Fear.

Everyone at one point or another has tasted fear. Authors know fear and speak of it. Most authors fear the fear but even more have learned one vital lesson – fear is good.

Fear is a motivator, an instigater, a castigator, an illuminator, a paralyzer and an energizer. Fear is what makes us feel alive and makes us worry that we’re going to die. Fear is under so much of who we are as people, as writers, as stories. Fear is important. And you should be afraid! Fear comes from what we know and it comes from what we don’t know. It’s insidious and sneaky and delicious. Fear is important. We learn from our fears and we adapt because of them. When you can accept fear into your heart, then you may benefit from it. Yes, I’m saying it is important give in and be afraid.

First, let’s look at why I believe all those adjectives. When we are small, we develop fear of the unknown. This is where we put the things we don’t understand, into the shadow beyond the darkness. Such fear can motivate us to run or to fight. Fight or Flight syndrome comes from this basic fear. The fear of the unknown is challenging and can be paralyzing if we don’t learn to fight through it. Simply turning a corner on a dark road meets this fear. Keep turning the wheel, despite your fear. Delicious things come from pressing forward (safely please, unless you are a character).

Second, there is the kind of fear that instigates reactions. We fear getting surprised so we set up booby-traps. We fear being “taken” by a criminal so we trap them instead. We fear getting into a fight so we avoid that person. We fear what is around the bend, the corner, or off the road.This fear is more about what will happen to us and isn’t always good. But it is a wonderful tool for your traitors, your villains, your contagonists. Channel it.

Next there is the fear that illuminates. Studying for a test out of fear of failure can illuminate us to knowledge and behaviors (ours and our fellow students and teachers!). This kind of fear shines a light on our weaknesses and our needs. This fear can be used to aid others, provide that ah-ha moment, lead to discovery of clues or the ultimate takedown of the antagonist.

Castigation often follows fear. When we have been frightened and we don’t wish to be frightened again, we often castigate the perpetrators. Most often we find it riding on relief. It causes a plethora of negative emotions including vitriol, anger, hatred, childish jealousy, envy and back talk. This is when our mouths often overtake good sense. This fear is damaging. It is what parents often do their children. It is what heroes often do in frustration or a lover to a beloved. Use it wisely because it hurts.

Finally, there is the fear that energizes. I could write on and on about fear but let’s concentrate on this positive aspect. This fear makes us feel alive. The fear of not meeting a deadline (work, school, curfew). This fear motives, illuminates, castigates, paralyzes, frustrates, and – the best part – separates the determined from the unsure. THIS is the fear which often guides an author to guide the conflict in the stories. This energizing fear is the substance of good stories. It combines all the elements of fear into one positive stroke, using all the elements to culminate into a great ending (doesn’t have to be a happy one!).

Sure, authors are afraid of failure. We all fear not being accepted. We all fear bad reviews. But when the fear energizes, it can be channeled into producing action. And that action makes us feel excited and alive. Latch onto that feeling and ride it. Let it become you. Never give up or let fear of failure win. You can benefit if you try, and keep trying.

Fear can be good for you. A little stress gets the blood pumping, colors your cheeks, makes you feel giddy and goofy and tingly all over. Fear about the first time you had sex. Fear about going to that first scary movie. Fear about Halloween and the haunted house. Fear about that last manuscript, the one you had nightmares over and the one the beta readers ripped you apart over. (You know the one that turned out good in the end but kept you up for a month in frightful worry!).

As long as you use your fear productively, as long as you don’t let fear overtake your good sense or your ability to produce/function, fear is your friend. That’s why I say, let fear in. Let fear enliven you. Let fear spark your characters, bring reality to your stories, breathe tension to your novels and excitement to your publishing. Fear, used well, is good!

So go ahead. Be afraid. I’ll meet you in the shadows.

Thanks for coming by.
I remain, Yours Between the Lines,
Sherry

A couple years ago (3 Jun 15) I read an insightful (and humorous) blog post by Julie Butcher from her personal blog Fire Drill (fabulous writer/author/columnist, if you are wondering, and it got me thinking. Julie writes that today’s authors need to consider what is current for teens when writing YA. Thirty years ago, teens didn’t do coffee the way they do now (even down to the ten-years old though I wouldn’t allow that, still..). Today’s youth truly are more health conscious despite all the overweight people in the world (me included), and they are reading labels and worried about GMOs and being “gluten-free.” Thanks for the reminders, Julie.

After I considered how much I hate intrepidly healthy people (just kidding! Maybe.), I thought about the reverse of what Julie said. I’m a boomer and I know many young people who are writing about other generations in their stories. Some are doing biographies while others are penning family histories. The point is, depending on the decade, things were very different when I was a kid, teen, and young adult. 

But how much effort is being given to the truth in building a culture in newer books?

For example, I heard on the news that Affirmed won the Triple Crown, gas was 91 cents. The big win was 1978. But just ten years earlier, gas was averaging only 34 cents! And a stamp was a nickel. It certainly alters perspective, right?

I was discussing the new cell phones with a young college woman (20 years old) and she asked me about my first cell phone. I laughed and told her about the “shoe size bricks” that were phones. And then I really floored her when I mentioned the “bag phone” we had in the late ’80s. It sat on the floor, on the “hump” in our car, right where the big plush bench seat separated so each of us could adjust our own. She was still reeling from shock I think because she said, “hump on the floor?” Ah the cars of yesterday! Something else to consider, yes? Those late 80’s don’t seem that far away to me because I remember them, but to her my world might as well be a separate galaxy.

Much was written of the early rock festivals. Take Woodstock, historical and beloved. There were no cell phones. There were no tablets. There were no Bluetooth devices or iPods.  Woodstock was 1969. The first Walkman – a fabulous portable cassette with foamy headphones, didn’t happen for another decade on July 1, 1979.

In keeping with what Julie mentioned, let’s talk coffee and food. Historians believe the first recorded coffee-house was in Constantinople, Turkey in 1475. So coffee isn’t a new thing. Starbucks, however, is. Coffee houses or coffee shops really didn’t “develop” into a conscious thing in the US until about 1990 (though it was in the more artsy places like SoHo, San Francisco, and New Orleans earlier).  Starbucks opened one shop in 1971 in Seattle (where many think the coffee craze started). I consider the coffee craze a part of the boomer experience, “boomerly” speaking.

But let’s go back a little further. I grew up in the Midwest on corn-fed beef and potatoes. As kids, we ran everywhere, pretty much without fear of anything. My town wasn’t small but it was a town and not a city. Still, we didn’t have gang violence, drive by shootings, drug dealer corners, or worry about being abducted, at least not in abundance or where we were restricted. People got their mail at the house from a mailman who walked. Newspapers were delivered to the porch (or the flowers if the aim was bad) by kids on bikes, kids walked to school when they could (because many could!). My first experience with a school bus wasn’t until I hit 8th grade. By then I was in Florida and in a more subdivision environment. We rode bikes to school in the 6th and 7th grade because that was accepted and gave us freedom. No one worried about us being stolen or killed. And that was only in 1966-1968.

But back to food. Sonic drive ins have been around since 1959. I never saw any until I was an adult but there were many “copies” around, perfect hangouts for dates. Drive-in’s were big when I was a teen and young adult. Movie theaters had balconies and you could smoke. We did. Theaters were where movies were shown and plays were performed. And balconies didn’t cost extra either.

At home, we didn’t eat wrap sandwiches and yogurt smoothies. We ate soft creamy ice cream or frozen custard, snow cones and Nutty Buddies. We bought hot dogs and hamburgers loaded with everything, the messier the better. Anyone remember Burger QUEEN?  And no popcorn was worth eating unless loaded with butter and salt. We ate red meat — meatloaf, sloppy joes, spaghetti with meat, meatballs, hamburger, steak (might be flank or flat-iron but it was steak).

No one read labels because there weren’t labels like there are today. That is an innovation of the last decade. No one really cared. Ever.

And no one I went to school with had a peanut allergy. PB&J sandwiches (peanut butter and jelly) were readily shared! Oh, and no backpacks. We carried all our books (lockers didn’t come until junior high and then we still carried to class), and our wee metal lunch boxes with thermos! Sandwich, box of raisins, apple, milk (no bags of chips, though sometimes I did get a bag of peanuts).

The point is, as Julie Butcher mentions, “Pay attention to the world.” Stay current with today’s inventions and trends if you are writing YA. If you are writing about young adults 30-40 years ago, understand the world and culture of that decade or century. If you want to write historical novels about the last fifty years, then realize how very different the times and people were. Even language can date you if you are writing lots of dialogue (and I know you are). Neato, groovy, cool, hip, man. Super, jelly-o, and jeez!

If you are an older writer creating YA characters today, be careful not to let your memories of “back then” become the world of your characters of today. And likewise, if you are a younger writer (40 years old and less), be careful not to let modernisms muddy up a retro, antique or vintage story.

Know your world. Mine, theirs, yours. You dig? Jeah (not a misspelling)! And your stories will shine brighter for your efforts. Your characters will be memorable, too.

(Thanks Julie Butcher)
I remain, Yours Between the Lines,
Sherry

Separate “Being” from “Doing”

There is so much chaos and violence in the world today. I’m with you on how perplexing it is to see good-hearted people turning on neighbors, to see normally kind children suddenly killing peers, or older adults planning to bomb buildings because a spouse was unfaithful. The world seems quite mad sometimes. And when you add politics into the mix, well, frankly, I am either speechless or soapboxing. There seems little room for anything “in between” these days.

As a result of this madness that makes us feel like we are drowning in sorrow and hatred, there is the added reality of jobs, taxes, entitements, rights, freedoms, all being beaten, bruised or completely extinguished. At every turn we feel frustrated, horrified, confused, tormented, violated, and downtrodden. We must react!

I get it.

Writers find a way to release those emotions, to vent the chaos, to highlight the issues, and lift their pens and pencils in the various causes which call each writer to action. For some, the challenge is an editorial or commentary. For others, they invoke social media and an uprising of action. For still others, there are petitions and bills and amendments, protests and town halls.

Writers are rarely silent on the world around them. We are often the avatars of information.

But I want to highlight one time when it may behoove the writer/author to be still. A long time ago, a very wise older gentleman put a hand on my shoulder and reminded me of something which I carry in my heart today. Over 40 years ago, I was sternly chastised with this warning:

You can’t confuse who you are with what you do.

Okay so some of you are saying, ah that’s not how I heard that saying. There are so many quotes out there about not confusing attitude with personality, desire with destiny and the list goes on. No, this is not that quote.

What this fine gentleman (a military man, a father, a visionary, and a jack-of-all trades) reminded me simply was this: You are a person of particular likes and dislikes. Your job/your work is not to be confused or combined with who you are as an individual. The two are separate and distinct. You do not marry your work, no matter whether it is hobby or profession. At the end of the day you don’t sleep with it or make babies with it, even if the work is something you do 24 hours a day (as in being in the military, being a doctor or a police officer.) Even a mother understands that who she is as a mother and parent is not who she is as a person. And many mothers will tell you they struggled to regain their private self from their mother self! That is the separation I speak about here.

The two entities are entirely separate and should stay that way. (And that is what people forget and one contributing factor why there is added chaos and discord, in my opinion.)

But that isn’t the extent of my warning. As you learn to know yourself and learn to live your life and keep your work from being who you are, you as a writer must learn a greater lesson:

Do not confuse who your characters are with who you are.

This is VERY important. Sometimes we get so caught up in the real chaos that we, as writers and authors forget and let our true feelings bleed over into our characters. If you are writing a memoir about yourself then that may be useful. However, 99% of the time, the vampire, shapeshifter, elf, robot, sweet librarian, or punk rocker won’t have (and can’t begin to fathom) your feelings or your attitudes. And you do your readers a disservice when you lose sight of the warning and forget the lesson. Your stories become preachy, muddied, and confusing. They start being about you and not your characters.

The warning holds true for any profession where you perform a service. Remember that who you are and what you do (writer who writes), are two entirely different and distinct things. Keep them separate. Learn to take yourself out of your reality and put yourself into your character’s reality. If you can’t keep them apart, then you are doing it wrong. No reader wants you to preach or soapbox to them through your characters and use your writing as an excuse to do it. Be mindful of your story and keep to the boundries that you designed. Reality and fiction sometimes meet but never with the heavy-handed chaos that is the full truth.

And how do you insure the separation? You step back and become the character and the reader of your story. You forget you and become them, the people who now live and breath the magic you create. Let them have their life and not yours. Be aware and trust your ability. It doesn’t matter what the reader thinks of you (though we want to be liked). What matters is what the reader thinks of the characters you create. Let the reader love them. And you can be you later.

And that’s my advice for this week. 

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*** Just two weeks to go til Christmas! Take advantage of the sale I have going on for Breaking the Glass Slipper, The Gypsy Thorn and Time and Blood. Check out my Amazon page (and follow me for whenever changes happen). Prices will change in the new year. Also, look for something special coming for Christmas concerning Midnight Assassin!

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*** Finally, Drahomira’s birthday is Dec 21, the Winter Solstice. If you don’t know who Drahomira is then you need to catch up with my fiction!). She’s planning a party so watch my Facebook author page for more details.

Until next time, I remain,
Yours Between the Lines,
Sherry

P.S. Don’t forget, every Monday on Instagram is #pinyourpen day! You can follow me and see what pen I put up today (and see past offerings too!) I’m doing this for one year, so catch up!