Writing Excuses

Jake Black fills in for Brandon "#1 New York Times Bestselling Author" Sanderson this week, and that's perfect because Jake writes comics and Brandon doesn't. So mostly this is Dan holding Jake's and my feet to the fire. We'll talk about the business of writing comics next week. This week it's more nuts-and-bolts, and we run for almost 20 minutes... Writing Prompt: Write a story in which Superman swoops into a room, kicks something, and then turns into Spider-Man. This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*. *Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please! Audible® Free Trial Details Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit

Question: Can you write a good book without a plot twist? Better question: is it a good book if your readers predicted what was coming? Best question: is a podcast about predictable prose itself predictable? No, seriously... the best question is "how can we use predictable, formulaic plotting effectively?" We actually answer that one. Writing Prompt: "Sense & Sensibility & Terrorists"

You are going to love this episode. Seriously. Brandon throws an idea at Dan and Howard, and then we spend 15 minutes expanding on that idea as if we were going to base a story around it. You people who keep asking where we get our ideas? You're asking the wrong question. Ideas are easy to come by -- everybody has them. The right question is "how do you turn an idea into a story?" This podcast skips to the important part of answering the question: demonstration. Enjoy! This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*. Your writing prompt: Bugs are now magical. Ohcrap. *Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please! Audible® Free Trial Details Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can

Larry Correia is either the guy who did everything wrong and then broke into publishing anyway, or he's the exception who proves the rule. He self-published Monster Hunter International, and then got picked up by Baen Books. If you're considering self-publishing, this is the podcast for you. This week's episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you by Scenting the Dark by Mary Robinette Kowal. Writing Prompt: A self-published book becomes a threat that will end the world...

Larry Correia, whose debut novel Monster Hunter International hit the market this summer, joins us for a discussion of plot-driven vs. character driven fiction. We start with a definition of terms and a discussion of the battlefield. Then we dive into the nuts and bolts of how to write what it is you want to be writing. This week's Writing Excuses is brought to you by Audible. Head over to Audiblepodcast.com/excuse for a free audio book and a 14-day trial. And at our recommendation, try out Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Writing Prompt: Come up with a plot-driven story, and then try to make it good with boring characters.

John Brown joins us again, and tells us that fiction "is all about guiding an emotional response in a reader." We begin with a discussion of depression, which John (like many of us) had to deal with. He tells us about the paths for emotional response, and how a beginning writer can end up in the depths of depression just by looking at the work of successful writers. But working through that, especially with cognitive therapy, can provide the writer with fantastic tools for informing his or her writing. And those tools are really why you're here. Listen closely! Writing Prompt: Give us villainous heroes, romance, and something that evokes terror.

John Brown rejoins us for this discussion of  repetition. How do we, as writers, avoid repeating ourselves? We're not just talking about the literal re-use of words and phrases here. We're interested in avoiding the re-use of themes, character arcs, and plotlines.  Forget the problems Howard might have coming up with a new joke... he (and all of us) need to reach further than that to keep things fresh. This week's Writing Excuses is Brought to you by Servant of a Dark God by John Brown. Writing Prompt:  The princess is trying to eat a pie, but someone is trying to stop her. Oh, and the fate of the world depends on the outcome.

Mary is back! We still had a Mary Robinette Kowal episode from WorldCon 67, and now you have it too! We take questions from the audience, and then answer them. Here are the questions: What do you do if your characters revolt and start to take over the story? When you became a writer what most surprised you with its difficulty? How do you build the history for the worlds your books are set in? Three huge questions, TWELVE answers. Enjoy! Oh... and your writing prompt: write about The Predestined Monkey.

John Brown, debut author of Servant of a Dark God, joins us for this discussion of  the avoidance of self-insertion. In polite company we call this the "Mary Sue," because it's difficult to say "self-insertion" in polite company, much less with a straight face. In broader terms, what we're covering is voice, and how to make our characters sound like themselves rather than us. This week's Writing Excuses is Brought to you by Servant of a Dark God by John Brown.

We won a Parsec Award at Dragon*Con, and it's a darn good thing we weren't there in person to give an acceptance speech. Otherwise this podcast might have happened live, in front of hundreds of people with sharp and/or heavy things in their pockets.

Mary Robinette Kowal joins us again, live at WorldCon 67 in Montreal! This time we fell back on that tried-and-true "Questions from the Audience" format, so the topic is pretty much what the audience asks for on the fly. If the questions were all over the map, our answers require a new school of cartography. It all kind of fits under "process," though, so for categorization purposes, we're calling it that. Also, we failed to discover the Northwest Passage. Maybe we'll find it next week, when Mary joins us for a third episode for more questions from the WorldCon 67 crowd. In completely unrelated news, something cool happened to us at Dragon*Con on Saturday. We'll talk about it in an upcoming 'cast.

Aside from being a delightful author and a Campbell award winner, Mary Robinette Kowal is a professional puppeteer. She joined us at WorldCon 67 in Montreal, and totally schooled us in front of a live audience. I mean it. TOTALLY SCHOOLED. If you want to learn something new about writing, and I mean something really NEW you need to listen to Mary talk about puppetry. You can't see the perpetual looks of astonishment and epiphany us jaded professionals wore during this recording, but I assure you they were there. We learned so much from Mary we decided to record two more episodes with her. Not because we felt like you, our listeners, necessarily deserved it. We wanted these recordings for ourselves. Mary required us to share. It was part of the deal.

Howard here, folks. On behalf of the entire Writing Excuses team I'd like to apologize in advance for that which you are about to receive. You know how sometimes one of those crazy thoughts seems like a good idea, and the more you talk about it the better the idea seems, and so then you actually do it and are left looking back at it with a mixture of awe and horror? This episode is like that. Brandon thought it would be funny to have  a discussion about dialects in which Dan and I actually do dialects. So we did. We're all very sorry. In the spirit of eponymy, I shall now write an excuse: "It was late, and we were so tired that we thought this would be funny."

Meanwhile, several side-characters found themselves looking for a sub-plot in the tavern. Something funny, or perhaps romantic to take the load off of the main story, but still tense enough to keep the pace going. Or maybe something that will let them introduce important elements to the main plot without the reader knowing that's what's going on... And that's pretty much what subplots are, and what they're for. But if we skip to the ending that way they can't do their job! So listen to the whole eighteen-minute podcast, and we'll rejoin our main characters next week, as the automated orbital lance counts down to zero...

Let's talk "trimming." Why do it? Well... because your manuscript is longer than it needs to be. Yes, we're talking to you. AND you. And you, too. None of you are exempt! (Well... maybe YOU are, but you can't be allowed to believe it.) So... what do you trim? We've covered "Killing Your Darlings" way back in Season One Episode Three, so while those are certainly on the list of things to cut, we're going to focus on tightening your prose and reducing word-count without changing the story. So that's what we cover in a brisk, 15-minute 'cast whose synopsis is at least fifty words longer than it needs to be. Maybe fifty-two.

Last week we discussed what kinds of events that you, the aspiring author, should be attending. This week we cover what you should and shouldn't be doing there. And we start with some don'ts. The word of the day? "Booth Barnacle." If last week's 'cast was a little long-winded, this one is downright rambling, coming in at a hefty nineteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds. Oh, the anecdotes! If you thought we were name-dropping last week (Phil Foglio, Kevin J. Anderson, and Lawrence Schoen) this week we throw around names like Larry Niven, Steve Jackson, John Ringo, and Tom Doherty. We sure hope you can learn from our meandering, celebrity-brushing reminiscences. And speaking of celebrity-brushing, brush up against us this week in Montreal at the World Science Fiction Convention! The Writing Excuses Panel is on Friday from 2:00pm to 3:30pm in P-513C, and will feature all three of your Writing Excuses hosts with as-yet-unnannounced special guests from the world of publishing, editing,

As genre-fiction writers we attend a lot of conventions. As aspiring genre-fiction writers you probably want to be attending conventions. But which ones should you spend time and money on, and what should you plan to do while you're there? We start by categorizing conventions - literary conventions, anime conventions, media conventions, conferences and trade-shows. Comic-Con, which just wrapped up today, is a media con. WorldCon is a literary con.  Clarion is a conference. BEA and E3 are expos. As authors and aspiring authors we want to focus on the conventions where we can rub shoulders with editors and agents. So have a listen and find out where you should be, and why... We'll cover what you should be doing at conventions in next week's 'cast. And here's hoping we'll see you at WorldCon! This episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you by Dungeon Crawlers Radio, those nice guys who interviewed Howard at ConDuit, and then bailed Writing Excuses out when our recording equipment di

As we did with The Dark Knight and Watchmen (the comic, not the movie), once again we turn our searing critical insight on a major work of successful storytelling talk about what they did right. If you loved the new Star Trek movie, or even just kind of liked it, we'll tell you what the writers did to achieve that; if you hated it, we'll show you some things you can learn from it anyway. If you haven't seen it, well, I think it goes without saying that this is a spoilerific spoiler episode full of spoilers. Listen at your own risk. This episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you by Stacy Whitman, a fantastic freelance editor beloved by all three Writing Excuses hosts. She does fantastic work on all manner of fantastic writing (including Howard's recent project with Tracy Hickman, XDM: Extreme Dungeon Mastery. If you're looking for a good editor, she's fantastic. Writing Prompt: Spock-a-doodle doo!

You've seen it done... "Zombie Apocalypse in Space." "Perry Mason in the Armed Forces."  It's genre blending, where the author takes themes prevalent in two different genres and combines them to create something new. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. We call down a few examples of both, and offer you listeners the sage advice you need to blend genres successfully. Summary: like the vegan barbecue chef, one of the secrets to your success lies in letting no-one know what that hamburger is made of. No, that metaphor is not in the podcast. I just thought of it now. We finish with a discussion of the genres we've blended in our own work, and Brandon tells us about the science fiction story he's decided to work on. This episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you by XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery. Pre-orders close this Wednesday! Writing Prompt: Combine "Horror" and "Western" and don't make it look like either one.

What are dramatic breaks? We open this episode with Howard very genuinely playing Doctor Watson to Brandon's Holmes, which is amusing because as it turns out, Howard uses dramatic breaks every day. Simply put they are the points in the narrative, typically at the end of a chapter, where we cut to another scene. Sometimes we are shifting perspective, sometimes we are advancing the clock, and sometimes we're merely pausing to take a breath. What are we looking for in a dramatic break? How do we identify the right place to cut away from one group of characters and focus on others? How do we avoid doing it the same way every time? And so we discuss those stopping points and the starting points that follow them. We cover the flow of time and the flow of story. We talk about delivering satisfying installments. We even hang from a cliff or two. Meanwhile... This episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you by XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery by Tracy & Curtis Hickman, illustrated by Howard Tayler. Autogr