Shows / Writing Excuses
Episodes
- Writing Excuses
12.32: Structuring a Short Piece
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard We begin our exploration of short story structure with a re-cap of the MACE quotient (Milieu, Ask/Answer, Character…
- Writing Excuses
12.31: What Makes a Good Monster, with Courtney Alameda
Your Hosts: Howard, Mary, and Dan, with guest host Susan Chang Courtney Alameda joined us at LTUE 2017 to talk monsters, and what makes the best ones so good…
- Writing Excuses
12.30: Tools for Writers
Your Hosts: Brandon, Piper, Dan, and Howard We are often asked what software we use to get our work done. In this episode we answer that question in a bit of…
- Writing Excuses
12.29: “Oh Crap, the Cops are Here!” with Joe McKinney
Your Hosts: Howard and Dan, with Steve Diamond, and special guest Joe McKinney We invited Steve Diamond, who has been a guest before, and who has some law…
- Writing Excuses
12.28: Trimming and Expanding
Revision: it's when you make a too-short piece longer, or a too-long piece shorter.Our Sponsors:* Check out MasterClass and use my code masterclass.com/EXCUSES…
- Writing Excuses
12.27: Choosing a Length
We discuss the ways in which we decide upon the length of the stories we write, and at which point(s) in the creative process we make that decision.Our…
- Writing Excuses
12.26: Q&A on Outlining and Discovery Writing
Your Hosts: Brandon, Piper, Dan, and Howard Our listeners had questions about outlining and discovery writing. Here are a few of the very best: Do you outline…
- Writing Excuses
12.25: Hiring an Editor, with Callie Stoker
Your Hosts: Howard and Dan, with special guest Callie Stoker Callie Stoker joined Howard and Dan at the World Horror convention to answer our questions about…
- Writing Excuses
12.24: Creating Great Outlines
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Mary Anne, and Wesley How might you go about creating great outlines? There are many processes, and we cover several of them…
- Writing Excuses
12.23: Proposals, Pitches, and Queries
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard Let's talk about selling your stuff. In this episode we discuss query letters, pitches, and proposals—the tools that…
- Writing Excuses
12.22: Hybrid Outlining and Discovery Writing
Your Hosts: Brandon, Piper, Dan, and Howard What can discovery writers learn from outlining? What can outliners learn from discovery writing? Is there a…
- Writing Excuses
12.21: Narrative Bumper Pool, with Bill Fawcett and Carrie Patel
Your Hosts: Howard and Dan, with special guests Bill Fawcett and Carrie Patel Bill and Carrie both have extensive experience writing for games, and they joined…
- Writing Excuses
12.20: Retrofitting Structure into a First Draft
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Mary Anne, and Wesley We're speaking again, at least in part, to discovery writers. In this case, we're talking about how to take a…
- Writing Excuses
12.19: Structure on the Fly
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard This episode is for you discovery writers, especially those of you for whom our current season of structure seems to…
- Writing Excuses
12.18: Gendered Dialect, with J.R. Johansson
Your Hosts: Howard, Mary, and Dan, with guest-host Susan Chang, and special guest J.R. Johannsen J.R. Johannson joined Howard, Mary, Dan, and guest-host Susan…
- Writing Excuses
12.17: Q&A on Style, Diction, and Paragraphing
Your Hosts: Brandon, Piper, Dan, and Howard We fielded some questions on style, diction, and paragraphing: Is it okay to have pretty prose in a straightforward…
- Writing Excuses
12.16: Writing Crime Fiction with Brian Keene
Brian Keene joined Dan and Howard at the World Horror Convention to talk about writing crime fiction, including how he goes about getting readers to feel the…
- Writing Excuses
12.15: Pacing With Chapters
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Mary Anne, and Wesley What makes a chapter? WHY is a chapter? How do we chapter, and do we always chapter the same way? Should our…
- Writing Excuses
12.14: Controlling Pacing with Structure
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard Let's talk about the structural tools we use to control pacing. These include sentence length and punctuation. Also…
- Writing Excuses
12.13: Beautiful Prose, Purple Prose
The rising, golden sun crested the snowcapped eastern mountains, its first morning rays pouring like molten lemon through the window to glisten and gleam from…
- Writing Excuses
12.12: Words as Words, with Linda Addison
Your Hosts: Howard and Dan, with Special Guest Linda Addison Linda Addison joined us at the World Horror Convention in 2016 for a discussion of the shapes and…
- Writing Excuses
12.11: Diction
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Mary Anne, and Wesley Let's talk about word choice. And when we say "let's" we mean "we're going to talk to you about…
- Writing Excuses
12.10: Developing Your Own, Personal Style
Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard talk about authorial voice, and how to stop being afraid of examining how you "sound" when you write.Our Sponsors:*…
- Writing Excuses
12.9: Q&A on Viewpoint
Brandon, Piper, Dan, and Howard answer listener questions on viewpoint.Our Sponsors:* Check out MasterClass and use my code masterclass.com/EXCUSES for a great…
- Writing Excuses
12.8 Short Stories as Exploration, with Tananarive Due
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard Tananrive Due, whose short-fiction expertise is exemplified in her collection, Ghost Summer, joined us on the Oasis…
- Writing Excuses
12.7: Description Through the Third Person Lens
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Mary Anne, and Wesley The third-person POV lens can be used for simultaneously describing the world to the reader and describing the…
- Writing Excuses
12.6: Variations on Third Person
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard This episode focuses on the third person POV, and some variations on them, like omniscient and limited, and some…
- Writing Excuses
12.5: Literary Fiction
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Mary Anne, and Wesley This week we talk about the genre of Literary Fiction. Our first hurdle is the word "literary" whose…
- Writing Excuses
12.4: Hybrid Viewpoints
Your Hosts: Brandon, Piper, Dan, and Howard, with Sandra Tayler Piper J. Drake joins the cast for our week-four episodes, of which this is the first. This week…
- Writing Excuses
12.3: Project in Depth, “Risk Assessment,” by Sandra Tayler
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard, with Sandra Tayler This Project in Depth episode contains spoilers for "Risk Assessment," which is included…
- Writing Excuses
12.2: How to Nail Character Voice in First Person
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Mary Anne, and Wesley This week we talk about character voice, and how to get it right in First Person. This POV is a strong tool…
- Writing Excuses
12.1: Variations on First Person
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard We're beginning a new season, and during 2017 we will be focusing our topics on structure. We are also going to…
- Writing Excuses
11.52: Elemental Ensemble Q&A, With Claudia Gray
Claudia Gray joined us aboard Oasis of the Seas to answer our attendees questions about the Elemental Ensemble. Here are the questions: Can you fit an ensemble…
- Writing Excuses
11.51: Ensemble as a Sub-Genre, with Lynne M. Thomas
Lynne M. Thomas joins us to continue our discussion of the Elemental Ensemble, which is one of our favorite elemental tools. It's not just for heists. It adds…
- Writing Excuses
11.50: Hand-Selling Your Book to Potential Readers, with Michael R. Underwood
Michael R. Underwood has talked to us about hand-selling books before, but that was about pitching to agents and editors. This time around he's talking about…
- Writing Excuses
11.49: Elemental Ensemble, with Michael Damien Thomas
Michael Damien Thomas, co-publisher and co-editor-in-chief of Uncanny Magazine, joined us for a discussion of the elemental genre that contains most of the…
- Writing Excuses
11.Bonus-04: Fantasy Food, with Elizabeth Bear and Scott Lynch
Elizabeth Bear and Scott Lynch joined Howard and Dan at GenCon Indy to talk about fantasy food, and how we engage our readers' appetites with our fiction. We…
- Writing Excuses
11.48: Elemental Issue Q&A, with DongWon Song
DongWon Song, literary agent with HMLA, joins us for a Q&A on the elemental genre of "Issue." Here are the questions, which were submitted by the…
- Writing Excuses
11.47: Issue as a Subgenre, with Steven Barnes
Steven Barnes joins us to tackle Elemental Issue, round two, in which we look at how to address it as a sub-element. He describes the thesis/antithesis…
- Writing Excuses
11.46: Colonialism, with Steven Barnes, Tempest Bradford, DongWon Song, and Shveta Thakrar
Our listeners have been asking for an in-depth, "crunchy" episode on colonialism, and related issues like cultural appropriation, for a couple of years…
- Writing Excuses
11.45: Elemental Issue, with Desiree Burch
For November, our elemental genre is "Issue," and we were joined by actor, writer, and comedian Desiree Burch. The Elemental Issue is similar to the…
- Writing Excuses
11.Bonus-03: Some Books Have Maps in the Front, with Maurice Broaddus, Mur Lafferty, and James Sutter
Three days late for the beginning of NaNoWriMo 2016, here's a bonus episode about maps. Because nothing says "keep writing" like "hey, let's draw a…
- Writing Excuses
11.Bonus-02: Horrifying the Children, with Darren Shan
Happy Halloween! Darren Shan talks horror with us in this bonus episode, made possible by our Patreon supporters.Our Sponsors:* Check out MasterClass and use…
- Writing Excuses
11.44: Project in Depth, GHOST TALKERS, by Mary Robinette Kowal
Spoiler Alert! If you haven't yet read Ghost Talkers, by Mary Robinette Kowal, this episode will spoil great swathes of book for you. Also, you probably won't…
- Writing Excuses
11.43: Elemental Drama Q&A, with Tananarive Due
Our third Elemental Drama episode is a Q&A, featuring Tananarive Due. The questions are from the attendees at the Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat: Rather…
- Writing Excuses
11.42: Elemental Drama as a Sub-Genre
Focusing on elemental drama can be tricky. Remember, elemental drama is basically "character change." A great many stories use character change in some…
- Writing Excuses
11.Bonus-01: Characterization and Differentiation, with Robin Hobb
Robin Hobb joined us at GenCon Indy for a discussion of characterization and differentiation. And by "discussion," what we really mean is "we ask…
- Writing Excuses
11.41: The Editor’s Wish List, with Navah Wolfe
Navah Wolfe, an editor at Saga Press, joined us to talk about the manuscripts she would really like to see. Ordinarily we don't encourage people to write to…
- Writing Excuses
11.40: Elemental Drama
The word "drama" gets thrown around a lot. What do we mean when we use "drama" as an elemental genre? For us, Elemental Drama focuses on one…
- Writing Excuses
11.39: Elemental Relationship Q&A, with Greg van Eekhout
Greg van Eekhout joined us at Phoenix Comic Con for a live-audience Q&A session about Elemental Relationship writing. Here are the questions: What is your…
- Writing Excuses
11.38: The Elemental Relationship as a Sub-Genre
We find the elemental relationship in all kinds of stories that are not fundamentally about relationships. The intimate interaction between characters is part…
- Writing Excuses
11.37: Casting Your Book, with Gama Martinez
Live from Phoenix Comic Con, Gama Martinez joins us for a discussion of casting your book. This is the process by which you create a cast of characters for…
- Writing Excuses
11.36: The Elemental Relationship
In elemental relationship stories the primary page-turning driver is the relationship between two or three characters ¹. In this episode we discuss ways in…
- Writing Excuses
11.35: Elemental Humor Q&A with Victoria Schwab
For our third Elemental Humor episode Victoria Schwab joins us as we field questions taken from our audience at Phoenix Comic-Con. Here are the questions: How…
- Writing Excuses
11.34: Humor as a Sub-Genre
Humor is present as an element, at least to some degree, in a substantial amount of the media we consume. In this episode we discuss some stylistic tools for…
- Writing Excuses
11.33: Crossover Fiction, with Victoria Schwab
Victoria Schwab, who also writes as V.E. Schwab, joined us in Phoenix to talk about crossover fiction—in this context the term means books that target a given…
- Writing Excuses
11.32: The Element of Humor
"Talking about humor is the least funny thing you can do." —Howard Tayler You have been warned! and with that out of the way... What is the driving…
- Writing Excuses
11.31: Futurism, with Trina Marie Phillips
Trina Marie Phillips joined us at Phoenix Comic Con to talk about her work as a futurist. Futurism, for those unfamiliar with our use of the term here, is…
- Writing Excuses
11.30: Elemental Thriller Q&A
We fielded the following questions about the "Thriller" elemental genre from listeners on Facebook and Twitter: How do I build tension consistently…
- Writing Excuses
11.29: Elemental Thriller as a Subgenre
Thrillers are, by their very nature, page-turners. In this episode we look at the thriller element as part of a story whose principal driver is one of the…