Fiction School

Helping You Have Serious Fun Writing Your Best Stuff

PODCAST

Helping You Have Serious Fun

Writing Your Best Stuff

How Writing Retreats Can Grow Your Career | Fiction School Podcast #35

Sometimes there are just too many dishes in the sink to get that line of dialogue right. The TV is too loud to make that first sentence sing, you know? Real life. It gets in the way of Fictionland all too often. But what if you want to get away from real life and...

Writing Faster, Being Prolific, and Increasing Your Writing Speed IF You Want To | Fiction School Podcast #34

Writing is a weird art form because it's so solitary. We sit in a nice artist's garret, or steal away a moment at our cubicle, or toil in a slightly damp and purple-walled dungeon (like Baker's basement office). And since we're alone, writers don't often talk about...

Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy with Special Guest David Barr Kirtley | Fiction School Podcast #33

Yeah, it SAYS #33, but this shoulda been #30. But. Of course. When we invite a science fiction writer on our podcast, that's the ONLY time the tech stuff goes wrong and a digital gremlin gobbles up our show... Oh, irony. But we had a great guest (who's also a fellow...

Writing Every Day, or Not, and How To Get Back in the Saddle After Not Writing | Fiction School Podcast #32

Weeeee're baaaaaaaack... Actually...we never really went away. We just got crazy busy, all three of us, with end-of-semester duties and grading and that kind of thing. 'Tis the life of the prof. Our unplanned hiatus inspired us to talk about how writers sometimes...

Should Writers Use a Pen Name? The Adventures of Beauregard Cornpopper | Fiction School Podcast #31

This week, the show isn't by us, it's by Nitro Jenny Jo, Hydrogen Z, and Little Deuce Lawley. Because we're talking all about Pen Names on the show this week. We got a cool email from David Cross (but not that David Cross), and it was written so well, we'll just get...

The Top Tools for Writers | Fiction School Podcast #30

I'm always jealous of creative types that get to have cool tools: painters with their big canvases, brushes, and smudges of color all over them; photographers with cameras and lenses and lights; dancers and their special shoes and those sweatshirt legging things....

The Quickie Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and Really Short Stories | Fiction School Podcast #29

This week, the epic struggle between Team Tommy and Team Jody reaches a new stratosphere, when Jody hangs up on the podcast. That's right. Girl couldn't take it anymore, so she just slammed down the phone in true Hollywood style. But not really. It was micro-fiction,...

How To Keep Tension Rising, and Rising, and Rising in Your Book | Fiction School Podcast #28

This week, we're answering a voicemail from Bonnie J. Rough, who actually made a guest appearance on Episode 25. Her question was a great one that many writers (including us) struggle with: how do you make sure you keep the tension rising in the right way over the...

Writing Across Genres with special guest Deanna Raybourn | Fiction School Podcast #27

What do you do if you're the kind of writer who likes to set books in the past, in interesting locations, but then your instincts tell you that the story has something mysterious happen there, too? And also, yeah, your characters are kind of into each other as well,...

Writing Sherlock Holmes, Researching Smarter, and Having a Career as a Writer with special guest Laurie R. King | Fiction School Podcast #26

You know how, when you ask some writers for advice, they'll say something like "Apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair," and it's so unhelpful it's kind of infuriating? But then you ask other writers, and they give you actual advice that blows your mind?...

How To Revise a Big Ol’ Book-Length Project: Advice From Over a Dozen Writers | Fiction School Podcast #25

Sometimes, you just can't stop the good times from rollin'. Like this week, many special things happened. First, Tommy's pleading and begging for all these weeks finally came into fruition. It happened. We. Got. A. Voicemail. It was a great question from a...

Tips and Tricks for Writing Action Scenes, from Baseball to Face-Punching to Maritime Madness | Fiction School Podcast #24

Anton Chekhov said, "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off." Well, Fiction School says if there's a fist in Chapter 1, it better punch somebody in the mouth by Chapter 3. If...

Writers and the Web: How to Use the Internet to Reach Your Readers | Fiction School Podcast #23

Lots of people are saying it's the best time in the history of the world to be a writer. It may be true. There's lots of cool stuff going on, amazing opportunities writers couldn't have dreamed of years ago. But there are some new jobs for a writer in this sweet new...

Writing Strategies with Point of View and Tense | Fiction School Podcast #22

We got a great question from our contact page from a listener, Rich, so we decided to do a show on it. Here's Rich's email to us: Hi All, Love the show; I download the (free!) podcasts from iTunes and I'm about halfway through. Have you considered doing a show on...

Writing Noir and Crime Fiction with special guest Megan Abbott | Fiction School Podcast #21

Fiction School is so stoked to have Megan Abbott on the show this week. She's one of the best writers of noir and crime fiction in the business today, and she's also an awesome and nice person. (It's good to chat with a nice person about, as she says, "people doing...

Judging a Book By Its Cover: What Makes A Good Cover, Why They Matter So Much…and DRAGONS! | Fiction School Podcast #20

This week we're celebrating the cover release of Tommy's next book in the Messiah Trilogy, Armageddon, Texas, forthcoming from Atticus Books. And may we say: DRAGON!! It's an awesome cover, and inspired a great conversation about book covers. Congrats, Tommy! Click...

How to End a Story: Cliffhangers, Closure and Retrospective Inevitability | Fiction School Podcast #19

There’s that moment when a book you're reading has just a few pages left, and you get a little anxious. You don’t want it to end, maybe. Or you’re dying to know whodunit. Will the girl get the guy? Will the misfits return home safely? There’s so much riding on that...

Horror Writing, New Trends, and Graphic Narratives with “The Wonder Woman of Horror,” literary agent Bree Ogden | Fiction School Podcast #18

This week on the show, we welcome a true literary Renaissance Woman to the show: Bree Ogden. She's a literary agent with D4EO Literary Agency, an editor with the macabre children’s magazine Underneath the Juniper Tree, an instructor at LitReactor.com where she teaches...

It’s A New Year, and Fiction School’s Gonna Help You Have Your Best Writing Year EVER. | Fiction School Podcast #17

Hey. You. With the typewriter. And the bookshelves, the imagination. It's me. The new year. Yeah, you might've bought a Cute Kitties calendar of me, but I'm here to tell you: This Is Gonna Be Your Best Year As A Writer. (You owe it to me after that calendar.) Listen...

Writing Character-Driven Stories with Round Characters | Fiction School Podcast #15

The local weirdo with the pet rat, the eccentric barista with the tattoo of an ironing board, the incompetent boss, the highfalutin poet. Good characters are the stuff of life. But do we love character-driven stories? Are readers willing to follow a highfalutin poet...