Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with Dan Koboldt, who is the editor of two books that are wonderful resources for writers of genre fiction titled Putting the Science in Fiction, and then more recently Putting the Fact in Fantasy. Dan is also a writer. His most recent book is called Domesticating Dragons. So Dan, tell us first of all, a little bit about how you got into writing genre fiction specifically, and then we'll talk more about some of those shady corners and things that people don't realize they might have to write about when they wander into genre fiction, and some of the research you've got to do.
Dan: I am the editor of these two non-fiction books that are intended for writers, but also I’ve been authoring fantasy and science fiction for over 10 years. I don't know, I guess I first got into the game, like many people, I was a long time reader, thought, Yeah, I should try writing that thing. Did try writing, turned out to be really bad at it for a long time, and then eventually after eight short years or something, I finally sold a book, and I did a trilogy with Harper-Collins. And then more recently, I've been writing for Baen Books. I've been writing books about dragons and genetic engineering. Somehow during all of this, I started this blog series. It originated from me being a geneticist - that's my day job. I'm a research scientist, and I started writing a blog post or two about things about genetics that people often get wrong in books, television, movies, etcetera, and how to get those things right. And so I was like, This is useful, and I wrote a couple of those, and then I thought, Man, it would be great to have this for so many different areas that people get wrong in media. And so I started inviting my friends to do this. Fellow scientists and engineers and doctors for the science fiction side, and then while I was at it, for the Fantasy side, I started recruiting historians and linguists and martial artists to talk about their area of expertise as it applies to writing genre fiction, what is the short course tutorial they can give to someone to help them get the details right.
Mindy: I know that I personally, having written a fantasy. I felt like, Oh, this will be great, I can make everything up, this is all my imagination. That ended up actually being the hardest thing I've ever done, was writing a fantasy series. You don't realize that you actually do have to do research and that you have to know some things about our world or about how certain things work in order to be able to write a convincing believable world in a fantasy. And I think a lot of people that are first starting to wander into genre fiction don't understand the amount of heavy lifting that's involved.
Dan: Yeah, that's true. I think fantasy writers, we think we get to make everything up and it's great, and we have total freedom, but most stories have some rooting in the real world and real human experiences so that people can relate to them as readers. And so when you start building a little bit around things that happen in the real world, it's easy to get into trouble, you're like, Well, these people gotta get around, so I'm gonna give them horses in this fancy world. And you're like, Okay, horses, and then you realize you don't know all the different parts of a horse. How to describe them or what they can do, how long they can gallop, what to feed them every day. There's just so much to quickly get in over your head, even though you're like, No, I'm making all this stuff up. There still has to be some grounding in reality, and for this blog series, and then eventually the book, my argument has been that the more you cover your basis for things that are gonna touch on reality, the more that people think, Okay, this person knows what they're talking about. And then you get to make up other things where you don't necessarily know what you're talking about, you get more leeway with the readers.
Mindy: One of the most helpful things that I ever came across as a writer of any type of fiction was the advice that you don't have to convince an expert that you know what you're talking about, you just have to convince the average reader. So Dan, obviously you're a geneticist, so any time you're watching a TV show, a movie or reading a book that has any sort of science about genetics or cloning or something like that, you know when they're full of shit. But that's you. Most everybody else that's watching this, or reading this, they won't even notice. So for example, I'm a farmer's daughter. Farming is never right. Farming is wrong in every movie ever. It's all wrong. Always, all the time. And I notice it. A quick example is A Quiet Place, wonderful movie, loved it. But the whole thing is you have to be quiet in order to never get attacked by the monsters. They're doing self-reliant living and farming. The entire place where they live is surrounded by a massive cornfield that is planted in perfect geometric rows that you cannot do unless you use a tractor. It's like that didn't happen, because those things are loud. And that is not hand-planted, literally no one noticed this, except me. But I'm like, Yes, I completely accept aliens, but you didn't plant that corn by hand. You do only have to convince the average viewer or reader that's true, but you do need to put in the work so that someone like you or like me can not be entirely pulled out of the story. Because I was pulled out of the story, I was enjoying the movie, I was having a great time, and then that scene came... And I was like, Oh, that's wrong.
Dan: And all you could think about was the corn.
Mindy: No, it's very true. And then anybody I know that has any sort of knowledge about historical weaponry, they can't hardly watch anything. They're like, it's all wrong.
Dan: Everybody has some expertise in something, some experience from childhood or it's their profession, or they've spent years and years around it, everyone has some area where they're an expert in something, and they're usually very hard to please. So I think step one is to avoid the most glaring errors. Now, avoid the things that are common myths or misconceptions that everyone gets wrong, and then step two is get a little bit of fundamental knowledge enough to show that you're at least basically competent and you know enough to be dangerous. That way you'll fool the average reader who doesn't know much about it, you'll at least satisfy or placate the reader who is deeply knowledgeable. And they're like, Okay, clearly they don't know about corn farming as much as I do, but at least they didn't have uniform rows when you're not allowed to drive any machinery. So that's what the book is about. Right, it's like, get a bunch of experts together, tell writers how to avoid the glaring errors and how to at least seem basically confident in a variety of subject matters.
Mindy: Know enough to be dangerous is a really good way to put it. Looking at the first collection, which is called Putting the Science in Fiction that came out in October of 2018 from Writer’s Digest Books. I've got my copy right here in front of me - Part one, research labs, hospitals and really bad ways to die. People get hospitals and medical stuff wrong constantly. Genome engineering. The brain, in general. Then - Space: things to know or for when Skynet takes over, rocket science, literal rocket science, cryo preservation, time travel, light travel, all of those things. But one of the things I really like about Putting the Science in Fiction is, these are the things that we know. How do you wanna take that and then move off of that with your extrapolation of fiction?
Dan: Future extrapolation, and this is the current state of knowledge. And where can you take it? At least get your starting point right and then take it where you want. If you think about the current state of space travel, it is significantly advanced over the 60s, but still primitive compared to where like most space operas are, etcetera. So I figured at least a basic instruction in some of the fundamentals will help writers cover their bases and then be able to explore areas where if they went with a solid foundation.
Mindy: Absolutely, I wanna talk a little bit about how did you go about gathering the folks that contributed to these collections?
Dan: That's a good question. This started as a long-running blog series, which it still is. But the process is essentially the same. I found people who were experts that many of them also were writing in genre fiction already. I got to know them through the writing community, and then so someone would make a mistake of indicating that in addition to being a writer, they were like an engineer or a doctor or a linguist or something like that. I'm like, Oh okay, well, now we're gonna talk about coming to do a guest post. The way I always hook them is, I'm like, do you ever notice that some people get these fundamental things wrong so often in books and TV?. And they're like, Yes, it always bothered me. And I'm like, Well, how would you like to put that into a blog post? That's how I cajole these people to come and write about their area of expertise, and I think it's very useful for many of them to be genre fiction writers because they're in the genre, they know many of the works, and so they can use examples. It's like, okay, in this super popular book series, what I like about how they address this thing… Like you say - it's a fundamental problem that always throws me out of the story is this. So it's useful to have accessible examples from people who are knowledgeable in the field too, and they just happened to be real world experts.
Mindy: I always talk about networking, especially in the publishing industry, making those connections and talking to people, 'cause you were learning these things before you went out and share them with the world, as you were learning these things through these conversations. And I think that it is so fascinating also how small our circles can be, so I got my copy of Putting the Fact in Fantasy and I'm just running down the list of contributors, I'm like, Oh yeah, I know him, I know her, I know them, right. It is a wonderful pool of knowledge that is wide and varied that you can definitely draw from.
Dan: You don't have to look too far to find someone who knows more about a subject than you. And there are a surprising number of experts floating around 'cause Sci Fi and fantasy, I argue they attract smart people. There's almost always somebody that has something in their real world job or area of expertise or upbringing that's super relevant to writing fantasy or science fiction, and that they can probably teach almost anyone about. So like you, I'm always thinking about meeting new people, finding out what we have in common, when what we have in common is we all like to write and be writers. And there are often these extra avenues that we might wanna explore like, Oh really... You grew up on a farm and you now currently keep a whole menagerie of animals? We should talk about that sometime and share that information with other people.
Mindy: I wanna go back to a project that you and I worked on together that was your baby, we worked on like an audio serial called The Triangle, you came up with the story and you recruited me, but then because it is about a plane crash and islands in the Bermuda Triangle, you are smart enough to then get our other co-author, Sylvia Wrigley, who is a pilot. When you're writing something like that, where we're talking about very, very specific types of travel and how do we fix the plane and try to get off the island, and is this viable?
Dan: Right, and that's the best thing you can possibly have is somebody sitting next to you who knows everything about the thing, and they can just be like, Stop right there, you're wrong for five different ways. Which is what Silvia did for us a lot. She investigates airplane crashes and stuff, it was the perfect thing for when we're writing about the Bermuda Triangle, all these bone-headed mistakes that mostly I was going to make about how these things came to pass, She was like, No, no, this is actually how they would investigate that, or how the call would happen. All that stuff. So the best thing you have is an expert sitting right next to you that's gonna tell you where you're going wrong or how to do this, right? That you can ask them any questions. Most of us don't always have that luxury unless you're super wealthy and can just hire a panel of people to sit with you and answer your questions. You have to have some other way to get that expertise, so it's useful to collect that sort of information on a blog or a book, or it can be a reference for anybody that needs it.
Mindy: Yeah, having Sylvia literally sitting next to us in the writer's room and we would be brainstorming and we'd be like, Well, what if... How could... What if they maybe... And she's like, No, no, no. Well, I guess we gotta think of something else.
Dan: That was also my claim to fame is like, Yeah, I did this thing with Mindy McGinnis, and then now she's writing with James Patterson, so it's almost like I'm James Patterson.
Mindy: You'll be able to Kevin Bacon me.
Dan: I know, seriously. Yeah, I mean, you just have your hand in so many pots.
Mindy: I do... Well, that's because I don't have a personal life. All I do is work.
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Mindy: Talking about Putting the Fact in Fantasy, I was looking at this over the weekend, and a lot of the things that I thought were super useful aren’t strictly for fantasy. There are a lot of things in here that you could use across different genres. Something else I thought was really interesting, and that is interesting about you as an individual, obviously you're drawing on your science background and your genetics background in Putting the Science in Fiction, quite a few of your contributions in Putting the Fact in Fantasy have to do with hunting and with archery.
Dan: That's true, that's true. Yeah, that's my side hobby, and it was my small contribution to this series because similar to with growing up in farmland, I grew up spending a ton of time in the woods, and so I'm always bothered when things are woefully wrong in the depiction of being in the deep woods and getting around. And then also the archery thing, it's just like a personal fascination of mine, something I spend a huge amount of time doing, so I'm hard to please in that front too. But that was me, I was like, This is my contribution. I can write about archery for this book, and I'll write about being in the deep woods and what that's like for this book, 'cause I wanted to have some little parts that I could contribute to this. And then this is the best fit. I had a lifetime of bow hunting in the woods and using historic methods to pursue deer and turkey and other game animals.
Mindy: I've never been much of a hunter, I know weapons. We’ll just say I'm on the perimeter of hunters, so I used to... I don't anymore, but I used to watch The Walking Dead. And I remember watching a scene, a fight scene where Daryl got his crossbow and was taking them down, and then he's out of arrows and he just runs into a group of zombies and he's just hitting them with his crossbow over and over, and I'm like, Oh no, no, no, you're gonna have to recalibrate that.
Dan: Yeah, the finely tuned instrument for range shooting is not a bludgeoning tool. If I were your writer consultant, I'd be like, Well, first of all, Mindy, when it's a crossbow, they're called bolts, not arrows. That would be like your 101 course.
Mindy: Not arrows, it’s a bolt. So I enjoyed your essay about archery very much, but then my favorite thing, you were like - any time anybody is running through the woods... No, they're not. You fall down.
Dan: True woods, especially in the country where you and I live, like it is thick in there, and it's under brush and everything has thorns and all the fallen wood is under foot. Unless you happen To know every square inch of it. 'cause you've been there and there's a very nice trail, like generally, you're picking your way through this stuff and trying not to get completely torn up. You're not full on sprinting through the woods chasing somebody with a sword. It’s just never gonna happen.
Mindy: There are times when there are things that are absolutely impassible.
Dan: Yeah, oh yeah, definitely. No, you can't get through, you’re like... Nope. Okay, I just have to totally go back and go around and I am willing to get down on my hands and knees and crawl through the undergrowth to get where I'm going, but there are times even then, I'm like, Nope, can't get through it. There's just no physical way to fit through thick patches of woods, and so these are the woods I'm dealing with. It seems like any time you wanna go somewhere, there's no great straight line to get there. You're like, Wow, I can kinda take this small game trail, I won't get too torn up. I can move kinda quietly and it'll go kind of in the direction I need. You can move in the Woods quickly or you can move quietly, but you can't really do both. If you have to get anywhere in a hurry, like anybody's gonna hear you from a mile around, including any animals.
Mindy: The other thing that you mentioned that I thought was super useful, you talked about navigating by the stars, and you were like, you can't see them.
Dan: No, and you can’t get a GPS signal sometimes.
Mindy: You're not navigating by the stars because you can't see them, there's a canopy.
Dan: A little detail here and there to let me know you stepped into the woods or at least talk to someone who has stepped into the woods and you know what it's like. I'll forgive you the small mistakes that maybe somebody who doesn't live in the woods would catch, if you've at least done a little bit of homework.
Mindy: Right, totally. I think that a lot of the stuff actually, that are in both of these books could be useful across multiple genres, not just science fiction and fantasy, but also mental health. There are quite a few different essays in Putting the Science in Fiction about mental health that are really helpful, there's parts about bipolar, schizophrenia, dementia.
Dan: We were putting together that book, the editor was like, you know... It's kind of curious, you have all these things, they're like science, space, engineering things, and any of the sections on mental health top doesn't fit as nicely with the theme. Those are the most viewed posts on my blog series, and there are so many people that wanna handle that well, so we gotta keep them. And then she understood, she was like, Okay, I totally get it now. And those topics are so relevant and wide-reaching that section of the book, I think it's called The Brain is Wider than the Sky, which I think is just a lovely section title. One of my contributors came up with that. It's true, there’s so much that we're learning about mental health, it's current state, that probably people, if they're gonna write a neuro-diverse character should at least have a basic understanding of. This was a way for them to at least get the 101 course, the crash course in writing, bipolar, Alzheimer's, those types of things.
Mindy: You were talking about talking to a linguist, but then also horses, and that's one of the things I think is really important, especially in fantasy, but really it can be anything. Horses. so Mindee Arnett, who is another Ohio author. She does write fantasy. She's also a very, very involved equestrian, and she gets lit up about people never getting horses right. And so there is an actual entire section about horses in Putting the Fact in Fantasy.
Dan: That's true. And I fully admit part of that was selfish and it's like I know that I don't know enough about horses to be a fantasy writer with a lot of horses running around. So I was like, there are many, many people who own horses, ride horses, train horses, etcetera, and they can tell you so much, and so I found several those types of experts, and I got a lot of those articles for the blog and then for the book, because it was so viable to just have them talk about basic things like matching the breed of horse you have to the thing your character needs to do. And naming the parts of the horse and the tackle that are required to ride the horse and avoiding mistakes in general, like horse care, how much food do they need to bring to feed the horse along the way? Just basic questions like this, it’s great to have people right there ready to answer, and then you're like, Okay, so I've got this guy and I definitely wanna put him on a stallion. And they're like, You probably don't... If he hasn't written a lot of horses, you don't wanna put him on the most difficult type of horse to ride, etcetera, Basically, things like that. Horses, I think are key. You could write a book entirely about courses for fantasy writers and easily find enough people to fill that out.
Mindy: I think people make the mistake when they're writing horses in like they treat them like cars. It's like I get up in the morning and I get on my horse. Like you turn on your car, and then you turn off your car when you're done using your car, and it's like, No, it's another living thing that is part of your group and you've gotta feed it and you gotta take care of it, and its health is imperative. It’s interesting to me, how complicated a horse is. So I grew up with a friend that had horses, but I have never known much at all about horses. I read all the Black Stallion books, that's where I'm at. My second book In A Handful of Dust, my characters are crossing the United States, and at one point, they do have horses. I know that I don't know enough about horses to do this well, and so I did ask Mindee some questions and enough that I could operate that way, but the nice thing was... And I didn't do this on purpose, but it actually worked out well, was that my characters themselves did not know horses very well.
Dan: Yeah, that's perfect.
Mindy: Yeah, so it worked out well. So they could be like, Well, shit.
Dan: Like you said, treating horses, like cars, they're actually susceptible to a lot of different types of injuries and illnesses and things that realistically, were probably happening all the time when horses were the main mode of transportation, and probably we've lost an appreciation for that. Now, it brings up a good point, which is my self-serving gain in doing the book and the blog are, is like - I learn more than anyone, 'cause I get to find the expert and have them write about the thing and put their post together, and so I get to learn it first and was like, Oh, this is so useful, and almost every time I'm like - people are gonna love this. Here, all the things that most people didn't realize about this particular topic, and whether that’s proper military strategy or even just... There's a lot about history in there too, because it's sort of taking inspiration from real world history. And I think probably most people with your podcast know, we have a very sheltered view of history, a very Eurocentric view of history is what most people get in their history classes in school.And that's only a small slice of world history, so we try to cover other aspects, African and Asian influences on the middle ages. History of the ancient Near East, just areas that are really fascinating for world building inspiration but are less covered by mainstream educational sources.
Mindy: Absolutely. Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find your books and where they can find these particular titles, Putting the Science in Fiction and Putting the Fact in Fantasy., but also where they can find your blog and where they can access all of the other wonderful resources you have on your blog.
Dan: I think that if you Google Dan Koboldt, or go to Dan Koboldt dot com, that's your starting point to find all of the things, but the books are available in eBook, trade paperback and they're available in audiobook. We really try to make it as accessible to anybody who wants the book, whatever format, you listen to, we can get you the nook..
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.
