Fable & The Verbivore

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A podcast for writers who read, readers who write, and anyone who loves words.

3 DAYS AGO

Ep 247: Success and Finding Contentment in Your Work

These notes include affiliate links. Today on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re sharing an unscripted episode where we talk about rethinking our definitions of success and finding contentment in our work. Over the last year, we’ve done a wide range of topics — from writing about disabilities to writing with empathy —that took a lot of energy and preparation. We’ve also been doing this podcast for almost 5 years and as we near our 250th episode we felt it would be good to do a series of episodes getting back to our roots of how this first began — through unplanned conversations about life, books, and the writing craft. So, for the next few episodes we’re continuing to see where our conversations take us, without planning in advance what we’ll talk about. In this conversation, we dig into reconsidering our ideas around success and finding internal motivation and fulfillment through your work. Things like: - Making your own definition of success, but also re-defining it when needed - Focusing in on internal motivations and noticing what actually brings you fulfillment in your work and process, but also what doesn’t - Accepting challenges that excite and spark interest for you in your work as well as require you to rise to the occasion - Noticing when what used to be motivating feels like drudgery and taking a break or stepping back to ask what’s changed and what may no longer be serving you - Looking at each project as its own individual story with distinctive needs and taking moments to assess what those currently are - Giving a project more time if its needs it in order to become what you feel it wants to be - Observing when the release schedule or your expectations for a project are adding too much stress or pressure and making choices that actively prioritizes what you currently feel is most important - Noticing when the joy is no longer there in your work and being willing to stop, get honest, and ask yourself some delving questions We hope you enjoy this episode and the more improvisational format of this series and that some of this connects with your own journey! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there! Into the woods, Fable & The Verbivore

17 min
17 SEPT

Ep 246: Affirmations, Rest, and Refilling the Well

These notes include affiliate links. This week on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re sharing another spontaneous episode — this time on affirmations, rest, and refilling our personal well. Over the last year, we’ve done a wide range of topics — from writing about disabilities to writing with empathy —that took a lot of energy and preparation. We’ve also been doing this podcast for almost 5 years and as we near our 250th episode we felt it would be good to do a series of episodes getting back to our roots of how this first began — through unplanned conversations about life, books, and the writing craft. So, for the next few episodes we’re continuing to see where our conversations take us, without planning in advance what we’ll talk about. In this conversation, we touch on navigating transitions, cultivating calm, creating opportunities for our interest and curiosity to spark, and the practice of paying attention. Things like: - Listening to nature sounds and reading transitional affirmations to help get through seasons of personal upheaval - Assessing your capacity for commitment in a given season based on your needs and responsibilities - Thinking about and making adjustments or modifications to your plans or practices to reduce their weight on your everyday life - Practicing physically opening up your shoulders to signal to your body and mind that you’re meeting the present moment with openness and curiosity - Noticing when you’re burning out and actively creating the time and space to nourish yourself - Using resources like images and quotes on Pinterest to help calm yourself before bed - Engaging with beautiful, interesting, and poignant things whose only job is to fill you and your creativity back up - Studying what has been meaningful to you in the past (in life/story/books/film/art/music) to discover what meaning you want to make in the present and future - Paying attention to and taking note of what moments spark personal importance and joy in your life, bringing them back to mind, and looking for opportunities to make new ones We hope you enjoy this episode and the more improvisational format of this series and that some of this connects with your own journey! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there! Into the woods, Fable & The Verbivore

18 min
10 SEPT

Ep 245: Improv, Surprise, and Knowing What's for You

These notes include affiliate links. Today on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re sharing another off the cuff conversation this time about improv, surprise, and knowing what’s for you. Over the last year, we’ve done a wide range of topics — from writing about disabilities to writing with empathy —that took a lot of energy and preparation. We’ve also been doing this podcast for almost 5 years and as we near our 250th episode we felt it would be good to do a series of episodes getting back to our roots of how this first began — through unplanned conversations about life, books, and the writing craft. So, for the next few episodes we’re continuing to see where our conversations take us, without planning in advance what we’ll talk about. In this conversation, we talk about improv and let the conversation flow and unfold based on the things that come to mind. Things like: - Learning by actively paying attention to someone else reading a book to an audience and seeing how they react, or take an opportunity to read your own work aloud to someone or perform in a live reading to see what lands with an audience in real time. - Using the rules of a good heist in stories outside that genre. The rules: make sure the audience knows the plan if the heist will fail and only give out small details of the heist if it will suceed. We note how Leigh Bardugo in Six of Crows does both to create the most tension possible. - Setting-up effective twists and surprises with planting , teasing information, and hinting. Not grabbing solutions out of left field (which could make it feel manipulative) and noticing when and why a surprise leaves us cold (and we call bull shit). - Studying what feels effective and ineffective around how early and how much to reveal character motivation especially when thoughts are in conflict with actions — prioritizing communicating the goal and at least some of the why. - Re-evaluating if you should reveal small things up front and/or plant more throughout, especially if knowing a piece of information increases the overall tension over a character’s choices (Matthias in Six of Crows) or buys much needed character sympathy (ex. Marlin in Finding Nemo). - Listening to ourselves and even the sense of dread we have when we try to do something to decide what is ours for now (what is challenging, but within our capacity) and what is maybe ours for another time (what we’re not yet ready or leveled up for) We hope you enjoy this episode and the more improvisational format of this series! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there! Into the woods, Fable & The Verbivore

37 min
4 SEPT

Ep 244: Productivity, Happiness, and Gratitude

These notes include affiliate links. Today on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re sharing an off the cuff conversation that we had about productivity, happiness, and gratitude. Over the last year, we’ve done a wide range of topics — from writing about disabilities to writing with empathy —that took a lot of energy and preparation. We’ve also been doing this podcast for almost 5 years and as we near our 250th episode we felt it would be good to do a series of episodes getting back to our roots of how this first began — through unplanned conversations about life, books, and the writing craft. So, for the next few episodes we’re seeing where our conversations take us, without planning in advance what we’ll talk about. In this conversation, we review the last month during our summer break. The practices we tried, lessons that revealed themselves to us, and some ideas we’re grppling with and thinking about. Things like: - Doing a postmortem at the end of a month to recognize all the things you did with your time and re-spark the little moments of joy you experienced. - Fable’s low effort method of tracking reads as screen shots on her phone. - The gift of positive psychology that the Verbivore rediscovered while reading Katherine Center’s Happiness for Beginners. - Normalizing liking most or part of something. Identifying and paying attention to what isn’t yours, but also allowing yourself to enjoy the parts that are. - Recognizing that we may never feel that we’re producing enough, and accepting that maybe that’s not where satisfaction will come from. - Paying attention to little things you want in the moment (like a hot tea or piece of chocolate or ten minutes of music) and consciously choosing to gift yourself with them several times a week without always making yourself earn them. - Using the practice of reminding yourself of 3 good/nice (however small) things that happened during the day just before bed to calm and settle your mind and body. We hope you enjoy this episode and the more improvisational format of this series! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there! Into the woods, Fable & The Verbivore

25 min
27 AUG

Ep 243: Embodying Characters Part 2

Today on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re talking about Brandilyn Collins’ book “Getting into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn From Actors” . In continuation of last week’s conversation about empathically embodying characters, we unpack a craft book that we both read by Brandilyn Collins where she describes seven common techniques used by method actors that writers can also employ to get in touch with their character’s inner lives. But one of the first things we talk about is the cover of this book, which we feel doesn’t quite do justice to this fantastic gem of a craft book or hint at how packed full of great takeaways it is on creating and embodying characters. We note how the idea of “don’t judge a book by its cover” is absolutely true in this case. We also loved that she talks about the technique for actors, translates them into tools that authors can use in their writing, and then gives examples from her work and classic literary works as well as exercises you can use to help strengthen those skills. The main method acting techniques that we discuss from her book are: - Secret 1: Personalizing - Making distinctive choices that help make someone feels real; Adding tiny details to character that reflect thought and don’t feel tacked on; Giving a character a “funny hat” and/or descriptors that help give us a shorthand for who the character is and helps readers remember them better; Subverting a stereotype or choosing to go down a slightly different path than typical; Include things your characters love and hate - Secret 2: Action Objectives - Give them a desire in a scene even if it’s to have a drink of water; Nobody speaks unless they want something; What are they trying to accomplish, Why is this scene necessary?, Are they getting closer or farther away from that goal? - Secret 3: Subtexting - Identify when your characters are directly asking for things they never would in reality; Look for opportunities to show your characters hedging around things in their dialogue, but communicate to the audience what they’re trying to do and why through thoughts and emotions and physicality; We are often cloaking what we want, but we’re still trying to get it - Secret 7: Emotion memory - Pull your own strong emotion and sensations from your memory; Pulling in your feelings and sensations in the moment - Secret 5: Inner Rhythm - The rhythm and pace as you write the story; An active intention of the beat of your story in the current moment or scene (Ex. fast, frenetic, plodding, slow but rising); Moving the emotions through a rise and fall As we bring this episode to a close, we talk about taking what is done in one genre and studying it and then deciding what aspects of it fit well for your own genre. Many of the examples in this book include pieces from Brandilyn Collins’ thriller novels, but we feel that the fact that those books often dial things up to an eleven allow for you to fully capture the idea while also considering how the concept would best be used within your own work and current genre. We hope you enjoy this episode! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there! Into the woods, Fable & The Verbivore

19 min
20 AUG

Ep 242: Embodying Characters Part 1

In this episode of Fable and the Verbivore, we’re talking about empathetically embodying characters. We open by calling back to the episode we did back in June about writing with empathy and adding in the idea of using a practice of embodying to connect more deeply with our characters. The word embody can be defined as: - To give a concrete form to - To express, personify, or exemplify - To make corporeal, to give body to a spirit, or to incorporate We also touch on how as writers getting into a character’s inner world can sometimes stop at their thoughts, which can tend to keep some of our characters at arms length from the readers. Writing characters that feel more real and we connect with deeply usually also means describing some of their emotional landscape and their physical sensations as well. Because of this, we unpack some embodying practices and exercises that can help express or communicate a character’s inner world more fully. But we also acknowledge that this can be hard to do, because it does take actively stepping into their shoes (mentally, emotionally, and physically) and finding ways to translate what we don’t always have a good way of expressing even about our own inner worlds. In our conversation, we touch on things like: - Use an emotion or wound thesaurus like the ones by Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman to move past more shallow and cliched emotions and descriptions to more nuanced, visceral, or specific ones - Read over lists of powerful descriptor words for a feeling or experience and picking the specific one that resonates — For instance, words to describe pain - Employ figurative language like a metaphor or simile — remember that we tend to feel metaphors closer since it’s a more direct connection than a simile - Seek out how other individuals express these parts of their own inner world and work on doing personally exercises to create a vocabulary to communicate yours - When you personally feel a strong emotion or physical sensation step back from it and observe — try to verbalize and put those observations into words - Notice writing that you personally find affective (eliciting your emotion) or effective (making an experience visceral) — study what it does - Pull from your own memory of difficult moments, physical sensations, or strong emotions — For example, how did your last sudden flash of rage feel? What did you do to try to calm yourself? - Observe someone’s outer actions during difficult situations and imagine their inner world of emotions, fears, and sensations that accompanies it - Seek out what an actor says about how they approached doing a difficult or emotive scene that you connect with. Often in interviews, they unpack what feelings and sensations they experienced during filming - Look for where you’re forcing an emotion on your characters and see if another more surprising or nuanced emotion is underneath — For example, anger that’s covering up grief - Get your character’s action in your body and/or words in your throat and pay attention to your sensations - General or overt emotions tend to leave us a little unmoved. The more specific and immersive the experience, the more likely our mirror neurons will activate and help us to feel them too. As we close this episode, we talk a little about how this process can also just be used as a practice in building active empathy for others. That acknowledging that we all have complex inner worlds and trying to understand them can help us more easily see things from each other’s point of view. We hope you enjoy this episode! Next week, we’ll be taking this topic a little deeper by unpacking the book “Getting into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn From Actors” by Brandilyn Collins. Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there! Into the woods, Fable & The Verbivore

17 min
6 AUG

Ep 241: Diversity in Six of Crows

This week on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re back from our summer vacation and talking about the Six of Crows duology as a great example of a diverse cast of characters with some thoughtful and nuanced disability representation. In this episode, we open by talking generally about how quickly Leigh Bardugo sets us within her characters shoes both emotionally and mentally, how she plays into common stereotypes and snap judgements we tend to make, and how over time she peels back the layers on her characters often flipping what we thought we knew about them on its head. Her choice to use seven points of view over the course of the duology, to hold back key pieces of information until characters are pushed to the brink, and to strategically decide who carries the narrative at different point in time allow her to create tension and distrust at certain points (especially towards the end of Six of Crows). We touch on the diversity of her cast from several different lenses, but mostly we focus on the aspects of the characters in these books that reflect disabilities. Some of these disabilities are more obvious and brought directly up as part of the narrative, but others are more coded a certain way rather than being explicitly stated. But most importantly these disabilities are treated with empathy and understanding, and none of these characters are solely defined by their disability. The examples we bring up are: - Kaz Brekker - (mobility impairment, cane user, PTSD, haphephobia) - Inej Ghafa - (Complex PTSD from recurring abuse at the Menagerie, possibly Checking OCD) - Jesper Fahey - (PTSD, ADHD, Novelty-seeking in the form of a gambling addiction, Masking of his Grisha abilities) - Wylan Van Eck - (Learning disorder - likely Alexia or Dyslexia, possibly PTSD) As we close this episode, we note that we highly recommend reading Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom as a study of how to write well-developed and well-rounded characters as well as just how to write a damn good duology. We hope you enjoy this episode! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there! Into the woods, Fable & The Verbivore

22 min
25 JUN

Ep 240: Writing Characters with Disabilities

This week on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re talking about writing characters with disabilities. We open by unpacking the difference in the definition of sympathy vs. empathy. Mirriam Webster’s definition of empathy is “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” It’s being able to step into someone else’s shoes — both mirroring their emotions (affective empathy) and taking their perspective (cognitive empathy). We feel that the best characters are written from a strong sense of both these kinds of empathy — whether you’re writing from someone else’s experience or your own. For writing about our own experience, we suggest doing some of the following exercises: - Journaling about your current thoughts and feelings - Free writing about a range of your specific experiences. For instance: one where your disability dominated the memory, one where you really struggled, when where you had fun or could joke about it, one where it was a mundane day and you barely even remembered it was part of your life - Getting into your body and thinking about how it feels now, how it felt in the past, and imagine what it would be like if your circumstances were different. For instance: your last pair of glasses broke, you ran out of medication, or if the pain you’re feeling worsened. - Talking openly and honestly about your experience with a trusted friend and not filtering what wants to come out of your mouth however vulnerable - Connecting with others stories and voices and seeing how your experiences differ For writing about someone else’s experience, we suggest doing some of the following exercises: - Review the ADA Guidelines about writing about people with disabilities - Reading an article written directly by someone with that lived experience - Look for dedicated websites that share articles and individual stories - Listen to an interview of someone sharing their personal experience - Ask if you can interview someone you know who has that experience and get their perspective - Explore and challenge your biases and assumptions - Explore and challenge the stereotypical view - Check to see if any members belonging to that community applauds a book/film/show as positive representation and lean in to understand why - Check to see if any members belonging to that community critiques a book/film/show as bad representation and lean in to understand why For bad representation, we acknowledge the legacy of things like Shakepeare’s Rochard III, Bond villains, and even Disney characters like Hook and Scar that often equate having outward disability and/or injury to having evil intent within and that representation is still very much present in the market and we have a long way to go. But we note that wishing to avoid something doesn't give you something to strive to achieve. So, we talk about our desire to do the characters justice by treating them with love and care and trying to make them as authentic as we can. Noting that when you give yourself that goal, you can then take the steps you need to make them feel like fully fleshed out characters. We also talk about some positive forms of representation where a disability is just one of many aspects of a character. Our examples come from Star Trek, comic book films and shows, the fantasy series The Hunger Games, and even the world of Bridgerton. Specifically, we mention: - Star Trek The Next Generation - Geordi La Forge (vision impairment) - Daredevil - Matt Murdock (vision impairment) - Hawkeye - Clint Barton (hearing impairment), Maya Lopez (hearing impairment) - Iron Man III - Tony Stark (PTSD) - The Hunger Games - Katniss (hearing impairment, PTSD) and Peeta (mobility impairment, PTSD) - The Eternals - Makkari (hearing impairment) - Bridgerton (Season 3) - Lady Stowell (hearing impairment), Lord Remmington (mobility impairment), Francesca Bridgerton (possibly au

26 min

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A podcast for writers who read, readers who write, and anyone who loves words.

Creator

Fable & The Verbivore
Years Active

2019 - 2024
Episodes

100
Rating

Clean
Show Website

Fable & The Verbivore

Fable & The Verbivore

Ep 247: Success and Finding Contentment in Your Work

Ep 246: Affirmations, Rest, and Refilling the Well

Ep 245: Improv, Surprise, and Knowing What's for You

Ep 244: Productivity, Happiness, and Gratitude

Ep 243: Embodying Characters Part 2

Ep 242: Embodying Characters Part 1

Ep 241: Diversity in Six of Crows

Ep 240: Writing Characters with Disabilities

About

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Fable & The Verbivore

Episodes

Ep 247: Success and Finding Contentment in Your Work

Ep 246: Affirmations, Rest, and Refilling the Well

Ep 245: Improv, Surprise, and Knowing What's for You

Ep 244: Productivity, Happiness, and Gratitude

Ep 243: Embodying Characters Part 2

Ep 242: Embodying Characters Part 1

Ep 241: Diversity in Six of Crows

Ep 240: Writing Characters with Disabilities

About

Information