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Writing Excuses 5.14: Visual Components of Novels with Scott Westerfeld

Scott Westerfeld joins Brandon and Howard for a discussion of the visual components of novels. His novel Leviathan is set in an alternate history 1914, and is designed to look like a book from 1914,...

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Writing Excuses 5.30: Writing Action

Dan and Howard are joined by Larry Correia and Robison Wells (Rob is the younger of the Wells brothers), and with the enthusiastic support of a live audience at LTUE they discuss writing action....

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Writing Excuses 5.31: Writing Romance

Sarah Eden and Robison Wells join Dan and Howard at LTUE to talk about writing romance. Sarah writes in the romance genre, but we’re not focusing on the genre — we’re talking about writing romance...

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Writing Excuses 6.9: Microcasting 2 Electric Boogaloo

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...

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Writing Excuses 6.20: Endings

Lou Anders joins Dan, Howard, and Mary for a discussion of endings. We begin by talking about how important it is to “stick your landing” at the end of the book, and then recap the Hollywood Formula to...

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Writing Excuses 7.9: Microcasting

Microcasting! This is a fancy word for “Q&A” — we pick some questions from Twitter, and do what amounts to nine mini-episodes of Writing Excuses with a side of bacon. This time around the questions...

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Writing Excuses 7.21: Project In Depth — Force Multiplication

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....

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Writing Excuses 7.33: Authentic Emotion

Writers, like actors, have to animate the inanimate, and evoke emotions that we may not have ever felt, and in this episode we talk about the things that we do in order to accomplish that. We talk...

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Writing Excuses 7.38: Writing Love Scenes

Shanna Germain joins Brandon, Mary, and Howard in front of a live audience at GenCon Indy to talk about writing love scenes. They’re not easy to get right, and they can be even more difficult to talk...

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Writing Excuses 7.49: Beginnings Revisited

We haven’t discussed beginnings this in a while, and when we did, we summed it up with “in late, out early.” Now we’re going to talk about what needs to be present when you’re “in.” We talk about tone,...

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Writing Excuses 8.15: Narrative Rhythm

We begin with an audio glitch and a jumbling of our usual intro. Why? Because it breaks rhythm, and sometimes you may actually want to do that. Narrative rhythm is the pattern of story elements and...

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Writing Excuses 8.18: Blocking

Blocking! What is it, why is it important, and how can you do it well? We begin with a definition (blocking is the part of the narrative that tells the reader where the characters are, where the...

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Writing Excuses 8.21: What the Avengers did Right

We here at Writing Excuses enjoyed Marvel’s The Avengers. This isn’t a movie review, though. This is a discussion of what the movie did right from a writer’s standpoint. The things we focus on? Dialog...

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Writing Excuses 8.27: Chapter Breakdowns

What determines our chapter breaks? How do we handle POV shifts, scene-sequel balance, and other considerations when we’re carving our stories into chapters? Dan starts with a discussion of the POV...

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Writing Excuses 8.31: Combining Dialogue, Blocking, and Description

The combination of dialogue, blocking, and description, can be considered from a couple of directions. The first is the idea that we’re really talking about making every element do double or triple...

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Writing Excuses Season 2 Episode 21: Fight Scenes

 Rob Wells joins the Writing Excuses crew for a second ‘cast, this time dealing with fight scenes. We talk about good blocking versus a bad blow-by-blow, and cover a few of the factors that may dictate...

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Writing Excuses Season 2 Episode 15: Knowing When To Begin

When do you know when you’re ready to begin? What does that question even mean? Apparently Brandon gets asked it a lot, though, so he posed it for the group. How do you know when that story in your...

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Writing Excuses Season 2 Episode 13: Violence

All three of your Writing Excuses hosts include a measure of violence in their written work. So Brandon, Dan, and Howard decide to clear the air a little bit. Why do we write about violence? What does...

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Writing Excuses Season 2 Episode 10: The Boring Parts

Dave Farland, aka Dave Wolverton again joins the Writing Excuses team, and helps us discuss boredom. Specifically, we cover how to deal with it, how to go about writing those “boring parts” that come...

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Writing Excuses Season 2 Episode 8: The Three Act Structure with Bob Defendi

With Brandon still mysteriously missing, Professor Bob Defendi returns to take Dan and Howard on a magical journey through the three-act format: every step, every element, every nuance of this very...

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