Writers in the Storm

Every year, after reading and talking to my "source authorities," I write a post about what changes to look for in the coming months. I had decided to eschew tradition this year. Until I began experiencing what they were talking about. (Here's a post I wrote on using change to enhance your writing.)

In case you haven't figured out, you are already strapped into your seat and the cosmic operator has pushed the button. Get ready for the roller coaster ride.

Next Monday, February 8th, is the first day of the Chinese Year of the Monkey. The Red Fire Monkey. Take a breath here. It's not that scary.

[Here's some fun facts about Chinese New Year.]

We'll all need our mental agility to sidestep the manipulation of others. This is the year to defy convention and try the unusual—if you feel the need. It's a year for fun and excitement. On the flip side, the challenge this year is self-discipline for your projects. Beware of a short attention span and the ups-and-downs of your writing work. Although this may be a difficult year for your friends, it is a little easier for writers. Use your own brand of planning (plotting) skills to help organize your writing.

In other traditions, this will be a year to finish long-term projects. It's a year to wrap up loose ends, take advantage of years of hard work, and revolutionize your writing life. Take stock of what is working and what needs to be changed or released. If it's not working for you, it's time to let it go. (Don't start singing that song.)

The first half of the year will be a time for consolidation to be able to take advantages of opportunities offered in the last six months of 2016. You may find yourself making courageous new choices. Follow your heart's desires.

Be sure your integrity helps you maintain an ethical stance that mirrors your personal truth. Wear your own character on your sleeve, even during unsettling, stressful times. You have an impact on others. Know that your influence is a valuable contribution, even to people you do not know. When you feel that you can't deal with the demands of your life, guard against giving up. Compassion for yourself, and others, can remind you that you are not alone. Be willing to accept inspiration, help and ideas from others. Connect with like-minded people.

You may find that the folks around you are annoying. Avoid quarrels and arguments. You may know better, but accept the choices of others.  Just like our characters, the people in our lives will need to "figure it out" on their own.

You may tend to get tired this year. Take time to rest. Take care of your body. Drink more water. Walk every day. Eat healthier. Take advantage of the healing qualities of nature. Spend three minutes in the morning or at night saying things you are grateful for.

2016 is likely to be an uncomfortable year. Not bad, but change is never comfortable. And there will be changes this year. More than usual. But if you are prepared, stay positive, and follow your truth, The Year of the Monkey could be a great year for you.

What challenges have you already faced in the first month of 2016? Do you feel this could be an important year for you?

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.

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.

Aimie K. Runyan

Three years ago when I sat down to begin plotting my novel, Promised to the Crown, I knew I had a huge task in front of me. I was dealing with an era most readers would only have a cursory knowledge of, and a series of events they would probably not be familiar with at all. The settling of early Quebec isn’t something most history teachers spend much time on… if any.

So how to convey the reality of 770 women who were sent over as “mail-order brides” by the king in order to marry the settlers and make little Canadians? You can’t. But what you can do is try to give a larger picture of what the women experienced by selecting a sampling of characters that can provide a wider lens to the reader on the world you’re trying to show.

With only the historical premise of Louis XIV’s “King’s Daughters” (so named because he paid for their dowry and crossing to Canada), I set about crafting three completely fictitious characters who came from different situations, but who would have to face the same challenges and realities in the New World. I didn’t want the limitations of using real historical figures because my goal wasn’t to tell the story of one or two women—I wanted to convey a larger truth. These are some of the methods I used to weave three separate narratives into one cohesive story:

• Start with archetypes. “The mastermind” “the mother” “the artist” are all concepts you can use to formulate how your characters take on the world. The person obsessed with solving problems is going to address issues differently than the person combing the world for inspiration for their next poem. You want to make sure your POV characters have a different enough world view to make it worth the hassle of writing from more than one POV. I began my characters with three very basic concept characters: the mother, the teacher, and the sheltered farm girl.
• Diverge from those archetypes. There is no person so simplistic that you can simply write them off as a two word personality type. Your character has likes, dislikes, needs, wants, and a past that shapes how they deal with reality. Making a rich character will make it easier for your reader to parse who is speaking. What if my maternal character was barren? What if my teacher character loved children, but was petrified to have her own? Dig deep into their psyche.
• Make sure each chapter or section advances the plot. Telling the same scene over again simply to get another character’s take is tedious. In small doses, it can be brilliant, but forward motion is key. This was a challenge in my early drafts because I wanted to tell each of my main characters’ in the moment they decided to leave for Canada. This made for 50+ pages where the characters got no closer to the new world. Choosing one character to focus on and begin the story in France, then giving the other characters’ ‘pivotal moments’ in bite-sized chunks of back story propelled the reader through the action faster and made for a much more compelling read.
• Make sure each main POV character gets enough “screen time” to make us care. You don’t need to make sure that the number of words you spend with each character is the same, but it shouldn’t feel lopsided. We also shouldn’t go so long away from any one main POV character that we’ve lost track of where they are and what they’re doing. I made several passes through my manuscript to ensure each main character was at least mentioned if they were ‘offscreen’ for a whole chapter, and tallied up their word counts to make sure there wasn’t a huge disparity. I didn’t have a perfect rotation of POV, but I made sure it was fairly close.
• In addition to strong characters, your voice for each must be on point. Pet expressions, gestures, vocabulary limitations, and more are key in keeping your POV characters distinct. The illiterate character, no matter how smart, will not have the vocabulary to match an educated counterpart. This is important, even when not dealing with multiple POV, but absolutely essential when you are. I made sure my Parisian characters were more worldly than my rural ones, and the literate ones more eloquent than those who had been denied an education.
• In most cases, it’s great to show one main POV character from the eyes of another. Is your detective as witty as he thinks? Is your ninja as cunning as she would have you believe? Let the other characters show us another angle on the truth. I loved showing my insecure character through the eyes of her friends. She was much more capable than she ever recognized.
• If you are travelling between different time periods in a dual narrative, make sure the language, setting, props, and more all fit the eras so as to keep the narratives separate. It’s easy to slip in an inappropriate word that will take the reader out of the appropriate context.
• Make sure that if you have a large number of main POV characters that you achieve a satisfying story arc for all of them in addition to an overreaching story arc. Each main character deserves a fully fleshed-out storyline, and for this reason, multiple POV books tend to be longer than single narratives. If you take on this structure, invest the time to do it thoroughly.
• Make sure you make transitions from POV character to POV character smoothly. Titling a chapter heading with the POV character’s name is very common. You can also shift from scene to scene in a chapter if you are very distinct with your voice, but this does not mean “head-hopping” willy-nilly within a scene. Stick with one character for a logical chunk of the story.
• The golden rule: Do not use multiple POVs for the sake of using multiple POVs. If you can tell your story without the shifts, you don’t need them. Use of multiple POVs is a really compelling tool if used well and is a necessary part of your narrative structure. If it’s not vital to the story, you’re just making your novel more complicated for no real reason, and complicated is not the same as complex and/or interesting.

We have seen some really wonderful multiple POV books in every genre recent years: The Poisonwood Bible, the Song of Ice and Fire series, The Girl on the Train and more. Is this structure to your liking, or do you prefer the author to stick to a singular narrative?

About Aimie

Aimie K. Runyan writes historical fiction that highlights previously uncelebrated contributions of women in key moments in history. Her first novel, Promised to the Crown, comes out in April of this year. She loves travel, music, and books above almost all things. She lives in Colorado with her husband and two children.

Find Aimie online at www.aimiekrunyan.com, her author Facebook page, on Goodreads, and on Twitter at @aimiekrunyan

Sierra Godfrey

If you’re anything like me, January isn’t so much a chance for resolutions and fresh starts as it is a reminder that now is no time to slack off. Things are still crazy!

For my part, I never make resolutions because I dislike it when I break them—but this January I did get really organized. I bought a gorgeous paper planner that is so pretty it’s a sure I’ll look at and use it, and I started a budget and finance binder. I might or might not have organized all our contact info into a Household Home Base Binder.

One area where I still need help is social media—for my business, for my writing. There’s so much of it and the sheer possibilities can be overwhelming. How do you keep up with it all without losing your mind? One of my website clients, the lovely and fantastic Kristin Lippert Martin, nailed it when she said to me, “I have Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, a blog, and Facebook—and it’s exhausting.”

No kidding.

What I know is this: Not every social media channel works for every type of business, and you have to spend a little time getting to know which one works for you. But you probably shouldn’t ignore them altogether. How? Glad you asked.

Do what you like.

This is a no-brainer, but there’s pressure these days to be on everything, otherwise we’ll feel left behind, especially if you’re of an age where the internets came into your life as a teenager or in your early twenties.  If you hate a social channel, don’t use it!

For me, Twitter works best. I am not going to Tumblr, and filming myself for YouTube is never going to happen. I resisted Instagram for a long time, but it turns out I like it. I hate Facebook. I’ve got enough going on in life to know that forcing myself to use the channels I dislike is silly. Do what you like!

But here’s the thing—set it up so the other channels are taken care of anyway. How? Glad you asked.

Recipe Tools.

There are a few websites that know there are those of us who want to be everywhere, but dislike many of the channels. Thank goodness! My most favorite of these is If This Then That (ifttt.com), which is a fantastic resource. Set a "recipe" so that every time you publish a blog post (for example), it publishes that post to twitter and intsagram and Tumblr for you—or however you like! It works all ways, so that an Instagram post can go to Twitter or Facebook or whatever. This saves you oodles of time, but its downfall is that it does not engage for you. So you’ll post—but people will figure out it’s an auto-post. (Meh. You might not care.)

A similar tool is Postso, which allows you to schedule posts across all your channels. Pinterest, Facebook—you name it. Postso isn’t free, but if this kind of thing takes up your time, it could be a worthwhile expense.

The one drawback with recipe sites is posting to Instagram. Instagram does not want any program posting to it, so it’s not possible to push posts to it from other channels.

But let’s say you hate using your phone to handle Instagram, and yet you heard there’s a significant writer community on it. What do you do to make things easier on yourself? Glad you asked.

Bluestacks

Bluestacks simulates a tablet or phone environment—on your desktop. What this means is you can use Instagram on your desktop and therefore get around the painful typing out of all those hashtags and things with your sausage fingers making typos every two seconds and Autocorrect embarrassing you with scatological or swear word corrections. It also means you can cut and paste from your other posts. It’s not perfect, but it’s free and it is a tremendous relief to be able to upload photos from my desktop or type out a long comment from my keyboard. I use it plus my mobile Instagram app, and the combination works really well.

All these tools are nice, you might be thinking, but none of them truly help you stay organized when it comes to getting that content out there. How do you manage that? Glad you asked.

Consider keeping really organized with binders.

I’m saying this because I’m super into paper planners these days, but I think there’s something to be said for writing something down and it sticking in your brain better than typing it. And there’s that out of sight out of mind thing, too. I can’t see where I type and file things away on my laptop, but I can see a pretty binder full of info on my desk.

A blogging binder could be too organized for some (possibly me), but for others it could be that kick start that you need. A blogging binder might look like this:

• A sheet for blogging topic ideas
• A sheet for your blogging schedule
• A sheet for your blogging goals, by week, month, or year if needed
• A sheet to show how the traffic is affected by your efforts

You can make these sheets up yourself in Word, or download a starter version. Here are a few places:

Strange and Charmed shows you what one looks like

Measuring Flower has free printables for a blog binder

If you want to go all the way with this, here’s the Epic Blog one year editorial calendar, $16.65 from Amazon. It’s a bit much, but hey—whatever works!

And my favorite, the Ultimate Blog Planner Kit is a free download.

How about you? How do you handle the madness of keeping up with social media? What tools do you use to keep it all under control?

About Sierra

Sierra Godfrey writes fiction with international settings and always a mention of football (soccer) or two. She is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association and a quarterly contributor to Writers in the Storm. She writes weekly about Spanish football for various sports sites, and is also a freelance graphic designer. She lives in the foggy wastelands of the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

Come visit her at www.sierragodfrey.com or talk with her on Twitter @sierragodfrey.