Writing Excuses - Podcast

I have not listened to Writing excuses yet as I’m still going through the WOTF podcast(maybe 30sessions left)

I’ll check it out soon but it might not hold my interest based on your description, especially the “painful” approach to female characters.

Honestly overall I recommend it; a lot of their back-to-basics are great, and a few episodes have been real eye-openers. Thankfully the bad ones are so obvious, at least they were to me, that they were still good lessons in what not to do.

And thank you for reminding me about the WOTF podcast. It's been on my to-listen list for a while but I keep forgetting to put it on my phone.

Writing Excuses has been running for a LONG time. They added a woman in season 8 or 9 (Mary Robinette Kowal) and have since done a really great job with representation and diversity of opinion. I've listened to seasons 10-present and recommend them. Never listened to the older seasons, guess I didn't miss anything.

I've listened to every episode and seasons 14-15 twice. I highly recommend it. They're great. I especially love those older brainstorm episodes (forget which season 9 maybe?) because it taught me how to think about my story before writing it. 

Posted by: @scribblesatdusk

I've listened to every episode and seasons 14-15 twice. I highly recommend it. They're great. I especially love those older brainstorm episodes (forget which season 9 maybe?) because it taught me how to think about my story before writing it. 

That's something I would definitely be interested in giving a listen to. I've changed a lot about how I go about conceiving a story recently, in particular learning to know when an idea is ready to start working on. When I first started entering the contest, I was still writing a lot like I did when I was a teenager--jumping on one idea that I had that intrigued or excited me, feet first, then just writing and seeing where it goes. In fairness, that did produce some good stories at times, but it also produced a lot of junk.

These days I think more through my ideas, let them evolve, and only start writing once I have a lot more conviction in the idea. And while it still doesn't always yield only the class of results I might always like to, I would say that the stories I produce now are, nonetheless, consistently better than they used to be.

I'll have to see if I can find a way to pin down these episodes specifically...

(Addendum: ooo, their podcast has a handy-dandy keyword tag thingy! It doesn't work right now, but Google's cache suggests that they hit this subject a number of times in seasons 7 and 8 -- for anyone curious, I searched for 'brainstorming site:writingexcuses.com' in Google, which pulls up a list of matching entries on that domain, which lets Google's cache function as a temporary index while their site isn't working. Of course, if their site is working, then it looks like you can pull up the list of relevant episodes at this domain directly: https://writingexcuses.com/tag/brainstorming/)