Writing Excuses · Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler
20.28: The Lens of Tradition
July 13, 2025·23 min·2 clips
Mary Robinette Kowal recounts how Ursula Le Guin discovered she wrote a book without naming female characters.
As heard by us
Tradition becomes a usable craft lens, not a museum label.
Writing Excuses uses this episode to ask a plain but useful question: what traditions are already steering the stories a writer makes? The panel starts with personal reading habits, from newspaper comics to mass-market paperback science fiction, then broadens into the…
Why you'd press play
If you want to spot the borrowed patterns shaping your draft.
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