April Davila's Blog, page 21

Cultivating Emotional Resonance

There are stories that are entertaining, beautifully written – and entirely forgettable. The minute I’m done with them, I never think of them again. And then there are stories with emotional resonance. The ones that haunt me. My mind comes back to mull them over again and again as I go about my life. I think of them years after I’ve read them, remembering a powerful moment, or a character quirk.

Emotional resonance is that empathetic link some authors are able to create between their characters and their readers. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about as I work on rewrites of my second novel.

Personal Conditioning

It’s important to note, when exploring the topic of emotional resonance, that not every story is going to resonate with every reader. That’s just a fact. The way I internalize a story as I read it, the way I imagine the fully formed characters in my head, will be different than the way you do.

One of the magical things about written stories is that they allow us that space to imagine the details in our own way. It’s why movie adaptations always fall short. No filmmaker can ever get it just “right” because it’s impossible that their vision of the story will match yours exactly, or even remotely.

That said, there are stories that do well in the market place precisely because they strike chord in a lot of people. To extend the metaphor – the chord’s vibrations resonate for most readers, as if there is some communal, emotional understanding of what the writer is communicating, and it runs deeper than the words on the page. It’s an intuitive connection.

What Your Character Wants

I’ve blogged about this specific topic briefly before (“Making Your Characters Want Something“). Specifically, I wrote about how the first fifty pages of my draft (of my first novel) were lagging and I couldn’t figure out why.

I *thought* I had given my character a desire. She wanted, more than anything, to not become her mom. But what I learned through a painful series of rewrites, was that not wanting something is not that same as wanting something else.

Try this. If you have a character defined by his or her desire to not be something, just make them want the opposite. In my book, since my character’s mother was a no-good alcoholic who couldn’t hold a job, I made my main character want a specific job. She wants to be a forest ranger. Because why not? It really didn’t mater what she wanted. She just needed to have something to work toward. And bam – my first fifty pages found an energy they never had before.

Empathizing with a character starts with understanding what the character wants. Many of the books that fall into the category of beautiful-books-I’ll-probably-never-think-about-again have characters who don’t want anything.

Emotional Depth

Emotional resonance has to do with the reader’s experience of the character’s desire. It’s only when I, as the reader, understand what a character is going through on an emotional level that I’m able to join them, instinctively, on their journey. The trick is, it takes time and tact to set up this kind of engagement.

As the writer, you can’t simply tell readers that your main character had their heart broken before and so now they’re reluctant to trust love. That’s about as moving as diagnostic report. You have to imbue your character with all that distrust, and you have to dive deep into where it comes from. If you can do that, then your readers will engage on an emotional level with the present day action of the story: how the desire they feel (a romance, maybe?) is at odds with their history.

It’s difficult to give examples without offering up spoilers, so I’m going to use a non-fiction example: “A Stolen Life,” the memoir written by Jaycee Dugard about being kidnapped and held captive for eighteen years. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say she escapes in the end (she did, after all, write a book about her ordeal).

Throughout the story she thinks of her mother. From day one, through two pregnancies, through some truly awful shit, she longs for her mother, remembering specifics of what it was like to be held in her arms, how her mom had the power to comfort her. It’s not forced or trite. This girl misses her mom and thinks she will never see her again.

So when you get to the end, to the part where she’s in the police station and she calls her mom for the first time – it’s devastating. I have never cried like that reading any other book. I was balling. I had to put the book down for a minute and call my own mom and just tell her that I love her.

Because I understood, I felt in my heart, what that moment was for this individual/character.

We Have To Be Willing To Cry

The bitch of it all is that, as writers, we will never get that kind of emotional resonance on the page if we’re not willing to feel all those uncomfortable feelings ourselves, to explore them, test words against them, and try to convey them in specific, visceral language.

I think this is what people are talking about when they say you’ll never make your readers cry if you’re not willing to cry yourself.

Historically I have written characters that are emotionally distant. In “142 Ostriches” I soaked the entire family in detachment. They don’t hug, they don’t listen to each other. It wasn’t a conscious decision at the time, but looking back, I think I was afraid to dive into them messy emotions that might have been called for. No regrets though. Emotional detachement worked for that story. I’m very please with how it all came together.

But with my new story I want to write a different kind of character. I want to write anger, and passion, and loneliness along with joy and exhalation. This story is much more epic. The emotional components need to be likewise.

Lately I’m working on a chapter wherein my main character is feeling pretty bitter and I always come away from those writing sessions just cranky AF. I can’t help it. I don’t like being bitter, but it’s what’s called for in the story, and I find I can’t write it if I don’t let myself feel it.

Building Tolerance

The ability to let myself dive into these uncomfortable feelings, to marinate in them long enough to get them on the page, has been the direct result of getting more serious about meditation.

Sometimes when I’m meditating, I experience waves of emotion. The practice of noticing them, naming them, and (if I’m not too overwhelmed) getting curious about them, has taught me about the many, many nuances of emotion. It’s allowed me to get more familiar with them and to describe them better on the page.

What’s more, mindfulness meditation has taught me that I can let myself feel certain things (like fear and sadness) without becoming overloaded. If I ever feel like I’m too sad, or angry, or whatever, I can always get up and end the meditation, but you know what? I never do.

Because I’m a writer. And when you’re a writer, everything is material.

Finding Balance

Not everything I’m writing these days will make the final cut into my new manuscript. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’m a big fan of plot. I have no intention of writing 300+ pages full of emotions and nothing else. In short, I intend to be pretty scathing with the old red pencil when it comes time to edit.

But just getting all these messy emotions into my pages makes me hopeful that I’m writing something new, something different than I’ve ever written before, maybe even something… emotionally resonant. I’m excited to see where it all leads.

PS – Some of you may know that I’m at the tail end of a 2-year meditation teacher training course. As I plan my future courses, I’m seriously considering offering a 3-hour seminar on meditation for writers. If it’s something you’d be interested in, drop me a note and let me know. We can explore it together.

Present Tense As A Zoom Lens

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of joining Zibby Owens (creator of the Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Podcast) as part of an Instagram Live series she was hosting while stuck at home (you can see the interview here). It was fun, but I’m so glad I stuck earound after my segment, because the women she interviewed after me kind of blew my mind.

Her name is Catherine Burns and she is the Artistic Director of The Moth. In case you’re unfamiliar, The Moth goes back to 1997 as a forum for people to tell their own true stories, unscripted, on a stage, no take backs. In addition to live events they have a radio show and a podcast. They have heard a LOT of stories.

Putting Live Stories On The Page

And so it was really interesting to hear Catherine talk about how she culled stories to be included in the new book “The Moth Presents Occasional Magic: True Stories about Defying the Impossible.” She talked about how smoothing the stories for print was a real challenge, noting that if she cleaned them up too much she “crushed the liveness out of them.” (You can view the 10 minute interview here.)

One specific thing she said caught my attention. She said (around minute 3:30 if you want to jump to it) that people, when they’re telling their stories live, tend to shift into present tense when they get to an intense moment in the story. “They use the present tense like a zoom lens,” she said.

You Cant’ Do That

A product of the MFA world, I’ve always been very careful to choose a tense and stick with it. Jumping around to different tenses, I learned, is jarring. And for the most part I agree. But what Catherine said got me thinking.

Because tense really does make a difference. Consider the following two sentences:

I was standing on the edge of the roof.So, there I am, standing on the edge of the roof.

The second has so much more energy. The present tense seems to remove the certainty that I come down off that roof, even though I clearly did (since I’m telling the story). You can really get the sense of what Catherine was talking about, how using the present tense feels like a zoom lens, bringing us in close to our narrator.

Or… Maybe You Can?

I find myself inclined to play around with it, especially now as I work on wrapping up the draft of my new project. Could I emphasize the final climactic moment by dropping into present tense? If so, how long is too long to hold my readers in the present? How do I navigate the transitions?

My structure-loving self shuts the idea down immediately. No, I think. Too risky. Best to not to eff with what’s working. But then I remember what one of my favorite teachers always says: it works if you can make it work. There are no rules.

I’ve read enough experimental fiction to know that playing with form can lead to some really interesting outcomes. (If you’re curious, check out The Tin Drum – that’s a book worth studying.) But I don’t write experimental fiction. I actually like a good, old fashioned, three-act, plot driven story. And so that’s what I tend to write.

Present Tense Opportunities

But there is one moment in my new novel that I would love to suck my readers into. It’s the part that, if I picture myself telling the whole story on stage, I would switch to present tense and use my hands to indicate the visceral sensation of a realization that changed my life. It is the most important part of my story.

Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll go for it and see if my editor even notices. Maybe I’ll pull it off so seamlessly that he’ll forget he’s an editor for a moment and just be sucked into the story.

Or maybe he’ll circle it in red pencil, that dreaded marker of a mistake on the page.

I guess I’ll never know unless I try.

How do you deal with tense in your stories? Are you a purist, or do you like to experiment? Would love to hear your thoughts.

How to Read When You Want to Write Better

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: writers read. Adjust accordingly. But what does it really mean to read like a writer? What do we do differently as writers browsing pages?

To answer these questions, I’d like to share an excerpt with you from Welcome To The Writer’s Life (selected as one of Poets & Writers’ Best Books for Writers) by Paulette Perhach.

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I had the pleasure of meeting Paulette at AWP this year and am very much enjoying her book.

Paulette Perhach is a writing coach and author. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Elle, Marie Claire, Slate, Yoga Journal, and Vice. She’s most widely known for her viral essay “A Story of a Fuck Off Fund.” She offers a free year of daily writing prompts at her site welcometothewriterslife.com.

Here’s what she had to say about reading like a writer*:

You’ll read differently now. From here on out, you’ll be studying.

I felt reluctant to write in my books for years, but once I started the practice, I understood its worth. Unless you get a book from the library (a fine way to save money), I recommend getting your pencil out.

You can also annotate in e-books, but I’m an old-fashioned gal when it comes to paper. I like making a book mine by charting my experience with it. I like to judge past readers of the used books I buy based on what they highlighted too.

Use your pencil to dissect, hunt for bits you can steal later, and look for lessons. When you mark something, you almost instinctively read it over again, cementing whatever it has to teach you.

If you don’t quite get how or why to mark up your books, try this system.

Underline what you love:

Perfect diction. A word so on point that it causes you to make a noise.Stunning sentences. The kind of sentences that make you want to learn how to do that. Consider copying them into your Writer’s Mission Control Center too.Character. Vivid physical details, backgrounds, gestures — anything that brings a person alive on the page for you.Setting. Visuals, smells, textures, music, or anything that builds the scene in your mind.

Mark what you can study:

The feels. Learn to recognize when a book causes an emotional reaction in your body, either fear, joy, excitement, or anger. Write whatever you’re feeling in the margins, and look at the style, content, and sentence structure to consider how the author is manipulating your insides with these words.Laughter. If an author makes you laugh, mark that with your laughter words of choice in the margins. I’m a ha! person, but I know and respect LOLers. Consider what kind of joke it is, perhaps writing underneath it whether it’s hyperbole, self-deprecation, understatement, etc.Questions. If you don’t understand why a writer did something, put a question mark next to it. You may come to understand it later.Rule breaking. When a writer breaks the rules, mark it. Then think about why they made that choice for the piece.

Note what you don’t understand so that you can look it up later:

Words you don’t know yet. Draw a squiggly line under new vocabulary. Or say, “Siri / Alexa / robot of your choice, what does _ mean?”Allusions. If you see a reference to another literary work, writer, or event you’re not familiar with, draw that same squiggly line. This often leads to your next read or a trip down a rabbit hole on Wikipedia.Star. A paragraph that says something you never realized you’ve always wanted to say. A page that brings tears to your eyes. A chapter ending that leaves you physically incapable of putting the book down. Put a big star next to it to chart where you fell in love with the craft a little more. Then read that part again.

For continued insights on writing, reading, and more, get yourself a copy of Welcome To The Writer’s Life and reach out to Paulette on her at https://www.welcometothewriterslife.com/

Happy writing!

* Copyright 2018 by Paulette Perhach. All rights reserved. Excerpted from Welcome to the Writer’s Life by permission of Sasquatch Books.

142 Ostriches on Sale

For all my GoodReads friends out there who have "142 Ostriches" on their Want To Read list, my publisher is offering the book for $1.99 for just two days. Now through Friday, you can take advantage of this great price on Amazon.

And in case you're still on the fence, here are just a few things people are saying about the book:
"A vivid, uplifting debut..." - Publisher's Weekly
"An enjoyable, winning, interesting novel..." - Booklist (Starred Review)
"A courageous coming-of-age story set in a unique and wonderful backdrop..." - Library Journal
(see more reviews on my website)

The deal ends on Friday, so tell a friend. Because books let our minds wander when our bodies are stuck at home.

Be safe out there my friends.

-April

A Scrivener Wrap-Up

In July of last year I set myself a challenge to blog about Scrivener, once a week, for a whole year. I called it the 52 Weeks of Scrivener Challenge.

Well, this is week 42 and I can officially say: it broke me. I’m done. I can’t do any more. (Which is mostly to say that my priorities have shifted.)

If you follow along with the blog you know I posted last week about making more time for my fiction writing. My second novel is coming along really well and I feel compelled to run with that.

So I’m calling it quits on the weekly Scrivener posts. But you know what? I wrote 41 in-depth pieces on the topic. That’s a lot of content. And just to prove it, I’m going to list them all here for you. Go ahead, dive in, enjoy.

52 Weeks of Scrivener – A Challenge

Getting Started with Scrivener

Getting Started with Scrivener

How to Use the Document Word Counter in Scrivener

The Scrivener Inspector: Meta-Data

Scrivener Snapshots

Comments & Footnotes in Scrivener

Tidying Up Those Double Spaces in Your Manuscript

Formatting Fonts in Scrivener

How to Use the Scrivener Word Frequency Function

Embed Websites in Scrivener (and Minimize Distractions)

Four NaNoWriMo Scrivener Tips

Composition Mode in Scrivener

Revision Mode in Scrivener

Quick Reference Windows in Scrivener

Explore Your Project History in Scrivener

Scrivener Drafts

Changing Scrivener Binder Icons



Tracking Writing Goals in Your Bullet Journal

Split and Merge Scenes in Scrivener

Using Scrivener Keywords to Track Ideas at a Glance

Scrivener Binder Icons

Creating and Using Scrivener Collections

Using the Scrivener Timeline

Highlight Your Adverbs (and More) with Scrivener

Four Easy Ways to Make Scrivener Instantly Awesome

Scrivener Front Matter

Label Colors in the Scrivener Binder

Moving Things in Your Scrivener Binder

Smart Quotes in Scrivener

Backing Up In Scrivener

Scrivener Text-To-Speech

Scrivener Dictation

Scrivener Dictionary & Thesaurus

Scrivener Footnotes

Outline View in Scrivener

Scrivener Layouts

Lock Your Editor in Scrivener

I hope these have been helpful to all of you out there writing in Scrivener.

Feel free to leave a note in the comments below if I forgot anything, or if you have a resource you’d like to recommend to other Scrivener lovers, or if you just want to call me a quitter. I’ve been called worse.

Changes Afoot

If you’ve been following along with the blog, you know that, from time to time, I like to change things up. Over the course of the 10+ years I’ve been working on this blog, there have been a lot of changes.

Some have been gradual, like shifting away from a diary format and instead focusing on practical tips. Other have been more dramatic, like the aesthetic redesign I did just before my book launch.

Well, it’s happening again, dear readers.

My main motivation for the changes I’m planning to implement is simple: I need more time to write fiction. As I mentioned last week, novel #2 is coming along well and I simply need more time to devote to it.

I love this blog. I love the people I’ve connected with through the blog. I love that it’s become a log of my journey as a writer. But these days, while I’m posting three times a week, the balance between writing online and working on my next novel has fallen out of whack.

Here’s how I’m planning to restore equilibrium:

Did I Say 52?

About 40 weeks ago I started the 52 Weeks of Scrivener Challenge. While these posts seem to be very popular among my writer friends, they take an ENORMOUS amount of time to put together. So I’m calling it. I’m done.

Next Monday, instead of my usual Scrivener tip, I will be posting a full listing of all the Scrivener tips and tricks I’ve shared in the last 40 weeks. It’s not 52, granted, but it’s still a lot of material.

If you’re into Scrivener, you’ll want to tune in for that.

California Trivia

It’s been fun to share snippets of California trivia I’ve collected while researching stories. From banana slugs to sourdough bread, there’s just so much to love about my home state. But every time I sit down to write one of the posts and search through my files of photos, there’s this little voice in my head that says: psst… you should be working on your novel…

Right you are, little voice.

Weekly Writing Posts

The posts I share on Wednesday, the ones focused on writing, are not going away. They’re just going to be a little less frequent. Instead of posting every week, I’m going to shift to every other week.

The main motivation for this change is that I want to dive a little deeper with these posts. Over the years, I’ve covered a lot of the basics, from clichés to query letters, and I find myself wanting to explore topics of greater nuance, which takes more time.

The Newsletter

Given that there will be less weekly content on the blog, I’m going to transition to a monthly digest. If you’re not yet subscribed, click here to get on the list.

I know, I know, you live for my weekly email, but I’ll make it up to you. The newsletter will be coming to you less frequently, but I’m bringing back an old favorite, strictly for subscribers: The Nerd Word of the Week. Only, you know, monthly. (If you don’t remember the Nerd Words, you can visit the whole collection of them on my Pinterest page.)

And Onward

Those are the highlights of what’s in store.

As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions. And again, I can’t pass up an opportunity to say how grateful I am for all of my readers, whether you’re here for a reason or a season.

Now let’s get back to working on that novel…

Lock Your Editor in Scrivener

This week, in the #52WeeksOfScrivener series I’d like to offer up a simple little trick that saves me a lot of grief. It’s called “Lock in Place,” which is a fine name, but it does beg a little explanation.

The Challenge

I like to edit in split screen. It allows me to reference things I’ve put down in other chapters, like place or character descriptions. But when I have two screens open like that I tend to accidentally click away from the section I’m actually working on.

Something about being a creative mind frame makes it hard to keep track of where I’m clicking, and suddenly clicking away from what I’m working on is jarring.

The Solution

Click on the editor screen you want to lock in, then go to Navigate -> Editor -> Lock in Place. (Shortcut: Option Command L)

In this example, I locked my left-hand screen in place. You can tell, because the header on that half of the split screen is now pink:

Now that it’s locked, I can’t click away from it (accidentally or otherwise). If I’m typing away and I suddenly think “oh, I need to see what I wrote in chapter 6,” I don’t have to click in the other window first, I can just click on Chapter 6 (or a research file, or an image, or whatever) in my Binder and it will automatically open in the other window – leaving my locked window right where it is.

It’s a simple thing, but I find it super handy when I’m in the groove of writing and don’t want to think about the software.

To undo the lock, just follow the same steps.

Next Week

Next week we’ll talk about how to customize your toolbar. Stay tuned. You can follow along on Twitter with #52WeeksOfScrivener, or sign up for my newsletter to get a weekly digest of all my posts.

Great White Sharks

This post is part of an extended series I’m writing about California.
You can find out more on my Why California page.

Two hundred thousand years ago in the late Pleistocene era, a relatively small number of great white sharks from the waters around Australia broke away and migrated to the northwest region of the Pacific.

Over millennia of isolation, this particular population of Carcharodon carcharias slowly became genetically unique. The region they now call home – an area of Northern California coast ranging from Bodega Bay to Big Sur and as far west as the Farallon Islands – is often referred to as the red triangle.

Ten percent of the world’s shark attacks on humans happen here. Despite cinematic speculations, it is generally understood that attacks on humans are the result of mistaken identity, as wet suits and surfboards have a similar appearance to that of the shark’s favored foods, seals and sea lions.

Northern California great white sharks are believed to have life spans of about thirty years, and to grow to around 4,000 pounds. Though they follow solitary and habitual hunting routes along the coast between August and December, it was recently discovered that during the first half of the year the sharks convene in the deep, mid-ocean waters off the coast of Hawaii. The behavior is still mysterious, but it is believed that the sojourn provides opportunity for procreation. 

Falling Back Into Writing

Is there any feeling more delicious than when a writing project is going well? Okay, I can think of a couple, but it’s not that kind of blog. Let’s keep it clean here, people.

As I mentioned in my post last Wednesday, I recently reached a point of being unwilling to wait out the pandemic any longer. I needed to write. And to write I need solitude. Not just quiet. Real aloneness.

Finding Some Aloneness

And so I’m back to getting up at 5am. It’s rough, and my days are clouded a bit by this fog of exhaustion, but it’s so freaking worth it.

My writing really flows in the morning. The part of my brain that likes to remind me that the dishes are piling up and the laundry needs to be done is still asleep at 5am. I sit down to write and it’s like I fall into the pages. I am gone. Three hours goes by like nothing.

Recruiting The Fam

Which leads me to the one upside of our new normal. Nobody in the family has to be anywhere at any particular time, so when I get to writing, I can keep at it. I flat out asked them all to leave me to it. My husband makes sure the kids are fed and I just stay in here in my office, typing away.

After about three hours I do start to feel a little fatigue. I try to stop at a place where I’m excited to keep writing, where I know what happens next, so that when 5am rolls around again I can get out of bed eager (yes, eager – at 5am) to get to it.

Filling In The Gaps

If I find a little extra time in the day (between homeschooling, laundry, exercise, and binge-watching Archer), I try to use the time to do research. I’m working on some historical fiction at the moment and there are a LOT of details I need to fill in, but I never stop to research while I’m writing. I just put XX to note where I don’t know a detail and move on.

Later, when I’m filling in the those details with my research, I’m in a totally different frame of mind. Much less creative, more problem solving. Answering specific questions about the construction of a log cabin, for instance, is a job that can be tackled in discrete units, in between tasks that have nothing to do with writing (cough*Archer).

And Onward

I’ve been working like this for two weeks now and I am floored how much work I’ve gotten done on my revisions. Yes, I’m super tired come the end of the day. I don’t care. Because I’m writing again.

And it feels so good.

Scrivener Layouts

This week on the #52WeeksOfScrivener series, we’re exploring the different screen layouts the program has to offer. What? You didn’t know there were layout options? Allow me to enlighten…

At the top left of your Scrivener window, just to the left of your search button, there’s a button that allows you to choose what shows on your screen. Click on that, drop down to Layouts, and you’ll see that you have seven different options. Here’s what they look like:

Default

The Default layout is the one you’re probably used to. It looks like this:

Three-Pane (Outline)

Clicking the second layout option allows you to open your outline in a panel between your binder and your writing. (For more on the Scrivener outline, see last week’s post.)

You can adjust what shows in the outline by clicking on the little drop-down menu (circled in red here below):

This is super handy if you like to write with your outline open.

Three-Panel (Corkboard)

This is a lot like the layout described above, except that instead of opening your outline in that middle panel, you open (yep, you guessed it) your corkboard.

You can adjust the way the cards display in your corkboard by clicking the icon at the bottom of the screen that looks like four note cards in a square formation (circled in red above).

Pro Tip: Scrivener will fill in the synopsis sections of your outline or cards for you. Just click on the scene in the binder (the column on the left), go to Menu -> Documents -> Auto-generate Synopsis.

Editor Only

This is a pretty simple layout, somewhat like Composition Mode. It aims to minimize distractions:

Corkboard Only

Again, pretty self explanatory, but this puts you into the corkboard view.

You can also enter this mode by clicking this little icon at the top of your screen:

Centered Outline

This option works the same as clicking the little icon immediately to the right of the corkboard icon (in the image above) which gives you the outline layout.

Not much more to say about that.

Dual Navigation

This one can be really handy if you like to keep a lot of windows open and or write in more than one section at a time. Here’s what it looks like:

And here’s how it works:

You use the Binder as usual to load the what displays in the main editor (in the photo above, the main editor is showing Chapter 1, and this is where you would type while working).

To change what shows in the Outliner (the top right section) you drag and drop from your Binder to the Outliner’s header bar. In the image above, this is the bar on the top right that says “Draft 2” because I dragged the file folder for Draft 2 to that bar.

What you click on in the Outliner is what will show up in the bottom right. In this example, you can see that I clicked on Chapter 3 in the Outliner (top right window) and so the contents of Chapter 3 are what are on display in the bottom right.

It’s worth noting that you can edit in that bottom right window as well as in the main editor. This can work similarly to using a Split Screen.

So Many Choices

Seven different layouts to choose from. Personally, I almost always go with Default, but it’s nice to know those others are available.