Writing Excuses

Your Hosts: Brandon, Victoria, Dan, and Howard What kind of career goal-setting do you do? We had a discussion in this vein with DongWon a few weeks ago, but neither Brandon nor Victoria participated then, so it's worth revisiting. Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson

Your Hosts: Dan, Howard, and Mary Robinette, with special guest Patrick Rothfuss We begin our discussion of revision by addressing a question we hear a lot: How do you know what needs to be changed? We talk about our various techniques for getting distance from our work, incorporating feedback, and breaking the process down into manageable chunks. Liner Notes: Lindsey Ellis on Three-Act Structure Credits: This episode was recorded by Bert Grimm, and mastered by Alex Jackson.

Your Hosts: Howard, with special guests Victorine Lieske, Tamie Dearen, Bridget E. Baker, and Nandi Taylor Howard leads this discussion with four guests who are doing well with self publishing. They share some numbers with us, and talk about their strategies for reaching their audience, and making the most of their market. Liner Notes: Given, by Nandi Taylor, is available on January 21, (just two days from this episode's air date) Credits: This episode was recorded live at WXR by Bert Grimm, and was mastered by Alex Jackson

Your Hosts: Brandon, Victoria, Dan, and Howard Victoria Schwab, who also writes as V.E. Schwab, joins us this year, and in this episode she helps us cover that deep concept of "theme," and how we as authors can state our themes without coming straight out and stating them—writing our themes "between the lines." Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson

Your Hosts: Dan, DongWon, Mary Robinette, and Howard Season 15 is going to be a bit broader than the previous seasons have, at least in the abstract. We're going to focus on your questions. In this episode we tackle the topic that dominates our collection of these questions: CAREER. Liner Notes: It hasn't actually been 15 years. It's been 12. Writing Excuses launched in February of 2008, and the first five seasons were not full-year seasons.  Credits: This episode was recorded by Bert Grimm, and mastered by Alex Jackson

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.