PODCAST

Writing Excuses

Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler

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

fiction careers

All Episodes

25:54

20.06: Lens 2 - Identity 1 - History & Community

Writing Excuses ·

2025/02/09

Have you ever wondered how much you need to know about a specific character before you start your story? Do you need to have an entire outline of their childhood before you can start writing in depth about them? We don’t think so! But it is important to listen to these questions as they emerge. This can help you figure out how to incorporate facets of each character’s identity that have narrative weight, instead of crowding the story with small facts that might not be necessary. This can help you

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25:10

20.05: Lens 1 - Who

Writing Excuses ·

2025/02/02

Today we are introducing the “lens of who” – which means talking about characters. We try to break big character ideas down into their elements. For instance, what do terms like "relatability" or "depth" of character really mean? One of the main take-aways from this episode is that your characters each have different sets of experiences, which *should* mean they could each describe the same exact thing differently. And you should know how to write this. Homework: Interview two

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33:24

20.04: Metaphor 1 - Puppetry

Writing Excuses ·

2025/01/26

For our 20th season, we are focusing on this belief: that the lived experience that we all have affects the way we think about writing. We’ve all heard Mary Robinette talk about puppetry for seventeen (or so) seasons. Today, she dives into puppetry as a metaphor that helps her understand writing– specifically character, voice, and genre. And she invites you to start thinking about metaphors you can use and make in your own life to help you think about writing in a new way. Homework: Watch a puppet

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21:55

20.03: Polishing Your Writing Lens

Writing Excuses ·

2025/01/19

One of the most important tools that a writer brings to their work is their own personal lens. This is shaped by your hobbies, your job, your history, and your experiences. In this season, we're going to be looking at personal lenses as well as the narrative lens through which stories are told. We'll look at how the questions of Who, Where, When, and Why shape a story. Also, we're going to do a Deep Dive later in the year with the novel All The Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, in

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24:54

20.02: Q&A Aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise, with...

Writing Excuses ·

2025/01/12

This episode was recorded live at our 2024 Writing Excuses Cruise. (Did you know that we host a writing retreat on a cruise every year!?! You can learn more at https://writingexcuses.com/retreats/.) While on a boat in Mexico, we were joined by author Mark Oshiro and literary agent Kate McKean. In addition to our hosts, they answered questions that were asked by our cruise attendees. Our answers included things such as how much space a character should take up and how to find the balance between

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23:18

20.01: Welcome to 2025!

Writing Excuses ·

2025/01/05

For our 20th season, we are focusing on your toolbox. We’re going to be thinking about tools in terms of the lenses that we use to approach a story. We’re going to focus on the four lenses of: who, where, when, and why (don’t worry– what and how will be looked at in a later season, since they’re more about execution and less about lenses.) Our hosts talk about the lenses they’re adopting as they look towards 2025. At the end of this season, we’re going to take all these lenses and apply them to one

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29:41

19.52: End of Year Reflections: Navigating Speedbumps

Writing Excuses ·

2024/12/29

Today, we’re reflecting on 2024. Individually, all of us went through a lot throughout the year—we encountered myriad speed bumps that slowed us down in different ways.. How do you balance your workload with your own personal life and its needs? How can you help make navigating these speedbumps easier by knowing your own limits and needs? We give you specific questions you can ask yourself in order to locate your problem points and figure out how to rearrange your life (and your stories about your

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24:19

19.51: And That Was That

Writing Excuses ·

2024/12/22

As the end of Season 19 approaches, we want to help you integrate what you’ve learned over the year. For December, we’ll be releasing episodes designed to help you make measurable progress on a writing project. So dust off your current work-in-progress, or pull out your brainstorming documents—we’re here to help you finish the year strong.Today, we’re thinking about endings—specifically, what endings have in common with beginnings. When you’re coming to your conclusion, you can revisit the start of

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31:20

19.50.5: An Interview with DIY MFA Founder Gabriela...

Writing Excuses ·

2024/12/18

We had the pleasure of sitting down with Gabriela Pereira, founder and instigator of DIY MFA, which is the do-it-yourself alternative to a Master of Arts in Writing. Pereira has some incredible advice for how to put together a writing curriculum for yourself. Using the pillars of writing, reading, and community, she explains how she first came up with the idea for DIY MFA. We also talk about how to build a well-rounded craft, how to know what you don’t know, and what exactly it means to “write with

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20:56

19.50: All Systems Go

Writing Excuses ·

2024/12/15

As the end of Season 19 approaches, we want to help you integrate what you’ve learned over the year. For December, we’ll be releasing episodes designed to help you make measurable progress on a writing project. So dust off your current work-in-progress, or pull out your brainstorming documents—we’re here to help you finish the year strong.How do you have multiple plot threads moving at the same time? Today, we’re talking about complex plot structures—focusing on space opera and epic fantasy. Some of

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22:14

19.49: Getting to Know You

Writing Excuses ·

2024/12/08

As we wrap up our Close Reading Series, we’re shifting our focus towards helping you integrate what you’ve learned. For December, we’ll be releasing episodes designed to help you make measurable progress on a writing project. So dust off your current work-in-progress, or pull out your brainstorming documents—we’re here to help you finish the year strong.What can we learn from romances? Today we’re talking about using elements of romance in your story (even if you have no romance in your current

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20:56

19.48: Beginning With A Thrill

Writing Excuses ·

2024/12/01

As we wrap up our Close Reading Series, we’re shifting our focus towards helping you integrate what you’ve learned. For December, we’ll be releasing episodes designed to help you make measurable progress on a writing project. So dust off your current work-in-progress, or pull out your brainstorming documents—we’re here to help you finish the year strong.Today, we’re focusing on beginnings. The titular phrase “beginning with a thrill,” doesn’t have to mean a burst of action or violence, but more so

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32:17

19.47.5: Interview with Andrew Buckley of the...

Writing Excuses ·

2024/11/27

What does it mean to be building a career as an author in this day and age? We talk with author and speaker Andrew Buckley about everything from author brands to conferences while we ask Andrew to give us advice on how to get comfortable talking about yourself. In addition to hosting the StoryCentric podcast and speaking at conferences, Andrew is a speculative fiction author, with a focus on paranormal fantasy for young adult readers. He also has a background in marketing and business. Thing of the

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25:37

19.47: Final Thoughts on Our Close Reading Series

Writing Excuses ·

2024/11/24

We reminisce on when we were on a writing retreat on a cruise in 2023, planning this close reading series. We have loved how this series grounded our conversations, allowing us to dive into works that were complex in specific ways. We have loved wading into the waters of voice, world-building, character, tension, and structure while talking about these phenomenal works of science fiction and fantasy. Thank you, listeners, for reading along with us. It has been powerful to read the same books, and to

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51:00

19.46: An Interview on Structure with N.K. Jemisin

Writing Excuses ·

2024/11/17

We had the pleasure of sitting down with N.K. Jemisin to talk about the structures and processes that helped create The Fifth Season. We talk about outlines, multiple plotlines, and planets as characters. Jemisin lets us into her writing process—ranging from the influence of poetry in her work to her process of writing “test chapters.” She also gives us advice on writing multiple POVs, the power of parallelism, and the intersection of mental health and storytelling. Thing of the Week: Alan Wake II

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22:21

19.45: A Close Reading on Structure: Tying It All...

Writing Excuses ·

2024/11/10

We’ve loved doing our close reading series throughout 2024, and The Fifth Season has been no different. Today, we’re reflecting on what we learned in our episodes focusing on N.K. Jemisin’s incredible work. We reflect on POV as structure, parallelism, and finding the beating heart of your manuscript. Thing of the Week: I Saw the TV Glow Homework: Reverse engineer an outline for your work in progress. Then, try to add one parallel.Do you want a signed special edition copy of The Broken Earth

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26:12

19.44: A Close Reading on Structure: Tradition and...

Writing Excuses ·

2024/11/03

Today we’re zooming out to see where N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season fits into the canon of fantasy literature. How does Jemisin interact with magic, words, and the expectations of the genre? And what expectations do the readers bring themselves? How does Jemisin repurpose parts of the hero’s journey while creating something fundamentally different? Does this work start a new lineage for epic fantasy? We think so! We talk about what other works this book is in conversation with, and what it even

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23:27

19.43: A Close Reading on Structure: Parallelism and...

Writing Excuses ·

2024/10/27

The structure of The Fifth Season features both mirroring and inversion. How do these structural shifts interact with the three POVs? On today’s episode, we talk about the parallelism of the perspectives and the linguistic references to seasons. This leads us to the question, how many things need to work in sync in order for readers to feel the cyclical nature of the plot (and life)? How does N.K. Jemisin use structural arcs, beats, and elements to create upheaval? And finally, how can you create

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21:56

19.42: A Close Reading on Structure: Whose...

Writing Excuses ·

2024/10/20

Structure and POV (point of view) are often intertwined. In N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, we see this in the myriad perspective shifts. In this episode, we talk about the importance of these shifts on the structure of the book. How does the narrator talk directly to us, and what purpose does this second-person perspective serve? DongWon shares one of their theories with us on the relationship between author, reader, and POV. P.S. Do you want a signed special edition copy of The Broken Earth

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21:32

19.41: A Close Reading on Structure: An Overview and...

Writing Excuses ·

2024/10/13

Just a reminder that we will be talking about a lot of spoilers, so if you haven’t read The Fifth Season, go and do so now! As we dive into N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, we wanted to tell you why we chose this work to examine the importance of structure. The structure of the book is the device through which we are understanding this world, in a way that feels radical in relation to what we normally see in fiction. We chose this novel because the structure is visible and active in a way that many

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