Writing Excuses

When people who have succeeded at a given endeavor speak about their success, we are inclined to listen because hey, we'd like to succeed there as well. It's critical to recognize the bias here. Survi...

26 Aug 201318min

How do you help your readers relate to the non-human characters in your fiction? The first question to answer is why you're putting non-human characters in the piece to begin with. What are your goal...

18 Aug 201318min

Microcasting! It's what we call a Q&A, because it's like several little podcasts in one! Here are the questions (you'll have to listen to the show for the answers): * How do you manage your workload...

11 Aug 201319min

The combination of dialogue, blocking, and description, can be considered from a couple of directions. The first is the idea that we're really talking about making every element do double or triple du...

4 Aug 201318min

What's a reluctant character? Well, it's somebody who needs to be dragged along into the adventure, somebody who isn't the sort of self-motivated, go-getter that we so often populate our books with. T...

29 Jul 201316min

We recorded this episode in front of our live audience at the first-ever Out of Excuses Workshop and Retreat. Here are the questions (you'll have to listen for the answers): * To Dan: How did you go...

22 Jul 201319min

We haven't talked much about contracts in the past. Why not? Well, we're not lawyers and we're not agents, so our experience with contracts has been as parties to them. But there are things we can sti...

14 Jul 201320min

What determines our chapter breaks? How do we handle POV shifts, scene-sequel balance, and other considerations when we're carving our stories into chapters? Dan starts with a discussion of the POV co...

7 Jul 201319min