Category Archives: Life Philosophies

Using What Scares You

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I went to a publishing conference in New York some years ago, and an agent said that a great author is a great storyteller. You can have all the craft and technique in the world, but if you aren’t a good storyteller, you won’t become a true success. Alternately, you can have the worst craft and know nothing of technique and be the next huge star of the publishing world. Yet, she could not define what made a good storyteller, like it’s some nebulous thing that cannot be truly understood. She was in the “you can’t learn it, you just have to be born with it” camp, a believer in which I am not.

But what is good storytelling if it’s not the expert use of craft and technique? I’ve been puzzling over it for years and I think I finally figured out a rather large component—a good storyteller is one who can tap into emotion with every word.

We humans, above all else, are creatures of emotion. We like to think we are creatures of intellect and reason and morality, but  these things are constructs we’ve created to put limitations and controls over the nasty, hind-brain, instinctual animal side that is human emotion. Emotion motivates us in pretty much everything we do. Our desire to feel happiness, love, safety, pleasure all shape our choices. Our desire to not feel pain, sorrow, grief, all push us to move in a particular direction, even if it’s subconsciouly. Every choice we make is rooted in our emotional health, or lack thereof. Our need to feel one emotion over another.

The crazy thing is, everyone human being past, present, or future feels the same emotions. Emotion is the one, true universal language. It is the one thing we all as a species, share, and no emotion is more familiar to us all than fear. Writing our fear, more than any other emotion, can truly raise a writer’s prose to new heights.

There’s two ways of writing what frightens us, and both are equally beneficial. The first is the obvious definition—if we want our audience to fear something, start with what we, ourselves, are the most afraid of. J.K. Rowling once said that she decided to put giant spiders in the Forbidden Forest in Harry Potter and Chamber of Secrets because she herself was afraid of spiders. Similarly, Peter Jackson’s rendering of Shelob in the Return of the King was built off his personal arachnophobia. Think of it as a mind hack. It’s easier to write what we know, how we personally feel about a particular thing or situation when we write about something that makes us feel the emotion we want to invoke. It’s easy to make spiders terrifying if the author is terrified of the creepy bastards, but harder to make a horse frightening if they make the author all warm and fuzzy on the inside.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a monster. It can be a fear of rejection, a fear of success, a fear of fear itself. It’s making the fear personal that’s the key, no matter what genre or sub-genre we are writing. Every genre deals with some sort of fear, and the more we make that fear our own, the easier it is to make the reader feel it with us.

The second way of looking at writing what one fears isn’t so obvious, and it’s something we all face at one point or another. It’s taking on those scenes that make us cringe. You know those scenes, the ones that make us uncomfortable or leave us at a loss. Wether its fight scenes or sex scenes or scenes of moral uncertainty, we all have a scene somewhere that tempts us to just skip it and have it happen off screen. After all, the worst fear of any writer is that an important, necessary scene will suck and bring the whole piece down.

But nine times out of ten, that seemingly impossible scene will become one of the more powerful moments in a story. Dan Wells once said that a scene in I Am Not a Serial Killer, where the protagonist draws a knife on his mother, was an especially difficult scene to write, but the final product is one of the most emotionally impactful moments in the book. Alternately, I have a friend who kept skipping over scenes where people were fighting (verbally or physically) because he wasn’t comfortable with violence, but it left his work lacking conflict and the story suffered because of it.

Part of why this is so effective, I think, is that the struggle to get the scene written and fear that it won’t work makes us slow down and take a long, hard look at what we’re doing, much more so than a scene that just plops itself down on the page. Difficult scenes force us to pull out all the stops, to dig deep and give it our all, thereby forcing us to put our best work on the page because anything less would just prolong the torture. Also, fear is conflict, and whether it’s felt by the character or just subconsciously by the author, it puts an edge, an undercurrent in the scene that can lift it above simple prose. It’s always the scenes I didn’t want to write, the ones that kick my ass, that I always end up the most satisfied with, and I think it’s because of the fear. If I wasn’t afraid of what I was writing, the writing would not be as good. Period.

Use the fear, share it. It won’t be easy, but more likely than not, your readers will feel it, and what they feel is what will stay with the reader long after they finish the story.

The Critique Group Waltz: Is Yours in Step?

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Having been approaching this Real Fiction Writer gig for something like 25 years, from fits and starts in the early days to the full-time efforts nowadays, I have considerable experience with in-person critique groups. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. There’s almost always some value, but is that overshadowed by hidden “costs”?

Critique groups have infinite permutations out there: genre, format, frequency, membership, etc. But something for new writers to keep in mind—easy to lose track of this in their exultant joy or fear that they won’t be able to find any other group—you are there to serve your writing.

You are there because you want something. Before you join, you should be clear about your goals and aspirations. After you’ve joined, reflect often on whether the group is serving your needs.

Critique groups are great for:

  • Helping fix problems with stories and novels
  • Exchanging industry news and opportunities
  • Increasing your writing skills
  • Camaraderie, community, and mental health

Benefits of Critique Groups (and their evil flip-sides)

“We meet on the fourth Tuesdays of odd-numbered months at 6 a.m. under the bridge. Bring your whole novel.”

The first criteria for determining whether a critique group is right for you is when it meets. The less easy, regular, and accessible its meeting times, the less useful it’s likely to be. I’ve tried groups that meet once a month or less, and they’re just not as useful, especially when I’m writing at a pace that a career demands. If your stuff only comes up for critique once every two or three months, ask yourself if that’s really enough for you.

  • Does the group format allows critiques of what you’re bringing?
  • Does the group meet often enough to form a cohesive unit? Too seldom? Too frequently?
  • Is the location conducive to a safe, open atmosphere?
  • What is the balance of give and take? If you have to contribute critiques on 80k words before you get to submit a single novel chapter, is that really worth your time?

Chicken Soup for the Bedraggled, Desperate, Down-trodden Writer’s Soul

Critique groups can be a great place to receive encouragement and support from fellow bedraggled, desperate, down-trodden writers. Finding your tribe for the first time can be an enormously valuable, uplifting experience. Cultivating them as friends and colleagues can reap benefits down the road as group members make some sales and advance their careers.

However, except for an infinitesimal, lightning-struck handful of the Anointed, a writing career can be best described as The Long Slog, and not everyone handles the daily reality of that with equal aplomb. Like a romantic relationship gone bad, your formerly brilliant group can devolve into a great seething swamp of bedraggled, down-trodden desperation—and suck you down with it. Jealously, resentment, and animosity can emerge in critiques, sometimes so subtly and unexpectedly that you don’t see it at first. Critiques should be honest, but also respectful and tactful. They should critique the work, not the writer. Group meetings should be a safe place for the exchange of ideas, supportive and constructive. You get enough emotional abuse from the rejection process without putting up with poison in a group of colleagues.

Balancing the Balance

One of the keys to a good critique group is that everyone should be at comparable levels of skill/career. However, that doesn’t mean you all have the same skill sets. In one of my current critique groups (I’m actually a member of two groups), two members are copyediting/language clarity vipers, another a gunslinging history expert, another with a fight choreographer’s eyes for the movement of a scene, and another with a firm grasp of a scene’s emotional landscape. This is the nature of an awesome critique group. (This group was a tremendous help in reviewing a rough early draft of Spirit of the Ronin.) Balance, Grasshopper.

However, while a broad array of skill sets is valuable, a broad disparity in skill level is not. When a group is newly formed or a new member comes in, balance can be thrown off. The give and take, the flow of feedback, needs to be roughly equal.

It can be extremely frustrating for a writer with more advanced skills and experience to critique the work of less experienced one, because she could, if she chose, pour hours of feedback into a short story where she can see the innumerable grammatical errors, punctuation problems, scene construction problems, clichés, incomprehensible plotting, false starts—the entire host of regrettable, understandable, and yet rankling newbie mistakes laid out before her like the vastness of the sea. Soon realizing this, she will wonder why, when she has insufficient time to write for herself, she’s spending so much time critiquing someone whose skills are still in the early stages. And the kind of critique that she needs—theme, rhythm, structure, nuance—is often beyond the newbie writer’s critique capabilities.

The flip-side of this for the newer writer is that the advanced writer is giving feedback that he doesn’t know how to use. He gets a manuscript back that looks dipped in the blood of a thousand red pens. And his spirit is crushed.

Building Skills Together

Another argument for joining a group of roughly similar level is that critiquing builds writing skills. It’s basic pedagogy in teaching English composition, and it’s a mainstay of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, of which I am an alumnus. Critique groups can expose your own unique writerly tics—over-description, overuse of “that” or “-ly” adverbs, underuse of plot logic—and help you fix them. Finding problems in the manuscripts of others teaches you how to find them in yours.

No one can critique to a higher level than their own set of skills. Some of the feedback from less advanced writers will be useful—all reader response is useful in some way—but in the end, the more advanced writer will be getting far less in the exchange, and the newer writer may get her manuscript bled upon with a red pen in ways that are unhelpful.

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

If you look deep enough, the literary world is filled with critique groups, pockets of famous writers who critique each other. George R.R. Martin, for example, is part of a long-time writers’ group that has been together for many years, and all of them are accomplished novelists. Such pockets exist everywhere, at all levels. If a group works well and remains together over years and decades, there are tremendous opportunities for members to help one another along this most difficult of creative paths. Promoting each other’s books, sharing industry information like anthology calls for submission, and “so-and-so talked to this editor who said…”

You likely won’t be able to join one of those pockets, but you just might become part of your own illustrious literary pocket.

Groups stay together because there is something about them that works for each member. Friendship, feedback, helping spackle over plot holes, giving triage to characters dying of two-dimensionality, and having some folks to thank on the Acknowledgements page of your bestselling novel. Those are the benefits.

Again, reflect on your needs and goals from a critique group and evaluate whether your group is meeting your needs. If you don’t feel like these are anywhere in sight, it might be time to move on. Or form a new group on your own.

About the Author: Travis Heermann

Heermann-6Spirit_cover_smallTravis 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.

He lives in 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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Your Support Net (Work)

Life Philosophies Mary Pletsch Self-Awareness Work-Life Balance 1 Comment

A writing community is made up of lots of different people with different life experiences, different skills, and different connections.  If we were all the same, maybe community wouldn’t be so important.  If writers were all interchangeable, we might only need community for social time.

But because we’re all different, our community can offer so much more.   Nobody can be an expert on everything, and sometimes hours of research can’t make a character or plot point as realistic as a conversation with someone who’s been there.

I’m a pilot.  I’ve been contacted by writers wanting to know how airplanes work, whether the maneuvers they were describing would be possible, whether their story “felt real.”

I’m not a doctor, but my husband is.  If I’ve got a character with a brain injury or a medical student who wants to date his former patient without breaking professional boundaries, I’m going to run my story by him.  And he’s not only my personal resource, either.  He’s had a long conversation over coffee with another friend of mine, discussing the physiology of werewolves for her novel-in-progress.

These connections aren’t limited to stories, either.  When I said I wanted to do a launch party for some of the anthologies I had stories in, I’d never done a launch before.  But Marie Bilodeau had.  And using her contacts in the Ottawa sci-fi community, my desire for a launch party turned into On the Brink, a series (that’s right, more than one) of launches for up and coming new authors in the Ottawa area.

When I first started submitting my stories for publication, I felt a little nervous.  Much to my surprise, an editor I knew from my fandom days was taking submissions for an anthology.  Had I not submitted a story that was of equal quality to the others she selected, I wouldn’t have gotten in.  But if I hadn’t known the editor–if I hadn’t kept in contact with her via Facebook–I would never have known that she was taking submissions.  (I discovered the Open Call facebook groups, Duotrope, and other market listings, later on!)

In fact, the only reason I went to Superstars–and met the Tribe, became a Fictorian, and appeared in the Purple Unicorn anthology (and upcoming Red Unicorn anthology) was because another writer friend of mine–not a Superstars instructor–posted about it on her blog.

And what goes around comes around–when the same person really needed to talk to a police department in Maine to get correct information for her recent novel, I was able to use my personal contacts to make that introduction happen.

Writers share information.  Opportunities.  Feedback.  Advice.  Maybe you don’t know how to do something, but someone else you know does.  Or maybe someone else has a main character who’s about to climb Mount Everest, but he doesn’t know a lot about mountain climbing.  If that’s what your mom does for a living, you can help that person out.

As with all things, moderation is key.  You won’t win yourself long-term support if you’re the person who’s always demanding help without ever giving anything in return.  Equally, you won’t build yourself a career as a writer if you spend all your writing time helping other writers instead of writing your own stuff.  But when everyone contributes fairly, the writing community becomes a big support net(work), and it lifts us all up.

Turning Milestones into Stepping Stones: Why Accountability Groups Work

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What is an accountability group?

  • it’s about being accountable for or answerable to the goals we set;
  • it’s where the internal realities of the writing life, the successes, the failures, the setbacks, the need for encouragement or motivation, can be expressed to others who understand;
  • sometimes it’s a form of therapy;
  • it’s a place to set goals; and
  • it’s about being motivated because we’ve made a promise (mostly to ourselves) that we want to keep.

All these things make accountability groups different from critique groups. Unlike a critique group, it’s not about honing your craft. Rather, it’s about the writing life and being accountable for the decisions we make.

Mostly though, accountability groups are about turning those huge milestones, like writing the 100,000 word novel in three months, into the stepping stones which help us manage and achieve our goals. Every marathon is run one step at a time, every book is written one word at a time and in either activity, pacing is paramount for success. Accountability groups help us pace our efforts and they provide the team to support us if we falter.

No one is as hard on writers as we are ourselves. The loudest critic is the one in our head and sometimes the only way to still that critic is through the support of our peers. It’s okay if a goal wasn’t met. It’s okay if something didn’t work out and if we’re not superhuman. We will live another day to write.

Accountability groups are a place to discuss what’s happening, a safe place to say, “Hey, I accomplished this!” or, “This didn’t work out as I’d expected.” or, “I so totally didn’t meet my goals!” It’s a place to share the wins, swallow the losses, and to set our sights on new goals. It can also be a place to brainstorm, ask advice, solve a problem, get encouragement and reassurance. It’s a place to set both small and large goals that are in line with the business plan. Most importantly, it’s a place where everyone understands.

I belong to two groups, an on line group and a local group. The difference between the groups is that the email group is weekly and the local one meets every three weeks. That allows me to set different targets and deal with different issues as they occur. The industry experience in the groups is very different and that provides me with a broader support group.

I haven’t been active in either for a while – the local one disbanded for the summer and I took a break from the online group too. When I’m not productive (aka life interfered with the writing plan in a major way), I don’t contribute much to my groups. That’s okay because they’re still there for me. I do go to the local one and the conversations are stimulating and encouraging. I continue to follow the discussions on the email group because it’s interesting to see what people are doing and if there’s a problem I can help with, I will. But the real reason I stay in touch with both groups is that it is a community of understanding friends that are there for me no matter what.

Turning huge milestones into manageable steps, supporting each other when we falter, celebrating when goals are met – those things make accountability groups worthwhile. Thank you my friends for your support.