Writers in the Storm

Lisa Cron

We are so proud and humbled that the Lisa Cron, the author of Wired for Story, and Story Genius has agreed to blog with us on a regular basis! In case you haven't yet seen her TED Talk, you can watch it here. Later. After you read her first installment of 'Ask the Story Genius'. 

Hello! It’s thrilling to be here to answer your story questions. I’ll be doing so every other month from here on out, but since I don’t have any of your question on tap just yet, I thought I’d kick it off with a question I’m often not asked by writers – until it’s too late.  Here’s how that process usually looks:

I’m reading a manuscript and the protagonist – let’s call her Betty - never gets mad, she always takes the feelings of others into account, she’s always polite, on time, and she never takes an extra cookie, even when no one is looking. In other words, Betty couldn’t be less interesting. After a while, “something bad” happens. Let’s say that Betty’s co-worker Ramona stole her hard-won research and is taking credit for it. Ah, I think as I read forward, now it’s going to get good! But Betty, understanding that Ramona had a hard childhood, takes a couple of deep cleansing breaths and decides that Ramona needs the promotion more than she does, so she ignores the whole thing and spends the evening making calls for Amnesty International.

By this time, I’m not only not on Betty’s side, I’m wondering two things: why Betty is such a wimp, and what is Betty’s behavior actually a front for – like maybe she’s so insufferably nice in order to keep anyone from asking who she’s got locked up the basement.

Here’s the kicker: When I ask the writer what’s going on – like, “Hey, why didn’t Betty get mad and, at the very least, tell Ramona off?” -- the writer will invariably answer: “Because I wanted Betty to be likeable, otherwise, the reader won’t care about her.”

And there you have it: The whole “likeable” question. Writers know that we have to care about the protagonist in order to read forward. Thus, it follows, the protagonist has to be likeable. And by likeable the writer means . . . kind of perfect. As in someone you’d definitely want to invite over for dinner. Someone so safe that you know they’d never say a thing to offend your right wing Grandpa, or incite crazy Aunt Harriet who has a bunker in the basement, or expose the fact that your millennial cousin is playing video games on the phone in his lap, or utter a regrettable word in front of your five-year-old niece Natasha who repeats everything she hears. Nor would you have to worry that when your back is turned they’d pocket the silverware.

In the name of making sure their protagonists are “likeable,” writers prevent their characters from doing a whole host of forbidden things: they can’t shoplift, even once as a child, unless it’s bread and their little sister is hungry; they can’t swear, even when they stub their toe; they can’t be mean to anyone, ever, especially children or pets. Nor, it often follows, can they stand up for themselves or what they believe in, unless it couldn’t possibly offend anyone.

In other words, “likeable” often means sanitized. And while “likeable” people don’t offend anyone, neither do they genuinely appeal to anyone, either. In fact the sanitized, the “picture perfect,” often arouses not benign interest, but suspicion. Because we humans know that nothing – and no one – is perfect. How do we know this? Because we aren’t perfect – at least not by those sanitized never-make-a-mistake definitions. After all, we know that the reason they tell us to “Never let ‘em see you sweat,” is precisely because we’re always sweating buckets about the right thing to do. 

So, here’s the scoop: what “likeable” really means is relatable. The reader needs to be able to relate to the protagonist, and to do that the protagonist must be vulnerable, flawed – in other words, decidedly not perfect and definitely not a surface, sanitized version of “a good person.” Otherwise, what do they have to sweat over?

There’s another reason this is so important. In a nutshell: stories are about how someone changes internally over the course of the novel -- leading to an “aha” moment -- which is what then allows them to solve the external plot problem. So if they enter the problem already perfect, why would they need to change? They don’t, which is why when you have a perfect protagonist, you have no story.

The truth is that it’s the baggage they carry – the places where they’re making mistakes – that make the protagonist human. We like the protagonist because of their supposed flaws, not in spite of them.

And here’s the irony – in real life we don’t like “perfect” people. We all know that person – the one at the office who always talks about their spouse so nicely and they’ve got pictures of their kids on the desk, and their always clothes are always neat and pressed, and they always have their work done on time, and they always remember everyone’s birthday (even before Facebook). Do you like that person? Of course not! They’re really annoying because they seem to wear their “perfection” on their sleeve – as if they never Ask wake up cranky or get road rage or snap at the cashier at Trader Joe’s for being too damn friendly. What they make you think is: Okay since nobody's that perfect, I wonder what he's really up to? We don’t like that person because we don’t trust them.

And just in case you’re still not sure – the truth is we are often captivated by characters who are decidedly unlikeable, despicable even. As writer Elizabeth George says, “Characters with the most edge tend to be the most interesting to write and to read about.” She went on to say, “I just read all four Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels in a row, and one of the two main characters is not likable at all. I found myself wondering how anybody could remain friends with her because she's so foul. But as a character she is fascinating and unforgettable."

Are you breathing a sigh of relief about now? It’s liberating to think that your protagonist can be a real person – who makes the kind of mistakes that we all do, but are always trying to keep other people from seeing. It’s like taking off those tight jeans at the end of the day and finally being able to let it all hang out and breathe. And nothing feels better than that!

"Now that I’ve answered a question that I posed, I’m open for your questions. They can be about any aspect of story – something you’re struggling with now, or would like a little feedback on, or are just curious about. Post them below, and I’ll dive in and answer as many questions as I can. Can’t wait! Till then, onward and upward my friends."

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Lisa Cron is the author of Wired for Story and Story Genius. Her video tutorial Writing Fundamentals: The Craft of Story can be found at Lynda.com, and her TEDx talk, Wired for Story, opened Furman University’s 2014 TEDx conference, Stories: The Common Thread of Our Humanity.

Lisa has worked in publishing at W.W. Norton, as an agent at the Angela Rinaldi Literary Agency, as a producer on shows for Showtime and Court TV, and as a story consultant for Warner Brothers and the William Morris Agency. Since 2006, she’s been an instructor in the UCLA Extension
Writers’ Program, and she is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts MFA program in Visual Narrative in New York City. In her work as a story coach, Lisa helps writers, nonprofits, educators, and journalists wrangle the story they’re telling onto the page. She can be reached at wiredforstory.com

Kimberly Brock

Lightning Collectors

There are these questions I get a lot as a writer.

“What do you write?”

 “Do you actually make any money at this?”

“How do you have the time?”

Blah. I don’t mind answering any of these questions, but honestly, they bore me. They’re so obvious. So unoriginal. These questions are placeholders. I have this theory that talking to a writer is akin to talking to an alien for most people. They just don’t know what to say to us. They can’t imagine what on earth our lives are like or what they have in common with someone who sits in a room in a smoking jacket, swilling two-day old coffee and murmuring to themselves about philosophy and Shakespeare. Or maybe we wear high heels and silk dressing gowns and drink wine while imagining hulking, naked, wealthy tycoons on horseback. That’s the thing. THEY JUST DON’T KNOW. So they don’t know what to say to us.

I’m not offended. It’s pretty funny, actually, because I know the truth. I know the coffee is hot from the Keurig and I may or may not brush my hair before 2pm. But sometimes, to be honest, I make stuff up. Stuff like how I write on trains crossing North Africa, or in bohemian apartments in Paris. Or maybe I only write twice a year when I’m on a yacht in the Caribbean. Or I can’t volunteer in my child’s classroom because I’m living amongst monks, finishing my next novel. Or I’m too weak to bring snacks for the little league team because I’ve totally been fasting for weeks, eating only banana leaves until the muse comes to me

Okay, okay. None of this has any bearing on the reality of my writing journey. At. All. (Think preschool parking lots, Costco, my closet floor, leftovers, etc) But I know these questions don’t really matter because no one bats an eye, no matter how I answer them. The most passionate reaction I might get to my zany responses is a mildly doubtful, vaguely Valley Girl, “Seriously?”

But there’s this one question I love. It is the best question, a sincere question. When I get this question, I know I’m meeting another alien, another seeker. This question comes at me differently, and if you’re a writer I bet you get it, too. The person asking will often lean in just a little. This question is a great skeleton key, slipping into a mysterious lock. It’s what’s inside that wardrobe in the attic. It’s the invisible ink that shines in moonlight. The secret language we storytellers speak only to one another. Ready? Do you know what it is?

Where do you get your ideas?

Ahhh. See there? Doesn’t that thrill you just a little? How I love this question for so many reasons! I love it for all it reveals in me. And in the one who is asking. And I have the answer always ready.

The same place as you.

BAM! POW! SHAZAM! All the comic book sound effects apply to this moment. Eyes meet. Recognition zings. Alien recognizes alien.

This question is about you, the writer, but also about the one who asks it. It’s about what connects us all, the true secrets of the storyteller. But beyond that, it’s about identity. It’s about a person who wants the answers for themselves because they know somewhere inside that they are something strange and wonderful and… they are like you. Of course, that’s not what I tell them because that would be boring and normal and not alien at all. But when it comes to this question, I tell them the truth in a way that only another storyteller will understand. A litmus test.

We’re Lightning Collectors. 

Wait. Watch. A real storyteller understands this answer intuitively. We know that we don’t GET ideas. We RECEIVE ideas. They are delivered to us from the universe, baby. Storytellers are built for stories. We are conduits. We just take in everything that’s around us and we are bathed in stories. We soak up the energy of our personal world. That’s what’s behind the curtain of every storyteller who ever cranked out a good yarn. Sounds easy enough, right?

Wrong. If your litmus test tells you the truth, your question asker will go bright-eyed and misty at this point. Because they know. And they know that you know that they know. And they know that once they know, they can’t un-know what they’ve always secretly believed about themselves. Scary? You bet. And that’s the real question that’s being asked. So, here’s my real answer. The whole she-bang.

Collecting lightning is not like carrying a basket through the woods. Collecting lightning means being a structure that invites risk to zip right through us. It means the chance of getting burned – sometimes, fried. It means standing in the worst kind of storms and not pulling inside yourself. And here’s where my answer really matters, when I tell this seeker the most important thing I’ve learned about what and who I am as a Lightning Collector. Seriously. I looked up lightning rods on Wikipedia, so I’d be an expert.

“…lightning is actually composed of both a cloud component and an oppositely charged ground component.”

Did you see miss it? Did you blink? It’s a glorious flash, the secret to what makes up all our stories, the requirements for lightning to strike – both the cloud and the ground. A story requires the energy of inspiration AND the grounded certainty of the storyteller’s courage. Wise Lightning Collectors know they can’t be afraid. They must be aware in a world of people who often aren’t. They have to believe - long before the flash, really believe – they are sufficient to conduct all that energy. That kind of confidence is what cauterizes souls and sparks voice.

Where do you get your ideas? If you’re paying attention, you already know the answer, don’t you? Oh, you dear and fierce Lightning Collectors, from the most mysterious source of all. Ourselves.

Are you present in the world in this way? Is it challenging to go through life with this kind of hyper-intuitive awareness? Do you find that your story ideas come to you from this awareness? Do you find comradery and comfort when you meet other storytellers who understand this kind of awareness?

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About Kimberly

Kimberly Brock is the award winning author of the #1 Amazon bestseller, THE RIVER WITCH (Bell Bridge Books, 2012). A former actor and special needs educator, Kimberly is the recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year 2013 Award. A literary work reminiscent of celebrated southern author Carson McCullers, THE RIVER WITCH has been chosen by two national book clubs.

Kimberly’s writing has appeared in anthologies, blogs and magazines, including Writer Unboxed and Psychology Today. Kimberly served as the Blog Network Coordinator for She Reads, a national online book club from 2012 to 2014, actively spearheading several women’s literacy efforts. She lectures and leads workshops on the inherent power in telling our stories and is founder of Tinderbox Writer’s Workshop. She is also owner of Kimberly Brock Pilates.

She lives in the foothills of north Atlanta with her husband and three children, where she is at work on her next novel. Visit her website at kimberlybrockbooks.com for more information and to find her blog.

June Stevens Westerfield

Creating a brand that represents you as an author and reflects your writing as a whole is hard enough when you write in just one genre.  Often, when an author writes books in just one series, their author brand gets tied inextricably with their series brand.  That isn’t ideal, but it isn’t necessarily a problem either.  But what happens if the author starts writing a completely different series or even a standalone novel?  What’s more, what if the new novel is in a completely different genre?  It stands completely outside of the author’s known brand.  The author now has two choices, either change their brand or use a pseudonym.

I was once on the 'pseudonyms for different genres' bandwagon.  But that was over a decade ago.  As the digital age has matured and social media has become a necessary part of an author’s platform, the ease of keeping up more than one author name has become more difficult.   It entails maintaining websites, blog posts, newsletters and active social media accounts for each pen name.  That is both expensive and time consuming.  If you write within several subgenres, maintaining your pseudonyms would be unmanageable, and it would leave little time for writing. 

The best option is creating an author brand that can encompass all that you write, and what you may write in the future.  In short, you want to brand yourself as an author, not your genre.   I’ve worked with several clients to create author brands that can represent their work as a whole.

The first step is figuring out what exactly does all of your work have in common?  Do they have a common audience, common themes, etc?  I always ask my clients to list at least three things all their books have in common.   At first most of them say “nothing, they are all different.”  But when pressed, they can usually find many more common traits than just three. 

Next is to pick one of those common threads, or even all three, to come up with a tagline to represent you as an author.  Not all authors choose to use taglines, and ultimately you may choose not to either, but choosing one can help you decide what direction you want to go with the visual aspects of your brand, such as colors, fonts, and logos. 

CASE STUDY: LAURA DRAKE

The best way to illustrate is to walk you through the re-branding process I went through with Laura Drake.  Laura writes both romance and women’s fiction.   In her mind, they are very, very different and on her website she was using two different taglines and branding images for them and had them separated into different sections of her website.  That was a little confusing for the reader, and made it confusing for Laura when it came time to promote her books. 

   

When Laura came to me to consult on her branding, I asked her to list three things that all her books had in common.  She balked at first, saying they were very different.  That’s a normal reaction, we like to think every series, every genre is unique.  But we are humans and our styles don’t change just because we write different genres. 

As a reader and fan of Laura’s work I had the advantage of being able to suggest a few things, and once the ball was rolling, Laura jumped in, a little more at ease.

We determined that all her books feature strong women at turning points in their lives, the stories focus on those women’s relationships (whether romantic or interpersonal), and they all take place in small towns or communities. 

We then took her two existing taglines, and decided that one of them was already perfect to represent all her work:

Ordinary women on the edge of extraordinary change  

Once she simplified her author brand, it made it possible for her to focus on the individual brands for her series.  She created lovely images with the book covers of each series, and then listed her series titles (with each book title popping up when the mouse passes over) in her menu bar.  This makes it easier for fans of a particular book who may not know the series title (or genre) to find what they are looking for.  It also brings the focus back on her books, and not the genres. 

Finally, she pulled it all together with the black and creamy gold color scheme of her website and her very simple initial logo in the top corner.  It’s sleek and elegant, just like her writing.

Laura’s case was actually pretty simple.  But what if you write is wildly different genres, such as paranormal romance, contemporary romance, and nonfiction?

It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible.  How do I know?  My first “multiple genre client” was myself.  I started out in contemporary romance, then added paranormal/urban fantasy.  Then recently put out some non-fiction.

The three things my books have in common: 1. My audience is women, of all ages. (even though I do have male readers)  2. I write strong female characters (even my non-fiction is about women’s strengths) 3. I focus on relationships and emotions

My tagline represents everything I ever want to write, no matter the genre, even non-fiction: Damsels Not in Distress.  But, my brand also represents me as a person, at least the public part of me.

I chose the color scheme of hot pink and dark grey because they are my favorite colors and they pop with the tagline.  Everything about my brand kind of screams.  And that is perfect for me.  I have purple hair and I’m kind of in your face.  My brand is brash and bold.

To make it even better, there is no shortage of awesome images out there that I can use to make “Damsels Not in Distress” promotional images.  And it’s okay if they are all different, it’s even better that way, because my damsels are all very different. 

The thing to remember when thinking about branding is that everything your readers see says something about you.  So, you need to think about more than just the words in your stories.  Who is the “you” you want the public to see, to get to know, not just through reading your books, but through your website and your social media.  That is the person you are branding. 

What do you think, WITS readers? Are you rethinking your brand? Any questions for June?

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Hey all, June is offering WITS readers a special!

About ABE

Author Branding Essentials is dedicated to offering comprehensive author centric branding and design services at competitive prices.  As an Author, your name is your brand. Building your Author Brand is key to success. Many agents encourage authors to begin building that brand long before they are published. At Author Branding Essentials we understand the unique criteria it takes to build an author brand, versus another type of business.  We can help you decide on the best options for your author brand and help you implement them.