Monthly Archives: June 2014

Announcements & News, Archive Seasons 7-10, Season 09, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 9.27: Pre-writing

24 Comments

What’s pre-writing? Well, it’s a little bit like “pre-cooking,” in which something is cooked prior to being put in the final recipe, but in food terms it might also be like “cleaning the kitchen” or “grocery shopping.” Outlining is one kind of pre-writing, but so is the creation of that 5,000-word prologue you decide not to keep, but which informed the whole rest of your story.

We talk about the different things that each of us do prior to actually laying down lines of prose, and how our processes differ between projects, genres, and mediums.

Special Announcement: The first ever Writing Excuses anthology, SHADOWS BENEATH, is available now. This anthology features stories brainstormed and critiqued here on the podcast, and includes draft versions, related episode transcripts, and authorial commentaries as well. Let Brandon tell you more about it!

Our critiquing episodes will begin airing next week, so if you want to read ahead, now’s the time to pick up SHADOWS BENEATH. Oh, and if you order the hardcover, you get the ebook free of charge!

SHADOWS BENEATH launches this weekend at Westercon 67, where Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard are Guests of Honor alongside Cory Doctorow, Christopher Garcia, William Stout, and Bradley Voytek.

Loving That Cover Art? Us too! It’s the work of Julie Dillon, who is on the 2014 Hugo ballot for Best Artist. You can admire (and comment upon!) the unobstructed original here in her DeviantArt gallery.

Dave Farland’s Writing Workshops sponsored us for this episode! Both Brandon and Dan have studied under Dave, and we’re all happy to wholeheartedly recommend his workshops to you. If you can’t fly to his place, well, visit MyStoryDoctor.com and take the online course. The coupon code for your Writing Excuses discount is EXCUSES, but don’t think that means you actually HAVE any of those…

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:00 — 12.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Sapient smells. Odors that think. Scents with their own hopes, dreams, and passions. Go.

Archive Seasons 7-10, Season 09, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 9.26: Adjusting Character Competence

9 Comments

This podcast references episode 9.13 where we introduce a three-slider model for characters.  In this episode we’re talking about how we adjust the reader’s perception of character competence, and why we might want to make the character more or less competent (or seem more or less competent.) We also talk about how competencies vary between domains, and how important it is for our characters to move between those domains.

Techniques discussed include showing failure, giving context, raising the stakes, and having competent antagonists.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:54 — 13.0MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Take a very minor side character and make them hyper-competent at something.

The Republic of Thieves, by Scott Lynch, narrated by Michael Page

Archive Seasons 7-10, Season 09, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 9.25: Adjusting Character Sympathy

10 Comments

This podcast references episode 9.13 where we introduce a three-slider model for characters. Here we talk about character sympathy, or rather the sympathy that the reader will have for the character, and how we as writers go about adjusting that sympathy — moving the slider, if you will. We also talk about why we want to make that adjustment, whether we’re dealing with villains, side-characters, or protagonists.

Some of our tricks for moving the slider include changing the characters around them, controlling the distance between the reader and the character, showing character weaknesses, and using humor to mask the unsympathetic moments. We talk about how we’ve deployed these tools in our own work, and how we’ve seen it done well in the work of others.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:56 — 13.0MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Take something that you’ve written recently. Swap out all of the dialog with completely different words (you can keep articles and pronouns) but retain the meaning.

The Butcher of Khardov: The Warcaster Chronicles Volume 2, by Dan Wells, narrated by Marc Vietor.

Archive Seasons 7-10, Career and Lifestyle, Season 09, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 9.24: Side Quests

11 Comments

Side quests come in a couple of forms — they may be something inside the book that takes the characters away from the main plotline, or they may be adventures that take place outside of the book itself.

We talk about the first type, and how to make sure they’re in the book for the right reasons, citing examples from The Wizard of Oz, The Hobbit, Redshirts, The Way of Kings, and The Hollow City among other stories.

In covering the second type, we talk about how ebooks have made ancillary, side-quest releases more common, and we cite the book trailers for the Partials series, the Glamourist Histories Christmas Stories, Steelheart, and the Schlock Mercenary Bonus Stories.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:42 — 12.8MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Create a story in which you have an incredibly powerful character, and a sidekick, then flip the relationship so the sidekick is in charge.

The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom, by Christopher Healy and Todd Harris, narrated by Bronson Pinchot

Archive Seasons 7-10, Season 09, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 9.23: World Building Without Breaking Viewpoint

24 Comments

Can you use a character with a limited viewpoint to introduce a reader to the fantastic elements of the world you’re building? Even if from that character’s point of view, those elements are not fantastic? In short, how do you get a fish to tell you about water?

This question came from a listener, and before we set about attempting to answer it, we need to establish that this is really difficult. It is one of the grand achievements of well-written genre fiction. There are lots of hacks we use to get around the problem, but what we try to do in this cast is answer the question without any of those tricks. Of course, we also want to cover the hacks, because we use them.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:24 — 12.6MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Come up with a really nifty, high-tech setting, and then present it using POV characters who have no idea how all these wonders work, and who take them for granted.

Extraordinary Zoology: Tales from the Monsternomicon, Vol. 1, by Howard Tayler, narrated by Scott Aiello