Writing Excuses

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard, with Jamahl Crouch - Jamahl Crouch (Illusmm1 on Instagram) joined us at the GenCon Indy Writers Symposium to talk about what writers get wrong about street art. Jamahl is many things,

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard - What motivates us? What really motivates us? Why? (Note: our motivations are probably not in service of some overarching plot.) How can we use this information to believably motivate characters? -

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Amal, and Maurice - Character backstories: these are the tales that describe how the characters in your story became who they are by the time they arrive in the book. How much backstory needs to be written before you start i...

Your Hosts: Dan, Mary, Aliette, and Howard, with special guest Emma Newman - Emma Newman, author, audio book narrator, and podcaster, joined us on the Baltic sea for WXR 2017, where, six days after a brilliant presentation on overcoming fear,

Your Hosts: Brandon, Valynne, Dan, and Howard - Our listeners submitted some great questions! How do you fairly and even-handedly write a deeply compelling character you deeply dislike? What's the best way to discuss a character's underlying m...

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard - When Mary says we could do fifteen different episodes on character arcs, she's being conservative. Notwithstanding, we set out to talk meaningfully about character arcs in one episode rather than in fifteen...

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Amal, and Maurice - Internal conflicts, simply put, are problems your characters have with themselves. In this episode we address the ways in which writers can build stories and subplots around internal conflicts,

Your Hosts: Piper Drake, Aliette de Bodard, and Wesley Chu, with special guest Ken Liu - Our hosts for this episode are experts in a great many different things. One thing that they have in common is that they're all members of the Asian Disapora,

Your Hosts: Brandon, Valynne, Dan, and Howard - Brandon wanted to ask us how our perspectives on character have changed since the very beginning of our writing. It's a difficult question to answer, and a very soulful sort of thing to answer in front o...

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard - Our characters become far more interesting when they begin interacting with each other. These interactions—these relationships—are often how our stories get told.