Writing Excuses

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd - The genre of your story is making promises to the reader, and the medium upon which your story is told makes promises too. - In this episode we talk about the expectations set ...

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd - The title of this episode comes to us from the first paragraph of The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss—a novel which delights us with turns of phrase and evocative prose fr...

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd - This week we're talking about giving inevitability to our intended surprise, and we open with a discussion of Chekov's Gun, which, as a writing rule,

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd - In the previous episode we discussed how to ensure that your surprise feels inevitable. In this episode we're covering how to make inevitability feel surprising.

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd - Your brand—your name, the cover art for your book, and even the typeface for the title—set expectations for the book's contents. That advice about not judging a book by its cove...

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd - Oh no! You're in the middle of a thing (a novel, a series, a career) and you suddenly realize that the expectations you set early on are not the expectations you'll be meeting.

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd - What are your influences? What pieces of art, music, literature, or other media have inspired you? In this episode we'll talk about making that inspiration deliberate,

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd - How do you translate things from the spark of inspiration into a work that someone else can consume? Like, instead of turning a movie into a book,

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler - We're beginning another eight-episode deep-dive series, and this time it's a fresh approach to story structure, led by our guest host Peng Shepherd. -

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler - In our second micro-structure episode, Peng Shepherd leads us into an exploration of the ways in which the use of multiple point-of-view characters can create a framework ...