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Posts by Carol Despeaux Fawcett

Aug 25

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Writing to a positive resolution

“Listen, Paula. I am going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost.”

Thus begins Isabel Allende’s heartrending story of the death of her daughter, Paula, who suffered a seizure and fell into an irreversible coma when she was 26 years old.

Hoping that someday her daughter will be able to read her words, Allende began writing as Paula lay in a Madrid hospital. The author deftly weaves the story of her family history, her upbringing, and the history of her country, Chile, with the story of her daughter’s illness. Though Paula: A Memoir is a tragic story of the loss of her child, Allende turns it into a beautiful tribute full of lyrical, mystical, and sometimes humorous writing. Though we suffer with her over her child’s fate, and feel her pain, she eventually leads us to a place of transcendence.

Instead of ending her book with an artificial, tacked-on “happy ending” or a moralistic treatise on “what she learned” from her journey, Allende begins long before the end of the book to show us her turns. Read more

Aug 23

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Three ways to feed your muse: hunting down inspiration, Part 2

You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.  Jack London

Inspiration comes from many places. Sometimes, it’s a visual image—fog settling over the bay, a blue jay teetering on a phone wire, a dead leaf swirling on the wind. Sometimes, inspiration comes in the form of sound—a phrase overheard, the sound of water rushing over rocks, silence when the power goes out.  But too often, inspiration doesn’t just come out of the blue—I have to go hunting for it.

One of my favorite ways to find inspiration is to read the work of others—poetry, fiction, nonfiction. As a writer, we train ourselves while reading to have different levels of awareness running at the same time. Kind of like having multiple computer programs running at once.

On one level, we’re fully immersed in the story or poem, but on another level we’re noticing language, syntax, the arrangement of words, metaphors, rhythm. We notice how the author or poet uses concretes and abstractions, how she presents her characters or builds suspense.

As you read, notice if the piece grabs you. And, if it does, where does that happen? Be on the lookout for what inspires your muse.

Sometimes, an idea or inspiration will come in the form of one word. One wild word that sparks your muse into action. Read more

Aug 19

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Nap your way to health & creativity

Let’s face it, we are insanely busy these days. It seems as if the more technology we have to make our lives easier, the less time we actually have for rest and relaxation or even vacations. (And when we do go on vacation, we often take our work with us).

We live in a culture where the myth of a superman and a superwoman is perpetuated daily and we begin to believe we can and should become these super beings.

I know. I’ve been there and still am to some extent. And I’ve paid for it with my health, my happiness, and my quality of life. It’s called burnout. And the really insane part is I’ve done it more than once. Think I’d learn, right? Read more

Aug 17

Three steps to change & how you can realize your writing goals

New York Times best-selling author Bob Mayer’s nonfiction book Write It Forward is the best book I’ve read for helping writers become successful authors. It’s not a book about plotting or character development (though he does have an excellent book for that—The Novel Writer’s Toolkit). Write It Forward addresses things like fear, self-sabotage, how to design a writer’s business plan with long term and daily goals, how to take yourself seriously as a writer, how to get others to take you seriously, and that big, scary monster called change.

Mayer’s three steps of change are:   Read more

Aug 15

Buck, the movie: how your characters reflect you

Last night I saw the documentary Buck about horse whisperer Buck Brannaman. This movie is not just for horse lovers. It’s a touching story of hope and humanity—how one man overcame the pain and horrors of his early childhood and turned that experience, with the help of loving foster parents, into helping horses and their owners. Instead of repeating the cycle of abuse his father perpetrated on him, Buck found a way to transmute that pain into love, understanding, patience, and compassion.

Buck is a modern-day cowboy version of Gandhi.

The film shows Buck at work—his 40 weeks on the road each year traveling from town to town putting on horse clinics for the locals, showing them how to communicate with and handle their horses. The film shows us where Buck comes from—his harsh early years where he developed the survival skills and insights that eventually set his personal philosophy. We also get to see him working on the set of the movie the Horse Whisperer with Robert Redford.

What does this story have to do with writing? As writers, we’re constantly on the lookout for good characterization, setting, dialogue, etc. This movie has it all—but there was something else I learned about being a writer. Read more

Aug 11

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The shape of a scene: endings

Each scene in your novel has a shape. The beginning is the set up. The middle is the rise of action with alternating beats. And then there’s the end of the scene which should have a little, or sometimes big, rise in tension.

Best-selling fantasy and sci-fi author, Nancy Kress, says that tension comes from two things pulling in opposite directions. The tension at the end of a scene could be something as small as a character’s thoughts conflicting with their actions. Or something as large as good vs. evil locked in immortal combat.

Kress says a rise in tension can be effected in several ways. Two specific ways are as follows: Read more

Aug 9

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Naming your fear is the first step to conquering it

Different cultures throughout time have taught us that naming things gives us power over them.  At the recent Pacific Northwest Writer’s Conference, New York Times best-selling author, Bob Mayer, spoke on the last day about fear. He started his talk with a quote from Stephen King:

“I’m convinced fear is at the root of most bad writing.”

I’ve taken Mayer’s Write It Forward online class and the first thing he does is have us name our fear. I couldn’t do it. For years, I’ve worked hard on conquering my fears and felt as if I’d pretty much conquered them all (even my extreme fear of snakes). I know all about the concept of “going fearward” and often recommend it to my clients. So when Mayer suggested I probably hadn’t been faced with my current fear yet, I thought, “Uh, huh. Right.”

But there was something wrong in my writing life. I’d been working on my next book and procrastinating terribly but not understanding why. I thought maybe my subconscious was trying to work something out with the plot. But that wasn’t it. Read more

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