Here's my latest article over on ScriptMag, about movies with a message.
One of the primary reasons I love sci-fi is that it provides a powerful vehicle for exploring social issues that might otherwise be too politically incorrect to tackle head on. I cut my sci-fi teeth watching Star Trek, which is known for its many messages and moral explorations, and I’m quite sure that it… [read more at ScriptMag]
Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay
Many people have unfinished writing projects that linger for years, but it's never too late to finish your book. And the time to get restarted might just be now.
I reached out to Terri Fedonczak, a long time writing community member, to talk to us about her experience finishing a long-time writing project after 15 years of dreaming and what that's been like for her. Terri has been such a great participant and gotten so much out of the writing community that I recently invited her to join us as a coach for one of our coaching groups on the site.
Read on to find out about Terri's extremely inspiring project for parents (I've seen a preview and it's terrific!) and how she conquered her writer's isolation and resistance with the help of the writing community and saw her book all the way through to done.
Thanks for having me, Jenna! When I finished my first draft, it was the culmination of a dream I have had for fifteen years. I remember telling my niece about how I wanted to write a parenting book and discussing topics with her; this was in 1996. When I actually finished my first draft, I thought there would be angels singing . . . not so much! What I didn’t realize was the time involved in the editing process -- there's always more!
I spent fifteen years working on the first draft, but I had been jotting down ideas in my journal for ten years before that. In the ensuing years, I wrote little snippets in journals and spoke ideas into my portable tape recorder.
Yes, my first session of the writing community was spent culling all the bits and recordings into a little 60 page book.
I interviewed three different editors, and picked Darla Bruno. She read through my first draft and suggested that the book wanted to be more. I hadn’t put my life into the book or any coaching tools. So, I took the challenge and spent the next year or so rewriting it. The completed book is 214 pages, and it’s everything I envisioned back in 1996!
I'm the mother of four daughters: three biological and one bonus girl that came to live with us in 2010. I'm a breast cancer survivor; I mention it, because it changed the course of my life. I left my fifteen-year commercial real estate practice to become a Certified Martha Beck Life Coach, writer, and speaker. Breast cancer changed my priorities completely; the threat of losing my life awakened me to the importance of living my right life.
The title of the book is Field Guide to Plugged-in Parenting, Even if You Were Raised by Wolves. It answers the question of how to be a good parent if you have no role models -- you know you don't want to replay your childhood, but you are lost as to an alternative. It's a compilation of all the parenting and coaching tools I have used successfully with my kids, with some humor thrown in to lighten the load. I walk you through a process to create your own parenting plan, so that your kids will be starting with an infinitely better foundation, thereby ending the wolf-baby cycle forever. Wolf babies is a term I coined to describe those of us who were raised by wolves and suffer from lack-based thinking as a result.
Jill Winski was in my life coach training class, and she put out an ad for the writing community on our Facebook page. I saw it and knew that I needed help with making my book a reality. It felt like divine guidance . . . and it was.
I’ve learned that there is no magic pill, place, or instrument that delivers a quality product. All it takes is complete honesty, utter vulnerability, and a daily practice of showing up to the page . . . no big whoop!
I think the biggest challenge I faced was the feeling that I was all alone in my desire to write a book. I knew I had an important message, I just didn’t understand how to deliver it. With the writing community for support and accountability, my biggest challenge now is the acceptance that I am a writer. It’s not a fluke or a pipe-dream; I wrote a book, ipso facto, I’m a writer! The biggest difference in my writing habit is that I’m no longer plagued with resistance, so I write every day. Some days it’s just 20 minutes of morning pages in my journal, and some days it’s three hours working on a blog post or outline for the new book . . . but I write every day.
First of all, join the writing community! It’s the best way to incorporate writing into your daily life. Secondly, write every day, even if it’s just 15 minutes in your journal. While your logical mind is busy watching your hand move across the paper, the most delightful tidbits will rise up from your creative mind. When one pops up that excites you, expand it . . . like you're telling your favorite friend a story. You don’t need anything other than a pen, paper, and a bit of quiet time to awaken your creative side . . . and then you’re off to the races!
I’m developing a program that I will be delivering to incoming 9th grade girls called, “Field Guide to the Wilds of High School.” I developed the program while on safari in Africa (jeesh, that sounds so hoity-toity), and it’s based on the power of the pride. I watched the way the lionesses took care of the pride, and how their raw feminine power ran their world. It reminded me of what’s missing in Girl World. So I’m taking the program into schools this summer, and then I will turn the results into a book for teens and a corresponding book for parents on how to survive high school.
I believe that everyone has a creative person living within them, and that creative energy can turn drudgery into joy. Find some way to nurture your creative side, and your life will blossom in endless and unexpected ways…or at least that’s what happened to me.
Terri Fedonczak has 22 years of parenting experience and is a certified life coach, specializing in parent and teen coaching. After 16 years as a commercial real estate agent, a bout with breast cancer transformed Terri’s life in 2010, making her realize that time with her four girls and patient husband was a much better deal than money and status. It was time to put her mission into action. She left sales and embarked on a journey of spreading the message of girl power for good. When Terri is not writing books, speaking, coaching, or blogging, you can find her paddle boarding on the sparkling waters of Boggy Bayou, knitting to the consternation of her children, who are buried in scarves and hats, or dancing in her kitchen to Motown.
You can follow Terri online at https://www.girlpowerforgood.com/ and on Facebook here. Look for Terri's Field Guide to be published in January 2014!
I had the pleasure of meeting Aaron Cooley earlier this year in Los Angeles and I was instantly intrigued by his story of not only how he came to write his first novel, Shaken, Not Stirred*, but also how he went about publishing and promoting it. So much so that I've invited him here to talk about it with us today.
Aaron is a both a screenwriter and novelist and works in film development for Joel Schumacher Productions. His knowledge of the film industry has influenced his approach to his novel, as you'll discover, and given him a leg up in creating a pretty bad-ass book trailer. He's shared some real gems of wisdom all writers can benefit from, including tips on e-publishing, what to write, and how to reach your audience.
Enjoy!
Well, I didn't intend to write a book at all. I've been working in Hollywood in film development and doing some screenwriting on the side for over ten years now. In 2007, while researching a movie I had been hired to rewrite, I came across a little blurb about a World War II-era Yugoslavian spy named Dusko Popov who Ian Fleming had met and upon whom he had probably based aspects of James Bond. (I now know there are dozens of people who have claimed to be his inspiration.) I thought this would make a fantastic buddy spy action film, so I started pitching it around town. What I found was that although no one had explored my particular Popov take on the story, there were already at least 3 or 4 "Young Ian Fleming" projects in development -- one of which finally got made for television starring Dominic Cooper and comes out next year. So I put it on the shelf. Two years later, I still couldn't get the idea out of my head and as I started to notice how popular and successful e-books had suddenly become -- I think Wool had just sold to Ridley Scott -- I decided to take a crack at it. I always dreamed of being a fantasy novelist when I was a kid and this was my chance to see if I could actually write a book start to finish.
I think the world of e-books is an exciting way for struggling screenwriters to get their work out there; screenwriting can feel like a very unrewarding career in which no one's reading your stuff, and nothing's getting made. Even many of the highest-paid names in the business feel this frustration. I've had three separate paid writing gigs that were read by probably about 20 people combined because those producers had money, but not the connections to do anything with the scripts. Whereas my book's being read by thousands of people I've never met. That's the real dream of a writer, isn't it?
We tried to do this big movie-type build-up to the launch that started weeks in advance. The main thing I would do differently is to get the book on sale as quickly as possible, much earlier in the process. Because Amazon only allows "big" publishers to do pre-sales, I will always wonder how many people saw my trailer or started following me on Twitter in May or June or July of 2012, discovered they couldn't buy the book yet, then completely forgot about it. I do think the main thing we did well was tie my book into the opening weekend of SKYFALL -- there were a lot more people searching online for Bond stuff in the weeks leading up to that, and a lot of online bloggers and journalists came out of the woodwork asking to interview me because they wanted to write something about 007 but didn't have access to the Broccolis or Daniel Craig. I think that helped with the great sales results I had in the first couple weeks.
It's funny you ask -- the paperback of Shaken, Not Stirred is finally going on sale starting Black Friday, mainly so my mom can use it as a stocking stuffer for Christmas. We started with an e-book-only release because when e-books exploded, it seemed like this thrilling, completely new medium -- like when people first started posting things on YouTube -- and that's what I was initially drawn to and wanted to be a part of. But I started to wonder if I might have made a mistake at last year's Thanksgiving. I'm from a huge family and celebrate Thanksgiving with 70+ people. Last year, it was 3 weeks after the e-book had been published, and all my older aunts and uncles and even cousins my age and younger were coming up to me and complaining that they couldn't read my book because they didn't have an e-reader. But when my 92-year-old Grandpa Harold cornered me about it, I knew I better do something about it. Since then, I've just been waiting for the right time. The next Bond movie is way too far away (2015!), so Christmas 2013 it is.
I have a full-time job -- but I actually think that's a good thing for writers. I can only devote two hours a day to writing, but if that's the only time you have, you really have to be focused in those two hours and it makes you more productive. I think if I had 8 hours I'd still only get 2 or 3 productive hours in each day. I actually set an alarm and turn off email and social media until that alarm goes off. The hardest time to motivate is when you don't know what your next project is, and you have to spend that 2 hours brainstorming and going through old idea docs and banging your head against your walls. I've spent weeks outlining an idea and reading thousands of pages of research on it only to realize, "This isn't the one." When you're supposed to be writing something, you know it. But make sure you pitch it to a couple people early on. To this day, my 3 or 4 best-received scripts (and the novel) are things that I pitched to people early on and kept getting, "Wow, that's awesome, you've got to write that," as a response.
I'm from the movie business, so I still always start with the three-act structure. Even my book has a classic three-act structure -- but I think it's perfect for it, since it's supposed to read like a prototype Bond movie. A lot of screenwriting books go into even greater detail about this structure; my favorite is Blake Snyder's Save The Cat*. There have been articles just this summer specifically ripping this book saying that movies are now too married to this structure. I have found my tastes drifting more and more to TV, so I can't argue with that. But it's good to have a map to get your story started early on in the process. I always try to put my story in Blake's structure beat sheet very early on, just because it gives me ideas for scenes I really need to get my characters from A to B. But then I throw that beat sheet away and never look at it again. Screenwriting rules are meant to be broken.
And ultimately it's all about the characters. I still use a worksheet of 30 character questions that my college screenwriting professor Marc Lapadula gave our class in 1997. It's detailed questions you should ask of all your main characters, from their relationship with their parents to how many sexual partners they've had and who they were. Characters are always the most important thing, and I think they're becoming more important again as people gravitate toward shows like BREAKING BAD. For the book, I filled out all 30 questions for my two male leads and Christine, the femme fatale. As I'm filling these out, almost every answer sends me right back to my story outline to add a scene or even just a line of dialogue based on what I now know about the characters' backgrounds.
Look, I had some obvious advantages working in this business. We shot the trailer on the Fox lot. My cinematographer has been our 2nd Unit DP (Director of Photography) on some of my boss's movies, and shot that submarine movie that came out earlier this year, PHANTOM. My editor gets paid a ton of money to direct and edit commercials, so he really knew how to make it the perfect pace and length. My composer apprentices under a living legend, Hans Zimmer. It was my idea, I wrote it and "directed" it, but these guys are pros who do this everyday and they made me look good. An author in Iowa unfortunately may not have the same resources and a weak trailer can potentially hurt you more than not having one at all. I think the main things that work about mine are that it's short and that there's no "acting" in it. I think unless you have real pros acting for a talented director, you're really rolling the dice on how professional the acting will come off. The best book trailers I've seen are quick, to the point, and don't have actors.
I think my Blazers might have a playoff team this year.
A former child actor, Aaron Cooley has been living on film sets since the age of three. Upon graduating from Yale, Aaron migrated to Los Angeles, where he has apprenticed under director Joel Schumacher, most recently serving as his head of development and Associate Producer. As a screenwriter, Aaron has developed projects for the companies behind PULP FICTION, TRANSFORMERS, ROCKY, SAW, and THE BREAK-UP, as well as helped create advertising for various MTV Awards Shows and public service campaigns. SHAKEN, NOT STIRRED is Aaron’s first novel.
You can find Aaron on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/fleming17f, where he tweets about all things Bond plus intriguing TV and screenwriting topics. Or "Like" his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/shakennotstirredbook for updates on the upcoming paperback release and his future writing projects.
As always, we love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Warmly,
Today's article is a guest post by story and Enneagram expert Jeff Lyons of StoryGeeks.com. His article touches on a often overlooked aspect of story development that many writers miss and their story structure suffers as a result: their main character's "moral problem".
Jeff will be teaching us more about how to identify a character's moral problem in his upcoming workshop here in Berkeley, California (I'm co-hosting) on October 26 and 27 on his method of Rapid Story Development. We'd love to have you join us if you'd like to learn more.
Now here's Jeff's article:
Hands down, the most important and most overlooked story structure element all writers either miss altogether or bungle is the moral problem. This pesky problem is not just a nice perk -- it is a make-it-or-break-it story structure component of any good story.
The moral problem is the hole in the heart of your protagonist. He or she starts off the story in some pickle, some predicament of their own making, ideally brought about by the very moral problem to which they are oblivious. This problem is making them act badly in the world. They are hurting people emotionally, mentally, and maybe even physically due to this lack. It’s the hurting of others that make it a moral issue, and not just a psychological one (the distinction is about hurting others versus hurting oneself). The character needs to learn some lesson about how to live in the world so that they no longer hurt others; some lesson that elevates them (hopefully, but not always) to be a better person. They learn that life lesson that makes them moral again.
Good stories have protagonists with this hole in their heart. And the best stories rip out the protagonist’s heart and then somehow heal it again, before the heart gets put back inside (I’m speaking metaphorically, of course -- unless this is a Clive Barker horror story).
So, the question becomes: how does a writer figure out how to find one of these heart-holes? How do you assure that your protagonist has a meaningful moral problem and an equally meaningful growth-moment at the end of the story where they see the error of their evil ways? Some writers have a natural gift for this and flawed and tortured protagonists come to them as gracefully as flight to an eagle. For others (i.e., most of us) the process of finding a good moral problem is more like trying to find a taxi on a rainy night.
The good news, however, is that there is a tool that any writer can use to help them crack this problem, regardless of their natural gifts. That tool is called the Enneagram. The Enneagram is a powerful archetypal system that describes the nine core personality drives underlying all human behavior. Each of the nine drives is rooted in thoughts, feelings and actions that largely determine how we interact with the world, for good or ill. Everyone has an Enneagram type -- including fictional characters and stories themselves. Writers have used this tool for many decades to develop multi-dimensional characters, but it can also be used as a story development too, when coupled with story structure principles. It is this relationship between the Enneagram and story structure that gives writers a doorway to finding the most dramatically powerful moral problem for their protagonist.
Let’s take an example and walk through the problem as a point of illustration:
You just wrote the movie The Verdict. Frank, the protagonist, is a ambulance-chasing, alcoholic lawyer who is constantly looking for the next sucker to scam into hiring him. You know he’s a drunk. You know he’s in pain. But what’s his moral problem? Is his alcoholism the moral problem? Alcohol hurts lots of people. Is his pain the moral problem? If so, what’s the pain? How do you figure out which it is? Writers spend lots of time caught up in this maze of questions and confusion.
Enneagram to the rescue. Each of the nine Enneagram personality styles has something called a "poison". This poison is the hole in the heart. It is the thing that poisons everything they do, everything they feel, everything they think. So, what’s poisoning Frank? Certainly alcohol is, but that’s mostly just hurting him. It’s not hurting other people. What he’s doing that’s hurting others is that he is using them. He sees people as targets, not people. So, we have the answer, right? He’s using people. That’s the moral problem, right? No, not quite. That’s what he’s doing; that’s not why he’s doing it. The moral problem is the motivation, the thing causing the using.
The Enneagram poison can help you quickly answer this question and find the real moral problem. Of the nine personality styles, the 3rd style ("The Achiever") is the one who has the poison of secretly feeling that they have no personal worth or value. This fits Frank’s actions to a tee. For him, people have no value; they’re things to be used. He ultimately feels this because deep down he believes he has no value or worth himself and therefore no one else has value either. Over the course of the movie he learns that, indeed, not only do people matter, but that he himself matters and he can make a difference in the world.
And so not only does the Enneagram technique of looking for the poison explain the motivation behind the protagonist's immoral behavior, it also points to the final self-revelation at the end of the story, where the hero or heroine realizes how to heal the hole in their heart. In this case, Frank realizes he has value and so do other people. He is able to make a new choice as a result.
As a writer, having this key piece of information -- a clear moral problem -- is critical for you to not only address your main character's development and arc, but also to guide you on how best to structure your story so that key story beats, like the inciting incident, low point, and final climax, are all driven by the engine of the protagonist's moral problem.
This is a deep subject, but a critical one for any writer. The moral problem can make or break your story, and the Enneagram can help you rapidly navigate the difficult questions that might otherwise hang you up and drag out the development process.
If you'd like to learn more, join us in Berkeley on October 26 & 27. Early registration ends TOMORROW, Thursday, October 10. Find more and register here: http://RapidStoryDevelopment.com
As always, we love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Warmly,
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In the third and final session of my interview series with Enneagram and story development expert Jeff Lyons (recordings no longer available), we talked about "Bridging the Gap from Motivation to Structure With the Enneagram." Today's post is a recap of what we discussed.
His process for "bridging the gap" from premise line to character to story is quite fascinating, and he illustrated it using a breakdown of The Great Gatsby according to the Enneagram.
Here's an overview of the process:
Have you considered using the Enneagram in your story development? Will you consider using it in the future? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Warmly,
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