A good story should reflect human nature as it is: flawed, corrupt, tormented, hateful, judgmental…. heroic, generous, compassionate, caring, curious, courageous, and so much more.  “Human beings are subtle, complex and unpredictable” Fred White explains in his July/ August 2014 Writer’s Digest article. “and one of the challenges of art is to capture that subtlety, complexity and unpredictability while still adhering to story design.  To be a good writer of fiction, one should be a student of human behavior, to be ever curious about what makes people do what they do, or fail to do what they long to do.”

Human Beings ARE complex and within that complexity lay frustration, contradiction and fear.  The process of writing good fiction, and of reading good fiction, draws this complexity out like good medicine drawing out infection.  It enables our readers to vicariously experience life through the various different psyches of people, who although may be different from one another share enough of these complex characteristics or dilemmas to be able to identify with them.  By observing and studying human psychology or behavior, we provide our readers with the opportunity to undergo a cathartic therapy just as we fictionalized our own before they ever met us at the first chapter.  Our readers become our characters or at the very least feel empathy, seeking their own redemption or answers, because we writers took something universal and found a creative and entertaining way to make it personal.  And for the reader, that is good fiction at its best.

“If you can’t explain it simply,you don’t understand it well enough.” Albert Einstein said and he was one hundred percent on the mark, in my humble opinion at least. Did you ever try to explain something to someone, whether a recipe or your take on the latest political crisis (and these days there are many of those!) and suddenly you get stuck like a back tire going round and round in the mud – not budging a single inch? Then you realize that perhaps you need to re-check that old recipe card or clarify that what you heard from this morning’s main stream media newscast about the latest Israeli / Hamas attacks was actually accurate before you say one more word.

It’s sort of like that in writing.

If you feel compelled to write with big words or phrases such as “in light of the fact that” instead of simply “because”, perhaps you are really trying to cover up the fact that you really don’t know what you are talking about but want to make it appear that you do.

In Jack Hamann’s article in the June 2014 “The Writer” he says that very thing:

” My drafts were clogged with phrases such as “in light of the fact that…” instead of simply “because; “with the exception of” instead of “except”; “at the present time” instead of “now”. Paragraphs were peppered with prepositional phrases (ah- don’t you just love those two words.. prepositional phrases…), passive verbs and circumlocutions. Sentences were stuffed with mumbo -jumbo: heretofore and whereas. And circumlocution.”

His article is titled “Less Legal” yet it applies to writing in general. Law Professor Megan McAlpin stated ” I think there is a desire to sound smart, but you actually sound smarter if you can take something complex and make it clear to anybody.”

We can all look up fancy words and plug them into our prose but it is a lot more difficult and ‘talented’ to be able to choose NOT to use those big words so that ALL of your readers will understand your piece and even more importantly, walk away with the very message you meant them to receive.

Writers need not be knitters, says Rachel Randall, a Managing Editor at Writer’s Digest, but they do need to seek out those things that energize them creatively. In the July/ August 2014 edition of Writer’s Digest, Ms. Randall explains how important it is to take time to refuel. Whether you are a writer, like me, or like Rachel Randall, or not, you must have your own goals or dreams lingering around in your head. I will guess that some of you , well most of you probably, actually have talent laying dormant inside you waiting to erupt, yet either you don’t believe it, think you have other “more important things to do.. like feeding your kids, or just haven’t been able to tap into it yet.
Writing is not just about writing itself.. its about finding those tasks that allow us to open the flood gate of ideas to come forward, just as Rachel Randall says in her article:
” We need to find tasks that relax us- be they gardening, cooking or hiking- to encourage and foster creative thought. We need to train our minds to recognize inspiration in even the most ordinary details of our lives, and we need to give ourselves the license to just play with our writing, to unleash our wildest notions on the page.”
Ms. Randall makes a very valid point.
As in everything we do, from cooking to wall-papering a nursery, its the ideas that fuel us, that empower us and give us confidence to put it out there. Without the seed, the flower will not grow and without the idea, the story will not bloom.

A story is like a painting; it’s the culmination of talent put forth on a blank slate- whether paper or canvas (or digital screen these days…) with the purpose to:
1. convey an emotion or dream or desire or thought
2. to please or affect its admirer, skeptic or critic in some way (entertain, interest, teach, guide, prove right or wrong, …) and finally
3. to release something inside the artist whether it is to cleanse herself, heal herself or share her experience.
And all the while, it is a meeting ground between an author and a reader.
In Meagan Kaplon’s interview with Jean Kwok in June 2014 The Writer magazine, she questions Ms. Kwok about how she would describe herself as a writer. “I want to communicate with people. ” she continues ” It’s this meeting ground between an author and the reader. It’s a two way street. What you put out there are objects for the reader to interact with and to make their own.” Ms. Kwok explains that she is always aware of the reader walking with her through the story and she says ” It’s like when you’re having a conversation, and you wonder if you are droning on and on. Are they falling asleep?… Just as when I write I’m always thinking: Is my reader still with me? Is she being entertained while she is hopefully learning something interesting? ”
For me, its important to express what I am feeling or thinking about while entertaining and subconsciously helping my readers get through their own experiences that may be similar to my own or someone else’s, while teaching those readers something new or perhaps while delivering a lesson or moral.
For example, perhaps my reader is having problems with her faith; questioning it, doubting it, because she just lost her cherished parent or has recently been widowed, or worse: lost her child. She wants to believe in God and Jesus and Heaven, if not for her loved one, but for her own desire to see him or her again. Struggling with her own demons, she picks up my story with hope to find answers and if not answers, then at the very least similar questions and doubts to her own so that she does not have to feel so alone in the world anymore.
If I could meet with that reader and comfort her with my story, sharing my own doubts with her while I subtly install some hope in her heart and mind, wouldn’t that be wonderful? Yet, it is not physically possible for me to meet one on one with all of the potential people out there who go through traumatic situations and therefore, sharing a story could possibly serve nearly the same purpose. The story IS a meeting ground between an author and a reader and the only thing missing is perhaps a shared pot of tea and some biscuits.

The heart and soul of story revolves around the characters: how they suffer, how they succeed, how they overcome obstacles, how they learn forgiveness and redemption, how they plough forward through life.
In Nancy Lamb’s “The Art and Craft of Storytelling”, we learn that “all powerful stories contain an essential core of personal truth- some essence drawn from real life that connects fictional awareness (how cool is that phrase- ‘fictional awareness’) with a writer’s direct or secondhand experience. This truth needn’t mirror the concrete world. Perhaps it is an emotional truth, a spiritual one, that resonates with the writer and forms the core of a story. Or perhaps this truth is an unconscious one, an association and motivation not fully understood at the beginning.”
I write my blogs to convey not only a deeper understanding and appreciation of the art of writing, but also to connect the world of fiction to the world of reality that we all live- day to day. Over the course of my studies of writing, I have learned that to be a good writer one must pay close attention to the details of day to day living- listening to conversations, studying the sounds of nature, turning up the focus dial to high so that even the faint cracks in the sidewalk stand out along our evening or early morning jogs. We writers learn that those details may one day come in handy as long as we recognize the opportunity to appreciate them when they come up, and store them in our ‘writer’s tool box’. In other words, we must live in the “now”, in the moment -for our readers. This way we can bring that ‘now’ or life lesson to those readers when they most need them….. in the form of a well crafted story.
“It is fiction that has the capacity to illuminate, to touch a reader on not only an intellectual level but a visceral one. It is that truth- deep and layered and passionate- that great storytellers express. And it is the uncovering of this truth- the search, the investigation, the examination- that makes a story compelling.” Nancy Lamb tells us this in her comprehensive guide to classic writing techniques.
Without the ability to create character, to enable him to acknowledge his challenge, then overcome it, we could not weave together a story that has the power to unveil a lesson, while simultaneoulsy drawing our reader deep inside. The fictional awareness we inspire allows our readers to look inside themselves or conversely, at the world around them, to see more clearly the things that once lay hidden from them.
By connecting the reader to our characters, tying her to her emotion- we enable her to grasp a fact or a lesson about war, suffering or the flaws in society, or whatever lesson she seeks, in a way that will affect her most deeply.
It is, after all, the ‘compelling story’ that we craft that delivers her sought- after lesson and it is our duty as writers to dig through the piles of life’s issues, plucking the lessons out from the waste that surrounds them so that our readers do not have to.

Just as we travel on our own journeys through the growing of dreams to our successes or failures to make them come true, through endless unanswered questions and trials and errors, we often find ourselves searching for self amidst the noise and clamor of a confusing and challenging world.
Take for instance Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher in the Rye” written by J.D. Salinger. Holden searches for meaning in a world of “phonies” following the experience of the death of his brother. As Holden weaves his way through one bad situation after another, he remains lost and alone in a dark world where he can find no light. As he drifts in and out of pain and confusion, his innocence is lost and he ultimately comes to understand there is hope to begin a new life.
Holden goes on a journey from innocence, confusion and frustration where he encounters life changing situations that reshape him, ultimately allowing him to realize that it could actually be okay. Throughout his journey, he searches for meaning and longs for home, passing through pain and darkness as he makes his way slowly toward the light that he has so much trouble finding.
And so, as Salinger did with Holden Caulfied, the writer will have his hero embark on a psychological, physical or emotional journey where he descends first into darkness before he is able to walk again in the light. Just as we do in real life, stepping from milestone to milestone, from challenge to challenge, often falling here and there along the way but ultimately getting back up on our feet, our hero takes us on his journey from innocence to understanding, from darkness to light- showing us that the attempt itself- the experiences we encounter and the lessons we learn- the journey- is actually the success we seek. As each of us should in real life, our protagonist must change in some way by the time he reaches the end of his journey.

Life is challenging. Each day we wake with a fresh start, a new hope for something better and it is up to each of us to reach as high as we can to attain what will make us happy or conversely, allow the latest obstacle to overwhelm us. No matter what the size of today’s struggle is, the power is ours to defeat it as long as we put in the effort.
Inside of us is a tiny seed of ambition that will only grow if we locate it and subsequently, use our time and energy to nurture it. Nothing is as satisfying as watching that seed grow into a full fledged dream come true. For some, its raising a child to adulthood and for others its a job or a new home. For many its all of those things.
Writing, like life, is daunting. As an author, I glimpse an idea and I toss it around in my mind and like a handful of snow rolled around on the ground until it becomes a jolly happy soul leading a line of children marching down the street, I give it life. Although I admit there are times (more than I care to let on) that I think it is too difficult, or overwhelming and I come shamelessly close to giving it up; murdering my idea before it has the chance to take its first breath. And if I dare to envision each step of the long challenging process ahead, from writing draft after draft, to revisions and edits and pursuing a publisher, I am sure to throw in the towel and find something else less intimidating to do instead.
But then where will I be at the end of the day when I reflect on my accomplishments or lack of..?
That’s easy. I will still be pacing back and forth at the bottom of the mountain, looking up at the top wondering what it looks like up there and how it would feel to climb higher than the clouds, actually reaching success.
So, as I roll around my idea, giving birth to my dream, I decide to take one step at a time without looking at the peak. Somewhere inside me is the strength I need to make my way to the top, and only I can find and nourish it as long as I keep moving forward and never give up.