Tag Archives: Story Ideas

Write Thru Crisis – Write It Down

Writing Tips, ,

Write Thru Crisis – Write It Down. “Go home, get some rest. Marnin’ the world new, every time.” In White Teeth by  Zadie Smith, gorgeous Jamaican Carla Bowden says these words to down-and-out Londoner Archie Jones.

Wise advice for today’s gone-to-madness world. Go to ground for a while and lick the wounds created by simply looking at, listening to, walking through the madness. Then, drag yourself up to as straight-back a position as you can manage and, if you are an author, Write It Down.

What is my own personal Biggest Mistake as a writer? Sometimes I don’t write things down. Crucial things that are the stuff of strong storytelling, because they have lots of Emotional Content. Which means they make me cringe and want to look away or, better yet, to run away. To do anything other than drag out my faithful notebook and record the psychic carnage.

We’ve got psychic carnage galore right now, right here in River City or anywhere. So, grab that notebook. Retrieve a stick of charcoal from the charred remains of what you once believed to be a sensible existence, and start scribbling. Fast as you can come up with words to describe the devastation. Because  this  reality is storytelling paydirt.

Too bad we are also in Biggest Mistake territory. I know this has happened to you, because it happens to all of us. The chaos of life presents you with a knock-your-socks-off story idea, so good you are blown away. So good you can hardly believe this super great fortune has been given to you out of the super obliterated landscape that surrounds you.

I call it the Idea from Heaven, or maybe, in these circumstances, from the other place. What has been given is a glimpse of narrative that, though it may be ugly to others, has for you, the storyteller, elegant symmetry. It is exactly the Inspiration you’ve been yearning for. Nothing short of paradise, or the other place, could deliver such a priceless gem.

You are struck profoundly. You are certain this moment will remain with you forever. It has been imprinted indelibly upon your soul. All the same, your writer’s practicality knows you should write it down immediately. But for some reason, often fairly trivial, you do not. For some reason, notetaking isn’t convenient for you at this particular time.

You don’t intend to put it off for long. You only intend to get done with whatever you’re into right now. Besides, this is the Idea from Heaven, or… A bolt of bestseller storytelling lightning has zigzagged across the deepest blue beauty of your writerly dreams sky. You absolutely will not forget a single detail. Except. You do.

You look for your priceless gem, maybe only minutes later, but it is gone, gone, gone. You search and search. You employ every memory-jog trick and technique you’ve ever heard of, but all you can recall is the feeling. All that remains is a whiff of the euphoria that blew in on this once-in-forever brainstorm. Everything else has evaporated.

You absolutely cannot believe what has happened, but… The story kernel that was destined to catapult you to the stars has flitted off, possibly to some other authorial imagination like a fickle tease, and your own authorial instincts tell you it will never return.

Brain science may have a theory or twelve about this phenomenon. Or maybe the universe if just screwing with you. Whatever the explanation, the upshot is always the same. You plunge into mourning. The Kubler-Ross five stages of adjusting to great loss lie ahead, and it is all your fault. Because all you had to do was write the damned words down, but you did not.

Meanwhile, back to our present definitely not- easy existence. Brainstorms are crashing and booming all around you. Pull your head out from under your comforting soft-stuff-filled comforter, mine is blue by the way. Gaze around you, take it all in, every earth and heaven rattling detail. Then. Write It Down. Write It Down. WRITE IT ALL DOWN!!!

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Alice’s latest novel A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 5 – is 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.” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.” “The best one yet!”

A Time of Fear & Loving

A Thankless Season – Riverton Road Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 6 – the series finale, is in progress. Stay tuned for further alerts. And, Write Them Down!

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

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Tell Your Emotional Truth Story – Why and How

Storytelling, ,

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.

https://www.facebook.com/alibettewrites/
http://twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks/
http://goodreads.com/aliceorr/
http://pinterest.com/aliceorrwriter/

The Best Story Idea – Dig Deep – Wait for It

Storytelling,
Redge and Alice at Home

A best story idea. In my opinion, this is one of those. It’s about two grandkids, an incontinent dog and how I took the path of most resistance. But first, I must own up to something. I’m not a dog person, which could explain why we had three cats and no dog until 3:15 p.m. one December Saturday. The two grandkids began a ten-day stay with us on that date, and ten days with an eight and three-year-old to amuse can be a challenge, which would explain the dog decision, if it hadn’t already been made several weeks before.

Our granddaughter, the eight-year-old, really wanted a dog and reminded us of this regularly, with dog stories, dog stickers, dog drawings and plenty of dog talk. But, what sent her message straight to my heart was Halloween. After several seasons of princess looks, this year she’d insisted on a brown puppy costume with white spots. Right then, I knew we had to get a dog. Three-year-old brother agreed, though he’d have preferred a dinosaur, and that was the source of this Best Story Idea. Meanwhile, I silenced my personal doubts by asking, “How much trouble can a puppy be?”

We set off for PAWS with small pooch intentions and a pet carrier and collar to match. I’d convinced myself all would be well, until the pooch with the most kid appeal turned out to be something other than a small puppy. He was a large, reddish-brown, part-husky mix titled Taylor and, as it happened, the perfect centerpiece for a Best Story Idea . He needed a home, and the grandchildren wanted to give him one. Plus, the trip to the shelter, combined with the pet selection process, had been long and arduous, and, frankly, I was tired. So, I agreed, though I suspected this was not my own Best Story Idea ever.

We put Taylor on hold while we hurried off to buy a dog crate larger than some apartments I’ve lived in. On the way, our granddaughter came up with Redge as a more fitting name. Taylor sounded too aristocratic for a lop-eared, cross-eyed animal of lumbering dimensions. Exactly how lumbering? I tried to measure him once, but Redge thought we were playing Capture the Tape Measure, along with the measurer’s hand. You’ll have to take my word he was a very large dog. You will also have to take my word that he gradually lumbered into my heart.

There are loads of Redge-experience anecdotes, most Best Story Idea material, many having to do with the fact that being cross-eyed caused him to see anything approaching him as an attacker.He lunged a lot, frightened people a lot, including the grandkids, and, when we tried tethering him for a brief moment of peace, he dragged our sizable dining table across the room. The leading dog trainer in the area finally threw up her hands and said, “Maybe you could find him a home in the country.” Eventually we were forced to take her advice.

That should have been the end of this particular Best Story Idea, except I had some self-examining to do. Why had I brought a dog bred to be a natural chaser into a house with three cats? Why had I taken the path of most resistance to adult common sense and good judgment? The truth was I knew the answer to all my Redge dilemma questions. Back on dog-search day, I’d been impatient and tired and eager to be done with the entire scene, so I latched onto the first choice instead of holding out for a better one.

As writers, we too often do the same when we don’t wait for the Best Story Idea. We latch onto the first word or phrase that comes to mind, or the first character quirk, or the first action gambit. We don’t push ourselves deeper into our imaginations in search of the word that most vividly expresses what we need to say, or the character detail that is less a quirk than a revealing motivation, or the plot turn that grows organically from what has already happened but is nonetheless unexpected.

We don’t wait long enough, or think clearly enough, or exercise our brains hard enough. The resulting scenario lumbers across the page, destroys the furniture it should have polished to a patina and, worst of all, disappoints the readers we were supposed to delight and enthrall with our Best Story Idea ever.

Why not write right past our first, most easily available choices to the better ones lurking further down? Then press on even deeper to the best we have in us, the phrase or detail or event that makes a story come alive and dance into our readers’ hearts, without a hint of lumber in its pace along the path toward an extraordinary read. Which is what occurs when we work hard and wait as long as it takes for the Best Story Idea to appear.

As for my previous reference to incontinence, at the same years-ago moment I was writing the first version of this cautionary tale, Redge was peeing on my kitchen floor. I like to think he was puddling me another Best Story Idea.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

– R|R –

Alice writes romantic suspense novels. Check out her storytelling choices in her latest book A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 5. Available HERE. You can find all of Alice’s books HERE.

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