do they go, what do they see, how do they get around? What interactions do they have? After this exercise, see if you can't find a few cool details that you learned in the process of this free writing that you can use in the background of your main story.

[Dan] Awesome. Well. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.