Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler discuss writing techniques in a fast-paced format. A weekly podcast about the craft and business of writing.
https://redcircle.com/shows/writing-excuses2130
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 11 days 19 hours 38 minutes
episode 49: 18.49: Giving Your Story A Voice
What does it mean if your writing is voice-y? How do you give your character a natural voice? We approach this question from the high-level perspective of craft, and the granular level of word choice and sentence structure. Erin talks about the research she did about Appalachian English for her short story Wolfy Things. And Mary Robinette Kowal tells us what it’s like to be an audiobook narrator, and how this helps her bring characters to life on the page...
episode 45: 18.45: NaNoWriMo Week 2 - Inciting Incident
Welcome to the first official week of National Novel Writing Month (or, almost the end of this week)! In this episode, we dive into how to write an inciting incident.
What is an inciting incident? It is often the thing that goes wrong in your story. Within the first page, writers should have something go wrong. But what should this thing be? Our writers have some advice for questions you can ask yourself in order to understand your novel’s inciting incident...
episode 43: 18.43: Worldbuilding in Miniature
If you're writing short fiction, how much of your world do you even need to figure out? Should you have it all written out? Can you just wing it? This week on the podcast, we discuss how much of a world to build for a short story (and how). We provide some guiding questions that you can use to build the world of your novel or short story. We explore different narrative structures, DND worlds without police, and the reader's experience...
episode 42: 18.42: Creating Magic Outside of a System
How do you write about magic? How do you build a world with magic and spells and potions? We dive into the rules and laws behind magical worlds. We often think of magic as being with a system, but what if it's not? What opportunities and challenges do intrusive magic/emergent fantasy and fabulism create for writers and stories?
Our writers and publishers talk about cultural differences across magical systems, and how you can build a fantasy world that is believable...
episode 41: 18.41: Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza
If you write short stories or enjoy speculative fiction, this episode is for you. Our host Erin Roberts has written short stories, interactive fiction, and has built worlds for tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs). For the next 8 episodes, we’ll be diving into three of her short stories. This week, Erin explains how to write outside of traditional genre classifications. We talk about the importance of antagonists, tone, and the horror genre...
episode 40: 18.40: How To Make Money From Your Hobby (with special guest Sandra Tayler!)
Or, The Business of the End of Schlock Mercenary
How did Howard start making money from his hobby of drawing and writing comics? How did he self-publish? We have a special guest on this episode! Sandra Tayler—Howard’s wife, the editor and publisher for Schlock Mercenary, and a published author—talks about starting their business. We dive into uncertainty, quality of life, and “manic optimism.” We learn about how to use pre-ordering, PayPal, and Kickstarter...