Writer’s life

Ten Tips for Writing Through Family Stress

September 25, 2016 By Guest

Please welcome Barbara Claypole White as our guest today. A Brit living in North Carolina, Barbara Claypole White writes hopeful family drama with a healthy dose of mental illness. Her debut novel, The Unfinished Garden, won the 2013 Golden Quill Contest for Best First Book, and The In-Between Hour was chosen by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) as a Winter 2014 Okra Pick. Her third novel, The Perfect Son, was a Goodreads Choice Awards Nominee for Best Fiction 2015, and Echoes of Family launches this week!

Writing to contract is extraordinarily stressful, as is sharing your family with mental illness. I juggle both and if I couldn’t write through stress, I couldn’t write. Other writers often ask how I cope, but my family stress and my writing have become symbiotic. I’ve figured out how to accept the chaos and let it fuel my writing. Maybe at this point, I can’t write without stress. I hope not!

Connect with Barbara on Twitter and on Facebook.

Ten Tips for Writing Through Family Stress

I’ve birthed four novels in the midst of family drama. My husband and son battle OCD, an anxiety disorder that generates an 80% divorce rate and a nasty suicide statistic; we have two aging parent situations an ocean apart; and we’ve had our share of medical crises. Often I’m the craziest person in the house, but throughout, I’ve written to contract—with the occasional extension. (Hey, I’m not Wonder Woman.) And along the way, I’ve picked up some kickass coping techniques:

Laugh like you mean it

I was having a good rant the other day when I overhead my husband ask our son, “Is she talking to us?” The Delinquent replied, “Nah, Dad. She’s just venting.” “How can you tell the difference?” my husband said, at which point I cracked up. Real laughter, the kind that snorts out through your nose, annihilates stress.

Acknowledge negative emotions

If you had mold in your house, you’d deal with it, right? Much of publishing is about handling rejection with a smile when you’d rather spit venom. Find a private place to release those feelings because denying them is akin to feeding them Miracle-Gro. Let’s face it: writing is personal to you. Here’s a useful trick from the war on OCD: assign yourself time to worry, set a timer, and when it goes off, you’re done.

Give your stress to a character

Who doesn’t love the Donald Maass third level emotions? After my mother fell and smashed up her elbow, I had to juggle my deadline with a dash across the pond. I was mad, I was resentful, but underneath I had horrible guilt. I bequeathed those feelings to my hero in a win-win situation that gave him authentic emotions and me therapy.

Think small

To counter my son’s crippling exam anxiety, we used to create a day-by-day study calendar, working backward from his finals. When his anxiety peaked, I would redirect him to his daily goal. He still uses this technique as a college senior, and I use it for deadlines. Next time you’re overwhelmed, shrink your world to daily goals. [Read more…]

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Confessions of an Intrepid Mermaid

September 18, 2016 By Guest

By chelseadaniele in the Creative Commons

We’re very happy to welcome Tonia Marie Harris as our guest today. Tonia resides in south-central Illinois with her husband, three children, and three rescue animals. In addition to writing novels, poetry and essays, she is President of WME Community Works, a non-profit organization that spearheaded the recent development of a grassroots library that serves her village and the surrounding communities. Tonia’s latest work-in-progress is a coming-of-age novel tentatively titled The Education of Sugar Girl. Her work has appeared in Twice Upon A Time, a collection of reimagined fairy tales, Hand/Eye Magazine, Mash Stories, Silver Birch Press, and various anthologies.

I’m a process junkie. When I finish a book I love—everything from Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History—I immediately want to know the how and why behind the scenes evolution of the story. What I realized was that my own process would never come together if I didn’t simply dive into the deep end and write the darn story.

Connect with Tonia on Facebook and Twitter.

Confessions of an Intrepid Mermaid

I’m swimming. The water mutes the sound of everything but the distant beat of my heart. The water itself is an echo of that rhythm. Voices and the pounding of feet above me are the sounds of another planet. I am a transmitter for something else entirely—the urge to move forward and rise for another breath and plunge back into the water again. Here I have no need for peripheral vision.

This is the recurring dream I had over the summer. This dream of swimming. If you analyzed this dream, you would tell me I’m on a journey through the depths of my subconscious. You would be right.

I am a plotter. I survey the land, measure the depths, and calculate the constellations. I am a pantser. I leave behind the diagnostics to plunge in and discover the wavering depths of story.

Another Word for Forward

This is my first confession: I’ve spent more time in this last year trying to define what kind of writer I am than doing actual writing.

I want to be a plotter. In real life I came to intimately know the power of to-do lists and preparation. Colorful index cards and the phantasm that is Scrivener lured me like a siren song. I spent months planning a dark fairy tale only to discover it wasn’t the story I wanted to write at this moment, not yet. Not the if I had time to write one book what would it be book.

I tried to plot my current manuscript, but each time something stopped me. Depression. My father’s cancer. More depression and all the wins and losses of daily life that can enrich our writing all while draining our power supply.

I tried pantsing. Familiar territory for someone who for years self-identified this way. It was all false starts and a brooding sense of failure. I wondered if my love for writing and this story in particular was a clichéd tale of star-crossed lovers.

What kind of writer was I, and why was I compelled to label myself before I could move forward?

Confession number two: I suck at achieving middle ground. Not because I believe the world revolves in black and white, but because I have a knack for playing the devil’s advocate. I can you give you compelling reasons to be a plotter or a pantser. [Read more…]

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Crazy Little Thing Called Love

February 14, 2016 By Guest

Please welcome back Molly Best Tinsley to Writer Unboxed. In a moment of sanity, Molly decided twenty years of teaching literature and creative writing at the U. S. Naval Academy was enough. She resigned, moved west, and now writes full time in Ashland, Oregon. Her fiction has earned two National Endowment of the Arts fellowships and her story collection, Throwing Knives, won the Oregon Book Award. She has explored the diverse possibilities of narrative in a spy thriller, Broken Angels, a memoir, Entering the Blue Stone, and most recently, the middle-grade adventure Behind the Waterfall. Peel back the skin of genre, and the same energy drives them all.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, Molly is here in a “bewildered and vulnerable state” to share a love letter to her novel-in-progress.

Over the years, inklings have built to this truth: when I’m not engaged with a writing project, I feel like I’m wandering around in a lonely place between widow and orphan—writing nourishes and defines me just as much as do my friends and loved ones. These days, I’m acutely aware of the flip side: my untitled novel-in-progress is fickle, frustrating, secretive, and generally difficult. Think of what follows as my way of understanding and surviving its challenges.

Connect with Molly on Facebook and also on Facebook at Fuze Publishing.

Crazy Little Thing Called Love

The creative process is seductive. Though it consumes huge amounts of time and energy, it holds out a promise of bliss, completion. Not always, but often enough, we look upon our transformations of darkness to light, chaos to order, pain to beauty, and we are glad. It’s no wonder spouses, lovers, children, get jealous of the hours we spend face-to-face with the screen, fingers fondling the keyboard. The bond between the writer and her work has the potential electricity of an intimate human relationship. And the soul-scouring challenges.

I’m in the muddled middle of a novel-in-progress. I’ll call it “Fifty Shades of Ambivalence” because we’ve been together now for a couple years, and it still refuses to tell me its real name.

It introduced itself as a short story immediately following a car accident. Friends tried to assure me that there was nothing I could have done to prevent my twilight collision with a large deer, but I knew I’d been mesmerized at the time by a British baritone reading John le Carre on CD, and I brooded over the possibility that I’d been partly at fault.

In my bewildered and vulnerable state, smoothing this painful debacle into narrative seemed to offer solace. If it didn’t clear up the confusion around what had actually happened, at least I’d be doing something creative—art would supplant life and thereby heal it.

The good news is a good chunk of the story spilled out in two sittings—a weekend fling. I had a fabulous time. Rereading what I’d written, I found words and expressions I didn’t realize I knew or have never used before in my life. The bad news: once I’d satisfied my emotional need, had my fun, I couldn’t end it. I tried for days, weeks, to contrive a nice epiphany and taper things off, with no success. Finally I had to realize that the story had designs on something more long-term, like a novel, maybe even a novel with complicated depths. I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to commit to that. [Read more…]

Ouch, My Feelings!

January 23, 2016 By John Vorhaus

As the international television consultant I sometimes am, I sometimes find myself working with people coming into TV script writing from other forms of writing, for the simple reason that in many parts of the world (well, my world) trained and experienced TV writers are thin on the ground. For those coming into TV writing from backgrounds in solo writing, it can be difficult to adjust to the collaborative creative process that writing for television demands. Such writers often have the expectation that their feelings will be taken into consideration – that they’ll be treated gently. They quickly learn that in the hothouse environment of a TV writers’ room, your ego is your own affair, and any time you go, “Ouch, my feelings,” that’s pretty much a problem you get to have all alone.

When I’m the bearer of this bad news, I try to break it gently – but, weirdly, not too gently. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, sure, but in the writers’ rooms I run, I don’t really want people’s feelings to be an issue at all. I want to get into productive collaboration as quickly as possible. So I ask my writers to join me in adopting a certain useful fiction (a useful fiction is something that everyone knows to be untrue, but agrees to anyway, for the sake of a common good). The useful fiction I’m promoting here is, “Inside this room, feelings don’t matter.” We all know it’s not true. We all know that our egos will make their presence known. But if we collectively commit to serving the work and not the ego, then we can go about the business of giving one another hard notes – often terribly brutal notes – without anyone wanting to open the nearest window and hurl themselves out.

Let’s say I’m giving story notes to a writer who’s never had anyone comment meaningfully on her work before. This is a very common situation in my line of work, and you would think I’d handle that writer with kid gloves. Yet kid gloves are the last thing I want. If I try to couch my notes in protective language, my message might not get through. Worse, my efforts to do so just reinforce the idea that protecting each other’s feelings is, or should be, our priority, which leads to more pulled punches and more lost efficiency. So I just say, “The notes are the notes. I know you’ll have an emotional reaction to them, but remember that here in this room we pretend that those feelings don’t matter. This clears out the space between us and lets us focus, together, on closing the gap between where the work is and where it needs to be.” [Read more…]

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Meanwhile, Back at Square One

December 3, 2015 By John Vorhaus

The first two novels I wrote appeared in serial form in a biweekly magazine, back around the turn of the century, when I basically bet that I could stay one step ahead of a pretty relentless deadline and/or still be churning out words when the fledgling magazine went belly up. I’ve always had a huge fondness for those novels, not so much for the content, but for the exhilaration of meeting that deadline, and for the audacity of thinking I could do so.

“Here are these training wheels, bub – now go hit the speedway.”

One of the novels I later published under the Bafflegab Books imprint and it continues to sell steady ones of copies to this day. The other remained an unexploited resource which, recently finding myself temporarily between projects, I took into my head to resurrect, edit, and fling unto the world. That was the plan. Let me tell you why it didn’t work out. [Read more…]