Season 07 – Writing Excuses: Recent Episodes
Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler
Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard each take a look at some changing aspect of the industry, and how they're reacting to that change.
How is "Men in Black" like "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter?" This week on Writing Excuses we talk about Secret History, and how to do it well.
A fast-paced Q&A covering discouragement, magic systems, ideas, and our embarrassing early projects.
We've talked about where to start. Now Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard talk about how to start -- what goes "in" when you're going "in late, out early."
Brandon Sanderson and Mary Robinette Kowal provide last-minute writing advice to you NaNoWriMo'ers out there...
Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mary review some of Emma Coats' "Pixar Rules" for storytelling
Howard Tayler gives NaNoWriMo participants a pep-talk on their way into the last week of the month.
What are the things that matter to your characters? What things matter to your readers? After we get the obligatory ambiguity out of the way, we settle into talking about the "stakes" and the escalation thereof.
Brandon and Mary take time out from World Fantasy to encourage everyone participating in NaNoWriMo.
It's microcasting time! This week we take a crack at the following listener questions:
What percentage of a rough draft makes it into print? What are the pitfalls of jumping from novels to short fiction, and vice versa? Do you need to start with short fiction first?
(This answer involves this link to Jim C. Hines.)
Should a novice writer fix glaring story problems during a draft, or wait until after? Can a self-published author get picked up by a traditional publisher? How do you get over the fear of writing something unoriginal?
(We break this question into two larger questions--we can do that, we use Author Math--and reference some previous episodes.) (We should also point out the irony that yes, Howard is usually the one who writes these up, but on the one day we say it's going to be Howard it's actually Dan.)
Can I pay you to help me outline my story?
(The answer to this particular question involves what I call "a massive yet slightly late announcement" about the "Out of Excuses" Workshop and Retreat. We also just announced a scholarship for the retreat.)
Janci Patterson joins us to talk about contemporary YA , her debut novel "Chasing the Skip," and writing from a pitch.
Dan Wells walks us through the seven-point story structure format he uses, and then we demonstrate by brainstorming this on a sample story.
Maurice Broaddus joins us to talk about "writing the other" -- writing other cultures, races, genders -- basically anybody who isn't much like you.
Pantsing! What are we even talking about?
We're talking about discovery writing, but apparently some folks think it's more fun to call it "seat-of-your-pants" writing. In this cast we cover this exhilarating process, and how it might best be applied.
Mary uses the "yes-but, no-and" trick. Dan starts with an end in mind, and then ignores it in order to write today's chapter. Brandon, despite being a fairly rigid outliner, often finds himself discovery writing when under odd sorts of pressures. Howard likens discovery writing to improvisational music.
Fundamentally, seat-of-your-pants writing is like seat-of-your-pants anything else: the more practice you have within that discipline, the more of the techniques you've mastered, the more likely you are to succeed in the endeavor.
Dan needs help writing a short story, so Brandon, Mary, and Howard endeavor to help him. Hopefully this will be educational for the rest of you.
RPG Luminary Monte Cook joins us at GenCon Indy 2012 to talk about writing for games, and the perils of trying to adapt game play back into prose.
Finishing one project means it's time to start the next one. And no, it's not necessarily going to get easier...
Emote! Now do it authentically! In this episode we'll explain how we do it, and hopefully help you do it better.
What do you do when your villain is more interesting and engaging than your hero? The first step? Admit that this is a problem...
Mary Robinette Kowal talks in depth about her novel Glamour In Glass, fielding questions from Brandon, Dan, and Howard.
Do we value originality too much? What does it mean to be original, and how can we, as authors, write wonderful things when all of the good ideas have already been used?
Recorded live at Utah Valley University, here's another Q&A episode from the LTUE Symposium!
The questions:
What was Brandon's plan with Mistborn and the themes regarding establishment? Why does Kelsier shrug so much? (This leads into a fun discussion of "tells.") How do you know when to stop a chapter? What about expanding it? How do you make your prose more transparent? How do you decide who and what to cut? What do you do to filter out the extraneous ideas that come while you're writing? What can collaborators do in order to create a single "voice" for the book? What's the best way to tackle a long back-story?
Want answers? You'll just have to listen...
Recorded live, our regular 'casters discuss time travel, and somehow manage not to become any of their own parents, or even uncles.
A microcast is our word for an asynchronous Q&A episode: you ask us tons of questions online, either through twitter or facebook or our listenermail account (on the sidebar), and we want to answer as many of them as we can. Not every answer can fill an entire episode, though, so we take the smaller ones and cover a bunch of them at once in a microcast. This week we take a brief, pithy look at the following:
Prologues and epilogues Using drawings to get across settings Simple tricks for naming things Would you self publish if you had a do over? How do you keep a powerful character interesting? Foreshadowing Trimming Flashbacks
Howard answers questions about "Force Multiplication," (the 12th Schlock Mercenary book) as posed by Brandon, Dan, and Mary.
Michael R. Collings and Michaelbrent Collings discuss cathartic horror with Brandon, Dan, and Mary in front of a live audience at UVU.
A Q&A with James Dashner covering paragraph edits, plotting, writing prequels to existing series, and more.
What is your "voice" and how do you identify it? James Artimus Owen joins us for this discussion before a live audience at Life, The Universe, and Everything at Utah Valley University.
Guest and gun-nut Larry Correia joins the Writing Excuses crew to talk firearms, fiction, and common mistakes.
In this second part a VERY SPECIAL two-part session of Writing Excuses Brandon, Dan, and Howard continue to tear into Mary's first novel outline.
In this outlining demonstration Mary reads from an early outline, then Brandon, Dan, and Howard brutally dissect it.
Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard tell you all the reasons why you shouldn't actually be writing, and why, especially at this time of the year, these writing excuses are so critically important to your career.
Brandon and Mary school Howard on "Man vs. Nature." They might school the rest of us, too.
Brandon, Mary, and Howard talk about the strengths of the omniscient POV, how to use it well, and what pitfalls to avoid.
Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard field seven questions in fifteen minutes and forty-two seconds: a new land-speed record!
Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard field questions from Twitter, including what to do if you don't like your characters, keeping your plot on track, and how grounded in real geography your urban fantasy should be. There is also a question about bacon.
Sarah Pinborough joins Mary and Dan at World Fantasy for a very writerly discussion of London. Also, they discuss using a city as a character.
Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard talk about Historical Fantasy (differentiating it from Alternate History), its popularity, and how you might go about beginning to write it.
In this particularly self-indulgent episode of Writing Excuses we take you behind the marshmallow. We explain the origins of the 'cast, and offer you rare insight into what makes this show what it is. We talk about how the show evolved, how our equipment came to be "borrowed," and how Mary came to be involved.
Sam Sykes joins Dan Wells and Mary Robinette Kowal for a discussion of sound, smell, taste, and touch in prose.
Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard tackle worldbuilding flora and fauna again, this time through negative examples, pizza-trees, and a can of worms.
How do you take a good character and make them evil? And why would you want to do this? Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard answer that second question first, and then walk you through the process of doing this.