Mindy: Today's guest is Maram Taibah, a fantasy writer born in Montreal, Canada. She was raised in Saudi Arabia, which at times was the most unimaginative place. This pushed her to escape into books at a very early age and from there into the craft of storytelling. Her most recent publication is the children's steam punk book, Weathernose. Maram is not only a fiction writer, but also a screenwriter and filmmaker. In 2014 she made her first short film Munkeer, and in 2016 Don't Go Too Far, both of which were screened at the Canne's short film corner. Maram joined me today to talk about how screenwriting can help you become a more concise novelist.
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Mindy: You are a writer as well as a film maker. I am someone who offers editorial services and one of the things that I often see aspiring writers trying too hard to do is control the visual. So in other words, they go overboard with their descriptions or my biggest pet peeve, they control character movement to an unnecessary degree. They will say someone reaches with their left hand or they raised their right eyebrow. They just really want to make sure that the reader is seeing exactly the visual that the author has in their head. It's a movie in their head, which I totally sympathize with. That's how it happens for me. They want the reader to see what they see. But this leads in my opinion as an editor to overwriting. So how does your film making work inform your authorial journey?
Maram: I totally get what you're talking about, about like finding the balance between over, describing, under describing. So it's a bit of a dance that you have to master over time. Because of my screenwriting work where you're, you're supposed to be more succinct with your description. You're not supposed to be describing the details too much. The writing happens a lot faster and you have to find shortcuts to describing things. So that kind of sometimes carries over to my fiction writing. And I've recently gotten feedback about my current work that I under described in areas. I would say for authors who are just starting is just describe as much as you can and then pare it down.
Maram: Find ways to be more succinct. Find the details that are not useful like right eyebrow, left arm, and then trim those out. I think it's really just a matter of allowing it to happen and then paring it down. If you're an over describer, if you're an under describer, it's, I think it's a matter of sitting with it, grounding with it a little bit more, in order to let the details come out, come through your writing.
Mindy: Especially with screenwriting, which I do not do, but I have many friends that do. I know that it is much more succinct. It is very much bare bones, but that is so the actor and the director have room for their interpretation and they're able to bring their visuals and their voice to the character or to the movie. And I feel that way about the reader as well. As a young person whenever I was reading a book, I would cast, for lack of a better word, my own friends or enemies or the person I had a crush on as the love interest. And that helped pull me into the book. I'm probably guilty of under describing, but I'm okay with that because I want my reader to be able to visualize the characters as themselves, as their friends, as their enemies, as the actor or actress of their choice. I want them to have that control. I'm very much a disciple of the death of the author. I want, I'm giving you this story. It's yours now. You're going to interpret it as you will and bring life to it in your mind. That's how I feel about it. So I think that, uh, that part of the writing experience and the screenwriting experience is probably somewhat similar, right?
Maram: The beautiful thing about screenwriting is that if you're somebody who has trouble plotting, if you're writing fiction and you have trouble plotting and you have trouble grounding yourself in action as opposed to just describing the world or describing the characters going about their day, some people get stuck in, in no drama, and they have difficulty creating the drama, creating the change.
Maram: Screenwriting actually helps you to do that because you don't get to describe stuff. And the only place where you have so much control is the action. With screenwriting, the script it's a page per minute, right? So every page is almost about a minute of footage. When you're writing a screenplay, you really are working through the timing of the film and so when it comes to describing screenwriting really helps. If you're an over describer, it helps you to just get on with it. So I would, I would advise writers who, even if you don't want to be a filmmaker, even if you don't want to be in Hollywood, just to learn screenwriting as a tool that helps you to really get into the story.
Mindy: I think that's great advice because what you're talking about now is another thing that is very difficult to get a grasp of if you're a new writer, that is pacing. And I often see again as an editor, so many people working on that buildup that pay off moment doesn't come until page 50 or 65 and your readers aren't going to stay with you that long. If you're working too hard to build up until you give them something, they're probably not going to stay with you because there are, I don't even know, an untold number of books in the world. Somebody else might give them action or plot direction a little sooner and they might put you down to go find someone else that might be a little more entertaining, for lack of a better word. So I think it's really interesting you're talking about a page a minute in screenwriting. I would think that doing or practicing screenwriting, even if you have no intention of going into development or trying to have someone pick up the script, be really good to teach you pacing as well.
Maram: Absolutely, yes. Um, a personal experience of mine was that I've always been a fiction writer ever since I was a child and I always got stuck in the first few chapters of a novel because I didn't know how to move the story forward. I was still shying away from the concept of drama, of creating drama, of creating an inciting incident of giving the character any forward action. And I was getting stuck in that place of like just starting out to describe the world and then, okay, well what next? So when I took a screenwriting course for the first time I did it online and I wrote my first screenplay, I just breezed through it. It was the most intense, most rewarding experiences I've ever had. It taught me a lot about storytelling and I carried that learning with me into fiction.
Mindy: Well, since you brought up carrying that learning into your fiction, when you are hopping in between projects, if you're working on a novel, if you're working on a screenplay are you putting on different hats, or are you just using the same toolbox but approaching it like you're working in a different room?
Maram: No, definitely. It's, it's two different hats. With a screenplay, the story arc, the way it works in a film is a little bit different than it does in fiction. And also when you're writing a screenplay, you are using visual language. So, uh, you have to learn the poetics of film. You have to learn the importance of objects and how they, they can tell a story without you saying anything. There's a lot of tools that you use in film that you don't necessarily need in fiction because in fiction you can just come right out and say it. You can just come right out and tell me what the character is thinking. You can come right out and tell me what they're feeling. Whereas with film, you have to symbolize that visually so that I can read between the lines. So they are two different hats.
Maram: There are so many similarities. It's a different approach. It's also a different timeframe. When you're writing fiction, you are going through the experience and it could take a while. It takes a long time for your character to flower to open up for you to understand what their path is and where they're headed. Whereas with film, it's snap, snap, snap. It's much faster.
Mindy: One of the things that I think of often when I'm talking within visual arts, you know, they say that a picture's worth a thousand words and it's true. It means to me that you're talking about pacing and what that means to me in terms of pacing is that you can use this visual, this symbol or this color or whatever. Even the lighting, there's so many elements that are going to come into the visual that you're creating that an author has to do like three pages of writing, which you do not want.
Mindy: Like that is not a good choice, but an author has to do that in order to create just one visual. I think an interesting exercise is just to take like a screen grab from a film where the character has an expression on their face or the the environment is incredibly important. Or even just take a piece of artwork and describe everything that you can about it and also set the mood, set the tone right, whatever this makes you feel when you're looking at it and try to write that and you could probably write 10 to 15 pages before you had scratched the surface of how this visual makes you feel.
Maram: To layer that exercise, I often advise writers, who are starting out to use music. So if I have a new project, I have new story that I want to tell, one of the steps that I usually take before actually sit down and write is I compile, I would curate a soundtrack, so I would collect all the bits of music out there. Usually just instrumental stuff. A lot of times I grabbed music from films that really invokes the place. It invokes the feeling of the place that I'm writing and invokes the emotions of the story. It invokes the ambience. So I would curate that and that's a very fun process. But then when I sit down and write and I use that music, it becomes a a trigger for emotions, for sensations of what I'm writing about. Not just that, but the more often you do it and use the same music, it becomes a like a mental trigger, right? So it'll invoke it much faster and it, and it just arrives. You just arrive in that place. That works for me and I found that it's useful for writers are starting out.
Mindy: Yes, I do. The same. I think it's a great exercise. I don't know if I've mentioned it on the podcast here before, but I don't use music simply because I write very quickly. So if when I'm drafting, when I'm editing it's much slower. But I don't use music simply because I might be writing a scene that has a particular feeling and then I'm skipping to the next one where the mood has changed or the narrator has changed. So I don't use music because my own moods aren't going to be that fickle. If I'm immersed in something I won't be changing. Well what I use is white noise, so I will just listen to white noise and that has been an excellent trigger for me that when I hear it, I know it's time to work. My brain says, okay, time to work. And also it is wonderful for writers that are on the move. So I'm traveling often and if I am on an airplane, if I am in an airport, if I am in a car, I can turn on my white noise and for one thing it drowns out any distractions. But also my brain is like, Oh, okay, we're working, so the trigger is the noise. It's not I have to be in my office or I have to have this smell or I need my cat. Like none of that is the trigger. It's something that's portable so that I can work when I'm not at home.
Maram: I relate to that. It's, it's the regularity of it that gets your juices flowing. I like to think of the creative cycle as the way I think about the cycle of nature, so it's really not something that you can necessarily control 100% but you can help it along.
Mindy: I like the idea of that using nature as a parallel because it is, I mean hopefully your creative process is organic and it's not something you were forcing, but I will say there are times when you do have to force it, so if your listeners out there are forcing it, don't worry, you're not doing it wrong. You mentioned the screenwriting and you that you took a class online. For my listeners. Is there somewhere you would suggest them going or enrolling or a class they would take?
Maram: I highly recommend Gotham Writing Institute in New York. They have amazing online classes in so many different genres of writing. They have romance, they have comedy, they have screen writing, you have fiction fiction one, fiction two. Ah, they have children's book writing and it's a 10 week class that is affordable and you learn so much.
Maram: Coming up. Three tips for world building.
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Mindy: One of your areas of expertise is world building, especially in fantasy realms. Fantasy and SciFi are the hardest genres in my experience, as the writer carries the onus of not only telling a story, but physically describing an entire planet, culture, political hot points, religions, socioeconomic , basically everything you don't have to explain, if you're putting something in a contemporary setting that the reader is familiar with. And you've got to make it interesting without info dumping. So I know that world-building is one of the areas that you really good at. So if you would like to share some of your tips, I'm sure that my genre writers would love to hear them.
Maram: Sure, absolutely. You're right about there being an extra quote unquote burden on a fantasy writer, a SciFi writer, or even a steam punk writer because you are creating something that doesn't exist and you're not working with your own world, your own life experience. You are creating something that is out of this world. But here's the thing. I have three tips for world-building today. One of them is grounding. So the reason that good world-building works is that it reminds us of earth in some way. One of the things that some authors or writers who are just starting out try to do is that they try to break too many rules and they try to to recreate in such a way that they want to rewrite everything, create stuff that is too to outside of our planet. I worked with a writer who was just starting out as well and she, she's a beautiful writer. Her style is so poetic, so lyrical. The world that she was building was so extravagantly beautiful and I really appreciate how unique it was, but the thing that got that threw me off the rails while I was reading it was that I couldn't relate to the characters and I couldn't relate to that world because it was too, she was trying too hard to recreate something that doesn't exist.
Maram: Okay. Your sky is pink. Things that people eat in your world are so weird and so fantastic or there's no rule book for the way to people talk in her world, everything, every single aspect of that world. She was trying to break the rule for. And my advice to her was, well, you've got to ground it in earth a little bit just so that I can step into it. Just so I can use what I know and step into your world. Just so that I can use what I know and relate to your character. So yes, your sky can be pink, but there has to be night and day, right? There has to be some layering that you use to ground your story with in a way that is earth-like, so yeah, get creative, change the roles, but always ground back to earth so that we can relate.
Maram: The other thing is that has to be some kind of metronome. In the wildest fantasy worlds out there. Um, I'm thinking like Narnia. I'm thinking like Brian Jacques, Redwall series. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but yeah, his characters are mice and foxes and moles and you know, animals, rodents. There's a metronome, there's a night and day, lunch, dinner, supper, breakfast. There are things that are recognizable. There's, there's a regularity that we, we know from our human lives. So that's what I mean by metronome. When I was writing my, my recent book, which I published in August, it's called Weathernose, it's a steam punk children's steam punk book. It's set in a universe called the Cerulean Universe and that universe, there's an Island called Lynette and I when I created that space as a blend between sort of Mediterranean culture and like far Eastern islands.
Maram: That's how I saw the landscape. But in that book, like in that world, people do get up in the morning, they go to work, they make money, they have breakfast, lunch and dinner. There's a bookstore, there are boats, you know, it's very similar to earth even though there's a lot of it that is fantastical. So that's what I mean by grounding.
Mindy: You're absolutely right about grounding. One of the things that I use myself when I was writing my fantasy series, the first one in particular, Given to the Sea, I had an area of this Island continent where the trees were actually dangerous. The leaves are the serrated leaves that you'll see on trees and serrated leaves exist in our world. I hike a lot and sometimes if the person in front of you is holding a branch back for you, they let it go. Usually they wait to make sure you've got a hold of it before, you know, it comes back and hits you in the face.
Mindy: Sometimes they don't. I've been hit in the face with a few branches in my life and when that happens, it hurts just because the branch has smacked you in the face. But I got to thinking one day as I was hiking about serrated leaves. We say serrated and to us, usually you think of a knife, but leaves can be serrated. They don't hurt you because they're leaves, but automatically I'm like, wait, what if they did? So I created this part of the Island where the leaves are sharp as blades. So if you're walking through this part of the forest and it's fall and leaves are falling, you could die because they're just slicing you open as you walk. And then I just take it a little step further. It's like, okay, so you got sliced like down to the bone and you're bleeding all over the place. Your blood is soaking into the ground. Trees drink water up out of the ground. So everything in nature has a reason for doing what it does. You were talking about the cycle of nature earlier and I'm like, Oh, okay. So the tree has a serrated leaf. It's actually a carnivore. It cuts you, you bleed, it drinks the blood, and then it grows. And then I'm like, okay, cool. This is a neat forest. Right? And I build all those things just off an idea of a tree and we know what a tree is. We know that serrated leaves exist, we know that trees drink water. So we've created something fantastical out of something very familiar.
Maram: That's fascinating.
Mindy: I think another thing that I do personally, when I am looking at fantasy, if you're using, and this is of course you do have to have some idea of measurements in their world because especially if they're traveling. I usually don't say miles or meters or anything like that because that's a measuring system on earth. But you can say, well, it's like two days ride or five days walk or whatever. You still have day, you still have night just like you were saying. But I usually try to have a different type of measurement system simply because as soon as you say inches or feet or hours or minutes, I'm immediately like, Oh yeah, well that's how I talk. That's something I use here. So something similar, something like you said, there's a sun, you can use the movement of the sun that tells time. That's what we're doing when we're using our minutes and hours. We just don't think of it that way anymore.
Maram: Right. If you look at all the fantasy out there, like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, I have a lot to say about Star Wars in a bit, but if you look at them, they come from earth. With the Perdane Chronicles, I believe the author was American, but he was inspired by ancient Welsh culture. And that was where the story was grounded in. And a lot of the naming, I'm going to be talking about naming in a bit. A lot of the naming comes from ancient Wales. You're not being unoriginal by allowing yourself to be inspired by what is on earth.
Maram: So the next thing I wanted to talk about with naming, the only reason I chose this aspect of world building, because find it very fascinating when authors have such a strong system for naming their characters. And I'm going to talk about Star Wars. So if you look at star Wars and you think about the names, there's Qui Gon Jin there's Obi wan Kenobi, there's Padme, there's Luke Skywalker, Han Solo. There's a sort of homogenous, a uniformity to the sounds of those names.
Maram: It's a craft. And very often names in fantasy will be inspired by a specific culture. So if you think about the names in Star Wars, they kind of sound a little bit like names in Asian cultures, right? Because of the way the syllables. And like I said with the Perdane Chronicles, the author was inspired by Welsh culture. One thing you could do when you're naming, when you're figuring out the naming system for your characters is to decide on a culture that is similar to the world that you're building, right? And then you could write down a list of words that you like from that language. It doesn't matter what they mean, just the sound of those words. Put them down in a list, and then play around with the syllables and mix them up and find out what names you could come up with. That's a really fun way to come up with names that are homogenous and that have a culture of their own.
Maram: Don't be afraid to just let your intuition form you as well. This doesn't have to be a cerebral process all the time. Sometimes, names will just come up for you naturally, organically, and they will sound homogenous if you're open to it. So Weathernose, which is about a, uh, old fashioned weatherman who wakes up one day to find that his career's being sabotaged because of 10 year old girl invented a machine that can predict the weather. And so he goes after her. He tries to destroy her, but he's always challenged and outsmarted by her cause she's a prodigy. So his name, the lead character, the weatherman, his name is Tart Morning and that was a very intuitive name that just came to me later on. In retrospect when I, when I think about my process, like why did I mean him Tart? It's kind of a ridiculous name for a middle aged man to have, you know it's a dessert.
Maram: That was his name and I went with it because it sounded like him. And then the prodigy, who is his nemesis in this story, the little girl, her name is Cyprus Corcal. That again was also a very intuitive name that just came to me. But if you think about them, they essentially borrow sounds from the English language with a little bit of an exotic twist. Another character in this world, who doesn't appear in the book, but he does exist in that universe. His name is Mammoth Bipcap, but if you listen to the word Bipcap, the syllables have an English feel. I don't think you'd find anyone in like say the UK or the U S who has the name Bipcap. I doubt it. It belongs to that kind of culture.
Mindy: You want your reader be able to see later on if they come across the character and the name is introduced to them. Once you have built the world, hopefully if you're doing a good job of making the different cultures homogenous, they can hear the name and automatically be like, Oh, that person is probably from this planet or from this culture and you, it's your job of course to do that building.
Maram: And one other fun tip that I could offer, go on Google and look for name generators. There are some pretty cool websites. What I used to do when I first started out writing fantasy is I'd look up names and name generators on Google and then I would play with the syllables in those names to make them my own. And then another thing you could do is to really look at the fantasy that you love reading and kind of study it, study it for the homogenous quality that it contains, and see how you could recreate that.
Mindy: And what's your third tip then for world-building?
Maram: The third tip is about rules. So when you're creating a world, you’ve got to think about the rules. What are the rules that govern your world? You're obviously not going to go in there and recite those rules to your readers, but you have to know them and then they can naturally or organically show up in your story. So if you know the rules well, it will show through the writing. Things you can think about re culture. So in the world that you're creating, what is the music like? Uh, is there literature that people follow? Is there etiquette in your world? What is the politics like there? What's against the law? Are there any superstitions? How do the laws of physics operate there? If there's magic, what is possible, what isn't? And then you've got to think about the people who populate your world.
Maram: How do they speak? What is acceptable in their culture and what isn't? And does your character maybe break those rules? Right? Is there a social hierarchy also? Is there some sort of prejudice? If you want to take the Harry Potter world, for example, there is prejudice against mudbloods. All of these things also borrow from earth, right? So we have these prejudices in one way or another, we have these hierarchies, we have rules, we have politics. And it has to be the same in your world as well.
Mindy: Absolutely. And those rules are so important. And that's one of the things that as an author you began to notice and bring a critical eye to other books and to TV and film. And for me that's one of the biggest sins is when you break your own rules of the world that you gave me. So the best example I have for that is, and I used to watch it all the time and I don't anymore, but The Walking Dead in season one smell was a big deal. If you could cover yourself with corpses and corpse blood and smell like you were rotting, zombies would leave you alone because they thought you were a zombie. They couldn't smell you. So therefore they couldn't find you. Suddenly in season two, there's a scene where there's a whole hoard of zombies coming down the road and all the characters are underneath cars and they're not being bothered. It's they're being quiet and they're out of their visual plane and so they're safe. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, no, you told me in season one that they smell you. So these people are laying here underneath these cars and they're perfectly safe if they're quiet and out of sight. And I'm like, Nope, that's not what you told me. You told me it's the smell. So that's one of the things that I am just super critical of very often is just making sure that you're not breaking your own rules or if you are that there's a very good reason. And you explain why.
Maram: Right. Right. In my book, Weathernose, for example, because it's a steampunk book, the focus in the story is invention. So that world is really built on innovation. It's innovation is valued and that is why Cyprus, the little prodigy is celebrated as a child and she's given free license to basically do anything she wants simply because she can invent. That's an aspect of the world. That's a characteristic of the world that I built. Is it healthy for a child to get to do anything she wants? No, but that's the way it works in this world.
Maram: But then again also children bully each other in this world. Adults fear change. People need jobs to survive, so it is the same as earth. It's just a great way to kind of, when you're writing, pinpoint what are the drivers? What is the driving force in this story, in this world that you're building? For me it's innovation and invention. What are the rules? What are the do's and don'ts? What is something that you're going to stick by? Like you said with the zombie story, you gave the reader or the viewer a function of that world and then you went and broke that rule and that creates a incongruency for the viewer. So you just have to be consistent. You have to decide what it is and be consistent with it.
Mindy: Why don't you go ahead and tell me where listeners can find you online and find your work?
Maram: Yeah, well I have a Instagram account so you can find me at Maram Taibah Author. You can find my book Weathernose on Amazon, both as an ebook and paperback. You can also subscribe to my newsletter, which you will find at and you will be receiving a lot of updates about my book. I also am creating content right now. Visual content sketches, memes, um, stuff that the characters are creating in their own worlds and you get those exclusively in my newsletter.