Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd The genre of your story is making promises to the reader, and the medium upon which your story is told makes promises too. In this episode we talk about the expectations set by various mediums and genres, and how we can leverage those to ensure that we deliver … Continue reading 17.1: Genre and Media are Promises →

• Animation, 
• Comics, 
• Fulfilling Promises, 
• Kuleshov Effect, 
• Murder She Wrote, 
• Mystery, 
• Promises to the Reader, 
• The Avengers

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd The title of this episode comes to us from the first paragraph of The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss—a novel which delights us with turns of phrase and evocative prose from beginning to end. We’re continuing our exploration of “promises as a structure” by looking at … Continue reading 17.2: It Was a Promise of Three Parts →

• First Lines, 
• First Pages, 
• First Paragraphs, 
• Fulfilling Promises, 
• Promises to the Reader

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd This week we’re talking about giving inevitability to our intended surprise, and we open with a discussion of Chekov’s Gun, which, as a writing rule, is mostly used in inversion. Next week we’ll focus on making inevitable things surprising. Liner Notes: Art and Editing of Suicide Squad (YouTube)  … Continue reading 17.3: Chekov’s Surprising Yet Inevitable Inverted Gun →

• Foreshadowing, 
• Fulfilling Promises, 
• Promises to the Reader, 
• Surprising yet Inevitable

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd In the previous episode we discussed how to ensure that your surprise feels inevitable. In this episode we’re covering how to make inevitability feel surprising. The title is a nod to the concept of the “red herring,” which is arguably the most useful tool for setting up a … Continue reading 17.4: The Gun on the Mantel is Actually a Fish →

• Chekov's Gun, 
• Fulfilling Promises, 
• Promises to the Reader, 
• Red Herring, 
• Surprising yet Inevitable

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd Your brand—your name, the cover art for your book, and even the typeface for the title—set expectations for the book’s contents. That advice about not judging a book by its cover? It’s lovely in theory, but in practice, that’s just not how it works. In this episode we’ll … Continue reading 17.5: The Promise of the Brand →

• Back Cover Copy, 
• Branding, 
• Cover Art

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd Oh no! You’re in the middle of a thing (a novel, a series, a career) and you suddenly realize that the expectations you set early on are not the expectations you’ll be meeting. What do you do now? , We’re talking about how go about resetting audience expectations, … Continue reading 17.6: Hitting Reset Without Getting Hit Back →

• Branding, 
• Expectations, 
• Fulfilling Promises, 
• Promises to the Reader

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd What are your influences? What pieces of art, music, literature, or other media have inspired you? In this episode we’ll talk about making that inspiration deliberate, and consciously learning from our influences. Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson

• Anxiety of Influence, 
• Influence

Your Hosts: Howard Tayler, Kaela Rivera, Sandra Tayler, and Megan Lloyd How do you translate things from the spark of inspiration into a work that someone else can consume? Like, instead of turning a movie into a book, you’re trying to create a book out of the movie in your head. And what if your “spark” isn’t a movie … Continue reading 17.8: The Alchemy of Creativity →

• Creativity, 
• Ideas

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler We’re beginning another eight-episode deep-dive series, and this time it’s a fresh approach to story structure, led by our guest host Peng Shepherd. Join us as we zoom right through the overarching frameworks defined via things like the Hero’s Journey, Freytag’s Triangle, Save … Continue reading 17.9: Let’s Talk About Structure →

• Character Arc, 
• Freytag's Triangle, 
• Kishōtenketsu, 
• Maps, 
• Master Class, 
• seven-point story structure, 
• Story Structure, 
• Three-Act Format

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler In our second micro-structure episode, Peng Shepherd leads us into an exploration of the ways in which the use of multiple point-of-view characters can create a framework within the larger framework of the story. Liner Notes: In one example we contrasted the single POV … Continue reading 17.10: Structuring with Multiple POVs →

• Master Class, 
• POV, 
• Story Structure, 
• structure

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler Guest host Peng Shepherd continues to lead our exploration of sub- and micro-structures by taking us into the scaffolding of in media res, flashbacks, and other tools for structuring a story by telling it out of chronological order. We also cover how to … Continue reading 17.11: Structuring with Multiple Timelines →

• in medias res, 
• Master Class, 
• Story Chronology, 
• Story Structure, 
• structure

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler One common structure—both macro and micro—is the “story within a story,” or “framing story” structure, and yet somehow we’ve never really explored it on Writing Excuses. Guest host Peng Shepherd is here to help us set things right. Liner Notes: Here are some … Continue reading 17.12: Structuring a Story Within a Story →

• Framing Story, 
• In-World Artifact, 
• Story Structure, 
• structure

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler Our exploration of sub- and micro-structures continues with guest host Peng Shepherd. This week we’re talking about how a story can be structured around a “thing.” The simplest explanatory example would be structuring around a map, which is where we start the episode… … Continue reading 17.13: Structuring Around a Thing →

• Maps, 
• Master Class, 
• Microstructure, 
• Story Structure, 
• structure

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler Guest host Peng Shepherd leads our discussion of “order-less reading order” (after we get past the business of “having too much fun with the episode title”). But what do we even mean by “order-less” or “disordered?” At one level, we mean you can … Continue reading 17.14: Structuring for Disordered or Order-less Reading Order →

• Fixup Novel, 
• Serials, 
• Series, 
• Story Structure, 
• structure

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler You probably already know what footnotes are¹, but have you ever seen a story told through the footnotes²?  It’s similar to the story-within-a-story structure, but there’s more to it than that. In this episode our guest host Peng Shepherd explores footnote storytelling³ with … Continue reading 17.15: Storytelling in the Footnotes →

• Footnotes, 
• Story Structure, 
• structure, 
• White Room

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Peng Shepherd, and Howard Tayler Thus far we’ve attempted to organize our discussion of sub-, micro-, and other alternative structures  with specific categories, but this domain is a lot larger than that. This final episode with our guest host Peng Shepherd has been titled “Miscellaneous Structures” because, y’know, … Continue reading 17.16: Miscellaneous Structures →

• Microstructure, 
• Story Structure, 
• structure

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Brandon Sanderson, and Gama Martinez Did you know that there are some famous intellectual properties which have entered the public domain, and which you can therefore use to create your own stories? It’s true! Gama Martinez (whose God of Neverland novel features Peter Pan) joined Dan and Brandon at LTUE to talk about … Continue reading 17.17: Writing in the Public Domain →

• Intellectual Property, 
• Public Domain

Your Hosts: Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson, with special guest Jody Lynn Nye So, you’ve decided you want something to be funny. How do you go about making that happen? Jody Lynn Nye joined Dan and Brandon at LTUE, and pitched this topic to them. And yes, it’s much more than just “delivery, delivery, delivery.” Liner … Continue reading 17.18: How to be Funny, with Jody Lynn Nye →

• Character-Based Humor, 
• Humor

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Brandon Sanderson, and Megan Lloyd Megan Lloyd returns to the podcast to talk us through the process of creating something in a collaborative environment, whether it’s a pair of authors working together, or a dozen people working to write, storyboard, and animate a television series. Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, … Continue reading 17.19: Working in a Collaborative Environment →

• Collaboration

Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Zoraida Cordova, Kaela Rivera, and Howard Tayler What’s the difference between an ensemble story, and a story the has a lot of characters in it? Zoraida Cordova joins us for this episode, kicking off an eight-episode mini-master-class about ensembles. In this episode we discuss what makes ensembles work, and how we … Continue reading 17.20: Basics of Ensemble Characterization →

• Characters, 
• Elemental Genre, 
• Ensemble, 
• Secondary Characters