19.48: Beginning With A Thrill
Writing Excuses
Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler
4.7 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2024
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As we wrap up our Close Reading Series, we’re shifting our focus towards helping you integrate what you’ve learned. For December, we’ll be releasing episodes designed to help you make measurable progress on a writing project. So dust off your current work-in-progress, or pull out your brainstorming documents—we’re here to help you finish the year strong.
Today, we’re focusing on beginnings. The titular phrase “beginning with a thrill,” doesn’t have to mean a burst of action or violence, but more so refers to how you hook your reader within the first few pages of whatever you’re writing. A great example of this is Toy Story, which we dive into at the end of this episode. Dan encourages us to shift our focus from starting with tension to starting with a thrill. How do you introduce conflict into your work while taking into consideration your genre? How do you establish—and then break— the “normal” in your world? DongWon talks about micro-tropes, and encourages us to steal and borrow from various genres. Also on this episode: meat cubes versus meet cutes. They’re different, even though they sound (phonetically) the same.
Thing of the week: The Favourite (movie)
Homework: What breaks “normal” for your character right now? Now, write that.
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Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, 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 www.com. |
| 0:11.8 | S.W.w.com slash writing excuses. |
| 0:15.4 | Season 19, episode 48. |
| 0:20.1 | This is writing excuses. |
| 0:22.7 | Beginning with a thrill. |
| 0:24.1 | 15 minutes long. |
| 0:25.4 | Because you're in a hurry. |
| 0:26.6 | And we're not that smart. |
| 0:28.1 | I'm Mary Robinette. |
| 0:29.2 | I'm Dong Wan. |
| 0:30.0 | I'm Erin. |
| 0:30.7 | I'm Dan. |
| 0:31.5 | I'm Howard. |
| 0:32.7 | And today we are going to talk about beginning with a thrill. |
| 0:37.0 | But first, we want to tell you a little bit about |
| 0:38.7 | what we're going to be doing all month. And this is Aaron. Yes. This is Aaron. 15 minutes. No, I was |
| 0:47.7 | inspired by an earlier episode that we recorded with Marshall, where we were talking about how |
| 0:53.8 | different genres can help you |
| 0:55.2 | understand writing in different ways. We're going to be focusing on a genre that does something |
| 0:59.9 | really cool that you can take into your own work for the rest of the month. I am excited to be a |
| 1:04.8 | part of these discussions because I literally have no idea what's coming. Well, that is also what all of the people who die at the beginning of a thriller say. |
... |
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