Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 142 | Charlie Jane Anders on Stories and How to Write Them

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

Telling a story seems like the most natural, human thing in the world. We all do it, all the time. And who amongst us doesn't think we could be a fairly competent novelist, if we just bothered to take the time? But storytelling is a craft like any other, with its own secret techniques and best practices. Charlie Jane Anders is a multiple-award-winning novelist and story writer, but also someone who has thought carefully about all the ingredients of a good story, from plot and conflict to characters and relationships. This will be a useful conversation for anyone who tells stories, reads novels, or watches movies. Maybe you'll be inspired to finally write that novel. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Charlie Jane Anders studied English and Asian literature at Cambridge University. She is the author of over 100 published works of short fiction and several novels, including the new Young Adult book Victories Greater Than Death. She was co-founder of the website io9, a blog about science and science fiction. She is a frequent event organizer, including the monthly Writers With Drinks. Among her accolades are Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and Crawford awards. She is the co-host, with Annalee Newitz, of the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast. Later this year she will publish Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories. Web site Wikipedia Amazon author page Twitter

From the neon lights of the club to the harsh, buzzing lights of the office. Don't let the wear show on your face. Just swipe Mabeline instant eraser concealer to erase the night before, wherever that happens to be. Instantly covered dark circles and under-eye bags for a brighter, more awake look. This do-it-all formula also contours, corrects, and highlights, all while staying lightweight, crease-resistant, and smooth. It may be the world's greatest eraser. Find your shade of instant eraser concealer at your local retailer. If you want something done right, you do it yourself.

That's why you change your own oil. You wouldn't trust your engine to just anybody. So go with the full synthetic motor oil you can trust. Pennzoil Ultra Platinum offers engine protection for the lifetime of your vehicle. So do it right with Pennzoil Ultra Platinum. Stock up now at Walmart. Pennzoil. Long may we drive. Limited lubrication warranty for lifetime engine protection.

Other conditions apply, including enrollment and receipt requirements. See pensoil.com slash warranty for full details and terms. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I know I love the story I'm about to tell, so some of you may have heard it before, but it fits in so well with today's podcast. Several years ago, my wife, Jennifer, was the writer in residence at the KVey Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. Jennifer is a science writer, a journalist, and so her job was to put on weekly talks or seminars or whatever workshops to help the physicists at KITP in Santa Barbara. Barbara, think about communication, writing, different ways of telling their stories to the outside world. And, you know, for the most part, the physicists went along with this, you know, be mused but tolerant. At one week, she brought up a friend of ours, who is a TV writer. His job is to write TV shows, network dramas, right, hour-long TV shows. And again, this is not something that most of the physicists had as an ambition that someday they would be writing for TV.

but what lit them up at some point as they were listening to our friend talk was, he explained the idea that there is a theory of writing an hour-long TV drama. There is structure there. There are certain pre-existing beats that you're supposed to hit, especially when you have commercials built in at certain time points. Certain kind of action events need to happen at the right time, certain kinds of character development, certain twists, etc. It's not just it goes on this and this and this and this.

an overarching structure. Of course, everyone who's done a little bit of work in writing novels or screenplays knows about this, the three-act structure, very famous in Hollywood dramas and so forth. But the idea that there was a theory suddenly lit up all the physicists in the room, like, oh, okay, so let's think about, you know, how we can use this and how we can tweak the theory and so forth. So I think that this idea of there being a theory of storytelling is useful not only if you want to write stories, and who amongst us hasn't either taken a hand at trying to write fiction or imagine that someday we would write our big novel, but anyone of us who consumes stories also, which is basically all of us. You get a little bit more out of what's

going on behind the scenes, whether it's watching TV or reading a novel, if you have some theoretical understanding of what is going on along the way. So today's guest, Charlie Jane Anders, is the perfect person to talk about this stuff. Charlie Jane is a very successful. novelist in science fiction and fantasy. She's won all the awards, the Nebula, the Hugo, Theodore Sturgeon Award, Locus Award, Lambda Literary Award, and so forth. But more importantly, for today's purposes, she's extremely interested in the craft of storytelling. Charlie James was one of the original co-founders of I-09, the website, and she did a wonderful series of blog posts on how to construct a story you're telling. And she's been doing a similar set of

helpful blog posts for Tor.com more recently that will be turned into a book. So she has a book coming out. It's not till August, but you can still think about it, a book coming out called Never Say You Can't Survive, How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories. Again, very useful if you're actually writing stories, even fascinating if you're not going to do it.

And Charlie Jane also has this week coming out an actual work of fiction, victories greater than death. It's a young adult novel, the first in a trilogy. So we talk about, you know, all the usual questions one has when one talks to artists. Like, where do you come up with the ideas? Is it characters first? Is it plot first? And, of course, the answers are intricate and different for every little piece of writing.

So I think this is going to be useful whether or not you're a storyteller yourself, because in some sense, aren't we all storytellers, really? And with that philosophy in mind, let's go. Jane Anders, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Yeah, it's so great to be here. Thanks for having me. So the first question, we're going to talk about stories, the power of stories. I want to give the audience members a little bit of inspiration and guidance if they want to become writers themselves, right?

But let's start with the softball question. What was your pandemic binging? What were the stories that you turned to in our time of lockdown for this last year or so? Oh, wow. I mean, for the most part, during the pandemic, I've been kind of gravitating towards like lighter entertainment, things that didn't, you know, upset me or depress me, with a few exceptions. So I've been watching a lot of like things like Summer Camp Island and the second season of Hilda came out. I have no idea what these are.

What is Summer Camp Island? Summer Camp Island is an amazing animated show. You can watch it on HBO Max. It's also, it was on Cartoon Network, I guess. And it's about an island that's like just a perpetual summer camp, which is full of witches and Yeti and aliens and, you know, monsters and ogre. It's got everything. And there's these two kids, Oscar and Hedgehog and their best friends and Hedgehog. Spoiler alert, Hedgehog eventually becomes a Hedgehog.

Sorry, eventually becomes a Werewolf. She becomes a Hedgehog, Weirwolf hybrid. And also, she becomes a hedge wolf, I guess. And, like, I don't know, if she goes a Werewolf and she also becomes a witch. So she's got a lot, she's a science geek. She actually runs a podcast on the show. She has a special radio show that she hosts. on Summer Camp Island, it's all about science.

It's called Science Talk. And it's her answering science questions. And that's like a running thing. And so I actually love the fact that there's this character who is a hardcore science geek who is obsessed with astronomy. And there's episodes about her trying to, you know, witness astronomical phenomena and study science. But she also becomes a witch and is like super into like learning how to cast spells and stuff. I think it's so great to have that representation. So you kind of go for the uplifting version of your story.

stories in the pandemic, yeah? Yeah, I mean, you know, and I've been reading a lot of YA because I'm writing YA and I wanted to kind of, you know, put YA in my brain while I was writing it. So I kind of had, I kind of was maintaining a kind of YA tone or voice or whatever. Sorry, so YA stands for young adult? That's right. Okay. That's correct.

Good. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. You want to be thinking and listening in the voice that you're speaking and writing in, right? Mm-hmm. So, okay, so for those of us, I mean, so that the reason why I started with that question is because it illustrates the fact that it is perfectly obvious, a cliche, that these stories play a role. Like, they mean something to us. You know, not to get too deep, because I kind of do want to be hands-on and constructive here for most of the podcast. But what's the big deal about these imaginary stories that we make up?

I mean, do you have a theory about why we care so much about stories? Like, you could read uplifting real-life things, but why do we make up? fiction instead. Yeah, whatever happened to upworthy.com. I can be reading Upworthy right now. Yeah, I mean, I think that stories are part of how humans deal with, you know, stress and how we deal with, you know, epistemic kind of, you know, crises and challenges. And, you know, I think that we tell stories in order to figure out the way the world works and to figure out, like, kind of a schematic of life, if you want, if you want, you know, and it's basically like storytelling is kind of an engine of, of, it's a way of modeling reality. It's a way of modeling reality.

And it's a way of kind of showing like if you do this, this will happen, basically. And, you know, there was actually a great, you know, nobody remembers this. But so I was obsessed with Dr. Who as a kid. And after Tom Baker stopped being the star of Dr. Who in the early, 80s, he went on to host a program about books, a children's program where each week they would, I'm not sure if they were, I've never actually seen it now that I think about it. I'm not sure if they were dramatizing the books or if they were just reading from the books or what, but it was a program to introduce kids to books. And I never watched that program because I wasn't in the UK at the time, but I was obsessed

to reading any, like I would go to, my parents were college professors and I would go to the university library and any kind of, I would go on the through the microfiche and look for anything that mentioned Dr. Who. Like I was like a hardcore Doctor Who not when I was like, yay, tall, you know, and my parents would just, you know, let me use the University Library to just obsessively read everything that it was to know about Doctor Who. And so I read this article that really stuck in my head where Tom Baker talks about this program that he's doing that's to introduce kids to books. And he said this amazing quote, books are wonderful because they save you from the tiresome process of learning from experience.

You know, because you don't need to go, like, you know, fight a dragon. If you can read a book about someone fighting a dragon, or, you know, you don't need to go do, like, you can experience things vicariously in a book. And then you know, well, gosh, if I go and do this, this and this, it's not going to turn out great for me. But if I do this, maybe it'll be okay. And, like, you know, you can kind of imagineatively live through a lot of stuff that you maybe wouldn't be able to live through in real life either because it couldn't happen in real life or because you would be dead if you tried to do it in real life. No, I'm 100% convinced

that I would be excellent at solving crimes because I have watched so many procedurals and mystery novels and things like that. I know everything there is to know. You just do zoom and enhanced all the time and then you know, you'd get it that way. No, I'd like that answer. It's a not a substitute but an extra bit of an experience that we can get by imagining these scenarios. And presumably what that says about science fiction or fantasy or things like that is that it just enhances the kinds of experiences we can imagine beyond those we could actually plausibly do ourselves. Yeah.

And, you know, I mean, it's a cliche to say this, but people had not yet been into space when we were started to write stories about here's what it would be like to go into space. And like, you know, I think like, I say this all the time, but you have to imagine something before you can do it. Like you have to imagine something before you can do it. And like also, you know, I don't want to understate the importance of escapism. I think escapism is is a really healthy impulse, especially when things are really bad. But even when things are good, escapism makes us bigger. It makes us bigger. It makes our, makes us able to imagine ourselves in all these different situations that we could. being in real life. And that just, it's fulfilling in a way that real life often really isn't. And so the ability to escape into a story gives us strength and gives us like inspiration to do awesome things in the real world. I think that people sometimes think that you can either

have escapism or you can go out and affect great change in the real world. And I think that it actually know it's more like the two things go hand in hand. Like being able to have escapism and be able to escape into stories when you need to will give you the emotional resilience to go out and make the world a better place in reality. But as you said recently on your own podcast, you and

Annalie Newitz have a wonderful podcast called Our Opinions Are Correct. Oh, thank you. And as you made the point that science fiction did a terrible job preparing us for the pandemic, right? Yeah. I mean, you know, I feel like we're going to look back

at most of our sort of pandemic fiction and, you know, especially movies and TV, and kind of roll our eyes after having actually lived through a pandemic. It's very different. I'm not saying that the last ship isn't going to hold up because that's a classic. But, but, you know, I think that in general, you know, maybe apart from that one Steven Soderberg movie, did I say his name right? Contagion, yeah.

You can edit me out saying, did I say his name right? But anyway, so apart from that one Soderberg movie, I think that most pandemic fiction, you know, cuts corners and kind of dramatizes and take some, and I think even the Soderberg movie has some issues that people have pointed to. But I think that, you know, it's a mistake to think of science fiction as, you know, a purely didactic medium or a purely didactic genre that, like, you know, nobody who watched George Melilliers a trip to the moon had a really good understanding of the actual process of traveling to the moon. Like, nobody was like, oh, okay, well, now that we've watched George Mellier's and we've seen the little rocket hit the man in the moon in the eye,

that NASA can just go build that and we can do it. And like this is an exact realistic simulation that we've run here. It's more like it's just seeing that makes people think, oh, maybe I could go to the moon. And maybe I could, you know, maybe there wouldn't be people in like adorable weird costumes dancing around on the moon once you get there. but you know maybe this thing that is kind of like dramatized in this very silly you know unrealistic way it just puts a bug in your ear or whatever it puts a thing in your head that like oh what if we could do that in real life you know it's the more the what if than the like it would be exactly like this kind of so I think this is yeah I think that I completely agree with that analysis and it is a universal impulse

to think of these stories and share them so much so that there's a bunch of people, most people in the world, I don't know, who think that they really could write some novels if they wanted to, right? That they have a novel in them in a way that most people don't think that they have a theory of dark matter in them. And it must rub you the wrong way as a writer. But do you think that most people... No, it doesn't.

It makes me happy. That was my question. Do you think that most people do have a novel in them? If only they had some wherewithal about shaping it and making it. it come to life? Yeah, I mean, I think we human beings, this sounds cheesy, but human beings, we are literally made out of stories. And some of them are true stories about things that have happened to us, but a lot of them are stories that we've imagined or that we've dreamed or that have kind of formed part of this kind of fabric of our psyches. And so, yeah, I think everybody's got many novels

inside of us. And I think that, you know, the thing is, I mean, I have to break that apart a little bit, which is that I think, as with most things, like, I don't think I could ever be a professional basketball player, even though I'm tall and, you know, and, you know, maybe meet other criteria for being a basketball player. I, there's certain, I don't have the coordination. I don't have the kind of, you know, I actually literally was diagnosed with, like, spatial integration issues when I was a kid. So I literally, you know, I'm actually, like, officially not good at throwing and catching and doing other stuff like that. But I think that most things that are mental that involve concentration that involve thinking, anybody can learn to do. And it's, you know, maybe some people

have an easier time than others. And maybe some people are good at like one aspect and not other aspects and have to work on the aspects they're not good at. But I think that, you know, I mean, anybody could, if they really worked at it, be good at math. Anybody who really worked at it could be good at writing. I think that, you know, it just takes a lot of work. I think that people who don't, haven't tried to write a novel or who haven't written, spent like years like me writing novels that never went anywhere or that never got published before finally getting a novel out into the world. Like people think all the birds of the sky was my first novel. And it's actually the sixth novel that I completed and, you know, revised and submitted for publication and really kind of tried to get

published. People who haven't gone through that process sometimes overrate the idea part of it and underrate the turning the idea into a working piece of fiction part. The craft. I think that those of us who've done it a lot will always say, oh, the idea is the easy part, which I think is true. And, you know, there's like, there's the story idea and then there's the premise as kind of expressed as a series of, you know, conflicts and, you know, questions and incidents and, you know, emotional catharsies and all that stuff. And those are, each of those is kind of an order of magnitude more difficult than the first, kind of, than the previous one.

The idea that you can buy a plane ticket or go out for dinner and eventually get reimbursed for it by your employer, by your business, sounds great, right? You're getting money back for something that you did. But of course, in the real world, the idea that you have to be. the idea that you have to keep all the records, hand in your expense reports, all that stuff, it's mind-numbing, it's soul-crushing, it takes time from the creative work that you'd like to be doing. And Expensify is here to help. Expensify is the most widely used expense management platform in the world with over 10 million users.

And the point is, Expensify makes it easy for you to get paid back. With Expensify, you just take a picture of your receipt as soon as you get it and you toss it. Better yet, you can link your credit card, and they will automatically match the receipt to the expense and submit the report for you. There are extra features for the modern-day traveler such as automatic international currency conversion, concierge for travel needs, real-time notifications, and mileage tracking. So visit Expensify.com slash Minescape to get started with a free trial. That's E-X-P-E-N-S-I-Y.com slash Minescape. Where do you personally start with? I mean, I know some people start with characters.

You can start with a setting. You can start with a plot, you know, a dilemma. Do you have a process there or is it sort of whatever comes? It really varies. And I think, you know, I would be a little bored if all my stories started the same way or kind of, you know, came out, came about through the same kind of genesis or whatever. You know, most of the time for me, I think I start out with a fun what if. And, you know, I have a bunch of word documents on my computer where I've written down,

oh, here's a cool idea. What if this happened? And, you know, if I don't write those down, I forget them within a day or so usually. And I have some. I swear there was one a week or so ago where I was like, oh, this is a really cool idea. And I didn't write it down. And it's just gone. I've forgotten it.

I'm just probably never. I was like, maybe it'll come back to me. And now it's been long enough that I think it's just never coming back to me. And so it's just, it's gone like tears and rain. But so sometimes you'll have a white. What if? And you'll just, you know, that's not a story. That's just a cool what if.

And then you have to kind of think about like, how does this become an emotional thing that's about people and about like personal experience and about like, you know, how do you turn this into a thing with a plot and with characters and with something that I feel invested in enough that I can devote, you know, weeks or months or years of my life to it. And, you know, the classic example that is, is all the birds of the sky. I was like, okay, what if there was a mad scientist and a witch? And they, you know, were in the same stories together. And at first I was like, what if they were enemies?

But then I was like, okay, what if they were friends? And that was the thing where that got in my head and just wouldn't let go. And I just, I was actually working on a different novel. And I had to kind of pause working on that other novel until I wrote down a bunch of stuff about this idea because I had to get it out of my head. And I just knew that that was going someplace. And at first I thought of it as primarily a genre exercise. And eventually it turned into something more personal and more kind of, emotional, which I think is how it has to happen for it to be any good in the end.

But then, you know, there are stories where I start out with a character and I'm just like, okay, who is this person? Why am I thinking about them? Where is this going to go? And then, you know, sometimes I start out with a science idea or a science thing. And there's not really a what if, like a what if in the sense of like, what if we all walked on our hands instead of our feet or whatever or what if everybody one day started talking backwards or, you know, those are just things that I'm throwing out there. There aren't real story ideas that I've come up with. But, you know, the big example that I have is my second tour book, the city in the middle of the night, which basically that started from, I had gotten really obsessed with tidily locked planets,

which, you know, we had written about a lot on I-09. And, you know, during the time that we had been doing I-09. I started working on I-09 in like mid-2007, like summer, fall 2007. And, you know, by the time I left I-O-9 in the spring of 2016, we had gone from like, totally like planets. We'd always kind of known that they were a thing, but we had learned so much more about them in that time. And there had been so many pieces of news that were exciting. And we were finally learning more about actual exoplanets in a way that we, I feel like we hadn't been previously, or at least there was a lot of news about them. And so I was just like, holy crap, these are so fascinating.

And, you know, they're, you know, the most common habitable planets that, you know, are within our potential reach outside of the solar system. So just to be super duper explicit here, a tidily locked planet, we're thinking of an exoplanet where one side of the planet faces its star all the time. So it's a hot side to cold side. Yeah. And I apologize. I was about to, I was sort of meanical. my way around to giving a definition of a time. But I think I was probably never going to get there.

So I appreciate that. But yeah, it's highly like pun. It's like there's a dark side and a light side. And, you know, it appeals to all these things that I'm obsessed with about like these really stark divisions and dichotomies and about like, you know, just like it felt the more I thought about it. The more I felt like it was like a fairy tale setting that you have like eternal darkness and eternal light. And it felt like a fairy tale realm in a weird way. like being on one of these tidal locked planets. And like, you know, so I spent, so I started out with basically a setting.

And I was like, okay, I want to write a novel that takes place on a tidily locked planet. Humans have been living there for a long time already. We're not going to see humans arrive on the planet. We're not going to see the space voyage to get there. We're just going to be living on this tidily locked planet. And my original kind of spark was like, okay, what kind of creatures are native to this planet and how do we interact with them? And that was all I had and I didn't have any characters. I didn't have any like plot.

I didn't even have like a what if other than what if we were living on one of these planets. And there was a native, an indigenous life form living there. So I had to, it took me two years basically to turn that setting into a story. And it was really kind of agonizing. It was really kind of excruciating. And I probably should have just given up and been like, I'm going to just go write something that takes place in Oakland, because that's so much easier to write a story set in Oakland than a story set on another planet a thousand years from now. But I was just really obsessed

with that setting, and I just kept reading about it and kind of talk to people about it. And finally, I did find the story that I wanted to tell, and then it all fell into place. But that was an example of me really coming at it from a very different direction. So I think it varies. That was a very long-way-dun answer. I apologize. No, but actually, no, that was the perfect length because both of those examples. I mean, one example is you had two characters, a magician and a science person, and in the other one you had the setting of this dramatically different planet. But in both cases, your job is to turn it into a story. In neither case do you have a story? So in neither case, did the plot come first, right? But, you know, we think at the very simplistic level,

we almost conflate the idea of a story with the idea of a plot. And I mean, maybe what I'm saying is talk about plots a little bit. And then we'll circle back to how you extract a plot from your initial starting point, which is very different. Yeah. So the way I think about it is the way I think, I think that you have the premise, which is like there's a witch and a mad scientist or, you know, whatever. People are walking on their hands instead of their feet. And that's, or that's not even the premise. That's the kind of like the spark or whatever. And then it becomes more of a premise when there's, I guess it becomes more of a story once there's a character involved and once it's like, so whose story is this? Like, say we're telling a story

about like one day everybody starts walking on their hands instead of their feet. Is your story about the one person who keeps walking on their feet and everybody else is walking on their hands and they're the one person who's like, I don't know what's going on and this is confusing to me because I'm still walking on my feet? Is your story about the first person to start walking on their hands and everybody else starts copying them? Is your story about, you know, somebody who is just a random person but starting to walk on their hands, messes up their life in all these ways that's like interesting. Or someone who doesn't have any legs who is now liberated by the fact that everyone's walking on their hands.

Right. Someone who's who's an amputee or who, you know, who's been, I don't know, who's, yeah. So I think that, and obviously there's, this is their, that premise or that idea opens up all sorts of questions around ableism that we should, that you'd want to unpack if you were going to really investigate this seriously. But so basically. you try to find a way in and you try to find a character who is affected by it

in a way that seems interesting or that seems like they're kind of an interesting vantage point beyond just like an every person who is affected by this in those same way as everybody else or somebody who, you know, this is going to be,

they're going to be interesting in some unique way. And meanwhile, you have to kind of think about like the larger implications in the second order effect, of like if this happened, how would everything else be different? How would like 20 million other things that we do in the world be transformed by this? And I think that, and you have to kind of, kind of build it out into more of like, you know, a story where like, okay, everybody's walking on their hands instead of their feet or like everybody starts speaking. Let's go with everybody

starts talking backwards because that's, that's, you know, brings to mind all those old Led Zeppelin albums or whatever, you know. Everybody starts. starts talking backwards and it's like everybody's doing backward masking all the time or something. Everybody starts talking backwards and it's like satanic or something. And that's not a story because that's just, okay, this thing happened. The story is everybody starts talking backwards and a person has been separated from their child and they can't find their child because their child is because all the ways that they would try to find their child would require them to talk forwards instead of backwards.

Like maybe their phone can't understand them. So the story is not everybody starts talking backwards. The story is I'm trying to get to my child who is on the other side of the world. And my phone doesn't work because it doesn't understand me talking backwards. And all these other things are, you know, the fact that everybody's talking backwards is making it harder for me to do this thing that I need to do. It has to be about a thing that's like a specific, like somebody has a thing that they're trying to do or somebody has a thing that's their story that they're trying to deal with. and the global kind of premise is just kind of shaping that or informing that.

Otherwise, it's not really a story. It's just a, there's a phrase that we used to use in science fiction writing circles back when I started out that people refer to a hate story, which doesn't mean hate as in, I hate this story. Hate is spelled H-A-I-T-E, and it stands for, here's an idea, the end.

And you can, there are, there are, they're actually professionally published stories that are hate stories. Especially in sci-fi. You can do it and get that published if you are skillful enough and if you can make the ideas seem cool enough. And I think I've honestly published one or two stories where I would classify them as hate stories. Yeah. Because I was basically just like exploring an idea. And then once I finished exploring the idea, I was like, that's all I got.

See you later. But most of the time, you don't want to write a hate story. You want to write a story where it's like, here's an idea and here's how it, shapes someone's life and hears the actual story is about someone who is, you know, on their own journey and, you know, and so especially when it's a big idea like that, you can't really make that the story. You have to make that kind of the kind of spark that leads to other stuff that becomes the story. Well, it's an interesting sort of implication here that in some sense we can use characters as the bridge between a premise and a plot, right? Because I think, you know,

for people like me, you know, sciencey folks, maybe, I would love to write a novel someday. I have other things in the way, so who knows if it'll ever happen, but plots are the hardest. Like, I can even imagine writing characters, but it's bizarre to me that plots are hard because, I guess sort of the puzzle-solving part of my brain thinks that if I already know what the solution is, then it's not that interesting. And I can't even imagine being one of those writers who just starts writing without knowing where the end is going to be. But maybe if you have both this premise, you know, magic and science or talking backwards or whatever, and then there's a person with a desire, right, with some obstacles in their way, then it becomes easier to sort of fill in how that becomes a plot or am I going too far?

No, I think that you're exactly right. I think that once there's a person who has, you know, wants and needs and, you know, things that they're trying to work out for themselves and it could be anything from like, you know, a kind of. identity crisis around like, you know, who am I, who do I want to be? Anything from that to I want to get this thing and these obstacles are in my way. Like, that's when you're usually cooking and that's, that's often, that is kind of the hardest part in a way because you have to really believe in this person and their goals or their desires or their kind of like questions that they're struggling with because that's the engine of your story. And like, you know, to some extent, you have to feel the urgency of this person's, you know, needs in order to be able to be invested in the story as a writer or as a reader. And I think that I, okay, so, you know, I do kind of

think of plots in terms of like you have a problem and then there's a solution, you know, and oftentimes when I start out, I don't know what the solution to the problem of the story is going to be. And part of the fun for me is being right there with this person as they're struggling or people as they're struggling to kind of find a solution to the problem that they're dealing with. And, you know, I like it when I'm surprised by things. Like, I feel like if I'm surprising myself, that means that the story is kind of cooking. Like, if there's no, if I'm not being surprised by what's happening, usually that means I'm on autopilot and that I'm just kind of like regurgitating stories I've read before or that I'm just kind of like

chugging along in a linear fashion without kind of like, there's not a lot of sparks flying kind of if I'm not being surprised by stuff that happens or by solutions or by issues that arise. And you know, you want complications and you don't want, like part of why you have complications is that when you get to the end and you find the solution, it feels a little bit like a magic trick where there's been all these hands moving around and stuff. But I think that, you know, I mean, usually the problem does contain the seeds of its own solution a little bit. And it's not like a murder mystery.

Like I think if I was writing a murder mystery, you can always tell. if someone has really kind of thought it through when they wrote our murder mystery, or if they just kind of got to the end and they were like through a darted at a dark board. Anyone could have done it. And I'm going to come up with a specious explanation as to how they're the murderer. I think if it's a murderer mystery, if I ever did really try to write one of those, I would really try hard to work that stuff out in advance. Like before I wrote the dead body falling on the floor with the knife between the shoulder blades,

I would already know who did it and kind of have an idea of why. And, you know, I mean, I wrote, actually, one of my unpublished novels had a little bit of an element of a murder mystery. And I did end up kind of diagramming the whole thing from the point of view of the murderer. Just to understand, like, the logic of from their perspective, what they thought they were accomplishing. And like, because it drives me nuts when the antagonist or the kind of, you know, when everything's revealed in the end and the antagonist. behaved in a kind of random arbitrary fashion just to make all the dots connect up. It's like, nope, they had to be thinking rationally from their perspective the entire time. And this situation arises so they did this. And so I actually was really invested in that. But I think that, yeah,

I think that if you're not writing a murder mystery, you know, there is going to be a certain amount of the solution having to come out of the problem and having to be like something that feels plausible and earned. But the other great thing about writing, of course is when you get to the end of your first draft and you're like, well, actually the solution was this thing that I should have introduced 200 pages ago. You know what? You can go back in revisions and introduce that thing 200 pages earlier. And the audience will never know that you didn't have that in your first draft. They'll never be like, well, but, you know, and like I think that oftentimes the thing that you think is going to be like the biggest problem for your characters turns out to actually. be the thing that helps them to solve the main problem in the end because they can turn to their advantage in some way. That's always a fun way to go. Well, I think that you make this point in one of the podcast conversations that there are some plots that are just like, it's a quest. There's a thing you want. It gets the characters

moving and it's all about some combination of the adventure and the witty banter along the way. But then there are other plots where somehow it's related to the characters, right? Somehow the characters, it means something to the characters along the way. And that's a more fulfilling kind of plot. Yeah. And, you know, I always like characters to maybe be a little bit selfish. Like, I get bored if a character doesn't ever have their own agenda that's kind of, you know, separate from or orthogonal to the, you know, the main action.

Like, if all a character wants is to get the widget that's going to do the thing. Yeah. You know, I'm like, okay, sure. I get the widget is important. The thing is important, you know. But at the same time, this is something I struggle with a lot because I find, I have to find different ways of doing this depending on the story. I always want the characters to have their own concerns and their own agendas that are kind of their, that are personal. Because then I care more.

And if I ironically or counterintuitively, I care more about the widget if in addition to or separate from the widget, they also want a pony or whatever, you know? And like, this is a thing. I don't want to give to any spoilers for the sequel to Victory is Greater Than Death, my young adult book that comes out in April. But in the sequel to Victory is Greater Than Death, there is a certain amount of, there's one character who is on a quest,

and their quest is of importance to basically every living thing in the galaxy. But they have a side quest, or they have their own personal quest, that they are more personally invested, and because it is meaningful to them personally. And I kind of lean into that, the personal quest, because it's just more compelling and interesting than the thing that is of equal importance

to everybody in the entire freaking galaxy. If you're a business owner, you might be making running your own business harder on yourself than necessary. Don't let quickbooks and spreadsheets slow you down anymore. It's time to upgrade to NetSuite. NetSuite by Oracle is the world's number one cloud business system. You don't need to pay for multiple systems that don't give you the

information you need when you need it. You can ditch the spreadsheets and all the old software you've outgrown. NetSuite gives you visibility and control over your financials, HR, inventory, everything you need in one place instantaneously. Whether you're doing a million or hundreds of millions in revenue, save time and money with NetSuite. Join the over 24,000 companies using NetSuite right now. Let NetSuite show how they'll benefit your business with a free product tour at NetSuite.com slash Minescape. You can schedule your free product tour right now at netsuite. com slash Minescape.

That's N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E dot com slash Minescape. Could we just talk a little bit about the role of conflict in plots generally? I remember being struck years ago by a quote from David Mamet that every character in every scene should want something and not necessarily the same thing, ideally, you know, different things. Sometimes they're working together. And that's sort of one poll on the spectrum. But I was struck equally well by a comment on Twitter, and I'm sorry, I forget who it was

by, like, they really wish that more movies would not have conflict in them. And I never heard that point of view expressed before. But, I mean, so on the one hand, why is conflict such a driver, especially when, you know, you and I are probably on the side of people who we want our characters to basically be competent, right? And, you know, trying to basically do good things, not like cartoonishly villainous. So you have to sort of gin up some conflict there. And do we overrate conflict? Is it just the easy way to make a story exciting or are there more subtle ways we should be taking advantage of?

Yeah, I mean, I think that people often have a very narrow idea of what conflict means. And when I was starting out as a writer, like my first attempts at writing fiction, I thought that conflict meant specifically that people had to be enemies or that they had to be screaming at each other or that they had to be really unpleasant to each other. And, you know, actually, Cecilia Tann, who's this amazing writer of kind of often she writes science fiction erotica. Right now she's working on an urban fantasy trilogy that is. kind of has erotic elements but is just kind of straight urban fantasy I think in the sort of Anita Blake mode and she also

I think she still runs it although I think she sold it but she has this publishing company Circulet Plus the press that does erotic science fiction anthologies and she she had it so when I was starting at writing back at the dawn of time

she was doing an anthology of erotic science fiction and I was like, oh, I'm going to try to write something for this and she had something in the guidelines about like wanting the stories to be, you know, to have a positive view of sexuality and to not have like, you know, depict sexuality in a kind of negative or, you know, to make sure that it's consensual,

but also just depict sexuality in a healthy, positive way. And somehow my neophyte writing brain turned that into nobody in this story can disagree about anything. Even unrelated to the sex, everybody has to be like, completely like, you know,

blandly, you know, there can be no conflict and no kind of, you know, no disagreement of any kind in this story. And it was, I think, I mean,

this is a, this is a tough, this is a high bar to get over because I wrote so many terrible stories back then, but I think this might be the worst story I ever wrote. I mean,

that's a, that's a, that's saying a lot because I wrote a lot really terrible stories. But I think it might be one of the worst stories I ever wrote. And like, you know, it took me a long time to realize that conflict is not just people being nasty to each other. It's not just people, you know, having deep-seated hatred or like, you know, only one of us. Like, it's not even the thing of like, you want this sandwich. I want this sandwich. Only one of us

can have this sandwich. And for some reason, we can't just split it. Like, you know, it doesn't have to be that. It can be very, conflict comes in many. different forms. And a lot of times conflict is subtle. A lot of times conflict is, you know, between people who like and appreciate and respect and admire each other. And they just have a difference of opinion about something. And I feel like in real life, we have conflict in a lot of situations where we wouldn't necessarily classify it as I was at odds with this person. It's more just like, we had a debate about this thing. And, you know, this person thought that, this thing should go in the recycling bin and I thought it should go in the trash.

And so we discussed it for 30 seconds and that we don't register that as like we had a conflict. But that counts. But that is a conflict. And like, you know, if you think about like, for example, Becky Chambers is, I think they're the called it's the Wayfarer Tetralogy, the series that begins with a long way to a small angry planet. You know, those books are very gentle and very kind and very sweet. And they were a huge inspiration to me in writing victories greater than death and some of the other stuff I've written recently. And those books are full of conflict, but it's not conflict on the sort of like, we are now fighting. It's more like, you know, off the top of my head, it's been a few years since I read a long way to a small,

angry planet. But there's one character who is keeping a secret. There's one character who is slowly dying of a thing that could be prevented, but their religion says it shouldn't be prevented. And other people want to prevent them from dying because they love this person. at one point there is a thing where they're I think attacked by you know interlopers but for the most part the conflict is not of the kind of shouty you know we're throwing things at each other conflict it's it's much more gentle and subtle and you know I think that we need to broaden our idea of what conflict is and how it can be done I think that people who say that they wish

they had movies with less conflict what they really are I don't want to put words in someone else's mouth but I feel like when someone says that but they're really saying is I wish that the conflict was gentler and less kind of, you know, antagonistic and more kind of, you know, because I think that there's one very specific type of conflict that people think of when they hear that word. Yeah, I think that's a great attitude or perspective on conflict because it is, especially if you don't want the cartoon or super villain, or even in many of the modern superhero team up movies, they seem to just feel the need to have the superheroes punch each other at some point for, no specially good reason. And it's like, all right, let's get over that. We know they're going to team up, okay? But yeah, but no, conflict happens at a million different levels in our everyday lives. And so

there is a cliche, but is it a truism? Is it obviously true? Or does it worth, is it worth thinking about that conflict is interesting, that this is what grabs the reader's attention, that, you know, the fact of that there are different possible ways to go and different characters want different things? I think that, you know, what's interesting is when someone has to struggle. And the struggle could, again, the struggle could be very gentle. It could be very kind of, you know, it could be a cheerful struggle. It could be a happy struggle. It could be a joyful struggle. It could be a struggle that is kind of a slow boil. It doesn't have to be like, you know, it doesn't have to be like we are now wrestling or whatever. But, you know, I think that, you know, there's that quote that Falkner, that often cited Quackner at Fockner quote that all storytelling is about the human heart and conflict with itself. And I think that, you know, characters who never have to make choices or have to kind of question themselves or never have to kind of work for their goals are not, we can think of probably a hundred exceptions

is what I'm saying. But as a general rule, characters who don't have to kind of grapple with things in some way are not usually interesting characters. A character who is sure of everything, a character who never has to second guess anything, a character to whom everything comes very easily is not usually the most interesting character. And you could definitely have a story where, you know, it's like, I want to get into the Space Academy. And all my friends want me to get into the Space Academy and my parents want me to get in.

and everybody in the story wants me to get in, but I still have to pass this exam to get in, and I'm stressing out about it. And like, in the end, I do get in, and it's a happy ending. But I'm still like, oh, my gosh, am I going to get in? You know, that could be a story. Like, nobody in that story has to be saying,

I don't want you to get in, or I think you shouldn't go, or, you know, you could have a story where, and you could have a story where it's like about someone who's struggling with a personal decision where they have two options, which are both good options that are, you know, both, neither of them is like a bad or destructive thing to do necessarily. They just have drawbacks. They each have, you can't do both things.

You have to do one thing. It's like, am I going to go to Germany or am I going to go to France? And they're really trying to figure out which awesome country they want to go to. And in the end, they make a choice or they decide they don't want to go to either country. They want to go to New Zealand. But, you know, conflict, I guess what I'm saying is conflict doesn't have to be nasty. No, I like the word struggle better because you can struggle against the universe, not necessarily against other people, right? Yeah, exactly. And like, you know, and the other thing is part of what Becky Chambers does so wonderfully in her books, I'm just going to keep kind of, now that I've kind of hit on her as an example, I'm just going to keep bringing it back to her. But part of what Becky Chambers does so wonderfully in her books is that when bad things do happen or when people are struggling with things, it's an opportunity to show everybody else supporting that person and being kind to that person and being there for that person.

And, you know, if nothing scary or taxing or troublesome ever happens, then you don't have that opportunity to show how we support each other and how we help each other and how we hold each other up. And so, you know, that's the other side of it. Okay, good. I like that. I like that expanded conception of what conflict is. We do want, you know, it can't be easy. You know, it's not that interesting if everything just happens automatically, then that's not really a very fascinating story. So let's go back into the nitty-gritty.

We have our premise. People are talking backwards. We have some characters. I mean, at what point do you make decisions like, is it a first-person narration versus third person? Is it a novel or a short story? Are we going to break it into a book? million scenes, like all these nitty gritty things.

Does this, is it, is that easy and natural at this point in your, uh, expert life? Or is it, is that the hard part? No, I mean, you know, I, um, I will change my mind about that stuff a lot. Um, at various points, victory is greater than death. My, my newest book was third person. It was first person. It was present tense. It was past tense.

It was, you know, and it had different structures. And I feel like that stuff. It is annoying if you are going through and changing first person to third person or vice versa because you're always going to miss like, you know, a bunch of. Some pronouns, yeah. Pronouns or whatever, like the first five times you go through it. Like there's always going to be like the stray thing where you forgot to change something and it's really confusing for the reader.

But hopefully you catch it before it gets published. But, you know, it's not that hard to go and change first person to third person or vice versa. you know, and you often get a certain way in and you're like, the way I'm telling this isn't the way this needs to be told. And I'm going to go take a step back and change it or I'm just going to keep moving forward but pretend that I always did it this other way. And later I'll go back and change the first chunk. But I think that those kinds of decisions, you know, you want to make them at the start, but sometimes you end up kind of changing your mind. And really the main thing that you need to think about that is harder to change.

once you have a first draft is kind of just the sense of tone and, you know, vague sense of genre and, like, sense of, like, you know, the kind of tag cloud or Venn diagram or whatever of what kind of things can happen in this story. And if you're going to, going to, going to, going to, going to, going to, going to, go in, like, a light whimsical tone. Mm-hmm. Having people getting, like, maimed and beheaded on every other page is going to, unless you're really going for, like, very over the top, high comedy kind of splatter. comedy. It's going to be really hard to be light and funny and whimsical with like, you know, beheadings on every other page and like blood spluttering everywhere. People do try. You can do like the Peter Jackson dead alive thing where there's got a guy with like a lawnmower, you know, basically like just shredding people's bodies all over the place. Well, Quentin Tarantino goes for that quite a bit, right? I guess so. Yeah, there's like splatstick is like a whole subgenre of horror. But it's hard to pull. But, you know, for the

most part, you need to make these kind of tonal decisions because they do influence the kinds of things that can be allowed to happen in the story. And so once you change your mind about tone, you have to go around and kind of maybe cut out stuff that doesn't fit the tone you've decided on. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and I Heart audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science, and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth?

I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me, and I left it on the mic. That's great.

Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Book Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Now I'd like to introduce you to Meaningful Beauty, the famed skincare brand created by iconic supermodel Cindy Crawford. It's her secret to absolutely gorgeous skin. Meaningful beauty makes powerful and effective skincare simple, and it's loved by millions of women. It's formulated for all ages and all skin tones and types, and it's designed to work as a complete

skin care system, leaving your skin feeling soft, smooth, and nourished. I recommend starting with Cindy's full regimen, which contains all five of her best-selling products, including the amazing youth-activating melon serum. This next-generation serum has the power of melon leaf stem cell technology. It's melon leaf stem cells encapsulated for freshness and released onto the skin to support a visible reduction in the appearance of wrinkles. With thousands of glowing five-star reviews, why not give it a try? Subscribe today and you can get the amazing meaningful beauty system for just 4995. That includes our introductory five-piece system, free gifts, free shipping, and a 60-day money-back guarantee. All that available at meaningful beauty.com.

And then how nitty-gritty do you outline the entire plot from start to finish before you start writing, if at all? I mean, do you just have like, I'm going to get there to the end eventually, which I suspect is G.R.R. Martin's way of doing things. But there's other people who just write out the whole beat sheet so they know everything that's going to happen and then it's just filling in some details to actually get it written. Yeah, I mean, as with most things, it varies depending on the different projects. In the past, I've mostly not been a big outliner before I start writing. With the young adult books, Victory's Greater Than Death and the sequels, I definitely did a lot more outlining because those books are much more plot heavy. And there was a lot of stuff where I was like, okay, I'm setting up this thing here and it has to pay off here.

And I have to really have an idea in my head of how this thing works or else it's going to really bite me in the butt later. So there was a lot more of that with Victory is Greater Than Death. But, you know, I generally, I try to leave a lot of room for surprises because like I said earlier, if I'm not surprised myself, it usually means that I'm kind of sleepwalking through the story a little bit. Like surprises are how I kind of keep excited about the story and how I keep invested in what's going on. And definitely in the case of victory is greater than death, there were a few things that happened where I was like, this was definitely not what I planned on, but it's way better than what I had planned on. And so I'm going to run with it. and it's going to change the ending a lot, but I'm going to just, I know how to get around that.

But sorry, let me, I mean, I need to sort of dig into that a little bit hopefully without spoiling the book, but how exactly does that happen? I mean, you sort of have a vague idea of what the scene is you're writing, and then you start writing it, and you just feel it going somewhere else?

Like I'm trying to get a tangible feeling for what is happening in your fingers as you're typing here. Yeah, I mean, so I'll give you an example from victories greater than death, which is like a little bit of a, spoiler, but I've actually mentioned it a couple of other times recently in interviews, and I feel good about spoiling this part of the book, because it's something I'm actually kind of proud

of, and it's, you know, it's, I don't think it's, it's not a major spoiler. So in Victory's Grater and Death, the main character is Tina, and she's very invested in kind of living up to this legacy that she's been given of, like, being this legendary space hero. And that's her whole jam is that she wants to live up to this heroic legacy that she's inherited. And she wants to save the galaxy. And she's on the path to do that. And so, you know, in my outline, I had, like, basically the middle of the book, there was going to be, she's on this alien starship with a bunch of the other kids from Earth.

They're having adventures. The adventures are kind of getting them closer to finding this thing that will help them to unravel the central mystery of the book, keeping it a little bit vague. But that's kind of the general thing. So that was, the outline had that and it was like, okay, so here's just, there's going to be an adventure here and it's going to be just like some stuff happens. And that was basically what was in the outline. And then I sort of write this scene where Tina and some of the other characters are trapped on a thousand year old starship, which was a fun setting to begin with. Because, you know, I love ancient starships. Who doesn't? So Tina and the other characters are trapped on this thousand year old starship in the middle of nowhere. and they're under attack. And, you know, as I was writing it, I just had this thing where I was like, okay, so because, you know, everybody else is incapacitated or doesn't know how to fight.

Tina's the only one who can get them out of this. And the only way she can get them out of this is by killing the people who are trying to kill them. Like this space gun she's got is a, it's basically a gun. It kills. It doesn't have a stun setting because that's not a thing in my world because it's not Star Trek. So the gun is a, it's a gun that kills. That's all it does. And so, and you know, Tina is like, okay, I'm following the footsteps of this space hero, killing people as part of the job. I'm going to do it. And so she does it. And afterwards, she's like, I'm fine. That was not a big deal.

It's all good. And then like a little while later, she just has like an emotional breakdown. It hits. And just like completely falls apart because, you know, killing people is actually really and intense and this thing of like someone was alive a minute ago and now they're not alive anymore. And even if they were trying to kill you and they maybe were not a good person, they had thoughts and dreams and a favorite food and a favorite kind of music. And they were a person. They had an inner life and you have put an end to that permanently. And that's huge. And as I was writing this, I was like, this should be a big deal. This should not be a thing that we just like, oh, okay, another adventure moving on to the next thing.

It should be a thing that we, to go back to what I said earlier, that we struggle with. Tina should struggle with this. Everybody should struggle with this. It should be a thing that we actually really think about. And once I had that part of the book, it didn't just feel like a one-off episode in the middle of the book that kind of was like getting us closer to the plot thing. It felt like a turning point and it felt like the rest of the book had to kind of be about that on some level because Tina's going to keep being in situations where she has to kill her

be killed and what's she going to do? And is she going to just keep on killing people? Because that's the easiest way out of every situation. And so that ended up being like a major part of the second half of the book and actually changed the ending of the book in ways that I won't get into because that is more of a spoiler. And it changed the rest of the trilogy a lot because, you know, Tina made some choices that that changes her trajectory. for the rest of the series. And so, and, you know, I felt in the end really good about that. After I had made that decision, but while I was still in the middle of writing and

revising the book, I went to this panel where these, it was like a panel at the nebulas, I think in 2018, 2019, I don't know, at the Nebula Awards where they had actual teenagers talking about young adult fiction. It was like everybody on the panel was either a teenager or maybe 20. And they were talking about what they liked and what they didn't like in, in, you. young adult fiction. And one thing that they kept coming back to is, I want to see violence and the consequences of violence dealt with in a realistic way. I don't just want to see killing, killing, killing with no thought to the consequences. And I was like literally sitting there in the back row

in the audience of this panel wiping the sweat off my brow because I was like, I dodged a freaking bullet there. I probably, if I hadn't thought about this, if I hadn't just written that scene and kind of gotten into the moment, I probably would have written a book where she goes around killing people and there's never, we never deal with it. And I would just be like, yep, she's a hero, she kills all these people. It's great. But because I had, you know, randomly written that scene and it just kind of hit me this certain way, I ended up with this thing that I think if those teens ever get around to reading that book, they'll hopefully feel like I did the thing that they were saying they wanted to see more of. But I feel like, you know, and I thought about it and not to get

all on my high horse, but, you know, the more I thought about it, the more I was like, being a teen in America today with like all this insane violence and school shootings and you know drills and like not knowing if somebody's going to come into your school with an assault weapon you know it's actually probably really important to think about this stuff you know yeah and um and to and to and to not treat it casually well it's a great answer to the original question because it does help illuminate how you can plot out what do you think is going to happen but then when you're writing, you have to get into your character's heads, right? And you might realize, like, I mean, this is the great challenge of a fiction writer who has multiple characters,

which is almost all of them, that it's hard to imagine the full inner life of many different people who presumably have different goals and, you know, different ideas about things. And you might, on the one hand, you might come to realize that they would feel a certain different way in a situation. But on the other hand, like, is that for you one of the challenges of just writing fiction at all? Or is that, again, the easy part? I mean, for me, that would be hard. Like, I think that if I did try, all my characters would end up sounding like me, and that would be terrible.

And, you know, you don't want that. Yeah, I mean, so that's actually two separate things, I think. One is, how do you kind of create, like, a larger cast or like a bunch of supporting characters who feel like people and not like just, like, you know, non-player characters or whatever, NPCs? And then the other question is a question of dialogue and how to make people sound different. And those are related but separate questions. And I think that, you know, I mean, I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I put myself in a situation where this young adult book has, or the trilogy, has a very large cast who I feel like I need to, everybody needs to have an inner life to some extent.

It needs to have character growth over the Christmas series. And there's times when I'm like, I wish I hadn't done that because there's a lot of characters to track here, especially in the second and third books, because, you know, it just gets bigger and bigger. And I do read other books sometimes, both young adult and adult, where I'm like, okay, so basically there's two characters in this book who feel like they have a real, and I don't want to call it any specific books, but I read books sometimes where I'm like, okay, these two characters, I feel like have a real interiority. And everybody else is a little bit of an NPC and a little bit of a, you know, everything that they say or do relates back to the main character. And there's never a sense of like this person really wishes that they were off doing. this other thing. Like, you know, I want to be a golf pro, but I'm going to help you with your thing for now.

But the moment an opportunity to be a golf pro arises, I'm going to be out of here. You know, I think it's really, so that thing of having everybody have an inner life among the supporting guest is tricky. And Require is just like, you know, like with all the birds in the sky, one thing I did was I sat down and wrote like a detailed

origin story for like 20 different characters in the book. Wow. Because I was like, if I know where they come from, and how they got here and what motivated them before the story started, then I can at least kind of have a sense of where they're going and what they're pushing towards. So that was one thing.

The other thing, I think, is something I learned from journalism, actually, that has been really helpful in writing fiction is, I feel like in journalism there's kind of an unspoken rule, and I'm probably going to get hate mail from journalists for saying this. But in journalism, there's an unspoken rule that if something happens three times it's a trend. Yeah. Yep. You're writing a trend piece. You know, you're writing a trend piece for a newspaper or a magazine and you're like, here's three examples of a thing happening. Therefore, it's a trend. And maybe that's the only three times that's ever happened. But if there's three times, it's clearly happening a lot. Like, you know. In the social media era, this has become too much because you can always find three people on Twitter to say absolutely anything, right? And so the people on Twitter are saying. I wish tweets weren't, sometimes I wish tweets weren't embeddable because I feel like if tweets were not embeddable, journalists would have to actually do a little bit more legwork to find people saying stuff. Anyway, so, but that's a whole other, anyway.

So once you know that anything happening three times is a trend, this is so helpful because if you see a character do something three times, then you feel like you're constantly seeing the character do that thing. and it's just three times and it can be a glimpse like oh this character is once again obsessing about this thing or yeah and you can and you can use that to your advantage of like okay the first two times you saw them do it this way but the third time they did it this way so clearly they've gone through some change and we don't really have to like spend a lot of time on that because the reader will pick up on it and be like okay you know and I think that I've noticed this in my own this is actually helpful that rule of if it happens three times it's trend is really helpful in general because often when I'm revising my fiction in general,

I'll have something happen 10 times because I really want to kind of like get across. This thing is happening a lot. And when I revise, I often will be like, you know what, I can cut it down to this happening two or three times and the reader will still think it's happening a lot. Right. Because the reader will notice, like people pick up on things more than you think they will, even if they're only subconsciously picking up on them. So, you know, that's a really helpful rule to remember.

And that's one of the ways that journalism has helped me as a fiction writer is knowing that rule of the three times, which again, I apologize to all the journalists listening to this. Some of our best friends are journalists. The dialogue thing, the dialogue thing is really hard. And part of it is just, you know, getting outside of like your standard own voice of the way you talk. And, you know, I do kind of listen to the way people talk in real life. I eavesdrop sometimes in an hopefully non-creepy way. I'm out on the street.

I'll hear people snatches of their conversations. I will, you know, I'll just kind of be trying to. consciously pick up on how people say things to try to write naturalistic dialogue. But also I will, with characters, I'll try to just like, be like, well, this character talks more kind of shorter, you know, punchy sentences. This character talks in long run on sentences that are just like, no, no, no, no, no, no, because they're so excited. This character will have like, I'll give, sometimes I give a character a couple of catchphrases and I'll try not to overuse it, but I'll just be like, this character sign and says this thing. And I'll just try to let that

seep in and I'll, you know, you read stuff out loud in general, the longer I do this, the more I feel like I have to read my stuff out loud in order to catch stuff because I'm so used to my own writing style and my own kind of like that my own kind of writing voice that I don't pick up on stuff and sometimes unless I'm kind of reading it out loud and just then I kind of stuff jams out at me more. Do you base characters on real people? Yeah. Sorry? Do you base characters on real people or aspects of characters? on real people? No.

Not anymore. I think I did when I started out, but I definitely have stopped doing that because I feel like at this point I've created so many characters that I kind of ran out of real people

but also I just, I feel like basic characters on real people just gets you into trouble sometimes. Not in the sense of like people will be like, oh, this character was based on me because I don't feel like that really happens by the time it's a fictional character

and a full-thage story, they've kind of gone in a different direction, but it just, it's kind of a limiting thing and it kind of keeps you from really knowing them as a fictional character, I think. So I will really try to, I'll just try to come up with like an interesting kind of like, like that what if thing that I talked about at the start,

the what if of like, oh, what if there was a person who really wanted to be a doctor, but they were afraid of needles. And so they became this other thing. And like, you know, I just, I'll try to come up with like an interesting kind of spark that gets me kind of to start imagining this person. Yeah.

And then I'll just try to run with that. I should have asked this before when you were talking about the character who shot someone and had to deal with it. But there is a sense, which I honestly don't think I understand, but a sense in which stories have a moral point of view, right? Like, not that the good people are necessarily rewarded and the bad people are punished, that obviously doesn't always happen in stories. But we have the feeling that the story.

knows what is good and what is bad. And we get a little annoyed. Like some people were annoyed with Wanda Vision, for example, because they felt that the main character did some terrible things that she kind of just got away with without really suffering for. Like, is that a guiding principle to how you structure your story? Should there be kind of a moral point of view? And how does the story even have a moral point of view? It's just a bunch of things happening over and over again.

Yeah. I mean, that's a huge question that we could talk about for a whole hour by itself. But, you know, I guess two things about that. One is, you know, back when I was writing for I-O-9 a lot, I think that I was one of the people who was really pushing the idea that stories have a meaning and stories have, you know, a meaning that is political and personal and social and that, you know, if you show a character doing a thing, there are ways that you indicate, you know, kind of a point of view about that and that you have to kind of acknowledge

that. And if you show someone going around killing people all the time, you are kind of saying something about violence in a way. And, you know, I love action movies. I love James Bond movies. I love the John Wick movies. I love, you know, I love movies that have a high body count. Don't get me wrong at all. But I feel like there is a way in which you kind of walk away from a movie like that with a certain feeling about violence.

And, you know, I remember being a teenager and walking out of a James Bond movie and just like having this like weird flash in my head of like, yeah, I'm going to go like get in a fight with somebody. Not because I wanted to get in a fight because I would, but I was just still so amped up. Yeah. From watching James Bond just like, you know, basically a small army of people by himself. And it was like, it wasn't even like an intention. It was just like a flash in my head of like, oh, you know, fighting. And then it was by the time I had walked out and like thrown my soda in the trash, that was already gone. But it was just, there was like a brief like spark in my head. Don't go telling your listeners that I'm like a, you know,

that I'm going to get in a brawl with them or that I'm like a mass murderer or whatever. They will draw their own conclusions. So I think that stories do have a point of view. And I think that more to the point, whenever you are creating a piece of fiction or a piece of storytelling, you have in your head an ideal reader or like a person you were telling the story too. And I think that a lot of times we don't really think about that. And part of where we get into trouble is that, you know,

as someone who is white and, you know, has a certain amount of class privilege and stuff, my default is to assume or to kind of picture in my head that the person who's reading my story or consuming the thing I'm creating is going to share certain characteristics with me. And of course, that's not going to be true. Yeah. In every case, in many cases. And so there's a certain amount of imaginative labor that you have to do to kind of project yourself to a reader who is not you, who is not.

someone who shares your viewpoint. And I think that having an ideal reader in your head is a really valuable thing because it allows you to kind of be like, anticipate like somebody's going to think this is happening and I have to either play to that or play against that. And like, you know, you have to know what the audience is expecting. If you want to confound their expectations, you have to kind of know how to meet your audience. But I think that at the same time, it's really good to kind of, and this is part of why I hire sensitivity readers. It's a part of why I try to read fiction written by people who are not from my same, you know, community or my same culture or my same background.

I think it's really good to project yourself beyond your own experience in terms of like imagining your own ideal reader. And I think that's a lot of where people fall down. I don't think, I don't ever think stories need to be morality tales or that they need to be didactic. Again, we talked about didactic fiction at the start. I don't think stories have to be like just so stories or, or, like, where like if you do this, this will happen.

You know, if you kill someone, you're going to like, your head's going to explode or whatever. But I think that you should at least kind of understand the model of the world that you're creating for your reader and the kind of reader that you think you're creating that model for and maybe trying to think beyond just like, you know, yourself and your three friends. Well, yeah. And as the writer, you do have control over not just the event. of the story, but how they are commented on or what their repercussions are. I think that the problem with Wanda Vision was that, you know, Wanda does some terrible things,

and then one of the other characters, instead of saying, wow, those are some terrible things, says to her, well, you know, they don't understand that you've gone through a lot, too. And so that just goes into the point of view of the story in some sense. And I guess one way or the other, your story is going to be judgy of itself, right? I mean, your story is going to render certain things that happen in the plot as, well, it's terrible that that happened, but it happened, or yay, this happened. Yeah, I mean, I think that, like I said, every story has a point of view and every story has, like, is communicating to someone and is kind of building a model of the world in a way. And yeah, sorry, I'm just repeating myself now, but yeah. Good.

I'm glad we're on the same way, like, but, okay, speaking of building a model of the world, again, you said a whole bunch of things earlier on that I don't want to let completely sluble. bit by. You know, part of the process for any fiction writer, but for science fiction fantasy, especially is the world building process, right? And I guess that would be another topic that I'm sure we could go on for many hours in podcasting about. Probably you have, right? Maybe we should put that in the links in the show notes. But let me ask the single question. You know, it seems that in the real world, if we just imagine what the future is going to be like 500 years from now. It'll probably be different than now in a million different ways. So many ways that it's almost unrecognizable. But it seems that what a lot of stories do is to pick a few ways to

highlight that things are different and then keep other things more or less recognizable to people in our current circumstances. Is that, I guess my question is, is that, once again, a fair characterization? Is that a smart thing to do? Or would it be even better to sort of try to really imagine how wonderfully different things are going to be in some very different circumstances? Yeah, I mean, I think that it's really hard to imagine a future and, you know, account for like a million different kinds of technological change and social progress and, you know, the ways in which, like, you know, I sometimes think about how different the world was 100 years ago or 200 years ago and how foreign our time would seem to someone from the early 20th or early 19th century. And I think that

we kind of underrate how drastic these changes sometimes often are and how complex and multi-layered they are. And, you know, you can kind of go at it from like, from the direction of trying to start from now and forecast your way forward, like, you know, years and years that TV show that Russell T. Davies created a year or two, which starts and the president works its way forward. I think, I forget, like 20 years. I can't remember exactly how far forward it gets. But, you know, and there's been other things that do that. I think Samuel Delaney wrote a book that does that. Doris Lessing did that in her Martha Quest books.

And it's just, it's really hard because it is kind of fractal or whatever. And, you know, there's like every single change has a million unintended consequences and second order effects. And so it's like, it just becomes like this really complicated thing. Or you can come at it from the opposite point of view and do kind of like a Philip K. Dick style thing and just be like, we're going to pick, you know, a hundred years from now and like just make it really weird in a bunch of ways and not really show how we got from here to there and just have it be kind of bizarre. And I've definitely done that. Like I have a story called, I've written a story called I'll have you know, which was actually adapted into an audio

dramatization that I really encourage people to hunt down. And, you know, I'll have you know, takes place like at some point in the medium term future, probably 100, 200 years from now. And it's just a weird, you know, everything is kind of augmented reality. Everything is, you know, people are learning in their sleep. People are like living to be 130, 140 years old routinely. Everything is just like bizarre and kind of off kilter. And it's, you know, it has a little bit of a cartoony feel to it because I'm not trying to like, plausibly say, well, this is exactly how I think technological and social change will play out.

It's just more, here's a bunch of wacky stuff happening, and it's kind of a vaguely coherent and self, you know, self-evident view of the future. And I think that that's often safer ground. I think that, you know, it's never really possible to predict even five years from now in a way that's like holistic. I think that you're going to end up with, you're going to end up missing a lot of stuff. And, you know, someone five years ago trying to predict now

probably would have missed a lot of what we're dealing with right now. Like if someone in, you know, March 2016 was trying to predict March 2021, there's some stuff that they would not have seen coming. I think so. Let's just say. But you're, I mean, maybe to land the plane here a little bit, your most recent novel just coming out now

is a young adult novel, which is a departure. for you, but it's still science fiction, yes? It's still, you said galactic empire kind of things, saving the galaxy. So what pushed you in that direction? Is this a longstanding ambition that you've had to write a young adult novel, or did you think it'd just be fun? Or is that where the real money is? What's going on here? So I've always loved young adult fiction. Like, young adult fiction is, you know, there's actually a Washington Post article from 2011 where I'm just like going on about how much

I feel like young adult fiction is the most exciting writing happening. So at least 10 years, I've been like really just a huge fan of YA. And I always thought about writing YA. And, you know, I had been noticing that YA had kind of taken a turn like maybe five years ago,

I was starting to notice that YA was really taking a turn from being more kind of dystopian, like kind of the Hunger Games, divergent, you know, uglies. Like there was a lot of dystopian YA for a long time that was kind of like a dark future where everything is terrible. And there was, YAA seemed like it kind of took a turn away from that towards kind of fun action, adventure storytelling that was more kind of like, you know, the kind of stuff that I grew up loving

and more kind of like a space in which you could do your own version of something like Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy or Doctor Who. And, you know, I was reading books like War Cross by Marie Liu and, you know, just a ton of other way a books that were coming out around the time that were just super fun and super exciting and just like you know had some had angst and had kind of emotional stuff in them but also we're just like fast-paced adventures and like lee bardugo does all these books that are just like super exciting and fun and they're keepers kind of and they're just like you know and they're in a up world that's just like really fun and exciting and there's darkness but there's also just like swashbuggling adventures and

fights and we're just, you know, it's just, that was something that really appealed to me greatly. And I'd always wanted to find a way to do my own kind of like, just zippy action adventure thing where I could be like, here's my version of Star Trek, Star Wars, Guardians of the Galaxy, Shira, you know, Shira wasn't out yet, but, you know, that became a thing that I aspired to. As I was working on this and Stephen Universe also, I hadn't yet really gotten in just Stephen Universe. But so stuff like that. And so, you know, so I was like, okay, maybe it's time for me to really think about doing a YA now that there's that now that YA has kind of taken this turn in a direction that's exciting to me. And, and I just thought a lot about like when I was a teenager, what was the thing that I was really obsessed with and what was the story that I would have wanted to read? And what's the wishful fulfillment that I would have wanted when I was a teenager kind of because I love wishfulful moment in storytelling. I think that's an underrated thing along with escapism.

And I really thought about like when I was a teenager, I desperately wanted a spaceship to just come down and land in front of me and be like, hey, you actually belong with us. You don't belong on this cruddy planet. You know, come with us. You know, we're your real people. And like, I still kind of wish that would happen. And just like take me away from Earth forever, kind of. And so I was just like waiting for that to happen when I was a teenager. And so I was like, okay, what if that actually happened?

And what if there was a teenager who actually did kind of belong in space and was actually really secretly an alien and had this awesome destiny and this awesome kind of adventure waiting for her in space? And that was my starting point. And then, of course, because I always want to make things more complicated and, you know, more. And it's not the thing about wishfulfellant does there have to be complications and problems or else it's just boring. I was like, okay, so what are the, what, what?

what goes wrong with this or what are the issues that she's going to deal with? And that kind of got into some stuff that felt really juicy to me about like what it means to be a hero. And, you know, I talked before about when she has to kill people for the first time and how hard that is. And so that kind of, it became, it became a way for me to kind of think about a lot of these stories that I'd love growing up and kind of examine them from this other vantage point. And so, and that felt just really fun and juicy and interesting to me. And that was kind of the rabbit hole. down. You know, final, this is going to be a sort of very down-to-earth question, but it's not just a book. It's the first book of a trilogy, right? I mean, how does that work? Do you, again,

plot out the whole trilogy ahead of time? How does it change the writing of the first book to know that there's going to be two books after it? How it works is that I bang my head against the wall over and over and over again until like I'm seeing stars. I don't know. It's like this is my first time writing a trilogy and, you know, I keep saying next time maybe I'll just write one book and break it into three because I just or write like a really long thing and then figure out how to break it into three things because gosh, it's so hard. And like I think that, I mean, you know, when I sold it, I had like a big chunk of the first book, but I also had an outline of the second and third books. And then I made a lot of choices in the course of writing the first book that drastically changed

the second and third books. I had to go back and outline them again. And at this point, the second book is basically done and I have a really good outline of the third book. So, you know, it's coming along, but there was a lot of trial and error. I mean, for me, there's always a lot of trial and error, unfortunately. There's a lot of, like, stumbling in the dark before I find the light switch or the path forward or whatever. But yeah, trilogies are really hard. And middle parts of trilogies are especially hard because you can't resolve everything. You have to like kind of just move things forward but not resolve everything. And in this trilogy in particular, the first book, I kind of, in the first book, Tina is mostly

on this alien starship with a group of other kids from Earth and a bunch of alien characters and this isn't really a spoiler. And they're dealing with like this quest that they're on. And there's a bunch of stuff where I'm like, well, I'll explain that in the second book. Oh, we can see that in the second book. Well, there's all this like bigger galactic politics stuff. And we'll, we'll explore that in the second book. And then it was like, time to write the second book.

And I was like, why did I do that? Why did I leave all this stuff for myself to like deal with in the second book? And like the good news is there's there's nothing that I set up in the second book that is going to be hard to pay up. Well, it's going to be hard in the sense that writing is always hard. But by the time the second book is over, I've already pretty much shown you everything I need to show you. and the third book is just going to be like action because everything's been established.

So I'm just, I'm actually dying to get back to the third book once I hand in the revision of the second book because I think that's going to be pure candy. Right. Like the second book is a lot of like a lot of world building because there's a lot of stuff where I'm like, well, there's a galactic society. We only kind of glimpse it in the first book and we really see it in the second book. And then the third book is just like fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. That's good.

It's a payoff. Yeah. But not that the second book isn't fun. No. Don't get me wrong. I'm not going to, I don't want you to tell. So much fun. I don't want anybody to come away from this with the idea that like the second book is going to be a slog.

In fact, I'm really grateful that people who've read the second book so far are like, you managed to keep the pace and excitement of the first book going, which I'm like, thank you. That's really, I was worried. So I'm really glad to hear that. Some of us like the world building. The second book, there's just, there's just more world building that I had to really work. And there was a lot of like trial and error with that.

You know, I'm rereading some of Ian Banks's. culture novels, which are classics, of course. But I had forgotten how much of them are just him, like, describing what, you know, the galaxy and the culture and all the different things. Like, the plot could be, you know, literally half the book. You could have the same exact plot. But it's great. It's delicious. You eat it up. So I don't think that's something to be worrying about. What do you think for the audience members who, as a final thought, are ready to write their first novels? What are the words of encouragement or inspiration or education you want to leave them with? I mean, what, how should they start going down this difficult?

No, no, no, no, no, no, I'm just kidding. No, writing is fun. And, you know, the thing is, I feel like, I mean, writing is incredibly hard and painful and stressful. And, you know, there's all this anxiety, especially if you start thinking of the publishing part of it, which is, you know, it's a whole other thing. Because it's business and business is always more kind of stressful in its own way. But, you know, the thing is writing should be fun and there are ways to make it fun. And, you know, just remember to have fun and play, I think, be playful. And, like, you know, revel in it, at least some of the time.

Revel in the, like, I'm a God in my own private universe. I can, anything I say goes, I can have everybody be like nine feet tall and bright pink if I want. And nobody can tell me that that's not okay. And just, you know, have fun with it. And, like, you know, there will be horrible, painful, awful parts. but there should also be parts where you're just having fun playing and inventing stuff. And the other piece of advice I always give to beginning writers is find ways to make it communal, find a writing group, find people to read your work to, share your work online,

go on Instagram live and read your stuff that you've just written, go on YouTube and post YouTube videos, go on Watpad or Scribdi, or I'm not sure if it's Scribdi or Scribdi, but, you know, go online, share your stuff with people. if we ever start gathering in the real world, gather in the real world and share your stuff with people, go to open mic nights, go to writing workshops, have a group of peers that you talk to and you commiserate with.

Find community because writing doesn't have to be this terrible solitary, like, lonesome thing. It can be a thing that is a shared experience. And that's often a much better way to go about it. Just so you know, all the advice you just gave to writers works equally well for theoretical physicists. So it might be much more general than you expected.

Wait, theoretical physicists are a god in their own private universe? Oh, yes. Of course. You're inventing the laws of physics. Come on. What do you mean? It should be the most fun thing you could possibly do. All right, Charlie Jane Anders, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

It's a lot of fun. Yay, thanks for having me. This was a blast.