19.10: Introducing Our Close Readings Series
Writing Excuses
Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 2024
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You’ve probably seen us posting about our Close Reading Series, and in his episode, we finally officially introduce it!
For most of the remainder of 2024, we’ll be diving into five core elements of writing by focusing on five different literary texts. We’ll spend five episodes on each one, and then we’re going to… drumroll please… interview the author(s)!
As you know, we’ve spent lots of time reading, writing, talking, and recording our thoughts about different elements of the craft. But this year, we wanted to ground our episodes in specific texts that you could read along– and analyze– with us!
Below is the schedule for each book or short story we’ll be diving into. The date on the right in parenthesis is the air date of the first episode in our series that will begin talking about that text. We highly recommend you read the book by that date, as we will be talking about the entirety of the text for all 5 episodes (including spoilers!)
First up: This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar
You can buy this (and all the other books!) through our bookshop link-- this is linked in our bio in addition to right here:
https://bookshop.org/lists/close-readings-season-19
Close Reading Series: Texts & Timeline
Voice: This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar (March 17)
Worldbuilding: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (May 12)
Character: “You Perfect, Broken Thing,” “The Cook,” and “Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an Account of Several Misadventures and How I Found My Way Home” by CL Clark (July 7)
Tension: Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark (September 1)
Structure: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (October 13)
Thing of the Week: SHINOBIGAMI: Modern Ninja Battle RPG
Homework: Take a scene from a work that you love and five highlighters/crayons/colored pencils - use one color to underline/highlight places where the voice comes through, one for great worldbuilding, one for character moments, one for any moments of tension, and one for moments that move the plot forward. What colors do you end up with? Where do they overlap? What are the colors of the moments you love the most? What would the colors of one of your scenes be?
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Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. |
| 0:05.6 | If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit |
| 0:08.9 | www.patreon.com slash writing excuses. |
| 0:15.0 | Season 19, episode 10. |
| 0:20.0 | This is writing excuses. |
| 0:22.0 | Introducing our close reading series. |
| 0:24.0 | 15 minutes long. |
| 0:26.0 | Because you're in a hurry and we're not that smart. |
| 0:28.0 | I'm Mary Robinette. |
| 0:29.0 | I'm Dong-wan. |
| 0:30.0 | I'm Aaron. |
| 0:31.0 | I'm Dan and I'm Howard. and I have a confession which is that we are actually |
| 0:35.6 | recording the introduction to our close reading series after we've recorded most of the |
| 0:40.4 | close reading series because honestly we wanted to get a sense of what this was going to be like |
| 0:45.7 | you know it's our first time doing this and I'll be honest even as a teacher when I hear the word |
| 0:50.8 | close reading sometimes I think boring class is going to feel like going to a bad college |
| 0:56.1 | class all over again. But I think it's been really fun. |
| 0:59.6 | This has been some of the most fun that I've had doing episodes. One of the things that people |
| 1:05.3 | talk about in our previous episodes when we've been trying to give examples of |
| 1:09.3 | things is that we often reach for film and television because we feel like there's a higher |
| 1:13.7 | likelihood that you will have seen the thing than that you will have read a particular |
| 1:17.0 | work. With this because what we've done is we've picked five books, actually two books, two Novellas and a bunch of short stories |
... |
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