Month: September 2023

Some studies have shown that 85 percent of the messages children receive are negative.

• Don’t do that.
• Don’t say that.
• Sit still.
• Stop it.
• You’ll hurt yourself.

This definitely sounds familiar. Even with good parents, you probably heard a lot of negative messaging during your formative years. Those of us without good parents heard the safety and discipline language, as well as some more emotionally burdensome messages.

If you’re anything like me, you absorbed this kind of communication and it’s become your default inner voice in adulthood. The emotional openness and vulnerability associated with creativity make some of us even more susceptible.

• Don’t write that.
• Don’t share that.
• You’ll be embarrassed if you do that.
• No one wants that.

During your day, notice how you talk to others – and yourself. Do you start a lot of sentences with No, Stop, or Don’t? Practice saying yes to yourself, especially when it involves your creativity. Practice telling yourself that you can. If that’s too much to ask, practice saying it to someone else. See how good it feels.

Another writing prompt/exercise, inspired by an exercise in A Year of Living Consciously, which was itself inspired by a common ethical quandary.

When do you tell the whole truth and when is it ok to lie?

The common scenario in this moral inquiry is the extramarital affair or one-night stand. If the affair is over or the lapse isn’t likely to be repeated, should the cheating spouse tell the other about it? On the one hand, honesty is important. Secrets kills relationships. On the other hand, being truthful could hurt someone needlessly. Again, this assumes that the cheat isn’t a serial offender, but had a one-time moral lapse.

Are your characters keeping secrets from one another? Game out these two scenarios. In one, have the secret-keeper confess and see where it leads. Does the confession bring your character closer to someone else, clear the air of a problem, or allow them to live with more integrity? Or does the revelation destroy something between the characters? If the character chooses to maintain the secret, how does that affect their relationships with others? To what lengths will your character go to keep this secret? What is destroyed or protected by the mystery?

In this week’s forecast for Aquarians, Rob Brezsny says it’s a good time for easeful creativity.

Brezsny notes that Oasis’ Noel Gallager wrote most of the music and lyrics for “Supersonic” in 30 minutes while the rest of the band had dinner, and suggests that a similar creative flow is in store for us water babies.

“I suspect you will have that kind of agile, succinct, matter-of-fact creativity in the coming days,” he says. “If you are wise, you will channel it into dreaming up solutions for two of your current dilemmas. This is one time when life should be easier and more efficient than usual.”

If he could peek into my life, he’d know that every day could be easier and more efficient, but I won’t hold that against him.

I’m not sure I have any relevant dilemmas, though. I wish I had more hours in the day so that I could work on my creative projects while still having some semblance of an orderly household and social life. I do like the idea of effortless creativity though. With my luck, I’ll use it all up on work crap.

Sometimes, the smallest irritation between friends can cause a break in the relationship. Perhaps someone forgot your birthday or didn’t express appreciation for a favor. Maybe you thought an accomplishment deserved some bragging. Did someone not “like” your Facebook post?

As a writing prompt/exercise, choose two characters – use characters from a current project if that’s easier – and imagine a small slight or misunderstanding between them. Whatever you came up with, make it smaller. Smaller than that. Make your idea so small that one or the other of your characters wouldn’t have noticed it on a good day. But today, for some reason, that irritation stuck in their craw.

Now imagine how that most insignificant moment could blow out of proportion and create a serious rift between your characters. What happens when someone can’t ignore or forgive another person’s minor indiscretion, or fails to ask for a clarification? How does the injury fester and what eventually erupts?

How much mountain can you create out of a molehill?

Continuing with the concept of moods, today consider what physical sensations accompany your protagonist’s moods.

Does fear cause a sick feeling in their stomach? Does anxiety knot up their shoulders? Does anger make their skin hot? Peak moods are more likely to trigger high stakes physical sensations. Lower intensity moods – such as irritation instead of anger – will probably bring on milder reactions.

When you signal a change in your character’s mood, consider using a shift in their physical sensations to foreshadow it. You don’t have to beat the reader over the head with multiple descriptions of your hero’s emotional state. Switch it up by showing their physical reaction as well.

Continuing on this mini-series of posts on character mood and how this influences their choices and observations, today consider how and when your protagonist’s moods change.

Your story likely has a number of obvious points for this kind of shift. Characters experience success or disappointment, obstacles and problems arise, solutions are found, and goals are achieved. Those are natural places where your hero’s emotional landscape will shift.

But you can also look for subtler ways to trigger a change in mood.

Often, our moods and bodies shift even before we acknowledge that something is wrong. A character who is lonely but doesn’t realize it may experience a drop in mood. They may feel depressed or irritable, even if they can’t put their finger on why. Our hero may ignore events spiraling out of control, but deep down, his emotional core will recognize it and his mood will change. Your heroine may not acknowledge that her old beliefs and ways of thinking aren’t working for her anymore, but her mood will change when her failures start to compound.

When you tune in to what your characters are feeling, also pay attention to what they’re ignoring, and consider how that affects their mood, outlook, and decision-making.

Another busy real-world work week, but I got several compliments on the marketing and sales plan I developed for my small company. Not bad for a guy who has no background in marketing or sales. Research Nerd saves the day!

I got myself back on track with blogging and creative writing this week. I got off-course after my eye surgery a few weeks back and then work projects (see above) took up a lot of my mental energy. But I got back to it. I was dreading working on my novel, partly because I couldn’t remember exactly where I left off and partly because I knew my next big project was ironing out some plot strands, which is always where I hit creative speed bumps. But I did it. I didn’t wait for inspiration or a special day. To make myself start, I read through what I had worked on before my unintentional break. Then I filled in some gaps. Breaking the ice on something difficult always makes the next writing session easier.

For the last couple of days, I’ve talked about how mood flavors our experiences and observations, in the same way we are influenced by our experiences and interests.

I’m going to try an exercise with one of my WIPs and thought it was an idea worth writing down.

Go through your story and make note of your protagonist’s mood in each chapter or scene, including how it might change throughout the segment. Much like your character’s goal for each scene, their mood is going to alter how they experience and describe their environment, as well as their decisions.

Flag places where you can strengthen your narrative or dialogue using your protagonist’s mood as a guide. Sharpen what they say. Use sensory language that reflects their mood and sets the tone for the scene.

As an extra step, create a separate tracker to show how your hero’s mood swings up and down throughout the story. If you discover that your hero is mostly upbeat or always on a downer, that might be a signal that your story is emotionally flat. On the other hand, you probably don’t want your character to experience wild mood swings from scene to scene. Consider adding stepping stone scenes to show the progression from one temperament to the next.

You might also flag your character’s highest and lowest points. Do these peak and valley moments occur at the right time in your story? Your major turning points and emotional scenes should correspond somewhat to your protagonist’s strongest moods. If your character peaks or valleys at the wrong moment, your story could feel emotionally off-kilter. Try to align the moods with your plot’s big moments and see what happens.

Here are some phrases I hear often but wish I heard less:

Writers shouldn’t write about certain topics. Writers of this type shouldn’t write about characters of that type. Such and such story isn’t yours to tell. You can’t joke about that. You can’t talk about that. You can’t talk about that in the way you talk about it. When you talk about your personal experience, other people who don’t have that experience might feel left out. When you talk about your happiness, someone else might feel sad. When you talk about your trauma, you’re ignoring people who have it worse.

Your thoughts are your own. Your stories are yours.

No one has the right to dictate how you spend your time or what you write about. No one has the right to stop you from talking about your experiences. You can talk or write about what’s happened to you, even if other people are jealous of your experiences, even if other people have gone through worse. Your life story isn’t inclusive. You are not required to send your thoughts through a social media gauntlet before you express them. There is no committee vote on how you spend your creative time.

There’s a time and place to discuss diversity and inclusion in writing, and whether a writer can do justice to a story idea. But today is an affirmation.

You are the only person on the planet with your distinct set of experiences, memories, observations, wisdom, and point of view. Many writers aren’t interested in or capable of writing through their individuality. Some get scared off, because they don’t want to offend anyone or be too extra.

Nah.

Lean into your history. Tell your stories through your uniquely skewed lens. Tell us what you’ve learned and believe. Put your ideas and wisdom on the page and let the world figure it out.

As a wise man once said:

“Each of you, for himself or herself, by himself or herself, and on his or her own responsibility, must speak. It is a solemn and weighty responsibility and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or politician. Each must decide for himself or herself alone what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn’t.

…Let men label you as they may, if you alone of all the nation decide one way, and that way be the right way by your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country, hold up your head for you have nothing to be ashamed of.” – Mark Twain

A close POV – either first person or close third – is a successful method for bringing your reader into your story. In both POVs, you have the opportunity to create the “…and you were there!” experience for your reader. When you write in a close point of view, the experiences you describe, how you describe them, the language you use, and even the syntax of your narrative should all be filtered through the personality and interests of your protagonist or narrator, to the best of your ability.

If your story or a scene is set at a busy convention hall, an extrovert and an agoraphobe will use dramatically different language to describe what they see and experience. An extrovert may scan the other attendees for name tags, to identify people to connect with, while an introvert may look for a quiet corner and flag the exits in case they need to make a quick getaway. A germophobe will be hyper aware of being touched, and may take extra notice of how people interact with themselves and their surroundings. If you’re worried about getting a cold, you’ll notice when someone scratches his nose and then touches a doorknob. Someone who has never attended such an event will have a different experience than someone who buys a ticket every year without fail.

Motivation provides another lens for description. In the setting above, is your protagonist there as a buyer or seller? Do they want to make connections, meet up with friends, get a photo with a celebrity? Are they looking for a specific object or experience? Is this event something they wanted to attend or did a friend or date drag them along? Figuring out what your characters wants in a scene will help you determine what needs to be described. What are they looking for? What’s missing? What did they not expect to see? A character who attends a tech convention looking for a specific cutting-edge gadget may experience other people and objects as a blur, while a character who isn’t tech savvy may be fascinated by every minute detail of all the new toys or susceptible to every sales pitch.

Similarly, mood affects how we experience our surroundings. A character attending an event with a prospective romantic partner will have a different experience than someone who got dumped the night before. And that can be the same character at different points in your story. When your protagonist is in a great mood, they are more likely to describe their surroundings and experience in upbeat, optimistic language. But when they are in a foul mood, everything looks like shit, even people and possessions they love.

A few weeks ago, I got talked into buying a ticket for an anime convention. To put it mildly, I’m not a fan. I like a small percentage of manga and a few anime movies, but in general, I don’t connect with the majority of the output. For every Akira there’s a Schoolgirl Cyber-Warrior Hentai Panty Drop that makes me want to gouge out my eyes and maybe call CPS.

But, it was a spur of the moment invitation, and I didn’t have anything else going on, so I decided to go. In the moment, I felt happy to be included and proud of myself for being more spontaneous than usual. I decided to be open-minded about it and look for art or movies that I might enjoy. I’m a veteran skimmer of content so I can blur out what doesn’t appeal to me and can find something to like in just about anything. Plus, I love watching other people geek out over stuff they love, even if the mystique is lost on me. I am 100% the friend who will enjoy the thing with you, even if I would never enjoy the thing on my own dime.

Then I got stood up. At six a.m. the morning of the con.

That day pass I bought? The night before, it was an out-of-budget splurge that gave me the unexpected treat of a day out of the house. I earned it. It was a ticket to fun. That morning, it was $65 flushed down the toilet. I do alright financially, but I still try to stick to a budget. If I wanted to treat myself to $65 worth of crap I don’t need, I would have chosen something way better than a ticket to an anime con.

But the ticket itself? The con? Didn’t change a bit from one moment to the next. My perception of them changed. One moment, the ticket was a goofy splurge that promised to me get out of the house for an afternoon, and the next, it was waste of money I could have spent elsewhere or not at all.

Pay attention to your characters’ moods. What they feel will color everything around them. If you tune in, the right language will start to present itself.