RITA ® Award-Winning Author of Fantasy Romance
//On trusting the Story Brain, making choices and questioning those choices – authors, I’m looking for comments on your experiences – and also how much I loved Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy.
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Exciting news!!! For all of you who have been waiting waiting waiting for the audiobook of ROGUE FAMILIAR, it is liiiivvveeee! Just on Audible for the next 3 months, then it will be wide. If you’d like to review, I do have some free downloads available. Comment here or email Assistant Carien via the website contact form.
Amusingly enough, our topic at the SFF Seven this week is self-care and burnout. I say amusing because this has been a topic of discussion in Jeffe’s Closet, my Patreon and Discord, these last couple of weeks. One thing I love about that space is that people can ask me questions and it gives me the opportunity to mull answers I hadn’t previously given thought to.
One gal asked me about advice on getting through when you’re faced with deadlines and your well is empty. I talked about this on Monday’s podcast, too, but I’m going to reiterate here because I think our group mind hit on something really important.
We often think of refilling the creative well as something lovely, peaceful, and largely passive. Self-care often carries the sense of similar calm. We think of leisurely strolls, hot bubble baths, a glass of wine, gazing at the sunset with friends, lingering over moving art at museums and galleries. All of these things are lovely… And not terribly useful when you’re facing deadlines, dealing with crises, and you’re already short on time with a well so empty you’ve got nothing left to put out the fires, much less create something to meet those deadlines with.
So, what do we do then?
The thing is, burnout is something we must take very, very seriously. I’ve been there – and once you hit full burnout, the bottom of the well is dry as a bone, then it can takes months or years to recover. It’s easy to put off our mental health, to decide that refilling the well can wait until this family member is doing better, or this deadline is met, or after some future date when we have time to deal with it. Except that mental health and burnout don’t obey our schedules. Taking this approach is like deciding that an infection can wait until we’ve finished some other projects – by the time we’re ready to deal with it, we could have blood poisoning or lose a limb.
What’s the answer then? This was my advice to her: cut out everything that is not actually on fire and aggressively fill the well.
I was concerned that this was too vague, but it worked for her! Sometimes we need permission to ignore everything that is not a crisis – to ask ourselves “is it on fire?” and set it aside if not. As for aggressively filling the well – an image that seemed to amuse everyone – I can’t tell you how to do that. We all have to find what refills our own wells. But as for going about it aggressively, that is the key. That means you’re prioritizing those activities, going after them with gusto, rather than waiting for the water to seep in. Muster your army of brooms and aggressively fill that well!
//Creativity and vacations/holidays, moving from writing as a hobby to a career, taking your mental health seriously, maintaining writing productivity, meeting deadlines, and methods for aggressively filling the well.
//Tough love talk on how our families and the people who love us most can be the biggest obstacles to getting that writing time. Related: wants and needs, the difference between them and how other people try to tell what ours are.
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Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is writing emotion and whether you as the author have to feel the exact emotion you’re writing.
There’s this tale about acting that’s been making the rounds for ages – it’s possibly apocryphal – about Dustin Hoffman being a method actor. That method asks actors to find the emotions within themselves to play the character, to find essentially their alternate self who would be that person and feel that way. The story goes that Hoffman spent an hour getting into that character’s skin and Sir Laurence Olivier strolled in, did his bit, and left again, saying, “My dear boy, it’s called acting.”
The point of this (again, possibly apocryphal) tale is twofold: the first that you can create the appearance of emotion without feeling it, and the second that everyone does things their own way.
You all should know by now that my primary mantra is this: figure out what your process is and own it.
People like that story because they can smirk at poor Dustin Hoffman doing things the American way, the overly-complicated way, the fancy way, but… is he wrong? Hoffman has an amazing acting career. He’s widely acknowledged as a brilliant actor. Clearly his approach isn’t “wrong.”
Is Olivier wrong in this story? Clearly not, for the same reasons as above. There is no wrong. There is no right. Both things can be true. Both processes work for those performers.
So, do I have to feel the emotion I’m writing in order to put it on the page? Nope. Do I sometimes? Sure, though it depends. Do other writers need to feel the emotion to write it? I’ve heard they do.
And it’s all good. Both things can be true.
//How I’m getting better at balance, increasing my wordcount, getting business done, and having more time to relax! Also, using AI “tools” as a writer and examining the whole point of being a creative in the first place.
//What it takes to be a career author – particularly a novelist – the kinds of sacrifices you have to make to carve out enough silence to hear the words of a story, and how there are no straight line trajectories.
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Happy Summer Solstice, all!
This week at the SFF Seven, we’re talking about our greatest writing challenge and how we manage it.
In some ways, this is a moving target for me, because it seems that – like clockwork – each book presents its own challenge. With 64 published titles under my belt, I feel like I should have this process down and there shouldn’t be surprises.
No such luck.
What I have to constantly remind myself is that the creative process is its own creature. It’s this connection to something beyond ourselves and thus is not within our control. Particularly for a writer like myself – I am incapable of pre-plotting and write for discovery, relying entirely on intuition – letting go of that desire to control is critical. It can also be difficult, especially when I’m trying to write to a particular idea or market.
For example, I recently wrote one-hundred pages of a book for my agent, according to a very particular comp. Let’s call it Ghost meets Out of Africa. (That is NOT it, but that’s one of my all-time favorite fictional comps. Points if you can name the movie it’s from.) In thinking about this project, I consulted my friend, Melinda Snodgrass, incredibly talented novelist and screenwriter who counts among her credits the Star Trek: Next Generation episode The Measure of a Man. I asked her how closely I should follow the beats of Ghost, if at all. She gave me an incredulous look and asked why, when I had a hugely successful story blueprint right there, I would do anything but follow those beats?
So, I tried.
Turns out that, not only am I incapable of pre-plotting, I also can’t follow an outline to save my life. I struggled to write that book. Having the story laid out in essence should have made it easier. Instead it made it 1,000x worse. For me. Because that’s not my process. Once I abandoned that outline (sorry, Melinda) and followed my intuition, the words began flowing.
That’s the major challenge for me: remembering to trust the process. Particulars change with every book. This principle endures.
//Ruminations today on what we mean by the “strong female character” and why this might be a more relevant conversation than I thought, given the state of feminism and challenges some female friends are facing.
//Happy to report that my training program to increase creative flow and word count is working! Also, additional thoughts on the ethics of using AI-generated work and how money factors into that for some people.
