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YOUR BIG LIE OR CHARACTER’S MISBELIEF
We’re doing a hybrid writing tip and podcast this week.
All the important stuff is written down here. All the fun stuff and Shaun aka The Talent is in the podcast where we talk about this important writing stuff and other things.
So, let’s get started.
The big lie or the character’s misbelief in your story is a major key to your character’s story arc, which is basically the emotional change…
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Overcoming Negativity Bias & Toilet Rats
Being an author or an artist or almost anyone is about navigating. You have to walk a fine line with criticism and praise, discern what’s real and what’s not, what matters or not, what is noise and what is important.
And sometimes?
Well, sometimes we only hear and dwell on the one negative thing that someone has said to us or written about us even though they (or others) have also said 100…
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The Spiral of Ick and Quiet Winners: You Don't Have to Flaunt Yourself to Succeed
Recently, I read an interview with an author who talked about how much children loved her book and how they tell her this.
It annoyed me. It may have been good marketing, but it sure didn’t feel like good human-ing, you know?
When you’re interviewed by a reporter or when you do a school visit, as a children’s book author, you have the ability to toot your own horn or you have the ability to…
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Shaun went off the rails, but this was supposed to be about how do you sustain a career as an author
This is obviously not the full transcript. You have to listen to hear the full weirdness, but . . . here’s the core.
How Do You Sustain a Career as an Author?
It’s a really good question, right? One, all of us authors are trying to figure out.
Rise With Drew writes,
“Creative careers are slippery. One-hit wonders abound, but fewer are enduring superstars,” Steven writes. “And this level of…
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The Info Dump from Hell and How to Avoid Them and Also UFOs
Talking about show vs tell at the scene level is a little bit harder than talking about it at the paragraph and scene levels.
But it’s also a tiny bit easier.
When you’re looking for telling at this level of the story, what you’re looking for is a couple of things:
A butt ton of backstory.
A butt ton of info dumps
A lot of flashback.
You can have bits of these things in your stories. Where…
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#carriejones#dogs are smarter than people#dogsaresmarterthanpeople#how to avoid info dumps#podcast#writing#writing coach#writing help#writing tips#writingcommunity#writingtips
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Author to Author: Chris Lynch Interview
Award-winning author of YA novels? Check.
Printz honor author, ALA Best Book winner, National Book Award finalist? Check.
Has a middle grade coming out March 11 that’s about to rock the world? Definitely.
Was so cool that Carrie was afraid to talk to him back in 2005 or 2006 or something? You know it.
Chris Lynch, award winning human and ridiculously gracious interviewee, graced Dogs are…
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#author chris lynch#author to author interview#carriejones#chris lynch walking the dog#dogsaresmarterthanpeople#podcast#walkin the dog#writing#writingtips
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LET’S SHOW YOU HOW SHOW VS TELL WORKS! Florida Man Poops on a Possum. We won't show you that
Hey! Welcome to our series of podcasts and posts all about showing vs. telling, which we are on fire about right now, right Shaun?
Growls.
You can check out the rest of the series on Carrie’s Substack Write Better Now or just the podcast episodes on her blog, https://carriejonesbooks.blog/
So, a lot of my writers have a brain like mine, which is sad for them. Just kidding! Just kidding! A lot…
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#carriejones#dogsaresmarterthanpeople#editor#florida man#podcast#possum#show vs tell#writing#writing coach#writing podcast#writingtips
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THE PROBLEM WITH ADVERBS & BEARS IN THE DOGGY DOOR: Let’s Show, Not Tell.
We’re continuing with our monster “Show Don’t Tell” series of podcasts and posts.
Adverbs are a big place where you tell and not show.
So, if I wrote,
“You are the sexiest manatee in the world,” Ham-Ham said hopelessly.
Would you think that works? Would you feel how Ham-Ham said it hopelessly?
Janice Hardy is brilliant and she has a really simple way of explaining how to determine whether or…
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#adverbs are bad#carriejones#dogsaresmarterthanpeople#podcast#show don&039;t tell#writing#writingtips
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Show Us Your Wounds Writers and Stealing Seven King Cakes
There’s this really great book for writers by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi called The Emotional Wound Thesaurus. It came out way back in 2017.
As they write in their prologue,
“Life is painful, and not all the lessons we learn are positive ones. As with you and me, the characters in our stories have suffered emotional trauma that cannot easily be dispelled or forgotten. We call this type…
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#carriejones#dogsaresmarterthanpeople#emotional wound thesaurus#writing#writingcommunity#writinglife#writingpodcast#writingtips
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TROPE ME OUT, BABY: THE JUMP SCARE AND JANUARY IS A BLISSED OUT MONTH
There’s a lot of ways that trope is defined, but for us here on DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE, we’re going with the Grammarist’s definition, which is:
“A trope is simply a common or recurring theme or method used in storytelling across all forms of media. Tropes serve as a way for creators to convey certain ideas and messages to their audience in a familiar and recognizable way.”
They go on to…
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#aliens#carriejones#dogsaresmarterthanpeople#maine#not aliens#peru#podcast#storm#tropes#writing#writing help#writingcommunity
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Aliens at the Mall Loving the Strange
This week, our first week back in 2024, we free styled.
Which means?
We talked about aliens at the mall. Shaun proudly drops the f-bomb at the end, so be warned. Yay for live podcasts.
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Hate Hard, the Beer Poems, and Building the Life You Want
I’ve been going through holes of Reels and short-form videos at night lately, watching people remodel their house or home, decorate for holidays, and then, um, being an Amazon affiliate.
At the same time, a lot of the writers I work with are having BIG DOUBT MOMENTS as they query and read Twitter/X and see authors behaving badly or agents behaving badly or people getting yelled at for sucking at…
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#beer#building life you want#carriejones#couples#dogsaresmarterthanpeople#humor#humore#life lessons#mainers#married#podcast#podcast who are married#podcasters#self development#writingtips
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Dig Deep and Baby Owl in the Christmas Tree
How to Dig Deeper in Your ScenesA lot of time, a writer will get feedback and it’ll say something vague-ish like, “Dig deeper.”
And then the author cries or gets angry or feels an emotion that no author wants to feel.
The thing is that this advice is sort of vague, but what it usually means is:
1. You have no setting in your scene or chapter or story;
2. Your character doesn’t react…
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Random Life Advice: Let’s Look At Each Other
When I go to classrooms on book tour or for school visits, teachers (or kids prompted by teachers) always ask me what the most important skill is for being a writer.
And I tell them a couple things.
No, it’s not about what a comma splice is or the coolness of objective correlatives.
It’s really a two part answer:
Notice what people are doing, their mannerisms, how they act, interact, hold…
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A Simple Trick to Write Better: Get Rid of the Nods
When I help writers with their stories, a lot of the times one of the things I tell them is that they need to dig more deeply.
They need to dig more deeply into the emotion and feel it with the characters.
They need to dig more deeply into the scene and see the characters there, interacting with their surroundings and each other.
And a lot of us writers in our early drafts of story, don’t dig…
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Dive Into The Conflict and Make Your Book Blurb Sing
Two weeks ago, we started talking about how to write a book blurb for your story and began with the first step, which is a hook. You can check that out here. And the second step is here.
So, if the first step is creating that hook, the second step, according to Shayla Raquel is dangling the characters. Then our next step is what Shaun has no problem doing in real life with anyone other than his…
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#carriejones#dogsaresmarterthanpeople#podcast#writing#writing book blurb#writingcommunity#writingpodcast#writingtips
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