Dogs Are Smarter Than People via Anchor: Recent Episodes
Carrie Jones
Welcome to Dogs are Smarter Than People with NYT and internationally bestselling quirky human author Carrie Jones, her slightly more normal husband, Shaun, and their dogs. Life tips. Writing tips. Dog noises. It's all here.
Bonus episodes of BE BRAVE FRIDAYS (telling people's stories of bravery) and LOVING THE STRANGE (all about celebrating the weird) and author-to-author interviews. Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, over on our substack, LIVING HAPPY, I’ve been talking a lot about creating our own realities in relation to success and meaning. This is really just sort of diving deep to realize that maybe your perspective isn’t the one you want.
When you attain your goals, do they satisfy you? That’s really the question. Listen to us talk about this, losing your junk (and word choice) and finding success your own way.
LINKS WE REFERENCECrafting Realities: Work, Happiness, and Meaning
Video Series on Managing Our Inner Worlds
https://shepherdexpress.com/puzzles/news-of-the-weird/news-of-the-weird-week-of-january-5-2023/
SHOUT OUT!The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Yep, we’re going there, because we’re the only self-development podcast that will.
Join us as we talk about brawls in the Waffle House, farting, and creating systems to actually achieve your goals.
DOG TIP FOR LIFESometimes you have to review the system to stop having resource guarding. Cough. Pogie. Cough.
SHOUT OUT!The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW!
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her poems every week on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
LINKS WE TALK ABOUThttps://www.thirstyfornews.com/2022/12/29/customers-start-wwe-style-brawl-in-texas-waffle-house/
We also talk about a link from Medium that won’t embed up there, but the link is in the narrative. Thanks for joining us and here’s to a good 2023!
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Since it’s the time of holidays for many religions, we thought it would be a great time to talk about the ancient types of drunk-foolery from the 1500s and how they still exist today.
And, a random story about a sleigh-riding Santa.
There’s a great post on Medium from back in November by Jack Shepherd one of Buzzfeed’s former directors. I know nothing about Jack Shepherd but he has a post “These Are the 8 Types of Drunk, According to the 16th Century” and since NYE is coming up, I wanted to have a podcast about it.
All of Shepherd’s list comes from Thomas Nashe wrote a pamphlet called “Pierce Penniless: His Supplication to the Devil.” Nashe was on this Earth in the late 1500s and he was a silly man.
DOG TIP FOR LIFEDon’t wait to be drunk to tell people you love them. Embrace who you are without the intoxicating liquors, human.
Links We Reference:https://nypost.com/2022/12/14/sleigh-riding-santa-claus-ticketed-by-grinch-cop-petty-to-say-the-least/
SHOUT OUT!The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW!
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Just so you all know, if my poem is about a relationship, it might not be about my own current relationship or even about me. :)
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Sometimes you see these little bastards in text or sometimes you might want to put them in there yourself. Gasp!
We aren’t here to tell you how to be fancy or not, but we are here to let you know how to be fancy correctly and not look like a schmuck.
E.g. is short for exempli gratia, or “for example.” But this is a REAL example, so you can use it when you mean, “here are examples.”
I.e. is short for id est, which pretty much means “that is” or “in other words.” This one you use like you’re saying “in other words” or “in essence.” It usually clarifies things.
So, you could say,
I like books, e.g. big books, small books, happy books, cook books, all books that rhyme, all books about crime, all books about time.
Someone might punch you if you say that, but whatever. You do you.
For i.e., you would write,
I like books, i.e., anything that I can read and is bound or on my Kindle or Nook. You’re clarifying what books are. Or you could say,
I like some books, i.e., anything by Carrie Jones and only Carrie Jones.
Shameless self plug up there.
Thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out my substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the other tips and submission opportunties and exercises are there.
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
This week we talk about the take-aways from spending time with the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, plus weird junk finds. Because why not?
Filmmaker Peggy Callahan spent a lot of time listening to spiritual leaders while working with author Doug Abrams who co-authored The Book of Joy.
She wrote for the Today Show, “Their message is needed now more than ever. We’re heading into the “most wonderful time of the year” and yet so many people are struggling. We’re wrestling with how to bring “joy to the world” when life is wrought with stress and challenges.”
They also created “Mission: JOY — Finding Happiness in Troubled Times,”a documentary.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE!There’s nothing wrong with loving your stuff. – Pogie the puppy.
SHOUT OUT!The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
I say all that, but sometimes I feature a Grammy Barnard Poem. Grammy Barnard died at the age of 102 and I was the youngest child by a lot of her youngest child, so in my head she was always older. I think she was in her 70s when I was born.
These poems make me feel a bit closer to her, allow me to imagine her in her 30s. And I like being able to do that. So, here’s a Grammy Barnard poem.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Weather vs Whether
It’s sexy to know the difference.
So, a lot of people mess up weather vs whether. I actually had one writer who just spelled the word consistently wrong as a totally made up word wether.
Anyway these bad boys are homophones which means they sound the same aloud, but they have different meanings and different spellings.
WEATHER – This is a noun or a verb. It can be what it’s like outside (hot, rainy, stormy, sunny_ or it can mean that you’re a bad ass and you’ve withstood some crap.
You have weathered the zombie apocalypse with nary a scratch.
Whoo, the weather today is amazing. It’s legit snowing glitter fairies.
WHETHER is no noun. It is no verb. This bad boy is a conjunction and it basically is the same thing as saying if. It connects choices in a sentences.
Yo, I plan to have a Bigfoot love affair whether or not he’s real.
Whether you think it is or not, I am so in love with how cool your rainbow farts are.
And there you go.
WETHER never works.
You can check out my blog here.
Thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out my substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the other tips and submission opportunties and exercises are there.
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
It’s part two of how to deal with being uptight about sex.Yes, this is a two-part podcast series Carrie isn’t cool with.Plus, we have a Florida man story about a bad choice in a Wal-Mart filled with cops.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE FROM SPARTY BOYTake your opportunities when you can and don’t let hangups hold you back. Even if you have to hump with a half-eaten burrito in your mouth, go for it if you want to.
LINKShttps://www.womansday.com/relationships/sex-tips/advice/a1004/get-over-your-sexual-hangups-92993/
https://nypost.com/2022/11/25/couple-gets-letter-revealing-creepy-secret-rooms-in-their-130-year-old-home/
https://www.foxnews.com/us/florida-man-busted-trying-steal-walmart-filled-cops-bad-idea-brad
SHOUT OUT!The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW!
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Last week, I took a little break because of the holiday in the U.S., but this week, we’re talking about cause and effect in fiction novels.
Troubleshooting Your Novel by Steven James has a big section about this:
He suggests asking yourself these questions to fine-tune your story.
- “Do realizations or insights occur after the event that caused them (as would naturally happen), or do I have things in the wrong order?
- “Does this scene move from cause to effect? If not, why not? Can I tweak the story to show the natural flow of events rather than stop after they’ve happened to explain why they did?
- “Does context dictate that I reverse the order to effect to cause? Rendering the story this way will force readers to ask, “Why?” Do I want them to do so at this moment in the book? Would lack of clarity about the character’s intention help readers engage with the story at this point? If it won’t, how can I recast it?
- “What will I do to ensure that each ball rolls naturally away from the one that just hit it, both in action sequences and in dialogue?”
And for a quicker fix, he suggests:
“Analyze every scene, as well as every paragraph, to weed out cause-and-effect problems. Pinpoint the connections between events. Does each action have an appropriate consequence? Does the emotional resonance of a scene fit in congruently from the actions within that scene?”
Thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out my substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the other tips and submission opportunties and exercises are there.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE FROM THE SOURCEShttps://www.writersdigest.com/there-are-no-rules/cause-effect-telling-story-right-order
https://www.amazon.com/Troubleshooting-Your-Novel-Techniques-Identifying/dp/1599639807--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, this podcast episode is probably going to be Shaun’s favorite because he grew up in a family that was not uptight about sex.
I, however, grew up in a family where a couple of the branches pretended we were all born out of the immaculate conception or just maybe sperm drops on a toilet or something.
We have some friends—good friends—who are currently exploring all things sexual in a consensual, relationship way.
They aren’t uptight.
Shaun’s not uptight.
And one of these things are not like the others.
Spoiler: Me. I’m the thing that’s not like the others.
But, it turns out that a lot of people are like me. Join us as we talk about five ways people are uptight and our bonus random thought about people who received a letter about secret spaces in their new home.
DOG TIP FOR LIFESometimes you just got to grab on and go for it (consensually, of course)
LINKShttps://www.womansday.com/relationships/sex-tips/advice/a1004/get-over-your-sexual-hangups-92993/
https://nypost.com/2022/11/25/couple-gets-letter-revealing-creepy-secret-rooms-in-their-130-year-old-home/
SHOUT OUT!The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW!
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her poems every week on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
It's a super short poem about living.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Over on Medium, Michael Lin has a post of short tidbits that he’s learned from reading 100 self-development books.
That’s a lot of books.
And it’s a lot of two-three sentence tidbits that he has, but one of them leapt out at met his week.
And it’s this:
“Don’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. Most of the world is not trying to fuck you over. Most of the world can do stupid things though, especially me.”
DOG TIP FOR LIFE You might expect everyone to throw you into the dog pound or the UPS man to come steal your bacon, but it’s just fear. Not reality.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE https://news.yahoo.com/woman-mistakes-seasoning-packet-for-bath-salts-has-very-weird-bath-i-just-turned-myself-into-literal-soup-203340089.html
https://medium.com/curious/how-i-turned-my-fears-into-my-greatest-weapon-c40781643f97https://medium.com/@michael-lim/40-short-life-lessons-i-learned-from-reading-over-100-self-development-books-4f6c4a75d914 SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW!
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her poems every week on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
This podcast we quickly (so quickly) talk about writing evil people’s dialogue.
And a great link that we reference is right here. There are a ton of resources as Matt Bird’s site that you can check out.
Thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out my substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the fun.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Let’s say your cat gets trapped in the pantry overnight and manages to chew through two bags of cat nip, spread it throughout the pantry and then have a panicked pea on top of a bucket of cashews before knocking over a vase, which smashes to the ground alerting you to the fact that she’s been stuck in there all night.
Or let’s say you’re a guy who decides to eat 40 whole chickens for 40 days.
You can take those experiences and be . . . something? This episode we look into the chicken man and the cat peeing in the pantry and the scale of positive and negative experiences.
SOURCES NYT article Diener, E., Wirtz, D., Tov, W., Kim-Prieto, C., Choi. D., Oishi, S., & Biswas-Diener, R. (In press). New measures of well-being: Flourishing and positive and negative feelings. Social Indicators Research.
https://psychologyroots.com/scale-of-positive-and-negative-experience-spane/
Schimmack, U., Diener, E., & Oishi, S. (2002). Life-satisfaction is a momentary judgment and a stable personality characteristic: The use of chronically accessible and stable sources. Journal of Personality, 70, 345-385.
Schimmack, U. & Reisenzein, R. (2002). Experiencing activation: Energetic arousal and tense arousal are not mixtures of valence and activation. Emotion, 2, 412-417
Schimmack, U., & Grob, A. (2000). Dimensional models of core affect: A quantitative comparison by means of structural equation modeling. European Journal of Personality, 14, 325-345.
Diener, E., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2008) Happiness: unlocking the mysteries of psychological wealth. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
This week’s podcast focuses on some advice from Roy Peter Clark. I hope you’ll join me for one of our short weekly writing tips!
Thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out my substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the other tips and submission opportunties and exercises are there.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
This week’s episode is all about special dog dinners and eating frogs for breakfast. So, yeah, basically time management.
Come hang out with us!
REFERENCES https://apnews.com/article/san-francisco-restaurants-dogs-a6c1ba368023209a1bb5afd027b76742
https://liberalarts.tamu.edu/psychology/2019/09/26/what-is-time-blocking/
https://betterhumans.pub/4-unsexy-one-minute-habits-that-save-me-30-hours-every-week-5eb49e42f84e
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
It’s another poem by Grammy Barnard. She was well into her seventies when I was born and lived to be over 100. She wrote a lot of poems about people being unfaithful. Poor Grammy.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
I'm breaking format this week, for once. Our high school had a credible and serious threat yesterday, staff and teachers and kids were locked down for hours and I want to talk about how people telling their stories makes things much more real than cut-up newspaper reports.
And that’s important.
Don’t forget how powerful writing is, okay? Don’t forget how powerful you are either.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Let’s talk about life lessons, you know those pity-ass short messages that are meant to give us massive epiphanies that turn our lives around completely.
I want to tell you that I hate life lessons.
And we talk about naughty ghosts in a house in Texas, too.
Come hang out!
SOURCES https://www.foxnews.com/media/texas-homeowner-hooker-ghosts-taken-over-rental-property-trying-stir-up-business
https://www.anxietyculture.com/puritan.htm
https://www.ramseysolutions.com/retirement/the-national-study-of-millionaires-research
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW!
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her poems every week on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
A poem
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called "A Feather" and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy. Please like and subscribe.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
This week’s podcast is some quick tips about how to make your scene memorable. I hope you’ll check it out.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Join us as we talk a little more about finding your damn purpose and sticking to it the way your dog will stick to farting in your office. And no, your purpose is not to change out the toilet paper rolls unless you want it to be.
LINKS WE TALK ABOUT: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/seven_ways_to_find_your_purpose_in_life
https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article267795392.html
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
A very very short poem this week.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
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Super Important Writing Tip For When You Think Your Story Is a Little Boring This podcast we super quickly talk about something you can do when it feels like your novel got a little boring.
Come hang out!
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out Carrie’s substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the regular stuff is there, including the transcripts to the podcasts.
Email Address
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This episode we talk about the two traps of self-improvement: the unworthy trap and the unapplied knowledge trap.
And also puppy dog eyes.
As Tony Robbins says (and Roomer quotes),
“Knowledge is not power…it’s potential power. Execution will trump knowledge any day.”
— Tony Robbins
DOG TIP FOR LIFE FROM SPARTY DOG
It’s okay to know who you are and go after what you want. SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
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A quick poem by me Carrie Jones.
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Here’s a big truth. I don’t know how to fangirl, and one time I was taking photos in Maine for the Maine Democratic Party at a house rented by famous writers and all my writer friends got excited.
They squeed.
They were super thrilled.
My own book had just made the NYT bestseller’s list, but it was kids fiction and really really far from literary fiction. For the circles of intellectuals, it didn’t give me a lot of cred.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
This week we talk about how the type of dog you have allegedly tells a lot about the type of person you are AND also David Levitin’s tips for an organized mind. Yep, it’s sexy talk about the hippocampus. And apologies. Shaun was extra this time.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Organize your toys and leave them in one happy place so you always know where they are.
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This is a poem by me, Carrie Jones, about paternity.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called "A Feather" and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Steve Martin had a catch phrase from his time on SNL and standup that he was a wild and crazy guy. He had an entirely different persona in the skit but you could feel it and tell he’d been inspired by something in real life and turned it into comedy through exaggeration.
Now, decades after that Wild and Crazy Guy skit, Martin has this masterclass and in it he says, “Everything you see, hear, experience is usable.”
He’s mostly talking about comedy, screenplays and skits, but it works for the other arts and writing other genres, too.
How people go about scratching their nose, trying not to pick at their wedgie, argue with their kids; how they greet someone at a school board meeting, or even your own observations like the feel of bad indoor-outdoor carpet under your butt, the way this particular headache throbs like an almost perceptible bass beat coming from a car down the street, right at your left temple and the base of your neck—all of it can be used in your story.
Martin suggests being “an active observer in life” which to him means always being “on the lookout.” And he says you should grab a notebook that fits in your back pocket to write down what you observe. He forgets apparently that women’s pants often don’t have pockets? And also about the notes app on your phone. But it’s still good advice. Write what you see and taste and fear and feel.
This advice isn’t new. Richard Powers, who wrote The Overstory, which won a Pulitzer has said this. Powers says, “Be present, practice attention, and the story you are working on will feed on everything in front of you.”
Writers need to be mindful not in the power of positive psychology sort of way, but just in a way of being fully present so that we can notice what’s going on around us and within us.
Maya Angelou says:
Angelou“I try to pull the language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy. Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.”
To understand language that sings, you have to understand the sounds of language, observe and pay attention to the details of conversations around you, how people choose different words for arguments than they do when talking about their day or asking for some water. Paying attention to the language on the page means paying attention to the sound of language in the air and using it.
Martin. Powers. Angelou. They all have and had it together. They know that writing is observing and translating, being present and recreating sharpness on the page and on the tongue.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out Carrie’s substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the regular stuff is there.
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First we talk about this woman who saw Elvis in her McDonald’s ketchup and then
A little bit about a lady who lets her dog sit at the table and wipes his bum.
Steve Martin, author, comedian, musician, cool human, has this MasterClass where he talks about how when he started out in show business and had absolutely no talent at all. But he took a chance at a comedy writing job where they basically just needed young people to write jokes.
He has three big wisdom chunks we share with you before Shaunie derails completely into the Land of Naughty.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Be always in reaching distance of the person who has the food and demand a seat at the table.
LINKS! https://positivepsychology.com/happiness-wellbeing-coaching-perma/
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/mum-double-take-after-spotting-28148114
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/i-wipe-dogs-bottom-eat-28141647
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The character in your story is the heart of your story.
It does not matter if that character is a person or a troll or a manatee. That character is the soul of your story. Setting, theme, plot are important, but the most important aspect is creating a character that the reader can connect with.
That connection can be emotional.
That connection can be intellectual.
But there has to be a connection.
How readers connect to the character isn’t always for the same reason. They might seem like a friend. They might seem like us. They might be who we want to be. They might be who we are afraid to be. And as authors, we have to find ways to make our readers care about the characters we put on the page.
That’s what we talk about this podcast! So listen in and like and subscribe and all those things.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out Carrie’s substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the regular stuff is there.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
This podcast is about a butt ton of Coors Light on a Florida highway and flow states.
A few years ago, we talked about FLOW on our podcast and then I just did again over on our LIVING HAPPY newsletter, but I thought it would be pretty cool to talk about it for another hot second because more people are talking about it now.
We’re trendsetters, baby.
RANDOM THOUGHT LINK https://www.npr.org/2022/09/22/1124451096/florida-coors-light-beer-cans-highway-crash
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.645498/full
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5763465/
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/flow-state
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This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
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Last week on the podcast and over on our substack, we talked about creating amazing characters and the role of backstory.
I’m going to talk a little bit more about that today.
Again, backstory is the events that happened to your character before the actual main story starts.
So backstory, once you have it, allows you to give your character goals in the beginning of the novel and throughout the novel because it allows you the writer (and reader) to know what forces and history make that character who they are today and drive them.
THE TWO GOALS (THANKS TO BACKSTORY) WHICH GIVES YOUR CHARACTER DIMENSION One goal is usually physical or tangible. They want something. Let’s say they want to drive a car. They are 15 and want to learn how to drive. That’s a tangible goal. The author wants to get her novel done. The puppy wants a bacon treat.
The other goal is usually emotional. This goal has to do with yearning. This goal is the reason for the tangible goal.
They want to learn how to drive (tangible) because they yearn to get out of their claustrophobic home (emotional).She wants to get her novel done (tangible) because her brother always said she couldn’t get anything done because she’s lazy and she yearns to prove him wrong (emotional).The puppy wants a bacon treat (tangible) because he yearns for bacon because that’s what he used to get in his first house before he got lost (emotional).
Without knowing the backstory, we wouldn’t know the emotional goals of the character, the why for their tangible goals. Instead we’d be reading and thinking, yeah, he wants to finish the novel. So what?
Tomorrow over on LIVING HAPPY, I’ll dive in a tiny bit more into this.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out Carrie’s substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the regular stuff is there.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Join us as we talk about calling a new born baby an aunt and cognitive distortions.
Cognitive distortions are basically when you notice something that happens outside of yourself and you distort the hell out of it and create this super exaggerated, super negative view of yourself or another person.
There are at least six of these bastards.
The first is called Catastrophizing. I’m a master at this, but let’s go through all of them according to Esther Perel, a therapist and author.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Sparty Dog says to only worry about the now, baby. Eat your treats, scratch your fur, snore, and call it good.
LINKS https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/how-to-recognize-and-tame-your-cognitive-distortions-202205042738
https://www.masterclass.com/classes/esther-perel-teaches-relational-intelligence/chapters/developing-self-awareness
https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/family/older-dads-weird-demand-to-family-over-babys-name-baffles-internet/ar-AA122iLR
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One of my grandmothers painted and wrote poems when she wasn’t busy raising her three children.
This is one of her poems.
Grammy Barnard Poem #3 MELANCHOLY, MAY 19, 1927 Cold and dark desolation’s arms
Embrace my heart and sound alarms
Of fearful, loveless days to be endured
To which my heart of late has become inured.
Where may I flee from these haunting visions
And from my constant indecisions?
Go I shall, and in my misery hide
In a lonely forgotten place where I’ll reside,
I’ll think of all the vows men make
And how quickly too they can forsake.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hey! Join us tis week as we talk about writing exceptional characters starting with backstory! It’s quick. It’ll make you a better author. It’s free.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out Carrie’s substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the regular stuff is there.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
W. Edwards wrote “Drive out fear so that everyone may work effectively for the company.”
Paul Zak says, “When learners are psychologically safe, they acquire new information easily because they have the cognitive and emotional bandwidth to concentrate on course material. Anxiety takes significant metabolic energy and inhibits learning.”
Join us as we talk a little bit about coffee balls, how anxiety makes it hard to learn and dog tips for life.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE FROM SPARTACUS THE DOG Don’t worry about anything. Just get your treats and snack and sleep whenever you can.
SOURCES https://www.edutopia.org/blog/the-science-of-fear-ainissa-ramirez
Paul Zak, Immersion (releases today!)
https://apnews.com/article/switzerland-climate-and-environment-83cc3ee9959e48301b98d68d15693b64
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
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A poem.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
It’s the last in our three-week series on scene and structure the Dwight Swain way. Let’s go.
Like we said in the first week, Swain makes us writers think of basic elemental structure and creating our novels in four steps:
- Making cool characters.
- Grouping your sentences and paragraphs into motivation reaction units.
- Grouping those motivation reaction units into scenes and sequels.
- Grouping those scenes and sequels into story patterns.
Last week we talked about scene and sequel and how it helps keep our novels not-episodic and logical because it’s all about cause and effect.
A quick recap.
Scenes have goals, conflicts and disasters. That is the sequence.
Sequels have the character’s reaction to the disaster, a dilemma where she figures out what to do next, and then a decision where they decide what the hell to do now.
So how do you make those scenes and sequels that we talked about in last week’s podcast work together?
You have to think of scene and sequel as a single unit, says The Manuscript Shredder.
They write, “One builds to the next, establishing a chain of causes that leads the reader through the character’s story. They are two sides of the same coin. Bring them together and make them both work for you.”
Or as Raven Oak writes.
“Scenes and sequels should continue to alternate the entire length of the novel, and in doing so, they’ll create a natural flow for both plot progression & character development. Many authors plan or outline the sequence of events using scene & sequel on index cards before writing.
“Just about any novel you read will follow this rhythm. It seems simple, but structure usually is.”
Tomorrow on the blog, I’ll be talking a tiny bit more about this and the types of disasters that can happen in scenes.
RESOURCES OF AWESOME
http://themanuscriptshredder.com/scene-and-sequel-making-them-work-together/
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out Carrie’s substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the regular stuff is there.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
This week’s podcast is all about Belgian psychologist Ester Perel who has two great podcasts and talks all about relationships and sex and you know, the stuff that gets us an explicit rating.
Listen in! There’s some great stuff in there!
RESOURCES https://www.ted.com/speakers/esther_perel
https://www.estherperel.com/about
IN OUR RANDOM THOUGHTS, WE MENTION THIS ARTICLE AND THE LINK IS HERE https://www.npr.org/sections/strange-news/
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW!
Our brand-new-amazing-creepy podcast is DUDE NO! It’s true crime with an occasional foray into the paranormal and macabre and it’s awesome.
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“FINDING THE STORIES” What does it mean to find story when you are the one who is oppressed?
What does it mean to find story when you are the one who is barely surviving in your own life?
When your mother cries to sleep every night because she can’t find a job, pay bills, fix the furnace. When the food she feeds you comes from the government line even though she’s too proud for that, too smart for that, too strong?
What does it mean to find a story full of magic when you are dying for magic in your own life?
When your body doesn’t work the way other kids’ bodies work? When your body gets used in ways it is not supposed to be used?
When people make fun of your clothes, your sex, your gender, the way you say your s’s, the shade of your skin, the curl in your hair, your last name, your first name, the way you see letters backwards, the way you see or don’t see at all, the way you learn?
What does it mean when there are these stories out there – these magical truths – these enchanted people and places when you are just barely managing to survive?
It means there are tiny life lines.
It means there are little pieces of help.
Story is powerful. We’ve know that for forever.
Books are burned and banned because people fear them.
Books are powerful because they are information wrapped up in empathy, they are reflections of our world as it is, how it was and how it could–it should– be.
And people fear that.
Instead of coming together to celebrate the enchanted, they attack it, call it evil, ban the ideas that do not match their own and say that they are doing what?
Protecting us, the children, the enchanted, the country, the people, the stories.
We do not need that kind of protection.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Check out my website if you have a hot second. And please like and subscribe.
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So last week on the podcast and on our blog where we elaborated a bit, we talked about the four main elements of story structure according to Dwight Swain, who wrote The Techniques of the Selling Writer.
THOSE WERE: 1. Making cool characters. 2. Grouping your sentences and paragraphs into motivation reaction units. 3. Grouping those motivation reaction units into scenes and sequels. 4. Grouping those scenes and sequels into story patterns.
And we talked about motivation reaction units, the sequence of cause and effect within a scene.
Swain describes a scene as a “blow by blow” account of the character as they take the time to get their goal despite the fact that someone or something is opposing them. The scene propels the story. The scene takes place in the a certain space of time.
AND WITHIN THAT SCENE ARE THREE STEPS, HE SAYS: 1. A goal 2. A conflict to achieving that goal (or opposition). 3. A disaster. The disaster in Swain’s structure means that the character is not any closer to her goal and might be even worse off. So sad.
This does not work in the third act of the story when there is a positive change arc and the character ends up in a better place. But it’s great for the beginning and middle of your novel.
AND WHAT’S A SEQUEL? It’s what connects the scenes. It’s where the main character thinks about what just happens and often creates a new goal. It’s where you make the character’s motivation really obvious. It gives the reader a pause between the more active scenes.
AND THERE ARE THREE STEPS OF THE SEQUEL: 1. A Reaction to what just happened 2. A Dilemma that’s what she is dealing with now that the disaster happened 3. A Decision that’s where she determines what the heck she’ll do next.
A lot of writers that I work with get super confused about the term SEQUEL. Is it not a scene, too? They wonder that. So, sometimes I call them LOUD scenes and QUIET scenes. You can think of them that way, too.
I’ll be going into this a bit more deeply on my blog Living Happy. I hope you’ll check it out.
SOME SOURCES! Writing the Perfect Scene, by Randy Ingermanson
Scene and Sequel: The Ebb and Flow of Fiction, by Mike Klassan
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out Carrie’s substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the regular stuff is there.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, Shaun is off in Florida HUNTING ALLIGATORS (!) leaving me alone to podcast, which means that all the talent is gone! I explain that in the podcast, but this whole episode is short and sweet. And it's mostly about what we're going to start on September 6 if Shaun survives with all his limbs and everything.
Check out our upcoming true crime podcast for people who don’t like to sleep, DUDE, NO! The website is here. The site for private bonus stuff is here.
And thanks for hanging out with me even when Shaun is off adventuring.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW!
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her poems every week on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
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Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
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Hey! It's quick writing tip time and this go around it's all about motivation reaction units and the four elements of structure.
To read all the transcript, head over to https://carriejonesbooks.blog
To read part two, head over to my substack, LIVING HAPPY.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out Carrie’s substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the regular stuff is there.
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This week's episode is all about dogs that cry happy tears when their people come home; how social media is potentially messing up teens; and how empathy is a badass super power that needs to swoop in and save us all.
For full notes go here to Carrie's blog.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
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Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
When I Was Born They Thought I Was Blind
The bandages on my face keep everything dark,
so dark, and there’s nothing to figure out,
no doubles of things, no blurs of movement,
but I know I’m home again.
The world smells of pot roast gravy,
cigarettes, my mother’s Chanel
No. 5, father’s engine grease fingers,
and my sister’s coconut hair.
Strands brush my cheek as she puts me on the floor.
The carpet bristles against my knees and palms.
Fingers sink in. Home. This is home.
Again. I know this rug. I crawl forward.
“Will she be okay?” My father’s voice
squeaks so far above me. Mom says,
“It’s not like she could see before.
Anything is better than that.”
The shag warms my palms.
Cars roar on the nearby highway.
My mother’s heels click
across the linoleum kitchen floor.
Van Gogh said the sight of stars
made him dream. I dreamt before
I could see.
Maya Angelou spoke of the ache
for home, where we go
to be safe. I dreamt of that, too.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Dwight Swain has a book, The Techniques of a Selling Writer, and there’s a chapter (well many) that talk about story structure, but one specifically begins like this:
Swain“All stories are ‘about’ the same thing: desire versus danger.”
So that’s a really good place to start.
Complete podcast notes are here.
These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
“You can’t love someone or something without relating to its existence,” says musician Pharrell Williams in a MasterClass about empathy. “In order to relate, you have to empathize.”
For Williams, it’s about changing your vantage point. “A lack of POV is a lack of context” he says, and when you don’t have a context then you can’t understand the greater situation that’s around you. It’s like you’re looking at just the mountain in front of you and don’t realize that there’s an entire landscape behind it.
“When you open your mind’s eye, you get a bigger view,” he says. This goes for people too.
The rest of the show notes are at carriejonesbooks.blog
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
"The Hurricane"
The workers at
the Hole in the Wall
catalogue their friends’ losses
to the group of diners
that come in and sit
at a high table.
One friend has lost
a porch. Another lost
their oyster building. Another
lost half their roof. Someone lost a car
to a big tree.
Someone and someone
else and someone else
lost their homes.
The hurricane just took their entire worlds.
Another. Another. Another.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Want to make your characters sizzle like a fajita plate? Join us as we quickly give some steps about building character chemistry on the page. More tips and the transcript are over at Carrie Jones Books.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
One of the key components of happiness and living a good life is having a good close relationship with someone else and for a lot of us, our closest relationship is with our spouse.
Cough.
So join us, an old married couple, as we discuss this horrifying news. All the notes and sources are over here.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
NOVEL STRUCTURE AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT ARE RELATED. Not just that, they are creepy best friends. You know the kind. They do EVERYTHING together, drink the same soy-caramel latte, have the same crushes on Bowen Yang, borrow each other’s Sketchers. . .
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
These podcasts, their transcripts, and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out Carrie’s substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the regular stuff is there..
Yes. It's that bad.
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Cheerleading mutant. It sounds pretty awful, but it’s actually a good thing. Because that optimism and gratitude help make your brain healthier and life better. That gives you the sort of cheerleading persona, but where does the mutant come in? Hang on and we’re going to tell you . . .
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
The show notes and sources are here.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
A poem about being not poet-cool.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
A scene. Let's have a quick rundown about it and why you need to know about this bad boy.
It’s this element of structure for the story. We all write them, but sometimes it seems like this overlooked aspect of our stories. I’m not sure why this is. It’s not as elemental as the word or punctuation. It’s not as long and sexy as a chapter. It’s not as easily diagramed as a sentence, right?
But it’s so important.
There’s an old book by Raymond Obstfeld called Crafting Scenes and in its first pages, he has a chapter called “What a Scene Is and Isn’t.” In it, he quotes the actress Rosalind Russell who was asked what made a movie great.
She answered, “Moments.”
And Obstfeld compared that thought about movies to our thoughts about scenes. He writes, “The more ‘moments’ a work has, the more powerful it is. Think of each memorable scene as an inner tube designed to keep the larger work afloat.”
And then there is the corollary, “The fewer memorable scenes there are, the quicker that work sinks to the depths of mediocrity.”
So What’s A Scene and How Do You Make It Memorable?
That’s the obvious question, right? A scene is usually action that happens in one setting. But it’s not always. It’s about focus. It can be ten pages or one.
Obstfeld says that a scene does the following:
Gives reader plot-forwarding information
Reveals character conflict
Highlights a character by showing action or a trait
Creates suspense.
And a memorable scene? What is that?
It’s unexpected.
What does a scene have to have?
A beginning, a middle, and an end.
And the beginning? It’s like a blind date, he says. You have to tell the reader what’s going on and not just expect her to know. It has to hook the reader in, pulling her into its clutches so she wants to keep reading.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out Carrie’s substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
In possibly the goofiest self-help podcast ever, we continue our bizarre ways with some advice from the Dalai Lama about how to live happy despite everything and also talk a bit about the robot who broke the kid's finger during a chess tournament in Russia.
As always, our notes and links to sources are at carriejonesbooks.blog, and . . .
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hey! It's a quick rundown on the positives and negatives of writing in past or present tense.
For the complete notes, check out the blog.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
This episode is all about napping and Carrie accidentally outing herself about her-cough-3 p.m. nap spree. Full notes are at carriejonesbooks.blog SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Lately, I’ve been working with a lot of writers who are sending in their stories and they seem to have a great fear of the mighty exclamation point.
And I get it. I get their concerns, the exclamation point has a pretty bad rap. We’ve all seen stories where every bit of dialogue ends in an exclamation point. Or our boss sends us an email and everything is a sentence fragment ending with that exclamation point.
The BBC even has an article about what overusing the exclamation point says about you, writing:
“Bill Bryson – writes, the exclamation mark is classically used ‘to show strong emotion (“Get out!”) or urgency (“Help me!”).’ If part of the point of punctuation is to change the timbre of the voice – another part is to get you out of a hole. Punctuation saves lives: there’s a meaningful difference between ‘Duck’ and ‘Duck!’ Both of Bryson’s examples are notable for the underlying sense of emergency, need for security, and atmosphere of fear. No wonder, then, that newspapers have historically referred to exclamation marks as ‘astonishers’, ‘gaspers’ and ‘screamers’; no wonder newspapers have been their most voracious advocates.”
They consider it the selfie of the internet. I think it’s sort of the selfie of the punctuation club, too. It’s like “Yo. Exclamation mark is in the house. Everyone give it some attention!”
And the BBC article goes on to say,
“Overuse of any punctuation mark tells us something about ourselves, in the same way overuse of any object does. How you punctuate your sentences might have something to do with how you punctuate your life.”
Here’s the thing: the exclamation point is not your enemy and it’s okay to use it in moderation.
Even the god-like purveyor of all things grammatical in U.S. novels, the Chicago Manual of Style says that the exclamation point can be used, just do it sparingly or it loses its effectiveness.
This is really true about everything from em-dashes to semicolons to the sexy and addictive ellipses….
Cough. See what I did there?
When you avoid the exclamation point in dialogue obsessively, it isn’t helpful and you end up with something like
She shouted, “I can’t believe you.”
Or
He yelled, “I’m going to kill you, so you betta run.”
Or
They hollered, “Help me.”
It looks dumb. The reader thinks, “Um, are they really shouting if there is no exclamation point?”
As the writer, you want to be in control of your world and part of that control is making sure that you don’t give the reader conflicting signals through verb and punctuation because a conflicted reader is a reader who won’t keep reading, who won’t keep trusting you the writer to take them on a journey into another world.
So, if you make someone shout or yell or holler in dialogue, really make them do it. Pretend they are a politician making a tweet or someone being ironic and throw them all in there. No, just kidding. Only use one at a time.
Seriously!
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We talk about the naked Florida man in the random section of the podcasts. We don’t transcribe that part, and believe me, you don’t wbut here’s the link to the article. but here’s the link to the article.
So I’ve been reading this book called The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, by cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin.
Anyone who has had wine with me (or a rum and root beer) will know eventually that cognitive neuroscience is my big regret—like it’s the date I went on and wanted a relationship with, but I had put so much time in with my BF political science that I just couldn’t dump him and swipe right on the cognitive neuroscience profile.
His book is full of cool stuff about how our brains are just really overwhelmed and wasting a lot of time dealing with things like 40,000 items in the grocery store or hundreds of emails and notifications and god-forbid texts starting before 7 a.m.
He suggests not trying to grab all the info all the time and be a little more chill because that’s what our brains need us to do. We have to focus on the important stuff, slow down, and work efficiently.
Daniel Levitin writes:
“Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new—the proverbial shiny objects”
Every time we make a decision, it uses up energy in our body via our brains. All those choices can distract us from the cool stuff sometimes.
So how do you make that better? 1. Get rid of clutter. Clutter actually increases the stress hormone in women (cortisol) and seeing it while we’re trying to focus? It breaks us. 2. Turn off the notifications on your email. He estimates that knowing and seeing those emails waiting decreases your working IQ by about 10 points. So avoid distractions. 3. Find organization systems and categories that work for you. Give all your things a place and put it back in that place so that the hippocampus (a part of our brain) knows where it is. Think of how your kitchen is organized or your clothes. Forks go with other silverware, right? Socks probably are hanging out for socks. That’s a system. 4. “Shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world,” Levitin writes. That’s why to-do lists on paper or digital are way better to have outside of our brains. We don’t want to have to retrieve things all the time. Levitin goes with “drop it, delegate it or defer it,” and if you can do something super quickly (like less than two minutes) just do it right away.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Don’t try to get a treat and poop and chase a squirrel all at once. Focus on one task at a time.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
The full notes are here.
https://carriejonesbooks.blog/podcast/marital-hate-and-have-trevor-noah-and-terry-real-figured-some-s-out/
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Every once in awhile, a dog climbs on the roof of a house and chills out, but if you’re Huck the dog, you do this all the time. How often? So often that your owner has to put a sign on the door.
Join us as we talk about Huck and also about defining happiness, doggy style.
All the episode notes and links are here at https://carriejonesbooks.blog/podcast/
LINKS AND RESOURCES https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/11/dalai-lama-arthur-brooks-each-us-can-break-cycle-hatred/
XIV, Dalai Lama, and Cutler, Howard C. The Art of Happiness, 10th Anniversary Edition: A Handbook for Living. Penguin Publishing Group, 2009, 294.
Course: “Managing Happiness,” HarvardX, accessed June 27, 2022.
“Why Are Dogs So Happy.” No author stated. Global Dog Breeds.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Because she’s not some drugged up doper or anything like that, but shivers have taken control of her whole entire body because it’s cold, cold, cold in Bar Harbor, Maine and it isn’t even winter yet.
Because she’s huddled behind the dumpster outside of Geddy’s. There’s a giant lobster claw at the front part of the restaurant and a massive moose on top of the ceiling because that’s what gets the tourists. Fake moose. Broiled monster lobster claws, red with death and sprinkled with white Christmas lights.
Because it gets to be too much, huddling there against the cold and the sun’s rising over the Porcupine Islands, so she gets up. She gets up and she heads out to the wharf where all the lobstermen tie up their skiffs, so they can get out to their moorings. The wharf’s not much of anything really, just a lot of pilings holding up a parking lot and then there’s some docks holding the skiffs. WE get
Because she runs out there because sometimes no matter how cold you are, running makes you warmer. It only works until you stop, though. When you stop running, the sweat against your skin turns you even colder. That’s why she usually don’t stop running.
Because she does today. She does today because today she is cold, cold, cold all the way into her capillaries. Today she is cold, cold, cold all the way into the roots of her teeth.
Because it’s not winter.
Because it will only get colder.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
A quick ramble about setting.
Writers, you need it. You might not want it. You might not be good at it, but setting is like a good fart. Sometimes you have to expel a little gas out of your rectum in order to be your best.
All the notes for this podcast don't fit here, but you can find them over at Carrie's main blog.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Back in 1862 Duchenne De Boulogne noticed that certain muscles in our face engaged whenever we were joyous.
It was an involuntary reaction of our cheek muscles, the zygomatic major, and the orbicularis oculi. That’s a muscle right in front of our temples and below our eye. And when those cheek muscles and that special little muscle engage? That’s when we smile.
The weird thing is this is a human universal. It happens all over the world despite gender, sex, culture, race, etc.
The weird thing is that if we make ourselves smile like this, with those muscles engaged, we actually usually start to feel happier.
The process reverses.
There’s a guy who teaches the Introduction the Art of Happiness at a Harvard X class, Arthur Brooks, who has an experiment where you take a pencil and hold it between your teeth and you keep it there for 45 seconds.
Do it.
Seriously.
When you do this you flex those muscles in your cheeks and your heart rate starts to decrease and your stress in your body? It starts to release.
What does that mean? It means that happiness is a shared condition of humans around the world.
It means we can see happiness expressed in people’s bodies.
And finally, most importantly, we can actually make ourselves feel happier just by doing that easy dorky experiment where we hold chopsticks or a pen between our teeth. How cool is that?
Brooks believes that “happiness is something that grows in us when we give it away,” and also that “happiness doesn’t just happen to you, you can manage it.”
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Manage your happiness! Work for it! Wag your tail. Grab a stick. It’s awesome.
LINKS https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:HarvardX+happy+2T2021/block-v1:HarvardX+happy+2T2021+type@sequential+block@dd8f672ef4ca4f44879ffd7ea4a38956/block-v1:HarvardX+happy+2T2021+type@vertical+block@049cf8336845451eb71bed94ecf75623
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2319446/
https://nypost.com/2022/05/19/topless-mom-in-her-undies-rescues-pet-goose-from-bald-eagle/
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Myths About Presidents
26.
He didn’t
Ride
A moose.
The photo is fake
Like a lot
Of presidential
things.
16.
He dreamt
His death,
Found himself
Waking in a coffin
And asked who
Was dead
In the White
House.
Dream mourners said,
“The president.”
He denied the dream.
Nobody listened.
The story was too good.
9.
He stood
At the podium,
Sworn in
And speechifying
For 8,445 words
In the cold
Of March.
He died
A month later
Of pneumonia
Linked to
His pontification
It was actually bad water
At the White House.
He’d been drinking shit.
1.
His teeth were made of wood.
But really they were just so old
And stained they looked that way.
27.
He did not get stuck in the tub and need
Six men to yank and yank and yank him free.
35
He didn’t call himself
A jelly donut in German.
45.
His toilet
Is not
Gold.
He is not
Christ. Or
Even the
Opposite.
46.
He is
Poor.
1.
He apparently
Could not
Tell
A lie
Unlike
All the others
Who could
Not
Tell
The truth.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Showing details in your writing isn’t just some annoying comment that agents, editors, and writing coaches and teachers paste into every student’s work.
You can see it now, right?
Big red letters. Loopy script. Maybe an exclamation point.
Join us as we give you a couple hints about how to do that.
All the podcast notes and links are at carriejonesbooks.com There's a ton of writing tips and all sorts of wildness over there.
These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Cognitive bias is a big deal because it's keeping you from making the right decisions. This is the start of our five-part series (of awesome) for a weird look at the types of bias and Shaun scoffing at all of them in a judgmental way.
Hey! All our show notes and links are here. https://carriejonesbooks.blog/podcast/you-are-so-biased-so-how-do-you-stop-it/
Please like and subscribe because it's a nice thing to do. And we'll love you forever.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
``` These firefighters show up at a hotel fire, maybe
Started in the laundry room during the off season, hoses
Frozen from winter temperatures, ice across roads;
The crumbling structure is about to fall, flames shooting out windows.
In our small town, three-hundred people
Are listening to the scanner because we can’t be there,
But our family and friends battle, wearing air
Compressors and safety equipment from 2002.
Twenty years outdated.
Other poets write about grief and hand holding,
The ache of winter trees bending with wind,
Charleston’s harbor, celebrations and tiny pains.
I sit here, listening, ineffective, useless.
I once fought fire. Nobody believes that
Though I have photographic evidence. I even
Used to dispatch emergency calls, take fists to the face,
Witness hate and rage that never made the scanner.
Twenty years outdated.
The firefighters work so hard to save that building,
But the roof collapses, only the foundation remains.
The thing is that building has burnt before. Twice.
They keep reconstructing it though, refusing to admit defeat,
Vaguely rethinking the design. After a couple months
Nobody even remembers what it was before.
When I was little, I used to dance, even got paid
For it. Nobody believes that either. Or that I reported sports
Taught gymnastics, was even a church secretary. I don’t fit
Any of those notions people have of who I should be.
Twenty years outdated.
Sometimes we rebuild only after everything has collapsed,
After burning walls fall outward to the snowy ground. Sometimes
There are witnesses. Sometimes there is only lonely horror as our structures crumble. ```
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us.
Story is basically a sequence of events, right? And to create a story you have to put that sequence of events together in a way that’s going to jive to the reader or for the reader.
To do that you need scenes, which make up that sequence of events.
A scene is the basic unit of a story, and there are two main types of scenes:
- The scene
- The sequel
Dwight Swain wrote a book called the Techniques of a Selling Story, and he basically defined them this way,
“A scene is a unit of conflict lived through by the character and reader.”
There are three big pieces there: * A conflict * Lived through * Character and reader
In a scene there needs to be conflict, immersion so your reader can relate to what’s happening to the character and LIVE THROUGH that character.
To have a conflict, you need to have a goal for your character so that something can obstruct it and your reader can worry.
It all makes sense, right?
Swain goes on to say that a scene must: * Be interesting * Move that story forward
He then writes that in order for a scene to make the story progress,
“it changes your character’s situation; and while change doesn’t always constitute progress, progress always involves change.”
And in each scene you need to have: 1. Goal- what the character wants (to own something, to be free of something, revenge) 2. Conflict (something keeping your character from that goal) 3. Disaster (Swain calls this the “logical yet unanticipated development that throws your focal character for a loss.”
Cool, right?
The sequel is what happens after that scene. It connects one scene to the next, Swain says. It’s a transition.
And its goals are to (in his words):
Translate the disaster into goalTelescope realityControl the tempo
It’s here that decisions are made. It’s here that the protagonist reorients themselves. It’s here where the protagonist has to find answers and possibilities and deal with what just happens and turn it into a new goal. And it often involves a bit of summary or exposition.
And these sequel/transitional places control the tempo of a story because they give the reader a tiny bit of a pause, slowing down the pacing. I’ll have more about scenes in my substack. The link is below and also here.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now.
These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
For exclusive paid content, check out Carrie’s substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
No More Elvis and the Cost of Alienation
There's a high cost to being alienated from our society.
Full notes on carriejonesbooks.blog
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
``` Holes and Vettes
Bar Harbor. Maine. 2022. A baseball field.
Corvettes line up in rows, engines still
For once and owners preening
From their folding chairs, legs poking
Into the same grass that supports Life
Flight helicopters in emergencies
And soccer cleats. This earth withstands so much.
It’s a yearly gathering that’s paused two years
Thanks to global disease, but now the drivers
Are all maskless and showing off
Their cars to locals who wander
Between the lines, marveling.
“I will never be rich enough
To own one,” says a man
in a black t-shirt to a guy
with a firebird red model.
“I thought that too,”
The guy says. “Work hard.
You’ll get there.”
The first man moves to run
A finger across the car’s hood.
The owner flinches like it’s some kind of assault.
“Try hard,” he repeats. “You’ll get there."
We all try hard
To get there,
Inventing monologues
Of worth based on materialism,
Who owns what, how shiny
Our skins are, our hair, our cars,
Houses. We pretend like any of this
Fills up the holes we dig inside ourselves,
Inside the ozone, inside the earth.
Darkening faces,
Double visions. Horror.
The Vettes represent adventure
And freedom. Not being beholden
Despite the car loans required,
The interest rates. The American Debt.
“There are eight
Generations of car here,”
Says an organizer
With a yellow sunhat
Perched on her head.
“This is the car of dreams.”
American Dreams.
And that’s the thing.
Have you ever hit your head
On a poem or a wall
Or something else hard
And realized that your dreams
Aren’t actually yours?
Have you ever felt like you’re falling
Though you are standing still on a field
Surrounded by excess and shiny paint
Jobs and pride, merciless, assaulting,
And begged for stable ground
Before realizing you’re just making holes, too.
Maybe the holes are in a ball field,
Or in the Earth or the ozone
Or maybe—just maybe—in your own damn heart. ```
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
First, we should define point of view just in case you need a refresher. Truth is, we all often need a refresher even when we don’t want to admit it.
Point of view is all about who is talking and/or telling the story.
YOUR NEXT QUESTION IS:
IS THERE ONE NARRATOR OR MANY? AND WHO THE HECK IS IT? That’s really one of the first questions you want to think about. You have to decide if you’re going to have just one point of view in your story or a lot.
A lot of our stories follow one character scene after scene after scene. Things that happen to the story happen to this character. We are invested in that character pretty heavily.
But sometimes, the story is about a person one but not told by that same person. This makes us a little more worried that Person One might not make it through the story because our subconscious brain thinks, “Um, why isn’t Person One telling the story? DO THEY DIE?!?!”
Or sometimes the events of the story happen to a ton of people. Think of that zombie story that became a movie. We have a lot of different narrators because there we want to show all their stories.
Then, you have to decide which of the main point of views you want to use. They all have good points and bad points, but let’s just set you up with the big three. Each can be determined by the personal pronouns that the narrator uses.
First-Person Point of View. This is the land of I. It’s all about me. It’s all about my story.
Here’s an example.
I went to the hospital and brought pizza.
Second-Person Point of View. This is all about you, you, you. Yes, you.
You went to the hospital and brought pizza.
Or to some cooler
You went to the hospital, bringing pizza with you.
Third-Person Point of View This is all about them and her and him. It can be omniscient or limited omniscient.
Here’s third person limited
Sadie went to the hospital. “I’m bringing pizza,” she thought. I hope they like it.
Or third person omniscient where you aren’t directly in the characters’ heads with internal monologue but know everything about everyone.
Sadie went to the hospital, a pizza box carried in her steady arms, the smell of pepperoni whisking around each person she passed, the orderly, the struggling father, the mother with the heroin-track arms, the gunman. He would kill for that pizza, but how could she know that? To be fair, right now he’d kill for anything and nothing.
There you go! There is also a Fourth Person Point of View, but that one would require its own podcast. So we’ll try to get there next week.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
``` King Kong Trolls
The self-appointed
writer-guru
on Substack
with four-
thousand
devotees
to his biweekly
missives
has decided
there are
no
more
geniuses,
really,
not any
more.
Someone
needs
to tell him
that he
just doesn’t
know
where to look.
The geniuses
aren’t banging
their chests,
King-Kong like
in their glory
despite being
ground dwellers,
telling the world,
“Look at me! Look
at me as I roar
and pontificate.”
They are the
discarded,
dreaming,
creating,
thinking
outside
the main
streams
of
plagiarized
discourse,
unnoticed
beneath
the giant
feet of
oversized
apes
capturing
all the attention
as our culture
dangles
from
their
plump,
hairy
digits. ```
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us.
Sometimes us writers become a little stylistic. We get addictions. We might fall in love with the ellipses or certain words. Or, we might forget things like what a comma splice is or—gasp—what a sentence is.
Yes, I said it.
Sometimes writers forget what it is to make an awesome sentence. So we’re here to quickly tell you.
LET ME SET THE MOOD.
A good sentence brings the reader into the story and grounds them or gives them information or makes them feel. It doesn’t confuse them. It shows emotion and makes the reader feel sometimes. It creates an image for your reader to imagine via detail.
YOU COMPLETE ME.
A good sentence is complete. What does that mean? It means it isn’t a fragment, but it has a subject and a verb in it and that subject and verb combine to make a thought. In grammarian fancy language we call that complete thought an indepenendent clause.
It’s independent because it can stand all by itself like a mighty sentence. It’s not broken with its leg in a cast and has to have crutches and lean onto other thoughts.
A good sentence doesn’t need other sentences to complete it like an annoying character in a rom-com.
So a sentence fragment is an addictive little poop and it is broken or fragmented because it doesn’t have a subject (what the sentence is about), a verb (what the subject of the sentence is doing) or a complete thought.
Here is an example of a fragment that isn’t a complete thought:
Although Big Foot sits.
Wait. What? We don’t know what happens although Big Foot is sitting, right?
Here is a sentence:
Although Big Foots sits on top of the garbage disposal, nobody can get a good photo of him.
Here is an example of a fragment with no verb
Smelly Big Foot, sexy Big Foot.
Here’s an example of a fragment with no noun
Running through the YMCA like he was human and not 8 feet tall and naked.
Fragments can be fun to throw in your story once in a while for impact, but too many and you just stop making sense.
IT MAKES SENSE.
We are not all James Joyce. We do not need to replicate Ulysses, his novel of massive sentences that are all contortionists. A good sentence makes sense and doesn’t make our readers’ brains hitch up.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
There’s this thing called a biological clock and it’s basically the timer of a bunch of things that your body does. It controls when you go to sleep, when you shoot out an egg, when your energy is high and when it crashes.
People who work third shift or whose shifts change have biological clocks that get all scattered. This happens to people who travel big distances too, right? We call it jet lag.
But even in a normal day we sometimes are more energetic and sometimes we are dragging and just want to find a couch and flop on it.
That clock though? It controls a lot. It also controls how alert you are, when you’re hungry or more easily stressed. It can even impact your immunity and hormones and temperature.
When you understand how it works? That’s when you can figure out how to optimize your life.
According to JE Driskell and B Mullen who co-authored “The efficacy of naps as a fatigue countermeasure: a meta-analytic integration” for Hum Factors, our energy levels decrease a bit when early afternoon hits. So, if you want a nap? And you can take one? That’s the time to do it.
Or, it’s an okay time to text your crush or sigfig if you know they aren’t super busy. Never text when you know someone is super busy.
And if you can’t take a real nap, if you can change up your work for a bit or take a break? It can really help your energy levels and focus and mood for the rest of the day. Cool, right?
That is the same time of day (noon to four) when concentration becomes a long lost friend. Thinking and focusing right after meals is also a bit hard. Most of us are able to think best during the late morning. But those times when focusing is hard are actually times when creativity is kick-butt. Wild, right?
Again, a good time to flirt text.
Not a good time? When you know someone is starting work, hanging out with their friends, running a marathon.
Understanding your own clock is a lot like understanding the clock and schedule of people you want to text. You’ll notice that there are times when you have long flirty conversations and times when it takes an hour for a response. Our bodies are like that, too.
Very Well Mind suggests that you can make your schedule more productive by not just knowing these facts, but also using them to establish a new daily pattern and also creating a steady sleep schedule where you go to bed and wake up at set times.
Gasp!
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Be smart. Text your fave in a way that doesn’t make you annoying.
LINKS WE MENTION Johnny Cash’s Water Tower Peeing Incident
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Loneliness
He is known as he enters the emergency room, jeans sagging off his waist as an orderly ambles
To meet him. He is hunching at the precipice between lobby and hall, intake and bathroom, and
Ready to be seen. It is hard to be seen these days in a little Maine town full of tourists
If you are Old. It is only easy right here, right now, in the liminal space before becoming
A patient. We watch him totter, trying to decide. Go in? Stay out? Become
Or remain. Before we arrived here ourselves for broken bones; children who gulped down
Their own therapies in too many numbers; corneas scratched by tree limbs; we had to make
Those decisions, too. Did we want to save ourselves or should we just embrace
That all we are is pain and numbness and pain? We came, but others didn’t.
We sought help. And waited and waited for it, looking at our origins in heart beats
And blood levels, skeletons pinned and set straight again, stomachs pumped,
Eyes numbed with drops we are told not to get addicted to. In his room now, just curtains
For walls, the hunched man yells, Hello. No answer to his polite entreaty. Hello. Hello.
There is no easy cure for him. Hello. He gives up, changes tactics, and bellows. I have to pee.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Here are some fast and dirty writing tips today that’s going to make your writing more intense. Ready?
Think about your tenses What’s that mean? It means don’t be writing like things are happening now and then shift over to writing like things were happening in the past. If you want the most immediate writing experience, write in the present tense. If you want a little padding? Write it in the past tense.
HERE’S A QUICK EXAMPLE:
I lost feeling on my entire left side of my body during our long run on Friday. I thought I might have been having a stroke.
That’s in the past tense, right? We read this, notice it’s in the first person and figure that the narrator has survived because she’s telling us about this after-the-fact.
Try it out in the present tense:
I lose feeling on my entire left side of my body during our long run. I think I might be having a stroke.
It’s more intense, right?
Let’s make that phrase even more intense.
Take out the distancing words. In first person especially, it’s really hard to get away from a lot of looking and knowing and words that pull us out of the moment and the immediacy of the character’s experience.
Distancing language tends to be the words like ‘seem,’ and ‘look,’ and ‘heard,’ and ‘know.’ When I revise, I think of these words as placeholders for where I can go back and dig in more deeply in certain places.
So, let’s take that sentence again in the present tense again and make it more immediate. THE ORIGINAL
I lose feeling on my entire left side of my body during our long run. I think I might be having a stroke.
CHANGE THAT UP AND IT LOOKS LIKE:
My entire left side of my body starts going numb during our long run. My left foot numbs first. Then my left hand and arm. When the left side of my mouth starts going numb, I gasp. I might be having a stroke.
You’re in there a bit more with that character now right. Is she having a stroke? What the heck is she running for? SHE IS BROKEN!
The rest of the tips don't feet here! I know! I know! So sad. You can check them out at my blog. The link is below.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
You can totally hack into other people’s heads. It sounds dastardly, right? But you can tweak other people’s memories.
On Mind Hacks, Heather Fishel cites the work of Dr. Jon Lieff and writes:
“Once an event occurs and time moves on, it becomes a part of your memory. Each time you recall that event and its details—smells, sounds, details, and so on—you’re not, in fact, remembering the original moment. Instead, you’re recalling the last time you remembered that memory.”
But it’s more than that. We tweak those memories to make better stories:
Fishel says:
“Wired writer Jonah Lehrer points out, human nature makes us love stories, and the more exciting and engaging a story is, the more we’ll want to share it. As a result, when we recount our memories both internally and to others, we ignore any facts that don’t suit the plot. Our minds allow us to toss aside any information that we dislike, replacing truth with pure fiction. Why? We simply want to fit in, and unless we change what we remember, our stories will suck.”
We will tweak our own memories so we don’t look dumb, so we fit in, so we tell a better story, and we usually don’t even realize that we’re doing it. And sometimes we have totally false memories.
What is a false memory?
According to VeryWellMind, false memories
“are misremembered, distorted, or fabricated recollections of past events. Such memories can be trivial, such as mistakenly remembering where you put your car keys, but they can also be much more serious.”
The big time consequences of false memories are the stuff of novels and tv shows: false convictions, financial loss, lawsuits, children dying in heated, locked cars.
But it is also a smaller scale thing. You are sure you left your cell phone on the desk. It is not on the desk. It is on the table. You have to wonder how many poltergeist cases are rooted in false memories, right? You think you shut the closet door, but the closet door is open. You are positive you locked the door. The door is unlocked.
You think you saw Bigfoot when you were six, but did you really, Carrie?
The rest of our notes for this podcast won't fit here, but they are one click away.
LINKS WE REFERENCE https://nypost.com/2018/09/27/scientists-discover-evil-people-share-a-dark-triad-of-traits/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/weird-yellow-brick-road-discovered-at-bottom-of-the-ocean/ar-AAX4kJd
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
``` "Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me."
We were visiting Mom’s best friend,
An aunt who wasn’t an aunt,
She taught school, the job my mother dreamed of
Before unplanned babies and rushed marriage
Turned her life into breaths clutching
At meaning. The ladies stayed inside with coffee
Laced with Kahlua and words steaming
At the edges of truths while I walked to the lake,
My body lurching forward. Last child by so many years
Made me a lonely only and I started singing
To the waves and the trees. The water-stained boards
Of their dock made me think of mermaids and tears.
Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me.
This is why I am a poet.
The dog emerged from the woods to the right,
A Doberman. One of Mom’s men friends
Had a dog like this. I reached my arms open, hugging the air
And the dog bounded into them. From the deck of the house,
My mother screamed, Carrie! No!
Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me.
This is why I exist.
What are you? I whispered to the dog as her tail wagged
And tongue lapped my face.
When the grown-ups came running out, the dog shifted,
Guarding me from their strange worries about credit and affairs,
Husbands who might find things out, children they left
Behind them, coughing and clinging to life.
They implored me to come with them. My hand ran
Along the dog’s fur and for the first time,
I felt powerful. I found a dog, I yelled, but she really found me.
The water clung to her fur the way I wanted to cling on
To that moment. Could she have really heard me wanting,
Singing need and loneliness into the waves and trunks
Of crooked spruce trees, my sadness hooking lines into the granite
That gave our state its name? Someone’s husband
Convinced them the dog meant me no harm. She didn’t.
Dogs never did. They still never do.
Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me.
This is why.
```
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Last week on WRITE BETTER NOW, we talked about fear for our characters as we write, and not all of you are writers, but I bet a lot of you are characters. Sorry! We couldn’t help teasing you there.
Anyway, FEAR is great when it comes to writing novels and short stories and getting our characters to do things proactively on the page.
But in real life? Eh . . . It can be a problem.
A lot of us use fear to motivate us to do things. Sometimes we do this consciously. Sometimes we do this subconsciously. But it’s basically the act of doing things because we don’t want an outcome that we’re afraid of.
Like what? We go to work because we’re afraid of losing our house to bankruptcy.
We go on a diet because we’re afraid of people’s scorn if we’re at our maximum density.
We are kind to our spouse when they are being a putz because we’re afraid of being alone.
And all those things? They are stressful.
It stresses you out if you’re always doing things because you’re afraid. And it also stresses you out if you’re always not doing things because you’re afraid.
Fear may keep you employed, fit, and in a relationship (albeit a potentially toxic one), but it’s not super helpful if you’re trying to not be anxious and stressed.
The rest of these podcast notes (too long to fit here) are here.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Just go for it, damn it. No fear.
LINK WE MENTION IN RANDOM THOUGHTS https://www.ladbible.com/community/bride-slammed-for-entering-wedding-walking-groom-on-a-leash-20220423
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
We walked by a grave that late spring day,
And there were no clouds, as if God had refused to cast the sky
With bit players. We thought of you as a tractor drove by;
—You had loved tractors, laughter, play.
Mourners claimed the tractor was a sign
That you were here with us in spirit somehow
Embodied in a John Green tractor with a plow
And some of us believed and inhaled the pine
Smells of New Hampshire and home.
But a tractor is not a dad
And nothing can take away the sad.
You left us alone.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us.
One of my favorite writing exercises is super simple. I take a bunch of novelists and ask them:
What is your protagonists more afraid of happening than anything else in the whole freaking universe?
We authors talk a lot about what our characters wants are, their yearnings, their goals, but we often forget about the dark side. Cue scary ominous music.
THE FEARS ARE LINKED TO A COUPLE OF REALLY IMPORTANT THINGS: 1. Obstacles 2. Motivations
Obstacles are easy. As the novel’s hero goes out in search of his goal to get his love, there are things that obstruct him. A terrorist. A snake. His sexy best friend who likes the same person. The obstacles GIVE him fear that he won’t get what he wants—the goal of the story, his perfect result, the yearning. The fear MOTIVATES him to keep trying.
But fear motivates in another way as well. When you make your character imagine the worst thing in the world—the fear can also hold him back from getting what he wants.
When you think about your character’s biggest fear, the deepest fear, the conceptual fear, the root fear, the FEAR OF ALL FEARS, you realize that it’s this fear that MOTIVATES the character. He isn’t just running to something. He’s running away from something.
Is it death? Isolation? Humiliation? Loss of wealth? Actual success? Failure? Humiliation? Aging? The big unknown?
Whatever it is, that root fear pushes your adorable character into the arms of the story, searching and working toward things that take him away from that big scary fear monster.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
In our random thoughts we talk all about drinking each other’s blood. Thanks, Megan Fox and MGK. That part isn't transcribed.
HERE’S THE REST OF THE PODCAST THOUGH. So, this is going to be a short podcast because we’re going to give you some super simple advice this week. Ready?
BLOW OFF YOUR PHONE
Your phone rings? You don’t recognize the phone number? Don’t answer it.
Seriously.
Every single time your phone rings and it’s not a number you know, it means it could be a spammer wasting your time.
More than that though, each of those calls in an interruption that you aren’t expecting and you aren’t wanting. Even if it’s someone awesome, you aren’t in a position to deal with that call to the best of your ability.
Make them leave a message.
If it’s important, they will.
CHECK OUR EMAILS TWO OR THREE TIMES A DAY, NOT AN HOUR
The same thing goes for email programs. Don’t check it all the time. It’s a distraction. Yes, sometimes the emails are super important, but most of the time it’s Texas Tamales telling you that you have only twenty-four hours left to get a fantastic deal that includes queso.
You have to prioritize your to-do list and your time. For that reason, don’t check that email first thing in the morning either. Get something else that is super important done.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Constant distractions make you lose your goal.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
AND we are transitioning to a new writer podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! You’ll be able to check it out here starting in 2022!
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Every Day The puppy galloped through the garden
While the Fed-Ex guy told me about how
His brain was fried. People keep offering
Me beer, he says. They say they’ll hide it
in my water bottle, but one accident
and I’ll lose my job. God, I need it though.
The tourists make everything harder as they walk
Down the center of the streets. Cruise ships
Anchor in the harbor. One has a giant slide
That goes all the way around the ship, even on the outside.
I feel like I’m on that every day, just going down.
Hey. Is that your puppy eating something?
I tell him, She chews at the roots of things, too.
Every day.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us.
It’s a super quick writing tip again today. Ready?
When you’re writing dialogue, make every new speaker a new paragraph. If you’re writing kids books? You might as well just keep each dialogue a paragraph of their own?
Why? Our brains are wired to read each paragraph as a new speaker. If we jumble a bunch of different speakers into one paragraph, it slows down the reader’s pace of reading and also can get their brain all hitched up as they try to figure out who is talking and when.
Why else? It makes more white space on the page. The more white space on the page, the less intimidating the text is for the reader—especially the reluctant reader.
So don’t write a paragraph like this:
Carrie said, “Please support our channel.” Shaun nodded and said, “We are insecure.” “That’s true.” They laughed. Shaun added, “Wow. This is boring dialogue to prove a point.”
Instead write the paragraphs like this:
Carrie said, “Please support our channel.”Shaun nodded and said, “We are insecure.”“That’s true.”They laughed.Shaun added, “Wow. This is boring dialogue to prove a point.”
Pretty easy, right? Now we know who said “that’s true” even though there wasn’t a dialogue tag there. No readers’ brains hitched during the reading of that dialogue and all is good with the world.
For other posts about writing dialogue, check out below:
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Some things you just don’t want to say yes to like say passing out condoms in Easter eggs at your kids school, but other times? You do want to say yes.
Improvisational comedians and actors know that every time they go up on the stage with no script, they are vulnerable.
What if they just stand there and no ideas come?
It’s the same as writers looking at a blank page. Or podcasters staring at an empty sound file.
But with improvisers, they can ask the audience for ideas.
“Give me a noun,” they’ll say. “Something you eat. A musical song. An emotion.”
And the audience members shout things. The improv performers don’t say, “Um, gerbil? I don’t eat gerbil.”
They just say yes to the ideas thrown at them, and then they create something that’s almost always funny.
The secret to their success and to so many other people’s success is that they say yes when they aren’t quite ready to say yes, yet.
A long time ago, a classmate from my MFA program asked me to teach a six-month program mentoring writers. I didn’t think I could do it, and I had a bit of a panic, but I said yes, and that yes has spiraled into a six-figure career teaching, editing and coaching other writers.
I did every single thing I could to make sure that those writers were being served well and getting the help they need.
It was the same thing when I decided to stop being a newspaper editor and get an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. I sent in the application before I could allow myself to think about it. I said yes to the idea, and it was only after I sent in that application that I realized that Vermont was pretty much the Harvard of children’s writing programs. Whoops.
I panicked when I got on campus, overwhelmed by people, tried to leave, stuck it out and within a year had three books under contract.
**But this podcast isn’t all about me. It’s about you. And maybe even Shaun.
You can always let your fears overwhelm you, be risk averse, be terrified of failure, of losing your life’s savings, of ending up living in a car. But you only have one big chance at this life and your dreams.**
You have to say yes before you’re ready because you’ll never be ready.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
AND we are transitioning to a new writer podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! You’ll be able to check it out here starting in 2022!
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Carrie is reading one of her poems every week on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
Here’s the link.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
``` "Celebrity"
Your life could be hated so much.
Once celebrated, you must know the joy—never.
Sitting by the sky’s vastness,
Listening to the screams
Hitting you. You must remember
To open your arms and tumble to Earth
And see if anyone embraces your bones, ascends;
Sometimes we feel like skeletons.
Ligaments, muscles, neurons barely holding it together.
We make so many into angels, waiting
For the fall. ```
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eri
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us.
No lofty talk about exposition or your story’s theme this week. Instead, we’re going back to basics with an easy grammar tip.
Some day (two words) vs. someday (one word). It’s a debate that happens on the page over and over.
Here’s how it works. Someday (one word) is basically “at an indefinite time in the future.”
Some day (two words) is all about a specific day that we won’t know in the future. It’s unknown. It’s unspecified.
Still confused?
We’ve got you.
Someday (one word) is an adverb. It’s talking about something that might happen in the future.
Here’s an example:
Someday Shaun may not make a sexual innuendo, but I’m not holding my breath.
Some day (two words) is an adjective and a noun hanging out together. The adjective (some) is saying at some unspecified or unknown day.
Here’s an example:
I am so psyched to have free time some day next month.
Here’s another:
I’m going on a date some day in July, but I totally can’t get excited about it because it’s so far away.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
There was recently a piece by a lawyer/poet critiquing a younger, more celebritified (we made up that word) poet that caused a bit of an uproar for multiple reasons.
Here’s the thing: Just because a poem doesn’t speak to you or your ‘idea’ of what a poem is doesn’t mean that it’s not a poem or that the person who wrote it isn’t a poet.
One man writing about one woman doesn’t get to decide that woman is or isn’t an artist or a poet no matter how adamantly he digs in his heels. One liberal doesn’t get to decide that about a conservative or vice versa. We shouldn’t think we have the power to label or un-label another person.
Being a critic doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole.
It isn’t just people on the internet though.
We were walking our puppy, Pogie, and our older dog, Sparty, this weekend, and a woman Carrie often tries to avoid stopped to talk.
The woman said that we needed to take our chunky, arthritic Sparty on more walks so he could lose some weight. She has no idea how many walks Sparty goes on. Disclosure: It’s more than it seems.
Next, she looked at our newly painted blue stairs and said, “Oh, that white splotch is still there. That’s been there forever.”
Then she gave our chubby dog a dog treat. A couple actually. Yes, the same woman who told us we needed to walk him more to lose weight.
Here’s another thing: Being observant doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole either. People don’t need to be celebrities for other people to want to take them down, to criticize, to refuse to say one positive thing.
The rest of the podcast notes are here.
LINKS WE MENTION https://www.huffpost.com/entry/javelina-stuck-in-car_n_6254a37de4b052d2bd58fd50
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/giant-snake-causes-chaos-seen-26690881
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Here’s the thing: A lot of us are lonely. Really lonely.
And making friends? As an adult? It can feel kind of scary.
Why does this matter? Well, Sherri Gordon on Very Well Mind cuts right to the chase:
“Research shows that after the age of 25, most adult friendships start to dwindle.1 Of course, some of this has to do with changing jobs, getting married, moving, and even having children.
“Forming meaningful relationships may be harder as you get older, but it’s well worth the effort. Good friendships have a myriad of benefits, including:2
- Better immune functioning
- Decreased risk of disease, illness, and injury
- Increased longevity
- Reduced stress
- Speedier recovery when sick.”
We want all that for you, so we’re here with some advice on how to make friends
Check out the people you work with One great way to make friends according to Dr. Miriam Kiramyer, a clinical psychologist interviewed by Emily Burns for The Cut is:
“We all have workplace acquaintances that we know deep down could be something more. Dr. Kirmayer suggests taking the leap to growing those relationships. Find a common denominator you can bond over, like a shared hobby or interest! You don’t have to talk about work. “Making an effort to gradually open up about different parts of your life, that can help to deepen that sense of connection,” said Kirmayer. Talk about your life, what you like to do in your free time, etc. Perhaps set up a Zoom coffee chat with your fave colleague or schedule a hangout with the neighbor you always joke with in the hallway.
The rest of the notes are at carriejonesbooks.blog They couldn't all fit here, sorry!
LINKS
https://www.foxnews.com/category/odd-news
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
AND we are transitioning to a new writer podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! You’ll be able to check it out here starting in 2022!
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Carrie is reading one of her poems every week on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
i! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
``` No one wants to admit that the moment they are home alone,
They start singing show tunes or childhood hits,
Pretending the crowds are adoring as they slide in socks across a hard wood floor
That isn’t actually a stage and there is no TikTok video being made.
Only we, random humans with our ridiculous bodies,
All gangling and bulbous, opposable thumbs a highlight
Want to be famous in secret—so many dreams sung off-key
Into the space of the kitchen, the only audience the dogs
Since the cats wisely look away. ```
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Exposition.
It’s a beast. And I never have a problem with it as a writer until I’m writing middle grade fiction.
This podcast we’re going to explain what exactly an agent or editor or writing coach or a teacher means when they look disdainfully down their noses at you and say, “You have too much exposition!”
For the rest of the notes, check out here . . .https://carriejonesbooks.blog/podcast/how-to-conquer-the-beast-called-exposition/
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
There’s an Anne Lamott quote that says, “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes—including you.”
And that’s a lovely quote and quite true in so many instances, but also sometimes? Sometimes it can feel next to impossible to unplug.
Sometimes that unplugging has to be a dramatic event where you realize that you have to rescue yourself from the habits that are controlling your life, or the people controlling your life and you have to actually take your own control of your life.
I know! I know! Terrifying.
BUT THE FIRST QUESTION IS: HOW DO YOU ACTUALLY TAKE CONTROL OVER YOUR LIFE?
Over at the greatergood, there are some potential possibilities that we’re going to share here. It’s a great article written by Anthony Rao and Paul Napper back in 2019.
Controlling Stimuli
They write:
“Agency begins with what you let into your mind—meaning what comes in from your environment. If you are lacking agency, it’s likely your attention is being hijacked and you need to figure out how to restore it.”
A phone next to you when you’re reading? It’s probably going to distract you, they say. But walking outside? It lets your brain recharge.
Same thing with email notifications.
Another thing they suggest is . . .
“Associate Selectively”
They write:
“It’s impossible not to be affected by those around us—it’s easy to “catch” their emotions, for example, and our brains tend to synch up when we associate with other people. That means you should set boundaries with difficult people, disentangle yourself from negative online interactions, and be more conscious of how you might be vulnerable to “groupthink”—pressures to behave or think in ways that are contrary to your values.”
How do you do that when that person is your kid? It’s a good question. But they suggest making sure you have a lot of interactions with people who want to help you cultivate your skills and talents, grow to your potential, and help you with your positive beliefs. Volunteering and just chatting can help.
Move Around
Get up. Off the couch. Off the chair. Stretch. Walk. Dance. As often as possible.
Learn
They write: “People with high levels of agency are continually learning more and expanding their capacity to learn by adopting a more open, collaborative approach to everything in life.”
THERE’S A WHOLE LOT MORE WE’LL TALK ABOUT NEXT WEEK TOO, BUT FOR THIS WEEK, TRY THIS:
Put your phone in another room while you work.
Go outside and walk if you can.
Get up every 40 minutes and move around for five. Set a timer.
Chat with someone positive or sign up to volunteer somewhere.
Sign up for a free class or even listen to a podcast like this. Take some time to learn something.
And think about this:
“You can’t buy, achieve or date serenity and peace of mind,” Anne Lamott says in a TedTalk about being sixty-one. “It’s an inside job, and we can’t arrange peace or lasting improvement for the people we love most in the world. They have to find their own ways, their own answers.”
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Bark. Communicate your needs and sometimes the neighbor will bark back and you’ll feel less lonely.
LINKS WE USE IN THE PODCAST
greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/seven_ways_to_feel_more_in_control_of_your_life
www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/help-i-found-a-weird-way-to-calm-the-dog-next-door-my-neighbor-is-furious-about-it/ar-AAVAHvE
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
``` The Retouch
They take me
And blot away all the flaws.
A sun spot becomes plain flesh.
A wrinkle vanishes.
The eraser moves over my whole image.
Sometimes I wonder if there is any me left.
In college, a poetry teacher insisted
We could not write about baseball hats
Or dolphins and I still wonder if manatees
Are allowed, poems about commodity cheese,
Trailers, dog farts. Or is still only proper subjects?
Why is it that we all try to erase
The deepest parts of our hidden centers,
Hardnesses that refuse to be blurred out
In image or word. ```
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us.
Carrie has been talking to a lot of her authors lately about the beginning of their stories and how to make them awesome. And Carrie has a lot of tips for the writers she works with, but we’re going to be fast here.
Make it Tense AF
You don’t want to make readers in our time wait for the good stuff. Nobody is into waiting right now. It’s all instant gratification all the time. This is even true for most books. Too many details. Too much setting or exposition. And too little tension means that readers aren’t going to want to read on. Your first page should make the reader ask a question that they want the answer to.
Show Us What Your Book and Character Are About
This tip really means we want to see the core of your character and what they are yearning for on the very first page. If your book is a mystery, let us see it. If your book is an erotic novel about a hamster and a gerbil, we need to know that, too. The first thing the reader sees your main character doing? That shows the reader who that character is. If she’s running to rescue someone because she hears yelling? That tells us something about her. If she’s running away because she hears yelling? That tells us something about her, too.
Show Us Where They Hell We Are
Nothing is more annoying than a book that has no grounding elements. Let us readers know where the characters are hanging out. Are we in this century? This world? A cold climate? A warm one? What part of the year is it? Let the reader know where your characters are.
Bonus Tip: You don’t want a prologue unless you really need it and you probably don’t need it. We know! We know! It’s super sexy to start with all that backstory instead of trying to expertly twist it into the forward-moving scenes. But it’s also super lazy. And agents don’t like them if you’re trying to get traditionally published.
Spoiler: You can’t just give up after the first ten pages. You want to make sure that your whole book is fantastic and keeps hooking the reader and making them want to read more.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
A Florida man got hit by a car and asked about his beer.
Carrie gets pretty annoyed at poor Shaun.
And we talk about people pleasing and how to stop it. The whole notes and transcript are over at carriejonesbooks@gmail.com
LINKS WE REFERENCED
https://www.ketk.com/news/weird-news/video-florida-man-struck-by-car-leaving-store-asks-if-his-beer-is-ok/
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
This poem is (I think) part of me delving into a character of a young adult novel work in progress.
Spring
My nerves are jangled, frayed.
Panic touches the under layers
of all my skin, and I take off,
breezing past Jackie and Joe
in as fast a walk as I’m capable of
without actually running.
“I’m out of here.”
I announce this
like I’m some kind of bad ass.
Spoiler: I am not a bad ass.
If I was a bad ass, I wouldn’t write poems under a pseudonym;
I’d be able to pass a damn driver’s test.
“How are you going to get home?” Jackie calls after me.
“I’ll walk.”
“It’s five miles,” she yells.
“Just go to work. I’m fine.”
And that’s it; that’s as much yelling back through the halls that I’m capable of. I’ve turned a corner and am pounding down the stairs, hanging onto the handrail as I go down, down, down even though the bannister is probably covered in germs from everyone else hanging onto it. I let go and unbalance hits me.
This world is pain.
This world is me
lacking balance.
This…
I am two seconds away from crying as I move past people and push through the doors. The outside air is a little cold. Spring has barely sprung. But it’s full of promise, normally, the smell of dirt losing its frozen solid nature, the buds on the trees popping through the tiniest twiggy limbs.
Branches.
They aren’t limbs.
They are branches.
“I don’t know how to exist,” I whisper as I start walking.
“I don’t know how to exist in all this life.”
There you go. That’s the thing.
I don’t know how to exist in this life.
I don’t know how to survive in this life.
How do I spring?
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us.
Here’s a really simple writing tip to make you a better writer.
I (Carrie) talk a lot to my writers about distancing words, which are words in writing that keep the reader away from the action. Those are words like:
- Saw,
- Heard,
- Noticed,
- Smelled,
And they take away from the immediacy of the story.
A writer will write:
Carrie heard the bomb explode.
And the reader will be one extra step away from the experience. Instead, you could write:
The bomb exploded.
Or:
A massive bomb shook the area outside the Boston Panera. Glass shattered from the front window, instant projectiles stabbing into pavement, cars, flesh.
It depends on how in depth you want to go, but either example is more intense than “Carrie heard the bomb explode.”
So, a sub category of those distancing words that you want to get rid of in your writing are “thought” verbs.
Those are words like: * Thinks, * Loves (sometimes) * Knows, * Understands, * Realizes, * Hates (sometimes) * Believes, * Wants, * Remembers.
Why shouldn’t we use those words? It’s pretty lazy. You’re a writer trying to build this entire world and experience for a reader and to do that you have to give concrete examples of what’s going on in that world, to bring the reader in and create immediacy.
You build that world piece by piece, laying out the details the way someone lays out an argument trying to convince you of something.
We’ll give you a quick example.
Shaun loves Carrie.
Yeah. Okay. Right? Maybe we believe it. But what if we wrote:
Every morning, Shaun padded down the stairs in his gym shorts, large, pale feet cold against the wood floor and filled the electric kettle, turning it on to boil. And every morning about ten minutes after Shaun started the tea, turned up the heat, let the dog out into the snowy yard to do his business, Carrie made it down the stairs too, wiping the sleep from her eyes. Shaun held out the mug of tea. “Be careful, baby. It’s hot.”He said that same thing every morning.And then he’d wink.
We now know that Shaun’s love language is acts of service and he’s giving those acts to Carrie that ungrateful woman. 🙂
Writing isn’t about shortcuts and abstractions. It’s about details, evidence, and communicating a world bit by bit. When you get rid of those abstractions and add those details, the evidence, when you SHOW the reader what’s going on rather than TELLING them? That’s when you become great.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
When we follow people—be the authors or internet gurus all about self-help or celebrities or influencers, we only see one side of who they are: the shiny side.
We see the end product of a book, a video, a photo, a blog post, a speech, but we don’t see the day-to-day humanity behind that. We consume the product, become devoted to the person, even sometimes think we’re friends with the person, and sometimes even think the things in their lives belong more to us than to them.
And that’s pretty interesting, right?
Last week our dog, Gabby, died and because Gabby is a big part of Carrie’s message and social media, she posted that Gabby had passed. So many people were lovely and kind and expressed so much sympathy because Gabby presented something good in their lives and because they were kind and had empathy because they’d been through loss, too.
But one person sent a message that said they were still really sad about Gabby and that Carrie may still be struggling. And that? That one little word ‘may,’ when combined with their statement about being really sad? It made us stop and think even though we know this person is absolutely lovely and only has the best of intentions.
Still, it was our dog that died, but we were the ones who may still be struggling?
We are no Tim Ferris or Kardashian or Tony Robbins or Anne Lamott, but our lives are real and not just consumption for others. We get joyous, desperately sad, grieve, make massive mistakes, and sometimes even do things incredibly right.
Sometimes when we follow others, we forget that those other people are people and sometimes we forget that we are people too.
We are all intrigued by the personality and human aspects behind the people we follow, be they entrepeneurs, philosophers, influencers, or Kardashians. But that doesn’t mean that we should forget that they are humans with whole teams sometimes helping them create a product.
You don’t need to be a product.
And you don’t need to feel bad about yourself if you aren’t an influencer or don’t have a massive following or don’t have beautifully curated Instagram photos.
You aren’t a product and even those famous people aren’t products. We are all humans, figuring things out as we go. We don’t need to imitate a Kardashian to be happy or to channel our inner Tony Robbins or Oprah or Anne Lamott or Jayson Reynolds. We need to define what it is that we truly want in life. If you are overwhelmed by the death of someone else’s dog, you might want to find more love in your life. If you are angry about something your town council did, you might want to be elected to a position where you can change things. If you are sad that other people are getting books published, you might want to start spending some time writing your own book.
Success is not about not eating carbs, wearing the right make-up, putting on the booty enhancers, and drinking a certain kind of energy drink. Success is about defining who you are, what you believe in, how you want to live your life. That’s not something you can imitate. It’s something you have to be. You have to choose to be who you are, not who the gurus want to be. You have to choose to live your life, not live through others.
That takes work sometimes, deep thought, and the ability to look inside yourself at what you want to be and who you are right now. It means letting go of past mistakes and moving toward a human-focused and humanity-focused present and future. It takes love, damn it. And the first step is loving yourself. Oprah, Kardashians, Ferris, Robbins, Reynolds are all probably great humans, but they aren’t you. And you? You’re just as great or maybe even greater. You just have to believe in yourself enough to let that greatness out.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
This morning when I planted
An apple tree in the backyard again
Because the last had been crushed
By the weight of beaten maple branches, broken fence posts
That had separated our yard
From the neighbor’s barren grass,
Until a storm knocked everything over,
Breaking, breaking, breaking,
I thought of you planting spruces
Wherever you lived, whenever you lived.
Delighting in shaping them
Into proper silhouettes, you’d said,
“Even Santa would approve of these big boys.”
You and I are not blood it turns out because Mom
Got lonely, bored, needy, got something. You never knew.
Firefighter lungs took you away before I learned,
Particulates turning into cancer all around your thick, hobbit chest.
Invading. Invading. Invading. Taking away
What seemed so solid and true.
You told me trees talked to other trees,
Anchored each other into the ground,
Talked to humans, too. Their species
Classification didn’t matter, you said.
It didn’t matter if they weren’t alike.
Maple could love oak could love spruce could love apple
The same way I could love you even when our blood
Turned out not to be the same. We still grew together.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
``` Ode To Another Nightingale
“My heart aches,” he says as if that will change her mind.
He quotes Keats, memorizes it the way others memorize song lyrics,
drunk, but not on hemlock or an opiate. Drunk
one minute and the next.
Keats is not pretentious enough a poet to impress
someone who sings with dryads and serves dark and stormies
every night at the Whale. “Keats is bullshit,” she tells him. “All litanies of bullshit.
Have you ever heard a nightingale sing?”
It’s like beatboxing, machine guns, not some trembling, deep-voiced
opera serenading you. It’s more like a car alarm telling you
someone has come too close, someone is trying to get closer, someone . . .
The bird is named after men, of course, men who sing late into the night,
men who pine with loneliness and drink with bitterness.
A nightingale gurgles. A man trills. They both whistle.
He doesn’t impress her with his heartache lines, his odes. “Fade far away,
dissolve, and quite forget,” she tells him. And after another drink, he does.
```
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us.
What is your story? Really? It’s more than you’re a writer. You’re a citizen of your community, your country, your world. You might be a certain race, religion, a sex (or not). You might have a faith, an economic status, a job. You might have hobbies, traits.
But you might not think you have a story especially when you see huge events unfolding in the world. You might think that your voice doesn’t matter, that your viewpoint doesn’t either. You might be used to people shouting you down when you say things they might not agree with or don’t want to hear.
This week we wanted to touch on how big events happen and we find them so harrowing and we think: Who am I to tell this story? I’m not in the Ukraine. I’m not on the frontlines of human rights struggles in Texas or Florida or China. I am not this or I am not that.
But here’s the thing. We are all witnesses or witnesses of witnesses. We all are a part of this world and the moments of this world. And we all get to tell our moments and our stories if we want to. Perspective and voice doesn’t just belong to people in power and it doesn’t not belong to people who see, who can testify, who can witness.
In Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola write, “Our role as writers can be that of witness. … Think of yourself as a witness and your writing will take on greater weight and urgency.”
Daisy Hernandez has a great essay where she comes to terms with her aversion to the term ‘witness’ when it comes to literature.
She writes (link below):
“While it may well be that no book has ever prevented genocide or fascism, we still have a necessity for literature to testify to the political conditions of our lives—not only so that we might have a record of those we have lost, but also that we might have a reason to gather with others to read and to continue resisting.”
She prefers the term ‘testimony.’
“In contrast to witness, I love the word testimonio, testimony. I love how it sounds: serious and engaged, aware of itself. Intentional. It says: I have made a decision, and I am here to testify.”
Intention is important. Connections are important. And so are authentic narratives. We learn by story, but we also learn how to be human via stories.
Connections happen because humanity happens. And even if you think that you’re not an important piece to the story that unfolds, you are. We all come through things through our own psychographics and demographics and bubbles and experiences. Each piece and understanding of the stories of our times matter.
George Sand wrote,
“Everyone has his own story, and everyone could arouse interest in the romance of his life if he could but comprehend it.”
Here’s the thing: There are enough buttheads out there in the world trying to prevent people from having a voice and trying to keep others from hearing that voice. It could be a company or government censoring tweets, political statements, books. It could be an ideological group banning books. It could be a sibling shouting at you to “Shut the hell up” when you talk about feminism.
But you can’t. You must not shut the hell up. As long as you can fight, fight. As long as you can write, write. As long as you can survive, survive.
For the rest of the podcast notes (they don't fit here), please check out this link to our website.
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A lot of people give up on things because they focus on goals.
THEIR GOAL IS: 1. Write 50,000 words by April. 2. Lose 20 pounds before the wedding. 3. Have $100,000 in the bank by January.
Goals are lovely. Goals are sexy. Goals work brilliantly for some people, but for some of us goals are absolute bullshit.
I know this. Yet I still fall into the goal trap all the time. If I don’t lose twenty pounds and only 19.5, I feel like I’ve failed. If I only write 49,998 words, I feel like I’ve failed. And I’m not even going to talk about the bank thing.
That’s because goals are all or nothing. You get them or you don’t.
Habits though? Habits are an author’s and a human’s best friend. Habits are amazing and good ones? They create other good ones.
Charles Duhigg wrote,The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. And in it he talks about keystone habits and how if we understand habits, we can figure out how to kick ass, basically.
The rest of our notes won't fit here, but you can see them on Carrie's website.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
AND we are transitioning to a new writer podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! You’ll be able to check it out here starting in 2022!
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
GABBY DOG POEM There can be no doubt,
her fluffy, furry, slobbery self
was meant to save us just not
the way she thought,
not from little gray squirrels
allegedly terrorizing the house,
standing on porch railings
as they stashed nuts
into their cheeks;
nor from Fed-Ex drivers,
obviously nefarious,
with those cardboard boxes
that could contain something awful
like ear cleaning solution or cats;
nor from the lumbering man
who drug oil lines through the snow,
hooking up house to car
like some cartoon villain ready to detonate explosives,
but from our own forever brokenness,
the way our hearts yearned
to just be loved by someone
despite all our flaws.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us.
So, over here on WRITE BETTER NOW, we’ve had a three-post series about how to develop your theme and what the hell even in a theme and blah, blah, blah.
This last post is really just focusing quickly on how to develop your theme.
Step One: Think what the hell kind of insight you want your readers to get. Can you show them a new way to think or see or feel about life?
Step Two: Write that as a statement with a noun and verb. I WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW THAT MIGHT DOES NOT MAKE RIGHT.
Step Three: Make sure that you aren’t shoving that concept down your reader’s throat like a bad over-moralizing superhero movie, right?
Step Four: Wonder how to do that. Realize that it’s about being subtle, not being a cringy cliché. But it’s also about your character actually struggling and not believing that concept.
Step Five: Think about those subplots to help show what that character needs to figure out.
Practical Creative Writing says it well: “A story without a theme is little more than a list of events.”
Wow, right? They even call the theme the pulse of your story.
MasterClass suggests:
First look for something universal that will resonate for people outside our own psychographics.
Then try to think of something that will keep your reader thinking.
All of that is very esoteric and abstract.
I think you should think about your plot and what your character needs to learn. Your story is about a firefighter with a dead eccentric dad who was raised by an uncle who believed magic and weirdness should be avoided at all costs. She’s up for a promotion at a fire department and doesn’t stand out. Something magical happens on a run and things spiral out of control. What is the theme here from just the bits I wrote out.
Theme has to be part of plot and character. It has to make sense.
But MasterClasses’s next suggestion we heartily agree with you want to make sure your theme is throughout the whole story, not just slammed in at the end.
They write:
“As you fill in the details of each act, make sure your main character encounters situations that highlight the theme. If you’re balancing multiple story lines, see if you can make your theme manifest in each of those narrative threads—ideally in a different way in each story line.”
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
There is an article over on Medium that annoyed Carrie, which to be fair, Medium articles by self-professed self-help gurus often do.
Cough.
It’s not because the guy has 250,000 followers, she swears. It’s just because he’s a bro-looking white guy regurgitating other people’s stuff.
And here’s the thing. To make impact, you don’t want to vomit up other people’s books or thoughts. You want to be your own person.
In New Hampshire literary circles of the 1970s and 1980s there was a dynamic poetry husband and wife duo of Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon. They were nothing alike in their poetry and Donald usually received a lot more kudos, but Jane? She made her moments.
I’ll always remember my Aunt Maxine introducing me to Jane when I was eight or something and saying, “She is a spectacular poet.” She pretty much gasped it all out because she was so enthralled.
I always wanted to be gasp worthy, honestly–in a good way, right?
So, there’s a piece in the National Book Review by Mike Pride that talks a bit about Jane (who died at just 47) where it talks about how her husband dealt with people being stupid about the difference between their poems and styles.
“Hall reacted when anyone suggested that he was a poet of big ideas while his wife wrote sweet and simple poems. “Yeah,” he’d say, “her style is a glass of water – a 100-proof glass of water.”
There is a tendency for us all to look away from the moments, the truths of our lives and existence and instead go for those superlative, larger than life moments, stories, celebrities, all that b.s.
But here’s the thing– even Captain America has to go poo. Even bigger-than-life people whose stories are cultivated for our consumption also have those smaller moments.
It’s not about the 250,000 followers. It’s about you making each moment, each interaction count.
And sometimes to do that you have to look and see how those moments have happened to you before.
Have you ever had a moment where your understanding of the world changed? An epiphany?
When was the last time you felt at the top of your game?
When was the last time you tried something new?
When was the last time you risked your reputation for your beliefs?
A lot of those moments have big emotions with them, right? And sometimes we get scared of those big emotions and when that happens? We can’t take risks because we’re afraid of the emotions and change that might come with those risks. Even when that change is positive, it’s something different, something new and that can be super scary for a lot of us.
But you’ve got to keep trying and dreaming and learning and being brave in order for cool things to happen.
How do you do this? 1. Think about what you really really want to happen in your life? 2. Make sure that this is something that you morally feel cool about. Don’t want to be an assassin if you’re against killing. 3. Make sure what you want feels like it gives you purpose. 4. Put in the time. Decisions don’t mean crap if you don’t actually put the action steps and time into that choice. Authors make our characters all the time. It isn’t enough for Captain America to go save the world. He has to take a super serum, learn how to fight and throw a shield, locate the bad guy. That goes for us, too.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
``` The apple fell to the ground
joining the others; rotting
had already begun the way it does.
We all fall and crack.
On the wire a squirrel ran to the right,
green apple in her mouth, prized
obviously, bigger than her head. Another
fell before a second squirrel appeared, apple
in mouth, bounding on the wire to the left this time.
I know I’m not the squirrels. I know
I am not an apple (though I feel round lately),
but I gather things too big to hold and drop
so many, bringing them to the road
where they’ll be carried off
by others or maybe smooshed under
wheels of cars or just left to rot.
I know. I’m not the apple
rolling aimlessly
until I can’t move anymore.
I know. ```
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us.
Last week on our podcast we talked about theme, and we’re going back there again.
We know! We know! So scary. Why risk it again? We risk it for you, dear listener. Like a matyr-parent from the early 2000s, we’re writing your college essays and yelling at the soccer coach and doing the work.
Once again, what actually is a theme? So, the theme is the central idea of your story.
According to aresearchguide.com:
“A theme in a story is the major idea that the story leans or surrounds. It comments on human experience, and more often a story relates to real life situations. All stories have at least one theme.
“A theme gives the general view of the story. It gives the reader the insight into how the story characters live to pursue something good, the results of conflicts and how all these choices come to pass in their lives. In a story, there can be major and minor themes.
A major theme is an idea the writer keeps on repeating in his work, portraying it as the most significant idea.The minor theme is the idea that appears briefly in the story.
“A theme needs to be compelling and captivating. You need to think carefully when choosing a theme for your story.”
Let’s go simple: It’s the idea your story is about and it’s good to include a verb in that idea and a noun/subject.
Some writing coaches will say to never ever explicitly state your theme. Some coaches will say you should absolutely have a character state your theme early on in your story (first act) but have your main character not get it.
Over on the blog writerswrite, they give examples of themes:
Crime pays.Honesty is the best policy.Who dares wins.Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.Home is where the heart is.The past is a foreign country – they do things differently there.You never really know anybody.People are predictable.People with nothing to lose are dangerous.Love conquers all.Blood is thicker than water.You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family.What does not kill you makes you stranger.
That site uses the Lajos Egri Theme Cheat Sheet, which is from Ljos’s book: The Art of Dramatic Writing. To see that and the other three-step program, please head over to carriejonesbooks.blog because all our notes don't fit here. So sorry!
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, if you’ve ever had the pleasure of dog ownership, you know that dogs do their business and then kick dirt up in the air or grass or just nothing.
They stand there looking kind of silly and kick or scrape at the ground. Sometimes their paws don’t even make contact with anything but they still do it and look like they are inventing some new TikTok dance that we’re not coordinated enough to do.
They aren’t.
They’re just acting on instinct.
According to the AKC
Dogs have glands in their paws that release pheromones that trigger social interaction with other dogs. These pheromones from dogs’ feet last longer than the scent of urine or feces, making them more effective as a communication tool.
If you’ve ever sniffed your dogs’ paws, you’ll notice a specific smell that isn’t always a clear sign that they need a bath or grooming appointment — it’s likely that your pup has recently stimulated the pads on their paws to produce pheromones and spread their “scent.” While these chemical reactions aren’t visible to the human eye, they’re as powerful as putting a mailbox out in front of your house with your last name on it to claim property.
The behavior dates back thousands of years, when dogs lived in the wild and were responsible for fending off prey. In the presence of other dogs, the action was used as a protection method.
Your pup isn’t attempting to ruin the lawn, but simply letting other dogs know they’re in charge.
What can we learn from this? Well, we could say that we’re learning that silly seeming behavior can have deeper roots, right?
Or we can say not to make assumptions about things that seem stupid because it’s just not your species’ way of doing things.
Or we could say, “Why the hell does everyone need to be in freaking charge all the damn time?”
Seriously, even our dogs need to be the top of the hierarchy? Maybe we all need to chill, spray something nice or burn a candle after we defecate, and call it good.
But wait. That’s not always the case, even with dogs. The AKC says:
AKCBut it’s not always a warning to “back-off” — this form of communication also allows canines to alert other dogs that there isn’t a present threat in the area. If another dog comes near, they’ll immediately know that another animal of the same species is close by.
Phew. I feel so much better about things now. There’s a goodness in knowing you aren’t alone. That there is community out there, right? That’s why people love Star Trek have conventions, that Danganronpa fans cluster together on Discord. It’s nice to not be alone.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Leave your best smell behind. That’s how others recognize and remember you.
LINKS WE REFER TO https://shepherdexpress.com/puzzles/news-of-the-weird/news-of-the-weird-week-of-feb-3-2022/
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
``` Parent Not Expected
I know nothing about the weather
I was born in or how the sky whispered
or stormed. I know nothing
about the man who helped make me,
other than his name and he smoked
cigarettes, constantly, until he got skin
cancer. I know his mother had thick,
dark hair, immigrated here, which was so different
from the story of my birth certificate
and the ancestors who had been here
for centuries, taking their time to take
the land. I know nothing about how
my mother struggled to hide the secret of me.
My nose gave me away. My quirky clothes gave me
away. The way I didn’t fit gave me away. I know nothing
of the people who came before
me on one side, grandparents,
great-grandparents, random uncles
and aunts, their pains. They are unknown
stories. They are wind that I can’t feel. They are
stars that don’t tell their secrets.
I am their secret and they are mine. ```
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
What is theme? This is the first in our three-week series about what theme is and how to find this abstract bugger and even develop it in your own stories. And to start things off, we have to define theme. Turns out there are a lot of different takes on this bad boy, but for today we’re going with LitCharts.
According to LitCharts,
A theme is a universal idea, lesson, or message explored throughout a work of literature. One key characteristic of literary themes is their universality, which is to say that themes are ideas that not only apply to the specific characters and events of a book or play, but also express broader truths about human experience that readers can apply to their own lives. For instance, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (about a family of tenant farmers who are displaced from their land in Oklahoma) is a book whose themes might be said to include the inhumanity of capitalism, as well as the vitality and necessity of family and friendship.
And you can have more than one theme in your story, but we’re just going to be focusing in on one right now.
The theme is something you have to develop in your story and it has a significant impact on your main character.
Your book will have a plot – the things that happen in the story.
Your book will have character development – how your character evolves or doesn’t in a story.
Your book will have a theme – the more abstract concepts that your story involves.
Themes can be broken into concepts and statements.
A concept would be: Love
Grief
A statement would be: Human love is imperfect.
Living with grief is permanent.
And your work as the author is to embody those themes in your character as they navigate the plot and world of the story.
Sadly, all our notes won't fit here, so if you're into reading the text and perusing the links head over here.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Ashley Bryan died this week. He was 98 and a brilliant artist, writer, and human who lived on an island in Maine near us and was the keynote speaker at a book festival we had. In a 2017 Horn Book interview with Roger Sutton and Nikki Giovanni, he said,
Ashley BryanIf someone says they are taking my time — that’s the one thing you never can take. I have to offer it. Time is of the moment, and the moment is all I have. If that moment isn’t precious to me, then I’m not living. Nothing is more important or precious to me right now than both of us talking
Ashley also said in that same interview
I love poetry. It’s at the heart of everything I do. Poetry transforms what we call language, and uses language as the stuff to become something else. I get spun around by what happens in words. When that occurs, it inspires images that seem so original to me as an artist, even though I’m following what the poem has offered.
So, I, Carrie was a bit heartbroken by this, not just because Ashley Bryan like me goes out in public with paint on his sweater (as you see in a photo on our blog taken when he was at the book festival), but because Ashley was such a light in this world. He seemed to get it–to not just rejoice in the moment, but to also rejoice in the twists to the moments.
In a New York Times article from 2020 entitled “Why Mundane Moments Matter,” Simran Sethi writes
SethiAlthough we, as a culture, typically favor the superlative, research shows that moonlight, and everything that is revealed in ordinary moments of our life, matters. Valuing the routine enriches our lives in ways we do not expect, because “how we spend our days,” the author Annie Dillard reminds us, “is how we spend our lives.”
You can hold onto the past and get bitter or sorrowful. You can project into the future and fill it with worry, but the moment you are in right now. That is your moment. You want to try to actually experience it fully, breathe it in. Be freaking alive in it, be present.
And Ashley got that. He expressed that in his love for community, for moments, for twists, for poetry, and in his art. In another interview with the Horn Book, he said to Sutton.
Ashley BryanIt is an urgency that is fundamental, and the essence is the same. It’s the urgency to discover something about ourselves in every work we make. I make no distinction between doing a block print, a collage, a watercolor, a tempera painting. To me it’s an effort to discover something of myself that I do not know and have not done. So each effort is like that of the child going out in the morning, making discoveries and having adventures.
We hope you find that too–that discovery–that fundamental essence in your moments and in your self.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Live in the moment.
Link we mention in our Random Thoughts https://shepherdexpress.com/puzzles/news-of-the-weird/news-of-the-weird-week-of-feb-3-2022/
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
``` The Lettuce
Again this summer
I’ve forgotten to harvest
the lettuce that we planted
when the ground was barely workable,
warm enough to support the tenderness
of seedlings, brown, pale, and white, barely
opening to the world, the air, the sun.
We are still human, he tells me, even though I think
that we may be losing whatever it is that makes humans human?
Humanity seems a fickle word now that pundits use it
to talk about the unfurling of threats, bombs, lies. The lettuce,
when you forget to harvest, shoots up
like it’s trying to reach the sky, but it rots
from the outside and in towards the core,
slowly taking over the joy of green, crisp leaves.
We are like this. Everything greens and grows and rots
when we aren’t looking. Democracies,
romaine, bibb, souls, humanities.
How can I forget to harvest the lettuce?
Why do we plant it at all? ```
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
A long time ago we talked about backstory on our podcast, DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE, but we thought it would be pretty helpful to quickly talk about it here on WRITE BETTER NOW.
Hey baby, what’s your backstory?
It’s that I married you, honey.
Hey baby, what’s your backstory? It should be a pick-up line at a bar, yet it somehow is not a pick-up line at any bar that I know of except maybe in a New Yorker cartoon or a bar in a town where there’s one of those MFA programs in writing literature for literary people doing literary things.
Anyway, it’s a term writers throw around all the time and it is basically just how we imagine our characters’ lives went before they are in the actual story that we’re writing.
But basically it’s the formative experiences that make your character who they are today in the story of your novel or poem or essay or short story.
I know! How can you imagine that your character had a life before your story? It’s like imagining your spouse had a life before you that wasn’t totally centered around you. Us narcissists have a hard time with that.
Steven Moffat, Doctor Who: A Christmas CarolDo you know, in nine hundred years of time and space, I’ve never met anybody who wasn’t important.…
According to a post on https://www.nownovel.com/blog/talking-character-backstory/
There are three uses of backstory.
- Developing the understanding of the characters. Like if your dad died of a heart attack in front of you and you couldn’t save him, then your character might have a savior complex. It helps the reader understand your characters’ motivations.
- It can heighten the stakes and the suspense. You were once addicted to dating cops. Cops were always bad for you. Will you date this one? NO! YOU MUST NOT.
- It makes it real damn it. By the time, you make it into a book, you’re not going to be a blank slate, born out Zeus's head. We all have prologues.
Hey! All the podcast notes don't fit here, so if you want to check out the rest in written form, head to carriejonesbooks.blog
Writing Tip of the Pod All Condensed Find the balance in your backstory and your life. Backstory is important, but it shouldn’t take over the current story
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Improving yourself is a really great goal. If you can quantify your progress and you’re into that? It’s even better, but what actually matters is what’s going on inside of you and that’s hard to quantify.
Emotions are a little bit subjective. Then can change and cascade and they aren’t easy to describe, let alone quantify sometimes. But what we think it’s really about–this whole self-improvement/self-discover thing is about not feeling like poop all the time inside your brain and emotions.
Feeling comfortable with who you are is important. Reconnecting with who you are means that you are so much more free, so much more capable, so much more courageous.
And feeling comfortable with yourself and your weirdness and your moods and the thoughts that filter in and out of your brain is really the thing.
It’s kind of THE big thing. It’s sort of what we all want. But when we want that comfort, it’s as if any internal suffering we have becomes a failure to the goal of self-improvement and that’s not super helpful. We’re allowed to f-up. We’re allowed to not feel constantly comfortable and not be ashamed or feel unworthy. It’s part of being alive and human, and it’s okay.
But most of us don’t want to feel like poop all the time. That’s definitely okay, too.
What matters is living with your whole heart, living with purpose and living with compassion for yourself and others. We have stories in our lives. We have patterns. And when we’re aware of them and where they come from? That helps us understand that we are okay, that we’re worthy, that we can be the good guy in our own damn story.
Tara Brach talks in her book Radical Acceptance about people feeling unworthy. That feeling of unworthiness tends to lead to feelings of shame and so you start looking for ways to be worthy.
But the thing is that worthy? It’s bullshit.
Brach writes, “Feeling compassion for ourselves in no way releases us from responsibility for our actions. Rather, it releases us from the self-hatred that prevents us from responding to our life with clarity and balance.”
We are who we are. And worthy as a concept and a word makes a couple of assumptions:
- That there’s one way to be worthy and unworthy.
- That the feelings of society or our culture get to dictate that across multiple situations and personality types and scenarios.
- That there is and should be a hierarchy of worth.
That means that we are letting other influences determine our worth. Outside influences. And we are accepting those outside metrics as determining factors about how we feel about ourselves. We write a book and it gets published but if it gets a bad review? We feel unworthy. We write a book and it hits the NYT bestseller list but not #1? We feel unworthy. We get cranky at someone in the grocery store line. We feel unworthy.
The rest of the notes don't fit here, but they are on carriejonesbooks.blog
LINKS WE TALK ABOUT https://www.facebook.com/chrisrosssongs
Chris Ross’s website:
https://www.chrisrossandthenorth.com/?fbclid=IwAR2gip9F8PsagKLnM0IkirX1gUGWS2wivU3B6w3wDIlkpRt0RGVXkwZykGo
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
``` Everything Makes Us Scared
The professor and his wife argue about the party though they love
each other. Chairs are meant to be where exactly
on the porch? Burgers pre-made or created on site?
He’s a hippie from the Marines. Everywhere is danger,
possibilities of pain. He wasn’t in a lot of war, but it was enough,
enough to know that things can become out of control
if you don’t take care. She just wants people to talk, mingle, to eat
grilled vegetables and be happy, to have a moment away
from fears and worries of this year, this country, this culture.
He says he isn’t worried. He’s older. He’s seen worse. And when the first guests
come to the party, he knows no-one. They are the mommies, he says. The daycare people.
Her friends. He lumbers off to the side.
The charcoal doesn’t light. Of course. Everyone stares.
The grill’s gas is low. Their daughter, three, twirls in circles, studies
the people, twirls again, a perfect mix of caring too much, caring too little,
the joy of being alive and chocolate cupcakes with sprinkles and the worry
of so many faces in her backyard. The mom, she is decades younger;
she’s cleaned the forest of wood, picking it up in the days leading to
the party. So many potential weapons. A little boy
takes a ball, pummels another.
A man says scathing things to his wife,
cutting her down in warning.
So many threats. We watch it all. My back
goes up against the wall of the house,
spine hitting shingles. They talk about pandemics,
violence. So many threats. We murmur our agreement.
Everything. Everything makes us scared. ```
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called A Feather and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us.
One of the big things that Carrie sees in stories a lot is nodding.
Here’s what it looks like:
Shaun nodded. “I agree that’s a lot nodding.”Carrie nodded in affirmation. “Yes. There really is.”For a moment they sat there and then Shaun smiled. “You want to get out of this excerpt and do the podcast, baby?”“Yes.” Carrie nodded. “I do.”
Why is this bad? Well, for a couple of reasons: 1. It’s the same action over and over. 2. That same action is really just repeating what the dialogue is doing. The dialogue is already telling the reader that the character is agreeing.
The cool thing is that whenever us writers revise our work, we can go back in and specifically look for these nods and recognize them for what they are: placeholders.
That’s right. Every single time you see a nod, I want you to ask yourself: 1. Does that nod really need to be there? 2. What can I replace that nod with. A more telling physical action that involves the whole body? The character interacting with their physical setting? Just blank space?
You want to just go a little deeper into visualizing that scene, feeling and embodying that character’s body, so that you can bring the reader into the scene, too.
If you think about our little excerpt from earlier, you’ll notice there’s no setting. We have no clue about where Carrie and Shaun are, but also we have no clue about what their whole bodies are doing, what they look like, anything.
Here, let’s try it again:
Shaun stretched his long legs in front of him, knocking his shin against the iron support of the office desk, and put his arms behind his head. “I agree that’s a lot nodding.”Carrie curled her legs under her and scooted her small velvet chair a little closer to him. “Yes. There really is.”For a moment they sat there and then Shaun tapped his finger against the computer screen, sniffed in the eggy smell of dog farts and said, “You want to get out of this excerpt and do the podcast, baby?”“Yes.” Carrie gagged, covering her mouth with her hand, cringing. Tears came to her eyes. “I do.”
Our bodies show people how we feel. How we stand, hold our head, purse our lips, move our hands, plant our feet, slump our shoulders, wiggle an eyebrow all communicate our emotional condition.
As writers, we have to key into those body movements, the expressions, so that we can have a full range of possibilities to help our readers be inside our characters’ worlds. That world is about a lot more than nodding, shrugging, and shaking heads.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Friends, sometimes your body is putting out a message that you might not want out there.
What am I talking about?
Well, here we go.
Shaun is a big, tall, broad-shouldered, thin-lipped man with large eyes and a large presence. When he crosses those strong forearms across his trunk and stands against a wall at a party, he is definitely sending a message to everyone glancing his way.
And what’s that message?
Go away.
Carrie is a short, buxom woman who tends to hug her purse to her chest whenever she’s sitting down at a restaurant or at a poker table. She’s definitely sending a message too.
And what’s that message?
Carrie is super insecure about everything and she’s clutching her purse like a baby blanket.
Neither of these are really the messages we intend to send. Shaun is just trying (usually) not to take up too much room. Carrie’s trying to hide her chest because that’s what she’s mostly insecure about. It’s hard when people stare at your breasts all the time.
But the point here is that we aren’t always cognizant of the messages that our bodies are putting out.
Verywellmind citing Foley GN, Gentile JP. Nonverbal communication in psychotherapy. Psychiatry (Edgmont). 2010;7(6):38-44.It has been suggested that body language may account for between 60 to 65% of all communication.
And sometimes we can’t control what we’re putting out.
That same article cites a study by Kleisner, Chvátalová, and Flegr which says,
VerywellmindOne study found that individuals who had narrower faces and more prominent noses were more likely to be perceived as intelligent. People with smiling, joyful expression were also judged as being more intelligent than those with angry expressions
So, some things we can’t control unless we have a lot of money for cosmetic surgery, but some things we can, right?
We can all remember that a closed body language often means that we’re telling people nonverbally that we’re hostile or anxious. An open body language often means that we’re telling people we’re open and friendly.
Knowing how you move in space, how you take up space (or don’t), is really helpful in understanding the impressions you give to people and the impressions others give to you, too.
So you want to improve those skills, right?
THE REST OF THESE TIPS DON'T FIT HERE! So, head over to Carrie's website to read them (if you're into that). SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
AND we are transitioning to a new writer podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! You’ll be able to check it out here starting in 2022!
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Carrie is reading one of her poems every week on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
So, this week I’ve decided to read one of my grandmother’s poems instead.
Full disclosure: I have a lot of grandmothers and they are all dead and this one was about 4’10 at maximum height and this grandmother was already 75 when I was born.
Luckily, she lived a long time so I got to know her. But her poems? They were hidden away and only brought out when my little hobbit dad begged her to see them. It was rare. She, like me, was pretty fearful about sharing her poems and her art.
But art and communication and thought isn’t meant to be hidden away, is it? So here’s to Grammy and here’s to being brave.
``` Grammy Barnard Poem #2
March 11, 1927
A Wish
Love, she goes hand in hand with spring,
To thoughts of this girl then you will cling,
Go dear, and to her tell,
Of the desire you have in her heart to dwell,
Tell her while sweet spring is here,
Tell her while she still is near,
Tell her of moonlight, tell her of flowers,
Tell her of love, and its wondrous powers.
```
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called A Feather and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
It’s Writing Tip Time and we’re going to give you three fast and dirty writing tips today that’s going to make your writing more intense. Ready?
Think about your tense
What’s that mean? It means don’t be writing like things are happening now and then shift over to writing like things were happening in the past. If you want the most immediate writing experience, write in the present tense.
Here’s a quick example:
I lost feeling on my entire left side of my body during our long run on Friday. I thought I might be having a stroke.
That’s in the past tense, right? We read this, notice it’s in the first person and figure that the narrator has survived because she’s telling us about this after-the-fact.
Try it out in the present tense:
I lose feeling on my entire left side of my body during our long run. I think I might be having a stroke.
It’s more intense, right?
Let’s make it more intense.
Take out the distancing words.
In first person especially, it’s really hard to get away from a lot of looking and knowing and words that pull us out of the moment and the immediacy of the character’s experience.
Distancing language tends to be the words like ‘seem,’ and ‘look,’ and ‘heard,’ and ‘know.’ When I revise, I think of these words as placeholders for where I can go back and dig in more deeply in certain places.
So, let’s take that sentence again and make it more immediate.
I lose feeling on my entire left side of my body during our long run. I think I might be having a stroke.
Change that up and it looks like:
My entire left side of my body starts going numb during our long run. My left foot numbs first. Then my left hand and arm. When the left side of my mouth starts going numb, I gasp. I might be having a stroke.
You’re in there a bit more with that character now right. Is she having a stroke? What the heck is she running for? SHE IS BROKEN!
Try not to use the same word too many times too closely together.
In the example above I deliberately use the word ‘numb’ and ‘my left’ over and over again. I’m cool with the repetition of ‘my left,’ but not so much with the numb. There are better, cooler words to mix in there and grab the reader’s attention. Let’s try.
My entire left side of my body starts going numb during our long run. My left foot disappears first. Then my left hand and arm. When the left side of my mouth starts to tingle, I gasp. I might be having a stroke.
There you go!
We’ve learned three fast tips to making your writing more intense.
Writing Tip of the Pod:
Be in the present (tense). Don’t be distant. Mix up your words, man.
Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Lately, a lot of Carrie’s writers have been talking about how they want to write with intention and that always makes Carrie’s brain hitch a bit, which is why we’re doing this podcast, a slightly deep dive into intention.
According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, intention means
the thing that you plan to do or achieve : an aim or purpose
And over at a site all about spiritual wellbeing appropriately called Blissful Light,
Intention is probably one of the most essential parts of healing, abundance, manifestation, personal and spiritual development.
Whoa, right? That’s a lot to put on one word or one state of being. Healing. Abundance. Manifestation. Personal AND spiritual development. It almost makes you tired to just think about it.
And it’s also a lot of . . . words. Abstract words. And over here on Dogs are Smarter Than People, we’re not really big on abstractions. So, we’re going to break it down a bit for you in real world terms.
You want a hot dog. You find money. You go to a store. You buy a hot dog.
You make a decision: buy a hot dog.
You do the actions: find money, go to store, buy dog.
Intention works the same way. You have to decide what you want and then you have to take the steps to get what you want.
Sometimes the deciding is the hardest part. It’s like when you go to the grocery store in the U.S. before COVID and there is an entire aisle full of cereal choices. Your brain balks. So much cereal! Too much choice. Wheatabix or Captain Crunch? Co-co-puffs or corn flakes? You can get stuck.
Back in 2004 Barry Schwartz wrote a book about people being overwhelmed by too many choices. A lot of other scientists and researchers dispute his theory. But, we know Carrie has a hard time with it. 🙂 You might too.
Here’s the thing:
We make choices every day. Stay in bed. Get up. Go to the bathroom now, try to hold it. Answer the phone? Don’t answer it.
We constantly live with intention, but we want to be able to visualize and make the big steps toward those loftier and more exciting outcomes. Prince Harry and Meghan Markel didn’t just leave their royal life for American; they imagined a different life and took all the complicated steps to get there. The Rock didn’t just become a superstar and get to dance with Gal Gadot. He took all the complicated steps to go toward bigger and bigger goals.
WE CAN NOT FIT IT ALL IN THESE NOTES, so head over to carriejonesbooks.blog to read the rest, but first . . .
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Dream big. Work toward those goals. Make choices that move you toward that vision. That's a huge part of living with intention.
AND THE STORY ABOUT THE POT BROWNIES AT THE SENIOR CENTER? It's right here.
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
``` “You Aren’t Allowed To Write About Me”
If by aren’t allowed, you mean you forbid it, then who are you to forbid?
If by write, you mean think, tell stories, try to understand, to recreate
you in a way that isn’t such a jackass,
I’m sorry, but you can only be improved,
and you’re missing out.
The you on the page is so much better than the you in life.
If by me you mean just you, I’m sorry,
but stories (even characters, even real-life
characters) are bigger than just one me,
just one you, just one.
None of us are just one.
Why don’t you try to imagine what it’s like
to not have a Lexus and enough money
to have your back shaved? Why don’t you try
to imagine what it’s like to listen to you asking someone
if they are ‘really an American,’ or telling them they look
like a pumpkin because they’re wearing an orange dress.
What it’s like to hold a given-to-you bouquet
and know that it will wilt because you don’t have
the water to let it survive, to go
in the shower and pray for warmth?
Why don’t you imagine what it’s like
to live bigger than who you are,
trying to push into who you are meant to be?
Imagine that’s more than a Lexus.
Why don’t you imagine?
I am not allowed to write about you.
I write about you constantly
even when you don’t realize.
You are the grit between my teeth. ```
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called A Feather and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
I was lucky enough to interview the brilliant, young, amazing and talented Tony Quintana, writer of wonder.
Tony talks about how he uses his perfectionism to motivate him, how his background in theater and art helped create Dashiel’s world, and how he began his debut novel in Spanish, only to decide to translate it all by himself into English. It’s a magical story and a magical book that began when he was just fifteen!
I hope you’ll check out the podcast and Tony’s amazing book! I mean seriously, just check out the art that it’s inspired.
WHAT IT IS ABOUT
When bloodthirsty metal soldiers from the empire of Zaphyrelia infiltrate the divine barrier protecting the magically-infused oasis of Azahar, an unlikely hero is found in Dashiel Ermitage, a simple librarian’s apprentice with a longing for adventure.
But with the metallic menace finally defeated after a valiant battle, Azahar faces a greater problem: the barrier that protects the land is weakening, leaving them vulnerable to their enemy. Dashiel’s wish for excitement becomes a reality when he is recruited to join the Cobalt Phantasms, an elite order that hopes to provide relief to the Zaphyrolean people suffering under a tyrannical rule. His journey takes him through a wonderful but dangerous nineteenth-century world of flourishing machines and dwindling magic.
Dashiel’s new life, however, is threatened by a long-held secret that will put an end to his adventuring days if it ever comes to light. Will he prove to be the hero Azahar needs to overcome their enemies, or will Dashiel’s past destroy his chance to save everything he holds dear?
WHERE TO FIND MORE ABOUT TONY AND HIS BOOKS
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tonymquintana/?hl=en
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100074737030172
Author page: https://www.crystalcarriagepublishing.com/tony-m-quintana/
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, this week in our attempt to make your life a little bit better, we’re talking about being toxic and we are specifically talking about men being toxic.
And to do that we first have to define what toxic masculinity is.
Maya Salem in a 2019 NYT article writes that it’s:
- Hiding your emotions, pretending you aren’t upset
- Making sure everyone thinks you’re hard. (not your muscles, but your brain/soul/emotions)
- Violence=toughness=powerful
Salem“In other words: Toxic masculinity is what can come of teaching boys that they can’t express emotion openly; that they have to be “tough all the time”; that anything other than that makes them “feminine” or weak. (No, it doesn’t mean that all men are inherently toxic.)”
But toxic masculinity is more than that. It’s a set of beliefs that a lot of men believe about themselves and that a lot of women believe about them, too.
What are those damn, stupid beliefs. According to Dr. Axe, they are things like (all the italicized below is a direct quote, but the format in the notes is hitching:
- Manhood is defined by violence, sex, status and aggression.
- Men should not be interested in “feminine things” because this makes them appear weak
- Men shouldn’t display “feminine” traits such as emotional vulnerability.
- Men and women can never truly understand each other or just be friends, for reasons like men are always interested in sex.
- Real men are strong and don’t show emotional signs of shame or weakness.
- Anger and violence are useful ways of solving conflicts.
- Men are not suited to be single parents/the dominant parent in a family.
So, you might recognize some of those beliefs in yourselves or in others, rights? And it’s kind of a lot of bullshit.
You can be male; you can be a man and be nuanced. And there isn’t some dichotomy of man strong/woman weak. We’re not even going to begin to talk about how tough female sex organs and birthing organs are, right?
Sigh.
That is a rant for another time.
Moving on, masculinity theory has its origins in gender theories and has been expanded by the work of Raewyn Connell (Australian sociologist), Dr. Ronald Levant (researcher) and others who speak of the patriarchal dividend. And according to Dr. Axe, it’s about:
“A set of values, established by men in power, that functions to include and exclude, and to organize society in gender unequal ways. It combines several features: a hierarchy of masculinities, differential access among men to power (over women and other men) and the interplay between men’s identity, men’s ideals, interactions, power and patriarchy.”
So, what are those values? We talked about some of them, but those aren’t all. Let’s go at it from another angle.
The links we reference and the rest of the notes are here.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
Mean People Suck She is driving, in her car, with the sticker MEAN PEOPLE SUCK
Stuck on the bumper. She hasn’t yet peeled
The sticker off, though she promised herself
When her dad bought her the car, she would before the week was through.
Mean people suck.
But as she drives the car, at night, down the curves
Of the Mud Creek Road, she isn’t thinking of the elegant statement
Stuck to her little, gray automobile, she is thinking
Of the boy poet in her German class, the handsome one, with hair,
And how, only a half hour earlier,
He gave her the best compliment she’d ever heard:
If you lived in Nazi Germany
You would’ve been in the resistance. I am sure.
Ah. She sighs at such a compliment, better by far than a litany
Of her attributes, of the color of her eyes, the beauty of her words.
Not better than the boy poet’s hand on her thigh,
Or perhaps, his lips on her instep.
You can only ask for so much.
This is what she thinks as something darts in front of her car.
Headlights turn the fur orange.
A cat, she thinks as she swerves. A fox?
The thud is as bad as she imagines
And for five seconds she keeps driving,
Five seconds before she pulls to the side of the Mud Creek Road,
Five seconds before she tries to find the hazards.
She can’t. She can’t find them and while she looks, her body
Shakes and she tells herself:
Drive back.
Drive back.
Turn around.
She does, watching the body grow large and clear in headlight beams.
Not a fox. Not a cat. No crying little girls tomorrow
Searching for Muffin or Smokey,
No pictures of cuddly kittens posted on supermarket wall or telephone poles.
A raccoon.
Why did she think the fur was orange? Is she color blind?
Do you need glasses if you’re color blind, she wonders.
Parking parallel to the body in the middle of the Mud Creek Road, she looks.
God, he is beautiful, this raccoon, perfect mask and paws and fur.
Move him, she orders herself.
Move him.
She opens the door, but the animal stirs… a slow, graceful lift of his head.
His eyes meet hers. And she knows, knows she can’t move him,
Knows she can’t take off her jacket, wrap it around his soft, bruised body,
Can’t bring him to rest in dignity by the woods. And she knows she can’t
Get in the car and run him over and over again and again,
Forcing tires over his furry bulk until the pain is over.
In her own hips, a pain like sciatica spreads, needles sticking and
Spinning down her flanks.
She shuts the door, puts the car in reverse.
The raccoon stares.
The raccoon watches the lights retreat and despite the increasing distance, despite
The roar of other cars coming closer, the rush of blood,
Despite everything, this raccoon hears the girl yelling to herself:
Coward! Coward…
And he agrees.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
We’re going to start the year off right by talking about porn.
What the what?
And this is your year to give up porn. And no. We aren’t talking about erotica. We’re talking about what self-help guru Tim Denning calls “addictive habits.” He uses the word porn to grab attention (it works if you’re here) and explain how these addictions are everywhere.
He then categorizes all the different types of porn we have.
There’s lifestyle porn – sitting on the toilet and whipping out your phone.
There’s money porn – always being on your phone or laptop so that you can earn that “100,000 in five months,” always reading the article or watching the podcast to figure out how to make that money super quickly.
There’s startup porn, which is basically being addicted to starting new businesses so you can get that money.
There’s revenge porn where you are a mean punk on social media, hurting people’s feelings in comments, subtweets, or messages.
There’s real porn. We don’t need to explain that, right?
There’s influencer porn where you are all about your brand and selfish instead of giving.
I think there are a lot more addictions than that. There’s the:
Diet Addiction You think you’ll be happy if you just lose that 40 pounds but you keep hopping from one diet to another.
The Outside Photos Addiction You think everyone wants to see your vista photos.
Television, Video, and Gaming Addictions You spend all your time consuming other people’s content and escaping. Escaping is fantastic, but you don’t want to do it all the time.
Denning writes:
“The secret to kill all forms of porn is discipline.“Discipline yourself to focus on what you know is good for you.“You have a list of habits already that you probably follow — like exercise, reading, leisure time, meditation — and you can focus your time there and get far better returns than the endless porn-fuelled addictions of meaningless nonsense.“Porn is an addictive distraction to doing the work you know you want to do. Getting started with your life’s work each day is hard, but so is continually distracting yourself with life porn.”
Instead, maybe think about what you want, who you want to be, what you want to do and think about how you can give up the porn that’s holding you back. 1. Stop trolling people. 2. Stop being mean to yourself. 3. Stop watching so much content (except us of course). Just kidding. 4. Stop making ideas and not actually pursuing those ideas. 5. Stop reading your phone when you go poop.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE! You only have so much time in this world. Use it well. Use it the way you want to. Not the way your addictions want you to.
LINKS WE MENTION https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2021/12/26/strange-news-stories-from-2021/
https://timdenning.substack.com/p/your-life-is-full-of-porn-stop-getting
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, here at the podcast we’re going to be making a big change this year and DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE isn’t going to be quite so much about writing tips and more about life tips.
Wait! What? Yep. We’re shifting.
First, we have fantastic content about writing, but um, we don’t have the word “WRITING” in our podcast.
If there is anything we’ve learned from our dogs is that you’ve got to be clear about communicating who you are.
Sparty communicates that he is a dog who is all about food and snuggles.
Gabby communicates that she is a dog who is all about keeping a watchful eye over her family and long hugs.
And “Dogs are Smarter Than People” while it’s gathered over 263,000 downloads (thank you all), is definitely not communicating anything about writing.
So, we’re shifting and adapting. We’re going to start another podcast called more appropriately “Write Better Now,” and we’re keeping this one and it’s going to be much more dedicated towards helping us all be as smart and wise as our dogs.
I hope you’ll chill out with us and join us in our journey. Maybe even like and subscribe.
Here’s our quote where we try to be wise:
“Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as being able to remake ourselves.” ~Mahatma Gandhi
And here’s our writing tip of the pod: Write the story you long to write, not the story you think everyone else wants to hear. Yes, you can make more money self-publishing if you blow off your own wishes/desires and write to market, and money is good, but you have to listen to your muse, too, take chances, and grow.
Dog Tip for Life Life is about more than money as long as you have food, shelter, clean water, safety and heath care. Go after the life you want!
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
AND we are transitioning to a new writer podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! You’ll be able to check it out here starting in 2022!
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
This week in honor of the holiday season, we’re going to talk about a time Carrie did a very Carrie thing at a grocery store in Ellsworth, Maine. It will eventually relate to books, we promise.
The Carrie Story
One day in the grocery store line a lady behind me dropped her bag of Cheetos.
I picked them up.
She dropped her box of Wheat Thins.
I picked them up.
She dropped her onion. It rolled over to me, shed some purple skin, and hit my foot. I smiled. I picked it up. I gave it to her.
“I must be missing the belt,” she said.
So, then, it was my turn with the clerk. I opened my bag and my wallet was not there. My check book? Check. But the wallet? MIA.
I told the cashier, terrified.
She said “If you’ve written a check here before, you don’t need an ID.”
???
So, I said, “I don’t know if I have.”
I spent the next three minutes alternately explaining that I had visions of my red cloth wallet hanging out by the 12-grain organic bread in the bread aisle, or in the post office where I’d just used it, or in the middle of the parking lot, or, gulp, in some evil wallet-snatcher’s hands.
I looked for sympathetic glances from the food dropper behind me, but she no longer liked me.
I wrote out the check. The machine beeped. The cashier looked at me, apologetically. “You’ve never written a check here before.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll run out and check in the car.”
So, I raced outside despite the fact I was not wearing a sports bra, and unlocked the car, and… no wallet. I gasped. Really.
I stepped back and there, beneath the tire, was a flash of red. I snatched it, clutched it to my chest (still without the sports bra) and raced back to the store.
“That was fast,” said the clerk.
“You found it!” said the nice guy who came to finish bagging.
Glare, said the dropping stuff lady who was behind me in line. Glare. Glare. Glare.
It’s like what I imagine happens to my books. I start off really well, everyone likes what I’m doing, and then — bang — I screw up. Drop the voice or something, make a character do something nobody wants her to do.
And then what? Glares from one. Sympathy from others.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Everything can help inform your story and make a scene to use later on.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Be kind when other people are struggling, not just when you are struggling.
LINKS WE MENTION
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
I was lucky enough to read Taylor’s book in development and I’m so glad it’s out there in the world.
During the podcast, we talk about Taylor’s first stories, her love of lions and even have a cameo from her amazing cat.
It’s pretty hard not to fall in love with someone as great and enthusiastic about writing as Taylor is. Her charm is infectious and her book is amazing! I hope you’ll check it out.
About her book!
The king of Hollow is dead. When the news of his murder is spread to his kingdom, no one knows why he was killed. For decades King Dravin ruled with wisdom, kindness and peace. A death this brutal was seemingly unprovoked. Queen Seraphina, his wife, now sits on the throne. With someone so sinister and evil ruling the kingdom, the only chance of finding the truth is in the hands of their 22 year-old daughter, Princess Adelaide.
Facing anything it takes to find the truth, Adelaide must overcome torture, betrayal, and the potential demise of those she loves most. When it seems as if she has finally found an answer, she loses all of her memories. Leo, a strange man that found her in the forest, is her only hope of discovering not only who she is, but what her mission was in the first place.
Will Adelaide find the truth? Or will she die trying?
Where to find her:
Socials:
INSTAGRAM: Instagram.com/authortaylorannwright
FACEBOOK: Facebook.com/authortaylorannwright
YOUTUBE: https://youtube.com/c/TaylorAnnWright
Get the book!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HPFMRKG/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm_WE4GYQP8YBGQBYH5RKP8
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Yesterday on Carrie’s blog she talked about a writer worry that happens a lot, which is figuring out when your novel has too many characters.
You should check that out at carriejonesbooks.blog if it’s one of your worries, but here’s a bit more information about making that deadly decision (deadly for your character, not you).
ANOTHER WAY TO DETERMINE IF THE CHARACTER NEEDS TO BE THERE IS TO THINK ABOUT YOUR CHARACTERS’ ROLES IN THE STORY. Protagonist – The main character. It’s the character that the reader likes, loves, roots for, worries about, the character that moves the plot forward and has emotional development.
Antagonist – The naughty one who keeps our protagonist from quickly achieving their goals.
Sidekick – The bestie. The support system for the protagonist.
Orbital – They tend to get the protagonist in trouble even if that’s not their intent. Think Hermione in Harry Potter. She’s the coolest, but her insistence on doing the right thing and being heroic sometimes pulls Harry into a path of uh-oh. The orbital is basically an instigator.
Love Interest – I don’t have to explain this one, right?
Confidante – This is the person the protagonist tells their secrets to. It can be a trusted friend, a mentor.
Foil – They aren’t the villain, but they are the protagonist’s opposite. Think Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter.
Red Shirts – These are the extras. They are hanging out in the background and encountered, but not super important. The Patils in Harry Potter
If you have a ton of one type of character, you can probably delete or combine one.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Diversify your characters’ roles and consolidate. Don’t have too many characters doing the same thing/serving the same role.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Keep your crew tight. Don’t think the red shirts are the sidekicks.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link.LINKS WE MENTION
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142716/where-does-noogie-come-from
https://www.gotoquiz.com/what_killier_wedgie_do_you_deserve_girls_only
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This is it! Our final installment in how to punctuate dialogue like a boss
And we’re talking about questions and quotations in dialogue because why not fry our brains a little more. Are you ready? And as a reminder, our last two podcasts also talk about this, so you should check them out.
Let’s start with . . .
Questions and Exclamations in Dialogue and there is not dialogue tag or beat.
They are just standing out there all by their lonesome.
When this happens, you just put the question mark or the exclamation point inside the last end quotation marks.
“Carrie is obsessed with manatees?”“Carrie is obsessed with manatees!”
So the formula for that is:
BEGINNING QUOTATION MARKS + QUESTION OR EXCLAMATION + QUESTION MARK OR EXCLAMATION POINT + END QUOTES
Questions and Exclamations With a Dialogue Tag
Now let’s add a dialogue tag for those questions and exclamations.
So here again, the exclamation point or question marks are right there inside the second set of quotation marks. DO NOT USE A COMMA, TOO! BANISH IT!
And do not capitalize the dialogue tag. LOWER CASE THAT BABY! It’s all the same sentence even with the exclamation point/question mark in there.
“Carrie is into manatees?” they asked, pretty much scowling because that was weird.
“Carrie is into manatees!” he said, gesticulating at the manatee. The manatee winked.
BEGINNING QUOTATION MARKS + QUESTION OR EXCLAMATION + QUESTION MARK OR EXCLAMATION POINT + END QUOTES + lowercase dialogue tag and the rest of the sentence + PERIOD.
Okay. Moving on to this dangerous territory.
Quote Inside Your Dialogue
Sometimes, you’ll have a character who is telling you a direct quote from someone else or a book or a song lyric within their dialogue, right? So, we have to tell the reader that this quote is a quote they are quoting (look at all those quote words) and not something they themselves are making up.
How do you do that?
You use the magical punctuation!
So, you put those double quotation marks around everything the speaker is saying AND THEN you put single quotation marks around what they are quoting.
“Carrie said, and I quote, ‘I am so into manatees.’ ”
“Carrie said, ‘I am so into manatees.’ Sometimes it’s hard to be married to her.”
Amazing, right?
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Knowing how to punctuate helps make agents, editors, and readers love you.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE If you’re quoting someone else, you want to show it. If you don’t? You’re plagiarizing. That’s naughty.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
LINKS WE REFER TO IN THE PODCAST https://www.foxnews.com/us/colorado-man-sets-moms-home-ablaze-trying-clear-cobwebs-blowtorch-police
https://nypost.com/2021/12/05/bomb-squad-rushes-to-hospital-after-wwii-era-shell-found-in-mans-rectum/
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In last week’s podcast we started to talk about how to punctuate dialogue because we’re sexy like that. And we’re continuing that discussion this week.
A great source of how to to punctuate dialogue is from theeditorsblog.net
They are calm and lovely and explain things really well.
And for a reminder: A dialogue tag is just the bits like “they said,” “she whispered,” “he yelled.”
Single line of dialogue with dialogue tag and action So, for this, you’ve got quotation marks around your dialogue with the dialogue tag following what was said. But before that, right before the end quotation mark, you have a comma. There’s no capital letter for that dialogue tag. Why? Because it’s the same damn sentence, that’s why, and you can’t just randomly capitalize things in there. A period goes at the very end of the action or beat.
“Shaunie is a cutie face,” she said, hoping Shaunie would look her way and smile.
Quotation Marks + Capitalized First Word + Comma + End Quotation Marks + Lowercase First Word in the Dialogue Tag + Comma (usually) + Action/Beat + Period.
You can switch that around and start off with the action/beat and the dialogue tag.
Hoping Shaunie would look her way and smile, she said, “Shaunie is a cutie face.”
Action/Beat + Comma + Dialogue Tag + Quotation Marks + Capitalized First Word + Period + End Quote
So, then you have the interrupting dialogue stuff that writers love. This is when the dialogue is all the same sentence, but it’s interrupted by the dialogue tag. When that happens, you want a comma before the last quotation marks in the first part of the sentence and then again after the dialogue tag.
“Shaunie is a cutie face,” she said, hoping Shaunie would look her way and smile, “but he doesn’t ever notice me.”
Or
“Shaunie is a cutie face,” she said, “but he doesn’t ever notice me.”
Quotation Marks + Capitalized First Word + Comma + End Quotation Marks + Lowercase First Word in the Dialogue Tag + Comma + Action/Beat + Comma + Quotation Marks + Lowercased first word + End Punctuation (not a comma) + End Quotation Marks.
Two sentences interrupted Or you can get all emphatic and make it two sentences because it’s dialogue. Then the first sentence has a period before the end quotes and dialogue tag. The dialogue tag ends with a period. The second quote section starts with a capital letter. Whew. That’s a lot. Ready?
“Shaunie is a cutie face,” she said, hoping Shaunie would look her way and smile. “But he doesn’t ever notice me.”
Quotation Marks + Capitalized First Word + Comma + End Quote Marks + Lowercase First Word in the Dialogue Tag + Comma + Action/Beat + Period + Quotation Marks + Capitalized First Word + End Punctuation (not a comma) + End Quotation Marks.
Whew, that was a lot. Our brains are fried? Your brains okay?
Writing Tip of the Pod Be sexy. Know your punctuation.
LINKS WE REFERENCE IN THE RANDOM THOUGHTS PART OF THE PODCAST https://omaha.com/news/national/roadrunner-going-faster-ends-up-in-maine-after-hitchhike/article_4ce788b0-ef17-50ea-b260-36325130663c.html
https://www.ranker.com/list/creepy-hitchhiker-stories/isadora-teich
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A great source of how to to punctuate dialogue is from theeditorsblog.net
They are calm and lovely and explain things really well.
But if you’re a little weird, you’re in the right place.
Let’s get started for this two-part podcast that we’ll finish next week.
And for a reminder: A dialogue tag is just the bits like “they said,” “she whispered,” “he yelled.”
Single line of dialogue, no dialogue tag. You put the whole sentence inside those quotation marks.
“Shaunie is a cutie face.”
Quotation Marks + Capitalized First Word + Period/Question Mark/Exclamation Point+ End Quote
Single line with dialogue tag (attribution) coming after it. This time you put the dialogue inside the quotation marks and also a COMMA of MAGIC right before the last quotation marks. Then after the dialogue tag you put a period like this:
“Shaunie is a cutie face,” she said.
Why is this?
It’s pretty simple, the whole thing is a sentence, but it’s a sentence in two parts. Part one is the stuff someone is saying aloud. Part two is telling the reader who is saying it. It’s all one big thing and that’s why you don’t have a period inside the last quotation marks before the dialogue tag.
Whoa. Mind blow, right?
And that’s the same reason we don’t capitalize SHE in the dialogue tag of SHE SAID.
Quotation Marks + Capitalized First Word + Comma + End Quote + Lowercase First Word in the Dialogue Tag + Period.
We’re going to do just one more and continue on next week.
Single line, but you’re putting the dialogue tag first So, it’s totally the same concept. It’s all one sentence, but this time the capitalization gets a bit wonky. You want to capitalize the first spoken word inside the first quotation marks and put a COMMA OF MAGIC right before it to separate the spoken words from the tag. Ready?
She said, “Shaunie, you are such a cutie-cutie face, my little coco-puff.”
So, you have a capitalized SHE at the beginning of the sentence, a comma at the end of the tag, quotation marks, then a capitalized first word.
Tag + Comma + Quotation marks + Ending punctuation (period, exclamation point, question mark) + End Quotation marks.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Know your dialogue punctuation because it gets super confusing if you don’t.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE When you know the rules, when you know how to communicate your wants, you should be able to get your people to understand you AND you can understand your people.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Links We Mention In Random Thoughts https://time.com/6115335/spacex-astronauts-200-days/
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/20/1057698279/cash-spill-san-diego–california-freeway
\
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These next few podcasts, we thought we should get all nitty-gritty with some quick grammar tips or style tips for people writing fiction.
It can help you nonfiction writers, too, we swear.
WHEN YOU’RE WRITING DIALOGUE (PEOPLE TALKING TO EACH OTHER), YOU’RE GOING TO WANT TO FOLLOW THESE PUNCTUATION RULES. Use quotes.
Have the dialogue tag (who the speaker is, the he said/she asked) in the actual same paragraph as the dialogue.
Punctuate it all correctly.
BUT HERE’S THE BIG ONE: Don’t go screwing around with those dialogue tags, also known as speaker tags.
You want to keep it simple when it’s a dialogue tag.
“Said” and “asked” are your besties here. If you do anything else? You look like a crappy writer who is trying too hard and the tag becomes more attention-grabbing than the very important words your character said.
“I love you,” she said reads a lot differently than “I love you,” she murmured and bellowed and hissed.
That can be your intention, but you don’t want to keep doing it all the time.
“I love you,” she murmured.
“I love you,” he cat-called.
“I know,” she bellowed.
He screamed, “Of course you do.”
“And what do you mean by that?” she enthused.
So, the other big thing to remember is this: You can’t sigh out or smile out words, so don’t use them for speaker tags. You can use them for dialogue beats, but that means you have to punctuate them differently.
“I love you,” she said. – Requires a comma after the word ‘you,’ and a lower-case S for ‘she.’
“I love you.” She sighed. – Requires a period after the word ‘you,’ and an upper-case S for ‘she.’
Oh, and romance and horror writers, we all love to make our characters hiss especially when our lovers are shapeshifters, but you can’t hiss out a bunch of words if there are no s-sounds.
WRITING TIPS OF THE POD Make sure your reader knows who is speaking by putting the dialogue tag next to the dialogue.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Only call attention to the things you want to call attention to.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
LINKS WE TALK ABOUT https://shepherdexpress.com/puzzles/news-of-the-weird/news-of-the-weird-nov-11-2021/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/new-words-in-the-dictionary
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Everyone tells you to raise the stakes in your writing.
And that’s a lovely, easy thing to say when you are the editor and not the writer. But what does it actually mean?
You hear this and think, “Yeah. Yeah. High stakes equal important. Cool. Cool.”
But then you start thinking about dinner or something.
But it’s important. Carrie’s first breakout novel was NEED and it was a series about pixies trying to cause an apocalypse. Those are high stakes, right?
Agent Donald Maas says it pretty well, “High stakes yield high success.”
He suggests knowing exactly where the stakes increase. What page does this happen? Can those stakes be higher? Do those stakes make it harder for your main character to get what he/she/they want to get?
A really, beautiful way he puts this stakes question out there is by asking authors to ask themselves, “So what?”
What’s the so what question?
It’s this: IF YOUR MAIN CHARACTER DOESN’T GET THEIR GOAL THEN SO WHAT? Does it matter? How much does it matter?
And that brings me to what I think of I think is Maas’s most important point about stakes:
The stakes in your story don’t matter unless you’ve built in human worth about your main character. If your character’s life doesn’t matter to the reader, than the stakes don’t matter, and this is even true for life-and-death stakes.
HUMAN WORTH So, that brings us to the question of what is human worth and how do you make it happen in your story. That’s obviously a big cultural question, right? And this isn’t meant to be about philosophy, but about writing, and yes it’s all intertwined.
YOU HAVE TO ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER. Who is she?
Why do we need to care about her?
What are the stakes that make it necessary for us to care that she gets her goal. There needs to be an extra burst of value in why us readers care about your character. Are they super moral? Are their morals and ethics at risk?
The rest of the notes (that don't fit) are here. WRITING TIP OF THE POD Make your characters matter. Make them redeemable. Make them have human worth.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Choose the people who see your good, not just your bad.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link.
SOURCES WE MENTION
https://metro.co.uk/2021/10/14/police-admit-officer-did-mistake-paddling-pool-of-goldfish-for-sharks-15420535/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2021/sep/07/talking-duck-in-australia-can-say-you-bloody-fool-after-learning-to-imitate-human-speech-video
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Carrie’s teaching a class at the Writing Barn for the next six weeks about . . . character!
That means we’re talking a lot about character in our house.
Of course, we’re also being characters because being characters is more fun than talking about them. It’s like the difference between telling in your writing and showing.
And in the writing world one of the big annoying things writers hear about their characters is that the character is “too static, man.”
What’s it mean to be too static? It means that the character isn’t growing or changing. The opposite of a static character is a dynamic character. That’s a character that grows and evolves.
In most stories (but not all) our protagonists grow and change and are dynamic dynamos. They are characters we root for or follow, right? The evil miser who hates Christmas becomes a generous benefactor. A little boy wizard who hides under the stairs becomes a wizard leader in the fight against darkness.
But if you think about the James Patterson series’s protagonists, most of them are like Sherlock Holmes and they don’t really grow and change. They are pretty consistent a lot of times.
And then there is the bad guy/antagonist.
Some editors will want your bad guy to grow and be dynamic too, but a lot of times those baddies and a lot of your side/secondary characters will be pretty consistent and static. Think Hannibal Lecter. Think Gaston in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
What can you use static characters for? To be foils to the main character.
To make fun of tropes and stereotypes or shallow people in society.
To get pulled along in the main character’s fun.
To sometimes have contradictory goals that create obstructions for that main dynamic character’s quest.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD There is a place for dynamic and static characters in stories, but you know, you should know what the words mean.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Don’t be static, dude. Grow. Become.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
LINKS TO THINGS WE’VE MENTIONED THIS PODCAST
https://www.today.com/parents/toddler-brings-his-new-best-friend-skeleton-everywhere-t192612
https://www.fox44news.com/news/weird-news/police-warn-woman-not-to-wear-halloween-costume-as-protest/
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You’re writing a book. And that book has to start somewhere. Where it starts? That’s called the opening scene and this little baby has a lot of work that it has to do.
It’s like the first moments of a blind date, but instead of a blind date between two people, it’s a blind date between the book and the reader.
Will they like each other?
Will they want to spend time together?
Are they meant for each other?
Only … it’s really will the reader like the book. Nobody cares if the book likes the reader. The reader has all the power.
According to Les Edgerton, who wrote the craft book, HOOKED, that opener has ten important components to grab that reader’s attention and make them want to chill on the couch with your book.
THOSE ARE: The Inciting Incident – Les believes that this needs to happen in the first scene. Other people do not agree with this.
The Story-Worthy Problem – That incident makes a problem that is going to propel the plot of the whole damn book.
The Initial Shallow Problem – This problem happens because of the inciting incident and makes the protagonist do something (take action), but it’s not the real problem of the story.
The Set-Up – Kind of makes the reader know what’s going to happen next and also helps the reader know what the heck is going on.
Backstory – You do not want a lot of this, which is the events that have happened before the story starts.
Opening Lines – Because duh. The story has to start, but you want them to be snazzy and make an impression.
Language – Because again, duh. Books are made of words. The words you choose and how you group them together make an impression.
Setting – Because the story has to take place somewhere. Let the reader have a sense of the physical space, the time, the culture.
Foreshadowing – This is the magic, my friends, because this is part of the hook that keeps the reader with you—the knowledge and hint that something is coming up next.
AND THAT OPENING SCENE? IT HAS GOALS: 1. You have to hook the reader. 2. You have to have a story-worthy problem. 3. You have to let the reader know what kind of story this is. 4. And tease that ending out a tiny bit.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD That beginning of your story is super important. Spend some time on it.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Set the scene. Establish your goals. Show them your character and do it right away.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Just like hanging out with a friend, or listening to an instructor drone on and on about the beauty of a mullet, the keys to controlling your novel’s pacing are language and conflict and scene sequence and stakes. We’re going to talk about those today.
What’s pacing?
It’s how fast or slow the story goes for the reader.
LANGUAGE IS A BIG WAY TO IMPACT PACE Let’s start with word choice. The words you choose can speed up the reader or slow them down. The way the words are grouped on the page? Same thing.
- Dialogue.
- Short paragraphs.
- Short sentences.
- Action.
Those four things speed things up.
And these things below? They slow that story down.
- Descriptive passages.
- Long paragraphs.
- Long sentences.
- Abstract language.
- A lot of talk about feelings.
- Flashbacks.
- Information dumps.
Special Help: If all your sentences are the same length and are constantly parallel in construction, you lull the reader to sleep. No sleeping readers, okay? You fall asleep, you run the risk of getting a mullet.
CONFLICT AND STAKES IS ANOTHER WAY TO IMPACT PACING In the scenes you choose, there needs to be some stakes and some conflict.
Stakes happen when your reader cares about the character and is worried about what might happen to them if they don’t reach their goals. In every scene that stays in your book, there needs to be a stake and a goal.
You can’t just have your character chilling with her bestie if there’s no point in that chillin. You need obstacles and tension and the reader needs to think, “Yikes! What happens if they fail?”
It’s really one of the biggest things about pacing. Because not having conflict and stakes and tension? It makes the reader stop reading.
SCENE SEQUENCE ALSO IMPACTS We couldn't fit ALL the notes here thanks to character limits so for the rest, check out my blog here. WRITING TIP OF THE POD Control your pacing; control your story.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Humans are always go-go-go. Life is too fast paced. Slow your roll so you can enjoy your belly rubs, walks, and treats.
LINKS MENTIONED https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2021/10/10/pasco-4th-grader-in-the-running-for-america-s-best-mullet?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axioslocal_tampa&stream=top
https://mulletchamp.com/
https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/kid-mullet-champion-named-meet-allan-baltz-2021s-winner/I47UA62EZJAINHKCMEW2PJEN3Y/
https://www.dazeddigital.com/beauty/head/article/44884/1/mullet-subculture-hair-history
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
IT’S BE BRAVE FRIDAY WHERE SHAUN OR I (FROM DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE AND LOVING THE STRANGE AND JUST BEING AN AUTHOR IN MAINE) SHARE PEOPLE’S UNEDITED, UNFILTERED STORIES, SO WE CAN ALL CELEBRATE THE BIG AND LITTLE BRAVE THINGS WE DO ALL THE TIME.
SOMETIMES WE DON’T EVEN REALIZE WE’RE BEING BRAVE. This Be Brave Friday story is from the wonderful and brave and cool and talented Lenka Vodicka who writes the Forest Fairy Craft books, which you should check out!
Here’s Lenka’s story. I was a mellow baby that slept a lot. Then I was a clumsy child that fell a lot. Then I was diagnosed with a genetic disease called Charcot (pronounced shar-co) Marie Tooth (CMT) which has nothing to do with teeth. It’s named after the three doctors that discovered it. CMT is also called hereditary neuropathy. CMT is a glitch in the genetic code that causes nerve damage, muscle weakness, balance issues, and fatigue. It’s degenerative, meaning it worsens over time. There is no treatment, other than bracing and corrective surgery that may or may not work. And there is no cure. I have CMT for life.
CMT symptoms can vary widely, even within a family. Some people have mild symptoms that are barely noticeable into their 80s, while others have multiple surgeries and use wheelchairs as children. My case was in the mild category for a long time. I couldn’t wear flip-flops, or scramble up rock climbing walls, but most people had no idea that I dealt with any disease at all. I could be normal. My challenges were usually invisible. Situations like mine, where challenges are not easily seen, may be called invisible disabilities.
Then, one day, that changed too. My feet hurt. Every day. Every hour of the day. Every minute of the hour. They ached like someone dropped a book on them. And they didn’t stop hurting. Fingers went numb. I never considered myself disabled before. The word was serious and full of baggage from sad movies. Facing the reality of my situation required a leap of bravery in itself. I wanted to run towards “normal” as fast as possible. Slowing down, facing my limits, and then asking, “How can I help myself? How can I make my life easier in this moment?” was big work.
I changed jobs and got a disabled placard for my car. Then the real bravery began. Because having an invisible disability means that every single time I ask for accommodations, I have to call on my inner brave self. Because my bravery is the opposite of heroes that step up to a moment of decisive action. It’s the opposite of heroines volunteering for a mighty quest. It’s the opposite of saying, “I think I can, I think I can. I believe in myself.”
My bravery is “No.” My bravery is approaching random staff person at a concert or event to ask if there is an alternative line or somewhere to sit that doesn’t involve steep stairs. Sometimes the information is online, but that doesn’t always translate to the location. And I’ve even had staff say, “I don’t know why the website says that.”
All the notes don't fit here! We're so sorry. You can see them here though on our blog.
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There are lots of fancy and complicated ways to figure out story structure.
There’s Save the Cat, the Snowflake Method, the Five-Act, the Four-Act, the Six-Act.
But sometimes all of those complicated methods bog some of our writer brains down.
So today we’re going to give you a super quick guide to story structure for your novel. You ready?
Step One: Name it. This does not have to be its forever name, just a way for you to find the computer file. It can be THE EVIL NOVEL THAT HAS NO NAME RIGHT NOW. That’s fine.
Step Two: Find a hero. Name them. Put them in a jam or a bad place. Maybe they suck at making commitments? Maybe they need a promotion. Maybe they live under the stairs. Give them a problem.
Step Three: Think about what has to occur in order for them to ovary up enough to try to deal with that problem.
Step Four: Now decide what is going to change once that hero gets proactive and tries to deal with that problem or once they take action.
Step Five: Are things different for our little hero now? How?
Step Six Okay. Something else needs to happen so that the story takes a turn or a veer to the right or left. What makes it go in another direction?
Step Seven Make things worse for our poor hero. How are they worse?
Step Eight Okay. If this is a positive change arc where the hero ends up in a better place, what is it that inspires them to make a big effort and go for that win?
Step Nine What is the big win (positive change arc) or the big loss (negative change arc)
Boom! There you go, how to figure out your novel’s basic structure in nine easy steps? Do you feel heroic, writer? You should.
Writing Tip of the Pod It’s okay to make it simple when it comes to story structure. It really is.
Dog Tip for Life When your people turn your head and look at you and you realize you’ve been caught, it’s time to stop because then they just think you’re a creeper.
Resources https://www.npr.org/2021/09/26/1040779728/pokemon-oreo-cookies-ebay-pikachu-mew
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
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No video today! Sorry!
This week things got a bit hectic. Apologies. But we wanted to quickly talk about what it means to be brave and of course, ask you to send in your Be Brave stories. Because we are still on a mission to share these stories and sing your praises with the world.
The Oxford Dictionary defines bravery as:
Ready to face and endure danger or pain; showing courage.
AND THAT’S PRETTY INTERESTING BECAUSE THERE ARE THREE COMPONENTS GOING ON THERE: You’re ready.
You’re going to endure something.
You’re showing courage.
The ability to endure is really about the ability to persevere, to face our fears and/or our circumstances and still be ready.
Ready for what?
Ready for whatever is heading towards us, the good, the terrifying, the empowering, all of it.
A lot of us spend a lot of our lives worried about worst case scenarios, rejections, falling down, and all of that energy we spend worrying? We can spend it actively moving towards our own moral and/or creative evolution and our goals.
Imagine: How cool would it be if you spent all the time you currently spend worrying about failing and instead use that time towards actively going after the things you want, the life you want to have, the person you want to be.
That’s what enduring is about. It’s about overcoming. And sometimes it’s about persisting. And almost all the time it’s about dealing with the fear that’s holding us back.
So much of the time the fear that’s holding us back? It comes from us.
Being brave means living in the moment, speaking with compassion.
Being brave means standing up for what you believe is right even when nobody else thinks the same thing.
Sometimes being brave is something as simple as responding to a Facebook post, or being compassionate, or reacting with empathy instead of anger.
Sometimes being brave is reaching out to someone else and saying, “This guy is a creep.”
Sometimes being brave is looking at yourself and know when you’re holding yourself back.
Being brave is truly defined by you and what you think it takes to persevere, to endure, to be ready and to shine.
BE A PART OF OUR MISSION! Hey! We’re all about inspiring each other to be weird, to be ourselves and to be brave and we’re starting to collect stories about each other’s bravery. Those brave moments can be HUGE or small, but we want you to share them with us so we can share them with the world. You can be anonymous if you aren’t brave enough to use your name. It’s totally chill.
Want to be part of the team? Send us a quick (or long) email and we’ll read it here and on our YouTube channel. Or email us at carriejonesbooks @ gmail.com
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The amazing writer and human, Ellen Booraem, spent nineteen years as a small-town journalist before quitting her day job to write four award-winning fantasies for readers ten and older (The Unnameables, Small Persons with Wings, Texting the Underworld and River Magic.
In this bonus podcast, we talked about Ellen’s writing tips to deal with writing blocks, the big leaps she took to start a fiction career at 52, and the incredibly cool WORD festival (the annual Blue Hill Maine literary arts festival) that’s coming up this October (which you should all check out).
We also touch on how working at a newspaper made us visual writers and trained us for fiction.
Ellen volunteers as a writing coach for students in her local middle school and is a founding organizer for Word, the annual Blue Hill (Maine) literary arts festival. Having ventured from her early time as Alton Hall Blackington’s next door neighbor in coastal Massachusetts, she now lives in coastal Maine with her partner, painter Robert Shillady.
Publisher’s Weekly called Ellen’s latest novel, “A dense emotional core, resonant voice, and themes of grief, shifting friendships, and family enliven Booraem’s contemporary fantasy, reminding readers that ‘hope is everywhere.’”
To find out more about Ellen and her books, check out Ellen’s website:
https://www.ellenbooraem.com/
To find out more about WORD (which is online this year), check out its website:
https://www.wordfestival.org/
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A lot of writers will worry that their stories seem flat. There’s a reason that they are worrying about that and it’s one of the core elements of good writing.
Ready?
You want to vary your sentence structure.
Take a bit of writing that you’ve done that feels flat—or maybe even one that doesn’t. Count the words in your sentences for two or three paragraphs.
Are they all five words? Twelve? Twenty-seven?
That robotic sameness in sentence length is one of the main reasons that writing can feel flat.
It’s like those ancient Dick and Jane books.
See Dick run.
See Jane skip.
See Dick wave.
The other big bugger is when all of your sentences are simple and declarative.
I walk to the forest. The trees are gracious, tall. I inhale the pine scent.
There is actually a whole, entire world of different sentence styles that writers can use and when you use them? That’s when you make your writing shiny and sexy and all the good things.
The names for these structures are pretty boring, honestly, but we’ll try to look beyond that, right?
Simple – You have one main clause.
Carrie is the best wife.
Compound – You have more than one independent clause. You probably use a conjunction.
Carrie wants to get another dog, but Shaun keeps saying no.
Complex – Oh, the sentence that probably has to pay for a therapist or is reading Foucault obviously in the park. This sentence has an independent clause and a subordinate clause. It’st the BDSM of sentences.
When hell freezes over, we will allegedly get another dog.
Compound-Complex – It sounds like a place with a cult, right? But it’s just a sentence with at least two independent clauses and one subordinate clause.
Carrie really needs a new dog to love, so Shaun said that they would get one when hell freezes over, so Carrie immediately got some dry ice and sent some down to Lucifer.
Refresher moments:
What’s a clause? A bunch of words chilling out together and one of those words in the group is a verb and another is a noun. Fancy people call the verb, the predicate, but we aren’t fancy here.
What’s an independent clause? It is a bunch of words that has a subject and a predicate. It is grammatically complete all by itself and doesn’t need anyone. Not any other words to stand alone! Darn it.
What’s a subordinate or dependent clause? A bunch of words that needs other words to be a sentence. This poor beautiful baby cannot stand alone and be complete, kind of like a protagonist in a Hallmark romance.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Vary your sentence structures and don’t be flat.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Variety is good. Don’t eat the same Milkbones all the time. Mix it up.
Be fluffy.
RESOURCES MENTIONED
https://nypost.com/2021/09/17/teen-gets-usb-cable-stuck-in-penis-in-attempt-to-measure-length/
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/weird/article251950768.html#storylink=mainstage_card
https://brobible.com/culture/article/hunters-michigan-two-bigfoot-creatures-fighting/
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
IT’S BE BRAVE FRIDAY WHERE SHAUN OR I (FROM DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE AND LOVING THE STRANGE AND JUST BEING AN AUTHOR IN MAINE) SHARE PEOPLE’S UNEDITED, UNFILTERED STORIES, SO WE CAN ALL CELEBRATE THE BIG AND LITTLE BRAVE THINGS WE DO ALL THE TIME. SOMETIMES WE DON’T EVEN REALIZE WE’RE BEING BRAVE. Here goes our email where she's being brave by telling us to be brave:
I’ve been reading your stuff on Patreon and Medium and loving it, as always. I keep having this crazy idea pop up in my head, so I’m finally going to go out on a limb–it’s Be Brave Friday, right?–and ask you about it.
You’ve likely already thought about doing this. Also, it’s probably not realistic. Then again, maybe it would be amazing!
So here goes: what if you started your own publishing imprint? You’ve already got a great platform, a well-developed brand and access to a ton of talented writers, many of whom, like me, are struggling to launch their stories into the world.
I’m so tired of reading excellent work by wonderful humans, but knowing it has little chance of reaching readers. Most authors barely have time to write, much less launch their own platforms, etc., even if they choose to self-publish. An imprint like yours could lend legitimacy to a whole swath of quirky life-affirming stories and help those stories reach the readers who need to hear them.
I know that you’re already working 24/7 to create your own content and run your own business. And I imagine the benefits to you would be quite small, though ultimately something like this would likely give you some marginal financial returns and increase your visibility, too.
That being said, I’m looking for a cause to devote myself to, so I’d be more than willing to write up a mission statement/business proposal and contribute my time, talents and even some limited financial resources on an ongoing basis. I’m guessing a whole lot of gifted writers, editors and designers would be willing to do the same. I know, I know: this is a giant, wild and probably foolish idea, but it wouldn’t stop nagging me.
I love and admire you. I want your stories and stories like yours to reach everyone. I want good humans to flourish. And now I feel scared and silly for saying all of this aloud. But I said it anyway, and that’s a win, right?
Sending you all kinds of love,
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This week’s podcast is all about the weird, wild drinking traditions in our world, plus some random facts, which led us down a wormhole (thanks, Dee!) to discover a woman who crushes things with her breasts.
We hope she’s okay. Allegedly, she has a house on an island in Maine. Maybe we’re neighbors?
RESOURCES
https://www.thrillist.com/vice/17-weird-drinking-laws-from-around-the-world-crazy-liquor-laws
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/worlds-strangest-drinking-customs_n_5758554
https://www.lastnightoffreedom.co.uk/ideas/drinking-traditions-around-the-world/
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Authors, let’s just admit it. We’re insecure.
Writing is communication and we want to make sure that our readers are getting what we’re putting down (Translation: Understanding what we’re saying).
SO, WHAT DO WE DO? We over-explain.
And that over-explaining slows down our pacing and makes our reader not want to read anymore.
THERE ARE LOTS OF BIGGER WAYS OF OVEREXPLAINING. And what is overexplaining? It’s when you just keep adding things on to make your reader get what you’re saying.
Like this:
Shaun punched the wall. He was so angry he could spit. His hands clenched into tight fists. “What kind of butthead are you?” he roared.
So, all four of those sentences tell us the same thing.
Shaun is angry.
You can cut down that to one or two and the reader is still going to get it. Trust the reader’s brains. Trust yourself.
HERE’S A REWRITE.
Shaun punched the wall. “What kind of butthead are you?”
But it’s not just in long passages that us writer people do this. We do it in short bits too.
HERE ARE SOME BIG ONES. She shrugged her shoulders. (She shrugged)
He nodded his head in agreement. (He nodded) or (He agreed)
They shook their head no. (They shook their head)
He looked at his watch to check the time. (He checked the time)
OTHER THINGS WE DO IS Tell something that we just showed. (Shaun punched the wall. He was so angry.)
Add in a dialogue tag that we don’t need, (the she said/they asked) when we don’t need it.
Add in silly adverbs that we don’t need.
Add in a bunch of statements all saying the same thing. (See that original example).
Acting like the reader is stupid. (Of course we know the person is nodding their head. We don’t think they are nodding their butt.)
Info dumps
WHEN YOU DO THIS OVER-EXPLAINING THING YOU: 1. Slow down the pace 2. Ruin the subtext. 3. Break my heart. 4. Make the scenes dull. Over-explaining takes out the pizzazz. 5. It takes away the immediacy and the forward motion of the plot and scene.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Be all one and done, people. Trust the reader to get it. Trust your skills to communicate well.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE. If you want a treat, sit in front of the pantry and drool on the floor.
LINKS WE TALK ABOUT IN THE PODCAST https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article254523322.html
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article254523322.html
Ripley's link.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Jordan's story is a bit too long to fit here so go to carriejonesbooks.blog for the notes or just click here.
Please send us your be brave stories when you feel brave enough, okay?
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I was lucky enough to interview author and writer, Martin Vidal, and pick his brain. I hope you’ll check out the video or podcast and give this man some props.
HERE ARE SOME HIGHLIGHTS TO ENTICE YOU TO LISTEN. On Martin’s website he says that he loves to write and figure things out, which really struck a chord with me because that’s what I do, too.
I hope you’ll listen to one of my favorite interviews yet with one of my new favorite people.
Martin’s Ambition Handbook is all about self-examination and self-transformation. And it’s a bit more of a holistic look at how to find success rather than a listicle.
Where to find Martin: Why Your Writing Might Be Too Good to Be Popular https://martinvidal.co/social-anxiety
Website: www.martinvidal.co
Books: The Ambition Handbook
Flower Garden
On Medium: https://martinvidal.medium.com/
Where to Find Me, Carrie:
https://carriejonesbooks.blog/
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So, now that we’re into the helpful part of the podcast and no longer talking about women in love with the alligators that attacked them or dogs and cats breaking records together, we thought we’d take a quick look at a big grammar mistake.
And that’s when INTO is one word or two. IS IT . . . Dude, I am so into you.
OR IS IT . . . Dude, I am so in to you.
Here’s how it works. INTO all as one word is a preposition, which means it’s showing MOVEMENT of one thing to another thing.
But IN TO (two words) has two grammatical bits going on right there. The IN is an adverb and the TO is the preposition. And they aren’t like snuggled up in bed like a cohabitating couple, they just tend to show up in the sentence next to each other.
Here are some examples: INTO AS ONE WORD: Baby, I made it into the office today, but only just barely because… cough… you know.
Lordie, look what Santa put into your stocking.
That alligator went into that woman’s head, man, like took total control.
INTO usually tells you WHERE something is happening.
IN TO AS TWO WORDS Look, I am standing in to make a statement to our senator.
Santa came in to say a hearty hello.
The dog and cat rode in to break that record on that damn scooter.
IN TO usually can be substituted with IN ORDER TO.
Easy, right? Consider yourself grammatical.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Two words are different than one.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Sometimes taking chances pays off (like when you jump on a scooter with a cat) and sometimes it doesn’t (like when you bite your handler’s hand). Choose your risks wisely. And that goes for copyediting too. Unless you’re super sure you know all the grammar, don’t copyedit your own story.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link.
LINKS WE MENTION IN THE RANDOM THOUGHTS PORTION OF THE PODCAST https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2021/09/16/canada-Guinness-World-Records-dog-cat-scooter-Lollipop-Sashimi-Melissa-Millett/5691631809102/
https://news.sky.com/story/woman-attacked-by-alligator-says-i-love-him-and-it-shouldnt-face-any-consequences-12385890
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It’s Be Brave Friday where Shaun or I (from Dogs are Smarter than People and Loving the Strange and just being an author in Maine) share people’s stories, but this week, I’m sharing ours. It’s the first time I’ve talked publicly about this and it’s kind of hard.
Trigger Warning for parent issues (not us). We have an adorable kid who has autism and ODD and ADD. And here’s the thing. They are funny and creative and have big emotions about their world.
That isn’t the easiest thing to handle for some people.
And we get judged about them all the time. Their ADD manifests in wanting to do a project all night long when they’re really into it. Their ODD manifests in not dealing well when we tell them they need some sleep. Their psychiatrist has said on multiple occasions, “This is not the bridge worth dying on.”
They’re right.
But people don’t get that.
And they judge. A lot.
And whatever. I’m fine with that because though I’m self-deprecating to the point that I tend to drive other feminists crazy, I’m confident that I’m a parent who is full of love and appreciation for her kids. The judging doesn’t matter because what matters is the human who is growing and learning and becoming.
That’s not what this post is about though. This post is about our kid’s other mother. The one who gave up on them two years ago. The one who has to get texts from the kid in order to even think to visit with them. The one who is trained as a teacher but didn’t even send a text to their own child to ask them how their first day of school in a new school system went. And two weeks later, still hasn’t.
This post is about anger, honestly, because I am so angry on behalf of our kid. And I not usually brave enough to talk about this or my anger. I’m a pretty conflict averse human except when it’s about things that hurt others.
But this post is also about hope. We all have moments every single day to do the right thing. To reverse the path that we’re on and actually be responsible and good, to reach out with kindness and with love.
That’s hard sometimes when you’ve sucked for two years. But it’s going to be a lot harder after you’ve sucked for twenty.
So all of us need to reach up, reach out, be responsible. Inaction is often just as horrible as bad actions, but we can always climb our way out of the hole we’ve dug by making those good choices, those kind choices (even when they are so damn hard).
We can all do this. Every single one of us. In order to make our families, our communities, our nation and our world better? We have to.
Here’s the video where I don’t stick entirely on script because I suck at that, honestly.
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Carrie reads a lot of novels in progress and helps writers make those novels better and one of the big things that happen that keep a book from being super star status is an unsatisfying ending.
Yes. Yes, that is about books, not sex, Shaun. But some of the same principles apply to both.
You want your ending to be satisfying even if it’s an unhappy ending.
So, how do you make your ending satisfying?
Ah, just like the copulation, it’s all about fulfilling your promises to the reader in the lead-up to that ending, right?
Your reader has been hanging out with you for 50,000 words at least (usually) and that means that you owe them what you’ve promised them–a complete story with a damn fine ending.
The rest of the notes are over at carriejonesbooks.blog
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Think about what your reader wants. Aim to please your lover/reader.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Sparty says it’s more satisfying to earn your treat rather than just be given the treat. The journey makes the ending more satisfying.
LINKS MENTIONED https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/priest-demons-figured-text-messages-24898111
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2020/12/28/23-of-the-strangest-things-that-happened-in-florida-in-2020/
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
We’ve all met them. The human at a party, in a line, or god-forbid sitting next to you in an airplane and they talk and talk and talk and don’t pause to breathe.
Do you enjoy those people?
Not usually.
Do you want them to shut the heck up for a half second?
Usually.
Well, writers, we hate to tell you all this, but we are guilty of doing this to our reader. Yes, you, writer, might be the annoying person on the plane talking about Aunt Sally’s hemorrhoids and all the fish you saw in Roatan during your five-day-long scuba adventure.
Don’t be those people. Periods are your friend. We can’t convince our thirteen year old this, but maybe we can convince you.
Periods are the enemy of your enemy: the run-on sentence.
What’s a run-on sentence? It’s basically a sentence that connects two independent clauses without any punctuation or a nice sexy conjunction.
What’s an independent clause? It’s basically this … an independent clause is so strong, so mighty, so full of awesome that it can be a sentence all by itself. It doesn’t need any help.
What’s a conjunction? It’s basically the cruise director of your sentence connecting clauses or words or phrases and getting them all to chill out and hang together.
And then we have a comma splice. The comma splice is a run on sentence with a comma stuck in there between those two independent clauses.
You want an example. Here you go.
Oh my god, I went to Starbucks, I got a pumpkin spice latte, they put the wrong name on my cup, they were calling out “Rachel,” I had no idea, right, I just stood there and stood there and stood there, I was the only one left, the guy at the counter looks at me and says, “Rachel?” I said I am “Raquel,” it was totally cold.
So how do you fix this? 1. Make those clauses into separate sentences.
Oh my god, I went to Starbucks. I got a pumpkin spice latte. They put the wrong name on my cup. They were calling out “Rachel.” I had no idea, right? I just stood there and stood there and stood there. I was the only one left. The guy at the counter looks at me and says, “Rachel?” I said I am “Raquel.” It was totally cold.
- Use the magical semicolon sometimes instead of a comma.
Oh my god, I went to Starbucks; I got a pumpkin spice latte. They put the wrong name on my cup. They were calling out “Rachel;” I had no idea, right? I just stood there and stood there and stood there. I was the only one left. The guy at the counter looks at me and says, “Rachel?” I said I am “Raquel.” It was totally cold.
- Use a sexy conjunction. We call these beautiful mistresses coordinating conjunctions or FANBOYS (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so).
Oh my god, I went to Starbucks and I got a pumpkin spice latte. They put the wrong name on my cup so they were calling out “Rachel.”
- Use another kind of sexy conjunction called the subordinating conjunction. These show a little-cause-and-effect or relationships.
Oh my god, I went to Starbucks where I got a pumpkin spice latte. They put the wrong name on my cup because they were calling out “Rachel.”
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
All links to the articles we references are at carriejonesbooks.com
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Be Brave Friday – No More Toxic.
Here on Be Brave Friday we share Be Brave stories from our home in Maine because we want us all to ban together and be stronger, braver humans.
This week, we found a few Be Brave moments on a Reddit thread (link in the notes) about “what improved your quality of life so much, you wish you did it sooner.”
That might not seem like a place where being brave stories would be, but the truth is that sometimes we hold ourselves back and have to make some brave moves to have a better life.
Like Alternative Rip4728 did.
They said, “Cutting out toxic "friends". After years of knowing someone it can be hard to see that they are no longer the person they were when the relationship started. My childhood best friend grew into a manipulative selfish prick. For years I hung out with him almost every day after work and always felt miserable afterwards. Everyone around me questioned why I still spent time with him. I always made excuses that seem ridiculous in hindsight. I should have cut ties 10 years ago.”
That’s not easy. As said mcnugsss:
“I am struggling with making this transition. One of my best friends growing up is honestly an immensely selfish person today. It pains me knowing that when I make this next change there is a real possibility that they will pretty much stop existing in my life. I know it has to happen because it would be best for me, but the fear of losing an old “friend” is crippling. The reality is they are already lost and I need to move on for my own well being.”
This whole thread really hit a nerve with thousands of responses and Bengoris gave some advice, having done this themself.
“There were a thousand little things and overstepped boundaries that added up over time and just made me resent the hell out of that friend group. Once we got into an argument, I honestly said what I thought and we stopped talking after that. For a long time, I kept asking myself if I did the right thing. If I was a shitty friend too. But I feel like I was there for them when they were not there for me. Like I listened to them, but they didn't want to listen to me. I know I always tried my best given the circumstances. And that brings me peace. If you feel like you've done right by your friends and they haven't done right by you, it's okay to part ways. You only have one life, you should be careful in deciding who gets to be a part of it.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/pbzt5b/what_improved_your_quality_of_life_so_much_you/
https://youtu.be/Mrli13BcUiw
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When I started being a reporter, one of my editors took me aside and gave me some candy and two books. One was the AP Style Guide, which is the manual for all the punctuation rules our newspaper followed.
The other was a book by E.B. White and William Strunk Jr., called The Elements of Style. My editor had met E.B. White who had a farm on the same peninsula that he did.
“This,” he told me, “is all you need to know.”
In that small book was a section called “The Elementary Principles of Composition,” and I’m not sure if it was all I needed to know as a writer, but I am positive that it was a pretty big deal.
So we thought we’d share three of those principles during this podcast. The first one is:
“Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one paragraph to each topic.” Writers blow this off all the time, but we shouldn’t. We especially blow it off with dialogue and that’s a big no-no.
Why is it a no-no?
Our brains are wired to think of paragraphs as a single idea or an action or a bit of dialogue. You don’t want to clump it all together because it gets confusing.
Sally smiled. “I love her,” Jane said. They each took a bite of calzone and gazed upon the manatee. Sally said, “Dogs are fun.”
You’ve got no idea what’s going on here really.
Sally smiled.“I love her,” Jane said.They each took a bite of calzone and gazed upon the manatee.Sally said, “Dogs are fun.”
Now you do. Each new speaker always gets a new paragraph for dialogue.
Here’s another principle. “As a rule, begin each paragraph with a topic sentence; end it in conformity with the beginning.” They go a bit on and on about this actually.
And our third one for today is once again back to the passive voice.
“Use the active voice. The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive:” They then give these examples.
S and W“I shall always remember my first visit to Boston.”This is much better than“My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.The latter sentence is less direct, less bold, and less concise. If the writer tries to make it more concise by omitting “by me,”“My first visit to Boston will always be remembered,”it becomes indefinite: is it the writer, or some person undisclosed, or the world at large, that will always remember this visit?”
We talk about passive and active voice a lot in another podcast episode. And we’ll be sharing more of these tips in our three week series, Strunk and Whiting It. No, that’s not really the name. We have no name for it.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Allow yourself to take advice from the masters.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE. Don’t be a schmuck.
RESOURCES AND ARTICLES MENTIONED https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/sexually-frustrated-sea-snakes-mistaking-24811140
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/man-claims-hotel-needs-ghost-24809705
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
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Because our daughter is home for the week, we’re taking the week off in posting BE BRAVE FRIDAY video and podcast and also our LOVING THE STRANGE podcast because we want to make family time a priority for this one week.
I know! We never miss a week.
And sometimes I have a tiny bit of anxiety over that, but it’s worth it. Family is worth it.
So instead, I thought I might quickly talk about what it means to be brave. Ready?
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A BRAVE PERSON?
It’s pretty simple really. Being brave means being tough enough to face your fears.
Being brave means knowing something scares you but wanting to defeat that wall of fear, climb over it, chip away at it, knock it down brick by terrifying brick.
Your fear may be about failure, about self-doubt, about spiders. Your fear might be about ridicule or judgement. Fears come in all forms.
Mine mostly come about sharing my art, speaking in public, good, old public ridicule, being poor again, and making the world a worse place.
Being brave means that you go after what you want, you evolve into the person you want to become and you don’t let those fears stop you.
SOMETIMES FACING YOUR FEARS HAS TO HAPPEN OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
As a lot of you know, I’m terrified of showing people my art, but I’ve always secretly wanted to be an artist even though my family laughed at this idea or rolled their eyes or scoffed. I never took an art class until right before COVID and that was an hour-long session about felting. Oh. Wait. That’s a lie. I took a class about drawing at the Y but quit after a session because I was too scared.
Still, I had these wants, you know? I wanted to paint. I wanted to get the images in my head onto canvas or wood or napkins or whatever, and I wanted to share them. Or at least–I didn’t want to be afraid to share them anymore.
So, BE BRAVE FRIDAYS was born and I would show people my paintings-in-progress every Friday and my PATREON was born where I would show people chapters in progress every Friday and our podcasts were born where my voice would be out there to be ridiculed every week (now three times a week, wow).
WHAT IS IT THAT BRAVE PEOPLE DO DIFFERENTLY?
THEY DO THE THING THEY ARE AFRAID OF EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE SCARED, EVEN THOUGH THEY MIGHT FAIL.
You can’t achieve if you don’t take a risk.
THEY ARE HONEST ABOUT WHO THEY ARE AND THEIR FEARS.
I’ve gotten a lot of feedback over the years, usually by well-meaning, well educated, white women who are a decade or two older than I am who tell me not to be so open about my insecurities.
Spoiler alert: Judging me for being insecure or telling me how to ‘be’ is a sure-fire way to NOT make me more secure.
But it’s also a sure-fire way to make me a bit angry. I am okay that I’m not perfect. I know I’m a work in progress and I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that. Why would I want to not admit that?
Once you start pretending to be someone you aren’t, you get so wrapped up in that lie that it becomes exceptionally hard to be who you are.
It becomes exceptionally hard to be brave.
Authenticity and being open about your flaws and weaknesses? It’s a brave thing.
THEY DON’T ONLY THINK ABOUT FEAR
For the rest of my notes and to share your story, head over to carriejonesbooks.blog.
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Voice is such a big deal for making memorable and believable characters in your story, but it’s one of the harder things to understand sometimes.
As writer Rita Mae Brown said,
“People are funny. No doubt you’ve noticed that others are not nearly as reasonable as yourself. Shocking, isn’t it? This difference between you and other people comes out in speech. Obviously, difference displays itself in the subject matter people speak about, but on a deeper, more subtle level, it displays itself in the way in which they frame those very ideas.”
The voice of your character is truly the heart and mind of your character and their background expressed on the page.
Or as Brown says, “Speech is a literary biopsy.”
There are a lot of different ways to think about the voice of your characters, that thing that makes them believable and sets them apart from the other characters even when they all have similar demographics (college sophomores, white women, middle class background, from Missouri).
But first we have to think about the two different ways voice is represented for characters.
There is
INTERNAL VOICE What they think. (Use only in first and limited-third person POVs)
EXTERNAL VOICE Word choice
Dialect
To make that character’s voice stand out, writers tend to do one of three things or a combination: 1. Write your way through it until your characters sound different. 2. Listen to people who are like your character and copy their cadence and word choice, sentence length, etc.
Sadly, all the notes won't fit here, but if you want to see them, just head over here.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link. This week’s podcast is all about strange things people do for luck.
Resources Mentioned https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/dad-catches-son-sneaking-out-24763972
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/dad-catches-son-sneaking-out-24763972
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(Carrie) was at a conference one time and hanging out with a bunch of celebrity young adult authors. One author said he wrote everything down in an outline form first.
Another author said that she wrote expressly to the Save the Cat beatsheet.
And I said, “I just kind of write.”
They gasped. I ordered a drink with actual alcohol in it and another writer saved me by saying, “I, like Carrie, just write after doing decades of research in a dark and lonely hole in my basement drinking only Post-um mixed with grape Fanta and crying the tears of salty mirth while trying to contact Dickens on my Ouija board.”
I kid! I kid! Nobody tried to save me. They just gasped.
So, here’s the thing: some writers just write. They don’t plot first. They just write and hope for the best.
I, Carrie, am oft. en one of those writers. We vomit it all out on the page and watch the structure form. And sometimes? Sometimes we have to revise a lot because of this.
And some writers can’t start until they’ve got the whole story nicely plotted out in intricate details.
And some writers are somewhere in between.
You might not even write the same way every time. Some books you might plot out completely. Some books you might not plot at all. Some books you might get to 40,000 words and scream and yank out the beat sheet from Save the Cat and drink whiskey straight and roll around on your floor amongst the tumbleweeds of dog fur and cry.
Cough.
No personal experience there or anything. But when you do get stuck, it’s good think of how to work out your plot. Here are a couple ways.
All the ways won't fit here in the notes, so check out carriejonesbooks.blog to see them, okay?
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Lately, Carrie has been talking to a lot of writers that she coaches and edits about settings.
That’s because a lot of writers are blowing them off. So, she’ll read a lot of passages like this:
“Hey,” I sit at my desk, “you coming over later?”
“Yep,” Shaun says.
“Cool.”
“I thought maybe we could have some hanky-panky.”
“Okay?”
So, we know that Shaun wants to have some hanky-panky and the “I” of the story is sitting at their desk. But we don’t know what kind of desk, where that desk is, if there are other people around, or even how she or he or they are reacting to Shaun’s request for hanky-panky, right?
Setting is obviously the place where things happen, but it’s more than that, right?
Setting makes your characters real. It grounds them. It shows the reader what’s going on without saying, “Yo, reader. This is what’s going on.”
What do we mean? Well, here, let’s play with the setting of that excerpt above.
“Hey,” I sit at my desk, flipping through some tentacle porn, “you coming over later?”
The dirt-streaked wall of my cubby gives a bit with the pressure of his hand, holding him up as he leans over my shoulder. “Yep.”
Betty is just on the other side of that cubby wall and beyond her is my boss, the other workers, everyone typing on their computers, pretending to be busy reading emails, analyzing data, reading contract clauses. Liars all. The air smells of old coffee and pot, broken things, broken people.
It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.
“Cool.” That’s all I say.
Shaun clears his throat, moves lower, closer to me, my hard metal desk, standard issue. His giant elbow brushing against the wall again. His voice is a low whisper. “I thought maybe we could have some hanky-panky.”
Someone coughs. That someone is Betty. I flip the page. A tentacle is exploring places on an elf that should probably not be explored. Shaun doesn’t smell like old coffee. He smells of sandalwood and pine, like man.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Okay.”
Totally different, right?
Now we have a lot more context even if we don’t know all the details of her office, the chair, the desk. The characters aren’t floating in a void.
Here, one more example before we move on. Same dialogue again. But different setting and different feelings
And the podcast notes don't fit, but they are here!
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link. This week’s podcast is all about strange things people do for luck.
RESOURCES https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a39179/five-real-life-horror-stories/
https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2021/07/30/canada-loose-llama-Arkell-Puslinch-Ontario/4701627667041/
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There are certain traps us writers fall into. * We generalize. * We are too abstract. * We summarize. * We fail at transitions.
And a lot of those negative tendencies can quite easily be fixed when you think about them a bit more and learn to recognize them.
Scenes are a bit like connected shots in a movie. I think everyone from Blake Snyder to Robert Olen Butler has said this, but they’re right.
The scene is the basic element of your story. You want to stay in one point of view. Think of it like the camera lens zooming in.
In film, the shot is similar, right? You stay in one uninterrupted image for a shot. Right? Then you hook those shots together. A lot of filmmakers, like novelists, use transitions. They move us from one place to the other.
Butler defines a scene as “unified actions occurring in a single time or place.” Shots becomes scenes become sequences. There is a beginning, middle, and end to all of these. And then you can have long-shots, close-ups, super close-ups, etc.
What we want to do as writers is to use those tools as well (even in first person). We want the extreme close-up of deep POV, but then also to pull back sometimes and see the world and big-picture setting, and then to see that middle distance scene where the character is interacting.
When I write YA and adult genre, my first drafts are almost all deep POV and I have to go back in and add those wider shots, sensory details, setting.
When I write middle grade, my first drafts are almost all middle shots and long shots, and I have to go back and do those extreme close-ups and close ups and that’s okay.
What you want to do as a writer is to know where you tend to lean. Are you a big-picture, abstract, distancer? Are you she-who-is-only-into-close-ups? He who does no transitions and only black-out cuts?
And you want to layer in those elements that you don’t have for effect.
When you don’t do this, you risk one of two things. If you’re a big picture writer with that long-distance point of view, you risk never showing intimacy or immediacy.
If you’re an extreme close-up writer, you risk never showing the reader that bigger world or big picture and sometimes your story can lack setting so it’s all just talking heads and interior monologue.
Don’t be afraid to mix it up. And don’t be afraid to mix up those transitions, those movements between scenes. Sometimes they can be big cuts and scene breaks and chapter breaks, but sometimes they can be softer and gentler transitional words...
The rest of the notes are at carriejonesbooks.blog
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
LINKS WE MENTION IN OUR RANDOM THOUGHTS Angel shots.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/bartender-explains-what-angel-shot-24605557
Nudist cruise.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/couples-anniversary-dinner-interrupted-nudist-24612029
Weird image on the CCTV.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/mum-calls-priest-bless-home-24611677
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
You’re writing a book. Yay! You send it out to people to read. That’s so brave! Look at you, you rockstar.
It feels awesome, right?
And then you hear from those readers: I don’t like your character. I don’t—I don’t know—connect with them?
When this happens, you are not allowed to: 1. Yell at those readers. 2. Threaten those readers. 3. Give up on that story.
Well, you could but you might go to jail and all your work on that novel will be for nothing.
So, it’s totally okay to: 1. Whine/cry for a second. 2. Be a little depressed about it. 3. Not give up on that story.
And what you want to do is figure out how to make readers like and connect with your main character super quickly.
So here goes. Five quick ways. 1. Gossip – Your readers want to know what makes your character tick, what makes them vulnerable. They want the deets, the gossip, right? They want to know something about your character that nobody else knows. 2. Goodness – Even if your character sucks a bit, you want to show the reader that they are someone that the reader wants to spend time with. Show that human worth, the fundamental goodness that’s somewhere in there. Make them actively do something good even if they are the devil. 3. Going all Angsty – The reason stories work is that the characters want something but they are conflicted about things inside. There’s got to be a bit of inner struggle. There has to be an outer struggle too. That struggle creates tension. Will they be okay? Will they get what they are searching for? What is holding them back? 4. Going into the Reasons – You don’t want to flood your stories with flashbacks. You don’t want to be Captain Info-dump, but you do want the reader to know that there is something that has made your character the angsty mess that they are and that something haunting stems from the past. The time before the story. 5. Goal!!! – I’ve already hinted at this, but your poor little character needs a goal, something they are striving for. The push towards that goal creates the tension.
Writer Chuck Wendig has said,
“You are the dealer; the character is the drug. The audience will do anything to spend time with a great character. We’re junkies for it. We’ll gnaw our own arms off to read just one more page with a killer character. It’s why sequels and series are so popular—we want to see where the character’s going. If you give us a great character, it becomes our only desire to lick him like he’s a hallucinogenic toad and take a crazy trip-ass ride where he has to go.”
Writing Tip of the Pod Make your characters irresistible any way possible. Memorable characters are addictive.
Dog Tip for Life Vulnerability is okay. It connects us. If nobody was vulnerable then nobody could be brave.
Links We Talk About In Random Thoughts https://www.npr.org/2021/07/15/1016300636/new-jersey-man-mistakenly-cleans-the-wrong-house
https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/man-finds-160-bowling-balls-under-michigan-home
https://www.facebook.com/groups/242562694098557/
SHOUT OUT!
The music in our podcast is available via the Creative Commons. It’s “Summer Spliff” by the awesome Broke For Free.
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So, here on the podcast we try to be helpful sometimes.
I know! I know! It’s hard to believe, but we thought this week, we’d give you a little insight about the writing life and writers. And lay down some truths.
WE WRITERS ARE EVERYWHERE LIKE DUST MITES There are a butt ton of posts on what writers need to know. And you know why that is? Because there are a lot of us.
Chuck Wendig wrote, “The internet is 55 percent porn and 45 percent writers.”
And that means we aren’t alone.
But it also means that we should freaking support each other. Don’t have your whole Twitter feed be “buy my book, buy my book, sweet mother of all things holy buy my book.” Writing is communication that’s actually two-way. We write. Others read. Sometimes they write back.
It’s good to remember that writing isn’t a solo gig.
NO TWO WRITERS MAKE IT THE SAME WAY Well, they might. But everyone’s journey is different.
I got a publishing contract one year after entering my MFA program at Vermont College and 18 months after quitting my newspaper editor job. I was lucky. But I was also working on my skills.
I have clients and friends who worked for ten years before breaking into traditional publishing. They are great authors. It just took them a bit longer to get there. But they might stay publishing longer than I do. Or not. Who knows?
That’s the thing. We all take different times and routes to get our books out there and get readers.
Similarly, in the world of independent publishing, there are people whose books are absolutely awful making $10,000 a month and some whose amazing and brilliant books are making $5 a month if that.
The takeaway here? The writing world is weird as hell.
The rest of the notes won't fit here, so check out the rest out here. Sorry!
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link. This week’s podcast is all about strange things people do for luck.
Resources From This Episode https://news.sky.com/story/fathers-day-thousands-of-funny-fathers-submitted-their-best-dad-joke-this-was-the-winner-12336765
https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2021/07/08/serval-captured-Atlanta-Georgia-Kristine-Frank/5981625770896/
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Sometimes you’ll read a book and you’ll think—um, did a vampire write this?
That’s not because it’s sexy and sparkling like the Twilight vampires or sexy and bloody with a rocking 1980s soundtrack like the Lost Boys vampires or sexy and in New Orleans like the Anne Rice vampires, but because the language in the story is so flowerly, so overwrought, so full of clauses that you think, “Only someone over two-hundred years old could have written this.”
Yes, you could argue that M.T. Anderson successfully did this with Octavian Nothing, which won a butt-ton of rewards, but you are not Tobin Anderson.
And that’s part of the point. A lot of us authors look to the classics, to the past and think, “Yo, Charles Dickens, man. Peeps are still talking about him. I should copy his style.”
No. Also, don’t try to sound hip when you aren’t hip like we just did up there.
If you’re writing historical fiction and like Tobin or Paul Kingsnorth or Dorothy Dunnett, and you think you have a really good handle on the syntax and speech patterns of the time, go for it.
But if you’re writing a contemporary novel about a woman in Maine living with a tall man and two dogs and three cats and one kid and figuring out if writing is worth it? No.
Honestly, even most historical fiction is written in modern language and style.
Why? Well, that’s because the novel is a communication. It’s you writing for the reader. It’s not just you writing. And you usually want the reader to feel comfortable in that novel, all snuggled in for a cool journey into the character’s world aka your book.
Write like you’re communicating with an audience that’s living right now if you want most readers to enjoy it and keep turning the page.
Here’s an example or what we’re talking about.
While, she stood, one foot upon the ancient sleeping device, and then seemed askance at what stance she had partaken, inhaled a breath so great that it moved her bosom in a terrifying rapturous way, pivoting and climactically inhaling without any scant emotion.
Rather than:
She stood with her foot on the bed. Her face flushed and some sort of scandalous thought crossed her mind. She turned away, sighing so deeply her whole body moved with it.
Okay. Neither are awesome. But one’s a lot easier to understand, right? That’s because it is in the style that’s today’s speaking/writing style, not the style of undead cats and vampires.
Writing Tip of the Pod Remember that writing is communication. Make it understandable for the people who are alive now.
Dog Tip for Life Be obvious about your wants. If you want to hang out with the undead, let them know.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link. This week’s podcast is all about strange things people do for luck.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Here in the Land of Writing Advice, we try not to lay down too many edicts because edicts are prickly things, but we’re going to put out four quick bits of writing advice that make you look a little more cool.
Let’s get started.
Nodding in acknowledgement. If you’re a writer and you write:
Carrie nodded in acknowledgement. “Yes,” she said. “I do want to someday ride a manatee.”
The reader/editor is going to think, “What the what?”
A lot of writers worry that the reader isn’t going to get it. They want to be helpful. But in that example up there, we have three ways the writer is telling us that Carrie is agreeing.
Carrie nodded.
In acknowledgement.
“Yes,” she said. “I do want …”
Trust your writing. Trust yourself, okay? And trust your reader.
HE THOUGHT TO HIMSELF The same kind of thing is happening here.
Shaun thought to himself, “Self, I am a pretty sweet man.”
Unless your book is about telepathy or has telepathic characters (hopefully manatees), you’re always going to be thinking to yourself.
So just write:
Shaun thought, “I am a pretty sweet man.”
It’s versus its Okay, whenever you have an apostrophe in the middle of a word it means one of two things:
There’s a letter missing and you’re smooshing two words together.
It’s showing possession.
It’s with the apostrophe means it is. It always means it is.
Its without the apostrophe means belonging to it.
So:
The werewolf ripped its tank top during the change and cried.
That one? No apostrophe in its.
The werewolf said it’s going down to J Crew to get a new tank.
That one? Apostrophe.
We’re versus were Continuing on the apostrophe train, we’re and were.
We’re has an apostrophe that’s showing you that it really means we are. The apostrophe is standing in for the a in are. Oh, that sounds weird.
The were (w-e-r-e) is second person past tense singular, past tense plural, and past subjunctive of the verb “be”
So we wouldn’t say:
Hey. The werewolves we’re changing in J.Crew because they were raging out over the lack of pink tanks with tassels.
We’d say.
Hey. The werewolves were changing in J.Crew because they were raging out over the lack of pink tanks with tassels.
Similarly, we’d say:
We’re werewolves, man, and we demand tanks with tassels. Got it?
Not
Were werewolves, man, and we demand tanks with tassels. Got it?
Writing Tip of the Pod Um. Everything we just said.
Dog Tip for Life Live in your current paragraph.
Resources -Links we talk about! https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2021/06/28/australia-Nude-Aussie-sunbathers-who-fled-deer-fined-after-rescue-from-woods/1071624916281/
https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2021/06/24/britain-RSPCA-king-cobra-plastic-toy-Workington-England/1231624552603/
SHOUT OUT
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
How do you make meaning in your life? That’s a big questions we’ve been struggling with here.
Success is defined for us: * It’s having a kid who graduates high school. * It’s having your own home, your own car. * It’s looking like a Kardashian. * It’s being strong like the Rock.
But when you were a little kid was that what you thought?
Let’s say you’re two. Success is going on the potty, honestly, and not the floor. Success is not wearing a diaper.
Success and happiness came from immediate things. It was a piggyback ride on your sister’s shoulders. It was twirling around in circles until you fell down dizzy. It was an ice cream cone that made it into your mouth and not the sidewalk.
It wasn’t a million-dollar book contract or celebrity endorsements. Or a McMansion. It wasn’t 8,000 likes on your TikTok video.
It was what made you happy inside. You. Not anyone else. And somehow along the way, a lot of us have forgotten what makes us happy. Us. Not society. Not Twitter. Not TikTok. Or YouTube or politicians or gurus who charge $390 for a class. Us.
When we’re little, we often don’t get to see people from all different demographics exploring, explaining, existing. We live in pretty big bubbles sometimes. But witnessing diversity in thought and life and experience especially from a young age allow us to grow and not fall into the traps of strict notions of “what it means to be successful.”
I could give a crap about what Mark Zuckerberg or our senators define as ‘successful.’ And when we chase other people’s definitions? That’s when we lose meaning in our lives. We have to define words like “success” and “happiness” for ourselves. Sometimes that means forgetting what we’ve been taught and remembering who we are.
We have to take back our own power and decide what success is to us, not society, not our parents, not our children, us. What gives us meaning? What gives us joy?
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Think about what you want from your writing. Is it to be a NYT bestseller? To make $600,000 a year. Or is it something simpler?
DOG TIP FOR LIFE It’s okay to find meaning in things other people scorn. To heck with them. You do you.
REFERENCES FOR RANDOM THOUGHTS https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/woman-moves-house-someone-died-24347158
https://shepherdexpress.com/puzzles/news-of-the-weird/news-of-the-weird-june-17-2021/
https://apnews.com/article/nh-state-wire-lifestyle-af56567aee135df951f4fc7f9b3c9d61
BE A PART OF OUR MISSION! Hey! We’re all about inspiring each other to be weird, to be ourselves and to be brave and we’re starting to collect stories about each other’s bravery. Those brave moments can be HUGE or small, but we want you to share them with us so we can share them with the world. You can be anonymous if you aren’t brave enough to use your name. It’s totally chill.
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hey! The full podcast notes with links are here!
A lot of writers get blocks. Sometimes those blocks have to do with story ideas, with the fear that their idea sucks, that they don’t have the writing chops to pull off a novel.
Sometimes those blocks have to do with worry that trolls will ridicule their story, nobody will read it, everyone will hate it.
Sometimes those blocks have to do with the fear of typos, of not being perfect.
But they all have to do with fear.
As a writing coach, I have to talk to a lot of writers about their blocks and their fears. And recently, I realized that adopting Tim Ferriss’s ‘fear setting’ approach could help a ton of the writers-students that I love so much.
Goals are brilliant, Ferris says. Resolutions? Fantastic. But nothing happens with those goals and resolutions if you are too afraid to make the steps.
So he delves into those fears and explores them and determines the potential and the risk.
That’s what you need to do with your writing (and your life).
Ferris’s process is quite refined and quite simple. We have links in the podcast notes on carriejonesbooks.blog so that you can find them in Ferris’s own extended version. He also has a TedTalk about them.
But it begins like this:“Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering. What doubt, fears, and “what-ifs” pop up as you consider the big changes you can—or need—to make? Envision them in painstaking detail. Would it be the end of your life? What would be the permanent impact, if any, on a scale of 1–10? Are these things really permanent? How likely do you think it is that they would actually happen?
Next, think about what you could do to fix it if that worst-case scenario happens. Write it down. Was it not quite as hard as your fear made you think it would be?
Next what are the benefits, the potential, the outcomes in forever ways and transient ways of all those scenarios and possibilities? Would you be more confident? Happier? Would you have more money? Make a scale of 1-10 and rate those outcomes.
(More notes on website)
Fear is our big lie in the story of our lives. All of us have our own big lie or lies. We worry so much about what might go wrong that we are afraid to embrace what might go right. We live so much in our heads that we fail to live in our world. We allow the fear, the lie, to hold us down. Our fear is also a symptom of our lie.
It's good to see how that's holding you back. Just like we want the characters in our novels to have transition arcs and evolve, so should we, right?
Dog Tip for Life Don't let your fear control your life.
Writing Tip of the Pod Use the big lie and your characters' fears to show their transition throughout the story.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link. This week’s podcast is all about strange things people do on dates.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Writing is a way of understanding stuff, not just yourself or the story in your book, but the way you look at the world.
And that takes being brave.
We are all brave and fearful in big and small ways in our own lives every damn day.
For me, Carrie just putting my voice out here on the podcast is terrifying because I had a teacher who made me stay in from recess once to tell me that I needed to fix my sloshy s’s because nobody would ever love a girl who sounded like me, no employer would hire me and no college would take me.
“Nobody will listen to a girl that sounds like you. Nobody will take you seriously. Nobody will ever marry you.”
So, doing a podcast might be super easy for some people? For me? Not so much because my brain hits back to those negative mental scripts of the past.
For Shaun…?
Here’s the thing. Life isn’t always awesome. And when it’s crappy, we have to keep writing and being brave. Sometimes it’s hard to focus. Sometimes it’s hard to believe there is a point. You think, “how is my story about a manatee and a sasquatch falling in love relevant?”
We get scared. So, you have to say to hell with fear, to hell with doubt. Damn it, everyone wants a love story with a manatee and a sasquatch.
Ridicule is a big fear for writers and for humans. We’re afraid of being persecuted, trolled, laughed at, of having someone say we and our life and our story is worthless.
Nobody will ever listen to … nobody will ever read … nobody will ever care…
That fear? It’s super real.
So we have to kick it’s ass and/or live with it and write and live anyway. We have to be brave.
We have to remember to be brave enough to believe in positive things about our selves and our lives and our worth.
Sometimes it can help to remember: A LOT OF PEOPLE SUFFER FROM THIS Reach out to other writers or humans. Encourage each other. Share your worries and stories. Lift each other up.
WRITE LIKE THE WORLD IS ON PAUSE Do whatever you have to do to ignore the rest of the world during your writer time. Turn off notifications and your phone. Put on headphones. Shut the door. Do the work alone. The world can wait for those 2,000 words to get out.
REMEMBER YOU KICK ASS Seriously, look at you, living another day, surviving, thinking, doing. You kick ass. You have value. Your story has value. When you are compelled to write something, that is for a reason. Nobody gets to tell you that your work doesn’t matter. If you make it? It matters.
We can't fit all our notes here, (more tips, links we reference) but you can read them here!
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Be brave. Take your power. Write your story. Get it out there. Don’t let anyone hold you back.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Be the master blaster. You’ve got to put yourself out there. Don’t let the humans tell you that you’re no good.
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
We’re keeping it simple this week, my friends, with three big tips to write better novels and being a better human.
Make your stories sexy and accurate. You can’t write a book that takes place in the south and not write ‘y’all’ or ‘bless your heart.’
You can’t write a book that takes place in the south and not have sugar in iced tea.
Similarly, you can’t write a book in New England in the winter and not have the character’s breath puff out into the cold air.
Your stories lose impact if you fail to be concise and sharp.
Your stories lose impact if your readers think, “WTF is this? There are no kangaroos in Maine.”
So, know your people. Know your setting.
And this goes for life too. If you keep buying your wife red roses and she’s told you a bunch of times that she doesn’t like roses, she likes tulips and bright flowers because roses remind her of death?
Yeah, that’s not good.
If you’re handing out flyers in a high school to promote your Gram and you don’t look like you’re in high school? Not going to go well.
If you leave your halloween prop out in May? Not going to go well.
Listen. Learn the details. Be appropriate, my friends.
Have a f-ing point. A story should have a damn theme. It’s what you want to say in the story. It reflects your personal beliefs, your experiences.
What’s a theme? According to MasterClass,
“A literary theme is the main idea or underlying meaning a writer explores in a novel, short story, or other literary work. The theme of a story can be conveyed using characters, setting, dialogue, plot, or a combination of all of these elements.”
So, your life should have a theme, too. What is your life’s theme?
Redemption? Love? Courage? Revenge? Good vs evil? Perseverance?
Pick one and give your life some meaning.
If it gives your life meaning to steal someone else’s adult toys for years and years (See the link) just know that this is illegal and stuff.
Don’t jump from one head to another. Readers want to get attached to your narrator. You don’t want to jump around from one character to another. That’s how the reader gets confused and detached and doesn’t want to follow the story any longer.
So, life is like that, too. Yeah, sometimes it’s frustrating hanging with one person, but you hop around too much? You might get a disease. Make your hopping purposeful.
BONUS TIP FOR WRITING NOT FOR LIFE. Put the damn conflict in there early.
In real life, it’s pretty nice to not have drama or conflict all the time. It allows us to blossom and to grow. And it’s easy to get addicted to the energy of drama and try to incite it for attention.
But peeps, that’s not the kind of attention you want. Negative attention kind of sucks. You want the positive kind.
However, in stories, the earlier you put the conflict, the more invested your reader gets. They want to know what happens. Readers (and people) are a bit addicted to conflict and drama and you want to put that on the page.
The rest of the notes and links are here...
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Every writer and storyteller wants their beginning of their story to be enticing, sexy, something that someone can’t put down.
A story is like a hot fudge sundae. You want the reader to gobble the whole thing down and that’s not going to happen if the first few bites suck.
Luckily, there are a few components that absolutely help us writers make the beginnings of our stories sexy.
Hook – This is the first sentence or first paragraph. You want it to clutch the reader in its hands and never let go.
What makes a sexy hook? A mystery. A question. A strong voice. Urgency.
I was not going to make it to the house. Not with this kind of poop.
Disruption – This is the tension. This is the suspense. Will there be trouble in the beginning? Can you sense it like a good phone psychic in the quivering resonance of the sentences and word choice? Are there big stakes?
I was not going to make it.
Backstory – I know! I know! It’s a naughty beast and we must be wary of it before it takes over our entire lawn like some sort of invasive weed. But you do want to sprinkle a little bit of it here and there.
I was not going to make it to the house. Not with this kind of poop. It had almost happened before in first grade in the pool.
Emotion – There needs to be some emotion on the page and that emotion needs to be detailed and sexy and all about the showing and not the telling. Don’t say, “Shaun was sexy.” Say, “Shaun rubbed that ice cream sundae all over his bulging pecs and he didn’t fart at all. He was the perfect husband.”
I was not going to make it to the house. Not with this kind of poop. It had almost happened before in first grade in the pool. They called me Poop Pants Patty forever after that. My eyes watered as I grabbed the steering wheel.
A Want and a Must Have – Your character needs to want things. Those things need to be surface level (an ice cream sundae or a toilet) and a bigger yearning (to finally feel loved or not be made fun of). They need to be on the page throughout the whole book and inform the entire book.
I was not going to make it to the house. Not with this kind of poop. It had almost happened before in first grade in the pool. They called me Poop Pants Patty forever after that. And now? Right before my first interview with Santa Claus? Seriously?
Things that Suck – Similarly, most books involve the transformation of a character on their journey. To have a positive transformation, there needs to be things wrong in your character’s life. Those things need to be there in the beginning.
I was not going to make it to the house. Not with this kind of poop. It had almost happened before in first grade in the pool. They called me Poop Pants Patty forever after that. And now? Right before my first interview with Santa Claus? Seriously?
Some day I’d know not to eat Flaming Hot Doritos sprinkled with Da Bomb hot sauce. Some day I’d be able to control my anxiety and my colon. Some day I wouldn’t self monologue in the car on the way to my super-important interview with Santa. But today was not that day.
Writing Tip of the Pod Make your beginning (and your ending) sexy.
Dog Tip for Life Make everything sexy
The music clipped in this podcast is “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
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We’ve all done it. We’ve misheard song lyrics or actual words. We’ve argued about whether someone was saying Laurel or Yanni.
But there is an actual term for that.
According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, a mondegreen is “a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung.”
I had a whole character in my first book that did this all the time.
Sylvia Wright made up the word in 1954 when she wrote an article about it for The Atlantic or possibly Harpers (these are the two most common citings), “The Death of Lady Mondegreen.”
She’d loved this Scottish song or poem that went
*They hae slain the Earl Amurray
And laid him on the green.*
That last line sounded like Lady Mondegreen to her.
According to an article in the New Yorker by Maria Konnikova,
Hearing is a two-step process. First, there is the auditory perception itself: the physics of sound waves making their way through your ear and into the auditory cortex of your brain. And then there is the meaning-making: the part where your brain takes the noise and imbues it with significance. That was a car alarm. That’s a bird. Mondegreens occur when, somewhere between the sound and the meaning, communication breaks down. You hear the same acoustic information as everyone else, but your brain doesn’t interpret it the same way. What’s less immediately clear is why, precisely, that happens.
The article goes on to say,
A common cause of mondegreens, in particular, is the oronym: word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided multiple ways. One version that Pinker describes goes like this: Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise.
Other times, the culprit is the perception of the sound itself: some letters and letter combinations sound remarkably alike, and we need further cues, whether visual or contextual, to help us out. In their absence, one sound can be mistaken for the other. For instance, in a phenomenon known as the McGurk effect, people can be made to hear one consonant when a similar one is being spoken. “There’s a bathroom on the right” standing in for “there’s a bad moon on the rise” is a succession of such similarities adding up to two equally coherent alternatives.
NME’s site has an article on the top forty misheard song lyrics and it’s hysterical.
It’s a British site and you should check it out, but their top three are: Number One – Dire Straits’s “Money For Nothing.” Wrong lyric: “Money for nothin’ and chips for free.”
Correct lyric: “Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free”
Number 2 Wrong Lyric – Paul Young’s “Everytime You Go Away.” Wrong Lyric: “Every time you go away, you take a piece of meat with you.”
Correct lyric: “Every time you go away take a piece of me with you.”
Number 4 Wrong Lyric (Yes, we skipped three) – Starship’s ‘We Built This City.’ Wrong lyric: “We built this city on sausage rolls.”
Correct lyric: “We built this city on rock ‘n’ roll.”
Here’s a link to the music clips used and the artist’s website. It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free. For the rest of the notes check out carriejonesbooks.blog
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You’ve all read a story or heard a story that just bores you to tears, right?
You don’t want to write that story UNLESS boring people is your goal. That’s a fine goal! You get to have that if you want it. Don’t let anyone take your goal away from you.
But if that’s not your goal? Let’s talk.
To not bore your reader, at the most basic level, you have to do three things. And these three things are the basic elements. Bare bones here, okay?
- Keeping your damn word.
Just like in a relationship, when you write a book for someone or tell them a story, you set up an expectation in them that there is going to be a payoff there.
There is always an expectation the reader will have.
Will they catch the murderer?
Will James get out of the giant peach? Will the rich family get out of the town?
Will Lassie save whoever Lassie needs to save?
Your book is full of these promises and questions that you the author set out for the reader and that you have to answer. If you don’t? You’re a promise breaker! And you’ve ruined your relationship with your reader.
- Making your damn character interesting (This has to do with plot too, actually.).
Your character has a journey. They make choices. The bigger the story and the scarier? The bigger the choices. The character in a thrilling story has to be the hero, the brave one, the choice-maker. Those choices lead you to a thrilling and amazing finale.
- Making time matter
If you have your whole life to hunt down the monster that’s killing everyone in town, there’s not as much tension there.
If the bomb is going to explode in 10,000 years? Same thing. But the pressure of a villain who is killing people, the pressure of the bomb about to explode, the pressure of a destiny that might not happen if you don’t hurry up?
That’s a big deal. It’s a trope. Who cares? Use it.
There’s some other things that make a good thriller, too. 1. There needs to be high stakes. Time limits. Multiple problems increases those stakes. 2. There needs to be an actual threat to the characters or society. 3. There needs to be some things that you don’t expect to happen, happen. 4. The characters need to be multiple dimensions, not flat little cardboard figures or game pieces. But interesting. 5. There needs to be some cool action going on. That might be mind games. Mind games count. Car chases do too.
Bonus Element: 1. Cool locations. Your reader wants to explore the world from the safety of their bed/couch/porch/subway seat. Your book lets them do that. Use details. Make those locations real.
Writing Tip of the Pod Think about your damn audience not just yourself.
Dog Tip for Life Make your own excitement like Gabby. Every moment can be thrilling.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
LINKS!
https://apnews.com/hub/oddities
https://www.mynbc5.com/article/video-shows-1-000-dolphin-stampede-off-california-coast/36017470#
https://www.menshealth.com/health/a19539973/i-put-a-giant-red-light-on-my-balls-to-triple-my-testosterone-levels/
Carrie's blog! Like & subscribe!
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A lot of writers go around saying that they can’t find anything to write about.
Ideas are everywhere; I promise.
Just this week there was a headline on theslate.com that read, “Two ‘masked bandits’ raid California bank, and they didn’t want money, officials say.”
The masked bandits were actually raccoons who broke into Redwood City Bank though it was closed.
They were reported when a guy using an ATM said he saw a stuffed animal moving around inside the bank. Humane society officials were called and the raccoons played tag for about ten minutes before letting the humans catch them.
They think the raccoons gained entry via a tree, then some airducts. Then they broke out some ceiling tiles, messed up some of the man’s papers and tipped over a computer. They did not get hurt. They did not take any money. Maybe they took a wall calendar or a you just opened a new checking account gift, but we aren’t sure.
So, you know that this is definitely a picture book or an early reader, right?
That’s the thing, ideas are everywhere.
During his TedTalk, Steven Johnson said
“We take ideas from other people, people we’ve learned from, people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. That’s really where innovation happens. And that means we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right?”
In another TedTalk, writer Elizabeth Gilbert talks about how ancient Greeks believed that creativity didn’t come from us humans, but from daemons, “divine attendant spirits.” Socrates was really into that. And the Romans, she says, called these spirits “genius.”
Ideas are genius. Ideas were separate from us and we weren’t responsible for them. Imagine if we believed that now.
You don’t need to stress about your process is the point. Your ideas will come. You can ask them to show up. And you don’t need to be afraid of those ideas coming or going. You just have to write, paint, sing, and allow your brain, your genius, your daemon to do the work. It can only do that if you show up to do the work, too.
Smithsonian Magazine says,
“The innovative drive lives in every human brain, and the resulting war against the repetitive is what powers the colossal changes that distinguish one generation from the next, one decade from the next, one year from the next. The drive to create the new is part of our biological makeup. We build cultures by the hundreds and new stories by the millions. We surround ourselves with things that have never existed before, while pigs and llamas and goldfish do not.”
We can't fit the rest of the notes here! But they are all on Carrie's website. And links to the sources are there too!
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
he smell of a really bad fart at a sleepover. The sound of giggles after someone has been dutch ovened at that same sleepover. The touch of a Dorito on your tongue. The sight of Godzilla’s leg outside your window.
The five senses are so important in your story. Those details yank readers into the narrative. They associate it with their own really bad farts, giggles, processed cheese tastes and um–Godzilla moments–and have an emotional reaction and recognition.
That’s what you, the writer, want. You want your story to feel real. Incorporating the senses lets you do that.
Spoiler alert: A story doesn’t feel real if it isn’t fleshed out with sensory details.
Here are the five senses in case you forgot:
- Sight (eyes)
- Nose (smell)
- Taste (tongue)
- Touch (skin, hair)
- Hearing (ears)
Here are examples of sensory language:
- His fart brought tears to her eyes. “Refried beans again, really?” (sense of smell)
- He stuck the entire lemon half into his mouth, puckered and sucked. “This helps with the smell,” he said. (sense of taste)
- His fart boomed beneath the covers and ended in a slow hiss. (sense of sound)
- The silk of the sheets against her nose was not enough to keep the smell at bay. Damn it. (sense of touch)
- The scaly leg took up the entire window. All she could see where reptilian scales, half oval, greenish, like big pieces of armor. (sense of sight)
Writing Tip of The Pod
A story without the senses is a story that’s dull, not real, and all in your head. You want to make it sexy. Sexy is the senses.
Dog Tip for Life
Live with all your senses. Explore the world through them. It’s all good. Smell the smells. Taste the smells. See the smells. Feel the smells. Hear the smells.
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link. This week’s podcast is all about urban legends.
Random Thoughts This week we talked about women's rights, COVID vaccines and also weird news. The link to the news is here. And the story about the deadly croissant animal is here. Stay weird everyone!
LET'S HANG OUT! HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
JUST CLICK ON THIS LINK AND FIND OUT HOW WE CAN INTERACT MORE.
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It’s 2021 and people are burnt out. There’s COVID-19. There’s political strife. Systemic bigotries and biases. There’s meanies at the grocery store and there’s that never-ending effort for some of us to pay for food, shelter, and health care, right?
On Carrie’s blog, http://www.carriejonesbooks.blog, she talked about how you can burnout on self care even, but also how writers seem super susceptible to burnout and why she was a bit burnt out for awhile. All the podcast notes (they don't all fit here) are there!
First, let’s put some definitions out there. Writer’s block is when you can’t figure out what to write.
Writer’s burnout is when you are super stressed and completely mentally and physically exhausted. You have zero motivation.
And surprise surprise this pandemic has burnt out a lot of people–not just writers.
What else causes burnout? * That damn stress * Nobody supporting you * Not being valued * Working too hard * Multitasking like a wild one * Chaos
What are the symptoms? Back in 2016, the Harvard Business Review had an article by Monique Valcour about beating burnout.
Her main three symptoms are
- Exhaustion
- Cynicism
- Inefficacy
Add to that:
- Zero motivation
- Not being interested in things
- Feeling like a big fail
- Not feeling attached to anything, especially your work
We have so much more to say about this, but it won't fit here, so head over to the blog, okay?
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Burnout is real. Take care of yourself.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Make your own mantra. Find your joy, don’t worry about that outside validation. Know your purpose and go after it. Sparty’s purpose is food. He goes after it. Even if it’s a bacon crumb under a coffee table, that dog is all in.
You’ve got this. Be like Sparty. Find people that support you and your voice.
Articles we mention in our random thoughts about Florida river monsters and Spaghettio's are: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-arapaima-new-invasive-species/
https://shepherdexpress.com/puzzles/news-of-the-weird/news-of-the-weird-april-16-2020/
https://www.amazon.com/Places-Hide-Harbor-Rose-Mysteries-ebook-dp-B083JJ4MPJ/dp/B083JJ4MPJ/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1609622692
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link. This week’s podcast is all about making Carrie hiccup and why people love hot sauce.
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Screenwriter Blake Snyder and his Save the Cat method really made the term/lingo “B” story and “A” story super popular. And I think sometimes that damn “B” story gets us all confused a bit, right?
So, basically let’s just go over the terms first.
WHAT THE HECK IS AN A STORY AND A B STORY? The A story is the book or movie’s big essence. People call it the “dramatic” core. It is the big plotline that the hero of the story follows on her journey.
The B story is the subplot basically. It supports the “A” story. It sometimes feels absolutely unrelated.
The FlyingWrestler blog defines it.
“It’s a secondary story that has its own beginning, middle and end, and is focused on its own problem, separate from but intertwined with the A Story.”
The scriptmag writes ,
“The B Story is your character’s secondary motivation or mission – the OTHER thing they have to accomplish. Your B Story may be a second problem or issue that your main character has to fix. And while your A-Story presents itself at the inciting incident and is solidified at the end of the first act with the acceptance of the adventure, your B-Story often can’t be identified UNTIL the second act begins, because it’s what is illuminated by the adventure beginning.
The FlyingWrestler blog again says,
“Just like the main A Story, the B Story’s main character should have a problem involving something external, which has its own significant life stakes. That means the problem isn’t only an internal issue, involving their need to grow and change in some way.”
So, the question becomes: Does my story have a B story? Or is it all A?
You don’t have to have a B story, but it can be helpful.
For more about this and the rest of the notes, check out our blog. You should like and subscribe over there to get more writing tips and weirdness.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Don't be afraid to be complicated. A good novel isn't a picture book and you want there to be a subplot.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Don't be a one-trick wonder. Have multiple goals and live life to the fullest. Don't just be an A story.
THINGS WE TALKED ABOUT IN RANDOM THOUGHTS For more about Lego theft, check out here on NPR.
More about UFOs? Check out this NYT article.
Script.mag has a great article here.
Here's the Flying Wrestler's take that we've quoted.
And the peeping-tom goat is all here.
Here’s a link to the music we clipped and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free. Thanks to the Creative Commons website!
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So a lot of writers get rejections that say, “Show, don’t tell.”
And then they are left wondering, what does that even mean?
And then everyone uses the Chekov quote, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
That’s because writers and editors like to quote other writers and editors because it makes us sound:
- Pretentious. Cough. I mean intelligent!
- Like we know what we’re doing.
DEFINITIONS TIME Showing is what it sounds like. You are showing what’s happening in the scene or with the character.
Telling is also what it sounds like. You are blunt and direct and are just stating things. Sometimes you’re stating and summarizing.
HERE IS A QUICK EXAMPLE: Telling:
Shaun was cranky.
Showing:
Gabby the dog barked for hours at the dogs trotting by the house that morning and after a quick pause for a drink from her red water bowl in the kitchen, she’d pranced back to the living room sliding glass door and started again.
Shaun tensed. He slammed his fist against his desk and roared, “Will you just shut up already?”
So why do you want to show more and tell less? It’s more community oriented. It gives the reader the truth about the character by illustrating it on the page rather than laying it down like an edict.
If I tell you, Carrie is a timid person, then you’re like okay. Whatever.
But if I show you a scene where Carrie steps outside and starts crying because the grass is long and things could be hiding in it and she starts sweating and shaking because she’s so afraid of the grass? You’re going to probably have a better understanding of how timid a person Carrie actually is.
Yeah, showing takes more words, but writers are word magistrates. We are dealers in the sentence and the language. Words are our friends.
The other reason is that telling makes things dull. It’s hard to be suspenseful when you just say everything all bluntly. When you tell, you are blunt. When you show? You are laying out little truths that compel the reader to turn the page and read on. You are giving the pieces of a meal, one bite at a time, rather than shoving a four-course dinner down their throat and making them gag.
It’s the difference between reading the episode recap for Wanda Vision and actually watching the show.
FOR THE REST OF THE NOTES AND LINKS TO OUR SOURCES (People Magazine and The Miami Herald) check out Carrie's website.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link. This week’s podcast is all about alien abductions and Maine as a UFO hotspot
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This week on Carrie’s blog, carriejonesbooks.blog, she’s talking all about chapters and so we’re talking about them on the podcast, too, because Carrie’s controlling like that.
And what we’re talking about specifically is chapter titles.
You can divide your books into chapters and just label them numerically, 1, 2, 3… But you can also give them a title like:
Chapter One Surviving the Podcast Here’s the thing.
Chapter Titles Help Your Readers How do they help your readers? In a lot of ways.
GRAB ATTENTION. You put these bad boys at the top of the chapter. And the reader thinks, “Ah! Look at that! I am paying attention.”
TELL READERS WHO THEY ARE FOCUSING ON NOW. If you have a story with multiple point of views, you can put who this chapter is focused on here.
SHOW LOCATION OR TIME CHANGES. You can give the reader some help. If you have a time jumping, place jumping novel. You can use this space to say, “Hey, we are in sexy Scotland in 2021.” Or you can say, “Look, we’re in Zambia in August.”
SHOW THEME OR THE FUTURE. It’s like a happy little spoiler where the reader goes, “Oh, that’s what this chapter is about.” This can be about theme, too.
SHOW ECHOES. A chapter title can be a first sentence.
Summing it up: And there you go. A quick bit about chapter titles and what they can do for you.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Chapter titles are good tools. Use them.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Use whatever you can to communicate things to your human. Wag. Growl. Bark. Spin in circles. Hit them with your paw. They are stupid and need a lot of help understanding what you’re putting down.
IN OUR RANDOM THOUGHTS WE TALKED ABOUT Bears in the outhouse
Snake in an Inhaler
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Our latest episode of LOVING THE STRANGE is here. It's about spontaneous combustion and poop styles.
The visuals for our podcasts are all on Carrie's YouTube channel. You can like and subscribe there, too!
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In our random thought (not transcribed here), we talk about
- Being a trophy wife
- A woman finding an abandoned apartment behind her bathroom mirror
- Another couple finding a hidden basement in their rental home.
SO A LOT OF MEDIUM ARTICLES AND BLOGS FOCUSED ON WRITING ARE ALL ABOUT: * How to increase your audience * How to make 60-trillion-dollars a year off your writing. * How to be like James Patterson and make 90-trillion-dollars a year.
But all of them seem to forget that writers are creators. Writers are people who make story and art (not just to make money), but also because they are compelled to create, to move, to incite, to inspire.
Especially when so many of us are struggling to make ends meet, it’s easy to focus only on the money. But your life is worth more than that. Your brain is about more than that, too.
You aren’t just about money. You are about creating.
“The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong…We are all the chosen few. We are all makers by design.” -Elizabeth Gilbert
Every single one of us creates something.
My dad built bird houses and engines. My mom embroidered like a beast. Neither of them would think of themselves as creators. Shaun’s dad painted Bob Ross things. His mom probably does something, too.
We all have urges. Those urges aren’t just about food, sex, and survival. There are also urges to create. But so many of us are told, you aren’t artistic. You can’t draw. You’re a math person. We let those moments define us. And we think, “Ah, I’m the left-brained kid.” We think, “Ah, I don’t have an aritistic bone in my body.”
That’s what Carrie’s mom told her, God love her, even though all Carrie ever wanted to do was draw. That’s right. Not write. Draw.
It doesn’t matter that Carrie makes very little money painting. It’s what gives her joy. So she does it whenever she has time. Writing and creating should be about expression, not just about how to make as much money as possible in as quick amount of time as possible.
Don’t be fluff. There’s a guy who writes a zillion Medium articles and has a massive following and makes tons of money. I’ve read a ton of his articles. I can’t remember any of them. That’s because he’s regurgitating to make money. It’s all fluff. Don’t be fluff.
Richard BransonThe most talented, thought-provoking, game-changing people are never normal.
Don’t let other people’s assumptions about you hold you back.
Naval RavikantThe most dangerous idea is silencing people.
Shaun’s a big man. He’s six-six. He looks pretty much like an ex-football player. People are stunned that he’s not. But if he wanted to study ballet, the guy should be able to study ballet.
We are born to live. We have to make money to survive. But we have to be about more than money to live. Create things. Explore things. Remember to live, too, okay?
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Write for the sake of writing.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE People are more than their looks or being sexy and this goes for dogs, too.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Here’s the link to our other podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
In the random thoughts part of the podcast we talk about Big Foot, wedgies and how you can tell when predators are looking at you.
THREE BIG STEPS TO LEARN HOW TO WRITE GOOD STUFF
There’s a lot of people out there who say that if you write every day you’ll become a better writer and that’s true … sort of. You also need the basics.
If you write every day, but you don’t learn about writing every day then you don’t get to improve. You just write.
And that’s not good enough.
Learning how to write has to do with a few things. And the first step is to know what you want to write.
FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU’RE INTO
Writing an epic fantasy isn’t the same as writing ad copy and that’s not the same as writing poetry. Pick something. It doesn’t have to be your only style, but pick one way first.
LEARN THE TOOLS
Now here’s the fun part. The learning. How do you learn how to write?
- Enroll in courses.
- Read things like what you want to write.
- Watch blogs, listen to podcasts, and read books about craft.
- Talk to other writers who do what you do. They might have cool resources too.
- Hire a writing coach or editor who loves helping people and not just loves making money.
GO FOR THE GRAMMAR
Yeah. Yeah. We know. Periods aren’t sexy. Most people don’t get turned on by scene structure, but you should!
If your story is awesome, but there is no punctuation or grammar or even sentences?
You’re not going to be understandable to your potential readers. They are just going to stop reading.
Places to Check Get Your Sexy Grammar On
- Grammar Girl
- Merriam Webster Dictionary
- Strunk and White’s, The Elements of Style.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
To be the best writer you can be, you need to spend time learning.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Dogs don’t give other dogs wedgies. We aren’t dogs, we have to take the time to communicate.
HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast and our new LOVING THE STRANGE podcast.
We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of.
Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
Thanks so much for being one of the 256,000 downloads if you’ve given us a listen!
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Here’s the link. This week’s podcast is all about loving places and feeling called to them when you have never been there before.
If you like what you read, please heart it below or share it, it means the world to this writer. x0- Carrie
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, there’s a lot of scuttlebutt in the children’s book world about agents behaving badly, which sounds like a Spring Fling Road Trip kind of thing, honestly.
But it’s more about agents being dicks and unprofessional. One recent superstar agent has been outed for allegedly “no longer agenting ethically” and not telling clients about their foreign rights, submissions, and speaking badly about authors to other industry professionals or being sexually harassing, bigoted, racists schmucks.
There’s a weird power dynamic that happens between traditionally published authors and their agents. The agents are really gatekeepers to the industry even if they don’t want to be, and it’s good for writers to remember that they can expect to not be treated like crap.
Things you don’t want your agent to:
- Ghost you.
- Be such a tool that most editors don’t want to work with them.
- Give you hives.
- Not telling who your book is being submitted to.
- Sexual harass you, be racist, be too burnt out or wigged out on drugs or alcohol that they don’t represent you well.
- Be too busy that they don’t represent you well.
We aren’t going to call out agents here because that’s not what we’re about, but here are myths about agents that new authors really need to understand:
- They work for you. You don’t work for them.
- They are human not gods. Be gentle with them, but expect them to be professional.
- Though it’s awesome when they are, it’s not their job to be your bestie.
- They may not be your agent for life.
So what is their job?
- Get book contracts for you.
- Negotiate those contracts for you.
- Submit your manuscripts to get those contracts.
- Protect your interests.
Doing all this they should always:
- Respond in a timely fashion to your inquiries. But don’t be a punk and spam them.
- Tell you where they are submitting your stories.
- Tell you when your stories are rejected or accepted and relay feedback.
When you look for an agent, you want to:
- Research the hell out of everyone and find your top ten. Make sure they actually represent the kind of book you’re writing.
- Check to make sure they aren’t villains.
- Check the proper way to submit to them.
- Query them in a professional way.
Writers Beware is an awesome site for understanding what agents should or shouldn’t do. The link is here and in our podcast notes. You should check it out.
Writing Tip of The Pod Don’t be a schmuck. Don’t let your agent be a schumck.
Dog Tip for Life When you look for treats, make sure to give them to everyone.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Thanks for listening!
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
In our Random Thought section of the podcast (Notes not transcribed), we talk about how straight men aren’t supposed to let the world know they like/have cats on social media. Shaun has thoughts. More here.
The rest of the podcast follows.
Every weekday Carrie posts on her personal Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin, inspiring quotes from our dogs and cats.
Sometimes they are just about bacon and naps because bacon and naps can be inspiring.
But it made us think of famous writing quotes and whether or not they are kind of b.s. And how very privileged some quotes are.
Like Marianne Williamson, who we are sure is an incredibly lovely person wrote this:
“Nothing binds you except your thoughts, nothing limits you except your fear; and nothing controls you except your beliefs.”
Which is lovely and partially true, but it comes from the perspective of a really lucky person who is white, who is good looking, who had a lot of advantages as a white American, right? It’s hard to say nothing binds you except your thoughts to a political prisoner who is legit in chains, to a Black man or woman in the U.S. who is jail for pot, for someone who has paralyzing fear because of trauma that’s happened to her or him or them, right?
Generalizations can be so inspiring and they can have truth in them for some people and sometimes even for most people, but it’s never going to work for everyone.
Writing advice and quotes are like that, too.
Like even the most amazing Ray Bradbury wrote
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
That’s a good quote, right? Us writers are easily destroyed. But being drunk on anything all the time usually means for most of us that we’re not helping create a solution to problems. Instead, we’re being drunk, putting lampshades on our head and saying, “Nah. Nah. Nah. I can’t hear you.”
It’s not the best look, really.
But sometimes the advice is pretty cool.
“Be strategic and resilient in the pursuit of your dreams. That sounds like a cheesy quote, right? But nah, I’m serious. Resilience is one hell of a quality to master and not many have the skin for it.” —Tiffany D. Jackson
“People are going to judge you all the time no matter what you do. . . . Don’t worry about other people. Worry about you.” —Jacqueline Woodson
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” — Henry David Thoreau
“Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende
“Healing begins where the wound was made.” -Alice Walker (The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart)
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
Blow off the b.s. And realize where it’s coming from. Sometimes it’s coming from people whose lives and brains are nothing like yours and sometimes it’s just coming from people who want to make a butt ton of money selling their advice to you.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Cats are okay. They’re good to snuggle with, too.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free
We have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE! We hope you'll check it out! Here’s the link. It's live Fridays.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
RANDOM THOUGHTS In our random thought, we talk about werewolves on bikes and what would happen if SuperBowl players dressed up like zombies and vampires. Who would win?
The photos we promised are here along with the rest of our podcast notes that don't fit here.
The Advice Part! So, advice is cool, right? It’s other people sharing their wisdom, but sometimes advice? It just sucks.
This goes for writing advice and life advice.
CarrieI was driving from Manhattan to Long Island with my boyfriend and his parents. These were wealthy people with a really expensive car. The dad was a partner at one of the top firms in the city, and he was brilliant. He was not, however, the best driver.
On this drive, my boyfriend and I were in the backseat and suddenly the car was bumping along. We looked up and his dad was legit driving his car on the median of the road, the bumped out divider thing.
His mom was screaming and he was just totally oblivious. The traffic was flowing, but heavy and there are signs in the median.
“Jimmy!” she screamed.
The sign is getting closer and closer.
And he said, “It is fine.”
He swerved off into oncoming traffic.
People screamed. He swore. He veered back up onto the median. The sign was still there, waiting.
I was clutching the door handle.
My boyfriend yelled, “Dad! You’re going to hit the—”
His dad slammed on the breaks. We waited about five minutes for his mom to stop swearing and for someone to let us to get back on the road.
And he said, I swear to God, “Let this be a lesson to you kids. Roads are not for everyone. You find your own damn way.”
Bad advice, right? Sometimes it’s okay to stay on the road. When you deviate off, you want to deviate safely and not run over signs or almost get people killed.
I also had a relative who told me college was for fools and that I read too much so I wouldn’t get anywhere in life.
Also the thought does count, but it usually doesn’t count for the person you’ve kind of failed.
And credit cards aren’t free money, Mom.
THERE’S GOOD LIFE ADVICE OUT THERE TOO LIKE: * Check your credit card and bank statements a lot. * Don’t make big decisions when you’re super angry. * Don’t not do things because you’re afraid of rejection. * Don’t not speak your mind because you’re afraid of trolls. * Floss your teeth so you can keep having teeth.
AND THERE’S BAD WRITING ADVICE OUT THERE TOO LIKE: * You always have to outline. If you see “always,” it’s probably going to be a bad piece of advice. * You should never outline. If you see “never,” it’s probably going to be a bad piece of advice. * Adverbs are always demons. You really don’t honestly want them to be totally almost every other silly word, but you can totally use them sparingly. Sorry! I couldn’t resist. * Semicolons are always demons. They aren’t; sometimes they help when a conjunction just doesn’t work. * Write the way you talk. This isn’t necessarily a good idea if you’re a person who talks like Carrie. Plus, it’s limiting. Do you want every character to sound exactly like you? Every book?
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
And we have a new podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, starting on Saturday, which we’ll stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Okay, recently I’ve been working on a lot of people’s stories that are fantastic except for one thing—one easily fixable thing—they have semicolons everywhere.
The semicolon is that little bit of punctuation that looks like there’s a comma on the bottom and a period topping it. And judging from people’s use of it? It’s an addictive, sexy beast.
Most people think they understand the semicolon. It’s a period topping a comma, right? You use it to do something or um … yeah …?
Here’s the thing, a semicolon is a divider. It’s like a comma and a period that way, but it’s not. It creates a different length of the pause for the reader between the words that it divides.
Yes! There are different levels of pause. Here check it out. We’ll do it with three sentences.
The first is a comma, but it will be a minimal pause.
Shaun wanted to talk about naughty things, but Carrie was not going to let him do that today.
Here is that same sentiment but with a medium-weight pause.
Shaun wanted to talk about naughty things; Carrie was not going to let him do that today.
Here is the same sentiment with the pause heavyweight fighter, the period.
Shaun wanted to talk about naughty things. Carrie was not going to let him do that today.
Your punctuation choice controls the pacing of your paragraph and sentence and if you put 18 of them in one paragraph? You’re going to slow down the pace of your story and also make readers get crinkly noses and hate you.
So how do you use semicolons? There are three major ways to use this sexy beast.
One. To connect a certain kind of thing. Semicolons connect two independent clauses. You know something is an independent clause if it can stand alone as it’s very own sentence.
It’s like using the conjunction and between two independent clauses to show they are really related.
Shaun is wearing big boy pants; he has been for forty-five years.
To read the rest of our notes (which won't fit here), check out our website here.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
So there you go. Don’t put semicolons everywhere because that’s a flag to agents, editors or readers. Use them when you need to because they can really help for clarity in lists, but remember too much of a good thing is a bad thing in writing.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Embrace the semicolon. You can change direction in your life, lean into the pause, but not into the end.
Check out Project Semicolon and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255).
RANDOM THOUGHTS In our random thoughts section at the beginning of the podcast, we talk about the people in South Carolina filming their procreation acts everywhere and wonder why there is no Maine Man when there are so many Florida Men.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Thanks to all of you who keep listening! Please share it and subscribe if you can.
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A lot of time you’ll write a story and a beta reader, agent, editor or reviewer will say, “This is not believable.”
And a lot of time, you’ll tweet something and some rando on Twitter will say, “WTF. You lie.”
And a lot of time, you’ll just be telling a story at a party (or during Zoom in COVID times) and people will say, “No way! No freaking way.”
This can be annoying especially when you’re trying to sell a book and you get that note.
Why Does This Happen? Sometimes people react that way because their world and experience doesn’t mesh with your own and they don’t understand that everyone in Downeast Maine calls everyone else “Darling,” even straight men say it to other straight men.
Sometimes it’s because you just haven’t suspended disbelief for them.
This happens in real life, too.
Sometimes Lies Aren’t Believable This man who used to be a Houston police officer (He resigned January 14.) went into the Capitol Building on January 6. And when he was interviewed, he told the federal agents that he wasn’t really part of the riots. He just wanted to see the amazing art. He was only in D.C. to help out his wife who had a business (cooking). But his phone (which the agents looked at) showed a bunch of videos and photos of him.
The photos and videos were allegedly in a deleted folder. But the folder was not all the way deleted.
And he was arrested because his story? It wasn’t that believable to those federal agents, right? I’m sure that when Shaun used to be a cop, he heard a lot of stories like this, too.
One time our youngest daughter who has autism and likes to make really big stories told other campers at the campground that we went to Disney but she had to sleep in a chair. The other campers gawped at us and said, “What?”
They didn’t believe her because it wasn’t believable. It didn’t match the people we were. Every time she does this, we say, “Buddy, if you’re going to lie, which we hope you won’t, you kind of want to make it more believable.”
And then I tell her about the girl I met in college who told everyone during freshman orientation that her parents died in a plane crash in Alaska. About two parties later that morphed to a plane crash in Hawaii. Then during homecoming weekend, her parents showed up in their BMW very much alive. Don’t be that girl. In life or in story.
How To Make Your Story Believable and Bad Ass
Michael Hauge over on “Story Mastery” has some great, easy ideas on how to make your story believable. They are pretty basic, but important to remember and those notes don't fit here, so check them out (and our resources and citations) over on carriejonesbooks.blog, okay?
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Make your character do things that make sense for your character.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE If you have to play it out and hype it up too much, it often isn’t believable. Don’t forget, the humans aren’t going to believe you’re starving if they are the ones who know how many treats you get. Backstory and evidence matter.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
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There are people out there who are just brilliant. Their brains are amazing. Their art is gasp-inducing.
But they can’t seem to achieve their goals.
These are the people who know twenty-two languages, have maybe five masters degrees, and shrug it off like it’s no big deal.
They can quote Derrida and Angela Davis in the same breath and make the connections between the two.
According to writer/blogger Jessica Wildfire, some people are ‘too good for their own good.’
She calls this the Cold Mountain Effect.
She writes:
Someone can know too much. They can be too talented. They’ll turn any project into an epic journey through the Himalayas. They don’t get tired of working. They don’t want to see the end. They’re not even perfectionists. They just love their work too much.
This stems from the story of the writer of Cold Mountain.
It made history in 1997 with a 61-week run on the New York Times best-seller list, moving 3 million copies.
Based on its success, Charles Frazier got an $8 million deal for his second book, with nothing more than a 1-page proposal. Cold Mountain swept the award scene that year, and went on to become a hit film that earned seven Academy Award nominations.
Sometimes it takes an intervention.
You probably don’t know that Frazier spent almost a decade working on Cold Mountain. According to lore, he couldn’t stop.
One of his friends finally snuck an unfinished copy of the manuscript to a literary agent, who signed Frazier on the spot. That’s the only reason anyone knows anything about Charles Frazier. It’s hard to imagine how long he would’ve kept revising it.
It’s not perfectionism that keeps them going, she argues, but the fear of their own success. Or it can just be the joy that they get from creating and doing and not wanting that joy to stop.
We don't have enough space to put the rest of the notes here, but you can check them out on carriejonesbooks.blog also so many apologies but Shaun gets a bit naughty in the podcast and Carrie gets a lot frustrated.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
Resources https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/somatic-psychology/201101/fear-success
https://www.msn.com/en-au/lifestyle/smart-living/the-cold-mountain-effect-explains-why-the-most-talented-often-dont-reach-their-potential/ar-BB1cNpoV
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On thought of the podcast, which is not transcribed here, Shaun gets a bit mad at political things. If you’re not into that, you might want to skip to the eight-minute mark.
Okay, first things first. What is a writing platform? An author’s platform is basically just the author’s presence on the web. Your website. Your TikTok, your Facebook, your Twitter, your Instagram, your podcast, your blog.
Unlike Coke or Spanx, your platform isn’t faceless. It’s all about you, the writer. As the foundation of your brand, you have to figure out what it is that you want to do and achieve.
Most writers want to tell stories.
That’s their goal.
So as an author your platform is going to be about how to tell your stories and how you tell your story, especially the story of you, the writer.
I’ve failed at this a lot because I’ve historically not been into talking about writing. I prefer to just write, but that put me in a weird little vacuum, a void.
A lot of writers worrying about their platform get started with a mission statement.
WHAT IS A MISSION STATEMENT. According to Tim Berry (link on the podcast notes),
“A mission statement is a simple statement that explains your company’s goals. It’s a summary of what your company does for its customers, employees, and owners. It explains how you do what you do. And, it focuses on why your company does what it does. Some of the best mission statements also extend themselves to include fourth and fifth dimensions: what the company does for its community, and for the world.”
And Blake Stockton wrote:
“A mission statement is a short, meaningful sentence (or several sentences) that summarizes the purpose that drives your business. A good mission statement says why you do what you do.”
It’s kind of a weird existential thing on some level because you’re basically asking WHO AM I and WHY DO I EXIST?
There are also people who absolutely believe that a mission statement should be one short sentence without a lot of fluff.
Once you have a mission statement, you think about how you can push your presence out there and what you actually want to do, Berry’s fourth and fifth steps. Those steps are over on the blog. And more that won't fit here.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
Thanks so much for being one of the 254,000 downloads if you’ve given us a listen!
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In life and in story, you have these things called transitions. Places were things change.
You go from one place to another, one scene to another, one chapter to another, one husband to another, one president to another.
A really good transition is really just a bridge that helps the reader go logically from one section, scene, chapter to another without it being awkward like a bad date or making their brain hitch where they say things like “We were just in space and now we’re at Wal-Mart? What the heck?”
Some people are amazing at transitions.
Some people have awkward transitions.
Some refuse to acknowledge there even is a transition.
But in the writing world, you want them to be smooth and there are a bunch of transitional phrases and words that authors fall back on to help them do that.
Our podcast notes for this episode are way too long to fit here, but you can check them out here.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE If you never, get off the couch, you never have a chance for treats from the pantry. If you snap every single time someone strartles you awake, you get less love. Embrace the transitions. They are opportunities for growth, to evolve, to learn new stuff, and potentially get some veggie bacon.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
Thanks so much for being one of the 254,000 downloads if you’ve given us a listen!
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Eight Sexy Ways to Write Sexy Carrie’s been editing a lot of erotica lately and despite her uptight New England ways, we thought it was time to give you all a few hints about writing sex scenes.
Gasp!
I know! I know! Here we go…
Hint #1 It needs to make sense.
We’ve all seen really un-sexy writing, right? You’re reading the passage and they are in a kitchen in a house in Wyoming and doing it on the counter and then—poof—they are in four-some on some beach in Belize.
And you’re reading this and you go, “What the what?”
The sexy parts doesn’t matter because the rest doesn’t make any sense.
Hint #2 Don’t make it vanilla.
Most readers aren’t reading because they want to hear about the same old missionary sex that they’ve been doing with their own partners for the last thirty-two years.
We read books to experience new things.
We read books to live out fantasies we might never have in our own life.
We read books to feel like characters who aren’t us, to empathize, learn, and discover.
We read books to get what we can’t always get in real life.
So make it hot.
Hint #3 Make your character interesting and not just um… someone who is having sex, rutting in various places.
Hint #4 Be into it.
No matter what your personal feelings are about sex, you want to write about it like you’re really into it. You want those endorphins to be out there on the page. You can be male, female, agender, gender nonconforming, gay, straight or pan to write sex. You can be any race or religion or ethnicity or social class to write sex.
Sex is pretty much a thing that a lot of adults do. That’s why we have babies and the species hasn’t died off.
Anyone who tells you that one demographic is better than the other at it? They’re being a bigoted punk. Don’t be a bigoted punk.
Hint #5 Show It. Don’t Tell It.
It’s all about the details. Fornicating is the point in erotic fiction, right? But it’s all in the details.
You read, “Two people have sex” and you think, “Yeah. Okay? Whatever.”
That’s telling, right? And it has no details and it’s super boring—so boring!
We want our characters to have dimension, to be human or vampire or zombie, but detailed. We want to root for them or cry for them or cheer for them when they scream, “Boo-yah!” into the bedroom when they’re done.
Hint #6 Dialogue is your friend.
Teasing, the promise, the verbal foreplay? It makes the actual act way more worth it.
You can be silly. You can be creative. You can be naughty. You can use a double entendre (say one thing, mean sex) and have fun.
Hint #7 Have fun. Just like in real life. Fornication can be funny. Use that.
Shaun’s Hint #8 If there’s any doubt, try it out.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD All the hints.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Do your research. Pound the streets. Watch other species. Know what you’re writing about.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
LET’S HANG OUT!
JUST CLICK ON THIS LINK AND FIND OUT HOW WE CAN.
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CHARACTER VS CHARACTERIZATION
Robert McPhee has a bit in his book, STORY, where he talks about character and characterization and one of my favorite aspects of that discussion is just this simple quote, which will hopefully be of some use to you:
TRUE CHARACTER is revealed in the choices a human being makes under the pressure—the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.
We show who our character is by putting her/him/them under that pressure. Are they brave or wimpy? Empathetic or narcissistic? Cruel or kind?
We see them through their choices. And we see who they are the most when the risk is large.
Inserting choices into the emotional arc and plot really pushes it to another level and that’s something that you can really do with stories. You can show someone’s character—who they really are.
Characterization is just a bunch of traits all tied together. It’s like a demographic. You know I’m a white woman with a MFA in Maine who writes. But my psychographic is a bit different, right? I’m someone who gives money to certain causes, who stops when I see an accident, who cries every time she sees a dog video but chooses to watch it rather than look away. That’s my character.
Our written characters are like that, too. Put them under pressure, give them choices, let us see who they are from that very first chapter so that we can see them change.
RANDOM THOUGHT
To hear about manly Christmases and martial law, you have to listen to the podcast, not just read the notes! Sorry!
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Show who your characters are by their choices and actions.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Don’t trust words. Trust smells and movements. Also, trust the person who gives you bacon.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
Thanks so much for being one of the 253,000 downloads if you’ve given us a listen!
LET’S HANG OUT! HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
JUST CLICK ON THIS LINK AND FIND OUT HOW WE CAN.
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A lot of us humans and writers spend a lot of time trying to impress people by being extra wordy.
And it seems like we’re all trying to avoid the word “because.”
This is extremely cruel to the word “because,” which probably gets hurt feelings, but it’s also super cruel to your readers and/or listeners who deserve clarity.
They need to understand what you’re putting down.
So, when it comes to “because,” we do not need to say:
- The reason is because (that’s redundant).
- Due to the fact that
- On the grounds that
- On account of
If you sound like a lawyer in a bad tv procedural?
You’re trying too hard.
HERE IS CONTRARY ADVICE…. “BECAUSE” OR “SINCE” CAN SOMETIMES FORCE YOU TO BE WORDY.
With the words ‘because’ and ‘since,’ you can almost always use either one. They are interchangeable BFFs.
Here are some examples.
- Because I hate you, I decided to date.
- Since I hate you, I decided to date.
They both mean “because” here because they are synonyms.
But sometimes “since” means “from the time’ instead of ‘because.’
Since we went to Disney, I’ve been crushing on Pluto.
That means “ever since the time they went to Disney” not “because.”
But you might not know that, right?
So, instead you might want to be wordy.
You don’t want to be ambiguous and have people wondering if you mean “because” or “ever since the time they went to Disney.”
The whole point in writing and talking is for people to understand you, so don’t be a schmuck. Be clear.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Don’t be wordy and know what your words mean and what they’re conveying to the reader.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Listen more than you speak. Look for clues in your environment and people’s actions so you can really understand them.
RANDOM THOUGHT To hear about punks, stabbings and vampires, you have to listen to the podcast file. Sorry! We only put the advice part in the notes.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
Thanks so much for being one of the 253,000 downloads if you’ve given us a listen!
HEAR MY BOOK BABY (AND MORE) ON PATREON On Carrie's Patreon site she reads and print chapters of unpublished YA novels. THE LAST GODS and SAINT and now ALMOST DEAD.
She also shares some writing tips, part of the WRITING CLASS OF AWESOME and sends people art.
It’s a super fun place to hang out, learn, read, and see Carrie's weirdness in its true form.
And she's starting up a brand new, adult paranormal set at a Maine campground. You can read the first chapter here.
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Okay, you all. We know this is harsh, but it’s truth time. Life isn’t about random interactions. Success isn’t about it either.
When Carrie became Andrew Yang’s Twitter friend, it made her super happy, but it didn’t actually do anything for her. When the Rock retweeted her tweet about disabilities…
Full disclosure: Carrie has no depth perception and also has epilepsy.
…but when that happened? It was cool because it was the Rock, but it didn’t make her suddenly more successful or cooler.
The Rock would never remember that retweet. Andrew Yang isn’t going to remember being Carrie’s Twitter friend.
It was a nice moment, but Carrie doesn’t really need that moment to make her feel cooler or more validated as a human being. That’s because though she presents as really insecure, she’s actually pretty cool with herself. And other people’s perceptions – even when they are the Rock or Andrew Yang? They don’t matter.
There’s a guy in our town who is a bit off and he thinks we are basically Satan incarnate. Does Shaun care? Not one for one freaking second. Why? Because he knows who the hell he is. He’s cool with himself. For the same reason when there are rumors about him or Carrie or even his bffs, does he care? Nope. That’s because he knows he’s the sh*t. He knows who he is.
It’s confidence, but it’s also about knowing that you can’t control what other people think about you all the time.
But there’s another side to this, too. You want to connect with your people, your readers, your audience, your friends, by being you, your authentic self, and you can’t do that if you’re busy worrying about what everyone else is thinking about you.
When you’re all ME ME ME all the time because you need to be an influencer or sell your book or whatever, you lose who you are and any connections you get? They aren’t even about you. They are about the false perception of you.
But it’s more than that, too. When all you care about is people’s perceptions of you, you stop caring about people.
And then, you’re basically an egotistical sh*t. Is that who you want to become? No. So, focus on the work. Focus on making connections where you care about the other person. Having the Rock retweet you doesn’t mean you’re going to be a movie star or an international bestseller.
What makes you succeed is the work you do, the care you give, the problems you help other people with.
Carrie is a successful novelist. Her books have won awards, been NYT and international bestsellers, but that’s because she took the time to learn to write and to understand people. She now uses those skills to help other people write their own books.
And those people? The ones she coaches and teaches and gets to know so well as they make their stories? Those are the people that matter to Carrie, that make her a success. Not the Rock. No offense to the Rock!
Pretending to be someone else, being preoccupied with others’ perceptions of you? It destroys you. Don’t be destroyed. Celebrate who you are and who other people are too.
Dog Tip For Life Be the dog you’re meant to be. Have your values align with your actions. And bark a lot about it if that’s your thing.
For the rest of the tips and notes, check out Carrie's blog here.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
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Here’s the spoiler: The Most Important Thing You Have In Your Writing Career Is You
We know! We know! You were probably hoping for a cool app, or the perfect book about plot beats, but nope. It’s you.
You can’t write if you don’t exist. You write best when you’re doing pretty fine.
So here are the ways to actually invest in yourself. Stay healthy for your brain It’s pretty hard to write when you feel like crap because when your brain is all broken. As Harvard Healthbeat says, “First it is important to remember that you need a healthy body to have a healthy brain.”
How do you do that? According to Harvard:
Step 1: Eat a plant-based diet
Step 2: Exercise regularly
Step 3: Get enough sleep
Step 4: Manage your stress
Step 5: Nurture social contacts
Step 6: Continue to challenge your brain
- Stay happy or at least okay. Relationships matter.
Stay happy or at least okay. Relationships matter. Your relationships with other people are really important. They help you evolve. There’s a thing called the dependency paradox.
As Kyle Benson writes,
“Our partners powerfully affect our ability to thrive in life. They influence how we feel about ourselves, what we believe we are capable of, and they ultimately impact our attempts to achieve our dreams.
“Even Mr. Self-Actualization (Abraham Maslow) himself argued that without bonds of love and affection with others, we cannot go on to achieve our full potential as human beings.
“Once we choose a partner, there is no question about whether dependency exists or not. It always does.
“Countless studies show that once we become intimately attached to another human being, the two of us form one physiological being.“Our partner regulates our blood pressure, our heart rate, our breathing, and the level of hormones in our blood. The emphasis of independence in adult relationships does not hold water from a biological perspective.”
There’s a link to Kyle’s post in our notes and it’s just so good, but the part that really rings true for writers and other creatives is this:
“When a partner is supportive, we are more willing to explore and our self-esteem and confidence gets a boost, which allows us to go after our deepest desires. This not only improves the quality of our lives, but it also deepens and enhances our satisfaction within the relationship and our physical health.
“But as many of us know, sometimes our exploration leads to failure, rejection, and painful experiences. When these bad events happen, our biological programming creates anxiety that leads us to seek proximity (physically and/or psychologically) with the person we love.
“If they are supportive during this stage, our stress will go down and we cope with our problems faster, which ultimately leads us to overcome the problem and continue to go after our deepest desires.”
So find those supportive partners and get rid of the rest!
The rest of the hints are over here!
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
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Seriously. The best books are like wedgies. You can’t ignore them. They get right up inside you and into places they aren’t supposed to go.
And sometimes it’s hard to get them out.
This week Carrie talked to a lot of her writers about how if you don’t long to write your scenes, your readers probably aren’t going to long to read those scenes either.
And recently the New York Times talked to Steve Martin (actor, writer, comedian) about books. He’s allegedly addicted to audiobooks, which is cool.
He said, “I’m also a sucker for the magic of opening paragraphs. I’ll never understand what the sorcery is in literature and movies that engages you immediately and makes it impossible to look away.”
A wedgie engages you immediately.
And a book can do that too, sometimes. But sometimes it’s not like a wedgie; it’s more like a bad 8-hour Zoom meeting about land use ordinances and setback requirements in a town you’ll never visit.
So how do you keep your book from being boring?
You wedgify it. Yes, we made up that word.
HOW DO YOU WEDGIFY A BOOK? 1. You go all in. Make the conflict as big as possible. 2. You have dynamic scenes where things happen. Not just the character’s meandering thoughts about Zoom meetings. 3. You make us care. Wedgies matter because your bum matters.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Go all in with your stories. Make the conflict (internal or external) huge, presidential huge. But more than that, make us care about who the conflict is happening to.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Won't fit here! Go check it out here
But it's all about commitment. Shaun gets testy!
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
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This week during the blitz of U.S. election news, there was an article gaining some traction called “Seven Life Lessons Everyone Should Learn Sooner Rather Than Later” by Nicholas Cole who Carrie wants to call Nicholas Cage because she is old like that.
Carrie has a tendency to hate these kind of articles because she thinks they are trite and insipid.
But his first point hit home. It was, “If you want to ‘do what you love,’ you have to work three times as hard as everyone else.”
N.Cole“Most people do not get to spend their lives doing whatever it is they love. Instead, they do what they are told they should do or what their parents or town or friends or peers suggest that they do. Or they simply pursue nothing close to their heart at all.”
Is this you?
Do you love something?
Do you do it?
He said, “But if you want to do what you love, you need to see that as a privilege, not an expectation.”
Which is interesting. What does that mean, right?
Carrie does what she loves. But to be fair, Carrie loves everything she does whether it’s being a YMCA gymnastics coach, a church secretary, a student, a newspaper editor.
“I love all the things,” Carrie says.
Cole never says anything about his assertion that you have to work three times harder to do what you love. And we're not sure where that comes from because he doesn’t source anything. It might just be a generalization, but we wanted to make sure.
WORST CAREER ADVICE EVER? Despite an exhaustive internet search of five minutes, we couldn’t find anything that backed Cole’s assertion, but we did find an article by Jeff Haden, which said the worst career advice is to do what you love.
He quotes Cal Newport, Georgetown University professor and author of So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Search For Work You Love.
Cal Newport"Telling someone to follow their passion--from an entrepreneur's point of view--is disastrous. That advice has probably resulted in more failed businesses than all the recessions combined... because that's not how the vast majority of people end up owning successful businesses.
"Passion is not something you follow," he adds. "Passion is something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world."
According to Haden, passions are a bad choice because: 1. They take time to cultivate. 2. It’s rare to actually have a career passion. 3. Passion is a side effect of mastery at something. 4. Working hard and improving your skills is more important than finding the perfect job.
Haden“Roughly speaking, work can be broken down into a job, a career, or a calling. A job pays the bills; a career is a path towards increasingly better work; a calling is work that is an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity. (Clearly most people want their work to be a calling.)
“According to research, what is the strongest predictor of a person seeing her work as a calling?
“The number of years spent on the job. The more experience you have the more likely you are to love your work.
“Why? The more experience you have the better your skills and the greater your satisfaction in having those skills. The more experience you have the more you can see how your work has benefited others. And you've had more time to develop strong professional and even personal relationships with some of your employees, vendors, and customers.”
For the rest of the podcast notes (which don't fit here), check out www.carriejonesbooks.blog
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ou will find a lot of popular content all about how to make money. There are a lot of random blog articles about HOW I MADE 8 TRILLION DOLLARS IN PASSIVE INCOME A MONTH or 22 AWESOME PASSIVE INCOME IDEAS.
Which is lovely. But a lot of us writers are thinking, “What are these even talking about?”
What Is Passive Income? Passive income is money that happens and builds from things that already exist. They can be from investments (like you rent a room in your house or an entire house or you open a savings account or CDs). It can also come from the investment of effort and time in something you build. This could be a YouTube channel or your eBook once it’s up and running. It could be affiliate marketing or selling prints of your art.
What is Active Income? Active income is money that someone pays you when you do something for them that’s a service. It can be your salary at the grocery store. It could be an hourly wage at a bookstore. It could be a commission. It could be a tip.
So what’s all this have to do with writing? According to a study by the Authors Guild, the average full-time writer’s median pay was $20,300 in 2017. That’s full-time. For most of us that’s not a big ton of money. There’s no real standardization of pay and that number doesn’t account for pay discrepencies for sex and race.
We go way more into this over on the blog with helpful hints.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
HANG OUT WITH US! HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER? JUST CLICK ON THIS LINK AND FIND OUT HOW WE CAN.
CARRIE’S TEACHABLE CLASS! I have a quick, pre-recorded Teachable class designed to make you a killer scene writer in just one day. It’s fun. It’s fast. And you get to become a better writer for just $25, which is an amazing deal.
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Carrie’s number one writing pet peeve is when authors write,
"I thought to myself." Seriously. You are always thinking to yourself, sweet writer, unless you’re telepathically communicating to a zombie hamster and then all bets are off.
But the thing is that I, Carrie, get why authors like myself do this. It’s because:
- We’re worried that the reader isn’t going to get what we’re saying.
- We’re padding our daily word count totals for NaNoWriMo, national novel writing month where you try to write a 50,000-word novel in November.
But here’s the thing. Your readers are smart or smart enough to know that when your characters are thinking, they are doing that to themselves and not anyone else.
Cut those words, sweeties. Trust the readers. Trust your writing.
If you say, “I think” or “I thought,” everyone knows it’s to yourself… unless, you know, telepathic zombie hamsters.
So how about you? What are your writing pet peeves?
In the podcast we also talk about the "me and my" issue and how you really don't want to say, "I am nauseous."
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Trust your readers. Don’t write down to them. Believe in your words.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE You don’t need to be insecure. Be proud of what you’re doing, who you are and what you’re putting down for the world to hear.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
Thanks so much for being one of the 252,000 downloads if you’ve given us a listen!
CHILL WITH US HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
JUST CLICK ON THIS LINK AND FIND OUT HOW WE CAN!
NEW BOOK ALERT! My little novella (It’s spare. It’s sad) is coming out October 1 and if you pre-order it now, you can get the Ebook for .99 before the price goes up to $2,99. It is a book of my heart and I am so worried about it, honestly.
There’s a bit more about it here.
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**This is a continuation of this week's blogs about adding tension and suspense in your writing. It's a bit short today. Sorry. Or maybe that's a good thing....
Here goes:
Is My Voice a Little Tense?**
Tension in writing can also come from your voice.
Not your speaking voice, but your writing voice, your style and your pacing.
Author Justine Larabeister has a series of posts on her blogs about how she alternates action-packed scenes/chapters with more introspective scenes.
Author William Reynolds calls it a roller coaster ride and says, “It works for pacing your writing as well as your scenes.”
I’ve talked about this before especially when I critique things. Sentence length and sound impact the reader’s experience of action and introspection.
While we’re having nice introspective wonderings about things to give the reader a break and/or a build-up we can have long, winding sentences wondering if anyone is actually reading this blog post at all and we can also natter on about it for a bit with no white space, and with long-long paragraphs.
But…
Action comes.
And as Reynolds points out:
“Sentences are short.
Paragraphs too.
Maybe there isn’t even time to –
Get the picture?”
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Short sentences. Short paragraphs. White space. Action verbs. That's what makes it tense, baby.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Don't be tense. Don't add tension to other people's lives. Know how your presence makes other people feel.
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER? JUST CLICK ON THIS LINK AND FIND OUT HOW WE CAN.
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The other night Shaun and I imbibed some alcohol and I declared that to not have a who-gives-a-swear-word attitude is to be compliant.
This made Shaun really happy.
I said it because I was talking about authors and politics and being afraid to say what you think because you are afraid of backlash. I’ve been listening to a lot of entrepreneurs and marketers who all preach putting your authentic self out there so that your group of supporters are supporting the real you, not some fake, shadow version that’s trying to appeal to everyone.
Shaun said “Google authors who struggled and said, ‘F-it, did a 360, and found success.”
This was hard to do, actually. There was no nice search results for that. But one thing it brought up was the infamous book called, “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*&k.”
In the article of the same name (Link is in the podcast notes), Mark Manson wrote,
“Chances are you know somebody in your life who, at one time or another, did not give a f- and went on to accomplish amazing feats. Perhaps there was a time in your life where you simply did not give a f- and excelled to some extraordinary heights. I know for myself, quitting my day job in finance after only six weeks and telling my boss that I was going to start selling dating advice online ranks pretty high up there in my own “didn’t give a f-” hall of fame. Same with deciding to sell most of my possessions and move to South America. F-s given? None. Just went and did it.”
Our notes are too long to fit here, but you can see them on Dogs are Smarter Than People or Carrie's website.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
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Ruth Bader Ginsberg died last week and our timelines lit up with people mourning her death and some people exulting in it.
Politics are often polarizing, but grief is often communal with people experiencing different amounts and aspects of it, but shared grief can be such a powerful thing.
Kindness matters. Even to the dead. Action and beliefs matter. Especially to the still living.
No matter what you think of her court decisions, which were meant to heal the ‘fractures in federal law,’ Ginsberg has some very good advice about marriage and words, which is why we’re talking about her now.
Back in 2016, Justice Ginsberg wrote about her mother-in-law’s life advice.
Ginsberg“’In every good marriage,’ she counseled, ‘it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.’ I have followed that advice assiduously, and not only at home through 56 years of a marital partnership nonpareil. I have employed it as well in every workplace, including the Supreme Court. When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.”
Ginsberg talked about how both her mother’s push for her to be independent and her professor’s focus on language influenced her, propelling her to rise in the ranks to become a Supreme Court justice.
Ginsberg“At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.”
Words influence thought influence action. Putting them in the right order? It makes all the difference.
She also spoke about the dynamics on the court where nine justices sit, saying,
Ginsberg excerpted in the NYT“Despite our strong disagreements on cardinal issues — think, for example, of controls on political campaign spending, affirmative action, access to abortion — we genuinely respect one another, even enjoy one another’s company.
“Collegiality is crucial to the success of our mission. We could not do the job the Constitution assigns to us if we didn’t — to use one of Justice Antonin Scalia’s favorite expressions — ‘get over it!’”
That might be the best marriage advice of all.
WRITING TIP FOR LIFE Your word choice and word order matter. Be selective.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Getting over it allows you to feel better and make your relationships stronger. Dwelling is never a good move. And selective hearing? Giving yourself time to react so that you don't act rashly? Always a wise choice.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
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About nine years ago, DEAR BULLY, the anthology of authors telling their stories of being bullied, or standing by, or being bullies was released. Carrie was the co-editor for this anthology.
And I am so proud of all the authors in there.
HEY YOU! AUTHORS! I AM PROUD OF YOU!
For a lot of them, it was a big act of bravery to tell their stories. For a lot of them, it was a big act of bravery just to survive.
I was thinking about that right now because our country (The U.S.) is having some major difficulties and bullying is the norm despite all the efforts and advocacy that happened back in 2009.
And there are truths in every single story of that anthology that resonate. Those truths are that pain is real, that actions and words can shatter us, that it's hard to remember how awesome you are when people are telling you that you aren't.
And there are differences in the experiences too. Some authors hurt more than others. Some used the experience to try to become stronger. For every one of us, the story is our own, and it is different. But one of the biggest, and greatest truths in those stories is that each and every one of us survived. We all lived to tell our stories. And if you are reading this right now or listening on the podcast that means that you have lived through too.
And here's the thing. You must keep on living and fighting and trying to remember that you are awesome even when people are hating on you.
People hating you doesn't change that you have worth.
People being violent towards you, doesn't mean you don't deserve respect, and tolerance and love.
People ignoring you on purpose, doesn't mean that you don't deserve to exist.
And the opposite is true. You don't get to hate, to decide other people's worth, to be violent and disrespectful either. We have to be the shiny light that we want in our lives.
Writing Tip of the Pod What's this have to do with writing? Well, it was an anthology of true stories from writers that Carrie co-created, but it's also about what makes the best stories.
Hint: It's not just having a beginning, a middle, and an end.
It's about having a point. It's about believing in something. It's about being honest and having something to say, something that might be hard to say but needs to be out there.
Dog Tip for Life Treat everyone the way you want to be treated. It's as simple as that.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
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This week we’re revisiting the idea of bad guys in our lives and in our writing because lots of us actually have bad people in our writing and our lives. These antagonists run the gamut from people who make us scream at their Facebook posts of Fakeness to actually physically hurting us and our community. Politics is full of making the other party the bad guy. People at work tend to make other employees or bosses the bad guys. We make bad guys everywhere.
Sometimes we make entire groups of people the bad guy like this week on Facebook a guy who manages an inn had a post that said,
I have a couple staying with us, celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. The woman came to tell me how she loves the Inn, but has been treated horribly by so many locals. Being told “go home” and have had obscenities shouted at her and her husband. I’ve seen posts in this group and others from people discouraging tourism. My question is.. .Do we want our town to be known as openly hostile towards visitors? Is this how the level of discourse is supposed to be?
And the responses were all over the locals. People saying locals were the bad guys. People accepting and expecting that those tourists’ side of the story was right and the locals were the bad guys. This might be true. It might not.
It’s like everyone just took one story, without verifying it, accepted it as truth and then jumped on the bad guy wagon.
THE QUESTION IS WHY? WHY DO WE DO THIS? I’m sure the original poster believes that woman and that woman may absolutely telling the truth or at least her version of it, but why do we all jump in and take it as reality when it’s hearsay and just that woman’s side of the story. I mean, she obviously doesn’t want to think, “Hey, all these people are swearing at me. Maybe I’m actually doing something wrong.” Instead, she cast herself as the victim and the others as being the bad guys. Which could be entirely accurate.
We don’t know.
And that’s just it. In real life, a lot of the time, we don’t know. Things aren’t always as simple as good and evil; absolute right and absolute wrong.
Although, sometimes it really is. There are certain things that are just evil.
One of the biggest questions a lot of new writers have is this:
DO I NEED A BAD GUY? Yes.
But your bad guy can be yourself or your main character.
Like in our random thoughts, Carrie is often showing that she is her own worst enemy. Watching tv gives her anxiety, but she almost always watches tv at night for a couple of hours.
HERE ARE THE STEPS:
- Figure out what your goal or your main character’s goal is.
- The bad person is whatever stands in the way of your character (or you) achieving your goal.
So, in life Carrie is her own antagonist because her goal is to not feel anxious at night, yet she still watches television for an hour or two. That’s an example of an inner-antagonist or bad guy.
Also in life, when Carrie doesn’t let Shaun watch American Pickers and makes him watch Pen15 or Teenage Bounty Hunters? She’s Shaun’s external bad guy, keeping him from his goal to chill with those picker guys.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Every story needs conflict. Sometimes that conflict and opposing force (what’s keeping your character from their goal) comes from the character themself.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
There are enough bad guys in the world. You don’t have to make them up.
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
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So, this woman, Aileen Weintraub on the Huffington Post, has an article that’s headline is, “I’m a Grown Woman and I Still Sleep with a Stuffed Animal.”
Aileen Weintraub“George is my deep, dark secret, and I’m sharing our story now in the time of COVID-19 because many of us are quietly struggling.”
And the article is sweet and lovely, and poor Aileen had COVID-19 and was terribly sick and was even more stressed because George, her stuffed dog has been with her for thirty years and she didn’t know if her stuffed animal would be able to go with her if she had to come to the hospital.
And she was ashamed because stuffed animals are allegedly “transitional objects.”
God bless this lady because if George, the stuffed animal in her bed, is her deep dark secret? What a nice life she’s had.
WHAT IS HYPERBOLE? Hyperbole is basically defined as an exaggeration that people use to emphasize an effect. It’s extravagant. It’s bullshit. It comes from the Greek word for “excess.”
I’m not sure if this ‘deep dark secret’ is hyperbole, but it sure feels like one.
And the problem with hyperbole? Is that it’s not truth. It’s inauthentic. It’s the tool of politicians and apparently op-ed writers and we’re all freaking too used to it. We don’t examine the extravagant claims of influencers, writers. Headlines and tweets and speeches and email subject lines are full of them.
All the notes for this podcast won't fit here, but if you'd like to see them head over to https://carriejonesbooks.blog/
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Write truth. Write things that resonate. Hyperbole is a great tool, but it shouldn’t be your go-to response.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Don’t hyperbolize the simple stuff.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
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Carrie has talked about this in her blog before, but we decided that it’s time to talk about it in the podcast thanks to an inspiring presentation writer Sami Main made for the Writing Barn last week.
It’s about one of the basic tenents of improv comedy and how you can use that for your writing and/or your life.
Do both! Overachieve. Anyway, it's amazing how Patricia Ryan Madson's Improv Maxims, apply to writing and life and love and all that sexy stuff.
Her first maxim in Improv Wisdom (New York: Belltower, 2005) is basically, "Say Yes." In improv, when two characters are doing a scene, both characters have to be positive, to say yes to each other's suggestions.
If one guy stands up there and says, "Let's go party." And then the other guy says, "No way." Well... the scene falls on its face and everyone goes home saying they hate improv and the improvers think they suck and everything is just BAD, BAD, BAD.
So, writing is like that too.
When our characters want to take us to new unexpected places in the plot, we just have to go with it. If we don't, our story stagnates.
We have to be willing to say "yes," to take risks with our characters and our plots and our language.
According to Madson, "Saying 'yes' is an act of courage and optimism; it allows you to share control. It is a way to make your partner happy. Yes expands your world."
I could go on about this forever. Like, how we get in ruts. Such as, my characters always have a love interest. And it's always a boy. How cool would it be if the love interest were a cat? Or a hamster? Or a fig tree?
Okay. I know. Banned book.
Or, how we get into habits with our writing just like we get into habits with our lives. How cool would it be to break a writing habit and make a better writing habit? To get out of the safety of routine, change our process and expand? To just say yes?
Writing Tip of the Pod Say yes to new ideas. Don't be in a writing rut or hold to your preconceived notions of what your story or writing life should beDog
DOG Tip for Life Try new things. Eat food off the floor. Go for it, humans!
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
COME WRITE WITH CARRIE! She is a writing coach, has a community/class, and edits for you. Find out more here.
WHERE TO FIND OUR PODCAST, DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE. The podcast link if you don’t see it above. Plus, it’s everywhere like Apple Music, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and more. Just google, “DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE” then like and subscribe.
Join the 251,000 people who have downloaded episodes and marveled at our raw weirdness. You can subscribe pretty much anywhere.
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So, over at the Good Men Project, they have a story called “Five Traits Men Want in a Partner That We Never Say Out Loud.”
As a woman, I (Carrie) find this pretty frustrating. Why do men not say these things aloud?
Paul Marsh of the Good Men Project writes:
Most of us are just terrified of vocalizing what we want and 1) being laughed at or ridiculed in some capacity, 2) not having our desires taken seriously, or 3) not getting whatever it is we’re seeking.
Marsh’s article which is anecdotal and not data-sourced is saying similar things as an earlier article in 2015 by Anthony D’Ambrosio that was in Elite Daily. D’Ambrosio had seven traits/characteristics to Marsh’s five.
Marsh writes:
The world is realizing that, while we’re deeply flawed, men also have a sensitive side, one chock-full of rich emotions that extend beyond those usually associated with us — like anger. Even companies like Old Spice are rolling out scented bodywashes with lavender and other naturally-derived ingredients that have long been associated with femininity.
HERE IS WHAT MARSH SAYS THAT MEN WANT: 1. Tenderness 2. Global listening skills 3. A kind talker 4. Respect which he defines as “being considerate about the desires, feelings, and traits of another person 5. Someone who ‘fights for you.’
D’Ambrosio’s article has reliability and being a best friend on the list as well as being self-aware and a communicator (kind talker and listener). He writes:
Remember: You don’t need a “life partner,” “soulmate,” or “the one” to make you a complete, happy, healthy person. You are enough, all on your own. But if you’re dating someone you love, and you’re wondering if they’re your ever after, look out for these seven traits.
And Also Remember: These articles are massive generalizations. Not all men want the same things. Not all men have a hard time articulating what they want. Difference and diversity are good things.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD What does this have to do with writing? Think about your characters and their entanglements. How do they react when other characters aren’t respectful, tender, good listeners or in their corner? Why does it matter to them? Why doesn’t it?
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Be kind. It’s what it’s all about really.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
For more about Carrie, check out www.carriejonesbooks.blog
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Award-winning news producer, blogger, podcaster, human, Chantal Watts is a bit of a force and she joins us on the podcast today and talks about her growing up, which reminds me so much of Jared Leto, and also how to be gritty and strong.
She's amazing and I hope you'll check it out.
Chantal's Links of Awesome. Chantal's Instagram
Full Frontal Nerdity!
WHERE TO FIND OUR PODCAST, DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE. The podcast link if you don’t see it above. Plus, it’s everywhere like Apple Music, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and more. Just google, “DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE” then like and subscribe.
Join the 251,000 people who have downloaded episodes and marveled at our raw weirdness. You can subscribe pretty much anywhere.
This week's episode about poop, dentists, surgery, flavored alcohol and Jung.
LAST WEEK’S EPISODE about slug bait, sages and archetypes.
Last week’s bonus podcast with Jessica Burkhart!
A link to our podcast about fatal errors, scenes, and ghost reaper sauce
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
COME WRITE WITH ME! I coach, have a class, and edit things. Find out more here.
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Over the past couple of months, we’ve been talking a lot about archetypes and how you can use them in writing and life, but we’ve failed to discuss where all this talk stems from.
It’s all from Carl Jung who is an old, dead, psychology pioneer who didn’t agree with another old dead guy, Sigmund Freud.
Jung was about the ‘collective unconsciousness.’ And he thought that in humanity’s collective unconsciousness there were basically twelve archetypes of character. It’s like if we are all part of a video game and the programmer only made twelve basic characters.
According to “Exploring Your Mind,”
Exploring Your MindTo define his 12 archetypes of personality, Jung studied the symbols and myths of many different cultures. These archetypes represent behavior patterns that make up different ways of being. They’re also cultural symbols and images that exist in the collective unconscious.
He defined the 12 Jungian archetypes as an innate tendency to generate images with intense emotional meaning that express the relational primacy of human life. They’re imprints that are buried in our unconscious. These terms define the particular traits that we all have.
So here’s the basic rundown of those twelve as related to poop found in the middle of the driveway because how else can you take a new spin on this? Every single psych major has blogged about archetypes. We’re going to do the first six in this podcast and the next six next week. Cool right? It’s like a cliffhanger.
Let’s start. Get ready for poop talk. THE SAGE It’s all about being smart and thinking. If someone poops, the sage is going to want to examine the poop, analyze the poop, and probably create a witty yet analytical tweet about the poop.
THE INNOCENT The innocent is optimistic that the poop randomly sitting in the middle of their driveway is meant for good. They will be happy that someone was capable of pooping out in the open like that. They will tweet about the goodness of pleasing others and possibly create a self-help book about poop or at least look for one which they will not download illegally but instead buy from a nice local independent bookstore. They might even put up a sign that says, “Feel free to come inside and use the bathroom next time, but no judgement.”
For the rest of the text that goes with this podcast, check out Carrie's website.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WHERE TO FIND OUR PODCAST, DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE. The podcast link if you don’t see it above. Plus, it’s everywhere like Apple Music, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and more. Just google, “DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE” then like and subscribe.
Join the 250,000 people who have downloaded episodes and marveled at our raw weirdness. You can subscribe pretty much anywhere.
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The Sage
It’s not the herb; it’s the archetype in writing and maybe in life, although they don’t seem all that common in the real world. Super common in the tarot and astrology and numerology emails Carrie gets.
So, what’s a sage? It’s a smarty pants. But it’s also a bit more.
According to the individualogist.com,
individualogist.com“Unlike other archetypes, the Sage archetype’s education doesn’t cease after graduation. They’re constantly applying themselves and enriching themselves throughout their entire lives.
“What drives the Sage archetype is their goal of knowing the truth behind everything. For that reason, majority of the conversations that they have revolve around their questions. This can be disadvantageous for them as they’ll take any form of misinformation as a form of deception. With that being said, they take lies very personally and feel emotionally affected when they discover that what they learned or believed in turns out to be wrong.”
According to a page on Masterclass, the sage is:
Masterclass“A wise figure with knowledge for those who inquire. The mother figure or mentor is often based on this archetype.”
They are smart, curious; they learn their whole life, use their intuition and are sort of addicted to information.
Weakness: These people think they know more than the rest of us and they often do and that makes them stubborn in their ideas and a little condescending sometimes.
Their challenges? According to the individualogist again,
“The Sage archetype needs to confront their fear and hatred for ignorance. It’s important for this archetype to realize that not everyone is able to learn at the pace and with the passion that they possess…. The Sage archetype needs to exercise humility and alter their perceptions of people in general.”
They are bit slow to act.
The Masterclass site gives examples as: “Athena (The Odyssey), Obi-Wan Kenobi (Star Wars), Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs), The Oracle (The Matrix).”
Do you have a Hannibal in your life?
WRITING TIP OF THE POD: Use the familiarity of archetypes or subvert them to draw your reader into your story.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE: Don’t be a condescending bastard.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
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n the past month, we’ve been talking a lot about archetypes and someone asked us what the difference is between an archetype and a stereotype.
So here you go, listeners!
FIRST UP, ARCHETYPES! According to masterclass.com when it comes to writing an archetype is,
Masterclass“An emotion, character type, or event that is notably recurrent across the human experience. In the arts, an archetype creates an immediate sense of familiarity, allowing an audience member to relate to an event or character without having to necessarily ponder why they relate. Thanks to our instincts and life experiences, we’re able to recognize archetypes without any need for explanation.”
SO, WHAT’S A STEREOTYPE? It can be positive. It can be negative. But it’s freaking simplistic.
And even positive stereotypes can be negative like if you say, “Women are good mothers,” it can be harmful because all women don’t want to be mothers and women aren’t unhappy if they aren’t mothers and some women’s biology doesn’t work for mothering and that doesn’t mean they are unhappy either. If you go one step further, it equates a woman’s value and role to that biological use. It also makes the assumption that all women are more nurturing and have those motherly positive attributes which means that men don’t.
AND WHAT’S A CLICHÉ? It’s something you see so many times in tv, stories, life, that it becomes ultra banal, ultra boring and ultra predictable.
The mad scientist.
The nerdy, but secretly sexy librarian.
The rich old cranky lady.
The egotistical warrior.
How do you stay away from clichés or stereotypes? You can parody them. You can deconstruct them. You can think about how to subvert them into something unexpected. Can the old rich lady actually be kind and not wear high heels and have a small dog? Can the egotistical warrior not be egotistical and self-effacing and neurotic? Can the nerdy librarian not be secretly sexy but actually overtly sexy in a glam way?
WRITING TYPE OF THE POD Think about your main character and the other major ones in your story. Are they normal? Typical? How can you tweak that and surprise the reader?
DOG TYPE FOR LIFE How are you a cliché? Are you fulfilling society’s expectations? How can you step out of your role and people’s expectations?
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
NEW SESSION OF WRITE! SUBMIT! SUPPORT! Write. Submit. Support. for Novelists with Carrie Jones ONLINE
These six-month courses offer structure and support not only to our writing lives but also to the roller coaster ride of submissions. We offer support whether you’re submitting to agents or, if agented, you’re weathering submissions to editors. We discuss passes that come in, submissions requests, the feedback we aren’t sure about, where we are feeling directed to go in our writing lives, and more.
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For all the great stuff about scenes, check out this link or go to carriejonesbooks.blog Writing Tip of the Pod Think about what kind of scene you're building in your story. Do you have too many character or theme scenes in a row?
Dog Tip for Life Think about your life. Do you have too many plot scenes going on? Is it all drama? Is there some theme in there too?
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
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or the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about writing archetypes for our characters and how they also apply to the real life humans we used to meet and interact with before Covid-19.
There are lists out there all over the place about this. Most have slight variations on the number of archetypes or the names of the archetypes.
Oh! If you haven’t heard in our past episodes, an archetype is according to MasterClass:
MasterClass PeopleAn archetype is an emotion, character type, or event that is notably recurrent across the human experience. In the arts, an archetype creates an immediate sense of familiarity, allowing an audience member to relate to an event or character without having to necessarily ponder why they relate. Thanks to our instincts and life experiences, we’re able to recognize archetypes without any need for explanation.
Last week we talked about the seducers, the week before we talked about the misfits and mavericks. This week, we’re going easy on you with the creator.
According to MasterClass, the creator is, “A motivated visionary who creates art or structures during the narrative.”
They make things! Like writers! They usually have willpower. They are sometimes self-involved. Or they suck at practical things.
To read the rest of the notes for this podcast head over to www.carriejonesbooks.com
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
DOG INSPIRATION Every weekday, our dogs have inspirational or motivating tweets on Carrie’s Twitter. Go check it out and be her Twitter friend.
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Ah, yes, the archetype. Last week we talked about the misfits and the mavericks because they are sexy as hell.
Again, Merriam-Webster says archetype are:
Good ole Merriam-Webster“The original pattern or model of which all things of the same type are representations or copies.”
Archetypes, according to Tami Nantz, help us understand what makes our characters tick. She says to ask:
Tami NantzWhat does he fear?
What motivates him?
What does he care about most?
And while I’m afraid to talk about this on the podcast with Shaun because his mind goes . . . places, this week we’re talking about the seductress.
Over on the Reedsy blog, the seductress is explained pretty well.
Reedsy blog“I’ll give you whatever you want,” is the refrain of the seductress — a character that comes in all shapes, sizes, and genders. They might offer power, sex, love, money, or influence but remember, these things always come with strings attached. If a seductress is involved, the moral of the tale is almost always, “Don’t believe anything that’s too good to be true.”
Strengths: Allure, charisma, lack of morals.
Weaknesses: The emptiness of their promises.
Desires: Control.
Examples: Mephistopheles in Faust, Delilah from Samson and Delilah, 90% of the female characters in The Odyssey.
Some more examples would be Mystique in X-Men and Meg in Hercules.
Valeria Black, writing for The Writing Cooperativehad a very definite take on the Seductress, which seems a wee bit reductive. She said,
The Seductress cares deeply about being in the spotlight. She loves attention and the way people fall head-over-heels for her.
But most of all, she loves being the most admired woman in the room.
Valeria Black
If you dig deep enough, she is a child and a dreamer at heart who craves constant stimulation in the quest for her one true love.
This hidden quest for lasting love is the main reason why it seems like she strings people along. But in reality it’s because she just gets bored quickly.
And this is so cool to think about if you have one of these characters or one of these people in your life. And I think we all know one of these seducer or seductresses, the person who is all about the sexual and physical validation, and doesn’t know what to do without it. Their self-worth comes from capturing as many admiring looks or hearts as possible. They are dependent on other people’s affection and attention. And that makes it hard sometimes for both them and their friends. Their dark side is like the femme fatale like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, right?
More notes on carriejonesbooks.blog
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
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The Misfits and the Mavericks A lot of writers use archetypes in their stories. Sometimes we don't even realize that we're doing it, actually.
There’s something really compelling about the heroes that don’t quite fit in especially the mavericks. The Huck Finns and Han Solos of the world and/or universe.
For whatever reason, the mavericks have turned away from civilization. Maybe it’s to find out what happened to their missing mom. Maybe it’s because their own elite family oppressed them and their quirks. Maybe it’s because they are doing a Thoreau and they wanted to see what it was like to be Spartan and nonconformist in a society that stresses conformity above all else.
Literary critic, Northrop Frye wrote about mavericks as heroes in novels in the U.S. and said,
Northrop Frye“Placed outside the structure of civilization and therefore represents the force of physical nature, amoral or ruthless, yet with a sense of power, and often leadership, that society has impoverished itself by rejecting.”
To conform or to not conform has often been the question. Apologies to Shakespeare. And it’s been a question both in American society and in its books, right?
How the main character fits into mainstream society is often the subject of some really good and compelling books like Gone With the Wind or To Kill a Mockingbird. They reject conforming. They strike out on their own.
The maverick is a character archtype. Here’s the definition of an archetype from studiobinder.com
studiobinder.com“An archetype is a consistent and typical version of a particular thing. It can be human, an object, or a particular set of behaviors, but the point is that it fits into a time-tested mold that embodies a pure form.”
Anyways, though that site is about scriptwriting, I think it has a lot of great information about writing characters.
It asks:
studiobinder.com again.“Why do character archetypes exist?
“Human beings tend to find their place within a group dynamic based around their strongest personality traits.
“You may have a group of friends with similar interests...
“But often one will be the “social butterfly” while another will be the "homebody."
“Your friends will begin to identify each other by these consistent traits.
“You’ve now defined yourself by a character archetype.”
The maverick archetype is obviously one of many, but what of their key motivations is the act of self-preservation. They break the rules to get their goals. Brave. Competent. Sometimes a bit snippy. Their temper is a bit fiery.
That pull between convention and autonomy has the possibility of making a story truly stick out as something extraordinarily special. Don’t be afraid to lean into it.
Are you a maverick? Do you write them? What's your archetype? We'll be looking at different ones the next few months. It's fun. Writing Tip of the Pod: Don’t make all your characters mavericks, but don’t avoid them either. Have you mixed up the archetypes in your story?
Dog Tip For Life: It’s okay to cultivate your own inner maverick.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
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RANDOM THINGS YOU LEARN ABOUT EACH OTHER DURING LOCKDOWN
So, in this house we’ve learned a few random things that we didn’t know before we had to isolate ourselves because of the Covid-19 pandemic and these things include some things that were mentioned on Buzzfeed and some that weren’t including:
Treasure Hunting For Gray Hair In Other People’s Hair Is Fun.
People Hook Up on the Scrabble app and Words With Friends.
Sometimes Your Relatives Don’t Close Cabinets.
How Much Noise Your Fellow Family Members Including Dogs Make.
Your Husband Is More Southern Than You Thought.
So, Buzzfeed had this article called, “17 Delicious Cookout Recipes That Will Impress Your Southern Friends and the first thing I thought was, “Do I have southern friends?” And then I remembered I have an entire Southern family and then I was ashamed. But the article was not all that Southern. Do writers think Northern people don’t have BBQ pulled pork, buttermilk fried chicken, BBQ baby back ribs, corn on the cob, fried fish, burgers, baked mac and cheese? And why would Southern people be more impressed by that than Northerners? Like where did this regionally specific food divide even come from? The only southern thing that was on there that Carrie (from the North) didn’t grow up with were collard greens. She even had peach ice tea. They had baked beans on there. Dudes, they are called Boston Baked Beans for a reason. They had potato salad on there.
And someone in the comments actually wrote: “This post should probably be changed to the perfect SOUTHERN cookout. Most of these things aren't gonna fly at a cookout in Maine!”
All you all, don’t talk about Maine if you’ve never been here. Similarly, give shout-outs to the origins and history of the foods that you’re blogging about because erasure isn’t a cool thing and that goes for socio-economic erasure and ethnic erasure. The foods of different cultures sustain us, build us, bind us, and also reflect our histories–the good and horrible parts. What does this have to do with writing? When you write about regions, think about it from more than your perspective. When you want to add some authenticity into your stories, think about the strange things you learn about your own house and family during lockdowns. Those details and nuance? That’s what makes a story authentic, not a bullshit blog post about how to impress your Southern friends at a cookout or a food post about Kimchi that never mentions it’s a Korean food. Writing Tip of the Pod Be smart. Be detailed. Be full of empathy, but don’t be so full of yourself that you forget the backs and lives and hearts of the people who came before you. That goes not just for writers, but for regular humans, too. Dog Tip for Life Dogs are all about origins and details. According to Sparty, our dog, “We dogs smell poop the way sommeliers smell wine.” It’s all about the nuance. Be about the nuance not the generalization. That’s true about writing and thinking. Smell the bouquet, appreciate the differences. SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
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Hey! Welcome to a bonus interview episode of Dogs are Smarter Than People, the usually quirky podcast that gives writing tips and life tips. I’m Carrie Jones and with me today is podcaster, actor and definitely a writer, the amazing Jose De La Roca.
Jose has a new book out, START PODCASTING: THE SECRETS OF A RADIO BROADCAST ENGINEER.
Jose has more than 17 years of radio broadcasting experience and now he shares with you all the secrets he knows about podcasting.
Jose say he is a dad first, talking monkey second, and a writer. He wrote a great book called How to be a Dad without a Dadand he’s worked for radio stations and streaming apps and I’m a little intimidated.
HisYouTube Channel has a lot of stuffies and he's in charge of Dad without a Dad Productions. He's super cool, super smart, and super fun.
Jose: Why are teddy bears never hungry? Because they are always stuffed.
We talk about imposter syndrome, being a doer, the state of the radio industry and using humor as a coping mechanism.
Jose: According to the IRS, I'm an actor, voice-over actor, sound engineer and a writer, but all I want to do is provide a better future for my son.
You should definitely check out the interview and Jose's links.
Jose on YouTube where he is hysterical.
Jose on Instagram where his pictures are stunning.
Jose on Twitter, which is where I met him. Score!
Link to Jose's interview.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
NEW BOOK OF AWESOME I have a new book out!!!!!! It’s an adult mystery set in the town where we live, which is Bar Harbor, Maine. You can order it here. And you totally should.
And if you click through to this link, you can read the first chapter!
And click here to learn about the book’s inspiration and what I learned about myself when I was writing it.
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What do you call a person who never farts in front of other people?
A private tooter.
What do you call it when someone eats refried beans and onions?
Tear gas.
Success is like a fart. It only bothers people when it’s not their own.
How do you say “fart” in German?
“Farfrompoopin.”
These jokes are from Fatherly https://www.fatherly.com/play/21-best-funniest-fart-jokes-kids/
Hey! Our episode notes are too big for this platform, so check out carriejonesbooks.blog
Writing Tip of the Pod Fart jokes last longer than most other things, just like farts.
Dog Tip For Life Right now, we need more fart jokes and less Zoom meetings. We need to engage with the people we’re isolated with and notice the nuance, the pauses, the gaps.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
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You know how sometimes you need a real-life friend of awesome who torments you so that you evolve? And sometimes you don't know how to say that friend's last name.
That's Sam for me.
Sam is a research technologist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor and she joins me to talk about evolving, being brave, and how hard it is to be my friend. Just kidding! Just kidding!
Sort of.
Sam does some pretty exciting research with Ron Korstange and the lab itself is doing tons of research and testing related to Covid-19.
For more about me and stuff, check out carriejonesbooks.blog
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Hey! Welcome to a bonus interview episode of Dogs are Smarter Than People, the usually quirky podcast that gives writing tips and life tips. I’m Carrie Jones and with me today is
Fiona Cameron Mackintosh is a poet from Toronto and manages Elderwood Coaching who doesn’t believe in tame language for wild things, which is possibly the best thing I’ve ever heard.
What do we talk about? You'll want to listen but here's a heads-up:
Poetry. Why do you think people are so scared of it?
What was the first poem that you remember that rocked your world?
Is it okay to misquote poetry?
How do you become a poet?
Fiona is absolutely amazing. You'll definitely want to listen.
Fiona's very cool website and coaching collective.
Direct Link to Fiona's Interview!
Another podcast with Fiona
Fiona on Facebook.
This week's regular episode - The Two Second Relationship Rule
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Okay. We’re married, but we weren’t always married, right? Like it didn’t happen when we were two and the first people we married were cough definitely not each other.
But we’re going to talk about dating anyway. And there is this concept that’s on Shallon Lester’s YouTube videos called the Two Question Rule. Lester is kind of a gossip columnist and sex advice person, but we’re going to be okay with that for this podcast.
This is not related to the five-second rule where you get to eat food if it’s only fallen on the floor for five seconds. I am so sorry Shaun.
Here’s the rule, simplified thanks to a Medium article by Emma Austin.
“When you’re getting to know a guy, especially if you’re flirting or seeing where things are going, pay attention to how many questions you’re asking him and how many questions he’s asking you in return. If you routinely ask more than two questions without him asking you any, take it as a sign that he’s not interested in you.”
There are exceptions:
-
He’s telling a story
-
You’re telling a story and not giving a pause for questions.
Here’s the thing. We all want to think that the other person is actually interested in us and so we ignore the signs that they aren’t. What are those signs?
-
They don’t ask any questions about you.
-
They only talk about themselves and are all preeny like a peacock
-
They don’t answer your calls or texts for days.
-
They tell you.
We are creatures of hope and sometimes we’re so desperate to feel loved that we end up with douchebags because we’ve blown off all the signs.
As Austin says, “And a lot of times, you just like someone and it makes you a little too hopeful. You really want them to like you back, so you look for all the little signs that they do — and ignore the bigger signs that they don’t. You project your feelings on them a bit and you find yourself making excuses for their behavior. Because at least the excuses feel better than the truth. You don’t want them to not be interested in you — you’d rather they were just too busy or going through something or having a weird day.”
Writing Tip of the Pod
When you’re having your characters interact and it’s a romance? Remember this rule. Don’t let your heroine do all the questioning? Don’t make her love interest a douchebag who only talks about themselves and never ask about her.
Dog Tip for Life
Try to remember that it isn’t always all about you. Don’t be the douchebag. Give love as well as accepting the treats.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
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When you think about people getting drunk in their underwear, you tend to think of Joe Exotic and the people on Tiger King, the hot-AF Netflix documentary, but the people who are masters at getting completely sloshed at home are the Finns.
Yes, the Finns.
They have a word for it and that word is kalsarikännit. That word means pantsdrunk
They even have emojis depicted half-dressed emoji people holding a beer or a wine glass that they send each other when they are solo drinking in their undies.
And that’s what is happening to America in the time of Covid-19. Believe me, this is such a thing that it’s a trending Instagram tag and even the Barefoot Contessa is getting involved.
Here’s the thing. People in northern, isolated, winter-dark, sun-absent climates know all about staying at home. They know about facing the darkness and drinking in their undies. Yes, undies. Not sweatpants. Undies. Part of being pantsdrunk is stripping down.
On Harper Collins’s website for Miska Rantanen’s book about the cultural phenomenon, it states:
According to an article by Claudia Alarcon in Forbes,
Claudia Alarcon"Pantsdrunk is one of the cornerstones of drinking culture in Finland,” says Partanen (an actual Finnish person she quotes). “The Finns are very reserved people, which is why there are jokes in Finland about how social distancing simply means that we keep doing what we've always been doing: avoiding physical contact and keeping at least a meter distance from others.”
When you are undergoing constant stress and anxiety, it increases your risk for both physical and mental health issues. You don’t want that. We don’t want that for you. So, it’s okay to find some joys even as the horrifying happens. Build a fort. Sing in the shower. Read books. Snuggle with puppies.
What’s this got to do with writing other than the fact that the tradition has been immortalized in a book? It’s about letting go, diving into your story and giving your anxiety a giant finger flip. It’s about tearing off your clothes and your devices and writing the raw, naked tipsy story without your internal critic or internal editor standing over your shoulder telling you to go get the seltzer water and put your clothes back on. That’s when you write cool stories.
This time we are in now, this pandemic, this physical isolation? It can divide us or it can make us closer. We can choose to despair in our systemic issues and lack and we should recognize it, but is just as important to notice the moments of humanity, of how people still find ways to create and communicate and love.
SHOUT OUT
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.“When it comes to happiness rankings, Finland always scores near the top. Many Finnish phenomena set the bar high: the best education system, gender equality, a flourishing welfare state, sisu or bull-headed pluck. Behind all of these accomplishments lies a Finnish ability to stay calm, healthy and content in a riptide of endless tasks and temptations. The ability comes from the practice of "kalsarikanni" translated as pantsdrunk.”
More info at Carrie's website.
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Today is the big day when we start posting podcast interviews with all sorts of cool, random people. A lot of them will be in the book world, but some are just in the world world.
Each interview talks a bit about being brave, being vulnerable, and the stuff we can't predict. And this first one? It also has a call out to Ric Flair.
What else? We talk about: * Book marketing * Theater for the Young * Indie publishing versus traditional publishing * Marketing your book * Social Anxiety * Teaching preschool * Writing brave things * And did I mention Ric Flair?
According to his website, author Jordan Scavone created his first picture book at about six years old. This first book, written and drawn (well, stenciled), was titled The Animals Look For Food. It was about, well, animals looking for food.
. After receiving his undergraduate degree in Children's Literature and Theater for the Young from Eastern Michigan University, Jordan began working on his first picture book. This past April Jordan received his M.A. in Children's Literature from EMU. He currently lives in Michigan with his wife Chelsea (June 2016!) and cat, Lizbeth.
Jordan's newest book, Night Warrior, just arrived! And he has a baby coming too! So, give him some love and check out the book on Amazon and his website.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Last week’s episode’s link.
WHERE TO FIND US The podcast link if you don’t see it above. Plus, it’s everywhere like Apple Music, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and more. Just google, “DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE” then like and subscribe.
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Now that we’re all home and living with our significant others because of CoVid-19 aka the coronavirus from Hell, it’s making some of go a little… Well, a little crazy. Why is this? Here we are housebound with the people we love with all our hearts and suddenly just listening to them breathe is making us want to throw knives when we really should just be so thankful that we’re not sick.
Are you feeling this way and freaking out about it?
Well, you are not alone. Not only is Covid messing with our anxieties, our livelihoods, our health and sending some of us into spirals of depression and grief, it’s also changing our routines and schedules and patterns and that can make us feel kind of vulnerable and off kilter.
This is where attachment styles come in. In her essay“Coping With an Insecure Attachment Style”on VeryWellMind on carriejonesbooks.blog, Marni Feuerman talks about how our attachment styles can be either secure or insecure and how they arise from our childhood.
She writes,
Feuerman“A secure style comes from consistency, reliability, and safety in one's childhood. As an adult, those with a secure attachment style can reflect back on their childhood and see both the good and the bad that occurred, but in the proper perspective. Overall, they generally feel that someone reliable was always available to them in their formative years. In adulthood, they enjoy close, intimate relationships and do not fear taking risks in love.”
Who are these magical, well-balanced people? They are the ones who are chill and not freaking out about how their significant other is loading the dishwasher, that’s who they are.
The rest of us have three insecure attachment patterns, she explains, and those are avoidant, ambivalent, and disorganized.
THE THREE INSECURE ATTACHMENT PATTERNS
Feuerman again“Avoidant: Avoidant people have a dismissive attitude. They shun intimacy and have many difficulties reaching for others in times of need.
Ambivalent: Those with an ambivalent pattern are often anxious and preoccupied. These people may be viewed as "clingy" or "needy," often requiring much validation and reassurance.
Disorganized: The disorganizedpattern is often the product of trauma or extreme inconsistency in one's childhood. Disorganized attachment is not a mixture of avoidant and ambivalent attachments—it is a far more serious state where a person has no real coping strategies and is unable to deal with the world.”
I am ambivalent AF. Gabby, our dog, is also ambivalent.
What do attachment styles have to do with writing? Well, when you’re writing about relationships in a dystopian novel or apocalypse, you want to account for those different types of personalities and levels of attachment.
We ran out of space on here, so for the rest of the notes check out carriejonesbooks.blog
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
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A lot of time I’ll be reading scenes in books and it will be two characters talking and I’ll only have a vaguely general idea about where they are. Maybe I won’t have an idea at all. We call this evil beast the talking heads syndrome.
Cue scary music here.
WHAT IS TALKING HEADS SYNDROME? No, it's not about the iconic 1980s group. Sorry!
It’s where there’s a lot of dialogue going on but there’s no actual anchor for the characters. It’s like they are floating in space blabbing at each other. There’s no physical world placement.
This happens a lot and it’s because some of us are writers who really hear our scenes rather than see our scenes or live in our scenes. It’s also because we sometimes forget to get those anchors in there.
How to Imagine Yourself in a Scene To do this exercise you have to step away from the keyboard for a second and stand up. We know! We know! Writers are all about sitting down and putting their butts in the chair and getting the work done, right? Well, give yourself five minutes and stand up in a quiet place preferably not in Starbucks or anything.
Now close your eyes and think about your scene where there are talking heads.
SMELL There you are with your characters. Maybe you can even imagine yourself as one of the characters. Possess them like they’re Zac Bagans and you’re filming Ghost Adventures. Inhale. What kind of smells are you smelling? Remember that.
SOUND You’re still there with the characters standing in the setting. What do you hear? Remember that.
TOUCH Your characters don’t stay completely still for the whole scene, do they? Have them move even if it’s to fidget. Let them touch things. What do those things feel like? Are they hot? Textured? Hands aren’t the only things that touch. Does their hair sweep over something? Does their foot kick against a table? Do their shoulders lean against the rough wood of the wall?
TASTE What does it feel like inside their mouth? Dry? Coppery? Do they need to brush their teeth? Please make them floss. Everyone should floss.
SIGHT This is the fallback for most writers and it can have some issues. We want to be able to visualize the setting and where things are happening, but we don’t need the buffer of the character seeing what’s happening.
There are a lot of stories where it says,
“Shaun looked over and saw the cat dangling from the curtain.”
Don’t pad the details with distancing words. Don’t tell us that Shaun’s looking. Just have us see.
Instead write,
“The cat dangled from the curtain.”
It’s so much more powerful.
MOVEMENT Have the characters move. Give them actions and objective correlatives to their emotional states.
What are the next steps to Banishing the talking heads? No, it's not casting David Byrne to an isolated bunker in Nebraska. It's also not putting him on SNL. It has nothing to do with him! I promise.
The next step is incorporating what you imagined for tasting, smelling, hearing, seeing, movement into the actual scene. You have to have your characters’ perceptions of the outside world and setting incorporated into that dialogue and action. Don’t be afraid to dig deeper.
The rest of the notes are at carriejonesbooks.blog
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So normally Carrie writes the podcast part of the podcast and this week she had no idea what to write. Should she write about Covid-19 and try to help people with things to do during their lock downs and times of social distancing? Should she totally ignore that and we go the other route with a happy, fun, dorky and totally non-informative episode? Should she cry?
It turns out that Carrie was thinking too much and giving herself writer’s block. Writer’s block is something Carrie never gets. So, she had to overcome it, right?
So here are some quick steps to overcoming writer’s block in the time of Covid-19. 1. Go for a walk if you can go for a walk without coming into contact with anyone else going for a walk. 2. Eliminate distractions. If there are other kids in the house or cats, lock them out of the room so you can focus. 3. Read a book. 4. Write something that isn’t what you’re pressured to write. 5. Set a timer and tell yourself that you only have 15 minutes to write so you better hurry up. 6. Disconnect your Wi-Fi. 7. Close your eyes and listen to a song that you’ve never listened to before. Then open your eyes and write. 8. Do a Graham Greene (old British author) and keep a dream journal. Every morning write what you’ve dreamt. This will come in handy some day and it counts as writing. 9. Visualize scenes in your story without writing. Just sit and try to daydream. Can you do it? 10. Allow yourself to make mistakes, jump around to scenes you can see. Writing does not have to be linear when you draft.
Back in 2016, Maria Konnikova wrote “How to Beat Writer’s Block” for the New Yorker, which touches on the research into writer’s block and it’s pretty interesting.
And way back in the 1950s, a man named Bergler wrote “Does Writer’s Block Exist?,” which was published in American Imago. Bergler said a writer “unconsciously tries to solve his inner problems via the sublimatory medium of writing.” A writer wasn’t lazy or bored. They hadn’t used up their muse and ideas. They just needed therapy. Later psychiatrists learned through studies that most writers blocked for three months or more were indeed unhappy. Was this correlative and how did the causation factors work?
I can’t find that, but what they did determine was that these unhappy writers seemed to be one of four blocked groups: 1. Anxious and Stressed Out Authors – Writing no longer gave joy because of emotional distress. They’re are the ‘nothing is good enough’ authors. 2. Irritate AF Authors - They were lashing out at others. These are the ‘I don’t want to be compared to others’ authors.’ 3. Whatever Authors – Apathy rules and they figure there is no point. These are the no daydreams, rules are mean and constricts my creativity’ authors. 4. I Am So Freaking Mad Authors – They aren’t sad. They’re really sick of it all and they are so angry and hostile. These are the ‘I am getting no attention’ authors.
I (Carrie) just was teaching an online class to some writers and admitted that I don’t daydream anymore, which is a big deal for me because I used to daydream all the time. A lack of daydreaming is a symptom of a writer who is blocked.
Other symptoms Of Writer's Block: 1. Less able to form images in their brains 2. Images they do form are more vague than in the past 3. Less ambition 4. Less joy 5. Less creativity
So work on creatively visualizing different things in your book and your life. Imagine what your character eats, what’s happening at the grocery story right now, the best kiss ever. Reawaken your creativity in ways that don’t involve judgement – yours or anyone else’s.
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If you’re going to write or communicate, it’s really cool to know what you’re writing or talking about.
What?
I know, right?
Here’s the thing. You think that you know everything until you realize that you don’t half as much as you thought you did.
We live in a time period where everyone is yelling, ‘fake facts,’ and ‘false news’ and ‘liar.’ We live in a time period that’s amazing because so many of us have things like indoor plumbing, internet access, prescriptions, food. But we also live in a time where people think they are omniscient.
None of us are omniscient. We all see things from our own perspectives built upon by our culture and our experience.
Yet, some people think that they know everything and lay down these edicts about what the right way to vote, to write, to think, to create, to live is.
But these same people don’t know the difference between unfazed and unphased. Don’t be one of those people. When you write, when you live, when you troll people on social media? Check your words and your facts. It makes your argument and your story and your opinion so much stronger when you can spell things correctly or when you have stats to back up your arguments.
And there is nothing bad about realizing that you’re wrong, about growing as a human in your thoughts. Evolving is a good thing. We promise.
Writing Tip of the Pod:
It’s okay to break the rules, but know the rules you’re breaking. Study your craft before you start telling people there is only one right way to do things.
Dog Tip for Life:
Know what you’re barking at, man. Don’t call a blowing bag a squirrel.
Free Write for Your Story
Write about a character who thinks that he/she/they know everything about something but they are terribly wrong. Incorporate that into your story if you can.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING NEWS! I have a new book out!!!!!! It's an adult mystery set in the town where we live, which is Bar Harbor, Maine. You can order it here. And you totally should. It's called the PLACES WE HIDE and it's scary and a first-person narrative and so much fun.
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Tips for Aspiring Writers? Everyone gives them. But these are the essentials that were inspired by a hot-wings induced stupor. Shaun doesn't believe you can get drunk off hot sauce, but I'm here to tell you that I (Carrie) can.
Seven Tips for Aspiring Writers 1. Write your ideas down anywhere and everywhere. Don’t think that you’ll remember the amazing ideas you got while in a half-drunken stupor from too many Buffalo wings. Have a notebook or notes file on your phone. Write that stuff down. 2. Ride hard for books. Not just your own books but other people’s too. 3. Wait. That’s not good enough. Ride hard for words. Fall in love with them. 4. Remember all stories have a beginning, a middle and an end where people (or hamsters or whatever) ride hard for something and there are obstacles blocking their way to get that something. 5. Remember all stories have characters who have external wants (a good hot wing) and internal desire (to be admired for devouring that damn hot wing without doing a Will Ferrell and crying). 6. Study people. Write people. Not card-board cut-outs. Don’t make your story an Instagram filter. Show people the quirks, the dirt, the torn hems on your skirt. 7. Write. You aspire to write? Do it, my friend. Don’t just aspire. Do.
Writing Tip of the Pod: If you want to write books, study people, study books, and experience as much as you can experience so you can use everything you do, see, and feel to communicate that to others.
Dog Tip for Life: ` Channel your inner Yoda. There is no try. Just do.
Or channel your inner Nike ad. Just do it.
Don’t aspire.
Work towards it. You’ve got it.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WHERE TO FIND US The podcast link if you don’t see it above. Plus, it’s everywhere like Apple Music, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and more. Just google, “DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE” then like and subscribe.
Big News! I just published a super cool adult novel. Gasp! I know! Adult! That’s so …. grown-up? It's called THE PLACES WE HIDE and it's super fun. It's got death, strong women, strong men, falling in love, firefighters, cops and a Maine blizzard.
You can order it here. Please, please, order it.
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This week, we've stepped away from our normal format because we're on a massive road trip from Maine to Georgia to Florida and back again.
So much time in the car is making our brains a bit - a bit - a bit - broken?
Have a listen. There's a special guest. She's eleven. She's got opinions just like her dad.
Apologies for the car noises. That's because we're in the car. Come join us.
Big News! I just published a super cool adult novel. Gasp! I know! Adult! That’s so …. grown-up?
Rosie Jones, small town reporter and single mom, is looking forward to her first quiet Maine winter with her young daughter, Lily. After a disastrous first marriage, she’s made a whole new life and new identities for her and her little girl. Rosie is more than ready for a winter of cookies, sledding, stories about planning board meetings, and trying not to fall in like with the local police sergeant, Seamus Kelley.
But after her car is tampered with and crashes into Sgt. Kelley’s cruiser during a blizzard, her quiet new world spirals out of control and back into the danger she thought she’d left behind. One of her new friends is murdered. She herself has been poisoned and she finds a list of anagrams on her dead friend’s floor.
As the killer strikes again, it’s obvious that the women of Bar Harbor aren’t safe. Despite the blizzard and her struggle to keep her new identity a secret, Rosie sets out to make sure no more women die. With the help of the handsome but injured Sgt. Kelley and the town’s firefighters, it’s up to Rosie to stop the murderer before he strikes again.
You can order it here.
Buy limited-edition prints and learn more about my art here on my site.
And... my new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
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There was a post on Medium on PS I LOVE YOU called, “The Silent Relationship Killer You Never See Coming” about how the silent relationship killer is basically routine and sameness.
The author, Barry Davret, compared relationships to a song that you love so intensely you listen to over and over again obsessively, but then suddenly, you are done with that song.
Couples, he says, set weekly and daily routines after that initial burst of frantic attraction and then? They get bored of having intercourse every Saturday, date night every Friday, laundry every Monday.
If they’re polite, they’ll still ask each other how their days went, but they won’t actually care about the answer because the answer is always the same.
He writes
“Look back on the last six months. Does it feel like it was one day lived 180 times?”
How do you defeat being bored in your relationship? He suggests two tips to not be bored * Occasionally be spontaneous * Pursue separate passions
This has never happened to us. As you can tell from our random thoughts, we’re weird. We’re so weird especially when we’re alone. I will fall down laughing because of the things Shaun says.
We think that Barry has it right, but he also has it wrong.
Yes, people get dulled by routines and because of the comfort in routines, and that might be partially be because they've stopped doing things on their own. But it's also more about empathy and building walls around yourself so you don't get hurt. The person you're in a relationship with sees you warts and all? And that, my friends, can be a bit scary.
To have a relationship that lasts and evolves you have to do the following things: * You have to find humor in yourself and each other even during the bad times. * You have to blow off the assumption that you know absolutely everything about your significant other as if they are a blank piece of paper rather than a living, breathing, changing organism. There is still mystery in them even if you aren’t seeing it. * You have to be willing to be vulnerable so that your partner can see that mystery inside of you. There is nothing dull in courage and it takes courage to be vulnerable.
How does this relate to writing? Hold on! We’re getting there.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Our novels and characters also need to have tiny doses of the unexpected to keep people from being bored. We want to have each character have differences and not be the same. That sameness, that lack of diversity? It makes Johnny a dull boy. Insert quirks into your characters.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Even when you’re on the same walk that your person always takes you on, there’s going to be a nuance in the smells you sniff up on the side of the road. Rejoice in that nuance. Seek it out. Live in the moment. It’s a good way not to be bored.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Big News! I just published a super cool adult novel. Gasp! I know! Adult! That’s so …. grown-up?
You can order it here. Please, please, preorder it.
So, um, please go buy it. I am being brave, but that means that despite all my reasons for doing this, I’m still terrified that nobody will buy it and I really, really love this book. A lot.
carriejonesbooks.blog
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This week, I’ve been editing two male authors’ stories and there is a lot of internal monologue embedded within the paragraphs of dialogue and exposition. At the same time that I’ve been doing this a man’s reaction to some people not having an inner dialogue has gone viral.
It began with a tweet as so many things do.
Kyleplantemoji wrote:
*Fun fact: some people have an internal narrative and some don’t.
As in, some people’s thoughts are like sentences they “hear,” and some people just have abstract nonverbal thoughts, and have to consciously verbalize them.
And most people aren’t aware of the other type of person.*
Later, on his blog, Ryan who is also Kyleplantemoji wrote:
My day was completely ruined yesterday when I stumbled upon a fun fact that absolutely obliterated my mind. I saw this tweet yesterday that said that not everyone has an internal monologue in their head.
This became a very big deal. Some people, it seems, don’t hear thoughts in word or sentence form in their heads. Ever.
Some people, it seems, have a constant inner monologue that never stops. Ever.
And people are stunned, flummoxed, and sometimes horrified that not everyone processes information or thinks the way that they do.
Writing Tip of the Pod
When writing, try to think of how your characters aren’t like you. How are their speech patterns, values, and thoughts different from yours. Do they all sound alike? They shouldn’t.
Dog Tip for Life
When living, don’t expect all people to be the same and instead of superimposing your thoughts and values and experiences, realize that they have their own experiences. It’s like in the dog world, a Rottweiler has a different life and interactions than a poodle wearing a tutu. They are both dogs and have similarities, but they aren’t the same. Even two poodles aren’t the same. We’re all unique and amazing. That should be respected not diminished as we all try to raise each other up.
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
BALLSY SPONSORED THIS EPISODE!
We’re super psyched because this episode is sponsored by Ballsy.
Best sponsorship ever.
And why is that?
Because Ballsy is for fun couples like us who are not into lame gifts for Valentine’s Day and they have a cool gift set just for Valentine’s Day and people like us.
You want this, don’t you?
There’s an I’m Nuts About You gift set and the You’re Incrediballs heart box set.
They are running a promo right now for LOVE DAY and all days, really. The retail price is $less than $50, and the coupon code is for 20% off.
Here is your code for you, our cool listener: DOGS20
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We have a bonus podcast this week and it has swears in it and some adult content, so we're going to give it an explicit rating even though it's not super explicit. We're just chill like that.
The bonus podcast features:
- Shaun lying
- Banff Film Festival!
- Carrie talking about third grader writers. Note: They have their characters rip their own hearts out in stories.
- The fact that the word 'fart' is a terribly ugly word and Carrie never quote-unquote 'rips one.'
- Bud-Lite
We're super psyched because this episode is sponsored by Ballsy.
Best sponsorship ever.
And why is that?
Because Ballsy is for fun couples like us who are not into lame gifts for Valentine’s Day and they have a cool gift set just for Valentine’s Day and people like us.
You want this, don’t you?
There's an I'm Nuts About You gift set and the You're Incrediballs heart box set.
They are running a promo right now for LOVE DAY and all days, really. The retail price is $less than $50, and the coupon code is for 20% off.
Here is your code for you, our cool listener: DOGS20
It has the word DOG in the code. That’s so cool. Just like you’ll be cool if you give this to your special man for Valentine’s. So go check Ballsy out at ballwash.com
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We like to think that our lives have a point and that they matter. I think they do, but we’re not here to get all esoteric on you. We’re here to help you be better writers and humans and one of the biggest things we need to tell you is this.
You need to ban the ‘whatever.’ If you want your life to have a point then you need to give it a point.
If you want your story to have a point? Same thing.
Your life and your story should never be about ‘whatever.’
In life, you fix things when they break. You create goals. You move forward to solve things. In your story? Well it needs to happen that way too. We have to lean into the guiding force that creates every moment and scene in our stories.
We focus so much on our feelings and our emotions, but here’s the thing – emotions change, feelings are flighty. What matters is our point or our purpose and that matters both overall and in the moment.
Remembering your point or purpose works really well when you’re arguing with your partner because they failed to hear you when you said, “Can you put the onions in the pot, right now?” Instead of being super cranky and resentful that they didn’t put the onions in the pot for two minutes, you can think, “Wait. What is my purpose of being with this person?”
Chances are your purpose isn’t about getting onions quickly into a pot or having someone to boss around. Usually your purpose about being someone is something like, “To build a happy, safe, collaborative life together.”
So, how do you find your life’s purpose? That’s a bit question that Carrie’s always struggling with.
A good first step is to ask yourself these five questions: 1. What happens because I am here? 2. What wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t here? 3. What am I good at and think is pretty easy? 4. What do I love doing when I do it? 5. What do I actually look forward to?
Ask yourself these questions over and over again and if you’re blocked on them, if you think you don’t make a difference in anyone’s life? Ask again. Keep asking. Wonder for a second if it’s easier to believe that you don’t matter than accept that you do.
Because you do.
You have a point.
Writing Tip of the Pod Just like our lives, our characters in stories need to have a point and a purpose and so do our stories. Ask yourself what each characters’ points are. Ask yourself what the story’s point is? Is it a treatise about government corrupt? A call to love?
Dog Tip for Life Dog’s don’t ask what they should be doing. They ask, what their purpose is? A protector dog protects. A hunter hunts. A lap dog laps. A lab eats. Their purpose propels their choices and gives them a point to existence.
So, think about it. What is your purpose right now in this second?
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WHERE TO FIND US The podcast link if you don’t see it above. Plus, it’s everywhere like Apple Music, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and more. Just google, “DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE” then like and subscribe.
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This week Carrie was in Georgia hanging out with her daughter who had just had an operation. Her daughter is fine! Anyways, on the way to the airport at 4 a.m., the taxi driver told her story after story, mostly about the drunk people from Fort Benning who had ridden in his cab.
He was an amazing story teller and I realized that sometimes writing is just like telling a big anecdote. And you don’t want to be boring. We all know the people who have super boring anecdotes that just go on and on, right? You don’t want to be that person!
The Three Quick and Simple Steps For Telling a Good Anecdote or writing a Good Story Hook them in This is the attention grabber.
Tell an actual story Tell a real story, not just a bunch of random details. Let it have a beginning, a middle and an end.
Give a Moment to Let the Message Sink In Your story has a point, right? Let us understand what that point is. Don’t rush the ending. Show how your anecdote or your novel or your story reflects a bigger piece of life. Let it resonate.
Writing Tip of the Pod Give your story a point.
Dog Tip for Life Do whatever you can to get their attention. Hook them in.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WHERE TO FIND US The podcast link if you don’t see it above. Plus, it’s everywhere like Apple Music, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and more. Just google, “DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE” then like and subscribe.
Big News! I’m about to publish a super cool adult novel. Gasp! I know! Adult! That’s so …. grown-up? It's a mystery. It has romance, Maine, death, and high stakes.
You can preorder it here. Please, please, preorder it.
So, um, please go buy it. I am being brave, but that means that despite all my reasons for doing this, I’m still terrified that nobody will buy it and I really, really love this book. A lot.
LEARN WITH ME AT THE WRITING BARN!
The Write. Submit. Support. format is designed to embrace all aspects of the literary life. This six-month course will offer structure and support not only to our writing lives but also to the roller coaster ride of submissions: whether that be submitting to agents or, if agented, weathering the submissions to editors. We will discuss passes that come in, submissions requests, feedback we aren’t sure about, where we are feeling directed to go in our writing lives, and more. Learn more here!
“Carrie just happens to be one of those rare cases of extreme talent and excellent coaching.”
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This week’s podcast is about something really important. It’s about remembering to have fun. For a lot of us, life has a ton of stressors and responsibilities. We have to make enough money to survive. We have to take care of our family and ourselves. We have to deal with a world and not succumb to constant catastrophic thinking about the state of the world.
It’s easy to forget to have fun. Or to feel guilty about having fun.
Or to feel guilty about having hobbies.
And here’s the thing. It’s great to be a professional writer and make money at something you love to do, but you don’t have to make money at it. A lack of financial rewards for your efforts doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It just means you aren’t getting money.
And money, my friends, is not everything.
What is everything? Having fun. Growing. Enjoying your damn self in this short amount of time you have on this world, making yourself wiser and stronger and embracing your moments of joy. Everyone who sings in the shower isn’t expected to make money at singing in the shower. That should go for those of us who write too.
Here’s the truth: You can write solely for the joy of writing. Don’t let other people’s opinions or standards give you or your writing validation. Don’t let the pressure for external measures of success (publication, an agent, an award, 100,000 social media followers) ruin your joy in creating stories.
Here are Five Quick Steps to Reclaiming That Joy 1. Rest when you need to. Take care of your body. Eat food. Drink water. The simple things that all us living organisms should be doing. 2. Don’t have buttheads for friends. Be with people who make you happy and support you and inspire you. Ditch the others. 3. Go outside. Seriously. Go out of the building. Feel the air. You are part of this earth. Remember this and take care of it, too. Study a flower, a rock, a tree. It’ll make you a better writer, too. Notice the whole. 4. Be grateful for the good stuff that happens. What do you have? You’re reading this, or listening. That means you have enough that allows you to do that. Pretty cool, right? 5. Open your mind and your heart. Try not to be so super judgmental. Be generous and chill when you can.
Writing Tip of the Pod
If writing isn’t your profession and isn’t feeding you and your family. It’s okay to stop if it’s not giving you joy. Wait until it gives you joy and go back to it. Also, remember that y-o-u-r (your) means belonging to you and y-o-u-r-apostrophe-e(you’re) means you are.
Dog Tip for Life
It’s good to have a pack of humans to clean up after you. That way you can enjoy life and be messy when you slobber on the windows barking enthusiastically at the Fed Ex guy. Try to find a good pack of humans to be your clean-up crew.
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This podcast was sponsored by BookNotes and this link sets you up for a free seven-day trail.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
NEW BOOK COMING OUT!
The Places We Hide arrives Feb 1. Preorder now! Romantic. Thriller. Mystery. Maine. Sounds good, right?
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Dealing With Distractions
How do you write (or live) when you’re surrounded by distractions? Recently, a great teacher was talking to me about me being his writing coach, but he was hesitant to start right now because of his new class load.
I’m a seize the moment kind of human because I always expect to die tomorrow. That ticking-clock point of view keeps me moving and going despite distractions, but I know not everyone is that way.
When I was a newspaper editor and Em was little, I was always dealing with distractions and I would write anywhere – at a planning board meeting, at a swim meet, at the Y on the bike, waiting in the car to pick Em up after school, in bed, standing at the counter, anywhere and everywhere. Noise was everywhere. Ten-year-olds would be having sleep-overs. Dinner would need to be made. Dogs would be barking.
And I would write.
I knew that if I wanted to write, then I had to write. And to do that? I had to force my brain to filter though the distractions and be in the flow.
So how do you do that?
According to an article on the Entrepeneur by Deep Patel, which we’ve linked to in the notes for this podcast, there are several decent methods for dealing with distractions.
Make It Chill
He says to, “Begin building habits that help you eliminate distractions and stay focused. Start by creating an environment in which you’re less tempted to get preoccupied with something other than what you’re working on.”
That means make things quiet. Close your door. Turn off the cell.
Make Pretend Deadlines
Deadlines make us focus. Make small time limits for you to get your work done instead of giving yourself all day to get your priorities done. I (Carrie) do this all the time, actually and even stress about my completely self-imposed deadlines. That anxiety sucks, but that focus? It makes me get a lot of things done.
Get into The Pondoro Method
What is this? It sounds sort of x-rated, right? It’s not.
Patel explains it as a method “in which you set a timer and are completely focused on a task for a period of time, such as 45 minutes straight. Then allow yourself a 15-minute break.”
It’s actually another thing Carrie does all the time, only she’s a 50-10 split. She also makes herself stand for that 10 minutes because she’s afraid of Dead Butt Syndrome, which we talked about in an earlier podcast. You should look it up. It’s wild in a dead-butt kind of way.
There you go. Three hot tips to help keep yourself from being distracted in 2020.
Writing Tip of the Pod
Don’t let distractions become your attention.
Dog Tip for Life
Pant throughout the podcast, look cute, and rest your muzzle on someone’s knee.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Please like, subscribe, and help us be goofs. We're everywhere like Apple Music, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and more. Just google, “DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE” then like and subscribe.
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This week on the podcast we talk about:Mr. Taco, Attacking Seagulls, Doing the Raccoons, and Goals. Also, Shaun sings.
So it’s the New Year and as we all know it’s all about goals and looking back and creating our lives in a new way.
People are spending money on exercise equipment and diet food and all that, but you know what? The you that you are? It’s totally fine.
Writers especially feel pushed towards outside affirmations and validations.
We think, “If I traditionally publish a book, I’ve made it. I’m a writer.” Or we might think, “If my self-published book sells 100 copies, I’ve made it.” Or even, “If I get 10,000 Twitter followers, then I’ve made it.”
Here’s the thing though. You are a person in a moment.
Every moment that you write? You are a writer.
You don’t have to aim for any goals other than the goal of self realization.
You are a writer by writing, not because you hit a list or make an editor you’ve never met buy your story or a critic that you’ll never know give you five stars.
Writing is communication and exploration. It is craft and art. It’s all these things bundled together and just like you – the writer – the human – it is shiny and real and just fine the way it is.
You are a writer by writing. You are a human because you do human things.
This year maybe we can give others and especially ourselves the empathy to not judge each other by our end goals, but by our journey and actions that we perform every day or every week, by how we create our stories and our families and our communities.
It’s okay to just write. It’s okay to just be. Let the goals that you create be about process as much as they are about achievement.
And have a happy new year as you, not a new you, but the you that you are, right now, in this moment, a beautiful, shiny soul.
Writing Tip of the Pod Three obstacles are important in your story especially if it's a picture book about a seagull trying to nab a French fry.
Dog Tip For Life Life is about community. Make your community good.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING NEWS
The Write. Submit. Support. format is designed to embrace all aspects of the literary life. This six-month course will offer structure and support not only to our writing lives but also to the roller coaster ride of submissions: whether that be submitting to agents or, if agented, weathering the submissions to editors. We will discuss passes that come in, submissions requests, feedback we aren’t sure about, where we are feeling directed to go in our writing lives, and more. Learn more here!
“Carrie’s feedback is specific, insightful and extremely helpful. She is truly invested in helping each of us move forward to make our manuscripts the best they can be.”
“Carrie just happens to be one of those rare cases of extreme talent and excellent coaching.”
IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, ORDER NOW! My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
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Subordinate clauses are baby clauses that can’t stand all by themselves as complete thoughts and they demand a certain kind of punctuation – or lack of punctuation. Here are examples:
If I can find Santa, then we can go party.
We can go party if Santa ever freaking shows up.
So, in both of those sentences there is a clause can’t stand alone as a complete thought:
If I can find Santa
If Santa ever freaking shows up.
A subordinate clause or supporting clause is basically a clause that’s supporting the show-stopping regular clause, right? These clauses do not get a comma before them if they are at the end of the sentence.
HOW TO DEAL There are words that always lead off these clauses. What I do is go back and do a find/replace in my work (or client’s work) when I’m copyediting.
Helpful hint for writers: If you include the comma in the find/replace search, it makes it so much easier.
Those words are… These conjunctions: After, although, as, because, before, even if, even though, if, in order that, once, provided that, rather than, since, so that, than, that, though, unless, until, when, whenever, where, whereas, whether, while, why, for, therefore, hence, consequently, and due to.
And these relative pronouns that make the world of the clause even trickier. They are part of relative clauses but then these overachievers? Well, they are part of a subculture called restrictive or nonrestrictive clauses.
These are the relative pronouns that, which, who, whom, whichever, whoever, whomever, and whose.
Are you Restrictive or Nonrestrictive Mr. Clause? These pronouns start either restrictive clauses or nonrestrictive clauses. Restrictive clauses also like to be called essential clauses because they are alpha like that, but also because they are – you guessed it – essential to the sentence meaning and shouldn’t be separated by a comma
Do you enjoy watching Santa Claus employ lots of elves that wear sexy sweaters?
No comma before that because the sentence needs to know the qualifier for its meaning.
But in a nonrestrictive clause? Well, you don’t have that happen. Here’s an example:
Watching Santa, who employs a lot of elves wearing sexy sweaters, is pretty freaking awesome.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Subordinate the proper things.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE It’s not about domination. It’s about understanding restrictions.
And there you go. Grammar Moment with Dogs are Smarter Than People. Happy Holidays!
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
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The Magic of The Eyebrow and Telling Details
What is this thing? This telling detail?
It’s a phrase or an image or a word that illustrates something about a character. It’s pretty exact. It’s a magical moment of showing rather than telling.
It’s usually pretty short.
And it’s the opposite of a telling description.
Here’s a bad description:
He was nervous and scared and sad all at once.
Here’s a telling-detail description:
He soothed himself, rubbing the tips of his own ears over and over.
Telling details make the characters and settings feel real. If we say, “Shaun lifted his eyebrows?” Well, that’s a cliché, but also it’s not quite enough to be a telling detail no matter how much people communicate with their eyebrows.
Here’s a bad description:
They walked into an almost empty bar.
We don’t really see the bar, do we?
Here’s something a bit better:
The bar smelled of beer and lilac bushes somehow. The Sonos speaker tottering on the edge of the reclaimed wood bar blared “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story. A man leaning between ferns used a pencil to smash a hole into the bottom of a Bud Lite can and chugged it all down. He crushed the empty can between his hands and belched out the alphabet to cheers.
“Wow. This place is weird,” I said and grabbed the door handle, ready to bolt.
Writing Tip of the Pod When you’re revising think, “Can I make this shorter? Tighter? Quirkier? More authentic?”
Dog Tip for Life Notice the eyebrows. The difference. The details. And use them in your stories.
This week's podcast Last week's podcast SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING NEWS LEARN WITH ME AT THE WRITING BARN! The Write. Submit. Support. format is designed to embrace all aspects of the literary life. This six-month course will offer structure and support not only to our writing lives but also to the roller coaster ride of submissions: whether that be submitting to agents or, if agented, weathering the submissions to editors. We will discuss passes that come in, submissions requests, feedback we aren’t sure about, where we are feeling directed to go in our writing lives, and more. Learn more here!
“Carrie’s feedback is specific, insightful and extremely helpful. She is truly invested in helping each of us move forward to make our manuscripts the best they can be.”
“Carrie just happens to be one of those rare cases of extreme talent and excellent coaching.”
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At its most basic a story’s components are these – a beginning, a middle, an end.
The beginning is the situation or set up.
The middle are the complications.
The end is the resolution.
Our lives are like this too. We begin in certain circumstances. We live and encounter complications and then we end.
But even within that simplified construction there are divisions. There are vertical stories and linear stories, which is a fancier way of saying stories that are character driven or plot driven.
Linear – plot driven Vertical – character driven. But the key word is up there twice and that’s – driven. We drive the stories we write and we also have to drive the stories that we live, controlling our own destiny so that we can handle the murky middles and complications and so that by the time we get to the resolution, we can feel satisfied by who we are and what we’ve done.
We tend to think of stories as either or. They are plot driven or they are character driven, but the truth is that most stories are intertwined.
And then there’s drama and melodrama. I think people can be roughly categorized as these types, too, but we can oscillate between the two.
A drama is usually more realistic. People will ponder things. The set might be a bit depressing or quirky or dull because – well, because real life involves these things, too.
A melodrama usually involves a chase sequence. The scenery rushes by quickly. There are things – all the things – happening.
What kind of story you’re writing is an important first step to think about even if you’re a writer who doesn’t outline ahead of time. What kind of life you’re living? That’s an even more important thing to think about honestly.
So what are you? Are you drama? Or are you melodrama? Are you linear or vertical? Do you oscillate between them all?
Writing Tip of the Pod: Think about stuff.
Dog Tip for Life: Be the drama or melodrama or middle-drama that you want to be? Also, it’s okay to be a drug cocktail.
The New York Post article we reference in the podcast is by Lindsay Putnam.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITTING NEWS
The Write. Submit. Support. format is designed to embrace all aspects of the literary life. This six-month course will offer structure and support not only to our writing lives but also to the roller coaster ride of submissions: whether that be submitting to agents or, if agented, weathering the submissions to editors. We will discuss passes that come in, submissions requests, feedback we aren’t sure about, where we are feeling directed to go in our writing lives, and more. Learn more here!
“Carrie’s feedback is specific, insightful and extremely helpful. She is truly invested in helping each of us move forward to make our manuscripts the best they can be.”
“Carrie just happens to be one of those rare cases of extreme talent and excellent coaching.”
IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, ORDER NOW! My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
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Stories are about people having emotions. Writers who write from their heads (outlining like crazy, etc,) are often missing out on the emotion because they are analyzing how to show emotion.
But it’s desire and yearning that makes stories stand out and makes writers into artists and truth tellers.
Robert Olen Butler says that yearning creates a dynamic of desire and that dynamic of desire creates plot and story. The need, the yearning, the want, is something that needs to bleed out into the page and it does. It does.
Good stories have two epiphanies in them that use this yearning. The first epiphany shows up early in the story where all the details culminate to show the reader what it is that the main character wants. The reader gets it, responds, relates, understands and yearns for it too – yearns for it enough to turn the page and keep reading.
The second epiphany is basically the climax or the story’s crisis. The main character is fully committed to her desire and she is at that make-or-break point and we’re there with her.
The difference between regular books and books that rock your soul is that they are about wants, not about yearnings. Yearnings are bigger than wants. They are the desire of the inside. The foe blocks that desire, that attempt to fulfill yearnings. The character responds. And that is plot.
Writers Tip of the Pod Make your characters yearn.
Dog Tip For Life Go after what you yearn for.
Random Thoughts In our random thoughts this week you get to hear:
- Shaun fail to see his beer advent calendar
- The Queen of Kittens talk about BTX
- Florida Men and the things you do
- Christmas Tree success.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING NEWS LEARN WITH ME AT THE WRITING BARN! The Write. Submit. Support. format is designed to embrace all aspects of the literary life. This six-month course will offer structure and support not only to our writing lives but also to the roller coaster ride of submissions: whether that be submitting to agents or, if agented, weathering the submissions to editors. We will discuss passes that come in, submissions requests, feedback we aren’t sure about, where we are feeling directed to go in our writing lives, and more. Learn more here!
“Carrie’s feedback is specific, insightful and extremely helpful. She is truly invested in helping each of us move forward to make our manuscripts the best they can be.”
“Carrie just happens to be one of those rare cases of extreme talent and excellent coaching.”
IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, ORDER NOW! My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
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This week? Well, our podcast is not our normal format because we’ve been in the car for… um… Okay? Forty-eight hours?
Apologies!
So, this week we drove from Maine to Vermont to Maine to North Carolina to Maine. In North Carolina, we went to Shaun’s dad’s funeral and it was the first time that Carrie’s been in a Southern church. And we learn that there is an adult-themed section of Shaun's brain.
WRITING NEWS LEARN WITH ME AT THE WRITING BARN! The Write. Submit. Support. format is designed to embrace all aspects of the literary life. This six-month course will offer structure and support not only to our writing lives but also to the roller coaster ride of submissions: whether that be submitting to agents or, if agented, weathering the submissions to editors. We will discuss passes that come in, submissions requests, feedback we aren’t sure about, where we are feeling directed to go in our writing lives, and more. Learn more here!
“Carrie’s feedback is specific, insightful and extremely helpful. She is truly invested in helping each of us move forward to make our manuscripts the best they can be.”
“Carrie just happens to be one of those rare cases of extreme talent and excellent coaching.”
IN THE WOODS My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
Order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
When people look at our dog Gabby, they almost always say, “Oh, she’s so beautiful.”
Gabby, however, isn’t beautiful by breed standards. She’s actually a mess. Her muzzle isn’t boxy enough. Her back sloops. Her hips splay. She’s about twenty pounds too skinny.
And that’s mostly all because she was abused and starved her first year of life, tied by a chain to a tree in the Alabama fields.
But Gabby isn’t about shame. Gabby is about being – being joyous, loving, and keeping her flock of kittens and people and one other dog safe. Gabby doesn’t have shame about her imperfections.
“She’s the prettiest puppy ever,” people coo to her when we take walks.
“Who’s the beautiful baby?”
Or sometimes it’s just a simple, “Oh, what a beautiful dog.”
Gabby has no shame about her broken body that doesn’t meet AKC standards. She has joy even when she’s broken, hurt, limping along or having a bad fur day. We can learn a lot from Gabby.
On the entry “shame v. guilt” on her blog, Dr. Bréne Brown writes,
Dr. Bréne Brown“I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging – something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection. I don’t believe shame is helpful or productive. In fact, I think shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive, hurtful behavior than the solution or cure. I think the fear of disconnection can make us dangerous.”
For many women and men, shame has a lot to do with not looking pretty enough, perfect enough, sexy enough, good enough. We stare at our eyes and worry about their shape, our lack of lips, our lack of butt, our lack of symmetry. Lacks. It’s always about lacks.
Gabby has no shame about how she looks because she’s a dog. People have no judgement about her lacks because they aren’t constantly fed how she’s supposed to look as a Great Pyr. They just see her dog soul shining through, her kind eyes and her fluffy, white fur.
We can’t quickly erase all the beauty programming that the media, our relatives, and even our friends and lovers have fed us, but we can know what triggers our shame and call it out.
Shaun says things like, “You are so beautiful.”
And I cringe.
I cringe and ask, “What about the scar on my stomach?”
And he’ll say, “Still beautiful.”
And I’ll keep cringing and say, “I think I’m losing my lips.”
“Still beautiful.”
“I have no eyebrows.”
“Still beautiful.”
What Shaun has is a great ability to pull me out of my shame spiral, but also empathy. It’s why he was a fantastic cop when he was a cop.
Brown writes this in the Semantic Scholar,
Brown againWiseman identifies four defining attributes of empathy: (a) to be able to see the world as others see it; (b) to be nonjudgmental; (c) to understand another person’s feelings; and (d) to communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings (1996). Empathy is almost an opposite to shame.
This post is too long to fit on Anchor, so for the rest of the words, listen to the podcast or go check it out on https://carriejonesbooks.blog
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
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So there’s a quick and easy way to figure out who you are and who you want to be, but also figure out what your book is and what it wants to be.
It’s called the high concept. It’s the dramatic question. It’s the way you describe in a quick captivating phrase all the energy inside your novel.
You can also do this for your life:
Like mine would be: Latchkey kid overwhelmed by family secrets sets out to find out who she is in a world that really couldn’t give a crap.
Sorry! Sorry! That’s so negative.
How about: Stuck in small-town New Hampshire, a weird psychic kid manages to survive thanks to her intellect until a rapist gives her a disease that attacks her brain. She survives anyways.
There are sort of standard questions for every genre of story and movies. Will they fall in love? Will the killer be caught? Will our hero survive the zombie gerbils? Will the events of our youth make us into fractured adults?
Don’t be shy about what your story is about. Will ET make it home? Will the Skywalkers go to the dark side – all of them? Will the Avengers defeat Thanos? Will Hugh Grant fall in love with someone in a fulfilling way? Even ghost ‘reality’ shows on tv have a dramatic question – Will they catch evidence – real evidence of the ghosts? Will they get possessed? Will they survive the night in the haunted castle?
An awesome dramatic question isn’t enough to make something a bestseller, but it’s an important start. Go get one. For your life and your story.
Next add in the obstacles. What’s making it complicated for ET to get home? For the ghost hunters to find evidence? Add those obstacles up so that we doubt that dramatic question is going to have a good answer.
Finally, make sure that your hero is someone with some damn strong convictions. ET knows he has to get home, right? Scarlett O’Hara is positive she has to marry that Ashley guy. Harry Potter/Iron Man/Captain America/Black Widow must defeat Voldemort/Thanos/Whatever Big Bad you want to insert.
That character’s super strong convictions are what makes us root for them. We feel that conviction. The stakes resonate.
Writing Tip of the Pod: Make a dramatic question.
Add obstacles.
Make your character have convictions.
Dog Tip For Life Make a dramatic question.
Realize you have obstacles.
Make yourself have the convictions to bash through those obstacles.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
LEARN WITH ME AT THE WRITING BARN! The Write. Submit. Support. format is designed to embrace all aspects of the literary life. This six-month course will offer structure and support not only to our writing lives but also to the roller coaster ride of submissions: whether that be submitting to agents or, if agented, weathering the submissions to editors. We will discuss passes that come in, submissions requests, feedback we aren’t sure about, where we are feeling directed to go in our writing lives, and more. Learn more here!
“Carrie’s feedback is specific, insightful and extremely helpful. She is truly invested in helping each of us move forward to make our manuscripts the best they can be.”
“Carrie just happens to be one of those rare cases of extreme talent and excellent coaching.”
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
We all want to be creative. We all want to be amazing at relationships. This guy, Benjamin Hardy, PHD, wrote an article on Medium exactly about that. It’s called “21 Behaviors that will make you brilliant at creativity and relationships.”
Basically, his article is saying that people limit themselves by defining who they are, what they can do, and what resources they have. This article is wildly popular with 31,000 likes, which means he’s made a ton of money off this point of view. And with over 19,000 Twitter followers, Mr. Hardy is pretty popular, too. He has posts that link to his articles like “10 Steps to Being a Millionaire in 5 Years (or Less).”
If you look at his twitter posts, you’ll find a lot of encouraging things about success and motivation and morning routines that guarantee success.
But we’re talking about just the first point in his article., which is that a goal must be wild and huge. It must be urgent with a time component. It must motivate you and he quotes Napolean Hill who wrote in the book, Think and Grow Rich, “Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.”
This is lovely. He also quotes Marcus Aurelias, a Roman emperor. And also Canadian author Justine Musk, who he introduces as only, “Elon Musk’s wife.”
There are a lot of white men talking and quoting and thinking going on in the first few paragraphs of Dr. Hardy’s piece. It’s all about going after what you want and making no excuses about your situation or self because those things will make you fail.
There are twenty more points in Dr. Hardy’s article, but we’re only going to talk to the first one because it relates to writing and why so much writing falls flat.
He writes:
Hardy, per Medium article cited aboveAs with all things in life, you get what you want**. If you prefer to make excuses and justifications for a lack of progress, then just admit you prefer your current station in life. Self-acceptance can be a beautiful thing.
However, once you desire progress more than convenience, obstacles no longer stop but propel you. As the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius is famous for saying,*“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”*
You have to have your main character have a desire and they need to pulsate with it. Your main character needs to be passionate about something. They need to go after those passions. There needs to be a bit of urgency about them. The obstacles that happen are the ones that your character needs to smash through in order to get to what she wants.
What is it your character wants more than any damn thing in the world?
Who does your character have to be to get that?
Now, how about you?
What do you want more than any damn thing in the world?
Who do you have to be to get that?
Dog Tip for Life Don’t be afraid to remember you aren’t a solo show. Think about who can help you become who you want to be and achieve what you want to do.
SHOUT OUT
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Shaun: A week or so ago, someone told Carrie that she’d be better served if she didn’t present as insecure on her social media.
Carrie: For the record, I am just open about when I’m scared about things. I’m not sure insecurity is the same as fear. I mean, I guess it is to a certain extent. But I’m not insecure about who I am. I like who I am, an occasionally anxious, goofy, smart, creative, quirky, open-book kind of person. Does that sound like who I am?
Shaun: Pretty much.
Carrie: Anyways, here’s the thing. You can pretend to be someone you aren’t. You can present any damn way you choose. But that’s it – it’s your choice. Nobody else’s.
Shaun: And Carrie? She has no problem being vulnerable. In her book, Daring Greatly, Brene Brown writes that the biggest myth about vulnerability is that it is weakness. And that’s possibly what happened with that person’s comment to Carrie last week.
Carrie: To be fair, about once a year a woman writer, usually older than I am, will tell me to present as more confident because I am strong and talented. They are trying to help me, personally, and the cause of all women, too. I think? But I don’t see the dichotomy between strength and vulnerability. They shouldn’t be on opposite ends of a line.
Shaun: Brene Brown writes, “We’ve come to the point where, rather than respecting and appreciating the courage and daring behind vulnerability, we let our fear and discomfort become judgement and criticism.”
Carrie: And she also says this, which I think is how it pertains to writers and artists and this podcast, “Vulnerability isn’t good or bad: It’s not what we call a dark emotion, nor is it always a light, positive experience. Vulnerability is the core of all emotions and feelings. To feel is to be vulnerable. To believe vulnerability is weakness is to believe that feeling is weakness.”
Shaun: So vulnerability is writing. Because vulnerability is risk and emotional exposure. And even the act of writing is vulnerable because almost the first thing someone asks you is, “Oh? Have I read you?” It’s like they determine your worth just by whether or not you’ve been on a bestseller list or not.
Carrie: Exactly, but just writing and deciding to create is a risk because it’s not the most financially secure thing in the world, but it also is because once you put your creation out there – unlike the accountant – you are vulnerable via ratings and bad reviews and internet trolls, which is massive emotional exposure. But it’s more than that. Writers have to incorporate emotion and vulnerability on the page. They create characters who are meant to tweak the readers’ emotions. Writers are like the tsars of vulnerability.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
You are a writer. You are a human. Embrace your ability to take risks, to be vulnerable. Emotions are not weakness.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Allow yourself to lick the kitten in public, adopt those who you love. Be open. Be vulnerable. Love.
Random Thoughts Included: * Carrie's anxiety about dental surgery * Bangor (Maine) City Council Signs * Carrie not being dead. We think.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Why Do People Suck So Much? One of the biggest things you hear in the world of writing is to make your character likeable, which is great and all but gives you two questions:
- How. How do you make your characters likable?
- How do you make your characters likable when in real life people suck so much? There’s an entire Reddit threadcalled “Am I the A-Hole?”
We talk about the second question in our RANDOM THOUGHT in the podcast, so the writer-helpful stuff is here, now. Ready?
What Do the Bad Guys Care About? Usually they are propelled by greed or power. In our society those things are usually indicative of a bad guy. Although, some segments of our society seem to laud those traits now.
What Do We Have to Do to Make Our Characters (or our selves) Not the Bad Guy? People want to care about the character. You automatically think that means the character is nice, right? No.
Think about those Marvel movies. Iron Man’s kind of a jerk. Sherlock Holmes? Jerk. But we still like and care about them. Why?
Here is What You Need To Do To Make Your Character Not an Butt Face The character has a big want and/or need. Iron Man wants to save the world.
Sherlock Holmes needs to catch a murderer.
We connect with that because we all have wants or needs.
I want to make $5,000 a month. This possibly make me a bad guy because that seems to be about money BUT if I want to make $5,000 a month so that I can pay for my child with autism’s medicines? Not quite so awful, right? It’s all in the presentation and the reason.
Conflicting Wants are What Really Makes It Pop When our character wants to save the world, but saving the world mean that he must sacrifice his entire business that he’s worked so hard to build up? That’s when our interest is super EXCITED. We’re all – Oh. Snap. What will he choose? What would I choose?
Caring About Others Who Are More Vulnerable This is the big one, really.
In the Star Wars movies, Rey is super snarky with the little droid when we first meet her, but then she refuses to sell that little droid baby for scrap money and protects it. Bing. We love this resilient go-getter named Rey who now has conflicting wants of her own survival (needs money) and protecting the droid (probably going to cost her money and her life).
So, we care about Rey because she cares. She has empathy.
What are the characteristics people admire in others?
Authenticity
Caring
Kindness
Empathy
Bravery
Charisma
Loyalty
Give your character one of those if you can.
The rest of this is over at my website because it was too long to fit here! SO MANY TIPS!
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, if you check out the link to this article on the Huffington Post by Leslie Kean, you'll have some good background on what we're talking about.
But Kean writes about the To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which is meant to "advance research into unexplained phenomena and develop related technology."
One of the players in that is Luis Eiizondo who worked for the United States' Department of Defense.
Leslie KeanIn short, less that two weeks after leaving the Pentagon, Luis Elizondo confirmed that UFOs are a real; they exist, and they have been officially documented. Can anyone argue with this fact now, given where this man comes from and what he knows?
And he kind of sort of pretty much said UFOs are real and that's a big deal.
Because if UFOs might be real, what else is? As writers, we're always trying to make sure that our stories are believable, but what if the unbelievable is no longer unbelievable? What happens then?
And how do we make the unbelievable believable? The biggest trick is that we have to make the person that the unbelievable things happen to have real reactions, emotions, belief systems and feelings?
We can believe that someone saw a UFO hovering over the Maine Turnpike if we see them before it happens, see them react to it in a way that's consistent with their character, and see them deal with the after effects.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD - To make the unbelievable believable focus on details.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE - Your life can become unbelievable in a good way. Embrace that.
RANDOM THOUGHT RUNDOWN If you listen to the podcast, you’ll hear:
- Talk about the underwear in Road House and Sam Elliott
- Tips about making a bestselling. Hint: It's about fear for the character and pity for the character.
- UFOs
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING NEWS THE NETHERLANDS IS AWESOME Steve Wedel and I wrote a super creepy book a few years back called After Obsession and it’s making a big freaking splash in the amazing Netherlands thanks to Dutch Venture Publishing and its leader Jen Minkman.
IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, ORDER NOW! My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
There are a lot of different ways to write a best seller, but the three of the most common features are these:
THREE MAIN HINTS TO MAKE A BEST SELLER 1. You have to engage the reader. 2. You have to keep them hooked. 3. Make them loyal.
Easier said than done, right?
Maybe not.
Think of what your story is about. Can you pitch the idea in less than fifty words? Less than twenty-five? Can you gel its essence down into a quick pitch? That's the high concept.
High Concept is a Really a big Question What's your big dramatic question?
Will the kid survive the evil wizard?
Will the young reporter fall in love with Mr. Bondage?
Will a resourceful young adult survive a pixie apocalypse?
Let the reader know from the very beginning what your story is about. Will Harry Potter survive the dark wizard Voldemort? Will Eleanor and Park fall in love? Who will die in this John Green novel?
Keeping the reader hooked This is where the obstacles and complications come in.
How do we keep our heroine challenged? What is in his or her way? Will her big dramatic question change into a new dramatic question.
MAKING EMOTION The other element is that we have to have a character who responds to things emotionally. That's what makes the story resonate. Our character already has a want. There are complications to the want. But more than that, the hero has to have intense emotions and reactions to those complications.
When Harry Potter has to dig deep and be brave, when he has to look in the Mirror of Desire and confront his deepest longings, when he has to face the wizard, know his friends might die (and on and on), he reacts emotionally and intensely and the stakes of his decisions have emotional consequences that elevate the reader and incite empathy.
Because we feel so connected to that character, we become loyal to that character. When we have that connection and loyalty? That book? It becomes something magical.
Writing Tip of the Pod The best books hook the readers early, elevate the stakes, and make us connected to the character.
Dog Tip for Life. Do not stay still. Go after your dreams.
Random Thought Rundown If you listen to the podcast, you'll hear:
- Carrie scream in the car and take the Lord's name in vain as she sees bear cubs run across the road.
- Shaun cranky about border patrol agents
- Big foot talk
- More beautiful weirdness.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING NEWS IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, ORDER NOW! My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
THE NETHERLANDS IS AWESOME
After Obsession is making a big freaking splash in the amazing Netherlands. I love them.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Jared Leto is a somewhat polarizing guy for who-knows-what reason. He’s model-pretty, a vegan, an award-winning actor and a musician. And there’s this quote I (Carrie) read that struck a chord.
“When you commit to something that’s seemingly impossible,” he says, referring to ascents both metaphorical and literal, “and you’re pushing through things that are seemingly hostile, and then you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, we did that,’ that’s a great feeling. And a little bit of pain isn’t a bad thing.”
Jared Leto to Rolling Stone’s Brian Hiatt
A lot of us writers whine a lot about writing. I’m not sure why that is. Is it because we’re plumbing the deep emotional recesses in our brain? Is it because we are creating an entire pretend world?
I used to get super cranky about this because compared to being a firefighter or an emergency dispatcher or juggling eighteen jobs as a single parent, it felt to me like everyone was a little bit whiny.
Then I realized that It’s because being committed to something, to a craft, to something when you are never going to be perfect, where you’ll always have room to grow? It can play a bit of havoc on your emotional wellbeing. But that’s okay. It’s like Leto says, you want to commit to that impossible thing to get the payoff. You want to be all in. Not a dabbler in writing or in life.
HOW TO COMMIT Emalie Jacobs has some nice hints on her blog about how to do that, to be committed. They are basically:
- Plan to write every day.
- Stay committed.
- Aim for a word count.
- Plan early.
- Find your people.
And all of this is so much of what the Write! Submit! Support! class that I teach at the Writing Barn is all about.
Back to Leto. Leto doesn’t dabble. He’s a method actor, a method singer, method artist and probably a method human. He commits wholeheartedly or he doesn’t commit at all. That’s true when he’s on stage singing or when he’s on the screen acting. He becomes.
BECOMES. Dabbling is the opposite of commitment. It’s an exploration. That can be good. But you don’t want to get so caught up in the explorations that you never focus.
“I don’t dabble,” he said in that Rolling Stone interview. “I dive in. 1,000 percent.”
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Don’t dabble. Commit fully to living the writing life. Don’t let other things take priority over your dreams.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Proofread your poop.
RANDOM THOUGHTS In our random thought portion of the podcast this week, we talk about:
- Carrie giving up dabbling
- Emcee duties at the MDI YWCA’s Women of Distinction event
- Hyphens. Semicolons. Politicians of all sides failing to have copyeditors.
- How do we trust reporters and politicians with big decisions when they can’t proofread things.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
MORE ABOUT US
It's on Carrie's website. Have a great day! Play with dogs!
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This week's podcast is not our normal format. We drove 27 hours or so this week. Our brains became a bit unglued - Okay. Even more unglued.
But we talk about:
- Writing
- Divorce
- Why People Get Divorced
- How By Using Those Metrics We Will Probably Get Divorced
- Paying Attention to Other People's Stories
- Rotarians
- The Common Ground Fair
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, ORDER NOW! My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Hey baby, what’s your back story?
It should be a pick-up line at a bar, yet it somehow is not a pick-up line at any bar that I know of except maybe in a New Yorkercartoon or a bar in a town where there’s one of those MFA programs in writing literature for literary people doing literary things.
Anyway, it’s a term writers throw around all the time and it is basically just how we imagine our characters’ lives went before they are in the actual story that we’re writing.
I know! How can you imagine that your character had a life before your story? It’s like imagining your spouse had a life before you that wasn’t totally centered around you. Us narcissists have a hard time with that.
Do you know, in nine hundred years of time and space, I’ve never met anybody who wasn’t important… Stephen Moffat, Dr. Who, A Christmas Carol
According to a post on Now Novelthere are three uses of back story.
- Developing the understanding of the characters. Like if your dad died of a heart attack in front of you and you couldn’t save him, then your character might have a savior complex. It helps the reader understand your characters’ motivations.
- It can heighten the stakes and the suspense. You were once addicted to dating cops. Cops were always bad for you. Will you date this one? NO! YOU MUST NOT.
- It makes it real damn it. By the time, you make it into a book, you’re not going to be a blank slate, born out of Zeus’ head or a clamshell fully formed on page 1. We all have prologues.
Standout asks how much back story does a story need and answers its own question pretty simply:
If judged solely on complexity, the answer to ‘how much back story should I include?’ would be ‘enough to pay for the reader’s efforts,’ however you also need to consider immersion. - Standout
Ah. Okay?
Here is our advice: * Don’t be fake. Don’t be pretend. We all know people who show up at a party, engage in small talk about absolutely nothing other than the weather, the traffic, where they work. There is no underlayment. It’s like they are a rug thrown on the floor, but if you touch that rug it will just slip away because there’s nothing holding it there. * Do not let your characters be rugs. * Ground those suckers with nails and staples if you have to. ModPodge them to the floor, give them a life before you. * Don’t tell us everything about them. We do not know that they prefer Aquafina to Poland Spring water or that they had an ingrown toenail when they were twenty-four any more than you want to know about the guy at the party’s hemorrhoid treatment unless it’s really good. Be sparing.
Stephen King: The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.
Writing Tip of the Pod Find the balance in your backstory and your life.
Dog Tip for Life Run through adversity. Don’t give up.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Over on the random thought part of the podcast, we hear about Carrie being passive-aggressive at the campground bathroom, Shaun sing, and random people at Smokey's Barbecue and Lobster.
But here is the more intellectual stuff. Um. Slightly more intellectual stuff?
This guy Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book Outliersand in it he outlines his belief that if you practice something for 10,000 hours and do that in a deliberate way, then you’ll become a top performer.
Who are the outliers? They are the best and the brightest.
We don’t want you to freak out over that 10,000 hours bit because that’s like saying, “Hey Shaun, I know you can’t run more than 60 seconds right now, but this Friday you’re going to run for 93 minutes.”
Spoiler alert: Shaun ran for 93-minutes straight on Friday. Carrie did too. Anyway, this guy named Danny Forest who writes on Mediumbreaks it down to something that feels a bit more doable. He says that he can learn soft skills in about eight hours and breaks it into working 30 minutes each day on those skills.
That seems a lot better than 10,000 hours, right?
There’s a difference between competence and brilliance, but that half-hour concentrated focus is how so many of us build our skills. Even dogs.
So, inspired by Mr. Forest, the Farrar has three things he wants to learn: Stained glass with lead suater
- Make movies on Adobe Premiere
- Spanish
- How to be a better parent
And Carrie also made a list: * Make movies on Adobe Premiere * Make felted paintings * How to self publish * How to draw * How to write travel stories * How to be Anthony Boudrain * Spanish * How to cook in the French style, but also to make kick-butt saltanas and samosas and all things in pockets, basically.
What do you want to learn? To do? For writing, focusing on writing or reading about writing for a half hour a day is really an essential tip to becoming a better storyteller. You see that advice everywhere and you see other people countering that advice saying to ‘ignore all advice,’ which is also actually advice.
Yes, do your own thing and do what works for you. That should be obvious. But don’t forget that you can’t become a brilliant guitar player if you’ve never picked up a guitar. You have to put in the time.
Writing Tip of the Pod Practice what you want to be good at. Do it in small bites. You've got this.
Dog Tip for Life Dogs are good at sleeping and practicing that. Be like a dog.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, ORDER NOW! My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
As you heard in our random thought, this week we went to see some early 1990s bands in concert. They were – well, they were old. The concert hall wasn’t even half full.
That sounds depressing, right?
It wasn’t. One of the lead singers has had cancer three times. His wife has had it once. They were both on the stage giving it everything they had.
And the lead singer?
He was smiling the entire damn time.
The Alarm at Portland's Aura Here’s the thing. In life and in story, we have to face crap, deal with it, and sometimes we are lucky enough to survive. And sometimes we are lucky enough to choose to survive joyously.
A story is no good if there’s no conflict, no obstacles to overcome. It’s hard to root for the characters or care for the characters if nothing happens. You don’t want to turn the page.
Obstacles make us stronger.
Overcoming obstacles gives us courage.
Courage and strength gives us freedom.
It’s not enough in our lives or in our stories to be incensed, to shake our fists at the sky, to rage about circumstance, we have to do the next step – action.
Without the action, we are just shouting for no reason, inciting without purpose.
Don’t be afraid to go to that next step in your life or in your story and if you can? Do it with joy and with kindness.
In the random thought, we talk about trust (Should you? How we establish it) and connections and how people kept introducing themselves to Carrie whenever Shaun left during the concert.
Those links are here:
Writing Tip of the Pod Obstacles make the story worth it. Actions keep the story moving. We want to root for someone. Make someone for us to root for.
Dog Tip for Life Joy. Embrace it. Wag your tail for everyone to see. Don’t be ashamed of it.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING NEWS IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, ORDER NOW! My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
In the Woods
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, a long time ago Carrie had a dog named Scotty, and she used to fill in at the police department as a dispatcher. For those of you who don’t know, she dispatched part-time because even though she made enough money writing (right then) she got worried that:
Carrie's Worries 1. I will suddenly make no money at all
-
I need to build up social security benefits
-
I will forget how to interact with other humans if I’m always at home.
ONE DAY HER GOOD DOGS WENT BAD So, she worked from 3:30 to 11:30 pm and when she came home Tala and Scotty, her dogs, greeted her at the door, all doggy happy.
Scotty was her new dog and he was a rescue dog from Alabama who was in a kill shelter, and for a long time we have thought that he was perhaps a grandpa who liked crawfish and Bud Lite a lot and was somehow caught in a dog’s body - like he was a shapeshifter who got stuck. He had a puncture wound in his neck when he got to Maine, two small holes. So, a vampire with a shapeshifting virus was possibly to blame.
Carrie had decided this was a true possibility. Already, she'd witnessed him:
-
Get ice out of the refrigerator.
-
Use his paw on a door handle to open a door.
And then when Carrie came home late, she saw a drawer that had been COMPLETELY shut when she left the house, and it was now open. Food was strewn everywhere. This meant Scotty grabbed the drawer with his mouth and got it open at least a little bit and then he either wedged his nose in or something and opened it more.
Why would he do that? Oh, he was probably sick of dog food and bored because she was gone. Which is doggy behaviour, we know,
Side note: Dog saliva combined with powdered sugar on a wood floor creates a glue-like paste that is impossible to vacuum or mop up. It must be attacked with Clorox bleach wipes. Carrie swears. She did not know this until that night.
And finally, though they ate peanut butter chips and brown sugar and confectioner’s sugar and Crisco shortening and Shepard’s pie mix and Italian seasoning mix, they did NOT eat chocolate!
Chocolate KILLS dogs.
And the dogs left it, only tearing open the end.
Carrie sort of imagined Scotty holding Tala back and saying, “Baby. It smells good, but it’s poison. It will kill us. Lets go lick up the sugar."
He's totally human
You know it, baby. Now go get me a beer while I lick the sugar off this here rug. Writing Tip OF THE POD What does all this have to do with writing? It's like what we were talking about in our Random Thought in the Car (you have to listen to hear that and about Carrie's accident). All stories aren't good ones. All people aren't perfect. The best writing is when those little imperfections about character or people peek through.
And use everything for your stories. Mine your lives and your dogs' lives, too.
Dog Tip For Life Dude. Do not eat the chocolate. Have some self control.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
It's a lot like life honestly.
Here's the number one hint.
Wait forever to start writing. Don't wait to start. Don't expect lightening to strike or a muse to come down from the heavens.
Just write. Call it practice if 'writing a novel' seems too big a task. Trick your mind into being chill about it. If you want to do something, you have to do it. Don't wait for permission. Just do it.
As long as it's legal and doesn't hurt other people. Obviously that sentence up there about not waiting for permission doesn't apply to all things.
But it does freaking apply to art and writing and joy and fun.
Again, as long as your fun doesn't hurt other creatures.
Back to the point. We wait all our lives for inspiration, for a prince or warrior-queen to come sweep us off our feet, for the muse to bless us with the perfect novel or poem or family or painting or child. But we have to put in the work. We have to be brave and actively go after what it is we want.
We might write a ton of sucky sentences. We might forget how to use a comma. We might fail and get rejected a million times.
That's what makes the quest good though. That's what makes the goal worth it.
So if you want to write a novel? Write it. Just get started.
If you don't want to write a novel? Don't.
Study craft. Push yourself. Think about who your story is about and how they relate to the world. Just write down the words you hear in your brain, the visions you see. Start it.
You've got this.
Writing Tip of the Pod: All of the above, man.
Dog Tip for Life Dude. Hang out in the truck.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING NEWS IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, ORDER NOW! My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
People, you have got to get your butts out of the chair, or the bed, or whatever. Seriously.
Your butt is breaking! Sorry Dying. Your butt is dying! According to a Huffington Post articleby Nicole Pajer, "Americans are sitting so long that their butts are literally falling asleep. “Dead butt syndrome,” or gluteal amnesia, is a condition that occurs when your gluteus medius gets inflamed and forgets to function normally."
Pajer's article, 'Dead Butt Syndrome' Is A Real Thing. Here's How To Tell If You Have It"was a big deal back in 2018, but I swear, we are not listening and our bottoms and our entire bodies are paying the price.
Yes, writers, I know that you're thinking, "Isn't the whole point of being a writer about making up imaginary worlds, sitting all day, and putting your butt in the chair?"
Spoiler: There are a lot of writer quotes expressly about how you have to put your 'butt in the chair' to get your writing done.
Tangent: Writers, there are actual books call "BUTT IN CHAIR!"
Second tangent: Putting your butt in the chair, doesn't make you an awesome writer. It just means you've put in some time with your bottom in a chair, typing. Writing is about craft, understanding humans, understanding language, and story.
Back to Butts An article by Anthea Levi, entitled "Dead Butt Syndrome Is One More Reason You Shouldn’t Sit All Day"stresses that sitting all day isn't good for anyone's butt, not even a writer's.
Sitting all day is not good for your bottom.
She quote says chiropractor Andrew Bang, who works at Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Institute.
Dead butt syndrome has to do with reciprocal inhibition—the process that describes the give-and-take relationship between muscles on either side of a joint. "In general, when one muscle contracts, a nerve signal is sent to its opposing muscle to relax,” says Bang.
Levi
Give-and-take relationships aren't just the talk of couples therapy for writers who are having a hard time. It's also about the body and the self. Our muscles work together but sometimes, they don't.
When we sit down too long, our butts get out of shape. The main muscles do a lot of beneficial things and when it's dead or not strong? Our pelvis isn't as stable. We can get pain in our back and hips. Our knees and ankles act up.
It all can go bad.
Levi's article talks all about the health dynamics and causes of that and you should check it out. Pajer's article talks about the signs of dead butt syndrome.
Writer's Tip OF THE POD Sitting in your chair all day is putting in the time, but crafting great writing is about more than that. It's about understanding people, story, life. It's about living. It's hard to live in one place, sitting down.
Keep your butt healthy, your heart healthy and your writing healthy.
Dog Tip for Life Moving is good.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Sometimes us writer people feel broken. We maybe got rejected one too many times. We maybe got a horrifying review. We maybe are stuck on Chapter 7560 in our epic fantasy WHEN THE BUNNY OF DOOM FELL IN LOVE WITH THE HAMSTER OF GLORIOUS GLORY.
This is normal. Creative people have a lot of big feelings. People who aren’t super creative also have a lot of big feelings. People feel. All of us. And sometimes? Well, sometimes those feelings aren’t always positive. So what do you do?
- DO NOT MAKE YOURSELF HURRY. Remember that feeling better can take a little while. So, can writing or revising a book.
- FORGIVE YOURSELF THE WAY YOU’D FORGIVE YOUR DOG. Give your soul a hug. Seriously. But it’s okay to be kind to yourself the way you’d be kind to a friend. Don’t make yourself suffer forever for a mistake you’ve made.
- REMEMBER EVERYTHING CHANGES. It might be pouring outside. You might not know how to finish your chapter. You might have forgotten to buy dog treats. But all of that can change. It will change.
- LOVE IS THERE WHETHER YOU WRITE THAT DAMN BOOK OR NOT.Seriously. Your worth isn’t about your productivity. You are wonderful and beautiful and amazing and smart. And you have to believe that you deserve good things. You do. Being a writer isn’t the only thing you are.
- DO OTHER THINGS. Seriously. Do not only write. Go out and live your own life, too. It makes for better stories.
- GIVE UP.Yep. You heard me. Look, you can’t control reviews, outside marketing, subjective tastes about people who don’t want to read books about a hamster falling in love with Mike Pence’s rabbit. You have to let go of that, give up trying to control everything. You can only control you and your reactions and thoughts.
Dog Tip for Life Dude. Just be.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING NEWS IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, ORDER NOW! My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
What to do when your book launches.
I don’t know.
Seriously. Some writers get tattoos, a piece of jewelry, a new charm for a charm bracelet. Some hold book release parties. Some go out to dinner.
As you'll hear, Carrie did none of those things. Instead, she ran, made a whiny video from the campground shower stall, had a Taco Bell incident, bought Shaun a new outfit, tried to raise money for ShelterBox and finally got a copy of her own book.
Plus, rainbow-unicorn golf carts.
The point here is that you have to create your own life and your own celebrations. Do what feels right to you when you achieve a freaking amazing goal like releasing a book, graduating, sobriety, whatever it is that makes you realize you achieved something.
Writer Tip of the Pod Try to make it memorable for you. You did something pretty darn cool. You created something.
Dog Tip for Life Don’t forget to be happy. It isn’t all about stress and anxiety all the time. Let go. Wag your tail.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, ORDER NOW! My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!
Gasp!
It's with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, two weeks ago the podcast featured poop texting and writing, but somehow only our random thought was uploaded and not the full broadcast.
Carrie feels this may have been her mother refusing to allow such things be out in the open. She raised Carrie better than this, honestly. No decent woman from New Hampshire talks openly about poop.
Shaun feels Carrie just messed up.
WE’VE BEEN MARRIED TOO LONG AND POOP TEXTS Sometimes you get married and you’ve been married for a long time and you remember that the beginning of your marriage is like a poem and there’s white space and new discovery in every line.
Sometimes you’ve been married a long time and it’s a routine, a science experiment that can be replicated. There can be beautiful comfort in a rut or a routine.
Some people want life to be poems.
Or not.
Some people want life to be expirments.
Or not.
Some people like patterns to their lives and their books, but some people don’t.
As writers and people, we have to decide if we want to be science experiments, or do we want poem moments again. Listen to the podcast to hear Shaun talk about poop texts, poop talks, Hallmark-quality texts and makes up brilliant poems and admits to excessive emoji use. Also, we haven’t really been married too long.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Random things in your childhood come up in your poems and stories. It’s okay to not realize this until your siblings tell you.Also, poop is funny.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Dogs smell their poop. They are proud of it until they kick grass on top of it. Dogs are not afraid of the poopy side of life. Embrace your dark side, but then know that the things you poop away should stay away.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING NEWS IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears TODAY!
TODAY!
Gasp!
It's with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, sometimes Carrie is a little extra.
Carrie:I was looking at people who liked me in college - all the ones that I didn't like back - and they were all so stable and mellow even in college when it was all about putting dissected sharks on the floor and jello shots. Now they are all grown up and they are stable and mellow and have these beautiful upscale lives. They're doctors, lawyers, engineers.
Shaun:But you have me.
Carrie: Exactly! And I love you. I love that you are unexpected and funny and occasionally dangerous.
What does this have to do with writing?
Carrie has a new book coming out. It's called IN THE WOODS. She's being a little extra about it. She is a little extra about everything.
What exactly is extra? Performingfartist says, "Doing the absolute damn most. For no reason."
Writing is supposed to be extra. It's supposed to be big and important even for the quiet books, even for the books nobody notices. It's all about pouring your heart into it. It's all about this damn quote right here:
Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
Audre Lorde
Also, we should add that "extra" like a lot of great words and terms originated in AAVE.
When people call you extra, it's mocking a bit, but it's also loving a bit. You're living large. Extra was a super popular term in 2015 and inspired a lot of memes, but it hasn't gone away yet.
Writing Tip of the Pod: Be extra! Shouldn't you want to be as big as possible, as enthusiastic as possible, as all-in as possible when you create.
Dog Tip for Life : Go all in. Be authentic. Being extra might involve a fake limp to get some love? Whatever. Be authentic in your need if not your limp.
SHOUT OUT
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING NEWS IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
In the Woods ART NEWS You can buy limited-edition prints and learn more about my art here on my site.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Sometimes you get married and you’ve been married for a long time and you remember that the beginning of your marriage is like a poem and there’s white space and new discovery in every line.
Sometimes you’ve been married a long time and it’s a routine, a science experiment that can be replicated. There can be beautiful comfort in a rut or a routine.
Some people want life to be poems.
Or not.
Some people want life to be expirments.
Or not.
Some people like patterns to their lives and their books, but some people don’t.
As writers and people, we have to decide if we want to be science experiments, or do we want poem moments again. Listen to the podcast to hear Shaun talk about poop texts, poop talks, Hallmark-quality texts and makes up brilliant poems and admits to excessive emoji use. Also, we haven't really been married too long. :)
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Random things in your childhood come up in your poems and stories. It’s okay to not realize this until your siblings tell you.Also, poop is funny.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Dogs smell their poop. They are proud of it until they kick grass on top of it. Dogs are not afraid of the poopy side of life. Embrace your dark side, but then know that the things you poop away should stay away.
Shout Out The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING NEWS IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
ART NEWS You can buy limited-edition prints andlearn more about my art here on my site.
PATREON OF AWESOME You can get exclusive content, early podcasts, videos, art and listen (or read) never-to-be-officially published writings of Carrie on her Patreon. Levels go from $1 to $100 (That one includes writing coaching and editing for you wealthy peeps).
Check it out here.
WHAT IS PATREON?
A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
None of us are perfect with the grammar, especially not us native-English speakers. We’ve got all these words that mean totally different things but sound EXACTLY THE SAME!
And today, we here on Dogs are Smarter Than People are going to do things. 1. Prove that dogs are smarter than people because they don’t have to spell. 2. Help you all out about a five-some of evil. Yes, I’m talking about Aah, ah, ahh, aw, and awe.
I know you’ve all seen it on Facebook. Someone you love writes, “Awe (a-w-e) that’s so cutie.”
And you’re like, “No! Agh. I don’t want to be evil and tell them but they are using the wrong spelling here.”
Let’s get started. Aah!Is an interjection. It’s like a giant mosquito as big as a velociraptor is hovering in front of your nose. You are afraid. Aah is what we use for those moments.
It has a super close relative – Ah!
Ahis an interjection, too. But this time you aren’t expressing fear; this time you are expressing love, surprise, pleasure, a realization.
“Ah! I now understand that was not a mosquito but was actually an Amazon delivery drone.”
And then we have their lovely relative, Ahh.
Ahhis when you get something or you accept something.
Ahh, I do love you and your way with drones.
Ahh, this is how the world works, you act like a narcissist on social media and you suddenly have a million followers.
Let’s move on.
Aw is what most people are meaning when they write ‘awe.’
Aw is when something is super cutie or adorbs.
Sometimes we use it to show we’re disappointed. Aw! English! You make no sense.
So, it’s like this:
Aw, you are the bestest, cutiest Rotary club president ever.
Aw, your puppy is adorable!
Aw, that manatee lingere is the best underwear ever!
Aw, I probably should have realized that I have no chill prior to taking a leadership role and now I’m just sub-tweeting everyone and whining about their underwear.
And then we have the all-mightyawe.
Cue God music. Feeling like you are full of admiration, fear, reverence because of something super big-time like God or manatees swimming nearby or some really amazing underwear?
This is awe.
She raised her hands to the sky, overwhelmed with awe as the flying manatee in purple plaid underwear approached.
At the edge of the Grand Canyon, he grasped her sleeve in awe of the magnificence below them.
Writer Tip of the Pod Dictionaries are our friends. Words have meanings. Don’t stress out if you mess up. We all mess up, but try to do the best you can. We’ll be in awe of your mad wordsmithing skills.
Dog Tip for Life It’s easy to spell ‘bark.’ Don’t sweat the small stuff. We make mistakes. If you don’t hurt anyone, yourself or end up in jail, it’s probably all good
Shout Out The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019! There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel, which is awesome.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Normally we talk about writing somehow, right? Because we’re a writing podcast.
But we aren’t this week.
This week, we’re talking about fashion advice for men because Carrie saw a post on The Art of Manliness that was “101 Style Tips for Men.”
First off, let’s just give a shout out that there’s a website called The Art of Manliness. That is a brilliant name.
Carrie’s favorite tip was this one:
27. Always dress like you might decide to drop by a restaurant or nightclub with a dress code.
Because you might. And even if you don’t, you might as well look like a guy who’s got plans.
The Art of Manliness
All the advice reminded us of those old 1980s, 1990s talk shows where the women would get their husbands make-overs in a super hetero-normative way and these guys would come out with this total, “Oh my gosh, I’m hot” saunter.” Or else they’d try to hide.
But it also makes us think about our fixation on fashion and appearance and buying things. If you look at that list it requires buying a lot of things. That requires money. And that’s a little frustrating.
How about “101 Feel Good Tips for Men” that are about being good people or something? How about if we spend a little more time our souls and our attitudes and our civics instead of worrying about never wearing graphic t-shirts?
Oh, wait. You can’t make money off that can you?
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Wag your tail. That’s all the style you need.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Style isn’t something you want to copy. Style in writing is voice. And your voice? It shouldn’t be determined by a list of 101 tips on what to think and how to write and who to be. It shouldn’t be about copying other people. It should be all you. Your voice.
Just like you shouldn’t go around trying to pretend to be Tom Cruise or Bieber or Idris Elba or Russell Wong and dressing like them, you shouldn’t go around writing like J.K. Rowling or James Patterson or Naomi Shihab Nye.
Be you.
Be your own style.
And if that puts you on a How Not to Dress or How Not to Write list? Who cares.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Carrie's having a bit of a rant this episode. Let's blame it on her going to a Lynryd Skynrd concert last night.
Here's the rant: There’s a lovely funny author who recently gave a speech saying that writing is terrible and that it is 100 % okay to complain about it incessantly and completely professional to do so.
Everyone is all, “Yes! And preach it!”
Except me.
I don’t care what’s professional or not. Obviously, I never have. And I know this will not be a popular podcast.
But what I do care about is people being miserable. If you are miserable writing, if you hate writing, please think about that for a second. If you hate writing, why are you doing it? We have this one tiny life (allegedly) to create things in, to communicate, to live and experience. Why are you choosing something to do that you feel is terrible?
And what is it telling kids when all the writers out there, those of us who actually do it for a living say, “Ack. Writing is terrible. It’s so hard.” Do you think that’s encouraging literacy? A love of reading? A love of writing and the written word?
Here’s a big secret: You don’t have to suffer. You don’t even have to suffer for your art. That’s something wealthy people in power spoon feed us. You’re allowed to rejoice as you create. It’s okay if you enjoy living and being. Find ways to do that.
Sure, sometimes things you love might feel terrible. But not all the time. Don’t let it be all the time. You deserve to have joy, too. You deserve to create in a state of wonderment and exploration and passion. You’re allowed to craft your stories while you’re happy or excited and enjoy the excitement.
Outside forces can make our lives terrible without any of our help. Don’t help them.
You deserve better than that.
Writing Tip for Life Like a person’s life, a writing life has highs and lows. Whenever possible choose highs. Whenever possible choose things and adventures that will make you happy, but more than that, give yourself the space and permission to allow yourself to be happy.
Dog Tip of the Pod Enjoy the smells, man. Smell that smell.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING NEWS IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
The wedgie.
It's the ultimate tv trope.
Give someone a wedgie and there are only two possibilities:
- You're a bully
- You're getting revenge on a bully.
In the U.S. culture wedgies are instantly recognizable and understandable. There are even three wedgie variations:
The Melvin, in which the undies are yanked up from the front.
The Atomic Wedgie, in which the undies are pulled over the head.
The Hanging Wedgie, in which the victim is suspended from an object by their underwear.
TV TROPES
But wedgies can be sinister jerks that are not just a trope for literature or tv so that us writer people can easily show someone being a jerk.
They happen in real life, too.
There are people who have wedgie fetishes, actually. There is also the occurrence called the accidental-self-induced wedgie.
And they can have consequences!
About ten years ago, a bunch of scientific articles were written about a man, 50, who had some bad back pain. His left leg and five toes on that left foot tingled and were numb.
Why? His 34-year-old wife gave him a wedgie when he was finally getting up off the sofa. For six years, he had those symptoms if he put his full weight on his left leg.
His wife no longer gave him wedgies, by the way.
What does this have to do with writing you might wonder?
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Something even as simple as a wedgie can have nuance and consequence and as writers we have to look deeply inside our underwear story and see what symbols and actions we're using. Are we putting a wedgie incident in there because it's the easy way to show someone being a poop monster? Are we fully thinking out the consequences of our character's choices and of what happens to a person's body when they get a really bad wedgie?
Dog tip for life You don't have to worry about wedgies if you don't wear underwear.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
A quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'dangerous' gets a lot of hits.
To be fair, so does a quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'fun.'
But we're not here to tell you about the perils and delights of flirting. We're here to talk about writing, life, and dogs. Actually, flirting is part of most people's lives. But we're FOCUSING on the writing aspect.
Flirting is showing someone that you are attracted to them.Hall, Carter, Cody, and Albright, (2010).
If you've listened to the random thought portion of the podcast, it's obvious that Carrie fails at flirting and in knowing when other people are flirting with her.
Side note from Carrie: This is because it's really extremely rare for me to be attracted to people in that way.
So, when it comes to writing about flirting, she has to do a lot of research about how people flirt, how people react to flirting, what the common aspects of flirting are.
All of us, as writers and humans, have blind spots or flaws. These places can be viewed as writing weaknesses or human weaknesses, but they honestly just make us real.
Second side note from Carrie: Not being attracted to people that way isn't a flaw, it's just something that's different than what our society considers the 'norm.'
When we're writing, we have to look for those places where we're not as strong. It could be setting. It could be showing our character's emotions. It could be plot. It could be making a character realistically flirt. It could be making dialogue real. The secret to becoming a better writer is to dive into those places where you're not as strong, and focus on them.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Be courageous. Go right to where your weaknesses are and excavate them. If you can't write a fight scene. Go write fight scenes. Read them. Watch them. Go into the places where your weaknesses are.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Flirting is not the same as being friendly. It's about intent.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
There's a BuzzFeed article about 23 Dogs Who are Too Adorably Stupid for Their Own Good.
Which is amazing.
But it made us think about why dogs get to be stupid and called adorable, but when humans are stupid, we're called stupid and it's derisive, you know?
There's this constant pressure to be perfect, intelligent. You misspell too as two and 180 Twitter people are on your case. We all put so much pressure on each other to be free of mistakes, perfect princesses and princes.
But dogs? They fall in the pool? They're adorable.
Dogs? They sit on a kid's face and it's amazing and funny.
Dogs? They sometimes think stuffed animals are real and we're all, "Aw.... adorable!"
We're so kind to dogs for their mistakes, but it's more than that. We love and celebrate their mistakes. Their mistakes become viral sensations of cuteness. But when it's our own selves?
We get mad. We judge ourselves. We are not quick to forgive. We expect to be perfect and when we aren't? It's like the end of the world.
It doesn't have to be like that. We can own our own stupid, love our goofs, our mess-ups, not judge ourselves and just live and grow and create.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD This is especially true for writers. We are all about having perfect stories and sentences in our first drafts, but that's not going to happen. We have to take breaths and forgive ourselves for using the word "KNEW" 89 times in a 300-word picture book.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE We're adorable. We're sometimes stupid. Be like us.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Writing News IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Carrie got really confused this week because she went on YouTube and looked up "Writing Advice" and there was a really popular vlogger who gives a ton of writing advice, but she's not published things.
She is, however, really definite on her views on how to be a good writer, which is lovely. It's lovely to be so confident.
But it made us think about what the worst writing advice ever is.
It's not: Write every day.
It's not even: Write what you know.
It's not: Write for you and if you like it, that's all that matters.
It's not any of those one-size fits all tidbits. Here's what it is: Don't write. It's a waste of time.
I don't care who is giving you this advice. It might be your mom, teacher, bff, your life-partner, kid, an evil bastard who lives next door, a published writer. Or worse, it could be your own inner-critic, which lurks like a demon of self doubt in your frontal lobe.
That advice? It's crap. It's jealousy or stupidity or self-doubt. If you want to write? Write.
Don't believe me that everyone deals with this? Or almost everyone? Here is a quote from the man, himself.
The problems of success can be harder because nobody warns you about them.
The first problem of any kind of even limited success is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that any moment now, they will discover you. It’s Impostor Syndrome—something my wife Amanda christened the Fraud Police.
In my case, I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door, and a man with a clipboard (I don’t know why he carried a clipboard, in my head, but he did) would be there to tell me it was all over, and they had caught up with me, and now I would have to go and get a real job, one that didn’t consist of making things up and writing them down, and reading books I wanted to read. And then I would go away quietly and get the kind of job where you don’t get to make things up anymore.
—Neil Gaiman, Commencement Speech at the University of the Arts Class of 2012
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Author Matthew Kessel has some pretty cool adviceabout what he does when he's overwhelmed by self doubt.
He writes through the doubt.
He reminds himself of all the good things he's done as a writer.
Incorporates that doubt into more emotionally resonate characters.
Talks through it with other writer people who know how it is.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Dude. Be who you are. Embrace it. Don't question it. Go with the flow, man. Don't let others label you or diminish you, but most importantly YOU don't diminish you.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, one of the big debates in the world of writing advice is the Write Every Day Debate.
I know! I know. Sexy name. High stakes.
But, honestly, it gets people so riled up. There are the Write Every Day Camp. They carry lit Twitter Torches and follow Stephen King who famously said:
"Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
And then there are the Anti Burn Out Crew who say that you can't possibly write every day because your fingertips will fall off.
People have Twitter wars about this.
But to be fair, people also create character sheets and become hyper-focused on knowing their character's favorite color and think that's more important than what it is that the character wants with all her heart, or what the character is terrified of happening.
WRITING Hint: Your character's motivations, her wants, the thing she's longing for and living to get? That's more important than her love of teal.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD There is no one way to be a writer. If you can write every day, write every day. If you can't, don't, but make sure you still actually write. You can't really be a writer if you only talk about writing and don't actually do it.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Nobody cares what Lassie's favorite color might have been. They cared that he wanted to save his family. Don't stress the meaningless details. Not in your story and especially not in your life. Focus on what matters.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Writing News IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
HEAR MY BOOK BABY (AND MORE) ON PATREON On February first, I launched my Patreon site where I’m reading chapters (in order) of a never-published teen fantasy novel, releasing deleted scenes and art from some of my more popular books. And so much more. Come hang out with me! Get cool things!
WHAT IS PATREON?
A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
I (Carrie) apologize for sounding so sick in this podcast. It's because I am super sick.
This week I got an Instagram message from a man selling his copyediting services and there were five incredibly obvious typos in his pitch. I'm talking about two words combined, misspelled words. Double punctuation at the end of a sentence.
It was sad.
So, there's another guy on the internet who makes a ton of money helping other people be writers and I'm sure he's lovely, but I find him incredibly frustrating.
Why?
He has a page all about writing advice and in that advice he has bullet points to make things simple because apparently people who want to be writers need things simple? Who knows.
BUT IN THOSE TEN BULLET POINTS HE HAS CONTRADICTORY ADVICE. IN ONE BULLET POINT HE SAYS, Don't be lazy. Don't sound stupid.
IN ANOTHER HE SAYS, Don't worry about being good. Just write.
Hm.
IN YET ANOTHER HE SAYS, Don't be a perfectionist.
Yeah.
Look. I'm sure he's helped a ton of people and his bullet points must have deeper meaning and insight, but here's the thing. Writing isn't about bullet points. Writing is about soul and depth. Writing is about communication and building worlds through words that create image and resonance.
HOW TO SURVIVE STUPID WRITING ADVICE 1. SORT THE GOOD FROM THE BAD Remember a lot of people are just trying to make money off you. Sad, but true. And some of these people are amazing and professionals and some aren't. You have to sort the good from the bad.
2. ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL Does your brain work exactly like your BFF's? Your mom's? You're dog's? No. It doesn't. All advice doesn't work for everyone. It's okay to be the writer who works in spurts, who doesn't outline, who writes every day. There's no one right way to write anymore than there is one right way to human.
3. BELIEVE IN YOURSELF When you get really crap advice at your writing critique group, or workshop or from your mentor or even your agent? And it just feels wrong?
That probably means it is. Don't let group think or even an expert sway you from the truth of your story.
4. TRY NOT TO COMPARE Here's the thing. If one writer publishes 100,00 copies? That doesn't make them a better writer than the one who publishes 10. There's a lot of stuff called marketing that goes on behind the scenes that makes one author have high sales. If one author always gets invited to conferences and you don't? It doesn't mean you suck. It might be that other author is good at schmoozing. Be proud of who you are and be who you are. Don't try to emulate the people who you think are successful. Emulate yourself.
5. BLOW IT OFF AND DIG DEEP Seriously. Blow off the comparisons, the advice that doesn't work. Study the craft, the books YOU love, notice sentence structure, discover why you like the stories you like and then think about why YOU want to write your story, dig deep into why it matters to you.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD If you're going to pay people to help you, please do it with someone reputable. Please do it with someone who can spell. And please do it with someone who gives you consistent advice that resonates.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Some people suck and just want to use you for money or cute Instagram pictures. Avoid those people.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
The city of Jackson, Mississippi is having a weird situation.
To be fair, Jackson has had weird situations before. People left Christmas trees in potholes. They decorate road signs in ways road signs aren't supposed to be decorated.
But now what's happening in Jackson is about something sacred.
It's about the mashed potato.
People are leaving bowls of mashed potatoes in all sorts of random places.
According to a Huffington Post piece, a resident is quoted as saying, “So we don’t know if someone is just playing a prank or if someone just had a lot of leftovers."
Nobody knows what it's about. That's sort of creepy. Also, it's a great base for a story. The best stories come from unexpected details and places. The best stories involve mysteries to be solved and motivation to solve them.
Writing Tip of the Cast Don't be afraid to take something beautiful like a potato and turn it into something creepy and evil. Keto certainly wasn't afraid to do that.
Dog tip for Life Always sniff things before you eat them.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING AND OTHER NEWS IN THE WOODS - READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It's scary and one of Publisher's Weekly's Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There's an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they've deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn't every story?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Science isn’t always right.
I know! Shocker.
Once, some scientists had this theory about the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. They truly believed that the lamb grew on a tree.
To be fair, it was the Middle Ages in Europe and things were kind of like America right now. People had no clue about stuff, but they pretended to.
Anyway, according to Ripley’s Believe it Or Not,
There were believed to be two distinct varieties of Vegetable Lamb: a bizarre plant that produced tiny lambs inside pods, and an equally-bizarre hybrid creature that consisted of a whole, full-sized lamb, which lived suspended from the ground by a small stem!
Chris Littlechild, Ripley’s Believe it Or Not
People believed this for centuries, right? Centuries.
What does this have to do with writing? When we write, we bring our pasts, our systems of belief and it ends up on our pages. Our work reflects our society and it reflects our own morality and beliefs. To be a good writer, we have to know what our truths are but also be willing to be challenged about them.
Writing is a communication, a social contract between the writer and the reader. We’re asking our readers to share our story, but also more subconsciously, to hear about our world views and thoughts. We’re inviting them in.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD It’s good for us to look at our own beliefs and morality occasionally. What do we believe in? Why do we think that’s right or true? How is that showing up in our stories?
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Dogs truths are simple. Love is good. Food is good. Sleep is good. Squirrels are evil. Don’t be afraid to gel your beliefs down into simplicity.
HEAR MY BOOK BABY (AND MORE) ON PATREON On February first, I launched my Patreon site where I’m reading chapters (in order) of a never-published teen fantasy novel, releasing deleted scenes and art from some of my more popular books. And so much more. Come hang out with me! Get cool things!
WHAT IS PATREON?
A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you.
IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So this dog caught a ball in his mouth and the video of it became viral. His name is Stanley the Collie and he has his own Instagram account. Of course he does.
But then an Australian newsman interviewed Stanley and Stanley promptly took the microphone cover and ran off with it. Of course he did.
Stanley wasn’t media savvy. Or was he? Either way. He wasn’t going to change his essential Stanley-ness for fame. Writers shouldn’t either. Popularity comes and goes and it’s a hard guess whether what your doing is going to make you famous or popular. But the thing is you have to write your story – your essential truths – anyways. No matter what. Or else you’re selling out.
If you get famous, still be real. Okay? Never lose the essential you.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Sometimes your book does well and you suddenly have people crying when they meet you. Don’t blow off your old friends, mentors and colleagues because that fame? You didn’t get there alone. Support the people who supported you. Don’t trade them in for shiny new friends.
And that’s true the other way, too. Don’t be a passive aggressive jerk because one of your friends is doing well. If every time you see them post or hear them comment about good things makes you cringe? Maybe you need to reassess. It’s cool to support each other, not try to tear each other down.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Don’t change who you are just because you’re famous. Eat all the things. Fall down. Love everybody as much as you love yourself.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING AND OTHER NEWS IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
HEAR MY BOOK BABY (AND MORE) ON PATREON On February first, I launched my Patreon site where I’m reading chapters (in order) of a never-published teen fantasy novel, releasing deleted scenes and art from some of my more popular books. And so much more. Come hang out with me! Get cool things!
HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, last month Carrie was on an airplane, where she was trapped on a Philadelphia runway for awhile. Okay, hours. And someone kept expelling gas out the rectum.
In Shaun language that means fart.
Anyways, they were all trapped there, smelling this smell, and it was bad. Not bad enough for them to cancel the flight, which has allegedly happened in the past, but it was bad.
It was a giant multi-person dutch oven.
We're not talking about the nice kind of dutch ovens from Le Creuset where you make phenomenal meals. We're talking about the kind where you're in bed with someone and you make a bad smell and then yank up the covers and trap your loved one in there so they must smell the smell and they can't escape.
What does this have to do with writing? Dutch ovens are all about being trapped in a situation you'd rather not be in, right? That tension and need to escape is a big part of writing, especially writing thrillers.
Writing Tension Tip #1 Writers need tension in their story, but you don't want to kill your reader with that tension. Your tension has a goal and a purpose. It's not just thrown in there for no reason. It's like when you're in a fight. You don't throw a punch without a purpose. You want to knock someone down.
Tension is like that.
But if you let it all loose at once (think bad gas) and then trap someone in there with it? They're going to want to escape. If there's no point in the tension except for tension then the reader is going to be overwhelmed and try to escape.
Writing Tension Tip #2 However, your hero? You want to trap them. You want that hero to be stuck in the dutch oven and trying to get out. Trapping your hero makes the reader sympathize with the hero.
Trap your hero. Put her in an impossible situation. Make him work to get out of it. Have them trapped emotionally and physically and need desperately to escape. All the tension must be around that.
Writing Tip of the Pod Trap your hero but not your readers.
Dog Tip for Life It's best to expel gas silently and blame the humans.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
On February first, I launched my Patreon site where I'll be reading chapters (in order) of a never-published teen fantasy novel, releasing deleted scenes and art from some of my more popular books. And so much more.
WHAT IS PATREON?
A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
When Carrie first started writing, she wrote contemporary teen fiction and she heard a lot of comments about being quirky.
She’d hear comments like “Could that really happen?”
And a lot of times, she’d answer, “Um. It already has.”
One time, I had a story with a wedding expo that featured cannabis. Everyone said, “You need to cut that. That would never happen.” Last week in Canada? It did. It was called the Canadian Canabis Wedding Expo.
In this world, things you don’t expect to happen tend to happen. And in your stories, it’s good to do that, too. Don’t be afraid to be bizarre. Don’t be afraid to have your character be the clerk in Petco who is there when a Watusi walks in. On a leash of course.
When you’re afraid to be weird, bizarre, or even just afraid to be yourself your writing suffers and becomes bland and boring. Take chances. Stand out. Be different.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Take chances. Stand your ground. Write weird. Life is weird. It’s okay to reflect that because when you do? You and your story stand out.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Weird is not an insult. Weird means you’re not boring, that you’re unexpected. Weird is good. Also, weird can make you go viral.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING AND OTHER NEWS IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
HEAR MY BOOK BABY (AND MORE) ON PATREON On February first, I launched my Patreon site where I’m reading chapters (in order) of a never-published teen fantasy novel, releasing deleted scenes and art from some of my more popular books. And so much more. Come hang out with me! Get cool things!
WHAT IS PATREON?
A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
In our random thought we talk about a Twitter thread by writer John Paul Brammer (@jpbrammer), which details how a cat and two dogs showed up at his apartment door and how they wanted inside. He couldn't figure out what the animals were doing there and what to do with them.
His tiny story had everything - confusion, an objective (to keep the animals safe), a mystery (where did the animals belong) and a conclusion when the owners came back home.
There was risk involved - a massive amount of risk to the animals and a smaller amount of risk to Mr. Brammer who obviously isn't a pro about dogs.
But, he pushed back his confusion and put himself out there to help the animals and keep them safe. He took a risk by opening the door to the dogs and cat. Twitter heralded him for it.
A good story involves risk - risk to the character - risk to the things she or he loves.
In life, sometimes those risks work out well. And honestly, sometimes they don't. But if you want to grow, you sometimes have to take those risks, reach beyond the ordinary and go after your dreams.
Writing Tip of the Pod The act of writing, of communicating your thoughts is a risk in itself. Take it one step more and be risky in your story, your dialogue, your ideas.
I think all writers should have one t-shirt that says Take The Risk. I’ve heard people say writing has changed their lives forever. I believe that. It changed mine in ways I couldn’t possibly imagine. Because the moment I let risk in, the world became a very easy place to navigate.
Susan Tupper, The Review Review.
Dog Tip For Life Humans tend not to be risk takers, but dogs? Dogs come from wolves, but according to studies, wolves are totally into taking risks, while dogs are a bit more hesitant. That's because dogs depend on their friends to help them out. Friends help alleviate the need for risks. Call on your friends when you need support and help. And be a friend when others need you.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
For more tips that go with this episode or others, check out www.carriejonesbooks.blog!
And please like and subscribe!
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Lots of us have bad people in our writing and our lives. These antagonists run the gamut from people who make us scream at their Facebook posts of Fakeness to actually physically hurting us and our community.
But one of the biggest questions a lot of new writers have is this:
DO I NEED A BAD GUY? Yes.
But your bad guy can be yourself? Like in our random thoughts, Carrie is often showing that she is her own worst enemy. Watching tv gives her anxiety, but she almost always watches tv at night for a couple of hours.
When it comes to life or writing stories, this can help you figure out what the antagonist is.
HERE ARE THE STEPS: 1. Figure out what your goal or your main character’s goal is. 2. The bad person is whatever stands in the way of your character (or you) achieving your goal.
So, in life Carrie is her own antagonist because her goal is to not feel anxious at night, yet she still watches television for an hour or two. That’s an example of an inner-antagonist or bad guy.
Also in life, when Carrie doesn’t let Shaun watch American Pickers and makes him watch Pen15? She’s Shaun’s external bad guy, keeping him from his goal to chill with those picker guys.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Every story needs conflict. Sometimes th”at conflict and opposing force (what’s keeping your character from their goal) comes from the character themself.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE “Dude. Us dogs do not need antagonists. We go for our wants. Over and over again,” says Sparty.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
BE A PART OF THE PODCAST! Hey! If you download the Anchor application, you can call into the podcast, record a question, or just say ‘hi,’ and we’ll answer. You can be heard on our podcast! Sa-sweet!
No question is too wild. But just like Shaun does, try not to swear, okay?
Here is the link to the mobile app.
HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
HEAR MY BOOK BABY (AND MORE) ON PATREON On February first, I launched my Patreon site where I'm reading chapters (in order) of a never-published teen fantasy novel, releasing deleted scenes and art from some of my more popular books. And so much more.
For more tips and about my upcoming books, please check out www.carriejonesbooks.blog
Thanks!
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
When you're in a business or nonprofit or just in your house, you'll often notice that emotions are kind of like the flu. They can be easy to catch.
When your friend is angry because someone is being a punk on Facebook, you often get angry, too. When your kid is sad, you can get sad. Emotions from others often seep into us, especially in a workplace.
Let's say everyone is super excited at a writing conference. Are you going to get super excited, too? Probably.
It's all about mirror neurons, emotional intelligence, and biomimicry.
Put simply, emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and control our own emotions and the emotions of other people.
Matt Hunckler for Forbes
Part of emotional intelligence is understanding that we often adopt or mimic the expressions, behavior and emotion of those we spend a great deal of time with.
Those bonds can help us or hurt us.
Research from University of Oklahoma and University of Texas at Austin shows that when individuals dislike the same people or find a common dislike of something in general, all of a sudden those individuals have a bond that easily turns into a friendship because it’s a connection.
What’s the life lesson in this? Take a minute and reflect, asking yourself:
What types of emotion do I give off and how does that affect others I interact with such as my family, roommates, team mates, colleagues, etc.?
How easily do I let others effect my emotions? Do I even know it is happening? Check out the Emotional Contagion Scale to see how vulnerable you are.
Are the people in my social networks the type of people I really want to surround myself with?
Are there actions or changes I need to make?
Jodi Schulz for Michigan State University
When it comes to writing, figure out how you can use the contagion of emotion to shift your main character's (or other's) world view and actions. Our characters are not static things and just like real people, they should be impacted (and impact) those around them.
WRITING TiP OF THE POD: When you write, remember that relationships and characters are about connections and those around them impact their growth and emotions.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE If emotions are contagious, pick your pack wisely. Don't hang around with the growling jerks. Hang around with the dogs who wag their tails and keep you happy.
SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Bar Harbor Maine - Next to our house, actually WRITING AND OTHER NEWS IN THE WOODS - READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It's scary and one of Publi
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
This week we're pretty low-key chill with an off-format podcast about the weird things about us
Basically, we answer some of our listener's questions.
We forgot the hardest one, which is:
How does Carrie get everything done? That one took too much time, so we'll share it next week.
We love you all and thank you so much for your awesome questions.
Why do you choose to live this way, humans? Shout Out! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING AND OTHER NEWS IN THE WOODS - READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It's scary and one of Publisher's Weekly's Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There's an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they've deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn't every story?
HEAR MY BOOK BABY (AND MORE) ON PATREON On February first, I'm going to launch my Patreon site where I'll be reading chapters (in order) of a never-published teen fantasy novel, releasing deleted scenes and art from some of my more popular books. And so much more.
WHAT IS PATREON?
A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you.
HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
BE A PART OF THE PODCAST! Hey! If you download the Anchor application, you can call into the podcast, record a q
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
To be a writer and a human you often have to be courageous. Writers put their books out there for other people to see. Humans put their selves out there (sometimes in places like Tinder) for people to see.
And that's scary AF, honestly.
With us writer people we're putting our inner thoughts on a page, we're exposing our insides and that can be so hard and when we do that? It hurts when we get rejected or judged or told that our insides suck?
And sometimes when we want to protect ourselves from that hurt we develop writers block.
Spoiler alert: Writers block is bad for writers because we don't write. But the thing is that writers aren't the only ones who get writers block, right? People get it, too. People get so afraid of doing the wrong thing, of being judged, of being publicly humiliated that we forget to live. We hunker down and have a shell of a life instead of trying something new.
Carrie: For me, the things that I get afraid about are my voice and being filmed. That's because I was bullied for my voice when I was little and because I'm kind of a dork when I get filmed and I think I'm too ugly.
Cough.
Real moment right there.
We really want to do video, but Carrie's pretty phobic about it because it feels like a place to be humiliated, for all that bullying as a child to bubble back to the surface and even though she's an adult now? It feels so vulnerable and raw.
Humiliation is traumatic and often hushed up, whereas embarrassment, given enough time, can be sublimed into a humorous anecdote. More fundamentally, humiliation involves abasement of pride and dignity, and with it loss of status and standing. The Latin root of ‘humiliation’ is ‘humus’, which translates as ‘earth’ or ‘dirt’. We all make certain status claims, however modest they may be, for instance, ‘I am a competent teacher’, ‘I am a good mother’, or ‘I am a beloved spouse’. When we are merely embarrassed, our status claims are not undermined—or if they are, they are easily recovered. But when we are humiliated, our status claims cannot so easily be recovered because, in this case, our very authority to make status claims has been called into question.
Neel Bierton, MD for Psychology Today
I think the point is to think about the worst thing that can happen from being humiliated. Lose your job? Your reputation? That sucks, but if you're still alive? That's what matters because if you can continue on, you can rise back up, right?
So here's what you do: Deal with the humiliation. Manage it. Do the right thing, not just the defensive thing.
Do better.
Work harder.
And go out and be brave again. Or just be brave the first time.
Writing Tip of the Pod Fear holds you back, but it can propel your characters forward. Humiliation of a character raises the stakes and also moves the plot, but it gives the readers something to relate to and someone to cheer for. Don't humiliate people in real life, but go for it in your books.
Dog Tip for Life Dogs move on.
Shout Out! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING AND OTHER NEWS IN THE WOODS - READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It's scary and one of https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
What is A troll? A troll is someone who is a poop. No! No. Sorry, let’s try to be a bit more academic here.
WHY DO THEY TROLL? All trolls are different and everything is a generalization but usually because they are bored and want some attention.
Don’t Feed Them It’s incredibly hard not to feed the trolls, especially if they’re attacking your friends or fans. But even if you aren’t a massively well published author with a fan base of 5 million trillion (cough) you can still attract the attention of people who want negative attention. Don’t give it to them.
The more you feed the troll, the louder and lively and bigger they get. It’s like Pinocchio’s nose growing every time he lied. Every time you respond to a troll, they get bigger and stronger.
Have Rules To Deal With Trolls Carrie has procedures where she almost always ignores trolls. She blocks or bans them from her feeds if they are spouting hatred or doing a lot of hate language. If she knows them in person or if she’s interacted with them before in a positive way, she gives them a warning. If they react with hate or continue, she blocks or bans them. She has banned other published authors before. She has banned people that she’s given gifts to.
It’s hard, but because she has set rules, she can look back to those and deal with less inner emotion.
It’s so hard, but don’t give it to them and escalate the situation. Ignoring their rants usually shuts them down.
Be Cool Inside With Who You Are and What You DO When the attacks are personal it can be so hard, but the thing is that you need to try to find a way to feel okay with yourself no matter what other people think.
There are always going to be people who love what you do and people who hate what you do and people who are totally oblivious and one of the big life lessons is that you have to ignore those haters.
Writing Tip of the Pod Look, when you write, you have to have villains and trolls, characters or situations for your protagonist to bounce off and overcome. Sadly, life can be like this, too.
Be as sure of yourself as you are of your main character. Have confidence as you write, in who you are as you write and live. Make the choices you can be proud of and give the middle finger to the trolls because they can’t touch you.
Dog Tip for Life Dogs avoid the trolls. They sniff them out, growl at them if they pose an immediate threat and move on. And if they don’t move on? They give it their all to destroy the threat.
Chose wisely in how you destroy the threat.
Shout Out! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING AND OTHER NEWS IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Someone just told me (Carrie) that we weren't really having a wedding anniversary because:
- We are celebrating it a few days late.
- We both forgot about it until the Thursday before the Sunday of the anniversary.
- Apparently, we didn't talk about it on Facebook.
Gasp! Who knew those were the criteria to keep your anniversary legit?
Here's our bonus podcast about it.
Spoiler Alert: This is not a poignant bonus podcast.
For more info on us and/or Carrie's books, check out her blog at carriejonesbooks.blog!
And please like and subscribe!
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
There's a 65-year-old man, Henry, who lives near Philadelphia who has depression. He didn't want to take medicine but he noticed he was happier when he was near his alligator, Wally.
Yes, a guy in Philadelphia has an alligator named Wally. If you can get past that, you can be okay with the rest of this. The doctor agreed to register Wally as an emotional support animal and the man now walks Wally around the neighborhood, hopefully not during winter and stuff.
He hugs. He likes to eat a lot of chicken wings but doesn't eat cats or goldfish. So basically, he is Shaun, who is also from Florida, but currently is a mammal, still.
This week, we've been thinking a lot about the the lenses with which we view things and how they help us process stuff, not necessarily alligators as service animals, but our lives and times that might not be awesome.
Those three lenses are: The long lens
The reverse lens
The wide lens
So, let's say I just got yelled at by my boss or Shaun. When I look back at our discussion, which was (Cough) heated I can use these lenses to have a better understanding of what happened and also to figure out how to move forward.
When I use the reverse lens, I look at everything my boss or Shaun said from their point of view. I think about why they said what they said, what their wants, motivation and backstory is. Why did they say those things? What were they feeling?
That sometimes can give you compassion about it. When I use the long lens, I think about those annoying things they said and ask myself, "Am I still going to be annoyed about this in six months? Two months? Two hours?" Is this really important?
I often think, "Is someone going to jail or dying because of this?" Then I tell myself to chill.
The point is to decrease the intensity of those negative feelings that are overwhelming you right after the conversation.
This brings us to the wide lens. The wide lens still focuses on you, but it puts the incident into the bigger context of your life. Yeah, your boss sucked, but EVERYONE in your life (hopefully) doesn't suck. Look at how much bigger your life is than just this experience. How many other person were cool with you today, this week? Maybe your boss isjust a schmuck. That's on them. Not you.
When bad things happen, we often make that one bad event (no matter how small) into this massive chapter in our life's story, falling into the trap of self-doubt and low self worth, but the thing is? Most of the time that one bad event is just someone else being a buttface. It doesn't deserve to be a chapter in your story. It shouldn't become the myth of your life. Every event has multiple interpretations that can be seen through so many lenses.
Interpretations are subjective so pick the interpretation you want for the incidents in your life. Pick them apart and choose the same way we do when we build stories for the characters in our novel.
Writing Tip of the Pod: Don't be afraid to write weird quirky books with weird quirky characters, because damn it? Life is weird.
Dog Tip for Life: Dogs are better than alligators.
Shout Out! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING AND OTHER NEWS IN THE WOODS - READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW! My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It's scary and one of https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Carrie has been working on the Write Submit Support Class that she's doing with the Writing Barn and the whole class is about creating a writing community and supporting each other, right?
And one of the first classes talks about "Living the Literary Life," which is a phrase that she's honestly not super into because she spends a lot of her time just trying to convince people to live their own life let alone a life with a qualifier in it like 'literary.'
Some people think living the literary life is about relationships. Carrie thinks it's about that, but it's also about intention. It's about giving yourself the space to notice things, people, conversations, poems, beer. It doesn't matter. And then making those connections into story. The literary life is about reading and noticing and writing.
It's about valuing yourself enough to live the life you want to live.
It's about the yearning that exists in you to live a life where you find meaning, and about the yearning that exists in stories where characters yearn, too.
So what does that have to do with boxers or briefs or the p-word, which was the original title of our post until Carrie realized that the p-word stood for words that aren't 'panties,' which was the p-word she was talking about.
Spoiler Tangent:Carrie hates the p-word, the panties one. Honestly, she hates a lot of p-words.
Back to the topic Our title refers to the fact that there's no one way to live the literary life just like there's no one type of undergarment that is the best for everyone. You life is yours. There's no one way to live it. The phrase 'literary life' is pretty vague, but that's good because you can take that phrase and put your stamp on it, just like your mom used to put your name in your underwear, right?
CHARLES DEBUSSEY SAID THERE IS NO THEORY, JUST TO LISTEN and that's pretty cool if you think about it. Listen to your heart, to what resonates to you. That's how to live your life - literary or not.
Writing Tip of the Pod - Think about your goals as a writer. What are your intentions? What would make you feel like you're living a literary life? Is it about reading, writing, noticing?
Dog Tip for Life - There's no one right way to do the simplest thing and that includes pooping.
Shout Out! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Help Us and Do An Awesome Good Deed Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
BE A PART OF THE PODCAST! Hey! If you download the Anchor application, you can call into the podcast, record a question, or just say 'hi,' and we'll answer. You can be heard on our podcast! Sa-sweet!
No question is too wild. But just like Shaun does, try not to swear, okay?
Here is the linkto the mobile app.
WRITING AND OTHER NEWS ART. I do art stuff. You can find it and buy a print here.
https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, Shaun and I made a bonus podcast at yesterday's Fourth Annual Bar Harbor Winter Beer Fest.
Yes, you heard that right.
We basically battled ridiculously cold temperatures the day before a giant storm in order to hang out with a bunch of Maine beer drinkers and we made new friends, talked to men in kilts, brewers, and a really cool guy making a film about kids doing really cool things.
Yes, we make less sense as we go on.
Yes, part of the podcast was created in a port-a-potty.
You should listen to it anyway.
Here are links to Thom's amazing project with the students trying to save whales. A newspaper article is here. An Instagram account is here. Thom's film projects Facebook page is here.
Shout Out! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Help Us and Do An Awesome Good Deed Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
BE A PART OF THE PODCAST! Hey! If you download the Anchor application, you can call into the podcast, record a question, or just say 'hi,' and we'll answer. You can be heard on our podcast! Sa-sweet!
No question is too wild. But just like Shaun does, try not to swear, okay?
Here is the linkto the mobile app.
WRITING AND OTHER NEWS ART. I do art stuff. You can find it and buy a print here.
TIME STOPPERS! You can order my middle grade fantasy novel Time Stoppers Escape From the Badlands here or anywhere.
People call it a cross between Harry Potter and Percy Jackson but it’s set in Maine. It’s full of adventure, quirkiness and heart.
MOE BERG The Spy Who Played Baseball is a picture book biography about Moe Berg. And… there’s a movie out now about Moe Berg, a major league baseball player who became a spy. How cool is that?
It’s awesome and quirky and fun.
https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
How can we make our organizations and ourselves happy?
We talk about this ALL THE TIME in our house. To be fair we also talk about expelling gas out the rectum and cookie recipes, but happiness gets mentioned a lot.
We like to think of this, which Will Durant wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do.”
Humans are pattern seekers, but sometimes those patterns aren’t helpful ones. We fall into our default patterns; they become like well-used highways, constantly-used routes to our thinking. Our brains are like mechanical devices, wired for efficiency and for those learned patterns.
How many of us get up, make coffee, go out and exercise, come back drink our coffee, go to work via the same road, every day - or some pattern like that. We're wired for efficiency. We've learned the pattern.
But the cool thing about our brains is that we can rewire them.
The currency of the media, social media, blog posts makes it that news is attention. And negative news gets a lot of attention. Threats get attention more than positive stories and inspiration. Or do they?
The more entrenched in our lives and our organizations and our networks that we become, the less we see the need for new patterns.
But we need are inspired evangelists. What we need is growth and change in our lives and in our writing.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Go write somewhere new. Seriously. If you are able-bodied, get up and go write somewhere besides your normal desk or coffee house or library. Switch it up.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Routines are important for dogs, but that doesn't mean that they don't get bored. Let your dog stop to sniff an interesting bush. Let yourself stop to notice an interesting tree. Add in 15 minutes to your schedule to allow yourself some room to discover and roam.
Shout Out The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
Warning Shaun was painting the walls in a super small room right before recording the podcast. You can tell.
Help Us and Do An Awesome Good Deed Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
BE A PART OF THE PODCAST! Hey! If you download the Anchor application, you can call into the podcast, record a question, or just say 'hi,' and we'll answer. You can be heard on our podcast! Sa-sweet!
No question is too wild. But just like Shaun does, try not to swear, okay?
Here is the link to the mobile app.
You can find out more about us at Carrie's website, carriejonesbooks.blog
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
A recent study by the Authors Guild basically says that if you want to be a writer, prepare to be poor.
In 2017, full-time writers made a median salary of around $20k. That’s full-time writers. In the last ten years, writers’ earnings have decreased by 42 percent.
The article talks about causes and how this impacts authors’ writings and our society. But it doesn’t talk a lot about mental health, about how a lack of pay impacts creativity.
The study’s press release quotes T.J. Stiles as saying, “Poverty is a form of censorship. That’s because creation costs. Writing requires resources, and it imposes opportunity costs. Limiting writing to the financially independent and the sinecured punishes authors based on their lack of wealth and income.”
So all that basically sucks, but still we write. And there are a ton of YOU CAN MAKE A MILLION DOLLARS ON YOUR FIRST BOOK people out there. Those people? They are people who are trying to make their own million dollars – off of you with their vague ‘info-videos’ and ‘seminars’ and downloadable assets that basically tell you to write, read, write more, submit, make a blog site. There we gave the same advice for you right now for free.
This week the Golden Globes were on and there were a bunch of winners, but way more losers. And while we were reading about it, the same lesson kept ringing out at us.
You and the work you do contributes to a bigger purpose.
Your actions make a difference to people.
Your presence, your existence, is important.
You don’t have to be Hollywood to be important. You don’t need a million followers. You don’t need to win a golden globe.You just need to be. Do you. Realize that your work matters and you matter more than the outside metrics of awards and money. You don’t need other people to tell you that you’re a success. You are one by being here.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD Be okay with not making a ton of money and having to do some side hustles – of the legal kind. Write the best stories you can, focus on craft, read a ton and you’ll stand out from the rest.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE Joy is more important than money but money buys bacon.
BE A PART OF THE PODCAST! Hey! If you download the Anchor application, you can call into the podcast, record a question, or just say ‘hi,’ and we’ll answer. You can be heard on our podcast! Sa-sweet!
No question is too wild. But just like Shaun does, try not to swear, okay?
Here is the link to the mobile app.
SHOUT OUT
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
TIME STOPPERS! You can order my middle grade fantasy novel Time Stoppers Escape From the Badlands here or anywhere.
People call it a cross between Harry Potter and Percy Jackson but it’s set in Maine. It’s full of adventure, quirkiness and heart.
MOE BERG The Spy Who Played Baseball is a picture book biography about Moe Berg. A
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Okay. Okay. I know we always try to be positive because we are positive people. Cough. But New Years? It's a little frustrating.
That's because it's all about goals and new starts. And you know, every day should be about that, right? And then you're like, "Crap, I failed in my goals. Crap, I need new goals. Crap, why is this party boring? Crap, should my new goal to be to never attend a party?"
And so on.
But that pressure? To be Instagram-worthy, to be super achiever goal person, to be extra? That's what makes New Years suck. At this house, we like to just celebrate that we're still alive, not bankrupt, and not in jail. It's way better that way because there's not as much pressure.
A long time ago - back in the 1980s - this guy Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was studying happiness. He gave people pagers. Remember this was in the 1980s. Then he and his research assistants would send the people messages at random times and ask how they were doing, feeling, what they were doing, etc. It sounds a bit like when your mom texts you, honestly.
And he discovered flow. People were happy when they were super engaged in the task they were doing. People weren't happy when they were doing nothing. They were happy when they were involved in something.
Minds were blown.
When people were in the 'flow,' they forgot about time, space, all the other detritus in their lives. They were focused on the now, on what they were doing. What they were doing might be writing, sports, hanging out with other humans, art, and so on... But for them the involvement was so intense that they became engaged and absorbed into it and were happy.
Writing should do that for you.
Help Us?
Hey! Please like and subscribe and even donate to our podcast so we can worry less about money. To check out more writing tips, life tips, or back episodes, check out Carrie's website carriejonesbooks.blog
Happy New Year!
Writing Tip of the Pod If you aren't in the flow, why are you writing? Give yourself ten minutes. Set a timer. If the writing isn't working, get up and go back later. Life is too short to be unhappy. Make that your new year mantra. Don't spend time outside the flow unless it's necessary.
Dog Tip for Life Fun and work aren't mutually exclusive. Having fun and being useful aren't either, man. Pull out your inner dog and go with the flow this year. Look for the flow.
Be a Part of the Podcast! Hey! If you download the Anchor application, you can call into the podcast, record a question, or just say 'hi,' and we'll answer. You can be heard on our podcast! Sa-sweet!
No question is too wild. But just like Shaun does, try not to swear, okay?
Here is the link to the mobile app.
SHOUT OUT The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
TIME STOPPERS! You can order Carrie's middle grade fantasy novel Time Stoppers Escape From the Badlands here or anywhere.
People call it a cross between Harry Potter and Percy Jackson but it’s set in Maine. It’s full of adventure, quirkiness and heart, but mostly it's fun.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
So, because Christmas is on the same day as the podcast release and we weren't - cough - super organized, we're sharing with you our day before Christmas.
What? Are there writing tips?
Nah. Not really.
It's just us. Randomly taking voice memos as we go about our days and then splicing that stuff together so you can see what it's like for us on Christmas Eve Day.
Be a Part of the Podcast! Hey! If you download the Anchor application, you can call into the podcast, record a question, or just say 'hi,' and we'll answer. You can be heard on our podcast! Sa-sweet!
No question is too wild. But just like Shaun does, try not to swear, okay?
Here is the link to the mobile app.
Blog Break It's a big holiday week here and so Carrie is going to be taking a bit of a blog break for the next two weeks. There will be a podcast today and next Tuesday, but other than that? It's a little time for Carrie's brain to recharge and rest. Thank you for understanding! But you can catch up on old blogs here at www.carriejonesbooks.blog
ART. I do art stuff. You can find it and buy a print here.
TIME STOPPERS! You can order my middle grade fantasy novel Time Stoppers Escape From the Badlands here or anywhere.
People call it a cross between Harry Potter and Percy Jackson but it’s set in Maine. It’s full of adventure, quirkiness and heart.
MOE BERG The Spy Who Played Baseball is a picture book biography about Moe Berg. And… there’s a movie out now about Moe Berg, a major league baseball player who became a spy. How cool is that?
It’s awesome and quirky and fun.
FLYING AND ENHANCED Men in Black meet Buffy the Vampire Slayer? You know it. You can buy them hereor anywhere.
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carriejonesbooks/support
Yesterday on her blog, Carrie talked about how feeling successful in your career or life is really tied to having your personal values resonate in your occupation, and being guided by those same core values instead of society’s outside metrics about what makes someone a success.
The blog is here. (carriejonesbooks.blog)
But on the podcast, we’re going to touch on something we’ve talked about before – stakeholders.
Stakeholders are all around you. They’re in your past and your present. They have expectations. They project their own crud onto you. They are the people who come to mind when you say, “What will X think if I do this?” They are real people. But they are also voices in your head.
For Carrie, an example would be when she drew as a little kid and her mom said, “Nobody in our family has an artistic bone in her body.”
That comment from someone she loved stayed inside of her, right? And it made her think she could never do art, but it also could make her go out and say, “To heck with that. I’m going to prove my mom wrong.”
Or maybe your mom’s dream was to save the world, but she never had the chance to. She projects that dream on you and now your dream is to save the world.
Coming to terms with what YOU want versus what your STAKEHOLDERS want is a really valuable experience in helping you feel successful and fulfilled.
HOW TO COME TO TERMS WITH YOUR STAKEHOLDERS:
Make a list. List all the people who have ever told you what you could do in your career. List all the people who have ever told you what you couldn’t do. List all the people who give you advice. Now, look at your list. Is that person important to you? Then that person is a stakeholder.
But stakeholders aren’t just people. Stakeholders can be colleges, institutions, social media.
Think about when you post something on Twitter, SnapChat, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. People like (or don’t), share (or don’t), comment (or don’t) and that gives you value and and ideas and judgements of others all meshed in one place. It becomes a stakeholder.
Our life and our choices are part of intertwined systems and so, too, is our feeling of success. A big first step towards self-fulfillment is realizing when it’s you being happy and satisfied versus other people being happy and satisfied for you.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
If your stakeholder’s influence created a fear or limitation, it’s time to let that go.
And if our idea of success and our career is about playing it safe? About being like the rest of the pack? You might want to rethink that, too.
There is safety in being like everyone else, in thinking like everyone else, in sticking to the pack and following the same route, but is that really helpful? Is that success for you?
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
If you aren’t taking risks with your writer, or taking the risk to be a writer, then maybe it’s time. Ignore the stakeholders that are limiting you. Be who you want to be. Take chances.
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”
Maya Angelou
SHOUT OUT
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
OUR PODCAST – DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE.
Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
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Too often we really focus only on the mechanics of story. Writers and student-writers are told to make perfect sentences, understand the use of the semi-colon, and to spell words correctly.
“Do not turn in a manuscript to an agent or editor unless it’s perfect,” is a pretty big industry standard.
Be perfect. Write perfectly. Have perfect grammar. Have a perfect plot. Spell everything perfectly. Here’s the thing: Your story won’t ever be perfect especially if you’re working on it all by yourself. Do the best that you can. Spell all the words. But do not fret about it forever.
So much of our writing life is spent making sure the mechanics of our stories are perfect, that we sometimes forget about the psychological aspects of our stories, the heart.
It happens to us from the very beginning in grade school. Our teachers focus on the paragraphs, the spelling, the grammar because they’re trying to teach us to effectively communicate with the written word, but they sometimes forget to talk about our imagination, our cleverness, how our stories show our deeper selves and feelings.
How many of us worked super hard on a fourth-grade story that we thought was the most amazing story ever only to receive it with a note like, “Good job with your paragraphs!” Or, “Well done with your spelling!”
RANDOM THOUGHTS
Our random thoughts this week both focus on imperfection. Shaun says in the first one, “I’m not exciting today.”
And the second one? Ho boy. Carrie feels super vulnerable about the second one, because it shows her totally tipsy because of her social anxiety and Shaun mixing WAY TOO STRONG a drink.
The point though, is that much like our podcast, our thoughts aren’t canned or perfect. We are real people, not polished, but pretty awesome anyways.
SHOUT OUT
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
WRITING TIPS:
Don’t forget about the heart of your story, the resonance. Forget about the mechanics for a bit. What is this story actually about? What is its heart?
People like to call it a theme, but that sounds too much like grade school to us. The heart of the story is the big, essential inside part of the story’s hero. Her catalyst. Her life’s question and realization. To find it, ask what your character’s heart wants and needs. To find it, think about the lie about the world (or herself) that your character believes. That’s how you find the heart.
DOG TIPS
Dogs don’t care about mechanics of things. They care about the heart of things. Be a dog.
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Shaun: So, Carrie's not the best in the mornings and too much noise, clutter, extra to-do items pretty much throws her completely off her game.
Carrie: One of the reasons that the dogs and I do daily motivating thoughts on my Facebook and Twitter accounts is because it helps ground me and make me feel less cranky and stressed.... Usually. Shaun, however, is a morning person who craves noise and tropical music while I'm a Pachibel's Cannon morning person.
Shaun: True.
Carrie: So, this week's podcast is the first in a series of podcasts about how to make your life and your writing life better and our first tip is....
DOG TIP OF THE CAST: Just say no to the stuff you don't want to do. You don't have to say yes to invitations or the extra responsibilities. You don't have to respond to every single text and/or email. You get to be in charge of these ancillary parts of your life. If you don't want to email/text/talk to someone, there might be a really good reason why. In this life, we have a limited amount of time to expend. Expend it well. Do it on your terms. Dogs get this.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD: Yep. Same point. Write the stories that you want to, that resonate with you. Say no to the stories you think other people want you to write. When you get rid of the baggage, the things you don't want or need to do, you free up your mind of clutter and give it space to create. Listen to the full podcast to hear Shaun's random thought all about marketing - KaPerPi. It's knowledge, awareness, public relations and public image. It's pretty cool.
SHOUT OUT
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
For more tips and insight and cool things, check out carriejonesbooks.blog or our webpage Dogs are Smarter Than People.
Thank you so much for liking and subscribing and sharing! You rock.
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So, honestly, this podcast is weird. We sound like we're on illegal drugs, but we aren't sure why. Our brains just weren't working. Sadly, Carrie's mouth wasn't either. Who else would call a 'podcast' a 'codcast?'
Anyway, we asked people for topics for our podcast. And people on Carrie’s Facebook were completely helpful.
Jon Hill wanted to know why there weren’t more palomino unicorns.
It’s an important question.
And some other people wanted us to talk about cow hugging. Matt Baya suggested we discuss this trend that started getting some big press in May 2018. Wellness is a 3.7 billion dollar industry that focuses on your spiritual, physical and mental health and wellbeing.
And now - cows can be a part of that.
Cows are warm and cozy and according to one farm in upstate New York, terribly relaxing. They make you feel good.
Listen to the full podcast to understand how Shaun feels about this - if you dare. Because we also talk about Okay Cupid, Friendsgiving, methane, and Rural Legends.
Dog Tip for Life: Dude. Do you. If you’re into paying people to cuddle with cows. Go for it.
Writing Tip of the Cast.Look. Do you research. Cow tipping allegedly is an urban legend. Don’t include urban legends as fact. Fake news. Fake facts? Calling them fake is the nice way of going about it. It’s lies. Writers are better than that.
For more brilliance and silliness, check out Carrie's blog, carriejonesbooks.blog
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In this latest episode of "Dogs are Smarter Than People," we talk about how to be a good friend and to write good friendships in your books and stories. Friendship and children's books are a pretty natural combination. Carrie's own books are big on friends even when they are full of romance.
Friends matter. And there are so many beautiful examples of friendships in children's books, but let's go with this Maine classic from E.B. White's Charlotte's Web.
Wilbur blushed. “But I’m not terrific, Charlotte. I’m just about average for a pig.”
“You’re terrific as far as I’m concerned,” replied Charlotte, sweetly, “and that’s what counts. You’re my best friend, and Ithink you’re sensational. Now stop arguing and go get some sleep!”
In our life, Carrie is Wilbur and Shaun is Charlotte. Just so you know.
DOG TIPS FOR FRIENDSHIP AND LIFE
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You do not have to be everyone's friend. Choose wisely. Pick the people who don't bring you down. That's the base for the friendship that you get to build on.
-
Don't pretend to be who you aren't. Don't be Captain Boasts a Lot. Don't Be Mrs. One Up or even Madame Fixes Everyone Else's Problem.
For the rest of the tips, check out carriejonesbooks.blog and search for "DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE." And please like, subscribe, and send us messages via the Anchor app. :)
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Carrie and Shaun are still driving through the South and getting a little punchy. Thinking up book ideas like the Towel of Poo and ruminating about whether toothbrush sharing is gross or not. Check out Carrie’s blog at carriejonesbooks.blog and please like and subscribe to the podcast!
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It is a bonus podcast where weird things happen like potential ghosts, fishing and roadside painted purple Jesus!
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Shaun: Two weeks ago we were hanging out at a friend's house and Carrie met a woman who was talking about writing, and how it helped her through some tough times and how she loved writing, but didn't think she could ever be one.
"It's all stream of consciousness," she said as if it was a bad thing.
This of course broke Carrie's heart.
Carrie: To be fair, my heart is easily broken. Like last week, when one of our friends said that Shaun is the best part of the podcast because he's funny and I'm trying to be informative. Heart broken for me. Happy for the Shaun.
Anyway, since I'm informative, stream of consciousness is a term that William James created a little over a century ago and it means
“… it is nothing joined; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ is the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life.” That's taken from Literary Devices Net, which was quoting Mr. James.
Toni Morrison, Jose Saramago, Beckett, Joyce all use stream-of-consciousness as a narrative construct in their stories.
Shaun: Honestly, our entire podcast is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness narrative. Tomorrow on Carrie's regular blog, she'll have some writing tips about using stream of consciousness.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE:
Live in your moment, go with your river of thought.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD:
Don't let anyone ever tell you that your literary constructs or devices or voice isn't cool. You do you.
SHOUT OUT:
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
OUR PODCAST - DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE.
Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There's a new episode every Tuesday! For more writing tips, check out Carrie's blog at www.carriejonesbooks.blog
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All sorts of different things scare different people. We’re breaking from our normal podcast format for Halloween and talking about our scary stories and what makes a story feel scary to us.
Stephen King said,
“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud. ”
And he also said,
“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm.
The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm.
And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…”
What scares you? Do you agree with King’s hierarchy of fear?
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Knowing when to hide is an okay life skill.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
Go for terror.
SHOUT OUT
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
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This past weekend was sort of scary.
Carrie's worst case scenario of presenting happened. She was scheduled to give a four-hour seminar on public image, but when she arrived the place wasn't unlocked, there was no water, but worse- there was no A/V. It was not pretty.
And then...
We went to a party, a SNL-themed party, and because our friends are good at peer pressure and we were dressed as Spartan cheerleaders, we stunted and Carrie had to jump on Shaun's back in a short skirt (with modesty shorts!) and she was so nervous that she actually got sweaty.
So, it turns out that Carrie was totally afraid to do a cheering stunt.
Carrie: This is because I am old and have broken knees.
And Shaun had to face his fear by actually performing the cheer.
Writing (like living) can be full of fear.
Over on The Write Practice, Jeff Elkins tells of "Three Tricks to Overcome Your Fear of Writing."
How does he deal with the fear?
HIS THREE TIPS FOR OVERCOMING THAT FEAR OF WRITING ARE:
He names it. He leans into it. Meditates through it.
And he also has this awesome idea for desensitizing yourself from fear, which is our .....
WRITING TIP OF THE POD!
"Take fifteen minutes to write something that scares you. Maybe it’s a scene you’ve been avoiding in your work in progress, maybe it’s a story you’ve been nervous to start, or maybe it’s a letter you’re scared to write. As you work, if fear raises its head, try one of the techniques above to work through it." - Jeff Elkins
DOG TIP FOR LIFE:
Dogs have all kinds of fears just like people do. When dogs have fears, we use treats to encourage them for brave behavior, we don't force them out of their safe places, and we don't shove their fear in their face and shout "GET OVER IT, BUDDY."
Because that's not cool.
We deserve to give ourselves the same respect. Reward yourself for being brave, don't insist on pushing yourself into your fear too hard and too fast.
Don't push yourself, man. SHOUT OUT
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
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A long time ago, our daughter Em was taking karate, which was the only martial art available then in our town.
She was eight years old and tiny.
The instructor was Shaun size – sort of – and bald, super intimidating. He had all the little ones line up and kick rectangular strike pads. Em’s kick was so unexpected and powerful that the adult holding the pad fell over.
Did they tell her, “Good job?”
Nope.
They made her sit down.
“What did I do wrong, Mommy?” Em asked.
“Nothing, buddy. Nothing.”
And a mom next to us whispered, “You were too strong. They don’t know what to do with women who are too strong.”
For the rest of the text that goes with this podcast, check out carriejonesbooks.blog "Dogs Are Smarter Than People."
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Trust yourself. Some writing gurus are... Well, there's no once size fits all about writing edicts and adjectives are not the devil.
For the words that go with the podcast, check out: https://carriejonesbooks.blog/dogs-are-smarter-than-people-podcast-stupid-writing-tips-are-stupid/
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Dogs are Smarter Than People is the quirky podcast about writing life and dogs and marriage, too.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
Remember that kindness, that telling moment of giving or empathy? T. hat makes the characters you write so much more likable. You root for characters who take care out of others.
Search the world and your life for those random moments. Use them in your writing.
Be the flamingo of change. Don't be afraid to be innovative, to be quirky, to be kind. We all tend to resist personal change, remember that when you're writing your characters. For more tips check out - https://carriejonesbooks.blog/dogs-are-smarter-than-people-the-podcast/
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For the written tips that go with the podcast, check out https://carriejonesbooks.blog/dogs-are-smarter-than-people-the-podcast/
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Writing tips. Life tips. Quirky as heck. It is our first and maybe most authoritative episode
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Paul Martin talks about Rotary and Polio
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Hooking Your Readers by Making Memorable Characters. Plus, horrible panelist types. Plus, Death Grip Eye. It's an awesome episode.
So, when you read a book, and you remember a book, a lot of the time it isn’t the plot that you’re remembering. It’s the character that has held you enthralled.
Plots are super important, but it’s the character that things are happening to that really hold the plot together.
A lot of stories fail because their main character is… Well, he’s boring. She’s a bit blah. There’s nothing about them that stands out.
We remember the people who are larger the life. I know we’ve talked about it before, but it’s so important. Make your characters outrageous. Make them wild. We all love Captain America, but he’s not quite as memorable as The Hulk or Iron Man.
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In the latest episode of "Dogs Are Smarter Than People," Carrie talks about Book Release Day, her lack of celebration ability, and explains what Conflicting Wants are and how they are good for story. Shaun disagrees. A lot.
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Join an internationally bestselling children's book author (Carrie Jones) and her down-home husband and their dogs as they try to live a happy, better life by being happier, better people . You can use those skills in writing and vice versa. But we’re not perfect, just like our podcast. We’re cool with that.
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