Word Docs

COVID-19 threw us headlong into online teaching at a moment's notice, requiring flexibility, agility and the fleet-footedness of a moscato-soaked gazelle. Well, it threw Alex and Sean into online teaching and moscato. Amy was on study leave. Now as Semester Two hits, Amy's joining them on the frontlines, but swapping out the moscato for a nice Clare riesling or a McLaren Vale grenache. What tips can the boys offer? How do you convert a curriculum from face-to-face Socratic teaching to the chat rooms and vids of the interwebs? What are the pitfalls? And what are the unexpected benefits? Pop a cork on your wine of choice and get ready for some truth bombs from three dedicated educators in the age of Zoom.

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What have we been doing this year? Other than teaching through lockdown, eating too much chocolate, drinking moscato, and yapping away on this podcast... In this episode we get to catch up on the Word Docs' latest projects, which involve a theatre/film project which is not a porno (but does feature a dominatrix), music made in the Hall of Possibility, and more pseudonyms for the woman who has everything. What other writers do you know who can get kidnapped by pirates on their way to a writing gig? Like, for real. Not in their imaginations. And what other academics do you know who are willing to dish the dirt on what it's really like to be a working writer? Fine, lots of them. But how many of them also make ambient music? One. Sean. Well done, Sean. He's reason enough to listen to this podcast - especially if you're smart enough to listen all the way to the end.

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In which Sean comes down from the mount, stomps out the burning bush and hands down the ten (and a half - don't forget the half) commandments of writing. After a healthy dose of heckling, his disciples agree they're pretty good. No 'thou shalt not covet thy neighbours ass' kind of good, but 'don't be a dick' is definitely a keeper. 

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Meet the man who ruined Alex's milk and cookies by writing a story so abjectly disgusting that it laid waste to bedtime. This week we're kicking off our 'Writers and their Partners' series, talking to Amy's partner, the Horror writer Jonny Zweck. (Sean refuses to participate in this misguided series next, even though it's patently his turn, and his partner is also a doc who writes the words. Alex, meanwhile, is threatening to go pick someone up so he can get involved. Be warned.) There's grammar talk, abject horror and the search for meaning, and the eternal question: how do you pronounce the word 'wolf'?

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It's a Showdown! Amy and Sean are going head to head over to Richard Curtis's film Notting Hill, with Alex caught in the middle. Except Alex is too obstreperous to stay above the fray, and Amy and Sean keep agreeing on everything. We can't even argue properly. This week we're looking at character, motivation, embedded sexisms and other isms in Notting Hill (a film from the Dark Ages that we keep finding ourselves arguing over at the pub), and a whole range of random logic holes in films that bear no resemblance to Notting Hill at all. This is peak Word Docs, where there's madness in the method, and we regret everything.

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This week Amy kicks off with a rant about people who want to 'break the mould' of genre fiction, instead of just doing it bloody well, which leads us down the rabbit hole of defining genres, arguing about the rules (knowing the rules; bending the rules; breaking the rules; stop breaking the bloody rules!), following formulas, smashing formulas, value adding and (because it's us) comparing genres to pizza. What other podcast about writing can be so smart and so dumb all at the same time? Guaranteed to be 80% cheeky and 100% 30 minutes long. (This may be our best episode yet, so don't miss it. It's probably all downhill from here.)

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This week we're probing (with consent) Sean's sometime-collaborator Garth Nix. A man who has penned many bestsellers, Garth gives us the lowdown on writing: where he does it (The beach! Alex is astounded. How does he keep the seagulls at bay?), how he does it (By hand! Alex is further astounded. How does he keep his hand from cramping?), and why writing full time was a trap. We get the dish on what it's like drinking in LA with Sean (there's imaginary nudity involved), on how to collaborate (Amy's taking notes and trying not to get hand-cramp), on moonlighting as a publisher and as an agent (clever), and (most importantly) on how to not to get cross. 

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Sean, Alex and Amy take almost a third of the episode to get to the point. Which is kind of the point. This week they're discussing the fine art of procrastination: procrastishopping, procrastibaking, Wikisurfing, how not to follow a recipe, stealing other people's nostalgia, and how great Frank Langella's eye performance is in the 80s classic Masters of the Universe. Sean is outraged by Alex's determination to put vanilla in everything, and disappointed by his own inability to find a goose neck phone clamp on the internet; Alex has a Save the Foxes t-shirt he can't remember buying, and a shameful secret about Back to the Future and the Pentagon; and Amy is stuck in the Matrix with this whole Frank Langella thing. Will they ever get to the point? Probably not.

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This week Alex, Amy and Sean interview their colleague Dr Lisa Bennett/Lisa L Hannett about her eerily beautiful dark fantasy fiction, her first draft agonies and second draft ecstasies, and her obsession with writing on trains. Turtles and tableaux, fine art and flying flips, Canadians, Scandinavians, and hillbillies from the Deep South - what more can you ask for? Writing talk? Oh yeah, we've got that too.

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Will Sean ever achieve his life's ambition of getting his work on the banned book list? Will Amy give in and write a book without rude bits? Will Alex stop slandering salamanders already! Or will they just ignore all the critics and push on, puritans, prudes and salamanders be damned! This week, the Word Docs discuss criticism: the good, the bad, and the medium. We'll be exposing all our scars and showing you which slings and arrows were fatal and which were merely flesh wounds (spoiler: none of us are dead yet). We'll ask the questions: Can criticism be helpful? And how can you find the emotional resilience to weather reviews, hate mail, fan mail, stalkers, trolls, and your own inability to accept praise? 

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