A lot of writers will worry that their stories seem flat. There’s a reason that they are worrying about that and it’s one of the core elements of good writing.

Ready?

A lot of the times your story seems flat because all your sentences are the same layout.

You want to vary your sentence structure.

Take a bit of writing that you’ve done that feels flat—or maybe even one that doesn’t. Count the words in your sentences for two or three paragraphs.

Are they all five word sentences? Twelve? Twenty-seven?

That robotic sameness in sentence length is one of the main reasons that writing can feel flat.

It’s like those ancient Dick and Jane books.

• See Dick run.
• See Jane skip.
• See Dick wave.

The other big bugger is when all of your sentences are simple and declarative.

• I walk to the forest. The trees are gracious, tall. I inhale the pine scent.

There is actually a whole, entire world of different sentence styles that writers can use and when you use them? That’s when you make your writing shiny and sexy and all the good things.

The names for these structures are pretty boring, honestly, but we’ll try to look beyond that, right?

Simple – You have one main clause.

• Carrie is the best wife.

Compound – You have more than one independent clause. You probably use a conjunction.

• Carrie wants to get another dog, but Shaun keeps saying no.

Complex – Oh, the sentence that probably has to pay for a therapist or is reading Foucault obviously in the park. This sentence has an independent clause and a subordinate clause.

• When hell freezes over, we will allegedly get another dog.

Compound-Complex – It sounds like a place with a cult, right? But it’s just a sentence with at least two independent clauses and one subordinate clause.

• Carrie really needs a new dog to love, so Shaun said that they would get one when hell freezes over, so Carrie immediately purchased some dry ice at WalMart and sent some down to Lucifer.

So, to keep your writing from feeling flat, you want to vary those sentences. Why?

• It keeps the reader engaged.
• It helps highlight important details. It helps vary tone. It puts emphasis on things (especially when you use a short sentence for that).
• It sounds more real. People don’t speak in identical sentence patterns. When they do, just like in your writing, it feels unnatural and stilted.
• It can be easier to follow when you change your sentence structure up.

How do you vary the structure?

• Use different lengths, like we mentioned above
• Use different types of sentences like we also mentioned above. Throw in that complex sentence in the middle of all your simple sentences.
• Don’t start all your sentences the same (the way I did up there).

Refresher moments:

What’s a clause? A bunch of words chilling out together and one of those words in the group is a verb and another is a noun. Fancy people call the verb, the predicate, but we aren’t fancy here.

What’s an independent clause? It is a bunch of words that has a subject and a predicate. Got fancy! It is grammatically complete all by itself and doesn’t need anyone. Not any other words to stand alone! Darn it.

What’s a subordinate or dependent clause? A bunch of words that needs other words to be a sentence. This poor beautiful baby cannot stand alone and be complete, kind of like a protagonist in a Hallmark romance.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE!

Vary how you bark to your humans. Sometimes go ‘bark bark.’ Sometimes go ‘barkwoofbarhbark.’ Keep them on their toes.

RANDOM THOUGHT

Our random thought came from here.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

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But I am still writing. And we are still podcasting! Gasp!

I am still doing this because I think that writers write. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

Say it with me, okay?

Writers write. That’s all it takes to be a writer—the actual writing things down.

We write rebellion. We write acceptance. We write through grief. We write through joy.

Sometimes our work is absolute poop, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we write, that we give ourselves voice no matter what.

Do not stop writing.

100 words a day? 30 minutes a day? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that your voice is there. Yours.

You matter.

Your voice matters.

Your writing matters.

Here are the things you need to do:

You need to:

1. Follow your writing wherever it takes you. Let the words carry you.
2. When you ache, write it down because that ache? Someone will connect with it. Someone will feel less alone.
3. The best writing is full of yearning. That yearning helps inspire us all to make a better world.
4. Whenever you feel joy, lean into it. Don’t worry that you don’t deserve it. Take it when it happens. Let your characters have it, too. Dance around the house. Sing in the shower. Catch raindrops. Even if you feel like the world is shattering around you. Allow your work and your self to be human.
5. When you write, you take power. You take the power to look at pain, at problems, at issues, at grief right in the damn face and you make it into art, into action, and into power. That’s a big deal.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Keep fighting for what you want.

COOL EXERCISE

Take 30 minutes at most. You can use no more than 500 words. Gasp! I know! I’m terrible.

And in that time and word count, I want you to write about one image that happened in the last week and has stayed with you.

Write down details.

Now, I want you to connect that concrete image to what you yearn for.

COOL PLAYLIST TO DO THIS TO

I picked songs without words for this one. Songs that feel like yearning to me.https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/6geuR3LwqThjiMydkhsHwA

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Parentheses Journal is a Canadian biannual.

You can send in up to two poems, flash fiction pieces, or short stories (max word count 2000).

Its reading periods are from November 20— March 10 (so now) and May 20—September 10.

Deadline: 10 March 2025

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

Our random thought came from here.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

All you all,

I (Carrie) am the WORST copyeditor for my own work. I’ll admit it and that’s because as a writer, I’m too close to it to pick out my errors, right?

That’s why it’s good to have other people read your stories before you put them out there.

So, we (Carrie and Shaun) are going to talk about some grammar mistakes: three super common ones. Ready?

1. Every day or everyday

What the what, right? There’s a difference?

Yes, yes, there is.

Everyday when it’s all one word is an adjective. That means it’s describing something that happens all the time.

Dreaming about manatees is an everyday occurrence for Carrie.

Every day when it’s two separate words is an adverbial phrase. Doesn’t that sound fancy and terrifying? Adverbial phrase.

It just means “each day.”

Every day Carrie dreams about manatees.

2. The magic apostrophe

I (Carrie) talk about apostrophes a lot and that’s because a lot of us just haven’t gotten the memo yet. That’s okay! Don’t be hard on yourself. Here’s the memo again.

Apostrophes have two main jobs.

Job #1 is to show that something is possessing something else. No! Not in an exorcism kind of way, but an ownership kind of way.

The manatee’s flipper was so cute.

The manatee owns that flipper. It possesses it.

Job #2 is to show there’s some letters missing because we have smooshed or contracted two words together.

So, ‘It is’ becomes it’s. The apostrophe is replacing the I in ‘is.’

Or ‘they are’ becomes they’re. The apostrophe is replacing the A in ‘are.’

A lot of us write a word and maybe that word ends in an s. We go, “AH! It ends in a s. There should be an apostrophe in there, right? I shall put one in.” Only DO THAT IF IT IS A POSSESSIVE.

Right: Apostrophes are cute little buggers and it’s hard to resist them.

Wrong: Apostrophe’s are cute little buggers and its’ hard to resist them.

3. Lose it or Loose it?

These words are evil little buttfaces. It’s that double ‘o’ versus single ‘o’ that gets our brains all hooked up. Choose or chose has this issue too.

Why are those o’s so confusing? I don’t know, but I do know that when I was little, I (Carrie) loved to put pupils inside them and make a smiley face.

Here are the hints:

LOOSE means not tight. It rhymes with moose!

LOSE means you have lost something. You poor honey. That rhymes with booze.

CHOOSE means you have to make a choice. It’s the present. It’s happening now. It rhymes with moose.

CHOSE means you already made that choice. Are you regretting it? It rhymes with pose.

Spoiler Alert: Don’t be a butthead about other people’s grammar mistakes.

Here’s the thing: We are all human. We all make mistakes. It is not the end of the world and other humans (the good ones) shouldn’t be trolls about it. No offense to trolls. But we all have to be a little less harsh, a little less judgmental and a lot more understanding and forgiving.

If someone writes its for it’s or lay for lie, it doesn’t mean they deserve to die or get your hairy eyeball of judgment. It just means they made a mistake. It’s part of being human. And it’s okay.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Enjoy life when you’re here and don’t waste your time being a meanie.

BE A PART OF OUR MISSION!

Hey! We’re all about inspiring each other to be weird, to be ourselves and to be brave and we’re starting to collect stories about each other’s bravery. Those brave moments can be HUGE or small, but we want you to share them with us so we can share them with the world. You can be anonymous if you aren’t brave enough to use your name. It’s totally chill.

Want to be part of the team? Send us a quick (or long) email and we’ll read it here and on our YouTube channel.

LET’S HANG OUT!

HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?

MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST? Just send us a message!

HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED

Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast and our new LOVING THE STRANGE podcast. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of.

Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK!

The Psychology Today article on meanness.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

Let’s be honest, here. Sometimes I throw the word “sexy” into a podcast title just to get Shaun to pay attention.

But the one-sentence summary is kind of sexy.

Over on the Advanced Fiction Writing Blog, Randy Ingermanson writes:

In that summary, you want:

• To show us the setting via information about where or when the story is happening.
• What Ingersoll calls “a paradoxical description of a major character.”
• Something weird/shocking/surprising that makes you think of that story question
• Something sexy. He calls this an emotive/kicker word.

Why is this sexy?

It’s sexy because if you can do this, you can understand your novel. Understanding is sexy. It becomes a map for your novel. You can see where you’ve gone off on a tangent, where things don’t adhere to that sexy summary.

Us writers often go off on tangents.

Or as Nico Waters on Rene Pen says,

“It’s the quickest way to explain or write what your book is about. It’s the hook to entice readers to want to buy your book. It also serves as our compass, our true north, as we continue writing the book.”

Waters has a great post about this and shows three formulas to do this, too.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Don’t be afraid to amuse yourself. Confidence and goofiness is a sexy combination.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

“Negative Space performs many functions: it focuses our eyes on the subject, it moves our eyes around a drawing or it keeps them still, it allows for visual space/room to breathe, and sometimes it gives the subject an extra layer of meaning.

“For example, ever seen this logo before?

“Sure, you’ve probably seen it a million times.

“But have you noticed the hidden symbol in the logo?! Focus your attention on the negative space of the logo - the space between the letters. Do you see it? Look between the E and the X. Now do you see the arrow?? YES. It’s subtle. It took me YEARS to see it. But once you see the arrow formed by the negative space you can’t unsee it. In this case, designer Lindon Leader used the negative space to create an image that informs the meaning of the subject. An arrow takes your package from here to there. Very clever, Lindon.”

This obviously has societal implications, which she writes about as well. She talks about sociologist W.E.B Du Bois’ work Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America, which shows in data and visualization what was and wasn’t going on.

In writing, we call this negative space white space, right?

How writers use it impacts readers’ experiences.

1. It focuses attention on shorter words and paragraphs.
2. It gives a visual break—especially when it’s at the end of the scene or chapter, right? A new chapter almost always begins on a new page. There’s a reason for that. It’s to let that last bit resonate. It’s to signal, “Hey! Rock star! You just read a chapter!”

So… how do you create white space?

1. Make your sentences shorter. Vary these babies.
2. Make your paragraphs shorter. Vary these babies, too.
3. In articles, make lists.
4. Make sure in dialogue that each person speaking gets their own paragraph. Don’t embed the dialogue.

WHY NEGATIVE SPACE IS GOOD IN OUR LIVES, TOO

Last week, on our blog, I talked about how boredom is actually a pretty awesome thing.

But basically, being bored allows us to have creativity, to replenish, to incubate ideas a and thoughts.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

Our random thought came from here.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

POGIE AND MR MURPHY DOG: This is 100% positive truth. We live about 65% of our lives in this white space where you think we’re sleeping but we’re really just chilling and trying to figure out how to get snacks in new ways.

PLACES TO SUBMIT

The Masters Review Short Story Award for New WritersEligibility: Emerging writers only Prize: $3,000 + publication + agency review Entry Fee: $20 Deadline: February 2, 2025

Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award

Eligibility: Early-career nonfiction writers Prize: $12,500 Deadline: February 19, 2025

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

There’s a feeling among many writers/bloggers/content creators that our brains are too overwhelmed by a high cognitive overload to want to read anything that isn’t super quick and fast.

I get this.

There is a lot of information out there in the world.

Short-form content is, they say, the key.

Tim Denning describes short-form content as “where you share big ideas, be a little contrarian, drop cliffhangers for your stories, and share who you are. It gives people a taste.”

“Many old-school writers want to take a stranger on the street and send them to their newly published book on Amazon. All the reader has to do is give up $15–20 and 15–20 hours of their life,” Denning writes. “None of this works anymore because the internet and all its information have burdened us with a high cognitive load.

“Our brains hurt.”

So, yeah, we say to hell with that. One size fits all doesn’t fit everyone and that comes to readers of everything—books, blogs, news sites, magazines. To say that it does? It’s a little depressing and fatalistic.

High cognitive load when it refers to writing usually refers to the principles of plain English.

What’s that?

It’s just concise sentences. It’s active voice. It’s anti-jargon.

KEEPING IT SHORT AND SIMPLE

Keeping it short and simple has often been a dictum of novel writing when it comes to length (make it only 50,000 words, God forbid it hits over 100,000). It’s also part of content creation (other kinds) keep the reels and videos to 1 minute or less, the picture books to less than 500 words, and so on.

But I’ve (Carrie, not Shaun) also been lucky enough to go on book tours and listen to readers complain that books are too stripped down, not long enough to get lost in any more. Those specific readers? They don’t want short and simple.

BLOWING THAT MAXIM OFF

We’ve built a hyper-local daily paper on the opposite of this thought. We aren’t simple. Our articles tend to not be short. Our word choice and sentence structure is though.

And we have no short-form content to lure people in. We rarely remember to share our posts on Facebook and Instagram. And when we do? It’s never pithy.

But despite this (and our complete lack of marketing and despite that there are some amazing and award winning papers in our area already), in two years we’ve grown to a digital subscription base larger than both the major legacy weekly newspapers in our county with their very large (compared to us) staffs.

Our staff of two (the same goofballs you’re listening to right now) has written over a million words this year, just on that paper, and our open rate hovers over 60%.

We write long.

And people? They like it because they get to parse through the information and determine what matters to them when we cover something like a town meeting. We don’t decide what matters for them.

We trust our readers to be smart, to make their own decisions. So, no, we don’t write short. It’s something that Heather Cox Richardson (one of the most popular writers on Substack) and Andrew Revkin do, too.

Dumbing yourself and your content down? It’s not sexy.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO BE YOU

The other aspect of this is something Denning agrees with and that it’s okay to be you—your weird self, your personal self—in your writing. AI can do a lot of super amazing things, but it can’t do that—it can’t be personal. It can’t be you.

So, when you are writing—anything and everything—just be yourself. Think about who you are writing for, yes, but also be true to who you are, too. That’s where the magic happens. That’s where the communication and the connection happens, too.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scotthutcheson/2024/12/27/why-leaders-should-add-writing-to-their-leadership-toolkit-in-2025

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Don’t be concise when it’s something you really want to get across for people.

COOL PLACE TO SUBMIT

The Paris Review Call for Poetry Submissions

The Paris Review is a literary magazine featuring original writing, art, and in-depth interviews with famous writers. The Paris Review accepts unsolicited submissions of poetry in January, April, July, and October. (Unsolicited submissions of prose are accepted in February, June, and October.)

All submissions must be in English and must be previously unpublished. Translations are welcome and should be accompanied by a copy of the original. Simultaneous submissions are allowed, as long as we are notified immediately if the manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere.

Please submit no more than six poems or one piece of prose at a time and please do not submit more than once per submission period. We suggest to all who plan to submit that they read the most recent issues of The Paris Review to acquaint themselves with material the magazine has published.

Deadline January 31

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

We hope that you are having a wonderful holiday season. It snowed here yesterday and it’s still super cool out. <3 This photo is from outside our neighbor's house.

Ready? Let's go!

A quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'dangerous' gets a lot of hits.

To be fair, so does a quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'fun.'

But we're not here to tell you about the perils and delights of flirting. We're here to talk about writing, life, and dogs. Actually, flirting is part of most people's lives. But we're FOCUSING on the writing aspect.

Flirting is showing someone that you are attracted to them.

If you've listened to the random thought portion of the podcast, it's obvious that Carrie fails at flirting and in knowing when other people are flirting with her.

Side note from Carrie: This is because it's really extremely rare for me to be attracted to people in that way.

So, when it comes to writing about flirting, she has to do a lot of research about how people flirt, how people react to flirting, what the common aspects of flirting are.

All of us, as writers and humans, have blind spots or flaws. These places can be viewed as writing weaknesses or human weaknesses, but they honestly just make us real.

Second side note from Carrie: Not being attracted to people that way isn't a flaw, it's just something that's different than what our society considers the 'norm.'

When we're writing, we have to look for those places where we're not as strong. It could be setting. It could be showing our character's emotions. It could be plot. It could be making a character realistically flirt. It could be making dialogue real. The secret to becoming a better writer is to dive into those places where you're not as strong, and focus on them.

WRITING TIP OF THE POD

Be courageous. Go right to where your weaknesses are and excavate them. If you can't write a fight scene. Go write fight scenes. Read them. Watch them. Go into the places where your weaknesses are.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Flirting is not the same as being friendly. It's about intent.

SHOUT OUT

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.

Writing News

IN THE WOODS, appeared in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books . There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed! 

HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED

Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!

ART

You can buy some of my art. I paint to help inform my stories and some of the prints are available now. There will be more soon. You can check it out here. 

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

And by recently, I mean yesterday.

Anyway, in it Vitaliy said that “Each Day Is a Separate Life.”

You wake up and you are born. You go to sleep and that’s the end of the day/life. You get it, right?

This concept isn’t new. It comes from Seneca, this ancient philosopher and thinker in the Roman Empire, 2,000 years ago, who was rather hyper focused on thinking about wealth even though he was one of the richest people of his time. And who knows? Seneca probably took it from someone else.

Seneca was a thinker and a clerk and a politician and a writer. So, like a lot of us, he did a lot of things.

What matters to us on the podcast today is what Vitaliy took away from Seneca’s writings and that’s the concept of time.

He writes,

“After reading Seneca, it is impossible not to want to retake control of the most important, irreplaceable gift you are given as a birthright – time. But how do you do this? I borrowed my practical solution from Seneca: ‘Begin at once to live and count each separate day as a separate life.’ “‘Each separate day as a separate life.’ What a brilliant idea. A life bookended by sunrise and sunset. A day is a perfect, meaningful measuring unit. I can look at each day and evaluate how I spent it. If I achieve mostly perfect days, then they’ll spill into a perfect life. ”Every January most of us set New Year’s resolutions. Though we don’t think about it that way, we really treat each year as Seneca’s separate life. Except that a year is so long that we forget about our New Year’s resolutions by March.

We writers (and other humans) waste a lot of time thinking about writing, procrastinating about writing, and doing things like cruising social media, that don’t help us actually write.

We only have a limited amount of time in each day. We waste a lot of it. “What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death’s hands,” Seneca wrote. His advice according to Vitaliy, “Hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.” Think of each day that you write as a new life as a writer. If you spend that day, not writing, what does that mean? If this was your final day would you want to create? Would you want to share stories? Or would spend that last day arguing with other people in town about curb cuts and bad parking jobs?

As Vitaliy writes, “The goal is not to change our activities but to change our state of mind as we carry out those activities. You don’t want to stop thinking about or planning for tomorrow; instead, as you think about tomorrow, remember to appreciate today. Or as Seneca puts it, ‘Hurry up and live.’” Try it for a week maybe. Just one week commit to a couple of things:

1. Live the day like it’s your last
2. Wake up in the morning thinking about what matters to you.
3. Write something or create something on each day. It doesn’t need to be finished. It doesn’t need to be perfect.

A lot of people ask me (Carrie) how I produce so much. How much? I’ve written over a million words for our daily newspaper this year. And that’s just our newspaper, right? Well, secret number one is that I have a Shaun. But secret number two is that I expect to never have enough time to get all I want to get done out there.

Prince was a little like this too, but um, much more genius.

But try it for a hot second—or a week. It’s the opposite of the slow it down and chill movement.

Vitaliy mentions having a daily journal so that you can “examine our ‘separate life’ at the end of each day.”

He writes, '“Reviewing your day presents an opportunity to learn from your mistakes and correct them. For instance, today I debated politics with a friend for an hour. As I look at that hour, the time was completely wasted, and I won’t get it back.”

That journaling can really help you think about what matters and how you spend your time. It’s a mindful moment. So, just think, maybe, about what you want your life (your days) to be about.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Routines can sometimes be the epitome of their lives. Make each day your best day. Get the cat food can. Take your walk. Look forward to all the things!

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

Link to that AP article

PLACES TO SUBMIT THIS DECEMBER! THE DRABBLE HARVEST CONTEST

[1 October 2024 through 31 December 2024]

A "drabble" is defined as a short story containing exactly precisely no more and no fewer than 100 words. It has a title, which can be from 1 to 15 words-- but no more than 15. That's a drabble.

You have to count each word. Hyphenated words, such as tete-a-tete, count as one word. Don't use your word count tool to count the words, because that tool will count an ellipsis ( . . . ) as three words, which really should not be counted at all. It will also count dashes ( - ) as words, which is wrong. So count each word by sight, not by tool.

Our drabble contests have themes. For each contest, we will simply throw the theme out there. Whatever the theme inspires you to write, that's what you write.​

The theme of this contest is:

Hunting with the Wolves

This contest is open from 1 October 2024 through 31 December 2024. You have two months to write 100 words. Easy!

Ah, but once you have written them, where do you send them? You send them to the contest editor, Terrie Leigh Relf, at tlrelf at gmail dot com. You'll have to combine that address--sorry, but we don't want her to be spammed. Send your submission in the body of the e-mail, please. If you want anything italicized, please indicate by * before and after the word[s] to be italicized.

Pay for drabbles is 1 cent a word, which means one dollar per drabble. Pay for First Place is $5.00, and pay for Second Place is $2.00.

SUBSTACK ITSELF

According to Curiosity Never Killed The Writer, “Substack runs a monthly short story competition. Its mission is to “revive the art of the short story, support artists, and produce something wonderful.” Genre: Short story. Length: 6,000-10,000 words. Prize: $100 plus 50% of subscription revenue to be sent by Paypal, Zelle, or check. Deadline: December 31, 2024. Reprints are ok so long as you still have the rights to distribute.”

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

So, we’re been talking about dialogue in novels lately and tips about it and the purpose of it. To find any back posts, just head to LIVING HAPPY and search “dialogue.”

One of the things that some writing stylists talk about is the three-beat rule, which is credited to Screenwriter Cynthia Whitcomb.

Reedsy explains this as:

“What this recommends, essentially, is to introduce a maximum of three dialogue ‘beats’ (the short phrases in speech you can say without pausing for breath) at a time. Only after these three dialogue beats should you insert a dialogue tag, action beat, or another character’s speech.”

If it sounds a bit formulaic, well, it is. But it can be really helpful, too, the way formulas usually can.

Reedsy made a little graphic to demonstrate all this:

Here’s another example from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451:

Montag stopped at the door, with his back turned. “Millie?”

A silence. “What?”

“Millie? Does the White Clown love you?”

No answer.

“Millie, does—” He licked his lips. “Does your ‘family’ love you, love you very much, love you with all their heart and soul, Millie?”

There’s no Rule of Three here. It’s more Rule of Three or Less, which makes it a tiny bit less formulaic, right, and it’s natural.

What Bradbury does is integrate the dialogue (spoken word) with the dialogue beats (the stopping at the door, the silence, the licking of lips.”That action beat is different from a dialogue tag, which is the she said, he said, we yelled. It is a beat of action or emotion or setting/senses. And the dialogue beat again (which is what the rule is about) is the "short phrases in speech you can say without pausing for breath.:

But back to the less-than-three-beat rule. When we look up that at that Bradbury piece, emotions glide right in. He communicates the tension of the scene, right? And those short lines and short bits of talking make it very fast paced.

People's brains react to that fast pace and recognize it and look for it in dialogue.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

THE FABER ACTION! PRIZE

Faber launches the Action! Prize in direct response to research from the National Literacy Trust that reveals children’s reading enjoyment is at its lowest level in almost two decades, and that the problem is most acute for boys.

The prize will be launched in conjunction with Literary Manager and Film/TV Producer Eddie Gamarra, who will be judging the prize alongside Kieran Larwood, author of the World of Podkin One-Ear series, and with the support of EmpathyLab.

The Action! Prize, now open to agented and unagented writers in the UK, Ireland and US, calls for fast-paced and filmic, action-packed adventure stories, and offers a publishing contract to the three winners. Entries to the prize need to feature a diverse cast of fully rounded characters in any one of these four age bands: 7–9, 9–11, 12–14, 14+.

Faber Publisher Leah Thaxton says:

‘We are all alarmed at the falling number of children reading for pleasure, especially when it comes to boys; it is clear they are not finding enough of what they need on the shelves. I’m keen we offer a much wider range of instantly appealing, action-packed stories that will compete with the adrenaline rush of gaming and screens. We know books are vital to children’s development, so this prize is a call-out for high octane, filmic, thrilling fiction that will get children hooked (back) into books.’

Founder of EmpathyLab, the UK’s only charity that focuses on building children’s empathy through use of high-quality literature, Miranda McKearney, OBE, says:

‘This generation of boys face so many issues, including toxic masculinity, where an empathy education would help. Scientific research shows that empathy is learnable, and that books are a powerful tool to build it. So this Faber prize is a really welcome, practical initiative. Over time it will be a pipeline for author events from male authors, acting as inspiring empathy role models. Right now, our world has never needed empathy more.’

Submissions are until January 30. More information is here.

DOG TIP OF THE POD

Dogs like short sentences when it comes to dialogue. Sit. Treat. Walk.

People do, too.

It keeps our attention.

COOL EXERCISE

Katherine Cowley has a cool action beats exercise to help.

“Write one paragraph in which a character takes a trip to the grocery store. Use just ONE type of action beat (for example, only long-shot action beats, only extreme close-up action beats, or only future action beats).

“Then write a new paragraph in which a character takes a trip to the grocery store. This time use as many different types of action beats as possible.”

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

Most of today’s random thought was brought to you by Carrie being anxious and depressed, but the cool stuff about the wallaby is from here.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

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These next few podcasts, we thought we should get all nitty-gritty with some quick grammar tips or style tips for people writing fiction.

It can help you nonfiction writers, too, we swear.

When you’re writing dialogue (people talking to each other), you’re going to want to follow these punctuation rules.

• Use quotes.
• Have the dialogue tag (who the speaker is, the he said/she asked) in the actual same paragraph as the dialogue.
• Punctuate it all correctly. (That’s a lot of knowledge right there.)

But here’s the big one:

Don’t go screwing around with those dialogue tags, also known as speaker tags.

You want to keep it simple when it’s a dialogue tag.

“Said” and “asked” are your besties here. If you do anything else? You look like a crappy writer who is trying too hard and the tag becomes more attention-grabbing than the very important words your character said.

“I love you,” she said reads a lot differently than “I love you,” she murmured and bellowed and hissed.

That can be your intention, but you don’t want to keep doing it all the time.

Here look at it.

“I love you,” she murmured.

“I love you,” he cat-called.

“I know,” she bellowed.

He screamed, “Of course you do.”

“And what do you mean by that?” she enthused.

So, the other big thing to remember is this: You can’t sigh out or smile out words, so don’t use them for speaker tags. You can use them for dialogue beats, but that means you have to punctuate them differently.

“I love you,” she said. – Requires a comma after the word ‘you,’ and a lower-case S for ‘she.’

“I love you.” She sighed. – Requires a period after the word ‘you,’ and an upper-case S for ‘she.’

Oh, and romance and horror writers, we all love to make our characters hiss especially when our lovers are shapeshifters, but you can’t hiss out a bunch of words if there are no s-sounds.

WRITING TIPS OF THE POD

Make sure your reader knows who is speaking by putting the dialogue tag next to the dialogue.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Only call attention to the things you want to call attention to.

In the Mood to Randomly Buy Us Coffee or the dogs some treats? Click here AND SEND US A $1. Earn a Shout-out on the podcast, too!

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!

LINKS WE TALK ABOUT

https://shepherdexpress.com/puzzles/news-of-the-weird/news-of-the-weird-nov-11-2021

https://www.merriam-webster.co

Everyone that is, except Carrie, who has trust issues and survives as a lonely, isolated writer in Maine.

What is a beta reader?

It's that person who reads your story, gives you some mild suggestions that feel like a big hug. This is a person you want to party with, a person you can cry to, a person with no mean judgement. This person is basically the human equivalent of your dog: loyal, helpful, good and they give you advice.

What is a critique partner?

These awesome people help you feel less alone, they share stories and ideas with you. They see your story piece by piece, usually, and they help you find the flaws in this work-in-process. These people are like your life partner. They see you without make-up. They see you vomiting into the porcelain pig of your creativity and they hold up your hair because nobody wants puke in hair.

Do you need beta readers?

According to everyone else in the world, yes.

But remember they aren’t an editor. They aren’t a critique partner. They aren’t your dad. They are just someone who gives you feedback.

There’s a great article on beta readers in The Write Practice that goes, “You might not want to hear this, but there is something wrong with your book.

“Hear me out. You know how you can read the same page twenty times and then someone comes along and points out a typo? Yep. We've all been there.

“The same thing can happen with major issues in your book. Things like inconsistencies in world-building, character description, plot lines, and even misplaced objects in the story can throw your readers out of your book and confuse the heck out of them.

“One of my beta readers caught the fact that I had my characters shackled and then a couple of paragraphs later, they were swinging fists and fighting. Where did the shackles go? Good question, dear beta reader.”

And that is why beta readers are great. You want them to be honest, to actually give you feedback, and to read in the genre your story is in and point out in a nice and gentle loving way about inconsistencies.

Ignore everything else Shaun says in this podcast.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Dog Tip For Life - Don't be afraid of showing us the messy, disgusting, less-than-perfect aspects of your process. We can love you no matter what.

Life Tip Of the Pod - Pick your critique partners carefully, man. Seriously. Pick someone who wants to stay up with you rather than pull you down.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

It’s here.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

PLACES TO SUBMIT

• The Passionfruit Review, Deadline: November 24, 2024  (Gold Star Program): Issue 14
• San Antonio Review, Deadline: Dec 1 2024,(Gold Star Program): Fiction & Nonfiction Prose

In his book Hit Lit, which we’ve been talking about, James W. Hall talks about 12 elements that he thinks really make those super-popular-multi-million-copy bestsellers in American fiction in the past 100 years or so.

And one of those features?

It’s a fractured family.

Yep. That’s a big feature of what Hall found in the 12 books he analyzed, (Gone With the Wind, Peyton Place, To Kill a Mockingbird, Valley of the Dolls, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, The Dead Zone, The Hunt for Red October, The Firm, The Bridges of Madison County and The Da Vinci Code).

“Families under economic stress, families at emotional war, families splitting apart, families with a missing parent, families dealing with disease, death, infidelity, job stress, or out-right life-threatening danger. You name it. Badly destabilized families are featured in each of our twelve bestsellers,” Hall writes.

Why? That’s the question, I think.

Why do we as readers buy and books that have fractured families in them. OR is it that books with a lot of these elements and features (there are 12 that Hall lists) make books that feel like a lived and recognizable experience.

Most of us know what a fractured family feels like. Most of us know what it is to feel like an outsider, to live in a time of crisis, are intrigued by secret societies.

These novels hit at commonalities in human experience. And families (even a lack of one) are things that resonates throughout our culture.

RANDOM THOUGHT

A man was arrested for sneaking into his neighbors’ homes and sniffing their shoes. the AP article about this is here.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

If you have to, go ahead and sniff shoes, just don’t eat them. Humans get mad about that.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

There’s an old NPR article about writing bestsellers that quotes critic Ruth Franklin’s overview of American best-sellers as saying "No possible generalization can be made regarding the 1,150 books that have appeared in the top 10 of the fiction best-seller list since its inception."

In his book Hit Lit, which we’ve been talking about, James W. Hall disagrees, talking about 12 elements that he thinks really make those super-popular-multi-million-copy bestsellers in American fiction in the past 100 years or so.

We’ve been talking about that a lot. Hall analyzed Gone With the Wind, Peyton Place, To Kill a Mockingbird, Valley of the Dolls, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, The Dead Zone, The Hunt for Red October, The Firm, The Bridges of Madison County and The Da Vinci Code.

And I just wanted to have a moment to regroup because I found an old interview with Hall and Marc Schultz on Publisher’s Weeklywhere he talks about what element he found in those 12 top selling books that surprised him.

He says, “One I didn’t expect to find is something we came to call the Golden Country, which is a phrase from Orwell’s 1984. Winston, the protagonist, trapped in this dull empty world, has created in his imagination this edenic, natural, beautiful landscape called the Golden Country. It’s his ideal world. And not just in these 12 books, but in all the bestsellers we looked at, there is always an image of a place or a time that’s this idealized, edenic, natural landscape that serves a reference point for much of the story.”

We’ve talked a bit about that in the last week. There’s this idealized want of an idealized world or time that we long for, right? And the characters in our books long for it, too.

In that same interview, Hall says, “But the ingredients themselves remain the same, as Americans we’re really reading, and have wanted to read, permutations of the same book for the last 100 years, and probably into the foreseeable future.”

And it doesn’t have to necessarily be awesome writing for us Americans to want to read these books.

“Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place, once cracked, "If I'm a lousy writer, then a hell of a lot of people have got lousy taste.’” Sarah Weinman writes, “What Metalious and her kin in best-sellerdom really possess, as Hall explains so well in Hit Lit, is the power to connect with readers through their hearts and guts as much as, if not more than, their minds.”

It’s about your heart, humans. About your heart.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

As we learned from the raccoons, don’t be aggressive if you don’t get your food or else they call the sheriff on you.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK ALL ABOUT A WOMAN CORNERED BY 100 RACCOONS. YIKES!

The link

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Guidelines:

• The winner receives $3,000; online publication; and a consultation with Marin Takikawa, a literary agent with The Friedrich Agency.
• The second- and third-place finalists receive cash prizes ($300/$200), online publication, and agent feedback.
• Submitted excerpts must be under 6,000 words.
• Submitted work must be previously unpublished. This includes personal blogs, social media accounts, and other websites. Previously published excerpts will be automatically disqualified.
• The entry fee is $20.
• Simultaneous and multiple submissions are allowed, though each submission requires a $20 entry fee.
• This contest is for emerging writers only. Writers with single-author book-length work published or under contract with a major press are ineligible. We are interested in providing a platform to new writers; authors with books published by indie presses are welcome to submit unpublished work, as are self-published authors.
• The contest’s deadline is 11:59pm PST on Sunday, October 27, 2024.

For full guidelines, check here.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

We’ve started a series of paid and free posts and podcast episodes about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. To see them all just look up “hit novel” or “bestselling” in the search bar.

Whew. Blah. Blah. Blah. Right? Not a bestselling way to start a podcast episode.

What’s a better way?

Well, according to Jack Hall who wrote Hit Lit, “In most bestsellers, there’s a central character who sets off on a journey that takes her from rustic America into turbulent urban landscapes, where her agrarian values either help her succeed or doom her to failure. Almost as often, the heroes of bestsellers make an exodus in the opposite direction, from the pressures of cities to the bucolic countryside.”

Think the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Think the Wizard of Oz.

Think Star Wars.

Think Twilight.

Think Outlander.

Jason Hellerman for NoFilmSchool writes, “The "fish out of water" idiom refers to a character who is removed from their normal day to day and has to catch up with their new outlook on the world. This writing trope is very popular in TV pilot episodes, action movies, and across almost any genre.

“If the character adapts fast to the new environment, it's said they are like ‘a duck takes to water.’"

You might be a city girl in the country or a country boy in the city or just a Hallmark Christmas movie character, but there’s something that resonates in that trope, something that makes a bestseller.

Hall takes it a bit deeper saying that it’s about mythic identities. We see it in elections. The midwestern dad VP choice. The hillbilly boy done good VP choice. The outsider. The insider. We create myths where every single person in the middle of America is a part of “Heartland” full of “hardworking blue-collar” peeps.

“Red state vs blue state. Working-class vs corporate elite. Virtuous vs decadent,” Hall writes.

These polarities become mythic, gigantic, and they popularize stereotypes and polarize views.

“While we all know these labels are bogus, they are so ingrained in our sense of national identity that we reflexively embrace them even as we discount their accuracy,” Hall writes.

Books that argue both sides of these polarities and tensions? They tend to be the bestsellers.

DOG TIP OF THE POD

Don’t be afraid to explore new experiences to make the best story of your life that you can!

RANDOM THOUGHT LINKS

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2024/09/21/mouse-airplane-meal-emergency-landing/75324632007

https://shepherdexpress.com/puzzles/news-of-the-weird/news-of-the-weird-week-of-october-3-2024

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

In James Hall’s book, HIT LIT, he looks at twelve top-selling novels and tries to find similarities to their success.

One thing that he found in the twelve novels is the theme of “America as paradise.”

He writes, “America-as-paradise, an idea that so powerfully shapes our national identity, is one of the key motifs.”

Despite the decade the story was written in, he and his students, he wrote, kept discovering the motif of America as a lost Eden.

“American readers have a powerful hankering for stories grounded in the earth itself,” he writes. “Surely, part of this hunger is connected to one of our central national myths—America as the new Eden. A land of second chances, fresh beginnings in the virginal wilderness.”

Blame it on the Puritans, maybe, but Americans have traditionally been into making novels into bestsellers if they talk about this.

Often, the story has to do with getting back to this golden land that the hero or heroine has been cast out of or alienated from. Think Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind trying to get back to her vision of the South and Tara, her home. Think Michael Corleone in the Godfather cast out of the family and its golden promise.

That longing to go back to the way things were (a more innocent time, a more accepting family or culture, a place of safety) is a common aspect in American hit novels.

Alfred Kazin says way back in On Native Grounds (1956), a lot of American literature “rests upon a tradition of enmity to the established order, more significantly a profound alienation from it.”

You can see this happen in the books that have sold over 100 million novels as well

The English books: A Tale of Two Cities, the first Harry Potter, And Then There Were None, The Hobbit, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland all have the loss of innocence or place and then the desire to get back to it or at least some mourning of it.

These are English novels, though. The top-selling American novels are the Da Vinci Code and The Bridges of Madison County, both selling over 80 million copies. Both involve protagonists who lose their safe worlds and lean into something secret, something complicated, across large vistas and settings.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Go to your greener pastures and escape the rodeo, but also be okay with coming back home to where it’s safe, too.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

It’s from the AP

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

LET’S HANG OUT!

Do you want to take a little online course, learn with me as your writing coach, buy some art or listen to our podcasts? Or give me a buck and read unpublished books on Patreon?

Just  CLICK ON THIS LINK and find out how we can interact more

WRITE SUBMIT SUPPORT

It’s my last time teaching Write, Submit, Support at the Writing Barn. It’s online. It’s six-months. It’s a kick-butt program. Come hang out with me and a few other writers for six months. Tons of feedback. Tons of support. It’s a great program. It is not starting this Sunday because of sickness and is being pushed back a month so you just barely have time to join.

Here’s a link to learn more.

And you can always just hang out with me here! And I coach and edit on the side, too.

xo

Carrie

We’ve started a series of paid and free posts about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here.

And today, we’re talking about a main element in writing a hit novel. Some people call it The Big Clock. Some people call it a Ticking Clock. Some people call it The Timer. Dramatic theory is fancy and calls it a Timelock, but basically, it’s the ticking bomb, a known and harsh deadline that your character has before it all explodes in her face.

Glen C. Strathy explains, “The technique is to give the protagonist a set amount of time by which to achieve the Story Goal or else suffer the consequence. Generally, you create tension by not allowing your protagonist to achieve the goal until the very last second (which is also the crisis of the story). We call this type of limit a ticking clock.”

So, examples might be:

1. You only have until 4 p.m. to get the antidote to your zombie hamster Ham-Hammy-Ham-Ham before he is a zombie forever.
2. An evil group of cheese-loving bunnies will eat ALL THE CHEESE IN THE WORLD if they don’t receive 3,000 pounds of gouda by nightfall.
3. A puppy-nado is coming in three hours and you have to evacuate the town of Bar Harbor before then. WILL YOU MAKE IT IN TIME? Actually, do you want to?

Strathy also calls this “an excellent way to keep your plot under control. For instance, if you give your characters a 24-hour ticking clock, you know all the events of your story must take place within that timeframe.”

It’s a way to keep your plot from going all wild and willy-nilly.

Cool, right?

James W. Hall calls it an “ever moving second hand” that “raises the anxiety level.”

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Dogs use the time element constantly. Whining and returning to your goal, always upping the want and stakes help.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

INSTANT NOODLES!

Holiday Issue (V4 I3): Holiday Noods

HOLIDAY NOODS is our 2024 winter holiday theme. Give us your best holiday fails (any December holiday, from Hannukah, to Solstice, to NYE, etc.) or your best funny work about noodles that happens to ALSO be holiday-themed in some way. The point of the end-of-year issue is always to be light-hearted to downright silly.

Submissions close OCTOBER 15, 2024 and the issue publishes DECEMBER 1, 2024.

INSTANT NOODLES IS CURATED BY THE MEMBERS OF THE OLD SCRATCH PRESS COLLECTIVE

Submission link is here.

COOL WRITING EXERCISE: THE STATUS QUO

What is the status quo as your novel starts?

Got it?

What changes it?

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

Got it from here.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

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Don't we all want that beautiful a-ha moment?

They learn about pinch points, rising action, falling action, subplots, inciting incidents, midpoints, themes, narrative arc, emotional arc, hamster zombies (just kidding) and they hyperventilate along the way.

There is no reason to hyperventilate if this way of looking at writing structure doesn’t work for your brain. You can simplify it a lot with no zombie hamsters involved.

Ready?

Here is the simplest structure choice.

• You have a character.
• Your character has a problem. Let everyone reading know she has a problem.
• How will she solve it?
• Make her try to solve it.
• Make her fail.
• Make her try to solve it again.
• Make her fail again.
• Do this until near the end (¾'s in) and make everything seem absolutely hopeless.
• Let her solve the damn problem.
• Let her rejoice.

How many times should she try?

In our Western culture, we like the number three for some reason. I'm personally more of a fan of the number four. But we authors tend to give the main character three big attempts to solve her issue before we let her succeed. We're mean like that.

Make it tougher

We call this the rising action, but basically it means that each time she tries to fix things, it should be harder, there should be more at risk, she should be more desperate and emotionally invested. We, the readers, should also be more invested as it goes along.

When the attempt fails, the tension gets a bit mellower until it rises again even higher for the second and third attempts. It becomes a pattern.

That's It - The Simplest Plot Structure Ever

Really. It's a pretty simple plot structure but it works. No, I didn't mention inciting incidents and midpoints and other things, because this is the simple plot structure. Key word: simple.

But, don't forget that even with the simplest of plot structures, the point of the story is to have it make sense. When your character does something, let there be consequences that logically move us to the next part of the story. Remember cause and effect? That's important to us writers.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Pogie says to just keep trying.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Shenandoah. Genre: Fiction. Payment: $80 per 1000 words of prose up to $400. Deadline: Opens September 10, 2024, and closes when they reach capacity. 

The Last Line. Genre: Fiction that ends with the last line provided. Payment: $20-$40. Deadline: October 1, 2024. 

COOL WRITING EXERCISE

This is via Reedsy:

“The Outsider

“If you're working on a novel or short story, write a pivotal scene from an outside observer's perspective who has no role in the story.

HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED

Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!

Or, um, just subscribe to this blog and maybe even pay $5 a month to get the paid-subscriber only posts. Why? Because I do not want have to start an Only Fans. Just kidding! Sort of. It would have to be about my feet.

OR BUY ART?

You can buy some of my art. I paint to help inform my stories and some of the prints are available now. There will be more soon. You can check it out here. 

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

So in writing one of the biggest tips that you start hearing starts in around third grade and it’s “SHOW DON’T TELL.”

And it’s sound writing advice, but it’s pretty sound life advice, too.

How many of us have heard the words, “I love you,” but never seen the actions that give proof to the words? You can tell someone you love them incessantly for hours, but if you don’t show them it, too, it’s pretty likely that the words aren’t going to rock that person’s world.

Telling is like this:

Shaun was a hotty.

Showing is like this:

Carrying four grocery bags and a kitten, biceps bulging, Shaun walked through the parking lot, approaching a couple of older men. The smaller man gawped at Shaun, staring at his chest, the kitten, the bags, the biceps.

“Wow,” the man said, pivoting as Shaun strode by. “Just wow.”

The man licked his lips. His partner hit him in the back of the head lightly and said, “I am right here.”

What Does This Mean?

Both examples illustrate that Shaun is a hotty, but one states it as fact (telling) and one elucidates with examples (description, reaction, action).

Here’s One More Quick Example

Telling

The lawyer liked to use big words to impress people.

Showing

Carpenter stuck his thumbs into the waist of his pants, lowered his voice and said, “Pontification is one of the more mirthful and blithe aspects of the judical system.”

IN REAL LIFE IT MATTERS TOO.

In life, you want to show too, not just tell all the time.

You can say, “I love you.”

You can also grab someone’s hand and say, “I love you.”

You can also scoff and turn away and step on an ant and say, “I love you.”

WRITING TIP OF THE POD

The actions matter. Showing matters.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Showing and telling simultaneously in life (not writing) works to get treats.

Random THought Link

It's right here.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!

Type your email…

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HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED

Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast and our new LOVING THE STRANGE podcast. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. 

Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!

Thanks so much for being one of the 263,000 downloads if you’ve given us a listen!

One of our newest LOVING THE STRANGE podcasts is about the strange and adorably weird things people say?

And one of our newest DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE episode is about fear setting and how being swallowed by a whale is bad ass.

And Carrie has new books out! Yay!

You can order now! It’s an adult mystery/thriller that takes place in Bar Harbor, Maine. Read an excerpt here!

They want to be hooked along.

They want to unwrap the answer the way people unwrap a birthday present.

That’s what Robert Prince says, anyway, writing in his class at the University of Alaska, ”The key to understanding what audiences really want in a story is to understand that the audience doesn’t want to know everything they need to know when they need to know it!  They want questions that get answered later.  Questions are what intrigue audiences and keep them sticking around because they care about the answers.  Every time you answer a question in your story, you better quickly come up with a new question or already have others that need answering.

“Consider Christmas or birthday parties, for example.  Why do we wrap the presents?  That’s ridiculous.  It’s a lot of extra work, you have to buy this paper that you only throw away, and it gets ripped off almost immediately after the person sees it!  Spock would have a heck of a time figuring out why we do that.  We do it because we love questions.  We love questions.  We love questions.  Few things fascinate us more than an unanswered question.  Heck, they basically named a long-running, rebooted TV series after this: Unsolved Mysteries.  They could have just as well called it “Unanswered Questions” but it doesn’t have the same dramatic appeal.  We wrap presents because the wrapping paper turns a Lego set into a question and a question is more fun than a Lego set, believe it or not.  The wrapping paper makes us ask, “What could be in there?  Is it what I asked for?  Is it something else?  Is it cool?  It could be almost anything!””

We talk about this today in the podcast. Plus, a random thought and the below dog tip.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Find a good question to snuggle with.

RANDOM THOUGHT

Our random thoughts about the Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876 are sourced from here and here.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

“After I’ve watched about 20 minutes of the film I ask myself, ‘If an atomic bomb were to go off and destroy everyone in this film, would I care all that much?’  If the answer is no, I don’t keep watching the film,” he says in his class at the University of Alaska.

He has this test because to make your reader keep reading, they have to care what happens to the characters in the story.

This is true in real life, too, right? When we interact with people, most of us have levels of caring. We might worry and care more about our parent or child when they drop the ice cream carton on their instep than about the random guy in the frozen dairy section of the grocery store when he does it.

But, if that guy starts tearing up, maybe is standing above the ice cream splattered all across the store’s scuffed tile floor and says, “This was for my mom. She’s dying and she asked for rocky road ice cream. This is the last rocky road ice cream!”

Well, yeah, we might care a bit more.

“A key component to storytelling is getting your audience to care about what happens to the characters in your story,” Prince says. “People stick around to hear the end of stories because they have grown to care about the people in the story and want to know what happens to them. If you’ve ever cried when a character died in a movie, then the filmmakers did an awesome job of making you care about the people in that film.”

The question becomes how to do that.

According to Prince, “you can make people care about the characters in your story by describing them well enough that your audience can picture them and recognize them as a certain type of person--maybe like someone they already know. How old are they? What do they look like? What kind of personality do they have? Do they have any particularly unique traits or mannerisms? This is why written news stories about people tend to include some seemingly odd and superficial facts about them at first.  Those facts are not included because the reporter is particularly superficial. The reporter included those facts because they know you will not be as invested in what happened to that person if you cannot picture them in your mind.”

Empathy, however, isn’t just built on perfection. We wouldn’t care as much about that grocery store guy with his ice cream if he’d just done the right things, expressed no emotion, and there was a clean up on aisle twelve.

Empathy builds off flaws and human worth, those virtues we love. It’s why Blake Snyder has “Save the Cat” as a trope and an inspiration. We care more about characters who save the cat or the puppy or even the zombie hamster.

“Flaws make characters relatable, more human, and feel a little more like underdogs,” Prince writes. “This is why James Bond has to get beat up in every 007 movie.  That’s how the filmmakers show us he is human so we can relate better to him.  It’s the same reason Superman has kryptonite.  We feel for characters when we see that they have some sort of weakness.”

And that other part is the struggle. We empathize with characters that are having a hard time getting what they want.

So to help your readers empathize with your characters you want to pass that Atomic Bomb test and you do that by . . .

1. Good description and unique mannerisms
2. Flaws
3. Human worth/virtues
4. Struggles

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Be like dogs. Dogs have human worth.

RANDOM BS GENERATOR LINK

The link is here.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

Five Ways To Get Story Ideas

Some authors have a really hard time just getting an idea for a new story. They burn out. They can't find anything that they think is 'good enough.' They just don't know where to start and that lack of a start makes them blocked.

This is so sad! There are ways to fight it.

One Way To Storm is BY Admiring Other's Work

Think about ways that other people's stories influence you. If you're an Outlander fan, think about why. If you were to write your own kind of time travel story would it be like that? With a lot of spanking and stuff? Or something totally different. How would it be different?

Another Way to Incite a Hailstorm of Questions

Ask your self questions. It's all about 'What if?' What if Trump wasn't president in 2018? What if everyone had blue hair? What if the earth had two moons? What if dogs were really space aliens?

Pogie the Dog: Wait. You mean they aren't?

Carrie the Human: No, buddy... I mean... I don't think so?

Third Way Where the Wind Is So Strong It Pushes Images into you

Some of my best ideas have come on a treadmill watching the country music network or MTV or some random YouTube channel with the sound off and just seeing images. Eventually, an image will hit me so hard that I have to write a story about it. The happened with my story, Love (and Other Uses for Duct Tape).

Fourth Way Of Icy Understanding

Figuring things out. This is sort of like Another Way, but instead of deliberately asking yourself off-the-wall questions, ask questions about things that matter to you.

A lot of my stories are because I don't understand something. Tips on Having a Gay (Ex) Boyfriend was because I couldn't understand a hate crime that had happened. I mean, you can never understand that kind of hate, but this one incident was so bizarre that the only way I could deal with it was to write my way through it.

Fifth Way—An Emotional Blizzard

Get emotional. What is it that always makes you laugh, cry with joy, weep with anger? What are the situations that pull at your heartstrings? Think about that as story. Write.

Dog Tip for Life

Inspiration is just attention. Notice what's around you. Then ideas will come.

Writing Tip of the Pod

Once you have your seed of information and your brain has successfully stormed, don't second guess your idea. Write it down. If you are a plot-first writer, think up the questions to flesh out your idea - who is the protagonist. What is she up against? What's her goal? How is she going to get it? Write it down. Do it. Don't block yourself.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINKS

APA article NPR

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

There. That’s the definition. We’re all good, right?

Wrong.

Let’s really talk about setting.

WHAT SETTING DOES

Setting is the foundation of your story. It is the ModPodge that has an addictive smell (Cough. Not addicted to ModPodge. Look away.) and glues all the story together.

WHAT HAPPENS WITHOUT SETTING

Your characters float around in nothingness.

Your plot makes no sense. You can’t have hamsters taking over the world if there is no world.

You have no theme. You can’t care about the kindness of strangers if there is no reason for the strangers to need to be kind.

You have no atmosphere. Atmosphere is sexy. It’s the feeling of the story. The ambience.

LITTLE THINGS SHOW IT

Just by defining a tree you are telling the reader something about the setting.

Like if you write:

She stared up at the palm tree.

You’re giving the reader clues. A palm tree will not be in Iceland. They are somewhere comparatively warm.

If you write:

She got out of bed.

You’re giving the reader a clue that she is wealthy enough to have a bed and in a culture or world where people sleep in beds.

And the thing is that clues are needed. Specific clues. Real clues. Without a setting, without a place where the story happens and a time where the story happens, the reader floats there in the sky, ungrounded, unanchored.

You know what happens when a reader floats in the sky? The reader drifts away. Your character does an action--like a fart. So you want to fart in some specific setting to help the reader sniff out and remember where they are.

Being specific anchors the reader. It ties them to your story and its characters. You will remember a fart that smells like eggs mixed with tuna mixed with a McDonald’s french-fry in church during a funeral. So be specific in details.

More than that though? Setting anchors your characters and your plot. Place makes us (and our characters) who they are. It gives a story atmosphere. It gives the character a world to interact with.

Think of a creepy Stephen King novel. It’s creepy because he takes certain aspects of Maine and creepifies them. Think of Crazy Rich Asians or The Bridgerton novels. They are luxurious because of the places where they take place AND the places where they take place help inform the novels, the characters and the plots.

HOW DO YOU MAKE SETTING?

Go in slow. Don’t overwhelm us with details about the Hamster World of Ham-Ham-Ster and its 87 leaders of the Teddy Bear Nation and all their names that start with H. Establish it. Move on with your plot and sprinkle in important details as you go. Be sparing. Only add to overall story.

Figure out what pieces of the setting matter the most. Is it the claustrophobic trees? The swarms of tourists disembarking cruise ships. The smell of blood coming from the old, wooden floorboards? Use those details. Not the kind of coffee your heroine puts in her Keurig unless that's really important.

Make it active. The setting matters as the characters see it, move through it, react to it. Whatever is weird about that place and how your characters interact with it? Focus on that.

Don’t be afraid to go places, to use Google maps, the internet. Do everything you can to get fully into that place so you use it later in your work. Pay attention to all the settings and use it.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Pay attention to where you are. That helps you know how to react, interact and be. So sniff all the fire hydrants. Don't Google Map your life. Experience it for real.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!

Type your email…

The traditional book publishing world is a bit like the wild west if the cowboys wore pink-framed eyeglasses and could quote Derrida.

People are heroes. People are let go. Entire divisions of publishing houses close. And so on.

And this continues this week with the changes at Hachette Book Group and its announcement of the closure of Workman: Algonquin Young Readers this September.

According to Editorial Director Cheryl Klein, “Our backlist and all books under contract will be absorbed into the Little, Brown Books for Young Readers list.”

But her team Adah Li, Sarah Alpert, and Shaelyn McDaniel will be gone.

Klein stays as editorial director for the Workman Kids Trade list.

Last week, the New York Times’ Alexandra Alter wrote,

“Last month, Hachette Book Group laid off seven employees at its Little, Brown imprint, as part of a corporate restructuring. It has since hired three new editors to fill positions at Little, Brown. These changes followed a reshuffling at the top. Little, Brown’s former editor in chief, Judy Clain, left to run an imprint at Simon & Schuster in January, and in March, Sally Kim, who previously worked as the publisher of Putnam, a Penguin Random House imprint, was appointed as the president and publisher of Little, Brown, becoming the first woman of color to lead the imprint.”

An imprint like Algonquin Young Readers is the way a publisher groups and markets books within the larger umbrella (in this case Workman, which is within the Hachette publishing group).

When an imprint like AYR ends, the authors feel stranded—editor-less—and that can be pretty scary.

Last summer, Penguin Random House (PRH) said it was merging Razorbill into Putnam Children’s; HarperCollins closed Inkyard formerly known as Harlequin Teen.

It’s usually about sales. Traditional publishers rely on sales to pay employees, pay for the books produced, pay the authors, and if the sales are not big enough? Things change. Sometimes it’s about personnel. Sometimes it’s about vision.

While it absolutely stinks for the people who lose their jobs or the authors who lose their inprint and people, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the sky is falling for an entire industry. It means things are shifting around.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Sometimes where you end up is better than where you started.- Mr. Murphy

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

That Bored Panda article is here.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

And it is a little naughty because this, my friends, is about selling a book, your book, and that requires being a little bit sexy.

Sexy is something I, Carrie, am very very bad at.

Let’s start by thinking about it this way:

A book description is an adverstisement for your book.

Writing a bad ad for your book doesn’t make you a sucky novelist. It just makes you unskilled at that. And that’s okay. You’ve been learning character development and plotting and novel structure and pacing. It’s okay to not know this part of the book world too.

Yet.

Here are the things you need to know about how to write a book description

MAKE IT BETWEEN 150 AND 250 WORDS

You want it to not be as long as the book. Or even as long as a novella. Or even as long as this post.

Any longer? People apparently stop paying attention.

FOCUS ON THE BARE PLOT MINIMUM AND THE HERO/PROTAGONIST

Show us how the main character’s decision has set them toward the adventure of the book.

MAKE IT IN THE THIRD PERSON

The third person is when you talk about other people and don’t use the “I.”

So,

Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar decided to adopt a hamster, little did they know, it was a zombie.

Not

We adopted a zombie hamster.

DO NOT BE CHEESY

You don’t want to go all fancy-pants on the book description. Stay away from adverbs and adjectives and a zillion clauses. Simple wins.

So, don’t write:

In the adorable town of Bar Harbor, Maine where tourist avidly romp in the summer and locals stoically manage the hard winters beneath the mini mountains and rocky coast, two hard-working podcasters tried to adopt a small rodent.

HOOK THEM IN

Book hooks happen in the first pages of the story, but they also need to happen in story descriptions.

A good way to do this is to show how your hero is unlikely to achieve their goal on their adventure.

Absolutely clueless podcasters Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar decided to adopt a hamster, hopelessly hoping for something easy to love. Little did they know that Hammy the Hamster was a zombie.

MAKE YOUR WORD CHOICE COUNT AND WORK FOR THE BOOK

If you use one or two words that are emotional and full of power, you can impact the reader and make them want your book.

Our book looks like some quirky fantasy, right? We know that from the plot.

If it was a mystery, we might use a word like MURDER>

Two podcasters. One zombie hamster. And a little Maine town about to host a million tourists.

Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar weren’t expecting that the hamster they’d adopted to help their podcast ratings would end up a zombie. Or that it would threaten all the tourists heading in to celebrate Acadia National Park’s bicentennial.

Now, these clueless podcasters, looking for a way out of their podunk town have a choice: find a way to get people to listen to them and protect both the tourists and Hammy the Hamster or just give up and hunker down with some Doritos (Hammy’s favorite) before it’s too late.

The future of Bar Harbor, Maine—and a million tourists—depend on them.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Hook ‘em and they’ll buy your book. In dog world, they’ll give you a treat when you hook ‘em. Show them what they need but bring them along, wanting more.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

These are from Duotrope which has an AMAZING list. You should check it out.

• 21 Jul 2024 06:59 UTC Macrame Literary Journal (Gold Star Program): Fiction
• 21 Jul 2024 06:59 UTC Macrame Literary Journal (Gold Star Program): Micro-Fiction
• 31 Jul 2024 14:29 UTC Witcraft (Gold Star Program): Witcraft Annual Humour Competition (Charges fees.)
• 31 Jul 2024 22:59 UTC The Passionfruit Review (Gold Star Program): Issue 11
• 31 Jul 2024 23:59 UTC Sunspot Literary Journal (Gold Star Program): Novella-length fiction, CNF, or graphic novel (Charges fees.)

Writing Exercise:

This one is just a simple prompt from Writers Connection

“The Whispering Forest: A forest speaks to those who listen. What secrets does it share, and what price must you pay for its wisdom?”

Random Thought Link

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ap-us-odd-cat-honorary-degree_n_6647b994e4b00e1a0a6c1f51

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

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Last week, we talked about pinch points both on the podcast and on the blog, and honestly? Nobody seemed super into it, but we’re finishing up this week. This post is going to be a bit more about the first part of act two of a three-act story, focusing on the time from the first pinch point to the midpoint.

Pause for a plea: Look, I know plot structure isn’t sexy the way character development or drama and obstacles and conflict are, but it’s super important. It makes a difference in your book wooing readers and in it wooing agents.

K.M. Weiland has a really lovely graphic that we’ve included in the podcast notes about where to put those pinch points.

Weiland is a bit of a goddess about structure and what she says about this first pinch point is this:

1. It comes about 37% of the way into the story.
2. It tells us that the bad guy has some power.
3. It can be a whole big scene or just the tiniest of moments
4. It sets up “the next 1/8th of the story, in which the character will slowly begin to grow into a new awareness of his story’s many truths–and specifically the truth about the nature of the conflict in which he is engaged.”

Right after this big and important pinch point, the hero of your story aka your protagonist moves into the section of the book that comes before the book’s halfway point or midpoint. Weiland calls this space from 37% to 50% a realization place and scenes for your character growth. The protagonist understand what’s going on a bit more. She starts to react with that knowledge informing her reactions and then her actions. Cool, right?

She writes, “In itself, the First Pinch Point does not reveal the true nature of the conflict to the protagonist. Rather, it foreshadows it by providing a peek at facts the protagonist has barely grasped as yet.”

She uses the movie ALIEN a lot to explain this. At the first pinch point, the crew realizes that the alien creature isn’t what they were thinking it was. Their choices start to be informed by that until the midpoint, which Weiland calls the MOMENT OF TRUTH.

At the midpoint in ALIEN that alien smashes its way out of one of the crew’s chest.

The truth of what they are dealing has exploded in the ship and on the screen (and on your novel’s page).

“It’s instructive when watching movies to observe the protagonist’s facial expressions prior to the Moment of Truth and then afterward. Before the Midpoint, he’ll often look baffled as he struggles to keep up with the conflict. Then the light dawns in his eyes at the Midpoint, and from that moment on, there’s a look of knowing determination on his face,” she writes.

Larry Brooks defines pinch points as “An example, or reminder, of the nature and implications of the antagonist force, that is not filtered by the hero’s experience.”

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Sometimes in life, your defining moments don’t come at the midpoint. - Mr. Murphy

So, what he’s saying is don’t think that there are certain points and ages in your life where you have to get things done. Life is not a book and it doesn’t need to be a three-act structure.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

These are via Authors’ Publish.

Bannister Press: Other – the 2024 fantasy short story anthology Bannister Press specializes in supernatural and fantasy stories loved by adults and young adults. For this fiction anthology, they only want submissions from writers who identify as women. “We are seeking international short story submissions by writers who identify as women for an anthology with a focus on what it means to be on the outside looking in, or comfortably or uncomfortably out of step with the world(s) at large, and with a fantasy element (either subtle or writ large). The story can be visually focused, or character/narrative focused, as long as it leaves the reader thinking about the story long after closing the book. We don’t want a lesson, we want an experience that makes us come alive. Humour is fine as long as it’s not about the mic drop.” Deadline: 31 July 2024 (extended) Length: Up to 3,500 words Pay: $0.08/word Details here.

DarkLit Press: In the Gallows Wake – A Pirate Horror Anthology This is a fiction anthology of “piratical horror stories that are certain to plunge readers into the heart of darkness on the high seas, where cursed pirates and spectral ships reign with terror and betrayal, promising no soul safe passage through their nightmarish waters.” And, “Diverse voices in pirate stories transform the high seas into a vibrant canvas of human experience, weaving a rich tapestry that blends historical accuracy with untold narratives, ensuring every wave and whisper carries the weight of authenticity and boundless imagination. This approach not only breathes life into the sails of traditional tales but also charts a course toward a more inclusive and multifaceted exploration of freedom, identity, and adventure.” They also accept reprints. Deadline: 1 August 2024 Length: 4,000-6,000 words Pay: $0.01/word Details here.

WRITING EXERCISE

This one comes from Studio Binder:

“Here are a list of dialogue prompts. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know who the characters are yet, or which character a certain line would be good for. Try not to think about how this could fit into your already existing story, or what scene this should belong in, just write:

1. “Why didn’t you answer before? I called you three times. Now you’re pretending like nothing happened.”
2. “I just have a lot of friends so…”
3. “You hate coffee?”
4. “It just doesn’t seem normal.”
5. “I’ve developed a kind of aversion to it. I don’t know, it made sense at the time.”

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

NYT

LINKS TO LEARN MORE

Larry Brooks, Story Engineering

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-27-2024

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

One of those things is pinch points.

This podcast episode is going to be the start of a quick series of podcasts and regular posts about pinch points. The regular posts will be at our Substack LIVING HAPPY under the WRITE BETTER NOW publication.

So, what are these little twerps called pinch points?

They a way of thinking about novel or story structure that helps us keep the reader engaged.

Pinch points are moments where the tension emerges again or is heightened. It’s a place where you seductively say to the reader, “Hey, baby. Let’s engage again.” Or maybe it’s that they are saying, “Dear Reader, let me remind you what exactly is at stake here for our poor, dear, pathetic hero.”

The pinch points are where the protagonist or hero of your story gets a little bit of pain. Ouch. So mean, us writers are so very mean.

As Writing Mastery describes, “They rekindle the tension that may have waned by reminding us of the primary conflict and what it means for the characters. Without stakes, readers will quickly lose interest—therefore, pinch points are events of the plot that, strategically placed, keep the narrative from losing steam.”

“In the traditional Three-Act Structure, the first act introduces the characters, setting, and conflict, while the third act culminates in the resolution. The second act, which constitutes the middle portion of the story, is often the longest and contains the rising action. Pinch points punctuate this act to create a sense of urgency and drive the story forward.”

Pinch Points Are Not Plot Points

So, here’s the super important thing. Pinch points are not plot points. Yes, there is a lot of P-words in there, but to pinch is not to plot, though a dastardly villain might plot how to pinch.

Plot points

• move the story forward
• are events
• connect the events of your story so it’s not episodic.

Pinch points

• Raise stakes or increase the conflict.
• Obstruct the hero from getting her goal, so often focus on the bad guy of the story or the antagonist and this is a big part of it, this is what makes it not a turning point
• Make the reader curious about what might happen, make them worried about what might happen, so keeps them reading
• Show us what our heroes are made of because of the extra pressure that these challenges create.

As Writers Helping Writers writes, “New writers often concentrate on the Hook, Midpoint, and the big twist at the end. But without well-placed Pinch Points, the story will lose its sense of rising action, conflict, and tension. The quest cannot exist without an opponent, and the Pinch Points show the reader what that opposition is all about. 

“Pinch Points show how high the stakes are. They also set up the emotional change within the hero as they react to the new situation.”

So, tomorrow on the blog, I’ll be talking about where these babies go in your story.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Do not let the pinch points keep you from moving forward toward your goals.

COOL EXERCISE

Think about the bad guy in your story. Now write down:

• Their fetish
• What they’d buy at the grocery store
• What they’d buy at Wal-Mart
• What they could do to make things harder on the hero and easier on themselves

PLACE TO SUBMIT

River Styx

The Castro Prize, named for our founding editor, Michael Castro, is a new prize awarded annually to exemplary works of poetry and fiction. River Styx editors carefully read and discuss contest entries and ultimately submit the strongest ten entries to the judges. For our 2024 contest, Christopher Castellani will judge fiction and Dg Okpik will judge poetry. We will award one winner for fiction and one for poetry, with one runner-up in each genre. The first-place prizes are $1000 each, plus publication in print and online. 

The entry fee is $20. If you would like to receive a copy of our latest print issue, River Styx 107, you may do so at a discounted rate of 50% off ($9.95). (Shipping rates apply. The discount is good for one copy of RS107 per entrant and cannot be combined with any other discounts or offers.) Entrants will receive a discount code in their confirmation email.

Works of fiction should not exceed 5000 words. You may send up to three poems. Work must be previously unpublished. You may submit multiple entries but each work must be submitted separately. If the work is a simultaneous submission, we ask that you notify us immediately upon publication elsewhere and withdraw the piece via Submittable. Withdrawing a submission will not result in a refund of the entry fee. The contest runs from May 1, 2024 through September 30, 2024. The winners will be announced on January 1, 2025.

All contest entries are read blind. The winner is chosen based on the strength and inventiveness of the writing, not on academic background, publication history, or any other accolades. Please do not include your name or any other identifying information on the work itself. Submittable provides features that allow us to read the work without seeing the contributor's name, contact information, or cover letter. Once winners are chosen, we can "unhide" this information to identify the winners.

ENTER NOW

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

So, if you're into writing, you read books about writing and actual books. You study the craft.

So, if you're into knitting, you study knitting. Entrepeneurship? Same thing, but first you probably have to learn how to spell it. My bad there.

There's a cool graph here that talks about how if you read a certain number of books, how you compare to other American adults. It's also a bit depressing because it basically says most Americans read two books a year.

Hallel K has a post on Medium about how you can use the 1-hour rule to catapult yourself into the 1% and I think that's a great post, but it's a little hyperbolizing. We like hyperbole though, right? It makes things easy.

Hallel uses a quote by Earl Nightingale.

“One hour per day of study in your chosen field is all it takes. One hour per day of study will put you at the top of your field within three years. Within five years you’ll be a national authority. In seven years, you can be one of the best people in the world at what you do — Earl Nightingale”

This might make you think, "Yes! Right. So true. Epiphany moment."

Or it might make you think, "Who the hell is Earl Nightingale?"

Well, he has a Wikipedia page? But basically he was a motivational speaker and a radio show host that died in 1989. He wrote Strangest Secret. And to him it's all about risk taking and he also said that the problem with people's lives and lack of success isn't cowardice, but conformity.

According to his definition, a success is when you go after a goal and achieve it. Deliberately. And only 1 out of 20 do that, he said.

The key, he said, is creating, not conforming, deliberate creation. Goals, he said, bring you places. A ship, he says, that has a crew and captain has a destination and it gets out of the harbor and ends up to its destination. But a ship without a destination? Without a captain and crew? If you just turn on the boat's engines, it might not even make it out of the harbor.

Deliberate learning. Goals. Focus. That's what matters, he says. Reading, learning? Those are important aspects. Maybe you won't get in the top 1% of whatever you're going toward, but you will get smarter, closer, and have deliberate action.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Pogie claims to be in the top 1% of Begging. She's an International subject expert in Food begging. Study in the morning and at night. This, however, is a photo of her apprentice, Mr. Murphy.

COOL EXERCISE

This is from MasterClass and it's all about goals.

"Create Realistic Goals

"If your goals are unrealistic, they’ll be unachievable and overwhelming. Don’t let your passion for finishing your novel cause you to push yourself too hard and set goals that simply aren’t possible. For example, it might not be reasonable to set a goal that you will write your novel in one month. Neither should you set a word-count goal to write 10,000 words a day—especially if you also have a full-time job. Setting reasonable goals in the first place will make it much easier for you down the road.

"Consider setting writing goals that you can accomplish step-by-step, one day at a time. The best thing you can do is create daily habits that will help you reach your goals—rather than burn yourself out early with ambitious expectations for yourself. Here are some goals that many writers will set for themselves:

• Write 1,500 words every day
• Write for three hours every day at a scheduled time
• Finish one chapter each week
• Practice morning journaling"

PLACE TO SUBMIT

River Styx Castro Prize 2025 (Deadline September 30)

The Castro Prize, named for our founding editor, Michael Castro, is a new prize awarded annually to exemplary works of poetry and fiction. River Styx editors carefully read and discuss contest entries and ultimately submit the strongest ten entries to the judges. For our 2024 contest, Christopher Castellani will judge fiction and Dg Okpik will judge poetry. We will award one winner for fiction and one for poetry, with one runner-up in each genre. The first-place prizes are $1000 each, plus publication in print and online. 

River Styx remains dedicated to publishing the works of writers and artists we believe represent current and future movements in society and culture at local, national, and global levels, whether that work is embedded in historical, contemporary, future, abstract, or impossible contexts. In other words, we seek out work which protests, proclaims, fumes, experiments, innovates, elevates, ruminates, and rushes ahead. And the form that work takes is often surprising, occasionally challenging to our sensibilities and ossified narratives, and always feels urgent and alive in some way.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

Sky News Greatest Dane

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

This is not the only way to write.

I am very much a product of the U.S. culture. And I’m going to talk a tiny bit in the next couple weeks about different forms/shapes of storytelling, but again . . . I am a student of this culture’s structures. I am not an expert at other structures. I adore them though. I’m going to be providing links.

And hopefully by quickly talking about some of them, you might go off and explore and adore, too. Maybe even get an epiphany for your own story?

So, another kind of storytelling is Middle Eastern and it's  Frame Story in our language.

And it's so cool. Basically, as the Novelsmithy explains "many types of stories, characters, and symbols are woven together into a larger tale.

"One Thousand And One Nights is the most famous example of this. In this story, Shahrazad tells story after story to the Sultan in order to keep him from killing her. Her stories include a variety of complex narratives, different characters, conflicts, genres, and morals. There are even frame stories within the larger frame story!

"Characteristics of Middle Eastern Storytelling:

• Outer 'frame story' tying multiple stories together
• Multiple characters and narratives
• Variety of genres, fantasy, and high action."

It's very influenced by The Qur’an.

Gulf News writes,

"One of the most revered traditions of oral storytelling is the hakawati. As intricate and complex as a weaving pattern, this motif-rich narrative style darts in and out of stories, offering unending drama where the storyteller begins one tale, deftly leaves it mid-way to pick up another and then has a third story emerging from a subplot of the first and so on. All this is done using the tools of allegory, folklore, satire, music and a visual spectacle of grand sweeping gestures and facial expressions to finally create an enthralling experience for his listeners."

There's a great piece about frame stories here.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Pogie's like "hey dude, I live my style and life in the frame story style of way. It always comes back to me. I'll always be doing something. I'll see a cat and I'll change my storyline." And that keeps happening. It's all about multiple stories in a brain.

WRITING EXERCISE

Do the Forrest Gump. Find a setting like a park bench and tell the stories that make a life. OR at least outline it.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Voyage simply aims to publish good work and provide a space for new and established voices. To get an idea of what we publish, please read our archives. General submissions are open year-round with no fee to submit.

We only accept submissions via our online submission managing system, Submittable. We DO NOT accept submissions via email. Submissions sent via email will be automatically discarded without a response. We accept simultaneous submissions, but please withdraw your work via Submittable if it is accepted elsewhere.

Though we consider reprints, please be advised that Voyage doesn't offer payment for work that has been published before. If you are submitting a piece that has been published, please notify us in your submission. 

Voyage pays $200 per accepted, previously unpublished piece of short prose.

Fiction: We are looking for short stories that surprise, inspire, entertain, or enlighten.

Creative Nonfiction: We’re on the hunt for personal essays and other creative nonfiction that specifically relates to the teen experience. Submit your creative nonfiction via our submission manager here.  

Manuscript Preparation: Please make sure your manuscript is double-spaced with Times New Roman 12. Submissions should be no more than 6,000 words. Please include the author's name and page number in the top right-hand corner of every page.  

RANDOM THOUGHT

Our random thought is about 10 cent beer night.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

Much of American film and novels is built on what's considered to be the classic three-act structure, which basically goes beginning-middle-end, and there's this rising line of the plot.

It ends up looking like a bit of a triangle.

As readers, we can sort of anticipate and feel that structure happening. In a rom-com, we almost always know how far into the book or movie it will be when the couple breaks up and then someone has to chase down a car or airplane or something so they can get back together. There's a lovely familiarity in that, but us writers don't always want a lovely familiarity with beats in all the prescribed places and a structure that looks like a triangle.

In an earlier podcast, Shaun, was asking me about the different structures and plots. And this is a pretty big question that people write entire books about, but I'm going to start here.

First, a structure is sort of the diagram of rising and falling and action that links all of the plot points together

The plot is something that connects the moments of the novel in a way that gives a novel its meaning. .

Janet Burroway defines plot as a “series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance …. Plot’s concern is ‘what, how, and why,’ with scenes ordered to highlight cause-and-effect.”

Plot, according to Ingrid Sundberg, is about patterns, rhythm, and energy. It’s about the movement and feeling your particular arrangement creates. The triangle (often called the Aristotelian story shape) is a visual metaphor for the escalating energy that is meant to come as a result of a classic design arrangement.”

This podcast, we're talking about all the different types of plots. Next time? We'll go all structure on you.

Here’s a list of different possibilities when it comes to plot:

• Mini-plot

• Daisy chain plot,

• Cautionary tale plot

• Ensemble plot

• Along for the ride plot

• Symbolic juxtaposition plot

• Repeated event plot

• Repeated action plot

Explanations of the Possibilities

Mini Plot – This is the emotional plot. It’s minimalistic. It might even seem like it does not have a plot, but it does. It’s just that the cause-and-effect is about emotional evolution and growth.

Example: Tender Mercies

Daisy Chain Plot - We have no main protagonist, so we have no main goal. A bunch of characters and situations are here and they are linked via cause-and-effect like a physical object.

Examples: Thirteen Reasons Why (has a protagonist, but it kind of works). Lethal Passage.

Cautionary Tale Plot - Hero? There is no hero! Comfort? There is no comfort! Our main character sucks. And instead the reader is the protagonist.

Examples: Jumped by Rita Williams-Garcia. Inexcusable by Chris Lynch.

Ensemble Plot - According to Berg, this happens when you have protagonists grouped in the same place and it is “characterized by the interaction of several voices, consciousnesses, or world views, none of which unifies or is superior to the others.”

Example: Give a Boy a Gun.

Along For The Ride Plot - Ah. Where is our protagonist doing proactive things? Not here. Here we have the secondary character pushing the action and the protagonist is there, zooming along with them. The protagonist has an emotional change anyways, but they aren’t Captain Proactive going after their goals.

Example: Looking for Alaska – John Green

Symbolic Juxtaposition Plot - Why yes, it’s the anti-plot, which some people treat like the anti-christ. This book is an existentialist's dream. It’s not about the emotion. It’s about having an epiphany, an intellectual epiphany. The plot is about ideas and themes and symbols and that connects everything and gives it meaning. The cause and effect? It’s really not here.

Example: Einstein’s Dreams by Lightman.

Repeated Events Plot - So, the same event? You see it multiple times but through differing perspectives so that we can see the truth from different characters’ points of view.

Repeated Action Plot - You know the movie Groundhog Day? This is it. This is where a character keeps doing the same things over and over until they try to get it right. They have a goal. But the sequence of events isn’t linear but repeating.

Example: Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Repeated action plots are the best. Wake up. Snack. Zoomies. Snack. Breakfast. Snack. Pee. Snack.

It's okay to life your life as a repeated event.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

The Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award

Your novel doesn’t have to be finished. We initially need only 5,000 to 8,000 words and a 300 word synopsis. If you’re long listed we’ll ask for a total of 15,000 words, including your original word count. Shortlisted? Then we need a total 30,000 words, again including your original entry and long listed word count. It all adds up to an incredible opportunity. Click here for all the details!

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

RESOURCES OF AWESOME.

Bechard, Margaret. “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Plot.” Faculty Lecture. Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, VT. Jan 2008.

Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narative Craft. 8th Edition. New York: Longman, 2011.

Chea, Stephenson. “What’s the Difference Between Plot and Structure.” Associated Content. 16 Feb. 2010. Web. 7 May 2011.

Fletcher, Susan. “Structure as Genesis.” Faculty Lecture. Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, VT. July 2012.

• Berg, Charles Ramirez. “A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films: Classifying the ‘Tarantino Effect.’” Film Criticism, Vol. 31, Issue 1-2, 5-57, 22 Sept 2006. Ebsco Host. Web. 6 May 2011.

• Pages 44 -66 in: McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: IT Books, 1997.

• Pages 165 – 194 in: Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

https://penandthepad.com/types-narrative-structures-8329065.html

It’s a question philosopher Sebastian Purcell asks his students every year.

Do you want to be happy?

For Purcell being happy has a lot in common with living a good life,

“The Stoic answer to this question, that the good life consists in flourishing (eudaimonia), has seen a resurgent interest that is indicative of a cultural shift. Interestingly, it looks to be taking the place left open by the retreat of religious belief,” he writes.

And stoicism? It’s a way to look at life and how the world connects, how they work. It’s physical, Purcell says, and metaphysical.

Most people think of me as a pretty happy person, and I possibly am. To be fair, before I started to feel a bit overwhelmed by my life, I’d always thought positively about things, expected good outcomes.

When I lived in another town and would drive from place to place for my job as a reporter or to pick up my daughter, Em, from school, I’d hear from people later.

“You just drive around smiling. What are you even thinking about?”

I couldn’t ever tell them. They’d scoff. I’d laugh. I’m pretty sure one city councilor called me a weirdo about it. I know a baseball coach did. It didn’t matter. I was who I was.

When Em was little, she and I would talk about her worries, I’d run through logically how outcomes were probably not what she’d expect. I do that with Xane, our other kiddo, too.

“If you fail a test, will you end up in jail? Will anyone die?” I’d ask.

Em would roll her eyes at me and say things like, “You’re being ridiculous,  Mommy.”

I’d bounce back with and say brilliantly, “You don’t have to expect the worst case scenarios all the time because a bad grade is not a worst case scenario.”

“I’m just being realistic,” she’d say.

“No. You’re being pessimistic,” I’d tell her, “because you aren’t going to fail anyway.”

The truth is that though I’ve told both of them these things and even though I motor through my day staying pretty chill and positive, often I would flop in bed at night and stare at the darkness for an hour, a weird shiver of anxiety creeping through me—anxiety stemming from things that I couldn’t quite place.

That doesn’t sound all that happy to me, but the truth was that even as I smiled in my car all by myself, even as I sold positive outcomes to my kids, I didn’t know how to even define happiness. I don’t think I’d ever really tried.

And I’m trying now.

Harvard professor, Arthur Brooks, says that “happiness equals enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning.”

Brooks tells his students to think of happiness as “a portfolio with four big categories of investments.”

He says, “We need all of them so our happiness can grow in a balanced way. The first investment is faith or life philosophy, it's how you make sense of the world.”

Family and relationships that will most likely stay with you throughout your life though you don’t choose them is the second category.

The third is the relationships we choose. What he calls our “most intimate relationships.”

“The fourth is meaningful work,” he says.  "That doesn't mean work that pays a fortune or features a fancy title. Rather, it's work that allows you to earn your success and serve others.”

A HAPPINESS PORTFOLIO

Those four categories aren’t solo acts. They work together and they all have to be there, he believes and that means? Well, it means that we don’t get to be in charge of our happiness all the time. Sometimes horrible things happen. Circumstances exist. And heredity is a factor, too.

I think I’m pretty lucky because despite all the choices she made and things she went through, my mom was a pretty happy human. And my biological father was always happy too. That accounts, Brooks believes, for about 50 % of my happiness.

I once asked Shaun, “Babe, would you call your parents happy people?”

And he said, “Now or when I was a kid?”

“Kid?”

Then he made a long whistling exhale and said, “Not really. I mean they weren’t really unhappy. Probably happier apart.”

So maybe take a hot second and think of your parents, too, if you know them. Do you think they were happy?

Brooks said,

“Approximately 50% of your happiness is inherited and another big chunk is determined by your circumstances at any given moment. But the remaining part, about a quarter, comes from this portfolio, which is under your direct control.

“Another metaphor for happiness is a meal which has certain macronutrients but instead of food's macronutrients of protein, carbohydrates, and fat, the macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And just like you need a balanced macronutrient profile in a healthy diet, you need balance to be a happy person.”

Brooks suggests taking a second and think of those four pieces of your happiness PORTFOLIO.

Your Life Philosophy – Do you have one? Do you have core personal values?

Your Family – Are there people you could call in an emergency?

Friends – Do you have a community somewhere? Where? Is it a club?  A house? A school?

Purpose-filled Work – Does your work (volunteer or paid) make you feel valued?

Are you happy in those places?

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

It's okay for your happiness portfolio to be:

Poop

Sleep

Eat

Cuddles.

God, knows it's Shaun's.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

APPLE IN THE DARK

Submit Here

Open through May: Our first-ever flash fiction contest! Our judge this year is Chelsea T. Hicks.

Submit your unpublished work (no more than three stories/essays at once) through our Duosuma page.

(We’d very much appreciate anything you can donate to the Tip Jar there!) Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but do please let us know if your work has been accepted elsewhere.

Rights: AITD ask for first publication rights. You may publish your work featured on the site elsewhere following initial publication, but please credit AITD with first publication.

SUPER QUICK WRITING EXERCISE

This one is pretty fun. And though it's meant for poems, it can definitely be for short stories. It's from ThinkWritten.

"7 Days, 7 Lines: Write a poem where each line/sentence is about each day of last week."

PLACES WE MENTION IN OUR RANDOM THOUGHT

Bird flu and cow cuddles

CDC

Pork and brain worms

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

RESOURCES:

A cool book to check out is  The Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Subtitle: Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy.

Brooks, Arthur. Managing Happiness. HarvardX. July 2022.

In Western culture right now, we tend to think of stories as three acts (a beginning, middle, and end with the bulk being in the middle), and with a protagonist or hero or main character (whatever you want to call it) who drives the story forward.

So, it's sometimes good to remember that there are other ways of making story and other cultures where the bulk might not be in the middle or the main character might not be so proactive. Story reflects who we are as a people.

Nobody keys into this as much as Robert McKee, who is quite the guru of screenwriting and story.

There are three of his maxims, explained by No Film School that really show that.

Those are:

"Your protagonist needs to be the one who makes the decision that brings about the climactic action.

"Is your protagonist driving the story forward? Are their actions and choices putting the story into focus and kicking it into gear? Make sure they are active, and not just along for the ride. Give them something to do. 

"Desire in your character is key.

"What does your character want? We talk about goals on here a lot. They need to have a goal, but also the reasoning behind it. That's where desires come in. I want to solve the case to make the city safer. I want to bring all my friends back from Thanos' snap. Give them something tangible and obvious.

"Character payoffs should always be emotional unless you have a special reason.

"Think about not only what happens inside your story but how these moments affect people internally. Does someone let a character down, or crush their heart with a rejection? Is there a way to hook that into the goal and show how things evolve within them? What do these emotional hurdles do to them or cause them to do? Let emotion guide the way."

For literature in our time, right now, and our culture, those are three big keys to making stories that will be purchased and will resonate with readers.

How does that reflect with our life though, right?

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

You've got to make things happen. Be the hero of your own story and make your people have emotional rewards when they give you what you want.

COOL WRITING EXERCISE

This is from Robert McKee and his book, Story:

"Lean back and ask, 'What would it be like to live my character’s life hour by hour, day by day?' In vivid detail sketch how your characters shop, make love, pray — scenes that may or may not find their way into your story, but draw you into your imagined world until it feels like déjà vu.

"While memory gives us whole chunks of life, imagination takes fragments, slivers of dream, and chips of experience that seem unrelated, then seeks their hidden connections and merges them into a whole. Having found these links and envisioned the scenes, write them down. A working imagination is research."

PLACE TO SUBMIT

The Bath Novel Award 2024  £5,000 international writing prize

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

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LINKS TO LEARN MORE:

SHOUT OUT TO STUBHY!

The snippet of our intro and outro music is only a snippet of this guy’s awesome talent. Many thanks to Kaustubh Pandav. You can check out a bit of his work at the links below.

www.luckyboysconfusion.Net or www.Facebook.com/mrmsandtheinfusions 

Thanks for hanging out with us! And remember, don’t be afraid to let your strange out.

There’s this great post on the SocialSelf blog that talks about what makes people likable and what keeps people from being likeable. And writers can learn from this, really.

The big things that make people likeable in real life are like a top ten list of awesome:

1. Be funny
2. Be a good listener
3. Don’t judge
4. Be authentic
5. Be warm and friendly immediately
6. Show people that you like them
7. Smile
8. Be humble, but also confident
9. Keep your promises
10. Know people’s names
11. Ask questions that aren’t yes or no answers.

They even have a bar graph about it.

When we’re writing, it’s hard to make a character listen to the reader or make eye contact with the reader, which scores high, but we can show them listening to other people, being kind to other characters instead of being all self-self-self and me-me-me all the time.

And you can make the character funny if that’s who they are.  If you think back to ancient Buffy the Vampire Slayer shows, the characters were a bit much sometimes, right? Buffy especially, but they became likeable and fun because they were funny and they tried super hard to keep their promises and be there for each other.

But just as importantly, that blog has ways that people sabotage their likability in real life.

What are those ways?

1. Humble bragging
2. Name dropping
3. Gossiping
4. Oversharing on social media

Now, for a book character, humble bragging and gossiping can happen in dialogue and be annoying and off-putting. But oversharing can happen, too, in a first-person narrative, right? You can tell too much, so much, that it feels like the action isn’t happening and that will distance the reader.

When it comes to keeping those unlikable aspects off that page, it gets a little bit trickier because you have to keep the reader interested enough in what happens to the character to keep reading. That's all about likability.

This is why I talk about those super objectives and desire lines a lot. If you can give your character a yearning/a goal in each scene and chapter (sometimes it’s more pronounced that other times), then the reader will wonder if the character will get it. This helps to get the reader involved and gives you a little more time to build up the connection with the character. That's because the readers want to know what happens and if the character will get their goal/yearning/want. That gives you more time to make them care about the character.

But to make them really care about what happens, you have to make them care about the character and to do that, it can help to let the reader see the character’s wound, that defect, that thing that haunts them. You want to see them in a moment of weakness or vulnerability or loneliness.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Smelling buttholes is great but you don't want to be one! - Mr. Murphy quote of the day.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

BLUE LYNZ PRIZE FOR POETRY

The annual Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry awards $2000 plus publication for a full-length poetry collection. The Prize is awarded for an unpublished, full-length volume of poems by a U.S. author, which includes foreign nationals living and writing in the U.S. and U.S. citizens living abroad. Lynx House Press has been publishing fine poetry and prose since 1975. Our titles are distributed by the University of Washington Press.

Top Prize:

$2,000

Additional prizes:

Publication

Entry fee: $28

Deadline: June 16, 2024

COOL EXERCISE FOR WRITERS

Write a "slice of life" moment for your character. Make them have a sit-down dinner with others and show:

1. What they want
2. What has hurt them in the past
3. Them being kind

Do not show any of it via internal monologue.

LINK TO OUR RANDOM THOUGHT

Our random thoughts are at the beginning of the podcast and not transcribed.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

Here’s the thing. For a lot of us, we have to make time to be a writer. That’s just how our brains and process work. There are some writers who manage to get 10 days of alone time and writer time and they power through a book in that time, but most of us aren’t that wealthy or that lucky.

That means to be a writer, we have to create the habit of writing.

This is where James Clear’s method comes into play. This guy has built an empire around helping people create habits. And he believes there are four steps to creating a habit.

Those steps are:

• Cue
• Craving
• Response
• Reward

This man has a ton of books and information all over the internet and bookshelves about this, but very basically, what he defines each as is:

The Cue

This triggers your brain to do the behavior.

He writes: “It is a bit of information that predicts a reward. Our prehistoric ancestors were paying attention to cues that signaled the location of primary rewards like food, water, and sex. Today, we spend most of our time learning cues that predict secondary rewards like money and fame, power and status, praise and approval, love and friendship, or a sense of personal satisfaction.”

The Craving

This is the motivation, the force, the desire, the reason to act.

He writes: “What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers. You do not crave smoking a cigarette, you crave the feeling of relief it provides. You are not motivated by brushing your teeth but rather by the feeling of a clean mouth. You do not want to turn on the television, you want to be entertained.”

The Response

This is the habit. It might be sitting at your desk at 8 p.m. every night and writing. It might be writing 250 words during lunch or waiting to pick up your kid from swim practice. It’s the habit.

“Whether a response occurs depends on how motivated you are and how much friction is associated with the behavior. If a particular action requires more physical or mental effort than you are willing to expend, then you won’t do it. Your response also depends on your ability. It sounds simple, but a habit can occur only if you are capable of doing it. If you want to dunk a basketball but can’t jump high enough to reach the hoop, well, you’re out of luck,” he writes.

The Reward

These are things that satisfy our craving.

He writes, “Rewards are the end goal of every habit. . . .We chase rewards because they serve two purposes: (1) they satisfy us and (2) they teach us.”

So, we sit down and write every day and eventually we get a book. That’s super simplified, but whatever.

There’s also that second part about how they teach us, right?

Clear writes, “Rewards teach us which actions are worth remembering in the future. Your brain is a reward detector. As you go about your life, your sensory nervous system is continuously monitoring which actions satisfy your desires and deliver pleasure. Feelings of pleasure and disappointment are part of the feedback mechanism that helps your brain distinguish useful actions from useless ones. Rewards close the feedback loop and complete the habit cycle.”

So, to build a habit, he says, to change your behavior, you want to think of each step (he calls them laws) to do the behaviors. The keys, he said are these (all direct from the post linked above and below):

It's pretty cool stuff, and you should probably check out his book or site if you're into this system and it rings true for you.

But for writers, especially, his clues on how to break bad habits and build new ones are just wonderful. Give yourself a really obvious cue that it's time to write (an alarm/notification/specific time), and make it attractive (light a candle/put on music you actually like) and make it easy (make small word count or revision goals) and make it satisfying.

DOG TIP OF THE PODCAST

Pogie has some anxiety, but she works by the cue system. She makes the things she wants attractive to you via hugs and puppy dog looks.

COOL EXERCISE

Stuck not being able to build a writing habit? Check out MasterClass' morning pages exercise here.

PLACES TO SUBMIT

Crook’s Corner Prize Eligibility: Debut novels set predominantly in the American South, published btwn January 1, 2023 and May 15, 2024 Prize: $5,000 Entry Fee: $35 Deadline: May 15, 2024

Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction Eligibility: All writers Prize: $1,000 + publication Entry fee: $30 Deadline: May 31, 2024

Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize Eligibility: Poets under 40 years of age Prize: $1,000 Entry fee: $15 Deadline: May 15, 2024

Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest Eligibility: Writers who have not published a book or a book coming out before April 2025 Prize: $2,000 + publication + review from Aevitas Creative Management Entry fee: $30 Deadline: May 15, 2024

OTHER LINKS

Our random thought came from here.

And here's a link to James Clear's post and page again.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

Links we mention:

https://www.ranker.com/list/creepy-forest-ranger-stories/amandasedlakhevener

And sometimes?

Well, sometimes we only hear and dwell on the one negative thing that someone has said to us or written about us even though they (or others) have also said 100 positive things.

You're an author. You get a glowing review but there's one line in there that says, "I didn't like the mom character." That's all you focus on.

This happens in real life, too. Your husband might tell you that you're beautiful 100 times a day, but that one time that he says, "Baby, maybe don't wear your sweater inside out?" Well, that's what you focus on.

Or, let's say, in news. There are hundreds of lovely, beautiful things that happen in a community--even a small community--every week or month? But instead, we write about the one potentially scandalous thing a person or a board does. And when we read the news, we often gravitate toward the tragedy, the crime story, the corruption story. And that's important to write about and share, but that's not all there is.

Negativity is not all there is.

As Tasha Seegmiller wrote back in 2016, "The reality of reality is that we are programmed with a psychological and physiological predisposition toward negativity bias. Daniel Kahneman explains that “The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. By shaving a few hundredths of a second from the time needed to detect a predator, this circuit improves the animal’s odds of living long enough to reproduce.”

"That bad review that you got? It’s going to linger longer than the good. Your fear of someone hating your book before it even comes out? Not all the way your fault."

We are programmed to be predisposed toward the negative. But we can lean away from that once we know it's there, sort of retrain ourselves toward the positive.

One of the ways to do that is a gratitude journal. Do not snark and look away. Writing down the good facts of your life not only trains your brain to see that good things have happened, but it also becomes a record that all is not poop.

As Alex Philippe writes,

"According to Winifred Gallagher in the book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, we literally don’t see as many things in our peripheral vision when we have negative emotions as when we have positive ones.

"And studies like the swimming rat experiment show how negativity can kill our perseverance: when a rat sees no way to escape, it will fight much less for its survival.

So, try it. Write something your grateful for. There's got to be one thing, right? Maybe tomorrow you can think of another.

Our random thought comes from here.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Don't think about all the "bad dog" moments. Think about all the treats you can get.

COOL EXERCISE

These are from a piece in Positive Psychology by Alicia Nortje, Ph.D. They are a direct quote.

1. "In the last week, what did you do that you are grateful for?
2. "In the last week, what did someone else do that you are grateful for?
3. "In the last week, what did you learn you are grateful for?"

PLACE TO SUBMIT

The Georgia Review

Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews. Online submissions for non-subscribers are charged, but there is no fee for mailed submissions.  

Details are here. Deadline: 14 May 2024 Length: Up to 9,000 words for prose, 6-10 pages of poetry Pay: $50/printed page of prose and $4/line of poetry, up to $800; $150 for reviews published on GR2.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

Not only is it okay. It's helpful.

This is true for both writers and normal humans.

Rereading books gives you:

• New ideas
• Reminds you of ideas you'd forgotten about
• Let's you notice new things because you aren't the same you who read that book the last time.

DONALD LATUMAHINA writes for LifeOptimizer, "'"Research shows that in just 24 hours people would forget most of what they’ve read. You might get a lot of good ideas from a book, but it’s easy to forget most of them. Rereading a book helps you refresh those ideas in your mind."

But what I like the most about what he is says is this, rereading . . .

"It helps you apply the ideas

"This, in my opinion, is the most important reason of all. Why? Because the primary value of reading is the application and not the reading itself. Mere reading could expand your knowledge but application could change your life. By rereading a book, you can see which parts of it you have applied and which parts haven’t. You can then focus your effort on the parts that need more work."

For authors, Victoria Grefger says all the way back in 2016,

"YOU REALIZE JUST HOW MUCH THE READER MAKES THE READING EXPERIENCE WHAT IT IS. This is important for authors, and since the majority of my readers here are authors, I thought this worth mentioning. By comparing what you thought of the book the first time around and what you think of it now, and what stood out to you then and what stands out now, you realize just how dependent a novel is upon its reader. This can remove some of the pressure that we feel as writers as we learn we can’t control the interpretative process of our work and don’t need to. That’s a load off, for sure!"

So go forth and read those books again! It's all good. The experts say so.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Murphy, the grand-dog, says that each redo makes you stronger. There's a much longer and more interesting version of this in the podcast.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

Our random thoughts come from here.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

 AGNI

AGNI, Boston University’s literary magazine, accepts a wide variety of works for their online and print publications. The publication accepts poems, short stories, think pieces, essays, reviews and memoirs from writers all around the world. 

• Submission dates: September 1 to December 15; February 14 to May 31
• Payment: $20 per page for prose; $40 per page for poetry (to a maximum of $300)

FUN WRITING EXERCISE

Over on the TED blog, there are 20 creative writing prompts from 642 Tiny Things to Write About:

Maybe try this one?

"Write the passenger safety instructions card for a time-travel machine."

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

It annoyed me. It may have been good marketing, but it sure didn't feel like good human-ing, you know?

When you're interviewed by a reporter or when you do a school visit, as a children's book author, you have the ability to toot your own horn or you have the ability to toot someone else's.

This interview I read sort of sent me into a spiral of ick.

So, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how to get more of my very long work day to not feel like work and how to make consistently enough money writing things to keep the family afloat.

Monday, on the blog, we talked about the Zone of Genius, a phrase I kind of hate and also the Flow State, which I’m much more into. This is just about places where work feels good, where it feels right.

What doesn't feel right to me is tooting my own horn.

And here on the podcast, I thought about how all this is really overcomplicating things. I am a fan of over complications, right, Shaun?

But life and happiness is really all about doing what you love. It’s about going for that and seeing what happens if you put the time in. Not about shouting "LOOK AT ME! I AM SUCCESSFUL!" Unless that's what give you joy.

It’s about doing what you love but also taking the steps to learn more and more about what you love, about listening to other people, about helping other people and also helping yourself by learning.

The best writers see outside themselves and into the lives and emotions, the yearnings, the obstructions, the needs and conflicts of others. The best storytellers know that stories aren't about just them.

Writers can do this. You’ve got to put in the time and go after your dream. You’ve got to stop worrying about the market and your niche and do the things that put you in that flow state, the things that give you joy.

You just have to start.

If you love writing, write. Share it. That’s it. But please don’t be an egotistical ass about it. It’s okay to communicate and focus on people who aren’t yourself, even if you’re an artist. Make it a habit to write and make it a habit to share what you write. And ask people to follow you wherever you are (substack, word press, x, medium, whatever). It’s okay to ask. Don’t constantly ask. Don’t only ask, but it’s okay to write and make money at it.

Recently, I've been on a bit of a Tim Denning kick, he's a writer and blogger. And he has an interesting bit about the habits of quiet winners. He writes about how they don't do media, don't flaunt their success, make fun of themselves, give credit to others. It's pretty interesting to me because it's how I was raised and it's also like that Lori McKenna song Tim McGraw sang, "Humble and Kind."

But one of the coolest bits in his blog is this: "Doing their work is what they like doing, not being noticed for doing their work. The meaning from their work cuts so deep that if a loud human being understood it they would give up their life and start again."

Our random thought came from here.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

PLACES TO SUBMIT

The Paris Review. Genres: Poetry. Payment: Not specified. Deadline: Opens April 1, 2024, and closes when they reach capacity.

Verve Poetry Press. Genre: Full-length poetry manuscripts. Payment: Royalties. Deadline: April 30, 2024.

Cast of Wonders. Genre: YA Speculative fiction. Podcast. See theme. Payment: $.08/word for original fiction up to 6,000 words. For reprints, a $100 flat rate for Short Fiction, and a $20 flat rate for Flash Fiction. Deadline: April 30, 2024.

COOL EXERCISE

This can be a lot of fun to do. Sometimes. It's from Dabble Writer, which has a ton of ideas for exercises about character development and story starters.

"Imagine someone who would be the polar opposite of your character. Describe them: how they look, what they love, what they hate, what they believe… everything. Then pick one trait and make it part of your character."

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

How Do You Sustain a Career as an Author?

It's a really good question, right? One, all of us authors are trying to figure out.

Rise With Drew writes,

"Creative careers are slippery. One-hit wonders abound, but fewer are enduring superstars,” Steven writes. “And this level of commitment requires not just originality but rather that ultimate expression of originality: the consistent reinvention of self. Again and again. 

“Long-haul creativity isn’t about a first act or a second act. It’s a third and fourth and fifth act. It’s that ultimate impossible, the infinite game, where the goal is simply to keep on playing.”

There's a woman over on the Creative Penn who gives a pretty long interview about author sustainability, pimping out her book--which may be one of the keys of of sustainability--who has been writing since 2014. Claire Thomas is her name.

She's written books about this and uses a personality test (enneagram) to explain to writers their blocks. In the podcast she says, "In our industry, we have a crisis of people being stuck and trapped because they've limited their options. Their subconscious mind has limited their options because of the patterns that it's functioning in as a default.

"So they can't always see an aligned path forward when the industry undergoes swift changes, which it does very frequently. So I can give you an example.

"If you're an author who's what we call a type three, this is the achiever, then your core fear is lacking value or being worthless, and pretty much everything you do is to avoid confronting this fear or feeling like you lack value or are worthless, if you're three.

"A pattern that almost always arises from this is the belief that they earn value through accomplishments and achievements. This can look like how many books they have in their catalog, how high their books rank after launch, and how many subscribers they have on their email list."

So, when you look at your personality type, you can see what might be holding you back. What the old scripts are running through your head, how your complacency or peacekeeping tendencies might keep you from talking about your triumphs for marketing, or how your love for isolating research might keep you from actually putting words down. More on that in the audio.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Work through your blocks to advance and evolve. Channel your inner cat. Or inner duck.

COOL EXERCISE

Go figure out your Enneagram. See if it's blocking you. Do it for one of your characters that you're struggling with.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Heron Tree

Deadline: May 1, 2024

We are accepting found poetry submissions for Heron Tree Volume 11. There is no fee to submit. Please see our submission guidelines at herontree.com/how/.

Creative Cosmos: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Art

Deadline: April 30, 2024

New monthly digital magazine, Creative Cosmos, seeking submissions of short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and original artwork. Creative Cosmos challenges mainstream narratives and champions the power of intuition, creativity, and high sensitivity as essential forces for self-understanding and positive change. First issue June 2024. Please visit our website for details: creativecosmosmagazine.com/call-for-submissions/. Be sure to note the deadline for submissions.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

LINKS WE TALK ABOUT OTHER THAN THE ONES UP THERE

https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/thats-a-first-woman-gets-dumped-by-tinder-date-at-hawaii-volcano-5315753

But it’s also a tiny bit easier.

When you’re looking for telling at this level of the story, what you’re looking for is a couple of things:

1. A butt ton of backstory.
2. A butt ton of info dumps
3. A lot of flashback.

You can have bits of these things in your stories. Where us authors get into trouble is when we have a lot of it and we have a lot of it in telling language.

So, that really happens when we do this:

Bud Godzilla looked down on his sweet friend turned zombie. They’d been friends forever, so this hurt. Three page description of how they met – info dump or backstory

Or:

Bud Godzilla looked down on his sweet friend turned zombie. They’d been friends forever, so this hurt. Three page scene of how they met – flashback.

You usually want to limit these places and instead sprinkle in action/dialogue/details throughout to help the readers understand that the characters have history or the world exists before the book begins.

There’s a balance between telling too much and too little. You want the reader to anticipate that something cool is going to happen or has happened, but you don’t want to leave them confused or knowing way too much.

You know how sometimes you’ll be on the plane and the person will not stop talking for six hours about their boil, their aunts’ piano obsessions, their dinner plans while you just want to finish watching the inflight movie? That’s what happens with those paragraphs of backstory, flashbacks and info dumping.

Everything is paused. The stakes are gone. And when that happens? You risk losing your reader completely.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Pogie says keep your eyes on the prize, my friend, and laugh.

COOL WRITING EXERCISE TO MAX OUT YOUR SKILLS

This comes from the Writing Cooperative and it's really about how to spot your info dump, which is an exercise.

"Once you spot an info-dump, ask yourself the following questions:

1. "How much of this information is it essential for the reader to know right now? Most of the information will not be essential. Be ruthless. Cut it out.
2. "Of the information left — if any — how can I get the protagonist to do something which shows or implies the information? This may involve minor or major rewriting, but you do no-one any good by avoiding it. Rework or add scenes which convey the information through present situations and your protagonist’s actions.
3. "If the information is necessary, how can I use it to enhance the emotional effect of the scene? Key in on the emotional impact of the scene and if you must retain information that can’t be shown or implied, look for ways to add it in a way that will have an emotional impact. ;But the woman you saw can’t have been my mom, Angie. Mom died when I was a kid.'"

PLACE TO SUBMIT

The Blue Mountain Review launched from Athens, Georgia in 2015 with the mantra, “We’re all south of somewhere.” As a journal of culture, the BMR strives to represent all life through its stories. Stories are vital to our survival. What we sing saves the soul. Our goal is to preserve and promote lives told well through prose, poetry, music, and the visual arts. We’ve published work from and interviews with Jericho Brown, Kelli Russell Agodon, Robert Pinsky, Rising Appalachia, Turkuaz, Michel Stone, Michael Flohr, Lee Herrick, Chen Chen, Michael Cudlitz, Pat Metheny, Melissa Studdard, Lyrics Born, Terry Kay, and Christopher Moore. bluemountainreview.submittable.com/submit

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

LINKS WE REFERENCE

https://gizmodo.com/another-ufo-report-is-a-bust-so-why-do-so-many-people-1851331674

https://www.singularfortean.com/news/2024/3/7/search-for-crashed-object-is-one-of-the-largest-ufo-search-operations-in-the-history-of-norway-investigator-says

I know you don’t want to talk about showing vs telling any longer, our massive series, but it’s really really important. It’s sunk many a cool book idea, stopped others in its tracks. It is a chaos agent in the life of many a good writer. And there are so many damn facets to it. I could fill a year of podcasts talking about it.

Don’t worry, I won’t.

But I would be remiss—no, we would be remiss—if we didn’t give people a couple more hints about how to locate told prose in their own text.

Here’s the thing. Told prose happens at three major levels:

• The sentence.
• The paragraph.
• The entire scene.

And there’s different ways of hunting it out for each type.

Let’s talk about the sentence level. At this level, telling language is usually explaining language. The question most writers have is how to find it. Janice Hardy wrote Understanding Show Don’t Tell and she has a lovely breakdown of this at the sentence level.

Motivational tells

Explains why a character is motivated to do something.

Words to look for: to, when, because

Example: Bud Godzilla ran over to Hammy the Hamster because he loved Hammy so much and wanted to hug him.

How to revise it: “I love you!” Bud Godzilla screamed, running to Hammy. “Let’s hug!”

Emotional tells

Explains that a feeling is happening, usually by saying the feeling itself.

Words to look for: Any emotion words; felt

Example: Bud Godzilla felt pretty darn happy to see Hammy.

How to revise it:  Bud Godzilla’s heart pitter pattered. Hammy was here! Right here! With him!

Mental tells

Explains thoughts without being immersed in the thought itself.

Words to look for: realized, believed, hoped, wondered, thought

Example: Bud Godzilla believed that if he could just hug Hammy gently enough and maybe give him some pizza, Hammy would love him, too.

How to revise it:  He’d hug Hammy gently. Maybe give him some pizza. Then, Hammy would love him, too.

Stage direction tells

Explains stuff before it happens or is just a little too detailed about what’s happening.

Words to look for: by, since, before, after, when.

Example #1: Before Bud Godzilla could hug Hammy, Hammy coughed up phlegm all over the floor.

How to revise it:  Hammy’s body heaved, shaking. “Bud! Don’t come closer!”

Bud stepped forward, arms open. “But, what’s—”

Phlegm spewed out of Hammy’s mouth. “Told you. Zombie bit me. Two hours ago.”

Example #2: Bud Godzilla sat in the car while Hammy got out of it. Hammy shut the door behind him, walked around the front of the car, hit the key fob to unlock Godzilla’s door, then reached out his hand and pressed the door handle, pulling it up and also pulling the door toward him so that it would open and Godzilla could get out.

How to revise it:  Hammy and Bud got out of the damn car. I have no idea how Godzilla fit in it or how Hammy touched the wheel but whatever.

Descriptive tells

Explains what’s about to be sensed. I usually call this distancing language.

Words to look for: saw, heard, felt, smelled, watched, seemed, looked, ah, so many!

Example: Godzilla could see that Hammy had turned into a zombie. Godzilla felt sad.

How to revise it:  Hammy’s mouth gawped open. “Brains. Need more brains.” 

Passive tells

Live in passive sentences. What’s that? It’s when the subject of the sentence isn’t doing the important work of the sentence.

Words to look for: was + verb; is being + verb, by (sometimes)

Example: Hammy was pushed into the roadway by the radioactive pepperoni pizza breath of Godzilla.

How to revise it:  Godzilla’s radioactive pepperoni pizza breath pushed Hammy into the roadway.

Whew! That was a lot. Carrie will be talking about this more on her substack, LIVING HAPPY AND WRITE BETTER NOW tomorrow.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Dogs are all about showing, basically because they can’t talk. Channel your inner dog, show people you love them.

WRITING EXERCISE OF AWESOME

This is from the fantastic Writer's Room:

"However, my favorite passive voice exercise is “the zombie test.” If you aren’t sure whether your sentence is active or passive, add “by zombies” after the verb. If the sentence still makes sense, then it’s passive. If it doesn’t make sense anymore, then it’s active."

PLACE TO SUBMIT

ADVENTURE WRITERS COMPETITION

Now open for submissions!

Enter between January 1, through April 30, 2024.

Click Here to Read the Rules

Click Here to Enter the Competition

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

Chickensandmore!

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

Printz honor author, ALA Best Book winner, National Book Award finalist? Check.

Has a middle grade coming out March 11 that's about to rock the world? Definitely.

Was so cool that Carrie was afraid to talk to him back in 2005 or 2006 or something? You know it.

Chris Lynch, award winning human and ridiculously gracious interviewee, graced Dogs are Smarter Than People with an author-to-author interview with Carrie Jones this week. He ignored Carrie's frazzled face, vaguely sweaty hair, and minor emergency to be one of the kindest, loveliest interviews ever.

Chris is the author of middle grade novel Walkin’ the Dog. He holds an MA from the writing program at Emerson College. He teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Lesley University. He lives in Boston and in Scotland.

And his book? It's amazing. You need to get it.

To find out more about Walkin' the Dog, click here.

More about Chris here.

Growls.

You can check out the rest of the series on Carrie’s Substack Write Better Now or just the podcast episodes on her blog, https://carriejonesbooks.blog/

So, a lot of my writers have a brain like mine, which is sad for them. Just kidding! Just kidding! A lot of them do better when they see an explanation of show vs tell rather than just having their editor or writing coach shout, “SHOW DO NOT TELL!”

So, here’s a paragraph that maybe could be tweaked for a little too much telling.

Once they reached Gwenda the Gerbil’s cage, Ham-Ham shoved himself inside before swiftly closing the trap door, notching it. He took a second to breathe while Gwenda stepped onto the hamster wheel. She sighed, and suddenly he felt her staring at him.

This is what happens when you immerse yourself in the scene a bit more.

Ham-Ham scurried into the cage, Gwenda following. This was bad.

“Latch the door!” she demanded, hopping to the wheel.

“I’m trying!” It clicked and his breath whooshed out, smelling of stolen dog food.

“They’ll never know,” Gwenda whispered, “come run up here with me before the human comes.”

“You have kibble on your fur.” “Oh,” she said, “I do. You want to lick it off?”

Not only is it less telling, but it’s in scene and we have a lot more context than just getting somewhere, closing a door, sighing, breathing and staring, right? One reads like blah. One reads like you’re in the moment (even though it’s in the past tense). One is flatter. One is more dimensional.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Look, you want to live your life in the moment, not have those moments told to you or via other people's/dogs/hamsters moments.

WRITING EXERCISE

This is from WillowWrites:

"Write a scene where two people are arguing. Show the anger and frustration without using the words angry or frustrated."

PLACES TO SUBMIT

NEA Literature Fellowships  sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Genre: Poetry. 

Prize: $25,000 grants to published creative writers that enable recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement. 

Deadline: March 13, 2024.

Savage Mystery Writing Contest. 

Genre: Mystery short story. 

Prize: Winning stories are published in Toasted Cheese. If 50 or fewer eligible entries are received, first place receives a $35 Amazon gift card & second a $10 Amazon gift card. If 51 or more eligible entries are received, first place receives a $50 Amazon gift card, second a $15 Amazon gift card & third a $10 Amazon gift card. 

Deadline: March 24, 2024. Opens March 22.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

We found the Florida man story here.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

So, hey! Welcome to our series of podcasts and posts all about showing vs. telling, which we are on fire about right now, right Shaun?

Growls.

You can check out the rest of the series on Carrie’s Substack Write Better Now or just the podcast episodes on her website.

And we're soon going to have some monthly author interviews starting with Chris Lynch.

One of the hardest places to differentiate showing rather than telling in writing (or vice versa) is when it comes to those internal thoughts and feelings.

So, here’s a quick example:

Ham-Ham groaned; he’d forgotten to turn off the water bottle drip in the hamster cage again.

So, there’s the groan. That’s all good and fine because it’s an action. BUT then you have him forgetting and thinking about what he forgot to do, right? All of that part is too much explaining and too distancing from the thought or the experience.

Instead of living with Ham-Ham as he realizes he forgot to do something important for the hamster cage bedding, we are distanced from it. It’s more a play-by-play in a ball game than being a player in the ball game actually kicking the ball and making a goal.

Instead go right into Ham-Ham’s head:

Damn it. Ham-Ham hadn’t turned off the damn water bottle. Now there’d be water drip-drip-dripping all day in the cage. The wood chips would be soggy as hell.

This seems simple. It’s not that simple.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Don't over explain everything. If you want me to sit, just say "sit."

WRITING EXERCISE

This comes from Ride The Pen:

“Some words are signs that you are telling, not showing. These bad words are (view them as villains): Adjectives and any form of the word “to be.” They will seduce you to tell, not show. You must resist their evil powers!

“With adjectives, you can put a quick label on anything; something is “beautiful, big, funny, strange…” The same is true for variations of “to be”: “he was, she is, it was…” All of these lead to quick labeling, rather than showing.

“But I will give you an anti-spell against their evilness. The formula is to ask yourself:

“How do I notice she is quick/he is funny/it is delightful/etc…?

“Answer yourself that question, and you will have a great list of descriptions to show to your readers. This question is like your secret weapon against all adjectives.”

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Able Muse (Poetry, Fiction, Essays & More)

Deadline: July 15, 2024

Able Muse is now accepting submissions for our forthcoming issue, winter 2024/2025. Submit poetry, fiction, essays, book reviews, art, and photography.

Submission opens yearly January 1 and closes July 15. Read our guidelines and submit at www.ablemuse.com/submit/.

RANDOM THOUGHT

The story about Bill Sprouse's book and his uncle being the Jersey Devil is here.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!

Adverbs are a big place where you tell and not show.

So, if I wrote,

“You are the sexiest manatee in the world,” Ham-Ham said hopelessly.

Would you think that works? Would you feel how Ham-Ham said it hopelessly?

Janice Hardy is brilliant and she has a really simple way of explaining how to determine whether or not you’re showing rather than telling. According to her, you should ask yourself if you can act something out.

If you can act it out, it’s showing.

If it’s not that easy to act out? It’s telling.

“You are the sexiest manatee in the world,” Ham-Ham groaned and put his head in his paws.

And it’s not just about dialogue tags, those he saids and they yelled and she moaned. It’s also about adverbs in action.

Take this one:

Ham-Ham quietly said something.

Can you show that a bit more without the quietly?

Ham-Ham whispered something unintelligible.

Ham-Ham whispered a sentence that nobody heard.

Ham-Ham whispered. What the hell did he just say?

It’s deeper, right? You feel it more. That’s why adverbs can really pull you into the world of telling. It’s a world you don’t want to stay in too long. A rabbit hole of boredom. Quick! Get out!

EXERCISE

So, how do you deal with this in your own writing? You can try to train yourself not to use too many adverbs, or you can revise those little poops out of there after your first draft.

Do a SEARCH in your story for the combination of LY. This won’t find all the adverbs in there (thanks to sneaky ones like VERY), but it will help. Cut them by two-thirds. Either cut them out or show that adverb in another non-adverb way.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

It’s okay to revise. It’s okay to take the time to really dig deep and show your humans what you want.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Cool Beans Lit.

Spring 2024 Issue.

It takes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, cross-genre, interviews, reviews, art, photography.

No fee.

Deadline: March 1, 2024.

Guidelines are here.

RANDOM THOUGHT

Our random thoughts this week came from here.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

As they write in their prologue,

“Life is painful, and not all the lessons we learn are positive ones. As with you and me, the characters in our stories have suffered emotional trauma that cannot easily be dispelled or forgotten. We call this type of trauma an emotional wound: a negative experience (or set of experiences) that causes pain on a deep psychological level. It is a lasting hurt that often involves someone close: A family member, loved one (etc.)… or results from a physical limitation, condition, or challenge.”

So, the key here is to not just write a quick character study and be like, “My character Hammy the Hamster has resentment because his dad never thought he did a good enough job as exemplified by when he came in second place for the Hammy Olympic Wheel Roll.”

The key is to make sure that this emotional wound impacts:

• The lie that festers inside of there (this is a false logic. Hammy believes he will never be good enough);
• The fear that gets bigger and bigger and bigger as time goes on, the fear that’s because of this wound;
• Their view of themself (Hammy thinks he’s a loser);
• How their personality shifts when things happen because of the wound or the lie.

And there’s even a website, that we’ve linked in the podcast notes where you can look up emotional wounds. That’s called onestopforwriters. You have to pay to access the full features of that website.

But it writes, pretty simply, “Emotional wounds from the past have the power to greatly impact our characters’ personalities and choices in the future. Get to know your characters intimately by choosing the right emotional wound; understanding its effects will enable you to write realistic, fully-formed characters that resonate with readers and make sense for your story.”

Angela and Becca even have a ton of resources (they call it the motherlode) here. And one of those things is a pdf for a backstory wound profile. It’s all pretty amazing, honestly. 

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Pogie has a lot of emotional wounds and she says, "Don’t let your wounds rule you; don’t be afraid of them. You’ve got this."

WRITING EXERCISE

When was a time your character actually felt at peace? Describe it. Do they want to get back there again?

Does your character do anything for self-care? What is it? Why or why don't they do it?

How would your character be different if those traumatic events of their childhood never happened?

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Superpresent Spring Issue

Deadline: March 1, 2024

Superpresent is seeking submissions on the theme Survival.  We are looking for all forms of poetry, writing, video, and visual arts.  Please look at our website for details of the call and to get a feel for our magazine. superpresent.org

RANDOM LINK WE MENTION ABOUT KING CAKES

AP article

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

Writers are promise makers. We tell our readers that we’re going to give them something just because of the cultural expectations that happen when someone opens our books.

What do we promise them?

We promise a character

The book is about someone. We reveal different aspects about that character as we show them act or react to the things that go on in the book.

The character will likely have something they want and something they yearn for and there will be things that keep that from happening.

We promise things are going to happen.

You can call this the plot if you’re into it. You don’t have to.

You can call this cause and effect or an action sequence. You don’t have to do that either.

But stuff happens in your story. That’s what makes your story a story.

To show the character and put them on a journey, we have to have things happening to them. Usually those things involve a problem for our character as they trudge forward and try to get their wants.

The character makes choices. Those choices have ripple effects. Sounds like life, right?

We promise that we’re going to tell the story in a certain way.

You can call this point of view and it has a lot to do with that.

You can call this voice and it has a lot to do with it.

You can call this mood even, but that’s a little reach.

The voice of the story creates an atmosphere. It tells the reader if they can trust the narrator or not. The word choice of the narrator and voice can tell the reader about the characters.

The point of view is all about how immediate the relationship between the reader and the narrator is. If it’s first person, that I point of view, then it’s going to be pretty immediate. Third person omniscient? That all knowing voice? Usually not so much.

We promise a setting

There needs to be a world where all of this takes place. Setting. Details.

And there’s one more big thing.

We promise to make sense.

An old editor’s blog post by Beth Hill puts it out there pretty succinctly.

“You promised an entertaining story.

“You promised a believable story.

“You promised a story that fits a genre if you write genre novels.

“You promised something different—a new character, a different world, a different dilemma. A different outcome.

“You promised cohesion and logic.”

We promise so much, don't me?

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Pogie says that if you tell someone you're going to take them for a walk, take them for a walk. Or, you know, they might not believe you any more about things--like that cats are not demon furballs from Oklahoma or whatever.

FUN EXERCISE

This one comes from IndieReader.

3. PIVOT!

In an episode of Friends, Ross enlists Chandler and Rachel to help get a new couch up to his apartment. They struggle to carry the hefty couch, to which Ross continuously yells “PIVOT!” as though if he exclaims this enough, the couch will glide on up the staircase. By the time they’re done, the couch has been chopped in half.

Don’t mangle your story to get it from your desired point A to point B. When you reach a point in the plot where the path seems irrevocably blocked, PIVOT on your heel and find another way. It doesn’t mean you can’t come back to this spot and try again later, but as Ross proves, kicking and screaming is not the best way forward.

For this exercise, go to the point of your story that’s troubling you and take it in a completely opposite direction. And go wild with it — introduce dragons and have the sky fall down and start writing in second person POV. You might just find that taking the strangest path helps you recalibrate your story’s compass.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction Eligibility: All authors writing in English regardless of nationality or residence Prize: $5,500 + publication by Mad Creek Books, an imprint of the Ohio State University Press Entry Fee: $30 (nonmembers); $20 (members) Deadline: February 28, 2024

RANDOM THOUGHT LINKS

Learn about the screech owl in Connecticut here. Photo courtesy of the Town of West Hartford Police Department/Facebook.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

“A trope is simply a common or recurring theme or method used in storytelling across all forms of media. Tropes serve as a way for creators to convey certain ideas and messages to their audience in a familiar and recognizable way.”

They go on to write,

“Think of the last book you read or a movie you recently watched. Did you reach a point where you could predict what was going to happen? Or did a character arise, and you immediately know it was the villain? That’s because the creator used tropes to build up the idea or the character.”

So, tropes create expectations in the reader, right? They are things that reoccur across films or books or songs or art that create an expectation and often have a symbolic meaning (but not always). Those who hate them say that they are overdone, so passe, boring. Those who love them say that they give comfort and can be used to powerfully convey referential meaning.

 Or as ThePleasurePen writes, “Tropes are not just narrative tools; they are also key in setting and sometimes subverting the expectations of your audience. Mastering this dynamic can elevate your storytelling, making your tales both satisfying and surprising.”

Tropes can create those expectations and subvert them or twist them or use them to shape stories. That’s because story doesn’t stop at the writer, right? Story is communication between the writer and the reader and tropes help the reader understand what you’re putting down there. Tropes are patterns. Patterns light up the readers’ brains in certain ways.

Here’s a way to think about it:

You’re watching a horror movie. There’s ominous music, a woman looks over her shoulder and then a man appears in front of her on the sidewalk. She jumps. We jump. The music and look over her shoulder create that expectation. The frame of the camera also helps create the suspense for a potential shock. It’s a jump scare.

But how do you do this in a book? That’s the question, right?

Usually, that’s done via suspense. In the book, THE TWISTED ONES, author T. Kingfisher has a woodpecker that the main character, Mouse, hears every night. Mouse hears that damn woodpecker every time she’s trying to fall asleep. Night after night. And then . . .  as  Ferrett Steinmetz writes for Tor . . .

“she realizes the things moving about in the night are living effigies, piles of bones tied together and somehow animated, and what she’s hearing is not a woodpecker but the stones hanging from the effigy’s ribcage knocking together as it’s been lurking outside her window this whole time.

“The delight of The Twisted Ones is how much the narrative implies, and how cunningly, without filling in all the blanks—it’s packed with subtle horrors left to fester as you take the thought further than the protagonist does.”

Other examples of tropes in horror are found footage or creepy clowns or the group splitting up to investigate or whatever when there’s a serial killer outside (or inside) the cabin in the woods. A trope in romance might be, oh no we have to share a hotel room. That sort of thing.

Paul Jenkins writes on Brilliantio, “There are countless literary tropes – from the misunderstood villain to the unexpected hero and everything in between. These classifications provide an essential framework for understanding how narratives are constructed and how audience expectations are managed.

“Moreover, Trope Evolution plays a significant role in establishing these norms over time. As cultures change and evolve, so do our stories and the tropes within them. For instance, the ‘damsel in distress’ trope has evolved significantly with societal changes reflecting stronger female characters who save themselves.

So remember this: every time you see a familiar plot twist or character type crop up in your reading journey—it’s not lazy writing but rather an intentional use of trope to craft a predictable narrative arc satisfying your innate longing for patterned storytelling. Understanding this helps deepen your appreciation of literature’s artistry and complexity.”

COOL EXERCISES

There are a zillion cool plot twist ideas and exercises here: Plot Twist Ideas and Prompts for Writers.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Pogie the Dog: Jump scares and cats are the greatest thing of all time.

L the Cat: Agree to disagree.

PLACE TO SUBMIT YOUR . . . NOVELLA!

Utter Speculation Novella Series

We are looking for stand alone speculative fiction novellas explaining or exposing the root of a real life supernatural mystery, urban legend or folklore, to include in a series we are building. (Please note, we don’t want a whole series by one author. At least not yet)

Submissions Open November 7 and close February 7

If we don’t find what we want, we may extend this deadline or reopen submission later

Please read and Follow All Guidelines Carefully or your story may be discarded without being read.

Novellas should be 20,000 - 35,000 words

Send a query with a story summary and a bio in the body of the email to:

specpubsubmissions@gmail.com

Payment is a signing bonus and royalty split to be discussed upon offer to publish.

Send full manuscript as a separate .doc or .docx attachment, Formatted in Shunn format style (Standard Manuscript Format)

Speculation Publication’s Utter Speculation Series is accepting novellas dealing with myths and legends until February 7th. Check it out.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

It's all about pretend aliens!

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

At the same time, a lot of the writers I work with are having BIG DOUBT MOMENTS as they query and read Twitter/X and see authors behaving badly or agents behaving badly or people getting yelled at for sucking at something.

And they are scared.

Now, there’s one part of this in that you need to put stuff into perspective. Losing your reputation isn’t the same as being in a war zone or in natural disaster or having someone violent in your own home, right?

We act like it is though.

Same thing about money. We act, sometimes, like it’s the only thing that gives our lives value. We all need to unlearn that.

What gives your life value is what YOU determine gives it value. That might be money if you’re into that. It might be family. It might be friends or having a sense of purpose. The point is that YOU get to determine that, not society, not TikTok viewers or literary agents.

When we go in to build or remodel or decorate a room, one of the most important questions is: What is the purpose of this room? What do I want it to feel like? What do I want to feel like when I’m in it?

When we go in to build a scene of our story, we ask those same questions: What is the purpose of this scene? Is it to show conflict, move the plot forward, dive more deeply into character, make a new obstruction? And more importantly, what do I want the reader to feel?

When we go in to build who we are as a person and our life, we can ask those same questions, too: What is the purpose of what I’m doing right now? What does my choice make me feel like? Who do I want to be here, right now, in this moment?

Kind of amazing but simple, right?

Who do we want to be? Are we making the choices to be that person?

I’ve lost that a bit lately. But I’ve made a list to start getting that back. I hope you will, too!

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Be the dog you want to be.

WRITING EXERCISE

This is from “What If,” which is a book of writing exercises. You can learn more about it here.

“Image Notebook

“Keep an image notebook and write down one image every single day by asking yourself “What’s the most striking thing I heard, saw, smelled, touched, or tasted today?”

PLACES TO SUBMIT

Gemini Magazine Fourteenth Annual Poetry Open Contest.

Unpublished poetry. Poems on personal blogs are accepted.

Entry Fee: $9 (three poems), $18 (six poems), $27 (nine poems), and $36 (twelve poems). Prize: $1,000 + publication, 2nd Prize: $100 + publication, and $25 + publication for four honorable mentions.

Deadline: January 2, 2024.

The 2023 Exeter Novel Prize is open to unpublished and published writers worldwide who are not represented by a literary agent. Entrants submit the first 10,000 words of their in-progress novel and a 500-word synopsis.

Entry Fee: £20.

Prize: £1,000 + a trophy, 2nd Prize: £100 + a paperweight (five winners).

Deadline: January 1, 2024.

SPECIAL NOTE:

We’re taking next week off! So, no posts or podcasts for the last week of December 2023! Happy new year and holidays to all of you!

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

How to Dig Deeper in Your Scenes

A lot of time, a writer will get feedback and it’ll say something vague-ish like, “Dig deeper.”

And then the author cries or gets angry or feels an emotion that no author wants to feel.

The thing is that this advice is sort of vague, but what it usually means is:

1.     You have no setting in your scene or chapter or story;

2.     Your character doesn’t react to things and then act on things;

3.     When your character does act and react to things, it doesn’t seem to be who the character is. Like you can’t have your introverted hamster making a flash mob dancing disco through the streets unless there is a lot of motivation;

4.     There are no stakes going on.

A way to fix this is to realize it’s happening. At the first part of each scene, write:

1.     What you want the reader to feel;

2.     What you want your character to feel;

3.     What the antagonist would think about this scene;

4.     What senses are happening in the scene;

5.     Look for words that distance the reader from what’s happening (see, looked, smelled, felt, noticed are a good start).

Now, here’s the thing. This works for life, too. Maybe you’re not feeling super fulfilled and you need a boost. Think about those questions about you and your choices. Can you figure out what you want to feel and how to get there?

DOG TIP OF THE POD

Go after the life you want even if it’s a reindeer. - PogieWRITING EXERCISE

Author Nicole Bianchi has a really, really great post with five writing exercises, and I’m kind of in love with it.

It’s here. And here’s an excerpt

“The Ernest Hemingway Exercise for Sharpening Your Observational Skills

In the 1930s, a 22-year-old aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson traveled to Florida to see if he could get some writing advice from the author he idolized: Ernest Hemingway.Hemingway ended up inviting Samuelson along on a fishing trip and sharing writing advice during their time at sea.

In this video, I detailed the three-step writing exercise Hemingway gave Samuelson.Essentially, Hemingway challenged Samuelson to pick a situation to observe and then try to retell it on the page.

For Samuelson, this was fishing.

For you, it might be an event that happens when you’re commuting to work or shopping at a store or eating at a restaurant or playing with your kids.Pretend you’re an artist heading out with your sketchbook to capture what you see and feel. Pay close attention to everything that is happening and the emotions that you experience.

Hemingway said,‘Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exactly what it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping, remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you that emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped.Remember what the noises were and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion, what the action was that gave you the excitement.’”

You should check her out.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

Owl Story

PLACE TO SUBMIT YOUR WRITING

MenagerieIt accepts fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. “We believe in sentences so sharp they draw blood, the strange and inexplicable, the wild and weird and uncanny, words in thickets, clusters, and flocks, pieces that move us beyond caring what others think about said pieces.” You can read about them a here.Deadline: Open nowLength: Up to 5,000 words for prose, 3-5 poemsPay: $50Details here and here.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

I loved Grady. He had this great, grizzly beard before it was cool, wore a dirty hat, had been married to an ambassador’s daughter, rode horses, drove cab in Colorado when all the beat poets and journalists were out there, and liked noir mysteries.

But whenever he pulled me over to his big metal desk in the newsroom, I knew that I was about to get advised.

“Cici,” he’d say with this perfect, gruff whiskey voice, “you’re a great writer, but have you ever thought about . . .”

And then he’d tell me something I hadn’t thought about.

• Passive verbs.
• Starting sentences strong with the important stuff first.
• The dreaded -ing

-Ings are addictive like all sexy grammatical elements are. They might not be as addictive as the debonair em-dash (—) or the lovely ellipses (…) or the goddess we know as the parenthetical ( ), but they are pretty close.

When you put -ing at the end of a verb that verb becomes progressive. You feel like the verb is happening right now in the present even if your tense is the past. Like this . . .

She was running, breathing hard and fast, shallow breaths that couldn’t quite make it all the way into her lungs. Running so that he wouldn’t catch up. And the ground was breaking beneath her, dead people’s hands reaching through the woods’ surface, fingers trying to clutch her sneakers, her ankles, even the laces. Anything.

Scary, right? Or, um . . . kind of?

Now let’s see that without the -ings on there.

She ran, her breath hard and fast, shallow breaths that couldn’t quite make it all the way into her lungs. She ran so that he wouldn’t catch up. And the ground broke beneath her. Dead people’s hands reached through the woods’ surface. Fingers tried to clutch her sneakers, her ankles, even the laces. Anything.

Wait. They both kind of work, don’t they? Absolutely. Sometimes you want to use those -ings for impact. But just like the em-dash, ellipses, and parenthetical statements, there can be too much of a good thing.

Crying because of the creepy man racing after her for five terrifying minutes, Carrie raced through the woods trying to get away and breathing out heavily even as horrifying zombie hands reached through the dirt and pine needles, hoping to grasp her shoes and bringing her down beneath the surface with them.

You can see the difference now right? We have present participles, adjectives, progressive verbs and even a gerund. Those -ings are doing a lot of work here and there’s just too darn many of them.

And what happens in that passage? The reader starts to get bored. It doesn’t feel fluid. The mind sort of numbs from all those -ings. And the bleed into each other, blending.

Yes, yes, I know! Blending has an -ing.

Now, let me try to do it without -ings.

She cried. She ran through the woods, each breath a prayer, an intake of hope as her feet raced across the pine needles. He was close. Too close. The thud of his footsteps pounded after her. The dirt trembled but not from her. Hands. Dead, decayed hands somehow broke through the hard ground. One poked up just as her sneaker hit the ground. It reached for her. Missed. Another tried. Another.

Different again, right? Same scene. No -ings. It’s pretty cool when you can see the difference of tone and feel that happen just by playing with one tiny element of the language.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Notice things. Don't drop the goods when you're running away.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Rejoinder. The Archival is Political special issue. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, cross-genre, drama, graphic narratives, interviews, art, photography. No fee. Deadline: December 15, 2023.

Ploughshares. Regular Reading Period. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translations. $3 fee (free for subscribers). Deadline: January 15, 2024.

Burnside Review Press. Book Contest. Poetry. $25 fee. Prize: $1,000, book publication, 10 author copies. Deadline: December 31, 2023.

COOL WRITING EXERCISE

This one is from Reedsy,

Play a game of Truth and Dare with your characters 

Most of us remember “truth or dare” from childhood sleepovers. Some would bravely declare “DARE!” and wait for the inevitably embarrassing challenge. Others would hazard a “truth…?” and wait nervously in their sleeping bags while the challenger mulled over which deeply provoking and juicy question to ask.

To dive deeper into your character’s emotional depths, ask a round of questions — both probing and seemingly innocuous alike. (Hey, you never know when your character’s favorite choice of ice cream topping might come in handy!) We recommend downloading our free character profile template — with the help of this worksheet, you'll be raring to go.

BEST RANDOM THOUGHT EVER

Well, it's just that . . . This is the best song ever.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

And I tell them a couple things.

No, it’s not about what a comma splice is or the coolness of objective correlatives.

It’s really a two part answer:

• Notice what people are doing, their mannerisms, how they act, interact, hold their heads.
• Live the biggest life you can, take opportunities, feel things, have adventures.

That’s what makes a difference on the page.

I once had a reporter ask me why I have details in my book and I may have laughed, which was super cruel of me, I know, but she was oblivious thankfully. And I said, “Details are what makes strong story, what shows character, what pulls someone into the world.”

By noticing other people or setting or how the air smells near a sewer grate or under someone’s arm, you create a world on the page.

This, is also pretty important advice for life, too.

Tim Denning writes,

“Get on a bus. Zombies everywhere.

No one is looking at each other or having a conversation. It’s just a sea of bodies looking at phones that are nothing more than a distraction.

Phones are dream killers. They’re full of other people’s priorities. What’s cooler is to have human conversations. It’s to look people in the eye and be present.

I had coffee with my old boss the other day. Every few minutes he kept glancing at his phone. He looked worried. He looked like he was under a spell. Or like a puppet master was pulling his strings.

He couldn’t relax or engage properly in the conversation. And this is the Great American Life that has been exported to most major nations, including Australia where I live. Sad.

Relationships are more important than notifications. And 99% of inbound phone calls aren’t urgent and can go to voicemail.

Life hack: put your phone on do-no-disturb mode, then add your family to favorites so only their calls can get through in case of an emergency.”

Julia Cameron, creator of The Artist’s Way says something similar, which is basically that by filling our time with distractions (Netflix, Wordle, Facebook, Tumblr, X, Threads, Instagram, YouTube, NYT Spelling Bee—the list goes on forever), we lose that connection to our muse—to the quiet within ourselves that creativity often springs from. We look only at a screen and fail to look at a world.

Wild, right?

DOG TIP FOR LIFE BY A CAT

Be noticed. But also notice things. Channel your inner cat.

WRITING TIP OF THE POD

Try to spend an hour without distractions on the screen and not even reading a book. What do you notice? Can you use that for your story?

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

RANDOM PLACE TO SUBMIT YOUR STORY

Air/Light.

Genre: New and innovative works of literary arts across all mediums and genres including cross genre work. Length: Up to 4,000 words for prose, and up to 10 pages for poetry.

Payment: Poetry: $50; Responses and department pieces: $100; Fiction and essays/nonfiction: $200; Visual art, music, and multimedia: $200. Deadline: December 1, 2023.

Our random thought is from here.

They need to dig more deeply into the emotion and feel it with the characters.

They need to dig more deeply into the scene and see the characters there, interacting with their surroundings and each other.

And a lot of us writers in our early drafts of story, don’t dig all that deeply because we’re too busy making sure we get words on the page and plot moving forward and story right there, you know?

That’s totally okay! It’s normal. There is no judgement here, but what you want to do (if you want to make the best story you can) is dig a bit more deeply.

You go back in and look for places where:

• People are shrugging, smirking, giggling, and nodding and smiling.
• A lot of distancing words that keep the reader from feeling the moment with the character. Those are things like: He felt. She saw. They noticed.

SO WHAT DO YOU DO THEN?

You find those places and—boom—you insert something that shows character or setting or scene or you can more simply take out the offending words.

“Find and Replace” for those nods and when you see them you can either:

1.     Cut them

2.     Use those places as a spot to show setting or physical reaction with the setting.

3.     Show a full body motion that is more grounded or telling.

Here, I’ll show you each of the examples.

The original.

Shaun nodded. “Yup. It’ll be full circle.”

You can just cut it.

“Yup. It’ll be full circle,” Shaun said.

You can use those places as a spot to show setting or physical reaction with the setting.

Shaun ran his pencil across the line of the hallway’s tile wall like he was trying to find a straight path forward. After a second, he dropped the pencil into his bag and refocused on us. “Yup. It’ll be full circle.”

You can show a full body motion that is more grounded or telling.

Students scooted by, rushing because of the bell, trying to be good, trying not to be late, not having their whole worlds randomly ripped apart. Shaun ducked back to avoid a cluster of students in goth t-shirts who were trudging quickly forward, heads down.

“Yup,” he said. “It’ll be full circle.”

Those nods and words like them are really just opportunities, placeholders for writers to go back in and make some richer setting or details to show and distinguish how each character is a bit different in how they react to the environment.

In that same scene, one character might duck his head down, shoulders slumping forward as he tries to wedge himself out of the way and out of the prying eyes of other students.

Another character might stretch and take up all the space he wants with his confident self and accidentally break someone’s nose with his elbow.

But the point is to use those moments to show the reader who the character is and what the setting is, to make it feel super immediate and real.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE VIA A CAT

Take no prisoners. Don’t live a shallow life. Take control of it.

WRITING EXERCISE OF THE PODCAST

Go into your story. Do a find/search or find/replace for a word like “nod.”

Count how many you have.

Cut that number by half.

PLACES TO SUBMIT

Hudson Review Short Story Contest. Genre: Short story up to 10,000 words. Prize: First prize is $500. Second and third prizes are $250. Winning stories will be published in The Hudson Review. All entries will be considered for publication. Payment at regular rates. Deadline: November 30, 2023.

J. F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction. Genre: Short fiction. Prize: $500. Deadline: November 30, 2023.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

So, if the first step is creating that hook, the second step, according to Shayla Raquel is dangling the characters. Then our next step is what Shaun has no problem doing in real life with anyone other than his own daughter, dive into the conflict.

So:

• Create hook
• Dangle characters
• Dive into conflict

What does “dive into the conflict” mean?

It means that in that book blurb, you want to show your potential reader what the conflict of the story is.

What’s a conflict?

It’s just when one force goes against another while the character tries to get their goal. The character wants something. The conflict is the obstacles that stand in her way. Super simple, right?

Or as Sean Glatch says in Writers.com,

“At its most basic, conflict is the clash of opposing forces with a character’s own pursuit of a goal. The character must overcome these opposing forces to achieve the goal. These opposing forces might take on numerous shapes, and might even exist solely within the character’s own psyche.”

Shayla Raquel has a couple great examples of blurbs that show conflict.

Frederick Starks has it all—a gorgeous wife who was his high school sweetheart, three beautiful children, a mansion and cars others envy, millions in the bank, respected in his community, admired by his employees, loved and respected by loyal friends. He revels in the hard-earned power and control he’s acquired.

As the saying goes, “All that glitters is not gold,” which Starks discovers when gut-wrenching betrayal by his wife sends him over the edge and into a maximum security prison.

—When the Serpent Bites, Nesly Clerge

THE FOURTH STEP

This brings us to the fourth step and that’s DETERMINE THE CONSEQUENCES.

You want to show what is about to happen. It’s that formula we talked about before.

“Conflict (“Character must do this”) + Stakes (“Or this will happen”) = Consequences.”

This is basically showing the reader what will happen if the character does or doesn’t get their goal.

THE FINAL STEP

And the final step according to Shayla Raquel? It’s just DINE ON THE BIG QUESTION, which, of course, makes me hungry.

She writes,

“End your blurb on an intriguing question or a point of tension—something that will convince the reader to take a chance on buying your book.

Example:

Bruce the bear likes to keep to himself. That, and eat eggs. But when his hard-boiled goose eggs turn out to be real, live goslings, he starts to lose his appetite. And even worse, the goslings are convinced he's their mother. Bruce tries to get the geese to go south, but he can't seem to rid himself of his new companions. What's a bear to do?

—Mother Bruce, Ryan T. Higgins

Whew. And there you go.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Sometimes, you know, I don't think about the consequences, but it's important to or else you might get put in time-out for the dog kennel - Pogie

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

LINKS WE MENTION

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_foods

So, if the first step is creating that hook, the second step, according to Shayla Raquel is dangling the characters.

What does that mean?

It means that the thing that propels your story needs to be in your book blurb.

Or as Shayla says, “Your characters are the story.”

You only have 150 to 200 words in that blurb, so you can’t tell your potential reader everything about those adorable characters, but you want to give them some details to hook onto.

She uses an example of Marissa Meyer’s Cinder to show how to do this:

Sixteen-year-old Cinder is considered a technological mistake by most of society and a burden by her stepmother. Being cyborg does have its benefits, though: Cinder's brain interference has given her an uncanny ability to fix things (robots, hoovers, her own malfunctioning parts), making her the best mechanic in New Beijing. This reputation brings Prince Kai himself to her weekly market booth, needing her to repair a broken android before the annual ball. He jokingly calls it "a matter of national security," but Cinder suspects it's more serious than he's letting on.

Although eager to impress the prince, Cinder's intentions are derailed when her younger stepsister, and only human friend, is infected with the fatal plague that's been devastating Earth for a decade. Blaming Cinder for her daughter's illness, Cinder's stepmother volunteers her body for plague research, an "honor" that no one has survived.

But it doesn't take long for the scientists to discover something unusual about their new guinea pig. Something others would kill for.

You see how it tells us a bit about Cinder and what’s wrong with her world?

•             She’s 16.
•             Her wicked stepmother and the world thinks she’s a mistake
•             She has the hots for Prince Kai
•             Her younger stepsister is sick and she gets the blame.

You can see from that blurb what step three is, right? It’s that there is a conflict set up. Cinder vs her mom, maybe against society, and so on.

And there are stakes, which brings us to step four, which is “determine the consequences,” Shalya says, writing,

“When there’s conflict, there are consequences to a character’s actions. What hangs in the balance for your characters?

“Formula: Conflict (“Character must do this”) + Stakes (“Or this will happen”) = Consequences”

And an example from Chris McGeorge’s Guess Who blurb

“If he doesn’t find the killer, they all will die.”

Hard to get more explicit than that. Next week, we’ll have the final step.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Always know the consequence - Pogie

WRITING EXERCISE

This is from Dabble Writer.

“Choose three objects at random, then look them up in a dream dictionary. Write down what each object symbolizes and imagine the person who would dream about them. What is the dreamer going through? Build a story from there.”

But instead, make that person, your main character. How can you weave in those images into the subtext of your story? How can you weave in their meaning?

PLACES TO SUBMIT

The New Verse News Seeks Current Events Poetry

Deadline: Year-round

Since 2005, The New Verse News has covered the news of the day with poems on issues, large and small, international and local. It relies on the submission of poems (especially those of a politically progressive bent) by writers from all over the world. The editors update the website every day with a poetic take on a current and specific headline. See the website for guidelines and examples. Then paste your non-simultaneous submission and a brief bio in the text of an email (no attachments, please) to nvneditor(at)gmail.com. Write “Verse News Submission” in the subject line of your email.

Jelly Bucket Call for Neurodivergent Writers and Artists

For Issue 14, Jelly Bucket will feature a special section dedicated to neurodivergent writers. Guest edited by Nathan Spoon, we’re looking for creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, 10-minute plays, and art specifically from writers and artists who identify as neurodivergent. Submit via Submittable: General submissions ($2) thru 12/1. Special section (no fee) thru 12/15. jellybucket.submittable.com/submit

We’ll talk about the final step in her process next week.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/section-blue-ridge-parkway-closed-after-visitors-allegedly-104550600

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

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There are all different ways to write these blurbs and make them tantalizing to readers, but there are set steps. We’re going to focus on the first one here.

First let’s explain what a book blurb is, right? It’s just the description of your novel that goes on the sell page on Amazon or other places. It’s short. It’s sexy. It’s enticing. You use it on social media, on Amazon.

It is the ad for your book that is everywhere your book is available to be sold and some other places too.

HOW LONG?

Oh, this baby is about 150 to 200 words.

HOW DO YOU MAKE ONE?

Shayla Raquel has a great post from last year where she writes, “Similar to what a writer would do for a query letter, a hook is meant to entice the reader to bite. It takes several tries to get the hook just right, but once you’ve got it figured out, the reader won’t be able to resist. When writing your hook, consider the following:

• Who is the main character(s)?
• What do they most deeply desire?
• What stands in the way?
• What is the setting or context for the story?”

She then gives some great and quick examples of this:

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars.

Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there.

—The Martian, Andy Weir

Could you survive on your own, in the wild, with everyone out to make sure you don't live to see the morning?

—The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

The Reedsy blog uses this one as an example. It’s Uncanny Times by Laura Anne Gilman.

Huntsmen, according to the Church, were damned, their blood unclean and unholy. Yet for Rosemary and Aaron Harker, the Church was less important than being ready to stand against the uncanny, as not being prepared could lead to being dead. 

But Blurbmedic has a really lovely infographic and guidelines, which is probably why it’s Blurbmedic.

It creates a template that’s really amazing at showing how the blurb is a teaser and also organizes the story, connecting emotion and tension to make a blurb interesting.

Hooks can be opened or closed.

And that site says that the open hook is the “statements or questions that make a reader ask more questions. The reader will have to read the book to find out.”

Carrie is dying. The moment she opened that door, her life had turned poopy.

You’re like, “Wait, what? Why is Carrie dying? What door? Why did she open it? what happened?”

The closed hook makes you ask questions and find answers.

Carrie is dying.

First, she opened the door that let in the zombie. Then the zombie bit her, but this kind of zombie doesn’t want to eat brains. It also eats poopy.

The point here, according to Blurbmedic, is to get the reader to be afraid of missing out on knowing what happens. The hook will build up the tension and make everyone intrigued.

It’s a really big first step.

EXERCISE TO HELP

A great exercise for this is to use the Killogator logline formula created by Graeme Shillin.

He says to write:

• “SETTING: When and where your story takes place.
• PROTAGONIST: Who your main character (hero or heroine) is.
• PROBLEM: The issue or event that causes your Protagonist to take action.
• ANTAGONIST: Who or what tries to stop your Protagonist.
• CONFLICT: The major obstacle, difficulty, or dilemma your protagonist faces.
• GOAL: What your Protagonist hopes to win, achieve, find, or defeat.”

You put it in here, also created by Graeme. Cool, right?

“In a (SETTING) a (PROTAGONIST) has a (PROBLEM) caused by (an ANTAGONIST) and (faces CONFLICT) as they try to (achieve a GOAL).”

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

In real life, you don't want the question of defecation location to be open ended.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Emerald City Seeks Fiction

Emerald City seeks fiction for our upcoming issues. We are a quarterly online fiction magazine that publishes traditional short stories, flash fiction, and hybrid works. We believe fiction is a necessary part of life; captivating storytelling transports us to other worlds while allowing us to make more sense of our own. We’re less interested in what genre something is or its literary status than we are in how much it moves us. Whether traditional, experimental, or something else fun, we publish well-crafted stories that make us reevaluate ourselves and our place in the world. emeraldcitylitmag.org

LINK WE TALK ABOUT

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/oct/26/weird-medieval-guys-olivia-m-swarthout-art-rabbits?ICID=ref_fark

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

Those earlier posts are linked below.

First off to recap, the big lie or character misbelief in your story is what motivates them or causes them to act in a certain way. If your character grows in a positive way, during the story, they usually realize by the end that the lie was a big ole lie and not a glorious simple truth and voila—life is better.

Your lie has to move the plot forward and it has to relate to your story’s theme.

According to LitCharts, theme is just “a universal idea, lesson, or message explored throughout a work of literature.”

So a character lie is something like “MIGHT MAKES RIGHT” because your character believes this with all their mighty heart. The theme might be love is more powerful than might. Often, the theme disproves the lie, right?

Cool.

Now, when you’re building characters for your novel and building the plot around them, you want to use that theme and that lie to make your story resonate, to make your readers or audience feel for the characters involved and root for them to stop lying to themselves and get some wisdom (in the form of the story’s theme).

So basically, you find the theme and the opposite (kind of tweaked) is usually the character’s misbelief.

So, here’s how it goes, step by step for those of you who like steps:

• Figure out the theme.
• Think of what’s the opposite of the truth of that theme (the lie).
• Think about why your main character believes this hideous lie.
• Write a little scene about it. Call it backstory. Think deeply about whether it actually needs to be in the story AS SCENE or if it can be sprinkled in.
• Think about other moments that made your poor honey of character believe this BS.
• Think about how believing this lie has totally messed up your character’s life right now in the story.
• Figure out if your main does something that they think sparks joy because of this BS lie but they are totally wrong?
• How does your character go after a goal that deals with the lie or the theme? This is the plot of your book.

Cool, right?

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Every once in awhile reassess the things you believe about yourself and the world. Are they really true? Why do you even believe them?

What’s the theme of your life? It sounds like we’ve had some Mary Jane, but seriously, as Kira Newman at the Greater Good asks,

“If your life were a movie, where would the plot be headed right now?

“You may not be immortalized in film anytime soon, but your life is still a story. According to psychologists, we all have an internalized narrative that explains how we became the person we are today and where we are headed tomorrow. Like any Hollywood blockbuster, this narrative has settings, scenes, a plot, characters, and themes.”

WRITING TIP OF THE POD

A lot of books are flat not because they aren’t clever or the plot doesn’t have cool things. They are flat because the characters are. The characters are often flat because there’s no big lie that’s part of their motivation.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Exploration and Recovery: Mental Illness and The Awakenings Review

Year-round

“The Awakenings Review is an award-winning literary magazine committed to publishing poetry, short stories, nonfiction, and photography by writers, poets, and artists who write from experience with mental illness: either in themselves, family members, or friends. Located in the Chicago area but international in scope, our print publication is one of the nation’s leading journals of this genre. By its nature, mental illness is a troubling, distressing, and painful experience. At The Awakenings Review we love to get works of renewal and healing, a positive outcome to your suffering and distress. We are currently accepting submissions for our Spring 2024 issue. Please read our submission guidelines at www.AwakeningsProject.org.”

RANDOM EXERCISE FOR THEME

Over on the Reedsy blog, there is a post about finding your novel’s theme. You can read it in full over there, but we’re going to encapsulate it here:

1. Write nouns that deal with your novel. Hobbits. Friendship. Powerful ring. Hot elves.
2. Pick one to be your center noun. Power.
3. Make a thematic statement with that theme. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

THOSE LINKS I WAS TALKING ABOUT

Write Better NowNeither of Us are Lookers, Seventh Grade Insults and Character Misbeliefs

Carrie Jones

·

Sep 28

Read full story

Write Better NowYOUR BIG LIE OR CHARACTER’S MISBELIEF

Carrie Jones

·

Sep 21

We’re doing a hybrid writing tip and podcast this week. All the important stuff is written down here. All the fun stuff and Shaun aka The Talent is in the podcast where we talk about this important writing stuff and other things. So, let’s get started.

Read full story

MORE LINKS TO HELP YOU OUT

Poop there it is

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

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Living Happy and Write Better Now! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Does a romance have to have Happily Ever After or Happy For Now to be a romance?

Does there need to be a positive, happy ending in order for a book to be a romance?

Let’s talk about it.

Unspoken agreement with the reader

WRITING TIP OF THE POD

If your story isn’t happily ever after, it may be a love story, but it might be hard to market as a romance.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

A goal of happy for now? It’s a damn good goal. Squirrels move. Mailmen come and go. The treat jar might diminish, but making the goal a for now goal? That helps keep it in balance.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

https://writingcooperative.com/hea-vs-hfn-aea4ad42f7c5