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

Our podcast title is “How To Write a Book Description That Gets Readers Tingling All Over” and that just sounds naughty, doesn’t it?

And it is a little naughty because this, my friends, is about selling a book, your book, and that requires being a little bit sexy.

Sexy is something I, Carrie, am very very bad at.

Let’s start by thinking about it this way:

A book description is an adverstisement for your book.

Writing a bad ad for your book doesn’t make you a sucky novelist. It just makes you unskilled at that. And that’s okay. You’ve been learning character development and plotting and novel structure and pacing. It’s okay to not know this part of the book world too.

Yet.

Here are the things you need to know about how to write a book description

You want it to not be as long as the book. Or even as long as a novella. Or even as long as this post.

Any longer? People apparently stop paying attention.

Show us how the main character’s decision has set them toward the adventure of the book.

The third person is when you talk about other people and don’t use the “I.”

So,

Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar decided to adopt a hamster, little did they know, it was a zombie.

Not

We adopted a zombie hamster.

You don’t want to go all fancy-pants on the book description. Stay away from adverbs and adjectives and a zillion clauses. Simple wins.

So, don’t write:

In the adorable town of Bar Harbor, Maine where tourist avidly romp in the summer and locals stoically manage the hard winters beneath the mini mountains and rocky coast, two hard-working podcasters tried to adopt a small rodent.

Book hooks happen in the first pages of the story, but they also need to happen in story descriptions.

A good way to do this is to show how your hero is unlikely to achieve their goal on their adventure.

Absolutely clueless podcasters Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar decided to adopt a hamster, hopelessly hoping for something easy to love. Little did they know that Hammy the Hamster was a zombie.

If you use one or two words that are emotional and full of power, you can impact the reader and make them want your book.

If it was a mystery, we might use a word like MURDER>

Two podcasters. One zombie hamster. And a little Maine town about to host a million tourists.

Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar weren’t expecting that the hamster they’d adopted to help their podcast ratings would end up a zombie. Or that it would threaten all the tourists heading in to celebrate Acadia National Park’s bicentennial.

Now, these clueless podcasters, looking for a way out of their podunk town have a choice: find a way to get people to listen to them and protect both the tourists and Hammy the Hamster or just give up and hunker down with some Doritos (Hammy’s favorite) before it’s too late.

The future of Bar Harbor, Maine—and a million tourists—depend on them.

Hook ‘em and they’ll buy your book. In dog world, they’ll give you a treat when you hook ‘em. Show them what they need but bring them along, wanting more.

These are from Duotrope which has an AMAZING list. You should check it out.

This one is just a simple prompt from Writers Connection

“The Whispering Forest: A forest speaks to those who listen. What secrets does it share, and what price must you pay for its wisdom?”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ap-us-odd-cat-honorary-degree_n_6647b994e4b00e1a0a6c1f51

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Dogs are Smarter Than People/Write Better Now

Last week, we talked about pinch points both on the podcast and on the blog, and honestly? Nobody seemed super into it, but we’re finishing up this week. This post is going to be a bit more about the first part of act two of a three-act story, focusing on the time from the first pinch point to the midpoint.

Pause for a plea: Look, I know plot structure isn’t sexy the way character development or drama and obstacles and conflict are, but it’s super important. It makes a difference in your book wooing readers and in it wooing agents.

K.M. Weiland has a really lovely graphic that we’ve included in the podcast notes about where to put those pinch points.

Weiland is a bit of a goddess about structure and what she says about this first pinch point is this:

Right after this big and important pinch point, the hero of your story aka your protagonist moves into the section of the book that comes before the book’s halfway point or midpoint. Weiland calls this space from 37% to 50% a realization place and scenes for your character growth. The protagonist understand what’s going on a bit more. She starts to react with that knowledge informing her reactions and then her actions. Cool, right?

She writes, “In itself, the First Pinch Point does not reveal the true nature of the conflict to the protagonist. Rather, it foreshadows it by providing a peek at facts the protagonist has barely grasped as yet.”

She uses the movie ALIEN a lot to explain this. At the first pinch point, the crew realizes that the alien creature isn’t what they were thinking it was. Their choices start to be informed by that until the midpoint, which Weiland calls the MOMENT OF TRUTH.

At the midpoint in ALIEN that alien smashes its way out of one of the crew’s chest.

The truth of what they are dealing has exploded in the ship and on the screen (and on your novel’s page).

“It’s instructive when watching movies to observe the protagonist’s facial expressions prior to the Moment of Truth and then afterward. Before the Midpoint, he’ll often look baffled as he struggles to keep up with the conflict. Then the light dawns in his eyes at the Midpoint, and from that moment on, there’s a look of knowing determination on his face,” she writes.

Larry Brooks defines pinch points as “An example, or reminder, of the nature and implications of the antagonist force, that is not filtered by the hero’s experience.”

Sometimes in life, your defining moments don’t come at the midpoint. - Mr. Murphy

So, what he’s saying is don’t think that there are certain points and ages in your life where you have to get things done. Life is not a book and it doesn’t need to be a three-act structure.

These are via Authors’ Publish.

Bannister Press: Other – the 2024 fantasy short story anthology

DarkLit Press: In the Gallows Wake – A Pirate Horror Anthology

This one comes from Studio Binder:

“Here are a list of dialogue prompts. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know who the characters are yet, or which character a certain line would be good for. Try not to think about how this could fit into your already existing story, or what scene this should belong in, just write:

NYT

Larry Brooks, Story Engineering

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-27-2024

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

There are some things in the writing world that don’t make a ton of sense in the world of regular humans.

One of those things is pinch points.

This podcast episode is going to be the start of a quick series of podcasts and regular posts about pinch points. The regular posts will be at our Substack LIVING HAPPY under the WRITE BETTER NOW publication.

So, what are these little twerps called pinch points?

They a way of thinking about novel or story structure that helps us keep the reader engaged.

Pinch points are moments where the tension emerges again or is heightened. It’s a place where you seductively say to the reader, “Hey, baby. Let’s engage again.” Or maybe it’s that they are saying, “Dear Reader, let me remind you what exactly is at stake here for our poor, dear, pathetic hero.”

The pinch points are where the protagonist or hero of your story gets a little bit of pain. Ouch. So mean, us writers are so very mean.

As Writing Mastery describes, “They rekindle the tension that may have waned by reminding us of the primary conflict and what it means for the characters. Without stakes, readers will quickly lose interest—therefore, pinch points are events of the plot that, strategically placed, keep the narrative from losing steam.”

“In the traditional Three-Act Structure, the first act introduces the characters, setting, and conflict, while the third act culminates in the resolution. The second act, which constitutes the middle portion of the story, is often the longest and contains the rising action. Pinch points punctuate this act to create a sense of urgency and drive the story forward.”

So, here’s the super important thing. Pinch points are not plot points. Yes, there is a lot of P-words in there, but to pinch is not to plot, though a dastardly villain might plot how to pinch.

Plot points

Pinch points

As Writers Helping Writers writes, “New writers often concentrate on the Hook, Midpoint, and the big twist at the end. But without well-placed Pinch Points, the story will lose its sense of rising action, conflict, and tension. The quest cannot exist without an opponent, and the Pinch Points show the reader what that opposition is all about. 

“Pinch Points show how high the stakes are. They also set up the emotional change within the hero as they react to the new situation.”

So, tomorrow on the blog, I’ll be talking about where these babies go in your story.

Do not let the pinch points keep you from moving forward toward your goals.

Think about the bad guy in your story. Now write down:

The Castro Prize, named for our founding editor, Michael Castro, is a new prize awarded annually to exemplary works of poetry and fiction. River Styx editors carefully read and discuss contest entries and ultimately submit the strongest ten entries to the judges. For our 2024 contest, Christopher Castellani will judge fiction and Dg Okpik will judge poetry. We will award one winner for fiction and one for poetry, with one runner-up in each genre. The first-place prizes are $1000 each, plus publication in print and online. 

The entry fee is $20. If you would like to receive a copy of our latest print issue, River Styx 107, you may do so at a discounted rate of 50% off ($9.95). (Shipping rates apply. The discount is good for one copy of RS107 per entrant and cannot be combined with any other discounts or offers.) Entrants will receive a discount code in their confirmation email.

Works of fiction should not exceed 5000 words. You may send up to three poems. Work must be previously unpublished. You may submit multiple entries but each work must be submitted separately. If the work is a simultaneous submission, we ask that you notify us immediately upon publication elsewhere and withdraw the piece via Submittable. Withdrawing a submission will not result in a refund of the entry fee. The contest runs from May 1, 2024 through September 30, 2024. The winners will be announced on January 1, 2025.

All contest entries are read blind. The winner is chosen based on the strength and inventiveness of the writing, not on academic background, publication history, or any other accolades. Please do not include your name or any other identifying information on the work itself. Submittable provides features that allow us to read the work without seeing the contributor's name, contact information, or cover letter. Once winners are chosen, we can "unhide" this information to identify the winners.

ENTER NOW

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

There are a lot of people who advocate spending just an hour a day doing something to become awesome. That hour a day is often learning. You study up about what you want to do, you self learn, you teach yourself to be better by learning all about the thing you're into.

So, if you're into writing, you read books about writing and actual books. You study the craft.

So, if you're into knitting, you study knitting. Entrepeneurship? Same thing, but first you probably have to learn how to spell it. My bad there.

There's a cool graph here that talks about how if you read a certain number of books, how you compare to other American adults. It's also a bit depressing because it basically says most Americans read two books a year.

Hallel K has a post on Medium about how you can use the 1-hour rule to catapult yourself into the 1% and I think that's a great post, but it's a little hyperbolizing. We like hyperbole though, right? It makes things easy.

Hallel uses a quote by Earl Nightingale.

“One hour per day of study in your chosen field is all it takes. One hour per day of study will put you at the top of your field within three years. Within five years you’ll be a national authority. In seven years, you can be one of the best people in the world at what you do — Earl Nightingale”

This might make you think, "Yes! Right. So true. Epiphany moment."

Or it might make you think, "Who the hell is Earl Nightingale?"

Well, he has a Wikipedia page? But basically he was a motivational speaker and a radio show host that died in 1989. He wrote Strangest Secret. And to him it's all about risk taking and he also said that the problem with people's lives and lack of success isn't cowardice, but conformity.

According to his definition, a success is when you go after a goal and achieve it. Deliberately. And only 1 out of 20 do that, he said.

The key, he said, is creating, not conforming, deliberate creation. Goals, he said, bring you places. A ship, he says, that has a crew and captain has a destination and it gets out of the harbor and ends up to its destination. But a ship without a destination? Without a captain and crew? If you just turn on the boat's engines, it might not even make it out of the harbor.

Deliberate learning. Goals. Focus. That's what matters, he says. Reading, learning? Those are important aspects. Maybe you won't get in the top 1% of whatever you're going toward, but you will get smarter, closer, and have deliberate action.

This is from MasterClass and it's all about goals.

"Create Realistic Goals

"If your goals are unrealistic, they’ll be unachievable and overwhelming. Don’t let your passion for finishing your novel cause you to push yourself too hard and set goals that simply aren’t possible. For example, it might not be reasonable to set a goal that you will write your novel in one month. Neither should you set a word-count goal to write 10,000 words a day—especially if you also have a full-time job. Setting reasonable goals in the first place will make it much easier for you down the road.

"Consider setting writing goals that you can accomplish step-by-step, one day at a time. The best thing you can do is create daily habits that will help you reach your goals—rather than burn yourself out early with ambitious expectations for yourself. Here are some goals that many writers will set for themselves:

River Styx Castro Prize 2025 (Deadline September 30)

The Castro Prize, named for our founding editor, Michael Castro, is a new prize awarded annually to exemplary works of poetry and fiction. River Styx editors carefully read and discuss contest entries and ultimately submit the strongest ten entries to the judges. For our 2024 contest, Christopher Castellani will judge fiction and Dg Okpik will judge poetry. We will award one winner for fiction and one for poetry, with one runner-up in each genre. The first-place prizes are $1000 each, plus publication in print and online. 

River Styx remains dedicated to publishing the works of writers and artists we believe represent current and future movements in society and culture at local, national, and global levels, whether that work is embedded in historical, contemporary, future, abstract, or impossible contexts. In other words, we seek out work which protests, proclaims, fumes, experiments, innovates, elevates, ruminates, and rushes ahead. And the form that work takes is often surprising, occasionally challenging to our sensibilities and ossified narratives, and always feels urgent and alive in some way.

Sky News Greatest Dane

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

On last week’s podcast and the one a few before that, and in a post, Shaun and I talked a bit about plot structures and narrative structures and how here in the U.S. we think of these usually (not always!) as pretty linear, and pretty much in a three-act framework (think beginning, middle, end) with rising stakes and drama as you go along.

This is not the only way to write.

I am very much a product of the U.S. culture. And I’m going to talk a tiny bit in the next couple weeks about different forms/shapes of storytelling, but again . . . I am a student of this culture’s structures. I am not an expert at other structures. I adore them though. I’m going to be providing links.

And hopefully by quickly talking about some of them, you might go off and explore and adore, too. Maybe even get an epiphany for your own story?

So, another kind of storytelling is Middle Eastern and it's  Frame Story in our language.

And it's so cool. Basically, as the Novelsmithy explains "many types of stories, characters, and symbols are woven together into a larger tale.

"One Thousand And One Nights is the most famous example of this. In this story, Shahrazad tells story after story to the Sultan in order to keep him from killing her. Her stories include a variety of complex narratives, different characters, conflicts, genres, and morals. There are even frame stories within the larger frame story!

"Characteristics of Middle Eastern Storytelling:

It's very influenced by The Qur’an.

Gulf News writes,

"One of the most revered traditions of oral storytelling is the hakawati. As intricate and complex as a weaving pattern, this motif-rich narrative style darts in and out of stories, offering unending drama where the storyteller begins one tale, deftly leaves it mid-way to pick up another and then has a third story emerging from a subplot of the first and so on. All this is done using the tools of allegory, folklore, satire, music and a visual spectacle of grand sweeping gestures and facial expressions to finally create an enthralling experience for his listeners."

There's a great piece about frame stories here.

Pogie's like "hey dude, I live my style and life in the frame story style of way. It always comes back to me. I'll always be doing something. I'll see a cat and I'll change my storyline." And that keeps happening. It's all about multiple stories in a brain.

Do the Forrest Gump. Find a setting like a park bench and tell the stories that make a life. OR at least outline it.

Voyage simply aims to publish good work and provide a space for new and established voices. To get an idea of what we publish, please read our archives. General submissions are open year-round with no fee to submit.

We only accept submissions via our online submission managing system, Submittable. We DO NOT accept submissions via email. Submissions sent via email will be automatically discarded without a response. We accept simultaneous submissions, but please withdraw your work via Submittable if it is accepted elsewhere.

Though we consider reprints, please be advised that Voyage doesn't offer payment for work that has been published before. If you are submitting a piece that has been published, please notify us in your submission. 

Voyage pays $200 per accepted, previously unpublished piece of short prose.

Fiction: We are looking for short stories that surprise, inspire, entertain, or enlighten.

Creative Nonfiction: We’re on the hunt for personal essays and other creative nonfiction that specifically relates to the teen experience. Submit your creative nonfiction via our submission manager here.  

Manuscript Preparation: Please make sure your manuscript is double-spaced with Times New Roman 12. Submissions should be no more than 6,000 words. Please include the author's name and page number in the top right-hand corner of every page.  

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Last week, maybe a week ago, maybe 82 years ago, who knows, we talked about alternative plot structures.

Much of American film and novels is built on what's considered to be the classic three-act structure, which basically goes beginning-middle-end, and there's this rising line of the plot.

It ends up looking like a bit of a triangle.

As readers, we can sort of anticipate and feel that structure happening. In a rom-com, we almost always know how far into the book or movie it will be when the couple breaks up and then someone has to chase down a car or airplane or something so they can get back together. There's a lovely familiarity in that, but us writers don't always want a lovely familiarity with beats in all the prescribed places and a structure that looks like a triangle.

In an earlier podcast, Shaun, was asking me about the different structures and plots. And this is a pretty big question that people write entire books about, but I'm going to start here.

First, a structure is sort of the diagram of rising and falling and action that links all of the plot points together

The plot is something that connects the moments of the novel in a way that gives a novel its meaning. .

Janet Burroway defines plot as a “series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance …. Plot’s concern is ‘what, how, and why,’ with scenes ordered to highlight cause-and-effect.”

Plot, according to Ingrid Sundberg, is about patterns, rhythm, and energy. It’s about the movement and feeling your particular arrangement creates. The triangle (often called the Aristotelian story shape) is a visual metaphor for the escalating energy that is meant to come as a result of a classic design arrangement.”

This podcast, we're talking about all the different types of plots. Next time? We'll go all structure on you.

• Mini-plot

• Daisy chain plot,

• Cautionary tale plot

• Ensemble plot

• Along for the ride plot

• Symbolic juxtaposition plot

• Repeated event plot

• Repeated action plot

Mini Plot – This is the emotional plot. It’s minimalistic. It might even seem like it does not have a plot, but it does. It’s just that the cause-and-effect is about emotional evolution and growth.

Example: Tender Mercies

Daisy Chain Plot - We have no main protagonist, so we have no main goal. A bunch of characters and situations are here and they are linked via cause-and-effect like a physical object.

Examples: Thirteen Reasons Why (has a protagonist, but it kind of works). Lethal Passage.

Cautionary Tale Plot - Hero? There is no hero! Comfort? There is no comfort! Our main character sucks. And instead the reader is the protagonist.

Examples: Jumped by Rita Williams-Garcia. Inexcusable by Chris Lynch.

Ensemble Plot - According to Berg, this happens when you have protagonists grouped in the same place and it is “characterized by the interaction of several voices, consciousnesses, or world views, none of which unifies or is superior to the others.”

Example: Give a Boy a Gun.

Along For The Ride Plot - Ah. Where is our protagonist doing proactive things? Not here. Here we have the secondary character pushing the action and the protagonist is there, zooming along with them. The protagonist has an emotional change anyways, but they aren’t Captain Proactive going after their goals.

Example: Looking for Alaska – John Green

Symbolic Juxtaposition Plot - Why yes, it’s the anti-plot, which some people treat like the anti-christ. This book is an existentialist's dream. It’s not about the emotion. It’s about having an epiphany, an intellectual epiphany. The plot is about ideas and themes and symbols and that connects everything and gives it meaning. The cause and effect? It’s really not here.

Example: Einstein’s Dreams by Lightman.

Repeated Events Plot - So, the same event? You see it multiple times but through differing perspectives so that we can see the truth from different characters’ points of view.

Repeated Action Plot - You know the movie Groundhog Day? This is it. This is where a character keeps doing the same things over and over until they try to get it right. They have a goal. But the sequence of events isn’t linear but repeating.

Example: Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

Repeated action plots are the best. Wake up. Snack. Zoomies. Snack. Breakfast. Snack. Pee. Snack.

It's okay to life your life as a repeated event.

Your novel doesn’t have to be finished. We initially need only 5,000 to 8,000 words and a 300 word synopsis. If you’re long listed we’ll ask for a total of 15,000 words, including your original word count. Shortlisted? Then we need a total 30,000 words, again including your original entry and long listed word count. It all adds up to an incredible opportunity. Click here for all the details!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Bechard, Margaret. “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Plot.” Faculty Lecture. Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, VT. Jan 2008.

Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narative Craft. 8th Edition. New York: Longman, 2011.

Chea, Stephenson. “What’s the Difference Between Plot and Structure.” Associated Content. 16 Feb. 2010. Web. 7 May 2011.

Fletcher, Susan. “Structure as Genesis.” Faculty Lecture. Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, VT. July 2012.

• Berg, Charles Ramirez. “A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films: Classifying the ‘Tarantino Effect.’” Film Criticism, Vol. 31, Issue 1-2, 5-57, 22 Sept 2006. Ebsco Host. Web. 6 May 2011.

• Pages 44 -66 in: McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: IT Books, 1997.

• Pages 165 – 194 in: Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

https://penandthepad.com/types-narrative-structures-8329065.html

Do you want to be happy?

It’s a question philosopher Sebastian Purcell asks his students every year.

Do you want to be happy?

For Purcell being happy has a lot in common with living a good life,

“The Stoic answer to this question, that the good life consists in flourishing (eudaimonia), has seen a resurgent interest that is indicative of a cultural shift. Interestingly, it looks to be taking the place left open by the retreat of religious belief,” he writes.

And stoicism? It’s a way to look at life and how the world connects, how they work. It’s physical, Purcell says, and metaphysical.

Most people think of me as a pretty happy person, and I possibly am. To be fair, before I started to feel a bit overwhelmed by my life, I’d always thought positively about things, expected good outcomes.

When I lived in another town and would drive from place to place for my job as a reporter or to pick up my daughter, Em, from school, I’d hear from people later.

“You just drive around smiling. What are you even thinking about?”

I couldn’t ever tell them. They’d scoff. I’d laugh. I’m pretty sure one city councilor called me a weirdo about it. I know a baseball coach did. It didn’t matter. I was who I was.

When Em was little, she and I would talk about her worries, I’d run through logically how outcomes were probably not what she’d expect. I do that with Xane, our other kiddo, too.

“If you fail a test, will you end up in jail? Will anyone die?” I’d ask.

Em would roll her eyes at me and say things like, “You’re being ridiculous,  Mommy.”

I’d bounce back with and say brilliantly, “You don’t have to expect the worst case scenarios all the time because a bad grade is not a worst case scenario.”

“I’m just being realistic,” she’d say.

“No. You’re being pessimistic,” I’d tell her, “because you aren’t going to fail anyway.”

The truth is that though I’ve told both of them these things and even though I motor through my day staying pretty chill and positive, often I would flop in bed at night and stare at the darkness for an hour, a weird shiver of anxiety creeping through me—anxiety stemming from things that I couldn’t quite place.

That doesn’t sound all that happy to me, but the truth was that even as I smiled in my car all by myself, even as I sold positive outcomes to my kids, I didn’t know how to even define happiness. I don’t think I’d ever really tried.

And I’m trying now.

Harvard professor, Arthur Brooks, says that “happiness equals enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning.”

Brooks tells his students to think of happiness as “a portfolio with four big categories of investments.”

He says, “We need all of them so our happiness can grow in a balanced way. The first investment is faith or life philosophy, it's how you make sense of the world.”

Family and relationships that will most likely stay with you throughout your life though you don’t choose them is the second category.

The third is the relationships we choose. What he calls our “most intimate relationships.”

“The fourth is meaningful work,” he says.  "That doesn't mean work that pays a fortune or features a fancy title. Rather, it's work that allows you to earn your success and serve others.”

Those four categories aren’t solo acts. They work together and they all have to be there, he believes and that means? Well, it means that we don’t get to be in charge of our happiness all the time. Sometimes horrible things happen. Circumstances exist. And heredity is a factor, too.

I think I’m pretty lucky because despite all the choices she made and things she went through, my mom was a pretty happy human. And my biological father was always happy too. That accounts, Brooks believes, for about 50 % of my happiness.

I once asked Shaun, “Babe, would you call your parents happy people?”

And he said, “Now or when I was a kid?”

“Kid?”

Then he made a long whistling exhale and said, “Not really. I mean they weren’t really unhappy. Probably happier apart.”

So maybe take a hot second and think of your parents, too, if you know them. Do you think they were happy?

Brooks said,

“Approximately 50% of your happiness is inherited and another big chunk is determined by your circumstances at any given moment. But the remaining part, about a quarter, comes from this portfolio, which is under your direct control.

“Another metaphor for happiness is a meal which has certain macronutrients but instead of food's macronutrients of protein, carbohydrates, and fat, the macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And just like you need a balanced macronutrient profile in a healthy diet, you need balance to be a happy person.”

Your Life Philosophy – Do you have one? Do you have core personal values?

Your Family – Are there people you could call in an emergency?

Friends – Do you have a community somewhere? Where? Is it a club?  A house? A school?

Purpose-filled Work – Does your work (volunteer or paid) make you feel valued?

Are you happy in those places?

It's okay for your happiness portfolio to be:

Poop

Sleep

Eat

Cuddles.

God, knows it's Shaun's.

APPLE IN THE DARK

Submit Here

Open through May: Our first-ever flash fiction contest! Our judge this year is Chelsea T. Hicks.

Submit your unpublished work (no more than three stories/essays at once) through our Duosuma page.

(We’d very much appreciate anything you can donate to the Tip Jar there!) Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but do please let us know if your work has been accepted elsewhere.

Rights: AITD ask for first publication rights. You may publish your work featured on the site elsewhere following initial publication, but please credit AITD with first publication.

This one is pretty fun. And though it's meant for poems, it can definitely be for short stories. It's from ThinkWritten.

"7 Days, 7 Lines: Write a poem where each line/sentence is about each day of last week."

CDC

Pork and brain worms

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

RESOURCES:

A cool book to check out is  The Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Subtitle: Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy.

Brooks, Arthur. Managing Happiness. HarvardX. July 2022.

You can learn a lot about culture by how it looks at what makes a good story and a good story structure.

In Western culture right now, we tend to think of stories as three acts (a beginning, middle, and end with the bulk being in the middle), and with a protagonist or hero or main character (whatever you want to call it) who drives the story forward.

So, it's sometimes good to remember that there are other ways of making story and other cultures where the bulk might not be in the middle or the main character might not be so proactive. Story reflects who we are as a people.

Nobody keys into this as much as Robert McKee, who is quite the guru of screenwriting and story.

There are three of his maxims, explained by No Film School that really show that.

"Is your protagonist driving the story forward? Are their actions and choices putting the story into focus and kicking it into gear? Make sure they are active, and not just along for the ride. Give them something to do. 

"What does your character want? We talk about goals on here a lot. They need to have a goal, but also the reasoning behind it. That's where desires come in. I want to solve the case to make the city safer. I want to bring all my friends back from Thanos' snap. Give them something tangible and obvious.

"Think about not only what happens inside your story but how these moments affect people internally. Does someone let a character down, or crush their heart with a rejection? Is there a way to hook that into the goal and show how things evolve within them? What do these emotional hurdles do to them or cause them to do? Let emotion guide the way."

For literature in our time, right now, and our culture, those are three big keys to making stories that will be purchased and will resonate with readers.

How does that reflect with our life though, right?

You've got to make things happen. Be the hero of your own story and make your people have emotional rewards when they give you what you want.

This is from Robert McKee and his book, Story:

"Lean back and ask, 'What would it be like to live my character’s life hour by hour, day by day?' In vivid detail sketch how your characters shop, make love, pray — scenes that may or may not find their way into your story, but draw you into your imagined world until it feels like déjà vu.

"While memory gives us whole chunks of life, imagination takes fragments, slivers of dream, and chips of experience that seem unrelated, then seeks their hidden connections and merges them into a whole. Having found these links and envisioned the scenes, write them down. A working imagination is research."

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

LINKS TO LEARN MORE:

It ended up being a bit of a free-for-all as we talked about the strange things people do sometimes.

The snippet of our intro and outro music is only a snippet of this guy’s awesome talent. Many thanks to Kaustubh Pandav. You can check out a bit of his work at the links below.

www.luckyboysconfusion.Net or www.Facebook.com/mrmsandtheinfusions 

Thanks for hanging out with us! And remember, don’t be afraid to let your strange out.

So building a sympathetic character on the page is a lot like being a sympathetic character in real life. This sympathetic character is basically the opposite of a butt-hole.

There’s this great post on the SocialSelf blog that talks about what makes people likable and what keeps people from being likeable. And writers can learn from this, really.

The big things that make people likeable in real life are like a top ten list of awesome:

They even have a bar graph about it.

When we’re writing, it’s hard to make a character listen to the reader or make eye contact with the reader, which scores high, but we can show them listening to other people, being kind to other characters instead of being all self-self-self and me-me-me all the time.

And you can make the character funny if that’s who they are.  If you think back to ancient Buffy the Vampire Slayer shows, the characters were a bit much sometimes, right? Buffy especially, but they became likeable and fun because they were funny and they tried super hard to keep their promises and be there for each other.

But just as importantly, that blog has ways that people sabotage their likability in real life.

What are those ways?

Now, for a book character, humble bragging and gossiping can happen in dialogue and be annoying and off-putting. But oversharing can happen, too, in a first-person narrative, right? You can tell too much, so much, that it feels like the action isn’t happening and that will distance the reader.

When it comes to keeping those unlikable aspects off that page, it gets a little bit trickier because you have to keep the reader interested enough in what happens to the character to keep reading. That's all about likability.

This is why I talk about those super objectives and desire lines a lot. If you can give your character a yearning/a goal in each scene and chapter (sometimes it’s more pronounced that other times), then the reader will wonder if the character will get it. This helps to get the reader involved and gives you a little more time to build up the connection with the character. That's because the readers want to know what happens and if the character will get their goal/yearning/want. That gives you more time to make them care about the character.

But to make them really care about what happens, you have to make them care about the character and to do that, it can help to let the reader see the character’s wound, that defect, that thing that haunts them. You want to see them in a moment of weakness or vulnerability or loneliness.

Smelling buttholes is great but you don't want to be one! - Mr. Murphy quote of the day.

BLUE LYNZ PRIZE FOR POETRY

The annual Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry awards $2000 plus publication for a full-length poetry collection. The Prize is awarded for an unpublished, full-length volume of poems by a U.S. author, which includes foreign nationals living and writing in the U.S. and U.S. citizens living abroad. Lynx House Press has been publishing fine poetry and prose since 1975. Our titles are distributed by the University of Washington Press.

Top Prize:

$2,000

Additional prizes:

Publication

Entry fee: $28

Deadline: June 16, 2024

Write a "slice of life" moment for your character. Make them have a sit-down dinner with others and show:

Do not show any of it via internal monologue.

Our random thoughts are at the beginning of the podcast and not transcribed.

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!