Writers in the Storm

by Laurie Schnebly Campbell

We all know your main character can’t suddenly stand up and dance around the room without having SOME motivation for doing that. Maybe a red laser-dot just revealed there’s an assassin trying to get a clean shot through the window, or maybe somebody just announced “you inherited three billion dollars” or their favorite song just came on the radio. Without any motivation or inciting incident, the sudden dancing is gonna look plain weird.

We know, too, this same character can’t accept a job in Antarctica without some motivation for doing that. Maybe it’s a chance to work with an old love who’s indicated an interest in picking up where they left off, or maybe the pay will cover a new roof for poor Grandma’s house, or perhaps there’s a rare breed of penguin expected to appear and being the first to see it would rejuvenate a faltering career.

Motivation vs. Goals

It’s pretty easy to come up with a motivation for whatever gets your character started on the action of the story. But technically, avoiding an assassin or reconnecting with an old love or spotting the amazing penguin isn’t a motivation. It’s an understandable desire, but it’s not a motivation.

It’s a goal.

”Fine,” you say. ”But that’s all just semantics.”

It could be, sure. Or it could be the difference between a character who goes through predictable actions without ever really coming alive on the page, and one who makes readers feel like this character is so fully, vividly real that they’d recognize ‘em in an instant if they met each other on the street.

(Or a ranch, a windswept moor, a vintage boutique, a bustling emergency room, or wherever this character tends to be seen.)

Why do we care about motivation?

Motivation is what makes this character the person they are.

It also makes ‘em the person they’ve been long before the story ever began, and the person they’ll be long after it concludes.

That’s not to say their motivation must remain consistent from beginning to end. It certainly CAN, and still deliver your readers a truly compelling character all the way through the story and beyond, but it doesn’t HAVE to.

Think about someone who wants something.

It might be a character in a book you’re immersed in right now. It might be someone you live or work with. Heck, make it easy – think about yourself and something YOU want!

It doesn’t matter whether you choose a tangible goal like “a new phone” or “a trip to Paris” or something loftier like “a cure for Covid” or “the happiness of my children.” No matter how lofty the goal might be, it’s still driven by a motivation.

How to choose the right motivation?

We don’t always know, and neither do our characters, what motivation lies behind a goal. I might want a new phone to make life more convenient, or to have more room for photos of loved ones, or to impress my co-workers, or to quit spending so much on repair hacks, without ever thinking about why that particular outcome matters to me.

The same is true if I want to cure Covid. Saving the world is an understandable desire, and there are all kinds of possible motivations:

• Someone might want the acclaim that comes from discovering a cure.

• Someone might want the recovery of their beloved father who makes life easier for them.

• Someone might want the freedom of once again being able to go anywhere anytime with anybody who looks interesting.

• Someone might want the world to be a healthier, happier place.

Which of those will be the most interesting character?

Any one of the above would work, except the last.

Wanting the world to be a healthier, happier place is pretty bland. It’s pretty universal. It doesn’t really TELL us anything about this person.

Whereas a character who wants acclamation, who wants Dad to smooth things out, who wants to explore every avenue they can find, is almost certainly going to be less bland. More interesting.

More the kind of person we’d like to read about.

So does that mean your characters should never have truly good, noble reasons for doing what they’re doing?

We’ll get into that more next month during “Plotting Via Motivation,” which goes into considerably more detail on how to use motivation to make your book shine. And because I always give a free-class prize to someone who leaves a comment whenever a blog gets 25 or more commenters (hmm, is that a word?)...

Let me ask you a question:

What’s a book you remember enjoying, and what did the main character want?

Please share it with out down in the comments. You don’t need to say WHY they wanted it, just WHAT they wanted. That’ll be a good way of showing how many different kinds of motivation can lie behind just about any desire…which is one more reason books are so fascinating to read!

And, yes, write. :)

Laurie

(Who should mention that as of February 22 the class is on a wait-list basis but it can’t hurt to email WriterUniv.com@gmail.com if you’re interested.)

About Laurie

Laurie Schnebly Campbell has taught Plotting Via Motivation for WriterUniv.com every spring for the past decade, with some authors taking it annually to plot their next story and others saving the “Big Fabulous Worksheets” to use on their own for subsequent books. She still loves getting Amazon shipments of novels she watched taking shape during the class and reading them not as a coach but a fan.

by Tasha Seegmiller

There is a tricky situation that occurs in the lives of writers. To people who are not engaged in some kind of similar creative pursuit, explaining a difficult day can be met with expressions of disbelief. “You mean sitting in your seat and typing words was hard? Exhausting? Really?”

These people may also not understand why the words of others can hurt, whether that hurt was intentional or not. It can be anything from a bad review to a critique from a well-meaning colleague or beta reader that can make us doubt, stall, quit.

I’ve been on a bit of a Brené Brown kick lately.

[Full disclosure: I gave away nearly a dozen copies of her Daring Greatly, have been listening to every talk I can get my hands on, and recount key points almost daily to my very patient husband.]

Most recently, I’ve been listening to The Power of Vulnerability, which has been great because it is a live recording of Brené and I get to hear that she is a lot like me in her resilience to this whole open and honest thing.

But it has got me thinking quite a bit about what it might mean to be a whole-hearted writer. To start with, these are the guideposts she suggests of whole-hearted living:

1. Practice Authenticity
2. Find Self-Compassion
3. Cultivate Resilience
4. Build Gratitude, Joy, And Sufficiency
5. Trust Your Intuition and Faith
6. Foster Creativity
7. Protect Your Play and Rest
8. Don’t Fear Calm and Stillness
9. Pursue Meaningful Work
10. Laugh, Sing, And Dance

(There’s a great visual of these you can print and/or color here)

While writers may be some of the most generous people I’ve ever met, we are also, by necessity of our craft, hyper-aware of the world around us. That is great when it comes creating characters and stories and settings and plots, but it’s less than great when the business and real world side of writing comes trickling out.

To get a quick overview of where you might stand as a whole-hearted writer, consider how you’d respond in the following situations:

• Someone signed with an agent after you and got a good book deal before you.
• People who are not now (and probably never will be) writers ask why you aren’t done with a book yet.
• You find an error in the final final copy of your book.
• You are at a conference when an agent/editor says another genre is growing faster than the one you are currently writing.
• You send out another batch of queries or go on submission.
• You are told that is the cover for your book, thanks but no thanks to your offer for additional feedback.
• You are presented with a publishing deal that is not quite what you were hoping for with a company you aren’t sure is a good match.
• A call to your agent or editor goes unanswered. Two calls. Three calls. And emails.
• Someone who writes a similar genre to yours had their book sell in several foreign countries.
• A writer shares their victory in completing 10,000 words in a day.
• Every week, you come across an article that undercuts your genre or mentions that the interest toward what you are passionate about is fading.

What was your response? Did you feel shame or unworthiness even though the situation was hypothetical? Did you want to hide, dismiss what you were genuinely feeling, or downplay the stress that was very tangible and very real? Could you envision yourself squaring your shoulders, bringing out your greatest attitude and showing “them” that you weren’t affected?

In these kinds of situations when we feel like something we hold dear, something we are working on or through is being attacked, Brené Brown suggests the following mantra:

Do not shrink.
Do not puff up.
Stand my sacred ground.

Is your writing sacred? Is your writing time? Do you allow yourself to acknowledge that people may not understand or do you feel the necessity to downplay what you are passionate about because it is entirely possible that explanation won’t change the opinion or someone else, or worse, will give them the excuse to think even less about your passion than they already do?

Do you have the courage to put out a piece of work that is honestly and truly the best you could do, knowing there is a decent chance it will be attacked in some way by someone? Do you have the courage to respond with grace and conviction, to acknowledge there was a mistake and you and your work might not be perfect? Do you really feel better when you belittle the person who left the review, gave the advice, passed you on the career path?

The greatest takeaway from all this is that being whole-hearted IS NOT EASY. But when compared with living a life that is detached, false, insincere or unfulfilled, I bet it’s the option where most of us would really like to spend a little more time.

How have you practiced being whole-hearted? What tips or tricks have you learned when your first instinct is to respond in a way you may regret later?

About Tasha

Tasha Seegmiller believes in the magic of love and hope, which she weaves into every story she creates. She is an MFA candidate in the Writing Program at Pacific University and teaches composition courses at Southern Utah University. Tasha married a guy she’s known since she was seven, is the mom of three teens, and co-owner of a soda shack and cotton candy company. She is represented by Annelise Robey of Jane Rotrosen Agency.

by Tiffany Yates Martin

No creative soul likes receiving negative feedback on their work—no matter what we might tell you, beloved crit partners, beta readers, editors, agents.

Yes, we may admit we need it, and that it helps immeasurably to get objective input on what may not be as effective on the page as it is in your head, but as one author I work with memorably put it, having someone offer positive, constructive critique of your story is like an Orange Theory workout: You dread it going into it, hate every second while it’s going on, but afterward you feel great having done it.

But receiving negative, destructive input—criticism—can do more damage to your writing, and your creative efforts in general, than almost any other pitfall of writing life. I’ve heard too many horror stories—one just this week that inspired this post—about feedback that shut down authors’ creative impulses, filled them with self-doubt about their story and their writing in general, and in one awful case decimated the author’s confidence so badly that she told me she was giving up writing. (Don’t worry—ultimately she didn’t.)

“Positive” feedback in this sense doesn’t mean all praise, or empty flattery. It means framing feedback as the carrot, not the stick. “This scene isn’t working” feels a lot different from, “This scene might be a bit stronger/have more impact if…” Just like in a marriage or any relationship, as soon as someone feels under attack, they shut down.

So how do you solicit useful critique, and perhaps more important, how do you assess the input you receive to determine what’s helpful for you and your story and what isn’t?

Crit Partners and Beta Readers

As with so many areas of life, asking for exactly what you want gives you a much greater chance of getting it.

With beta readers and crit partners, you can save yourself—and them—a lot of wasted effort by offering specific guidance for what kind of input you’re looking for:

• Does it hold together overall?
• Was there any place your interest flagged?
• Did anything feel unrealistic to you?
• Were there any characters who didn’t feel real or believable or relatable to you—and if so, why, exactly?
• Did you understand what they were working toward and why that mattered to them, and were you rooting for them; i.e., did you care about their goals?
• Was the end satisfying?

I advocate giving your readers not only your manuscript, but an actual accompanying questionnaire. They will appreciate the clarity and structure of knowing what you want from them, and you will guide their feedback to the specific areas where you need it.

That also lets you set the tone of it with your questions so that you elicit information about their reactions to the story, but don’t leave a ready opening for their unsolicited elaboration on what you did wrong and how to fix it. You are looking for objective input into how well the story you wanted to tell is coming across on the page—so what you want to know is how it impacts readers, and your betas and crit partners are your “test cases.”

To paraphrase the famous Nail Gaiman quote, when someone tells you what’s not working for them in your manuscript, that’s good information. When they tell you what you did wrong or how to fix it, that’s generally not.

Industry Professionals

That brings us to agents and editors—the trained and experienced professionals who will, occasionally, offer more prescriptive input: not just how the story comes across to us on the page, but why certain areas may not be as effective as they could be, and sometimes suggestions for ways you might address the issue.

It pains me to say this, but some of the horror stories I’ve heard—no small number of them, in fact—involve these industry professionals. They may be harsh in their tone or assessment; might try to tell an author what she should or must do with her story; might co-opt her vision with the person’s own preferences, biases, or market needs. None of that is helpful to you as a writer.

A good editor/agent should offer feedback that, as with beta readers and crit partners, reflects her reactions—“Readers may not understand why she would leave her husband here after such a minor disagreement,” for example—as what they are: personal impressions and opinions, not absolute fact, as in, “It makes no sense why she leaves here.”

That may seem like a hairbreadth distinction or simply a nicety of phrasing, but it’s more than that—the former fulfills the proper function of any objective feedback, which is to hold up a mirror to the author so she can more clearly see what she actually has on the page, rather than what she’s filling in because she knows the story so well.

Our job is to tell you how what is on the page may come across to readers, based on our hopefully broad experience not only with many other manuscripts, but in your genre and in the current market. Good agents and editors weigh and need intimate knowledge of all those areas.

Trained professionals also ideally have a broad and very deep knowledge of writing craft so they can share with an author why something may not be working—the kind of actionable, practical input that lets her figure out how to address the issue. For instance, in the above example an editor might observe that the character’s motivations feel unclear and the stakes feel a bit low, because readers aren’t yet specifically seeing why saving her marriage is important to her.

Industry pros may even offer occasional suggestions for how an author might address areas that might benefit from strengthening (all respect to Mr. Gaiman)—but it should be a suggestion only: “Perhaps you could let us see a scene where her goal of becoming an artist is a bit more concrete, and how her husband doesn’t support it—for instance, maybe she’s throwing a new piece of pottery and he casually walks in and criticizes it, or she gives him one of her pieces for their anniversary and he tucks it into a drawer, or something similar that illustrates their dynamic more clearly?”

Suggestions like that should be used simply as a “for instance,” to illustrate the point and perhaps spark ideas. The author might love one of the specific suggestions and run with it, or she might use the ideas as a springboard to come up with her own version that accomplishes the same end—showing this fuzzy dynamic more concretely—but in a way that feels more organic to her vision.

But even with these pros, the tone should always be positive, constructive, and respectful of your work, your vision, and you as a writer.

Indie publishing has marvelously democratized the industry…but it also means a lot of people are hanging out their shingle who perhaps don’t have the qualifications or temperament to do so, from small presses to agents to developmental editors to book coaches.

I can’t stress this enough: Vet the professional you are paying or contracting with to assess your work. Not just by checking their experience, track record, references, etc.—although that’s also crucial—but get a sample of their work. See how they approach your writing.

Just as editors can tell from a few pages what areas of a story may benefit from strengthening or clarifying, authors can tell from a few pages of sample edit whether an editor is offering practical, actionable, positive critique. (You can find a free 13-page guide on finding and vetting professionals on my website here.)

The Most Important Takeaway

This is worth boldfacing: All feedback is opinion—whether that of a professional or not.

Ideally professionals’ opinions are informed by their breadth of experience and expertise, but just as with any other reader, they are still subjective impressions, and can be based on more than simply whether they think the story is good. Readers may be influenced by their personal preferences, market trends, the author’s platform, a publisher’s or agent’s current list of authors/titles, even their mood.

Which means no critique or criticism is a referendum on the objective worth of you, your story, or your writing.

And if someone tells you in any fashion that your story—or you as a writer—has little or no worth, walk away from them and never look back—never give it a second thought. That kind of feedback is utterly unproductive, and frankly it’s flat wrong.

In almost thirty years of working as an editor with everyone from major bestsellers to first-time authors, I can truthfully say I have yet to see a manuscript without worth, that doesn’t have something we can work with and build on.

Nor have I ever seen an author who should hang it up and stop writing—because you are human, and as such you have a story to tell—multitudes of them—and you, and they, are fascinating.

And because this is the process: Writing is rewriting. It’s how we improve. Good critique helps you dig out that gold; it doesn’t blow up the mine.

What are your thoughts on critique vs criticism? What is your favorite (or least favorite) type of feedback? Do you have any questions for Tiffany? Please share them down in the comments!

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. She's led workshops and seminars for conferences and writers' groups across the country and is a frequent contributor to writers' sites and publications. Under the pen name Phoebe Fox, she's the author of six novels, including the upcoming The Way We Weren't (Berkley). Visit her at www.foxprinteditorial.com or www.phoebefoxauthor.com.