The Way Out of the Wasteland

 

This handsome dude is looking for his forever human and home. And this totally has something to do with our topic this week. You see. I write my blog posts on Thursday evening for publication on Friday morning. But this man. He had his neuter surgery Thursday. When I picked him up and got him in the car to come home, he went into respiratory distress. Our regular vet was closing down and they'd already sent techs home. So off we hied to the local urgent care veterinary place. An insane amount of money later, we discover that Ramases has pneumonia. Initially, they diagnosed it as aspiration pneumonia, which is dreadful, awful stuff. The urgent care vet wanted the cat hospitalized, so they transferred us to an emergency hospital nearby. We go there. That vet disagrees with the treatment plan and long story short, we get out of there at half past midnight with sick cat in tow. I'm operating on three hours of sleep. 

Drama over the 4th of July holiday has upended my current living arrangement. The ripples on that are slowly building to a tidal wave that I suspect will mean everyone packs up and moves. But in the meantime, HERE have an overdose of uncertainty! 

Whether it's my brain or whether it's rational to feel this way, I'd like to say everything's on fire.

I used to think these were things that needed to be recovered from - as if writing were something that needed to be held in reserve for when conditions were just right. I still suffer from this because I know a little about how my brain works best. But I am starting to realize that 'best' is an unobtainable ideal. All of these events in my life that make me feel like I'm going to explode, pack the cats into a car, change my name, drive into the middle of nowhere, and buy a house for under $200k to live in peaceful obscurity aren't one off events. They're life. My life. There is no calmer. There is no 'when stuff settles down'. This is it. It takes an act of radical acceptance to digest that realization. Then all that remains is to ask whether writing in the midst of all that life makes everything better or worse.

For me, the answer is better. I made writing my retreat - the little hit of dessert you sneak when you think no one is watching. It gives me energy and helps keep me sane. Because it keeps me saner than I would otherwise be, most of my family are invested in leaving me alone while I write. Sometimes. But this reframe isn't necessarily enough to refill an empty well. Silence, technology fasts, sensory walks (where you walk slowly and rotate through observation - what do I hear, what do I smell, what do I taste, what do I feel on my skin, what do I feel internally, what do I see) and any thing else that generates energy for you will help. Maybe you cook the world's hottest chili. Or you build model ghost ships inside bottles. If they make you feel better for having done them, they fill the well. Rescuing gives me energy when I finally match a cat like Ramases to his forever person. So hey. Anyone in FL or neighboring states what a handsome, sweet, spotted tabby who drools when he's happy (and he's happiest when you're petting him and giving chin rubs). I'll even deliver. 

I think the important bit is to know what's important to you. Writing takes a toll. Rest and breaks are necessary. We tear up a lot of cognitive and emotional ground while writing - but it's *different* mental and emotional ground than our life dramas. Leverage that while recognizing that eventually, all those synapses need rest and that rest will not be rushed.

Burnout

Have you been staring at your blinking cursor, wondering how you’re going to fill the page? Have you been sitting down to write only to find yourself doing the dishes or scrolling your socials? Have you been experiencing burnout?

There are numerous ways burnout hits. Which also means there’s a lot of options to work through it—yay! But none of it’s easy–boo. 

I’ve been through burnout, I wrote about it here. And the most important takeaway I can share is that you have to be able to give yourself grace. If you can’t write. It’s okay. If you can’t focus and lose every writing minute you had in the day. It’s okay. If you couldn’t bring yourself to even open your WIP. It’s okay. 

Give yourself grace and avoid piling on the guilt. In my experience, guilt adds to the burnout. Refilling the well takes time, if you don’t have time and are on a deadline check out Jeffe’s post from yesterday. 

How do I take care of my writer self? Surrounding myself in nature refills my well. So does being creative in any way that isn’t writing. When burnout is really depression in disguise, it’s okay to ask for help. You’re not alone.

Self-Care & Refilling the Well When Things Are on Fire

 

Exciting news!!! For all of you who have been waiting waiting waiting for the audiobook of ROGUE FAMILIAR, it is liiiivvveeee! Just on Audible for the next 3 months, then it will be wide. If you'd like to review, I do have some free downloads available. Comment here or email Assistant Carien via the website contact form.   

        

 

Amusingly enough, our topic at the SFF Seven this week is self-care and burnout. I say amusing because this has been a topic of discussion in Jeffe's Closet, my Patreon and Discord, these last couple of weeks. One thing I love about that space is that people can ask me questions and it gives me the opportunity to mull answers I hadn't previously given thought to.

One gal asked me about advice on getting through when you're faced with deadlines and your well is empty. I talked about this on Monday's podcast, too, but I'm going to reiterate here because I think our group mind hit on something really important.

We often think of refilling the creative well as something lovely, peaceful, and largely passive. Self-care often carries the sense of similar calm. We think of leisurely strolls, hot bubble baths, a glass of wine, gazing at the sunset with friends, lingering over moving art at museums and galleries. All of these things are lovely... And not terribly useful when you're facing deadlines, dealing with crises, and you're already short on time with a well so empty you've got nothing left to put out the fires, much less create something to meet those deadlines with.

So, what do we do then?

The thing is, burnout is something we must take very, very seriously. I've been there - and once you hit full burnout, the bottom of the well is dry as a bone, then it can takes months or years to recover. It's easy to put off our mental health, to decide that refilling the well can wait until this family member is doing better, or this deadline is met, or after some future date when we have time to deal with it. Except that mental health and burnout don't obey our schedules. Taking this approach is like deciding that an infection can wait until we've finished some other projects - by the time we're ready to deal with it, we could have blood poisoning or lose a limb.

What's the answer then? This was my advice to her: cut out everything that is not actually on fire and aggressively fill the well.

I was concerned that this was too vague, but it worked for her! Sometimes we need permission to ignore everything that is not a crisis - to ask ourselves "is it on fire?" and set it aside if not. As for aggressively filling the well - an image that seemed to amuse everyone - I can't tell you how to do that. We all have to find what refills our own wells. But as for going about it aggressively, that is the key. That means you're prioritizing those activities, going after them with gusto, rather than waiting for the water to seep in. Muster your army of brooms and aggressively fill that well!

Fantasia Brooms GIFfrom Fantasia GIFs

Self-Care and Burnout: A Writer's Cycle

 To all our US readers:

Happy Independence Day!

This Week's Topic: Self-Care & Burnout

Burnout is caused by us caving to pressures both external and internal. There is no taskmaster like our own conscience, is there?  It can make us gleefully ignore all the warning sirens of impending collapse with the intoxicating refrain of "just one more..." On occasion, we are blessed with the sweet, sweet glory of being in the Writing Zone. The words are flowing, the technology is cooperating, and there are no interruptions. We double our average word count for the day. We finish the WiP in record time. We publish the mss ahead of schedule. And then...

We can't come up with bupkiss.
Total burnout.

Whilst in the throes of burnout, the very notion of creativity causes us to wander off and drool in a corner. Our brains throb as if we were beamed with a fastball. We spend days, nay, weeks trying to recover from overachieving. Deadlines for other projects zoom past as we remain listless. We are such gluttons for punishment that we know the dire consequence awaiting us at the end of the Great Writing Jag, yet we sprint towards it, lost in our fugue, giddy at all we are accomplishing in the moment. 

We promise to pace ourselves next time. 

Another lie. We won't. We will rejoice whenever we stumble into the Writing Zone. We are willing prisoners of the cycle of overachieving and burning out. Naughty writers. We should take better care of ourselves. We should apply the lessons from all those self-care workshops. We should find the balance between creativity and healthiness. 

Bwaahaha. No. 

Not at the expense of our Beloved Story. Our fictional progeny take priority over our mental and physical well-being. Manic episodes? You betcha. Knowing better but not doing better? Ayup. Self-sabotage? Masters of it, we are. We will bitch about burnout and falsely vow to adhere to the principles of self-care, yet we will not change. There's another story crawling around our brains and we can't wait to tell it. 

That's the real reason writers are weird. 

In Search of Emotional Resonance

 

Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash

The question this week is, do I have to feel the exact emotion I'm writing? And my answer is more complicated than a yes or no—like many aspects of writing, there is nuance here!

To me emotion is at the heart of story. Readers seek out the stories that they do in order to experience emotions vicariously. Sometimes that emotion is even right there in the name of the genre, like in thrillers. Romance novels tend to have a wide range of emotional expectations, from swoony love interests to heart-wrenching action and as a fantasy romance writer it is always my goal to bring those emotions to life. 

Getting authentic emotions onto the page requires a certain level of vulnerability and being in touch with my own memories and visceral reactions, so in that way I do go through the same emotions as my characters. At the same time, I don't usually experience those emotions fully while writing. It would be pretty hard to type while weeping or fuming, so if nothing else, my characters live and express and experience their emotions in a much richer fashion than I do. 

One of the joys of writing fiction is the chance to dramatize actions and events, bringing characters and situations vividly to life. Even when I tap into a particularly powerful memory or experience, fictionalizing it takes it to a new level. Creating emotional resonance with my readers is the goal, which sometimes means reaching for higher highs and lower lows than I experience in my everyday life.

Jaycee Jarvis is an award winning fantasy romance author, who combines heartfelt romance with immersive magical worlds. When not lost in worlds of her own creation, she lives in the Pacific Northwest with her spouse, three children and a menagerie of pets. 

Find her at http://www.jayceejarvis.com/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorJayceeJarvis

Mastadon: @Jaycee@romancelandia.club

Twitter: @JayceeJarvis 

Exploiting Emotion

Jeffe told the perfect Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier story earlier this week. I'm happy to report the incident DID happen, according to Dustin Hoffman. 

Riffing off of what Jeffe talked about, I've come to say the story gives us a glimpse into the two distinct acting traditions these two men came from. Hoffman is a Method actor. It's a very American (by way of Russia) way to approach veracity in acting. The short theory behind it is that only honesty reaches through the divide between actor and audience. The actor must feel whatever the character feels or else the character won't read as true to the audience. Olivier came from the British acting tradition which, based as it is, so firmly in Shakespeare, focuses on technique. Another infamous Olivier quote goes something like "It isn't my job to feel anything. It's my job to make you feel what I want you to feel.' This one likely is apocryphal, but I can't prove that as a search for it took me straight to one of those 'hi-jack your box attempt' websites. It was just a story that got told at acting school. Since it shores up the technique (I don't feel) versus Method (I feel everything) acting arguments, we'll accept it. The theory to technique is that by mastering text, subtext, vocal range, and physicality, a technical actor can evoke emotional reaction in an audience.

The different schools are about establishing honesty. Modern audiences don't want to see actors acting, very much like readers don't generally want author intrusion in stories. In both cases, viewers and readers long to be swept up in the story as if they were standing in the protagonist's shoes themselves. To bring viewers and readers  as close to the work as humanly possible, actors and writers must play on some deep-seated psychological truths about humans.

Humans are deeply empathetic creatures. Whether we want to be or not, we are social animals. Our survival as a species relies on our ability to unconsciously and universally identify emotion from the faintest shifting of an expression or body language. This skill is available to us as infants. It's that important. More interestingly, for a brief moment, when we identify an emotion in someone else, we mirror it as if by trying on the expression we see in someone else confirms for us what feeling is associated with it.  Performers of all kinds learn to leverage it.

Can you see where Method and technique come at exploiting human emotional hot buttons from different directions? Method makes you mirror the feeling you see the actor experiencing. A technical actor has the physical, vocal, and body language skills so well rehearsed that they can choreograph the exact sequence of techniques to hit so as to elicit the emotions they want from an audience.

This is a lot of words to come at how I approach emotion in a novel. My only goal is to make emotion clear, clean, and cutting. If my character is laughing, I want you smiling along with her. If she's terrified, I want you looking over your shoulder. Method - me feeling the feelings  and then jotting them down is fast and easy. However, it's also easier to muddy the emotions and it's easy to get lost in the emo. Also, it's  a tough lesson, but just because I feel the fear, it doesn't mean I'm going to do a good job of communicating it to readers. Actors have faces and bodies for audiences to read. Writers have to build those things before readers can be impacted by them. Technique - word choices, paring complex emotion stacks down to bare bones, describing clear physical cues, sentence length, and white space - offers a tool kit that helps me manipulate readers into feeling what I need them to feel.

It will be no surprise to you that I feel like both are necessary. The trick with Method work is to use it to call up a reminder of a feeling. Technique then catalogues the details. Where do I feel that in the body. What does it feel like? What's my breath doing? What's the sensation? Where? What happens if it heightens? What does it feel like as it drains away? It's interesting to me that every human on earth may experience fear in personal and specific ways, but the experience is so recognizable, that even our 6 month old infants can identify and mirror it. That means I can give you my personal experience of emotion in a story and you will experience your version of that emotion - not mine. And I don't care. My job is not to make you feel what I feel. My job is to trigger you to experience your own emotions with the story I'm telling. My emotions will ring hollow to anyone but me. A story only comes to life if the emotion I write accesses your emotions. That's the only way a book can read as true to a broad audience.

So the answer is both. Both is good. I do need to feel. Some. I need to not feel enough that I can remain critical and objective enough to leverage solid technique.

To Feel or Not To Feel

I just finished a well-written sci-fi thriller, Mindwalker by Kate Dylan. While reading you’ll feel the main characters confusion, tension, brief moments of relief, and hunger for rightness. If you hadn’t guessed, I highly recommend this read! 

The inverse of tapping into all those character’s emotions as a reader is our topic of the week: do you have to feel the exact emotion you’re writing? 

I’d love to do a mini study on this and interview authors of books that I emotionally connected to as well as authors of books whose plot sucked me in. I’m curious to see if there’s any correlation to their writing process and my connection to the book. Of course, any study done by anyone on this would be skewed by the scientists’ views and personal preferences. Still, it would be interesting. 

I’ll put that idea on the back burner, but for now I can look at my own writing and compare to what readers have told me.

Step 1: Looking back at the books that I’ve written, my most emotional scenes do trigger the same emotions my characters are feeling. I do experience the anguish, the nervousness, the heart palpating fear—albeit to a lesser extent. And maybe that’s why writing is emotionally draining and I’m tired afterwards! 

Step 2: Review comments provided by readers (listeners for TMS and feedback on my other manuscripts). Interestingly, the readers/listeners experienced grief, and some tears, during the major loss scenes. Readers/listeners also reported sharing sweaty palms and pounding heart with the intense action scenes. And, yesssss, they were swept into the romantic moments with one listener saying “now I understand why people read these books”. 

Step 3: Comparison: My readers/listeners shared the deep emotion scenes with my characters, which correlates to the emotions I felt while I was writing those scenes. 

Conclusion: For me, I do experience emotions as I am writing. I put myself into my characters shoes because I want to feel what they’re feeling and be able to sense my way through the scene. Is it necessary? No, there have been plenty of times I write with a more technical goal in mind…and I bet you can pick those parts out. 

Maybe I don’t need to do a study on authors and emotions since I know for myself I will experience an echo of my characters emotions as I write. I believe it makes my stories better, but then again, I’m an emotional reader and want to be sucked in that way over the plotting. 

Are any of you, dear readers, like me in this? Do you also need some yoga and/or meditation after a good writing session?

Writing Emotion and Owning Your Process

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is writing emotion and whether you as the author have to feel the exact emotion you're writing.

There's this tale about acting that's been making the rounds for ages - it's possibly apocryphal - about Dustin Hoffman being a method actor. (Oooh, Marcella found it!) That method asks actors to find the emotions within themselves to play the character, to find essentially their alternate self who would be that person and feel that way. The story goes that Hoffman spent an hour getting into that character's skin and Sir Laurence Olivier strolled in, did his bit, and left again, saying, "My dear boy, it's called acting."

The point of this (again, possibly apocryphal) tale is twofold: the first that you can create the appearance of emotion without feeling it, and the second that everyone does things their own way.

You all should know by now that my primary mantra is this: figure out what your process is and own it.

People like that story because they can smirk at poor Dustin Hoffman doing things the American way, the overly-complicated way, the fancy way, but... is he wrong? Hoffman has an amazing acting career. He's widely acknowledged as a brilliant actor. Clearly his approach isn't "wrong."

Is Olivier wrong in this story? Clearly not, for the same reasons as above. There is no wrong. There is no right. Both things can be true. Both processes work for those performers.

So, do I have to feel the emotion I'm writing in order to put it on the page? Nope. Do I sometimes? Sure, though it depends. Do other writers need to feel the emotion to write it? I've heard they do.

And it's all good. Both things can be true.