In this podcast, interns Owen and Coney will discuss what it takes to write a compelling story for a video game. This podcast features special guest, Grayson Morley, who offers to share his own insight on different video games and what good writing looks like for it.

Featured Video Games and Soundtrack:

• Darkest Dungeon - The Town by Stuart Chatwood
• Detroit: Become Human - Hostage by Nima Fakhrara
• Hades - Gates of Hell by Darren Korb
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Main Theme by Manaka Kataoka
• Genshin Impact - Beats of Water Drops by Yu-Peng Chen
• Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location - Crumbling Dreams V3 by Unknown
• Devil Survivor 2 - Dark Clouds by Atlus Sound Team
• Fallout - Khans Of New California by Mark Morgan
• Ghosts of Tsushima - Komoda Beach by Ilan Eshkeri
• Fallout 4 - Rebuild, Renew by Inon Zur
• Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons - Main Theme by Gustaf Grefberg

For the first podcast of the semester, Anngie, Diana, Emily, and Laini explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of tropes. Do tropes make writing inherently bad? Are there good tropes? Can we redeem exhausted ones? Let's talk about it!

Anngie: Book Tropes We’d Like to See Die, Tropes and Clichés in Writing
Diana: 5 Book Tropes That Need To Die, 5 Exhausted Movie Tropes that Need to Die, We've Outgrown the Ugly Duckling Transformation
Emily: Are Tropes Always Bad?, The Good, The Bad & The Overdone: Tropes in fiction
Laini: 9 Common Character Tropes and Tips for Avoiding Them, How Writers Can Reimagine Common Storytelling Tropes

On this week’s episode of RU Writing?, Writing Arts Interns Marissa, Tara, and Laini breakdown common misconceptions about writers and writing myths. Is it all hearsay, or is there some truth behind the legends? 

Marissa:  14 Myths About Writing, 13 Myths About Writing 
Tara:  Ten Myths About Writing, The Seven Writing Myths 
Laini:  The Glamorous and Unattainable Writing Life: 6 Common Misconceptions About Being a Writer, 4 Myths Keeping You From Being An Amazing Writer 

This week, Matt, Tara, Connor, Marissa, and student guest Elizabeth Mosolovich, discuss the practice of balancing school and creative project. Each bring their own perspective and strategies to balancing their lives. 

Articles: 
Tara: How to balance full-time work with creative projects
Marissa: School-Life Balance, How To Balance Your Creative Passion With Your College Workload
Connor: The Lazy Manifesto: Do Less. Then, Do Even Less. Manipulate Time With These Powerful 20 Time Management Tips
Matt: 9 Tips for Maintaining Your Creative Passion When You Have A 9-To-5 Job, How to balance your creative projects with your day job

This week, Marissa, Connor, and Tara discuss writing strategies that help them in their studies and passion projects! 

Here were the articles we read:
Tara: 12 habits from successful writers
​Marissa - 7 Useful Tips for Establishing a Routine
Matt - 8 Steps to a Writing Habit
Connor: 15 Writing Habits for Author Success, Integrity: Without it Nothing Works

The dreaded writer's block! How do we experience writer's block, and what are some strategies to combat it? And, maybe more importantly, is it real? This week, Connor, Tara, Matt, and Marissa kick the semester off figuring it out!  

Podcast articles we read:
Marissa: Is Writer’s Block Real?
Tara: 25 Famous Writers on Writer’s Block
Connor: Types of “Writer’s Block”
Matt: Probing Question: Is writer's block real?

This week, Morgan, Matt, and Connor invite Dr. Jason Luther to discuss the question, is print dead? Dr. Luther teaches Self Publishing; Methods of Analysis and Evaluating Writing; Writing, Research, and Technology; and Introduction to Writing Arts. His research focuses on DIY culture, publishing, publics, and sound writing. Jason has presented at several national conferences and has recently co-edited both a special issue of Community Literacy Journal and the 2017 edition of The Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition. His work and expertise within both digital and print mediums made him a great guest to have for this episode. We hope you enjoy! ​

This week, Connor, Morgan, and Matt discuss the world of multimodality! Is there such a thing as a "monomodal" text? How does the Rowan Writing Arts Department teach multimodality? Listen in to find out! 

Here are the resources we used to frame our discussion:
Why We Should Study Multimodal Language
All Writing is Multimodal
​Graphic Novels and Multimodal Literacy: A High School Study with American Born Chinese

Earlier this semester, Connor Buckmaster got a chance to talk with Heather Lanier, a new faculty member here in the Rowan Writing Arts Department. Dr. Lanier is the author of Teaching in the Terrordome: Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach For America, and two award-winning poetry chapbooks: Heart-Shaped Bed in Hiroshima (Standing Rock, 2015), and The Story You Tell Yourself (Kent State U, 2012), winner of the Wick Poetry Open Chapbook Competition. Her work has been noted in The Best American Essays Series and The Pushcart Anthology Series. She has published poems and essays in many places, including Salon, The Sun, Vela Magazine, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, and more. She has a forthcoming book about raising her daughter with a rare chromosomal syndrome, set to be released in the summer of 2020. ​