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Another storytelling concept to wrap our minds around is called Suspended Disbelief. The Dictionary says: “It’s a willingness to suspend one’s critical faculties and believe the unbelievable; the sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment.”

Wikipedia says: “The term was coined in 1817 by the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who suggested that if a writer could infuse a ‘human interest and a semblance of truth’ into a fantastic tale…”

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In Stephen King’s classic book, On Writing, which I highly recommend, he says that writing is telepathy, and I think he’s right. There’s a magic that happens when words are transported across space and time and into a reader’s mind, especially when the words help the person experience something they wouldn’t be able to in their everyday lives.

Research shows that when we read we’re actually experiencing the story on a neurological level as though we’re the character themselves, much like a dream.

Of course, not all writing accomplishes this sleight of hand to the same degree. Having your reader…

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What does Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Fifty Shades of Grey have in common?
They’re both groundbreaking stories.

But let’s think about that. What does that mean? Groundbreaking?

It means that something changed.

The dangerous occult combined with fun-loving kids. S&M, the dark side of sexuality, combined with a handsome billionaire. Sounds like magic, sounds like sparks. But even more than that, these stories tapped into something…

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It must have been a lot of work being the tribal elder who had to remember all those stories and enact them in front of an entertainment-starved crowd. He had to get it right, deliver the scenes and a storyline in a way that pleased his audience.

There was an art to it.

That’s why it’s funny when people find out that you write, that you’re a storyteller, and they want to offer ideas.
“You’re writing a book? Oh, I have a great idea for a story.”

Coming up with the idea is the easy part. It’s kind of like saying, I have an idea about building a house. If you want to build a house, I’m your guy. I have all kinds of ideas.

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If you know much about martial arts, you know that Tai Chi is deceivingly slow, yet highly adaptable. It doesn’t have the flash or showmanship of a flying kick, but through years of practice you’ll have more finesse and skill than the practitioners of other disciplines. You’ll also have the grounding principles to take your craft wherever you’d like to go.
Writing is like Tai Chi.

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Philip Pullman once said, “After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
It’s true, because we need a narrative to have the world make sense.
Think about it. Primitives are sitting around a fire. Speech has arrived on the scene. What are they talking about?

Write Your Best Story—Learn How Today
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Hello, I’m Christopher Hawke and I’ve dedicated my life to helping people excel with their writing. If you’re an author, an aspiring author, a writer of any kind, I have just the thing to help you hone your craft: a month-long video series that requires no more than 10 minutes a day and is guaranteed to change your writing life.

So, writing, we start with an idea. Maybe it’s even a great one. We write for a while. Usually we’re good for getting about 1/3 of the way finished with our story and then, somehow, we run out of steam. We don’t understand it. We start again. Some of us have been starting again for years—we’ve got all these starts and no (or very few) finishes…

What’s wrong?

What’s wrong is: we have an idea but not a story.

What we’re going to learn now is how to build our story one scene, or block, at a time.

Take a sheet of paper and draw on it something resembling this chart. We’ll fill it in in a minute.

Let’s think back for a moment to your favorite movies, shows, and books.

What do you remember about them?

Why are they your favorites?

Chances are they have a few things in common. Regardless of location, I’m guessing your favorite stories have memorable characters in them.

But why? What makes them memorable?

Somehow, they’re probably larger than life. Indiana Jones wasn’t just an archaeologist and Mary Poppins wasn’t just a nanny.

Characters become larger-than-life (and memorable) when they accomplish things that are beyond what you or I would. They adhere to a set of ideals and morals that drive their actions. They do the right thing…at least in the end. That’s what makes them hero-worthy.

Keep in mind these are not absolutes rules. There are exceptions. But, having your character adhere to a higher standard of living will help them rise to herodom. And having a hero will help you (often times) fashion the best story possible.

There are those stories where you’re left wondering, now who was the hero again?

And sometimes they even work.

Breaking Bad comes to mind. By season 3 I was thinking to myself, who am I rooting for again? The Meth addict? The guy making the drugs? Or the cheating spouse?

Still, I, along with so many others watched on—perhaps hoping one of the characters would rise up and become the hero.

Anyway, the take away here is that a reader will most reliably bond with a character who they want to see succeed at something, something noble, their higher purpose.

You could always write a book about a guy who likes to kick puppies, but I think you’re swimming upstream when it comes to getting people to see him as a hero.

Now, in the character column, let’s write your character’s name and give them some attributes.

What do they look like? What are their mannerisms? What do they smell like? What do they sound like? What’s their occupation? Who are they really and why?

In other words, where do they come from? What’s their story? We call this backstory, it means who the character is because of what’s happened to them up until the point where the first scene starts.

So, a story starts with a character and then a location.

Draw a line in the bottom half of the sheet and in the bottom half of the character column write the location of your initial scene.

Where is your character? A busy train station? The middle of a desert? A Taco Bell? Is it morning? Noon? Night?

We’re going to get more in depth with scene description later. For now, the important thing is to simply have a place picked out—a place and time for your character to exist in.

You’ve probably heard the expression show don’t tell. Well, showing starts here.

But, what does that really mean?

For now, what it means is I want you to take the time to immerse yourself in this setting as though you are your character, so you can relay the location to the reader later. Take into account sounds, smells, tactile feelings, tastes, and sights.

Think of your scene in terms of the vantage point of a camera, a wide shot first, and then a closer medium shot and a close up.

Remember the television show Cheers, the way they showed the outside of the bar and then shots of the different characters inside after that?

Keep this in mind when you first think about your location and craft your scene. Jot it down now, if you think it would be helpful, along with any other initial sensory details you’d like to add.

Got that?

Great.

Now we have an idea of who our character is and a decent idea of where they are.

Now what?

In many ways, it’s as if we’ve carved Pinocchio. We have something here, but it’s not yet living. If you remember the story of Pinocchio, you’ll recall there’s a blue fairy that says he can become a real boy if he proves himself to be “brave, truthful, and unselfish.”

There are uncanny similarities between this and what our characters will have to do to become alive in your reader’s minds.

What’s the magic here?

Empathy.

Imagine a guy who lives in a meager New York apartment. He leaves his building each morning and walks the two blocks to his TV repair job where he sits at a workbench most of the day, testing sets.

Who cares, right?

What’s so special about this guy?

Now let’s take that same guy. He’s on his way to work one morning and hears a squeaking sound coming from a drainage grate. He can’t be bothered. He’s late. And walks on until nearly to work.

But there’s something about the sound he just can’t let go of. It was nearly a whimper. He doubles back and discovers a bedraggled kitten. He reaches in and scoops up the cold and trembling cat and wraps her in his coat.

Now, as he labors through the day, the kitten plays beside him on a rug.

So, who cares about this guy now?

You’ve got to care more than you did, right?

Do you care enough about him that when he’s thrown into the back of a white van on his way home from work later, leaving the kitten by itself on the side of the road, you’ll wonder what will happen to him?

We’d care about what happened to them both, wouldn’t we?

Obviously, you don’t need to hit the reader over the head with a kitten or puppy as a device to rally empathy, but it’s important that you understand the concept.

Introduce empathy early in your writing, make sure that we care about your characters. Remember, just because you care about your characters doesn’t mean that anyone else does.

Write Your Best Story—Learn How Today
Prepare for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)

 

What’s the definition of writer’s block?
It’s the condition of being unable to think of what to write or how to proceed with writing.

How can you overcome writer’s block?

If your brain is “locked up”, chances are you’re thinking too much. You probably have a death grip on your story idea and plot and have followed your idea into a logical corner. The key words here are “brain”, “thinking”, “logic”, and “idea”.

I recommend finding ways to unleash your emotional side.
This may be different for you, because what sparks the richest emotional experience varies from person to person, but I recommend tuning into what makes you feel the most.

Sometimes a walk may help, to clear the head—getting alone. But most importantly, what are you going to fill your head with?

The tried and true answer is art, and artful living…. View beautiful paintings, listen to majestic music, engage with an aesthetic garden, read a powerful book, talk with an old friend. Write some prose freehand, let the words flow. Forget about punctuation on the page—and the punctuation of your life. Give yourself an artful day, and see if your story doesn’t take shape when you sit down to write.

Here’s a video excepts from the Craft of Writing video series on making your writing (and life) soulful.

There is a reason why Stephen King is one of the bestselling writers in the world, ever. Described in the Guardian as ‘the most remarkable storyteller in modern American literature’, Stephen King writes books that draw you in and are impossible to put down.Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King’s advice is grounded in the vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported, near-fatal accident in 1999 – and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery.

This writer’s guide is packed full of insightful lessons on writing well. Gleaned from years of teaching writing workshops and crafting his own stories, Christopher Hawke teaches these lessons in a clear and concise way. While a fan of The Elements of Style and Chicago Manual of Style, this book is geared more toward the heart of writing—what makes a story really work and why.

Touted as “The most comprehensive class on the market today…entertaining and inspiring…” by V. S. Alexander, and designed especially for the busy writer, these lessons require no more than 10 minutes a day and will change your writing life.
Community Authors cofounder and award-winning author Christopher Hawke walks you through both beginner and advanced lessons.

This book is based upon an award-winning video series entitled, Craft of Writing, by Christopher Hawke.
To learn even more, with the help of visual examples and additional writing lessons, go to EclecticStores.com and buy the entire series.
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Maybe you’re a first-time novelist looking for practical guidance. Maybe you’ve already been published, but your latest effort is stuck in mid-list limbo. Whatever the case may be, author and literary agent Donald Maass can show you how to take your prose to the next level and write a breakout novel – one that rises out of obscurity and hits the best-seller lists.
Maass details the elements that all breakout novels share – regardless of genre – then shows you writing techniques that can make your own books stand out and succeed in a crowded marketplace.

You’ll learn to:
-establish a powerful and sweeping sense of time and place
-weave subplots into the main action for a complex, engrossing story
-create larger-than-life characters that step right off the page
-explore universal themes that will interest a broad audience of readers
-sustain a high degree of narrative tension from start to finish
-develop an inspired premise that sets your novel apart from the competition

Then, using examples from the recent works of several best-selling authors – including novelist Anne Perry – Maass illustrates methods for upping the ante in every aspect of your novel writing. You’ll capture the eye of an agent, generate publisher interest and lay the foundation for a promising career.

“Every morning I jump out of bed and step on  a land mine. The land mine is me. After the  explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the  pieces back together. Now, it’s your turn. Jump!”  Zest. Gusto. Curiosity. These are the qualities  every writer must have, as well as a spirit of  adventure. In this exuberant book, the incomparable  Ray Bradbury shares the wisdom, experience, and  excitement of a lifetime of writing. Here are  practical tips on the art of writing from a master of  the craft-everything from finding original ideas to  developing your own voice and style-as well as the  inside story of Bradbury’s own remarkable career  as a prolific author of novels, stories, poems,  films, and plays. Zen In The Art Of  Writing is more than just a how-to manual for the  would-be writer: it is a celebration of the act of  writing itself that will delight, impassion, and  inspire the writer in you. In it, Bradbury  encourages us to follow the unique path of our instincts  and enthusiasms to the place where our inner genius  dwells, and he shows that success as a writer  depends on how well you know one subject: your own  life.

Becoming a writer begins with a simple but important belief: You are a writer; you just need to write.

In You Are a Writer, Jeff Goins shares his own story of self-doubt and what it took for him to become a professional writer. He gives you practical steps to improve your writing, get published in magazines, and build a platform that puts you in charge. This audiobook is about what it takes to be a writer in the 21st Century. You will learn the importance of passion and discipline and how to show up every day to do the work.

Here’s what else you will learn:

-How to transition from wanting to be a writer to actually being one
-What “good” writing is (and isn’t)
-How to stop waiting to be picked and finally choose yourself
-What it takes to build a platform
-Why authors need to brand themselves (and how to do it)
-Tips for freelancing, guest blogging, and getting published in magazines
-Different ways to network with other writers, artists, and influencers
-The importance of blogging and social media and how to use it well to find more readers and fans of your writing

You Are a Writer will help you fall back in love with writing and build an audience who shares your love. It’s about living the dream of a life dedicated to words. And it all begins with you.

Instantly find out what you need to write your very best story.

Story craft expert Christopher Hawke walks you through over 30 writing lessons in this award-winning video series.

Get immediate and forever access to the craft of writing insights that V. S. Alexander touted as “The most comprehensive class on the market today…entertaining and inspiring…”

Click on the sample lessons below that interest you, to find out more.

“Community Authors’ series the Craft of Writing is the most comprehensive class on the market today. Christopher Hawke guides the writer from story concept to the finished product in an entertaining and inspiring fashion.”

—V. S. Alexander, author of The Magdalen Girls and The Taster

 

Write Your Best Story—Learn How Today
Prepare for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)

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