Season 14 – Writing Excuses: Recent Episodes
Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler
It’s that time again: it’s a new year, and that means a new Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat! This year we’ll start with some classes and events in Houston on September 25, and then we’ll hop on a cruise ship and head to Cozumel, Georgetown, and Falmouth. You’ll arrive back in Houston again on October … Continue reading WXR 2020: Scholarships! →
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard, with special guest Natasha Ence
Natasha Ence is a professional game master.
(Yes, you read that correctly.)
She joins us to discuss collaborative storytelling, and how the principles of game mastering for role-players can be applied to creating a fulfilling, engaging story.
Credits: This episode was recorded live at LTUE by Dan Thompson, and was mastered by Alex Jackson.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
We've spent all year focusing on worldbuilding, and it's time to move on.
Almost.
In this episode we try to cover some points we may have missed, we talk about what we've learned, and discuss some of our favorite recent examples of worldbuilding.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
We've all heard the adage "write what you know," and in this episode we set out to un-misinterpret it. The phrase is fraught, and perhaps the most perilous bit is that it can be used an excuse to not write. Here at Writing Excuses we're pretty committed to approaching things in ways that let us do MORE writing, so this topic is a great place for us to leave you out of excuses.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab
In this episode we discuss how our customs and mores govern our own real-world interactions, and how our understanding of these interactions can be applied to our worldbuilding.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
The entire year has been about learning how to worldbuild, and we've learned a thing or two ourselves while preparing material for you. In this episode we talk about some of those lessons, and try to answer stray questions that didn't fit into any of previous episode buckets.
Liner Notes: If Dinosaurs Had Body Fat Like Penguins
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Piper, Dan, and Tempest, with special guest Nicola Griffith
In this episode we discuss how to faithfully represent people with physical disabilities through the characters we create. Our guest, Nicola Griffith, walks us through the process of rigorously imagining how the world might look to someone with a particular disability.
Credits: This episode was mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
Among science fiction and fantasy plot devices, the "uncommon resource" trope is common enough to almost seem cliché. Fortunately (?), the economic principle of scarcity is ubiquitous enough in real life that most of us don't even blink when presented with the idea in fiction.
So how do we keep it fresh? How do we roll scarcities into the economies we create, and the worlds we build?
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab
Economists tend to see everything as economics, which is kind of how proponents of ANY discipline see their discipline, but it's not a bad way to look at worldbuilding through the lens of economics. In this episode we talk about how this works for us, and how it lets us roll our worldbuilding into our storytelling.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Liner Notes: Mahtab mentioned The Economics of Science Fiction on Medium.com
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
Where do you draw the line between what seems plausible, and what would be cool? If you pick "plausible," how do you stay cool? If you pick "cool," how do you avoid knocking the readers out of the story? And finally, how might we structure things so that when the time comes, we don't need to choose one or the other, because we can have both?
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and engineered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Howard, Mary Robinette, Dan, and DongWon
Let's talk about career planning. It's a lot more than just launching a career by selling a book, and in this episode we talk about the kinds of things we want to be thinking about and preparing for beyond simply selling our next book or project.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Bert Grimm at WXR 2018, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
Alternate histories (and historical fantasies) are a staple of genre fiction. In this episode we talk about the worldbuilding process, the tools we use, and the pitfalls we try to avoid when constructing these kinds of stories.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab
Let's make history! In this episode we talk about doing exactly that—creating real-feeling histories for secondary world settings. We discuss the resources we turn to, the pitfalls we try to avoid, and the places where we think the history has been done really well.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
How do you decide between digging one really deep, narrow well, and digging one really wide, shallow ocean? In this episode we talk about our desires to build worlds which appear both vanishingly wide and unplumbably deep, when we have time to do neither.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Howard, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Dongwon
"Positioning feels like the most important question in all of publishing." — DongWon Song
In this episode we talk about how to ask and answer the question of positioning, which is "who is this book for?"
Credits: This episode was recorded before a live audience aboard Liberty of the Seas by Bert Grimm, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard, with special guest Jared Quan
Jared Quan serves as a volunteer on several non-profit boards, and joined us to talk about the opportunities that exist for writers. Administration, leadership, writing and editing, and teaching are just a few of the many kinds of roles available for volunteers.
Credits: This episode was recorded live at LTUE by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
Some science fiction and fantasy stories arise from a premise which, under even just rudimentary examination, appear utterly ridiculous. And some of these stories are hugely successful. In this episode we talk about how we manage our worldbuilding when the goal is less about building a world which works, and more about getting the audience to buy in on something outlandish so we can get on with our story.
Liner Notes: "Went With The Wind" begins about two minutes into this full episode of the Carole Burnett Show
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab
How do we come up with names? How do we do it in ways that enhance our worldbuilding? What are the elements that give our invented naming schemes (even the zany ones with lots of syllables and apostrophes) verisimilitude?
In this episode we talk about some of the tricks we've used, the pitfalls we've avoided, and conlangs in general.
Liner Notes: In Episode 12.51 we discuss Conlangs ("constructed languages")with Dirk Elzinga.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
The advice commonly given to writers is to worldbuild an iceberg, but only to show the reader the tip. This is still too much work. Icebergs are big.
In this episode we talk about worldbuilding the tip of the iceberg, and then worldbuilding as little as possible of the rest of the iceberg so that the tip behaves correctly.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
How do you write a setting in which the status quo is one with which you deeply disagree? How do you create a conflict of this sort without being overtly pedantic or preachy? In this episode we talk about creating engaging worlds while worldbuilding around—and yes, over—landmines.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
Let's talk about worldbuilding with gender roles. Most of us have grown up with a very strongly defined binary, that distinction need not be how we craft the worlds in which we set our stories. In this episode we discuss the resources we have to help us, and the approaches we've taken to worldbuild with gender in our own work. We drill down pretty deeply on some worldbuilding with Brandon, and yes, we run quite long.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Liner Notes
Axes of Power spreadsheet pronoun.is, #ownvoices, #nonbinary
Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab
In this episode we talk about how to put characters in conflict with their setting, and how to structure our work so that these conflicts arise organically rather than feeling mandated by plot.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and master by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Piper, DongWon, Amal, and Maurice
We like food, and we like to talk about food. Our hosts this week talk about how this influences their fiction, (not to mention how incredibly complex [and interesting, and delicious] the subject is.)
Credits: this episode was recorded by Howard Tayler, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
So, you're going to go someplace and learn something you can't learn in any other way. Maybe it's location research for setting. Maybe you're off to interview an expert. Whatever you're planning, you need to be planning it well. In this episode we discuss the field research we've done, how we went about it, and how we might do it differently.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
EPISODE ORDER NOTE: As of this writing, episode 14.28's web-sized audio file isn't ready. We'll run it next week, and eventually swap the dates to get 14.29 and 14.28 in the right order.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab
How do you write about warfare in your stories when you've never fought in a war? How do you describe brilliant tactics when you're completely untrained in military movements? How can you portray the emotions of someone on a battlefield without having been on a battlefield yourself?
In this episode we tackle these questions and more. (Hint: the answers include "research")
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
In this episode we stories with the "Person-vs-Setting" structure. These are stories where nature fills the role of antagonist, and may also be what governs the pacing, and the delivery of key emotional beats.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, and Dan, with special guest Rob Kimbro
Rob Kimbro joins us this week to talk about Aristotle's elements of tragedy, and how they might be applied to our writing. The six elements are (in Aristotle's order of descending importance): plot, character, idea, dialog, music, and spectacle. We discuss this tool in terms of critiquing existing work, and in finding direction in the things we create.
Credits: this episode was recorded by Howard Tayler, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Howard, Mary Robinette, Dan, and DongWon
Guest-host Dongwon Song joined us at WXR 2018 as an instructor, and gave great advice regarding the business side of working as an author. In this episode he takes us through a conversation about choosing an agent.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Bert Grimm, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
Political Intrigue stories are less about "politics" (as colloquially defined by pop culture) and more about mysteries. Per Mary Robinette, they're often like heists of information. The word "politics" here is used in its purest sense: POWER.
In this episode we talk about how we worldbuild for stories in which the flow of information and misinformation affect the shift of power, and how to craft those stories so they're, well... intriguing instead of being boring.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Answering questions about the power structures you live within can help you with the worldbuilding of politics in the fiction you write.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
Sherlock Holmes has his Watson for a reason. Readers need a character to whom some things must be explained. In this episode we talk about how we create these gateway characters without delivering "maid and butler" dialog, or talking down to the reader.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Dan, Tempest, and DongWon
The single most asked question we get on the subject of writing cultures other than our own is some variation on "can we even DO this anymore?"
Short answer: YES, YOU CAN.
Our objective with this episode is to encourage you to put in the work, do the research, and write outside of your culture or personal experience. At risk of sounding cliché, it's not easy, but it's worth it.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
What is an allegory, anyway? This episode probably won't settle that question, but we did manage a discussion on how to use our stories to teach things, or be stand-ins for things, and to do it in the ways that allegories and/or parables might.
We talk about some famous allegories, some things whose authors insisted were not allegorical, and the possible pitfalls of didacticism.
Credits: This episode was engineered by Dan Thompson and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab
We often worldbuild religions and rituals for the stories we create. In this episode we discuss the decisions surrounding this, and our approaches for doing it well.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
Theme is one of those high-falutin' concepts we're often reluctant to approach in a nuts-and-bolts sort of way. In this episode we'll talk about how our themes can be communicated through elements of our settings, deepening reader engagement with the things we write.
We offer examples from our own work, and from things we've watched or read which have done this in ways that resonated well for us.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Rob Kimbro, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Howard, Mary Robinette, Dan, and DongWon
This episode is about comp titles (comparative titles), which are those things you use to describe your project in terms of other works. We discuss the ones we've used (both successfully and unsuccessfully), and the criteria we use to come up with good ones.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Bert Grimm, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
Your setting can quickly tell the reader what kind of a story they're reading, and in this episode we'll talk about how we make that happen. Think of it as the "establishing shot" principle from film making, expanded to cover whatever worldbuilding details we choose to reveal first.
Liner Notes: Here are the Schlock Mercenary Book 19 prologues Howard described, complete with the footnotes which make fun of prologues.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab
We've spent a lot of time talking about magic systems in our worldbuilding. It's time to talk about science and technology in that same way. This has been a staple (perhaps the defining staple) of science fiction since before "science fiction" was a word.
At risk of opening the "where do you get your ideas" can of worms, this episode covers a little bit of where we get our ideas, and where you might get—and subsequently develop—some more of yours.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
"Show, don't tell," they tell us. Except sometimes showing is not always the best thing to do. Or even the right thing to do. Sometimes we should be telling. In this episode we'll tell you about telling. (We'd show you about telling, but we still don't have a video feed.)
Credits: This episode was recorded by Rob Kimbro, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
What's the difference between an obstacle and a complication? Margaret Dunlap takes the lead on this episode for us, giving us the tools we need to create 'impediments to main character progress' which will drive our stories across page turns (and commercial breaks) in compelling, twisty ways.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Daniel Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Tempest Bradford, DongWon Song, and Julia Rios
Julia Rios joins us to talk about writing characters who come from one of the many Latin-American cultures or subcultures. "Latinx" is a catch-all term for people with Latin-American heritage, including mixed-race people. In this episode we talk about mash-up cuisine, intersectionality, and how to navigate the subtleties to find the specific cultural elements which will help you create Latinx characters.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Bert Grimm, and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
When we say "without rules" we're talking about stories whose magic is not held under logical scrutiny for the reader. There are lots of reasons why you might do this, and in this episode we'll talk about not just about the why, but also the how.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab
Let's design magic systems! We talk about how we do it, and how the principles of magic system design apply to the science fiction systems we create, and vice-versa.
NOTE: In this episode we're talking about "hard" magic systems, where there are well-defined rule sets (even if the reader isn't shown them explicitly.) Next week we'll talk about "soft" magic.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
Let's infodump without infodumping. Let's deliver lots of exposition without sounding expository. Let's talk with the maid and the butler without having maid-and-butler dialog.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Benjamin Hewett, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Howard, Mary Robinette, Dan, and DongWon
We invited attendees at WXR 2018 to ask us some general worldbuilding questions. Here's what they asked:
What cultural stuff do you need to know during the writing process? How do you treat overlaps between real-world religions and fictional religions when the fictional religions are part of the story's fundamental conflict? How much worldbuilding do you have figured out before you start your first draft, and how much do you discover on the fly? What's the point in a book beyond which you shouldn't introduce big worldbuilding elements? How do you ensure that the world comes through as a character of its own? How much change to terminology is too much?
Credits: This episode was recorded live by Bert Grimm, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
How weird, how far outside the realm of what the reader feels to be familiar, is too weird? Where is the line beyond which the fantasy is too fantastic, the unreal too unrealistic, or the aliens too alien? In this episode we discuss finding that line, and with the tools at our disposal, possibly moving it.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab
Let's talk about race, sort-of. Let's talk about creating races—species of people, really—which is a critically important activity in much of our worldbuilding. In this episode we discuss a few of the pitfalls, some of our own techniques, and a few of our favorite alien¹ races.
¹Can of Worms: It's likely you'll subconsciously code your creations after people who are "other" to you. This is both fraught and inescapable, but we don't want to discourage you from trying. On May 26th we'll go into detail telling you "yes, you can," in a Writing The Other episode entitled "Yes You Can."
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
When you're defining your world for the reader, some voice in the text must speak those definitions. This episode is about how we use character voices—their dialog and their narrative view points—to worldbuild. What do they see? How do they perceive it? What are their favorite jokes? What do they say when they swear?
Credits: This episode was recorded by Benjamin Hewett, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Dan, Tempest, DongWon, and TJ
This is the first of our Writing The Other episodes, in which we set out to help writers portray people who are unlike them. In this episode we're joined by T.J. Berry. She walks us through the language and terminology of bisexuality.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard
Margaret Dunlap joins us during season 14 to talk about worldbuilding. In this, her first episode with us, we talk about worlds in which a monolithic culture (like, say, 'everyone wears hats') is represented. We cover how to use the trope to your advantage, and how to avoid the trope if it's going to cause problems.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab
Mahtab Narsimhan joins us this year for a dozen episodes on worldbuilding, and this week we're talking about geography and biomes. These pieces of our settings can be central to the stories we tell, but they can also be backdrops, and the story purposes they serve may determine which tools we use to describe them.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
Season 14 is all about worldbuilding¹, and we're kicking it off with a discussion of when you do that bit of work. Do you handle worldbuilding before you write the story, as you write the story, or after you've finished the story? We'll talk about how we do it, and the benefits and drawbacks of each approach.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Benjamin Hewett, and mastered by Alex Jackson.
¹ The question of whether this term should be a closed compound (worldbuilding), an open compound (world building), or hyphenated (world-building) is an open one. Our decision to use the closed compound "worldbuilding" in our episode descriptions this year is a matter of personal preference.