Fifteen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart.

A Clarification For Mary Robinette Kowal

Fifteen minutes long, because we’re in too much of a hurry to report all the facts to you… We here at Writing Excuses endeavor to give good advice, but we’re not good at telling long, complete stories. In our recent “getting published” episode we accidentally (I SWEAR) misrepresented our good…

Writing Excuses 4.17: Living with the Artist

Sandra Tayler, Dawn Wells, and Kenny Pike  take over the ‘cast with some coaching from Dan (and heckling from Howard)  to talk about what it’s like to live with an artist. We cover the ups and the downs, and share embarrassing anecdotes because we know you want to hear them,…

Writing Excuses 4.10: Writing for Young Adults

Jessica Day George joins the Writing Excuses crew again, this time for a discussion of writing for young adults, and maybe for teens, or even middle-grade readers. This isn’t a podcast about rigidly defining the boundary between the YA and middle-grade genres, though. That’s publishing. We’re talking about writing. If you…

Writing Excuses 4.7: Q&A with James Dashner

Recorded live at LTUE 2010, here’s a high-energy Q&A session with the Writing Excuses crew and our special guest James Dashner, author of The Maze Runner. We cover outlining vs. discovery writing, the return to the hairy palate, education for writers, killing people, whether or not we want a bagel, pragmatic…

Writing Excuses 4.6: Pacing with James Dashner

This episode was recorded live at Life, The Universe, & Everything 28, The BYU Symposium on Science Fiction and Fantasy, and features, among other things, our largest audience ever. Oh, and James Dashner, our friend and the author of The Maze Runner. It also features what has to be our roughest…

Writing Excuses 4.4: Agents. Do you need one?

We’re going to wade into a recent e-brouhaha, but it’s not going to be the Amazon vs Macmillan one. No, this is the one where Dean Wesley Smith argued that authors do not need agents. But you don’t need to read that to appreciate this ‘cast. So… do you need…

Writing Excuses 4.1: Types of Humor

Welcome to Writing Excuses Season 4, featuring new, shorter episode titles! Also, if you don’t count the bonus episodes or the Parsec Award Acceptance Speech, this is our 100th Episode! Brandon kicks this off by asking “What does Howard do that’s funny?” and then by categorizing the sorts of things…