Writers in the Storm

by Tiffany Yates Martin

Writing is a career where it can feel that there are so many outside forces standing between you and your goals: work or home commitments that may keep us from your writing time; the agents or publishers who stand at the gates of career “success”; the booksellers or reviewers we need to help us reach readers.

But often the most formidable foe of our writing lies within ourselves.

I like to refer to these internal antagonists as the demons, and I used to think I was alone in all too frequently entertaining a panel of them: those insidious internal voices that instilled me with self-doubt.

But at a recent writer's retreat where each evening we held group discussions about a variety of writing-related topics, one night nearly 45 attendees showed up eager to talk about their demons—a subject brought up literally by popular demand.

It turns out most of us seem to suffer from some sort of demons: impostor syndrome, fear of failure, procrastination, comparison, or a host of others.

What Are These Demons?

Personal demons aren’t confined to our creative efforts—they may assail us in the workplace as we doubt our ability or efficacy, or at home, as we worry we’re failing as a parent or partner, or in the mirror, as we compare ourselves to the artificial standards held up by models and celebrities and social media.

But I think that they’re especially rampant among creatives.

Examples of Authors Battling Their Demons

• Recently an author whose debut novel has won a dozen awards posted about self-doubt and feelings of comparison with other authors’ careers as they work on their second novel.
• Another author, whose last book has remained in the rarefied air at the top of the Amazon charts since its release, garnering more than five thousand reviews and a 4.5 rating, castigated themselves during the editing process on their follow-up novel for the amount of revisions the story entailed—wondering why they didn’t “know better” by now.
• An author who has had more than half a dozen well-received and popular published novels lost their publisher and worried that no other pub house would ever want to publish them.

These are demons I’ve witnessed recently among highly accomplished authors considered successful by most metrics. Among authors who haven’t yet achieved certain career milestones, the demons can grow even louder and more aggressive: “What makes you think you can write?” “You’ll never finish/get an agent/get published.” “You don’t have what it takes.”

And worse. Horrible personal judgments and attacks we’d never dream of saying to someone we cared about—or even to a stranger. Yet we batter ourselves from the inside with such negative, hurtful, destructive messages—we who should always be our own greatest champion, the one person we can count on for support no matter what.

Our various demons may be different, but they have two things in common: they all have at their root some version of “not good enough,” and they keep us from fully stretching our wings to see what we can do and reveling in our own achievements.

4 Steps to Wrangling the Demons

The difficult truth is, your demons will likely never be vanquished or banished. They are part of you—yours forever.

So how can we learn to overcome those negative messages our demons whisper in our ears to free ourselves to achieve our full potential—not just as writers, but in all walks of our lives?

First off, in the middle of an acute attack, the most important thing to do is to stop it immediately. The longer you let those automatic erroneous messages play on in your head, the more they gain steam and the more destruction they can do.

Call a positive, supportive friend or loved one who always makes you laugh. Go see a movie. Go for a hike in nature with your dogs.

Don’t wrangle the demons or try to reason them away—it’s almost impossible to do that in the middle of one of their attacks anyway. Just silence or ignore those voices in whatever way you can. Do not entertain their messages for one second.

Once the storm passes—and it will—it’s time to address them head-on.

Identify your demons:

• Chances are excellent that your demons are always the same: mine are impostor syndrome, perfectionism, and comparison. Think about the commonalities in your bouts of self-doubt and see if you can put a name to yours. Before you can deal with your antagonist, you have to identify them.

Find the patterns:

• Trace back what was happening in your life at the time the demons attacked. I’ve learned that when things are going extremely well for my career, my impostor syndrome demons come swarming out of their cave to shoot me down. When I find myself stuck—whether in creating a new workshop or course, writing an article on craft, or working on my own writing—often it’s the perfectionism or comparison demons gleefully holding me back.

Knowing the triggers allows you to get a handle on the demons before they run rampant over your psyche.

Take control:

• Your demons actually came into existence to protect you in response to some inner wound—just like your characters’ vulnerabilities and fears stemmed from theirs. Their messages are intended to keep you from feeling pain—but they’ve never matured past their childish misinterpretations of what caused it, and their delusions come from irrational fear.

Luckily you have become an adult. You can reassure those demons that all is well and you have things under control, just as you would with a child scared of monsters.

This not only defuses their power, but it lets you even learn to love the demons a little, to be grateful to them for trying, in their limited understanding, to keep you safe.

And then hit them with a big dose of reality.

To paraphrase The Martian, logic the shit out of it:

• When I have impostor syndrome, for instance, I remind myself that I’ve been in the publishing business for thirty years and have worked on literally thousands of manuscripts. I’m not putting anything over on anyone--I legitimately have this knowledge and am simply looking to share it.

When your demons tell you that maybe you don’t have the chops to succeed, remind yourself of evidence to the contrary, or that growth is a normal part of mastering any skill, or that this is as mercurial a business as any on earth and rejection isn’t necessarily a reflection of your or your work’s merits. Reaffirm that success doesn’t come from external definitions, but only from your own. That you aren’t in competition with anyone else. And that you’re a writer because you write.

The most important thing to remember—over and over again—is that these automatic messages are false, simply maladaptations to emotional pain that have been allowed free rein for so long, they’ve convinced you that they are the truth about you.

They are not.

Take yourself seriously—as a person, as a writer, as an artist. You are all these things, and you have nothing to prove to anyone, even your demons. Even yourself.

When do you find that your demons are most likely to attack your writer journey? What tips do you use to defend yourself from the internal writer blocks we all face? Share with our readers below.

About Tiffany

Tiffany Yates Martin has spent nearly thirty years as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling and award-winning authors as well as indie and newer writers, and is the founder of FoxPrint Editorial and author of the bestseller IntuitiveEditing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing. Under the pen name Phoebe Fox, she's the author of six novels, including the recently released The Way We Weren't(Berkley). Visit her at www.foxprinteditorial.comor www.phoebefoxauthor.com.

Top Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

by Ellen Buikema

Great writers make their stories authentic by allowing us to experience what their characters hear, see, smell, taste, and touch—capturing the senses so we are fully involved. Adding sensory details about smell into your writing creates a stronger story bond for your reader.

Scent memory is potent.

Memories fade as time passes, but a faint whiff of a loved one’s perfume can send your mind’s eye smack into a scene from a forgotten past. Sense of smell is a person’s most robust sense. You can be in a familiar place with a blindfold on and your nose will let you know where you are.

• The sense of smell is more closely linked with memory than any other sense.
• It brings emotions to mind. We are attracted to each other by smell.
• It helps us survive. A foul smell warns us of danger, like when we smell food gone bad or smoke choking the air.

Sensory unit in the classroom.

I introduced my young students to lessons on the five senses. For the sense of smell, I used those old black plastic film canisters with tiny holes poked in the lid so there was no way for the students to peek at what they were going to smell.

Every canister was labeled with a number. Each child checked out the canisters one at a time to avoid copycatting. Their answers were noted and discussed later during circle time. I enjoyed watching their facial expressions during whiffs. Everyone smiled at the cinnamon oil.

One child smelled my neck and said, “You smell like my auntie. I don’t know why.” Must have been the cocoa butter.

Writers can use the sense of smell to show a character’s background or to move a plot forward.

Say your main protagonist is a child in an orphanage trying to come up with a way to run away from her situation. A fire breaks out somewhere in the building. She smells smoke, alerts whomever she can to the danger (she is a good-hearted character). Recognizing her chance to leave in the chaos, she grabs her belongings and runs, thereby moving the story forward.

Ways to develop a sense of smell in writing.

Smelling danger

Our brains are wired in a way that makes us hyper-alert to unfamiliar sensory information, including smells. If you want to unsettle you characters, add in rotting, chemically, goosebump raising smells into your story.

Practice:

• After spending time indoors, step outside for a bit to be in a different environment.
  • Our sense of smell adjusts and after a while there are scents you won’t notice.
• Walk back inside and take note of what you smell.
• Open up the refrigerator. Do you have a science experiment brewing in the rotter? (In our house that’s the drawer where food is forgotten and goes to die.)
• Think about how certain smells, known and unknown, might help to define your characters.
• Write a paragraph about the smells your character loves and hates.

Smelling recall of another time, person, or place

Smells can cause flashbacks to warm, wonderful times or a place of horror. The same smell can bring joy or pain dependent upon the individuals experience at the time they were exposed to that particular odor.

Some people love the smell of lilies. I cannot stand them. To me they reek of death. I don’t know why, and probably would need hypnosis therapy to figure it out.

Practice:

• In your mind, revisit different times in your life.
  • Your best friend’s house from childhood
  • Family homes
  • School
  • Library
  • Movie theaters, drive-in and indoors
• What smells do you associate with those places in time? What emotions?
• Write a paragraph about the odors and try to call to mind the emotion without calling it by a specific name.

Many authors use sensory writing well.

The following quotes are from writers who use the sense of smell effectively.

“The smell of a grow room is the scent of transpiration, of fecund exertion. It’s the trapped sweat of a high school locker room, the funk of a hockey jersey steaming on a radiator.” Bruce Barcott, Weed the People

“We moved on the Tuesday before Labor Day. I knew what the weather was like the second I got up. I knew because I caught my mother sniffing under her arms. She always does that when it’s hot and humid, to make sure her deodorant’s working. I don’t use deodorant yet. I don’t think people start to smell bad until they’re at least twelve. So I’ve still got a few months to go.” Judy Blume, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

“Chili dogs, funnel cakes, fried bread, majorly greasy pizza, candy apples, ye gods. Evil food smells amazing -- which is either proof that there is a Satan or some equivalent out there, or that the Almighty doesn't actually want everyone to eat organic tofu all the time. I can't decide.” Jim Butcher, Side Jobs: Stories from the Dresden Files

“I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark.” — Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“So when I closed my eyes, when I drifted into a half dream and found myself in that underpass, I may have been able to feel the cold and smell the rank, stale air, I may have been able to see a figure walking towards me, spitting rage, fist raised, but it wasn’t true.” Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crust crumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” James Joyce, Ulysses

"After a while, I stretched out on one of the benches and closed my eyes. The kerosene smelled like lacquer, and I kept feeling waves of nausea. My bones were cold. I could isolate the icy scent of pine trees that sneaked through the walls. Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks." Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually), Thoughts on Faith

“…ripe piss, ancient cabbage, dead and rotting rat — was on Danny's skin, in his hair, in the fibers of his suit; Varian inhaled that scent like a penance.” Julie Orringer, The Flight Portfolio

“There is little difference between the Zulu warrior who smeared his body with Lion’s fat and the modern woman who dabs hers with expensive perfume. The one was trying to acquire the courage of the king of beasts, the other is attempting to acquire the irresistible sexuality of flowers. The underlying principle is the same.” Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

Other Links we love:

• Here are some Fun Smelly Facts.
• Check out 30 of the Best Words to Describe Smell in Your Writing.

If you want to make your readers feel what you’re describing, use the power of scent. Understanding how compelling the sense of smell can be, use it to entice your reader.

What sense do you use when writing? What writers do well with sensory writing? Do you have any examples you’d like to share?

* * * * * *

About Ellen

Author, speaker, and former teacher, Ellen L. Buikema has written non-fiction for parents and a series of chapter books for children with stories encouraging the development of empathy—sprinkling humor wherever possible. Her Works In Progress are, The Hobo Code, YA historical fiction and Crystal Memories, YA fantasy.

Find her at http://ellenbuikema.com or on Amazon.

Top Image Photo by samer daboul from Pexels

by Lynette M. Burrows

Many writers spend days, weeks, months, even years creating characters using complex character profile worksheets. The best characters aren’t a collection of data points on a worksheet. Depending upon data points like the genre, physical attributes, favorite desert, or what he’s wearing may disrupt story flow even to the point of what many call writer’s block. Not that those data points are unimportant, but focusing on the lies, secrets, and scars of your characters will give your stories power. That emotional journey ties everything together into a book your readers can’t put down.

The Why

Lisa Cron calls it your character’s misbelief. KM Weiland calls it your character’s lie. Brandilyn Collins calls it inner values. And Donald Maass says it’s how we get readers to make their own emotional journey. What are they talking about?

Most people have morals, values, or other belief systems that guide them in their choices. It’s the reason they choose B over A when A and B are equal. Call it an inner guidance system. Most of us don’t think about it much, it just is.

When we read a story or watch a film, we connect with characters whose inner guidance system is like ours. Choices the character makes, and the possibilities rejected by that character, fascinate us. The more we wonder, “would I have done that” and “what’s he going to do now,” the more we are hooked.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll call that inner guidance “value,” from now on.

Keep the Train Moving

Lisa Cron calls those values the story’s third rail. In an electric railroad system, the third rail is the rail that supplies the power. It keeps the train moving.

Example

Your character is a nurse who believes other people’s needs are greater than his own. He skips lunch to take care of a patient’s needs. He doesn’t leave at the end of his shift until another nurse arrives to care for his patients, and he stops to help a panhandler who looks ill.

Each of those situations shows his positive value. So far, so good. The lie he tells himself is that he’s fine. He can do with skipping a meal, or less sleep, or less money. That his needs aren’t important.

Loss of Power to the Train

If you haven’t created your character’s values or you aren’t consistently expressing those values, your story runs out of power.

Example

Two patients share a single room. One patient is a famous singer, the other had emergency surgery last night and is in a lot of pain. Your nurse notices the singer has lots of boisterous visitors and the surgery patient cannot rest. The nurse keeps walking because it’s lunchtime. And he's broken the reader's suspension of disbelief.

That’s a full stop of the story and maybe your reader’s interest.

A story needs to run down a track toward and ending, but there also needs to be a push and pull.

More Than One Value

There is a direct correlation between a character’s values and emotions. And it’s not only one emotion or value your character needs. The character also needs a value that prohibits him from reaching his goal. Otherwise, why has he not been able to reach his goal before the story starts? This is where the fullness of your story’s power comes from.

Two incompatible (not necessarily opposite) values drive your character. This ensures that he will struggle to get to his goal. It’s why he hasn’t reached this goal prior to the story start. These conflicting values provide him with a struggle without external antagonists.

Example

Your nurse believes marriage is a sacred trust that must be unbroken. And he has a wife who is ready to divorce him because he’s always working extra and never has time for her. Now, his values are in conflict. His wife needs more of his time and so do his patients.

How can he reconcile those two sets of needs? This story will be about how he decides which value he can break and which one he cannot.

Your Character’s Lies, Secrets, and Scars

The why behind your character’s lies, secrets, and scars is important. It’s the backstory that supports the lie or secret or scar (emotional, not necessarily physical). Your reader doesn’t need to know the whole backstory, but you do. If you understand why your character will believe one thing to the point of making choices that are self-destructive, you will empower your story.

Example

As a child, your nurse may have witnessed his father’s deep devotion to his dying mother. That's a scar. He could have been further traumatized by his father’s total collapse after the mother’s death.

His father’s collapse and need to be institutionalized is your nurse’s secret, his shame. His lie to himself is that he fears he will suffer the same fate if his wife divorces him. That lie might force him to make decisions that go against his belief that his patients’ needs come before his.

I’ve tied his lies, secrets, and scars all together in this example, but your character can be more complex with separate reasons behind his lies, secrets, and scars.

The Relationship between Value and Theme

As a person, you may not think much about your values. As a writer, the more you use those values in your main characters, the more powerful your story becomes. This increased power is especially true if you use your characters’ values to sharpen the point of your story, your story’s theme.

Let’s say your theme is community good is greater than personal good. Your character’s overt value can be the same or a variation of that. Your nurse’s value that other people’s needs are greater than his own fits nicely in this theme.

Example

Forgive me, but I’m going to use the easy target, a pandemic. Your nurse’s supervisor is asking him to work extra because some of his co-workers are sick. His wife is asking him to go to her parent’s mountain retreat with her. If he doesn’t go, she’ll consider the marriage over.

Based on his previous choices and lessons he’s learned, his decision will be to work for the community good (your theme). His wife serves him the divorce papers she’d already had drawn up before she leaves. He learns he’s strong enough to let go of her, that caring for his community makes him strong, and you can end your story there. Or you can add a little twist that he’s beginning a new relationship with a co-worker whose values are the same.

Note

Don’t tell your reader about the alignment of your character’s values and your story’s theme. Just like the train conductor collects your ticket without discussing the function of the third rail, your character’s decisions and actions reveal his values.

Test His Values in Every Scene

How and why your character overcomes his struggle is why we read.

We humans live every day with lies, secrets and scars. On at least a subconscious level, we read to find ways to make it through our personal struggles. So the more you put his value to the test in every scene, the more you hopelessly hook your reader.

Let your reader feel the struggle your character feels, see it from his eyes. Test him in ways that will surprise and thrill your reader. They will love you for it.

Still Not Convinced?

Look at the three character's images on this post. What impressions do you have of them? They aren’t the same, are they? Yes, we chose these images for the greatest contrast. But the difference between each of these characters is more than just the clothes or setting. We humans make judgments about what other people value. You probably have a few ideas about what lies, secrets, and scars those three have.

It’s their lies, secrets and scars that make them individuals. And in the story world, those values keep those characters moving toward an inevitable clash. A clash you, the writer, can use to hook your readers to the very last page.

Have you created a character from his lies, secrets, or scars? How did that move your story forward? If you haven't tried this method of character building before, will you try it now?

About Lynette

Lynette M. Burrows loves hot coffee, reading physical books, and the crack of a 9mm pistol—not all at the same time, though they all show up in her stories. She writes thrilling science fiction readers can't put down.

Her series, The Fellowship Dystopia, presents a frightening familiar American tyranny that never was but could be. In Book One, My Soul to Keep, Miranda discovers dark family secrets, the brutality of the Fellowship way of life, and the deadly reality of rebellion. In Fellowship, the series companion novel, a desperate young man and his siblings hide in the mountains from the government agents who Took their parents. Book two of the series, If I Should Die, will be published in 2022.

Owned by two Yorkshire Terriers, Lynette lives in the land of Oz. You can find her online at her website, on Facebook, or on Twitter.

Top Photo by Balazs Busznyak on Unsplash

Second Photo by  Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Third Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

Last Photo by Ayo Ogunseinde on Unsplash