Category Archives: Storytelling

Storytelling Mentor on Your Shoulder

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Storytelling Mentor on Your Shoulder. Every writer I know has endured rejection. I certainly have. In fact, on the occasion of my first major rejection, the editor implied, or maybe told me straight out, that I had no idea what I was doing.

My first big mistake that day was agreeing to a sushi lunch. I didn’t know sushi from tsunami at the time, but I did know I should appear cooperative. So, I replied, “Sushi’s good.” Had I guessed the true purpose of the lunch, I would have made a different response. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a clue, though I probably should have.

I was writing my second novel for this editor. The first hadn’t set the world on fire.  The second was supposed to correct that, but the revision phase had dragged on so long I’d almost lost track of what my story was originally about. As I took a wobbly chopstick grip on my third portion of something raw and wet wrapped in seaweed, my editor let me know she felt the same.

“This just doesn’t work for us,” the editor said. If you have ever heard or read those words, you know what happened next. I plunged into shock. On the other hand, I was back on track in one respect. I got that the revision phase was finished. Novel number two was off the table, as surely as the sushi had slipped from between my chopsticks and plummeted to my plate.

“You seem to think a bird sits on your shoulder and tells you how to write,” my editor was saying. “Like you don’t have anything to do with it.” I needed to be at the top of my mental game right then, but I was incapable of responding. Instead, I excused myself, dashed to the ladies’ room, and leaned my clammy forehead against the cool black tiles of the marble stall.

A Storytelling Mentor on Your Shoulder?  I had never been aware of anything, with or without feathers, telling me how to write a book. What I had always been aware of was my lack of power. Because of the way the publishing world works, I had no control over the destiny of my writing career. Now, I understood how perilous such a position can be.

If you have ever submitted a manuscript anywhere, you know what I mean. You labor over your work, send it out into what feels like a void. then wait for a thumbs up or down on your efforts, your ambitions, your hope. You endure this because you have no idea what else you can do. You are as clueless as I was in that ladies’ room with my forehead pressed against tile as black as I believed my future to be.

A few years later, I became an editor myself. That choice had a lot to do with power. I was determined to regain mine, and to pass it on. As an editor, then a literary agent and teacher, I would be that bird. I would sit on a writer’s shoulder and whisper in her ear the words she needed to hear to avoid her own demoralizing rejection scenes. I could do that because my years on the other side of the desk taught me a lot about how to create a marketable manuscript.

I have been sharing that knowledge ever since. Still, the dread words are out there. “This just doesn’t work for us.” Words that hit their mark hard for any writer. I wish I could guarantee they will never be heard again, but I can’t. What I can offer is my experience and expertise, and to be a bird with an empowering song you need to hear. A Storytelling Mentor on Your shoulder. Stay tuned to this blog. I have many more melodies to sing.

Meanwhile, ask your crucial questions. How does your attitude need to be adjusted? What fears do you face about your writing career? What do you most eagerly desire to know? Add a question comment to this post, or email me at aliceorrbooks@gmail.com. I will be honored to respond.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

Alice Orr’s Christmas story A Vacancy at the Inn – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 3 – is available on Amazon HERE. Enjoy!

Alice Orr A Vacancy at the Inn

Praise for A Vacancy at the Inn. “Grabbed me right away and swept me up in the lives of Bethany and Luke.” “Undercurrents of suspense move the story along at an irresistible pace.” “The Miller family is rife with personality quirks, an authentic touch that demonstrates Alice Orr’s skill as a writer.”

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

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Write Thru Crisis – Salted Wounds

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Write Thru crisis – Salted wounds. Mother’s Day was a few weeks ago. My son once said, “This is a holiday created by Hallmark Cards to sell their product.” My response to that might be, “This is a holiday created by Morton Salt to sell their product.”

I am a mother who had a mother, and a grandmother who had a grandmother. All of which does have a Hallmark card side. Idyllic resonances that could prompt sweet, four-line rhymes. Plus, a Morton Salt side, associations with wounded places, some scarred over, some still bloody, all conflicted.

Meanwhile, on a grander scale, there is the Covid-19 catastrophe. Whether you believe this to be our century’s worldwide plague or a conspiratorial hoax, we are all in the midst of a Morton’s moment magnified. This situation rubs salt into every vulnerable, sensitive corner of our psyches, the places where we most long to be left undisturbed.

Unfortunately, crisis of any kind is, by nature, disturbing. Crisis is an impertinent, belligerent, often malicious finger, rubbing the Morton’s deeper in, making certain we experience its sting to the max.

Back to Mother’s Day, which I pick on only as an example. Like the Corona Crisis, Mother’s Day is a universal phenomenon, whether you celebrate either or not. We all have some relationship with motherhood. We are all in the grips of this crisis. We all have wounded places.

Animals are a good example of what to do about the last of those. When wounded, they find a place of refuge, a crevice where they can burrow in, lick the lethal elements from their wounds and, hopefully, heal. Each of us has a similar refuge close at hand, our personal stories and the telling of them.

Here, as examples, are two of my own refuge stories. Coroneal Mom’s Day was bittersweet for me. On the lighter side, I missed my son in law’s waffles. Last year, I stuffed myself so full of them, I had to lie immobile for an hour to recover. This year, he and my daughter stood six feet from me in the street, avoiding mention of waffles or anything else we missed.

On the heavy side, my mother suffered from mental illness. Which is why I spent most childhood weekdays with my kind, loving grandma. She passed away when I was seven years and three days old. Life before then and life afterward were very different realities me and, for some reason, this Mother’s Day has brought those times close to my heart.Grandma and Alice at Two and a Half

Obviously, each of these snippets requires much more detail to become an actual story. As I said, they are only examples, starting places in search of further telling. They are also crevices I may burrow into, salve my wounds with words, and heal, or celebrate. You can do the same.

What real-life stories does Mother’s Day 2020 call forth for you? No crevice is required, only a pen, a journal, and sentences. Or draw a picture, construct a collage, compose a lyric and some music to go with it. Whatever your medium preference may be, let it wash the salt away, dull the sting, encourage healing to happen.

And don’t forget the feelings, where method and magic meet. Share your stories, if you wish, at aliceorrbooks@gmail.com, and let me know if you would like others to experience them too. Share this post also. We all have stories to tell, as we Write Thru Crisis.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Alice has spent most of her professional life in publishing, as book editor, literary agent, workshop leader, and author. She’s published 16 novels, 3 novellas, a memoir, and No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript That Sells (revised version coming soon). Her current work in progress includes Hero in the Mirror: How to Write Your Best Story of You.

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Tell Your Emotional Truth Story – Why and How

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Tell Your Emotional Truth Story. Why is it so important to do that? Because, if you don’t tell your emotional truth, your story will have no beating heart. Your story will not come alive on the page. Why not? Because your story has not first come alive in your own writer’s soul.

What is Emotional Truth? Emotional truth is what is really going on in your story, the real truth of what is happening to your characters. The surface of things, what your characters allow to be seen and heard, can be manipulated to conceal what they are truly feeling, but great stories are not about feelings being concealed. Great stories are about feelings being revealed.

How Do You Find Emotional Truth? Real life is the mother lode from which you mine your own emotional truth and then refine it into storytelling treasure. The deeply felt emotions that are the beating heart of your story come from your own personal experience of emotions you have felt yourself in your own life. They have the power to make your reader feel deeply too.

How I Found My Emotional Truth Story. I write romantic suspense novels. Scary things happen in my stories. Hailey Lambert, the main character of my book A Year of Summer Shadows, is assaulted and strangled. That happened to me once. My character and I both survived. Now we both benefit from my emotional truth of that awful experience.

The Details of That Emotional Truth Story. The powerlessness while it was happening. The shock and numbness after it was over. The way others might have seen me at that moment had there been anyone present to see. I didn’t need to take notes. All of that was branded on my psyche in indelible emotional ink. Deeply felt experiences do that to us.

Dig for Those Details and You Will discover Storytelling Gold. Unfortunately, we have all had similarly indelible experiences. We have been changed by them, traumatized by them, sometimes stopped in our tracks by them. Now we get to convert them into the very raw material of intense, dramatic, powerful storytelling.

Stephen King Agrees with Me. He has said, “For me, there have been times when the act of writing has been an act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair. Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”

I Agree with Stephen King. Despair, and the trauma that can cause it, are a way back to an act of writing from the most vivid and vital center of your bloody, beating heart. I don’t mean memoir writing, though digging for emotional truth is crucial there too. I’m talking about reimagining real-life experience into the “spit in the eye” that is a riveting piece of fiction.

Mining for Gold Requires Excavation. Our emotional truth is not usually what we show on the surface of ourselves. It is more deeply true than what we show on the surface. Your stories can be the expression of that subterranean truth brought to the light and recreated in words. The result can be the best writing you have ever done.

Find Your Gold Mine Stories. Whether you realize it or not, you know what these stories are for you. Check your heart, your stories are there. Write them, whether as fiction or non, the way your heart feels them to be true, which may differ from factual truth. Facts are verifiable. Feelings are not. Someone else’s emotional truth may vary from yours. BUT that does not make your truth any less valid, or hers either.

Emotional Truth Stories are Individual. Your emotional truth is what you honestly feel. Your character’s emotional truth is what she honestly feels. That honesty gives your story its authenticity, its bleeding, beating heart. That inner authentic truth is what really matters and makes your story really matter, to you as you write it, and to your readers as they read it.

So, dig down and dig deep. You will know when you hit the mother lode because it will zing straight to your heart, just before you zing it to the page and Tell Your Emotional Truth Story.  Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

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A Wrong Way Home – Alice’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 1 – is a FREE Kindle eBook HERE. Enjoy!

Alice’s latest novel is A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 5. Available HERE. 

Praise for A Time of Fear & Loving. “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “The best one yet!” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

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