Writers in the Storm

by Ellen Buikema

Writing is a solitary endeavor, and many writers are happy to stay in their writing caves. However, one must escape into the wild sometime. Consider approaching the art of writing as you might a traditional job where you bounce ideas off co-workers, commiserate when things go wrong, and celebrate each other’s successes.

Never underestimate the power of networking.

Everyone has talents in different areas, but talent needs to be cultivated. “The first essay I ever wrote was perfect in every way,” said no writer. Ever.

Great writers start as mediocre ones. Practice is the route to greatness and networking, spending time with and learning from other writers, is the vehicle that will get you to your destination faster.

Where to find writers

Social Media

Facebook groups

There are private and public groups for writers of different genres as well as writing and editing groups to explore. There are many talented people out there who are willing to help out a fellow writer. We are all in this together. I cannot emphasize this enough.

If you need to find some writer groups, here are a few I recommend:

• Fiction Writers and Editors (no promos, spam, or bullies)
• Meet the Authors!
• We PAW Bloggers (We Poets, Authors, Writers, and Bloggers)  
• Authors Networking Group  

Twitter groups (aka hashtags)

The Twitterverse abounds with writing communities, which are denoted by their hashtags (#). Here are a few: #WritingCommunity, #writinglife,  #nanowrimo,  #amwriting. This is also a place that many agents and editors frequent. Also, a recent blog by Frances Caballo’s has a handy list of 105 hashtags for writers with a short description of each. Marcy Kennedy's post at WITS has a lot to offer as well for understanding the Twitter writing community.

LinkedIn

Writing is a business populated with artists who work in various specialties. LinkedIn is a great place to meet book formatters, illustrators, editors, printers, publicists, and other writers.

Blogging in Print and Video (vlogging)

Blog 

According to the latest blogging statistics, 77% of Internet users regularly read blogs. Blogs are easy to find. All you have to do is type a topic in the search bar along with the word blog and BAM, there you have it. For fun, I typed in “motorcycles blog” and was given the opportunity to view a few hundred of them.

Try typing in the genre that interests you and the word blog. You’ll not only find great material, you’ll also find other writers who may have similar interests. Many writers have their own blogs. Contacting them from their sites is simple. It has been my experience that writers are generous folks and will get back to you when they are able.

You're already onto this, since you're here at WITS. You can also connect online with other writers via this resource page at Writers Relief.

Vlog

Video Blogging is not quite as common as blogging just yet but is a good way to learn more about a writer, or anyone for that matter. Most vlogs are found on YouTube.

Other places to look:

• Vimeo
• Instagram via Instagram Live and IGTV
• TikTok - Current estimates show that TikTok has about 80 million monthly active users in the United States. 80% are between the ages 16-34.
• Facebook Live - I experimented with Facebook Live about four years ago. The vlog was fun and a bit unnerving for me, mostly because I had a primitive setup. I recorded myself with my cellphone propped against my laptop’s screen. Amazingly enough, it worked out okay.

Writing Workshops

• Local Library - Writing workshops are great for meeting like-minded people. These groups often meet once a month. This is an opportunity to meet with people who write in different genres, and have varying levels of experience. Some are seasoned professionals; others are just beginning their journey. I met the person who eventually formatted my eBooks and another who designed my first book cover at a local library workshop. I’ve also made many good friends at my monthly writers group.
• MeetUp - There are hundreds of thousands of MeetUp groups covering a plethora of topics in at least 180 countries. I belong to a few writers groups on MeetUp. They have been invaluable resources.
• Zoom - Since in-person meetings of larger groups is currently ill-advised due to the pandemic, Zoom a cloud platform for audio and video conferencing, is a safe, secure method to meet online. My weekly critique group is using Zoom. This enables people who are not local to join the group as geographic boundaries are irrelevant.

Writers’ Associations

Professional writing organizations are a good way to interact with other writers and further your career, no matter where you are in your writing journey. Many associations offer great ways to connect online as well as in person with local member events. Each writers’ association has its own perks.

Perhaps one of these groups will suit your needs and interests:

• Authors guild
• The National Writers Union
• International Women’s Writing Guild
• National Association of Independent Writers and Editors
• Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators
• Romance Writers of America

Connecting With Authors in Your Genre

Some tips for being successful in building lasting connections:

• Begin with the authors with whom you are familiar.
• Go to GoodReads or Amazon and then enter your genre of choice in the search bar to see authors in that genre and their work.
• Engage with writers on their social media pages. Always be positive. Share their posts. Comment on their blog post. (This is an excellent way to begin communicating with another writer.)
• Chat with writers at conferences.
• Avoid spamming, tagging other writers with your work.

There is no need to be alone on your writing journey with so many people to engage in meaningful conversation. Be brave. Reach out.

How do you connect with other writers? Are you finding work-arounds for the new normal? Please share your experience with us down in the comments!

* * * * * *

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 Work In Progress, The Hobo Code, is YA historical fiction.

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

Top Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

by Barbara Linn Probst

Kill those darlings.

We all know the cliché (actually, it was Faulkner, not Stephen King, who coined the phrase) and, accepting its wisdom, do our best to kill those beloveds no matter how much it hurts. Sentences, paragraphs, whole scenes get deleted, leaving a cleaner and stronger narrative.

These darling are deleted from the story, but not from our laptops or minds. Many of us (okay, me, but I’ll bet I’m not the only one) squirrel them away, hoping we’ll be able to squeeze them into a future manuscript. 

Of course, simply shoehorning them in—because we have to use them somewhere, right?—seldom works. Unless, by some amazing chance, a grandfather scene exactly like the one I just deleted is precisely what the new book needs, the darlings need to stay in their coffins.

However, there are other possibilities for this excised material if we abandon the idea of keeping our darlings intact as chunks of prose and consider, instead, what they indicate, arise from, and serve.  We can explore these “other possibilities” by zooming in and zooming out to consider them from different perspectives.

Zooming in

Just as we do with a camera lens or font size, we can zoom in closer to get a magnified look at a smaller amount of terrain. With prose, that means focusing on smaller units, extracted from their context.

An image, a descriptive detail, a gesture, a sentence or two of dialogue—that may be all that’s worth saving from a passage that otherwise has to be deleted.  Taken as stand-alone bits of language, freed from their context and associations, these small “usable items” might worth saving for use in a new story.

In stockpiling these usable phrases, it’s good to note their referents so you’re clear about how they might be used later. Does a phrase denote arrogance, an emotional softening, a sense of foreboding? Later, you might be searching for a way to convey that very quality, and you’ll have a private dictionary to turn to. Retaining the meaning, along with the words, also helps to check the tendency to insert a phrase where it doesn’t really belong, simply because you can’t stand not to use it somewhere – the hallmark of a soon-to-be-dead-again darling.

Zooming out

In contrast, we can step back from the specific words to their source. What was that “memory of grandfather” scene really about? Was it about the remorse at having taken someone for granted, nostalgia for a sense of safety that’s no longer possible? The yearning to be someone’s favorite again, for no reason other than her existence? A child’s confusion to see someone she thought she knew growing feeble, his presence diminishing? What was the human feeling at the scene’s core, and why did it matter—to the character, and to the narrative arc?

These sensations, intentions, aversions, and desires are only accessible when you zoom out and view the passage from a wider perspective, letting the trees blur so you can see the forest—ignoring the words so you can see their source.

Once you find that, you can change certain words and sentences to fit a new story. Rather than transplanting the passage exactly as written—or, on the other hand, tossing out the whole thing—you can re-use the essence.

To give an example: In an early, long-abandoned novel that (fortunately) will never see the light of day, the adult daughter of my protagonist was writing a master’s thesis on Georgia O’Keeffe.  The “reason” I had her doing that was (ouch) so I could sneak in a backstory scene in which the protagonist had a profoundly transformative experience, years earlier, while viewing O’Keeffe’s masterpiece Black Iris. The adult daughter’s thesis served no purpose in the story, however—nor, in fact, did the museum scene. Both were, appropriately, killed off. I mourned and moved on.

Yet there was something about the O’Keeffe painting that stayed with me—something it evoked that I yearned to express. That “something” noodled around in that murky in-between part of the brain where creativity often occurs, and then burst into life unexpectedly a year later, providing the genesis for a much better story that became my debut novel, Queen of the Owls. I feel safe in saying that without that now-dead darling, Queen of the Owls wouldn’t exist.

Make use of both!

Zooming in and zooming out are inverse processes. In the first, context is discarded, freeing the words from their moorings; the focus is narrow, precise. In the second, words themselves are discarded, freeing the intention or emotion that gave rise to them; the focus is wide, diffuse. In neither case is the “darling” preserved intact, in the hope of shoe-horning it into a new slot. We’ve all tried that, and it doesn’t work.

Sometimes, of course, darlings can and should stay dead. But not always. To delete and destroy all darlings would be a shame since they often contain much of value.

That’s why we love them.

Your turn. Do you have a file of deleted material -- chapters, scenes, paragraphs, sentences? What fresh possibilities might the material offer to your story? How have you been able to use them in the past? Please tell us about your darlings down in the comments!

About Barbara

Barbara Linn Probst is a writer and researcher living on a historic dirt road in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her novel (Queen of the Owls, April 2020, and the forthcoming novel The Sound of One Hand, October 2020) tell of the search for authenticity, wholeness, and connection. In both novels, art helps the protagonist to become more fully herself. Queen of the Owls has been chosen as a 2020 Pulpwood Queens Book Club selection.

By Becca Puglisi

We know the importance of making our characters authentic, believable, and memorable for readers. But relevance is important, too, because it makes them relatable. Readers see characters who are facing the same issues they’re facing or dealing with the same struggles they’re dealing with, and a bond is formed.

As an example, look at To Kill a Mockingbird. It was written in 1960, but this story about children navigating a racially-charged culture that is altering their safe and comfortable world is still relevant to us almost 50 years later.

Are your characters relevant?

Relevance in your stories is about finding an element for your character or story that your reader can relate to in the real world. It might be heavy (a theme, social or political issue, moral quandary, or mental obstacle) or minor (a hobby or interest, dominant character trait, or common missing human need). Either can be effective. And if you can come up with a common thread that hasn’t been used a million times, that’s always a plus.

To that end, I’d like to share a real-life malady I’ve recently learned about that may be incredibly relevant to readers today.

Introducing "Compassion Fatigue"

When Angela and I were writing our latest thesaurus on occupations, we were researching the nursing career and stumbled over a term we’d never heard before: compassion fatigue. It’s defined as:

Exhaustion, emotional withdrawal, apathy, or indifference experienced by those who have been exposed to repeated trauma, tragedy, and appeals for assistance

This condition is all-to-common in occupations where people are constantly exposed to trauma (e.g. first responders, social workers, journalists, therapists, animal welfare workers, etc.) The frequent exposure to horrible events inherent in these jobs leads to a necessary psychological withdrawal as these workers try to distance themselves from what they’re seeing. While a certain level of withdrawal is healthy, serious cases can lead to problems on the job, relationship conflict, and debilitating mental conditions like PTSD.

Well, you might think, that’s interesting, but my character doesn’t have that kind of job.

Due to the 24-hour cycle of social media and news networks, compassion fatigue is becoming much more widespread. The public’s constant exposure to the suffering of others—sometimes on a hard-to-fathom scale—is taking its toll.

Compassion fatigue presents with the following symptoms:

• Physical and emotional exhaustion 
• Moodiness
• Increased apathy
• Lack of focus
• Weight loss
• Insomnia
• Increased drug or alcohol use
• Isolation
• Feeling hopeless or powerless
• Loss of interest in things that once brought joy
• Self-blame (for not doing more)
• Decreased efficiency at work
• Denial

This should give you an idea of how detrimental compassion fatigue can be. You may even recognize some of these symptoms in yourself as you navigate the constant barrage of news coverage. This malady is becoming more common, and therefore more relevant, for today’s readers. As such, it might be something that could work in your story, but as with any real physical or emotional affliction, it needs to be handled responsibly and thoughtfully.

Questions to help you decide:

1. Does It Fit for My Character?

The first consideration is whether or not compassion fatigue actually works for your character. We’ve all seen the results of authors trying to force certain habits, personality traits, or emotional responses onto their cast members. The inauthenticity is almost unbearable, leading to a disconnect with readers.

As with any other aspect of characterization, you have to do your homework and make sure it makes sense for the character. Compassion fatigue might be a reasonable outcome for someone who…

• works in a job where trauma and tragedy are frequent.
• lives, works, or volunteers in a war zone or area of high crime.
• is a caregiver to a chronically or terminally ill loved one.
• consistently sees trauma second-hand (on the news, social media, etc.).
• is highly empathetic and compassionate to begin with.

Basically, if your character consistently witnesses circumstances that naturally arouse their empathy but they’re unable to do anything about those situations, they’re at high risk for compassion fatigue. If this is the case for your character, it may be something that can be written into your story.

2. Have I Done My Research?

Compassion fatigue is a real ailment and, like any real-life element, it needs to be represented accurately. If you’ve suffered with this condition, you’ll have firsthand experience and it will be easier to write. If you haven’t, get to work researching.

• Find people who have dealt with it and talk to them.
• Read medical journals and legitimate sources.
• Join discussion groups and online communities.

Gather the information you need so you can write this condition accurately and realistically for your character.

3. Does It Serve My Story?

Like any physical or mental ailment, compassion fatigue doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It will have far-reaching effects on your character that will impact your story, so it should only be included if those effects serve your purposes. Here are a few natural outcomes of compassion fatigue that might do your story some good:

• It Provides Organic Conflict Options. Insomnia, lack of focus, moodiness—the symptoms of compassion fatigue are going to cause problems for your character at work. Likewise, increased apathy and withdrawal will make it harder for him or her to connect with loved ones. Good stories require conflict in every scene, and compassion fatigue can provide that conflict at home, on the job, and everywhere in between.
• It Impacts Human Needs.Basic human needs are universal to everyone. They’re important to us as authors because when one of them is threatened or removed, it becomes a motivator, driving the choices and actions for your character. Compassion fatigue can impact many of these needs. So whether you need your character to make a monumental error, hit rock bottom, or recognize their need for change, it can be used to position them exactly where you want them.
• It Contributes to Character Arc. What changes does your character have to make in order to grow and evolve by the end of the story? Maybe she needs to learn that she is as important as the people she serves, and she needs to take better care of herself. This might relate back to a wounding event she’ll need to finally confront and deal with—one where she was devalued or mistreated in some way. If compassion fatigue can tie into any of this, it will make it easier for you to map out that arc.

Final Thoughts

Compassion fatigue is just one example of an element that could provide a sense of relevance for your readers. The options for writing stories that feel very “now” are endless.

 If you can find that one element to connect your character with today’s reader, it won’t matter how different they are in gender, age, race, time period, or geographic location. It will be enough to start that empathy bond that can carry readers all the way through the story to make sure the character comes out okay.

What’s relevant about the story you’re writing? Or have you read a book recently that resonated with you because it felt very now or current? Please share it with us down in the comments!

About Becca

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and other resources for writers. Her books have sold over 500,000 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 library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.