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20.35: Deep Dive into “All the Birds in the Sky” - Using the Lens of Where · Writing Excuses

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  [SPEAKER_00]: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patrion.com slash writing excuses.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Season twenty, episode thirty-five.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: This is Writing Excuses.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: A deep dive on all the birds in the sky using the lens of wear.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm Mary Rubinette.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm Dan.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: I'm Aaron.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: And I'm Howard.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: And I'm here to talk about places.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: All the birds in the sky had for me some of the most memorable and grounding
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  [SPEAKER_04]: place moments in anything I've read recently.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: One of them was when Lawrence is taking his trip to, I guess it was MIT to go see a launch and someone tells him, you know, I'll give directions to your parents so they can find their way there.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: and someone comments that they will never find their way there without specific directions.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: I remember a couple of occasions driving in Boston and complaining about it to someone and having them tell me, oh yeah, the budget for the Boston MTA is handled like, here's the amount of money you have, see how wrong you can make all the maps.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: And I bring that up because it feels like something that everybody who lives in Boston
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  [SPEAKER_04]: knows and it's something that by the characters brushing up against it in this, you know, this flirtation with the location, we become very grounded in it.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, yes, that's Boston.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: What I like about that actually is that the way Charlie Jane is handling one of the tools that we have, which is context.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Anyone who knows Boston knows that this is true, but she also provides context for people who don't know Boston, which is a great trick that you can use with, like, secondary world fantasy.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not just for real world places.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, I mean, what I really love in the later portion of the novel is how lived in this vision of San Francisco feels.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, it feels like the author has such a deep connection to this place.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, I don't know if our necessary bookstore is real and if it's inside the mall that is described in the book, but I believe that that's a real place that has been transformed in this way.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I believe that these streets are laid out like this.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's so many details from the bus stop to the parks to all these that feel
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Very authentic to me in a way that is so detailed that gives this backdrop in this context to the characters, right?
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And so this fight between matching technology feels really rooted in this fight over San Francisco that we've seen unfold over the past couple decades.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I can't remember exactly when this book comes out, but like it is definitely in the heart of that conversation, right?
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And so place is really informing the characters, responses, and goals in a very deep way.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I think something really interesting about why it feels lived in is that there's always the unnecessary detail, which is often the way that we look think about place.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: You know what I mean?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, if you, I think sometimes the mistake you can make as a writer is to be like, I'm describing a beach.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm gonna talk about how they're sand and waves and all the things that a beach contains.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: But a lot of times it'll be like, that's the beach where like every spring, the penguins like flood it for some reason, how they got through it.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: and leave behind Penguin egg and like then you have to step over them.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the thing that like if I went I would remember about the beach.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: It is either something emotional context to me or an interesting detail that distinguishes it.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Like the mall where all the signs are in half or all the signs are in Spanish is something that like you're going to remember that's going to distinguish it and I love that she manages to put that in.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, and so much of the description of place is couched in interactions.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: She's not just describing the bookstore, she's not just describing the restaurants, but giving really specific details about how the characters interact with those places.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Two of the ones that really stood out to me were, at one point, they flagged down a food truck, which is so completely outside of my experience with food trucks,
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  [SPEAKER_02]: that it immediately took me somewhere else.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm like, oh, this must be a thing that the author has experienced.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: This must be unique to that place.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: The other was they, I think it was Lawrence was eating fried chicken at some point and just going on and on about how it didn't leave his fingers messy.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, that's such a small little detail about this one specific chicken place that fries in such a way that it doesn't get all greasy.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And those are such a brilliant way of letting you into that space.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I also, I'm just gonna, the interaction thing made me remember a line, when the kids are in middle school and they run away to this, to try to go to the river because it makes a pew pew sounds.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's this line, you know, well, this sucks.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Lawrence squatted down to examine the river and nearly soaking his butt on the slushy ground.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: what's the point of ditching school if we can't go make laser noises on the ice but the that squatting down to examine the river nearly soaking his butt on slushy ground even if you haven't experienced that kind of uh... wetness that kind of you know if you are someplace that doesn't get snow that doesn't get slush you know what it's like to have your butt wet
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  [SPEAKER_00]: from sitting on something that was unexpectedly damp.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And I love that she gives us this very tangible thing that implies the rest of the world and also through a way, like with your Fred chicken example, you know what it's like to eat Fred chicken and thinking about the wonder of, oh, wow, Fred chicken that doesn't leave my hands messy.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, it just invites you in and implies everything else through one of the other things we use for where which is the senses.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, there's a chain here that I want to make sure we've established the connections, having a place that I'm familiar with in the book, grounds me in the book, having a character interact with a place makes the setting and the character, you know, work together.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: If you've got all three of those to where I know the place and the character interacts with the place, then you've completed this link that has drawn me all the way into the story.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: And yes, Merri, I'm going to, as you were saying, you know, the senses.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: I think of the Spice House, you know, the description of that house where the wood smells like, you know, things used in curry.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: The woods.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: In the first chapter, if any of you have gone wandering in the woods as a kid and been lost, there is an emotional element to a forest where you don't know which way the road is and Charlie Jane connects us to that and connects the characters to that and uses where as a lens to pull us me anyway all the way into the story.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I think the other thing that she does that's related to this is that she's also using the where the place and the characters perceptions of it to underline some of the major themes of the book.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: There's this line, I'm going to read you a fair bit here, but
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  [SPEAKER_00]: The parrots were eating cherry blossoms on the top of a big tree on the crest of a steep hill, not far from Grace Cathedral.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: A half a dozen green birds with red splotches on their heads, just tearing the shit out of those white flowers.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Pedals scattered across the sidewalk and the grass as the birds squawked and worked their crooked beaks.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: While Lawrence and Patricia watched from the steep bank of the park lit across the street.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: San Francisco never stopped astonishing Lawrence.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Wild raccoons and possums wandered the streets, especially at night.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And their shiny fur and long tails look like stray cats unless you looked twice.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And he talks a little bit more.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And then says, the only reason Lawrence ever saw these urban twists of nature was because he hung out with Patricia.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: She saw a whole different city than he did.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And that, for me, is like encapsulating the strength of their friendship and the crux of the book that they see different worlds.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And so by presenting these different worlds, by having this moment where Lawrence is looking at the birds, but we know that he is not seeing the birds the same way Patricia experiences birds.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I think one of the fun ways that Charlie Jane is using where to support this theme that we've been talking about with the book.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean, sort of encapsulating a lot of what we've been talking about.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: So I think the mistake that people make when talking about setting or world building is that it's about immersion, right?
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  [SPEAKER_03]: People think it's about immersion.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And it is to some extent you want to like have your reader smelling seeing what do things feel like when they touch it.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I think all that is incredibly important.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: But even more important than that, it's a lens into how the character thinks and feels about the world, right?
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And you know, that is everything from both examples in terms of like the fried chicken and the slush are telling us something about Lawrence in that he's kind of fussy.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: He doesn't like to be dirty.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: It would be so bad for him if his butt touched that slush in a way that Patricia would be not notice it at the same level.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: He's thinking about is there a grease on my hands, right?
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And the thing about setting and what I love about what she has done here with San Francisco and the latter half of the book is
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  [SPEAKER_03]: The way I talk about New York City is that it's haunted, because anywhere I go in New York City after having lived there for the majority of my adult life, I no longer live there sadly, but I have so many memories of every neighborhood and versions of that neighborhood in versions of the person I was and the people I knew and who I went there with, who I was hanging out with, then all of these things
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  [SPEAKER_03]: are layered on any space that I go to in New York pretty much, any neighborhood, any region.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I just have lived so much of my life there, right?
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And so setting, I think when I think about it, is this lens into character and emotion?
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Because it's about what they were connected to in that time.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: How the people that they're with, you know, in the way that that scene you just described is changing literally how Lawrence sees the world.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: He is noticing the pair of telegraph hell.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: He's noticing the raccoons.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: He's noticing all of these different elements that he just would have been invisible to him without this person that he's with.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: I have a question that I want to ask all of you and it's a tricky one.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: So we're going to wait until we've taken a break.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: I promised you a tricky question.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: It's so tricky that I have to explain it first.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: In many stories, the place that a thing happens.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: The where is chosen because something it had to happen somewhere.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: You know, they have to be standing on something.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: You know, after we breathing something, San Francisco in this book is not that place.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: It is a character unto itself.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: But are there places in this book?
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  [SPEAKER_04]: And I can only think of one.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: Are there places in this book that are used because the plot had to do a thing, but it doesn't really matter where it happened.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: And the only one I can think of is the flashback to Siberia.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: We had to have a thing happen that was bad and it had to happen where there was methane, clathrate and so on and so forth.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: And so we picked Siberia, but it could just as easily have been Canada or Alaska or or something.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to disagree with the premise of your question a little bit and then I'll sort of circle back to answering the thing that you're asking.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: But to me, I don't think that San Francisco is just a character of the book.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I think the book is about San Francisco in a very, very deep way.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: right and it's about this sort of fight for the soul of the city in terms of this community and connection on one side this pursuit of technological solutions on the other side right this technology that is sort of taken over how they think about the city it versus this person Patricia who is out there helping people who you know are living with a it's helping people are homeless or you know being taken advantage of right it's this real
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  [SPEAKER_03]: fight over what it means and also just sort of them myopicness of what is happening outside of San Francisco that influences so much the book of like we're like oh yeah that happened in Korea that happened of Florida that happened over there I will concede that in my haste I understated the importance of San Francisco to the story
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  [SPEAKER_03]: This question stands though.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: The question does stand and I do think that it's one of one thing that's really interesting is when she does jump to other locations.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: A sign from Boston Boston MIT feel really important because that's like where a lot of this text starts from and then ends up in San Francisco in the Bay Area, right?
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  [SPEAKER_03]: But then the stuff that is happening outside out, whether that's Denver, Colorado, maybe it wasn't number of the Colorado or Siberia, they don't feel a little bit like, oh, this could be kind of anywhere because
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  [SPEAKER_03]: The book isn't about those places.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: The book is about this place over here, right?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I was just going to say that when you're talking about places a character, it occurs to me that place being a character doesn't mean it has to be a particular type of character.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And so like in this way, perhaps like it is a, it is the thing that the two, it's like they're trying to like fight over in the divorce type of thing, that the two sides are fighting over where a Siberia to me feels like an antagonist.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: There are a few times in which the place is the antagonist.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: the Eastern European city that Patricia gets dropped into and can't understand anything that they are saying.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: The maze part of the school where it's like, it's just the way that that place is described is just a litany of bad things that happen to you there.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: The maze isn't really described as like, and then maybe you get stuck in a hole or like, then maybe you fall off a wall and like, you're flat or whatever happens in the maze and then it's like, but we don't ever see it other than that.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And so maybe the thing to think about a little bit is what kind of
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  [SPEAKER_01]: character is the place playing.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it just a one off?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it a deep part of it?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it something that the characters are going to have to fight with or against?
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, thematically bad stuff happens when you don't have deep connection to the place, right?
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  [SPEAKER_03]: All the places we're describing the characters are connected to and that's where all the bad stuff in this story happened.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: So I actually want to talk about one of the places that is a literal character, which is the tree.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Mm-hmm.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Yep.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things about the tree is that when she first sees it, it is just a place.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: The birds, the birds occupy it.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And then the second time she comes across the parliament, you know, with a parliament of birds, she, it is just the tree and her talking, and it's just a character at that point.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: But then when she returns to it,
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  [SPEAKER_00]: as an adult and looks at it.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: She is aware of it as a place, but also as an entity, which is I think one of the interesting things about this.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Because it's something that happens with the other characters.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: We see it happen with her and Roberta, that her relationship to them changes, so her understanding of them changes.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that also happens with place, but
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I think the tree is the only thing really that she experiences as a child and as like that we have a has a continuity all through the thing, but her relationship to it changes.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: The tree functions as opening and closing parentheses and if you include Lawrence's closet,
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  [SPEAKER_04]: and treat Lawrence's closet as paragon and then as caddy we have opening parentheses twice with the tree and the closet and then at the end of the story we have closing parentheses where the tree and the closet caddy become become one that's a neat structure and it's not there
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  [SPEAKER_04]: I say it's not there for the reader.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: It's there for the reader, yes, because structures like this, even if you don't see them, they help resonate with you.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: They help you know that the story is ended.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: But as a writer, knowing that you are going to come back to a place helps you build the story.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like when she describes the tree the second time or that when she comes back to it as an adult with Lawrence, she says Patricia had forgotten how massive and terrible the tree was.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: But when it's described earlier, it is not described as massive and terrible.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: how overwhelming the embrace of its two great limbs, how like an echo chamber, the space in the shadow its canopy was.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: She had expected it to seem smaller now that she was a grown-up just just a tree after all, but instead she looked at it, it's great hanging fronds and its Norl's surface and felt presumptuous.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: for even coming into its presence again.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is such a different perception of the tree and her relationship to the tree than she has at the other time she experiences it.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is for me, one of the things, one of the lenses we talked about was the lens of time.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is one of the things for me that is I think a great example of how you can use place in the character's place to it to show their growth and evolution.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: the roles of these places.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a tool that I use a lot, which is what's the emotional reaction I want the reader to have to this chapter this scene, this whatever.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: What is the emotional function of the thing?
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  [SPEAKER_04]: When I first began reading the story, the woods were grounding me.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: There was this sense of
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  [SPEAKER_04]: sense of joy and comfort of child in the woods because I had that experience as a kid which we then get to the tree and it becomes sense of wonder coupled with a little bit of dread because I don't know what's going to happen and and in reading in reading back over some of these places I look at the emotional functions of
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  [SPEAKER_04]: of Siberia, I like antagonist.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: The emotional function of the bookstore, the emotional function of San Francisco, which is manifold and hugely layered.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: And even so, I am understating it.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: But that tool, as I look at the lens of where from the perspective of the reader,
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  [SPEAKER_04]: Uh, I step back through the meta and ask myself, okay, as a writer.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: How did she do this?
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  [SPEAKER_04]: How much of this was deliberate in the selection of place and the writing about place and how much of it did Howard just happen to bring to the story because because Howard.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I guess we'll find some of that out when we get to interview Charlie Jane later.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, we should probably move on to home work.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: I have homework and it's related to that thing what I just said.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: List the locations in your current work in progress.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: Next to each one, describe its story functions.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: Is it there to ground?
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  [SPEAKER_04]: is it there to a vote sense of wonder?
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  [SPEAKER_04]: Is it purely plot logical?
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  [SPEAKER_04]: A thing had to happen in a place and so I picked this one.
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  [SPEAKER_04]: Is it world-building?
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  [SPEAKER_04]: So make this list of the places in your work in progress and then take a step back from it and ask yourself if any of these places can be changed or should be changed based on what you now know about them.
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: This has been writing excuses.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: You're out of excuses, now go right.
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• 20:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Koal, Dong Wan Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Taylor.
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