Six Storytelling Tips

1. Doodle. I love to doodle and this often inspires a fun story starter. Doodle off of paper, too. Think outside the box. Maybe the act of doodling makes it into your story.
2. Lists. I generate lists of words and events that might happen to a made character. This helps with word variety, too.
3. Listen. Jot down what people around you are saying. Combine the sentences of two different conversations. WHOA, did that just lead you to an amazing new story?
4. Ask questions. I let my kids ask as many questions as they want. That includes my own children in my family and the kids in my workshops.
5. Senses! Make sure your story includes things people see, feel, hear, smell, and taste. Get that brain activated!
6. Humor. My favorite six sense is the sense of humor. Even a scary ghost story is better with a little joke here and there.

What’s not to like?

There’s some debate if Facebook helps anyone at all.

A good friend of mine who is also a great writer recently turned off her Facebook in order to complete a major project. It was a good decision for her because she knows that like many of us, social media can be distracting. It is so easy to sit on Facebook (or other social media) and scroll through my feed laughing at funny posts, rolling my eyes at overly dramatic posts, burning with rage at posts about injustice, and trying not to cry at moving, uplifting posts. And for some people, Facebook is more than distracting, it’s detracting. It makes them feel downright bad.

It is a lot easier to scroll than tackle tough writing tasks. So why don’t I eliminate Facebook from my life all together?

Because like any good optimist, I think there is some good in everything. Even Facebook.

I spent a great day yesterday working with a creative friend yesterday who wondered if Facebook really was useful for her. Also this month, one of my favorite clients has reached out to me to ask for two presentations on social media, one for beginners and one for advanced users. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how social media like Facebook can be useful.

Story Source

People share stories on Facebook, and writers need stories. Facebook helps with inspiration! No, I don’t suggest you steal people’s life stories for your next novel, but I do suggest thinking about motivations and background and choices. Use what you read about how people to act to make your characters seem as real as possible.

Network It

Hello, critique group! Yes, you can connect with other writers and conduct a pretty decent critique group via Facebook. And if you get into a great professional writers’ group you can also learn valuable info on how to pitch your work. Just make sure you give as much as you get. Remember, online networking can be a lot more effective if you also incorporate some IRL (in real life) experiences.

What You Don’t Know

Facebook helps you gain knowledge, if you use it right. Go beyond just liking friends and find some pages that feature information on different cultures, or foods, or skills. Like them. Learn form them!! Maybe push yourself to go to new events that you discover online and learn about yourself, too.

Hone Your Funny Bone

As a writer, use Facebook and other social media to write as funny as you can as succinctly as you can. Humor works well on social media and helps you practice your craft. As a reader, find some joy in the world. Think about what it is that people love to read about and include these elements in your stories.

Keep It Real

Sometimes all we need to do is post our goals in public to help us reach them. Once you have a good core group of friends, you can ask them to help you stay accountable. Just don’t forget to lend the same support to other writers who also need that nudge.

Facebook for the Checkbook

Facebook helps writers get writing work – sometimes. It works for some people, but it’s not the best way to land great gigs and it should never be your only way.

There are lots of ways to use social media for your benefit. But I think a big part of using social media the right way is to think about your goals and identify drawbacks. I have turned off notifications and only go on social media during designated times during the day when I don’t have other obligations. I also monitor my usage on RescueTime so I can find out if I’m cheating!!

What ways do you find Facebook to be helpful?

You can also check out my article about how Pinterest can be less about procrastination and more for productivity.

I’ve been keeping track of my writing submissions, rejections, and acceptances in a fancy little notebook for the past three years.

Fancy notebook

In a private Facebook group, I recently participated in a discussion about how much money other full-time freelancers make annually. Many of them are doing full-time journalism and copywriting and not trying to make it as fiction writers. While I keep track of my financials, I was inspired by this discussion to analyze the volume and success rate of my pitching.

So I launched into the analysis of my submissions, rejections, and acceptances. Now, even though someone I love very, very much is like and expert on Numbers, charts, and graphs, I’m not so much of an expert. So I started out very simply with a numeric chart. Later I might try pie charts and bar graphs. Also, later I might analyze my non-fiction versus fiction rates. But at this point, here are my basic numbers.

One of the hardest tasks I had in making these charts was choosing a color for each year. I don’t exactly have an eye for design, so I decided to use the Pantone colors of the year!

2013 Submissions

2014 Submissions

2015 Submissions

2016 Submissions – will this be the year I submit over the summer?

So it looks like 2015 was a good year in terms of overall volume. I did better on my amount of submissions and, probably logically, did better in terms of acceptances. There’s also a definite bell curve in terms of what time of year I am most productive with submissions.

For 2016, I hope to maintain a steady rate of submissions even over the summer. I’d also love to hit at least 10% of acceptances for the year.

Do you keep track of your submissions, rejections, and acceptances? Have you ever analyzed your success rate?

I juggle a lot of projects simultaneously, but every once in awhile I dive in full force on a project and decide to work on it until it’s ready to go. I’ve kind of dabbled on a certain story about bees for awhile. Back in April 2014, I went on an SCBWI writing retreat back and jotted down the basic outline. Throughout 2014 and 2015 I’ve read lots of books about bees. In 2015, I went on a bee walk!

This is going to BE fun!

But this year I’ve gone ahead and committed myself to finishing the full draft. I’m over 15,000 words into the first full draft. My final word count goal is around 35,000 so I’m close to halfway. The number of bees in a hive actually outnumbers the words in my manuscript.

Which brings me to my next question and it’s not about bee science. It’s actually “who is my main character?” It’s pretty hard to pick one main character out of a hive of 50,000 bees.

It’s also hard to write animal, or in this case, insect dialogue. It has to be just right to be believable. As another part of my research, I’m reading some of my favorite animal fantasy books Watership Down and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.

Right now when I need a break from writing new chapters, I go back and work on fine-tuning the first two pages. I want to strike the right balance between description and setting the scene in the hive, some dialogue to draw in younger readers, and establishing a page-turning problem. At a recent critique group I was told that I didn’t make it obvious enough that I was writing about honeybees. I felt a little defensive about the comment, though, because when kids pick up a book they will see (hopefully) a bee on the cover, read a blurb on the back of the book, read the tagline, etc.

Despite that, I decided to take a look at the first two pages of these books.

Two Classics

So there’s no dialogue here but there is a big problem presented right on the first page. And the words “field mice” are mentioned right in the first sentence.

Here’s the first page of Watership Down. Rabbits aren’t mentioned until the third sentence, and it’s not even clear that this story is about rabbits. Unless you look at the front cover, then you get a clue that the story is about rabbits! There really isn’t a problem clearly stated here on the first page unless you really think deeply about the quote from Agamemnon and know something about the role of Cassandra.

On both first pages, there’s really a lot of detail about the natural setting. I love that about these books. I feel really dropped into the scenery and the experience of the main characters. That’s really essential to the animal fantasy in my opinion. I’m definitely going to focus on that aspect of writing in my bee story.

Sometimes it’s really hard to tell if I should finish a story. I have several writing projects happening all at once. Some are non-fiction articles I’m researching, some are fiction stories I’m writing. Since most of the stories aren’t on assignment but are things I’ve decided to work on during my own time.

I jump around from project to project. If my energy starts to ebb on a certain story I usually don’t feel bad switching to another story. But if it sits neglected too long I start to feel a little guilty. I’m not saying that every project is worth something. For instance, I don’t think “Santa’s Best Friend” is going anywhere. That’s just a feeling, though, not an objective assessment.

I confess to having a little bit of worry about this. What if I keep starting stories but don’t finish any? Does that make me seem less productive? Or like I have no follow-through? I often feel really compelled to finish things that I start, just to prove I can.

But maybe that’s not the best use of my time. Maybe it’s better to stop working on stories that aren’t working.

I don’t really have a rubric for deciding if a story is worth finishing or not. It’s often just a vibe or a guess. So how do other writers know they should finish the story?

I know just how Melissa feels.

There’s quite a few different approaches there. It seems like not a lot of writers don’t mind giving up on certain projects when they aren’t feeling it.

I certainly don’t want to work on something that makes me nauseous.

Fellow writer Denise offers four times for writers to know when it’s time to give up on a story. 

So when do you know it’s time to stop working on one story and start on another?