Writers in the Storm

Julie Glover

The hardboiled detective, the spoiled princess, the bad boy with a heart of gold, the diamond-in-the-rough heroine—surely, these sound familiar. We’ve read them, and we may have written them. Call them tropes or archetypes, but they’re recognizable characters who can easily fall flat on the page. And flat characters are about as appealing as over-chewed gum.

Sure, stereotypes hit at something, but they aren’t the whole story—and certainly not an interesting story to read. We want three-dimensional characters that readers care about, characters who feel real.

So how can we writers get readers to care? How can we add flesh and bone? How can we freshen up our characters? Let’s talk about some twists.

Twist the Type. Here’s a tried-and-true trope: the Cinderella story. Cinderella characters go from rags to riches, from neglected to noticed, from loneliness to love. We’ve seen umpteen renditions of this basic tale, so what makes your character fresh?

Well, what if your Cinderella is an outcast because she’s a cyborg, and her “glass slipper” is a robotic foot? That’s Cinder by Marissa Meyer, in which she twists the type to bring Cinderella into a sci-fi world and make her original and engaging.

You might recognize other twists, like Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, who retold Romeo and Juliet, but with vampires and humans instead of Montagues and Capulets. Or Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, who featured gladiators fighting to the finish, but instead of trained warriors, the contenders are children.

To twist the type, think “What if instead of ___, the character is actually ___?” You can likely come up with some great ways to infuse a familiar type with new perspective.

Twist the Motivation. The beauty of reading a story is seeing not only the outside persona of a character, but also the internal motivation. Even if it looks to others like a stereotype, you can establish a different story beneath the surface.

Let’s take a literary character we all know: Batman. He wears a mask and tights, fights crime, drives a super-cool car, and keeps a bunch of technology in a cave. Okay, that’s intriguing, albeit odd. But it’s his personal, childhood wound of his parents’ murder that makes his choices understandable and compelling. Once he’s a guy who experiences grief like us, he becomes real and worth cheering for. Knowing his motivation deepens the character.

Ask why your billionaire has pursued fortune above all else, why your villain must steal government secrets, why your cheerleader wants to be homecoming queen, why your werewolf must find a mate. Find the wound or reason why your character has chosen their outside persona, and then show the deeper motivation.

Twist the Setting. Once there was a golden age of Westerns, but it seemed to be dying out. Until George Lucas brought us a brand-new western, set in space: Star Wars. We got spaceships instead of horses, lightsabers instead of guns, a saloon of disreputable aliens instead of a saloon of disreputable humans. He even put the villain in a black hat, or helmet – whatever. By changing the setting, he delivered recognizable characters with a new set of adventures, which alters how they react and how we react to them.

I love how Laura Drake did this with her Sweet on a Cowboy series. We’ve read cowboy romances, but the opening of The Sweet Spot let me know I was in for a fresh treat:

The grief counselor told the group to be grateful for what they had left. After lots of considering, Charla Rae decided she was grateful for the bull semen.

Welcome to the world of professional bull riding, a world I sure hadn’t been in before. It’s a fresh setting with distinct challenges and deepens my interest in the characters.

Whether it’s the whole novel or a particular scene, consider other backgrounds or locations that put your characters in a new light, test them more, and bring a brand-new perspective.

How can you use these three quick tips—twist the type, twist the motivation, and twist the setting—to make your characters become more real and engaging?

 

Julie Glover writes young adult fiction, collects boots, practices rampant sarcasm, and advocates for the interrobang. Her YA contemporary novel, SHARING HUNTER, finaled in the 2015 RWA® Golden Heart®. She teaches a YA character course for the online Lawson Academy and is represented by Louise Fury of The Bent Agency.

 Colleen M. Story

You’ve heard the advice “write every day.”

It good advice, especially if you’re serious about having a long-term writing career. But what if you’re doing it—you’re showing up—but you’re not happy with the results?

Maybe you’ve suffered some of the symptoms:

• When you do sit down to write, you stare at the page, unsure where to start.
• You dread sitting down to write, because you feel blocked, or uninspired.
• You actually manage to write, but when you look it over, it just doesn’t look good to you.
• Your story just doesn’t feel “right” no matter how much you work on it.

If you’ve experienced any of these, don’t despair. The solution is pretty simple. Next time, you just need to make sure you’re ready to write when you sit down.

How do you accomplish that?

Successful Writers are Writing All the Time

Most successful writers will say they “write all the time,” even when they’re not at the computer (or notebook or typewriter).

They’re thinking about their stories while in the shower, while driving, and even when watching movies. A writer “in the zone” will take a trip to the grocery store, and see something that gives him an idea for a scene he’s working on in his book. Or she’ll be talking along to her friend about something, and wham, she figures out a sticky plot point.

If this isn’t happening to you—if your story isn’t “living” in your head and popping up at you at various times during the day and night—most likely you’re not ready to sit down and write.

This is a sign that your muse isn’t with you yet. She may be hovering somewhere in the distance, watching, but she’s not an active member in your creative project. Usually, there’s a reason for that.

Somehow, you’re scaring her away.

Three Reasons Why The Muse is Avoiding You

How could this be? You’re sitting down every day, after all, waiting for her. Why won’t she come help you out?

To be truly prepared to write when you sit down, you have to have the muse at your side ready and willing to do her part. Every writer is different, and you may have to do some detective work on your own to figure out what’s going on, but here are three reasons why your muse may be a little apprehensive—and how you can make things more to her liking.

1. You’re too distracted.

Perhaps you have your smart phone nearby and you’re checking your Facebook page too frequently during your writing time, or you’re thinking about your to-do list rather than your characters. Maybe something is going on in your life that’s stressing you out, and try as you might, you can’t “not” think about it.

Focusing on one thing is not an easy task, especially in today’s world where everything competes for our attention. If you’re distracted, though, your muse will know it and she’ll stay away.

To fix it: Turn everything off, including your smart phone, your Internet connection, and of course the television and any other distracting machines. If you’re writing at home, make sure your family knows not to bother you. Do whatever you have to do to create a bubble around you that allows you to concentrate.

If you still find your mind wandering, start writing about how distracted you are. Likely your words will show you why you can’t stay on task. Maybe you need to write about whatever it is that’s stressing you—even if it’s the writing itself. You may not even realize how much it’s bothering you—in which case doing a little freewriting will reveal that to you.

Once you know the reason why your attention keeps wandering, you can solve the problem and get back to writing. The solution may be as simple as writing down the issue, setting it aside, and promising yourself that you’ll attend to it after your writing time is over.

2. You’re in a rut.

Routines can be beneficial, in that they help us maintain the writing habit, but if you’ve been in the same routine too long, it could be that you’ve dulled your creative brain.

And the muse doesn’t like that, at all.

To fix it: It may be time to shake things up. A good way to do that is to spruce up your writing area. Maybe you need a new chair, some new paint on the walls, a different light or some new pictures.

Are you exercising regularly? If not, that will dull you out more quickly than just about anything. Exercise benefits the brain as well as the body, so get back into it, even if it’s just a daily walk before you sit down to write.

Have you done anything new lately? Taken a new route into town? Gone exploring around your home area? Tried a new skill? Signed up for a new class? Find ways to inject novelty into your life, and then sit back and watch the muse come a little closer as your brain fires up again.

3. Your story doesn’t “grab” you.

Sometimes we think we want to write about something, but when we actually sit down to write about it, the magic just isn’t there.

That could be a sign that your topic isn’t the right one. As long as you continue to try to pursue it, the muse will ignore you.

Or it could be that you’re playing it “too safe” with your writing. Is there something you’re holding back?

To fix it: Set the work aside and try something new. Give it at least two weeks. If the original topic is really meant for you, you won’t be able to forget about it, and you’ll eventually go back to it. In the meantime, have some fun with your writing.

This is the time to go a little crazy. Write about something that strikes you as a little far out, a little edgy. Go to the extremes. If the new idea doesn’t get your heart racing a little, you haven’t gone far enough yet.

Maybe you were writing a family drama before. Try a short story involving a murder. Maybe you were writing a romance. Try a love story between two dangerous characters, or make the romance more scandalous than you normally would.

If you were writing a fantasy with wizards and dragons, try an urban setting instead. Throw some drug dealers into the mix—maybe they’re shape-shifting drug dealers. Or make your cops particularly vindictive werewolves.

The point is to get yourself excited about what you’re doing again. Have fun! The muse can tell when your adrenaline kicks up, and she’s attracted to that, so do what you need to do to get your fingers moving faster. In the end, if you go back to your original topic, you will have infused a little life into your process.

Or, you may discover that you were meant to write murder mysteries about shape-shifting drug dealers in love with vindictive werewolf cops all along. Eureka!

Do you have ways of inviting the muse in so you’re ready to write when you sit down? Please share them with our readers.

 

Colleen M. Story writes imaginative fiction and is also a freelance writer specializing in health and wellness. Her first book, Rise of the Sidenah, was recently honored in the North American Book Awards. Her next novel, Loreena’s Gift, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in April 2016. She is also the founder of Writing and Wellness, a motivational site for writers and other creatives. Find more at her website, or follow her on Twitter.

 

Kathryn Craft

Turning Whine Into Gold

I am a writer.

For ten years, as a dance critic, I failed to own the power of these words. For me writing was a guilty pleasure, like eating potato chips, only I could make a little money while doing it.

But then I had a visit from my uncle, an English teacher and unpublished novelist, who shared his perception that I had the perfect life—living on a farm, renovating my home just the way I wanted it, raising my children, and writing dance criticism.

I scoffed at the last, echoing the rest of my family’s prevailing sentiment: “But I make so little money.” My uncle responded, “What we need in this world isn’t money. What we need is influence.” I have never forgotten those words.

Shortly thereafter I started journaling—in other words, writing for free, with words no one else would ever see. Those were the words that made me feel real.

I know you are a writer, too, and here’s why.

You felt an electric surge when you read the opening words of this post. If you scanned that sentence too quickly, go back and read it aloud. Yeah, it’s that jolt.

You may write to entertain, yes, but more importantly you do so to empty your mind of the noise that commands most people’s attention. You’ll dig deeper to unearth the richer material many will miss.

On the days you don’t write (note irony) you are fashioning Facebook posts, honing the perfect 140, or organizing notes for an upcoming talk. While doing daily tasks you are daydreaming or pondering. You care what your loved ones are saying but must often ask them to repeat, because something they said sent your mind onto a tangent. Your text messages are never shorter than three paragraphs and your emails become the basis of blog posts.

You whoop aloud when, after fifteen minutes of effort, you realize that replacing “expect” with “anticipate” will make all the difference in your sentence. Communication matters to you, so very much it sometimes hurts.

During any spare moment you read anything that’s sitting around—cereal boxes, shampoo ingredients, your kid’s homework. And then, just for fun, you read.

You are curious. Others may wait out their dentist appointments with eyes closed; you’ll leave knowing the names of the instruments, what they’re for, and something personal about the one whose hands were just in your mouth. Maybe you even wanted to be a dentist, but had too many other interests to limit yourself. Your stories allow you the satisfaction of having lived more than one life.

Even if your love is writing fiction, truth and honesty are of the utmost importance. You probably had a trauma or difficulty earlier in life that you chewed on for a long time, and writing helped you make sense of it. This made you feel like an outsider and you studied the behavior of others to figure out why.

That time when you threw your back out and pain kept you pinned to the couch, you asked someone to fetch a pad and paper so you could record how you felt. You took notes during the final waning days of your mother’s life so you wouldn’t forget what was funny and beautiful, even in these dire circumstances. You needed proof that while aging and dying are inevitable, they need not equal helplessness and despair.

You are a gambler, and hope that your work will meet with monetary reward. But at the end of your life, it will be more important to you to say you’ve done something meaningful with your time here on earth than to have left behind the money you made from doing so.

Know this, and stay strong in it: being a writer is your identity. This is powerful medicine for when inevitable writing challenges arise.

Your identity is what no agent, publisher, critic, or Barnes and Noble buyer can take away from you. It is the expression of the god in you—“I am a writer” is your version of the way the great “I am” self-identified to Moses at the burning bush on Mount Horab. Writing is the way you deepen your observations and apply perspective; it is how you will change the world. By outlasting your corporeal presence, your words will bestow a measure of immortality.

You are a writer. What will you do with this fearsome gift?

 

Did you see yourself in this post? What other attributes reinforce your sense of self as a writer? In what ways are you different from the non-writers you know? Please share in the comments!

About Kathryn

Kathryn Craft is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks: The Art of Falling, and The Far End of Happy.

Her work as a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com, specializing in storytelling structure and writing craft, follows a nineteen-year career as a dance critic. Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, she hosts lakeside writing retreats for women in northern New York State, leads workshops, and speaks often about writing.

Kathryn lives with her husband in Bucks County, PA.

Twitter: @kcraftwriter
FB: KathrynCraftAuthor