BRANDON: Everyone give a warm welcome to Mary
Robinette. CLASS: (applause)
MARY ROBINETTE: Thanks. Brandon invited me here to talk to you about
short stories, because he is good at many things . . . that are not short stories. I know, it's shocking. I write a lot of short stories. But the thing that you should understand is
that writing is fractal. Once you understand how something works at
one length, you can actually apply it to other lengths, as long as you understand the principles
that are involved. If it's something that works in a paragraph
level, you can scale it down to sentence, up to chapter, scene, or five-volume monstrosity. What is a short story? Now, I'm not talking about the market definition,
but about the reader experience. Short stories are about delivering a specific
emotional punch. It's a specific experience. Novels are about immersion. This is an important distinction to understand,
that when readers pick up a piece of fiction, they're picking it up because they want to
effect a change in their brain. They want to have an emotional experience,
and they want a specific ride. So novel readers, the analogy that I use is
that it's like two different modes of watching the Olympics. You can watch the Olympics, like WATCH the
Olympics. You watch the pre-show stuff. You watch all of the Road to the Olympics
with the fancy music and people running in the background, the heartfelt things about
someone's mom and how they drove them in the dark to whatever it is. You watch all of the different athletes in
whatever competition it is that you are totally invested in. Even if there's one gymnast that you are there
for, you watch the competition, because you want to know. Then your gymnast goes out and they do their
flippy flippy routine, and it's amazing, and they stick the landing. Then there's the hugging with the coach, and
then there's the medals ceremony. And then there's the post-show interview,
which is the denouement, and you have watched the Olympics. That's a novel. A short story is, someone has forwarded you
a YouTube clip of the gymnast doing the flippy flippy routine, and you watch it, and it begins
right before they flip, and it ends when they stick the landing. You have watched the Olympics. Very different experiences. But you're reading them, or watching them,
for different things. In one case, you just want that punch, that
excitement of watching someone stick the landing and doing something exceptional. In the other you want this long, immersive
thing. With a short story, it's that quick fix, and
that's an important thing to understand. Now we get to some structure. Ready? We have the MICE Quotient. Whee! Okay. The MICE Quotient is an organizational theory
that explains pretty much every story, fiction and nonfiction. I'm going to talk about this through a lens
of fiction, but I'll let you know that if you have to write an essay it works for nonfiction
too. Now stories are made up of, click, four elements:
milieu, inquiry, character, and event, mixed in different proportions. These elements can help you determine where
a story starts and stops, and the kind of conflicts that your characters face. Click. A milieu story begins when your character
enters a place, and it ends with your character exits the place. These are things like Gulliver's Travels,
Around the World in 80 Days, classic examples. Click. Knowing where milieu stories end, this also
tells you the kind of conflicts that go in the middle, because your job as a writer is
to figure out what your character needs to do, and then systematically prevent them from
reaching the goal. The moment that goal is reached; the story
is over. So you are just mean. Click. Milieu conflict, if it ends when you exit
a place, all of the stuff in the middle is about difficulty with navigating that space. It's people getting confused about finding
the exit. It's trouble surviving in the place. It's attempting to navigate. Anything around place is going to be milieu,
anything where you're struggling with the space you're in. Inquiry stories, click. Inquiry stories are driven by questions. They begin when a character has a question. "Huh?" And they end when they answer it. "Aha!" These are, it's a super complicated structure. But it's things like Sherlock Holmes, murder
mysteries. These are classic inquiry stories. Click. For an inquiry conflict, your goal is to keep
your character from finding the answer. They're lied to. They can't understand the answer. The answer leads to a dead end. Those are what red herrings are. Click. Character stories. Character stories are driven by angst. "Oh, my life is so hard!" In the simplest form, they begin when a character
is unhappy with themselves, and they end when they're happy. "Ah, I'll never be popular." "Now I'm popular!" But really they begin with an identify shift,
a shift in how the character self-defines, and they end when the character's self-definition
solidifies, when they have a new understanding of self. So these are coming-of-age stories, romances. Those are classic character stories. Click. Your character is trying to change. Stop them. Don't let them break out of their role. Fill them with self-loathing. Have the change backfire. Those are character stories. Now event stories, click, are driven by action. These begin when the status quo, or the sense
of normal, is disrupted, and they're restored when there's a new status quo. And by the way, yes, "everyone dies" does
count as a new status quo. But it is very much an external threat. Character is internal. This is external. So by this point you understand the drill. Click. Don't let your character restore the status
quo. You have fight scenes. You have chase scenes. You have explosions. You have mor disruptions to status quo. Again, you're just mean. That is your job. Click. Super easy to confuse character and event. Character story is interior. I'll never be popular. Event story is external. Asteroid coming at the earth. If the asteroid is thinking "I'll never be
popular," the asteroid is having a character story. OK. Click. So that's what individual MICE elements look
like, but you almost never see a single thread story. Most stories are made up of multiple threads,
because single thread stories are really boring. Click. How do you do it? Now, for a lot of people in the room, this
will explain how you do it. For those of you who do not do computers,
let me give you a different analogy. This is nesting code. If you open milieu, and then you open inquiry,
you have to close the inquiry before you can close the milieu. If you think about it as getting a box, and
the box is labeled "Milieu" on the outside of it, and you open it up and there are a
bunch of milieu toys, and then inside is a smaller box filled with inquiry toys. And you open that up and you pull out those
inquiry toys, and then you play with all of them while you're telling your story. And then at the end of the day you have to
put them back in the box. So you want to put the inquiry ones back into
that smaller box so it will fit inside the larger box of the milieu. It's kind of like trying to return something
to Ikea after you've-- if you don't get it all back in the box, you wind up with that
extra piece, and why are there so many Allen wrenches? To use a concrete example, click, Wizard of
Oz is a beautifully nested story. It begins as a character story. Click. Dorothy is dissatisfied with her role as a
Kansas farm girl. Then we open the event. Tornado! Then we open the milieu. "Welcome to Oz." And then we open the inquiry. "What do the ruby slippers do?" Click. At the end of the story, Glenda arrives and
says, "Oh, the ruby slippers will carry you home. Oh." Which, honestly, she could have said at the
beginning. It would have saved everybody a lot of time. But it does close the inquiry. Then we close the milieu by Dorothy leaving
Oz. And then we close the event by arriving back
in Kansas, where the status quo has been restored. And then Dorothy says, "I didn't need to go
looking any farther for adventure than my own backyard," closing the character. When you have stories, click, that feel like
they end, and then end again, and then end again, not thinking of any films in particular,
it's often because that ending sequence is out of sync. One of the things that actually happens to
this one is it is closing out things in a faithful order, to a film that you haven't
seen in quite some time. That's one of the reasons it feels out of
sync. The other thing that will happen is, you remember
those boxes? If you think about it instead as actual thread,
or a piece of elastic, the longer I'm stretching that piece of elastic, the more tension it's
under, so when I release it it's releasing more energy. That piece of thread, that elastic thread,
is your reader's attention. So the longer that attention has been under
stress, the more the cathartic release you're going to get at the end. If you release something early, you don't
actually have enough time to get another piece of thread up to that same tension, because
you aren't spending as much time with it, which is why sometimes a story will feel like
it just fizzles out. That's the end of the PowerPoint. All right, so, we're going to write a story,
in class, today. OK. You're like, "Wait. Wait. I didn't sign up for-- I signed up for a lecture
class." OK. We're going to write a 250, approximate, approximately
250-word piece of flash fiction. And the reason I'm having you do this is that,
again, once you understand how this works, you can unpack it. But I often find that the easiest way to understand
something is to just put it into effect. Brandon, I want you to try this too. BRANDON: I just sat down with my laptop. MARY ROBINETTE: Perfect. OK. So the opening. The opening is where we meet our character
and make promises for our readers. I'm going to talk about the things that you
need to establish. But the order in which you need to establish
it is up to you. The key here is that your reader wants to
be oriented. In your first three sentences, who, where,
genre. That's it. Who, where, and genre. Now, there's a bunch of different types of
opening. I will be clear that the type that we're doing
right now is something that's called an action-driven opening. Speaking of action. To make things simple, I'm going to wind up
assigning you some things. I'm going to assign you a character, I'm going
to assign you an object, and I'm going to go ahead and give you a genre, just to make
it so that you don't have to pick quite so many things in this moment. But if you want to do something else, that's
also fair game. The things that you're going to be doing is
that you are going to be using, your genre is science fiction. Your character is a jockey. Is it like a horse? Possible. It could be a disc jockey. It could be karaoke jockey. This is where you get your freedom, is you
get to define what jockey means in this context. And coaster. Could be a coaster that set a beverage on. It could be a roller coaster. It could be-- you know, so any of those things. Science fiction, jockey, coaster. OK? Now, before you start, let me give you just
a little bit more to help you out. I said that you need to establish where. This is your location. Your reader wants to be grounded about where
they are. For the location, I want you to link to a
sensory detail. Rather than, "She stood in the battleship's
engine room," which does tell me the location, you're going for something more like, "The
thrum of the battleship's engines resonated through her feet." Does that make sense? For your location, I want a sensory detail. For your character you're going to be wanting
to use point of view, how the character sees and interacts with the world. One of the easy things you can do kind of
in your own brain is to define a shorthand for the character. It could be something like, sexist boss, spunky
pirate, angsty teenage jockey. Although, let's be honest, when we're teenagers
it's just angsty all the time, so I could have just said teenage jockey there. But something that gives you an idea of what
their attitude is. That's the piece you're looking for. I've already defined that you've got jockey. You get to put the adjective that defines
their attitude in front of that for yourself. Does that make sense? The way you're going to explain that to me
with the who is that you're going to give me their action. What are they doing? What is the thing that they're doing? What is the action that they're taking? Does that make sense? Then the genre, you want to get in a genre-specific
detail as fast as you can. This is going to be something specific and
unique. "Thrum of battleship's engines," sounds specific,
not unique. If I said, "The thrum of the battleship's
warp core drive," that gives you a much more specific thing. "The thrum of the battleship's steam engine
through its iron-clad walls," gives you a different specific, unique detail. Does that make sense? OK. So you have three sentences to do this. Bonus points if you can do it in one. And this does not mean long sentences. This means specific sentences. You have three minutes. That's a minute per sentence, which is a luxury. All right, time is up. It's okay. I know that some of you are going to keep
writing while I'm lecturing. I am comfortable with this. My example-- You're all looking at the math
equation that I put on the board with fear. I know. I'll explain it in a second. So here's my example. Two sentences, because I was going for the
bonus points. "Hydraulic fluid dripped out of the roller
coaster’s AI straight onto Chelsea's jockey I.D. Where the heck was that leak?" So, what do we have? We have roller coaster, "roller coaster's
AI," so that's my genre-specific detail. "Straight onto Chelsea's jockey badge." So she's underneath it. So you've got location and character. And "Where the heck was that leak" tells you
a little bit about what she's trying to do, which is to fix the leak. But it also is giving you a little bit of
her attitude, that she's cranky. Make sense? OK. In three sentences, you shouldn't have had
room to get into trouble, yet, with this other thing that happens with short stories, which
is that you try to put too much in. For our purposes, you are going to be allowed
two characters and one location. No more than two characters. Let me explain why through this magical thing. Terrifying. The length of your story is equal to the number
of characters, plus the number of stages, or scenes, scenic locations, times 750 words,
times the number of MICE threads you have, divided by 1.5. Why is it like that? Let me explain. Each character or location you add has the
potential to add, on average, 500 to 1,000 words to your scene or story. You can do it with less, but this danger is
there. Every time you put a character in, they cost
something from your word budget. Every time you put in a scenic location, it
costs something from your word budget, because you have to spend words to describe them. So since it's 500 to 1,000, 750 is the average
of that. So this is, you add up the number of characters
and the number of stages or scenic locations, and then you multiply it by 750 words. Each MICE Quotient thread has the potential
to make your story half again as long. Yeah. The reason is because you have to keep it
alive every single time, all the way through that story. When you multiply it by MICE, the number of
MICE threads you have, let's say you have three MICE threads, you'd multiply it by three. This dividing by 1.5 does the mathematical
trick of making it half again as long instead of three times as long. Does that make sense? In theory? This is useful as a diagnostic tool. It's useful as a predictor, a rough predictor. Like, if I have a story and I'm like, "This
is a story about eight brothers who are on a quest across America, stopping at five different
theme parks," That is not a 250-word story. It makes it super easy to spot. It is not perfect. It's a rough rule-of-thumb predictor, but
it's a useful thing. For ours, because we're going to try to keep
it to 250 words, you have a maximum of two characters and one location. You see how you're already in danger if you
have two characters? So try to keep it short. Your next sentence is going to be about--
we're going to introduce our conflict. Conflicts are all about your character trying
to achieve a goal and failing to achieve the goal. This is why it's called a try-fail cycle. Try. Fail. In a short story, and sometimes a novel too,
I would normally ask you to give me that first conflict within the first 13 lines. But in a piece of flash fiction, for our purposes
of this exercise, you get two sentences, and those are your next two sentences. Your next two sentences are, what is your
character trying to do and why? That's the setup of your try-fail cycle. That's the thing they are trying to do. And then, once we know what they're trying
to do, what is stopping them? What is stopping them? Now for flash fiction, one of the tricks that
you can do is to have several of the try-fail cycles be implied as happening before the
scene starts. I will give you an example of mine, and then
I will let you dive in and try your own. "Where the heck was that leak? If she didn't manage to get the coaster back
online before the race," this is what she's trying to do, get the coaster back online,
"she'd have to forfeit her entry money." There is the why. And I'm at BYU. "Not a gosh darn suggestion from the trouble
shooter on her heads-up display had isolated the problem." Which implies that she has already done some
trouble shooting before it starts. Do you understand what I mean about the implication,
which is useful in flash fiction? You are, again, you're going to write me two
sentences. Any questions about the sentences that you're
writing? What is your character trying to do and why? What is the barrier? What is stopping them from doing that thing? All right? Once again, two sentences, a minute per sentence. You can do it. Luxury. Now we're going to start throwing conflicts
at them. What I want you to do is look at what you've
got on the page, and I want you to identify the MICE Quotient element. Are they trying to escape from something? Are they trying to navigate in a place? If they are, then you've got a milieu. How many people have a milieu going on? OK, cool. Are they trying to answer a question? If they are, then you've got an inquiry story
going on. How many people are trying to answer a question? OK. Are they unhappy with themselves, angsty? Then you have a character story. How many character story people? Yep. And are they trying to change the status quo
or sense of normal, change the world. Event stories. OK. I'm unsurprised. That means you know what kind of conflict
to throw at them. If it's a milieu story, for those of you that
have it, stop them from getting to wherever it is that they're trying to go, whether that's
getting out of a thing, or getting into a thing. Stop them from that. Stop them from crossing that threshold. If it's an inquiry, block them from answering
their questions. Character, make them unhappier. An event story, more things go wrong. Here's the trick. When something fails, they try a different
approach. That's what the try-fail cycle is. Again, your job as the author is to knock
the character down and pick them up again. I'll just note that asking a question and
getting snubbed, it doesn't have to be a big try-fail cycle, just an asking and getting
snubbed is a try-fail cycle. Each action that your character takes should
have a consequence. We usually describe this as yes, but/no, and. "Yes, but" means that they made progress towards
their goal, but they were pushed back from it. "No, and" means they did not make progress
towards their goal, and they were pushed farther back from it. What we do here is we-- let me use an example. In Star Wars, rescuing the princess is a milieu
thread, while being chased by Vader, or the Storm Troopers, being chased, they jump into
the-- it's like, are they going to get out. That's the basic question. Are they going to get off the ship? What's the first thing they try? Jumping down a chute. Does that work? Yes, but it's a garbage chute. So what's the next thing they try? Blaster. Does shooting a blaster at the walls work. No, and it wakes up a creature underneath
the-- the water thingies. Are they able to deal with the creature? Yes, but only because the walls of the trash
compacter start coming in. So you understand what I'm talking about here? What you're going to be looking for here is
a try-fail cycle for your character. Try to just give them one, where they try
something and it fails, and things are a little bit worse. You can have it succeed and things still get
worse. But try for a failure, a straight-up failure,
and "and things get worse." Does that make sense? OK. For this one, whoa! I'm giving you five whole sentences and five
minutes. Again, luxury. All right. Here's how mine shook out. And again, I know some of you will contrast
writing while I read. I'm comfortable with that. So she had the heads-up display in our previous
thing, when I established the problem. She was trying to find the thing. "Fine. It was time to improvise." So that's the thing she's trying. She's improvising. "Chelsea stuck her hand into the AI's guts
and traced the slippery fluid up as far as she could go. The interior of the roller coaster was still
cold from sitting overnight in the cryo bay. Condensation clung to the walls and mixed
with the hydraulic fluid coating her fingers. She closed her eyes, trying to imagine," I'm
being very blatant here. "She closed her eyes, trying to imagine the
interior, as she ran past the junction box, AND sudden heat stung her fingers. Chelsea jerked back, cracking her head on
the toolbox behind her. 'Gosh darn it all to heck!'" CLASS: (laughter)
MARY ROBINETTE: But you see what I did there? There's a thing she tried, and it failed,
and things have now gotten a little bit worse, because she has shocked herself and hit her
head. Does that make sense? So you understand also proportionally what
has happened to your story is that the beginning is, at this point, about the first third. You've got your set-up right there proportionally. Then we've spent more words on that try-fail
cycle than we did on the set-up. Does that make sense? You can see the proportions starting to take
place there. Now we start into the end of the middle. The try-fail cycle is the middle. The end of the middle is where we're coming
out of this. It's about the two-third or three-quarter
mark in most things. You ask questions. You open up problems. You make things worse. Then you start to resolve them. You start to close those story questions. This is why you always bog down, by the way,
at the two-third/three-quarter mark, because you're changing mode. Interestingly, there is a phenomenon in psychology
called the three-quarter effect, that when someone is doing something, at about the three-quarter
point is when it seems like they can't possibly finish it. Part of what's going on apparently, mentally,
is that you assume you have that much longer to go, instead of realizing you only have
a quarter of the time to go. That's some of what's happening. But most of it is that you're changing mode
from starting things to ending things. So how do you do that? The conflicts, yes, but/no. The resolutions . . . are going to be in blue,
and very large. The resolutions are . . . faint. Yes, and. Because that's a movement towards the goal
and a continuation towards the goal. And represents continuing in the same direction
in many ways. Excuse me, yes, that. This marker is terrible. Can she write on the board? I have no comments at all on that, because
I know whose guest room I'm staying in. No, but. That means there's been a reversal that they
didn't do the thing, but they still get something towards the goal. That would be something like, a "yes, and"
would be, are they able to-- someone is hungry. Are they able to buy lunch? Yes, and it came with an extra order of churros. "No, but" would be something like, they're
trying to diffuse the bomb. Are they able to? No, but when it explodes it goes out the window
and lands on the bad guy. Thank you. I mean, those are terrible examples, but you
understand what I mean. So you're going to switch to closing mode. This means that the next try-fail cycle that
your character does is going to be a try-succeed. Whatever it is that they do is going to solve
the problem. Now in a story, or a novel that's more than
250-ish words, you would do multiples of those iterations, getting them closer to the goal
each time you would iterate it. In our case, because we're doing a piece of
flash fiction, we're going to solve the problem right now. Does that make sense? And again, you get about five sentences to
solve this sucker. OK? If you can do it in less, that's great. So I'm giving you another five minutes. Here's how mine plays out. She has cracked her head on the toolbox behind
her. "Gosh darn it all to heck! Shaking her hand, she glowered at the roller
coaster. 'You know, if I have to forfeit this entry
money, I'm going to have to sell you just to pay rent, and you'll probably wind up in
scrap.' She reached into the chassis again. 'Please, please let me find the leak.' Her heads-up display lit up with what looked
like a diagnostic message, from the AI that was supposedly offline. 'The leak is from the thermal coupler in my
right braking mechanism, but fluid dynamics make it appear to come from the manifold.' Chelsea's mouth dropped open. 'If you knew that all along--?'" OK. So you see what I did? I just-- the next thing she tried worked. So now we have to end it, because that's not
an ending, right? The problem is solved, but it's not satisfying
yet. In the ending, we aim towards closing out
the MICE elements we opened. We're talking about big elements. You open lots of small ones in there as well. But you want to nest them, the way we were
talking about. If you've got multiple threads going on, you
want to make sure that you close them out so that they all fit neatly back into their
box. You're mirroring the ending, which also means
that you're going to mirror those-- if you think about it as mirroring those last three
sentences, that you actually need the same things. We need to know who, where, and genre or mood. Things have shifted over the course of the
story. So you want to ground the reader by making
sure that they understand what has shifted, that you kind of draw a line under it. Hitting those points again will help us see
the change. For the who, we're going to again use an action
or reflection, the character actively thinking about something specific. For the where, often a sensory detail. Again, if you look at the beginning, sometimes
pulling a sensory detail from there is useful. And genre, something specific. In this case when I say genre, I'm really
thinking more about the mood, because often the tone has changed. Like, if the character starts in a very happy
place and you're writing a tragedy, and it ends in a tragic place, which is why it's
called a tragedy, you would want the mood to be different at the end than it is at the
beginning. So you want to express that with the words
and the language structure that you use. I'm going to read you my example, and then
I'm going to give you three sentences to wrap up your story. "Chelsea's mouth dropped. 'If you knew that all along--' She closed
her eyes, cursing her own stupidity. Three years as an AI jockey and you'd think
that she would remember that even in a roller coaster, the temperamental things needed the
magic word. Next time she'd say please sooner." OK. Now it feels like it's over, right? It's that mirroring that I'm doing. So, you've got three sentences to wrap that
up. Make sure that I know where my character is
now, emotionally. If they have changed place, if you're in a
milieu, make sure that I know where that new place is. Give me a little bit of mood and that genre-specific
detail, with the thing that makes it feel specific to the story. Three sentences, three minutes. All right. The rules that I was giving you about three
sentences, five sentences, those are rules of thumb. That's an easy goal for you to hit. In the real world it's going to be more flexible
than that. But it's something that's achievable. How many people have something that now has
a beginning, middle, and an end? Great. Ah ha! Did you actually write a 250-word short story? BRANDON: It's 650. CLASS: (laughter)
MARY ROBINETTE: Still-- I take great pride in the fact that that is probably the shortest
story you've ever written. BRANDON: Yeah. MARY ROBINETTE: But you can see how you can
take the principles from doing this exercise and apply them at a longer length, the proportional
idea of what these stories look like, what each of those pieces are doing. You can probably see how, if you put another
piece of MICE element in there that you would then have to establish two problems at the
beginning, rather than just one, or you'd establish one problem, then a little bit later
you'd introduce the other one, and that that's, again, going to make the story proportionally
longer when you do that. We now have six minutes for questions. Any questions? About-- Yes. STUDENT: I guess, how do you-- I guess, the
model of, like, opening and closing with, like, the same conflicts works really well. But I guess I'm curious about, what if your
story, like, changes direction. Like, say, the characters start out to do
something, and then realize something about themselves or something about the nature of
the conflict that causes their goal to change, and what they're trying to accomplish is different
from what it was at the beginning? MARY ROBINETTE: So what happens when the goal
changes part way through the story? One of the things is that you would actually
want to sign post that a little bit to the readers that this might happen. I do that by basically having something that
is thematically linked to the goal that they will eventually solve. If my character is-- the end of the story
is going to be my character saving the world, but the beginning of the story is them trying
to become comfortable with themselves, I would still start with some disruption to their
life, some external disruption, to indicate that there are going to be events-- that there's
a status quo disruption, a larger one coming. Does that make sense? That's one thing that you would do. The other thing is that as they're going through,
make sure that whatever that initial one that they started with was, that you still do close
it out. For instance, if I start and my character
is like, "Why is this dead body on the floor? My husband has been killed. Oh, my tragedy as a widow and the death of
my husband." The detective comes in and they're working
together to solve this crime. Then the detective and widow fall in love,
and she wasn't looking for love, but now she's found it and they get married and live happily
ever after. And we don't know who killed that man? OK. You understand the problems? STUDENT: Yes. MARY ROBINETTE: OK, great. Anybody else? Yes. STUDENT: I don't know if there's a hard and
fast rule for this. With longer short fiction, would you still
try to establish, like, genre within the first three sentences? MARY ROBINETTE: The question was, in longer
form, would I still try to establish it within the first three sentences? I do. The reason is because, when the reader starts,
they have no information at all. So they need-- the longer it takes to ground
them, the slower the story is going to feel, and the longer it's going to take-- the more
likely they are to put it down if they're confused. So I do try to get it within the first three
sentences. But I don't try to-- don't feel like you have
to be super specific. Like, if you're doing a cryptocurrency noir
murder mystery on an interplanetary cruise ship, I don't need to know all of that in
the first three sentences. I just need to know, "Oh, it looks like we're
into the future thing-ish." OK? Yeah. STUDENT: If it's urban fantasy, what's a good
way to do [inaudible]. MARY ROBINETTE: Urban fantasy is a good question. One of the tricky things with magic, in urban
fantasy in particular, is that often when you introduce magic, people will think it's
in the past, and if you introduce techy, people will think magic isn't going to happen. So trying to do both at the same time, if
you can, in the three sentences, is great. However, often with urban fantasy, you're
dealing with a character who is unaware of the fantastical world. So that gets a little harder. That's one of those places where you are,
to some degree, relying on where you're shelved in the bookstore. But you would still want to establish, this
is-- you'd still want people to know what time they're in, so that there's only one
of those two things that's going to be a surprise when it changes. Does that make sense? All right. One minute. I'm going to turn it back to Brandon. BRANDON: I'm just going to say thank you to
Mary Robinette. CLASS: (applause)
MARY ROBINETTE: (inaudible) BRANDON: We will have this on the YouTube
channel if you want to watch through it again. But good job, guys. I expect you all to sell flash fiction pieces
now. CLASS: (laughter)
