20.29: Authorial Intent
Writing Excuses
Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler
4.7 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 July 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What the heck is authorial intent? Does it matter? And how do intentions end up on the page without cluttering or overwhelming the story? Today, our hosts dive into message versus content, and how to wrap your intention and narrative structure into your story’s execution.
Homework: Take your work in progress, and in two sentences, describe to yourself why you are writing this (could be a scene, a chapter, or the whole book). Then, write one sentence explaining why that is the reason that you’re writing this.
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Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, 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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| 1:15.0 | Season 20, episode 29. |
| 1:19.3 | This is writing excuses. |
| 1:22.0 | Authorial intent. |
| 1:23.7 | I'm Mary Robinette. |
| 1:24.9 | I'm Howard. |
| 1:25.6 | And I'm Dan. |
| 1:27.0 | And we are going to talk to you about this particular, this little aspect of the lens of why called authorial intent, |
| 1:36.4 | a.k.a. Why are you writing this book? |
| 1:40.6 | Or this thing, or this scene, this chapter, this screenplay, this whatever. |
| 1:46.3 | This line of dialogue. |
... |
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