Mark interviews editor Joshua Essoe about the elements of atmosphere, mood, and world-building.
Prior to the main segment, Mark shares a personal update, comments from recent episodes, and a word about this episode's sponsor.
You can learn more about how you can get your work distributed to retailers and library systems around the world at starkreflections.ca/Findaway.
In their conversation, Mark and Joshua talk about:
- How Joshua got into being an editor twelve years ago
- The limitation of only being able to work 1:1 with so many clients at a time and how that led to Joshua deciding to release books (Essoe's Guides to Writing) to assist writers with some of his knowledge/experience
- The way Joshua divides up a typical day of work, which involves a lot of burning the midnight oil
- Joshua's unique way of combining two subjects into a single double-sided flip book as a special Kickstarter exclusive project
- The first flip book - Action Sequences / Sex Scenes
- The second flip book - Worldbuilding / Mood & Atmosphere
- The problem with trying to release a flip-book format in the traditional print book market. (Where does the bar code that's supposed to be on the "back" of the book go?)
- Original artwork from James A. Owen that is part of these books, and this special Kickstarter project
- The 6 major areas where writers usually have issues in Worldbuilding, including Info-dumping, which is also broken down into 6 types:
- world-building info dump
- the back-story info dump
- the technical info dump
- dialogue info dump
- thought info dump
- emotion info dump
- How Kevin J. Anderson does a great job of setting up his world in the first several pages of the Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. novels
- Three big things that you need to do in your world-building: broadening it, deepening it, and involving it
- How writers need to shackle their impulse to share too many details about their world all at once to readers
- A discussion of Tolkien's world-building, which involved a combination of intriguing teaser moments, but also some longer segments of info-dumping
- What are we talking about when we're talking about Mood and Atmosphere?
- How there aren't that many books in existence on the topic of mood and atmosphere
- The way that every aspect of your writing that can contribute to mood
- How atmosphere is a part of mood, but is a big enough element that it can be understood and explored on its own
- An excellent example of atmosphere from A Wrinkle in Time
- How you want to be purposeful when creating and sharing mood in your writing
- Some of the rewards that are going to be available in Joshua's Kickstarter
- And more...
After the interview, Mark reflects on a couple of things from the discussion.
Links of Interest:
The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast ("Laser Groove") was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
