A perpetual Jersey boy, SL Harby lives in northwestern New Jersey with his wife and muse, Jessica and their bad ass rescue dog, Tellulah.

Visit www.ReadSLHarby.com for fiction, reviews, creator interviews and more!

• According to this link by Meg LaTorre at Savvy Authors, “agency” means the character is more proactive than reactive in the story. The character does stuff instead of stuff just happening to him/her.
• To give characters agency, ensure they drive the plot through active choices and pursuit of clear, motivated goals, rather than passively reacting to events. This involves providing meaningful choices, showing consequences for their actions, creating internal and external conflicts that require decisive action, and allowing for character growth based on their decisions. (thanks, AI and this link)

How do you do it? Check out this link (summary below):

• Active, Not Passive: Your protagonist should be the driver of the plot, making decisions that shape the story, not just having things happen to them.
• Clear Goals: Give characters specific, achievable goals rooted in their desires and motivations.
• Strong Motivations: Explain why a character takes action, linking their choices to their values, beliefs, and internal struggles.
• Meaningful Choices: Present dilemmas where characters must make difficult decisions that reflect their personality.
• Consequences: Show the tangible positive and negative outcomes of their decisions, reinforcing their impact on the story.
• Conflict as a Catalyst: Use obstacles and conflicts to force characters to act and make choices.
• Show, Don't Tell: Reveal agency through actions and dialogue, not just narration of thoughts or feelings.
• Character Arc: Allow characters to change and develop as a result of their experiences and choices.
• Avoid Deus Ex Machina: Don't resolve conflicts randomly or through external forces beyond the character's control.

Read more on the blog

Some expected costs: Table ($50-200), vendor license (maybe), travel -- if you have an LLC, you can consider all of these business expenses.

Some preparation consideration: Table aesthetics - what will get people's attention? How can you display your logos and branding? What props will you use to lure people? Rex has foam boards of the book covers, Kasie has QR code displays. Rex has a foam baby eating a rat, it was a Halloween store buy. What giveaways will you have? We've used candy and we've used stickers. Match the stickers to the event. Book display stands are available at Amazon and the foam board displays will have theirs in the purchase price.

Some of the vendors we mentioned for giveaways: DiscountMugs.com, VistaPrint, 24HourWristBands.com

Tote bags - people walk around with the bags and advertise for you. This is a good onsite investment.

Book pricing can and should be related to the people at the event. Consider charging what you think the people will pay. All the authors charging the same thing may not sell anything. But when Rex charges what he thinks the people will pay, he undercuts the other authors. Volume is what matters here, he says, so the more books you can put out in the world the better.

How to present yourself at the table: look professional, a jacket and a nice shirt, something relevant for the event, put out a select number of books so that people can peruse them individually. Engage with people, talk to them, don't be nervous. Know something about the subject.

Read more on the blog

Five years ago, we talked about this as taking the easy way out by doing anything but writing. In 2021, we touched on the topic as it related to Paying Your Writerly Dues. And last week in our quest for inspiration, we suggested some of these activities to channel your creative vibes. 

This time we’re taking a list from the Executive Director of the Pat Conroy Literary Center, Jonathan Haupt, who presented on the topic at last week’s Joy of Writing conference for the SCWA. We’re going to expound upon each of these topics on the air. No segments today, just working the list:

1. Join a writers’ group
2. Go to a writers’ conference
3. Be a loyal customer to your local indy bookstore
4. Write reviews for your favorite indy bookstores
5. Attend author talks and book signings
6. Send than you letters, notes, and messages to authors
7. Like, comment, share, subscribe to authors’ digital content
8. Post reviews for books you enjoy
9. Go to book festivals
10. Be the “in conversation with” host
11. Be a library patron, better yet, a Friend of the Liberary
12. Support literary journals and magazines
13. Be a literacy volunteer at your local schools
14. Donate books to the Little Free Liberaries
15. Join the Authors Guild
16. Join a book club
17. Join Authors Against Book Bands
18. Advocate for the rights to read and write freely
19. Chronicle the times in which you live
20. Support the arts and your fellow creatives
21. Be a literary tourist
22. Read.

Read more on the blog

Five years ago, we talked about this as taking the easy way out by doing anything but writing. In 2021, we touched on the topic as it related to Paying Your Writerly Dues. And last week in our quest for inspiration, we suggested some of these activities to channel your creative vibes. 

This time we’re taking a list from the Executive Director of the Pat Conroy Literary Center, Jonathan Haupt, who presented on the topic at last week’s Joy of Writing conference for the SCWA. We’re going to expound upon each of these topics on the air. No segments today, just working the list:

1. Join a writers’ group
2. Go to a writers’ conference
3. Be a loyal customer to your local indy bookstore
4. Write reviews for your favorite indy bookstores
5. Attend author talks and book signings
6. Send than you letters, notes, and messages to authors
7. Like, comment, share, subscribe to authors’ digital content
8. Post reviews for books you enjoy
9. Go to book festivals
10. Be the “in conversation with” host
11. Be a library patron, better yet, a Friend of the Liberary
12. Support literary journals and magazines
13. Be a literacy volunteer at your local schools
14. Donate books to the Little Free Liberaries
15. Join the Authors Guild
16. Join a book club
17. Join Authors Against Book Bands
18. Advocate for the rights to read and write freely
19. Chronicle the times in which you live
20. Support the arts and your fellow creatives
21. Be a literary tourist
22. Read.

Read more on the blog

What can we do about it?

This writer offered a few tips and tricks:

• Read, read and read again – other writers can gently or violently shake something free in us
• Surround yourself with other writers – group, conferences, readings, book stores, go where the writers are
• Be open to conversation – you might avoid too much socializing when you’re focused, but right now you need conversation, so seek it out
• Spend time elsewhere – travel or retreat, get into a new space to shake yourself out of mundaneity

Our AI answers also suggest immersing yourself in the world. But being intentional about it is what matters. Don’t just move through the world, observe and record what you’re seeing and let those observations light the fuse to new stories.

Segment 2

Let’s talk about creativity as an inspiration. Do you watch other stories? Veer into nonfiction books? See concerts or artwork? 

Some image or phrase might inspire you to write the backstory or the what-happened-next. Sometimes movies can have a side character that makes you want to write what that character might be doing otherwise.

Can you be spontaneously inspired? What are the results of such experiences? Novels? Short stories?

Segment 3

Planned writing exercises? Yes, please. Some prompts might start a new story or inspire a character or longer work.

I like a writing prompt exercise but sometimes others’ prompts are dumb. Where do you get writing prompts?

Google AI. For real. Just ask it for writing prompts for adult writers. Otherwise you’ll get a bunch of elementary school prompts like “how was your summer vacation?”

Read more on the blog

• How can AI assist with research and brainstorming? AI can help writers research topics, generate outlines, and brainstorm ideas for stories or articles.
• Can AI help with editing and proofreading? Yes, AI writing assistants can offer real-time suggestions for grammar, style, and structure, improving the overall quality of writing.
• How can AI be used to enhance creativity? AI can generate prompts, scenarios, and alternative perspectives to help writers overcome creative blocks or explore new ideas.
• Can AI tools be used to tailor content for different audiences? AI can assist in analyzing audience demographics and preferences to customize the tone, style, and content to specific segments.

Some writers are worried about AI. They ask:

• Will AI replace human writers and artists? This is a significant concern, especially in fields like scriptwriting and content creation, where AI could automate tasks traditionally performed by humans.
• How will AI affect writers' income and compensation? Writers worry about the potential for downward pressure on wages due to the increased competition and automation offered by AI.
• What are the ethical implications of using AI in content creation? This includes questions about copyright infringement, plagiarism, biases in AI models, and the transparency of AI-generated content.
• How can intellectual property be protected in an AI-driven world? Concerns exist about AI systems being trained on copyrighted material without compensation or permission, leading to legal challenges and uncertainty about ownership of AI-generated content.
• How can the uniqueness and value of human-written work be preserved? Writers and industry professionals are exploring ways to differentiate human creativity from AI's capabilities and ensure fair compensation for human artists.

On X:

One writer asked, what are you writing that no one seems to want? – i.e. the MSWL for agents and publishers may not include your WIP.

Read more on the blog

The Seven Deadly Sins (this link) in Roman Catholic theology, are the seven vices that spur other sins and further immoral behavior. First enumerated by Pope Gregory I (the Great) in the 6th century and elaborated in the 13th century by St. Thomas Aquinas.

The sins are:

1. Pride
2. Greed
3. Lust
4. Envy
5. Gluttony
6. Wrath
7. Sloth

We’ve done these before (episodes 151-157), but it’s been a while and this time we’re going to sharpen the focus on the sins as potential stakes-raising behaviors.

This week’s focus is Lust. When we did this in Episode 155, I was writing novels with a good bit of sex in them. Weirdly, that hasn’t changed. In fact, the motivation of Lust is even more relevant to my vampires who are equally motivated by thirst.

Last time we started here:

What is lust? According to Wikipedia:

Lust is a psychological force producing intense desire for an object, or circumstance while already having a significant other or amount of the desired object.[1] Lust can take any form such as the lust for sexuality (see libido), money, or power. It can take such mundane forms as the lust for food (see gluttony) as distinct from the need for food. It is similar to but distinguished from passion, in that passion propels individuals to achieve benevolent goals whilst lust does not.

Going straight to the source, Christianity.com gives us this:

Lust is essentially to crave something, usually associated with worldly desires of sexual intent or material possessions. Lust has as its focus gratifying oneself, which often leads to toxic actions to fulfill one’s desires without consideration of the consequences. Lust springs forth from selfishness and greed.

Lust is considered a sin because it puts physical, human impulses above Godly or spiritual pursuits. Not unlike greed, lust is insatiable and similar to pride, is focused on the individual, not the betterment of family or community. 

Are there any benefits to lust?

Read more on the blog

The sins are:

1. Pride
2. Greed
3. Lust
4. Envy
5. Gluttony
6. Wrath
7. Sloth

We’ve done these before (episodes 151–157), but it’s been a while and this time we’re going to sharpen the focus on the sins as potential stakes-raising behaviors.

DeadlySins.com gives us this definition: “Envy is the desire for others’ traits, status, abilities, or situation.” It happens when one is convinced others are smarter, luckier, more attractive, or better than themselves. The punishment is to be put in freezing water in the afterlife.  

Also according to DeadlySins.com, “medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas said of Envy: “Envy according to the aspect of its object is contrary to charity, whence the soul derives its spiritual life… Charity rejoices in our neighbor’s good, while envy grieves over it.” (2, 36, ad 3)”

What kinds of characters are envious? 

What kinds of envy are there?

What famous characters have acted on envy to upend a protagonist’s efforts?

Read more on the blog

The Seven Deadly Sins (this link) in Roman Catholic theology, are the seven vices that spur other sins and further immoral behavior. First enumerated by Pope Gregory I (the Great) in the 6th century and elaborated in the 13th century by St. Thomas Aquinas.

The sins are:

• Pride
• Greed
• Lust
• Envy
• Gluttony
• Wrath
• Sloth

Like I said, we’ve done these before (episodes 151-157), but it’s been a while and this time we’re going to sharpen the focus on the sins as potential stakes-raising behaviors.

This week’s focus is Gluttony. What do we know about gluttony? Let’s ask AI.

Gluttony is often associated with overeating, but it can also refer to overconsumption, such as drinking too much or bingeing on Netflix. A gluttonous character may prioritize their own pleasure and satisfaction over their health or responsibilities, and may struggle with self-control and moderation. A primary goal for the gluttonous is comfort, and they may seek an overabundance of any item that's pleasurable to achieve constant pampering. 

Some examples of gluttony in literature include:

• Beauty and the Beast: Gaston eats five dozen eggs every morning
• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: The mayor, Bruce Campbell, keeps getting fatter as he gets more corrupt
• Jabba the Hut from Star Wars
• Falstaff from Henry V

Read more on the blog

The Seven Deadly Sins (this link) in Roman Catholic theology, are the seven vices that spur other sins and further immoral behavior. First enumerated by Pope Gregory I (the Great) in the 6th century and elaborated in the 13th century by St. Thomas Aquinas.

The sins are:

• Pride
• Greed
• Lust
• Envy
• Gluttony
• Wrath
• Sloth

What is wrath? Anger? Hate? Straight to the source, Christianity.com says this about wrath: 

Wrath can be summarized as strong vengeful hatred or resentment. The warnings of wrath in Christianity arise from the consequences of vengeance in human relations. We can become consumed by rage and revenge to the point of acting irrationally and immorally. This is the wickedness of wrath and why it is included as a deadly sin.

Some books where wrath plays a critical role (link):

• Lord of the Rings - Sauron - “evil scourge of Middle Earth” says enough
• The Wonderful World of Oz - the Wicked Witch of the West sends all the things to kill Dorothy
• The War of the Roses - a couple’s failed marriage turns into spite and wrath
• The Godfather - Michael’s almost entirely motivated by wrath of the vengeance variety
• Harry Potter - certainly Voldemort (Tom Riddle) but also Bellatrix Lestrange, Sirius Black, and Severus Snape all act out of wrath
• Bond books - specifically supervillain SPECTRE leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld (featured in three Bond novels and six films) is one wrathful guy—and arguably the most diabolical of all of Bond’s nemeses
• Moby Dick - personifying wrath as vengeful God (i.e. nature) and Ahab’s tireless quest
• Othello - we know the revenge, the manipulation but Iago’s actions come from a place of deep hatred for Othello, he weaponizes his hate
• Stephen King gives us It and Carrie, both wrath-driven title characters

Wrath is a “sneaky” sin because it can simmer for years before a character takes action. It can also fuel microaggressions and show itself only in a slow drip, not a tornado invasion.

ProWriting Aid’s series on character traits is useful (we’ve used it the last two episodes). They list these as possible causes of anger or wrath (link):

• Chronic stress or anxiety
• Genetics or family history of anger issues
• Feelings of injustice or unfair treatment
• Inability to manage emotions effectively
• Learned behavior from family or peers
• Personality disorders such as borderline personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder
• Frustration with life circumstances or feeling powerless
• Traumatic experiences such as abuse or neglect
• Substance abuse or addiction

Read more on the blog

The Seven Deadly Sins (this link) in Roman Catholictheology, are the seven vices that spur other sins and further immoral behavior. First enumerated by Pope Gregory I (the Great) in the 6th century and elaborated in the 13th century by St. Thomas Aquinas.

The sins are:

• Pride
• Greed
• Lust
• Envy
• Gluttony
• Wrath
• Sloth

What is sloth? This link is “What is sloth and why is it worse than laziness?” and here’s what the author says: “The sin of sloth is a bit deeper than laziness, and that subtlety is found in the thing that keeps us bound up: fear.”

How does fear affect sloth? The dark side here is the lack of motivation or a person’s choice to accept the easy way, the lowest risk, by doing nothing. The Bible calls out idleness or failure to think toward the future and plan for it. Slothf

Read more on the blog

The sins are:

1. Pride
2. Greed
3. Lust
4. Envy
5. Gluttony
6. Wrath
7. Sloth

We’ve done these before (episodes 151–157), but it’s been a while and this time we’re going to sharpen the focus on the sins as potential stakes-raising behaviors.

According to DeadlySins.com Pride is excessive belief in one’s own abilities. It interferes with the acceptance of God’s grace and is the sin from which all others are born. It’s also called vanity. So let’s unpack that.

Read more on the blog

The Seven Deadly Sins (this link) in Roman Catholic theology, are the seven vices that spur other sins and further immoral behavior. First enumerated by Pope Gregory I (the Great) in the 6th century and elaborated in the 13th century by St. Thomas Aquinas.

The sins are:

1. Pride
2. Greed
3. Lust
4. Envy
5. Gluttony
6. Wrath
7. Sloth

We’ve done these before (episodes 151–157), but it’s been a while and this time we’re going to sharpen the focus on the sins as potential stakes-raising behaviors.

This week’s focus is Greed. According to deadlysins.com “Greed is the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the spiritual. It is also called Avarice or Covetousness.”

In the Summa Theologiae, Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas said Greed: “it is a sin directly against one’s neighbor, since one man cannot over-abound in external riches, without another man lacking them… it is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, inasmuch as man contemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things.” (2, 118, ad 1)

According to SimplyCatholic.com: 

Greed: the desire for and love of possessions. “Sin … is a failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods” (No. 1849).

The literary trope is the miser and some of the most well-known misers are (link) Silas Marner, Ebenezar Scrooge, and Shylock.

BUT, greed isn’t always about miserliness. Sometimes it’s about the accumulation of wealth or power (link).

Read more on the blog

Charlie started watching Ted Lasso and in a recent episode he told his wife she didn’t need to keep trying to be happy with him. He let her go. I think the secret he was keeping – and something that made him a really compelling character – is that he knew he couldn’t optimism his way out of that situation. He couldn’t believe his way through it. His core value – the power of positive thinking – doesn’t always work.

So, today’s topic: What secrets are your characters keeping? Which ones are really dangerous? Which ones aren’t?

Let’s start with why your character should be hiding something. This article suggests secrets can add tension to the story, can give your characters a chance to grow, and add depth and complexity to the story. 

Where does the depth and complexity come from? The secret should be connected to the character’s goal. The depth comes in secondary and third-layer reasons for what they’re trying to do. Does the secret make it harder to achieve the goal? It can also add complexity to the mission if the secret affects the character in a certain way – does thinking of it make them sick? Make them sad?

When will the character come clean? Choosing the time to reveal the secret is critical. It should be a choice the character has to make – revealing the secret will move the plot in a specific direction. 

Read more on the blog

In a linear narrative structure, the viewer finds it facile to comprehend the way the narrative is moving. This is mostly because the viewer is naturally fed with all the information required to process whatever is happening on screen.

And then explaining what non-linear stories do:

However in a non-linear narrative structure, the viewer has to use his head in order to connect the dots. Non linear narrative structures are usually adopted to build suspense, to create tension or generally to create a sense of mystery within the spectator. The most crucial aspect of a non-linear narrative structure is that the narrative does not adhere to the norms of a generalized method of storytelling. In other words, in a non-linear narrative structure, there is no hard and fast rule to strictly follow a chronology.

Some types of non-linear narratives:

• Analepsis or a flashback – used to establish critical backstory, probably only used once or twice.
• Zigzag – alternating between two different timelines, often for the compare/contrast (like The Godfather II) and sometimes to provide answers in one narrative with the exposition of another (like in Memento)
• Prolepsis – or a flash forward, showing things that will happen in the future
• Syllepsis – or grouping multiple characters or stories to tell parallel stories that eventually interconnect (think Love Actually) or have some adjacent ideas or characters
• Retrograde – chronological storytelling in reverse chronological order – Mulholland Drive is an example, as is one story of The Last Five Years
• Achrony – disconnected, disjointed, disorganized (like Inception) with no real connection between the order in which events occur and the order in which they’re told
• Chronicle – events occur simultaneously but are told in no specific order (like Pulp Fiction) popular in disaster movies

Read more on the blog

Linear Storytelling (from this link)

Linear storytelling, the conventional and time-tested approach, follows a chronological sequence. It presents events in a straightforward manner, adhering to a clear cause-and-effect progression. This structure provides a sense of order, enabling audiences to follow the narrative with ease. A classic example of linear storytelling is the hero’s journey, where the protagonist embarks on a transformative adventure that unfolds in a linear fashion, from initiation to resolution.

Advantages of Linear Storytelling (from this link)

1. Clarity: Linear storytelling offers a straightforward and easy-to-follow narrative structure. It provides clarity to the audience, allowing them to comprehend the story’s progression without confusion.

2. Emotional Buildup: The chronological sequence allows for a natural buildup of tension, emotion, and suspense. This gradual development creates a powerful emotional impact on the audience, drawing them deeper into the story.

3. Traditional Appeal: Linear storytelling aligns with the traditional storytelling format, making it a familiar and comforting experience for many audiences. It caters to a sense of expectation and satisfaction derived from a well-structured narrative.

Read more on the blog

So today we’re going to focus on Star Wars, not just sidebar it, and talk about worldbuilding (like this episode) and apprentice-mentor relationships (like this one) and writing in existing lore (like this episode).

So what is Star Wars? Here’s an entire YouTube channel dedicated to explaining Star Wars to you. With 4,028 videos. Yep.

The basics are - there’s a sith lord that wants to take over the galaxy and does and builds a strict and evil empire. What’s a sith? Someone extra powerful with the darkside of the force. What’s the Force? It’s an energy that lives in and all living things in the galaxy and it’s wielded like magic by the Jedi. Who are the Jedi? They’re knights meant to protect the galactic senate (the rule making body of a democratic republic) - a body of equal representation for every star system that is thrown over by the sith lord.

The story began for all of us in 1977 with Episode IV: A New Hope. In this movie, we meet Luke Skywalker, son of a deceased Jedi knight thrust into a hero’s journey.

We have a special guest in the studio this week, Hollie Whitener. They don’t give PhDs in Star Wars but if they did, this kid would be halfway there.

We’ll see where the conversation takes us. Everything is fair game.

Read more on the blog

As such, I’ve had very little time for anything else although I did manage to take six more pages in the vampire rewrite to our writers’ group meeting on Wednesday. Slow progress there.

Didn’t have a topic for today. So I took to the internet to see if any writers were asking something magical we could unpack for a full hour. There’s a few here but mostly it’s one shot and done. So it’s a GRAB BAG week.

Read more on the blog

So today we’re talking about some major projects and the general (and specific) tools and techniques for organizing them.

Examples of major projects that we’ve worked on:

• A novel
• A short story collection
• A podcast
• An anthology
• A website
• A book launch

Some common themes and questions to ask:

• What is the purpose of the project?
• Who is the target audience?
• How will I reach that audience?
• What resources do I need to accomplish this?
• What resources do I already have?

Some common barriers:

• What do I not know about the work I’ll have to do?
• How much time do I have available to allocate to this project?
• What are my deadlines?
• What do I need to get from others and how long will they have to complete their parts?

Read more on the blog

Adjectives are modifiers. They modify a noun to make it more specific. House becomes tiny house. Cat becomes lazy cat. Grandfather becomes grumpy old man. Full explanation here.

So when should a writer use them? Like all things, there’s a blog about that. Find it here. But in general, here’s the suggested guidelines:

• Brevity - don’t over do it. In drafts sometimes we’ll have two adjectives and then revise it to one or none. If the noun can get the job done, it doesn’t need the adjective.
• Specificity – be specific about what you’re describing. The adjective should do the work of narrowing the reader’s WIDE imagination into the very specific image you want to impart.

Types of adjectives:

• Telly – informing or surmising such as “She was angry.” in which case, we see the summation of her emotion as ‘angry’ instead of the symptoms of that emotion like a glare, narrowed eyes, or some other indicator of rage.
• Showy – dramatize or activate the noun such as “The drink was fizzy and cheerful.” You might just say “The drink fizzed cheerfully.” to replace the weak “to be” verb, but either way “fizzy” is a pretty descriptive word.
• Overwriting – applying multiple adjectives like “he London bus was big, red, and smelled of lentils.” We know it’s big and red, it’s London. The interesting part is its smell but if the sentence read “big, red, and smelly” we wouldn’t really know what it smelled of, would we?

Read more on the blog

So today we’ll look at what makes a strong opening page, how to work through the opening scene in revision, and whether you need to revisit that opening scene in subsequent pages or at the end (kiss the beginning as they say).

We’ve done this topic before, as mentioned, in Episode 94 way back in 2020 and again in Episode 171 but that was in January 2022. So we’ve learned a lot since then. Right?

This time, we’re going deeper in the rabbit hole. I’ve taken the links from our blog and clicked through their links. It’s very meta.

Let’s start with this “How to Start a Story: 10 Tips from Literary Editors” (we should have run these by Heather last week):

1. Start with something unexpected (they gave the 1984 example - clocks striking thirteen)
2. Start with a compelling image (leverage the 5 senses - what does it smell like here?)
3. Start in media res (we did a whole show on this) – get right to the action, just make sure your reader isn’t untethered from the character so much so they don’t care what’s happening no matter how exciting it is
4. Start with something short. An observation that makes us curious enough to read further.
5. Start with a question. But not a question, really, except that it makes the reader question or maybe the main character is questioning something.
6. Start with curiosity. Give enough to make the reader curious but don’t make it so cryptic they’re frustrated by it.
7. Start with building the world and the setting. If that setting is dynamic - a storm coming in, the coast after the storm has receded, the busy terminal of a train depot, etc. Or could a peaceful stroll through a quiet town interest a reader enough to keep reading?
8. Start with something new. So this is that insipid “be creative!” advice that we loathe, but the example of it: I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. Is actually more explanatory. It means to use your writing to say something that hasn’t often been said or to pose an unpopular opinion.
9. Start with tension that has room to grow. So, rather than the literal explosion, something intense that leaves room for the scene to grow or be revisited.
10. Start with something that will intoxicate your reader (I know, I know, ‘how?’). Remember your POV, put yourself in that position, share his/her experience in a way that draws the reader in.

Read more on the blog

• How many revisions does a novel need?
• How long does revising a novel take?
• What is a reasonable revision schedule?
• What is a good revision process?
• Where should someone begin when revising a novel?
• Why does revision get such a bad rep?

The answers, of course, are 10, two weeks, every waking minute until it’s done, and beginning-to-end, repeat.

Only joking. Mostly. In truth, revision is as personal as writing and every writer does it differently. Show’s over. Joking again. We’ll unpack a few approaches and set some expectations and also explain what these different levels of revision actually are.

Revision - this is a holistic look at the story, characters, plot, etc. You’re re-visioning, seeing it again. This requires distance on the original creation of the thing.

Editing – this is the scene-by-scene paring down or pillowing out of the novel. Where do we get too much description of 17th century modes of travel and where could we use more description of the murder’s collared shirt?

Proofreading – this is grammar, punctuation, and if you’re a true stickler, it’s where you

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Why was Dragon Boat racing the right occupation for Tripp Avery? What is it about the challenge of Dragon Boat racing that requires more of Tripp than anything else he's done? He worked his way up from poverty to prosperity, became a 'someone' out of 'no one' roots, so how is Dragon Boat racing a different kind of challenge?

We all write what we know. Some of Tripp is some of Roger -- just as some of Brian Listo from After December is part of Kasie -- so how protective are you of Tripp as a character? I am fierce about Brian (flaws and all) so I imagine you're especially attached to Tripp. What made you decide to go first-person narrator with Tripp and put us in his head for the entire book?

Some of the book takes place in Charleston. A city you know well. What opportunities did setting the book there give you to celebrate (or maybe question?) Charleston as you know it? How important is setting to the story?

There are some great characters and relationships in this book. Among them are Amy, Tripp's wife, with whom he has a special bond celebrated through their mutual love of flowers. Amy is the one who encourages Tripp to coach the Dragon Boat in Beaufort. It's a devastating loss in a previous coaching life that makes Tripp reluctant to compete with such fragile athletes. How important is Amy's encouragement to get Tripp to take another risk like coaching the Dragon Boat? What does she know about Tripp that he doesn't know (or believe) about himself?

Tripp questions (in Chapter 12) if his commitment to the Dragon Boat work is his own love of turning underdogs into champions. There's a kind of selfishness to the undertaking, which he seems acutely aware of, and which he battles with throughout. In his "pep talk" he reminds the athletes that cancer is not an excuse and warns we will not allow them to humiliate themselves or each other by not giving all they have to the undertaking. What is it about a cancer diagnosis that brings this kind of determination to the front of any character?

The Final Victory is a difficult book, one that looks at mortality with eyes wide open and challenges readers to make the best of every minute they've been given in this life. Said one reader, "I had to put it down for a while." The journey for Tripp and his boat mates may hit a little close to home. But through its grief and triumph, the spirit of the novel is to be encouraging, to be certain good things can come from bad circumstances. Buy it local here.

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So how is it actually done? Well, here’s the link explaining what Six Pass Plan among others:

1. The Framework Pass
2. The Story Pass
3. The Plot/Scene Pass
4. The Feedback Pass
5. The Writing Pass
6. The Tweaking Pass

These aren’t really after-the-fact at all. They’re in fact a process for drafting and revising. The Framework Pass is actually the discovery of the novel, your first pass at it where you build in the basics of the plot, characters, setting, etc. You might try different points of view how the story will be told, distance from the narrator, that kind of stuff here.

The Story Pass is still big-picture stuff, only it’s not writing stuff (like POV), it’s story stuff like character motivation and plot holes.

The Scene Pass is where you examine each and every scene for its impact on the novel and its fitness or rightness for the overall book. Don’t skip this step, this is where you really tighten up your writing and find those lackluster or lagging places.

The Feedback Pass is where you give the novel to others to respond. This is usually after the beta readers have rendered their mark ups and you are incorporating their feedback or making their suggested changes. Did you notice how the first draft wasn’t given to readers yet?

The last two passes – Writing Pass and Tweaking Pass – are you going through to edit the writing. Sentence structure, repetition, phrasing and length of paragraph and chapter. The tweaking pass may be spellcheck, grammar, and punctuation, too.

Next week, we have areal editor joining us to talk ab

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In searching for 3 Act Structure resources, I found this link gives us 11 basic structures:

1. The Fichtean Curve
2. The Three Act Structure
3. The Hero's Journey
4. Freytag's Pyramid
5. The Five Act Structure
6. Save the Cat Beats
7. The Snowflake Method
8. Dan Harmon's Story Circle
9. The Seven Point Story Structure
10. The Story Spine
11. In Media Res

and OMG there’s some NAMED types here. So we’re doing that today.

I guess if you make the shit up, you get to name it. So let’s unpack Fichtean, Freytag, and San Harmon this week.

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Missed a week of Write On SC? Nostalgic for those oldy-but-goody topics? Check out our podcast library on Apple, Google, and Amazon.

ProWritingAid’s take on this story arc conversation can be found here. But here are some notable highlights:

1. Stasis. This is the current situation you find your main character in.
2. Trigger. This is an inciting event that changes the course for your main character.
3. Quest. The trigger results in a quest for your main character to achieve a goal.
4. Surprise. These are complications that prevent your main character from achieving his goal.
5. Critical Choice. This is when your main character chooses what path to take and confronts the obstacles.
6. Climax. The critical choice results in the climax, the peak of tension in your story.
7. Reversal. Your character is changed in some way.
8. Resolution. The story ends with a satisfactory closure.

These are high-level plot points. The Save the Cat beat sheet is more detailed:

(15-beat structure of Save the Cat!)

1. Opening image – catapult your audience into the story
2. Theme stated – what is this story about?
3. Set-up – includes the “old” world or the regular world, how things are before the disruption; establish place, characters, and hint at conflict
4. Catalyst or inciting incident – disrupt the status quo, but protagonist isn’t in it quite yet
5. Debate – will they or won’t they? What’s at stake? Should the protagonist get in this fight?
6. Break into two – the clear choice between the protagonist’s options and the choice gets made
7. B story – whatever subplot you have planned should commence here
8. Fun and games – protagonist learns new tricks, advances in new skills, starts to figure stuff out
9. Midpoint – this may be a realization, may be a complication, may be the end of the escape hatch
10. Bad guys close in – something has happened that brings the danger closer
11. All is lost – the inevitable moment where the protagonist realizes this is just too hard (impossible!)
12. Dark night of the soul – protagonist has actually lost hope
13. Break into three – character claws around looking for options and trying to salvage the mission, possibly having to overcome some deep fear or damning belief
14. Finale – character synthesizes what they’ve learned and applies the solution to the problem
15. Final image – leave the reader/audience seeing/feeling the theme of the story

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We debated whether or not to write from a detailed outline in the initial draft – it provides direction, it stifles creativity – the age-old debate of planner vs. pantser. In any case, we agreed the outline is useful for knowing the trajectory of the characters and the plot.

Which brings us to the common structures for a piece. This link gives us 11 basic structures:

1. The Fichtean Curve
2. The Three Act Structure
3. The Hero's Journey
4. Freytag's Pyramid
5. The Five Act Structure
6. Save the Cat Beats
7. The Snowflake Method
8. Dan Harmon's Story Circle
9. The Seven Point Story Structure
10. The Story Spine
11. In Media Res

We covered the Save the Cat beats last week and the Seven Point Story Structure is basically the turning point structure. So this week we’ll look at the 3 and 5 act structures and then tackle some of the others next week.

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1. The Fichtean Curve
2. The Three Act Structure
3. The Hero's Journey
4. Freytag's Pyramid
5. The Five Act Structure
6. Save the Cat Beats
7. The Snowflake Method
8. Dan Harmon's Story Circle
9. The Seven Point Story Structure
10. The Story Spine
11. In Media Res

We’re now down to numbers 5, 7, 9 and 10, leaving out 11 because we covered it here and three because that deserves a point-by-point breakdown which we gave here and here and here. Though it’s been a few years, so we might go back to it..

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1. Is there any other profession besides weatherman insulted by the insinuation that an animal could do it as well or better than them?
2. Is there any other animal with psycho abilities equal to the groundhog (who, by the way, is wrong like 80% of the time)?
3. Is there any other tradition that is so meaningless and yet has persisted this long?

The answer to all of these questions is yes. Because humans are not always very smart.

Let’s start with animals who predict the future: before meteorologists we humans needed to know if it would rain and stuff and we relied on the animals’ superior senses (this link):

• Cows lie down and dogs eat grass before it rains
• Woolly bear caterpillars have less color before a cold spell
• Oak leaves reach a certain size (a squirrel’s ear) and that’s when it’s time to plant corn
• Migrant birds can hear the undetectable to humans infrasound that indicates a storm on the way
• Cows, sheep, and dogs have all been recorded as having hyperactivity before an earthquake.

But it’s not just the weather, animals have senses about other things, too:

• Oscar the nursing home cat predicts the imminent death of patients and he’s persistent - he’ll scratch at a door to be let in and stay with the ailing—dying—until they're gone.
• Paul the octopus has predicted eight world cup champions from his aquarium in Germany (link) then he died
• Sonny Wool the sheep took up where he left off and predicted all of his home team’s matches in the 2011 Rugby World Cup
• Jim the dog, though, is even more impressive: identifying hickory trees, identifying cars by color and license plate, predict the sex of unborn children, and pick individuals from a crowd. The Missouri state legislature even tested Jim to prove his abilities and he passed. (link)
• Here’s an article of 20 other predictor animals (link)

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But really, why we’re here this week is to celebrate the new version of Road House being advertised. Haven’t seen the trailer? Here it is.

So, should old(er) movies be “rebooted” or remade into modern versions? Today we’ll take on the debate.

Assigned talking points:

• Rex – the classics: what old movies have been re-made that are better in their original form? (mostly Kasie and Hollie will listen and nod because we won’t have seen most of these)
• Hollie – the animated/live action travesty – why does every story need at least two versions?
• Kasie – why is it okay to try to re-vise (re-vision) the same story - Shakespearean upgrades, etc.

Feels like we won’t need much more than these prompts, but if you’re interested in links to th relevant arguments, we’ll add those after the show.

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• Tina Fey — Mean Girls, 30 Rock, Saturday Night Live
• The Coen brothers — The Big Lebowski, Raising Arizona, o Brother Where Art Thou, and Fargo
• Julius J. And Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch — Casablanca
• Greta Gerwig — The Barbie Movie, Ladybird
• Aaron Sorkin — The West Wing, The Newsroom

Only the Casablanca crew was working from source material, and that was a play. The others were written for the screen, specifically.

So what about that category at the Oscars of “best adaptation” – what makes adapting harder (is it?) than creating for the screen?

Last April we visited specifically the adaptations process with Episode 228 with the focus on the origin of the story. And today we’re going to expound upon that with the craft of bringing the book alive with some great ones and some terrible ones.

For example, what’s the difference between Wonka as played by Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp? They both have the same source material. So why are these interpretations so different?

I just watched Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. which was a Judy Blume novel in the 70s and became a cool retro look at teenage-ish girls 50 years later.

There’s a great line in Entourage (I think) where Jeremy Piven’s character says something to the effect of, “if screenwriting is hard, why do Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have Oscars?”

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Segment 1

But first! We have two very special guests in the studio this morning. Let’s introduce them and talk about how they’ve supported us and the show.

Segment 2/3

What is perspective? It’s the lens through which we view the story. Most of us are the hero in our own story and that’s true for fiction, too. Many of our villains don’t think they’re bad, they’re just doing what they need to do, what they feel called to do. Think of the retelling of The Karate Kid from Johnny’s perspective – this punk kid moves in from out of town and starts challenging everything. Ruining his senior year.

So, what about some of these stories:

• Star Wars from the perspective of the Empire, or from Leia’s perspective
• Gone With the Wind from Melanie’s point of view, or from Ashley’s perspective
• Harry Potter as told by Neville Longbottom – this is actually a fan fic
• Goonies and Home Alone from the villains’ perspectives
• The Incredibles from Frozone’s perspective
• Rocky from Adrienne’s perspective

Or these Christmas stories:

• A Christmas Story from the mom’s perspective
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas from the perspective of the Whos in Whoville or Max the dog
• A Christmas Carol from Tiny Tim’s perspective

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This week we take on the other point of view (POV) – third person. This is all those stories with the “he she they” characters. Increasingly we see a desire for “close” third so we’ll unpack that and help you identify third person when you see it.

BUT FIRST! Next week is listener appreciation week and we’ll be joined in studio by a couple of fans of us and the show. Our moms! Well, it’s Rex’s mom and my mother-in-law but she’s been my Mama for 20+ years so we’ll call her mom, too. If you want to weigh in on the show, complete this feedback form.

As always, Write On SC is grateful for the support of the South Carolina Writers Association. We have accepted the organization’s patronage this year and it’s helped us pay our bills and keep the lights on as they say. Thank you, SCWA for supporting the show and promoting our efforts to make better writers (and readers!) out of the audience on 100.7 The Point and our podcast audience, too.

Let’s get to it: What is a 3rd person narrator?

The narrator is the one telling the story and while sometimes the story is through the character’s eyes (1st person), a LOT of times, it’s more like a camera perched on one (or more) character’s shoulder observing what’s happening.

Back in Episode 83: Who’s Story is this Anyway? We talked about the different POVs. So we’ll borrow some from that. That was during COVID so we mighta been a little kooky. But then, before that, in Episode 56, way back in 2019, we also talked about this POV thing. So we’ll borrow some from then, too. I even did this was back on Episode 3 with my cousin Preston, who, not for nothin, now has a PhD in Literature and teaches out at Stanford. Back then I think he was still an undergrad.

So the primary advantage of third person is distance. Imagine reading all of Harry Potter’s books living in that kid’s head. Yikes. Third person lets the narrator tell the story, follow the character, but keep enough distance that we’re not bogged down with the internal monologue of our (likely) troubled protagonist.

What are some books that do a good third person?

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Special thanks to the South Carolina Writers Association for supporting Write On SC all year long. We’re grateful to them and glad to promote the SCWA as the place to go to improve your own writing, learn more about the craft and publishing, and join a community of writers here in South Carolina. Learn more at myscwa.org.

Borrowing some from Episode 56 (can you believe it’s been that long ago?): There are basically three kinds of narrative perspective: first, second, and third person. Some of the more interesting versions include collective first (“we”) and epistle second person (letters) and omniscient third (all-knowing).

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November 4th was Storyfest and that was awesome.

November 11th was the SC Libertarian Party state convention and that was interesting.

November 18th Kasie went Clemsoning.

So we’re back here, live on November 25th and we’ve decided to challenge one another to read better books. Really we just want to have read some of the same books. Longtime listeners know we have a few go-tos: Gone With the Wind, The Great Gatsby, Star Wars. But other references are a little one-sided.

So we’ve decided in 2024 to get on the same page with at least 12 books. So I’ll challenge Rex to 6 and he’ll challenge me to 6. Today’s show we reveal what those books will be. Should be fun.

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NaNoWriMo for anyone who missed last week is National Novel Writing Month and it’s facilitated by this website and the non-profit that supports it.

When did you first hear of NaNo? Have you ever done it?

The first step is to register, it’s free. The second step is to create the project. You’ll need a name (it’s a working title) and a word count goal. The site recommends 50,000 words. That’s how you “win.”

Why do it? Commit to a daily grind - write every day is advice frequently given by very prolific writers. Let’s unpack “Write Every Day” – what are the benefits? Certainly speed. When I was blogging everyday I could draft a 500 word blog in 15 minutes. 

Another reason for NaNo – find writers in your area or online (in your genre?) to connect with and share the experience. This is an online challenge but local write-ins are organized, too. Columbia WriMos have a Discord Server and schedule meet-ups around town. Here’s the Discord link but not it’ll expire in 7 days so if you click it and it doesn’t work, it’s old. You’ll want to join ColaWriMos on the NaNo website and the lead will send you an active Discord link.

They’re also using Facebook, so search ColaWriMos there and you should be able to find the full events listing. Write-ins are fun if for no other reason than to not write alone. I usually end up saying “hi” and then putting my earphones in because for real people use it as a chance to talk about the book they’re supposed to be writing.

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So we have a couple of things to catch up on first. Two weeks ago was HorrorCON. How did that go?

Our dear friend and writing group lead, Ginny Padgett passed away on September 11th. So we’d like to take a moment to honor Ginny and talk about her influence on us.

Segment 2

In August, we talked about antagonists and their impact on the protagonist’s pursuit of his own objectives. Check episodes 241 and 242 for details. In thinking about all the elements of a successful plot, I considered taking us down the “plot arcs” road again since our shows from last December on those topics do not have recordings available for them. But I wanted to make sure we do those one after the next and since it’s football season, we’re on an every-other-week rhythm here right now.

So, that said, we’ll keep looking at plot elements until we can get back to the plot types and arcs. Today’s element is conflict. 

• Primary conflict
• Secondary conflict
• Adjacent conflicts.

We did conflict about a year ago. Check out that episode here.

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So it’s Spooky Season and we’d normally dive head first into the ghoulish stuff but it’s also the two weeks leading up to NaNoWriMo and so we’re going to run a back-to-back prep sesh for the frenzy that is NaNo.

One plug for the ghoulish stuff: Halloween night (10/31) we’ll be at the British Bulldog Pub for a Noir at the Bar event brought to you by Raegan Teller and Chris Errol Maw of “Words and Wine” notoriety. The readers are Bonnie Stanard, Cathy Blake, Irene Stern, Kasie Whitener, AJ Brown, Paula Benson, Raegan Teller, and Phil Lenski. The program begins at 6 p.m. but Kasie should be there by about 5:30 if ya’ll wanna come have a pint.

So let’s break down this NaNoWriMo thing. What is it? National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 as a challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Get their origin story here. They’re a non-profit of volunteers supporting writers and would-be authors and claim to have had a hand in books like Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus and Marisa Meyer’s Cinder – both kick-ass novels. Highly recommend.

In any case, it requires that participants create a profile online and then climb into the driver’s seat and start pumping out the words. And in Rex’s opinion deliver a steaming hot pile of garbage in thirty days. I’m not going to disagree since my first NaNo project is the vampire novel I’m still re-writing six years later.

Last year 51,670 participants completed the challenge. So imagine all those authors working through revisions and eventually querying and publishing those books. That’s a LOT of books!

More importantly, the NaNo legacy is the eternal debate between the planners and the pantsers and that’s a topic we’ve taken on before in Episode 172 back in January 2022 and again earlier this year as we talked about Aging Into Plannerhood in Episode 226.

But today we’re going to compare and contrast the two as a way of delivering best practices and then next week, we’re going to share our plans for the NaNoWriMo challenge – new novels we plan to produce in November. Seriously.

If you think we’re exaggerating on how pervasive this debate is, check out this book written specifically on how to turn pantsers into planners.

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In Episode 100 (way back in June 2020 – COVID anyone?) we talked about Romantic Subplots and in Episode 159Catherine Peace made her first appearance and we talked about romance as a genre and in Episode 160, we added Ella Shawn to the mix and the three of us giggled through all the subgenres of romance.

And in Episode 98 (also way back in 2020) we talked about the role of the best friend and in Episode 131 just six months later we talked about why you have to kill the best friend character. We hit that topic again in Episode 214 earlier this year when we advised our friend Abby to kill one of her characters off.

So why do it again?

Because best friends and love interests are NOT the protagonist or the antagonist (except in romance working the friends-to-lovers trope). They are supporting characters who can do a variety of things:

• Complicate the plot - make it harder for the protagonist to choose to pursue his goal
• Offer encouragement to the protagonist – prop them up, cheer them on
• Serve as a foil – show what the protagonist is not i.e. impulsive, cowardly, or ruthless
• Prove the protagonist is likable – the thing about friends is, they teach strangers that we can be trusted, that we have redeeming qualities; in a story like After December, Brian’s friends tell the reader that people like him and if we don’t because we’re in his head, that’s less because he’s actually a jerk and more because he’s showing us who he really is.
• Give the protagonist something to lose – Raise the stakes! When the best friend disapproves or the love interest is in danger, the protagonist has to make a tough choice

Segment 2

Let’s talk through some frequently asked questions about best friends:

1. Do they / should they have their own character arc?
   1. Yes examples - Hermione Granger, Samwise Gamgee
   2. No examples - Melanie Hamilton, Goose, Sam in Casablanca
2. Should they support the protagonist?
   1. Yes examples - Ron Weasley (until he defects in the last book), Kit from Knight Rider, Nick Carraway (doesn’t question Gatsby)
   2. No examples - Watson to Holmes, Mercutio to Romeo
3. Should they challenge the protagonist?
   1. Yes - The Last Starfighter - Centauri challenges Alex to become a Starfighter, so does Grig, Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; Charlotte Lucas to Elizabeth Bennett in P&P; George Knightly to Emma Woodhouse in Emma
   2. No - Tin Man, Lion, Scarecrow to Dorothy
4. Should they betray the protagonist - especially if the protagonist is in the wrong?
   1. Yes - Neville Longbottom is a tattle tale; Benedick tricks Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing because Claudio humiliated Hero under false accusations
   2. No - Iago betrays Othello because he’s jealous and in that way becomes the enemy of the protagonist; Edmund betrays his siblings by going to the witch in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Fredo betrays Michael Corleone because he feels he’s not getting what he deserves.

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What about the mutual satisfaction ending?

Plot-by-role discussion of the antagonist at this link.

• Early (the hook) - the antagonist has their own thing, not really engaged with or concerned about the protagonist
• Inciting incident - the protagonist’s choice puts them in conflict with the antagonist’s goal; the antagonist may still be unaware of the protagonist’s goal, but their paths are converging rapidly now
• Plot Point 1 - if the two haven’t met (and they might not for a while) at the very least, there are proxies setting up challenges on behalf of the antagonist that interfere with the protagonist’s goal
• First Pinch Point - the protagonist should feel at this point the impact of the antagonist’s conflicting efforts; should feel the presence and power of the antagonist as a force working against the protagonist; the antagonist should make some sort of move against the protagonist here

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First, Kasie finally got around to that whole cache of recordings and put them all up on Simplecast through June 30th. July to come. It starts here with “The Write Stuff” from last fall. (I know. I told you it had been a while).

In August, we’re doing a series. We haven’t done this for a few months. We’re focusing on Characters this month:

• Protagonist (8/5)
• Antagonist (8/12)
• Best friends & love interests (8/19)

To recap the protagonist, s/he’s one of these four types:

1. Hero / heroine – achieves things because of their own means
2. Antihero – lacks the qualities found in the hero, distinctly unlike the hero
3. Villain – unequivocally the bad guy – The Joker, Joe Exotic The Tiger King
4. Supporting protagonist – less common than other types, when the story is told from the minor role’s perspective – Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby

And has these 10 attributes:

1. Has a problem that needs solving
2. Has the ability to act
3. Has reasons to act
4. Has something to lose
5. Has something to gain
6. Has the capacity to change
7. Has a compelling quality
8. Has an interesting flaw
9. Has a secret
10. Has someone or something trying to stop them

If your protagonist doesn’t have all of those things figured out, better get revising.

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Importance of the Protagonist 

Something unique to horror stories is that there is an unusually large difference in power between the antagonist and protagonist, and this imbalance is present right from the very beginning.

Because the antagonist is so much more powerful than the protagonist, the protagonist's motivation needs to be clear, it needs to be compelling, and it needs to be readily understandable to your audience. It doesn’t matter if the protagonist’s motivation to pit herself against the monster is selfish (she doesn’t want to die) or selfless (she doesn’t want her daughter to die). 

What elements make the most compelling horror protagonist? Does weakness in a character allow the reader to become more immersed in the horror?

Is the protagonist in horror simply a vehicle for us to see the antagonist? To experience his horror from a safe distance? Is it okay not to be interested in the protagonist at all? 

Some have said the best horror protagonists have a downward spiral.

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Last month we jumped around a bit – special guests, time travel, the mentor character. It was all pretty self-serving. Rex went on vacay so I brought my friends on.

In August, we’re going to try for a series. We haven’t done this for a few months. We’re focusing on Characters this month:

• Protagonist (8/5)
• Antagonist (8/12)
• Best friends & love interests (8/19)

The protagonist in the story is (link) the character who drives the action and whose outcome matters most. Emotional heart of the narrative and central to the conflict of the story.

Good protagonist examples:

• Luke Skywalker
• Scarlett O’Hara
• Officer Brodie (Jaws)
• Frodo
• Rocky Balboa
• Will Turner (Pirates of the Caribbean)
• Clarice Starling
• Elizabeth Bennett
• Sarah Connor (T2)

Is the protagonist also the hero? (link) not necessarily.

• Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver)
• Anakin Skywalker
• Micheal Corleone
• The Punisher
• Jack Reacher
• Wanda Maximoff (WandaVision Disney+) – has a heroic redemption
• Jack Torrance (The Shining)

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It's been said that copy editors are the "first readers" as well as the “last line of defense” – they approach a text not from the point of view of the writer, but the reader. They are advocates for the readers; they are "quality control" for the publication.

• Agree, disagree, or both?
• Why should a new writer hire an editor?
• What misconceptions do most writers have about editors?
• How you define a draft? Many of our listeners think this means rewriting the entire manuscript from scratch.

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Welcome to the studio, Roger Jones. The Final Victory is set to be released April 30th and is available for pre-order now on Amazon.

The Final Victory follows Tripp Avery, a prominent businessman whose life gets disrupted by a cancer diagnosis. Tripp decides, during the peak of his battle with cancer to coach a mixed masters dragon boat on its way to the national championships. While the rowers work through their own cancer battles, personal lives, and identity crises, Tripp finds himself pushing himself and everyone else to overcompensate for being dealt a bad hand.

Interestingly, the same thing had JUST come up on an episode of Suits which Charlie is watching and I’m giving one ear/one eye to when I’m between songs on Spotify or stories on my kindle. In the episode, a writer wanted to sue the bookstore/publisher she worked for because she had shared an idea with her boss and her boss had shared the idea with an established author. That author then wrote the book and the publisher and store was selling the book. The writer, a clerk at the store, claimed she’d had other ideas that the publisher took as well.

When the clerk first told the lawyer this story, I responded, “Write the book. The idea doesn’t count until it’s written.”

Anyway, the story went on with the lawyer trying to help the clerk only to finally turn on her saying, that same idea could have been any one of these titles and present her with a stack of books. The point? Ideas are nothing. It’s the work of writing the actual story that counts.

So, after delivering this same advice to the woman on the Summer Series session I said, “Have you written the book?” She said no. I said, “Don’t pitch. Don’t query. Go somewhere and write that book. Then query and pitch. No one pays for ideas. They pay for finished books.”

Read more on the blog.

This week we’re doing the mentor-apprentice relationship and once again, I’m using it for my own purposes. See, I’m writing about a new-ish vampire, Blue, and his sire, Raven, and the hero-worship of progeny to sire – especially given the rules of their faith – and how eventually Raven will betray Blue because, well, some might say our heroes always let us down.

What is the mentor-apprentice relationship? So this link talks about the mentor specifically and defines it as: The mentor is a source of knowledge, wisdom and support to the main character, and is typically a side character who is static.

The mentor’s role in the story is to be wise and unwavering, to offer an objective view of the hero’s struggles and to instruct and teach the hero. They’re usually experienced, have some wisdom the hero needs, and can show up in the nick of time to save the hero or bail him out of a tough spot.

Read more in the blog.

The song is Timeless and it’s on Taylor’s recently released re-recorded album Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) there’s a great story behind her re-recording the music, BTW, we can chat about that if we want. But this song was one she’d imagined for the album and cut way-back-when and so with the re-record she’s added it in. She said later it was inspired by Caroline and Klaus, characters in The Vampire Diaries, so appropriate I’d be into it, right? 

The theme of the song is that no matter when they met, they would have had an epic love – we would have been timeless.

Read more on the blog

Joining me in the studio today is Dr. Anna Courie, an Army wife, nurse, corporate social responsibility officer, and author of six titles. Anna’s 20+ years in the healthcare field include experience in public and private sector health promotion. Anna is a graduate of Clemson University, the University of Wyoming, and Ohio State University. In her spare time, she consults in public health, facilitates retreats, writes books, and blogs for Living Compass Ministries, Christ Walk, 50 Days of Fabulous, Earth and Altar, and Lent Madness. Anna loves her family, Clemson football, traveling, reading and hiking. Home is wherever the Army (and God) sends her.

Let’s talk about what Anna’s been up to recently. Whether there are any new book ideas on the horizon. How the changes happening in her personal and professional life are sending her to the page to write or keeping her from that creative space. We’ll just riff a bit with Anna cuz she’s my bud and I think a really cool person to hang out with.

We’ve done the 7 Basic Plots before (March 2022) so we’re just going to quick review it and then deep dive on the ones Anna’s most interested in.

So this comes from the book by Christopher Booker which was basically his opus. It was the culmination of his career studying literature, and, honestly, is a pretty comprehensive list. So a couple of caveats:

• It’s a list of basics which means they’re not all encompassing and there are certainly exceptions.
• It’s an attempt to generalize which means they’re open for interpretation.

Here are the 7 Basic Plots:

1. Overcoming the Monster
2. Rags to Riches
3. The Quest
4. Voyage and Return
5. Comedy
6. Tragedy
7. Rebirth

Too general to be useful? Helpful in terms of a general outline for setting (and meeting) expectations?

Ash Smith, another SCWA Board member with a BFA in creative and professional writing. Ash is currently are working on their first novel. We met at the Fall 2022 Pawley’s Island Conference for SCWA and were fast friends. Ash has served with the Membership Committee in the capacity of outreach at events including Charleston’s AtomaCON in April and Columbia Writers’ Alliance’s Literary Arts Festival in May. As with most volunteer positions, once is never enough and everytime I’ve asked Ash to serve, they’ve stepped forward with enthusiasm. So thanks, both of you for being here.

We’re going to talk a LOT about Storyfest and what it is and how people can learn more and get registered.

Full show notes out on the blog here.

Last week’s episode on war was so rich, I’m glad to continue the conversation this week with author Jerry Dean Pate, a former journalist in print and radio media turned novelist of historical fiction. Pate’s first novel, Plagued by Bad Beliefs was published with friend of the show Alexa Bigwarfe through Write|Publish|Sell. We’ll talk about the novel, the origins of the story, the rigor of historical fiction, and the choice to indie publish the book.

Here’s a little bit about Jerry Dean Pate

Here’s a synopsis (and BUY link!) for the novel

So last week we did “conflict” and this week we’re turning it up to 11 with War which, as you might imagine, is extremeconflict.

Don’t miss adjacent episodes on raising the stakes and “White Knuckle Scenes” which address the concept of “tension” in fiction and our first “conflict” conversation way back on episode 10.

Last week we told you that conflict, according to this resource from Oregon State, means “thwarted, endangered, or opposing desire. It’s when a character wants something, but something else gets in the way.”

Today we’re going to take War as extreme conflict and work out what they do to the narrative in three specific capacities:

1. As setting (or backdrop)
2. As primary conflict (this story is about the war or violence itself)
3. As exposition (it happened before the story but the residue is still here)

A few years ago, World War II novels were all anyone was publishing and I (Kasie) read WWII in every theater on the globe:

• Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (San Francisco)
• All the Light We Cannot See (Normandy/coastal France)
• The Postmistress (Cape Cod)
• Five Quarters of the Orange (French countryside)
• The Orphan’s Tale (Western Europe)
• Sarah’s Key (Paris)
• Wildflower Hill (Australia)
• Shanghai Girls by Lisa See (Shanghai)
• The House at Tyneford (England)
• The Bronze Horseman (St Petersburg)
• Atonement (England)

It felt like the only thing worth writing about was the stories surrounding World War II and I think the compulsion was that so many people who’d lived through the conflict were passing away. In any case, the “theaters” of war were many – the Pacific, the East Coast, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Great Britain. There wasn’t a place on earth that the war didn’t touch. I haven’t read any novels about Canada or South America during that period, but I’m sure there are some.

In any case, what was it that made WWII so compelling? Even Outlander jumps off from WWII before plunging back into the Scottish rebellion of the Jacobites in the 1740s. People were changed, irrevocably, by WWII.

And that – irrevocable change – is the reason war is a compelling topic for stories. 

Read more on the blog.

We did an episode on raising the stakes and one on “White Knuckle Scenes” back in October of last year. And when I texted you and asked, “What should we talk about tomorrow?” you (Rex) said, “tention.” Leaving off that “tention” is a misspelled version of “tension” I assumed you meant how to create drama, conflict, or action in the scene.

So we’re going to work on that today: how to make the scene interesting by building the conflict. Because, while we did the tension thing a year ago, we haven’t done “conflict” since episode 10.

Conflict, according to this resource from Oregon State, basically means “thwarted, endangered, or opposing desire. It’s when a character wants something, but something else gets in the way.”

In the broadest terms, there are 7 types of conflict (link):

1. Character vs. characters
2. Character vs. society
3. Character vs. nature
4. Character vs. technology
5. Character vs. supernatural
6. Character vs. fate
7. Character vs. self

At the scene level, these conflicts play out in dialogue and action, and drive the plot forward.

Read more on the blog.

We have done character episodes before. Early on, we did Despicable Characters, Archetypes, Names, and how to Be Mean to Your Characters. Then, more recently, Do you Have to Like the Main Character? and giving them agency, diversity, patriarchy, and arcs.

So we might have done it all. Except we haven’t. We haven’t done origins – where do characters come from? And we haven’t done values – what do your characters believe in? And we haven’t done sketches – how do you get to know these characters before you write them?

As an admitted pantser (Kasie) and an evolving planner (Rex), we will today talk about those Voices in Your Head – the ones you hear and cannot ignore and the ones you’ve heard for so long they’re more like friends.

All those weirdo writer things – the things we blame on characters – are up for discussion today.

What is character development and why is it important? (masterclass link) Do characters simply spring from your head unbidden? Are they living in there, lurking in there, like parts of yourself you won’t let out?

Read more on the blog here.

Wednesday night we had a fun time at The Aristocrat on Washington, reading short pieces called “flash” fiction. The official definition of flash fiction is stories that are 1000 words or less. Fiction, obviously, not true. But the crucial part of it is the length. Lengths vary, though, which makes it more confusing. Between 5 and 1000 words? Or between 300 and 1500?

So why write flash fiction? What’s the purpose?

According to this Writers’ Digest blog it’s to focus on the “narrative movement” rather than focusing on character development or any other trivial things like setting or plot. So what does the writer mean by “narrative movement”? I don’t know. She never explains. Just provides a list of links to other people’s articles on the topic. The fuck? Yup.

So these bits are from some of those articles. Come on. Rabbit hole with me.

Characteristics of flash fiction (FAQs link):

• Few Characters
• Descriptions that show rather than tell (isn’t that all fiction?)
• Verbal efficiency of a poet – yeah, I’ll give you this. Flash is a read-aloud form.
• Clear vision – know where the story is headed from the beginning and get there in the end (again, isn’t that all fiction?)
• Who publishes flash fiction? I dunno. Contests. Lit journals. Instagram. You name it.

Actually, this blog was written by someone who started a flash fiction press. So there’s some specialists. And she answers the question, “Why do it?” 

Read more on the blog...

What is a frame story?

There’s a great video and full definition from the Oregon State University’s English department here. A frame story is a story-within-a-story – think Hamlet and the play happening inside the play, or The Princess Bride where the grandfather is reading to the grandson and over the course of the experience, the grandson changes his perspective on the story – “Maybe you could come back and read it again to me tomorrow?”

The Canterbury Tales may be the most famous of these. It’s Chaucer’s masterpiece that brings travelers together and gets them each to tell a different story so we have the bigger story – the journey and the travelers – and within it, each of the tales, ranging from moral to baudy.

Full show notes out on the blog here.

My Submittable account has 88 declines in it dating all the way back to 2012. A bunch in 2013, a pair in 2014 and 2015, a few in 2016 and 2017, and the bulk of them in 2018 when I went on my submit-every-week tear and racked up 52 “no thanks yous.”

Is that how you build calluses? Well, yeah. Get told “no” enough and you get used to it.

We all have our great rejection stories. What’s yours?

Show notes out on the blog here.

No, we did what professionals do. We moved on. And revised the crappy out of our stories. What did that revision process look like? That’s the topic of today’s episode: Rejection sucks and so does your story.

Full show notes on the blog here.

All the sarcasm, silliness, and fun of pretending we know what the animal thinks led Charlie to suggest this topic for the show. It made me think of books that have animals as main characters and how and if the author chose to put us in the mind of that animal. So that’s what we’re talking about today. It’s an animal lovers’ paradise, complete with silly voices.

Definition time: personification is a noun meaning the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form.

So the first obvious thing to unpack is how authors assume one of two things:

1. We have to get in the mind of the animal and think about what it knows, doesn’t know, and cares about or doesn’t care about.
2. We pretend the animal acts and thinks like a human.

Full show notes out on the blog here.

What is a simile? A simile is a phrase or comparison to describe something. They’re spotted when you see the word “like” or “as” to create the comparison.

Metaphors, on the other hand, are figures of speech that describe something through comparison without using “like” or “as.”  

• You act like a dog | You ain’t nothin but a hound dog
• Life is like a box of chocolates  |  Life is a box of chocolates
• Like the back of my hand  |  better than I know myself
• She walks in beauty like the night  |  Hela is night and darkness and fear.
• I wandered lonely as a cloud  |  I am a feather on the breeze.
• What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?  |  Our dreams had pruned.

Get the rest of the show notes on the blog here.

We didn’t expect motifs to go into a second week. And yet here we are.

Themes, symbols, and motifs are frequently treated together when taught, but they’re different (link):

• Themes are abstract or conceptual and live in the backdrop of a story as a main idea.
• Symbols are objects that represent something else: a white dove, a skeleton key, a snake
• Motifs are symbolic, but not objects rather, phrases or words repeated: the scent of oranges in Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris is used to indicate the triggering of a migraine by the characters’ mother. The smell of peanuts at the circus is used to taunt the little girl who wants to be part of proper society in The Greatest Showman.

Full show notes (cusswords and all ) out on the blog here.

Juxtaposition

What is juxtaposition and why should you use it? Not exclusively a literary term, juxtaposition means to put two or more things close together to demonstrate the contrasts between them. 

Grammarly provides this guidance on when to use it:

• Strengthen an argument
• Create an emotional response
• Add deeper meaning.

Sufficiently vague? I thought so, too. Some juxtapositions are antithesis – “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” or a deafening silence, a sweet sorrow (also oxymorons, btw).

Full show notes out on the blog here.

This week we talk reasons and strategies for rewrites and build in some practical work for Kāsie during our conversation. It’s time to roll up our sleeves and do the real work of writing a great book.

Get the full show notes out on the blog here.

If so, what does that say about all the crap I’m publishing? Don’t we think movies that actually get made and especially those with ginormous marketing budgets and hype are actually better than my own novice indie suchness? Maybe not.

In any case, the section on exposition caught us as particularly interesting because it’s been a while since we did exposition in the “what not to do” approach during NaNoWriMo in episode 166 and a little more recent, but not much more so when we took on origin stories for the Christmas episode 170. 

Today, we’re going to approach exposition from a character backstory angle, specifically focused on those things the writerhas to know but the audience doesn’t. Let’s start with an experiment.

Link to the show notes here.

• His IMDB profile – you gotta know this impressed the hell out of my family
• News from the Augusts Chronicle – a homecoming of sorts for film camp
• Doko Film Festival includes Thad
• Link to The Harvest on FilmFreeway so you can see some of Thad’s work

So let’s talk about where good story comes from.

Here are the show notes on the blog.

Get the full show notes here.

1. Reading
2. Writing
3. Revising
4. Querying
5. Marketing / selling

Each activity has its own positive impact on the writer’s work. And each one has its own tools and takes its own allocated time. Some can be done simultaneously.

Get the full show notes here.

• Digital platform building and the insights we’re giving away
• Digital marketing tools like email lists
• Digital plagiarism
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Scrivener, Google Docs, Word and other tools writers use to create manuscripts
• Temi and other voice-to-text options
• Wattpad, Vella and other serialization platforms
• Digital submissions – via email or submittable
• Twitter and other ways to find and stalk agents and publishers

Get the full show notes here.

So let’s start with the basic outline of the Hero’s Journey and then we’ll do some examples and pick apart our favorite parts:

• The Call — being chosen to undertake the journey
• The Companions — who will accompany the hero?
• The journey itself — distance, obstacles, treachery
  • Monsters
  • Temptations
  • Deadly opposites or opposing dangers — think colliding armies
  • The underworld — death itself or a glimpse of the other side in the form of visions and insights gleaned by ghosts and spirits
  • The helpers — maintain posts along the path and assist the hero and companions in some way
• Arrival and frustration — within sight of the goal but a new and terrible series of obstacles presents
• The final ordeal — the last test of the hero’s personal transformation
• Achievement of the goal — life affirming, it was all worth it finale of the story.

read more...

At the beginning of November, to help out our NaNoWriMo’ers, we did an episode on Character Arcs. In the third segment we briefly touched on the negative arc, or the moral descent. Here’s some notes from that episode:

The disillusionment (or negative change) arc, the character also believes a lie, is confronted with the truth and is able to overcome the lie, but the new truth — existence after accepting the truth — is tragic.

This is Michael Corleone. He believes himself to be good, to be righteous. But he is a criminal, a ruthless loyalist to his corrupt family. When he accepts this about himself, he is tragically doomed to lead the family after his father’s death.

This video calls this the “corruption arc” wherein the character has the truth, and is very aware of it, but as he is tested, he decides to exchange the truth for a lie — i.e. the Corleones must kill their enemies.

So what are the elements of the moral descent character arc? How do you know you’re in one?

read more...

You’ve met Carolyn Hartley before, she’s one of our Patrons and the owner of J. Merrill Press in Chapin, South Carolina. The vision for J. Merrill Press has always been to publish stories of courageous women and never is this more true than in Adele’s duet.

The first book, Redemption: One Woman’s Dream to Overcome Oppression, Find Family, Love, and Forgivenessintroduced us to Adele. Born into wealth before her father died, Adele and her mother found very different circumstances with her stepfather. Spun away from family into a life of poverty, strife and violence, Adele nonetheless retains the memory of a happier destiny. When she sets off in search of her place in the world, she finds more than she asked for. Themes of courage, family, determination, and resilience dominate Redemption and our connection to Adele is deep and wide.

It’s no surprise, then, that Carolyn picked up Adele’s story on the day of her grandmother’s funeral in Reconciliation: Atone the Devil in Buried Sunshine. No longer the timid, naïve girl of Redemption, Adele (though only 19) has inherited the family’s struggling coal mining business and her grandmother’s role as matriarch. Doing what’s best for her sisters and the town that depends upon their family, Adele navigates distrust, betrayal, and even her half-crazed step father’s relentless attempts at revenge. Reconciliation is a satisfying next installment in a saga that has so much to offer.

read more...

After reading an article about the reason we need to keep reading novels, I (Kasie) suggested to Rex that we take on this idea of critical reading and how we build that skill set. We take it for granted that people read. For two reasons: 1) we read a TON and think that’s normal and 2) we write and we are hoping (hoping!) that people will buy our shit and read it.

This week we take a look at this reading thing. What do the trends look like? What are the opportunities (to think about this like entrepreneurs) and what are the worrisome numbers? When I couldn’t find the original article I read, I just googled “screens are making us reading” (seriously) thinking I’d find it. Turns out, I found a lot of conversation, going back as far as 10 years, related to reading on screens versus reading on paper and predicting the end of books. Yup.

Let’s unpack.

Rumors of the long-form demise:

• No one reads novels anymore
  • This article is about how no one will read your book – is this a supply and demand problem? Are there not enough readers consuming enough books to meet the supply of so.many.writers.? Publishers Weekly thinks so. Stats: 16 minutes per day reading (for those few Americans who actually do read books) and 3 hours per day of Netflix (if you wonder WTF is with that ratio you’re not alone).
  • The big 4 represent 75% of the commercial book market and people tend to read books that are already popular. Sigh.
• Former bibliophiles confess to having a hard time reading or finishing a book in this esquire article.
  • Blame our smartphones and their incessant notifications
  • We’ve been training our brains to skim and scroll instead of reading for depth and understanding
  • The author says, “my mechanisms for focus and attention have been gradually worn out and I find it harder now to shift gears.” Does that resonate?
  • And this: “Reading is a prolonged and concentrated effort in dealing with only the subject at hand, weaving through the logical transitions paragraph after paragraph and building a comprehensive thought after one has gone through the entirety of the text. It is, after all, a skill that requires considerable and constant practice. Simply put, the kind of reading we do in social media is easy, messy, random and incidental.”
• Is this about reading comprehension skills? If you had a strong reading comprehension skill set, would the extensive social media reading have degraded those skills? Or, if you had a poor reading comprehension skill set, was social media made for you and is exploiting that?

read more...

In entrepreneurship, we encourage founders to tell their stories so we can see all the millions of ways people come into ownership and no two stories are the same. And writing is the same. Everyone does their thing differently and so hearing a bunch of stories is a great way to stay encouraged.

That said, I found this awesome Joanna Penn blog with some “what I’ve learned” and thought we could riff on that. These are things she’s learned from being an authorprenuer for a decade and I think they’re relevant to those mid-stride authors like us and maybe even a little surprising and encouraging.

1. When you get bored or things feel a little stale, hang on a bit longer. Things will change, and you will, too.
2. You can keep a mature author business going with just a few consistent actions.
   1. Writing books
   2. Podcasting
   3. Email marketing (grow your list!)
   4. Other things?
3. You don’t have to grow your business.
   1. Some projects are meaningful even if they’re not profitable
   2. Some projects are FUN and this work should be fun

read more...

Professional writers who depend on volume for income (like those one-book-a-year professionals John Grisham and Nicholas Sparks) have the creative process down to a science. And all those teachers who teach “How to Write” have also disseminated their craft down to a process. We’re going to work on that today.

Since Rex teaches writing and I used to, many moons ago, we’re uniquely qualified to discuss what total horseshit some of this stuff is. We’ll break down the common elements of the process and some cool tips, tricks, and tools. Plus, we’ll debunk some stupid shit people say when they’re teaching you how to write and why you should ignore that garbage.

Ya’ll in? Let’s do this.

So Charlie’s gone back to school for nursing and he had to write his first paper this weekend and as he was talking about organizing his resources and writing his introduction, I got this weird deja vu from grad school when I had to be all intentional about writing. And then I thought about all the blogs (like this one!) that I write on the regular and whether I was following the tried-and-true or if I’d invented my own work habits around this thing I do for a living.

I consider myself a professional writer. Do you?

What delineates professional from novice? Or hobbyist?

What habits do we keep that support our distinction as “professional” writers?

The other thing that happened this week that made me think about this writing process concept is we hosted through SCWA a Writing Studio write-in on Thursday. The Columbia II chapter brought the prompts and we ran four 10-minute sprints with various prompts and some discussion afterwards.

Everyone thought it was very useful and productive. I used the prompts to think about the revisions I’m doing for the vampire novel. For two reasons: 1) I’m totally preoccupied with the vampire novel revisions right now and 2) I hate to waste my designated writing time on things that won’t move me forward. Meaning: I don’t want to doodle. I want to draw.

So some of the writing process steps include these forced-creativity activities that I can see having a place in a classroom but wonder if they have a place in the real world life of working writers. I wonder if Stephen King pulls out his trusty writing-prompt box of cards and decided to meander through some phrases like, “The thing you still need to know about me is…”

Do you “exercise” your writing? How? When? Where? What becomes of those exercises?

read more...

Today’s session is a good “beginning of the year” session, I think, because it can be part of your 2022 writing plan. We briefly touched on some writing goals we have and we’ve done entire episodes on setting, measuring, and keeping writing goals. So today’s exploration of the various writer types and what your type means for your writing habit should come in handy.

Take an actual quiz here.

Let’s start with the three levels:

• Lawful – this means you stick to this type no matter the project, it’s ingrained in you and difficult to change out of
• Neutral – this is conditional; so if you’re mostly this, but sometimes that, you’re in this category
• Chaotic – according to whim, day of the week, or color of the M&M you just drew from the package

read more...

Okay, today’s writing-related (non-goal) topic is Great Beginnings. New Beginnings. First lines and first pages. Starting off on the right foot. All those euphemisms for the most important page in the book. The first one.

When we did this topic in May of 2020 (episode 94) I told you about a terrible beginning to a romance novel that had triggered my gag reflex. It’s often the case that the first page of a book is a bit of a difficult entry point. Even a more recent read (that turned out to be quite good), The Beautiful, struggled to pull me in. Too much world-building and exposition dumping. Needed information? Sure. As fascinating to me, newbie to the world, as it is to the author? Probably not.

read more...

Let’s get into this Character Arc thing. So I found this tweet and YouTube clip that talks about Rick’s character in Casablanca and how at each point of the character arc, one character comments on how Rick is changing. Sometimes it’s even Rick himself. And I thought, “Have we ever done character arcs?” and the answer is, “no.”

So here we go. What is a character arc and what are some examples of types? This link will be of use.

The character arc is how the character changes over time and is linear — it has a beginning, middle, and end — but does not have to follow the plot arc.

Four basic types:

1. Positive change (moral ascent)
2. Transformational (hero’s journey — might include ups and downs)
3. Negative change (moral descent)
4. Flat
5. Open-ended

The lie your character believes about themself will be the thing they fight against and ultimately overcome to end the story. We covered this extensively in the core wound episode. 

Character arcs are the whole purpose of fiction. The change that a character makes is the reason the story exists. Without change, there is no story. And change creates drama (tension) and that creates meaning.

read more...

Mark Allan Gunnells loves to tell stories. He has since he was a kid, penning one-page tales that were Twilight Zone knockoffs. He likes to think he has gotten a little better since then. He loves reader feedback, and above all he loves telling stories. He lives in Greer, SC, with his husband Craig A. Metcalf.

Google does it again. I found this link to the 30 scariest scenes in Western literature which was a goldmine for what we want to do today which is really break it down. What’s happening in the scene? How is it constructed and how does it work?

The rage of Achilles — when he arrives on the battlefield, the Trojans quake with fear and when he unleashes his battle cry, some of them fall back and impale themselves on their own spears. Um. Wow.

Banquo returns to haunt his killer — in Macbeth we know they won’t get away with it, right? But Shakespeare lets the dead man’s ghost show up with all of his descendents and scare the shit out of Macbeth.

The creature and the uncanny valley — in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley writes the creator’s rebuke of his creation as a rage-filled verbal lashing, but the creature’s response is exponentially worse.

read more...

Get the full show notes out on the blog here.

Theme for the day

Scary Series: Serial Killers

Agenda

• SCWA Upcoming events and goings-on
• It’s October! Let’s Halloween!
• What’s up with Serial Killers?
• How to write a convincing serial killer

I’m reading You right now which is a thriller about a stalker / serial killer that was made into a Netflix series. It’s crazy good. The narrator is so compelling I’m having a hard time putting it down. And the violence is so matter-of-fact and seemingly the next-logical-step that you don’t even have time to anticipate or dread it.

Thing is, I (Kasie) don’t know anything about how to do this. And Rex had done it before, so this might be a “how to” and it might be a general explanation of why a writer would take this on.

I googled “Writing Serial Killers” and found this awesome article. So let’s start there. Essential elements:

• The killer — who is s/he? What do they want?
• The victim — how do the two know one another? What was the last interaction the two had?
• The location and condition of the body — direct quote from the blog: Where was the victim killed? Was the body transported and dumped? Was there and attempt to hide the victims identity? Why? How were they killed? Was it overkill? Rage?

Scary Series: Vampires

Agenda

• SCWA Upcoming events and goings-on
• It’s October! Let’s Halloween!
• Vampires aren’t scary
• How to write a convincing vampire (no sparkling!)

I found a How Stuff Works (yeah, the science site) entry for How Vampires Work which is just awesome. Here’s the link. Here are the highlights:

• They were once human
• They died and “rose again” which makes them “undead”
• Can be attractive, highly sexual beings
• Can also transform into animals (most commonly a bat)
• Death by beheading, stake to heart, fire, and direct sunlight
• Injured by crucifixes, holy water, and garlic
• Immortal and do not visibly age
• Cannot cast a reflection
• Have superhuman strength (and speed)

Theme for the day

Paying Your Writerly Dues

Agenda

• SCWA Upcoming events and goings-on
• How have those book promotional events gone?
• What to know about “paying your dues”
• Even some super famous authors sat alone in a bookstore

My mom joined me at M Judson Books in Greenville back on September 12th. Four people bought books, two bought shot glasses and one got a wine glass, too. Then last week’s library event, two publishers of an online magazine and the librarian attended. I sold six books, a wine glass and a shot glass. At the neighborhood event my friends threw, two people came by and bought four books. Then I signed another half dozen that had been purchased by people who couldn’t attend.

So, overall, three events sold 20 books. Because COVID shut down my After December promotional calendar, these events were my first ever.

Is it usual to sit, lonely, waiting for people to stop and ask about your work? What are author events? What should you expect? How should you prepare?

Visit the Featured Author section of the show notes on WriteOnSC.blog to learn more about guests and friends of the show.

Become a patron and get your spot at Featured Author on the website and the show.

Visit the YouTube channel for more interviews with authors.

Welcome back to the studio, Catherine Peace, romance author. And our new addition, Ella Shawn, author of Southern Gothic Erotica. Let’s get to know her for just a minute.

Last week we broke down some tropes and sub genres of Romance. It was mostly fun to shock Rex with all the various layers and requirements of Romance writing. It’s more complicated than non-readers might suspect.

Today I thought we’d start with out favorites list. So here are the categories and we’ll just add ours as we go:

• Favorite sub genre?
• Favorite trope (here’s a list)?
• Favorite couple?
• Favorite era?
• Favorite author?
• What title brought you into the romance genre as a reader?
• What author brought you into the genre as a writer?

• Meet Catherine Peace
• Romance genre expectations
• How to write the steamy scenes

Welcome to the studio, Catherine Peace, romance author. Catherine Peace has been telling stories for as long as she could remember. She often blames two things for her forays into speculative fiction—Syfy (when it was SciFi) channel Sundays with her dad and The Island of Dr. Moreau by HG Wells. She graduated in 2008 from Northern Kentucky University with a degree in English and is still chasing the dream of being super rich and famous, mostly so she can sit around in her PJs all day and write stories. Catherine currently lives on a farm in South Carolina. E-I-E-I-O.

I (Kasie) of course jumped into This Time Next Year — a vampire romance — so let’s start there. How did you get started in paranormal romance? What’s the appeal?

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After Raegan said she wasn't a book launch expert, Kasie admitted this was just a chance for the two of them to talk about their new books that had recently launched. So some advice, but a LOT about Raegan's new book and Kasie's as well.

• SCWA Upcoming events and goings-on
• Launch Day report for Before Pittsburgh
• Launch Day report for Time to Prey
• Best practices for launching your book

Raegan’s fifth novel, Time to Prey, launched this month. Check out the details here.

Let’s talk about Launch Day with a project management approach:

How do you decide what day to launch?

How many weeks do you count back so begin planning?

What are some critical tasks?

What happens when those tasks don’t happen on the designated timeline?

Who are the people you rely on to get these things done?

Do you ever have conflicting timelines/deadlines and have to adjust?

• Launch Day report for Before Pittsburgh
• SCWA Upcoming events and goings-on
• The 7 Deadly Sins recap
• Sloth as a character trait, motivation, and antagonizing force

The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices, or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of vices within Christian teachings,[1] although they are not mentioned in the Bible. Behaviours or habits are classified under this category if they directly give rise to other immoralities.[2]According to the standard list, they are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth,[2] which are contrary to the seven heavenly virtues.

So the 7 Deadly Sins discussion started with “Pride” and then we did “Greed” which is not to be confused with gluttony which is a sin in and of itself. Then we did “Wrath” and “Envy” and “Lust.” That was fun! Last week was “Gluttony” so we’re wrapping up the series this week with “Sloth.”

Unlike our other deadly sins, sloth doesn’t seem to have the indulgence that gluttony, greed, and lust; or the passion of pride, wrath, and envy. Sloth seems to be more about being lazy. “Sloth” is a sin of omission in that it literally translates into “without care.”

The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices, or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of vices within Christian teachings,[1] although they are not mentioned in the Bible. Behaviours or habits are classified under this category if they directly give rise to other immoralities.[2]According to the standard list, they are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth,[2] which are contrary to the seven heavenly virtues.

So the 7 Deadly Sins discussion started last week with “Pride” and this week we’re taking on “Greed” which is not to be confused with gluttony which is a sin in and of itself. But we did have an extensive conversation about the difference between greed and avarice once upon a time. 

Get more on the blog here.

The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices, or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of vices within Christian teachings,[1] although they are not mentioned in the Bible. Behaviours or habits are classified under this category if they directly give rise to other immoralities.[2]According to the standard list, they are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth,[2] which are contrary to the seven heavenly virtues.

So the 7 Deadly Sins discussion started with “Pride” and then we did “Greed” which is not to be confused with gluttony which is a sin in and of itself. Then we did “Wrath” and “Envy” and last week “Lust.” That was fun!

So this week we’re up to Gluttony and we’ve done this topic before. In Episode 134 on avarice and greed, we worked on how greed is characterized by wanting more than you really need. Isn’t that the theme of all the Seven Sins? Aren’t they all about being insatiable?

• Summer project update
• SCWA Upcoming events and goings-on
• The 7 Deadly Sins recap
• Gluttony as a character trait, motivation, and antagonizing force

The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices, or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of vices within Christian teachings,[1] although they are not mentioned in the Bible. Behaviours or habits are classified under this category if they directly give rise to other immoralities.[2]According to the standard list, they are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth,[2] which are contrary to the seven heavenly virtues.

So the 7 Deadly Sins discussion started with “Pride” and then we did “Greed” which is not to be confused with gluttony which is a sin in and of itself. Then we did “Wrath” and last week “Envy” which brings us to “Lust.” Let’s get it on.

• Summer project update
• SCWA Upcoming events and goings-on
• The 7 Deadly Sins recap
• Lust as a character trait, motivation, and antagonizing force

The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices, or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of vices within Christian teachings, although they are not mentioned in the Bible. Behaviours or habits are classified under this category if they directly give rise to other immoralities. According to the standard list, they are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth, which are contrary to the seven heavenly virtues.

• Summer project update
• SCWA Upcoming events and goings-on
• The 7 Deadly Sins recap
• Envy as a character trait, motivation, and antagonizing force

The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices, or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of vices within Christian teachings,[1] although they are not mentioned in the Bible. Behaviours or habits are classified under this category if they directly give rise to other immoralities.[2] According to the standard list, they are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth,[2] which are contrary to the seven heavenly virtues.

This week is “Wrath.”

• Summer project update
• SCWA Upcoming events and goings-on
• The 7 Deadly Sins recap
• Wrath as a character trait, motivation, and antagonizing force

Jodie Cain Smith is the author of two recently release books. The second edition of The Woods at Barlow Bend and the new release Bayou Cresting: The Wanting Women of Huet's Pointe. Check out her home page and order one or both of the books. She's a phenomenal storyteller.

Before Pittsburgh is the second release in the After December duet and follows our protagonist and first person narrator Brian Listo as he navigates the years following his best friend's death by suicide. It won honorable mention at the New York Book Festival and is already earning five star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.

Here's a link to the YouTube video (visual!) version.

Get After December here.

Pre-order Before Pittsburgh here.

View Kasie's UnapologeticallyX blog here.

Dive into The Full Moon in Neverland on Wattpad here.

Full show notes out on the blog here.

Agenda

• What are some cliches and archetypes for male characters
• How the patriarchy informs and perpetuates male cliches
• How to avoid the big-box-everyone-expects-it male character

Full show notes out on the blog here.

Complete show notes including links to  Len Lawson's bio and works on the blog here.

• Meet Cayce LaCorte
• Put Yourself Out There, they said, It’s Good For You.
• Sore losers and Slushfest
• How to stay out of slush

Full show notes on the blog here.

Studio recording was not functional for the first half of the show, so our talk with Cayce is just half the episode. But we're adding the Behind the Scenes for you here, too. Something we reserve for our Patreons.

• Virgin, Whore, or Madwoman?
• Do these stereotypes still exist?
• How to avoid it?

Full show notes out on the blog here.

Agenda

• Indie Bookstore Mention
• SCWA upcoming events
• Writing People of Color (POC) characters
• How to do it (sort of)

Full show notes out on the blog here.

Full show notes out on the blog here.

Full show notes out on the blog here.

• Vella from Amazon and what it means for serialization
• What is serialization and how can you do it?
• Should you serialize?

Full show notes out on the blog here.

Show notes are on the blog here.

• How the death of a specific character impacts the story
• Cliches and tropes to avoid with this

Become a patron of our show at www.Patreon.com/WriteOnSC

Show notes are on the blog here.

Show notes are on the blog here.

The show notes are on the blog but this episode went all the places, as did the one after it, Part 2.

• You have a book in YOU! – deciding to write
• You have to take it seriously – focusing on craft
• You have publishing options – deciding to pursue representation or self publishing
• You have work to do – marketing your book, building your audience, staying relevant

• Structure is scaffolding
• Basic structures available to you
• Structure vs. form
• How to choose and why to experiment

• Time as a topic — all month!
• Setting your story in a specific time
• How to show the passage of time in your story

• Time as a topic — new month!
• Time Travel in novels
• How to write a Time Travel story (like there’s an instruction manual)

• What we mean by “Survival” as a motivation
• When the stakes are too high to be real

• Character Motivation Series
• Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic motivation (review)
• How to write a character driven by ambition, greed, or avarice

• Character Motivation Series
• Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic motivation (review)
• How to write a character seeking forgiveness

Get the show notes on the blog writeonsc.blog Click Here

Get the show notes out on the blog here.

Get the full show notes on the blog here.

Get the full show notes on the blog here.

Get the full show notes on the blog here.

Get the full show notes on the blog here.

• What are stakes?
• Why do you need them?
• Low, high, internal, and other types
• How do you raise them without putting everyone in life threatening danger?

• What your character wants
• Needs and wants are different
• Tropes and cliches
• How to introduce it

• The Frenemy is what exactly?
• Like a villain, but not
• How do you write one?
• Do you have to have one? Why or why not?

Show notes here.

Show notes here.

Show notes here. 

Show notes here.

https://writeonsc.blog/2020/07/25/episode-105-be-obvious-about-it/

https://writeonsc.blog/2020/07/18/episode-104-what-the-actual/

Get the Behind the Scenes footage on YouTube:

https://writeonsc.blog/2020/07/11/episode-103-publishing-options/

Check out the YouTube Behind the Scenes footage here:

https://writeonsc.blog/2019/03/16/march-16-saying-i-do-in-fiction/

https://writeonsc.blog/2019/03/09/march-9-make-mine-evil/

Here are the show notes for the show we recorded discussing the advantages of attending events like that one: https://writeonsc.blog/2018/10/27/episode-16-conferences-workshops-and-retreats/

Click here for the complete show notes: https://writeonsc.blog/2018/09/29/episode-12-genre-basics-mystery-guest/