The Green-Eyed Monster: A Writer Roundtable

We've all seen the meme. It's the standard visual for jealousy now, it seems. A man and a woman are walking and the guy looks back at another woman, an action that causes the woman he's with to cast them both a sidelong glance (or glare). But what about jealousy in regard to our writing careers. Or maybe it's just plain envy. I wanted to know, so I asked a few folks who have been in that life of words for a while what they thought. 

Do you get jealous of the success of other writers you know? How do you deal with that? How do you avoid the comparison trap? 

Elizabeth Donald: Another writer’s success does not diminish my success, my accomplishments, or my potential for either. There isn’t a finite quantity of success to go around; it’s not pie. When my writer friends have a great new contract, a stellar review, major sales, etc. I am happy for them. I know they have worked very hard to get where they are, as I do, and I have faith that one day my hard work will be rewarded as theirs was. I find it distasteful when I see a writer complaining about someone else’s success, or that they don’t understand why it hasn’t happened for them yet. Is it so hard to simply be happy for someone else’s good fortune?

I remember something Frank Fradella said once when we were holding a Literary Underworld panel: that when many authors support each other and provide an artistic community for each other, the work is inevitably better. I am mangling what he said, but he brought up the Lost Generation of writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald bashing around Paris together in the 1920s. And he wasn’t arguing that we were all incipient Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, but more that their natural talent was enhanced by being in community with others. (Not that Hemingway is a great example of lack of competitiveness, be that as it may.) It’s one of the reasons the Literary Underworld exists; to help authors support each other and help each other succeed. Jealousy, competitiveness, resentfulness… None of these things make any sense to me. They’re counterproductive to the goals of art, and they eat away at the soul.

Ef Deal: Another writer's success means people are still reading and books are still important. I feel confident there will be readers for what I write, and I say huzzah to all.

Just one thing more: I set a modest goal for myself when I was very young (9) that I would publish in Fantasy & Science Fiction and I would publish a novel. I've done both, and I'm still writing and publishing short stories and I have at least a few more novels to put out there, so I don't feel any reason to be jealous of someone else. Would I like to be #1 on some list? Sure. Would I like to win some obscure or famous award? Absolutely. Will it change anything about my writing? Not likely.

Susan H. Roddey: For me, it's not "jealousy" so much as a feeling of inadequacy. It's Imposter Syndrome, and thanks to being a card-carrying member of the Gifted Kid Burnout clique, I'm exceedingly hard on myself for reasons that have nothing at all to do with other people. Even when I do experience success, I'm always looking for the storm cloud to block the silver lining. Success for others, though... I'm 100 percent here for it and will be the biggest cheerleader anyone has seen. I WANT my friends and colleagues to do well.

Relevant aside: This weekend Misty Massey won an award that we were both nominated for, and I am so ridiculously happy for her that I could burst. Am I disappointed that I didn't win? Eh, kinda. Or I was for a whole quarter of a second. I know she absolutely deserved to win though, and we still have cause to celebrate.

Bobby Nash: Another writer's success doesn't make me jealous. I'm thrilled to see others succeed.

HC Playa: Generally I am inspired by other's success....even when that success doesn't particularly seem warranted. Say a work isn't really that good. We can all point to well known titles that hit it big and got movies, etc, but they are at best mediocre, sometimes downright trash. It can be easy to play the 'why not me' game, but rather than fall into that trap, it's better to say "Well, if they found success, so can I. I simply have to keep writing."

For the vast majority of writers, it's a long game; intermittent success amid many rejections. I focus not on comparing myself to other writers, because that too is an easy trap to fall into and self-sabotage, but on the fact that the feedback I have gotten from my stories is overwhelmingly positive. People enjoy the stories. No, I haven't hit it big, but I am doing my job well--I am writing stories that others enjoy. All the rest is luck.

Alan J. Porter: Jealousy doesn’t really enter the equation. I’m always happy to see others succeed - especially if it’s someone I know. And seeing other writers succeed is always an inspiration to keep pushing on. 

An editor told me early on not to make comparisons as no one else can write the books/stories I write the way I write them. - One of the best pieces of advice I’ve had.

H. David Blalock: As print books become scarcer, magazines go online, and AIs become authors, it's hard to be jealous of anything coming out today. I'm just grateful there are a few human beings left actually writing and not depending on AI or ghostwriters to flesh out their ideas. Kudos to the actual creators. More power to them.

John Linwood Grant: I go down into the cellar again, and trawl through my collection of other writers' hair, toenail clippings, and general bodily detritus - until I find the right bits for my next set of clever little clay dollies. 🙂

Sean Taylor: For me, it gets down to what I see as the difference between envy and jealousy. Jealousy for me is when I want someone else's stuff and I don't want them to have it. Envy is when I want to achieve the same kind of things. For example, when I was writing for Gene Simmons for IDW, I tried and tried to parlay that into a new gig for when that one was over. But it didn't happen. I got a few invites to pitch for everything from Jem and the Holograms to Transformers, but either the line was going to an author that fit the demographic better and was more well known, or the whole license was moving to another publisher. So, when I failed, and then I saw folks I had worked with before move into major gigs like TMNT, Ghostbusters, Godzilla, and New Warriors, I got frustrated. Sure, I was envious and I wanted to understand why and how they could translate one gig into something bigger and I hadn't been able to. But in the end, it pushed me to keep trying, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding. And yes, I was incredibly happy for those friends to succeed at bigger gigs, but I could be happy for them and a little envious too, couldn't I?

Krystal Rollins: I'm not jealous of others' success. I applaud them. Just makes me work harder.

Josh Nealis: I always say there's good jealousy and bad jealousy. Bad jealousy is obviously being mad that somebody else is succeeding where you have not. Good jealousy is the same thing except for you understand that it's likely they deserve what they've received, and you be happy for them, but you turn that jealousy into motivation and push yourself harder.

Brian K Morris: It's been a long time since I compared my skills or success (or lack thereof) to any other writer's. It's just not a productive use of my time or energy.

When my friends succeed, I find it a cause to celebrate. Their accomplishments make me work harder so when they move up, I still can justify my presence at the table with them.

James Tuck: I love seeing writers I know succeed at this weird wonky gig we all chose. I hope every one of them kicks ass!

Thankful Writers Pass the Turkey

Let's get some November thankfulness in here on the ol' blog. I'll set the virtual table with imaginary turkey, dressing, and cranberry sauce, but I'll need you to bring the thankfulness. (And don't even try to touch that mac and cheese. That's all mine. LOL)

What are you most thankful for this year as a writer? 

Ef Deal: Thankful to be writing with ease. It's as if a dam broke and the stories keep pouring out of me. I don't write many things, but I am three and two-halves into a paranormal pre-steampunk series that I just love, and book one has been contracted for publication.

Robert Krog: My first published novel.

Bobby Nash: I think I wrote some good stuff this year.

Brian K Morris: An overabundance of work.

Jason Bullock: That I survived Covid related complications when so many others didnt last year or this one.

Tamara Lowery: The invaluable source of information the author community here on FB has been in my journey to re-release my Waves of Darkness series as self-published. You guys ROCK!

Gordon Dymowski: Managing to balance creativity, work, and caregiving for Mom.

Krystal Rollins: Inspiration from you.

Tried and True Methods To Create and Maintain... Suspense!

For our next writer roundtable, let's talk suspense. What are your tried and true methods for creating and maintain suspense in your work? Feel free to quote examples you've written.

Bobby Nash: If my POV character is the one experiencing it, I use short, choppy sentences, disjointed or incomplete thoughts, distractions that move from one to the other. It feels frantic in that character's thoughts. I try to have the reader feel the character's anxiety.

Corrina Lawson: Ticking clock.

John L. Taylor: I use descriptive cues in their environment. One I used in a yet unpublished manuscript was to have a seemingly unmenacing character began talking to the POV character while Greig's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" is being played on a piano in the background. His tale gets more and more morbid with the music until the POV character realizes she's talking to the Angel of Death who's threatening to kill her entire city at the crescendo. It doesn't have to be that blunt, but even like a mounting noise like scratching, or a smell the protagonist is gagging on. Mix these with their rising suspicion or internal monologue and I find it builds effective tension. Also, have an event that the reader is waiting to happen, then tease it coming. In the same horror story, we read in the prologue that the POV character has snow-white hair. In chapter one, I describe her hair as naturally raven black. The reader knows something supernatural and extremely traumatic is going to happen, something that changes the protagonist's entire core nature. So I drop hints every four chapters or so until the event happens in the climax. Remember though, the more tense wind up, the bigger the payoff must be. So don't overdo it. Sometimes the moment you're building to isn't a climactic event, just a part of the journey. Place tension appropriately within the POV character's arc.

John Linwood Grant: I quite like to reflect the ‘feel’ of what is coming, to build suspense, by including aspects not immediately relevant to the expected action. So the time by the clock, in the first example below, is symbolic of something coming, as is the restlessness of a dead fox in the second. It’s about planting the idea that things are about to change, without saying it openly.

“The moon is near its first quarter, a bright crescent barely clouded now. The silver wound of it illuminates Commercial Street and the ways beyond. Almshouses and chapels, slum tenements and public houses, some showing a faint light. Mile End in the distance; breweries and rookeries around. The hands of the Christ Church clock, not so far away, stand at almost four in the morning…” (Assassin’s Coin)

“A dead fox stirs, unable to rest, its white bones gleaming in the tough grass. The owls do not call.” (Horse Road)

Bill Craig: Create a sense of urgency, as if the hero is racing against a clock.

Brian K Morris: In my writing, I like to establish that the character is moving towards something mysterious, unknowable. It's even better when I remove their support systems and any reasons to retreat from the danger.

Marian Allen: I put my characters out of their element or out of their depth and make sure the readers know it. In my mystery/comedy Bar Sinister, the "detective" is a naive busybody poking around a murder as if it's a fun puzzle. In my historical (1968) mystery A Dead Guy at the Summer House, the main character is trying desperately NOT to be told what happened before he was hired as a handyman, and doesn't even know a murder has been committed -- but other people think he knows ALL about it. I like for my characters to be -- with the readers' knowledge -- to approach danger unawares, so the reader can sit on a bus and shout aloud, "Don't go in there!" Good times.

Ian Totten: Stillness in the air coupled with distant sounds (cars on a highway, a dog barking) and an overall sense of quiet where the scene is taking place. If I can’t sense the dread and suspense in my head, it needs to be reworked until I do.

Krystal Rollins: Broderic Martin sat behind his desk, in his luxury office that overlooked a beautiful waterfall fountain. His office window would open about a quarter of the way up, just enough to hear the water splash back into the concrete pool below. He loved to listen to the water drop in sequence, people everywhere were in a cheery mood and police sirens whaled in the distance. After the sun went down was his favorite time to sit back and relax in his leather chair; the light bulbs in the pool lit up in color. It was mesmerizing, almost like a woman in a colorful silk nighty walking up to him. Anything that he wanted, she would do. The night secretary would quietly lock up his office but didn’t dare disturb his peaceful thoughts before she left for the night. He used the classic excuse to his wife that a couple of his friends from different states flew in for an all-night poker game. But instead, he used the time alone, the time to clear his mind, time to meditate, time he needed just to wind down. To see the colors of the rainbow under the water come to life, sometimes he broke down and cried. A cleansing. It was a life that most would love to have; a casino hotel that made him millions per year. A beautiful wife that looked at him all day through an eight by ten glass who wanted him home more with her and the children. He had employees by his side that would do anything he asked them to and top-notch security when he needed it. Broderic controlled a part of Las Vegas, taken over from his dad who did everything by the book. It was a different time, a dog-eat-dog world. His father made lots of friends, all Broderic did was make enemies and that’s why in his mind, everybody wanted to be around him. Ever since college, he always wanted to have fun all the time; dinner parties, expensive cars, children in private school and all the women his could desire.

Earl Carlson: Hideous and horrid, she stands over me, savoring her triumph, threatening me with finger wiggles, and salivating at the prospect of gluttonizing on my unsullied flesh. The blood of her last meal, still fresh and flowing, drips from her jowls, and her fangs gleam a ghastly white amidst the gore. I cannot help myself. I close my eyes in a vain attempt to shut her out – to make her go away. Please, Devla, make her go away. And I scream. All my terror, all my hopelessness, all my anguish coalesces as a flaming liquid in my belly, and emanates from my every orifice, my every pore, in one final, one last-ever, forever scream.

Gordon Dymowski: Bring your audience to attention, give them a clue as to what may happen....and leave them there.

Suspense is all about letting the audience come to their own conclusion before you add something that makes them want to know more. Only resolve the tension when there's no other alternative.

Hiraeth Publish: The best way is to create and develop a character who connects with the reader, and put that person in credible, yet outre jeopardy.

Jason Bullock: I like to take the reader through the scene at the beginning with a volley of description in and around all the senses a character could experience it in. The following paragraphs lead up to the climax of the scene like a roller coaster edging to the crescendo waiting for the moment of conflict to strike the Bailey so to speak.

Sean Taylor: There are several techniques I like to go to as my stand-by methods. The first is to vary the sentence length. Short sentences increase reading speed, which can also increase tension. Then hit 'em with a long, compound sentence for a sort of full stop, like hitting the pavement from a great height. 

Another is to use a repetitive phrase that draws readers back to the central idea they're supposed to be in suspense about. Nothing cheesy, but subtle enough to keep that ticking clock or pending appointment they just can't miss fresh in their minds. 

The sounds of letters and words themselves also contribute to suspense. Easy to skip letters like "s" and "z" and "m" give a reader a sense of peacefulness, all is well, you can just skip over this quickly and go with the flow. Hard sounds like "k" and "p" and "d" mess up a reader's pattern, almost guttural stops, potholes in the reading that keep a reader wanting to move faster in the text than they're able usually. 

But the best way, I've found is to keep asking myself as a writer, "What's the worst thing that could happen at this moment?" and then having the guts to put my characters in those awful situations until the story needs to start digging its way out of the hole.

Murder on Her Mind -- The World of Krystal Rollins

I first met Krystal Rollins at a former job. I knew her for several weeks before I learned she was a fellow writer. She's one of the few fellow writers I got to know as a person first, and friend, rather than as a writer first, then friend. And that makes her special.

Tell us a bit about your latest work.

My latest work involves a going back in time farther than I have ever been. Murder on Paper works with characters that sees the same owner of a tobacco plantation being removed from his empire but only one person keeps a journal of the events. The plantation gets handed down for generations including the journal kept in a box of family papers until a young woman about to wed finds something old and exposes family secrets.

What are the themes and subjects you tend to revisit in your work?

My theme to each book has the word "murder" in it.

What would be your dream project?

My dream project is to be a ghost writer for someone.

What inspires you to write?

Its not what inspires me to write its who inspires me to write: Great family and friends all the time asking me what the new project is. Also meeting new people who also write and meeting Sean Taylor has been a big inspiration for me.

Where would you rank writing on the "Is it an art or it is a science continuum?" Why?

Writing is an art. Its a plain piece of paper and as it forms, only you know where it is going. Then the final masterpiece is off to display where others can take interest and look at it from a different angle and finally figure out where it came from: a plain piece of paper and internal thoughts.

Any other upcoming projects you would like to plug? 

Murder in the Mayhem Mansion is a project that I had so much fun writing. Its one project that I laughed at the end.

To pick up Krystal's work, visit Amazon at: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&search-alias=books&field-author=Krystal%20Rollins

Writing Pet Peeves -- A Roundtable

For this week's round robin interview, let's take a peek behind the curtain and see what plagues the Wizard while he (or she) works.

What are you writing pet peeves that plague you from your own work?

Nancy Hansen: My biggest irritation is always my poor typing skills. My hands can't keep up with my brain. I'm also a very disorganized thinker. I do a lot of backspacing, retyping, cut & paste, and editing on-the-fly. In the end it looks good and I have less cleanup, but while I'm actively working it's aggravating because that all slows the pace down. The arthritis stiffness and some early carpal tunnel numbness just makes it more of a challenge.

Brent Chittenden: I'm terrible with endings. I'm strong with beginnings and middles but I suck at the end. I've worked at trying to plan them out better but I still need to get better at planning them.

Jim Beard: I tend to run out of room and have to pull off a "hurry up and end this thing" ending. I also can barely stand to go back and read through what I've written. I'm like "one draft, that's it." :)

Lance Stahlberg: Segues. I hate when I put a great ending on a scene and then I'm like "Well now what.

Krystal Rollins: The ending for me is always hard. The book has to go out with a bang.

Bill Craig: Remembering new characters names from one chapter to the next.  Most of my books have ensemble casts, much like a tv show.  When I introduce someone new, remembering exactly what their name is or how it was spelled from one chapter to the next can be very challenging, especially since I have gotten older.

Van Allen Plexico: To help with that, I keep a Notepad window open on the screen with all the characters' names, grouped by who is with whom at any given moment of the story.

Nancy Hansen: The character names I generally don't have trouble with remembering, but will often misspell them, especially in fantasy writing where there are special spellings. I've had to enter them in the word processor dictionary so that if I do misspell one it will flag it for me. I sometimes give little details like eye color, or height, and have to keep that consistent throughout too, since I use a lot of recurring characters. Over time I try and build a character dossier of pertinent facts I can refer back to. Emphasis on the 'try' part here...

I.A. Watson: Several.

1. FIXATION ON CERTAIN WORDS: When I think of a word I'm happy with it recurs several times in just a few paragraphs. If I'm not careful various different characters all "exclaim" or a place is depicted as gloomy in multiple descriptions.

2. CONFUSED SUBECTS AND OBJECTS: I have to watch for times when I know what I'm referring to but the sentence structure I've used suggests otherwise. For example. "He faced his enemy and spat on his face."

3. CREEPING CLICHÉS: I have to avoid people dangling like puppets, exploding like a volcano, and fighting like a tiger.

4. SHOWING OFF MY SOURCE MATERIAL: If I'm not careful I switch from narrative to lecture mode. The background is there to support the story, not interrupt or overwhelm it. There's a reason I resort to footnotes.

5. CLUMSY DIALOGUE HANDLING: I overuse the formula "xxxxx," he said, "xxxxx", where the first senternce preceded the attribution and the dialogue continues thereafter in the same sentence. I use the passive description too much in sentences like "This way," he called, dragging himself up the cliff face; better to say: "This way," he called. He dragged himself up the cliff face.

6. JUMPING IN MID-SCENE: Starting with a line of dialogue or with a key event can be a great way of ramping up the excitement or making the readers perk up to wonder what's happening now, but it can be overused. There are times when a workmanlike "The travellers reached the sealed gates by sundown" prevents readers being distracted by working out where the hell things have jumped to.

7. WORRYING ABOUT WHAT READERS OR EDITORS WILL SAY: I hate it when I try to second-guess responses and become a critic based not on what I think of my work but on what I think others will think of it. For example, I've just been writing more of my St. George and the Dragon novel. As one might expect it mentions and even discusses Christian themes. I worry that "religious talk" might put some readers -- an an editor -- off. I have to force myself to ignore those worries and do what feels artistically right; let the editor or the reader raise the objects later.