Today at Writers In The Storm we’re giving thanks for the “writerly” people and things that help us put words on the page. One of the things we're grateful for are the two new team members -- Lynette Burrows and Lisa Norman -- who have joined the behind-the-scenes team here at WITS. Please join us in welcoming them!
We're also opening the door for our readers! Share your gratitude for writerly things large and small down in the comments.
I am thankful for all the people who have helped shape my writing, occasionally nudging me in another direction to make a clearer, more interesting story.
Many eyes on our work makes all the difference in the world.
In a year that started with loss, I am grateful it was also about friends who stepped up to help.
It has been a year full of new opportunities for blogging, and writing, and writing friends. And I am especially grateful for the honor and delight that is being part of the WITS crew.
Jenny Hansen
I'm giving writerly thanks for TWO things.
First of all, I am deeply grateful to Lynette and Lisa for joining our team. We are a close-knit group behind the scenes here, doing what's required to keep WITS running. It is our honor to do that work, but it is still work. My fellow WITS Warriors amaze me with their energy, their ideas, and their talent.
I am also giving thanks for Melinda Cohan and her team at The Coaches Console for making my day job dreams come true. I am two months from officially launching a LinkedIn Coaching business and it brings up some of the same emotions as a story launch. It's exciting, invigorating, rewarding, AND terrifying.
Here is the quote from Melinda that has kept me moving forward this month.
I'm grateful for rekindling the joy of writing small and trying out short story contests this year! It was fun to write with others doing the same contests, and it reinvigorated my writing.
I'm grateful for the amazing camaraderie of writers from around the world.
Instead of isolation, I've found friendship and connection with fellow writers through NaNoWriMo, Lawson Writer's Academy, and Writers In the Storm. What a wonderful gift this connection is for all of us!
I'm also excited to moderate "It's a Wonderful Writer's Life," the December "advent calendar" of prompts for writers happening at the Lawson Writers Academy. It's going to be so much fun!
We won't be posting here on Friday this week, but we hope you continue to stop by to share your "writerly thanks" with us until we return on Monday.
If you're in the States, we hope you're preparing for a great Thanksgiving. If you're doing NaNoWriMo, we hope your word count is making you happy (or that you at least had fun). And wherever you are on your writing journey, we're thankful that you share your journey with us here at Writers In the Storm. Our readers are the BEST!
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.
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.
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
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?
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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.
