Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation

No Flat Writing

A lot of writers will worry that their stories seem flat. There’s a reason that they are worrying about that and it’s one of the core elements of good writing.

Ready?

A lot of the times your story seems flat because all your sentences are the same layout.

You want to vary your sentence structure.

Take a bit of writing that you’ve done that feels flat—or maybe even one that doesn’t. Count the words in your sentences for two or three paragraphs...

This week? This week has been a bit rough for me.

But I am still writing. And we are still podcasting! Gasp!

I am still doing this because I think that writers write. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

Say it with me, okay?

Writers write. That’s all it takes to be a writer—the actual writing things down.

We write rebellion. We write acceptance. We write through grief. We write through joy.

Sometimes our work is absolute poop, but that doesn’t matter...

In our Random Thought, we talk about why people are mean. The link to our source is at the end of these notes.

All you all,

I (Carrie) am the WORST copyeditor for my own work. I’ll admit it and that’s because as a writer, I’m too close to it to pick out my errors, right?

That’s why it’s good to have other people read your stories before you put them out there.

So, we (Carrie and Shaun) are going to talk about some grammar mistakes: three supe...

THE ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY

Let’s be honest, here. Sometimes I throw the word “sexy” into a podcast title just to get Shaun to pay attention.

But the one-sentence summary is kind of sexy.

Over on the Advanced Fiction Writing Blog, Randy Ingermanson writes:

In that summary, you want:

Wendy MacNaughton on her Substack Draw Together talked about negative space this week and she wrote,

“Negative Space performs many functions: it focuses our eyes on the subject, it moves our eyes around a drawing or it keeps them still, it allows for visual space/room to breathe, and sometimes it gives the subject an extra layer of meaning.

“For example, ever seen this logo before?

“Sure, you’ve probably seen it a million times.

“But have you noticed the hidden symbol in the logo?! Focus your attention on the negative space of t...

And how we've blown off writing maxims to be successful

There’s a feeling among many writers/bloggers/content creators that our brains are too overwhelmed by a high cognitive overload to want to read anything that isn’t super quick and fast.

I get this.

There is a lot of information out there in the world.

Short-form content is, they say, the key.

Tim Denning describes short-form content as “where you share big ideas, be a little contrarian, drop cliffhangers for your stories, and share who you are. It giv...

Hey! It’s a quick happy holiday greeting from us. We took a quick pause in our celebrations to make the shortest podcast episode ever.

We hope that you are having a wonderful holiday season. It snowed here yesterday and it’s still super cool out.

SHAUN IS SICK! Gasp! He is never sick. But he is, so I've made the executive decision to replay/republish one of our most popular episodes from three years ago.

Ready? Let's go!

A quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'dangerous' gets a lot of hits.

To be fair, so does a quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'fun.'

But we're not here to tell you about the perils and delights of flirting. We're here to talk about writing, life, and dogs. Actually, flirting is part...

We improvised this podcast and you know what? You can kind of tell. It's all about making mistakes (a tiny bit about what holds some of us back about making people pay for our work) and we quickly reference this guy!

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA...

So, recently, Vitaliy Katsenelson, CFA, who is a writer and investor had a Substack post that really resonated with me.

And by recently, I mean yesterday.

Anyway, in it Vitaliy said that “Each Day Is a Separate Life.”

You wake up and you are born. You go to sleep and that’s the end of the day/life. You get it, right?

This concept isn’t new. It comes from Seneca, this ancient philosopher and thinker in the Roman Empire, 2,000 years ago, who was rather hyper focused on thinking about wealth even tho...

Dogs are Smarter Than People, Writing Exercise, Cool Submission Opportunity

So, we’re been talking about dialogue in novels lately and tips about it and the purpose of it. To find any back posts, just head to LIVING HAPPY and search “dialogue.”

One of the things that some writing stylists talk about is the three-beat rule, which is credited to Screenwriter Cynthia Whitcomb.

Reedsy explains this as:

“What this recommends, essentially, is to introduce a maximum of three dialogue ‘beats’ (the short phrases in speech you can say without pausing for breath) at a...

A few years ago, we posted this episode about dialogue, and honestly? We're . . . um. . . burnt out because of the election and people. So, since we're already focusing on dialogue over on LIVING HAPPY, we're recycling (upcycing) this from a few years ago. Thanks for putting up with us!

These next few podcasts, we thought we should get all nitty-gritty with some quick grammar tips or style tips for people writing fiction.

It can help you nonfiction writers, too, we swear.

When you’re writing dialogue (people talking to each other), you’re going to w...

So, in the world of writing, everyone talks about needing a beta reader and a critique partner.

Everyone that is, except Carrie, who has trust issues and survives as a lonely, isolated writer in Maine.

What is a beta reader?

It's that person who reads your story, gives you some mild suggestions that feel like a big hug. This is a person you want to party with, a person you can cry to, a person with no mean judgement. This person is basically the human equivalent of your dog: loyal, helpful, good and...

We’ve started a series of paid and free posts and podcast episodes about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. To see them all just look up “hit novel” or “bestselling” in the search bar.

In his book Hit Lit, which we’ve been talking about, James W. Hall talks about 12 elements that he thinks really make those super-popular-multi-million-copy bestsellers in American fiction in the past 100 years or so.

And one of those features?

It’s a fractured family.

Yep. That’s a big feature of what Hall found in the 12...

Dogs are Smarter Than People

There’s an old NPR article about writing bestsellers that quotes critic Ruth Franklin’s overview of American best-sellers as saying "No possible generalization can be made regarding the 1,150 books that have appeared in the top 10 of the fiction best-seller list since its inception."

In his book Hit Lit, which we’ve been talking about, James W. Hall disagrees, talking about 12 elements that he thinks really make those super-popular-multi-million-copy bestsellers in American fiction in the past 100 years or so.

We’ve been talking about that a lot. Hall analyzed...

Dogs are Smarter than People podcast

We’ve started a series of paid and free posts and podcast episodes about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. To see them all just look up “hit novel” or “bestselling” in the search bar.

Whew. Blah. Blah. Blah. Right? Not a bestselling way to start a podcast episode.

What’s a better way?

Well, according to Jack Hall who wrote Hit Lit, “In most bestsellers, there’s a central character who sets off on a journey that takes her from rustic America into tur...

We’ve started a series of paid and free posts about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here.

In James Hall’s book, HIT LIT, he looks at twelve top-selling novels and tries to find similarities to their success.

One thing that he found in the twelve novels is the theme of “America as paradise.”

He writes, “America-as-paradise, an idea that so powerfully shapes our national identity, is one of the key motifs.”

Despite the decade the story was written in, he and his students, he wrote, kept discovering the motif of...

So, last week was Shaun’s birthday. Yay, Shaun!

We’ve started a series of paid and free posts about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here.

And today, we’re talking about a main element in writing a hit novel. Some people call it The Big Clock. Some people call it a Ticking Clock. Some people call it The Timer. Dramatic theory is fancy and calls it a Timelock, but basically, it’s the ticking bomb, a known and harsh deadline that your character has before it all explodes in her face.

Gle...

A lot of the writers I teach get really freaked out about structure. They go on multiple craft book journeys trying to find the structure that resonates with them, the one that gives them that beautiful a-ha moment. Who can blame them?

Don't we all want that beautiful a-ha moment?

They learn about pinch points, rising action, falling action, subplots, inciting incidents, midpoints, themes, narrative arc, emotional arc, hamster zombies (just kidding) and they hyperventilate along the way.

There is no reason to hyperventilate if this way of looking at writing structure doesn’t...

We talked about this a long while ago, and I've revisited it, too, but it's time, my writing friends, to revisit it.

So in writing one of the biggest tips that you start hearing starts in around third grade and it’s “SHOW DON’T TELL.”

And it’s sound writing advice, but it’s pretty sound life advice, too.

How many of us have heard the words, “I love you,” but never seen the actions that give proof to the words? You can tell someone you love them incessantly for hours, but if you don’t sho...

Readers want questions that they’ll get answers to.

They want to be hooked along.

They want to unwrap the answer the way people unwrap a birthday present.

That’s what Robert Prince says, anyway, writing in his class at the University of Alaska, ”The key to understanding what audiences really want in a story is to understand that the audience doesn’t want to know everything they need to know when they need to know it!  They want questions that get answered later.  Questions are what intrigue audiences and keep them sticking around bec...

Author, podcaster and professor Robert Prince has this thing he does when he watches a movie: the Atomic Bomb test. 

“After I’ve watched about 20 minutes of the film I ask myself, ‘If an atomic bomb were to go off and destroy everyone in this film, would I care all that much?’  If the answer is no, I don’t keep watching the film,” he says in his class at the University of Alaska.

He has this test because to make your reader keep reading, they have to care what happens to the characters in the story.

Brainstorming . . . Even the word sounds a little creepy. Like there is a storm inside your brain. It sounds... It sounds sort of violent and hazardous and windy. In this podcast, we talk about the storms inside our brain and how those storms can become story ideas.

Five Ways To Get Story Ideas

Some authors have a really hard time just getting an idea for a new story. They burn out. They can't find anything that they think is 'good enough.' They just don't know where to start and that lack of a start makes...

Setting is where your story happens. It’s the time period. It’s the physical place. You can have more than one setting.

There. That’s the definition. We’re all good, right?

Wrong.

Let’s really talk about setting.

WHAT SETTING DOES

Setting is the foundation of your story. It is the ModPodge that has an addictive smell (Cough. Not addicted to ModPodge. Look away.) and glues all the story together.

WHAT HAPPENS WITHOUT SETTING

Your characters float around in nothingness.

Your plot makes...

Algonquin Young Readers Will End in September

The traditional book publishing world is a bit like the wild west if the cowboys wore pink-framed eyeglasses and could quote Derrida.

People are heroes. People are let go. Entire divisions of publishing houses close. And so on.

And this continues this week with the changes at Hachette Book Group and its announcement of the closure of Workman: Algonquin Young Readers this September.

According to Editorial Director Cheryl Klein, “Our backlist and all books under contract will be absorbed into the Little, Brown Books fo...

Our podcast title is “How To Write a Book Description That Gets Readers Tingling All Over” and that just sounds naughty, doesn’t it?

And it is a little naughty because this, my friends, is about selling a book, your book, and that requires being a little bit sexy.

Sexy is something I, Carrie, am very very bad at.

Let’s start by thinking about it this way:

A book description is an adverstisement for your book.

Writing a bad ad for your book doesn’t make you a sucky nove...

Dogs are Smarter Than People/Write Better Now

Last week, we talked about pinch points both on the podcast and on the blog, and honestly? Nobody seemed super into it, but we’re finishing up this week. This post is going to be a bit more about the first part of act two of a three-act story, focusing on the time from the first pinch point to the midpoint.

Pause for a plea: Look, I know plot structure isn’t sexy the way character development or drama and obstacles and conflict are, but it’s super...

There are some things in the writing world that don’t make a ton of sense in the world of regular humans.

One of those things is pinch points.

This podcast episode is going to be the start of a quick series of podcasts and regular posts about pinch points. The regular posts will be at our Substack LIVING HAPPY under the WRITE BETTER NOW publication.

So, what are these little twerps called pinch points?

They a way of thinking about novel or story structure that helps us keep the reader en...

There are a lot of people who advocate spending just an hour a day doing something to become awesome. That hour a day is often learning. You study up about what you want to do, you self learn, you teach yourself to be better by learning all about the thing you're into.

So, if you're into writing, you read books about writing and actual books. You study the craft.

So, if you're into knitting, you study knitting. Entrepeneurship? Same thing, but first you probably have to learn how to spell it. My bad there.

On last week’s podcast and the one a few before that, and in a post, Shaun and I talked a bit about plot structures and narrative structures and how here in the U.S. we think of these usually (not always!) as pretty linear, and pretty much in a three-act framework (think beginning, middle, end) with rising stakes and drama as you go along.

This is not the only way to write.

I am very much a product of the U.S. culture. And I’m going to talk a tiny bit in the next cou...

Last week, maybe a week ago, maybe 82 years ago, who knows, we talked about alternative plot structures.

Much of American film and novels is built on what's considered to be the classic three-act structure, which basically goes beginning-middle-end, and there's this rising line of the plot.

It ends up looking like a bit of a triangle.

As readers, we can sort of anticipate and feel that structure happening. In a rom-com, we almost always know how far into the book or movie it will be when the couple breaks up and then someone...

Do you want to be happy?

It’s a question philosopher Sebastian Purcell asks his students every year.

Do you want to be happy?

For Purcell being happy has a lot in common with living a good life,

“The Stoic answer to this question, that the good life consists in flourishing (eudaimonia), has seen a resurgent interest that is indicative of a cultural shift. Interestingly, it looks to be taking the place left open by the retreat of religious belief,” he writes.

And stoicism? It’s a way to look at...

You can learn a lot about culture by how it looks at what makes a good story and a good story structure.

In Western culture right now, we tend to think of stories as three acts (a beginning, middle, and end with the bulk being in the middle), and with a protagonist or hero or main character (whatever you want to call it) who drives the story forward.

So, it's sometimes good to remember that there are other ways of making story and other cultures where the bulk might not be in the middle or...

It ended up being a bit of a free-for-all as we talked about the strange things people do sometimes.

SHOUT OUT TO STUBHY!

The snippet of our intro and outro music is only a snippet of this guy’s awesome talent. Many thanks to Kaustubh Pandav. You can check out a bit of his work at the links below.

www.luckyboysconfusion.Net or www.Facebook.com/mrmsandtheinfusions 

Thanks for hanging out with us! And remember, don’t be afraid to let your strange out.

So building a sympathetic character on the page is a lot like being a sympathetic character in real life. This sympathetic character is basically the opposite of a butt-hole.

There’s this great post on the SocialSelf blog that talks about what makes people likable and what keeps people from being likeable. And writers can learn from this, really.

The big things that make people likeable in real life are like a top ten list of awesome:

A lot of writers that I work with have a problem. The problem is that they want to be a writer, but before they come to me? They don’t write.

Here’s the thing. For a lot of us, we have to make time to be a writer. That’s just how our brains and process work. There are some writers who manage to get 10 days of alone time and writer time and they power through a book in that time, but most of us aren’t that wealthy or that lucky.

That means to be a...

We found a topic! It ended up mostly being about poop and creepiness and three-foot tall humanoids.

Links we mention:

https://www.ranker.com/list/creepy-forest-ranger-stories/amandasedlakhevener

Being an author or an artist or almost anyone is about navigating. You have to walk a fine line with criticism and praise, discern what's real and what's not, what matters or not, what is noise and what is important.

And sometimes?

Well, sometimes we only hear and dwell on the one negative thing that someone has said to us or written about us even though they (or others) have also said 100 positive things.

You're an author. You get a glowing review but there's one line in there that says, "I didn't like...

Here's our main premise this week: it's okay to read books you've already read.

Not only is it okay. It's helpful.

This is true for both writers and normal humans.

Rereading books gives you:

DONALD LATUMAHINA writes for LifeOptimizer, "'"Research shows that in just 24 hours people would forget most of what they’ve read. You might get a lot of good ideas from a...

Recently, I read an interview with an author who talked about how much children loved her book and how they tell her this.

It annoyed me. It may have been good marketing, but it sure didn't feel like good human-ing, you know?

When you're interviewed by a reporter or when you do a school visit, as a children's book author, you have the ability to toot your own horn or you have the ability to toot someone else's.

This interview I read sort of sent me into a spiral of ick.

...