Writing in the Tiny House

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The following is a transcript of this episode. The complete transcript can be found on the show's website.

[00:00:00] Devin Davis: All I'm saying, guys is that if your one character is Glorfindel and your other character is Ratagast, there had better be a damn good reason why the woman's name is Brenda. Today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello, hello, hello! And welcome to the show. Welcome to Writing in the Tiny House. I am your host Devin Davis, and I am the guy living in a tiny house who is here to show you that the fictional book that you have in your mind is a thing worth doing. And it's completely possible to do no matter how busy you claim to be.

[00:01:02] So if you compare-- just some side stuff, cause we get to do announcements first. If you compare the sound quality of this episode versus the previous episodes, you might notice that it is different. The reason why is because I have new.

[00:01:19] Sound equipment that I am still getting used to. So while I am figuring out how all of this works, we get to kind of work together and to be patient and kind and all the rest until I have all of this figured out. I'm excited for it. It also means there are a lot more chords on my counter, but it's okay. We're doing it. Over the past few episodes that have been just me, I have realized that there gets to be kind of a workshop or at least a lecture series. I mean, I don't want you to think that we are in school, and that we are here to study, because I am not. However, sometimes with specific ideas, I know that a lot of the people who listen to my podcast are fantasy fanatics, but a lot of the other people who listen to my podcast simply write general fiction. And I believe that some of the things that I'm going to be sharing in these like 101 episodes that I'm going to be putting together over the next few weeks, over the episodes where it's just me, I'm going to be putting together some guidelines and just some thoughts and feelings and just some general directions on where to go with specific things while you are developing the bones and the base of your novel.

[00:02:51] And one of, as one of, one of the points to talk about, which we will be talking about today is names. When we go to write our book sometimes, especially if we are pantsing, if we have not outlined very in depth, sometimes characters seem to just pop up as a way to solve a problem or to create a problem if we need that.

[00:03:17] But sometimes characters just pop up and we don't know who they are. We don't know their names. This happened to me a couple months ago when I got to rip my work in progress in half. And now I have two half finished books. I got to include a new main character as a way to make this new storyline or what used to be a subplot and is now a main plot, in order to make it work, I had to introduce a new main character or at least a new supporting character. And I didn't know who he was. I didn't know his name. I didn't know things about him. And so over the course of several days, I got to kind of imagine and think about him, about the culture that he might've come from. And granted, I'm writing fantasy.

[00:04:12] And so the culture gets to be whatever I want it to be. However, it still gets to be something believable. I'm going to be doing a 101 episode on world building. And part of that is culture in the world that we are inventing. And we'll dive into how the culture ties into characters and how it ties into the overall feeling of towns and villages and family dynamics and different things like that.

[00:04:41] But for the sake of this episode, let's get into the importance of names. And we're going to stick to contemporary fiction or urban fantasy first, and then go into high fantasy where we get Lord of the Rings names and we get dragon names like Ingeloacastimizillion if you are an RA Salvatore fan, and stuff like that. With names, this is my opinion, but I feel that it is a very good opinion. With names, they get to be something that is at least easy to figure out. Mind you, most of your readers are likely going to be American and they are going to be native English speakers. And so it is always helpful if you stick to American English pronunciation guidelines. And the tongue twisters and things can sometimes distract us from developing a relationship with the character.

[00:05:45] I have found that in many of the fantasy stories that I have read, if the names are completely new and foreign and strange to me, I usually just forget them. Especially with audio books, if it doesn't strike a chord with me, I'm not going to keep it around in my mind. If I am reading a printed book or an ebook, if I can't figure out the pronunciation, I am the type of person who hates to pronounce a name wrong.

[00:06:18] I hate that more than anything else. More than a lot of things. And so quite frankly, when I was in high school and Harry Potter was becoming more and more famous and picking up steam, I did not know how to pronounce Hermione's name. And it seemed that nobody in my hometown actually did. And so I would go around asking people for guidance with this. Like, what do you think it's supposed to be? So many people thought that her name was actually "Hermy-un". Her her, her Meehan Hermie own various different, weird things like that. And so I think that is why J K Rowling chose to include in the body of her story some pronunciation parts with Hermione's name, just because I think she realized that many of her readers had no idea how to pronounce her name.

[00:07:19] If you remember, there were some exchanges between Hermione and another student from a different school. I forget which book this is in, but this guy was not a native English speaker and he wasn't pronouncing her name right. And so she got to help him out by pronouncing her own name and spelling out the words as sounds in the text of the story.

[00:07:43] By having her do that, JK Rowling gave us a tool to realize how the flip we're supposed to be pronouncingHermione and how it is not in fact Hermiun. So it's useful to include basic spelling rules, basic pronunciation rules, and tailor them to your target audience. Be mindful that it is likely American English speakers who will be reading your book and it's okay to help them out.

[00:08:13] It's okay to throw them a bone when it comes to developing names. For instance, a good example of this, I was going to include some names in my book and I was going to spell them. So I, I don't like to make up too many names. My names tend to be traditional names. If they belong to one family, then I'm going to go like traditional Roman, or if they belong to another family, then I'll usually pick kind of a different origin for those types of names and try to keep things cohesive and sounding like they belong. But I don't like to make up too many names just because my setting is Victorian. And so I like to have more familiar sounding names. Victorian and we go into Edwardian. And so I like things to be more predictable like that and more familiar.

[00:09:09] But I personally have a love for the traditional spelling of some of the Celtic names like Shivonne and Alva, and some other things like that. There is a character in my book named Alva, but I chose to spell her name A L V A just because American readers are the people who are going to be reading my book. If I were to spell it A I L B H E nobody would know what that is. They would think it would be Ail-buh-huh or Ailby or some unpronounceable problem. I also love the name. Siobhan. Siobhan is traditionally spelled, if you go with the Gaelic spelling, it is traditionally spelled S I O B H A N. I have an old friend named Siobhan who lives in Southern France.

[00:10:11] And it was the first time I had seen her name and I wasn't familiar with Gaelic pronunciation when I first met her. Just the rules for it are different, but I don't expect people to know the rules for Gaelic pronunciations. I don't expect people to know that S I in Gaelic spellings is pronounced Shh, or B H is pronounced with a V sound. I don't expect people to know that. And so if I choose to include the name, I do my best to Americanize it just so people don't have to worry too much about what it's going to be. Or they don't have to worry too much about pronouncing the name wrong. If it's pretty easy to figure out, even if it is a little bit different, I've found it's easier to connect to a character if I can say their name. If you think differently, please go ahead and send me a message on Instagram and we can have a discussion, but that is certainly a guideline that I would choose. Also, if you are writing urban fantasy, or if you are writing contemporary fiction, we can move away from fantasy for a little second.

[00:11:38] A good idea-- and I picked this tidbit from the author Alexa Donne. She is a YA thriller author. And she has some brilliant advice on her Booktube channel on YouTube. She brought a thing to my attention that I wouldn't have thought of before, or I wouldn't have put together the logic of it before.

[00:12:03] If your character is 21 years old, living in a modern time, living in, you know, New York or wherever they are, it means that their name was likely popular when they were born. If you choose to consult like a baby name book, and you choose to look through a baby name book for today, for 2021, those names are for today. Those names are for 2021. If your character is 21 years old, it means that they were born in the year 2000. And the baby book names would likely be sorted differently and chosen differently. If your character is 37, they would have been born in the mid eighties and it is entirely possible that they could have a different name than if they were born in the year 2000 or if they were born in the year 2021. In modern days, I have noticed that there is a resurgence right now of some names that were popular and common when my grandmother was a little girl, which is awesome. But that's how the trends are right now. And so it's important to pay attention to that.

[00:13:32] Also with the names, with the things, sometimes it is also very valuable to think about who this character's parents might've been. It's okay if the parents aren't in the book and it's okay if you don't focus a ton on developing like a character profile for the parents and like giving the dad a job and an address and those different things. But if you picture this kid being straight laced and a rule follower, and always telling the truth, it's possible that character's parents might've been strict or conservative or whatever. And the reason why is because if the parents were more traditional, they would likely name them a more traditional name.

[00:14:26] If the kid was born in the eighties and their parents were more traditional, this kid might have the name of Brittany. If the kid was born in the seventies and the parents were hippies, it might be like Rainbow Star or something. Knowing how the parents would have approached that can be valuable as to how you would name them.

[00:14:47] If the parents are conservative and you want to name the kid like Spike or Blade or something, there should be a very good reason for that. It's just because conservative parents, aren't very likely going to name their kid Blade or Spike or things like that.

[00:15:09] Moving over to high fantasy, I personally like to mimic regions of our world to include in my book, just because of the familiarity of it. I like names to resemble each other. I like family names to resemble each other or a certain culture to kind of have all of the common sounds of names. So the one island village that I have, to me, the culture itself represents to an extent some Japanese village fishermen culture. And so I chose to have all of the names be traditional Japanese. For a family that lives on the mainland on the main continent way further north, for the main family of my series, I have chosen those to be more traditional Roman or traditional Greek. And so we have names like Demetrius and Brontes and different things like that.

[00:16:14] When we're doing that, it is okay to have your names be as off the wall as you want. I mean, heaven knows Lord of the Rings, J R R Tolkien invented like new languages and stuff for the world that he was creating. And the names certainly add to the immersion of that world. Having names, having them all sound the same, having them all be like the Elvish names are absolutely beautiful to me.

[00:16:44] They're very sing song. They're just lovely. They roll off the tongue if you know how to pronounce them. And that's fine. Tolkien is a little bit different. Odds are you are not Tolkien not because of your capacity to write, but because you were not born at the same time that Tolkien was born. You are writing to a modern audience, and a modern audience has different expectations than the audience that Tolkien was writing for back in the day.

[00:17:19] And so things get to be a little bit different just because different people are going to be reading your book. And so if you wish to, it is okay to have some different things resemble things in this real world, just so it can be a bit more approachable and more digestible to your reader, just because remember your reader does not live in your world. It's okay to help them out. And it's okay to have an amount of familiarity with whatever sometimes. If absolutely everything in your manuscript is brand new and requires a ton of explanation because there's nothing in it that is just inherently knowable or inherently understood because it's not common in this real world, then odds are your manuscript will be filled with a lot of info dump. It would be filled with a lot of exposition and it will be really heavy to get through and really hard to kind of wade through. It'd be like wading through like heavy sticky mud.

[00:18:36] So that's it for today. That is this character development 101 episode on characters and names. A quick shout out to my patrons. Thank you so much for your generosity. This show could not be like this without my patrons giving like they do. If you wish to become a patron, go to patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse, and you can get early access to these episodes. You can get an additional episode every month and you can spend quality time with me on our private chat rooms on Discord.

[00:19:10] Again, follow me on social media. My Instagram tag is @authordevindavis, my Twitter is @authordevind. Thank you so much for your time, guys. We will see you next week and have fun writing.

Follow this link to check out the book The Gem State Siege:

https://amzn.to/3yDtVDn

Become a patron to Writing in the Tiny House today!

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The following is a transcript of this episode. The complete transcript is available on the show's website.

[00:00:00] Devin Davis: Are you ever worried about writing a large amount of text in a short amount of time? Then you need to listen to AJ Mac, author of the book The Gem State Seige. He wrote the entire thing during NaNoWriMo of 2020, and he is our guest today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello, hello, hello! And welcome to the show.

[00:00:47] Welcome back to the show. I am Devin Davis, your host, and I am the guy living in a tiny house to show you all of the different ways, regardless of how busy you are, that you can write that book. We focus mainly on fiction, at least the majority of these episodes. Today we have a person that I have been so excited to get to know. His name isAJ Mac.

[00:01:11] His first name is actually Aaron. And it's not in the interview. So I get to share a little tidbit before we play the interview. I actually met Aaron on a Facebook group looking for a critique partner. I had no idea what he had done. I had no idea his story or the process that he had taken to write this thing, but we exchanged first chapters many, many months ago and he critiqued my first chapter.

[00:01:40] I critiqued his first chapter. It was a great experience. And then like, a couple months later, I realized that his book was being released and was in print. So today we have AJ Mac, author of the book The Gem State Seige to share his entire story with us.

[00:02:02] AJ Mac: I started off writing a completely different novel that I said I was going to release first, but then I thought about the options of like Permafree books and like start in content. Cause I just wanted to kind of roll into something that was a little bit bigger of a project than the one that I released first. And it took me about 10 years to actually write that novel, like rewriting and constantly revising and all of that. The final draft of that book, it took me about nine months to do a hundred thousand words, I think. And I was just like, okay I need to write it a little bit faster if I have this goal of doing all of these books and all of this story, this this whole sci-fi universe that I've created in my head, I might want to write a little bit faster.

[00:02:52] So NaNoWriMo came along. I found it on Facebook, found a lot of groups on Facebook, talking about writing 50,000 words in a month. And I was like, Okay. That's a challenge. I'm going to take it. I don't know if I can do it, but I'm going to try.

[00:03:07] So October 31st. I was just like, kind of like at my computer at 1159, like a runner at a Olympic track meet. 12 o'clock hit and I just started going. It took me about 20 days, 21 days, I think to get the 50,000 words, but I did it and I proved to myself that I actually could write faster.

[00:03:29] Devin Davis: NaNoWriMo, though it calls itself a competition, is more like a big push to get people to start writing. No one is looking over your shoulder. You don't submit your progress to anyone, but it's just a month long marathon in the spirit of writing. And it is celebrated by everyone. When Aaron got in the thick of it, he had some big realizations about his own writing process.

[00:03:58] AJ Mac: I like being a pantser for the most part. Doing Prep-Tober is what they call it when you're preparing for NaNoWriMo I took some time out and wrote like a whole outline. I started setting up my writing space, and I bought Scrivener, and I wrote out and it took me about a day or so to write this entire like, outline of what I was going to do.

[00:04:21] And about Chapter Two, I was like screw outline. Yeah. I just yeah.

[00:04:26] Devin Davis: He wrote for hours every day. Like he said, it took him 21 days to get his first draft completed. Three weeks. And as you might imagine, it took a toll on his social life.

[00:04:41] AJ Mac: I don't think I talked to my girlfriend much during that time. I was working night shift at my full-time job. And what I would do is I would work 5:00 PM to about 4:00 AM, was my schedule. And I would spend as much time as I possibly could while I was working-- which wasn't much-- writing. And when I was at home I would wake up early. I still wake up earlier about 11 o'clock and I will write until I go to work. so I I was pretty much, at my computer the entire time.

[00:05:14] Devin Davis: Because he wasn't an experienced writer, at first he didn't know how to go about self edits and critique partners at all. This is how he handled it.

[00:05:25] AJ Mac: And I sat on the manuscript for about a month and a half maybe. And like, there were a lot of people saying that if you write something in NaNoWriMo, then it should at least be a year out before you actually start, like, thinking about publishing, but I was determined. I was determined to get some feedback on it. And I, I went to Facebook groups and like a bunch of critique groups. And I start querying for some people to give me some feedback on the book. And that was my start. And to editing that rough draft and submitting that rough draft and seeing if there was a actual concept for me to even publish a book.

[00:06:05] Devin Davis: And a few short months later, he had The Gem State Siege in print.

[00:06:13] AJ Mac: It's about Tawnie Simms, a world-renowned conspiracy theorist who finds herself in the middle of a cataclysmic event in her hometown, Idaho falls. When what seems like a natural disaster, a mysterious organization that uses the tragedy is fueled to start a mass extermination disguised as a pandemic. Tawnie has to find her way to stop the monstrous billionaire responsible while keeping her and her five-year-old son safe.

[00:06:41] Devin Davis: So this book required some research, not only about concepts, but about geography. The story takes place in Idaho falls and Aaron doesn't even live there.

[00:06:54] AJ Mac: The pantser in me decided to find it somewhere where geysers would make sense for for the relic that I used in the book. So Yellowstone National Park was, was nearby. I have a fascination with-- and this is going to sound horrible-- but I have a fascination with like end of the world kind of cataclysmic movies like that, like movies, like 2012 and Water Worlds, things like that. Just kind of like interests me. So the apocalyptic trope I feel like that's my thing. That's what interests me. It's a lot of build up to what I'm doing in the scifi universe that I'm creating and the world that I'm putting together. And that just happened to be one of the starting points of the world.

[00:07:36] Devin Davis: So I asked him what got him interested in books and science fiction in the first place.

[00:07:44] AJ Mac: A lot of fanfiction. I used to do a lot of sketches growing up and drawing my own comic books specifically when I was younger. It was a show called Dragon Ball Z that for whatever reason in America did not want to continue past a certain saga.

[00:08:00] So I started drawing my own and that trend never left. Like I fell in love with writing and coming up with my own ideas. And I felt comfortable. Like growing up as an introvert, I felt comfortable just writing my own reality as opposed to living in the real reality, I guess. And it just kind of worked for me.

[00:08:19] Devin Davis: All of us as writers, face roadblocks and other struggles. And sometimes we have self doubt.

[00:08:25] AJ Mac: I struggled with the belief that I could even write that fast, considering that I've just been sitting on a bunch of ideas for 10 years before I actually decided to publish a novel. For any aspiring author that wants to write, join a community like NaNoWriMo where people are having the same challenges.

[00:08:47] Devin Davis: Not only is Erin cranking out books, but he and his friends also do a podcast.

[00:08:54] AJ Mac: My podcast is called The Dirty Trunk podcast. And we like to say that that's where the elephant is always welcome. And we talk about the uncomfortable conversations about growth and building your mindset as an entrepreneur. They come out every Tuesday, and the last episode we discussed your environment and how it shapes your future as an adult.

[00:09:17] Devin Davis: By the time this episode airs, the Dirty Trunk podcast will have reached more than 100 episodes.

[00:09:26] AJ Mac: For anybody who's listening to this episode here, if you have the goal or the dream to be a published author, do it. You can listen to this podcast and everybody who joins Mr. Devin on this this journey being a guest on this awesome podcast that he has here in this platform, you can listen to every single one of them talk about their dreams, their goals of how to start and how they started, but it will not be possible for you unless you actually put pen to paper and do it. Do not let fear get in the way of your goals and your dream.

[00:10:01] Devin Davis: A special things to Aaron, author name AJ Mac, for joining me today on Writing in the Tiny House. He is working hard on the next several books of his series. And I am excited to see when those are going to come out. If you are interested in ordering or reading the Gem State Siege by AJ Mac, follow the link in the show notes and it'll get you there.

[00:10:26] And that is it for today. Thank you so much for my patrons. Without them this show can not be possible. If you wish to become a patron, patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse. You can get early access to these episodes. You can get an additional episode, and you can get quality time with me over our exclusive chat rooms on Discord. Follow me on Instagram. My handle is @authordevindavis and on Twitter, my handle is @authordevind. Thank you so much for listening. We will see you next week and have fun writing.

A special thanks to Karen Christoffersen!

www.bookwisepublishing.com

[email protected]

She does free 30 minute consultations!

Become a patron to Writing in the Tiny House today.

patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse

The following is a transcript of this episode. The complete transcript can be found on the show's website.

Devin Davis: If you are looking to do a book on your own, then you need to get to know Karen Christoffersen owner of Book-wise Publishing. She assisted me in doing my first two books and she is actually our guest today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello. Hello. Hello, and welcome to the show. Welcome back to Writing in the Tiny House.

[00:00:49] I am your host Devin Davis, and I am the guy living in the tiny house who is here to show you ways to get that novel written. Even if you are the busiest person in the whole world. And today we have a special guest. And before I do a really big introduction, let's go ahead and meet her. This is Karen Christoffersen. She is a producer and the owner of Book-wise Publishing.

[00:01:18] Karen Christoffersen: Hi Devin. I'm so excited to be able to do this with the Writing in the Tiny House. I thought that the title of your podcast was delightful. And so the fact that you've invited me to be on it is, is an honor.

[00:01:35]Devin Davis: I have known Karen for, forever, it seems. Her son and I are very good friends. And back in my early twenties, when I wrote my first book As Magic Shifts, it was Karen who did all of the heavy lifting to get it published and to produce it and to clean it up and to move all of the moving parts to form this cohesive picture we call a book. And the first book I wrote As Magic Shifts was published under CMS publishing, which at the time was owned by Karen Christoffersen, and then later she moved to Book-wise Publishing. And my second book, The Witch's Pupil was published under Book-wise.

[00:02:25] Karen Christoffersen: Book-wise publishing was started back in 2006 when there was a company called Book-wise and Company owned by Richard Paul Evans, number one New York times bestselling author, and several partners who decided they wanted to create a publishing arm. And they called it Book-wise Publishing and came to me and asked me, because I'm a producer, if I would produce a hundred books for a hundred new authors. As a producer, all we do is start a project and finish it. I was doing television commercials, radio commercials, motion pictures. I was doing all kinds of production as a producer, but I'd done two non-fiction books for Richard. It's a piece of cake, you know, you start, you finish. And so I said, sure, I can do that. And of course, my dad taught me never to say no. He said, just go out and find out how to do it. And so I ended up surrounding myself with a lot of really talented people: editors and illustrators and designers and all kinds of people actively involved in the publishing industry locally and nationally.

[00:03:39] And they made me look very good. And I coordinated everything. And so I've been doing that since 2007, 'cause we started that the second year and after a year and a half, Richard decided that, and by the way, Richard was only doing endorsements. He wasn't doing anything. I was operating the business alone. And after a year and a half, he decided he really didn't want the liability anymore. I'm pretty sure that's why. And besides he had his irons in so many fires at the time, he was just going gangbusters, doing all kinds of things. And he sold it to me for a dollar. The branding alone for Book-wise Publishing was worth $20,000. Plus, you know, there were other parts to the company that had value. And so I said, sure, I'll do that. It did take me because there were a hundred authors and then they added another 50 when they added a program called Write-Wise. So I had 150 authors that I was responsible for producing their books.

[00:04:43]And out of the $5,000 they paid, I only got 1300 to work on their books. So it took me a couple of years to get the company in the black, but obviously not all of those hundred and 50 authors came back and finished your books. So I eventually just continued doing more and more and more until today.

[00:05:07]Devin Davis: Karen has been doing this for more than 14 years, and she has produced more than 500 books, anything from paper back ,to hard back, to board books, to tub books, to eBooks and audio books.She ha s a team of talent that can do it all and can do all of the things. And so she has become a very valuable resource for anybody who wishes to self publish.

[00:05:38] Karen Christoffersen: My goal is to make my authors as happy as I possibly can. So when I put that book in their hands, it's like putting that baby in her mother's arms. It's a moment of just pure joy, and that's what I look for.

[00:05:53]

[00:05:53] Devin Davis: So Karen estimates that the expense of producing a book is about $3,000. My personal estimation is closer to $5,000. And many authors get a book finished, they write it, they edit it and they go through the entire huge process of getting a manuscript ready. And now it's printed, or it is available to order in the ebook form or whatever, they have this finished product, but many of them just don't know what to do next.

[00:06:26]Karen Christoffersen: If we can just get authors atuned to the fact that this is a small business. The startup business is tough and you have to build and you have to stick with it. Well, a book is like that as well. You have to be on there every day. You know, write a blog, do a newsletter. You must have a website. Websites are very inexpensive to do now. The hard part is selling it.

[00:06:54] So if people start off from the beginning, I remember Richard Evans told me, he said if I had started collecting email addresses when The Christmas Box first came out, he said, I've had millions of names, but he didn't start collecting addresses for like 10 years. And so that's one thing that I can't convince enough authors to do is to go out there and start building that list.

[00:07:21] Tell your friends to share. Tell your friends to send this to their friends and ask your friends if you can have their email address.

[00:07:29]Devin Davis: So where to get started. The process of writing a book has so many steps and so many different professionals to bring in on board to the project that it is so easy to lose track of what you need to do. It is easy to lose your steam and it is easy to lose focus. So, what Karen has put together is called the Book-wise Publishing Boiler Plate and she passed this document onto me.

[00:07:59] It is updated regularly. The one that I have was current as of July 7th, 2021. And it goes through and outlines step by step, the different things that you need to do in the writing process to produce a book, to get to that finish line of having a book. And then we move on a little bit to marketing after that.

[00:08:27] So if you are interested in the Book-wise Publishing Boiler Plate document, go ahead and email me. My email is [email protected]. And I will be able to send that to you so that you can see what Book-wise Publishing has put together. As far as that is concerned.

[00:08:49] Karen Christoffersen: One thing I think is really important is that if you are a serious writer, if you're serious about completing a book, you need two books, you need your book, but you also need a journal. And write in your journal every day what you do, whether you write 10 pages, whether you call so-and-so who knows an editor or an agent or whatever is happening in your book life, keep a journal of it because you're going to want to refer back to that sometime. And you will have valuable information that you don't even know was valuable at the time you received it. So two books.

[00:09:29]Devin Davis: Sometimes as business owners and as people who are creative, we failed to see the importance of record keeping. So with different things like this with having your manuscript that you are working on and then keeping track of the things that you did to progress that manuscript that can serve you in many different ways. It can show you, first of all, exactly how you did it so that you can do it again when you move on to your second manuscript. It can also serve as kind of a force to lift you up. If you are feeling down, if you are feeling unmotivated, you can look back to the specific days where you pushed through and did a lot and accomplished a lot, and had a really successful day, as far as production goes, and you can replicate what you did to get past that and to do it again. And so record keeping is very, very important in a small business, not only just the financial side, but also what you have done for production.

[00:10:42] With me, I have my book, well, my two books. I now have two books, two manuscripts that I'm working on. I also have this podcast that I need to keep track of. With the podcast, I don't keep track of all of the notes that I have taken for each episode, but I definitely have a planner because this is a regular release schedule. And so I need to be organized and I need to think ahead.

[00:11:08] And if I ever want to have days off, it means that I need to get things done beforehand to earn those days off or to prepare for them. So with books, I have done the book writing before I know how to do that. And I know the people that I need to get ahold of for the next steps, because I've done that too. And I never did keep a second journal, but I also recommend doing that just as Karen pointed out.

[00:11:36]But also something, another thing that Karen does, and this was surprising to me, Karen has an entire career built around producing and around marketing. And so Karen has spent her entire adult life writing the short stuff, saying impactful things in a very short amount of time, because in marketing, you don't have pages and pages to build or to develop.

[00:12:06] You get to hit them hard and you get to say the important things in a good, meaningful way right away. And so Karen writes the short stuff. With my books, she wrote the blurbs on the back of the covers because she's good at that. And she knows how to do the small things well. And so when she moves on to share with me something else that you will hear here in a second, I was completely surprised and delighted by this little gift that she shares.

[00:12:44] Karen Christoffersen: I was going to read to you just a little thing. 'Cause I don't write books.

[00:12:48] I do a lot of writing, but I don't write books because I have too much work to do just editing. I decided to write as what I call a fictionalized narrative based on true events. And I bring other people in like, you know, the boy in my neighborhood who was my friend and his quote from his point of view, what he sees happening in my life.

[00:13:13] But I thought it might be fun just to read a tiny little excerpt. So I would like your response to these four short paragraphs. You're ready for this?

[00:13:25] Okay. Now I grew up in a trailer in a tiny home and and I had a sister who played Elvis Presley all the time.

[00:13:34] And my big brother, 12 years older than me. He looked like Elvis Presley. I thought Elvis was my brother. And I liked big words. This is when I was five years old. But even when I was five years old, I liked big words. So this is four paragraphs for inspiration for you guys.

[00:13:52]Butch was my friend. He was about 10 or 11, and I was five. Butch had a dog named Gunner. He was a big German shepherd, mostly black, but he had a lot of golden fur in his face and he was beautiful. He was bigger than me, probably twice my size, a happy dog, always looked like he was grinning, kind of like me. Dad called me a grinning idiot.

[00:14:15]Butch had to keep him on a long rope because we didn't have fences. So Gunner had to be leashed when we were at school. And I lived right on Route 66 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So it was a nasty road. I remember riding the school bus home one day. And as we got to our stop right in front of our trailer park, there was a dark something in the middle of the road, a ways in front of the bus.

[00:14:37]I didn't think anything about it at the time, but when we walked to our trailers, I noticed Butch was looking around and couldn't find Gunner. He called him, and Gunner would always come when he heard Butch call but not this time. And then I knew what that black thing in the middle of the road was.

[00:14:55] And I was sick at heart, sick to my stomach, and didn't know what to do. Butch and his dad dug a hole near the back of their trailer space I remember it was in the spring because the wild flowers were in bloom and I picked a bunch to put on his grave. Butch was pretty stoic. I liked that word.

[00:15:12] It meant strong and quiet-like I loved big words, even as a child. I knew he was hurting, but he didn't have to show it. I liked that. He could hurt inside, but he didn't have to show everybody and make a fuss. At my house, someone was always making a fuss. That kind of quiet strength really impressed me. I wanted to be like that, but I was a girl and girls, well, we're usually not the epitome of quiet strength.

[00:15:40] The role model I had at the time was just the opposite. I remember standing there as Butch's dad shoveled dirt into the hole, singing quietly to myself, "You ain't nothing but a hound dog crying all the time, nothing but a hound dog." It was my requiem for Gunner. He was a good dog, a loyal and loving one. Died on Route 66, just east of Albuquerque.

[00:16:06] And that is my tiny excerpt from my narrative. And I wanted to write it in such a way that my kids would actually read it. And so I bring this up because anybody out there who is thinking about writing the book and thinks they can't write a book. Well, I thought I couldn't write a book, but I I'm starting to think I might be able to, because I read a few of these pieces to my children and they liked them and ask for more.

[00:16:38]Devin Davis: So there you have it. Anyone can write a story. And a lot of us want to write some form of memoir, either for ourselves, for our lives or for a loved one. Like Caroline Nadine Helsing did in one of those previous episodes. And you should. And it is fun to bring focus to the idea of a fictional narrative based on real events and how that can be just fine and a beautiful way to do your own narrative or your own memoir or the memoir of a loved one.

[00:17:14] It can be fun. It can be entertaining. It can be more memorable that way. If you choose to incorporate those elements as well, just as Karen is choosing to do with her own personal memoirs. I know that I will, when I do my own stuff later on in life, I'm not interested in writing a memoir today. But if you are interested in reaching out to Book-wise Publishing, do their website at www.bookwisepublishing.com. And if you want to reach out to Karen Kristofferson herself, her email is [email protected]. It has three Z's in a row. Uh, I will include that email address and a link to the website in the notes of the show.

[00:18:03] Also, again, referring back to the boiler plate document. If you want to get a hold of that, feel free to reach out to me. My email address is [email protected]. And I would be able to send that over to you.

[00:18:18]That's it for today. A big shout out to my patrons who help make this show what it is. If you wish to become a patron, you will get early access to this content, you could get an additional episode every month and you could spend quality time with me over some private chat features in Discord.

[00:18:35] Just go to patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse to sign up to become a patron today. Also, be sure to follow me on social media. On Instagram I am @authordevindavis, on Twitter I am @authordevind. And thank you so much for listening. Be sure to be on the lookout for next week's episode, where we will be hearing from author AJ Mac, who wrote The Gem State Siege during NaNoWriMo last year. So that is coming up next week. Thank you so much, guys. Have fun writing.

Become patron today! Visit patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse

Be sure to check out the podcast Writing Roots, found wherever you listen to your podcasts!

The following is a transcription to this episode. The complete transcription is on the show's website.

Devin Davis: Do you have the most awesome character in all of fiction and you have wonderful plans for this character, but you just don't dare to put those plans into action? Well, I am here to tell you to dare to dream. Well, in ways. Today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello, hello, hello! And welcome back to the show. Welcome back to Writing in the Tiny House. I am your host Devin Davis, and we are here together for another wonderful episode of writing in the tiny house. I am the guy living in a tiny house in Northern Utah, who is here to show you how to fit in writing a book, even in the most busy of schedules. So that's what we're doing.

[00:01:09] That's what we do here. Sometimes we have interviews of professionals in the field. Sometimes we have me talking about different writing advice. Last week, we talked about plotting from the inside out, from finding an event that would happen in your plot and in your book and finding ways to entangle that with all of the different subplots and then working backward so that you can find out how everybody got there.

[00:01:41] This week, we are going to be talking about characters and the awesome things we want them to do. So this is still plotting. This is still doing the plot structure stuff. But I warn you: what I'm about to talk about can be dangerous. But first I want to do a quick shout out. You know, that in these episodes I sometimes have announcements.

[00:02:06] One of the podcasts that I just stumbled upon is called Writing Roots by Aspen House Publishing. They release episodes twice a week and they are great. And I highly recommend that you guys search them out and have a good time with that. It's been fun exploring some of these other writing podcasts and just building a community like that.

[00:02:27] So that's it for announcements. Let's just get in to the nitty gritty of this. Let me first share with you the warning. Let me first set the stage. This stage is: you have this wonderful character, and because I am a fantasy genre author, we're going to keep things kind of fantasy.

[00:02:50] If you do any other type of fiction though, this totally applies. So with fantasy, anything can happen. There's magic. I appreciate a really good magic system. I appreciate believable characters. I appreciate human characters that I can relate too. So we have this character who is becoming more and more powerful in magic, and we imagine this wonderful big finale or this wonderful big spell or this wonderful big situation that this character really should be put into.

[00:03:31] If the character were in that situation, the entire plot would be more exciting. And that particular scene that you are imagining would be fun to write. It would be fun to envision. It is fun to daydream about. If it were a movie, you know all of the camera angles, you know all of the pictures, you know all of the special effects that it would have.

[00:03:54] And so we get to ask ourselves, "How did we get our character to do that? How do we get our character to get there?" We need to include these exciting moments because it's fun. And that's what makes some of this literature really fun is really big magic, really big high stakes things.

[00:04:18] We like the fights. We like the battles, at least in fantasy we usually do. And so it's important to include those things. However, when it comes to this specific character, doing this specific thing or developing in this specific way or having this or that specific backstory, it is important to step back and ask yourself why.

[00:04:49]And this is the reason why I say things like this. If you do not step back and ask yourself why it can lead to problems with your writing. It can lead to problems with your story. When you have a character who needs, in your opinion-- and it truly is in your opinion, none of this is real. And so you are in charge of everything in this writing process. But if you have this woman who needs to learn a specific spell or needs to do a specific fight, then you need to find a believable way to get her there. It is important to write down the different things that you want this character to have, and that you want this character to do.

[00:05:42] It's important to write all those things down for all of the main characters. But, you need to cross reference all of that with the previous stuff that I said in the previous episode. You need to make sure that you're getting your character from this stage to this other stage in a believable way. It needs to be something that is organic.

[00:06:10] It needs to be something that is real. It needs to be something that we can believe. And so what the pitfall is, is plot devices. Sometimes plot armor. If you're familiar with that term, that is when the character doesn't die or doesn't really get hurt just because they are the main character.

[00:06:32] Not because they are otherwise special in any other way. But just because they're the main character we protect them, or we have our main character or our main crew of characters, and we need to get them from here to there, but we have written them into this corner. And so how do we get them out of this corner?

[00:06:53] Well, the problem is the unbelievable solution or the convenient thing that comes by. I spoke about plot conveniences earlier when I spoke about Santa Claus showing up in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in the Chronicles of Narnia and Santa Claus brought deadly weapons, which the children would be needing at the end of the book, and that is all very convenient. And this way of plotting can lead to these plot conveniences. However, I'm going to tell you that if your character absolutely needs to do a specific thing, what I invite you to do is write down what that specific thing is, and then sit on it for a while.

[00:07:42]Have it in the back of your mind. If everything in the story already makes sense and leads up to that, and this would be just a natural progression along the way, then absolutely stick it into your story. If not, pay attention to your gut feeling. If it ends up being extra or stupid, or unbelievable, or just too much, or it ends up affecting the pacing-- like things get really slow and boring now that we have this thing in there-- then I invite you to step back and to perhaps revisit it or to throw it away entirely. There have been many wonderful ideas that I have thought of in my own stories that simply did not survive just because there was no organic way to include them in the story.

[00:08:40] So in instances like this, sometimes sometimes, and I absolutely give you every excuse to do this if you feel you need to. Sometimes you simply must sit down and write it anyway, knowing that it is going to be modified later. And you could write thousands of words just because you need to write that. You need this particular scene or event to exist for you, for you as the storyteller. In writing that scene, it brings you a little bit closer to your character. It lets you get to know the character and the dynamics of the environment that they're in, the stakes that they have and many more things. But it is okay to then turn around and rip it out of your manuscript.

[00:09:36]If you are the type of person who has heart failure over deleting things in their manuscript, it's okay to cut them from the manuscript that you are working on and paste them into another file that you can title your graveyard and to have those ideas continue on in the graveyard for either further inspiration or just reminiscing about what might've been. When I wrote my first book As Magic Shifts, the prologue was the longest chapter in the entire book by far, and it was the prologue. And if you do any type of Googling or just a quick search in YouTube, you can discover that prologues are kind of on the hot plate right now.

[00:10:34] They're kind of a debatable subject. Do you need a prologue? Do you not need a prologue? And there are a million different things to say about that subject. But in my book As Magic Shifts, when I wrote that 13 years ago, I simply needed to write this battle scene. And in the prologue, I wrote the battle scene from start to finish.

[00:11:00] It was the entire battle. And it had characters in it that had not been introduced in any other aspect. It had events in it that were confusing. It had multiple points of view. It was a mess. It was also 45 pages long. Which is too long for a prologue. You want your prologue to be shorter than the average length of your chapters.

[00:11:26] And so it was a problem and I sat back and I recognize that. And so what I did instead was after I wrote the entire prologue, I took just a single scene from it, the most important scene, and I made that become the prologue. And had I not done it that way, at least that's how it became for the second draft.

[00:11:52] Had I not done it that way-- had I not sat down and written out this entire battle-- I wouldn't have arrived at that scene that worked for the second draft. And that's okay. What I did later was I had a way to understand the characters backstory, and as a way to understand just some of the magic and some of the effects that were happening in a really negative way. I had flashbacks of sorts to that war, to that battle that happened years and years ago, as a way to explain to the reader and to actually some of the other characters, what was actually going on and why it was happening in this way. And so I never forgot that battle.

[00:12:45]Again, this is the thing. If you have main characters that you really, really, really want them to do specific things or act in a specific way, make sure you reference your overall story and pay attention to your gut. It has also been my experience that if I let things marinate for long enough, I will be able to come to a very logical conclusion about those things, whether or not to put them in the book. Or I can find the absolute perfect way to include them. And sometimes that takes time. Sometimes that just takes that patience, that ability to sit back and allow the forces at work to just kind of figure out this aspect of the story that you didn't understand before.

[00:13:45] For me, I daydream about my books all day, every day. And so sometimes I get fixated on the really exciting things on the good things that I find in the storyline. And because I'm the storyteller and because I'm the author, they all make perfect sense to me. And then sometimes when I draft, I don't see that they don't make sense yet, or that they need more or that it's too much, whatever.

[00:14:15]But in the times that I do see that this doesn't work right now, or that this character doesn't get to act in this way right now, or this event doesn't get to happen right now, but I still allow myself to daydream and I still allow myself to think about it, I have found that for the really important events in my entire overall story, even though some of the context might change, I have found there is always a creative and beautiful way to approach those events every time. And that moment is so exciting when, when I come to realize, oh, it gets to happen this way. So the event is still there! And I still get to be excited about what is about to happen and the magic and the action, and you know, what the characters are going to learn and grow from or whatever, if that's even in the scene.

[00:15:17] And even though the context may be different and sometimes the secondary characters might be different or the setting might be a little different. I have found that there are creative ways to find the perfect place for those exciting moments. And for those important moments, sometimes it requires a bit of ju from your manuscript, but it can happen.

[00:15:42] Sometimes you get to be prepared to put them on the back burner so that you can give it more time to marinate and let your creative brain find the most perfect way to include that important scene.

[00:15:58] So that is it for today. Thank you so much for joining me. And a special thanks to my patrons: without my patrons, this podcast would not be possible. If you are interested in joining the patron gang, go to patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse. You would be getting early access to these episodes. You would be getting an additional episode every month and an opportunity to spend private time with me.

[00:16:24] So again, that is patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse. Also be sure to follow me on Instagram. My handle is @authordevindavis and on Twitter my handle is @authordevind. Again, thank you so much for joining me today and have fun writing. We will see you next time.

S1E24 Plot, but Inside Out

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This is a transcript of this episode. The full transcript is found on the show's website.

Devin Davis: You know, there has been wind, there has been rain. There has been everything you can imagine. And so I'm hoping that my microphone doesn't pick it up because we have a deadline today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello, hello, hello! And welcome back to the show. Welcome to Writing in the Tiny House. I am your host Devin Davis, and I am the guy living in a tiny house who is here to tell you how to write that novel specifically. But we don't just pay attention only to novels. We pay attention to all books. It has been my experience that so many adults who work a nine to five and have a family also have a book idea in the back of their mind that they simply have not started writing.

[00:01:12] And I'm here to tell you that it is possible. And I am here to show you how it's done. So as far as announcements go, we are here and we are on our 24th episode. Isn't that so fun? I have been doing my darndest to kind of get ahead of things and it's a lot of work, friends. The podcast itself is a lot of work. I absolutely love it. And it brings me a lot of joy. But to get ahead of my publishing schedule and to give myself some room to breathe and stuff has taken a lot of effort.

[00:01:45] I don't really have a day where I can sit down and record like six episodes. That's not how it works. And so instead I've been doing a lot of interviews and I have been doing about two podcasts a week and becauseI have a patron community, I get to do an additional episode every month and that episode gets to be really good.

[00:02:07] So there's just a lot of recording and I simply do what I can in the time that I have. I don't have my boys every night. I am alone on most nights. And my goal has been to record two episodes a week and publish one. So with some time we're going to get that nice big cushion.

[00:02:28] In case, well, which is what I want that way if I need to take time off, the publishing schedule won't be interrupted. Or if something happens or if there's an emergency, then you, my friends, don't need to worry about some good additional content and neither do I. And that's good. It is good to have that.

[00:02:47] Additionally. So August is very soon, actually, August is this month. You CA it's this month, we are presently in August, as you can tell. And that means that we have three months to prepare for NaNoWriMo. So NaNoWriMo is basically when we get our writing idea and we map it out and we outline as much as we feel we need to. And we make a goal that in November we write 50,000 words of that project. Now in my life, 50,000 words does not make a novel. Even if you read the NaNoWriMo guidelines, they pretend that 50,000 is a novel. In most publishing standards, 50,000 is a novella, but 50,000 words in a month would be a huge step in the progress of anybody's book.

[00:03:59] So for the traditional debut novel, which should be at about a hundred thousand words, you would get halfway there. If you are already at like 40 to 50,000 words, you would finish the thing by the end of NaNoWriMo. And so that is what I am preparing to do. I want to have all of November's podcasts recorded in advance.

[00:04:24] November is going to be a little bit different just because that entire month is going to be a big push to 50,000 words. I currently have two works in progress that are half done. And so to get 50,000 more words is a big freaking deal. Even if between now and then I managed to finish one of them.

[00:04:44] There's always more to be written. And I have short story ideas that need to happen too. All the things. There are a million different ways to get to 50,000 words, even if it's not just in one manuscript. And so NaNoWriMo November is going to look a bit differently instead of just the informative episode content that I have done in many of these episodes, like the tips and tricks and whatever, in November, we're going to take a different approach just because I am inviting you, my listening community, to do NaNoWriMo with me, especially my patrons.

[00:05:24]So think of a project where you can do a big push to the end and let's nail it down in the month of November. But in November, we are going to have episodes on how to deal with stress. I know that one of them is going to be a guided meditation, just different things like that, ways to clear your head, ways to keep you going.

[00:05:46] And so it may not be related specifically to writing. It might be more related just to achieving goals and pushing through things that will stand in your way and different things like that. Starting a routine of whatever it might be. So that in November we can tackle our goals and push through to the end.

[00:06:11] In 30 days and that is amazing. So there's going to be a lot of that and preparing for it in October, we're going to have episodes on how to prepare for that type of a marathon. So that's what the content will look like in the fall. And we have three months leading up to that. So stay tuned. It is going to be awesome in November.

[00:06:37] It's going to be a little bit different and I will be posting updates on my personal progress on the Discord community and also on Instagram. So if you follow me on Instagram, you can see that. If you are not a part of the Discord community, you need to become a patron to do so. So go to patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse, and, there will be a giveaway, there will be a lot of back and forth on how to stay on track, on how to push through, on how to move forward. And so NaNoWriMo is a big goal this year. So let's do that right before the holiday season. It's going to be great.

[00:07:17] So anyway, onto the main body of this episode. I want to talk about how to structure plot. And do it from the inside out sort of. So the plot of a story can happen in many different ways. It is, especially if you're doing fiction and you are not modeling something with your fiction. A lot of people take an event. And through the inspiration of that event, they write a story. And so that story is inspired by events that actually happened.

[00:07:54] And so putting in the rising action and whatever else is a bit easier, just because everything that they're writing happened in some way already. If you are writing a book with a larger cast and a more complicated plot with several subplots, things get to happen a little bit differently.

[00:08:16] And so for something like a big epic, something where people go up against impossible odds and there's that really, really big finish at the end. And the stakes are like life or death or the death of a village or like life of death, of their loved ones or whatever else. That's what I mean by an epic.

[00:08:42] Sometimes what you can do is imagine, and I've done this with a lot of the key points in my books and with a lot of the subplots too. And you get to go through and think about how this applies to your characters later. But what I do is I envision what the outcome will look like. So I start at the end or I start at the middle.

[00:09:11] I start at what the outcome of whatever conflict, whichever conflict I choose to look at and I see how it ends. And I see who's in that conflict and who's in the picture and I go through and I map out. So I've told you that I'm kind of a pantser when it comes to writing, I don't really like to use an outline and that is true to an extent I outline a lot.

[00:09:44] I just don't write it all down and I don't write down every last detail of the scenes that play through my mind. I like a lot of the details of the scene and the interactions of the people in the scene to unfold as I write them. But there definitely has to be a direction and there has to be, you know, an ending, there has to be a way to get there and there still has to be a goal.

[00:10:12] And so in that respect, I definitely outline, and I recommend outlining. Otherwise you won't know what to do and you will have writer's block like you won't believe. So anyway, If you start at the end and you see who's all there and you see how it happened and you see all those different things, then you take the people who are there and you trace backwards.

[00:10:41] How did they end up there? What other big thing in the entire story? So an event that affects all of the subplots or most of them had to happen so that after that they would have this big finish at the end.

[00:10:57]And you call that event like Event D. From Event D you see, who is there and you imagine which other big event in the story would have brought everybody to that point, and you label this other event Event C and you move on back to B and then back to A. This is one way of an infinite number of ways to come up with a good plot. And it's a way to make sure that there is continuity and that there are ways that your subplots tie together. I appreciate all of the subplots. I do not have the brain power or the attention span to pay attention to subplots that happen in the first book and then are dropped until book five and then picked up again.

[00:12:00] I don't pay attention to all of those things. And so I like to have a good book where all of the subplots tie together in some way in the span of one book, and this is a way to ensure that. It's a way to keep all of the subplots there. It's also a good way to keep them tangled and it is so fun and so freaking hard, but so fun to have all of these subplots and to have many people involved in all of the subplots. It makes the book ridiculous to write, but it makes it intriguing to read and it adds so much suspense and it adds so much pull and so much grip. It really grips me when everybody is in everybody else's business. And then a big thing happens and there's a reason why everyone was there.

[00:12:58] And then the subplots, and the main plot kind of separate for another few chapters. And then they meet together again. And then at the end, for a big finish. I love that. Now, when you're doing it and we'll get to this in subsequent episodes, you need to make sure that your characters are doing it right.

[00:13:19] And you need to make sure that the pacing is correct among other things. But we're going to touch on those things in some of the next episodes of Writing in the Tiny House.

[00:13:30] So that is it for today. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you wish to become a patron and get early access to the episodes or a bonus episode every month, or be involved in our community and spend time with me every month.

[00:13:46]Then be sure to go to patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse. Also follow me on Instagram. My handle is @authordevindavis and on Twitter. And my handle is @authordevind. Take just a minute and leave a review on whatever app you are listening to this podcast through

[00:14:13] a special thanks to my patrons. Without you, this podcast. Would not be as fun or as possible. So thank you so much, guys. Be sure to join in next week and have fun writing.

S1E23 Unapologetic, with Caroline Nadine Helsing

To become a patron go to patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse today!

Caroline Nadine Helsing is today's guest.

www.carolinenadinehelsing.com

Instagram: @caroline_nadine_helsing_author

Find her on Facebook and Youtube to see supplemental material to the book.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CarolineNadineHelsingAuthor

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaaUCsUd28AhZSVoOXq9p_A

Follow this link to get her book Unapologetic: Tales of the Original Party Crasher.

https://amzn.to/3BkQDSB

The following is a transcript of this episode. The full transcript is available on the show's website.

Devin Davis: If you ever choose to write a memoir about a loved one in your life, I recommend doing it the way Caroline Nadine Helsing did it when she wrote her book, Unapologetic: Tales of the Original Party Crasher. Caroline is our guest Today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello, hello, hello! And welcome to Writing in the Tiny House. I am Devin Davis. I am your host and I am the guy living in a tiny house in Northern Utah, who is here to show you that the novel idea that you have floating around in your brain, it is 100% possible for you to buckle down and write it. And today's guest is a perfect example of how that is done and why that is done. These don't have to always be big works of fiction. Sometimes they can be works of fiction inspired by actual events. So let's take a second. And let's meet our guest. She is a woman living in California who grew up in Hawaii. And let's see all of the different things that she did before she actually started writing a book. She has done all the things you could ever imagine, my friends.

[00:01:47] Caroline Helsing: My name is Caroline Nadine Helsing. I can say I'm originally from Honolulu, Hawaii, and moved to California two days before my 23rd birthday.

[00:01:57] I feel like I've had multiple lifetimes. I almost feel like I reinvent myself every two years. So what brought me to the mainland was I was doing a bit of acting in Hawaii and the natural progression is to move to Los Angeles. So that's what I did. I came over with my little Lhasa Apso Bentley, and he used to jump on the bed and sleep with me. And I had gotten a new bed, a new mattress that was higher than my old one, and he couldn't jump up anymore. And so I made this dog step for him to get up onto the bed. And that essentially is what got me out of the acting business. It turned into a company, a manufacturing company for pet products. So we made dog steps and clothing. Our first slogan was "Bitches love me." I had that company for about 10 and a half years, and that's what brought me down to Orange County. And when I sold it-- gosh, I think I sold it in 2013-- I went back to one of my first loves, which is photography. And I started volunteering through the Rotary Program and started traveling with these mobile medical clinics. And we would go to Mexico, we went to the Amazon and the rainforests, the Peru, India. And I would document these trips and also volunteer where I could like in India was amazing.

[00:03:21] We were one of the last groups. Administer polio vaccinations via the droplets before they moved to injection. So it just was a very rewarding experience for me. And in documenting through my photography, I would also write and then I started writing and submitting stories to the local papers.

[00:03:41]And that evolved into just me realizing that I really loved writing. And in the back of my mind, I always had this seed of an idea to tell my mother's stories because she was unlike any mother I had ever grown up with. She was kind of like a cross between a Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's to like Moira from Schitt's Creek. She was, she was very unapologetically herself and she taught me the value of being authentic to yourself. She was one that just always followed her bliss.

[00:04:16]Devin Davis: So you can see that Caroline has done everything in her life. She's been a business owner, she has done photography. She has done writing. But I had to ask her, why now and why this book?

[00:04:34]Caroline Helsing: But I always loved creative writing in school. That was like my, I loved English. I love. I love that aspect. I was always journaling, so I was always writing. And I think in the back of my mind, you know, I I'd always said, I, I knew, I didn't know how, I didn't know what I was going to write about, but I knew I was going to write a book and I didn't know that it was going to wind up being a book about my mother. But it was the perfect avenue for me. It was almost like she was channeling through me because I got it done in a little over a year and maybe I have COVID, you know, the pandemic to thank. I was just, you know, home and I, I literally treated it like a full-time job.

[00:05:13] Devin Davis: But it was with her mother's passing that Caroline got started with her book.

[00:05:19]Caroline Helsing: Well like I said, I'd always had this seed of an idea to tell her stories. And I think after she had passed, my mother had passed in 2019 in January. Actually it was New Year's Day, which again, if you, know about my mother, I mean, it was the perfect day because she had to go with a big bang.

[00:05:35]In 2019 it was towards the middle end of the year, I started thinking maybe I'm going to kind of like start to jot down her stories. And I actually I took a memoir class just to kind of get my feet wet and the very first chapter I wrote was one of the ones that I put in the book.

[00:05:55]It was towards the end. It was basically my journey with her and her ashes. Before she passed, I had promised her that I would take her back to all of her favorite places in New York city. Cause she was from New York city and she was very much in New York and she loved New York, even though she wound up migrating west. When she met my father, they wound up settling in Hawaii and lived on an island for 36 years. But I promised her I would just take her back. She had said in passing, oh, when I die, I want my ashes spread across Bergdorf Goodman, which is this high-end, you know, department store in Manhattan. So that kind of gives you an idea of like her, her personality or character. And so, you know, when she died, we all were like, oh wait, she did.

[00:06:38] What did she want, like, what, you know, what do you think she would have wanted? And I said, well, she did say this. And I, you know, of course, I don't know what she kidding. I don't know, but in just sitting with it , it was the perfect thing for her to kind of like come full circle and, and bring her back to the city that she just adored.

[00:06:56] Seeing the city and going literally to all the places that I'd ever remembered her talking about to me truly enabled me to see that city through her eyes. It's like a gift that you give to your loved ones whom you leave behind. So that I think is what inspired me to write her story, once and for all to really do it. And so I I started November, December of 2019 is when I really started.

[00:07:26]Devin Davis: Sometimes when we start these big projects, it is really easy to feel isolated and alone, like many of us have experienced over the past 18 months. But it is also very beneficial when we are on these big endeavors where it's only us writing and nobody else helping us. It is very, very beneficial to form a writing group.

[00:07:53] To get a group of men or women or whomever else wants to listen to you, who is in the same boat as you and who will give good, honest feedback for the things that you are creating. And for Caroline, this kept her motivated and this brought her to the end to finish her book.

[00:08:19] Caroline Helsing: A few of the students and I decided to form a writer's group. I had to drive up there and I was fine to do it because it was just so nice to be able to bounce ideas off of another writer. And I consider them all so talented. We all had our backgrounds we added to the table, but that I feel is what got me through, kind of kept me accountable having this reference group for me personally. We met weekly, and for me, just in the back of my mind, knowing there was a group of people every Saturday morning waiting to read something from me, I had to at least write something.

[00:08:57]Devin Davis: Like with so many different projects that I have spoken about, including my own, but also others that I have heard about in recent years, Caroline's story evolved from how she envisioned it when she started to what it ended up being in the end.

[00:09:19] Caroline Helsing: When I originally started, it was just all about my mother. All I wanted to do was write about my mother. I didn't want to be in the book. It's about my mother, right? And they were the ones that kept saying No, Caroline, we want to know more about you. It helps us to understand her through your eyes and you know, whatever it was, they were saying. So I would like sprinkle a little bit of me here. So weird and odd, you know, like I didn't want to, and then just getting that feedback really helped. I wanted to create scenes with dialogue. And of course I wasn't there obviously prior to my being born and my mother's life, and I write a lot about my mother's youth, and they had said, you know, you can write as if. You obviously know her essence, so write as if. I had enough anecdotes, enough things, stories from different people from herself that I was able to take that information and create a scene as if it happened. I mean, I don't know the complete details the things that happened to her in her youth, but I feel like the point and the purpose was to give you an idea of what it could have looked like in the context of what actually happened. She was too much of a fun character to write. I couldn't not have fun with her.

[00:10:32]Devin Davis: But because so much of her mother's life happened before Caroline was even around, Caroline had to set out on an adventure of sorts to gather some of these other stories that she had only heard of before; these other stories of when her mother was young.

[00:10:50] Caroline Helsing: Other than the stories that I remember firsthand from my mother or firsthand from my own experience I talked to relatives, friends. I mean I write about the fact that I actually was getting to know the man behind my father, because he was someone that I called on Mother's Day because there was no one else to call, you know, and then we started talking about her and I was so impressed. My father is 94 years old and his memory is incredible. He remembered the fact that she was wearing a pink knit dress the day they met, and what song was playing in the background when he realized he was in love with her.

[00:11:33] So it connected me and my father. It connected me and her best friend, Marilyn. And it just kind of brought me closer to not only my own family, but the friends that were dear to her. And what was really cool is that it felt like my mother still is around me. This was such a therapeutic experience for me to not only digest and relive things, but make sense of who she was. When the book was done, I was worried that I would feel like I was losing her. Like I would lose her again because what would happen when I stopped writing about her? She was the thing that I thought about every single day. When I was done, what was that going to be like? And it, I have to say, I am probably more busy now than I was when I was writing, because I'm promoting it; I'm still talking about her. And this is probably exactly how she would've wanted it because she loved when people were interested in finding out about her. So she probably has had a hand in this too.

[00:12:36]

[00:12:36]Devin Davis: As she started writing her book, there were moments that were easy and there were moments that were challenging. And these are things that I can completely relate to as I write fantasy works of complete fiction. And as I have spoken to other authors who have been through the similar process of starting and completing a book, there are moments that are so easy to write, and there are other moments that are a struggle to get through.

[00:13:06] Caroline Helsing: I loved writing about the Catskills days. I loved writing about my experience with her towards the end, where I was traveling with her with the ashes. I mean, half the time I'm sobbing as I write it. So it's not like it was easy in that extent, but it flowed through me. I would say what was harder was the first chapter, for example, where it's just like, okay, I just have to set this foundation. She was born here I had to get to some extent that out of the way, the foundation of her mother and father. What was the most fun and enjoyable parts for me to write was the dialogue. And that's where I had my creative license. I was worried about writing about my father because my father is still alive and I didn't want to write anything to have made him take pause or sad in any way. He is a very private person so that was my biggest thing. Especially when I had the story finished I was just worried about what he would think about, you know, anything I might have written, you know, he really helped me and set my fears at ease when he said," Listen, this is your memories of your mother. Yes, I'm private, but I'll just have to take that into consideration when I read it. You've worked so hard on this book." It was almost like he gave me the permission to release her story. Cause there was a part of his that I don't know, maybe I just wrote it for me, you know, I want him to be okay with it.

[00:14:38]Devin Davis: One of the things that touched me, the very, very most in reading this book was Caroline's sensitivity toward her brothers schizophrenia. I have read many books with schizophrenia in them, either as part of the story or as part of the memoir. And I actually have close friends who deal with things that are similar to that.

[00:15:07] And the way that I had previously been exposed to schizophrenia in literature was that it was something to be feared, even though my personal own experience of it was not that way. It didn't always match that. And I loved that Caroline chose to make her brother's schizophrenia completely real. At the same time, it was just a part of him.

[00:15:34] It was just him. It was simply a way of explaining some of his quirkiness and the way that he viewed the world. And she said that when they arrived at a diagnosis, things became so much easier and it was such a blessing to be able to work with him, finally, understanding how he operated.

[00:15:58] Caroline Helsing: Nothing like the movies, you know, it's not like he hears voices, but he is a little different. Other people don't have to deal with the struggles that he's had to. And I write about the earlier days before we had this diagnosis. He would do things that we just kind of made you scratch your head, you know? And they were funny. They were funny. One of the scenes I write about was when he had stayed with my father's ex-wife. So he's staying with her and our half-brother for the summer. And anyway, he wanted to do something nice for them to say thank you. So he decides, "I'm going to paint the house and not just with one color, but with three." And it's just a simple white house, but he buys a can of yellow paint, a can of blue paint, you know, and he goes to town, just painting the trims.

[00:16:49] And I mean, so yes, he was quirky and funny. But he wanted to do something nice. He wanted the house to look really nice for my father when he came there to pick him up. But I think I wrote it with humor and love, and that was my intention. That was definitely my intention throughout. I wanted to tell the truth, but with love.

[00:17:06] Devin Davis: Not only did it help Caroline better understand her brother, but it also helped her mother too. And she shared that the relationship between her brother and her mother improved quite a bit after arriving at this diagnosis.

[00:17:22] Caroline Helsing: It really did kind of open up and connect deeper with my mother and they started traveling together. So it was nice that he was able to live a happy life.

[00:17:33]Devin Davis: So Caroline wrote the book, she published the book, but she had the entire work be only the story. There were no pictures. There were no maps. There were no visual representations of anything about the life of her mother or herself. And she did that on purpose. And I really liked the reason why she did it.

[00:17:56]Caroline Helsing: Sometimes your imagination is a lot stronger. And it doesn't really matter exactly what she looked like. But sometimes like you just imagining something, it's more powerful. So I made the decision not to have pictures in the book.

[00:18:09]Devin Davis: When I first got this book, I absolutely devoured it. I was dubious at first about reading a memoir or reading a biography of sorts, but this was such a wonderful way to do it. She describes that she included dialogue and she made scenes and it was as if she took her mother's personality and reenacted some of these important things that her mother did when her mother was younger. And I loved the spirit that it brought to my impression of who her mother was and still is. And it brought me a more important impression on the love that she has for her mother and the wonderful family dynamic that they all share.

[00:18:59] Choosing to take a fictitious spin on some of the things in this book was wonderful and it brought personality and it brought light and it brought interest and just a wonderful experience too, with a story of Caroline's mother. And it is something that I will consider doing when I write my own story about my life.

[00:19:21]I'm such a storyteller anyway. And so to take those experiences and to turn them into scenes with dialogue and action and create an actual story based on real memories and based on actual events is something that I love and is something that really, really speaks to me. This book was such a wonderful reading experience.

[00:19:45] Again, it is called Unapologetic: Tales of the Original Party Crasher, and it is available on Amazon. I got my copy on the Kindle. And if you wish to connect with Caroline, she has a website that I will include in the notes of this episode called www.CarolineNadineH elsing.com. And she is on social media with her full name on all of the places.

[00:20:16] Again, I will include links to that in the show notes of this episode. And otherwise that is it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening to Caroline's story. A big thanks to all of my patrons. With our Patreon program, you can gain early access, an additional episode or exclusive time with me and other top tier patrons. Just go to patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse if you wish to support me on this podcast. The social media that I have for my writing and for this podcast is at@authordevindavis if you're going for Instagram and @authordevind for Twitter. And please take a second to leave a review on whatever you are listening to this podcast through. Thank you so much, guys, have fun writing. We will see you next time.

S1E22 Villains and Plot

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The following is a transcript of this episode. The complete transcript can be viewed from the podcast website.

[00:00:00] Devin Davis: Have you ever read a novel where the main character should lose like a lot, but because the story needed them to win and survive at the end, they just never did lose? Well, on the other hand, have you ever read a story where the villain was so awesome that he probably should have won, but didn't? Well, then let's talk about villains and plot today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello, hello, hello! Welcome back to Writing in the Tiny House. Welcome to the show. I am Devin Davis. I am your host and I am the guy living in a tiny house who is here to show you that writing that work of fiction that you have in your brain is completely possible, and you should do it. Today we are discussing villains and plot.

[00:01:13] Last week, I told you that we would be discussing villains in action. This is kind of that. I was thinking about what action actually meant and all of the points that I had written down fed more into plot rather than just action, because villains can do just about anything you want them to do. But in the overall scheme of things, they play a very important role in the plot.

[00:01:38] Don't you think? So today I don't actually have a lot of announcements because things have been going pretty smoothly and there is nothing new to speak about. So let's dive right in to villains and plot. I have a list of four pitfalls to avoid when structuring your villain and your plot when you go to do the rough draft of your book or the outline of your book. The first thing to avoid is the hierarchy structure of the villain and his henchman. The reason why this is kind of hard to avoid is because we like it. We like the idea that once a bad guy is defeated that there is another bad guy who is stronger, who is more talented, who has more magical powers. And then once that guy is defeated, perhaps there's a third bad guy who is the villain's right-hand man, until we finally get to the bad guy himself. The reason why this is so popular is because it's easy to see, and it's easy to structure a series around. You have book one of the little bad guy and then it just gets a little bit bigger until book three or book five or book seven or however many books are in your series. You finally get to nail the main villain who is behind this entire problem the whole time. It is also a popular way to structure video games. You have the bad guys and you have the henchman and the little fodder guys that are easy to pick off and are not a very big threat.

[00:03:29] And in doing those things, the main character, which is you, gains experience points and gets a little stronger and learns some new things. And onward, the story progresses. However, this is becoming cliche. This is certainly a trope that has been done time and time again. And it is more common to see villains more like people.

[00:03:58] It is more common to see heroes more like people. Like I mentioned in the previous episode, it is more common to see a flawed, main character and to see a main character make some dark decisions. At the same time, it is becoming more common to see a villain with redeemable qualities, or to see a villain who is completely justified in what they are doing.

[00:04:23] And so this structure, this hierarchy structure that you have to beat down the fodder before getting to level two before getting to level three on up to the main big boss at the end, isn't new. It's not fresh. And so find another way to structure the bad guys in your story, especially in your trilogy or in the number of books that you're going to be writing that are related to each other. There are a lot of ways to do it. And at the end of this episode, I'm going to share with you one of the most delightful ways that I found in all of the fantasy fiction that I've read in presenting to you actually a group of five books.

[00:05:10] It is a quintet. So stay tuned until the very end to get that little tidbit. So the second pitfall to avoid ,and granted, you should be avoiding this anyway, it's a thing called plot devices. A plot device, and the reason why I bring this up, this is actually kind of bigger, fundamental writing, but a plot device is a thing that happens only because the writer needs it to happen because something else needs to happen later.

[00:05:48] A plot device is usually pretty contrived. It sometimes can come out of nowhere and all that it serves is for the plot to move forward or to save the main character or whatever. It's these little unbelievable things that happen in order for bigger things to happen later, but that is all the good that they serve.

[00:06:16]One of the most popular plot devices that I can think of is actually in the Chronicles of Narnia in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The children are there in this barren wasteland of frozen ice, and suddenly Santa Claus appears and Santa comes bearing gifts of lethal weapons.

[00:06:39] If you think about it, Santa does not belong in Narnia. There are not other people like Santa Claus that populate Narnia. There are granted a lot of other fantastical creatures and a lot of fun other characters, but Santa Claus himself does not belong there. And the fact that he appears at the very best time and comes bringing gifts that all of these children are going to need to save the day at the end is the biggest plot convenience I have read in a long time.

[00:07:14] Granted it's in a children's story and. We can have more plot conveniences in children's stories if we want to. That's fine. But in the more grownup stuff you get to pay attention to your plot conveniences. Some people call this plot armor. It's when the main character simply has to live because otherwise the book will end too soon.

[00:07:36] And so against all odds, they always win. Or against all odds, they and their central group of friends will win or will come out unscathed and you simply know that just because you know the story. And so it makes things predictable and it makes things unbelievable to a certain degree.

[00:07:59] The reason why I bring this up on a villain's episode is because not only do you get to think of your main character when you are mapping out your plot, but you also get to think about your villain. When your plot is filled with these conveniences and these devices that make the main character always win, you get to see on the other side of that coin or the other edge of that sword, what it does to your villain, or how it paints your villain with these plot devices. Sometimes it can make your villain come across as pretty dumb or come across as way too complicated, way too overthinking things and not realistic in that way. Or it can cheapen such a better deeper experience with that villain if those plot conveniences were not included.

[00:09:03] One of these favorites that I like to call out in fantasy fiction specifically, I like to refer to as the wild card. It's when the forces of evil are upon us. And it looks like the forces of evil are going to win. And we are all in dire straights, but something out of nowhere happens. And it's big and it was not foreshadowed to begin with and it's unexpected and it's a surprise. And to an inexperienced reader, it's probably super awesome. But to the rest of us, it earns kind of,, an eye roll. I read a book once, I don't necessarily want to call it out on the podcast, but there was a situation similar to what I described. The forces of evil were about to conquer this special, magical place. And from out of nowhere, there came a spell that transformed one of the types of magical creatures living in this place into these big warriors. And so these little rinky-dink fairies were transformed into this army of warriors. And the spell happened, and it lasted just long enough for the forces of evil to be abated and for the day to be saved. And then the fairies shrank back down to their normal little fairy selves. The reason why I bring up these things is because you have thought all of these wonderful things through with the villain, you have thought about the awesome ways that the villain is going to come in and threaten the safety of this or that magical place.

[00:10:52] And to throw in a wild card ending really cheapens all of the effort and all of the believability and all of the energy that you have spent trying to build up a believable villain. And instead the reader sits back and realizes that regardless, the villain will not win and it can take them out of the story and it can convince them not to carry on with the series or even to finish the book.

[00:11:24]The fourth pit fall that you get to pay attention to is the villain's backstory. Backstories are wonderful. I love a good backstory. However, it has been used a million times that every bad guy was once an abused little boy or girl. Every bad guy, every bad girl, every bad woman was abused when they were little. And while psychologically all of that makes sense, it is also something that is commonly found in all of literature. And what it can do is make excuses for the villain. If you want the villain to simply be bad and to simply be awful, there are other ways to develop backstory to that. There can be something amiss when they were little and they were involved in things that simply fostered that thing that was amiss. There can be interests that they were exposed to when they were little that carried with them as they learned magic or as they learned business, if it's modern contemporary fiction, or it can be a lot of different things like that.

[00:12:35] If you want them to be abused when they're little, that is fine. It is something that happens all the time in fiction, though, when we do get a good backstory to a villain. And I have read enough and read a wide enough variety of fiction to tell you that not every vicious villain and awful person and person who is threatening to destroy worlds or whatever, not all of them were abused by their dads. There are other ways to do it and to find those ways is fascinating and it makes the writing so much better and so much easier to follow along. And it really catches your interest and holds it there when it is new and it is fresh.

[00:13:24] So let me take a moment with this book review. I'm going to be reviewing the Cleric Quintet by R.A. Salvatore. R.A. Salvatore was one of my very favorite authors when I was in high school. I have since, now that I've gained some more experience in reading and in writing, I've come to find that sometimes his magic systems are a little bit convenient, but I'm going to talk about this particular series of five books. They're five short-ish books, I believe, or five average sized books. It's not a monstrous series, but the Cleric Quintet is about this young man named Cadderly who studies at a library and comes to learn the big mysteries of magic. And over the course of five books, you see it happen and you really come to understand just how powerful this young man becomes.

[00:14:25] And it was a really cool progression to see it over five books and to see actual power happen and to see the learning of spells or the manipulation of matter, or whatever, was really delightful to me. At the same time though, and this is the type of villain that I love to see the very, very most, this villain starts out with Cadderly studying at the same library. This structure didn't have a school. It didn't have classes, it didn't have teachers. It didn't have that type of structure. It just had this library of knowledge. And everybody from everywhere came to this library to learn and to gain more knowledge that way.

[00:15:10]There was another young man studying alongside Cadderly, they weren't friends. And this young man is kind of an awful person. He wasn't talented. He was clumsy. Granted Cadderly was also clumsy. But over the progression of these five books, you watch this untalented jealous, horrible man, young man gradually become the darkest, most threatening monster that comes about in book five. And it is delightful to see, and it was so fun to read. And that is the type of villain that I appreciate the very most, where you see perhaps an amount of foreshadowing, you see character traits and you see people in the very beginning of the story and you think maybe this guy is going to end up being something bad or doing something awful.

[00:16:10] And over the course of it all, you see all of the you see the background, you see the story unfold, you see the reason why this person chooses to be where they are. And you understand their attitudes toward this or that. It makes the villain so much more believable and so much more awesome.

[00:16:33] It is this type of villain that I am choosing to write in my current work in progress, or at least as part of it. Right now I have two half finished books. In one of them, that's totally how the villain is going to be unfolded. And the other one it's going to be different.

[00:16:49] But that is how it is in this book. So if you are interested in checking out the Cleric Quintet, please follow the affiliate links in the description of this podcast episode. And yeah, I give this, I give this entire work of five books. R.A. Salvatore has written a lot of books. And like I said, he was one of my favorites in high school.

[00:17:13]He was one of the Forgotten Realms authors. Did wonderful stuff. One of his characters Drizzt Do'Urden, who was a dark elf, is considered to be one of the most liked in all of fantasy fiction. And this is written by him. So go ahead and follow those links.

[00:17:30] I give these five books, easily, four out of five stars. They were so much fun. But I reflect on some of the things in there and there was an amount of convenience to them, but it was a great read. It was fast paced and the magic and the fighting in RA Salvatore's writing is so much fun. It is so easy to get caught up in all of those wonderful moments.

[00:17:53] And that is it for today. Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode .Thank you so much for my patrons, for the generous donations that they give every month. If you are interested in becoming a patron to this podcast, there are perks such as early access to these episodes an additional episode every month or exclusive time with me and other top tier patrons that you can have access to. Just go to patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse and sign up for one of the tiers today.

[00:18:23]Follow me on social media. My Instagram handle is @authordevindavis. My Twitter handle is @authordevind. And please take just a moment to leave a review on whatever software you are listening to podcasts through. Thank you so much for your time, and we will see you next time.

Today's episode is all about the baddies and what they say!

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Transcript:

Devin Davis: Does your modern fantasy novel take place in 2021, but your modern villain sounds like he came from 1921. Then, my friend, we need to talk about villains and dialogue today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to the show. Welcome to Writing in the Tiny House. I am your host Devin Davis, and today we are going to be talking about villains and how they should be talking. Again, I am a father of boys living in a tiny house in Northern Utah. And I am here to show you that the novel idea that you have bubbling around in the back of your head, it is 100% possible to write that no matter how busy you think you are.

[00:01:17] I know that a lot of my listeners are family people. I know that a lot of my listeners have full-time jobs. They have a lot of hobbies when they get home, they have kids, they have all the things. And so there are a million reasons not to write a book, but I am here to show you with this podcast that is entirely possible to write at least that one book.

[00:01:40]With today's episode, I actually don't have a lot of announcements. I have been doing a lot of prep for the upcoming weeks with this podcast. Like I said in the previous episode, I've been interviewing my head off and it hasn't changed. And I'm excited about that. Interviews are awesome.

[00:01:58] Interviews are very well supported on this podcast and they bring such wonderful value to everyone, to the listeners, to myself. It's fun to build those relationships. Additionally, it helps the podcast grow and it helps the guests grow, whatever it is that they're growing, whether or not they just finished writing a book, whether or not they are an editor, whether or not all the things, it's a way that we help each other achieve our goals.

[00:02:29] And I'm all about that. I think that's really good. There is an African proverb that says, "If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together." And I just like that. It just the idea of linking elbows and everybody going across the finish line together and achieving our goals by helping each other out.

[00:02:53] I think it's a wonderful idea. Today, however, we do not have a guest. We have me and I am here to bring you the second episode of this series on villains. Like I said in the previous episode, villains are actually near and dear to my heart. I love a good villain. I love a convincing villain. There is so much value that a good villain brings to a story.

[00:03:20] And I am all about that. It's important to have a good, main character. It's important to have a good hero, but I would dare say it is equally important if you are writing the type of story that has a prominent villain to have that villain be amazing. So with today's episode, we're going to be talking about dialogue and I'm going to bring up four pitfalls to avoid if you want to write a convincing villain.

[00:03:54] This is not a comprehensive list. This is just what I think is important. For me, dialogue is a big part of any type of a story. I love dialogue. I love seeing the exchange between two or more people especially when they have different ideas and they help each other come to conclusions and help each other out that way.

[00:04:15] I love seeing an author conveying these different personalities, meshing together through dialogue. It's one of my favorite parts of any story. And my own work tends to be pretty dialogue heavy, just because I love that. I love establishing relationships through words like that, so the first item on writing a convincing villain.

[00:04:39] So let's take a step back and let's think about your work in progress, or think about a really good book that you read recently, or even a good movie. What type of story was being shared? Was there a villain at all? And if there was a villain, was he or she prominent throughout the entire story and what type of cool things did they do?

[00:05:04] What type of cool things did they say? If I bring up those subjects and they make you giggle, usually means those things weren't done effectively. And I'm sorry, but a bad villain is something to laugh at. Seeing bad dialogue and seeing a horrible cliche villain is actually one of my favorite things to laugh at. I'm kind of weird like that. I love a bad villain, almost as much as I love a good villain, just because they are a perfect example of what not to do.

[00:05:33] The first pitfall that I have on my list is witty banter. If you are writing scenes where the villain comes into contact with the main character a lot it depends on the atmosphere that you are building in your story. If your story is witty, if it's funny, if it's making fun of a cliche, then witty banter is fine. However, an exchange between a villain and a main character, you need to really pay attention to what their relationship actually is. If they knew each other beforehand, it's possible that they would say more to each other during these encounters while the main character is trying to foil the villain. For instance, if the villain is the dad or if the villain is the neighbor or a teacher or something like that, it's entirely possible with that pre-established relationship that they would talk to each other or that they would have more to say, or the tone of the conversation would be more desperate, more pleading rather than more demanding, or there would be more of an attempt to find common ground. That means that if this prior relationship exists already, it needs to be established in a really good way before these other encounters, when this character has stepped into the role of the villain. Otherwise, the witty banter, the back and forth smart crack of the whip things, if that is the tone of your story, then go for it. Otherwise I say, don't do it. For me, it makes a lot more sense to have a villain say nothing if the villain and the main character encounter each other, but don't know each other. It makes a lot more sense to me if under the pressure of whatever this big master plan is going on, that there would be a lack of words and there would be a lot more emotion without the words. And that's something that I personally would avoid. Again, pay attention to the overall tone of your story though.

[00:07:56] The second pitfall is wordy or unnatural insults. That kind of goes hand in hand with witty banter, but it seems like the old school cartoon villain always had something stupid to say to the main character, to our hero. Sometimes it rhymed. Sometimes it made fun of their outfit. Sometimes it made fun of their special ability.

[00:08:24]I don't know. I remember a lot of recent superhero movies though, where the insults were pretty on the nose and pretty bad. And I personally don't like that. To have that type of really bad crappy insult really puts me out of the story. And I personally wouldn't do it. I like things to be more believable than that.

[00:08:50] And that is usually the tone of my book anyway. I tried to make it as realistic as I can, even if it is a fantasy story filled with magic. I like the relationships to be authentic. And so insulting someone? Well, first of all, if your superhero is wearing underwear over their tights, and then they're in a cape, I think that can be done away with, and I think that you already realize what type of a problem that would be. But make sure that the insults are believable and make sure they're not wordy. Wordiness isn't okay, guys. When we try to create emotion around a person or around a situation or around an event that's happening, sometimes we think the best way to build that emotion is to say a lot of words and to say like five words when we could say only one instead. I was recently critiquing for one of my critique partners.

[00:09:46] And she was so excited about this chapter that she sent to me. And it was kind of a wild chapter. It was a dream sequence, a nightmare sequence where like every other page was a different scene in this dream sequence. And the main character was super confused. And then a few paragraphs later, she would be in a different place and she felt really unsafe and didn't understand what was happening.

[00:10:15] And then at the end there was the really big villain. And the big villain was saying stuff that a real person wouldn't say unless they had a prior relationship. And I was sure to note that in my critiques for this critique partner. I said, make sure that your villain is a person before they are a villain.

[00:10:38]We are not writing Power Ranger episodes, and we're not writing 1950s superhero comics anymore. Unless you are. If you are, that's fine, then you can disregard this entire episode. But make sure that they are a person before they are a villain. And the same can be said with your hero. Make sure your hero is a person before they are a hero.

[00:11:01] And so with some of the dialogue in this critique that I did for this critique partner, I went through and just made little notes out in the margin saying if you can follow what your villain is saying with that evil maniacal laugh, I mean, I, I don't really want to do it into the microphone, but if you can follow what they said with that evil maniacal laugh, then you need to change what they said, because that evil, maniacal laugh has no place in your book. Or at least it shouldn't, it doesn't have a place in my book. So avoiding wordy and complicated and unnatural insults and other just language as well, also weak language.

[00:11:50] So this is the third pitfall that I have on my list. Weak language. A lot of us think that all language needs to be flowery and that all villains need to speak properly. Especially if it is a villain who is doing the master plan type of thing. If he's a big, strong brute, sometimes we naturally tend to give him different dialogue and to say things differently. But if he's the secret elaborate plan maker, if he's the guy who is taking over the world because he is smart and he has this intricate plan to do so, we tend to sometimes think that that guy would speak with proper English. And with kind of older English, I have been reading a book recently that is fantasy. It takes place in kind of that typical medieval Europe fantasy world, where a lot of fantasy novels take place. And the dialogue between the hero and the king and the King's evil advisor, those stock characters, is not natural because they're making it old. And the thing is they don't need to make it old.

[00:13:18] They can have it be more natural than that. I'm not saying that they need to modernize their dialogue much, but the thing is, the world is made up already. And this place, even though it resembles medieval Europe, it is not medieval Europe. And so the dialogue can be whatever you want it to be.

[00:13:40] And so it doesn't need to necessarily have the references to pop culture and it doesn't need to have the slang and whatever else, but when they start referring to things in a really old fashioned way, when we start talking about well, when we start whipping out the insults that my grandmother would use, I don't think that is as convincing as just better natural language conversation, to be perfectly honest. And this is another thing. One of the things that we come up against as a writer is we find that our writing tends to be really revealing of ourselves.

[00:14:20] I read a meme the other day, that writing is supposed to be embarrassing in the way that it makes us feel naked. And that suggests that as a writer, we get to be brave. And for many of us, sometimes that gets to involve our relationship with language, and sometimes our relationship with swear words.

[00:14:45] If you don't want to use foul language in your book, you certainly don't have to. It is 100% possible to write a convincing villain and a good hero and a wonderful world without having foul language if you don't want it there. If you want to appeal to a younger audience and have it be cleaner than that, that is 100% up to you.

[00:15:04] However, I'm going to paint a picture on purpose to demonstrate a point. If you have a villain, and she grew up on the wrong side of town, and she has a drug problem and she beats her kids. And at the end of the book, it finishes with her killing her husband. And yet the F-word tends to make her clutch her pearls, I don't buy it. I'm not saying that you need to incorporate the F-word into your book, but that was a big obstacle for me to face. And I have a villain kind of similar to the situation I just described. And I don't know, growing up on the wrong side of town and a drug problem and whatever, whatever else, just painting that picture of a rough bad guy. And then thinking of the language that they would use, I got to kind of get over my apprehension of using strong language, just because I don't use strong language like that. I don't use strong language towards my kids, but it made sense that he would. And so it was one of those things where I could either have clean language or I could have the proper effect. And I couldn't choose both. I didn't want to choose both. And so I got to kind of swallow my apprehension with the foul language and I got to include it in my manuscript. I'm not saying that I'm going to keep everything that's there just because I'm on my first draft, but you may encounter a similar problem.

[00:16:49] If you are a more proper person who uses more proper language, or if you would never dabble in some of the things that you want to include in your book. Like if you have always been straight laced and you've never done drugs, or if you never had premarital sex or whatever, if those things are not a part of your life, you may not want to include them in your book.

[00:17:16] But like I said, Sometimes you get to either choose between the content you leave out or the effect that you want to have, or that you want to convey to your reader. And it's just something to consider. I'm not saying that every scene needs to have the F word or that every scene needs to have sex or that every scene needs to be some grownup harsh thing.

[00:17:41] I would never say that; it's your story. You get to write it the way that you want. However, if we sit back and we consider these things to be more like tools that convey a specific emotion and reaction to our reader, then suddenly they're not so scary. And language is one of those tools. I understand that strong language offends many of my readers, or at least it's not something that many of my readers would use all the time or whatever, especially towards their kids or towards their loved ones. And so I very consciously get to pick and choose the type of language that the bad guys or bad women, whatever, in my manuscript get to use, because I know that that type of language conveys and inspires a very specific reaction to many readers.

[00:18:34] So kind of a long rant there. The final thing on my list is the closing monologue. And this is a cliche that has been made fun of a lot in many superhero movies, specifically the Incredibles from Pixar. The first movie, we know that at the end Syndrome has the family kind of arrested and detained and he starts monologuing and it buys the family some time to do something. And then Syndrome catches himself in the monologue. The thing is, the pull towards the final monologue is actually very appealing if you have not structured your story to not need the closing monologue. The reason why we want a closing monologue is because we want to show the reader just how clever we have written this villain.

[00:19:31] We want to reveal his backstory perhaps, or we want to reveal every step of this elaborate plan that just got foiled or is on the cusp of being revealed to us on the cusp of being accomplished. We as the writer, we want to convey to the reader just how genius this guy actually was. And a closing monologue seems like the good way to do it.

[00:19:58] However, my friends, there are ways to avoid the closing monologue. You can have clues along the way. You can have an investigator or another person reveal this or that. You can have the bad guy's right hand man abandon that side of the conflict and join the other side and then share secrets.

[00:20:18] There are a million different ways to do it, but the closing monologue is something that we have read enough of and it has been made fun of enough that you don't get to include the closing monologue in your fantasy novel with your villain unless you want to. If you do choose to include it, prepare to have snobs like myself call you out on it.

[00:20:44]And that brings us to today's book review, just very quickly wrapping this up. The book that I want to bring some attention to is The Cabinet of Curiosities by Preston and Child. This book is a mystery whodunnit thriller. And so the nature of books like these is the actual villain of the story is in the shadows and not revealed until the very end.

[00:21:16] So why would I mention this book in this episode specifically? The reason why is because there are so many subplots in this book that tend to bring conflict and to clash up against one another. And as those subplots figure themselves out and get resolved and move the story forward, there are so many conversations between people who are antagonizing each other.

[00:21:51] So there's the investigator. And then there is the institution getting in the way of the investigation, or the people trying to shut down the museum, or the person working at the museum trying to keep their job. There are a lot of different examples like this. And so, in a way it's like there's a handful of mini villains running around throughout this book.

[00:22:13] This has very good examples of dialogue between people who are causing trouble for each other. People who have separate agendas and want to achieve those agendas and are trying to stop each other and are trying to get ahead and get away and whatever else. And so it, it has wonderful, believable, fun dialogue throughout the book that's not just insults and awkward accusations. There are a lot of wonderful things in this book, but this has a very good example of dialogue between people who hate each other and are getting in the way of each other. And it's good. This book is wonderful.

[00:22:59] This is a part of a collection of books. Preston and Child are two authors who wrote many books with this common FBI investigator as this common thread throughout the books. There are a lot of them and this one is possibly the most successful of them all. It's hard to say. But the collection is called the Pendergast novels.

[00:23:29] Pendergast is the gentleman who is the common investigator throughout all of these books. And like I said, they, they are all whodunnit mystery thrillers. So that is what I recommend. I definitely give this book five out of five stars. It is wonderful. And check it out today.

[00:23:48] That is it for today. Thank you so much for joining me with this episode of Writing in the Tiny House where we discussed villains and dialogue. The next episode is going to be on villains and action. We're going to talk about the entire secret elaborate plan and how that gets to look, or at least the things to avoid when developing your own secret elaborate plan for your villain.

[00:24:11] So thank you for joining me again. If you want to support this podcast, feel free to sign up with our Patreon. Go to patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse and sign up for one of the tiers today that comes with its own perks. Again, thank you for the patrons that I already have. And for the generous donations that you are sending to this podcast every month. Be sure to follow me on social media. My Instagram handle is @authordevindavis. My Twitter handle is @authordevind, and we will see you next time. Thank you so much, guys. Have fun writing.

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Devin Davis: Because we all know that in so many stories, the good guys wouldn't be as awesome if they didn't have an equally awesome bad guy. We are talking about villains today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello, hello, hello! And welcome back to the show Writing in the Tiny House. I am Devin Davis. I am your host and I am the guy living in a tiny house in Northern Utah, who is here to show you that despite how busy you think you are, that one book idea that you have bubbling in the back of your brain is completely possible to do.

[00:00:59]Over the next few episodes where it is just you and me, I am going to put together a series on villains. We're going to talk about why villains are awesome.

[00:01:11] We're going to talk about believable villain dialogue. Backstory actions, all the good things, because villains are awesome. But first let's do some announcements with the podcast. We actually have a brand new patron who signed up to support this podcast. His name is Sam. Sam, welcome aboard. Thank you so much for your generous donation.

[00:01:36]Sam and I actually go way back. I know Sam, we have been friends for a long time and I was just so excited when he said that he was going to be signing up to become a patron through Patreon with Writing in the Tiny House's program with Patreon. So welcome aboard. Thank you so much for your donation.

[00:01:58]Also a quick shout out to another podcast. I just want to mention the podcast called Finding the Magic, with Trisha Copeland. This is a podcast dedicated entirely to interviewing authors and talking about their books.

[00:02:14] It can be found on, I think this one is exclusively on Anchor. But go ahead and see if it's found everywhere else too. And it's a good one, guys. It is definitely one worth checking out.

[00:02:27] So this episode will be coming out the Wednesday after Independence Day. I hope that you guys had a good federal holiday. I certainly did. It has been spent putting together a lot of content for this podcast. I've been doing my darndest to get all the interviews lined up and done and interviews are really good.

[00:02:50] Interviews are special. I love the interview episodes. They bring so much value to this podcast and they are actually the episodes that are the most supported. I have been interviewing my head off over these past two weeks to get more of that content here, just because it's something that I enjoy and it is something that has proven to be valuable for all of you as well.

[00:03:17] In the meantime, though, there are still plenty of episodes where it's just going to be you and me and over the next few, it's going to be me and you. And we're going to be talking about villains. So let's go ahead and get into the main body of this episode.

[00:03:32] So let me tell you my story when it comes to villains, what made the villain such a unique part of my enjoyment of fiction? This actually goes back to high school. Yes. I am going to tell you about the magical time that I was in high school. And the Broadway musical Wicked just came out. And of course I bought the soundtrack.

[00:04:01] I knew all the words I went and saw Wicked here in Utah, the instant that it was here playing. And the reason why I bring up Wicked is because of the unique take that that story has on who the villain is. So for those of you who are unfamiliar with the musical Wicked or unfamiliar with the book that the musical is based on, the book is called The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

[00:04:32] The book was hard for me to read, but the musical was wonderful and I would take anybody to see the musical, including all of my kids. The reason why this carved a wonderful, beautiful little space in my heart for villains is because the main character Elphaba is treated like a villain. She is actually the main character.

[00:04:53] She's the person that we are cheering for, but she is misunderstood. She is a victim of circumstance and the entire city notices that she is different and because she is different and because she is powerful, she is treated poorly. She is treated with violence. She is treated with bias and with fear and with all of the horrible things that you could treat a person.

[00:05:22] And so towards the end of the story, or at least I guess the second act, she says "Fine! If this is what you think I am, then this is what I shall be!" And I love that. I love a good villain and my love for villains grew from my experience that I had with this story of Elphaba. And it was from there that I came to really appreciate everything that a good villain brings to the table in a good work of fiction.

[00:05:56] Now, granted, there are plenty of works of fiction that don't have a villain just because the story may revolve around some other form of conflict. It could be disease, it could be a competition. It could be other forms of trials in a person's life. Or it could be that unseen villain, like going up against an institution or something like that.

[00:06:22] So not every work of fiction has a villain, but when it has a villain, I feel that it gets to be a good villain. And that matters.

[00:06:32]With more and more people coming out with fiction with fantasy fiction, with these more epic battles, there gets to be good villains and the classic space opera-- I'm talking to you, Star Wars-- this space opera is where there is an obvious good side and an obvious bad side. And the heroes are pure good heroes and the bad guys are pure bad guys. And there is never confusion about that. With the more recent movies of Star Wars that have come out, they're starting to become more nuanced than that. With the original many episodes and original many movies, it was that classic space opera of the good guys are the good guys. And they're always the good guys.

[00:07:25] And then the bad guys are the bad guys. And now that so many people are writing these epic genre-specific stories, we are beginning to get more nuanced characters and especially more nuanced main characters and better villains. It's becoming more common to see a main character that has a dark side, or that sometimes chooses darkness or chooses a bad thing or chooses to hurt someone. But they're still the good guy. And they're still the person that you're following in the story and kind of rooting for. At the same time you get to see them make these dark decisions. Also it is becoming more common and I'm so grateful for this because of the color that it adds to the storyline. It is becoming more common to see villains that have redeemable qualities, even though their role in the story is not redeemable. Or a villain in their secret identity, they're a family man and they're a good dad and a good spouse, but behind the scenes, they're like ruining the world or you can see a villain who is doing what they're doing, but they have a completely legitimate reason for it. And that adds such wonderful flavor and wonderful complexity to the storyline itself. When you have this guy who is not so obviously evil, it becomes so fun to kind of feel out what do I really want to get out of this story? Or where do I find myself in this conflict? Am I really siding with this main character who's kind of a jerk sometimes? And he was written that way on purpose. Or am I siding with this villain who has a completely legitimate reason to do the things that she is doing? And I get it. Under the same circumstances I would hope that I would be courageous enough to do this too. And so it can be this big, moral dilemma that can kind of rip you apart.

[00:09:42] And I love that and I love the excitement and the confusion, and just the wild ride of being taken on this emotional roller coaster. I love the dichotomy and I love having to choose or to do some soul searching, to see if this was a real circumstance, where would I be? Which team would I be batting for?

[00:10:08]So for today's book review, I am going to talk about a book that is near and dear to me that was released very recently called The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by VE Schwab. This was released just a few months ago and it was one of the first books that I read in 2021. And I knew after I finished it, that it would be one of the best books that I would be reading in 2021. The writing style of this novel is incredible. VE Schwab has definitely built for herself a name in fiction, and she has built it from the ground up. She has done an amazing job and this book, I'm not going to pretend that this book is perfect or complete in all aspects, because it is not. But there is profound beauty found within this book. And the most beautiful parts, I believe, are the exchanges between the main character Addie LaRue and the bad guy, Luc. So I'm not going to give away all of the premise of this book, just because it is something that I want you to go out and read. But the entire premise of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is it is a deal with the devil trope. The devil comes in every other chapter and has a thought-provoking and meaningful conversation with Addie LaRue, where they discuss life and they discuss morality. And it is the most wonderful thought-out villain that I have read in such a long time.

[00:12:03] So add The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue to your To Be Read list today. And I hope that when you read it or if you've already read it, you can share with me your thoughts of the bad guy, Luc, just because I want to hear what you think. It was one of the most impressive things about the story for me, but I want to know what you think, and I want to know what you thought about him as a villain. So be sure to join the Facebook group of Writing in the Tiny House and share with me your thoughts. I give that book and easy five stars. Like I said, the book is not flawless in all respects, but it is definitely a five-star book.

[00:12:49] So go ahead and check that out today. And that is it for today. Thank you so much for joining me with this episode of Writing in the Tiny House. Again, I am Devin Davis and thank you for listening. A big thank you to my new patron, Sam. Welcome aboard.

[00:13:05]If you want to join the Patreon program, go to patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse. Go ahead and sign up for that today. Also that special shout out to the podcast, Finding the Magic, with Trisha Copeland. You can catch me on Instagram. My handle is @authordevindavis. And the social media things, the links are all in the description of this episode. So thank you for joining and we will see you next time. Have a good one guys.

A complete transcript of this episode can be found at the end of these few links.

Aime Sund, Editor, Red Leaf Word Services

www.redleafwords.com www.instagram.com/redleafwordserv

"The Sun, a Book, and a Dog" blog

https://sunbook.home.blog

Today Aime spoke about her love for A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness. Follow this affiliate link to discover the book:

https://amzn.to/3xgxoXy

Be sure to become a patron at www.patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse

Instagram: @authordevindavis

We'll see you next week!

Devin Davis: [00:00:00] Knowing that something is going to be challenging and dangerous is the very definition of courage. It is also the definition of stupidity. And this is why life is hard, today on Writing in the Tiny House

Hello? Hello. Hello, and welcome back to the podcast or Writing in the Tiny House. I am your host Devin Davis. And I am the guy who does the show once a month. I'm sorry, once a week. Can you believe that it is already the end of June, my friends? So I am the guy living in a tiny house in Northern Utah, who is here to show you that writing a novel is entirely possible.

And on today's episode, I have a treat for you. We have, we actually have a guest and she is a person who has gone from one extreme—As far as this world goes—to the other extreme into editing. You will totally understand what I mean. When we get into the interview, it's probably going to be a short interview, but it's going to be a good one, I promise. But first let's take care of some housekeeping. I announced an episode or two ago that if you wish to support me in this thing, in this podcast, I, right now I am doing all of the things on my own. I am paying for some overhead things that come up that I am gladly footing the bill for, but if you wish to get involved in the way of donating some money, I do have a Patreon account that I have not bothered to explain in very much detail in previous episodes. So right now the Patreon is set up kind of like any other Patreon account, if that is something that you've heard of before. So this means that if you wish to donate to the podcast every month, you can pledge $5. You can pledge $10 or you can pledge $20 and those things get you additional perks the more that you give.

So at the lowest tier, which is the $5 tier that gives you early access to all of the episodes that I'm going to be doing for the rest of time, that gives you access to the episodes on Friday. No, excuse me. On Saturday. One of those days. And then I will post that episode later to the public, the following Wednesday.

And so you will get episodes about five days in advance. If you choose to do the $10 tier, that will get you an additional episode every month, likely put on by me. And it'll be a lot of fun and it will be for you. It'll be for the patrons. It won't be for anybody else. It's not something that I'm going to put these on this channel for everybody else to see. And then the $20 tier, which is really where it's at folks, with the $20 tier, you get exclusive rights to private chat rooms with myself. And once a month, I will get online with the people who are in my $20 tier with my Super VIP Patrons. And we get to talk about you about your writing, about your projects or about me, or about the show.

You get to be intimately involved with how the show is going and with what you want to get out of the show. It is my super VIP patrons that I'm going to be paying the closest attention to when it comes to content. And when it comes to what all of these things need to be along the way.

So. Go to Patreon.com/Writing in the Tiny House if you wish to give. And I am delighted to receive if that is how you choose to support this. And if you find value in this podcast, there gets to be a way for you to give. So again, Patreon.com/Writing in the Tiny House. I will have links to that in the show notes of this episode.

So not a very big deal for announcements today.

So without further ado let's go ahead and meet our guest.

Aime Sund: [00:05:04] Hi, I'm Amy Sund and I am the editor behind Redleaf word services.

Devin Davis: [00:05:11] Amy is an editor living in Massachusetts. And when she first got started she wasn't doing anything that had to do with editing she was actually actively involved in Horticulture

Aime Sund: [00:05:28] I began as a horticulturist, so I still need my plants around me all the time. I was a horticulturist for over 20 years. And it's still, it's still my first love plants are still what I gravitate towards As much as I love the plants. It's, it's a different ball game when you're doing it for other people too.

Devin Davis: [00:05:46] While Amy loved the horticulture aspect. She found that it was challenging to do much with it in her state of Massachusetts, because the thing isn't regulated there, the practice doesn't require licensing and it doesn't require education. And so it was hard to get ahead.

Aime Sund: [00:06:05] Here where I am in Massachusetts is also not a regulated industry, so anybody can jump in and do it. And that really waters. The playing field down. And I did go to school for horticulture, which was really, really cool.

And I loved it. So it was time for a change and editing, was it because I love to read. And that was what I really got excited about when I thought about what I wanted to do next was to do something with words. I think of editing as an Al chemical process. there's ingredients that need to be put in, and I put some ingredients in and you as the author put ingredients in, and then what comes out is a manuscript that's at a better state than it was. It's a partnership process. You have to have all the ingredients for it to work. Right. And that was certainly true with alchemy.

Devin Davis: [00:07:00] So she started her own freelance editing firm called red leaf word services, which specializes in historical fiction fantasy. And of course horticulture because awesome. I absolutely love that. I think that is so fun. While Amy and I were discussing all of the details about her business, she introduced me to a new sub genre that I never thought was a sub genre before. She talked about garden fiction. And I loved everything about that.

Aime Sund: [00:07:41] I'm not really sure whether it is a sub genre, but I did do a search on good reads. And I came up with a bunch of books and of course I put them right on my TBR, which is a mile long. But there's always things that are happening in the garden. And poisonous plants are always something that comes up especially in historical fiction.

You find them a lot in historical fiction and historical mysteries. So it was just another avenue of that, which I just enjoy everything about that genre. The historical fiction that is, and gardens and they figure in a lot of them, and it's just a place that people at all times have gravitated towards.

And, just the knowledge that you need to have to write it. It can be daunting to do all that research for all these different plants that can do different things and that meant different things to different people at different times within history. That's, that's a lot of research. But coming from that background, I just really comfortable with it. So that's, it's kind of a niche, I think.

Devin Davis: [00:08:49] Now I am not a horticulturist by any means, but I do have a bit of a background when it comes to some plant related stuff. And I mean way background things. My dad actually has a degree in botany and he definitely has quite the green thumb. We had a greenhouse growing up and we had all these plants and we had all of the different things and finding an appreciation for horticulture was definitely a part of my upbringing.

However, as an adult, I have more than a passing interest in herbal medicine. And so I definitely share a bit of an appreciation that Amy would certainly share when it comes to stumbling upon a piece of fiction, especially a fantasy fiction or historical fiction where the medicine or the herbal preparations resemble something that is real or the herbs that they use resemble an herb in real life that would function in a similar way to what they need now, instead of just a completely made up plant that is there to fill the spot of this magical herb that they need now in their story. And so it was just this fun and unexpected common ground that I had with Amy with, with this interview, that was just a delight to talk about.

And she agreed that some of these things are so fun to stumble on and to bring out the history of all of that is so rich and brings out such a wonderful flavor to the writing itself.

Aime Sund: [00:10:36] And there's so much to draw on through that too. Plants have a, they go so far back into history and, and their uses. And I mean, talking about Lotus seeds that can last for hundreds of years and still germinate when they're found in, in Egyptian tombs and things. I mean, that's amazing. That's amazing.

Devin Davis: [00:10:57] And as we continued speaking, I was not aware of this, but Amy Sund is working on her own piece of fiction. She is working on her own bit of fantasy writing, and I was completely unprepared for that going into this interview.

Aime Sund: [00:11:19] Okay, well I think it would be described as portal fantasy because it does take place mostly on an alternate world, but it is an alternate world that has connections here to earth at different places on the earth. So it takes advantage of some of the science behind lay lines, if you're familiar at all with those. I have a numerology and astrology element that works in there and it is also heavily plant-based as well. And I'm, I'm doing the old adage write what you know. I suppose you could say so. Yeah, but it is definitely in progress. I'm working out a lot of the backstory and just trying to get that out there by some short stories and a blog series that's set in the world.

Because I have so much in my head that there's no way it would make it into a book. I'm just trying to introduce the world slowly. And maybe then by the time the book's out, there'll be people who want to read it.

Devin Davis: [00:12:25] The blog that Amy talks about is called the sun a book and a dog. And of course I will include links to that in the show notes of this episode. And then to wrap up the interview, she described to me her most influential and favorite work of fiction.

Aime Sund: [00:12:47] . I would have to say the biggest influence for me for a work of fiction would have to have been a discovery of witches by Deborah Harkness. I can honestly say this is the first book that gave me a book hangover, even though I only read it about three years ago. So. I got to the end and I didn't want it to end.

And I had a hard time closing the cover and I was just in a funk for the rest of the day. I, I loved it so much and I went as soon as the library opened Monday morning, I went and got the next one. It was, yeah, it was a wonderful, wonderful book. And it really put me into historical fiction as well, because there is a lot of history in her books. And the time periods that I'm really familiar with and that I love, which is Europe in the 15, 16 hundreds, mostly. So that was right up my alley and I didn't want it to end and I just kept going. I whipped through the next two books. and that's what made me want to write. If I could give somebody else that feeling someday, maybe then I've done my job. That's how I approach it. That's how I would really like, to be remembered, I suppose. I think if you had asked me for a non-fiction book, I don't think I could have given you one, I automatically would have gone to fiction just for that reason. Just because. It draws so much out and it, it lets the imagination play and , it certainly gives me a place to escape to and a place to run into. Having something that I can go to immediately set some time aside to, I know I'm going to read now, that's what I look for.

Devin Davis: [00:14:30] A big, thank you to Amy Sund at red leaf word services for being on the show today, it was such a delightful time to speak with her and to see what is going on in her life and to get to know her better. I met her kind of as an aside in some of my Instagram endeavors, and it's been so fun to build relationships like this.

So be sure to check out her website and her blog for her work in progress for her fiction. All of those links are in the show notes. And remember too, Check out the Patreon page, go to Patreon.com/Writing in the Tiny House. If you wish to donate and support financially this podcast. Again, I am Devin Davis.

Thank you so much for joining this show and we will see you next time. Have a good time writing guys. We will see you later. Bye.