Writing Excuses

I have this sense that if you find smart people and put them in a room to talk about anything, that whatever they say will, at least, be insightful and most probably also enjoyable.

Writing Excuses is built on a similar format. Four really smart fiction writers, who are also friends and have been talking to each other over a microphone for years, speak for about 15 minutes about the art and craft of writing fiction - usually genre fiction and fairly often specifically science fiction or fantasy. The result is insightful and enjoyable in dollops!!

 

Reading fiction is known to have made readers more empathetic, but if these authors are any thing to go by, writing fiction really stops you from judging people but make you pause to understand them - whether these turn up as characters in your book or as readers of your story. They work thru clichés and harmful generalisations that kill your story and don't deliver for the world we live in.

At 15 minutes long these conversations between Dan Wells, Howard Taylor, Brandon Sanderson, (my favourite) Mary Robinette Kowal and occasionally their guests are not that long, but far more full of smarts than the authors often pretend.