The Write Focus

Writing Challenge Check-in #2 ~ 4:25

We have the second 7 days of the June Writing Challenge. This week is the actual start of the novel; the first week sketched out scenes that would build into chapters. We also had basic research and setting up our masterbook last week.

This week shows the benefit of foundational work as we pour into the Rough-Write stage of the novel.

Besides our check-in for the first 13 days, I discuss how I’m a puzzler in the sketching stage, a pantster in the Rough-Write stage, and a Plotter in the Draft stage.

Also, here are the 8 Steps to a Perfect Scene, which I picked up somewhere ages ago and still find very helpful.

Timings

• 0:39 Intro
• 0:43 Challenge Check-in
• 3:39 Puzzler / Pantster / Plotter
• 8:15 8 Steps to a Perfect Scene
• 12:35 Closing

Total Time = 13:36

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is the June Writing Challenge, starting on June 1 and continuing to June 30, with check-ins on June 7, June 14, June 21, June 28, and July 5.

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook and templates from the Discovering Characters

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

June Writing Challenge ~ Check-in #1 ~ 4:24

It’s the Writing Challenge, this June on The Write Focus.

In addition, we give the #1 indicator of writing success and introduce the 7 writing stages for building any content type, fiction and nonfiction.

The Writing Challenge started on June 1 (we promoted it in our May 31 episode). We’re attempting 1,500 words per day throughout the month. Achievement = 45,000, but even if we’re far short, we still have success ~ because we’ve avoided the dreaded blank page.

TIMINGS

• 0:39 Intro
• 2:10 Stages of Writing
• 8:21 Challenge Check-in
• 11:13 Closing

Total Time: 12:12

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is the June Writing Challenge.

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook as well as templates from the Discovering Characters series.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

4:23 Ornaments (Significant Lists) / Discovering Characters

In this episode, we finish the series Discovering Characters.

Tomorrow starts June, and The Write Focus will have a June Writing Challenge. We hope to write the equivalent of 1,000 words per day, giving us 30,000 words by the end of the month. That’s a great start on a novel or nearly a complete novella, or a handful of short stories. 1,000 sounds not a lot, but summer is filled with distractions and disruptions. Join us for the June Writing Challenge, 1,000 wpd. We’ll share our progress starting on June 7, then June 14 and 21 and 28, with a final check-in on July 5.

As for this episode, last in Discovering Characters, we’re going through what I call Ornaments to the story. These are significant lists. Characters. Items. Events.

Ornaments add richness of detail to our plot, just as ornaments add richness of celebration to a Christmas tree.

TIMINGS

• 0:37 Intro
• 2:15 Ornaments
• 3:33 Honorable and Dishonorable
• 5:15 Professions and Others
• 7:55 Stereotypes than can Enrich
• 10:25 Archetypal Situations and Shapes
• 14:18 Closing

Total Time: 14:18

Discovering Characters can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

4:22 / Transitions / Discovering Characters

We have two more episodes in the Discovering Characters series. Today’s episode is the 3^rd of the Sliding Scales, the first being Progressions and the 2^nd Transgressions. This 3^rd Sliding Scale is Transitions.

Circumstances can cause growth and change even when our hearts and minds may have intended to avoid any transformation.

We often are pushed into our transitions, in ways that we never anticipated, and so it is for our characters. People may linger at a plateau for years. Eventually, however, they will tip into the next stage. Transitions are never chosen; they come from outside forces that propel our changes.

 

Timings

• 0:39 Intro
• 1:52 Transitions
• 2:42 Stages of Grief
• 5:00 Example
• 5:37 Psychological Stages to Maturity
• 14:14 Example
• 20:30 Closing

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

Discovering Characters  can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

4:21 / Transgressions / Discovering Characters

We’ve almost finished our Discovering Characters series. In the last episode, we presented how characters can be developed to reveal their growth or decline or their alterations.

In this episode, we present the dark side of characters: the Transgressions.

Only a couple of episodes remain in this series then we’re off on a Summer Challenge. For now, on with the episode.

Timings

• 0:39 Intro for Transgressions
• 1:10 Aristotle’s Tragic Hero (5 elements)
• 6:25 Examples: Macbeth, The Bookshop, Ophelia
• 12:30 Sevens
• 15:37 Writer / Protagonist / Antagonist
• 19:33 Closing

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

Discovering Characters  can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

4:20 / Progressions / Discovering Characters

From the beginning of this Discovering Characters series, we’ve built our primaries from the ground up with templates and interviews We’ve looked at our individual primaries, the protagonists and antagonists, as well as our secondary characters and their relationships with our primaries.

The best characters are not static but change, whether they grow or decline. That’s today’s focus: Progressions.

Timings

• 0:39 Intro
• 1:14 Sliding Scales
• 1:39 Progressions
• 1:47 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (with a bit on PTSD)
• 8:58 Examples: 2 by Jane Austen & 1 by Jack London
• 12:07 Closing

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

Discovering Characters  can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

4:19 / Character Lessons from Myths / Discovering Characters

We’ve reached the last major section of Discovering Characters, which is Décor or Special Touches for Characters and the Sliding Scales.

We begin with Lessons from Myths, primarily Greek mythology, that huge melting pot of myths.

Here in modern times we can barely see the distinctions in cultures that compose the myths. Time has blurred those distinctions for us, and now we look back and think one culture when it is many. The myth of Medea alone offers the collision of four different cultures.

This episode takes an extended look at something I developed after years of teaching mythology. It combines the traits of the Epic Hero with archetypes into what I called the Greek Heroic Pattern. We’ll look at the best example of the GHP from classical antiquity then offer 7 others that more from ancient times to our modern ones.

The addition of the Greek Heroic Pattern and 7 protagonists through time will have this episode running longer than usual (TOTAL RUN TIME = 34:39)

TIMINGS

• 0:39 Introduction
• 1:52 Special Touches for Characters / Lessons from Myths
• 4:47 Sacrifices that Protagonists have to make
• 6:10 Deities & Fighting against Deities
• 7:53 Heroes of Greek Myth
• 11:05 Intro to the Greek Heroic Pattern ~ 9 areas
• 15:13 Perseus in the GHP (Hollywood ruins a good protagonist)
• 19:52 7 Protagonists = Orpheus, Psyche, Arthur, “Invictus” persona, Darcy, Aragorn, and Iron Man
• 32:50 Closing

 

Direct Link to the Blog https://thewritefocus.blogspot.com/2023/03/character-lessons-from-myths.html

Discovering Characters can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

4:18 / Mentors / Discovering Characters

Yoda. Q. Nanny McPhee. Spock. Gandalf. JARVIS. Dumbledore. Mary Poppins. Merlins.

All mentors.

A mentor is a wise elder who teaches, provide gifts, motivates and plants seeds. They are wise, mysterious, a little deranged, and incredibly awe-inspiring. They can be much-loved … or dark and dangerous. They can provides gifts willingly … or present challenges difficult to overcome.

Mentors can act for or against the protagonist, wish him/her well or curse to oblivion, and know the answer yet give wrong directions. Whatever their goal and motivations, mentors have four functions in story even as they improve our plots OR DESTROY THEM.

TIMINGS

• 0:39 Intro
• 3:25 Beginnings
• 6:30 4 Functions of the Mentor
• 9:51 Good & Bad
• 13:42 Mentors and Plots
• 15:00 Closing

Total Run Time = 16:39

 

Direct Link to the Blog https://thewritefocus.blogspot.com/2023/03/mentors-discovering-characters.html

Discovering Characters  can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

4:19 / Tests from Enemies / Discovering Characters

Conflict moves stories.

The protagonist faces the conflict, battling with it and dealing with it. Whether our focus is Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, George R.R. Martin or Dean Koontz, the swiftest action-adventure or the highest literary fiction, the protagonist battles a conflict-creator.

The antagonist creates the deepest and longest conflict, yet other characters can also be conflict-creators, even if that character is not evil. These characters offer tests for our primary character.

One such character is the Love Interest. That’s a curious addition to an episode on Enemies. I’ll explain at the end of the episode.

For now, we have the Tests that come from Active Enemies of the Protagonist.

TIMINGS

• 0:39 Intro
• 1:41 Opening
• 3:28 1^st Test
• 6:43 2^nd Test, in 2 forms
• 9:35 3^rd Test
• 11:40 4^th Test, with 2 choices
• 15:43 Love Interest
• 18:32 Closing

Total Run Time = 20:11

Discovering Characters can be purchased at these links:

• https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19
• https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

• View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

4:16 / Allies and More / Discovering Characters

While Teams actively engage with the primary characters and the story’s conflict, many other characters will populate stories.

Whether in a short story, a simple anecdote in nonfiction, or in novels and epics, these other characters flesh out the skeleton of our writing. Allies, Foils, Love Interests, Blocking Figures, and more all participate in the conflict, driving it forward or directing the protagonist or antagonist.

In this episode, we present five of the key types of Allies and More.

 

CONTENTS

• 0:39 Intro
• 1:22 Allies, Enemies, and More
• 4:16 Allies for the Protagonist
• 5:07 Ally
• 7:04 Foil
• 10:06 Neither Ally nor Enemy
• 10:53 Herald
• 12:31 Blocking Figure
• 14:10 Idol
• 16:11 Trickster
• 17:30 Closing

Total Run Time = 19:08

 

Discovering Characters  can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

 

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)