Writing Excuses

This episode was recorded live at Life, The Universe, & Everything 28, The BYU Symposium on Science Fiction and Fantasy, and features, among other things, our largest audience ever. Oh, and James Dashner, our friend and the author of The Maze Runner. It also features what has to be our roughest start ever. We don't get to actual content until around four minutes in. Seventeen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're pretending this was an object lesson. Also, we love picking on our friend James. Pacing! What do we do so that people keep turning pages? Which useful tricks do we hate? Which subtle methods do we prefer? And most importantly, what does James Dashner do? We talk about reveals, punchlines, cliffhangers, chapter length, and the "Brandon Avalanche." Also, we talk briefly about the look on my face, and the roof of James' mouth. Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Ender's Game: Special 20th Anniversary Edition by Orson Scott Card Writing Prompt: Someone opens a door, and finds a wet, seeping cardboard box on the doorstep. This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*. *Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please! Audible® Free Trial Details Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

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

Roll for initiative, folks! Brandon, Dan, and Howard all play tabletop role-playing games, and sometimes even play together. The question of the hour (well... quarter-hour) is "how can these games help your world building, storytelling, and anything else having to do with good writing?" If this 'cast doesn't make you want to play RPGs with your friends, congratulations on a successful Saving Throw vs. Dark Podcast Magic. If this 'cast doesn't make you want to sit down and start writing, you have our condolences. That's not the saving throw you were supposed to make! In the spirit of not-necessarily-related personal information: This week we learn that Howard is moister than Dan. In related news, see the Writing Excuses crew this coming Saturday, February 13th, at the Life, The Universe and Everything Symposium at Brigham Young University in the Wilkinson Center. We'll be there for the full symposium, but on Saturday we'll actually be recording in front of an audience. You'll also get to meet Bob Defendi, who gets mentioned at least three times in this episode. Audiobook Plug: Nation, by Terry Pratchett Writing Prompt: Don't write about players being sucked into their RPGs. That's been done a lot. Suck the RPG characters out into our world, and see what happens. This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*. *Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please! Audible® Free Trial Details Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

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

We're going to wade into a recent e-brouhaha, but it's not going to be the Amazon vs Macmillan one. No, this is the one where Dean Wesley Smith argued that authors do not need agents. But you don't need to read that to appreciate this 'cast. So... do you need an agent? This depends on the operating definition of "you" and "agent." What kind of contractual experience do you have? What kinds of things will your agent do for you? And if you decide you do need an agent, how do you go about identifying the agent who is right for you? We'll cover all of this and more! Unrelated to agents (but definitely in the "and more" category): Howard reveals deeply personal information in this podcast! Audiobook Plug: The Maze Runner, by James Dashner Writing Prompt: Write a story in which a bestselling recluse author dies, and his agent scrambles to keep the career alive without telling anybody. Skin in the game, baby! This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*. *Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please! Audible® Free Trial Details Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

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

How do you avoid letting other people's work creep into your own? We're all influenced by the media we partake in whether we admit it or not. How much of those influences should we allow into our own work? How do we control that? As we engage the topic, we admit that sometimes we want to be influenced, and that letting those influences do their work is a good thing. But this isn't the podcast where we cover that. This is the podcast where we talk about tuning that out. We also talk about tuning out the influence of those who are critiquing or commenting on our work. These might be fellow members of the writing group or other early readers, or they might (especially in Howard's case) be outspoken members of your audience ranting on web forums or wikis. And then we talk about whether or not we should allow Brandon to influence our work. Take that, Brandon! (Take it, in fact, all the way out to nineteen minutes and six seconds!) Audiobook Plug: The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Writing Prompt: Write a story, and pretend that a famous historical figure is looking over your shoulder and offering advice while you write. This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*. *Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please! Audible® Free Trial Details Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

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

If you want to write a good, heroic hero, this is the podcast for you. We're not necessarily talking about the archetypical, classically-defined, capital-H "Hero" in this podcast, though. We're talking about what makes readers stand up and cheer. And yes, this can be applied to the archetype, but let's not digress. We talk about perseverance, sacrifice, hard work, fear-facing, and a bunch of other attributes that we find inherently heroic. Audiobook Plug: The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell Writing Prompt: Write a scene in which a character makes a noble sacrifice and is not rewarded. Mystery Soundbite! We have no idea who those gents with mouthfuls of marshmallows were, but Jordo caught them on tape... This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*. *Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please! Audible® Free Trial Details Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

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

Welcome to Writing Excuses Season 4, featuring new, shorter episode titles! Also, if you don't count the bonus episodes or the Parsec Award Acceptance Speech, this is our 100th Episode! Brandon kicks this off by asking "What does Howard do that's funny?" and then by categorizing the sorts of things he finds Howard doing. Obviously this puts no pressure whatsoever on Howard to be funny during the podcast. Which is good, because he really wasn't, cold medicine notwithstanding. Again, we manage talk about humor without being funny. We manage to cover character-based humor, physical humor, and non-sequitur, brushing alongside cognitive humor and exaggeration as we go, but hey... we only had 15 minutes to work with. Oh, and we ran over by 4 minutes and fifty-seven seconds. Writing Prompt: Write something funny using non-sequiturs and cold medicine. This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*. *Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please! Audible® Free Trial Details Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

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

For starters, let's clear the air. Yes, the first episode of the new year is also the last episode of Writing Excuses Season 3. And yes, we'll be getting Season 2 and Season 3 on CDs pretty soon here. Collaboration! This is one of our all-time most requested topics, and we're covering it now because we still haven't done much actual collaborating but we want to talk about it anyway. Why? Because we each have some collaborations planned (including one for all three of us, but shhh... it's still a secret) and it will be fun to talk about this again in a year or so and argue about all the things we got wrong this time around. But you should still listen to what we say here in our collaborative infancy. That way you can lord it up over us when we flip-flop after having attempted to work together. You should also pay attention when we tell you beginning writers why you should not be collaborating. And then we'll give you some procedural tips for when you decide to collaborate anyway. Writing Prompt: Write a story (all by yourself) about a collaboration which goes horribly, horribly wrong. This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*. *Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please! Audible® Free Trial Details Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

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

Tragedy. It's just TRAGIC. Tragedy is also one of the classical forms that writers need to know how to work within. Why? Well... because the Greeks thought we should be forced to have strong emotional responses to literature. Writing Prompt: Write a delightful story about happy, cheerful anthropomorphic creatures who all die horribly. This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*. *Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please! Audible® Free Trial Details Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

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

What is an Antihero? There are lots of definitions of this word, so Dan boils it down to just three: The Frodo, The Punisher, and The Talented Mister Ripley. And that third definition is the one Brandon believes to be the most correct, at least in the strict literary sense. This was a difficult 'cast for Howard because he's familiar with Frodo and The Punisher, but has no experience with The Talented Mister Ripley beyond movie trailers. He gets by, though. He's seen a lot of movie trailers. Have a listen, and learn a lot. Writing Prompt: Write a true, classically-defined antihero in such a way that Howard will enjoy it. This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*. *Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please! Audible® Free Trial Details Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

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

This episode totally would have updated earlier if I'd only known sooner that it was ready to go. Jordo says he emailed me early this evening, but if he HAD then you'd have been listening to this by 8:00pm Sunday. So... how much of that do you believe? Is the Narrator lying to you, or is he just wrong? Maybe he is lying to himself, and thinks he's being honest with you. Most importantly, though, how does any of this apply to your writing? Well, that's what the podcast is for... Writing Prompt: Have an event occur, and then provide five different character perspectives on the event... none of which are completely accurate. Note: this episode updated a little late because I wanted an object lesson in the write-up, not because I was relaxing on the couch until 11:15pm. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

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