When You’re Not a Writer – Yet

I believe all writing is good practice for a writer.

While my kids were growing up, I put aside “being a writer” for day jobs. However, many of those day jobs involved writing. For example, I’ve written stacks of court reports. Did that build any skills for my fiction writing? Absolutely.

1. I had to interview people and present their position accurately – to do that I listened carefully and checked for understanding. Even the few villains I encountered had what they believed were good reasons for their actions. So I avoid cardboard characters in my fiction. I know each of my characters from the inside out. Each has a distinct voice.

2. I had to pay attention to details. Small details, buried amidst non-essential information, often clarified an issue or sequence of events. The same holds true in fiction – the details often decide the course of events.

3. I had to take the facts I’d gathered and present them in a logical order that helped the judge make sense of the situation – which was often quite complicated. The same skill is necessary in fiction. If you confuse the reader by putting a conclusion before the facts that lead to it, you will probably lose them altogether.

4. I couldn’t include every single piece of information I collected. I had to decide which facts were necessary and which were superfluous. When writing fiction, I always know more backstory than my readers – they’d be bored if I included all of it. I have to choose what they need to know when. It’s the same skill, repurposed.

5. I also had to decide when to quote an interviewed person directly and when to paraphrase. When writing fiction, I need to decide where to describe interactions and where to use dialogue. The elements that make each effective are remarkably similar whether a court report or a novel.

What about jobs that don’t involve much writing? It’s all experience. Most writers have had a series of jobs before they start making a living (or at least part of one) writing.

If you find a complete job history of an author and then read all of that author’s work, you will probably find characters and settings that use non-writing jobs.

www.sherimcguinn.com www.amazon.com/author/sherimcguinn

Press release:

Sheri McGuinn at Gold Country Writers Six-Author Event! Official release.

Event date: Sunday, March 25, 2018 – 1:00pm to 4:00pm Event address: FACE IN A BOOK, 4359 Town Center Blvd #113, El Dorado Hills, CA 95762

http://www.getyourfaceinabook.com/event/gold-country-writers-six-author-event

#writingnovels #genre #voices #backstory #audience #novels #writingprocess #novelwriting #material #tryingtobeawriter #fiction #inspiration #Writing

Does it work?

My next novel, which will come out later this year, is Peg’s Story: In Search of Self. It’s the story of the mother in my first novel, Running Away. After that book came out, I wrote and sold the screenplay – the selling part took a few years. You may have seen the movie Running Away on Lifetime, and it’s been pirated to YouTube as well.

If you’ve read the book and watched the movie, you know that the movie did a great job with the suspense line but the backstory for the characters is different. That also means the dynamics between characters and the focus of the story changed.

The cover of the book and poster of the movie show the difference:

The novel is about the relationship between mother and daughter and how a subtle predator manipulates both of them to the point where Maggie (the daughter) ends up running away. The emphasis is on the mother-daughter bond – that’s why the hands are reaching for each other on the novel’s cover. My original script stuck with that emphasis, as did the re-writes I did to make it more affordable to shoot.

I’m still the only screenwriter on the credits, however the director added short scenes, including some up front to establish the stepfather as a bad guy quickly. The filmmakers explained that was essential to hold the audience. With several short scenes, the director also added a story line making the stepfather evil beyond what he does to Maggie. As in the movie poster, he becomes the focal point.

Film is a collaborative medium and the final measure is always: Does it work?

1. Whenever someone tells me they’ve seen the movie, their comments center on the creepy stepfather – no one talks about the girl or her mother. My central theme didn’t survive, but the film does grab people and hold their attention.

2. I sold the script to a production company with a track record for producing and marketing films to television and computer movie markets. They sold the film successfully to French-speaking European television and then Lifetime. They knew their market.

So yeah, the film works. I got paid, got my credits at the beginning and end, and it’s added to my IMDb page. I’m happy.

Next week I’ll take a closer look at the film and how it compares to my screenplay.

www.sherimcguinn.com www.amazon.com/author/sherimcguinn

#scriptanalysis #HollyDeveaux #Lifetime #evaluatingamovie #runningaway #movieanalysis #writingprocess #screenwriting #doesitwork #makingamoviefromabook #metoo #inspiration #BillyMcNamara #PaulaTrickey #MeToo #critique #Writing

Motivational Boards

Each year I was in Arizona, a group of us would gather near the changing of the year and spend an evening with stacks of old magazines and glue sticks, sharing and enjoying our community as we made vision boards for the coming year. Some approached it with specific ideas in mind; I let intuition lead me to specific pictures and phrases that I then glued onto my poster board. Sometimes this clarified what I wanted in the coming year, sometimes it was just fun. But always, there were a few key words that reflected something I needed to work on.

What’s not on it? Photos of my kids and grandkids—those are in another place in my home, not my workroom. They are enormously important in my life and always present in my being, but they are not the reason I write. That comes from the core of me that existed long before they were born. So the photos on my motivational board are of me as a confident little girl and an adventurous traveler. There’s also a striking headshot from my twenties, when I wanted to be an actress. There’s a newspaper clip I’ve kept since I was fourteen, about making the world a better place to be, and quotes that strengthen my resolve to keep trying. There’s a photocopy of the first check I received for writing work and photographs I’ve taken that remind me writing is not my only creative endeavor.

What else is not on it? Specific goals and my writing credits—I post my accomplishments for the past year and goals for the current in a different place.

My motivational board is about supporting who I am and why I create—the force within.

www.sherimcguinn.com

www.amazon.com/author/sherimcguinn

#writingprocess #motivation #motivationalboards #thewritinglife #inspiration #Writing