Tag: podcast

A Simple Trick to Write Better: Get Rid of the Nods

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
A Simple Trick to Write Better: Get Rid of the Nods
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When I help writers with their stories, a lot of the times one of the things I tell them is that they need to dig more deeply.

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!

Strange Morning Rituals

Loving the Strange
Loving the Strange
Strange Morning Rituals
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This week we talked about strange morning rituals. It was very live. Shaun dropped the f-bomb many a time and I had to use the Ding-a-Ling-Liar bell many times. Thanks to Suzie for sending us the bell! 

We talk about links from the thought catalog (an image), wandering aimfully, and blinkist.

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.

Dive Into The Conflict and Make Your Book Blurb Sing

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Dive Into The Conflict and Make Your Book Blurb Sing
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Two weeks ago, we started talking about how to write a book blurb for your story and began with the first step, which is a hook. You can check that out here. And the second step is here.

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!

LINKS WE MENTION

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_foods

Baby bears are the new bison and how to write a book blurb

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Baby bears are the new bison and how to write a book blurb
/

Last week, we started talking about how to write a book blurb for your story and began with the first step, which is a hook. You can check that out here.

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!

How to Make Your Book Blurb and Trippy Art About Dragon Intimacy How to Make a Shart Tantalizing?

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
How to Make Your Book Blurb and Trippy Art About Dragon Intimacy How to Make a Shart Tantalizing?
/

I’ve decided it’s time for a new series of podcast now that we whacked character lies down to a mush of sobs.

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!

The Story’s Structure

Carrie Does Poems
Carrie Does Poems
The Story's Structure
/

I wrote a poem this morning. You can hear Sparty snoring in the background. He has been sick so I couldn’t bear to move him. Apologies for that.

THE STORY'S STRUCTURE

The beginning is here. 
You set up what might happen.
You show all the character’s flaws, 
What they need to learn, the lie they believe
About themselves, about the world. 
Spoiler: This is what they’ll learn by the end.
They will learn that the lie is not true. 
This is where the character waits in the margins
Or hides in cupboards or bedrooms
To come flouncing or trudging onto the page,
Defined by black ink usually, by words and actions and a meet-cute.

The middle is where things get murky. 
This is meant to be the bulk of the book’s life.
Your character is past the point of no return,
They have nestled into a giant peach or a wizard world,
And things are fun and games, but not necessarily,
Actually, fun unless they are into hard lessons, 
And everything they want being blocked not just by outside forces—
Those beastly antagonists—but also by the lie they keep choosing to believe. 
But good things happen here, too. Boys fly brooms.
Enchanted forests are explored. We are into a world of magic, of falling in love.

Until we are not. And that is the end.
Which sounds terrifying, doesn’t it? 
It’s a bed without a head on a pillow.
It’s a final set of empty pages without words.
That’s too negative. This is what it is: 
The end is the place where realizations happen
For us and for the character we’ve been watching.
We find out that we’ve both been believing a lie.
We find out that we don’t have to wait in the damn
Margins or stay in the lines that march across a life
—I mean a page—and we damn sure don’t have to be
Plath in a kitchen, Sexton in a garage. Hemingway in the foyer.
We can choose to continue. This is what sequels and semicolons are for: 
For learning all over again; adventuring all over again; becoming all over again. 
We are more than three act structures, aren’t we? 
			
			I think we are.

We Ended Up Talking About Lies

Loving the Strange
Loving the Strange
We Ended Up Talking About Lies
/

We had no topic for our live broadcast Friday, so we ended up talking about lies. Did it make sense? Not really.

LINKS WE MENTION

Indy 100

Bored Panda

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.

Happily Ever After or Happy For Now

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Happily Ever After or Happy For Now
/

It’s a romance brawl. Not really. But it’s a bit of one. And it comes down to this:

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!

If It Doesn’t Have an HEA (or HFN), It’s Not Romance

https://writingcooperative.com/hea-vs-hfn-aea4ad42f7c5

The Great HEA Debate: Can Romance Be Romance Without a Happily Ever After?

Strange Neighbors

Loving the Strange
Loving the Strange
Strange Neighbors
/

Well, this was live and you can tell. Apologies. 🙂

LINKS WE MENTION

https://www.buzzfeed.com/morgansloss1/neighbor-horror-stories-reddit

https://brightside.me/articles/15-users-shared-crazy-neighbor-stories-that-will-make-yours-seem-good-as-gold-797946/

https://littlethings.com/lifestyle/terrible-neighbor-stories/2347246-5

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.

YOUR BIG LIE OR CHARACTER’S MISBELIEF

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
YOUR BIG LIE OR CHARACTER’S MISBELIEF
/

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.

The big lie or the character’s misbelief in your story is a major key to your character’s story arc, which is basically the emotional change and development of who you character is.

The lie drives the stupid or wonderful things that they do in the story.

It’s what motivates them in a way.

Sometimes the protagonist or main character or hero of your story doesn’t believe THE BIG LIE, but everyone else does. That’s super cool, too.

The lie can be a small deal—I am going to win the Little Miss New Hampshire Song and Dance Contest though I can’t move my hips and I am ancient and the contest is for 8 year olds and under. (I now want to write this story)

The lie can be a big deal on a societal and personal level—Might always makes right, so I’ll beat everyone up to get my way.

On Writers Helping Writers they say that the big thing is this: Your lie has to move the plot forward and it has to relate to your story’s theme.

They also break it down to inner and outer lies (which are a bit like character-driven lie and plot-driven lie, right?).

They write:

“Plot-driven stories often focus primarily on an outer-world Lie such as Hunger Games‘ Lie that “oppressive government is necessary” or Jurassic Park‘s Lie that “science should always be advanced.” Character-driven stories usually focus on an inner Lie, such as “men and women can’t be friends” in When Harry Met Sally or “money is the measure of worth” in A Christmas Carol.

“An inner-world Lie will affect the character’s outer world, sometimes even to the point of becoming the outer world’s Lie. And vice versa, an outer-world Lie will likely become crucial to the character’s inner conflict and self-estimation.

“The distinction is important not so much because of how the Lie manifests in the story as it is because of where the Lie originated. Where did this Lie come from? Who (or what) gave this Lie to the character? And what do the answers mean for the character’s motivations and ultimate arc within this story?”

Carrie is going to be talking more about this in the upcoming weeks, but we want for you to think about those questions for your own life too.

Is there something you believe that might not be quite right? Sometimes it might be that you’re bad at art or sports or school. Sometimes it might be that you can only be loved if you are perfect. Sometimes it might be that if you just work hard enough you can be Bill Gates rich.

Just like for your characters, your lie can be destructive to your own life.

On Writers Helping Writers, Angela Ackerman writes,

“We are often our own biggest critics, aren’t we? Whenever something goes wrong, we feel disappointed, frustrated, upset, or hurt. The fallout might cause others around us to suffer too, causing further anguish and guilt. When this happens, unless the situation was in no way tied to us, we tend to blame ourselves:

“When the character’s thoughts circle disempowering beliefs (that they are incompetent, naïve, defective, or they lack value) as a reason for their failure, it eats away at their self-worth. This, combined with a need to identify the pain’s cause will lead to a specific effect: an internal lie will form. This Lie (also called a False Belief or Misbelief) is a conclusion reached through flawed logic. Caught in a vulnerable state, the character tries to understand or rationalize his painful experience, only to falsely conclude that fault somehow lies within.”

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Pogie’s big lie is that she’s a super toughie. She is not. Do you have this lie?

WRITING TIP OF THE POD

Think about your character’s lie. What is it that they wrongly believe?

LINKS WE TALK ABOUT

2 Different Types of the Lie Your Character Believes

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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