We talked about this a long while ago, and I've revisited it, too, but it's time, my writing friends, to revisit it.

So in writing one of the biggest tips that you start hearing starts in around third grade and it’s “SHOW DON’T TELL.”

And it’s sound writing advice, but it’s pretty sound life advice, too.

How many of us have heard the words, “I love you,” but never seen the actions that give proof to the words? You can tell someone you love them incessantly for hours, but if you don’t show them it, too, it’s pretty likely that the words aren’t going to rock that person’s world.

Telling is like this:

Shaun was a hotty.

Showing is like this:

Carrying four grocery bags and a kitten, biceps bulging, Shaun walked through the parking lot, approaching a couple of older men. The smaller man gawped at Shaun, staring at his chest, the kitten, the bags, the biceps.

“Wow,” the man said, pivoting as Shaun strode by. “Just wow.”

The man licked his lips. His partner hit him in the back of the head lightly and said, “I am right here.”

What Does This Mean?

Both examples illustrate that Shaun is a hotty, but one states it as fact (telling) and one elucidates with examples (description, reaction, action).

Telling

The lawyer liked to use big words to impress people.

Showing

Carpenter stuck his thumbs into the waist of his pants, lowered his voice and said, “Pontification is one of the more mirthful and blithe aspects of the judical system.”

IN REAL LIFE IT MATTERS TOO.

In life, you want to show too, not just tell all the time.

You can say, “I love you.”

You can also grab someone’s hand and say, “I love you.”

You can also scoff and turn away and step on an ant and say, “I love you.”

WRITING TIP OF THE POD

The actions matter. Showing matters.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Showing and telling simultaneously in life (not writing) works to get treats.

Random THought Link

It's right here.

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!

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Readers want questions that they’ll get answers to.

They want to be hooked along.

They want to unwrap the answer the way people unwrap a birthday present.

That’s what Robert Prince says, anyway, writing in his class at the University of Alaska, ”The key to understanding what audiences really want in a story is to understand that the audience doesn’t want to know everything they need to know when they need to know it! They want questions that get answered later. Questions are what intrigue audiences and keep them sticking around because they care about the answers. Every time you answer a question in your story, you better quickly come up with a new question or already have others that need answering.

“Consider Christmas or birthday parties, for example. Why do we wrap the presents? That’s ridiculous. It’s a lot of extra work, you have to buy this paper that you only throw away, and it gets ripped off almost immediately after the person sees it! Spock would have a heck of a time figuring out why we do that. We do it because we love questions. We love questions. We love questions. Few things fascinate us more than an unanswered question. Heck, they basically named a long-running, rebooted TV series after this: Unsolved Mysteries. They could have just as well called it “Unanswered Questions” but it doesn’t have the same dramatic appeal. We wrap presents because the wrapping paper turns a Lego set into a question and a question is more fun than a Lego set, believe it or not. The wrapping paper makes us ask, “What could be in there? Is it what I asked for? Is it something else? Is it cool? It could be almost anything!””

We talk about this today in the podcast. Plus, a random thought and the below dog tip.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Find a good question to snuggle with.

RANDOM THOUGHT

Our random thoughts about the Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876 are sourced from here and here.

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Author, podcaster and professor Robert Prince has this thing he does when he watches a movie: the Atomic Bomb test.

“After I’ve watched about 20 minutes of the film I ask myself, ‘If an atomic bomb were to go off and destroy everyone in this film, would I care all that much?’ If the answer is no, I don’t keep watching the film,” he says in his class at the University of Alaska.

He has this test because to make your reader keep reading, they have to care what happens to the characters in the story.

This is true in real life, too, right? When we interact with people, most of us have levels of caring. We might worry and care more about our parent or child when they drop the ice cream carton on their instep than about the random guy in the frozen dairy section of the grocery store when he does it.

But, if that guy starts tearing up, maybe is standing above the ice cream splattered all across the store’s scuffed tile floor and says, “This was for my mom. She’s dying and she asked for rocky road ice cream. This is the last rocky road ice cream!”

Well, yeah, we might care a bit more.

“A key component to storytelling is getting your audience to care about what happens to the characters in your story,” Prince says. “People stick around to hear the end of stories because they have grown to care about the people in the story and want to know what happens to them. If you’ve ever cried when a character died in a movie, then the filmmakers did an awesome job of making you care about the people in that film.”

The question becomes how to do that.

According to Prince, “you can make people care about the characters in your story by describing them well enough that your audience can picture them and recognize them as a certain type of person--maybe like someone they already know. How old are they? What do they look like? What kind of personality do they have? Do they have any particularly unique traits or mannerisms? This is why written news stories about people tend to include some seemingly odd and superficial facts about them at first. Those facts are not included because the reporter is particularly superficial. The reporter included those facts because they know you will not be as invested in what happened to that person if you cannot picture them in your mind.”

Empathy, however, isn’t just built on perfection. We wouldn’t care as much about that grocery store guy with his ice cream if he’d just done the right things, expressed no emotion, and there was a clean up on aisle twelve.

Empathy builds off flaws and human worth, those virtues we love. It’s why Blake Snyder has “Save the Cat” as a trope and an inspiration. We care more about characters who save the cat or the puppy or even the zombie hamster.

“Flaws make characters relatable, more human, and feel a little more like underdogs,” Prince writes. “This is why James Bond has to get beat up in every 007 movie. That’s how the filmmakers show us he is human so we can relate better to him. It’s the same reason Superman has kryptonite. We feel for characters when we see that they have some sort of weakness.”

And that other part is the struggle. We empathize with characters that are having a hard time getting what they want.

So to help your readers empathize with your characters you want to pass that Atomic Bomb test and you do that by . . .

1. Good description and unique mannerisms
2. Flaws
3. Human worth/virtues
4. Struggles

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

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

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

One Way To Storm is BY Admiring Other's Work

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

Another Way to Incite a Hailstorm of Questions

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

Pogie the Dog: Wait. You mean they aren't?

Carrie the Human: No, buddy... I mean... I don't think so?

Third Way Where the Wind Is So Strong It Pushes Images into you

Some of my best ideas have come on a treadmill watching the country music network or MTV or some random YouTube channel with the sound off and just seeing images. Eventually, an image will hit me so hard that I have to write a story about it. The happened with my story, Love (and Other Uses for Duct Tape).

Fourth Way Of Icy Understanding

Figuring things out. This is sort of like Another Way, but instead of deliberately asking yourself off-the-wall questions, ask questions about things that matter to you.

A lot of my stories are because I don't understand something. Tips on Having a Gay (Ex) Boyfriend was because I couldn't understand a hate crime that had happened. I mean, you can never understand that kind of hate, but this one incident was so bizarre that the only way I could deal with it was to write my way through it.

Fifth Way—An Emotional Blizzard

Get emotional. What is it that always makes you laugh, cry with joy, weep with anger? What are the situations that pull at your heartstrings? Think about that as story. Write.

Dog Tip for Life

Inspiration is just attention. Notice what's around you. Then ideas will come.

Writing Tip of the Pod

Once you have your seed of information and your brain has successfully stormed, don't second guess your idea. Write it down. If you are a plot-first writer, think up the questions to flesh out your idea - who is the protagonist. What is she up against? What's her goal? How is she going to get it? Write it down. Do it. Don't block yourself.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINKS

APA article NPR

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast

Setting is where your story happens. It’s the time period. It’s the physical place. You can have more than one setting.

There. That’s the definition. We’re all good, right?

Wrong.

WHAT SETTING DOES

Setting is the foundation of your story. It is the ModPodge that has an addictive smell (Cough. Not addicted to ModPodge. Look away.) and glues all the story together.

WHAT HAPPENS WITHOUT SETTING

Your characters float around in nothingness.

Your plot makes no sense. You can’t have hamsters taking over the world if there is no world.

You have no theme. You can’t care about the kindness of strangers if there is no reason for the strangers to need to be kind.

You have no atmosphere. Atmosphere is sexy. It’s the feeling of the story. The ambience.

LITTLE THINGS SHOW IT

Just by defining a tree you are telling the reader something about the setting.

Like if you write:

She stared up at the palm tree.

You’re giving the reader clues. A palm tree will not be in Iceland. They are somewhere comparatively warm.

If you write:

She got out of bed.

You’re giving the reader a clue that she is wealthy enough to have a bed and in a culture or world where people sleep in beds.

And the thing is that clues are needed. Specific clues. Real clues. Without a setting, without a place where the story happens and a time where the story happens, the reader floats there in the sky, ungrounded, unanchored.

You know what happens when a reader floats in the sky? The reader drifts away. Your character does an action--like a fart. So you want to fart in some specific setting to help the reader sniff out and remember where they are.

Being specific anchors the reader. It ties them to your story and its characters. You will remember a fart that smells like eggs mixed with tuna mixed with a McDonald’s french-fry in church during a funeral. So be specific in details.

More than that though? Setting anchors your characters and your plot. Place makes us (and our characters) who they are. It gives a story atmosphere. It gives the character a world to interact with.

Think of a creepy Stephen King novel. It’s creepy because he takes certain aspects of Maine and creepifies them. Think of Crazy Rich Asians or The Bridgerton novels. They are luxurious because of the places where they take place AND the places where they take place help inform the novels, the characters and the plots.

HOW DO YOU MAKE SETTING?

Go in slow. Don’t overwhelm us with details about the Hamster World of Ham-Ham-Ster and its 87 leaders of the Teddy Bear Nation and all their names that start with H. Establish it. Move on with your plot and sprinkle in important details as you go. Be sparing. Only add to overall story.

Figure out what pieces of the setting matter the most. Is it the claustrophobic trees? The swarms of tourists disembarking cruise ships. The smell of blood coming from the old, wooden floorboards? Use those details. Not the kind of coffee your heroine puts in her Keurig unless that's really important.

Make it active. The setting matters as the characters see it, move through it, react to it. Whatever is weird about that place and how your characters interact with it? Focus on that.

Don’t be afraid to go places, to use Google maps, the internet. Do everything you can to get fully into that place so you use it later in your work. Pay attention to all the settings and use it.

Pay attention to where you are. That helps you know how to react, interact and be. So

Algonquin Young Readers Will End in September

The traditional book publishing world is a bit like the wild west if the cowboys wore pink-framed eyeglasses and could quote Derrida.

People are heroes. People are let go. Entire divisions of publishing houses close. And so on.

And this continues this week with the changes at Hachette Book Group and its announcement of the closure of Workman: Algonquin Young Readers this September.

According to Editorial Director Cheryl Klein, “Our backlist and all books under contract will be absorbed into the Little, Brown Books for Young Readers list.”

But her team Adah Li, Sarah Alpert, and Shaelyn McDaniel will be gone.

Klein stays as editorial director for the Workman Kids Trade list.

Last week, the New York Times’ Alexandra Alter wrote,

“Last month, Hachette Book Group laid off seven employees at its Little, Brown imprint, as part of a corporate restructuring. It has since hired three new editors to fill positions at Little, Brown. These changes followed a reshuffling at the top. Little, Brown’s former editor in chief, Judy Clain, left to run an imprint at Simon & Schuster in January, and in March, Sally Kim, who previously worked as the publisher of Putnam, a Penguin Random House imprint, was appointed as the president and publisher of Little, Brown, becoming the first woman of color to lead the imprint.”

An imprint like Algonquin Young Readers is the way a publisher groups and markets books within the larger umbrella (in this case Workman, which is within the Hachette publishing group).

When an imprint like AYR ends, the authors feel stranded—editor-less—and that can be pretty scary.

Last summer, Penguin Random House (PRH) said it was merging Razorbill into Putnam Children’s; HarperCollins closed Inkyard formerly known as Harlequin Teen.

It’s usually about sales. Traditional publishers rely on sales to pay employees, pay for the books produced, pay the authors, and if the sales are not big enough? Things change. Sometimes it’s about personnel. Sometimes it’s about vision.

While it absolutely stinks for the people who lose their jobs or the authors who lose their inprint and people, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the sky is falling for an entire industry. It means things are shifting around.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Sometimes where you end up is better than where you started.- Mr. Murphy

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

That Bored Panda article is here.

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

Our podcast title is “How To Write a Book Description That Gets Readers Tingling All Over” and that just sounds naughty, doesn’t it?

And it is a little naughty because this, my friends, is about selling a book, your book, and that requires being a little bit sexy.

Sexy is something I, Carrie, am very very bad at.

Let’s start by thinking about it this way:

A book description is an adverstisement for your book.

Writing a bad ad for your book doesn’t make you a sucky novelist. It just makes you unskilled at that. And that’s okay. You’ve been learning character development and plotting and novel structure and pacing. It’s okay to not know this part of the book world too.

Yet.

Here are the things you need to know about how to write a book description

MAKE IT BETWEEN 150 AND 250 WORDS

You want it to not be as long as the book. Or even as long as a novella. Or even as long as this post.

Any longer? People apparently stop paying attention.

FOCUS ON THE BARE PLOT MINIMUM AND THE HERO/PROTAGONIST

Show us how the main character’s decision has set them toward the adventure of the book.

MAKE IT IN THE THIRD PERSON

The third person is when you talk about other people and don’t use the “I.”

So,

Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar decided to adopt a hamster, little did they know, it was a zombie.

Not

We adopted a zombie hamster.

DO NOT BE CHEESY

You don’t want to go all fancy-pants on the book description. Stay away from adverbs and adjectives and a zillion clauses. Simple wins.

So, don’t write:

In the adorable town of Bar Harbor, Maine where tourist avidly romp in the summer and locals stoically manage the hard winters beneath the mini mountains and rocky coast, two hard-working podcasters tried to adopt a small rodent.

HOOK THEM IN

Book hooks happen in the first pages of the story, but they also need to happen in story descriptions.

A good way to do this is to show how your hero is unlikely to achieve their goal on their adventure.

Absolutely clueless podcasters Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar decided to adopt a hamster, hopelessly hoping for something easy to love. Little did they know that Hammy the Hamster was a zombie.

MAKE YOUR WORD CHOICE COUNT AND WORK FOR THE BOOK

If you use one or two words that are emotional and full of power, you can impact the reader and make them want your book.

If it was a mystery, we might use a word like MURDER>

Two podcasters. One zombie hamster. And a little Maine town about to host a million tourists.

Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar weren’t expecting that the hamster they’d adopted to help their podcast ratings would end up a zombie. Or that it would threaten all the tourists heading in to celebrate Acadia National Park’s bicentennial.

Now, these clueless podcasters, looking for a way out of their podunk town have a choice: find a way to get people to listen to them and protect both the tourists and Hammy the Hamster or just give up and hunker down with some Doritos (Hammy’s favorite) before it’s too late.

The future of Bar Harbor, Maine—and a million tourists—depend on them.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Hook ‘em and they’ll buy your book. In dog world, they’ll give you a treat when you hook ‘em. Show them what they need but bring them along, wanting more.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

These

Dogs are Smarter Than People/Write Better Now

Last week, we talked about pinch points both on the podcast and on the blog, and honestly? Nobody seemed super into it, but we’re finishing up this week. This post is going to be a bit more about the first part of act two of a three-act story, focusing on the time from the first pinch point to the midpoint.

Pause for a plea: Look, I know plot structure isn’t sexy the way character development or drama and obstacles and conflict are, but it’s super important. It makes a difference in your book wooing readers and in it wooing agents.

K.M. Weiland has a really lovely graphic that we’ve included in the podcast notes about where to put those pinch points.

Weiland is a bit of a goddess about structure and what she says about this first pinch point is this:

1. It comes about 37% of the way into the story.
2. It tells us that the bad guy has some power.
3. It can be a whole big scene or just the tiniest of moments
4. It sets up “the next 1/8th of the story, in which the character will slowly begin to grow into a new awareness of his story’s many truths–and specifically the truth about the nature of the conflict in which he is engaged.”

Right after this big and important pinch point, the hero of your story aka your protagonist moves into the section of the book that comes before the book’s halfway point or midpoint. Weiland calls this space from 37% to 50% a realization place and scenes for your character growth. The protagonist understand what’s going on a bit more. She starts to react with that knowledge informing her reactions and then her actions. Cool, right?

She writes, “In itself, the First Pinch Point does not reveal the true nature of the conflict to the protagonist. Rather, it foreshadows it by providing a peek at facts the protagonist has barely grasped as yet.”

She uses the movie ALIEN a lot to explain this. At the first pinch point, the crew realizes that the alien creature isn’t what they were thinking it was. Their choices start to be informed by that until the midpoint, which Weiland calls the MOMENT OF TRUTH.

At the midpoint in ALIEN that alien smashes its way out of one of the crew’s chest.

The truth of what they are dealing has exploded in the ship and on the screen (and on your novel’s page).

“It’s instructive when watching movies to observe the protagonist’s facial expressions prior to the Moment of Truth and then afterward. Before the Midpoint, he’ll often look baffled as he struggles to keep up with the conflict. Then the light dawns in his eyes at the Midpoint, and from that moment on, there’s a look of knowing determination on his face,” she writes.

Larry Brooks defines pinch points as “An example, or reminder, of the nature and implications of the antagonist force, that is not filtered by the hero’s experience.”

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Sometimes in life, your defining moments don’t come at the midpoint. - Mr. Murphy

So, what he’s saying is don’t think that there are certain points and ages in your life where you have to get things done. Life is not a book and it doesn’t need to be a three-act structure.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

These are via Authors’ Publish.

Bannister Press: Other – the 2024 fantasy short story anthology