Archetype Writing Blog

If you've tried to send a question through my Q&A form and it hasn't worked OR if you sent me a question and I never answered it, please re-send. Someone let me know about the problem, and I've gotten the form all fixed now, and I'm receiving the questions properly again! I haven't done any Q&As lately for the blog, and I'd like to remedy that!

In Other News...

My latest Psychology Today post, What You Think You Know About Psychology May Be Wrong, was selected to be an Essential Read in PT's Creativity area, and was also recognized in a CNN Health blog.  The post is essentially a reiteration of the WGTP's premise, so if you like the post, you'll love the book!

Writer Stina Lindenblatt posted a wonderful review of the WGTP this morning -- she called it brilliant! You can check it out here.

The Kindle version of The Writer's Guide to Psychology is finally available!!  If you prefer a hard copy, of course, you can also get one of those!

Finally, don't forget my upcoming book signing in Columbus, Ohio: Saturday, January 22nd @ 2pm at the Borders on Kenny Road.

Today is the day!  The day every writer waits for and dreams about -- the day her first book hits shelves.

For me, that book is THE WRITER'S GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY: How to Write Accurately About Psychological Disorders, Clinical Treatment and Human Behavior.

If you haven't ordered a copy yet, you can visit my WGTP website for more information including the media kit (which includes review excerpts) and a detailed table of contents, follow me on Facebook, or visit my new YouTube channel.  And you can always send me your psychology and writing question here at Archetype Writing.


I am also thrilled to announce that in addition to enthusiastic blurbs from novelists like Jonathan Kellerman, Jilliane Hoffman, and Roberta Isleib, my first reviews are in from the New York Journal of Books, and they're  excellent. Please read a brief review from the NYJB here and a much more extensive one (by a different reviewer) here.

I created the Archetype Writing website several years ago with the WGTP still just a seed of an idea in my mind.  My goal was twofold: first, to try out the idea of psychology for writers (thank you all for your support along the way!), and second, to build a platform. I know that Archetype has grown a little static as I've worked on the book, but the site is still alive!  I hope to be able to update more regularly in the upcoming months.

Blog Tour & Giveaways

In the meantime, please celebrate my book release with me!  Over the next two weeks, I will be doing a blog tour.  Several of the stops will include giveaways of autographed books!

This week:
Dec 1: QueryTracker Blog
Dec 2: Shooting Stars
Dec 3: Murder by Four (moved to 12/10)

Next week:
Dec 6: Danyelle Leafty/Myth-Stakes
Dec 7: Imperfect Clarity
Dec 8: Christine Fonseca
Dec 9: Elana Johnson -
          Also, Christine Fonseca is also going to review the book this day.
Dec 10: Murder by Four is hosting a guest post

Bonus:
Dec 13: Mary Lindsey      

Archetype Book and Mug Giveaway!

I'll be keeping you posted on the various giveaways here.  I'm also going to be doing one here.  Post a comment here, on the Archetype blog between now and next Thursday, December 9th, and you'll be entered to win not only an autographed copy of the book, but also a very special, very rare Writer's Guide to Psychology mug!  I'll announce the winner here on Friday, December 10th.

My forthcoming book, THE WRITER'S GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY, now has its own website and blog!

As I've made this journey, I've been sharing the ins and outs with you, so I figured I'd talk a bit about the importance of websites in promoting your book.

I'm going to quote PR THERAPY author Robin Blakely, because she says it so well:

It's mandatory in today's world to have an Internet presence.  Currently, that internet presence must, at a minimum, consist of an e-mail address and a website or landing page.

Why is a website so crucial?  Well, partly because the first thing many of us do when we hear about a product that interests us is go online to find out more. A website dedicated to the author/book in question serves several purposes:

1. It legitimizes the author and the book.

You'll all have to forgive me for being so very in absentia of late. I've had a lot going on with the upcoming book, but I'm excited to finally be able to unveil some information: the cover, the title, and the publication month.  Since you're all writers too, I thought you might be interested in the process we went through to reach these decisions -- read on!

I turned in my completed and polished manuscript last October to the fab team at Quill Driver Books (hereafter referred to as QD). We took the holidays off and then dove into January with some fine-tuning in anticipation of the book listing going out with Quill Driver's fall catalog.  (Yes, it's just now spring, but remember, publishing almost always operates months in advance.)

First, we changed the title from Nervous Breakdowns and Psychopathic Killers: The Writer's Guide to Psychology to The Writer's Guide to Psychology: How to Write Accurately About Psychological Disorders, Clinical Treatment and Human Behavior.  


Why?  Well, my original goal was to create a title that grabbed the browser -- NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS AND PSYCHOPATHIC KILLERS! -- and made her want to pause long enough to look at the subtitle and then the book.  However, QD made a really good point: many, many people browse books online, and the subtitle often isn't visible.  So we needed a title that made clear the book's purpose.  We banged around some possible titles and subtitles and finally came up with one that not only clearly explained what the book was about, but was interesting, too.

Next came the book cover.  QD had a design firm come up with three different cover options, all of them quite different.  I  asked some of the people I was closest to what they thought; meanwhile, QD discussed the options internally and also asked the book distributor folks for their input.  In the end, we chose a design that best seemed to convey the concept captured by the new title.  Seeing the book cover is kind of like putting on a wedding veil -- you realize in a way you hadn't before that this is really going to happen!

Most recently, I got a publication month: December 2010 -- just in time for holiday shopping!  The book isn't yet available for pre-order, but it should be soon.  I'll be sure to let you know.

In the meantime, I'm starting to think again about publicity. At the top of my list is the Archetype website.

I first created Archetype several years ago while I was building my initial platform. One of my goals over the next few months is to rebuild the Archetype website.  There's a good chance I'll be starting from scratch and creating something that aligns even better with the book than the current site.  Never fear -- I'll definitely be keeping the Q&A, though I may switch it over to a blog format -- blogs are so easy to update!

If you have thoughts or suggestions on the new site, by all means, now is the time to speak up!

More soon!

QUESTION: A young girl is taken prisoner along with a number of her family members. The women are separated and sent to separate prisons from the men, and my character eventually ends up being held in isolation in a nunnery, though not outright treated cruelly. After eight years, after her father wins his rebellion, she is returned home. What would the emotional effects of this be?

Those are all kind of extreme reactions, but in a lot of ways that's the nice thing about dealing with individual differences -- you can make the story go in the direction you need it to if you understand the basic psychological possibilities. That is, we can say "she could do x, y, or z depending on the temperament she was born with" and you can say, "Ah, y would work best for my story."

So having the reactions above toward men -- fear -- are one possibility.

Another would be to have her want to please them, but I see that being the least likely possibility. If she's mostly spent time around women, she's either going to see women as strong, capable creatures who don't necessarily need men, or as victims of men's behavior -- it depends on the messages she got as a captive. If she was constantly being told in some way that "this is the evil men do," then she will see women as victims and be more obsequeious with men. If men simply weren't a part of these women's lives, though, I think it's more likely she would just see men as strange and different and women as capable. I see her being very cautious around men. They're strange creatures, and how to understand strange creatures? You sit back and observe. I think she'd be a sponge, watching how other people react to men, how they react to each other, how they treat her. She might even respond to them the same way she has learned to respond to other women, and be confused when they don't always respond the way she expects. How analytical she is will depend some on how smart she is, and how curious.

You can go in whichever direction you want with her feelings about her father. It would probably depend on how she remembers him -- as distant and punishing or as kind and loving. It would also depend on the messages she was given about him. If the nuns constantly told her she was there because of her father and seemed angry or disapproving, she'd pick up that attitude.

Finally, given that she needs to get married and whatnot, she might also feel some resentment toward men for changing her life so profoundly. You and I might think of being isolated as horrible, but people adapt to the situations they're in and find ways to survive. Change is hard, and going from being isolated to being around lots of people would probably leave her wishing at times that she could just be left alone, or even that things hadn't changed. Because while being isolated might not have been fun, it was familiar.

You can combine several reactions as she re-integrates into society -- just make sure her changes aren't sudden flips, that they happen gradually and that we see enough of what's going on with her to get why maybe she went from being terrified of men to being willing to sleep with one. :)

Remember, if YOU have a psychology in fiction question you want to see answered here, use the Q&A form on the Archetype site or send me an email at w e b m a s t e r (AT) archetypewriting (DOT) com. (Take out the spaces in the first word and please use Q&A in your Subject Line!).  If you would prefer to have the question answered on the QueryTracker.net Blog, you can email your question to c k a u f m a n (AT) querytracker (DOT) net. Again, please use Q&A in your Subject Line!

QUESTIONS: 1. What kind of therapy would a teenage girl go through after she's been in an abusive relationship? 2. Are there any books or websites you could recommend for more information dealing with therapy post break-up? 3. Since there is a new love interest in the MC's life, would he be involved in any sessions?  4. Is there a way for him to learn how to be there for her, or is that something that is never considered? 5. From what I've read, girls who've experienced relationship abuse may have posttraumatic stress disorder after it's over. Do you have any other resources you'd recommend?

• PDF Article: Beyond Victim Blaming: Feminist Therapy and Battered Women
• Online Article: Theory and Techniques of Feminist Therapy
• I have not read Lenore Walker in a long time, but she is one of the experts on DV.  You might check Amazon or your local library to see whether they have copies of her work.

3. Since there is a new love interest in the MC's life, would he be involved in any sessions? 

I'm not a procratinator, really. But sometimes I don't push myself hard enough with my writing schedule. Writing a nonfiction book with a publisher deadline has certainly taught me that I have to push myself the entire time so I can get to the finish line with not just a complete project, but also one that's of excellent quality.

When I was in high school, I got my papers written long before anyone else even started. Same thing with college. In graduate school I had to learn to stop doing that, because when my classmates started asking questions of the professor, the assignment would sometimes morph into something else. Which meant I had to rewrite it.

But when I had 9 months to write an entire nonfiction manuscript, I was like "aw, no problem." I mean, 50,000 words in 9 months? Come on, I wrote that many for NaNoWriMo in one month!

Turns out that writing the sort of nonfiction I'm writing is just a teeeeensy weensy bit different from NaNoWriMo. Whodathunk?

As you all know by now, my nonfiction project, which is going to be published by Quill Driver Books, is to teach writers--especially fiction writers--to use psychology accurately in their stories in far more depth than my website on the same topic. (Don't worry, I'll let you all know the publication date the instant I find out!) So, writers won't embarrass themselves anymore by confusing schizophrenia with multiple personalities, or by showing people having actual full-body convulsions during electroconvulsive therapy.

The trick to all of this is that I have to do a lot of research to make sure I'm getting things accurate. In other words, it's not good enough that I "know" something in my head -- I had to find written evidence to back everything up. Not because this is going to be like a peer-reviewed journal article with a million citations, but because I'm supposed to be the expert here, and I'd darn well better have my expert information straight. I have two full 4" binders full of journal articles, and then shelves and shelves of books I've referenced. At any given time over the past few months, you could walk into my writing room and find towers of reference books.

Anyway, so I started writing back in February, before the contract with Quill Driver was completely hammered out, because I wanted a head start. I did some great interviews with people who worked in mental hospitals and pounded out about half the chapters (unedited).

In May, my awesome agent Kate, who's reading over my chapters after I finish each one (never, ever let anyone badmouth a boutique agency to you--getting that kind of personal attention is such a help), suggested I create a schedule for when I would complete the remaining chapters so she'd know when to look forward to each batch.  (I also have to mention my fantastic readers here, who are looking at my chapters before I send them to Kate and helping me clear up anything that's confusing.)

So here's the schedule I sent her:

June 1 - Ch 1-5 (5 ch -- these were attached)
July 1 - ch 6-8 (3 ch)
August 1 - ch 9-10 (2 ch)
September 1- ch 11-12 (2 ch)
September 15: TOC, index, etc.
October 1, 2009: publisher due date

July nearly killed me, with 3 chapters. I mean, I wrote more than half of what I'd gotten done so far (ie 5 chapters) that month. I may not be a procrastinator, but I'd been far too lackadaisical about my writing schedule. Still, somehow I got it all done. This month was kind of rough, too, especially because I burned myself out a bit last month, but I managed. Now I just have to get through August and get my final chapters done.

When everything's written, I'm going to print the whole thing out and read through it with a red pen, trying to clean up any rough edges. I believe in having everything as polished as possible before it goes to an editor. I know that when I edit someone else's work, if I'm dealing with big things I ignore the small things. So when I edit my own work, I try to get all the big things so the editor can teach me new ways to be a better writer with her edits.

Oh...and my contract also says that the book will be published within x months of me submitting the manuscript...assuming the manuscript is satisfactory. If a writer submits a rotten manuscript, it can negate the entire deal. No pressure, right?

So what are you working on, dear Reader?  How do you keep yourself on track with your writing?