Writers in the Storm

by Laura Drake

Some of my best ideas come to me while I’m riding my bicycle.  I had an epiphany during a gorgeous Southern California ride yesterday.  Several pieces fell in place at once; a major “Aha” moment.

I love it when that happens!

Piece 1:

For anyone who is not familiar with Maslow, here’s the Reader’s Digest version:

In the 1930’s Abraham Maslow put forward his “Hierarchy of Needs” concept to explain behavior. His theory was that you strive to move toward the top of the list you see to the left. You can’t move up the ladder until the lower need is met, as anyone who’s been on the lowest rung can attest to (been there, Ain’t going back.)

Piece 2:

My husband and I were watching one of those obnoxious “Weight Loss Breakthrough” ads on TV the other day. He didn’t understand why people couldn’t lose weight and keep it off (he has more drive than most – he lost 50 lbs 5 years ago.) I’m a Weight Watchers member, and the talk this week was about creating goals to achieve weight loss.

Okay, stay with me here, because my theory works for anything you want to achieve, not just weight loss.

Goal-setting advice tells you to break a large goal into small steps and you’ll finally get to your ultimate goal/need.  That’s great.  On paper.

But what if your goal is majorly BIG -- like writing a novel?

You picture your ultimate goal – let’s say it’s standing on stage, holding up a RITA. The spotlights are flashing off your sequined ball gown.  All your friends are there, cheering you on. You get the picture.

Okay, you set smaller goals, but ultimately your focus is on that stage, and your acceptance speech.  Next to that, the smaller goals just aren’t doing it for you.  Yeah, you’re making progress, but all those little steps only remind you of how far you have to go. Makes your feet hurt, just looking at them.

I think this is why we fail.  After awhile, you just burn out.  The effort just doesn’t seem worth it, so you move on to the next thing you want.  But there are two problems with that:

• First, the goal you’ve abandoned is the one you wanted most, or it wouldn’t have been first, right?
• Secondly, in spite of excuses you make, deep down, you know you’ve failed, and it hurts.  You feel guilty, which lowers your self-esteem and makes the next goal harder to achieve, because you don’t really trust yourself to do it. After all, you let yourself down before, right?

You’re moving down Maslow’s pyramid!

So what do you do?

Back to my bike analogy. One of my goals is to get stronger on the bike.  I’m on a ride, working hard, pushing through sweat and pain.

Suddenly, I’m distracted by a mockingbird’s song.  I notice that the temperature is perfect.  The rolling hills have changed since I was last on this route; tawny grass stretches away forever.

I’m so absorbed by the joy of being alive and being out in nature that I don’t even realize I’ve toiled up a major hill – it didn’t hurt at all!

That’s the Hershey Kiss part.  Is it the high you’ll get, accepting your RITA?  Not even close.

But it’s a Hershey Kiss – a moment’s sweetness on the tongue.  Okay, I’m mixing metaphors, but– it’s about focus.  You need to take the time to revel in the small goals.  Wallow in them.

Just ask an actor with an Oscar on their mantel -- they’ll tell you the evening was great, but what mattered to them was the journey, getting there.

Like Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans”.

The Hershey Kisses are the joy of life!  Savor them; I wish you many.

What gives you YOUR Hershey's kisses? Are there people or activities that help you keep going on this writing journey, especially on those days when you really want to quit?

by Linda O. Johnston

I’m delighted to be back for another guest blog on Writers in the Storm.  Once again, I’m blogging about cozy mysteries.

Do you know what makes a cozy mystery "cozy?"

Well, they all star amateur sleuths, for one thing.  There are a lot of Jessica Fletcher types of characters out there who just happen into murders and are drawn into solving them, even though they don’t really know the first thing about how to find a killer, at least not at first.

Sometimes they’re driven because they are the main murder suspects, or their best friends or close relatives are.  Sometimes, it’s just because they stumble over a body, either literally or figuratively, and have to figure out whodunit.

In cozies, the sleuths may be amateur but they’re not dumb.  They often have friends or relatives who are in law enforcement who can help them out.  Sometimes those friends are really good friends, like their love interests.  And, yes, most cozy protagonists are women, since their readership is also primarily female.

One thing that often pulls readers into a cozy series is the underlying theme.   The readers may share the protagonist’s interests on anything from pets (that’s my theme!), to hobbies, to one or more kinds of paranormal activities, to cooking or sewing or any other kind of personal pursuit.

Cozies tend not to be particularly graphic, although that may be changing.  Even when a protagonist stumbles over a bloody body, that blood isn’t described in gory detail.  In some stories these days there might be a little bit more description of the dead body, or even of what goes on in the protagonist’s bedroom.  Her sex life usually takes place off the page, even when she has a love interest.

Cozy mystery protagonists also often have friends who are sidekicks in addition to those in law enforcement.  They’re helpful sounding boards for running theories by, or even sometimes help to dig out those all-important clues.

Most cozy mysteries tend to be written in series, so you can get to know the character and friends, and dig further into the themes.

Do you find this fun?  I hope so--and here’s a little blatant self-promo which may also be of interest to those of you who want to write cozy mysteries:  I’ll be teaching an online class called: Kiss Me or Kill Me: Writing Cozy Mysteries for Romance Writers.  It’s offered by the Orange County Chapter of Romance Writers of America, and starts mid-February.  Notwithstanding the name, it could be of interest to you if you’re interested in writing cozies but don’t write romance.  I will be addressing the basics of how to write cozy mysteries. Hope to see you there!

Do you read cozy mysteries? Do you have any questions for me? What is it that attracts you the most to these books vs. "traditional" mystery novels?

Linda O. Johnston is the author of 29 published novels, with more to come.  She currently writes the Pet Rescue Mysteries for Berkley Prime Crime, a spinoff series from her Kendra Ballantyne, Pet-Sitter mysteries, also for Berkley .   The second Pet Rescue Mystery, THE MORE THE TERRIER, was an October release, and the third, HOUNDS ABOUND, will be available in April 2012.

Additionally, Linda writes paranormal romance for Harlequin Nocturne--the Alpha Force miniseries about a covert military unit of shapeshifters.  Watch for one in 2012.  And also coming up, in July 2012 is Linda’s Harlequin Romantic Suspense UNDERCOVER SOLDIER!

As a corporate software trainer, I’ve got to be ON each day I’m in the classroom. It doesn’t matter whether I was up all night with a teething baby or if my best friend and I had a fight. Nobody cares about those things when they come in for a day of Word or Excel or leadership training. They’re focused on what they need to learn and it’s my job to deliver.

There are personality types who would hate my job. They’d get tired by all that “on” business. I see it a little differently. Every day that I walk into the classroom, I know:

• All my problems get checked at the door.
• I’m going to provide a service.
• I’m going to have a fun day.
• I’ll get to see people learn, and light up over what they learn.

Do you see a trend with perks I listed above? It’s me, me, I, I. Even though it doesn’t look like it. Training is a vacation from my own busy head where I get to focus on other people. It works for me because it plays on some of my innate strengths.

I went to a Training conference earlier this year that was geared toward the accounting industry. The keynote presentation was called, “Building a Strengths-Based Organization” and it shined the light on a disturbing trend:

Society, starting with our schools and continuing through our workplace management teams, sure does put a mighty amount of focus on improving our weaknesses.

After hearing some speakers at that conference, I started thinking crazy thoughts. What might happen if these organizations put this same amount of energy in developing peoples’ strengths?

What kind of mountains could we move as writers if we applied our efforts toward being stellar at the things we’re good at, rather than focusing all our energy on our “faults?”

I’m not talking about turning into a bunch of narcissists that can do no wrong. I’m talking about making it a primary goal to discover your innate strengths and spend more time playing to them. This conference spun my head around and, strangely enough, most of what I learned applied more to writing than it did to training.

Let me give you an example:

We did an exercise in the conference pre-session where we listed the things we were good at – we had 60 seconds to scribble them down off the top of our head. We were directed to find the skills we’d always been good at.

Hint: Most people don’t “see” these innate skills as anything nifty or unusual. In other words, they don’t see their own special talents. (Sound familiar anyone?)

The abilities people came up with were amazing – there was so much talent in that room and the majority of it was not being used the workplace (read: writing), where we spend at least 50% of our waking hours. How sad is that? These abilities were being relegated to the hobby side of the fence.

My innate strengths, in no particular order, were: writing, teaching, motivating others, doing hair and learning software.

I felt extremely lucky when I looked at my list. Life pushed me early into a job I am uniquely suited for. Except for the “doing hair” part, my innate strengths describe the perfect software trainer. No wonder training feels so easy…it draws on at least three areas of my innate strengths, so it doesn’t feel like work.

This brings me to another worrisome trend:

I’ve noticed a disturbing trait that’s common to creative people, in this case writers. Many writers seem to think that because they have weak areas that they are bad writers.

I have a question for you perfectionists: Why is it acceptable for multiple attempts when learning to ride a bike, or dance the tango, or knit but it’s an “epic fail” to write a few books before you get good at it?

Lots of first novels remain unpublished for a reason. They were practice for the other books. I don’t get why it’s expected to take years to learn the piano but it’s not acceptable sit down at the writing page and have less-than-perfect prose fall from your fingertips.

It doesn’t mean you’re a slacker just because you like to do the things that come naturally to you. In fact, I’m going to take this further and issue you a challenge:

Pay attention to the things that are easy for you and try to do them more often.

The easiest way to bring your “A” Game to your life is to play to your strengths. In American League Baseball, they can use pinch hitters or pinch runners. Why can’t we do a little of that in our own writing groups?

Here at Writers In The Storm we have:

• Pinch World Builders (Fae Rowen)
• Pinch Steamy Scene Pros (Sharla Rae)
• Pinch Description Writers (Laura Drake)
• Pinch Theme Builders (that would be me)

I can’t write a transition to save my life. I’ve had it take me an entire page to get my characters from an elevator to the front door of a building. (Yeah, that was embarrassing.) While we’re on my biggest “weaknesses”:

• I feel like a voyeur when my characters’ clothes come off.
• I can’t figure out how to build a space world.
• The thought of writing a 400 page novel makes me sweat.

Does this make me a crappy writer? Nope. It just means that my strengths lie elsewhere. I have to go to my A-Team to get my “A” Game sometimes. And that’s OK. I want to know when the Writing Police decided that we have to be great at every single aspect of our writing.

Even though the 400 page novel makes me sweat, writing a single scene gets me all fired up. That’s the way I’m wired. Writing short is fun, and falls into the playtime category. Writing long (as in a novel) is extremely hard for me. Still, it’s a dream of mine to publish novels so I keep at it.

What are your innate strengths? I’m not talking about the things you’ve learned to be good at. What were you always good at? Share your uniqueness in the comments section – we want to hear about it.

Happy Writing!
Jenny