Rachelle J. Christensen

Romance, Suspense, Mystery Author

Failure is Temporary

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Writing Tips by Rachelle

Failure really isn’t terrible if you can say to yourself, “Hey, I know I’m gonna be successful at what I want to do someday.” Failure doesn’t become a big hangup then because it’s only temporary.

–Jerry Della Femina

Man, this guy must’ve read my mind or pulled it from a writer’s creed or something. 🙂 Isn’t that what every writer says to themselves after they receive their 50th or 100th or 250th rejection? Honestly, this is what I said to myself on my path to becoming a published author and I continue to keep plodding away and learning from every “failure” that comes my way.

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Find Your Voice

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Writing Tips by Rachelle

I’m not an expert, but I’m willing to share some of the things that have helped me on my road to becoming a published author.

Today we’re going to focus on–Find your voice

One January, I went to a one-day writing seminar in Provo. I took my 4 month old baby boy with me because it was a small class and I had a moment of *insanity/mommy wants to break her parole from being housebound with a baby and pursue her writing career*

My baby was supposed to be good. Instead my husband ended up having to come and get him halfway through. This was after he’d pooped through his diaper and down my leg and I’d tried to wash out my pants and use the blow dryer in the bathroom. I told you it was insanity!

Anyway, what does all this have to do with voice? I’m a gettin’ there!

We did several writing exercises and one of them was on voice. I don’t remember a lot of fine details about that class, but I do remember the impression made that it was important to find your own unique writing voice.

You can’t imitate someone’s writing style or voice because it will come off sounding phony. Think of your favorite books of all time. What was it about those books that sang to you?

I’m guessing it was the incredibly potent voice of a character–the way the character seemed to be sitting right beside you as you read about their travails. The strength of the voice in a novel can make or break it. In literary novels, voice is usually the number one factor that creates the story.

So how do you find your own voice?

By writing.

Write in first person, third person, present-tense, past-tense. Find your style and find how you can best identify with your character.

When do you find the most joy in your writing?

Have you analyzed your writing? Do all of your characters sound the same? Do any of your characters haunt you while you’re telling their story?

Your voice should be so real that your story leaps from the page and connects with readers.

*Try some free-writing exercises. Write about a girl chasing butterflies. Write a page about a boy climbing onto the roof of a school.

Examine your writing. What do you see? What do you hear? Does your writing speak to you, and if not, why?

After that crazy day, when I returned home from the class and took care of my family and rocked my baby and got ready for bed, something happened.

I was tired. I got in bed and closed my eyes and began to relax and a sentence came into my mind.

Sometimes the wind sings through the trees like it has a soul of its own.

My eyes opened. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my DANA and wrote down the first line. I savored that first line. Where had it come from? Then I wrote the first page.

And I felt it!

I felt like I had found my voice. The words were singing to me and I continued to work on that novel for the rest of the year. The first few chapters won a first place and second place award and I continued to write.

I loved writing a literary inspirational romance called, “Wind Song.” I loved it because I found my voice and my voice flowed onto the pages until the words sang a story that touched my heart.

I hope that you can find your voice. Practice. Listen. Write. Cultivate your voice. Dig for it. And let it sing.

I offer a mentoring service for aspiring writers and would love to have you join me! I have many other tips that will help you. Sign up on the wait list here for the new online training: Write the Novel in You in 90 Days! This guide can help you to write your novel from start to finish in 90 Days.

I also offer a personal coaching service, so if you’re ready to take the next step in your writing, go HERE.

Visit Rachelle’s For Writers Page to find more resources HERE

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Classic Metaphors

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Writing Tips by Rachelle

I love my writer’s group–Authors Incognito! They are always so helpful when I’m stuck in a rut. I can ask them any question and get some great suggestions. One of my friends, Janice, posted these helpful classic metaphors today–sometimes it’s so hard to feel inspired when it comes to metaphors. I hope these help bring inspiration to your day! And if you don’t know I’m speaking tongue in cheek after reading the examples below, then you might be a little dense, like a large brick of moldy cheese.

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

7. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

8. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

9. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

10. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

11. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

12. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

13. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

14. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

15. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

16. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

17. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

18. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

19. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

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Recipes for Success

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Rachelle’s Writing Tips

I just received an email with some wonderful writing tips. There are a lot of books out there to help an aspiring writer become great. Have you ever wondered what to read in order to have a successful writing career? It’s true, a writer education can help give you a leg up in the publishing world.

I loved this quote from Eschler Editing:

“As Larry Brooks said, “An anesthesiologist has to do only one thing well: Put the patient under without killing him. But she has to know about five hundred things to do it successfully. It is the same with the writer.'”

It can definitely take a while to learn those “five hundred” (ish) things, but there are resources that can help you learn the tricks of the trade. You can head over to this blog post for some great recipes for success:

Nightstand Recipes for Success

Happy Reading!

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Prepping for NaNoWriMo

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Writing Tips by Rachelle

National Novel Writing Month takes place each year in November. Writers from all over the planet set a goal to write like crazy. In order to “win” Nano, you need to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

To give you an idea of what that means, a typical novel is around 80,000-100,000 words. My first novel, WRONG NUMBER is 72,000 words and my next novel, CALLER ID is about 83,000 words.

Remember last week when I told you that I participated in NaNo for the first time? You can see my post HERE. I won–something that completely amazed me because my baby was only two weeks old when NaNo started on the first of November.

The next year, my hope was that I wouldn’t have 50K words left on my new novel. I challenged myself to a personal NaNoWriMo during the month of October and I hit 33,000 words. It was pretty exciting to see those words pile up. I’m kind of competitive–even with myself–so I have an Excel document in which I track the amount of words I write each day.

There were nights back then when I was so tired and I really wanted to veg, but then I’d look at my word count which I’d worked at in snatches all day between changing diapers, helping with homework, helping my girls practice piano, making dinner–you get the idea. Often I would think, I’m only 800 words away from hitting 2,000, which was my daily goal. Sometimes I would make it and other times I wouldn’t. I don’t write on Sundays, so that means I had to up my daily word count goal to reach the monthly goal.  But every day I was more motivated to write because I was pushing toward that goal.

If you’re a writer, I encourage you to sign up for NaNo and make a goal.

If you’re not a writer, focus on what you do want to accomplish in another area of your life, make a goal, and make it happen.

What do you want to achieve?

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November Means NaNoWriMo

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Writing Tips by Rachelle

Okay, most of you know that I am a writer. I’m one of those crazy people that gets a thrill out of writing a descriptive scene with just the right amount of tension. I’m also well-aware of how the word count feature in Microsoft Word works and *YES!* I am a writerly nerd and I track my word count on an Excel spreadsheet.

So you’re still wondering about the title of this blog post?

Let me explain…

I belong to some fantastic groups of writers who have a passion akin to mine and for years I observed my writer pals participate in a seemingly impossible quest called NaNoWriMo. It stands for National Novel Writing Month and the challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

The first couple years I heard about NaNo, I just thought there was no way that I could possibly do that. 50,000 words in 30 days???!!! I figured I’d have better luck running a 5K in 15 minutes.

For those of you unfamiliar with Word Count–my first suspense novel, Wrong Number, had over 72,000 words–that’s a 198 page book people. So yeah, there are lots of books out there with lots and lots and lots of words!

So when I first heard about NaNoWriMo, I didn’t think it was possible. That was before I gained more confidence in my writing abilities. The next year I had a newborn baby and just didn’t think I could do it–again the confidence was a bit lacking.

The next year, I was on a roll finishing up a literary novel–one whose characters haunted me night and day to finish their stories and I didn’t want to stop my writing and revising stage to begin a new 50,000 word novel.

And in 2010?

Well, I had another newborn baby, and so when I saw all my buddies signing up for NaNo, at first I thought, there’s just no way that I can do this because I’ll be nursing/caring for my infant roughly 8 hours a day (and in the middle of the night) and what about my other 3 kids?

But then that writing craziness kept bugging me and tempting me with visions of Excel spreadsheets accumulating word counts aggressively. Thoughts of finishing a novel by the end of the month were too much to resist after feeling like I was practically comatose in the last few months of my pregnancy and not having the energy to do anything!

So I enlisted for NaNoWriMo! I told my hubby that I just wanted to try for it, but later I confessed (something he already knew) that I don’t do well with trying–I have to DO and so if I was going to sign up for this I was going to work hard to meet my goal and probably be pretty disappointed if I couldn’t make it.

Well, I hit 13,010 words that first week and was on a Word Count high!

My husband rocked our sweet baby and helped me squeeze in the writing time I needed to make my goal. I was so excited about the progress I made on that new novel, which was a follow-up to my first book, Wrong Number.

The best part about the NaNoWriMo challenge is that it helped me realize what I’m capable of as a determined writer and it has given me a good dose of motivation to keep up the daunting task of filling pages with words because I love to write. I realize that there is a good possibility that I might not be a winner with 50,000 words in the NaNo challenge, but I was going to DO my best.

I’m so grateful for wonderful friends that are cheering me on and for my awesome family who continually supports me in everything I do. I’m grateful for challenges that show us the possibilities within that we were afraid to see.

I hope that if there is something you’ve been thinking about doing–maybe you haven’t been able to dig up the courage and confidence to give it a shot yet–but I hope you go for it. Reach for the stars!

Are you going to do NaNo? I’d love to hear about it!

Visit Rachelle’s For Writers Page to find more resources HERE

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