And how we've blown off writing maxims to be successful

There’s a feeling among many writers/bloggers/content creators that our brains are too overwhelmed by a high cognitive overload to want to read anything that isn’t super quick and fast.

I get this.

There is a lot of information out there in the world.

Short-form content is, they say, the key.

Tim Denning describes short-form content as “where you share big ideas, be a little contrarian, drop cliffhangers for your stories, and share who you are. It gives people a taste.”

“Many old-school writers want to take a stranger on the street and send them to their newly published book on Amazon. All the reader has to do is give up $15–20 and 15–20 hours of their life,” Denning writes. “None of this works anymore because the internet and all its information have burdened us with a high cognitive load.

“Our brains hurt.”

So, yeah, we say to hell with that. One size fits all doesn’t fit everyone and that comes to readers of everything—books, blogs, news sites, magazines. To say that it does? It’s a little depressing and fatalistic.

High cognitive load when it refers to writing usually refers to the principles of plain English.

What’s that?

It’s just concise sentences. It’s active voice. It’s anti-jargon.

KEEPING IT SHORT AND SIMPLE

Keeping it short and simple has often been a dictum of novel writing when it comes to length (make it only 50,000 words, God forbid it hits over 100,000). It’s also part of content creation (other kinds) keep the reels and videos to 1 minute or less, the picture books to less than 500 words, and so on.

But I’ve (Carrie, not Shaun) also been lucky enough to go on book tours and listen to readers complain that books are too stripped down, not long enough to get lost in any more. Those specific readers? They don’t want short and simple.

BLOWING THAT MAXIM OFF

We’ve built a hyper-local daily paper on the opposite of this thought. We aren’t simple. Our articles tend to not be short. Our word choice and sentence structure is though.

And we have no short-form content to lure people in. We rarely remember to share our posts on Facebook and Instagram. And when we do? It’s never pithy.

But despite this (and our complete lack of marketing and despite that there are some amazing and award winning papers in our area already), in two years we’ve grown to a digital subscription base larger than both the major legacy weekly newspapers in our county with their very large (compared to us) staffs.

Our staff of two (the same goofballs you’re listening to right now) has written over a million words this year, just on that paper, and our open rate hovers over 60%.

We write long.

And people? They like it because they get to parse through the information and determine what matters to them when we cover something like a town meeting. We don’t decide what matters for them.

We trust our readers to be smart, to make their own decisions. So, no, we don’t write short. It’s something that Heather Cox Richardson (one of the most popular writers on Substack) and Andrew Revkin do, too.

Dumbing yourself and your content down? It’s not sexy.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO BE YOU

The other aspect of this is something Denning agrees with and that it’s okay to be you—your weird self, your personal self—in your writing. AI can do a lot of super amazing things, but it can’t do that—it can’t be personal. It can’t be you.

So, when you are writing—anything and everything—just be yourself. Think about who you are writing for, yes, but also be true to who you are, too. That’s where the magic happens. That’s where the communication and the connection happens, too.

Hey! It’s a quick happy holiday greeting from us. We took a quick pause in our celebrations to make the shortest podcast episode ever.

We hope that you are having a wonderful holiday season. It snowed here yesterday and it’s still super cool out. <3 This photo is from outside our neighbor's house.

SHAUN IS SICK! Gasp! He is never sick. But he is, so I've made the executive decision to replay/republish one of our most popular episodes from three years ago.

Ready? Let's go!

A quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'dangerous' gets a lot of hits.

To be fair, so does a quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'fun.'

But we're not here to tell you about the perils and delights of flirting. We're here to talk about writing, life, and dogs. Actually, flirting is part of most people's lives. But we're FOCUSING on the writing aspect.

Flirting is showing someone that you are attracted to them.

If you've listened to the random thought portion of the podcast, it's obvious that Carrie fails at flirting and in knowing when other people are flirting with her.

Side note from Carrie: This is because it's really extremely rare for me to be attracted to people in that way.

So, when it comes to writing about flirting, she has to do a lot of research about how people flirt, how people react to flirting, what the common aspects of flirting are.

All of us, as writers and humans, have blind spots or flaws. These places can be viewed as writing weaknesses or human weaknesses, but they honestly just make us real.

Second side note from Carrie: Not being attracted to people that way isn't a flaw, it's just something that's different than what our society considers the 'norm.'

When we're writing, we have to look for those places where we're not as strong. It could be setting. It could be showing our character's emotions. It could be plot. It could be making a character realistically flirt. It could be making dialogue real. The secret to becoming a better writer is to dive into those places where you're not as strong, and focus on them.

WRITING TIP OF THE POD

Be courageous. Go right to where your weaknesses are and excavate them. If you can't write a fight scene. Go write fight scenes. Read them. Watch them. Go into the places where your weaknesses are.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Flirting is not the same as being friendly. It's about intent.

SHOUT OUT

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.

IN THE WOODS, appeared in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books . There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!

HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED

Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!

ART

You can buy some of my art. I paint to help inform my stories and some of the prints are available now. There will be more soon. You can check it out here.

We improvised this podcast and you know what? You can kind of tell. It's all about making mistakes (a tiny bit about what holds some of us back about making people pay for our work) and we quickly reference this guy!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

So, recently, Vitaliy Katsenelson, CFA, who is a writer and investor had a Substack post that really resonated with me.

And by recently, I mean yesterday.

Anyway, in it Vitaliy said that “Each Day Is a Separate Life.”

You wake up and you are born. You go to sleep and that’s the end of the day/life. You get it, right?

This concept isn’t new. It comes from Seneca, this ancient philosopher and thinker in the Roman Empire, 2,000 years ago, who was rather hyper focused on thinking about wealth even though he was one of the richest people of his time. And who knows? Seneca probably took it from someone else.

Seneca was a thinker and a clerk and a politician and a writer. So, like a lot of us, he did a lot of things.

What matters to us on the podcast today is what Vitaliy took away from Seneca’s writings and that’s the concept of time.

He writes,

“After reading Seneca, it is impossible not to want to retake control of the most important, irreplaceable gift you are given as a birthright – time. But how do you do this? I borrowed my practical solution from Seneca: ‘Begin at once to live and count each separate day as a separate life.’ “‘Each separate day as a separate life.’ What a brilliant idea. A life bookended by sunrise and sunset. A day is a perfect, meaningful measuring unit. I can look at each day and evaluate how I spent it. If I achieve mostly perfect days, then they’ll spill into a perfect life. ”Every January most of us set New Year’s resolutions. Though we don’t think about it that way, we really treat each year as Seneca’s separate life. Except that a year is so long that we forget about our New Year’s resolutions by March.

We writers (and other humans) waste a lot of time thinking about writing, procrastinating about writing, and doing things like cruising social media, that don’t help us actually write.

We only have a limited amount of time in each day. We waste a lot of it. “What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death’s hands,” Seneca wrote. His advice according to Vitaliy, “Hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.” Think of each day that you write as a new life as a writer. If you spend that day, not writing, what does that mean? If this was your final day would you want to create? Would you want to share stories? Or would spend that last day arguing with other people in town about curb cuts and bad parking jobs?

As Vitaliy writes, “The goal is not to change our activities but to change our state of mind as we carry out those activities. You don’t want to stop thinking about or planning for tomorrow; instead, as you think about tomorrow, remember to appreciate today. Or as Seneca puts it, ‘Hurry up and live.’” Try it for a week maybe. Just one week commit to a couple of things:

1. Live the day like it’s your last
2. Wake up in the morning thinking about what matters to you.
3. Write something or create something on each day. It doesn’t need to be finished. It doesn’t need to be perfect.

A lot of people ask me (Carrie) how I produce so much. How much? I’ve written over a million words for our daily newspaper this year. And that’s just our newspaper, right? Well, secret number one is that I have a Shaun. But secret number two is that I expect to never have enough time to get all I want to get done out there.

Prince was a little like this too, but u...

Dogs are Smarter Than People, Writing Exercise, Cool Submission Opportunity

So, we’re been talking about dialogue in novels lately and tips about it and the purpose of it. To find any back posts, just head to LIVING HAPPY and search “dialogue.”

One of the things that some writing stylists talk about is the three-beat rule, which is credited to Screenwriter Cynthia Whitcomb.

Reedsy explains this as:

“What this recommends, essentially, is to introduce a maximum of three dialogue ‘beats’ (the short phrases in speech you can say without pausing for breath) at a time. Only after these three dialogue beats should you insert a dialogue tag, action beat, or another character’s speech.”

If it sounds a bit formulaic, well, it is. But it can be really helpful, too, the way formulas usually can.

Reedsy made a little graphic to demonstrate all this:

Here’s another example from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451:

Montag stopped at the door, with his back turned. “Millie?”

A silence. “What?”

“Millie? Does the White Clown love you?”

No answer.

“Millie, does—” He licked his lips. “Does your ‘family’ love you, love you very much, love you with all their heart and soul, Millie?”

There’s no Rule of Three here. It’s more Rule of Three or Less, which makes it a tiny bit less formulaic, right, and it’s natural.

What Bradbury does is integrate the dialogue (spoken word) with the dialogue beats (the stopping at the door, the silence, the licking of lips.”That action beat is different from a dialogue tag, which is the she said, he said, we yelled. It is a beat of action or emotion or setting/senses. And the dialogue beat again (which is what the rule is about) is the "short phrases in speech you can say without pausing for breath.:

But back to the less-than-three-beat rule. When we look up that at that Bradbury piece, emotions glide right in. He communicates the tension of the scene, right? And those short lines and short bits of talking make it very fast paced.

People's brains react to that fast pace and recognize it and look for it in dialogue.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

THE FABER ACTION! PRIZE

Faber launches the Action! Prize in direct response to research from the National Literacy Trust that reveals children’s reading enjoyment is at its lowest level in almost two decades, and that the problem is most acute for boys.

The prize will be launched in conjunction with Literary Manager and Film/TV Producer Eddie Gamarra, who will be judging the prize alongside Kieran Larwood, author of the World of Podkin One-Ear series, and with the support of EmpathyLab.

The Action! Prize, now open to agented and unagented writers in the UK, Ireland and US, calls for fast-paced and filmic, action-packed adventure stories, and offers a publishing contract to the three winners. Entries to the prize need to feature a diverse cast of fully rounded characters in any one of these four age bands: 7–9, 9–11, 12–14, 14+.

Faber Publisher Leah Thaxton says:

‘We are all alarmed at the falling number of children reading for pleasure, especially when it comes to boys; it is clear they are not finding enough of what they need on the shelves. I’m keen we offer a much wider range of instantly appealing,...

A few years ago, we posted this episode about dialogue, and honestly? We're . . . um. . . burnt out because of the election and people. So, since we're already focusing on dialogue over on LIVING HAPPY, we're recycling (upcycing) this from a few years ago. Thanks for putting up with us!

These next few podcasts, we thought we should get all nitty-gritty with some quick grammar tips or style tips for people writing fiction.

It can help you nonfiction writers, too, we swear.

When you’re writing dialogue (people talking to each other), you’re going to want to follow these punctuation rules.

• Use quotes.
• Have the dialogue tag (who the speaker is, the he said/she asked) in the actual same paragraph as the dialogue.
• Punctuate it all correctly. (That’s a lot of knowledge right there.)

But here’s the big one:

Don’t go screwing around with those dialogue tags, also known as speaker tags.

You want to keep it simple when it’s a dialogue tag.

“Said” and “asked” are your besties here. If you do anything else? You look like a crappy writer who is trying too hard and the tag becomes more attention-grabbing than the very important words your character said.

“I love you,” she said reads a lot differently than “I love you,” she murmured and bellowed and hissed.

That can be your intention, but you don’t want to keep doing it all the time.

Here look at it.

“I love you,” she murmured.

“I love you,” he cat-called.

“I know,” she bellowed.

He screamed, “Of course you do.”

“And what do you mean by that?” she enthused.

So, the other big thing to remember is this: You can’t sigh out or smile out words, so don’t use them for speaker tags. You can use them for dialogue beats, but that means you have to punctuate them differently.

“I love you,” she said. – Requires a comma after the word ‘you,’ and a lower-case S for ‘she.’

“I love you.” She sighed. – Requires a period after the word ‘you,’ and an upper-case S for ‘she.’

Oh, and romance and horror writers, we all love to make our characters hiss especially when our lovers are shapeshifters, but you can’t hiss out a bunch of words if there are no s-sounds.

Make sure your reader knows who is speaking by putting the dialogue tag next to the dialogue.

Only call attention to the things you want to call attention to.

In the Mood to Randomly Buy Us Coffee or the dogs some treats? Click here AND SEND US A $1. Earn a Shout-out on the podcast, too!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!

So, in the world of writing, everyone talks about needing a beta reader and a critique partner.

Everyone that is, except Carrie, who has trust issues and survives as a lonely, isolated writer in Maine.

What is a beta reader?

It's that person who reads your story, gives you some mild suggestions that feel like a big hug. This is a person you want to party with, a person you can cry to, a person with no mean judgement. This person is basically the human equivalent of your dog: loyal, helpful, good and they give you advice.

What is a critique partner?

These awesome people help you feel less alone, they share stories and ideas with you. They see your story piece by piece, usually, and they help you find the flaws in this work-in-process. These people are like your life partner. They see you without make-up. They see you vomiting into the porcelain pig of your creativity and they hold up your hair because nobody wants puke in hair.

Do you need beta readers?

According to everyone else in the world, yes.

But remember they aren’t an editor. They aren’t a critique partner. They aren’t your dad. They are just someone who gives you feedback.

There’s a great article on beta readers in The Write Practice that goes, “You might not want to hear this, but there is something wrong with your book.

“Hear me out. You know how you can read the same page twenty times and then someone comes along and points out a typo? Yep. We've all been there.

“The same thing can happen with major issues in your book. Things like inconsistencies in world-building, character description, plot lines, and even misplaced objects in the story can throw your readers out of your book and confuse the heck out of them.

“One of my beta readers caught the fact that I had my characters shackled and then a couple of paragraphs later, they were swinging fists and fighting. Where did the shackles go? Good question, dear beta reader.”

And that is why beta readers are great. You want them to be honest, to actually give you feedback, and to read in the genre your story is in and point out in a nice and gentle loving way about inconsistencies.

Ignore everything else Shaun says in this podcast.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Dog Tip For Life - Don't be afraid of showing us the messy, disgusting, less-than-perfect aspects of your process. We can love you no matter what.

Life Tip Of the Pod - Pick your critique partners carefully, man. Seriously. Pick someone who wants to stay up with you rather than pull you down.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

It’s here.

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.