Fifteen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart.
Let’s talk about failure… but let’s talk about it so that we can avoid it. How do you know if your ending has flopped? What kind of approaches to ending a story should you be avoiding? How can you recognize these approaches in time to avoid them? The best approach?…
As the end of Season 19 approaches, we want to help you integrate what you’ve learned over the year. For December, we’ll be releasing episodes designed to help you make measurable progress on a writing project. So dust off your current work-in-progress, or pull out your brainstorming documents—we’re here to…
When you’re subverting your readers’ expectations, do you need to do the exact opposite of what they’re anticipating? Today, we dive into this question, using various examples of books and movies. We then examine how P. Djèlí Clark does this throughout Ring Shout– does he subvert our expectations completely? Not always.…
Learning is great, but how do you translate it into doing without getting overwhelmed? What is the difference between learning in the classroom and executing when you’re on your own? Marshall, our incredible recording engineer, just finished an MFA program. Congrats, Marshall!! On today’s episode, we gril Marshall in order to understand…
Ali Fisher, editor at Tor Books and member of the podcast Rude Tales of Magic, joins us for a three-part series on editing. First up: length! How do you edit your work—whether it’s a book or a short story or a novella? Maybe you wrote a draft during NaNoWriMo, maybe you…
It’s week four of NaNoWriMo! Or, National Novel Writing Month, which happens every year for the month of November. This week, we are talking about how to write climaxes, how to write resolutions, and what exactly the three-quarter mark is. How do you write a climax scene? How to keep…
Welcome to National Novel Writing Month! For November, writers all over the world are trying to complete a novel, or write 50,000 words. In honor of NaNoWriMo, all of our November episodes are going to focus on writing a novel or big project. For our first week—starting! How do you…
The first episode in our eight-episode Deep Dive into Howard’s weekly webcomic strip, Schlock Mercenary. We grill Howard on how he taught himself to draw, why he decided to self-publish (hint: his wife, Sandra Tayler, helped him), and how he managed to write an ending. Homework: The “How it should have ended”…
How do you slowly reveal the supernatural in an obviously supernatural story? How can you prepare your audience for a reveal without disclosing it too quickly? If someone is familiar with your writing, they know the genre and what to expect from it. We talk about how we work within these confines…
Your Hosts: Mary Robinette and Howard Tayler, with special guests Fran Wilde, C.L. Polk, and William Alexander Whether or not you’re writing from your own experience, depicting disability in fiction is fraught. In this episode we’ll talk about some of the dos and don’ts in order to provide you with guidelines for disability…
