Race Riots

18 Friday Aug 2017

Summer is over at least for my school aged children. I’m sad, but happy that the fighting will and has decreased.

My current WIP deals with Black Lives Matter, which is the nice, polite way of saying that it discusses deaths of black people at the hands of police officers. A week ago, I had the opportunity to attend Writer’s Police Academy in Wisconsin. I learned so many things and have come back a better equipped writer who can now write with more accuracy.

This conference also provided me insight into the craziness cops endure while on the job and how every call can end with them not coming home. I always knew it was a dangerous job to be in law enforcement, but I didn’t understand the extent of it and how they have to be vigilant every single minute. Indirectly, it provided the opposite viewpoint of this issue in a way, I hadn’t thought about before.

I came home pumped up to explore both sides of the problem in my manuscript and to give it the weight it deserves. I’m not sure I have the skills or the talent to do it justice, but I’m trying.

I was looking through my research and stumbled across this video from the 1967 Detroit uprisings. I think it’s relevant now and thought I’d share. It’s an hour long, outdated in terminology, and even racist, but there are still so many nuggets of truth in it. **Heads up there’s some graphic, disturbing scenes.

Summer Break

21 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by Rachael Dahl in Writing

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I thought I posted this, but guess not. The kids are out and we’re doing summer things. I’ll catch you in August.

Spring Break

27 Monday Mar 2017

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No posts for the next two weeks due to my kids being on Spring Break. Yes, the younger two get two weeks off, while the middle schooler only gets one.

Happy Holidays

19 Monday Dec 2016

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See you in 2017

Objective Correlatives

12 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by Rachael Dahl in Characters, Manuscript, Work In Progress (WIP), Writing, Writing Resources, Writing Tip

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As usual, last week I went to visit my grandpa at the nursing home. They had a huge sign that warned the unit was sick with Gastroenteritis and to not visit unless absolutely necessary. I turned to go away, but one of the staff stopped me to ask me about something my grandpa received. Against my better judgement, I followed them onto the unit, solved the problem, and decided since I was already there to go ahead and visit my grandpa. Bad decision! I ended up sick for three days and passed it on to my six-year-old daughter, who was also ill for three days. Knock on wood, so far we’re the only two out of the family that came down with this horrible bug.

There are things you don’t want to share, like the nasty disease above and then there are things you do want to share. Cindy Baldwin’s blog is something I found that has been helpful while I’m plotting my next manuscript and that is something I want to share. She doesn’t write often, but she has several nuggets of helpful writing advice in between her personal stories. My favorite is the topic of objective correlatives. If you’re like me and clueless as to what that means, Cindy does an excellent job of explaining it in detail here. Basically, it’s a “grand-scale metaphor” that is throughout a story. The Phoenix in Harry Potter is an example–that I swiped from her post–and she explains it in detail if your curious about it. So, long story short, I’m trying to figure out how to get this into my next WIP.

Have you heard of this? If so, have you used it in your writing or have you read it in a novel?

*cover art original U.K. edition

Diversity In Writing

07 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by Rachael Dahl in Characters, Writing, Writing Tip

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This is a topic near and dear to my heart. I’m white or if you prefer Caucasian. My hubs looks white but is Creole, which is a mixture of African American, German, and Cuban. His family hails from Texas via Louisiana and my children are a mixture of us. None of us has dark skin. However, I love my husband’s family, which runs the spectrum from dark African American to light, Latina, and Asian. Because of this, I always write characters that reflect one of them as I feel they are so underrepresented in literature or stereotyped. Recently, an agent, Saba Sulaiman addressed the question if someone should “throw” diversity in their manuscript to make it more marketable. She provided the best answer I’ve seen. If you’re wondering the same thing, I recommend you check out her answer at Pub Hub.

Show Don’t Tell

10 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by Rachael Dahl in Writing, Writing Resources, Writing Tip

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I thought I did this well in my writing, but according to the feedback I received from an editor, I actually do the opposite. So, that sent me on a quest to find out exactly what I was doing wrong. Here’s the best advice on how to make sure you’re not doing what I did.

It’s a blog post by editor Kate Foster and she discusses how many blogs are out there dedicated to this topic. She’s right. There are a gazillion of them. However, she enlightens us with some excellent “code” words that show us exactly how we show or how we tell. In addition she explains how to show with examples and by doing the following; “…show…them [the reader] through facial expression, body language and inner thought…”

I’ve been using this advice to catch my “telling” errors and I hope it works for you too.

First Time Author Woes

03 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by Rachael Dahl in Manuscript, Writing, Writing Tip

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The other day a writer friend of mine told me that writer’s whose debut novels come out to critical claim and big advances always struggle with their sophomore novel. She cited several friends she knew and quoted them as saying that they wished their first book wasn’t such a hit because of all the pressure to repeat it. Marie Claire published an article by such an author who wrote a piece that reiterated my friend. So to my writer friends who are not published, yet, be careful what you wish for.

Here’s the article. *Be aware there is some cussing.

Likable Main Characters

19 Monday Sep 2016

Posted by Rachael Dahl in Main Character (MC), Manuscript, Writing, Writing Resources

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It’s hard to write main characters that are strong and likable. Agent Linda Epstein’s blog had a recent guest post who addressed this particular problem and it struck a chord with me. I’m sharing the part of the post that I liked down below. For the rest of the article, you can read it here. (Highlights are my own.)

“According to the Transitive Property of Reader-Character Relations, readers will echo the reactions of characters they already know and like and/or trust, and oppose the reactions of characters they don’t like or trust. Consider the opening of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The Dursley family is shown to be amusingly small-minded and aggressively normal, so we readers enjoy feeling superior to them. But we also learn the Dursleys hate the Potter family for being so different, and since we dislike the Dursleys, we automatically like the Potters—a useful first step in making readers sympathize with Harry. Think about how your character math works as you introduce new figures into your book.

You can also use supporting characters to create more dimension in a character who thus far has had only one identity.

In the woods waits the only person with whom I can be myself. Gale. I feel the muscles in my face relaxing, my pace quickening. . . . The sight of him waiting there brings on a smile. . . .

“Hey, Catnip,” says Gale.

—The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

In the first six pages of The Hunger Games, we see that Katniss loves her family, but she’s not a particularly kind, enthusiastic, or pleasant person. Then she goes to meet Gale in the woods, and this happens: She relaxes. She smiles. She experiences pleasure in someone else’s presence, and Gale likes her as well, which confirms Katniss must have some warmth we haven’t seen yet. That affirms our own interest in her and maybe even warms it up to affection, and that makes us extremely invested in her when she volunteers for the games at the end of the chapter.

A corollary to the Transitive Property: Readers like characters who are liked by other people. They are suspicious of characters who aren’t liked by other people. If you’re writing premise-driven fiction, consider giving your protagonist friends right away, because the friends provide an instant affirmation of the worthiness of the reader’s interest in the protagonist. With that interest confirmed, you can get right on with the plot.”