On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

In a recent post on the Writer Unboxed blog, author Kathleen McCleary offered suggestions on how to weave kindness into our stories. Here’s an excerpt from that post:

Betrayal, greed, vanity, pride, impulsivity—all the human flaws that drive plots and create good stories are exactly that, flaws. I read a dozen books on my recent vacation, but two that stood out were Ann Patchett’s new novel Whistler and a brilliant work of non-fiction, The Gales of November, by John U. Bacon (and believe me, if someone had told me I’d be gripped by a book about the Great Lakes shipping industry and the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, I’d have said, “Clearly you don’t know me very well”). I also saw The Odyssey, the movie that’s everywhere right now, and it captured me, too. I’ve thought quite a bit about why these works resonated and what I could take away from that for my own writing. And what gripped me were not the mistakes and shortcomings that fueled these stories, but a different theme: Kindness.

It may be that I am especially starved for reading about kindness these days, because no matter what “side” you’re on, we live in ugly, divisive times. And yet, how exciting is it to read about nice people who treat each other nicely and get along just fine? It’s not exactly the kind of stuff that keeps you up at night, desperate to turn one more page. But making sure there’s a streak of kindness in your fiction is exactly the kind of emotional truth that readers respond to, and that helps us as writers plumb what truly matters. Consider:

Kindness as a plot twist. Honestly, when Ann Patchett’s book opened with the main character running into her former stepfather and there were hints of a trauma in her past that involved him, I thought all the worst, most-depressing things you can think about what the book was going to be. And it totally contradicted all of them. It’s not a spoiler to say the stepfather is a lovely, warm human who did all he could to protect and nurture his stepdaughter. It confounded my expectations but also stereotypical plot tropes. It made me delight even more in the relationship between the two. Think about how you could make kindness run counter to what readers might expect.

Kindness as the foundation. One of the overwhelming themes of The Odyssey is kindness to strangers, to treat every guest as an honored friend. This isn’t just a nice thing to do; it’s the foundation for a moral universe, to treat others as you would like to be treated. And to defy or deny this fundamental tenet is to set in motion forces that can lead to destruction and despair. Odysseus plays upon the Trojans’ faith in this in gifting the Trojan horse; it leads to the fall of Troy and to Odysseus’ own fall as he violates a moral code he believes in. His long journey back home, and the pain and loss he endures, are all part of the price he pays. Whatever moral universe you create in your fiction, develop what happens when your character knowingly defies its most important value.

Kindness in unexpected characters. If you think of the men who work on Great Lakes freighters and the captains who oversee them, “tenderness” and “kindness” aren’t exactly the first words that come to mind. But John U. Bacon brings to life all 29 of the men lost on the Edmund Fitzgerald, and it’s the notes of kindness that make the characters memorable. Oiler Blaine Wilhelm kept every penny he won in card games or every coin he got in change when buying a beer in port and put the coins in a coffee can he would bring home to divide among his seven kids at the end of every season. The captain, Ernest McSorley, a smart and fair and experienced sailor, agreed to take one last run on Lake Superior late in the season to earn extra money to help pay for cancer treatments for his sick wife. These are real life stories about real men, and it’s these small details that stick, in real life as in fiction.

Kindness as resistance. Sometimes, kindness is a form of rebellion or even revolution in a world where evil seems to have triumphed. Eumaeus the shepherd in The Odyssey welcomes a stranger (the disguised Odysseus) into his home, even after he’s been beaten and taunted by the men (the suitors) who are also strangers in Ithaca, and whom he also treated with kindness and respect.

My mother used to always quote Henry James, who once said, “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” (I did double-check the veracity of this quote). It’s not a bad mantra to live by. And, when used judiciously, it’s not a bad mantra to write by, either.

Where does kindness fit into your writing? Are you conscious of making sure there is a thread of kindness somewhere?

Source: Writer Unboxed

On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

In a recent post on the Writer Unboxed blog, author Kathleen McCleary shared the importance of the one-word question “Why?”

Years ago, in my other life as a journalist, I interviewed Michael Jordan for a cover story for the magazine I worked for at the time. At the peak of his fame, shortly after his father was murdered, Jordan had quit basketball to try playing baseball. When I interviewed him, he had just made the sudden and surprising decision to return to basketball.

I had 30 minutes to interview Jordan and I was nervous and he was polite but not too excited or exciting. Desperate for something different from him, I said, “I read that Ghost is your favorite movie. Why?”

Suddenly, he came to life. He sat up and leaned forward, and really looked at me. “Because I’ve always believed that after we die, we come back to watch over and protect the people we love,” he said. “And since my father died, I’ve felt him watching over me. And the whole reason I decided to leave baseball and come back to basketball is because that’s what my father is telling me to do. Right now.”

It was an incredible moment, the story made news, my editor was happy, and I understood on a gut level the huge importance of the one-word question “Why?”

And as I’m embarking on writing my fifth novel, I remind myself every day that I need to keep asking “WHY?” You know the important basic questions about story: What does my character want? What’s my character’s flaw? How does this flaw affect my character’s life and world? What does my character need? We all have to do that work. But for me, “Why?” is the key.

I got the idea for this new novel, my fifth, almost a year ago. It was an interesting idea with a hint of magical realism and I felt intrigued but I wasn’t inspired to actually start jotting down ideas or scenes. Then recently, while hiking in Ireland, I was thinking about why it would matter that this magical thing happened, and suddenly I had an answer and a reason for the book to exist. It changed everything for me. So, whether you’re just starting out or deep into your twenty-seventh book, here are some Whys to remember:

The obvious Whys. These are the questions about character, motivation, and plot that are crucial for our own understanding of our stories. Why is my character making this choice? Why can’t my character change? Why does my character want this thing that she wants so badly? Why can’t she get it? Why does it matter? You know these. Come back to them again and again. Sometimes the answers change as you get deeper into your story.

The Whys we need to ask our characters. These are questions that help you get to know your characters in the same way you get to know someone new you meet, or get to know a friend better. I teach English to immigrants and we often talk about how to have a good conversation, or how to keep a conversation going. And one of the keys to having a great conversation is being genuinely curious about the person you’re talking to. If they mention that they’re afraid of snakes, finding out why could be interesting. If they always wanted to be a doctor but became a carpenter instead, that’s a potentially fascinating why to unearth. Ask your character: “Why does that particular thing/event/person frighten you? Why do you love trees/knitting/movies so much? Why is your daughter named Jeannie?” It’s the stories behind the details that give a fictional world its realism and believability.

The Whys we need to ask ourselves. “Why does it matter to me to tell this story? Why do I need to tell it now?” Knowing the reasons that we need to write and why it matters to do it at a certain point of time in our lives is important. I have written entire novels because I was compelled to write, because it was the only way I could process difficult events or feelings in my life. Writing them out in fiction was a way to get through. I’ve also written novels for the pure enjoyment or challenge of writing. Yet another important Why to ask ourselves is “Why I am struggling to write this story?” The answer to that speaks volumes, too, and may tell us it’s time to change direction, dig deeper, or, hard as it is, put a story aside.

Source: WriterUnboxed

On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

In a recent post on the Writer Unboxed blog, writer/photographer Kelsey Allagood shared the following insights:

We writers talk a lot about sustainability. About how to not burn out, how to protect the work, how to make space for our creative selves while also having to pay rent and answer emails. We talk less about how dynamic that process actually is. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that sustainability is a state I can achieve, or an end goal, like once I’ve figured out my morning routine or my word count goal or my relationship to social media, I can then stay there. I will have achieved it: the State of Balance™.

Unfortunately, the writing life (mine, at least) has never been still. We get jobs. We lose jobs. A family member moves in. A season shifts. Our relationship to the work shifts—sometimes we’re deep inside it and sometimes we’re circling it from the outside like maybe we’ve forgotten what it’s for. And maybe the balance we worked so hard to build a year ago might not even be the right balance for who we are now.

What I’ve had to learn, repeatedly, is that the adjustments themselves are the practice. Noticing that the work has gone quiet and turning toward it again without self-recrimination (personally, this is the hardest). Or noticing that I’ve been in production mode for so long that I’ve stopped reading, stopped dreaming, stopped absorbing anything, and choosing to open a window. Noticing that I’ve been waiting for inspiration and actually what I need to do is just sit down. These are micro-corrections. They’re so small that sometimes I don’t recognize them as acts of craft.

But they are. They’re the same intelligence that keeps us upright on one leg.

I don’t think we master balance in our writing lives any more than we can master tree pose. I certainly haven’t mastered either. What I’ve gotten better at—slowly, inconsistently, much like my yoga practice—is recognizing when I’m starting to tip. Making the adjustment a little faster. Stopping expecting the stillness to last and starting to trust that I can find it again, not because I’m stable, but because I’ve practiced returning.

I keep coming back to yoga the way I keep coming back to writing. Not because I’ve gotten good at it. Because every time I come back, I remember what it feels like to be in the body I actually have, in the life I’m actually living, making the small corrections that keep me here.

Source: Writer Unboxed

On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

Award-winning author Greer Macallister shared the following inspirational post on the Writer Unboxed blog:

You can do anything. You can write a book. You can get an agent, if that’s what you want, a real powerhouse. You can get a great advance. You can click with your editor in a life-changing way. You can emerge from the editing process with a beautiful book, a wonderful book, a book readers will love. You can write a bestseller. Then you can write another one, a second book that readers embrace just as warmly as the first. You can do this over and over. You can be a career writer for the rest of your life.

Is it hard to believe statements like this? Impossible? Well, in some cases, of course it is. Things like selling thousands of copies aren’t truly within our control. When I say “anything is possible,” I don’t mean it literally.

But I want you to believe it, for yourself, just for a while.

Writers seeking publication go through so many tough times. The “query trenches” can be so disheartening, so full of rejection. Once you’ve published a book, things aren’t much better: you still spend so much time worrying about whether your book will be well-received, and even if it is, the chance for disappointment with your second book is right around the corner.

The world will tell you that you can’t have the dream you want. Writing your book will be demoralizing, slow, rocky, or worse. Life will get in the way. Agents will reject you. You will have disappointing experiences with editors or other people important to your process. Your life’s work may be met with either a sea of negative reviews or resounding silence. Copies of your book will sit unpurchased. The odds are against you at the beginning, in the middle, the whole way through.

More than likely, you will hear, over and over, that what you want is impossible.

So, for a while, don’t listen.

Try the exercise. Tune out the voices saying that you can’t and tune in to your own voice telling you that you can.

Believe that you can make it happen. Believe that your mind is capable of a masterpiece. Believe that your book will find a grateful waiting audience. Believe that rejection is temporary, because it is. Believe that no one can stop you but you. Believe that your work deserves publication as much as anyone else’s. Believe that your idea will rise above the fray. Believe that a world is waiting for you, a community of writers, that will welcome and celebrate you as one of their own. Believe that no matter what obstacles life throws your way, you will persevere, pushing forward again and again to pursue your ultimate goal.

Believe that anything is possible.

How does that feel?

Source: Writer Unboxed

On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

In a recent post on Writers Unboxed, author and coach Kathleen McCleary shared her reasons for writing. Here’s an excerpt from that post:

The answers to the Why do I write? question are as varied as we are, we writers, we joyful, tormented souls. You can find a great compilation of quotes from well-known writers on why they write here. When I really thought through this question for myself, I came up with this list:

I write to process my own feelings. I became a novelist in my forties, when my husband and I made a cross-country move and I had so many intense feelings about leaving behind our home in Oregon—the first house we’d ever owned, the house we’d brought our babies home to, the neighborhood where we’d established deep, life-long friendships—that I didn’t know what to do with it all. So I started writing a story about a woman who had to sell a house she loved because she was getting divorced. I could pour all my sadness about the move, my passion for my house and my hopes for the future into that character. And a side effect of processing your emotions honestly in fiction is that what you write rings true for readers. Crazy as my main character was (a little crazier than me), I found an agent and sold it in a pre-empt very quickly because it had an emotional truth that resonated with people. I can’t tell you how many readers and reviewers wanted to tell me about the houses they’d loved and lost. No matter what feelings you’re processing, you’re not the first or only human to feel that way, and that resonates.

I write to connect. Author Jami Attenberg said “I write because it is the thing I have to offer, the sharpest skill I have. I write to make people—and myself—feel less alone. I write because I want to communicate messages with the world.” It’s deeply gratifying to have readers respond to what I write because it resonates for them, as with all the people who wanted to tell me about their beloved houses, and makes them feel seen and understood. One reader wrote to me: “You managed to describe thoughts and feelings I couldn’t even begin to put into words. I found myself saying to myself, YES. That is exactly how it feels.’” Do I write to elicit that kind of response in readers? Well, hell yeah.

I write stories so I can control my own narrative, give my characters some of the experiences, choices, and emotions I wish I’d lived. We can provide our fictional characters with the deeply empathetic parent we wish we’d had, the lover who “gets” us on a soul-to-soul level, the wild career success we wish we’d enjoyed, the son we wish we’d had—not to mention creating characters with qualities we wish we embodied. George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo) says, “The result of [the] laborious and slightly obsessive process [of writing] is a story that is better than I am in ‘real life’ – funnier, kinder, less full of crap, more empathetic, with a clearer sense of virtue, both wiser and more entertaining.”

Read the rest of the post here.

On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

In her latest book, Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, New York Times bestselling author Maggie Smith breaks down creativity into ten essential elements. Here’s a thought-provoking excerpt:

Tenacity means sticking with it even when it’s not making you feel good. Even when your ego isn’t surfing a big, wonderful wave. Maybe your ego has been pulled under and is being trashed around.

This is where patience comes in: You have to keep trying, persisting, without instant gratification. We have to press on even if the conditions are less than ideal, even if we experience pushback, even if we don’t have the time or materials we wish we had, even if it’s taking longer than we expected. Remember that progress is often gradual, incremental, sometimes two steps forward and three steps back. Transformation rarely happens in some eureka or aha moment, because this isn’t a movie, it’s life.

When it gets difficult, stay with it. Don’t use difficulty as an excuse to “take a break”—because we all know that in this life, it’s all too easy to be sidetracked. To close the laptop or the notebook, to pick up your phone or the TV remote, to go make a snack, to do those chores you’ve been meaning to do. An intended fifteen minutes can turn into two hours, or a day, or weeks.

STOP. The laundry can probably wait, the clean dishes in the dishwasher aren’t going anywhere, there’s nothing good streaming (and if there is, well, it can wait). Your creativity is calling. It needs you. Work on your endurance and stamina. Wring your mind out like a rag over a bucket, until it’s bone-dry. Get every drop.

Remember: Attention is a form of love.

Source: Dear Writer, pp. 205-206

On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

In a recent post on the Writer Unboxed blog, award-winning author Greer Macallister shared the following insights:

I don’t remember the time before I was a reader, just as I don’t remember the time before I was a writer. I’ve always read for the joy of it. Now, as a published author, I read for a number of other reasons as well, but the joy, if I look for it, is still there.

It’s one of the reasons I don’t have much patience for people who think they should write a book but can’t remember the last one they read once that wasn’t assigned in high school or college. People who say “I’m going to revolutionize [genre]!” without ever having read a book in that genre. People who claim proudly that they’re the first to write a book that addresses a certain situation or worldview without doing the research to figure out how many books exist in that space already.

Because for most of the writers I know, we can’t un-link the two. We started writing because we loved reading. We’re over the moon that we have become the people we once looked up to, creating stories that fill readers with emotion. We may not read at a blistering pace given life’s other demands and temptations, but if you give us the freedom and space to choose an activity, reading is going to be high on the list.

Reading is also an important job responsibility as an author. I used to say that I read less frequently for pleasure these days because I’m so often reading for professional reasons, like manuscripts to blurb, books I’m reviewing, or novels I’m interviewing fellow authors about for in-conversation events. But I’ve realized that all the reading I do, even with an expectation attached, is still a source of pleasure for me. I’ve never subscribed to the aphorism that “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life” — it’s still work — but it is significantly easier to get through that work if you find it enjoyable.

On occasion, I do find that my identity as a writer influences how I read. I fully admit that if I know a novel has been wildly successful, I too often go into reading it with a chip on my shoulder, jealous of the writer’s success. I acknowledge the bias. It also turns out that in most of these cases — most recently for Lessons in Chemistry, The Wedding People, and The Correspondent — midway through the book, I find myself acknowledging Oh, yes, I get it. I’m reading differently than I would be if I weren’t a writer, yes, but being a writer doesn’t make it impossible for me to enjoy someone else’s book. I may be more conscious of structure and technique than the average reader, but when the book is good, I can still get fully lost in it.

All this to say that if you are a writer, you are also a reader. What we read changes, but why we read remains the same. We read because we are readers. We are readers because books bring us joy. And we are writers (at least in part) because we want to bring that joy to others.

Source: Writer Unboxed