Top 10 Writing Prompts of 2018

1. Custom Etymology

Write a story or a scene about someone inventing a new word—or, alternatively, giving an existing word a new meaning.

2. Unexpected Inking

You are showering one morning when you notice a tattoo on your body that you’re quite sure you don’t remember getting. What is it, how did you get it, and what does it mean?

3. Handwriting Anatomy

Consider your handwriting or a character’s handwriting. What significance does it have, and what does it say about the type of person you/they are?

4. Musical Incantation

You’re absent-mindedly singing to yourself when suddenly the topic of the song comes true.

5. Thou Mayest

Write a scene or story about a character who has committed a misdeed—a crime or a more minor indiscretion—and must decide whether to face the consequences and make amends for the act or to conceal or avoid it.

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6. A Book of Chance

Go over to your bookshelf, close your eyes, and pick up the first book you touch. Open the book to a random page, read the first full sentence on that page, and use it as the inspiration for a story or scene. Include the original line at the beginning or end of your response.

7. Madder Libs

First, think of…

• a word you use too much.
• the name of a city you’d like to visit.
• an unusual color.
• a hobby.
• a physical quality a person might wish for.
• an animal.
• a famous author.
• a verb ending in -ing
• a number.
• an adverb.

Then, use at least five of these in a story or scene that also includes the phrase “What is that?”

8. Things We Lose

This prompt is simply a line from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Do as you please with it—incorporate it into your story, use it as inspiration, turn it on its head, make it into an anagram—anything you’d like: “Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.”

9. Unfairy Tales

Write a scene that involves a fairy tale trope turned on its head or otherwise deviating from typical expectations. For example: A princess who’s cruel to her kind stepmother; a golden goose that lays explosive eggs; a big, frightening wolf who really just wants a friend.

10. The Color of Ideas

Choose one to three colors from the color associations chart below. Note the different meanings. Create a character or place associated with each color. Profile the character(s) or setting(s), or write a scene about them.

Interested in more writing prompts?

Check out WD Editor Cassandra Lipp’s 81 Creative Writing Prompts for Writers or WD Editor Robert Lee Brewer’s 25 Plot Twist Ideas and Prompts for Writers.

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The post Top 10 Writing Prompts of 2018 appeared first on Writer's Digest.

The year 2018 marked the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s science-fiction classic Frankenstein was first published. Her tale of creating new life became a sensation, capturing the imaginations of storytellers and filmmakers across the world and inspiring dozens of new stories and adaptations. Some are straight retellings of the original plot, while others take the concept of Frankenstein’s monster in a completely different direction—think Herman Munster in the 1960s television series The Munsters, or Lurch the butler in The Addams Family.

The literary canon has endured the passage of time and inspired writers for generations—even to the present day, with contemporary novelists like Helen Fielding, Dean Koontz, Curtis Sittenfeld and others regularly drawing from the classics. When modern writers update these enduring stories and tell them in a refreshing way, they’re paying homage to the beloved original while capitalizing on its complexity and potential. As such, there are numerous reasons to consider pulling out your old high school reading list and plundering those books for your own story’s stimuli. Here are four of the most prominent benefits.

Twice Upon a Time: 4 Reasons to Write Books Based on Classic Literature

1. Strong Scaffolding

Many of these stories have successfully endured for a reason: They have vibrant characters, strong conflict and interesting story arcs. By updating these tales and telling them in a new way, writers can capitalize on the literary strength of the original tale.

Take, for instance, Jane Austen’s magnum opus: Pride and Prejudice. With her sharp wit and independent spirit, Elizabeth Bennet was a groundbreaking character when the novel debuted in 1813. Bennet’s charisma, as well as the drama surrounding her family, her romance with Mr. Darcy, and the formal English society of the period, has thus served as the model for multiple makeovers.

Imitating the Masters: How to Develop Character and Tone Through Imitation

Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible, published in April 2016, is aligned to the original plot of Pride and Prejudice but takes place in modern times. Liz is a successful 30-something magazine writer who returns to her hometown of Cincinnati to help care for her elderly father, only to find her family coming apart at the seams. But after a handsome doctor—fresh from an appearance on a reality TV show—and his neurosurgeon pal turn up at a friend’s barbecue, Liz’s world is turned upside down. Through the rest of the book, the love story plays out, drawing on Austen’s themes from start to finish. Even so, the novel is so infused with Sittenfeld’s own voice and present-day updates that it stands on its own as an engaging, humorous
commentary on modern society and culture, even appealing to fans who’ve never picked up an Austen novel.

Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding stands as yet another re-interpretation of Pride and Prejudice—this version set in ’90s London, with protagonist Bridget serving as an Elizabeth Bennet manifestation, and her family, like the Bennets, serving as one of the main sources of Bridget’s mortification. The humor is ridiculous, the situations exaggerated, and Fielding’s interpretation infuses Austen’s classic with modernized novelty to hilarious end. By taking the rough structure of Pride and Prejudice and giving it a 21st-century makeover (or late 20th, in Fielding’s case), these authors used the Regency novel and its seminal main character to create something authentically their own—and of their times.

2. Timeless Ideas

“There are no new stories.” How often have you heard that old adage? Whether or not you believe it’s true, there’s little argument to be made: Trying to think up a completely original plot is a near-impossible task. There’s a reason literary agents ask for comparative titles in queries—because every manuscript has a comp, in one aspect or another.

Sitting in front of a blank document and trying to engineer a story from thin air can also be intimidating. By putting your own twist on one that already exists, there’s a template for the plot in place from the get-go, reducing the pressure of conjuring something from scratch and allowing you instead to focus on infusing your own voice and calculated nuance. (For hands-on tricks on how to do this, see “The Imitation Game.”) Consider it teamwork: Ron Chernow wrote the meticulously researched biography Alexander Hamilton, but it was playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda who used the historical text as inspiration for a smash-hit musical about diversity, perseverance and standing up for what you believe in. You would never accuse Miranda of plagiarizing or ripping off Chernow, but the connective tissue between the two works is undeniable.

While good novels act as a time capsule of the period in which they were written, the truly great works of literature are transcendent—their themes universal and prophetic. Frankenstein first came to Shelley in a dream when she was only 18 years old. The text itself imagines what might happen when we push the boundaries of scientific discovery. It explores the essence of life, what it means to be human, where the boundaries of scientific ethics blur, and how it feels to be different and alone in the world.

Storytellers since have retold Frankenstein in countless creative ways. Dean Koontz wrote a series of Shelley-inspired novels set in present-day New Orleans, in which his Victor Frankenstein facsimile, Victor Helios, forges new life-forms (androids with flesh) using modern technologies, specifically synthetic biology. An episode of “The X-Files” had a contemporary take on the tale as well, using the concept as a vehicle to comment on the dangers of genetic engineering.

Today, audiences continue to find the ideas behind Frankenstein intriguing because the book draws on so many raw emotions and ethical questions: Young people might relate to the monster’s anger and fear at feeling misunderstood and alone in the world. It raises issues of prejudice, rife in modern society, and there’s huge scope for exploring how people react to those who are “different.” Questions surrounding the ethics of DNA manipulation and genetic engineering—incredibly pertinent with ongoing breakthroughs in gene editing—also make modern retellings of Shelley’s story even more ripe for continued exploration.

3. Creative Play

Putting your own stamp on a classic can also be a fun, challenging exercise in creativity. Examine the ways in which the previously mentioned examples altered the original source material to devise a unique, distinctive narrative. The methods for doing so are myriad: Change the genre (as Mel Brooks did in his slapstick hit comedy Young Frankenstein); contemporize the setting (as both Sittenfeld and Fielding did with Pride and Prejudice); assume a perspective not explored in the original (the specialty of bestseller Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked, After Alice and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister); base one of your characters off someone else’s iconic character, but drop them in an entirely new setting (ever notice how Albus Dumbledore watches over the halls of Hogwarts, and Gandalf takes on the well-being of Middle-Earth, but they fill parallel roles?). In order to pull it off and not seem derivative, you must harness the full potential of your creative flair.

The novel Great by Sara Benincasa was inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In her retelling, Benincasa recreates Jay Gatsby as a young woman named Jacinta. The story follows Naomi (our Nick Carraway stand-in), a teen who reluctantly accompanies her mother to the Hamptons for the summer. While there, Naomi becomes friendly with the popular, trend-setting Jacinta, a neighbor who blogs about fashion and hosts lavish parties, and like the analogous Gatsby, party-girl Jacinta has secrets—and a scandal thus unfolds. The retelling sticks to the structure of the original story, but puts it into a modern setting, alters the voice for a young-adult audience and, perhaps most importantly, flips the lead from male to female: a veritable triple threat of artistic deviation.

And don’t think for a second that seeking inspiration from the literary canon will handicap your chances at signing with an agent, finding a publisher or even garnering major awards. Jane Smiley’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize–winner, A Thousand Acres, is a modern interpretation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, based in rural Iowa. The Bard’s tragic story of conflict and betrayal is reconceptualized by Smiley as the tale of a farming family in the Midwest who experiences alcoholism, domestic violence and money problems. Far from being overshadowed in adaptation by its origin, A Thousand Acres garnered tremendous critical praise on its own merits.

4. Pre-Established Fans

Last but not least, don’t discount the fact that by recasting an already beloved work, you’re stepping onstage before an eager, waiting assembly. There’s a certain comfort in the familiar. Admirers of the original are often keen to experience their favorite tales told in a new way. The fact that your story is based on the oeuvre of a literary master may pique potential readers’ curiosity and provoke them to pluck your book off the shelf.

Think about Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which has been retold literally hundreds of times without ever seeming to get old, and continues to evoke joy in audiences. In film alone, its reinterpretations run the gamut in terms of genre:

COMEDY:Scrooged, the 1988 adaptation, was a successful take on A Christmas Carol because it depicted the miserly Ebenezer as a selfish television executive played by the hilarious Bill Murray. By employing humor, the work is recast through a completely fresh lens.

ROMANCE: The 2009 movie Ghosts of Girlfriends Past follows womanizer Connor as he’s visited by premonitions of his past, present and future lovers. They explore his pursuit of meaningless relationships and shallow lifestyle, and as he sees what he’s missing, he starts to regret his decisions. What makes this take divergent is that, unlike other interpretations, this Scrooge-like character isn’t tightfisted with money—he’s just afraid of making a commitment to a meaningful relationship.

BIOGRAPHY: Released in 2017, The Man Who Invented Christmas explores A Christmas Carol through the life of its author. It looks at the well-trod tale from a completely different perspective—exploring the life of Dickens himself and the real inspiration for Scrooge. (Spoiler alert: It was his father.) This version attracts a whole new audience of literary enthusiasts and amateur historians—not just those in the mood for a feel-good holiday film.

The memorable personalities of Dickens’ Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future—and the parable at the heart of the story—have helped A Christmas Carol develop into a comfortable story for all ages, and its distinct qualities allow plenty of room for you to adapt wildly while maintaining a recognizable connection to the inspiration.

Modern writers can cull from ageless stories in innumerable ways. Beyond the books standard in high school and college English classes, fairy tales and myths from ancient cultures are equally suitable for fodder. Your only limit is your imagination. For instance, in George Saunders’ experimental novel Lincoln in the Bardo, entire chapters are composed of short excerpts from history books—some real works, some fictional passages Saunders drafted himself. It’s exciting, it’s inventive—and it won the Man Booker Prize in 2017.

Apply the techniques outlined in this article, and soon you’ll be re-animating the bones of old stories in new and exciting ways—with, hopefully, better results than Victor Frankenstein.

This course will demonstrate that the best way to become a good writer is to study the writing of others, especially the work of the masters. Learn more and register.

The post Twice Upon a Time: 4 Reasons to Write Books Based on Classic Literature appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Cassandra Clare wrote her first published novel in a closet. That is, in one of those “cozy” New York City apartments, wherein the bed doubles as an office chair and the desk looks suspiciously like a windowsill. At the time, she worked the night shift as a copy editor for the National Enquirer, spending daylight hours in her cramped apartment, cranking out chapters, researching agents, writing queries, reworking her manuscript and, eventually, signing a contract for publication of the soon-to-be New York Times bestselling YA novel City of Bones.

That book would prove to be the first of several bestsellers in a multi-series collection of 12 novels (and counting)—plus several short story anthologies—known as the Shadowhunter Chronicles: tales from an urban fantasy world brimming with angels, demons, warlocks, vampires and faeries, plus the enemies and allies thereof. Of those, perhaps the best-known series within the broader universe is The Mortal Instruments sextet. Clare’s follow up, the Infernal Devices prequel trilogy, harks back to the Victorian Era, and the December 2018 release of Queen of Air and Darkness completes The Dark Artifices, a sequel trilogy to Mortal Instruments. Fans of Clare can expect to further explore the Shadowhunter universe in a new trilogy, The Eldest Curses, the first of which will be released in Spring 2019.

Despite her early successes, it wasn’t until the stellar release of her third book that the YA superstar was finally able to ditch her tabloid gig and embrace novel-writing full time. Today, the 45-year-old’s books have sold over 50 million copies worldwide in more than 35 languages and have been adapted into film, television and two manga series.

Clare, whose real name is Judith Lewis, pens her books like clockwork: She’s published at least one Shadowhunter book per year since 2007, with additional short stories and collaborative works interspersed among them. Often, she says, the processes overlap such that she’s plotting out one book while copy editing its predecessor.

Many of her co-authored works, like The Bane Chronicles novellas with Sarah Rees Brennan and Maureen Johnson, belong to the Shadowhunter universe, while the five-book middle-grade Magisterium series with Holly Black, author of The Spiderwick Chronicles, ventures into an entirely new world.

In conversation with WD, Clare shares her thoughts on plotting a multi-part series, venturing out into middle-grade, collaborating with other writers, and more.

Your world is so intricate. Tell me about your plotting process. How do you lay out your narratives?

I’m an outliner. I know there are people who are plotters and people who are more pantsers, but I am definitely a plotter. I need to know what is going to happen in a story. So I generally start with what I call a “macro-plot,” in which I sort of take the story from Point A, where it begins, to the end, and try to lay out the significant moments. And I think pacing is a good way of looking at it, because I’m looking at the moments where the story turns.

For me, there are basically five points where the story turns: You’ve got the beginning of the story. Then you’ve got the inciting incident, something that changes things for the character so that the story [takes off]. And that’ll be a realization or an event: a birth, a death, something that causes you to answer the question of, Why now?—Why are you telling this story now, from this point? And then you have your midpoint, where the story often reverses itself or changes and you learn new information. You usually have the low point of the story where things seem lost for your characters. And then you have your denouement.

(Immersive Nonfiction & Idea Generation with ‘The Fifth Risk’ Author Michael Lewis)

I try to plot those out, and that forms a spine on which everything else is built. Then I’ll do what I call a “micro-plot,” in which I actually plot out each chapter and what is happening in terms of the characters and the arcs and the events that are occurring in order to create a full story.

Obviously those things will change. They’re not going to stay completely the same as I move through the story; some things will work, some things won’t work. But for me, it helps to have that as a guide. And I think that does help me keep these books, which are quite sprawling and involve a lot of characters, as tightly plotted as possible.

Most of your books take place in the same universe, but you didn’t write the series in chronological order. How do you ensure consistency and continuity when you’re writing these novels that jump around in time?

I know. I keep thinking, Why did I do that? But that’s me. I try to be disciplined in my outlining and whatnot, but sometimes it’s a case of “follow your bliss”—I do the stories that I’m the most excited about at the time. And it just happened that, when I was finishing up Mortal Instruments, the thing I was most excited about was doing a historical. I had this idea and I loved it, and I wanted to do it. So I jumped back in time and did The Infernal Devices, which is set in 1878. Then I jumped forward in time and did The Dark Artifices. And now I’m jumping back to 1903 and doing [a new series called] The Last Hours.

It’s imperative for me that I have a bible. I think they often call it that in TV writing as well, where everything is noted down. You know, the genealogy of all the families, what things and how they work, the rules of magic. The location of all the major known places in the books. I refer back to that. If somebody ever stole it, I would be so doomed.

The dialogue in your books feels so natural. Do you have any advice for crafting strong conversations?

Listen to the way people actually talk. To an extent, all written dialogue is stylized where we take out the ums and the sort ofs and the minimizing language. And remember that there is a rhythm. That the back-and-forth of talking is rhythmic: Somebody gives information, somebody else reacts. You have to get that pattern down. I love writing dialogue. It’s one of my favorite things.

When I was writing Infernal Devices, one thing that was helpful to me was sitting down and listening to audiobooks and plays written in the Victorian Era, so I could get the cadence of Victorian dialogue and the way that they talked. I did it as a sort of immersion thing. For about six months, I only read books, watched movies and listened to plays that were written in the specific time period my characters were operating in, so that I was sort of walking around thinking in that kind of language.

You have a very dedicated fan base. Have you used their feedback to shape what you’ve written?

Definitely—when they give me feedback on certain characters or things that they love. I’m very interactive with my fans, and they’re very interactive with me. For instance, they absolutely love the character Magnus Bane in The Mortal Instruments series. He’s an immortal warlock, and I thought, There’s no reason he couldn’t be in The Infernal Devices, so I put him in. People love him so much and it was great to see him at a different stage of his life. It was in large part fan feedback that caused me to include him as a significant character in that other series.

That character—Magnus—is gay, correct? And beyond him, diversity is core to your books. Why is having a diverse cast of characters important to you, and how do you avoid falling victim to stereotypes when you’re writing these characters?

[Magnus’s boyfriend] Alec is based on a friend of mine I knew when I was younger who committed suicide because he was gay and his family did not accept that. Alec was a way of giving him—though he wasn’t around—a story that he would have loved. He, like me, was a big fan of science fiction and fantasy, a big fan of stories and adventurers and kickass fighters. To see a character who was like him, who was this badass demon fighter and got to have all these adventures, would have meant the world to him. What I thought when I created Alec was, This will hopefully be something that can mean a lot to people who want to see themselves reflected. There’s not enough representation across all the boards.

And in the same vein, I’ve tried to create many other characters that people can see themselves in. There are autistic Shadowhunter characters. There are trans characters. There are characters with different body types. There are characters of different ability, and all these characters of different races and ethnicities. Being a Shadowhunter—being this cool sort of hero—isn’t restricted to any one kind of person.

In terms of avoiding stereotypes, it’s something that you have to keep an eye out for. When I create characters that are not like me, I always use sensitivity readers. When I was writing, for instance, the trans character Diana, who is in The Dark Artifices, I met with many trans women who live in my area and talked to them extensively about how to build her character, how to know exactly what to avoid. That was my first question. I sat down [and asked], “What do you not want to see in this character? What do you not want me to express?” And then when the book was done, I had trans readers give me their feedback and changed it accordingly.

Mortal Instruments is often referred to as a YA “urban fantasy” series, but you’ve said in the past that it has also been categorized as YA romance. How do you feel about those genre designations?

They’re marketing designations. When I first sold my book, it was sold as urban fantasy. And that’s what we looked at it as. And then Twilight came out and suddenly all of these publishers were pushing books toward being marketed as romance. There is romance in The Mortal Instruments, absolutely. I love romance and I love writing it, so that’s not a problem. There were definitely books that I saw out there that were not romance that were sort of shoehorned into this category. Then we got The Hunger Games, and everything was marketed as a dystopia.

One thing about having a career that’s now spanned about a decade is that no longer happens to me. In the early days of my books, my publisher did a lot of designing kind of romantic-looking marketing for them—part of that paranormal romance marketing boom. I’m glad that has faded away. Now the books are marketed as their own thing.

One of the things I love about YA, actually, is that it’s not broken down into those categories [as much as adult fiction]. It’s all together in the bookstore. So you write a mystery and then a romance and then a science-fiction book, they’re all going to be shelved together. But if you’re an adult author, all of those books would be shelved separately in the bookstore. YA encourages intersectional fiction. It doesn’t matter if your book is difficult to shelve. If you’ve written a science-fiction romance, you don’t have to worry about where it’s going to end up.

How does your process change when you’re writing with co-authors?

I’ve written with a bunch of co-authors who are friends of mine—Robin Wasserman, Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Thompson—on the anthology series we’ve done, which are short stories set in my [Shadowhunter] world. I was influenced to do this by classic urban fantasy, books like the Thieves’ World [anthologies] I grew up reading where groups of writers would get together and write different stories all set in the same world. This was something that I grew up thinking of as completely normal, and then I realized it wasn’t something that people were still doing. I was like, “Let’s bring it back.”

That was interesting because these are all people who are very familiar with my world and my characters. We have workshops on my books together. They definitely know what they’re doing. So we would sit there and kind of back-and-forth these ideas. It was almost like working in a writer’s room on a television show, where you all know the characters and you all know the world and you’re sort of tossing ideas back and forth—that could happen or this other thing could happen.

And then when I wrote with Holly Black, and we created Magisterium, which is a five-book series for middle-grade, it was totally different. We had to build the world from the ground up, together. It wasn’t my world; it was our world. We were both equally responsible for building all the pieces of the magic system. And I didn’t have any veto power. With the anthologies, I’m kind of like the showrunner because it’s my world. But with this, Holly and I had equal say. It’s a different balance. They’re both fun in different ways.

Did you find writing for middle-grade more difficult?

I was worried that I wouldn’t have a middle-grade voice. That was how the whole discussion with Holly started—I was reading Percy Jackson in an airport. I said [to Holly], “I have this idea that I think would be a great middle-grade book but I don’t know if I have a middle-grade voice.” She wrote The Spiderwick Chronicles, which are classics, and she sort of sat up and said, “I have a middle-grade voice.”

We decided then [that] we could write this together. When we sat down to write the beginning—because we were going to use it to sell the publishers—she plopped it down in front of me and said, “Let’s see your middle-grade voice.” I was like, “You know, this is like teaching someone to swim by throwing them into the pool.” But I started writing and she was like, “This is great. This is exactly what middle-grade is like.” I was like, “Oh, thank god.”

I think I got there not because I have an inherent ability to do this, but because I’d read a ton of middle-grade before I had sat down to start. If you want to write in a genre you’re not used to, the best thing you can do is sit down and spend a couple of weeks reading in that genre.

You’ve done quite a bit of short fiction as well, which can be a particular challenge in these genres because you don’t have quite as much room for detail. So how do you go about choosing the right details to make a short story paint a complete picture without going overboard?

Oh man, short fiction is so hard for me. One of my best friends is Kelly Link, who is a short story writer. She has been multiply awarded and nominated for the Pulitzer for her short fiction. She’s brilliant, so it’s a little terrifying to be around her. But she has given me great advice that a short story is more of a formal exercise—to try to think of it as the way that I generally think of novels, but that I’m telling a smaller piece of that story. And that piece of that story is often more intense. You’re getting a slightly more concentrated story in a short story.

So there have been various short stories that I have written—there’s one called “A Fortunate Future Day” that takes place in a sort of destroyed future world. We don’t actually learn that much about everything that’s happened in the world because with a short story, what you’re concentrating on is your character and what happens to your character in the story: How do they change? What are you learning about this character in this story?

How did the film and TV adaptations of The Mortal Instruments come to be, and how much say do you have in that?

I have no say at all. [The TV show] came to be because they had done the movie, and the movie had done okay, but not what they wanted. And they decided that part of the issue with the movie was trying to tell this big story in a two-hour format, and that they would be better served by selling it as a television show and trying to tell the story in a much longer form format. It was an interesting move because instead of making a second film, they basically took all their materials and went to networks and were like, “We want to do this instead.” And I think that that was a really interesting way to continue to develop the story. But I have literally nothing to do with it. I don’t know what their plans are.

What can you tell us about your latest novel?

The Queen of Air and Darkness, which is the last book in The Dark Artifices trilogy, is out in December [2018], and I’m going on tour for that. I’m very excited. And then the first book in The Red Scrolls of Magic, which is a spin-off series that’s just about Alec and Magnus, is coming out. After that, I have an adult series called Sword Catcher that’s coming from Random House about a boy who is kidnapped from his home and forced to be a stand-in for the crown prince of a country, and discovers that the crown prince who is in line to inherit the throne is a pretty evil guy.

The post YA Author Cassandra Clare Reveals the Practical Magic Behind Her Bestselling ‘Shadowhunter’ Series appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Welcome, welcome, writers! From fiction to nonfiction, whatever your genre persuasion —whether you scratch your words with quill pen on parchment or click away at your computer keyboard—the Writer’s Digest podcast is for you.

Today I have the pleasure of having Elizabeth Sims on the show!

Elizabeth is the author of the Rita Farmer Mysteries, the Lambda and GCLS Goldie Award-winning Lillian Byrd Crime Series, and other fiction, including the standalone novel Crimes in a Second Language, which won the 2017 Florida Book Awards silver medal.

Elizabeth is also an internationally recognized authority on writing, and has written dozens of feature articles on the craft of writing for Writer’s Digest magazine, where she’s a contributing editor. Her instructional title, You’ve Got a Book in You: A Stress-Free Guide to Writing the Book of Your Dreams (from Writer’s Digest Books) has been specially recognized by NaNoWriMo and hundreds of other websites and bloggers, and her own weekly blog, Zestful Writing, has been included in several top-100 blog lists.

Now listen in as Elizabeth and I discuss the advantages of using old school writing implements, and how to balance these tools with those of the digital age to advance your writing career.

The Pen Is Mightier (Than the Word Processor)

This episode of the Writer’s Digest Podcast is brought to you by Writer’s Digest magazine.

Do you want to write a book or get published in 2019? Writer’s Digest can help. For almost 100 years, WD has featured practical technique articles, tips and exercises on fiction, nonfiction, poetry and the business side of writing and publishing. Subscribe to Writer’s Digest magazine at writersdigest.com/subscribe.

In this episode Elizabeth shares:

• Pros and cons of the writer’s physical vs. digital toolkits.
• How writing tools have evolved over time.
• Balancing the quiet, deep work of writing with the flashy technology of today.
• Ways to say “no” gracefully, and guard your writing time.
• Boxed sets, then and now, and how to use them to advance your writing career.

Listen in to hear Elizabeth talk about all these things… and more!

Return to the WD Podcast homepage.

About Elizabeth Sims

Elizabeth Sims is the author of the Rita Farmer Mysteries, the Lambda and GCLS Goldie Award-winning Lillian Byrd Crime Series, and other fiction, including the standalone novel Crimes in a Second Language, which won the 2017 Florida Book Awards silver medal. Her work has been published by a major press (Macmillan) as well as several smaller houses, and she’s written short works for numerous collections and magazines. She publishes independently under her personal imprint, Spruce Park Press.

In addition, Elizabeth is an internationally recognized authority on writing. She’s written dozens of feature articles on the craft of writing for Writer’s Digest magazine, where she’s a contributing editor. Her instructional title, You’ve Got a Book in You: A Stress-Free Guide to Writing the Book of Your Dreams (Writer’s Digest Books) has been specially recognized by NaNoWriMo and hundreds of other websites and bloggers. Elizabeth’s weekly blog, Zestful Writing, has been included in top-100 blog lists, and she belongs to several literary societies as well as American Mensa.

Links and Resources

• To connect with Elizabeth check out her website at www.elizabethsims.com.
• And if you want to check out her blog, Zestful Writing, head over to esimsauthor.blogspot.com.
• Learn even more techniques to balance old and new school writing tech to aid your marketing and creative processes from author Dan Blank in his interview on DIY MFA Radio.
• Want more ways to help you find that quiet place inside yourself and write good books in the fast-paced digital age? There are some DIY MFA interviews that will help. Listen to this episode with author Maxine Rosaler  for tricks to help you tap into your unconscious mind while writing. And for ways to help you shake off the self-consciousness of writing and make an impact with your words, check out this interview with author Sebastian Barry.

The post The Writer’s Digest Podcast, Episode 11: Writing Technology Old and New appeared first on Writer's Digest.

My book, This Life or the Next was also born behind bars, but not as a testament of my own experiences. Rather, it was shaped by more than one hundred hours of dialogue with a jihadist doing time for partaking in terrorist organizations in Syria. We met during one of my writing workshops in a high security prison, and he asked me to listen to his story. So I did. I listened. Asked questions. Took notes. I found it motivating, in a time where so many authors work with autofiction and other forms of literary selfies, to focus on someone else’s life. But this is not without challenges and difficulties.

When you have such an intimate dialogue with another human for hours and hours, you cannot just deal with it as a source of information. At the same time as you’re trying to gather scenes for the book and searching for interesting details to make the characters more complex, there’s a person in front of you dealing with a very deep psychological process. He has seen his friends die. He has been shot in the leg. He has seen a beheaded corpse tied to a rope and dragged around by a car.

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I realized my source was re-traumatized as he dug into these memories. So how do you balance the literary and the psychological process? After a while, I realized that the questions I asked merely to improve the novel were also helpful for his own therapeutic process. When I asked him for more details, he was able to grasp his own inner imagery much better. But you cannot rush a process like that. It’s all about developing an intimate relation of trust, and accepting that in cases like this, being an author is so much more than putting words together.

Another huge challenge was on the question of truth. We shared the goal of creating a novel very close to the truth, but anything close to snitching was out of the question. That was fine for me, as we could disguise, transpose, fuse and fictionalize his experiences, so that nobody got into trouble—keeping the bones of the story, but covering it with new flesh. But then he avoided talking about family problems as well. We couldn’t just pretend it didn’t matter for his life development that his father was in prison for eight years during his childhood and had problems with drug addiction. So I pushed him on that one and got a few things down in my note book. Other things, we ended up insinuating rather than spelling them straight out, and although it started as a way to respect my source, I realized it worked much better from a literary point of view as well. After all, a first person narrator that tries to avoid a topic just adds another layer to the story.

Besides talking with my source in prison, I had to do a lot of research on an array of topics. I wanted to be able to put what he said in a context, and know where to dig deeper with my questions. I studied Islam and the Quran, obviously, and read about violent Islamism, the history of ISIS and the Syrian War. I saw numerous lectures by salafist preachers, and joined Islamic meetings in Oslo. Although I could use very little of this directly in the novel, it helped establish a closer relationship with my source in prison. He could trust I knew what he talked about when he mentioned Anwar Al Awlaki or talked about different insurgent groups in Syria. I even went to Friday prayers in a mosque and practiced Mixed Martial Arts to get closer to his life. Until I broke a rib, that is. In any case, I knew this was not a book that could be written with an intellectual distance.

This brings me to another question: What about critical distance? My source is in prison for partaking in a terrorist organization. This isn’t a topic you want to play around with. I am open about the fact that I see my source as a friend today. Isn’t there a chance I sugarcoat his story?

Could be, of course. But the possibility to ask the really tough and confrontational questions only arose when we had established a very intimate relationship of trust. Then I grilled him. But I’m stuck with the problem that I don’t know how far from the truth his story is. Did he do things in Syria he hasn’t told me? The only redemption is he is honest about not being honest, and that’s reflected in the novel too. By doing so I invite the reader into the same doubt I had to deal with as I listened to him.

Working with writing sources in this way, and on such a sensitive issue, demands a specific approach to writing. With this approach, the story is born in the space between the source and the author. A space the author has to create and revere. You have to give up on your ego and accept that you can’t control the story that much. It’s an approach to writing that demands humbleness, but also the willingness to confront and get deeper into painful matters with the person in front of you. In my opinion, this puts at stake what writing is about. Is it about exploring self or exploring the other? And can you do one of those without the other?

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The post Behind Bars: Working with Inmates as Fiction Writing Sources appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(3 Pieces of Writing Advice From Michael Lewis.)

Through the collapse of the housing market in 2010’s The Big Short, the introduction of big data to the nation’s pastime in 2003’s Moneyball, or the root of behavioral economics in 2016’s The Undoing Project, Lewis rides the seemingly imperceptible edges of epochs to chronicle the point where the tide ebbed, often discovering riches hidden underneath.

It’s a skill he’s been honing for decades. The 58-year-old nonfiction bestseller first cut his narrative teeth as a bond salesman, witnessing the heady descent of the investment bank Salomon Brothers from Wall Street juggernaut to financial sector cautionary tale, detailed in his 1989 debut, Liar’s Poker.

Inherent curiosity ultimately led Lewis to cover several notable trends that helped define the late 1990s and early 2000s, fortuitously capturing them at their height. From the dot-com boom in The New New Thing (1999) to the rise of offensive linemen in quarterback-protection football in The Blind Side (2006), Lewis blends immersive reporting with his trademark observational wit, fueled in part by an unlikely cast of characters that drive the narrative with panache. His ability to distill complex topics has translated well to the silver screen: Three of his books have been adapted into star-studded films, collecting Academy Awards nominations and trophies along the way. The late, great Tom Wolfe—himself a sage of narrative nonfiction—once said of Lewis: “In my pantheon, [he] is the highest-ranking young writer.”

For his latest, The Fifth Risk, Lewis has centered his focus on the most vulnerable point of the Republic: the peaceful transition of power between presidential administrations. By chronicling the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the somewhat chaotic assembly of his cabinet, Lewis reveals the inner workings of some of the most overlooked federal agencies and how they impact our daily lives.

Providing abundant detail into facts from how the Department of Commerce predicts the weather to the Department of Energy’s role in preventing nuclear war, Lewis narrates his civics journey through the opaque avenues in which the government serves its citizens. Set against the backdrop of the early days of the Trump administration, he also details the potential peril that can lurk when those operations are overlooked or left in disrepair by absent leadership.

Lewis sat down with Writer’s Digest to talk about The Fifth Risk, his approach to structuring a narrative, and the genesis of book-length ideas.

You have a gift for taking the Byzantine and making it both accessible and entertaining to readers, but the federal government is a uniquely complex beast. What made you want to explore that subject?

When Trump was elected, I had this sinking feeling and it took me a while to identify what was bothering me. I had just come off writing The Undoing Project, which was in part about how people are really bad at evaluating risk. And, in particular, there was a kind of throwaway line in the book: These two Israeli psychologists had pointed out that people aren’t really good at understanding catastrophic risks. That if you take something that’s a one-in-a-million risk and make it a one-in-ten-thousand risk, people don’t really feel the difference.

I was aware that Trump—who I think of as a weirdly risk-loving person—was largely ignorant of the federal government, and was being handed the federal government. And the government was this portfolio of, among other things, catastrophic risk. I guess at some point, I connected the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach with that and I thought, This is kind of interesting. You have this guy who is really a machine for amplifying all sorts of risks being handed this portfolio of risks.

So I started poking around, and it was this very odd situation. A combination of Obama’s sense of responsibility and new federal law required an outgoing president to prepare for a transition—prepare essentially a course in how various parts of the federal government worked for the incoming administration—[and] led to this really wonderful course in how government work was being created. And the Trump administration just had not shown up to take the course. They basically didn’t show up for the transition. So then I had an idea, and the idea was: I’ll go take the course. I’ll go figure out what the hell the federal government does that the Trump administration doesn’t know it does, and that’s what led to the book. It led first to a couple of pieces in Vanity Fair, and then led to me wandering further inside the federal government.

The story is a bunch of things at once, but it’s me looking for hidden risks. Risks that people may not appreciate are being managed by the Trump administration, or mismanaged, and it’s also giving myself a little bit of a civics lesson of what the hell does the Department of Commerce actually do. And when you get into these places, I mean, it sounds strange to say— they’re riveting. There’s no part of the federal government that doesn’t have some serious purpose. And in most cases, when you ask the average American citizen what it does, they have no idea. So I felt there was a kind of literary opportunity created by Donald Trump potentially mismanaging this whole enterprise, and that threat just electrified the material.

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In terms of timeline, we’re not even two years removed from the inauguration itself. You’ve turned this book around pretty quickly. I know The Undoing Project took years of legwork to put together. How does your approach to research change from book to book?

There are a couple of big differences between these last two books. One was that this one is shorter. It’s half the length of The Undoing Project. And second, it’s reportage. It’s me really wandering around trying to see what’s going on. So there was very little required in the way of historical research, whereas with The Undoing Project, I had to dig into the history of Israel and the history of these two guys, one of whom is dead, and the material was a long way away. In addition, The Undoing Project—one of the reasons it took so long is it took me a long time to believe that I was actually qualified to write it. I just thought, There’s got to be someone else who is better suited to be doing this.

In the case of The Fifth Risk, I didn’t really have that thought, just because I felt like I’m as qualified as any citizen of the United States to go to try to understand my government. I was coming at it from the point of view of an innocent, whereas with The Undoing Project, I didn’t have that luxury. I had to get up to speed at kind of a graduate level on a field, cognitive psychology, that I knew nothing about. So although the federal government is sprawling and incomprehensible and impossible to get your arms entirely around, once you’ve performed the trick of deciding where inside you want to go and why, and limiting it that way, it wasn’t nearly as hard to do.

What was hard about it was getting people that were inside the government to want to talk on the record. [They were afraid] they were going to lose their jobs. I left stuff undone that I could have done. There were two or three other places that I would have kind of liked to have gone, but I was just trying to give the reader a general idea. I don’t have to be comprehensive here. So the selection was the difficult part. Once I decide I’m going to write about the Department of Agriculture, it’s not that hard. You start calling people and you pull on one thread in a hairball and the whole hairball comes unraveled. Once you’re inside the place, you quickly get to what the story feels like it should be. Having said that, if I was a more diligent person, I would have turned it around even faster. It was probably an honest nine months work, or a year’s work, and it’s taken me two.

In your books, of the sources you talk to, you typically find some that serve as central characters. They appear prominently, pushing forward the through-line. When reporting, how do you know when you’ve found a person who could be that central character?

You are absolutely right, I hook up with people and I let them tell my story. I’m in the market for teachers. And when you were in school, you can remember when you would walk into the classroom and you were just entranced by the person at the podium talking to you about whatever subject it was, and you can remember when it was just dreary. And there are people who are gifted teachers and there are people who are just not very good at it. And so you kind of know when you meet a gifted teacher, and that’s exactly what I’m in the market for. It’s what I was in the market for this story as much as any. When I wandered into Energy or Agriculture or Commerce, the White House, I was looking for someone who really could just explain things to me and explain them in an interesting way.

(6 Tools for Writing Nonfiction That Breathes.)

Finding that person … it’s not a science, but the way I find the people is I talk to 50 people to find one. So if you walk into the American stock market to write a book about the American stock market, there are a lot of people who say, “You have got to go talk to Brad Katsuyama over IEX. He’s got a story and a way of looking at this that’s just really interesting.” [Editor’s Note: Katsuyama is a central character in Lewis’ 2014 book, Flash Boys, about high frequency trading.] So people lead you to the main character.

One of the themes linking your books is the question of how we, as humans, assess value: the value of people, places, commodities. Does The Fifth Risk continue that trend? What makes value assessment such fertile ground for exploration?

The answer is yes. I was intrigued, in particular, by the disconnect between the value of federal employees and what they’re paid, and what people think of them. They’re people doing things that are mission critical to society who are paid modest sums of money, and who are routinely kind of shat upon. That really interests me. In some ways, they are the mirror image of a Wall Street guy who makes millions of dollars a year who doesn’t actually make any contributions to society at all. But the other thing that really captured my imagination in the very beginning was the way people valued the risks. The way society is misjudging the risks it’s running, and is doing it because—I think—we’ve essentially lived through a historically unprecedented period of decades of relative peace and prosperity. We’ve forgotten what real trouble looks like. So we’re courting real trouble in ways that we never would if we had a living memory of it. So it’s a misevaluation of the risks. That interested me a lot.

I think one of the threads through some of my books, anyway, is markets. How markets function or don’t function. And much of what I’m writing about that the government does is stuff that the market wouldn’t do. The reason the government is doing it is because the market doesn’t. That doesn’t mean it’s not important. Collecting all the data that we need to predict the weather is really important, but the market wouldn’t do it by itself. The story certainly reflects my interest in where markets kind of fail, because that’s where government steps in.

For The Undoing Project, you met psychologist Daniel Kahneman (a main character in the book) in 2007, which is right around when you were working on The Big Short. When you’re sorting through your bucket of ideas, how do you know what idea you want to pursue next?

You’ve asked me at a good time, because I finished this book last week and I’m already thinking about what I want to go to. When I’m working on something like The Fifth Risk, I will see things that will interest me [and] will make little manila folders with the idea on them. And I’ll toss them into a pile next to my desk and I’ll forget about them. So I’m now on the road. I’m going home tomorrow, but on Monday I will literally take this giant pile of manila folders with ideas and go through them and say, “Are any of these where I want to go next?” And if I feel a flicker of interest and passion about it, I’ll start out on one.

I’ll call my magazine editor and I’ll say, “What do you think about me trying to do 10,000 words on this subject?” And if he thinks it’s great, I’ll start in on that. And if it ends up being really fertile, it becomes a book. If it doesn’t, it might not even become a magazine article. There’s a lot of trial and error. But it’s funny because if you ask me what I want to write next, generally, I would say I want to write a sports book. I want a break from financial crises and government, and I would like to go have some fun with sports. But if I don’t have a subject that’s compelling, then I won’t write a sports book. So I have these theories about what I would like to write about, and sometimes it just doesn’t pan out.

It’s a bit like romance, right? When you’re single, all of a sudden weird things walk into your life that otherwise wouldn’t walk in your life. I’m now single and open to romance with ideas, and now moving through the world, kind of making eyes at them at the bar. And whatever happens happens.

In structuring your books, characters will often be introduced in somewhat unexpected ways. It shows a lot of patience in laying out your narrative. How do you plot that out when trying to get from A to Z?

It’s the hardest question. I don’t find myself able to start until I know where I’m going to end. Another way of saying it is: I can’t start until I know the structure of the thing. And I play forever with that. Some stories have very simple structures, and some have very complicated [ones].

The Big Short was one that was very complicated because I had not one main character, but basically three. Threading them together, it took me forever to figure out who goes where. But I also find when you recognize there is a structural problem or a structural challenge, that it often reveals stuff about the material. Like The Big Short, in realizing that I was looking for ways you might have gotten to the right answer when Wall Street came to the wrong answer about what was going on in the markets—and there were these three different ways to get the right answer [embodied by my three characters]—it focused my mind much more sharply on the particular way the people who were the heroes of The Big Short had gotten to the right answer.

I agonize over structure. I’m never completely sure I got it right. Whether you sell the reader on turning the page is often driven by the structure. Every time I finish [a book], I have this feeling that, “Oh, I’ve done this before, so it’s going to be easier next time.” And every time, it’s not easier. Each time is like the first time in some odd way, because it is so different.

A lot of your work in Vanity Fair tends to foretell your books. You did a piece on Daniel Kahneman before The Undoing Project came out, for instance. What are the biggest differences between a magazine piece and a novel? How do you know when an article could be blown up to novel length?

Sometimes, I go to write a magazine piece and realize while I’m writing it that there’s a book here. This isn’t a 10,000-word thing—this is a 50,000- to 100,000-word thing. So that starts the process. For me, the magazine world is R&D: That’s the research and development. I’ve never had a subject where I thought, Oh, by the way, this is a book, and I know it before I’ve written a word of it. Always, it started as some minor thing.

So Moneyball, for example—in the end I did not run a magazine piece in advance of it, except the excerpt to the book—but it started with me talking to The New York Times Magazine editors about writing a piece asking whether there was now class warfare inside of a baseball clubhouse, because some people get paid $8 million and some are getting paid $200,000. I wondered if the left fielder was pissed off when the highly paid right fielder dropped a fly ball. And that got me into baseball. That magazine piece that never happened got me to Moneyball as a subject. So the magazine stuff is my way of getting out of bed in the morning and getting to work—that’s the role it plays. And if it becomes a book, it becomes a book just because I think it’s got that level of interest, it’s worth writing at that length.

You recently signed a deal with Audible to do some of your magazine work in an audiobook-style format. Talk about what drew your interest there, and how that approach is unique.

Not only some: I am going to all of my magazine work for Audible, because it’s not that much. I’ll tend to do one or two big pieces of magazine work a year, and I’m just going to do them [with Audible] now. The reason I’m going to do it that way is, first, I find when I read—when I have to read something aloud to an audience or to myself in a recording—I see all kinds of stuff that I don’t see if I don’t read it. I mean, I see mistakes, I see infelicities, I see unnecessarily complicated sentence structure and words. I see devices that creep into a piece of writing that I think are more likely to be repaired if you have to perform the piece.

Second, the pressure up front of knowing you are going to have to entertain an audience that’s listening rather than an audience that’s reading, I think it’s kind of a higher bar to jump over. That’s going to raise the standards of what I write about. I’m already finding that when I’m thinking about subjects, I’m requiring more of the subject thinking about it as an audio-magazine piece than I would have if I was thinking of it as a written-magazine piece. I kind of like that. The short answer is: I think it’s going to make me better. And my editor for Vanity Fair, who I adore, moved to Audible, and I wanted to continue to work with him.

What drew you to nonfiction, as opposed to fiction or poetry or any other kind of form?

There’s a kind of writer who’s the stereotypical writer, who knew he was going to be a writer from the age of 6. And everybody said, “Oh, he’s got a way with words,” or “Oh, he’s bookish,” or “All he does is sit in his room and read,” or “He writes great poetry.” And that person is naturally channeled into literally thinking they are writing fiction and writing stories. And I was never that kid. I was a jock. I loved to read, but I did not define myself by my relationship to the printed word until I got out of college. So I was already starting in an odd place. I hadn’t studied creative writing. I never thought of myself as a writer, I just started to see things that were interesting to write about. It was an engagement with the world, coupled with a love of putting words on the page, that got me going in first place. So nonfiction was a natural place to start.

Having said that, I do think that the distinctions that we make in this country between fiction and nonfiction are a little overblown, in that most good novelists are drawing on direct experience of the world and often go off and research things in a way that a nonfiction writer does. And nonfiction writing requires, if you do it really well in a narrative way, some of the tricks of a fiction writer. The lines get much more blurry in other countries. We have a sharp divide between them. I never felt like there were a lot of things that I have to say that I can only say in a fictional form. I feel like what I have to say I can get across in nonfiction.

What advice would you impart to writers looking to break into book-length nonfiction?

I would start small. I wouldn’t just start by trying to write a book. I’d start by publishing pieces online or in magazines or newspapers—wherever you can get them printed. There are two kinds of general pieces of advice I would give young writers. One is: Make sure what you want is not to be a writer, that what you want to do is write. You see this a lot in colleges and creative writing programs—all these people who love the idea of being a writer who actually don’t particularly want to write. And so they moan and groan and kind of preen as writers, but they don’t actually write. If you want to be a writer, write. Think of yourself as a tradesman; don’t think of yourself as an artist. If the artistry comes, great. But it’s going to follow on the heels of lots of training in your craft.

The second thing I would say is it’s very hard to write without having things to write about. You can write about your navel, you can write about your dreams you had last night and other things that nobody is going to have any interest in but your mother. On the other hand, you can get out in the world and find things that are interesting to write about. That doesn’t mean necessarily going out as “a writer.” You could go work on a Chinese fishing boat, but having experiences that interest you in the world are a good first step to having material.

The post On Writing Immersive Nonfiction & Idea Generation with ‘The Fifth Risk’ Author Michael Lewis appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the November/December 2016 issue of Writer’s Digest magazine.

Write what you love to read: The advice, oft-touted, sounds simple enough. But few embody this approach as successfully as Robert Crais, whose slickly plotted, toughtalking, wisecracking crime novels continue to prove worthy of comparison to the hard-boiled classics he cut his teeth on—while showcasing a style that still manages to be his own.

An Emmy Award–nominated writer for “Hill Street Blues,” “Cagney & Lacey” and “Miami Vice,” in the mid-’80s Crais traded in his lucrative TV credits for his dream of having a spot on bookshelves. He put his own team on the case, and Los Angeles private eye Elvis Cole and his partner, Joe Pike, have been collecting fans since their introduction in The Monkey’s Raincoat, which won the 1988 Anthony and Macavity awards and was nominated for an Edgar. They’ve
starred in 16 of Crais’ 20 novels to date, making their author a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and Mystery Writers of America Grand Master. His latest, The Promise, new in paperback earlier this year, pairs Pike and Cole with the stars of his 2013 bestseller Suspect, LAPD cop Scott James and his K-9 partner. A 17th in the series was released in early 2017.

How his writing has evolved along the way—and what we can all learn from it—is, like many things in the writing life, best described by the author.

You’ve talked about your 1999 hit L.A. Requiem as a turning point in your career. What in your approach and perspective changed at that point?

I grew up as a crime-fiction junkie. I write in this field because I grew up reading in this field …

You grew up in a family of law enforcement, too, correct?

In my family there are I think now five generations of police officers. Th at may not be in reality how it sounds—it’s not like growing up in a TV show—but the true benefit for me, I think, was in seeing police officers as human beings, and understanding who they are in real life. That gave me an appreciation for the nuance of their characters in detail that hopefully I’ve brought to the characters of my novels.

So I grew up reading this stuff and loving it; my favorite writers in those days were the classic American detective fiction writers: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Robert B. Parker. So when I created Elvis Cole and set about writing my books, that was coming from a place of enthusiasm, I was a fan. And the first seven books were written in the style of the traditional American detective novel: first-person point of view of the detective, everything is seen through the detective’s eyes, because I thought that’s what you’re supposed to do.

But as I wrote them, I began to feel constrained by that limitation. I wanted to tell stories that were broader than one could tell frozen in that traditional pattern. So by the time I got to No. 8, which was L.A. Requiem, I just decided to take out the jams and combine all the different types of crime fiction and thriller fiction that I like to read.

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It wasn’t an easy decision. I’d had this traditional approach [that was] proving to be pretty popular. Part of me was saying, You’re about to shoot yourself in the foot. But I felt strongly that I could tell the stories I wanted to tell if I expanded the canvas. I brought in points of view of other characters, cut from good guys to bad guys, did the flashback thing, and was still so unsure that when I sent it to my agent, I told him, “If the publisher hates it, I’ll give the money back.” Luckily, it worked out.

I’ve had this saying I’ve used forever as a self-motivator, a little sign in my office that says, Trust the talent. What that means to me is, when you’re at your darkest moments and you think you’re writing the worst thing that’s ever been written, and it’s going to be a failure, you just want to give up and go to Madrid, the best thing you can do is simply give yourself over to your instincts.

So you still have those dark moments sometimes?

Of course. After 20 books people must say, “He must knock this stuff out now.” But most of the writers I know don’t escape the effort that goes into writing. In fact, I think if you’re doing the job correctly it gets more difficult, because each time you go back to the well, you have to dig deeper.

When you begin, no writer knows where you’re going to end up—and I’m not talking about the plot. I plot things out—I know where the story’s going—but what I never know is: Can I pull this one off? Can this all add up to be what I want it to be? Is it true, is it real, is it strong, does it
have the right energy? You face those questions every day.

And especially when it’s damn hard, and the words aren’t coming, and you really have to bash your head into the wall, you do have those dark moments.

The only difference between me today and me then is that I’ve now been through it 20-plus times, so I have a greater level of confidence that I’ll be able find my way out of the darkness. At the beginning I didn’t know, and that was really scary. Now I have more faith that even though I’m lost right now in this moment, history shows I can probably figure my way out of this. Just keep pushing, just keep typing, just keep writing.

So what is your process? You said you plot things out.

I have to figure it out before I write. Otherwise, I’m just lost. Maybe that comes from my TV days where there’s this fairly rigid professional process: You think up the story, you have to pitch the story to someone, a bunch of people sit in a room and talk out the story, you come up with an outline, all the themes are broken down, there it all is before you ever write the screenplay.

I actually wrote a couple of manuscripts, prior to my first published novel, with the high-minded idea that an artist would never, ever plot out a story in advance. If you were a true artist, you simply started typing. It was like magic: You know, your eyes rolled back in your head, and the story came to you and you were just glowing with inspiration, and days or weeks later you came out of your trance and had this beautiful novel.

Well, I tried that twice, and they were just terrible. One had a 500-page beginning and a 50-page ending and there was no middle. I mean, these things were so bad I never even submitted them—even I knew they were bad, why inflict them on anyone else?

So when it came time to write the next book, I said, Listen, you’ve failed twice in a row, why don’t you do it the way you’re comfortable with? And what makes sense to me is to figure stuff out in advance.

With a lot of writers, we’re not talking about the same thing when we say we outline. Many people believe outlining is an intellectual process: Chapter 1: Elvis walks into a room and a woman wants to hire him. Chapter 2 … And you come up with 40 or 50 of those and there’s your book.

But it isn’t that at all. I’ll spend three or four months figuring a story out before I ever begin to write it. And it’s never sequential for me. In the beginning the ideas or thoughts come to me sort of globally. I always start with a character—character is what motivates me, what interests me. There’s some human aspect to the nature of a particular character that has to get its hooks in me. Thereafter I just sort of free-flow scenes with that person or with that person’s problem, with general situations that interest me, and I end up with sort of this mass of random scenes, but little by little some of them begin to connect, because I find them the most interesting or the most relevant.

After many weeks of this stuff, 80 percent of those random scenes and notions I’ve come up with are in the garbage, but I begin to see a story arc there, and the story arc comes together. All those scene notes, character notes, I put on little notecards and pushpin them up on black boards in my office. I’m very visual; I like to see it laid out in front of me. After three or four months I have something that actually works as a story.

I don’t need 100 percent of everything figured out, but I typically need 75 or 80 percent. I have to see the beginning, the middle and the ending I want to reach: This is what I’m trying to do with this particular story and these characters. When I’m confident in that, I’ll begin to write. …

[All told it typically takes] around 10 months, give or take a little bit. I usually don’t write all the chapters or all the scenes sequentially. As I’m figuring everything out, getting closer and closer to the process, I’ll write scenes that end up [coming much later in the story].

Voice is important with recurring characters especially. When developing a new character, what are some techniques you use to make him sound distinctive?

Always it begins with an emotion. Sometimes that emotion’s not definable at the beginning. I’ll see an image or imagine the character doing something that I don’t understand but that fascinates me.

To give you an example, the first novel where Joe Pike is the main character was The Watchman, and the very first notion that eventually became that book was this image I had of a young woman in a convertible. Her hair is flying because she’s driving really, really fast, hands on the wheel at 10 and 2, knuckles white, wind is screaming past her, she’s pretty and her eyes are clenched closed.

That’s all I saw, but what grabbed me was that her eyes were closed, and I was hooked. I thought, There’s something about this woman—I want to know why her eyes are closed, I want to know how she came to this place. Who is she? It’s always like that, with all the characters.

From something like that, I’ll begin to think about a character, and if need be I’ll research a character. One of my (now continuing) characters is former Delta [Force] operator/now mercenary Jon Stone, and it was the same sort of genesis for him, though because of the nature of his work, I ended up doing an enormous amount of research on private military contractors. … Contrary to the stereotypic image of muscle-bound, professional warriors, you find people who are Rhodes scholars. You find people who are voracious readers who read and write poetry. You find all these fascinating things. And brick by brick the character becomes real to you—you use your imagination to connect the stilts of reality that you found through research.

You can hear the way he sounds, you can see the way he walks. And pretty soon they come to life. I mean, I’m not saying when I’m off my meds they come to life, but they become the kinds of characters you want to read about. I’m going to give that book a year of my life, and thought about that way, you want to spend it with people you find interesting and care about and have grown to love.

You do a lot of hands-on research with the LAPD, FBI, bomb squads and the like. How much do those experiences change the course of what you plan to write, versus informing the plots you have in mind?

Constantly. First of all: Research is the best. Research is more fun than writing. Research, you get to go outside!

Do you find it’s best to do it while outlining or writing, or do you finish research before the story starts?

I begin researching a particular subject or character when I’m first conceiving it. If I need to know something about police K-9 dogs, or private military corporations, or how to make a bomb, whatever it is, I’ll begin researching, and the more real-world research I can do, I pick up a ton of small stuff that adds enormously to the writing.

I do that research in the beginning, but you find that as things develop over the course of creating the book, you need to find out other things. Again and again, you trip over a pothole where you think, I don’t know that, or, How do they do this? When I’m in the heat of the writing, I’ll make crap up, because I want to keep going. But that’s never good enough, and I’m always bothered by that, so in the coming days or weeks, I’ll retro-research it, and then if I have to revise or add things, I can do it.

Research is never finished—not until the project is over. It simply goes on throughout.

Some newer writers are intimidated by the idea of that kind of research, especially not knowing if the book will ever be published. They worry about not getting access, or not being taken seriously.

What would you tell writers who are feeling that way? 

I was once the person who didn’t have 20 novels published, so what I learned firsthand is that if you present yourself professionally and respectfully, you’ll be treated professionally and respectfully.

But the notion that, I don’t want to spend a lot of time researching this because someone might not buy it, I think is a recipe for failure and is also disrespectful to your own work. Why write it if you’re not going to try to make it the strongest, most powerful, most alive thing you can?

You’ve got to throw yourself into it. If you’re writing about a world in which you need to do research to learn about it, then feel passionate about it. If you’re not passionate about what you’re writing, you’re writing the wrong thing. I cannot stress how much I believe that.

I don’t know how other people feel, but writing, whatever I’m writing, is an emotional event for me. The intellectual part of it comes later, as almost the mechanical part of getting the emotional stuff right, getting it all typed up and ready to go. Successful writing is all about passion, to create a world that’s full and complete and engrosses the reader. And remember, first and foremost the reader is you.

Why write about anything if you’re not going to write about something you’re passionate about, characters who you’re fascinated by, a world in which you want to be in, even if it’s only for a short period of time? That passion is the engine that has to fire the whole thing, drive the whole experience.

Every one of the books I’ve written—hell, all the TV scripts I’ve written—at some place in the genesis of those things I found something that I was really hungry to write—because I wanted it there. I wanted to create it and see it and have it in front of me. And I think it’s a mistake for anyone to somehow disassociate themselves from that passion, to think that the creation of a compelling piece of fiction can be had simply on intellectual terms.

It becomes cold, and I don’t think you want cold. You want heat, you want fire. That’s what we gather around and warm our hands with.

The post Fired Up: Robert Crais on Passion, Process and Plot Twists appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Also remember: you want to design your book cover not just to attract readers, but to attract the right readers. This post that we wrote at Reedsy will take you through the anatomy of a book cover and help you build yours from the ground up so that it’s optimized to sell.

Cover Imagery

Whether you use an edited stock image, an illustration, or bespoke photography, imagery is your cover’s starting point and will affect all future decisions—such as text positioning. Since your cover will be displayed as thumbnails in online stores, the clarity and impact of the cover image are crucial.

For example, the cover for Sing Me to Sleep by Angela Morrison is based on a Shutterstock image of two hands, which has been manipulated, edited, and layered with other elements by a designer to have the desired effect. You can read more about this and stock image manipulation in this guide to book cover design. The image of the two hands works for Sing Me to Sleep as it hints at the tentative relationships that the main character Beth makes, and represents the emotion-driven action of the story.

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A cover image, if effective, will:

1. Indicate what genre the author is operating in,
2. Provide hints as to the contents of the book, and
3. Compel people to read it.

A picture does indeed tell a thousand words. In this case, it needs to tell (or indeed sell) all the thousands of words in the novel.

Typography

When handling the words on a cover, it’s important to think in terms of visual hierarchy. In other words, how are you going to arrange the title, the author’s name, and if applicable, the subtitle—paying close attention to the relative size of each element?

For example, this cover design for Stephen King’s End of Watch has a minimal but dramatic image with the author’s name much larger than the title. King’s name is the central selling point, so it stands to reason that it’s at the top of the visual hierarchy. Equally, if you are a first-time author, or have a particularly long, impressive, or intriguing title, this will alter how you arrange the text.

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Font choice is also extremely important and should have almost as much consideration as the book title itself. A swirly, stylish font might suit a romance novel, but would look out of place on the front of a thriller, or a non-fiction book, for example. There are trends that come and go, but more or less, it just needs to be readable.

The Spine

Often treated as an afterthought, the spine is actually a kind of concentrated book cover. In physical bookstores, there isn’t space for all the books to be stored cover-side forward, and the spine might be all that people see. So, it needs to be just as eye-catching and effective as your book cover.

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Typically, the spine will show the book’s title, the author’s name, and possibly an extension of the front cover image, or at least the background style. You can be really inventive with this—some covers have images that wrap right around the spine to the back cover. Whilst it’s only a small bit of the book cover, the spine is definitely not something to forget.

Back Cover

The back cover is like a second line of marketing—if the front cover hooked them in, now the back cover has to close the sale.

Practically, the back cover of fiction books tend to include a tagline (also known as a logline or the shout line), a blurb, possibly a brief author bio, a barcode, and an ISBN number. If that last bit sounds confusing, check out this guide to ISBN for self-publishers. Non-fiction is likely to include all of the above, along with author credentials if the work is professional, maybe an author headshot with the bio, as well as testimonials (which may also appear on the front cover).

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Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, for example, has a continuation of the front cover imagery with the matchstick, a catchy tagline at the top, “Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive—but not how to live,” as well as a blurb that teases the reader into opening the book, and a glowing review to top it off. The back of the book is a bit like an elevator pitch. If a reader has got as far as picking up the book, the back cover is there to clinch the deal.

Now Your Turn

How will you combine all these elements to make the perfect book cover? Your book cover is your product packaging—it’s your branding for your book and for you as an author. A professional book cover will make readers take you seriously as an author whilst attracting the right readers to the story that you’ve worked so hard on.

Click to continue.

The post The Anatomy of a Book Cover: A Guide for Authors appeared first on Writer's Digest.

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A history of severe clinical depression provides me with a finely tuned B.S. detector when it comes to fictional characters who have mental illness. I can tell if they were written by an author who has or has not experienced the symptoms her- or himself. As writers, we have a sacred responsibility to accurately portray the mental processes involved in psychiatric disorders. We must also continually update literature with the most current treatment methods. This can be a matter of life or death.

Part I: Symptoms

Suicide never rears its head out of nowhere. It lurks, stalking its prey’s consciousness for years, waiting for the opportunity to present itself as the best option.

For much of my life, I thought I was destined to die by suicide. I absolutely did not want this fate, but as a teenager I began to feel the painful thought processes that led me in that direction. This mounting pain was both relieved and compounded by stories I read and heard—in literature and in literary lore.

Throughout my teenage years and much of college, I felt paralyzed and unable to tell anyone about my daily mental experience. I had frequent thoughts of death and dying, of profound aloneness, of hopelessness, of different methods I could employ to end or at least dull the abstract pain in my head. But these thoughts were too inconvenient, too embarrassing, too shameful to admit. Guilt compounded my shame because I had all the external factors in my favor: a loving family, a few close friends, a safe community, success in school. I would not learn the biochemical cause of my depression until many years later.

While growing up, as we all do, I looked to stories for guidance on how to conduct my life, searching for clues in both literature and hearsay as to how I might wind up. Secretly, I identified with stories about other people like me—fictional characters and the writers who created them who are all labeled sensitive, creative, literary, and crazy.

These stories were electrifying and horrifying to me. On the one hand, they made me feel less alone: at least there have been others like me; I am not the only one. But on the other hand, I witnessed their unhappy fates. If they did not live in isolation (J.D. Salinger), they were either institutionalized (Zelda Fitzgerald) or died by suicide (Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf). It seemed inevitable that at some point in my life, these would be the only choices I would have.

Now What? Using Therapy to Break Story

By age 20, I was a full-fledged English major at Duke University. I never contemplated studying anything else because literature was my lifeline. I felt more connected to characters and the authors who created them than to anyone in my daily life—mostly because the characters were honest about their interior experience. But by junior year of college, not even literature could keep me from spiraling. In addition to my depressive thoughts, I had daily anxiety attacks. I lived in terror, thinking that someone was going to break into my apartment and kill me, or worse, that I would be kicked out of school because I was crazy. I was on the verge of my suicidal destiny; the lurking monster was inching closer.

I sought treatment. I tried anxiety medication. But I still could not admit my suicidal thoughts to anyone. I felt like I was standing in a vacuum of empathy. Until I read one of my assignments for my class on fairytales.

Reading the German story “A Wondrous Oriental Fairy Tale of a Naked Saint” by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, I connected to someone who understood my condition deeply. The title character, the Naked Saint, lives in a cave and cannot do anything but dwell on the “turning wheel of time.” He goes outside only to yell at other people who are preoccupied with petty amusements, such as talking with other people. The cave metaphor described precisely how I felt. He understands! Wackenroder totally gets it!

Later that day, I met up with a friend who had no idea I was depressed. But now, I had a socially acceptable avenue through which I could voice my thoughts.

“So, I read a really cool story for my fairytales class today,” I said.

She was interested. I explained my deep connection to the character. A small fraction of the depressive weight in my chest lifted. Literature had formed a bridge for me between this man who lived in the 18th century and my living, breathing friend who sat next to me in my car. For the first time in years, I had hope that others might understand too.

That summer, I tackled my depression like a full-time student. I saw a new psychiatrist and started taking an antidepressant for the first time. I read every book about mental illness I could get my hands on: The Bell Jar; Girl, Interrupted; Prozac Nation; An Unquiet Mind.

Literature helped me build a community for myself of people who I believed would understand me, even if my only contact with them was through their printed words. Elizabeth Wurtzel’s stability she achieves with Prozac inspired me to stay on my newly prescribed medication. Kay Redfield Jamison’s acceptance of her bipolar illness gave me hope that perhaps I would someday be able to be as candid about my experience.

Literature comforts in a way that clinical definitions and diagnoses cannot. It can help people recognize the symptoms of mental illness in themselves long before the predator of suicide pounces. This is why it is vitally important for writers to accurately portray the thought processes involved in mental illness. Identifying with the writers and characters mentioned above helped me realize my dark thoughts were not unique to me and were not my fault. They were symptoms of a disease that could be treated and managed and discussed with other people.

This genuine connection with others is essential to the process of surviving and healing from mental illness. Therefore, we writers who struggle with mental illness need to be forthright about the daily reality of our interior lives. It’s also essential that writers who have not experienced it firsthand must dedicate themselves to thoroughly interviewing people who have. It is not sufficient to merely consult “expert” psychological professionals. Anyone who struggles with mental illness is an expert on their own experience.

Part II: Treatment

My story does not end there. Openness and connection are vital, but not everything. One must also have one’s proper chemicals, I will learn; otherwise, the brain may not be capable of openness and connection.

In 2010, I graduated from Duke and remained on my prescribed medication for four happy, stable years. I told my family members and close friends about my depression. I wrote a book about my experience, hoping to return the favor that all the authors had given me, hoping that talking and writing about suicidal thoughts would banish them for good.

I was wrong.

Just before starting graduate school for journalism, I told my doctor that I wanted to get off of my medication. I was tired of side effects and thought I didn’t need it anymore.

About a month into grad school, the depressive monster returned, and so did the anxiety. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t keep any food down except yogurt. I couldn’t sleep more than three hours a night. I had daily suicidal ideations.

I tried going back on my original medication, but it did not help. My personal archive of stories about other depressives included some about people who had gone off their effective antidepressants, tried to go back on, and then killed themselves because the meds didn’t work anymore—such as David Foster Wallace and also an uncle of mine. My mind told me that this, too, would be my story. I had no other narrative option.

More than ever, suicide was poised and ready to attack.

I had to drop out of graduate school, feeling like the ultimate failure. I attempted suicide, like I always knew I would.

But I also tried everything in my power to help myself. I did not want to die. I just wanted the thoughts to stop. For nearly two years, I was hospitalized in seven different psychiatric facilities in five different states. I underwent two rounds of intensive electroconvulsive therapy. I took over 15 different types of psychotropic medication. I saw over 20 different mental health professionals. Some were compassionate; others treated me like scum.

Throughout all this, I turned to literature. I read and reread books on mental illness, seeking examples of effective treatment. All I could find was medication, talk therapy, and electroconvulsive therapy—none of which did me much good.

Both literature and the medical establishment had failed me. I lost hope that anything could help me. Until I met one progressive psychiatrist who changed everything.

This psychiatrist reassured me that my thoughts were treatable symptoms, not a death sentence. Instead of prescribing medication based on trial and error, he gathered objective data. He performed a blood test that indicated that my serotonin levels were drastically low. Serotonin is the essential “happy chemical.” He also insisted that I get genetic testing, so he could prescribe the precise medications that would work for my brain chemistry.

The Perception Gap: Using Character Perspective to Propel Your Plot

My genetic testing results revealed precisely why I had gone through what I did. My brain cannot produce adequate amounts of serotonin on its own, especially when I am stressed. My psychiatrist explained that I was indeed destined for a major mental health crisis, and that destiny had been written on my DNA all along.

Based on this information, my doctor prescribed me a new antidepressant that I had never tried before. Over the next few months, the suicidal ideations backed away, slinked off, then vanished.

The new medication and the information genetic testing provided gave me the stability I needed to rebuild my life and create a new narrative for myself. I returned to graduate school—this time for speech-language pathology—and now I am working in the field as well as writing a book about my experience with genetic testing.

The canon of literature on mental illness needs more stories of triumph with the help of the newest technology available. Literature must not only realistically portray the symptoms of mental illness but must also evolve with current science to reflect the most up-to-date treatments. These stories must be told so that people know the full range of narrative outcomes open to them, for we all need stories of light to follow. Finally, for perhaps the first time in human history, we have the medical technology that can stop the incessant stalking of suicide. Those of us who struggle with clinical depression no longer need to fear a destiny that may seem warped by mental illness. It is possible to take control, write the stories we want to write, and live the stories we want to live.

Part III: Literary Critique

As I read more and more books whose main characters have mental illness, I discovered that there is a distinct difference between the way depressive thought processes are portrayed by authors who were inspired by their own experiences and those who were inspired by others’ experiences. The fictional works Thirteen Reasons Why and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which were both written by authors who observed mental illness rather than experienced it, do not come nearly as close to capturing the reality of what goes on in the mind of a severely depressed person as works such as The Bell Jar, Girl, Interrupted, and Prozac Nation.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest describes mental illness as a sort of “fog” in the mind, and even at one point the narrator states that slipping into the “fog” is not painful. This could not be further from the truth. Feeling like you are not in control of your own mind is extremely painful, even though it is an abstract kind of pain. The author, Ken Kesey, also seems to frame mental illness in a very misogynistic manner, as if it can be cured by exerting dominance over women. One character states, “… man has but one truly effective weapon against the juggernaut of modern matriarchy…” and reveals that this weapon is sexually mounting the “oppressor.” Really, Ken Kesey, in 1960’s America there was a “matriarchy” that needed overthrowing? What society did you live in?

Great Storytelling: Goldilocks and the Three Stories

Thirteen Reasons Why makes the mistake of presenting suicide as if there must be a cogent narrative of perfectly rational “reasons” for making that choice. The main character, Hannah, who recites her “reasons” for choosing suicide, presents her story in a clear, detailed manner. This is virtually impossible for a person who is truly suicidal. The pain in your mind is far too strong and overpowering to be able to narrate such a story. Severe depression is an inherently irrational, not rational state. Furthermore, the predominant “reasons” for depression are usually not external circumstances. Often, the underlying reason is brain chemistry. It is a genetic predisposition, which is exacerbated by environmental circumstances. “Reasons” for suicidal thoughts are concocted by the mind in order to try and justify the hopelessness to which is already prone.

The works written by those who experienced depression, on the other hand, vividly portray the true symptoms of a clinically depressed mind. Below is a list of thought processes with which I could identify while I was depressed.

The Bell Jar:

1. Preoccupation with death
2. Empty, aimless feeling
3. Feeling lack of autonomy
4. Easy crying—sadness is not proportional to the stimulus
5. Fear of unstructured time
6. Inability to concentrate, even on things that you enjoy and are good at
7. Lack of hygiene: “The reasons I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.”
8. Inability to sleep
9. Preoccupation with time: “I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.”
10. Thinking about suicide methods
11. Self-harm
12. Recognizing symptoms in clinical description of depression
13. Not wanting to be a burden on family

Girl, Interrupted:

1. Yearning for release from consciousness
2. Slow build up through time to suicide attempt: “Suicide is a form of murder—premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.”
3. Internal debate about whether or not to kill yourself; extreme internal reactions to seemingly innocuous stimuli: I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won’t. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked the movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself.”
4. Overwhelmingly negative mindset, blaming the world: “My hunger, my thirst, my loneliness and boredom and fear were all weapons aimed at my enemy, the world… [My sufferings] proved my existence. All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.”
5. Heightened sensitivity, easily overwhelmed by stimuli: “There is too much perception, and beyond the plethora of perceptions, a plethora of thoughts about the perceptions and about the fact of having perceptions.”
6. Brain concocts reasons for feeling the way it does: “[The mind is] full of claims and reasons. ‘You’re a little depressed because of all the stress at work,’ it says. (It never says, ‘You’re a little depressed because your serotonin level has dropped.’)”
7. Self-harm: Face scratching as a way to remind her that she was in pain, even though nobody else could see it.

Prozac Nation:

1. Negative, self-defeating thoughts: “No one will ever love me, I will live and die alone, I will go nowhere fast, I will be nothing at all. Nothing will work out.”
2. Family history of depression
3. Dwelling on death and methods of suicide, but don’t really want to die
4. Overanalyzing family dynamics, searching for cause of depression
5. Moving to new places and trying to run away from depression
6. Lack of hygiene, questioning taking showers: “You know you’ve completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights. So far as I’m concerned, the last shower I took is the last shower I will ever take.”
7. Thinking depression is intrinsic part of who you are: “I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was part of my character that made me worthwhile.”

If you or someone you know has been experiencing these symptoms of depression, please seek treatment. Thanks to genetic testing, there is an effective way to prescribe medication that can help. Genetic testing also provides information you can use to keep yourself healthy throughout your entire life. Please see “Get Help” on my website for a list of action steps you can take to get genetic testing and start getting healthy. The website also contains more about my story and some FAQ’s about my experience with mental illness, genetic testing, and psychotropic medication.

Gather further insights into the mind of your characters with our on-demand webinar from psychotherapist Dr. Donna Dannenfelser, How to Develop a Psychological Backstory for Your Characters

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The post Literature as a Lifeline: How Stories and Genetic Testing Can Save Lives from Mental Illness appeared first on Writer's Digest.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the brilliant Ilise Benun for about five years now. During my time as online content director and editor-in-chief of HOW design magazine, a career-centric publication for graphic designers, llise was a regular contributor, providing savvy advice on personal branding, marketing yourself and your work, managing your career like a business and earning more money as a freelance designer. In addition to being a business coach and adjunct faculty at Maryland Institute College of Art, she is a Program Partner for HOW Design Live and the host two podcasts, her Marketing Mentor Podcast and The HOW Design Live podcast.

And make no mistake—Ilise’s expertise goes well beyond graphic design. Whether you’re a writer or an author looking to build your platform, market your books or self-publish, or you’re interested in getting into freelance writing, Ilise’s insights on Marketing-Mentor.com and in her seven business books, including The Creative Professional’s Guide to Money, steer entrepreneurial writers toward more lucrative and strategic career paths.

That’s why we invited her to speak at indieLAB (September 29–30 in Cincinnati) and share some of her insights in a special LAB that will help writers understand their worth and reimagine their careers with a more entrepreneurial mindset.

Here, Ilise shares a few tips on for getting started in freelance writing — a topic she’ll address in greater detail in her indieLAB session on what it takes to forge a successful writing career of any kind.

What are the first steps for writers who want to do freelance writing work, but lack connections and experience?

First of all, don’t stress about what you don’t have. Focus instead of what you do have—namely experience. For example, a landscape designer who wants to be a copywriter can bring that history and knowledge to the industry to write about it. Likewise, an x-ray technician getting into freelance copywriting understands the equipment, the manufacturers of which probably need stronger, more benefit-oriented writing for their sales materials or web site.

Keep in mind also that everything you write is an example of your writing, especially if you don’t have a big impressive portfolio. So the summary section of your LinkedIn Profile and every email message you send is an opportunity to show how well you write.

Then, go out—literally—and talk to people. Attend networking events, meet ups and trade shows. Spend the day in a coffee shop where people are working and start up conversations. Find small business owners (they’re everywhere!) who need help with their marketing. That inevitably involves writing. Find out what they need—web copy, brochure copy, sales copy, white papers, content marketing and blog posts. If you can help, offer to do so. Then all you have to do is negotiate a deal (that’s what my session will teach you) and you’ve got a client!

The 12 Best and Worst Things That Could Happen After Your Freelance Article Is Accepted

What are three things you should always include in a freelance writing contract?

1. A deadline—even if they don’t have one, you should make one. Otherwise, things don’t get finished.
2. The fee you agreed to—especially if it was agreed to verbally. People often forget or misunderstand, so stating it clearly in writing will put everyone at ease.
3. A paragraph that stipulates what will happen if something changes, such as a “kill fee” whether the project changes or grows or is cancelled.

How important is it for a freelance writer to build a personal brand? How can you ensure that your brand is unique?

If you don’t want to be a blur in the eyes of your ideal clients, then you must have a personal brand. And that brand is what makes you different from other writers. What is it that makes you stand out? You may not know but others do. Don’t wrack your brain to come up with it yourself. This is a listening exercise more than anything. Listen to the compliments you receive. Instead of blushing, try to understand what others appreciate about you. Is it your ability to clarify the complex? Is it your quick mind? Is it your reliability and the fact that you’ve never missed a deadline? It may have nothing to do with your writing. It could be about how you work. Mine any recommendations or testimonials you’re received to find language to integrate into your brand. (Here’s an excellent article about personal brands for freelancers.)

What are some ways freelancers can improve their chances of success when pitching to big-name publications?

The 3 Ps are the keys to successful pitching (and much more).

• Personalization: Tailor every pitch to show you’ve done your homework and are a perfect fit for the publication.
• Persistence: Don’t give up after just one try. It takes many efforts to even get someone’s attention in the first place, much less get them to respond. So you have to follow up and pitch over and over, often in the face of silence, without being discouraged and without assuming you’re being rejected.
• Patience: Because timing is everything—your pitch has to land at the moment when they’re open. So the more often you reach out, the more likely the timing will be right and your name will be familiar and therefore trustworthy. That’s what it takes—but that takes time!

Can you give us a brief preview of what you’ll be talking about at indieLAB?

My hands-on lab session will focus on what it takes to build the confidence to be a successful writer. There’s a lot of internal work that has to take place, plus some very practical skills to learn. Most writers haven’t had the training in these skills but somehow think they should already know them, especially when it comes to pricing and talking about money.

So I’m going to show attendees how to determine their value to each client (because it’s different from client to client) and then what to say to secure the best deal. Plus, I’ll share the seven small, but lethal, negotiating mistakes made most often (and what to do instead).

In the hands-on part of my session, we will price a sample project together in real time, then share that info to see how others are pricing too. It promises to be fun!

Follow Ilise on Twitter @ilisebenun and sign up for her Quick Tips at www.marketing-mentortips.com, and don’t miss her workship at indieLAB in Cincinnati, Septemeber 29–30, 2018!

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