Writing Excuses

We have an exciting announcement! Writing Excuses is publishing a book, Now Go Write, which will feature writing from all of our hosts! Sign up for our newsletter to learn when our book is coming out! So, for our next few episodes, we’ll have each host share one of the topics that they have written a chapter about for the book. Today, we’re starting with Mary Robinette, who will be covering the...

Erin and Howard sat down with paleontologist Dr. Tara Lepore for a fascinating dive into the science—and storytelling potential—of deep time. Dr. Lepore explains why paleontology is about far more than dinosaurs and how mammal teeth can reveal “birth certificates” millions of years old. We hope you come away with new ways to think about science as story—and how to weave the vastness of deep time...

Erin describes her own writing process as, “a bunch of random practices thrown into a bag and shaken up." Nevertheless, for today’s episode, Erin managed to organize her processes into four categories: getting work, getting in, getting done, getting right. Listen as Erin gives us tips and tricks for freelancing, deadlines, and saying no. Homework: Write down all the tips and tricks you’ve learned...

We’re continuing our episodes focusing on our hosts’ personal writing practices. Like Mary Robinette’s. DongWon’s involves a bit of… chaos. DongWon’s day job as a literary agent is demanding and unpredictable, so they often have to fit in their writing process into their free time. They are also often collaborating with other authors and friends (often writing for games)—so how does all of this...

A lot of people ask published authors what their writing process is like, as if it is a key to being able to write. The only important process is the one that works for you. So, we’re going to let each of our hosts spend an episode explaining their own personal process. Our idea is that the best writing process is the one that works for you. Also, this is going to change over the course of your...

Today our hosts tell you why you don’t need to listen to all of our episodes—or even most of them. Each of our five hosts weighs in on how you can combine the topics, subtopics, and lenses that each episode features in order to create a structured path forward for your own writing journey. We start with a broad overview of this season’s structure. Why did we use the simple categories that most of...

We had the absolute joy of sitting down with Charlie Jane Anders, the author of the book we’ve focused on for our last four episodes (All the Birds in the Sky). We talked with Anders about POV, tone, and how she played around with humor —partly by occasionally using an omniscient POV! Anders also explained how to incorporate humor and whimsy, and what it feels like to take risks as an author in...

This is our final episode before we have Charlie Jane Anders on the podcast to talk about her writing process next week! Today we’re talking about intention by analyzing thematics, the author’s intent, and the way Anders uses tone and tradition to express the core ideas of the book. We also dive into the friction created in the two opposing viewpoints of the world that Anders presents. On one...

If you still want to read All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, you can purchase it here!We are looking today at the lens of when. But we’re not going to look at time periods—instead, we’re going to examine flashbacks and foreshadowing. “All the Birds in the Sky” takes place in four distinct times. For instance, one of the characters foreshadows a grim future for the children we’ve...

If you still want to read All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, you can purchase it here!Today we’re talking about places and place-moments. We’re looking at how Anders uses context, details, and relationships to create a deep, familiar, and authentic reading experience for us, even if we’ve never been to the locations in the story. In this episode we’re also analyzing how Anders...