I’m Totally Judging You Some More

So, like six years ago, I wrote this post. You read the post and implemented its teachings. You used a spell checker and read the submission guidelines carefully. You really fine-tuned those first few paragraphs and made sure your full narrative arc was there. You inserted vivid sensory details and then checked your submission guidelines again. Good work!

Now let’s dig a little deeper.

Try to submit early. Now, to be honest, this doesn’t really apply to the competitions that I judge for, where a contest coordinator holds all the entries and releases them to judges in batches after the dates close. But for a lot of competitions, judges start reading entries as they come in. So if yours comes in the early trickle, you can expect it to get a little more attention and thought than the one coming in with the flood at the last minute.

Build the story to the theme. If your competition has a theme, the theme merits more than a small, inconsequential mention. The story should be written with the theme baked in, not sprinkled on top. On the other hand, make sure you’re not just taking the obvious route. A unique application of the theme is more likely to stand out in a judge’s mind.

Double check for conflict. Please. Pretty please. I can’t tell you how many beautifully written chunks of text I’ve had to mark poorly because there was no conflict, and therefore no tension. Conflict doesn’t have to be big or physical, but it does need to be present, or your story isn’t going to make an impression on readers (including judges).

Make sure goals and motivations are clear. Like conflict, characters’ goals and motivations are often missing in otherwise strong entries. Clarifying this doesn’t have to take a ton of space (which is great if your competition comes with a word limit), but it can really make characters’ choices make sense. Plus, goals and motivations make excellent conflict generators and drive the plot forward.

Look beyond the trope. This next one is specific to memoirs and autobiographies. Now I mean this in the kindest, gentlest way possible, but your life story should not be a cliché. If you are a woman, finding yourself on an international trip following your divorce is going to bore the judges silly. If you are a man, the drug-fueled sexcapades of your youth aren’t impressing anyone. If you find that your life does fit into some kind of trope, that’s okay! But really zero in and focus on what makes your story unique. You are special and amazing, so don’t write yourself like you aren’t.

Play with dialog. This is also a fairly specific tip, but I see quite a few competition entries that have no dialog whatsoever, or a line or two at most. That has worked well for maybe two of them. For most stories, well written dialog is waaaay better than the narrator describing what the character is thinking and doing for the entire story. It breaks up the monotony, shows readers things about your character, and tells us about character interactions. You don’t have to have dialog, but really be sure that’s the best route for your story.

Use beta readers. I know I harp on this a lot, but getting another set of eyes on your story is super helpful. Beta readers can point out confusing spots that make perfect sense to you and help you find the nitpicks your brain is too tired from drafting to see anymore. They can pick out the spots that maybe moved a little too quickly or slowly, and give you an early warning system for what contest judges might think, back when you still have time to do something about it.

Choose excerpts carefully. If your competition entry is a portion of a larger work, you’re going to have to be very thoughtful in choosing what chunk to send in. A natural choice would be the beginning of the larger work, but consider other passages as well. Choose something that has an entire story arc within the excerpt alone. If the beginning takes a long while to get going, that might not be your best choice for a short story competition. The best entries have a beginning, middle, and end, and that goes for excerpts as well.

So there we have it! My even-more-nitpicky tips for competition submissions! Not all of these tips will apply to all stories out there, so find what makes the most sense for your story and apply as needed. (Except the beta one. That applies to all stories everywhere.) Good luck in your submissions!

And until next week, happy writing!

Speech to Text Experiment

An artist’s depiction of life, crushing my hands.

Well, my friends, it seems we are there. I am drafting this blog post using speech to text after badly dislocating a finger while goofing around in a bin of kinetic sand with a bunch of 4-year-olds in the Pre-K room at work. So we’ll see how this goes. My fervent hope is that, since this is not fiction, hopefully my tongue will remain unpossessed. We shall see.

The first thing that I notice (infuriatingly) is that this does not punctuate unless I specifically tell it to. It also does not capitalize. I think editing might be a little beastly, but at least I can do that all with my right hand. I am also belatedly realizing that I probably should have done some kind of timing exercise to see what the difference was between a post that is typed up directly and a post that is “spoken up”, if you will. Oh, well.

However, the recorder does keep up pretty well with my speaking speed. I am talking a little slower and more clearly than I would in a conversation, but I made sure nobody in the house could possibly hear me so I can live with this. I also am pleasantly surprised with the general lack of spelling errors, homophone mix ups, things like that. I see a lot of students using this at school– particularly students who struggle with writing fluently and need a little bit of help to get their ideas down on paper when their fingers can’t quite keep up– and I generally see few mistakes of this nature. Most of the mistakes are, as noted in the previous paragraph, punctuation and capitalization mistakes. So I probably should have seen this coming. but I am nonetheless pleasantly surprised at the accuracy of the speech to text.

(Future Jill here, butting in to Past Jill’s work to let you know that editing was kind of a pain—literally and figuratively—but since the mistakes are all of the same nature and fall in the same patterns, it was relatively easy to find them all. Assuming I found them all. There are probably a bunch that I did not and I will now spend the next half hour obsessively rereading this post to try to find them.)

(Future Jill here, again. In hindsight, this post is actually quite a bit shorter than average. I feel like I have an easier time building more complex thoughts and arguments when typing silently than when dictating. I’d have to delve into this a little more to be sure. Maybe I’ll experiment with this later, when my hand is in one piece again. I think my spoken language is just a little simpler. I also think that this is all happening kind of on the fly, which is probably also impacting my ability to be clever and profound, too.)

Honestly, this exercise has been more successful than I anticipated. You’ll have to judge for yourself whether this post more rambly than usual, but I think if I had bothered to do some kind of outline beforehand, that wouldn’t be an issue either. (This would have helped with the length of the post as well, I think.) I think this might be a method that I will personally be more open to using in the future. I do seem to injure my hands a lot and I think this might help me to be a little more reliable with the blog post that I might otherwise end up being.

In a related side note, my husband and I have started looking at the EDS splint rings that I was talking about in this post. I had hoped to last a little longer than this before they were needed, but at least now I will get to look like a sexy lich queen cosplayer. Dreams really do come true.

So until next week, take care of your fingers and happy writing!

Reblog: Time for Writing

Greetings, friends! It’s time for another exciting reblog! This week’s article comes from Scott Allan over at Self-Publishing School. Time for Writing: How to Make Time to Write in Your Busy Life lays out the author’s favorite tactics for being a weekend wordsmith. I’m more of a write-every-day kind of gal, but I know that what works for me might not work for everyone. So without further ado, here is Mr. Allan’s Time for Writing!

Time for Writing: How to Make Time to Write in Your Busy Life

POSTED ON AUG 22, 2019

Written by Scott Allan

Carving out the time to write a book requires planning, persistence, and at times, a lot of caffeine. Even with all the right elements in place, making time for writing is a major undertaking, especially when your days are filled with commitments to work, family, and social activities.

So, you have a dream to write that book, but you’re locked into a schedule that’s keeping you from pursuing your dream. I know the routine: Get up, work all day, come home and make dinner, and look after the kids (or unwind in front of the TV) and then you fall into bed, exhausted, before you have to do it all again the next day. When the weekend comes, you just want to kick back, take it easy, and put the week behind you. Then Monday comes around and the rat race starts all over again. Soon you can hear yourself making excuses for all the reasons why you didn’t write:

“I was so busy this week I just didn’t have time…”

“I’ll do it next week when I’m more organized…”

“I’ll start writing when I’m feeling more motivated…”

“I’ll get to it once I quit my day job and have more time…”

But as you know by now, there’s never a perfect time. We’re always busy with something. And if we don’t take action when we can, the excuses will keep coming until we run out of time forever. Don’t let your dream die. I’m going to help you get your book done.

Time for Writing: 8 Steps to Becoming a Weekend Writing Warrior

By becoming a weekend writing warrior, you can get it done. I know because I’ve done it. In this post I’ll share with you my 8 step strategy for writing a book on the weekends even if your week is crazy busy.

1. Start With Intentional Planning

When it comes to getting your writing done, strategy is everything. Without a plan, you drift; and when you drift, you end up back where you started, wasting more time while procrastinating. The key to writing a book on your weekends is to get plan out how you will use your writing time…

Ready to read the full article? Head on over to Self-Publishing School to read all eight steps.

And until next week, happy writing!

Guest Post: What Makes a Great Storyteller?

Sorry about the disappearing act last week. I was drawing a real quick-and-messy comic about drowning in schoolwork and then my art program died suddenly when I was about two-thirds of the way done with it, sinking my little comic. And at that point, since I was afore-mentioned drowning in schoolwork, I let it go to its watery grave and saved myself/my grades.

I’m turning in my final projects for the semester tomorrow (assuming I finish them tonight, haha… ha… *cries*), so this week probably would have been more of the same, except that Anna’s got my back! (As usual!) The real Anna Taylor is a freelancer, fiction writer, and editor, as well as a super awesome accountability buddy who as very seriously threatened me with musicals and running laps more than once to help me meet a looming deadline. She’s pretty much fab all around. And she’s written up a guest post today to help save me from drowning! Thanks, Anna!

Without further ado (much or otherwise), here’s Anna’s What Makes a Great Storyteller? Enjoy!

What Makes a Great Storyteller?

Story builds upon itself. Something I’ve been struggling recently as I jump back into the world of drafting is that I want to make my stories the most eloquent, descriptive, emotional things I possibly can. I find that I can’t do that on the first draft, and the perfectionism hits me hard. I fall into the “if I can’t do it perfect on the first go round, I can’t do it at all” trap, and that doesn’t help anybody.

In the last couple days, though, I’ve decided to let go of perfectionism and let the story be what it needs right now, so that I can build upon it later. In that decision, I’ve realized that most of the story is coming out in more stage directions (He did this, she did that, she said this, then he said that). Sometimes I’ll find a little nugget of goodness in the writing, but most of the time, it’s linear and unadorned.

It’s made me ask the question, “What level of language use do I really need to tell this story effectively?”

What made Shakespeare an Excellent Storyteller?

Shakespeare is credited with having invented over 1,700 new words in the English language that we still use today. These include, but are obviously not limited to, academy, torture, dauntless, impertinent, friend, jovial, and many more. He’s also one of the most well-known storytellers literally ever. But I don’t think it was his ability to smash some words together to create new ones that made him so memorable. It was more his ability to make his audience feel something through the evocative language he used.

Language and storytelling go hand in hand. Storytelling isn’t about perfect grammar and big words. It’s not about who’s the most intelligent or eloquent. It’s about sharing ideas and lessons with others in a way that they’ll remember for years to come. The mark of a good storyteller isn’t that they used the most words in the dictionary, and no, you don’t get extra points for crossing into a different language.

The mark of a good storyteller is when your audience can’t stop thinking about it. I know I loved a story when I enjoy the telling of it. I know it was actually a great one (let’s define that as a story that affects a larger audience, and is not just subjectively good), when I haven’t watched or read the story for days, yet scenes or bits of dialogue or imagery will pop back into my head without provocation.

Shakespeare was excellent, but it wasn’t his words. It was how those words made his audience feel, and how they reacted to the story. It wasn’t his words he was really known for until some crazy person decided to analyze them hundreds of years later and concluded that he was a master wordsmith.

What Makes You an Excellent Storyteller?

Storytelling, in the end, is about taking something intangible- a thought, a feeling, an abstract concept of what a house looks like- and making it into a tangible, real thing. We obviously do this with varying degrees of vocabulary, but you don’t have to have an extensive one to make the magic happen. In fact, sometimes it’s the simplest terms that make the most concrete image of events for your readers; images that are shared across the board so that everybody sees that same thing. Because that’s the beauty of storytelling. The ability to have more than one person experience things in a similar way.

What makes you a great storyteller is your ability to state something so simply, and so clearly, that every viewer, reader, and critic is getting the same story 100% of the time, regardless of their own individual life experiences.

What makes you a great storyteller is your ability to cross barriers with words and make people see another’s life in a different way. To help others stand in your shoes for a few hundred pages, and make their own life just a little better for having read the story.

So, to say that you have to be a master wordsmith to tell a good story is like saying that you have to work at a three-star Michelin restaurant in order to cook a good meal, and that’s just not the truth. All you have to do in the end is start. In the end, the story, if made well, will build upon itself.

Can’t get enough of Anna and her wisdom? There’s much more to be had! You can find her on her website, or on her very fun YouTube channel. Enjoy! And until next week, happy writing!

Reblog: How Writing a Screenplay Is Similar to the Scientific Process

Hi, friends! Happy April! Sorry for the lack of warning, but just like that, another Camp NaNo is upon us. I’m taking the very lowest of low roads on this one, with the worst, sloppiest “plan” for getting “words” so I can “win” Camp this spring. I’m embarrassed already and we’re just getting started. Should be a fun month.

But you know what that means! Reblogs! Terrible art! Pathetic excuses! This month we’ve got it all. Starting with Joy Cheriel Brown’s article, How Writing a Screenplay Is Similar to the Scientific Process, as published in Script Magazine! Enjoy the wisdom of someone a lot smarter and more articulate than me. And wish me luck!

How Writing a Screenplay is Similar to the Scientific Process

Using a question while writing your screenplay as if it were a science project is a way to teach a level of depth that most people would say is impossible. But when you look at the marvels of the universe, nothing is impossible. Science—and life—will surprise you every time.

• JOY CHERIEL BROWN
• MAR 28, 2023

I started writing screenplays when I was 10 years old after seeing Home Alone in the theatre and being told by my parents that I couldn’t get an agent to pursue acting. I would have liked to have gone to a school for the performing arts, but alas I didn’t get in when I auditioned for the performing arts magnet school because my mother was told that they already had too many Black students. 

I’m from Prince George’s County, Maryland, which has been predominately Black since I was a kid. When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, they turned many of the neighborhood schools into magnet schools with special programs to promote desegregation in the county and busing. And where I lived the magnet program for John Carroll Elementary was Science and Technology…

Can’t wait to read the rest of the article? Head on over to check it out! And until next week, happy writing!

Keeping Your Desk as Unusable as Possible

Ohhhh man, I am swamped, my friends. Sorry I missed last week. I didn’t forget. I was perfectly aware. I was just drowning in schoolwork. But it looks like this is just the workload going forward for the next four-ish years, so I’m hoping I’ll find my equilibrium soon and settle into a rhythm.

One thing that isn’t helping me find that rhythm? My desk. My poor desk has become Ground Zero for e v e r y t h i n g. It started out with one neat little To Do pile, that turned into a heap, that turned into my entire desk surface, that spread into little piles leaning against the desk legs and on my seat and is now currently expanding into the walking space around the desk too. Work stuff, school stuff, writing stuff, parenting stuff, all of it, all of it, I say, is tossed in the general vicinity of my desk. I expect my desk to collapse into a black hole somewhere around late April.

Now I’m not one of those people who needs a perfectly tidy space to be able to get work done. (If that were the case, I would never ever get anything done. Manifesting a bubble of sub-catastrophic entropy all around myself is my superpower.) But I do need enough space to either squeeze my butt between piles of stuff on my seat and have my laptop on my knees or a spot to set my laptop on the desk so that I can crouch uncomfortably in front of it. Bare minimum. But even that is a bit too much to ask sometimes.

So since I am a flippin’ legend at making my desk as unusable as possible, I thought I’d share some of my hot tips for keeping things absolutely unworkable.

Digitize Nothing, Save Everything.I… don’t know why I have this compulsion, but I really want to save everything that might even remotely be useful at some point down the line. And since paper doesn’t take up a lot of space, it’s easy for me to justify keeping scads of the stuff around. Because scanning takes time. *pouts* So I have notebooks filled with notes for classes I took over a decade ago. Old bills I have already paid. An expired club membership card. Drawings from my children and students. Mostly used notebooks that have at least three perfectly good pages left in them. Doodles I made that, now that I think about it, I actually have digitized and they exist happily on the web and oh my giddy aunt, why do I keep all this stuff???

Used Once? Out Forever. I used a pair of noise cancelling headphones once two months ago. They are still on my desk. There are two mustard yellow AA batteries and I can’t remember what they are from or if they have any charge. Five pens, three four sticky note pads, a piece of sheet music, and—I kid you not—a dusty talenti ice cream container that I used two years ago to hold my son’s Space Camp money. It is still sitting on my desk, empty save for a bank deposit receipt, just waiting for it’s definitely-going-to-happen-sometime-soon new purpose. Seriously, probably a good third of the stuff on my desk right now could be put into longer-term storage somewhere not on my desk right now and everything would be perfectly fine, but being organized and practical is rookie behavior.

Be Nostalgic About Everything. As I write this, I’m looking at a pile of REI stickers. I will never use them. I don’t remember where I even got them. But they are beautiful. So I guess those are staying on the surface of my desk forever. An unnecessarily large stack of bookmarks—especially the ones that are really just old clothing tags and Dutch Boy brand paint chips—takes up a rather embarrassing amount of space too. Because… I like them? My expired driver’s license, but it has a picture of me back when I was young and adorable; some chaptstick a friend made that I likely never will use because, despite making no effort whatsoever to acquire them, I accumulate chapstick faster than a human could possibly use them; a pile of darling coupons my youngest made me, even though we both knew he was fervently hoping I would never turn them in; my oldest child’s first library card. A weaker person would have these things either weeded through or properly stored in a memory book of some kind by now, but I prefer to keep them out cluttering my desk instead. Makes things cozier.

Desk Drawers Are Vaults of Secrets that Must Never Be Opened. I mean, honestly, I do sometimes show moments of weakness and use things on the top layer of my desk drawers—my drawing tablet or my strangely large collection of rulers, for example—but the deep stuff? I couldn’t even tell you what’s down there anymore.

Never Do Today What Can Be Done at Some Indeterminate Time in the Murky Future. Remember that To Do pile I mentioned earlier? Most of the things in it aren’t time bound. And that is a problem for me, because that it means I don’t have to do it right now, or possibly ever! How liberating! And so the pile grows. Every time a new stack of mail comes in that I should probably look through, but none of it looks immediately important, shows up, my desk is an easy drop site. When it’s bedtime and there’s stuff on my bed and I’m too tired to properly put it away, it gets tossed on my seat.

All this growing clutter makes it easier and easier for me to just avoid my desk altogether. It’s unusable and it makes me feel like a bad person. And avoiding my desk means that I don’t have an ideal work space, which means I’m not working to max capacity, which means I’m falling further behind. Which means I don’t have time for tidying and straightening, so the desk grows ever worse. It’s like a population of cannibal hamsters, feeding on itself.

So if you want to be like me (and who wouldn’t??), be sure to use these awesome tips for curating an awesomely unusable desk. Your future self will wonder what the heck you were thinking when you listened to me!

And until next week (and maybe after I’ve cleaned my desk off and become functional again), happy writing!

PS- Seriously, don’t do this to yourself. Why do I do this to myself?

Reblog: 7 Ways to Build a Writing Habit

Hello, internet friends! I’m busily chipping away at my tiny writing goal–still a bit behind, but not outrageously so. And I’m closing in on the finish line for my classes for the semester, so I’m pretty much married to my laptop right now, haha. But we’re getting places!

This week’s reblog, Seven Ways to Build a Writing Habit in 2022, comes from Melissa Hart, a regular contributor at The Writer magazine. I’m always looking for ways to build better habits, especially for things like writing, which have a habit of falling by the wayside. (Although I suppose one might argue that I could turn that looking time into writing time. *coughs*) So without futher ado, the reblog~!

Seven ways to build a writing habit in 2022

Ready to make the new year your best year yet? These tips from the pros will help you keep writing all year long.

 

BY MELISSA HART

PUBLISHED DECEMBER 22, 2021

The pandemic has not been good for my fiction. It’s been too easy, since March 2020, to knock out articles and essays for a paycheck and forgo the pleasures of novel writing in favor of making the family yet another meal or suggesting mother-daughter activities that don’t involve my teen’s smartphone. Colleagues around the world tell a similar tale, admitting to profound anxiety in this changed world, along with a lack of motivation and focus.

A new year, however, brings the gift of starting fresh and honoring the writing we most want to accomplish by building the habit of putting words to paper or screen. Hoping for inspiration, I interviewed experts across the country about how best to cultivate a new writing practice or jumpstart a stalled routine.

1. Quiet your mind

Authors Paulette Perhach and April Dávila met at the 2020 AWP Conference in San Antonio. Perhach had a booth promoting her book, Welcome to the Writer’s Life, and Dávila – who had just launched her debut novel, 142 Ostriches – stopped to chat. They found that they were each leading groups back home that combined meditation and writing practice.

“We got to talking and said ‘What if there was an organization that provided a yoga studio model of meditation and writing online?’” Perhach explains. “There are different teachers, and so each class is a little different, but you know you can go in multiple times a week to work out.”

The result of their conversation is A Very Important Meeting (AVIM), an online space in which writers can sign up for an hour, which includes 10 minutes of mindfulness meditation plus 45 minutes of writing time, and then 15 minutes of chatting with the instructor and participants, if desired. The classes are open to any writer at any stage of their career, with a suggested $5 donation.

On a Tuesday morning in September, I logged into a session hosted by author and Buddhist nun Faith Adiele. She asked us to close our eyes, then led us in a series of breathing exercises and stretches for the neck and shoulders before delivering a short dharma talk. Then, it was time to write.

I turned off my camera and fell into a story I’d been working on, not even tempted to check my email because I knew Adiele and the other participants were also writing. The next week, I signed up for another meeting. There’s something about taking 10 minutes to quiet the mind before sitting down to write that keeps my inner critic at bay and facilitates deep work.

“Going from meditating straight into that creative space is a really nice transition from being still and calm and accessing that deeper level of your consciousness where your creativity lies,” Dávila says. “It feels like you’re writing from your best place.”

Perhach explains it this way: “I feel like my mind for the first few decades of my life was like this wild horse that was dragging me along, and now I’ve figured out how to put the reins on the horse and take it where I want to go. I put that power of my mind that used to keep me up all night with worry and anxiety toward my creative projects and use that imagination that used to tell me everything that could go wrong into creating captivating stories instead of telling myself a story that makes me lose sleep.”

2. Set an intention

Before you sit down to write, it can be useful to determine whether you’ll work on a novel, short story, nonfiction chapter, or poem. Some writers commit to working for a set amount of time. Others aim for a certain number of pages or words.

Anyone who’s ever participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) knows the magic formula for churning out a 50,000-word manuscript in 30 days is 1,667 words a day. During the months of April, July, and/or November, over half a million people commit to writing a novel, memoir, or nonfiction book with support from the nonprofit.

Co-Director of Programs Marya Brennan explains…

Ready to read the rest? Head on over here! And until next week, happy writing!

Writing Without the Writing Part

Charcoal Work by Agnes Grochulska

I’ve been working on Blood and Ebony, my Snow White retelling, since about the beginning of the year and it’s been pretty smooth sailing. At least, it was until three weeks ago. Because three weeks ago, I found an issue that needed fixing. And three weeks ago, I could not figure out how to fix it. Nor could I at two weeks.

But one week ago, a breakthrough! And by breakthrough, I mean I phoned up my friend, had a long-ranging conversation about how our kids were doing in school, how our husbands were doing at work, and then about what was wrong with my story. Not counting all the catching up chitchat, I was back on course inside of about ten minutes.

And so this week, let’s have a quick look at all the things we can do to help move our stories along without actually moving our stories along. These things might seem like goofing off (insert You Should Be Writing meme here), but we know they’re actually our brain’s way of mucking through the gunk in our brains to straighten out how we want to tell our stories in all their detailed glory.

So here—in alphabetical order no less—are a few things you can do when you’re in some way unable (or just plain not in the mood) to proceed in your story by actually writing the thing, but you don’t want to lose any creative momentum in a given project. Sometimes one of these tactics is all that’s needed to get yourself back on the move again!

Art I love this one. I wouldn’t say that I create visual art for every story that I write, but more often than not, you’ll find my desk scattered with sketches of my latest story as I try to work out what exactly I want the characters, places, and tech/magic to look like. If I’m having a hard time visualizing the world, I force myself to with art. Rarely, I’ve even been known to make music in the style of my story’s world. All of it helps to ground me in the places and with the people that I’m trying to write about.

Brainstorming This is the one thing in this list that I would say I do every time I write a first draft of any story, every time, without fail. Sometimes I’ll brainstorm on the screen, but it’s always more fruitful if I do it with pen and paper instead. Not sure why, but it just seems to fully open my creative brain in a way that only partially opens at a computer. So when I’m creating something new, it’s often conceived, at least in part, on a blank piece of paper. Now when I’m brainstorming, it’s almost never actual text or dialog that will be in the story itself. Rather, it’s broad plot ideas, themes, and character development that will make up the unseen bones of the stories.

Character Profiles, Interviews, Etc. This one, I don’t do a whole lot, but it’s always fun when I do. And usually a little goofy too, especially with the interviews. Like with brainstorming, this stuff never actually finds its way into the story, but it helps me if I’m having a harder time figuring out the character’s history, motivations, goals, etc, which means I’ll have a hard time writing any scene with that character in it. (Bad news if it’s a main character, haha.) If I have a stubborn character who still won’t talk to me, it’s also fun to interview another character about the stubborn one and seeing what they think about them. That usually gets the ideas flowing.

Chatting with Pals This here is Ol’ Faithful, and she never fails me. I don’t think I’ve ever talked through a writing problem with my writing friends and not been able to sort through at least part of it. In fact, I can’t think of a single time where I didn’t get it all sorted by the end of the conversation (although I’m sure it’s happened and I just don’t remember it). I usually hesitate to use this trick because, although effective, I don’t want to ruin surprises for the same pool of people that are inevitably my beta readers too. But if I’m really in a bind, this is my go-to brain block buster. Works. Every. Time.

Music And not like the music in the Art heading. I mean, just playing music that has nothing to do with my story at all. I play a few different instruments and I like singing, so this one gives me a lot of room to play in and music has just always, consistently, beautifully uncorked my brain when it’s getting itself all wound up. Something about music just magically soothes my anxiety and depression in a way that nothing else really seems to and makes me feel all calm and creative and quasi-meditative. If I’m getting all worked up because I’m writing blocked and I can’t figure out how to work through it, music helps keep me from making the situation worse by getting wound up about it. And more often than not, just chilling out is enough to get my writing back on track.

How about you fine readers? Do you have any tricks to get the words flowing when they’re rather not move? Let me know in the comments below! I can always use more tricks!

And until next time, happy writing!

Mad Science!

If you haven’t read Girl Genius, I’m just gonna set this down here… https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/index.php

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend a conference for high school science educators with my husband. And although I was reminded multiple times that, as a “tag along”, I was under no obligation to attend the abundance of workshops, sessions, and presentations, you can bet your itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot zucchini that I went to everything humanly possible. You people think I’m gonna go sunbathing when I could be growing algae for adorable/creepy brine shrimp to snack on? That I’ll go shopping when I could be extracting macronutrients from Wendy’s bacon cheeseburgers? Ha!

There are a lot of things I don’t like about my brain, but I love my boundless curiosity. I want to know everything! And the conference was like trying to drink out of a firehose. There was way more juicy research being presented than I had the time (let alone memory space) to absorb. I scribbled endlessly in my little notebook and still didn’t get even a tenth of it all down. It was fantastic!

All this succulent science reminded me of the beautiful time when I worked in a university research library cataloging periodicals. One of my I-kid-you-not-they-paid-me-to-do-this responsibilities was to spend a portion of every day skimming through the newly received research journals for interesting articles. We might use these articles to come up with new library displays, pass them along to researchers working in that particular field, or just to be aware of what was happening in research in case one of the patrons had questions. And on top of just enjoying learning all this fantastic stuff, I might use these articles to come up with new story ideas. This was hands down my favorite part of the job.

But you don’t have to work in a research library or attend a national science conference to get your hands on some juicy research ideas! A lot of it is available online, especially if you access it through your local college, university, or library. At the very least, most articles you can access through Google Scholar will give you a title and an abstract, giving you  just enough information to brainstorm up something cool.

For example, let’s take a peek at today’s splash page for Nature, a publication that’s been laying down cutting edge research since 1869 (including contributions by heavyweight Victorian scientists like Tyndall and Huxley *fangirls*).

Look at this wealth of story ideas! It just keeps going the further you scroll. These titles may be an obvious boon to science fiction writers, but those on the lookout for a searing new social critique would find it easily in articles about the need to promote mathematics among Ghanaian girls, or the utterly shocking news that top companies’ climate pledges miiiiiight not be all they’re claiming to be. And it doesn’t take a huge leap to imagine a fantasy slant wherein mages are raising the alarm over dangerously fast growth in atmospheric arcanic residue and what all that rogue magic might mean for the world’s hapless residents.

Didn’t see anything on Nature’s page that tickled your fancy? Try checking out Science News. Or maybe the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. Or PNAS, or Popular Science, or Frontiers in Neuroscience, or any of the ACM journals. Riffling through the table of contents for any one of these provides a wealth of story ideas in a broad range of genres.

So next time you find yourself blocked for new writing ideas, try thumbing through an index of some exciting new research publication. You just might find your next big idea.

Until next week, happy writing!

An Audience of One

A few months ago, I was reading CM Schofield’s awesome blog and one of their posts, A Waffle About Anxiety and Pitches, caught my attention. They wrote about Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which is one of my head monsters too, and they pitched a novel (*chortles*) idea for dealing with it: writing a fun story just for yourself, without the intention of eventually cleaning it up and showing it to other people. They called the umbrella those stories fell under the “fluff folder”, which is adorable.

I’ve always written with the intention for there to be an audience of more than just me. Sometimes, I would decide after the fact that it wasn’t going to work out. Usually, I’d get a good chunk of the way through, or just power through the entire story, and then decide afterward that it wasn’t marketable, or figure the plot was nonexistant, or realize I was a white middle class American female writing about not one of those things, or find some other issue that was too profound for me to simply ‘fix’. It was disappointing, but oh well. You move on. But I have never tried writing without a broader audience from the outset.

Writing is widely recognized for its therapeutic properties. Whether it’s journaling, or dream recording, or even jotting to-do lists, I’ve always felt like any kind of writing helps to ground me and steady me out when I’m feeling off the wall in one way or another. And fiction writing helps too—who doesn’t love revenge-writing a dastardly backstabbing or an epic fight scene that leaves your character coughing blood? (Oh, is that just me? Um.) But you know what doesn’t help my anxiety? Pitching. Querying. Anything of this nature. Submissions are my crucible of the soul and I am yet to come out of a round of subs without feeling like I’ve just had a piece of my heart excised and my chest put back together by a bear with an industrial staple gun. I imagine that, even if I do ever manage to get published, getting a steaming pile of lackluster sales would feel pretty similar. Opening up something you’ve worked so hard on for so long to the world—and then getting a whole lot of stony silence in return—just aches.

So what would happen if I just… didn’t do that bit? Just skipped the whole anyone-else-ever-might-see-this-some-day part?

My mental health has been pretty fragile over the last year. I’m on the mend (fingers crossed!) but still not in great shape. So I figure, why not? I still keep my massive Ideas List and quite a few of those stories are… questionable, at best. A new session of Camp NaNoWriMo is coming up in July, so I think I might sort some of the wackiest story ideas into my own Fluff Folder and have a crack at one of them next month. And I have a new story idea about a desperate young man going into a magic-steeped human remains market looking to make a deal that just might fit the too-wacky-to-share bill.

How about you fine readers? Do you ever write just for you, or is there always a wider audience in mind? Have you ever had a story swing camps—switching from marketable to private, or from the fluff folder to the great wide world? Let me know in the comments below!

And until next week, happy writing!

PS- Don’t forget to check out CM Schofield’s blog for art, stories, and the progress of an in-the-trenches writer! Do iiiiit!