Jane Friedman's Blog: Jane Friedman, page 33

Free Resources for Writers at the Public Library

Today’s post is by book coach, author and librarian Kate Stewart.

One of the best pieces of advice for writers is to read as widely as possible, especially in your genre. For centuries, public libraries have made that goal for writers not just possible, but affordable.

Beyond books, most public libraries offer additional services incredibly helpful to writers. Getting familiar with online and in-person library resources, free with your library card, can take your writing and research skills to the next level. Most large public library systems offer the following services. Even if you live in a small town or rural library with limited resources, you still may be able to take advantage of offerings from nearby large systems that participate in regional consortiums.

Research databases

Libraries subscribe to a wide array of research databases that can help you find background material for your nonfiction book or important facts and details for fiction, especially historical fiction. Most of these databases are behind paywalls that are prohibitively expensive for individuals to access. They can be the key to finding the answers to questions that aren’t easily Google-able. The following databases (and many more) may be available at your library, and you should be able to use them remotely via your library’s website and logging in with your library card.

Ancestry. You might have used Ancestry.com for tracing your own family history, but there are many historical resources on the site, including census records, military records, and the records of births, marriages, and deaths. For writers of history, biography, and memoir, or historical fiction based on real events, Ancestry is one of the most popular sources available.Newspaper databases like NewsBank and Newspapers.com can provide factual details to improve your storytelling for both nonfiction and historical fiction. Simply browsing newspapers for the time and place your characters live in can give you a feel for accurate language, food, clothing, culture, and social events. Some writers have also stumbled across old newspaper articles that gave them a brilliant idea for the plot of their next book. Much of the drama of everyday living was often reported in the newspaper—just check the front page for tales of murder, love affairs, political intrigue, and other stories stranger than fiction.NoveList is a database started more than 30 years ago to assist librarians in one of the most important services they offer to users: lists of what to read next when you’ve found a book you really like, also known as “readers’ advisory.” Librarians work for NoveList to both summarize and tag books listed in the database and to also think about how books in certain genres are related or similar. Amazon and other bookstore websites have “you may also like” lists on the website for each book, but they may not be quite right. NoveList is usually available to library users as well as librarians, and just like Ancestry and NewsBank.

If you have a particularly tough question you can’t find the answer to, you can always ask your local reference librarian at the library or by phone, email, or chat reference. One of librarians’ greatest skills is knowing how to dig deep into research databases or print sources—and they usually have access to networks of librarians and experts to go to when they can’t figure it out themselves. They are used to fielding all kinds of weird questions, and they love a good challenge!

In-person library programs

Library programming isn’t just story time for young children—librarians offer all kinds of in-person events for adults. Many of these include book groups and book talks, and some host writing groups for local writers or even have multiple groups for different genres. These groups might be led by a local librarian, a professional writer or writing teacher. My local library system, the Pima County Public Library, hosts a writer-in-residence who offers writing workshops and drop-in writing help.

Libraries also help non-profits, artists, writers, and other creatives with applying for grants and fellowships. They may have access to databases to search for grants and offer grant-writing workshops for the public. You may be surprised how many grants are available, some only for writers who live in a certain area or write in a specific genre. A librarian can help you search for these and also help you find books on grant writing.

Libraries also host book launch events or author talks by local writers. If there isn’t a local bookstore in your area (and some aren’t big enough to host events), working with a public library on a book event may be a great option. Libraries typically promote events on social media and spread the word in-person about your event to their patrons.

Parting thoughts

Using library services regularly and encouraging others to do so too is a terrific way to support your local library and can be just as important as making a donation. Libraries across the country have been under fire with book bans and threats to funding. Funding for libraries is driven by usage statistics, so each time you show up to a program or use a database, you’ll be counted in reports to library administrators, donors, and county and city officials.

If your library isn’t offering the services described above, go and ask. Librarians are happy when patrons show up to offer ideas and volunteer. Working with patrons on developing programs that are needed and wanted is a normal part of a librarian’s job, so don’t feel shy about making a request. Taking advantage of these services might not only improve your writing, they can also help you find new writing friends and build a local writing community.

How an Academic Editor Can Help a Scholar Write a Better Article

Photo by Andrew George on Unsplash

Today’s post is by writer, podcaster and editor Wayne Jones.

Scholars generally have two very different venues in which to publish their work, and hence two different audiences as well. The main one is the academic journal, where they are generally talking to and writing for other scholars in their discipline. The other is popular media like the magazines, blogs, podcasts, and many other places where they are talking to the general public. It’s common, for example, for a scholar to be a guest on a news show in order to provide informed background for whatever crisis, war, or calamity we humans have gotten ourselves into now. Or they might write an opinion piece for a well-known newspaper or news source, or be interviewed at length by a podcast host, or even have their own Substack site.

In these popular sources, the best scholars are well aware of the audience and know they have to “translate” into standard English the often arcane jargon that their peers would have no difficulty understanding. But they don’t all succeed. We saw lots of examples of that during the pandemic. Some would talk about viral shedding and leave the reader or listener a bit perplexed, but some would just call it a sneeze.

Part of an editor’s job for a popular venue is to keep the scholar on the vernacular track. That doesn’t mean they have to dumb down what they are writing. Quite the contrary, actually. Working with their editor, they have to make sure that the complexity of what they are talking about is intelligently and clearly conveyed. The editor’s work here doesn’t differ a lot from what it would be when editing any prose piece. Make it clear. Make sure it flows well. Use the right, precise words. And make sure the reader benefits from the writer’s expertise without being distracted by jargon, over-long sentences, and other things that might make them click on something else that appears more comprehensible.

In academic journals, though, scholars are in their natural habitat, and the editor’s challenge is more difficult. I do copy editing and proofreading of academic articles in subjects that I have varying degrees of knowledge in—a lot in some cases, little to none in others—but, in any case, where I am not even close to being an authority: theology, American history, queer studies, feminist literary criticism, cinema, criminal justice, and many more, depending on which issue of which journal I’ve been assigned by the university press. I’m not an interloper. The editors at the press know that they can’t expect their freelancers to be scholars or even experts. But what an academic editor does bring is a knowledge of words and tone and style—what we call writing.

Some of the terms a scholar uses may look deceptively and exactly like those same words in standard English, but they have very specific meanings in the particular discipline. Bad faith, for example, is something that most of us understand in general parlance, and even in collective bargaining, but if the article is about Sartrean existentialist philosophy, then it means a very specific thing. If you believe the article has had too many instances of bad faith, and perhaps dishonesty or insincerity might be worthy alternates, then you’d be making a bad mistake that the scholar would point out to you during one or other stage of the editing process. (As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, for Sartre bad faith is “self-deception practised in order to avoid absolute responsibility for one’s own actions.”)

Perhaps writing style is an even more difficult aspect of academic writing for an editor to navigate and negotiate. I have read and edited some truly beautifully written articles on subjects I had little familiarity with but which I ended up learning a thing or two about. I’ve also edited articles that I found nearly impenetrable, where the combination of professional jargon, a sesquipedalian style, and a tendency to long, winding sentences compelled me to examine each sentence, read and re-read, until I finally gleaned what I thought was the meaning. Sometimes I had to query the author or do some additional research to figure out what they were talking about.

There are two aspects to this latter style. One is numerous very long sentences. Writers of popular nonfiction, and certainly writers of fiction, are routinely told about the importance of variation in the length of their sentences. It’s not just to follow some silly rule—longer or shorter sentences can not only passively affect the readability and the resultant pleasure that the reader derives, but the more clever writers are also keenly aware of the effects that varying sentence length can confer. Some scholars are not aware of this. So their tendency is often to pack as much of their thought as possible into a single sentence, with commas and semi-colons doing their damnedest to hold the thing together in some semblance of understandability. I often have to go back and confirm that I did, in fact, see a verb in there somewhere.

The second aspect is use of jargon and fancy words that are not discipline-specific. These not only interfere with comprehension, but they also lengthen sentences unnecessarily, and worst of all they have that stench of modern cliché about them. An issue is seen through the lens of something. A narrative is a diegesis. Different aspects of a topic are competing registers. And so on. However, these are not errors and are likely to be perfectly well understood by the other scholars with whom the writing scholar is communicating.

The academic editor has a delicate task here. The audience won’t, as it were, blink an eye at differences lenses. The registers won’t for a second be read in the retail sense, where perhaps the new cashier is trying their best to keep up with the seasoned veteran. If I am copy editing, I usually intervene or make a comment in a few situations. One is when the use of jargon is too frequent. They are easily eliminated or substituted with standard English. The other is when the jargon results in a mixed metaphor. For example: “While other scholars have noted the variety of Joyce’s symbolic imagery in this chapter, I see it through a more concrete lens which compacts the pictures into a single package.” That kind of thing.

Academic editors may also help with structural editing, which is rare in my experience, but I don’t hesitate to do it in some cases. The need is often obvious and the fix is often easy. For example, the flow of the article might make more intuitive sense and serve the reader better if, say, topic A were covered at the beginning because topic B later on depends on a knowledge of A.

Finally, academic editors help with documentation and citation. I can say categorically that I have never edited an academic piece in which I have not made one, and more often many, changes to the endnotes/footnotes and to the format of the works cited section or bibliography. I have empathy for the scholar here. It’s enough that they have to know everything about eschatology, and so I understand why they can usually only do their basic best in implementing the journal’s style guide and especially the often giant-sized style manual on which it is based. That’s an editor’s job and I’m okay with that.

The Pitfalls of Expert Advice

Photo by Joseph Corl on Unsplash

Today’s post is by writer, editor, and book coach Lauren Reynolds.

When I decided to change careers and write for a living, I researched and read everything I could. I attended seminars, writing workshops, and took several courses. I was hungry for information and, in my pursuit, grew so full that I was bursting at the seams—too overloaded to decipher good advice from bad.

One afternoon, while listening to an author discuss her technique of writing longhand, it dawned on me: What works for one writer may not work for another. There was no way I would write an article by hand, let alone an entire manuscript.

That may not sound like a revelation to most, but for me, it was big. I had been elevating expert wisdom above my intuition and, in the process, lost my confidence. Once a self-deprecating and humorous writer, I had become dull in an effort to sound serious. I lost my voice and, inevitably, lost my way.

As a book coach working with writers, I’ve discovered this phenomenon is not unique. Expert advice is valuable, but it’s how you assess it that makes it meaningful and useful. “Write what you know” doesn’t require killing someone if you want to write murder mysteries.

Don’t strain your neck looking to experts perched on a pedestal. It’s natural to place our role models on a pedestal—we all do it. We are blinded by stellar reviews, fortune, and fame. By consuming successful authors’ advice like gospel, writers hope that if they emulate their writing process or techniques, they, too, might achieve similar success.

However, when advice is taken out of context or not carefully evaluated, it can do more harm than good. So consider several factors first.

Advice is often generalized.

What works for Jodi Picoult probably won’t work for Judy Blume, as every writer has their particular methods.

For many writers, revising a first draft requires deleting copious material. For other writers, their first draft looks more like a detailed sketch, and they add more material as they revise.

Some writers swear by writing in the early morning hours, and other writers just plain swear. Some writers binge-write for a few months out of the year and finish a first draft within one season. Other writers write daily, and it takes them a year to complete a first draft.

We look to experts in the hope of unearthing some secret or trick, but unfortunately, there isn’t one.

People have varied resources.

The more successful a writer becomes, the more resources they have.

Stephen King recommends writing 2,000 words a day. Though he credits his wife for much of his success in his book, On Writing, most people don’t recognize this support system allowed him the time to reach that word count. If we all had a wife like Tabitha, perhaps we, too, could eke out 2,000 words per day.

Resources such as time, money, and support are invaluable. A writer who is a full-time parent or works outside the home will have fewer resources to write efficiently than a writer with fewer responsibilities or more significant support.

The final result isn’t the whole story.

While reading a published book, it’s easy to forget that it likely took several drafts to arrive at the polished version. We don’t get to see the frustration the author experienced, the sleepless nights, the manuscript thrown across the room. While some authors may require less effort than others, some struggle just as much as new writers.

Seasoned writers can experience just as many frustrations, doubts, and fears as the rest of us—no one has it all figured out. Sometimes, having one successful book creates a frozen response, in which the author can’t write a second book for fear of producing a less-than-stellar follow-up. Nothing is scarier than reaching the pinnacle of success only to slide down the other side.

Who is an expert?

In the era of TikTok influencers, it’s becoming harder to decipher who really has the experience or knowledge to know what they’re talking about and which people are actually misleading their audience.

Remember toy commercials in the 1980s, in which some advertisers would show toys flying through the air? After purchasing the toy and bringing it home, children were disappointed to learn their toy couldn’t actually fly. Children felt duped, and though they suffered, I imagine the parents suffered more. The whining, the tears, the waste of money, the trip back to the store—all of it contributed to consumer outrage. Eventually, there was enough pushback to change advertising altogether, making it illegal to mislead consumers.

Evaluating someone’s experience, knowledge, or personality serves you better than being seduced by the most tech-savvy, beautiful websites or online courses. While an MFA teacher may not have a shiny New York Times bestseller, they probably have worked with enough writers to provide helpful guidance.

Also, expertise does not always equate to time spent in the profession. Newer writers tend to be voracious readers and researchers. They may have a great understanding of market trends and be energized to help others new to the field. Meanwhile, seasoned writers with a wealth of experience may be jaded and tired. Or, they may possess great knowledge but be ineffective at translating that knowledge into helpful advice.

Avoid taking advice too literally.

Sometimes, it’s not about the advice dispensed but how it’s received. When finding your way in a new profession, it’s easy to take things too literally because there’s little foundational knowledge to help filter advice.

“Don’t use adverbs” and “Write what you know” are two common pieces of advice that new writers often apply too rigidly. A book without a single adverb would be a difficult one to write. And newer writers often interpret “Write what you know” to mean they should only write about places, characters, or emotions they have experienced firsthand. If this were the case, there wouldn’t be any books with science fiction, serial killers, or paranormal activity.

For most advice? It’s about trial and error.

Ultimately, you won’t know if expert advice is helpful unless you try it. It’s like watching videos about how to ride a bike. Until you get on a bike, you won’t truly understand the physics of balance and motion—it’s the same with developing a writing process.

You may discover that writing daily helps you stay connected to your characters, or you may need days off between writing scenes to daydream about your character’s interactions. You may read books in the genre you’re writing and unintentionally mimic the author’s voice. Or, you may find that reading books in your genre breathes life into your creative process.

Once you establish some techniques and processes that work for you, remain open to change. Each new project brings different demands requiring flexibility. Knowledge is a continuum, and remaining curious, patient, and malleable is helpful. If a technique isn’t working after diligent attempts, move on to something else.

With time, patience, and trial and error, you will learn to discern which advice is most beneficial for you.

Keep Your Novel Out of the Dreaded DNF—Did Not Finish—Book Club

Photo by George Milton

Today’s post is by author Amy L. Bernstein.

Admit it. You love to read novels. But every so often, you start a book you cannot bring yourself to finish. Perhaps you close it gently and with regret, maybe a tinge of guilt. Other times, perhaps you want to throw the book across the room in frustration.

Every reader has a DNF (did not finish) list. I will not share mine with you here, but trust me, it’s not short! And every book—no matter how popular—has its own legion of DNF readers.

Consider, for example, a well-known bestseller like Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. More than half a million reviews are posted on Goodreads alone. Over 20,000 of those are two-star reviews and more than 7,000 are one-star reviews. One disenchanted reader summed up the book this way: “SNOOZE!!!” Clearly, that reader is not alone.

As the 15th-century English monk and poet John Lydgate once wrote (italics mine), “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”

In literature, as in life, there is no accounting for taste and not every book is for every reader. But as an aspiring or published novelist, one thing is certain: You want to do everything in your power to keep your book out of the DNF Book Club. Your readers will have the last word, of course, but there’s no point in giving them reasons to hurl your precious creation into a blazing fireplace.

I did some digging to learn if the DNF issue could be quantified. According to the widely cited 2022 American Reading Habits Survey, more than half (52%) of 2,000 American adults surveyed reported they did not read a full book over the course of a year. And nearly 29% reported never finishing a book they started reading.

In 2023, the same research source reported that the average American adult citizen (the term is not defined) starts 12.6 books per year but only completes 5 of them.

And according to ThinkImpact, an educational research organization, the median number of books started and not necessarily completed per year among readers aged 15 to 65 or older, is four.

Assuming there’s at least a grain of truth in these statistics, the implications are fairly sobering. As an author, what steps can you take to write a book that the vast majority of readers will want to read all the way through?

I’m sharing a checklist that I think of as a set of avoidable (or unforced) errors. You can’t anticipate all the reasons a reader may not finish your book, but you can strive to avoid the biggest DNF red flags.

1. Make the character connection

Readers must find someone in your story—hero, anti-hero, or villain—to relate to, root for, or pin their hopes on either to succeed (in the hero’s case) or to fail (in the villain’s). That connection is usually forged through emotional empathy, which is quite “sticky” in terms of holding the reader’s interest, even if other elements are less well imagined. The deepest connections usually arise from complex, well-drawn characters and relationships where the story opens up not only who they are but how they cope. And the stickiness factor grows stronger when the reader lands on others to care about, such as a child in peril or an aged grandparent seeking a graceful death. Absent the character connection, the reader is apt to feel on the outside looking in, and that doesn’t bode well for reading to the end.

2. Maintain high stakes right until the end

Generally speaking, novels are bigger and bolder than real life. (Fredrik Backman may be an exception who proves the rule.) Readers crave life-and-death stakes; battles that rage across entire galaxies; love affairs where forces conspire against the lovers’ union. Give us big, emotionally potent stakes that raise questions readers demand to be answered by the end of the book (but not before!). Will Elizabeth Bennet ever wise up and see that the man of her dreams is right in front of her? Will astronaut Mark Watney live long enough to leave Mars and return to Earth? Will Ripley continue to get away with murder? The books that keep us reading raise high-stakes questions about all aspects of the human condition and then tantalize us with hints of a resolution—with or without some misdirection along the way. Keeping your readers guessing the outcome of a high-stakes plot is a surefire way to make them finish.

3. Deliver truth in advertising

A big DNF red flag is pulling a bait-and-switch on the reader. Your jacket copy promises, say, a juicy crime thriller featuring a feisty detective; the first 10 pages start off with a bang. And then…the story shifts in ways the reader could not anticipate and may struggle to follow, not because your writing is complex in a literary way, but because you’ve made a dramatic switch in character focus, tone, pacing, point of view, time period, or all of them nearly all at once. Suddenly, your detective vanishes from the page; we’ve left the 21st century for the 17th; pirates show up, and…well, I’m exaggerating to make a point, which is that you haven’t met the reader’s expectations based on the teaser and the book’s setup. Some readers will take this ride with you—but many will not. When your reader orders a red sweatshirt, they don’t expect to receive gray sweatpants instead. Make sure your book reads as advertised and don’t imagine you can capture a reader’s heart by promising to deliver an aspect of your story that is far from the real story you tell—or the way you promise to tell it.

4. Avoid the doldrums

The best literary fiction gives readers access to dense description, interior psychological states, and philosophical ruminations. God bless Henry James, A. S. Byatt, and everyone in between. Chances are your book isn’t purely literary and your readers prefer something a bit more lively and plot-forward. The greatest disservice you can render them, therefore, is to bore them. But that’s what you’ll do if you do not strike a fair balance between scenes that keep the story and characters moving and scenes that devolve into lengthy exposition and/or detailed backstory that turns into info-dumping, thus slowing your book to a crawl rather than deepening its mysteries and meanings. A little of all that goes a long way. Your readers may put up with a few of these detours, but if you insert too many, you’ll test their patience and surely lose many before the last page.

5. Hone your razorblade

There’s a good reason many agents and publishers these days rarely take chances on long books (say, over 100,000 words) from debut or lesser-known authors: Readers don’t want to read them and/or don’t have time to do so. Have you ever found your heart sinking when you notice on your Kindle that you’re only 8 percent of the way through an ebook that’s already making you weary? Not a good sign. Your job is to prune your manuscript ruthlessly; cut the fat; keep excitement and purpose on every page; and don’t overwrite, state the obvious, or include redundancies. Credit your reader’s intelligence and make them lean into the story.

6. Honor your genre

Nothing kills a reader’s interest faster than a broken (or irretrievably violated) trope within a beloved genre. If you’re writing a thriller, horror, fantasy, romance, cozy mystery, or other clearly delineated fiction genre, your North Star is to satisfy the reader’s need for, and expectation of, familiar plot progressions, genre-compatible protagonists, and satisfying (and somewhat expected) resolutions. Go ahead and introduce twists and surprises; bend conventions a bit; have fun with expectations; but give readers what they crave in the end. This is one bargain with your readers you cannot afford to toy with, or they may indeed toss your book across the room.

Don’t bite the hand that feeds

Writers often set out to write the kind of book they would like to read. You know what writers don’t do? They don’t set out to write a book they themselves would abandon as readers because it’s dull or plotless or the characters are too shallow to care about.

As you write, ask yourself if you’re giving your future reader easy reasons to stop reading. To be sure, you’re not a mind reader and readers can be fickle. But that’s all the more reason to do all you can to reel them in and keep them happy right up until THE END.

The Missing Link in Memoir Character Development

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

Today’s post is by writer and editor Lisa Cooper Ellison. Join her on Wednesday, June 19, for the online class The Psychology of Character Development for Memoirists.

In a previous career, I worked as an inner-city special education teacher. Many of my students were trauma survivors who’d experienced unspeakable violence. Some days books, chairs, and desks were thrown against the wall without warning. Hours later, the same student would smile and laugh as if nothing had happened. Sometimes we’d learn the reason for their outburst, but others remained a mystery—at least to us.

Many readers encounter stories with characters who are equally baffling. They act one way for a hundred pages, then do a 180 that violates what we know about them and their world, then carry on as if nothing strange happened.

When beta readers or critique partners flag this, some writers lean into the “show” side of “show don’t tell,” and add more gestures, facial expressions, and actions, hoping to clear things up. Others rush to insert flashbacks that explain their character’s psychological state. Occasionally a frustrated writer will say, “Don’t we all do strange things without understanding why? What if my art simply emulates life?” or “Maybe it’s the reader’s job to figure it out.”

Odd, confusing, and unexpected behaviors are a staple of real life, but in storytelling, the chain of events must make sense and move your story forward. That doesn’t mean spelling everything out for the reader. But you must know your characters’ motivations, so you can strategically plant clues that help the reader understand them.

Character motivation is an issue writers of all genres struggle with; however, memoirists face a few additional challenges. Unlike fiction writers, they can’t change situations to suit their stories, and the only lives they truly know are their own. They must dig deep into their psyches and observe others keenly to build realistic characters.

In graduate school, I encountered a quote that’s often attributed to the Austrian psychologist and neurologist, Viktor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

In that space, we filter events through our internal landscape, which determines our actions and decisions. I created the C.I.A. formula based on this quote to help you understand how your character’s mindset influences their reactions in every scene.

Complicating Event + Internal Landscape = Action Taken by Your Character

First, a complicating event, or stimulus, occurs. This obstacle prevents your character from achieving their goal. It could be a boss entering with a stack of papers just as you’re leaving for a weekend trip, a traffic jam, or an argument with your spouse.

The action your character chooses in response to this stimulus could include something they say or do, or it could be a decision made by your protagonist that only appears as thought. The complicating event and action are what you see. They make up the plot.

A character’s internal landscape builds a bridge between the event and your character’s reaction. A character’s internal landscape consists of three components: their worldview, carry-in expectations, and carry-over issues between your characters.

Character worldview

Your character’s temperament and life experiences will shape their worldview. These experiences include events that cause core wounds, relationships that serve as protective factors, and deep needs that create blind spots that get them into trouble. A character’s viewpoint will shift as your story unfolds.

To establish your character’s worldview, have them behave as if they have a certain history. For example, let’s say your main character grew up in an alcoholic home and developed some codependent tendencies. You might include a flashback at some point that helps us understand this tendency, but in early chapters, all you need to do is show a character behaving codependently, perhaps by making excuses for a loved one’s bad behavior, trying to appease an angry spouse, or micromanaging their child’s recovery, something Ann Batchelder shows extremely well in her memoir Craving Spring.

Carry-in expectations

Most writers spend countless hours developing their main character’s worldview but often neglect to account for the influence carry-in and carry-over issues have on their behavior.

Carry-in expectations consist of the needs, desires, and emotional state your character brings into a scene. Some carry-in issues will stem from things that happen before your story begins, but it’s more effective to set most of them up inside your story.

For example, in the prologue for The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls hides from her homeless mother as she heads to a party. Afterward, she’s so ashamed, she ruminates on her responsibilities to her parents. When she invites her mother to lunch at a Chinese restaurant a few days later, she carries in the guilt established in the opening scene as well as a sense of duty and history of trying and failing to help, which is developed through a few lines of interiority in scene number two.

Justin Torres masterfully weaves a set of carry-in issues into the second chapter of his semi-autobiographical novel, We the Animals, through a single page of flashback micro-scenes that explain why Justin and his brothers don’t question their mother’s confusion about what time it is.  

Carry-over issues

Carry-over issues are issues between characters developed in earlier scenes and carried over into this one. Justin’s flashbacks are also great examples of carry-over issues, but here are a few more.

In a chapter titled “We Don’t Negotiate” from Laura Cathcart Robbins’s memoir Stash, the narrator and her husband have formally separated, but their divorce isn’t final. In a previous chapter, her lawyer instructed her not to negotiate with her husband.  But that’s exactly what he asks her to do, saying “You know that’s what they want, right? The lawyers? … They want to pit us against each other and run up the bill.” Laura realizes they are living “in a siege state.” Part of her wants to give in, “but there’s too much at stake.” She carries over the escalating tension through some terse dialogue between the narrator and her soon-to-be ex, then reinserts the lawyer’s instructions with two quick lines of interior monologue. Do not negotiate with him outside of my presence. …Give him nothing.

In the chapter titled “Dream House as the River Lethe” from Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In the Dream House, the narrator endures a terrifying nighttime drive across several states to appease her volatile partner after she has a meltdown. Two carry-over issues influence her decisions in this scene: The partner’s reckless driving during a prior trip to Savannah and their recent conflicts.

Now you’re ready to insert clues readers can follow

Understanding your character’s worldview, carry-in, and carry-over issues will help you create a strong cause-and-effect chain that propels your story forward.

In your book’s setup, reveal your character’s worldview by having them act as if they have a certain history through actions and internal monologue.For carry-in issues, you can include an occasional flashback, but better yet, show your character forming their beliefs and expectations during a critical scene’s emotional beat.When it comes to carry-over issues, develop conflicts or alliances early on. If the dynamics are obvious, nothing further is needed. Just have your characters continue with the current dynamic. If it’s subtler, or you need to emphasize the stakes, use a line or two of interior monologue, dialogue between your characters, or body language as a reminder.

Tactical decisions like this are how you can create art that truly emulates life. Best of all, inserting these clues and context will ensure no readers are baffled.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join us on Wednesday, June 19, for the online class The Psychology of Character Development for Memoirists.

What to Ask Your Beta Readers

Photo by Yi Liu on Unsplash

Today’s post is by Andrew Noakes, founder of The Niche Reader.

You’ve assembled your team of excellent beta readers, you’ve convinced them that yes this manuscript is your precious creation, years in the making, but no you will not have a complete meltdown if they don’t enjoy every single aspect, and you’ve hit send.

Job done, right? Wrong!

It’s time to think about what you’re going to ask your beta readers once they’re finished reading. Although asking “what did you think?” is sure to elicit some kind of response, you’re going to have to dig a little deeper to get what you need.

This is a specialty area for me. For the last few years, I’ve been running The Niche Reader’s beta reader service, and in that time I’ve managed hundreds of projects. I’ve learned that asking the right questions is just as important as finding the right readers. This is how to do it.

Structured feedback: why and how

Structured feedback means asking a list of carefully chosen questions. This is good for you and good for your beta readers. They’re not qualified editors (more on that next), so they often don’t know what their feedback should focus on. Giving them structure makes it easier for them. For you, it means nothing will be missed, which can often happen if you don’t ask specific questions. If you’re worried about missing out on more spontaneous answers, no need—you can still invite those by posing broader questions alongside the targeted ones.

We use online forms to capture answers from beta readers, turning each piece of feedback into a handy PDF for our authors. You can achieve something similar using a Word document. Write out your questions and ask your beta readers to respond to each one, then return the document to you. I would recommend asking them to aim for a few sentences for each question, on average, to ensure you get enough detail.

Beta readers versus professional editors

Beta readers are very different from editors. They are typically ordinary readers with little or no expertise on story craft or publishing. They’re not here to tell you whether your plot conforms to a three-act structure, whether your characters have enough internal conflict, or whether your book can succeed in the current commercial market. Save questions like this for your editor.

Beta readers provide a different, but equally useful, perspective. They can tell you which characters they connected with and which they didn’t, where in the story they started to lose interest and where they felt like they couldn’t put it down, whether your ending was satisfying or frustrating. This perspective—a reader’s perspective—is invaluable.

Questions you should always ask

Start by trying to gain a broad understanding of what your beta readers liked and didn’t like. We always ask these three questions to begin with:

What was your overall impression of the story?What did you like about it the most?Was there anything you didn’t like about it? If so, what?

The first question asks for the broadest possible response. It should provide a top line answer to whether your beta readers enjoyed your book and why, or why not. It doesn’t lead them in any particular direction, so you know you’re getting an honest, spontaneous response. The second and third questions are almost as broad but invite your beta readers to provide a bit more detail on what worked for them and what didn’t.

After this, you should narrow in on the specific things you need to know. There are several questions I recommend asking:

Did the story grab you at the beginning?Were there any points where you started to lose interest?Was the story easy to follow? If not, why not?Was there anything particular that you found confusing?Was there anything that you had trouble believing or that seemed illogical?Did you notice any inconsistencies in the plot, with the characters, or with anything else?

The answers to these should tell you if there are any sections, including the beginning, that need to be made more engaging and whether there are any confusing, convoluted, unbelievable, or inconsistent aspects of your story that need to be addressed.

You should always ask your beta readers about the characters. We ask four character questions as standard:

Did you find the main character engaging? If so, what was most engaging about them? If you didn’t find them engaging, why not?Overall, which characters did you find the most engaging, and why?Overall, which characters did you find the least engaging, and why?Were you able to keep track of the characters, i.e. who was who? Were there too many?

These ensure you get a response about your main character (if you have one), as well as your other key characters.

Finally, don’t forget the all-important question:

Did you find the ending satisfying?

To these, you might want to add other questions. For example, we always ask about the general standard of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and formatting, in case this is useful for the author. But the questions above should be your core questions that you always ask.

Genre-focused questions

Every genre has its own conventions and expectations, so it’s often worthwhile including some genre-focused questions as well. For fantasy, you might want to ask about worldbuilding; for historical fiction, the authenticity of your setting; for romance, the level of spice. You get the idea!

Questions specific to your story

There may be specific things about your story you’d like your beta readers to reflect on. Perhaps there’s a scene, plot point, or feature of a character that you feel anxious about. The best place for questions like this is at the end, as you’ll be able to see whether the issue you’re concerned about cropped up earlier in their feedback, spontaneously. If not, that’s often a sign that they didn’t consider it a serious problem or priority, which is helpful to know in itself.

You could also ask other questions, such as whether your beta readers would like to see a sequel, what books they think your story is comparable to (this is helpful for locating your story within its genre and subgenre), and whether they like your title or prefer an alternative you might have in mind.

How to interpret feedback and what to do with it

One huge benefit of using beta readers is that you can establish patterns. If one beta reader doesn’t connect to your main character, but all of the others seem to find them very engaging, then that one beta reader is an outlier, and you probably shouldn’t re-write your protagonist purely on the basis of their opinion. But if several beta readers identify something as being problematic, then you know you probably ought to pay it some attention. Look for common threads.

Expect your beta readers to love some aspects of your story and be less keen on others. Sometimes, the bits they like and don’t like will surprise you. Let yourself be encouraged by the positives, and work on the aspects that need further consideration.

Above all, celebrate the fact that, at last, your story has found its way into the heads and hearts of people other than you and your close circle. You’ve taken that first step towards putting it out into the wider world and seeing how people respond; it will give you more confidence and courage for the next step after that.

How Symbols Can Support Your Writing Life

Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash

Today’s post is excerpted from Breathe. Write. Breathe.: 18 Energizing Practices to Spark Your Writing and Free Your Voice by Lisa Tener.

When my husband Tom and I began dating, he took me to his mom’s house one weekend and invited a couple he knew. As the four of us walked down the road, I spied an owl, high up on a branch in a distant tree. “Look, an owl!”

“Where?” Carol asked. No one else saw it until we walked much closer.

“That’s not an owl,” Steve said. It clearly looked like an owl to me.

“It’s too exposed to be real. It must be a plastic owl to scare away the birds,” Tom offered.

I decided he must be right, but Steve tested the theory and threw a rock at the leaves near the owl, causing it to stir. Owl, indeed. And alive. (But, come on, Steve. Who throws a rock at an owl? Just no. Don’t do that.)

I have an uncanny sense for seeing animals in nature, animals that normally hide from humans or disappear in the light of day. I believe we all have this ability when we open our awareness to the previously hidden world around us, the world that our harried, productive, modern selves insist we don’t have time to explore. It takes quieting our mind chatter and slowing down to natural rhythms for us to see this world.

On one level, the owl incident immediately showed me that not only did I discount my knowing, but I stifled my voice and didn’t speak up when Steve threw the rock, despite how wrong his actions felt to me.

My interaction with the owl continued to reveal a new understanding about my life. As I recalled the owl while lying in bed that night, I had a kinesthetic experience. I felt myself on one side of the owl, representing divine feminine energy, and Tom on the other, representing divine masculine energy. The owl perched above us in the center, as we wound around each other like ribbons on a maypole. I felt the power of this interweaving of masculine and feminine. It conveyed to me that every romantic relationship has a dimension greater than the experience between two people. In our off-kilter world, each relationship holds a healing power to balance and harmonize feminine and masculine.

This understanding was not so much a linear thought; it came as more of a felt sense, full mind-body-spirit kind of knowing.

Although we’d only been dating for a couple of weeks, through this experience with Owl I knew Tom as my soul mate, our relationship as part of our personal healing and a planetary healing. This may sound grandiose, yet many cultures view the everyday world as full of symbols and guidance.

Life speaks to us through symbols that help us learn, grow, heal, and create, if we slow down and listen. Jesus spoke in the symbolic language of parables as did many prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Hindu stories in the Bhagavad Gita and other spiritual texts are meta-metaphors, full of symbolism.

When I walk a client through my Meet Your Muse exercise, the muse often speaks through symbols, both by how the muse shows up (and in what guise) and by providing symbolic images in answer to our questions.

Paying attention to symbols in your life

Pay attention to what you see and hear today:

Animals that cross your pathA word you hear several times from different sourcesSong lyrics that pop outSensations or pain in your bodyObjects or people that spark something within youNumbers that show up repeatedly

If each experience appeared in a dream, how might you interpret the symbols? First tap into your intuition for answers. After that, you can look up symbols on the internet. Kari Hohne’s dream dictionary at Café au Soul is my favorite resource.

What does the symbol or symbolic event have to teach you about your writing or other areas of your life?

You can also seek out a symbol. You can close your eyes, ask a question, and see if a symbol comes up. Or you can find an inspiring animal totem card deck, like Jamie Sams’ Medicine Cards or the beautiful Spirit of the Animals by Jody Bergsma. Think of what you plan to write about today and ask for an animal spirit guide to support you. Or pick a card without any specific plan, and write about what the card means to you or seems to communicate.

Using symbols to inspire and enrich your writing

While writing is an inner journey, you can add elements of the outer world to make it more concrete. Bring some fresh cut lilacs to your writing space, light a candle, or breathe in the scent of your favorite essential oil. If you have a deck of animal spirit cards or any other divination deck, choose an image that speaks to you and place it in your writing space. These outer prompts serve you in several ways:

Symbols in your writing space underscore the message that this is your special writing time, connecting you to your creative source.These brief rituals connect you with your senses—smell, touch, sight, sound, and taste—the magic talismans for your authentic voice.Such brief rituals become part of your writing habit, making it easier and easier to groove right into writing from a place of wonder.Simple rituals provide an easy way to bypass the inner saboteur.Rituals can add an element of fun and play. And the muse loves to play!Writing rituals have a way of making our writing time feel more magical. Bringing in symbols can open you more fully to the creative magic within you.Creating a writing ritual

Create a writing ritual incorporating the steps below:

Choose a symbolic object and hold it in your hands. Feel its weight, shape, and texture.Close your eyes and imagine carrying your sacred object with you as you open a gate to your creative inner garden.Imagine your object soaking up the good qi of the garden, and being able to bring that good qi back with you in the object, to inspire and support your writing.Imagine bringing back your sacred object as you return through the gate to present time.Open your eyes and imagine placing the object near you to nourish your creativity.Write about the experience and what the sacred object means to you, and use the writing to segue into an ongoing project or new piece of work, such as a short poem, blog post, or story. How does the ritual affect your writing?End the ritual with a feeling or prayer of gratitude.If you want a simpler ritual, you can light a candle or smell a special essential oil or flower and imagine it giving off creative energy to support your writing session.Symbols at work

Is there a character trait that’s holding you back at work or a skill or trait that might help you succeed on a work project (or in your career, in general)? Close your eyes and look for an animal or other symbol that might embody the skills or traits that would help you in this endeavor. Write a dialogue with the animal/symbol. Ask it questions and answer as if you were the animal/symbol. What might you do differently?

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out Breathe. Write. Breathe.: 18 Energizing Practices to Spark Your Writing and Free Your Voice by Lisa Tener.

What Do We Really Mean When We Say “Show, Don’t Tell”?

Today’s post is by author and book coach Janet S Fox.

Let me just start with: I do not condemn “telling.” There’s a place for it in every story, and that’s mainly in the interstices between scenes.

But there’s a reason we must show things when we are in scene and not tell: readers attach to clear actions and emotions. And that’s key to pulling the reader into your story.

Here’s what I see in stories that “tell” too much: two people are having a conversation, but the dialogue is stilted and expositive. Or a character is reacting in a scene, but we don’t understand why because the emotion is not on the page. Or two people are interacting (a fight, a love scene, a heist, a whatever), but we really can’t tell what they want or need.

In an earlier post, I discussed the use of elision to show emotion and to elicit it in the reader. Today’s post comes from the opposite angle: specific in-scene craft techniques.

There are four ways to show in scene: through dialogue, interiority, gesture, and sensory detail.

Showing through dialogue

It’s a common to tell your reader information by having one character convey it to another in dialogue. For example, take teen friends and competitors Harry and Paul.

“Hey, Harry,” Paul said, “I heard you have an appointment tomorrow with Dr. Brown so he can take an X-ray of the knee you twisted yesterday when we were playing pickleball.” 

“That’s right, Paul. This knee really hurts. When you pushed me, I couldn’t believe it. Dr. Brown said he’d take the X-ray and he’ll tell me if I’ll ever walk again, much less play pickleball.”

We feel removed from the relationship between the boys, as Paul dispassionately reiterates things that Harry already knows. We can’t feel anything for Harry because he’s telling us it hurts. But if the author showed Harry’s anger about being pushed by Paul and Paul’s disdain by using antagonistic dialogue, we’d feel it:

“You SOB. You meant to do it.”
Paul shrugged. “You’re a jerk on the court. You had it coming.”
“Damn you. Never again.”
“Got us another pickleball date in two weeks.”
“Not happening! Dammit, I can’t even feel my foot.”
“Brown’ll fix you up.” Paul waved his hand. “See you in two weeks.” 

To show in dialogue:

Show the speaker’s emotions by using what he says or leaves out in dialogue. Reflect emotions rather than recite facts.Don’t have anyone “tell” things to other characters, especially things they would already know.Showing through internal monologue

Internal monologue is the stuff that is going on inside the character’s head—also known as interiority. The reader has no idea what your character is thinking and feeling unless you find a way to convey it. But once again, you have to avoid merely “telling” the reader, and this one is a little harder to accomplish.

Understanding character backstory and the emotions driving them are essential to getting their emotions expressed through internal monologue. Most of the time your main character won’t be able to express their deepest emotions, their deepest fears, their internal need or lack because they haven’t sorted them out. But you need to know what they are feeling and wanting, in order to convey emotion through the character’s thoughts.

When your character is thinking about how they feel, try the following:

Use memory as metaphor: “I felt like I did when I walked alone into that classroom and everyone burst out laughing.” (implication: “I’m ashamed, I’m upset, I’m miserable”)Use irony: “I should be happy.” (implication: “But I’m not”)Use self-deception, so the reader becomes a sympathizer or an analyst: “I shoved Harry because he acted like a jerk.” (implication: “What would you do?”)Showing through gesture

The third way to convey emotion through showing is through action or “gesture,” which can range from the smallest tic to the big behaviors.

Let’s go back to Paul and Harry:

Harry lunged for the ball, but Paul, coming from behind, gave Harry a hard shove. Harry stumbled, then fell with a cry.

Harry rolled on the court, clutching his right knee, his face twisted, eyes closed. “What’d you do that for?” Harry said through clenched teeth.

Paul twirled the racket in his hand. “You were acting like a jerk.”

Even without the dialogue you can tell what Paul is feeling. And Harry’s pain and shock are clear from his gestures.

To get to gesture:

Act out scenes as if you are on stage. Get up out of your chair and move around in space, gesturing as if you are the character. Use those gestures in your writing.When you write an emotional scene, sit back and imagine yourself in that scene. What are you feeling? Is your skin prickling? Is your mouth dry? Heart pounding? Breath short? Fists clenched? There are a million ways to physically react to an emotion. Show those in your scenes.Showing through sensory detail

A storm experienced by someone who has just fallen in love is different from the same storm experienced by someone who has just lost a loved one, or by someone who is hiding from a murderer, or by someone who is about to be crowned queen of the underworld.

Consider this passage:

Harry tasted blood and the rank smell of sweat made him nauseous. The slap of balls on racquets was like a nail gun in his brain, and the blinding sun baking the court made everything worse as he clutched his knee in agony. Maybe he had acted like a jerk, but Paul had no business shoving him like that. Harry knew he’d be out of commission for weeks.

To use sensory details to convey emotion, don’t just describe the setting or the scene. Instead:

Describe the emotions inherent in your character’s observation of the setting or scene, through symbolism and through metaphor.Run a check to see how many specific sensory details you’ve mentioned.Check for things seen, heard, touched, smelled, tasted, and relate them directly to the emotional context.Other concrete ways to show

Words/phrases like “I saw, “I felt,” “I heard,” and so on filter the action and tell the reader what is happening. Replace these filter words with active verbs and strong nouns. For example:

Telling: “I felt scared in the dark room as I heard the wind.”Showing: “Branches scratched the glass as the wind moaned. Shadows crept from the corners, and I shivered in the icy air.”

Using words like “happy,” “sad,” or “excited” can be a weak way to express your character’s inner life. Show your character’s feelings by understanding how the human mind and body react to situations. For example:

Telling: “I was elated.”Showing: “As I danced around the room I burst out in giggles. I thought I would sprout wings. He loved me!” 

Passive voice is distancing and tends to lean toward telling rather than showing. In addition to passive, try to avoid using the helping verb “was” with a past participle (any verb plus “-ing”). For example:

Telling: The dog was chasing the ball.Showing: The dog leapt at the ball.Exercise

Print out 10 to 20 pages of your manuscript and use highlighters or colored markers to outline scenes in one color, summaries in another. Reread your manuscript out loud, looking for the clear images that your mind creates when you enter a scene. If the image is vague, you may be summarizing/telling.

How Naming a Character Is Like Naming a Child

Today’s post is by author Ginny Kubitz Moyer.

Over the course of my life, I have chosen names for two real human beings and approximately 200 fictional ones. The processes are surprisingly similar. Both involve a blend of logic and intuition, and both feel like deeply consequential decisions.

Of course, it’s fair to say the stakes are higher when naming a baby. You’re choosing a moniker that will (in most cases) follow another person throughout their lifetime, forming others’ impressions at school, in the job market, even online. The responsibility feels weighty, and it is.

But choosing a name for a protagonist is also an important task. Apart from any portrait that might be on the book cover, a name is likely your readers’ first encounter with the fictional person who will, one hopes, captivate them for hundreds of pages. How does a writer land on the right one for their main character—and for all the other characters, too?

Below are a few factors to consider. They just might help you select the perfect names for your fictional creations … and, should the occasion arise, for actual flesh-and-blood ones, too.

1. Consider the time period.

If I tell you I went to high school with a few Tiffanys and Chads, can you guess my approximate age? Needless to say, neither name found its way into my novel A Golden Life, which takes place in 1938. Instead, my characters are called Frances, Lawrence, Gene, Celia, Joe, Arthur, and Nancy. Very few of those names are in my high school yearbook (Class of ’91), but they certainly would have been in my grandmother’s.

As a historical fiction writer, I’ve found that my research process organically fills my subconscious with names from whichever era I’m writing about. When drafting, I draw names from that well as needed. If I get stuck, the Social Security Administration’s lists of the most popular baby names by year are an invaluable resource (as well as being great fun to explore).

2. How does it sound?

Charles Dickens excelled at choosing names that fall memorably on the ear while subtly illuminating the characters’ personalities. In David Copperfield, the “ah” sound in “Mr. Micawber” hints at the character’s perennial openness and optimism, while the name “Edward Murdstone” evokes something cold and sinister. Taking a page from Dickens’s book, in A Golden Life, I called one character Celia Ventimiglia. The name’s musical lilt reveals something about the woman herself, a character who (unlike my protagonist) is in harmony with her family. In my first novel, The Seeing Garden, one of my main characters is named William Brandt. I chose the surname for its emphatic, strong finish, which fits a decisive man of business. (The fact that it contains the world “brand” was another plus for a character who cares deeply about his public image.)

3. What’s the meaning?

My sons are named Matthew and Luke. While the meaning of those names wasn’t the primary reason my husband and I selected them, “gift from God” and “light” both capture something of how we felt about their births. Likewise, in writing fiction, a name’s meaning is rarely my primary consideration, but it can subtly highlight some aspect of the character. For the protagonist in an upcoming project, I landed on a name that means “peace” because the novel is set during a time of war. In A Golden Life, the name “Belinda” means “serpent,” which echoes a motif used in connection with the character. Even if I don’t specifically point out the meaning in the story, I find that its presence subtly enhances my writing.

4. What are the associations?

I taught high school for twenty-six years and discovered there’s a little-known occupational hazard to the profession: when I was pregnant, my colleagues warned that every name I was considering for my child would bring up an association, good or bad, with a former student. “Some baby names will be completely off the table,” they said, and they were right. (If you are a former student named Matthew or Luke, rest assured that my memories of you are nothing but positive.)

Of course, names that have certain associations for me may hold different associations for others; a writer can’t possibly anticipate or work around that. But it’s fair to say that if you name your protagonist Elvis, Jesus, Holden, or Hermione, there will be a specific image that flashes into your reader’s eye before they can begin to picture your character. That can either be a deal-breaker for the name or, in some cases, a plus, something you use strategically. (A protagonist named Elvis who can’t carry a tune, for example, might bring exactly the ironic touch that you want.)

5. What is your preference?

There are a handful of female names I have encountered in books over the years and have absolutely loved. Even if I’d had ten daughters, though, these names are unlikely to have been used. My husband and I granted each other veto power in the baby-naming process, and I doubt he’d have embraced some of my favorites, many of which have a decidedly old-fashioned ring.

But when you’re a novelist, you have free rein to use any name you like. This is how I ended up with Lavinia and Vivian in The Seeing Garden and Kitty in A Golden Life. There’s something satisfying about being able to put these names in the pages of a book, possibly winning new fans for them in the process. (Will my efforts help Kitty and Lavinia rank up on the Social Security list? Stranger things have happened.)

One final thought: There’s usually a more flexible timeline to naming fictional people than there is to naming real ones. With no bureaucratic deadlines or family members pressuring you for a decision, you can take ample time getting to know your characters and choosing accordingly. I’m a discovery writer who figures out the story as I write, so my drafts often have characters named “she” or “he” until I’m a good way into the story… at which point I consider the factors above, plug the winning name into the manuscript, and see how it goes from there.

And how has it gone, all this naming? Well, both of my sons, now teenagers, tell me they love their names. And no readers have told me that Catherine, my protagonist in The Seeing Garden, is really more of a Sierra, Mimi, or Blanche.

I’m going to call that a win.

When Writing Gets Hard: 3 Hidden Causes of Writer’s Block

Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas (@manzanitafire), an award-winning author, editor, and book coach. 

One newspaperman, Red Smith, is credited with saying, “Writing is easy. You just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.”

When Dorothy Parker was asked if she enjoyed writing, she replied with characteristic wit by saying, “I enjoy having written.”

All of which is to say, writing is famously hard.

If you occasionally hit a rough spot for what feels like no reason at all, then the solution is often to stop for a moment, take stock, and look a little deeper into what it is you’re attempting to write.

As a writer myself, I’m no stranger to these sorts of points, where it feels like I’ve been cruising along with my writing only to suddenly hit a brick wall. And as a book coach, part of my job is helping people get through these rough spots in their creative work.

In looking at this phenomenon from both the inside and the outside, I’ve come to see that there almost is a reason for it—though these reasons may not be at all obvious to us at the time.

In fact, these are usually points where the wise storyteller inside us is trying to tell us something.

1. You don’t know enough about your story.

You may know how the story starts, and how it ends. You may know who the characters are, exactly what they love and hate about each other. You may even know what it was in the protagonist’s past that led her to have such strong feelings about what the antagonist is doing.

The fact is, you can know a lot about your story and still not know enough. And by enough, I mean the right things—the things essential to telling a compelling story, at the level of the big-picture structure.

Those are the story elements I focus on in my course on big-picture storytelling, and in my one-on-one outline coaching work as well: your protagonist’s emotional journey in the story, and subsequent transformation; the cause-and-effect trajectory of your plot, and how it pushes your protagonist to grow and change; and what your characters want and why they want it.

I’ve seen this over and over again (and experienced it for myself): If you’re not clear as a writer on any one of these things, you will eventually hit the wall with your story—or head off in the wrong direction entirely, with an increasing sense of uncertainty and unease as you do so. Which in turn makes writing hard.

Why? Because your wise inner storyteller is trying to tell you that you don’t know enough about your story to write it.

2. You don’t know enough about your scene or chapter.

You may be clear on how your story fits together in the big picture but still be in the dark as to how a given scene or chapter unfolds—and the more important that scene or chapter is to your story, the harder it will be to write.

These are the days when many of us stare at our computer screens for hours on end, writing and deleting and writing again, and deleting again, in a frustrating loop that can actually lead to thinking in ways that aren’t very kind to ourselves.

What is wrong with me? Why can’t I write this? What is my problem today?

In my experience, this is just another variation on the first issue: Your wise inner storyteller is telling you that you don’t know enough yet to write this scene or chapter.

The solution in this case is to simply to stop trying to write that scene or chapter directly and pre-write instead—in whatever form you find most helpful.

Prewriting might mean taking some time to make some notes about that scene or situation in your process notebook. (You keep one of those, right?) It might mean freewriting in that notebook about what each of the characters in this scene or chapter is feeling at this point in the story, about what their perspective and agenda is.

Or prewriting might mean actually drafting that scene or chapter in a very loose way, by hand, then going back over it and adding possible variations and possible deletions, without making any commitments either way—and then, and only then, going to the computer and formalizing the language.

Try this the next time you feel stuck in this way, and I think you’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to write that big scene or chapter when it doesn’t feel like you have to produce it “from scratch.”

3. What you think you know is wrong.

In other cases, you may feel like you know exactly what’s supposed to happen in this section of your story, or exactly what is supposed to happen in this scene or chapter, but … it still feels really hard to write.

Some folks get stuck here—for days, months, and sometimes even years. But writers are nothing if not stubborn, so many of them simply find a way to push on through.

If that’s what you’ve done with a section of your manuscript, this may wind up being a section you feel you can never quite get right. You may go over and over it again in revision, tweaking and nipping and cutting, fiddling with the language, the transitions, the POV, whatever—but no matter what you do, something about it still feels off.

And because we spend so long reworking on those sections, we often wind up getting attached to them. They become those “darlings” Faulkner was talking about—the ones we ultimately have to kill, for the greater good of the story.

Which is to say, sometimes the parts that feel hard to write, or hard to “get right” in revision, are simply wrong for the story, no matter how much you’ve managed to convince yourself otherwise.

Meaning: it’s out of keeping with what you’ve already established, it will not help you land the ending, it leads to a wrong ending, it IS the wrong ending, it will not create a satisfying experience for the reader—or some combination of the above.

In this case, your wise inner storyteller is telling you to step back and reconsider what you think you know about the story and see if there’s something you’re missing—and something different here that needs to happen in this section of your novel instead.

Have you experienced this type of “writer’s block” with one of your stories?

And is there a point in your writing journey where your wise inner storyteller was trying to tell you something you didn’t realize at the time?

Let me know in the comments!