Blogger: Janet Kobobel Grant
If you’re like me, you’re always on the lookout for resources or creative ways to approach the writing craft or to be at the top of your publishing game. We can use all the help we can get!
Crafty Writing Tip
This audio CD on fiction writing, The Hero’s 2 Journeys, consists of the content from workshops presented by Michael Hauge and Christopher Vogler. Here is how Amazon describes the CD’s premise:
MAKE YOUR STORY THE BEST IT CAN BE — ON 2 LEVELS
Hear each superstar teacher present his unique approach to . . .
A) The OUTER JOURNEY, the essential structural principles driving every successful plot. Each brings years of practical experience and extensive research to 1) Story Structure, 2) Character Arc and 3) How to Give Your Story Greater Commercial Appeal. Full of specific examples.
B) The INNER JOURNEY, the deeper storyline that makes a story truly great. HAUGE’S VIEW: The Hero moves from hiding within a protective identity to experiencing his or her true essence. VOGLER’S VIEW: The Hero’s inner need is invisible at first, but is revealed to the Hero by the end of the story.
Sometimes those who develop these paradigms
to help writers to think about their stories overstate how the concept works for all manner of writing (which I think kind of happens here), but nonetheless, the ideas presented are stimulating.
Crafty Organizational Tips
Looking for organizational ideas that will make you more productive? Read this article.
Crafty Perspective on Being Daring
Hesitating to dip in and try something new? Seth Godin has a thought-provoking perspective on that.
Now it’s your turn to share.
What craft book/webinar have you discovered lately that has your creative juices flowing?
What writerly technique has worked for you to craft a better book? (Reading aloud, starting your novel in the middle to jumpstart the storyline, etc.)
What little organizational discovery has brought some relief to your overstuffed writing life?
What tip has moved you to a new level with your marketing/publicity efforts?
TWEETABLES
Tips on being #productive as a writer. Click to tweet.
#Writing tips exchange going on now via lit agent’s blog. Click to tweet.
My problem (or blessing) is that every day is different. Sometimes my dear hubby is home and we eat dinner and watch a bit of television together. Sometimes he leaves for a meeting before I get home. Some days I go to work early or stay late. Other times someone has a crisis, or needs a hospital visit, or a shoulder to cry on. Occasionally, someone cancels and I have an unexpected empty evening.
*”Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete” (James 1:4). Thus I plod on. It isn’t steady, it isn’t trendy, it isn’t neatly summed up with a set of bullet points. But I’m making progress and maturing as a writer. One day, my WIP will be complete. And I’ll move on to the next challenge–with another flexible plan, continual prayer and a persevering heart.
And you will succeed mightily, Shirlee, for you are a strong woman of deep faith.
Shirlee, I understand. When I had a day job with a regular schedule I got more done in my spare time than I accomplish now that I’m retired. I go from one meeting or task to another without using the bits and pieces of time in between effectively.
Interesting post, Janet, and fascinating links.
* I suspect that to get the full benefit from Hague and Vogler’s CD, one really needs to at least have a working knowledge of Joseph Campbell’s work, at the very least the PBS series “The Power Of Myth” or its companion book.
* One of Campbell’s main points is that the wedded metaphors of myth and ritual keep a society stable – and when these are seemingly stripped away by science (as Saul Bellow put it, science “cleaned house” on belief) a culture loses its compass. One may posit that it’s happening now, in the US, but this is merely a mirror of what every ‘primitive’ culture went through when it met one that was more ‘advanced’. This time, however, the enemy is within our breast; the seculars who claim a sort of atheistic gnosis are also well-trained (in our universities, using our tax dollars) to shout down those who would question their flawed and ultimately futile arguments. (To wit, one of Sagan’s favourites, ‘Evolution via Cosmic Ray Mutation’. Sagan overlooked the fact that the vast majority of viable mutations – that don’t kill – also result in sterility, and that the theory’s statistically insupportable. But Sagan had a series on PBS, which BILLIONS and BILLIONS of people watched, and how could he have been wrong? That’s not his only foray into pseudoscience; his quoting of the Drake equation on the number of ‘communicative’ civilizations in the universe is a hoot. Its ‘probabilistic’ genesis is wild…uh, burro…guesswork.)
* My feeling is that the Christian writer has to have a firm grip of what I would call ‘Christian Mythology In Context’ – not that Christianity is a myth, mind you, but that (as Lewis wrote) what makes Christianity plausible (and thus divinely guided) is precisely the fact that it is mythology come to life; the innocent God, for example, slain by treachery and restored to life echoes the story of Balder in Norse mythology.
* When we recognize and ACCEPT our place in a historical structure of myth, as the true and living culmination, brought to purity, of those dark and bloody sagas, then, I think, we will make quick inroads into the secular world.
* For it is, in fact, the secular world, the victim of academicism and technocracy gone amok, that has a hidden need. It needs US.
Spot on, Andrew. I can explain the simple way we learned in middle school to calculate the odds of rolling a particular number playing dice and the fact of molecular biology that all the amino acids in proteins are only one of two possible mirror images (same for all the sugars in DNA and RNA). Then I can prove it’s impossible for even the molecules that make up living cells to accidentally form in some prebiotic soup. (For the human genome, it’s one chance out of 2 multiplied by itself 3 billion times chances, i.e. zero). *Anybody reading here could prove it, too. The whole proof takes less than 5 minutes, even with explaining mirror images and dice odds, but scientific facts that contradict the secular origin-of-life myth are deliberately ignored by folks like Sagan and suppressed in public school curriculums. Simple chemistry is ignored because it doesn’t support the myth. Maybe I should write out the demonstration and post it at my blog site.
I don’t feel as though I can add much in the way of tips. I am too new at this. I will share with you something I did when scribbling my first draft. Sometimes a later scene would pop into my head and it was so great and powerful that I went straight to writing it and went back to the rest of the story after.
I like the concept of an outer and inner journey. It’s a nice, distinct way of putting it. I think just remembering that will help.
Off topic. I wanted to share with you that I sent off my first agents submissions last night! Eeek! My first toe in the pool of publishing. I now eagerly await my first rejection 🙂 excited and nervous!
That later-scene vision has come to me too. I use a technique I learned from meeting management–to “park” great ideas in our parking lot (a designated space on the board or flip chart that everyone can see). So I write just enough to contain the thought and park it. Goodness knows, I can’t have that great vision drive off into the sunset!
*Acceptance or rejection, sending off your first submission is a big accomplishment. Congratulations! I suspect that you feel like I did at grad school. After guiding three kids through their many tests, I waited for my first test grade in decades–heart thumping, full of both anticipation and fear. Breathe, my young friend. God has it under control.
Congratulations, Nicholas! It takes courage to send off that submission. 🙂
Reading and reading aloud has really helped me. Reading great works helps because you learn to distinguish between great writing and the areas that need help. You learn to notice scenes that didn’t move the story forward, or notice dialog that was just something a guy wouldn’t say, etc. I’ve learned so much here at B&S. I don’t know if reading is making me a better writer, I pray so, but it’s helping me see and hear what I like and don’t like.
Shelli, I believe reading, especially really fine writing, elevates a writer’s game. If we don’t know what we’re aiming for, how will we ever hit it?
I have some tips for writing novels that interconnect in time and share some characters but are not actually sequels. I’m writing historical in the Roman period with one coming to market, three finished manuscripts ready to polish, and two about one half written.
*I use PowerPoint as a visual aid to maintain consistency among the plots and people. I made a set of overlapping family trees that show major and minor characters, including their ages. Minor characters in the first and second have become major characters eight years later in the fourth and fifth. A major character in the second is minor in four others.
*The third (publishing first in October) and fourth overlap in time with several shared characters. I made a timeline that combined events in both to make sure a letter from one arrived at the same time in each.
*Like Nicholas and Shirlee, I get future scenes in my head while writing. I also stop the current scene to write something about the new one. Sometimes it’s a few notes like Shirlee, but other times I’ll switch and write the full new scene. It happens for full stories and not just scenes. I write on whichever novel I’m feeling inspired to work on that day. Switching between also helps build a consistent story world between novels. Sometimes I rewrite part of one in light of what just happened in another.
I also have a PowerPoint file filled with images of any facet of life that I might need to describe or to hold in my mind as I’m writing a scene. My characters do a lot of traveling, so it has maps as well. That keeps the travel realistic so they don’t travel much farther in a day than is possible on a horse or sailing ship.
You’re juggling a lot by writing what sounds like several complex novels simultaneously. But you’ve found a system that really works to keep consistency and to be factually accurate.
Good for you!
My old day job trained me. I ran two completely different sconce projects plus two different engineering ones. It trained me to shift focus quickly. I’m never writing new material on more than two plots at once.
Multitasking, thy name is woman!
Ummm, Carol, I’ll take issue with your last statement. Multitasking is gender neutral. It’s just what you’ve got to do.
Science not sconce. Never worked on sconce. Fie, fie upon spellcheckers and a comment box that won’t scroll on a phone.
Janet, this is off-topic, and I ask your pardon in advance – but this seems to be something writers should realize –
* As reported by Fox News, Amazon is culling negative reviews of the new Clinton/Kaine book, “Stronger Together”. Negative reviews are being removed, apparently on a daily basis, or simply blocked.
* It would seem to me that it’s vital for a Christian author to realize that reviews of their books may likewise by manipulated, depending on the political climate, and that a commercial website cannot be regarded as an unbiased arbiter.
* Here’s the link –
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/09/26/bias-alert-amazon-fixed-reviews-for-hillary-clintons-book.html
When I hear or see this type of report, I always like to check other sources to give me (hopefully) a balanced sense of what’s going on.
I was blessed to be able to take a one day seminar with Michael Hague back in February. I keep returning to his teaching on the character’s identity and essence and moving them from identity to essence. The perfect example is Michael in Tootsie. He begins the movie fully in his identity, an actor and bit of a jerk who uses women for his own purposes. As he dresses as Dorothy, he moves closer to his essence, a person with empathy and love for women and what they go through. By the end, he’s back as Michael the man, but fully in his essence, no more jerk. I love that journey, and aspire to write something even half as beautiful. I also turn to Donald Maass’s teachings about going deeper and getting to the inner fear that drives the character. When I start getting teary, I know I’m close.
Thanks Janet, great resources, and thanks to everyone for sharing your ideas.
Carrie, I agree that getting to a character’s inner fear is a great device for creating a three-dimensional character.
Janet,
*I don’t have any tips, but I do have a suggestion (and maybe everybody is light years ahead of me in this) : take a class or read a book on apologetics. I am taking a class at church called “Foundations” from Ken Ham’s “Answers in Genesis” ministry.
Although Ken Ham’s aim was to help Christians as they are speaking to people, the same points are useful for writers.
*He said out that in the 50’s and 60’s, before prayer and Bible reading were removed from schools, many countries were an “Acts 2” culture. People, even non-believers, knew Biblical facts. Now we live in an “Acts 17” culture, like the Greeks Paul spoke to. Ken Ham spent a good deal of time on the importance of knowing your audience (or, readers!)
*I took the class to help me be equipped to deal with possible questions about faith at my day job; I am finding it a valuable resource in writing also. I thought this worth passing along to others.
Peggy, I would add that reading any books about persuasion or influence can also be helpful to writers. We’re eager to persuade others to see the world the way we do. Thinking about ways to be more effective is a good exercise for us.
One huge help to me is to be with other writers who are going for the gold. This year I joined two completely different writing groups. It motivates me when I listen to everyone report out their new successes since the last month. I also get a variety of ideas from them. The other nice part is that I get to help new writers who are just starting out. It is then that I realize I already have lots of knowledge under my belt. It’s an encouragement to me and I don’t feel so much like a lone wolf anymore.
I’ve been reading “Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert in an online book club. It is not a Christian book and gets kind of crazy once in awhile, but I’m really enjoying it. Lots of great advice and inspiration there and it is hilarious and fanciful as well.