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

So, Carrie’s been thinking a lot about success lately and if you check out her blog you’ll see she’s had a heck of a last two weeks trying to define success and come to terms with it and all that.

But here’s the thing. Nobody wants to fail. You can talk about loving the process and that’s important, but striving for success is also important. For authors, getting a mindset for success can be… well, almost impossible.

Look for Inspiration – Spend 10 minutes with things that inspire you. For some people that’s music, poetry, dogs, being outside, listening to an awesome podcast.

Don’t be Rigid – Understand that no matter how well you plan, life is chaos. If your plan has a glitch, a swerve? Don’t let that freak you out so much that you stop. Be flexible like you do yoga all the time or something.

When you Mess Up Learn From It – Dwelling in mistakes and failures keeps you in those places mentally. Stepping back and wondering, “What can I learn from this so next time I rock it?” That’s what makes a success mindset.

So, Carrie’s been thinking a lot about success lately and if you check out her blog you’ll see she’s had a heck of a last two weeks trying to define success and come to terms with it and all that.

But here’s the thing. Nobody wants to fail. You can talk about loving the process and that’s important, but striving for success is also important. For authors, getting a mindset for success can be… well, almost impossible.

Look for Inspiration – Spend 10 minutes with things that inspire you. For some people that’s music, poetry, dogs, being outside, listening to an awesome podcast.

Don’t be Rigid – Understand that no matter how well you plan, life is chaos. If your plan has a glitch, a swerve? Don’t let that freak you out so much that you stop. Be flexible like you do yoga all the time or something.

When you Mess Up Learn From It – Dwelling in mistakes and failures keeps you in those places mentally. Stepping back and wondering, “What can I learn from this so next time I rock it?” That’s what makes a success mindset.

Sometimes in life we want to be memorable, right?

And other times? Not so much.

Shaun is so tall and formidable that he doesn’t have much choice in being memorable or not. Carrie? She can fade into walls if she wants to.

In writing, there are some pretty simple things you should do to make sure people remember your character.

Talk about that character every 30-40 pages. People forget the characters they don’t see. This is true in real life too. Remind people you are out there.

Give them a cool name. Carrie Jones? Not a cool name.

Just give. In real life and in writing, giving matters. People remember kindness.

What do I mean by that? Give them something like a tattoo, a way of bending their foot to the side when they talk. Give them a strong personality trait. Do the work to make them memorable.

In real life, it’s the people who focus on one goal, strategy, process who tend to make a big bang.

This is linked to that memorable trait. Being quirky might make you a bullied kid, which is basically hell, but when you’ve embraced that difference, your originality, your authenticity? That’s when people remember you.

If you’re in a room full of a dozen white guys in suits, none of them are going to pop out. It’s the woman in the flowing skirt that you’re going to end up remembering.

The best kind of work is the kind that makes you messy (even if you’re a Virgo) inside and out.

And for a lot of writers, especially writers for kids, our job isn’t just about making story; it’s about making a difference somehow in at least one kid’s life. That is a messy business because in order to make a difference, you have to dig deep, to go through a lot of dirt and mud and rock to get to what it is that matters to you and to your story and to your reader and/or life partners.

When Carrie goes to schools, she always tells the kids that one of the important steps to becoming the best writers you can be is to live the biggest life you can live. To not risk life or jail time, but to have adventures, to do things that you would never expect yourself doing.

Big stories have conflict, and none of us are really into conflict in our lives, but it’s the conflict that allows our stories to have mean

Even the word sounds a little creepy. Like there is a storm inside your brain. It sounds… It sounds sort of violent and hazardous and windy. In this podcast, we talk about the storms inside our brain and how those storms can become story ideas.

Some authors have a really hard time just getting an idea for a new story. They burn out. They can’t find anything that they think is ‘good enough.’ They just don’t know where to start and that lack of a start makes them blocked.

This is so sad! There are ways to fight it.

Think about ways that other people’s stories influence you. If you’re an Outlander fan, think about why. If you were to write your own kind of time travel story would it be like that? With a lot of spanking and stuff? Or something totally different. How would it be different?

Ask your self questions. It’s all about ‘What if?’ What if Trump wasn’t president in 2018? What if everyone had blue hair? What if the earth had two moons? What if dogs were really space aliens?

Sparty the Dog: Wait. You mean they aren’t?

Carrie the Human:

In this podcast, Shaun decides he wants to be a guru, or at least create the Church of Sparty the Dog. Also, we are responsible and discuss critique partners, beta readers and how to say “Klimt” and “Chianti.”

So, in the world of writing, everyone talks about needing a beta reader and a critique partner.

Everyone that is, except Carrie, who has trust issues and survives as a lonely, isolated writer in Maine.

It’s that person who reads your story, gives you some mild suggestions that feel like a big hug. This is a person you want to party with, a person you can cry to, a person with no judgement. This person is basically the human equivalent of your dog – loyal, helpful, good.

These awesome people help you feel less alone, they share stories and ideas with you. They see your story piece by piece, usually, and they help you find the flaws in this work-in-process. These people are like your life partner. They see you without make-up. They see you vomiting into the porcelain pig of your creativity and they hold up your hair because nobody wants puke in hair.

In Episode Eight, we learn a little bit about voice. Also, in our ‘voice experiment,’ Shaun lets loose with a couple of f-bombs, so I’ve marked this episode as explicit. The man cannot be controlled.

Whether you’re writing or just living, your voice is an integral part of what you are communicating to the world.

Voice isn’t just about your sentence structure and word choice; it’s how your narrator sees the world. It’s what drives them. It’s the subconscious experiences that have created their reality.

To get to the voice of your character, you have to be your character.

In episode 7 we learn that not all experiences are the same and Carrie tries baked spaghetti. She tries not to be a pain about it. She fails.

Dog Tip For Life – Live in the moment. Seriously. Eat the baked spaghetti. Don’t worry about if you’ll like it or if others will judge you. Try it.

In this quick bonus podcast, Carrie interviews Shaun and learns some sad, sad truths about what it’s like being married to a writer like her.

In Episode Six of our podcast, we get a closer look at the differences in speech patterns and get to hear Shaun impersonate his grandmother and totally not understand the use of adjectives in dialogue tags. This sounds vaguely boring, but I promise. It’s probably our funniest cast yet.

Dog Tip For Life: 

We communicate with our bodies, not just our words. Communicating effectively gets you more treats.