20.10: Interview with Chuck Tingle: Breaking the Rules

Writing Excuses

Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler

Fiction, Business, Careers

4.7 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today we have the pleasure of talking with author (and longtime listener!) Chuck Tingle. We invited him on the podcast to talk about breaking the rules—both in terms of how to publish and what to publish. Chuck told us about the business and creative rules that he has upended—he doesn’t do readings, he is anonymous (during our interview he wore a pink bag over his head), and he thinks you should tell and show. Chuck then shares some of his favorite failures, what he learned from them, and how failures actually aren’t real. Also featured on today’s episode: puppet bloopers, approaching art, and why LOVE IS REAL.

You can learn more about Chuck Tingle here.

Chuck’s Thing of the Week: The FrankenStand (a vegan hotdog stand in LA that serves horror-themed hot dogs)

Homework: Choose a section from your current Work In Progress (WIP). Think of the writing rule that you’re treating as the North Star of Writing At Large (what would the English Department hammer into you?). Try to rewrite that section without that rule or doing the opposite of the rule. Then, look at it and see what changes that makes. Is there a version of your writing where you can use this as a tool, and not a rule?

P.S. Our retreat registration is open, and we are starting to fill up! We are going to unlock our creative processes in Minnesota and explore Story Refinement as we cruise down the Mexican Riviera! Learn more here.

P.P.S. Are you tired of ads?! You can join our $5 tier on Patreon and receive ad-free episodes each week!

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Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dongwon Song, and Howard Tayler. Our guest was Chuck Tingle. 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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0:46.7	This episode of writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends.
0:52.6	If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.com
0:58.8	slash writing excuses.
1:02.2	Season 20, episode 10.
1:06.5	This is writing excuses.
1:09.2	Interview with Chuck Tingle, Breaking the Rules.
1:12.2	I'm Mary Robinette.
1:13.5	I'm Dong Wan.
1:14.7	And I'm Howard.
1:15.8	And we are joined today by our special guest, Chuck Dingle, who, let me just say, as we start off, I'm so happy to have you here because love is real.
1:26.5	Ah, well, you know, want to know why I'm happy to be here.
1:30.2	Along with that, I think there's some buckroos that believe we are one in the same,
1:35.9	or at least about a decade ago did.
1:40.3	And I guess this kind of clears it up unless you have a little soundboard and you're flipping between voice modulations.
	...

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