Writers in the Storm

Jamie Raintree

The holidays are a time for slowing down and reflecting on the past year. They're also a time for thinking about the year to come. Whether or not you set resolutions, no doubt you've got ideas about what you'd like to accomplish in 2017 and the bad habits you want to leave behind in 2016.

If you're like me, you probably never check off quite as many things as you'd like on your to-do list for the year, and you never quite integrate those new habits you know you should. And so you approach the New Year cautiously hopeful, knowing you're not going to miraculously be a new person but promising yourself you're going to try to keep heading in the right direction anyway.

But what if this year could be different? What if you could make bigger strides than ever before? What if you could quit breaking those promises to yourself, and keep your motivation up long enough to finally bring your dreams within reach?

KNOW YOUR "WHY"

In the many years I've been writing and working toward my goals, there's one productivity tactic that has made all the difference between the years I've made great progress and the ones I haven't, and that tactic has been to continually improve my self-awareness. The more I understand what motivates me, what I feel my purpose is, and what I want to offer the world, the more effective I am on a day-to-day basis. Because true productivity doesn't start on the outside, with scheduling habits and motivating blog posts--though those things can help from time to time--it starts from deep within you, where your fire resides. It starts from that pull that makes you want to write and publish in the first place.

Have you taken the time lately to ask yourself why you're writing, why you're striving for publication, or why you're setting these goals for yourself? Now is the perfect time to do it. Sometime over these next couple of weeks, sneak away with a journal and a cup of coffee, and before you set any more goals or resolutions that may slip through your fingers yet again, ask yourself that telling question. And don't settle for the first answer. Just like when we are seeking our characters' motivation, we must ask ourselves why over and over again, until you feel a stirring inside you--that "aha" moment that we all live for when we're writing fiction.

You need those in your real life too.

That's your fire.

STAY CONNECTED TO YOUR MOTIVATION

The reason most people struggle with making real changes, and real progress each year is because they quickly lose connection to that fire. Daily routines can sap your energy, the curve balls life throws at you can knock you off track, and your own insecurities can make you forget your "why." Even when you are working toward your goals, you can get overly focused on the "what" and pretty soon, when things aren't going the way you'd hope, you fall into despair, wondering why you ever wanted to follow this path in the first place.

But the power of remembering your 'why' - of remembering that fire, is in harnessing it. If you wait until you're discouraged to remember your purpose, you may get back on track, but it's only in staying connected to that fire when times are good that you get ahead.

Once you know your "why", find a way to keep it in the forefront of your mind. Post it in your work space, written down, or as a quote or picture. Journal about it frequently, especially when you feel your motivation start to wane. Schedule frequent dates with yourself to re-examine your goals and make sure they are still in line with your "why."

FLAME IT - PROGRESS BEGETS PROGRESS
Even though I don't follow the "write every day" rule (I write Monday through Friday, which is enough for me), there's a good reason it's touted all over the writing community. If you understand the intention behind it, you can see that the real goal behind this tactic is to keep up the momentum. You've probably felt the effects yourself, when you've had particularly productive streaks. Progress begets progress, and it's this momentum that fans your flame.

If you allow your dream to fall dormant, even for a little while, the flame starts to weaken, and if you fall off your resolutions by the end of January, as many people tend to do, it becomes mere embers. Yes, it's always there, ready for you to fuel it again, but if you want this year to be different, keep it roaring. Keep working. Take small steps when you have to, but always keep moving in the direction of your dreams.

(If having visual proof of your progress inspires you, check out my 2017 Writing & Revision Tracker here.)

As we sidle into another year, it can be easy to come into it jaded and negative. What's really going to change? Here's the thing, though: you can. You can grow a little bit more every year. You can get closer to your goals every single day. And being intimately connected with the reason behind your goals makes the journey a little easier, because instead of having to push yourself toward your dream for another year, you can be pulled by that inner fire, that inner purpose, which requires a lot less effort.

So what lights a fire under you? What is your "why?"

ABOUT JAMIE

Jamie Raintree is an author and a writing business teacher. She is also a mother of two girls, a wife, a businesswoman, a nature-lover, and a wannabe yogi. Her debut novel, PERFECTLY UNDONE, will be released on October 3, 2017 by Graydon House. Subscribe to her newsletter for more writing tips, workshops, and book news. To find out more, visit her website.

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James Preston

“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

We’ll come back to that in a minute.

Story is important. What we do is important. My guess is you believe that or you wouldn't be reading this blog. I had that knowledge driven home one year on vacation.

Welcome to another installment of Writers in the Storm. I hope you get two things out of this essay: first, a reason to believe your writing is important and second, a reason to believe in stories with happy endings.

The Importance of Story

My friends and I visited Stratford-on-Avon (yes the Stratford-on-Avon). I had just broken in to fiction writing, selling short stories to Analog Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov’s, and others. Outside the building I saw a framed poster advertising a performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays, an event to raise money to restore the house, and Charles Dickens was one of the performers. And I felt this flash, this epiphany, and it hit me that I was part of that tradition. Sure, they were generals in the writing army and I was the second assistant to the junior file clerk, but I was part of it.

Story is important. You believe that, but if you’re like me every now and then you need encouragement. Writing is tough. That early sale to Asimov’s? It fell through and it took months to find another home for the poor story.

There are times for most of us when we are looking at a rejection letter or facing the dreaded “what happens next?” when we ask ourselves why we’re doing this. I want to offer a surprising reason to believe that what you do is important, one that you may not have thought of. And my reason is more important than I realized when I started writing this essay. Your writing may save the world.

As writers we are immersed in daily-changing memes, currents of thought. One enduring current is the fear of the rise of the machines — artificial intelligences that are smarter than we are.

What if the machines don’t do what we want them to? In the classic Stanley Kubrick film, 2001, HAL killed the rest of the crew and was trying to kill his pal Dave. In Her (2013) Samantha the AI thanks her boyfriend Theo the human for teaching her to want. A good thing? But those are only movies, right? Okay, how about your autonomous self-driving car hearing you talking about trading it in. What if it doesn't want to go?

The good news is there are people worrying about the problem, and they have a range of solutions. Okay, a little bit of background on artificial intelligence.

There are two kinds of AI, “Weak” and “Strong.” Weak is the kind that speaks up from your dashboard to tell you that you have missed the turn and it’s recalculating. It's with us now, everywhere, like in your appliances. (Side note: some researchers are very worried about the security of this “internet of things” but that’s beyond the scope of this essay.)

“Strong” artificial intelligence is self-aware. It's Skynet, or the Matrix, or Samantha and it’s around the corner, a decade or two away. But, it’s not too early to think about teaching a machine ethics. Well, the first problem is deciding what good behavior is. And that’s where we come in.

One promising solution is being developed by Mark Reidl at the Georgia Institute of Technology: read the machines stories.

Read the robot stories that show things like being helpful, polite, not destroying civilization. So you don’t want to read HAL a story where everybody dies.

Back to Dave and his little problem with HAL. The latter is the “strong,” AI that runs the spaceship and HAL has, well, he’s gone off the deep end, his elevator no longer goes all the way up, he’s a few fries short of a Happy Meal. You get the idea. What happens when your AI gets cranky? The dreaded “blue screen of death” takes on a new meaning when it's in your self-driving car or the 757 landing at LAX.

Yep, a culture’s fiction embodies the best (and of course, the worst, in the antagonist) and one way to teach an AI — the more recent term is “Artificial Life” but that one kind of makes me nervous — to be good is to tell it stories that show good behavior rewarded. And what better group of writers to do that than romance novelists?

In Defense of the Happy Ending

In my mystery stories things usually work out, and I suspect that is true for yours, too. And yet everywhere we see the reverse, “a bittersweet tale of love gone bad,” “a grim exploration of the angst inherent in modern life,” “a futile effort to break the chains of (fill in the blank).” You won’t find this in my writing. To quote a recent Nobel Prize winner, “It ain’t me, babe.”

Joy is important. There’s not enough of it to go around. Comedy, a close cousin to happiness, is hard. Don’t believe me? Check out an interview with Jerry Lewis called, “No Apologies.” He tackles this issue head on and makes a case that if you want horror, just pick up a newspaper. Comedy, and I would widen that to include all happy endings, is harder.

So, “and he folded her into his strong arms and whispered, ‘l love you,’” is not only satisfying, not only reflective of reality, it also may be important in ways we cannot envision.

With luck, when HAL says, “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that,” Dave will say, “Hal, remember that Jayne Ann Krentz story I read you? And how the hero and the heroine cared about each other?”

“I liked the dust bunnies, Dave.”

And the spaceship door swings open . . .

And story saves the world.

I’m interested to hear how you feel about the long tradition that we are part of, and how stories might be used in the future to train thinking machines.

 James R. Preston is the author of the award-winning Surf City Mysteries. The most recent is Sailor Home From Sea. He is finishing the second of a projected trilogy of novellas set at Cal State Long Beach in the 1960s. The next Surf City Mystery is called Remains To Be Seen and will be available in 2017. His work has been selected for the UC Berkeley Special Collection, California Detective Fiction. And when he needs inspiration for a great opening, he looks at a Jayne Ann Krentz. 

For More Information (and for fun) —

Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot and the rest of the robot novels. He invented the Three Laws of Robotics in the 1950’s and more than half a century later they are strong candidates for implementation. On top of that, these are good stories. 

Popular Science, The New Artificial Intelligence. Special Issue, (2016). Lots of intriguing ideas as well as a good definition of the kinds of AI.

Foreign Affairs July/August 2015. “Hi, Robot: Work and Life in The Age pf Automation.” A good, detailed discussion of the social implications of machine intelligence and how we might get along with them.

2001  (1968) no discussion of AI is complete without HAL singing, “Daisy, Daisy” as Dave pulls the AI’s circuit cards.

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969) The US turns defense over to a supercomputer, only to find that the Russians have done the same. Colossus takes over, and assures its creator that mankind will eventually love it.

Her (2013) Touching man/OS love story marred (IMHO) by really rough language.

The Matrix (1999)  All three, but the first is the best. It's almost a throwaway, but watch one of the characters choose blissful illusion over nasty reality. Video game, anyone? At least in this future the machines find humans useful — as batteries.

Star Trek: the Motion Picture (1979) The alien machine built around the Voyager probe is searching for meaning and regards humans as an infestation.

The Terminator (1984) All I need to say is, “I’ll be back.” Once again man is an infestation that needs to be wiped out.

 

 

Angela Ackerman

Stories should be a true experience for readers. Like a gourmet meal, we want there to be more to them than just what is seen on the surface. This depth can be added a number of ways—through subplots, character arc, subtext, theme, and symbolism. Of them all, symbolism is one of the simplest methods to employ, and it packs a serious wallop. 

Symbolism is important because it turns an ordinary object, place, color, person, etc. into something that goes beyond the literal. Babies represent innocence and unlimited potential, spring is synonymous with rebirth, shackles symbolize slavery, the color white brings to mind purity.

Symbols like these are universal in nature because they mean the same thing to many people. As such, universal symbols are helpful as readers see them and understand what they literally and figuratively mean. This not only delivers another shade of meaning to whatever is being described, it also promotes word economy because, by its very nature, symbolism allows us to convey more.

But a symbol can also be personal in nature, more individual, meaning something specifically to the character. For William Wallace in the movie Braveheart, the thistle represents love since one was given to him by Murron when they were children. To most people, love in the form of a prickly weed wouldn’t typically compute. But as it’s used throughout the film at poignant moments, the audience comes to recognize this personal symbol for what it means.

So whether the symbol is universally obvious or one that’s specific to the protagonist, it can add a layer that draws readers deeper into the story. The setting itself can become a symbol as a whole should you need it to. A home could stand for safety. A river might represent a forbidden boundary.

More often than not, your symbol will be something within the setting that represents an important idea to your character. And when you look within your protagonist’s immediate world, you’re sure to find something that holds emotional value for him or her.

For instance, if your character was physically abused as a child, it might make sense for the father to be a symbol of that abuse since he was the one who perpetrated it. But the father might live thousands of miles away. The character may have little to no contact with him, which doesn’t leave many chances to symbolize. Choosing something within the protagonist’s own setting will have greater impact and offer more opportunities for conflict and tension. A better symbol might be the smell of his father’s cologne—the same kind his roommate puts on when he’s prepping for a date, the scent of which soaks into the carpet and furniture and lingers for days.

Another choice might be an object from his setting that represents the one he was beaten with: wire hangers in the closet, a heavy dictionary on the library shelf, or the tennis racquet in his daughter’s room that she recently acquired and is using for lessons. These objects won’t be exact replicas of the ones from his past, but they’re close enough to trigger unease, bad memories, or even emotional trauma.

Symbols like these have potential because not only do they clearly remind the protagonist of a painful past event, they’re in his immediate environment, where he’s forced to encounter them frequently. In the case of the tennis racquet, an extra layer of complexity is added because the object is connected to someone he dearly loves—someone he wants to keep completely separate from any thoughts of his abuse.

Motifs: Symbolism on a Larger Scale

Connecting readers with our stories is what we all hope to achieve as authors. This is why the stories we write often contain a central message or idea—a theme—that is being conveyed through its telling. Sometimes the theme is deliberately included during the drafting stage; other times, it organically emerges during the writing process. However it occurs, the theme is often supported by certain recurring symbols that help to develop the overall message or idea throughout the course of a story. These repeated symbols are called motifs.

For example, consider the Harry Potter series. One of the motifs under-girding the theme of good vs. evil is the snake. It’s the sign for the house of Slytherin, from which so many bad wizards have emerged. Voldemort’s pet, Nagini, is a giant snake. Those who can speak Parseltongue (the language of serpents) are considered to be dark wizards. By repeatedly using this creature as a symbol for evil, Rowling creates an image that readers automatically associate with the dark side of Potter’s world.

Because motifs are pivotal in revealing your theme, it’s important to find the right ones. The setting is a natural place for these motifs to occur because it contains so many possibilities. It could be a season, an article of clothing, an animal, a weather phenomenon—it could be anything, as long as it recurs throughout the story and reinforces the overall theme.
Themes can either be planned or accidental. If you know beforehand what your theme will be, think of a location that could reinforce that idea—either through the setting itself or with objects within that place—and make sure those choices are prominently displayed throughout the story.

Need a bit of help finding the right symbol for your story?

Did you know we have a comprehensive Symbolism and Motifs Thesaurus at One Stop for Writers? Stop by sometime and explore the many possible symbols that can be used to enhance the deeper themes in your writing.

How have you used symbolism and motifs in your writing?  If you haven't, how would you like to use them to enhance your writing?

Angela Ackerman is a writing coach, international speaker, and co-author of five bestselling writing books, including The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression. She is passionate about helping writers succeed. Her site, One Stop For Writers is a powerhouse online library like no other, filled with description, story structure, and brainstorming tools to help writers elevate their storytelling. You can also find her on Twitter, Facebook and at her blog, Writers Helping Writers.