Fifteen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart.
Let’s get this out of the way up front: in the syntax of elemental genres, the phrase “the element of thriller” is clunky. But we’ll say it anyway. We discuss the difference between the drivers in thrillers, horror stories, and mysteries, and use the elemental genre tools to assist in…
We talk a lot about “raising the stakes” in our writing. When we say “stakes,” we’re referring to the things that keep our characters involved in the conflict, rather than just walking away and doing something else. We dig into what this really means, and how everyone in the story…
Steve Diamond joins us for our third and final Elemental Horror episode as we field your questions about this particular building block. Here are the questions we selected from your submissions: If I want to make peanut butter terrifying without being silly, how do I do that? What is your personal…
Steve Diamond joins us to kick off our month on the elemental genre of horror. We explore the emotional components that readers seek from horror, and then drill down into the ways that we can create those reactions in our readers. Credits: This episode was recorded by Daniel Thompson, and…
You may still have questions about how to apply elemental adventure in your work. Hopefully your questions are similar to the ones we collected below, because these are the ones we answered: What do readers like more: protagonists going through lots of different incidents and locations, or through a few that…
Let’s be adventurous. Let’s move beyond simply being cooks, and strive to become chefs. In this episode we explore using the element of adventure as an ingredient in something that has far more than adventure going on in it. Why do we like adventure? What draws the reader forward? Credits: This episode was…
Our exploration of elemental genres continues with the sense of “I want to do that.”
Gama Ray Martinez joins us at LTUE to field questions on the Element of Wonder, which were submitted by members of our audience. Here are the questions: How do you create wonder in non-genre stories, where there are no super-powers, spaceships, or spellcasters? How do you avoid making the wonder…
If the Element of Wonder is the driving force behind “sense of wonder” science fiction and fantasy, then that same element can be used to give wondrous flavor to stories whose driving force lies among the other elemental genres. We talk about how to use wonder at smaller scales, how…
Let’s map Newton’s Laws of Motion onto writing. Because a wordcount at rest tends to remain at rest…
