Writing and Life, and the Advice We're Misusing.

K.M. Weiland work has been posted in the past and probably will be in the future, because it's just good stuff.

Her latest post, "6 Bits of Common Writing Advice You're Misusing," is another great resource for writers, but it's also a great resources of life.

Here are a few most notables:

1. Write a Likable Character

You hear it all the time. If you don’t create characters readers like—and especially a protagonist readers like—why would they ever want to read your story? Stories are made or broken on the strength of their characters, which means you must get readers invested in your main character right from go.

Common writing advice says your protagonist must be likable. But don’t confuse likability with perfection. Readers love flawed characters.

What Writers Sometimes Think This Means:

The problem is that writers sometimes think this means they must write a character who is an utter saint. If he makes a mistake, if he speaks in anger, if he’s selfish, if he sins—readers will instantly judge him, hate him, and drop him. Instead of creating a realistically flawed (andinteresting) human being, these writers end up with either a

a) a self-righteous goody-goody

b) a self-flagellating goody-goody

The irony here is that “perfect” characters are hardly ever likable characters.

What This Bit of Writing Advice Really Means:

Because we often equate other people’s ability to like us with our ability to avoid of messing up, we think the same must apply to our characters. But (aside from the fact this is an utterly false paradigm) consider some of your favorite characters. I’m willing to bet most of them are egregiously flawed. And don’t you love them the more for those flaws?

When you’re told to “write a likable character,” what you’re really be told is to “write a realistic, compelling, relatable, interesting character.” So give him a relatable motivation and pile on the sins, because readers have a high capacity for forgiveness.

Application to Life:

We love flawed fictional characters because they are relatable. Characters that are to goody-goody become distant because we know ourselves. We know that, try as we might, we are deeply flawed and fully sinful - that we have ghosts. 

When we read the struggles and failures of fictional characters, we see ourselves, and we have compassion, and we end up loving them more.

Characters like Cora who kills a white boy while trying to escape North, the adulterous John Proctor in The Crucible, and lying, scared, and over emotional disciple, Peter.

But not so much with the non-fictional characters of our daily workplaces, the family members that gather around the Thanksgiving table, and the members of our churches. Their faults are not lovable but deplorable. They drive us apart, they seep into our thoughts while driving or washing the dishes. They're the subjects of our cryptic blog posts. 

Suddenly, the realistic, compelling, relatable, interesting characters that are so lovable in books are our enemies in life.

Patrick Lencioni refers to this as the Fundamental Attribution Error, "The tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of {others} to their intentions and personalities, while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors" (The Advantage).

Reading and writing stories can remind that, just as we and our favorite characters are flawed, so to is our neighbor. And that makes them realistic, compelling, relatable, and interesting . . . if only we choose to keep reading and not close the book.

4. Flesh Out Your Minor Characters

Your protagonist may make or break the show, but the supporting cast is just as important to the success of his story. If your minor characters are boring, flat, and clichéd, your entire story will suffer. This means you must lavish just as much attention on the little people as you do your shakers and movers. Even your smallest of walk-on characters need to strike readers with just as much realism and charisma as your larger-than-life protagonist.

Common writing advice says you must flesh out even your minor characters—and you should! But you must do it artfully, using only story-pertinent details.

What Writers Sometimes Think This Means:

Every character is the hero of his own story, right? And that’s exactly what some writers seem bent on doing: writing an entire story for every minor character, however insignificant they actually are within the plot. When you end up telling a minor character’s entire life story just to “flesh him out,” you know you’ve gone too far. In fact, even just sharing a single detail about this character if it is not pertinent to the story is a bridge too far.

If you introduce your walk-on taxi driver with a lengthy conversation about his large family, you’re telling readers this man and his family are important—to the plot, to the protagonist’s development, or to the thematic premise. In short, every minor-character detail you include had better be doing double or triple duty, rather than simply serving to tell readers, “See, look, this guy is a real human being! No, really!”

What This Bit of Writing Advice Really Means:

By all means, bring your minor characters to life. But do it deftly. Do it in a way that creates irony and subtext—and most importantly moves the plot forward.

Application to Life:

"You must lavish just as much attention on the little people as you do your shakers and movers." And how much more this applies to life.

How we treat those who can do nothing for us, who can provide little or no return, defines our character more than anything else. Being kind to those who are kind is easy. Being kind to those who are undeserving, who are cruel and seemingly fully selfish, is not. But it's what makes a "successful story."

In life, there are not minor or flat characters, there is only people - humans who want and love and fail and feel just like the rest of us - who want to be the hero. Lavishing attention on the "little people," those who cannot speak for themselves, fight for themselves, or think for themselves, is the mark and beauty of the best of humanity - it's humility. It's the mark of a hero.

People like Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, and those whose names will never appear in blogs or headlines because they didn't do what they did for attention, but because it was the right thing to do. And at the end of their lives, their funeral parlor is full.

5. Add Conflict to Every Scene

Here’s one you hear a lot these days: conflict, conflict, conflict. Without it, you have no plot and no story. If characters aren’t fighting, struggling, overcoming in every single scene, the forward momentum of the plot will founder, and readers will grow bored and give up on the book. More than that, conflict is directly related to the pertinence of any scene within your story. If something isn’t happening to push the conflict forward, then chances are high that scene can and should be trimmed from the story.

Common writing advice says you must include conflict in every scene—and you should! But you must make sure it is story-driving conflict, rather than random arguments.

What Writers Sometimes Think This Means:

In their determination to include the magic story elixir of conflict, writers sometimes end up manufacturing it. The result is random conflict—arguments, obstacles, and even physical altercations that actually do nothing to move the plot.

Turns out, conflict all by itself is not a surefire indicator of a scene’s plot-progressing necessity. Too often, writers feel their story is lagging (particularly in the Second Act), so they throw in a random argument between allies—or the neighborhood bully attacks—or there’s a car wreck—or who knows what else. The result is, at best, melodrama. At worst, readers will be just as bored as if the characters really were doing nothing.

What This Bit of Writing Advice Really Means:

It’s not enough to throw in a random argument to spice things up. Every bit of conflict in every scene must function as part of the overall plot, creating a seamless line of scene dominoes—one knocking into the next—that progresses your story from beginning to end.

Just as importantly, every bit of this conflict must pertinently impact your character’s arc and your story’s theme. If it misfires on any of these three levels—plot, character, or theme—it risks irrelevance and must be reexamined to strengthen it into something with the ability to truly power your story.

Application to Life:

Saying that a story without conflict is boring and will cause the readers to lose interest is perhaps true, but it is also shallow at the least - inaccurate and unhelpful at most because it doesn't relate to life. Try telling a middle school child struggling with the harshness of an overwhelming bully that it's what makes his life - his story- interesting. Tell a father whose searching for answer after losing his job or a wife and mother of three who has recently discovered that she a widow and must carry the burden alone that this is what moves their story along, "from beginning to end," and see if they are comforted. 

It won't. Because the purpose of conflict is not to move the story along. 

Conflict and hardship is a part of life, we know that. But how we interpret conflict can change how we view life.

"It’s not enough to throw in a random argument to spice things up," Weiland writes, and that is true, and it's probably good advice for writers. But in life, there is no "random argument" because, to paraphrase Weiland, every bit of conflict in every moment of life functions as part of the overall story, "creating a seamless line of scene dominoes—one knocking into the next."

The argument with a loved one that seemed to spawn from nothing and that ended nowhere is part of the seamless line of dominoes that was knocked, sometimes days or even years prior.

A blowup is never just a single isolated blowup. Somewhere, someone has pushed a domino. 

Knowing this can remind us perhaps of a few things.

1. Patience - because if we love that person, we want to know what's really going on. We want to lay a domino on its side and stop the progression.
2. Empathy - because we know ourselves and that really, when we are frustrated over a dirty kitchen, there is really something bigger we're wrestling with. So we listen.
3. Forgiveness - when we are close to someone, we are the ones they fall on. And sometimes,, they can't do anything about it - they've just been pushed over. So we bare it.

Thank you K.M. Weiland for the post, and thank you for reading!

Hemingway's Cocktail for Rough Times

Eighty years ago, Ernest Hemingway invented the perfect cocktail for the times.

“Death in the Gulf Stream,” as he called it, was Hemingway’s salve for 1937—a dark year marked by an economic recession in the US, Joseph Stalin’s wrenching Purge Trials, a new war between China and Japan, and the Spanish Civil War which he covered as a journalist for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

War corespondent Ernest Hemingway, 1937.(AP Photo)

That year, the then-38-year old Farewell to Arms writer was emerging from a creative slump. He published To Have and Have Not, a novel about a desperate fishing-boat captain forced to engage in contraband operations between Key West, Florida, and Cuba in order to make ends meet. Hemingway devised what he called a “reviving and refreshing” gin based highball that “cools the blood and inspires renewed interest in food, companions and life.”

Hemingway describes it as a cocktail to be enjoyed from 11:00am on.

Take a tall thin water tumbler and fill it with finely cracked ice.

Lace this broken debris with 4 good purple splashes of Angostura, add the juice and crushed peel of 1 green lime, and fill glass almost full with Holland gin…

No sugar, no fancying. It’s strong, it’s bitter—but so is English ale strong and bitter, in many cases.

We don’t add sugar to ale, and we don’t need sugar in a “Death in the Gulf Stream”—or at least not more than 1 tsp. Its tartness and its bitterness are its chief charm.

Hemingway’s recipe was documented in Charles Baker’s 1946 compendium, The Gentleman’s Companion, An Exotic Cookery and Drinking Book. It’s also included in a book of cocktail recipes compiled by Colin Field, the head bartender of the Ritz Hotel Paris, who created a themed bar in honor of the Nobel Prize winning writer.

From Quartz.

Let's Just Talk, Like Dr. Maya Angelou

"Vulgarity is vulgarity" no matter the color of mouth.

or 

"I might like you actually, or you might like me actually. Or I might not. But I will certainly treat you fairly."

She is one of the best.

Good Fiction : Good Life

The best fiction writers write like they’re in love—and edit like they’re in charge.

First drafting should be a wild and wonderful ride, full of discovery, dreams and promises. But at some point you have to settle down and make the book really work. You need to approach your manuscript with sober objectivity and knowledge of the craft.

Having reviewed hundreds of manuscripts over the years, I’ve identified the five mistakes that most regularly turn up. Start your revision by addressing these, and you’ll immediately change your story for the better.

This is the introduction from a Writer's Digest post entitled, The 5 Biggest Fiction Writing Mistakes (& How to Fix Them). In it, James Scott Bell does exactly what the title suggests, he identifies the 5 biggest fiction writing mistakes and shows how to fix them.

But what if these truths were applied to life? Truths such as:

1. Happy People in Happy Land

Chief among the most common problems, in first chapters especially, are scenes presenting characters who are perfectly happy in their ordinary worlds. The writer thinks that by showing nice people doing nice things, readers will care about these pleasant folk when the characters are finally hit with a problem.

But readers actually engage with plot via trouble, threat, change or challenge. . .

Yet, most of the time what we say we desire most is to live a happy life in a happy land. Yet, when it comes to stories, happy people living in happy lands bore us . . . because it just isn't all that relatable. Like a good story, there needs to be adventure.

2. A World Without Fear

The best novels, the ones that stay with you all the way to the end—and beyond—have the threat of death hanging over every scene.

Death comes in three forms. Physical death is a staple of the thriller, of course. But there’s also professional death, where the main character is engaged in a vocation and the particular matter at hand threatens that position: A cop assigned a case that may mean the end of his career. A married politician falling for a young staffer. A devoted mother losing the child she loves to drugs. Your job, if it’s vocational death overhanging your novel, is to make whatever problem the protagonist is facing feel so important that failing to overcome it will mean a permanent setback to his main role in life.

There’s also psychological death (“dying on the inside”), most often emphasized in character-driven fiction. This is where the romance genre comes in. It has to seem as if the lovers must end up together or their lives will forever be less than what they could have been.

Regardless of which form you use, you must put death on the line so fear may be felt throughout. Fear is a continuum—it can be simple worry or outright terror. You can put it everywhere. And you should.

Once the story is underway, scenes where fear isn’t present in some form mean the stakes are not high enough or the characters aren’t acting the way they should in the face of death.

Achilles says the same:

3. Marshmallow Dialogue

Dialogue is the fastest way to improve a manuscript—or to sink it. When agents, editors or readers see crisp, tension-filled dialogue, they gain confidence in the writer’s ability. But dialogue that is sodden and undistinguished (marshmallow dialogue) has the opposite effect.

Pro dialogue is compressed. Marshmallow dialogue is puffy.

Pro dialogue has conflict. Marshmallow dialogue is overly sweet.

Pro dialogue sounds different for each character. Marshmallow dialogue blends together.

Fortunately, the fixes are simple.

First, make sure you can “hear” every character in a distinct voice. . . 

Second, compress your dialogue as much as possible, cutting fluffy words, whole lines or even entire exchanges. Here’s an example:

“Mary, are you angry with me?” John asked.

“You’re damn straight I’m mad at you,” Mary said.

“But why? You’ve got absolutely no reason to be!”

“Oh but I do, I do. And you can see it in my face, can’t you?”

The alternative:

“You angry with me?” John asked.

“Damn straight,” Mary said.

“You got no reason to be!”

Mary felt her hands curling into fists.

Finally, when writing dialogue be sure to include some sort of tension in every exchange. Remember fear? At the very least you can have some aspect of it (worry, anxiety, fright) going on inside one of the characters so that communication is partially impaired. Try playing up the different agendas each character has in a scene. Let them use dialogue as a weapon to get what they want.

Perfect for life, right? When speaking (in real life) speak clearly and don't fluff, be honest not sugar coated, an original (confident) not an echo, and be a great listener. 

The Chinese character for "listen" is this:

When engaged in a dialogue, listen with your ears, your eyes, and heart. Treat the speaker like he or she is king. Which means although we are honest and original, we are also respectful.

Beautiful.

4. Predictability

Readers like to worry about characters in crisis. They want to tremble about what’s around the next corner (whether it’s emotional or physical). If a reader knows what’s coming, and then it does in fact come, the worry factor is blown. Your novel no longer conveys a fictive dream but a dull ride down familiar streets.

The fix is simple: Put something unexpected in every scene. Doing this one thing keeps the reader on edge. . .

Life is unpredictable. No matter how many lists we create, plans we make, or details we check and recheck, we are not in control. 

Dull rides that lead us down familiar streets are safe, but boring. As Bilbo says, “It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to" or what what you'll discover. 

A life that is unpredictable is Life. 

5. Lost Love

As I said up front, writing a book is like falling in love. Outlining and planning are the wooing. Drafting the novel is your commitment to marriage (which would make the opening scenes the honeymoon). But at some point, you and your book will likely need some marriage counseling. Because when you lose the verve for your material, it shows.

So how do you regain lost love? The surest way is by going deeper into your characters.

Start with backstory. Maybe you’ve already done an extensive bio for your main character. Try starting a new one. Keep the best of the old material, but put in plenty that’s new.

Focus on the year your character turned 16. Create an account of what happened at that crucial stage. What incident shaped her? What romances, heartaches, tragedies? Write those scenes in detail.

Do this for your antagonist, too, and your secondary characters. Soon enough you’ll be excited to get back to your story.

Also, try focusing on what your protagonist yearns for. We yearn because we feel a lack, a need, a hole in our souls. So yearning is about connection. This, in fact, is the power of mythology, some of the best storytelling of all time. Joseph Campbell taught that myths were a way of gaining connection to something transcendent, a life source, an essential mystery.

Readers, too, yearn for connection—with stories they can get lost in and be moved by. Fix these five areas in your work, and your books can be among them.

Holy Crap. Think of all that could happen to relationships if we applied THIS truth? Sheesh.

Thanks for reading, and good luck!

Should we Say “And” Instead of “But”?

I stumbled across the following article and thought it worth storing away because I like the discussion it raises, or at least should raise. I'll ask the question at the end.

This post is from Nicole Francesca:

In Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, a “dialectic” refers to the idea of two truths being true simultaneously, even if they seem to oppose one another. It’s a practice in removing ourselves from black-and-white, either-or thinking, which is one of the greatest limiting factors in our collective ability to grow. We’re so used to seeing things as one-or-the-other and never as both-at-once that we unconsciously choose a side and live there. It needn’t be so. It’s not an easy transition always, but here’s the trick that I learned this first year in grad school to become a clinical social worker (which is a long way to say “therapist”):

Whenever you’re about to say “but,” replace it with “and,” or “and it is also true that.”

Fair warning: everyone that is very used to standing at the either-or edge of the both-and lake will not be amused by your commitment to swimming. They may have never even heard of such an outrageous idea, as I had not, of allowing both things to be true at once.

And for good reason. How can we rectify something good as also having bad elements, and vice versa? That makes the black-and-white territory quite gray indeed, and, my friends, we are fucking terrified as a people of the gray area.

It means we have to dig deeper to figure out how we feel about things, what our actual motivations are. The gray area removes the ease of simply choosing a side and leaving it at that. The other factor is this: anyone who has been on the receiving end of a “this truth, but this truth” knows that anything before the “but” is lost to oblivion forever.

I love you, but I can’t stay.

See how that works? We can’t even hear the shit before the “but,” and for good reason. “But” ends dialogue. It says, “the first truth is not nearly as important as the second truth.” Turning it into, “I love you, and I can’t stay,” opens a door for exploration, and values the first truth just as much as the second.

I encourage you to give it a try, and I’m going to give you some examples from my own life, because it took me a good while to commit to the both-and—and now I’m sold for life.

I am angry at the state of the world, and it is also true that I am in love with every small beautiful moment of each day.

I am confident, and sensitive.

Fully experiencing grief is the only way to move through it, and it is also true that grief hurts in ways that tear apart the very soul.

Being poor has made me resourceful beyond measure, and it is also true that poverty fucking sucks.

I’m the only one that can repair the damage incurred to me, without my consent, during my childhood, and it is also true that that’s really unfair.

The difference in how the statements feel when you remove the “but” has a palpable feel to me. Do they for you? It allows the reality of pain to exist without denying the reality of responsibility, or the reality of what seems to oppose the pain. It allows us some small measure of liberation without losing accountability.

The binary of either-or is a lie. As humans, we’re meant to swim in the both-and lake, and explore the deeper-than-surface shit. Joy can include grief, and pain can include beauty. It often does, without us even realizing it.

Side Note: I also want to make note that this can be used by people with nefarious intent and it’s important to be able to recognize that. Any tool for healing will be twisted as tool for control by those who need control, even if they don’t realize they desperately need it. For example:

“I hurt you, and my love for your made me do it.”

Be always sure to listen to exactly whom is taking responsibility for the gray area in which they wade.

So here is my question:

Does this mean we should never say "but"?  

I love this article because it does highlight how we are "so used to seeing things as one-or-the-other and never as both-at-once that we unconsciously choose a side and live there." And I think you would agree that we see this in most everything: religion, race, personalities, etc..

So again, does this mean we should never say "but"? And if not, where? When? On what topics, issues?  

Thank you Nicole for inspiring a discussion - even if it is only with myself.

Ditching Empathy is a Bad Idea

Paul Bloom, psychologist and Yale professor, argues that empathy is a bad thing—that it makes the world worse. While we've been taught that putting yourself in another's shoes cultivates compassion, it actually blinds you to the long-term consequences of your actions. In this animated interview from The Atlantic, we hear Bloom’s case for why the world needs to ditch empathy.

Video by  The Atlantic

1. Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. 

Bloom's misuse of empathy creates a problem, namely, that he's wrong.

Empathy, deep and real empathy, isn't done for the purpose of self, "to get a buzz out of it", but for another - to understand and share in the pain they are suffering. To connect with them, for their sake.  Not ours.

Perhaps the reason why we care about the baby in the well is because it's here, in front of us, and we can do something about it.  The war is over there, untouchable . . . what possible difference can we make? For many of us, not much.

But we can save the child in the well.

"Selfish moralizing" is an issue worth discussing and probably one we should be against, but not empathy.

Empathy breaks down the walls of diversity, allowing us to "understand and share the feelings of another." It asks us to think not of ourselves, but of others - which is never a bad thing.

But Blooms is right, "If [we] really want to make the world better, spend less time trying to maximize [our] own altruistic joy."  But then he says, "And in a more cold-blooded way think, 'how can I help other people?'" 

And the answer to that Mr. Bloom is this: by being warm-blooded, and empathetic.

The Millennial Question : Simon Sinek