Tag Archives: Bookshelf Genre

Season 18, Theory and Technique

18.08: Building a Mystery

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After last week’s deep dive into The Spare Man we’re ready to talk more generally about mysteries, and the tools we use to write them. Obviously we can’t cover all of that in just one episode, but don’t worry. In upcoming episodes we’ll explore more of these tools in detail.

Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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Give yourself some context for the upcoming episodes. Read a mystery!

The Glass Onion (Netflix)

Archive Seasons 11-15, Season 14, Theory and Technique

14.17: It’s Like “Car Talk” meets “Welcome To Nightvale”

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Your Hosts: Howard, Mary Robinette, Dan, and DongWon

This episode is about comp titles (comparative titles), which are those things you use to describe your project in terms of other works. We discuss the ones we’ve used (both successfully and unsuccessfully), and the criteria we use to come up with good ones.

Credits: This episode was recorded by Bert Grimm, and mastered by Alex Jackson

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Come up with six comp titles—three for existing projects, and three for projects you may want to write. May, in fact, need to write…

A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine

Archive Seasons 11-15, Season 12, Theory and Technique

12.52: Cross-Genres as Gateways

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Piper, Howard, and Dan

What are the books which have drawn us from the bookshelf genres where you’re the most comfortable into bookshelves you haven’t read from? What can we learn about our own writing by reading these gateway books? How can we set about writing them ourselves?

Credits: this episode was recorded in Cosmere House Studios by Dan Dan the Audioman Thompson, and mastered at the intersection of Cowboys and the Great Lakes by Alex Jackson

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Write a story where one of the characters thinks they’re in a different genre than the genre of the story itself.

The Diabolic, by SJ Kincaid

Archive Seasons 11-15, Season 12, Theory and Technique

12.5: Literary Fiction

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Mary Anne, and Wesley

This week we talk about the genre of Literary Fiction. Our first hurdle is the word “literary” whose use in this context can imply that all other genres are somehow not literature. In that vein, then, we’re talking about mainstream, or “non-genre” fiction which is crafted with close attention to the finer points of the prose. After framing our discussion, we dive into the nuts and bolts of writing in the Literary Fiction genre.

Credits: This episode was recorded by Andrew Twiss, and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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You drive your spouse to the airport and watch them fly away on a trip. Then you go straight home, and find them there in the house, sitting at the computer…

Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie (print and ebook available here)

Announcements & News, Archive Seasons 11-15, Season 11, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 11.1: Introduction to Elemental Genre

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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 a new term: Elemental Genre.

During 2016 we are going to explore what we write, why we write, and how we write in much the same way as previous seasons have, but our guidepost this year will be this concept of Elemental Genres. In January we’ll stay high-level and firm up the framework. Starting in February we’ll drill down on each of the Elemental Genres, and explore the writing process.

Here’s what the year will look like, month-by-month:

WX-11-Cover-PaleGradient4January: Introduction
February: Wonder
March: Idea
April: Adventure
May: Horror
June: Mystery
July: Thriller
August: Humor
September: Relationship
October: Drama
November: Issue
December: Ensemble

We’re really excited about this year’s format, and we’re confident that by examining our writing in this way we’ll learn (and perhaps even teach!) some new things.

Note: 2016 is a leap year, but this episode was recorded in 2015. When we said “it’s not a leap year” we were confused. 

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Take three stories (books, films, whatever) you love, and explore the emotional impact those stories have on you. Strip away the “bookshelf” genre, and try to identify for yourself the core elements that make those stories work.

Lost Stars, by Claudia Gray, narrated by Pierce Cravens