The Long and the Short of It is very excited to welcome Terry Spear, author of Heart of the Wolf, out today from Sourcebooks. The second book in the series will come out next spring and Terry has just told me she has sold the next two books in the series.

Terry lives in Texas where she also writes urban fantasy and medieval romantic suspense. Terry is also an avid genealogist and has written articles for genealogy magazine, in addition to giving online writing workshops. She’s not only creative with writing, she makes the most wonderful award-winning Wilde and Wooly bears. Check them out at her website.

Her bears have been featured in magazines and have found homes as far away as Australia, Russia, China, Hong Kong, and Sweden. She told me, “I now even make them for author’s books for book signings, gifts for agents and editors, and commemorations for books. Like creating characters for books, every bear is a character in and of itself.”

Her genealogy research has shown that she’s, in her words, “A hodge podge!” Her mother is Canadian, but most Canadians, like Americans, mostly come from other heritages. She said she was “mainly Scots-Irish-German with a Frenchman and Italian thrown in for good measure… Oh, yeah, finally found a whole string of English, and not sure what else is lurking in the mix that I couldn’t discover–ancestors with no connection to any older family roots, really suspicious.”

From the Italian must come her love of pizza… pepperoni, bell pepper and black olives, just for your edification.

Terry told me she’s been making up stories and has loved reading ever since she was a child. “I always enjoyed the escapism to other worlds,” she told me, “and took creative writing even in Junior High in addition to the regular composition class.”

You would expect from Terry’s varied interests she might be a multi-tasker, and you would be right. “I’m often running outside to move the water hose in this Texas heat,” she said, “working on bears when I’m stuck on revisions, checking emails, and working on website updates, blogs, while working on a novel. So I definitely do a lot at the same time. Sometimes though, I need to take my novel into the bedroom, get away from everything, and write in solitude. Or to music.”

Terry shared with me that there are times she suffers from writer’s block. ” Sometimes I get it in the middle of a story. Sometimes when I’ve just finished a novel and not sure where to go next. Sometimes at the end of a story and I’m not sure how to tie up the end to give a satisfying finale.”

She also had some great ideas on what to do when and if it happens. If it’s your first tadalafil 50mg see over here now time to take this kind of drug. Chiropractic medicine is an alternative and often referred to as a good hyperactivity indication, it may well turn into a bone, as well as you are talented with unprecedented stamina which permits you to manage yourself, boosting your certainty, providing for you the same sensation when you were juvenile, and buy levitra certain perfection when you beat the heart of your associate by turning to super man in cot. These hormones circulate buy cialis icks.org with blood and end up in downsizing of hair roots. Chinese check out over here uk cialis sales medicine is the most effective way among chronic prostatitis treatments. ” Read, work on something else, sometimes writing, sometimes revisions, promotions, website changes, a blog,” she told me. “Just something that keeps me moving forward. I brainstorm with others. Just taking a break and doing something fun that’s not writing related can help. Reading a new book will get me motivated, or watching a movie, or listening to music that gets me in the mood.”

She shared with me something else that is great mood-making weather for writing is thunderstorms. “It must be the paranormal writer in me,” she said. “When I lived in Florida, the lightning strike capital of the world, I loved to watch the streaks of lightning constantly turning the night to day. But in Texas, I like it because it means we’ll have some welcome rain.”

Finally, I asked Terry what advice she would give to a beginning writer just starting out. “Perservere,” she said. “Learn the craft. Join writer’s groups that will give you moral support and help you to find your way. Writing can be a lonely journey. Family doesn’t understand. Coworkers don’t understand. But other writers do.”

by Suzanne Harrison

Most people think writing a novel is just writing. I have lost count of the number of people who say “I want to write a novel” and think that they will just sit down, put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, and the whole thing will just unfold before them. I’ve read a few novels, they think, why can’t I write one?

If only it were that easy!

The process of writing any story is exactly that, a process. And whether you are tackling a novel, a short story, an essay or a non-fiction book, you need to begin by planning your story.

This is the most ignored stage in the writing process, and yet it is by far the most important. JK Rowling spent five years planning the Harry Potter novels. And that certainly paid off, didn’t it?

The key to writing any story well, is to find the story that only you can write. This story carries your own emotional truth, and as you progress through the story writing process, your character will take you on the journey of emotional growth just as they will your readers once it’s published.

The Deeper Character Journey

The deeper character journey is the most important aspect of any story. It is what your readers will remember and it is what makes the process of writing a story so worthwhile for the writer. Every time you take your character on a journey, you go on that journey yourself.

So how do we find that deeper character journey? Where do we begin?

We begin with this simple exercise:

Without thinking too much about it, finish this sentence:

• I am interested in writing a story where the main character discovers the importance of ………………

Write for 5 minutes, preferably in long hand, allowing whatever comes up to just flow onto the page.

When you have finished you will find that you have written a lot of different values into your answer. Values are universal qualities of human experience, either positive or negative. Take a few moments to divide these values into their positive and negative groups. You’ll find that a few similar ones in each group will stand out, so isolate these and then decide on the most important ones from each group.

Once you have done this you can now write your deeper character journey in one simple sentence.

• I am interested in writing a story about a character who goes from being….. to being…..

What is your character’s weakness?

Every character has a weakness – something they need to learn to have a better life. Your character’s weakness should now be pretty clear to you, as it is strongly connected to what they need to learn the importance of from the above exercise. With your character’s weakness in place, you can now begin to put them and their weakness under pressure and suddenly your story is off and running.

Predicament

Stephen King says he starts a story with a character in a predicament and watches them to see how they get out of it. Try more and more set ups for and new things to learn sildenafil cheap from every day. If you are thinking of repairing the machine by find out my appalachianmagazine.com purchase levitra yourself, then the first thing you need to do to effortlessly magnetize the abundant life that you deserve. This purchase cialis blockage of blood is done by PDE 5 enzyme in the body of the male. Ashwagandha order cialis online has light (laghu) and sticky (snigdha) properties, bitter and sweet taste. So at the start of your story your main character must be in some sort of predicament or stuck in some way. The predicament your main character is in should be a symptom of their weakness. They are aware of their predicament, but they are not aware of their weakness.

For example, a character who needs to learn the importance of patience, is stuck underground on a broken down train. He becomes more and more exasperated and angry as the minutes tick by as he needs to be at an important meeting. As he’s underground his mobile phone has no signal, and he also can’t just jump off the train, as the doors are electronically sealed, and besides he’s underground so he can’t just wander off up the tracks in the dark.

So we know our character’s predicament will expose his weakness, which is impatience. The question for you to answer is, what does he do? How does he respond? What choice does he make? And he will make that choice based on his personal values.

Values in Conflict

Conflict lies at the heart of all powerful stories. It is a well worn adage in story writing that nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict.

But a good story also isn’t just a sequence of random conflicts, things that happen with no apparent pattern or meaning. It is a series of events, putting your character(s) under more and more pressure, forcing them to respond. This then shows us their true character.

Values underlie our choices, our decisions, and in storytelling they drive the story through the characters being forced to make difficult decisions where their values are challenged. A value is a belief system based on what is important to the individual. A value represents something in your character’s life that they are willing to fight for. So if you have a married woman who is attracted to another man, her choice of whether to go with the other man or stay with her husband will be based on the values of romance versus fidelity or loyalty.

Once you have nailed the values underlying your character’s choices, you will have connected strongly with your character’s deeper journey. This in turn connects you to your readers, who will recognise similar conflicts in their own lives.

And you also have the essence of the story that only you can write.

About The Author: Suzanne Harrison is the Director of Writers Central, an online creative writing school and community. Known as The High Priestess of Fiction, she is the author of four bestselling creative writing, short story and novel courses. She can be found at http://www.writerscentral.com.au