Writing Excuses

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler Guest host Peng Shepherd leads our discussion of "order-less reading order" (after we get past the business of "having too much fun with the episode title"). But what do we even mean by "order-less" or "disordered?" At one level, we mean you can just pick up the story anywhere and start re...

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler Our exploration of sub- and micro-structures continues with guest host Peng Shepherd. This week we're talking about how a story can be structured around a "thing." The simplest explanatory example would be structuring around a map, which is where we start the episode... kind of like how The Lord of the Rings...

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler One common structure—both macro and micro—is the "story within a story," or "framing story" structure, and yet somehow we've never really explored it on Writing Excuses. Guest host Peng Shepherd is here to help us set things right. Liner Notes: Here are some examples of story-within-a-story structure....

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler Guest host Peng Shepherd continues to lead our exploration of sub- and micro-structures by taking us into the scaffolding of in media res, flashbacks, and other tools for structuring a story by telling it out of chronological order. We also cover how to do this without breaking the flow of the story. Liner Notes: The &#3...

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler In our second micro-structure episode, Peng Shepherd leads us into an exploration of the ways in which the use of multiple point-of-view characters can create a framework within the larger framework of the story. Liner Notes: In one example we contrasted the single POV Killing Floor, by Lee Childs with its multiple-POV T...

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler We're beginning another eight-episode deep-dive series, and this time it's a fresh approach to story structure, led by our guest host Peng Shepherd. Join us as we zoom right through the overarching frameworks defined via things like the Hero's Journey, Freytag’s Triangle, Save The Cat, and Seven Point Story S...

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd How do you translate things from the spark of inspiration into a work that someone else can consume? Like, instead of turning a movie into a book, you're trying to create a book out of the movie in your head. And what if your "spark" isn't a movie in your head, but instead a suite of emotions? In this episode w...

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd What are your influences? What pieces of art, music, literature, or other media have inspired you? In this episode we'll talk about making that inspiration deliberate, and consciously learning from our influences. Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson Our Sponsors: * Check o...

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd Oh no! You're in the middle of a thing (a novel, a series, a career) and you suddenly realize that the expectations you set early on are not the expectations you'll be meeting. What do you do now? , We're talking about how go about resetting audience expectations, whether mid-story, mid-series, or mid-career, inclu...

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd Your brand—your name, the cover art for your book, and even the typeface for the title—set expectations for the book's contents. That advice about not judging a book by its cover? It's lovely in theory, but in practice, that's just not how it works. In this episode we'll talk about how your brand gets defined,...

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd In the previous episode we discussed how to ensure that your surprise feels inevitable. In this episode we're covering how to make inevitability feel surprising. The title is a nod to the concept of the "red herring," which is arguably the most useful tool for setting up a good surprise. Credits: This episode was r...

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd This week we're talking about giving inevitability to our intended surprise, and we open with a discussion of Chekov's Gun, which, as a writing rule, is mostly used in inversion. Next week we'll focus on making inevitable things surprising. Liner Notes: Art and Editing of Suicide Squad (YouTube) Credits: This episo...

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd The title of this episode comes to us from the first paragraph of The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss—a novel which delights us with turns of phrase and evocative prose from beginning to end. We're continuing our exploration of "promises as a structure" by looking at the promises made by the prose of your fir...

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd The genre of your story is making promises to the reader, and the medium upon which your story is told makes promises too. In this episode we talk about the expectations set by various mediums and genres, and how we can leverage those to ensure that we deliver a satisfying story. Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall...

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd The structure you're using for your story isn't just helping you organize your plotting. It's telling the audience what's going to happen. Story structures make promises to audiences, and these audience expectations are, in large measure, outside of our control. In this episode we talk about the expectations se...

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd Our next 8-episode intensive is all about promises and expectations. Our guest hosts are Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd. They're joining us to talk about how the promises we make to our audiences, and the expectations they bring with them, are a structural format. In this episode we introduce the topic, and t...

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Fonda Lee, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler Here at the end of our 8-episode intensive series on Worldbuilding we discuss stepping away from the defaults, the clichés, and the tropes, and choosing every element deliberately. There's nothing inherently wrong with the tropes. We're just suggesting that they be included only after deciding we actually want them....

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Fonda Lee, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler Magic and technology are tools that we, as writers, use to tell interesting stories, and they're very, very similar tools. In this episode we'll examine some ways in which both magical and technological elements can be used in our stories. Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex...

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Fonda Lee, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler As we do our worldbuilding with similarity, specificity, and selective depth (per the previous episode), we should take care to apply these things throughout our stories. In this episode we discuss how these elements we've world-built can become "textures." Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr....

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Fonda Lee, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler Writers are illusionists, and worldbuilding requires no small mastery of that particular magic. In this episode we'll explore the creation of believable illusions through the techniques of similarity, specificity, and selective depth. Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson...

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Fonda Lee, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler In our world, the ostensibly "real" one (simulation theory notwithstanding), stuff is changing all the time. Why, then, do we see so many fantasy worlds whose once-upon-a-times seem timeless? A more important question: how might we, as writers cognizant of the ubiquity of change, work that understanding into our writ...

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Fonda Lee, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler Let's follow up on character biases with an exploration of moral frame. When we say someone is "morally gray" or "morally ambiguous," what we're really talking about is the way they fit into the moral frame defined by society. In this episode we talk about that frame, and how we can apply it, through...

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Fonda Lee, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler The world of your book is most often shown to us through the eyes of the characters who live in that world. In this episode we discuss the fact that those characters have biases which will distort the reader's perception of the world. Knowing this, we can use it to our advantage. Credits: This episode was recorded by Mar...

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Fonda Lee, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler We're beginning another master class, another deep dive series of episodes, and this time around we'll be led into the realms of good worldbuilding by Fonda Lee. In this episode Fonda talks about her process, which includes plotting and character creation along with the worldbuilding. Credits: This episode was record...

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, C.L. Polk, Charlotte Forfieh, and Mary Robinette Kowal Our eighth and final M.I.C.E. Quotient discussion will explore using M.I.C.E. as a diagnostic tool. So... your manuscript is done, but something isn't working. How do you figure out where the problem is? If the ending isn't satisfying, M.I.C.E. can tell you whether the ending itself is actually at fault, and in t...