Don’t Mock Me!

My favorite part of the Noah’s Ark story is not that he listened to his god and therefore managed to save mankind and the animals, and it’s not the rainbows, or even the dove as a symbol of divine peace and love.  My favorite part happens long before the rains begin to fall.  I love that no matter how much people laughed and scoffed at what he was doing; Noah still went right on building that ark.  Think about how many days, weeks, months it took to build that thing and all the while they were mocking him.  His commitment and tenacity is an awesome example of doing what you believe in no matter what those around you might think.  Noah was willing to look foolish in the eyes of everyone around him so that he could fulfill his destiny.  As an entrepreneur, I find that story quite inspirational.  How many of us were laughed at or mocked when we first started our adventures into self-employment.

People continually say, “Oh you’re so lucky!  I wish I was a rich business owner!”  whenever they encounter a successful entrepreneur.  I find that statement to be ignorant and somewhat insulting.  Like Noah, most entrepreneurs started out with a vision of some sort, a passion, and a strong sense of purpose as they began building their business.  Many of us are shot down from the very start before we’ve even begun.  The minute we start telling friends and family of our plans, they start reminding us that we are not smart enough, talented enough, or wealthy enough to launch such a dream.

I remember years ago when I first took my big leap of faith and quit my ‘real job’ to create Tomorrow’s Edge.  My children and my best friend supported me, but everyone else sweetly and politely reminded me of all of the reasons that I should not do it.  A friend of mine called me on the telephone to remind me of how he had told his boss to go to hell one day and quit his job to start his own company.  Two years later and bordering on bankruptcy, he was begging that same boss to forgive him and to take him back on as an employee.  Didn’t I know just how many people fail at self-employment within the first couple of years?  Was I crazy to even consider such a thing!

A woman who had been like a second mother to me for many years told me that since I didn’t have a formal college degree and a doctorate in mental health, that I was not qualified to even think about doing the work that I was about to do.

A woman from my church who had been really close to me got really angry and chewed me out one day because she said I was trying to start my own church and was trying to copycat our minister.  Her loyalty to our minister and her dreams was lovely, but I really didn’t see how Tomorrow’s Edge was ever going to be a church or even a religion.

My own extended family never even heard me as I told them over and over for the first five years of the company’s existence that I was even doing this thing.  They all acted like I was sitting home painting my toenails pink every day.  Most of my family still really has no clue what I do and why I do it.

Does any of that matter?  Heck no!  These people’s opinions of me and of my goals didn’t really change a darn thing.  And that’s the point.  When you have a goal, a dream, a vision, a mission that burns a hole in your soul when you are not working at it, then you are willing to look like an idiot and a stubborn old fool if that’s what it takes to succeed.  So what if you don’t have a loving support system.  It’s your dream, your goal, your vision, your mission – not theirs.  If they were meant to do it, then they would have that relentless fire burning in the depths of their souls to roll up their sleeves and help you.  It was never theirs to love in the first place, it was always meant for you and you alone.

If you don’t have the backbone, tenacity, focus, drive, and raw passion to get beyond what other’s think of you and your dreams, then you have no business trying to be self-employed.  Make a fool of yourself, so what!  What if you fail?  Who cares?  Most successful entrepreneurs have a handful of failures under their belt before they finally learn all of the little business secrets and such that is required in order to become fiscally stable and profitable.  You are going to have some of your product lines fail and some of them are going to sell.  You are going to have employees flake off and some who will be incredibly loyal and helpful.  You are going to have last minute disasters that nearly bankrupt you and you’re going to have windfalls that make it all worth while.  Self-employment isn’t for the weak and the easily swayed.  If your family and friends can make you question whether or not you have any business starting your own company, what do you think your competitors are going to do to you?  They’ll chew you up and spit you out.

The nay-sayers are your practice customers and your practice competitors.  They give you the opportunity to seriously answer the important questions: Are you committed, really committed?  Do you have what it takes to stand up for what you truly believe in?  Can you sell the nonbelievers on the viability of your ideas?  Do you believe in your goal?  Do you believe in yourself?  Can you defend your decision to go into business for yourself without getting angry and emotional?  Thank your family and friends for mocking you!

Skye Thomas is the CEO of Tomorrow's Edge, an Internet leader in inspiring leaps of faith. She became a writer in 1999 after twenty years of studying spirituality, metaphysics, astrology, personal growth, motivation, soulmates, and parenting. Her books and articles have inspired people of all ages and faiths to recommit themselves to the pursuit of happiness. After years of high heels and business clothes, she is currently enjoying working from home in her pajamas. To read more of her articles, sign up to receive her free weekly newsletter, and get free previews of her books go to http://www.TomorrowsEdge.net

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Don’t Let Go Of Your Dreams – Not Again!

Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
Edgar Allan Poe

You wake up screaming!

Your spouse calms you down; reassuring you it was just another nightmare.

Even as you settle back and start drifting into slumber again, you wonder why the only dreams you have nowadays are bad ones.

What happened to your once fertile imagination that was able to conjure exciting, almost always enjoyable dreams; pleasurable mental movies you could play against the screen of your inner eyelids day or night, awake or asleep?

The problem so many of us face in daily life is one of encroaching walls; figurative rock faces that creep toward us inexorably, leaving us with less and less room to manoeuvre.

If you remember the trash compressor scene in Star Wars where Han Solo, Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker are trapped, we’ll be on the same wavelength!

When we were younger, it seemed our imaginations allowed us to roam the world, making it our stage or better yet our playground.

But we allowed ourselves to grow up – and not always in the right way. Many of us have lost the ability to dream big, great dreams that fuel mental excursions.

And that’s tragic, because those exciting journeys within our skulls are the only things that permit us to grow beyond the normal confines of our too often drab lives.

Thankfully, none of us has totally lost that ability to dream and imagine. I can prove it!

When you’re stuck behind a desk that seems to have grown shackles that attach themselves to your ankles and wrists, don’t you readily dream of a better place, a better way of life?

The problem is those dreams tend not to last too long. Someone or something is always crashing into our reality, bringing us back to earth with a rather hard bump.

But if we want to lay claim to a life that is bigger than the one we now live, we must recapture that long-lost childhood facility to dream good dreams for sustained periods.

You see, being able to see beyond things as they are now, through rosy mists of future probability and then perceiving them as they might be, is the common denominator of life’s big winners.
If they can do it, so can you, because all of humanity shares that God-given endowment. As Stephen Covey puts it, “In addition to self-awareness, we have imagination – the ability to create in our minds beyond our present reality.”

If you use your ability to imagine properly, it will expand into one of the most potent time management tools at your disposal – your capacity to idealise and dream of a better future.
Of course, we all know people who do nothing but dream. I’m not asking you to become such an airhead. I’m saying you need to give yourself permission to look beyond perhaps the grey, drab walls of your existence and ask yourself if this is the rich, abundant life God created you for.

Most people would have to say NO.

That would be a great first step.

The second is to grant yourself permission to daydream actively for short spells at a time – even if it is only for 30 seconds while stuck in a traffic jam. (Of course, if you commute to work using public transport, you have even more time at your disposal.)

So, get a dedicated little notebook and jot down whatever comes to mind during these brief, but precious mental excursions.

MY OWN EXPERIENCE

I remember doing a similar exercise about a decade ago, when I felt trapped in a great paying job that was nonetheless squeezing every drop of joy out of my life.

And so I dreamt and wrote, wrote and dreamt, and then wrote some more.

If you think that a similar exercise will help you detect what’s important to you, then you really should get to know yourself better by tapping into your dream bank.

I consider this so important that Step 2 in my e-book 5 Steps to a Saner Life is DREAM.

Most people know how to dream at night. But they have a problem retaining their far more vital lifetime dreams within a solid framework for awakened review.

Such a pragmatic framework allows those who know how to go about it well to follow up on those dreams, to prioritise them, then to take action on the most exciting ones.

Are you among those who want to recapture lost dreams but are not sure how to do so?

Then, 5 Steps to a Saner Life includes a starter list of such dreams. It contains the outrageous mingled with the challenging and practical.

After a long while of working through practical exercises of dream harvesting, I began noticing a pattern in where my thoughts kept taking me.

I spent a long time charting my dreams and thoughts. Then came the time to stop dreaming and to take action!

I had to gather my courage and walk away from the security of that soul-sapping high-paying job onto a path only dimly lit by the lamp of those written dreams.

Since then, some months, even years, have been very hard. But looking back, it’s been worth it to get from there to here.

I’m not asking you to quit your job. Just to give yourself permission to start to dream again.
And then to have the courage to pursue the right dreams.

In this context, I love what Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “To be thrown upon one’s own resources is to be cast into the very lap of fortune; for our faculties then undergo a development and display an energy of which they were previously unsusceptible.”

And so, the way I see it, finding the courage to reignite your latent ability to dream and having the discipline to record those dreams is just a tiny, tiny step away from giving yourself permission to truly start living again!

© Rajen Devadason

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Don’t Clone your Book or Business Marketing

Remember that the miracle of cloning sheep has its drawbacks. The main one–dying young.

Don’t let your business die young by following the herd. Instead, think of the natural ways you like to market.

Here are some marketing ideas that make big promises, and don’t always deliver. And, when followed by investing a large amount of money and time, only a few who follow these expensive programs will get the results they hope for.

One. Make your book a #1 best seller on Amazon. This idea teaches authors that if they offer $1000’s of bonus books, reports and the like, and tell all their email lists to buy the book on a particular day at Amazon, they will make extreme sales.

In many sales letters that give away $1000’s more than the price of their book, it looks a little suspicious or gimmicky. “Killer copy” and other web sizzle language doesn’t bring confidence to most business people. The programs sold are over $2500. An old saying came from Robert Allen something like: “You make much more money teaching people how to make money than they ever will implementing the skills.”

Two. Optimize your web site standings in the search engines with ads placed in Google.com and through pay-per-click advertising.

For the pay-per-click program, after putting a lot of time into writing ad copy, paying an upfront consultant fee, and paying monthly costs of the key words, I’d say the results for my top four business books were near 0.

Yes, I heard of one author that didn’t invest more than $400 a month to reap $4000 book sales, but her book was highly specialized. When another web master I know followed this tact, she invested thousands a month to yield 50% sales in the beginning months.. For $2500 investment for the first month, she made $1250. Once the competition caught on, her sales dropped way below 50% and no longer gave her a desired income.

Three. You pay around $1000 to get you book into a Print on Demand format and be listed on the POD web site. Sounds good? Maybe not. These printers do not promote your book, just as publishers don’t. They take a big cut from your sales, and your book may be priced too high to make good sales. Most authors make no or little money from this adventure. With just a little education and professional bookcoaching, you can learn a much better way-far less expensive and still get your POD book out there.

Natural Marketing-Three Ideas

One. Like myself, if you are an author or small business, it will be easy and natural for you to write short articles and tips for top web sites and article directories in your field. This one action has kept me at #1 in Google for the phrase “bookcoaching.” for five years and has placed my writings on over 129,000 sites, the number increasing 1000 each month. That means 3500 targeted visitors a day at my site. That means great sales.

Two. If you don’t like to write much, maybe you’ll like BLOGs. They bring similar results as the articles and your own ezine do. It’s a mini web site, and an interactive process your visitors will like it because they see you more casually and personally. When I wrote a blog, it was question and answer format, also letting my humor and opinions out to show I’m human. You can also put your how to articles on your blog with a link to where you sell your products or service.

Three. If you like to share yourself and your solutions with others publically, you may enjoy presenting to groups and have your product available at the back of the room. A similar venue would be joining a networking group. Bring your business card that features either your blog site URL or your ezine subscription information. When you collect these email addresses, you grow your lists of targeted potential buyers.

Cloning isn’t always healthy or profitable. Stay true to your own style of sharing yourself, your business, or book.

Book and Internet Marketing Coach Judy Cullins helps businesses build clients and sell books. Author of "How to Write your Book Fast" and "The Fast and Cheap Way to Explode Targeted Web Traffic," Judy offers free eBook "Book Writing and Marketing Tips" with monthly ezines at http://advancedarticlemarketing.com/

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Done

There comes a time in every manuscript’s life when it’s time to proclaim it finished. Done. Such a final word, that “done,” isn’t it? It means you’re not allowed to do any more tweaking, no more massaging the words to make them come out nicer. It’s time to let go and let those words, imperfect as they may be, go out into the world and become something separate from you.

While you’re writing and rewriting, those words are a part of you. They represent your thoughts, and therefore, they represent who you are at that exact moment in time. But eventually, no matter how insecure you feel, it’s got to be time to send those words out of the nest and see how they fly.

If you’re writing for an audience, then you know the feeling: the moment that you decide your work is ready to show. Exhilarating? Terrifying? Satisfying? Maybe all three.

It’s too easy to hang onto that manuscript for just another day, another week, another draft. It’s a convenient excuse that we suddenly become blocked during the final draft, or that we procrastinate doing the final proofread. We do this because we’re scared that the words we’ve chosen aren’t good enough. They’re not ready. We fear they’re going to leap out of the nest and land on their faces in the mud.

And you darn well could hold onto those words forever, sheltering them from the cruel outside world. You could be just like the overprotective parent who won’t let her teenagers date (they’re “too irresponsible,” “too immature,” “not ready”).

Let your teenagers date. Let those words fly. Realize that no writer ever feels 100% confident in every word he or she writes. I’ve never written a piece that I feel is perfect—something that conveys exactly what I intended it to convey, completely and concisely. And yet, I’ve written hundreds of finished pieces. They’re not perfect, but they’re done. I had to find the courage to let each of them go.

It is a courageous act; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Writing is enormously risky. Every time you send your work out into the world, it’s like you’ve just left the house without your skin on. You’re an open nerve ending. (“If they don’t like it, I’ll just diiiiiie.”) But have you ever died of criticism or rejection before?

In our profession, there are no “rights” and “wrongs.” 1+1 doesn’t equal 2. We can’t take a test and score 100% and therefore know that we’ve now mastered the craft of writing. A car mechanic knows when he’s done because the engine runs smoothly again. A dentist knows when he’s done because the cavity is filled. A writer, on the other hand, never has a natural ending point. There is no 5:00 whistle that tells us it’s time to pack it in. We just make that decision, quietly to ourselves, when it feels we’ve written all we need to write.

Acknowledge to yourself that you may never believe your work is perfect, but that you’re going to have to resign yourself to stopping sometime so you can move on to a new project. There won’t ever be enough time for you to write everything that’s in you to write, so use your time wisely. Don’t spend too much time agonizing over each word; rewrite until you’re proud of what you’ve written, then move on.

When you look back at your work later, you’ll undoubtedly find things to criticize—“How could I not have seen that before? What a redundant passage!” Do your best to give yourself credit; what you wrote merely represented you at that particular moment in time, not the eternal “you.” The eternal “you” still has lots of chances to get it just right.

And maybe there will be no defining work; maybe you’ll discover that your greatness came in bits and pieces, spread out over a lifetime of imperfect writing. But until you’ve found the courage to be finished with something, you’ll never amass that lifetime of writing; you’ll never gain perspective on your talent as a whole if you spend forever on just one project.

Take that leap of faith and let yourself see the project through to the very end. Don’t put off that final proofread; make yourself do it, hard as it may seem to stand so close to the finish line. Give yourself the reward of closure, and celebrate the dedication it took to get to the end.

And now, my dear writing comrades, I’m done.

Jenna Glatzer is the author of OUTWITTING WRITER’S BLOCK AND OTHER PROBLEMS OF THE PEN, available at http://www.absolutewrite.com/jenna/books.htm. She is also the editor-in-chief of Absolute Write (http://www.absolutewrite.com) and a friend to small furry creatures everywhere.

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Does Your Novel Have A Heartbeat?

PART I of The 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series

You’ve read through what you’ve written—your first few scenes, your first chapter, your completed novel—and you’ve discovered that your words don’t move you. They don’t make you want to keep reading. They don’t make you laugh or cry. If writing is bleeding on the page, well, you might have scratched yourself, but you don’t need a transfusion. And you don’t know what went wrong.

When you started writing, did you know what story you were telling? This is trickier than it sounds. You might have known your characters, you might have known your world, and you might have known your plot…but even with this much planning done, it’s entirely possible that you had not yet located your deep layer, the heart of your story, the engine that drove you to write it in the first place.

Odds are very good you did not know your theme.

Your theme is nothing more and nothing less than the heart of a novel. It is not a grade-school exercise in tedium, that single droning sentence you wrote that told your reader what you were going to tell him. In a novel, your theme is a living, vibrant, critical thing. It is your particular passion in this particular novel summed up in a handful of words. It is what you need to say.

Need. That’s the critical thing in a theme. If you’re writing novels, if you are doing something this complex and challenging, you’re doing it because something in you needs to write. You have something to express, some particular point of view, some set of life experiences, some driven hunger that you must put down on paper. You NEED. And you need to say what you need.

Maybe it is: In spite of having survived heartbreak, I believe in true love. Or: I believe good can triumph over greater evil. Or: If I were King of Everything, this is the way the world would be.

Your plot is the map of your story. Your theme is the map of your soul, and it is where your characters will find their direction, their flaws, their hungers, and their own passions. They only breathe with your breath, and they only bleed with your blood. Your plot may be Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl, but your theme—your take on the world based on your life, your own hopes and aspirations, your own beliefs—might be Chubby Bald Guy Deserves the Love of a Wonderful Woman.

You have themes in you. You’ve built them from love and courage, but you’ve built them from anger and fear, too. You live with them every day, when you’re muttering that argument you had with your spouse or colleague, designing better comebacks; when you’re watching the boss cheat someone and you’re getting furious about it; when you’re watching a disaster and telling yourself, Someone could have prevented that; when you’re hearing the latest political garbage and thinking, This is not the way the world should be.

I could do this better. I WOULD do this better.

And so you write.

You have rich, powerful, compelling, passionate themes boiling inside you. You have something worth saying. Now you just need to know how to figure out what it is, and how to get it on the page.

In Part II: How To Find Your Novel’s Pulse, you’ll learn how to identify your themes, and figure out which are worth pursuing.

Full-time novelist Holly Lisle has published more than thirty novels with major publishers. Her next novel, THE RUBY KEY, (Orchard Books) will be on shelves May 1st. You can receive her free writing newsletter, Holly Lisle's Writing Updates at http://hollylisle.com/newsletter.html

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Do You Remember Your Nursery Rhymes?

Who hasn’t written a poem before? Even once? I believe most people go through a phase in life and it pushes them to pen a poem; ok, or something that resembles a poem.

At an early age, we have been exposed to poems. Remember the nursery rhymes? They’re poems. Someone put melodies on them so adults can sing the rhymes to little kids and the little kids can remember them easily.

You’ve probably written a poem of some sort in the past. Whether you write poems for fun, for personal reasons, or for publication, here are 3 poetry prompts you can try out:

1. I Am. For each of the letters in your first name, think of at least 3 positive adjectives. Next, go over your adjective list and circle the ones that describe you best. Then use those adjectives for your “I Am” poem.

2. A Quinzaine. Quinzaine is from the French word quinze, which means “fifteen.” A quinzaine is an unrhymed verse having 3 lines and 15 syllables. Line 1 gives a statement and the remaining 2 lines ask a question that relates to line 1.

Here’s the form:
line 1 – 7 syllables
line 2 – 5 syllables
line 3 – 3 syllables

And here’s an example of a quinzaine:

Sun’s radiance shuns shadows
Will the morning steal
the darkness?

3. The Object Poem. Choose an object. Next, list down the reasons you think the object you chose represents you (or your personality). From your list of reasons, which one is the most powerful? Which one conveys the strongest image of yourself? Once you’ve chosen your main image, list at least 10 things that support this main image. Build your poem from there.

Copyright © Shery Ma Belle Arrieta-Russ

About Shery: Shery is the creator of WriteSparks!™- a software that generates over 10 *million* Story Sparkers for Writers. Download WriteSparks!™ Lite for free at http://writesparks.com

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Digital Storytelling

In its most basic form, character animation is about storytelling. As you will see, characters drive a story, and, in turn, the story further defines the character. A good story gives characters motivation, conflict, and a path of action. Without these things, your characters will not truly spring to life.

Story structure has a few important concepts. First, you need a character who is motivated by a need. To achieve that need, the character must overcome obstacles. As the character deals with the obstacles, the audience learns more about who the character is. It is simple to explain, but telling a good story is an art form in itself. Now that you understand some of the basics of storytelling, you can start to develop stories of your own.

What type of story do you create? There are quite a few. There’s the simple story with a full plot that has a beginning, middle, and end. There are also stories that are really just a collection of gags strung together, as in a Road Runner cartoon. Even those simple cartoons have the essential basics of a story: The Coyote’s motivation is to catch the Road Runner. He just seems to encounter plenty of obstacles along the way.

Keep It Simple
Although it is wonderful to imagine the most incredible and complex stories, there will always be limits. Even the biggest studio blockbuster has a fixed budget. For a personal film, the limit is the amount of time that you alone can give to the project. Most projects fall somewhere in the middle.

With any project, there is always the tendency to bite off more than you can chew. Creating a story is easy. Actually producing it is another matter altogether. It is always best to keep the time and budget constraints in mind. Knowing how much time and effort are required to produce a particular film is knowledge gained mostly from experience. The more films you make, the more aware you will be of the time and expense involved.

For students who are creating their first film, the best advice is to keep it small. This means sticking to a handful of characters and a situation that is manageable. Usually two to three minutes is plenty, and four to five minutes is ambitious. Films over five minutes might require some outside help. Remember, the classic Warner Brothers cartoons were all only six minutes long.

In any project, simplicity is typically the best way to go. Most of the best short films have very simple plots and stories. The Pixar shorts are a great example, in that they all have only a handful of characters and one simple conflict. Another case for keeping the story simple and the number of characters small is that you can spend more screen time developing each character. Isn’t “character” what character animation is all about?

Brainstorming a Premise
You can develop stories in many ways. Some people prefer to write out their thoughts. Some people like to work it out visually. One way is to simply brainstorm ideas. Brainstorming is an exercise in pure creativity. Get a sheet of paper and start writing down ideas. If you like to draw, you can also make simple sketches to work out a story visually.

Take a sheet of paper and fill it with one-line premises for films. The more premises, the better; if your ideas spill over to a second, third, or fourth sheet, that’s great. You may even take several days to come up with the ideas, keeping a pad in your pocket to write down ideas as they hit you. At this point, you simply need to generate ideas for characters, stories, or both. These can be complete or incomplete ideas; the goal at this point is simply to free your mind, be creative, and come up with as many ideas as you can.

A sample page might look like this:

Adult can’t open childproof bottle
Prank phone calls gone bad
Angry Milkman who delivers nothing but sour milk
How to Climb a Tree, as told by a fish
The cockroach who became president
Dust bunnies brought to life by static electricity
The woman who stole the Eiffel Tower
A hamster who can’t sleep because the dog is snoring
A drill sergeant running a flower shop.
Plane with broken engine—two people, one parachute
Ham and two slices of bread try to convince cheese to make a sandwich
Hot potato, the world’s sexiest potato
Spinach on tooth that won’t go away before big speech
Stan, the guy who was canned as ham in Spokane
Magician who has a stuck bunny
Big, mean wrestlers playing shuffleboard

As you can see, these are just ideas, not complete stories—don’t worry about whether they will work. Put these ideas away for a day or two, and then go back and review them objectively. For each premise, try to picture exactly how the story will take shape. Remember, a complete story needs three things: character, motivation, and obstacles. Ultimately, one of these many ideas will strike you as the idea for your film. Once you’ve chosen your premise, you’ll need to develop your story.

Developing Your Premise into a Story
As you can see, the possibilities for premises are limited only by your imagination. Once you have a premise in hand, you need to ask yourself some very serious and objective questions about how the film will be made.

The first question that you need to ask yourself is whether the film can be made at all. If it’s a story about fish, for instance, you may need to animate water. Ask yourself if your software is capable of handling the types of shots and characters that the premise demands.

You also need to think about length. Some stories cannot be told in a few minutes, although you’d be surprised as to how much you can cram into that a span of time. Simple is usually better, however. Typically, this means focusing on one set of characters, one motivation, and one set of conflicts.

Fleshing Out Your Premise
You’ll need a stack of note cards or Post-It notes for this exercise. Select your favorite premise from the previous exercise. Using the premise as your guide, think up story points, writing down or drawing each point on a separate card.

These points can be as simple as “She walks down the street,” and “Notices something in the window.” If you have an idea for a visual gag, draw it on the card. You should simply generate a large number of ideas at this point. If the ideas don’t flow readily, you might want to select a different premise.

Once you have as many ideas as you can think of, go though the stack of cards and organize the story points into a rough outline of the story. You can do this by pinning the cards on a bulletin board or laying them out on a table. Once you’ve arranged these cards into an outline, you have a good idea of what your story will look like.

Developing a Script
Once you have a ton of ideas, you’ll have a stack of index cards and will need to organize your story so that you know, beat for beat, the exact sequence of events, including the ending. Let’s take the idea of the adult who can’t open the childproof bottle. Getting to the contents of the bottle is the adult’s motivation; the complex cap is the obstacle. Pretty simple story.

Fleshing it out, the adult could use all sorts of wild schemes to get the cap off: a can opener, a blowtorch, dynamite. If other characters, such as a kid, a dog, and a hamster manage to open it with no help, it can just serve to humiliate the adult and strengthen his motivation.

All of these conflicts need to build to an ending as well. The ending could be simple, with the adult driving himself crazy with frustration. It could be ironic—he finally opens the bottle, only to find it empty.

As you finalize the structure of your story, you will also need to be writing a script. This could be as simple as a point-by-point outline of the action, to a full script with dialogue and screen direction.

Visualizing Your Story
At this point, in addition to writing, you’ll need to be visualizing. Animation is a very visual medium, so you will absolutely need to see how your film looks on every shot. Even if you draw in stick figures, sketching out your ideas in storyboard form will help you understand exactly how gags and situations in your film will be staged.

While sketching storyboard panels can be very quick for some people, others have problems with drawing. Drawing 3D characters might be less accurate because the drawings might not be true to the actual characters. If your characters are already built, you can visualize the story another way, without drawing. Simply pose the characters in your 3D application, and render stills to use as the storyboard. No scanning is required; the images are true to the actual characters, and the 3D scene files can be saved and used later as layouts for animation.

Finalizing Your Story
Once you have your story worked out, you’re only at the first step. The film still needs to be produced. As a story is produced, minor things may change, but the core of the story should remain the same. You should have a good story, which is the foundation for creating a good film.

George Maestri is the author of several animation books from New Riders Publishing, including [Digital] Character Animation 2, Volume I and [Digital] Character Animation 2, Volume II. He is also the series editor for New Riders' [Digital] series of books, including [Digital] Lighting and Rendering and [Digital] Texturing and Painting.

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Dig Deeper With Your Novel’s Subthemes

Part V of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series

By now, you have a solid grasp of the importance of having a theme for your story, of keeping it personal and hidden (to avoid writing the dreaded Message Book), and of hanging on to the courage of your convictions in writing it the way you need to, knowing that you cannot ever please everyone, nor should you try.

That’s a good, solid foundation for writing a book that people will read, and then re-read, and then recommend to friends, and finally buy as presents for people they really like. Which is, after all, the writer’s ultimate goal—to write a story readers love so much they’ll share it with other people who will love it, too.

But you can still go deeper, and make the work richer and more compelling, by layering in subthemes.

[Brakes screech, and someone mutters, “Wait a minute. You finally sold me on themes. But SUBthemes? C’mon, already.”]

Subthemes are one of the best friends novelists have. (They’re far less useful for folks who write short stories, simply because subthemes add to the length and complexity of the story.)

Subthemes do three massively useful things for the writer crafting a novel—things a single theme alone cannot do.

1) They force the world of the story into three dimensions. If the book is focused on one theme—no matter how fascinating and wonderful that theme—and all the characters are focused on that one issue, and all the action revolves around that one issue, then, no matter how skilled the writer may be, the book will feel thin. Step beyond the borders of the main action, and no character has anything to do, or say, or think, or any reason to exist. Their lives are bordered by the main theme. By adding subthemes, you fill out your characters’ lives with needs and events that are important to them outside of and separate from the main story’s focus.

2) Subthemes add length and complexity. (I mentioned this above in the negative sense, but that which is the bane of the short story writer is in this case the boon of the novelist.) I receive the following question at least once a week from beginning and intermediate writers—“How do I make my story longer without padding it (and without trying to figure out more plot, because I’m out of ideas)?”

Subthemes by their very nature give you something extra to work into your plot—the unexpected pregnancy of the heroine adding complications while she is running for her life; the villain who in the midst of working mayhem discovers the mother he truly loves is dying; the harassment of the main character by the practical joker at work whose stupid jokes later become mixed up in the life or death issues already besieging the hero.

3) Subthemes allow you an extra opportunity to…um, for lack of a better word…vent. And get something good out of the bad things that have happened in your life. This is admittedly a strange side benefit, but just about every writer I know has SOME issue that repeatedly makes its way into his (or her) novels. The trick, always, is to keep YOUR issue out of the book, and make the issue really and truly related to the character, with different events and a different resolution.

So where do you find your subthemes?

1) Pick a subtheme that is distantly related to the issue driving your novel. If your theme is “Why do bad things happen to good people?”, and your story is about a father who comes to terms with the lingering death of his oldest kid after the boy contracts some terrible disease, a related theme would be how the father finds ways to bring happiness to the kid’s life (and his own) for whatever time they have left. Or how the kid makes a friend in the middle of his personal tragedy, or learns to do something he’s always wanted to do. Or how the father makes one thing his son has always wanted come true for him.(Man, this would be a grim book.)

2) Pick an unrelated issue, and give it, in disguised form, to primary or secondary characters. Using the example above, an unrelated issue that could become a theme would be how the father hangs on to a job when he’s both the sole provider (say the kid’s mother died, or just left) and his kid’s sole source of care and support; or how the kid sets out to win the science fair before he dies, and wins the respect of a teacher he previously hated.

3) Pick some train wreck in your personal life, THOROUGHLY disguise it, give it to people totally unlike the people who were involved in YOUR train wreck, change names, locales, and events… And then work though it the way you should have, or wish you could have, the first time. Using this method, the father could be going through your horrible divorce, but HE could find the good ending you didn’t get. Or he could give up his fantastic career as a professional poker player to be with his son, and could find something good from that loss, rather than the constant regret you have from a similar situation.

In every case, your priorities in using subthemes are to:

* give yourself more story than what you’d get if you only focused on your theme,

* give your reader something extra, and different, to take away from the book.

You and your story will benefit in more ways than you can imagine.

In BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE, Part VI, Interweaving Your Novel’s Themes And Subthemes, you’ll learn three of my favorite techniques for balancing themes and subthemes while writing your novel.

Full-time novelist Holly Lisle has published more than thirty novels with major publishers. Her next novel, THE RUBY KEY, (Orchard Books) will be on shelves May 1st. You can receive her free writing newsletter, Holly Lisle's Writing Updates at http://hollylisle.com/newsletter.html

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Description – How is it Done These Days

I picked up a story the other day written in the 1950s. Here’s an extract:

“Two storys high and built of granite, rose the Georgian house, but the porch and its pillars were of red, conglomerate stone. They broke the unbending gravity of the grey front with a touch of colour. Behind rolled blue hills, now melting into the splendour of gold and orange above them; while southward, beyond a little park, extended meadowlands, wooded ridges, and fields of corn yellowing to harvest…”

Phew! It’s all very poetic but you’d be lucky if a publisher read past the first sentence – we’re simply not supposed to write like this anymore.

Conversely, I was researching for a radio interview recently and tried to find modern examples of locality description – failing to find very much at all. I was surprised actually at how little description modern authors use.

I did find this, by Kathy Reichs, to use as an example:

“The building stood alone on an acre of land that was entirely enclosed by an electric fence. Surveillance cameras dotted the barrier’s upper rim, and powerful floods lit the perimeter…”

Do you notice how much more succinct and direct this is compared to the example above? And by the way, this is about the only piece of description in the first 100 pages of Reich’s novel!

Even physical descriptions of people are kept very brief in modern works – and are usually only inserted to help us understand the mind of the ‘describer’ – that is, the main character/s.

Modern fiction is all about action – people doing things, thinking, making links, engaged in puzzle solving and obstacle tackling. Gone are what we take for granted. What things, places and people look like are only included if they are unusual or pertinent to the plot.

I get emails about this all the time. ‘Where can I find a good resource to teach me about description?’ ‘Well, you probably can’t,’ I have to say. It’s not specifically taught anymore, because, I would imagine, it’s not a tool you’re going to use much as a modern author!

I guess it’s because of the communications boom of the past 50 years.

Because of TV, movies, the Net etc, most of us know what things and places and people look like. We only need shorthand notes to work out for ourselves what a ‘blonde attorney’ or a ‘old warehouse’ might look like. So descriptions of ‘flowing golden tresses across her pin-striped jacket’ or ‘aging stone and broken glass amidst rusted girders’ become redundant, even gratuitous.

Today, readers just want the story and nothing much else. Here’s an example from Patricia Cornwell. First line of a novel:

“The late morning blazed with blue skies and the colors of fall, but none of it was for me…”

She’s established time, date, the mood of the protagonist – and managed to intrigue the reader too – in just under twenty words! Now that’s succinct – and a lesson to us.

If you read a lot of bestsellers – which I do – you’ll see there’s no real trick to writing popular fiction – it’s more to do with discipline. The best writers seem to know when to hold back and almost disguise the fact that they’re writers at all. The story, plot and characters are everything and the only things that drive the novel.

Any superfluous wordage is excised – and don’t be fooled by the finished products you buy off the shelf. Modern novels are ruthlessly edited, pared back, honed and rewritten, sometimes numerous times by editors, proofreaders and by the authors themselves to achieve what seems like effortless, but tight writing.

They have to be – we readers want only the best now. And, if we want to write best-selling fiction, we must also learn to write, and rewrite, be ruthless with ourselves and our craft to achieve the best results.

Remember the old adage – and it can apply extremely well to modern fiction, whether it be description or any other prose related activity: “When in doubt, leave it out!”

©Rob Parnell PS: Want your own writing honed to perfection? Speak to me first. This article is written by Rob Parnell. Visit his website at www.easywaytowrite.com

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