Charlotte Rains Dixon

By guest blogger Charlotte Rains Dixon

WHEN MILLI SUGGESTED I write about how Emma Jean Sullivan, the main character of my forthcoming novel, Emma Jean’s Bad Behavior and I are alike and different, I was apprehensive. After all, my novel’s title describes my character’s behavior—Emma Jean indulges in some very bad behavior! What if people think the novel is autobiographical?

Those of us who write fiction find massive protection in it. I didn’t write a tell-all memoir, for instance, about my every thought and deed. I wrote a novel about a fictional heroine, where I could safely hide some of my worst traits and tendencies, and perhaps a few stellar ones, too. My characters spring forth from some place deep within. They are of me and yet they aren’t me.

But still. Emma Jean sleeps with a much younger man, gets ragingly drunk on an airplane, and lies about the veracity of one of her student’s books. And now, with Milli asking me to write this guest post, I’m supposed to fess up about how we’re alike?

Sigh.

Since I’ll do anything for Miss Milliver, I’m writing this post. Please don’t judge me too harshly. Here goes:

Emma Jean is funny. Like, all the time. I’m not. Well, I’m funny once in a while. But not consistently. I’m even afraid of being funny.

Emma Jean is brash. She tells off nosy reporters, propounds on her theories to adoring fans, proclaims loudly what she wants when she wants it (usually, at that very moment). Me? Not so much.

Emma Jean is a bestselling novelist and has a popular blog. I’ll just mention this in case the gods are listening—I would love to be a bestselling novelist. But I’m not, yet. As for my blog, well, it does okay.

Emma Jean falls madly in love with people, places, and things. She loses her heart, hard and swiftly, for a young man she meets at a book signing, for the resort town of Sun Valley, for a pesky little girl who wants to be a writer. Our girl Emma Jean has herself some passions. And I do, too. I fall in love with people, places and things with great regularity. I’m pretty sure this is why I write—so I can express these passions.

There’s a huge gap between who Emma Jean thinks she is and who she truly is. This is one big way in which we differ. At least I hope so—I like to believe that with all the spiritual and creative work I’ve done, I have a firm grasp on who I am. Emma Jean believes she has a very specific and strict public persona she must uphold. Over the course of the novel, that persona gets stripped away in a bruising public fall. I’m pretty good at stripping away my own pretenses.

The great news for Emma Jean and me is that when you get rid of the pretense, your true self emerges.

As for that affair with the younger man and drinking too much on an airplane? Not telling. That’s for you to guess.

Emma Jean’s Bad Behavior will be published in February of 2013 by Vagabondage Press. She’d love it if you got to know her, foibles and all.

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Charlotte offers five years worth of articles on creative writing on her blog, Charlotte Rains Dixon. She’ll be offering another session of her Get Your Novel Written Now class in October—just in time to get you ready for NaNoWriMo!

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Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. — Harold Whitman

I’m usually a passionate, enthusiastic person. Death, to me, is when I lose my enthusiasm. Or when I forget that’s what I need.

The past week has been difficult. Unwittingly (I resisted the urge to say stupidly), I had let my driver’s license expire and felt oppressed by all the steps I’d have to go through to replace it. Instead of spending time on my creativity and writing, I was studying road rules and practicing reversing into tight spaces. Emotionally, I was busy dreading my brush with authority and building it up into worst-case scenarios.

Not surprisingly, the more I tensed up about my expired driver’s license, the less things went my way with anything else. I attempted to solve that by trying harder.

The day of the driving test, I woke up only half-rested and still in full possession of the set of problems I’d acquired during the previous three weeks. Unexpectedly, as I drank my coffee and glanced through a writing project, something shifted. A fresh possibility for how to use all of the experience and knowledge I’d gained flashed before my eyes.

As we drove to the patrol barracks, I was on a creative high. I wish I could say I passed my maneuvering skills test and the road test with flying colors; however, due to a crack in our windscreen, I wasn’t allowed to take the tests. Even though I would now have to suffer another delay (there had been several already, which had increased my dread horribly), this time it didn’t faze me too much. Why? Because I’d regained that magical state: enthusiasm and passion!

Looking back over my journal entries for the past week, I saw that in my darkest moments I’d written an entry entitled “Don’t Try So Hard Today.” I wrote,

While reading book reviews on Amazon.com last night, there was something about letting energy flow instead of resisting it. Seems like a major point, but how exactly do I do that?

Enthusiasm seems like one way that I already do it.

Mind you, as I wrote that I was feeling as far from enthusiasm as you can get. I was just trying to remind myself of something that really works for me.

There will probably always be times in life when we grope our way through and use all the wrong approaches, even when we “should know better.” What I learned was that all it took was to remind myself of a feeling state that works for me. And then ease up on myself at least a little. And then that feeling state found a way to burrow through all of the muck and plug me back in.

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Milli Thornton is the author of Fear of Writing: for writers & closet writers. She is owner of the Fear of Writing Online Course, where her mission is to put the fun back into writing. Milli enjoys coaching writers here at Writer’s Muse.

A long time ago, back when I lived in Australia, I was a member of a local writing group. Lots of really nice folks plus an interesting variety of experiences and writing styles.

One woman had written her memoir and decided to self-publish. She sunk a wad of cash into getting 5,000 copies of her book printed—an expensive undertaking back in 1989 before the days of print-on-demand.

One Saturday I was at the farmer’s market when I ran across this author sitting in a lawn chair with a pile of her books next to her. Wanting to support her, I purchased an author-signed copy and took it home to read. What happened next made me feel very guilty.

Her book sucked. She had listened to advice from the writing group and then taken it on as her mantra: Write what you know and keep the language simple.

Good advice. Usually. Unfortunately, she took it to an extreme. Her book was written in such plain language—and with such a lack of any excitement added to the tale—I could not even finish it. Even though this lady was such a nice person I felt as if I was betraying her.

If she had tempered the advice by spending plenty of time exploring her own unique writing voice, and then cultivating a belief in it, her memoir might have had more life to it. Instead, she wrote it the way she’d been told to.

Critique Groups: How Much Is Enough?

I saw a discussion online where writers came out of the woodwork with disturbing stories about having their manuscripts messed up by critique groups. Typically, what started out as helpful became a maze of advice and myriad suggested changes, until the original story felt lost. One writer at Nail Your Novel said

I’m feeling a bit discouraged and don’t know how to recapture the original freshness. I think there are some good changes in the revisions, but also a lot of bad direction.

One of the perils of getting help from other writers to rewrite your manuscript is that everybody’s an expert on how you should have written it. But just because someone is a writer doesn’t mean he or she understands how to constructively critique a manuscript.

There are lots of good beta readers out there (I can tell by how happy my friends are when they exchange manuscripts with writers they trust), but sometimes it takes a professional to help you see the real issues.

Even then it’s not always a constructive experience. Once I paid for a critique that was so off-the-cuff and so not-on-target and SO opinionated, I felt I’d wasted my money. I had the same manuscript critiqued by a true professional and it was an entirely different result—showing me where I needed to do the rewrites to improve what I already had while leaving me still feeling good about my story.

That second critique felt professional and supportive. The second one was written by someone who didn’t need to get her ego gratification from proving what I’d gotten wrong. Someone who knew what she was talking about. Had I made the changes suggested in the first critique, it would have stripped the backbone out of my story.

Which leads to the issue of subjectivity.

Even the Judgment of Publishers Can Be Off-Target

An article entitled 30 famous authors whose works were rejected (repeatedly, and sometimes rudely) by publishers (see #1 in Related Topics below) gives a dramatic overview of this. The list of 30 includes Anne Frank, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, George Orwell . . . I’m sure these publishers kicked themselves later when the rejected writer’s manuscript went on to become a classic and, in most cases, to make a bucket-load of money.

Had any of those writers taken the “advice” implied by the rude rejections and given up on trying to get published, the literary world would be a much poorer place.

Just because someone offers you writing advice doesn’t mean it will be right for you. Even if that person is a professional.

3 Things You Can Do To Avoid the Perils of Taking Writing Advice Too Far

Listen to your intuition. If you feel the suggestions will ruin your story, keep what feels right for you and discard the unsuitable advice;

Get a second opinion;

When seeking a critique, take preventative measures by choosing your reader(s) wisely (see #2 in Related Topics).

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RELATED TOPICS

30 famous authors whose works were rejected (repeatedly, and sometimes rudely) by publishers

Are You Emotionally Ready for a Critique? Two Ways to Know

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Milli Thornton is the author of Fear of Writing: for writers & closet writers. She is owner of the Fear of Writing Online Course, where her mission is to put the fun back into writing. Milli also blogs at Screenwriting in the Boonies and Milliver’s Travels and coaches writers at Writer’s Muse.

EVERYBODY KNOWS that if you want to be a writer, you need to read a lot. Expose yourself to great literature. Expose yourself to the bad stuff, too. The more you read, the more you learn about writing. Reading is a subliminal school for writers.

That’s invaluable, but do you also know how to use reading for your own personal writing mission?

Here’s how. Watch for that magic moment when the author’s writing makes YOU feel like writing. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, maybe you just haven’t noticed it yet. I think it happens to most writers when they read; it’s just that some frame it in very negative terms:

Gee, I could never write that good. I’m just never going to be as good as XXXX.

But if you’re comparing yourself to your favorite author, that’s just baloney. That writer didn’t start out GREAT. Great is an overused word, and we tend to not remember what it really means. If you’re talking about someone’s creative achievements, it means this (from Dictionary.com):

a person who has achieved importance or distinction in a field: She is one of theater’s greats.

Anybody who achieves greatness has well and truly paid her dues. Such as the example from above: the great theater actress. If you read her autobiography you would undoubtedly read about all the obstacles she had to overcome. About how she started at the bottom and took every minor role she was offered until she eventually started inching up the ladder. How she studied the greats and dreamed of someday being worthy of their autographs. How she . . .

You get the picture. A good example from screenwriting comes from the co-writers of Shrek, who talk about writing ten screenplays as practice for getting good before they ever started putting their work out to agents and producers.

I’m not saying you have to write ten novels/screenplays/non-fiction books before putting a toe outside your door. I didn’t do that myself. (I wrote my first script in 29 days, then spent about a year improving it. And then I put it out there.) I’m under no illusions of greatness myself. But I’m also not going to sit around reading someone else’s work (such as the script for The King’s Speech, which I admire deeply) and kill off my own learning curve as a writer by saying “I’ll never be as good as him.”

Bah. I used to do that to myself. But not anymore.

Now when I read something good I wait unselfconsciously for the magic moment. The moment when I get inspired to write because that author just did a really great thing for me. He or she entertained me, or moved me, or gave me an important insight that I can use in my life.

And how did that author do it?

BY WRITING.

If we don’t write, if we don’t practice, if we don’t constantly hone our skills, then our potential audience(s) will never get the benefit of our unique contributions.

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Milli Thornton is the author of Fear of Writing: for writers & closet writers. She is owner of the Fear of Writing Online Course, where her mission is to put the fun back into writing. Milli also blogs at Screenwriting in the Boonies and Milliver’s Travels and coaches writers at Writer’s Muse.

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend
it for you.

— Carl Sandburg (1878–1967)

Profile of a Time Vampire

What does a time vampire look like? They usually don’t come with fangs and dripping blood. If they did, at least we would know one when it shows up! Instead, time vampires are usually nice people. A T.V. can be anyone from the gracious lady on the church committee who does so much for everyone, genuinely improving people’s lives, to someone in your own family.

The annoying truth about time vampires is that we’re doing it to ourselves. Our avoidance of setting boundaries or learning to say no is really the problem, not the other person’s expectations. Have you ever noticed that if you give a toddler a little leeway with boundaries, she’ll immediately sense a power advantage and try to push the boundaries even further?

Atlas Shrugged . . . and Found Out How Horribly Selfish That Was!

Here’s a wee story from a book called Why Your Life Sucks (and what you can do about it) by Alan H. Cohen. The author was visiting the Florida home of circus entrepreneur John Ringling. In the garden he was impressed with a bronze statue of Atlas. His first thought: This guy is not a happy camper!

Cohen emotes: “While Atlas is often romanticized, his job sucks. If you accept his position, your life will suck. If you assume responsibility for everyone and everything around you, you will rapidly become a crispy critter. Besides, it doesn’t work. When you try to run the whole show, you get frazzled, frayed and fatigued. You feel overwhelmed, grow resentful, and [...] blow things into major issues.”

Cohen goes on to remind us that this is the fast road to shoulder pain, digestive problems and high blood pressure.

So why do we do it? Because we’re chicken. We’re afraid to say no because people might get mad.

I’ve experienced many terrible things in my life, a few of which actually happened.

— Mark Twain

It’s Easy for You to Say All That! You Don’t Know So-and-So

You’re right. It’s too easy to give advice when I don’t have to deal with the people in your life. Besides, I’ve been chicken plenty of times myself when I should have marked my boundaries (while other times wishing I’d kept my big mouth shut). That’s why I’m going to show you a way to deflect people that doesn’t involve upsetting anybody.

Blame the job.

What does she mean, blame the job?

Simple. Just say you have to work.

Millions of people are at their jobs everyday, which means they can’t do that errand for mom or go to the volunteer’s committee meeting. And no one gives it a second thought. “Debra can’t be here today; she has to work.” End of story. Even before the committee chairman finishes that short sentence, people have already lost interest. There’s no drama or resentment about Debra because everyone knows the job comes first.

Just because you’re a writer doesn’t mean your work is any less important. Since the dawn of the alphabet, writers have contributed untold benefits to society. Be one of those, not the writer who puts herself last.

Just because you can work in your pajamas if you want to doesn’t mean it’s not a real job. The trick is to use selective detail. Don’t tell people you’re going to write, because they’ll pounce on what sounds like a lesser priority and try to get you to put their stuff first.

Try This Technique for Guilt-Free Living

Here are some examples of what you can say whenever other people want a piece of your time:

— I have to work.

— I have a deadline.

— I have to leave for work right now now or I’ll be late.

(If you set an appointment with yourself to write, you can say that last one in all truth. And if
the coffeehouse is your office, no one needs to know. Do you ask for the details of their cubicle?)

You probably noticed that these were all “end of conversation” type statements. Most people will drop the subject as soon as they hear something that signals boring details.

Red Hat Lunches for Writers

A funny story to end with. Every time I saw her, one lady I knew in Mississippi would ask in her Southern belle accent: “And what is it you do?” Each time I told her I’m the author of a book that helps writers. She never knew what to make of this.

Whenever she called her husband at his office so “Sweetie Pie” could relay her always-last-minute invitations to the Red Hat lunches via my husband, she could never understand that mysterious thing I was doing that made me miss the normal things in life—like Red Hat lunches.

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Milli Thornton is the author of Fear of Writing: for writers & closet writers. She is owner of the Fear of Writing Online Course, where her mission is to put the fun back into writing. Milli also blogs at Screenwriting in the Boonies and Milliver’s Travels and coaches writers at Writer’s Muse.