Hide and Create

This week on Hide and Create, Jordan Ellinger, Moses Siregar, Joshua Essoe and Jaye Wells talk about Urban Fantasy. Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t know what exactly this Urban Fantasy genre is; there is a lot of confusion over it and what qualifies a book to fit into it. Harry Potter is the biggest example I can think of. There is a lot of confusion between UF, and Paranormal Romance. The two biggest differences are that, 1) PR ends with a happily-ever-after; and 2) if you remove the romance from a PR, the story falls apart — but if you remove it from UF, the story remains viable.  Listen on for more!  

This week on Hide and Create, Jordan Ellinger, Moses Siregar and Joshua Essoe welcome Jaye Wells to the show as Diana Rowland takes a couple of months leave of absence. (Don’t worry, she’ll be back!) Jaye, for those of you who don’t know, is a USA Today best-selling, urban fantasy author. We throw Jaye a softball this week to discuss what’s in her wheelhouse, worldbuilding! The whole point of worldbuilding is to create something vivid and alive. To give a strong sense of place — and not just any place. Your place. Your individual creation, different from any of those other worlds out there. With that in mind, don’t let it distract you from the true purpose of engaging in its creation in the first place — your story. You could literally ponder all the implications and ramifications of Transporter technology, for example, for a year and maybe still not get under the skin of it. So remember your world is in service of your story, your story is not in service to your world.  

This week on Hide and Create Joshua Essoe, Jordan Ellinger, Moses Siregar and Diana Rowland talk about how Star Wars and Star Trek compare. “May the Force be with you” or “Live long and prosper”? “I am your father” or “He’s dead, Jim”? “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” or “I’ve given her all she’s got, captain”? Star Wars is an epic hero’s journey; the same story that people have been enjoying and craving from the beginning, and it takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Much of the setting may be in space, but it is very much the swords and sorcery fantasy. Star Trek is an idea story all about the brightness of the future. Future setting, future virtues, future technologies, hope for what the future holds. It looks forward while Star Wars looks backward. Really, the two complement one another beautifully.

This week on Hide and Create, Joshua Essoe, Diana Rowland, Moses Siregar and Jordan Ellinger talk about creating religion. Religion and spirituality and questioning the meaning of life are part of the most basic part of being human. It’s in our nature to think and believe. We have faith. Even if that belief is that there is nothing to have faith in. A world can be made richer, deeper and more vibrant with the inclusion of the belief systems of its inhabitants. So how can you create one?

This week on Hide and Create,  Moses Siregar, Joshua Essoe, Diana Rowland and Jordan Ellinger talk about ending your stories. The stronger you’ve emotionally invested your reader, the more impactful the ending will be. The more you make your readers feel your protagonist’s heroism, or pain, or both, the more effective your ending will be. Your ending is where your protagonist really gets to show that he’s a hero, earns it — so make sure you’ve set your character up so that your readers can really feel that heroism. Your climax is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, right? So you’ve got to make sure that the treasure at the end of the quest is worth it. (And the answer to the end of the show is to keep them wanting more. See what we did there?)

This week on Hide and Create, Diana Rowland, Joshua Essoe, Moses Siregar, and Jordan Ellinger talk about writing from the dark side. Writing is therapy. And sometimes it’s alien abduction. You never know. Just as your writing can benefit from your life experience, your life experience can benefit from your writing. Next time you’re stuck in line, waiting for groceries, waiting at the DMV, riding an elevator, let your mind wander. What would be the worst possible thing that could happen in that situation? What would be the most amazing thing? Or the most romantic? Everyday life is rife with writing prompts and stories, all you have to do is let your mind do the walking.

This week on Hide and Create, Jordan Ellinger, Moses Siregar, Joshua Essoe, and Diana Rowland talk about who influenced their writing and why, but also about some of today’s influential writers. What book did you read, or movie did you see, that sparked the fire of desire to indite your stories and burn them into your readers’ minds? (Note: don’t write like that — see? Multitasking.) Everybody has someone or something that helped shape their style and tone and voice as a writer. What are yours?

This week on Hide and Create Moses Siregar, Diana Rowland, Jordan Ellinger, and Joshua Essoe talk about what you shouldn’t do in the publishing business. Don’t be a dick.  Take care not to take advantage. Meet your deadlines. Don’t join in the mob-trash-talk. Don’t take rejection personally. Help when you can. Build your platform, but don’t spend all your time promoting. Don’t forget that your main job is writing. Everything in this field is finding that delicate balance, and timing. Don’t be the person who sells sells sells themselves. Pay close attention to submission guidelines. Build your personal Voltron. Oh, and remember to wash behind your ears.

This week on Hide and create, Jordan Ellinger, Diana Rowland, Moses Siregar and Joshua Essoe talk about writing kick-butt openings. There are plenty of good guidelines and rules — don’t start with dialogue, give the entire novel in the first sentence, give yourself a focus for the scene, intro your character with a name, don’t start with an info dump, don’t start with someone waking or dreaming . . . But writing a good first page, a good first line, is more than that. To quote Stephen King, “To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar.” Here are ways to make your Jar of Moonbeam Catching.

This week on Hide and Create Moses Siregar, Jordan Ellinger, Diana Rowland, and Joshua Essoe talk about writing monsters. A monster isn’t just a beasty with fangs and an appetite. A monster is something that offends our sensibilities, sets the fine hairs on the backs of our necks on end. So how do you do it? Think about what primal human fears are. Take those fears and create a monster to exploit them. One sterling piece of advice to keep things scary is to let the reader do the work of scaring themselves by keeping the monster hidden. Que readers how to respond through character reactions. There are many ways to approach creating a horrifying monster, but as with most everything story-related, the key is evoking a powerful emotional reaction in your readers.

This week on Hide and Create, Diana Rowland, Joshua Essoe, Jordan Ellinger and Moses Siregar try to make you cry. Why do we write? It isn’t merely to entertain, and it certainly isn’t for the money or the hours. No, we write to move our readers, and ourselves; to touch emotion in some way. What better way than making everyone cry! Listen on, intrepid auditors, for our thoughts on how to do this.

This week on Hide and Create, Diana Rowland, Moses Siregar, Joshua Essoe and Jordan Ellinger talk about creating magic systems. One thing that we can agree on, and there is a lot of debate on this subject, is that you have to remain consistent with your magic. Casually introducing new powers into your magic system will leave readers feeling untethered to your world. If magic plays a big role in solving the problems of your characters or your story, then it should have rules that govern it, If it doesn’t then there won’t be any tension. If there are no rules, then you can just use “magic” to get out of any situation, and your readers will expect that, and you won’t evoke any emotional responses. That’s what we’re calling a hard magic system. If magic isn’t used to solve major conflicts and is used more to evoke a feeling of wonder and to provide an atmospheric backdrop, to add a sense of the unknown, and perhaps evoke a feeling of mystery in your story, the rules don’t have to be as hard and fast. That’s what we’re calling a soft magic system. Both can work beautifully, it all depends on your story, what your goals are, and who your audience is. The real cost of magic boils down to conflict! Whichever way you choose to go, break your system, and exploit it to figure out how it can be abused; figure out all the plot holes it might create so you can fill them.  

This week on Hide and Create, Moses Siregar, Joshua Essoe, Diana Rowland, and Jordan Ellinger work on becoming immortal. Would you take the chance to be immortal if you had the chance? There’s the vampire question for you. Or, back in the realm of reality, would you write an immortal character if you had the chance? How would you do it? How do you make a character like that sympathetic and relatable? What are the stakes? There are dozens of different examples of immortality in fiction to choose from, and many times that ways to handle it. Listen on for our thoughts on how to handle it.

This week on Hide and Create, Joshua Essoe, Jordan Ellinger, Diana Rowland, and Moses Siregar generate some conflict. Without conflict you don’t have a story. Unless your character is doing something you have no plot. The plot comes from the MC doing everything he or she can to overcome the obstacles standing between them and their goal(s). Conflict is entertaining. Conflict not only drives your story but will drive your audience. Think about what is popular on television now, and the proliferation of reality TV. Why do we watch it? Remove obvious contenders like Survivor or Real Housewives or Jersey Shore where the conflict is in your face. Would you watch a show about cooking food like Ace of Cakes or Iron Chef if there was no conflict? Of course not! Conflict drives tension. It can be a race against time. It can be internal, it can be romantic. It doesn’t have to be a big fight scene, or knock-down drag-out battle. As a bonus this week, we have the full outtake of my conflict-ramble, creating a “live” story out of the three main types of conflict for you: http://www.writingpodcastonline.com/audio/JoshuaExposition.mp3

This week on Hide and Create, Diana Rowland, Joshua Essoe, Jordan Ellinger and Moses Siregar talk about your health! “God, I hope they don’t die before finishing the series!” We’ve all thought it. Just don’t let it be about you. Listen and learn, my beauties. We’re working to save lives here.