Writers in the Storm

Angela Ackerman

One of the most important jobs we have as writers is to always push the story forward, forcing our protagonist to act. This isn’t always easy.

Characters, like people, fight change and personal growth because it makes them feel vulnerable and can be emotionally painful. The fact is, it’s always easier to stay cocooned in the safety zone, to keep the status quo, avoiding change. When a character simply plods along, they don’t have to make hard decisions or choices that carry risk, they don’t have to go out on a limb and ACT.

The problem with doing nothing is that the character becomes stuck, never reaching out to their destiny, never truly becoming the person they were meant to be by letting go of the past and the fears that chain them.

Change is necessary for a successful character arc. Change is how our characters become stronger, more capable and confident. It’s what sparks the ability to chase after their goals, find happiness and achieve satisfaction. It’s how a character goes from being incomplete to whole.

When characters are being stubborn about change, it’s time to pull out the big guns. Using specific Pressure Points we can force them to act, opening the door to inner growth. You can’t hide from a pressure point, and that’s the beauty of incorporating them into your story. Good or bad, a character must act and in doing so, reveal who they truly are, both to readers and to themselves.

Let’s look at some pressure points:

TEMPTATION

Dangling something your character covets in front of them and then showing the inner struggle as they either accept or reject the offering is not just a way to develop the plot. Temptation will create a window into their inner strength (or weakness), shows cognitive reasoning, and reveals their values and moral beliefs. Will the character give in? Does this situation cause their moral ground to tremble? Does it show their thought process as they vacillate between giving in and staying strong? Temptation should always pressure a character and show the war going on inside them as they reach a decision.

CHALLENGES

Throwing a big challenge your character’s way, especially when it comes with high stakes, can force them to think on their feet and marshal their strengths so that their best qualities rise up. Succeed or fail, how a character behaves under pressure will say a lot about who they are at their core.

SUCCESS AND FAILURE

Based on the outcome of a challenge, success or failure will create a second pressure point. If successful, confidence will swell and the euphoria rush often prods them to take on further challenges as they realize they were stronger and more capable than they previously believed. If they fail, it forces reflection, bringing their shortcoming and flaws to light as well as the realization that they must change or adapt in some way to see a better outcome.

REDEMPTION

This pressure point is another valuable contributor to both story and character development. Any character who fails (either themselves or others) will see stakes in a new light moving forward and the challenge becomes personal. To avoid another negative outcome, their passion and determination flares as they seek to prove that they are up to the task, and therefore worthy. This desire for achievement opens them to changing in ways that will help them tackle a problem or crisis from a place of strength.

Do you use these or other pressure points to push your hero to evolve, hitting the high notes of Character Arc? Let me know in the comments!

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About Angela

 

 

Angela Ackerman is a writing coach, international speaker and co-author of several bestselling writing books, including The Emotion Thesaurus. She loves building communities and her newest project, One Stop For Writers, is a powerhouse online library like no other, filled with description and brainstorming  tools to help writers elevate their storytelling. You can also find her on Twitter, Facebook and at her website, Writers Helping Writers.

Sierra Godfrey

You might remember a hullabaloo in August on Twitter called Pitch Wars. It’s a contest where writers submit queries to agented and published writers in the hopes of being taken on as a mentee. The contest is a terrific opportunity to get detailed, one-on-one coaching from an experienced writer, but the sheer number of people who enter and talk about it also provide an excellent opportunity for something entirely different: learning about how to present yourself online.

Christopher Keelty, an active writer in the #PitchWars feed, began to notice a few things about potential mentees based on the flurry of mentee bios going around: the way writers presented themselves online varied greatly.

And it really shouldn’t. Not when it comes to the basics. And that’s what I’ll tell you about today.

First, know that Keelty did a little data gathering after looking at a hundred or so Pitch War mentees in one of the many blog hops going around, and posted about what he found. He noticed that:

• Only about a third of writers had their own name as the URL.
• About a third of sites he looked at didn’t feature the author’s name anywhere.
• Many sites were missing an email address or contact form.

Some of these things are obvious to me, but it’s my business to pay attention to the way things are presented on websites. Your website is your calling card, brochure, brand—and it works 24/7 for you.

Here are a few tips on keeping things clear, whether your site is a custom-designed affair or a Wordpress/Blogger/Tumblr site:

Your URL

Keelty said, “Another third or so owned “TheirName.[Something].com,” as in Tumblr, WordPress, or Blogger. The remaining third use a URL that is basically unrelated to their name–in almost all cases, because the URL matches the title of the web site.”

Domain names are cheap, but I know that’s not what’s holding a lot of you back from getting your own domain name. It’s that sense of permanence – of holy shmoly-ola, I’m really doing this. Yes, you are! Look. It’s just you and me here, so lean close: You’re here to stay. Domain names are a relatively cheap investment.  It shouldn’t cost you more than $15 or so per year. Get one.

Additionally, having yourname.com increases your Google ranking. You can get a domain name no matter what type of site you have—Blogger, etc. You can also simply purchase a domain name from webhosting sites like GoDaddy and forward it to your free blog. (Note that whatever site you buy your domain name from, they’re going to offer the domain at a low intro rate, but they almost all go up to the $15 at the end of the promotional period.)

If you just can’t be convinced to buy your own domain name no matter how many chocolate cakes I offer you, then please get your name in your blog, so it’s “yourname.blogger.com” or wordpress or whatever. If one of your objections is that your domain name is already taken, add books, author, or writer in there, so it’s “yournamewriter.com.”

Your Name

Consider this fact: websites are like billboards. Your visitors are flying by at 85 65 (really, Officer) miles an hour and they spend about five seconds looking at your site before deciding to move on or engage. There’s a whole industry around the effort of getting people to simply click on something--anything! Just please don’t leeeeave!

Keelty wrote: “In some cases, their name might be in a sidebar somewhere, but several writers didn’t have their name anywhere on their site. In some cases the only clue to the author’s identity was their embedded Twitter widget.”

Get your name up there on every page. Try to avoid putting it in an image (Google searches like it better when your name is in text), and make it large. Don’t hide it as a teeny, tiny little monkey peeking out from behind something else. And don’t be afraid to be big! Yes, it will feel weird to put your name in large letters. Sit with it for at least two weeks.

Keelty noted that Blogger and Tumblr users “were particularly likely to omit their name from their page.” It’s not clear why this is, but a lot of bloggers like to name their blog. That’s fine. Look at the lovely Jenny Hansen’s* blog. Her blog is called More Cowbell and that blog name is large, but her name is also easy to see, consistent, and clear at the top.

*Jenny is lovely on her own, but especially lovely because she is my editor here at WITS today. And also, she knows Weekends in Las Vegas Things about me.

Contact information

Oh, I know. You don’t actually want anyone contacting you. But yes you do, because you have no idea who is looking at your website or blog. Agents! Editors! Employers! They’re all looking. (Stay tuned for a super duper secret bonus trick for learning how to see if they’re looking.) So give them a way to reach out to you. You might find yourself with an award, or money, or a package of fresh cookies, and we all know you don’t want to miss that.

If you’re worried about putting your personal email address on the web, you’re right to be worried. It’s going to be picked up by the Evil Spam World Order and then you’ll be getting emails about resurfacing your garage floor and promises of anti-wrinkle secrets. A contact form solves this problem nicely, as does setting up an email address for this express purpose through Yahoo or Gmail. (Just remember to check it now and then.)

Super duper secret bonus tip: Confirm Everything.

So how do you know people are looking at your site? If you have a Wordpress site, you may be able to install Google Analytics or the Jetpack plugin depending on your theme, both of which give you site statistics in a handy toolbar format. Blogger also offers some basic site statistics in their settings area.

Statcounter.com is my most favorite site statistic tool, even better than Google Analytics. It works with most types of sites (although I have only used it with Wordpress), and it’s free. My goodness—it tells you who came to your site, what they’re looking at, and when they left. That means if I have a page about Real Madrid on my website that I put all my time and effort into, but I can see from my stats that no one is looking at it, and instead they're all looking at my page about Atletico Madrid (because they’re a more fabulous team, obvs), then it’s time for me to switch focus.

And, gratuitous soccer reference aside, I’m just saying that if you happen to know where in the world someone is located, someone like an agent in New York for extremely random example, and then you see someone in New York is looking at your website right after you happened to send her a query… well. You might feel prett-tty, rootin-tootin’ pleased with yourself, is all.

So what’s your experience with getting your name, URL, and contact info on your website? You DO have a website, right? Leave your URL in the comments—I’d love to see it.

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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 the 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.

Kathryn Craft
Turning Whine Into Gold

“Oh man, I love that book!”

Are there any more seductive words for an avid reader? You may be reading on right now just to discover which book I’m talking about.

Never underestimate the power of love.

This is a post about marketing. Set aside your technological age cynicism and its resistance to messages delivered 24/7 to buy, buy, buy. I want to invoke a much older sensibility. The impulse that inspired the first cavewoman to, after adding a few herbs to the game in her kettle, run straight to her neighbor and say, you’ve got to try this!

Why bother, you might ask. It takes a big promotional budget to create a bestseller. Yes, money can work, but so can the long tail of love. For a year after its hardcover release, enthusiasm for Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees spread through book clubs. When the book club-preferred trade paperback released, sales exploded and it hit the New York Times list—where it stayed for two and a half years.

The love you share for your favorite title can, without a doubt, affect book sales.

So. What if that title is your own?

Let’s set aside the upbringing that suggests we are not to toot our own horns. We all know that writing is a magical experience—the characters emerge through the mist, their words shudder through our typing hands, their journeys often surprised us. If we can credit ourselves for anything, it is learning our craft and preparing our minds for the labor ahead. As would, say, a midwife. If you were a midwife, wouldn’t you think it was just fine to share your love of the child you brought into the world?

Might as well face it: Refusal is not an option. With promotional budgets slim, publicists overworked, review pages shrinking and book blogs overwhelmed, the onus is upon the author to spread the word about new releases. Like it or not, we must sell.

Instead of damning ourselves to “selling,” though, why not elevate ourselves to “sharing the love”?

If you have a book in hand, your love for your characters has already brought you so far. It has informed every word you used to present their deep desires and dilemmas in your query, your synopsis, and your manuscript. That love made your premise feel important to the agent that offered representation and the editor who offered to purchase rights.

Why stop there, when it is clear that love can help you sell books?

Now that your book has been published, each in-person event, blog post, and social media micro-post presents a similar chance to shine the spotlight of love on your project. When you hear an impassioned author speak, don’t you want a bit of what they have? Their curiosity, their empathy, their vibrancy? Your readers will want the same from you, and they will intuitively know that they’ll get more of that from your story.

This approach can reinvigorate the dreaded task of online promotion. I’ve written here before about the benefits of online positivity. You will always have haters—miserable cusses who don’t understand that not all books are for all people, who don’t connect to your message, and who wish you would simply disappear. They skulk online, dropping one-star reviews like bombs and then scurrying back into the shadows.

Sometimes, however, such people are book reviewers.

I had an early three-star review for The Far End of Happy that left me scratching my head. By definition that meant she liked the book, but that was a bit of a miracle, since her review said she “hated” all three of my point-of-view characters and the way they reacted to the suicide standoff at the heart of my story.

Months later, when she posted the review on her blog and rather inexplicably tagged me in her tweet, I asked the other authors in my marketing collective not to retweet—fine that she has her opinion, but I saw no benefit in broadcasting it for her.

That’s when the most amazing thing happened.

Feigning innocence, a couple of my colleagues commented on her tweet, saying, “I loved that book too!” Quite a dialogue ensued, in which my advocates specifically stated how much they appreciated my book’s imperfect characters—women like them, who would have no clue how to conduct themselves in a similar emergency. The loving attention they brought to this blogger’s tweet publicly changed her opinion about my title. Soon she was tweeting about how much she, too, loved the book and its characters! Those tweets testified to the transformative power of love.

Reality is, once your book is out in the world, there are factors that affect sales over which we have little control. What if love doesn’t sell enough books? The way I see it you will have arrived at the same place, only your life will have been full of love. I can’t see a downside.

There’s never harm in practicing love. Let’s do it! And maybe your enthusiasm for your work will result in a sale right here, on this blog, today!

In the comments, please share what you especially love about a premise or a certain character, whether in your published novel or work in progress. Don’t forget the title—this is marketing, after all. Let’s spread some love and awareness of our favorite novels—even if they’re our own!

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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