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Gratitude Attitude Writers Style

Writers Life, ,

Gratitude Attitude Writer’s Style. “At this time of the rolling year,” as our great storytelling mentor Charles Dickens wrote in A Christmas Carol, gratitude feels obligatory, or maybe just appropriate, if you are more comfortable with that.

Gratitude Attitude Writer’s Style. Which got me thinking about what we, as writers specifically, might list in our thankfulness inventory. So, I posted an internet query under the heading “Writing Life Gratitude.” The responses have made me very grateful indeed.

Gratitude Attitude Writer’s Style. Most prominently, we are grateful for one another. “Critique partners who give me their honest opinions and encouragement when I make mistakes,” says Kayelle Allen. Ruth Casie adds, “Writing partners who enrich my life with their friendship, caring and great brainstorming ideas.”

Gratitude Attitude Writer’s Style. Each of us can reflect on a history of helpers: other writers who may themselves suffer through dark passages of career disaster, crippling self-doubt, or personal life turmoil. Nonetheless, they reach out to urge us back toward the light. Roni Denholtz, Marcia James, D.V. Stone and Jennifer Wilck echo the rest of us in saying, “Thank you all so much for that.”

Gratitude Attitude Writer’s Style. Joan Ramirez is grateful for “a loving husband who shares my enthusiasm for my novel writing career” and is her best friend as well. Several others, including myself, mention family, including grandchildren. Writing may be a solitary pursuit, but we are definitely not alone.

Gratitude Attitude Writer’s Style. And who isn’t thankful for readers? “All the readers who’ve stuck with me for so many years and keep buying my new books,” says Meredith Bond, while Marcia James reminds us to thank the Beta readers who help us hone our work, and I feel personally in debt to readers who make the effort to review what we write.Gratitude Attitude Writer’s Style. I was moved by those of us – Connie Bretes, Paul Lima, Nancy Morse – who shared their struggles through serious health problems, and somehow found the will and stamina to keep on working, or to get back to the writing desk eventually.

Gratitude Attitude Writer’s Style. Jean Brashear, Marie Force, Joan Peck and Livia Quinn spoke of the 60 Minutes story of Tim Green’s battle with ALS. “How dare I ever falter for a second,” Jean says, in the face of such inspiring courage.

Gratitude Attitude Writer’s Style. My own heart was hard-struck by the inspiration of one of our own, Susan Meier. “This year, every inch of my life, including my career, was tested when my son died in January,” Susan says, and thanks RWA and her sister chapters for their support. At the time of her loss, she had a manuscript due, and her publishers and editors helped her through when she insisted she must work on toward deadline. We are also with you, Susan.

Gratitude Attitude Writer’s Style. The greatest number of responses to my Writing Life Gratitude question were about being thankful for the opportunity to write in the first place. “To fill my hours with writing, and for the wonderful characters that keep me company,” says Carol Roddy aka Caroline Warfield. “To start with an idea and end with a published book,” says Joan Peck. Dee Knight speaks of her latest book, which “languished unfinished for years,” and now is completed at last.

Gratitude Attitude Writer’s Style. The ultimate joy of writing is summed up beautifully by Elizabeth Tarry-Crowe. “I’m grateful that, after years of writing, I still strive to get better, shoot higher, try harder,” and Lisabet Sarai agrees. Whatever life and career setbacks confront us, we do what we can and must to heal, then we forge forward again.

Gratitude Attitude Writer’s Style. Finally, as in the beginning, we are together. “I’m grateful for my writing friends….” Alice Valdal says. “The writing world is so different from the one I first joined, but writers willing to share and laugh and cry and encourage and keep trying are still there. For that I am grateful.” Me too! Happy holidays.Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

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

A Time of Fear & LovingPraise 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.”

A Wrong Way Home – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 1 – is a FREE Kindle eBook HERE. “Danger & romance explode in a red-hot read.” Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

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Tell Strong Stories – How to Write a Great Main Character

Storytelling, ,

Tell strong stories. That’s what every writer longs to do. What are strong stories anyway? To conquer an audience and make it your own you must tell a story that moves them. A story that moves them emotionally. Emotional Power is the impact your story must have.

The key to an emotionally moving storytelling is Character. The success of your story hangs on the strength of the main character you create and the way you employ that character as a storyteller. If your goal is to Tell Strong Stories your main character must move the narrative forward emotionally.

Why is your main character so important? Because your protagonist’s story is what connects you with the reader. You draw the reader in and make her care. That’s how you hook a reader. Mastering the art of the narrative hook is essential to writing a successful story.

You set that hook by creating a story in which the reader cannot help but become emotionally involved. First and foremost you do this by creating a character with whom the reader cannot help but become emotionally involved.

Which means that the reader must care about what happens to your character. The reader must begin to behave as if the Protagonist of your story were a real-life person they know personally. Your character’s defeats are the reader’s defeats. Your character’s triumphs are the reader’s triumphs.

When you make your readers feel this connection you have them hooked. And they will stay hooked from beginning to end.

[For example, I was hooked by both Rick and Ilsa in the film Casablanca and wanted both of them to triumph. The conclusion turned out to be more complicated than that, which hooked me deeper still. Those screenwriters knew how to Tell Strong Stories.]

Here’s how to begin creating characters as real as Rick and Ilsa.

#1. First, the character must hook you. You as author must be as emotionally involved with your character as you want the reader to be.

#2. Which requires that you as author must know your character intimately. You must know your characters – especially your main character heroine or hero – from the Inside Out. Which means you must understand as deeply as you possibly can what it’s like to be your protagonist.

Why do you need to know so much about your protagonist? In practical terms, you must know enough to keep your readers reading. You need to know a lot about a character to make her sufficiently complex to carry the weight of your story from the beginning to the end of a book.

You must know enough about this character to bring him to life on the page and make the reader care about him.

[For example, Charles Dickens brought Ebenezer Scrooge to life on the page in A Christmas Carol, and made us care what happened to him as well. Dickens knew Scrooge from the Inside Out.]

Here’s an exercise for getting to know your character from the Inside Out. Project yourself into your main character. Become your main character in your imagination. Then ask yourself the following five questions about that character.

#1. What does my main character want in this story? Is this desire significant enough to make a reader also want this thing for my character? Is this desire significant enough to make a reader want it for my character all the way through the length of an entire book? Or at some point does this desire pale into “Who cares?” territory for the reader?

#2. How much does my main character want this thing? Is this the most crucial need my character has ever experienced? Have I effectively communicated my character’s sense of urgency? How in specific scenes, action and dialogue can I turn up the story heat on the intensity of my main character’s desire?

#3. Why does my main character want this thing? Are her reasons – her motivations – admirable? Are these motivations logical in this story situation? Are her motivations believable to the extent that a reader will accept them as legitimate enough to motivate an intelligent, independent protagonist throughout the entire length of my story? Will a reader not only believe these motives but also adopt them on behalf of my character and root for her to achieve her desires?

#4. What does my main character not want? Is my character running away from something? If so, what is it and why is he on the run from it? Is my character avoiding something? If so, what is he avoiding and why? What is my character afraid of? Why is my character afraid of this thing?

[Here’s another way to Tell Strong Stories in terms of drama, intensity and power. Make sure every character fears something. Especially your main character. For example, what does Scarlett O’Hara fear in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind?]

#5. What’s at stake for my main character in this story situation? What will happen if she fails to achieve what she wants or needs? Are those consequences dreadful enough to make a reader dread them as well? Who in my story besides my main character could also be adversely affected? How in specific scenes, action and dialogue can I intensify these stakes by making the potential consequences more devastating, pervasive and far-reaching? In order to Tell Strong Stories you must raise the stakes as high as your story will allow.

Brainstorm every possible response to each of these questions. Always push yourself beyond the first, most obvious possibility toward less expected, more original ones. The farther reaches of our imaginations are the place from which we Tell Strong Stories.

Alice Orr – https://www.aliceorrbooks.com

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Amanda Miller Bryce is the main character of the strong story that is Alice’s new novel A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 5. Meet Amanda HERE. You can find all of Alice’s books HERE.

What readers are saying about A Time of Fear & Loving. “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “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.”
“A budding romance that sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”
“The best one yet, Alice!”

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Life Changes When You Start the Day Writing #MFRWauthor #IAN1

Writers Life

The first monsoon clouds from my terrace

On many summer weekends, Jonathan and I leave the city for our camp in the Skylands of northwest New Jersey. Two days later, unfortunately, we return from all of that relaxation with a list of city-life things to do long enough to bring stress barreling back big time.

The next day, an act of iron-bound determination will be required to make myself pick up my notebook or pop up a file in my computer and write. Too often the notebook and the word doc file lose out. The post-weekend lists seem so much more crucial to our weekday existence. They are about keeping our real-world life running on the smooth track rather than the bumpy one after all, which is crucial to the max. That is what I’ve tended to believe most of the time.

But something happened this past weekend at camp that disrupted my customary way of thinking. I started a new book, not an adaptation like my last two books have been. The first, A Vacancy at the Inn, a novella that was orphaned when I decided to leave my agent. The second, A Villain for Vanessa, a re-imagining of a previously published novel whose rights I’d reverted.

This new book is neither of those things. It is a brand-new story, fresh out of my creative brain matter and growing word after word into scene after scene like a miracle on the page in front of me. Maybe that is why, when I work up Monday morning, I ejected the To Do lists from their previous priority position and replaced them with a long writing session. Maybe the magic had me in its thrall.

When the same thing happened on Tuesday morning, my doubts disintegrated. I was enthralled indeed. Caught up in an alternate world of story that seems somehow more truly my reality than my day-to-day down-to-earth one. And here is something else equally enthralling. After each writing session, an aura of the magic remains. My mind feels less fettered. My worries press less heavily. The To Do lists have lost a huge dollop of their tyranny.

Voila. Because I start my days writing, my life has changed for the much, much better. Alice is in Wonderland again. What do you think about that? I think things are getting curiouser and curioser.

Alice Orr – https://www.aliceorrbooks.com/

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Book 5 of my Riverton Road Romantic Suspense series – A Time of Fear and Loving – will debut on Saturday, September 16th, our 45th wedding anniversary. A Villain for Vanessa – Riverton Romantic Suspense Book 4 – and my other books are available from Amazon HERE.

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