20.25: Writing Confrontation (LIVE Aboard the WX Cruise)

Writing Excuses

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

Fiction, Business, Careers

4.7 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our hosts explore how to write compelling confrontations—whether physical fights or emotional arguments—in a live episode recorded on the Writing Excuses Cruise. Building off Dan Wells' class Why Your Fight Scene Is Boring, our hosts break down reactions into four elements: focus, physicality, thought, and action. The discussion dives into how newness, character history, and anticipation shape these moments, and how effective confrontations reveal both character and motivation. Plus: sword fighting, puppetry, and driving on black ice.

Thing of the Week: Death and Other Details (on Hulu)

Homework: Watch an action scene in a movie—something that you really like. Then, to underline how different books are as a medium, transcribe it— blow for blow, step for step, and see how long you can get into that before you tear your own hair out because it becomes incredibly boring. Then, after you've proven that the blocking and the blow-by-blow doesn't work, rewrite that scene in a way that does, in a way that translates to and uses the medium of prose.

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Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, 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.
0:05.7	If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.com.com
0:11.9	slash writing excuses.
0:15.2	Season 20, episode 25.
0:19.3	This is writing excuses.
0:21.6	Writing Confrontation
0:23.6	aboard the writing excuses cruise.
0:26.6	I don't know what to say now.
0:29.6	Just your name.
0:30.6	Ah, I'm Dan.
0:32.6	I'm Mary Robinette.
0:33.6	I'm Aaron.
0:34.6	And I'm queuing Dan.
0:36.6	I'm also Howard.
0:40.6	So we are aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise in front of a live audience.
0:49.0	And the first thing that happened on the cruise, one of the first things was that Dan
0:53.9	taught a class called
0:55.7	Why Your Fight Scene is Boring. I went to the class because I would also like to know why my
1:00.7	fight scenes are boring and realized as he was talking that it actually applied for every form
1:06.4	of confrontation that your readers, your characters go through. It's not just the physical confrontations.
1:13.3	It's also the verbal altercations. It's facing off against a dragon. It's, well, I guess that is a
1:22.5	fight scene. But point being, it applied to a lot of other things. And we thought that it might be fun for you all to listen to how we come up with lesson plans
	...

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