Writing Excuses

Your Hosts: Mary Robinette Kowal, James L. Sutter, Dan Wells, Cassandra Khaw, and Howard Tayler How do you give players meaningful choices while still keeping the story within a reasonable set of boundaries? In this episode James and Cassandra lead us in a discussion of branching narratives, and the ways in which we as writers can create them. Credits: this episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson Liner Notes: Dan mentioned this collection of "Choose your own adventure" plot maps. Howard illustrated the concept of "narrative bumper pool" in Tracy Hickman's X-TREME DUNGEON MASTERY Narrative Bumper Pool from X-TREME DUNGEON MASTERY, used with permission

Our Sponsors:
* Check out MasterClass and use my code masterclass.com/excuses for a great deal: https://MasterClass.com
* Check out Talkiatry and use my code talkiatry.com/WX for a great deal: https://www.talkiatry.com
* Check out Tin Can and use my code tincan.com/WX for a great deal: https://tincan.kids


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Your Hosts: Mary Robinette Kowal, James L. Sutter, Dan Wells, Cassandra Khaw, and Howard Tayler For the next eight episodes we'll be talking about roleplaying games, and how that medium relates to writers, writing, career opportunities, and more. We're led by James L. Sutter and Cassandra Khaw on this particular quest. In this episode we lay some groundwork, define a few terms, and hopefully get you excited about looking at games in new and useful ways. Credits: this episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson

Our Sponsors:
* Check out MasterClass and use my code masterclass.com/excuses for a great deal: https://MasterClass.com
* Check out Talkiatry and use my code talkiatry.com/WX for a great deal: https://www.talkiatry.com
* Check out Tin Can and use my code tincan.com/WX for a great deal: https://tincan.kids


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Your Hosts: Mary Robinette, Dan, Amal, and Howard For the last seven episodes we've explored language, meaning, and their overlap with that thing we mean when we use language to say "poetry." In this episode we step back to some origins, including, at a meta-level, the origins of this podcast as a writer-focused exploration of genre fiction—the speculative, the horrific, the science-y, and the fantastic. Because there is an overlap between language and meaning, and there are myriad overlaps among the genres we love, and as we step back we see poetry striding these spaces, its path in part defining and in part defying the various borders. Poetry, scouting the fraught borders between the kingdoms of Meaning and Language. Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson. 

Our Sponsors:
* Check out MasterClass and use my code masterclass.com/excuses for a great deal: https://MasterClass.com
* Check out Talkiatry and use my code talkiatry.com/WX for a great deal: https://www.talkiatry.com
* Check out Tin Can and use my code tincan.com/WX for a great deal: https://tincan.kids


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Your Hosts: Mary Robinette, Dan, Amal, and Howard Rhyming is powerful. It can signal a form, or telegraph whimsy. It can be predictable, surprising, and sometimes both. It may also be seen as childish. When, then, is it time to rhyme? Will rhyming "internally" fit? As opposed to a line-ending bit. For answers, just listen. But rhymes will be missin' Especially where they'd deliver a predictably naughty word at the end of, say, a limerick, because in this context, that would definitely be seen as childish. Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson. 

Our Sponsors:
* Check out MasterClass and use my code masterclass.com/excuses for a great deal: https://MasterClass.com
* Check out Talkiatry and use my code talkiatry.com/WX for a great deal: https://www.talkiatry.com
* Check out Tin Can and use my code tincan.com/WX for a great deal: https://tincan.kids


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Your Hosts: Mary Robinette, Dan, Amal, and Howard How does a poem happen? Absent an external structure, what makes a thing a poem? The key word in that question may be "external," because ultimately the poem on the page will be the implicit definition of its own structure—even if it borrows a "non-poetic" structure from another form. Structure is as structure does. "Unstructured" is just a way to say "I am unfamiliar with this structure," or maybe "I don't believe that this structure is fit for poetry." And that might be a thing you are currently saying. After all, "blog post describing a podcast episode" is definitely a structure. Does the embracing of that structure make this thing into a poem? If this thing is a poem, how did that happen? Liner Notes: "Girl Hours" by Sofia Samatar (via Stone Telling magazine), "The Hill We Climb," by Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman (YouTube from the Biden/Harris Inauguration) Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson. 

Our Sponsors:
* Check out MasterClass and use my code masterclass.com/excuses for a great deal: https://MasterClass.com
* Check out Talkiatry and use my code talkiatry.com/WX for a great deal: https://www.talkiatry.com
* Check out Tin Can and use my code tincan.com/WX for a great deal: https://tincan.kids


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Your Hosts: Mary Robinette, Dan, Amal, and Howard Rigorous structure in poetic form is commonly pointed at when we declare Poems have meters and rhymes, as the norm. Yet words without patterns can roar like a storm So why pay attention, why study with care Rigorous structure in poetic form? Just set it aside, surrender the gorm (means "alertness", a quite-handy rhyme I put there) Poems have meters and rhymes as the norm. Let some of it go, perhaps. Let it transform beyond all the rhyming. Deny, if you dare: Rigorous structure in poetic form Okay, you can maybe keep some of it warm Those toasty iambics by which you might swear: Poems have meters and rhymes as the norm. This episode text I wrote: does it inform? Will all be confused when this couplet doth air? "Rigorous structure in poetic form: Poems have meters and rhymes as the norm." Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, and mastered by Alex Jackson. The villanelle above was the first—and hopefully last—ever composed by Howard Tayler. Yes, the Writing Excuses tagline is a haiku. No, Howard did not know that when he wrote it in 2008.

Our Sponsors:
* Check out MasterClass and use my code masterclass.com/excuses for a great deal: https://MasterClass.com
* Check out Talkiatry and use my code talkiatry.com/WX for a great deal: https://www.talkiatry.com
* Check out Tin Can and use my code tincan.com/WX for a great deal: https://tincan.kids


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Your Hosts: Mary Robinette, Dan, Amal, and Howard We might begin with description. Or we might begin by deconstructing the act of describing. Wait. No, not there. Let's jump in AFTER the deconstruction. Let's leap beyond a statement of topic, let's hurdle clear of mundane declarations of the audio file's length, and together plunge headlong into metaphor, the icy water perhaps calling to mind Archimedes, as we describe our episode (or any other thing) not in terms of its intrinsic attributes, but by taking account of what it has displaced into the spaces it doesn't occupy. How long does the displacement remain? How might one apply paint to the emptiness after the thing has left? What color is silence that follows the end of the episode? (An end which follows twenty minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the four of us discuss the kinds of words we imagine when we say "poetic language.") Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, and mastered by Alex Jackson

Our Sponsors:
* Check out MasterClass and use my code masterclass.com/excuses for a great deal: https://MasterClass.com
* Check out Talkiatry and use my code talkiatry.com/WX for a great deal: https://www.talkiatry.com
* Check out Tin Can and use my code tincan.com/WX for a great deal: https://tincan.kids


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Your Hosts: Mary Robinette, Dan, Amal, and Howard Patterns in the way we're speaking may betray which 'brain' we're using; often bound by what's familiar, sometimes loosed for free-er choosing. Writing like the day-brain's thinking Singing while the night-brain's winking All the cadence going funky (golden-mantled howler monkey) Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, and mastered by Alex Jackson. XKCD #1412, by Randall Munroe, was referenced during this episode. As was the Greater Cleveland Film Commission.

Our Sponsors:
* Check out MasterClass and use my code masterclass.com/excuses for a great deal: https://MasterClass.com
* Check out Talkiatry and use my code talkiatry.com/WX for a great deal: https://www.talkiatry.com
* Check out Tin Can and use my code tincan.com/WX for a great deal: https://tincan.kids


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Your Hosts: Mary Robinette, Dan, Amal, and Howard Can you hear your writing sing, being intoned instead of read? With the dialogs as tunes whose tags say "sung" instead of "said?" When the rhythm of your prose echoes the rhythm of a song you'll see perhaps you've been a poet all along. Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, and mastered by Alex Jackson. Les Miserables was written by Victor Hugo, set to music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, and ruined here by Howard Tayler.

Our Sponsors:
* Check out MasterClass and use my code masterclass.com/excuses for a great deal: https://MasterClass.com
* Check out Talkiatry and use my code talkiatry.com/WX for a great deal: https://www.talkiatry.com
* Check out Tin Can and use my code tincan.com/WX for a great deal: https://tincan.kids


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Your Hosts: Mary Robinette, Dan, Amal, and Howard This is how we begin our master class on poetry, with Amal El-Mohtar: With not one question, but two. What is poetry? What is prose? Yes, both questions are a trap. Or maybe two traps. But definitely a beginning. Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, and mastered by Alex Jackson

Our Sponsors:
* Check out MasterClass and use my code masterclass.com/excuses for a great deal: https://MasterClass.com
* Check out Talkiatry and use my code talkiatry.com/WX for a great deal: https://www.talkiatry.com
* Check out Tin Can and use my code tincan.com/WX for a great deal: https://tincan.kids


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy