The Writing Czarina

Hold on to your preconceived ideas of the need for a “brick and mortar” storefront operation.

With The Snail on the Wall bookstore, Huntsville’s Creative Entrepreneur of the Year winner, Lady Vowell Smith, has developed the perfect mix of online sales and pop-up events.

Smith, owner and founder of The Snail on the Wall bookstore, is a book aficionado with a Ph.D. in literature. She established The Snail on the Wall as a “bookstore without a store” in 2017, starting with a pop-up store at Randolph’s Under the Christmas Tree market.

With razor-thin margins on books, coupled with major competition from the “Big Box” bookstores, community bookstores have had a hard time surviving, even in the best of times.

Smith’s business model has low overhead and high flexibility, but also offers the same services that a “brick and mortar” independent bookstore would customarily provide: a curated selection of books, personal recommendations, gifts for readers, author events, and community partnerships with schools, organizations, and businesses.

A lack of small local independent bookstores – a place where readers and authors could meet and share ideas is what prompted the creation of The Snail on the Wall, she said.

“I knew that Huntsville was missing out on nationally known authors coming to our city,” said Smith. “They were stopping in Birmingham, Nashville, Atlanta, and every place around us because they had independent bookstores and Huntsville didn’t.

“I didn’t know anything about bookselling, so I thought I would experiment with a ‘store without a store.’ Then, once the model started, the delivery service worked, and it reaches more people than it would if it were in one fixed location.”

idk if anyone will find this useful, but this is how i go about planning my stories. i mostly write fantasy, so that’s what this is most applicable to. but it could work with other genres too.

so there’s three major components to a story: the characters, the plot, and the world. creating them individually is the easy part, but they all connect and affect each other in different ways. (like you can’t have a character who loves peaches and eats them every day if they live a peasant in a region that doesn’t grow peaches, for example.)

so i created a cheat sheet to help connect all three components together.

1) the world creates the characters.

this is related to the peach example above. the characters should be a direct result of the environment they grew up in and the environment they currently live in.

2) the characters are limited by the world.

also related to the peaches. characters can’t do anything outside of what the rules of their surroundings and universe allow, such as eating peaches when they’re not available. this also applies for magic users. they can’t have unlimited magic, so keep in mind what you want out of both the characters and the world when creating magic systems.

3) the characters carry the plot.

we’ve all heard it before: “bad characters can’t carry a good plot. good characters can carry a bad plot.” but we all like a good plot anyway. try to make sure you’re not giving your characters too heavy or too light of a plot to carry.

4) the plot pushes the characters.

if nothing in the plot happens, your characters will remain static forever. if you struggle with plots, try starting with what character development you want to happen, then go from there.

5) the plot depends on the world.

you can’t overthrow the evil government if there isn’t one. think of what your world needs most and what your plot is centered around, and fit those two together.

6) the world is changed by the plot.

even if your plot is centered around something most of your world would call “insignificant”, the world will still experience some change from the plot. either the evil government will be gone, or maybe that one teacher is now way more careful about keeping an eye on the test key. either way, the world will be different from now on.

final note: usually people will be able to write one or two of the components with ease, but don’t know where to go from there. i personally can’t write plots, but thinking this way has really helped me actually make a story out of the world and characters because i looked at what i needed from what i had. i really hope this can help you too! happy writing!

tl;dr this is a cheat sheet to help anyone who struggles with writing one or two of what i consider the three major components to a story.

The top two easiest ways are leaving kudos and writing a comment. Here’s a list of a few other ways:

publicly bookmark their fic with the Rec box checked

publicly bookmark their fic with tags or a comment about how much you like it

recommend their fic to friends in conversation

write a post recommending their fic to your followers

create fanart for them - a drawing, a moodboard, a comic, whatever your style might be

send them an ask telling them they’re your favourite author

ask them for permission to podfic or translate their story to bring it to a new audience

tell them if you’re rereading their fic (a truly amazing compliment)

sharing/reblogging/retweeting their work on social media

liveblogging/live reactions while reading a fic 

sharing theories of what you think will happen next

engaging with the author online through ask games/memes

asking the author about their writing process/choices they made about a specific fic

any secondary fanworks (with their permission), which includes fanart and podfic as ao3cotd mentioned, but also fanfic - remixes, inspired bys, all of it; and any other creative medium you can think of, such as fan edits or playlists

Murder-boarded an author's entire blog to theorize what the next installment of a story would be about;

Made cookies inspired by a flashback scene in which a character was baking while drunk. The cookies had 0.3% of relevance in the story;

Started randomly quoting one of my favorite fics in a fandom discord the author was also a part of;

Fanarted not only scenes in stories but also random headcanons the writers I follow came up with once;

Sent prompts when authors asked for some;

Followed them on different social media platforms;

Supported their various projects, even for fandoms I was not that invested in;

"What if I can't" and "why am I doing it" questions often get you lost in the weeds

Worst case scenario, you're right, and you can't do it, but now you have knowledge to make you a better writer

Best case scenario, you have a fuckload of fun writing something new and unexpectedly awesome

That took all the effort that went into telling us, the reader, that the character was non-binary and that was the end of it (including a scene where they tell off another character for trying to ask their birth sex) and smashed it to pieces in one grand notion of BUT JUST SO YOU KNOW, THEY WERE BORN AS A GIRL. Now, I kind of saw this coming because the writer seemed to be having a hard time writing about non-cisness without explaining it in chunks of exposition and seemed to want to make the main pairing a lesbian one, but not because one of them is non-binary, but up until then effort had at least been put in to take the character seriously as simply non-binary and that’s that. The whole reason I’m writing this is because the above scenario happens a lot, especially by cis writers and it bothers me to no end that there aren’t many characters who are ‘just trans’ and who cares what their birth sex is? It’s important to understand that we do need more characters who are trans or non-binary, but you don’t need to have some huge birth sex reveal just to show they are trans. You could try instead having the character be open about being trans, or making casual references to trans specific things either to do with passing, or surgery or experiences (ask trans people for advice!). You should avoid having another character be ‘snooping’ on them changing and finding out they’re trans, or have it revealed only when they are about to have sex (also a reminder that there are trans people who have had lower surgery so don’t have their birth genitalia any more anyway and it’d be nice to see more of them written) because it makes out that our transness is some kind of lie that must be revealed to others.

And here’s a link to the trans rights carrd and the black trans lives matter carrd!! Even if you can’t donate signing petitions can do a lot of good!

But we talk mostly about all of that in respect to sex, and relationships, and it’s important to remember this applies to other things, too.

If someone says, “don’t tell anyone I got this new job,” and you then tell people, you’ve violated their consent, their privacy, and their autonomy.

If a friend says, “I don’t like it when people touch my hair,” and you keep touching their hair, you have violated their consent, their autonomy, and their privacy.

If a coworker asks you not to tease them about their new boyfriend, even if it seems like gentle and friendly fun to you, and you do it, you’ve violated their consent, their autonomy, and their privacy.

People remember these things, and they hurt. Not as much as sexual assault, obviously. But those small violations of your wishes, those instances of disrespect, still hurt, and they can add up.

Here are ten questions to ask that will not put your friend in a tough spot, but will still give you some useful input on your novel:

1. At what point did you feel like “Ah, now the story has really begun!”  2. What were the points where you found yourself skimming?  3. Which setting in the book was clearest to you as you were reading it? Which do you remember the best?  4. Which character would you most like to meet and get to know?  5. What was the most suspenseful moment in the book?  6. If you had to pick one character to get rid of, who would you axe?  7. Was there a situation in the novel that reminded you of something in your own life?  8. Where did you stop reading, the first time you cracked open the manuscript? (Can show you where your first dull part is, and help you fix your pacing.)  9. What was the last book you read, before this? And what did you think of it? (This can put their comments in context in surprising ways, when you find out what their general interests are. It might surprise you.)  10. Finish this sentence: “I kept reading because…”

Your friend is probably still going to tell you, “It was good!” However, if you can ask any specific questions, and read between the lines, you can still get some helpful information out of even the most well-meaning reader.

hhhhhhhhh w h a t is going on

This is a lovespoon. They’re found in several cultures worldwide, particularly in Scandinavia, but most famously in Wales (that photo is a Welsh lovespoon) and, from at least the 17th century, they were given as gifts by a suitor to his intended lady. They’re supposed to be carved from one block of wood, and decorated with various symbols which have slightly nuanced meanings, all basically a variation on ‘you’re rad, want to get wed?’

Because marriage in poor, rural parts of Wales was often more akin to cohabitation at the time (i.e. you didn’t really have a big ol’ legal ceremony, you just sort of said ‘we’re married now’ and shacked up together) a lovespoon could act as a wedding ring of sorts; you’d put your goshdarn heart and soul into carving it and you’d give it to the dame you sought, and if she accepted the spoon, then you were essentially wed, or at least bound together in a meaningful way. It’s assumed that they were initially supposed to be at least somewhat functional, because people did in fact eat with wooden spoons back in the day, but they’re now purely decorative. And hoo boy, can they be decorative. These are some of the ones on display at St Fagans Museum:

Nowadays, they’re generally mass produced, and tend to look more like this: