Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar

It ended up being a bit of a free-for-all as we talked about the strange things people do sometimes.






SHOUT OUT TO STUBHY!



The snippet of our intro and outro music is only a snippet of this guy’s awesome talent. Many thanks to Kaustubh Pandav. You can check out a bit of his work at the links below.



www.luckyboysconfusion.Net or www.Facebook.com/mrmsandtheinfusions 



Thanks for hanging out with us! And remember, don’t be afraid to let your strange out.

So building a sympathetic character on the page is a lot like being a sympathetic character in real life. This sympathetic character is basically the opposite of a butt-hole.



There’s this great post on the SocialSelf blog that talks about what makes people likable and what keeps people from being likeable. And writers can learn from this, really.



The big things that make people likeable in real life are like a top ten list of awesome:




Be funny



Be a good listener



Don’t judge



Be authentic



Be warm and friendly immediately



Show people that you like them



Smile



Be humble, but also confident



Keep your promises



Know people’s names



Ask questions that aren’t yes or no answers.




They even have a bar graph about it.





When we’re writing, it’s hard to make a character listen to the reader or make eye contact with the reader, which scores high, but we can show them listening to other people, being kind to other characters instead of being all self-self-self and me-me-me all the time.



And you can make the character funny if that’s who they are.  If you think back to ancient Buffy the Vampire Slayer shows, the characters were a bit much sometimes, right? Buffy especially, but they became likeable and fun because they were funny and they tried super hard to keep their promises and be there for each other.



But just as importantly, that blog has ways that people sabotage their likability in real life.



What are those ways?




Humble bragging



Name dropping



Gossiping



Oversharing on social media




Now, for a book character, humble bragging and gossiping can happen in dialogue and be annoying and off-putting. But oversharing can happen, too, in a first-person narrative, right? You can tell too much, so much, that it feels like the action isn’t happening and that will distance the reader.



When it comes to keeping those unlikable aspects off that page, it gets a little bit trickier because you have to keep the reader interested enough in what happens to the character to keep reading. That's all about likability.



This is why I talk about those super objectives and desire lines a lot. If you can give your character a yearning/a goal in each scene and chapter (sometimes it’s more pronounced that other times), then the reader will wonder if the character will get it. This helps to get the reader involved and gives you a little more time to build up the connection with the character. That's because the readers want to know what happens and if the character will get their goal/yearning/want. That gives you more time to make them care about the character.



But to make them really care about what happens, you have to make them care about the character and to do that, it can help to let the reader see the character’s wound, that defect, that thing that haunts them. You want to see them in a moment of weakness or vulnerability or loneliness.



DOG TIP FOR LIFE






Smelling buttholes is great but you don't want to be one! - Mr. Murphy quote of the day.







PLACE TO SUBMIT



BLUE LYNZ PRIZE FOR POETRY



The annual Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry awards $2000 plus publication for a full-length poetry collection. The Prize is awarded for an unpublished, full-length volume of poems by a U.S. author, which includes foreign nationals living and writing in the U.S. and U.S. citizens living abroad. Lynx House Press has been publishing fine poetry and prose since 1975. Our titles are distributed by the University of Washington Press.



Top Prize:



$2,000



Additional prizes:



Publication



Entry fee: $28



Deadline: June 16, 2024



COOL EXERCISE FOR WRITERS



Write a "slice of life" moment for your character. Make them have a sit-down dinner with others and show:




What they want



What has hurt them in the past



Them being kind




Do not show any of it via internal monologue.




LINK TO OUR RANDOM THOUGHT



Our random thoughts are at the beginnin

A lot of writers that I work with have a problem. The problem is that they want to be a writer, but before they come to me? They don’t write.



Here’s the thing. For a lot of us, we have to make time to be a writer. That’s just how our brains and process work. There are some writers who manage to get 10 days of alone time and writer time and they power through a book in that time, but most of us aren’t that wealthy or that lucky.



That means to be a writer, we have to create the habit of writing.



This is where James Clear’s method comes into play. This guy has built an empire around helping people create habits. And he believes there are four steps to creating a habit.



Those steps are:




Cue



Craving



Response



Reward




This man has a ton of books and information all over the internet and bookshelves about this, but very basically, what he defines each as is:



The Cue



This triggers your brain to do the behavior.



He writes: “It is a bit of information that predicts a reward. Our prehistoric ancestors were paying attention to cues that signaled the location of primary rewards like food, water, and sex. Today, we spend most of our time learning cues that predict secondary rewards like money and fame, power and status, praise and approval, love and friendship, or a sense of personal satisfaction.”



The Craving



This is the motivation, the force, the desire, the reason to act.



He writes: “What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers. You do not crave smoking a cigarette, you crave the feeling of relief it provides. You are not motivated by brushing your teeth but rather by the feeling of a clean mouth. You do not want to turn on the television, you want to be entertained.”



The Response



This is the habit. It might be sitting at your desk at 8 p.m. every night and writing. It might be writing 250 words during lunch or waiting to pick up your kid from swim practice. It’s the habit.



“Whether a response occurs depends on how motivated you are and how much friction is associated with the behavior. If a particular action requires more physical or mental effort than you are willing to expend, then you won’t do it. Your response also depends on your ability. It sounds simple, but a habit can occur only if you are capable of doing it. If you want to dunk a basketball but can’t jump high enough to reach the hoop, well, you’re out of luck,” he writes.



The Reward



These are things that satisfy our craving.



He writes, “Rewards are the end goal of every habit. . . .We chase rewards because they serve two purposes: (1) they satisfy us and (2) they teach us.”



So, we sit down and write every day and eventually we get a book. That’s super simplified, but whatever.



There’s also that second part about how they teach us, right?



Clear writes, “Rewards teach us which actions are worth remembering in the future. Your brain is a reward detector. As you go about your life, your sensory nervous system is continuously monitoring which actions satisfy your desires and deliver pleasure. Feelings of pleasure and disappointment are part of the feedback mechanism that helps your brain distinguish useful actions from useless ones. Rewards close the feedback loop and complete the habit cycle.”



So, to build a habit, he says, to change your behavior, you want to think of each step (he calls them laws) to do the behaviors. The keys, he said are these (all direct from the post linked above and below):





It's pretty cool stuff, and you should probably check out his book or site if you're into this system and it rings true for you.



But for writers, especially, his clues on how to break bad habits and build new ones are just wonderful. Give yourself a really obvious cue that it's time to write (an alarm/notification/specific time), and make it attractive (light a candle/put on music you actually like) and make it easy (make s

We found a topic! It ended up mostly being about poop and creepiness and three-foot tall humanoids.





Links we mention:



https://www.ranker.com/list/creepy-forest-ranger-stories/amandasedlakhevener

Being an author or an artist or almost anyone is about navigating. You have to walk a fine line with criticism and praise, discern what's real and what's not, what matters or not, what is noise and what is important.



And sometimes?



Well, sometimes we only hear and dwell on the one negative thing that someone has said to us or written about us even though they (or others) have also said 100 positive things.



You're an author. You get a glowing review but there's one line in there that says, "I didn't like the mom character." That's all you focus on.



This happens in real life, too. Your husband might tell you that you're beautiful 100 times a day, but that one time that he says, "Baby, maybe don't wear your sweater inside out?" Well, that's what you focus on.



Or, let's say, in news. There are hundreds of lovely, beautiful things that happen in a community--even a small community--every week or month? But instead, we write about the one potentially scandalous thing a person or a board does. And when we read the news, we often gravitate toward the tragedy, the crime story, the corruption story. And that's important to write about and share, but that's not all there is.



Negativity is not all there is.



As Tasha Seegmiller wrote back in 2016,

"The reality of reality is that we are programmed with a psychological and physiological predisposition toward negativity bias. Daniel Kahneman explains that “The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. By shaving a few hundredths of a second from the time needed to detect a predator, this circuit improves the animal’s odds of living long enough to reproduce.”



"That bad review that you got? It’s going to linger longer than the good. Your fear of someone hating your book before it even comes out? Not all the way your fault."



We are programmed to be predisposed toward the negative. But we can lean away from that once we know it's there, sort of retrain ourselves toward the positive.



One of the ways to do that is a gratitude journal. Do not snark and look away. Writing down the good facts of your life not only trains your brain to see that good things have happened, but it also becomes a record that all is not poop.



As Alex Philippe writes,



"According to Winifred Gallagher in the book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, we literally don’t see as many things in our peripheral vision when we have negative emotions as when we have positive ones.



"And studies like the swimming rat experiment show how negativity can kill our perseverance: when a rat sees no way to escape, it will fight much less for its survival.



So, try it. Write something your grateful for. There's got to be one thing, right? Maybe tomorrow you can think of another.



Our random thought comes from here.



DOG TIP FOR LIFE





Don't think about all the "bad dog" moments. Think about all the treats you can get.



COOL EXERCISE



These are from a piece in Positive Psychology by Alicia Nortje, Ph.D. They are a direct quote.




"In the last week, what did you do that you are grateful for?



"In the last week, what did someone else do that you are grateful for?



"In the last week, what did you learn you are grateful for?"







PLACE TO SUBMIT



The Georgia Review



Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews. Online submissions for non-subscribers are charged, but there is no fee for mailed submissions.  



Details are here.
Deadline: 14 May 2024
Length: Up to 9,000 words for prose, 6-10 pages of poetry
Pay: $50/printed page of prose and $4/line of poetry, up to $800; $150 for reviews published on GR2.







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

Here's our main premise this week: it's okay to read books you've already read.



Not only is it okay. It's helpful.



This is true for both writers and normal humans.



Rereading books gives you:




New ideas



Reminds you of ideas you'd forgotten about



Let's you notice new things because you aren't the same you who read that book the last time.








DONALD LATUMAHINA writes for LifeOptimizer, "'"Research shows that in just 24 hours people would forget most of what they’ve read. You might get a lot of good ideas from a book, but it’s easy to forget most of them. Rereading a book helps you refresh those ideas in your mind."



But what I like the most about what he is says is this, rereading . . .



"It helps you apply the ideas



"This, in my opinion, is the most important reason of all. Why? Because the primary value of reading is the application and not the reading itself. Mere reading could expand your knowledge but application could change your life. By rereading a book, you can see which parts of it you have applied and which parts haven’t. You can then focus your effort on the parts that need more work."



For authors, Victoria Grefger says all the way back in 2016,



"YOU REALIZE JUST HOW MUCH THE READER MAKES THE READING EXPERIENCE WHAT IT IS. This is important for authors, and since the majority of my readers here are authors, I thought this worth mentioning. By comparing what you thought of the book the first time around and what you think of it now, and what stood out to you then and what stands out now, you realize just how dependent a novel is upon its reader. This can remove some of the pressure that we feel as writers as we learn we can’t control the interpretative process of our work and don’t need to. That’s a load off, for sure!"



So go forth and read those books again! It's all good. The experts say so.



DOG TIP FOR LIFE









Murphy, the grand-dog, says that each redo makes you stronger. There's a much longer and more interesting version of this in the podcast.



RANDOM THOUGHTS



Our random thoughts come from here.



PLACE TO SUBMIT



 AGNI



AGNI, Boston University’s literary magazine, accepts a wide variety of works for their online and print publications. The publication accepts poems, short stories, think pieces, essays, reviews and memoirs from writers all around the world. 




Submission dates: September 1 to December 15; February 14 to May 31



Payment: $20 per page for prose; $40 per page for poetry (to a maximum of $300)




FUN WRITING EXERCISE



Over on the TED blog, there are 20 creative writing prompts from 642 Tiny Things to Write About:



Maybe try this one?



"Write the passenger safety instructions card for a time-travel machine."







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.



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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