In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using The Emperor to guide their discussion. They discuss the different tips and tricks they use to create rich societies and governments in their writing.
Question of the week: What’s an aspect that you focus on to develop your governments and societies? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story by Houston Howard
Transcript
Crys: Hello friends and welcome to the Write Away Podcast Episode 89. It is March 31st, 2022 as we are recording. I’m Crys Cain with my cohost…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
Crys: How’s your writing week been, JP?
JP: Yes. It has been good. So I think the last time we were talking, I was in the middle of doing edits for a client. And I got that done, and that had taken up time, as well as another project that I really wanted to focus on to get those out the door and be as good as possible.
Now I’m back in edit mode for the short story that we’re working on as a reader magnet. And there was an interesting thing I realized a couple of days ago because I was really stuck on a scene. It wasn’t that there was anything inherently wrong with the scene, it’s just that it wasn’t flowing the right way.
And I was getting really frustrated with it, and being the one doing the edits, I usually just rework what’s there. But I was looking at it and I’m like, what is there is just not doing it for me. And I’m like, I’m stuck. So I opened a different word document and I was just like, okay, JP, what’s wrong? What do you need this scene to convey?
And it was just straight up telling. It was just like, blah, blah, blah, this is what I want in the scene. And then I wrote the scene the way that I envisioned it. It’s funny because it’s very close to the original scene, but it was almost as if like I just needed to get away from what was physically written there and rework it. And in this case, it’s a co-written piece, but I think I’ve even done that before with written pieces. And it was just a technique I hadn’t thought of doing, and I realized it works really well.
Crys: Super interesting. Yeah. I’m trying to think of like a correlation to another art, but other than starting from scratch, there’s really no other correlation really. I know this is good, but it’s not quite right so I’m going to go redo it over here and then come back and make the adjustments. I was like trying to think if there is painting techniques equivalent to that. I don’t know of one.
JP: I’ve done it before too where I’ll sketch out an idea on a post-it note because I have problems. But then I’ll use a different medium to make the final piece or whatever because obviously you’re not going to do the final piece on a post-it note. But it was almost that sense where I couldn’t use the medium or what was there, I had to look at something blank and re envision it.
Crys: Yeah, I do that for first drafting, but I’ve not done it for editing.
JP: Yeah, so that was interesting. But yeah, otherwise been a good week.
Crys: I lost a couple of days to a tension migraine from sitting terribly because I haven’t sat at my desk for three weeks. I was just really super fucking angry at my keyboard because the space bar was half broken and so subconsciously I was avoiding my desk. And it’s an external Bluetooth keyboard, so I tossed it. And I have a spare, I have a better one coming. So now I can sit at my desk. So that’s exciting.
I also managed to get about 1500 words done on a queer lighthearted fantasy that I’ve started as a way to take a breather from the big epic that I’ve been trying to work on. I realized that for a lot of my writing, I need a very good grasp of the beginning and end of the story. The middle can be muddy, that’s fine. But I need a very clear grasp on the beginning and ending, or at least the ending so I can figure out the beginning. And with the epic, I have thought that I had that, but it hasn’t been right. And so I’ve been struggling with that.
I had a really great conversation with a friend of ours, Alicia McCalla, this week. And she asked some really great questions that I think has shifted it in a better direction. But regardless, I’ve been taking a break with this lighthearted queer fantasy that could even function as a standalone, which I have never intentionally written before in my life. So that’s exciting. And that’s just been fun to know this book has an end. I know where this end is.
JP: Yeah. I totally get that because I have some of those projects where it’s just like, I need to look over here, I need to do this for just a little bit, feel a little comfort over here. You just let that other ones stew.
Crys: Of course, the moment, like I did put my full attention on the shorter lighthearted project, all of the ideas start popping up for that bigger project. And I’m like, I had just relegated you to the side table for a month or so, please calm down.
No, don’t calm down. Bring all the ideas.
JP: You did mention Alicia, and I wanted to just give her a quick shout out because she saved our butts on The Serial Fiction Show. We had a narrator ghost us and she was willing to do a narration for us. I think the episodes already come out. And it was phenomenal. It was excellent. So if anyone needs a narrator, Alicia McCalla.
Crys: Absolutely. All right. So for our question this week, our card that’s leading us is The Emperor. Would you mind giving us a description?
JP: Absolutely. The Emperor comes right after The Empress, so he’s like the father archetype sitting on a large throne in most of the older styles. And he has a suit of armor that he wears underneath red robes, red robes indicating power, et cetera. Very much a protective, defending your loved ones, the rock in which you rely on for stability and security.
Some keywords for him would be authority, power, fatherly. And then in reverse if you can imagine what would be the opposite effects of those, it would be controlled, domination, rigidity. So that fatherly that’s a little overbearing. But that’s pretty much what The Emperor stands for.
Crys: And the question we have for our writing topic is: how do we create rich societies and governments within our speculative fiction? So fantasy, sci-fi, paranormal, all that good stuff. Now with what you’re working on with Abe, you guys have a secret society. So it’s our world, but there’s this whole unknown group with levels of power and secrecy. How did you guys come up with that?
JP: So when we were talking about the weird fantastical things that interjoin us and what our interests are, we fell on the Kabbalah, which that’s where our magic system relies on. And then I don’t know how this came up, but our system then fell along the lines of like a chess board and utilizing the titles, pawn, knight, bishop, et cetera, using those as levels of hierarchy and deciding like who has the right to do what and all of these other rules. But it was very much along the lines of the pieces of a chess board.
I think that’s partly because we wanted this society to function as if it is playing a game, if that makes sense. And so that’s probably why we fell on chess so quickly. But that’s how we approached it as we just thought of basically two things, Kabbalah and chess, and was like, how would this work? And that’s what happened.
Crys: I love that.
In my fantasy I tend to, not urban fantasy but like more the traditional fantasy, I tend to lean more on monarchies as my governmental structure. And part of that is I’m really fascinated with the effects of growing up knowing that you have responsibilities and also believing that there are rights that come along with those responsibilities. I’m fascinated with that.
But societally as an immigrant, I’m fascinated with how immigration plays out in different countries. So in my big epic fantasy, immigrants are a huge part of my community and figuring out how they fit into society, especially in a Royal monarchy society. And one of the lower princesses has a lot of immigrant friends. How do they fit in? How do they not fit in? Where are they accepted?
So one of the things I like to do is look at who are the outsiders in any society or governmental structure because I find that they’re going to have some of the most interesting stories. Why are they outsiders? How does that affect the government?
With the fantasy as well, one of the things that drives my different countries is many of them operate from different religions and magical uses. So the country that my first character moves to is very rigid, books, rules-based magic. While she’s an intrinsic mage, which is more along the lines of elemental and more emotions and communication-based magic. And that affects how their cultures and societies work as well. Within her culture they have this belief that spirits that are in everything, very animistic, that they talk to and that they respect. And the culture that she moves to is much more rules-based, logic as in two plus two equals four. And that affects how those societies work.
JP: Yeah, I think that’s actually really interesting cause you have the rules-based versus this more spiritual side. And when I was looking into how cultures develop and how we can utilize that in our writing, it really came down to one big question, which is what do they value?
And even when you think about in the real world, maybe not so much now because we’re so intertwined, but if you were to think 50 years back or a hundred years back, it would appear that in Western culture, truth is more valued, and in Eastern culture, honor is more valued. And those have different aspects of how you interact within that culture.
And I think that you can utilize that question to ask what do they value and how does that interact? And also where they’re physically located. Is it a place where they have a ton of wheat? They probably value wheat, but they probably don’t value their farmers because anyone can be a farmer and anyone can get wheat. But then do they value their merchants because they’re the ones getting all the money? And what does that look like?
And so I think thinking about those questions and maybe utilizing that like, “what do they value” is probably the best way to derive these cultural aspects of your world. Or however it is, a fantasy world, or even if it’s steeped in the actual world.
Crys: A really nerdy way that I like to come at that question is: where does their money come from? And you hinted at that. But when you ask, where does this society’s money come from, you do start defining their values. So if we were to say the U.S.’s money comes from retail, and it comes from services, it comes from entrepreneurship, like it’s capitalism, right? But if we were to say, well, technically the people in Norwegian countries get their money the same way from all those things, but they don’t spend as much time getting it. And if you start just talking around it, then you start like placing the importance that money has in that society, who has it, who wants it. And you start seeing what those layers of society are.
JP: Yeah, definitely. And I think it’s funny, you were talking about how you seem to like monarchies in yours. And I almost think that I like some type of hybrid with like theocracy because I love adding that little religious aspect to it. And I think even in our urban fantasy, if you think about the hierarchy, it’s the more access someone has to this, it’s basically like a being or an energy or whatever you want to call it, the higher on the ranking they are, as if they’re more like holier than others or whatever you want to say. And so it becomes a very theocratic society, especially when the top one is meant to be the embodiment of it. And so it’s funny because I think that’s a direction I like to explore.
Crys: Normally my villains are theocrats.
JP: Nice. I think part of it is I really love exploring world religions and just different ideologies. I almost minored in religious studies, if I wasn’t trapped in the science building. Which I’m fine with, I was happy with doing. But I think that that’s why I like exploring that concept.
Crys: Yeah. Yeah. I have piles of religious trauma. But I think that extreme beliefs tend to go along with villainry really well. And I do have religion like built into my societies because that is something that just tends to pop up historically. I love exploring like the different levels that people have attached. Like will I do this because it’s my culture and that’s what we do, like there’s no strong feelings about it, but that’s what we do. Others who reject it, others who fully embrace it, I do love exploring that.
JP: Definitely, a hundred percent. And I know that this applies to every type of writing. We’re obviously going to talk about more fantasy, more of that kind of realm, but even in contemporary fiction, wherever you place your characters, there is some type of society there. Now, if it is where you grew up, you know that society, you’re not going to think about those kinds of things. You’re not going to think about what that government looks like. You’re not going to think about what the cultural aspects of that world are because that’s what you’ve grown up in. If you start writing in these other places, this is always something that you should consider is how are they slightly different than maybe what you know?
I know that in social studies there’s the acronym, SPRITE. It’s social, political, religious, intellectual, technological, and economic. I don’t know if that would help anyone, but you ask yourself those questions as to within that era and that location. What are these aspects? How does that impact a person or how does that impact that government or that society as a whole? And I think that’s also important because you can get across culture regardless of what you’re writing in.
Crys: Yeah. Before we wrap up, I do want to call up one of our favorite books for folks who want to create societies that give them a lot of room to tell a lot of stories, and that’s You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story. We’ve referenced that a few times, more than a few times. It’s a chunker, you can only get it in paperback. And I think it’s too overwhelming for most beginning writers, but it is definitely a reference. I think if you were writing fantasy, sci-fi, or like anything that you want to tell like 50 – 100+ stories in one single world, this is a book for you.
JP: Yeah. Sorry, I’m going to keep rambling.
Even in romance, if you continue on with the series, usually it’s that town that has the anchor point. And giving that town breath and life and whatever that culture whatnot is, I think you can pull that from You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story. And I think that keeping these kinds of questions in mind is a way to make your story unique.
Crys: For our listeners, my question is: what’s an aspect that you focus on to develop your governments and societies?
JP: Yeah. I’d love to hear it.
Crys: All right. We are about to go record our Patreon episode, and our business question this week is about putting too much emphasis on your business and what that looks like, and how you can calm the F down. So if you’d like to hear that you can come on over to our Patreon.
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