Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Why Do People Love Hot Chicken Wings and Will Carrie Survive the Hiccups
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This week on LOVING THE STRANGE, we stayed away from the paranormal and delved into (a tiny bit) why people love hot sauce and hot chicken wings.
Carrie hiccuped her way through the vegan version of wings, which were sort of peach-puree nuggets while Shaun went full-on carnivore, gnawing on the bones.
We talked a bit about the Heatonist, Gotcha! (Carrie’s favorite 80s movie), which came first the chicken or the egg, and how a lot of people who like hot sauce are thrill seekers, but some are just used to it. They grew up with it. They like its flavor or they’re super competitive. There’s more on that in our resources!
So a lot of writers get rejections that say, “Show, don’t tell.”
And then they are left wondering, what does that even mean?
And then everyone uses the Chekov quote, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
That’s because writers and editors like to quote other writers and editors because it makes us sound:
Pretentious. Cough. I mean intelligent!
Like we know what we’re doing.
Definitions Time
Showing is what it sounds like. You are showing what’s happening in the scene or with the character.
Telling is also what it sounds like. You are blunt and direct and are just stating things. Sometimes you’re stating and summarizing.
Here is a quick example:
Telling:
Shaun was cranky.
Showing:
Gabby the dog barked for hours at the dogs trotting by the house that morning and after a quick pause for a drink from her red water bowl in the kitchen, she’d pranced back to the living room sliding glass door and started again.
Shaun tensed. He slammed his fist against his desk and roared, “Will you just shut up already?”
So why do you want to show more and tell less?
It’s more community oriented.
It gives the reader the truth about the character by illustrating it on the page rather than laying it down like an edict.
If I tell you, Carrie is a timid person, then you’re like okay. Whatever.
But if I show you a scene where Carrie steps outside and starts crying because the grass is long and things could be hiding in it and she starts sweating and shaking because she’s so afraid of the grass? You’re going to probably have a better understanding of how timid a person Carrie actually is.
Yeah, showing takes more words, but writers are word magistrates. We are dealers in the sentence and the language. Words are our friends.
The other reason is that telling makes things dull.
It’s hard to be suspenseful when you just say everything all bluntly. When you tell, you are blunt. When you show? You are laying out little truths that compel the reader to turn the page and read on. You are giving the pieces of a meal, one bite at a time, rather than shoving a four-course dinner down their throat and making them gag.
It’s the difference between reading the episode recap for Wanda Vision and actually watching the show.
Telling kills immediacy.
Just like distancing language, telling puts a wall up between the reader and the experience of the characters.
If I write, Carrie heard the bomb explode, it’s not as gripping. You are distanced from the experience.
Compare that to if I write,
The bang rippled through the air. The cops’ radios all began squawking with orders and directives as the cops turned as one towards the source of the sound and the smoke…the smoke billowed out and up. Carrie turned with them. The plastic, the soot, the burning on her tongue made it hard to swallow.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
Show more. Tell less.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Show it as best as you can for all the good treats.
RANDOM THOUGHTS
Our random thoughts this week were about:
A stray dog at Dollar General stealing a purple unicorn. He’s okay and found his forever home! Yay! Link from People.
A woman who was allegedly stuck in Florida tunnels and a drain for three weeks. She’s okay! Link from the Miami Herald.
How Shaun announced at the Covid vaccine place that Carrie doesn’t bleed. He’s okay, too. Link from our life.
HEY!
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link. This week’s podcast is all about strange habits.
almost dead book by carrie jones
HEAR MY BOOK BABY (AND MORE) ON PATREON
On one of my Patreon sites I read and print chapters of unpublished YA novels. THE LAST GODS and SAINT and now ALMOST DEAD. This is a monthly membership site (Hear the book chapters – $1/month, read them $3-month, plus goodies!). Sometimes I send people art! Art is fun.
On this, my second site, WRITE BETTER NOW, you can do a one-time purchase of a writing class or get two of my books in eBook form or just support our podcast or the dogs. It’s all part of the WRITING CLASS OF AWESOME.
It’s a super fun place to hang out, learn, read, and see my weirdness in its true form.
This week on Carrie’s blog, carriejonesbooks.blog, she’s talking all about chapters and so we’re talking about them on the podcast, too, because Carrie’s controlling like that.
And what we’re talking about specifically is chapter titles.
You can divide your books into chapters and just label them numerically, 1, 2, 3… But you can also give them a title like:
Chapter One
Surviving the Podcast
Here’s the thing.
Chapter Titles Help Your Readers
How do they help your readers? In a lot of ways.
Grab attention.
You put these bad boys at the top of the chapter. And the reader thinks, “Ah! Look at that! I am paying attention.”
Tell readers who they are focusing on now.
If you have a story with multiple point of views, you can put who this chapter is focused on here.
Show location or time changes.
You can give the reader some help. If you have a time jumping, place jumping novel. You can use this space to say, “Hey, we are in sexy Scotland in 2021.” Or you can say, “Look, we’re in Zambia in August.”
Show theme or the future.
It’s like a happy little spoiler where the reader goes, “Oh, that’s what this chapter is about.” This can be about theme, too.
Show Echoes.
A chapter title can be a first sentence.
Summing it up: And there you go. A quick bit about chapter titles and what they can do for you.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
Chapter titles are good tools. Use them.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Use whatever you can to communicate things to your human. Wag. Growl. Bark. Spin in circles. Hit them with your paw. They are stupid and need a lot of help understanding what you’re putting down.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link. This week’s podcast is all about spontaneous combustion and poop styles.
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
In our random thought (not transcribed here), we talk about
Being a trophy wife
A woman finding an abandoned apartment behind her bathroom mirror
Another couple finding a hidden basement in their rental home.
So a lot of Medium articles and blogs focused on writing are all about:
How to increase your audience
How to make 60-trillion-dollars a year off your writing.
How to be like James Patterson and make 90-trillion-dollars a year.
But all of them seem to forget that writers are creators. Writers are people who make story and art (not just to make money), but also because they are compelled to create, to move, to incite, to inspire.
Especially when so many of us are struggling to make ends meet, it’s easy to focus only on the money. But your life is worth more than that. Your brain is about more than that, too.
You aren’t just about money. You are about creating.
“The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong…We are all the chosen few. We are all makers by design.” -Elizabeth Gilbert
Every single one of us creates something.
My dad built bird houses and engines. My mom embroidered like a beast. Neither of them would think of themselves as creators. Shaun’s dad painted Bob Ross things. His mom probably does something, too.
We all have urges. Those urges aren’t just about food, sex, and survival. There are also urges to create. But so many of us are told, you aren’t artistic. You can’t draw. You’re a math person. We let those moments define us. And we think, “Ah, I’m the left-brained kid.” We think, “Ah, I don’t have an aritistic bone in my body.”
That’s what Carrie’s mom told her, God love her, even though all Carrie ever wanted to do was draw. That’s right. Not write. Draw.
It doesn’t matter that Carrie makes very little money painting. It’s what gives her joy. So she does it whenever she has time. Writing and creating should be about expression, not just about how to make as much money as possible in as quick amount of time as possible.
Don’t be fluff.
There’s a guy who writes a zillion Medium articles and has a massive following and makes tons of money. I’ve read a ton of his articles. I can’t remember any of them. That’s because he’s regurgitating to make money. It’s all fluff. Don’t be fluff.
The most talented, thought-provoking, game-changing people are never normal.
Richard Branson
Don’t let other people’s assumptions about you hold you back.
The most dangerous idea is silencing people.
Naval Ravikant
Shaun’s a big man. He’s six-six. He looks pretty much like an ex-football player. People are stunned that he’s not. But if he wanted to study ballet, the guy should be able to study ballet.
We are born to live. We have to make money to survive. But we have to be about more than money to live. Create things. Explore things. Remember to live, too, okay?
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
Write for the sake of writing.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
People are more than their looks or being sexy and this goes for dogs, too.
In the random thoughts part of the podcast we talk about Big Foot, wedgies and how you can tell when predators are looking at you.
THREE BIG STEPS TO LEARN HOW TO WRITE GOOD STUFF
There’s a lot of people out there who say that if you write every day you’ll become a better writer and that’s true … sort of. You also need the basics.
If you write every day, but you don’t learn about writing every day then you don’t get to improve. You just write.
And that’s not good enough.
Learning how to write has to do with a few things. And the first step is to know what you want to write.
FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU’RE INTO
Writing an epic fantasy isn’t the same as writing ad copy and that’s not the same as writing poetry. Pick something. It doesn’t have to be your only style, but pick one way first.
LEARN THE TOOLS
Now here’s the fun part. The learning. How do you learn how to write?
Enroll in courses.
Read things like what you want to write.
Watch blogs, listen to podcasts, and read books about craft.
Talk to other writers who do what you do. They might have cool resources too.
Hire a writing coach or editor who loves helping people and not just loves making money.
GO FOR THE GRAMMAR
Yeah. Yeah. We know. Periods aren’t sexy. Most people don’t get turned on by scene structure, but you should!
If your story is awesome, but there is no punctuation or grammar or even sentences?
You’re not going to be understandable to your potential readers. They are just going to stop reading.
We aren’t going to call out agents here because that’s not what we’re about, but here are myths about agents that new authors really need to understand:
Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
So, there’s a lot of scuttlebutt in the children’s book world about agents behaving badly, which sounds like a Spring Fling Road Trip kind of thing, honestly.
But it’s more about agents being dicks and unprofessional. One recent superstar agent has been outed for allegedly “no longer agenting ethically” and not telling clients about their foreign rights, submissions, and speaking badly about authors to other industry professionals or being sexually harassing, bigoted, racists schmucks.
There’s a weird power dynamic that happens between traditionally published authors and their agents. The agents are really gatekeepers to the industry even if they don’t want to be, and it’s good for writers to remember that they can expect to not be treated like crap.
Things you don’t want your agent to:
Ghost you.
Be such a tool that most editors don’t want to work with them.
Give you hives.
Not telling who your book is being submitted to.
Sexual harass you, be racist, be too burnt out or wigged out on drugs or alcohol that they don’t represent you well.
Be too busy that they don’t represent you well.
We aren’t going to call out agents here because that’s not what we’re about, but here are myths about agents that new authors really need to understand:
They work for you. You don’t work for them.
They are human not gods. Be gentle with them, but expect them to be professional.
Though it’s awesome when they are, it’s not their job to be your bestie.
They may not be your agent for life.
So what is their job?
Get book contracts for you.
Negotiate those contracts for you.
Submit your manuscripts to get those contracts.
Protect your interests.
Doing all this they should always:
Respond in a timely fashion to your inquiries. But don’t be a punk and spam them.
Tell you where they are submitting your stories.
Tell you when your stories are rejected or accepted and relay feedback.
When you look for an agent, you want to:
Research the hell out of everyone and find your top ten. Make sure they actually represent the kind of book you’re writing.
