Writing Excuses

This month's Master Class episodes focus on pacing, and we're dividing the concept of pacing into two parts: the first is the sense of progress within the story, and the second is the sense of the pas...

2 Aug 20150s

Marie Brennan joins us again, this time to help us field your questions about middles. Here are the questions we collected from the various social media feeds: * How do you maintain interest without...

26 Jul 20150s

We're past the middle of the Season 10 Master Class, but we're still in the middle of our month on middles. Perhaps some spectacular failures will help us all enjoy the middle a bit more as we write o...

19 Jul 20150s

Marie Brennan took a break from her book tour and joined us for this discussion of Polytheism in fiction. (Note: Marie recorded several episodes with us, and we're posting them out of order.) We begi...

12 Jul 20150s

Lots of people struggle with the middles of their books. One way to look at the middle is that it's the point where you're no longer working on that new project that has you excited, but haven't yet g...

5 Jul 20150s

We close June's Master Class episodes in the usual manner, with a Q&A from our listeners and followers on Twitter. * How do you "Show, don't tell" a character's thoughts? * How do you describe a ch...

28 Jun 20150s

What defines a scene? How do we, as writers, structure things using scenes? When does a scene begin, when does it end, and when has it gone on too long? We each do this a little differently, and obvi...

21 Jun 20150s

We are often asked questions about the young reader markets, and while there are numerous professionals writing, editing, and publishing for that demographic, we haven't yet had an in-depth discussion...

14 Jun 20150s