Writing Excuses 20.37: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Why
Key points: Why? Intent. Thematics, tone, tradition. Core idea! Discover the theme after writing the book, or decide the theme before writing? Conversations or canons? Exploring questions. Hospitality.
[Season 20, Episode 37]
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[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.
[Season 20, Episode 37]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Deep Dive on "All the Birds in the Sky" through the Lens of Why.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
[DongWon] So, this is our last segment in this deep dive that we've been doing with Charlie Jane Anders book, "All the Birds in the Sky." We are delighted that we have an opportunity to talk to her as well, so there'll be an interview of her coming up to sort of recap a lot of what we've been talking about, which will be especially relevant for this week's topic, because, in part, we are talking about intent. This episode is really about the lens of why, and as we've talked about earlier in the year, things we're focused on are the thematics of the story, the author's intent, the way she uses tone and tradition to sort of express the core idea of the book. Right? So we're hitting this one last, because we get to kind of sum up a little bit some of the things we've talked about before in terms of setting, in terms of timeline, and in terms of character to get a real sense of how is she assembling all of these into a legible, coherent thematic message in all of this. And so, I guess, my question for you all, and it's a little bit of a broad question beyond just this book itself, but when you're thinking about your intention of putting these thematics in a project, how are you approaching that and how do you see Charlie Jane doing that here?
[Mary Robinette] It varies for me, project to project. Some of them I discover the theme after I've written it. This book feels very much like a lot of the themes were decided ahead of time. Which is, I think, some of it is the friction between two opposing views of the world.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] But the other thing, for me, that I think… That I found intriguing was the… That friction comes from the stories that we tell ourselves about the world, and I see very deliberate decisions being… Book 1, book 2, book 3, like, the decisions that were to frame each of those, the decisions about the kinds of conversations the kids had, the tropes that Charlie Jane is using of here's a fantasy kid, here's the science fiction kid. I see those as being decisions that were probably made… Like, baked into the idea.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this has an explicitly dialectical structure. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] You have two opposing viewpoints that have to reach synthesis by the end of the story. Right? In this very classic Hegelian structure, to get too wonky about it. But you have magic on one side, or magic and community and connection, and then you have sort of rationality, science, cerebral kind of approach to the world. In this sort of, like, we can solve the big problems versus we need to be… Trying to solve too big of a problem causes more problems. Right? That's like sort of these two competing viewpoints. And sort of the tension between individuals within those viewpoints with the systems that they're embedded in as well. So, you have all of these different layers, but the fundamental thing is quite simple, of magic versus science. Right? And then as you dig into that, she's found ways to layer on complexity over and over and over again to each of those elements.
[Howard] Yeah, because the schools of magic have finally come together historically. You had the healers and you have the tricksters, and they were at war, and science didn't enter into it. That was… Those two were fighting. And when we look at the way, I think the character's name is Milton, his approach to solving things with technology in many cases is to buy up technological solutions that would be competing with the way he wants to do it. And so that dialectic between… Or that contrast, that conflict between science and magic is reflected within each of those realms.
[Erin] Yeah, I was thinking about… I was wondering for myself, thinking about, in magic, it's really explicit that there are these two things that had to come together. And I was wondering, like, what is it on the science side? It's harder… It was harder for me to parse. And as you were talking, I was thinking about, I guess, it's makers, because there's a lot of, like, makers and takers. Like it seems like there are the people who create things and then the people who acquire them from others. Which feels like it isn't exactly… Because the person they're taking from was also a maker, but, like, it feels like there is so much acquisition that it doesn't even allow for there to be a diversion within that side of things, in the same way that there is in the magical side of things.
[Mary Robinette] Well, I… That's interesting, because I actually thought that Serafina was in many ways representing the other side of science. Because she's working on the science of emotion with the robots. And that that is a thing that Lawrence specifically has trouble with, that he specifically has trouble with his own emotions and his relationship with this girlfriend and the types of science that he's doing are very, like, this is cool, this is flashy, let's go into another world. But emotions, that's this amazing almost witchcraft thing that the girlfriend is doing.
[DongWon] And it's the thing that changed Eunice. Right? To become a Peregrine, he needs that emotional resonance from having this connection to Patricia, and, yeah, I mean, there's also the magic she's accidentally putting into him, and all that. But the… On the magic side and on the science side, we get this microcosm view of what it is like for these two opposing things, and this sort of like uneasy synthesis that we get in the magic world of the healers versus the tricksters, that is really not a synthesis, it's just doing two different things at different times in a way that doesn't really work. You know what I mean? Like, the tension between the healers in the tricksters is like constant throughout that, and it was just such an interesting thing of her putting in this model of, like, here's the bad answer, here's what it looks like when you think you're synthesizing, but you haven't actually done the work to combine two different things.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And then… I mean, there's a little bit of a thing at the end of, like, we don't see how relieved that work… The hard work of synthesis happens between magic and science happens at the end, it's a little bit like done magically, but, like, a gesture towards this future that is more resolved than what we've seen in the magical world or in the scientific world, because, again, there is that tension there too, between the emotional and the science or between the makers and the takers. Right?
[Mary Robinette] You just reminded me, and I don't remember the exact, like, that in… When Lawrence goes to MIT, to see the rocket launch, and there's this dude who says, "Do you want to come see this really cool thing that I did with the rocket?" And… I can't remember her name, but the woman who's showing him around…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Isabel.
[Mary Robinette] Isabel. And she's like, "What you did?" And this idea of the takers who take credit for things that other people did as opposed to people who are, like, look at this community that we're working in.
[DongWon] And we see that in Milton, too. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And Milton puts Lawrence in that role of literally parachuting in and being like, oh, your company [garbled] Right? And we see what that does to that guy over time as he becomes, like, a more depressed version of himself, but also this more cautious version and a little bit wiser than the other people in the room, when they're like, "Should we blow up the world? What do you think?" You know what I mean? And, like, it's such an interesting scene because we get this note… I think it's him who has that note of caution in that conversation. But, yeah. So, in seeing sort of like the way in which these dialectics are like structured throughout the book, there's also this meta-commentary thing that's happening here. Right? That we have these two opposing ideas in terms of magic versus science, but we also have this book is synthesizing multiple traditions. Right? It's speaking to fantasy and science fiction, it's speaking to genre and to literary. Right? And we've kind of touched on these a little bit.
[Mary Robinette] And I think it's also speaking to age groups as well.
[DongWon] Yeah. It's like middle grade, YA, and adult all at once. In terms of the book itself, sitting at these, like, crossroads between all of these different genres and categories, in a way that I think… Not to put you on the spot, Dan, but it seemed like it was a little uncomfortable for you, and maybe like how do you bounce off the book a little bit. I guess, like, when you're looking at where does this book fit into the conversation that a genre is… How do you blend those two things? Right? We see a lot of science fantasy these days. But what makes it feel more one than the other?
[Erin] This is not an answer to your question at all.
[Laughter]
[Erin] But I…
[Howard] But I'm going to say it anyway.
[Erin] [garbled] Another path.
[DongWon] [garbled] stupid.
[Erin] [garbled] But it's like one thing that I love… If you go to book readings with, like, literary people…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] They'll always ask what works is your work in conversation with?
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] And, interestingly, despite the fact that I think science fiction and fantasy are extraordinarily historically focused genres, I don't hear that question as much on the genre side of things.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] I think it's assumed that you're in conversation with everything, and therefore, why are you even asking. But I don't actually know the reason that is.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think there is a real resistance to that. Instead, in science fiction and fantasy, we talk about canon instead of conversations. Right? And, maybe I'm betraying the amount of time I've spent at poetry readings by trying to get us to talk more about conversations. Right? Because I think this book is in conversation with Earthsea and Diana Wynne Jones on the one side, and with, like, big idea science-fiction on the other side. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] They're such like… The characters on the scientific side are so clearly inspired by old school science-fiction, of, like, we can fix the world by doing X, Y, and Z, and then this heroic fantasy, this magical school stuff on the other side. And so trying to blend those two…
[Mary Robinette] You're making me think of something that I noticed just recently at a literary reading, and I was the only science-fiction person there. And I noticed that everyone who started their readings, whether they were doing poetry or a novel, would start with here's why I told this story, this is what this story is about, here are the images that I was interested in. And then they would read it. And whereas I'm like, hello, we're on Mars. Okay, let's go.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Let's take a break there, and when we come back, I really do want to dig into this, like, why did you write this book question.
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[DongWon] Welcome back. I think… Right before the break, Erin and Mary Robinette, you were both talking about these questions that you encounter in the literary world that you don't necessarily encounter in the genre world. Right? And we're drawing really, like, broad distinctions between those, but I think it's a little useful in this case. The thing that I'm always thinking about when I'm considering a manuscript, or reading a book, whether or not I enjoyed it, is do I feel the author's perspective in the text? Do I get a sense of where they're coming from, and why they wrote this thing? And then sometimes I'll ask them that and people seem really surprised at the question. Right? In the way that you're saying of, like, you… In our spaces, we don't always step back and consider why. Do you think it's useful to think about why before you start writing?
[Mary Robinette] So, what's interesting to me is that I do, in novel length, at any rate, I do usually have a reason that I'm conscious of before I start writing the book. A Why. For short fiction, sometimes I'm just like [uhu] and there's a story.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] And that's coughed out. But with novels, there's always a question that I have that I'm kind of exploring. Like, in the Martian Contingency, I just joked that I was, like, all right, everybody, we're on Mars. Let's go. But what I was actually interested in was what does it take to create a new community in a new place. And so that's my why behind the writing is this question. And I don't know… Like, what I find useful about it is that when I was having to make a decision between two choices for something I could do in a scene, it helped me narrow down to this is the one that supports that question I'm asking.
[Dan] In my own writing, I have found that if I don't know why I'm writing a story in advance, or if my why is very shallow, then the book will come across as very shallow. My cyberpunk books, the [cherry dog?] books, which I love, and I will happily write more of them. The very first one, I wrote it because I wanted to write cyberpunk. That was the whole why. The question I was exploring was can Dan write a cyberpunk…
[Laughter]
[Dan] Book? And I think that you can see that in it. It doesn't feel as deep or as interesting as the other books in that same series. By the time I got to the third one, it was very much me exploring my relationship with my teenage daughter. What is it like, how is that relationship formed, how is it maintained, how can it go sour, and that was what I was looking at, doing it through the lens of this cyberpunk adventure story. And so when I have a why am I writing this and what is this about in mind in advance, even subconsciously,…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Dan] The writing is more interesting.
[DongWon] Well, I think also, we've been saying this thing in terms of literary writers talk about who are they in conversation with, and then the why. I think a lot of that also is them looking back at what they have written. I don't know that they have those answers upfront. So…
[Dan] Yeah.
[DongWon] Just to be clear, we're not saying that, like, this kind of writer thinks about it ahead of time, this kind of… I think we are all unreliable narrators…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Of our own intent in mind and all of that. And so I think sometimes it's figuring out what the hell did I write after the fact.
[Howard] I do not remember who wrote it, and it would take me a while to source it, but I remember the quote very well, which was the things that you think are your weaknesses are strengths. You're not ready to see your actual weaknesses.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Mm... Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That's a little close to home.
[Howard] I know. The first time I read that, I was like, oh, I hate that. I hate that so much. But on topic here, when I ask myself why am I writing this story, there's a spectator up in the nosebleed seats who says, whatever answer you come up with, that's great as long as it get you writing, but you're wrong. Because there is a real why there that you're not ready to look at yet. You need to be able to look at it before you finish the story. But be able to answer the question upfront. Be able to have a meaningful why that gets you writing.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] But there's going to be something under that that's more important. And I know that sounds kind of whoo whoo and mystical, but…
[DongWon] You need to have a reason, it doesn't have to be the reason.
[Erin] Yeah. And I'll be honest, I really admire people, when I ask them, and actually a lot of genre people, like, who will sometimes say, like… I'm like, what are you writing? They're like, I'm writing about, like, grief and my cat. And I'm like, oh, my God. I'm writing this chick who sits in a room. Like, I…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] A lot of times, I am very, like, focused on what I'm trying to do and not why I'm trying to do it. And I really admire the ability to understand the greater why. I think a lot of times, for me, it's a little bit more like these are eight things that made me think about writing this story, and some of them are very silly, and maybe one of them is a little bit important, but probably not. And then, like, just kind of throwing that in a bag, like a bag of things, and shaking them.
[Dan] I hesitate to put words in Charlie Jane Anders mouth, and we can ask this question… We can ask why did you write this more fully when we do the interview with her. But the thing that kept coming across to me while reading it was that she was writing this book to kind of point out that magic and fantasy and science fiction were not all that different.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] Both sides came up with genuinely terrible plans to save the world. Both of those plans had the same ultimate effect of destroying community as a concept. And the finale is we have to synthesize these things and bring them together, we're really not all that different. And I don't know if that is what she actually intended. I don't know if that is… Like, I was reading it almost as a response to our community.
[DongWon] Yup.
[Dan] Fantasy and science fiction authors fighting with each other.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Dan] And, again, we'll have to ask her, but that's how it felt to me.
[DongWon] It's interesting, because, again, I think if… Maybe her idea at the beginning… I mean, we're projecting. Right? But as a thought experiment, if the idea at the beginning was I'm going to write a novel about the fight between fantasy and science fiction. But at the end of the day, what the book is actually about, and the final reveal is that the dialectic isn't math and magic, the dialectic is isolation and community. Right? And that's the thing that is really being contested with is how do we connect to each other, when we have all these differences. But you're right, that each of their solutions on the science side and on the magic side was what we need to do is disconnect from each other…
[Mary Robinette] And…
[DongWon] That is the enemy.
[Mary Robinette] And we see that on a small scene level, again, going all the way back to the beginning of the book, that the… When Patricia goes and she talks to the parliament of birds, when Lawrence goes and he goes to MIT, they both have a sense of belonging in that moment, of something amazing happening. Lawrence, in particular, felt like… There's the line when they see the two minute… Or two second time travel thing, about, that it was like a… Being let into a secret club. And then that gets taken away from them. And so I think through the whole book, you're absolutely right, there is this sense of community versus isolation, community is healthy, isolation is not healthy.
[Erin] Yeah, I think that it's really interesting through this whole discussion, listening to different things that we've said about the why of this book is like, DongWon, you've talked about the soul of San Francisco, which I… Like, being fought over, which is something I know zero things about. And I… It makes me wonder, like, is it even… Is it important… I think it is not important, I will say that we actually know the why…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] As long as it feels like there is a why, to what Dan was saying. And, what I think is interesting is sometimes people in science fiction especially will say, like, I didn't like this story because it felt like it was trying to teach me something. It felt like the theme was too strong and too easily understood. And I wonder if that is what it is. Like, if it… If everybody comes away with the exact same point…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Then it feels like it's too heavy on the page.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] That there should be a little bit of a lightness that allows you to read a few different thematic elements into it, as opposed to just like banging you over the head with one.
[Mary Robinette] I heard Elizabeth Bear said this thing. She said the difference between a story and a polemic is that a story asks you a question and a polemic answers it.
[Dan] I was about to say the exact same thing. When I teach about theme, that's what I tell students, is that theme is a question that your book is going to explore, not necessarily a book… Not necessarily a question they're going to answer.
[DongWon] Well, I was thinking about the movie Sinners, because it's all I think about these days, and one of the things I really love about that film is it refused to resolve into an easy answer. Right? It presents you lots of easy answers along the way, and then one by one, knocks those pins down. Right? And then leaves you in this place, not of confusion, there's an emotional clarity. But then when you try to unpack it into easy lessons, it's very resistant to that. And I think one thing that is really lovely in this book is we start with thinking, oh, it's going to be X or it's going to be Y. And then the end result is something different. Right? And I… It still feels like… She sets up the shape of the answer, and that shape is still true, but the details all change along the way and really matter what those changes are.
[Howard] One of the questions that I ask myself, usually mid project, is not why am I telling this story, but it's why is anybody reading it. And you can take it tongue-in-cheek. Why would anybody read this? I'm working on a bonus story right now for the next Schlock Mercenary book, and I realized I was doing a fine job of telling the story, but part of the why with people reading it is because they want to look at the pictures. And I realized I needed to pay a little more attention to what was going on in the background. And then I started doing some worldbuilding in the background, and came up with this whole thematic idea of [Geiger Suisse] as the architecture. And one thing led to another, and I realized, oh, yeah, I really needed to ask that question. Because now the story is deeper. There's more going on, because I recognized that the reader doesn't just want to read the story that I have in mind, they want to look at something else that inspires, makes a sense of wonder, or whatever. And I don't have to ask or answer questions with it, I just need to put things in.
[Dan] Geiger Suisse sounds like a genre of music that I would deeply love, and never listen to.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] This is pretty accurate, I think. But something you were saying made me want to add yet another metaphor into the lens of…
[Unknown] Yes, please.
[Mary Robinette] Writing. Which I got from… I've been thinking about it a lot. Which I got from Amal El-Mahtar, where she did a keynote speech talking about writing as an act of hospitality.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Which it. And I've been thinking about it in terms of the why of it. That when you buy a house, when you decorate the house, when you buy furniture for that house, that you're serving the why of yourself. These are the needs I have, and that that is the writing of the story. But you're also thinking about who you want to be inviting into the home and the circumstances under which you want to invite them in. So, like, someone who knows that they have a lot of out-of-town guests is going to want to set up something that has a guestroom. Somebody who's like, oh, my God, please, no, no one into my house, is like we have barstools. But when someone comes into your home, like, you… Like if someone's coming in with a mobility device, you'll add a ramp, you'll rearrange the furniture. But if someone comes in and they don't like the color orange, you don't hide the orange. So, knowing why you're making changes to the story is about knowing how it serves you, but also how it serves the people that you are inviting into the story. And some of that goes back to the things we were talking about earlier, about providing context for people who wouldn't… Who come into the story who don't have the context, but you want them to feel welcome.
[Erin] I think that's true. I also think though I do want to say a word for stories that live in a place of discomfort. In which the point is for you to sit on furniture that you would never have sat on…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And not enjoy it and make that think about what this says about the way you sit in the way you stand in the world, and where you feel welcome and where you assume that you are not welcomed. And so I think there's something really exciting about hospitality, because hospitality can be a welcome, and hospitality can also be something that you are doing to someone. You can be inhospitable on purpose, in order for people to think about what it means in order to be hospitable to others.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] The thing I would say about that is, like, a haunted house is also an act of hospitality. People are signing on for the ride.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] although, you should communicate what this is. And so, yeah, I think sometimes, if I'm inviting people over, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to serve you my food, the kind of things that I eat and like to cook. And I'm not going to serve you something that you literally can't eat, because you're vegetarian or allergic to an ingredient.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] But beyond that, also, this is my home, it's my created experience that you're going to experience [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] And there's some people that you don't invite into your home.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And also they're…
[Howard] Gordon Ramsay.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] But also, like, I… When I… I have a massage therapist who will come to the house sometimes to help me deal with some stuff. And, yeah, I experience some pain.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] In that house and I am better for it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] But that is, again, deliberate decisions and the why of it. So, but, the why at first is how does it serve you the writer, and then you start thinking about who else you want to affect.
[Howard] Which is why I say it hits me about mid project…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] When I have to ask that question again.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So…
[DongWon] I love this topic. I feel like we could talk about this for a very long time, but we're going to leave it there for now. Thank you all for going along with us on this deep dive into Charlie Jane Anders "All the Birds in the Sky." I'm very excited to talk to her and find out more about her perspective on it and the things that she wants to talk about, in terms of the process of writing that book.
[DongWon] In the meantime, though, I have a little bit of homework for you. I want you to take some time away from your drafting as part of your writing process, and really sit down and think about your intentions. What is your why of this project? Why are you feeling like this is the story you need to write now, in this moment, as your next thing? And write that down. It doesn't have to be long, it can be a simple sentence. And then once you've written it down, take it out of your notebook, put it in a desk drawer somewhere, and don't look at it.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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