Coming to you “live” from CONduit, Writing Excuses is pleased to welcome fantasy superstar L.E. Modesitt (plus a slightly different Howard, by which we mean that Howard was out of town and replaced by Dan’s brother Rob).

Our topic for this episode is “practicality,” which is another way of saying “fantasy and science fiction may be unrealistic, but they should still be plausible within your definition of reality.” In other words, if you have an army of 1000 armored knights, you’d better have an economy and political system capable of producing and supporting them.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Imager by L.E. Modesitt, Jr., about a mage so powerful anything he thinks can become reality.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points: Practical fantasy — think it through. Is it humanly feasible? Beware of societies without visible means of support — i.e. no trade, no value? Watch out for dumb villains. Five gold coins for a dagger means daggers are worth more than gold? Think about value, don’t just borrow from the video games. Watch for cities in the desert — without water, agriculture, or other support? Beware the one-climate planet! Avoid techno-porn, gadgets without social infrastructure. Write what you know, or can research, or can check with an expert. Who makes it, who uses it, and how do they trade for it? Use bad tropes as writing exercises — how could this happen? Why?

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses season four episode 21, I think. We are live at CONduit without producer Jordo and without Howard, but we have several guest stars so we are going to go ahead and launch into it. Dan, tagline us.
[Dan] 15 minutes long because you’re in a hurry, and we’re not that smart.
[Brandon] Oh. I thought you were going to make Rob say it. We have Rob Wells.
[Dan] I didn’t think he’d be able to.
[Brandon] Rob Wells is actually pretending to be Howard, so he’ll answer to Howard, right, Howard?
[Rob] Sure.
[Brandon] Rob Wells is Dan’s brother, and also a fine writer in his own right. But we also have a very special guest star. L. E. Modesitt… er, I said it wrong. L. E. Modesitt, Jr. Hi, Lee.
[Lee] Hi, Brandon.

[Brandon] Lee is going to be sitting in with us today. Our podcast topic today is actually going to be one that Lee suggested which is the practicality… writing practical fantasy. What do you mean by that, Lee?
[Lee] What I meant was… it’s actually the reason I got into writing fantasy as opposed to science fiction. I got really ticked off many, many years ago when I read a fantasy that had 10,000 armed knights running around on each side. Because being an economist, and having been trained in semi-practical stuff, I realized that when it takes 12 hundred acres to support one armed knight, you don’t have a country that you can hold together with horses if you’ve got 10,000 on each side of a war. And likewise, I always wonder about all these people running off on crusades with no money. The only time that ever happened in history was the Children’s Crusade and they all got killed or enslaved. Yet these were fantasy tropes that people were using. I thought, “You know, in this writing business, you really ought to stick close to at least some what I would call human practicality — the way people actually operate if they’re at all human.”

[Brandon] Okay. Let’s try and delve into a few big fantasy cliches in this area. I don’t want to say… cliche is the wrong word. Big problems with fantasy that you see a lot. Lee, what are the big ones?
[Lee] Well, I think the big one is that people don’t understand economics. Basically, everything in human society or any kind of advanced society requires some form of trade, and it’s got to be paid for. If everybody does magic, it has… shall we say… no economic value. Second, another trope that… it’s not economic, but it is resorted to far too often, is the dumb villain. I mean, if somebody is a powerful villain that’s going to be really a challenge to your hero, they’re not going to be dumb. They may have a different set of values, but they’re not going to be stupid.

[Brandon] Dan or Rob, have you had any of these that you’ve seen that really bug you?
[Dan] I think one of the ones that’s becoming really, because of role-playing games and video games is misunderstanding the movement of money. Like he said, with economics. If you actually do have a society where it costs five gold coins to buy a dagger, then that means that steel is more valuable than gold, and you have probably just screwed up your economy. Video games have to do that, because they need some system of showing money. You shouldn’t do that in writing. You need to actually figure out how much would it cost… you don’t necessarily have to go that deep, but make sure that you don’t have these kind of wildly ridiculous imbalances.
[Brandon] Okay. Rob, anything? Er, Howard?
[Rob] Luxury! [laughter in the background] I just read a book not too long ago that this bothered me a lot in. It was kind of a similar situation to what Lee was talking about with the economics of it. It was an area where they described… I mean, we knew how many people lived there, and we knew generally the size of it, and it was very small, and yet we were believing that these people were growing their own food. It just didn’t make any sense.

[Lee] I thought of another one.
[Brandon] Okay, go for it, Lee.
[Lee] The city in the desert. No water supply, no fields, no agriculture, but you’ve got this enormous cosmopolitan city in the middle of the desert. Often there is even no magic to rationalize it by. What do they eat? Where does it come from? How do they stay alive?
[Dan] On that note, going into science fiction, you have the ecological problem where one planet is one single terrain type. The ice planet, the desert planet, the jungle planet. Dune, I think, is the only book that’s ever made that work, because he spent half the book giving it a solid scientific grounding. Other than that, it’s just not a feasible way for a planet to function.

[Lee] Okay. Let’s take off on that in a different sense. There’s what I call techno-porn.
[Brandon] Be careful, we have a PG rating.
[Lee] Well, I techno-porn I mean a love in science fiction of a technological gadget or sets of gadgets that would never actually be implemented. I’ll give a historical example of this. At the 1939 World’s Fair, they projected that we’d all have helicopters and commute to work by the 1960s. Can you imagine 5 million personal helicopters converging on New York City?
[Dan] Wait. You guys don’t have your own helicopter?
[Brandon] Mine’s parked out back.
[Lee] Yeah, it’s technologically feasible. You could build those 5 million helicopters. But you wouldn’t have the air control system to operate it, and people couldn’t afford them. But it’s technologically feasible. This is what I call techno-porn. If you’re going to write about a technology, you have to figure out, is it going to fit in the society that you’re actually contemplating? Who’s going to pay for it? Who’s going to build it? Why would anybody use it?

[Brandon] One I’ve heard a lot, which actually scared me a time when I was beginning to write, was all of the horse people complaining that authors who write horses in fantasy don’t know what they’re talking about. With this… horses in particular, there are still a lot of people who have horses, or ride horses, who know about horses. Most of your readers… this is not a reason to not get it right, but most of your readers are not going to be economists like Lee is, and they may not notice these things. The horses are going to get noticed. Which is why there are so few horses in my books. No, really.

In writing, we have an old adage. It goes, write what you know. Usually this is being used to refer to realistic fiction saying write stories from your life or places that you lived or things that you did. I always thought, “Well, this doesn’t apply to me, this is complete bunk because I write fantasy. What do I know? No one knows what this is, no one has lived in these places, I have to write what I don’t know.” But as I have come to understand, there is another level of this adage, which refers to… if you don’t know anything about something that your readers will know about, you’re going to have to be very careful. Your choices are to either research that, to ignore it and write it poorly, or to try and write around it. Which is what I generally do.

My characters don’t go sailing. I haven’t had the time to research sailing in the extent that I want to, so I haven’t written any books about sailing. I would be completely… I wouldn’t write the book like Kevin J. Anderson just wrote, which was an entire sailing novel. Or David Drakes Lord of the Isles. These are stories that involve a lot of this sort of thing. I just didn’t write that.

I wrote what I knew. What do I know? I’ve grown up in the city. I talk about city life. This is why my characters don’t travel very much. It happens in one city. Because the stories I want to tell, and the things I know about, happened in this sort of situations. If you want to know about things, you could research them and learn how to do them. Another thing you can get away with is what I did in The Way of Kings with having a character who is a surgeon. I took it from two different tacks. One, I did some research, and we’ll talk about research later in the podcast. Then I gave it to a surgeon afterward, and said, “Find where I’m writing things wrong.” He did. He read it and he gave us a bunch of feedback on it. It was actually F. Paul Wilson that we gave it to, because I have connections. We got feedback on that, to get it accurate.

[Brandon] Let’s go ahead and pause for a break. Lee, you are going to tell us about our book of the week, which also happens to be one of your books.
[Lee] The book is Imager. Is available in audio, hardcover and paperback. It is the first book of the Imager portfolio which will be a trilogy followed by another trilogy.
[Brandon] Okay. You like to do that double trilogy thing.
[Lee] Well, it’s because I have the feeling that I don’t do more than three books about a given character very well. Because I believe in character change, and if you go more than three books, you turn people into emotional plastic people because they have to twist so much to make it believable.
[Brandon] Okay. That makes sense. So you can download… the first book is called?
[Lee] Imager.
[Brandon] Imager. It’s steam punk, isn’t it? A little bit? You
[Lee] Not quite. It’s called Victorian level technology with the remnants of a guild system and early steam power. So it’s sort of steam punk fantasy, maybe, stretched slightly.
[Brandon] If you haven’t read any of Lee’s books or listened to them, they are fantastic. I highly recommend them. He’s an excellent writer. One of the writers that I read quite a bit before I broke in myself. You can download a free copy of Imager at audible by going to audiblepodcast.com/excuse and get your 15 day free trial and give his audio book a listen.

[Brandon] All right. So. The second half of the podcast, let’s talk about how to not make these mistakes. Do you have any advice, podcasters, for aspiring writers, who are now thinking, “Wow. I know nothing about economics. I am going to fail hard-core and massively.” Lee, what can they do?
[Lee] I think the simplest thing is think about who produces it, how you would get it as a consumer, and about what you would pay for it. We don’t necessarily know… you don’t have to know economics, you just have to know one simple rule — nothing in a society is free. If you start from that point of view, and just think about it, you can avoid the worst mistakes.

[Brandon] Okay. Dan, any advice?
[Dan] With trying to develop a system like that, look for any way you could break it. In fact, if you have some friends who are good hard-core role players, get them to just power game your system and try to break it in half.
[Brandon] Oh, wow, that’s clever.
[Dan] Because that is where they are going to find every loop hole. They’re going to find some way in the economy, or the magic system, or the whatever that you’ve developed… they’ll find ways to become instantly powerful by getting whatever. So look for ways to break it, and then try to patch those holes.

[Brandon] Rob? Any suggestions?
[Rob] Yeah. I admit I’m not a fantasy writer, I write science fiction, and YA science fiction, so it’s very light science fiction. Anyway, but… my suggestion, something that you mentioned earlier, when you were talking about the city in the desert. I was thinking that is a great writing exercise is, to take some of these tropes of fantasy or just any writing, take those tropes and then say, “All right, why is this a city in the desert?” You can take your original vision of the city in the desert. Then say, “Well, what is it? How do they survive? What would allow this to happen? Is it magic? Is it that they are the hub of trade, and they have some resource there that is not water, but people bring them water?” So I think that it’s a great writing exercise. You can take these things, and you can say, “Well, how could this work? Why would this happen?”
[Dan] I kind of like the mythbusters idea. Once you’ve decided something doesn’t work, you just keep adding stuff to it until it does.
[Brandon] Until it explodes?
[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] I really like that concept because it does describe a way that sometimes I do my fiction. We talk about… I mean, one way to phrase this would be by calling it top-down storytelling. Where you start with this is what I want to have happen, how can I make it happen? I’ve talked before about my own writing process, where I often will build my plots that way. Where I’ll start with the ending and say how can I build to this great ending that I’ve just thought of? You could use it with your really cool world building element. Lee, any other advice? You were an economist. Do you have any like little tricks and little tips that can help us understand the economics of practical fantasy?

[Lee] I think I actually gave you the first one. The basis of it is just think about how you, as an individual, would function in that situation. How do you pay for things? How do you buy things? Who… where do you get it from?
[Brandon] Would you say that looking at the agricultural base is a way to start? You brought up the knight. A lot of things we’ve looked at… you said the city in the desert. Food really is the basis of economy.
[Lee] Actually, it is. Basically, it’s the basis of any society above subsistence. Any society above a subsistence level has to have, what we call in economic terms, an agricultural surplus. That is to say, the people who produce the food have to produce enough more than what they consume to be able to sell it or trade it to the artisans. People who build tools and everything else. Basically, you can’t have a society where everybody is so poor that there’s nothing left over from what they produce. They’ve got to be able to produce extra or you won’t have a society.
[Brandon] Okay. That’s excellent. Okay. Well, let’s see if we can get a writing prompt. Who am I going to make… I’m going to make Howard do it. Rob… Howard… Rob Howard, give us a writing prompt to take us out.

[Rob] Well, terrific. Okay, um… I can’t think on my feet. Let’s just go with that, the city in the desert. You’ve got a city in the desert, there’s nothing around it but sand. Figure out why that city is there, how they survive, and how they support all the people.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.