Writing Excuses 20.21: The Lens of Context
Key points: Context, worldbuilding, and setting! How do you know what you really need for your story? What will my character interact with? What does the plot need? The 8 gems of Rohisla! Where do you want to create emotion or conflict? Tie worldbuilding to character conflict. Think about the cost of this piece of worldbuilding. Think about implications! In prose, suggesting a broader context is okay, but in gamewriting, people get irritated if there's nothing behind the door. For GM's, don't build more world than you need. Think about what the reader needs to tell the story in collaboration with you. What if you have a context, but no story? First, what can go wrong and who is affected by it? What were you interested in when you built that context? Try a mashup, borrow a character from somewhere else and shove them into this context. Play with unspoken or hidden context!
[Season 20, Episode 21]
[DongWon] Wouldn't it be so nice if you could outline your novel, organize your worldbuilding, write your book, format your ebook, and publish it on the same website? You're in luck. Camprie is the all-in-one platform for authors, offering both a full-featured writing software and KDP-style publishing, but with 80% royalties and none of the predatory practices you're stuck with with a few other competitors. Campfire's tools feature versatile panels that make creating characters as simple as moving notecards around a corkboard only much more organized, convenient, and without the inherent dangers of working with thumbtacks. Its wide range of tools include templates for creating settings, a magic system builder, and more. All of which are connected to a word processor that makes it easy to reference your notes as you write. When you're ready, publish your book on Campfire's e-book shop and include artwork, worldbuilding notes, short stories, and more for readers who want to explore your setting in more detail. Try Campfire today at campfirewriting.com and bring your book to life.
[Mary Robinette] This episode of…
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[Mary Robinette] Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Season 20, Episode 21]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] The lens of context.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
[Erin] And this is our first sort of episode now that we've introduced the lens of where and when. I thought the very… The very next thing we needed to do is actually talk about creating context in a story. And what I mean by this is that when you are worldbuilding, especially if you're doing science fiction and fantasy, you can create, like, so much world. You can create all the where's, all the when's, especially in science fiction and fantasy. So how do you figure out what the… How do you figure out, like, what actually is needed for your story? How do you use the world and the setting to create the context in which your story is going to succeed as opposed to sort of just everything you could possibly know about that setting?
[Mary Robinette] I tend to think about things that my character is going to interact with. So I tend to break things into details that are plot specific in that there is a plot event that's going to happen around it, there's a piece of worldbuilding, something is going to happen at the… With the gems of [Releasia?] So we actually really need to know what those gems are.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I love that it changes every time you say it.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I have no idea what you said [garbled]
[Howard] For context, in a previous episode, we created… And by we, I mean Erin…
[Laughter]
[Erin] The eight gems of Rohisla.
[Chorus: Rohisla!]
[Dan] How can you not remember the important…
[DongWon] That was like the 13 gems of Rho…
[Dan] Context?
[Laughter]
[Howard] Okay, you know what? Let's… I just want to talk about this for a moment, because as… From the standpoint of a humorist, I want to be able to tell jokes in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, where I'm not making fun of sci-fi or fantasy. And so what I establish is a context in which a thing is funny. The gems of Rohisla thing is making fun of the fact that we can't keep track of Erin's worldbuilding.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to write it down…
[Howard] And that's…
[Mary Robinette] So that I can remember it in the future.
[Howard] And the best example I can come up with is the one where… And I've used this in my humor classes… Where the puppeteer alien and the Kzin alien are talking about where human's sense of humor comes from. And the puppeteer is an herbivore, the Kzin is a carnivore, and the Kzin says, "I think that humor is an interrupted defense mechanism." And the puppeteer says, "Humans are insane. No sane creature would interrupt a defense mechanism." And knowing that the puppeteer is an herbivore just makes that funnier, because they're like sheep. Why would you interrupt a defense mechanism? But you have to have the context for that joke to play. And so, for me, the decision on building context is where do I want to be able to tell jokes. And that's… At one layer of obstruction up, where do I want to be able to create emotion? Where do I want to be able to create conflict? Where do I want to be able to create a platform that has no railings?
[DongWon] Ultimately, context only matters if it's giving context to something. Right? If you're just giving me context for the sake of having it, I'm not going to remember it. The reason we can't remember the eight gems of Revisla is that it's not tied to anything, other than the fact that we find this word funny for some reason. And it's… Which is why when I talk about how do you introduce worldbuilding, I always say to tie worldbuilding to character conflict. If a piece of information about how the world works is connected to something that the character wants, needs, or has at stakes, or is afraid of, then that is going to make it so that it's memorable. Right? And that can be as simple as children get report cards, when your eight-year-old MC goes home, there's going to be a report card waiting for him, and he doesn't want his parents to find out what it is. Now the piece of worldbuilding that's important and relevant, which is report cards, matters. Right? That could also be children are executed when they turned nine.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] That's going to be an important part of worldbuilding…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Unless they have all eight gems of Rohis…
[Laughter]
[Howard] They were report cards [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] They just sort them into the poop chute.
[DongWon] Exactly. But all I'm saying is that… I think [Steven Universe Show] does this incredibly well. Where you start with a very simple premise and end up at the end of that show with an incredibly massive space operatic level of worldbuilding and scope. And the way they get there is that at each element that they're introducing to that worldbuilding, they're tying it to a very specific character in their conflict.
[Mary Robinette] And one of the problems that I think writers run into is figuring out what pieces they're actually going to need. And, for me, it comes down to the cost of it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] How many words am I going to have to spend on it to make the reader understand it? For instance, you all do not need, in order to understand this podcast, you all do not need to know that we are sitting in a hotel room. You don't need to know the order that we are sitting, which chair type people are, that Marshall stands when he is engineering and looks like a DJ. Actually, you do need to know it, it's pretty awesome. You don't need to know any of that to understand, but sometimes we get so excited because we thought these things through that we will put them down on the page, forgetting that it doesn't actually carry any story burden.
[Howard] And worse still, we put these things down on the page, forgetting that any context that is co-… That is made up of information that could be in any way relevant is going to suggest… Is going to have implications. Things that can grow out of it. I think of… And the books and the movies did just fine, so it's okay for me to complain… Hunger Games. The idea that a Battle Royale has become a central societal point post some sort of apocalypse suggests a huge measure of historical worldbuilding that I was never satisfied with the presentation of. And so the story fell apart for me. And I'm not saying that these stories are bad, because clearly they did just fine. But as a writer, I try to make sure that I'm not going to put anything into the context that I have to explain away later because it suggests something that makes my story hard to grab.
[Erin] This actually reminds me of something I learned when I was moving between prose and game writing. So, a lot of times in a short story especially, if you want to make your world feel like it has more depth, you will… You can include detail that suggests a broader context than this story has time for. So you could say, like, we met while searching for the eight gems of Rohisla, and you're not… That's not what the story is about, and it gives… And the context that matters is, like, this is my relationship with the character. So you've provided a relationship context, but not a world context. And yet, knowing it, makes you feel like there's a bigger world out there. In game writing, if you do that, people'd be like, in our next mission, we should go collect those gems, and, like, you have not written anything…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] For the GM, or if it's a videogame, like, there's nothing behind that door. And so then, players get frustrated, because there like, why did you create a context that I can't explore?
[Howard] You now need help from the eight GM's of Rohisla.
[Erin] Oh, wow.
[Howard] Oh… [Garbled]
[laughter]
[Erin] But I think that that's something that, like, even in fiction, you can do. It's like you really have to be careful, like…
[Yeah]
[Erin] You don't want it to make it seem like the more interesting story is happening outside of the page that the reader is being forced to follow.
[DongWon] A piece of advice that I give to new GM's is don't build more world than you need. Right? And, like, if I am starting a new campaign setting, if none of my characters are playing a paladin or a [garbled] or somebody who intersects with religion, I'm not writing down what that pantheon is. I'm not going to sit here spending six hours making up 12 gods for this world if nobody here is religious. You know what I mean? And it's just like religion isn't a major component of the story. We don't need to know all the details of it. We can be pretty vague about it. And then, when you stumble into a situation that requires that, that's when you build it out. Right? And so a little bit of, like, a… You build the track right ahead of the train. Right? You're building it as you cross. And you don't need to have every single piece of this imagined out… Maybe have some idea of where that might be going. But think about, what are your characters interested in? Right? If you have somebody who is a merchant, then, yes, you're going to need to understand the economics of it. If your characters are children, no, you don't need to understand where the grain is being shipped from. You know what I mean?
[Howard] You brushed up against here the concept of just-in-time manufacturing, which became a huge market force in the 30 years leading up to the pandemic of 2020. At which point, we broke enough supply chains that everybody looked at just-in-time manufacturing and said, oh, no. This doesn't work anymore. And I loved how, as somebody who world builds, I was able to look at something that seemed very sensible and suddenly see circumstances in which it completely fell apart, because now I understood, in a way I just hadn't understood before, the way things are inextricably related.
[Mary Robinette] You'll hear a lot of times people talking about worldbuilding as there's an iceberg, but you only need the tip of the iceberg. And then there's an implication that you actually need to build the entire iceberg. For me, it's like if I am telling a story in which Titanic runs into the iceberg, yeah, I need to know that there's this mass under there. But if I'm telling a story about some fishermen who are going nowhere near the iceberg, I don't need to know it's there. When I was building puppets, I would build the armature that needed to be in underneath in order to hold their clothes up. That I would have where their bodies were… Like, the joints would be in the right place. Everything that caused the puppet to move in a way that was believable. But I wouldn't build the muscles, because they… The audience would never see them. They were not anatomically correct, except sometimes, when I was trolling on another puppeteer…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] There, it had a point. Right?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It had a purpose. So, for me, what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about it is where do I want to put the effort, but where also do I want the reader to put the effort. Because the reason you don't have puppets be anatomically correct and you try to eliminate all of that stuff is every piece of that adds weight that then the puppeteer has to carry. And because your reader is actively building that story with you, every piece of context that you give them gives them a narrative weight that they have to carry. It's a memory that they have to hold onto. So if you use the context to direct their attention, to give them the tools to tell the story that you want to tell, to tell that in collaboration with you, you're going to have, I think, a more successful story. Do you need to know how things move? Yes, if it's in relation to something else.
[Howard] When I look at Fawzi bear, I think of him as being fluffy all the way through. I don't think of your hand in him. I just think… I mean, the surface of Fawzi bear, the way he moves… He's a big fluffy bear. And so the piece that you didn't build, because you couldn't, because there's no room for your hand, is a piece that I go ahead and imagine for you.
[Erin] And on that beautiful metaphor, we're going to take a short break.
[DongWon] Wouldn't it be so nice if you could outline your novel, organize your worldbuilding, write your book, format your ebook, and publish it on the same website? You're in luck. Camprie is the all-in-one platform for authors, offering both a full-featured writing software and KDP-style publishing, but with 80% royalties and none of the predatory practices you're stuck with with a few other competitors. Campfire's tools feature versatile panels that make creating characters as simple as moving notecards around a corkboard only much more organized, convenient, and without the inherent dangers of working with thumbtacks. Its wide range of tools include templates for creating settings, a magic system builder, and more. All of which are connected to a word processor that makes it easy to reference your notes as you write. When you're ready, publish your book on Campfire's e-book shop and include artwork, worldbuilding notes, short stories, and more for readers who want to explore your setting in more detail. Try Campfire today at campfirewriting.com and bring your book to life.
[Erin] So the question that I have, now that we're back, is, we've sort of been presuming in our first half that you know the story that you want to tell, and you can then shape the context around that story. What if you've just been worldbuilding in worldbuilding and worldbuilding and you've got all context, and you're not sure, like, where the story is in there? Are there any tools that you can use to actually figure out how to use that context as a lens and not just a landscape?
[Mary Robinette] I have a worksheet we've shared with readers before that I will use when I find myself in this position. It hasn't happened to me a lot, but every now and then, I have an idea and I have the world for it, but I have no idea what the story is. Because most of the time, I do have a character in mind. So I go through an exercise to figure out what kind of things that can go wrong and who can be affected by it. So I will list a list of 20 people who can be in that world, looking at the socio-economic spectrum. I will look at power structures. I will look for those things to look for where things can hurt. Which is not that every story has to be about pain and hurt, but that is usually a place to find a stake and defined someone who has a reason to want to change something. Whether it is something about themselves or something about the larger world. So those are things that I will look for is who has a reason to activate and…
[Howard] Just asking the question is often enough to end up with a character or an entire story. When I look at a magic system or a technology system, one of the first questions I ask is if it's valuable, can it be stolen, can it be smuggled, can it be counterfeited? Just asking the question is enough that suddenly a whole smuggling ring pops into my head, and now I have a story. A whole counterfeiting ring, and now I have a heist or whatever. So, asking the questions about, as Mary Robinette said, asking about the pain points is often the easiest starting point.
[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, one place to start… I think this is kind of tying into what Mary Robinette's saying, is take a look at the worldbuilding you've created. If you've done a ton of worldbuilding, you've done a lot of creating that context, and you're looking for a story to have that context within, then you can look… What you're looking for is what are you interested in. What you're looking for is why am I writing this story? And you will have focused on different parts of the worldbuilding over others. Say you are focused on the religion and spirituality of this world. Say you're focused on the history and mythology, the prophecies, the economics, the technology. Whatever those things are, figure out which one you were drawn to and build on that. Right? Like, this can be Mistborn's magic system. This can be the history and poetry of Lord of the Rings. This can be the Galactic politics of Star Trek. Right? Each of these are pulling the audience, and pulling you, as the creator, in different directions. And that can give you a starting point of what do you want to have your characters interacting with.
[Mary Robinette] I sometimes will… When I'm having trouble with this kind of thing, one of the other things that I'll do is the mashup. Where I'm like, okay, here's this context that's really interesting, this world. What happens if I remove a character from another context and drop them into this one? This is essentially fanfiction, which I think is a glorious thing. But this is a way to have your fanfiction jollies and still get paid for it. Which is that you take a character that you love from another world, you drop them into this context. They're gonna change because of the new context. Obviously, you're going to rename them, but the social circles that they have, all of those things, how do they react? How are they moving through this world? Sometimes I will… Sometimes it's not from another piece of IP, it's… I have this character that has come into my head that I haven't been able to find the world for them, and I just shove them into this context to see kind of… Thought experiment about what happens. And often the contrasts between the two will give me opportunities that I wouldn't have had when I was just, like, single-handedly… Or single-mindedly focused on one thing.
[Erin] Yeah. I think a lot of times… I've been thinking about this in a slightly different way, because of the game writing I've been doing, which is that, while you don't want to create contexts that, like, lead the person down the wrong path, creating game hooks when you are creating a setting is a big thing that people do in tabletops. So you'll write about a world and you'll create little pieces, like little bits of discontent, little pieces of things that the GM can, like, use if they want to, then create a whole story in a place that you haven't written it for them, you've just suggested it. I think of those as, like, the but-also's. Like, if you describe a great place, there's always somebody who'd be like, oh, but also… Like, oh, have you thought about that? Or think about, like, who in your setting would write the Twitter thread that's like…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Hold on to your butts. You think that, like, X thing is great? Like, about this context? Like, here's 15 things that are horrific. Like…
[DongWon] [garbled] Twitter? It's just a horrifying thing to introduce.
[Laughter]
[Howard] You know what? Coming back to the eight gems of Rohisla, you put them into your game, and then in the little sidebar for game hooks, it says, "Actually, six of the gems of Rohisla are genuine and two of them are counterfeits." And now we know that there's a story here that the players might be able to interact with.
[Mary Robinette] There's another thing that I think is kind of fun to play with, which is unspoken context. Where you, the writer, are aware of something and it is affecting the way you move… Everything happens in the story, but you don't necessarily need the reader to know it. For instance, when we recorded these episodes, we recorded them out of sequence. So the episode that you just listen to, we made a ton of jokes about poop chutes. But we were recording it on Navigator of the Seas and DongWon was not with us. In our timeline, the thing that we just recorded was an episode that you heard weeks ago about the eight gems of Rohisla, and we're all present for that. So it's shaping the way we are moving through. So sometimes it can be fun, actually, to have that little piece of that iceberg, you don't need the whole iceberg there, but just a little piece of the iceberg that is affecting the way characters interact with each other. And it's not that you have to make sure that the reader understands it. Like, I did not need to pause and explain this, you would have been fine without that. But it does affect the story. And so sometimes I will play with that. Like, offstage, these two were totally getting it on, and it's affecting small things, but I don't need the reader to understand it. I don't need to do a side quest to go watch the sexy fun time scene.
[Erin] Well, that is fun.
[Mary Robinette] It is.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I do think it's delightful that our context episode is the one riddled with inside jokes.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Dan] We didn't do this on purpose.
[DongWon] Half of them, I'm not getting, because I missed the cruise.
[Mary Robinette] There's a whole thing about trees and poop chutes and Legolas, like, scooping poop at the bottom, because that's where all his… It's…
[DongWon] Okay.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] All right.
[Erin] [garbled] context.
[DongWon] Without this context, actually.
[Erin] It gets away from us. It's time to give homework and move onto a new one.
[Erin] So, now we have the homework for you, which is, I'd like you to take a context, some piece of worldbuilding that you've done, and come up with three different narratives that you could write that use that context. Then, separately, I want you to take a narrative that you've written and come up with three new contexts in which that narrative would succeed.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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