Writers in the Storm

I haven’t felt strong since May 15.

If you don’t know about the tragedy in my life, brace yourself for devastating news.

My husband died in an airplane crash. And his death changed me, forever.

But when needed, I can be strong.

I channel the strengths I had before May 15, and I can do anything I could do before he died.

But in order to channel your strengths, you need to know them. There are lots of ways to determine your strengths. I’m sharing an easy, fun way today.

Who Are You?

What words would you use to describe yourself?

Take each letter of your first name and think of a word that starts with those letters that describes you. First responses. No censoring.

Use a name that’s at least five letters long. If your first name is Lori, add the first letter of your last name and use LoriK.

Use descriptors that represent you that are positive.

These are off-the-top-of-my-head responses from several years ago.

M – Master Planner
A – Assertive
R – Risk-taker
G – Goofy
I – Imaginative
E – Enthusiastic

I don’t feel those strengths too often. Not since Tom died.

Here’s how I feel:

M – Missing Tom
A – Authentic
R – 'rong – Everything is wrong without Tom here.
G – Gutted
I – Inescapably Sad
E – Erasable – Like I’m not here. Because it seems like Tom got erased.

Clearly, those aren’t strengths. They’re feelings.

They’re honest feelings. I’m authentic about my life-changing loss.

That’s a sad, sad, sad list. I am inescapably sad. And that’s okay for now.

Don’t worry about my emotional state. Don’t worry that I came up with the word erasable.

Bad things happen. Any of us can be erased from this world at any time. And that’s the only E word that popped into my mind. I was authentic and shared it here.

Considering the catastrophic loss, my emotions are right where they need to be.

Back to focusing on strengths. I can access my strengths, use them, and feel stronger.

Three weeks after Tom died, I taught a week-long class for West Texas Writer’s Academy at West Texas A&M University.

You may be thinking WHY? 

I didn’t have to teach that week. Everyone understood. No one would have been upset if I’d cancelled.

But I needed to prove to myself that I could do my life. That I could go on without Tom, even though part of me wanted to stay in bed and never leave my room.

I turned on my teaching brain and did my Margie thing. And the following week I taught an Immersion class in Dallas.

My strengths got me through each day.

M – Master Planner – I was prepared. Teaching materials, loaded handout packets, and millions of on-target examples.
A – Assertive – I took charge.
R – Risk-taker – I pushed myself to be there, to teach two weeks in a row.
G – Goofy – I laughed and joked around. That’s who I am.
I – Imaginative – Deep editing techniques and teaching methods.
E – Enthusiastic – I shared my passion for helping writers make their writing as strong as it could be.

I had most of the feelings in my list for those two weeks. I missed Tom. It felt wrong to not call him, to not hear from him. At times I felt gutted. When I wasn’t teaching, I felt inescapably sad. But I didn’t feel erasable, I felt valuable.

I don’t feel erasable now. Please don’t worry about me.

Okay – now it’s your turn.

Write the letters of your name in a column and throw down the first descriptors that come to mind that start with those letters.

Choose words that describe your personality, your approach to life. Not short, near-sighted, and chocoholic.

BE FAST, FAST, FAST!

Don’t take more than 10 seconds to come up with all of your descriptors.

You may be oh-so-creative. You saw how I used R for wrong. So wrong, but right for the list.

Analyze Your Descriptors

How do your strengths work for you?

Can you channel your strengths even when you don’t feel strong?

Please share your list of strengths in the comments. I’d love to see them.

A Quick Note About Defeat Self-Defeating Behaviors

Who Are You? is one of the exercises in my Defeat Self-Defeating Behaviors course. It’s packed with dozens of ways to get your writing career on a smart track and keep it on that smart track.

The DSDB lecture packet is available through my website. I’m teaching the DSDB class online in January. If you’re interested, you can register now.

THANK YOU to the WITS gals for hosting me again. Love you all!

BLOG GUESTS — THANK YOU for dropping by WITS.

Please post your WHO ARE YOU? list, or just say Hi.

You could win a Lecture Packet from me or an online class from Lawson Writer’s Academy. The drawing will be Sunday night, 9:00 PM Mountain Time.

Lawson Writer’s Academy – October Courses

1. Deep Editing, Rhetorical Devices, and More – Instructor: Suzanne Purvis teaching Margie Lawson’s course
2. Create Compelling Characters – Instructor: Rhay Christou
3. A Deep Editing Guide to Make Your Openings Pop – Instructor: Margie Lawson
4. Five-Week First Draft – Instructor: Koreen Myers
5. Crazy-Easy Awesome Author Websites – Instructor: Lisa Norman
6. New Course:  Two-Week Intensive — Fixing Your Plot – Instructor: Shirley Jump
7. New Course:  Profitable Facebook Ads – Instructor: Michelle Fox

About Margie

Margie Lawson — editor and international presenter — teaches writers how to use her psychologically-based editing systems and deep editing techniques to create page turners.

She’s presented over 120 full day master classes in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and France, as well as taught multi-day intensives on cruises in the Caribbean.

To learn about Margie’s 5-day Immersion Master Classes, full day and weekend workshops, keynote speeches, online courses through Lawson Writer’s Academy, lecture packets, and newsletter, please visit: www.margielawson.com

Interested in inviting Margie to present a full day workshop for your writing organization? Contact Margie through her website, or Facebook message her.

Interested in attending one of Margie’s 5-day Immersion classes? Click over to her website and check them out.

Jenny Hansen

A few years back, I wrote a post called How To Focus on Your Story's DNA that identified the elements of story that never change. I use those unchanging elements to help keep my story on track. Theme is one of those important elements, and it's a tough one because most of the writers I talk to don't how to articulate their story's theme. Or they learn it as they write, which is a huge leap of faith.

What is a story theme?

Theme is the "big idea." The underlying message, or the critical belief about life the author is trying to convey. This belief, or idea, is universal. It transcends all barriers (i.e., age, culture or religion).

For myself, I like to simplify "the big idea" to a few quick words. Examples: There's no place like home, shame blocks happiness, control is illusion.

Theme as an iceberg

Reedsy made a cool graphic in their post, What Is the Theme of Your Story?Inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory, they created a diagram that illustrates the relationship between the theme of a book, its story, and the plot.

• Plot: the events of the narrative
• Story: internal and external character conflicts
• Theme: drives both plots and story from beneath the surface

"Like the portions of an iceberg beneath the surface, theme may not be immediately apparent to the reader — but it is implicitly conveyed through the writer's craft, using story, character conflict, and symbolism."

Writing around a theme

John August, the creator of Charlie's Angels and Big Fish penned a great post about Writing From Theme, which I've excerpted in blue below.

Note: This post demonstrated his level of awesome to me. I write to theme, once I know what it is. This guy writes from theme...as in he figures it out in advance and builds a whole story around it. There are always great lessons to learn from the awesome people.

I suspect what your pro-theme writer friends were talking about was some essence that permeates every moment of a good film. Something that’s in its DNA. You feel it when it’s there, and notice it when it’s missing — even when the script otherwise seems solid.

Think back to one of your favorite movies. Chances are, you could pick any moment in it, and it would “feel like” the movie. That is, you could take that little slice of it, plant it in some cinematic soil, and it would grow into something resembling the original.

My favorite movie is Aliens, and it meets this test easily. Pull out any sequence — even before Ripley has agreed to join the mission — and it would grow into a story that fits its universe.

I don’t know that “theme” is really the best word for this DNA quality I’m describing. But I think it’s what we mean when we say it.

Theme as the essential idea

For Big Fish: I had a lot of conversations about “what it was about.” Not the plot, really, but what the point of it all was. I talked about the difference between what is true and what is real. I don’t know that I ever articulated it quite that way, but this was definitely the underlying idea that informed every moment and every character in the script.

And for most of my projects, I can point to the DNA ideas:

• Charlie’s Angels: Three princesses must save their father, the King.
• The Remnants: The end of the world isn’t so bad.
• The Variant: You are still your younger self.
• Go: You cross a line, then your only way out is to accelerate.

For [some] projects, I remember saying these things aloud before I started writing. For others, I probably didn’t. But I could definitely feel the edges of their core ideas before I put pen to paper. I won’t start writing until I know it.

When you really understand a project’s DNA, it’s much easier to write and rewrite. You know exactly what types of scenes, moments and lines of dialogue belong in your movie, and which don’t.

Every scene in your screenplay can change, but it still feels like the movie.

Simplifying theme

John August's magic did not help me explain theme to my nine year-old and her 4th grade class. The video below did it for me, in a way that was easy for them to understand.

https://youtu.be/k8muSkXjPHE

To summarize: Theme is the lesson the author wants you to get from the story. Themes tell us what we should or should not do to ensure happiness and success in our own lives.

How to discover theme (simple version)

1. Observe what the characters in a story say and do.
2. Ask yourself what were the consequences of those actions.

How to describe theme (simple version)

1. Themes are a complete sentence.
2. Themes never contain character names.
3. A theme is true for everyone — young or old, rich or poor.

Theme help for pantsers

Laura Drake would not forgive me if I left this part out. Many pantsers have no idea what the theme is until they are done with the first draft. That is their discovery draft, when they find out all the magic that lurks below the story they were compelled to write.

That's okay, pantsers. You can put the magic into the second draft. Your theme will still be there, waiting to be defined and refined by you. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither is your story. You'll nail theme in the editing process.

Do you know your story's theme from the beginning, or learn it as you go along? Do your themes surprise you? Do you have themes you write about over and over again?

About Jenny

By day, Jenny provides training and social media marketing for an accounting firm. By night she writes humor, memoir, women’s fiction and short stories. After 20+ years as a corporate software trainer, she’s delighted to sit down while she works.

When she’s not at her personal blog, More Cowbell, Jenny can be found on Twitter at JennyHansenCA or here at Writers In The Storm.

Laura Drake

Everyone has seen Mr. Mom, right? My favorite line from the whole movie is when Michael Keaton is dropping his kids off at school, pulling into the circular drive against traffic, and like four moms tell him, "You're doing it wrong."

Look, I'm not saying I'm the Mother of Social Media (although I'm probably old enough to be), but I've seen and heard things there that make me mad. Not because Newbies don't know better, but because there's so much wrong information floating around out there. These poor beleaguered writers are running from one platform to another, freaking about their numbers, tearing their hair, and screaming, "BUY MY BOOK!" Then ramping up, when people don't.

I was a career business-person. Business doesn't mess around. They want results. So here's some common-sense advice:

It's NOT about the numbers.

I see people on Twitter (possibly other places too) either lamenting their dismal number of followers, or crowing that they've reached some round number they're excited about. Hellloooooo — there is no gold star, free Cracker Jack prize or even green stamps (told you I was old) given for an ideal number of followers. It's about ENGAGEMENT.

Unless you're someone super famous that people listen to, and look up to (sometimes for dubious reasons — this is SM, after all), all those people aren't going to engage with you. And numbers don't sell books — engagement does. More on this in a minute.

It's not about, BUY MY BOOK!

I don't do a lot on Twitter, but I really enjoy the #WritingCommunity — or I used to. It's a huge group of writers, talking about the process, or word count, or posting inspirational memes, etc. It was my warm fuzzy place — a place I could interact with other writers.

But in the past two months or so, it's become a billboard for selling books, writer services, and the like. UGH. That was my one place to get away from all that! I posted, asking what the deal was all of a sudden. Many agreed with me, some didn't mind it. What hurt was the one who said,

"Know what you mean, but publishers look for evidence of a strong social media presence when you pitch and they may want to take on an ebook."

That is so sad. Guys, you're doing it wrong. What agents and publishers want to see is that you have people on social media that you're "friends" with — and I don't mean you "friended" them on FB. They're people who like you, and what you post. Guess what? If they like your posts, they're probably going to like your voice, and it follows they might take a chance they'll like your book and buy it.

What do you write about? Here's an example. I write romance and women's fiction, but it is, and will always be, set in the West, usually small towns, and it may have a cowboy or two. Who do I engage with? Rodeo women, cowboys wives, farmers ... you know, country people!

Get creative. Who is huge in your genre? Who in that genre is similar to your writing? Go look at their followers. Follow them. Engage with them. After all, they're a consumer of what you write, right? That's doing it right.

Engage, Engage, Engage!

Hey, I'm not all that. I spend time thinking about how to do this better, and just a couple weeks ago, I realized I was doing it wrong too.

Seriously. I may require an intervention.

I spend a lot of time on FB. I don't use my author page much, because I believe people want a real human to interact with. I have built a following of around 4k. That's not a huge number. BUT I work hard to engage with them.

Every morning, I post: coffee memes for the Morning Brigade, a beauty pic for the day, a mom meme, an awwwww for the day (think adorable puppies and kittens, and yes, Jenny, bunnies), and something from the weird file (you'd have to see it to believe it). Oh, and SNARK! I've had over 800,000 likes, probably get 50 or more comments a day, and God knows how many shares.

That's good, right? By the way, you do follow me, right? You can, HERE.

It is, except I wasn't taking advantage of one of my strongest avenues to sell my books! Yes, when I had a release, or a cover reveal, or a great review, I posted about it. But I never gave away my books in my general feed — only the groups I'm involved with.

HUGE duh.

So I did a giveaway for three books — ONLY for those who had NOT read a book of mine. All they needed to do to enter was to comment which book they'd like. Do you know I got 200 comments on that post? That's 200 people who love my posts daily — like my voice, my twisted sense of humor. They'd like my books! Three didn't seem enough to give — so I got in touch with my publisher, who kicked in 20 more.

It's done — they're all out and, I hope, being read. I truly expect to turn most of those into fans. And guess what? My Amazon ranking went up for a week after the winners were drawn — I assume non-winners went and bought a book.

There's always more to learn — go out there and do it right, people. Sell a shit-ton of books!

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