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

What does that mean? It’s the day that your book is officially on the shelves or downloadable and stuff.

It is the day that you’ve been working towards and dying to happen. And sometimes what seems like a big deal to you? Isn’t as big a deal with the rest of the world. I know, right? Silly rest of the world.

So, here are some tips on how to deal with that.

Try not to freak out that nobody will notice your book birthday since everyone in your family either doesn’t care or is dead. Or because despite the fact that you share all your friends’ business and nonprofit stuff all the time, nobody shares yours.

Try not to check your Amazon rankings.

Here are things to do to make your day better:

Celebrate. This means party in some way. It can be big and glorious or tiny and just involve hugging a tree. Any way is a good way.

Mark the occasion: Some authors get tattoos, have parties, eat cake, drink tequila or whole milk. Some authors buy expensive jewelry.

Tell everyone you know somehow. Social media. Emails. Carrier pigeons? It’s all good.

Writing Tip of the Pod: Celebrate your success. You deserve it.

Dog Tip for Life: Celebrate a book release the way you celebrate finding a new tree to urinate on. (I apologize. Shaun was in charge of this part this week).

Ryan’s track is available to this podcast thanks to his generosity and the Creative Commons. It is probably the best part of the episode, honestly.

If you go read it, come back. And we were thinking about pretentiousness because of our random thought in the car all about NPR voices, etc.  And there were a lot of brilliant annoying writer types on there like the:

“The Writer Who Loves to Bemoan the Difficulty of His Craft”

and

“The “Writer” Who Doesn’t Write”

and

“The Writer Who Name-Drops Like It’s Going Out of Style.”

But they didn’t really list the pretentious writer exactly, but they did list

“The “Esoteric” Writer Who Only Reads Things in German.”

I beg you all. Don’t intentionally try to be pretentious. That doesn’t mean that big words are bad. It doesn’t mean that deep thought is bad. It’s the opposite really. Own your thoughts and let them be relatable to intellectuals and non-intellectuals. The ability to create a story that resonates is more than making yourself sound like you teach at Harvard. It’s about authenticity and truth.

To write truth, you have to live truth.

Writing Tip of the Pod: Don’t pretend to be something you aren’t. Don’t surround yourself with people who are just like you.

Dog Tip of the Cast: Dude… Live your life without trying to impress others. Be you.

Shout-Out – The music from this podcast is off the Yorkshire Electric EP by Hope and Social, “People Change,” and Ryan Andersen’s”Crashing,” is made possible thanks to the Creative Commons.

It’s almost out! You can pre-ordermy middle grade fantasy novel Time Stoppers Escape From the Badlands here or anywhere. The official release date is August 7! 

If you listen to the podcast audio this week, we talk a lot about the dialogue in the book Carrie was reading, and it is about how important realistic dialogue is, but the writing tips for the blog post are more about forcing out the bad.

Sometimes it feels like everything is going wrong. No matter how hard you work or try, it just seems like everything is a giant fail.

Big events like not getting a book contract or getting a divorce add up with small things like your wi-fi isn’t working or you used up all your data on your cell phone plan of evil.

And those bad things suddenly seem like they infect everything else you’re doing. You had the middle seat on an airplane flight and suddenly you’re officially in the fiery pits of a hellscape and you’re convinced that the universe hates you.

And you decide to give up.

Well, here’s the thing: giving up shouldn’t be an option and one failure? It doesn’t make your whole life a failure.

You have to rewire that negative thinking and realize that you can handle this.

When you feel like everything is impossible, try not to give up. Remember you can do anything. Keep trying.

Dogs don’t worry too much about failures. They keep on trying, too. Channel your inner dog.

Sometimes, people might tie you to a log just because you refuse to stop scrounging for bacon. Do not stop scrounging! You deserve the treats. Hints: Log = self doubt Bacon/treats = success Do what I do, pull the log behind you. It only makes you stronger Xo Sparty the Dog

Spoiler alert and Warning: This podcast episode ended up being so off-the-wall and kind of explicit because there is a ton of swear words because we recorded the “Random Thoughts” at night after a party. Also, Shaun calls Carrie “stupid.”

He is not yet forgiven.

Back to Our Regular Podcast: This podcast is supposed to be about living the best life and the best writing life that you can and that… my friends… that can be a process. Cough.

But…

Carrie just ended a six-month stint teaching a class called Write! Submit! Support!, which was run by the Writing Barn in Austin. It’s an online class that follows a distance program MFA, but with the added bonus of adding community and support to each other via support partners, online classes and Facebook groups.

Carrie taught this program, but she also learned a lot, and the thing she learned is that she had it easy.

She got a book contract about twelve months after she decided to become a writer. But that’s weird and it’s abnormal, and a couple years later her books series magically became an international and NYT bestseller. This is also weird and abnormal.

She took it for granted.

And during this program, she was once again reminded that there are other writers out there who are brilliant and talented and still haven’t  been published.

It isn’t because those writers aren’t amazing. They are talented and clever and their stories rock. It’s random things that didn’t happen for them the way they happened for her.

And she learned in the past six months that for most people the key to success? It’s being relentless.

There is no giving up.

Something blocks the path? Fix it. Charge into writing and submitting and the writing life with focused action and determination and do not give up. Ever.

That’s what makes a difference.

Be relentless. Fix mistakes. Never stop moving forward toward the goal of being a writer. Quitting doesn’t let success happen.

Focus on the problems in the book and then in the career. Book is boring? Fix it. Characters are flat? Fix them. Need an agent? Begin looking for one. Current agent doesn’t work well for you? Find another one. Be relentless.

You deserve to succeed. Be relentless for yourself.

That is hard to do sometimes if you have a certain personality type (Hint: Carrie’s), but it’s so essential.

Relentlessness is basically persistence on steroids. Do it. You deserve it. Don’t give up. Make the world hear you. You deserve to be heard.

So, um, a lot of the time during the podcast Shaun will say something that makes Carrie have these huge pauses because she’s reading the subtext underneath what he’s saying.

Honesty moment: Shaun’s subtext is usually naughty, which is totally okay because they are married, but Carrie has these brain hiccups when that happens because:

Anyway, Alicia Rasley said that in writing: “Subtext is like a gift to the astute reader—an additional layer of meaning implied by the text but not accessible without a bit of thinking. … Experienced readers aren’t confined to the text—what’s printed on the page—they interact with the text, fully participating with the writer in the making of meaning in the story.”

Sort of how Carrie interacts with Shaun during the podcast.

Writing Tip of the Cast: Not everything has to be super obvious. Trust your readers. Remember your book, like a podcast, is a conversation, not just a monologue.

Dog Tip for Life: Don’t be afraid of the subtext. Notice people’s nuance, the meaning under what they’re saying.

The music in this podcast is “Check Them In” by Ema Grace and her site is here. We’re able to use this amazing music, thanks to Ema’s kindness and the Creative Commons.

The Spy Who Played Baseball is a picture book biography about Moe Berg. And… there’s a movie out now about Moe Berg, a major league baseball player who became a spy.

You should totally buy Carrie’s book about Moe. It’s awesome and quirky and fun. She’s heading to Houston, North Carolina, and Virgnia soon, just to talk about it. How cool is that?

In this podcast’s Random Thought of the Pod, we tell the story of Gabby the Dog who has an aversion to people who have dabbled with cocaine and also talk about Carrie’s quest to be alpha.

Heroes have to do a lot in your story. Not only do they have to save the damn day, they also have to make you care about them while they do it.

I know. I know! Saving the day should honestly be enough, but it isn’t.

We readers want our heroes to be human so that we can relate to them, which is why we writers try to give them a moment of humanity near the beginning of the book.

Caring moments

Goofy  moments

Quirky AF moments

Universal moments that we can all relate to.

You have to be alpha in your own book. Make your characters work. Be firm in your decisions and choices.

There’s no one right way to be. Embrace who you are, who you want to be. And if you want everyone to fall in love with you? That’s how you do it. Be authentic. Don’t pretend to be a cat. Embrace your dogness

Writing News

The Spy Who Played Baseball is a picture book biography about Moe Berg. And… there’s a movie out now about Moe Berg, a major league baseball player who became a spy. How cool is that?

You should totally buy Carrie’s book about Moe. It’s awesome and quirky and fun. She’s heading to Houston, North Carolina, and Virgnia soon, just to talk about it. How cool is that?

A lot of the times that Carrie works with writers, she notices that they are pulling back from the emotion that is happening in the story. Instead of allowing the reader to feel the terror of being kidnapped or the anxiety of moving to a new place or the desperate sorrow of losing a loved one, the writer skims over these emotional times with a simple moment of telling like, “John was sad that his dog died.” Or worse. “The dog died. John went to school.”

These are lost opportunities. They are also places where the story goes flat or in writer speak, “fails to resonate.”

A lot of writers, especially children’s book writers, are kind people and by default they don’t want to hurt their characters or dwell in any negative emotions. They are trying to protect their characters and the readers.

But those good intentions don’t actually help anyone.

The real world has pain. Our stories have pain, too.

We have to learn to deal with hardships. Our characters do, too.

And the emotion of stories, the ups and downs, are the ride that our readers are signing up for. They want to feel with us, be transported into others’ lives.

For example, Harry Potter had hardship after hardship and so did his friends. J.K. Rowling didn’t shy away from the hard emotions and hard times. She’d add in beats, moments of dwelling in those big moments of joy and sorrow. What Harry felt, the reader felt.

The premise of your story needs to do this, too. It has to have an emotional hook that makes you wonder and care right away. Again, think of Harry Potter – the story of the boy who lived, a lonely orphan who must overcome the evil wizard who killed his parents. Just thinking about the premise fills you with thoughts and wonder and worry and so many questions. The emotional stakes are so high.

Embrace your emotions. Think about what makes you snarl, yelp, wag your tail. Go after the ball. Go after the moments that make you feel good.

Um… again… embrace your emotions. Don’t be afraid to express real emotion. It feels safer to hide your emotion, but passion makes better life and better stories. Be passionate about what you’re writing and about how your living.

Shaun used to call Carrie, “WC,” because he is evil.

No. Really. He called her that because she was always thinking up the worst case scenario for every situation and planned for that, which is not a particularly healthy way to live.

But. . . it’s a pretty good way to write. The ‘what if’ element of any situation in real life can be expanded into a story. Throw in a ‘what if’ coupled with a ‘worst case scenario’ into your story idea and you have really high stakes.

Like when Carrie wrote the Need series, she thought, “What is the worst thing that can happen to this girl forced to move to Maine from Charleston? Oh. How about her biological father is a pixie king who is kidnapping people to feed off them because he can’t control his hunger and need. Ah. That’s not bad enough. How about we throw in an impending apocalypse and she has to turn pixie to stop it?”

Story ideas can come from anywhere. Your own life. The news. Random stories of friends. Country music videos. But the story ideas that are heart-stopping are the ones where there’s a worst case scenario involved. Take a situation in your life and think, “Whoah, what if those people were cannibals?” or “Whoah, what if that cat was a secret Russian agent?”

Those ‘what if’ stories are the stories that make high stakes and high action.

Don’t be afraid of the worst case scenarios.

Editor Cheryl Klein talked about reading writer Dave Eggers’ interview in Harper Magazine. She talked about it during a time in her life where she felt like she was in a fog and had no direction. It was right after college. For those of us in the kid book world, it’s super hard to imagine someone as amazing as Cheryl lacking focus and direction. She graciously sent me her commencement speech where she details this and it was – It was eye opening. And comforting.

In the article Klein referenced, Eggers basically said he just said yes to possibilities and opportunities. According to Klein, he said, “There is only saying yes to opportunities whenever they come—Trying whatever makes your world larger, your experience greater, your life better— Sometimes just for the pleasure of trying new things, of saying yes.”

This is something Carrie tells kids at almost every single school visit that she does.

She talks about improv and tells them to just say yes to ideas and adventures. She is always asked for advice on how to be a writer and she always says, “Gulp up experiences. Live the biggest life you can live.”

The center of attention in your life? What is it?

What is it that you want to do? To be? It’s easy to feel superfluous, but you are not superfluous and when you understand your life’s work? That helps.

A lot of people tell you to find and/or refine your purpose  by making a sentence:

So, Carrie’s would be:

I’m Carrie Jones and I write stories about kindness and bravery and connection for kids because they deserve those sort of stories to become the best humans they can be. and to feel less alone

Or that’s what she thought it would be until last week when she had a little bit of a crisis.

I am Carrie Jones and I write things for somebody because I don’t know how not to write and I’m sort of expected to so yeah. Wow. This sucks. 

On Carrie’s Facebook page last week, she asked people what they do when they’ve had a fail moment and can’t quite get over it, how do they find their way again?

One wonderful person, Rhonda Parrish, said this, “I got a tattoo. Right on my hand where I can see it all the time. It says, “Fail Better.”  Because I have often felt like a failure in the past, and I know I’ll feel that way in the future as well — but I don’t want fear of that feeling to stop me from doing things. The tattoo is there to remind me that not succeeding at something is not failure, but not trying it in the first place might be. And also that failing once doesn’t always equal failure. I can always try again. And again. And again. It helps. It puts my neurosis right there on my hand for everyone in the world to see LOL But it helps.”

And then she used this quote:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett

When you know that there are possibilities, when you remember one moment doesn’t forever define you, when you say yes to adventure, when you tattoo reminders? All of that… Every bit of it… It can help.