Writing Excuses

Pitching your work... authors often have difficulty with it. Even authors who have no trouble spinning a fantastic story may find themselves at a loss telling people ABOUT that story in a way that makes it compelling.

We cover three kinds of pitches -- the one-liner or "elevator pitch," the three- or four-paragraph explanation, and the in-depth synopsis. We also talk about the sorts of situations in which you're going to need these.

Few skills are as important to new authors, and few weaknesses can be as career-limiting.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin, narrated by Don Leslie

Writing Prompt: Take three of your favorite books and write one of each kind of pitch for each of those books. Now convince a friend of yours to read one of those books using one of those pitches.

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Peter Ahlstrom, assistant to Brandon Sanderson, and Valerie Dowbenko, assistant to Pat Rothfuss, join Brandon and Dan to talk about what they do for "their authors."

While this may seem like an incredible luxury -- most of you listeners aren't going to rush out and hire an assistant -- there are things that can be farmed out from the earliest stages of your career as a professional writer. The goal, of course, is for the writer to find more time to write.

It's also a lot of fun to hear Peter and Valerie talk about how they keep Brandon and Pat writing, and to listen to them talk about some of the unusual things they do as part of this job.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, narrated by Wil Wheaton

Writing Prompt: First person once removed -- give us a story from the perspective of a first person narrator who is NOT the cool person.

The Shoes, Pat Has All of Them: Because that's what Valerie did for him.

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.

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Microcasting again! The questions we fielded from the Twitterverse include:

* How do you hold the whole story in your head when it's a thousand pages long?

* What steps do you use when creating a character?

* As an outliner, when do you start putting in the details?

* How do you patch plot holes?

* How do you come up with names?

* Is there one writing skill you'd like to get better at?

* Writing groups: what do you look for?

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Hard Magic, by Larry Correia, narrated by Bronson Pinchot

As Promised, Here is a Link: The Everchanging Book of Names

 

Speaking of the Twitterverse: The Writing Excuses team is BrandSanderson, MaryRobinette, HowardTayler, JohnCleaver (Dan), and MonkeySloth (Producer Jordo).

Writing Prompt: Someone has to save the world from an intercontinental ballistic hairball, but their keyboard layout has been changed.

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.

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Cyberpunk: What is it? Why is it? We've mentioned it before, but we've never attempted to tackle it.

We begin with an attempt to define cyberpunk (the literary genre), which is typically near-future SF, anti-establishment, early dystopian fiction featuring connectivity, body modification, and culture shifts. We argue a bit over the finer points, which fits the topic perfectly.

We move on to discuss how you might set about writing cyberpunk, which is, as Dan points out, the SF genre we're catching up to. We almost live in that world already. You're going to need to do some research, reading up on the genre and looking closely at where current technology is taking us.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson, narrated by Jennifer Wiltsie.

Writing Prompt: A cyberpunk setting in which tattoos are the equivalent of implanted tech... and somebody has hacked your tattoo.

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.

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Microcasting! It's our high-speed Q&A! Here are the Q's, listen to the 'cast for the A's.

* Is it still safe to go the commercial publishing route?

* How do you find the balance when writing serious stories with silliness in them?

* What are the alternatives to three-act structure?

* Do you ever lose your drive, and what re-inspires you when you do?

* How does your writing life affect your non-writing life?

* What was the defining moment in your life where you decided to become a writer?

* How effective are book trailers?

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: 1421: The Year China Discovered America, by Gavin Menzies, narrated by Simon Vance

Writing Prompt: Give us a story in which writers are using actual fantastic creatures in the process of writing fantasy -- ink from unicorn horns, elf-skin parchment, etc.

Promised Liner Note Links: Dan's 7-point Story Structure,

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.

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Filk.

It sounds like a bad word.

Okay, what it actually sounds like, provided you've fallen in among actual filkers, is AWESOME. It's music named after a typo, and sung around subjects near and dear to genre fans.

Tom Smith, filker extraordinaire and musician magnifique, joins Brandon and Howard at Penguicon to talk about writing music, and to talk about the Filk genre in particular.

Our only episode with actual music in it, this is the last episode of Season 5, and Tom Smith sends us home with a brilliant little song he made up using requests from those in attendance. Tom, we expect an eventual epic song-cycle centering around "The Wizard of Wheat."

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett, narrated by Stephen Briggs.

Writing Prompt: Tom ended up singing his response to our writing prompt. What can you do with the words "wizard" and "bakery?"

Additional References for Filk: The FuMP, Filk resources on the Internet, and (per Tom's suggestion) a YouTube search for Filk.

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.

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*Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please!

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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.

John Scalzi joins Brandon and Howard at Penguicon for a discussion of writing dialog. John's advice begins thusly: "start reading outside Science Fiction and Fantasy." It's good advice regardless, but John's justification for it is fascinating.

Dialog in prose is not very much like real-life dialog. Your goal as a writer is to convince the reader that it is. And that's what we're going to try to teach you how to do. Or at least how to learn how to do.

 

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Fuzzy Nation, John Scalzi's reboot of H.Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, narrated by Wil Wheaton

Writing Prompt: Write a dialog between someone ordering at a drive-through and someone taking the order, but the person taking the order is being held up at gunpoint.

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.

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Okay, let's have some fun. Not that we weren't having fun for the previous 150+ episodes, mind you. But this is extra-fun.

Brandon, Dan, and Howard take the urban fantasy writing prompt about big-box stores and decide to brainstorm a story out of it. When we begin this 'cast all we have is the prompt.

Then we brainstorm, plowing through setting, character, conflict, and story.

By the end of the 'cast we're ready to make a pitch to an editor and sell the book.

Okay, maybe not. But the book is totally ready for us to sit down and write. Or, better yet, for YOU to sit down and write.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Kitty and the Midnight Hour, by Carrie Vaughn, narrated by Marguerite Gavin

Writing Prompt: Take what we've done in this 'cast and try to come up with a plot and an ending. Alternatively, take the list of competition films from the most recent Sundance Film Festival and pick six that are somehow part of a Fey plot.

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.

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*Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please!

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Let's talk about bibles. Specifically, story bibles. What are they, why do we use them, why might we NOT use them, and what tools are working for us?

Howard again plugs wikidpad, which he converted Brandon to, and which Dan Wells just couldn't bring himself to love. Dan uses several different Open Office files. The important thing, though, is that when we need to store information about the book in someplace besides the book itself, we write it down in our story bibles.

Dan talks about his new project, how important the story bible was for that, and what sorts of things absolutely have to go in there. Howard talks about the sorts of Schlock-tech that often end up

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Freakonomics, by Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner, narrated by Stephen J. Dubner.

Writing Prompt: Someone is a were-animal. Pick an animal that hasn't been done. Were-banana-slug, perhaps?

9:40 through 10:10: Yes, we went kind of quiet there. Somebody kicked a cable, maybe?

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.

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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.

It's time to talk about alpha readers, and we start with a caveat from Howard: "I don't want to read your book." Let's face it, we here at Writing Excuses might be great alpha readers, but we're not YOUR alpha readers. We can't be your back-door to fame and fortune as a genre fiction writer. The good news? There are good alpha readers out there waiting for you. You just need to know how to find them.

We talk about conventions a bit, those places that are full of genre-fiction lovers who might be able to help. We talk about Brandon's writing group (his alpha readers) and how his agent and editor are actually beta readers. This contrast illustrates the sort of things you should be looking for in an alpha reader. We talk about Howard's alpha reader (Sandra) and how she has to look at a script with no pictures, no blocking, and no dialog tags and figure out whether or not it's going to work. This illustrates how she's a genius and Howard's just a hack.

Brandon and Dan also cover what they do not want in alpha readers -- poor delivery of criticism and proof-reading topping the list.

And then we finally get around to some tricks for building a solid stable of alpha readers. It's not something you're going to pull off overnight.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: The Dragon Factory: The Joe Ledger Novels, Book 2 by Jonathan Mayberry, narrated by Ray Porter.

Writing Prompt: Any time you've caught cold you're actually being possessed. Gesundheit.

Loud Howard: brought to you by a too-close microphone. Jordo did his best to fix this in post, but we don't record on multiple channels so there's only so much that can be done on our budget.

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.

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*Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please!

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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.