Alexander is the author of the collections Universal Love and Children of the New World, which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a best book of the year by NPR, Google, and Electric Literature. His fiction and interviews have appeared in Rolling Stone, World Literature Today, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Best American Experimental Writing.

He is the founder and director of The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Siena Heights University. Today we will be talking about his latest story collection: Universal Love.

In this episode Alexander and I discuss:

• How he balanced hope and cynicism in stories set in the not too distant future.
• His process for building a short story collection and choosing what was included.
• Why you should embrace the mess of early drafts and take plenty of risks.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About the Alexander

Alexander Weinstein is the author of the collections Universal Love and Children of the New World, which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a best book of the year by NPR, Google, and Electric Literature. His fiction and interviews have appeared in Rolling Stone, World Literature Today, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Best American Experimental Writing. He is the founder and director of The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and a Professor of Creative Writing at Siena Heights University. 

You can find Alexander on his website or follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

Universal Love

A hypnotic collection of speculative fiction about compassion, love, and human resilience in the technological hyper-age, from Alexander Weinstein, author of Children of the New World. 

Universal Love welcomes readers to a near-future world where our everyday technologies have fundamentally altered the possibilities and limits of how we love one another. In these gripping stories, a young boy tries to understand what keeps his father tethered to the drowned city they call home. A daughter gets to know her dead mother’s hologram better than she ever knew her living mother. And, at a time when unpleasant memories can be erased, a man undergoes electronic surgery to have his depression, and his past, forever removed.

In an age when technology offers the easiest cures for loneliness, the characters within these stories must wrestle with what it means to stay human in an increasingly cybernetic future, and how love can endure even the most alluring upgrades.

In the vein of Weinstein’s critically-acclaimed first collection, Universal Love is a visionary book, written with one foot in the real world and one stepping bravely into the future.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 366

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 366: The Art and Craft of a Short Story Collection – Interview with Alexander Weinstein appeared first on DIY MFA.

Jeff grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he spent two of his high school years at a boarding school much like the one depicted in his debut novel Attachments, which we’ll be discussing today.

In the ’70s, he studied film/tv/theater production at Emerson College in Boston and then moved to LA, where he worked as a concert lighting designer and toured the country with national rock and reggae acts while teaching himself to write screenplays on the side.

Years later, he was teaching high school English and running a martial arts school when heard the call to write again. In 1989, he sold the school he’d built, rented a small office, and gave himself one year to write three screenplays. 

The second of those―a quirky romantic comedy where the two lovers don’t even meet until the very last page―sold almost immediately, and Sleepless in Seattle became a surprise megahit worldwide. 

For his screenplay, Jeff was nominated for an Oscar, as well as for Writers Guild and BAFTA awards, among others. His other credits include the Disney adventure film Iron Will, New Line’s romantic comedy Sealed With a Kiss, and the independent comedy Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys. His script for Saving Milly, based on Mort Kondracke’s searing memoir, earned the 2005 Humanitas Nomination, an honor he treasures. 

Jeff is a father, stepfather, father-in-law, and grandfather and is based in Malibu.

In this episode Jeff and I discuss:

• His method for moving characters with their own agendas through the plot.
• How to avoid the dreaded info dump and his advice for what to do instead.
• Why you shouldn’t focus on the theme, but should worry about the story instead.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About Jeff Arch

Jeff Arch grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he spent two of his high school years at a boarding school much like the one depicted in his debut novel Attachments. In the ’70s, he studied film/tv/theater production at Emerson College in Boston and then moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a concert lighting designer and toured the country with national rock and reggae acts while teaching himself to write screenplays on the side. Years later, married and with a young family, he was teaching high school English and running a martial arts school when heard the call to write again; in 1989, he sold the school he’d built, rented a small office, and gave himself one year to write three screenplays. 

The second of those―a quirky romantic comedy where the two lovers don’t even meet until the very last page―sold almost immediately, and Sleepless in Seattle became a surprise megahit worldwide. For his screenplay, Jeff was nominated for an Oscar, as well as for Writers Guild and BAFTA awards, among others. His other credits include the Disney adventure film Iron Will, New Line’s romantic comedy Sealed With a Kiss, and the independent comedy Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys. His script for Saving Milly, based on Mort Kondracke’s searing memoir, earned the 2005 Humanitas Nomination, an honor Jeff treasures. Jeff is a father, stepfather, father-in-law, and grandfather and is based in Malibu. Attachments is Jeff’s first novel.

You can follow Jeff Arch on Facebook and Twitter.

Attachments

At a boarding school in Pennsylvania, a deathbed request from the school’s dean brings three former students back to campus, where secrets and betrayals from the past are brought out into the open―secrets that could have a catastrophic effect on the dean’s eighteen-year-old son.

Told in alternating points of view and time frames, Attachments is the story of best friends Stewart (“Goody”) Goodman, Sandy (“Pick”) Piccolo, and Laura Appleby, the girl they both love. The friends meet in 1972 at a boarding school in coal-country Pennsylvania where they encounter Henry Griffin, the school dean, whose genuine fatherly interest and deep human bond with them is so strong that when he has a severe stroke almost twenty years later, he uses what could be his last words ever to call out their names.

Attachments is a puzzle―and the only one who knows how all the pieces fit is in a coma. In the process, longtime secrets are unearthed, revelations come out into the open, and Young Chip Griffin is about to learn something he may or may not be able to handle.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 359

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 359: Trust, Threat, and Truth: A Journey Through the Craft of Writing – Interview with Jeff Arch appeared first on DIY MFA.

When I was 34, I got serious, joined a writer’s group and started another novel, but I dropped it about five chapters in — again, because life.

This year, I returned to that novel because it wouldn’t let me go. With the help of Rachael Herron’s 90 Days to Done course, I decided to start over from scratch and 74 days later, I finished it. A few months after that, I enrolled in DIY MFA’s Pixels to Platform course, which gave me all I needed to launch my writing platform.

And voila! My new writing career is now underway at the age of 48. In most careers, this would be considered too late to just be getting started. You might feel too old compared to your younger colleagues. However, with a writing career, it’s never too late, and there are five reasons why.

When you’re older, you know yourself better.

Just because you are older, doesn’t mean you are too old. From my teens to my 30s, I often set unrealistic expectations for myself and then gave up when I couldn’t achieve the impossible. At one point in my early 20s, I decided I would get my feet wet as a freelance writer by submitting articles to magazines. I wrote my very first article, did zero revisions, and then sent it off — along with my SASE — to YM magazine. When I received the inevitable rejection letter several weeks later, I took that as a sign that I didn’t have what it takes to be a writer, so I quit. That kind of all-or-nothing thinking was the norm when I was too young and idealistic to understand that worthwhile ventures require resilience and perseverance.

In contrast, when you’re older, you know your strengths and limitations, and how hard you can push yourself. You are better equipped to strive for — and accept — progress over perfection. This kind of self-knowledge is priceless when dealing with deadlines, struggling with motivation, and working on several writing projects at once.

You’re not too old, you have invaluable life experience.

Living a couple of extra decades means I have more to say now than when I was in my 20s. Although I write YA novels, the perspective I have 30 years removed from being hot off the griddle of angst allows me to write with more clarity and meaning than if I had written about the same teenage protagonists back then.

Most of us could probably tell at least a few heartbreaking anecdotes from our own lives. We’ve seen some stuff. These experiences not only provide fertile ground for growing stories, they enrich our ability to separate the wheat from the chaff in our revisions because by now, we know what matters most. It also helps us to write characters with more layers and depth because our earned wisdom is our greatest muse. We’ve been there, done that, and lived to tell about it. So, why not do it now?

You know the craft better now.

In my early 20s, I completed a six month course on writing for children and teenagers. It was from the Institute of Children’s Literature. Remember them? Their ads were everywhere back in the 80s and 90s. I also subscribed to Writer’s Digest, Poets and Writers, and The Writer magazines, and I read several books on the writing craft. While that all sounds impressive, what I didn’t actually do was write.

Maybe you’ve been thinking about writing for years, perhaps decades. Maybe you’ve even written on and off. However, all the time you’ve spent thinking about writing, studying writing and writing some here and there was not for naught. It was practice. You were priming the pump. You were observing, studying, taking it all in, and producing when you felt inspired. Now, it’s time to take all of that preparation and funnel it into actual writing, while trusting that you know what you’re doing because now you do.

Knowing there is no time to waste will keep you motivated.

I’ve been a high school teacher and college adjunct for close to twenty years. I have another decade before I can retire with some comfort. And I don’t feel old, I feel experienced. My plan is to do well enough in my writing career to be able to retire early, hopefully in the next five years or so. Therefore, since I began writing seriously this year, I’ve felt a sense of urgency about my writing career because I know I’m getting started much later in life than others.

Starting later isn’t a bad thing; it can help you create the momentum you need to keep going until you achieve the level of success you desire. What’s more, launching your writing career as an older adult will also provide you with something meaningful to focus on and sustain you in your later years.

You have more time to invest in yourself.

Although I’m nearing fifty, I don’t feel old. I remarried a decade ago and now have two young sons at home. However, I’m in the minority. Most women my age and older have moved beyond their child rearing years into another season of life. At that stage, you have more time to spend on doing what you enjoy without worrying about taking time away from your families and other responsibilities.

In addition, when you’re an older adult, you’re no longer striving to establish yourself in your previous or current career. This affords you the time and energy to pour into your writing and set goals for your writing career. Perhaps for the first time in your life, you will be working hard to do something you truly love. You can write with passion, knowing you’re doing it all for you — and your readers.

So, whether you’ve already started writing seriously or are still just thinking about it, know that now is the exact right time for you. There’s a reason you haven’t started your writing career until now. Trust that. Now, get going!

Anita Ramirez is a writer and teacher who transforms bilingual, dispassionate teens into lovers of books, one reader at a time. When she’s not teaching Hispanic/Latinx literature and composition to her high school students or linguistics at the college level, she’s revising her first bilingual YA novel and attempting to win NaNoWriMo while writing her second. Anita is a California native who’s been living in New York for the past 25 years. She loves the poetry of Pablo Neruda, teen movies from the 1980s and café con leche. You can find her at www.anitawritesbooks.com and connect with her on Twitter and Instagram.

The post #5onFri: Five Reasons You’re Never Too Old to Launch a Writing Career appeared first on DIY MFA.

I want to tell you a secret about my own experience with this exercise. When I first started, I had a grand plan of taking my daily data and creating a beautiful graph in Excel that would reveal the secret inner workings of my mind. What actually happened is that, about a month in, I realized I didn’t need the beautiful graph. While the data was important for giving my routine structure and to help my comparison from day to day, the most important thing I got out of it was the general awareness of myself.

As I progressed with this daily routine, I found it easier to apply it to my writing even though I was not tracking anything specific from day to day. Thanks to my daily habit I became aware enough that I finally noticed what my Writer’s Intuition was telling me: I was happier writing in the mornings, I need to have no distractions when I’m writing new words, and I love revision. I had always “known” these things, but now I could actively work toward writing in the situations and places that helped me be the most productive. That is when my Writer’s Intuition really took off because I could more easily separate problems with writing from problems with myself.

Let’s discuss how to use your Writer’s Intuition to help when you get stuck in your writing…

Figure out where the problem is.

Most often when I get stuck writing, I ask myself one simple question first: What is the exact problem keeping the story from moving forward? A lot of people know there’s a problem but aren’t able to narrow it down any further. “There is a problem” doesn’t really give you much direction. So read over the section, the page, or the story again and this time listen to what your Writer’s Intuition is trying to tell you. Try for a definition such as, “The character isn’t doing what I want here,” “There’s no way to get them out of this situation” or “This plot point doesn’t make any sense because of this other thing.”

At first you might have trouble defining the problem, but again, the more mistakes you make and the more times you get stuck, the better your Writer’s Intuition will get at telling you where the problem is. That being said, your brain knows when it can’t focus on writing, but it doesn’t always tell you in an easy-to-understand way. Sometimes you might get stuck on your story for a reason that has nothing to do with the story.

If I can’t come up with a specific problem with the story, then my Writer’s Intuition might be telling me the problem isn’t with the story. That means the stuck spot might actually be me. Maybe I’m worried about something at work, perhaps I didn’t get enough sleep the night before, or today could just be a self-care day due to my depression. If this is the case, then I take a step back from my story to take care of my own needs so I can come back when I’m at my best.

When you have identified the stuck spot in your story, even if you’re not 100% sure you have it right, it’s time to…

Dive into your toolbox

Sort through all the writing skills and exercises you have accrued over your writing time. I’m not going to go into any specifics here, since that’s not what this article is about, but think of the ways you have dealt with this problem in the past. If you haven’t dealt with this specific issue before, or if what you’ve tried isn’t working to fix the problem, then head to the Internet. Ask your writer friends if they have suggestions, search for the problem and see what kind of articles come up, or take a writing course based around the problem you’re having.

You will make mistakes. You might think you’re having trouble writing because you’re worried about your spouse’s job, but it’s really a plot problem. You think a character has a motivational issue, but it’s really that your well is empty and you need to recharge. Your Writer’s Intuition can just be wrong, because you can’t know everything. My advice to you is…get used to being wrong. It happens to everyone. But don’t let that discourage you from trying! Making mistakes is how humans learn; it’s how we hone our skills and develop our Writer’s Intuition. Plus, if everything went perfectly all the time, that would make for a pretty boring story.

And always remember to…

Trust your Writer’s Intuition

Writing a book is a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t think you have to solve a problem right away if it’s giving you trouble. If you can’t define the problem, or if you try a few things and it still hasn’t helped, then it’s fine to take a step back. Go take a walk, do the laundry, play with a pet, read a book. Your Writer’s Intuition will continue working on the problem subconsciously, because that’s just what it does.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that it always comes up with the perfect fix. Your Writer’s Intuition is a compilation of all of your experiences. If you’re continually pushing yourself to be a better writer, you’re going to run into problems you’ve never had before. Don’t let these stop you. Sometimes I have problems in my story that I simply don’t have the skill to fix yet. In that case, all you can do is keep going, and keep learning, and work on fixing it in the next draft. Your Writer’s Intuition will continue to expand and grow.

Laura Highcove has a degree in computer science, which is obviously why she is a fantasy writer. She is influenced by anime, video games, table-top gaming, programming, horses, and Norse mythology in no particular order. She currently lives in beautiful Blacksburg, Virginia with her computer, two cats, and husband. Her psychic abilities have not yet developed, but she remains hopeful. If you’d like to learn more about her, head over to her website and sign up for her newsletter (and get a free short story) here.

The post Using Your Writer’s Intuition Intentionally appeared first on DIY MFA.

Several weeks ago, I went into the doctor’s office for my first ever MRI at the age of 29, and it was honestly a terrifying experience. But, not the MRI itself. In fact, aside from being slid into a massive tube, the whole process was really quick and largely uneventful. (There were a lot of loud noises from the machine, but I got to listen to classical music and take a nice nap.) 

The fear, however, came from everything leading up to the appointment: the scheduling, the anticipation of what the results would say, the unknown of what those results would mean for and to me after they were given. It was a lot to think about and frankly, scary. Because at the end of it all, what I feared was the examination of my mortality. Now, not every instance of fear is something quite that heavy. But whatever your fears happen to be, big or small, they can do more work than just being frightening. They can, believe it or not, be inspiring.

Take a minute and think about some of the things that you’re afraid of, whether it be a certain insect, hospitals or even being in a room full of strangers. Now, think about how those things make you feel and how you’ve responded to them. Everything you’re thinking of from the fear itself to the response is one of the many ways that we know we’re not only alive, but how we conduct ourselves in everyday life. And all of this can be extended to the characters we create in our stories. 

Sometimes in our writing, our characters can start out with a lot of momentum. But after awhile, if we’re not careful, things can flatten out and plateau. And sometimes, it’s because a character’s motivations have been lost or misdirected, and are in need of reexamination. One way to do that is by taking a look at one of their main motivators: Fear.

1) Ask you characters to name their fears, big or small

Depending on the character, asking them to name their fears can sometimes be the most difficult part of the process. Because not only are fears scary to talk about, they’re also deeply personal. And that level of vulnerability can, at times, be very hard for a character to walk into willingly. So, try starting the exercise of reexamination in an environment that is comfortable and familiar to your character(s), and you can do this either in your head, on a sheet of paper or on a computer screen.

Next, start taking them through a series of questions about how they’re doing mentally, so you can determine if having this conversation now will yield the best results or if you should have it later. Example questions could include: How are you feeling today? When was the last time you slept? Has there been anything particular on your mind lately? Etc. After you’ve had the chance to sort of assess where they are mentally, go ahead and begin asking them about their fears, whatever they may be.

With the main character of my novel, Abigail, it took years to get her to the point where she was not only able to name her fears (like isolation and not belonging), but to talk about them. When she did, I finally started to understand some of her responses to certain situations in the novel better, and it made the writing of her more authentic because I knew why she was leading me down particular paths.

2) Present a character’s fears to them

These do not need to be scenarios that end up in the final draft of your stories, but sometimes writing them out can, again, be helpful in understanding how your characters respond to being face to face with the things that frighten them. Which, can also help you better understand what motivates them. 

After learning about your characters’ fears, take one or two of them and come up with a scenario where that fear is front and center, and place your character right in the middle of it. For Abigail, it was placing her in the middle of the woods all by herself with no one or any kind of civilization around for miles. Once your character is set up, take note of how they’re responding to the fear that’s been presented to them. Have they frozen in front of it? Have they tried to run or escape? Do they even believe what they’re seeing or experiencing is real? Or are they trying to talk themselves out of it being in front of them? The information you get out of this can be crucial to your storytelling because when we as writers know how our characters respond in the face of their fears, we can better understand the ways in which they will interact with not only the worlds you’ve created, but the people within them.

3) Give a character a scenario where they have the opportunity to overcome or give in to the fear

Different from just placing the fear in front of them, set your characters up in a scenario where they have the opportunity to either overcome their fear or give in to it. And this distinction is important because what they choose to do about their fears, says a lot about them and how they handle conflict, stress, difficulty and a whole host of other everyday roadblocks. Those responses alone can give you a world of insight into how they will respond to pretty much anything you throw at them.

For Abigail, her response of fleeing danger or conflict or hard things has turned out to be a hallmark of who she is in the novel. And it has even inspired many different circumstances and scenarios in the story that weren’t in the original draft, but ended up working out a lot better in later revisions.

In the same way we learn about ourselves when it comes to engaging with our fears, so too, can we learn a lot about our characters when we give them the same opportunity to engage theirs. Whatever the response your characters have to their fears be sure to pay close attention as it can give you a great view into not only who they are, but who they can be depending on the circumstance. Because when our characters are at their fullest and most authentic, it helps us move past our own fears to make our stories the best they can be.

Jenn Walton is a writer, editor and storyteller based in Washington, D.C., whose fiction works are housed mainly in the speculative genre. She has completed her first novel project that explores, through the lens of a failing utopia, what happens when society gives in to its fear of the other. She previously wrote for a communications firm where she drafted and edited sponsored and organic content for top-tier academic institutions, Fortune 500 companies and leading philanthropic organizations that has run in The Washington Post, USA Today and the Atlantic. For more from Jenn, please visit her at her website or on Twitter.

The post How to Deepen Your Characters by Assessing Their Fears appeared first on DIY MFA.

You can edit on paper, first getting it all out and then sifting through for the nuggets to keep. But editing can also be done in your head, using some logic, some common sense and a huge dose of creativity. Whether you are working on draft material or devising a story in your mind, keep these thoughts in mind.

1) Think of a biography

A biography (or autobiography) is a life story. Clearly, you can’t pack in every detail of a lived life in a volume that fits on a normal bookshelf. Authors have to be highly selective in what they include, distilling constantly.

What to include? Clearly, the most interesting, exciting and meaningful parts of the much longer life story. This is the most exaggerated example of distillation. Think of a non-alcoholic beer versus a shot of vodka you can set on fire.

Second, biographies are written only about the most unusual of lives – heroes, survivors, the super-rich, super talented, or otherwise larger-than-life.
Moreover, a well-written biography is not just a list of facts, it’s a true story. All the ideas form a single, tightly woven rope pulling the reader through the book from opening words to the last page.

2) Think of a memoir

Okay, now we are talking about only one slice of a life, a further distillation. A person can write more than one memoir, like the wonderful Stephen Fry, because a memoir is about one event or phase in a life. Now, the content is even more distilled and purposefully interwoven into a theme. While a biography tells you ‘everything about a person’ and the reasons they are who they are, a memoir has an even more specific takeaway message.

A memoir is meant to instruct in some way – by good or bad example. A life well-lived or a life best steered clear of if at all possible. A famous opera singer or a drug addict. The point is, the whole story revolves around a single idea – a rise to fame, redemption, overcoming impossible odds, inventing a game changer, like the light bulb, the Polio vaccine or Facebook.

3) Think of fiction

In fiction, the sky is the limit because everything can be made up. So, make up the good stuff, and pack it in. Consciously skip the bland stuff. This should be obvious but sometimes it takes practice.

Don’t talk about meals, or showers, or walks to the mail box unless it’s critical to the plot. If you do put in a dinner scene, it should have a justifiably deeper meaning – like you poisoned your hero or fed him magic beans.

Why have a common scenario in the background when you could big it up? Instead of a fallback dinner scene for ‘an important talk’, why not put your characters on a roller coaster ride, or bungee jumping or talking at the exact moment your heroine finds out there really is a monster under the bed? In general, skip past any ‘everyday things’ and the reader will fill in the obvious missing bit, no problem, and thank you for it.

4) Heighten

Once you are sure everything has a place in your story, you can focus on heightening. Everyone knows how the ‘fish story’ grows over time. The joke is, a dad and son catch a foot-long fish. As the story is repeated, and the tendency to exaggerate for effect and out of pride grows, the size of the fish lengthens and lengthens. This is the art of showboating and great story telling. Who wants to hear about a foot-long fish – compared to a three-foot-long fish that fought so hard it almost capsized the boat?

Look for fish in your writing. Readers will thank you and the whole point of fiction is that it’s anything but truth. Heightening means going that extra stretch and adding the extraordinary. The love in Twilight is not ‘normal’ or ‘everyday’ love: it’s once-in-a-century love. It’s a one in a billion love. And it’s not between ‘two normal people’. It’s between a human outsider and a vampire who’s been waiting his whole life just for her.

Can you crank up the extraordinary in your story?

At the level of individual paragraphs and sentences, think about how to ramp up your verbal imagery. Increase the numbers and types of images formed in the reader’s brain. It’s the mental imagery that helps those words jump off the page and into reader’s minds in a memorable way.

5) Synergize

The biggest and best impact in terms of distilling and heightening your content is when the sum is more than the parts.

You want all the parts of your story to not only hang together, like pearls on a necklace, but to mean more to the reader because they are together and in that particular order. Would you rather have 20 pearls in your hand, or ordered by size, the biggest in the middle, on a necklace? Your book should be a fine pearl necklace – or that Ferrari. Really, whatever you chose.

Sometimes you can look at your story and crank up the ‘juxtapositions’ or ‘opposites attract’ nature of things. For example, if you have two characters working together, make one is the foil of the other – good cop, bad cop, for example. Can you ramp up the differences to highlight the nature of both?

Final thoughts

Remember, readers want gripping, compelling stuff, without slow parts, but there is always a balance. You can wind a rubber band so tight it snaps. Readers might feel breathless, left out of key parts of the story or wishing you lingered a bit longer on a scene or given them time to catch their breath.

Sometimes, holding back is the trick to heightening the tension. Anticipation is an awesome force in a reader’s mind. Sometimes the trick is to prolong the calm before the storm, or to juxtapose tranquillity with a shock surprise. It’s how you use all these tools that counts.

Dawn Field loves to read fiction and non-fiction, especially in draft form, and to try to understand what makes great writing and how writers tick. She can be contacted at her gmail account ‘fiedawn’.

The post #5OnFri: Five Ways to Distill and Heighten Your Writing appeared first on DIY MFA.

Today I’m delighted to have K.M. Weiland on the show.

K.M. Weiland is an award winning and internationally published author with a passion for helping writers become published authors. Through her award winning website, Helping Writers Become Authors, she has mentored numerous writers. She is also the author of several books on the craft of writing.

In our interview, we dive into her book Creating Character Arcs, and the craft elements that make characters of all types pop off the page.

In this episode K.M. Weiland and I discuss:

• How to create a strong character arc that works with your plot, and why there is danger in not structuring your characters.
• Why theme is an important element in your story, and how to use for maximum effect.
• What the three types of character arcs are, and how to recognize and craft each type.
• How change occurs in a flat arc, and why these characters resonate with readers.
• How to fix a story with no character arc, and why a no arc story can work.
• How to craft change in a story on both internal and external levels, and why the power of choice is important to all types of character arc.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About the Author

K.M. Weiland lives in make-believe worlds, talks to imaginary friends, and survives primarily on chocolate truffles and espresso.

She is the IPPY, NIEA, and Lyra Award-winning and internationally published author of Outlining Your Novel, Structuring Your Novel, and Creating Character Arcs.

She also writes historical and speculative fiction from her home in western Nebraska and mentors authors on her award-winning website Helping Writers Become Authors. Click the link to connect with K.M. Weiland.

Creating Character Arcs

Have you written a story with an exciting concept and interesting characters—but it just isn’t grabbing the attention of readers or agents? It’s time to look deeper into the story beats that create realistic and compelling character arcs. Internationally published, award-winning novelist K.M. Weiland shares her acclaimed method for achieving memorable and moving character arcs in every book you write.

By applying the foundation of the Three-Act Story Structure and then delving even deeper into the psychology of realistic and dynamic human change, Weiland offers a beat-by-beat checklist of character arc guidelines that flexes to fit any type of story.

Gaining an understanding of how to write character arcs is a game-changing moment in any author’s pursuit of the craft.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase DIY MFA makes a small commission at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 146

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 146: Create Compelling Character Arcs — Interview with K.M. Weiland appeared first on DIY MFA.

Today I have the pleasure of speaking with fellow New Yorker and awesome author, Emma Straub. I had so much fun doing this interview because it was almost like talking to a parallel universe version of myself. After the interview, Emma and I figured out that as kids growing up in the same city around the same time, we came from fairly similar neighborhoods and we even the schools attended were very alike. Talk about crazy coincidence!

But now, let’s get down to business. Emma Straub is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Vacationers, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Elle, and Conde Nast Traveler, and she is a contributing writer for Rookie. Straub’s work has been published in fifteen countries, and her newest book Modern Lovers is out now.

To listen to our conversation about writing, New York, and Emma’s new book, click play below.

In this episode Emma and I discuss:

• Point of view as a story vehicle
• How to decide who the true protagonist is in a multiple POV narrative
• Writing as collaboration with the reader
• Letting the characters lead the story
• How your real life experiences inform your writing
• Time as a focal point for character

Plus, Emma’s #1 tip for writers.

About Modern Lovers

A smart, highly entertaining novel about a tight-knit group of friends from college—their own kids now going to college—and what it means to finally grow up well after adulthood has set in. Like in The Vacationers, Straub again brings her keen observation and subtle wisdom to a story of relationships that explores ambition and pleasure, the excitement of youth and the shock of middle age, all while maintaining throughout that perfect balance of amusement, substance and tenderness. Elle confirms that Modern Lovers “has the smart, cool sensibility of Straub’s other novels,” and promises that “you’re sure to love this one just as much.”

If you decide to purchase a copy of Modern Lovers we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where DIY MFA gets a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

To learn more about Emma and her books, follow her on Twitter or Facebook. You can also visit her website at: www.emmastraub.net.

Link to Episode 103

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Unleash Your Storytelling Superpower!

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Get an in-depth look at 4 character archetypes.

• Learn about their strengths and their weaknesses.
• Find out how to develop stories that create the most dramatic conflict for these archetypes.
• Discover how to implement these ideas to create memorable stories that resonate with your readers.

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome.

The post Episode 103: Writing the Multiple Point of View Novel – Interview with Emma Straub appeared first on DIY MFA.

But first, some news. OMG word nerds, our next episode will be number 100 and I have something really exciting planned so make sure to watch your iTunes for that release. That episode will kick-off our weeklong Storytelling Superpower video series designed to help you figure out what stories and what characters you’re BEST at writing.

To access the video series and download our cheat sheet describing all the Storytelling Superpower archetypes, sign up with your email at DIYMFA.com/STSPvideo. and get all those materials. You an also take Storytelling Superpower QUIZ to discover your unique superpower as a writer.

Now onto today’s episode.

Today I’m delighted to interview Susan Breen. In addition to being the author of the new Maggie Dove mystery series, Susan is also a wonderful writing teacher and one of my very first mentors. Many listeners have heard me tell the story about how I took a horrendous writing workshop in college. By the end of that semester I was so shaken to my core that I did touch pen to page for seven (yes, seven!) years. Susan was the wonderful teacher who coaxed me back in to writing, and she’s very likely the one responsible for my wanting to be a writing teacher myself.

In this episode, Susan and I talk about one of my favorite writing topics: how to craft compelling characters. Listen to the audio below.

In this episode Susan and I discuss:

• Where characters come from.
• Navigating stereotypes while writing characters.
• Character flaws as character development
• Making sure your characters think and using description to convey emotion
• Naming characters

Plus, Susan’s #1 tip for writers.

About Susan Breen:

Susan Breen is the author of a new mystery series about Maggie Dove, a Sunday School teacher turned detective. The first book of this series–titled Maggie Dove–came out yesterday and the second will be out on October 4, 2016

Susan also teaches creative writing at Gotham Writers in Manhattan, where I took my very first writing class post-college. Her first book, The Fiction Class, was published by Penguin in 2008 and it’s a fabulous read. She’s also published stories and articles in places like Best American Non-Required Reading, ComposeJournal.com, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Mother of three children who are now grown up and flourishing, Susan lives with her husband, two dogs and one cat in the Hudson Valley.

To learn more about Susan, you can visit her website, or follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or Goodreads.

Link to Episode 99

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If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, leave a review, and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available. Also, if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please share!

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome.

The post Episode 99: Create Compelling Characters – Interview with Susan Breen appeared first on DIY MFA.

Today’s interview will be a juicy one. I’ll be talking to Stephen O’Connor about his debut novel Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings, a profound exploration of the ways in which the institution of slavery warped the human soul, as seen through the story of Jefferson and Hemings. In this episode, we discuss how to approach controversial topics in your writing while treating the subjects with grace and respect.

In this episode Stephen and I discuss:

• Mindful writing about controversial topics and marginalized groups
• Idea evolution from short story to novel
• Writing outside your experience
• Accessing the unconscious mind as part of the writing process
• Issues of point of view

Plus, Stephen’s #1 tip for writers.

Resources

About Stephen O’Connor

Stephen is the author of two collections of short fiction, Here Comes Another Lesson and Rescue, as well as Orphan Trains, an acclaimed history of a pioneering nineteenth-century child welfare effort, and Will My Name Be Shouted Out, a memoir. His fiction has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence.

About the Book

Historians have shed invaluable light on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, yet their internal feelings and motivations remain a mystery. In Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings, O’Connor’s protagonists are rendered via scrupulously researched scenes of their lives in Paris and at Monticello that alternate with a harrowing memoir written by Hemings after Jefferson’s death, dreamlike sequences in which Jefferson watches a movie about his life, and a chance encounter where Hemings and Jefferson run into each other “after an unimaginable length of time” on the New York City subway.

O’Connor eschews easy answers, aiming to illuminate the horrors of slavery and the hypocrisy of the Founding Father who wrote “all men are created equal,” while allowing both Hemings and Jefferson their full human complexity. Jefferson—at once admirable and despicable—becomes a vehicle for understanding a destructive imbalance of power that persists today. Hemings emerges as a powerful force, asserting her right to freedom of body and mind.

To learn more about Stephen O’Connor, visit his website or follow him on Facebook.

Link to Episode 93

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If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, leave a review, and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available. Also, if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please share!

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome.

The post Episode 93: Narrative Devices, Delicate Topics – Interview with Stephen O’Connor appeared first on DIY MFA.