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.

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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.

We’ve started a series of paid and free posts and podcast episodes about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. To see them all just look up “hit novel” or “bestselling” in the search bar.

In his book Hit Lit, which we’ve been talking about, James W. Hall talks about 12 elements that he thinks really make those super-popular-multi-million-copy bestsellers in American fiction in the past 100 years or so.

And one of those features?

It’s a fractured family.

Yep. That’s a big feature of what Hall found in the 12 books he analyzed, (Gone With the Wind, Peyton Place, To Kill a Mockingbird, Valley of the Dolls, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, The Dead Zone, The Hunt for Red October, The Firm, The Bridges of Madison County and The Da Vinci Code).

“Families under economic stress, families at emotional war, families splitting apart, families with a missing parent, families dealing with disease, death, infidelity, job stress, or out-right life-threatening danger. You name it. Badly destabilized families are featured in each of our twelve bestsellers,” Hall writes.

Why? That’s the question, I think.

Why do we as readers buy and books that have fractured families in them. OR is it that books with a lot of these elements and features (there are 12 that Hall lists) make books that feel like a lived and recognizable experience.

Most of us know what a fractured family feels like. Most of us know what it is to feel like an outsider, to live in a time of crisis, are intrigued by secret societies.

These novels hit at commonalities in human experience. And families (even a lack of one) are things that resonates throughout our culture.

RANDOM THOUGHT

A man was arrested for sneaking into his neighbors’ homes and sniffing their shoes. the AP article about this is here.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

If you have to, go ahead and sniff shoes, just don’t eat them. Humans get mad about that.

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!

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Dogs are Smarter Than People

There’s an old NPR article about writing bestsellers that quotes critic Ruth Franklin’s overview of American best-sellers as saying "No possible generalization can be made regarding the 1,150 books that have appeared in the top 10 of the fiction best-seller list since its inception."

In his book Hit Lit, which we’ve been talking about, James W. Hall disagrees, talking about 12 elements that he thinks really make those super-popular-multi-million-copy bestsellers in American fiction in the past 100 years or so.

We’ve been talking about that a lot. Hall analyzed Gone With the Wind, Peyton Place, To Kill a Mockingbird, Valley of the Dolls, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, The Dead Zone, The Hunt for Red October, The Firm, The Bridges of Madison County and The Da Vinci Code.

And I just wanted to have a moment to regroup because I found an old interview with Hall and Marc Schultz on Publisher’s Weeklywhere he talks about what element he found in those 12 top selling books that surprised him.

He says, “One I didn’t expect to find is something we came to call the Golden Country, which is a phrase from Orwell’s 1984. Winston, the protagonist, trapped in this dull empty world, has created in his imagination this edenic, natural, beautiful landscape called the Golden Country. It’s his ideal world. And not just in these 12 books, but in all the bestsellers we looked at, there is always an image of a place or a time that’s this idealized, edenic, natural landscape that serves a reference point for much of the story.”

We’ve talked a bit about that in the last week. There’s this idealized want of an idealized world or time that we long for, right? And the characters in our books long for it, too.

In that same interview, Hall says, “But the ingredients themselves remain the same, as Americans we’re really reading, and have wanted to read, permutations of the same book for the last 100 years, and probably into the foreseeable future.”

And it doesn’t have to necessarily be awesome writing for us Americans to want to read these books.

“Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place, once cracked, "If I'm a lousy writer, then a hell of a lot of people have got lousy taste.’” Sarah Weinman writes, “What Metalious and her kin in best-sellerdom really possess, as Hall explains so well in Hit Lit, is the power to connect with readers through their hearts and guts as much as, if not more than, their minds.”

It’s about your heart, humans. About your heart.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

As we learned from the raccoons, don’t be aggressive if you don’t get your food or else they call the sheriff on you.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK ALL ABOUT A WOMAN CORNERED BY 100 RACCOONS. YIKES!

The link

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Guidelines:

• The winner receives $3,000; online publication; and a consultation with Marin Takikawa, a literary agent with The Friedrich Agency.
• The second- and third-place finalists receive cash prizes ($300/$200), onli...

Dogs are Smarter than People podcast

We’ve started a series of paid and free posts and podcast episodes about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. To see them all just look up “hit novel” or “bestselling” in the search bar.

Whew. Blah. Blah. Blah. Right? Not a bestselling way to start a podcast episode.

What’s a better way?

Well, according to Jack Hall who wrote Hit Lit, “In most bestsellers, there’s a central character who sets off on a journey that takes her from rustic America into turbulent urban landscapes, where her agrarian values either help her succeed or doom her to failure. Almost as often, the heroes of bestsellers make an exodus in the opposite direction, from the pressures of cities to the bucolic countryside.”

Think the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Think the Wizard of Oz.

Think Star Wars.

Think Twilight.

Think Outlander.

Jason Hellerman for NoFilmSchool writes, “The "fish out of water" idiom refers to a character who is removed from their normal day to day and has to catch up with their new outlook on the world. This writing trope is very popular in TV pilot episodes, action movies, and across almost any genre.

“If the character adapts fast to the new environment, it's said they are like ‘a duck takes to water.’"

You might be a city girl in the country or a country boy in the city or just a Hallmark Christmas movie character, but there’s something that resonates in that trope, something that makes a bestseller.

Hall takes it a bit deeper saying that it’s about mythic identities. We see it in elections. The midwestern dad VP choice. The hillbilly boy done good VP choice. The outsider. The insider. We create myths where every single person in the middle of America is a part of “Heartland” full of “hardworking blue-collar” peeps.

“Red state vs blue state. Working-class vs corporate elite. Virtuous vs decadent,” Hall writes.

These polarities become mythic, gigantic, and they popularize stereotypes and polarize views.

“While we all know these labels are bogus, they are so ingrained in our sense of national identity that we reflexively embrace them even as we discount their accuracy,” Hall writes.

Books that argue both sides of these polarities and tensions? They tend to be the bestsellers.

DOG TIP OF THE POD

Don’t be afraid to explore new experiences to make the best story of your life that you can!

RANDOM THOUGHT LINKS

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2024/09/21/mouse-airplane-meal-emergency-landing/75324632007

https://shepherdexpress.com/puzzles/news-of-the-weird/news-of-the-weird-week-of-october-3-2024

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...

We’ve started a series of paid and free posts about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here.

In James Hall’s book, HIT LIT, he looks at twelve top-selling novels and tries to find similarities to their success.

One thing that he found in the twelve novels is the theme of “America as paradise.”

He writes, “America-as-paradise, an idea that so powerfully shapes our national identity, is one of the key motifs.”

Despite the decade the story was written in, he and his students, he wrote, kept discovering the motif of America as a lost Eden.

“American readers have a powerful hankering for stories grounded in the earth itself,” he writes. “Surely, part of this hunger is connected to one of our central national myths—America as the new Eden. A land of second chances, fresh beginnings in the virginal wilderness.”

Blame it on the Puritans, maybe, but Americans have traditionally been into making novels into bestsellers if they talk about this.

Often, the story has to do with getting back to this golden land that the hero or heroine has been cast out of or alienated from. Think Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind trying to get back to her vision of the South and Tara, her home. Think Michael Corleone in the Godfather cast out of the family and its golden promise.

That longing to go back to the way things were (a more innocent time, a more accepting family or culture, a place of safety) is a common aspect in American hit novels.

Alfred Kazin says way back in On Native Grounds (1956), a lot of American literature “rests upon a tradition of enmity to the established order, more significantly a profound alienation from it.”

You can see this happen in the books that have sold over 100 million novels as well

The English books: A Tale of Two Cities, the first Harry Potter, And Then There Were None, The Hobbit, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland all have the loss of innocence or place and then the desire to get back to it or at least some mourning of it.

These are English novels, though. The top-selling American novels are the Da Vinci Code and The Bridges of Madison County, both selling over 80 million copies. Both involve protagonists who lose their safe worlds and lean into something secret, something complicated, across large vistas and settings.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Go to your greener pastures and escape the rodeo, but also be okay with coming back home to where it’s safe, too.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

It’s from the AP

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 “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

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WRITE SUBMIT SUPPORT

It’s my last time teaching Write, Submit, Support at the Writing Barn. It’s online. It’s six-months. It’s a kick-butt program. Come hang out with me and a few other writers for six...