In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using the card Strength to guide their discussion. They discuss how they use fear to guide their story and what fear can look like in different genres.
Question of the week: How do you find that fear shows up in your stories? And how do you use it? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Three Story Method: Writing Scenes by J. Thorn
Transcript
JP: Hello friends. This is episode number 94 of the Write Away Podcast. And it is May 5th, 2022, as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my cohost…
Crys: Crys Cain.
JP: Hi, Crys, how has your week been?
Crys: We have recorded this once already, and then it turned out that my internet and my audio were whack. You all listening get the benefit of me having stumbled through not remembering what I did last week, the gist of which was that I did pretty good on some non-fiction early in the week.
I’m doing a basics of TikTok course that I have a lot of friends who have just been overwhelmed at the mere opening of TikTok app, which I completely get because I was that way too. I think I downloaded it, opened it, was very confused, deleted it, and then downloaded it and opened it again, and slowly figured it out. So my goal with this very short course is to walk people through the basics of getting TikTok useful for you as both a consumer and a creator.
JP: Yeah. Yeah, cause right now I’m a hundred percent a consumer and I have no idea where to even start.
Crys: JP is my Guinea pig. I have a few volunteers for Guinea pigs, so I’m very excited. I haven’t really got any fiction done, but I did have some lovely fiction thoughts on my walk this morning. And my fiction brain is reloading after a bunch of people chaos in the house, and so I just have been focusing a lot on admin tasks this week.
How about you?
JP: Nice. Also in the same boat where we recorded earlier. So last week, the day job had me working at 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM. And I would wake up earlier than that because I’m not going to wake up at 9:00 PM like I’m some crazy monster. I’m sorry for those that live out there and do that. So I had time ahead of time for the day job. And I was using that time to write and edit and all that, and I was very productive.
This week, everything shifts as they do, and I’ve been working like 5:00 AM to 2:00 PM, which you’d think, oh, great, so after work I have all this wonderful time. But I have found out that I am very much a person that between waking and heading to the day job is my creative time. And when I don’t have that the rest of the day just doesn’t work. So by the time I’ve been done with the day job, I’ve just been laying on the floor, staring at the ceiling or bingeing Russian Doll, which has been interesting.
But yeah, so it was something I’ve learned this week for sure that I never had to consider, but that creative time ahead of doing things like the day job has been crucial to my own productivity. So yeah, it’s been okay though. I’ve been able to do some things.
Crys: Yeah. I have probably lamented more about your insane schedule than you have in the last two weeks, out of just empathy for you.
JP: been surprised how much I liked working third shift, because I can ignore the world for the longest time.
Crys: There is benefits when you have to work with humans to working the third shift. But it’d be even better to not have to work with humans if you didn’t want to.
JP: Ah, we’re getting there sometime.
Crys: I did want to let everyone know that there is a book out that we want to share with you. We are part of this project with J Thorn, and one of the outcomes of it has been this book that he wrote on writing scenes. And so we are technically contributors, AKA, we gave it a pass through and made some comments. But if you have read Three Story Method, or if you find the concept of writing scenes sometimes just feels weird to you, or you just really want to make stronger scenes, we’re going to have a link to this in the show notes, but it is the Three Story Method: Writing Scenes by J Thorn. It’s available now and I believe it’s on basically everywhere you can buy any book. It will also be an audible as soon as Amazon processes it through their systems. So go check that out, friends.
JP: Yeah. I believe from the words of J, Three Story Method is a really good overview a really good base level, of coming into the project, and then Writing Scenes he was saying it’s a bit more technical. But it’s one of his more favorite ones that he’s written about three story method, because he felt like he really got into some of the grittier details that he’s wanted to convey in the original. So I highly recommend it.
Crys: Yeah, and I think this will be more useful to more writers on a daily basis.
JP: A hundred percent.
Crys: Okay. The card that is directing our question this week as we go through the Major Arcana is Strength. And that is what number?
JP: Eight.
Crys: Yes. Now will you give us a bit of a description?
JP: Thanks. Thanks. Okay. So keywords upright: strength, courage, persuasion, influence, and compassion. Reversed: inner strength, self-doubt, low energy, and raw emotion. Strength card originally is depicted with a woman gently stroking a lion on its forehead. So we can see the ferociousness of the lion, but also the fact that the woman has tamed the wild beast with her calming, loving energy.
So lion being that symbol of raw passion, desires. And then the woman showing that animal instinct and raw passion can be expressed in positive ways when inner strength and resilience are applied. Yeah.
Crys: Yeah. Excellent. And the question that we are asking ourselves…
JP: So I’m curious, how do you use fear to drive the story?
Crys: I think that this actually ties in pretty closely. You and I really like the concept of the lie the character believes, about the world, about themselves, whatever it is. And I think this ties in really closely with that because the lie that they believe is often the thing they fear is true, or they believe it’s true. I’m trying to come up with a more concrete example. Maybe like you’ve got to get yours cause one’s got your back. If we say that’s the lie they believe about the world, the fear and the belief are that no one is going to support you but you. So for me, they’re two ways of describing the same thing.
JP: Yeah, definitely. And whereas you like to ask the question, what lie do my characters believe, mine is geared towards what’s the story hypothesis or what’s the direction that the story is going. And because I like to think of it as a hypothesis, as to like X leads to Y, I asked the question, where is it at its weakest? Where is it at it’s down point? And that’s when I answer my question about what lie do they believe. What are their fears? What is driving them to not move in this positive direction?
So I definitely think fear is a really strong entry point to use when thinking about like, how are you going to develop your story? Because I think fear for your character is really what’s going to push them out of their boundary. It’s really what’s gonna push them and move them forward.
Crys: Yeah, I think all good stories have fear as an underlying motivator, even the ones that I think of as lighthearted. Because as I’m sitting here and I’m thinking of what we’ve been calling cozy fantasy, like low stakes fantasy, low stakes stories, even those ones start from a place of fear. I’m worried that life will continue to go on the way it is. I’m afraid that something will happen so I’m going to do things to prevent it.
Brian McDonald in You Are a Storyteller, the podcast, in his books, he talks a lot about how storytelling is sharing survival information. He with the most stories survives. And the reason we need survival information is to avoid the thing that we’re afraid of.
JP: Yeah. definitely.
Crys: Death, loss of money, being alone. There’s a million things we can be afraid of.
JP: Yeah. And I really liked the reiteration that like even the cozies, even the romances, it’s all driven by some type of fear. So the cozy that I want to write later this year, one of them is basically just fear of commitment, fear of opening oneself up to another person. And then with the fear of commitment, it’s like the fear of taking on responsibilities that they weren’t prepared to take on, that they wanted to do something almost selfishly, and now they have to open up and be willing to be vulnerable with other people in order to make that kind of commitment.
I think fear is such a scalable thing. It doesn’t have to be world ending, it can be as simple as just one’s own personal resistance, which is the fear.
Crys: Yeah. The book that got me really just like focused on the cozy fantasy, was Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldry. And the main character is mercenary who starts off by quitting the mercenary lifestyle. And there’s this fear, even if it isn’t stated as a fear, that if she stays, she will continue fighting until she dies and she’s afraid she won’t ever have anything different. So she goes to start a coffee shop.
And then there is a fear throughout the rest of the story. One, that the coffee shop will fail and she’ll have to go back to work. Or to keep the coffee shop, she will have to return to fighting, and once she does that, then her work to leave it has been destroyed.
So there is always fear backing the choices that she makes. And I think that’s true in life. Like when we’re weighing choices, we’re weighing our fears of what might happen if I choose this, or what might not happen if I choose this.
JP: Yeah. It’s what’s going to hurt less is ultimately that. That made me think of The Hunger Games. So taking the stakes and raising them to 10 right away, Candice’s fear is her sister being the one that’s going to go to this hunger games and die. That’s her fear is that she’s losing her sister. So then she sacrifices herself because she’s not willing to let her sister die. She’s willing to die instead of her sister. And so that’s the pain point choice that she has to make right off the bat. And then there’s a slew of other fears that she’s hit with. But I think that that’s her driving force, that’s her fear, is just the protection need to be self-sacrificing so that others can survive.
Crys: Yeah, so fear, essential. We can’t write without it.
JP: Yeah. And you have to write with it, which is the same thing.
Crys: My question for our listeners, since we’ve decided that fear is essential, is particularly: how do you find that fear shows up in your stories? And how do you use it?
JP: Yes. I want to know. Be vulnerable.
Crys: I’m afraid of being vulnerable, JP.
We are about to go record our business episode for our Patreon listeners, which will cover the question…
JP: What part of your author business scares you?
Crys: If you’d like access to these episodes, as well as our monthly tarot review, you can join us at patreon.com/writeawaypodcast. And thank you so much for joining us this week.
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