Writing Excuses

As we wrap up our Close Reading Series, we’re shifting our focus towards helping you integrate what you’ve learned. For December, we’ll be releasing episodes designed to help you make measurable progress on a writing project. So dust off your current work-in-progress, or pull out your brainstorming documents—we’re here to help you finish the year strong.Today, we’re focusing on beginnings. The titular phrase “beginning with a thrill,” doesn’t have to mean a burst of action or violence, but more so refers to how you hook your reader within the first few pages of whatever you’re writing. A great example of this is Toy Story, which we dive into at the end of this episode. Dan encourages us to shift our focus from starting with tension to starting with a thrill. How do you introduce conflict into your work while taking into consideration your genre? How do you establish—and then break— the “normal” in your world? DongWon talks about micro-tropes, and encourages us to steal and borrow from various genres. Also on