Writers in the Storm

 I don't "do" poetry.

In my first writing class–a seminar style graduate-level class for English majors (what was I thinking?)–this math major freaked when I was handed a long poem and told I'd be leading a discussion about it.

The professor gave me advice that I still use for finding the significant takeaways from articles and conference sessions. In my notes, I highlight the phrases or sentences that I connect with, then I compile those golden lines into a shorter piece that means something to me.

Here are my golden lines from  the RWA 2014 conference, from craft to marketing to building a social media platform. I've noted who gave the sage advice. I hope you get something from my take-away.

1. For the first read through of your completed manuscript, print out a hard copy. Don't stop to fix problems. Use a check-mark to note where the prose drags. Put parentheses around horrid sentences. Circle sections needing more detail or emotion. Use a question mark for "What did I do here?"  (James Scott Bell)
2. At every juncture, look at the situation from each character's POV and have each make the best move they can from his or her own POV. (James Scott Bell)
3. A complex character has two emotions at war at the same time. This increases reader interest. (James Scott Bell)
4. What would make your character throw a chair through a window? Find those moments and deepen the POV and emotional impact. (James Scott Bell)
5. Backstory rule of thumb: You're allowed a total of 3 sentences in the first three chapters. In the next three chapters you're allowed a total of three paragraphs--not all together! (James Scott Bell)
6. Give your agent a list of what you do really well when you go out for a contract. (Eloisa James)
7. The Six Goals of Online Book Promotions: sales, new readers, exposure, name/brand/book recognition, build relationships with readers, networking with authors, bloggers and reviewers (Laura Kaye)
8. A writer's power is in her ability to evoke an emotional response in the reader. (Robin Perini)
9. Details can take your story from melodrama to powerful. SPICED: Specificity, Powerful verbs, Image-making picture-forming words, Compelling dialogue, End hooks, Deep POV (Robin Perini and Claire Cavanaugh)
10. The Care and Feeding of the Social Media Beast: Consistency is key. Blog two to three times a month on your website, Facebook one to two times a day, Twitter five to eight times a day, Pinterest one to five times a day, Instagram one to three times a week. Do not link all your social media! Each has a different job and a different audience.(Tyra Burton and Jana Oliver)
11. Insurmountable odds make a book breathless. Your goal as a writer is to make the reader think, "How is the writer going to pull this off?" (Sarah MacLean, winner of the 2014 RITA™ for Best Historical)
12. How to keep your creative brain waves functioning at optimal levels: Write at the same time every day. (Kathleen Baldwin)
13. Tips for Upping the conflict: (Sarah MacLean, except where noted)

• Torture your character. Think the worst thing that can happen and do that. (Carrie Ryan)
• Use your characters' fears against them. Scare them into action.
• Any time your characters are close to getting together, throw them an obstacle.
• Don't write from a place of fear that you can't figure out the dilemma.
• Don't pull your punches. Put in all the emotion and action.

 Bonus URL from Penny Sansavieri, a marketing expert who specializes in internet marketing: If you are selling your books on Amazon, this gets you to a "back page" with a drop down menu of all the categories. You're allowed two categories, but pick three to five and change them monthly. Find the narrowest categories you can. The algorithm kicks it when you're number one in a category. It doesn't matter if there are only five other books in the category. Your best chance to get Amazon to promote your book with its algorithm is to be number one in any category.

http://www.amazon.com/-/b/?node=1000

I would be remiss if I didn't give a shout out to Lisa Wells who mentioned Writers in the Storm at her Blog Bites session.

And finally, the best advice of all:

 You did really well. I was unhappy because last year I got asked for two fulls, and this year I only am sending two partials and a query. Bless you,
Laura Drake, for giving me a kind attitude adjustment. Sometimes I can be my worst enemy. You did really well, too. Congrats on that beautiful golden lady. (And thanks for letting me carry it!)

Want to share some of your golden lines from RWA14? Do you have advice to pass along? I don't know about you, but I freely admit that I need all the help I can get!

 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.

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 horrors of algebra 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 undergraduate writing classes like the plague, she now enjoys sharing her brain with characters who demand that their stories be told.

 

Shannon Baker

I write mysteries. I don’t write sci fi/fantasy because my mind is tethered to the real world too tightly to make the great leaps required to build whole new worlds. And by tethered, I mean, I’m not that imaginative. Write what you know, they say. It’s good advice that makes creating fiction so much easier than if you had to make it all up from scratch.

When we moved to Flagstaff in 2007, there was a huge controversy waging over pumping treated waste water onto a ski area on the San Francisco Peaks just outside of town. Those peaks are sacred to several local tribes and feature in their creation stories. It’s where the tribes collect plants and herbs and perform vital ceremonies.

This situation seemed ripe for a murder mystery. I “borrowed” from real life and pretty much used the whole set up for Tainted Mountain. I jumped into it, researching and asking questions. It didn’t take me long to discover the Hopi tribe. Destitute and tiny, this tribe who makes its home on three mesas north of Winslow, believe they are responsible for the balance of the entire world. They view themselves as a microcosm of the world and what happens with them will be played out in full forces over the planet. I swear I didn’t make up any Hopi stuff. All of the weird, magical, amazing bits in my books are from real life research.

I was hooked. I started playing the “what if” game to build the plot. Who would be the most affected by this fight? Aha, the ski resort owner. Write what you know, right? I made Nora a business woman, even though accounting is not exactly a career path littered with excitement and action. I figured we wouldn’t be following our unfortunate heroine, Nora, as she built spreadsheets and created projection analyses.

About this time, I landed a day job in my new town. I was hired as an accountant at The Grand Canyon Trust, an environmental non-profit whose mission is to protect and restore landscapes on the Colorado Plateau. My position, as unlikely as it sounds, was finance manager and administrator of the Trust’s cattle operation on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. Like Nora, my job was dry and boring. Oh, but the perks!

As with any good book, my time at the Trust was full of conflict. I never got used to the ebb and flow of finances at a non-profit. However, I loved working with inspired, passionate, creative people in those amazing landscapes.

At lunchtime, while I reheated my leftover beef stew, and they’d quaff some kind of green, lumpy juice they’d made from CFS shares, we talked and laughed and I learned about botany, biology, hydrology and Native American culture. They introduced me to quinoa, for which I am forever grateful.

They taught me about composting and cold frame gardening. My world view expanded as they shared their travel experiences and knowledge of strange and beautiful places. One woman spent weekends in the southern Arizona desert assisting illegal immigrants. Another woman took me cycling up Snowbowl Road and through Page Springs outside of Sedona. I reached new heights of happy hour accomplishment with another. The ranch manager took me to places on the North Rim that few people ever get to see. Those field trips—breathtaking!

I was in the early stages of plotting Tainted Mountain when I started at the Trust and quickly decided Nora needed to be an environmentalist. That would create big internal conflict for her and I had great examples of earnest and dedicated people I worked with. Using my new work situation, I again followed the “write what you know” advice.

When book two, Broken Trust, rolled around, Nora was out of a job. By this time, I’d left Flagstaff and was back in my capitalist comfort zone. Sticking with what I know, I let Nora find a position with a non-profit. I got to indulge my writerly urge for revenge on distasteful ex-coworkers. Nora steps into an organization full of characters that sprang from my mind…almost. I changed their genders and positions, mashed up traits and distributed them to various characters. I got to kill off a couple of them, make fun of others, and laud some, all to the background of this quirky world of Other People’s Money. I even set Loving Earth Trust, Nora’s new employer, in a farm house eerily similar to the one in which I worked. Except the fictional one is in Boulder Canyon instead of Flagstaff. That was the handiest part, since I knew the place often smelled like burnt toast, how the heater sounds when it kicks on and off, and the creepiness of being in the rambling structure alone at night.

Am I worried one of my old co-workers will read Broken Trust and be offended or sue me? Not at all. I’ve changed enough details and made stuff up so there’s no issue of libel. As to the people coming after me because I present them in a bad light: They’ll never recognize themselves. That’s the way it works. They don’t see themselves as despicable. But the real reason I’m not worried is that I’m pretty sure none of them will read it.

What about you? Do you write what you know? Have you used real characters or situations in your writing?

Shannon Baker writes the Nora Abbott Mystery Series, a fast-paced mix of murder, environmental issues and Hopi Indians published by Midnight Ink. Broken Trust, released March 2014, takes place in Boulder, CO. A lover of western landscapes, she can often be found backpacking, skiing, kayaking, cycling, or just playing lizard in the desert.  Tainted Mountain, the first in the series is set in Flagstaff, AZ and is a New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards finalist. Shannon is Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers 2014 Writer of the Year. She serves on the board of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and is a member of SinC and MWA.

Shannon's Website

My favorite quote is from Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture (if you haven’t read that small book, you should - it’s incredibly inspiring).

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”

If you’ve read this blog for long, you know a bit of my publishing story:

• 15 years
• 413 rejections
• 3 books written before I got an agent and sold.

Last Saturday, I received Romance Writers of America^® highest award – A RITA^® for my first published book, The Sweet Spot. I don't even have words to describe that experience, but for me it was the pinnacle.

People ask me how I was able to keep going all those years. I usually tell them that I’m too dumb to quit, then I laugh. I don’t talk about the real reason. I’ve decided to share my story here, with you, in hopes that it will help someone else facing challenges.

In my early college years, I was in a challenging RN program. I could handle the bookwork, but being the youngest in my class, I didn’t have the maturity to handle the emotional side of dealing with dying patients. Their suffering terrified me.

I wanted to get out, but I had nowhere to go. My home was a middle-class battleground; my hard-working mother and my loveable alcoholic dad were divorcing. The home I knew was collapsing.

So when I met a guy who liked me, I went with him. We eloped after we'd known each other a total of ten days. He took me to his house – an idyllic log cabin on a river in upper Michigan. We were married in front of a roaring fire, with the snow coming down outside. Sounds romantic huh?

There were other cabins nearby, but summer people owned them. It was January. We had a wood stove for heat, but couldn’t afford propane for the stove or the washer and dryer. The mailbox was five miles away, the town ten. We had one car. No phone. No cell phones back then – no computers. He believed that women shouldn’t work; that was a man’s job. So I stayed home all day, cleaning, teaching myself to cook in a Dutch oven and washing our blue jeans with a floor brush.

When he started hitting me, I thought it was my fault. After all, I didn’t even know how to balance a checkbook. But when I got better at all those things, the hitting didn't stop. For no reason I could discern, at times my sweet husband would disappear, to be replaced by a stranger with angry eyes. I hid bruises, walked lightly and tried very, very hard not to conjure that stranger. I didn’t tell anyone. My family and friends all thought I was blissfully happy. And I worked hard to hide the truth behind pretty curtains.

A book saved my life.

We went to town once a week on Saturday to do grocery shopping and laundry, and every week, I went to the library. I checked out the biggest books I could find, so I wouldn’t run out before the next Saturday. Something clicked when I read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I realized I could take control of my own life.

Suddenly, I saw my paths clearly. I could stay and die, or leave and live. I guess I needed to hit bottom, because it gave me something to push off of. I decided to live.

Don’t call Oprah. That was long ago, and I have a wonderful life and a 27 year-and-still-going-strong marriage to Alpha Dog.

Over the years, I’ve come to cherish the lessons I learned in that cabin. I've kept the vow to never again let things 'just happen' to me. The experience showed me that no matter how many mistakes I made, I knew how to pick myself up and start over. That time in the cabin taught me to meet life, head on.

Five, ten, even fifteen years isn't so long to wait for something you want. If it’s something you really want – don’t let the walls get in your way.

Here's my acceptance speech.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/d641Hq_iZw8]

Write on - Peace out.

~Laura

 

Today is the release of the next in my Widow's Grove series, The Reasons to Stay!

Romantic Times 4 Stars!

Where she belongs?

Free spirit Priscilla Hart doesn't get tied down, to anyone or any place. Then she arrives in Widow's Grove and meets her half brother. The ten-year-old tough guy has no one else but her. So Priss stays—for now.

But her sexy new landlord, Adam Preston, is interfering with her ideas. He's everything Priss normally steers clear of—committed, stable and no rebellious urges in sight. As opposite as they are, each conversation, each touch, each kiss they share feels so right. Can a little gangster-wannabe, an irresistible "nice guy" and an odd assortment of new friends make Priss want to stay for good?