S9 EP10: Interview: Steven Barnes. Mace Windu: The Glass Abyss

The Benin's Ilkong House. And welcome to another episode of Radio Rebellion, Star Wars, for the time you host Albreta Calderon and thank you for joining us today on another Star Wars Saturday. Just like us, we're the OT1, can we? And our very special guest today, we're so happy to be able to talk with Stephen Barnes, the author of the new Star Wars book, Mace Windu, that last update that just came out earlier this week.

Stephen, thank you very much for joining us today. How are you doing? You know, I'm doing great. This is the last day I'm here at Comic-Con and then I get to go home and home is always a good idea.

On the other hand, I also like being at conventions and meeting players and signing books and asking people what they want from a book. It's all part of the flow of what it is that my life does. Alte, how are you doing? I don't want to forget you up there.

I'm doing fine. I'm very tired. Oh, I've had like a long day, but I'm here and that's what's important. That's what's important.

I was out at a horse retirement center that we got. I saw you. I saw you. Having fun with some horses, peaceful afternoon, peaceful morning.

When it's not Star Wars, Stephen again, congratulations on the book Mace Windu, the glass that we just came out on Tuesday by now mistaken. Look at that cover. You just mentioned you're at Comic-Con. You're talking about a couple of things.

Special edition for Comic-Con. That cover is also amazing. I know I don't have a copy of this edition here with me, unfortunately. I gave my copy away to my best friend.

Okay. I was telling you guys before we started. I was at a pool party. It was for my brother-in-law.

There was a group of Star Wars fans there. When I was like, oh, I'm going to go introduce the importance because of the Mace Windu boots. I was talking with three people and all three of them went like, that's the one with the awesome Mace Windu cover. I went like, that's the one.

It is a nice cover. It really is. I'm not, I don't have a lot of visual discrimination. I'm not good at visual design.

So I saw that cover and I wasn't sure that it was good. I think people's reactions to it. I'm like, oh, okay. That's the problem with my brain.

I think cover is great. I think it's great. I think people are reaction to it. It's like, oh, it's a great cover.

If you say so. How does it feel so much like yourself? So you've been doing this for a while. But to have that book finally out there for everyone to enjoy.

It's just full on release. I mean, relief, I guess. I've never, I've published close to four million words of fiction. And I've never stopped being nervous.

I've never stopped caring what people thought. I think that when you stop caring, people think you become a hack. It's, you write in order to express an emotion. So my question is, do people understand what I was trying to say?

If they understand what I was trying to say, but they don't like it, that's my fault. If they don't understand it, that might be them. No, maybe that's reverse. If they don't understand what I'm saying, what I was trying to do, I take responsibility for that.

I was not clear enough. I didn't do my job right. If they didn't like it, that's on them. If people like this, they don't like that.

That's, marketing is finding the right people. Now, in this case, what I wanted was for Star Wars fans to love the book. I mean, I was trying to do a book that I thought they would enjoy. That was one of my primary criteria.

So coming to Nurekamakon is my first chance to see and interact with people in the wild as it were. It's like, do the wild, stalking the wild Star Wars fans. What do you think? Did I do the job?

Was it okay? And so there is a certain amount of nervousness in there. Like I said, I think you should be a little bit nervous. You should be scared.

So I don't mind being, I don't mind a little fear. Like you mentioned, Nurekamakon is starting to wrap up. I already started to wrap up. It's like you still got a full day and a half.

It's going to be wild. It's just like really, it exploded twice as many people there today as there were yesterday. So it started to look more like San Diego coming from the Mad app. That was that yesterday being the Lucas Film Publishing Panel.

Being able to talk about the work I get for the first time. We had a pack room. So there were a ton of fans in there, hundreds of people there. And I had a chance to talk directly to them.

And that was very satisfying. I love that. I could do that every day. Just actually get out and talk to people.

It's one of the things that powers you when you're trying to work and you're working on something and you're minding yourself. Why should I care so much? Why should I look at every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every image, every scene? Why?

Because it's because there's a fan out there who cares about this. As much as I care about Star Wars, I don't know how to start with it. Except for the first movie I've seen every one of the other day that they opened. But I don't care about them as much as some of you got.

And so like I said to you, I understand I'm a guest in your house. I want to be a good guy. Yeah. Alright.

It's very nice to hear that because we always make this joke. Whenever there's a backlash to a certain story, it's like, we always think no one goes into Star Wars being like, I'm going to ruin this for someone. It's always nice to hear that. Or not here.

But like, have people constantly confirm like it's always coming from a place of love and someone. It's not always come from a place of love. I can promise you, there are people who write media tie-ins or their own work and are writing down to their audience. Okay.

My first book signing, mini mini mini mini movie movie. A guy in his late 40s, 50s maybe came to the signing and he was a writer and he gave me a business card. And his card said freelance hack and literary mechanic. He was dead of alcoholism within 18 months.

You can write for money. You can write down with contempt but it poisons your soul. I won't write unless I can find something to fall in love with. If somebody says, if I need the money, someone says, we'll give you X amount of money to write something that I don't care about.

And I had to think, I would find something to care about. I would find something to love. This gives me a chance to say this, do this, something. Because if I don't do that, that's abusing my muse.

It's abusing a little boy inside me. Then he's the writer. He's the writer. He wants to say this and let's put on a show.

Wow, why sabers and snakes? That kid has never brought up and if I'm lucky, he never will. He's got a bad-ass father to protect him. That's one of the things when people say, oh, I was just for kids and don't change.

That kid inside of us still wants to be all that I'm raised and everything that we think is. We're still adults but it's that kid that wants to see those stories. That's right. Never lose your enthusiasm.

That's when you start to die. Growing up does not mean stepping away from the kid. It means developing a protective adult self. And then you collect your action figures and you collect your comic books and you have fun.

Because you engage with the real world. We engage with the real world. We have to make money. We have to deal with other adults.

But every adult we deal with is really a kid wearing an adult suit. I wish kids knew that though. I think they look up to adults and think that there's a transformation and there really isn't. You just start doing different things that maybe you were doing yesterday.

But the truth is that in all arenas of life that's all transformation is what you do the things that the person you want to become does. And at some point you take a step every day and pretty soon you wake up in here in New Territory. It's like, oh, you're still the same guy. If you practice martial arts, it's something I understand very well.

You just go into school and act like the black belts. You become as close as possible to acting like the black belts. And one day if you keep doing it longer, teach your ties of black belts around your waist. And you realize, oh, I still feel the same in certain ways.

I understand myself a little different. The same thing is true in writing. You know, at one point, I'm watching the puppet show. And then as soon as I sell my first story, I'm invited behind the stage.

From the other position, I can see the strings. It's gradual. It's incremental. And you need to bring the older person that you were, the younger person that you were, along with you.

Or you become a husk, a shell. And that ain't no fun. I think when my kids say, oh, that, you're embarrassing, Mason. This is me.

I'm not doing it on purpose. This is just me. A major lesson in my life had to do with realizing that you could either be the thing or you can pretend to be the thing. The same energy that you would use to pretend, to wear a mask, to pretend to be something to people.

That's the exact energy you need to become, what it is you want to become. So it's like, as soon as you realize that other people will never really understand who you are, that other people will always try to make you into what they need you to be to feel good about their lives. But they're also hoping that you will reject that. Because it's, it, it weighs.

That mask weighs a lot. So when they meet someone who is free or freer than them, they will both try to tear you down and they're hoping that you're going to win. Because if you win, if you can get the adult goodies in life without growing up in that way, you're giving them permission to do it. You know, I'm still the same asshole I was when I was seven years old.

I just go with three black belts and four million words in print. Yeah. Yeah. You got to back it up.

All right. So let's go now. We'll see. You all right?

Yeah. Yeah. No. So you mentioned you basically seen every Star Wars movie.

I saw the person about five days after it opened. Okay. Can you talk to us a little bit about that relationship with you with Star Wars since 77? All the way to a couple of days ago.

Basically, I saw the first coming attraction for Star Wars. I think probably the Gromance Chinese theater. I wasn't all that impressed. The trailer had a lot of scratches on it.

It looked like it had worn out. The special effects didn't look like anything particularly special. I mean, it's like, that's interesting. It's another space movie.

I'll go see it. Sure. Then I had a friend who was not really in the science fiction, but told me, he says, yeah, I saw the movie. I really liked it.

It went with Star Wars. I said, you like that? Really? Okay.

So I went in to see it and the instant the Star Destroyer came across the stream. I said, oh, okay. Now, like, you're talking. Now we're talking.

Now we're talking. Now. All right. All right.

Okay. I understand why people are reacting this way because we had never seen anything. The special effects. There were some special effects shot in First Men in the Moon that were as good as the static shot to start with.

The special effects in 2001 space odyssey in some ways still have not been surpassed, but that was in a in service to a pastoral story. One that was about the cosmos, you know, the hero of 2001 is the universe itself. In the beginning, we had never seen that along with dynamic movement connected to a dynamic heroic story grounded in myth. So you really are feeling what's going on as well as overwhelmed by these groundbreaking effects that George Lucas was doing.

It was a breakthrough on multiple levels. There was never been anything like that. So that was the beginning of the empire was even better. Return to the Jedi was not better.

For me, I thought that it had a lot of values in it, but you know, those E walks. I got E walks tripping tanks with buying a little more than I could wrap my mind around. You know, then you get the prequels, which I enjoyed. You know, I saw that they you can feel some of the ring rust on the first one, but going back and watching it again, that pot raise fantastic.

Yes. The dark mall fantastic. And the attack of the clothes, you know, I'm right there. Christopher Lee.

Hey, now, you know, by the time you get to be a revenge of the set, you know, and probably get into the first movie and so forth and so on. Wonderful. What you have is a major mythology, 20th century, not 21st century mythology. We were watching it come to life, you know, every episode doesn't have to be perfect.

Any more than every James Bond movie is perfect. But James Bond movies are sui generis and so are star wars. Star Wars is a separate island of concern and you can really only evaluate them against each other. That is an amazing accomplishment.

So you know, it is, you know, as I said, I've got as much of a star wars fan as some of the people in their room who live it and breathe it. But I love it. Star Wars, you know, and every movie that comes out, you know, I'm right there and a lot of this stuff on television is just, there's so much that I can't keep up with all of it. But I think it is a fabulous world.

I mean, just, you know, like I said, sui generis, it is its own thing and it is a magnificent thing. You think it's easy to keep making movies, look how fast the Matrix movies fell off. You know, one wonderful movie and then one so-so movie where you're kind of saying, well, maybe we get better than third one. And then the fourth is like, oh, it was like, I didn't forget why the first one was good.

And I watch it. It's so easy to lose the magic. It's so easy for the bean counters to start saying, well, let's just do this again. How do you maintain art in there?

And so what you have with Star Wars, Star Wars has been able to attract thousands of creative people to work in the various iterations of it for what 40 years? I mean, it's like, it's crazy. It's just crazy. And I'm a tiny little cog in a big machine.

I like what that machine does. So I tried to be the best cog I could be. Yeah. Go ahead.

I'm not just going to say the way that you might say, I think I haven't thought of it the way that way. I think that's the way that we know it's its own thing. And every other science fiction on sci-fi fantasy out there gets compared to Star Wars. When you get compared to Star Wars, when you get compared to anything else, just so we tell.

You just impose your words up to Star Wars, they don't put Star Wars to the other things. So that says that good, bad, better, superb, whatever, it is a world of its own. If you think about the creative force, it takes to create a world. And all I can say is George Lucas earned his billion.

Yeah. Yes he did. Yes he did. And so we're here talking about Omeigh's window book.

So I'm very curious. You talked about the prequels, you enjoyed them when they came out. So how's your relationship with Mace Windolbin since he first appeared on screen and he's in Pat the Metas on screen? Well, that's a relationship with Mace Windol because Mace Windol was pretty much a cyber.

We saw him kill people and we saw him bark orders. Most of the relationship with Sam Jackson. That's how stars are in their money. They bring gravitas.

They bring him, it's like, oh, it's Sam Jackson with the lightsaber. Wow. So it's very cool. You know, the idea of a black Jedi is very cool.

I can't miss that. But I did notice that he did not do as much as I would have wished he would do. And I was aware of the fact that in subsequent iterations, you know, the books and so forth, I didn't read about him in the books. But from what I heard, he was a little bit of a cipher.

You know, once again, there's not a lot of inwardness. So when they asked me to, would I be interested in writing this? I had just gotten finished. Another writing assignment.

I was working in the writers room for the Friday the 13th television series with Brian Fuller. And I was literally on my way, I'm driving home. If I'm remembering this properly, I could be mythologizing a bit here. But I was on my way home.

I just went and said, I got a call from my agent asking, would I be interested in writing a maze window book? I had some questions about that. It's like, would they let me humanize it? I had some very specific requirements for that.

And when they indicated that they would, then that put it in the house of this is something that might touch my heart. This is where I could feel like I was making a significant contribution to the world. And that's kind of what you look for in the creative artist. You look for times that maybe if you do it right, it makes a difference.

If I do this right, if I bring everything I've got to this, I do my best work, God willing that the river don't rise, could this be important? And within a limited context, I think the answer to that is yes. If I did my job right, I could make a difference. And that's what I tried to do.

I like that as well. I like that as well. And while you were writing the book, your thoughts or your relationship with maybe that idea of Sam Jackson, did that change, did that transform? Sure.

I thought being Sam Jackson. And then it became Sam Jackson playing a role and then it became, you know, it's with it. Although I visualized his face and I thought about his speech pattern, it eventually became the question of who is this man? I had to get underneath his skin.

And remember that for all of his supernatural powers, so forth, you're a man. And I think that my take on it is that I don't want to be too specific about this. Some of the people who had portrayed him or written about him had not in my opinion fully embraced his humanity. And so I looked at that as something I could give to him.

And that's something that I threw out the whole book. There were times that I was reading. It's like, does this feel like the Mace Windu that I know from the movies or the Tag of the Clone? So they're prequels because that character was expanded as the one we see individually.

So he took a little bit of time to get used to that idea that he's not just that story. All you saw of Mace Windu in the movie was barking orders and killing people. But what was he like behind closed doors? What's he like when he's hanging with his friends?

You know, if you can't imagine Mace Windu dancing around the kitchen in his underwear and make pancakes, you have not thought about him as a human being because that's what human beings do. I've known great warriors and they have moments where they're cracking jokes and have a book because they're human beings. They're not golems. They're not made of granite and have no feel.

That's nonsense. And I wasn't going to write that. I wouldn't do that. It's dishonest.

Well, as you mentioned, you have background in my show, there's a part of the beginning of the book. It goes through all the whole book that Mace Windu, his little home that he has, he has all his lights over, he has kind of a special place and always takes a time to sit down, meditate, center in service. That's something you brought from your experience with martial arts that you went to. I've been in martial arts my entire life.

It's very, very, there are only three things in the world I care about. I care about my writing, I care about my family, I care about martial arts. That's it. And so the question of what would a spiritual warrior be like in a world where spiritual phenomena are like electricity?

Where they're actual physical things where I can actually demonstrate to you. It's not like, do you feel the warmth from my hand? It's like, bid my arm. No, you're talking about something where you can levitate a pencil with it.

The entire world's religious organizations have been built on stories of miracles that the people at the hand of the organization cannot demonstrate. That doesn't mean that these miracles do not exist. It means that you need faith. Faith doesn't exist in the Star Wars universe in the same way because they can actually demonstrate.

So you actually have to ask yourself, well, what would that be like? What would it be like to live in a world in which you can demonstrate the things that people talk about in old texts, the mountain came to Muhammad. Jesus raises the dead. Buddha does this.

I wanted to ask the question, if you start with the human, how do you touch the spiritual realm where matter and energy are partially controlled by and flow through the human heart? What is that? So I had to go to the edges of what I have seen and know in terms of martial arts and yoga and meditation and things that I've done and ask myself, well, if parallel lines meet and infinity, what's out there? And then bring that back and say, how would that affect a human being?

And so yeah, absolutely. It's informed by spending half a century doing these things. Speaking of faith in Star Wars, one of my favorite things in Star Wars is the way the first works and how it's visualized. And I always love seeing how other people interpret not just the first one, how other cultures, the views on the first.

And here we have the web, the people on the same axis, what did that idea come from? Oh, it developed slowly. I developed New Zachs as I went. The whole building is one of the skills of science fiction that I learned at the feet of masters.

You know, Larry Niven and Jerry Cornell, they taught me to think that even though Star Wars is not science fiction, science fantasy, we don't really care how it works. We care how it feels. How are your face? I don't care.

I'm making me feel something. The literature of thought. Science fantasy and space fantasy. Space opera is a world of feelings.

So I needed to believe in the world of news axis because I'm not capable of writing if I don't, if there is not some consistency there. My brain won't work then. So I knew I wanted to build a society that was inside a giant geo because Star Wars is a world of monocultures and monoacologies. These planets have a dominant, it's part of the fun.

It's part of the bion. You don't try to justify it. This is just the way it is. Dig or split.

So that was the monocology that I wanted to play with. But then once I got into it, I started developing the creatures and the ecology and the society and how did that side have to work. Then one of the things that began to develop was this notion that there were mushrooms. When I first started it, that was just a goof.

It just sounded like it would be cool. But at a certain point, it's like I punched him. You don't think about how you formed your hand and how you moved your hips and how you did this. That's all unconscious confidence.

So the thing that sounded cool to me, some part of me knew I could make it work. Or it wouldn't have felt cool. You follow your feelings at that point, but you educate your feelings. So if all I really wanted was in one sense, do something that was a little bit Alice in Wonderland.

You know, I could see a caterpillar smoking a hook on top of a bunch of the colors turned into spider worms. And the mushrooms turned into a planet spanning ecology through the miculeal connection. And then it gets to some point that these things were sensitive in this particular way and that get me of this way, that the micilia becomes a metaphor, physical metaphor for the interconnectedness of the force. And then I remembered an article that I read talking about the largest structures in the universe, which are these webs of these energetic webs of gravity and so forth between different planets and stars over.

And all of it started coming to me. And a piece of information here and a quote from there and an idea from there, there's a party that's always sifting human and says, does it fit? Does it make sense? And if it makes sense, is it cool?

Would it be fun? Because there are things that would make sense that are cool. It's like of that set of things that are cool and make sense, they become, let me try it out. So I started trying it out.

It does this work. You know, if I create the world this way, is that something that people will enjoy? So you notice I've gone through those levels of does it make sense? It's cool to me.

Now, would the readers enjoy if all those things are true, then it stays to the bottom. Yeah. How fun is it just to go through that whole, you know, coming out in each of my D and then it starts to spend it as you get all those all the ideas and all the books I feel for it. What's the best, what's the best sex you've ever had?

It's that good. Yeah. Alright. The artist was at every talks about that and it's moving stay hungry or pumping iron.

Pumping iron. The intense pump from, you know, from weightlifting is better than sex. Now, I understand that he doesn't mean it's more intense than that. So when that level of pleasure, if you can find something approximating that level of pleasure that connects to the thing you do in life, you're going to spend the time and energy necessary to get good at it.

It's called sexual transmutation. It's actually talked about the book, Think You Grow Rich, that you take the energy that most people use chasing around after looking and you find something that motivates you that much. And when you do that, it's you look up one day and you've mastered that discipline. It's as simple as that because you did it every day.

You did it with passion. You cared about it. You did it. You did it.

You did it. You did it. You look up one day and other people looking at you and say, wow, you're a master of this. I just can't do it.

So a big part of the book is mace going through the reawakening of his childhood and having these dreams of when he joined the Jedi was he abandoned by his father and that informs a lot of his decisions going forward. You've mentioned already that a big part of what you wanted to do with mace was humanizing. Was that part of the reason you went this approach with him of questioning his relationship with the Jedi? Was that part of that humanizing?

It was part of that. It was part of that. I could probably look at anything I did in that book and give you more than one reason why I did it. So I needed there to be a question of whether or not mace could succeed.

In order to do that and still respect his level of power within the Jedi order, I needed to attack it. I needed to diminish his capacity so that he would have an argument. If he's a bad ass at the beginning, a bad ass in the middle of a bad ass at the end, that's a dull book to me that there needs to be a give and take. So my thought was, how can I break him down so that I could then reconstruct him?

And in the process of breaking down, we get to examine his psychology. And it's the odd thing to examine what he is because we're taking him apart. So I needed to diminish him in order for us to understand just how magnificent this human being is because if you see him at his weakest and then you see the component parts, he puts himself back together and becomes this utter bad ass, you know, past man in the galaxy to take him through that process allows us to appreciate him more as well as humanizing him and understanding. Oh, it isn't that he has no flaws.

It isn't that he has no fear. It's that he is connected to it has a commitment to something that is larger than himself and enough larger than himself. He can step out of his ego. He can step out of his pain.

He can step out of his poor little me and be the magnificent warrior that he needs to be in order to do it as he's committed to do it. You know, warriors, soldiers know what they're fighting for because they were ordered to do so. Warriors fight because something they love depends upon it. So you were mentioning like when you were in the process of deciding to write the book, you talked about some things you had to include on the book that you wanted to do as part of that humanization.

The relationships in Star Wars is something that has always been there, but I think it's taken a little bit for us to see relationships in the Jedi Order. It's starting to happen more and more. So how important was it for you to include that element? We wouldn't be talking.

So it was very important. We wouldn't be talking. Draw your own conclusions about that. Okay.

You were talking about warriors. For you, what makes a great Jedi rather than a warrior, a Jedi specific. The Jedi isn't something separate from a warrior. A Jedi is a type of warrior.

A Jedi is a spiritual warrior from my point of view who can actually touch the power of the universe. And that's all that is there's been sacred monks, warrior monks. They are in some ways like warrior monks. The aspect of the warrior is the martyr is willing to die for what they believe in.

The warrior is willing to die and take you with it. That's what makes difference. You're totally willing to die, but also willing to kill. You know, take no mistake.

It's like people thought, oh, the peaceful warrior this. Yeah, in some ways. But there's no difference there between a martyr. Is somebody willing to die for what they believe in?

Warriors have forced their power. They can do the job. And so the Jedi are a form of that. And because they operate under the council, they have these decades and they're following these commands.

But you're talking about a form of warrior books. Yeah. There's a quote in the book. I'm trying to find it.

But I think it's King Shan talking to Mays about Jedi always fight, but you know what you're fighting for, something like that. I tell you what exactly what you're saying right now. I love coming back a little bit to the relationship question. Is that character that he forms his attachment to, which is King Shan, Knightburg, which is nothing that Mays as I encountered, this foil to him.

How important was that character? How do you come up with if I'm going to put Mays Windu and Jedi Master in their position having a feeling for someone, the person's going to grow feelings towards this kind of kind of a Knightburg, this otherworldly person. That's the only woman in his level. Okay, because otherwise he's abusing his power.

Obviously a Jedi could seduce any table, any tavern when she met. I mean, it's like power is hugely attracted, powers in Abadise. These are the most powerful human beings in the galaxy. So it would be unethical to have a relationship with just an average person.

That's a heartbreaker. But he, so I needed to create someone who is a leader who has her own force, her own power, sex that they are equals and can walk together. But while the relationship is two people traveling the same road at the same pace from long enough to walk together. They're climbing the same mountain together and you just kind of look at them and say, we're going to the same place, we have the same force, the same way we're going to the same way we're going to the same way we're going.

And that's a friend. If you get a young factor on top of that, if you also look at them in your hand brain and it goes, ding, ding, ding, ding, now you have the potential for a relationship. So the question was not whether or not Jedi can love. The question is whether or not they can love without forming a pats is this wrong to start because I know I cannot be there for you all.

What is this? Who are we? Can we be together for a little while? And I always start with characters that are kind of stick figures.

I tend to start with a story and then ask myself who are the best characters to see that story through and they start to stick figures. And I build them out as I go. I discover them as I go. And eventually they start talking to me.

If I started with a character, the question would be what is the best situation to explore this character? So I can start with character. I can start with situations. The Aristotle's question, what's important, more important plot of character, it's a trick question.

So all plot is what a given character does in a particular situation. So you explore the situation through the character and you explore the character through the situation. And so the two are actually part of a whole. And I can enter into that yin yin yin yin.

I can enter into that dance at any point. It's like if you understand geometry, if I give you three points, you can draw the rest of the circle. As a writer and I understand the geometry of story because I have it in unconscious narrative, you haven't done this. You tell me anything about a character or a situation.

And I can give you a potential rest of it. It might not be what it is that you want to do. But I can tell you the characters that need to be there. You start with characters like the situation, you need to empty them out.

You have John McLean who is an egotistical stuff, toxic masculinity, cop from New York. What would be necessary to empty him out? We put him in a situation where all of his skills are tested to the maximum and he has to keep going because the woman he loves is at risk. You're always looking for that.

What's the situation? Because when you go to the gym to work out, you work out until something called muscle failure. If you don't work out to muscle failure, your brain does not expend the resources necessary to get you stronger because of the survival response. You're signaling to your brain unless I get stronger, I will die.

Unless I get stronger, my family will die. So people are psyching themselves up for these big lifts. They're imagining that they're lifting a car off their kit. How else are you going to tap into that emergency reserve?

That's what's necessary to take you from? So you're always looking for that. So you have a character like me, it's windy. The Jedi are the strongest warriors and the Jedi Council and stronger still.

It might be the strongest human Jedi. It may be one of the strongest, maybe the strongest overall. What the hell will test him? And who is the woman who could love him?

Who could stand next to him? Who could match his energy? Those are the kinds of questions you have to ask as you're creating characters. Like I said, I create them on the fly.

I don't create large dossies when I begin to write. I use writing to discover the world. And I'm guessing that also we are great. Not really for a great moment when that character comes alive.

It's what you pray for. It's what you want to know when it's going to happen? I don't know what's going to happen. What my mentor used to call a bald and unconvincing narrative until the characters start talking to you.

At that point, the magic takes over. At that point, I'm not directing the story with my forebrain. My hindbrain, the six-year-old kid, the seven-year-old kid I was when I decided I wanted to be a writer. It's like, oh, we're creating a world here.

Look at these things that are happening. What it is, I write until I can hear the music. There is a music that starts happening at a certain point. Then all I have to do is conduct the orchestra.

And then right now in the notes. It's just trying to find a way to express this. Because ultimately, it's an epivol. It's all about words.

But ultimately, storytelling, music, jazz is what happens between the notes. Story telling is what happens between the words. I can put the words there. But you're looking for what's called the transderivational search.

If I tell you a word, every time I use a word, your brain starts looking for the meaning of it. If there are succession of words, then you go meaning, meaning, meaning. So the words are up here, meaning and feeling, connecting the meaning of it. So I'm guiding your unconscious mind by using words and images in certain patterns.

The unconscious part of it, this is too complicated to control with the conscious mind. Ultimately, what you do is you do your best with the conscious stuff and then you pray that at some point your unconscious mind will take over. And so far in my career, that's always happened. But something a day may come when it doesn't happen.

It wasn't today. It might be tomorrow. So you never take it for granted. You never take your music for granted and you always give thanks for the blessing.

I'm glad it hasn't happened. Today is not that day. Because one of my favorite parts of the book was New Sexies and how that whole town down there was kind of expanded. And we've seen a lot of different media like places and cities become characters in the world that we're playing.

And New Sexies felt like a character inside, of course, metagos and inside. But you have that great way of the fronting palace in all these places. How do you, what's that? Part of it, you talked a little bit about how everything's connected.

But making New Sexies feel like a character in the book. How did you go about doing that? Go back to that thought about it. If I give you three points, you could draw this on.

I feel that there is a platonic ideal of my story on the reporter. And the story actually happened in a different reality. All I'm doing is recording back. What I'm doing is I'm trusting that my unconscious mind understands the geometry of story.

I am, it will give me 1% of that full picture every time I sit down. Any day that I sit down, it will give me 1% more. News access came into existence a piece at a time. But it wasn't like a Lego block.

It was more like developing a picture. It's just like I have a shadowy sense of it and then it's a little bit sharper. And maybe I made a mistake. That's not true.

It would have to be this. Because it doesn't fit what I understand the geometry of story. It doesn't fit what I understand about how societies develop or the life cycle of animals. Or whatever.

My wife, who is a great horror writer, is creating a monster. We're working on something together and she has a monster. I'll ask, well, what's the life cycle of the monster? What does the monster want?

Whatever its internal motivations. Otherwise, it's just a thing with teeth crouching in the shadows. It's here to scare you. No, it has its own motivations.

What does it want? What is it? The what we learn about the world teaches us certain things about the way physics work and physiology and psychology and psychology and so forth. So we understand these things kind of unconsciously.

So I have to keep working with the story until it makes sense to the part of me that understands how people develop, how animals develop, how societies develop. So if I know this about one thing about news axis, that implies a ton of other questions. You know, how do they get rid of their cesspools? How do they get their food?

What medium of exchange do they use? How is their society controlled? From the top to the bottom is it democratic? It is it this?

And by the way, people who are interested in world building, I could not suggest a course more strongly than big history. That's in Wondrium or the great courses, of course, because it's the history of the entire universe from the Big Bang to 1950. It's an amazing book. It's amazing course.

It's like 50, 25 hours, 50 left, half hour lectures taking all of the physics to astronomy, to geology, to biology, to anthropology, to sociology and so forth and so forth. Once you understand how it all fits together, you kind of have it back there. So I said, I want a society that's set in the geo. All right.

Tell me how would they build around the stuff? What kind of tools would they have to use? You know, this. I have to try to understand more about this society than I write about.

So that I have real safety. I knew more about news access than I said. That's more out there. That's exactly right.

But then you say, well, what do I need to give the reader the illusion that I understand this world, that this world is real. A writer is God in the universe of story. An author must have authority. I develop authority by some people do it by creating like an encyclopedia based on people.

That's totally legitimate. I do it by building as I go and then understanding that there is a physics of the way societies develop animals evolve and so forth and so on. You need to be a writer. You need to be constantly researching some area of expertise that you care about.

Science fiction writers will write as a writer. I think should have an emphasis. Should have something that they have decided that they want to become absolutely expert at. I am expert at understanding human mental and physical development to create that.

I'm an expert on master. That's what I decided to become an expert at. But there's so much social content, biological reality. How do human beings motivate themselves?

What are the client movers? I had to have an opinion about those things. And given that, I could have an opinion about how societies develop. I can build a metago.

I can build a metago. I want to talk about the practical process of creating a world. As I've read the mention, there's all these places in New Saxis and from what he told me there's these tunnels and there's also all these groups and there's some biotic relationship in the planet and in the city. How do you practically keep track of this?

Are you making maps? Are you sticking notes? Is there a Bible on these actors? No, I did not create a Bible on these answers.

But I took notes and I will create lists of questions about it. And then I have to trust my mind to hold that together. I can see there's access. I close my eyes.

I'm there. I built it one piece of the clip. But you asked a different question. I used sticky notes.

I used Microsoft Word. I used Google Docs. It was really written on Google Docs. It was also written on a program called writer duet.

It was written as a script before I wrote it as a book. So I wrote it as a 200 page script. I can write a script much faster than I can write a book. And the software is specialized for writing.

So I can go from sticky notes to index cards. I've got a huge whiteboard. I've got a depth. It's just a whiteboard.

I can scribble on that. I can make notes. I can draw things. Then I have my Star Wars encyclopedia here.

Then I have a visual encyclopedia there. And I used various software things to help me with my research. I wasn't going to use AI to write the name of the combination. But I could use it like Google to research.

What starships are used at the battle of such and such? Give me both. There it is. I can take that.

What might this be? Bang. I've got that. So I will use everything from the writer duet to outlining programs, to mind map programs.

And one of the things I've found is that if I take that point of view like being a reporter, they have to do the story really happen. As I write about it, I may find that some of my assumptions about that story were incorrect. And I have to make a correction. Something in this.

I can't do that. So I will use everything. Every tool I have journals and this and that. And I will just keep expressing the same idea in different ways.

Different formats. I put it on Google Docs. If I put it on 3x5 cards, I put it in an outlining program. Every time I express the same idea in a different way or the same scene, I will take what I know about it.

I know ultimately because I trust my storytelling apparatus is like having three dots. I understand the geometry. So the circle that would allow me to include those three dots has a certain shape already. Give me four dots and I'll give you a sphere.

I'll give you a balanced four dimensional three dimensional. This is why a writer I think needs to start with short stories. Do not start writing in a novel link. You write something small.

A small enough, just three, four, five pages. A small world. Knowable. You can begin to understand the geometry of story and how it relates to your emotions.

You can hold it in your mind. And as you go, then you make it slightly larger story. It's exactly the same as if you're trying to learn how to juggle. You don't start by chainsaw.

You start with something that is small enough that you can do it and think about it. It's like I'm thinking about catching it. It's like, okay. But then you're looking for the moment when you were doing it and you were thinking about something else, but your hands kept moving.

Now it's getting uncomfortable. Now I can add another star. Now maybe I can try and get the five stars. Now let me try three balls.

You start with something that is short and small enough that you can wrap your heart around it. Because one way looking at story is a Swiss watch. I do a beating heart just one way that I put it. You're looking for the engagement of your physical energy, your emotions in your mind.

You start small, very small. And then you slowly get larger and larger. You try to push yourself just a little bit, just like 1%. If you get 1% better every week, you get hella better in five years.

That's a lot of growth in five years. It's all the growth you need in five years. People overestimate how much they can accomplish in a year, but underestimate how much they can accomplish in five years. So if you do that, if you set it up so that you're slowly getting better, you look up one day and you're juggling a chainsaw.

It's as simple as that. It really is. But you have to have faith in yourself to be able to start small and grow. Otherwise, you'll take on too much too soon and you'll fail and you'll think, oh God, I guess I just can't do this.

You just give yourself a chance to develop. That's just a general life message. I guess something like kids when they're failing at something. Just keep trying.

Just keep practicing. Eventually you'll get to the point you want to get to. You have to do more than just keep trying. You also need proper mentorship, proper mentorship.

I have something, I wrote a book on how to become a Jedi. I didn't say that out loud. All the magic formula. And it's my approach to personal development.