Month: September 2017

Readying for NaNoWriMo

If you don’t have any idea what NaNoWriMo means, don’t fear, I will explain and you can read about my first involvement here. NaNoWriMo is an acronym for National Novel Writing Month. It is also a great website where you can be supported in your writing endeavors and share your dreams with other dreamers. At the NaNoWriMo site, you can sign up to participate in writing a novel in one month, track your writing progress, get support, and connect with writers online and in person. If you find yourself signing up, look me up and be my friend, I am JansheaAuthor there.

One of the biggest wins for me last year was discovering the rich bounty of writers in my area, and all the wonderful, supportive ways I could be involved with getting better at crafting stories. In the other months that I am not participating in NaNoWriMo, I can participate with local writers and online ones with the continuing writing camps held and months dedicated to polishing up your new masterpiece.

So, we are only in the month of September, why would I bring up NaNoWriMo now? Well, we have a bit over a month to decide what will be working on in November and many of us are still trying to figure that out. Some of us have pages of ideas and partially fleshed out stories, some of us write works for publishing year round and may know what is next on the schedule. Yet many of us could benefit from a little time to decide on a subject matter and start outlining a broad picture to work from. Now, I am not a huge outliner before writing, but in spending time crafting, I have found it a great help to have an overview of storyline, characters, setting, time, and possibly theme. It is much easier than you might suspect to forget the details when using names, dates, or familial connections. It brings the story to a screeching halt when writers get distinguishing details wrong during the course of a book. Readers are discerning, while the writer sometimes misses things from constantly reading the story. You can probably guess, I found this out the hard way in my own work.

As such, I am starting the thinking, deciding, and big picture work for this year’s NaNoWriMo. I found those little reminders and ‘atta girls’ doled out when participating, really felt good and helped with goal setting. Sometimes writers get lost in all the ideas and have a terrible time focusing. Occasionally I am even paralyzed to inaction from too many thoughts and poor focus. So, if you are like me, try starting now and set some small goals in preparation for the marathon of NaNoWriMo. If you are more put together as a writer than I am, feel free to share your skills in getting there! Either way, I hope you spread your wings with your writing this year. May you soar to a new level in  your writing.

I am starting with subject matter. I will spend the next week deciding exactly what subject I plan to tackle this November. What will you work on to prepare for NaNoWriMo? Let me know in the comments. I look forward to hearing from you.

Parenting Through The Hurricane

I am back and running after a week of preparations, moving targets, and no power after Hurricane Irma came through. I feel blessed to have come through with our family intact, along with our home. As we continue the clean up efforts, I want to talk about parenting through hurricanes, or any storm. Particularly, parenting exceptional children of differing abilities. In my family, the differing ability we struggle the most with during storms is anxiety.

Anxiety is often thought to be the exclusive purview of adults. It is also portrayed as a person who is afraid to go places or to start things. I’ve learned that anxiety can look like anger through actions and words. It can inhibit sleep, and yes, just plain make you worried about the smallest chance of something going wrong or being different in your well-ordered world. For anxiety sufferers, storms might be right at the top of the list of things they never want to encounter. That is because storms are inherently unpredictable and bring more unknowns than they feel comfortable with.

We have spent years helping our children embrace who they are, including the anxiety. With that, comes lots of plans on how to calm our bodies and redirect our thoughts to what is more likely to happen, not what seems to be the worst scenario. With storms, we try to follow a plan of action meant to minimize their fears and keep them participating in life, rather than focused on the storm. The plan includes being truthful and direct, talks about what we will do in different outcomes, and reminders of past success of making it through storms. That is for the kids. For the parents, the plan is a lot looser. Parent Plan for the Hurricane is a lot less regimented and designed to help us not go crazy trying to manage the fears of the anxious ones. Remember though, it is hard to help anyone with fears that don’t always look like fear and leads them to act out, regress, and spend a bunch of time destroying things in their attempt to control their environment. So the parent plan includes adult beverages and laughter. The adult beverages help the laughter, which keeps everyone calmer.

As Irma made its way towards our state, leaving death and destruction in its wake and on the heels of the devastation in Houston, all parenting had to be done with laughter and love. My kids were scared and extremely concerned about everyone in the path of the hurricane as well as those affected in Houston. Parenting through this time requires patience and dedication. And really, I am a little skeptical that parenting and patience actually go together anyway! Irma caused a lot of damage, yet we were minimally impacted. We will spend time cleaning our home and helping our neighbors to show them how we come back from bad things. I hope it helps, because, hope is all we have. No one knows how well we are helping them, they can barely articulate their own feelings. I also don’t know how well we handle the patient part after the millionth questioning on the same topic. But we try, when we screw up, we talk about how it isn’t easy for adults either. We all just have to keep at it. And then we do that, keep at it. This week we won while parenting through the hurricane. I pray you get some parenting wins this week too.

Research: Four Areas of Importance for Writers

Many writers I have met have been writing for years. Whether it is in a journal, stories in school, or just stories for their own love of them, many have been crafting for a significant time. One of the challenges when you want to write for others, is all the pieces you need to put together to make your story enjoyable. This means a level of research needs to be done. Some things to think about include character history, language of the time, any historic actions that will impact your story, and naming of characters and places.

Character History

Don’t be fooled thinking you only have to know how your characters are connected and what they are doing during the arc of the book. For characters with depth, it is a good idea to know characteristics that might not even make it into the book. Consider these tips on character development from the book, Story Engineering: Mastering the 6 Core Competencies of Successful Writing by Larry Brooks. We want multidimensional characters that engage readers and keep them invested in our book. Mr. Brooks proposes there are three dimensions of character that should be explored and decided when composing your story.

  1. Surface Traits, Quirks, and Habits.
  2. Backstory and Inner Demons
  3. Action, Behavior, and Worldview

If you spend time knowing what these dimensions are for your characters, even if you don’t use every bit of the backstory or worldview, it will help write people that seem like the ones you encounter in the real world. This level of reality helps keep the reader engaged and can be researched with known facts about real people as a starting point.

Language of the Time

If you are writing a story set in a real place or in a historic and real era, one of the keys to a fluid story is making sure the language used isn’t too modern if set in the past, nor too old or dated if set in the present or future. Research on the language can include reading history books, books published during the era, or stories set in that era. A really good one, if your era isn’t too far in the past, is movies and plays from the time. These give a very immediate feel to speech and slang of a time. When writing a futuristic tale, the writer can take more liberties with language, even adding new words and meanings for their envisioned time. Many in the writing world will tell you that reading books set in the time of yours, or in the same genre, can be good ways to get into the feel of your own fictional story.

Historic Actions

If you are writing a fictional story based in a known era, there are a number of occurrences that could add to your story. Maybe you write about the era of World War I, or Regency England, or Colonial Africa. Many actions commence during such times and can be researched to use as a backdrop. Placing known events in your story helps people relate to it and its characters. When your story is set in the future, research into scientific themes can add a level of believability and build a bridge to your new world. Characters have the opportunity to be a part of these occurrences and even impact them, a la Forrest Gump. Interaction with historic figures, or plausible future happenings are a rich ground for compelling stories.

Naming Characters and Places

Here is an area where your imagination has a chance to make huge moves. Amazingly the amount of time placed in names of people, and places they interact in a novel can pay off in large dividends at the conclusion of the story. How many people have whole memories around names like Hannibal Lector, Harry Potter, or Frodo Baggins? I know I do and you could probably spend all day listing the people and places that have stayed with you long after the last page is read and the cover closed. There is a nifty website that generates names for a host of different occasions. The Fantasy Name Generator has a large selection of names that cover a multitude of people, places, and things. You can name armor, or restaurants. You can choose fantasy names, or real names, or even names from specific cultures. It is a great tool for a starting point or actual combinations when you have hit the naming wall. Try not to get too bogged down in a name everyone will like. Often, when the author loves a name and feels it works in the story, that is enough. We all know we can’t please all the readers all the time. Sometimes our stories are located in real places, so there is less worry. But, it is always beneficial to change actual business names, sometimes to even change where or what is located in a spot.

These are just four areas that I find essential to a writing project. Sometimes the research involved may be extensive and involve travel. But, if that isn’t in your budget, yet, use the internet. It is a fantastic tool filled with information just waiting for you to discover and use in your next acclaimed piece of fiction. So, get out there and create your masterpiece. Feel free to share any tips you have found that could help our readers.