Remember when we used to buy a whole album of music from an artist? If you don't remember, just roll with me anyway. (And stop making me feel so old!)
Quite a few of my albums—both vinyl and CD—are collections of most popular or beloved songs; that is, the artist's Greatest Hits. Well, today is a greatest hits day here on Writers in the Storm!
Because below are the top 11 posts of all time written by our hosts. You'll surely see one here you'll want to click on — either because you hadn't seen that post before or you want the refresher. Enjoy!
Tolkien never expected his books to do more than line the trash heap. Here's great tips from a man who wrote for the joy of it, and never gave up. Courtesy of Jenny Hansen.
I promise this is the last in what was never intended to become a series. But it seems every time I think of "F" words, more come to mind...
My blog with the first six words can be found here. Like the first six words, these F-words are perfectly "clean" for mixed company and young ears, so no worries, no matter where you're reading this.
Let's start with a group of three words that might make life difficult for your characters: festering, forbidden, and frantic.
Is there something in a character's backstory that is like a festering wound? We all know that to avoid staying two-dimensional, our characters need a backstory. Backstory is true in the eye of the beholder, so it will have a lot more impact on your character than those who experienced the same event in your story.
You probably don't need to think deep to find something in your own past that you remember differently from a sibling or a parent. For you, it bordered on traumatic. For someone else, they barely noted it. They certainly remember it differently than you do.
If something was forbidden, that, too, can add to backstory. If it is currently forbidden, well, you've just upped the conflict in your story. Remember that the sooner you resolve the forbidden element, the sooner you've resolved the tension in that thread. To maintain reader interest, you can resolve the forbidden element then up the stakes by adding a new layer of tension.
How do you do this? Well, let's say your romantic couple each have reasons for their affections to be forbidden. She believes he loves her sister. He believes he's the bastard son of her father. When she discovers that he doesn't love her sister—that was just her sister's girlhood fantasy and revealed when her sister happily gets engaged to someone else—your female lead character believes the way is clear for her to love—and have that love reciprocated by—the male character. Oops, he still believes she's his half sister, and no matter how attracted to her he is, he's going to fight the attraction, even to the point of hurting her. For her own good.
These first two F-words can lead to making characters frantic, but so can a lot of other things, like ticking clocks, plot twists, other characters. You know...all the things that make writing your own stories so much fun. A frantic character can make mistakes take work for you, as the author, for the rest of your book. Or you can semi-resolve them and leave your characters with a worse dilemma.
Which brings us to the next group of F-words: facade, flexible, and family.
Maybe you thought of family as in F-word when you read my first blog on F-words. There is no doubt that, for many people, family is an F-bomb. There is a reason so many people dislike (even hate) the holidays. How many of your friends currently aren't speaking to one or more of their relatives?
Feel free to take out your aggressions, your feelings of being slighted or devalued, the times you were powerless to state your truth, around your family. Those experiences will make your story, and your characters, more authentic. On the other hand, you may be one of the lucky ones who had great parents and supportive siblings. That would color a character's backstory as well.
Perhaps you, or your character, or the "good child" in your family because you've developed an impenetrable facade over the years. What an effective way for one character to keep out another character. And what a wonderful way to build a relationship—it could be very rocky at first—as one dedicated person chips away at the facade of the other because they know there is something of great value below that facade.
Family and facade can lead to learning how to be flexible to survive. Of course, you can be flexible without calling on a character's facade or family. Flexibility can also be seen as a weakness particularly in male characters.
The final group of F-words can be a writer's treasure chest of ideas when wanting to throw out one positive nugget of a character. Friends, fascination, fulfillment, and the future can shade your characters with attitudes that bring readers back to your books for those satisfying endings.
How many times have you heard those sayings like friends being the family we choose for ourselves? The people we choose to surround ourselves with show a great deal about us—our strengths, or weaknesses, our likes and our dislikes.
What fascinates your characters? Do they thirst for knowledge? Do they work to perfect a craft, a hobby, a trade, a physical ability? How do they pursue their fascination? Do they bring others, like friends and loved ones, into their fascination?
How do your characters see their futures? This probability will change during the course of your story as your characters move through their character arcs. Good for you! This gives more depth to move your characters from cardboard to real. You can also use what a character wants for their future for motivation and conflict and plot-driven nuances of your story. Similarly, a character can react to a possible future in a strong negative way which helps them grow and "improve."
Finally, that leaves F-word number ten: fulfillment. By the end of your book, your characters need to have their hearts and lives filled with happiness, and probably love, even if you aren't writing a romance. I write science fiction, on the speculative fiction side of the genre, and my characters better feel that they've made their world a better place to live and learned to love themselves. If they've learned to open their hearts to another, so much the better.
Do you have another F-word to add to our collection? How has it improved your writing?
About Fae
Fae Rowen discovered the romance genre after years as a science fiction freak. Writing futuristics and medieval paranormals, she jokes that she can live anywhere but the present. As a mathematician, she knows life’s a lot more fun when you get to define your world and its rules.
P.R.I.S.M., Fae's debut book, a young adult science fiction romance story of survival, betrayal, resolve, deceit, and love is now available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Fae's second book, P.R.I.S.M: Rebellion, will be available for pre-order in October 2019.
I'm a born pessimist — whenever things are going too well in my life, I get this overwhelming sense of dread. Because I just know that doom is right around the corner.
Obviously I'm not here to advocate pessimism, or we'll all be doomsayers and how annoying would that be?!
But sometimes, writers read motivational quotes, and rather than feel inspired, we feel cheated. For example, remember that saying, "If you can dream it, you can achieve it"? Yeah, right. Whoever said that probably didn't dream of making the New York Times bestseller list with their debut book.
Always?
So what if you're a pessimist like me? Or just having one of those seasons when the writing gig is going about as well as Alexander's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day? What if the motivational quotes just aren't doing it for you?
You're not the only permanent or temporary pessimist writer out there. Let's hear from some famous authors with their pessimistic — and yet somehow inspirational — observations about writing.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. ~ Ernest Hemingway
No wonder I keep feeling like this should be easier than it is, and yet it isn't. We're always learning, or should be.
Writing is a delicious agony. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
Sounds about right.
To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself. ~ Anne Rice
Oh great, the very thing I tried so desperately to avoid doing throughout adolescence and my dating years, now I'm supposed to embrace. Bring it on! Let me be a fool for the sake of the story.
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. ~ Anne Lamott
Too often, we compare our first drafts to other authors' final products, and then feel awful because we don't measure up. But maybe it's okay to be terrible at the beginning, as long as you're willing to polish the story and the prose to a shine.
Because hey, the alternative sucks.
The easiest reading is damned hard writing. ~ Thomas Hood
Of course it is! Why should we be surprised? Dancer Fred Astaire once admitted: "I suppose I made it look easy, but gee whiz, did I work and worry." Creatives must recognize that requires intense effort to make something appear seamless.
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~ Thomas Mann
True. Becoming a better writer makes it more likely that you'll recognize when your story isn't quite there. You know you can do better, and you will.
When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done. ~ Stephen King
Only Stephen King would immediately come up with the analogy of murdering children (I hope), but he's spot-on about how much it can hurt to edit. And yet, we must accept the pain to reach that next level, the level of penning a novel readers won't forget.
I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide. ~ Harper Lee
We can't take critique, rejections, and bad reviews too personally. Even if what you write is fantastic, someone won't like it. (Though I don't know who it was that didn't like To Kill a Mockingbird.)
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business. ~ John Steinbeck
Good information to know going in. But hey, we can do a lot to make it more likely we'll win the race, and when our horse crosses the finish line first? Aaaah, a sweet, sweet victory!
Or at least carry on.
What pessimistic quotes about writing actually inspire you to keep going?
About Julie
Julie Glover is a pessimist by nature, but an optimist in practice! Because no wants to hang out with an Eeyore all day—not even Eeyore himself. (Although an overly cheery Tigger would get old quickly too...)
Julie writes cozy mysteries, young adult fiction, and supernatural suspense (under the pen name Jules Lynn). Her upcoming YA contemporary novel, SHARING HUNTER, finaled in the 2015 RWA® Golden Heart®, and her co-written Muse Island Series is available now, beginning with book one, Mark of the Gods.
