Writers in the Storm

I am not an old soul. I am a klutz and a fairly slow learner. I bumble through life, making almost every mistake possible before finding the right way.  People (most notably, my long-suffering parents) tried to explain things to me. But that’s apparently not how I learn. And I don’t think I’m alone.

This used to make me feel like a failure. But it doesn’t anymore.

Do you remember when you were little? If you don’t, observe a child who is preschool age, attempting something new to them. They try, make mistakes, learn, and move on. They don’t beat themselves up, because they seem to know instinctively that making mistakes is how you learn. Do you, as an adult, fault them for that? Of course not! You explain, and demonstrate and encourage, until they get it, or decide it isn’t for them, and they move on to try the next thing.

But something happens around the golden years of junior high (yes, that’s sarcasm). Peer opinion becomes a red-hot pressure cooker. It’s no longer okay to make mistakes. We look around and decide we’re behind—everyone around us has it together, and we never got the manual. We watch adults, observing their competence and confidence.

So you start racing, trying to catch up. You don’t take chances anymore, because you may make a mistake. And everyone will find out that you are clueless. You stick to things you know. You don’t try new things, because you can’t take the chance that you might not be good at them. You may even chose a career, not because you love it, but because you’re competent at it. And how sad is that?

Somewhere around forty, I gave up looking for the manual. I accepted my ‘process’. I’m always going to stumble through life, making mistakes. I relaxed when I realized that my whole life is an experiment.

Remember the scientific method from school? In case you don’t, here are the steps:

• Ask a Question
• Do Background Research
• Construct a Hypothesis
• Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
• Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion

Mistakes aren’t failure.

Each mistake I make brings me closer to the correct conclusion. Mistakes are an essential part of learning!

Thomas Edison's teachers said he was "too stupid to learn anything." He was fired from his first two jobs for being "non-productive." As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb.

                       Do we think of Edison as an idiot?

I belong to a national writer’s organization. I can’t tell you how many people I met who joined with an ardent fire in their eye. They wrote, they learned, they submitted. They were rejected. Repeat.

I noticed when they began to look around them, seeing others working hard and some succeeding. I remember that look from junior high. They were counting their mistakes, and looking for the handbook that everyone else seemed to have. Many disappeared shortly thereafter.

Once I rediscovered the scientific process, I didn’t quit—even after 15 yrs. And 417 rejections. I now have two publishers, seven contracted novels and last year, I won the 2014 Romance Writers of America^®   RITA^® award for the Best First Book.

People tell me I’m an inspiration, but I’m not. I’m a bumbling klutz, who refused to take mistakes as a judgement of my ability. I don’t have to be perfect. I don’t have to get it right the first time (or the 500^th). All I have to do is learn something from each mistake and continue to improve. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

You have a choice of two ways to look at your mistakes, and no one’s opinion matters but yours.

One will freeze you to immobility, one will move you through any adversity.

And one of those choices would be a big mistake.

 So  are you ready to take up my challenge of seeing life as an experiment? Do you have any tips for us on how you slay the demons in your head? 

 

by Angela Ackerman

A friend of mine, the talented YA author Martina Boone, debuted last year with Compulsion, a southern gothic mystery romance novel showcasing a protagonist with the most unique and amazing talent: she is a finder of lost things. For her, this inherited talent (sometimes a curse, sometimes a boon), acts a compulsion--when she senses something lost close by, she is driven to discover the item’s location and return it to where it belongs.

Not only does this steer the plot of the book in many interesting ways, it is also an example of brilliant characterization layering which makes her heroine Barrie Watson so unique and compelling.

When I fell so in love with this book (and yes, I am absolutely recommending you read it), I had to ask myself WHY.  For me, it was the secret mystery behind her talent. I wanted to know how this inherited skill flowered into being, and how it involved the unusual blend of ruling families of Watson Island. I also wanted to uncover each lost item just as powerfully as Barrie did, and unravel why they had been hidden away in the first place.

I know I’m not alone at being drawn in by secrets. As readers, when something is hinted at but unknown, we sit up and pay attention. We hunger to follow clues down the rabbit hole until the shape of what is being withheld is revealed. This is why secrets are so addictive, and act as an excellent way to bring readers closer to your characters.

Pinpointing Your Character’s Secret

Have you thought about what secrets your hero might be harboring, and the price that comes with bearing them? After all, rarely are secrets good things, especially in fiction. In fact, they are usually a rat’s nest of pain, because often a secret is kept out fear of exploitation or judgement. Sometimes at the heart of one lies the character’s Emotional Wound.

Here are some types of secrets to help you decide what motivates your character to keep one.

Secrets Revolving Around Guilt:

There is a deep fear that, if a secret comes to light, one’s reputation and value among those one cares about will be diminished or even destroyed. Secrets that tie closely to guilt are ones where the character has done something that crosses moral lines. As author David Corbett states in The Art of Character, “guilt is between you and your conscience.”  A few examples:

• Infidelity (cheating on a spouse or lover)
• Theft or destruction of another’s property
• Throwing someone “under the bus” to obtain an advantage or avoid consequences
• Aggressive or bullying behaviors that forces someone into submission or acquiescence
• Lying or deceit

Secrets Revolving around Shame:

When shame is involved, the worry that one’s secret will shatter the view others have about oneself is even more pronounced. Shame is not always logical or deserved. While it may be a result of an action or choice, it might also simply be the mistaken belief that one could or should have done something to avoid the eventual outcome. A few examples:

• Failing to achieve a goal or objective which impacts other people
• Failing another in their time of need
• Events that will cause humiliation if known (being forced to perform immoral acts during a college hazing, for example)
• Negative associations (being the child of a known serial killer; having past ties to a violent or disreputable organization, etc.)
• Past victimization, especially sexual in nature (a rape, for example)

Many secrets have elements of both guilt and shame because it is human nature to internalize and personalize situations even when it is underserved or inaccurate to do so. A rape victim may keep her abuse a secret out of shame for what was done to her, and guilt at believing (wrongly so) that she was somehow partially to blame because of something she did or didn’t do.

Secrets Revolving Around Exploitation:

Some secrets are kept simply out of the worry that if found out, another might take advantage in some way. A few examples:

• Having a special power or exceptional talent (psychic abilities, super strength, etc.)
• Being a Person of Interest (having fame or power due to one’s own success, or by association, such as being the daughter of a political figure or well-connected oil tycoon)
• Making a discovery (an invention, scientific breakthrough, a new technology or process that will revolutionize, etc.) which others will covet and likely try to appropriate

Secrets out of Necessity:

Many times a character keeps secrets because they feel they must, not so much for themselves, but to protect others. The reason may also tie into one of the above factors, saving someone unnecessary pain, guilt or exposure. A few examples:

• Keeping the truth to oneself regarding an event because someone is too fragile to accept what happened, or bear personal responsibility if that is the case (and there is no reason to cause further pain)
• A family secret that is closely guarded for fear of exploitation or unfair persecution
• A tradition, piece of knowledge or practice that is safeguarded for privacy, to avoid exploitation, or to keep the information from being misused/misinterpreted or corrupted
• Keeping a secret because it belongs to another, and it is not one’s place to reveal it
• Being legally or ethically bound to keep a secret (like those kept between lawyers and clients, doctors and patients, a priest and parishioner, etc.)

When planning a secret to use in your story, consider these questions:

Does this secret enhance the plotline, or distract from it?

Does this secret align with the character’s moral code?

Does this secret send a message about the character’s personality that meshes with how I want readers to think about him or her?

What’s your character’s secret? Let me know in the comments!

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About Angela

Angela Ackerman is a co-author of the bestselling resources, The Emotion Thesaurus: a Writer’s Guide to Character Expression, The Positive Trait Thesaurus: a Writer’s Guide to Character Attributes and The Negative Trait Thesaurus: a Writer’s Guide to Character Flaws. A proud indie author, her books are sourced by US universities and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors and psychologists around the world. You can find her on Twitter or at the popular site, Writers Helping Writers™, which specializes in building innovative tools for writers that cannot be found elsewhere.

Her ebook, Emotional Amplifiers, is currently free on Amazon.

Kathryn Craft

Turning Whine Into Gold

To embrace paradox we must hold two seemingly conflicting concepts as equally true. Wisdom literature is rife with paradox, suggesting that we receive through giving, gain through losing, and live through dying. “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it,” said Mahatma Ghandi.

Experienced writers know this truth. Comedians make use of the inherent absurdity of paradox all the time, from Ellen DeGeneres’s “Procrastinate now. Don’t put it off,” to George Carlin’s “If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?”

As a literary device, a paradox asks the reader to puzzle through a challenging concept. Consider these examples:

“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” This statement from George Orwell’s Animal Farm certainly has the sting of political truth about it.

“The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb,” from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, makes us think about the way nature both gives and takes our lives.

“Child is the father of the man”—this phrase from William Wordsworth is a concise way of saying that all childhood experiences lay the groundwork for our future lives; in that way our childhoods “father” us as adults.

As a reader, does the notion of paradox excite you or make you toss your literary cookies and run for the hills? As a writer, you’d best make friends with it, because the writer’s life is full of paradox.

A few for your consideration:

• Writers must have intense focus but breadth of perception.
• Writers must believe in their salability even as they receive rejection after rejection.
• All published writers must believe in their worth, yet few will receive life-sustaining paychecks.
• Fiction writers make things up to seek the truth.
• Authors must invest fully in their product while detaching from its commercial and critical success.
• Setbacks and reversals are manna for the creative mind and have their own rewards.

Sound crazymaking? It’s the way of paradox. Yet artists are well suited to its challenges; we are used to being both “this and that.” In any one writing session we might be both mother and child, healer and destroyer. A powerful wizard or a humble shoemaker.

If we writers have the capacity to embody all characters while bringing any one scene to the stage, why are we always trying to give the businessperson the hook—especially when she might be the one holding the key to commercial success?

Writing is an art and publishing is a business, and your happiness (and perhaps your sanity) depends on embracing both. Accepting this challenge as the current way of the publishing world is freeing. Think of this the next time an editor tells you, “We honor your process and want to give you all the time you need, of course, but if you could turn those edits around in a week that would be great.”

By pursuing publication you are choosing to move into new digs, and they are located right on the corner of Bohemia and Wall Street. When you look down at the intersection from your second-story writing room, will you see only traffic crashes and bloody casualties, or the flow of opportunity that now surrounds you? The choice is yours.

There is a Buddhist saying: “A moment of stress only holds on as long as the heart does not let go.”

Ah, paradox.

Which of the listed paradoxes do you find most challenging? Can you find a way to love that challenge? Share the love in the comments.

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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