Writers in the Storm

Last Wednesday my post suggested several possibilities for a job description for writers. If you missed it, you can read it here.

Today I was going to share ideas on how to incorporate those bullet points in your writing. Only four days have passed, but I've moved from very specific items to a much broader view in the interim. 

I've been thinking about all the people who re-read their favorite books, who have shelves filled with "keepers" that they regularly revisit—or just look at the cover and sigh with fond memories. I must admit, I have a big selection of  keeper books, but I don't re-read them. Ever. Why would I do that, because I know the plot by the time I finish the book.

Years ago, in the days when we had WITS throwdowns, I took the side of plot-driven stories versus Laura Drake, who chose those that are character driven. (Did you know that Shakespeare is commonly described as a plot-driven author by scholars? Nice for my ego!)

After a week-end plus two days of re-reading my favorite keepers, I've got to admit a shocking fact. I picked my all-time favorites, but when I began reading I found that I didn't remember the plot. In some cases I remembered almost nothing of the plot, in others I remembered the big stuff, but I forgot the smaller, more intimate details. In every case, I remembered how I felt while reading the book, the rollercoaster ride of emotions from anticipation, fear, wonder, relief, and joy. Now I understand why I enjoy genres besides science fiction. Now, I read for emotion, not plot. 

Sacrilege! All four of the books I've written began as plot-driven stories. In the revisions—at times, painful revisions—the emotions my characters felt finally made it to the pages. I remember one of my first critique partners, Marie Sparks, asking, "But what are they feeling?" on every single page. Well, those feelings are on every single page now. And as I'm beginning to write PRISM 2, the characters' emotions are a driving force. Instead of thinking of "outside" factors being turning points, for the first time I'm considering making my characters' emotions, their "inner lives," front-and-center from the get-go. (This will save me a boatload of time in revisions!) 

Think about the highlight of your last vacation. Maybe you were camping by a stream, or hiking on a mountain, or eating an amazing meal, or wandering a museum when you saw something that wowed you. If that experience wasn't in the last couple of years, I challenge you to come up with the specifics-the name of the stream or trail, the exact menu, the artist. But I'll bet you remember how you felt at your epiphany. Joy, wonder, or happiness might describe your emotion at the time.

Our bodies feel—and remember—emotion. We have that felt sense of awe, fear, anxiety, love, and the whole range of emotions because that's how we stored emotions before we had words. And our emotions—or the memory of them—often saved our lives. That's why emotions are so powerful. That's why readers read fiction—for the emotion. We have genre fiction so readers can easily find a book that has the emotion they want to feel, whether it's terror (horror), fear (suspense), love (romance), surprise (science fiction), tension (mystery)...You can finish the list.

The cool thing is, we can feel more than one emotion at a time, which amps up the power of our reaction and our memory of the event. You've probably walked into a room that a child or pet has "destroyed" only to find the child or pet sleeping in the midst of the mess. The anger you feel is immediately mitigated by the love you have for the sweet "innocent" sleeping so peacefully—before you start screaming. Those two emotions are melded together in your memory of the event. You won't be able to recall the memory without feeling both emotions. That's some powerful juice.

So, the job of a fiction writer is simply-defined: Write a story that forces your reader to feel emotions.

Easy to define, not so easy to accomplish. 

Those fifteen bullet-points in Part One can serve as starting points if you're boarding the NaNoWriMo train today. The first Wednesday in December, I'll finish our exploration of a writer's job with specific writing craft tips and examples to give your readers an emotional response, a felt-sense response, that makes them run for more of the same in your next book.

Can you share an example or a way you convey a specific emotion without naming that emotion in your manuscript? What emotion do you have trouble getting on the page?

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.

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 shares 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.

P.R.I.S.M., a young adult science fiction romance story of survival, betrayal, resolve, deceit, lies, and love.

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

Sue Ward Drake

I recently spoke on a panel at Romance Writers of America national conference on writing disabled characters. I was asked to present because I had previously worked with the conference for permission to have a transcriber at workshops because I’m deaf.

At my recent presentation, an audience member asked if I thought I wrote "inspirational porn." I’d never heard the expression, but I suppose presenting a disabled person as a ‘normal’ romance heroine with the same sort of worries as any other woman might well be categorized this way. By other people, mind you. After the conference, I realized I’m actually an inspirational junkie, but not because I have trouble hearing. Or maybe that’s why. I don’t know, but I have to face the truth.

Say your goal is to write a book.

You can’t turn around without running into a self-help book on goal setting. In the beginning of the 20^th century men like Napoleon Hill wrote inspirational books about success with a focus on becoming rich. There are still plenty of people giving how-to-succeed-in-business books. Now there’s life coaching and SWOT analyses.

What will help you reach your goal?

The number one quality a writer must have is stubbornness. The will to sit yourself down and write every day. The will to keep marching through the muck (which is what failure feels like).

The next is a belief in yourself. Because you’re going to be writing a lot of words before you write something others want to read. If you enter contests there will be plenty of people who will tell you what’s wrong with those words.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard professor, says of her book Confidence: “Confidence isn’t optimism or pessimism…It’s the expectation of a positive outcome.” So how do you develop the confidence to keep moving toward that goal?

I have a folder full of newspaper and magazine clippings dating back to 2000, which means I must have had this in my office because my house was flooded during Hurricane Katrina. A lot of these are about how to be happy (from SELF magazine) but most are about how to achieve goals. I have a whole year of Gail Blanke’s columns for the magazine REAL SIMPLE about motivation, syndicated newspaper articles by Jeff Herring on taking action toward a dream, interviews from the New York Times business section and even the Vows section. One wedding I clipped mentioned the bride who, when she wanted something, would go after it with a “sort of mythological force.” That’s the type of confidence you need to be a writer—or just to live a happy life.

What specific process will help you reach your goal?

Athletes use visualization to win their races. They visualize every turn down the mountain, every  flip at the end of the pool until they’ve reached the finish. Writers can use the process to achieve their goals.

Make a vision board with clippings or photographs of yourself or make one on Pinterest. Write down what you want, even if it’s as simple as finding a place to write. In Henriette Anne Klauser’s Write It Down Make it Happen: Knowing What You Want and Getting It she describes how she and others have used this method to finalize their dreams by writing down what she wanted step by step and why. She suggests writing about those times when you successfully went after a goal, any goal, big or small. This doesn’t have to be New-York-Times-bestseller-list stuff.

Story board your steps to success. When your confidence hits the skids, write down those defining moments when you went after something because you wanted it more than effort.

Often the most important type of confidence isn’t self-confidence, but that nurtured by others. So find your cheerleaders, your tribe. Don’t have a writing group in your town? Get one long-distance via contacts you made at conferences or through social media.

Reinforce your goals with affirmations every day. Use the word ‘I’ and your name. One of my favorites is about having unlimited creativity, naturally. Another example might be: Because I am a talented author, I easily create my own opportunities. Paul Norris, former CEO of W.R. Grace & Company who also had a handicap said in a New York Times business interview: “Always create situations that will create opportunities in the future, even if you decide not to take them.”

Remember there is an unlimited supply of success, whatever that means to you. Nora Roberts is quoted as saying: “If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never get it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.” 

How about you, WITS readers? How do you manage to stay positive?

 *     *     *     *    *

 Sue Ward Drake grew up in an old house full of dark windows, with a passion for writing, travel and international spy thrillers. Her early literary efforts include submitting a short story to a national magazine at the age of eight and writing a fictional advice column for her high school newspaper.  After a year of study in Spain and a stint living in a farmhouse on a Greek island, a location she used in her first traditionally-published romance, HEAR NO EVIL, she returned to New Orleans where her gradually worsening hearing led to a career as a computer analyst for a bank and a local university.

A survivor of the devastating hurricane Katrina, she currently resides in Nevada with her husband of thirty-eight years. When not writing, she enjoys hiking, swimming, and cooking low-density meals. You can visit Sue on Twitter and find out more about her writing and her books at  www.SueWardDrake.com.  

Over the years, I've read many articles and listened to many talks about the job of a writer. Or the responsibility of a writer. I never really worried too much about those ideas, because I knew the job of a writer was to write the best story possible. 

Now that my first book is out in the world—even if it's only been twenty-four hours— I've been considering my "job" with respect to people who pay money for, then read, my book.

Here are possible answers to the question:

• To deliver an engaging tale
• To deliver a message, be it social commentary, inspiration, or warning, in an engaging way
• To deserve our readers' time
• To offer value to our readers
• To offer hope
• To present possible solutions to life's problems
• To allow readers to escape from their lives for a few hours
• To open readers' eyes to other "things" in life
• To give readers a chance to laugh, or cry, or scream, or love
• To incite imagination or creativity
• To provide a safe environment for readers to feel emotions that might be unsafe in real life
• To provide tales paralleling a reader's life
• To show how to "go another way"
• To provide a reflective mirror for readers' thinking, behavior, and emotion
• To provide catharsis for the writer

This last option could begin a list of negative reasons to author a book. There are, no doubt, many. However we aren't going into things like "payback" because if you're here, reading this, you're interested in your craft, and I'm betting you're not writing for revenge or to bang some kind of drum.

There are those neophytes who are motivated purely by money and believe they can pound on their keyboards and, in the blink of an eye, produce a best seller. I'm betting this isn't you either.

If you are like me, you have a real connection to your characters and their stories. You write because you have to tell the story of the people who've taken up residence in your heart and your head. You want to share this most marvelous story with others. And your reasons for writing this story might include several of the above list and more.

Take a moment now to think about why you write. If suddenly, reading books went to zero popularity, how would that affect you—in the not so obvious ways? How would your inner fire for writing fare? If writing fiction became illegal, what would you risk to share your voice?

Such a scenario seems unlikely, except in speculative fiction stories. But stretching your thinking can help you find what fires your passion for writing. And knowing why you write, may just improve your writing. I know that dealing with my job as author was important for me during the revision process for P.R.I.S.M. I know that the final revision was better for the time I took to "figure out" my own backstory and why it was important for me to tell this particular story. 

Next week on Wednesday, I'll dig into the nitty-gritty of the how-to techniques for the above bullet points. 

What would you add to your writer job description? 

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.

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 shares 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.

P.R.I.S.M., a young adult science fiction romance story of survival, betrayal, resolve, deceit, lies, and love.

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