Fifteen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Victoria, Dan, and Howard How do you decide what sort of event ends your story? How do you set the scale and the stakes for that event? And once you’ve made these decisions, how do you set about writing the best possible ending? Credits: This episode was…
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard Listener questions drove this episode, and there are only two of them but they were pretty good drivers. Here they are: Is it a problem that all my dialog ends up as logic-based debates between characters? What can I do to create…
Your Hosts: Dan, Howard, and Mary Robinette, with special guest Patrick Rothfuss We begin our discussion of revision by addressing a question we hear a lot: How do you know what needs to be changed? We talk about our various techniques for getting distance from our work, incorporating feedback, and…
Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab We’ve spent a lot of time talking about magic systems in our worldbuilding. It’s time to talk about science and technology in that same way. This has been a staple (perhaps the defining staple) of science fiction since before “science fiction” was a word.…
Your Hosts: Brandon, Valynne, Dan, and Howard The term “iconic hero” allows us to differentiate between different kinds of heroes who appear in series. Nancy Drew and Conan the Barbarian are iconic, but Leia Organa and Aragorn are epic. In this episode we discuss how (and why) to go about…
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard Our characters become far more interesting when they begin interacting with each other. These interactions—these relationships—are often how our stories get told. In this episode we explore ways in which we can fine tune relationships in service of our stories. The tools include…
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Mary Anne, and Wesley When we talk about “raising the stakes,” we mean making the outcomes of the events in a story increasingly important to the reader. In this episode we talk about the tools we use to raise the stakes in ways that are more sophisticated…
We discuss the ways in which we decide upon the length of the stories we write, and at which point(s) in the creative process we make that decision.
Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t yet read Ghost Talkers, by Mary Robinette Kowal, this episode will spoil great swathes of book for you. Also, you probably won’t get as much out of it. This week’s episode is a Project in Depth discussion focusing on Ghost Talkers, by Mary Robinette Kowal.…
In elemental relationship stories the primary page-turning driver is the relationship between two or three characters ¹. In this episode we discuss ways in which we can write character relationships—parent/child, buddy-cop, romance, and more—to be compelling. Credits: this episode was recorded by Jeff Cools, and mastered by Alex Jackson ¹We’re…
