Tag Archives: Indiana Jones

Archive Seasons 11-15, Season 11

11.17: Elemental Adventure Q&A

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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 are similar to each other?
  • What lessons can we learn from adventure games?
  • How can we make action scenes that adventurous, but that are not fight scenes?
  • Are there tropes we should stay away from in adventure fiction?
  • Do you have suggestions for non-western styles of adventure fiction?
  • How do you safely skip the long, boring parts of a journey without missing out on necessary character development?

Credits: This episode was recorded by Daniel Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson. 

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Make a list of cool set pieces that people could visit. Figure out how your characters’ entry into these places will change the places, your characters, and the story.

Alif the Unseen, by G. Willow Wilson, narrated by Sanjiv Jhaveri

Archive Seasons 7-10, Season 09, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 9.26: Adjusting Character Competence

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This podcast references episode 9.13 where we introduce a three-slider model for characters.  In this episode we’re talking about how we adjust the reader’s perception of character competence, and why we might want to make the character more or less competent (or seem more or less competent.) We also talk about how competencies vary between domains, and how important it is for our characters to move between those domains.

Techniques discussed include showing failure, giving context, raising the stakes, and having competent antagonists.

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Take a very minor side character and make them hyper-competent at something.

The Republic of Thieves, by Scott Lynch, narrated by Michael Page