Without knowing the backstory, we wouldn’t know the emotional goals of the character, the why for their tangible goals. Instead we’d be reading and thinking, yeah, he wants this. So what?
I’m going to talk a little bit more about that today.
Again, backstory is the events that happened to your character before the actual main story starts.
So backstory, once you have it, allows you to give your character goals in the beginning of the novel and throughout the novel because it allows you the writer (and reader) to know what forces and history make that character who they are today and drive them.
The Two Goals (Thanks to Backstory) Which Gives Your Character Dimension
One goal is usually physical or tangible. They want something. Let’s say they want to drive a car. They are 15 and want to learn how to drive. That’s a tangible goal. The author wants to get her novel done. The puppy wants a bacon treat.
The other goal is usually emotional. This goal has to do with yearning. This goal is the reason for the tangible goal.
They want to learn how to drive (tangible) because they yearn to get out of their claustrophobic home (emotional).
She wants to get her novel done (tangible) because her brother always said she couldn’t get anything done because she’s lazy and she yearns to prove him wrong (emotional).
The puppy wants a bacon treat (tangible) because he yearns for bacon because that’s what he used to get in his first house before he got lost (emotional).
Without knowing the backstory, we wouldn’t know the emotional goals of the character, the why for their tangible goals. Instead we’d be reading and thinking, yeah, he wants to finish the novel. So what?
Tomorrow over on LIVING HAPPY, I’ll dive in a tiny bit more into this.
For exclusive paid content, check out my substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the other tips and submission opportunties and exercises are there.
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
I know! I know! We’re writers not accountants or mathematicians, but there is a great lovely magic to using numbers in our sentences and paragraphs.
What a lot of people don’t know about my writing life is that I started out intensely focused on newspaper stories and poetry.
What the what?
Yep. It’s true. I was actually a sports reporter and a poet for awhile. And it’s weird, but also lucky, because it allowed me to get some training that not all novelists get. And this post calls back to that training.
Here’s the thing: Numbers, repetition, lack of repetition? They all have their place in our writing arsenal. We can use them to make impact.
Poets repeat elements purposefully and us writers can use that tool in our own writing, too.
What exactly am I talking about?
I’m talking about the elements of a sentence and how we can vary them or not to stress things or to make them lyrical.
A lot of us writers have favorite kinds of sentences. We might be fans of simplicity or of multiple clauses. We might be all about starting every sentence with “he” or be addicted to beginning with a subordinate clause. You’ll write a paragraph like this:
He walked outside. He went up to a tree. He hugged the tree. The tree didn’t hug him back.
Or . . .
As he walked outside, he went up to a tree and hugged it. While he hugged the tree, a bird fluttered by and chirruped.
We get in these ruts of style and structure and we are lulling the reader a bit, right? It gets boring.
No writer wants to be boring!
Now, I want you to imagine that you are a writer supervillain and your job is to manipulate your reader into feeling what you want them to feel. You’ve taken away their agency and through the sheer power of your storytelling tool box, you are making them cry and worry and imagine and feel.
But to manipulate our sweet readers to the best of our abilities, we have to be able to access all our tools and this is one of them.
One – The Simple Sentence.
This is the kind of sentence that tells us one thing. It’s probably an important thing.
Jesus wept.
Hug me.
The boy was dumb.
Trust them.
These are the sentences where we don’t give the reader any room to doubt. They are simple. They are declarations. There is nothing fancy going on.
Two – Things Get Deeper
When we add another element, the reader suddenly has a slightly different feeling about the sentence and the character. Traits are thrown out there. Do those traits make sense together? Are they odd together? There is power in both of those decisions.
Jesus wept and snored.
Hug me and the manatee
The boy was dumb and enthusiastic.
Trust them and the dogs.
Things are different now, aren’t they?
Here’s a great example.
“The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.” – Claudia Rankine, Citizen
When we put two things together, life and story aren’t quite so simple anymore. We’re making the reader think.
Three – Making Magic
In the Western writing world, the power of three is a thing in both narrative structure and paragraph/sentence structure. Editors look for it in picture books where the main character has to try three times before succeeding in their goals.
The most common type of book structure thanks to Aristotle? Beginning. Middle. End. Three acts.
Even Christianity gets in on it with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—the holy trinity, right?
Jesus wept and snored and wept.
Jesus wept and snored and washed his feet.
Hug me and the manatees and rejoice.
The boy was dumb and enthusiastic and dead.
Trust them and the dogs and maybe not the gerbils.
With three we have that resonating power, but we also have the chance for humor and a twist. Things aren’t so simple any more, not so declarative. But they feel done—complete—resonating.
It’s also kind of fun to look at it without the AND in there connecting things.
Jesus wept, snored, and wept.
Jesus wept, snored, and washed his feet.
Hug me, the manatees, rejoice.
The boy was dumb, enthusiastic, and dead.
Trust them, the dogs, and maybe not the gerbils.
It’s interesting how much difference a tiny AND can make, isn’t it?
Here’s an excerpt that shows the power of three followed by the power of two.
“I wonder if I would tell him what I became, what I made of myself, what I made of myself despite him. I wonder if he would care, if it would matter.” – Roxane Gay, Hunger
So good, right?
Four And Up
The simplicity of one? Gone.
The duality and occasional divisiveness of two? Gone.
The magical completeness of three? Gone.
We are into the land of over four. And four and more? That’s a lyrical place.
Jesus wept, snored, and wept, smiling.
Jesus wept, snored, and washed his feet without water.
Hug me, the manatees, and rejoice and sigh.
The boy was dumb, enthusiastic, dead, and full of yearnings.
Trust them, the dogs, and maybe not the gerbils and maybe not the crickets either since they never stopped running in circles (gerbils) and running their mouths (crickets).
Okay, maybe my super villain writing examples weren’t so lyrical, but here are some better examples. Look at what Jacqueline Woodson does here:
“Our words had become a song we seemed to sing over and over again. When I grow up. When we go home. When we go outside. When we. When we. When we.” – Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn
One of the most famous practitioners of this is Tim O’Brien.
They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.” – Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Roy Peter Clark talks about this concept a lot, but he also makes a lovely primer that really shows what each element can do.
“Use one for power.
Use two for comparison, contrast.
Use three for completeness, wholeness, roundness.
Use four or more to list, inventory, compile, expand.”
Yes, Carrie, that’s all well and good, you’re probably thinking, but how do I apply this to MY story.
Well, you can apply it to make special moments snazzier or more powerful.
When you go over a scene, look for places where you want to be powerful. Use the one. Look for places where you want a litany, create that O’Brien list. Think about how your dastardly writer supervillain self wants to make the reader feel. Where would it help the reader to add on things/images/examples? Where would it help the reader to subtract those same things?
It really is a skill that I’m positive you can do and use to make your writing even more brilliant than it already is.
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?
Sometimes you’ll read a book and you’ll think—um, did a vampire write this?
That’s not because it’s sexy and sparkling like the Twilight vampires or sexy and bloody with a rocking 1980s soundtrack like the Lost Boys vampires or sexy and in New Orleans like the Anne Rice vampires, but because the language in the story is so flowerly, so overwrought, so full of clauses that you think, “Only someone over two-hundred years old could have written this.”
Yes, you could argue that M.T. Anderson successfully did this with Octavian Nothing, which won a butt-ton of rewards, but you are not Tobin Anderson.
And that’s part of the point. A lot of us authors look to the classics, to the past and think, “Yo, Charles Dickens, man. Peeps are still talking about him. I should copy his style.”
No.
Also, don’t try to sound hip when you aren’t hip like we just did up there.
If you’re writing historical fiction and like Tobin or Paul Kingsnorth or Dorothy Dunnett, and you think you have a really good handle on the syntax and speech patterns of the time, go for it.
But if you’re writing a contemporary novel about a woman in Maine living with a tall man and two dogs and three cats and one kid and figuring out if writing is worth it? No.
Honestly, even most historical fiction is written in modern language and style.
Why?
Well, that’s because the novel is a communication. It’s you writing for the reader. It’s not just you writing. And you usually want the reader to feel comfortable in that novel, all snuggled in for a cool journey into the character’s world aka your book.
Write like you’re communicating with an audience that’s living right now if you want most readers to enjoy it and keep turning the page.
Here’s an example or what we’re talking about.
While, she stood, one foot upon the ancient sleeping device, and then seemed askance at what stance she had partaken, inhaled a breath so great that it moved her bosom in a terrifying rapturous way, pivoting and climactically inhaling without any scant emotion.
Rather than:
She stood with her foot on the bed. Her face flushed and some sort of scandalous thought crossed her mind. She turned away, sighing so deeply her whole body moved with it.
Okay. Neither are awesome. But one’s a lot easier to understand, right? That’s because it is in the style that’s today’s speaking/writing style, not the style of undead cats and vampires.
Writing Tip of the Pod
Remember that writing is communication. Make it understandable for the people who are alive now.
Dog Tip for Life
Be obvious about your wants. If you want to hang out with the undead, let them know.
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 writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
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 FROM RANDOM THOUGHTS
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
Failing one time? It doesn’t make you a failure.
Failing 1,000 times? Still doesn’t make you a failure. You’re only a failure if you decide to be.
That evil inner voice? The butt-face that says you aren’t good enough, that you don’t deserve good things, that you can’t do it?
That little monster is Self-doubt. It hangs out a lot with its big sister, Anxiety. And you don’t have to have them over to play in your head anymore.
Just this week, we posted our podcast and a guy (editor/writer) on Twitter didn’t like it but posted a link to his own blog and said, “COUNTER POINT.”
His blog was all about not wanting to give out writing advice or talking about his own life/anxiety/whatever issues.
All of that is so fine and good for him for telling the world why he is the way his beautiful self is, but this little bit of me was like:
What? Counterpoint? Counterpoint to saying life is deeper than write what you know?
Counterpoint to what?
And why the hell did you post under my tweet your own link without even having the grace to like mine?
If my blog post (if you even read it) inspired you enough to ‘counterpoint’ why not like it?
And then I had a lot of work to do helping writers and writing my own stories and I let it go.
It was a bit of a win for me, honestly. Because all I want to do is be a better human and one step towards that? For me? It’s banishing Self-doubt.
It’s almost like the universe gave me a present right there.
But this isn’t just about me. It’s also about you and how you can do that too, right?
Here’s how to kick Self-Doubt and Anxiety out of your house.
Tell them to get out. Seriously, once they start whispering their disparaging believes about your worth, tell them, “Get out. I hear you. I don’t need you. Bugger off. You’re ruining the party.”
Remember good things. If Self-doubt is a bully who won’t leave, you sometimes have to call in the reinforcements. Those reinforcements are the good time, the good memories. The times you were proactive and kicked butt.
Phone a friend or text or Facetime. Sometimes your own memories aren’t strong enough and you have to talk to someone about your self-doubt. Telling another person about your doubts sometimes helps you realize how dorky they are and how they are like the OOPS page on a Rotten Tomatoes movie listing. The congnative dissonance because obvious when you say things aloud.
Make a Journal of Awesome. At one point in my life, I had to print out people’s positive emails and reviews so that I could remember that I had helped people, that my stories connected to people before. I even put in fan mail and fan art and blog posts about positive interactions. Yes, I really was that depressed. Self-doubt had set up home.
Failing one time? It doesn’t make you a failure.
Failing 1,000 times? Still doesn’t make you a failure. You’re only a failure if you decide to be.
Remember you aren’t the center of the universe. I know! I know! You ARE the center of your own universe probably, but we all have to push away our inner narcissist and remember that most people aren’t noticing what you’re doing. Yes, there are trolls out there, but they most likely won’t find you. And if they do? They’re trolls and you’re awesome and you will deal with it. Don’t let your fear of ridicule keep you from living your dreams.
That one is a big one for me, really, which was why ‘counterpoint’ was a bit of a setback.
I’m still working on it and it’s the main reason I still blog, do podcasts, and YouTube. All those things force me out of my comfort zone and into past trauma places about my voice and weirdness. The more I do it? The stronger I get about it.
Oh! And the last one is so important that it’s getting pulled from the list.
What other people think about you doesn’t get to determine who you are.
That’s right. I have a sibling who thinks I’m lying about my DNA. His belief that I’m a liar? It doesn’t make me a liar. I have DNA tests to back me up. Yes, I’ve got the receipts.
But even if you don’t have the receipts, don’t let anyone else make you the villain or the victim of your own story. Only YOU get to decide that. No matter what other people do to you, think of you, say about you, only YOU get to determine if you love yourself and if you have worth.
Here’s the final secret: You do.
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?
Every writer and storyteller wants their beginning of their story to be enticing, sexy, something that someone can’t put down.
A story is like a hot fudge sundae. You want the reader to gobble the whole thing down and that’s not going to happen if the first few bites suck.
Luckily, there are a few components that absolutely help us writers make the beginnings of our stories sexy.
Hook – This is the first sentence or first paragraph. You want it to clutch the reader in its hands and never let go.
What makes a sexy hook? A mystery. A question. A strong voice. Urgency.
I was not going to make it to the house. Not with this kind of poop.
Disruption – This is the tension. This is the suspense. Will there be trouble in the beginning? Can you sense it like a good phone psychic in the quivering resonance of the sentences and word choice? Are there big stakes?
I was not going to make it.
Backstory – I know! I know! It’s a naughty beast and we must be wary of it before it takes over our entire lawn like some sort of invasive weed. But you do want to sprinkle a little bit of it here and there.
I was not going to make it to the house. Not with this kind of poop.It had almost happened before in first grade in the pool.
Emotion – There needs to be some emotion on the page and that emotion needs to be detailed and sexy and all about the showing and not the telling. Don’t say, “Shaun was sexy.” Say, “Shaun rubbed that ice cream sundae all over his bulging pecs and he didn’t fart at all. He was the perfect husband.”
I was not going to make it to the house. Not with this kind of poop.It had almost happened before in first grade in the pool.They called me Poop Pants Patty forever after that.My eyes watered as I grabbed the steering wheel.
A Want and a Must Have – Your character needs to want things. Those things need to be surface level (an ice cream sundae or a toilet) and a bigger yearning (to finally feel loved or not be made fun of). They need to be on the page throughout the whole book and inform the entire book.
I was not going to make it to the house. Not with this kind of poop.It had almost happened before in first grade in the pool.They called me Poop Pants Patty forever after that. And now? Right before my first interview with Santa Claus? Seriously?
Things that Suck – Similarly, most books involve the transformation of a character on their journey. To have a positive transformation, there needs to be things wrong in your character’s life. Those things need to be there in the beginning.
I was not going to make it to the house. Not with this kind of poop.It had almost happened before in first grade in the pool.They called me Poop Pants Patty forever after that. And now? Right before my first interview with Santa Claus? Seriously?
Some day I’d know not to eat Flaming Hot Doritos sprinkled with Da Bomb hot sauce. Some day I’d be able to control my anxiety and my colon. Some day I wouldn’t self monologue in the car on the way to my super-important interview with Santa. But today was not that day.
Writing Tip of the Pod
Make your beginning (and your ending) sexy.
Dog Tip for Life
Make everything sexy
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?
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
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!
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
So, a lot of people think that there are three main types of scenes:
Fight scenes
Negotiation scenes
Sexy sexiness scenes
And the important part of every scene is conflict. That’s because when conflict happens, the character is forced to do something.
Readers want to watch characters do things, right?
Except for fans of Waiting for Godot, but to be fair the characters are waiting. That’s an action.
Sorry! Tangent.
What us writers have to do is make the conflict matter.
For the conflict to matter it has to be about your character wanting something so damn badly, but they aren’t getting it in a way that’s easy.
The biggest, strongest desire is when our character’s want makes them suffer.
Your character arguing about how to hard boil eggs wouldn’t be a meaningful conflict UNLESS it’s somehow connected to her biggest needs and wants and yearnings.
Your character arguing about how to hard boil eggs might be a meaningful conflict IF he has been on the perfect hardboiled egg quest because it’s the only thing he remembers about his dad – his perfect eggs. Or something.
What meaningful conflict does is that it forces the character to do something, to act, to make a choice. The type of conflict relates to that choice in the scene.
FIGHT SCENE
This is usually about willpower or strength or determination. You will by beating up your opponent or by dealing with something for a long time, enduring it.
Think Atlas holding up the world.
Think about Captain America being beaten up by the Winter Soldier and he keeps getting up.
That’s a fight scene.
SEXY SCENES
I could probably call this a seduction scene, but I’m not terribly mature.
In these scenes you have one character (or multiple ones) manipulating another character’s desires. It might not always be about the sex.
Darth Vader’s big scene where he tries to get Luke to join him, be part of the dark side, stop fighting. He gives him the possibility to be important and a place to belong.
NEGOTIATE ME SCENES
These are scenes that are a push and pull between solutions. It’s about compromise. It’s about logic. It’s very Ravenclaw.
It’s whenever a gangster convinces people to do something.
Negotiation scenes are all about that logical outcome. And at the end of it, everyone goes, “Ah. That makes sense. Of course, we’ll do it that way.”
Each type of scene requires different responses about the character and tells us different things. I think you should lean into these earlier scenes with the men being either fight or manipulation.
Mike Nichols, this ancient director, really loved to talk about those three types of scenes. He was pretty adamant about them being the only types of scenes that there are and he would always say, “When in doubt, seduce.”
Actually, I think his partner, Elaine May might have said that.
But the truth is that you can have a scene be more than one thing at a time. That intricacy makes them pretty beautiful and so much more poignant. Whenever you can add the character enduring (Fight) to a negotiation, it’s a better scene. Because it’s layered.
Other screenwriters and playwrights (like Pete Peterson) have taken this from Nichols and talked about it on podcasts all over the place. One interesting and possibly helpful insight on this is by Jonathan Rogers of THE HABIT after an interview with Pete Peterson.
He wrote:
To frame every fictional conversation as a fight, a seduction, or a negotiation is to foreground desire. And desire is the engine of storytelling. What do your characters want? There may be other questions at stake in the stories you tell, but that question is ALWAYS in play. It is an unavoidable fact that writers always need to communicate information; sometimes they communicate that information in dialogue. But characters carry on conversations in order to get what they want. If we use dialogue merely to convey information and neglect the interplay of characters’ desires, that dialogue will almost surely be flat, uninteresting, and less than believable.
This may be another way of saying the same thing, but dialogue is something that characters DO to each other. Fighting, seducing, and negotiating are actions, not merely an exchange of information or opinions. And, by the way, in the process of fighting, seducing, and negotiating, your characters will provide information and express opinions that your reader will find most helpful. The point here is not that characters can only fight, seduce, or negotiate, but that whatever else is happening, one of those three things has to be happening.
In real life, not every conversation is a fight, a seduction, or a negotiation. Sometimes people really are just providing information or expressing an opinion. Or talking baby-talk to a baby or asking for directions or ordering French fries. But not everything in real life is raw material for a story. I’m reminded of Steve Martin’s exasperated reminder to John Candy in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: “Not everything is an anecdote, you know.” We spend a third of our lives sleeping. I don’t care how realistic your fiction purports to be; it would be a mistake to devote a third of your word-count to people sleeping.
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?
In my work as a writing coach and an editor, I read a lot of stories that don’t feel real. That might be because there are no senses involved. But the other big culprit is setting.
Every story takes place somewhere.
That’s right. Let me say it again.
Every story takes place somewhere.
And our job as a writer is to show the specific details of that setting, to give setting a presence in the story just as much as we give the plot and characters a presence in the story.
I’ve written before:
Setting has lovers and haters. It can be quite the polarizing part of the writer world.
The haters think of setting and the thing of description. Or they think of massive amounts of description that continues on forever and ever. The think setting equals boring.
The setting lovers think setting is the best thing in the whole universe. Their stories start with paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of mood and setting.
But no matter what camp you’re in, setting isn’t something that should be tacked onto a story. Setting is more than describing the living room. It creates the feeling of a story and its time, where it happens, its bit of the world. Poets and novelists of the past often make the landscape a character in their poem or their narrative. The claustrophobia of a small town like in Peyton Place or even Twilight’s moody darkness is part of the story and is an important aspect to the main characters’ moods and choices.
Writers who can visualize the setting and put that on the page are writers who transport their readers.
How do you make your settings amazing and sexy?
Make it surprising. Make how your characters interact with it matter.
We all expect someone to be moved at a sunrise or sunset’s beauty. What if your character is afraid of it?
Let your readers know what’s going on.
Keep them oriented in the scene. Don’t have the characters just floating out there in talking heads dialogue with no details or just all internal dialogue. Characters need to interact with the space.
Make your character interact with the setting on a big and small level.
Has your character been in their town their whole life and feels like it’s crushing her soul? Show that. That’s big-picture-interaction.
Does your character keep trying to scrub the dog drool off her wood floor? Show that. That’s small-picture-interaction.
Use All the Senses
I wrote about this earlier. It’s easy. Humans smell, feel, see, touch, hear and taste. Your characters should too. What they smell, feel, see, touch, hear and taste? That’s part of the setting.
Make it interesting
Every place is unique. Every setting has an aspect of difference. Bring those unique details out and have them matter to the story.
What Are The Three Types of Setting?
Wait what? Yep. You read that correctly. There are three types of setting.
Temporal – the era that the story is happening in.
Environmental – The geographical area
Individual – specific place in that area
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?
You are always trying to give your reader the best experience they can get out of your stories.
My fingers were poised above my keyboard, ready to spring into action as soon as my mind had a good thought on what I might write about today.
Mind you this was a rather long pause and poise and behind me, Carrie, who was diligently working as always, said this, “I really wish that authors would realize that you cannot hiss a sentence that has no s sounds in it.”
It’s truth.
She did not say it angrily, but the way that she stated it made me laugh incredibly hard! I laughed at the way that she said it, but once I had finished with my joyful endeavor I thought that this makes perfect sense, but yet I had never, ever had that thought.
As somebody who does not consider themselves an author, I don’t think of such things often. However, in hindsight, it seems like one of those jewels of wisdom that once heard from the mouth of another makes perfect sense. I mean what if snakes made buzz sounds. Would they still hiss? I think not, that is a bee’s job!
Carrie Talks to Gabby About How You Can’t Hiss a Sentence That Doesn’t Have S or Sh sounds.
Shaun thinks more.
Then I got to thinking about this a bit more. How important is our understanding of the languages that we speak and their interpretation to how we view our world? What if we woke up one morning and s sounds were now z sounds? Bees would hiss and snakes would buzz?
What if our native language is one that does not have the s sound, or perhaps more importantly, the z sound? How would we know if we were in close proximity to a bee and we couldn’t see it?
Of course, if our native tongue didn’t include those sounds it makes sense that naturally we would still hear the same sound and most likely experience the same warning signals due to our experience with the sounds, but my point is, know your language and how it relates to your craft.
This is your job, writers.
As a writer you are constantly setting a scene. You are always trying to give your reader the best experience they can get out of your stories. You want them to be immersed, involved, and able to imagine that they themselves are there in that scene, living every nuance of the adventure that awaits them!
It can be tough and take a lot of time, patience and learning, but most all crafts are only mastered through tedious and frequent practice.
Shaun Pretends Like he Isn’t a Writer
Again, I will say that I am not an aspiring author and most of my experience in all areas of the writing craft comes from the guru who sits behind me every day. I am not judging but merely trying to pass on what I have learned by assisting or listening to Carrie talk to herself while she works, so please don’t think that I believe myself to be any better than you.
I do however, encourage you to get back to mastering your craft and enjoying the process of writing, revising and always learning!
Shaun Does a Shameless Plug in A Way Carrie Cant.
If you need assistance in any phase of your writing you can always contact Carrie who offers a wide array of services and is an extremely knowledgeable and wonderfully kind person to work with and/or learn from.
Success doesn’t ride on the coattails of forgetfulness or excuses. It rides on doing and getting things done!
You ever have one of those days where you wake up, claw your way out of bed to start your day and after five minutes the only thing you really want to do is go right back to bed?
As I write this I have been awake for approximately one hour and fifty minutes and returning to the sleeping realm still seems to be the only thing my brain can concentrate on.
But, I have work to do, work outside of and away from the house and my beloved wife, Carrie, is counting on me completing my Thursday assignment of authoring a blog post.
I never want to let Carrie down, so regardless of what my brain is telling me I have sat down in front of my computer and started to type. Why would I torment myself this way, you may ask.
The answer is simple.
We all have responsibilities, usually to many people who are counting on us to get one or more things accomplished and usually within a certain frame of time.
The only way to get anything done is, simply put, just start doing it!
If you never start, it will never get completed.
Not only do you need to start, you need to persevere, come back to it if you have to take a break, but never stop doing it or it will always go unfinished.
That includes writing.
Maybe you don’t feel like writing on a given day, maybe you are experiencing writer’s block or maybe you have a long ago forgotten unfinished work.
Whatever it is, you need to sit down and just start!
Just put words on paper or screen and let them flow forth from you. They don’t have to be perfect, nothing is the first time around, but pretty soon you will have a much increased word count.
As you write you may even have an epiphany, a new idea or path for your story to take. Some of the best ideas come from just letting whatever thoughts and words ooze out of your noggin.
After you have logged a few paragraphs or pages, you can go back, reread your beautiful work, do a little editing (because you were just going with the flow the first time around) and most times you will find that there is something within that dribble that you can really use. It may require a little tightening up, a little changing around, but it’s there, a story, or at least the bones of one.
As you complete this sequence, hopefully you will find yourself getting into the process more, your body feeling more awake and excited about the drudgery that you had no interest in even beginning a short while ago.
Now, I realize that we have all read or heard this advice before. I am simply reminding you of it.
Sometimes we need reminders about the tiniest and most simplistic of ways to fool ourselves into doing something we don’t want to. We all forget and we all make excuses, but success doesn’t ride on the coattails of forgetfulness or excuses. It rides on doing and getting things done!
YOU can do it, just start, go grab your dreams and don’t forget to love your way through it!
Shaun
Shaun clawing his way into a hat.
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?
Generalizations can be so inspiring and they can have truth in them for some people and sometimes even for most people, but they’re never going to work for everyone.
Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Keep Your Cat Out Of Tinder and Other Sucky Advice
In our Random Thought section of the podcast (Notes not transcribed), we talk about how straight men aren’t supposed to let the world know they like/have cats on social media. Shaun has thoughts.
The rest of the podcast follows.
Every weekday Carrie posts on her personal Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin, inspiring quotes from our dogs and cats.
Sometimes they are just about bacon and naps because bacon and naps can be inspiring.
But it made us think of famous writing quotes and whether or not they are kind of b.s. And how very privileged some quotes are.
Like Marianne Williamson, who we are sure is an incredibly lovely person wrote this:
“Nothing binds you except your thoughts, nothing limits you except your fear; and nothing controls you except your beliefs.”
Which is lovely and partially true, but it comes from the perspective of a really lucky person who is white, who is good looking, who had a lot of advantages as a white American, right? It’s hard to say nothing binds you except your thoughts to a political prisoner who is legit in chains, to a Black man or woman in the U.S. who is jail for pot, for someone who has paralyzing fear because of trauma that’s happened to her or him or them, right?
Generalizations can be so inspiring and they can have truth in them for some people and sometimes even for most people, but it’s never going to work for everyone.
Writing advice and quotes are like that, too.
Like even the most amazing Ray Bradbury wrote
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
That’s a good quote, right? Us writers are easily destroyed. But being drunk on anything all the time usually means for most of us that we’re not helping create a solution to problems. Instead, we’re being drunk, putting lampshades on our head and saying, “Nah. Nah. Nah. I can’t hear you.”
It’s not the best look, really.
But sometimes the advice is pretty cool.
“Be strategic and resilient in the pursuit of your dreams. That sounds like a cheesy quote, right? But nah, I’m serious. Resilience is one hell of a quality to master and not many have the skin for it.” —Tiffany D. Jackson
“People are going to judge you all the time no matter what you do. . . . Don’t worry about other people. Worry about you.” —Jacqueline Woodson
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” — Henry David Thoreau
“Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende
“Healing begins where the wound was made.” -Alice Walker (The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart)
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
Blow off the b.s. And realize where it’s coming from. Sometimes it’s coming from people whose lives and brains are nothing like yours and sometimes it’s just coming from people who want to make a butt ton of money selling their advice to you.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Cats are okay. They’re good to snuggle with, too.
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 writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
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!
loving the strange the podcast about embracing the weird
