Writing Excuses

Aside from being a delightful author and a Campbell award winner, Mary Robinette Kowal is a professional puppeteer. She joined us at WorldCon 67 in Montreal, and totally schooled us in front of a live audience. I mean it. TOTALLY SCHOOLED. If you want to learn something new about writing, and I mean something really NEW you need to listen to Mary talk about puppetry. You can't see the perpetua...

Howard here, folks. On behalf of the entire Writing Excuses team I'd like to apologize in advance for that which you are about to receive. You know how sometimes one of those crazy thoughts seems like a good idea, and the more you talk about it the better the idea seems, and so then you actually do it and are left looking back at it with a mixture of awe and horror? This episode is like that....

Meanwhile, several side-characters found themselves looking for a sub-plot in the tavern. Something funny, or perhaps romantic to take the load off of the main story, but still tense enough to keep the pace going. Or maybe something that will let them introduce important elements to the main plot without the reader knowing that's what's going on... And that's pretty much what subplots...

Let's talk "trimming." Why do it? Well... because your manuscript is longer than it needs to be. Yes, we're talking to you. AND you. And you, too. None of you are exempt! (Well... maybe YOU are, but you can't be allowed to believe it.) So... what do you trim? We've covered "Killing Your Darlings" way back in Season One Episode Three, so while those are certainly on...

Last week we discussed what kinds of events that you, the aspiring author, should be attending. This week we cover what you should and shouldn't be doing there. And we start with some don'ts. The word of the day? "Booth Barnacle." If last week's 'cast was a little long-winded, this one is downright rambling, coming in at a hefty nineteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds. Oh...

As genre-fiction writers we attend a lot of conventions. As aspiring genre-fiction writers you probably want to be attending conventions. But which ones should you spend time and money on, and what should you plan to do while you're there? We start by categorizing conventions - literary conventions, anime conventions, media conventions, conferences and trade-shows. Comic-Con, which just wrappe...

As we did with The Dark Knight and Watchmen (the comic, not the movie), once again we turn our searing critical insight on a major work of successful storytelling talk about what they did right. If you loved the new Star Trek movie, or even just kind of liked it, we'll tell you what the writers did to achieve that; if you hated it, we'll show you some things you can learn from it anyway. I...

You've seen it done... "Zombie Apocalypse in Space." "Perry Mason in the Armed Forces." It's genre blending, where the author takes themes prevalent in two different genres and combines them to create something new. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. We call down a few examples of both, and offer you listeners the sage advice you need to blend genres successfully...

What are dramatic breaks? We open this episode with Howard very genuinely playing Doctor Watson to Brandon's Holmes, which is amusing because as it turns out, Howard uses dramatic breaks every day. Simply put they are the points in the narrative, typically at the end of a chapter, where we cut to another scene. Sometimes we are shifting perspective, sometimes we are advancing the clock, and so...

How do you take criticism? How do you react, if you even do react? Does criticism cause you to change the way you work? Criticism can come from your peers in a writing group, from editors sending you rejection letters, and from those one-star Amazon reviewers who are out there looking for something to hate. In this episode we provide anecdotes from other authors including Patrick Rothfuss and Kevi...

Howard here... I've learned that it's a really bad idea to run out for a bio-break between podcasts. When I returned to the packed panel room I could tell that everyone's attitude towards me was subtly different. It wasn't until we started recording that I realized Brandon had turned our Q&A panel into a "Stump Howard" panel. Our good friend Eric James Stone joined us f...

This episode was recorded live at CONduit in Salt Lake City with special guest Aprilynne Pike. Our topic: How do we "keep it real" when writing speculative fiction? What does that even mean? (Okay, it means making the stuff that exists in real life seem real.) Short answer: Research. We talk about how we go about researching the "real" elements of our various works, all the while t...

Don't you just hate it when things unfold out of order? Why do writers do that? We explain why they do it, and how they do it, and then we discuss how to avoid some common mistakes. Non-linear storytelling is inherently risky, after all. Maybe not as risky as jumping ahead two episodes in a non-serial podcast schedule, but it's still life on the edge. Writing Prompt: Write a story about a...

Welcome to Season 3 of Writing Excuses! With eighteen hours and fourteen months of podcasting history behind us, it seems appropriate for us to talk about history, and how to write it. We talk about the iceberg principle -- 90% of the history stuff you write never gets seen by the reader, it's just there to support the 10% that they do see, the "tip of the iceberg" -- and why for some...

And here we are, at the final episode of Writing Excuses, Season 2. As promised, this episode is going to be super-useful to new writers, but it's going to be extra-super-useful to one new writer in particular, Brandon's nameless friend who listened to 9 hours of Writing Excuses podcasts and is now too overwhelmed to write. Have you ever wondered why we only 'cast for 15 minutes (give...

This the third in our series of retrospective episodes. The most important thing Dan learned this year? Being a full-time author is a lot different than he thought it would be. How different? What was Dan expecting? Was he really imagining silk pajamas and a notebook computer on the beach? We talk about the types of non-writing work that we've found ourselves doing, and why those things are so...

Here's the second part of our three-part "what we learned this year" series. This time around Brandon tells us the most important thing he learned this year. Summed up? Gimmicks cannot compensate for bad writing. So... what's a gimmick? We begin with hooks and pitches, but gimmicks can include things like photo-realistic cover art, internet grass-roots campaigns, and factoids like...

This is the first of a three-part series in which Brandon, Dan, and Howard tell each other (and you, of course) about the most important thing each of them has learned in the past year. We start with Howard, who seems to believe that of all the many things he's learned about writing in the previous twelve months, the list-topper should be the fact that he is a satirist. So really the episode i...

Let's talk about failure... but let's talk about it so that we can avoid it. How do you know if your ending has flopped? What kind of approaches to ending a story should you be avoiding? How can you recognize these approaches in time to avoid them? The best approach? Identify the promises you've made to your readers, and then fulfil them with your ending. Okay, now you don't have t...

Last week we talked about reading critically, reading as writers. This week we decided to apply that critical reading skill to Watchmen, the Hugo award-winning graphic novel by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons and colorist John Higgins. We start (once we get past the donuts in our mouths) by breaking it down into character, setting, and plot, and then we further dissect each of those elemen...

As a writer you obviously know how to read. But being a writer changes how you read, and what you read, and even why you read. Do you read more, or less as a writer? How do you read so that your reading doesn't interfere with writing? How do you channel your reading into bettering your writing? And what's the difference between a critical reader and a book critic? Writing Prompt: Write a s...

Nancy Fulda, assistant editor at Baen's Universe and editor-in-chief and founder of Anthology Builder, joins us again while Dan Wells is out celebrating his birthday. We discuss the rise of digital SF magazines, and touch on concepts like user-generated content, the Superconducting Copy Machine, and disruptive technology. We talk about print-on-demand vs. self-publishing, we laugh as Nancy put...

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Nancy Fulda fills in for Dan for this week's episode (he was sick, she was in town, huzzah!) but she's more than just "filling in." She's FEATURED. Nancy is the assistant editor for Jim Baen's Universe, and as such is probably the one who rejected your story. Nancy is also the editor-in-chief and founder of Anthology Builder, where you can create collections of short storie...

Tracy Hickman joins us again at "Life, The Universe, and Everything," and in this episode we let Brandon ask him random questions while Dan and Howard chime in with comments that hopefully don't detract from the discussion. During the interview Tracy mentions his latest project, XDM: Extreme Dungeon Mastery, but he doesn't mention the very latest news about it. That news is that Tr...