Writing Excuses

Killing characters for all the right reasons, and knowing what the wrong ones are.

Shanna Germain joins Brandon, Mary, and Howard for a frank discussion of love scenes.

Pantsing! What are we even talking about? We're talking about discovery writing, but apparently some folks think it's more fun to call it "seat-of-your-pants" writing. In this cast we cover this exhilarating process, and how it might best be applied. Mary uses the "yes-but, no-and" trick. Dan starts with an end in mind, and then ignores it in order to write today's chapter. Brandon, despite being a fairly rigid outliner, often finds himself discovery writing when under odd sorts of pressures. Howard likens discovery writing to improvisational music. Fundamentally, seat-of-your-pants writing is like seat-of-your-pants anything else: the more practice you have within that discipline, the more of the techniques you've mastered, the more likely you are to succeed in the endeavor.

Dan needs help writing a short story, so Brandon, Mary, and Howard endeavor to help him. Hopefully this will be educational for the rest of you.

RPG Luminary Monte Cook joins us at GenCon Indy 2012 to talk about writing for games, and the perils of trying to adapt game play back into prose.

Finishing one project means it's time to start the next one. And no, it's not necessarily going to get easier...

Emote! Now do it authentically! In this episode we'll explain how we do it, and hopefully help you do it better.

Eric James Stone joins the cast to talk astronomy as a tool for world-building

Spoilers galore as we discuss "Hollow City," in depth, with author Dan Wells

The crew fields questions about criticism, suspension of disbelief, tension, and more.

What do you do when your villain is more interesting and engaging than your hero? The first step? Admit that this is a problem...

Mary Robinette Kowal talks in depth about her novel Glamour In Glass, fielding questions from Brandon, Dan, and Howard.

Do we value originality too much? What does it mean to be original, and how can we, as authors, write wonderful things when all of the good ideas have already been used?

Recorded live at Utah Valley University, here's another Q&A episode from the LTUE Symposium! The questions: What was Brandon's plan with Mistborn and the themes regarding establishment? Why does Kelsier shrug so much? (This leads into a fun discussion of "tells.") How do you know when to stop a chapter? What about expanding it? How do you make your prose more transparent? How do you decide who and what to cut? What do you do to filter out the extraneous ideas that come while you're writing? What can collaborators do in order to create a single "voice" for the book? What's the best way to tackle a long back-story? Want answers? You'll just have to listen...

Capers and Heists as a plot form, with lots of movies cited as examples.

Brandon answers "The Way of Kings" questions from Mary, Howard, and Dan.

Recorded live, our regular 'casters discuss time travel, and somehow manage not to become any of their own parents, or even uncles.

A microcast is our word for an asynchronous Q&A episode: you ask us tons of questions online, either through twitter or facebook or our listenermail account (on the sidebar), and we want to answer as many of them as we can. Not every answer can fill an entire episode, though, so we take the smaller ones and cover a bunch of them at once in a microcast. This week we take a brief, pithy look at the following: Prologues and epilogues Using drawings to get across settings Simple tricks for naming things Would you self publish if you had a do over? How do you keep a powerful character interesting? Foreshadowing Trimming Flashbacks

Howard answers questions about "Force Multiplication," (the 12th Schlock Mercenary book) as posed by Brandon, Dan, and Mary.

Michael R. Collings and Michaelbrent Collings discuss cathartic horror with Brandon, Dan, and Mary in front of a live audience at UVU.