I think we can all agree the last year and a half has had a profound effect on everyone. As writers, it’s safe to say we’ve all been changed in some way or another. I can tell you that in the last eighteen months my creativity, as well as my mental health, have taken quite a beating. My normal writing processes have been completely derailed, leaving me wandering through my drought-stricken imagination, searching for any trickle of inspiration.
So, now that things are opening up, how do we pull out of the funk and get the creativity flowing again? Here are a few ideas that seem to work for me.
Get Outside
I know it sounds simple and that’s because it is. I’ve been staring at the same walls for so long I know every cobweb in every corner of my office, so a change of scenery works wonders. I never thought of taking the dog for a walk and breathing some different air for a few minutes could make such a difference, but when I’ve been in isolation for so long, it’s a game changer. Listening to the sounds of outside life and trying to describe the tree, flower, or bug I just came across is a good mental exercise that gets the brain cells chugging along again.
Go for a Drive
When I say go for a drive, I’m not talking about running errands or getting the shopping done for the week. I just fill the gas tank and drive aimlessly. I might take that road I’ve always wondered about but never turned onto before, or slow down and really look at the places I pass every day but haven’t paid much attention to. If I see a house that catches my eye, I might make up a story about the family who lives there, or maybe someone who died and now haunts it.
I’m also lucky enough to have a vehicle that allows me to get off the road and explore the deserts and mountains near my home. Ghost towns, old mines, and long abandoned structures offer loads of inspiration.
Recover Lost Routines
When everything shut down, a lot of things got messed up. Familiar routines were disrupted and the places we escaped to had limited access or shut down completely. We lost our comfort zones. I had certain pubs I would write in because the character of the location (as well as the people) inspired me. Returning to those places has opened doors in my brain that were slammed closed during the lockdown.
I’ve also been able to return to the Musical Instrument Museum where I volunteer, and it’s done a lot to get me inspired again. Every piece in every display has a story, as do most of the patrons I have the opportunity to interact with.
Call an Old Friend
This one is a biggie. Reconnecting face to face with people again has helped my mental state. While I’ve enjoyed the time spent on video conferencing and chatting over social media, there’s nothing that recharges my soul like catching up in person. We’ve all got that one friend we lost touch with (maybe even before Covid) that always brightened our day when we sat down and caught up. It’s time to look them up, invite them out, and spend a few hours laughing, crying, and just reminiscing.
Do Something Just for You
This one might sound a little selfish when you have family and friends who have suffered as well, but self-care is important. If you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t be doing them any good either. Rediscover that one thing that made you happy before all this pandemic stuff. It doesn’t matter if it’s something no one else in your circle enjoys doing—do it for yourself.
I help take care of my spouse, my in-laws, a few outlaws, and any other strays that might happen by. When it all gets to be too much, I escape and sneak out to the antique mall (thank God it’s open again). It’s my happy place that I don’t have to share with anyone else. I find things that remind me of my childhood and go on treasure hunts for whatever inspires me that day (usually old cast iron skillets).
Some Final Thoughts
There’s no doubt the world has changed and will never completely return to life as we knew it, so we have to adjust. In truth, the world never stops changing from the time we’re born until we draw our last breath, so we’re used to adjusting to whatever comes next. Things just happened a lot faster this time. My best advice is to slow down, take a deep breath, and give your brain a chance to catch up.
What impact has the last year and a half had on your creativity and productivity? What have you found helps you deal with the changes? Let us know in the comments!
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About Eldred
Eldred Bird writes contemporary fiction, short stories, and personal essays. He has spent a great deal of time exploring the deserts, forests, and deep canyons inside his home state of Arizona. His James McCarthy adventures, Killing Karma, Catching Karma, and Cold Karma, reflect this love of the Grand Canyon State even as his character solves mysteries amidst danger. Eldred explores the boundaries of short fiction in his stories, The Waking Room, Treble in Paradise: A Tale of Sax and Violins, and The Smell of Fear.
When he’s not writing, Eldred spends time cycling, hiking and juggling (yes, juggling…bowling balls and 21-inch knives). His passion for photography allows him to record his travels. He can be found on Twitter or Facebook, or at his website.
I just watched a video by one of my favorite motivational speakers, Simon Sinek, where he states: "There is a big difference between 'falling' and 'failing.'"
How powerful is that? So many authors suffer terrible anxiety over their fear of failure. "Failure" often sounds so very catastrophic. What if we changed our language and called it "falling" instead? Maybe falling down is normal. Maybe it is okay.
The video, which is only two and a half minutes, was an a-ha moment for me.
https://youtu.be/TTMiILxqBSc
A look at how to reframe failure
Failure’s got such a crappy reputation because it makes most people feel bad. No one likes to feel painful emotions. According to this wonderful article at VeryWell Mind, there are several practices that can help take the sting out of a perceived failure.
1. Embrace Your Emotions
Uncomfortable emotions like embarrassment, anxiety, anger, sadness, and shame are hard to manage. This article offers the thought that “allowing yourself to feel the emotions is motivating. It can help you work harder to find better solutions so that you’ll improve next time.”
2. Recognize Unhealthy Attempts to Reduce Pain
Minimizing pain doesn’t make it go away. Distractions and escapism just kick the pain down the road.
3. Learn and Practice Healthy Coping Skills
Call a friend, play with a pet, or practice positive self-care like exercise, meditation, or a quiet bubble bath. These are all healthy ways to deal with pain. Find what works for you.
4. Acknowledge Irrational Beliefs About Failure
Does anyone else have those irrational beliefs about failure? That crazy head tape is the worst part of growing up with a narcissist – they say it to you first, then you then say it to yourself.
Ugh.
It took me years to stop the internal monologue that says failure means you’re “bad” or unlikable or that you’ll never succeed. Being able to reframe failure was such a relief.
Examples of more realistic thoughts:
I can try again tomorrow.
It's okay to fail sometimes.
I can handle this.
I can learn from this.
Failure is a sign that I’m challenging myself to do something difficult.
5. Accept Responsibility for ONLY Your Part
Many of those irrational failure monologues encourage us to take responsibility for a bunch of crap that’s not our fault. In simpler terms: you’re only responsible for cleaning up your own side of the street.
6. Revel in Your Good Company
Lots of people fall down. Thomas Edison and Walt Disney are two of the most famous. Jack London’s Call of the Wild was rejected more than 900 times. We are in a business with an enormous “failure rate.” Remember, you only need one person to say "yes" to set you on your path to success.
7. Create a Plan and Don’t Dwell
When you fall down, get up. Very few great plans are made from the fetal position.
You can always make a plan once you’ve forced yourself to get up, to stop dwelling on what didn’t go right. Great plans come from focusing on what you will do, and especially what you will do differently. Step one is always to pick yourself up after you fail. Check yourself for actual and metaphorical bruises. Apply "ice" to those wounds in the form of the suggestions in #3 above.
The Most Self-Destructive Behavior
A word on the most self-destructive behavior I've watched us creative types engage in: comparison. Worrying about someone else's strategy or success is crazy-making. (And a guaranteed way to help you down the path to perceived failure.)
I love Laura Drake's "Writer Pep Talk," which is perfect for this situation. It's short and it's simple:
"No one gets it all."
Say it slow with me now.
No. One. Gets. It. All.
She said that to me for years before my head cleared enough to hear her. I was a struggling young mother and it was a vast relief to let some of my perfectionist burdens slide off my aching shoulders.
It's a simple, logical fact that most of us are truly great at only a few things. And maybe not so great at other things. Some of us are great at writing dialogue and terrible at writing body language. (*raises hand*) Some people have great discipline, but no ideas. Others can write short but not long. Some writers struggle with storytelling or world-building or grammar. But no one gets it all.
So why do so many writers believe they have to be good at everything or they are failures?
My Young Epiphany
Laura's advice helped Baby Writer Me keep going. Accepting that "no one gets it all" allowed me to imagine creative ways I could acquire more than I had, especially as a new mother. Maybe I could share the load...let someone see the first draft...hire a housecleaner or a virtual assistant.
I began to think that maybe that most hideous of all "S-words" (should) could go suck an egg.
I realized I could fall down, without feeling like my world would fall down around me.
A Novel Idea (pun intended)
I'm sharing Sinek's advice so I'm not the only one following this road to a better mindset. His advice, "to grow our own strengths, rather than be intimidated by the strengths of others," is so powerful for writers. (Plus, I always share the good stuff with my peeps here at WITS.)
I'm proposing we take failure out of the equation, and simply called it "falling." That we embrace the belief that we can always get back up and try again, maybe with a friend or fellow writer who can give us the encouragement we need.
I'm proposing that it's okay to fall down.
What are your thoughts on "failing" vs "falling down?" Do you struggle with any of this? Please share your thoughts with us down in the comments!
About Jenny
By day, Jenny provides corporate communications and LinkedIn advice for professional 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.
Think about the way you craft a scene. Dialogue is pretty much a given. Some of us even use what our characters say as a backbone to begin filling in the blank page. Action is the same. We’ll often unconsciously describe what our characters are doing as they’re speaking. But unless your natural inclination as a writer leans toward setting, location doesn’t always score a lot of space on the page among the rest of the scene elements.
Where your story takes place is just as important as what your characters say and do. Sometimes we get caught up writing witty banter and choreographing every move that we forget to write in a backdrop. This is especially true if we tend to be more character-driven in our writing.
Let’s take some time to focus on what’s important when writing location.
Location is Everything
You’ve probably heard this phrase before. It applies to everything from buying real estate, to where you raise a family, to where you post an ad for your next book release. Location also applies to setting.
It matters where and when your scene takes place. Check out the buildings below.
Although both are pictures of a house, there are differences! The mood of the scene will change in each of these places—even if you use the same event and the same characters.
Think about it this way. John invites Lisa to his house. Lisa can barely afford groceries and rent on her salary and is trying to raise her daughter as a single parent. When she arrives, John tells her that he’s her biological father, he has a terminal disease, and has left her everything he owns in his will.
Depending on which house is his, she’ll feel two totally different ways about that news.
Setting is a Character
You’ve also probably also heard this phrase, especially when it comes to world building. Being stranded at sea in the middle of a storm (The Perfect Stormby Sebastian Junger) is different than being stranded on an island with carnivorous dinosaurs (Jurassic Parkby Michael Crichton). But both the ocean and the island become an antagonist in each story. If you want a more concrete example, let’s take Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling. Hogwarts, with its hidden passages, shifting stairways, and talking portraits is definitely a character of its own.
If I asked you whether a movie better demonstrates the concept of “show” or “tell,” you’d probably pick “show,” because it is a visual medium. If I asked you if a book or a movie gives you a better feel for the location of a story, you’d probably pick the movie.
And I’d disagree.
While books don’t have the luxury of green screens and CGI, they do have a hidden power. The power of words and imagination. Movies are bound by their visuals. They “tell” us what to see in such a specific way that our imagination isn’t required. But words come with a freedom that invites imagination in and lets us create our own visuals.
Words Have Unlimited Potential
Painting a vivid picture using only words isn’t easy. Some writers are great at it. For them, it seems to just show up as a natural skill in their writing toolbox. Most of us aren’t that lucky, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn. One step to cultivating this talent is to realize location is our weak spot in writing and then be deliberate as we “sketch” our location into our work in progress.
In our heads, we know exactly what our scene looks like, but our readers don’t. That’s why it’s so crucial to make sure the idea in our heads makes it to the page. Whether you want to create a visual outline for your reader and allow them to fill in the details, or give concrete descriptions key to your story, you have to take your vision and share it in a clear manner to provide your readers with the intended experience.
“Don’t tell me the morning is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” (Anton Chekov)
This is one of my favorite quotes when it comes to painting a word picture. So remember, provide a picture of the location to let your readers know:
If it’s night, show the stars in the sky or the headlights of a car.
If it's unbearably hot and humid, show the sweat on your character’s face and the haze on the horizon of heat rising off the pavement.
If it’s raining, show water soaking your character’s blouse and puddles she’s avoiding.
Set the Stage
When a movie opens, the location of the scene is the first thing you notice. You can’t help it, because those visuals set the stage and we want to set our stage in the first few paragraphs, too. Be sure to bring your location into the start of every scene or location change. It’s hard for readers to “see” your brilliantly crafted set or even fill in your more abstract outline if they have no idea where the scene is taking place.
Imagine you are in a movie theater, ready to watch the latest blockbuster, you wouldn’t simply close your eyes and listen to the opening dialogue, would you? Readers need the context of location to be grounded in the scene or they won’t stay engaged. Just like the movie, provide the visuals and keep your readers turning the page.
We want the reader to see this: Not this:
Don’t leave your reader “stuck” inside a white room. Orient your readers to location with at least a minimal description—even if you’re picking up from a previous scene.
Example: We ended the last scene in a parking lot, and it's also where the next scene begins. Because the reader might’ve bookmarked and walked away for a while, you want to jog the reader's memory using a few words. Perhaps something like this:
The blacktop in the parking lot was hot enough to fry eggs.
Now our reader has context of the location that will keep the continuum of the story flowing and keeps them engaged in our book.
When Less is More
Sometimes, though, too many details can overwhelm a reader. You don’t always need to paint every detail of a location. Use other ways to give a visual, like incorporating places most people are familiar with even if they’ve never been there. Try visualizing a scene while reading the next examples.
What comes to mind when you read the following?
maximum security prison
small-town grocery store
hole-in-the-wall diner
Lake Superior in July
Times Square in December
an old mining camp in the Colorado mountains
Most of us will form an instant picture—though we might not see exactly the same thing. Your experience with each location will dictate what pops into your head. This technique can easily add details of location to your writing.
Mood Matters
Location sets the mood of a scene. How you describe a place tells readers the tone of the scene and shares how the character feels about it. What moods come to mind when reading the following examples?
Example 1: Sometimes you only need an idea to tap into a mood.
The faint glow of the floor-to-ceiling fireplace plus a few table lamps cast the great room in a mix of light and shadow. A long brown sofa on a thick shag rug faces the hearth. Two overstuffed loveseats and a cherry coffee table complete the room. Compared to the cutting chill of my current company, the chalet teases me with visions of books, blankets, and endless mugs of hot chocolate.
Example 2: Sometimes you don’t need any actual physical description at all.
It didn’t help that I was alone in a house that was more “modern mausoleum” than “contemporary living.
Example 3: Sometime the context to the character's world view.
Oak Cliff High: Preparatory Academy and Boarding School. Breeder of the best. Alma mater to the elite. Nanny for the neglected. And—thanks to some poor choices I’d made my first week here—my hell away from home freshman, sophomore, and now junior year.
First Impressions are Crucial
It is best to provide the reader with the most description the first time we see a new place. When you introduce a location, your reader forms a lasting impression, good or bad, that’s hard to change. Make sure it’s the impression you want them to have.
Example:
The sixties had birthed this office. Shaggy avocado carpet covered the floor. Old books with multicolored spines bulged from the bowed shelves lining two of the four walls floor to ceiling. The hulking bookcases gave the room an I’m-closing-in-on-you feel. There were no couches or lounges. Just an ugly metal desk, a tall gray filing cabinet, and two retro command chairs that could have come off the set of the original Star Trek.
Peripheral Vision
Location has many layers of action when we consider our stories in real life. Take out your “word” camera and pan out on your writing scene. What’s going on in the background? Is your character alone? In a crowd? Watch for characters who seem to show up suddenly when they’ve been standing on the sidelines all along. Make sure the reader knows who’s in the scene.
Example:
The drone of everyday conversation buzzed through the congested coffee shop like annoying insects Kim wanted to swat away.
What does your character hear, smell, feel? Go beyond what can be seen to give a more 3D visual.
Weave in Description
This is a great way to avoid an information dump. After the initial setup, you can add interesting details that further your story, creating a more vivid picture of location for your reader.
Example:
I pull my ’69 mustang along the curb behind David’s boring black sedan. That’s where I lock my gaze. Not on the iron gates to my right or the sprawling estate behind them that could be a fancy bed-and-breakfast—but isn’t.
How Much is Enough?
When to add and how much is a delicate balance that you, writer, can decide. Use pacing within your story and consider how you sprinkle the location throughout each scene to decide.
If your main character is running away from an evil clown, we’d expect a short, choppy description of where the action takes place. If she’s describing a boy she likes from school, we’d expect longer, more descriptive flowing prose.
Beware, though. Location can pull us deeper into a scene or boot us right out because it is a powerful element in writing. It can also make us root harder for the characters or decide we don’t care if they survive the story, but we risk losing the reader altogether if we don't add the right amount of location description.
How do you know if you’ve painted a solid word picture?
How can you be sure the story in your head gets onto the page?
Be deliberate when writing about location.
Search for where you’ve written descriptions of location.
Make sure it’s at the beginning of each scene.
Ask someone to read a random scene without giving them any background information or set up. Then have them describe what they “see.”
Can someone describe what you wanted them to see? If not, go back and fill in the missing visuals.
I think you’ll find that polish how you present your locations will deepen and strengthen your story and your scene.
I love your comments. Please leave them below. Does writing locations come naturally to you? If yes, why? If no, how can you be more deliberate about making sure you include great description in every scene? What are some ways you use location to deepen your characters and your story? Thanks for sharing!
If you liked this blog, you can find Part 1 of Bring Your Book to Life here: Characters are People too.
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About Lori
An encourager at heart, author, editor, and writing coach Lori Freeland believes everyone has a story to tell. She’s presented multiple workshops at writer’s conferences across the country and writes everything from non-fiction to short stories to novels—YA to adult. When she’s not curled up with her husband drinking too much coffee and worrying about her kids, she loves to mess with the lives of the imaginary people living in her head.
