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Writing Excuses 20.21: The Lens of Context 
 
 
Key points: Context, worldbuilding, and setting! How do you know what you really need for your story? What will my character interact with? What does the plot need? The 8 gems of Rohisla! Where do you want to create emotion or conflict? Tie worldbuilding to character conflict. Think about the cost of this piece of worldbuilding. Think about implications! In prose, suggesting a broader context is okay, but in gamewriting, people get irritated if there's nothing behind the door. For GM's, don't build more world than you need. Think about what the reader needs to tell the story in collaboration with you. What if you have a context, but no story? First, what can go wrong and who is affected by it? What were you interested in when you built that context? Try a mashup, borrow a character from somewhere else and shove them into this context. Play with unspoken or hidden context!
 
[Season 20, Episode 21]
 
[DongWon] Wouldn't it be so nice if you could outline your novel, organize your worldbuilding, write your book, format your ebook, and publish it on the same website? You're in luck. Camprie is the all-in-one platform for authors, offering both a full-featured writing software and KDP-style publishing, but with 80% royalties and none of the predatory practices you're stuck with with a few other competitors. Campfire's tools feature versatile panels that make creating characters as simple as moving notecards around a corkboard only much more organized, convenient, and without the inherent dangers of working with thumbtacks. Its wide range of tools include templates for creating settings, a magic system builder, and more. All of which are connected to a word processor that makes it easy to reference your notes as you write. When you're ready, publish your book on Campfire's e-book shop and include artwork, worldbuilding notes, short stories, and more for readers who want to explore your setting in more detail. Try Campfire today at campfirewriting.com and bring your book to life.
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of…
 
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[Mary Robinette] 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 21]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] The lens of context. 
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Erin] And this is our first sort of episode now that we've introduced the lens of where and when. I thought the very… The very next thing we needed to do is actually talk about creating context in a story. And what I mean by this is that when you are worldbuilding, especially if you're doing science fiction and fantasy, you can create, like, so much world. You can create all the where's, all the when's, especially in science fiction and fantasy. So how do you figure out what the… How do you figure out, like, what actually is needed for your story? How do you use the world and the setting to create the context in which your story is going to succeed as opposed to sort of just everything you could possibly know about that setting?
[Mary Robinette] I tend to think about things that my character is going to interact with. So I tend to break things into details that are plot specific in that there is a plot event that's going to happen around it, there's a piece of worldbuilding, something is going to happen at the… With the gems of [Releasia?] So we actually really need to know what those gems are.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I love that it changes every time you say it.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I have no idea what you said [garbled]
[Howard] For context, in a previous episode, we created… And by we, I mean Erin…
[Laughter]
[Erin] The eight gems of Rohisla.
[Chorus: Rohisla!]
[Dan] How can you not remember the important…
[DongWon] That was like the 13 gems of Rho…
[Dan] Context?
[Laughter]
[Howard] Okay, you know what? Let's… I just want to talk about this for a moment, because as… From the standpoint of a humorist, I want to be able to tell jokes in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, where I'm not making fun of sci-fi or fantasy. And so what I establish is a context in which a thing is funny. The gems of Rohisla thing is making fun of the fact that we can't keep track of Erin's worldbuilding.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to write it down…
[Howard] And that's…
[Mary Robinette] So that I can remember it in the future.
 
[Howard] And the best example I can come up with is the one where… And I've used this in my humor classes… Where the puppeteer alien and the Kzin alien are talking about where human's sense of humor comes from. And the puppeteer is an herbivore, the Kzin is a carnivore, and the Kzin says, "I think that humor is an interrupted defense mechanism." And the puppeteer says, "Humans are insane. No sane creature would interrupt a defense mechanism." And knowing that the puppeteer is an herbivore just makes that funnier, because they're like sheep. Why would you interrupt a defense mechanism? But you have to have the context for that joke to play. And so, for me, the decision on building context is where do I want to be able to tell jokes. And that's… At one layer of obstruction up, where do I want to be able to create emotion? Where do I want to be able to create conflict? Where do I want to be able to create a platform that has no railings?
[DongWon] Ultimately, context only matters if it's giving context to something. Right? If you're just giving me context for the sake of having it, I'm not going to remember it. The reason we can't remember the eight gems of Revisla is that it's not tied to anything, other than the fact that we find this word funny for some reason. And it's… Which is why when I talk about how do you introduce worldbuilding, I always say to tie worldbuilding to character conflict. If a piece of information about how the world works is connected to something that the character wants, needs, or has at stakes, or is afraid of, then that is going to make it so that it's memorable. Right? And that can be as simple as children get report cards, when your eight-year-old MC goes home, there's going to be a report card waiting for him, and he doesn't want his parents to find out what it is. Now the piece of worldbuilding that's important and relevant, which is report cards, matters. Right? That could also be children are executed when they turned nine.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] That's going to be an important part of worldbuilding…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Unless they have all eight gems of Rohis…
[Laughter]
[Howard] They were report cards [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] They just sort them into the poop chute.
[DongWon] Exactly. But all I'm saying is that… I think [Steven Universe Show] does this incredibly well. Where you start with a very simple premise and end up at the end of that show with an incredibly massive space operatic level of worldbuilding and scope. And the way they get there is that at each element that they're introducing to that worldbuilding, they're tying it to a very specific character in their conflict.
 
[Mary Robinette] And one of the problems that I think writers run into is figuring out what pieces they're actually going to need. And, for me, it comes down to the cost of it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] How many words am I going to have to spend on it to make the reader understand it? For instance, you all do not need, in order to understand this podcast, you all do not need to know that we are sitting in a hotel room. You don't need to know the order that we are sitting, which chair type people are, that Marshall stands when he is engineering and looks like a DJ. Actually, you do need to know it, it's pretty awesome. You don't need to know any of that to understand, but sometimes we get so excited because we thought these things through that we will put them down on the page, forgetting that it doesn't actually carry any story burden.
[Howard] And worse still, we put these things down on the page, forgetting that any context that is co-… That is made up of information that could be in any way relevant is going to suggest… Is going to have implications. Things that can grow out of it. I think of… And the books and the movies did just fine, so it's okay for me to complain… Hunger Games. The idea that a Battle Royale has become a central societal point post some sort of apocalypse suggests a huge measure of historical worldbuilding that I was never satisfied with the presentation of. And so the story fell apart for me. And I'm not saying that these stories are bad, because clearly they did just fine. But as a writer, I try to make sure that I'm not going to put anything into the context that I have to explain away later because it suggests something that makes my story hard to grab.
 
[Erin] This actually reminds me of something I learned when I was moving between prose and game writing. So, a lot of times in a short story especially, if you want to make your world feel like it has more depth, you will… You can include detail that suggests a broader context than this story has time for. So you could say, like, we met while searching for the eight gems of Rohisla, and you're not… That's not what the story is about, and it gives… And the context that matters is, like, this is my relationship with the character. So you've provided a relationship context, but not a world context. And yet, knowing it, makes you feel like there's a bigger world out there. In game writing, if you do that, people'd be like, in our next mission, we should go collect those gems, and, like, you have not written anything…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] For the GM, or if it's a videogame, like, there's nothing behind that door. And so then, players get frustrated, because there like, why did you create a context that I can't explore?
[Howard] You now need help from the eight GM's of Rohisla.
[Erin] Oh, wow.
[Howard] Oh… [Garbled]
[laughter]
[Erin] But I think that that's something that, like, even in fiction, you can do. It's like you really have to be careful, like…
[Yeah]
[Erin] You don't want it to make it seem like the more interesting story is happening outside of the page that the reader is being forced to follow.
 
[DongWon] A piece of advice that I give to new GM's is don't build more world than you need. Right? And, like, if I am starting a new campaign setting, if none of my characters are playing a paladin or a [garbled] or somebody who intersects with religion, I'm not writing down what that pantheon is. I'm not going to sit here spending six hours making up 12 gods for this world if nobody here is religious. You know what I mean? And it's just like religion isn't a major component of the story. We don't need to know all the details of it. We can be pretty vague about it. And then, when you stumble into a situation that requires that, that's when you build it out. Right? And so a little bit of, like, a… You build the track right ahead of the train. Right? You're building it as you cross. And you don't need to have every single piece of this imagined out… Maybe have some idea of where that might be going. But think about, what are your characters interested in? Right? If you have somebody who is a merchant, then, yes, you're going to need to understand the economics of it. If your characters are children, no, you don't need to understand where the grain is being shipped from. You know what I mean?
[Howard] You brushed up against here the concept of just-in-time manufacturing, which became a huge market force in the 30 years leading up to the pandemic of 2020. At which point, we broke enough supply chains that everybody looked at just-in-time manufacturing and said, oh, no. This doesn't work anymore. And I loved how, as somebody who world builds, I was able to look at something that seemed very sensible and suddenly see circumstances in which it completely fell apart, because now I understood, in a way I just hadn't understood before, the way things are inextricably related.
[Mary Robinette] You'll hear a lot of times people talking about worldbuilding as there's an iceberg, but you only need the tip of the iceberg. And then there's an implication that you actually need to build the entire iceberg. For me, it's like if I am telling a story in which Titanic runs into the iceberg, yeah, I need to know that there's this mass under there. But if I'm telling a story about some fishermen who are going nowhere near the iceberg, I don't need to know it's there. When I was building puppets, I would build the armature that needed to be in underneath in order to hold their clothes up. That I would have where their bodies were… Like, the joints would be in the right place. Everything that caused the puppet to move in a way that was believable. But I wouldn't build the muscles, because they… The audience would never see them. They were not anatomically correct, except sometimes, when I was trolling on another puppeteer…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] There, it had a point. Right?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It had a purpose. So, for me, what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about it is where do I want to put the effort, but where also do I want the reader to put the effort. Because the reason you don't have puppets be anatomically correct and you try to eliminate all of that stuff is every piece of that adds weight that then the puppeteer has to carry. And because your reader is actively building that story with you, every piece of context that you give them gives them a narrative weight that they have to carry. It's a memory that they have to hold onto. So if you use the context to direct their attention, to give them the tools to tell the story that you want to tell, to tell that in collaboration with you, you're going to have, I think, a more successful story. Do you need to know how things move? Yes, if it's in relation to something else.
[Howard] When I look at Fawzi bear, I think of him as being fluffy all the way through. I don't think of your hand in him. I just think… I mean, the surface of Fawzi bear, the way he moves… He's a big fluffy bear. And so the piece that you didn't build, because you couldn't, because there's no room for your hand, is a piece that I go ahead and imagine for you.
[Erin] And on that beautiful metaphor, we're going to take a short break.
 
[DongWon] Wouldn't it be so nice if you could outline your novel, organize your worldbuilding, write your book, format your ebook, and publish it on the same website? You're in luck. Camprie is the all-in-one platform for authors, offering both a full-featured writing software and KDP-style publishing, but with 80% royalties and none of the predatory practices you're stuck with with a few other competitors. Campfire's tools feature versatile panels that make creating characters as simple as moving notecards around a corkboard only much more organized, convenient, and without the inherent dangers of working with thumbtacks. Its wide range of tools include templates for creating settings, a magic system builder, and more. All of which are connected to a word processor that makes it easy to reference your notes as you write. When you're ready, publish your book on Campfire's e-book shop and include artwork, worldbuilding notes, short stories, and more for readers who want to explore your setting in more detail. Try Campfire today at campfirewriting.com and bring your book to life.
 
[Erin] So the question that I have, now that we're back, is, we've sort of been presuming in our first half that you know the story that you want to tell, and you can then shape the context around that story. What if you've just been worldbuilding in worldbuilding and worldbuilding and you've got all context, and you're not sure, like, where the story is in there? Are there any tools that you can use to actually figure out how to use that context as a lens and not just a landscape?
[Mary Robinette] I have a worksheet we've shared with readers before that I will use when I find myself in this position. It hasn't happened to me a lot, but every now and then, I have an idea and I have the world for it, but I have no idea what the story is. Because most of the time, I do have a character in mind. So I go through an exercise to figure out what kind of things that can go wrong and who can be affected by it. So I will list a list of 20 people who can be in that world, looking at the socio-economic spectrum. I will look at power structures. I will look for those things to look for where things can hurt. Which is not that every story has to be about pain and hurt, but that is usually a place to find a stake and defined someone who has a reason to want to change something. Whether it is something about themselves or something about the larger world. So those are things that I will look for is who has a reason to activate and…
[Howard] Just asking the question is often enough to end up with a character or an entire story. When I look at a magic system or a technology system, one of the first questions I ask is if it's valuable, can it be stolen, can it be smuggled, can it be counterfeited? Just asking the question is enough that suddenly a whole smuggling ring pops into my head, and now I have a story. A whole counterfeiting ring, and now I have a heist or whatever. So, asking the questions about, as Mary Robinette said, asking about the pain points is often the easiest starting point.
[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, one place to start… I think this is kind of tying into what Mary Robinette's saying, is take a look at the worldbuilding you've created. If you've done a ton of worldbuilding, you've done a lot of creating that context, and you're looking for a story to have that context within, then you can look… What you're looking for is what are you interested in. What you're looking for is why am I writing this story? And you will have focused on different parts of the worldbuilding over others. Say you are focused on the religion and spirituality of this world. Say you're focused on the history and mythology, the prophecies, the economics, the technology. Whatever those things are, figure out which one you were drawn to and build on that. Right? Like, this can be Mistborn's magic system. This can be the history and poetry of Lord of the Rings. This can be the Galactic politics of Star Trek. Right? Each of these are pulling the audience, and pulling you, as the creator, in different directions. And that can give you a starting point of what do you want to have your characters interacting with.
 
[Mary Robinette] I sometimes will… When I'm having trouble with this kind of thing, one of the other things that I'll do is the mashup. Where I'm like, okay, here's this context that's really interesting, this world. What happens if I remove a character from another context and drop them into this one? This is essentially fanfiction, which I think is a glorious thing. But this is a way to have your fanfiction jollies and still get paid for it. Which is that you take a character that you love from another world, you drop them into this context. They're gonna change because of the new context. Obviously, you're going to rename them, but the social circles that they have, all of those things, how do they react? How are they moving through this world? Sometimes I will… Sometimes it's not from another piece of IP, it's… I have this character that has come into my head that I haven't been able to find the world for them, and I just shove them into this context to see kind of… Thought experiment about what happens. And often the contrasts between the two will give me opportunities that I wouldn't have had when I was just, like, single-handedly… Or single-mindedly focused on one thing.
[Erin] Yeah. I think a lot of times… I've been thinking about this in a slightly different way, because of the game writing I've been doing, which is that, while you don't want to create contexts that, like, lead the person down the wrong path, creating game hooks when you are creating a setting is a big thing that people do in tabletops. So you'll write about a world and you'll create little pieces, like little bits of discontent, little pieces of things that the GM can, like, use if they want to, then create a whole story in a place that you haven't written it for them, you've just suggested it. I think of those as, like, the but-also's. Like, if you describe a great place, there's always somebody who'd be like, oh, but also… Like, oh, have you thought about that? Or think about, like, who in your setting would write the Twitter thread that's like…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Hold on to your butts. You think that, like, X thing is great? Like, about this context? Like, here's 15 things that are horrific. Like…
[DongWon] [garbled] Twitter? It's just a horrifying thing to introduce.
[Laughter]
[Howard] You know what? Coming back to the eight gems of Rohisla, you put them into your game, and then in the little sidebar for game hooks, it says, "Actually, six of the gems of Rohisla are genuine and two of them are counterfeits." And now we know that there's a story here that the players might be able to interact with.
 
[Mary Robinette] There's another thing that I think is kind of fun to play with, which is unspoken context. Where you, the writer, are aware of something and it is affecting the way you move… Everything happens in the story, but you don't necessarily need the reader to know it. For instance, when we recorded these episodes, we recorded them out of sequence. So the episode that you just listen to, we made a ton of jokes about poop chutes. But we were recording it on Navigator of the Seas and DongWon was not with us. In our timeline, the thing that we just recorded was an episode that you heard weeks ago about the eight gems of Rohisla, and we're all present for that. So it's shaping the way we are moving through. So sometimes it can be fun, actually, to have that little piece of that iceberg, you don't need the whole iceberg there, but just a little piece of the iceberg that is affecting the way characters interact with each other. And it's not that you have to make sure that the reader understands it. Like, I did not need to pause and explain this, you would have been fine without that. But it does affect the story. And so sometimes I will play with that. Like, offstage, these two were totally getting it on, and it's affecting small things, but I don't need the reader to understand it. I don't need to do a side quest to go watch the sexy fun time scene.
[Erin] Well, that is fun.
[Mary Robinette] It is.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I do think it's delightful that our context episode is the one riddled with inside jokes.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Dan] We didn't do this on purpose.
[DongWon] Half of them, I'm not getting, because I missed the cruise.
[Mary Robinette] There's a whole thing about trees and poop chutes and Legolas, like, scooping poop at the bottom, because that's where all his… It's…
[DongWon] Okay.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] All right.
[Erin] [garbled] context.
[DongWon] Without this context, actually.
[Erin] It gets away from us. It's time to give homework and move onto a new one.
 
[Erin] So, now we have the homework for you, which is, I'd like you to take a context, some piece of worldbuilding that you've done, and come up with three different narratives that you could write that use that context. Then, separately, I want you to take a narrative that you've written and come up with three new contexts in which that narrative would succeed.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.47: Final Thoughts on Our Close Reading Series
 
 
Key points: Reading for an aspect is exciting. It's nice to have something concrete to tie concepts to. You don't read authors because of what they do poorly, you read them because of what they do well. In your own writing, celebrate what you do well. Try compliment sandwiches. Start with what works, what you like about the book, then go into the critical part, then back up and point out what works, what shouldn't be changed. Try cheerleading critiques, highlight the awesome parts! Analysis! First find the healthiest part, then lift everything else up to that. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 47]
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, there. If you missed out on the very cool special edition of one of our close read books for this season... I'm talking about the Orbit Golden Edition of the Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin. This is so beautiful, and we've arranged for you to still get 20% off. Listen. The set includes an exclusive box illustrated by Justin Cherry/Nephelomancer, a signed copy of The Fifth Season, fabric-bound hard cover editions of the trilogy, gilded silver edges, color end paper art which I love, brand-new foil stamped covers, a ribbon bookmark, and an exclusive bonus scene from The Fifth Season. You need to read this scene. All you have to do is visit orbitgoldeditions.com to order and use the code Excuses for 20% off. And to let them know we sent you.
 
[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 47]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Our Final Thoughts on Our Close Reading Series.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we need to read more.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I still need to read more. I'm Howard.
[Chuckles]
 
[Dongwon] Yeah. So this is… We've come to the end of this season of Writing Excuses, where we took you all through very detailed readings of five different works that we love, through five different aspects of the craft of writing. We're just going to chat a little bit about how we felt about it. Things that we thought were highlights. Any low lights that came up. But, for me, I had the best time in the world doing this. For each of these books, they're books that I know well, by and large, and in each case, there was a thing that they were doing that I was always so impressed by that I wanted to understand better. So, this was such an opportunity to get some of my favorite people together and force them to talk to me about it. That's, I think, what all these podcasts should be.
[Mary Robinette] We… I mean, we could completely change the format of the podcast forever, and keep doing this. I was also extremely excited because… I don't know if our listeners can tell, but we like each other and enjoy talking to each other.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] But, in fact, we do. What was fun for me was that some of the stories I had previously read, and some of them I was coming into for the first time. So it was interesting… Like, the ones that I had already read, This is How You Lose a Time War, I had read some of the C. L. Clark stories, and I had read The Fifth Season. But reading them this way, going back and seeing things, knowing how the story was going to end… Like, I was still emotionally tense through those stories, but I was also… My writer brain was able to dial in, because I was reading them very consciously for specific things. Whereas the two that I hadn't read, going in and reading Ring Shout and thinking, okay, I am reading this and I am specifically looking at how tension is being handled. It didn't break the story for me at all, like, the rest of the story, I was still moved by it. But it caused me to pay more attention to things than I normally do, and that was exciting for me.
[Erin] I have to say, I'm getting, like, a little nostalgia moment…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Because I'm remembering when we were sitting, all on the cruise, actually, like, having I think some sort of meal…
[Dongwon] Yeah.
 
[Erin] And, like, now we've actually gone through and done it. I think what I loved about it is that I love talking about random abstract things, but I think sometimes it's nice to have something concrete. So that when you talk about a concept or you're mentioning something, it doesn't just feel like it's floating in the air, it feels like it's attached to a work. So, even if you like these works, you hated the works, at least it's something where you can say, "Oh, I get that is a specific example." It also stopped us from using Star Wars as examples all the time…
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Erin] Which was… It is a personal love of mine.
[Dongwon] I love Star Wars. But it's not that useful as an example, actually, is what I've found over the years of teaching.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And it is a movie.
[Dongwon] Yeah. So, getting to talk about actual books that were complex in specific ways, and let us really dive into what is voice, what is worldbuilding, how do you use it? We kind of touched on this, but each of these books could probably, or each of these works could probably have been used to teach any of the subjects. Right? We could… Absolutely could have used Ring Shout to teach character. We could have used the C. L. Clark to teach structure. By God, the structure in his stories…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, my goodness.
[Dongwon] Right? We could have used Time War to teach worldbuilding. Right? Like, we could have swap them around. So, the puzzle for us as we were planning this series was often, like, where do we put these books?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dongwon] It was a very fun puzzle to solve. I feel really good about how that kind of worked out. But, I'm curious, was there one where you found yourself restricted from talking about an aspect of the book because we were focused on one aspect and you wished we could focus on a different thing?
[Mary Robinette] I really wanted to be able to talk about character when we were in Fifth Season.
[Dongwon] Yeah. That is absolutely true. Yeah.
[Erin] I don't know. I think I liked the mismatch. In fact, I was just thinking that it'd be, like, a fun game to, like, take all of these aspects, think of them as, like, you have, like, a regular D6 six-sided die and then, like, next time I read a book, or in my rereading something, roll and be like, I'm going to pay attention to its use of character this time, or this time I'm going to pay attention to worldbuilding.
[Dongwon] Well, that's a great way to introduce the concept for next season Writing Excuses where we're going to do the same five books… No, I'm kidding [garbled]
[laughter]
[Howard] For… Gosh, 16 years? Writing Excuses started in February of 2008. For many, many years, the conversations that we would have about books were… That we had all read… Were restricted to kind of a narrow overlap of things that everybody had read. We didn't do deep dives on them at all. But, off mic, we would often have really deep conversations, one or two of us, about a book we'd just picked up. Then a third one of us would come into the room and say, "Why aren't we mic-ing this? Why aren't we having this conversation?" The answer is because it's going to take another eight years for us to be clever enough to figure out…
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Howard] That if we just give ourselves homework to all read a book, we can do this thing.
[Dongwon] Well… [Garbled]
[Mary Robinette] It's not so much giving us homework, it's giving you…
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Our dear listeners…
[Howard] Well, yes. We gave our listeners homework. But you gave me homework.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Okay. I had to read… I hadn't read… I'd read Time Wars. I think that may have been the only one of these.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, wow.
[Howard] That I had already… That I already read. From one standpoint, I was like, oh, gosh. They're giving me homework. Never used to have homework.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Used to be I could just talk about Star Wars.
[Laughter]
[Howard] But from another standpoint, to use the rotate the object and see how the shadow changes, from another angle, what this looked like for me is, wait a minute, I get to have these fun conversations that we had off-mic on mic. With friends who love reading and love writing and understand craft in ways that I do and in ways that are way better than I do. I still love being the you're not that smart part of the tagline, because that's still my job. So this close reading series… It's been magical for me.
[Dongwon] Yeah. I think that that hits on a really important point for me, which is I'm still relatively new to the podcast as a full-time host, and I have never felt so connected to our audience than I did through this series. Because we ask you guys to read along with us. Right? Knowing that, knowing that we could have these really in-depth conversations because you guys showed up, you did the work, you read the works, and we didn't have to worry about spoilers. It really felt like we were having a conversation with you all in the room with us. Right?
[Mary Robinette] It's one of the things that I've been enjoying on our Patreon…
[Dongwon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Going into the Discord that's attached to it. Because watching… That's one of the places that we can really see the listeners having a conversation and we can engage in it too. That has been a lot of fun watching people… Especially when we did Ti… Well, I guess, as we are recording this, not all of the episodes have released yet. So… But I recall this whole conversation about Time War where people were going, oh, my goodness, I understand what's happening now. My mind is blown. I'm like, yes. This is why we picked this episode.
[Dongwon] Exactly. So, making this, which is largely us talking in a room that you guys get to hear, feel more participatory, feel more open to the audience as well… I don't know. It's been really nice.
[Erin] Yeah. I was thinking about during our last book, we talked about what's in conversation. What books are in conversation with… And it just occurred to me that a podcast is us in conversation with each other, but because we all read the books, and you've read the books, like, we are in true conversation with you. I think of that as like, really beautiful, and I think one of the things I'd love to chat about more… I'm sure we have to go to a break soon, but… Is how do you create that kind of conversation now that you're going forward?
[Dongwon] Yes.
[Erin] If we're not doing this, if we're doing something different, how do you keep that up so that you can have that kind of conversation outside of our podcast?
[Dongwon] One of the best ways to do that is to go to patreon.com/writingexcuses and join our Discord… No.
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] Yeah. I would love to talk about that more in depth, but let's take a quick break first, then we'll come back on that.
 
[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Erin] My thing of the week this week is an article, making you do the work of reading essays that I really love. I have recommended the essay Forget Protagonists: Writing NPCs with Agency to, like, everyone I've ever met, and so now I'm going to recommend it to you. It is a great look at how do we make the characters, in a game in this case, but in your writing as well, how do you make them feel like they live when the focus isn't on them from the narrator, the focus isn't on them from the main player? How do you make your NPCs, how do you make your secondary characters feel like they exist? This writer, Meghna Jayanth, she talks about it from the perspective of writing the game 80 Days, but it really works from anything that you're doing, thinking about how do you not center your protagonist to the point that it feels like all of the other characters are just paper dolls waiting to be played with by them, and instead, make them feel like real living people that your protagonist gets a chance to hang around with. So, check out the essay Forget Protagonists: Writing NPCs with Agency. It has lots of pictures in it. So, it's fun, it's cool, and you should learn from it.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, the thing that you were talking about, Erin, is actually homework that I assign to my short story cohorts sometimes. I will give them a short story to read. Sometimes it is as simple as saying why don't you all subscribe to Sunday Morning Transport or to Uncanny? So that you get reminders, so that your all reading the same story at the same time. But you can do this with just a group of friends. Yes, does this sound like a book club? Yes. Secretly.
[Dongwon] Was book club the thing we keep accidentally calling this series internally? Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But, the difference is that, as you will hear about later in the season, when we have a conversation with Gabriella from DIY MFA, one of the things that you can do is to do this kind of deep read and read specifically for anything. So if you have a group of friends and you're like, hey, let's read a book, but let's read specifically for how they're handling voice. Or maybe even assigned, if you want to assign each other homework, you can be like I'm going to read for voice, and someone else can be like I'm going to read for tension. And just go in and read intentionally. But still reading for fun.
[Dongwon] Yeah. That's such a cool idea. Like, I could see each of us having done that with this. A different way to structure it is each of us have taken an aspect and recorded an episode per book on each aspect. But… Not to rebuild this season as were wrapping it up…
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] That would have been a fun way to do it.
 
[Howard] I just realized that one of the things that Sandra and I love most doing together is TV time where we're just watching anything together, but we're both very writerly, very artsy, in the way we approach things. One or the other of us will often grab the remote and say, nope. Stop. I gotta rewind this because this thing… Just look at what they did with the light, or the color, or the dialogue, or the whatever. We deconstruct it on the fly, and you can't do that in the movie theater, and you can't do that with friends who don't get why you're doing it. You only get to do it with your friends who love taking art apart in order to be able to make their own art better.
[Mary Robinette] When we talk about taking art apart, frequently what we're talking about is nitpicking and being like, oh. They did this. I'm so annoyed about that. Why are all of these women in the Regency wearing spandex gloves? But I was talking to… Spandex doesn't exist yet, Erin.
[Laughter]
[Erin] I looked at my hands like what is wrong with them?
[Mary Robinette] But I was… I took this class by Tobias [Bechel?] called Finding Your Spark. One of the things that he said in it, which so resonated with me, and is what we were doing with this whole series. He said you don't read authors because of what they do poorly.
[Dongwon] Yeah
[Mary Robinette] You read them because of what they do well. So, example that I have of this, it's something that most of you have read, maybe, or at least are aware of. Nobody reads Isaac Asimov for his characterization…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Or his portrayal of women. Like, that is not why you read him. At all. But you do still read him. And you, as a writer, there's… Well, some of you still read him.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] His career seems fine.
[Dongwon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Let's put it that way. When you do read him, it is not for those things, is for the ideas, it is for other things. And with your own writing, we tend to discount the things that we do well because those are easy for us, and we think easy is not valuable. And it's not that you shouldn't push, but when you're reading something, when you're doing one of these deep reads, when you're watching something in… A fun way to look at it is to celebrate, like, what are they doing really well. I'll do that even when I'm going to something that is really terrible. I try to find at least one thing… This is some live theater that I'm thinking of very specifically…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But at least one thing that they've done well.
[Dongwon] It's… I think more of my job than people realize is sitting authors down and telling them what they're doing well. Right? I think it's hard to see when you're in it sometimes. So I view a lot of my job as being like, hey. You're really good at this part of this. You are doing this really well. Yes, do we need to work on X, Y, and Z? Sure. But there's all this other stuff. Right? There's a form of critique feedback called the compliment sandwich…
[Mary Robinette] I call… Yeah, go on.
[Dongwon] What do you call it?
[Mary Robinette] I just realized, the moment I heard sandwich, I realized we're talking about two different things. So…
[Dongwon] We are talking about two slightly different things, but go ahead.
[Mary Robinette] No. Talk about yours first, and then…
[Dongwon] Okay. Okay.
[Mary Robinette] Do you want a segue into that more neatly, or…
[Howard] This is fun. Our listeners love this stuff.
[Laughter]
[Howard] This is compliment sandwich Dongwon.
[Mary Robinette] Carry on.
 
[Dongwon] The compliment sandwich. um… The compliment sandwich is very, very important. And that… Whenever I see somebody skip the bun as it were, which is you start talking about what works about the book, what you liked about the book, then you go into the critical part, and then you come back out and you explain again. Yes. Also remember these are the things that work, don't change these things. Make sure that that stays. Is what people don't understand about why that structure's really important. I think a lot of people are, like, yeah, yeah, compliments. Let me get to the hard stuff, the work that needs to be done. I think both editors can feel that way and authors can feel that way. But from my perspective, the compliment part is an alignment exercise. It gets me making sure that I understand the vision of what you're trying to accomplish. There are many times where I've done the compliment sandwich, and the author's like, wait, wait. Nope. You've misunderstood. This is what I'm trying to do. Right? Like, or you haven't read this part yet, because I only sent you the first 10,000 words. Here's what's happens in acts two, three, and four. Right? So that exercise of understanding how the parts of this work is really important both for me as an editor, but also for you as a writer. I encourage you to as much as possible when you're reading… Engaging with art that you're interested in, think about what does work about it as much as you think about what doesn't. That will give you some of the tools to look at your own work and be like, damn, that was a good sentence. I like this character arc. Sure, do I need to fix the villain? Absolutely. But this part is working, let's preserve that and [garbled]
 
[Mary Robinette] So, the type of thing that I was talking about is very similar, but it's a critique that's called a cheerleading critique. You… I had this idea that when you're critiquing, and we're talking about critiquing as opposed to…
[Howard] As opposed to critical reading.
[Mary Robinette] As opposed to critical reading. But in… I ask usually people to tell me about things that are awesome, boring, confused, or disbelief. But with a cheerleading one…
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I only want them to tell me awesome. And that is so important for writers to know. Frequently, they do not know what they are doing well. We had a… I ran into one of the authors and I won't betray which one, but one of the authors that we've been talking about this season. Ran into them at a convention, and one of the things that they said was, thank you. I've never had anyone talk about my work this way.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I was like, oh, no. But they just… It was so meaningful to them…
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] To hear someone get really critical, really like in the how is this working? Why is this doing? They'd never heard anyone discuss their work in that way before. That's something that you can set up for yourselves with a critique group, or the type of reading that you're doing.
[Howard] I would say analytical instead of critical, even though the word critical is the right word.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Because analysis is less value laden.
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Howard] I love analysis. We took form and analysis classes for music in college, and I came out of some of those classes wishing that I could hang out with this group of people once a week and dissect a piece of music together again. And I just now remembered that wish as I'm realizing, oh. I'm kind of getting to do that with a new group of friends and a completely new medium, and it doesn't have music in it…
[Laughter]
[Howard] But I'm okay, because I love words too.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] I think there's something really nice about figuring out, also, like, how sometimes the things that you maybe need to work on are themselves complements of things that you've done well.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] In the way that it is not maybe until you are listening to a particularly amazing piece of music that you realize that your speaker system could be better.
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[Erin] You see what I mean? But until then, you're like, whatever.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] But then you're like, oh, wow. Like, so sometimes it's like I love the characters so much that, like, I really wanted them to experience more tension, because I just wanted to see how they would deal with that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And really, celebrating that, like a lot of times, there is some gem that is shining so brightly that it's just that we want the rest of it to shine as brightly as that.
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Erin] As opposed to… The other parts are not holding it down it's just that we just want to make the entire thing shiny and bright.
 
[Mary Robinette] Have I told you about my re-wilding of the landscapers experience?
[Dongwon] A little bit, but go on. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So, it has… Is changing the way I'm approaching revision. Because we've got this property, it's got a lot of invasive species on it, so we are re-wilding it. We're pulling out the invasive species, replanting it with native species or species that are at least are not poisonous. And so one of the things that I expected was that they would start in the section that was filled with privet hedge and English ivy. The landscapers said no. We want to start in the healthiest part of the landscape, because that tells you what the rest of the landscape is supposed to look like. I found that when I'm… Now, when I'm looking at my manuscripts, that I look at, okay, what is the healthiest part of it, what am I trying to support, what am I trying to nurture? When I'm reading other people's, I'm like, what is the healthiest part of this? What is this doing really, really well? Let's lean into that, let's play to those strengths. How can we lift everything else up so that it's doing this too? How can we get that better sound system? How can we pull up the English ivy?
[Dongwon] Yeah. What I love about this is you need to learn what the good version of this thing is. The thing that you're trying to accomplish, need to have a sense of what the healthy version is, what the accomplished version is. The only way to do that is by encountering it in other people's books.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Dongwon] That's where you start. You start by reading. If you want to write, you have to read, and you have to love reading, and you have to be excited about the category that you're in. Because, again, it's a conversation. If you want to participate in the conversation, you need to know where it came from. Now I'm not saying you need to have read the entire canon. You don't need to read X, Y, Z work. But what you need to do is understand why you're excited to write this thing. Why do you want to write it? What's the conversation you're trying to start, to participate in, to evolve?
[Howard] You're using the word conversation… If you want to participate in a conversation, you have to spend a lot of time listening.
[Dongwon] Yes.
[Howard] If all you do is talk, it's not a conversation, you're lecturing a group of people who already know more about what you're trying to say then you do.
 
[Dongwon] On that note, I have a little bit of homework for you that's going to help you start this conversation, participate in it, and be an active participant in the work that you're trying to create. So, what I want you to do… This may not be surprising, given the conversation that we had, but what I want you to do is get a group of friends together and pick a book you love to discuss and unpack what makes the book tick. Then I want you to find us on Instagram and tell us what book you picked and how that conversation went.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go read.
 
[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.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.40: An Interview on Tension with P. Djèlí 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.
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Writing Excuses 19.24: An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine
 
 
Key points: Deep historical roots, in Byzantine history. Medieval empires. Did the novel come from the research, or as you were working on a fiction project, did you just reach for the things you knew? Was it a challenge to blend elements from two different cultures? How do you know when you've done enough research? Complexity of history versus complexity of worldbuilding? How do you keep track of all that stuff? How often do you find yourself looking stuff up, or does writing it down once mean it stays in your head? How do you take that research and make it come alive for the reader? You tie character and theme together, and connect it with worldbuilding. Are your characters a lens on a thematic element, or is it scene-by-scene? Is there an example of someone with a different set of lenses that impacts what they see and how you portray the world? Was the novel always from Mahit's point of view, or did that come partway through writing? 
 
[transcriptionist apology: Arkady seemed to be talking in a metallic echo chamber, which I found difficult to understand in some spots.] 
 
[Season 19, Episode 24]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 19, Episode 24]
 
[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
 
[DongWon] With us this week we have a very special guest. We've spent the last month talking about A Memory Called Empire. I'm very pleased that we were able to get the author, my friend and also client, Arkady Martine, to join us today to talk about her experience with writing the book, how she thinks about worldbuilding, and some ot the stuff that went into it. So, Arkady, welcome to the podcast.
[Arkady] Hi. I'm so glad to be here.
[DongWon] So, obviously, I love the book and I loved it from the very first time I… It came across my desk. One of the things that really stands out to us is all of the dense, intricate, and complex worldbuilding that you put into this novel. Right? Science fiction/fantasy kind of lives and dies on the worldbuilding a lot of the time. But this one felt very distinct and unique and special. I wanted to hear a little bit of where all that comes from. I know you have, like, deep academic roots as well, in history, and… I would love just to hear from you about where the origins of this novel were for you when it comes to the cultures and societies you decided to put in it.
[Arkady] Oh, yeah. Okay. Great question. So… Things not to do when you have a [garbled] in medieval history in Sweden. Write a book about the same things that you are working on in your [garbled] instead of writing the academic book that might have gotten you tenure.
[Chuckles]
[Arkady] So I kind of did that. Which is all to say that I am trained as a Byzantine historian with a specialization in the eleventh century sort of eastern frontier. Armenia, Byzantine, are two different Arabic speaking kingdoms. I'm super interested in diplomacy and letter writing and empires and frontiers, and I spent like a decade of my life doing that professionally as an academic. It's a curious thing about being an academic, where you're not really supposed to get emotionally involved with what you're working on. At least, not in how you write it. I have always been emotionally compelled by that whole suite of subjects. I've also always written science fiction and fantasy. So, there was a point, like, the summer after I finished my dissertation where, for complex reasons, I was living in Phoenix for three months. Which I don't exactly recommend, those three months being Jun, July, and August in Phoenix. Yeah, I decided that I clearly needed another enormous project. That was getting kind of annoying that I was one of those people who had never successfully written a novel. So, clearly, I was going to try that. Having just put down the 250 page nonfiction thing I had written.
[Chuckles]
[Arkady] What came out of that was trying to figure out a way to work on and work through all of that fascination with Empire and assimilation and medieval frontiers and frontiers in general. And, like, seeing it through a science fictional lens. And then some stuff that I had always been fascinated by and had written some very juvenile early attempts at novels. Like, what happens if you have the ghost of the person who used to have your job in your head?
[Chuckles]
[Arkady] The first version I ever tried to write was actually fantasy. That did not go well. It did not last. You may recognize a bit of it. But, anyway, that got in there too. So, Byzantium, the medieval Empire in general, that's the deep basis. I pulled a ton of little cultural events out of that. The poetry contests in my writing come from that. The dilemma of the succession crisis comes from that. I kind of started with, like, the succession crisis at Heracles in the, like, six hundreds and then it went… It doesn't follow. But it starts there. So I've used a lot of historical plot to inspire my plot.
 
[DongWon] Do you think that came from… You were studying this, you are interested in it, you are avoiding writing your nonfiction about it…
[Arkady] Yeah.
[DongWon] So, did the impulse to write this novel come from that research and that knowledge, or as you were working on a fiction project, did you just instinctively reach to the things that you knew? Like, was there a chicken or an egg there?
[Arkady] I feel like 60 percent egg, 40 percent base. I really knew I wanted to write about the scenarios that I had encountered in my research. Not a historical novel where I would, like, tell those stories. But, then where I found myself imagining the emotional impact of living through and experiencing historical events I had been studying. You can either write a historical book or you can just take that question and use what I love science fiction for, which is sort of expand it, explore it, it really up close to it. Then, as I was writing, because it took me a while to write the book. I had never done this successfully before. The longest thing I had ever written before Memory was, like, for Asimov's. So it took me about three years. I did find myself reaching for tools I knew. Those tools were sometimes things like, "Oh, right, I want to do political poetry contests, because I love them. I think they're very cool. I need something like that here." But there was a point also where I deliberately didn't make those choices, where I reached for other tools instead of the instinctive ones on purpose. I do want to mention, before we get away from, like, direct historical inspiration that Teixcalaan is not Byzantine in space, exactly. That's on purpose. Because if I had done Byzantines in space, I would have needed a monotheistic religion. I really didn't want to write a book about that. That's not this book. Someday, I'll write a book about God. But it's not going to be this one.
[Chuckles]
[Arkady] I had too much going on. So I needed to get away from this kind of mono-ism, like one Emperor, one God, one, like, line through history, like this [detelogy?] that's in Byzantine texts. So, I was like, okay, I need a different source of completely outside of the kind of monotheistic Western traditions. I ended up being deeply interested in another very complex, very colorful, and quite simultaneous imperial power, which is the [Mehico?]. I pulled a lot of inspiration from [Mehico], the Aztecs in English, and the way that that Empire did assimilation and all of its cultural tags. Because I didn't want my readers to feel like… Well, I knew that my readers were probably going to think that space Byzantium was just space Rome.
[DongWon] Right.
[Arkady] Because that's the instinctive thing. I also wanted to make things weirder than just [people one?]. So, I, like, I very much deliberately combined cultural myths.
 
[DongWon] I mean, I guess what you're saying is that you didn't want to write a historical novel. Right? You wanted different aspects in there. So… Was it a challenge to find a way to pull different elements from two different histories, two different cultures, and blend them, or was it a pretty straightforward process of, like, oh, the names are coming from here, the religion's coming from here, the poetry battles are coming from here?
[Arkady] It felt pretty organic, except for the languages. Which I made some pretty stark choices early on. Because in my early drafts, I was using a lot more Greek in, like, the backdrop of the Teixcalaanli language. It just did not work. I'm not a con lang person. Like, I don't do this for real. Like some people who come up with vocabularies. No. But I am a person who unfortunately spent a while taking historical linguistics courses and I care about phonology. So, everyone had to sound like it went together and sound culturally appropriate when I use, like, [poems?] and metaphors. But, aside from the religion choices, which is probably where I had this moment of, okay, I'm going for a more Mesoamerican feel, it was pretty organic. That's partially because a lot of medieval empires actually work in very similar ways. So there's more commonality than you expect. Secondly, because I'm absolutely working off of my own aesthetic sense, like, the things I wanted to have. I love flowers. I don't think we do enough in science fiction in general, like, everything is all chrome and steel and glass. It's all very like iPhone. I find this boring. I like flowers, I like declaration, I like weird architecture. I like a kind of [Romanticism?] to my science fiction. All of that led me very easily to meso American cultures, which I have not spent a decade of my life immersed in the study of meso American cultures, I have, and am still doing a ton of research there as well. So…
 
[DongWon] I mean, obviously this question doesn't apply to the Byzantine component's so much, because of how much you did there, but, like, when you're doing research on meso American culture, on [Mehico] and like these ancient empires, how do you find the line of, like, this is enough research? I need to stop researching, and start writing. Like, was that a difficult balance for you or did you just sort of naturally find that flow?
[Arkady] Well, this is why I don't write historicals. Because if I wrote a historical, I would have to be able to re-create a depth of field in my [garbled] bank that matches what we actually know. When I'm working in science fiction, I do a lot on… I don't want to say just on vibes, because that's not enough. But I do a lot on defaults, I do a lot on in… If I'm pulling this kind of influence that got me interested in, like, sacrifice rituals. Why do people do that? I don't need to reproduce the argument of what scholars have come up with about why people use sacrifice rituals to accomplish political things in a particular culture. What I do need to do is understand that myself, and get a feel for it, so I get my characters to reproduce that feeling for my audience.
 
[Erin] Yeah. I'm curious. You were talking about the difference between, basically, the complexity of actual history and the complexity of worldbuilding. Which is, I think, naturally just less complex, because there's only so much you can bring in. I wondered, are there areas where you felt like you decided to go, like, for more complexity versus, like, more of a… More vibes? How did that intersect with the story that you were trying to tell?
[Arkady] So, the places I ended up with complexity that I hadn't originally planned to do are where the story that I was writing demanded that I knew things that never went on the page. This meant that I had… Several. Several lists of, like, okay, how does the government work? Who works in what department? How are they related? What is their history? When did they develop? None of that needs to be on the page for the story I was telling. All of that needed to be in my head so that I didn't contradict myself, and so that at some point, hopefully, some of the political intrigues stuff resolved into understandable lines of action. I did a similar thing in Desolation when I was trying to work out how the Teixcalaanli army worked and how people were promoted and how they work through it and like how… Just like the practicalities. I did a lot of, I guess what I would think of as traditional worldbuilding for that. Where I sat down and was like, "Okay. There are this many regions. Why are they called regions? Because I don't want to deal with coming up with another name for them."
[Laughter]
[Arkady] "How do you become commander of a region? What happens when you retire? What happens with training? Do people swap jobs? Do people swap, like, different parts of the military? Like, if you are a fighter pilot, are you always a fighter pilot? Or could you end up, like, a logistics officer?" All of that stuff I thought about on purpose, and sort of like brainstormed to myself and wrote down so I didn't end up making up something else later on impulse. But in terms of some of the other places where it looks like I did that, like, on the poetry contests, all of that was pretty much it should feel like this and I know there are historical examples where this worked. So I can do it.
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] It's so interesting. It almost sounds like… Sorry, it almost sounds like the things that you were more emotionally tied to, you didn't feel as much the need to, like, research is the things that were like, intellectually… You know what I mean, like, you love the poetry contests, so, like, you knew how they needed to feel and didn't need to do as much, like, notetaking. Maybe I'm wrong there, but…
[Arkady] Yeah.
[Erin] [garbled] particularly deep, but…
[Arkady] There's a hidden thing, which is that I had already done the research. I just didn't do it for this project. I didn't do it [garbled] I knew it already. Although I think something like a poetry contest is like anything that becomes more plot or aesthetic or theme. You can kind of, like, let it exist on its own without having to justify it. You can just decide that's true. Then the question… The worldbuilding question to ask afterwards is given that this is true, what else is true? What else must be true? That's actually how I do a lot of worldbuilding, like, when I'm doing it on purpose. Like, there's a ton of edible flowers in [pig plot?]. That was a… I think, this is cool moment. But in response to that, I thought a great deal about how do these people get their food? What kind of cultural signifiers are there between eating plants and eating animals? That got more interesting for me because I have characters from place were eating luxurious food is commonplace and others from a place where eating luxurious food is exceedingly rare, if it ever happens at all, and eating animals is weird, because where would you get a whole animal just to eat it?
[DongWon] I love that moment of her horror at watching somebody eat something that was cut from the side of a cow. Right? Like, just like this idea of…
[Arkady] [garbled] turnip space sandwich.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] [garbled] more… Oh, that scene is an absolute delight. I want to dig into some of the more mechanical things about how you take that amount of worldbuilding and make it feel felt and relevant to the characters. But before we dig into that, let's go ahead and take a quick break.
 
[Arkady] My thing of the week is a relatively new novel by Paz Pardo called The Shamshine Blind which I just finished reading this past weekend, actually. It is a kind of classical noir, but with a deeply exciting science-fiction premise. The premise is during the Falklands war… So the war over the Falkland Islands off of Argentina, between Argentina and the UK, the Argentinians came up with a method to kind of by spraying this special powder on people, they can feel emotions. Those emotions are actually, like, weapons of mass destruction. This changes the whole course of history. The book is set 30 years after that, so it's all part of the backdrop of the world. It is… I love noir and I love, like, noir detectives and how broken down and brutalized they are by the world. Having that incredible twist and having the entire noir be rooted in is this character going to feel emotions that are hers or is she always going to rely on thinking that emotions are something that are externally imposed, like, took all of the stuff that we love about noir and made it both incredibly thematically obvious and incredibly thematically hidden, and also just incredible.
[DongWon] It's a great pull for an episode on worldbuilding, because it… The worldbuilding… It ties into the central question of noir, which is this really shut down emotionally unavailable hero, and then, it's like all the world is about these big emotions. I think that's super cool.
[Arkady] I loved it. I think you all should read it.
[DongWon] Thank you so much.
 
[Erin] All right. We are back. Before we get into sort of the nitty-gritty of the mechanical tools, I have a nitty-gritty process question which is you mentioned all these things that you documented and thought about, and I'm kind of curious, like, how did you actually keep track of all that? Like, how did you actually know what you had investigated and what needed to be investigated as you were doing your research?
[Arkady] So… I'm not anybody's poster child for how to do this in a sensible way. I have a Word document labeled what is everyone's motivation? That was an editing artifact, but I still only have a Word document labeled The Teixcalaanli Military which is just everything I ever thought of, but didn't really go on a page about the Teixcalaanli military. In terms of like research research, when I wanted to go find out about something, I basically used a lot of the same methods that I've always used for doing academic or policy work, which is I have a physical notebook and a pen, and I underline things in a document that I'm reading, or take notes and mark page numbers. That just… I just have a million of those. But I didn't do a ton of that. At any point. For Memory and Desolation. Some of the things that like look a little bit more like I must do research questions, like, some of the biology stuff in book 2… And I know you guys haven't talked about book 2, but there's, like, weird alien biology in book 2 that matters. A lot of that involved medical textbooks and like zoology textbooks. I didn't exactly take notes so much as, like, stick post it's all over them. I'm not actually organized. Except the lady inside my own head.
[Chuckles]
[lovely]
 
[DongWon] I love the simplicity of that process. I love just having Word documents that are like this is about this topic, and I know I reference it. How often do you find yourself going back to, like, those underlined passages or marked passages? Like, how often do you find yourself having to look stuff up? Or was just the act of writing down the military structure enough that it stayed in your brain when you needed to call it up?
[Arkady] The big structure stayed. Right. I understand it, I could explain it right now. Although I haven't written about it directly for a couple of years. But the thing that I always have to go back to is if I have named something, I have to write down what I named it. This can even sometimes extend two characters who actually have speaking parts. The number of times I've called… Well, the guy in chapter 3. That guy.
[Chuckles]
[Arkady] But especially if I've done cool names, like names of spaceships, names of continents, names of planets, all that has to get written down somewhere because I will forget it and I will make up a new cool thing. And confuse people, including myself.
[DongWon] Suddenly you just have 10 cool things, 10 cool planets you didn't need, you know.
[Arkady] Yeah. Or you've named absolutely everybody in book 2 the number sign 2 and then a word starting with steam and you hadn't noticed.
[Chuckles]
[Arkady] Intel you did the dramatis personae at the end.
[DongWon] Hum... Yeah.
 
[Erin] I often wonder how… This may be the question we were getting at before we went to break, which is, so you've got all of this stuff. Because I find sometimes people do a lot of research and they know a lot of stuff, but then it's hard to, like, translate it into making the overall come alive. Which your world absolutely does. So how do you take all these things that you know, and then, like, make it exciting and juicy and wonderful for all of us readers?
[Arkady] It's character work which is to say it's theme. I know that sounds weird, but they are, for me, very, very close. The things that I want to show the reader, I'm going to show them through either a close point of view with a character or through a deliberately selected broader point of view, like an omniscient, or one of the more fun ones, like second person or like an unreliable person narrator who's telling you a story. So the secret of… The voice is always going to point out specific things about the world. Those are choices that I'm making that guide the reader's like mental eye, I guess. What do I want the reader to notice? Because the reader doesn't need to know what research I did in 99 percent of the cases. I mean, I love footnotes, but most of the time, fiction doesn't need them. The reader has to want to come along with me, so I need to give them a reason to keep looking in the direction I'm pointing. That's usually the inside of the character's head. Why is that character looking at the thing? Why do we need to know? Or, it's a POV voice that is also pointing something out to the reader, that it's doing a frame. I'm a very structure and theme oriented writer. I like playing games. The Teixcalaan books are actually pretty straightforward for me. They go in one direction, and while most of the characters are unreliable, they're not unreliable on purpose. They're trying to tell you what they see. In a way, that directness let me do more with the world. Because I'm not ever letting or making the character voice, or the authorial voice, deliberately misdirect the reader. So the reader is… If I tell the reader to look at something, like, look at these buildings, look at this edible flour, look at all the strange clothes people are wearing for a reason that are political, I'm telling them that because it's story important or character important or creates a sense of thematic community. That keeps the reader with me, even when I'm doing a bunch of fancy footwork.
 
[DongWon] You immediately tie character and theme together. Right? You're also underlining the way that worldbuilding and theme are connected. When you're thinking of a character, are you thinking of, like, them being your lens on a specific thematic element, and therefore a specific worldbuilding element? Or is it more scene by scene, oh, this is a good time for Mahit to illustrate this aspect of assimilation or how language works or… Like, are you looking at it on like a very granular level or are you starting at a very high level of, like, this character's about assimilation, this character's about succession, this character's about whatever it happens to be?
[Arkady] Well, they're all about assimilation and they're all about succession. But some of them… Well…
[DongWon] I picked the broadest ones, I'm sorry.
[Arkady] Sorry. Mahit is in some ways… I suppose I'm glad I set this only in her point of view, except for little tiny interludes in the whole book. The whole first book. Because she has a very narrow thematic lands that… And that lens has a very wide scope. Her lens is she is… She is from the border and she wants to be assimilated if that means something different than what it does. That sounds complex, but it's actually kind of like a pretty focused thematic lands. But that touches practically everything she sees. So I just pick that up whenever I need it and pulled back to it whenever I want to sort of ground the reader in it. It also lets me show off all the world because Mahit loves it. But it's also new to her. It also is going to make her think and be uncomfortable. So I get to do all those things while I'm showing the reader what I've made, and all, hopefully, stay with me, because they care about how she is seeing what she's seeing.
 
[Erin] I love what you said about the, like, the width and the depth of the lens the thematic lands and the character lens. I'm wondering if there's an example that comes to mind for you of somebody who has a very different set of lenses and how that impacts the way they see and you portray the world? If that makes sense.
[Arkady] In Memory specifically, or anywhere?
[Erin] Ummm...
[DongWon] I mean, I think you can talk about Desolation if you wanted. I mean, our readers won't be as familiar with it, so be a little bit more careful about spoilers, but, like… That's one that has more POVs.
[Arkady] Yeah.
[DongWon] So I can see that being…
[Arkady] It's easier to talk about in Desolation, but I think it might be more interesting to think about it in Memory. Because… Well, there's one scene in Memory that I desperately wanted to write in someone's point of view that wasn't Mahit. I didn't do it. I actually didn't even let myself do it for fun, because it would have not… It would have ruined it for me if I had done it, like, the way that I [garbled view it like the squibs in your id?] for me, which is… So, the poisoning scene, the aftermath of the poisoning scene, with the flower and the hallway and 19 Ads and Mahit. I wanted so much to write that from 19 Ads's point of view and it would have ruined the book. The book does not work when you do that.
[DongWon] [garbled that] would have been…
[Arkady] But, all my God.
[DongWon] That doesn't… I do want to see it, though.
[Arkady] But that scene played through my head from her point of view, and I kind of like had to write it deliberately. Like react against that instinct. 19 Ads has a very different lens. [Garbled] 19 ads That's lens is actually… Well, in Memory is about dealing with being in charge and being deep middle-aged and also grief. Also, like, deliberately not making choices that you might have made before. Like, not repeating your own mistakes. That's what she's thinking about all the time. Which [garbled] making new mistakes, which is always fun. But the way that she approaches that scene is from a position of a lot of knowledge and a lot of power and also a position of incredible amounts of emotional stress. Which [garbled] the book, you have figured out why she's under that much emotional stress, because it very nearly is the [garbled] commit murder again and doesn't and then has to deal with it. Like, also, there's like a different sense about sex and desire and death. So that scene would have been completely fun from her point of view. But very different. Thematically very different. It would have pulled the thematic lands of the book to be about questions of rulership rather than questions of assimilation. Like, what do you oh people? What do you oh people when you have power? Which is, like, one of my favorite questions in the world to write about. It's a lot more there in Desolation, like, on the surface. In part, that's because of who else gets point of view in Desolation. But it is an undercurrent in Memory. Where the question of okay, who has power? What can you do now? What responsibilities do you have? Can you abdicate them? Those questions are there for Mahit, but they're underground.
 
[DongWon] When you conceived of the novel, was it always from Mahit's perspective? Like, where you always intending it to be from the perspective of this outsider whose new to this place who loves this place. Like, she has, you're right, that super wide lens, but also all of that depth. Which is almost like very impossible to get in a certain way. Did she come to you at the beginning or was that a thing that arose part way through to solve a problem?
[Arkady] She was there from the beginning. The question I had about midway through writing was whether I was going to add anybody else. I thought about that a lot. It would have been a very different kind of book had I, because, structurally… At least the very first draft of Memory is a information control spy novel, which means that the audience and the characters… Main character, should find out about what's going on at approximately the same time. The questions about what is happening in the world are hyper dependent on who knows what. If I added more people, I could have shown a lot more things, but it would have been a novel that wasn't about what does Mahit know and when does she know it. It would… That would not have been the plot driver that allowed me to move the story forward. So I thought about it a lot, and I did not do it, because… In part, because I was absolutely terrified of what that would do. Remember that I had never written a whole novel before. It seemed difficult enough to deal with one person, and also to try to, like, go back and layer in more people. I also thought about that in some of the revisions that I considered. Essentially, voted against it, except for very, very small bits, the interludes are not, in fact, in tight third like everything else. The interludes are in a kind of omniscient third on purpose. Because of…
[DongWon] Those were a late, late addition, right?
[Arkady] Oh, yeah. Like, not the first revision I did, which got me the manuscript that I submitted to you, DongWon.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Arkady] But the… I think, like, maybe not even the first revision I did for my editor. Might have been there, might have been the second one when I realized I had accidentally… I needed a second person.
[DongWon] I think it was in the first or second revision. Yeah.
[Arkady] Yeah.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Arkady] I collapsed too much motivation into one character and needed him to be two people. I still think I probably could have ended up with three people, but it was getting hard to get them all on stage.
[DongWon] Yeah. It's already a big book.
[Arkady] Yeah.
[DongWon] Amazing. Thank you so much. I believe you have some homework for us as well?
 
[Arkady] I do. So this is a prompt about worldbuilding through observation. I actually, to my delight, I think there's set it up as a conversation. It is using the character in the story that you are currently working on, could be your main character or somebody else, look at the nearest building you can see out your window and describe it from their point of view. What does that say about the world that you are in and the world that they are in?
[DongWon] I love that. I love returning to that idea of the lens and the few focus and all of that. Arkady, thank you so much for joining us. This conversation was an absolute delight.
[Arkady] It was super fun. Thank you for having me.
[DongWon] With that, you're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.19: A Close Reading on Worldbuilding: An Overview and why A Memory Called Empire
 
 
Key points: Worldbuilding. Not just the things you invent. Spaces, relationships, and interconnections. Not just speculative fiction, worldbuilding is a part of any fiction you are writing. Where do your characters live, what kind of people live there, what kind of industries, schools, family... Worldbuilding gives you texture, realism, and plausibility. What you don't show as well as what you show! Worldbuilding establishes stakes for your characters. What's important. Legal system, physical infrastructure, what people value. Rules and systems as much as physical material spaces. Think about your establishing shot, that first scene. Not always a wide shot, sometimes a single detail can tell you a lot about the world. How much do you need to establish and explain? Beware of the "in a world" prologue. Balance show and tell. Two kinds of worldbuilding, decorative and structural. Structural things drive the story. Decorative is just fun. And sometimes things are both! Audience surrogate, fish out of water...
 
[Season 19, Episode 19]
 
[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 19]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Worldbuilding: An Overview and why A Memory Called Empire. 
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Marshall] 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, to kick off this second series that we're doing of close readings, we are going to be talking for the next few episodes about worldbuilding. Why it's important, how it functions, and to dig into that, we wanted to do a close reading of Arkady Martin's A Memory Called Empire. This is a really wonderful novel. It won the Hugo award. I am very biased, because as a literary agent, I represent Arkady and I worked on this book, so I know it pretty well. But to kick us off here, before we dig into A Memory Called Empire specifically, I wanted to talk a little bit about the concept of worldbuilding. What is it exactly, what are the basic mechanics? Just so we all have a shared vocabulary heading into doing the actual close reading.
[Mary Robinette] So when we talk about worldbuilding, it's really easy to get hung up and think that it's only about the things that you invent. But, for me, it's also about not just the spaces, but the relationships between people, and how all of the things interconnect. That it's… It is worldbuilding because you are thinking about those connections, and the connections are often the things that are significantly more interesting than any individual thing that you may invent.
[Dan] Well, it's worth pointing out, I think, that we tend to think of worldbuilding as being a part of spec fic exclusively, but regardless of what you're writing, worldbuilding is an important part of it. When I was writing the John Cleaver books, a big part of those books was figuring out how big is the town he lives in? What kind of people live there? What kind of industries do they work in? Where does he go to school, what is school like? What is his family like? Who are the other people that he's known? That helps give the town a lot of texture and a lot of realism and a lot of plausibility. That is absolutely a part of worldbuilding.
[DongWon] Yeah. What you don't show is as important as what you put on screen. Because any novel or any short story, whatever it is, there's going to be way more details and facets of this world than you can fit into your book itself. So, you don't have to invent every aspect, or if you do in an attempt to be realist, you don't have to show every aspect. The way I think about worldbuilding, and this kind of ties into what Mary Robinette was saying, is it's about establishing stakes for your character. Because what parts of the world you show are the things that are important to the people in your world. So, what the legal system is, what the physical infrastructure is, what rich people value, what poor people value, all those things are going to be part of your worldbuilding. So, as you're establishing what's important to your characters, think as much about rules and systems as you do about physical material spaces.
 
[Howard] You used the word establishing, which always takes me to establishing shot. As you're doing your worldbuilding, as you're writing languages, creating religions, doing geography, whatever else, at some point, the rubber will meet the road and you have to write that first scene. That first scene is your establishing shot, where you start giving people the details they need to understand what's happening here. If you look at a helicopter shot of New York City, at the beginning of something, you know that this is taking place in New York City, or a city. If you have a helicopter shot zooming over rolling fields of grain, you know that it is a completely different type of story. Just understanding that principle can help you set up that first scene so that your worldbuilding works.
[Mary Robinette] Also, along those lines, that establishing shot does not need to be a wide shot. That often, zooming in on a single telling detail is going to tell you a lot about the world more so than the rolling fields of grain. So one of the mistakes that I will sometimes see people make with worldbuilding when they are doing it in spec fic is the feeling that they need to do that wide shot. While there are times that you need to do it, and it's something that we'll see with Arkady's work, there are also places where just starting very, very tight in is going to serve you better. That decision is based less on worldbuilding and what you want to convey about it and more about the tone of the book. Like, are you doing something that's very intimate, are you doing something that's really slow? When we start looking at Arkady's, it's a huge empire that we're being introduced to, so it is both a wide shot and, I think, a more detailed shot. Which is a lot of fun.
 
[DongWon] Part of why this is so fun to talk about in speculative fiction is that when you're doing contemporary realism, you get… You've got a lot of shorthand, right? As Howard was mentioning, if you have a wide shot, a helicopter shot of New York City, you've established a lot of world that you don't need to explain to your audience. When you are inventing a new culture, so, as we get into Memory Called Empire, when you're like approaching this massive planet-city, there's so much you need to establish and explain. So, sometimes, in that case, when you do the big wide shot, as Mary Robinette was talking about, it can be very overwhelming and not give you very much information. So zeroing in on a very specific thing often is a way to get to more information faster. Because if you try to tell them everything at once, their brain's going to shut down. That's when we start talking about quote unquote info dumps.
[Dan] Yeah. This is making me think of the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, where there is a ton of world, the incredibly expansive world… He's famous for his worldbuilding, and yet, the first several chapters, and our introduction, our establishing shot, is all just the Shire. It's a peaceful little village with just a bunch of idyllic sheep and people eating happy meals together. Not actual happy meals…
[Laughter]
[Dan] But they're eating meals and they're happy about it. That doesn't tell us what the world is like, but it is vital worldbuilding because it tells us what the characters are leaving behind.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Dan] And it establishes, like you said, the stakes. This is what we're protecting when…
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Dan] We leave here and go out into the rest of the very complex world.
 
[Howard] A common mistake that I've made myself in regard to delivering your worldbuilding to the reader is delivering it the way the late 90s and 2000's movie trailers did, "In a world." In a world, guy… He's the guy who pitches the worldbuilding in 15 seconds so that you know the pitch for the novel. Okay? He is not the guy who opened your story. Having a story that opens with some text telling you where we are, and then the first scene contextually gives me 80% of that information… You know what, we didn't need that text.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] We didn't need that. We didn't… I say we didn't. Maybe we didn't need the prologue of your novel. But consider if your prologue is "in a world," go ahead and just start with chapter 1.
[DongWon] Well, this is where I love the balance of show and don't… Show and tell. Right? Because we hear the advice all the time, show, don't tell. But when you're communicating worldbuilding, there's so much information to get across that sometimes you do just want to come out and say the thing. You do just want to explain it. I think a lot of our favorite examples are ones that don't do that, because it's more memorable to find an effective way of showing it without explaining. But also, sometimes, slowing down and just explaining, "Hey, this is how this world works. This is how this legal system works." You will have to do that, especially in speculative fiction, because there's too much to explain to let your audience infer it. When I find myself getting super confused by worldbuilding when I'm looking at submissions, it is almost always because they have tried to adhere to closely to just showing me. Then I'm like, "Wait, wai, wai, wait. I don't understand because this could mean 8 different things."
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[DongWon] So, finding that balance point is the trick, especially early in your book.
 
[Mary Robinette] I find that I break my worldbuilding kind of into 2 categories, decorative and structural. So the structural things are the things that are driving the story. Like when we get into A Memory Called Empire, one of the things that's in there is something called a cloud hook. Arkady just like drops us into it, we just… Like does not really explain it, except in pieces, like, gives it to us as a character interacts with it. The reason that it's worth taking the time to have the character interact with it and spend that time with it, is that later, the cloud hook becomes this really important thing. But there's other pieces that happen in the story, like there are these little hummingbird-like things. We don't need to know where those come from or anything like that. Those are purely decorative. That, for me, that I will see people put in a decorative thing that there super excited about, and then people don't understand it, and they try to explain it, and it's not important.
[Laughter]
[Dan] One of the things that I always try to do in my books is put in enough of these decorative elements that the reader is never sure until it matters which elements are loadbearing and which elements are decorative. This is one of the things I love about the movie My Cousin Vinny. Because it has such wonderful worldbuilding, is you take these outsiders into this small southern town and they encounter the mud, and they encounter grits, which they've never seen before, and all of these little aspects of small-town life that just blow their minds. Then, about half of them become vital to winning the case at the end. Grits doesn't sound like it would be a loadbearing element, and it absolutely is. It's just…
[Howard] You make them thick enough…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I was gonna say…
[Dan] So, yeah. It's the… That ability to… I mean, it's not quite red herring, but it's just as you are explaining the world and where your story takes place, the reader has that thrill of not knowing which elements are vital to the plot and which elements are fun and which are both.
[DongWon] This goes back to talking about how contemporary fiction can be a stretch in the imagination, because for 3 out of the 4 people here on this recording today, grew up in grits-eating country…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] So the idea that someone wouldn't know what they are…
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[DongWon] Completely baffling to me when I watched this as a child. But, on that note, let's take a break for a few minutes, and when we come back, we'll start digging into A Memory Called Empire.
 
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[Erin] I think a lot of people have heard the song Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. But if you haven't heard that song and aren't singing it to yourself right now, then really, go ahead and listen to it. Because it's amazing. I will admit a little bit of theft here. My father had taught high school English for many years, and always used Fast Car is a way to teach his students point of view. I think it's because it's a great story in the song that's all about this woman trying to get a man with a fast car to run away with her, but you get these little glimpses from her life as it is, as it will be, as it was. It's a great way to look at how past, future, and present can all come together through one particular person's POV. So, listen to Fast Car, and if you want to be like my dad's students, think about what it would be like if that song was sung from the point of view of the man with the fast car and not the woman looking for him.
 
[DongWon] Okay. So, I would love to start talking about the text itself and why we chose this particular book. In some ways, it's a little obvious, because it's right in the name, it is about Empire, and when we think about big science fiction worldbuilding, we tend to think about space empires. We tend to think in fantasy about books like Lord of the Rings that have really rich, complex settings. I find the way that Arkady, the author Arkady Martine, approaches worldbuilding in this particular book to be really fascinating and nuanced and complex, but what about you guys? I mean, what did you feel about when this book was proposed, why we decided to settle on this one for the close reading?
[Dan] I was so excited that we chose this book. I read it… I have right here with me my original ARC that I read before it came out. It blew my mind. This is one of the best science fiction books I think I've ever read. Most of that stems from the incredible work that she's done with the culture. So much of science fiction is worldbuilding a new technology or worldbuilding a new alien or a new environment. Most of the work here is a culture. The story is, in large part, about getting to know what this culture is like and how their names work, and how poetry is vital to the things that they do. It's just such a rich book because of that.
[DongWon] Yeah. Talk about surprising loadbearing elements, it's rare that you get a science fiction novel that has loadbearing poetry recitals…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] That radically alter the direction of the plot.
[Howard] Also, unusual to get something with such an epic scope that has a single POV. We… I mean, yes, there are other POVs for interludes and for chapter bumps, but the story is being told through the perspective of one character. I think that's part of why the worldbuilding is so accessible and so effective. We have a stranger comes to town, really, is the… Well, not… Somebody goes on a trip is the story structure here.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] We are seeing a new place through the eyes of someone to whom this place is new, but she has loved it from afar and has studied it and is now immersed in it. Every paragraph… Every paragraph gives us tidbits about this struc… About this place.
[Mary Robinette] So, for me, the thing that is interesting and exciting is that it is not a single world. That every paragraph illuminates 2 worlds at the same time. Because our main character, Mahit, comes from Lsel, which is a space station. It is an un-planeted world. Has come to this planet that is part of this Empire, this massive Empire. So all of everything that she sees is seen through the lens of someone who grew up not on a planet, and also has had this deep, deep love for this culture, but has never been a direct participant of it. Interacting with people who are, who have grown up in it. So there's all of this really wonderful, like, very muscular writing that is happening, where we're using all of the tools that are possibly at our disposal. She's using interactions with the environment, she's using point of view, she's using conversation, she's using every tool. Epistolary things. Every tool to convey all of this rich information. But had to create, like, there's 2 worlds that we are getting information of, and then there's bits of other places and other cultures. Even within the world that we're in, there's multiple cultures, for both. So that's why I was excited by it.
[Howard] For me, one of the scenes that best calls that out is the café bomb. Because someone sets off a bomb…
[DongWon] We're going to dig into this very deeply in a couple of episodes, actually.
[Howard] Yeah. Yeah. But, the idea that on a planet, someone can…
[DongWon] Yep.
[Howard] Protest by blowing things up. But on a space station, that would kill everybody. It would never occur to anyone to protest by setting off an explosion, because that would destroy the world.
[DongWon] Well, she has a whole speech, actually, where someone did do that in the consequences were that were so extreme. Right? They immediately physically spaced everyone involved and cut them off from their [imago line], so they essentially just erased them from society in a radical way. The difference in scale of response versus what you can do on a space station versus what can happen on a planet is one of those fascinating little things.
[Howard] Actually, yeah. So it calls up her perspective of I come from this place…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I'm now in this new place. If this thing happened in the old place, it'd be completely different.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] It's such a novel of contrasts, and the way Arkady uses that parallax of perspective to give you perspective on the whole universe. Right? Because 99.9% of the book takes place in one location, in one city. Really, between 2 offices, primarily.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] It mostly just… The range of spaces in the book is very limited. But when you think about the book, your memory of it is so expensive, of a sense…
[Mary Robinette] Your memory of Empire.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Your memory of Empire is a sense of multiple worlds, of massive systems, of huge space wars. But the action in the book is very constrained and very limited.
 
[Dan] Yeah. I was going to say that on one hand, this idea of the outsider coming in is just My Cousin Vinny again.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Right? It's… That's such a helpful trick and a wonderful little tool to explain one culture is explain it through the eyes of an outsider. But it is rare to see the opposite done. Like, if My Cousin Vinny told us as much about Brooklyn as it does about little southern town, then that would be closer to what we're talking about here. The differences between them is kind of the whole story.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Dan] I love, in particular, how torn she is about this. Mahit… You get this sense that she doesn't want to love Teixcalaani culture as much as she does. That they are imperialists, that they are colonialists, that they are kind of absorbing and warping all of the other cultures.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Dan] And that everyone who encounters them loses a little bit of themselves, but at the same time, she just really loves it. It's this kind of otaku visiting Japan since almost…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] That she's like, "I'm so excited. I'm finally here. I've watched all of these movies about this."
[DongWon] Yeah. With the difference that Japan is not actively colonizing the United States. Right?
[Dan] Yes. Yes. Right.
[Howard] If it was a Chinese otaku visiting Japan…
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] In 1940.
 
[DongWon] Well, this is why this book is so significant to me personally. The term we usually use for what you're talking about is audience surrogate. Right? You have somebody who is… Stands in for the audience, arriving at the place, and we see it through their eyes, so there's an excuse to explain all of the things about how this works. Right? So this is Kitty Pride arriving at Xavier's mansion, and we get to see oh, these are what all the X-Men are. Right? But in this case, Arkady pulled an incredible trick, in my view, where the subjectivity of the audience surrogate becomes very, very important. Because they are not just a visitor, they are someone who is resisting assimilation, resisting Empire, by the place that they are visiting. What does it mean to love the Empire that is destroying your culture? I'm Korean-American. My family is from Korea. Which was… This is a complicated statement I'm going to make, but has been occupied territory by the United States since the Korean War. Right? The influence and dominance of American culture on Korean society cannot be overstated. So the idea of coming from a colonized people, colonized by many people… Another example is the way Japan has colonized Korea. I love Japanese media. I watch animes. Some Japanese filmmakers are some of my favorite filmmakers of all time. Right? Whether that's Kurosawa or a variety of other people. Those things are very near and dear to my heart. So what it is to feel like you love the cultures that have actively or passively tried to destroy the culture of the people that you come from is a very complicated emotion. To see that represented on the page by this person who is not only trying to figure out how to survive in the most literal way, but also to preserve her identity and her people's safety. It was such an inversion of the trick of the audience surrogate, that I was completely blown away. Again, that contrast between the 2 perspectives gives you all of this depth and all of this complexity of the world she encounters.
[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing that she also did, in addition to that, the other layer of it, is that… Often the audience surrogate, the fish out of water, has no experience and everything is new. Mahit is a subject matter expert.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Fluent in the language, studied it, top marks. Knows the history. Still… Still, there are these enormous lacuna in her understanding. I think that the… That those gaps, those places where herself, her home, rubs up against… And her book understanding of a thing rubs up against the actual experience of it, those are the things that make the world building in this so meaty that I'm just so excited to be digging into over the next several episodes.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think many of us here have had the experience of living overseas are visiting overseas for a period of time. It's amazing how much you can do all this research, you can speak the language, and still the texture of actually being there is wildly different. Right? Again, this is a thing for me growing up as a child of immigrants, going back to Korea, is this culture I know so well in so many ways, but Korea is different from being Korean-American. Right? So, while it's not exactly Mahit's situation here, it was such a familiar experience of thinking you know how things are going to go, and then somebody says the word and you're like, "Oh, my God. What does that mean in this moment? I thought this meant this other thing, but now they're saying this…"
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] How do I navigate this social interaction that made sense to me through the filtered version I experienced or from watching movies? But then somebody's saying to me right now, what do I do?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] That is such a fascinating experience.
[Dan] Yeah. I… With that is this idea of loving a culture so much and living in that culture and still realizing that you're an outsider.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Dan] I had this experience living in Mexico. I lived in Mexico long enough to start to consider myself Mexican. I'm not. I would never actually say that I. But there is that bit of… I don't really fit in here. But I do, but I don't. This book explores that so well.
[Howard] I think the power of this novel lies in the fact that as readers, we come away from it understanding what it means to be Lsel…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] To be Teixcalaani. And we understand that there's a depth way beyond that that we could never have, because we weren't born there. We weren't raised there. That level of immersion is one of the things that I love about good worldbuilding and well presented worldbuilding. A Memory Called Empire pulls it off perfectly.
[DongWon] Well, I think that's a great note to leave it on. I'm so excited to dig in in-depth over the next few episodes about specific things about this book that communicate all the concepts we talked about here. So, thank you guys for joining us on this little journey here.
 
[DongWon] I have some homework for you in the meantime. That is, I would like each of you to pick one of your favorite fictional worlds, whether that's Middle Earth or the galaxy in Star Wars or what Memory Called Empire… Whatever world has spoken to you in your past. Then, I want you to write down 3 different attributes of that world. So, think about ones that establish culture, think about ones that establish legal systems and power, and think about ones that establish physical spaces. All of these things are going to communicate different things about what's important to your characters. So if you make a list of those, I think that's a great starting point to understand how you can approach writing a world that feels robust and consistent.
 
[Howard] 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.43: Worldbuilding In Miniature
 
 
Key points: How much world can you put in a short story? How much world do you need to write a short story? Take one or two aspects of a concept, dive into those, and handwave the rest? Throw in a few small details to make the world feel bigger? Do enough worldbuilding to make sure the framework for the story exists. Keep a tracking document, with notes on each worldbuilding element, and review after drafting. Look for places that aren't loadbearing, where a specific detail can imply a larger world without opening questions. How much exposition does it take to explain the element? Too much, it is distorting. Short fiction readers expect you to leave things out on purpose. Every worldbuilding element creates stakes for someone. Everyone has their own understanding of the world. Emphasis, something that is important to the character, or decorative flourish, adding tone for the reader? Short fiction relies a lot on the reader filling in implications and patterns. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 43]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding In Miniature.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're really tiny.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Erin] I love short fiction, as we've already discussed, so I'm going to talk about worldbuilding in a short fiction world. I'm really excited to kind of... This is one where I don't have a great theory, I just kind of want to think about it out loud, like, how much world can you put in a short story, and how much world do you need in order to write a short story? I will say that when I start writing short fiction, I often just have a one liner. I usually have, like a... Sour Milk Girls is the best example of this, even though it came out of a longer idea, it was what if memory were a commodity? Then, my second question is always who is suffering? Because I am me. Then, usually that's where I place my main character in that. But there is a lot of stuff that's not explained in any of the short stories that we read. There is a lot of things you don't know about the broader world. What I think short stories give you the opportunity to do is to take one or 2 aspects of a concept that have emotional resonance for your characters, dive into those, and then handwave the rest. If you can throw in a few small details that make the world feel big on top of that, all the more so the better. But I'm curious what y'all think about, like, when you're reading or writing, what is the difference between what you see in a world in miniature versus big?
[Howard] For my own part, the one idea… This is a cool thing, I want to tell a story about it. How much worldbuilding do I need to do? I need to do enough extrapolative worldbuilding… Where'd this come from, where is this going… That I can be certain that the framework for the story I've created actually exists. If your… What if memory was a commodity story, if there was something about the way commodification of memory went that made orphanages not exist, then suddenly I've unplugged the story and I would have to go back and rework it. So that's really the extent of it. I just make sure, hey, is this a cool idea? Yes. Does this cool idea negate the way in which I want to explore the cool idea? If the answer is no, I'm off to the races.
[Erin] I often think about… Thinking about did I break it midway through…
[Sputters]
 
[Erin] So I have a theory, like, that every writer does something subconsciously really well. You'll have writers will say like this character came and spoke to me at night and, like, told me their story. That never happens for me, but I feel like those people just do character on a subconscious level. For me, a lot of worldbuilding happens on a subconscious level. Where I'll toss a detail into a sentence, I'll be like, "And then they went to…" I don't know, whatever thing, random thing I've decided to put in their. Later I'll be like that doesn't necessarily make sense. Like, in a world where memory is a commodity, they're probably not in space. So I probably should take the space elevator reference out, for example. It didn't happen, but it could have. So one of the things I actually do is while I'm writing, I will sometimes keep a document open, a PowerPoint a lot of the time, weirdly, and actually put anything that I put in that's a worldbuilding element into a one particular slide on the PowerPoint. So that at the end of drafting, I can look can be like, do these work?
[Laughter]
[Erin] Actually seem like they belong in the same world, yes or no?
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Oh, interesting.
[Erin] If one is an odd item out, I need to go back and either figure out a way to make it make sense in my head, or excise that and it needs to go into a different story.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's really interesting. That's a really neat, measurable tool.
[DongWon] Cool trick, yeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So I… For me it's… I will also just drop in random details, and I find that when I'm specific about a thing, that it implies this whole larger world. So I look for places where I can be specific about something that's not necessarily loadbearing, that implies a larger world but doesn't open questions. That's where you get into the tricky thing with worldbuilding, is if you drop in something that… And then it opens a question about the story. Like, well, why didn't they just ride the Eagles? Then… That's where you're creating a problem for yourself with the worldbuilding. So one of the tricks that I use is how much exposition do I have to use to explain the thing that I've just dropped in. If it's more than 2 sentences, then it's a worldbuilding detail that is distorting the story. Because I'm like, that's too much. The other piece for me is the difference in expectations between audiences. So, novel readers I've found assume that if you don't put something in, it's because you forgot about it, because there reading for that immersion. Short story readers are so used to putting the story together from pieces of implication that they work on the idea that if it's not there, you left it out on purpose. So you can say, "Well, I used a Teraport thing." If you don't mention how that works, they're like Oh. Well, it's not important to the story, how it works."
[Erin] I also love one of the things I think you can do for short fiction audiences is use the way that pattern… That minds create patterns to create some of that broadness.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] Like, if you say this is the 3rd God of death, okay, well, that's interesting. There are obviously 2 previous gods of death. What happened to them? I don't know. Maybe I don't need to say. But it makes me think about audience expectation as when I started writing tabletop, you can't do that.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] So if you put a detail into a scene, you have to expect players will want to go talk to the first 2 gods of death or know what happened to them, or if you create something that's like that came from the caves of pleasure, like someone's going to want to go there. In fact, when I first started getting feedback back from editors, it was like, "Stop putting in the details that you do not have the word count to explain." Because I was so used to that short fiction thing that you do where you kind of drop the things out there and let people create it. But it's interesting to think that in novels, people will expect you to kind of build the world out that far.
[DongWon] Yep. As a kind of a theory about why it happens this way, and this is sort of informed by my perspective from an editorial side more than a writer side. Right? That is to flip the iceberg metaphor on its head. The iceberg metaphor being that, like, does all this worldbuilding we only see the top 10%, but the rest of it's below water. You as the writer need to have some idea what that is. Instead, the way I think about worldbuilding, and one thing that's also important, is to realize that worldbuilding isn't a science fiction and fantasy thing. It's not a genre thing. It is a fiction thing. Any story you're writing, you are including worldbuilding. Whether you are describing a suburban cul-de-sac or a war zone or a high fantasy city, all of that is worldbuilding.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Because every time you introduce a world detail, it is… You're introducing a rule for that world. So people think about worldbuilding as like a particular type of technology or a particular location, but for me it's a way to tell your readers, your audience, what's important. Right? Because if you are introducing a university, then you're saying a certain type of hierarchy is important. If you are introducing a magic system, you're saying that logic is important. Right? So what matters to your characters are the rules of the world around them. So if you're saying there are police, then obeying the law is important in a certain way. Right? That creates character stakes. Right? The problem you run into in the RPG is you don't have control over the characters. So every time you introduce a worldbuilding element, you're introducing stakes for somebody. One of those stakes is I worship the God of death. This is the 3rd one, what the hell happened to the first 2? I gotta know. Right? So that becomes an impulse for that character to explore, because suddenly you've established stakes for them by putting something into the world. Right? So it is very useful, the iceberg metaphor is very, very useful, but sometimes if you're stuck about what do I actually need to include in this story, you can take a step back and say, "Okay. Who's my character, what matters to them, what rules do I need to define so that they can make the choices they need to make?" Then be hyper specific about which aspects of the world are you showing us to establish the emotional stakes for that character.
 
[Howard] See, we had James Sutter on the podcast years ago. He's one of the lead creatives at Paizo. His position, for 3rd God of death, would have been completely opposite of what your editors were telling you, Erin, in that he would encourage writers to say, "Oh, and this character is a monk from the Singing Cliffs." What are we doing with the Singing Cliffs? I don't know, I'm just putting some things together so that you feel like the world is bigger than just where you are. Are the players going to want to go to the Singing Cliffs? Maybe they are. You, as a writer, is a game master, need to be prepared to design the Singing Cliffs. Within a franchise, though, I think this is where your editors come in, James Sutter was in a position where he could drop Singing Cliffs and the whatevers all day long because he knew, at some point, he's going to get to go create those. Your editors are like, "Please stop dropping new locations in our world. We don't have that budget."
[Erin] Yeah. We are going to talk more about this and about the iceberg theory when we return from the break.
 
[Erin] Often times when we think about tabletop role-playing games, you think big D&D playing with a bunch of friends. But there are a lot of smaller games that can actually help you build worlds, and think about your writing in really interesting ways. One of them is The Quiet Year from Buried without Ceremony. What it is is a game where you're mapping out a new community on a tabletop using playing cards that you probably have in your own home to answer really interesting questions about that community. Like, what are the omens? What's the largest body of water? What are people afraid of? What do they run towards? I love using this when I'm trying to think about building a new world, to make me ask interesting questions that can help to broaden my story and make it that much more interesting. So, definitely check out The Quiet Year by Buried without Ceremony.
 
[Erin] So, I was very excited when you talked about the iceberg theory…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Because I love thinking about it. One of the things that I think came up earlier was the idea about, like, a that character and worldbuilding intersect. Which I think is even more important in short fiction than it is in longer fiction, because it's so much more character focused a lot of the time. I was thinking, like, and iceberg has a very different meaning to the captain of the Titanic as it does for somebody who is a coldwater swimmer, or somebody who is an iceberg diver. That's not a thing, but let's say it is. Where…
[Howard] A climatologist.
[Erin] A climatologist. Thank you. I think that one of the things I like to think about with worldbuilding is every single person does not understand the world in the same way. I think that sometimes a mistake or something that I see that like gets me under my skin is when it seems like everyone has the same knowledge of the world within a world. You know what I mean? It's like everyone knows about the battle of X. Y'all, we barely know our own history…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Going back like a year. You know what I mean? It's like things that people said everyone would remember, like, I love looking at all the crimes of the century that have existed. Like, I remember in Ragtime The Musical, they talk about the crime of the century being, like, Evelyn Nesbitt's husband murdered her somebody… I don't remember, because no one cares. So, I think thinking about like what do your characters know of what the world is and how it works is very different… Even between the 3 of us, we would probably explain something differently about the way of the world. That gives you a lot of ways to think about worldbuilding, to think about power in worldbuilding, to think about what are the ways in which a world matters. Because if you make the world matter to the character…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Then you make the world matter to the reader.
 
[Mary Robinette] So this… That idea of what matters to the character and matters to the reader gets back, for me, to how to control that in short story form. As you all have been talking, I feel like I've had a little bit of an epiphany. Let me just try this out and see how this fits for you all. So I was thinking that one of the ways that I will use worldbuilding's for emphasis. That, using the puppetry metaphor of focus, that the longer you linger on something, the more important it is to the character. That long gaze. So, I think that worldbuilding comes in, like, when we're dropping these specific details for the reader. That there's kind of 2 modes with a spectrum in between of the decorative flourish and the emphasis. That the thing that you're trying to put emphasis on, with the emphasis, these are the things the character interacts with. These are the things we're going to have to know what the ripple effects are. But then you also have the decorative flourishes which exist to create tone for the reader. So when you're looking at, like, your PowerPoint slide of the things, it's like do these fit in the world, it's not just do these fit into the system, it's like do these support the tone I'm trying to create for the reader in the short form and is my character interacting with them in a way that moves the story forward. Like, those are the pieces that I think that were looking at, and everything else we can kind of… Like, if it's not doing one of those 2 things, does it belong in the story? How does that fit?
[Erin] I love this, and I especially love it because it lets you know when your worldbuilding is not going wrong, but where you may be creating issues for yourself in making your story too big. If your decorative flourish feels like something that should have impact on the character, but it's not…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] You treated as a flourish, but it actually… Like, why would they not care… Why would this not be the thing that matters to them? That's when it feels like, okay, now I want to go explore that. So part of it is figuring out what should be just a flourish.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] What is just an extra that helps to create tone, and what is it that actually hits the core of your story, which means you have to understand what's the core and the heart of the story and the characters.
[DongWon] Well, some of the examples you brought up are things that you wanted to be flourishes, but end up being loadbearing in a certain way. Like, putting a space elevator in your story, your like, "Oh, wait. This was supposed to be a flourish, but if I introduce that, it complicates things too much." Right? So I think finding that balance… I do love this framework… Is such the trick of the whole thing.
[Howard] The decorative flourish of this character is a monk from the Singing Cliffs, that's fine, that's decorative. But if we then, a few paragraphs later, talk about this pattern of stucco as being something that is commonly found among the tribes of the Singing Cliffs, suddenly the reader sits forward and says, "Oo. Singing Cliffs. That must be important." If you didn't want it to be important, don't use that flourish in 2 places.
[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Because you've now…
[DongWon] That lingering gaze.
[Howard] Now created a clue that you didn't want to create.
[DongWon] Yeah.
 
[Erin] I also think it's good to look at your flourishes. This gets back to what you said about if you put police in, then that's a specific society. I think sometimes the flourishes that we go to are the flourishes we know from our own lives.
[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So, when we're trying to create like a quick obstacle, we might have like a garden, for example, show up. Because guards prevent you from getting places. But having a guard says something about the system of justice, about a system of power. So even though that may not be what your story's doing, and you may choose in the end not to care about it… One of the things that I also think is fun to do is look at what is the broader world that my flourishes are implying, and is that the world that I want my story to live in.
[DongWon] That's such an interesting one, because, as I mentioned, I like to run a lot of RPG's, I do a lot of campaigns and campaign settings. I almost always do homebrew. The challenge I have set myself multiple times and I have failed at every time is to build a city or world that doesn't have police. Right? This is a of me pushing, and then trying to advance my anti-[garbled incarcerate] thinking, how do I imagine a world that doesn't have those kinds of systems of power? Right? It is very hard. Right? It's very hard to envision that world from where we stand right now, and it is so interesting of a for me to explore this idea, and interesting to me in watching the ways in which I failed to do that. Because I do have an instinctive like, well, the characters did something chaotic, we need some police to chase them around now. Or they killed somebody, what do we do about this? Like, what systems of justice can we put into play here? It becomes very difficult. But I do like this idea that you can use worldbuilding as a critical tool in your set. Right? I think we think of it so much as a thing just for the characters to bounce off of, but it can be so generative on its own. I think that's part of why I love RPG's in general, is because the main tool I have as a GM often is those worldbuilding rules to influence my characters and guide them and direct them. So the way that works into fiction is giving your characters those stakes and those things to bounce off of.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Yeah. I will say that I… One of the things that I'm really proud of in my work on Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is that the setting I created, God's Breath, has no police.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And also has no centralized power. Which is very difficult. Because it is hard. It's like at the end of a story…
[DongWon] A fun challenge.
[Erin] You know what I mean? Like, you… Like, who is then telling you to go do things?
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] Who is rewarding you when you come back with stuff? Also, like, how do you make big changes, because I think something that we often see in fiction, which doesn't work in the real world, but feels good in fiction, is the idea that, like, you change the king, you change the world.
[DongWon] Yup.
[Erin] You change the corporate, like who's running the evil corporation, the evil corporation fixes itself. So, like, there's the idea that you want to take an evil and like personify it. So figuring out how to make things a little more about the system and less about the person…
[DongWon] It highlights how much of our fantasy stories rely on restoration fantasy. Right? So if you want to tell a fantasy story in a high fantasy setting, so much of what we're looking for is, how do we depose the evil king and restore the rightful heir? Right? When we take out some elements like policing, like jails, like centralized power, then suddenly you're in a much more complicated world. That can be really fun. Also, my players were like, "We don't know what to do with this world half the time." It's interesting to watch the ways it failed in that way. Because without some of those narrative structures, your audience won't always know how to interact with the world that you've created.
[Mary Robinette] Right. When you're dealing with short fiction, because you're relying so much on the implication and the pattern seeking that the reader comes with, you have to be aware of what those societal things are because the reader is going to apply that lens. If you aren't thinking about it ahead of time, with your world building, even if it's not fully on the page, the reader will impose stuff for you.
[DongWon] Exactly. Everyone comes to the story with their own baggage and their own understanding. Being aware of that and conscious of that is part of your challenge as the creator.
[Erin] Yeah, I will talk really quickly, I know we're getting towards the end of time, but one of the things that was a challenge for me, when I wrote Snake Season, is that it's very much in one person's head…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] She was very isolated from the world. Part of the reason that the Conjureman exists as a character, and that also the women that visit, like, exist… You don't see them, but they are like a function in the story, is to give you a sense of what the world thinks it is around her. Because otherwise, she's just… You don't… You can't tell what's real and what's not real, what's going on, but by having these characters who represent like the world trying to exert itself on the character, it gives a to give some more meat to what's going on and to tell what is a flourish and what is actually like a loadbearing wall of this particular narrative.
[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah. We had such a fun conversation over breakfast, Mary Robinette and I, over what actually happened in the story, like what's real.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] I love that it's slippery. Right? I love the implication that there is reality somewhere here, but your world building elements make it kind of slippery in a way that's really fun and… I don't know. It makes it energetic in that way.
[Howard] Well, bear in mind that the reader experience here is… This was not a story about what kind of world is this. This is a story about what is this person going to do. What has this person done. I mean, the reader can go back and ask those larger questions, but the story wasn't created to answer them. The story was created just to… I say just to. The story was created just to mess…
[Laughter]
[Just to mess with you.]
[Laughter]
[Howard] Mess with you.
[DongWon] Because you are the antagonist, going back to a previous episode.
[Mary Robinette] But I think what it does is that… That because it's slippery, because to refer to the magic system, the magic system episode, because it is not well defined, it creates more space for the reader to bring themselves into it. I think that's one of the real powers of short fiction, is that all of that implication stuff means that the reader… Each reader's reaction is going to be different, because they are putting more of themselves into the story, I think, in a lot of ways.
[Howard] There's more room for the reader to do that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Erin] I think we are about at the end of things. But before we go to the homework, just a heads up that we are going to be taking a quick pause in this deep dive. Because National Novel Writing Month is upon us. As much as I love short fiction, I also love Nanowrimo as a way to stretch and see what I can do in a different form. We're going to invite you all to come with us and think about the ways we can all sit down and write a novel or novel shaped object together. With that, the homework.
 
[Howard] Right here. Take a big worldbuilding concept, and when I say concept, I mean interrelated, the whole big worldbuilding thing, and pick one or 2 iconic elements that bring it to life for you. Then take one of those and make it a key piece of one short scene.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[DongWon] Please rate and review us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice. Your ratings help other writers discover us for the first time.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 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.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.34: Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing
 
From https://writingexcuses.com/18-34-seventeen-years-of-foreshadowing
 
Key points: How can you take what you're writing and lay good foreshadowing in it, how can you look back and edit to put good foreshadowing in, or how can you make what you've already written work? What are the foreshadowing tools? Use stuff that's already on the table. Take what you're already doing and make it intentional. Use both plot foreshadowing and emotional foreshadowing. Foreshadowing can be for red herrings, too!  Use alpha readers to find out what needs more emphasis, where to hang a lantern. Foreshadowing leads to a reveal, so make sure the pieces are in place to justify the reveal. Do you have to put foreshadowing in your work? What does foreshadowing do for us? No, not necessarily deliberately. But character drives plot, which is a form of foreshadowing. Plot, worldbuilding, character, theme, it all can contain foreshadowing, so the story makes sense. When you explain a story you are writing to someone, you stop and say, I need to explain X. That's something to foreshadow in your writing! Genre, telling a story, plot beats, they all are kinds of foreshadowing. Plant Chekhov's gun on plenty of mantles, and fire them as needed.
 
[Season 18, Episode 34]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing.
[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] Seventeen Years of Foreshadowing. In the previous episode, we talked about me ramping up to the finale of Schlock Mercenary, and the… I think it was Mary Robinette asked the question, "When did you know what the ending was going to be? When did you know you were going to have a big ending?" There's 17 years of foreshadowing going into the final three years of Schlock Mercenary. Because, even though I didn't know where I was going at the very beginning, I managed to make the early stuff work. That's part of what we want to talk about today is how to take what you're writing and lay good foreshadowing at the very beginning, how to look back at what you've done and edit so that there's good foreshadowing in it, and, when, like perhaps a web cartoonist, you don't have the luxury to go back and edit and put in the foreshadowing, you can make what you've already written work. So, I'm going to pose this to our august body of…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Of hosts. What are your favorite foreshadowing tools? How do you like to do it?
[Mary Robinette] My favorite stuff is actually using things that are already on the table. I very rarely will be writing and think, "Um. I need to put this in because I'm going to use it later. Let me foreshadow this plan that I'm going to do." I'm much more likely to hit a point where I need to use something and then look back at stuff that I've already laid down, grab one of those things, and then go back and tighten it or tweak it and maybe put it in one additional place. The closest I've come to really… It's probably not true, but the closest that I can think of that I've come to doing additional… I mean, intentional foreshadowing in the Glamorous Histories, I was like, "And then Jane uses…" And I said bracket. I was like, "And then Jane," and I said bracket, "uses a technique of glamour that is going to become very important and plot specific later…"
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Then when I got to that point where I knew what that thing was, I came back and dropped it.
[Erin] I'd say I'm a pretty, like, instinctive whatever you call that type of writer these days, pantser or gardener or what have you. So, for me, a lot of times it's figuring out what have I… What's my subconscious already done, similarly, and then make it conscious. Take the things that I'm doing unintentionally and make them intentional. There's a story that I'm working on now that involves rhyming in it, which I promise is better than it sounds, and I realized that the rhymes were happening at random times in the story. I thought, "Well, what if they happened at moments… At specific types of emotional moments?" So I wanted to have these rhymes in the story, but could they be doing more? Then, that way, when you see the rhyme, the fifth or sixth time, even if you don't notice it on some level, you're going to see like that means that there's been a ramp up of emotion. So it's less the plot foreshadowing than an emotional one, but it's because I'm like, okay, if I'm going to do this thing, I might as well do it on purpose.
[Howard] I love that kind of micro-structuring. Absolutely love it. In the mixed mediums, cartooning is words plus pictures, there's even more of it available. The fact that you can cant the camera a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right, and, if when a particular speaker is on, you always skew the camera just a little bit in one direction… It doesn't have to be much, five or 6 degrees is enough. The reader probably won't notice, but the reader's subconscious is going to be on board with there is something about this character that weird, that's tilted. The rhyming, a purely prose version, that's neat.
[Mary Robinette] The other thing that I will sometimes do… I said that I rarely do foreshadowing intentionally, is that sometimes I will, when I'm writing my story stuff, I will foreshadow as a way of laying down a red herring. Because I want the reader to spot it and go, "Oh, oop. She's foreshadowing something that's coming up." Then I don't use it. Like, it's deliberately putting the gun on the mantle with no intention of using it. So I will do that sometimes. Because I… When I am reading and I spot something where the author has put something in, and it's very clearly foreshadowing, it can often make me frustrated, because I can… It reminds me that I'm reading in some ways.
[Howard] It can knock you out of the story because you see… You start seeing the narrative scaffolding and… You're not supposed to see the scaffolding, you're supposed to live in the house.
 
[Erin] One thing I find really interesting about foreshadowing is to me it's a received action. So, someone has to take up what you are putting down. So, like, sometimes you think you have put so much scaffolding, you're like, "How could anyone not notice it?" People read it and be like, "I did not notice that that one, there was doing all the work that you thought it was doing, because you understand the entire story." So one thing that I find really fun to do about foreshadowing is to do it, and then give the story to someone and say, like, "What did you actually get?" Then adjust from there. I find personally that I read more into things like as a reader, I tend to take the tiniest things and think that they're foreshadowing. So I write that way. It turns out that sometimes I actually need to hit a point harder than I think I needed to. So sometimes what I do is just go back and take a moment that I'm like this was the teeniest bit of foreshadowing and then like shine more of a light on it. Because, to me, it was big, but to the other people it was small. It sort of feels like when you have a crush on someone and everything they do, you think is really momentous, but they're not noticing because it's all in your head. It's the writing version of that.
[DongWon] I've been having this problem a lot, not necessarily the crush part, but I've been having this problem a lot in general, which is, I've been doing a lot of [TDRBG?] GMing. So I've been running [garbled] campaigns and things like that, and I keep doing this thing where when you're starting a campaign, all you're doing is foreshadowing, you're laying out a huge buffet of plot hooks really, which will be foreshadowing things later. Then my players keep looking at me and being like, "We don't know what we're supposed to do now." So I think I'm having that thing of sometimes you really need to hang a lantern in a way that feels very obvious to you, the writer, that won't necessarily feel as obvious to the reader, because he'll be presented with so much information. Right? So putting your finger on the scale to make sure that this thing is highlighted in a certain way is such a challenge to sort of put yourself in the audiences shoes so they're set up to receive that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think it's… It is that making sure that they notice it, but walking the line between not noticing it and being predictable.
[DongWon] Yup. Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] I think one of the things that happens to the creator is… The reason it's… Like, but it's so obvious, is because you know the end. You know all of the intentionality behind it. The reader does not.
[DongWon] Well, this is where you can hook into pattern recognition in your readers in a really useful way. This is kind of what Erin was talking about a little bit in just… You can set up these rhyming structures, because we've seen heist movies before. So we know when you're going to show the vault in a certain way, we have certain expectations of where that story's going to go. You can leverage these story beats, these tropes, whatever you want to call them, in a way that helps you emphasize the foreshadowing that you want, and then you can either subvert our expectations in terms of the red herring that Mary Robinette was talking about or you can fulfill them in satisfying ways, and then that'll feel, when the reader gets there, they'll be like, "Oh. They were telling me about this 50 pages ago. That's so satisfying." Right? So I think a lot of when you're starting a story, when you're in those early stages, and maybe you do or don't know where you want to go, but a lot of what you want to start doing is start laying out these early parts of different story patterns, and then figure out which ones you want to conclude, and pick up on, and which ones you want to like close the doors on as you go. Right? So, for me, sometimes thinking about those like little micro arcs, of like a character arc or a plot arc, can be really helpful in setting reader expectations and sort of priming the pump for them to get interested in what the eventual foreshadowing is going to result in.
[Howard] Well, the foreshadowing has to lead to a reveal. We will get to that reveal after our thing of the week.
 
[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about Babel by R. F. Kuang. This book just blew me away. One of the… I listened to it in audio. I highly recommend the audio edition, which is narrated by Chris Lew Kum Hoi and Billie Fulford-Brown. It is a story of a group of young students in Victorian Oxford who are translation students. It's a story about colonialism. It's a story about patriarchy. It's a story about friendship and found family. The magic system is so exciting, because the power of magic comes in the tension between words that cannot be translated into another language… Or, they can be translated, but that the process of translating, you lose some essential meaning of that. It's just really, really delicious. One of the reasons I wanted to highlight it for you is that she does this beautiful thing where it's this group of friends in the way they interact and behave with each other in the beginning when everything is going well foreshadows the way they are going to interact and behave with each other when things go poorly at the end. It's just… It's lovely because it sets up an inevitability and also is not predictable. Because you are hoping that things will go a different way. It's a beautiful book. One of the reasons I recommend the narration, the audiobook, in particular, is because you get… There are footnotes which are part of the structure of the book. But the footnotes are read by native speakers of the languages, so you can hear how the words are actually intended to be said. So that's Babel by R. F. Kuang.
 
[Howard] When I was 10 years old, I found a mystery novel and I started reading it, and immediately realized there was highlighting and handwriting all over these pages. I asked my dad what was going on. He said, "Oh, that's one of the books that grandpa read." Like, why did he write in the book? "Well, your grandfather loved reading these mystery novels, and every time he saw something that was a clue, he would write notes about it. He would highlight it. Because he wanted to be able to solve the mystery before the detective did." So he was putting in this conscious effort. I want to go on the record right now and say that is not how my foreshadowing works.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I write to the reveal. I don't write to you figuring out the reveal. I write to the reveal. So that when a thing happens, you look at it and you say, "Oh, of course that's what happens because there was this bit of foreshadowing." But, to use a silly example, if the camera has panned across gasoline dripping from the bottom of an automobile, then, well, there's going to be an explosion, and when you get the explosion, you're like, "Oh. Because there was gasoline and whatever." But there could also be no explosion because someone grabbed the fire extinguisher. It's… Whatever the reveal is, I want to have the pieces in place so that it feels justified. One of the only places I can remember consciously planning ahead for a big foreshadow was, and I think it was in book 15 or book 16, I had one of the characters talking about Fermi's Paradox. In a galactic society, where there's… The aliens have been around us for a thousand years, what does Fermi's Paradox even mean? Why is it even important? The answer is, well, um, galactic society should be a lot older. This galactic society is only about 40 or 50,000 years old. We are there other ones? What is happening? What is going on here? Having one character puzzling over that, and other people brushing it off, made for good comedy, but it also let me come around to, towards the end of Schlock Mercenary, coming up with my answer to Fermi's Paradox as a way to help drive the end of the story.
[DongWon] So you could have a plot load bearing academic concepts?
[Howard] Exactly. Exactly.
 
[Mary Robinette] As you were talking, as we've all been talking, it's actually occurred to me that we may be having some listeners out there going, "Oh, I'm not doing any of this." So, let me ask the question, do you have to put foreshadowing in? In your work? Then that leads to the follow-up question of what does foreshadowing actually do for us?
[DongWon] I want to say that, no, you don't have to do it in a conscious and deliberate way. But there is one aspect of this I want to touch on, and we haven't talked about much up until this point, which is one of my favorite modes of storytelling is what I think of as character as destiny. Where, I mean, this is… Game of Thrones is very famous for this, Fonda Lee's books do this incredibly well. There's a mode of storytelling that's very much about the plot is going to derive from these foibles or characteristics or essential aspects of who your characters are, and then how they're going to interact with each other. Right? Circe wants… Loves her children, loves her family, and therefore will do anything to defend them past the point of reason. Right? We know this fact about her. So that is a form of foreshadowing in certain ways for later events when she becomes completely unhinged. Right? Over the… Spoilers, I guess… Deaths of her children. Right? Those little things that character is destiny can operate as a form of foreshadowing. So I guess my answer to your question is, no, you don't have to have it explicitly in there in the way that we've been talking about in terms of like certain plot hooks, setting up certain plot beats later, but it will always kind of be there if you've written your characters well. Because your people… Your characters will make decisions that should make sense to the reader. Therefore, we will always have a certain satisfaction when they make choices that are true to the characters that we've met so far. That is, in itself, its own form of foreshadowing.
[Erin] Yeah, I think a lot of times we think of foreshadowing as such a plot…
[Yeah]
[Erin] Specific thing. Like… It's like a plot thing you need to do. But I actually think that all… I agree, like… Foreshadowing is kind of sense making. You help people make sense of the story. Sometimes you do that in a plot way and sometimes you do that in a worldbuilding way. Like, there is worldbuilding foreshadowing where in order for a thing to exist in your world at the end, it's probably good for people to understand that it is like… That there is something of that in the world earlier on. Otherwise, it feels like a deus ex machina, where it's like, "And then there were spaceships." You're like, "I thought we were in Lord of the Rings, so that was surprising to me." You need to somehow… Maybe there's wreckage of mechanics that people find along the way, and that's a foreshadowing of its own. But I really think that foreshadowing can be… Can, I think, lead people sometimes to put too much of it into the plot, and not enough in other places. Because one of the things I sometimes I find myself doing in stories is like I figured out how to make the plot make sense, but now the characters don't feel like they're in that plot.
[DongWon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] The characters are just being dragged along by it. They're doing things to foreshadow the action, but their behavior hasn't been foreshadowed, so it doesn't seem true to the character. So I would sort of challenge folks to look for ways in which your story makes sense on every level, character, theme, world, as you move along, and not just think of foreshadowing as something that needs to move the action.
[Howard] For the discovery writer, it's useful to point out that at some level, foreshadowing is the inevitable outcome of the syntax of a narrative. If you have a narrative in which things happen one after the other, you can look at the things that happened earlier and they are foreshadowing for the things that happened later. At some level, that's all foreshadowing is. The larger foreshadowing, the example I gave of Fermi's Paradox, that's the case where I'm now working to an outline and I want to have something big happened. I wanted to be big and satisfying, so I have to do some advance planning. But if you're discovery writing, you can probably read back through your manuscript and find foreshadowing everywhere. Because it's a natural growth of the syntax of the narrative.
[Erin] I actually think humans are natural foreshadowers. But we do it in asides. When you're telling a friend a story about something that's happened to you, you will often pause midway through the story and go, "Okay, but to understand why I hate my boss, you've really got to think about like that time she broke the copier on purpose and I've never forgiven her." Do you know what I mean? We naturally foreshadow, we just don't do it in a very like artful way…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Because we just stop and go like, "Now you need to know this thing." So, sometimes I find that if you actually talk about your storytelling to other people, you will find yourself explaining the story that you've been writing, and then you'll stop, and you'll be like, "Oh, wait, the thing I didn't explain is X." That's the thing that is really important to foreshadow. So, by doing it like artless Lee like to a friend over a drink, over coffee, you can actually figure out what you need to do more artfully on the page.
[DongWon] I would argue that one of the best storytelling podcast that's out there right now, it's a podcast that's very popular called Normal Gossip, which is people telling gossip stories to each other about normal people. It's not gossip about celebrities, it's gossip about somebody you know. It's the single most funny thing I've ever listened to in my life. But also, it's so useful because it's exactly the stuff that you're talking about. Where each story has to be so beautifully structured and crafted to get the right feeling and rhythm of storytelling out. I love this idea of that's… If we are always naturally foreshadowing because you want to communicate to the person that you're talking to what kind of story are we in? Is this funny? Is this sad? How is this character relevant? What kind… So often, it's like, well, I know that person's going to make some chaotic choices, because you're telling me a story about them. Right? Otherwise, this isn't going to resolve in an ordinary, normal way. We all know it's going to get crazy from here. So I think that's part of the joy of a certain kind of storytelling. So, just by the fact that you are telling a story, you are foreshadowing a certain kind of elements, a certain kind of plot beats. So, in some ways when we talk about foreshadowing as an official technique, it really is just turning the dial up a little bit on some of those features. It's intentionally ratcheting up what are already natural storytelling patterns that we all have, and that you're already doing if you're writing anything.
[Howard] When the next door neighbor's gas grill explodes, and somebody says, "Y'a know, this reminds me of a story," we are all paying attention. Because contextually, you've just foreshadowed something that I'm on board for. I want to start this last little bit by saying we're probably familiar with Chekhov's gun. I had people accuse me of using Chekhov's gun. "Howard, in Schlock Mercenary, there are so many mantles, and so many guns, and so many… We just expect there to be gunfire all over throughout the ending." Yeah, for my own part, I had lots and lots and lots of throwaway gags that I knew I could return to if I needed them in order to make something feel like it was inevitable.
 
[Howard] I have homework for you. Last week's homework, take one of your favorite things and write a new ending. Homework this week, take a throwaway gag from one of your favorite things. Something that was only a plot point in one episode or in one book or in one scene. Right… Outline a scene in which that turns out to have been foreshadowing for something of huge dramatic import.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[DongWon] This episode is made possible by our incredible Patreon supporters. To support this podcast and get exclusive access to Q&As, live streams, and bonus content, visit the link in our show notes or go to patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
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Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.29: Collaboration And Partnership
 
 
Key Points: Partnerships with other people or other IP's or groups. Even sequels and short stories set in established worlds need collaboration. Working in someone else's IP or working with your past self. Fit into the existing continuity or play with it. Collaboration is not the same every time. With some IP work, the canon rules. In IP work, you don't get to pick the audience. Get to know the audience, at least a little. Learn what kind of collaborator you are, and what type of collaborations you enjoy. Know who you are working with, too. Writing for a property you love may still be harder than writing your own thing. What do you do to make a collaboration work? First, accept that writing is egotistical, and collaboration requires you to let go of part of that ego and listen to other people. An effective tool is focusing on fiting your story within this framework. You've been picked for your personal voice, use it! Match their mechanics and aesthetics, but express your personal voice. What is intrinsic to the first part, what does the audience love, and how can I tell a new version of that? Collaborators sometimes see different things. Collaboration challenges you to think about the essence of the story you want to tell because you don't have full control of all aspects. Collaboration can teach you new tools. Two writers working together works best when each one knows what they are bringing to the partnership. Each case is a little bit different. Sometimes you have to put your foot down if the collaboration is going towards something harmful, or a story that doesn't need to be told in that way. This is a delicate process! Know where your line is.
 
[Season 18, Episode 29]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Working in Partnership.
[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] I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We are going to talk about working in partnership with other people or with other IP's which can often be an entire group, rather than a single person. Part of this is collaboration. But this is also something that you often will find yourself doing with your own work when it's time to go back and write a sequel to something or a short story set in a world that you or someone else has established. There are rules you have to follow in order to make sure that it stays true to the original thing. So this is something that all of us have done to varying degrees. So let me start by just kind of throwing this out as a general question. Why is it important, or rather, how is it different when you have to work within an established IP versus just creating something whole cloth?
[Mary Robinette] So, there are built-in constraints that you have to work towards. I've done this in a couple of different modes. I've done this in someone else's IP for games. I collaborated with Brandon on the thing for The Original. But the thing that I'm doing right now is, that is, is basically collaborating with my past self. I'm writing the fourth book in the lady astronaut That series, and I have to fit it in between the novels that I have already written in the short stories that are farther down the timeline of this. As I was working on it, I had… Like, I worked out this whole outline, grabbed one of the short stories to reference a character name, and realized that it takes place two years after the end of this novel. So I could not have the ending that I was aiming for because it broke the rest of my canon.
[Howard] Kevin J. Anderson, who famously has written a number of Star Wars novels, was on the podcast and gave us what I considered the high water metaphor, which is Lando Calrissian and Han Solo in Return of the Jedi, when Lando Calrissian needs to take the Millennium Falcon and Han says, "Don't scratch it." Your job as a tie-in fiction writer, according to Kevin J. Anderson, is you need to take the Millennium Falcon, blow up the Death Star with it, bring it back to Han without scratching it. I love that metaphor so much.
[Mary Robinette] There's a number of different things that I think that you're thinking about with that. It's the fitting into the existing continuity. So there's a couple of different ways you can play with it. One is that you can… You could play that as Lando manages to do all of that without scratching it. The other is you can have this whole side quest of, oh, crap, I have, in fact, scratched it, now I have to clean it up before Han knows. So there's a certain amount of gleeful playfulness that you can do where you're like, "Hum. You told me that I can't do this thing, but let me see if I can…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And still be respectful to the IP.
[Howard] The back-and-forth that I got to have with Doug Seacat when I was writing tie-in fiction with Privateer Press. We were talking about coal technology and magic. I told him, "Hey, are you aware of coal tar?" He said, "What's coal tar?" I said, "Well, it's a 19th-century thing that was a byproduct of coal processing. It's a mild acid that got used in medicine all the time." He said, "I didn't even know about that. Well, it's going into the book." So… That level of the partnership for me was so much fun because I got to reach into Doug's head and find out what they'd said and then see if I could add things to the universe. He paid me a very high compliment at the end and said, "I love what you did with the technology inside this war jack. We haven't had anybody actually try to describe how one of these works, and you just went for it." I'm like, "Yeah, I stared at pictures of railroad engines for hours, but this was fun."
 
[Mary Robinette] The other thing that I want to say is that I think understanding that collaboration is not going to be the same way every time.
[Right]
[Mary Robinette] So, Brandon and I have collaborated on a thing, and Dan and Brandon have collaborated. Both of these are audio… Things that were intended for audio. Our collaboration processes were completely different. With me, Brandon handed me a script… Or, not a script, an outline and a world Bible. I sat down and we had a little bit of back-and-forth, fleshing out the outline where I turned it into scenes that made sense to me. Then I started writing it. In the process of writing it, I would hit these worldbuilding things, which is the thing that Brandon is known for, that made no sense at all…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Because what he realized in that process was that so much of his worldbuilding was figuring it out as he was going. So we had to have a lot of back-and-forth about that, and jettisoning those things that had been planned and plotted that didn't actually make sense once we actually got in there. Whereas Dan was given this very blank slate, which we talked about in the first episode in this series.
[Dan] Yeah. The Dark One novel was similar to what you got. He gave me an outline, but actually very little if any worldbuilding of how the secondary world… It's a portal fantasy… How does that actually function. The collaboration for this process was just, "Hey, this would be cool to do this podcast story. Do it. It has to explain how this character in's up in prison." That was the entire thing that I had to work with.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. I think, I have a number of clients who do a lot of IP work. Right? I have clients who have written for Bioware and Blizzard and Marvel and Star Wars. Right? Some huge brands. It is always fascinating to me seeing how that process works when there is decades sometimes of canon, and canon that's incredibly important to the fan base. Right? So, if you play with the worldbuilding of Dragon Age, you're going to have a lot of conversations around that. Now, the problem is, there's an asymmetry here, because you're dealing with a big corporation who is trying to develop a videogame, make movies, make TV shows, in parallel with what you're doing, so it's also trying to hit a moving target with people who are very busy. So sometimes as the writer, when you're coming into this, you need to find a way to manage your time and sort of protect your time, so that you're not spending… You're not doing revision after revision after revision chasing a moving target of what the current canon and what the current lore is. Working… Doing that kind of work for hire work can be incredibly rewarding, financially, and it can be really fun to write in these universes, but it is a particular skill that's almost a management skill as much as it is a craft skill of finding a way to fit into that world.
[Erin] I think that's so important… Two things that you said that I love. One is that you don't get to pick the audience. That's, I think, the biggest thing in working in intellectual-property work, IP work, is that the audience for this work has been determined for you, and often times has been built up for a long time. So you may be able to play with the world and with what you're doing, but ultimately… When you write a novel, you might think, "Here's the audience that I want for it." But if you're writing for a game, it's these gamers. So you need to know a little bit… I think it's always wise to get to know the audience a bit. You don't necessarily have to pander to them, but it's good to know what the expectations are coming in, what people sort of want from this property or from this world, so that you have a sense that you're playing to the strengths of it as opposed to fighting it, which is never a good thing to do. I would say the second thing is, if you do a lot of collaborative work, is learning the type of collaborator that you are and the type of collaborations that you enjoy. Because not everything is going to be your cup of tea. Sometimes you don't like working with, like, big multinational companies because ultimately they hold a lot more control. You might consider like more of a one-on-one collaboration like Mary Robinette was talking about. I love writers' rooms, where your getting together with a group of people to create something and you're doing a lot of the generative work together. Then going off and writing and coming back to see how it went. Just because it plays to things that I think are really fun. Sometimes you don't know these things until you do it. But if you've collaborated on anything in your life, a school project…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] A grocery list, like, a vacation, you know a bit about yourself when you work with other people. You can then try to use that and build on it when you collaborate in a creative space.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. I think it's really important to not only know who your audience is, but who you're working with. Right? Because I've seen writers go into collaboration with some of these big IP that have a fan base that may not always be the easiest to work with. Especially if they're fem, especially if they're queer or a writer of color, they can get a lot of pushback in a way that can be very unpleasant. Coming up, I have Mark Ashiro is collaborating with Rick Riordan. One of the things that collaboration was specifically because Rick did not feel like he was in a position to write these queer characters. So he wanted to find a queer writer to take that on. It was a thing that Mark and I looked at very carefully in terms of how is Mark being positioned to the fans and in what way. I mean, we could not have a more wonderful partner than Rick on this. Then he and his team have taken absolute care to make sure that Mark is seen as a full collaborator and is front and center in the fans' eyes. So, knowing that we had that backup going in really changed the calculus for us of, like, is this a thing… Or, like, how do we approach this, what do we need to do to make sure that, like, we're going to navigate this well. Right? The book's coming out soon. Fans are really excited, we're really excited, I think it's going to be a really beautiful partnership.
 
[Dan] Yeah. This is such an important thing to consider. Especially, remembering back to my days trying to break into this, where I was like, "I will take anything." But also if you let me write for a property that I love, that's even more exciting to me. It is often so much harder than just writing your own thing. I sat down, back when Star Wars kind of ramped up its new slate of novels a few years ago, I sat down with Claudia Gray who's been writing a ton of Star Wars stuff, and said, "Tell me everything, I would love to work in this." By the end of that conversation, I was like, "Absolutely not."
[Chuckles]
[Dan] "This is not for me." I love Star Wars, but this process that you go through that produces very good books and the people who do it enjoy it is definitely something that I would not have enjoyed. So you do need to pay attention to who you're going to be working with, what their process is going to be like, how much do you love the property. Given the same opportunity to write for Star Trek, I would absolutely say yes, because it's more of a personal connection for me. But there a lot of extra considerations when you get into this kind of work. Let's pause now, and when we come back, we want to talk more about how this collaboration works.
 
[Mary Robinette] I wrote a story with Brandon Sanderson called The Original. This story is about a woman who wakes up and discovers that her husband has been murdered, and, more than that, that she is a clone, and her original murdered him. She's been given a period of time in which to track down her original and bring her to justice. It is science fiction, it's immersive, but it is audio. It is specifically written for audio. It was a lot of fun to write. So, if you're interested in someone who's doing a lot of self reflection out of force, this is something you might want to pick up. It's called The Original. That is by me, Mary Robinette Kowal and Brandon Sanderson.
 
[Dan] All right. So, how do we do this? We've talked about a lot of the perils of collaboration, and a lot of the benefits that you can get. Specifically, how is it different? What do you need to do in a collaboration to make it work?
[Howard] I want to start by saying that there is nothing is inherently egotistical as writing a novel that you expect other people to read. That's good. It is an inherently egotistical act, and I accept that. I accept that and I embrace that. It's important to accept and embrace that, because the moment you're collaborating, you have to recognize that at least a little bit of that ego you gotta let go of it. You have to let go of that and learn to listen to other people over the voice of your inner artist who is shouting for the things that you want. This may sound like a 101 level technique, but I'm here to tell you, the world is the place that it is because it ain't a 101 level technique.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, along those lines, one of the things that I have found to be a very effective tool is to think about, there's your goal. You have to tell a story for someone else in this world, or in your own world. But that you want to bring… You can fit your story, the story that you want to tell, within this framework. There's a reason that they picked you to tell this is opposed to someone else. That is your personal voice. So I'm going to draw… Take a brief sidestep to draw out the distinction in voice. There's three types. There's mechanical, there's aesthetic, and there's personal. If I use puppets as a metaphor, which I'm very fond of doing. When we say mechanical, it's like what kind of puppet is it. When we say mechanics in writing, it's like third person, first person, game, YA, whatever you're doing mechanically. That can be taught, that can be mimicked. Aesthetic, what does that puppet look like, what does it sound like. Those can be taught and mimicked. Personal… If you loan the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it looks like a different character. Which is why everyone freaked out when Kermit's original puppeteer, Jim Henson, died and Steve Whitmire took over, even though it's clearly the same puppet. So it's matching mechanic and aesthetic. So when you are coming in, you want to make sure that you're matching their mechanics and their aesthetics, but recognize that your personal voice is part of why you were hired. So your ideas, your personal experience, those things are going to express themselves in the fiction, and that has value. At the same time, you're also going to have to make decisions about which pieces of your personality you are sharing with them, and which pieces you are retaining, and which pieces you're willing to say, "You know what, we can overwrite that," because it is getting in the way of my paycheck and the things that you want me to do.
 
[Dan] Another consideration here when you… One of the things that you mentioned was the story you want to tell. I think that that's such a big part of this. One of the things we said at the beginning was even when you write a sequel, you are essentially in collaboration with yourself. It is interesting to me to look at sequels or second seasons of the show and realize, "Oh, this creator misunderstood what the audience loved about the first thing." Right? One of the examples I like to use for this is The Temple of Doom, the second Indiana Jones movie. What Spielberg and Lucas loved about the first one, and what they were trying to do, is not necessarily what the audience took away from that first one. The things that the audience loved were not… About Raiders of the Lost Ark… Kind of weren't present in the second one as much. That was a case of them identifying different things than the audience did in terms of this is what I'm going to continue, this is how I'm going to keep this story going. You can see the same thing with season two of Heroes, people developing superpowers. What the creators thought we all loved about that and therefore what they focused on in season two was people coming together and forming a super team. Whereas the audience was like, "No, we already saw that. We want to see the team do something together now." Because what the audience kind of pulled out of season one was, "Oh, I love these characters, and I want to see them continue to grow along this path." Rather than I want to see them walk the same path over again. So identifying what it is that really makes this click, and how can I give you more of that while being different, is part of not only writing a sequel, but also writing an episode of a TV show, writing a short story set in a larger world. What is intrinsic to this, what does the audience love about it, and how can I tell my own new version of that?
 
[Erin] I think one of the challenges and excitements of working in collaboration is that you may feel differently about that than a collaborator does. You may believe, like, that the audience is getting character and they may believe, no, the audience is really into the tension of it. So, sometimes you do have to set aside, especially if you're working with a collaborator that has more positional power, like, they're a big company, and ultimately you're not going to convince Marvel that they are wrong about the character. They're going to tell you, "It's this," and you're going to have to work with it. But I think that that's actually some of the most fun of it, and why I enjoy collaborating, is figuring out what are the mechanics and aesthetics that I need to fit my personal voice to, and how can I still make things that are core to me as a storyteller come through in this different format. Sort of like when we were talking about writing in a different format, when you're using someone else's mechanics and aesthetics, it is its own, like, sort of genre of writing. Figuring out how to tweak things and say things differently, but still get the core through, is so important. I remember Mary Robinette several episodes ago, you talked about, I think, essence and form.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Which I always say as essence and expression. It's, you change the expression, but the essence is there. I think what it challenges you to do is think about what is the essence of the story that you're trying to tell in a way that you might not when you have full control over all aspects of the storytelling.
[Dan] I understood this principle you're talking about in a completely different way when I took the time to look at my favorite X file episodes and realized they were all by the same writer. There was something that that writer was putting into the stories, that essence, that personality, that intimate connection to what was going on, that I responded to. It's one of my favorite shows, I like most of the episodes. But these four or five in particular spoke to me in a very unique way, because it was that singular author's voice coming through.
[Mary Robinette] This is a thing that we have to do in puppet theater a lot, that… They say it takes 5 to 10 years to establish a company, and during that time, you have to do names, like Pinocchio, Snow Queen. So the goal is to figure out how to do the story that you want to tell while still having the audience feel like they came out of the theater seeing Pinocchio. It comes down to figuring out, okay, what are the markers, what are the things that are important in these stories? Like, I know that in The Calculating Stars, and this is part of what I get from reading the five and four star reviews, when I'm in the right frame of mind, is that people like seeing women in STEM, they like seeing someone who's dealing with anxiety, they like a happily married couple, and they want to be in space. Like, I have to make sure that as much as possible, I give you at least one scene in space.
 
[Erin] I also think you can get tools from collaboration that are like random things you would never have to have known otherwise.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] A good example of this is, so Zombies Run is based out of the UK, and all of the characters are British. I am… Was, when I was writing, the only non-British writer. So I would write things and they would be like, "This is very American." They'd be like, "You just used this American slang. This is not how things work. Stop saying… Whatever… The floors start at zero." It really made me, like, open my eyes in a way to sort of what are the things that I'm making assumptions about in the way that I tell stories that I wouldn't have thought about if a collaborator hadn't said we tell stories a little differently and you're going to need to adapt to that. I actually think that even though I don't write in Britishisms outside of that, it really helped me think differently about the assumptions I was making as a writer.
 
[DongWon] Mostly, up until this point, we've been talking about writing for IP or writing for an existing universe in those ways. There's another type of collaboration that is two individual writers working together. I've been fortunate enough to work on a number of co-written projects that were quite successful. Your talk about tools is what made me think of this. I think they've worked the best when I could see each writer knew what they were bringing to the table. So, in the case of James S. A. Corey, that was Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Like, Daniel was really bringing this sort of like rich worldbuilding, really thoughtful politics, very expensive sort of systems oriented thinking. Then, Ty was bringing a really strong sense of action and pacing and all of these things. It was one of these things that each of them individually… I mean, Daniel is a truly wonderful novelist in his own work, but I could see how the alchemy of the two of them working together were making something that was so dynamic and so fun, and created this really fantastic science-fiction series. Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, working on This Is How You Lose the Time War together, that is a collaboration that's really driven by their friendship, and each of the two characters, Red and Blue, are kind of reflections of both their styles and ways of being in the world, and then figuring out a little bit of how their friendship worked through these two characters interacting and talking to each other. You could just sort of see, like, Max's more mechanical thinking, Amal's more like organic thinking… I'm obviously being very reductive here. But, like, these two I think coming together in these two characters in these really symbolic ways and weaving together to make this really beautiful story. So, what I love is each of them knowing what their toolkit was and also understanding there was a way that that would we interact with someone else's toolkit to make something that works better together than individually.
[Dan] Well, let me follow up and ask you some questions about that. Was there a point in either of those processes where you, as the outsider, saw them start to click into what those roles were?
[DongWon] I think with Daniel and Ty a little bit more. Because that was a little bit more not clearly what section was written by which person. They did alternate, and then they would sort of pass and edit together. That was meant to be seamless. With Max and Amal, it really was more… Each… Red sections and Blue sections are meant to sound different. So those were written separately, and then sort of edited to work as a whole, but that was… Also that just showed… They didn't even tell me they were working on this. It just appeared on my desk one day. I was like, "What did you guys do?"
[Chuckles, laughter]
[DongWon] Which turned out to be a beautiful sort of surprise. So it depends a little bit on the project. Right? With Mark working with Rick Riordan, it has been, again, a little bit more deliberate of Mark. Like, okay, how do I fit into this voice, into this style of storytelling, while bringing their own sort of personality and their own perspective to it. Which is what, as Mary Robinette was talking about, they were hired to do. That's why Rick wanted Mark, because they had read Mark's other work and said, "This fits. This is the perspective that these characters need to have. This is Nico." Right? So I think in each of… Each case is a little bit different is one of the things that also is really useful. Not only look to who you're partnering with and what are they bringing to the table. Know what you bring to the table. It's always a little bit of a tap dance, always a little bit of give-and-take.
[Dan] Yeah. The first collaboration I did with Brandon was for a book called Apocalypse Guard, which is not published and might not ever be published. We back burnered that one. But that is a book he wrote for Delacorte and wasn't working. He basically handed it over to me and said, "Is there any way you can fix this?" Which meant that I came into it kind of more with that mindset of, well, what are my strengths here? I had the benefit of looking at an existing thing and realizing, okay, what do I… I know Brandon is better at endings than I am, he is better at worldbuilding than I am. What am I going to bring to this? Character and voice and humor. That really helped us crystallize, this is what I… My specialty, this is what your specialty, we're going to put these together and create something neither of us could have done on our own.
[Erin] This is making me think of one really specific type of collaboration, which is that I also do some cultural consulting, where I come onto projects and collaborate with them to make sure that there thinking about the world beyond the one that they just know from their own cultural background, is the way I'll put it. So, just bringing my own experience to the table. Those tend to work better when it really is a collaboration, versus, like, a we wrote this, please fix it so we don't get canceled, which is a thing that sometimes happens. But when it's truly collaborative, it's really interesting because what happens is you're bringing your understanding and, like, I'm bringing my worldview and saying, like, "how is this worldview a little different than the worldview that you would bring?" Even though you're in sort of more control of this property and what's happening with it, I'm trying to bring something different to the table that I want you to listen to, because it's going to reach a whole new group of people and also, just, I think, be a broader and more interesting story. I would say that one thing that I've really gotten out of doing this is, even in other collaborative projects, I will put my foot down if I feel that the collaboration is going towards something that I think is harmful, or just like a story that I don't think needs to be told in that particular way, because it's not… It's putting things out in the world that I don't agree with and I don't want sort of my name associated with. That can be a really delicate process, which is why I'm bringing it up right here at the end of the episode. But I think it can be very delicate to figure out when can you take power in a collaboration, and when is it important to say, "This is my Hill to die on. I do not want us to tell this type of story." And when do you have to let things go, and really understanding the difference between something you may not like aesthetically or a choice you may not have made as a storyteller, and something that you think is a deeply personal and, like, thing that you don't think should be out in the world in the form that it is in the particular collaboration.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I've seen… We mostly talked about when things go well. I've also seen collaborations not go well, and those projects not make it to publication, which I think, in each of those cases, was for the best. Right? I think that's also something to keep in mind, is that there are failure states of this that are different from the failure states of writing your own solo project. Sometimes it's knowing what's important to you, knowing where your line is and saying I'm not going past this line and holding that ground, which can be very difficult to do, but it's important to have clarity about why you're doing this and what you're bringing to the table.
 
[Dan] Okay. It is time for some homework. What we would like you to do today as an exercise… This is not going to produce salable fiction, because you are taking words from somebody else. Grab something on your TBR pile, a book that you are intending to read and haven't gotten to yet. Open it up, find a random paragraph, and use that paragraph is the opening of a short story.
 
[Mary Robinette] In our next episode of Writing Excuses, we learn what all the one star reviews for I Am Not a Serial Killer have in common, and we talk about the two halves of a reader's brain. Until then, you are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.03: An Interview with Erin Roberts
 
 
Key Points: Erin Roberts. Working nonprofit communications, then science fiction, fantasy, and horror. MFA! Short stories, and beyond. Telling stories about the way the world is, and the way it could be. The black experience in the American South. Game writing, letting people play in your world. It's all storytelling and worldbuilding. Getting paid? Be scrappy. Check out grants, residencies, and scholarships. Look at projects for creative nurturing, setting you up for the future, and it pays well. Love the work you do. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 3]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] An Interview with Erin Roberts.
[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.
 
[DongWon] So today we are talking with Erin Roberts. We're going to find out a little bit more about her background and where she comes from and the perspective that she's bringing to the podcast. So let… I kind of wanted to start with you've said that you're kind of the early-stage writer here among the five of us, and you're bringing that perspective to the podcast. So let's just dive right in. Where did you get your start? What was the thing that brought you to writing as a serious thing that you were pursuing?
[Erin] Great questions. So I often think of myself as a little bit of a late bloomer, because I was just going about my life, living, working the nonprofit field, doing my thing. In New York, there's the Gotham Writers Center. They were having a class on writing science fiction and fantasy in person, which was like the first time they'd had it in person ever. I decided to take the class, and had a really great professor who just… Was actually, "You're not bad at this. Like, you might want to look into this some more, like this writing thing. It could work out for you." Which is why I love teaching, and why I think teaching is so important, because you just need somebody to kind of believe in you and say, "Like, this could work." So that was not that many years ago. I think it was 2014. So, 2014, 2015. I had not been doing any writing or other than in the margins of my notebooks during boring work meetings. So I just decided to mainline writing. Basically, like think of me with an IV with writing [garbled] coming into it. So I went off to Odyssey writing workshop, I went and got an MFA, I listened to Writing Excuses podcasts…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I did everything that I could to just try to learn about it. But I really kind of came sort of out of nowhere in my life and decided to take this kind of radical shift.
 
[DongWon] That's such an exciting transition. When… What was your first sale? Like, how long did it take you to get to that first professional sale?
[Erin] My first sale was in… I think it was 2016. It was actually while I was at the MFA program, which was great because it forced me to write all the time because I had to turn in things to my professors or they would beat me.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Not really. They… So I was turning in things all the time and working on stories. I think actually the first story I sold, Wolfy Things, was something I wrote during Odyssey, and then reworked a bit during my MFA, and then sold to PodCastle. Go, PodCastle. Just really… It was just like a couple of years for that to happen. Then I just kept writing and had a few more sales. I had a few things out in 2018. Then blah blah blah pandemic. I've been doing a few other things with my time as well, but I continue to love and work in the short story form.
[DongWon] Was that the first place you had submitted to or had you submitted to several places before you got there? Like, how long did it take you from the time that you're like, "I think this is good enough to send out," to it ending up on PodCastle?
[Erin] That one took… It took a little bit of a journey. It went around the world. You know that old song? "Been around the world, and I, I, I, I can't find my baby." It's like that, but with short stories. So, I think it was maybe the 10th or 11th, it took a while for that one to sell. That's how it goes a lot of the time.
[Mary Robinette] I was wondering, because you talked about the MFA. I know that you're a science fiction, fantasy, sometimes horror. I always hear people talking about how difficult it is to do science fiction and fantasy in an MFA program. Did you have any pushback? Is that where you started? Like, what was that like?
[Erin] I specifically picked the Stone Coast MFA program because they are science fiction and fantasy, horror, friendly. I will say that from the time that I went to the MFA program, which was like 2017 2018 to now, programs in general have become much more friendly to speculative fiction. I see that now as somebody who teaches at a university, the people that they're looking for as professors, the classes that they're offering. I think people were like, "it was a fad. It'll go away." Then they were like, "It didn't go away, and our students are going to write it. So we might as well bring people on who know about it, and who don't turn up their noses at it." So I think we're actually coming into a really rich, amazing hero for learning about speculative fiction in an MFA program, if that's the thing that you want to do.
 
[Howard] Okay. So, in 1999, my next-door neighbor had just gotten out of medical school and started an OB/GYN practice at age 45.
[Mary Robinette] I cannot wait to see where this segue goes.
[Howard] He had no idea… He'd been a gym coach…
[Erin] [garbled to me]
[Howard] A collegiate gym coach, and then decided, "No, this isn't what I want to do with my life." It was super inspiring to me. I quit my day job doing software middle management to become a cartoonist. I've seen in my own life that there's a huge effect on my writing that comes from all that stuff that happened before hand. So the question for you… Yes, you say you came to writing late. There's nothing wrong with that. You frontloaded with all of this information, all of this life experience. How has that colored, how has that altered, how has that affected the things that you create?
[Erin] Oo, I love that question. In part because I don't really know. I think it's something that… It's something good to think about more. I think it's something we all could think about more. Because you are you. Sort of like if your face changes every day, you don't notice it. It's when you go and you look at someone else and they're like, "Oh, my gosh, your face has shifted." How this is happened, I don't know. But you see yourself differently than other people see you. So the experiences I've had to me are just the experiences that I've had. But I've had a lot of fun times. Like I… There are things that I've learned in working the nonprofit sector, in working in the social justice philanthropy, this really… That really impacted the way that I think about how writing can create positive change in the world, the ways in which we see the world. One of the things that you learn a lot when you work in nonprofits, and I worked in nonprofit communications, is that there are well-worn paths that we have in our thinking a lot of the time. Part of what you try to do when you're in my job is to shift that path a little bit, and say, "Hey, you know, the world could be a little different if we go this different way." Writing can do that, fiction writing does that as well. Every piece of fiction is telling some sort of story about the world, the way it is, the way it could be. I think that having thought about that differently outside of the fiction world really helped me think differently about how fiction does that as well.
 
[DongWon] Great. Let's take a break for a second to talk about the thing of the week, and we will be right back with more from Erin Roberts about how to build a career and how to build a life in the writing world.
[Erin] All right. Our thing of the week is Dungeons & Dragons, y'all. It is Journeys through the Radiant Citadel which is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure book. It's a compilation of different adventures, including one written by me, yours truly, Erin Roberts, that's about horror and Southern Gothic and black folks. But what's really important and exciting about this book is in thinking about the different perspectives that we all bring to the table in the way that it shapes the world's that we create, Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is a D&D book, an official out from the Wizards of the Coast D&D book that was written entirely by people of color. Bringing our own lived experiences and perspectives to the page and saying, medieval European fantasy, awesome. But what else can I bring to the table? For me, it was what can I bring about the black experience in the American South. For other folks, it was what can I bring from Mexico. From other folks, it was all around the world. So people were really bringing themselves to the table and saying, "Play in our world. Experience our adventures. Just have a good old time, in a D&D way." So, it's Journeys through the Radiant Citadel, and it's out from Wizards of the Coast.
 
[Dan] All right. So I have a question for you. As someone who has also worked in the gaming industry, I'm really fascinated to hear about your game writing. How did you get into that? What are your plans for it in the future? Do you see yourself as primarily a game writer, primarily a fiction writer who does games? Tell us about that aspect of your career.
[Erin] Sure. I'll start with the second part first, which is that I think of myself as a storyteller. Really, what it's about is figuring out what's the best venue to tell each story. So there are times when you want to control the story, you want to know exactly how the person is moving through it. That's what prose is great for. That's where you're trying to control everything from where somebody takes a breath to what they think of the characters. Not always successfully, but that's a little bit of the dream. In game writing, you're letting people play a little bit in your world. Part of it is creating a backdrop for other people to tell their stories. So it's just a very different type of storytelling. But it's all storytelling, and it's all worldbuilding, which is one of my favorite parts of just storytelling as a whole, and why I've always liked science fiction and fantasy and horror. For me, I got involved because a very kind person, I told them I really wanted to do some game writing. Ajit George, an amazing game writer himself, he passed my name to a few folks, and then I wrote for them and they were like, "Come back and write more. And write more, and write more." Because as… If you're ever a freelancer or someone working in a field like that, getting the first job is hard, getting the second job is harder, and the third is the hardest. Because that's where you really have to prove that you've got your mettle, and that like it wasn't a complete fluke. So I will continue working and going forward and doing more game writing and doing more storytelling in all forms.
 
[DongWon] That's amazing, and that kind of segues into a thing that I'm wondering about. Because I'm a literary agent. My concern is how do we get people paid for the creative work that they do. Right? You've mentioned some creative sale… Or professional sales. Doing the game writing. What does that look like for you in terms of putting together a sustainable life that is centered around your storytelling, around your writing?
[Erin] I'm a scrappy, scrappy girl. So I'm all about making sure that I get paid, no matter where it comes from. One thing that I think we could all be is a little bit scrappier, actually. Obviously in… One of the great things about speculative fiction is that people are generally paid, especially in the short story world, which they aren't in other genres. But like I've gotten my local jurisdiction to give me grants. Like, I'm a big fan of grants, of residencies, of scholarships. There is money out in the world for people who… They're just like, "We want you to write more. We want to support that." A lot of times, they're not even getting as many applications as they could. So I'm taking all the money. I'm going to just ruin my life here by telling other people to like look and see what's available in your area. Even if you take the money out of my pocket, I want other folks to have it as well. But I've used grants, I've used freelance jobs, game writing pays. It's doing a little bit of everything to balance it out. One of my favorite things when I'm trying to decide what I want to do next and take on a project is something I saw recently on Twitter that apparently Dolly Parton says, which is to decide it's got to do two of the following three things. One, it nurtures you creatively. Two, it sets you up for the future. And three, it pays well. So if it does two of those three, definitely consider it. If it does all three, you probably want to do it if you can. Also, I would say, if you can like keep your own health and sleep at night and have relationships with other people. But those are the things that kind of I think about. But money is definitely one of them. So, get scrappy.
[DongWon] That is such fantastic advice. I love that so much. I just want to add one last note, just to tag onto that, is I so wish more science fiction and fantasy writers knew about the grants, knew about how to apply for residencies. It's a thing that's incredibly common in the literary world. I've seen writers really build a whole life for themselves, even before publishing their first story, even before publishing their first book. Really, just do some searching, learn how to write a grant application, learn how to apply for residencies. See what's out there, and there's a ton of opportunities to help you figure out how to build a life that is centered on writing that isn't necessarily about directly getting paid for the fiction that you're putting on the page.
 
[Howard] Okay. So, Erin, I don't know that I've got the dates right here, but sometime between 2010 and 2014, something happened where you went from doing the thing, or doing all the things, you were doing many things, and you decided, "Hey, I think I want to be a writer." What was it about writing that appealed to you? I mean, was it something you read? What planted the hook? What was it that so gigged you out of what you were doing before and pulled you into this horrible world we all live in now?
[Erin] Well, I'll tell you a secret about myself first. Which is that I love most things that I do. I think a lot of folks, there's this theory that you sort of have like your soul sucking regular life jobs and things, and then like your creative amazingness. I loved my work in the nonprofit field, and there's another version of me who's doing that now. But what I loved about it was the ability to… I love puzzles. I love the puzzle of figuring out how to take the story that's in your head and put it on the page. I just finished working on a story and I… There's the thing that happens where you're working on a sentence and you realize, "I've got it. Oh, my gosh, this thing is in my head, it now came out, and it came out the perfect way that it was supposed to." To me, there's magic in that. In really being able to… Who knows where it's happening in your brainstem, but that process is something that's so magical. Trying to capture that magic, even on the days when I want to like shred everything I've ever written, is part of what keeps me going and keeps me motivated from day to day.
[Mary Robinette] I love that so much. It's something that I think is unfashionable, the idea that we love what we do. The fiction of the "oh, the angst… Oh, it's so hard, my writing, my craft. I suffer for it." We never hear the "I love what I do. Look at that, I wrote something good." So, I'm delighted to hear that that is part of what guides you.
[Erin] Absolutely.
[DongWon] Yeah. For me, it's always like I think writers are their own best advocates. No one's going to fight better or more clearly or more cogently then you will. I think that starts with loving what you do and loving your work. Erin, it's just such a delight to hear you talk about that and about that aspect of it.
 
[DongWon] So, Erin, I believe you have our homework for us this week.
[Erin] I do. This has been an amazing time, because it's gotten me to think about what's brought me to where I am. So the homework is to think about what's brought you to where you are. When you write, when you read, you bring a bit of yourself to the table. So write down what are three things that have happened in your life that you loved as a storytelling conceit. It could be anything from the real world to the imaginary, that you think you carry with you and that you bring to the page. Either when you're reading or when you're writing.
[Mary Robinette] That's wonderful homework. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 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]
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 17.9: Let's Talk About Structure
 
 
Key points: Beyond Freitag's Triangle, Save the Cat, Truby's 22 steps, and other overarching story frameworks, what are the specific techniques that fit into these narrative shapes? What is the writer's version of copying the masters? Sometimes you have a story, character, setting first, and then try to find a structure to fit. Other times, you have a structure or element of structure, and need to develop the other parts. Think about what is the important aspect of the story, and how can the structure enhance that. Look at what you are trying to do, and think about what structure can help bring that out.
 
[Season 17, Episode 9]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, our structured deep dive class, Episode One, Let's Talk About Structure.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Peng] I'm Peng.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We have a brand-new class starting, eight episodes, we're going to talk about structure. You've heard us talk about structure a lot, so we wanted to bring in Peng Shepherd to get her take on all of this incredible stuff. Peng, tell us about yourself.
[Peng] Well, first of all, thanks for having me. My name is Peng. I am a speculative fiction writer and the author of The Book of M, which came out in 2018, and The Cartographers, which is coming out in March.
[Dan] Well, excellent. Thank you very much. Now, we are starting today to talk about structure. This is your class and your outline. Where do you want to start in this structural discussion?
[Peng] Well, I think we should just talk about… We should just talk about structure in a kind of general way just to open this deep dive series. I also just want to say how important it is, I think. So what I really want to do with this series is go beyond the Freitag's Triangle, Save the Cat, Truby's 22 steps, these really big overarching story frameworks and look at structure much more closely as really specific techniques that can fit into these really big general narrative shapes that often get talked about. Because I think that structure at this level of detail gets overlooked a lot. We spend a lot of time as writers talking about plot and character and world building, but we don't often give structure the same level of attention. It's just something that sort of happens naturally to a lot of our stories. But I'd like to talk about ways that we can be a lot more intentional with structure as we write.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I was excited about when we were talking to you and bringing you in for this was exactly that, we tend to go back to the same things. So, two things that I wanted to say. One is that I asked Peng to come because I've been working with her for the past couple of years doing programming for the Nebula conference. When I was president, she was in charge of that with Erin Roberts and [K. M. Szpara]. So, it's really nice to have someone with this kind of breadth of knowledge of the industry. The other thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently, which is one of the reasons I was so excited about this topic, is the idea of structure in general. When we're talking about things like Freitag's triangles, Save the Cat, all of that, what we're really talking about is something in art that we call copying the masters, where you take an existing structure like what you used to do as an artist and sometimes still do is that you would take a painting and you would make an exact copy of that painting as a way to learn the techniques. Another related thing that you would do… Can do is you would take a painting and draw circles around the major elements. Then remove the original painting and put your own elements into the structures, into those circles, to kind of copy their compositional structure. I think that a lot of times what happens to us as writers is that we are constantly copying someone else's structure as a kind of reflex. It's like, "Oh. I've found Save the Cat." That works. It works every time. Except that it… The problem with that is that it gives you… The problem is something that can give you repeatable results is that you are always going to be repeating the same kind of story. So what I'm excited about with this is that we're going to be talking about a lot of different structures, which is going to really broaden the kind of story that you're going to be able to tell.
[Dan] Yeah. I… On my other podcasts that I do called Intentionally Blank, we did an episode about Encanto, the movie, which follows… Which ignores a lot of what we think of as kind of structural norms, because it is based on Latin American magic realism. Which does not follow a lot of the structures that we think of. It's been fascinating to have that conversation with a lot of people in the audience who, some people thought, "Oh, this didn't work. The ending didn't land. It's because they were expecting one thing and got another. Other people in the audience were very thrilled by seeing something that was so new and different that they hadn't seen before. A lot of that just comes from using different structural techniques. There is not one way. I do think, and I'm guilty of this myself, we often teach that the existing structure that we use is there because that's just how brains work. It isn't really. It's a cultural artifact. There are lots of different ways of doing it.
[Howard] Yeah. We talked about this at great length in the setting expectations class we did at the beginning of this year, end of last year. We talked about how when people recognize the beginning of a structure in a work that they're consuming, whether it's a movie or a book or whatever, you've set their expectations for that structure unfolding per formula through the rest of the work. If you're not seeing that structure, they will often be disappointed. It's which is what some people who saw Encanto experienced. That doesn't mean that it's wrong. It means that we haven't yet educated the audience to set expectations for a structure they've never seen before.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. A lot of structures exist for reasons that aren't… That are just kind of encoded. Like, the three act structure that we are all very familiar with, one of the things about that is when you listen to… When you really unpack what's happening with the three act structure, it's like, well, there's a beginning, and then there's a middle, and then there's an end. That's not actually all that useful when you really dig into it.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] I'm wondering if we should actually pause for a book of the week, since I think we are about at the middle right now.
[Dan] Yeah. I think that's a good idea.
[Mary Robinette] Speaking of structure.
[Dan] Let me take that one. I've got our book of the week this week, which is actually another magic realism novel called The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina by Zoraida Cordova. She's been on the show before, and she's a really wonderful author. This is the story of a magical family with Ecuadorian roots, but living in a place called Four Rivers in Oregon. The grandmother, the matriarch of the family, calls everyone together right at the beginning of the book to tell them that she is dying and they need to come and collect their inheritance. This being a magic realism novel, the inheritance is not money, it's several other things both good and bad that spin out over the course of the novel. It's told in multiple timelines, we get the modern stuff interspersed with the life of the grandmother as she grows up. The woman, Orquidea. It's a really wonderful book. I'm absolutely loving it and I recommend it very highly. It does have a very unique structure. It's not following a lot of the rules that we expect. It's very surprising and delightful to not see so many things coming. So, anyway, great book, check it out.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, I'm particularly interested in this whole topic, and I'm about to ask Peng a question. Because I am in the process right now of working on the outline for the Martian Contingency, which is book 4 in the Lady Astronaut series. The structure which I used for Relentless Moon was the seven act structure that… Seven point plot structure that Dan teaches. It will profoundly not work for what I want to do with the Martian Contingency. I've been like trying all of these different structural ideas to try to figure out exactly what the framework is that I'm hanging the thing I want to talk about, the thing I want to explore in the story. So, Peng, what are some… When we're thinking about structure, what are some of the implications that are there for us when we start looking at how to pick one of these, a different structure than maybe one that we're used to working with?
[Peng] Yeah. It's an interesting question. I think there's two ways to come at it. Because there are some writers who probably come up with a story or a character first, and then you have to figure out what kind of structure to use, which is what it sounds like is happening for you. The story and the characters are already really, really set. Then, on the other side, you could come up with… Or just have a structure or an element of structure that you really want your work to center around, but you don't have anything else yet. It's sort of like you come up with the character first or the premise first or the setting first? So, I think… I don't know which is harder. They're both hard. If you come up with the structure first or you come up with the characters first. But I think that if you've got the seed of a story, you've got the seed of the character, and you're trying to figure out what type of structure would be best for that, you first have to ask yourself, what is the most important aspect of your story that you're trying to explore? Is it the character or the relationships between characters, for example? Because then you might want to consider structures that focus on that, like multiple timelines or multiple perspectives. Or is the thing that you're trying to emphasize most the world or your world building or the setting? In which case, you might want to focus on a structure that is built around… And we're going to talk about all these in depth in future episodes. But you can focus on a story that's built around a specific thing in your world, or stories that have footnotes. Or, if the thing that you want to focus on the most is maybe like a twist, if your whole story is built around a twist, there are different structures that lend themselves really well to that kind of reveal, more than others.
[Dan] In a lot of ways, I feel like what we're saying is similar to the episode we did last year with Amal about poetic forms. That there's lots of different forms of poetry, whether it's a Shakespearean sonnet or a sestina or something like that, and the form you choose will help guide the poem itself and the impact that it has on the reader. We often think that there's only one structure and we have to use it. That's not the case. There's lots of different ones. Like Peng was just saying, the one you choose can help draw out elements of your world building or your characters or the twist you want to focus on or things like that. They can change the pacing and the tension. I think that's a really great point to make.
[Howard] One of the things that I… And I do it instinctively at first, and then I fall back on craft when I realize I'm doing it. If I've come up with a fascinating setting or a fascinating… A location or a thing or a technology or a plot twist or a character, I will begin structuring the story I want to tell around how our understanding of that thing unfolds. If it's a character who's undergoing transformation, then… Are there beats in that transformation? Well, those beats become structural landmarks around which the story paces itself. Are we exploring a location? Well, the geography becomes kind of a map to the structure. Once I realize that I've started doing that in my head, I take a couple of steps way back and say, "All right. Does this map onto an existing structure that I know how to use? Does this map onto seven points? Does this map onto kishotenketsu? Does this map onto… What does this map onto and how can I use it?" Usually I don't catch myself soon enough, so there's lots of slop.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The… I was actually just thinking about kishotenketsu, which is the first time that I really… When we… I had talked about, oh, there are other things, like the rule of three is very Western, but other places it's the rule of five, the rule of nine. But until we did the episode with Dong Won Song, where we looked… Did a deep dive into Parasite, the film, and they were talking about kishotenketsu, I hadn't really thought about what… How that worked and why that film was so satisfying. So in that structure, you have… It's a four act structure. You have interaction, ki, development, sho, twist, ten, and conclusion, tetsu. It's… It is… It's really satisfying, and one that I'm… It's the one that I've been thinking about, contemplating, for Martian Contingency. But it is this thing where there are so many options out there that it's just exciting to be talking about this.
[Dan] Yeah. Well, I… Before we end, I want to point out that this doesn't have to be a massive sweeping thing. It could be something much simpler than we're making it sound. For example, Avatar The Last Airbender, the cartoon. It is split into three seasons, each of which follows one of the major nations that's involved. We get Water, and then Earth, and then Fire in season three. That, like Howard was saying, that's just the geography of the world and the world building influencing how the story is told. So, just thinking in those terms, you can come up with, well, why did they use three seasons? How did that fit their story? Well, it allowed them to explore each of the three extant nations. The Air doesn't get one because it doesn't exist anymore. So that's… At some level, that's what we're saying. Look at what you're trying to do and see what structure is going to help bring that out.
 
[Dan] Anyway, we've gone slightly over time. So let's throw this to Peng. What is our homework for this week?
[Peng] Your homework for this week is to pick a favorite book with an interesting or unusual structure and see if you can identify how the author's chosen structure enhances some aspect of the story, whether it's the tension or the plot or character development.
[Dan] That's wonderful. Thank you very much. We will be back next week with more talk and some specifics about structure. Between now and then, you are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.49: Magic and Technology: Two Sides of the Same Coin
 
 
Key points: Magic and technology are often mentioned as parts of worldbuilding for speculative fiction stories. They are tools. Not inherently good or bad, it is how the author uses them that creates the interest, tension, and story. You should use them for a purpose. Either magic or advanced technology can be used to advance your plot. Set the ground rules, then remain consistent and follow those rules. Do remember that resources are never evenly distributed and accessed. People who have daily access are likely to consider it technology, while less common access makes it magic. Remember that all your characters are biased, and their view of the world is incomplete, so pay attention to your character's relationship with the magic or tech. Think about what your character does not know or misunderstands about the magic or tech. Try to avoid the "just like our world but with X" fallacy. Remember the ripple effects of even small changes. 
 
[Season 16, Episode 49]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Magic and Technology: Two Sides of the Same Coin.
[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're going to talk about magic and technology. We could come up with all kinds of fun little quotes about how they're related to each other. But... Tell us about them, Fonda. How are they related to each other?
[Fonda] I like talking about them together and in a sort of special separate episode because they are mentioned as such huge parts of worldbuilding when it comes to speculative fiction stories. I think of them as tools. They're both tools. They're tools in two different aspects. The first being that they're not inherently good or bad, right? I mean, you have a tool, you could use a knife to free a hostage, you could use it to cut steak, you could stab someone with it, and it's what people choose to do…
[Howard] Those are all three the same activity. Sorry, keep going.
[Fonda] Howard, I'm a little worried, but I will continue.
[Dan] [garbled] stab Howard.
[Fonda] So, what people decide to do with that tool is where the interest, where the tension, where the story lies. They're also both tools in the sense that if you create them, it is for a purpose, and if they're in the story, they need to be there for a reason and they ought to be used. So I think of them as serving similar narrative functions. It's one reason why I move very easily between writing science fiction and writing fantasy. Because, regardless of whether you are employing magic or you're employing advanced technology that doesn't exist as we know it today, you can do similar things with them in order to advance your plot. The thing to keep in mind is that in either of those cases, you establish the ground rules for your magic and your tech, and remain consistent and follow them.
 
[Dan] Now, I'm going to say this because I know that one or more of our listeners out there is thinking this right now. What if I invent a magic that is inherently good or bad? An example that comes to mind is the Reckoner series by Brandon, where having superpowers is inherently corruptive and makes you into a bad person because of the nature of the magic. That is to Fonda's second point, a narrative tool, and the way that the author has chosen to use it. So, yes, don't think of these as limits or us telling you that you can or can't do something. Just be aware that you are making choices, and that you are using these tools for a specific outcome.
[Fonda] Yeah. That's a good example of doing something different with the idea of dark magic. Right? Like, often times in fantasy, you have this term dark magic. I always want to sort of dissect that a little bit and ask, "Well, okay, what makes it dark? Is it the people who use it? A tendency to do dark things, or is it used primarily by a certain type of person, or it has been used to do terrible things in the past and so now it has connotations of being evil?" So I think if you pull that apart and tease it apart a little bit, you can find more nuance and more angles to approach something that is sometimes taken for granted, like dark magic.
[Dan] That's very cool.
 
[Fonda] Another thing that I want to say about magic and tech is that there is no human resource in our world that is ever evenly distributed or accessed. Right? We have cell phones in the hands of pretty much everybody that… Who you see on the street, but there are places in our world where people don't have running water. So they're… An easy way to make your fantasy or science fiction world seem simplistic is to give the impression that the world doesn't have any of the same problems that we do, and everyone views the magic and the tech in the same way and has equal access to it. Because, we talked about making our worlds feel real. A world where everyone has magic and the magic is limitless and it's equally accessed feels not only difficult to believe but has less conflict and is inherently less interesting.
[Mary Robinette] I think, to your point about magic and technology being two sides of the same coin, because people are pattern seeking creatures, we treat them the same. Like, we have… We'll say… There are magic spells in our real world. Like, if you need a bus to come, you will walk away from a bus stop. It's a very simple magic system, but it works every single time. If you need to invoke rain, leave the house without an umbrella. It's a very… It's again, a simple magic system. But these are the ways that we interpret the world and the ways that we use things. Electricity is a magic system. Some people understand it deeply and can get it to do really cool things. The rest of us just apply the work that someone else already did. One of the reasons…
[Howard] There's a group of people in the middle who are dead.
[Mary Robinette] There is a group of people in the middle.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But there are people in modern-day America who do not have a good relationship with electricity, who think that it is related to many of the modern evils, and so want to limit its use. There's a number of different places where you can find that being reality. It's my parents were born in the same year, in the same city. My dad got an electric train when he was seven at a time that my mom was living in a house with a dirt floor that did not have electricity in the house at all. So, when we're talking about the things that are uneven, it's not just along one axis. It's along multiple different axes that people have uneven relationships to whatever this, whether it's magic or technology.
 
[Dan] I want to pause here in the middle to do our book of the week, which I get to talk about this time. It is David Mogo Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa. He is a Nigerian fantasy author. This book, it was his first published one, takes place in a post-apocalyptic Lagos, Nigeria, where magic and technology have kind of been combined together. Which is why I thought it would be fun for this one. The apocalypse in the book was that the thousands of gods that kind of live in the spirit world have collapsed into earth, and Lagos is this kind of semi-livable wasteland where these gods and their magic powers are just kind of there, and sometimes they cause good things to happen, and sometimes they just cause more entropic reactions of things falling apart or ceasing to work. David Mogo, the Godhunter of the title, he can go around and kind of collect these things and trap them and use them for different things. The villain also is trying to use the gods for various purposes. So it's a really fascinating book, not only at the culture that he develops for this kind of ruined Lagos, but also the way that magic is used in the way that technology is used by the characters in the book. That's David Mogo Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa.
 
[Mary Robinette] It's a great book. It's really… It's well worth reading. But a book that you made me think of is God Engines by John Scalzi, in which the literal engines of spaceships are gods that have been harnessed as power sources. So again, both magic and technology. I think that's kind of the thing for me is whatever… Anyone who is interacting with it on a daily basis is going to view it as technology. Anyone who is not interacting with it on a daily basis is going to view it as magic, regardless of what it is.
[Fonda] I love stories that combine magic and tech. There's something about them that is so catnip to me.
[Howard] Yeah. There was an Iain Banks story, novel, Against a Dark Background, I think was the name, where it's a science fiction adventure with a MacGuffin, and the MacGuffin is called the lazy gun. All we know about the lazy gun is that if you point it at someone and pull the trigger, they will die, and the larger the group of people you point the trigger at… You point at when you pull the trigger, the more likely it is that you're just going to get a big boring explosion. Also, if you turn it upside down, it's 3 pounds heavier. That's all we know about it. Those elements never get explored. We never try and throw the gun to someone and have it turn over midair and end up heavier when it… It's… It functions in the story like a magical artifact. In that regard, in a science fiction story, it's a worldbuilding tool that tells us we've forgotten a lot. Somebody built something that we no longer know how to build. There are a lot of other things in the story that are your typical sort of science-fiction things that work the way you expect a science fiction thing to work. They have some rules and then those rules get exploited in order to use the thing in a heroic way. Huzzah. But when we get our hands on the gun, we're not actually answering questions about the gun. We're shooting it in order to get away with it and then the story ends. I was actually very satisfied that it left me with this puzzle, and this idea that in a technology and pseudo-magic story, there were elements that wouldn't be explained.
[Fonda] Yeah. I have a magic element in my trilogy, but I never call it magic. Back to Mary Robinette's point, that the people who interact with something on a daily basis don't think of it as magic. Characters don't think of this thing as magic. They would never call it magic. It's just a natural part of their world. We talked way back in episode two of this master class, all your characters are biased and have an incomplete view of the world, like the blind men and the elephant. When you are writing a world with magic or advanced tech, that principle of all your characters are biased is one to keep in mind really strongly, because what does your character have access to? What is their relationship to the magic and the tech? So you need to answer for yourself, well, who controls this technology or this magic? Who benefits? What's the power structure around it? What is possible to do with it? Do you need training? Do you need a license? Do you need someone to vouch for you? Are you born to it? Like, what are all the sort of social structures and rules, inherent rules, around the magic or technology? Then, where does your character fit? What do they see? How do they interact? Because they're not going to have the complete view. Your char… People are going to have very different opinions about magic and tech, just like they do in our world.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the fun exercises that I play with sometimes is also what do your characters not know or misunderstand about the technology. I have a friend who's an astrophysicist. She was recently asked to explain… Like, a reporter called and was like, "Can you explain, we've got some questions from children, why is the speed of light what it is?" She's like, "Nobody knows that."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] "That's the speed of light." He's like, "Why did the Big Bang happen?" She's like, "First of all, the Big Bang is not actually what happened, probably. Second, no one was there. We've got theoretical models, but how am I supposed to… You want me to explain that to a five-year-old?"
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But at a certain point, it doesn't matter how much you know about something, you're still going to run up against something that you don't know. Like, parachutes. We don't actually know how parachutes work. Like, not enough to be able to design better parachutes by any method other than building them and tearing them.
 
[Dan] So, while we are talking about this idea, this giving context to the magic and the technology, let's talk about some of the… I guess one of the main problems that I see with a lot of aspiring writers is the kind of just like our world but with X kind of fallacy, where everything is identical, except something has changed.
[Mary Robinette] You mean like Jane Austen with magic?
[Dan] Yeah. Which is… No. That's a good one to bring up. Because I've had long conversations with you about how you designed the magic in the world so that they could compliment each other without either one breaking the other one in half. Whereas there are a lot of things we see… The Netflix movie Bright did not do that, and it was trying to use our modern world essentially unchanged except that orcs and fairies and elves and stuff are real and everyone's known about them for hundreds if not thousands of years. Which doesn't work. There's a lot of things fundamental to even just the naming conventions of Southern California where the story takes place would be different if the Catholic Church had been destroyed or altered by the presence of fairy magic, right? So, talk to us a little bit about that, that kind of ripple effect about changing one aspect of a world can change everything else.
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the examples that I cite sometimes, or think about sometimes, is that in Valor and Vanity… So, glamour, which is the magic system, is basically… It's an illusionary form of magic. In my mind, and this is why I'm like magic is technology, in my mind, what they're doing is manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum. But they're only manipulating the waveforms. Glamour is just waves, not particles. This is my own brain. Obviously, that does not actually work. Just FYI, glamour is not real.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Despite some of the letters I have received. So… But, the… There is a point at which I was having them do a form of glamour, and I'm like, wait, if you do that, they will have invented telephones in 1817. That changes everything. I had to go back in and layer in a little bit about having glamour droop down to the earth. Like, I basically went back and looked at the things that I already laid, and thought, which tool can I use to explain why this won't work? In order to keep it from being… From accidentally having this ripple effect. So I was constantly doing this back and forth to layer things in to keep it from changing the world too much. Because I wanted the power dynamics to stay the same. I also made the decision that glamour was equally distributed, so that what you get instead is the differences between… That's not the power difference between countries. The power difference remains the same… Related to many of the effects that happen in our world. Whereas, if I had said, "Ah. This is…" Which I did with Ghost Talkers. Their understanding of ghost was something that was very British-centric. But quite recent, and a carefully guarded secret. So, if the world of Ghost Talkers, which is set in World War I, if that had continued past that book, the outcome of World War I, the… Like, I was going to have to start changing every battle going forward, because of those decisions that I made.
 
[Dan] That's awesome. Well, it is on this subject, in fact, that we have our homework. So, Fonda, tell us our homework.
[Fonda] Yeah. This ties very closely to what Mary Robinette was talking about, which is thinking about the ripple effects and the second, third, fourth order effects that adding a speculative fiction element to your world would result in. So I want you to think of one just thing that you would change about our world and come up with as many aspects of the world that would be different from our own as a result. So, let's say, children have night vision, or, dogs can talk. Just one little thing. Do a brainstorm of how that would affect everything that you can think of in sort of our society daily life. After you've done that for a little while, mark one or two that could be the seed for an interesting conflict or an interesting story.
[Dan] Sounds great. Well, this is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 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.
 

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