Shows / Writing Excuses
Episodes
- Writing Excuses
14.43: Sequencing Your Career Genome
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.42: Alternate History
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard Alternate histories (and historical fantasies) are a staple of genre fiction. In this episode we talk…
- Writing Excuses
14.41: History
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.40: Deep vs. Wide
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.39: Positioning Your Book in the Marketplace
Your Hosts: Howard, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Dongwon "Positioning feels like the most important question in all of publishing." — DongWon Song In this…
- Writing Excuses
14.38: Volunteer Opportunities for Writers, with Jared Quan
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.37: Outlandish Impossibilities
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard Some science fiction and fantasy stories arise from a premise which, under even just rudimentary…
- Writing Excuses
14.36: Languages and Naming
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.35: What You Leave Out
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.34: Author Branding
Your Hosts: Howard, Mary Robinette, Dan, and DongWon Authors have brands whether they want to have them or not. It's a simple principle of marketing, and the…
- Writing Excuses
14.33: Writing Imperfect Worlds
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…
- Writing Excuses
Worldbuilding Gender Roles
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.31: Cultural Setting as Conflict
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.30: Eating Your Way to Better Worldbuilding
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.29: Field Research
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.28: Warfare and Weaponry
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.27: Natural Setting as Conflict
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard In this episode we stories with the "Person-vs-Setting" structure. These are stories where nature…
- Writing Excuses
14.26: Lessons from Aristotle, with Rob Kimbro
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.25: Choosing Your Agent
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.24: Political Intrigue
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard Political Intrigue stories are less about "politics" (as colloquially defined by pop culture)…
- Writing Excuses
14.23: Governments Large and Small
Answering questions about the power structures you live within can help you with the worldbuilding of politics in the fiction you write.Our Sponsors:* Check…
- Writing Excuses
14.22: Characters out of Their Depth
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.21: Writing The Other — Yes, You Can!
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.20: Allegory in Fiction
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.19: Religion and Ritual
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.18: Setting as Theme
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.17: It’s Like “Car Talk” meets “Welcome To Nightvale”
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.16: Your Setting is a Telegraph
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.15: Technology
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.14: When To Tell
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…
- Writing Excuses
WX 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.12: Writing The Other — Latinx Representation
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.11: Magic Without Rules
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.10: Magic Systems
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.9: Showing Off
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard Let's infodump without infodumping. Let's deliver lots of exposition without sounding expository. Let's…
- Writing Excuses
14.8: Worldbuilding Q&A #1
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.7: How Weird is Too Weird?
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.5: Viewpoint as Worldbuilding
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.04: Writing the Other—Bisexual Characters
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.03: World of Hats
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard Margaret Dunlap joins us during season 14 to talk about worldbuilding. In this, her first episode…
- Writing Excuses
14.02: Geography and Biomes
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…
- Writing Excuses
14.01: Worldbuilding Begins! Up Front, or On the Fly?
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…
- Writing Excuses
13.52: Working Dad is a Spaceman
Your Hosts: Howard, Mary, and Dan, with NASA astronaut Thomas Marshburn. Last week's episode may have sounded like the last one for 2018, but that's an…
- Writing Excuses
13.51: Wrap-up on the Year of Character
Your Hosts: Brandon, Valynne, Dan, and Howard We decided to wrap up this year on character by letting Brandon ask us some deep questions. "We decided"…
- Writing Excuses
13.50: What Writers Get Wrong, with Zoraida Córdova
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard, with special guest Zoraida Córdova Zoraida Córdova, an award-winning author of urban fantasy, was born in…
- Writing Excuses
13.49: How to Finish
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Amal, and Maurice Last week we talked about character death. This week we talk about other, less fatal ways in which a…
- Writing Excuses
13.48: Character Death and Plot Armor
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard The characters we create are not all destined for long lives. Sure, some are, but a great many of them are…
- Writing Excuses
13.47: Q&A on Fixing Characters
Your Hosts: Brandon, Valynne, Dan, and Howard You had questions about fixing character problems. We had had answers! Here are the questions: How do you fix…
- Writing Excuses
13.46: The Unsexy Side of Space, with Bart Smith and Ben Hewett
Your Hosts: Howard, Mary Robinette, and Dan, with special guests Bart Smith and Ben Hewett When we talk about space travel we're usually talking about rocket…
- Writing Excuses
NaNoWriMo 2018 Bonus Episode, with Mercedes Lackey
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard, with special guest Mercedes Lackey NaNoWriMo 2018 is half-way over today. Are you stuck? Do you need to…
- Writing Excuses
13.45: Next Level Narration
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Amal, and Maurice Narration is that stuff which tells your story, but isn't dialog. It's the voice of your narrator, and…
- Writing Excuses
NaNoWriMo 2018 Mini-Episode 2
Your Mini-Episode Hosts: Amal El-Mohtar and Maurice Broaddus, with Special Asides from Mary Robinette Kowal We're a week in to NaNoWriMo. If you're scared of…
- Writing Excuses
13.44: Alien Characters
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard As writers of speculative fiction we are frequently tasked with writing a species or race of alien people…
- Writing Excuses
NaNoWriMo 2018 Mini-Episode 1
Your Mini-Episode Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard Back in 2017 we recorded a bonus episode for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and…
- Writing Excuses
13.43: Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are
Your Hosts: Howard, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Amal Many of us write characters who know more than we know, and/or who think faster than we do. Writing those…
- Writing Excuses
13.42: Writing Excuses Talks to an Astronaut, with Special Guest Kjell Lindgren
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard, with special space-guest Kjell Lindgren Kjell Lindgren, flight surgeon, Expedition 44/45, joined us for an episode…
- Writing Excuses
13.41: Fixing Character Problems, Part II
Your Hosts: Brandon, Amal, Mary, and Maurice This is the second of our pair of episodes in which we talk about how we, your hosts, fix the problems we've…
- Writing Excuses
13.40: Fixing Character Problems, Part I
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard This is the first of two episodes in which we'll talk about how we, your hosts, fix the problems we've identified…
- Writing Excuses
13.39: What Writers Get Wrong, With Wendy Tolliver
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard, with special guest Wendy Tolliver Wendy skis, and snowboards, and writes YA novels. She is also the parent of…