Fifteen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart.
Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Fonda Lee, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler As we do our worldbuilding with similarity, specificity, and selective depth (per the previous episode), we should take care to apply these things throughout our stories. In this episode we discuss how these elements we’ve world-built can become “textures.” Credits:…
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard We’ve spent all year focusing on worldbuilding, and it’s time to move on. Almost. In this episode we try to cover some points we may have missed, we talk about what we’ve learned, and discuss some of our favorite recent examples of…
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard Where do you draw the line between what seems plausible, and what would be cool? If you pick “plausible,” how do you stay cool? If you pick “cool,” how do you avoid knocking the readers out of the story? And finally, how…
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard What’s the difference between villains and antagonists? How is an obstacle character different from those other two? How are they alike? And most importantly, how can we use this information to write effective opposition to our heroes, protagonists, and main characters? Credits: This…
We’ve introduced the concept of Elemental Genre already. It’s time to start digging in to the elements themselves, beginning with the Element of Wonder. We started with this one because “sense of wonder” is a term that gets used to describe what makes some science fiction stories work. In this…
In which Max Gladstone introduces us to the concept of the Magical 1%
How do we interact with readers who find meaning in our works that we don’t recall putting in there?
Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard talk about using character foils in building a story.
Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mary discuss communications technology, and how the ability for characters to communicate is a critical piece of your world-building, whether you’re writing science-fiction, fantasy, or pretty much anything else.
Brandon, Mary, Dan, & Howard discuss putting character motivations on the page in support of plot, character arcs, and the story in general.
