Tag Archives: Writer Wednesday

Scoreboard Status Writers’ Style

Motivation, ,

Scoreboard Status Writers’ Style. Have you ever heard this ponderous question? “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear, is there any sound?” Well, let’s ponder this one. “If your book falls into the marketplace, and nobody notices, are you still a real writer?”

 That doozy has been frying in my brainpan for some time now, and I’m not alone. More and more of us are deciding to quit the writing game. We not only consider ourselves losers there, we’ve concluded that we aren’t even up on the scoreboard.

We toil long and hard and believe we’re writing strong stories, but don’t sell many books. We don’t make much money either. What we thought of as a writing career is behaving more like a writing hobby. And, the IRS may be about to make that hobby status official.

Been there. Am there now. The only book sales I’m sure of are the copies I send to reviewers, because good reviews are supposed to make all the difference. My reviews are stellar, and no difference has been made.

Many authors report a similar experience. Their reviewers are generous, enthusiastic, even ecstatic. Still, sales figures don’t budge enough to get them even into the minor leagues. We’re playing pickup ball on the sandlots of scribes.

Before we start sputtering over the obvious injustice – let’s sprint this sporty metaphor back to the scoreboard concept. Who is up there in lights anyway? Whose numbers soar high, then higher still, over and over again?

The “Why?” of the above questions is in the last phrase, “over and over again.” These are repeat performers, repeat big sales performers, like our beloved Stephen King. Their identities repeat as well. The same bestseller names sell best, as I said, over and over again.

They are the superstars. According to a recent Sunday New York Times article, once you’re a superstar, you stay a superstar. Everybody knows your name. You’re a proven, recognizable commodity, and readers feel most confident buying a brand name. Plus, there are only so many superstar slots on the board, and those are pretty much filled.

 I succumbed to the blues notes of that tune several months ago. I stopped writing anything other than the occasional blog post and a regular column. Then I read the Sunday Times article, felt the truth of it, and somehow that turned me around. “WTF am I doing?” I shouted.

After I stopped writing, I became a less satisfied person. Anyone in my family will bear witness to this. So, started writing again. I picked up my novel-in-progress, shoved Patrice, my beleaguered heroine, into hot water, and turned up the temp.

Then, one morning, after a subsequent writing session, something happened. I was standing in my bedroom listening to a conversation between two people who only exist in my head. Patrice and John, my hero, were saying things entirely new to me. And, guess what? It felt great.

So, to hell with the scoreboard. Whether or not the marketplace acknowledges the presence of my stories in its midst, I am still a real writer. How about you?

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.comA Wrong Way Home

 A Wrong Way Home – Alice Orr’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 1 is a FREE eBook HERE. Enjoy!A Time Of Fear & Loving book cover art

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.” “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/aliceorrwriter
http://twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks/
http://goodreads.com/aliceorr/
http://pinterest.com/aliceorrwriter/

The Ideal Story Idea Equation

Storytelling, ,

The Ideal Story Idea Equation. Every writer I know, and probably every writer I don’t know, is praying for the Idea from Heaven. The perfect combination of elements that will create the best story you’ve ever written and take you where you want to be in your writer’s adventure. What we sometimes forget to emphasize is the Combination of Elements part. The Equation.

The Technicolor Idea Strike. Most of us have, on very happy occasion, experienced the exhilaration of a technicolor idea strike. A story concept, maybe a scene, appears suddenly, unexpectedly, like lightning in the mind, revealing something entirely new, previously unimagined. “This is it,” we cry out in creative ecstasy. “This is the story I must write.”

An Idea Is Not a Plot. The problem is that we don’t really have a story. We have an idea for a story, and an idea is only a beginning. A story, particularly in the commercial fiction arena, requires a plot with a beginning, middle and end. At best, our flashes of inspiration will get us through the opening scene, maybe the first chapter. Without lots more work and a much bigger brainstorm, the story tumbles downhill from there.

The Cocktail Party Scenario. Permit me to illustrate with a cocktail party scenario that goes something like this. Author stands at the edge of the party crowd to maximize observation potential. Fellow partier sidles over, discovers that Author is, in fact, an author and suggests some variation on the following. “I’ve got a terrific idea for a novel. Bestseller for sure. How’s about I tell you my idea, you write the story, we split the take fifty-fifty?”

The Peril of Underestimating The Storytelling Process. A giant misconception is in play here. This non-writer underestimates the writing process. Somebody once famously said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.” The partier with the great story idea knows nothing about the bloodletting aspect of the writer’s craft. He doesn’t understand that an idea is not a story.

An Idea Is Only A Kernel. That kernel may possess the potential to grow into the next Nora King Mary Higgins Grisham opus or it may not. Either way, tons of nurturing, strain, frustration, doubt and even bloodletting must be applied between planting and harvest. A clever idea is a jumping off place but without the sweat equity required the storyteller is in for a hard fall.

The Equation Begins With Character. An idea flash may reveal intriguing, even startling circumstances, but those circumstances must happen to equally intriguing characters or the agent/editor/reader will soon cease to care.  An intriguing character comes to life on the page, has a history fraught with complex experience, and a personality riddled with contradictions, like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote. Such characters are complicated, often confused, and always in conflict with each other.

The Equation Continues With Conflict. Great storytelling is all about story conflict, and that conflict must have enough power to reach beyond the initial story idea. Enough power to propel the agent/editor/reader, nonstop and without much respite, from first scene to last with a riveting rollercoaster ride between, like in The Color Purple by Alice Walker.

A Powerful Story Idea Plants The Conflict Kernel Deep. A powerful storyteller cultivates that kernel through obstacles, frustrations, near misses and reversals as layered and complex as the characters themselves. Conjuring all of that requires opening the previously mentioned vein. A lightning flash story idea makes the first cut, then the real surgery begins.

The Ideal Story Idea Equation Is Simply This. Great Idea plus Characters We Care About plus An Excruciating Conflict Situation equals First Class Storytelling. Which is, of course, not simple to accomplish, but that’s the challenge which creates the conflict at the heart of your great writer’s adventure. Welcome to the rollercoaster.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

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.

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

 

Go Confidently Into This Good Year

Motivation, ,

Go Confidently into This Good Year. My grandchildren gave me a very important gift one Christmas. That gift was a mug with these words printed on it. “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.” I’d pointed that mug out one day at a Barnes & Noble where the kids and I were indulging in a much beloved pastime – book buying.

The Dread Begins. I coveted that mug from the moment I saw it, but now I actually had one. Sitting in my writing corner, that day and every day, holding my coffee and my trepidation. Sometimes, after a sip of the former, I would put the mug back down with the words facing deliberately away from me, in order to avoid confrontation with the latter.

A Helluva Assignment. Truth was, I didn’t feel equipped to Go Confidently anywhere. My first great critic, next to myself, was my mother, and I could hear her speaking from beyond this material plane, plain as day. “You always take on more than you can chew.” She’d said a mouthful of unchewables, and I had no smartass response. Would you? Well, we’d best get one.

We Need a Plan. That’s a pic of me standing at a podium, like I did for 30+ years, hardly ever appearing to lack confidence. Want to know why? Look at what I’m doing. Checking my notes. When I need to look, and maybe even be, confident, I make a plan. I write that plan down. Then, with a few smartass digressions thrown in, I follow it. We need to do the same now. In writing. With lots of specifics. Make a plan for how to Go Confidently into This Good Year.

What is “the direction of your dreams”? What do you want to accomplish right now? By which I mean, over the next 3 months. Grab a paper product or device you can write on. Don’t ponder much. We’re brainstorming, not brain-straining. Remember what I said about specifics. List anything that comes to mind, as long as it’s a concrete action. And write really fast,

Map Those Directions for the next few miles. New page(s). Still in rapid-response mode. To each item on the above list, add 3 specific actions you might take to make that accomplishment happen. Don’t edit or judge or compare the validity or practicality or whatever of your original list items just yet. Simply whale away into that brainstorm. No self-harpooning allowed.

Refine Your Route. During that last exercise, my guess is you found yourself responding more enthusiastically to some of your original dream accomplishments and less so to others. Go back over your combined list now – dream achievements plus specifics to get there. Asterisk the dream categories that excite you most. Once again, don’t ponder. Follow your gut.

Prioritize Your Trail Markers. Draw a big circle around each of your asterisked achievement categories and the how-to’s that go with each. Still fast-tracking. Rate those circles in order of importance to your career as you see it right now. Or in order of which ones turn you on most. Number them. And there you have it. A Plan for Your Next 3 months.  After that time has passed, simply grab a tablet and your stormy brain and repeat the above exercise for the next 3 months, then the next, and so on.

Now – Here’s the Kick-Start Kicker. If you did what I asked. If you moved ahead fast as gangbusters. If you short-circuited any and all temptations to edit/judge/second-guess the storm gusts your brain was gifting to you. Then my guess is you experienced little or no self-doubt during this entire slam-bam process. You were Confident about what you were doing.

What Comes Next. Whether you realize it or not, you have made a bold move toward “Living the life you’ve imagined.” But don’t dwell on that too much just yet. Celebrate instead. Because you did it. You made it. You are now ready to Go Confidently into This Good Year.

P.S. These two pics are years-back shots of our grandkids. Maya after winning a Tai Kwan Do Championship she didn’t think she should even enter. Julian, well, ready to take on the Hulk. They must have Go Confidently mugs of their own. In fact, Grandma is confident that they do.   Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

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.

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