Are we too “domesticated” to write truly great stories? This might seem like an odd question, but bear with me. I’ve been incredibly blessed over the course of my life to travel all over the world. While I did get to check out some of the resorts, my favorite travel stories seem to always involve places no one in their right mind would go…on purpose.

Note I DID qualify with “in their right mind.”

Like the time I lived in Syria, went out into the desert to look at ruins but failed to pack enough water *face palm*. This ancient Bedouin shuffled past me wearing a huge glass bottle full of water…that he was selling by the sip.

I have no shame.

I bought the WHOLE BOTTLE.

Or when I was on the Mexican border and had to go to the ladies’ room. As I am sitting there…a chicken just walks in and decides to be my friend. Still funny.

In the jungles of Belize, I spent all day wielding a sledgehammer to pull up a sidewalk at a school (humanitarian mission). The entire day it rained on me. I spent seven hours slogging through mud in the rain carrying buckets of cement, ripping up rebar, and patrolling—machete in hand—for snakes.

End of the day? All I wanted was a shower. I strip down to everything but my seriously stupid lime green flip flips with big goofy flowers on the toes, turn on the water…and SCORPIONS RAIN DOWN OUT OF THE SHOWER CURTAIN.

Apparently goofy flower flip flops make an excellent weapon.

Why are these some of my favorite stories? Especially since none of them cast me in a particularly good light. Whether it is me being too dumb to pack WATER in the SYRIAN DESERT or naive enough to not watch for SCORPIONS in a JUNGLE, there is a common thread.

I was far too domesticated.

Domesticated Writers

There is a strange cognitive distortion we can all experience being a part of First World living. We really don’t know what it is like to worry about most of that really important stuff at the base of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

I mean FOOD? Me? Hunt? *hair flip* I don’t even know how to track tacos. Are burritos migratory? Do pizzas travel in packs?

***If you know, please answer in the comments.

Please understand. I am seriously grateful that I am an American, that I live in a wonderful country and enjoy incredible blessings. Yet, how often do we take these blessings for granted? How much can modern life lull us into a form of sensory sleepwalking that make our writing come across as dull, colorless or inauthentic?

Case in point.

One of my favorite classes to teach was Beyond Bulletproof Barbie. This class covered combatives (various forms of martial arts), guns (everything from pistols to long arms), and bladed weapons. I enjoy teaching it because, while I “get” we write fiction and can’t be 100% accurate, a handful of really great details truly enhances authenticity.

When reading any fight scene, I can almost instantly tell a writer who has a) never been punched or b) has never thrown a punch.

How?

Easy.

Punching suuuucks. I know! News flash. Either way. Honestly. Sucks to be puncher or punch-ee. And I get that it is easy to believe the person doing the punching gets the better of it but no. FUN FACT! Unless one is a professional fighter, odds are pretty good you will break or dislocate something in your hand.

Am I suggesting we start Writer Fight Club? No…because I can’t talk about Writer Fight Club. Also, pain sucks. But, I do believe the answer is simpler.

Domesticated Distortion

Sometimes, just recognizing we have a blind spot is a great start. This is where, first of all, being a prolific reader will be seriously helpful. We can only do and experience so much, so why not rely on the experiences of others? The more we read, the deeper creative well we draw from.

I have no idea what it is like to live in the aftermath of a war (and pray I never do). But I can read works from people who have. I’m not a man, a child, a space alien, a battle hardened Marine, or a geriatric, but I can be all those things because I can use empathy and imagination. That said, empathy and imagination, like other writing muscles, need strength training.

If we believe we might be too domesticated, then how might we ratchet up the story intensity? I recommend practicing deep empathy. Try writing in Deep POV.

Refer to: Deep POV: What IS It & Why Do Readers LOVE It So Much?

Deep POV is not only a fantastic way to hook readers into the story experience at a whole other—visceral—level, but it will also help us be aware of our domesticated blind spots.

Try doing some short writing pieces on the same topic. Same story prompt but from as many different POVs as you can think of. Maybe change the setting, too.

Most of us tend to—at least in the beginning—write as ourselves. Hey, I did it! Still do. When they say “write what you know” then this is kind of a “no duh” thing right?

But can you take a story prompt then write from the perspective of someone who is NOT you? Empathy is a fantastic skill in life and in writing.

Experience Informs Perspective

We can take a simple scenario and do a fun thought experiment/writing exercise. Take our domesticated brains into a domesticated situation that suddenly is anything BUT.

There is a bodega on the corner of a major city. It’s late at night. There is an Uber driver, an elderly person, a young mother, and a juvenile delinquent. Someone decides to rob the bodega.

Who is it? How do the others react? Who “saves” the day? Should it have been “saved” at all? Are things not as they might appear? Do we end up with an unlikely hero? An unintended tragedy?

Could you write the story where each person is the robber and make us empathize with their motives? Note I said we had to empathize not agree. That is an important distinction. In life, we are all good, law-abiding citizens so cognitive dissonance like this stretches our brain muscles.

The key to having a reader empathize is to show who the character is and relay their why (motive).

Under normal circumstances, robbing a bodega is unacceptable. But great stories leave normal in the dust. Additionally, those around react correspondingly using their frame of reference and life experiences. They can help ratchet the tension in the story.

Say our would-be robber is the Uber driver. A half hour earlier, he picked up the Ride from Hell. Unfortunately for him, his fare took a page out of the noir classic Collateral and our poor Uber driver is actually a hostage, himself.

He has to hit a certain number of bodegas before midnight or his family will die.

That’s already a bad night, but what if the senior citizen is an ex-Green Beret and decides to be a hero? What if the teenager is actually a twenty-eight-year-old Vice officer? Or the young mother is actually part of the cartel and was there to collect extortion money from the owner?

What if the cashier just found out his wife was leaving him for his brother and they’d emptied all his savings. All he has left is this crappy job and he just can’t be pushed one…more…step.

We can make these people as benign or interesting as we want. There are plenty of everyday people who do extraordinary things—good and bad—with the right lever. Conversely, there are plenty of folks walking around who seem ordinary at first glance but are anything BUT.

Eg. Spies never look like spies unless it’s the movies.

Psst, neither do aliens.

This is where fiction becomes FUN.

Domesticated Imaginations

I know what it is like to get caught up in the humdrum of life. Whether it is the day job, the WIP that we have been working on for months, life, family, health issues. We can forget how important it is to shove ourselves out of our comfort zone to knock the dust off our imaginations.

Maybe you can do this in your own WIP. If you are stuck, pull out a supporting character and write an experience from their POV. When in a scene, think from all angles. Sight is the weakest of all the senses yet writers (in my experience) rely on it too much. Can we see if we can put ourselves even deeper into the scene? FEEL the cold, TASTE the heat, SENSE the danger?

What Are Your Thoughts?

I know I was suffering from being too domesticated. After working from home for almost twenty years, I took a temporary job in November to get out of the house. You know you’ve been working at home too many years when you eat your lunch like you just served a dime in the pen.

It’s been a lot of fun and has gotten me out of my comfort zone, but the schedule has been a mess trying to fit it with homeschooling and other work. FINALLY it seems to be leveling off. I’ve been working in fashion marketing and the holidays was just BONKERS crazy and January is the start of a whole new year and and and and. LIFE.

BUT it really did show me how many experiences I’d forgotten about working on my own with only my imaginary friends to bug me. VERY different being in a corporate setting.

But I am still here. Still weird. Weirder by the day. So any of y’all have tips on hunting those burritos?

What are our thoughts? Do you think maybe you hold back too much in your work sometimes? Maybe you could push a little harder but have gotten out of the habit?

Also, feel free to drop a try at the bodega story in the comments. I always love seeing y’all show off!

The post Are We Too “Domesticated” to Write Great Stories? appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Fortitude—enduring the tired, tedious and unremarkable chores—is what makes the difference between those who dream and those who do.

Why am I talking about this? Because recently I saw some quote scroll past on social media. It was something (of course) posted by one of those super happy “life coach” people.

Though I’m certain the quote was meant to inspire, it hit a sour note with me. It seemed dismissive of the pain, sacrifice and—yes, suffering—of those willing to dream, and then stick to that dream. It bypassed the fortitude necessary for success.

I don’t recall the quote’s exact wording (they’re all so similar), but the saccharin essence was the same. Apparently, if you don’t LOVE every single moment of what you’re doing, then maybe you don’t have the right career.

Keep searching! Dream! You have a right to be HAPPY! If it isn’t making you HAPPY, then MOVE ON!

See, writing—much like any worthy undertaking—comes part and parcel with a lot of drudgery and loads of stuff we’d rather not do.

Fortitude & Learning Curve Drudgery 

A lot of folks believe that just because they’re proficient in their native language, they are then automatically qualified to write amazing fiction. Yeah…no.

Not judging at all. I used to be one of those people. I had zero concept how ridiculously hard it was to craft a readable story, let alone a good one.

Writing a novel that could span anywhere from 50K to 150K words (depending on genre) that manages to grab then hold a reader’s interest? AHHHH! Balancing plot points, plot arc, character, dialogue, scene and sequel, A-lines, B-lines, on and on?

It doesn’t take too long to understand why many great authors turned to booze and drugs.

*gives Poe a pass on the whole “heroin addiction'” thing*

Far too many writers start out believing the first novel they write is perfect, and if anyone counters this? They fall apart. Some give up. A few hire “editors” who are happy to tell them “the other meanie editor was totes unprofessional and it’s fiiiine to have fourteen POVs…all from cats.”

Others double-down on the denial and write a sequel or—God help us all—a series of equally crappy books that don’t sell.

Why?

Because learning to write novels is hard.

I’ve been through this, myself. My two formative mentors both made me cry…a LOT. And I am NOT a person who cries.

These mentors were nothing like my writing group. My writing group was so encouraging!

Bob and Les didn’t tell me my writing was unicorn tears, they told me it was more like what might come out of the other end of a unicorn.

No, not a unicorn. A hyena with tapeworm and a bad case of mange.

*weeps*

I didn’t love writing the same stuff over and over. Guess what? Didn’t always love reading and rereading the books they recommended I study.

Come to think of it, I didn’t love putting out my best only for it to come back with so much red I wondered if it had been hit by a bus then SHOT before they returned it.

Sure I could have quit. Thought about it a lot. A lot. Because shouldn’t I LOOOVE every moment of what I do? But, I didn’t quit because I wanted to become an excellent writer. I required more than glittery sparkly talent. I had to hone and develop fortitude.

I’m still a work in progress.

My critique group were fantastic cheerleaders, which we need…but not necessarily to make us better.

Cheerleaders look super pretty, but cheerleaders don’t train touchdowns.

Coaches who call out bad form, terrible plays, and awful habits create winners. These experts are hired to criticize, make a player watch footage over and over and, if warranted, do cherry-pickers until the player wants to DIE. Might seem “mean” but THIS is what will help that player make touchdowns.

Drudgery. Not pom-pom waving.

Fortitude: Welcome to the GRIND

There’s drudgery in the actual writing. Oh no! Yes, you heard it here first. Writing, while one of the BEST jobs in the world, contains more than its fair share of suckage.

The first draft can be loads of fun, until the mire of Act Two where you find yourself contemplating sudden and unexpected alien abduction—either for yourself to spring you from writing, or for your characters because you’ve messed up somewhere in the plot and written yourself into a corner.

Becoming successful in writing (or anything really) is never in the BIG things we do. It’s the compilation of a lot of small acts that build up over time.

It is showing up day after day even when we’d rather get a root canal than figure out what went sideways somewhere between page 1 and page 400.

We have to research, proofread, edit, revise, and all of this takes focus and time and pain. By the time a book is “ready” to be published, odds are pretty decent we’ll hate our own book and hope we never have to read it again.

***FYI: The feeling passes…eventually. Most of the time. Maybe.

Publishing Drudgery

For those who still want to traditionally publish, there is the drudgery of writing synopses and query letters and researching agents. Add the drudgery of the actual querying and subsequent waiting.

Meanwhile, most of us have day jobs and laundry and family members who expect to be fed every day #HighMaintenance.

Oh, and make sure to start writing the next book (refer to the love-fest above).

For those who choose a non-traditional path, we have to locate and hire the best people. Or maybe learn to format or design a cover ourselves. There may be multiple iterations of a cover. Then, if we believe we’ve found all our typos in our seventeen (hundred) passes? *clutches sides laughing*

And if we believe the proofreaders and editors caught all them too? Maybe, but..

On top of this, add in bookkeeping, record keeping, accounting, building a platform, understanding keywords and SEO and blah, blah, blah.

Suffice to say that YES, writing is a WONDERFUL job! I wouldn’t be here twenty years later if it was all bad. Yet, I do have to confess that choosing to become a writer showed me the worst parts of my character…in Technicolor.

I didn’t start blogging because I EVER believed my blog would be what it is today with millions of unique visitors. Want to know why I began blogging? I had ZERO self-discipline.

I’d become a person who didn’t want to do anything that I didn’t LOVE. If I wasn’t having FUN, then clearly I’d chosen the wrong career, right?

Wrong.

The Fortitude Factor

People who reach their goals and dreams are different for sure. Are they more gifted? Talented? Unusually good-looking? Perhaps. But, more often than not, these folks excel at handling the boring parts of the dream.

To which I shall refer to one of my favorite books on achievement. James Clear’s Atomic Habits (which I HIGHLY recommend), is fabulous. Yet, this quote in particular piqued my attention:

The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty. Perhaps this is why we get caught up in a never-ending cycle, jumping from one workout to the next, one diet to the next, one business idea to the next. As soon as we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy—even if the old one was still working.

~ James Clear, Atomic Habits

You have NO idea how often I hear, “If I only had the TIME, I’d write more.” As if time is laying around in the couch cushions with the petrified Cheerios and the TV remote no one’s seen Twilight was popular.

Hey, I have been guilty here, too. Still can fall into old (bad) habits if I fail to remain vigilant. Yes, even after a pandemic when we all had more time than we knew what to do with.

The reason people (mistakenly) believe they must FIND TIME? It’s likely because they’ve hit the part of the writing process that’s actual WORK. It’s ceased to be a glorious high.

And, if they don’t start a new book (chasing the high), then they put off writing altogether using excuses more creative than their plot ideas.

Hey! Told y’all I have been guilty too…so no hating .

Yet, when we look at anything worth achieving, from writing an amazing book to being a great parent to running a profitable business, we see that it is how these individuals handle the millions of unremarkable unexciting and downright soul-crushing (but necessary) tasks that makes all the difference.

We see the same common denominator in every success story, from the legendary athletes willing to do the same drills over and over until perfected to the entrepreneurs who mined drudgery for the edge they needed to outpace all competition.

Fortitude: Can You Handle Being BORED?

Everyone loves new beginnings. The new relationship with no baggage and all hugs and kisses, the smell of the fresh notebook, the empty page waiting for all of our brilliant ideas. We love the new blog because it holds so much promise.

Then there is the new workout from YouTube, the new diet we found on Instagram, the new craft project we saw on Pinterest….

A lot of us fixate on whether we can handle the BIG moments, the MAJOR crises but I’d actually offer different advice. We need to ask the hard question.

Can we fall in love with pain and process as much as the end result? Everyone loves the summit selfie but few want the climb. It comes with hypoxia and pretty good odds you’ll die and no one will be able to claim your frozen corpse…ever.

Many of us LOVE the idea of six-pack abs…but we LOVE tacos more. We struggle after a few weeks. Why? Because we are tired, sore, and even though we’ve been working out for a WHOLE MONTH, we still don’t have a ripped physique.

Heck, we can’t even see a muscle. We’re tired of the pile of smelly clothes, the aches and pains and having to measure all our food. It isn’t FUN. In fact, it’s downright tedious.

We don’t LOVE the gym, the job, the book, the YouTube channel anymore because it’s day after day of nothing all that special…and pain.

Lots of that.

Catching Fire

Yet, all these small actions add up over time. When we embrace the dull actions and commit, we will eventually ignite. Ray Bradbury poetically asserted paper had an ignition point of 451 degrees Fahrenheit. The actual number is about thirty degrees higher.

Paper will burst into flames at about 480 degrees Fahrenheit (without being directly exposed to flame).

Using this analogy, let’s take our metaphorical paper and heat it to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, then 250, then 300, then 440, then 451. Boy, this is boring and taking a LONG time and taking energy. Nothing is happening.

Heat it to 460, then 470, then 477 and then throw up your hands because paper NEVER sets on fire without a high-budget marketing plan…I mean match.

Or, maybe there is a marked transformation somewhere between 477 degrees and 482 degrees. At 477 degrees Fahrenheit all looks the same. Oh but add in a little more energy and IGNITION. And this ignition all occurs within a range of a couple degrees.

Then…BOOM!

The same goes for becoming a successful author (as in a professional who’s PAID to play with our imaginary friends). A major key to success largely rests on how we handle the boring parts. Can we keep going, keep putting on the heat when it looks as if nothing is happening?

Success doesn’t have a canonized ignition point. If it did, being successful would be easy. Fortitude is a massive game changer.

If I knew I had to write five books, three series, add in a hundred blogs and forty three good reviews to reach literary stardom? Dang skippy I’d stick with it. There wouldn’t be ANY drudgery, because I’d have certainty.

But that’s the problem.

The ignition point for succeeding in anything is anything but certain (and might not even exist in some cases). It differs between people, generations, goals, industries, abilities, etc. We DON’T KNOW and THAT is precisely why drudgery can so easily undo us if we lack the fortitude to outlast it.

In the End

I want all your dreams to catch fire—your dreams to write, create, to be an excellent parent or partner, to achieve the remarkable.

If you can appreciate that every masterpiece began as a blank canvas, a hunk of marble, an ugly cement foundation, a sketch, or an idea and that IN BETWEEN there was a lot of wash, rinse, repeat and fortitude (which we can control)? You’re on your way to reaching those goals.

We’re rarely limited by our talent, yet we’re all too often hobbled by impatience. Drudgery makes us cave in too soon. It takes time to hone skills, learn a craft, build an audience, etc. Just keep pressing and hopefully you’ll see your ignition point and it will be the most beautiful light you’ve ever seen.

Then you get to do it again for the next goal . *smoochies*

But, you’ll be better and stronger because you know to expect the span of suck before the breakthrough! You will have strengthened and honed the fortitude required to finish. And the cool thing is, the more we work it, the stronger it gets.

What Are Your Thoughts?

I love hearing from you! Do you struggle with the doldrums in your dreams? Is it hard not to just start something new? Are your fortitude muscles weak? Have you been starting over so much that maybe that’s why you aren’t further along? Are you so sick of your book you want to cry? #GotTheTShirt

Don’t you wish we had the magic “temperature” where our dreams LIT UP? Some way to know if we were close? Or even heading in the correct direction? Have you struggled with learning to finish what you start? Been too easily distracted?

The post Fortitude: Dream, Do, Then Keep on DOING Day After Day appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Schadenfreude is a word that many of y’all might not have heard of, yet we’ve all felt it. Interestingly enough, it can be a great tool to keep our audience interested and breathlessly wanting more. What is schadenfreude, other than a fifty dollar word we can toss around to impress friends and colleagues?

Schadenfreude—a combination of the German words for damage and joy—is the pleasure we feel at the misfortune of others.

Before anyone gets too judgy on me, we have all felt it.

Have you ever had some driver on the highway who believed they were above the rules and didn’t need to merge and take turns? Instead they sped up the shoulder so they could cut the line instead of patiently waiting their turn? Schadenfreude is the delicious enjoyment you felt when there actually was a police officer present who summarily pulled them over and ticketed the bejeezus out of them.

Don’t you judge me. Y’all know you love it, too.

We humans, by and large, have a sense of justice encoded in our psyche. This is why even a preschooler has a level of acumen usually reserved for an IRS auditor when adults pass out candy. They sense what is fair and unfair, right and wrong.

This ingrained sense of right and wrong and fair and unfair is part of what drives our need for a sense of justice. We don’t like it when others “get away” with doing something we perceive as “wrong.”

Shades of Schadenfreude

Therein lies the deliciousness of schadenfreude…the what we consider “wrong.”

Like most things involving the human psyche, this isn’t black and white, rather it exists on a spectrum. There is wonderful thrill of pleasure we feel when a speeder gets a (deserved) ticket that can go as far as total dehumanization of others and a delight at their complete destruction.

Schadenfreude is story jet fuel.

Before you might believe you are too “evolved” for such feelings, how many movie plots pivot on the bullies finally getting a taste (or more) of their own medicine? When there is a gross power imbalance, and that imbalance is abused, we humans can turn positively feral.

One of my favorite authors, Lucy Foley, wields schadenfreude like few other authors I’ve read. The Guest List and The Midnight Feast are page-turning dark delights. Alice Berman is another author who uses this darker side of human nature to create a thrilling story in I Eat Men Like Air.

Why do I love these books? Because these authors (stories) pick apart “the beautiful people.” From old money to self-anointed Instagram influencer demi-gods-in -their-own-minds, these stories pry at something primal in all of us…that some people are “better.”

Instead of characters who are grateful for a blessed life dripping in privilege, they are the entitled. They amuse themselves at the suffering of others purely for sport. Not only that, but they take great delight in how they, themselves, are above the rules. When these sorts of people commit crimes, the “real” world cannot punish them.

But Author Gods can.

Lovely Loathing

Foley and Berman are of the suspense-thriller variety, but Kevin Follet is another author who is unparalleled at whipping up a fire of resentment that rivals the fires of Gehenna. When I read Pillars of the Earth, I literally had to keep taking breaks reading the book because my own level of hatred overwhelmed me.

Like any book, Pillars of the Earth isn’t for everyone. It nearly wasn’t for me. Every time I considered throwing in the towel, I I found I couldn’t stop because I HAD to know if there was any kind of justice in this mad, mad world.

All of these books have a common thread. Raw, beautiful exquisite revenge justice.

We are ALL wired with a sense of right and wrong.

Even sociopaths have a sense of justice.

Read Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door. A sociopath might not lose any sleep emptying your bank account, but would be horrified if you did the same to him.

Follet masterfully wove situations where I was rendered utterly and hopelessly powerless.

What is the epitome of being a victim? ZERO POWER. When evil strikes, what does it do to a person?

It strips away their power.

From money crimes to sex crimes, to hate crimes to murder it’s the same. Arson, abduction, terrorism, shootings, sex trafficking, burglaries, large-scale vandalism, gossip, slander, lies, it hits us all in the same place.

It makes us afraid and vulnerable and impotent.

What makes it worse? When we KNOW who’s done this, but this is a person no one can touch.

This was what made me practically foam at the mouth reading Pillars of the Earth. Because the story is (loosely) based on actual history. In the Middle Ages, nobility and high-ranking clergy got away with a LOT of really, really bad things.

Talk about powerlessness to the power of a thousand.

*Kristen punching things* *grabbing for inhaler* *ponders subscribing to Hallmark channel*

Yet, it kept me listening (turning pages) because I could not rest until the world was set right and justice was served. I wasn’t even sure it would be or could be. And if it was, HOW?

THAT, my friends, is some fine storytelling (so I am extremely glad I didn’t return the book). Also, THAT is the raw power of schadenfreude.

Villains & Schadenfreude

There are many ways to create legendary villains. And, keep in mind, there are different types of villains. Though, I recommend giving the villain a sympathetic goal, like the word wrong exists on a spectrum, so does the word sympathetic.

I get that far too many “normal people” think writing is easy. That if they only had enough time they’d be the next J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin. Sadly, no number of lockdowns is enough to disabuse some folks of the notion that storytelling is more than playing with imaginary friends.

To tell great stories, we are required to think differently than regular people.

***Refer to 13 Reasons Writers are Mistaken for Serial Killers

A book is more than a lot of flowery words, it is a peek into what makes people tick. Which is all well and good except some people’s “clockwork” is arguably manufactured in HELL.

Villains (antagonists) cannot want what they want for no reason. “Just cuz” is not good enough. When storytelling, we must be capable of violence. That is the only way for the “happy ending” to have any meaning.

***And before you think this is only for gritty genres, remember most fairy tales have some pretty horrifying villains.

Even the most revolting people in all the works I have thus far mentioned, deep down, believed themselves the heroes of their own stories. No matter how horrible they were, they genuinely could not see themselves honestly. Their world was a funhouse mirror designed to warp them into something they were not.

That said, some characters deserve destruction for one simple reason.

They are beyond redemption.

They are the rabid dogs of fiction. Writers and audiences alike know that to let some characters live or remain free is unacceptable. They are poison.

Why schadenfreude is such an incredible literary device is because it speaks to justice, which is universal. When crafting a villain (or even side characters who serve as antagonists), what universal rules are they breaking? Why? How? Now, can you dig deeper until the pages BLEED?

Villains & Cognitive Distortion

To a degree, all characters in our story are dealing with cognitive distortions. If they aren’t, then they aren’t interesting. All humans struggle with personalizing, catastrophizing, minimizing, justifying, unattainable standards, wishful thinking, etc.

In fact, for your touring pleasure, here is a list of 50 Common Cognitive Distortions.

All characters should have a cognitive distortion–to a degree–because all characters should arc.

While the MC or other positive forces (allies), grow, mature and evolve, the villain does the opposite. The villain devolves. They become even more convinced of their righteous cause, even more controlling, raise their already absurd standards to new levels of ridiculous, etc.

Ideally, we will give some reason for why the villain does what he does or believes what he believes. While we might not be able to, say, empathize with the actual cognitive distortion, we (the audience) can empathize with either having experienced the distortion ourselves OR the reason for the distortion.

For example, I cannot relate to the same level of entitlement as Francesca Meadows in The Midnight Feast. I am not old money, reared to believe I am privileged and entitled BUT I DO viscerally remember the first time I met another kid named “Kristen” and the raw fury I felt that another kid in my preschool had MY NAME!

MY NAME. MINE.

It’s a silly example, but she had to be destroyed that childlike rage is something a good story can tap into to give us the proverbial “sympathy for the devil.”

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin

The Bible, in the Book of Daniel, tells the story of Belshazzar, who was King Nebuchadnezzar’s successor. Talk about a guy with an ego problem! He holds a banquet for all the nobility and thinks that calling for all the holy vessels from the Jewish Temple is a great idea…since they totally didn’t have enough cups *flips hair*.

What Belshazzar didn’t know—and likely would not have cared even if he did—was that he’d committed a great sacrilege. Y’all know the phrase we toss around, “Read the writing on the wall.” Well, this is where it comes from.

After Belshazzar uses all the holy vessels as Dixie Cups for his Meta-Influencer BBQ, a disembodied hand appears and writes Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin on the wall.

He can’t read the writing on the wall (nod to Shakespeare and IRONY) and calls for Daniel to translate the message, which was in Aramaic.

God tells Belshazzar that 1) his days are numbered (another nod to Shakespeare) 2) that his kingdom will fall, and 3) that he has been weighed, measured and found wanting.

There are good reasons that we find all the best stories mirrored in Scripture or Shakespeare.

Humans don’t change, and if humans don’t change, then—ipso facto—villains don’t change.

The entitled trust fund baby can genuinely believe they are “better” than others. Yet, though they are deeply believe they are better than others, they simultaneously fear their days are numbered. Frequently, they know that while they are better than everyone else, they’re never “good enough” for the person (people) who matters.

Additionally, with villains like this, their pride becomes their Achille’s Heel. They so wrapped up in their agenda, they are blind. Because they are blind, they cannot help but fall.

And none of us (readers) mind if they’re given a little push.

Schadenfreude & Catharsis

From Edgar Allen Poe’s The Telltale Heart to Kathryn Stockett’s The Help we audiences aren’t happy until there is some form of comeuppance.

***Ironically, in The Telltale Heart the MC is the villain. His own inborn sense that evil cannot go unpunished is the point of the story.

All stories are only as strong as their villains. If we are wishy washy on the villain, the rest of the book is bland. When we hold back on our villain, we inadvertently wreck our stakes.

There is something primal in all good stories. Humans have deep sympathy for the unavenged, the disappeared, and the disenfranchised. Every day, we see injustice and evil, and every day we know that the people causing much of this suffering will never be called to account.

Writers & Schadenfreude

Do you wield a little schadenfreude when you write?

I always find it a bit funny when readers ask if my villains are based on people I know because…DUH. YES. #SeriouslyDumbQuestion

Are they wholly patterned off ONE person? No. That would be copying not creating. They’re a collage of a million little events that made me…ME. And I get to enjoy a little bit if schadenfreude by casting them in my world .

*insert evil laughter*

It’s very therapeutic and cheaper than a defense attorney.

Do you see how just a touch of schadenfreude can also help with a “too perfect” character (maybe an MC)?

“Cutting someone down to size” is enjoyable in life and in fiction. Though we didn’t go into it today, can you see how schadenfreude can work in a redemption story, a love story, or wherever a character needs to grown and learn some humility?

I LOVE hearing from you!

Had you ever heard the term schadenfreude? Are you now committed to now finding ways to work this word into everyday conversation? Do you enjoy books and movies that deal out at least a little revenge?

Am I the only person who revels when a hidden cop pulls over a reckless driver?

Thoughts? Opinions? Favorite tales of schadenfreude?

And remember, my perennial author branding book, Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World and my mystery thriller The Devil’s Dance are both on sale on Kindle right now for only .99.

Whether it is comments, shares, sales, or reviews, these are the things that keep us content producers (and authors) going and able to keep delivering. I always appreciate your support and love being able to keep doing this for you!

The post Schadenfreude: Misfortune, Revenge, Justice & Catharsis appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Stakes, bizarrely enough, are a key ingredient missing in many stories. If the characters don’t have skin in the game, why would the audience? The bigger the stakes the better the page turner. Whether on the page or on the screen, what keeps audiences enraptured the most? What makes us spend an entire weekend inhaling a book, a series, or binging that Netflix series?

We want to have to know…what happens.

How does the MC react to a certain problem? Can they recover? Do they win? At what cost? Ultimately, we have to know how it all turns out.

That is the beauty of stories and why we humans love them so much. Real life has stakes but little to no assurances that everything will work out for the better.

Life has plenty of stakes but little to no closure. It is no coincidence that one of the first “matchmaking” sites on the internet was Classmates.com. So many of us, new to the shiny internet, finally had a way of looking up people we once went to school with to see what happened.

Did the Homecoming Court really go on and lead the same charmed life they seemed to enjoy in high school? What about the bully? The smart kid? How about that crush we never quite had the courage to talk to? Did we miss out on a gem or dodge a bullet?

Stakes are the fuel that fires our need for closure. This is critical for any story. Read a book to a five-year-old and try to stop halfway through. Even kids won’t let us off easy. Because of the rising stakes, they’ll want to know, “How does it end?”

Stakes and Structure

Last post, we discussed agency and we took an aerial tour of plot structure. We toured all the major sections of plot, what they do, and how one section should feed into the next.

Now before you guys get the vapors and think I’m boxing you into some rigid format that will ruin your creativity, nothing could be further from the truth.

Plot (storytelling) is about elements, those things that go into the mix of making a good story even better.

Structure is about timing—where in the mix those elements go.

When you read a novel that isn’t quite grabbing you, the reason is probably structure. Even though it may have good characters, snappy dialogue, and intriguing settings, the story isn’t unfolding in the optimum fashion. ~James Scott Bell from Plot and Structure.

Structure holds stories together and helps them make sense and flow in such a way so as to maximize the emotional impact by the end of the tale. How we keep ratcheting emotions is we layer on higher and higher stakes.

If structure is the recipe for a fine meal, the stakes are how, and when we apply the heat. We can buy all the fanciest ingredients for a French meal. Have all the expensive doo-dads. We can measure out every ingredient to the milligram but what happens if we never turn on the heat? Or, conversely, we cook everything on the highest heat possible?

While we DO need to look at how to add the ingredients, timing how we heat the story makes the difference between a masterpiece and a mess.

The Micro-Scale of Story Structure

We’re going to first ZOOM IN and place the novel under a literary electron microscope.

The most fundamental basics of a novel are cause and effect. Super basic. An entire novel can be broken down into cause-effect-cause-effect-cause-effect (yes, even literary works). All effects must have a cause and all causes eventually must have an effect (or a good explanation).

I know that in life random things happen and people die for no reason. While life often IS stranger than fiction, fiction ain’t life.

So if a character drops dead from a massive heart attack, that seed needs to be planted ahead of time.

Villains don’t just have their heart explode because we need them to die so we can end our book. Our MC can’t suddenly discover a journal that EXPLAINS EVERYTHING in the middle of Act Two because we failed to properly plot an actual story and painted ourselves in a literary corner.

Now, all these little causes and effects clump together to form the next two building blocks we’ll discuss—the scene & the sequel (per Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure). Many times these will clump together to form your ‘chapters.’

Whenever I edit or teach writing, I have a mantra: “Never leave a logical place to put a bookmark.”

Scene & Sequel & Stakes

Word order matters, or we end up with confusion.

Structure’s two main components, as I said earlier, are the scene and the sequel.

The scene is a fundamental building block of fiction. It is physical. Something tangible is happening. The scene has three parts (again per Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure, which I recommend every writer buy and read and study).

• Statement of the goal
• Introduction and development of conflict
• Failure of the character to reach his goal, a tactical disaster (raise the stakes)

Goal –> Conflict –> Disaster

The sequel is the other fundamental building block and is the emotional thread. The sequel often begins at the end of a scene when the viewpoint character has to process the unanticipated but logical disaster that happened at the end of your scene.

Emotion–> Thought–> Decision–> Action

Link scenes and sequels together and flesh over a narrative structure and you will have a novel readers will enjoy.

Oh but Kristen you are hedging me in to this formulaic writing and I want to be creative.

Understanding structure is not formulaic writing. It is a story delivery system that makes sense on a fundamental level.

Formulaic writing refers to the execution of story structure. It’s a reflection of skill, or rather, lack thereof. So relax, structure is your friend. It will make writing and finishing books easier, and it comes with the added bonus of not confusing the bejeezus out of the readers.

This little recipe also helps us slowly (and later quickly) turn up the heat on our characters.

Skin in the Game

One of the biggest mistakes I see, particularly with new writers, is we can be too nice. There is a good reason normal people (code for “readers”) eye us writers with a deserved degree of suspicion. It takes a certain level of sadism to write great stories. When any mere boring mortal would want to back away from pressure or explain away a problem, we writers must plunge ahead and let the characters and (by proxy) the readers suffer.

The more they suffer, the better.

Why do you think A Game of Thrones was such a worldwide phenomenon? Huge, huge stakes! Global and personal. We, the audience, learned pretty quickly not to get too attached to any one character because they were likely to not only die, but die horribly.

So long as the HBO writers stuck with that recipe, global audiences couldn’t get enough. The minute they rushed the story, broke the rules and took away the stakes? The series imploded into a disaster.

Refer to post: A Game of Thrones: A Song of ‘I Literally Can’t Even’

A major reason the HBO series devolved into disaster is they’d done an incredible job of raising global and personal stakes. Stakes drove audiences to forgive major delays in later seasons. We were all biting our nails to the quick, our nerves shredded…then the characters all got a magical pass.

Spoiler Alert: Ice Zombies no big deal and winter never came.

How Vested are Your Characters?

When we craft any story, we must ask ourselves, “What do they have to lose?”

I love pretty prose probably far more than the next person, but using cerulean instead of blue is not what makes audiences care. We aren’t there for the wordsmithery, yet it is very easy for us writers to fixate on a new way of saying green instead of focusing on the bits that matter.

If you go look at most of the authors who are guaranteed to sell a lot of books, usually the prose is fairly plain. These authors understand it is the story that matters most. Stakes are what will stake our reader in place and refuse to let them go until THE END.

Thus, ask yourself:

What happens if my MC fails?

Who suffers if my MC fails?

How does their world change for the worse if the MC fails?

If nothing changes, we are missing a key ingredient to our story. As the story progresses, the challenges will get harder physically and emotionally. Our characters need a compelling reason to keep going.

Upping the Stakes

Going back to my recipe metaphor, there is a time and place to up the stakes and to back off a bit.

Have you ever been to an action movie that was just fight scene after chase scene after fight scene? You never got a chance to take a breath and walked away needing a nap…or a drink?

Here is an instance of the writers either making the sequels too short in duration or not having enough overall. The sequel is the breather where the characters process and act/react to what’s happening. If our sequels are missing or underdeveloped, this can make our characters come across as one-dimensional.

Audiences don’t care deeply about those kinds of characters.

Then we have the opposite. Sometimes filmmakers try to take stories that are excellent on the page—because audiences have the window into what the characters are thinking via the narrative—and put it on film.

Problem is, you have to cast really, and I mean really superlative actors to pull it off…and even then *yawns*

These are frequently the artsy films that seem to never take off. All the stakes are internal, existential and…meta. While critics might love them, usually these films are a flop with regular audiences.

In fact, any time I see the phrase “a visual masterpiece” I know the movie is likely to suck.

Do both these “genres” have a fan base? Sure.

There will always be people who will go to the next Mission Impossible move just like there will always be folks, pinkies outstretched, who loooove anything at Cannes. Yet, those are the fringes and, if we want to reach the biggest audience, the fat middle part of the bell curve is a better bet.

The Goldilocks Zone

When it comes to most genre fiction, we should look to the scenes and sequels for cues as to where, how and how much to raise or lower the stakes.

If we go back to our example last week with LOTR (Lord of the Rings). When Frodo and Samwise set off from the Shire WE the audience know they are eventually going to have to destroy the ring in Mount Doom…but they don’t. Had Tolkien started off with that, Gandalf would never have pried the Hobbits from under the bed.

On each leg of the adventure, there is a resting period and then Tolkien ups the heat. He makes the invading armies closer than they realized, bigger than they imagined, and he progressively shortens the ticking clock.

What if we aren’t writing epic high fantasy?

Genre and Stakes

I have a post where y’all can go check out the different genres. We need to know what genre we are writing so we know what the rules are. And yes, we need to follow the rules. We need to know the rules to break the rules. That is art. Breaking rules we don’t know is just called being a hack.

If I am writing a mystery, then I know my story needs to open with a crime and that the entire point of the story is figuring out whodunit (And Then There Were None). Writing a thriller? A big bad thing happens at the beginning…and it is a race against time to stop way bigger bad thing from happening (Jurassic Park).

On and on. Look at your story’s genre and see what the reader expectations are…then feel free to break rules to deliver what they wanted but never expected in that way (Gone Girl).

Stake Sizzlers

What are some ways we can organically up the stakes in our story? Remember to Be a Secret Keeper. Resist the urge to explain. Audiences, in large part, are hanging on because they want to find OUT some piece of information. This is why flashbacks, by and large, are a no-no.

If we know WHY Eric Northman (in True Blood) is dark and brooding the first time we see him, it kills the thrill. Yes he is a vampire and they are a notoriously emo bunch, but why is he uniquely emo? Unlike (IMO the tedious Bill Compton) Eric Northman was far more interesting because we didn’t get all this backstory right out of the gate.

He remained a mystery longer, which was why I felt he was a far more powerful driver for the series.

Hold off on self-actualization. Characters who are too sane, too evolved and too emotionally healthy are a fiction snooze fest. The trick is that they are likely to believe they have their sh!t together…when that is far from the case. OR, if they know they’re a mess, they will vastly underrate their faults, over magnify their virtues or completely miss what their issues are altogether.

The story then, should be designed to peel away their self-delusion and make them face their darkness so they can change for the better.

The MC must be sympathetic and redeemable. Before anyone shouts me down, I get this has a lot of latitude. Antiheroes and anti villains are becoming increasingly popular. That said, there are certain lines we cannot cross with most audiences. Feel free to join in the thirteen-year-long argument on my post What Went Wrong with the Star Wars Prequels?

Anakin Skywalker is a little kid killer. Never redeemable. Ever. The end.

What are your thoughts?

Do you struggle with being too nice to your characters? I know I still do. Often I have to go back and write in some mess ups to keep the tension going. Are you bad about over sharing? Over explaining? Can you see some tricks in here to keep audiences wanting more?

I love hearing from you! Anything you’d like to add? Maybe books, series or movies that handled stakes really well? Do you have any questions? Topics you’d like for me to explore in future blogs?

And remember, my perennial author branding book, Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World and my mystery thriller The Devil’s Dance are both on sale on Kindle right now for only .99.

Whether it is comments, shares, sales, or reviews, these are the things that keep us content producers (and authors) going and able to keep delivering. I always appreciate your support and love being able to keep doing this for you!

The post Stakes: How to Hook an Audience All the Way to THE END appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Agency means a condition of being in action, instrumental, or possessing some kind of power. It can incorporate not only making decisions, but the belief that we (or our characters) have choice. If we think about it, if there aren’t options, then by default, our characters have no power and are not making any decisions. They are the flotsam and jetsam being flung along by the currents of Fate.

Code for “boring.”

I’ve been editing fiction for over twenty years, and one of the biggest problems I see with new writers is that the “story” is really just a series of bad things happening. There is no agency. The character is totally reactive. To a degree, this is fine in the opening salvos of the story.

To a degree.

If we parse apart novel structure, what we will see (especially with good stories) is that there is a steady progression of agency that flows in tandem with rising pushback, higher stakes, and a steadily compressed ticking clock.

My favorite writing instructor for plot is Larry Brooks. His “How To” Story Engineering, for me, was a game changer. For years I knew how to edit a plot, but when I sat down to write, everything just sort of fell apart. I’d read craft books or take classes and, what seemed so simple and doable, always turned to utter mush roughly 25,000 to 30,000 words in.

Many of you might know what I am talking about.

You come up with a BRILLIANT story idea and begin writing. The first 10,000 words are amazing! The words flow and you write until you think your hands might fall off.

By about 15,000 to 20,000 you begin losing steam.

After 28,000 to 30,000 it starts feeling like it might be easier to do brain surgery from space…with an egg beater. #KillMeNow

Why is that?

Structure and Agency

I love, love, love the way Larry teaches us how to think about plot (and recommend the book, obviously). He gave me a simple way of thinking about all my stories in a way that keeps me always moving forward.

Additionally, if I do get stuck, I can quickly diagnose WHY and where and how I am going wrong.

I prefer to think of story in five acts (just an expansion of Aristotelian three-act structure).

The opening is Normal World. This is usually pretty short, especially in our modern age where audiences have the attention span of a crack addicted fruit fly…that also happens to have severe ADD.

Yet, Normal World is CRITICAL. This is where we (the audience) will meet the protagonist we are supposed to care about enough to dedicate time, money and attention we don’t have for an average of 12-15 hours. It is also where we get an idea of the problem this character will have to face and overcome to be rightfully called a hero.

In the LOTR (Lord of the Rings), we begin in the Shire. Why? Because we have to actually care about the Hobbits and the Shire. We cannot be vested in a people and place we don’t know.

The inciting incident, introduces the core story problem. If there is no hint that Sauron is alive and well and living in Beverly Hills Mount Doom, there really is no point to us even meeting Gandalf and the Hobbits. But keep in mind, no decision has yet been made.

When Gandalf sticks a ring Frodo inherits into the fire, he only believes the ring possibly maybe might be THE RING. For Frodo and Samwise, the adventure has not yet begun.

In Normal World, the character will have very little to no agency…until…

Turning Point to Act One: Agency Sparked

The inciting incident reveals a fork in the road. This is where the MC’s life bifurcates. One road leads to retaining the status quo. The other road leads to adventure.

Yet, the character must choose of their own free will to set out on adventure.

Events cannot simply fling them ahead. Granted, they will be signing up for far more than they can handle, but (at the time) they don’t know that. They also need to have some vague idea of what the adventure entails. To toss characters out into the world and push them from point to point is NOT dramatic tension.

It’s soap opera writing.

Which is fine for fan fiction (episodic writing), but not great for novels, novellas, short stories or screenplays.

When Frodo and Samwise leave the Shire, their goal is NOT to destroy the Ring of Power in Mount Doom. It is far simpler. It is simply to meet Gandalf at The Prancing Pony. While scary and out of the comfort zone, it is (to them) still doable. Additionally, they know the adventure is in some way tethered to a ring dangerous enough to even scare the great Gandalf the Grey.

Act One: Running

In Act One, our MC will be largely reactive. They don’t yet believe they have agency, though they still must exercise it for a good story.

For instance, Gandalf doesn’t force Frodo and Samwise to meet him. They agree to leave the safety of the Shire.

Additionally, it isn’t Frodo and Samwise’s fault they miss Gandalf at the rendezvous point. However, they must choose to trust Strider. They have to choose to either stay at The Prancing Pony (or return after the Black Riders have left and hide) OR to follow a stranger they don’t know into the wild.

We authors must always provide opportunities where, if the character(s) makes a decision, one decision pushes the narrative forward and the other ends the story.

What Does this Look Like?

For instance, in the movie Labyrinth, we meet Sarah faffing off in a park in costume reciting lines from a play. In Normal World, Sarah is flaky, entitled, immature (but also clearly hurting).

The inciting incident is when she discovers her missing teddy bear and decides to be emotional and take her out anger on her infant brother. She chooses to recite the call to the Goblin King to take her baby brother.

Granted, she has zero clue it will work, BUT when it does work and David Bowie materializes—looking far too sexy for a grown ass man in makeup and big hair—and offers her a chance to have all her dreams…the story truly begins.

One decision lets him rule her, give her all she ever desires…if she only turns over her baby brother. The other decision is to race against the clock and see if she can rescue her brother from the center of the labyrinth.

Obviously, if she gives up baby brother, the story ends. And an entire generation of preteen girls, myself included, took 25 years to work out why she didn’t grab the deal.

Quick Note on Labyrinth

Movies can be a lot of fun to study, especially good ones. If you haven’t seen Labyrinth or have slept since then, I recommend going back and watching. I learn something new every time. In fact, the last time I watched it I learned a whole new level I’d missed, but had been there all along.

Roll with this and indulge me, it’s actually cool/important.

Sarah arrives late to babysit her brother. We (the audience) are somewhat misled. The stepmother points out exactly what Sarah’s problem is. Sarah is stuck and not growing up normally. The stepmother tells Sarah that she can say if she has plans, that they want her to have plans and she should have her own plans, but Sarah balks. She treats her like the evil stepmother out of a storybook no matter what she says.

Dad backs up stepmother. This event is what drives Sarah into a temper tantrum.

But pay attention.

Dad is obviously remarried and remarried long enough to have an 18 month old baby. One would assume, given the times, that Dad and Stepmother had dated and married before the 9-10 months to have the brother. This means a minimum of 2.5 to as much as 3 or more years has passed since Sarah’s mother was in the picture.

My entire life, I assumed Mom had died, since Hollywood loved killing off parents. Watch the introduction when she is in her room. Played at normal speed, we see playbills with the mother and even with Sarah.

Okay, so mom was an actress and daughter is a theater nerd following in mom’s footsteps.

Or is she?

Now PAUSE the MOVIE

Now, go back and rewatch and hit PAUSE. If you do this, the entire story changes. Pay attention to the newspaper clippings taped in her vanity mirror, the clippings that at normal speed I’d assumed were likely an obituary or newspaper articles about a famous but now dead mother.

Whose face do you see?

JARETH, the Goblin King.

In among the articles and scrapbook clippings a whole new story emerges.

Jareth looks just like the mother’s costar. What now seems far more likely is the mother ran off with another man and abandoned her daughter at roughly age 12-13…exactly the time she should have started transitioning into adulthood.

This is a whole other level of emotional damage.

It now makes perfect sense why Sarah is emotionally moored in childhood. Additionally, a sparkly, charismatic man offering to take care of her if she sacrifices a child in her care, has a whole new twist.

If great movies understand the power of Normal World, we should too. Every story should introduce the Big Boss Troublemaker right from the start.

In Labyrinth we get this in the park where she’s reciting the final lines to take down the Goblin King. BUT, we ALSO see him again in her bedroom in the moments before she recites the incantation that sets off all events from there.

Act One: REACTIVE

Once our MC decides to step out on adventure, sure, there will be a lot they cannot control. Yet, they still must have agency, meaning options.

New writers can be very bad about making the MC far too passive. They have no other choice but to do X, Y, Z. This is author intrusion.

Now, I am not suggesting to make the options silly. The Hobbits aren’t choosing between trusting Strider and certain death. They could circle back to the inn for shelter or decide to hide in the woods and wait it out for Gandalf. The choices might suck, but they are at least doable.

Agency is limited in Act One because not only should we have a plot arc, but a character arc. If characters are too perfect and can handle everything the story throws their way with dignity and aplomb? That is a snooze fest.

There has to be something emotionally undeveloped that must change by the end of the story.

For the Hobbits, they believe their happiness and fulfillment lies in adventure, in anywhere BUT the Shire. The very place they despise for being boring will be the one place they’ll (eventually) be willing to sacrifice their lives to save from certain destruction.

For Sarah, she’s stuck in nostalgia and is refusing to evolve. Again, when she steps into the magical realm, who does she meet? Hoggle. Again, Hoggle tells her what her problem is, but she is not yet matured enough to appreciate the advice. He tells her, “You take too much for granted.”

Taking things for granted is a hallmark of childhood. It is, in fact, a mark of ZERO AGENCY.

Act Two: Warrior

Act One is relatively short. How do we spot the turning point to Act Two? This is when the MC shifts from running to fighting. In Act One, circumstances bigger than them are beating the hell out of them. They fight back but are really hitting in the dark. They are unaware of what the larger story problem is and probably still unaware of their character flaws that are holding them back.

Act Two is when some sort of event or information changes the MC’s perspective and their level of agency. They go to being a mix of reactive and increasingly proactive.

When the Hobbits take refuge with the elves, Gandalf confirms that Sauron is back and there is only way to stop him. At this point, the Hobbits still can go BACK to the Shire. Rather, they willingly decide to keep going. Frodo will bear the Ring and Samwise will act as a helper/bodyguard.

In Labyrinth, Sarah is stuck in an oubliette (a small prison cell). The adventure has effectively ended. Hoggle comes to her aid and is happy to lead her back home and out of the labyrinth. If she goes home, story over. Yet, we are in Act Two. Sarah bribes Hoggle to help her solve the labyrinth.

She has effectively taken on a new level of agency.

Act Two will be the longest act. Again, I recommend Story Engineering. Larry has some great diagrams and formulas and examples. But, in Act Two, the thing we must remember is our characters must have increasing levels of agency.

NO CHEATING!

Maybe your character is far too perfect. Or the opposite. They don’t have any of the right answers…they are just luckier than a leprechaun dressed in a coat made of rabbit’s feet.

Bad thing happens—Oh no what will we do?—then some existing character or new character rescues them out of the mess at zero cost and with no effort from them.

NO.

This is the part of the book where many new writers decide to leave a convenient journal, video, have a new character appear with all the abilities and answers. NO.

Y’all might know I love horror (supernatural type books), and I read…a lot. Recently, I listened to a book with a premise that had a lot of promise. I couldn’t finish it.

The characters had no agency. Instead of them actively having to find answers to why crazy/life-threatening stuff was happening in their basement, the author used a crap ton of seriously convenient “dream sequences” that served as flashbacks to spoon feed vital details.

NO.

Flashbacks are a sign of weak/lazy writing.

Before anyone argues with me, check out Why Flashbacks Ruin Fiction and Time as a Literary Device. Can we mess with time? Sure! I love doing that. But like all things in writing, the rules exist for a reason. There is a certain WAY to go about using time.

Tossing in hidden boxes of journals or videos slipping in dream sequences absolves the characters of responsibility. In short, it takes away agency. Handing characters the answers all-but-spelled-out is cheating.

Bright Idea Fairies and Agency

Since Act Two IS so long, you’ll have what are called “pinch points.” This marks how our character is not only progressing along via plot, but how they are emotionally maturing. Since they are not yet fully evolved, they’ll try to rely on their old ways of thinking. They haven’t yet come to understand that their old habits/worldview etc. is precisely part of the problem.

Which is why, as they are trying to solve the core story problem, they will have what I call “bright idea fairies.”

Usually the “bright idea fairy” will be in some way related to the character flaw. If your MC is a workaholic who needs to appreciate life and family, expect them to orchestrate events where they can have BOTH (Inviting the wife and kids to a company event).

Maybe your MC is a fighter. Their instinct will be to fight. If they hide and avoid, they’ll look for better ways to hide and avoid. If they’re a control freak, they’ll keep white-knuckling and refuse to trust others and delegate.

In Labyrinth, Sarah is taking on increasing levels of responsibility, but not enough. She is still far too reliant on her allies.

Bright Idea Fairies (BIFs) are directly responsible for the False Victory and, by default, the Darkest Moment.

The False Victory is the Big Boss BIF, the brightest of the Bright Idea Fairies. It is the last event that should prove to our MC they must make those final changes that transform them from a lowly MC (protagonist) into a hero.

The Darkest Moment is where everything has failed and the protagonist is dumped unceremoniously at the final crossroad. One road leads home (and to failure), the other plunges ahead into certain death (or at least implied certain death).

Agency Unleashed: Act Three HERO

After the darkest moment, we usually see the rally of the allies. Once everything has been stripped away, what matters is restored. HOWEVER. The difference here is that the hero finally understands they must go it alone. Only ONE character can take on the Big Boss Troublemaker.

***Or two if this is a Buddy Love structure like LOTR or a romance. Yet, the two have effectively become one. In romance, guy and gal must come together if they hope to be victorious. Yes, they can spend the entire book driving each other bonkers BUT they must come together like VOLTRON in order to win.

This is the climax of the story. The odds should be total sh!t. In fact, the worse the odds, the better the story. That and time should be almost out. If the MC fails, super bad things need to happen or we will not care.

These can be large-scale catastrophic implications. Sauron rules Middle Earth and destroys all Frodo and Samwise hold dear, OR personal catastrophic implications. Sarah loses her little brother forever.

By Act Three, your character has ditched the old self and is now battling the BBT (Big Boss Troublemaker) on new terms. Frodo and Samwise willingly accept a suicide mission to protect the Shire.

Sarah goes in to face Jareth on her own. How does she win? She claims her AGENCY.

“You have no power over me.”

Once she finally realizes that Jareth only has as much power as she has been willing to relinquish, he loses his hold over her.

The Denoument: Agency Realized

After the battle is won, the world might be in shambles but everything has changed for the better. Yes, the end of every Marvel movie means some big city is reduced to rubble, but the greater threat has been neutralized.

At the end of LOTR, we see an interesting bookending in the movie.

In the beginning, the Hobbits (mistakenly) believe adventure outside of the Shire is the key to personal fulfillment. They are naive and childlike which is largely why Sauron never offered them jewelry.

He underestimated that the very qualities that nearly get them killed (frying bacon on a mountain with dead kings on their trail) is also what makes them remarkably resilient to the sway of the Ring (and arguably the only reason they succeed when all other races have failed).

Yet, there is a cost.

Unlike the opening in Normal World, our heroes aren’t bouncing along getting into mischief. They sit, somber and broken at a table, forever changed. Their fellow Hobbits laugh and drink and joke in the background, oblivious to the sacrifice these Hobbits made to make that a reality.

They have learned that self-serving adventure is not the secret to happiness, rather sacrificial love is the key to joy.

The book is vastly different than the movies. In the book, the Shire does not survive in tact.

It is razed, and the Hobbits killed or enslaved. Life is no longer beautiful and innocent. Those in the Shire live in fear and are barely surviving.

Our band of heroes return expecting a hero’s welcome only to come to the horrible realization the battle is far from over. The biggest fight is yet to come. They must liberate the Hobbits and rebuild what remains of their home.

That said, while everything they knew and took for granted is obliterated, they can finally rebuild in a world that is no longer under constant threat.

Unlike the other Hobbits who have bowed down to their oppressors, Frodo, Samwise, Merry and Pippin pass on their lessons and show their fellow Hobbits they have more power than they know.

Using Agency in Our Writing

The key thing to remember about agency is that our character must always be actively involved in the decision making process. They can and WILL make a lot of bad decisions. Yet, over time, as they mature, these decisions will vastly improve.

I use this when I am writing. It doesn’t matter if we are a plotter who loves outlines or a pantser (write by the seat of our pants). In fact, for the pansters here, having an understanding of agency is KEY. It’s likely even more important since we rely more on intuition to write.

I am a Plotser

That means I create a log-line that says, overall, what my story is ABOUT. But it serves as a guideline to keep me pointed in the correct direction. If I know (usually by word count) that I am well into Act Two, then I know when my MC is being too passive.

Are they relying too much on others? Do they still react to everything as opposed to becoming increasingly proactive? Am I offering actual choices to my character, or am I just letting them drift along the riptide of bad situations? Am I cheating and allowing my characters to rely too much on luck?

Trust me. All these years later, I still have to delete sections because I recognize either the character is too evolved for so early in my story OR they need to do better because they can’t be so passive and dull-witted halfway into Act Two.

I hope you will now watch movies and read books with fresh eyes. Being a writer is a fabulous calling because watching movies, series, and reading books are all considered professional development.

I guarantee that if you see a story that breaks these rules, it is probably a story you either struggled to finish or didn’t like (but might not have been able to articulate WHY you didn’t like it.)

What are Your Thoughts?

Does this idea of agency help you better understand story flow? How you can use it to ratchet dramatic tension? Few things will make us turn pages like a character who has decisions but is making the wrong ones. Conversely, few things will turn us off like a character who keeps making the wrong decisions and fails to ever learn.

Does this help you in a place where you are stuck? Maybe offer some insights into how you can up the stakes? Can you now see better why you loved some stories or grew tired of others?

If we think about agency in terms we are familiar with, what comes to mind. Literary agent? This is a person with power we don’t have to make decisions where we cannot. Now zoom in on that feeling and make sure it’s in your stories.

I love hearing from you!

And remember, my perennial author branding book, Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World and my mystery thriller The Devil’s Dance are both on sale on Kindle right now for only .99. Also please grab a copy of Larry’s book! Especially for those who struggle with plot.

Whether it is comments, shares, sales, or reviews, these are the things that keep us content producers (and authors) going and able to keep delivering. I always appreciate your support and love being able to keep doing this for you!

The post Agency: The Critical Component of ALL Great Stories appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

How do we build an audience without coming across as a stalker crossbred with an MLM rep? This is no easy task, especially since most creative professionals don’t exactly shine in this area. Face it. If we’d been good at high pressure sales, we’d be languishing on our yacht along with other people who excel at high pressure sales (or in federal prison *shrugs*).

Suffice to say that it is really tough to shift gears from being artist to trying to build a following large enough to impact sales.

But does it need to be as hard as we can make it?

The answer is always “NO.” We writers are notorious for overcomplicating everything. So no. It does not need to be as hard as we make it.

If you read my last post on branding How to Create YOUR Audience: Identify, Connect, Convert, I talked about low-consideration purchases and high consideration purchases. Why is that important? Because we know that, when it comes to selling books, competing on price or give-aways is automatically a bad plan for 98% of authors. If your name rhymes with Stephen King? Be my guest. For the rest of us mere mortals….

Sometimes knowing what NOT to do is the best way to plan what one SHOULD DO.

If books (entertainment in general) is a high-consideration purchase, then we know we are going to have to curate our brand and build an audience. How do we do that with no books or only a book or a couple books?

We don’t build an audience as much as we build a TRIBE.

1,000 True Fans

In my book, Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World (ebook now on sale for .99), I talked about Keven Kelly’s post about 1,000 True Fans from 2008. I wrote Rise of the Machines to be evergreen. The point of the book is to teach you how humans think and why they like what they like.

Why did I write it?

Because I knew social media was going to be one more thing we authors needed to do if we wanted to be successful. If we had to build an audience, then I wanted y’all to know how to build and what to focus on.

Hint: NOT BIG NUMBERS.

Back then, the Big Six was still around and their marketing people were giving terrible advice.

Publishers and agents became fixated on vanity numbers. I worked with a lot of mega-authors who were household names. They were apoplectic and panicking because Such -and-Such had 100K followers and they didn’t.

It is really hard for most people to grasp that big numbers aren’t the be all and end all. What matters is how much the people who DO follow you CARE. What good does a million followers do me if none of them ever engage in what I post?

To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.

Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly said this sixteen years ago and it is still true today. In 2019, influencer Arianna Renee had an Instagram following of 2.3 million followers and she still couldn’t sell 36 t-shirts to launch her clothing line. She only needed to mobilize 0.000013% of her following and couldn’t do it.

This isn’t to depress you (I hope) as much as it is to encourage you. It is far better (and easier) to dig deep than spread wide.

Using Word Clouds to Build

If you haven’t read the last branding post, I strongly recommend you do because—as promised—today is more of a workshop.

I first want to point out that everyone has different skills, budgets, lives and likes. The whole reason I took a detour from writing to even teach branding is I wanted authors to have time left to do the things they loved to do most…to create. That said, our job isn’t all writing. We have editing, revisions, taxes, research, and did I mention taxes?

Suffice to say I would LOVE to have a formula where everyone only did things they wanted to do. I am good, but not that good. Secondly, if we think we are going to open a bunch of social media accounts and just automate and expect fans to materialize? That isn’t going to happen. It might feel like we have a brand and a platform, but there isn’t any engagement so there will be little loyalty.

Most likely we will get relegated as white noise. But, for those of y’all who have followed me any length of time, y’all know how I feel about automation. I don’t like eating spam, so I don’t serve it.

Why I came up with the word cloud is it gives you a better idea of WHAT and HOW to build and WHERE. Play to your strengths. The best social media platform to build is the one you will USE.

That said, too many writers hop on social media and our brains vapor lock.

I am a writer…so…I’ll talk about….writing.

Y’all ever had a relative, acquaintance or colleague who only ever talked about one thing ever? I had an uncle who only ever talked about sports. Despite him knowing I could not care less if baseball fell off the planet, it was all he talked about.

How many of y’all here enjoy hanging out with those people?

Brands are EMOTION

Whenever you do any kind of branding, the key is figuring out the overall emotion that you want to underpin everything. Advertisers have been doing this for over a century.

Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

What’s riding on your tires?

A diamond lasts forever.

Just Do It

In just a sentence, these brands convey the major emotional through-line that hooks people first. Obviously there is a lot more to these brands than just the one line, but who cares? If Nike sells tennis skirts or wristbands it is all powered by the call to get off our a$$es and do it!

Whether we like it or not, people will feel the same about us and our writing. The key emotion I wanted everyone to feel with me and my work is “safe.” It is why I named my first book We Are Not Alone: The Writer’s Guide to Social Media. I could have named my book Marketing for Writers but I would have rather thrown myself in traffic. WHY? Because most of us would rather throw ourselves in traffic than do this marketing stuff.

But since I knew we HAD to do it, at least we didn’t have to go it alone. It’s why I work to use so much humor and make fun of myself. There is no boneheaded idea you have I probably didn’t have first…but of course I believed it was GENIUS—until it blew up in my face like a “present” from ACME.

We (You) Are Not Alone

Yet, whether I am talking about fiction, branding, life in general, the core emotion is “this” is a safe place to be a hot mess. And that actually does bleed over into my fiction.

In The Devil’s Dance (ebook also now on sale for .99), Romi Lachlann did everything right and it still fell apart.

Romi grew up white trash in a tiny town on the road to nowhere. She “escapes” and gets her education and a premium job in tech sales…only to be left holding the metaphorical bag when her rich fiancé pulls an Enron-like scandal, disappears, and leaves her as the FBI’s prime suspect.

Broke, blackballed and out of options, she has no choice but to slink home, defeated and humiliated, to her Jerry-Springer-crazy-as-a-bag-of-frogs family…and then she and family run afoul of a cartel.

Whether y’all read my goofy blogs here or my fiction, it is pretty clear I am remaining true to my brand.

So that is what I would like to posit to all of you reading. What do you want other to FEEL when they see your name, read your posts, your blogs your books, etc? Because while we might post on all kinds of topics, depending on what kind of social media platform we choose to use, there will still be a certain flavor to what we post.

Kind of like our friends. We have the funny friend, the serious friend, the super mom, the sport friend, whatever…but that doesn’t mean that is ALL of who they are. When we have friends, ideally we talk about a lot of other things and experience the entire spectrum of emotion. If not? That is a pretty shallow friendship.

Our goal is to replicate that “emotional experience” on line, because whether I like it or not? Most of the people we know, like and bond with are going to be online.

Build the Foundation

The word cloud gives you not only a place to start the conversation, but the longer and more robust the cloud, the more accurate a profile you will have of your potential fan (the person most likely to gravitate to you and thus your books).

I asked y’all to submit word clouds to use as examples. I will do my best, but I will reiterate that the LONGER and more detailed the cloud, the better the results. But, I get it. It was a big ask and I am super happy a couple people were willing to be vulnerable.

What I like to do with the word cloud is to come up with that I call a branding log-line. It serves as a theme for the feeling you want to give your audience. Sort of like your own Diamonds are forever. I might not have We are not alone plastered everywhere, but if you look at the lion’s share of my content, the fingerprints are there in the way I build.

If you want to post your log-line as part of your website or blog? Go for it. Visitors will know what to expect.

Example #1 Deborah Ademola:

Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Barbara (Faroese tragic romance), Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Titanic (1997 movie), Barbara (1997 Danish movie adaptation), The Fellowship of the Ring, autumn, winter, blue, pink, purple, black, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Office (USA), Canaletto paintings, Monet, Renoir, watercolour landscapes, Sherlock Holmes, bread-making, soap, luxury hand wash, hollyhock, verdana, roses, hoards kalanchoe plants, crocuses, snowdrops, Soap & Glory lotion and hand cream, Foo Fighters, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, too much music to count, lives on Spotify and YouTube, Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, spagetti and tomato sauce, A Christmas Carol, Columbo, Sweet Home Chicago (Robert Johnson), Little Wing (Jimi Hendrix), relearning Chinese, Qin Empire Alliance series, obsessed with etymology, loves writing by hand, obsessed with medieval European calligraphy, also Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, qigong, obsessed with German rom-com Isi und Ossi, lifelong aficionado of Baroque music, Bach is the best!, always reading about five or six books at a time, walks almost everywhere, Resolve (Foo Fighters) almost brings me to tears, obsessed with Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras

Looking at this cloud, I could pull out…

Debroah Ademola: To Thine Own Self Be True

Deborah Ademola: But Here We Are

Deborah Ademola: Concrete & Gold

Deborah Ademola: All Roads Lead Home

Deborah Ademola: Nothing Left to Lose

Deborah Ademola: No Roses without Thorns

Deborah Ademola: Tiptoeing Through Time

Deborah Ademola: The World as a Canvas

Deborah Ademola: Garden in My Soul

Deborah Ademola: Pride & Prejudice in the Paleozoic

Deborah Ademola: One Rainy Wish

Once I have a log-line to work with, see how the content almost creates itself? All of these can be as broad or narrow as Deborah wants them to be. When we have just a tiny bit of a border to build in, that is when creativity kicks in.

She can look to her cloud and just be…herself. When on-line, if she simply talks and posts about the things she enjoys, other people who connect to those things will find her. Since people generally buy from who they know and like this is a good way to filter through the gazillions of people and find her people.

Example #2 Cherlyn Gatto:

Classics like Oliver Twist, Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, and The Lord of the Rings, Movies like The Bear, Gilmore Girls, This is Us, The Firm, Edison bulbs, kayaking, biking, all things melancholy, edgy, and redemptive, baking bread, farm life, sunsets, night skies, bonfires, warm blankets, cozy socks, Instagram reels of babies and puppies and surprise bears and crazy falls, The Monkees and 60s classic rock and Christian worship bands, dark chocolate, Starbucks Chestnut Praline Lattes at Christmas time, football games, rustic country anything, horseback riding, long car rides and road trips to anywhere, decorating Christmas cookies, thundershowers, sunflowers and meadows, definitely Apple over android and Starbucks over D&D, editing versus the blank page, fiction more than reality, days that open without commitments, approval from others, scheduling and organizing but not following through, wet earth in springtime, gravely voices, when my son sings in his band, ice water with lots of lemon, pine candles, fires in the hearth, corn hole and badminton and any game I can win.

Cherlyn Gatto: God Only Knows

Cherlyn Gatto: Murder, Mayhem and Cozy Socks

Cherlyn Gatto: For What It’s Worth

Cherlyn Gatto: Bad Moons and Bonfires

Cherlyn Gatto: Starry Nights and the Sudden Drop

Cherlyn Gatto: The Game of LIFE

Example #3 Barbara Meyers:

Family. Books. Reading. Fiction, Thrillers, suspense, mystery, sometimes “big” romance or “women’s” fiction. Bible, spirituality, prayer, observant, exercise, blue, salty snack foods. Raspberries, yogurt (vanilla), granola; dogs, walking, home improvement shows, cooking shows; Bourne movies, grandchildren, tee shirts, shorts, writing fiction; TikTok, psychology, human nature, personal growth, listening, cards (greeting and playing); kindness, friends, pens, journals, ideas, games, bubble baths, healthy, aesthetics, flipflops; Holidate, CJ Box, Nick Petrie, Robert Crais, Sandra Brown, Jane Casey, Claire McGowan, winter (in Florida, especially); ADD, weak follow through, Suduko, distracted, disorganized, poor career and business management ability; resists learning new things. Don’t bore me with details or directions. Quotes. Stand-up comedians, humor, laughter, smiles, adventures.

Barbara Meyers: The Rest is Just Details

Barbara Meyers: Leap of Faith

Barbara Meyers: Leap of Fai–NOPE!

Barbara Meyers: Spies, Lies & Flip Flops

Barbara Meyers: Precious Things

Barbara Meyers: Cloud on My Lips

Barbara Meyers: Got Sand in My Sanity

Example #4 Kathleen Saunders

I love reading, writing, my family and pets, all animals (the reason I’m vegetarian), the outdoors, our cottage at the lake, watching wildlife, walking, gardening, swimming, riding, teaching, continuing to learn daily, improving my French, travelling (especially Europe), The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, How to Stop Time, The Midnight Library, anything by Kate Atkinson, Ann Cleeves books, The Children of Men and anything by P.D James and Ruth Rendell, music (everything from Joe Cocker and Roy Orbison to Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars), Lost, Survivor, American Idol, and old movies, landscape paintings, and anything with an interesting use of colour especially with subjects from nature.

***Kathleen I am guessing at your last name so correct me if I am wrong.

Kathleen Saunders: When the Night Comes

Kathleen Saunders: Face in a Cloud

Kathleen Saunders: Sunshine on My Shoulders

Kathleen Saunders: Time in a Bottle

Kathleen Saunders: At the Stroke of Midnight

Kathleen Saunders: A Place in This World

Kathleen Saunders: Life on a String

Kathleen Saunders: Hands in the Dirt, Eyes on the Skies

Build With Attitude

A BIG THANK YOU to everyone who was brave enough to put up a sample cloud. Usually when I do this one on one, I will send back for a longer cloud or some more specificity in the words. These were a bit on the short side for my preference, but I am still in awe of your courage.

If I nailed it, great! If not, then y’all at least see what I am doing here.

Song, book and movie titles are great fodder for the imagination and you can’t copyright a title. If you have a song that you believe is your theme song? See if you can work with it. Just avoid the lyrics because musicians—rightfully—are very territorial.

The cool thing about this log-line is you can change it out. It is supposed to be a guideline, not a noose. Like an outfit, it impacts how you might present yourself. Sundress/suit versus a military uniform.

Again, to build a brand, just talk about the things you are passionate about. If you love kittens? Great! Animal videos? Sure! That is fantastic content people love to interact with and share. Same with funny memes. Or nostalgic posts. There are certain kinds of content that by its nature, have better “legs” and are better material to build with.

We can dive deeper into how this all works on line later. If you really want this expounded, pick up a copy of Rise of the Machines because I have a whole section on this and the book is .99.

But, I hope you can see that, with a word cloud and a log-line, you can take an honest inventory of what kind of social media is a good fit. What social platform is the best for building an audience? The one you ENJOY.

The entire point of this is learning ways to begin the conversation in an authentic way. Then, you’ll become the author people happen to know and like (and they trust your content). You have your people and, unlike buying email lists or spamming people, they’ll want to be there.

What Are Your Thoughts on the Build?

Even if you don’t use the word cloud to create a log-line, do you see how it is a really useful tool for not only starting the conversations, but to keep them going? While genre might impact the log-line, it doesn’t have to. Our log-line really is more reflective of our voice.

I can think of fantasy that is super serious The Lord of the Rings versus super silly/campy Army of Darkness. Both stories play out in a medieval setting but aren’t remotely like each other.

Whether we write romance, horror, thrillers, mystery, that is more of a side point. Readers will gravitate to our unique lens that we bring to the creative table. That’s why I don’t like us fixating too hard on the books themselves. Your fellow humans can surprise you.

They might HATE romance, but they love your romance novels. I have had people who never read thrillers or horror, but they gave the genre a chance because I wrote it. And they’ve told me they’ll likely never read another in that genre, but they loved mine. Sometimes, they didn’t even read them because, while they don’t like that genre, they have friends or family who DO…and they give my books as gifts.

Trust me, there is almost no greater compliment.

Ultimately, we don’t have to sell to everyone. Who cares if a person buys only one book, so long as it is YOUR BOOK? And if that person likes you and your books, that is a great step toward that super fan who’s positively EVANGELICAL about everything you produce. It is easier to build with friends.

The SUPER FANS are who you want to invest your heart in because they give theirs freely in return.

The post How to Build an Audience, No Duct Tape Required appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Ah, culture. One word that can encapsulate so much. It’s nice and bendy, too, which is fabulous for story ideas (or for injecting more conflict in a story that feels flat). Put more than two humans together and somewhere, somehow they will find something to fight about.

They might be from the same country, but a different region (a New Yorker and a Texan) or from the same state but different part (Manhattan versus Buffalo). Even if they are from the same city, they might have a different heritage (Latino versus German). Maybe conflicting occupations. Think engineer and yoga instructor.

There are a gazillion ways that we humans can stumble into conflict. Age, sex, race, religion, socioeconomic status, education, hobbies, political views, on and on and on invariably impact our perspective. It’s a clash of cultures, so to speak.

One of the main reasons I love the idea of a “clash of cultures” is because this allows us (Author God) to create tension that feels organic and begs for us to keep turning pages (or watching). In fact, it is a long time staple of some of the most successful stories.

What is literally every Hallmark movie? The workaholic executive (insert Type A high achiever here) meets the down-to-earth organic grocer (insert chill Type B/recovering Type A here). A crowned prince falls for the everyday girl. Billionaire falls for the wedding planner. Heiress falls for the activist. Or flip that.

Why do we love these stories? Because they are fun. One world trying to understand and work around the other, butting heads, but then finally coming together at the end and being better for knowing one another.

Audiences cannot get enough of….

The Odd Couple

This trope works wonderfully for romance, comedy, romantic comedy. You guys remember the show Dharma and Greg? For those who have followed my blog for a while, I hammer on log-lines. Can you tell us what your story is about in 1-3 sentences?

You can almost SEE the book/series/movie with just that snippet.

How is this for a great log-line?

You can see the delicious conflict right off the bat with just the couple, but what about their respective cultures?

Dharma’s father is a paranoid pothead who doesn’t trust the government and her mom is an Earth mother hippy who reads chakras and cures all that ails you with a crystal. Her parents are very bohemian. Contrast that with Greg’s parents, who are elite, moneyed, and politically conservative, and….

…the jokes practically write themselves.

Notice in that wonderful IMDB log-line, whoever wrote it goes on to explain why this odd couple works. They each have something the other party needs. Therein lies the rub. We humans can sense what we need intuitively long before our brains catch up.

Very often we are attracted to the very people who make us crazy. We gravitate to the culture that makes us bonkers. Frankly, I think it is why most writers are married to an engineer or an engineer-type personality.

***You know who you are.

Whether it is Green Acres, The Odd Couple, Dharma & Greg, The Big Bang Theory, or every Hallmark movie ever made, it WORKS.

And culture is a FABULOUS area with a lot of unexplored terrain. Guess what? This trope also works for mysteries (Sherlock Holmes), science fiction (Star Trek) psychological thrillers (Fight Club), action movies (The Bourne Identity), kid movies (Finding Nemo), fantasy (The Witcher) etc.

The Fish Out of Water & Culture

We all recognize the “fish out of water” story, right? Whether it is a rags to riches (Goodwill Hunting) or a riches to rags (Uptown Girls), or a little of both (Trading Places) audiences cannot get enough. And it works for every genre from campy comedy (Green Acres) to action-thriller (Safe House).

I recently discovered a new favorite movie, The Farewell. If this movie doesn’t make you cry a little…you might not have a soul. When it comes to clash of culture this story hits on ALL cylinders and I promise NOT to ruin it.

Though there is plenty of drama, there’s also loads of laughs. Not only do you have a clash of culture between young and old, but the literal clash of cultures between…well, cultures.

Granddaughter Billi is a typical Chinese-American girl living in NYC with her immigrant parents. Though Billi lived in mainland China when she was a child, she’s been in the USA so long she is thoroughly American.

Her parents try to act as a bridge between the old country and new. When Billi’s grandmother gets a diagnosis of Stage Four cancer, Billi is utterly mystified why no one in the family will tell her. Yet, Billi’s mother says it perfectly:

Chinese people have (a) saying. When people get cancer, they die.

Lu Jian in “The Farewell”

Culture Shock

The family plans a trip to China, telling the grandmother that the spur of the moment gathering is for a wedding. Secretly it is a way they can all see her one final time before she dies. Billi is not welcome to come along because the family is afraid she will blow it. Then, add on TOP of that family that has immigrated elsewhere. One of the uncles moved to Japan and his son (groom) has a Japanese bride.

All of this makes for a beautiful, heartwarming story that will make you laugh and cry and—regardless where your family is from—maybe hug them a little tighter.

The Generation Gap

Regardless where we are from, our occupation, our gender, there is one conflict that transcends them all…AGE. This is true with siblings, relatives, bosses, or just LIFE. If there is an age gap, there is fantastic room to grow an amazing story.

Some of our most timeless stories capitalize on this trope. The Joy Luck Club (both the book and the movie) is a wonderful tapestry of three generations of Chinese women. In present-day the mothers and daughters seem to do nothing but fight. Why? The mothers only want what is best for their daughters. They were once young, too and they also saw their own mothers struggling with the same issues.

The moms want the best for their daughters and yet the daughters cannot seem to “see” anything but their mothers’ disappointment, disapproval, or disdain. The point of the story is to iron out the wrinkles that keep coming between two generations of women and make a way for a better future.

Mentors & TOWANDA!

Who doesn’t love a good mentor/mentee story? The mentor is a mentor because that person has more experience and, therefore, is likely older. There is a generational gap and a culture clash. A great example is the movie Fried Green Tomatoes (based off the novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe) .

Evelyn Couch is a middle-aged doormat who puts up with far to much bullsprinkles from her husband and family. When she meets a mysterious nursing home resident, they strike up an unlikely friendship. Ninny Threadgoode spins a tale (set in rural America in the 20s) about love, loss, life…and even some murder.

Over time, those stories serve as a beacon in the dark that leads Evelyn on a journey of self-discovery, evolution, and finally…empowerment. #BestSceneEver

The good thing, again, about a generation gap is that it works for all genres. Fried Green Tomatoes is a drama with elements of comedy. So is Steele Magnolias, The Karate Kid, and (the book) A Man Called Ove or the movie.

Though we wouldn’t, per se, classify any of these stories as a straight up comedy, they cannot help but make us laugh when generations collide.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice!

Talk about a story that also hits on all cylinders when it comes to the culture clash. Today, we will stick to the original Beetlejuice because the new one merits a standalone post.

It…is…AWESOME.

There are all KINDS of perspectives log-jamming with each other. The Living (the Deetz family) and the Recently Deceased (the Maitlands), edgy sophisticated NYC/versus L.L. Bean, teenager versus parents, dead people who want to be alive and a teenage girl who wishes she were dead. Everywhere you turn in this movie, there is conflict and tension.

Which is why the movie is still fantastic…34 years later.

Everyone wants something different, yet who they are/where they are from (perspective/culture) creates problems. Whether it’s the newly dead Maitlans who need answers yesterday. Or the overworked and long dead social worker from the other side, Juno who measures her schedule in decades.

Nothing comes easily.

Charles Deetz wants a rural escape, but his high-strung, neurotic wife needs to create…starting with his house. Lydia, the teenager who wants to disappear is the only one who can help the Maitlands, who want nothing more than to be SEEN.

And, if that weren’t enough drama, toss in a lunatic unemployed trickster spirit. Nothing like mayhem to generate some teamwork, right?

Can’t Have CULT, Without CULTure!

Culture is a word with a lot of variegated meanings. It can also be as broad or narrow as we want or need it to be, as you can probably tell from the wide range of examples I gave from virtually every genre. If you are trying to create a story that is “same” enough to resonate, but “different” enough to spark interest…try starting with a culture clash.

I used that technique to fix my first novel, The Devil’s Dance.

When I wrote my original story idea, all the beta readers…hated my MC. They loved all the supporting characters, but something just wasn’t connecting with the MC.

Sigh. *bangs head on wall*

My idea: Riley was a combat vet, recently home from Afghanistan who’s family unintentionally runs afoul of a major cartel.

Problem was? According to the beta readers, though they liked the idea, my MC wasn’t relatable.

I rethought my approach, shifted from third-person close to first-person and then used my campy blogging voice.

The Devil’s Dance

Instead of Riley Romi being a bad@$$ but damaged character who was more than capable of handling a cartel, I changed her into a hot mess fish-out-of-water up against impossible odds (and that’s just her FAMILY).

Romi grew up white trash in a tiny town on the road to nowhere. She “escapes” and gets her education and a premium job in tech sales…only to be left holding the metaphorical bag when her rich fiancé pulls an Enron-like scandal, disappears, and leaves her as the FBI’s prime suspect.

Broke, blackballed and out of options, she has no choice but to slink home, defeated and humiliated, to her Jerry-Springer-crazy-as-a-bag-of-frogs family…and THEN she and family run afoul of a cartel.

To make matters worse, the FBI thinks she’s making a run for the border (not Taco Bell).

LOADS of worlds colliding that makes for a hilarious, nail-biting read (if I do say so myself *gets cramp patting own back*).

See how I had a story that was “meh” but was able to save it simply by pivoting a little toward the zone with the most conflict? Culture saved my story idea. Though I kept the same kernel of an idea—a small town with a dark secret, a family up against the cartel—the story was 180 degrees different and a million times better.

What Are Your Thoughts?

Do you see how culture is far more influential that a lot of people might imagine? Nerds versus Normies? Old versus young? The jaded versus the neophyte? Can you see how just even on a micro-scale, you could inject more dramatic action, tension and subtext by simply playing up each character’s cultural perspective?

What are some other movies, books, or series that you now see executed the culture clash with particular brilliance? In a world being deluged by same old same old, what are some crazy cultures you might be able to force together in a story? Same…but DIFFERENT?

REMEMBER: Last post How to Create YOUR Audience: Identify, Connect, Convert, we talked about how to make the author brand more manageable and authentic. How do you connect to then curate your unique audience? I am still eager for victims volunteers for when I post on what exactly we do with that word cloud. This is to help you work smarter not harder. Though my other personalties are happy to help, this is a sweet chance to get free consulting for those brave enough to post their word clouds in the comments.

Remember the longer the cloud the better and also tell me what GENRE you write.

Until next time!

The post Culture, Conflict & Creating Fresh Stories People LOVE appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Wounds matter in life and in fiction. We’ve all been hurt in some way and to some degree. Just goes with being human.

Admitting weakness, failure, mistakes, and flaws isn’t always easy. In fact, it can be downright terrifying for even the ‘strongest’ of us. It’s an especially daunting task in a world that idolizes something none of us will ever be…perfect.

Wounds are part of the human experience. When we understand the nature of wounds, our fiction becomes all the richer just by adding in these layers.

All genres and all stories require wounds. No wound and no story. Even The Little Engine That Could had self-esteem issues and a confidence problem .

Wounds provide friction vital for conflict. No conflict, no story. Conflict turns pages, sells books, and cultivates fans. Remember, last time, we discussed how the market is BEYOND GLUTTED with BAD STORIES? How can we possibly stand out in against millions of titles, when even the ROBOTS are competing?

No one wants literary meatloaf. Boring=DEATH

One tried and true way to stand apart is the ‘No, duh.’ Tell AMAZING stories. We MUST come up higher. Again, no one wants literary meatloaf. This said, one of the BIGGEST weaknesses I see as an editor is writers holding back. You cannot afford to be meh. Definitely not in fiction. Wounds are THE best way to sell a story and cultivate an audience, especially these days.

Which is fine, because we are all feeling a bit damaged lately—writers & readers—so it is wonderful to escape in a story where a) the characters are wounded, too b) we can relate and maybe work through our demons and drama and c) there is resolution (and maybe even a happily-ever after!).

The entire point of stories is a flawed character overcoming some internal issue (damage) in order to triumph over an external problem. It’s why readers read fiction.

Undamaged characters aren’t simply boring, but the audience won’t be able to relate with them. How can we empathize with someone who lacks a past? Who’s never made a mistake, has no regrets, or has lived a charmed and problem-free life?

Short answer? We can’t.

In fact, the more messed up a person (or character) is, often the more interesting they become. Give them a shameful past, enough secrets to stress out Homeland Security, and more skeletons in the closet then a royal family. Audiences LIKE messed up people because they are a) the same but different (usually) b) they are unpredictable c) they inject excitement/drama into the everyday.

Remember Fight Club? When we meet the narrator and MC, he is dull as dirt…until MARLA. Who makes TYLER DURDEN emerge. So even if your character is a Safe Susan or Dull Dave, toss a lunatic character (and their peaceful, quite lives) into a blender then hit HIGH and watch the FUN.

Suffice to say that, today we will talk some about craft, and next time I have some completely new content regarding how to build your platform, identify your readers then connect with them and build a thriving fan base. It is a topic I have kept solely for classes and conferences, so should be fun.

Moving on!

Wounds: Genre Dictates Damage

All this said, the wounds we (writers) create need to fit the genre because genre acts as a guideline for reader expectations. Our goal as authors should be to meet then exceed reader expectations.

Stories are all for the reader or should be, which is why genre constraints can be very helpful for writers.

No one expects a cozy cupcake mystery to explore the nature of evil. Readers who gravitate to this genre are wanting a lighter read and will resent us playing Dostoyevsky.

Conversely, if a reader is in the mood for a story that probes the depths of the human condition, they’re probably not picking up a novel about a cupcake baker who solves local crimes.

Many emerging writers often shy away from damaged characters and use genre as an excuse to avoid the uncomfortable. Big mistake.

A cozy cupcake mystery can give the reader the light entertainment she craves and also offer emotional resonance she needs…without being Crime, Punishment and Cupcakes (though that’s a killer title, LOL).

When we understand wounds better, it helps us cultivate layered characters who’ll make for page-turning stories, regardless of genre. Let’s look at some common sources for wounds.

Pain of Perfect

First, what is perfect? Good question. Humans all across time and in every culture idolize perfect (always have and always will) though what perfect is varies vastly and changes all the time.

Just take a moment to google female beauty standards across the ages and it’s easy to see how, while the world around us might change, people don’t.

We are still ridiculous.

The ancient Incas thought being cross-eyed was super sexy. RAWR. They often fitted infants with a plank between their eyes to artificially create this ‘natural’ beauty for those unlucky enough to be born with ‘normal’ eyes. Ancient Greece was hot for the unibrow.

From ideal body type to what constitutes success to what constitutes normal or abnormal is in constant flux, and is different everywhere. It even varies from household to household depending on culture, and you got it…wounds.

This is where writers can have a lot of fun creating mayhem in fiction.

Wounds: Pain of Falling Short

No matter what genre we write, a character failing to ‘live up to’ some ideal is gold.

Maybe your character has spent a lifetime being measured against the ‘perfect’ older sibling, and struggles with self-esteem. This character might flounder trying to create his/her own distinct identity.

Or flip it.

What if the character happens to be the ‘perfect’ older sibling? This character didn’t ask for family or outsiders to pick on his or her younger sibling for not being as smart, talented, pretty, ambitious, etc.

This character never asked to be the standard unit of measurement to judge another human being. How much guilt might come with that? Think of the pressure or even the fear of being exposed as a ‘fraud’?

Also, we have another ‘person’ who lacks a distinctive identity. While we have two very different ‘people’ both characters are defined in relation to the other.

Outsiders have denied agency to both. It’s amazing how something as simple as birth order can create a wound that drives characters and their decisions (good and bad). And notice how this works no matter the genre. From pulp science fiction to an epic Joe Abercrombie A Little Hatred high fantasy (mixed with a smidge of steampunk), this formula WORKS.

Retell an old story using just this framework as a mental exercise, and you’ll see what I mean.

How does Little Red Riding Hood change if she has an older sister who usually does the deliveries to Grandma? What if the Three Little Pigs are actually embroiled in a desperate war of sibling rivalry? Who are they building the houses to impress? How would Sleeping Beauty feel from the POV of the illegitimate and (TRUE) first daughter of the king, condemned to always be in the shadow of the beautiful, cursed little sister?

Just LOOK at how fun these old worn out stories become with a fresh new spin! Take all those battered, broken parts the world likes to throw away and refashion them into something powerful.

We see this sort of sibling wound explored in everything from The Joy Luck Club (literary fiction) to Game of Thrones (epic high fantasy) to one out of every three Hallmark movies .

Wounds & the Diseased Family Tree

Since we’ve all managed to survive a pandemic, many of us recall what it was like to be trapped in close quarters with loved ones. How we might have even become more hyperaware of old wounds that hadn’t healed at all or had healed improperly.

BOOM!

We touched a bit on family damage a moment ago in regards to ‘perfection.’ Family damage can come in many forms.

Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box does a brilliant job of exploring the ‘anti-goal’ which is a common fruit of the diseased family tree.

Judas Coyne is a famous rockstar, wealthy beyond imagination who has everything (including a lot of emotional baggage). Hate, anger and resentment fueled his incredible success, yet false guilt and profound shame keep him from enjoying any of it. A vengeful ghost determined to destroy him body and soul might be the only thing with the power to liberate Coyne from his emotional bondage.

Sometimes the diseased family tree is not as obvious. Often, parents believe they’re giving their children the best, but are actually deluded about the nature of their motives….

Rich Girl Problems

In The Luckiest Girl Alive, TifAni’s mom is superficial, materialistic, and self-absorbed. Her father is an emotionally absentee ghost who resents his life. Her mother pushes for TifAni to attend an elite prep school to give her daughter all the opportunities she missed (code for ‘marry real money’). Dad doesn’t have the spine to stand up and say ‘no.’

Both parents are too self-centered to realize TifAni in that school is a ticking bomb.

Of course, not every character needs to grow up in Season Ten of The Jerry Springer Show in order to take on some damage. The road to therapy is paved with good intentions.

Parents are human, too.

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty explores how the best of intentions can poison everything.

Life Wounds All

Life has 100% fatality rate. No one gets out alive. Also we’re all going to get hurt somewhere by someone (and hurt others, too). Thing is, life is all…pointy.

If family doesn’t make us bleed, then school, peers, romantic interests, work colleagues, social media, well-meaning editors, book reviews, or plain bad luck will.

I know. I missed my calling writing inspirational cards .

Why am I talking about all this? Because of what we JUST talked about. Writers have more ‘competition’ than any other time in human history. With no gatekeepers, discoverability is a nightmare. There are a gazillion choices for books and most of them (like cable channels) are a waste of what little free time we have.

More is Not Always Better

From movies to television to books, audiences are deluged with tired tropes, boringly predictable plots and characters with the emotional depth of a goldfish. We can see this ‘glut of meh’ as a problem or use it for our advantage.

If we know why readers read, what they want, then we can work hard on what matters.

Readers long for emotional connection and stories that help them deal with pain, ease their pain or maybe even solve/release their pain. They want hope that messed up people overcome big problems in spite of, or perhaps because of, wounds and flaws.

Audiences yearn to believe that, on the other side of their problems, there is joy, peace, true love, freedom, fulfillment, healing, understanding, wholeness!

Wounds are healed and victory sealed. Who doesn’t want more of THAT?

What Are Your Thoughts?

Getting tired of the same old same old? From Hollywood to books it feels like it’s just the same stuff over and over. I get giddy when I discover something truly excellent. Some of my best therapy and a-ha moments have come from fiction.

What about you?

I love hearing from you!

What are your thoughts? We need to write the stories that change the world because, if one looks back? That’s what writers do. The world is ailing and our stories provide the medicine, if not the cure.

Global politics, the economy, work, one crisis after another! The world needs an escape. WE NEED AN ESCAPE. So can you think of ways to put that imagination to use in ways that will help those Normies out there cracking up?

What are some ways that you can reimagine wounds? Have you had to narrow of a definition? Are there some ways you can think of to delve deeper than the surface? Who are some of your favorite wounded characters from the page and/or the screen?

The post Wounds & Characters: The Damaged REBORN! appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Bad decisions make the best stories.

If we want to write about people who make the right choices, who plan their work and work their plan, who always keep a cool head, then that is the realm of self-help not fiction. Fiction is about good people—who mean well—doing selfish, foolish or downright dumb things.

When we have characters who have all the looks, skills, talents, and can be counted on to always do the right thing—and do it with poise and grace. This can morph into what is called a Mary Sue Character.

Granted, in the greater scheme of things, some decisions are better than others. Not all decisions are bad decisions if we have the right context.

Sure, if someone abandons a baby at our door, one might think that lighting up said baby with flamethrower is a bad decision…unless we learn that it isn’t a baby human, rather a baby demon (left there to kill us and eat our soul).

Context can make a huge difference.

This said, I imagine most of us don’t wake up and think, “You know what? I think I will do something epically stupid today.” The same thing goes for our characters.

Thus, while we need our characters to make bad decisions, we have to be really careful how and why they do this or we can inadvertently either make them tedious or Too Dumb to Live.

Both types of characters are hard to root for.

So, how can we organically create a character who makes bad decisions?

Use Emotion Amplifiers

Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, creators of the incredible set of resources The Writer’s Thesaurus series (I strongly recommend buying them ALL) are releasing a new Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus in May.

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this idea of emotion amplifiers because, if we even look at our own lives, how many times have we lost our cool, cut off a relationship, quit a job, or just made a royal mess out of everything because we were in a bad emotional spot?

Any other time, we might have handled adversity with dignity and aplomb. The problem is, when we happened to show our metaphorical butt, it wasn’t any other time.

Let’s say this is the week our lowly MC might have been struggling with a bad cold. But since people were relying on him and he’d never once been late or missed a day, he chose to go in anyway so he didn’t place an unneccesary burden on his coworkers.

Unfortunately, on the way to work, his car unexpectedly broke down and stranded him in triple digit heat. Since he’s been sick, he forgot to charge his cell phone, meaning he had to walk in dress shoes to get help.

Which, of course, made him late.

All that was bad enough, but then his boss chews him out in front of everyone on the floor and accused him of being—of all things—lazy.

I am banking that you guys are not perfect people. Perfect people are not my audience. So I’m fairly certain all of us can completely relate to this poor imaginary soul I just described.

Decisions and Dimension

Emotional amplifiers can make our characters a) far more relatable and b) far more forgivable. Writing fiction is hard. Yes, I know the rest of the world believes what we do is super easy, but yeah…no.

It can be really easy to fall into simply getting our MC (main character) from this point to this point to that point almost like we are following an instruction manual. And that is possibly fine for a first rough draft.

But then ask, “How can we deepen these characters?”

Throw in emotional amplifiers. They aren’t making decisions from an ideal place where everything is going well. In fact, in Act One, our characters should be, by and large, mostly, if not totally reactive.

They can be dealing with sickness, the climate (unusual heat wave), the strange/unfamiliar, stress, etc. etc. This is going to cloud their judgement and, when they do make “bad” decisions, the audience forgives them.

Remember, it isn’t as important how the MC starts a story as much as how they END one.

That is what makes a hero.

Aside from emotional amplifiers (going through a divorce, kids acting out, loss of a job, recent death, etc.) we can also remember that whatever scenario our MC faces…they should not be prepared to ideally handle it.

Even something as simple as a migraine or toothache can make life derail with a quickness.

Also keep in mind that your character is not the only on in your story with stuff going on. Yes, my imaginary MC above got a royal butt chewing from a normally reasonable boss. But, maybe unknown to the MC, his boss just found out his wife was leaving him right after the company owner gave the promotion he desperately needed to his hard partying kid to “teach him responsibility.”

Yes, bad days have a funny way of colliding with spectacular results and mayhem.

Ignorance and Bad Decisions

I don’t know about you guys, but sometimes I look back at my life and wish I had a time-traveling DeLorean so I could zip back in time to kick my own @$$.

Now, back in 1995, did I think doing X, Y, or Z was a great (if not good enough) decision? Duh! Obviously. That is the b!t*h about maturity.

We only gain maturity through experience, and only gain experience by screwing up. The more we screw up—and learn from those bad decisions—the more mature we become. Which is all well and good once we’ve made it through the trial by fire in one piece.

Obviously, once we are on the other end of any catastrophic period of life, we can look back and slap our foreheads. The “right” answers seem so obvious.

Hindsight is 20/20.

In the meantime, our characters (like us) simply have to choose the best they know how and muddle through. They might have limited information, limited skills, or limited options.

Regardless, the MC believes at the time they are doing the best they know how.

The Best Decision Among Crappy Decisions

Here is another gem y’all might have faced. When we look at our life of the lives of those around us, we have to be careful. It can be easy to get all judgmental (or maybe that is just me). We like to think we would have done things differently.

Maybe.

This is where fiction is wonderful for developing human empathy. Sometimes all decisions suck. All that is left is to choose the least sucky of the list of sucky decisions, right?

This is where those emotional amplifiers can really come in handy. When humans are stressed, our bodies shift into what is referred to as “Lizard Brain.” This is survival mode and our mental drop-down menu limits us to three options: fight, flee, freeze.

If our character is under enough stress, they very literally may not see other options that, at any other time, would be obvious. So, while fight, flee, or freeze might be excellent options for outrunning a swarm of bees, it might be less of a bright idea when dealing with that difficult coworker.

Time is NEVER on the MC’s Side

Whenever I do book coaching, I have all my clients do a log-line. This is where you tell me your entire story in ONE sentence. Using this one sentence, I usually can spot why and where the author is struggling with their story.

Here is the formula I use to create a solid log-line (story).

Intriguing protagonist + active verb + core story problem (antagonist/Big Boss Troublemaker) + stakes + ticking clock.

If any of these elements is missing or weak, it will muck up a story. One of the most common pieces writers overlook? TIME. It is never your friend. Ever. Not in life and not in fiction.

Being rushed is one way a character can make bad decisions. Not only might the character be reacting (fear) but if they don’t have the necessary time to do the research, ask wiser mentors, war game out possible ways their decisions could go to hell in a hand basket…they are almost guaranteed to be making a “dumb” decision.

Bad Decisions Fire the Crucible

This applies to pretty much all characters, even when we are dealing with a series. Yes, in Book One, our MC will arc to a certain degree. In the beginning of the story, they should be missing some critical knowledge, training, maturity, etc. that would make them fail. The story crucible is what fires out the character impurities.

Yet, even if we have a series, our characters should ideally keep growing. Last post I mentioned one of my favorite epic high fantasy authors, Joe Abercrombie.

Abercrombie has some seriously bad@$$ characters. Yet, maybe the fighter with a reputation that withers his opposition still needs to learn a thing or five. Put him in a situation where those skills that served so well in a different time and place are actually a handicap.

Redeeming Mary Sue

Characters who always have the answers, who do and say the right things all the time are dull as dirt. Many new writers begin with a Mary Sue and then I have to go in and have them take away some of the shiny perfection.

That is normally what I recommend. Yet, there are ways Mary Sues can become fabulous characters. Maybe in their world they are perfect and know how to do everything expertly. But what happens when we toss them into a place that those “assets” are not only “detriments” but could get them and others hurt or killed?

The new Amazon series Fallout is wickedly great fun. Amazon MGM has done a fabulous job of employing a Mary Sue character in a wonderful, unique way that will have you on the edge of your seat.

Fallout is based off a video game and is a diesel punk fused with a post apocalyptic story. I promise not to ruin anything because at least the first season of the series was brilliantly executed (which, if you’re a die hard gamer, you know that is highly unusual for stories based off video games).

The MC Lucy MacLean grew up in a very 1950s world with almost a campy exaggeration of 1950s traditional American values. Good citizenship, manners, politeness, excellent hygiene, and friendliness are highly valued attributes and Lucy excels at all of them. In fact, she might even be viewed in her society as a “perfect” success.

Now, take this very clean, very naive and optimistic young woman and cut her loose in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Suddenly all those Mary Sue qualities that scored her top marks in Vault 33 very well could get her and others killed on the surface.

This (below) isn’t exactly what Lucy likely imagined when it came to her knight in shining armor….

Remember I said good and bad decisions rely heavily on context?

But, if Lucy hopes to survive in a world that has gone mad, then she will have to grow, change, and adapt. This is even more critical when considering, in this world, there aren’t really any good decisions…only the one least likely to end in disfigurement, dismemberment or death.

Yes, it has plenty of violence but it is that raw brutality juxtaposed to silly idealism that actually makes the Fallout story (and the characters) too good (or bad) not to love.

Thus, when you are creating your world, another great way to turn up the heat on a character is to give them some exemplary skills…that just do NOT work in the world/story they must navigate.

Just like Abercrombie’s Logan Nine Fingers, most ruthless fighter in the North, has to relearn how to get around when thrust into “civilization,” conversely Lucy MacLean learns pretty quickly that “Please” and “Thank you” and taking turns just ain’t going to cut it when everything from the mosquitos to the locals are trying to rob you, kill you, and maybe even eat you.

Any Thoughts About BAD Decisions?

Do you find yourself being too nice to your characters? Does it frustrate you when stories make it too easy on the characters? Can you see how emotional amplifiers can take a relatively normal situation and escalate the tension for some great story drama?

Any experience in life?

I LOVE hearing from you! What are your thoughts? Opinions?

The post Bad Decisions: The Crucible of Great Stories appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

The Johari Window can be one of many powerful tools for crafting dimensional characters. It can also help creators develop layered stories (plots) that will resonate long after the audience reaches “The End.” Why?

Because great fiction is even better therapy. And after the past four years in particular, who DOESN’T need at least a little lot of therapy?

Yes, I’ve talked about the Johari Window before, but it’s been ages. Since I figured most of us have slept since 2021, it seemed like a fantastic topic to start off the year (especially for those who’ve set a resolution to write a book…preferably a GOOD book).

Too many believe fiction to be a fluff, an escape, a fantasy getaway (while, ironically, spending almost all disposable income consuming it).

Some fiction does this for sure. Yet, the stories that hit the market and continue to ripple for decades, centuries, or even for millennia share a common denominator.

Stories offer the audience deeper insights into themselves, their beliefs, and the world around them. It trains empathy and gives us the easiest way to “walk a mile in another person’s shoes.”

Additionally, great stories have timeless messages. It’s why we can take a Shakespearian play and set it in modern times and the story and message are just as powerful.

The characters might wear modern clothing, fight with machine guns instead of swords, but we identify with their hopes, dreams, hurts, struggles, blind spots and weaknesses just as much as the audiences from centuries ago.

What is the Johari Window?

American psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham developed this model in 1955 as a way to improve group dynamics. The Johari Window is a technique used to refine and boost feedback, prompt disclosure, and ultimately deepen self-awareness.

“Johari Window” derived its appellation using a combination of the two psychologists’ names.

The model is founded on two fundamental ideas.

First, that trust is earned when one reveals personal information to others.

Second, that this information then leads to feedback from others which can then give the person a more accurate “reality.”

Using feedback, we can become more self-aware and change accordingly.

The Johari Window Structure

The Johari Window consists of four “panes.” Two panes reflect the self and the other two represent blind spots and areas unknown to the self but visible to others.

The first pane is the most open. This is information a person knows that others know as well.

The second pane is the blind spot. Often this is what others can see, that the person (character) cannot.

The third pane is a hidden area containing information the person knows, but hides from others.

The fourth pane is the Unknown area, the place where all parties are completely in the dark.

Creating a Character

The blind spot is critical for creating a dimensional protagonist who can arc to becoming a hero. Ideally, we want to design a story problem that forces the MC (main character) to finally see their blind spot and how it’s negatively impacting their lives (and others).

The story problem is the crucible. If our MC had never encountered the story problem, they would have remained ignorant of a critical weakness.

Other characters in the story (mentors, allies, antagonists) represent the sounding board that drives that final self-awareness and group understanding.

Ideally, by the end of the story, the MC has dealt with the blind spot, and the Unknown Quadrant will be markedly smaller.

Applying the Johari Window for Fiction

Now that I’ve explained what the Johari Window IS, how can we apply it practically if we don’t work in HR?

Instead of using a movie or book, I’ll riff a quick example. It’s rough and imperfect but most novels are in the beginning. The key is that we at least get off to a sound start with a solid story foundation.

Let’s say I want to write a Young Adult Urban Fantasy about a teenage girl, who, after a bad accident, starts having nightmarish hallucinations.

She’s unaware that she can actually see into the future.

Pane #1

This is information my character knows mixed with what others also know. This is usually very surface.

For instance, the character, her fellow students and teachers know her name is Sarah Smart, that she has lank dark hair and is spindly thin. She’s a sophomore at Small Town High who performs just well enough to pass her classes.

Sarah is a loner who sports combat boots, spiky jewelry, and concert shirts from various heavy metal bands.

She doesn’t have friends, lives in a rundown area of town, and rarely talks to anyone. Though she doesn’t cause trouble, she goes to great lengths to push people away. Perhaps she answers any questions with closed-ended, yes-no answers.

Maybe she cuts class, or retreats to the library whenever there’s a pep rally. She also constantly chews aspirin.

All this “information” is obvious to Sarah and those around her.

Pane #2

This is Sarah’s blind spot. Others might see areas of the blind spot, but Sarah will be oblivious.

Sarah fails to see herself the way others do. In her mind, she’s not hurting anyone and wants to be left alone. Others, however, find her caustic, abrasive, stuck up, or just plain weird.

Sarah thinks she’s crazy, her headaches and visions a remnant from a head injury suffered in a bad car accident.

Pane #3

This is what Sarah knows that others do not.

Her mother who, after almost twenty years sober, now drinks every waking hour. Mom fell apart after her only son (Sarah’s brother) drove the family car headlong into a tree and died.

The tox screen indicated he was well over the legal drinking limit. Also, witnesses claimed to have seen him swerving and driving erratically, thus the town rumor was that he was driving under the influence.

His body was so mangled, Sarah and her mom had to hold a closed casket funeral.

The town gossip grew so bad, Sarah and her mother had to move. No one in the new town or school knows about her brother, the accident, or her mother’s severe drinking problem.

Right after the hospital released Sarah, she suddenly started getting bad headaches coupled with terrible and confusing visions. She has no idea what’s happening and believes she might be going crazy.

Perhaps, she believes the headaches are from the accident, the visions are due to her guilt. Why did she let her brother drive? Why did she not see he was unfit to drive?

She hadn’t even seen him drinking. He hated alcohol because of what it had done to their parents. But the tox screens don’t lie, right?

His death is all her fault and these headaches and nightmarish visions are her due punishment.

Pane #4

This is the information unknown to all parties involved (at least in the beginning). Sarah isn’t going crazy, she actually has the ability to see into the future.

Her brother wasn’t drunk at all. He, too, had the same gift—he could see into the future—and was hit with a vision while driving which caused him to lose control of the car.

This is also what will form the basis for the story problem (more on that in a moment).

Sarah actually wants friends, to be part of a community, but is too ashamed and afraid. The story problem will change this and shrink the Unknown for Sarah as well as those around her.

Story Problem

Using this quick exercise with the Johari Window, it’s now easier to construct a story that will force Sarah to face what she fears (that she’s going crazy) and to make peace with her inner demons (guilt about brother’s death).

Ideally, it will drive Sarah onto a path where she’ll gain mentors and allies. The more awareness she gains, the more information she shares, the closer relationships she will form.

Story Problem: What if Sarah’s brother actually is NOT dead?

If we take a page from to hit Netflix series Stranger Things, maybe some black bag government operation had been watching her brother.

He’d been in counseling, discussing his visions and someone with a lot of power realized they weren’t hallucinations at all. Rather, the young man could actually see future events.

At the time of the accident, this agency saw the perfect opportunity to abduct the brother. They substituted another (badly mangled) body, forged the tox screen and dental record match, then helped spread rumors the young man died drinking and driving.

This agency is now using him in some underground bunker to predict terrorist attacks.

Normal World

We get to know Sarah in her regular, but broken, world. See her picking up empty bottles of cheap vodka and putting her mom to bed before she heads off to school. Maybe she prizes a photograph of her “dead” brother out of Mom’s hands as she tucks her in to sleep off the booze.

At school, Sarah sits on the sidelines wanting to be part of the group, but pushing away anyone who tries to be friendly. Maybe she runs into a new substitute teacher who sets off all her spidey senses, but she has no idea why (he’s an agent following to see if Sarah, too has the gift).

The substitute teacher is a proxy, and how we introduce the Big Boss Troublemaker—the black bag agency that has her brother hostage and wants her, too.

Sarah later talks to a teacher, only to have to cut the conversation short because of one of her headaches. In the bathroom she’s knocked to her knees with a vision of a fellow student run over by a jock speeding through the parking lot, but dismisses it.

Only a nightmare. A hallucination.

She firmly believes this until she’s leaving school and the leading action preceding up to the event plays out exactly as she’d seen it happen in her vision.

This time is different. She takes action.

Sarah dives after the kid, preventing them from being run over. The fellow student likely will be her first ally.

Yet, her direct intervention into a future event will also be the signal that lets the enemy know Sarah does have the gift they seek.

This is a turning point for the BBT—she’s like her brother and they want her, too. It’s also a turning point for Sarah—maybe she isn’t crazy after all.

Plotting from the Panes Pains

See how using the Johari Window we’ve created a dimensional character with a lot of baggage, issues and self-doubt? This knowledge also offered a clear way of seeing a solid story problem that would make Sarah grow.

Also see how the plot practically FALLS into place?

What would our Sarah want more than anything? To have her brother back.

If she starts suspecting she isn’t crazy, this propels her on a search that will begin revealing that she actually does see the future, her brother had the same complaints, and if he had her gift? Maybe he isn’t dead.

She’s propelled down a path searching for answers, a road that will inevitably lead to finding out the truth.

We also have an accurate picture of her in her community in the beginning and a good map of where the story needs to go.

If it begins with Sarah as a loner, wracked with guilt and shame and alone?

Then it should end with the family restored and those responsible for taking her brother defeated.

She also won’t do this all alone because as she grows, gains feedback, and information flows freely, the Unknown—there is a secret agency that abducted her brother—shrinks significantly.

Sarah, freed from false guilt and shame, should be a far different person at the end.

Also, those around her, will see her with different eyes.

Sarah isn’t some weirdo jerk with a chip on her shoulder. She’s their friend, ally and she has very special powers. The entire group has new knowledge, which creates a powerful and unique bond.

There really IS a world of black bag operations, underground bunkers and dangerous men in suits willing to do anything, even kill, in order to abduct teens with special abilities to use or weaponize.

The Johari Window Story as Therapy

Most good fiction is a journey to self awareness. We have a protagonist in his/her normal world. Everything is fine…but not really.

There is a critical missing piece keeping the protagonist from being self-actualized. This is plainer to see when we realize that most beginnings and endings of novels (and movies/series) are actually bookends.

Normal world is their world with the wound festering and hidden. The denouement? The world is restored but whole, wounds exposed to heal.

All of us have blind spots. If we didn’t, therapists would go bankrupt and have to get a “real job.” Truth is, most therapists know exactly what our problem is the first day we sit in their office. Problem is there are all kinds of other emotions clouding our vision.

This is one of the reasons shrinks do a lot of listening, nodding and asking questions. And probably a lot of doodling and playing tic-tac-toe on their notepads to stave off the boredom while they wait for us to catch up to the obvious.

Our story problem in a sense is extreme therapy for the protagonist. Instead of our character spending years on a couch being probed with uncomfortable questions and given homework to write letters to her inner child?

She is thrust into a bank heist, an alien invasion…or her brother is abducted because he has visions of the future that others want to use for their own ends.

The “Johari Window” as Writing Tool

There are countless methods for creating a cast of dimensional characters. Yes, it is a therapy technique as well as a tool to improve communication. It is also AMAZING for crafting plots and characters (unreliable narrators especially).

But, I hope my example above showed you how you might employ the four panes to craft deeper, more layered characters. How it can also help us make sure we’re choosing the best story problem that will drive the most change.

What are your thoughts on the Johari Window? I LOVE hearing from you?

Had you ever heard of the Johari Window? Are you eager to give it a try? I’d only tinkered with the concept mentally until I wrote this post, but I was able to create a character and a pretty decent plot problem in about an hour.

I’d love to hear from anyone who tries this and your results! Or if you’ve used it before and how it worked out. I know it’s a rather odd leap from a tool used by many companies as more of an HR tool, but writers are masters of repurposing .

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