writingtips – 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!

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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The Spiral of Ick and Quiet Winners: You Don’t Have to Flaunt Yourself to Succeed

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

The Spiral of Ick and Quiet Winners: You Don't Have to Flaunt Yourself to Succeed

00:00 / 00:26:37

Recently, I read an interview with an author who talked about how much children loved her book and how they tell her this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You just have to start.

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

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

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

Our random thought came from here.