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

I’ve been going through holes of Reels and short-form videos at night lately, watching people remodel their house or home, decorate for holidays, and then, um, being an Amazon affiliate. At the same time, a lot of the writers I work with are having BIG DOUBT MOMENTS as they query and read Twitter/X and see authors behaving badly or agents behaving badly or people getting yelled at for sucking at s...

How to Dig Deeper in Your Scenes A lot of time, a writer will get feedback and it’ll say something vague-ish like, “Dig deeper.” And then the author cries or gets angry or feels an emotion that no author wants to feel. T he thing is that this advice is sort of vague, but what it usually means is: 1.     You have no setting in your scene or chapter or story; 2.     Your character doesn’t react to t...

When I was a baby newspaper reporter, one of my editors, Grady Holloway, used to call me over to his desk. A lot. I loved Grady. He had this great, grizzly beard before it was cool, wore a dirty hat, had been married to an ambassador’s daughter, rode horses, drove cab in Colorado when all the beat poets and journalists were out there, and liked noir mysteries. But whenever he pulled me over to his...

When I go to classrooms on book tour or for school visits, teachers (or kids prompted by teachers) always ask me what the most important skill is for being a writer. And I tell them a couple things. No, it’s not about what a comma splice is or the coolness of objective correlatives. It’s really a two part answer: Notice what people are doing, their mannerisms, how they act, interact, hold their he...

When I help writers with their stories, a lot of the times one of the things I tell them is that they need to dig more deeply. They need to dig more deeply into the emotion and feel it with the characters. They need to dig more deeply into the scene and see the characters there, interacting with their surroundings and each other. And a lot of us writers in our early drafts of story, don’t dig all...

Two weeks ago, we started talking about how to write a book blurb for your story and began with the first step, which is a hook. You can check  that out here. And the second step is here . So, if the first step is creating that hook, the second step, according to  Shayla Raquel  is dangling the characters. Then our next step is what Shaun has no problem doing in real life with anyone oth...

Last week, we started talking about how to write a book blurb for your story and began with the first step, which is a hook. You can check that out here. So, if the first step is creating that hook, the second step, according to Shayla Raquel is dangling the characters. What does that mean? It means that the thing that propels your story needs to be in your book blurb. Or as Shayla says, “Your cha...

I’ve decided it’s time for a new series of podcast now that we whacked character lies down to a mush of sobs. There are all different ways to write these blurbs and make them tantalizing to readers, but there are set steps. We’re going to focus on the first one here. First let’s explain what a book blurb is, right? It’s just the description of your novel that goes on the sell page on Amazon or oth...

So far we’ve talked (and written) twice about character misbeliefs. Then we took a baby break because we’re like that, but we’re back on it now, my friends. Those earlier posts are linked below. First off to recap, the big lie or character misbelief in your story is what motivates them or causes them to act in a certain way. If your character grows in a positive way, during the story, they usually...

It’s a romance brawl. Not really. But it’s a bit of one. And it comes down to this: Does a romance have to have Happily Ever After or Happy For Now to be a romance? Does there need to be a positive, happy ending in order for a book to be a romance? Let’s talk about it. Unspoken agreement with the reader WRITING TIP OF THE POD If your story isn’t happily ever after, it may be a love story, but it m...

On our last podcast and post, we talked about the character misbelief, which is basically what the character in your story believes that isn’t real or true. The big component of this is that your character believes this big lie about life or about themselves because of something that hurt them in the past. The thing that hurt them in the past that causes that big untruth that dictates their lives...

We’re doing a hybrid writing tip and podcast this week. All the important stuff is written down here. All the fun stuff and Shaun aka The Talent is in the podcast where we talk about this important writing stuff and other things. So, let’s get started. The big lie or the character’s misbelief in your story is a major key to your character’s story arc, which is basically the emotional change and de...

It's a weird, wild, not PC live ride into strange storm things as we wait for Hurricane Lee. I tried to keep this podcast on track. I failed. Links We Mention https://www.factretriever.com/hurricane-facts https://bestlifeonline.com/storm-facts/ http://www.theworldgeography.com/2011/04/top-8-weirdest-natural-disasters.html https://news.yahoo.com/7-weird-weather-phenomena-around-200000567.html SHOUT...

In our random thought we talk all about the Ig Nobles. We don't transcribe that, so you'll have to listen. Sorry! But now, let’s talk about logic. When you are writing a novel and something doesn’t make sense—let’s say someone has brown eyes on page 2 and blue eyes on page 1—your editor if you have one is going to call you on that. If they don’t call you on that, the readers’ brain will hitch when...

Chuck Wendig has a piece on his blog, Terrible Minds , called "Series vs Standalone: Cage Match," which shows that Wendig is great at blog headlines and marketing. But his riff on a BlueSky conversation between a lot of writer elite. And it’s why he’s writing standalones mostly from now on instead of a series. Quickly, his reasons are: "Writing a series is depressing. Publishers tend to give all t...

A poem for Monday!

This week we tried to take a deep dive into the strange, but basically just told four stories. God only knows what went wrong, honestly. LINKS WE MENTION: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/8htqnq/what_strange_thing_have_you_witnessedexperienced/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Weird/

So, a lot of self-help out there on TikTok and blogs is all about being . . . Well, happier, more efficient, better humans. We explore this all the time ourselves as we try to lead better lives, but one of the big things about this is that it sort of makes it seem like we live in a bubble where only we exist, that if we just work harder, better, more, in a different way, then we can get everything...

How to Stay Motivated Even If You’re a Writer A lot of writers hate writing. They sit and stare at the blank page or screen. They end up posting about how hard writing is, how torturous. Their post will get them a million likes. But it wasn’t always like that for that. Most of us write because at one point we really loved writing. Drawing? The same thing. There was a study of little kids in a scho...

Awe can get us through time times, scientists are saying. We'll check this theory out, define awe a bit, and obviously--get goofy. DOG THOUGHT FOR LIFE Sparty says: Slow down. You move too fast. Smell every tree and fire hydrant. LINKS WE MENTION https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_awe_can_help_us_through_tough_times https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-35200-w https://greaterg...