Tag Archives: Peter Molyneiux

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 10, Uncategorized

Writing Excuses 10.33: Combat, with Marie Brennan

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Marie Brennan joins us again, this time for a discussion about writing combat. She’s studied fencing, combat choreography, and is *this close* to having a black belt in shotokan karate, bringing a valuable perspective to the discussion. Also, she’s written an ebook called Writing Fight Scenes, so she knows how to talk about this stuff.

We discuss some of our favorite fight scenes in movies and in books, why they work well, and how we can go about creating those sorts of things ourselves.

That Scene We Couldn’t Stop Gushing About: Here’s a no-Netflix-membership-required version of the Daredevil fight scene. It’s a teaser from Netflix, but it’s unabridged. For context, Daredevil is looking for a kidnapped child, and has tracked the boy’s captors to this hallway.

 

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Look at the purpose of the fight you’re about to write. Make a list of everybody who is in the fight, and what each of them wants to get out of the fight. Include what do you, the author, want to accomplish. Then write the scene.

A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent, by Marie Brennan, narrated by Kate Reading