Writing Excuses

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard - When we say "without rules" we're talking about stories whose magic is not held under logical scrutiny for the reader. There are lots of reasons why you might do this,

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Tempest Bradford, DongWon Song, and Julia Rios - Julia Rios joins us to talk about writing characters who come from one of the many Latin-American cultures or subcultures. "Latinx" is a catch-all term for people with Latin-Ameri...

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard - What's the difference between an obstacle and a complication? Margaret Dunlap takes the lead on this episode for us, giving us the tools we need to create 'impediments to main character progr...

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard - "Show, don't tell," they tell us. Except sometimes showing is not always the best thing to do. Or even the right thing to do. Sometimes we should be telling.

Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab - We've spent a lot of time talking about magic systems in our worldbuilding. It's time to talk about  science and technology in that same way. This has been a staple (perhaps the defining staple) of scienc...

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard - Your setting can quickly tell the reader what kind of a story they're reading, and in this episode we'll talk about how we make that happen. Think of it as the "establishing shot" principle f...

Your Hosts: Howard, Mary Robinette, Dan, and DongWon - This episode is about comp titles (comparative titles), which are those things you use to describe your project in terms of other works. We discuss the ones we've used (both successfully and unsuc...

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard - Theme is one of those high-falutin' concepts we're often reluctant to approach in a nuts-and-bolts sort of way. In this episode we'll talk about how our themes can be communicated through elements...

Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab - We often worldbuild religions and rituals for the stories we create. In this episode we discuss the decisions surrounding this, and our approaches for doing it well. -

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard - What is an allegory, anyway? This episode probably won't settle that question, but we did manage a discussion on how to use our stories to teach things, or be stand-ins for things,