Yearly Archives: 2021

8 Valuable Tips for Writer Elevator Pitches

You’ve just met someone new. Once they find out you’re a fiction writer, they might ask, “What do you write?” You have thirty seconds to answer. Go.

These interactions can happen anywhere—at a writers’ conference, at the store, at a bus stop, at a party, and, yes, even in an elevator. Every interaction is a chance to entice a new reader. Or a chance to flub it.

Let’s not flub this. Here are my tips for creating and delivering a masterful elevator pitch.

  1. Plan the pitch. Visualize the interaction. The person will ask you what you write about, but they’re really wondering if you write what they like to read. You’d like them to be a new reader, to buy your books. This is a chance to find out if those different goals intersect. Write down a four or five sentence answer you can deliver in thirty seconds. Rewrite these until they’re interesting, upbeat, and compelling. Remember, you’re answering a question about what you write, not selling a used car.
  2. Rehearse the pitch. Speak your sentences aloud, as if to a new acquaintance. Do this in the mirror. Smile. Make eye contact. Exude confidence and enthusiasm.
  3. Wait for the invitation. When the meeting occurs, don’t launch into your pitch. Let them ask the question, which may occur when they find out you’re a writer. They may not ask, which is a sign they’re not a potential reader.
  4. Speak naturally. Yes, you rehearsed, but don’t let your pitch sound rehearsed. Let your voice tone rise and fall normally, and avoid speaking in monotone. Don’t talk too fast.
  5. Smile and make eye contact. Just like you rehearsed it. The first reason for this is to make your pitch more compelling. There’s a second reason…
  6. Watch for signs of interest. As you’re speaking, watch the person’s eyes for signs of increased interest. If that occurs, alter your pitch to follow up on what you just said that perked their interest.
  7. Be ready for follow-up questions. The person might well ask, “What else have you written?” or “What are you writing now?” or “I like stories about [whatever]. Have you written anything like that?” Of course, the best follow-up question is, “Where can I find out more about your books?”
  8. Make the connection. If they ask for more information, be ready to provide it. You can offer to send an email. You can trade contact information using smartphones. You can mention your author website. You can even provide an author business card.

Soon you’ll be, as they say in the elevator biz, going up. But that’s only if you follow the wise advice of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 18, 2021Permalink

Maslow’s Hierarchy of (Fictional Character) Needs

You may have heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but have you thought about how that hierarchy might apply to the characters in your stories?

An excellent post by author K.M. Weiland inspired me to write about this topic. I encourage you to read her post, too.

As a refresher, Abraham Maslow published a paper in 1934 titled “A theory of Human Motivation.” In it, he postulated that people are motivated in stages by various categories of needs. Moreover, he thought the more basic needs must be satisfied before a person can be motivated by higher level needs. If circumstances change and a more basic need becomes unsatisfied, the person drops back down the hierarchy.

Most often, you’ll see this hierarchy depicted as a pyramid. However, a succession of overlapping curves more accurately reflects Maslow’s theory. A person doesn’t just step up the levels of a pyramid, but rather moves through a series of waves.

Fictional characters have motivations and needs like real people. Maslow’s theory applies to them, too. If your character is practicing to be a concert pianist (Self-actualization), and her house catches fire, it’s more realistic to have her run to save herself (Physiological need) than to remain at the piano.

When creating characters for a story, I write down both their motivation and goal in my notes. Think of these two things this way: a goal is a specific thing you want; a motivation (or need) is why you want it.

Here are my listed motivations for some characters in my stories, along with how Maslow might have categorized them:

  • Hototo, from “Broken Flute Cave.” Motivation: to maintain traditions of the tribe, to keep connections with ancestors, and to sustain music.  Maslow’s categorization: belongingness and love needs.
  • Edgar Allan Poe, from “Reconnaissance Mission.” Motivation: to find order, rationality, and discipline in all things. Maslow’s categorization: self-actualization. (Poe’s needs shift during the story to basic survival—physiological needs.)
  • Brother Eilmer, from “Instability.” Motivation: Knowledge. Maslow’s categorization: self-actualization.
  • Lani Koamalu, from “The Cats of Nerio-3.” Motivation: to finally outsmart the Artificially Intelligent character or at least prove its equal. Maslow’s categorization: esteem needs. (Lani’s needs shift during the story to basic survival—physiological needs.)
  • Johnny Branch, from “After the Martians.” Motivation: adventure, making a difference in the world. Maslow’s categorization: esteem needs. (Johnny’s needs shift during the story to basic survival—physiological needs.)

Here’s my takeaway—don’t get hung up on the details of Maslow’s hierarchy. It’s a theory, and many have criticized it. However, be aware that people (both real and fictional) can have many needs, and the needs can shift based on circumstances.

You should have a good understanding of your characters and their needs. To have sufficient conflict in your story, the needs of the protagonist should differ from (and be in conflict with) the needs of the antagonist. Whether these characters’ needs fit into Maslow’s hierarchy is not really important.

Needs form the basis of goals. The pursuit of goals drives behavior (speech and action). Characters with opposing goals result in conflict. The behavior of characters as they deal with the conflict moves the plot. At the story’s end, a goal is satisfied, or not, but the protagonist either learns something or dies in a meaningful way.

Those essentials of story-writing are far more important than strict adherence to a theory of human needs. You may find Maslow useful, but don’t feel bad if your story doesn’t fit his theory. Writing a good story is one of the primary needs of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 11, 2021Permalink

Leading a Writers’ Group

Have you joined a writers’ group in your local area? If so, have you given any thought to running for president of the group? There are good reasons to do that.

Many years ago, I served as president of such a group. Back then, it was known as The Writers’ Association of Anne Arundel County, or TWAAAC. (All the good acronyms were already taken.) Sometime after my term ended, they changed the name to the Maryland Writers’ Association (MWA).

This past week, the current MWA officers held a Zoom meeting to gather and honor all the past presidents of the group. It was wonderful to talk to people I hadn’t seen in many years, and to learn how much the organization has grown and to find out about all the new activities going on.

All volunteer organizations have too few members doing all the work and too many members doing nothing. Writers’ groups are no different, and might even be worse, given that writing is a solitary, time-consuming activity. Still, I believe if you’re asked to serve in some official position, even as president, you ought to consider doing it. Here’s why:

  • It will serve as a new life experience for you, especially if you’ve never led a group before. As a writer, you should seek out such new experiences. That way you can write with authority about characters going through their first leadership positions.
  • You’ll meet and work with other writers. This expands your network of contacts, several of whom might become readers or critique partners someday.
  • It many develop your leadership capabilities. As president, you’ll face problems and you’ll have to think of solutions or at least evaluate and implement the best ones proposed by other group officers.
  • It will help overcome a fear of public speaking. Being the leader, you’ll have to speak to the group. That experience will serve you well when it comes to giving readings from your books at writing conferences, or talking to readers at book signings.

Yes, there’s a small downside to serving as president of a writers’ group. Time spent performing presidential duties is time not spent writing. However, your term will not last forever. Typically, presidents of such groups serve for only a year or two.

Perhaps you believe you’re too young to serve as president. Maybe most members are older and seem more experienced. That’s how it seemed to me. Here’s the reality—most volunteer organizations seek out young people who are full of energy and ideas. They’re the ones who keep such groups fresh and vital. The more senior members are looking for people like you.

In many cases, those older members have already served their time as president and now lack the time or energy to do so again. Often, they’ll gladly serve as a mentor for you if you’re not sure what to do.

If you do get elected president of your group, I’d encourage you to spend some time thinking about the future of the group. What activities would inspire and nurture writers? How might the organization reach out to gain new members? In what ways could the group be better in five years and what steps are necessary to make those improvements happen?

Finding answers to these questions and acting on them could make your term as president enjoyable and valuable to the group.

I hope you are able to serve as president of your local writers’ group. You’ll do well. It’s not rocket science. That job can even be performed, with some competence, by a much younger—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 4, 2021Permalink

Editing in Perspective

While editing your manuscript, you might wish to look at it from three different viewpoints, or perspectives, to give your story a complete assessment.

A nice post by Jennie Nash inspired this blogpost, but I’ve taken her ideas in a different direction. I concur with her that it’s helpful to get out of your own head and try to see your story through other eyes. That will help you decide what to cut, what to keep, and what to rephrase.

Here are the three perspectives I suggest:

Your Characters. Take each of the major characters in your tale, get inside their heads, and think about the story from their point of view. Are there parts that don’t work? If your character is telling you, “I would never do (or say) that,” listen to that voice. It means that person is unrealistic—literally uncharacteristic. Either change the dialogue or action, or revise the character to make the voice and action plausible.

Your Readers. The audience for your story doesn’t see the story as you do. A reader has limited time, and a lot of other stories to read. The beginning of your tale really has to hook the reader, grab attention and not let go. In the middle of your story, you can’t afford many boring parts, or any parts that are both boring and lengthy. Shorten or get rid of them before your reader throws your book away. There may well be passages you love, but are unnecessary when viewed from a reader’s point of view. Delete them.

Your Editors. Don’t forget those nice folks with the eyeshades and blue pencils, the ones who decide whether to risk the publisher’s money and reputation on your story. They really don’t see your story as you do. They see every grammar and spelling mistake, every plot hole, every cliché and stereotyped character, every ambiguous phrase, every confusing description, and every character that acts out-of-character. It’s best if you see these things first and not give the editor an excuse to reject your story.

There. When you’re done, you will have viewed your story from three perspectives, much as a blueprint depicts an object using front, top, and side views so a manufacturer can understand it from multiple dimensions.

Of course, there’s a sort of fourth dimension involved here, and that’s—

You. You had the idea for the story in the first place and you wrote every word of it. What’s more, it was really you pretending to be characters, readers, and editors throughout the editing process above. It’s been all you every step of the way. When the story is published, it will have your name on it. Are you proud of it? If not, perhaps you ought to let that story sit and percolate awhile before picking it up again for further editing.

I’ll conclude with one interesting trick of perspective, one little-known fact about a peculiar optical illusion. When viewed from any angle, I’m still—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 27, 2021Permalink

Creating Troubled Characters

Readers can be drawn to characters with mental troubles. All fictional characters have troubles, of course, since conflict is necessary to good fiction. But today I’m focusing only on characters with mental disorders.

Note: nothing in this post is meant to diminish or glorify the real problem of mental illness. People with such disorders should seek and obtain professional help, and there should be no stigma attached to that.

My purpose is to discuss how an author should portray a fictional character with a mental disorder. Anyone who reads books or watches movies knows that audiences are fascinated by such characters. Troubled characters ratchet up the conflict and drive the plot. They also give readers and viewers a glimpse into the complexities, wonders, and horrors of the human mind.

This week I attended a Zoom lecture by Loriann Oberlin, who writes fiction under the pen-name Lauren Monroe. Unlike me, she is an expert in psychology. Her talk inspired this blogpost, but everything in this post is my interpretation.

In her talk, Ms. Oberlin referenced the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). This book, published by the American Psychiatric Association, discusses disorders such as neurodevelopmental; schizophrenia spectrum; bipolar; depressive; anxiety; obsessive-compulsive; trauma- and stressor-related; dissociative disorders; somatic symptom; feeding and eating; elimination, sleep–wake; disruptive, impulse-control, and conduct; substance-related and addictive; neurocognitive; personality; and paraphilic; as well as conditions such as sexual dysfunctions and gender dysphoria.

Ms. Oberlin stressed the importance of doing your research so you can depict a particular mental disorder correctly. I’d amend that advice just a bit. It’s easy, when conducting research, to go down rabbit holes and research too much. So, learn when to quit doing research and shift to writing your story. If your character’s behavior and speech don’t exactly match some known disorder, don’t worry about it too much. The APA occasionally comes up with new ones.

Here are my suggestions if you wish to create a troubled character:

  1. You should include a backstory explaining the character’s behavior. You needn’t start the story that way, but perhaps work it in as a flashback. Did the disorder spring from one or more events in the character’s childhood?
  2. You need to reveal the character’s symptoms to the reader early and throughout. Remember to show, don’t tell, these symptoms.
  3. Is the troubled character the protagonist? If so, then some sort of change is required in the story. Perhaps the character takes steps to overcome problems caused by the disorder. Or maybe the disorder brings consequences for which the character must suffer. Perhaps the character struggles with the disorder, then finally comes to terms with it.
  4. If a different character is the protagonist, then the troubled character need not change, but your protagonist must change, perhaps by learning to accommodate the troubled character’s disorder.

Here are examples where I’ve used troubled characters in my fiction:

  • In “Ripper’s Ring,” Horace Grott is a loser, barely qualified for his job carting bodies to the morgue in London in 1888. He comes upon the legendary Ring of Gyges that enables its wearer to turn invisible. In time, that new-found ability turns Horace into a serial murderer—Jack the Ripper. The story is partly in Horace’s point of view, and partly in that of the detective tracking him down.
  • In “The Six Hundred Dollar Man,” Sonny Houston is a nice young man with virtually no negative traits, living in the Old West. After being trampled by farm animals, he’s given a steam-powered arm and legs by an inventive doctor. These superhuman abilities change Sonny and he descends into madness. The story is told from the point of view of the doctor, who comes to realize the consequences of his well-meant invention.
  • In “A Tale More True,” no character has a mental disorder, but I cite the story because Ms. Oberlin mentioned how ‘Munchausen Syndrome’ has been renamed ‘factitious disorder imposed on another.’ The famous fictional character Baron Munchausen, the one with such fanciful lies, appears in my story. The attention given to the baron’s tall tales inspires my protagonist, Count Federmann, to make his own trip to the moon.

Now that you’ve read this post, if you do write a story about a character with a mental illness and that story becomes a bestseller, and you’re invited to make speeches and give interviews, don’t forget to thank—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 20, 2021Permalink

Raise the Stakes!

Does the current draft of your story seem uninteresting? Do you have to wake up your Beta readers after they get through the first page? Perhaps the stakes aren’t high enough.

Earlier this week, I attended an excellent Zoom talk by author Amber Royer called ‘Giving Everyone a Stake in the Story.’ That talk inspired this blogpost, but, as usual, I’m putting her presentation into my own words.

No, not even spelled right
Yes, a stake, but not the kind we mean

What, exactly, is a ‘stake?’ As a noun it has two meanings, the first being a stick or post driven into the ground, but we’re interested in the second meaning. One theory suggests that people in medieval Europe would wager on events (jousts or other contests) by placing bets on wooden posts—stakes. Over time, they referred to the bets themselves as ‘stakes.’

A stake, then, is the thing being risked, the thing that could be won or lost depending on an outcome of a future event.

What do the key characters in your story have at stake? If they aren’t taking some risk with a chance to win or lose something, your readers won’t care about them.

To have a stake, the characters must want something. The more important that thing is and the more they want it, the more interesting your characters will be. Stakes are tied up with motivations.

The thing your character wants could be tangible, like a physical object, or a job promotion; or it could be intangible, like love, status, or respect. Maybe it’s not something they want, but something they want to avoid, like humiliation, defeat, loss of self-respect, injury, death, etc.

Once you decide what your characters have at stake, think about how far they’re willing to go to get what they want, or avoid what they don’t want. Would your characters give up money, time, their reputation, their honor, a friendship, their life?

Stakes aren’t just for protagonists. Your antagonist needs a stake, too. Consider thinking about this even before developing your protagonist. What does your ‘bad guy’ want, and how far is she willing to go to get it?

Your story might also include a ‘Stakes Character.” This character personifies and represents what’s at stake for your protagonist. Often both the protagonist and antagonist strive for the Stakes Character, or want what that character has, but they use different means.

For example, in the movie Mary Poppins, George Banks is the protagonist. Mary Poppins is the antagonist, and the children, Jane and Michael, are the Stakes Characters. George thinks his career as a banker is what’s at stake, but really, it’s his role as a father. Mary opposes his focus on his career and works to make him realize being a good father is far more important. Seen in that way, they’re both fighting for the children.

Even your minor characters will have stakes. However, don’t let them steal the show away from the main protagonist/antagonist conflict.

How do you find out what’s at stake for your characters? Ask them. (Well, not out loud if you’re in public—that would seem weird.) Ask tough, deep questions. Think about their answers and let those deep, personal confessions influence how you write about those characters in the story.

Amber Royer credits editor Donald Maas with categorizing stakes as Personal, Public, or Ultimate. Personal stakes are inside, usually unknown to the world. Public stakes are known and often shared. If the protagonist fails, more than that one character would be affected. Ultimate stakes are the really deep ones underlying all other motivations. They’re at the end of the ‘why?’ chain of questions. They’re the ones you’d give your life for. A single character can have one, two, or all three types.

If your story is tedious or dull, or the characters seem flat and lifeless, raise the stakes! Give them something more to win or lose. Make them willing to risk more. If that doesn’t work, ask yourself how you’d write your story if you were more like—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 13, 2021Permalink

After Your Great Idea – the Difficult Part

Got a great story idea, have you? All that’s left is to type up the words, send them to a publisher, and start spending all that advance money, right?

Not so fast.

First, I suggest you read this wonderful guest blogpost by author Elizabeth Sims, posting on Jane Friedman’s site. Sims gives indispensable advice about how to convert an idea into a story. I’ll give my own spin on her guidance below, but her post explains it in more detail.

She describes four techniques to use. You may use them singly or in combination. Sims says you can take your original story idea and bend it, amp it, drive it, and strip it.

Bend It

Take your idea and shape it into something worth reading. Alter it nearly beyond recognition. Change it in ways that make it more exciting and dramatic. Isaac Asimov read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon and imagined the decline and fall of a future galactic empire. He bent the idea further by adding an advanced science called ‘psychohistory’ which predicted the fall of the empire, then wrote his Foundation Series.

Amp It

Your story idea includes some characters with goals, motivations, and problems. Okay, now crank up the volume. Make the goals nearly unreachable, the motivations into obsessions, the problems nearly unsolvable. Raise the stakes. Frank Herbert dabbled with growing mushrooms and enjoyed watching the moving sand dunes near Florence, Oregon. From those interests came Dune, a novel of prophesies, magic, royal family destinies, drug-induced mental states, treachery, self-doubts, and impossible odds.

Drive It

Carry your story idea to extreme ends, ultimate possibilities, and previously unexplored realms. Where ‘Amp It’ has you elevating internal character emotions and personalities, ‘Drive It’ is where you supercharge the plot. Disgusted by what he’d read of the communist Soviet Union, George Orwell took that as a starting point and drove it toward the bitter and dismal future of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Stalin became Big Brother. Secret police became ubiquitous spy cameras. Propaganda became the language of Newspeak and the concept of doublethink. Soviet slogans became “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.”

Strip It

If your idea gets too big and the novel threatens to overwhelm you, cut it down to size. Readers can’t keep track of an entire world, but they can follow a single character. If you portray that character well enough, readers will understand the metaphor—through that one character, you’re representing many. Angered by a newspaper advertisement urging the U.S. Government to unilaterally suspend testing of nuclear weapons, Robert A. Heinlein could have taken Tolstoy’s War and Peace and set it in outer space. Instead, for Starship Troopers, he wrote a stripped-down version, describing an interstellar war from the perspective of a single soldier in the Mobile Infantry.

Now that you have Bend It, Amp It, Drive It, and Strip It in your writer’s toolkit, take another look at your story idea. Just think of the possibilities, all because you read this post by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 6, 2021Permalink

Engineers Can’t Write

My college degrees are in engineering and my career was in an engineering field. I’ve never received a degree in writing or literature. Now I write fiction. Is that even allowed?

At one point in my career, I had a boss who’d say, “Engineers can’t write.” He was, of course, referring not only to fiction, but also the sort of nonfiction engineers must write—specifications, instructions, memos, emails, etc. It pleased him that I was an exception, but daily experience with others only proved his rule 99% correct.

Not many engineers write fiction as a spare-time hobby, but I did, and now it’s my sole retirement job. I believe stories written by engineers often suffer from common deficiencies that make their stories unappealing to editors and readers. These deficiencies result from the rigorous thought processes of the engineering mindset. In particular, engineer-writers:

  • emphasize things, particularly human-made things, not people or emotions;
  • focus on actions, not internal motivations; and
  • over-explain, in detail, how gadgets work.

The essence of engineering is problem-solving, and engineer-writers often pen stories in which the protagonist solves a complex problem. The problem tends to involve things, not people. The story often glosses over the protagonist’s emotions and desires. The feelings of other characters, if mentioned at all, involve amazement or admiration for the brilliant main character.

An Engineer’s Guide to Writing Fiction

Perhaps you’re an engineer who wishes to write fiction, but hasn’t been successful yet. Here are some pointers:

  1. Think of ‘success in writing’ as you would any engineering problem. The end objective is to create a manuscript that maximizes the emotional response and enjoyment of end users (readers). These readers may not think like you. The only raw materials at your disposal are words.
  2. Keep in mind what readers care about and what all classic fiction emphasizes—characters. Show your readers what your characters dream about and long for. Show readers your character’s fears, vulnerabilities, feelings, and doubts.
  3. When writing fiction, you’re leaving your neat and logical world of machine parts, where rigid physical laws and mathematical equations govern how materials and subsystems interact, where you work within the laws of nature to benefit people. You’ve entered the infinitely more complex and messier world of human emotion, motivation, and fantastic imaginings.
  4. It’s fine to include machines and vehicles in your tales, but go light on the descriptions. Pick a few key details to mention, just enough to give an impression and let readers imagine the rest. You don’t have to explain how it works; trust readers to go along for the ride. How your characters feel about the machine is more important than the machine itself, so describe it through their thoughts.
  5. You didn’t learn engineering in a day, and writing good fiction is no different, no less complex. You’ll have to learn the craft. Read fiction within and outside your favorite genre. Read books about writing. Go to writers’ conferences. Join a fiction writing critique group.

 Now that I think about it, I believe my former boss was wrong. Engineers, like you, can write. Not only can you write good fiction, you will. Many others have, and since I followed their path, you can follow—

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 30, 2021Permalink

6 Things Story-writers Can Learn from Songwriters

Many songs tell stories. Can our musical counterparts—songwriters—teach a few things to prose fiction writers like us?

Many songs, perhaps most, just convey a mood or a thought. Today I’m only considering ‘story songs’ and I’ll define them as tunes having (1) one character with a problem, (2) a plot where the character struggles to solve the problem, and (3) an ending where, as a result of the character’s actions, the problem is resolved. That’s the definition of a story, too.

Songwriters have a few advantages over story-writers. They can:

  • set the mood of the story with the tune and instruments alone;
  • use melody, rhythm, and the tone of their singing voice to convey emotions and the up-and-down cycling of tension;
  • use pauses to delay a surprise ending until the time is right; and
  • can repeat phrases (say, in a chorus) without the listening audience getting bored by the repetition.

By contrast, story-writers must convey their tale using words alone.

On the other hand, songwriters operate under a couple of constraints not faced by story-writers. They must tell their story in a very short time (typically four to ten minutes), and most often they must do so in poetic rhyme. Due to the brevity of story songs, many of them resemble flash fiction stories, those with 1000 words or less.

From what I’ve gleaned in my research, story songs are more prevalent in country music and folk songs than in other musical genres. Also, certain singers are more drawn to story songs than others. Examples include Harry Chapin (“Taxi,” “Cats in the Cradle,” and “Flowers are Red”) and Johnny Cash (“A Boy Named Sue” and “One Piece at a Time”).  

Story songs tend to be somber, dark, or even tragic in tone and message. There are some humorous ones, such as Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and upbeat ones like “Devil Went Down to Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band, but these are exceptions.

Often, like most songs, story songs tend to involve young love, or lost love. Further, they tend to be about ordinary people, poor or middle-class people with troubles.

What can story-writers learn from songwriters?

  1. Set the scene with a few well-chosen words. Don’t start with backstory—you can fill that in later. In “Puff the Magic Dragon” by Peter, Paul and Mary, we’re only told the dragon lived ‘by the sea, and frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honahlee.’
  2. Introduce your main character early, and make that character compelling, someone with whom readers will identify. In Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana,” we are drawn to Lola, not because she’s a showgirl with yellow flowers in her hair, but because she and Tony ‘were young and had each other, who could ask for more?’
  3. Early on, force your character to face a difficult conflict, one that’s serious and will drive the plot. The very first lines of “Coward of the County” by Kenny Rogers are, ‘Everyone considered him the coward of the county,’ setting up an inevitable test of manhood. In “Stan” by Eminem, the narrator establishes early that he’s got an irrational obsession, a hero fixation that is messing up his life.
  4. Choose a few key details to describe things. There’s no need for complete descriptions. “Hotel California” by The Eagles is masterful, giving us mental images such as cool winds, warm smell of colitas, hearing the mission bell, lighting of a candle, etc. The song zeros in to give precise details about a few things, and listeners fill in the gaps.
  5. Resolve the conflict in a way that the character learns something, perhaps something unexpected. In “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffett, the song’s chorus keeps changing as the narrator learns who’s really to blame for his troubles. In “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman, the narrator thought a man with a fast car would drive her to a better life, but in the end tells him to ‘take your fast car and keep on driving.’
  6. Story ideas. Take your favorite song and convert it into a story. Twist it enough so you don’t violate its copyright, but you can channel the same emotions inspired by the song into your story.

About now, one of the songs I mentioned is stuck in your head, right? I better quit, since you’re busy humming a tune and no longer reading words written by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 23, 2021Permalink

6 Things You Need to be a Successful Writer

In this post, author Mike Swift claims there are six things a successful writer needs. If you don’t already have these things, can you buy them at the store?

Here are the six things on his list:

  • A desire to be heard;
  • Life experience;
  • A way with words;
  • Perseverance;
  • Luck; and
  • Hard work.

I don’t see much to quibble about on his list. I was tempted to add Time, but if you have a desire to be heard, you’ll find time.

For now, let’s accept his list as accurate. Right now, you’re looking back over the list and checking off the items you have, and your tally is coming up a little short of six. So is mine. Now you’re asking: how do I get the ones I don’t have?

A Desire to be Heard. Perhaps you don’t have this. Or, more accurately, you don’t think you have this. Remember, at some point in your life, you had something important to say and everybody in the room was ignoring you, intent on something else. Think back to that feeling. You do have something to say, and it’s high time the world listened up.

Life Experience. Mike Swift equates this item with ‘having something to write about.’ He wasn’t implying that you have to be old or retired to write. In my view—and, I’m guessing, in his, too—even teenagers have sufficient life experience to write about. I think everyone over the age of thirteen can check this one.

A Way with Words. This might be the biggest stumbling block for most folks who’d like to write someday. They read the classics and think, “I could never write like that.” I suggest looking at it a different way. True, you could never write like [insert favorite author name here], but that author couldn’t ever write like you either. Perhaps you’re not looking for A Way with Words, but Your Way with Words. Moreover, this item pretty much gets checked off with practice. You’ll find your voice the more you write.

Perseverance. So you’re the type who gives up at the first setback. Can you learn perseverance? Yes. First, remember day follows night; that lowdown feeling of failure never lasts forever. Second, recall your Desire to be Heard; that might translate to a goal you can push for. Third, visualize your future self achieving that goal; visualization is a good motivation method. Fourth, realize you don’t have to do it all in one day; take bite-sized steps so you can get back on track and reward yourself for achieving those small tasks. Those things will help you persevere.

Luck. This might seem the one item on the list you can’t control. Luck just happens, right? Maybe. But if we examine the careers of the luckiest authors out there, we’ll likely find they’re also the ones who work hardest and persevere. Maybe we’ll find they’re open to new experiences, fresh ideas. In short, maybe, for them, luck didn’t just happen. They made it happen. Maybe you can, too.

Hard Work. Ooh. The difficult one. Can we skip this? I’m afraid not. However, for a writer, ‘hard work’ is not the same thing as it is for a bomb disposal expert, a brain surgeon, a skyscraper scaffold worker, or a firefighter. Folks in those professions might be willing to swap their job for the ‘hard work’ of a writer. Besides, these six things overlap, so if you have a Desire to be Heard and a little Perseverance, you’ll be willing to work hard.

Maybe you’ve rethought your tally and now can claim you have all six things. Success is in the bag now, right? Well, not so fast. These things aren’t like on/off switches where you either have them or you don’t. Each is a matter of degree. If you’re not a successful writer yet, it could be that you lack one or more of the six things to a sufficient extent.

To achieve success in writing, you need to keep working to improve all six items, not just the ones you’re weak in. In this struggle for self-improvement, you’re not alone. There’s at least one other—

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 16, 2021Permalink