Why “Show Don’t Tell” Can be Dangerous Advice for New Writers

From Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris:

It’s been said that if writing advice were classic rock, “Show Don’t Tell” would be “Stairway to Heaven. But is it always good advice?

Of course nobody wants to read a novel that tells a series of incidents. That can sound like a four-year-old recapping his day. “I had Froot Loops and then Dad took me to preschool and I played with blocks and ate a bologna sandwich and then I went to the bathroom and did number two…”

You want to show us the action in a series of scenes not tell us what happened. (Well, maybe we really don’t need the author to show the bathroom scene. )We know a “telling” sentence like “Veronica was beautiful,” is bland. It’s better to say something more like “Veronica’s flowing auburn hair and voluptuous figure had a powerful effect on Nigel and Clive.” That way we can show what she looks like and let the reader in on the emotional reactions of the other characters.

But a whole lot of writers, especially newbies (and the dreaded “writing rules police” ) take the “Show Don’t Tell” thing way too far and turn it into an unbreakable rule. That can make for some murky, slow, and downright boring fiction.

Here are some ways that following the Show Don’t Tell rule to the letter can interfere with good storytelling.

Too Much “Show Don’t Tell” Slows the Pace.

If you spend ten pages describing the shabby apartment of the murder witness, and we hear the screaming children and the blaring TV and smell the unemptied cat litter box and overflowing garbage can, you have a vivid description, but no story.

A writer should only dwell on the key scenes where important action is occurring. It’s perfectly okay to tell the reader your detective can see the witness is a harried single mom who is barely able to cope so her testimony may be useless. Then he can move on with the investigation and the story the reader cares about.

Some newbie writers confuse descriptions of violence with conflict. If you describe every blow and scream of pain in a fight scene, your story is not moving forward. The story stops until we know how the characters react to what’s going on and how the fight alters the trajectory of the plot. The carnage needs to do something to the characters and contribute to the plot, or it’s no more interesting than a description of the sofa cushions.

“Camera’s Eye” Showing Skimps on Information

When we write as if we’re a camera simply recording the physical events of the story, we are showing, but we’re also cheating the reader. This is when we simply say, ‘She winced’, ‘He smiled’, or ‘He took her hand,’ but we don’t say how the characters feel about this action.

When we fall into this pattern, we ignore the fact that the reader has no idea what the wincing, smiling, or handholding means. Writers who use this style may refuse to tell the reader what the actions mean, because they are convinced it will violate “Show Don’t Tell.”

This happens partly because most of us have been brought up on television. We have the conventions of the screenplay hardwired to our brains, because we saw TV shows before we could read. But what we see on the screen isn’t a screenplay. It’s the interpretation of the script by actors, directors, cinematographers, composers, and a whole host of other creative people.

When a screenwriter says a character clenches his fist, this clench will be interpreted by a director and actor to show a whole spectrum of emotion. Lighting and music and camera angle will enhance them.

But when a novelist tells us a character clenches his fist, he is not letting us in on much.

Is the character angry and about to punch somebody? Trying to keep from crying?  Suffering from a painful intestinal ailment? We’ll never know if the author won’t tell us.

You’re not a camera. You’re a novelist. And it’s your job to give us as much information as possible to tell your story.

Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris

Exploring the structure of Freytag’s Pyramid

From NowNovel.com:

Storytelling is at the heart of our human interactions. We tell stories when we talk to each other, explaining what has happened in our lives. We also pay money to consume stories in the form of movies, theatre, books and so on. So many stories use the Freytag’s Pyramid (or Triangle) method, and it’s worth looking at it in detail to see how you can use it in your own writing. Understanding the plot structure is a good way of engaging readers and creating compelling narratives.

So, what is Freytag’s Pyramid (or Triangle) and how can you use it to write fiction? Let’s explore this in more detail. You may have heard of it, as it’s a literary analysis mode that is spoken of often when exploring creative writing. It was named after Gustav Freytag, a 19th century German novelist and playwright who first devised it.

What is Freytag’s Pyramid?

Simply put the Freytag Pyramid is a narrative structure that breaks down a story arc into five sections or five acts. The five-act structure looks like this:

  • exposition
  • rising action
  • climax
  • falling action
  • resolution/denouement 

Freytag’s Pyramid is so called as it falls into a pyramid structure.

It’s a helpful way to order the series of events and plot your stories, and will ensure you have a recognisable beginning, middle and end in your story. It’s super useful to consult it. So many stories naturally follow this pattern anyway, as we’ll see in the examples below, and it’s good to have to it to hand and make a study of it. It’s an excellent way to figure out how a story unfolds. Using it helps you create a logical progression of events, and gives readers a sense of familiarity and satisfaction. 

It’s important to note that although Freytag’s Pyramid is an extremely useful tool to use, be aware of the fact that it might not fit every story structure.

First, though, it’s important to note that although Freytag’s Pyramid is an extremely useful tool to use, be aware of the fact that it might not fit every story structure. Freytag devised his pyramid by looking at classical Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama and observing how these plays were constructed. The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, was the first person to say that the structure of drama is shaped like a pyramid with a beginning, middle and end, what is known as the three-act story structure. 

The downside is well explained on Reedsy:

Make no mistake: Freytag’s pyramid is not a one-size-fits-all structure. It identifies story elements that are common to classical and Shakespearean tragedies, including a revelation or plot twist that changes everything — resulting in catastrophe for the hero. As a result, the pyramid is less applicable to non-tragic narratives in which the protagonist usually wins out in some way, or when writing more upbeat genres like comedy.

Exposition

This is where the stage is set: the author introduces the main characters, setting and milieu of the story. It’s here that the characters’ backgrounds, motivations and circumstances are introduced. This is also where, most likely, you will show the reason for the story. In other words, in this section the writer will establish the central conflict or problem that the protagonist will face in the story.

Thematic concerns will be introduced here as well, as well as hints of what character development might occur in the narrative.

Your exposition should end with the ‘inciting incident’ – that’s what will start the ball rolling in the narrative, or set off the events of your story.

Rising action

The inciting incident occurs in this section. Ideally this section should occur quite early in your story. You don’t want to have reams of exposition here. You can always weave in backstory and more as the story progresses. The inciting incident is the event that disrupts the status quo and sets the main conflict of the story in motion. The protagonist is now faced with a problem, challenge or dilemma that they must solve.

Link to the rest at NowNovel.com

Everyone says: why the rule about dialogue tags isn’t cast iron

From Nail Your Novel:

I’ve seen dialogue tags discussed a few times recently on writing forums.

The discussion goes like this.

‘When writing a piece of dialogue, do you need synonyms for “said”? Doesn’t it get boring for the reader? What about words with a bit more expression, such as exclaimed or spat or shouted or yelled?’

‘Noooo,’ comes the reply, overwhelmingly. ‘Only use “said”.’ 

I agree, mostly.

I also disagree.

Yes, ‘said’ will do most of the time. It’s almost invisible to the reader, so it doesn’t get boring. You’re using it merely to convey who’s talking. And if you feel you’re overusing ‘said’, consider doing without it. In a conversation between two people, the order of speakers might be obvious by the give and take of the paragraphs. There are also other ways to slip in a clue to who’s talking. You can use actions. Eg ‘Molly began to peel the orange.’

On the subject of actions, don’t forget that other things are going on in the scene as well. A common problem with dialogue is that writers get obsessed by the characters’ verbalisations, so they forget to include other sensory details. The rest of the scene disappears, as if the narrative has become a radio play. 

The solution? Write the dialogue, then go back and add other stuff. That’s what most of us have to do.

So remember your characters are also sitting or standing or walking or driving. All of these non-spoken ingredients can help you establish who’s talking.

Link to the rest at Nail Your Novel

Character Type & Trope Thesaurus: Matriarch

From Writers Helping Writers:

DESCRIPTION: A female elder who rules over her family, tribe, or clan.

FICTIONAL EXAMPLES: Catelyn Stark (A Song of Ice and Fire), Lady Jessica (Dune), Mother Abagail (The Stand), Madea Simmons (the Madea franchise), Abuela Alma (Encanto)

COMMON STRENGTHS: Adaptable, Ambitious, Analytical, Bold, Calm, Cautious, Confident, Decisive, Disciplined, Discreet, Focused, Inspirational, Just, Loyal, Nurturing, Organized, Persuasive, Protective, Resourceful, Responsible, Traditional, Wise

COMMON WEAKNESSES: Confrontational, Controlling, Cowardly, Fanatical, Humorless, Inflexible, Manipulative, Obsessive, Oversensitive, Paranoid, Perfectionist, Pushy

ASSOCIATED ACTIONS, BEHAVIORS, AND TENDENCIES
Being a wise guide and counselor
Teaching her family about moral standards
Taking care of the needs of her family
Knowing what she believes and standing firm on those ideals
Making important decisions for her family
Being able to make hard choices that are best for the group
Not being afraid to take risks
Clinging too tightly to her beliefs and not listening to other points of view
Seeking to hold onto her power rather than consider changes that should be made
Being unwilling to ask for help when she needs it

SITUATIONS THAT WILL CHALLENGE THEM
A family conflict that makes it difficult for her to maintain objectivity
A family member rejecting the matriarch’s vision or leadership and striking out on their own
An external threat that must be overcome, such as an epidemic or war

TWIST THIS TROPE WITH A CHARACTER WHO…
Is an authoritarian traditionalist instead of a wise and nurturing counselor
Loves to meddle in the personal lives of her family and friends
Is blind to deep personal flaws, such as being manipulative or closed-minded
Has an atypical trait: Timid, Playful, Callous, Violent, Sleazy, Quirky, etc.

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

8 Steps from Amateur to Pro Writer

From Writers Helping Writers:

Every author starts out as a hobbyist. We write as kids, for fun. As we get older, we write when we have free time or the fit takes us. For many, that’s as far as it goes, and there’s value in that.

But for others, over time, our writing passion grows. Chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you’re looking to take the next step and become a professional author. Here are 8 changes you should make, in no certain order, to level up your writing to pro status.

1. Make Writing a Priority

This one is kind of a no-brainer, but it’s hard to do because we have other responsibilities and activities that are important. Paying the bills (working a day job). Parenting. Developing friendships. Bingeing Stranger Things for the third (fourth?) time.

Life is busy, full of non-negotiable duties and fun stuff that steal our time. But the truth is, we make time for what’s important to us.

Pros prioritize writing. This requires a reshuffling of our To Do list. It may mean jettisoning some things completely. Because only when writing is a priority will it get the time and attention needed to take you to the next level.

2. Practice Patience

The fact that you’re reading this post shows that you recognize the importance of honing your craft and acquiring new skills. Research, learning, application…these all take time.

But once you decide to pursue writing as a career, there’s a natural temptation to escalate the process. After all, this isn’t like other jobs; no one’s monitoring your progress and deciding when you can take the next step. There’s no hierarchical ladder that must be climbed. It’s just you, your computer, and the Publish button.

Patience is a defining characteristic of professionals because they recognize that becoming really good at something doesn’t happen over night. They know that positioning themselves for success takes time. So don’t just focus on the end result of publishing the book or hitting a certain sales milestone. Dedicate yourself to growth and improvement. Respect the journey, and resist the urge to skip steps along the way.

3. Seek Out Criticism (and Be Able to Take It)

I’ve got an eighth-grade son who loves music. He plays multiple instruments but is focused mostly now on the bass clarinet. Recently, he entered a Solo and Ensemble competition, where students perform a piece of music for a professional adjudicator and are given a grade of Superior, Excellent, Good, etc.

I sat in on his performance and was able to listen to the judge’s feedback. I thought Dominic had done very well, so I was surprised to hear the judge offer so much criticism. I kind of wanted to punch her.

Walking out, I said to D that he’d unfortunately pulled a tough judge, and we would just hope for the best. I got my second surprise of the day when my son said he was happy to have gotten this adjudicator because her helpful feedback was going to make him a better player.

Sure, the score mattered (he got a Superior, by the way), but D recognized that if he wanted to become a premier player, he needed to improve his areas of weakness. And he couldn’t see what those weaknesses were. None of us really can. It takes other people to point them out.

If you want to become better as an author, you have to get helpful feedback. Critique partners and beta readers, writing coaches and editors—there are so many knowledgeable people in the industry who can help with this. But they won’t come to you. To become a superior writer, you’ve got to seek them out and be willing to take their feedback.

4. Become a Perpetual Learner

Becoming a pro takes time because there’s always more to learn. New writing methods and techniques, emerging technologies and software (A.I., anyone?). Marketing, bookkeeping, business strategies . . . Pros know that writing, as a career, is always in flux. If you go into it with the mindset of a lifelong learner, you’ll be able to adjust and won’t get steamrolled when things change.

5. Approach Writing as a Business

This is one of the toughest mindset shifts to make because we love the writing so much. We have this image of ourselves as successful authors, sitting in our office typing or scribbling away day after day. And while I would argue that writing is the most important thing, there’s so much more to becoming a pro.

To get there, we have to view writing as a business. Yes, success requires researching and drafting and revising. But it’s also setting up a bank account and ordering checks, filing annual taxes, building a brand, marketing our products, hiring people to do the things we can’t or don’t want to do, creating and maintaining a website, figuring out which distributors to use to sell your books and familiarizing yourself with their platforms…

Oi.

It can be overwhelming because we don’t want to do all that stuff. We. Just. Want. To. Write. Can’t we just write?

Well . . . no. Professional writers do plenty of writing, but they’re also building a business. And all the other stuff is part of that.

This goes back to #4. Broaden your mind and accept this fact: to be a professional, you will have to learn all the things. You don’t have to become an expert; just look at me doing Angela’s and my finances (/shrieks). It’s not easy. It’s definitely not natural, and sometimes it’s not pretty, but I do it because it has to be done. Embrace the lifelong journey of learning these tasks (or learning to

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

Emotional Intimacy Between Characters Isn’t Just for Romance Novels

From Jane Friedman:

When writers think of writing intimate scenes, our minds often go straight to the bedroom—to romantic or sexual intimacy. But that puts an unnecessary constraint on what intimacy is when intimacy can be physical or emotional, platonic or romantic. At its simplest, intimacy in a relationship is the state of closeness or deep familiarity. Regardless of what their relationship is, emotional intimacy between characters often begins long before they get physically intimate (if they ever do) and some level of emotional intimacy belongs in every close relationship.

No matter what you’re writing (even if it’s not romance), emotional intimacy between characters is important to creating authentic relationships and creates the backbone for deep relationships between characters and readers.

Emotional intimacy is a bond based on mutual understanding, vulnerability, and trust.
Yes, these are necessary qualities of successful romantic relationships and make those steamy scenes in my favorite romance novels even more fun to read. Emotional intimacy can level up scenes with physical intimacy to the place where the physical interaction feels more profound and more impactful for both the character and the reader.

But pause and consider how important mutual understanding, vulnerability, and trust are to other relationships. A friendship or a familial relationship that lacks any of these things will be either flat and boring or will be full of tension and conflict caused by misunderstanding.

Think about your protagonist, regardless of whether they are romantically involved with anyone. They are likely to have close relationships with at least one, if not multiple, other characters.

A character will have varying levels of closeness (i.e., emotional intimacy) in relationships with:

  • friends
  • coworkers
  • parents
  • siblings
  • cousins
  • roommates
  • mentors
  • and yes, their partner or love interest.

There can even be moments of emotional intimacy between acquaintances or strangers who have a shared experience or mutual understanding.

These various levels of emotional intimacy allow the reader to get to know your protagonist and the other characters they interact with. Showing emotional intimacy between characters is a way to show various aspects of who that character is—what they like or don’t like, what they believe, and who they share their thoughts and hopes and dreams and fears with.

Moments of emotional intimacy enable readers to care about characters by seeing them be cared for and care for others. Writing moments of emotional intimacy (or the lack of it) between characters helps your readers assess the dynamics between the characters, their roles in the story, and the arc of change within the relationship or caused by their relationship.

Emotional intimacy is often shown in the small things, the quiet moments, and even moments unspoken.
In moments of emotional intimacy, characters are increasingly comfortable together. They open up to one another and communicate their truths, fears, and insecurities. They support each other without needing to be asked, or they validate the other person’s feelings.

Emotional intimacy can be shown through:

  • remembering someone’s preferences
  • shared or inside jokes
  • understanding non-verbal cues
  • honest conversations about hopes, fears, dreams, traumas
  • positive physical reactions to another character that shows a feeling of safety or comfort

Emotional intimacy between friends/love interests: In Ali Hazelwood’s contemporary YA romance Check & Mate, one character anonymously sends a hotel room service order of chicken soup and three Snickers bars to another character who is having a stressful day. The recipient knows immediately who sent it (but tries to tell herself she’s wrong). This moment mirrors a scene earlier in the novel when she made him chicken soup while sick and commented on how she was charging him for the supplies she bought, including the “emotional support Snickers bar” that she purchased for herself.

Emotional intimacy between siblings: In Brenna Bailey’s queer small town romance Wishing on Winter, after retiring from his life as a rockstar, a man moves in with his sister to help her out. He goes grocery shopping to fill her fridge and buys all her favorite foods that he can think of, most notably the cookies with the jam in the middle.

Emotional intimacy between an acquaintance/mentor and mentee: In Julie Murphy’s YA novel Dumplin’, a teenage girl expresses her grief at the death of her late aunt. In losing her beloved aunt, she also lost her compass. Her friend suggests that maybe her aunt was only supposed to be her compass until she was able to be her own compass. This interaction spurs the teen girl to choose her own destiny, and leads to the friend becoming a mentor character later in the novel.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

The Art Of The Novella

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I’ve been trying to figure out how to teach an in-person novella class for years now, but I knew it would be both time and cost prohibitive. I love novellas and I love discussing them and I love reading them and writing them and…

We tried a novella “workshop” kinda sorta after the in-person workshops. I would tell the attendees a short-hand way of doing a novella in the same world they’d been writing in, and then they could submit the finished novella few weeks later.

I don’t think that was satisfying for them. It certainly wasn’t for me. It felt like a Band Aid. Teaching a class in-person would be tough, because I figure it would take a minimum of two weeks. We don’t have a cheap place for people to stay here in Las Vegas, and even if we did, the kind of teaching and writing wouldn’t really blend.

Finally, I decided on a faux in-person workshop. I’m going to do the workshop I planned, only spread over 9 weeks, not counting the writing. After all the learning, the writing starts. Participants turn in their novellas and I will read them. (Note: I will not edit them. People who’ve been to my workshops know that I don’t edit. I read for story.)

I’m very excited about this. More importantly, I think it’ll work.

I planned a leisurely announcement, but success got in the way. I just found out that the novella class that focuses on science fiction is more than half full, and that was only with it being announced to Dean’s people. I want you all to have a chance to get into that one, so I’m announcing now.

I mentioned a science fiction workshop. Yep, there is one, and one for mystery, romance, and fantasy as well.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books.

Sharpen the details

From Nathan Bransford:

Now then. Time for the Page Critique. First I’ll present the page without comment, then I’ll offer my thoughts and a redline. If you choose to offer your own thoughts, please be polite. We aim to be positive and helpful.

Random numbers were generated, and thanks to CBwriter, whose page is below:

Title: Come As You Are
Genre: Bookclub psychological thriller
(pls note British English!)

Marc took the narrow turning for Wigpool passing a warning sign for wild boar. The Forest of Dean was nothing like the well-behaved woodland that bordered his garden in Surrey. A damp, earthy smell invaded the car as he pictured a family of boar, all bristles and tusks, running through the undergrowth, gathering speed and then erupting in front of him to total his new 4×4.

He had wanted to bring his wife to the reunion, but Penny had been adamant: no partners. There was something unsettling about the prospect of spending the weekend with his ex-housemates without the comforting buffer of his spouse. He tried to remember the last time he’d slept alone and couldn’t. Night-time in the forest would bring the kind of blackness you could slice with a knife. No comforting car headlights or friendly glow of lights from neighbouring houses. He would have to keep his bedroom window open because of the heatwave which meant he would be kept awake by foxes, boar, and who knew what else, making noises indistinguishable from a murder in progress. Then a bat would fly in.

Surrey bats wouldn’t do that, but he was certain anything was possible in this borderland between England and Wales.

He glanced at the sat nav. The car was a red arrow on an empty screen, the metalled track he was driving along apparently unknown to modern mapping systems. Hard to believe there was a “pretty cottage” with “an enormous lake” nearby.

I like that this page immediately situates us in a particular place and there’s a strong voice to guide us through the opening. The reference to animals making scary noises in the forest gives a tantalizing taste (presumably) of what’s to come in a psychological thriller. I enjoyed the distinction between Surrey and forest bats, which showed some fun personality.

My concern with this opening is that it feels a bit choppier than it needs to because information and context is dribbled out rather than just situating us cleanly the first time a concept is described. We first have a car, then it’s specified that it’s a “new 4×4.” We hear about “the” reunion, then eventually find out it’s with ex-housemates, then much later on that it’s at a pretty cottage on the border between England and Wales. I’m still not sure who Penny is.

There’s not much to be gained by forcing the reader to piece everything together. Err on the side of being clear the first time around.

Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford

Nathan continues his post with a redline of the page.

The Enduring Lessons to be Found in a Jane Austen Novel

From Woman Writers, Women’s Books:

Why has Jane Austen endured?

The question is asked so often, as the film industry magics up more adaptations, and the publishing industry burnishes our shelves with more spinoffs and retellings (have you read Death Comes to Pemberly, or seen the television adaptation of Death Comes to Pemberly? So. Good.) Austen fandom is alive and thriving, but how is it that, of all those who have put pen to paper in the past, it is Miss Austen whose works sail forward century after century like this?

When balls and carriages and courtships are long gone, why are we still turning over her pages?

Well alright, the allure of balls and delicate courtship might be easy enough to explain. When modern dating can be reduced to swipe right or left, there is something entrancing in the idea of flickering candlelight and gentlemen murmuring eloquent compliments; of the handsome Mr. Darcy becoming enraptured with Elizabeth Bennet’s sparkling eyes.

The escapism to be found in these novels and that faded world is incredibly tempting, but it is not escapism alone that holds our attention. The sparkle of the Regency world, so well described in Austen’s works is merely the window-dressing, the powdered sugar on top. The underlying substance of the novels are the characters themselves; so rich in detail, so complex in their psychology, so wholly real, that they can, and do, inhabit our modern world.

I mean, who amongst us hasn’t been trapped in conversation with a Mr. Collins? And who hasn’t been taken in by the charm and flattery of a Wickham? Not just in romance, but think of that boss who had seemed so great in the interview process, but turned out to be a horror six weeks into the job, or of that new friend who turned out to be not your friend at all.

When Elizabeth Bennet realizes she has been deceived by Wickham, she reflects back on the clues that were there for her (and us the reader) to have seen all along. She realizes how inappropriate it was for a stranger to single her out in a party and tell her his life story, and how obvious his constructed victim narrative was. She realizes that his actions never matched up with what he said he would do, or said about himself, and that he often ghosted her. She realizes how much he flattered and flirted with her, so that she never looked rationally at his behavior. In contrast, she realizes the awkward Darcy, for all that he always said the wrong thing, in the end always did the right thing.

There are no pantomime villains in Austen’s world, no cardboard cut-out character of a dashing hero. Considering the birth of psychology as a field of study was still some decades away, Austen’s grasp of reading people is a marvel, and she teaches her reader to do the same.

And how did she come by this knowledge? Her life was so limited, her experience of the world so small. Drawing rooms and visiting neighbors, the occasional trip to London or Bath. But perhaps it was her limitations that gave her such incredible insight, to delve so deeply into her subject matter, to really consider all the minute details and foibles of characters like those neighbors coming to tea, to then create such real people in her novels.

Or maybe it was necessity.

Link to the rest at Woman Writers, Women’s Books

Character Type & Trope Thesaurus: Newcomer

From Writers Helping Writers:

DESCRIPTION: This character is new (in town, at work, to school, etc.) and has to learn the rules for fitting in. The newcomer is frequently used as a narrative device to introduce the reader to the world and explain its various aspects in an organic manner.

FICTIONAL EXAMPLES: Bella Swan (Twilight), Claire Fraser (Outlander), Dorothy Gale (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), Robert Langdon (The Da Vinci Code), Thomas (The Maze Runner trilogy)

COMMON STRENGTHS: Alert, Cautious, Courteous, Curious, Diplomatic, Independent, Innocent, Introverted, Objective, Observant, Patient, Pensive, Private, Resourceful, Responsible, Sensible

COMMON WEAKNESSES: Apathetic, Childish, Evasive, Gullible, Ignorant, Insecure, Needy, Nervous, Suspicious, Timid, Withdrawn, Worrywart

ASSOCIATED ACTIONS, BEHAVIORS, AND TENDENCIES

  • Having a fresh perspective
  • Being curious about their surroundings
  • Not knowing or understanding the rules of the new environment
  • Standing back and observing rather than jumping right into things
  • Adaptability; learning quickly
  • Noticing everything; being highly observant
  • Keeping to themselves until they get the lay of the land
  • Naïveté
  • Being an easy target due to their innocence or lack of knowledge
  • Trying (and failing) to understand the new world through the perspective of their old world

SITUATIONS THAT WILL CHALLENGE THEM
Meeting someone new and not knowing if they’re a friend or foe
Facing hostility and rejection simply because of their outsider status
Being expected to meet certain standards before they’ve developed the skills needed to do so
Getting lost in the new environment

. . . .

CLICHÉS TO BE AWARE OF
The intern who must master the skills they’ll need to be successful in the industry
The “chosen one” newcomer who is the only person who can solve the the new world’s problems

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

Structure: The Safety Net for Your Memoir

From Jane Friedman:

Structure is the safety net readers fall into. Nailing it is the way we hold space for them and let them know that while we might keep them guessing, or stir up challenging emotions, we’re taking them somewhere important.

Structure is a safety net for writers too. When it’s missing, they send anxious emails to me and other writing coaches asking what to do. As a writer, I know what it’s like to hang from the trapeze bar of an idea and wonder if I can hold on long enough to find both a point and a satisfying ending.

Writers need to cultivate two types of structure: process and project. Process structure sustains you while you’re drafting and revising. Project structure is what you employ to give your work shape.

. . . .

Build a secure process

Your first task is to choose a process to follow. Better yet, form a group that can do this work with you. That way, you’ve got a posse to lean on when the predictable struggles follow.

It doesn’t matter if you select the model Allison K Williams shares in Seven Drafts, the experimental invitations of Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, the journey Sue William Silverman takes you on in Acetylene Torch Songs, or the first-draft guidelines I offer in this post. Pick one. Use the content as your safety net—at least for your next draft—but don’t be afraid to wander off on your own.

When the inevitable doubts creep in, refer back to your safety net. Bask in its comfort and fall into its guidance. If you’re still lost, explore what’s going on with your writing group. When you’re feeling more grounded, wander off again.

Build your memoir’s structure

Once you understand what your story is about, you’re ready to tackle your project’s structure. Some of you will know exactly what this should be. If you don’t, consider whether a simple or complex structure is best for your book. Some structures, like the three-act, will feel like their own safety net, because they deliver a certain level of predictability. The more experimental you are, the more you must serve as that safety net for your reader by truly understanding the story you’re trying to tell and ensuring that the structure you’ve chosen leads them in the direction you’re hoping for.

After you’ve chosen a structure, learn both the basics and nuances of working with it as well as the skills needed to successfully execute it. As you do this, identify one or two exemplar texts to study, and feel free to pick something everyone’s raving about (it needn’t be a comp title for your work). As you mull over which structure might be the best fit, read reviews for these books to see what resonates with readers. Attend to the things people say about how the book is structured or how the story unfolds.

Now, pick it apart. Map the major turning points on note cards. Analyze the thematic threads woven through the narrative. Find the beats where inner change occurs. Do everything you can to understand its construction.

In your next revision, emulate this text’s structure. At this point, don’t worry if it’s a perfect fit. Just see if you can mold your content into it using note cards. After completing this exercise, see if you can expand, fracture, or break free of this constraint to make it your own. If you get lost, or it feels like you’ve broken your book, go back to the map you’ve created for the original text and look at what you might have missed. Once you’ve regained your footing, try again.

If it still fails to work, or it feels like you’re trying to strong arm your story into a structure that simply doesn’t fit, stop. This is a sign that you’ve chosen the wrong structure.

While this might seem like extra work, this process will allow you to truly understand your story and why a specific structure works. The more faith you have in your story’s structure, the more you’ll become the safety net your reader is hoping for.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

Writing and Music: a Not-So-Odd Coupling

From Writer Unboxed:

As some of you may already know, in addition to being a highly sought-after shirtless model for romance novel covers, I am also a longtime professional musician, having earned my first money for playing drums at the ripe old age of 14. In fact, music was my fulltime profession until my late 30s. And I didn’t start seriously writing fiction (inasmuch as anything I write could be considered “serious”) until I turned 40. (So you might say that as a writer, I was a 40-year-old virgin. But I digress…)

Coming into a new-to-me art form with a lengthy background in another, I’ve been repeatedly struck by how many parallels I’ve encountered between the two creative paths. It has also been interesting to note the very different experience of learning one art form as a child, and learning another as an adult (inasmuch as a person like me could ever be considered an “adult”).

But I’ll leave the exploration of the whole young-versus-old-artist rabbit hole for some other day. Today, I want to explore five similarities I’ve found in pursuing two art forms – writing and music – at the professional level. I’ll start with the one I think is most important:

1. It’s a business.

Thus far I’ve been calling them art forms, but when you start actively seeking a paying audience for your work – whether written or musical – you quickly become aware that you are dealing with a business, which brings with it numerous rules, obstacles and rites of passage, many of which are not clearly stated or even openly acknowledged. Yeah, it’s fun like that. Trust me: You’re gonna want to wear a helmet.

In each case, because it’s a business, many decisions that will affect your success are A) based on money, and B) out of your hands.

As a musician, this could come down to who is willing to hire you, or to pay to see you perform, or to publish your music (an area that used to be where the money was in songwriting), or to finance your recording and/or tour, or to buy your recordings. Bottom line: It’s about who will spend their money on this thing you chose to do. As the artist, all you can do is make whatever product or service you’re offering as appealing – and as competitive in terms of financial value – as possible.

Writers are in a similar position. Whether you’re pursuing the traditional publishing route, or self-publishing, or trying to get a piece of your dramatic work produced either on stage or screen, somebody else has to decide that what you’re doing (or promising to do) is worth their money.

In both cases, as an artist, you are free to express yourself in any way you see fit. But as an artist who wants to be paid for that art, it quickly becomes obvious that some pathways lead a bit more directly to potential revenue generation than others. Hence my next observation:

2. Genre matters.

For example, a thrilling 70,000-word whodunit with a strong, confident protagonist stands a better chance of selling some copies than a 600-page second-person diatribe exploring the modernist paradigm of discourse that forces the reader to choose between subcapitalist situationism and the dialectic paradigm of consensus. (Incidentally, I have no earthly idea what that means. I got it from the oh-so-useful Postmodernism BS Generator. You’re welcome.)

Similarly, a catchy three-chord pop song performed by an attractive singer whose only formal dance training clearly involved a pole is likely to get far more airplay than say, one of Conlon Nancarrow’s experimental pieces for player piano. (Warning: cannot be un-heard.)

While my examples above focused on some artistic endeavors being more accessible and/or commercially viable than others, genre is about more than simply what happens to be popular. Probably even more important is the way that genre establishes expectation. Genre helps promise an experience to the consumer, sometimes without them needing to read a word or hear a note. When you see one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels in a bookstore, you know what you’re getting. Ditto when you see a recording by AC/DC, or a poster for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Like it or not, fitting neatly into a genre makes it MUCH easier to package your work. But that doesn’t eliminate your challenges, because of the next fact I’ll bring up:

3. There’s no “right” way.

If simply checking off some genre boxes was a foolproof formula for success, everybody reading this column would already be a bestselling author. Just because Lee Child earned more money while you read this paragraph than I did in a year, doesn’t mean I can simply write a “Zack Preacher” series of thrillers that will sell equally well. There’s still some magic, mojo and luck involved, along with things like talent, confidence and savvy. And don’t forget determination – most of the “overnight successes” we hear about were years in the making.

But the lack of a “right” way extends beyond genre. There’s more than one route to successful publication, from traditional to self-published, or combinations of both. There are plotters and pantsers sharing space on the NYT Bestsellers list. There are Hero’s Journey writers and Cat-Saving authors and people who’ve never heard of either, all selling beaucoup books. Which is French for “a crapload of,” if I’m not mistaken.

The same goes for music: There are classically trained virtuosos, and self-taught musicians who can’t read a note. There are incredibly polished performers, with seemingly supernatural abilities and machine-like consistency; there are unpredictable punk rockers who can’t be bothered to learn to play or sing, and who may or may not commit a felony during the course of a performance – and that’s if they even bother to show up.

Hell, just among us drummers, there are those who hold their sticks in that rather fancy-looking way you see in Revolutionary War paintings, and those who grip them like a pair of hammers – and an age-old schism between the two schools that can rapidly go off the rails in ways you’d never believe, in the consequence-free verbal-cage-match environment of an internet discussion forum.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

How to write the perfect plot twist: Anthony Horowitz’s 5 top tips

From Penguin UK:

It’s fair to say that Anthony Horowitz knows his way around a killer plotline. The bestselling author has not only captured readers with his mystery novels, Magpie MurdersMoonflower Murders and the Hawthorne mysteries, but taken on the mantle of his predecessors with two acclaimed Sherlock Holmes novels – The House of Silk and Moriarity – and three James Bond novels. So when he agreed to offer a masterclass in writing the perfect plot twist, we knew we were getting one of the best. 

It’s definitely worth watching The Art of: The Murder Mystery in full to get the depth of Horowitz’s wisdom, as well as stories about how he wrote his fantastic novels. But here are five nuggety takeaways to keep by your writing table (perhaps, like Horowitz, you eschew the keyboard for a fountain pen?) in the midst of your murder mystery-writing. 

1. Don’t underestimate the planning

Horowitz acknowledges that some writers like to sit down and let the story flow out, but he’s not one of them. “I often spend longer planning a book than I do writing it,” he says. “A good example is Magpie Murders, which took me something like 10 years to work out and then about two years to write, but it was a very, very complicated book and required an enormous amount of thinking.

“I put everything down on paper. I make copious pages and pages of notes until I am ready to write and by the time I do sit down at my desk, I have a sort of a map of where I’m going and everything is going to work.” Make sure, though, that you leave a little room to surprise yourself when you get to the page: “If I can’t surprise myself, how can I surprise my reader?”

2. Start with a simple formula

Not sure how that plan should begin? There’s a Horowitz Hack for that: “Start with a simple formula,” he advises. “A plus B equals C. A equals one person, B is another person, C is the reason why A murders B. That’s your bullseye. If that’s original and interesting and surprising enough, then you can tell us who A and B are, and and that’s your next ring.” Once you’ve got the basics, he explains, you can build out into the worlds your characters occupy, who knows them and how they know each other.”  

3. People should be able to guess the twist

Want to know the secret of a killer plot twist? It should be obvious enough for people to potentially guess it – but surprising enough that they rarely actually do. One of the major influences on Horowitz’s work was Agatha Christie, an author who he says always surprises him but “you always feel you could have guessed because all the information has been down there in front of you. When I’m writing my book, I’m very influenced by that. When my publisher or my agent or anybody else reads one of my books, the first question I ask is not ‘Did you enjoy it?’ but, ‘Did you guess it?’ Because that, to me, is the crux of the matter. If they do guess it, I feel a sense of disappointment but at the same time, if they can’t get it, then I haven’t played fair. What I prefer to do is for them to say, ‘No, I didn’t get it, but I should have.’ That’s what I’m aiming for.” 

4. Live inside your book

The best way to bring a story to life? Inhabit it. “There’s one piece of advice I would give to writers: don’t stand on the edge of the book, looking over the edge of the chasm. Live inside the book looking around you,” Horowitz says. “What my characters see, I see. What they feel – the wind or the sunshine – I feel. If I’m inside the book, I’m not thinking about it as being something that you or anybody else will read. I am merely inside the world of the book – all that comes later.” 

5. The only rule is originality

Link to the rest at Penguin UK and thanks to NC for the tip.

Writing Rules That Beg to Be Broken

From Jane Friedman:

The following are some of the so-called rules of writing fiction that I take a special delight in breaking. Creative writing is about possibilities, not about restrictions and limitations.

Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.
In 1962, in a letter to a young writer, John Steinbeck added six tips for writing well. The above was one of those tips. Its error lies again, as all rules do, with its use of the absolute never. I frequently will not, because I cannot, begin a story or novel until I have crafted the perfect first paragraph. Of course there is no such thing as a perfect sentence, but the temporary confidence instilled by thinking that I have crafted one is what allows me to tackle a project that will consume my waking and sleeping hours for the next year or more. Stopping now and then to polish a faulty phrase or image is like taking another hit of confidence.

Five or six hits every morning keep me flying through the hours. But if I cannot fix a weakness within a minute or two, I will not allow my momentum to stall out with fretting and hand-wringing. Placing parentheses around the offending phrase, or highlighting the entire scene, will call my attention to it during the first rewrite.

I do not believe, as some practitioners apparently do, that a morning’s work is like a fast-moving stream through which one must dare not stop paddling, not even for a moment. Go ahead and stop if you want to. Pull ashore. Have lunch. Creep up as close as you can to that egret in the tree. Take a nap if you feel like it. In short, do whatever works for you. The imagination is resilient and flexible, and your routine should be too. But only if that works for you. I am most productive when I adhere, albeit loosely, to the discipline of beginning the morning with a bit of meditation, followed by four to six hours at my desk, followed by a good workout or hike. That’s my routine. It doesn’t have to be yours.

Write what you know.
In the days of Thoreau and earlier, when it was necessary to walk several miles to consult with someone more knowledgeable than you, Ernest Hemingway’s write what you know might have been sound advice. Hemingway also said that every writer needs a friend in every profession, someone whose expertise can be accessed—a statement that appears to contradict the earlier statement.

In order to do my research back in the 1970s and 80s, I had to visit a small-town library every week to order another load of books on interlibrary loan, which made the librarian my best friend. Today, a writer’s best friend is the internet.

I feel certain that Hemingway’s write what you know admonition was not intended to be an absolute. A clearer rendition of that advice would be to write what you know after you’ve done a ton of research and before you forget it all. And always remember that you are writing fiction. Fiction is stuff you make up. You can do that too. You can make stuff up.

Back at the turn of the millennium, I signed a contract, based on a single opening scene, to write two historical mysteries featuring Edgar Allan Poe for Thomas Dunne Books. I had never before written a historical novel and was not confident I could create a convincing New York City of 1840. In one scene it was necessary for me to get Poe across the East River in short order so that he could hotfoot it to Manhattan. I spent weeks trying to find a bridge he could cross or a ferry that would convey him in the allotted time. No such luck. I was stuck. I moaned about this impasse to a friend of mine who was also a writer, and he said, “It’s fiction, Silvis. Make up a bridge.”

Frequently it is the not knowing that brings a story alive, the writer’s desire to know what he does not, which then leads to the character’s discovery of what she did not know, and then the reader’s delight in participating in that discovery.

Show, don’t tell.
A favorite admonition among writing teachers all over the world. This admonition is only half false. The true part is that good fiction is built on dramatic scenes comprised of action, dialogue, description, and conflict—i.e. showing through visual and other sensory details and strong, active verbs. But a certain amount of telling is necessary too. Summary and exposition hold the scenes together. Telling bridges the time gap between scenes and between relevant beats. A little bit of telling, even if it’s something as simple as “Two weeks later,” opens nearly every new scene and every chapter.

So, once again, the problem with the rule is not that it is wholly false but that it is stated too rigidly. Summarization complements dramatization in every novel. In some, it shoulders the narrative load. Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End, for example, is a brilliant novel that is almost wholly told rather than shown.

In general, the more “literary” a novel is, the more it relies on reflection, speculation, and summaries of events. That is why a literary novel is so hard to adapt for the screen; so much of the momentum of the story is interior, taking place only in the characters’ heads.

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman ran into this very problem when attempting to adapt Susan Orlean’s nonfiction The Orchid Thief for film. The problem was so infuriating that he finally seized upon introducing himself into the story as twins, one of whom was being driven mad by attempting to write the adaptation without sacrificing the book’s artistic integrity, and the other as a hack only too ready to pander to Hollywood’s lack of artistic integrity by changing the story willy-nilly. “Show, don’t tell” is fine advice if you are aiming for a quick sale of movie rights, or if you are fifteen years old and learning how to write in scenes, but the proper amendment of the phrase for the rest of us should be “show when you can, but tell whenever showing isn’t necessary.”

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

A Handy Trick for Brainstorming Your Plot

From Writers in the Storm:

You don’t have to know everything about your story before you start plotting.

Since writing is fairly split between character writers and plot writers, you can bet that half the writers you meet have had struggles with plot (the other half with characters, but that’s another post). Even when you enjoy it, and are good at it, plotting has its challenges.

How do you know what your protagonist has to do? What types of problems and conflicts should your protagonist face? How do you fill in the middle so it doesn’t drag?

Figuring out how to get from the inciting incident to the climax is a head-scratcher—even for hardcore plotters like me. But the key to making this easier is structure.

Structure helps a lot when figuring out your plot.

Structure is like the line drawing of your story. It contains all the key turning points and general flow of how the novel will unfold. Once you know the general shape of it, you can color it in any way you want. For genre novels, it’s even easier, because you’ll have expected tropes to further guide you. You won’t have to draw the image from scratch—you only have to color in the lines.

For example:

  • In romance, there’s a meet-cute that leads to romance, and eventually a Happily Ever After.
  • In mysteries, there’s a body or crime that leads to an investigation, and eventually solving the crime and finding justice for the victims.
  • In non-genre novels, there’s a problem discovered that leads to attempts to fix that problem, and eventually resolving that issue and the protagonist finding happiness.

These turning points and expectations can help you develop a rough concept of your plot.

Maybe you know the details early on, maybe you don’t, but that’s okay. The goal here is to find that general framework for your plot to get you started.

I’m in final edits right now for a science fiction detective novel I plotted using this concept. Detective novels have a “formula” of expected tropes and a very clear structure of what happens when. But that didn’t mean my plot would be the same as every other detective story. The tropes and structure gave me a framework that helped guide my brainstorming. I made it unique to my story, based on what that story needed.

Let’s look a little closer.

Readers expect a detective novel to open with either the crime or the PI getting hired. But I didn’t want it to open with the client hiring my PI, because I felt that jumped in too fast. I wanted time to set the scene and ground readers in my science fiction world first. If they didn’t understand the world, they wouldn’t understand the mystery.

So I knew I had to have an opening scene that included the two big tropes of my mixed genres—introduce the PI nature and establish the science fiction world. I didn’t know what that scene would be at first, but it was clear I needed to show my PI at work in that world to accomplish both of those goals. That gave me solid place to start brainstorming.

Using that and the general trope and structure format, I was able to craft a basic outline:

  • Protagonist’s job and world introduced
  • Client hires protagonist to solve problem
  • Protagonist investigates and finds connections to his past
  • Crime escalates and new problem occurs (in most mysteries, this is another body)
  • Protagonist investigates new crime and tries to figure out the personal connections
  • Suspects stack up and are investigated
  • Connections are figured out and perpetrator is revealed
  • Perpetrator apprehended, case solved

It’s rough, but it’s something I could work with.

This works for genre and non-genre stories.

A romance novel will have a similar conceptual outline. It begins with the two love interests and their problems. Then the plot moves to the meet-cute, the attraction dance, problems with getting together, getting closer and then being torn apart. It ends with working things out, and then finally getting that happily ever after.

A non-genre novel will be more general, beginning with the protagonist living their life. They then encounter a problem and make a lot of mistakes that create more havoc in their lives as they try to solve it. Eventually, they face a moment when they want to give up, but they struggle to pull themselves together and keep going. Finally, they face the main conflict and resolve the problem.

Link to the rest at Writers in the Storm

Fairness: the hidden currency of the workplace

Not exactly about writing, but possibly a good writing prompt. And a very effective use of video.

From The Economist:

Some videos are almost certain to go viral: wild animals that pilfer food from unsuspecting families, cars that career through the windows of crowded cafés, pilots trying to land planes in high winds. Some are less obvious candidates to ricochet around the internet. Take, for example, the case of Brittany Pietsch, whose recording of a call in which she is laid off from a tech firm called Cloudflare went viral last month.

The recording lasts nine minutes, shows no one save Ms Pietsch and involves words like “performance-improvement plan”. Despite these unpromising ingredients, it makes public a moment of human drama that could occur to almost any employee. It also tugs at a fundamental human instinct. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Ms Pietsch’s dismissal, the manner in which she was fired, in a summary call with two people she had never met before and for reasons that are never properly explained, seems unfair. And few things matter more to people than fairness.

In experiments where one person decides how to allocate a pot of money with another, recipients will routinely reject an offer if they feel they are being given too little, even if that means neither party gets any cash. A fair share matters more than free money. Equity matters in non-financial life, too. A study conducted in 2012 by Nicholas Wright of University College London deliberately made some participants thirsty by hooking them up to a saline drip; they would still reject offers of water from fellow participants if they felt they were being offered too little.

Given how much weight humans place on fairness, it makes sense that managers should think about it, too. For questions of fairness arise almost everywhere in the workplace—not just when people lose their jobs but also in who gets hired, who gets the credit when things go well and who has that really nice desk right by the window.

Fairness is not just a preoccupation of workers. Last month a judge in Delaware ruled against Elon Musk’s eye-watering compensation package at Tesla on the ground that it was unfair to shareholders. A recent study into ceo compensation by Alex Edmans of London Business School and his co-authors found that bosses care about fairness, too. Money is not just about what it can buy; ceos think it is only right to be rewarded for better performance, and to be paid in line with their peers. A sense of fairness can be responsible for driving up bosses’ pay and fuelling anger about it at the same time.

Customers value fairness, too, not least when it comes to pricing. Consumers instinctively recoil at the idea of prices rising in response to surging demand, whether for Uber fares on a busy night, face masks in a pandemic or snow shovels the night after a big storm. Such views are deeply ingrained. A recent paper by Casey Klofstad and Joseph Uscinski of the University of Miami asked Floridians for their views of anti-price-gouging legislation that would prevent shops from raising prices after a hurricane. Even when told that economists and other experts believe that mandatory price ceilings would exacerbate shortages and lead to store closures, respondents supported the law. (Depending on your point of view, this either proves that the public is irrational or that economists are not human.)

. . . .

This combination of salience and subjectivity makes fairness a tricky area for managers to navigate, but not an impossible one. No hiring decision will feel fair if qualified employees do not even know that there is a job going; a survey of 3,000 jobseekers by Gartner, a research firm, in 2021 found that half of them were not aware of internal career opportunities. No lay-off will feel fair if it is too impersonal.

Link to the rest at The Economist

https://www.tiktok.com/@alexyardigans/video/7322931907887484206?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7325688532458309150

How to Develop Your Unique Writing Style

From C.S. Lakin:

When tackling the art of fiction writing, it’s common to immerse yourself in the fundamentals: plot, structure, characters—the building blocks that demand time and mastery. Surprisingly, writing style often takes a backseat initially, with early attempts appearing clunky and derivative. It’s all part of the growth process.

I think it wasn’t until my fifth novel that I hit my stride and found my writing voice for my fantasy series. If you’re just beginning to venture into fiction, be patient! You have a lot of plates to juggle, and developing a unique, fresh, and compelling voice will take time and work.

Keep in mind, of course, that genre sets the rules. When the publisher of my fantasy series read my relational drama Someone to Blame, he told me he never would have guessed that I wrote that. He couldn’t recognize my writing style at all.

As it should be. Every time I’ve written in a different genre, I’ve studied best sellers and taken notes. Then I practiced until my prose fit right in.

. . . .

Much like a toddler learning to speak by mimicking adults, new writers often start by emulating established authors. This imitation is not just flattery but a smart learning strategy. By studying and imitating the style of great writers in your genre, you gain insights on how to craft your stories.

However, at some point, you must release your tight grip and venture into writing with your unique style. There’s no magic moment, but as you experiment, take chances, and let your imagination roam, your distinct voice begins to emerge.

Listening to Your Body

Okay, I know that might sound weird, but I learned this truth from mystery writer Elizabeth George. Your body will tell you if what you are writing is “spot-on” or if there is something off about it. The key to finding your unique writing style lies in being true to yourself.

Have you ever written a passage you really liked and wanted to use, but you had this nagging feeling it didn’t work? Then, when you squelched that warning and shared your passage with your critique team, what happened?

They all responded the same way. It doesn’t work, they said. It feels wrong. Maybe they had more specific responses for you that helped you see why and in what ways that passage didn’t work. But, hey, you already knew that. Or, you would have, had you listened to what your body was telling you.

There’s an uneasy feeling of discomfort a seasoned writer gets when she veers away from a true and honest writing voice and starts forcing the style for one reason or another. Then again, a writer can just get burned out, or have days or weeks in which she feels uncreative and can’t seem to come up with effective prose that feels like her true voice.

Listen to your body as you write—it will be honest with you. That uneasy feeling when deviating from your true voice is a signal to course-correct.

Inspiration and Creativity

Inspiration for just the right writing style can come from various sources. Reading exceptional prose before writing, as suggested by Elizabeth George, can jumpstart creativity. However, fine-tuning passages, experimenting with different tenses or tones, and using prompts can all be part of honing your style.

You’ve probably heard the adage “garbage in, garbage out.” And then there’s “you are what you eat”—which could be rewritten to “you write what you read.” Keep in mind that reading a lot of drivel (you can determine what constitutes that) can adversely affect your writing.

Be wary of asking for feedback from others. Oftentimes well-meaning critics will end up curtailing your creativity. Conversely, if readers are noticing problems with your style, pay attention and see what you can learn from their criticism (which, I hope, is kind and encouraging).

Link to the rest at C.S. Lakin

Lessons In Chemistry

From Notre Dame Magazine:

I have a confession to make: I am a writer. I have a hard time reading a book just for the story. Often I’m peeking behind the curtain, sussing out the tools the writer uses to make that story — point of view, verb tense, the objective correlative — see what I mean?

Bonnie Garmus’ debut novel, Lessons in Chemistry, still on The New York Times’ bestseller list more than a year after publication, came into my life after a very long spell of my own not-writing, so I had the pleasure of reading the story for the story. I did not get hung up on tools or structure. And I had fun.

Garmus had me on page 1: It is 1961 and a mother is packing her daughter’s lunch, albeit in a laboratory and with the certainty that “her life was over.” 

The premise is believable. What mother hasn’t had a bad day? And despite that, she’s the one packing the lunch, getting the day started. Just, what was that part about in a lab? I’ve packed lunches in some unusual places, but never in a lab. And it’s 1961. How many women were there in labs? And her life is over?

I wanted to know what would happen to Elizabeth Zott. Spoiler alert: I am giving away the ending.

Zott is the host of an afternoon cooking show, Dinner at Six, that is famously famous. Even the American president has seen and glowed about it.

But before she became a television host, Zott was a graduate student in chemistry at UCLA. More intrigue. Not a lot of women were studying chemistry at that level in the 1950s — but this is the University of California, the geographication of liberal for American readers.

However, in Zott’s case, no degree ever follows. She is 10 days shy of graduation when her faculty mentor finds her in the lab late at night checking test protocols, which is to say, putting in the extra effort she knows she must make to stay on his otherwise-all-male research team. Again, things are tracking.

When Zott tells her mentor of an error she believes she has found, he is irritated and determines to cover it up. He starts by putting his student back in her place, which means he tries to rape her. She escapes by stabbing him with a pencil. While he is rushed to the hospital, campus police pressure Elizabeth over and over . . . and over to make a statement of regret. She finally does: She regrets not having more pencils. 

Clever, and all too real.

From there, Elizabeth finds a position in a lab. Male colleagues mistreat her. Only one does not.

The tragedy in Lessons in Chemistry never overpowers the story. Garmus is a genius at buoying inequality and trauma with humor, resilience and the stark reality of a character who has nowhere else to go but through. Even Zott’s dog is a full-fledged character with emotion, motivation and internal dialogue that is just, well, so very much dog. The writing is brilliant.

I eagerly bought into the fictional dream until the very end: Elizabeth is saved by a wealthy female benefactor.

Can women save women? You bet. Were there wealthy female benefactors in the early 1960s? Absolutely. Did I want Elizabeth to prevail in her field of choice due to her intelligence and ability? One hundred and ten percent.

Because women don’t actually need saving. Elizabeth is no damsel in distress. She is a woman emasculated — pun intended — by a system seeped in misogyny. When women outsmart the system . . . and change it? That’s the ending I want.

I do not want one opportunity to open up for one woman at one point in time. I want change. I want laws to change. I want men and women to change. I want society to change.

Perhaps, however, that revolution of change begins with one woman helping another woman. Perhaps it takes a deus ex machina kind of shift because that shift is so incongruent to society.

. . . .

Lessons in Chemistry is well worth the read not only for the insight and inspiration but also for Garmus’ sharp wit and excellent writing. It is a story that stays with the reader, encourages her to think. It encouraged me to look at what I can do, how I can support people on the margins in a meaningful way.

Link to the rest at Notre Dame Magazine

The First Rule of Write Club

From Writer Unboxed:

Fight Club, the book and the movie, comes at you like a right hook. In my experience, you love it or you hate it. But unless you’re tragically hipster or a Gen Z nihilist, the last thing you are is ambivalent.

Which brings us to the topic of today’s post.

Welcome to the Suck.

I’ve been in the publishing industry for nearly 25 years. It’s always been the Wild West. Lately, though, it’s been looking less like a Western and more like a post-apocalyptic dystopia. We went from High Noon to The Hunger Games in six seconds flat.

In this landscape, your story is either a Sherman tank, or a ghost.

“One size fits all” fits no one.

I can’t tell you how many writers I’ve talked to who say their story “could appeal to everyone… anyone from age ten to seventy, any race, any gender, any walk of life!”

No, it really, really doesn’t.

Because nothing appeals to everyone.

Hell, I know people who don’t like pizza, and if that’s not proof there is no universally appealing thing on earth, I don’t know what is.

More importantly, appealing to everyone should never be your goal when it comes to writing, especially now.

“Universally appealing” generally means average, safe, standard.

That’s DMV beige. That’s unseasoned boiled chicken breast.

That’s ghost territory.

Turning it up to eleven.

It started with the rise of the internet, when a plethora of images, information, and interaction were suddenly, literally at your fingertips. Ironically, in a time where we have the largest buffet of brain candy in the world, people are starving for all the choices.

(If you’ve ever spent an hour perusing Netflix titles while choosing nothing, you know what I mean.)

As a result, it takes something truly vibrant, amplified, and dare I say polarizing to connect with the right readers… the ones who will not only love your work, but spread it like an underground rebellion through their various whisper networks.

In this environment, “meh” is the enemy. Ideally, you want people to either love it or hate it, but by God, they have strong feelings either way.

That’s what we’re looking for. Strong feelings.

But how do you do that?

  • Start with the right project. Impact has to be baked in at inception. Start by identifying three main elements: personal passion, reader experience… and, quite frankly, a hook that could bring in a marlin.What are you genuinely thrilled to write? What will readers in that genre adore about it? And in the intersection of those two, what will surprise them, compelling them to find out more about it?
  • Amplify. You’re then going to turn up the volume on these elements. Ultimately, you want to write things that make you grin and rub your hands together gleefully. Even if it initially feels self-indulgent, a darling that’s going to be slaughtered later, toss it in.

    Repeat with reader experience. Think about what draws readers to your genre. For example, in mystery, they love the puzzle, the challenge. They want the clues, the twists, the red herrings. They want to feel smart, but challenged. They want to know they could solve the murder – but still be pleasantly surprised at a fair, believable, yet unexpected finale.

    Add depth to your characters without “reinventing” the genre or sacrificing pacing. Play off their expectations, leading them to a lull of “oh this again” before belting them with a surprise.Look for universal fantasy elements, those primal emotional hooks that are irresistible, and incorporate them as often as possible. What are the core emotions for the story and the set pieces, and how can you make them shine? How can you look at each scene, and think about adding in things that will delight your readers?

    Finally, what are your (for lack of a better term) “viral moments”… the stuff that’s going to get people talking? Not in a general “I really liked this book” kind of way. In an “Oh my God, that scene, the one at the wedding? I couldn’t believe it!” kind of way. Specific scenes that make them strong-arm friends into reading the book because they’ve got to talk about it with somebody!
  • Distill. In a world that has the attention span of a goldfish with ADHD, you’ve got mere moments to make a strong impression. Once you’ve got all the delicious and deliberate material, you’re going to distill the experience down for the most impact. Streamline and reduce. Look at every element – characterization, plotting, pacing, dialogue, setting – for ways to tighten, strengthen, enhance. Story level and scene level. This is a diamond that you’re carving for drama, and polishing for emphasis.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

Don’t Shave That Yak!

From Seth Godin:

The single best term I’ve learned this year.

I want to give you the non-technical definition, and as is my wont, broaden it a bit.

Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occurs when you find something you need to do. “I want to wax the car today.”

“Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I’ll need to buy a new one at Home Depot.”

“But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls.”

“But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor’s EZPass…”

“Bob won’t lend me his EZPass until I return the mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though.”

“And we haven’t returned it because some of the stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair to restuff it.”

And the next thing you know, you’re at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.

This yak shaving phenomenon tends to hit some people more than others, but what makes it particularly perverse is when groups of people get involved. It’s bad enough when one person gets all up in arms yak shaving, but when you try to get a group of people together, you’re just as likely to end up giving the yak a manicure.

Which is why solo entrepreneurs and small organizations are so much more likely to get stuff done. They have fewer yaks to shave.

So, what to do?

Don’t go to Home Depot for the hose.

The minute you start walking down a path toward a yak shaving party, it’s worth making a compromise. Doing it well now is much better than doing it perfectly later.

Link to the rest at Seth Godin

The Power of the Prompt

From Writer Unboxed:

In 2010, the consensus was that a writer needed to have a blog.

As a dutiful rules follower, who at the time wanted an agent, I started blogging regularly about my journey, about a software program my friend had recommended called Scrivener, and—for more than a year—I penned a weekly blog post called The Sunday Squirrel.

The odd name comes from an experience I had in Toastmasters in my twenties. We had a member, Ken, who was truly a remarkable speaker. Anytime we had an unfilled speaking slot, he would give an impromptu speech using a random topic from the audience. His most memorable was a humorous, completely off-the-cuff, 7-minute speech about hunting squirrels as a kid, that may or may not have been complete B.S. I was impressed.

My hope was that I could grow a similar skill with the written word through extemporaneous writing. I especially wanted to hone my “show-don’t-tell” skills via short pieces of prose with low stakes. So, every Sunday, I picked a random word or topic and then wrote around it, publishing the result immediately, with minimal editing.

The very first squirrel was water bottle, and here’s what I came up with:

He reached for the water bottle tucked into the truck’s console, but it slipped from his grip as he lost the feeling in his fingers. The bottle fell to the floor with a thud, water pulsing out onto the dirty carpet. Every lost drop made him more desperate to quench the fire in his throat as his heart stopped beating and he gasped for his last breath.

A bit, morbid, but you get the idea. These grew increasingly longer, quickly becoming 800-1500 word scenes with a full arc.

Looking back, I’m shocked that I was brave enough to put the results of those impromptu writing sessions out there for all the world to see, and shocked that some of them aren’t too bad. It seems like limiting yourself to a word or specific idea would stifle creativity, but I’ve found that it actually feeds mine. The wilder the concept you have to incorporate, the more creative you have to be.

I’ve done similar prompts at writing conferences, and I’m always surprised how much fun it is and how easily my writer brain takes off when given an assignment.

One of my favorites used three words and a quote.

Words/Concepts: cocktail bar, Sunday school teacher, riding crop

Quote: “I’m just doing what the fortune cookie said. Who am I to stand in the way of fate?”

I somehow wrote a 504-word scene using all the elements in 30 minutes. There are a lot of days when I’d be happy to get 500 words in two hours, so that felt like a breakthrough. Sometimes a blank page is overwhelming. I can write anything! Except, oh, no, I can write anything, what should it be? Where do I start?

Narrowing the possibilities can cut through the indecisiveness and unfreeze your brain.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

Writing with Intentionality

From Writer Unboxed:

A few days before the Solstice, against my better instincts, I opened an Instagram advertisement for a Planner. I couldn’t resist. The ad promised Productivity. Wellness. With this Planner I would achieve not just my goals, but my dreams. 2024 would be my best year ever.

I am a list-maker by nature; I have a day job that is governed by reports, meetings, and deadlines and I live or die by my daily office planner and a stack of yellow legal pads to track my goings-on. Other than the shared office Google calendar, I don’t digitalize my planning. The act of recording a task or an appointment by hand makes a deeper connection with my brain: I feel it as much as I see it.

But this Planner promised next-level empowerment, and for a moment I lingered on the website, wondering if it could be true.

Suddenly, my IG feed was nothing but advertisements for Planners. Gorgeous things, some the size of an atlas, others made to nestle as neatly in the palm as the ubiquitous smartphone. Some leather, others cloth-bound and embossed, like a Penguin Classic, begging to be opened, their creamy pages caressed. Some were filled with motivational quotes or creativity invoking prompts. Others had a Dashboard that would keep me on track or a Workflow System to chart my progress and hold me accountable (How? I marveled. A Planner with a built-in guilt genie, tsk-tsking when I drank a second glass of wine on a weeknight or blew off a Saturday morning of writing to finish the latest Ruth Ware novel?).

What is it about these Planners that is so irresistible? Why did I find myself, overcome by Agenda-Envy, googling “Best Planners 2024”? Yes, there is the allure of fresh starts. The intoxication of untouched pages and untapped pens that goes all the way back to grade school with the perfume of newly sharpened pencils and the smooth glide of Pee-Chee covers unmarred by doodling.

As I plunged down the Planner rabbit hole, I realized my search wasn’t about finding the perfect tool to organize my routines. What these physical objects represent—whatever their degree of bells and whistles—is greater than all the promises they make to optimize our lives. It is what we already carry within us: intentionality.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines intentionality as:

“the mind’s capacity to direct itself on things. Mental states like thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes exhibit intentionality in the sense that they are always directed on, or at, something: if you hope, believe or desire, you must hope, believe or desire something.” *

I think of it as how and where I direct my time and energy to achieve deeply desired goals.

With the recognition of a desire for intentionality came a poignant reflection. Although my day-job life is well-structured and my inner creature of routine regularly trundles her outer self to the pool and the yoga studio, I haven’t given the same attention to my creative life.

Once upon a time I had and that intentionality—the deliberate, directed focus of time and energy—resulted in a writing career that was both inwardly fulfilling and on a public upward trajectory: In a short span of time, I’d landed an agent and took two novels to publication.

That trajectory was interrupted by divorce and its attendant financial distress: I left the full-time writing career that I’d launched only three years before to return to a traditional 9-5 with its steady paychecks and health benefits. Naturally my writing career had to adjust to the sudden change of priorities; however, my expectations didn’t get the memo. I kept up the internal pressure to produce and publish until that pressure became a painful bruise of self-recrimination and its partner, self-doubt.

I restarted my traditional work life, first in the wine industry I had most recently left, then in non-profit administration that had been my earlier professional calling. I stumbled from a bad relationship and into lasting love. Like all of us, I lurched through the pandemic years, with the unexpected grace of finding myself a homeowner again in the opening days of the lockdowns. I was breathlessly busy and distracted.

I kept writing, the thing that gave me a sense of self during a time of massive personal change. But in the five years it took me to write my next novel, I’d let my intentionality as a writer fizzle and flatten.

I can fill the spare moments I have as a writer with words, a what that distracts me from the greater why. But in a writing career that has flowed and ebbed these past several years­, I had lost touch with what brought me to the page in the first place. It wasn’t until this past fall, seven years after my divorce and seven-a-half years after the publication of my first novel, that I stepped back to deeply examine my thoughts and hopes about my writing life.

Late September, I stood in front of a group of eight writers on the first day of a novel-writing course and proclaimed that in our time together—90 minutes over eight Wednesdays—our focus would be on writing, not publishing. We would free our expectations of the external possibilities of our work and instead lean into the challenge and joy of crafting a great story. A principle I, their instructor, had lost touch with some time before.

We’re culturally imprinted to focus our fresh-start energy on January 1. The pool lanes where I swim laps ripple with new bodies the first weeks of the year. Dry January has become a thing. My Substack feed is replete with newsletters about resolutions and renewal. It tracks, of course. We end the year saturated with celebration, decoration, libation. The stark, cold, reality of January (for those in the Northern hemisphere) makes for a natural transition to discipline. But when in the busy several weeks that precede the start of the new year do we really have the time and energy to be deliberate about our hopes, goals, intentions for our creative lives?

I would like to invite in a new New Year practice for my writing, and for yours: Let’s make the month of January our time to actively reflect on our writing goals and intentions.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

Designing Thriller and Mystery Twists That Work

From Jane Friedman:

When mystery, thriller, and suspense authors plot their stories, one of the biggest consistent hurdles is designing twists that work. I’ve written previously about how thinking about your villain’s motivations can unblock a climactic scene in a thriller. But what if we’re still in the planning stages of our novel, and we feel stuck as to how to make the story fit the modern thriller convention of “twisty”? What if we’ve written our story, but our beta readers are seeing our twists from much too early on, or we keep getting feedback that the story is too predictable? How do we ideate twists that work?

These questions come up every time I teach and coach thriller writers, and they’re good questions. First, let’s define a few things:

What is a villain?

Mystery, thriller, and suspense (MTS) stories are the villain’s story, as told and perceived by the protagonist. As such, villains are equally, if not more important to figure out, than the protagonist. In MTS, the villain is the character doing the Bad Thing, and the protagonist is the person trying to stop the Bad Thing. The protagonist may or may not know who this person is, but as the story unfolds, they get closer and closer to the truth, ultimately uncovering what’s actually going on. The villain in these types of stories is sentient, and will go to equally great lengths as the protagonist to achieve their goal. This villain may frame other people to look like the real villain to the protagonist, or may be pulling the strings behind the scenes. Most importantly though, this person has their own wants, needs, motivations, and desires, and they are the person with whom the protagonist will have an ultimate face-off in the story.

What is a twist?

The protagonist’s journey in both thrillers and mysteries is effectively the unveiling of the villain’s plan, as experienced by the protagonist. The protagonist is our (the reader’s) “guide” through the story, because the protagonist is the character leading the reader along as they uncover what the villain was/is ultimately up to. As such, I like to define twists as follows:

Twists are the reveal of the villain’s truth. This truth feels “twisty”, because the reveal of the truth is unexpected to the protagonist.

What makes a twist satisfying?

Satisfying twists are the only logical answer to a puzzle that seemed seemingly impossible to solve as the reader/protagonist moved through the story. Satisfying twists are unexpected, but do not appear out of nowhere. They make perfect sense when the reader looks backwards at what they’ve already been shown on the page via the protagonist and what the protagonist saw, but aren’t easily guessed until they’re revealed because the protagonist led us astray. All the clues were “on screen,” i.e., on the page for us to see the correct answer (the villain’s truth), but those clues were seen (but ignored), or seen (but misinterpreted), or seen (but overlooked) by the protagonist throughout the story.

In other words, the protagonist was dead sure up until the reveal of the villain’s truth that the answer was something else. And because the protagonist was so sure, the reader will be happily led to that same conclusion. These clues were there for the reader to pick up on (and sometimes we do, which is part of the puzzle MTS readers love), but because readers tend to go along with whatever the protagonist thinks/sees/feels about a mystery, by deliberately designing our stories so that our protagonists ignore/misinterpret/overlook clues, the end result is a delightful manipulation of what the reader thinks as well.

By contrast, twists are unsatisfying when they’re predictable, convenient, or feel “unearned,” as they feel when the clues were not on the page for the reader or protagonist to pick up on. For example, if the protagonist has no way of knowing what’s really going on because the villain hasn’t been on the page at all, it can feel very unsatisfying. We (the reader) want the chance to be able to figure out the mystery along with the protagonist, to solve the plot problem, and to see and interpret the clues.

Of course, the flip side of this is if there are too many clues on the page or the villain is predictable, we won’t find the reveal of the villain’s truth twisty at all. It will fall flat. Predictability can take many forms: it can show up when our villain is too obviously evil and therefore easy to guess. It can appear when we lean into tropes in the genre (i.e., the spouse did it), without playing with or changing up motivations. (Pro tip: A trope can become fresh if the reader thinks, via the protagonist, that the answer is obvious, and then the true answer is the villain is someone entirely different.

The key to achieving satisfying, balanced twists and clues is to remember that the protagonist is our guide to uncovering the villain’s truth. Because the protagonist is the character leading the reader along as they uncover what the villain was/is ultimately up to, we as the author have ample opportunity to mislead the reader via the protagonist’s misinterpretation of the clues. Twists feel “twisty” because we (the author) have carefully engineered the story to mislead the reader via the protagonist’s journey and their assumptions.

As such, I recommend keeping the protagonist (logically) convinced about a plausible other solution right up until the point they face the truth. This applies to all the main twists: the midpoint twist (at 50%, where the story takes a turn), the climactic twist (at roughly 85%, where the protagonist faces the villain themselves or the person they think is the villain, and restores order) and the final twist (at roughly 98%, where the protagonist uncovers something unexpected, sometimes facing the true villain).

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

The Wound and The Contradiction

From Writer Unboxed:

Finding ways to deepen characterization

Over the holidays and now into the dark days of winter, I’ve been re-watching The Sopranos. A lot of former favorites don’t hold up, but Tony Soprano is a masterpiece, a combination of great writing with the perfect actor, and I’ve been enthralled. Really, the detail work in the show is remarkable and worth studying. (The New York Times published a guide to rewatching here.)

As I studied the writing, in this and a few other things over the break, I have been working on a theory of character rooted in two things, the wound and the contradiction.

The wound is the simple truth that every being carries with them a wound, a defining pain. The contradiction is that thing that sticks out in their personality or actions that is contrary to every other thing. Together, these two things will do a lot of heavy lifting to elevate your characters and make them memorable.

First, the wound. This is that thing that shapes them, a scar or mark or a memory they carry like a bag of rocks. It’s the think they can’t get over even (or especially) if it seems they’ve put it to bed. My grandmother’s father died when she was eleven, orphaning her and sending her through a long series of homes with relatives until she was old enough to make her own home.

I’m sure it’s not difficult for you to pick out a wound for yourself, maybe lots of them. The one we want for a character is the big one, the hard mark. A loss, probably, something that spun life in new directions.

Tony has been one of my favorite characters to teach for a long time, and I found even more to love this time around. He’s relatable and conflicted and piercingly human, but he’s also this tragic archetype that will never escape his fate.

We can relate to Tony Soprano because despite his status as a mob boss, he is everyman, a guy with a lot of responsibilities and a high-pressure job. He suffers panic attacks. He loves his children. He really listens when people talk to him. He’s a toucher, he puts his hands on people in gentle ways. By the standards of his world, he has absolute integrity. He rules his kingdom and his world with fairness and honor. He tries to prevent wars and unnecessary killing. He rewards loyalty. And he has an absolutely horrible mother he still wants to please.

Tony’s wound is his mother. She is a cruel and distant woman who is never satisfied, but somehow, Tony keeps trying. He can never be the fully realized man he wants to be because a big part of him is still that deeply wounded little boy who loved the mother who was cruel to him.

In the also remarkable television show This Is Us, all of the family members suffer from the same wound—the untimely death of the father of the clan, Jack. Each of them has suffered in a particular way, each not-coping with the wound in ways that profoundly affect their lives moving forward. One is a famous actor with addiction and insecurity issues, another a seemingly high-functioning professional with anxiety that can lay him out, and a chronic binge eater who cannot let go of the father she adored. Paradise lost, never to be regained.

Notice, none of these wounds are particularly original. There are only so many ways humans are wrecked, and most of them are rooted in not getting needs met in childhood, some way or another.

The wound gives us the material to build a character of great depth and width. If you know this wound, you will be able to build in relatability in a dozen different ways. Study trauma and the ways it manifests in personality and you will discover an encyclopedia of personality traits. Tony copes with his loss by serial womanizing. He blunts the pain by reaching for the arms of women, but he also suffers because he dreams of a family that can’t exist. Kate from This Is Us blunts her feelings with food, her twin brother with alcohol.

That leads us to the second half of the idea, which is the contradiction.

Robert McKee in his book Story talks about plotting from a quadrant of values. The lowest point is what he calls “the negation of the negation,” which is a complex idea of reversal which in plotting is the farthest place you can go from where you want to be. In character, that’s often the opposite of the main thing. If he wants love, for example, he doesn’t experience hate, he experiences hate masquerading as love. The main contradiction in terms of character is much the same. It will be something out of alignment with the top layer of character, a quality that almost always holds the seeds of possible destruction.

Tony Soprano’s main contradiction is that he’s a mob boss who suffers panic attacks so severe he has to see a therapist. Since secrecy is one of columns upholding the mafioso life, that presents a really big problem. The anxiety stems from his wound, his inability to make peace with his brutal mother, but at the heart of it, he’s a king archetype who doesn’t want the job. The anxiety, the wound, the panic attacks all hide the fact that he doesn’t want to be a mob boss. The way his wound manifests hold the seeds of his destruction: a mob boss can’t tell secrets, can’t have anxiety attacks, can’t fall apart.

But he does.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

Six reasons you’re confusing the reader

From Nathan Bransford:

If you hand off your novel to a loved one and you can’t help but notice their attention wandering, it might be more than their unfinished game of Wordle that’s getting in the way. You might have written a novel that’s more confusing than you think.

I’m going to round up a list of reasons you might be confusing your reader.

You might have thought of before some of the first ones on the list, but they’re still worth a gut check, sort of a “did you try turning it off and turning it back on” level of writing advice.

But stick with me here, because I’m going to get to some you might not have thought of before.

You’ve lost sight of what’s actually on the page
This one is basic and fundamental. As writers, it’s nearly impossible to avoid projecting things onto the page that just aren’t there. Really ask yourself: Can I see what is and isn’t on the page?

You know what settings look like, why characters are doing what they’re doing, and why there’s a gargoyle playing pickleball atop every gate in your novel. Unless those details are actually on the page, the reader is going to be confused.

Every single writer struggles with this to some degree, which is why editing is so important, but some writers struggle more than others to put themselves in the shoes of someone who’s coming to their work fresh. Unless you can build that empathy muscle for your future readers, chances are you’re going to end up with a book that readers find a bit mystifying.

The perspective is broken
A novel’s perspective is absolutely fundamental to the reading experience. It helps determine where the reader situates their consciousness within the scene they’re constructing in their head.

If the perspective is omniscient, we’re anchored to an all-seeing “guide” who steers us around a scene. If it’s limited or first person, we’re tied very closely to a particular character.

We contextualize what happens in the scene with that vantage point in mind. For instance, if a first person narrative voice refers to a “he” within a scene, we know the narrator is referring to the man he’s talking to. If the perspective is unclear, we may be confused which character the “he” pronoun refers to.

When the perspective is a mishmash, we will quickly struggle to make sense of things and will feel extremely disoriented. Make sure you know your perspective, and keep it utterly consistent.

Your writing is imprecise or needlessly convoluted
The more energy the reader has to spend parsing sentences, the less they’re able to simply focus on the story.

Now, let me be clear that I’m not saying every single sentence needs to be as taut and spare as Hemingway. It’s okay to be flowery and interesting if you want to. But unless you’re explicitly aiming to create something challenging or experimental, err on the side of precise, elegant, and digestible.

Sharpen your physical description and make sure readers can visualize their surroundings, don’t bog things down with needless details about everyday objects, clear out the clutter around your verbs, and read your prose out loud to catch convoluted phrasing.

Precision is everything.

You’re trying too hard to be mysterious
Sure. We all love a good mystery. And sometimes authors are so worried they’re being boring they try to make every single micro-moment in their novel mysterious.

When they do this, they can easily cross a line where it stops being mysterious, and instead it’s just annoyingly vague. It’s exhausting to try to follow a story where a character is running around doing confusing things for confusing reasons. You’ll wear the reader out if they’re left to only grasp at what is happening entirely from scant clues.

Make sure the reader is well-situated in the story, choose your mysteries very judiciously, and try to build mysteries around whether characters will succeed or fail. It’s hard to feel anticipation for an impending encounter if we have no idea why the dragon they want to slay is important in the first place.

Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford

PG notes there are lots of links at the OP to additional information on the items Mr. Bransford discusses.

Editing and Reading Observations

From Dean Wesley Smith:

Our job as editors is to try to figure out which stories the readers of our publications will like. But if you are putting your stories up indie and not many are selling, you might want to pay attention to some of these points I am making from an editor perspective.

I find it fascinating how many writers have no understanding of the advanced levels of craft in fiction writing. They often think that major bestsellers who sell hundreds of thousands of copies of every book are just marketed better, or lucky, when actually those writers have learned the craft of grabbing and holding readers.

But it is easier for new writers to blame marketing as the reason others sell so well than it is to realize maybe they need to become better storytellers.

So back to my reading observations as I look for stories to buy for Pulphouse from the stories sent in by Pulphouse Kickstarter backers.

Yesterday I mentioned two major reasons I stop reading a story. Lack of Depth and bad Pacing. Those two are the major two, but now how about the next two major reasons I stop reading and send a story back to the writer?

Walking to the Story… This is common because writers see it on television so much. For example, almost every series of Star Trek, almost every episode, starts with characters doing something below decks. Then they head for the bridge, often called, and when they get to the bridge the story starts. They basically turbo-lifted to the story.

This does not work in fiction. And I know I must be missing some cool stuff when I quit and send the story back, but every reader of my magazine would miss it as well.

Fake Details… A fake detail is a detail the writer puts in that has no image with it. A writer’s job is to completely control the reader and what they are seeing and feeling at any given moment, yet fake details rely on the reader to bring an image from their lives.

I use the word “barn” to illustrate this point. When I say the word “barn” I am thinking of a single-story building, built into the side of a hill, with grass on the roof. That fit your image of barn? More than likely not. So your image would conflict with mine and you the reader would get confused and leave the story.

I am always stunned how many writers in the depth workshop assignment on this topic put the word “horse” in front of barn. Not a clue why.

Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith

Ten British Dialects You Need to Know

From EF Education:

If you’re learning English in the UK you might think you’ll come home with a perfect British accent that sounds like you got English lessons from the Queen herself.

In reality, there are almost 40 different dialects in the UK that sound totally different from each other, and in many cases use different spellings and word structure. In fact, there’s pretty much one accent per county.

Here are 10 British dialects you need to know:

1. Scottish

Let’s start in the North, with the accent that universally symbolises glassy lochs (lakes), snowy mountains, tartan, and… shortbread? The Scottish accent as we know it now developed as late as the 1700s, but existed in different forms before that.

It was heavily influenced by the Gaelic language, which was (and still sometimes is) spoken in certain areas of Scotland, as well as Norse languages from Viking invaders. Scots would say Scotland as ‘SKORT-lond’ instead of the Standard English ‘SKOTT-lund’.

Take a trip to cities like Edinburgh and Glasgow to hear the Scottish accent.

2. Geordie

People from Newcastle speak a dialect called Geordie, which is one of the strongest and most distinctive accents in England.

Geordie changes all the rules of Standard English, so nothing is pronounced as you’d expect it to be: the word button would be pronounced BOT-tdan instead of BUH-tun, with a ‘ooh’ sound on the letter U and a rolled T. Yeah, best to Youtube it, folks.

3. Scouse

People from Liverpool are called Scousers or Liverpudlians, and their dialect (which, like Geordie, is very strong and instantly recognisable) is called Scouse.

Liverpudlians would say woss dtha? instead of what’s that? with a lot of emphasis on the letters A and Y in words. They also roll their Rs, making it hard to tell if they’re saying L or R. Bless them!

Places you can visit to learn Scouse include Liverpool and nearby Manchester.

4. Yorkshire

One of the biggest counties in England, Yorkshire has a distinctive accent where one of the biggest pronunciation differences is on the letter U, which is spoken as ooo rather than uh – so cut is pronounced coht and blood is pronounced blohd.

Apparently it’s seen as one of the nicest and most trustworthy dialects by other people in the UK, but personally I’ve never met a trustworthy Yorkshire person (just kidding, they’re lovely).

You’ll hear the Yorkshire dialect in cities like York, Leeds and Sheffield.

5. Welsh

Officially a different country, Wales has a culture and language of its own that’s spoken by half a million people. They have brilliantly long and complicated words like Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which is the name of a Welsh village (and the second longest place name in the world).

When Welsh people speak English, their accent is instantly recognisable – they pronounce words like ‘Wales’ as WEE-alss unlike the English, who pronounce it WAY-ells.

You’ll learn the Welsh dialect if you visit Cardiff or nearby cities like Bristol.

6. Brummie

Possibly the cutest name on our list, this accent is actually one of the most ridiculed in the UK – which is quite mean, because clearly people from Essex have never heard themselves speak.

The name is derived from Brummagem and Bromwichham, both historical alternate names for the large city of Birmingham, where people speak this dialect.

People with a Brummie accent would say the word ‘hello’ as heh-LOUW instead of HEH-low, although there are lots of variations of the accent across the city (it’s the third-largest city in England).

Link to the rest at EF Education

A Brief History of the United States’ Accents and Dialects

From Smithsonian Magazine:

The United States may lack an official language, but a road trip across the country reveals dozens of different accents and dialects of English that serve as living links to Americans’ ancestors.

What’s the difference between these two linguistic terms? Accents center on the pronunciation of words, while dialects encompass pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. They both often vary by region.

“Even Americans, most of whom speak only English, usually know more than one dialect,” notes the Linguistic Society of America. Consider, for instance, how an individual might speak to their boss versus a stranger who just rear-ended their car.

Dialects are rooted in the same system, but “their partly independent histories leave different parts of the parent system intact,” according to the society.

Myriad factors influence variations among American accents and dialects, including waves of settlement in a region, geographic location and class differences.

“There’s never [just] one accent in a given place,” says Teresa Pratt, a sociolinguist at San Francisco State University. “There’s so much variation, even in one particular region.”

The U.S. is commonly divided into distinct regions: the West, the Midwest, the Southwest, the Southeast and the Northeast. But broad accent categories based on these regions are more accurately broken down into diverse dialects across different localities.

Dialects in the Deep South—encompassing Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina—are distinct from those in Texas, a large state that’s home to several linguistic varieties, as well as a mix of Spanish and English (nicknamed Spanglish) closer to the U.S.-Mexico border.

“The South gets stereotyped as a monolith, which is really unfair,” says Nicole Holliday, a linguist at Pomona College.

The many variations in the American South include South Midland, Ozark, Coastal Southern, Virginia Piedmont, Gullah, Cajun English and Gulf Southern.

The popularity of specific dialects is often tied to regional history. When English colonists first arrived in North America in the early 17th century, they landed on the East Coast, establishing English-speaking communities in the North and the South. The French, the Dutch, the Spanish and other European powers also introduced their own languages as they colonized different parts of the continent. Speaking styles in different colonies remained distinct because travel opportunities were limited at the time, says Jessi Grieser, a linguist at the University of Michigan. “Historically, it’s about migration and who went where,” she adds.

English settlers succumbed to competing influences when they came into contact with Native Americans and colonists from other countries, all while isolating themselves from England. Centuries of settlement on the East Coast resulted in more linguistic variation among the region’s cities because English was spoken there longer, Holliday says.

Link to the rest at Smithsonian Magazine

Beyond BICHOK: How, When and Why Getting Your Butt Out of the Chair Can Make You a Better Writer

From Jane Friedman:

You’re driving on a long stretch of highway when you have an insight about your main character’s childhood. Or you’re mid-hair-rinse in the shower, when you suddenly understand how to bring together the braided strands of your novel. Or you wake up at 2 a.m. with the resolution to that thorny plot issue you’ve been wrestling.

Have you ever noticed how many ideas arise when you’re not sitting at the keyboard? 

As writers, we’ve all experienced the law of diminishing returns—the point at which our writing stops being generative and begins to feel like we’re pulling each word from our synapses by hand. I spent the better part of a decade investigating how to create what I half-jokingly call a “law of increasing flow.” How might writers support our writing practice in a way that doesn’t leave us mentally burned out?

Conventional advice: butt in chair, hands on keyboard

For decades, writers have been told the most important thing to do is to put “butt in chair, hands on keyboard.” As acronyms emerged with USENET forums in the 1990s, this became abbreviated “BICHOK.”

BICHOK is essential to writing. You can’t publish a book without sitting down to write, to revise, to revise again (and again and again), to query, or to fill out your author questionnaire. Yet so often, it’s treated like a Puritan work ethic or a punishment: “You put your backside in that chair, young man, and don’t get up until you’ve written 10 pages.”

That may work for some writers, and if you’re among them, more power to you! That kind of disciplinarian approach, though, doesn’t work for me.

Putting hands on a keyboard doesn’t make someone a writer, any more than holding a Stratocaster makes someone a musician. There are many times when we can gain insight by looking away from our work. These include: Before we sit down to write, during the writing process, and between revisions. What we do during those times is every bit as important as getting the words down.

To understand how this helps your writing, it’s important to understand the interplay of the conscious and subconscious mind.

How the subconscious and conscious mind work

When I was younger, I used to tell people that my best writing bypassed my intellect entirely; it came from my heart and flowed down my arm. While that might sound precious and woo-woo, it turns out my instincts were right on. The intellect has many wonderful uses—categorizing and sorting (and revising, oh so much revising.)—but it’s a terrible writer.

The thinking mind informs our writing; it’s what allows us to conduct research, analyze information and execute the ideas we have. Original ideas, though, can only come up when we deliberately allow the mind to wander—and pay attention to its whereabouts.

The conscious or rational mind, including what we call the intellect, takes in about 2,000 bits of information per second. However, it can only process about 40 bits of information per second.

The subconscious mind, on the other hand, takes in upwards of 11 million bits of information per second. We know more than we are aware of knowing. The subconscious retains everything we’ve ever experienced. It combines seemingly disparate ideas and experiences and comes up with new and unusual connections. Just ask anyone who’s ever dreamt about their aunt Myrtle performing Riverdance in a T-Rex costume. The subconscious is creative.

Creativity comes from beyond the thinking mind

J.D. Salinger once wrote, “Novels grow in the dark.” By that, he meant that they emerge from the subconscious mind. In my experience, what we call intuition is logic of the subconscious, delivered to us in aha moments after it has had time to percolate.

Consider the old-fashioned tin coffeemaker, the kind you put on a stove. You add the ingredients—water in the bottom, coffee grounds on top—but you don’t expect coffee right away. The stove has to heat up; the water has to boil. Then it has to percolate, mixing the bubbling water with the grounds, as the water slowly takes on the flavor of the grounds. The process takes time and can’t be rushed. Creative percolation is the same.

Many of us get ideas from sudden insights, but waiting around for those is a fool’s errand, because there’s one major block: The thinking mind is as noisy as a jackhammer, whereas intuition whispers. As long as our thinking mind is engaged, it will be difficult to notice subconscious insights.

When we look away and we relax the thinking mind, we’re more receptive to our intuition.

. . . .

When to look away

Conventional writing advice suggests taking a break when you know what’s coming next. That presumes that only your writing time is productive and that all look-away time is unproductive.

But in Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, the late sci-fi author wrote: “As soon as things get difficult, I walk away. That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.” He clarifies by saying that when you move toward cats, they tend to move away, but if you ignore them, then they become interested.

Here are some of the ways I know it’s time for a break:

  1. I’m zoning out
  2. When words are sputtering out instead of flowing
  3. I’m tab-hopping instead of writing
  4. I’ve rewritten the same paragraph ten times
  5. When anxiety is present and I believe the thought “I can’t possibly take a break, I’m too busy”

Paradoxically, when I believe that I can’t possibly take time away from writing, that’s when it’s most essential. That anxiety-to-panic isn’t doing my writing any favors. It’s a state of contraction, which is the opposite of expansive creativity.

If I work until the point where I feel completely depleted, it takes a much, much longer time to rebound than if I routinely top off my creative reservoir. It is so much easier to prevent burnout than to recover from it.

Aside from your personal creative rhythms—and each of us has our own—there are three main times when it’s important to take time away from the keyboard, with different recommendations for each.

1. Preparing to write (before you sit down)

In a hypnotherapy session, the therapist spends up to 75% of the time (or more) getting the client’s body to relax and their mind in a receptive state, so the suggestions can get through to the subconscious. The same principle applies to leveraging the subconscious in your writing. Making your mind a receptive environment for ideas to bubble up is essential to writing more, better and faster.

Novelist Haruki Murakami aims to put himself into a trance—a hypnotic state—through his daily routine. When he’s writing a novel, he gets up early, writes for a stretch of time and then goes for a long run and/or long swim. He’s in bed by 9 p.m. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing,” he’s quoted as saying. “It’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

The more time I spend getting into a quiet, aligned place, the more smoothly the words flow out. Generally speaking, my first drafts that come from a quiet place are far better and require less revision than those that I overthink from the beginning.

How to prepare: There’s an old joke about a student of Buddhism who asked his teacher how long he should meditate. “One hour every day,” replied the teacher. “I can’t do that!” the student replied. “I’m too busy!”

“Okay,” the teacher said. “For you, then, two hours.”

Many of us, especially those with full-time jobs and/or families, have limited writing time. “I don’t have time to look away!” I can hear you saying. For you, then, I say, take half your writing time and get grounded. Even if that’s 15 minutes out of 30 at 5 a.m. Just experiment with it.

If you want writing to flow through you, take time to quiet your mind first. Have the courage to be utterly unproductive. The quieter you can make your mind, the more space you’ve generated for new ideas to arise, and the more easily your writing will flow when you sit down at the keyboard.

Instead of trying and pushing and forcing, see if you can make the mental switch to allowingreceivingflowing.

Play around with this idea of “relaxed but alert” and figure out what works for you. By learning to develop the observing circuit and purposely engaging that circuit alongside the daydreaming one, you will become more attuned to your deeper creativity.

2. Take regular daydreaming breaks while writing

In my experience, writer’s block comes from overthinking. Taking regular breaks—say, every hour to 90 minutes—can help clear up space in your thinking mind for the subconscious to bubble up original ideas and story solutions.

In Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, psychologist Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman and journalist Carolyn Gregoire write, “Turning our attention away from the external world and tuning in to the world within—dreams, fantasies, stories, personal narratives and feelings—not only builds a sense of meaning and hope…but also allows us to tap into our deepest wellsprings of creativity.”

How to daydream for increased flow: The idea is to relax your mind and allow ideas to arise, rather than pushing and pushing and pushing. A few years ago, a client made a custom hula hoop for me. Trying to hula hoop without knocking down a plant or terrifying my cat invariably results in me laughing—and a complete pattern interrupt that creates more space for creativity to arise.

Let’s say you’ve been working on a pivotal scene where your main character faces her biggest fear. You’ve been hammering away at this scene for a while, and it doesn’t feel as though you’re making progress. Instead of doubling down and pushing harder, try stepping away and allowing, as Bradbury wrote, ideas to come to you. Don’t push your brain—creativity doesn’t respond to efforting; instead, try to relax your brain and let your mind wander.

These breaks don’t have to be long. According to Kaufman, even 15 minutes of shifting your focus—say, washing the dishes, doing some mindful stretching, or taking the dog out for a walk around the block—can relax the thinking mind enough for ideas to bubble up.

Often, I’ll print out a hard copy of an article-in-progress and go for a walk. After a bit, maybe 30 minutes, I’ll sit down and take one pass through the draft. I might spend 10 to 20 minutes making notes. Then I put it away and continue walking. Another half hour or so later, I’ll find another bench and sit down for another pass. I’m also a big fan of what I call “coffee shop edits”—taking a hard copy to a coffee shop and editing in a different environment.

Maya Angelou took this “different environment” idea even further: She rented a hotel room in her hometown by the month and wrote there in the mornings, then edited at home in the afternoon.

From a young age, Angelou also implicitly understood the difference between the conscious and subconscious minds. As she told the Daily Beast:

[My grandmother] used to talk about her “little mind.” So when I was young, from the time I was about 3 until 13, I decided that there was a Big Mind and a Little Mind. And the Big Mind would allow you to consider deep thoughts, but the Little Mind would occupy you, so you could not be distracted. It would work crossword puzzles or play Solitaire, while the Big Mind would delve deep into the subjects I wanted to write about.

Not everybody has the freedom to work this way, and this is my process; within the boundaries of your own life, you can find your own rhythms. The key to remember is this: The quieter you can make your mind, the more space you’re creating for ideas (and thorny plot situations) to resolve.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

Your Scene’s First Page – The Essentials

From C.S. Lakin:

Every scene must have a point or purpose–that should be obvious. You, the author, need to know exactly what a scene is intended to accomplish. Getting that down is half the challenge.

The other half is front-loading your scene with the essentials. And these essentials apply to any scene, whether the first or the fiftieth.

When considering the point to your scene, you need to know exactly where in the story that scene will occur. Instead of thinking “I wonder what I should have happen to my character next?” first look at what section (some think in terms of acts) of your novel this scene is going to be placed.

For example, the second act of your novel involves progress and setbacks for the protagonist as he goes after his goal. As you build to the big climax, you are making it harder and more hopeless for him, with more obstacles and complications. Keeping this in mind helps you determine exactly what the purpose of your scene will be.

If you aren’t aware of basic novel structure and the essential plot points and where they are positioned in a story, you should take the time to learn this. Why? Because if you don’t get novel structure clear, your scenes aren’t going to serve the plot’s interest. They will wander about aimlessly, confusing readers and accomplishing little to nothing of importance.

Each scene in your novel should be moving the plot forward. Each scene should reveal some new information, but not just anything—the information needs to help move the plot forward. The bottom line? Every scene must have a point to it or it shouldn’t be in your novel.

The Essentials of Scene Openings

What I’ve determined over the decades of writing, editing, and teaching fiction, is the first paragraphs must set up the POV characters mood, mindset (how they’re thinking), and motivation. Even if previous scenes have shown these things, every scene needs some hint or reminder of these three vital elements. I call this the 3 M’s of Character Setup.

If you’re unfamiliar with these components, read my many posts on masterful character description and deep POV. It’s the character’s motivation that matters to readers and the plot.

Once you have the purpose in mind for your scene, what next? Let’s look at the first five key components to crafting that scene.

  1. The high moment. Your scene has to have a key moment that encapsulates the point of your scene. Think carefully about what that moment should be. It’s usually a reveal—a clue, a new bit of information, a reveal of character that impacts the story. It can be big or subtle.

Moments aren’t about big action but about significance. What is significant to your POV character for that scene. A high moment can be a complication that shows up, a reversal (something happens opposite to what the character expected), or a surprise twist to the plot.

  1. Start in the middle of action. Last year on this blog we spend a month covering the fatal flaw of “nothin’ happenin’.” The popular term in medias res means starting in the middle of something. Remember last week I gave the scene example of character John waking up and getting dressed, then heading to work? That may sound like the scene is starting in the middle of things. John is waking up and getting going in his day, right?

Nope. The idea here is to start in the middle of something interesting that’s going on. Something that makes the reader wonder just what has been happening up till now.

Imagine walking into a room to find two people in the midst of an argument. You know you’ve missed something, but you’re intrigued to find out just what. That’s the feeling you want to get with your scene openings. I suggest thinking about that high moment, then starting about 15-20 minutes of screen time earlier. That time factor will vary depending on your scene, certainly, but it’s a good rule of thumb when considering at what moment to open with.

  1. Establish the POV character and stay in that POV. Make sure to be clear whose POV this scene is in by the first or second paragraph. It may be obvious, such as when writing in first-person POV. But even with first person, it can be easy to fall into explanation and lengthy narrative that feels out of POV. So make that character present to the reader right away.

“Rule” is: only one POV per scene. So stick with that one character, showing only what she can see, think, or feel. If you need to get into another character’s head, wrap up that scene, do a scene break (put a # in the middle of a blank line), and then start the new scene.

Link to the rest at C.S. Lakin

Character Type & Trope Thesaurus: Dark Lord or Lady

From Writers Helping Writers:

In 1959, Carl Jung first popularized the idea of archetypes—”universal images that have existed since the remotest times.” He posited that every person is a blend of these 12 basic personalities. Ever since then, authors have been applying this idea to fictional characters, combining the different archetypes to come up with interesting new versions. The result is a sizable pool of character tropes that we see from one story to another.

Archetypes and tropes are popular storytelling elements because of their familiarity. Upon seeing them, readers know immediately who they’re dealing with and what role the nerd, dark lord, femme fatale, or monster hunter will play. As authors, we need to recognize the commonalities for each trope so we can write them in a recognizable way and create a rudimentary sketch for any character we want to create.

But when it comes to characters, no one wants just a sketch; we want a vibrant and striking cast full of color, depth, and contrast. Diving deeper into character creation is especially important when starting with tropes because the blessing of their familiarity is also a curse; without differentiation, the characters begin to look the same from story to story.

. . . .

DESCRIPTION: Evil personified and seemingly invincible, this antagonist is out to rule the world. They often use fear, intimidation, and the extensive resources (magical, military, or otherwise) at their command to dominate and control others.

FICTIONAL EXAMPLES: Sauron (The Lord of the Rings trilogy), the White Witch (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), Voldemort (the Harry Potter series), Thanos (the Marvel Universe), Emperor Palpatine (the Star Wars franchise)

COMMON STRENGTHS: Adaptable, Alert, Ambitious, Analytical, Bold, Confident, Decisive, Efficient, Focused, Independent, Industrious, Intelligent, Meticulous, Pensive, Perceptive, Persistent, Persuasive, Proactive, Resourceful, Talented

COMMON WEAKNESSES: Callous, Cocky, Controlling, Cruel, Devious, Disloyal, Evil, Greedy, Haughty, Impatient, Inflexible, Judgmental, Manipulative, Obsessive, Perfectionist, Possessive, Pretentious, Resentful, Suspicious, Temperamental, Unethical, Vindictive, Violent, Volatile

ASSOCIATED ACTIONS, BEHAVIORS, AND TENDENCIES
Having a strategic mindset
Being single-minded in their pursuit of the ultimate goal
Carefully controlling their emotions
Having a big presence that fills the room
Wearing clothing meant to make them more intimidating
Walking confidently with long strides
Taking quick, decisive actions
Being emotionally unavailable
Having little tolerance for mistakes; being unforgiving
Easily replacing allies or underlings who fall short of the character’s expectations

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

Bad Writing Advice: 21 Terrible Tips You Should Ignore

From Scribe Media:

One of the first things you learn as an Author is that everyone has writing advice for you.

And most of the advice is terrible.

It starts the second they find out you’re writing a book:

“Write for the love of writing!”
“Write for yourself!”
“Follow your passion!”
“Write when you’re inspired!”
“Never write in a cafe!”
Those cliches sound like good advice because you hear them all the time.

But they’re all awful.

. . . .

1. Write when you’re inspired

This is the worst piece of advice you can get as an Author.

That’s like saying you’ll go to the gym when you feel like working out. You might go once in a while, but you’re not going to get in shape. People who make working out part of their routine stay in shape because they go even when they don’t want to.

If you only write when you’re inspired, you’re probably never going to write. And if you do only write inspired (and rarely), you’re going to write about disjointed topics that don’t connect.

Why? Because inspiration doesn’t follow a plan.

Somerset Maugham said this about inspiration:

“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

Authors attributed with similar quips and routines include:

  • William Faulkner
  • Peter De Vries
  • Raymond Chandler
  • Ernest Hemingway

If you want to write a book, you must have a plan.

That means deciding:

  • What time of day you’re going to write
  • How long you’re going to write
  • Where you’re going to write
  • What word count you want to hit

And you have to put it on your calendar.

Then sit down and do it.

Also, we recommend giving yourself permission to write mediocre stuff. Every Author arrives at good writing through the valley of mediocrity.

Start by getting your ideas down, whether or not they feel inspired.

Don’t get me wrong: inspiration is great, and you should harness it when it comes. It’s perishable, and it’s valuable. So use it.

But you can’t rely on it.

You can’t only write when you have it.

. . . .

3. Write for the love of writing itself, not for what writing might get you

This is excellent advice if you want to be a poor poet. For everyone else, it’s terrible.

I’m not saying it’s bad to love writing. If you fall in love with the process of writing and you can’t wait to do it every day, that will definitely help you write your book.

But it’s terrible advice to give an Author.

Why? Because you start thinking that if you don’t love your writing, you’re doing it wrong.

That’s simply not true.

By most people’s definitions, I’ve been wildly successful as a writer. But I might love writing 10% to 20% of the time.

I have a whole spectrum of emotions the rest of the time:

  • indifference
  • hate
  • apathy
  • disgust
  • resignation
  • exhaustion
  • joy
  • contentment

All of those.

So, the advice I would give is this:

The reason you write is to get something from your writing. There’s no other reason to write—at least if you want to publish what you’re writing.

If you’re writing a journal, with no intent to publish it, that’s great. In fact, it’s amazing. I keep a journal myself, but it’s not for the love of journaling.

I keep a journal because I get something out of that too.

But don’t tell an Author, who’s trying to write and publish a book, to write only for the love of writing.

That’s what I call a luxury belief. Writers love telling stories. And snobby, elite writers love telling snobby, elite stories about their own work.

“I write for the love of writing.”

Not true. They write to make money or to raise their status among their peers.

You might love writing, or you might not. Either way, the love of writing isn’t the point of it if you’re publishing your work.

The point of writing and publishing is to create a change in the world. To create a change in other people’s attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors, or your own life.

That’s the real advice. It’s the advice that can energize a writer and transform a book.

You’re not writing for the love of writing–that’s just a bonus. You’re writing to create change.

. . . .

5. Buy The Chicago Manual of Style & The Elements of Style

The only reason to buy these books is to set them on fire and throw them out your window.

Those books are shackles. They’re shackles that snobby, elitist writers try to convince other writers to wear.

I’ve met a lot of Authors. But I’ve never met one Author I like who also likes The Elements of Style (there might be exceptions to that rule, but if there are, I don’t know of them).

Here’s what you should do:

Write simply and directly, in your own words and voice. Invite readers to connect with who you really are.

Link to the rest at Scribe Media

A brief history of English spelling

From The English Spelling Society:

The English writing system

English has grown from the language brought to Britain in the 5th century by Anglo-Saxon invaders from North Germany. Its history is usually divided into three main phases:

Old English – from the arrival of the invaders in the 5th century to around 1130
Middle English – roughly 1130 to 1470
Modern English – about 1470 to the present

However there were many changes within each phase – for example Early Modern English (roughly 1470 to 1700) is seen as distinct from truly Modern English. In reality, of course, change has been ongoing through all the phases.

The Roman alphabet and Latin were used in Britain when it was part of the Roman Empire (AD 43 to 410), and they stayed in use in the Celtic parts of the British Isles after most of the Romans left.

However, the invaders brought with them the runic alphabet, known as the futhorc from its first six letters. A few small examples of Old English written in runes have survived. There were at that time already several distinct English dialects based roughly on the separate kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England.

In 597 St Augustine came from Rome to Canterbury and converted the Saxons in Kent to Christianity. After this the Christian monks started using the Roman alphabet to write English. As the Roman alphabet did not have enough letters, they also used some runes, such as Þ (called thorn) for the th sounds in this and thin. At this stage, English spelling was mostly fairly simple, as the letters matched the spoken words quite well.

Major surviving works in Old English include the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Bede’s History of the Christian Church in England (translated into Old English from Bede’s Latin), and the saga Beowulf.

The English writing system
English has grown from the language brought to Britain in the 5th century by Anglo-Saxon invaders from North Germany. Its history is usually divided into three main phases:

Old English – from the arrival of the invaders in the 5th century to around 1130
Middle English – roughly 1130 to 1470
Modern English – about 1470 to the present

However there were many changes within each phase – for example Early Modern English (roughly 1470 to 1700) is seen as distinct from truly Modern English. In reality, of course, change has been ongoing through all the phases.

The Roman alphabet and Latin were used in Britain when it was part of the Roman Empire (AD 43 to 410), and they stayed in use in the Celtic parts of the British Isles after most of the Romans left.
However, the invaders brought with them the runic alphabet, known as the futhorc from its first six letters. A few small examples of Old English written in runes have survived. There were at that time already several distinct English dialects based roughly on the separate kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England.

In 597 St Augustine came from Rome to Canterbury and converted the Saxons in Kent to Christianity. After this the Christian monks started using the Roman alphabet to write English. As the Roman alphabet did not have enough letters, they also used some runes, such as Þ (called thorn) for the th sounds in this and thin. At this stage, English spelling was mostly fairly simple, as the letters matched the spoken words quite well.

Major surviving works in Old English include the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Bede’s History of the Christian Church in England (translated into Old English from Bede’s Latin), and the saga Beowulf.

English lost and found

Shortly after the Norman Conquest in 1066, Norman French replaced English as the language of government and the nobles, but English always remained the language of the common people. However French words began to be used in English and this has had a deep and lasting effect on the language, not least the spelling.

In the end Norman French went into decline after the loss of most of England’s French lands. Then English (now Middle English) began to be adopted once more for official and literary use. This happened during the 14th century, but the process was not complete until about 1430.

Examples of works in Middle English include Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, Langland’s Piers Ploughman and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

The early 15th century saw attempts at standardizing English spelling. The main one is known as the Chancery Standard, because it was used by the Court of Chancery and other official bodies.

However, the new system was not consistent. It used both English and French ways of spelling, which accounts for many of the problems in modern English spelling. Although some words of French origin were respelled to suit English speech, eg boeuf > beef, bataille > battle, compter > count, others were not, eg table, double, centre.

Very early Early Modern English works include the morality play Everyman (late 15th century) and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (as printed by Caxton in 1485).

English lost and found

Shortly after the Norman Conquest in 1066, Norman French replaced English as the language of government and the nobles, but English always remained the language of the common people. However French words began to be used in English and this has had a deep and lasting effect on the language, not least the spelling.

In the end Norman French went into decline after the loss of most of England’s French lands. Then English (now Middle English) began to be adopted once more for official and literary use. This happened during the 14th century, but the process was not complete until about 1430.

Examples of works in Middle English include Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, Langland’s Piers Ploughman and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

The early 15th century saw attempts at standardizing English spelling. The main one is known as the Chancery Standard, because it was used by the Court of Chancery and other official bodies.

However, the new system was not consistent. It used both English and French ways of spelling, which accounts for many of the problems in modern English spelling. Although some words of French origin were respelled to suit English speech, eg boeuf > beef, bataille > battle, compter > count, others were not, eg table, double, centre.

Very early Early Modern English works include the morality play Everyman (late 15th century) and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (as printed by Caxton in 1485).

Printing adds to the muddle

William Caxton first set up in business as a printer in Bruges (now in Belgium). There in 1473 he made the first printed book in English, the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. Caxton returned to England in 1476 and set up a press in Westminster. The first book known to have been printed there was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Caxton’s spelling was based on the Chancery Standard, to which he added his own variants. Sadly, though printing brought many advantages, it also added to the irregularity of the spelling system. The printers Caxton brought with him from the Low Countries were unused to the English language and made spelling errors, eg any, busy, citie for eny, bisy, cittie. They also sometimes used Dutch spellings, such as adding an h after g, turning words like gost into ghost. Although many of the changes they made were later weeded out, some of them, like ghost and ghastly, are still with us.

The printers also tended to lengthen words. This was driven partly by money – they were paid by the number of lines printed – and partly by page layout, such as making the right-hand side of the text line up neatly. Many simple spellings became more complex, eg frend > friend, hed > head, seson > season, fondnes > fondnesse, shal > shall. However in this the printers were only following the centuries-old practice of the legal scribes, who were paid by the inch for their writing.

Another factor was the printing of the first English Bibles at the time of the Reformation. Many of these were printed abroad for fear of persecution, as producing a Bible in English was regarded as heresy. The recopying from texts that were already corrupt and the use of non-English-speaking printers in Europe added to the diversity of spellings. As there were no dictionaries, and few books of any kind, people tended to copy the spellings they found in any version of the Bible they could look at.

Link to the rest at The English Spelling Society

The instant he found this site, PG was in love. How can anyone resist a group called The English Spelling Society?

A bit of exploration on the site disclosed the existence of the International English Spelling Congress. The initial session of the Congress was held on 30 May 2018. The final session of the Congress was held on 28 January 2021. You can watch it on YouTube.

The purpose for holding the Congress was to discuss how English language spelling should be updated. The participants came to three conclusions:

  • The debate on acceptable alternatives to traditional spelling is not closed. The Society’s website (Personal View Section) will remain open for members wishing to submit their own schemes for peer review and more general comment.
  • The Committee’s support for TSR will be reviewed after 5 years to assess the degree to which the Scheme has become acceptable within the English Speaking World.
  • Any financial support for publicising or otherwise assisting in the dissemination of TSR will be modest.

One of the short-listed schemes wass TSR:

TSR

TSR is a relatively conservative scheme which only changes spellings where absolutely necessary and consequently makes fewer respellings than with many other alternative proposals. Features include:

  • Removal of redundant letters.
  • Removal of ambiguity for the letter combinations that can currently represent more than one sound.
  • Applying more consistently the underlying rules of current spelling (especially the so-called Magic E and Doubling Rules).
  • Retaining only a few of the current irregular spellings so that these can be memorised fairly easily.

Despite its conservative nature, TSR claims significant improvement in the predictability of English spelling and consequently the potential for better access to literacy.

The website includes copies of academic papers discussing the reform of English Spelling going back to the 1940’s, including titles like, Economic and Social Costs of English Spelling.

PG couldn’t find a page on the TESS where he could apply for membership. He would definitely have done so if membership was offered. He would also buy a cup and a T-shirt with the Society’s logo on each.

Just Say No to Artificial Intelligence in Your Creative Pursuits, Please

From Chuck Wendig: Terrible Minds:

Art is about people.

This is obvious and simplistic on the face of it but I think it’s important to remind ourselves of this–

Art is about people.

It is by people. It is for people. Art — and by proxy, storytelling — is a conduit between the maker of the art and the witness to that art. I made this, the maker says, and they did so for myriad possible reasons. They did it because it was beautiful, because it was horrible, because it scared them or enraged them or titillated them, or some combination of all of that. They were driven to portray a thing, or subvert a thing, or invent a thing.

The art forms a connection. The witness to the art — the one on the other end of that connection — experiences it however they must. They relate to it. They rebuke it. They adore it. They obsess over it. They detest it even as they can’t look away. Art, story, music — they form this ephemeral thing that is a way for us to talk to each other metatextually, across spans of distance great and small, and even across time itself. We scream our strange creations out into the void in the hope of being heard. A signal that we’re not alone. And we witness art in much the same way: as a reminder that we are not alone.

. . . .

The introduction of so-called “artificial intelligence” — which, really, is just a keenly-designed high-tech mimeograph — has gunked up the conduit between artist and audience with great clotted gobs of digital snot. It’s a pipe crawling with the Too-Many-Fingers monsters waggling their many bent digits at you while screaming twee authorial pablum and dipshitted disinformation in your ear. It’s gunk. It’s a mess.

I’ve spoken before about how “artificial intelligence” is really about the fetishization of idea —

. . . .

Artificial intelligence isn’t a person. It’s not even really, despite how I describe it, a machine. It’s the representative of a company. It’s the tool of not just one corporation, but many.

And it only exists because real people did real art.

Without something to chew up, it has nothing to spit out.

It steals our stuff, milks it, and kicks it aside, then shows it proudly to the world as if it did anything other than bleed an actual artist dry. It turns the artist and the art into dirt, then just regrows stuff from that same earth.

It’s a thief.

Link to the rest at Chuck Wendig: Terrible Minds

PG says that Chuck reliably produces some of the best rants on the internet.

However, PG believes that AI is another tool an author may choose to use to write more easily/better in the same manner as typewriters were selected by some authors as preferable to fountain pens and word processors were selected by some authors as preferable to typewriters.

Does anybody want to get rid of SpellCheck or Grammarly because they’re a form of computerized writing assistance?

If AI works for you as a part of your writing toolkit, PG says you should use it. If you don’t like AI for any reason, don’t use it.

Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group

From The Paris Review:

Last spring, a friend of a friend visited my office and invited me to Langley to speak to Invisible Ink, the CIA’s creative writing group.

I asked Vivian (not her real name) what she wanted me to talk about.

She said that the topic of the talk was entirely up to me.

I asked what level the writers in the group were.

She said the group had writers of all levels.

I asked what the speaking fee was.

She said that as far as she knew, there was no speaking fee.

I dwelled a little on this point.

She confirmed that there was no speaking fee.

When an organization has, say, financed the overthrow of the government of Guatemala, you would think there might be a speaking fee. But I was told that, in lieu of payment, the writing group would take me out to lunch in the executive dining room afterward. I would also have my picture taken in front of the CIA seal, and I could post that picture anywhere I wanted.

“So my visit wouldn’t be classified?”

Vivian confirmed that I could tell anyone I wanted. “Just don’t tell them my name—or I’ll have to kill you. Just kidding!”

As I considered the invitation, I kept wondering why I’d been invited. I don’t write about CIA-adjacent topics, nor am I successful enough a novelist that people outside a small circle—one that I doubt includes U.S. intelligence agencies—know my name. So the invite was a bit of a mystery. This was the second-most common question that came up when I told writer friends about it, topped only by: “No speaking fee?” At first, I wondered whether the gig was part of a recruitment strategy. But it doesn’t take a vast intelligence apparatus to know that I am not intelligence material, not least because I am a professional writer.

Next I wondered if my visit could be used as soft-diplomacy propaganda. Look how harmless we are! We let writers come to our headquarters and pose for pictures. The CIA had veered into this type of literary boosterism before—supporting, for example, the founding of the very magazine for which I am writing this piece. So it wasn’t out of the question. In 2021, I had turned down an invitation from the government of Saudi Arabia for an all-expenses-paid trip to a writers’ retreat at al-‘Ulā, as I didn’t want to be a part of their arts and culture whitewashing. But in the end, I couldn’t think of a way that I’d be a useful propaganda tool for the CIA—unless they anticipated me writing this essay (in which case, kudos CIA)—and so I said yes.

***

On the agreed-upon morning a few weeks later, I left my apartment in D.C. and drove into the haze of Canadian wildfire smoke that was floating over the city. By the time I turned off the George Washington Parkway at the George Bush Center for Intelligence exit, and on to a restricted usage road, I was already nervous. I’m the kind of person who weighs and measures my suitcases before flying, lest I be scolded at the airport, and I do not like driving down roads with signs like EMPLOYEES ONLY and WILL BE ARRESTED.

At the gate intercom, I gave my name and social security number—Vivian had gathered this information and more ahead of time, over a series of phone calls, each from a different phone number—and a police officer gave me a visitor’s badge that was to be displayed on my person at all times. He warned me that I was to be escorted at all times.

I met Vivian in a lot between the first gate and the second gate, where her car was the only one parked. She gave me another badge that appeared identical to the first. I left my phone in my car as instructed, and we got into Vivian’s car and drove to the second gate. That was when things started not going as planned.

Four agitated police officers blocked our way.

“He can’t leave his car here!” they yelled when Vivian rolled down her window.

“But I cleared this ahead of time,” Vivian said.

“He can’t leave his car here. It’s a security risk.”

“But how am I supposed to escort him if we can’t drive together?”

“Ma’am,” one of them said, “I just do parking.”

It turned out that, like in many bureaucracies, the individual parts that made up the CIA were siloed, and there was no point in arguing about logical contradictions.

Vivian gave up and drove me back to my car, clearly stressed. I told her it wasn’t a big deal—I would just follow her.

The problem, she said, was that we wouldn’t be able to park in the same lot. And I had to be escorted at all times. And employee parking at the CIA was a mess. “It’ll take me forever just to walk to you.”

She resolved that she would simply park in VIP visitor parking with me, and if she got a ticket, she got a ticket. “Just follow me.”

I got in my car and followed her to the gate. I watched from behind the wheel as she drove up to the gate, talked to one of the police officers, and drove off past the gate at a good clip, very much not being followed by me.

I pulled up to the gate, and an aggressive police officer questioned me about why I had two badges.

“Didn’t it seem strange to you to get a second badge when you’d just got your first one?”

“I’ve never been here before,” I said. “Everything seems strange to me.”

A different cop told him to give it a rest, handed me a third badge, and asked if I needed directions to VIP parking. I have a terrible sense of direction—I once got lost at Costco for so long that they had to call my mom over the PA; I was fifteen—and Google Maps isn’t much use at Langley.

The nice cop said that I needed to turn right and follow the road until the sixth left. There I would see a line of squad cars and a gate, where my badge would swipe me in.

“If you see a helicopter, you’ve gone too far,” he said. “Just loop back around. Don’t make a U-turn.”

When I later told Vivian about the mean cop and the nice one, she said, “They’re always doing that good cop–bad cop thing.”

“For parking?”

“For everything!”

I found the VIP parking on my first try. I held my badge out to the scanner. The gate rose! I drove in. And drove. And drove. And drove. In circles, because all the spaces in the small VIP lot were taken. I couldn’t leave the parking lot—I wasn’t supposed to be unescorted anywhere on campus, but at least in visitor parking my presence was somewhat explainable—so I kept circling the lot, accumulating sweat. Finally, someone left. I parked, got out, took a breath of ashy air, and wondered what to do next. I was relieved to see Vivian’s car stuck at the VIP gate, negotiating with the voice on the intercom.

“They won’t let me into VIP parking,” she explained as I got into her car. “They said it’s a security risk.”

We turned back onto the main road and drove for a bit. And then, after a bend, there appeared an abundance of parked cars. Cars upon cars upon cars. I’d never seen a parking lot this big, outside of professional sporting events. The quadrants were labeled by color, the rows by letter; we weaved through row after row of Virginia plates, from Blue D all the way up to Purple V without finding a spot.

I asked Vivian how many people worked at the CIA.

“Maybe two million?” She smiled and confessed that she had no idea, even though I was made to understand that she had been at the CIA, and in the writing group, for a number of years.

As we snaked through line after line of cars, Vivian told me that if you worked here and wanted to avoid a twenty-minute walk from your car, you had to be at the office by 7 A.M. I wondered if this was intentional—a way to encourage long hours, like the tech companies that offer employees free dinners in the cafeterias that don’t open until 6:30 P.M. Or if it was the result of expansion necessitated by the post-9/11 surveillance state and the popularity of phones that record our every movement. As Kerry Howley notes in Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State, we have created and stored more data in the twenty-first century than in the rest of human history combined. If the government wants to find coherent stories in all that data, I thought as I looked at the vastness of the lot, someone has to comb through it.

At first, we couldn’t find the conference room. Like me, Vivian wasn’t allowed to bring her phone into the main building, but even if she had, I don’t know who she would’ve called for directions. CIA officers generally don’t know their coworkers’ last names. (The Starbucks at Langley is the only Starbucks where baristas aren’t allowed to ask for your name.) So I am without photos or notes, but walking through the main building at Langley, is, in my memory, like walking through an airport terminal in a major metropolis, crossed with a hospital, crossed with an American mall, crossed with an Eastern European university. It’s big and gleaming and cold and brutal, all at once. There was a hall of presidential portraits with notes from commanders in chief to the Secret Service, all of them written in elegant fountain pen, except for Donald Trump’s, which was written in Sharpie and said “I’M SO PROUD OF YOU!”

We finally found the conference room, through a side door in the CIA Museum. It was unclear who this museum was for, but it was not a bad museum, full of objects of interest: pieces of the Berlin Wall, tie-clip cameras, Soviet bugging devices, et cetera, displayed in glass cases. Six people were seated at the conference table inside the conference room, which was windowless and had a big CIA seal on the wall.

“Sorry we’re late!” Vivian announced.

“Strip search?” one of the men joked.

“Parking,” I said.

A collective groan. The goddamned parking.

I began by asking what people were writing. Surprisingly, none of the CIA writers were writing spy novels. They were working on short stories. Self-published dystopian sci-fi. A presidential biography. Upmarket fiction. A personal blog, which I was told to check out if I ever wanted a really good muffin recipe. The writing group was organized around what sounded like a listserv announcing periodic meetings to whatever members were available that day. Only about half the people in the room seemed to know one another.

I talked a little bit about writing beginnings and working through false starts. I read the first page of my latest novel, explained why I’d set the first scene in the U.S. when the rest of the novel takes place in Ukraine, and went through all the false starts I’d taken to get where I was going. One officer raised their hand and asked about establishing voice in first versus third person. Another asked about revision techniques. Another about the shift from writing alone to working with an editor. It was the least remarkable Q&A I’ve ever been a part of.

I had a little time to kill before our lunch reservation—seating time in the executive dining room was not flexible—so Vivian took me to the gift shop.

Given that almost no one’s allowed inside Langley and the people who work for the CIA aren’t supposed to advertise it, it was, like with the museum, a bit of a mystery who the gift shop was for. The shelves were stocked with T-shirts (Central Intelligence Agency), mugs (Central Intelligence Agency), and novelty barbecue sauce (Top Secret Recipe!). There was also a Pride Month display (Central Intelligence Agency in rainbow). I bought a Pride Month pen for four dollars.

***

The dining room was long and mostly empty—apparently a security thing—with white tablecloths and a long wall of windows looking out at the swampy greenery of northern Virginia. Or I was told that it normally looked out at greenery. Today it looked out at wildfire smoke. The menu was essentially cafeteria food—normal American fare. I ordered a burger with sweet potato fries and a Coke from a businesslike waitress in a white dress shirt.

The CIA officer seated next to me asked if I thought it was worth getting a literary agent. I said yes, and she seemed skeptical.

“In my other work,” she explained, “I can get movie people attached.”

I still have no idea what she meant.

While we waited for our food, the writer of dystopian sci-fi confirmed that if you work for the CIA, lawyers have to vet anything you publish. But they were more lenient than I would’ve guessed. She said that one of her novels had helped change how the agency viewed fiction versus nonfiction. While reading her novel, the lawyers decided that just because a character in a novel says something doesn’t mean that the author necessarily agrees, so there should be more leeway for CIA fiction writers. (Which suggests CIA lawyers are more nuanced literary critics than half of Goodreads.)

Obviously you can’t share classified information, I was told. You can’t violate the Hatch Act, showing your political affiliation, and you’re also not supposed to violate the Washington Post rule, which was: Would the CIA be embarrassed if this were in tomorrow’s Washington Post? (This seemed trickiest to determine.)

Another officer mentioned that, since the CIA has people doing things abroad that could be considered dubious, you had to be sensitive about that. I asked what they meant when they said dubious, which resulted in a change of topic. I asked if they knew of any issues with someone trying to publish something that they couldn’t get approved. One of the older writers said that she had heard of an officer who had tried to publish a memoir that discussed his experience of racism in the CIA and was told he couldn’t until he retired.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

Correcting Pretentious Pronouns

From Nurse Author & Editor:

If pronouns following prepositions or verbs sound lofty or pretentious, they probably are. Without attention to grammar rules, nurse authors and editors can make common mistakes by selecting the wrong form of the pronoun. Pronouns following prepositions and transitive verbs should be the objective form of the pronoun, not the subjective form. These experienced editors describe the rule, suggest a quick-fix tip, and provide several practice items followed by answers.

As a writer, editor, or editorial board member responsible for how the language of the profession appears in print, nurse authors and editors must recognize and employ the proper use of pronouns following prepositions and transitive verbs. The paragraph below is littered with pronoun errors, where the “case” of the pronoun is inappropriate to its function in the sentence. This kind of error, most unfortunately, is becoming rife in common conversation and is even seeping into formal, published writing. (Bernstein, 1965.)

Common Pronoun Problem: “If you and I would make the perfect team, then why did the Director of Nursing not pick you and I to serve on the task force? It must have been because of the night nurse; people are always noticing friction between she and I.”

If you did not have your teeth painfully on edge while reading the above paragraph, please attend carefully to the tips in this article on writing or editing using correct pronouns in nursing literature. Then, try your new skills on some samples at the end of this article.

Background on the Problem

Why should this have come about? Our theory is that it is from lack of focus on grammar rules in school, which leads authors to write today more from their colloquial “ear” than from English grammar. Once upon a time, when our generation was young—let’s say, in the streets of New York—some would say, sounding tough and down-to-earth, “Me and her went to the store.”

As we grew older and diligently learned our lessons at school, we came to understand that this was not the proper way of speaking. We learned the rules of grammar described later in this article and realized that to be taken seriously in the world of adults, not to mention professional adults, we would have to say “She and I went to the store.” We understood this to be the correct way of speaking and writing.

What may have happened in later generations is that, sadly, teaching and learning the rules of grammar fell out of fashion. Without knowledge of the underlying rules, the only guideline for many may have been some vague sense in their inner ear that “she and I” was classier than “me and her.” (Bernstein, 1.)

As a result, even well-educated nurses are sometimes caught today writing something like “It was generous of the Nursing Director to invite he and I to the planning meeting,” thinking themselves the essence of correctness and gentility, when in fact the pronouns in the prepositional phrase should be “him and me.”

Did the Nursing Director really invite “he” to the meeting? No, she invited “him.” Did she invite “I” to the meeting? No, she asked “me.”

Grammar Rule

The rule for pronouns following prepositions and transitive verbs is to use the same pronouns in pairs that you would use if each pronoun were alone. Because “she invited him” and “she invited me” are correct, then the correct compound expression is “she invited him and me.”

Quick Fix

The quick-fix test to correct this mistake, which usually happens where there are two pronouns in the sentence, is to eliminate one of the pronouns and listen for what sounds correct in the singular expression. (Hodges et. al., 3.) For example, test the following sentence by trying each pronoun alone:

  • Questionable sentence: “The patient asked she and me for a medication.”
  • Singular test for the first pronoun: “The patient asked she for a medication.” It is easy to see in this singular form that the pronoun, “she” is not correct and the sentence should read “The patient asked her for a medication.”
  • Singular test for the second pronoun: ‘The patient asked me for a medication.“ This singular form is correct, so the second pronoun is correct as ”me“ in the pronoun pair.
  • Revised sentence: ‘The patient asked her and me for a medication.“

Listen for what sounds correct in the singular expression.

Subjective and Objective Pronouns

To understand the grammatical rationale behind all this, you need to remember that pronouns come in “cases” (and we don’t mean twelve to a carton). The case of a pronoun is the form it takes to show its relationship to other words in a sentence. (Burchfield, 2.) The two cases we are concerned with here, and in most nursing manuscripts, are the subjective and the objective.

Subjective Case

The subjective case is the form a pronoun takes when it is the subject of a verb: “I, you, he, she, it, we, you,” and “they.” For example, the pronouns in the examples below are used as subjects of the sentences:

  • I hung the IV.
  • She checked vital signs.
  • They told us we were doing a good job.
  • You can change the dressing.
  • It was a mistake.

Objective Case

The objective case is the form a pronoun takes when it is the object of a verb or preposition. In the sentence “I handed the forceps to the surgeon,” “forceps” is the object of the verb “handed,” and “surgeon” is the object of the preposition “to.” Substituting pronouns for the forceps and the surgeon, the sentence becomes “I handed them to her.” Both pronouns are in the objective case.

Pronouns in the objective case are “me, you, him, her, it, us, you,” and “them.” Examples of sentences with objective pronouns are:

  • The pharmacist gave the TV to me.
  • The note came from her.
  • Give the folder to them.
  • The patient asked for you.
  • Make time for it.

Notice that “you” and “it” have the same form in both subjective and objective cases. This may be a partial cause of some people’s confusion. When pronouns are the objects of verbs or of prepositions, they must be in the objective case! (Hodges et. al., 3.)

Pronouns that are the objects of verbs or prepositions must be in the objective case.

Pronouns Following Prepositions and Verbs

In your writing or editing, you need to pay particular attention to pronouns that follow verbs and prepositions, as they are likely to be functioning as objects. You cannot simply rely on the relative positions of the pronouns within the sentence (i.e., if the pronouns occur early in the sentence, it does not indicate the need for “you and I”).

This tricks some authors who write “Between you and I, the meeting was a waste of time.” Even though the pronouns occur early in the sentence, they do not perform the same grammatical function as in “You and I agree that the nurse manager is late for the meeting.”

Try It Activity

To give you some practice on this important point of grammar, determine which of the following sentences are correct and which incorrect. For those that are incorrect, make the appropriate correction. Answers with rationale follow the article.

  1. The new staffing schedule was shown to everyone except she and I.
  2. Everyone went to the site of the disaster, which left the nurse practitioner and me as the only ones staffing the Emergency Department.
  3. The competition for the last spot on the re-engineering committee came down to him and I.
  4. I paged the attending, but by the time she called back, me and my charge nurse had already started CPR.
  5. According to her and her daughter, she had missed her medications three days in a row.
  6. We really needed more than two people to lift the client, but her and I were the only staff on the floor at the time.
  7. To both Jill and I, that job on the stepdown unit seemed like a golden opportunity.
  8. Personnel called both Jill and me to interview for the position.
  9. The best person for the job is me.
  10. She and I left the hospital after our shift was completed.
  11. The nursing textbook is being written by she and I.
  12. The pink scrubs are only worn by him and her.
  13. If me and her wanted to become registered nurses, we could attend a hospital-based, junior or community college, or a 4-year college program.
  14. Everyone was transferred from the Emergency Department, leaving me and her to handle all emergency cases.
  15. He and I cannot imagine work more personally satisfying than that of a hospice nurse.

Link to the rest at Nurse Author & Editor

PG admits his discovery of the OP was triggered by his dislike of the whole “personal pronouns” fashion/imposition/pretentiousness/fad.

When dinosaurs walked the earth, Mrs. Edna Lascelles, a delightful and tiny little English lady taught PG and his classmates the rules of English grammar. Since PG wanted to speak and write the way Mrs. Lascelles did, he worked hard to learn and apply those rules to his speaking and writing.

PG’s mother would become a high school English and Speech Teacher herself after PG and siblings had left the nest (She and PG graduated from college the same year and his mother had significantly higher GPA than PG did.) His mother had the same attitude toward the rules of English grammar, modeled them in her speech and writing and pointed out errors in grammar committed by those she and PG heard in various public places.

PG was also a voracious reader when he was growing up and credits that practice with also helping him to absorb the rules of grammar.

The Über Skill for Writers

From Jane Friedman:

One of the most important abilities a writer can hone doesn’t involve writing—at least not their own.

Learning to objectively assess other people’s stories, and pinpoint what makes them effective or not, will do more for your own writing craft than even psychologist K. Anders Ericsson’s much vaunted (and misinterpreted) 10,000 hours of practice popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. 

That’s not to denigrate the importance of actually doing the work of writing. But no amount of putting words on the page will teach you as much as analyzing what makes story work and training your own editor brain.

Analyzing story like an editor informs every element of writing and every skill a writer must develop—not just editing, but also drafting and revision, and storytelling skill as well as craft skills.

The ability to see our own work clearly is one of the greatest challenges of writing. Authors fill in the blanks of their characters and world and stories in their heads without realizing whether it’s coming across effectively on the page to readers. It’s almost impossible to assess our own work as objectively as we can with other people’s.

That’s why practicing the skill with stories we did not create is one of the best ways of learning to see the component parts of effective story and internalizing those skills in the ones you do.

And no matter where you are in your writing career, whether multi-published or at the beginning, you already have the main tool you need to master this skill: yourself.

Analyzing starts with you

Outside of the intrinsic rewards of creating story, story’s effect and its purpose is the reaction it elicits in the recipient. Much of the reason we work to understand and master essential story components like character development, well-structured plots, meaningful stakes, strong momentum, suspense, etc., is because these are the tools by which story compels its audience.

So in learning to understand these core craft elements, we start with observing our own reactions to the stories we take in, and trace our subjective reaction to the objective techniques that elicited them.

I called this objective analysis because you aren’t colored by your own intentions for the story; you’re simply taking it in as an observer, the way editors approach a manuscript when working on it.

And yet where humans are concerned, there’s really no such thing as pure objectivity. We are all subjective creatures, bringing our own biases, experiences, judgments, and perspectives to everything we experience. But it’s those subjective reactions that will lead you to discover the techniques of story that are effective for you, that lead to the types of stories that affect you and move you and elicit a reaction.

By learning to pay attention to how you are impacted by story, both good and bad, you learn to trace back those ultimate effects to the techniques that elicited them. You use your subjective reactions to determine the objective craft techniques the storyteller used to create them.

Analyzing in the wild

In analyzing what you read (or watch or hear or see), first start with your overall general impressions: Was the story effective? Did it engage you? Elicit any reactions in you? What were they—and where in the story did you feel them?

“Reaction” may mean you loved it, were moved, affected, excited—or it may mean it angered you, galvanized you, engaged your attention and thoughts. Indifference results from those forgettable stories that make no ripple at all.

Then you’ll trace those reactions back to specific story elements they relate to, and dissect why those elements worked (or didn’t, which can be equally instructive). And finally you examine the text line by line, identifying granularly how the author created the effect you perceived.

. . . .

Finally I can go back and dissect, line by line, how she weaves this tapestry. Let’s take just the opening paragraph—I’ll insert my analysis in red:

That Veronica and I were given keys and told to come early on a frozen Saturday in April to open the school for the Our Town auditions was proof of our dull reliability. [Patchett plunges readers into the story in medias res, right in the middle of the action. From the first line she begins to paint a picture of the situation and the characters—both that they are responsible but that they see themselves as dull.] The play’s director, Mr. Martin, was my grandmother’s friend and State Farm agent. [The first brushstroke in creating a sense of place—a small, interrelated town.] That’s how I was wrangled in, through my grandmother, and Veronica was wrangled because we did pretty much everything together. [Relationship details—both with her grandmother, who clearly has influence over the protagonist, and Veronica, clearly her best friend, which also sets up stakes on these relationships that are both germane to the story.] Citizens of New Hampshire could not get enough of Our Town. We felt about the play the way other Americans felt about the Constitution or the “Star-Spangled Banner.” It spoke to us, made us feel special and seen. Mr. Martin predicted a large turnout for the auditions, which explained why he needed use of the school gym for the day. The community theater production had nothing to do with our high school, but seeing as how Mr. Martin was also the principal’s insurance agent and very likely his friend, the request was granted. Ours was that kind of town. [All small, telling details about the world of the story, the character’s background, and setting up the central role Our Town plays throughout the story as well as its themes.]

Another reader might have different reactions to a story like this. Maybe it seems too quiet or small. Maybe they think nothing really happens. Those are as valid as my own interpretation. Analyzing story isn’t about whether it’s good or bad or you like it or not. It’s about how authors use concrete storytelling devices to create an effect. How you are impacted by that varies from reader to reader—and it’s part of learning your own style and voice as a writer.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

Rest and Relaxation

From Almost an Author:

As I write this post, soldiers from a local Army base are departing for a time of R&R and to spend time with their friends and family over the Christmas holiday. If you are active duty or a veteran of our military, thank you for your service. There is a special joy we experience during Christmas, despite the chaos going on in the world around us.

We understand that at Christmas we need to slow down and enjoy the little things in life like conversations with friends. Or simply being still and doing nothing other than enjoying being in the company of our loved ones.

. . . .

A recent study used shows how people’s stress levels increase during the holidays. I learned after my accident just how important rest is to the ebb and flow of life.

I learned in rehabilitation after my accident that stress and not getting enough rest can damage our brains. That is why I protect my downtime and sleep time.

Rest isn’t limited to sleep. It’s a change of pace and change of our routines or habits. Rest helps us keep our lives from becoming stagnant or overbearing. We all need to learn to practice the art of resting and relaxation.

R&R

The slang term, “R&R” has been used in the armed forces for decades and is short for, “rest and recuperation, rest and relaxation, or rest and rehabilitation.” The term applies to a type of leave granted to personnel which allows them to return home to visit their family.

The military understands the importance and need of soldiers having free time to rest and recharge from their service to the country. The stress of serving our country and being away from loved ones can be depressing, stressful, and lonely for our servicemen and women.

. . . .

Now my younger brother is preparing to retire from the Army after 20 years, next month he will have a total shoulder replacement before his wife gives birth to their first child next year. He also suffers from PTSD after serving three tours overseas.

His go-to stress release is long-distance running as an ultra-marathoner. Again, rest doesn’t necessarily mean sleeping; R&R focuses on a change of pace and doing what we enjoy the most. Regardless of our vocation in life, life can become overbearing or monotonous, especially for us writers.

. . . .

The writer’s life can be just as hectic and restless as a soldier’s life. Writers are always writing, even when not at a desk or computer. Our minds are constantly thinking of new ideas or ways to improve and edit what we have already written.

Burnout usually develops when we fail to take breaks or get enough rest. Writer’s block occurs when we overthink. Psychologically, our minds lock down when we push them too hard .

We resist slowing down and resting for many reasons: fear, perfectionism, self-criticism, and external pressure. Overworked minds perform less efficiently, just like an exhausted body does. Below are four reasons writers need to get more rest from derbyshirewritingschool.com.

  1. Become better writers
  2. Develop more ideas
  3. Understand who we are
  4. Curate and create material to write about.

Let me clarify, resting doesn’t mean being lazy or unproductive. Rest is simply a change of pace to help refuel our creative juices and give our minds and break. It helps our bodies relax and recover from the stress of the writer’s life.  It gives our brains time to slow down and refocus.

Focus

I have already explained how hard it can be for someone with a brain injury to stay focused, even perfectly healthy people can have difficulty focusing if they fail to get enough rest.

Distractions are anything that inhibits our ability to focus, if we fail to get enough rest, our attention spans are inhibited and we are more easily distracted.

And we all know how easily people are distracted today thanks to technology. The human brain can only process so much information at any time. If our minds are not working at 100%, our processing abilities will not be 100%. The military understands that a rested soldier is a more capable soldier.

A rested writer is a more productive writer in the long run. Our brains are the CPU for our nervous systems. The better we take care of our brains, the better our performance will be, will be able to focus better. Below are some tips on how to improve our focus.

  • Minimize distractions
  • Get enough sleep
  • Eat better
  • Meditation
  • Take regular breaks

Link to the rest at Almost an Author

Specificity matters in opening pages too

From Nathan Bransford:

Time for the Page Critique. First I’ll present the page without comment, then I’ll offer my thoughts and a redline. If you choose to offer your own thoughts, please be polite. We aim to be positive and helpful.

Random numbers were generated, and thanks to rish, whose page is below:

Prologue

A sudden wind came from nowhere, carrying the stench of a body I knew lay up ahead; I had to be close.

I raised the collar on my navy-blue blazer, even as I sweated under the scorching August sun. I’d been walking for ten minutes in a wilderness park three hours north of Toronto, unsure of the direction. Why hadn’t someone met me at the park’s entrance?

I made my way across the forest floor with a band of screeching blue jays stalking me. They seemed to be calling to me. Although the canopy of tree tops shielded me from the blistering sun, it did nothing for the boggy ground under my feet. Every step brought up another cloud of mosquitoes, and I swatted at each new bite.

When I saw the yellow police tape just ahead, it spurred me forward.

I flashed my badge at the cop standing guard. “Good afternoon, DS Bradley, sir.” After I signed into the scene log, he briefed me on the team’s findings. I already knew who the victim was: Charlotte McPhee, thirty-eight years old, and a TV news anchor. They found her car at the west gate to the park. She’d been missing for forty-eight hours. Hikers spotted the body along with a knapsack, then fled, fearing a killer was on the loose.

I swung under the tape. The single female in the group, a police photographer, lowered her camera and nodded at me. Looking beyond her, I saw three investigators—two of them glanced over at me. Then I spotted the medical examiner kneeling next to the body.

This is a largely competently-written opening, but it falls pretty flat for me. The narrative voice feels distant from the protagonist’s motivations and thought processes, which makes it difficult to connect with what the protagonist is doing in this scene and why it matters. We learn precious little about anything other than the forest and the body.

Specificity is a perennial suggestion in my query critiques, but it goes for first pages as well. There are several missed opportunities in this page to provide more specific context that might help tease open the story. Who did the protagonist expect would meet them at the entrance at the park? What is the badge they flash? A press badge, police badge, or other?

With a narrative voice that connects us to the protagonist’s mindset, motivation, and plans, and greater specificity to anchor us with the details, the story would feel much more cohesive and we’d have a better sense of why we should start investing in this particular body.

Here’s my redline:

Prologue

A sudden wind came from nowhere, carrying [Doesn’t “sudden” already convey the wind “came from nowhere?”] carried the stench of a the body I knew lay up ahead; I had to be close[Clearly?]
I raised the collar on my navy-blue blazer, even as I sweated under the scorching August sun. I’d been walking for ten minutes in a wilderness park three hours north of Toronto, unsure of the which direction I was headed [Unsure of the direction of what? If it’s the direction they’re walking in, how hard could that be to figure out if it’s sunny?]. Why hadn’t someone [Be more specific–who or what did they expect] met me at the park’s entrance?

I made my way across the forest floor with a band of screeching blue jays stalking me. They seemed to be calling to me. [Feels redundant] Although the tree canopy of tree tops shielded me from the blistering sun [Forcing the reader to update their mental image from “sweated under the scorching August sun. Needless dribbling out of details], it did nothing for the boggy ground under my feet. Every step brought up another cloud of mosquitoes, and I swatted at each new bite[Swatted at each new bite? Why would you swat the bites instead of the mosquitos?]

When I saw the yellow police tape just ahead [Be more specific], it spurred me forward. [ORIENT THE READER ON WHAT THE PROTAGONIST NEEDS TO DO HERE AND WHAT’S AT STAKE]

I flashed my badge [What badge?] at the cop standing guard. “Good afternoon, DS Bradley, sir.” After I signed into the scene log, he briefed me on the team’s findings.

Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford

Scene Mastery: Navigating Common Goal-Driven Scene Pitfalls

From Writers Helping Writers:

Goal-driven scenes are akin to the classic joke setup, “A _ and a _ walk into a bar …”

A _ and a _ walk into a bar. The scene begins with the entrance of the protagonist and antagonist.

The first guy says … The first guy, our protagonist, lays out what’s on his mind—his immediate agenda, or the scene goal.

And so the other guys says … The antagonist throws a curveball, a turning point that disrupts the expected flow.

… [punch line]! Surprise! Something new is revealed or happens that makes everything collide in an unexpected way.

In a joke, we laugh because the poor first guy has encountered something completely expected. In a scene, we turn the page to find out what the first guy does next. It’s cause and effect, action and reaction—the foundation of every novel.

Here’s how goal-driven scenes work.

Goal Establishing a clear scene goal draws readers into whatever the character will spend the scene attempting to accomplish, usually some incremental step toward the central story goal.

Turning point But something doesn’t go as anticipated, and the character is halted by a conflict, obstacle, reversal, or complication. This interruption, the scene’s turning point, throws a monkey wrench into what readers and the characters were hoping for or expecting.

Change Things are different now, because the turning point has changed the character’s original plan or course of action. How will this scene affect what’s next?

1: Establish the Scene Goal

Scene goals are incremental steps toward the ultimate story goal. They’re the viewpoint character’s immediate agenda. What’s on their mind? What did they get up today to accomplish? Unless you’re writing some variety of mystery or thriller, this agenda should be made clear to readers right away.

In a renowned memo to the writers of The Unit, playwright and filmmaker David Mamet underscored the necessity of clear scene goals.

Every scene must be dramatic. That means: The main character must have a simple, straightforward pressing need which impels him or her to show up in the scene. This need is why they came. It is what the scene is about. Their attempt to get this need met will lead, at the end of the scene, to failure—this is how the scene is over. It, this failure, will, then, of necessity, propel us into the next scene.

Issue: Failing to get the character emotionally engaged with the scene goal. Scene goals are serious business. If your character isn’t invested, readers won’t be either. The scene will flop, bereft of stakes and dramatic tension.

To clearly establish a scene goal, show readers what the character plans to do and why it matters to them. Properly done, this process hooks readers into the scene, rallying them to root for the character and keep reading to see whether they triumph or fall flat in their efforts.

 Issue: Forcing a new scene goal with every scene, or keeping the same scene goal throughout the story. Because scene goals represent incremental steps, they’ll evolve as the story progresses. In fast-paced sections of the story, your viewpoint character’s immediate agenda may shift every scene. The bigger and more challenging a goal, the longer it will take to accomplish, and some goals will require multiple scenes to accomplish.

2: Interrupt With a Turning Point

The turning point is the peak of a scene. It’s the whole point of the scene, its raison d’être.

At a scene’s turning point, things stop unfolding the way the character had hoped or expected. They now face some new problem, conflict, or obstacle.

While this point in a scene is often described in terms of conflict, it’s often not about conflict at all. Although conflict is fundamental to every story, it’s not a necessity in every scene. Framing the peak of a scene as a turning point, rather than outright conflict, allows for more nuance.

A scene turning point can take the form of a complication, obstacle, or reversal. These terms are mostly self-explanatory, but let’s touch on what’s meant by a reversal. Renowned screenwriting and storytelling master Robert McKee identifies two types of scene reversals:

1. Reversal of power The relative power of the viewpoint character and another character in the scene swaps.

2. Reversal of expectation The viewpoint character enters the scene expecting one thing, only to encounter a different outcome.

Some of the most common scene writing problems are related to trouble in this turning point phase.

Issue: Failing to directly relate the scene turning point to the scene goal. For example, if Camille’s objective is to covertly retrieve a secret code from her coworker’s files, it wouldn’t make sense for the scene’s turning point to be returning home to find her apartment flooded due to a burst water heater in the unit above. This is definitely a nasty setback for Camille, but it doesn’t have any bearing on the pursuit of the secret code; that plot thread is left dangling.

Instead, imagine Camille poised to steal the secret code form her colleague’s office when the receptionist rushes down the hall with word of an emergency call from Camille’s landlord. This turning point directly affects the scene goal of obtaining the secret code. Just as Camille anticipates snatching the code, she’s yanked away.

Issue: Centering the scene turning point on an entirely internal dynamic. The scene turning point of a goal-driven scene demands the involvement of the viewpoint character with another person, thing, or event. Internal conflict alone isn’t enough to sustain a goal-driven scene, though it’s a powerful catalyst in reflection scenes (a topic for another day).

Issue: Mistaking the most exciting moment of the scene as the scene’s turning point. Think of the turning point as the peak of significance in the scene, not necessarily the most intense or dramatic moment. It’s the apex of tension in regards to the thing that matters most to the viewpoint character. It’s a crucial moment in the pursuit of the scene goal.

Issue: Rushing through the scene’s turning point. As the peak of a scene, the turning point is the juiciest part to readers. Give readers time to appreciate it. Sink into character interiority, allowing readers to savor their entanglement in the turning point. Unravel the character reactions one sticky finger at a time. While there may be times when you want to sweep into the next scene for shock value or chop things off to create a cliffhanger, in general, readers relish the opportunity to appreciate the character’s predicament. (Contrast the writing at this point in the scene with the first and last phases, which could require only a paragraph or pointed sentence to effectively convey.)

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

“Funner” vs. “More fun”: History and Recommended Usage 

From English with Alex:

I have often said that language is democratic. This means that the speakers of a particular language ultimately get to decide which words and phrases are accepted in communication, and which words and phrases are considered out of fashion. Before you roll your eyes and accuse me of saying that language does not have any rules, and that people can say whatever they want, remember that languages evolve over time, and that common usage and what people actually say will trump grammar books almost every time, and that new words and word uses get added to dictionaries all the time regardless of you feel about them. This is certainly the case in the debate over “funner” and “more fun.” So, before we answer the question “Which one should I use?”, we need to travel back in time to understand how this funny debate started.

History: The beginning of “fun” Today, we use “fun” as both a noun and an adjective. You can have fun (noun form) or have a fun time (adjective form). Even if some dictionaries list the adjectival form of “fun” as “casual,” every modern dictionary recognizes both uses. But this has not always been the case. So, let’s have some fun and look back at some history. To begin, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,”fun” actually started as a verb meaning “to cheat, joke, or jest.” The earliest documented use the OED has of “fun” as a verb dates back to 1685. No, I’m not funning with you.

Our usage of “fun” as a noun meaning “enjoyment” or “pleasure” first appeared in the early 1700s. The word kept this meaning and usage for over 100 years. Then, in the early 1800s, publications on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean started using “fun” as an adjective as well. And if it was being used in magazines, then it was definitely being used in pubs and factories. Not everyone agreed with this usage, of course. As has often been the case throughout history, people in upper classes, or simply those who thought that “proper language” had to be protected and preserved, frowned upon the usage of “fun” as an adjective. But, as is also often the case, that did not stop people from using it. And as more people used it, and as “fun” became accepted as an adjective (“a fun time,” “a fun show,” “a fun concert”), people naturally started wondering, “What are the comparative and superlative forms of ‘fun’?” So, in the late 1800s, we started seeing “funner” and “funnest” appear in print.

Why “funner” and “funnest”? Going by comparative and superlative adjective rules, “funner” and “funnest” make sense. The general rule is that regular one-word adjectives are transformed into their comparative forms by adding -er, and into their superlative forms by adding -est. For example, small becomes smaller and smallest, cold becomes colder and coldest, fine becomes finer and finest, and so on. But “funner” sounds a little strange, doesn’t it? For example, “Brenda’s party was funner than Julia’s.”

“Hmm,” said the grammarians. “Why not make fun an exception?” This meant putting “fun” in the category of two-word adjectives that don’t end in -y, such as daring and careful, and three-word-or-more adjectives such as courageous and ridiculous?”

In these cases, English speakers add “more” for comparatives, and “most” for superlatives. For instance, more daring and most daring. So, even though it is a one-syllable adjective, let us add it to the “more” and “most” category because “more fun” and “most fun” just sound better, don’t they?

…Do they? And this is the debate we have been having for decades.

Link to the rest at English with Alex

Five Top Tips To Smash Your Writing Goals in 2024

From Writers Helping Writers:

1) Establish a Writing Routine 

In 2024, it will be crucial for writers to establish a consistent writing routine that suits their lifestyle. Set aside dedicated time each day or week for writing and treat it as a priority. Whether it’s early mornings, late nights, or specific blocks of time during the day, having a routine will help maintain focus and make progress.

Consistency is important, but that doesn’t have to mean writing every single day if that doesn’t work for you.

2) Set Clear Goals 

Setting clear and achievable goals is a vital step towards completing writing projects in 2024. Break down larger goals into smaller, manageable tasks or milestones. This will allow writers to track progress, stay motivated, and celebrate successes along the way.

‘Bitesize chunks’ has always been my mantra … but just as importantly, we need to EVALUATE our progress and let go of goals or things that no longer serve us too!

3. Embrace Technology (or at least understand how it really works)

In the constantly evolving world of technology, writers need to embrace tools and software that can streamline their work process. By leveraging the right technology, writers can save time and focus more on their writing.

From writing and editing software to online research tools and productivity apps, there are numerous resources available to enhance efficiency and creativity. B2W likes to use Grammarly, Coschedule and Hemingway.

The hot topic for 2023 was A.I, which is both a threat AND an opportunity for creatives. As we saw in the recent US Writers’ Strike, it’s a good idea to understand how AI works and what constitutes unethical use, because AI is not going anywhere. By understanding what AI is and isn’t, we can protect our interests.

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

Martín Solares on Creating Novelesque Excitement

From The Literary Hub:

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, people were said to lead novelesque lives if they traveled extensively, experienced major twists of fate—at times disastrous (and someone would come to the rescue), at times lucky (in which case an enemy would try to destroy them). In any event, their lives were full of surprises, adventures, interesting anecdotes; protagonists who placed the most daring bets, laid it all on the line. The novelesque was at its prime: no one would have associated it with distraction, or called it boring, or outlandish.

Then, in the second decade of the twentieth century, as Thomas Pavel shows us in La pensée du roman (The thinking novel), came the great novels that sought to be more like poetry: Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, to name just a few, followed shortly thereafter by a long train of imitators who, in their attempts to emulate their predecessors, managed to write some tremendously boring books. Adventure novels seemed to be the last bastion of surprise. As a result, people began to describe the novelesque as not having its feet on the ground.

A story is novelesque when it provokes in the reader, at regular intervals, the burning question: What will happen next? This question is as powerful as a wave: it lifts us high, pauses for a moment, takes our breath away, and unfurls onto the sand, or another wave, with a crash before disappearing. It’s strange: when we talk about a novel, we remember the emotion it produced but never the nearly minuscule strategies that built up our interest throughout. Of an enthralling novel, we remember—at most—the emotion and the suspense, that private pleasure it generated in us, the moments when we suffered because of a character’s impending doom; we don’t remember the techniques used to produce those sensations.

According to Raphaël Baroni, one of the theorists who have studied the curiosity sparked by fictional narratives, the tension we feel when reading a story is also a poetic effect, the result of well-crafted intrigue. For Baroni, tension mounts when the reader has to wait to see how the plot will be resolved, and this waiting is marked by enough uncertainty that the denouement sparks an intense reaction.

Though a far cry from novels focused on developing a highly literary language, several early twenty-first century television shows brought back the novelesque in the nineteenth-century sense—its constant surprises, its strategies for holding the reader’s interest—and, in doing so, revealed to practitioners of the form just how much they had forgotten of this essential aspect of their art. And they did something else: returning to this essential element of the nineteenth-century novel, they turned the novel into a popular product that is also undeniable in its artistic refinement, able to captivate the most demanding novelist.

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub

Grappling with Two Character Types

From Writer Unboxed:

There’s a character in a novel I’m writing at the moment who, despite having passed on some time before the beginning of the action, haunts the story. Not in the literal way of a ghost story, but their memory and influence shapes a good deal of what one of the main characters does, which has ripple effects on other characters and on the narrative itself. This shadow character is key to the story but not a main character as such. It’s not an easy one to write, because their actions in the past can seem incomprehensible and even abhorrent at times. Yet, in order for the main character to progress in their own life, they need to come to terms with those actions, to understand and possibly to forgive them.

Developing a shadow character who isn’t particularly sympathetic and who only appears through the eyes of others remembering them, never speaking for themselves, has been quite a tricky task. How a) do you make them seem fully rounded, and b) how do you avoid readers disliking them so much they lose patience with the story itself?

I knew that I must not let my own feelings about their behavior taint my portrayal of them. I had to be as objective as possible whilst also conveying the very real effect the shadow character’s actions had on different people’s lives. I had to subtly indicate possible reasons for why the shadow character behaved as they did, yet not make it too obvious, either. It’s not necessary to turn them into a more likable character, but at the same time they need to be at least relatable so readers don’t completely write them off. It’s quite a balancing act—but so far, it’s working!

On the other side of the coin to the enigmatic shadow is another important type of character whose inner thoughts and feelings readers are not privy to, except through the reactions of the main characters. Like the shadow, they aren’t main characters, but they are also very important, key to the development of the story. And, as in the case of the shadow, you only see their inner selves reflected through the eyes of others. But unlike the shadow, they are highly attractive. And they can speak for themselves, because they are physically present, not shadows at all. In fact, hearing their voices whilst seeing them purely through the eyes of one of your main characters can enhance their presence and appeal, sometimes so strongly, especially in the case of a love interest, that it feels as though you are being swept away in that powerful feeling yourself.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

How Improv Made Me a Better Writer

From Publishers Weekly:

Six years ago, I was a single mom with Wednesday and Thursday nights free in that strange, silent way only a recently divorced person can understand. So, I did what all normal and not-at-all-emotionally-unstable individuals do: I signed up for an improv class.

Over the next year, I completed the class series and auditioned for the theater’s house team, and—spoiler alert—I made it! Performing in front of a paying audience proved more intense than taking classes. And soon, improv became a great teaching tool in many areas of my life, including my writing.

At first, I thought improv and writing couldn’t be more opposite—one is performed in front of an audience, the other alone in a quiet space. But now, after hundreds of shows, I’ve come to see how wrong I was. Here are six things I learned from improv that dramatically impacted my writing.

How to think fast: I’m a self-diagnosed overthinker. With writing, I could retool the same three sentences seven times before I’d show them to anyone. I like that. It’s safe.

But improv is not a slow art. When a performer hits the stage, the show is in her hands. There’s no stopping, rethinking, or asking for an extension. Though writers don’t get rewarded for speed, and good improv takes its time in developing stories and characters, the pressure of creating in front of an audience has helped me quiet my inner editor.

How to think specifically: Improv has no props, costumes, sets, or special effects. When working in a medium of the invisible, it’s important to ground scenes in the familiar. Details set a scene, create an agreed-upon reality, and provide something for audiences to see.

In writing, creating a world for readers to perceive presents similar challenges. Just like onstage, offering some authentic details can heighten the level of realism in writing. It’s through specifics that we enter a shared world, whether through words on a page or actors on stage.

How to think boldly: One of the tenets of improv is to never negate another player’s ideas; instead, we respond with a version of, “Yes, and….” It’s not a hard concept, but I found it a difficult rule to follow. What if I make a fool of myself? What if no one laughs? Yet, over the years, I’ve found halfheartedly playing an uncomfortable moment only shares the awkwardness with the audience, whereas giving in to discomfort lets us find a shared humanity. And that’s what makes any art relatable.

As I’ve numbed my fears onstage, I’ve found my first drafts pouring onto the page and my mind open to more possibilities. For a writer, learning to adapt to new opportunities is important, and for me that looks like saying, “Yes, and…” more often: going to conferences, writing in a new genre, accepting speaking opportunities, writing this article.

. . . .

How to think about myself: My biggest mental shift since improv has little to do with my craft or career—it’s a change in the way I see myself. I no longer claim the title of writer or improviser. Instead, I gladly accept that I’m a creative person. All creativity takes an insane amount of courage, and every time I get onstage, I’m reminded how important it is to try new things in life. Only by taking inspired risks can we shift our thinking and continue to evolve.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

Writing about Understanding

From The Paris Review:

The paragraph is perhaps an undercelebrated unit of writing. Sentences get their due, as do individual words, but paragraphs? At the Review, we’ve asked writers to select a favorite paragraph and write a paragraph—or several!—on it. This is our first piece in a periodic series.

Yes, I think you three have been quite happy. But I doubt if Cordelia has enjoyed a single moment of her childhood. It has all been a torment to her. She is not selfish. It is not what she has lacked that is an agony to her, it is what we all have lacked. She has hated it that all our clothes have been so shabby and that the house is so broken down. She has hated it that I have always been so late in paying Cousin Ralph the rent. She has hated it that we have so few friends. She hates it that your father has gone away, but not as you hate it. She would have preferred a quite ordinary father, so long as he stayed with us. She wishes she could have lived a life like the other girls at school. Your father’s writing, my playing, and whatever goes with those things, and the enjoyment we have had, are no compensation to her for what she has lost. Now, do not dare to despise her for this desire to be commonplace, to be secure, to throw away what we have of distinction. It is not she who is odd in hating poverty and”—she felt for the word—“eccentricity. It is you who are odd in not hating them. Be thankful for this oddity, which has brought you safe through terrible years. But do not think you owe it to any virtue in yourselves. You owe it entirely to your musical gifts. The music I have taught you to play must have made you realize that there is a great deal in life which is not affected by what happens to you. Also the technique has been more help to you than you realize. If you are not soft, it is because the technique you have mastered, such as it is, has hardened you. If God had not made you able to play you would be as helpless as Cordelia, and it is not her fault but God’s that she cannot play, and as God has no faults let us now drop the subject.

This paragraph appears late in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, which is likely the novel I’ve reread more often than any other. And this passage is one that I return to all the time, both when life is hard and when life seems lenient enough to grant me a moment of reprieve. At the center of the novel are three sisters: Rose and Mary, twins who are prodigies on the piano, and Cordelia, their unmusical sister who dreams of becoming a world-famous violinist. This paragraph comes after Cordelia’s dream is dashed, and Mamma, their mother, who is a genius on the piano, speaks sternly to Rose and Mary and their brother Richard Quin, admonishing them.

There are many things I love about the paragraph. As I’m typing it out, I’m surprised how long it is. (In fact, many of West’s best paragraphs are long, sometimes occupying an entire page or two). Readily, West allows a character to speak without authorial interventions or interruptions from other characters. Were I discussing this in a writing class, comments would be bound to arise that this is not the right way to write dialogue, but who cares about the right way or the wrong way to write dialogue when one can listen to an extraordinary character like Mamma talk, as thrilling as listening to Shakespeare or a master pianist? The best writing—not only long passages of description but dialogues, monologues—always has an element of music and an element of poetry in it. This paragraph has both in abundance.

And what Mamma says—“Be thankful for this oddity, which has brought you safe through terrible years. … The music I have taught you to play must have made you realize that there is a great deal in life which is not affected by what happens to you”—is what I often repeat to myself, sometimes in a variation for my own situation: “Be thankful for your oddity, which has brought you safe through terrible years. … The books you’ve read and the books you’ve written must have made you realize that there is a great deal in life which is not affected by what happens to you.” Some people—perhaps many, one imagines—are ready to disagree with the sentiment, which goes against a kind of Americanness by which much of life (and literature) has to be seen and experienced only through the lens of the self: my angle, my story, my identity. Well, the more reason for me to celebrate a different sentiment along with Mamma.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review