Writing Excuses

This episode was recorded live at Life, The Universe, & Everything 28, The BYU Symposium on Science Fiction and Fantasy, and features, among other things, our largest audience ever. Oh, and James Dashner, our friend and the author of The Maze Runner. It also features what has to be our roughest start ever. We don't get to actual content until around four minutes in. Seventeen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're pretending this was an object lesson. Also, we love picking on our friend James. Pacing! What do we do so that people keep turning pages? Which useful tricks do we hate? Which subtle methods do we prefer? And most importantly, what does James Dashner do? We talk about reveals, punchlines, cliffhangers, chapter length, and the "Brandon Avalanche." Also, we talk briefly about the look on my face, and the roof of James' mouth. Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Ender's Game: Special 20th Anniversary Edition by Orson Scott Card Writing Prompt: Someone opens a do

Roll for initiative, folks! Brandon, Dan, and Howard all play tabletop role-playing games, and sometimes even play together. The question of the hour (well... quarter-hour) is "how can these games help your world building, storytelling, and anything else having to do with good writing?" If this 'cast doesn't make you want to play RPGs with your friends, congratulations on a successful Saving Throw vs. Dark Podcast Magic. If this 'cast doesn't make you want to sit down and start writing, you have our condolences. That's not the saving throw you were supposed to make! In the spirit of not-necessarily-related personal information: This week we learn that Howard is moister than Dan. In related news, see the Writing Excuses crew this coming Saturday, February 13th, at the Life, The Universe and Everything Symposium at Brigham Young University in the Wilkinson Center. We'll be there for the full symposium, but on Saturday we'll actually be recording in front of an audience. Yo

We're going to wade into a recent e-brouhaha, but it's not going to be the Amazon vs Macmillan one. No, this is the one where Dean Wesley Smith argued that authors do not need agents. But you don't need to read that to appreciate this 'cast. So... do you need an agent? This depends on the operating definition of "you" and "agent." What kind of contractual experience do you have? What kinds of things will your agent do for you? And if you decide you do need an agent, how do you go about identifying the agent who is right for you? We'll cover all of this and more! Unrelated to agents (but definitely in the "and more" category): Howard reveals deeply personal information in this podcast! Audiobook Plug: The Maze Runner, by James Dashner Writing Prompt: Write a story in which a bestselling recluse author dies, and his agent scrambles to keep the career alive without telling anybody. Skin in the game, baby! This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by

How do you avoid letting other people's work creep into your own? We're all influenced by the media we partake in whether we admit it or not. How much of those influences should we allow into our own work? How do we control that? As we engage the topic, we admit that sometimes we want to be influenced, and that letting those influences do their work is a good thing. But this isn't the podcast where we cover that. This is the podcast where we talk about tuning that out. We also talk about tuning out the influence of those who are critiquing or commenting on our work. These might be fellow members of the writing group or other early readers, or they might (especially in Howard's case) be outspoken members of your audience ranting on web forums or wikis. And then we talk about whether or not we should allow Brandon to influence our work. Take that, Brandon! (Take it, in fact, all the way out to nineteen minutes and six seconds!) Audiobook Plug: The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Writin

If you want to write a good, heroic hero, this is the podcast for you. We're not necessarily talking about the archetypical, classically-defined, capital-H "Hero" in this podcast, though. We're talking about what makes readers stand up and cheer. And yes, this can be applied to the archetype, but let's not digress. We talk about perseverance, sacrifice, hard work, fear-facing, and a bunch of other attributes that we find inherently heroic. Audiobook Plug: The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell Writing Prompt: Write a scene in which a character makes a noble sacrifice and is not rewarded. Mystery Soundbite! We have no idea who those gents with mouthfuls of marshmallows were, but Jordo caught them on tape... 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 fir

Welcome to Writing Excuses Season 4, featuring new, shorter episode titles! Also, if you don't count the bonus episodes or the Parsec Award Acceptance Speech, this is our 100th Episode! Brandon kicks this off by asking "What does Howard do that's funny?" and then by categorizing the sorts of things he finds Howard doing. Obviously this puts no pressure whatsoever on Howard to be funny during the podcast. Which is good, because he really wasn't, cold medicine notwithstanding. Again, we manage talk about humor without being funny. We manage to cover character-based humor, physical humor, and non-sequitur, brushing alongside cognitive humor and exaggeration as we go, but hey... we only had 15 minutes to work with. Oh, and we ran over by 4 minutes and fifty-seven seconds. Writing Prompt: Write something funny using non-sequiturs and cold medicine. This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*. *Note:

For starters, let's clear the air. Yes, the first episode of the new year is also the last episode of Writing Excuses Season 3. And yes, we'll be getting Season 2 and Season 3 on CDs pretty soon here. Collaboration! This is one of our all-time most requested topics, and we're covering it now because we still haven't done much actual collaborating but we want to talk about it anyway. Why? Because we each have some collaborations planned (including one for all three of us, but shhh... it's still a secret) and it will be fun to talk about this again in a year or so and argue about all the things we got wrong this time around. But you should still listen to what we say here in our collaborative infancy. That way you can lord it up over us when we flip-flop after having attempted to work together. You should also pay attention when we tell you beginning writers why you should not be collaborating. And then we'll give you some procedural tips for when you decide to collaborate anyway. Wr

Tragedy. It's just TRAGIC. Tragedy is also one of the classical forms that writers need to know how to work within. Why? Well... because the Greeks thought we should be forced to have strong emotional responses to literature. Writing Prompt: Write a delightful story about happy, cheerful anthropomorphic creatures who all die horribly. 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 per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free

What is an Antihero? There are lots of definitions of this word, so Dan boils it down to just three: The Frodo, The Punisher, and The Talented Mister Ripley. And that third definition is the one Brandon believes to be the most correct, at least in the strict literary sense. This was a difficult 'cast for Howard because he's familiar with Frodo and The Punisher, but has no experience with The Talented Mister Ripley beyond movie trailers. He gets by, though. He's seen a lot of movie trailers. Have a listen, and learn a lot. Writing Prompt: Write a true, classically-defined antihero in such a way that Howard will enjoy it. 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 credi

This episode totally would have updated earlier if I'd only known sooner that it was ready to go. Jordo says he emailed me early this evening, but if he HAD then you'd have been listening to this by 8:00pm Sunday. So... how much of that do you believe? Is the Narrator lying to you, or is he just wrong?  Maybe he is lying to himself, and thinks he's being honest with you. Most importantly, though, how does any of this apply to your writing? Well, that's what the podcast is for... Writing Prompt: Have an event occur, and then provide five different character perspectives on the event... none of which are completely accurate. Note: this episode updated a little late because I wanted an object lesson in the write-up, not because I was relaxing on the couch until 11:15pm.  That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Is there a disconnect? Brandon specifically introduces the episode as "World-building political correctness," but the title here says "World-Building Gender Roles." And then Brandon goes on to blame Howard for picking the title. There is, in fact, a disconnect. Oh the mirth! Howard was imagining a slightly wider scope for the 'cast, but Brandon focused the crew on just one aspect. And that's probably best. After all, this is only fifteen minutes long (okay, 17 minutes and 10 seconds) and as has been said before, we're not that smart. How does a 21st-century author go about world-building fantasy universe gender roles while writing for a 21st-century audience? How does the problem change if the setting is the far-flung future? And of more immediate interest, is it possible for three men to discuss this without a) putting their feet in their mouths while b) simultaneously stepping on landmines? Have a listen. We're going to wait waaay over here and hope the internet can't

A Monday without Writing Excuses is kind of like a Tuesday without Writing Excuses, only far less aggravating. With Brandon once again by our side(s), we venture once more into the realm of humor: this time, specifically considering how to blend humor with decidedly unhumorous elements such as drama and horror. Why do humor and horror go so well together? How can you make something funny without losing the powerful character drama? And how did we possibly get through this episode without mentioning "Shaun of the Dead," which combines humor and horror and drama more brilliantly than anything in recent memory? Writing Prompt: Make the most inappropriate joke you can, but make it appropriate. Once again, Writing Excuses is brought to you by Audible.com, and this week we're trying something new: homework! Sometime in January we'll spend an episode examining "The Hero with A Thousand Faces," by Joseph Campbell, so this is your warning to study up. You can read your own copy, borrow one

Dan, Howard, and Jordo descended into the basement at Dragon's Keep where members of the local NaNoWriMo chapter were attempting to bolster their word-counts for the day. We talked to them about National Novel Writing Month, and about the things that were getting them stuck. Good times! Writing Prompt: Kill one of your characters with a shovel. 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 per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before

Dan and Howard are again joined by Jake Black, who writes comics (and some other things) for a living. Jake tells us how he got into the business, and we talk about how this might be applied to other folks. But you can't do it exactly the way he did it because they've bricked that entrance up. Writing Prompt: Our superhero gained his superpowers by writing technical articles for Wired... 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 per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are mor

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.