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

Making dialogue sound natural

From Now Novel:

Whether you’re writing a novel or a short story, you are going to want to make your dialogue natural and true to real life, as it’s spoken in the real world. How do you go about achieving this, when ‘natural dialogue’ can be boring to read if you write it verbatim?

As to why you should make your dialogue sound natural, Daniel Boyko and Zoha Arif of Polyphonic Lit have this to say:

Unnatural, inorganic dialogue can make any character sound like an evil robotic Martian stranded on the great abomination of earth (with no hope of reconnecting with its extraterrestrial kind), trying to camouflage into human society and failing completely and utterly to do so.

. . . .

In his book  How to Write Dazzling Dialogue, James Scott Bell explains the difference between real speech and fictional dialogue. He writes that:

Dialogue is not real-life speech. It is stylized speech for which the author, through the characters, has a purpose. 

That’s a crucial distinction. We don’t want to merely capture reality in our fiction. We aren’t filming a documentary.

What we do is render something that feels real but is intended to create a desired effect. 

Real-life speech is meandering and often boring. 

Fictional speech doesn’t meander (unless, of course, a character has a strong reason to run on and on).

Firstly, you have to listen to natural dialogue. The best way of doing this is not to have a conversation, because then you are so busy being part of the give and take that you don’t really hear the natural rhythms of dialogue. One recommendation is to go to a coffee shop and eavesdrop. Listen to how people speak in the real world, note the rhythms and cadences: when people get excited, or sad, note how the tone changes. Note, too, how people don’t use complete sentences, how people pause, and sometimes the listener will rush in to fill that gap while the speaker is pausing. Notice when people lose their place, forget things, and just simply don’t complete their thoughts. And yet despite that, the meaning of what they are saying is implied by the rest of the sentence.

Link to the rest at Now Novel

What Sleeping With Jane Eyre Taught Me About Pacing

From Jane Friedman:

I’ve been sleeping with Jane Eyre, lately—courtesy of The Sleepy Bookshelf, a podcast designed to help me snooze.

Except it’s been keeping me awake.

I’ve loved this classic since childhood, every reread captivating me as if for the first time.

But it soon became clear that I was sharing my bed not so much with Jane, as with Charlotte Brontë herself. Listening to the novel has been showing me things I had missed on the page—the first-person narrative drawing me in so close I could almost believe it was memoir—and night after night I’ve been reveling in a writing-craft class led by the venerated author.

One such class addresses a storytelling weakness that shows up a lot in my writing and editing practice: high-tension scenes that rush to their finish with the speed of a bullet train.

Brontë’s talent for keeping readers on tenterhooks reminds me of Matthew Dicks and his hourglass technique, which he shares in Storyworthy (entire book, so good!).

Going too fast is one of the biggest mistakes storytellers make, Dicks says. When you arrive at the moment readers have been waiting for, “It’s time to slow things down. Grind them to a halt when possible.”

Consider the properties of an hourglass: the upper chamber containing story still to be told. No grain of sand before its time. All flowing inexorably to the same destination.

In one of my favorite scenes (spoilers ahead), Jane Eyre returns to Thornfield Hall after a year of yearning, desperate to clap eyes on her great love, Mr. Rochester, whom she fled upon learning at the altar that he was already married.

As she approaches the Hall, I itch to press fast-forward. Would he be there? Would they helplessly reunite, or would her moral restraint prevail? Had I been turning pages, I’d be reading very fast indeed—which is what readers do when narrative tension flames through the roof. How else to defend against an author’s merciless manipulation?

But because I was forced to listen and wait, I caught Brontë in the act of tipping the hourglass—again and again.

She sends Jane on four separate journeys to find Mr. Rochester, starting with a 36-hour coach ride from her home to Rochester Inn—ample time for reader anxiety to flare. Rather than simply asking the innkeeper for news of her lost love, Jane prolongs hope by walking the remaining two miles to the Hall.

It is a walk designed to drive the reader to the edge of endurance.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

14 Do’s and Don’ts of Time Management for Writers (from a Recovering Over-Achiever)

From K.M. Weiland:

For many of us, writing is one of the most important things in our lives. And yet, it can be all too easy to let that “most important thing” end up at the bottom of our to-do list. If yet another day has passed in which you haven’t been able to write—or a day in which you did write but getting it done was a struggle—you’re not alone. Time management for writers is possibly one of the key skills of the lifestyle. This is true whether you write full-time or write around your full-time responsibilities.

I’ve always been a schedule hacker and someone who tries to make every minute count. I’ve also always been someone who constantly laments that there isn’t just one more hour in the day. Time management is something of an obsession for me, probably because it’s a game you never completely win. In years past, I’ve gone down the overachiever path of absolutely flying through my days and trying to cram in as much as possible. There are seasons in which that is effective or even unavoidable, but eventually it becomes unsustainable. I’ve also gone through seasons in which circumstances dictated I do as little as possible, but that too is unsustainable over the long term.

Inevitably, the sweet spot is found in balance. Each person’s balance is different, depending on personality, health, goals, obligations, and other factors. No matter what your lifestyle, the demands of the modern day keep us busy and distracted. This can be especially challenging for a creative who needs downtime to breathe and think and wander, as well as concentrated go-time in which to enforce discipline and actually get words on paper.

Recently, I received the following question from reader Joan Arc:

I enjoy reading your blog posts and I like the fact that you like suggestions from your fellow writers. But as I am engaged in school and trying to balance life whilst I study, I find it is becoming more difficult to devote the time to read them. I was wondering if in the near future, you could give some helpful hints about time management and how to balance a writing schedule that will stay even when life takes priority. This is a thing that I, along with many aspiring writers struggle with, and consequently, I lose inspiration for my book. Do you have any suggestions for this?

In today’s post, I’m going to review some of the do’s and don’ts of time management that I have found most supportive throughout my writing career. First, however, I will say a word about consistency in general. I’ve written before about the pros and cons of writing every day, ultimately landing on the view that it’s not important that you write “every” day. What is important is consistency—whatever that means to you—since consistency is what staves off that loss of inspiration Joan references.

8 Do’s of Time Management for Writers

The following eight “do’s” of time management for writers are all practical steps to take in aligning your daily schedule to your vision for your writing life. Note, that it’s important to start with your vision. Start by getting clear on your own goals, not just for writing but for other areas of your life as well. This will help you identify your ideal schedule, as well as what is achievable at the moment.

1. List Your To-Dos So You Can See Them All in One Place

If your day is anything like mine, then it is made up of a bazillion little to-dos. Many of them are so infinitesimal (emptying comment spam on the website) or ordinary (brushing my teeth) that I don’t always think of them as “to-dos.” And yet, they add up fast. When trying to get clear about how to streamline your schedule and create flow states throughout your day, take the time to analyze everything. Time management for writers isn’t just about writing. It isn’t even mostly about writing. It’s about optimizing the entire day so the writing time comes as easily as possible.

2. Create “Batches” of Related Tasks

Once you’ve created a list, group your tasks thematically. A personal motto that serves me well in some instances and not so well in others is “do whatever is in front of you.” Sometimes this is the single best method for moving forward through a large task or for creating momentum when you feel stuck. Other times, it just ends up scattering your focus all over the place. Instead of eating the elephant one bite at a time, you eat a little of the elephant and a little of the giraffe and a little of the hyena—and you end the day feeling you haven’t accomplished anything.

Batch your tasks, so you can focus on one thing at a time. For example, don’t check email throughout the day. Reserve a slot at an optimal time of the day when you can sort through and respond to all emails at once.

3. Multi-Task (With Care)

Multi-tasking is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can undeniably help you move through multiple projects at a quicker rate. On the other hand, the growing amount of research on the loss of productivity associated with multi-tasking is sobering. Even though all that busyness can make us feel super-productive, the actual metrics don’t always weigh out. Use caution and consciousness when adding multi-tasking to your schedule.

That said, there are times when multi-tasking takes everything to 2.0. For example, you might plan to listen to an audiobook or podcast whenever your hands are busy elsewhere (e.g., commuting, doing the dishes, or, for me, designing weekly social media graphics such as the Pinterest image at the top of my posts).

4. Schedule Downtime Relentlessly

When we think of time management for writers, what usually comes to mind are all the tasks we want to do. But particularly if you’re wanting or needing to cram a lot into your daily routines, one of the most important things you can schedule is downtime. Make downtime your priority. Except in situations in which you have no choice (e.g., your paycheck is on the line, your child has an emergency, etc.), the downtime on your schedule should be the last thing to take the hit. I’ve learned this the hard way. These days, I adamantly schedule “downtime” and self-care first thing in the morning. If I don’t do it first, I don’t do it, and because it is the most important part of my day, I prioritize it relentlessly.

5. Make a Commitment With Yourself

Making schedules is the easy part; sticking with them is where the road can get rough. There are two key pieces to sticking with a schedule. The first key is creating a schedule that works. This often requires trial and error, some degree of flexibility, and self-forgiveness.

The second key is discipline. Think of your schedule as a commitment to yourself. Not only are you committing to do all the tasks you’ve laid out for yourself, but when you show up to one of those tasks, you’re going to give it your full attention. This is true for every task on your list, but as a writer, it’s the writing time that should be particularly sacred.

It can be so easy to carve out an hour or two in your day for writing… and then spend half or more of that time twiddling it away. Now, sometimes twiddling is really just creative lollygagging or even dreamzoning, both of which are part of the creative process. But other times (and you know when those times are), the twiddling is just procrastination.

6. Schedule Writing Tasks and Writing-Related Tasks Separately

People often ask me if outlining, researching, and editing count as “writing time.” In my view, they do. However, when it comes to time management for writers, it can be valuable to schedule them separately. Depending on your preferences, the temptation to do a little of everything during “writing time” may end up being counter-productive. For example, if I’m trying to get myself into the headspace of flowing with a scene I want to write, I don’t want to interrupt that with the sudden urge to go research some tidbit. I try to schedule myself out of my distractions by penciling in a slot for researching or editing or whatever else at a different time from my writing.

7. Create a Quick Warm-Up Routine

After zooming through all the to-dos that fill the rest of your day, it can be tough to sit down at your desk and suddenly turn on your inspiration and creativity. And yet, you only have an hour, and you can’t afford to waste any of it!

One of the best tricks I’ve ever used for transitioning into my writing time is a personalized warm-up routine. At certain times in my life (when I’ve had more time), I’ve scheduled warm-ups as long as 30 minutes. These days, my warm-ups are usually quite short. I choose tasks that help ground me, pull me out of a mental space and into my deeper, body-oriented imagination—such as a quick grounding meditation, lighting a candle, breathing some essential oils, or taking a bite of chocolate or a sip of coffee. I may also read over what I wrote the day before or read a quick section from my research or character notes, to help pull myself back into the mindset of my story.

8. Write in Fifteen-Minute Spurts

There you are, sitting at your desk right on schedule, ready to write. And… the words just aren’t coming. The urge to twiddle is strong. You look at the clock and suddenly this precious hour seems like for…ev…er. Before you know it, fifteen minutes have passed and you’ve rewritten the same sentence a total of three times.

The brain hack I like to use is writing in fifteen-minute spurts. I tell myself I’m going to write 500 words (or whatever) in fifteen minutes. Writing 2,000 words in an hour seems overwhelming, but 500 in fifteen minutes? I can do that! Then… when the fifteen minutes is up, I take another drink of coffee or a bite of chocolate, and do it again.

Link to the rest at K.M. Weiland

For PG, reading advice about becoming more efficient with time is usually worth his time. That said, the time management strategies that are effective for one person are not necessarily the best way for another person to reach a high degree of efficiency.

Sometimes, the types of strategies included in the OP can be helpful for PG, but at other times, he needs to think deeply over an extended period of time to prepare himself to do something well. At other times, it’s more efficient for him to close his eyes and let his mind wander.

It’s not like his brain forgets what he needs to figure out, but relaxing and mentally wandering reduces the pressure PG has been putting on himself to get a mental task accomplished.

When the pressure is reduced by not focusing on a task to obsession, the less conscious and less logical parts of his brain present a solution that his logicbrain would never have considered.

There’s nothing particularly original or groundbreaking to what PG’s brain does and doesn’t do, but a conscious brain hack isn’t the best way for him to get mental tasks done. Sometimes the best recipe for success is no real recipe at all.

Character Type & Trope Thesaurus Entry: Bad Influence

From Writers Helping Writers:

DESCRIPTION: This character compromises others and leads them down the wrong path. They could be villainous, deliberately attempting to misguide others, or may be the friend who’s always getting people into trouble.

FICTIONAL EXAMPLES: Grima Wormtongue (the Lord of the Rings series), Scarlett O’Hara (Gone with the Wind), Amy Dunne (Gone Girl), Faith LeHane (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

COMMON STRENGTHS: Adaptable, Adventurous, Ambitious, Analytical, Bold, Charming, Creative, Decisive, Focused, Independent, Industrious, Intelligent, Observant, Persistent, Persuasive, Resourceful

COMMON WEAKNESSES: Controlling, Devious, Dishonest, Hypocritical, Impatient, Impulsive, Irresponsible, Jealous, Manipulative, Melodramatic, Mischievous, Pushy, Rebellious, Reckless, Selfish, Spoiled, Stubborn, Uncooperative

ASSOCIATED ACTIONS, BEHAVIORS, AND TENDENCIES
Manipulating and controlling others
Having a charismatic presence
Breaking social norms
Advocating for and taking shortcuts
Using bribes to entice others to their way of thinking
Encouraging risky or destructive behaviors
Shifting blame to others
Being cunning
Identifying threats or risks before they become a problem
Homing in on others’ weaknesses
Knowing how to exploit others’ desires to their own advantage

SITUATIONS THAT WILL CHALLENGE THEM
Being confronted by someone they’ve wronged and having to deal with the consequences
Encountering a cunning rival and having to up their game to outmaneuver them
Becoming friends with a positive role model who seeks to make the character better

TWIST THIS TROPE WITH A CHARACTER WHO…
Is being manipulated into manipulating others by a behind-the-scenes puppet master
Isn’t overtly trying to be a bad influence

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he “felt impelled” to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: “[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.” You see, he “feels impelled” to write — feels, presumably, that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.


George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Editing Racist Language

From Writer Unboxed,

Once again, serendipity gave me this month’s topic.  Not long after I put up last month’s piece on cultural appropriation, the New York Times published an article on the controversy around plans to rewrite the works of Georgette Heyer.  Ms. Heyer, who wrote from the 1920s to the 1970s, essentially created the modern Regency romance.

She’s delightful to read in a lot of ways.  I love her use of early 19th century language, but her Jewish characters are cruel stereotypes.  Her estate has agreed to a new edition of her books with the anti-Semitism edited out.  It’s about time.

The NY Times article argued both sides of the question.  Readers are generally smart enough to see that things were different in the past, so posthumous rewriting to fit more modern sensibilities is unfair to the author.  On the other side, the racist language of the past may be so offensive that some readers will be unable to read it at all.

In Ms.Heyers’ case, the offensive characters are relatively minor and easily rewritten to erase any antisemitism.  In fact, because the characters are stereotypes, the book is stronger without them.

In other cases, the racism is so interwoven in the narrative that the story can’t be saved.  For instance, I couldn’t get through Gone With the Wind.  I mean, yes, great characters, wonderful romance, historic sweep, all of that.  But I couldn’t get past the Lost Cause narrative – that the Confederacy may have lost the war, but, gosh darn it, they were right all along.  The book can be taught in academic settings, where a teacher can give the cultural context, but by now it is more a historical document about the bad old days than popular entertainment.

Then there’s Booth Tarkington.

The house I grew up in didn’t have many books, and I think I read all of them – my older sister’s Bobbsey Twins collection, Oliver Twist (when I was far too young to follow it), a 19th-century edition of Pilgrim’s Progress, with woodcuts.  And Penrod and Sam, a collection of short stories by Booth Tarkington.  Later in life, I got hold of the first book in the series, Penrod.

Both books tell stories of Penrod Schofield, a boy growing up somewhere in the Midwest just after the turn of the 20th century.  Two of Penrod’s friends were black, the brothers Herman and Verman.  (That is correctly spelled, by the way.  As Herman explains when they first meet Penrod, their parents just like rhyming names — they also have an older brother Sherman.)  Because Tarkington was a product of his time, the brothers are often described using racist language.  But . . .

In one of the stories from Penrod, Penrod has to stay in town while most of his friends visit relatives in the country to escape the summer city heat.  While on his own, Penrod meets a bully, Rupe Collins, who menaces and humiliates him.  And in one of the nice bits of characterization that make Tarkington worth reading, Penrod falls straight into hero worship.  He starts spending more time with Rupe and emulating him.  When Sam returns from the country and runs into Rupe and Penrod, Penrod encourages Rupe to bully Sam the way Rupe bullied him.  Rupe is happy to comply by putting Sam in a headlock.

Into this scene walk Herman and Verman.  Their immediate reaction is to tell Rupe to leave their friends alone.  Rupe orders Penrod to throw them out of the carriage house where they’d been playing, referring to them with a racial slur.  Herman takes even more exception to this.  Rupe responds by towering over him and threatening him, much as he had threatened Penrod.

And then Herman and Verman just beat the sweet bejesus out of him.

Again, the language is extremely, unfortunately racist.  I remember one reference to Verman hitting Rupe with a rake, as hard as he could, tines down, “because, in his simple, straightforward, African way, he wished to kill his enemy and kill him as quickly as possible.”  And I can certainly appreciate why many readers wouldn’t be able to get past the language.  But the story’s stuck with me all these years because what the brothers actually do is brave and honorable and done in defense of their own dignity.

Especially since Tarkington is completely behind them.  They are the heroes of the story, full stop.  When they send Rupe packing, they are justifiably exultant with no hint of guilt or regret.  And their attack breaks Penrod’s hero worship, helping their friend get back to normal.  Despite the language, I find it hard to be offended by a story in which two black boys are celebrated for beating the stuffing out of a white racist.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

PG could argue the case that sanitizing the wording of old books to suit present-day mores is a form of whitewashing racist, etc., attitudes from an earlier time.

Is it not more instructive for students and others to understand how easily and readily writers and establishment publishers fell into the odious practice of using offensive racist terms to describe other human beings?

Are readers and society at large to assume that the American establishment has always been pristinely free of bad racist habits? One of the benefits of studying history, including literary and publishing history, warts and all, is to avoid the mistakes of the past.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Winston Churchill

Times When Commas Have Been Critical

From diyMFA:

It may appear to be a tiny little mark, barely bigger than a period. YET, the usage or omission of a comma can make a huge difference in your meaning and maybe even your wallet. Let’s take a look at three times when a comma could have or did change the course of history.

Tariff Act of 1872

I think we all hate paying taxes, but fruit importers got a break from theirs when a clerk misprinted a hyphen as a comma instead. The early United States began imposing tariffs (taxes) on imported goods as far back as 1789. Over time, these laws were modified and had to be copied into new documents.

Well, maybe they didn’t have their coffee that day, but a poor clerk writing up the new tariff made a boo-boo and added a comma where it shouldn’t have been. The original law (from 1870) had exempted “fruit plants, tropical and semi-tropical for the purpose of propagation or cultivation.” But in 1872, a stray comma came in after “fruit,” which made importers argue that all fruits (not just full fruit plants) should be exempt.

People made arguments and debated on both sides. Congress eventually changed the comma, but not before refunding over $2 million ($40 million with inflation) to importers they had taxed while the comma was in place.

Maine Dairy Deliveries

Big corporations will do anything to save a buck—except check their commas. In 2014, five drivers for a dairy company sued the company for overtime pay, which they claimed stemmed from the lack of the Oxford (serial) comma in their contract.

The contract said that overtime did not apply to workers involved in the “canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of” perishable foods. 

Notice how this list does not have a comma before the “or”? Well, that lack of the serial comma in this sentence implies that the overtime exemption doesn’t apply to those who ONLY distribute and do not pack the items.

The courts officially agreed with this reading of the document and awarded a $5 Million settlement covering 127 drivers. So, before you go arguing for or against the Oxford comma, make sure your meaning comes first and your preference comes second.

Link to the rest at diyMFA

The Timeless Power of Universal Themes in Fiction

From C.S. Lakin:

As avid readers and writers of fiction, we often find ourselves drawn to stories that leave an indelible mark on our hearts and minds. Have you ever wondered what makes certain stories stand the test of time, resonating with audiences across the globe, regardless of cultural or geographical differences?

The answer lies in the artful incorporation of universal themes—the bedrock upon which the most enduring and impactful stories are built.

What Are Universal Themes?

Universal themes are timeless, fundamental ideas that are shared by humans collectively and individually. They are the threads that connect the human experience, delving into emotions, beliefs, and values that resonate with people from all walks of life.

Whether it’s the exploration of love, the quest for justice, or the enduring human spirit, themes speak to the heart of storytelling in a truly universal language. I like how Michael Hauge, Hollywood story consultant, puts it: Theme is the character’s inner motivation made universal. It’s what drives your character toward her goal that resonates with readers.

Infusing Theme Strategically

Incorporating universal themes into fiction is not merely a stylistic choice; it is a strategic move that elevates a story from being entertaining to becoming emotionally resonant and thought-provoking.

These themes serve as the glue that binds the narrative together, providing depth and meaning to the characters’ journeys and the plot’s twists and turns. When readers connect with a universal theme, they see themselves in the characters, fostering empathy and understanding across diverse backgrounds and experiences.

You don’t have to create a general setting or situation that everyone can relate to. In fact, the more specific and narrow the milieu of your story, the more the universality can resonate. Take a novel like The Kite Runner, a blockbuster book set in Afghanistan. The cultural setting might have been unfamiliar to the majority of readers, but the moral dilemma and thematic issues the characters face are extremely relatable—the humiliation, shame, and fear explored are all emotions people everywhere have experienced.

Another novel that highlights universal themes is The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Whitehead’s powerful book reimagines the historical Underground Railroad as a literal network of trains, offering a harrowing portrayal of slavery and the quest for freedom. The themes of resilience, the pursuit of justice, and the human spirit’s capacity to endure in the face of oppression simmer through the pages.

Universal themes enrich the narrative tapestry by delving into fundamental aspects of life – love, loss, redemption, justice, and the human condition. By tapping into a shared reservoir of human experience, writers create stories that resonate profoundly. These themes serve as a bridge between the characters and the audience, fostering empathy and connection.

The Profound Impact of Universal Themes

Beyond emotional resonance, universal themes provide a platform for exploring complex and meaningful ideas within the framework of a narrative. They allow writers to delve into societal issues, moral dilemmas, and philosophical questions, inviting readers to ponder and reflect.

Link to the rest at C.S. Lakin

Why Activism Leads to So Much Bad Writing

From The Atlantic:

When artists turn to activism or introduce politics into a work of art, it’s usually taken as something virtuous, an act of conscience on behalf of justice. But artistic and political values are not the same; in some ways they’re opposed, and mixing them can corrupt both. Politics is almost never a choice between good and evil but rather between two evils, and anyone who engages in political action will end up with dirty hands, distorting the truth if not peddling propaganda; whereas an artist has to aspire to an intellectual and emotional honesty that will drive creative work away from any political line. Art that tries to give political satisfaction is unlikely to be very good as either politics or art.

Last month, 92NY, a Jewish cultural center in New York, canceled a long-scheduled event with the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen after he and 750 other writers and artists signed an open letter in the London Review of Books calling for “an end to the violence and destruction of Palestine.” The organizers insist that the event was only postponed, but that’s not how it looked. The cancellation was part of a wave of suppressed speech following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel: Pro-Palestinian student groups have been banned, speakers disinvited, and employees fired; a ceremony honoring a Palestinian writer was canceled and an Islamic art exhibit withdrawn; the only Palestinian American member of Congress was censured. All of these acts are hostile to the values of free expression in a liberal democracy.

Link to the rest at The Atlantic

When Getting It Wrong Makes It Better

From Writer Unboxed:

In the late ‘70s, when I was a freshman at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, a film crew descended upon our quirky little town to shoot a movie. At the time I believe it was called “Bambino,” but that would change. The movie focused on an annual bicycle race the university hosted, called the Little 500 (a reference to the famed Indianapolis 500, the big annual auto race held 50 miles to the north). The Little 500 was the event of the year for students and townspeople alike, and to this day it draws crowds of 25,000 whenever April rolls around.

When you live in smalltown central Indiana, it’s not every day that Hollywood comes calling, and both the city and the university greeted the film project with open arms. It was the talk of the town, and soon we began seeing sections of the campus and surrounding area cordoned off while a cafeteria, courtyard or local street was commandeered to film some scene.

What was the movie about? Nobody really knew, other than that the climactic moment would be a reenactment of our big bicycle race. And – most thrilling of all – there was an open call to attend said reenactment as an extra, since they needed the stadium in which the race was held to be full of people. As a bonus, they also needed a ton of competitive bike riders, and since my dormitory floor had a team that had qualified to compete in the real race, the guys on that team were hired to ride in the reenactment, while the rest of their loyal floormates fake-cheered them on from the stands, hoping to be captured forever on film.

Suffice to say, we were stoked.

It didn’t take long for some of the novelty to wear off. The film crew seemed to be everywhere, and they showed no signs of ever being done. It became tiresome to have to walk around to a rear entrance of an academic hall, because the front of the building was being used for some scene they were shooting.

Even more troubling, we began to notice what they were getting WRONG. We heard talk that the movie would highlight rivalries between students and “cutters” – a derogatory name the filmmakers were using for the local townspeople, harkening back to a bygone era when Bloomington was home to a large workforce of limestone cutters. The problem was, the limestone quarries had been closed for years, there was little or no actual rivalry, and nobody called them “cutters.” “Townies,” maybe. A few called them “stonies” (for “stone cutters”). But what was all this “cutters” nonsense? No, this did NOT bode well.

And then there were the race scenes. Despite the initial surge of interest, it quickly became evident that there was no way to actually fill the stadium where the race was being filmed day after day, because nowhere near enough people were showing up. So the film crew would direct us (yes, yours truly was in some of the crowd scenes) to all shuffle back and forth to different parts of the stadium and sit together in crowded clumps of people. After one shot was completed, we would be ushered to some other section of the stands, and we began to understand that they would somehow stitch together the footage to make the stadium appear full, when in reality you were likely seeing the same much smaller group of people over and over again, sitting in whatever section of the stadium the camera was capturing at a given moment. Although this was long before the advent of CGI, even then we were skeptical of such a low-tech approach. (You’d be surprised how quickly a bunch of 19-year-old Midwestern punks become experts in critiquing filmmaking techniques.)

The movie didn’t come out until the following year, by which time it had been renamed “Breaking Away.” Back in Bloomington, we all flocked to the movie theater to see it, hoping to catch a glimpse of ourselves in the bike-racing scenes.

I don’t think any of us were prepared for the finished result. A film that we had assumed would be about our famous bike race was instead more of a buddy movie with a side order of romance, tacking on a trumped-up rivalry between students and townspeople that in no way represented the real dynamic of the artsy little town we all knew and loved. The verdict was swift and unanimous:

Clearly, this movie sucked.

So imagine our surprise – and righteous indignation – when the film became a hit, earning not one but four Academy Award nominations, and actually winning for best screenplay!

How could this be? The lead actor had skinny legs, and everybody knew that the best competitive cyclists had legs like sequoias. And during the “cute meet” when the male and female romantic leads first crossed paths, the girl rode away on a motor scooter (which nobody rode on that campus), and – wait for it – drove the wrong way up what any self-respecting Bloomingtonian knew was a one-way street! And in what had to be the worst blow of all, during the race scenes, the cameras swept past the crowds far too fast for any of us to recognize ourselves.

This was an outrage. How could Hollywood have gotten our world so wrong?

It wasn’t until many years later, when I began harboring serious thoughts about becoming a storyteller, that I realized that with little or no exception, nearly everything that movie got wrong actually made it a better story. More on that in a moment, but examining the success of Breaking Away made me start to realize that getting the facts right is not always the goal in fiction. Getting the story right is.

A hard lesson from a bitter pill

Still, that can be a bitter pill to swallow. I think most of us get bugged when a book or movie gets something wrong – particularly when it’s something about which we have highly specialized knowledge or experience. In my case, as a professional musician, I can tell you that music is something that they almost NEVER get right in books or movies. This can happen whether the music is the focal point, or merely a side detail.

Because I’m a drummer, people always ask me what I thought of the movie Whiplash, and I have to carefully temper my response in order not to go full Ebenezer Scrooge on them. I mean, sure: the film might have provided a platform for some powerful drama – and okay, some damn good acting – but it was utter nonsense in terms of realism, basically amounting to nothing more than a thinly disguised sports movie where a ball was swapped out for some drumsticks. Two thumbs down from The Keithster.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

One Well-Chosen Detail: Write Juicy Descriptions Without Overwhelming Your Reader

From Jane Friedman:

Have you ever read a description in a book and actually stopped to say to yourself, “Dang, that’s good.” And then maybe read it again?

If so, you’ve probably also read a book where you found yourself mumbling, “I really don’t need to know every detail about this guy’s library/tools/muffin recipe” as you flip a few pages to find where the story picks up again.

It takes practice to write immersive descriptions that draw readers in, without going overboard so that we bore them and lose their attention. It’s one of the more delicate elements of craft.

Let’s start with how to write lush prose.

Writing engaging descriptions

I was reading Moonglow, by Michael Chabon, recently and came across this description of an ominous figure:

His close-cropped skull was indented on one side as by the corner of a two-by-four. In the crevice formed by his brow and cheekbones, his eyes glinted like dimes lost between sofa cushions.

The specificity of the description just floored me. I can absolutely see this guy in my head and I wouldn’t want to bump into him in a parking lot staircase. It got me thinking about great descriptions, and their opposite: clichés.

The dreaded cliché

A cliché is any turn of phrase that you’ve ever heard before: fire-engine red, soft as a pillow, robin’s egg blue, fast as a speeding train. You get the idea.

Basically, a cliché is a symbol. It’s the literary equivalent of clipart. 

. . . .

Characters can be cliché too. If you’re writing an elderly lady and you tell us she has gray hair and wrinkles around her eyes, an image will form in the mind of the reader, sure, but an opportunity has been missed to create a specific character, one unlike any other.

As an example, consider this description from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping:

… in the last years she continued to settle and began to shrink. Her mouth bowed forward and her brow sloped back, and her skull shone pink and speckled within a mere haze of hair, which hovered about her head like the remembered shape of an altered thing. She looked as if the nimbus of humanity were fading away and she were turning monkey. Tendrils grew from her eyebrows and coarse white hairs sprouted on her lip and chin. When she put on an old dress the bosom hung empty and the hem swept the floor. Old hats fell down over her eyes. Sometimes she put her hand over her mouth and laughed, her eyes closed and her shoulder shaking.

The difference is in the details. Specific details are what lift descriptions out of cliché. But digging deep for details is difficult because our brains are inherently lazy. We see something pale blue. We check our mental files for ways of describing it and come up with “sky blue.” Accurate, yes, but you’ve missed the chance to describe the object as only you can.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

7 Keys to Writing the Ultimate Spy Thriller

From ScreenCraft:

What does it take to write a great spy thriller?

From the James Bond franchise to every Mission Impossible installment — and everything around and in between — the spy thriller has long been one of the most intriguing genres in film and television.

We’ve had spy thrillers based on true stories (Bridge of Spies and Argo), slapstick comedies (Spy, the Austin Powers Trilogy, Top Secret!), action comedies (True LiesMr. and Mrs. Smith), slow-burn thrillers (Tinker Tailor Soldier SpySyrianaThe Third Man), compelling television series (Homeland24Jack Ryan), and so many more.

While there are many obvious variances of what makes a great spy thriller — due primarily to the popular subgenre that is often blended with other genres — here we feature seven essential elements to great contemporary spy thriller scripts.

Screenwriters can mix and match these keys to apply to their spy thriller scripts, depending on the genre they are blending it with.

1. FIND THE KILLER LOGLINE

If you’re not hired to write the latest James Bond, Jason Bourne, or Ethan Hunt blockbuster, you have to do your best to find a killer logline that will force Hollywood decision-makers to take notice.

It’s not enough to tell your version of those types of spy thrillers. You can’t simply create your own Bond, Bourne, or Hunt, give them a new name or gender and pass them off as your own. That’s not going to be enough to sell the script on spec.

You need to create a unique and original spin on the popular subgenre.

A logline is the expression of the intriguing concept you’ve conjured, answering the question of who, what, when, where, how, and why.

A hapless New York advertising executive is mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies and is pursued across the country while he looks for a way to survive. (North by Northwest)

Retiring CIA agent Nathan Muir recalls his training of Tom Bishop while working against agency politics to free him from his Chinese captors. (Spy Game)

A desk-bound CIA analyst volunteers to go undercover to infiltrate the world of a deadly arms dealer and prevent diabolical global disaster. (Spy)

A fearless, globe-trotting, terrorist-battling secret agent has his life turned upside down when he discovers his wife might be having an affair with a used car salesman while terrorists smuggle nuclear warheads into the United States. (True Lies)

A spy organization recruits an unrefined, but promising street kid into the agency’s ultra-competitive training program, just as a global threat emerges from a twisted tech genius. (Kingsman: The Secret Service)

A bookish CIA researcher finds all his co-workers dead and must outwit those responsible until he figures out who he can really trust. (Three Days of the Condor)

In the bleak days of the Cold War, espionage veteran George Smiley is forced from semi-retirement to uncover a Soviet Agent within MI6. (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)

A 1960s secret agent is brought out of cryofreeze to oppose his greatest enemy in the 1990s, where his social attitudes are glaringly out of place. (Austin Powers: Internation Man of Mystery)

What’s your spin on the subgenre?

Is there a way to weave a spy thriller concept into the horror genre? Is there a MacGuffin that is intriguing enough to center your spy thriller around?

Whatever the concept may be, it has to stand out from the already ingrained spy thriller franchises. Hollywood has read so many versions of those stories. It’s up to you, the writer, to take the subgenre in a new direction or center it around something unique and different.

2. THE BIG OPENING

While some may believe that the big thrilling spy movie opening has become a cliché, you can’t deny the expectation that audiences (and studios) have when they sit down to watch a spy thriller.

But remember that there are many different versions of a big opening.

You can go the James Bond route, and focus on action spectacles.

. . . .

You can take a cue from the original Mission Impossible and focus on early twists, turns, and intrigue.

. . . .

3. A UNIQUE PROTAGONIST AND ANTAGONIST

You can’t just have a great hero go up against a cookie-cutter villain. It works in spy thriller franchises at times because of the fan base. But you also can’t just have a cookie-cutter protagonist go up against a unique and compelling villain either.

They have to be equally strong in your script — and they have to compliment each other through their characterizations and those character traits that are constantly being put up against each other.

If it’s just another spy or secret agent going up against just another leader of some faceless evil organization, Hollywood isn’t going to take notice. The studios have their own franchise for that.

What makes your protagonist and antagonist different than what we’ve seen before already?

Is your protagonist a disgraced spy rotting in a prison for a crime they did not commit? Have they assumed a new identity after leaving the CIA, now working as a kindergarten teacher to atone for the terrible things they’ve done in their past? Or maybe they are a spy hired by a spy organization because of their multiple personality disorder — thus able to beat any lie detector test.

Is your antagonist the thought-to-be-dead twin of your protagonist?

These are all horrible (or brilliant) ideas maybe, sure. But the point is that you have to think outside of the box.

Link to the rest at ScreenCraft

Beware These Big Baddies: 22 of the Best Book Villains

From Book Riot:

The Big Bad Wolf, the Evil Queen, the Stepsisters, Joker, Darth Vader – these iconic villains have stayed with us for a very long time. We read about them, we see them in movies, in the originals and remakes. What makes a villain iconic? What makes them timeless? For you to remember them years and years later and still know what the story is about and what the villain did so the hero couldn’t achieve their destiny. These book villains tell their story, you might even relate to them a bit, but the way they do things might not be the right one.

For me, a villain needs to have a reason. A reason for them to do what they’re doing. And for you to see it in a different light, it might be the way to change things, yes, but the villain always does it in their own way: not at all caring that they might create chaos. The hero, if you’re in a A+ story, is not at all that good. They might not follow the rules completely. So you have that gray area that you can see how easily the hero can turn into a villain. The villain also can work into that area. Take a look at these book villains.

Best Book Villains in Children’s Books

Dolores Umbridge From Harry Potter

When I first got introduced to her, I instantly didn’t like her. And with reason! Her whole story arc is to be a bad person. She tortured Harry, she was completely on Voldemort’s side, she fought with him. Through it all, Dolores Umbridge was a pain to read about whenever she was on scene.

The Grinch From How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

One of the greatest book villains. He hates Christmas and wants everyone to be completely miserable like him? So he decides to steal Christmas from the Whos. How does he do it? He dresses up as Santa, puts some antlers on top of Max’s (his dog) head, and call it a day. It’s wonderful.

Smaug from The Hobbit

A dragon who was drawn to the fortune of the Lonely Mountain? It’s pretty amazing when you meet him for the first time. Plus he pretty much doesn’t care about the world. He just wants his fortune and to lie there with it.

The Sea Witch from The Little Mermaid

You might know Ursula, the sea witch in the Disney’s retelling, but the Sea Witch from the original tale by Hans Christian Andersen is much worse and more cruel. Why is that? Well, she makes a deal with the Little Mermaid for human legs. Her tongue is chopped off, her fin is cut in half literally to make two legs, and whenever she walks on land, she will feel like she’s walking on sharp knives.

. . . .

Best Book Villains in Adult Fiction

The Wood From Uprooted

The Wood is a frightful entity. A living, dark entity that feeds constantly. If someone went inside the Wood, you probably won’t be seeing them again. Or if they did come out, they would come out changed, be it in the mind or on their bodies. The Wood ate you alive and good riddance if you so much as get neared it. That’s why everyone is afraid of it and the only one who can protect the town is the Dragon, another being that whispers fear.

Circe From Circe

If you’ve read The Odyssey, you know about Circe. The sorceress who was exiled to the island of Aiaia. Who was a very important part of Odysseus’s journey. But when you read that, you don’t stop and think about Circe’s story and upbringing. Madeline Miller’s book shows you how the stories vilify Circe, and in this love letter to her, Circe becomes a new being. There’s more than turning men into pigs, believe me.

Pennywise From It

One of the most terrifying clowns in history. Pennywise is still making people have nightmares. With the new remake, It came back into our lives. Pennywise is a shapeshifter that changes into people’s fears or loved ones in order to manipulate them and kill them. It’s a rather intelligent being that stalks the Derry kids in the form of a clown because it knows that kids love clowns so it would be easier to get to them.

Link to the rest at Book Riot

4 Paths to Redeeming Your Villain

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

Have you ever fallen in love with a story villain? Or at least found yourself liking them somewhat against your will? Seems a little weird, experiencing all the happy feels for this character, but I think we’ve all been there.

When a villain is well written and well rounded, they can tug at our heartstrings just like the protagonists do. This can be cruel, since the villain is usually destined to fail. I say usually because stories can include a change of heart for the enemy.

Is this what you’d like for your bad guy or girl? Let’s take a peek at the villain’s journey and see what their path to redemption might look like.

Understanding Character Arcs: Positive Arcs

First, we need to have a basic understanding of character arc. In essence, this is the transformation a character goes through from the start of the story to the finish.

In the opening pages, she’s lacking something internally. Often, this comes out of a wounding event from the past — a trauma that was scarring. She was compelled to don emotional shielding to protect herself from the pain of that experience and any possible recurrence.

This emotional shielding comes in the form of bad habits, defense mechanisms, personality flaws, biases, and skewed beliefs. While intended to protect the character, that only creates more problems. They’re so destructive that they create a void in her basic human needs. This void leads her to pursue a story goal (outer motivation) that will fill that need. But her emotional shielding cripples her, keeping her from succeeding and becoming fully realized.

Throughout the course of a positive arc, the character recognizes those internal problems and begins to address and change them. This enables her to grow and deal properly with her past, eventually ensuring that she meets her goal and achieves fulfillment.

Understanding Character Arcs: Negative Arcs

That transformation is the essence of a change arc. It’s the one most protagonists follow. But there’s another, lesser-used arc form that’s common for villains.

In a failed arc, the character is unable to overcome their issues and the demons of the past. She fails to make the necessary positive changes that would enable them to achieve satisfaction and fill their inner void. Characters following this arc end the story either back where they started or worse off than they were to begin with.

Very often, this is where you’ll find the villain in your story. She may be aware of the wounding event from her past, but she’s already tried to deal with it and has failed. Now she’s embracing her dysfunctional behaviors, believing they’ll make her stronger. Or she may never have faced her past and is living in denial, refusing to address it. Either way, she’s destined to continue living an unfulfilled life that lacks closure — unless she’s given the opportunity to try again, and this time, succeed. Then…redemption.

How To Go About Redeeming Your Villain?

So as an author interested in redeeming your villain, you first must know her backstory, which will tell you what she’ll have to overcome to succeed.

  • What wounding event from the past profoundly impacted her?
  • How did her view of herself or the world change because of it?
  • What new behaviors, beliefs, habits, and responses developed as a means of protecting herself from a recurrence of that event and the negative emotions associated with it?

There’s a lot of backstory to explore, but questions like these will get you started. 

. . . .

Once you’ve got a clear vision of your villain’s history, you can use one of the following techniques to get her back on the road to healing.

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

Character Type & Trope Thesaurus Entry: Lady of Adventure

From Writers Helping Writers:

DESCRIPTION: This self-sufficient and tenacious woman seeks out adventure and new discoveries, often breaking with the conventions of her time to do so.

FICTIONAL EXAMPLES: Arya Stark (Game of Thrones), Eowyn (the Lord of the Rings trilogy), Mulan (Mulan), Dolores Abernathy (Westworld), Lara Croft (Tomb Raider)

COMMON STRENGTHS: Adaptable, Adventurous, Alert, Bold, Confident, Courageous, Curious, Decisive, Efficient, Enthusiastic, Focused, Independent, Industrious, Passionate, Perceptive, Persistent, Resourceful, Spontaneous, Spunky

COMMON WEAKNESSES: Cocky, Impatient, Impulsive, Irresponsible, Obsessive, Pushy, Rebellious, Reckless, Self-Destructive, Self-Indulgent, Stubborn, Uncooperative, Volatile

ASSOCIATED ACTIONS, BEHAVIORS, AND TENDENCIES
Being street smart
Restlessness; needing to be on the move
Lacking patience
Thinking for herself
Rejecting the conventions that don’t suit her
Persistently pursuing her goals; seeing things through
Disregarding people in authority—specifically those who would try to force her into a specific role or keep her from certain activities
Spontaneity
Avoiding long-term commitments (in case a better offer comes along)
Believing that romantic entanglements will slow her down

SITUATIONS THAT WILL CHALLENGE THEM
A romantic partner wanting to settle down
Sustaining an injury that affects her mobility
Getting pregnant
Rules changing that restrict women’s freedoms
Being saddled with additional responsibilities at home or work, making travel and adventure less possible

TWIST THIS TROPE WITH A CHARACTER WHO
Has a stable home life, with children
Is elderly
Has an atypical trait: indecisive, nature-focused, sentimental, verbose, whiny, vain, etc.

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

For more information about various character tropes, check out the Thesaurus Description Database which you can find via the Writers Helping Writers Home Page.

Roving Ramblers Make the Best Protagonists

From The Millions:

I often talk with other writers about the engines of stories: features of character, plot or even object that allow the narrative happenings to unfold. Sometimes this engine can be literal, as in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” O’Connor’s classic tale features a family on a road trip: An actual vehicle moves the plot along from moment to eventual tragic moment. In other iconic works, the engine is more difficult to pinpoint. By whatever strange magic Haruki Murakami’s Kafka On The Shore guides us through its pages, it is not so simple as the causal churning of gears endemic to most plots. More the hidden engine of dreams, which we are better able to intuit than we can explain.

Of all such engines, the “roving rambler” archetype has fascinated me most over the years: fast-talking, ever-moving characters of modern literature liable to take us on strange, unpredictable rides by way of their fidgety feet and hyperactive minds. Restless and unrestrained, they get themselves into trouble and have to work their way out of it. They are the consummate raconteurs; their stories are powered as much by their madcap interactions as by their introspective asides. There tends to be something bothering them, but they don’t want to disclose their distress, or will do so only discursively. Most often they’re found in cities, where the urban landscape’s constant onslaught of sites, sounds, and strangers naturally lends itself to rambling.  In fact, to allow the protagonist of my own novel, Pay As You Go, as much space to ramble as he would like, I went about making up a city from scratch, then populating it with as many interlocutors as would fit its tangled grid. His name is Slide, and the city’s name Polis.

In honor of the literary wanderers that precede Slide, I’ve composed a small collection of novels, novellas, and a short story that feature roving ramblers of various stripes. Some are chattier than others, but they all boast that penchant for discursive aside and spontaneous interaction characteristic of the archetype—and perhaps the only appropriate response to modern life’s mania.

Luster by Raven Leilani

Edie moves through New York with both the thrust of desire and the comfort in squalor mainly found in twentysomething city dwellers. Her apartment is a mess, the coworkers she’s slept with have taken to avoiding her, she’s jaded about the performative hypocrisy of her employer, a publishing house, and wary of the more pleasant-seeming Black woman they recently hired, as if to replace her. (Which they do.) She’s also sleeping with a married man. It’s an explosive cocktail, lit on fire by Leilani’s sharp wit and kinetic pace as we move from city to suburbs and back again. Edie misses nothing: She divulges about marital relations, erotic pleasure, absurdities of race, painting, and family ruptures, whether others or her own. As for what’s bothering her? It’s a little bit of everything.

The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis

A contemporary of García Márquez and a poet for most of his literary life, Mutis began writing this series of novellas in his sixties—almost as a surprise to himself—after a recurring character from his poems began to speak to him in more fully formed prose. Maqroll the Gaviero, or Watcher, is a standout in modern literature, a world-weary wanderer more at home in the worn tomes always on his person than in the brash, semi-legal farces in which he finds himself. We follow him up the length of a jungle-piercing river in search of dubious riches and to the heat-drenched bustle of a teeming port city, rubbing shoulders with various criminals, accomplices, lovers, and friends along the way. Farcical, baroque, and always in search of meaning, these stories operate in the highest echelon of linguistic artistry.

Link to the rest at The Millions

How to Exclaim!

From The Millions:

Noisy. Hysterical. Brash. The textual version of junk food. The selfie of grammar. The exclamation point attracts enormous (and undue) amounts of flak for its unabashed claim to presence in the name of emotion which some unkind souls interpret as egotistical attention-seeking. We’ve grown suspicious of feelings, particularly the big ones needing the eruption of a ! to relieve ourselves. This trend started sometime around 1900 when modernity began to mean functionality and clean straight lines (witness the sensible boxes of a Bauhaus building), rather than the “extra” mood of Victorian sensitivity or frilly playful Renaissance decorations.

Things need to make sense, and the ! just doesn’t, subjective and subversive as it is, popping out from the uniform flow of words on the line. Since the triumphal conquering of smartphone technology and social media, the exclamation point finds fewer and fewer friends: We live in a digital village, chatting to one another from across the globe, and will use emotive social cues such as the exclamation point, and plenty of them. And because we just need to press down a thumbbbbbb to reproduce any character at nearly no cost, we’re more likely to flood the digital world with !!!!!!. No wonder we’re a little allergic to the poor !, stigmatizing its ubiquity as annoying and unnecessary. Along came Donald Trump and gave ! the coup de grâce by larding his tweets with exclamation points during his electoral campaign and presidency. Through Trump’s posturing and the mark’s erect body and one-balled bottom, ! has become “aggressively phallic,” and is in bad need of saving.

Thankfully, neither attitudes towards the exclamation point, nor its functions, have always been as negative and harmful. For hundreds of years, writers enjoyed the punchy power of a well-placed !, wielding its mighty sword of “here be feelings!” with aplomb and persuasiveness. Here are five ways that literature can recuperate the abused exclamation point.

1. Conspicuously absent.

Ernest Hemingway is the king of understatement. Gruesome battles, gory wounds, death stealing a baby out of a mother’s arms—none of those deserve a relieving exclamation point, or narrative comment guiding our feelings. We have to do all the emotional labour ourselves, as the author serves us the bare bones of action only in his fusion of fiction with a journalistic style of observation. In his Nobel Prize-winning 1954 novel The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway holds the emotional tone as flat as an unruffled water surface, until the old man believes a giant marling has swallowed his bait, and he’s waiting for just the perfect moment to pull the pole:

Come up easy and let me put the harpoon into you. All right. Are you ready? Have you been long enough at table? “Now!” he said aloud and struck hard with both hands, gained a yard of line and then struck again and again, swinging with each arm alternately on the cord with all the strength of his arms and the pivoted weight of his body.

The exclamation point falls flat. All the expectation and excitement rushing into the uplifting mark, and then—nothing. The marling keeps on swimming for another 100 pages. This punctuation tsunami lifts itself out of nowhere and goes nowhere. Hemingway plays tricks on our feelings with this exclamation anti-climax, standing starkly out as the only ! in the novel, just as the rest of the lonely 59 exclamation points dotting Hemingway’s entire works. !‘s presence can produce big emotions. And so can its absence.

2. The more the better.

If Hemingway is the master of one, Salman Rushdie juggles with infinity. In his acclaimed 1981 novel Midnight’s Children, Rushdie uses the staggering number of 2.131 !s—and average of six exclamation points per page! That’s a lot of shouting. Rushdie’s novel traces the life of children born at the stroke of midnight on the day of Indian liberation from the British empire on August 15, 1947. All of them possess magical abilities, and the book portrays a world flush with supernatural energies, different languages turning into one another, thoughts, feelings, places, and motivations, all jostling for prominence. So much life, jumping from the page needs a punctuation springboard, and the exclamation point is happy to provide. Rushdie received the Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children, as well as the Booker of Bookers among all winners—twice! There must be something about those !s that caught the judges’ eyes.

3. To hell with propriety!

Lovers of eighteenth-century literature like to tout Jane Austen as the prim pristine lady novelist representative of the tender emotions and unspoken rules of Georgian society. Her books, however, are watered-down versions of her unadulterated manuscripts, filtered through several rounds of editing that have erased the real Austen, passionate, spontaneous, and alive to the rhythms of conversation. Oxford Professor Kathryn Sutherland has published the surviving Austen autographs, witnessing a writer that’s much sloppier and real than we’re used to, and maybe comfortable with.

In Austen’s last novel, Persuasion, the heroine Anne finally has a clarifying conversation with her romantic interest Captain Wentworth after nearly a decade of will-they-won’t-they. In the posthumously printed text, Anne weakly berates Wentworth for thinking she is still the same young person: “‘You should have distinguished,’ replied Anne. ‘You should not have suspected me now; the case so different, and my age so different.’” The manuscript, on the other hand, shows a woman fervent and warm in her finally honest heart-to-heart with the man of her life: “You should have distinguished—replied Anne—You should not have suspected me now;—The case so different, & my age so different!—” Dashes, underlinings, scratchings-out, and the tell-tale exclamation point paint a much-needed new picture of an established author who doesn’t shy away from letting her “elegant females” exclaim in the name of love. Only that this was too much eagerness for her male editors who muted her voice through flattening out her varied punctuation. If in doubt, be Jane, and exclaim!

Link to the rest at The Millions

Why I Prefer to Read Fiction without Lessons or Messages

From Jane Friedman:

In an episode from the second season of The Simpsons in, yes, 1991, Homer hopes that allowing Bart to donate his rare blood type for a transfusion to save Mr. Burns’s life will result in a substantial financial reward. When they receive only a thank-you card, Homer writes an angry letter to his boss, who ultimately does reward them—but with a huge Olmec god’s head carving that of course is of no practical value to the family. A debate ensues about the moral of the story, but Homer concludes there isn’t one: “It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened!”

I feel the same way, though not dismissively like Homer. I don’t read fiction to be taught anything. For sure, there may be things in fiction that depict the way things are (or should be) in the world, but if that seems like the author’s main purpose, then for me it’s a hard no, as the kids say.

What I want in fiction is a virtuoso demonstration of the use of our messy, malleable, beautiful language. I want to see clichés avoided and in their place fresh, strong, exuberant images and descriptions and stories. I want the author to pay attention to how they are saying something even more than to what they are saying. One of the characters in the great short novel Lord Nelson Tavern (1974) by Canadian writer Ray Smith dismisses Jane Austen because all she wrote about were “the absurd concerns of silly small-town girls in England around 1800.” Another character disagrees, because regardless of subject matter, the important aesthetic for Austen was that everything was “closely observed and accurately rendered.” Again: it’s not the what that counts but the how.

Perhaps the icon in defending fiction lacking messages is the great American writer Vladimir Nabokov, who chose to push back against ridiculous claims made about his character based on some people’s reading of Lolita (1955). Modern editions of the novel now generally include an afterword, “Vladimir Nabokov on a Book Entitled Lolita,” in which he states:

There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books.

No morals, no messages. The John Ray whom Nabokov refers to is the fictional writer of the foreword to the novel, who says the exact opposite of what Nabokov believes: “for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson … ‘Lolita’ should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.”

A few weeks ago I began re-reading the short stories of another great American writer, Raymond Carver, whose fiction was published mostly in the 1980s and 1990s (the movie Short Cuts is based on his stories). There isn’t much that’s offensive in the subject matter of Carver’s writing, and certainly nothing close to pedophilia, but there’s also not a single lesson to be found in or between the lines of his extremely spare prose. There are scores of examples. “Kindling” (1999) is about Myers, a man “between lives,” who rents a room in a couple’s home. The story presents the interactions of the three of them as well as the daily routine of the couple, which Myers adapts to. He starts writing things in a notebook, and the story ends after he writes an entry, and: “Then he put the pen down and held his head in his hands for a moment. Pretty soon he got up and undressed and turned off the light. He left the window open when he got into bed. It was okay like that.”

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

PG is kinda, sorta in the same camp with the author of the OP.

He won’t automatically reject fiction that has a message, (he loved To Kill a Mockingbird ) but he’d rather be transported most of the time.

Would You Turn the First Page of this Bestseller?

From Writer Unboxed:

Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page.

. . . .

Here’s the question:

Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents.

So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those three dimes or the quarter and a nickel. It’s not much, but think of paying 30 cents for the rest of the chapter every time you sample a book’s first page. In a sense, time is money for a literary agent working her way through a raft of submissions, and she is spending that resource whenever she turns a page.

Please judge by storytelling quality, not by genre or content—some reject an opening page immediately because of genre, but that’s not a good-enough reason when the point is to analyze for storytelling strength.

How strong is the opening page of this novel—would it, all on its own, hook an agent if it was submitted by an unpublished writer?

Henry’s eyes are burning into me from across the living room. “Your summer is going to suck.”

There’s an echo of snorts from my teammates, the loudest coming from Mattie, Bobby, and Kris, who all told me something similar when I said no to joining them in Miami this summer.

“Inspiring words, Turner,” I shoot back at my unimpressed roommate. “You should become a motivational speaker.”

“You’ll be sorry you didn’t listen to me when you’re stuck doing manual labor and team-building activities at staff training next week.” Henry continues to flick through the Honey Acres brochure, his forehead creasing with a frown the further he gets into it. “What’s night duty?”

“I have to sleep in a room attached to the campers’ cabin twice a week in case they need anything,” I say casually, watching Henry’s eyes widen in horror. “The rest of the time I sleep in my own cabin.”

“It’s a no from me,” he says, throwing the brochure back onto the coffee table. “Good luck, though.”

“Could be worse,” Robbie muses from across the living room. “You could have to move to Canada this summer.”

Were you moved to want more?

This novel was number one on the New York Times paperback trade fiction bestseller list for October 22, 2023. Were the opening pages of the first chapter of Wildfire by Hannah Grace compelling?

My vote: No.

This book received 4.2 out of 5 stars on Amazon. Considering the “merits” of this opening page, I’m guessing it’s the author’s fans who propelled this to the number one spot. But would it have passed an agent’s muster if by an unknown writer?

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

PG was about to opine, but was brought up short by the fact that he knows nothing about the romance publishing world after Romeo and Juliet, which he read when he was in college. William Shakespeare was a surprise guest lecturer and was terrific once you got past his heavy accent.

Confessions of an Arrogant and Humble Writer

From Publishers Weekly:

In my younger years as an author, I was, admittedly, a bit of a diva. All the workshops and conferences I’d attended failed to deliver this key piece of advice: don’t be a jerk. Now that I’m older and not quite so clueless, my top priority when working with editors, publicists, and booksellers is to be the World’s Nicest Author. Overall, everyone’s much happier.

The humility I now embrace isn’t phony. A writer’s life is brutal: the repeated rejections and disappointments have scraped off all the hubris, along with many layers of skin and pieces of my internal organs. I have definitely gotten over myself.

That said, I’ve noticed that the old arrogance isn’t really gone; it’s still there, squatting like a stubborn toddler in my rib cage. Furthermore, I’ve come to see it as a good thing, this tenacious trait—even an essential thing. I understand now that my ability to sustain a writing career through some really tough stretches is largely due to the fact that I can be both arrogant and humble.

Granted, arrogance and humility sound like opposite ends of a continuum in one of those personality schemes, like extroverted and introverted. How can a person be both? Also, why would anyone want to be either? Arrogance evokes images of an insufferable bore, and humility suggests a lack of confidence—a pigeon-toed wallflower with a squeaky voice. What if we drop the judgment, quit assuming that these two qualities are etched-in-DNA character traits, and instead view them as tools—like an air pump and a pair of needle-nose pliers?

Consider this: if young aspiring writers did not have inflated views of their abilities, they’d never persist. A strong puff of hot air keeps them rising. But if they don’t soon learn humility—that they actually are not able to churn out a perfect story in one draft—they won’t improve. They’ll be wafting in the clouds going nowhere, and they’ll be alone, because they’re windbags.

Remember: humility does not equate to low self-esteem, nor is it a weakness. It’s the ability to keep yourself in perspective, to see yourself accurately—as a person with flaws and talents, like everyone else in the world. As it turns out, that’s what we authors are: people. Unlike arrogance, humility brings us closer to reality. Even if we sometimes crave fantasy.

In my own writing life, I’ve noticed that arrogance and humility alternate. As I work on a first draft, I think my story is the greatest piece of prose humankind has ever seen. People will love it; literature professors will teach it; I’ll win a giant prize.

Then I put the draft aside for a few days and return to it in the guise of an ordinary human. Rereading the draft in a humble frame of mind, I see that, holy cow, it’s awful! How embarrassing! What was I thinking?

I start revising, and again I’m brilliant, soaring toward that pantheon of literary gods. Then I get stuck on some problem in the prose, and, oh no, I’m a regular human after all.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

Marry ’em and Bury ’em: Weddings, Funerals, and Your Novel

From Writer Unboxed:

Rituals can hold deep significance in our lives, which is why they can be so powerful in stories. Because weddings and funerals can indicate an important moment of change, many novels open or end with them.

The emotional nature of such moments in real life can result in the misperception that the reader will be automatically moved by the inclusion of any such ritual. Take the backstory of a married character’s wedding, for example. In manuscripts I see, it usually goes like this:

We’d met at college, some twenty years ago now, and married the year after graduation. Everyone stood as I entered the sanctuary; tissues were pulled from evening bags. My father’s arm steadied me as he walked me down the aisle, the train of my white dress collecting rose petals scattered by my adorable niece. My rock, my husband-to-be, waited for me at the front of the church, his smile drawing me forward, step by step.

Take it from someone who cannot possibly get through a live wedding ceremony without tears: on the page, the wedding just described will be of zero interest to your reader for several reasons.

  1. We’ve all been to this wedding in real life—maybe, many times. We may even have starred in one or two. But that event that felt so uniquely personal to us, as written here, is so generic that it does nothing to give us a deeper understanding of this particular character’s story.
  2. Without raising a question about that wedding in the reader’s mind that will provide context and imply impact on the current story (such as, I thought he’d been looking at me when I walked down that aisle), the reader won’t appreciate the interruption in that forward movement.
  3. You must also trust that if the reader already knows this point-of-view character has been married for twenty years, they will simply accept that at some point, this couple tied the knot in one way or another.

Likewise, writers hope that readers will be moved by the tears of the protagonist and any number of other characters at a funeral. But not all funerals are inherently sad. Without added context, your reader won’t know how to feel.

As a novelist, you aren’t a borrower of story anyway. You are a builder of context; the emotional significance of any included scene must be mined. You will not find that significance in the ways such rituals are similar, but in the ways the scene is personal and unexpected.

Let’s look at some examples that work.

Unusual setting details

Abraham Verghese’s Covenant of Water, an Oprah’s Book Club pick, features a wedding in the second chapter. The setting is rural South India, in 1900. The groom, a 40-year-old widower, is late. Verghese did not waste time describing his 12-year-old bride’s visceral sensations; he let the setting do the work.

Light from the high windows slices down, casting oblique shadows. The incense tickles her throat. As in her church, there are no pews, just rough coir carpet on red oxide floors, but only in the front. Her uncle coughs. The sound echoes in the empty space.

The implication of that empty space—the unknown void she’s heading into—is chilling. Later that same page:

There’s a disturbance in the air. Her mother pushes her forward, then steps away.

The groom looms beside her and at once the achen begins the service—does he have a cow ready to calve back at the barn? She gazes straight ahead.

In the smudged lenses of the achen’s spectacles, she glimpses a reflection: a large figure silhouetted by the light from the entrance, and a tiny figure at his side—herself.

Imagine if you were twelve, and the first glimpse you caught of your husband was in the priest’s smudged spectacles—after a push from your mother, no less? These unexpected details drew me in, and the feistiness of her cow comment gave me hope for her future agency.

I suspect the majority of Verghese’s target readers, unable to imagine such a scenario in their own lives, will want to know what happens next.

Voice

On p. 5 of Blue Hour, a Barack Obama 2023 Summer Reading selection, author Tiffany Clarke Harrison’s narrator has just met a man while taking photographs of his store for a magazine:

In a few months we would be married. Stand before a judge. Me in black combat boots and a white minidress, and you in a trim burgundy floral print suit. We linked arms and held hands. Repeat after me, the judge said, and we repeated. Recited vows as somewhat strangers, then family. I could hardly bring my tongue to curl around that word family, to protect it. So why do I consider it now? Why do I consider my parents and sisters? Our baby, dead before birth? Now as the world bears down on Black bodies (and another man killed), and I am tired. Now that I’ve had enough.

All the wedding basics are there, but stripped down. That she’s speaking to the groom is edgy. This one paragraph evokes the premise of the entire novel: how a mother can sustain hope for a mixed-race child born into such an uncertain and violent world.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

Writing Lessons from Singer-Songwriters

From Writer Unboxed:

On one of my initial panels as a first-time novelist, when asked what authors inspired me in my writing, I replied, “I was probably influenced as much by Steve Earle and Steely Dan as anybody I read.”

I stand by that.

I started my creative life as an accompanist for two superb women vocalists on the coffee-house circuit (billing myself as “The World’s Most Adequate Guitarist”), and then joined a bar band and toured the Midwest, performing in such famed musical Meccas as Kokomo, Indiana; Ypsilanti, Michigan; and Lima, Ohio. (Best compliment I ever got: “Who’s the guy who sings like a chick, he’s really good.”)

Music has always had a profound effect on me (my paternal grandfather was a music teacher). My first obsession was folk music, and I was particularly fond of revival stalwarts like Judy Collins, Tom Paxton, Odetta, Pete Seeger, and Dave Van Ronk.

It was from them, especially the traditionalists, that I gained an appreciation for the story song, especially old ballads such as “Pretty Polly,” “Barbara Allen,” and “John Riley.”

But the songs I came to love most deeply were written by the musicians themselves, which made them more personal. And looking back, I can see that I learned a number of writing lessons from those efforts.

Granted, in general songs bear a greater resemblance to poetry than narrative, and they have the twin advantages of rhyme and music to bring their messages home. What I’ll be talking about here are songs that do indeed tell a story with the familiar beginning-middle-end structure.

. . . .

Tom Paxton: “My Son John”

This Tom Paxton original from 1966 really affected me, possibly more than the traditional ballads, because of its relevance to the Vietnam War and my own close relationship with my father:

My son, John, was a good boy, and good to me
When we had hard times, well, he stood by me
We were in work and out of work and on the go
If he had complaints, I never heard a-one
He would pitch in and help me like a full-grown man
My son, John. John, my son

My son, John, went to college and he made his way
Had to earn every penny, but he paid his way
He worked summers and holidays and through the year
And it was no easy struggle that he won
But he laughed at the ones who thought he had it hard
My son, John. John, my son

My son, John, got his uniform and went away
With a band playing marches, he was sent away
And he wrote me a letter when he had the time
He was losing his buddies one by one
And I prayed and tried not to read between the lines
My son, John. John, my son

My son, John, came home yesterday, he’s here to stay
Not a word to his father have I heard him say
He seems glad to be home, but I can’t be sure
When I asked him what he’d seen and done
He went up to his bedroom, and he closed the door
My son, John, John my son
He went up to his bedroom, and he closed the door
My son, John, John my son

This is a classic example of less is more, in that it’s not made clear what the son has “seen and done”—that’s left to our imagination, and it’s all the more powerful because of that, especially after the long buildup showing the relationship between father and son and the profound respect the former has for the latter.

Also, the last two lines are repeated, which provides a haunting effect—something hard to duplicate literally in fiction. Instead we have to find ways to repeat an imagine or an idea indirectly so that the association is made unconsciously—for example, the use of water, fish, glass, and eyes in the screenplay for Chinatown

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

The Hero’s Journey: A Primer For Freelance Writers To Tell Better Stories

From The Write Life:

When you know how to tell stories and how to hold attention, it can make you a better freelance writer.

The Hero’s Journey is a great storytelling framework that should be a part of your writing arsenal so you can master the art of writing for an audience. While you will not always use this framework, there are elements of it you can sprinkle into your writing to make it even stronger.

It is one thing just to write for clients and churn out good, high-quality content, but knowing what holds the attention of readers and inspires them to stay hooked on every word will keep your career alive for a long time.

In this article, we will be diving into what The Hero’s Journey is, the basics you need to know, how you can use it in your overall writing, and a brief primer on some other storytelling frameworks you can use if you want to break outside of this method.

. . . .

Why Does Storytelling Matter?

Storytelling is an essential part of human communication and connection. No matter how much SEO and other marketing tools out there continue to take presence, the heart of good writing will always revolve around stories we read and share.

Storytelling allows us to convey complex ideas, emotions, and experiences in a relatable and engaging manner, making information more accessible and memorable.

Through stories, we can empathize with characters, share wisdom, pass down traditions, and inspire change, fostering a sense of unity and understanding among individuals and communities.

Depending on the type of writing you do, you can also use it to create fascinating ads, compelling blog posts, and shareable social media posts.

There are few downsides to learning the basics of storytelling so you can bring it into your writing. It is often something you will have to practice on your own so you can improve your skills in this area. It can also help to read fascinating and famous stories that use various methods so you can understand how they work.

Why Should Freelance Writers Know How To Tell Stories?

It is no secret that making it as a freelance writer is not always a walk in the park. When you are a freelance writer, you are battling thousands of other writers out there for a chance to make it.

While there is an abundance of work to be passed around, there is still something to be said for having tools at your disposal to make you a better freelance writers than other writers out there.

One of those tools is being able to tell stories that captivate and holds readers attention. One of the great storytelling frameworks is The Hero’s Journey. While you might not be able to tell the whole journey in everything you write, the summary you mainly need to know is that everyone loves a hero’s victory story.

That could even translate to you telling the story of a local business in your area and the business owner’s challenges as they had to get their business growing.

The Hero’s Journey is simply a framework for you to use to be able to tell a captivating story, and it is one we have used all throughout history to tell important stories over and over.

What Is The Hero’s Journey?

The Hero’s Journey is a narrative framework and storytelling pattern that was popularized by Joseph Campbell, a scholar of mythology and comparative religion, in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces which was originally published in 1949.

Campbell’s work explored common themes and structures in myths, legends, and religious stories from various cultures around the world.

What Are The Steps In The Hero’s Journey?

If you want the detailed version of this journey, you will want to read his book that is mentioned above. It is a much longer approach and analyzation of each of the steps along the path.

Here is the short summary of The Hero’s Journey path:

  • The Ordinary World: The hero begins in a familiar and ordinary environment, which may be mundane or even oppressive.
  • Call to Adventure: Something disrupts the hero’s ordinary life and presents a challenge or opportunity. This is the initial call to action that sets the hero on a new path.
  • Refusal of the Call: The hero may initially resist the call to adventure, often due to fear, doubt, or a sense of inadequacy.
  • Meeting the Mentor: The hero encounters a mentor or guide who provides advice, training, or supernatural assistance to help them on their journey.
  • Crossing the Threshold: The hero decides to leave the ordinary world and enters a new, unknown, and often dangerous realm.
  • Tests, Allies, and Enemies: The hero faces a series of trials, meets allies and enemies, and undergoes personal growth and transformation.
  • Approach to the Inmost Cave: The hero approaches a central challenge, often a symbol of their ultimate goal or the villain they must confront.
  • Ordeal: The hero faces a major obstacle or battle, which is a critical and often life-threatening test.
  • Reward (Seizing the Sword): After overcoming the ordeal, the hero reaps a reward, which may be a physical object, knowledge, or personal growth.
  • The Road Back: The hero begins the journey back to the ordinary world, often facing new challenges or pursuing the final confrontation with the antagonist.
  • Resurrection: The hero faces a final, often life-or-death, ordeal that represents the climax of the story. This can involve a confrontation with the main antagonist.
  • Return with the Elixir: The hero returns to the ordinary world with the knowledge, experience, or object gained during the journey, which can bring transformation and positive change to their life or community.

Examples of The Hero’s Journey

We will not spend too much time diving into these stories and explaining what they are about, because that could be a whole article in and of itself. However, here are a few stories that embody The Hero’s Journey storytelling formula:

  • The Lord Of The Rings
  • Harry Potter
  • The Lion King
  • The Matrix
  • The Odyssey

Link to the rest at The Write Life

How Can I Set Aside the Cacophany of Writing Advice and Just Write?

From Jane Friedman:

Question

I attend webinars and online conferences, to learn the craft of writing, though I was a poet in another life back when getting my BA. I was raising a child so hedged my bets by double majoring in developmental psychology and creative writing. Hedging my bets gave me less craft lessons.

Now, an empty nester with a lot of time on my hands, I’ve carefully added authors and writing coaches I follow. I used to follow anyone whom I thought could give me the best answers on writing/memoir. Now, though, my inbox is filled with newsletter advice I can’t possibly find time to read. I want to stick with the two and I know and trust: Lisa Cooper-Ellison and Jane Friedman.

Searching for the one author whose advice is the “key” is fruitless. Yet after a conference I still tend to follow a few speakers and their newsletters. Any advice on how to keep to a couple authors and editors I trust and stop the bouncing around between editor to editor and and settle into a chair and write?

—Elizabeth Undiluted


Dear Elizabeth Undiluted,

The great news here is that you already recognize what you need to do: Sit down and write. So why can’t you?

The answer lies in whatever underlying needs, fears/anxieties, and/or feelings of responsibility have been driving you to bounce around. And I must admit, as a long-time advice giver (who has no shortage of qualms about my position as one), I can be at fault in this predicament, along with my colleagues, at making people feel they need to stick around for my guidance.

Let’s cut to the chase: You can get by fine without it. Nothing bad will happen if you stop. Maybe you’ll take a little longer to figure out specific craft challenges. Or perhaps you won’t be as sharp on some business issues. On the other hand, you’re likely to have dramatically less anxiety that you’re doing things wrong, or that conditions in the market aren’t favorable for your work, or that you’re inadequate to the task of marketing and promoting. (A lot of inadequacy that writers feel is driven, IMHO, by advice givers.)

That’s the short answer, but here’s the longer one that explores specific reasons you might be avoiding the writing chair.

You have fear of missing out.

Speaking personally, I keep logging onto social media platforms I don’t care about and subscribing to countless newsletters because I feel like I’m going to miss out or become uninformed. That said, it’s literally my job to be informed about what everyone’s talking about in the writing and publishing community. But is it your job? Probably not.

It’s highly unlikely you’re going to miss out on a piece of valuable information or knowledge that would dramatically change your writing fortunes, which you seem to realize. It’s more likely, in fact, you’re going to come across harmful information from people who have no business giving you advice. Most important, a lot of the lessons to be learned about writing come from doing it, from the practice, from showing up. So that’s priority number-one. Everything else is secondary to supporting that effort.

That said, I think your strategy to focus on one or two people you trust is excellent. This gives you some reassurance that if there is something you probably ought to know about, one of these people is likely to bring it to your attention. Or you could ask them to point you in the right direction if a specific need or question arises. (I swear I would say this even if you hadn’t mentioned my name as one of your preferred sources! And thank you for that trust.)

The other thing I’d suggest is that the best advice and guidance still tends to come in either book form or class/workshop form, brought to you by experts you know and trust (or that have been recommended by the experts). This is not to discount the many wonderful newsletters, blogs (like this one!), social media accounts, podcasts, and so on that offer advice. But let’s be honest: Most of it is disposable. If it’s not bringing you joy, if it’s not something you actively look forward to (and especially if it’s something that feels anxiety producing or a burden), it’s time to let go of it.

You need more knowledge to tackle your writing challenges.

You mention that hedging your bets gave you less craft lessons, which implies you don’t feel as schooled or as advanced as you would like at this point in your writing life. I would dig deeper into this feeling, if it’s there. Is there something about your current writing project that you’re feeling ill-prepared to tackle? Are you feeling deficient in some area? Is there a weakness you wish you could eliminate?

One of the reasons writers avoid writing is that we don’t know next steps on a writing project. Maybe we’ve written ourselves into a corner or we don’t know where the story is headed and can’t figure out the answer. So when you sit down at your desk, you have no clue where to begin. Or you simply procrastinate to avoid the unpleasant feeling of being stuck.

If you can pinpoint what the writing problem is, then I’d look for books that might help you with a breakthrough. Or, if you have the resources, you could consider hiring a professional editor or coach to help you through the impasse. Alternatively, a class or workshop can help for less cost if you’re surrounded by both a great instructor and sharp students.

There are some writers I meet who simply fear messing up and try to gather as much advice as possible before they even begin. Unfortunately, the writing process is more or less defined by messing up and starting over. Writing is revising. Good writing advice can help you avoid the serious pitfalls, or bring clarity to a confusing process, but creative work of any kind is going to involve countless bad ideas. It’s important to work through the bad stuff to get to the good stuff. (And hopefully you’ve gained enough self-awareness to know when you’ve moved past the bad into the good.)

You want to be a good literary citizen—you owe it to these people.

Maybe you’re appreciative of the speakers, teacher, editors, and coaches you’ve learned from. You want to support them, so you subscribe to their newsletters and follow them on social and try to engage. It’s a way to be a good literary citizen, to see and be seen—all good things when you’re trying to make your way in the literary community.

But at some point, your writing has to come first. And you’ll outgrow some of the people you used to learn from. A lot of writing advice, by necessity, is for beginners. It tends to get less useful over time as you become more experienced. The people who give advice know this. No one will get offended if you silently drop away. (And if they do, I humbly suggest they have a lot to learn about the business of helping writers!)

Not writing is more enjoyable than writing.

Writing is hard work. I mean, yes, it can be enjoyable, but it’s the joy we take in doing challenging work. It requires mental focus. For memoirists, there’s often the additional challenge of emotional drain.

So it’s natural to look for other things to do instead, especially activities that are writing adjacent, like reading writing advice or gathering with other writers to talk shop or joke around.

We all need a break and we can’t be writing all the time. But if you develop a habit of avoiding the work, especially by reading writing advice or attending conferences and classes, ask yourself why. Then read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, if you haven’t already, to delve deeply into the psychological challenge of producing art, to recognize how we all pretty much do anything to avoid such work.

You’re trying to prepare now for future problems you don’t have.

Don’t focus on problems that exist downstream. Focus on the problem that you face now. The experts will be there when you need them.

Imagine that you haven’t read a piece of writing advice for five years. You haven’t subscribed to any newsletters. You have no clue what you’ve missed. But you wish you had their insight on some new challenge or the next step in your journey. Go to Google and search for your favorite expert’s name, plus keywords related to the problem you’re facing. Presto.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

How to Create Character Mannerisms from Backstory Wounds

From Jane Friedman:

The best way to deepen and enrich our characters is to develop them from long before they enter the story we’re writing. Every character (really, every human being) struggles with one or more wounding experiences that create life-long emotional responses. These backstory wounds result in the lies our characters tell themselves, or what Lisa Cron in Story Genius refers to as “misbeliefs.”

By borrowing from acting techniques, especially those developed by Konstantin Stanislavski, writers can follow a logical sequence of development to create a character that feels real and alive while their wound and misbelief may remain buried and invisible—even to the character.

Backstory wounds in action

Backstory wounds come in all shapes and sizes, but they share one thing in common: Whether seemingly trivial or clearly debilitating, the wounding experience is unforgettable and causes lasting pain. The wounding can be singular or repeated, and because we each experience pain in our own way, even small wounds can be damaging. Examples include bullying, abuse, poverty, loss of a loved one, physical disability, fear during a natural event, failure.

Because we process pain by trying to make sense of it, we turn to self-reflection, and that can quickly turn into self-blame. Self-blame forms the lie or misbelief that dominates all future behaviors.

Here’s an example of the wound and the misbelief in action in a character:

A child witnesses her father leave when her parents divorce. She reflects that the divorce must be her fault—she was naughty, or cranky—and the lie that forms is “My dad left me and Mom because he doesn’t like my behavior, so I must be defective.”

The lie begins to emerge as a statement of fact: “Defective people (like me) can’t form relationships.” This fact perpetuates fear: “I’ll be abandoned again, because I’m defective.” And fear of further wounding holds this character in thrall: “To keep myself from being abandoned again, I won’t form relationships at all.”

This character will grow up with an emotional shield that could result in all sorts of possible character arcs: a cold woman who callously murders her partners; a broken woman who hops from one affair to the next; a timid woman who walks away from any possible partner; and so on.

Character behaviors and traits emerge from the wound

Character behaviors are patterned by the character’s emotions that result from the misbelief. Actors study human behavior to develop mannerisms or tics that are outward physical manifestations of those misbelief-generated emotions.

We can use the same sequence of developing our characters to create mannerisms, traits, and tics that reflect their deep-seated emotions in a way that shows the wound and misbelief emerging through those gestures.

Here’s the step-by-step exercise to help you uncover your character’s wound, its lasting impact, and how it reveals itself through your character’s actions on the page.

  1. Choose your character, and brainstorm 5 possible wounding backstory events for that character. Try to make them each a little different, with different impact. Remember that these events happened long before the start of your story.
  2. Choose what feels like it could be a powerful event for your character and write a full scene around it. You may or may not use this scene in your story; if you do I suggest burying it deep in the narrative.
  3. Identify the lie or misbelief that results from the wound that emerges from this scene. For example, bullying might result in the lie that your character must protect himself.
  4. Identify the lasting emotions in your character that are produced by the lie. The bullied kid feels that to protect himself, he must act tough; or, he might fear that trying to protect himself will lead to abuse.
  5. Identify the behaviors that result from those emotions. The tough kid might bully other kids, or take up boxing, or wear clothing that feels/looks like armor; or the fearful kid might run and hide from any conflict.
  6. Identify the mannerisms, traits, or tics that result from those behaviors. The tough kid might affect a swagger, or a sneer. He might wear all black. He might push others out of his way in his rise to the top. He might abuse substances, or conversely refrain from them in order to be fully in control. The fearful kid might have a speech impediment, or an odd way of not looking directly at others, or he might have OCD.

To take this back to our woman who was wounded by divorce, she may have traits like standing rigidly and speaking forcefully, or tugging on her sleeves as if to hide her skin, or insisting on perfection in everything and everyone around her because being less than perfect results in abandonment.

The traits that define your character will rise directly from their wound.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

Why Genre Fiction Is So Effective in Tackling Social Issues

From Publishers Weekly:

When writing a novel, it’s best to show, not tell. When tackling social issues, it’s best to tell a story, not preach. The former is a rule every writing course teaches us. The latter is something I learned the hard way.

Novels have been tackling social issues throughout history—think of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist or John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The former denounces Victorian London’s inhumane treatment of the poor, while the latter depicts Dust Bowl migrants facing unjust labor conditions in California. Books like these are usually serious and biting, meant to expose problems and sway readers to the author’s stand on a particular issue. They’re sometimes called social novels.

In my native Philippines, José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere has stood the test of time and is widely regarded as the country’s greatest social novel. It was written in Spanish and published in 1887 as a blistering indictment of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines. The book led to the author’s execution at age 35, but it also helped spark a revolution.

Today’s social novels don’t necessarily carry the gravitas of Rizal or Steinbeck or Dickens. Readers identify books such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears as genre or speculative fiction. This implies that their primary function is to entertain rather than shape opinions, despite the issues they tackle, which include the suppression of freedom of thought (Fahrenheit 451)women’s control over their bodies and lives (The Handmaid’s Tale), and homophobia and toxic masculinity (Razorblade Tears).

Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress explores racism faced by African Americans and political corruption in Los Angeles after WWII. It’s a quintessential mystery that follows a novice private investigator named Easy Rawlins. The book is a great example of how effective genre fiction is in presenting social commentary.

At the 2023 ThrillerFest, held in New York City in June, Mosley talked about how he uses mystery to explain what’s wrong with the world. “A book worth its salt,” he said, “is something other than the story and plot.”

Devil in a Blue Dress and the other genre novels mentioned above are popular precisely because they don’t preach. This little fact escaped me when I first wrote the manuscript that became my novel Multo, meaning ghost in Tagalog. The book follows a Filipino American bounty hunter named Domingo as he looks for the only quarry who has ever eluded him: an undocumented, biracial Filipina named Monica who can disappear like a ghost.

As a recent immigrant, the subject of immigration is close to my heart, so it’s only natural that my novel focuses on the struggles and aspirations of immigrants, documented and undocumented alike. For years I toiled on my manuscript from the perspective of Monica, who overstays in the U.S. in pursuit of her American dream: her white father who doesn’t know she exists. The father, an Air Force general, wants no political scandal. He hires Domingo to apprehend his daughter and take her to immigration authorities for deportation.

The manuscript was universally rejected by literary agents, who deemed it “un-commercial.” In hindsight, I admit it was a naive attempt at proselytizing. It took many years before an idea that ultimately saved my novel dawned on me. What if I told the story from the point of view of the bounty hunter? Domingo is a secondary character, a kickass hunter of fugitives and a wiseass observer. Unlike the protagonist, he’s a naturalized U.S. citizen. He can afford to make fun of the immigration system.

Changing my novel’s narrator organically revamped the tone and pace of the manuscript. Multo became a thriller. It tells the same story, but more effectively because it no longer preaches.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

The Dichotomy of Creativity and Order

From Writer Unboxed:

Earlier this week, my massage therapist called to remind me that we had an appointment that started…five minutes ago. Rushing in, hair askew, I apologized, and admitted that I used to have a lot more trouble with things like appointments before the iPhone was invented. It usually reminds me, twice, but we changed the time and I forgot to add the alerts, and…

She gently interrupted my whittering. “You’re just creative. That’s how it is.”

As artists we’re often forgiven for being scattered, losing things, forgetting commitments, and for good reason. It’s not laziness or lack of respect, it’s just that highly creative people are often lost in another world, with only a tenuous connection to this one, where the physical world of time and space and money and other humans exist.

But I have to tell you, I hate being late. I hate missing appointments. I hate feeling like the world is full of wind, knocking me around at its whim. I dislike clutter and mess. I hate to have nothing to cook for dinner so that I’m eating frozen macaroni and cheese for the third time in a week.

Left to my own highly creative, scattered mind, that would be the constant state of things. In fact, it was always the state of my life as a young woman and young mother. Things were often forgotten, or insanely messy, or I lost my keys or forgot appointments or we ate crappy meals because I forgot to plan.

It made me feel like a failure. Why couldn’t I juggle the world the way other people did, like my sisters and my friends?

The secret is so simple. Planning and routines. Good habits. I hate to sound like a self-help cheering squad, but honestly, I am a die-hard planner these days, and it goes along nicely with my diarist side. I can plan and then check things off to the satisfaction of the diarist who wants to know exactly what we’re doing with our days.

Learning to plan started when I began to write novels under deadline. At first, sometimes those deadlines were insanely tight—three books a year while running a household of elementary school children and making a budget based on advances work. I had to know what and when and where I was working, where I would be at a given time, and to do that, I made calendars with color coding.

It didn’t work that well.

I tried several systems. The calendar. There was a thing called Sidetracked Home Executives that used a file box with color-coded cards divided into daily, weekly, etc tasks that helped me stay on top of things for awhile, but it fell apart, too. Kids took priority, then work, then high nutrition over food I could fix in 10 minutes because I forgot to thaw anything. (Pre-microwave, young friends.)

Over time, I tried and discarded dozens of systems. And then came two life-transforming tools: the iPhone and the bullet journal.

I love the bullet journal. Planning, it turns out, is a deeply satisfying activity if you bring some color and systems into it. Everyone uses the BUJO differently. I’m not in the superfancy camp of little boxes to check off or special divisions for every one of my goals (though, you go if that works for you), but I do plan a lot. The overview of the year; two weeks spreads where I note appointments and loosely plan meals.

I create plans for writing, of course. This is the one area where I use boxes to color in for every thousand words of the work-in-progress. I also keep a log of what I write each day. (See Rachel Aaron’s post on 2k to 10K, which I’m sure I’ve talked about before.)

The iPhone is the big thing, however. I have created lists for shopping, grocery, Costco, others, and because you can train Siri to add things, I don’t have to stop and type something. I can just say, “Siri, add eggs to my grocery list,” or “add reminder to do laundry on Tuesday at 10 am” and the robot in my pocket does it.

She will also remind me that I have an appointment if I add it properly, and despite my recent lapse, I don’t miss many anymore.

Systems create habits. I like to have things happen at the same time, same day of the week, as much as humanly possible. Second Tuesday, 2 pm, massage. Fourth Tuesday, 2 pm, cleaners.

This goes to watering plants, Thursday morning. To making a grocery list, Sunday afternoon along with looking at the BUJO and weekly plan, and planning meals that work with this week’s tasks. Going to the farmer’s market, Friday morning.

I know, I know. All of you out there who don’t suffer this brain chaos are thinking, “Duh!” But for those of us who don’t have your gift, planning and habits are a godsend.

What is the connection to my creativity? It’s about making space for the writing (and the painting, which is another post). If I’m not backtracking to the grocery store for the forgotten butter, or rescheduling a missed appointment, or using up my creativity tring to think of what to cook for dinner, I can write more freely. External order creates space for wild internal creativity.

How does that work in reality?

This morning, I’ve been planning my upcoming year. I finished the first round of my book for next year and need to get moving on the next one. I’ll do revisions on WIP this fall, and I still have some visitors coming in August.

There’s also a side project that calling my name very insistently, and I want to give it some space.

The only way to accomplish those goals is to be real with the amount of time I actually have. How much time will I need to revise the book? Not sure, but at least a month or two. Do I know what the next book is? It’s between two, and I have to decide which one goes first.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

PG has discovered that he can have too many systems. At this point in his life, PG is reconsidering how many/how few systems will handle what he needs to/should do during a day or week. He’s not certain if he’s ready to tackle a month yet.

How to Create Mood Effectively in Your Fiction

From Writers Helping Writers:

Every person or character, at any given time, is in a particular mood. Generally, mood is a person’s state of mind, but it’s more than that. Mood can also describe the disposition of a collective of people, a certain time in history, or the ether of a place.

Regardless of what kind of mood we speak of, it’s always subjective. Ten people can be experiencing the same event at the same place and time, yet, depending on their perspective, their individual mood will differ.

We all know about moods and have a range of them we express and feel, whether we’re aware of them or not. We can sense others’ moods just as they can sense ours. The mood of the character should affect the way he perceives his environment, and expert writers will carefully choose words and imagery that act like a mirror to their emotions.

First, Consider Your Scene’s Purpose

Your story may have an overall tone or mood, but every scene is a microsystem of mood that depends on the emotional state and mindset of your character. When you plot out your scene, you need to first think about how your character will interact with his setting based on his mood and the purpose of your scene.

Remember: it’s the purpose of the scene that determines all the setting elements—what you choose to have him notice (and not notice) and react to and why.

Words Are Everything

However, learn this truth: it is not the originality of a world or the degree of creativity in the world itself that makes a fantasy novel shine with brilliance; it’s the choice of words and phrases that the author uses that evokes not just a right sensory experience but makes readers fall in love with the writing.

Please note: this doesn’t just pertain to fantasy novels. Every novel involves the creation of a “world,” and so writers need to take just as much care in the creation of any world in any genre. Take a look at this hastily written sentence:

Bill walked through the forest until he found a cottage set back in the trees . . .

Now consider the reworked description below that I spent a bit more time on:

Bill slogged along the leaf-choked path, the spindly arms of the bare maples quivering in the cold autumn wind—a feeble attempt to turn him back. But he pressed on until he spotted, nestled in a copse of willows, the derelict cottage slumped like a lost orphan, the lidless windows dark and vacant. Hardly a welcoming sight after many tiresome hours of travel.

A specific mood is created by bringing out Bill’s mindset and emotional state. Without knowing anything else about this scene (if I’d written one), a reader can clearly sense the purpose of the action by the things he notices and the words used to describe them

To immerse your readers in the world you’ve created, you need to spend time coming up with masterful description. And the components of such description are the nouns, verbs, and adjectives you choose.

Mood Nuances

We all know about moods and have a range of them we express and feel, whether we’re aware of them or not. We can sense others’ moods just as they can sense ours. The mood of the character should affect the way he perceives his environment, and expert writers will carefully choose words and imagery that act like a mirror to their emotions. It’s a reciprocal factor: mood informs how the character sees his setting, but the setting also informs his mood—shifting it or intensifying it.

Take a look at this passage from The Dazzling Truth (Helen Cullen):

Murtagh opened the front door and flinched at a swarm of spitting raindrops. The blistering wind mocked the threadbare cotton of his pajamas. He bent his head into the onslaught and pushed forward, dragging the heavy scarlet door behind him. The brass knocker clanged against the wood; he flinched, hoping it had not woken the children. Shivering, he picked a route in his slippers around the muddy puddles spreading across the cobblestoned pathway. Leaning over the wrought-iron gate that separated their own familial island from the winding lane of the island proper, he scanned the dark horizon for a glimpse of Maeve in the faraway glow of a streetlamp.

 In the distance, the sea and sky had melted into one anthracite mist, each indiscernible from the other. Sheep huddled together for comfort in Peadar Óg’s field, the waterlogged green that bordered the Moones’ land to the right; the plaintive baying of the animals sounded mournful. Murtagh nodded at them.

 There was no sight of Maeve.

Culler is masterful in her usage of imagery to convey sensory detail. The feeling of rain on Murtagh’s skin is described by flinching at spitting raindrops. The blistering wind attacks his pajamas. Dragging the heavy door shows the sensation of his muscles working—proprioception. And of course we have visuals, which paint the stage for us.

We also have the sound of the brass knocker—used for a specific purpose—to tell us he’s concerned about the children waking. This is a good point to pay attention to: sensory detail should serve more than one purpose. Don’t just add a sound or sight without thinking of the POV character’s mood, concerns, mindset, and purpose in that moment. The more you can tie those things to the sensory details, the more powerful your writing.

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers by C. S. Lakin

The Flashback: A Greatly Misunderstood Storytelling Device

From Jane Friedman:

They’re the bogeymen of publishing. Along with prologues, adverbs, and semicolons, flashbacks may be the most vilified—and most misunderstood—of storytelling devices, ones that work only if they don’t seem like devices.

Yet flashbacks are inherently artificial. Even when we are revisiting memories in life, we rarely replay an entire scene from start to finish, chronologically and in full detail. Memory doesn’t work that way; it’s slideshows and not a movie.

But one prime reason that flashbacks are a common literary convention is that, used well, they can be an effective way to present essential information and backstory. Readers have become trained, as with so many fictional devices, to accept the artificiality of flashback provided it doesn’t interrupt their experience of the story.

And there is where the trap lies that so often derails an author’s attempt to use flashback: If not woven seamlessly into the flow of the story, a flashback can draw attention to itself, reveal the author’s hand, and pull the reader out of the fictive dream.

But you don’t have to avoid this potentially potent device as long as you follow a few key guidelines in weaving flashbacks seamlessly into your story.

1. Determine whether a flashback is in fact necessary.

Before you start wielding this potent and potentially disruptive weapon, let’s examine why you want to brandish it at all. Flashback is like cayenne pepper—a little bit can add spice and depth to the stew; too much can overwhelm it.

The main misstep I see in flashbacks is using them as backstory dumps of information authors think readers need to know to understand the story or characters. That may in fact be the case, but paving in background via flashback can be like wielding a machete where you needed a scalpel.

There are three main forms of introducing backstory:

  • Context: This is information woven into the main story throughout, often so seamlessly you don’t even realize how much information you’re getting amid the forward movement of the story.
  • Memory: When characters call to mind details from their past—still within the action of the “real-time” main story.
  • Flashback: A scene from the past presented as if it’s happening “live” before readers’ eyes, which fully interrupts the main story.

It’s this last form that makes flashbacks so dangerous. Used unskillfully or too often, they lend an erratic feel and potentially compromise readers’ engagement.

A good, healthy chunk of the time (let’s say 80–85 percent, because you can’t really quantify story with math, but it sounds right), context is going to be the most fluid, seamless, and organic way to incorporate backstory. The rest of the time memory is the most effective device.

That remaining little sliver is where flashbacks come in.

So when you use them, use them judiciously—like that cayenne pepper. Ask yourself what makes flashback the strongest way to incorporate the backstory, worth its many risks. That will often be one of several reasons:

  • It’s an essential, defining element of the character’s past relevant to the current story and their arc—like their main “wound” or a formative event that dictates or materially affects the character’s journey in this story.
  • It’s a “secret” or reveal that’s finally being fully shared—one central enough to the main story to warrant a full dramatization.
  • It’s brief, woven into a “real-time” scene, and serves to heighten impact, stakes, or meaning in the main story. Often this type of flashback will be just a few paragraphs.

2. Determine the most effective placement for a flashback.

The most challenging place for a flashback is opening your story. It can disorient or confuse readers—like walking into a room looking backward—and risks feeling like a false promise of what the story is actually about. That said, an opening flashback can work if used deliberately and well, and usually kept ruthlessly short.

There are no real “rules” or systems for where to place a flashback, but a good guideline with all backstory is to ask yourself my version of the “Watergate question”: What does the reader need to know and when do they need to know it?

Overloading readers with backstory before we’re fully invested in the main story hamstrings its effectiveness. The author’s job is to find where a flashback most effectively serves and furthers the main story by offering essential backstory at the most impactful, germane time—which ties into the next guideline.

3. Move the story forward, both within the flashback and in the main story.

Imagine a friend is telling you the harrowing tale of her recent car accident when she stops suddenly to relive shopping for that car just days earlier.

That fact may be relevant to heightening stakes and impact for the wreck—dammit, it was her brand-new dream car!—but in the middle of the much more relevant action of the story it stops momentum cold.

This is when flashbacks fail, as if the author is putting the main story on ice while she takes the reader on a journey down Memory Lane.

It’s the trickiest balancing act. Authors should use flashbacks in a way that still move the main story forward, even as we are briefly glancing backward.

That means the flashback should not only encompass its own strong forward momentum within the scene it presents, but its use at its particular point in the story should also serve to move the main story forward—usually in one of the ways described above.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

7 Craft Books to Help You Become a Better Writer

From Electric Lit:

Craft is often thought of as the backbone of literature, the scientific and mathematical side of the creative process that examines an artist’s techniques. In prose, it often involves terms such as plot, pacing, point of view, characterization, scene-setting, structure, dialogue… It is the rational breakdown of those mechanisms that work behind the scenes in the stories we love and despise most—the ones we wish we’d written ourselves.

In literature, craft is fascinatingly unlike itself in any other subject. Instead of becoming more and more obvious as well as understood, it becomes subconscious, supposedly, once you’ve mastered it. But craft never ends. Even if it is turned on its head, that twist and distortion itself is a part of craft. It becomes a new and exciting way to design a story, to surprise a reader, to invent a structure that’s never been thought of before. This is the heart of craft and what the following seven books aim to describe each in their own unique way. 

The titles on this list are at the forefront of contemporary literature, engaging with experimental structures, rebelling against the canon, and carefully pointing out the ways in which our assumptions delude us. Whether you are an aspiring writer, a Pulitzer-Prize winning memoirist, or a curious reader, these books on craft will change you and the way you think about the world—as well as literature—within the complex confines of beauty and truth. 

Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses

In Craft in the Real World, Matthew Salesses—bestselling author and Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University—breaks down the meaning and implications of craft in fiction, redefines its terms, and elaborates upon the history and “rules” of writing workshops in the U.S. since 1936. He argues that literature should not exist in a vacuum and that the “responsibilities of actual life” also belong in the realm of art. Through thought experiments, examples, and anecdotes, Salesses masterfully upends the framework of many MFA programs and the way many writers have been taught how to approach feedback, revision, and cultural expectations in their work. This book is a must-read—as it significantly addresses the issues that have plagued white-centric literature for far too long and proposes alternative ideas and methods that will revolutionize contemporary fiction today. 

“Craft is about who has the power to write stories, what stories are historicized and who historicizes them, who gets to write literature and who folklore, whose writing is important and to whom, in what context. This is the process of standardization… These standards must be challenged and disempowered.”

. . . .

Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos

Body Work by Melissa Febos also goes against the tide of traditional craft books. In four essays, Febos beautifully gathers her own experiences, reflects upon what she’s learned from writing and from teaching, and analyzes specific examples from the historical canon while revolting against them through personal narratives. The award-winning essayist and University of Iowa Professor shows how navel-gazing and confession can still be moving without feeling overdone, especially for women who fear being cast out by a misogynistic bias in the industry. Febos encourages her readers to examine the assumptions they’ve inherited about writing, such as how to structure a sex scene, the scripts we follow in art and in life, and the true place for cruelty in literature.

Throughout the collection, Febos is unparalleled as she draws on the power of healing through art, makes philosophical arguments on the ethics of writing about real people, and shows just how deeply one must travel to eliminate the distance between the author and the nonfiction narrator. 

“Writer was the only role I could see myself occupying in society… It offered the gift of self-forgetting, a transcendence on the other side of which lay insight.”

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

Plan to Write a Book When You Retire? Some Tips for Late Blooming Writers

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

A lot of people hope to write a book when they retire. And that’s a great plan. Late blooming writers can do very well for themselves if they learn to write well and have something unique to say.

Some writers who became successful authors in their later years were Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was 64 when she published Little House on the Prairie, Bram Stoker, who was 51 when Dracula came out, and Frank McCourt, who was 66 when his first book, Angela’s Ashes made it into print.

Late blooming writers have some advantages over younger people starting writing careers. For one thing, they have decades of experience to write about. And they’ve got a lot more reading under their literary belts. Presumably they’ve read a lot in their chosen genre, so they know their audience, and what that audience expects.

Well, unless they don’t…

The Trouble with Memoirs

Oh, you read mostly thrillers, but you plan to write a memoir about your abusive childhood and fight with prostate cancer? Yeah, most late blooming writers think they’ll start with a memoir.

So start reading! You can’t just sit down and write a memoir if you’ve never read one any more than you can write a mystery if you’ve never read Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler.

When choosing what to write about, it’s good to keep in mind that memoirs are the hardest books to sell — whether you’re querying agents and traditional publishers or self-publishing.

Why? Because it takes topnotch writing skills to write a memoir other people want to read, especially one that chronicles abuse and pain. This week, on Jane Friedman’s blog, editor Hattie Fletcher says, “if you’re asking whether writing this memoir is likely to justify your time and energy, financially — well, unfortunately, that’s probably a very short response letter. It’s almost certainly not.”

However, the “misery memoir” is an accepted genre, and some of them sell very well. Look at James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, which was a bestseller until the revelation that it wasn’t a memoir at all, but mostly fiction. Then fans were furious. They wanted a misery memoir, not a novel.

But it’s still not the best way to break into the business. If you’re not famous, nobody much cares about your life story, unless you’ve got a great hook. (Like you’re Elvis’s love child, a kid famously rescued from a well, or you invented the creamsicle.)

Late Blooming Writers Should Think Outside the Book

I have to admit you couldn’t pay me to read most memoirs. Bad ones can be tedious and cringey.

But I’ll read anything David Sedaris writes. His short memoir-like essays are brilliant and hilarious.

If the book you want to write is a memoir, you might consider writing it in bits — otherwise known as “creative nonfiction” essays. You’ll have readers gobbling them up if you write them with a punchline, like David Sedaris, or an uplifting message, like the stories in the “Chicken Soup” anthologies.

Short essays are much easier to sell than a full-length book. They can also be a sales tool if you decide to write a book later.  Published essays help you gather a following and build a “platform.”

In fact, who knows — you may find those essays work well as blogposts, and your “book” should really be a blog.

Turn Your Life Experiences into Fiction

But you don’t have to write a memoir if you want to write about your life experiences. You can write those experiences as fiction. Change names and settings and you’ll probably find the characters take off and lead you to places you never expected.

Ruth Harris wrote a great post a few years ago on turning real life into fiction.

 “After getting bogged down over and over because I kept thinking “it really happened” was important, it eventually dawned on me that ignoring “it really happened” was even more important.”

You just need to be careful you don’t libel anybody. So make sure your bad guy isn’t recognizable as a real person. And if you’re writing about that tall, dark, handsome stranger who totally messed up your life, make him a short gnome-y bald dude and he’ll never own up to being that guy.

Miss Ellwood was a Great Teacher — in 1971

I’ve found that a lot of late blooming writers tend to fall back on what they learned in high school when they pick up writing again. This is fine when it comes to avoiding dangling participles and overuse of adverbs.

But writing in the style of Jack Kerouac is probably not going to impress many publishing professionals in 2023. Hey, Jack Kerouac himself probably couldn’t get a nibble from an agent today. Reading habits have changed.

And now that you’re writing as a grown-up, Miss Ellwood isn’t going to be here to give you a gold star for effort, or praise you for being “honest” when you write cringey confessions and navel-gazing musings.

The truth is, you’re not a student anymore, so nobody’s being paid to encourage your fledgling scribbles. If you want anybody to read your stuff, you have to keep that reader in mind. And she’s probably not Miss Ellwood.

Nobody’s going to read your book because you (sob) spent 4 whole years writing it. Most authors spend that long on their first book. It takes a long time to learn to write narrative prose with the right pacing, tension, action, and characterization to keep a reader turning the pages.

People generally don’t want to pay you for your learning time. You need to produce a saleable product before you can make sales.

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

Writing About Pain: Best Practices for Great Fiction

From Writers Helping Writers:

Show Don’t Tell

This one comes first, because if you want to create evocative and compelling descriptions, showing is the way to do it. Take this passage, for example:

Pain throbbed in my wrist. It radiated into my fingers. Tears sprang to my eyes.

On the surface, this description gets the job done because it adequately describes the character’s pain. But it’s not engaging. Lists seldom are—yet this is how pain is often described, as a series of symptoms or sensations. This isn’t how real pain registers, so it being described this way won’t read as authentic to readers.

Don’t stop the story to talk about what the character’s feeling. Instead, incorporate it into what’s happening. This keeps the pace moving and readers reading:

Cradling my throbbing wrist, I searched for the rope and loosed it from my belt. I drew a shuddering breath of relief to discover my fingers still worked, though the pain had me biting nearly through my lip.

This description is much better because it reveals the pain in bits and bobs as the character is going about her business. It uses words that describe the intensity and quality of the pain: throbbing and shuddering. There’s also a thought included, which is important because when agony strikes, our brains don’t stop working. The opposite is actually true, with our thoughts often going into overdrive. So including a thought that references the character’s mental state or physical discomfort is another way to show their pain to readers in an organic way.

Take Personal Factors into Account

The character’s pain level and intensity will depend on a number of factors, such as their pain tolerance, their personality, and what else is going on in the moment. Being aware of these details and knowing what they look like for your character is key for tailoring a response that is authentic for them. For more information on the factors that will determine your character’s pain response and their ability to cope with their discomfort, see the 6th post in this series.

Adhere to Your Chosen Point of View

Whether you’re telling your story in first person, third person, or omniscient viewpoint, consistency is a must, so you’ve got to stick to that point of view. If the person in pain is the one narrating, you can go deep into their perspective to show readers what’s happening inside—the pain, yes, but also the nausea, tense muscles, and the spots that appear in the character’s vision as they start to black out.

But if the victim isn’t a viewpoint character—if the reader isn’t privy to what’s happening inside their heads and bodies—you’ll need be true to that choice. Stick with external indicators that are visible to others, such as the character wincing, the hissed intake of breath through clenched teeth, the weeping of blood, or the skin going white and clammy.

Consider the Intensity of the Pain

All pain isn’t created equal, and the intensity of the pain being described will often determine the level of detail. Excruciating, agonizing pain is going to be impossible for the character to ignore; because of their focus on their own pain, more description is often necessary. On the flip side, a lot of words aren’t needed to express the mild, fleeting pain of a stubbed toe or bruised knee. The severity of the pain can guide you toward the right amount of description.

Don’t Forget about It

Remember that pain has a life of its own. Some injuries heal fast, with the pain receding quickly and steadily. Others linger. Many times, healing is a one-step-forward-two-steps-back situation, with things seeming to improve, then a relapse or reinjury causing a setback. And then there’s chronic pain, which never fully goes away.

The nature of the injury will dictate how often you return to the character’s pain and remind readers of it. Minor injuries can fade into the background without further mention. But moderate and severe hurts will take time to heal. This means your character will be feeling the pain well after it began, and you’ll have to mention it again. But when you do, the quality and intensity will be less, and your description will follow suit.

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

Let characters’ emotions spill in unpredictable ways

From Nathan Bransford:

One of the strangest things about writing fiction is that it often needs to make more sense than real life.

In real life, people fall into grief-stricken states of paralysis, wander around aimlessly without knowing what they’re looking for, and endlessly endure unpleasantness without trying to change anything about their circumstances. It’s extremely difficult to make those things interesting in a novel.

When we’re reading novels, it’s confusing and even frustrating when a character doesn’t act in accordance with their desires. To put it more simply: characters who care about something need to act like they care about it. They need to prioritize coherently (if not always rationally).

If they’re terrified, they need to act terrified. They shouldn’t be in the mood to stop in a place of danger and engage in endless breezy banter.

If they’re stuck, it’s helpful to see them at least try to escape so we can grasp the contours of their obstacles.

But there’s still plenty of room for humans to be human. One way you can give your character more latitude to act irrationally and convey to the reader that they really do care is to let their emotions spill out unpredictably.

A character under stress should act like it

Particularly when a writer has fallen a bit too in love with their dialogue, they can unintentionally create incongruities where it feels like a character can’t possibly care about what’s happening in the narrative if they are so unruffled that they have all the time in the world to engage in witty banter.

Now, this can be made to work. The James Bond-ish unflappable hero is an archetype for a reason. But the way to pull this off isn’t to show nothing at all getting to the protagonist. It’s to show stress building and then leaking out in unpredictable ways.

For example, a young protagonist who suffers an indignity from a teacher at school may not be able to immediately channel their frustration. If they were to lash out at the teacher, they’d get in still-more trouble, so they may well bite their tongue in the moment. But instead of simply moving on, the injustice should build and fester, and the protagonist might lash out at a safer target, like a friend or parent, or engage in some risky or uncharacteristic behavior. That acting out may well compound the stress even further.

In other words, the conflict isn’t just allowed to dissipate. It’s more like a ticking time bomb.

The most important principle here: Don’t let a good conflict go to waste!

Don’t let your character’s emotions just disappear. Pour them into an increasingly unmanageable bucket that might spill over at any time.

Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford

Not a fast writer? You can still build a successful publishing strategy

From Nail Your Novel:

The classic advice for authors, particularly indie authors, is to pump out a lot of books fast to build a big backlist and keep your readers interested. But that pace of writing and production doesn’t suit everybody.

Exhibit A, the introduction to my newsletter.

I write books slowly.

I probably won’t have a new release for a while but I’ve always got adventures to share. My newsletter is my diary of what’s mattered to be in a month, as a writer, editor, book adorer, storybrain for hire.

For a long time, slow-burn authors in the indie world weren’t getting seen or acknowledged. Most of the guidance was geared to fast producers. It seemed that if you didn’t put out several titles a year, and have a backlist that would fill a car boot, you wouldn’t be able to build a readership. What about the people whose work didn’t fit that pattern?

link to the rest at Nail Your Novel

How to Write a Compelling Transition Sentence

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

At a writers’ workshop, I once heard a beginning writer talk about how it had taken him almost all day to write a paragraph describing his character waking up in his bedroom upstairs and going to the kitchen downstairs to make breakfast.

“He made eggs and toast,” continued the writer.

“And then what happened?” I asked.

“He got some strawberry jam out of the refrigerator.”

Not much of a story, I thought. “The jam was poisoned?” I prompted.

He shook his head. “He found a body near the stove.”

Which meant the writer needed to beware the dreaded narrative-crushing, throat-clearing set up.

Which also meant he needed to learn how to write a compelling, effective transition sentence.

What is a transition sentence?

Transition sentences are the crucial bridges that link one thought to the next or one scene to the next.

Well-constructed transition sentences, unlike London Bridge, do not fall down. Instead, they structure a smooth-flowing story, ensure forward progress, escalate suspense or tension, and, in turn, create page-turning, can’t-put-it-down fiction.

We’re talking about the hard working sentences that move your story from here to there, from him to her, from good guy to bad guy.

The transition sentence seamlessly moves the reader from one character, scene, place or mood to the next.

For example:

“As up-and-coming country singer, Joe Bob Smith, knocked on the door of the Memphis company’s hottest hit maker, in cold, snowy Moscow, his sister, CIA super agent Daphne Smith, bundled in thick sheepskins, skulked along the wall surrounding the Kremlin.”

So here we are: all the way from Memphis to Moscow, from pop music headliner to tense thriller in a single sentence.

The transition sentence can also link one thought or mood to another:

“She loved him, but she was already late for work and he’d left the car’s fuel gauge pointing to empty. Which meant she would have to stop at the gas station first and would make her even later.

“Which also meant she wanted to kill him.”

Three sentences that shift the mood.

Whether the tone is mystery, thriller, or comedy depends on genre.

How to write a powerful transition sentence.

The transition sentence must be clear, simple, and direct as it moves the reader’s attention from one focus to another and provides the connective tissue that supports compelling narrative.

It might link AM and PM, Wednesday and Friday, Spring to Summer — or one place to another — from Memphis to Moscow, from the kitchen to the living room, or from one thought or mood to another.

“Leaving the hot, steamy kitchen and the winey beef stew for which she was locally celebrated, Linda Jones checked the mirror to refresh her makeup and tidy her hair. She wanted to look her best when the tall, Cary Grant lookalike United Parcel man rang her doorbell even as she fretted about what she could do to keep her husband from finding out about him.”

The well-crafted transition sentence can compress or expand time.

“As Henry Tailor gunned his silver Ferrari into merging traffic, he recalled the time almost fifteen years ago when he’d been dead broke. He’d vowed never to be poor again, and he’d lied, stolen and cheated to make his way to the top of the Hollywood heap as CEO of Colossal Pix.”

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

Character Type & Trope Thesaurus: Whiskey Priest

From Writers Helping Writers:

DESCRIPTION: A well-meaning priest, pastor, or other religious professional who exhibits moral weakness through a particular vice. Though he is acutely aware of his personal flaws, he continues to carry out his sacramental duties and takes his responsibility toward his charges seriously.

FICTIONAL EXAMPLES: Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale (The Scarlet Letter), Father Donald Callahan (Salem’s Lot, The Dark Tower), Friar Tuck (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), Imperius (Ladyhawke)

COMMON STRENGTHS: Cautious, Centered, Cooperative, Courteous, Diplomatic, Discreet, Empathetic, Generous, Gentle, Kind, Nurturing, Observant, Passionate, Patient, Persuasive, Private, Protective, Responsible, Spiritual, Supportive, Wise

COMMON WEAKNESSES: Addictive, Compulsive, Cowardly, Evasive, Humorless, Hypocritical, Insecure, Nosy, Self-Indulgent, Weak-Willed, Withdrawn

ASSOCIATED ACTIONS, BEHAVIORS, AND TENDENCIES
Struggling with personal demons
Being burdened with a dark secret
Having compassion for others
Feeling deeply compelled to serve God to the best of their ability
Feeling guilty about past mistakes or present weaknesses
Seeking redemption or forgiveness
Willingly making sacrifices for others
Being disillusioned by the cruelties and harsh realities of the world
Going to great lengths to keep his indiscretions secret
Being full of contradictions…

SITUATIONS THAT WILL CHALLENGE THEM
A situation that threatens to reveal the character’s vice
Encountering someone who challenges the priest’s beliefs
Being tempted in a new area…

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

What Are Antagonistic Proxies? And How Can They Help Your Story?

From Writers Helping Writers:

Understanding how story works means stripping it down to the basic mechanics that undergird storyform itself. At its simplest, story is protagonist versus antagonist. However, it’s important to understand the definitions. Although we most commonly (and usefully) think of protagonist and antagonist as vibrant, three-dimensional personalities, the functional reality is a bit simpler. Protagonist is the part of the story that drives the plot via a forward-moving goal. Antagonist is the corresponding part of the story that creates conflict by obstructing that forward momentum. So what are antagonistic proxies, and how do they fit into this mix?

It’s true that on a mechanical level, the antagonist is simply whoever or whatever stands between the protagonist and the ultimate goal. But when we start layering on all the enticing nuances and details that take story from a basic equation into a full-blown facsimile of real life, we start discovering a couple more rules of thumb.

One is that the antagonistic force needs to be consistent through the story. Just as the protagonist’s forward drive should create a cohesive throughline all the way through the story, from Inciting Event to Climactic Moment, so too should the antagonistic force present a united front that consistently opposes the protagonist for thematically resonant reasons.

But this gets tricky. As you deepen the complexity of your story in pursuit of that “facsimile of real life,” it can often become difficult to create logical story events and to keep the protagonist and the antagonist properly aligned throughout.

For instance:

  • Your story might not feature a specific human antagonist, but rather a series of humans who oppose the protagonist at different levels and moments.
  • Your story might not feature a human antagonist at all.
  • Your story might play out on a large scale in which it simply doesn’t make sense for protagonist and main antagonist to meet until late in the story or maybe not at all.
  • Your story is complex, as is life, and focuses on a system as the antagonist rather than a specific person or entity.
  • Your story focuses on relational goals rather than action goals, in which case the antagonist might, in fact, be the protagonist’s greatest lover, friend, or supporter (more on that in a future post).

These variations, and many more, show how antagonistic proxies can come in handy. And what are antagonistic proxies? Antagonistic proxies are exactly what they appear to be: less important characters who stand in for the main antagonist. Really, the use of antagonistic proxies is quite intuitive. There’s a reason the henchman is a universal trope!

However, using antagonistic proxies comes with some pitfalls. The most important pitfall is that when you start adding in sub-antagonists without understanding the underlying function of the antagonist’s role in story form, you can end up struggling with a chaotic story structure or a plot and/or theme that feels like it’s being pulled in many different directions. The good news is that as long you understand the function of the antagonist, you can add as many antagonistic proxies as you need without derailing your story.

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

Writing Techniques: Use and Abuse of “Lampshading”

From Writers Helping Writers:

What Is the “Lampshade” Technique

Believe it or not, the lampshade/lantern/lampshade-hanging technique is just this: Purposely call attention to a cliché, illogical, or contrived element, often in characters’ dialogue. By calling attention to something that threatens a readers’ suspension of disbelief, we’re essentially telling readers, “Yep, the story world thinks these elements are odd too. Just roll with it.”

The TV Tropes site includes many examples which point out how this technique isn’t new:

Sir Toby Belch: Is’t possible?
Fabian: If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

— Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

In addition to simply using self-awareness to point out issues, lampshading can sometimes also take the opportunity to answer or justify how the situation makes sense. For example, to defuse readers’ skepticism or criticism of an event, a character might share further information after the fact, such as explaining unknown motivations:

Lampshade: “Yeah, I’m glad we won, but why did Klaus suddenly decide to help us?” Susan threw up her hands. “That makes no sense. He never wanted our team to win.”
Justification: Paula pointed down the field to the opposing team. “See that girl? Cynthia broke up with him last night—ugly scene from what I heard. Maybe he wanted her team to lose more than he didn’t want us to win.”

Depending on circumstances, lampshading can create moments that come off as winking, hilarious, clever (or too-clever-for-its-own-good), meta, lazy, handwaving away weak writing, etc. So we need to understand when lampshading will help or hurt our writing and story.

Lampshading Might Hurt Our Story When…

Lampshading done well helps keep readers immersed in our story, but lampshading done poorly risks pulling readers out of our story even more than if we had just left our writing alone.

Situations where lampshading can hurt our story or writing include:

  • Our story’s style is serious or sincere, so even mild or well-done lampshading risks a tonal change of being too-clever, meta, or jokey.
  • Our story’s narrative is strong and/or readers of our genre won’t question the plot tropes/clichés, so lampshading risks an impression of “apologizing” for lines or elements that readers may not even notice if we don’t point them out.
  • The questionable elements are part of a strong emotional moment in our story, so lampshading risks undercutting—or at least interrupting—the emotions we wanted to evoke (such as in the game-winning example above).
  • Our story naturally keeps readers at a distance—less engaged or immersed—so any lampshading, especially meta, fourth-wall-breaking, or too-clever-by-half moments (unless, of course, that’s the kind of story we’re trying to tell), risks preventing readers from taking anything seriously (e.g., if our characters don’t seem fully invested and care about the story’s events, readers might not care either).
  • The questionable elements are part of a major or important moment in our story, so lampshading, with its “don’t worry about it” and “just roll with it” attitude, risks giving readers the impression that the moment isn’t important.
  • There’s no story at all without the questionable elements, so lampshading that emphasizes the issue can make the entire story feel weak or “fake.”
  • Our characters’ reactions are believable within the story world, so lampshading risks an impression that we aren’t confident in our writing, worldbuilding, or characters.

Most importantly, as alluded to in that last bullet point, we don’t want to lampshade something simply because we’re not confident in our writing. Once per story, we might need to move the plot along with a contrived situation that we’re not entirely happy about, and maybe that event could use a lampshade, just to keep things moving. But lampshading due to self-consciousness can feel defensive, like we’re trying to avoid any-and-all criticism or essentially apologizing for our work. Instead, we should fix the problem so we can feel at least somewhat confident in our writing.

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

Training scenes work in movies. They (usually) suck in novels

From Nathan Bransford:

Some of the most beloved scenes in movie history involve training for combat.

Obi-Wan Kenobi making Luke put the blast shield down so he can train blind with his lightsaber in Star Wars: A New Hope. Morpheus and Neo fighting an epic, beautiful, mesmerizing joust after Neo learns kung fu in The Matrix. Take your pick from hundreds of “ragtag fighting force humorously gets their s*** together” montages.

Now, I challenge you this: Name a great training scene in a novel.

I’ll wait.

Okay, sure. Of course they exist! I list some below, and I’m sure some good ones will pop up in the comments section. But if you put the scene where Morpheus tests Neo’s kung fu into a novel, it would be a snoozer. When I’m editing novels, I often see interminable training scenes that were clearly written for the future movie adaptation rather than the actual novel at hand.

Screenplay-ize your novel at your peril. If you have movie training in scenes in mind when you’re writing a novel, you risk crafting a stinker of a scene unless you can tailor it for what works in books.

The reasons for this discrepancy reveal a whole lot about the narrative differences between good cinematic storytelling and good novelistic storytelling.

The interiority of novels

At the risk of oversimplifying, cinema is a storytelling device that favors the exterior, whereas novels favor the interior.

Cinema is visual. It’s nearly impossible to get intimately inside characters’ heads the way we can in novels. We judge cinematic characters almost entirely by their actions (hence the classic “save the cat“), rather than being attuned to their hidden motivations and desires. The occasional clunky movie voice-overs that tell us a characters’ secret thoughts are the exceptions that prove the rule.

With novels, we’re far, far more attuned to why characters are doing what they’re doing. We often know their precise hopes and dreams. We can see the way they’re thinking through their options and choices. It puts a much greater premium on how a character is prioritizing their time and energy and scenes flowing from characters actively going after the things they want in a relatively coherent way.

I am willing to stake this claim: Novels need to make more sense than movies.

That’s because when we read, we’re busy co-creating the world in our own heads. When it’s unclear why exactly a character is doing what they’re doing, it rings a much louder alarm than it does when we’re sitting back in a comfy chair in the theater and just watching things unfold on the screen.

Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford

Spotlighting Rural Crime Fiction

From The Daily Yonder:

Small-town crime is big.

There’s never been a time when readers of mystery and crime novels didn’t like stories in rustic and rural settings. James M. Cain’s 1934 crime novel The Postman Always Rings Twice was grabbed up by readers — and banned in Boston — for its torrid story of a murderous affair in a roadside California town.

Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot solved a murder in a small town in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd back in 1926. Even earlier, Arthur Conan Doyle put Sherlock Holmes and John Watson through their paces in a number of isolated estates and villages (small towns in the English countryside in particular have never suffered from a lack of fictional murders).

And, of course, Elmore Leonard brought the blueprint to the American West and the hills of Appalachia, as covered in our most recent edition.

But tales of small-town crime have become increasingly popular in recent years, and many books not only tell stories about murder and mayhem, but also about the kind of remote places that bear witness to those crimes.

One of the newest novels to explore this rich dramatic potential is Small Town Sins, published on August 1. It was written by Ken Jaworowski, an editor at The New York Times and is his first novel.

Jaworowski weaves three stories that only occasionally intersect: A nurse who befriends a dying teenager, a volunteer firefighter who finds and decides to keep $2 million, and a recovering addict who discovers new purpose — and a despicable target — after finding himself alone in the world.

Jaworowski said in an interview that there are reasons rural and small-town crime stories are so popular right now.

“There are a lot of rural stories out now — S.A. Cosby and Karen Dionne immediately come to mind — and I’d say that’s because they sell. Publishers want to make money, and rural readers are book buyers. I love New York City more than anything. I lived there for nearly a decade. But even I am a little tired of novels set in high-brow worlds populated by Yale graduates. So very few of us have been to a four-star French restaurant. But everyone has, at one time or another, been in a local bar. Readers can relate to such settings. And if your readers relate to your settings, it’s easier to draw them into the plot.”

Author Kelly J. Ford, whose new novel, The Hunt, is about a serial killer stalking an elaborate Easter egg hunt in small-town Arkansas, said in an interview there’s a universal appeal to rural crime stories.

“All small towns and rural areas have their eccentricities, but there seems to be a shared emotional experience that resonates and connect readers of these stories,” Ford said. “Even folks from larger towns or cities typically grow up in enclaves or neighborhoods, little universes with their own mythologies, criminals, and characters.

“There’s always that one family whose last name, when you hear it, whispers ‘Run.’”

A New Golden Age?

Some of today’s best practitioners of rural crime writing have been honing their craft for years. Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of The Cold Dish, the first of author Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire books. The series, now two-dozen books and counting, mixes humor, action, mysticism, and remote Western settings in its tales of modern-day Wyoming sheriff, Walt Longmire, who patrols one of the most sparsely populated areas in the United States. The books are the basis for the Longmire Netflix series. I love Johnson’s humor and always recall a detail that firmly established the books’ remote setting: In Longmire’s little town, cell phone service is dependable in just one spot in a particular parking lot.

Link to the rest at The Daily Yonder

Motif in Literature: Definition and Examples

From The Grammarly Blog:

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five, there is a phrase that marks every death in the book: “So it goes.” The phrase is unavoidable, much like death itself, and it draws the reader’s attention to the book’s larger theme of inevitability.

The phrase “so it goes” is an example of a motif: a recurring story element with symbolic significance. Motifs direct readers’ attention to larger themes and engage them on an intuitive level. They are great tools for creating depth in your writing.

What is a motif in literature?

A motif (pronounced mow-teef) can be an object, image, sound, idea, or word. A couple of key qualities can help you determine if what you’re reading is a motif:

Motifs are repeated throughout the story. In fact, “motif” is a French word that translates to “pattern.” If you notice the same object, phrase, or symbol multiple times throughout the story, it’s probably a motif. 

Motifs point to a larger theme or concept. Oftentimes, a motif will recur in similar situations throughout the story. For instance, in the Vonnegut example above, the words “so it goes” always occur after a death is mentioned. Noticing what situations the motif appears in gives the reader insight into the larger message the author is alluding to.

What is the purpose of a motif?

The main purpose of a motif is to draw attention to a theme. Attentive readers gain access to a theme or underlying message by paying close attention to the story’s motifs. In this way, motifs can engage readers on an intuitive level. 

Writers may also use motifs for these reasons:

To enhance a mood. In Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, the author hides the acronym “VFD” throughout the series to indicate the Baudelaire children are in danger. This creates an aura of suspense every time the reader notices the three letters in succession (e.g.: Volunteer Feline Detectives, Voluntary Fish Domestication).

To create symbolism. Typically, oranges are not associated with death or destruction, but in The Godfather, director Francis Ford Coppola creates a new symbol by repeatedly featuring oranges around scenes of death. For what it’s worth, the production designer has denied that the orange symbolism was intentional. Regardless of the filmmaker’s intentions, viewers have decided that oranges are one of the movie’s motifs.

Motif vs. theme

A theme is a story’s overall message or meaning. It’s what guides the narrative, causes characters to act a certain way, and gives the text a deeper meaning. Themes are typically broad and conceptual. Examples of themes in literature include mortality, good versus evil, corruption, redemption, and love.

Motifs, on the other hand, are elements that point toward that theme. For example, if a book’s underlying theme is about mortality, then an author might attach the motif of decay to their language (as William Shakespeare does in Hamlet). Every time the reader encounters worms, maggots, or skulls, they’re directed to reflect on the broader themes of death and mortality.

In short, a theme is an abstract concept that underlies the entire story. A motif is a recurring element throughout the story that points toward that theme.

Link to the rest at The Grammarly Blog

Writing Short Stories to Jumpstart Your Novel Writing

From Writer Unboxed:

What do you do when you reach a roadblock with your novel? Do you go for a long walk? Pour a glass of wine? Vent on social media? While all those things are helpful (at least to me), I like to go to a tried-and-true backup that I know I’m good at: short-story writing.

I got my start writing short stories in college, so they’re a comfort blanket for me. And I’ve found interchanging novel-writing with short story-writing provides a unique honing of writerly skills that I would otherwise lack if I only concentrated on my novel.

Here are some of the benefits writing short stories provide:

1. You learn to complete a story arc in a finite amount of time. And I mean that both figuratively and literally. When writing short stories that you intend to submit for publication, you often have to work within finite word counts. You have drabbles, which are 100 words or less; Flash Fiction, which is usually 300-1K words; and traditional short stories, which can be anywhere from 1k-7k words. (Anything longer is considered a “long” short story or a novella.) And because it’s not a novel, which can take months to years to write, you’re usually working on short stories over the course of a few days to a few weeks. This is especially true if you’re writing for a deadline-driven contest. You learn to increase your pacing and shorten your character arcs to a few thousand words. The skills learned by working on short stories can help your novel-writing chops by allowing you to get to the heart of your story faster, which in turn gives you more real estate to flesh out the characters and the plot instead of leisurely wandering your way to them.

2. It gives you a sense of accomplishment—and more. You can (usually) write several short stories in the time it would take you to write half a novel. This directly translates into fuel you can use to finish your novel in that it can serve to kickstart your motivation as you gain writing momentum. Getting your work published and out into the world gives you an ego boost that can help you survive the Imposter Syndrome doubt that comes from wondering if your novel will ever take shape/take off/ be successful. I use these small acceptance accomplishments to remind myself why I got into this business in the first place.

3. It can add to your writing resume. It’s a known fact that plenty of good writers get passed over by agents and editors and that rejections are inevitable, regardless of the writing quality. But publications in reputable journals and magazines can add substance to your query letters, and that may lead agents to take a closer look at your work. This may especially benefit a debut novelist seeking agent representation.

4. Submitting short story queries helps hone your query-writing chops. Trust me, after writing dozens of short story queries, or even hundreds, you can use what you’ve learned to write a knockout novel query. For example, writing short story queries helped me hone my professional voice when approaching someone for paid work. It taught me to perfect my elevator pitch, as I essentially provide one for each story I submit—again, do dozens or hundreds of these and you start to gain an ear for what works and what doesn’t.

5. It gives practice for following submission guidelines. While many novel-submissions usually just involve a basic query to the agent/publisher/editor, when someone requests a partial of your manuscript, you will need to follow their submission guidelines explicitly. I learned how to tailor my short story submissions to specific formatting guidelines just the way indie publishers and small presses demand—sure, the Shunn format is a good place to start, but not every house wants it the same way, and small details missed can get your submission tossed out. It’s important to carefully research the guidelines required for EACH manuscript submission and follow them to the T.

6. It provides a much-needed mental break. Wrestling with your novel WIP can lead to burnout. I’ve been there, and in the depths of my frustration, short stories gave me the space I needed to get into another world for a while, to handle a new set of characters that had different challenges than those I wrestled with in my novel. Or, on the other hand, you might find that writing a short story set in the world of your novel helps deepen your understanding of that world and its characters. As Amazon can attest, many a successful novella was written as a spin-off to full-length novels. They sell because fans want to know more about the characters they’ve come to love, and short stories and novellas provide that desired fix

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

The 3 R’s of a Successful Professional Writing Career

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

You started out with dreams of a professional writing career, didn’t you?

And then you achieved your goals, didn’t you?

But now what?

You thought being a professional, published writer would liberate you from the routine of a day job.

You also thought you’d be able to control your own time — and that you’d be the master of your fate.

And finally — at long last! — you’ve arrived at the place where you’re the boss of you.

Well, haven’t you?

And now what?

Now you find out — surprise! — that being a professional, published author can  feel a lot like being a 9-to-5 wage slave.

With a few scary gotchas for your extra added enjoyment.

Like, for instance —

That the mean, demanding, impossible-to-please boss is the ogre in the mirror.

That the Monday-to-Friday treadmill morphs into a seven-day-a week trudge.

And then there’s the weekend.

Huh?

“Weekend?”

What’s a weekend?

Don’t remember those, do you?

Or that your paycheck might — or might not — arrive on time.

And, even if it does, will it cover the rent, the car payment, the baby sitter?

So what you do now that you have a successful professional writing career? Now that you’re your own boss?

IME the best way to approach the issue is to curse, cry, kvetch go back to basics.

You know, the three R’s.

1.  Routine

You can’t control the weather, the soul-sucking fight you had with your partner or your kid, or who’s gonna be the next president.

You can’t control the reality that some days will fly by, but that others will feel like you’re stuck in a wasteland, tethered to your recalcitrant WiP with Gorilla Glue.

At times you will feel inspired.

Other times you will wonder what on earth ever made you think the great/brilliant idea that would make you rich & famous would maybe turn out not to be so great/brilliant after all.

At least right now at this moment when you’re stuck, can’t figure out what happens next, and hate your $&^%# book/article/blog post. And, if things start to feel really dire, maybe even yourself.

But rather than helplessly letting the wheels come off, remember that what you can control is yourself, your creativity, and how you invest your resources and allocate your energy.

Now is when routine  — often reviled, but always reliable — can be your best friend.

Whether you’re an early morning lark or a late night owl, you already know your own best time time to sit down with your notepad or in front of your computer.

Even when you think you’re at rock bottom and are sure you have no ideas, priming the pump works.

Read something you love for inspiration.

Read something you hate because you know you can do better.

Try writing/typing something/anything until, as NYT writing mentor David Carr said, it turns into writing.

Because IME, DC was right, and it will.

Why and how is for the philosophers/neuroscientists to figure out, but — one way or another — routine almost always will get the job done.

2. Repetition

Stay with it/keep at it— word after word, day after day, week after week.

Even when you’re convinced you’ve written yourself into a box or a blank wall with a bright, blinking No Exit sign.

IME all those false starts, all those discarded drafts, will yield to sheer stubbornness or, to put it more diplomatically, determined persistence.

Sooner — or sometimes later — you will start making sense to yourself. A messy process, but an approach that — eventually — works.

When you start submitting and the rejections roll in — which they will (sorry about that) — keep at it.

Whether you’re angry, depressed, or discouraged, don’t give up. Stay determined.

Remember that it’s not just you but every writer who has ever faced a blank page or a disheartening rejection — which is everyone — has been there, done that.

In a recent interview bestselling writer Dennis Lehane (Gone, Baby, Gone and Mystic River) commented, “All I hear are no’s.”

. . . .

3.  Revision

Your book is finished.

You’ve typed “The End.”

Congratulations!

But wait!

You’re not finished!

There’s more!

Glitches, aaaarghs, and wtf’s.

Plot holes, oopsies, and lapses in logic.

Enhanced by dust bunnies under the bed and dirty dishes in the sink.

It is here that “Susan” you or your editor will find that has mysteriously morphed into “Sullivan” halfway through the manuscript.

Or where the setting has inexplicably changed from heat-ravaged Houston to snow-bound North Dakota.

Or when the Grammar Gods descend from Mount Strunk & White with wrath in their eyes and author assassination in their hearts.

Wha? How did that happen? Who knows? But whatever it is, you’d better find it and fix it or feel the wrath of hundreds of ticked off readers who will not be shy about expressing their displeasure.

Besides, other, frustrating gotchas are most likely lurking in the shadows along with the cooties and cobwebs. Easy to overlook. Difficult to ferret out. Not all that tough to correct — once you find them.

Which is the reason Mother Nature created betas, editors and proofreaders. And obsessed, perfectionistic writers. (Coughs. Raises hand.)

Because I learned early on that editors will reject your manuscript and readers — if you manage to find any — will pounce and “reward” you with an Everest of one-star reviews.

Revision time.

What?

Again?

OMG do I really have to go over that d*mn thing one more time?

Yes, you do, but consider the up side.

Here is your golden opportunity to polish your book to a dazzling, irresistible gleam.

Don’t waste it.

Take advantage, because, once your book is published, your time is up, and you will have no more opportunities to fix, tinker, fluff, or polish.

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

Character Type & Trope Thesaurus: Doomsday Prepper

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.

. . . .

Doomsday Prepper

DESCRIPTION: Paranoid and prepping for the end of the world, doomsday preppers have a very specific skillset, as well as access to resources that are in short supply elsewhere. Their knowledge and assets can be useful in certain scenarios, and these characters often become important contacts for the protagonist, supplying exactly what’s needed in the moment.

FICTIONAL EXAMPLES: Burt and Heather Gummer (Tremors), Hershel Greene (The Walking Dead), Howard Stambler (10 Cloverfield Lane), Dale Gribble (King of the Hill)

COMMON STRENGTHS: Adaptable, Alert, Analytical, Cautious, Focused, Independent, Industrious, Nature-Focused, Observant, Organized, Private, Proactive, Protective, Resourceful, Responsible, Thrifty, Traditional

COMMON WEAKNESSES: Fanatical, Nervous, Obsessive, Paranoid, Pessimistic, Rebellious, Stubborn, Suspicious, Uncooperative, Withdrawn

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

Growing Pains: Why Coming of Age Stories Are for Everyone

From Writer Unboxed:

My second novel, which was released last March, is a coming-of-age story. The book’s protagonist is a sixteen-year-old boy. A few months before the publication date, I had a conversation with my publisher about whether the book should be marketed as a young adult novel or as adult literary fiction.

“It really could be either,” my publisher said. “I think there’s something in it for everyone.”

After weighing the pros and cons of each, we decided to go with adult literary fiction, partly because the novel contains mature content that some parents might find unsuitable for teenagers, and also because we felt that the book would have an opportunity to reach a wider audience as an adult novel.

I was happy with this decision until the book came out and one of its early readers, who also happened to be my father, sent me an email. “It’s a good book, but I don’t think it’s for the over-seventy crowd,” he wrote. “It’s hard to identify with a teenager at my age.” (For the record, he also gave the book a four on Goodreads 😐.)

I was considering asking my publisher if we could revise the book’s metadata when positive reviews started to come in, all of them from adult readers.

“I’m not a teenager,” one woman told me, “but I could really relate to the book’s main character. I’ve had some similar struggles in my life recently. I was rooting for him to succeed the whole time.”

By definition, coming-of-age stories portray a time in a character’s life when they’re undergoing a metamorphosis—in the process of becoming a better, more evolved version of themselves. For most of us, this development takes place when we’re in our late teens or early twenties. But life, especially over the past few years, doesn’t always stick to the rules. Big changes can take place in anyone’s life at any time whether we want them to or not.

If you asked someone to give you a list of their favorite books, it’s likely that at least one coming-of-age story would make the cut. Classic novels like A Catcher in the RyeThe Chocolate War, and The Outsiders occupy an eternal place in people’s hearts because we all know what it’s like when the phonies won’t get off our backs and the rich kids cheat to win.

One of my favorite novels is Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. Set in 1950s Minnesota, it’s the coming-of-age story of eleven-year-old Reuben Lands. The story is full of adventure, tragedy, poverty, hope, love, and miracles that feel true-to-life. I’ve read it a dozen times. Every time I read it, I’m reminded that it’s not just our circumstances that define our characters but the ways in which we choose to handle them. I’m also reminded that, if we’re open to it, it’s possible to grow and change as a person no matter our age.

Although it’s been widely read in high school English classes since it was published, Peace Like A River was intended for an adult audience.

Coming-of-age stories are universal. They occupy their own special niche in the world of storytelling. By showing us humanity at its very worst and at its finest, these stories bring to light the limitations and awesome potential that human beings possess. And because coming-of-age stories deal with themes like self-discovery, injustice, sexuality, class, and race they can also sometimes help us make sense of events that happened in our lives decades ago and the ways in which those things have become woven into our cores.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed