How do you use language and scale to focus your writing? Today, we think about scale and movement across vast spaces. What do characters’ movements tell us about empires and also—force? We talk about Martine’s incredible work establishing an empire across time, not (just) space. We read aloud some of Martine’s writing, and try to understand exactly how they work, and what they’re doing to build the novel’s world. 

A refresher on why Worldbuilding is essential and some working definitions of how we want to talk about it. After the break, we discuss why we chose this book and highlight what it does well. As always in our close reading series, we distill each text’s elements into approachable steps for you to take in your own writing. 

Thing of the Week: 

Softboiled eggs in an instant pot: 1.5 cups of fridge-cold water. Add 2-6 eggs onto the little trey. Pressure cook for low on one minute, and then release the pressure after 90 seconds. Remove the eggs (use tongs!), and put them in a bowl of fridge-cold water for one minute. Now, try them! If thye’re too runny, then for your next bath, increase your wait time for pressure release by 5 seconds. If they’re too firm, reduce the wait time by five seconds. That one variable: how long you wait before releasing pressure, is the only one you need to worry about. (Does this resonate with our study of worldbuilding? Maybe? DM us on Instagram and tell us what the metaphor or analogy is for you! @writing_excuses ) 

Homework:

Take one of your works in progress, and write three paragraphs, each describing a different kind of scale: 

1. A scale of time

2. A scale of place/ space

3. Emotional scale (fear, joy, ambition, sadness)

Here’s a link to buy your copy of “A Memory Called Empire” if you haven’t already:

https://bookshop.org/lists/close-readings-season-19?

Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points: Scale! Space, time, action? Ceaseless. City-world. Glitter-pricked lights. Serenity. Expansion and compression. Arriving at Teixcalaan. Wear-resistant carpet. 

[Season 19, Episode 20]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

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

[Season 19, Episode 20]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Worldbuilding. Scale, How to Make Worlds Feel Big without Overwhelming the Reader.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[DongWon] Because you’re in a hurry.

[Howard] And we’re not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I’m DongWon.

[Dan] I’m Dan.

[Howard] And I’m Howard.

[Dan] Today, we’re going to talk about scale. Both establishing it and then maintaining it. I want to start this episode by reading a little bit of the prelude to A Memory Called Empire because she does such a wonderful job of establishing scale, just right from the very first sentence. Which is…

“In Teixcalaan, these things are ceaseless: star-charts and disembarkments.”

I love, in particular, that word ceaseless. The word endless would be accurate, sure. Space empires are huge, space itself is endless. But making it ceaseless tells us… Well, let me ask. What do you think that that word adds to this?

[DongWon] I also love the difference between ceaseless and unceasing.

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] Unceasing would be the more common one, but ceaseless implies endless and relentless, both.

[Dan] Yes.

[DongWon] It is not just that Teixcalaan is an infinite Empire. It is that it wills itself to that expansion. It is choosing to be unceasing by being ceaseless.

[Howard] Without using the phrase, it sets up the proposed conflict of irresistible force meets an immovable object.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] By saying, here, then, is what an irresistible force looks like.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing that it did for me is that it says people are moving around between stars constantly.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Disembarkments and star-charts. That this movement across vast spaces is… That, for me, gave me this… Really a sense of this… Oh, this is an Empire.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] This is an interstellar empire.

[Dan] For me, but this really does is it starts off by establishing a scale, not in space, but in time.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Dan] Not that this is an Empire that has no end, but that it never stops.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Which is very different. The travel is constant, the expansion is constant, everything is going to just keep going. Let me read the next sentence.

“Here is all of Teixcalaanli space spread out in holograph above the strategy table on the warship Ascension’s Red Harvest, five jump gates and two weeks sublight travel away from Teixcalaan’s city-planet capitol, about to turn around and come home.”

There’s so much scale in that sentence as well.

[DongWon] It’s [remarkable] how in 2 sentences, she has established the nature, tenor, and scope of this Empire. Right? We’ve all spent time on cruise ships. The word disembarkment I think fills us with a certain level of… Sense of fear and tedium. Right? That is also implied with that. We get a sense of bureaucracy. With this mention of a warship, we get a sense of how Teixcalaan is expanding its ceaseless borders.

[Mary Robinette] Holograph also gives us…

[DongWon] Holograph. Yep.

[Mary Robinette] Another layer of technology that is available to people.

[DongWon] Yeah. Then she says jump gate is a way of just we’re not going to talk about the technology…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Of interstellar travel. We are not interested in that. That’s not important to this book.

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] It’s a thing that get you from point A to point B.

[Howard] The thing that frightened me in that opening phrase was disembarkments are ceaseless. Embarkments weren’t…

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] The Empire is vomiting itself outward, and that’s the part… Sure, there’s some people coming back, but it’s…

[DongWon] Also, who’s disembarking? Right? Is it soldiers? Is it tourists? Is it bureaucrats?

[Howard] I imagined many of them were soldiers, but, yeah.

[DongWon] It asks all these questions so quickly.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah. Well, this is where, for me at least, we really start to get a sense of the scale of space.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Of physical space. Because it’s not just a jump gate. It’s five jump gates and then two weeks of sublight travel. We are out in the boondocks of this civilization.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] So far away from the city-planet capitol, which, again, the Coruscant idea. The entire planet is a city, that is the capitol of this Empire that has so many jump gates and still stretches at least two weeks sublight travel beyond the farthest jump gate.

[Howard] Part of what I love about A Memory Called Empire is that while the concept of city-planet is not new to the genre, Coruscant. I forget the name of the world at the center of the Foundation Empire.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Thinking that because you have read it before, you have read this would be a terrible mistake.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] A terrible, terrible mistake. I loved so much the discovery that this was the planet-city, the world city, the city-world done differently, done freshly. It was delicious.

[DongWon] She’s also leveraging those allusions. Right? She’s leveraging the fact that we’ve seen this before.

[Howard] Oh, yeah.

[DongWon] She doesn’t really explain what a city-world is, we’ve seen that on screen. Right? She doesn’t need to explain what a jump gate is. We know that. There’s such shorthand here that’s also very useful of establishing technology level, scope, all of these things.

[Dan] Yeah. So we’ve talked a little bit about the scale of time and the scale of space. We’ve hinted at every step about the… Like, you said, the tone, the tenor, of this particular civilization. So here’s the 3rd sentence of the book, which I think just brings everything home and really just hammers that nail in to demonstrate the scale of their ambition. Which is…

“The holograph is a cartographic version of serenity: all these glitter-pricked lights are planetary systems, and all of them are ours.”

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. It’s… The ownership of that. Also, glitter-pricked is such a specific phrase that says these are decorative baubles on the vastness of this Empire.

[Dan] Yeah. Well, the word serenity as well. That’s when you are viewing it from this far away, when you’re looking at it as a map or as a holograph, then, sure, it is serenity, it is the Pax Imperium. We don’t concern ourselves with the process of conquering or of colonization or of resolution or of maintaining the peace. Because that’s going to happen somewhere far away on a glitter-pricked light.

[DongWon] What does it mean for a warship, called Ascension’s Red Harvest, to think of serenity? What has…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] That ship done, or represent, to achieve the serenity that you can have when you’re at that scale? Right? Empires get to think about serenity because they have already ruled over anything that looked like opposition. They… The scale affords a bias of treating people like they are simple.

[Howard] It is a little bit like eating hamburgers and fried chicken regularly and never having visited a butcher.

[DongWon] Exactly. What I love is from this section, what we’re immediately going to do is zoom into Lsel Station.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] There is this concept in architectural interior design. Frank Lloyd Wright was very famous for this, of expansion and compression. Right? You go from a large space, you compress someone into a narrow hallway, and then you let them emerge into a big open space. Right? So, when you walk into a Frank Lloyd Wright building, you will often be like, “What is up with this hallway? Why is it so narrow? And why is it so short?” The idea is that he was forcing you into a small space so that when you came out again on the other side, you would be in awe of how open and beautiful this common space that he made was. That effect is very much here in this book. I mean, Arkady’s also studied urban planning and architecture, and I think that shows even in the narrative structure of moving us from this massive scale on this opening sentence, then we’re going to go into a constrained space station as they are under pressure trying to figure out what to do about this demand from Empire before we return to Teixcalaan.

[Mary Robinette] The… So I’m just going to read the introduction of Lsel Station because I think, again, that that contrast is really amazing.

“In Parzrawantlik Sector lies Lsel Station: one fragile turning jewel, a toroid twenty miles in diameter rotating around a central spoke, hanging in the balance point between a handy sun and its nearest useful planet.” 

This is just one fragile turning jewel, so linking it back to that star chart, the glitter specks, but also twenty miles…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, we know how small that is. Also, I thought in my own brain about the deliberateness of using imperial measurements at that point. Twenty miles in diameter. Then, the other piece that caught me in this sector… In this section, was not just that, but also the difference in the way that the captain of the ship is introduced versus… The 4th sentence of the introduction… “This scene – some captain staring out at the holographic reproduction of Empire” and then she says “a hundred such captains, a hundred such holographs.” So, like, saying this person is not important, this person is just a wheel… A piece in the cog. But, right after we get introduced to this small toroid, this tiny, tiny thing, we get, “A shuttle spits itself from the station’s spoke, travels a few hours distance to the waiting gold-and-gray metallic hulk of the warship, deposits its cargo – one human woman, some luggage, some instructions – and comes back again unharmed.” That’s when you’re like, okay, this one human woman is the person who’s going to be important. That narrowing down, the coming in, the way we are using language in scale to focus us on this person versus a hundred captains. It’s such a beautiful, beautiful use of scale to tell us what’s important.

[Dan] Yeah. I want to talk more about that technique of narrowing scale in the first chapter. But, first, we are going to pause and take a little break.

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[Howard] It’s recipe time. I love soft-boiled eggs, but I struggle to get them perfect because there are so many variables in play. Recently, I discovered an Instant Pot trick that reduces that to just one variable. The recipe goes like this. Put 1 1/2 cups of fridge cold water in the Instant Pot. Put 2 to 6 eggs from the refrigerator on the little tray. Pressure cook for low on one minute, and then release the pressure after 90 seconds. Remove the eggs. I use tongs because hot! And put them in a bowl of fridge cold water for one minute. Now, try them. If they’re too runny, then for your next batch, increase the wait time for pressure release by 5 seconds. If there to firm, reduce the wait time by 5 seconds. That one variable, how long you wait before releasing pressure is the only one you need worry about. So, after a couple of tries, you too will be making perfect soft-boiled eggs every time. Unless your refrigerator is really wobbly about temperature. I don’t have a fix for that.

[Dan] Hi. Welcome back. We’re talking about the scale of A Memory Called Empire. I want to take a look at chapter 1, if we can. The prelude showed the one human woman, which is Mahit, leaving a space station and coming to Teixcalaan city itself, the city-planet capitol. This whole… Well, maybe not the whole chapter, but a significant chunk of this is just her arriving. I want to talk about this in terms of scale because we get to see Teixcalaan in several different ways as she draws closer and closer to it. Which helps with the scale of a lot. The first thing is basically she gets… She’s in some kind of little drop pod, or landing transport, that leaves Ascension’s Red Harvest and then breaks atmosphere and starts coming down. Teixcalaan is described at this point in almost mythological terms. This is the way that we see it in our dreams, this is the way that it is presented in movies or in legendary stories. Then, the closer that she gets to it, we start to see it in different ways.

[Mary Robinette] The… Again, the thing that Arkady is doing in that section to demonstrate the difference between Mahit and the giant kind of grinding nature of the Empire. Like, when we talk about… When she’s… The tiny little shuttle thing that she’s in. Like, spits out, and she sees the giantness of the city. But then when she’s in process, we’ve got this whole section where… “There’s some business with the seed skiff, shunted into a long line of other such vessels, moving along a great conveyor until each one could be identified and come to its assigned gate.” That’s circling back to that thing about disembarkments from the very beginning, that this is a massive process that she’s just a seed almost that’s being spat into the Empire to try to take root.

[DongWon] Well, when you look at something like Star Wars, you don’t see a lot of this. Right? You don’t see bureaucracy. I think that’s why I like [Andor] was such an exciting show for a lot of us, because suddenly we were like, “Oh. It takes stuff to make an empire of this scale run.” So, right from the jump, Arkady is communicating to us one of the most important things about this world is military power, because we have Ascension’s Red Harvest, but maybe even more than that, how much of a pain in the ass it is to do anything in this world because of how many layers of bureaucracy it requires to view entire planets, entire systems, as these pinpricks of light.

[Howard] I was reminded of my first business trip to New York City, back when I was a tech guy. One of the guys I was with punched me in the kidney and said, “Dude. Stop looking up.” I’m like, “Why? It’s amazing.” He says, “You look like a tourist, and you’re marking us.” His concern was that by me just soaking up the magnificence of all these tall buildings, I was making myself a target potentially for pickpockets. I don’t know if he was right, but that phrase, “Stop doing that, it makes you look like a tourist,” came back to me when I thought of Mahit on Teixcalaan because there are things she is going to look at and be amazed by that everybody else is just taking for granted.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] the sky.

[DongWon] Yeah. She’s never seen the sky this color. Right? Going back to what Dan was saying about the way culture is part of this, right? Her appreciation of the apex of the poetry, of the history which we’re seeing in this sort of mythological tone approaching the city, we’re seeing it from her perspective, in that way, that is absolutely influencing how she experiences this, how she… There’s a poem later referenced that is just a poem about the buildings architecture of Teixcalaan that is something that is so resonant to her, that she’s heard all of these structures described in poetic verse that she’s memorized at some point. Right?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Well, also that moment with the… Where she’s describing all the things via poetry? It’s also like a 45 minute drive…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, again, you get this sense of, okay, so wait. This person has memorized a 45 minute… And hasn’t finished the poem…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That’s just…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, again, the sense of scale and what’s important, the values…

[Dan] Well, as befits Teixcalaanic culture, this kind of sense of being shocked at how beautiful it is is part of their propaganda. Let me read a little bit here. 

“The city appeared exactly as it was always described in Teixcalaanli documents and songs: the jewel at the heart of the Empire. Complete with atmospheric glow.

<That’s what looking at it is meant to make you think,> said her imago.”

That’s, yes, they have to wait in line to get in, but they have to wait in line here specifically so that they can be properly impressed by how amazing this city capitol is. Later… Let’s talk more about this narrowing thing. Because this is their first impression. Then they get closer down, and we start getting this linguistic description. The word for world and the word for city were the same, as was the word for Empire. Like, this is not just the city at the heart of the Empire, but in a very strong cultural sense, this is the whole point of everything.

[Howard] We’re going to come back to…

[Dan] This city is the Empire.

[Howard] We’re going to come back and really drill down on that during an upcoming episode.

[DongWon] But the way in which she’s using these tools to really communicate this huge scope and the specific are the same… I’m blanking on the term… Is it synchricity that… Where the small thing contains the entirety of the big thing? Right? In terms of a linguistic sense. It’s both syncricity and autonomy at the same time, which is the inverse. It’s all things are contained in this small thing. What she’s telling us, the audience, there in these moments as Mahit is descending to the planet, is this is going to be a book about the entire Empire. Also, we’re compressing into one location.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] We’re gonna stay here. That’s what everything about this opening is telling me is we’re not going to be bouncing from planet to planet. This is not an interplanetary adventure. This is a political novel that’s going to take place in one place. One of the interesting tensions about this book from an editorial perspective as I was working on on it and working with the editorial team on it is the balancing between the need for an exciting and driving plot in this very spy thriller way that much of the action unfolds and the primary concerns of the book which are these galactic scale issues. Right? So, again, the trick of compression is very important so that we understand that the individual action of the book, the murder at the center of this book, is going to be one that has galactic consequence. So, she’s using the worldbuilding to tell us, hey, here’s what’s important for the plot. I want you to start thinking about the scale of this Empire, so when we spend the next 5 chapters talking about how one guy died, you’re going to still be thinking about all the other stuff, too.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] As an aside, this is where Arkady threw down a gauntlet for every writer in the room, when she said the experience of looking at Teixcalaan is exactly as it is written in the poems.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] As a writer, I’m like, “Oh, God. If I could write a poem that did to you exactly what the experience did, I would have arrived as a writer.”

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That moment, I mean, for me, that set a very high bar and I realized, “Oh. The height of that bar is important later, isn’t it?”

[DongWon] This is such an interesting thing about scale and scope of a world that we don’t see that much in media, which is the use of storytelling and the use of pop-culture. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The way pop culture can communicate scale, and that’s something that she’s done here in a really interesting way.

[Dan] Yeah. I want to read one sentence where we make this switch that DongWon’s talking about, from galactic scope to kind of the human scope.

“The City had come closer: it filled up the horizon, a vast curve she was falling into.”

We have spent pages describing planets as tiny pinpricks of light, and now this one city is so big that is devouring her, is completely consuming her. She is… Now we’re getting that sense of the personal scale rather than the galactic scale.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Then she does this other thing that is an extremely important worldbuilding trick which is, after that, after we’ve done all of that, that she gets out of this ship and steps…

“She stepped onto the gate, and thus into Teixcalaan itself.

The skyport gate had an airy utilitarianism, constructed aware-resistant carpet and clearly marked signage between glass-and-steel-paneled walls.”

She takes all of this unfamiliar stuff, all of the strangeness, and says, “You recognize this experience.” By pinning that, dropping us, like all of this exciting awe and wonder, it’s like, this is still going to be a ride that is familiar to you. That… Also the juxtaposition between the awe and wear-resistant carpet, like, we know that so well.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It’s such a great job of establishing scope and then bringing it down into the… Here we go, now we’re into the business of the book.

[Dan] Well, just to really let you know, if you haven’t for some reason read this yet, the quote that I read in the quote that Mary Robinette read are 3 pages apart.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] Because there’s so much magnified detail going into every simple step of this process.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] What I love is, at that point, we’ve now reached the end of the first sentence, we’ve reached the disembarkation. Now, we’re off to the races. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So, again, this thing of big things contained in small things is reflected even in the structure and the rhythm of the writing. I think for our audience, this might be sounding a little overwhelming at this point because the techniques applied here are very advanced. Right? They… She is doing this at such a high level in such complex ways. But, hopefully, as we start to break it down, as we explain how different component’s of that work, you can start to see how you can pick and choose some techniques that might be able to be incorporated into your writing, or at least shift how your thinking about how do I do some of the things, how do I create this feeling that I have at the end of the first few pages of this book?

[Dan] All right. We are going to end here. I’m going to give you some homework. I want you to take a work in progress. Something that you’ve written or are writing, something you plan to write. Write 3 paragraphs. Each describing a different kind of scale. Give us a scale of time. A scale of place or space. And then some kind of emotional scale. Whether that is fear or joy or ambition or sadness, whatever it is. Give us a sense of those. Write those 3 paragraphs. That’s your homework.

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

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

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