The Writer's Journey

In today's episode we take a break from discussing and analyzing creative fiction to examining possibly one of the most important, and certainly most stressful, nonfiction projects in a young person's life: writing their college application essay.

Our guest, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Martha Mendoza, has been helping high school seniors with these essays for over a decade and is one of the organizers in her local school district's annual essay mentoring program. In our discussion she talks about what makes these essays so difficult, gives advice for how seniors might choose topics and how we, as writers, might help a student out.

Remember, we have a Writers Process meetup every Wednesday. Check us out.

We've been putting AI chatbots through creative writing challenges, but what are these systems actually doing when they write? In this episode, we bring in AI expert Bill Moore. Bill works with AI on the coding side, so we had him apply his technical know-how to literary prompts – including crafting the opening of a...

Authors & AI SeriesEpisode 7: Not Your Usual Words to Write By: The AI Podcasting Challenge! Is nothing sacred? After exploring how AI might steal our writing jobs, we’re now testing whether these digital usurpers can replicate our podcasting chemistry too. Google’s NotebookLM claims to transform documents into conversations between virtual “hosts,” setting up the...

Authors & AI SeriesEpisode 6: AI & Authorship: Where’s the Line? We’ve explored AI as brainstorming allies, critique partners, and research assistants. Now we’re tackling the most contentious question: should writers use AI in the actual writing process? Not the “generate a novel in a week” approach (both ethically dubious and creatively hollow), but rather...

Authors & AI SeriesEpisode 5: AI Solutions for Author Marketing In the current publishing industry, authors are expected to handle their own social media. If we wanted to be out there interacting with people, we probably wouldn’t have picked artforms that have us sitting alone for hours everyday. What writer hasn’t wished for an assistant...

Authors & AI SeriesEpisode 4: Harnessing AI without Losing your Voice:A Talk with Kate Scott Can AI truly enhance your creativity without taking over? Our previous episodes left us wondering, but in this episode of “Words to Write by,” we interview educator Kate Scott of the “AI for Squishy Humans” newsletter who offers some refreshing...

Authors & AI SeriesEpisode 3: Generating Feedback via AI Submitting work to your first workshop or critique group is nerve-wracking – these aren’t your supportive friends or family, but strangers with opinions. Yet honest feedback is the lifeblood of growth for writers. The problem? Workshops are expensive, inflexible, and the quality of feedback varies wildly....

In this episode, we’re finally putting the Hero’s Journey to rest and bidding farewell to Christopher Vogler’s “The Writer’s Journey.” And by “putting to rest,” we mean cramming the entire second half of this doorstop of a book into one episode. Renee takes one for the team by distilling each chapter down to its least painful bits. Then we’ll zoom out to discuss what we actually found valuable in this tome and offer our candid recommendations on how to approach reading it.

For the second half, we’re pivoting to something that won’t collect dust on your shelf—our new mini-series on AI and its invasion of the writing world. Do chatbots mean the end of the craft of writing, or can we humans somehow incorporate the AI’s as tools to improve our stories? Today, we’re just examining how alarmingly far AI has advanced since our last tech episode two years ago (spoiler: it’s terrifying).

Remember, we have a Writers Process meetup every Wednesday. Check us out.

An Interview with Lia Riley Check it Out: The Hero’s Journey Study Guide Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey insists all stories follow the Hero’s Journey template—but does this actually work for romance novels? I mean, we know they have climaxes… just not necessarily the kind Vogler was talking about. In this workshop, we corner romance...

Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s JourneyStage Eleven: The Resurrection&Stage Twelve: Return with the Elixir Check it Out: The Hero’s Journey Study Guide Just when you thought you had the Hero’s Journey all figured out, we’re back with a surprising twist! In our previous episode, we confidently declared that the “Road Back Home” stage was the climax...