Writers in the Storm

Kathryn Craft

Turning Whine into Gold

This month I’ve been seeing a lot on social media about the benefit of positivity. It is the simplest and most immediate cure for whining!

A positive attitude will keep you in problem-solving gear and
win you many champions in the publishing business.

In this great interview between Porter Anderson and my friend and NYT bestselling author Jonathan Maberry, Jonathan says, “more doors will open if you go into the business with happiness and joy and optimism.”

No truer words, my friends.

As storytellers we get to play God. We can make good and bad things happen, and have it all come out the way we want it to in the end. But real life is less ordered. It requires us to deal with circumstances beyond our control. To surrender. Reframe. This skill set will help you leave despair behind and turn toward optimism and hope.

Dealing with it

If you have truly been wronged, it is important to note your emotional reaction—after all, we can’t have people walking all over us all the time. Best not get stuck there, though.

Harsh, angry words, especially when used to embellish a diatribe on public record about how you’ve been wronged—an f-ing agent rejected you, your book was orphaned when your f-ing editor retired, you lost your super publicist when she f-ing decided to switch lines of work, a major review is a f-ing personal vendetta—tend to whip you into a decidedly unhelpful, self-justified frenzy.

If you love to ride the downward spiral, I suggest you do so off-line. Your fury will damage your friends if they engage with it, and will stall all forward movement in your writing and your career until you get over it.

Instead, after you note your anger, let it go as soon as possible so you can surrender to your new circumstances.

Surrender

If we think of change in terms of loss—even if all we’ve lost is our expectation of how something will go—we adapt by moving through the stages of grief. If denial is the first (tweet: “Oh no! It can’t be true—my editor is going into the restaurant business?!”), accepting your circumstances allows healing (tweet: “Best wishes to Dream Publicist as she opens NY Sushi—if she can gussy up raw fish like she did my raw words, can’t wait to try some!”). During the intermediate grieving stages of anger, bargaining, and depression, consider staying off-line—and the sooner you can push through them in private, the better.

Whether or not you want to accept it, reality is, the agent doesn’t want you, this book may not get published without an in-house advocate, your publicist is gone, that bad review won’t get unpublished. Invectives and self-pity won’t change that. If you still need to tweet, do so in a way that helps you reach for positivity: “No publishing news today. There’s been a plot twist. Researching Plan B—stay tuned!”

Once you’ve fully surrendered, you’ll free up energy to reframe.

Reframing

The trick to reframing a situation requires that you embrace paradox: you must think of yourself both as the hero of your own small story and as a pawn who must surrender to a much larger one.

Examples:

The orphaned book. If no one else in the house (or the industry) believes in the book, was it really all that marketable? A book needs staunch advocates to make it in the business; without this it will not get the send-off it deserves. The pawn must surrender, because the only thing worse than no publishing record is a poor publishing record. Your inner hero can decide whether to re-submit elsewhere, self-publish—or, heartened by getting this close—set it aside to write the next.

The lost publicist. “I’m screwed,” you think—but are you? As a pawn, even though you loved everything your last publicist did, you’ve got to let her go. But your inner hero has already learned her techniques, and could teach them to someone new if need be. What if the next publicist, with a different way of thinking, comes up with alternate approaches that help your work reach a wider audience?

The bad review. The pawn cringes as he reads—then the hero laughs. He knows that many books that rise to popular success have been scorned by critics (Twilight, anyone? Da Vinci Code?). And clearly you must not have seen this video, in which Brad Meltzer turns the bad reviews of his The Book of Lies into a YouTube trailer with almost 20K hits.

If you doubt that Brad’s creative approach was effective, check out all the comments beneath the video on YouTube! And we have to believe Brad felt a whole lot better after taking on this creative project than if he had simply stewed in self-righteous anger.

When your life in publishing hits a pothole, deal with it, surrender, and re-frame. You’ll be happier, and you’ll find a lot more people willing to help you reach your goals.

After all: do you want to lead a life you love, or one you only whine about?

If you want to practice: share an example of a speed bump you hit in your writing life, requiring that your inner pawn surrender even as your inner hero found a way to turn it into a positive.

About Kathryn

Kathryn Craft is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks: The Art of Falling, and The Far End of Happy, due May 2015. 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 now serves as book club liaison for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. She hosts lakeside writing retreats for women in northern New York State, leads workshops, and speaks often about writing. She lives with her husband in Bucks County, PA. Although a member of The Liars Club, she swears that everything in this bio is true.

 

I'll admit to being 'adverb adverse'. It’s one of my reading pet peeves  I’m reading along, immersed in the story when I start to notice them. And once I do, every one becomes a drop of water on my forehead, drip, drip, dripping until I want to heave the book.  They irritate me enough that I will put a book down, no matter whose name is on the cover.

Why? Because it’s lazy writing. It’s the easy way out – the first thing you think of. The problem is, it’s the first thing everyone thinks of. It’s Margie Lawson’s ‘invitation to skim’.

Let's see if I can convince you that I’m right.

I read somewhere that putting in an adverb is like saying, "I really, really, mean this." And as a reader, don't you assume that if an author put it in, they meant it? Adverbs are overkill. If you feel you need an adverb, I'd make the case that your sentence needs work rather than the band-aid of an adverb.

Yes, I know, some famous author's books are littered with them. I use them now and again myself. But my point is — you should scrutinize every one before you put it in. For example - which is better?

“She lightly knocked on the door.”

“She tapped on the door. It echoed in her ears like an axe to a carcass.”

The above example is from Chuck Sambuchino’s amazing blog. You can read it all here.

See what I mean? An adverb can be your signal of a place that you can strengthen your writing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you can never use another adverb. There are times when you need one.

• To see how authors I respect used adverbs I turned to my hero, Pat Conroy. He doesn’t use many, but when he does, it’s for the poetic cadence. How do I know this? He’s been known to spend an hour, just getting one sentence right. This is from South of Broad:

“I went directly from a fearful childhood to a hopeless one without skipping a beat.”

“I found myself thoroughly unable to fulfill my enhanced duties as an only child.”

• Sometimes you want to be over the top; when you DO mean to say, ‘really, really’. This is from my August release, Sweet on You:

Irritation oozed into the cracks in her armor. She now officially hated that accent.

The pulse pounding blood to her face was proof that you couldn’t actually die of embarrassment.

• Adverbs can work in dialog as well – they help give a natural feel. From my other August release, The Reasons to Stay:

“That is exactly the last thing I want.”

“I’m only trying to wake your ass up. Life isn’t safe, or neat and tidy.”

“You really must think I’m an ass.”

So what's the Fix? Easy. Do a 'find' for 'ly' in your manuscript. Read the sentence with the adverb, Unless you really, really need it (Yes, I’m smirking), strengthen the sentence by editing it out. I make the case that your sentence and your writing will be stronger without it.

If you DO decide to leave the adverb, use it consciously. Have a reason for it being there - other than you were in a hurry.

So here's your assignment: Open a chapter of your WIP (work in progress) and do a find for 'ly'.

Oh, and don’t be depressed if you have a lot of them. In writing this blog, I discovered, from my own search, that I’m in love with the word ‘only’ and didn’t realize it.

Sigh.

So have I convinced you to be 'adverb adverse'?

 

About Laura

Laura Drake is a city girl who never grew out of her tomboy ways, or a serious cowboy crush. She writes both Women's Fiction and Romance.

She sold her Sweet on a Cowboy series, romances set in the world of professional bull riding, to Grand Central. The Sweet Spot (May 2013), Nothing Sweeter (Jan 2014) and Sweet on You (August 2014). The Sweet Spot won the 2014 Romance Writers of America^®   RITA^® award in the Best First Book category.

Her 'biker-chick' novel, Her Road Home, sold to Harlequin's Superomance line (August, 2013) and has expanded to three more stories set in the same small town. The Reasons to Stay released August, 2014.

In 2014, Laura realized a lifelong dream of becoming a Texan and is currently working on her accent. She gave up the corporate CFO gig to write full time. She's a wife, grandmother, and motorcycle chick in the remaining waking hours.

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Angela Ackerman

Ah, Fall. Can you hear it, the melody of birds chirping? The rattle of sun-lit gold leaves in the breeze? And of course we can’t forget the click and clatter of keyboards as writers everywhere brainstorm, plot and organize their stories and characters for NANOWRIMO.

Oh...do I detect an awkward shuffle of feet? A side-eye glance? Perhaps it is because you haven’t yet begun prepping for the Big Day. Or maybe it’s because you’re heady with the idea of winging it, determined to let pure creativity spin from your fingertips when the hour strikes midnight on November 1st.

Well, while writing by the seat of your pants is part of the idea behind NaNoWriMo, here’s the truth. Each November, the literary floor is littered with the quivering, sugar-crashed bodies of writers whose plots died mid-steam. Why? Because a novel is still a novel, whether you take a month to write it, or a year. This means that even if you are a Pantser, the more you know about your hero and his motives going in, the stronger the book will be because his actions and choices within the story will have purpose.

Let’s talk turkey. What basic character brainstorming should be done on the hero in advance?

• The Basics: sex, age, job, ethnicity, physical description...whatever amount you need to give him shape (yes, even you Pantsers!)
• Personality: choosing a blend of positive attributes and negative flaws that together make your hero unique and memorable
• Talents, Skills and Quirks: what thing (or things) make your character remarkable and interesting? What special talent or skill does he have that will add dimension to the story itself?
• Moral Beliefs: understanding the compass that navigates his decisions and choices (MORALITY)
• Outer Motivation: what he wants most (the GOAL)
• Inner Motivation: why he wants it (satisfying a great NEED or DESIRE of his)
• Outer Conflict: the forces working against him (like the antagonist) so you can start thinking about how best to provide friction
• Inner Conflict: what inside him is holding him back or hurting his chances for success (his FEARS & FLAWS)
• Damage Assessment: who and what messed with your hero’s head enough to give him emotional wounds that have not healed, and what false beliefs does he carry as a result? (BACKSTORY, WOUND AND LIE)

How do we discover these things?

Simple: Backstory. I don’t mean the sludge of dumpy information that slows your story to a crawl, but the kind that is just for you, the author. Knowing what happened to your character in the past gives you a window into who he is now, on the doorstep of your novel. His history will help you figure out how he thinks and behaves, so you can write his actions authentically and pull readers into the story.

Old experiences, both good and bad, shape a hero, as do people who influence him along the way. Creating a backstory for your protagonist is the best way to create a fully fleshed, compelling hero that will make readers care. Brainstorming is important, even for secondary characters. And while you don’t have to go into as much detail, no one should walk into the story a blank slate. In real life, we all have a past, and our characters should too.

To write a character well, a writer must ask questions. What does he fear most? Who wounded him? What is missing from his life, and what does he need more than anything? What flaws of his trip him up and mess with his life? What strengths are within him, holding the key to achieving what he wants most? It’s all there in the backstory, waiting for you to find it!

Two tools to help you brainstorm character backstory

Character Profile Questionnaire: not your average “height, weight, hair color” type questions...instead, dig deeper into who your character is by asking probing questions about his fears, morals, secrets, emotional wounds, special skills and interests.

The Reverse Backstory Tool: a visual aid to help you see how your hero’s specific attributes, flaws, emotional wound (and lie the character believes about himself), as well as his deepest needs all tie into revealing inner motivation to achieve the outer goal.

(These are simply two of our Writers Helping Writers tools. For more, visit us here.)

Once you know your hero’s strengths and weaknesses (and his fatal flaw), you can plan exactly how to throw a gauntlet of challenges his way in your NaNoWriMo novel, forcing him to face his fears, shed his flaws and rise up to become the hero he was meant to be. (Character Arc, right there!)

Have you participated in NaNoWriMo before? Did you prepare ahead of time or dive in pants first?

Happy Brainstorming!

Angela Ackerman is a writing coach and co-author of three 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. Angela can be found at the popular site, Writers Helping Writers, which specializes in building innovative tools for writers that cannot be found elsewhere.