Writers in the Storm

The world is a chorus of pings and alerts, and, for a creative, that noise is more than a distraction—it’s erosion. We spend our days building rich, emotional, sensory worlds for our characters, but we often leave our own souls in a sterile, gray "To-Do" list environment.

If you’ve ever sat down to write and felt your energy vanish before you typed a word, that’s not a lack of talent. It’s probably decision fatigue.

Decision fatigue is a common ailment in our modern world. There are only so many decisions a rational human being can make in one day. Some are common: What am I going to wear today? Coffee or tea? Carbs or protein for breakfast?

Others are more stressful: Which of those emails am I going to answer first? Is that a scam? My favorite software just changed and now I hate it. What am I going to switch to?

When decision fatigue steps in, your nervous system is resisting the weight of the world, not the work of the story.

Building Sanctuary in the Senses

In my own office—my sanctuary—I’ve started surrounding myself with things that ground me: a warm blanket, a fountain, and a wax warmer for lovely scents. I’ve added plants because seeing something grow reminds me that creativity has its own seasons.

When life gets loud, we need breathing room. Not a retreat to a cabin in the woods (although... I wouldn't turn one down), but a "reset" we can trigger in thirty seconds.

The Five-Minute Reset

Try these sensory anchors to tend your spark when the room feels crowded:

• Touch: Keep a "talisman" at your desk. It could be a smooth stone or a favorite figurine. When the inner noise gets too high, hold it. Let your body remember it’s safe.
• Sight: Look for an ember of joy: a shift in the light on the floor or a sentence you wrote that lands "just right." A pet. A picture of a friend. Surround yourself with things that make you smile.
• Sound: Mark the threshold of your writing time with a specific song or the sound of a fountain. It tells your brain: Here, we create.

Play in the Sandbox

We often treat technology and publishing like a final exam: stressful and judgmental. We must succeed or… what? What terrible thing do you imagine happening if you don’t succeed? Or is that just me?

What if we approached our industry as play? Play removes the pressure to succeed and invites discovery. It keeps your creative spark growing because it removes the "test" mentality and replaces it with curiosity.

Your job isn't to save the world today. Your job is to shine in it. When your spark burns steadily, you become a point of clarity in a crowded world.

What is one sensory "anchor" at your desk that helps you feel grounded? If you don't have one, what’s one small thing you could add today to make your space feel like a sanctuary?

About Lisa

Lisa Norman's passion has been writing since she could hold a pencil. While that is a cliché, she is unique in that her first novel was written on gum wrappers. As a young woman, she learned to program and discovered she has a talent for helping people and computers learn to work together and play nice. When she's not hanging out with her family, writing, or teaching, she can be found wandering the local beaches.

Lisa writes as Deleyna Marr and is the owner of No Stress Writing Academy. She also runs Heart Ally Books, LLC, an indie publishing firm.

Interested in learning more from Lisa? Sign up for her newsletter or check out her school, No Stress Writing Academy, where she teaches social media, organization, technical skills, and marketing for authors!

Her next book, The Work of Joy is now available here.

Top image from depositphotos.

by Becca Puglisi

What does your character fear the most? You need to know because that fear will motivate them throughout the story and contribute to their fatal flaw—something they must address if they want to achieve their goal and grow as a character.

You see, when a deep fear or insecurity is triggered, characters instinctively default to a familiar defense mechanism. Usually, this is a knee-jerk response that helps them deflect, control, or avoid emotional pain. Dishonesty, denial, aggression, and isolation are examples of these self-protection measures.

Those behaviors and flaws in response to perceived threats are a kind of emotional shielding that keeps potentially threatening people and situations at a distance. They’re unique to the character’s life and personality, most often arising in the aftermath of a painful experience.

Let’s look at this in action with young Lindsay.

A Character Arc Character Study

Eight-year-old Lindsay was abandoned by her mother at the mall. What she takes from thisawful experience is that the people who say they love you might not, and they could leave you at any time. This makes sense to Lindsay. Her mom did say she loved her, and she was a good mom at times—but at the end of the day, she chose to dump Lindsay without looking back.

So Lindsay goes into foster care, where she encounters more people who don’t care about her, use her for their own reasons, and generally aren’t in her corner. Over the years, this deepens her belief that if you let others get close, they’ll either hurt you or bail when things get too hard.

Her desire to be part of a family is overpowered by her fear of being abandoned again. To protect herself, she behaves in ways that discourage people from engaging. She’s rude, hostile, and emotionally distant. These tendencies are like a porcupine’s quills, warning people to keep away.

Analysis

Lindsay experienced something horrible as a child, and her greatest fear is that it might happen again. So she adopts new traits and behaviors to protect herself. And to a degree, they work, because people can’t abandon her if they’re always kept at arm’s length. The problem with using flaws and unhealthy defense mechanisms for self-protection is that they also block good things: healthy relationships, positive opportunities, and the chance to work through problems constructively and build resilience.

Knowing this information for Lindsay, we see a snapshot of who she is at the start of the story: wanting to be loved and belong but isolated, fear-driven, and unable to trust. And as her fear becomes more entrenched over time, her emotional shielding also deepens, creating new problems in her current story.

Lindsay’s hostility keeps people away, and this suits her just fine. But as she gets older, it starts being an issue—like when she mouthed off to the corner store owner when he didn’t give her a job, and she ruined any future opportunities there.

In her late teens, she’s placed with a new family that seems to truly care and isn’t scared off by her tough-girl attitude. Their daughter is her age, and for the first time Lindsay has someone to talk to and hang out with. But when the family brings up adoption, Lindsay’s fear of abandonment is triggered because the only family she’s ever had took off.

Her hostility rises as it always does when she feels threatened—and if she lets it out, it could stop the adoption in its tracks. Is that what she really wants?

Analysis

This is a crossroads moment for Lindsay. She’s become aware of both her fear and how her behavior is limiting her. To achieve her goal of belonging to a family, she needs to heal from her pain of being abandoned, and the opportunity is right here. It terrifies her, but she wants to find a family who loves her. To do that, she must 1) fight her fear instead of being ruled by it and 2) overcome her fatal flaw.

The Two Parts of a Fatal Flaw

In fiction, a character’s fatal flaw is the central internal obstacle they must overcome to reach their goal. It has two parts: a behavioral component—something they do—and a cognitive component—something they believe, also known as a false belief.

Lindsay’s fatal flaw is her hostility (behavioral) combined with the idea that letting people in leads to hurt (cognitive). If she doesn’t challenge both, her fate will be sealed and any hope of being part of a family will go up in smoke. But why would she reject her fatal flaw when it’s helped her feel safe for so long?

Growth can only happen when the character recognizes that her defensive behavior is keeping her stuck. What’s causing Lindsay’s hostility? Her fear of abandonment. By recognizing how much power her fear holds over her life, she takes the first step toward subduing it.

Newly aware of fear’s stranglehold, Lindsay challenges herself to see past the fear and view her life objectively. Her foster family’s unconditional love has created opportunities for Lindsay to be herself. She remembers moments when she let her guard down and nothing bad happened. When she spoke her mind, she wasn’t kicked out. Without fear obscuring her view, she now sees that putting herself out there emotionally doesn’t always result in harm.

Analysis

A new belief takes hold: Lindsay needs people, and vulnerability is a necessary part of achieving that end. It’s a risk worth taking. With this new perspective, she sees that her hostility is standing in the way of what she wants, and she can take steps to respond differently when she feels threatened, letting people in instead of keeping them out.

Backstory Elements You Need to Know

This is a character study of a change arc in action. To win in the story, the protagonist must face their fear, challenge their false belief, and replace the behavioral aspect of the fatal flaw with productive habits. This isn’t easy. It means embracing vulnerability for the hope of something better, and only someone truly committed to change can achieve it.

It also requires you, as the author, to know exactly what your character must overcome so you can provide the opportunities for growth that will enable them to succeed (or fail, if you’re writing a tragedy). To get there, you’ll want to identify the following backstory elements of your character’s arc:

• Their wounding event
• The specific fear it spawns
• The lie they believe about themselves or others (it explains, in their mind, why the wounding event happened)
• Their shielding behaviors and traits they adopt to protect themselves from experiencing the same trauma again
• Their fatal flaw: the cognitive aspect (the lie) plus the behavioral aspect (their go-to trait or behavior meant to protect them). Your character will have adopted many shielding behaviors in the wake of their trauma, but one of them should rise to the top as their default response that protects them when they’re threatened while keeping them from getting what they want the most.

Armed with this information, you’ll have a good idea who your character is on page one, how fear will drive them, and the fatal flaw they’ll have to address by the end. And you can build a story that will get them exactly where you want them to go.

For more information about the fatal flaw, fear’s role in character arc, and how it contributes to your story, check out The Fear Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to What Holds Characters Back.

Do you create your character’s backstory to help identify their fatal flaw? What character flaws do you tend to use? Is there a character with a specific fatal flaw that sticks with you?

* * * * * *

About Becca

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and best-selling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and other resources for writers. Her books have sold over 1.4 million copies and are available in multiple languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online resource for authors that's home to the Character Builder and Storyteller's Roadmap tools.

Top Image by John Hain from Pixabay

by Jenny Hansen

I had a great conversation recently with a writer who said something profound: “I understand writing craft…but I don’t know how to connect it to ME for marketing.”

How honest is that? And why don’t more writers talk about this?

The truth is that every time a reader picks up your books, they’re not just deciding whether to read your book. They’re also deciding whether to trust you as a storyteller.

That decision doesn’t come from your plot alone. It comes from what I call “the story behind the story.”

The Shift Many Writers Haven’t Made Yet

We tend to laser-focus in on the goal of writing a great book. That’s a valid goal. No book, no writing career. But once we’ve written a great book (or two or twenty), our long-range goal is to keep readers coming back, book after book

To get this kind of loyalty requires something deeper.

Readers need to feel things like this:

• “This author gets me.”
• “I feel like I know them.”
• “I trust them.”
• “I know what I’m going to feel when I read their books.”

Let’s put this into "NYT Bestseller List perspective":

• In The Hunger Games, readers don’t just follow Katniss. They read the books and watch the movies for stories about survival, sacrifice, and moral courage.
• In Charlotte's Web, we’re tuned in to see how Wilbur gets saved, and what happens to Charlotte. We’re drawn along by friendship, purpose, and what it means to matter.

Different genres. Different themes. But the same kind of reason why we stay: we trust these authors to take us on a journey. We trust their intentions.

Your Core Story: The WHY Behind Everything You Write

Your Core Story answers a not-so-simple question: “WHY do you write these kinds of stories?”

And I’m not talking about the surface “why.” I’m talking about the real why that drives you to write a book or a series.

Maybe you write:

• Stories where justice wins
• Stories that explore identity and belonging
• Stories that find humor in chaos
• Stories that eradicate shame

Your Core Story becomes the emotional throughline across your work. Your books will often change, but your Core Story doesn’t.

It’s why readers follow YOU, not just your books.

Bestselling Author Core Story Examples

(And yes, I browsed the internet for great examples and picked some favorites.)

1. Suzanne Collins

Core Stories: Exploring the emotional cost of survival, and what it means to stay human in inhumane systems.

How this shows up:

• The Hunger Games series is about survival vs compassion
• She also writes about power structures, sacrifice, moral choice

2. Stephen King

King doesn’t just write “horror,” he writes about what happens when people confront fear.

Core Story: Ordinary people are forced to confront extraordinary darkness (in themselves and externally).

How it shows up:

• It → fear, trauma, childhood vs adulthood
• The Shining → isolation, inner demons

3. Colleen Hoover

Hoover doesn’t just write romance. She writes about where love and self-worth collide, and how that struggle plays out.

Core Story: Love is powerful, but it must never come at the cost of self-worth.

Note: Hoover was a social worker before she was an author. Her Core Story reflects her prior career.

How it shows up:

• It Ends with Us → love vs self-respect
• The characters of that story are forced to choose themselves

4. John Grisham

Core Story: Justice is fragile. Grisham’s characters must decide whether they’re willing to fight for it.

He writes about what it costs to stand for what’s right.

How it shows up:

• The Firm → integrity vs corruption
• A Time to Kill → moral justice vs legal system

5. Kristin Hannah

Core Story: Ordinary women are capable of extraordinary strength in impossible circumstances.

She writes about strength, not just survival.

How it shows up:

• The Nightingale → courage in war
• The Four Winds (and The Great Alone) → resilience in hardship

6. Fredrik Backman

Core Story: Broken people are still worthy of love, belonging, and redemption.

He writes about the humanity underneath behavior.

How it shows up:

• A Man Called Ove → grief, connection
• Anxious People → humanity, empathy

All of these authors are very distinct. Readers may come to their books for the plot, but they stay for the pattern.

Quick summary of the above

Let’s zoom out from these authors’ individual books to their Core Stories:

1. Suzanne Collins → survival + humanity
2. Stephen King → fear and human darkness
3. Colleen Hoover → love + self-worth
4. John Grisham → justice vs corruption
5. Kristin Hannah → resilience + the strength of ordinary women
6. Fredrik Backman → broken people + belonging

They have different genres and different audiences, but each author is exploring a very similar emotional truth across their body of work.

How do you identify YOUR Core Story?

Here are a few questions you can ask.

• What emotional truth repeatedly shows up in my writing?
• What do I care deeply about exploring?

 “Core Story” is more than “theme.”

Different books have different themes. But the Core Story is typically something that will show up across multiple books, woven in alongside plot and theme and character. (Once you see your Core Story, you can't un-see it.)

One last question: If someone read ALL your work, what do you think they'd see as your Core Story?

Look for Your “Throughline”

There is absolutely a throughline to your work, and you should know what it is. Instead of asking, “What’s this book about?” ask: “What connects everything I write?”

That throughline is:

• Your brand.
• Your voice.
• The topics you care so deeply about that they show up book to book to book.

These are part of your Story DNA at the author level.

Final Thought

I’ve often told my non-writing friends, “I just want to entertain people with my stories.” And I mean that.

But underneath that surface answer, I’m driven by deeper things.

• A need for clarity: of feelings and communication.
• A desire to lift people up and help them feel seen.
• To speak the hard-to-speak-about things.

There is always a deeper reason behind your work. That’s what “the story behind the story” actually is.

When you understand it, everything changes. Not just how you market, but how you write.

Have you defined your Core Story yet? If so, would you share it with us in the comments? If not, feel free to ask me any questions you have!

About Jenny

By day, Jenny Hansen provides brand storytelling, LinkedIn coaching, and copywriting for accountants and financial services firms. By night, she writes humor, memoir, women’s fiction, and short stories. After 20+ years as a corporate trainer, she’s delighted to sit down while she works.

Find Jenny here at Writers In the Storm, or online on Facebook or Instagram.

Top photo purchased from Depositphotos and edited in Canva.