Writing Excuses

The villain problem, as we define it here at the beginning of the 'cast, is when the heroes are less proactive than the villain, when they spend most of the book doing little more than reacting to the cool things the villains do. It's one reason that villains are often more interesting, more memorable, than the protagonists against whom they face off. The villain steals the show.

So we talk about how to offset this. There are lots of tools available -- focusing on the hero's passions, giving the protagonist an internal conflict independent of anything coming from the villain's plotting, and building a solid acceptance of the "call to action" fairly early in the story.

Halfway through we arrive at the conclusion that the villain problem isn't actually a problem with the villain. It's a hero problem, and that's probably the key piece you need to come up with a solution for your book.

Mary talks to us in depth about Glamour in Glass, and yes, there are spoilers. She discusses the challenges she faced with the project, and some of the inspirations and key concepts that drove it.

Brandon, Dan, and Howard fire questions at Mary, and while she's supposed to be on the spot she fields everything with aplomb (with the exception of that one surprise at 4:42.) We learn about the military applications of the glamour magic system, a system that up until now we'd only seen in the drawing rooms of high society.

The content here is particularly fascinating (and useful!) if you're looking to write alternate history, as Mary goes into quite a bit of detail about what went into the rather significant changes she made to the history in her books. Her research process is worthy of your close attention.

Hello Kitty at 4:42: The cat's name is "Pinecone" and its arrival was unexpected.

It's important to be original, but is it possible to be TOO original? Further, is it possible that we over-value originality?

Dan raises the question in regards to James Cameron's Avatar, which made lots of money and was widely enjoyed, but which was also roundly criticized for being a story we've already heard before. Christopher Paolini's Eragon is similarly criticized. It is solid execution upon a story cycle that science fiction and fantasy fans are already intimately familiar with.

Howard talks about borrowing "uplift" from David Brin, Mary points out that David Brin borrowed it from Christian Missionaries in Africa, and Brandon then ponders aloud whether this 'cast is going to be of any use to any of you.

Each of us have struggled with this. It's exceedingly unlikely that you won't. The point? Originality is not the be-all, end-all some make it out to be, and authors need to take care not to pursue it to the point that they miss other objectives.

Meme of the Week: "If I pee far, it's because I stand on the shoulders of giants." -- Howard Tayler

Recorded live at Utah Valley University, here's another Q&A episode from the LTUE Symposium!

The questions:

* What was Brandon's plan with Mistborn and the themes regarding establishment?

* Why does Kelsier shrug so much? (This leads into a fun discussion of "tells.")

* How do you know when to stop a chapter? What about expanding it?

* How do you make your prose more transparent?

* How do you decide who and what to cut?

* What do you do to filter out the extraneous ideas that come while you're writing?

* What can collaborators do in order to create a single "voice" for the book?

* What's the best way to tackle a long back-story?

Want answers? You'll just have to listen...

Capers! They're delicious on bagels with lox and cream cheese. Also, tricky to write well, and often called "heists."

Dan explains the caper/heist format to us using Ocean's Eleven as the model, so we can identify the key elements that are typically present. Brandon explains the key difference between the two styles: In the first, the reader doesn't get the whole plan, and the plan goes off without a hitch. In the second, the reader gets the whole plan, but the plan goes wrong and the team has to improvise. Ocean's Eleven is an example of the first. The Italian Job and Mission Impossible are examples of the second.

One challenge writers face, as opposed to filmmakers, is keeping the reader in the dark for an Ocean's Eleven-style caper without cheating.

We talk about how the formation of a team of experts or specialists is critical to the form, but also works across lots of other forms. Beware using these teams as a substitute for character development, however.

The combined viewing time of our example films is, quite frankly, oppressive. Don't watch them all in one sitting. But if you do, that was all part of our insidious plan to keep you busy while somebody else steals your stuff.

What is a Pig in a Poke: Basically, it's a confidence scheme involving a substitution.

There are a lot of things that Our Very Own Brandon Sanderson can get away with. In The Way of Kings, he gets away with not just one, but TWO prologues. In this 'cast Mary, Dan, and Howard get to grill Brandon about his opening epic, The Way of Kings.

This is the second entry in our "Project in Depth" series in which three of the cast members gang up on the fourth and ask them all about one of their books.

We get answers about the prelude/prologue decision, the extremism of the setting, and lots of information about why this book needed three different major character POVs. Brandon talks in detail about some of the character problems he encountered with Dalinar in the early drafts of the book. If anything, this part of the discussion points up the importance of a good re-write.

Finally, Brandon talks about his naming conventions.

Coming to you pre-recorded from the boomy basement of Brandon Sanderson, here's an episode about time travel. Oddly, there's an audio artifact here where we're hearing faint echoes of those speaking, and some of them precede the stuff they're echoing. "Oddly?" More like "Serendipitously." It's a shame we didn't know that would happen. If we really WERE time travelers we'd have seen that coming.

We begin by categorizing three major types of time travel by the movies they appear in: "Twelve Monkeys," "Back to the Future," and "A Sound of Thunder" (the short story, though. Not the movie.) We then talk about the tools each of these provide to storytellers. We also talk about the challenges involved in writing a time travel story, and how to overcome these challenges by writing about the things that will always be interesting, rather than focusing on the time travel itself. We also talk a little about time travel clichés, perhaps by way of warning you.

A microcast is our word for an asynchronous Q&A episode: you ask us tons of questions online, either through twitter or facebook or our listenermail account (on the sidebar), and we want to answer as many of them as we can. Not every answer can fill an entire episode, though, so we take the smaller ones and cover a bunch of them at once in a microcast. This week we take a brief, pithy look at the following:

* Prologues and epilogues

* Using drawings to get across settings

* Simple tricks for naming things

* Would you self publish if you had a do over?

* How do you keep a powerful character interesting?

* Foreshadowing

* Trimming

* Flashbacks

We're doing something new, and Howard gets to go first.

The plan is to take something one of us has completed, and which you've had ample time to read, and grill the creator about the project. Obviously there will be spoilers. Also, we're going to run a bit long on these.

First up in our "Project In Depth" series: Howard's most recent online volume of Schlock Mercenary, Force Multiplication. You can read it for free at the link above. It's been nominated in the Best Graphic Story category for this year's Hugo Awards, this entire episode features Howard on the spot answering questions about the project from Brandon, Dan, and Mary.

The biggest issue discussed is the female perspective. In Force Multiplication Howard challenged himself by casting all of the leads for the story as women, and it changed the storytelling process for him significantly.

He also talks about the setting -- Haven Hive -- and how he needed the setting to functionally isolate a small ensemble cast. He talks about naming a little, and finally talks about how he turned a sterile-sounding high-concept plot into an interesting story.

Next up on our Project In Depth series: The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson. You have been warned. We'll also be doing Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamour in Glass and Dan Wells' Hollow City. We're NOT doing this back-to-back. You've got a little time.

Thing That Would Make Howard Sound Smarter: Remove every last "you know" from his dialog. (Note that this would not actually increase Howard's IQ.)

Michael R. Collings and his son Michaelbrent Collings join us live at UVU to talk with us about cathartic horror. In particular, we talk about how the catharsis is part of what makes horror such a delightful genre. Michael leads with an example from his own writing, a novel called The Slab. Brandon talks about the physiological response, and Mary compares the cautionary aspects of horror to the early (read: pre-Disney) fairy tales. Dan cautions us against didacticism, and explains about how the underlying story is usually quite different from what's on the page. Michaelbrent further explains how our personal catharses empower us to write good stories and invoke similar responses from our readers.

Free Shot: No, Howard wasn't even in the room for this episode.