Writing Excuses

You may still have questions about how to apply elemental adventure in your work. Hopefully your questions are similar to the ones we collected below, because these are the ones we answered: What do readers like more: protagonists going through lot...

Steve Diamond joins us to kick off our month on the elemental genre of horror. We explore the emotional components that readers seek from horror, and then drill down into the ways that we can create those reactions in our readers. -

How do we go about describing the clothing our characters are wearing? How do we use that to add depth to our story? What are the common mistakes that writers make when they start dressing their characters? -

Steve Diamond joins us again to talk horror, this time about using elemental horror as part of our stories' elemental ensemble. We discuss how the sense of dread can be a page-turning motivation, and how it can complement the other "keep on reading" mo...

Steve Diamond joins us for our third and final Elemental Horror episode as we field your questions about this particular building block. Here are the questions we selected from your submissions: If I want to make peanut butter terrifying without be...

Shannon Hale joins us at LTUE for a live-audience session in which we explore gender biases, and extrapolate from there to our many other unconscious biases. - Our unconscious biases are not just the things that we consider to be "just the way things ...

Mystery may well be the most common element in use, at least in some form or another, across the many bookshelf genres comprising "fiction." We discuss the driving force of elemental mystery, how to evoke those feelings in the reader,

We talk a lot about "raising the stakes" in our writing. When we say "stakes," we're referring to the things that keep our characters involved in the conflict, rather than just walking away and doing something else. We dig into what this really means,

Per our Elemental Genre theme, this week we further explore elemental mystery. Elemental mystery can be found in any work in which our curiosity is what keeps us turning pages. The type of satisfaction we feel at the reveal may also reveal the elementa...

In this episode we field some questions about elemental mystery. Here they are! How do you balance between two mysteries in the same story? What types of mysteries can fit well as sub-plots? What do you do when beta readers figure out the my...