Writers in the Storm

by Lynette M. Burrows

There is an avalanche of messages about the way to writing success on the internet. You invest tons of time and money via trial and error to determine which way is right for you. It would help if there was a single tool you could use to make your choices and decisions, wouldn’t it? That tool exists. It’s called intention.  

Writing with intention gives you and the words you write, a clear purpose, power, and drive. Whether you are a seasoned writer or a just starting your writing journey, infusing intention in your writing can significantly enhance its impact. It allows you to set up yourself and your business for success.

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.”

— Henry David Thoreau

Know Your Why

It’s almost a cliché to ask a writer if they know their why. However, knowing why you write gives you clarity. You are far more likely to succeed if most of your writing and business decisions are made with that clarity. 

What is your why? What moves you to write the stories you write? What is the message? Are you writing for fun? For profit? For entertainment?

Don’t judge yours or others reasons for writing. Your why is neither good nor bad. It simply is.

Why is this important?

Writing is a long-term commitment. It takes time to discover who you are as a writer, learn how to express your message and stories in the most accessible ways, and to learn to manage your writing life.

Your why also defines your business.

There are different strategies to use for each why. For each strategy, there are a myriad of possible tactics to use. Unless you know your why, how can you choose your best strategies? Take time to figure out your why.

What is Your Core Message?

You are aware of your why, now it’s time to discover your core message. It doesn’t matter if your core message is love endures or life is an adventure or any other message. You may have two or three core messages. There is no right or wrong message. However, if you have more than three, look deeper at those messages. Pare them down to the most basic two or three.

Explore your message through the theme(s) of your stories. Use language that reinforces your message. Choose a genre and story structure that supports your message and guides your reader to the intended take away.

Awareness of your core message allows you to craft your stories, your words, with purpose.

Explore Your Message

Intentional fiction allows you to tailor characters and situations that challenge your themes and messages. Give your characters purposes, motivations, actions, and reactions that are coherent. Your message will give your stories a depth and purpose that will be authentic and will connect with your audience. Create protagonists and antagonists, of course. But remember to craft supporting characters and spear carriers who add different perspectives. Even your settings and recurrent images or motifs can be part of the story argument.

Through this exploration, you clarify and expand your own understanding of your message. But you are not the only one who benefits from this. Through your characters, you allow your readers to clarify their own thoughts and connect with the themes, the messages, and the conflicts. 

Read with Intention

To read with intention means you intentionally choose the books you read. Read deeply in your genre, yes, but also read outside your genre. With your why and your message in mind, choose to read fiction and nonfiction that both support and challenge those ideas of yours. Explore your curiosity. 

Intention also means you protect your time and your mind. Know what books you will not read and under what circumstances you will not finish reading any book you started.

Intentional Environment

Choose your work environment. Granted, because of time, money, or space, you may not have the best choices, but think about your environment. Would music, or a scented candle, or a better chair give you an environment that works for you? When you consider how to change or improve your workspace, prioritize those things that help you the most. This post explores ways your environment can increase creativity.

The more ergonomic choices will help you work longer and more efficiently. But is longer hours sitting in a chair your goal? Keep in mind what your core message(s) are. What environment will support your efforts to express that message?

Intentional Improvement

Guided by intention, you also practice intentional improvement. You study the craft to improve your strengths and shore up your weaknesses. Choose to read craft books that will help you explore new techniques or structure that will help you express your message. Deliberately seek qualified sources to teach you. Find multiple sources so you can choose the path and methods that work for you.

Is there a writer or work you admire? Examine its story structure. Study the author’s word choices, sentence structure, and pacing. Copy passages so you experience those choices word-by-word. Save favorite descriptions for later inspiration.

Focused practice of new techniques and styles of writing becomes a natural extension of your decision making. How do you practice writing? Write a poem in different styles. Rewrite one of your paragraphs in the style of a writer you’ve studied. Practice twisting clichés into something more original. 

Intentional Business Decisions

If you intend to sell your books, there are choices to make. Should you choose traditional publishing, hybrid publishing, or independent publishing? What will you charge? Will you sell on your website? In person? Do your research. Get the information you need to make you decisions. Successful businesses require intentional decisions.

Use your why, your message, and your core beliefs to set up a business you want and will work on for a long time. Define that business. Will you choose to expand? How will you do that? Write a business plan. It doesn’t need to be a formal one, but you’ll need a formal plan in some situations. 

You’ll need to research the how your country defines business. Do you need a license? Do you need to pay taxes? 

If you are like many writers, marketing confounds you. Intentional writing means doing research and discovering which type of marketing is most likely to work for your books. It also means learning enough to avoid scams and schemes that promise quick money or success. 

Use intention to craft an emotional appeal to readers based on your core message (the one your book explores). 

But Intention Takes the Joy out of Writing

You get to choose when and what to be intentional about. Discovery writing (also known as pantsing), a first draft, can be an intentional choice. Intentional discovery writers may choose pay for a developmental editor to help you clean up that draft. Or you could intentionally learn to write a clean first draft. 

Self-care isn’t optional if you intend to make writing a long-term habit or career. There may be mental or physical health challenges, but you can choose to maintain the best mental and physical health you can. Self-care includes joy, spontaneity, exercise, and all the other aspects of self-care.

Choose to give yourself inspiration days, relationship-building days, days for spiritual reflection, and days to “veg out.” Your creative mind and spirit need intentional care. 

Intentional Decisions Are a Path to Success

Remember, intention isn’t a bad word. It’s a choice. You use intentional choices every day when you take this route instead of that one to the department store or on a trip. Each day you decide how you’ll use your time, your energy, and your attention. Make your decisions intentional.

Some of you are proud of always making instinctual (pantser) decisions. If you decide pantsing is best for you, that is an intention. If your instincts are based on an internalized why and message, it can be successful. But instincts are often based on internalized messaging from others. Dare to make intentional decisions. That's where your path to success lies. It's where your power lies.

With intentional decision-making, you define your business, your writing, and what success means to you. Lean into your why and your messages. Lean into your power.

What is one intentional decision you made in the past? Is there an intentional decision you’ve made for the future?

About Lynette

Lynette M. Burrows is an author, blogger, creativity advocate, and Yorkie wrangler. She survived moving seventeen times between kindergarten and her high school graduation. This alone makes her uniquely qualified to write an adventure or two.

Her Fellowship series is a takes “chillingly realistic” alternate history in 1961 Fellowship America where autogyros fly and following the rules isn’t optional. Books one and two, My Soul to Keep, and  If I Should Die, are available everywhere books are sold online. Book three, And When I Wake, is scheduled to be published in 2024.

Lynette lives in the land of OZ. She is a certifiable chocoholic and coffee lover. When she’s not blogging or writing or researching her next book, she avoids housework and plays with her two Yorkshire terriers. You can find Lynette online on Facebook, or on Mastodon @LynetteMBurrows@wandering.shop or on her website.

Image Credits

Top photo by Positive_Images from Pixabay

Second image by Benjamin White from Pixabay

by Angela Ackerman

What do the most successful, memorable novels out there have in common? Emotional impact. The reader becomes so connected to the story, characters, and world they feel something profound as they read. 

This is no surprise because emotions are central to the human experience. Whether it’s joy, hope, fear, or something else, we’ve felt it. Emotions color our world, shape our values, inform our decisions, and help us navigate life. So, when reading a story awakens something within us, it’s because we see the characters as people who yearn, hurt, and struggle just as we do. We feel connected to them and care about their journey. 

Stories with high emotional impact bring readers back for more, so we want to do all we can to make them feel involved and invested. These strategies will help you psychologically hook your reader’s emotions.  

Strategy #1: Show, Don’t Tell

This is the Big Daddy of writing advice, which is why it is so often talked about: showing provides an experience, telling provides information. There’s a place for both, but especially when description touches emotions, we want readers to feel part of the moment. So, when the character is upset, worried, hopeful, or euphoric, what does this look like? How do they express it through body language, dialogue, vocal cues, thoughts, internal sensations, and actions? 

Showing emotions using the above indicators will help readers imagine what the character feels far better than writing, Billy was sad. Realistic displays of emotion also trigger the reader’s memories of a time they felt the same thing, causing them to empathize with the character and what they’re going through. 

Show, don’t tell isn’t only about emotions, though. In fact, every time we want to share something about a character, place, or event, we should think about what that detail does for the story. How will it further the plot, round out worldbuilding, reveal characterization, reinforce emotion, or involve readers? This is what good showing does, so if the detail doesn’t match any of these, chances are it can be omitted or shared as a bit of telling so we can move on to something more important.  

Strategy #2: POV Filtering & Internal Observations

Another important way we generate emotional impact is to use POV filtering. At any moment in the story, your POV character is feeling certain emotions, is focused on specific goals, and they’ll have personal reasons for their motivations. This means what they notice about their environment, what they say (or hold back) in conversations, and the things they zero in on or dismiss all should come through a filter of emotion and intent.

A fearful character will carefully examine evening shadows around a doorway or near a dumpster whereas a character on a fun night out with her friends will not. A character concerned about loyalty may ask leading questions as a test, but a trusting character will take everything at face value.

POV filtering/deep POV also allows you to share private internal observations, so readers become insiders to what the character truly thinks and feels. 

Strategy #3: Sensory Detail

In the real world, we notice the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures around us. This sensory information helps shape how we feel and allows us to be more immersed and present. In the story, sensory description does the same thing, making readers feel part of the moment and helping to influence what they feel as they read. How?

Well, consider a character standing at the edge of a farmer’s field in the dark, waiting to meet a friend who called and begged for her help. It’s late, cold, and her friend hasn’t showed. Our character is worried, trying to puzzle out what could be wrong, and confused about why she was told to come here of all places. Then there’s a crack of thunder, and rain begins to pelt down.

Describing those cold, painful drops hitting our character’s skin will not just convey discomfort to readers, it increases the sense of urgency and foreboding that something bad has happened. 

Strategy #4: Authentic, Relatable Characters

If we want readers to become emotionally invested, we need to give them someone to care about. Our primary characters should be so well-developed they feel like they’ve walked out of the real world. This can only happen if we take the time to think about who they are, and the needs, motivations, flaws, and fears that make them human.

And speaking of human, that means we want to build characters who make mistakes, screw up, and have regrets. Characters who are not perfect are ones a reader will relate to and get behind. (If you need help building a character top to bottom, give this tool Becca and I designed a try.) 

Strategy #5: Vulnerability

In addition to creating a lifelike character, we need to make sure readers see something that is commonly masked: inner vulnerability. Like real people, certain things will make the character feel insecure, exposed, and weak. Often these things are tied to painful experiences, and their instinct will be to hide their vulnerability, wear emotional armor, and avoid anything (or anyone) that triggers those internal feelings of hurt. (It’s what we all tend to do, after all.) 

But just because our characters have a mask on doesn’t mean these insecurities don’t exist, so find moments where you can show a character’s vulnerability through what they avoid, how they overreact, and if it is a POV character, their innermost thoughts and reflections. Vulnerability is a emotional point of common ground that readers and characters share. 

Strategy #6: Language Choice and Literary Devices

This one isn’t a surprise, but one of the best ways to create emotional impact is with language! Choose specific language that is loaded with meaning and emotion. Sure, we can say a character walked across the room, but did they saunter, limp, weave, or stride? Verbs can hint at how a character is feeling in the moment, their sense of purpose, what’s important to them, who they are deep down, and more.

Figurative language and literary devices like metaphors, similes, alliteration, personification, etc. also can add power, meaning, and help crystalize an image in the reader’s mind so they feel a certain way. 

Strategy #7: Tension, Conflict, and Stakes

When readers care about a character, they won’t want bad things to happen to them. So of course, what will we do? Make sure there’s plenty of obstacles, roadblocks, and adversaries (conflict) on the path to the character’s goal, put something meaningful on the line (personal stakes), and introduce uncertainty over the outcome (tension). This trifecta ensures readers get an emotional ride. 

Strategy #8: Common Ground

I’ve hinted at this throughout, but it generates emotional impact so greatly that it bears repeating—your story should have loads of common ground. It doesn’t matter if the story takes place in a fantastical world, or your character is an assassin fighting zombies, readers should see themselves in the story.

Readers (hopefully) are not assassins nor have experience with zombies, but they do know the toil of a difficult workday, the self-critic that emerges every time a mistake is made, and how empowering it is to have others look up to you. By including everyday human experiences like these, we create a bridge of common ground. Readers feel seen, known, and validated. Emotional impact for the win! 

What’s your favorite strategy for creating emotional impact?  Feel free to share it in the comments!

About Angela

Angela Ackerman is a story coach, international speaker, and co-author of the bestselling book, The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression, and its many sequels. Available in nine languages, her guides are sourced by US universities, recommended by agents and editors, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, and psychologists around the world. To date, this book collection has sold over a million copies. 

Angela is also the co-founder of the popular site Writers Helping Writers®, as well as One Stop for Writers®, a portal to game-changing tools and resources that enable writers to craft powerful fiction. Find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Image Credits

Top image by Mikko Koivuneva from Pixabay, edited by Lynette M. Burrows

Second photo by Richárd Ecsedi on Unsplash

Third image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

by Miffie Seideman

If you’ve been penning stories for any length of time, you’ve already been exposed to countless writing tips. One such tip is “Write what you know.” This well-meaning phrase is not only often misunderstood, but also creates angst and even creative blocks among writers. 

What does “Write what you know” mean? 

“Write what you know” has often been strictly interpreted as a literal directive to develop stories based only on a writer’s personal life. In other words, only write what you have personally lived and experienced. 

Oh, so wrong!

On one hand, this interpretation is very wrong. If we followed that advice, our writing repertoire would be drastically limited (not to mention boring and repetitive). It would mean I’d mostly be writing about training for triathlons or creating primers on properly dosing medication in critically ill patients. And as passionate as I am about these subjects, even I’d be bored writing yet another article on proper swim stroke technique or drug calculations. 

And…so right! 

On the other hand, “Write what you know” is perfectly correct. 

Wait! How can that be? 

Well, it boils down to definition. Importantly, it’s the meaning of the word “know” that needs to be better understood.

What does “know” really mean? 

If you ask someone what they know, after some hesitation, you’ll likely get just a list of basic talents related to work, life, or school. 

I’m a nurse. I know how to bandage wounds, take a temperature, give my patient medications…

Ask them to dig a little deeper and they might begin to uncover a wider array of knowledge. For example, nurses know the suffering of their patients and how to help ease their pain. They know the joy of healing, the grief of loss, etc. 

Encourage them to explore even deeper and the list may grow to include more intimate lessons, such as personal loss, loneliness, fears, desires, wants, disappointments, and so much more. 

Now, we’re getting to what they “know.”

Uncovering emotional truths and lived experiences

What this person has finally delved into are their deepest “lived experiences”, from emotional to physical to mental. And we all have a wealth of them. Some make us happy to recall, others not so much. George R.R. Martin has referred to these lived experiences as the “emotional truth of your own life” and suggests they help writers create more compelling stories and characters. 

So now, when you weave a nurse into your plot, she doesn’t just bandage Mr. Jones’ wound or give him his next dose of chemotherapy. She talks to him, feels for him, worries for him, and tries to support him. She’ll also be comforting his worried family. Later, she may hold his head over a bedpan while he vomits or hold his hand when he’s in pain. 

Now you try it

When I taught pharmacy students how to dose premature neonates in the ICU, they learned much better when I had them apply what I was explaining to them. It’s the same process I incorporated into The Grim Reader—not just explaining how to realistically write a perilous drug scene, but giving the opportunity to practice using exercises in every chapter.

If you’d like to have a working list of your own “knows” when you sit down to craft your next story, try this little exercise to get you started:

• Task-based “knows”:
  • Start a list of some basic, practical tasks or knowledge you’ve learned in order to function in your job, life, or career. Maybe you’re a college student and understand dorm life, cafeteria food, the challenges of noisy roommates, and the stress of studying all night for a test. Or maybe you’re an engineer, or dog groomer, or a housewife. All of these experiences offer a pool of valid “knows” to draw from when writing. 
• Life experiences:
  • Add a second list of non-work-related experiences you’ve had, such as skydiving, riding a horse, or hiking. Maybe sewing your kids’ clothes when they ripped, raising a puppy, giving birth, or breaking your arm.  
• Life Lessons:
  • Add a list of lessons you’ve learned, especially through emotionally impactful events. These can include things that are both good or bad, such as betrayal, loyalty, heartbreak, or hope.
• Raw emotions you intimately know:
  • Finally, add a list of emotions you’ve personally experienced (love, sadness, happiness, grief, etc.)

See how much you know? 

These lists help provide the tools to help you turn a character from a flat 2-dimensional protagonist to one the reader relates to, empathizes with, or even hates. They will also help you take your reader on a memorable adventure. 

What “know” doesn’t mean

It was never intended that “Write what you know” would suggest that you can only write stories involving those lists you just developed. I’m pretty sure George R. R. Martin has never seen real dragons, and yet he’s been able to develop engrossing stories, with deep, rich characters and twisty plots heavily involving these beasts. 

How? 

He didn’t restrict himself to only writing solely based on his own life experiences, but combined them with imagination, some good old-fashioned writing craft, and research. You, too, can write evocative and compelling stories that go beyond your own experiences. 

What not to do when you don’t “know”

All the first-hand knowledge about your emotional truths is not going to help you create an accurate and believable story involving a real event, place, or experience you know nothing about. The worst thing a writer can do at this stage is decide to make the facts up. Yes, imagination is key to writing. But there is a line beyond which your readers will identify you as fake (especially if they know more about the subject than you do). 

For example, a number of movies have scenes involving blatantly incorrect drug effects. From the character that instantly passes out from a chloroform-soaked rag across her face to the victim who dies within seconds of an insulin overdose—these scenes are not real. Fact has been abandoned for dramatic effect. The outcome? The reviews amongst my pharmacist, nurse, and physician co-workers have been unforgiving, saving the rest of us from the need to spend time and money on a poorly written storyline.

These kinds of errors risk pulling today’s savvy readers out of the story you’ve crafted for them. In some cases, this can end up losing readers and generating bad reviews.

Do this instead

What if your character needs to parachute to safety from an airplane, but you’ve never experienced the thrill of the free-fall before you pull your chute? Or you’re planning to have a villain knock out your heroine with a sedative, without ever having felt the effects of that kind of medication yourself? 

A good first step is to begin by making a list of the story elements you need to understand before beginning to write. Then, research, research, research! But be careful. With the internet, there’s not only a world of good information at your fingertips, but also a lot of false information. Vetting your resources will be extremely important. A few places to start include: 

Librarians

Librarians are an often-overlooked valuable resource to find valid references and books on specific subjects, such as skydiving.

Videos and documentaries

Almost any subject can be found researched through online videos. 

Specialist Interviews

Speaking directly to a specialist or someone that has lived the very experience you’re writing about is another way to gain enough knowledge to believably develop your scene. For example, in order to help writers understand the barriers a homeless character would face when seeking addiction treatment, I interviewed medical specialists working with that population, before including that information in The Grim Reader. What an eye opener that was!

Visit the location

If you have the resources, visit the area you’re writing about. Interact with the locals, see how they live, talk, work. But also, realize you’re only seeing an outsider’s viewpoint and consider asking a local resident to beta read your scenes. A less costly option for geographical research can include travel videos. From the magnificent waterfalls in Iguazu to the rock cliff walls of the Grand Canyon, travel videos can offer astounding insight.  

So, should you “Write what you know?”

Yes! But now that you understand this tip is not a restrictive edict, as well as how to apply it, you should feel much more empowered as a writer. 

Did you try the exercise on listing your “knows”? Did you make any discoveries? Has your writing been hampered by the “Write what you know” recommendation in the past? Share your experiences with other writers in the comments. 

About Miffie

Miffie Seideman has been a pharmacist for over 30 years, with a passion for helping others. Her research articles have appeared in professional pharmacy journals. She blended her passion for pharmacy and her love of writing into THE GRIM READER: Putting Your Characters in Peril (A Pharmacist’s Guide For Authors), being published January 16^th, 2024 by Red Lightening Books and Indiana University Press (on X at #ReadRLB and @iupress). She’s represented by Amy Collins with Talcott Notch Literary Services.  

An avid triathlete, Miffie spends countless hours training in the arid deserts of Arizona, devising new plots for her upcoming fantasy love story. She can be found hanging around her website http://GrimReaders.com offering tips to writers and on X @MiffieSeideman…you know…tweeting. Contact her at info@grimreaders.com/ 

Image Credits 

• Twain Quote: Depositphotos
• Dragon/fantasy:  KELLEPICS, Pixabay
• Thinking man: GDJ, Pixabay
• Syringe/needle, Miffie Seideman