Writing Excuses

How do you use language and scale to focus your writing? Today, we think about scale and movement across vast spaces. What do characters’ movements tell us about empires and also—force? We talk about ...

19 Maj 202427min

Why is worldbuilding is essential in your writing? Today, we answer this question and dive into some working definitions of how we want to talk about it. After the break, we discuss why we chose this ...

12 Maj 202428min

Sometimes we know the action and themes of your story, but you don’t know how to build an economy that supports those. Well today, we explain just how to do that! What are some questions you can ask y...

5 Maj 202426min

How do you find the right size for your story? And speaking of size, what do novellas do differently than both short stories and novels? What even is the difference between a novel and a novella? How ...

28 Apr 202428min

Today we get to talk to the inimitable Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar. Amal and Max are on the podcast to tell us about how they wrote a book together (hint: they didn’t write it together in the for...

21 Apr 202447min

As we conclude our first deep dive of our close reading series, we want to explore how the evolution of voice helped carry readers throughout "This Is How You Lose The Time War." We also talk about th...

14 Apr 202425min

What's epistolary writing? Well, it's writing through letters. But it's also a lot more than that. As we continue to dive into the concept of Voice, we want to explore the importance and power of the ...

7 Apr 202425min

On our third episode diving into Voice through the novella “This Is How You Lose The Time War,” we begin to explore the different voices that make up the two main characters in the story. Last episode...

31 Mars 202423min