Writers in the Storm

It’s here. The fourth anniversary of Write Up a Storm.

We’re writing up a storm from 7:00 a.m. to 12:00p.m. EDT. If you missed the tips, you can read them here on our Facebook page.

Seventeen hours of opportunities to connect with others, meet goals, and get your words “on paper.”

We’ll be writing from the top of every hour for fifty minutes. In the interest of health, we’ve planned a ten minute break at the end of every hour for walking around and other physical necessities. If you need to work on a different schedule, say around breaks and lunch at work, that’s fine. Keep track of your progress and, when you get a chance, let us know how you’re doing.

During that ten-minute break, you’re welcome to post your word or page counts and anything else in the comment section on our Facebook Event page. (No other electronic “stuff” which might end up being a time sump and stealing your planned writing time!) We’ll tally numbers and post them every hour. Or so. Heck, we’ll be writing, too!

We’re hoping for at least a novella-length combined word count. Fae is betting we can get a novel’s worth of word count.

You can commit to hours or only a fifteen minute block of writing time. Just follow through on your goal. That’s how you finish a book. Today is a chance to make headway on finishing your book. As Laura Drake says, “You can’t sell a book if you haven’t finished one.”

So let’s support each other and make this fun. Because it can be, with a community. Writing is, by nature, a solitary endeavor. That doesn’t mean you have to feel alone. Join us.

Here’s your dance card:

Laura Drake will start the party from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. EST.

Fae Rowen, Jenny Hansen , and Julie Glover will check in during the day at the top of the hour. Don't panic if we miss an hour or two of check-in. Heck, we're writing, too, and might misplace our schedule!

Of course, we’ll all be checking in throughout the day, even when we don’t have “formal” responsibilities.

You can let us know you’re writing as you begin, or you can share what you’ve accomplished when your writing stint is finished.

Today’s the day. 

Write Up A Storm.

Share your experiences and word counts on our Facebook page.

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.

Punished, oh-no, that’s published as a co-author of a math textbook, she yearns to hear personal stories about finding love from those who read her books, rather than the horrors of calculus lessons gone wrong.  She is grateful for good friends who remind her to do the practical things in life like grocery shop, show up at the airport for a flight and pay bills.

A “hard” scientist who avoided writing classes like the plague, she now enjoys sharing her brain with characters who demand that their stories be told.  Amazing, gifted critique partners keep her on the straight and narrow. Feedback from readers keeps her fingers on the keyboard.

When she’s not hanging out at Writers in the Storm, you can visit Fae at http://faerowen.com  or www.facebook.com/fae.rowen.Share this...

Julie Glover

I recently passed my 10-year anniversary of Writing In Earnest. I began the novel that became my first full manuscript after I evacuated to my in-laws’ house to escape Hurricane Ike, which hit the Texas Gulf Coast in September 2008. When I returned home, I committed to writing one full hour each day, which quickly turned into two to four hours of writing until, finally, I had a complete book.

It’s been a long road since then.

The road included seven manuscripts and multiple short stories; pitches, submissions, and rejections; finaling in various contests, including RWA’s Golden Heart; classes, conferences, and craft books; landing my dream agent; more submissions and rejections; co-writing three novellas; self-publishing that trilogy; and much, much more.

Although every writing journey has unique aspects, a 10-year anniversary demands that I share some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

1. Nothing else matters if you don’t finish the book.

A great story idea and a wonderful cast of characters, a perfectly structured plot, well-crafted scenes, etc. equal a Big Fat Zero if you don’t finish the book. And I don’t mean the first draft, though that’s very important.

To me, a finished book is one that’s ready to go to your beta readers or critique partner or be submitted to an agent/editor or even published. Dig deep, write, edit, and finish the book.

2. Know why you’re writing.

At first, I wrote for me—just to see if I could write a whole novel. Then I wanted people to read it. And now I want to also make money so I can pay my bills and keep writing. As my goals have changed, I've needed to shift which aspects of writing I'm focusing on.

If you’re a hobbyist in the writing world or crafting a single family memoir, some of the intense write-or-die advice doesn’t really apply to you. But if you need to eat on the money you make writing, you might focus less on the sweeping epic you dream of writing and more on rapid release shorter works.

It all depends. Be clear about why you’re writing so you know which advice to take and which to take with a grain of salt.

3.  Learn your craft.

Too many writers think they already know how to write, since they read a lot. Funny, because I never once thought that visiting my massage therapist once a month qualified me to get a therapy table, charge customers, and start rubbing backs. Substitute your own analogy, and you understand what I'm saying.

There are authors, good authors, and great authors. Do everything you can, within your resource limitations, to become a great author. If you write fantastic books, readers will keep buying what you write.

4. Story beats prose.

However, don’t focus so much on crafting words and phrases that you lose sight of being a wonderful storyteller. Our brains are wired for story (see Lisa Cron), and that’s what people ultimately want. It’s why novels that aren’t all that well-told still sell when a great story underlies the less-than-spectacular prose.

Of course, putting together a wonderful story and well-crafted prose makes for a standout combination. Don't forget: Story beats prose.

5. Find a writing community.

We say it all the time on Writers in the Storm, and we promote it by bringing writers together for conversation, but it’s important to be in community. Not only will you feel a sense of belonging and experience encouragement, you learn from other authors. I’ve learned as much from conversations with other writers as I have from classes, conferences, and craft books.

Join a chapter in your genre, connect online, and/or form your own group. But find a writing community.

6. Put your work in others’ hands.

This is one of the hardest things to do at first! You’ve spent hours and hours and hours on your novel, and now you’re going to share it with a beta reader, a critique partner or group, contest judges, an agent or editor, or your own family member.

What if they hate it? What if they red-pen it everywhere? What if they just don’t get you?

It’s tough, but if you want readers who pay, you have to be willing to start with readers who don’t pay who will give you honest feedback.

7. Don’t listen to everybody who critiques your work.

That said, not everyone who critiques your pages has the same quality of feedback. Be choosy about who you send to, consider their viewpoint, and then make your own decisions. At the end of the day, it’s your book.

You need to be very, very open to critique, but also willing to stand your ground when your story’s integrity is at risk.

8. Be an entrepreneur.

If you’re like me, you’re thinking: But I don’t want to be an entrepreneur, I just want to be a writer!

Sorry to break it to you, but I fought this for far too long. I’m saving you the years of grief I experienced, resisting the inevitable. If you’re writing in the 21^st century, you’re a business.

You can be self-published or traditionally published, agented or unagented, and still you are a small business responsible for your own career, marketing, and finances. Learn what you can about running your business well.

9. Embrace your own writing process.

Writing advice based on a particular writer’s process abounds. Write every single day. Write first thing in the morning. Plot first, then write. Don’t plot, just write. And on and on and on.

Reality check: Successful authors run the gamut on how they actually manage to go from story idea to book-on-shelf.

Go read about various authors’ processes and try things out, but don’t feel like any one particular approach is the be-all-end-all. The only thing they all have in common is they finish books (see Point #1).

10. Remember, writing is a journey.

As I write this post, I’m in Knoxville, Tennessee, a destination that took over 13 driving hours to reach. My journey involved some great roads and scenery and some not so great moments where I wanted to pull to the side of the road and give up.

Most journeys are like that, with ups and downs. So is writing. I’ve learned that I will have super-highs and dispiriting lows, but neither represents the whole journey. Don’t get too caught up in the mountaintops or the valleys. Most of the way is a steady drive, and you’ll get where you want by focusing on the destination.

What have you learned in your writing journey?

About Julie

Julie Glover usually writes cozy mysteries and young adult fiction. But she recently branched out to co-author the Muse Island Series with Kris Faryn, which begins with Mark of the Gods, under the pen name Jules Lynn. You can visit the series website here, follow the Facebook page here, or head to her Jules Lynn website to learn more.

by Becca Puglisi

As I’m sure you’ve heard roughly a gajillion times, your story’s first pages are very important. Editors and agents typically request just a portion of your story’s opening, and potential buyers read only a sampling when they’re looking for books to buy. So whichever publishing route you take, those first pages are the only chance you get to win over the gatekeepers—to introduce your story in a way that sucks them in and makes them realize they simply have to have it. 

There are a lot of elements you want to include in your story opening, but I’d like to focus on the one that plays a huge part in winning over readers: emotion. If you’ve hung around Writers Helping Writers at all over the past ten years, you’ve heard Angela and I nattering on about the importance of character emotion in our stories. That’s because we believe it’s the key to triggering the reader’s emotion. The character is the one readers will relate to, the one who will make the reader feelsomething as they’re turning pages. So we have to convey the character’s emotions as early as possible, in a way that will engage readers. Otherwise, that first sampling is all they’re going to see.

Thanks to the Critiques 4 U contest that we run monthly at the blog, I’ve read quite a few first pages, and I see the same emotion-related problems cropping up over and over. I’d like to address those today.

Not Enough Emotion

It’s not uncommon for me to get all the way through someone’s first page and realize that I have felt…nothing. My emotions haven’t been stirred at all. And when I look back over the sample, I realize it’s because the character hasn’t felt anything, either. If the reader can’t tell what the character is feeling, how are they supposed to know how to feel themselves? And if a scene event doesn’t affect the character’s emotions, why does it matter?

The key here is that the author needs to make sure something impactful is happening. Maybe this comes in the form of a conversation, where the protagonist is reacting to the information being shared or the character who’s sharing it. It could be a moment between friends that shows how important the BFF is to the protagonist. Maybe it’s an actual event or occurrence that has meaning, such as a wedding, a job interview, or the cat yucking on the carpet when the character’s running late for work. 

Once you’ve ensured that meaningful things are going on, the character will need to respond appropriately to what’s happening, even in a small way. Which leads us to problem #2.

Emotion that Has Been Told

While it’s important to get the character’s emotional state across to readers, that’s unfortunately not enough. We have to do it in a way that engages their emotions. Engagement rarely results from telling, because telling doesn’t pull readers in. It takes them out of the active role of a participant in the character’s story and puts them at a distance, just sitting back and listening to events being told to them.

On the other hand, when we show that emotion, it seems more real to readers. They feel like they’re involved in the character’s experience. Their own feelings are stimulated and a bond begins to form, one that will pull the reader further into the story. For instance, here’s an example of emotion that has been told:

He was afraid.

And here’s the same emotion being shown:

His skin felt like it was trying to glide to the back of his body. (Tad Williams, Otherworld series)

Both of these descriptions express the same emotion. But the second one gives you an impression of what that character might physically be experiencing in that moment. We’ve all had that “crawling flesh” sensation; when we see the character going through it, it triggers our own emotional memories and helps us to associate better with the character, inviting us into his experience.

Here’s another example of emotion that has been shown, from Gennifer Choldenko’s Al Capone Does My Shirts:

My face burns. My ears heat up like two heaters attached to my face.

The author doesn’t need to say that the boy is embarrassed; the physical indicators do that for her. We’ve experienced that feeling before, and we get a hint of it through the use of the bodily cues associated with that emotion.

It’s important to keep in mind that emotional responses don’t have to be big to be effective. Maybe a vocal cuecan be used, such as the volume of the voice increasing or decreasing. The character’s hands may start to fidget, or their body posture may shift. Even something as minor as a sigh or an eyebrow being raised can indicate a stirring of emotion. Use the character’s voice, body language, or even their thought process to help you show their emotional state in small ways, which can help you sidestep another emotion-related problem.

Too Much Emotion

Just as too little emotion is problematic, so is an overabundance of it. Melodrama happens when a character’s emotional responses are over the top and don’t make sense for the situation. This is a problem because it’s not authentic, and anything inauthentic is going to create distance for the reader as they realize something is “off” and subconsciously pull back. 

The best way to avoid melodrama is to know your character’s emotional range. Each person has a unique range of emotions, meaning, you can have two people in the same situation and they’ll express themselves differently. Knowing what this looks like for your character will enable you to write their responses in the way that best fits their personality.

So think of that range as a spectrum—a straight line with demonstrativeon one end and reservedon the other. Ask yourself: Under normal circumstances, where will my character fall on this spectrum? If you can figure this out in advance, you’ll have a snapshot of how they’re likely to respond to everyday scenarios, and you can write their reactions consistently.

It’s also good to remember that emotions don’t bounce all over the place; they follow a continuum. So, if your character starts the scene contented but will become angry at some point, you’ll need to move him gradually toward that end emotion. Maybe you start by adding something that causes him to become irritated. Then he moves to frustration. And finally…anger. A character shouldn’t jump from contentment to rage unless there’s a psychological reason for doing so. Knowing the natural progression of emotions will enable you to write your character’s responses logically and keep you from falling into the melodrama trap.

Listen, I understand the pressure to get our first pages right. There’s a lot riding on them, but the emotion piece can definitely contribute to success. With these tips, you should be on your way toward strengthening your opening and encouraging readers to become more fully invested in the character and the story. For more information on how to write character emotion well, you can also reference the newly released second edition of The Emotion Thesaurus.

Do you have a question about getting the emotion right in your WIP? Want to share a tip about writing emotion?

ABOUT BECCA