Today we’re talking with Carla RA, who writes about robots and might be a robot herself. We just can’t know. Carla is a scientist by day and a sci-fi writer by night. She is a Brazilian cosmologist (of the quantum kind), mathematician, and historian of science. With her secret identity as a sci-fi author, she likes to speculate on humanity using fantastical, science-based themes.
Carla RA: Robot or not?
Tell us more about your short story work.
My latest publication is a short story titled “Wild Pistols.” It’s about David, an unreliable, good-natured narrator trying to be accepted and find a place to settle. The catch is that David is the first sentient robot to ever exist—or is he?
This story is very dear to me because it was the first time I had a story accepted for publication. And it happened both in Portuguese and in English! I have sold microfiction in English before, but Wild Pistols was the first short story I published.
Seeing the reaction to this story has been quite an experience. By the end…
<span style=”cursor:help;” title=”spoiler text here”>…we don’t really know if David is a robot or not. I had readers telling me it was too evident he was a robot, while others said it was clear as day that David was a human. I find this amusing. These conflicting impressions make me think I did something right with this one.</span>
I don’t have a passionate or touching answer to this one. I mostly read science fiction, so that’s what I write about.
Where do you find inspiration for your stories?
Ideas pop up from nowhere all the time. I think reading is the greatest source of story seeds (but not the only one). So, I don’t really need to be inspired to get those. I need inspiration for how to build a story out of these ideas. For me, at least, ideas come in the form of “What ifs,” and crafting a plot and characters around this question is not intuitive to me. Sometimes, it’s undoable! I have a whole folder with story seeds waiting for a plot that might never come.
Therefore, I would say that my main source of inspiration is to study the writing craft. Learning more about plot structure, tropes, character design, plot bits, and that kind of stuff is what allows me to create an engaging story around a vague idea. I’ve heard people saying they avoid studying the craft, fearing it would hinder their creativity. For me, it’s the opposite.
Studying is my primary source of inspiration.
(This sounds super nerdy, right? I’m aware of my dorkiness.)
What is your favorite sci-fi, fantasy, or horror trope?
Time travel. There’s something about playing with time that always entices me. You can get creative in so many ways without falling into clichés.
What is your favorite speculative fiction book (besides yours)?
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I knew the tale way before reading the book, as many do. However, reading it is a whole other experience. The story is much more nuanced than what is immortalized in the tale of Fankenstein’s monster! It earned a top spot on my favorite list.
What is the best robot story you’ve written?
Now that you’ve asked, I realize I wrote many robot/AI stories. How funny! “Wild Pistols” and “How to Identify a Robot”are published; Artificial Rebellion is all about AI also…
Carla RA. Beep boop.
Well, to answer the question, I think my favorite that I wrote was the last one, the yet unreleased flash fiction “Unobserved.” I’m still in the honeymoon phase with this one.
What is the world you long to see?
That’s a tough one.
The tricky part about embracing diversity is that one’s utopia is another’s dystopia. So, I won’t describe a utopia.
There are a couple of things that I believe are within our reach and would improve our collective lives significantly: being more in tune with our natural environment and slowing down our daily lives. Sadly, many people see wilderness as exotic or uncivilized, all the while living a frantic life, always in a rush, anxious for the next thing. I want to live in a world where taking it easy and enjoying nature are not perceived as being lazy and rube.
How does your day job as a scientist impact your work?
The biggest impact I perceive is the other way around. Exercising my creative writing has changed the way I approach science. I found a place for creativity in my work, leading me to make a less stilted science. It improved how I usually explain ideas and concepts. It’s a lesson on storytelling: you can only make your message accessible if you know how to deliver it.
Bonus question: Novels or short stories? Which do you prefer to read? Which do you prefer to write?
Short stories all the way! I struggle to write longer formats, and I often get bored reading a full-length novel.
Not your traditional sports story, “Earthball” (and Earthball) are all about teamwork and togetherness in a future you might even want to see.
Cover by Melissa Weiss Mathieu.
The ball spun perfectly in the middle of the ship’s storm cellar, blue-green, round and full as a living planet, suspended in place, ready for play, pregnant with unspent momentum.
“…HAJIME!” Cried Captain-Grandmother Atsuki.
As one, with cries of kiai, two dozen sprawling bodies launched themselves from every angle, every bulkhead slapped with foot and limb. Two dozen howling spacers hurtling together toward the big round ball, which nearly slipped from grasp from the split-second difference of these hands arriving on its smooth rubber surface just before those hands. But those hands touched the ball, and reestablished something like equilibrium, before the smooth surface slipped again, caught this time in Ensign-Niece Oceanne’s belly, just under her floating ribs. Her loud ‘ouf!’ gave way to the subtle cries and laughter of the game of Earthball, as crew bumped into one another in the frantic, writhing effort to keep the slippery ball in place, far away from any bulkhead whose merest glance would end the game.
On the free trader Kanno-Maru, there are only so many ways to stand out from the crowd of family. Ensign-Niece Kanno Oceanne struggles to find her place on the ship, amidst Kanno family expectations and Kanno family values. She is not quick about her duties, nor is she studious in her schooling. But in the game without teams, only teamwork, the game of Earthball, she has a chance to shine.
If only her father would let her.
When her cousin suggests she switch sides, Oceanne eagerly accepts. Little does she realize that her change of position sets in motion a chain of events that could tear the crew, her family, entirely apart.
For fans of inspirational sports stories (or hippie games), “Earthball” is the only game in town.
This story, “Doutor Compaixão,” came from a challenge from the inestimable Cat Rambo, namely, take the prompt “A Brazilian math teacher proposes marriage to compassion” and make a story of it.
They called him “the beggar who counts.”
They called him a saint.
They called him “Doutor Compaixão.”
But when the pacification police came in heavy gear with shields and guns, they didn’t call him anything. They said they had never seen the man Pedro Sores Canto.
Word had come from Rebeca Itoh Silviera, down in the city at the university, that a raid was coming to the old favela she had escaped. A man inside the police came to visit his parents and give them the remittance and the bribes he won as a policeman the day before, saying that the raid was seeking out the old math teacher who gave lessons and refused reals for it. No, he did not know for what crime. He was a policeman, how was he to know what crime a man was to be arrested for?
Word reached Pedro Sores Canto as he held a chalkboard to his knee, cracked chalk showing the curve of a bell that held the secrets of all the universe, probably. Word came the same way all his payment came, as a butchered chicken or a jug of beer or a whispered word of forgiveness. The children scattered like crows from the stern faces of their mothers, anxious that the man who had freed Rebeca Itoh Silviera should do the same for their children. If the pacification police took him away, who would teach the children to make numbers dance and speak Portuguesa as the rich in the city do?
“Do not worry for me, Senhora de Assis, Senhora Ventura, Senhora Quintana.” He smiled. “Have compassion for yourselves and your children. Keep a close eye on them tomorrow, and remind them to count.”
As he carried home the butchered chicken and the jug of beer and the terrible news, he thought of Alcione. He had come to Cantagalo, first climbed the steep hills between tar-paper and tin, five years before, latest in a string of hidden places that had been his life since her words to him. He wondered what had become of her. Either dead or married, he decided, a cloud of children underfoot like flies in sweltering winter.
Either way, she had long since departed from him. All that was left of her to him were those words:
“You have no compassion.”
Passion he had had. Passion enough that, in the irrational way of very rational men, he had killed her lover. Passion enough to conceal his love until it burst from him, passion enough to confess it to her after the deed was done.
Compassion was something else again, a limit to converge on and never reach. It was not the passion one could have for a woman, for the woman, for Alcione, but a love for her and everyone and everything. It was as particular as the names of Senhora de Assis and Senhora Ventura and Senhora Quintana and Vitor Ferraz de Avis and Rebeca Itoh Silviera and Alexandre Cubano Sozinho. It was as grand as Sugarloaf Mountain and deep as the Pacific. It was an idea that he, Dr. Pedro Sores Canto, once the brightest young turk in Brazilian mathematics, could not grasp.
As he had lay in shallow ditches outside São Paulo at night, or slapped mosquitos from his skin and calculated his grim odds of survival on elaborate bell curves in the Amazon jungle, or lay awake watching reflected fires in the tin roof of some favela or another, the bitter sting of Alcione’s other words had left, along with her face, and her voice, and so, insensibly, his obsession had moved from her to the idea, compassion, the idea that was to him a nebulous air and an equation to solve and to her an immediate reality to experience.
It was his attempt to solve the equation and to make the nebulous idea concrete and real that had kept him to the favelas. He had learnt the Buddhist mantras and the Catholic prayers and the strange notions of the poor and criminal Evangelicals he had found himself hiding among. Santa Teresa de Kalkota had stayed with the poor for compassion, so, too, would he. He could have hidden from the authorities a dozen other ways, perhaps even returned to academia. But it was safer in the favelas, and it was in the favelas he would finally solve compassion.
His trail had started in São Paulo a murderer, and ended here, at the top of Cantalgo Hill, in the garret of a brick building that smelled always of frying onions and the human drift, a saint. Doutor Compaixão.
Senhora de Assis had said the raid would come tomorrow. Senhora Ventura tonight. Indeterminate. Very well, he could study his chances. 50% chance they would come tonight, 50% tomorrow. He need only play the probabilities, what his students and their fathers called gambling.
“Senhora Preto, I must leave tonight,” he told the elderly landlady smoking her hand-rolled at the living room table. “Please tell any visitors I have already gone.”
Senhora Preto nodded, exhaling a little puff. He was not the first tenant to leave suddenly as rumors of another raid swirled around the streets and markets and living room tables. She approved of his good manners in announcing it beforehand, though. It spoke to good breeding.
He climbed the stairs to his garret for the last time. There was not much to pack. Only a few shirts, another pair of pants, the hundred-year-old calculus textbook that Jorge Figueiredo Boaventura’s father had given him many years before, before Jorge had broken his leg and died. Poor child, almost a man, and then…
Pedro Sores Canto sighed. Jorge had died three years before, and all Pedro could rouse in his heart was regret that such a promising mind had been snuffed out like a candle. He muttered prayers for him, but there was no heart in it.
Still, it was nearly fifteen years since Arthur Castilho Nakata had died under his hand and Alcione had left his life forever. Still his death-rattle and her compassion animated him. And he had remembered Jorge’s name, and said prayers for him. He converged on compassion…
The startled cry of Senhora Preto jarred him from his meditations. The pacification police moved fast these days, lightning war, not like the old days. That they would arrive so soon was more than three standard deviations from the mean, less than 0.16% likely. He did not have to look out the tiny window to know that the house was surrounded, that there was no more running for him unless he sprout wings and fly. He would be taken, and tried, and, in the end, executed. Perhaps Alcione would appear, after all these years, to testify against him.
A second cry, from Senhora Preto, stabbing through the shouts and buffets and bullets of the pacification police. It was a cry of pain. Pedro Sores Canto felt something rise in him, a stone in his throat and a balloon in his mind. Senhora Preto had done nothing to earn whatever the pacification police had done to elicit that cry from her. No more than Jorge Figueiredo Boaventura had deserved to die.
No more than Arthur Castilho Nakata had deserved to die.
The room seemed bathed in light, though only a cheap flashlight flickered feebly. He saw there the faces and names of all the students he had taught, all the parents he had consoled, saw again Alcione’s face as it had been when it had driven him to madness, Arthur’s face in serene repose and free of suffering. He saw faces that he knew were attached to the boots storming up the stairs, the voices screaming guttural cries. He saw his own face. They were all individual and crystal clear, they were all as one.
Alcione would never have married him. She had been right, he had no compassion. And now? Had he approached the apex, converged on the limit at last? Or was his teaching, his kindness, his genius of little pains and remembered names, only a “good-enough” approximation?
This was the last unknown in the equation, the last x to solve for. There was a way to solve it.
The stone in his throat was desire. He desired that they all be free of suffering, sinners and saints both, and especially all the fallen, glorious, troubled, human souls in between. He wished it with his whole body, so hard it ached, heedless of the tramp of boots and the oncoming cries.
Alcione would never have married him, but…
“Compassion,” he asked, sinking to his knees on the bare floor, “will you marry me?”
Something inside him said yes, and he felt himself lift as if on wings.
When the pacification police kicked the thin plywood castoff excuse for a door open, they found only an empty room. In confusion, they dripped into the tiny room. Behind his helmet, Vitor Ferraz de Avis muttered a prayer of thanks to Santa Maria, who in her compassion had liberated old Doutor Compaixão.
Think this story was good? Bad? Just plain weird? Let me know in the comments!
One week ago, the SFWA announced this year’s finalists for the Nebula Awards – with the proviso that Martha Wells has turned down any honors, saying that she’s already got enough praise for her work, and she wants to open the field for other writers to shine. Because Martha Wells is a class act. I will be at NebulaCon again this year, and as before, I’ll be offering my predictions and opinions on the short stories, novelettes, and hopefully novellas before June.
But, on first blush, what do you think of this lineup? Let me know in the comments!
Nebula Award for Novel
The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)
The Water Outlaws, S.L. Huang (Tordotcom; Solaris UK)
Translation State, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz (Tor; Orbit UK)
Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, Wole Talabi (DAW, Gollancz)
Witch King, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)
Nebula Award for Novella
The Crane Husband, Kelly Barnhill (Tordotcom)
“Linghun”, Ai Jiang (Dark Matter Ink)
Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher (Tor; Titan UK)
Untethered Sky, Fonda Lee (Tordotcom)
The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older (Tordotcom)
Mammoths at the Gates, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)
Nebula Award for Novelette
“A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair”, Renan Bernardo (Samovar 2/23)
I Am AI, Ai Jiang (Shortwave)
“The Year Without Sunshine”, Naomi Kritzer (Uncanny 11-12/23)
“Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down The Moon”, Angela Liu (Clarkesworld 6/23)
“Saturday’s Song”, Wole Talabi (Lightspeed 5/23)
“Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge”, Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny 9-10/23)
Nebula Award for Short Story
“Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont”, P.A. Cornell (Fantasy 10/23)
“Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200”, R.S.A Garcia (Uncanny 7-8/23)
“Window Boy”, Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld 8/23)
“The Sound of Children Screaming”, Rachael K. Jones (Nightmare 10/23)
“Better Living Through Algorithms”, Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld 5/23)
“Bad Doors”, John Wiswell (Uncanny 1-2/23)
Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose (Del Rey)
The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern, J. Dianne Dotson (Android)
Liberty’s Daughter, Naomi Kritzer (Fairwood)
The Ghost Job, Greg van Eekhout (Harper)
Nebula Award for Game Writing
The Bread Must Rise, Stewart C Baker, James Beamon (Choice of Games)
Alan Wake II, Sam Lake, Clay Murphy, Tyler Burton Smith, Sinikka Annala (Remedy Entertainment, Epic Games Publishing)
Ninefox Gambit: Machineries of Empire Roleplaying Game, Yoon Ha Lee, Marie Brennan(Android)
Dredge, Joel Mason (Black Salt Games, Team 17)
Chants of Sennaar, Julien Moya, Thomas Panuel (Rundisc, Focus Entertainment)
Baldur’s Gate 3, Adam Smith, Adrienne Law, Baudelaire Welch, Chrystal Ding, Ella McConnell, Ine Van Hamme, Jan Van Dosselaer, John Corcoran, Kevin VanOrd, Lawrence Schick, Martin Docherty, Rachel Quirke, Ruairí Moore, Sarah Baylus, Stephen Rooney, Swen Vincke (Larian Studios)
Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Nimona, Robert L. Baird, Lloyd Taylor, Pamela Ribon, Marc Haimes, Nick Bruno, Troy Quane, Keith Bunin, Nate Stevenson (Annapurna Animation, Annapurna Pictures)
The Last of Us: “Long, Long Time”, Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin (HBOMax)
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Michael Gilio, Chris McKay (Paramount Pictures, Entertainment One, Allspark Pictures)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Dave Callaham (Columbia Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, Avi Arad Productions)
The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli, Toho Company)
In this edition of Philosophy (in a Teacup), I sit down with author, community organizer, and NaNoWriMo leader Joe Gremillion. Joe Gremillion spends his time writing and critiquing fiction, leading local hikes, and photographing landscapes. His website, like his novel, is in perpetual development. But if you don’t mind the figurative sawdust then head over to www.joephotos.art.
The man, the myth.
Thank you for joining us! Tell us more about your book/ series/ short story work.
My sci-fi novel in development tells the story of people from conflicting ideologies who learn to see each other’s side. Pressure’s on as the antagonist exploits an ecological disaster and people’s fears. It started with a different premise — or more like a challenge. How many boring sci-fi tropes could I tweak, break, or parody? But over time it turned serious and led to some new ideas.
Why do you write speculative fiction? / What is speculative to you?
I’ve enjoyed reading about distant worlds since I was knee-high to a tribble. How would people adapt to a world whose day lasts nine hours? How do you enforce laws when everyone can vote by flying to a different planet? On an airless moon, is making air a type of farming? What are seasons like when you have two suns?
These aren’t real, or even realistic. But they’re based on contemporary physics, which gives them a connection to our world, our lives. Even better, “contemporary” is the crucial qualifier. When I started writing stories, we assumed that other stars had planets but didn’t know for sure. Now astrophysicists have a list of more than 3,000 and some are beyond anything we thought possible. Reality keeps challenging imagination.
Where do you find inspiration for your stories?
I’m an introspective sort. Many of my ideas come from juxtaposing absurd ideas and asking questions. My favorite is to play either “five steps of what if” or “five steps of why don’t.” A bit of worldbuilding from my novel began with, “what if space stations didn’t have outside walls?” I asked myself five times before coming up with a concept that did more than reinvent space habitats. It also created the basis for my novel’s premise.
“What if” and “why don’t” works for story concepts too. The Planet of Hats trope is useful in a short story or single episode, but got I tired of entire cultures defined by one trait. So one day I juxtaposed two ideas: “why don’t Klingons wear t-shirts?” Laugh if you will, but that was my first step. The second was, why don’t Klingons have self expression?” Then, “why don’t we see Klingon artists? Or plumbers? Or hair color specialists? It is a good day to dye.” Extrapolating on humorous ideas led me to create a caste-based system with unique beliefs and history from which two of my MCs hail.
Earlier I mentioned two protagonists with conflicting ideologies. This caste-based society was the second. But the more I developed the second, the more I changed the first to contrast against it. From Klingons wearing peace-sign shirts came, “what if self-expression was compulsory?”
What is your favorite sci-fi, fantasy, or horror trope? / What is your favorite sci-fi subgenre?
You may have noticed that I don’t like tropes themselves, but I have a few go-tos. The Fish Out of Water Character is always fun (and useful when introducing readers to strange new worlds). The Mentor/Apprentice or Jaded-Soul/Eager-Explorer pairs often appear in my stories. Binary stars — a classic. The Hero’s Journey is a solid framework … but lately I’ve started exploring the Heroine’s Journey too. And then there’s the old favorite: Peter’s Evil Overlord List.
What is your favorite speculative fiction book (besides yours)? / What is your favorite speculative short story?
My current favorite is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I enjoyed how it balances explaining science while advancing the plot; two unlikely characters who make assumptions that baffle each other; how the story unfolds using the ol’ “amnesia” plot to let the story unfold naturally.
What is your favorite unusual speculative fiction story? / What is the most unusual story or book you’ve written?
Looking back, three books opened my eyes to unusual environments: The Integral Trees, Heart of the Comet, and Rendezvous with Rama. They’re not unusual stories, but much of my writing depends on the setting so these were influential.
Mine. I’ve slogged away at this for years. I love it and I hate it and I’ve quit it three times and it won’t leave me alone aarrrrgh.
How do nature and your photography influence your writing?
Not much. I enjoy landscape photography but see it as a separate hobby. Although it does change my perception of the world. And the vast array of our natural world is incredible, when you think about it. How insects fly is amazing. It’s also fun to see how photographers capture different photos of the same person to tell different stories. Photography tech keeps advancing, which is often overlooked in sci-fi worldbuilding. If someone invents, say, an antigravity device, we rarely see its failed prototypes — much less offshoots, spinoffs, or surprise applications.
(What if we turned an antigravity device upside down? Would it double gravity? Imagine a gymnasium where weight lifting and aerobics were the same thing. Hmm, where’s my pen?)
So except for changing my perceptions, inspiring alien ecologies, observing human behavior, and adding dimension to worldbuilding by watching technology advance, what have the Romans done for us?
Bonus question: Novels or short stories? Which do you prefer to read? Which do you prefer to write?
Novels. Definitely. Endings are my personal antagonists, and writing novels keeps them further away from me than short stories.
As I discussed in the introduction, Orson Scott Card is a terrible human being. He deserves the condemnation he’s got over the past twenty years. But he’s also the guy who wrote Ender’s Game, and, what is better, Pastwatch and “Unaccompanied Sonata.”
And he’s the guy who wrote How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, which is still on my shelf.
I wouldn’t trust him with my teenage daughter, but I trust him to know how to write, and keep writing.
Among many other interesting (and sometimes dated) advice, in How to…, Card talks about what he calls the MICE Quotient. MICE stands for
Milieu
Idea
Character
Event
This isn’t, like so many others, a way to figure out what story to tell (he has other chapters for that, as do we), but rather, to figure out how to tell it. And that is an altogether subtler magic.
Because so many ideas, so many stories, can be told as any of them, and it’s up to us as writers to pick the one that best suits the kind of story we want to tell, and how we want to tell it. Let me introduce them.
Milieu
A milieu is a place, a setting. The conventional structure for this is “story begins when protagonist comes to the place, ends when they leave (or decide to stay).” All portal fantasies (including Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, and Flash Gordon) are milieu stories. A whole lot of other stuff can happen while the protagonist is there (defeating a Wicked Witch and unmasking the Wizard, for example) but the promise the story makes at the beginning is that the end is when the protagonist either stays or goes.
Idea
An idea story starts with a question, and ends with an answer. Card cites a lot of Golden Age SF that basically romanticized the scientific method, I’ll go ahead and cite literally all mystery novels instead. No Time starts with the question, “who kills Gooch?” And although there’s a lot of fate vs. free will philosophy and a romance with his wife and a temptation with Maria, the story ends when Gooch gets his answer. Same with Sherlock. Same with that hot popular TV show about the detective/doctor/policeman confronted with a strange occurrence and tasked with figuring it out and solving the mystery.
Character
A character story, in Card’s view, is a story where the protagonist starts in one place in society and either winds up in another or gets stuck where they are. They can either be happy or unhappy about their initial place, their ultimate destination, or both. It starts when the character realizes they’re unhappy (either because their life has just been taken from them, or because they just can’t take it any more). This can be a bride who gets cold feet but ultimately decides to go through with the wedding, or a Horatio Alger hero who goes from rags to riches, or Raskolnikov going from prospective murderer to repentant sinner.
Character stories are subtle stories, and can make great subplots, too, because the story happens inside a person – how their actions and perceptions change, even if the external world does not. Many generational stories and immigrant tales, taking the family itself as the character, are character stories as they find their place in society and either accept that place or start the cycle of struggle over again.
Event
There is a rent in the world, and someone has to fix it. This can be the emergence of a Ring of Power and awakening of a dark lord, or a flood swamping the town, or the death of a patriarch leaving a power vacuum. We can learn things, people can change, but the beginning and end of the story is “the thing is broken” and “the thing is now fixed.” Characters can remain static – Card cites Indiana Jones, but ultimately his literary forebear Doc Savage is the perfect example. Someone has ground Prosper City to a halt and at the end Prosper City lives up to its name again – and Doc is the same rich globe-trotting knight-errant as ever.
The power here is that each of these frames provide different spectacles, in the French, different cadres to run the story by. Let’s work an example.
Let’s say I have in mind a Doña Ana Lucía story, where she goes to the zeppelin-cities of Lakshmi to recover the Jade Monkey from an old flame and restore it to Firstdown Colonial on Prithvi. The old flame has turned evil, and not only won’t release the Monkey, but tries to kill Doña Ana Lucía for it. However, a more dangerous enemy emerges seeking the Monkey, killing the old flame, leaving Doña Ana Lucía to avenge their death and escape with the Monkey (and a ton of regrets).
A neat plot, but it’s not really a story yet, is it?
If I wanted to play this as a milieu story, that’s simplicity itself – Doña Ana Lucía arrives on Lakshmi, conducts all her business there, cradles her dying ex in her arms, bewails the senseless death, confronts the killer, and …leaves. Circle opens, circle closes. Very useful if I want to play up how she’s a fish out of water, or take a tour of the place from the eyes of a newcomer, or maintain an outsider’s eye on the action as it proceeds.
If I wanted an idea story, the ultimate fate of the relic would remain in doubt for a long ways into the story. It would open as soon as Doña Ana Lucía asks “where is the Jade Monkey?” and end only when she lays eyes on it, over all the bodies she had to leave to get there. This would be an altogether murkier and more noirish story than the milieu version, which could be fun if I wanted to play with the relationships and ambiguous characters, and focus on Doña Ana Lucía’s intellectual prowess in cutting through all the fog and mystery to the truth behind it all – no matter who it costs her.
If I wanted to do it as a character story, I’d have her start after the Jade Monkey …but ultimately seek reconciliation with the old flame. She’d have a friend or idol decision, and likely fail it, having that moment of reconciliation only as the ex lay dying in her arms, and spend the rest of the story avenging their death to atone for the lost years they could have had together. If she gets the Jade Monkey at all, it will be a Pyrrhic victory and a bitter taste in her mouth. The focus of the story would be on the attempted reconciliation – and the vengeance to follow, with the Monkey increasingly incidental.
If I wanted to do this as an event story, the Monkey would have some kind of cosmic significance – the centerpiece of the Jade Scholars’ Hall’s museum, her museum, and she’s a laughingstock unless and until she gets it back. Or it rightfully belongs to the tribe descendant from the artist that carved it, and they are not really a people without it, and justice demands she retrieve it for them. She can romance her ex, narrowly evade death, avenge them…but the story ultimately ends when she returns the Monkey to where it belongs, stands back, and sees how the world has been put back in place.
I have written all four of these. I have written all four of these with la Doña. It takes a bare-bones plot description (and sometimes not even that) and makes it into a story, with color and shade and focus. It’s a set of spectacles, and I can take up the red ones and all appears bloodied or the yellow ones and all appears honeyed. I see different things from each view, and choose the ones I want to wear while I work this particular plot, this idea.
Take one of your own stories, one of freewritten children of a Bradbury list as breathed through Goldberg, and try on different MICE quotients on them before you parcel them out in quarters like Dent. See how many stories you can tell out of one magical noun in a list.
That’s right. After years of preparation, Doña Ana Lucía Serrano’s first adventure, “Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood“ is now available!Get your copy today!
Cover design by Melissa Weiss Mathieu. Cover art by Kim Schmidt.
The taste of her goodbye kiss lingered on Doña Ana Lucía’s lips as they threw her over the drumhead.
In this thrilling installment, Doña Ana Lucía Serrano falls into the clutches of interplanetary heiress Anni Talavalakar, whose venuswood box contains a secret that could implicate half the Six Worlds of Earth! But how are the sinister criminalSyndicates involved? Blackmailed by a mysterious figure, Doña Ana Lucía will need all her wits and skill to avoid death by a Syndicate bullet or dishonor over the interplanetary airwaves.
Dent’s little essay packs a surprisingly limber, versatile formula for storytelling – a bit like a slim Swiss Army knife. It doesn’t apply to everything (you can’t very well write a “two people sit at a table and talk” type of sci-fi story with it – at least, I can’t) but what it does apply to, it does the job very well, and you have a great deal of fun writing it.
If writing free is the path of inspiration and surprise, the Master Pulp Formula – writing staccato – is the path of fun.
Example Story: Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood (Lady Ana Lucía Serrano and the Venuswood Box)
On the face of it, it just sounds like some other guy’s Save the Cat model. Start in media res. Introduce all the characters. Show, don’t tell. In a 6,000-word story, you have to hit an action scene and a plot twist at every 1,500 words.
But, there in the descriptions of the “different things” that would be “swell” to have the villain doing for this story, there’s
“IS THERE A MENACE WHICH IS TO HANG LIKE A CLOUD OVER THE HERO?”
Lester dent
I defy you not to hear that in Howard Cassell’s voice. Walter Winchell’s at a stretch.
I got to admit, that’s what first hooked me. The lingo. The jive. That breezy thirties style.
But, underneath that, there’s a powerful engine of storytelling in here, or, rather, of yarning. Because this is a method of building the kind of story where characters act, things happen, and by the end, something large or small has changed in the world. Stories of any length, depth, or complexity. Stories like solarpulp.
To begin with, it is not limited to 6,000 words. Indeed, I’ve only rarely managed it in 6,000 words, most of the stories I write in this métier average 14,000 words. It’s the proportions that matter:
A quarter of the way in, the hero has an action-packed confrontation (suitably scaled up or down to the size of the story at hand) and a twist and setback that keeps them from finishing it then and there.
The hero gets more grief, mainly not their own fault, and gets into another conflict halfway through. And it should be a different kind – if Doña Ana Lucía drew her sword and dueled at the first quarter, let her give chase or get pinned to a firefight now.
In the third quarter, the menace grows thicker and darker, and a mirror of the first quarter twist leaves the hero with almost no hope of success. The action may retreat for most of the last quarter, but the menace and tension mount until the hero is “almost buried in his troubles,” then, and here Dent emphasizes, “the hero extricates himself with HIS OWN SKILL, training or brawn.”
After the climax, the hero clears up any mysteries and we close on a final line, “the snapper” that leaves the reader with the intended takeaway feeling.
These outlines or master formulas are only something to make you certain of inserting some physical conflict, and some genuine plot twists, with a little suspense and menace thrown in. Without them, there is no pulp story.
Lester dent
This structure applies to novelettes, too. It applies to movies – let me take Raiders of the Lost Ark:
“First line, or as near thereto, introduce the hero and swat him with a fistful of trouble.”
Indy is betrayed before we even see his face, and then repeatedly by his remaining colleagues, infiltrating the temple of the Hovitos. Then, of course, Belloq shows up and chases him out. All this in the first ten minutes.
“Hero’s endeavours land him in actual physical conflict near the end of the first [quarter]…there is a complete surprise twist development.”
The destruction of the Raven Bar (and Marion’s triumphant, angry “I’m your goddamned partner!”) comes at almost precisely the one-quarter mark of Raiders. And with Sallah and “the boss German, Dietrich” introduced less than a minute later, all the players are on stage.
“Another physical conflict […] a surprising plot twist to end the [second quarter] […] Does the second part have SUSPENSE? […] Is the second part logical?”
Sallah captured, Indy and Marion trapped in the Well of Souls by Belloq and his Nazi friends, who now have the Ark. This kicks off one of the greatest chains of action scenes in all of American cinema, the escape from the Well of Souls, the Airplane Fight, and the Truck Chase. Although the action-packing is heavy (and lesser creators than Lucas, Ford, and Spielberg at the height of their powers would have made it drag), the timing is still there – the twist that they’ve been discovered comes just before the halfway mark, the snakes just after.
“A physical conflict […] a surprising plot twist, in which the hero preferably gets it in the neck bad […] The hero finds himself in a hell of a fix.”
After the extended action sequence ending with the Ark, Indy, and Marion aboard the Bantu Wind, the conflict at the end of the third quarter is understated – it’s a suspense scene, rather than an action scene. Dietrich and his men storm the ship, take the Ark, re-capture Marion, and Indy is barely hanging on by a strap to a Nazi sub. He has to hide, skulk, and disguise himself, and meanwhile we find out they’re not going to Berlin – why not? What is Belloq planning?
“Get the hero almost buried in his troubles […] The hero extricates himself by HIS OWN SKILL.”
Indy challenged Belloq, holding the Ark ransom for Marion, but he relents, and is captured to witness Belloq’s moment of triumph. Does Indy wriggle out of the ropes and take on an entire division of armed Nazis? Well. No. He escapes the fate of those who look into the Ark by his own skill – heeding all the warnings he’s got since the pointer scene that the Ark is not for human eyes or hands and shutting his own eyes and, critically, passing this on to Marion, too. He didn’t get out of the ropes with his own skill, but he got out from the wrath of God that way, and that’s a damn sight bigger.
“The snapper, the punch line to end it.”
I don’t really have to say it, do I? The government warehouse. The Ark was lost, then found, and now, symmetrically, is lost again. Cue John Williams.And it applies to novels.
Take Dune, for example.
The first quarter conflict is Yueh’s betrayal, the fall of House Atreides, with the twist being that the Fremen are far more than anyone (even the Duke) anticipated. In the middle, we have the knife-fight with Jamis, and the revelations of the source of the spice and the Waters of Life. The third quarter, the action is Paul riding the worm and the twist that now is the time for his strike against the Emperor and the Harkonnens. The final confrontation is the knife-fight with Feyd-Rautha, the twist being that Paul has given himself to the coming Jihad. The final line is a bit weak, but the rest of the book’s strengths more than make up for it.
But in a novel, you need something more.
This wasn’t the case for Dent. Each Doc Savage novel ended with Doc much the same as he was before – the globe-trotting do-gooder, Trouble Buster, Inc., the Man of Bronze. He is unchanged for all his adventures, a bronze statue, and even when Monk quits smoking, or Ham acquires a pet monkey, or Doc acquires a cousin, it doesn’t change them. They learn nothing, for they already know all.
That doesn’t satisfy. Not anymore.
The folks over at Rampant Games, in their exhaustive How to Write Pulp for Fun and Profit, explore the pulp character arc. Building on Dent’s model, they introduce the standard pulp hero character development – the hero initially starts out seeking a false goal, start incorporating a better/truer goal, plan to go back, and ultimately commit to the truer goal in the end. This opens up possibilities. Consider Temple of Doom: Indy lights out after the Shankara Stone (for fortune and glory), discovers what’s happened to the missing children, frees them (while still collecting the Shankara stones), and uses two of them to defeat the villain who enslaved the children and returns the last to its home village – giving up the fortune and glory that would have come with it.
Now back to Dune. Paul seeks vengeance for his father’s death and his rightful place as ruler of Arrakis. He glimpses a vision of the jihad to come and the Golden Path, and works to avoid it while continuing to pursue his vengeance. But, here, Paul fails the character arc – when his son is killed, he pursues his vengeance to the hilt, rejecting the “truer goal” of avoiding all the havoc, chaos, and bloodshed it entails.
Indy’s is a triumphant pulp arc. Paul’s is a tragic one.
In any story of action, you can have the protagonist choose to embrace or forsake the higher calling that comes along in the course of pursuing their base goal. The idol, or the friends we made along the way? And many a villain putting a hero in that perilous position had a journey like that once of their own, one that, like Paul, they failed. Every sinner has a future and every saint a past, isn’t that so?
Finally, it’s not limited to just action. Romances often work to the same tempo as Dent’s most testosterone-poisoned pulps. Consider Pride and Prejudice…
Those of us who are into boys can contemplate Mr. Darcy aaaaaaall daaaaay…
…the second ball (where Elizabeth verbally fences with Darcy before he lights off for London with Bingley) and the sudden departure leaving Jane in the lurch are the end of the first quarter, Darcy’s first proposal (and the contents of his letter) and Elizabeth’s rejection are the confrontation at the end of the second, Lydia’s surprise marriage to Wickham caps off the third, and Elizabeth’s confrontation with Lady Catherine and reconciliation with Darcy round the book out. The action, here, is relational – conflicts between people and between people and their own hearts, where the “surprise per page” is in the repartee and the conflict is handled with words (or subtle gestures) and not fists.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider how to apply action, twists, and climaxes to erotica.
Next time, we’ll wind it up with the last of my three tools: Orson Scott Card and his magnificent mice.
The two most influential non-fiction books on my writing career are Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writingand Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I got introduced to both in those halcyon days of my homeschooling, when I launched my first magazine and sent in my first story and won 3rd place in the Ray Bradbury contest from seven states away. And, from that first magic hour between eleven and two in the morning, powered by Pepsis, cheese sarnies, and the Blade Runner soundtrack, they’ve always gone hand-in-hand in my mind.
Both books are collections of short essays, approaching writing from different angles in each, but often singing the same hymns in new variations. Both sing of the passion of writing, of the great giddy joy of watching the words unfold onto the page. “I wind them up and watch them go!” exclaims Bradbury in his perpetually ten-year-old voice. “Set your fingers on the keys, lay your head back, and just let it flow” says Natalie Goldberg in the weary voice of a Midwestern Zen master, before enthusing about how the computer will wrap around your words so you don’t have to reset the typewriter. Both are delighted to be startled, awed by sudden insight, adherents of a mystical (dare I say Zen) approach that comes at storytelling as the prophet comes to the Divine, and like the prophet must describe the indescribable, and put into words what transcends all words.
Bradbury comes around again and again to his lists of words – free-association and psychological outpourings of nouns and phrases. I’ve come to calling them “Bradbury lists.” Here’s one I free-associated recently:
The glass miles. The glass acres. The electric chimneys. The chimneys of the sun. The snow gardens. The gardens of the north. The inheritance. The trust. The shrinking inheritance. The trust under glass. The oncoming storm. The glass inheritance. The wildfire. Fire on the snow. Hot, Wet Canadian Summer. The slush. The broken ice. Plants or power? Guns or butter? The chimney and the arpent. The plants and the plant.
But what to do with them?
Peer at them.
Bradbury looked deep into “The Ravine,” and saw there a memory, the tickle up his back as a young boy raced home in the darkness in Waukegan, Illinois in 1928. I let my own mind flitter over “the Diction-fairy” and wondered what such a creature could be. Other times, amidst “the corals” and “the fishery,” saw “the city sunk, the city risen,” and asked, what city had it been? How had it sunk amidst the corals (as clearly it had, based on where in the paragraph it was)? And how did it rise again?
Then, something …catches. I have no other word for it. Like the dust in a nebula converging, like a child quickening in the womb, like a spark in the kindling, something catches and lives. The idea takes on life and begins to spark all on its own. I look at “the Diction-fairy” and I can hear Mom describing her to the narrator, feel the rush of childlike hope in his heart, and then it’s off to the races. And a race it is, you have to be fast to catch an idea that’s taken off in your head, get down the bones of it, sketch out the size of it, even just gently touch on the magnificent thing you have just witnessed inside your own skull.
And that’s where Natalie Goldberg comes in.
As Ray returns to his lists, Natalie returns to her pages, the freewritten stuff every morning and whenever she needs it after. You can see it in the rhythms of her (never more than a few pages) essays, the sway of her hand when she wrote them longhand into those silly 99c Tweety Bird ringed notebooks. She doesn’t stop to correct her spelling or her grammar or her diction – indeed, it’s a sign that something has broken through, something come alive, if the rush of word-idea-flow-motion is too quick to be caught by mere English. Shocking phrases jump out, stark truths that are somehow comforting for being true and naked, insights into her life or her writing.
The poet’s credo is to “write drunk, revise sober.”
This is the drunkenness.
“Writers don’t drink because they’re writers. Writers drink because they’re writers who aren’t writing.” – Natalie Goldberg
I call it “writing free.” From sitting in stillness, like a good Quaker, allowing nouns to rise, recording them on a page or a document (anything, as long as it’s blank. It’s important that it was blank) to the contemplation of one or another as they call out to me – here a memory, there a nameless sensation, there the echo of a voice I almost heard once – and watch them play off each other, catch fire, burst into sun, quicken into life, and take off! And I’m racing off after them, across Natalie’s ever-forgiving blank pages, the new living thing turning phrases and turning ideas and turning up laughter until I arrive at the end of the story…
…when a soldier’s life meant something, when it never did the first time…
…when the dead Dyson sphere begins to knit, slowly, imperceptibly, back together…
And I am shocked. Sometimes I laugh. Sometimes I cry. But never did I expect how that one would turn out!
And the beauty of it is, neither did anyone else.
Back in 2022, coming out of a long, dry stretch, I wrote of “angels from the Id.” When writing free works purest, finest, that is what it is. It is something that really does touch transcendence, allows me to write something greater than myself, greater than the reader. And a handful of times, it comes out perfect on the first try.
But when it doesn’t, I go and make love to my wife, read Les Misérables to my daughter, do karate, read the latest Asimov’s. And the next day, sober, I sit down to edit. There is nothing sacred about words. They can be cleaned up, moved around, refitted, if it makes the story better.
It’s just that, sometimes, when you write free…the story is sacred, and it infuses the words with a power you never held alone.
The whole damn writing community defines ourselves by our strictures. You write fantasy, I write science fiction. She’s literary, he’s genre. Are you profic, antiship, a twit, a bookstagrammer?
Let’s us draw lines in the sand and pick a side, it’ll be great sport!
Except…
I write science fiction, fantasy, horror, and under other names, romance, Westerns, erotica, mysteries, thrillers, and men’s pulp. I take great pride in it. Each genre strengthens the others.
QUERY: Are you a plotter or a pantser?
ROSCOE: I’m all three.
Welcome to R. Jean Mathieu’s Three Tools of Writing.
Over the next few weeks, I’d like to walk you through some of the ways I write stories. I say “some of the ways,” because no two stories are the same, and because the tools are always the same. I don’t scream on Twitter how all you need to fix a bed is a hammer, or how all cabinets should be built with screws only. (I scream about other things on Twitter, thank you very much.) Instead, I look at the job, pick the tool I think is right for the job, and try it. If it doesn’t work, I’ll try a different tool – and a different way of approaching the story.
I have three tools that I come back to again and again, well-worn and fitted, after twenty-five years of constant use, to my hand. They are:
Bradbury’s lists (and Goldberg’s free hand)
Dent’s Master Pulp Formula
Card’s MICE Quotient
I’ll be going into each in detail over the following weeks, but here’s the short version.
Ray Bradbury’s free-association lists, in my mind, are bound forever to Natalie Goldberg’s free-writing notebooks. Ray conjured out of the air lists of nouns, nouns that became memories, or notions, and which burst forth into characters or conceits and finally into stories. Many of his classics still bear the stamps of their birth – “The Veldt,” “The Pedestrian,” “The Long Rain.” And Natalie Goldberg, a poet of my mother’s generation, believed in the truth of freewriting, of allowing the words to race across the page without censure from our conscious minds. Hell, I’m doing it right now. Both believed in the bones of stories, letting these hard, firm truths thrust upward and outward to startle and inspire us. And, taken together, they have written me stories that made me weep.
Lester Dent’s Master Pulp Formula is just that – a formula for writing a pulp yarn of six thousand words, applicable at sixteen thousand or sixty thousand, believe you me. It’s a formula for keeping everything in proportion – so your story doesn’t start dragging in the second quarter, or rushes unsatisfactory toward a crashing climax. And, with a sufficiently loose definition of ‘action,’ you can apply it to startling results to romance, erotica, or Westerns, too.
(And remember, per the Snowflake Method, it’s not really an interesting story until the third perspective enters the page.)
Orson Scott Card is a terrible human being – but, confoundingly, also a very good writer. He’s not the only one, not even the only one on your bookshelf. And, before I knew what a terrible human being he was, I read his book, and his method of writing – the MICE Quotient – is too good a way to write for me to thrust away. What, then, is your story? How do you frame it? Is it coming to a place? Or is it asking a question? Or fixing a rent in the world? Or struggling against your place in the world? The power here is that any one idea – a person, a place, a mere notion – can become different stories depending on which avenue you pursue, how you choose to frame it.
Here they are, three tools, three totally contradictory ideas about writing, about art, about storytelling. And I use them all.
Because each could be the right tool for the given job.
Join me, over the next four weeks, as I show you how to use my three tools for your writing job.
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