Writing Excuses

Today, we’re talking about the tension that is actually happening on the page, and the contextual tension is what the reader is bringing to the table. Ring Shout lives in a place of contextual tension...

8 Sep 202426min

Compared to This is How You Lose The Time War, which we read earlier this year, Ring Shout deals with a very real world. This discordance, where authors make their audience uncomfortable by creating t...

1 Sep 202418min

Today we have a wildcard episode for you! We are talking about all the different ways you can sustain your writing career. Our host, Erin Roberts, has done an incredible job of applying for grants, fe...

25 Aug 202428min

Today we’re taking a break from our Close Reading Series to discuss writing workshops and retreats! We dive into how to find and prepare to attend a workshop or a retreat and what to think about for o...

18 Aug 202429min

We sat down with CL Clark to talk about character—specifically, how they build different POV characters in the compressed space of a short story. We dive into plot processing (a tool CL Clark has lear...

11 Aug 202433min

Today, we’re taking a higher view on the techniques we’ve been talking about over the last four episodes and focusing on how you can use our takeaways in your own writing. We’ll go over our final thou...

4 Aug 202424min

We have a theory that we want to work through on today’s episode: agency is the ability to take action, whereas choices are more about the interior life of the character. We use Mary Robinette’s talki...

28 Jul 202423min

Our episode today focuses on C.L. Clark’s short story “You Perfect Broken Thing” for how the character's stakes shape the barriers facing her. We use this story to examine how to tell the difference b...

21 Jul 202422min