Fifteen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart.
The word “genre” has a lot of weight to it. Arguments about whether a particular work is, or is not, part of a given genre are long, and tedious. Season Eleven will not be engaging in those arguments. We’re giving all that a wide miss by adding an adjective, and defining…
Welcome to Writing Excuses! Writing Excuses has been running since 2008 so we have A LOT of episodes. Knowing where to start can be tricky so we’ve created a bit of a guide to help you out depending on where you are in your writing and what you are looking…
Nalo Hopkinson joins us again, at sea, for our second Master Class installment on endings. We cover some of the reasons why an ending might not be working, and then talk about the sorts of diagnoses that will help you solve the problem. You’ll likely need to dig deep in…
Words take time to read, but that’s not the same amount of time that the words communicate…
How do you know which bits of your story have to come first?
This month’s syllabus topic is story structure, and we’ll be starting with the part we start with. And that part usually isn’t the beginning — that’s where the story starts for the reader. We’re going to talk about where the story starts for you. It’s the answer to questions like…
At the Out of Excuses Workshop and Retreat we premiered the Season 10 concept, and we invited our attendees to give us the questions we need this month. (They’ll also be the ones providing our questions for February, but we’ll cast our net wide for questions in March.) Ideas are hard!…
Charlie Harmon, one of the luminaries of Utah area fandom, joined us to talk about disability in narrative. She’s been going blind gradually since she was a child, and these days while she can see some colored blurs, she cannot read, or recognize faces. We talk about some of the…
We talk about how to make characters more or less proactive in the stories we tell.
What to do when you discover your planned ending isn’t actually going to work…
