Category Archives: The Writing Life

Sitting in my gilded cage, my chicks chattering discontent gave me peace. I held them close while I frowned at the bars surrounding me…

This was the beginning of a story I wrote for my eldest daughter a few years ago. I’ve seen others similar, describing the freedom someone attained through the efforts of a mentor or loved one. Like them, I wrote this story to thank my sweet girl. At only 14 years old, she started me on the path of becoming a writer. She found my efforts at my first story, which years later became an award-winning novel in my Mankind’s Redemption series.

Since that day of discovery and encouragement, she’s been my biggest fan and a source of strength amid disappointments. Not only am I inspired by the woman she has become, but I’m also thankful for the inspiration she’s given to my career.

There’s another person who made a major difference in my life more than thirty years ago. PE teachers often get overlooked in the academic system, but my elementary PE teacher took a special interest, helping me to make changes that influenced the rest of my life for the better. A friend of mine found her contact information, but every time I tried to write to her, I couldn’t seem to put my thank you into the right words. I hadn’t seen her since I was a child. Would she think me ridiculous? Writing this post has reminded me of the joy of saying, “Thank you,” regardless of the years.

If you have that special someone in your life—friend, relative, or mentor—I encourage you to take a moment and drop them a note. It can be a card, an email, or a story, but it will be worth it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an email to write. Live grateful and prosper.

Colette Black lives in Arizona with her amazing family, two dogs, and a mischievous cat. Current publications include the Mankind’s Redemption series, The Number Prophecy series, The Black Side anthology, and an appearance in One Horn to Rule Them All: A Purple Unicorn Anthology. More info at: www.coletteblack.net

Turning Experiences into Method Acting

July 6, 2015

fictorians

Conventions Emily Godhand Horror Self-Awareness Successes Superstars Writing Seminars The Writing Life Writing as An Emotional Outlet 2 Comments

A Guest Post from Emily Godhand

Back in February of this year I was able to attend to Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta’s “SuperStars Writing Seminar” on a scholarship from Wattpad. This was a seminar to “teach you the business of being a writer” and boasted many instructors well known in the industry. I was given the opportunity to learn from individuals such as Jody Lynn Nye, Todd McCaffrey, James A. Owen, and Kevin and Rebecca themselves. And those are just the people I had the great fortune of meeting!

When I first learned I was picked for the scholarship, I was beyond excited to the point of being in actual disbelief. I felt like I had been eating a chocolate bar named Wattpad and was enjoying something pleasant and made me happy, and then suddenly I was holding a shiny golden ticket in my hand. But as happy as I was, I was so nervous I thought maybe it was a set up to a middle school joke come back to haunt me. You know the kind where someone said something positive and then laughed at you for actually believing it? That can’t just have been me, right?

Sometimes I can turn pretense into an art form and act full of grace and charm, when internally I’m screaming and shivering like a naked chihuahua about to piss itself. Factor in that crowds and hotels greatly trigger my PTSD, and I was ready to curl up in the corner, hug my knees, and rock back and forth until the world made sense again.

Within this internal cesspool of doubt and insecurity, and amidst schoolyard worries of “Will the other kids like me?” and “What if I’m not prepared enough? or worse, “What if they don’t like my story?!”, I did have those sickly feelings of hope and anticipation that this was going to be something wonderful at best, and at worst, great fodder for your writing.

Because new experiences can be a writer’s bread and butter.

And yet, writers have a certain reputation for being reclusive and introverted, withdrawn into a world of our own making where reality is just a thing for those without imagination. It’s true, writing is hard work that takes focus and some of us need our solitude to do that. The long nights fueled by IV drip caffeine. The sweat forming at your brow from the intensity of your thinking. Putting ass-in-chair for hours to finish that latest chapter. The incredible amount of work we put into our writing to the point that we should probably eat something. Preferably every day. And maybe even two or three times if we can afford to be away from your keyboard that long. I’m sure for some of us (…me) our core muscles are neglected to the point we’ve melted into hunched monstrosities with T-rex arms, and we haven’t seen the blessed light of day such that we shriek and cower when some well-intentioned soul opens the curtain. ((…just me?))

When I sat down to write, and I would have trouble describing something, or conveying an emotion, I was always given the advice “write what you know”. Then felt frustrated because I didn’t think I knew anything except maybe what it’s like to hide within the tiny walls of my office with just the rats and ennui for company. …And maybe also some random, dated pop-culture references. If I needed to write about characters that were self-absorbed recluses with awkward social skills and crippling self-doubt I had that down. Because that’s all I’d ever know unless I faced my anxiety as much as was healthy and explored the world around me. By not seeking out new experiences, especially challenging ones, I was limiting what I knew, and therefore limiting what I could write about.

I figured, I spend countless hours pretending to be individuals who face their fears and the unknown, so surely, truly, I could learn a little from method acting and borrow some of the character’s strength to be able to go to this seminar. And if I couldn’t and ended up numb and dumb with fear and anxiety? I write thrillers and horror stories. I could certainly make use of those feelings in my work.

I was fooling myself if I ever thought I could glean the secrets of the universe to translate onto pages by doing the same routine every day. I’m a human being first, and human beings tend to crave variety and novelty. Writing is hard enough, but it’s hard to write believably about things you haven’t seen or experienced.

When I needed to describe 16th Street Mall in downtown Denver, I put on some pants, left the house, and went to downtown Denver. I needed to know more than what it looked like, and I had the opportunity to learn. The pictures I found online were stunning, but photographers are known for getting the best shots of a place. It’d be the difference between your wedding photos and waking up to your partner in the morning. There’s a different type of beauty in authenticity.

What, it doesn’t always look like this?

The staged photos in the best light may not convey the actual feeling of being there: the noises, the smells, the weather, the conversations, the dress, the atmosphere. When I did go downtown, I witnessed a dirgesinger get heckled by buskers who broke into Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”. I got to speak to the buskers about their experiences and see how many artists were on the street. I couldn’t have done any of that from my house, and while it may not have made a significant difference in the overall plot of my story, those tiny details weren’t unnoticed by my readers, and contributed to their immersion in the story.

In that particular chapter there were several twists and turns and horror elements, but the realistic description of downtown Denver was what really hooked my readers. They also had comments on something else they liked, sure, but nearly every single person commented on the description of downtown Denver.

* The way you discuss Denver, it really comes to life and makes elements like the “prophet” even creepier.

* I love the way you describe Denver. You completely capture that downtown urban feel. The characters you create are all rich and vivid.

* I’ve never been to Denver. 16th Street sounds amazing.

* Sounds like a really neat downtown area, very artistically stimulating.

* Gotta say I loved the downtown scene, with the preacher and the singers. It kind of eased off the tension for a moment and painted a vivid picture of things that make the city unique.

….Success!

Still, it’s one thing to do something as simple as go downtown in my own city and simply report what I found there. It’s another to use my own experiences and feelings to empathize with my character and convey what they are feeling, especially if they are painful or negative.

When I had to do this with my main character’s recovery from her trauma and the first month of her PTSD, it was like finding that mental storage closet where you had shoved all your memories. And as your hand hovers over the knob, you’re not sure if some musty linens are going to fall on your head, or if they’re going to have every crawling, putrid thing topple down with them.

It was probably the hardest thing I ever had to write because it felt like tearing open an infected wound to clean it. Yet I would say it is also probably the truest expression of my own voice since for the most part I just told how I felt and my own experiences, and put those words in my character’s mouth.

This particular scene received the most praise out of all 60+ chapters (as of this writing).

* I can feel Annie’s sense of desperation to understand what happened, and her frustration at the world for wanting her to figure it out too fast.

* I can really feel Annie’s confusion, distress, her anger and frustration. My favourite part by far was her speech to the psychiatrist. Although I really hated him, he was written well.

* The psychology of grief and trauma came across as very genuine. The feeling of loss over someone’s death rarely manifests itself directly, at least not until years after the event.

* I think anyone who reads this is going to be able to feel the pain Annie is going through right now, and the way you’ve described her trying to cope is heartbreaking. I think this is probably one of your best chapters as far as the use of language goes, and I feel bad for Annie’s mom too… Just trying to help but she has no idea how. 🙁

So, how did things go at the Superstars Writing Seminar? Next time you read a piece by me about a character finding acceptance and understanding with a group when she was afraid of rejection, you’ll know.

About the Author:
Emily Godhand is a paranormal thriller author who lives in a book fort in Denver, CO, with seven rats who revere her as their Queen.

As former psychiatric technician, she draws her inspirations from her work and the constant nightmares she’s had for 13 years. As such, her works tend to focus on an exploration of trauma, immortality, and human consciousness.

Read her latest work on Wattpad, where she is an Ambassador.

Commonalities in our Journey

July 4, 2015

fictorians

Abby Goldsmith Conventions Ideas & Plotting Interacting With Fans Interacting With Professionals Motivation Self-Motivation Starting a Career Storyline Submissions The Writing Life 1 Comment

A Guest Post by Abby Goldsmith

When Nathan Barra asked me to write a guest post about why I write fiction, I hesitated. It’s a good question, and one that I haven’t pondered in years. I’ve been stuck in a rut. Not writer’s block, but paralytic self-doubt, questioning everything about why I chose to pour so much of my life into a career as a novelist. I’ve watched others rise from amateur to best-seller within less than half the time I’ve been struggling to get my novel series published. I lag behind most of my peers, editing and rewriting and editing and rewriting. I’m in danger of becoming a bitter, grizzled veteran.

Self-doubt is a cornerstone of every novelist’s life, I think. When I talk to other aspiring novelists, I hear commonalities in our journey. Most of us grew up with a love of reading. Most of us received praise from readers who adored our stories. Most of us bashed our heads against the harsh realities of the publishing industry, which seems to be shrinking from corporate mergers. From there, our paths diverge in two directions. Either we give up and quit writing novels, or we get published and continue onwards.

My path feels like the most extreme version of that. Rather than hiking a trail towards success, I’m navigating a storm-tossed sea, hurled about by towering tidal waves. The praise I receive is enough for a lifetime. My failures are EPIC. As for the part where I either get published or quit . . . I’m sailing between those routes, unable to get my novels traditionally published, unable to give up and quit. I’m preparing to self-publish a completed six-book-series, and I’m nearly paralyzed with the fear that it will all go wrong.

Most people, even committed writers, don’t base every major decision of their life around the dream of becoming a bestselling author. I suspect that most of my peers would have quit after more than decade of setbacks. Why am I so driven?

Childhood. That’s surely where most addictions and personality disorders form, and I suspect it correlates with dysfunctional families. I won’t detail how troubled my childhood was. Suffice it to say, I needed an escape. So I walked for hours, listening to music, inwardly cheering as my characters delivered justice to their enemies, or proved their worth to those who doubted them. Stories were my only way to feel powerful and in control. That feeling was better than anything I could get elsewhere. I was addicted.

By the age of twelve, I’d completed two novels, a series of short stories, and a trilogy of comic books. A literary agent working with Random House, unaware that I was a child, read my first manuscript and sent a scathing rejection letter, including the phrase, “It sounds like a mentally challenged person wrote this.” Upon learning my age, she offered to edit my manuscript and promote me as a child author, but I’d already taken her first letter to heart. I decided that my stories were unfit to be shared with anyone. They collected dust in shoeboxes.

In college, two of my student films were selected out of hundreds for special recognition, and received high praise in international film festivals. I began a promising career as an animator. With my confidence boosted, I dared to share chapters of a potential novel with an online critique group. Their reactions astounded me. Everyone in the group wanted to read more. They tore each other’s work to shreds, and rightfully so, but my work was exceptional.

After years of being ashamed of my writing skill, I reversed direction all at once. A dam burst. Within the space of one year, I completed a 520,000 word manuscript, a 59,000 word manuscript between drafts of the big one, and an unfinished 70,000 word novel. My boyfriend thought they were amazing.

Still worried that my skill was amateur, I asked for readers with trepidation. Part of me expected scathing rejections. Instead, I received a flood of support and praise that changed my life, and affects me to this day.

A programmer in New Zealand read all my manuscripts, and said, “SEND MORE!” A teenager in Norway did the same, telling me that he’d missed classes to read them under his desk at school. A woman I never met emailed me to say, “Whatever gift for storytelling exists, you have it.” The artist of my favorite web comic offered to endorse my novels, after reading. A coworker at my office tentatively agreed to try the big one. He began reading it in his cubicle. The next day at work, he said, “I got no sleep. I stayed up all night turning pages! You’ll have no trouble getting published, so stop worrying.”

And I did. From that point forth, I’ve considered myself a talented storyteller, although my prose and craft needed seasoning, and there are always aspects where I can improve. Literary agencies and publishers rejected those early manuscripts due to the usual bouquet of amateur issues: Point of view head hopping, passive voice overused, weak verbiage, and other problems that are familiar to career-minded writers.

To improve my craft, I went to the Odyssey Writing Workshop. George R.R. Martin liked the first chapter of my big novel, Catherine Asaro privately praised my short story, and I felt as if my skill would leap ahead light years after all I learned from editor Jeanne Cavelos. Encouraged, I scrapped the 520,000 manuscript and rewrote it from scratch, as two separate novels. They’ve each been whittled down to the 90,000 to 105,000 word range.

I wish I could say that all that effort led to success. It hasn’t. At least, not yet. The massive rewrite deadened the beginning, and I’ve had a hellish time trying to get it to appeal to the traditional publishing industry. On top of that, I’m no longer the same person who wrote the original rough draft. Fifteen years have passed. I believe I understand why epic saga authors, such as Patrick Rothfuss, struggle to finish. When a story has the weight of a magnum opus … when it feels too massive to do it justice … when the task requires decades of your personal life … well, I can only speak for myself, but there’s a damned lot of pressure to get it right. A project that huge only happens once. Humans don’t live long enough, or have enough energy, to do it twice.

I will write other novels. I have other big stories to tell, after I publish this series (the first two books are the rewritten rough draft from fifteen years ago). But this epic will always be more special to me than any others. It’s the story that began in my teens, and spanned my twenties and thirties. It’s the one that shaped the course of my life.

I write because I believe in my power to tell stories that amaze people, and leave them to reevaluate their world-views.

About the Author:
Stories and articles by Abby Goldsmith are published in Escape Pod, Fantasy Magazine, Suddenly Lost in Words, and several anthologies. She’s sitting on six unpublished novels, preparing for an epic debut. http://abbygoldsmith.com

Turning Point – Where I Found my Confidence to Write

July 3, 2015

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Ideas & Plotting The Writing Life No Comments

Where did you learn to write? Where do your story ideas come from?

These are the two questions I get asked most often. And when I tell people where I learned and how that learning now gives me my ideas, they most often shake their heads and say, “Really?”

I always loved stories and the power of words to whisk me away to other realms and realities. I wanted to write them, to tell them but I felt too shy, too awkward, too inadequate, and too intimidated. To overcome this, I took a university degree in English, and instead of feeling my confidence soar, I was devastated. How could I, a lowly kid from the farm, ever be as perfect, so lauded, or garner so much depth and awesomeness in words? The bar was set high and everything I learned taking that degree didn’t set my creativity free – it only intimidated it.

Oh, I still dabbled with ideas but achieved nothing of substance. I just didn’t know how to make it work. The answer, oddly enough, was found by going back to University, but not in English Literature classes.

My great revelation came when I studied Food Science at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Agriculture. That meant I had to take a variety of classes including Agricultural Economics. I worked for a while in that department because I had a gift for understanding and telling the stories found in numbers. That was second nature to me, but still, that wasn’t where I learned to write fiction.

My fiction writing emerged from studying chemistry and microbiology. In microbiology, I had to observe and explain worlds – what creatures they were composed of, how they came to be, what their effects were on the systems they were found in and so on. In chemistry, I had to explain cause and effect, or stated in writing terms, to observe, document, explain the characters’ (substances and elements) actions, reactions, and the consequences of those actions and reactions. Both courses taught me to be an astute observer, to document, to ask the what-ifs, to understand and explore their worlds.

The formulas for writing and working in a scientific environment are all the same – observe, document, ask the what-ifs, hypothesize, understand and explore.

So hail to economics, microbiology, chemistry, and physics too! They’ve kept me in good stead because now I see the stories in the world around me. For example, I’ve found them in a creek near my house, looking out an airplane window and seeing the Canadian Shield below me, visiting henges in England, on a Moroccan shoreline, in ancient digs in Crete, on an island, in my back yard and in all the people I’d like to know about.

Now I explore the rich world of what-if around me. It bursts with ideas and possibilities and my writing life abounds with stories yet untold. I may never be as perfect as the masters who had once so intimidated me, but I don’t care. All I care about is the world I know and explore and I revel in the joy of sharing it. My world now is filled with What-If?, How Come?, and Why Not? – aren’t those the questions children so often ask? That sounds like another story, for another time…

Happy writing!