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

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 fo...

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...

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 po...

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 s...

On last week’s  podcast  and t he 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&n...

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 h...

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...

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...

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...

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 li...

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 are...

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 positiv...

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: New ideas Reminds you of ideas you'd forgotten about Let's you notice new things because you aren't the same you who read that book the last time. DONALD LATUMAHINA writes for LifeOptimizer , "'"Research shows...

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 s...

This is obviously not the full transcript. You have to listen to hear the full weirdness, but . . . here's the core. How Do You Sustain a Career as an Author? It's a really good question, right? One, all of us authors are trying to figure out. Rise With Drew writes, "Creative careers are slippery. One-hit wonders abound, but fewer are enduring superstars,” Steven writes. “And this level of commitm...

Talking about show vs tell at the scene level is a little bit harder than talking about it at the paragraph and scene levels. But it’s also a tiny bit easier. When you’re looking for telling at this level of the story, what you’re looking for is a couple of things: A butt ton of backstory. A butt ton of info dumps A lot of flashback. You can have bits of these things in your stories. Where us auth...

Babe, I know you don’t want to talk about showing vs telling any longer, our massive series, but it’s really really important. It’s sunk many a cool book idea, stopped others in its tracks. It is a chaos agent in the life of many a good writer. And there are so many damn facets to it. I could fill a year of podcasts talking about it. Don’t worry, I won’t. But I would be remiss—no, we would be remi...

Award-winning author of YA novels? Check. Printz honor author, ALA Best Book winner, National Book Award finalist? Check. Has a middle grade coming out March 11 that's about to rock the world? Definitely. Was so cool that Carrie was afraid to talk to him back in 2005 or 2006 or something? You know it. Chris Lynch, award winning human and ridiculously gracious interviewee, graced Dogs are Smarter T...

Hey! Welcome to our series of podcasts and posts all about showing vs. telling, which we are on fire about right now, right Shaun? Growls. You can check out the rest of the series on Carrie’s Substack Write Better Now or just the podcast episodes on her blog, https://carriejonesbooks.blog/ So, a lot of my writers have a brain like mine, which is sad for them. Just kidding! Just kidding! A lot of t...

We’re continuing with our monster “Show Don’t Tell” series of podcasts and posts. So, hey! Welcome to our series of podcasts and posts all about showing vs. telling, which we are on fire about right now, right Shaun? Growls. You can check out the rest of the series on Carrie’s Substack Write Better Now or just the podcast episodes on her website . And we're soon going to have some monthly author i...

We’re continuing with our monster “Show Don’t Tell” series of podcasts and posts. Adverbs are a big place where you tell and not show. So, if I wrote, “You are the sexiest manatee in the world,” Ham-Ham said hopelessly. Would you think that works? Would you feel how Ham-Ham said it hopelessly? Janice Hardy is brilliant and she has a really simple way of explaining how to determine whether or not y...

There’s this really great book for writers by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi called The Emotional Wound Thesaurus. It came out way back in 2017. As they write in their prologue, “Life is painful, and not all the lessons we learn are positive ones. As with you and me, the characters in our stories have suffered emotional trauma that cannot easily be dispelled or forgotten. We call this type of t...

Writers Are Promise Makers Writers are promise makers. We tell our readers that we’re going to give them something just because of the cultural expectations that happen when someone opens our books. What do we promise them? We promise a character The book is about someone. We reveal different aspects about that character as we show them act or react to the things that go on in the book. The charac...

There’s a lot of ways that trope is defined, but for us here on DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE, we’re going with the Grammarist’s definition, which is: “A trope is simply a common or recurring theme or method used in storytelling across all forms of media. Tropes serve as a way for creators to convey certain ideas and messages to their audience in a familiar and recognizable way.” They go on to writ...