Writing Excuses

Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab Let's talk about race, sort-of. Let's talk about creating races—species of people, really—which is a critically important activity in much of our worldbui...

10 Feb 201916min

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard When you're defining your world for the reader, some voice in the text must speak those definitions. This episode is about how we use character vo...

3 Feb 201917min

Your Hosts: Dan, Tempest, DongWon, and TJ This is the first of our Writing The Other episodes, in which we set out to help writers portray people who are unlike them. In this episode we're joined by ...

27 Jan 201918min

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Margaret, and Howard Margaret Dunlap joins us during season 14 to talk about worldbuilding. In this, her first episode with us, we talk about worlds in which a mo...

20 Jan 201917min

Your Hosts: Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab Mahtab Narsimhan joins us this year for a dozen episodes on worldbuilding, and this week we're talking about geography and biomes. These pieces of our set...

13 Jan 201918min

Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard Season 14 is all about worldbuilding¹, and we're kicking it off with a discussion of when you do that bit of work. Do you handle worldbuilding bef...

6 Jan 201921min

Your Hosts: Howard, Mary, and Dan, with NASA astronaut Thomas Marshburn. Last week's episode may have sounded like the last one for 2018, but that's an artifact of December having five Sundays rather...

30 Dec 201820min

Your Hosts: Brandon, Valynne, Dan, and Howard We decided to wrap up this year on character by letting Brandon ask us some deep questions. "We decided" might be the wrong phrase, because nobody except...

25 Dec 201825min