Brent and Evan talk about action, plot, and pacing on the Orbit Live Crowdcast channel. Presented by Tubby & Coo's Booksellers. Original air date 9 September 2020.
Answered questions:
How do you organize ideas and projects? Pen and paper, Excel/Word, in your mind palace etc.
Once you've identified that there's a particular area of writing that you want to improve on (e.g. romance plots), how do you go about improving that skill? Are there a bunch of vignettes in your worlds that you'll nefariously package as a short story collection one day?
How did you find your "voice" in the your writing. Did it come naturally or did a favorite author or person inspire the way you write your novels?
How would you describe the taste of your readers’ tears?
(asked by fantasy author Peter V Brett)
What is your opinion on writing "groups"? You know, those people who get together (pre-pandemic days) and share bits about their writing, excerpts or otherwise? Helpful or detrimental in your experience?
What has been the greatest struggle with overlapping subplot lines trying to mingle with the main plot? How do you keep everything from getting muddled?
How do you find the balance between "wow this character is a brat/ jerk" and "wow this character is a brat/ jerk, but I love him"? Open question to both authors, but from experience, Kip and Durzo could have both been really grating characters because of their "unlikable" qualities, but I ended up loving them. Do you leave this up to your beta readers to decide what is "too much"?