The Essentials of Storytelling

Posted on January 30, 2015 ·
Image from Flickr by joinash

Image from Flickr by joinash

My son hates to write. By write, I mean the physical act of taking pencil to paper and shaping the letters that form words that form paragraphs. He’ll get there; it’s simply that his hand can’t keep up with his mind, which is whirling with stories, always. And boy, can Gabriel tell stories.

The other day, his sister decided to type one of Gabriel’s stories as he was telling it. It turned out pretty good, so I sent him with a copy for his teacher, who praised him and encouraged him to read it aloud to his classmates. (Don’t you just love teachers?)

Inspired by this triumph, Gabriel enthusiastically asked me to dictate another story for him the next day. I smoothed out a few transitions, otherwise it would have been one long sentence punctuated several times with “and then!” but otherwise I did not prompt him in any way.

When I printed this out and read it over, I was struck by Gabriel’s natural instincts for storytelling. In one paragraph, he captured the essentials that so frequently seem to elude writers—the simple three-act structure of setup, confrontation, and resolution. Here is “The Dinosaur and the Rock,” printed with permission by Gabriel Corral:

The Dinosaur and the Rock
Gabriel Corral

Once upon a time there was a dinosaur who was hungry. When he got to a plant, he noticed a big rock in front of it. He whacked it away with his tail. Then the rock bounced off a piece of rubber and killed the plant. Then the dinosaur picked up the plant with his horn, then the rock hit him and flung him to the top of a silo. When he slid off, he whacked the rock again, then he ate the plant.

END

I know, adorbs, right? Our hero doesn’t change much, so there is the problem of character development, not to mention physics and the issue of the mysterious piece of rubber. Keep in mind this is a first draft.

But the basics are all here—we have a main character who has a problem: he’s hungry, and there’s a rock standing between him and his dinner. THIS IS IMPORTANT. Your character needs a problem to solve, and your readers need to know what it is right away. Next, we have rising action as the dinosaur attempts to solve his problem and is continually thwarted by his antagonist. Finally, we have resolution as our hero prevails, and eats his dinner.

Details can be worked out later. For now, who is your protagonist, what’s her problem to solve, and who or what is standing in her way? Go write her story, and don’t forget to throw in plenty of cool action scenes. Silos are highly recommended, but optional.

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My Most Important Resolution

Posted on January 1, 2015 ·
Read more. Write more. And one more thing...

Read more. Write more. And one more thing…

Last New Year’s Day, determined not to set myself up for failure, I chose only one resolution. It worked; I’m happy to say I kept my promise to read 52 books in 2014. I started the year with Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and ended with Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming. And what a way to end the year. Woodson’s memoir, written in verse, was hugely inspiring, and so beautifully written I didn’t want it to end.

In between I read fantasy, horror, young adult, science fiction, literary short story collections, historical fiction, and much more. It was refreshing to set a reading goal instead of a writing goal. I’m an ambivalent writer—sometimes writing makes me feel wonderful and other times it makes me feel terrible. But reading always feels good. There’s no guilt involved, no self-doubt, no fear of failure.

Maybe that sounds like a cheat, like setting a reading goal wasn’t a real challenge. But it was—finding time for anything can be difficult—and what helped was tracking and publicly posting my progress with the Goodreads Reading Challenge.

Completed

I’m joining again this year, with the same goal of 52 books, only I’ve resolved that half of those books will be nonfiction. This was partly inspired by Woodson’s memoir.

I considered choosing a writing resolution for 2015. In July I turn 40, so there’s already something momentous about the year ahead. In a good way—no birthday so far has ever felt sad to me. When I turned 30 I had this amazing little girl by my side. At 35 I had a wonderful husband and a beautiful son. At 39 I had a book contract and later that year, my first published novel. So when it comes to turning 40, I just feel lucky that my greatest dreams have already been realized.

Still, there are many things I want to accomplish this year. I want to finish my second novel. I want to submit my essays and short stories more frequently. I want to take more chances. I want to stop being afraid of what people think. I want to celebrate my writing successes instead of apologizing for them (thank you, Angela Jackson-Brown). I want to trust those successes instead of doubting their validity. I want to eradicate the aforementioned guilt and self-doubt and replace them with confidence and pride.

Above all, I want to be kinder to myself. I think I can accomplish everything I want to this year, including all of my writing goals, if I just do that one small thing.

New Year’s resolutions 2015:

1. Read an average of one book per week.
2. Read one nonfiction book for every fiction book.
3. Be kinder to myself (and the rest will follow).

And you?

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When Our Characters Feel Real

Posted on December 17, 2014 ·

 

Image from Flickr by HartwigHKD

Image from Flickr by HartwigHKD

My friend and I met at the library on Saturday, in theory to exchange pages and give thoughtful critiques on each others’ writing. That didn’t happen. What we ended up doing was talking a lot about our current writing projects.

She feels ambivalent about hers—a book she started in November for NaNoWriMo. But when she talks about her previous project, the novel she wrote last year for NaNo, her whole demeanor changes, and she speaks about her characters with affection. As if they’re real people.

I love this. I want to see her go back to this novel.

When I wrote The Fourth Wall, I cared about my main character but in a distant way, because I was still getting to know her and uncovering her story. It was after I wrote the book that I began to think of Marin more as a real person. A person who—after rejections started piling up—I was letting down.

I know how it sounds. You’re probably rolling your eyes. Marin isn’t real, you’re thinking. She’s a fictional character. But that’s not how I felt when I started to wonder whether her story would be known. I felt as if I’d convinced a girl—who had great difficulty expressing herself—to use her voice, only to risk that voice going unheard. The possibility of failing her became an actual ache.

When my friend talks about her main character, when she says her name, I hear this same kind of affection and longing. This is a girl she loves and a story she feels must be told. That’s the kind of passion it takes to get a book published. You have to want it that badly.

If you’d like to get to know Marin, click here for your Kindle copy of The Fourth Wall. It would mean so much to me. I do think you’ll like Marin. Maybe, like me, you’ll even end up loving her.

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It Only Takes One “Yes”

Posted on December 7, 2014 ·

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Image from Flickr by jepoirrier

Friday was the anniversary of a pretty special occasion for me. On that day, three years ago, I received my first acceptance letter, for a short story called “Eleven Seconds.”

I will never forget the moment I received that email. It was a cold December evening, and we were gathered around the fireplace. I remember when I saw the subject line I cried out, and Abbey, who was nine years old, thought something was wrong. Then I hugged her and I hugged my son and I hugged my husband. I would have hugged you too, had you been there.

SLAB email

I’d been writing stories since grade school, but it wasn’t until my thirties that I began seriously submitting my work. Sometime after my son was born I just decided to go for it. I decided my dream of turning the title “aspiring writer” into “published author” was a good dream, and it deserved to happen, and the only way it would happen was if I stopped hiding behind the idea of it and actually put my work out there.

So I did, and I spent years collecting rejection slips. They didn’t bother me as much as you’d think. Simply corresponding with editors made me feel as if I were moving forward. It put me in a different category of writers. There are those who think about submitting their work, and then there are those who submit their work. Only writers from the second category get their work published, and the rejections they collect along the way become a kind of badge of honor.

I’d heard that once a writer breaks through, the acceptance letters start coming in pretty regularly. And that was true for me–within a month I had another one, and more would soon follow.

But there will always be rejections. Nearly everything I’ve had published was rejected first.

For example, “Eleven Seconds” was rejected three times. The Fourth Wall was rejected twenty-two times. Don’t worry too much about how many times you hear “No,” because it only takes one “Yes.”

Don’t give up.

Here’s the text of my little story that could, which originally appeared in SLAB literary magazine in the spring of 2012. Read it, if you like, and then go submit one of yours.

ELEVEN SECONDS

It started in the kitchen. A clinking of porcelain, a delicate, dreadful trembling, cups and saucers and unused dinner plates jumping in the cupboards like those little beans from Mexico. What were those called?

Thunder ripped the ground and the old man jerked up from his chair, instinctively, but the fear passed through him like a bullet. His heart fluttered once. He sat back down.

From his seat in the living room, the old man watched his kitchen heave forward and burst apart. The world could shatter around you; he knew that. Bending forward, he plucked a fragment of china from the ground, like a flower. His wife, Winnifred, had painted this piece, before the cancer took her last year. He could see her clearly, her pale knotted hand curled around the thin brush, looping and twirling like a dancer. The old man pressed his hands together and folded them over the broken china, like a prayer.

Thanks for reading!

 

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What NaNoWriMo Says About Writers

Posted on November 21, 2014 ·
Image from Flickr by gothick_matt

Image from Flickr by gothick_matt

On Saturday I forgot to take my phone to work. With this realization came a flash of near-panic—it was too late to go back, and I couldn’t fathom an entire nine hours without checking my email or accessing social media accounts.

I knew without a doubt that my husband would bring the phone; we live seven miles from my job. But I also knew that flash of near-panic was kind of pathetic–*gasp* nine hours without email!–so I challenged myself to go a day without the Internet. When I called Alex from the company phone to let him know not to bother texting me, he offered to bring my phone.

“No, I don’t need it,” I said bravely. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Just check it here and there, let me know if I miss a call.”

“Okay.”

I got by fine, and I had remembered to bring my Kindle, so there was something to read on break. When it was time to text Alex at lunch and see how his day was going, I instead dialed his number and asked if I’d missed any calls. He said, “No, but there’s some people…Tweeting? About Nay-no…something? I don’t know, some guy named Jason is Twittering, or whatever.”

I giggled. “It’s NA-NO. For NaNoWriMo. Twitter’s just letting me know a bunch of people are talking about NaNoWriMo.”

“Oh. What IS it?”

I proceeded to explain the concept of National Novel Writing Month. A month when hundreds of thousands of writers join in a quest to write a novel in thirty days, and thousands more cheer from the sidelines. Everyone supports each other; it’s not a competition but a common goal, and there are no failures because any progress toward a first draft is a reason to celebrate.

I told him about the write-ins, the sprints, the forums, the pep talks—all the ways writers motivate themselves and other participants to reach the finish line. And in doing so, I realized two things:

  1. It’s nice to have one quality phone conversation with your spouse instead of texting back and forth throughout the work day.
  2. When describing NaNoWriMo to a non-writer, it really hits you how supportive and tight-knit the writing community is. It’s incredible, you know? And pretty wonderful.

How’s your NaNo project coming along?

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Book Sales and Royalty Statements

Posted on October 31, 2014 ·
Image from Flickr by Leo Reynolds

Image from Flickr by Leo Reynolds

“So, how are sales going?”

I get this question a lot, along with the more direct “How many books have you sold?” I wish I could tell you. Unfortunately, published authors can’t track their sales in real time.

The only indication I have of how day-to-day sales are going is watching my Amazon rankings, and I have no idea what they mean. I don’t think anyone does, really. The ranking is depicted with a line graph which sometimes spikes, which maybe reflects sales, but you can’t tell how many or where the sales came from.

Other than that, I rely on semiannual royalty statements, and even those don’t tell me much. I can see how many ebooks sold in the prior six-month period and how many books were sold via direct sales (purchased through the publisher’s website) because those sales are final. Distributor sales are different, however; those books are returnable.

For example, for my book launch party at Changing Hands Bookstore, the store purchased 70 copies of The Fourth Wall. Fifty people showed up, half of the copies sold, and the host had me sign an additional 12 copies for the shelves. So that’s 47 books; what happens to the other 13? The bookstore can return them within a certain period of time.

So for my July royalty statement, those 70 copies show as distributor sales, but I don’t get paid yet because the sales are subject to return. My January statement will reflect how many books the bookstore returned, and then I’ll get paid for the remaining sales. Make cents? See what I did there? 😉

Yes, Nielsen BookScan tracks retail print sales which Amazon reports, via Amazon Author Central, on a weekly basis. But that’s not an accurate number; not all retailers use Nielsen BookScan. Amazon estimates the number at 75%.

Anyway, I’m still trying to find an appropriate and satisfying answer to “How many books have you sold?” without burdening my well-meaning friends with the above info. I guess a good answer is this: “More than one and less than a million, but who’s counting?”

Authors, how do you respond?

Happy Halloween, everyone!

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Do You See What I See?

Posted on September 26, 2014 ·
Image from Flickr by gradesi

Image from Flickr by gradesi

When a writer publishes fiction, she understands that her work will be interpreted differently by different people. In his book On Writing Stephen King says, “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”

You shouldn’t try to force your reader to see something exactly the way you imagined it.

Which becomes interesting when publishing creative nonfiction. It can be surreal having readers interpret in a different way something that actually happened.

Last week I had a piece published in Brevity Magazine called “Code Talkers.” True to their name, Brevity only publishes essays of 750 words or less. I love writing this way, taking a moment in time—one scene, one turning point—and trying to tell a story based on that moment.

I love allowing readers to imagine the rest of the story.

What struck me about the comments I received on “Code Talkers” was that, although the essay is written from a child’s point of view, several readers perceived it from an adult’s point of view; some even saw the cop as a sympathetic figure.

This is intriguing since part of the story has to do with misunderstandings and assumptions. To the young girl those misunderstandings and assumptions belong to adults, but to adults the misunderstandings would naturally belong to the young girl.

Anyway, I’m blown away by the response to this piece. Thank you to everyone who commented publicly and privately. And to those of you who kindly asked after my brother, he is doing fine. 🙂 We are as close as ever, and we still sometimes talk in code.

To read the essay, click here.

Have you ever written something and had a reader see it differently than you imagined or remembered it?

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Are Blog Tours Worth It?

Posted on September 12, 2014 ·
Image from Flickr by manoftaste.de

Image from Flickr by manoftaste.de

This summer I embarked on a national month-long book tour, meeting readers from Missouri, Wisconsin, California, Pennsylvania, and several other places. Of course, it was a virtual book tour–or blog tour–so I saved a lot on gas.

Still, blog tours aren’t cheap, and they’re more work than I ever would have guessed. Now that the tour’s over, several authors have asked me: was it worth it?

As with anything related to book promotion, the answer isn’t simple. It depends on how you measure worth. Many authors understandably measure in numbers, something I try to avoid (and wrote about here). But if you’re curious about the numbers, I tallied a few:

  • Sixteen hosts signed up to participate in the blog tour for The Fourth Wall.
  • Over 900 people entered giveaways for a copy of the book.
  • Dozens of potential readers reached out by leaving comments on blog sites, Facebook and Twitter.
  • Four of my blog hosts reviewed The Fourth Wall and posted their reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.
  • One giveaway winner has already read the book and posted her review on Amazon and Goodreads.
Not bad, right? But there were also surprise outcomes, like an on-going friendship with my tour host (I couldn’t imagine a more perfect pairing; Crystal and I had a blast).

And the fact that having to prepare blog posts about the subjects of my novel and answering pages of interview questions helped renew and focus my passion about the novel’s subjects and themes; it also helped me when it came time for an in-person interview with a local reporter.

Finally, an aspiring writer who visited the first tour stop on WOW! Women on Writing clicked over to my website, found the “classes and critiques” page, and sent an inquiry. She ended up purchasing a critique for her extraordinarily personal memoir, and I was touched and honored.

It’s never easy for a writer to share her work—it takes a great deal of bravery to commit those words to paper let alone place them in the hands of a stranger to be judged. This writer and I worked together on smoothing her essay (it didn’t take much; she’s a fantastic storyteller); I helped her craft a cover letter and she submitted her story, promising to keep me informed. That’s an outcome that can’t be measured.

Ah, but what about the biggie, you wonder. What about book sales?

It’s impossible to tally book sales in relation to the blog tour, even if I could track sales in real time, which I cannot. How would I account for the readers who added The Fourth Wall to their TBR list and purchase it months from now? Those who borrowed it on their Kindle and may later tell a friend? Or the guy researching theater terms, next year, who stumbles across one of the blog posts from the tour? There’s no way to know.

What I do know is I met some wonderful people on my blog tour and had meaningful discussions about writing, publishing, inspiration, music, and dreams (especially lucid ones). I feel like I did something to get the word out about my novel. Which feels pretty great.

And I saved a lot on gas.

Click here to visit the tour.

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Giveaway! Enter to Win Feather Earrings

Posted on August 13, 2014 ·

photo

Frankie’s handcrafted feather earrings from The Fourth Wall have become quite popular! Of course, it was my husband who made them, and I have ONE pair left to give away.

To enter the giveaway, just pop your email address into the subscription box for Elizabeth’s Newsletter. You’ll receive a confirmation email from MailChimp; once you confirm your subscription, you’ll be entered into the drawing.

The newsletter will be published twice a month beginning mid-September. It will include writerly inspiration, insights into the publishing process, and discounts on classes and critiques. Your email address is safe with me, and you can opt-out anytime, so there’s nothing to lose. But hopefully, you’ll stick around for awhile. 🙂

The newsletter subscription box should be to your right, or directly below this post. The giveaway ends Saturday at midnight, MST, and the winner will be notified on Sunday.

Go enter, and good luck!

UPDATE on August 17:
The winner is Maria D.! Thanks for entering, everyone. 😀

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The Secret to Social Media–One Year Later

Posted on August 8, 2014 ·
Image from Flickr by mkhmarketing

Image from Flickr by mkhmarketing

This month I’m celebrating a birthday. No, not mine! What are you thinking? I turned 39 in July, and I’m not ready to turn 40 quite yet. 😉

What this month marks is one year of blogging, tweeting, pinning, and goodreading, although my computer tells me that’s not a word. In one of my earliest blog posts, The Secret to Social Media, I wrote about my initial reactions to each of the following four sites, and in this post I’ll tell you what’s changed a year later.

Pinterest

Then: As a writer, I’d forgotten the pure joy of expressing emotions solely through visual imagery. With Pinterest, you can create boards that reflect the things you care about, and you never have to say a word.

Now: Yep, sounds lovely, but Pinterest was the one to go. I still have an account and I’ll probably revisit it sometime, but it’s just not possible to juggle five or six social media accounts. I knew this going in, but I figured the one to fall would be…

Goodreads

Then: What I love most about this site, so far, is I have one place to list my “to be read” books. Now I can collect all the scraps of paper, sticky notes, and electronic lists buried in my phone and shelve those titles in Goodreads.

Now: For a long time, this was all I could do on Goodreads. The problem is that it’s not a user-friendly site. But on January first, I resolved to read a book each week for 2014. Goodreads came in handy for this resolution because of their Reading Challenge—where you publicly declare a reading goal for the new year. Anyone can view your progress. That was the motivation I needed to stay on task, so I dug my heels in and learned how to navigate the site. Now I truly love Goodreads, and I’m only three books behind my goal.

Twitter

Then: This was supposed to be my favorite, because that’s what everybody says. I do like Twitter—there’s something about the immediacy of it that’s freeing—but it’s confusing.

Now: Surprise! Guess which social media site is my favorite? Twitter did take time to understand—in fact, it would be months before I caught on. But once I got comfortable jumping into conversations with total strangers, I met some amazing people. Most are generous—Twitter is all about sharing and discovering. Many are also fall-down funny; I’ve laughed myself to tears on more occasions than I can count. The only downside is that it can be a distraction.

Blogging

Then: My personal favorite. This has been a shock—I worried about the time it would take to blog, I worried no one would read my blog . . . now I know it’s about perspective.

Now: I admit I’ve lost that perspective several times. There’s no question that blogging can feel frustrating because it is time-intensive and once in a while seems as though you’re talking to yourself. To ease that frustration, I made some adjustments:

  1. I no longer spend several hours on each post. Yes, I did that. Those early posts were drafted on Mondays and heavily edited throughout the week, then published on Fridays, which could take all morning.
  2. I stopped worrying excessively about typos.
  3. I started posting less frequently. In the beginning, I posted weekly, but twice a month works better for me and I actually get more visitors that way. I think you have to give people a chance to miss you. 🙂

One great thing about blogging is looking back on old posts; it was sweet to read the first one—written a few days after I received my contract. I was so unsure of what lay ahead: I didn’t know what the book title would be, or what the cover would look like, or when it would get published. All I knew back then was a dream had come true, and that was enough.

Oh, and the secret to social media? It hasn’t changed: give yourself permission to have fun.

(See the original post HERE.)

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