podcast – Carrie Jones Books

How Not to be a Butt-Hole in Real Life and on the Page

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation

How Not to be a Butt-Hole in Real Life and on the Page

00:00 / 00:24:10

So building a sympathetic character on the page is a lot like being a sympathetic character in real life. This sympathetic character is basically the opposite of a butt-hole.

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:

Be funny
Be a good listener
Don’t judge
Be authentic
Be warm and friendly immediately
Show people that you like them
Smile
Be humble, but also confident
Keep your promises
Know people’s names
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?

Humble bragging
Name dropping
Gossiping
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:

What they want
What has hurt them in the past
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!

Sometime When I Read a Poem

Carrie Does Poems

Sometime When I Read a Poem

00:00 / 00:01:29

Sometimes when I read a poem,

Right after, I have to find another and plunge

Down between its lines, a better kind of baptism,

Just to get clean. I run out of breath, sometimes.

Sometimes, I meet myself in the spaces.

Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.

The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Summer Spliff by Broke for Free.

Someone was sleeping outside her tent right next to her and how to make good writing habits

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation

Someone was sleeping outside her tent right next to her and how to make good writing habits

00:00 / 00:23:23

A lot of writers that I work with have a problem. The problem is that they want to be a writer, but before they come to me? They don’t write.

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

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!

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I Saw a Poet’s Face Today

Carrie Does Poems

I Saw a Poet's Face Today

00:00 / 00:02:21

The Poet's Face
by Carrie Jones

I saw the poet’s face for the first time 
Today. It wasn’t what I expected, 

More Springsteen than Jesus. His head tilted 
To the side like a dog when it just can’t 

Figure out what her humans are trying 
To say. His brow was heavy, eyes too sad, 

Bags beneath them holding all the wrongs we’ve 
All accumulated just beneath skin. 

I wonder if those wrongs are what leaks out 
Onto the pages, again and again. 

I saw the poet’s face today. It was 
What I expected. There was no beauty 

Just age and sadness and an unfixed gaze, 
No big wisdom lurking in the spaces. 
He just looked normal. Is he? Am I, too?

Overcoming Negativity Bias & Toilet Rats

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation

Overcoming Negativity Bias & Toilet Rats

00:00 / 00:19:01

Being an author or an artist or almost anyone is about navigating. You have to walk a fine line with criticism and praise, discern what’s real and what’s not, what matters or not, what is noise and what is important.

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.