Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 11.39: Elemental Relationships Q&A, with Greg van Eekhout

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/09/25/11-39-elemental-relationship-qa-with-greg-van-eekhout/

Q&A Summary:
Q: What is your favorite way to establish relationships? Is it through dialogue or is it through background or is it through narrative? How is it?
A: Dialogue, because it can quickly establish the relationship. Action, because it shows characters that know each other well.
Q: How do you recover when a relationship between a hero and a supporting character starts to feel forced?
A: Throw something in that messes up expectations. Banter.
Q: How do you show a best friend relationship?
A: The same as for a romantic relationship, intimacy in dialogue and a degree of physical comfort with each other. Leave out the gaze. Best friends stay together even when they fight. Best friends are the ones who are still there after everyone else leaves.
Q: When doing romance, how do you decide to move fast or slow?
A: It depends on the kind of book. Erotica? Jump in fast and stay there. Others, much more slowly.
Q: Do you try to make the nature of the relationship between characters clear, or do you often leave things to subtext? Do you use different techniques to write different types?
A: Yes. Relationships in Schlock Mercenary depend on whether people like working together, and on relative rank. How close characters are governs how much subtext you use.
Q: How do you approach writing a relationship with a transsexual character without making it stiff or unnatural?
A: Deferred. Talk to people who have primary experience.
Q: What are your favorite relationships to write?
A: Happy marriages. Functional families. New friendships. Prickly antagonists. Working relationships where characters are discovering each other's competencies.
Q: How do I write a starting relationship, a friendship or things between two characters that the reader doesn't even know well yet? How does someone start off with that?
A: What do the two characters need and want? Similar, so they work together, or opposed, so they work against each other? Either way, use banter as they explore how they are going to interact.
Q: How do you transform love into hate and vice versa?
A: Time. Money. Betrayal.
Q: When writing a love triangle, how do you keep from making it obvious the final couple ahead of time?
A: Make them both plausible choices.
Q: Recommendations for books that focus on familial friend relationships rather than romance.
A: The witches in Terry Pratchett's Discworld. Mother-daughter in A Wrinkle In Time series Nancy Drew and her dad, Monica Mars and her dad.
( Relationships mean never having to say you're sorry? )

[Brandon] Well, why don't we end with a writing prompt instead? Greg, you've got a writing prompt for us.
[Greg] Yeah. How about take a look at the actual place that you live, the city or the neighborhood, the general region. Find some source of magic that is specific to that location that if your story were taken somewhere else, taking place someplace else, the magic would have to be different. Something endemic to where you live.
[Brandon] All right. So, thank you, audience at ComicCon.
[Whoo!]
[Brandon] Thank you, Greg van Eekhout.
[Greg] Thank you guys. This is fun.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Writing Excuses 11.17: Elemental Adventure Q&A

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/04/24/11-17-elemental-adventure-qa/

Q&A Summary:
Q: In an adventure story, what is more liked by readers? If protagonists go through many different incidents and locations, or a fewer number of incidents and locations, but that are similar to each other and have a theme?
A: Do them both! It depends. Big globetrotting tale, more cool exotic locations are better. Smaller scale, more focused. Adventure stories need lots of exotic settings, using the element of adventure to enhance may not need that.
Q: What lessons can we take from your favorite adventure games for writing adventure fiction?
A: Multiple levels of terrain and that environment you can interact with are more interesting. Different characters, different strengths; so include different kinds of adventure, chase scenes, fight scenes, talking scenes. Make sure there is something personal at risk for the character.
Q: With all the superhero franchises around, what are some tips on writing adventure stories outside of fight scenes and world ending consequences?
A: Exotic locations don't have to include a fight scene. Great adventures don't even need villains. Use accelerated timebombs – escaping the burning building, getting out of the path of the avalanche, getting to the hospital. Two different people trying to get the same thing in an exotic location makes an adventure!
Q: Are there tropes that have been overdone need to be avoided in regards to adventure fiction?
A: Tropes are ingredients, not inherently bad. What you do with it and the ingredients you combine it with make the difference. If adventure is the only thing a scene is doing, that may be a problem. Advance the plot, reveal stuff about characters, mix in other ingredients. Make your adventure scenes complications that change the story or the characters, not just obstacles in the way.
Q: Do you have any suggestions for non-Western, nontraditional styles of adventure that could provide variety or a fresh take on things for readers?
A: Grab a bunch of books and read them. Consider the kung fu final fight where the bad guy faces a whole group of heroes.
Q: How do you make the journey exciting? Do you have to include all the details to it? If you skip a bunch of it, how do you get across to the reader the character moments that I have taken place during the parts that you skip of the journey?
A: Think about what you're trying to accomplish. Different stories focus more or less on the journey. Skip the boring parts, trust the reader to fill in between the high points. If you can find a way to make the journey not boring, put it in.

( A fight, a chase, an ambulance racing to the hospital... It's an adventure! )
[Brandon] I'm going to have to shut it down here. I'm sorry for all of you that put questions. There were 54 responses and we answered like seven of them, if that many. But we thank you very much for listening. We're going to point you at some homework for next time, for our next elemental genre. So I want you for your homework to make a list of set pieces, really cool places that people could visit. I then want you to go a step further, and I want you to say, "How does my main character entering this place, interacting this place, change who they are?" We don't want you to just go to cool places, we want those cool places to change your story and change your characters in interesting ways. That is what I think will make adventure fiction kind of go up a level for you. Now, as I said, we'll be moving on to horror next week. We want you to brace yourselves for that. Dan's going to make you afraid. But until then, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Writing Excuses 6.28: Interstitial Art

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/12/11/writing-excuses-6-28-interstitial-art/

Key Points: Interstitial art falls in the interstices between recognized genres. Beware beta readers and others pushing you towards the genre of their choice. Write what is important to you. Dialogue with your readers can help separate "this isn't what I expected" from "I don't understand." Don't put yourself in a box unless you want to. Consider a local salon.
( between the cracks of the keyboard... )
[Mary] I thought you were going to do that. Oh! So, for your writing prompt today, try to write something that doesn't fit neatly into the boxes. Maybe pick a genre and look at it and go, "Okay. Well, these are the tropes," and defy them.
[Dan] All right. Well, excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

Writing Excuses 5.20: More Dialogue Exercises

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/01/16/writing-excuses-5-20-more-dialog-exercises/

Key Points: Make sure characters have different personalities. A little banter goes a long way. Practice and good writing group comments can help. Think about how to evoke character and make it interesting. Beware narrative and description forced into dialogue. Keep the dialogue natural. Short, the way most people talk. Trust your readers to make connections, to put things together and figure out what is going on and why.
( exercises by the listeners )
[Brandon] I'm going to read those. We'll just skip the writing prompt. I'm just going to end this by reading some Saberhagen. All right?
[Dan] OK. Nice.
[Brandon] Hear me, for I am Ardneh. Ardneh who rides the elephant, who wields the lightning, who rends fortifications as the rushing passage of time consumes cheap cloth. You slay me in this avatar, but I live on in other human beings. I am Ardneh, and in the end, I will slay thee, and thou wilt not live on.
Hear me, Ekuman. Neither by day nor by night will I slay thee. Neither with the blade nor with the bow... neither by the edge of the hand nor with the fist... neither with the wet nor with the dry.

The next line is him dying.
[Dan] Sweet. Talk about promises to the reader.
[Brandon] Yeah. There we are. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 31: Line Editing Dialogue

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/08/08/writing-excuses-4-31-line-editing-dialog/

Key Points: Look at various ways to rewrite, and consider which works best for your purposes. Dialogue is an imitation of speech that feels realistic, not a transcript. Consider the voice of the character. Watch out for said-bookisms, adverbs (aka Tom Swifties), and "seem to"s. Make sure snappy retorts snap.
( Lots and lots of line editing... )
[Brandon] All right. Writing prompt this week was given to us by Producer Jordo who really, really, really wants you to write some stories called, "The Importance of Being Earnest Goes to Jail." Or, no, "Earnest goes to Camp?"
[Dan] Or to jail. I'm sure you could take any Earnest movie and mash it up with Oscar Wilde and come up with an abomination that we would all love to hear.
[Brandon] We want a mashup of an earnest movie with Oscar Wilde. So there's your writing prompt. You might have an excuse this time to not write.
[Howard] You've got a couple of good excuses, but please write anyway. Because you're writers. Right?
[Brandon, Dan] Right.
[Brandon] Bye-bye.
[Howard] That was awful.

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 24: Writing Comics with Jake Black

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/08/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-24-writing-comics-with-jake-black/

Key Points: Comic scripts need to be clear enough in stage directions and dialogue for the rest of the creative team to figure out what's going on. Be prepared to adjust and tweak. Comic characters don't talk a lot -- 20 or fewer words in a balloon. It's a visual medium, and dialogue and captions eat up art space.
( Inside the Fortress of Solitude )
[Dan] We are running far over time, so we are going to cut this. Please tune in next week when we will talk about how to get into the business of writing comics, and how to succeed and stay in the business of writing comics. Your writing prompt for today is to write a story -- you can do this as prose or you can do it as a comic script -- in which Superman swoops into a room, kicks something undefined, and then turns into Spiderman.

Writing Excuses Episode 32: Talking Exposition with Patrick Rothfuss

from http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/09/15/writing-excuses-episodes-32-talking-exposition-with-patrick-rothfuss/

Key points: don't start with info dumps. Avoid essays, police artist sketches, thesis statements, repeating. Use three good details, and characters in action. Toss readers into the world, and move the story and the characters forward. Arguments are good. Make every sentence do more than one thing. Give your readers a little tease, then wait. Make the exposition a payoff instead of an entry price.
( to da dump, to da dump, to da dump, dump, dump )
Take one thing that's unimportant and explain the heck out of it. Take something else that is very important and don't explain it all.