A few years ago Susie and I were writing books with very high concept premises. Or is it premii? She was writing RITA finalist My Foolish Heart. I was writing Dining with Joy. The former was about a radio host for the lovelorn who’d never been on a date. The latter about a cooking show host who couldn’t cook. Great ideas. Great pitch lines. Easy to see and understand. But when we were writing, the premise itself became paralyzing. We dubbed those books the ones with the paralyzing premise. High concept is great. Almost necessary in today’s publishing world. But writing them can be a challenge because you’ll always wonder, “Am I capturing the premise well?” In Dining with Joy, not only did I have to explain how and why […]
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Three Steps to Being a Voice, Not an Echo
Writing in the Christian market pushes us to go beyond the realm of this life to find meaning and purpose for our characters. While we are not writing sermons and devotionals set in fictional places with fictional characters, we are imitating life. For the Christian author, Jesus is very much a part of our every day life. We want to express Him in some way in our stories, through the lives of our characters. But often our stories sound hokey, canned, full of Christianese. How we talk in the foyer at church, or in Sunday school class does not translate into fiction. Remember, our goal is to write great stories about great characters. Our goal is not agenda fiction where we pound the pulpit so to speak about some error of […]
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What if the HERO was the HEROINE? – Turning Your Story Upside Down
I started reading a great book last week and about a third of the way through a thought hit me: What if THE HEROINE was THE HERO and THE HERO was THE HEROINE? Meaning, what if their rolls were reversed? Suddenly the book became much more interesting and the one on my Kindle seem kind of status quo. Sure, some of the other plot points would be different if SHE was a HE, but it would also raise new, more intriguing plot obstacles. In an historical book, it might be hard to switch rolls. If you were writing about the Alamo, it would be hard to have a man spying on General Santa Anna since the spy was a female prostitute. But, what if you took an historical event, like […]
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Food Fight! 8 ways to keep healthy while you write
Boy, doesn’t that title just make you sit up and take notice. I woke up thinking about this today. Food. Writing. Diet Coke. Writing. Chips. Writing. Diet Coke. Writing. Tea. Writing. Water. Water. Water. To undo the chips and Diet Coke, of course. Writing. After returning from the fantastic Deep Thinkers retreat, I’d resolved to cut back on this, do a little more of that… But a week later, I can feel myself, see myself, slipping into old habits. Some of it is just determination. Any kind of discipline requires inspiration followed by a boat load of determination. But to keep going, we need motivation. Motivation comes from little successes. Big successes. Encouragement. More inspiration. A notch up on the determination. But it also requires resolve in our emotions. To just do it! And […]
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