Category Archives: Authorial Trust

A Guest Post by Monique Bucheger

The theme of the Fictorian blog this month is “Moments Of Inspiration In Life: Our experiences as people influences our writing.” Which made me ponder: Why do I write what I write? And why do I keep doing it? The answer comes from my individual journey through life.

When I was 12, two of my friends from school were physically abused at home by their parents. I knew they needed help, but since I was also a kid, I didn’t know how to help them. That feeling of helplessness stuck with me for many years—so I decided to do something about it.

Soon after we married, my husband and I applied to be foster parents and were licensed. Through the years we have cared for over 100 foster kids as well as our own 12 children. The feeling of helplessness lessened, though the guilt for not being able to help my abused friends never went away.

When I was pregnant with our youngest child, I started writing again—something I did all the time as a teen—but had put on hold to raise our family. I had intended to write one book about a quirky, spunky 12-year-old girl named Ginnie West to keep a promise to my high school creative writing teacher.

Instead, it has turned into a four book middle grade series with at least three more books to go.

The series features half-orphaned Ginnie West and her best friend, Tillie. Ginnie’s mom died in an accident when Ginnie was three. Tillie’s dad abandoned his family six years before the start of book one (The Secret Sisters Club) after abusing Tillie and her mom.

Tillie’s parents have been divorced for four years. Now, Ginnie and Tillie want to be sisters—for very different reasons—and since Ginnie’s dad and Tillie’s mom aren’t dating other people, the girls decide to nudge them toward each other.

Mostly the series is about friendship, BFFs, horses, finding out who you are, changing what you don’t like, and belonging—important things to kids aged 8-14, as well as everyone else.

My Ginnie West Adventure series also deals with surviving the ripples of child abuse, defining who you are, being okay with who you are, accepting other people within safe parameters, going outside your comfort zone to do the right things and not defining yourself by other people’s weaknesses—among many other things.

It is also a fun, funny, wholesome series set on a modern day farm where kids “candle” eggs they gather and milk ornery goats. Where family is defined by people you choose to associate with as well as by those you are born to. Where kids concoct schemes that often backfire—resulting in both humorous and not-so-funny opportunities to solve problems and mature in unexpected ways.

In short, I write contemporary realistic fiction with humor. Helping kids (and adults) navigate the murky waters of pre-adolescence in what I hope is an empowering way.

Kids may not be able to change certain realities in their world but I want them to know they get to choose how they think about themselves and and their reality. If there is something they don’t like, they can make changes. If there is something they do like—I want them to embrace their uniqueness.

Middle grade is the time when kids start realizing that the world (and themselves) are full of possibilities. It is also when peer pressure begins—in both positive and negative ways. Kids hear and embrace certain messages about themselves—and they believe them.

This can work equally as a benefit as well as a detriment. When kids live in a safe home and have good self images, they flourish. When life experiences haven’t been so kind, kids believe the worst about themselves or other peoples’ bad opinions of them.

Because of my background as a foster parent, overcoming child abuse and other hardships are themes in my books. Even if a person wasn’t or isn’t a victim of child abuse, we all know people who were or are.

Bruises on the body heal and disappear, bruises on the soul linger and color lives in unexpected ways—often resulting in poor choices that complicate life unnecessarily.

Child abuse and its effects are not something people want to talk about, but something way too many people live with or were wounded by, and something that affects how people make decisions for the rest of their lives. When you are the victim of child abuse, you want to know why—and you want it to stop.

Sometimes I wonder if the time spent writing my books would be better used doing something else. Then I hear from someone who has read one or more of my books and lets me know that the book or story line helped them deal with something they were struggling with in their life.

Before I was published, a lady I’ll call Lily, messaged me one day and told me that she had read all of my books on our critique site. She had grown up in an extremely abusive home—her mother locked her and her sister in closets for days on end-not feeding them, beating them, allowing boyfriends to have their way with her daughters.

In short, Lily grew up with horrific, vile, damaging experiences. She told me that she couldn’t believe that any family could be so loving as the West family, but it was healing to her that such a family could exist. She told me that reading about how the West family helped kids like her comforted the abused little girl inside her—and gave her hope for other kids like her.

Lily’s story encouraged me to pursue publication—not an easy journey as people familiar with the process can attest. However, since my series has been published, I have heard from many other adults who lived with an abusive parent who have found peace and strength in my series.

Adults who weren’t abused (many teachers and parents) have told me they welcome an opportunity to read an age appropriate series with their kids so they can have open discussions that deal with the ripples of child abuse (poor self image, wrongly thinking they deserve to be abused, feeling powerless to change things).

I have been pleasantly surprised to find my books resonate with kids and adults alike—one of my biggest fans is a 72-year old man. Last year several tween and teenage girls rushed over to my table at a book signing, wanting my newest release, Being West Is Best. They were fully invested in Ginnie and Tillie, and wanted to find out what happened next.

My main character, Ginnie, is a spunky, courageous girl with a strong sense of loyalty and adventure. She loves trying new things and while she doesn’t often outright break “the rules”—there are often piles of twisted and bent rules in her wake.

Her BFF, Tillie, is more timid—but no doormat. In each successive book, Tillie realizes that she can overcome her rough beginnings and that she is worthy of being treated well. Together, they give each other strength and permission to explore this thing called life and make their own definitions of who they are.

Like Ginnie’s great-uncle is fond of saying: “You may not be able to help the whole world, but you can do your part to help your corner of it.”

Empowering kids and adults to overcome bad experiences and to find courage to redefine their world and how they view it—in effect to become superheroes in their own lives—is why I continue to write the Ginnie West series.

About the Author:
When Monique Bucheger isn’t writing, you can find her playing taxi driver to one or more of her 12 children, plotting her next novel, scrapbooking, or being the “Mamarazzi” at any number of child-oriented events. Even though she realizes there will never be enough hours in any given day, Monique tries very hard to enjoy the journey that is her life. She is the author of the middle-grade Ginnie West Adventure series, a picture book titled “Popcorn,” and in the process of releasing two new series in the near future-a family drama and a middle-grade fantasy.

Mining the Pain

July 15, 2015

Travis Heermann

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Pain is a part of life. Suffering is the human condition. It rains down on us and we wallow in it. It eats at our guts and we keep feeding it until there’s nothing left but a shell.

If there is anything that every single member of the human race holds in common, it is one thing.

Love.

All of us have loved. Most of us have lost. Lovers, children, parents, friends, pets. Betrayals, unravelings, deaths, or simply unrequited yearnings. All love comes together, and then it must, inevitably, come apart. Someone said that all love stories ultimately end in tragedy.

Rather than philosophize all the live-long day, I should point out that this is going somewhere.

Artists are uniquely suited among us to use that pain to illuminate the human condition. Music and poetry and prose comes along at just the right moment, lances that boil of loss that’s festering in one’s soul and lets healing begin.

On the way to the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2009, I was driving through the forests of upstate New York toward New Hampshire, with a background noise of hurt emanating from how a woman I really loved was breaking my heart. And then some song I had picked up on a free Starbucks iTunes card cycled through my iPod for the first time and blasted a hole in my heart ten-miles wide, splattering bits of my soul all over the inside of the car. The song was “Sometime around Midnight” by Airborne Toxic Event, and it evoked a tidal wave of sad, sick, helpless desperation that I swam in for the next several hours. I listened to it over and over, memorizing every word. That song, in that moment, was about me.

So I arrived at Odyssey, started getting to know my amazing classmates and teacher, and settled in. The first week brought in the award-winning horror writer Jack Ketchum as a guest instructor. During his lecture, he said something I will never forget:

“In your writing, examine love always, and binding.”

And then Ketchum went on to explain that stories are almost always about love coming together, coming apart, or strengthening, renewing, reaffirming the bonds between characters. There are, of course, exceptions, but anytime you’re dealing with human beings in conflict, the crux of the story is almost always one of love’s multitude of forms. Even war stories are often the about the camaraderie among soldiers.

His lecture crystallized for me what I had been writing about for years. And throughout the rest of the workshop, I applied this newfound insight in every story I wrote.

And all that pain I had experienced in the car, I poured into the stories. They were raw, dripping with emotion. But they were real.

Today, in the midst of writing this, I was procrastinating over on Facebook, and another quote popped up on a friend’s feed:

“Great writing is not perfect; it’s real. It bleeds and leaves a trace.” – Jordan Rosenfeld, A Writer’s Guide to Persistence

The writing I produced in the midst of that pain back then is still some of my favorite, because it all came straight from the depths. It was far from perfect, but it certainly left a mark on me.

Writers of all stripes are uniquely suited to distill our pain into art. But what makes it “art,” rather than commonplace catharsis? Does anybody really want to read your therapy? Unlikely. It’s not the fact that you’ve had the courage (or neediness?) to put your pain on the page and show it to people. It needs to offer the reader something of value: a unique insight or perspective. What do you want the give the reader as they walk away?

Growth is a good place to start. People lose patience quickly with those who wallow in their pain for interminable periods and never learn from it, never get past it, or repeat the same mistakes over and over, and so will readers. What did you learn from your pain? Will your characters learn it too? What does your story have to say about love and binding? This discussion is leading us straight into the idea of “theme.”

You may not know what your story is about until you type THE END, but you should be able to look at it with an objective eye and identify its theme. The hard part here is being able to look past whatever emotions you mined to build the story to look at it objectively. All that raw emotion feels absolutely, 100% true and real to you, but not necessarily to the reader. You still must have the ability to lead them into it.

Just like nothing should get in the way of love, the writer should allow nothing to get in the way of writing about it, especially not worries about who will read it. You may have loved and lost, but maybe you can get a good story or two out of the experience.

About the Author: Travis Heermann

Travis Heermann’s latest novel Spirit of the Ronin, was published in June, 2015.

Freelance writer, novelist, award-winning screenwriter, editor, poker player, poet, biker, roustabout, he is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the author of Death Wind, The Ronin Trilogy, The Wild Boys, and Rogues of the Black Fury, plus short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines such as Perihelion SF, Fiction River, Historical Lovecraft, and Cemetery Dance’s Shivers VII. As a freelance writer, he has produced a metric ton of role-playing game work both in print and online, including content for the Firefly Roleplaying Game, Legend of Five Rings, d20 System, and EVE Online.

In August, 2015, he’s moving to New Zealand with a couple of lovely ladies and a burning desire to claim Hobbiton as his own.

You can find him on…

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Grief and Method Writing

July 13, 2015

Kim May

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Method acting (using memories of your own painful experiences in order to convey that same emotion in a performance) is a subject that actors often have opposing views on. Either they think it’s the only way to effectively convey strong emotions or they think it’s a cheat that does more damage to the actor’s psyche then it’s worth.

Oddly, method writing doesn’t have the same stigma. Maybe it’s because it’s incredibly hard to create when we’re feeling strong emotions like grief. It could also be because some of those experiences were so painful that we don’t want to revisit those memories for any reason. However, if you are able to string words together in the proper order when those painful moments arise you can use them to add depth and authenticity to your writing that it may not otherwise have.

Last year I attended the Anthology Workshop that Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith do every winter. It’s very intense and requires a lot of prep work; most of which is writing six short stories for six specific themed anthologies, each edited by a different professional editor, in six weeks. I was determined to write all six. Not only did I want to get the most out of the workshop (it’s not cheap) but I also didn’t want to let Kris and Dean down since they were kind enough to let an unpublished writer (me) into the workshop.

Unfortunately the day I started writing the first story my cat stopped eating. She was almost nineteen years old and her mobility had been declining for several months. In fact I had to place the giant tackle box I store my make-up and hair pieces in (old theater habit) next to the bed so she could use it as a stair. Having watched her brothers go through a similar decline prior to their deaths, I knew what was coming.

I had so much invested in the workshop that I was hesitant to pull out, especially since I didn’t know exactly how long she had left. She outlived her eldest brother by a decade so I kept writing in the hope that she would hang in there long enough for me to finish the last story. All of this weighed heavily in my mind when I wrote Blood Moon Carnival, which is in the anthology pictured above. All of the sadness, fear, and grief I felt I poured into that story. It wasn’t easy but the end result was definitely worth it. Without that experience the protagonist’s reactions wouldn’t have right. Grief for a friend or grandparent, while intense, is different than grief for a spouse or child — something I didn’t realize until I experienced it.

As I said before, because it’s hard to create when intense emotions like this take over your mind you shouldn’t feel bad if you can’t utilize them in the moment. I think the only reason it worked for me was that I did it prior to her death. I certainly couldn’t have done it right after her passing. If you’re not able to use the experience while the memories are still fresh, you can draw on them later. These kind of memories don’t diminish with time.

Always (or Never?) Leave Your Readers Hanging

March 18, 2015

Nathan Barra

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Every so often, I hear a writer claim that everyone must “Always end your (book/chapter/scene/page/sentence/introductory clause) on a cliffhanger.” Yes, maintaining your reader’s momentum through the story is essential. Yes, cliffhangers can be an effective means of doing just that. Extremely so. By their very nature, cliffhangers leverage the reader’s investment in character or story to push the narrative forward and create a sense of urgency. However, they also run the risk of backfiring and driving readers away if used improperly or cheaply.

This sort of manipulation typically takes one of three forms. In the first instance, a beloved character is threatened, but neither their fate nor their response to the danger is revealed. It is a sort of dramatic pause, like cutting to a commercial break in your book. The emotional draw in this instance is dread; the reader wants to know that the character will survive the encounter. They keep reading to find this answer.

Another option is to have a powder keg moment. In this structure, the reader has been anticipating a specific event, usually some sort of violent conflict. It is akin to watching the fuse burn towards a keg of gun powder. The reader knows that the explosion is coming. They have been waiting for it, bracing for it. However, in the moment before the explosion of action, there is a prolonged stillness and the scene is cut. In this case, the draw is anticipation. The reader needs to see how the events play out and if those events match how they thought the scene would progress.

The third major case is what I sometimes call “the First Boot Drops.” A major story event occurs, often unexpected, but before the characters or reader have time to fully react, the story cuts. Though the threat to the character is implicit, the reader’s tension comes from not knowing what will happen next. They are drawn forward by their need to witness those consequences. They are waiting for the other boot to fall.

In all three cases, cliffhangers play upon the reader’s need to know the resolution to a threat against a beloved character. The situation must represent a believable and immediate threat whose consequences would be severely and personally damaging to the PoV. For that to happen, the reader must be deeply enough invested in the character to feel a sense of urgency. Used too early in the story, before a strong bond is developed between reader and PoV, the technique will feel like a cheap ploy.

The threat’s believability hinges on the reader’s trust of the author’s skill. I see cliffhangers as an addendum to the writer’s contract with the reader. They accept the situation because they believe that the writer will pay off on the promise with a satisfying resolution. Revealing that the character was never actually threatened after all is cheating. You might get away with pulling that sort of bait and switch once, but over use of cliffhangers will numb your reader to threats against the character. Once they come to believe that any threat against the character is an instance of “crying wolf,” it’s game over for your book.

As for immediacy, it is perfectly legitimate to cut to another PoV in order to draw out the suspense. However, the contents of that second PoV must be interesting enough to keep the audience moving forwards until you cut back to the character you left hanging. Furthermore, the threatened character needs to resolve their situation to pay off on the tension. Lag for too long, and the effect is lost.

Cliffhangers are an effective tool, not a one size fits all solution for every situation. They require authorial trust and reader commitment to be effective, as well as an impeccable sense of timing. Used too often, they begin to feel cheap and lose their effectiveness. However, betraying your promise to the reader is even worse. False anticipation will drive readers away faster than any other authorial sin.