Writing Excuses

Brad Beaulieu and Jaym Gates join us from the GenCon Indy Writing Symposium to talk about good versus evil, and how your character might swing between the two. And it's all about that swing. Moral grey areas are more interesting if we move through them. We talk about how we swing the pendulum, what difficulties we encounter, and what sorts of things we want to have happen to our reader when it moves.

Nalo Hopkinson joins us for this episode, which we recorded before a live audience of Out Of Excuses Workshop & Retreat attendees. October's master class episodes focus on endings, and in this first installment we talk about what an ending really is. It's obviously the last part of the book, but the gestalt of "ending" is so much more than just "The End," and it's important that we understand all that before committing ourselves to being done writing it.

(Note: You can start writing your ending any time you want. Stopping writing your ending, and being done with it? There's the rub.)

This episode was engineered aboard The Independence of the Seas by Bert Grimm, and mastered ashore in a secret laboratory by Alex Jackson.

Kevin J. Anderson joined us at Sasquan/WorldCon 73 to take questions about plot twists. Here are the questions that came in from our live audience:

* Genre Twists: good, bad, or ugly?

* Can you compare and contrast a good plot twist with a bad one?

* What is the biggest mistake professional authors make with regarding plot twists?

 

Our second installment for the Master Class's month of context covers the way dialog between characters may change meaning depending upon the context you create for them. This context may be the setting or genre, and it may also be the "beats" in which you describe what a person is doing while speaking. We talk about how to make this work for you, how to avoid some of the common pitfalls in writing dialog.

Liner Notes: Howard mentioned episode 10.11: Project-in-Depth: "Parallel Perspectives". If you need to go back and have a listen, now it's easier!

This month's wildcard episode comes to you from the 2015 GenCon Indy Writers' Symposium, where Dan and Howard had the opportunity to interview Susan J. Morris and Marc Tassin. Susan is one of the finest moderators the symposium has ever seen, and Marc directs the event, building the schedule around good panelists and great moderators. Their advice is insightful, fresh, and spot-on. If you ever find yourself scheduled to speak on, or moderate, a panel, this episode is a great listen for beginning your preparation.

We've talked about plot twists before. This episode covers the way in which the type of plot twist is dependent on, or signaled by, the context of the story. Getting plot twists right may mean surprising the reader, but it's just as important to have the twist surprise the character.

SPOILER ALERT: Avengers: Age of Ultron, and The Sixth Sense, among others. It's hard to talk about plot twists without talking about some really good ones.

This month's master-class topic is "Context," but the Q&A at the end of the month (coming real soon!) is on plot twists, featuring a special guest who joined us at Sasquan, the 73rd Annual World Science Fiction Convention.

Charlie N. Holmberg, who was recently signed by Amazon's 47 North imprint, joined us in front of a live audience it Sasquan (the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention) to talk about breaking in to the industry. Brandon and Dan broke in a decade ago, and Howard never actually bothered breaking in.

This episode is brought to you by David Farland's writing workshops at mystorydoctor.com, whose URL completely escaped Howard during the episode. Here are two coupon codes:

* August50 gets $50 off any course regularly priced $399

* August100 gets $100 off any course regularly priced $749

 

We wrap up this month's discussion of pacing with a Q&A. Here are the questions we pulled out of the virtual hat (read: Twitter) for answering during the episode:

* What are some early indications of a pacing problem?

* How do you chart pacing so that it remains even?

* Can you control pacing using scene/sequel format?

* How do you handle character progression during travel without making it choppy?

* It feels like new authors are required to deliver breakneck pacing. Is this true?

Marie Brennan joins us again, this time for a discussion about writing combat. She's studied fencing, combat choreography, and is *this close* to having a black belt in shotokan karate, bringing a valuable perspective to the discussion. Also, she's written an ebook called Writing Fight Scenes, so she knows how to talk about this stuff.

We discuss some of our favorite fight scenes in movies and in books, why they work well, and how we can go about creating those sorts of things ourselves.

That Scene We Couldn't Stop Gushing About: Here's a no-Netflix-membership-required version of the Daredevil fight scene. It's a teaser from Netflix, but it's unabridged. For context, Daredevil is looking for a kidnapped child, and has tracked the boy's captors to this hallway.

 

As we said last week, we're talking about pacing, and we've divided the concept into two parts. Last week we covered "sense of progress." This week we're talking about the passage of time. We discuss the tools we use, some of which are very mechanical (scene breaks, chapter breaks) and some of which are quite intricate, and require finesse to get right.