Category Archives: Live Audience

Archive Seasons 11-13, Guest, Live Audience, Season 12, Theory and Technique

12.51: Constructed Languages, with Dirk Elzinga

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Your Hosts: Howard, Mary, Dan, with guest host Beth Meacham

Dirk Elzinga, an associate professor of linguistics, joined us live at LTUE to talk about constructed languages, and how we, as writers, might go about constructing them for our work.

Liner Notes: The big stack of notes from Dirk required its own page. Below are links to specific tools mentioned during the episode.

Credits: This episode was recorded live at LTUE by Dan Dan the Audioman Thompson and mastered beneath a pyramid of stone tablet encyclopedias by Alex Jackson.

 

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Come up to with a non-combat, non-warfare metaphor to talk about a debate.

Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin

Archive Seasons 11-13, Career and Lifestyle, Guest, Live Audience, Season 12, Theory and Technique

12.47: Screenwriting and the Writers Room, with JD Payne

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Screenwriter JD Payne joined us before a live audience at LTUE to talk about writing for the screen, specifically regarding doing this work with others in a room full of writers.

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Give a character description using only visual cues in 20 words or less

Boilerplate by Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett

Archive Seasons 11-13, Career and Lifestyle, Guest, Live Audience, Season 12

12.35: Short Fiction Markets, with Spencer Ellsworth and guest host Beth Meacham

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Your Hosts: Mary, Dan, and Howard, with guest host Beth Meacham

Spencer Ellsworth and Beth Meacham joined us before a live audience at LTUE 2017 for a discussion of short fiction markets, which ones we love, and why.

Credits: this episode was recorded live at LTUE 2017 Dan Dan the Audioman Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:32 — 11.4MB)

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Dream up a story worthy of an epic page count, and try to write it in 4000 words

A Red Peace, by Spencer Ellsworth,

Archive Seasons 11-13, Guest, Live Audience, Season 12, Theory and Technique

12.31: What Makes a Good Monster, with Courtney Alameda

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Your Hosts: Howard, Mary, and Dan, with guest host Susan Chang

Courtney Alameda joined us at LTUE 2017 to talk monsters, and what makes the best ones so good. We discuss some of our favorites, and how the criteria we apply to them can be applied in the creation of monsters of our own.

Credits: this episode was recorded live at LTUE 2017 by Dan Dan the Audioman Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson

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Create a uniquely American monster

Shutter, by Courtney Alameda

Archive Seasons 11-13, Guest, Live Audience, Season 12, Theory and Technique

12.29: “Oh Crap, the Cops are Here!” with Joe McKinney

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Your Hosts: Howard and Dan, with Steve Diamond, and special guest Joe McKinney

We invited Steve Diamond, who has been a guest before, and who has some law enforcement background, to help us grill Joe McKinney, who has tons of that background, and who also happens to be a best-selling author.

This Week’s Liner Notes are extensive. Follow the link for a Google Doc, or click here for our local mirror of Lyn Worthen’s notes.

Credits: Mastered by Alex Jackson

 

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:49 — 14.3MB)

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“Oh crap, the cops are here.”

The Savage Dead, by Joe McKinney

Archive Seasons 11-13, Guest, Live Audience, Season 12

12.21: Narrative Bumper Pool, with Bill Fawcett and Carrie Patel

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Your Hosts: Howard and Dan, with special guests Bill Fawcett and Carrie Patel

Bill and Carrie both have extensive experience writing for games, and they joined us at GenCon Indy to talk about writing for an interactive story, like a tabletop RPG, or a video game.

Narrative Bumper Pool: This term comes to us from Tracy Hickman’s XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery. 

Narrative Bumper Pool from X-TREME DUNGEON MASTERY, used with permission
Narrative Bumper Pool from X-TREME DUNGEON MASTERY, used with permission

 

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Look at a “great mistake” in history, and speculate about how that mistake could have been avoided, and how the world would be different had that mistake not been

The Buried Life, by Carrie Patel

Archive Seasons 11-13, Guest, Live Audience, Season 12, Theory and Technique

12.18: Gendered Dialect, with J.R. Johansson

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Your Hosts: Howard, Mary, and Dan, with guest-host Susan Chang, and special guest J.R. Johannsen

J.R. Johannson joined Howard, Mary, Dan, and guest-host Susan Chang at LTUE 2017 for a discussion of gendered dialect.

We lead with a quick introduction to the Genderlect theory, by Deborah Tannen, which uses a very broad brush to describe key differences between the ways men and women in western societies communicate. We then explore the way some of the individual voices we’re familiar with have been influenced through gender role, cultural socialization, and even neuroatypicality.

Our goal in this discussion is to learn to write dialog which serves our stories and our characters, and  to do so in a way that both leverages and defies the existing stereotypes.

Liner Notes:

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:02 — 13.1MB)

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Use the concepts of  gendered dialect to write a scene set among members of a matriarchy.

The Row, by J.R. Johannsen

Archive Seasons 11-13, Guest, Live Audience, Season 12, Theory and Technique

12.8 Short Stories as Exploration, with Tananarive Due

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard

Tananrive Due, whose short-fiction expertise is exemplified in her collection, Ghost Summer, joined us on the Oasis of the Seas to talk about how to use short stories to explore aspects of the craft. We discuss the importance of allowing ourselves to fail, and how we can learn from those failures, and continue to push our own limits. We also talk about how we go about pushing those limits, and what we do in order to most effectively explore new techniques.

 

Credits: This episode was recorded aboard Oasis of the Seas by Bert Grimm, and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:26 — 10.0MB)

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Take something larger that you’ve written  and find a short story in it. Write that story.

“Summer“, by Tananarive Due, which you can find in the Ghost Summer collection.