Writing

No, You Shouldn’t Use AI, Even on the Small Stuff

July 13, 2025July 13, 2025 Kara Jorgensen4 Comments

If you’ve followed me on social media for longer than a few days, you know I hate AI. I am morally opposed on every level to AI because it not only destroys the environment but is a tool of fascism. As much as I would like to word vomit about that, instead, I would like to speak about why writers shouldn’t use AI, even for seemingly minor details as so many AI-using authors claim to do.

Here’s the thing, there are no truly minor details or unimportant parts of a book as everything needs to further the characterization and mood of the story.

I can already feel some writers rolling their eyes at that. Feel free to do so at your own peril. Writers who are willing to hand over parts of their project to AI to “free up their time” to do other things should instead look at their relationship to hustle culture and why they have chosen quantity over quality. Hustle culture is rife in the writing world with many author groups pushing a churn and burn mentality where authors need to publish every 3 months or be lost to irrelevancy. If you go onto Amazon’s top 100 category boards for books on writing, you’ll find books about writing more or writing faster. While those can be useful, writing more isn’t the same as writing good or better books. The hustle side of the writing world stresses that readers don’t care about the books themselves. They’ll read anything as long as it checks off a few boxes for them, and that once you have hooked them, readers will come back every 90 days to choke down whatever book you throw at them.

I despise this mentality. For one, it is patronizing to readers. Readers won’t stick around if your book sucks or if the quality goes down over time. We’ve seen this with readers noticing an author with a massive backlist has turned to AI, and they abandon them when the writing becomes nonsensical or the quality change becomes noticeably bad. I don’t like when authors treat their readers like shit or take advantage of them by assuming they will always be there no matter how they treat them or how crappy their books are. If you’re a writer, I believe you should write for yourself first, but anything you sell to readers should be the best it could possibly be for them since they’re the ones supporting you monetarily.

What I hate even more about the hustle culture mentality is the way corporate speak has made its way into creative fields. Creativity can and should make you money. Artists should be paid fairly for their work and be able to make a stable living off of it. At the same time, I don’t think creativity should be treated like a business in the way that corporations expect exponential growth at all times. It is unsustainable. We cannot write more books every single year and increase our yearly word counts exponentially. It is impossible and will quickly lead to burn out and quality loss. In order to meet these unsustainable quotas, authors turn to AI because others have convinced them that if they outsource the tedious parts of writing to the machine, they will free up time to write more of the things they enjoy or just write faster. The problem is that those tedious parts aren’t useless; everything in your book should serve a purpose.

What many of these “write more in less time” gurus purposely ignore is writing as a craft. There is almost no discussion of how to make your writing better, only how to do it faster. If they did care about craft, none of them would be suggesting using AI. As someone who teaches young writers how to better their work, every piece of writing I have seen from AI is far worse and emptier than anything brand new writers in my classes have come up with. AI writing is confusing, devoid of charm or character, and just flat-out bad. 0/10 do not recommend using it because it will take way more time to edit than just writing something yourself. A study with people who code showed that while they thought they were taking less time using AI, they were actually taking longer because they had to review it, fix it, etc (source). This is on top of the environmental harm, the fact that it is a tool of fascism, and a plagiarism machine.

The thing that a lot of writers using AI for the “boring parts” don’t seem to understand is that the minor details are incredibly important to your story. One of my most hated posts online is the whole, “Only English teachers care that the drapes are blue. They’re just blue. The author just gave it a random color. It isn’t that deep.” Sure, that can be true occasionally, but 99% of your descriptions and details should be purposeful. When you are creating a world, even if a story takes place in the real world, you are building a microcosm specific to your characters and the story you are telling. Therefore, there is an added level of cohesion and purpose in those details that might not appear in our material reality. When you are setting the scene, you need to think about how you want the reader to feel while interacting with this part of the world, how the structure fits the function of this setting, and how the point of view character effects the way the world is interpreted or experienced. For example, a character with a phobia of dentists is going to view, experience, and describe a dental office differently than someone who doesn’t think getting their teeth cleaned is a traumatic experience. If you just let AI fill in the description of the dental office, you are losing that context. Even if the character isn’t scared of it, they will still notice details other characters won’t, and while you’re writing your story, that should be something you focus on.

The other place I’ve heard people using AI for “busy work” in books is dialogue. This really makes no sense to me because dialogue is one of the best ways to insert characterization, motivation, and movement into a story. Even if you feed a chat bot relevant information about your character, it isn’t going to understand the context of your work and anything about the character below a surface level. Any dialogue it spits out will be generic, boring, and probably ill-fitting for the moment. This is one of those situations where editing extensively will be necessary and will probably take longer than just writing it yourself.

But what if I’m stuck? Why can’t I just use AI to fill in the gap for me?

Because that’s cheating! It’s cheating yourself out of using your brain to puzzle out what should go next. It’s like saying, “I find this exercise hard, so I’m going to use a motor to move the dumbbell for me.” It isn’t going to help you, and at some point, your writing muscles are going to shrink and atrophy until you can’t write anything without constantly circling back to AI. Using AI long-term causes cognitive problems (source). If you continually use it to help write your books, you will become more dependent on it and eventually get worse at writing. The best way to combat this is to face the things that challenge you head-on. Why are you stuck on this dialogue? Why do you struggle with description? Do you not know when you need to add it, or do you simply need some resources to help you name things?

There are a ton of writing resources online made by authors for authors, many of which are free. Instead of using AI, slow down and invest time and effort into getting better at your craft. I know hustle culture says write more, write faster, publish quicker, but the best way to get ahead as a writer is to take time for yourself and do things to be a better writer. Sometimes, that looks like taking a break to read good books, watch shows that stoke that creative fire, do other crafts to refill your well. Other times, it’s dissecting how other authors write well and figuring out how to do that in your own way. Writing takes work, and work means effort on your part. Using AI to write the things that you struggle with or find boring means that you are cheating yourself out of the opportunity to learn, grow, and become a better writer. Before you run to ChatGPT for help when you get stuck, look up a resource on Google that can help you with this particular thing. If you are struggling, others have too, and there’s a 90% chance that someone has made something to help you figure it out on your own.

Writing

AI Writers, Please Quit

May 18, 2025May 17, 2025 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

I came across this excerpt from a writer talking about using generative AI during her writing process, and all I have to say is, if you use generative AI to help you write your book, please quit writing.

That isn’t hyperbole or snark; I mean every word. Here’s the thing about writing, it isn’t glamorous, but people think being an author is. People who use AI to write some or all of their books want the aesthetic of being a writer. They want the fans or readers, they want the pretty covers, the money (lol), the minor amount of fame and prestige it bestows upon someone who has published, but ultimately, they don’t want to do the work to get there. And writing is work. It is incredibly unglamorous work. It’s long days staring at a screen, figuring things out, murmuring to yourself, getting stuck, and getting stuck, and getting stuck. It’s weeks of fiddling with descriptions or rewriting things that don’t quite make sense or need a bit more life breathed into them.

For the writers who use AI, they look at the work part and think about how to eliminate it. Who wants to deal with the ugly, un-fun bits of the process? Let the machine do the things I find hard or unenjoyable.

But once you outsource your process to the plagiarism slot machine, is it even yours? See, the thing about AI is that it doesn’t magically come up with new stuff for you. It’s essentially the predictive text feature on your phone, so it pulls up the most likely thing it can from a combination of words. Not the most correct or the most interesting, the most likely. Whatever description or idea it is spitting out is the lowest common denominator. It’s always going to give you a homogeneous, verbal statistical average. If you generate a bunch of statistical averages, your book is also going to be statistically average and have the same voice as other writers using AI. For some writers, at least the ones who use AI, that’s fine. As long as they can make a little more money or churn out work a little more quickly, who cares if the quality suffers? Their readers won’t even notice.

The fact that they think their readers are so indiscriminate that they won’t even notice their is statistically average is sad. Either they don’t value their readers and don’t think they’re intelligent or they have cultivated a following of people who will shell out for average slop and be happy about it. Personally, if an author I read did that, I would stop reading them, unfollow them, and never give them a dime because they don’t respect me as a reader, and I know a lot of other readers and writers who would do the same.

The thing about art is that the process is the important part. We make money off the final product, but we better our skills through the process and ultimately that is what gets us the best product. Going back to the original quote above, writing that off-handed description of the lobby in the paranormal fish hospital is part of the process. It is the process of getting better at writing descriptions; adding more depth, realism, and interest to your setting; adding theme or mood into your story through the use of setting. No description in your book should be pointless enough that you can hand it off to a computer to write. If it serves no purpose, don’t write it.

The fundamental issue with writers using AI is that they choose to outsource their creativity instead of bettering their craft. Learning your craft comes from doing mundane bits repeatedly or by dissecting what writers you like do and figuring out how to work it into your writing. It’s like playing a sport. Having a robot shoot baskets for you won’t make you better at basketball, only you doing lay-ups and practicing can do that. Writing, art, crafts, etc. are skills that can only be increased with practice. Every writer using AI has lost the plot in that regard. Outsourcing the mundane bits will ultimately make you a worse writer because the muscle you have for writing those bits will atrophy over time, and you will have to rely on it more and more. Same for using it for research, coming up with ideas, outlining, editing, etc. Those are skills you need to learn and strengthen through practice and getting feedback from other people. The machine cannot give you feedback as it does not have a brain that can analyze and be critical. It can only regurgitate what it thinks you want to hear. It’s also not a search engine, so any research it brings up is not necessarily accurate, just the thing that appears the most in relation to the terms you gave it. It’s a median machine.

At its core, authors utilizing AI leans heavily on the idea that talent for art or writing is either innate or store-bought with no between. Those who think they don’t have innate talent go for store-bought (the AI) when in reality the writers they think are innately good have just practiced for years and the store-bought isn’t talent, it’s basically a box of saw dust mislabeled as cake mix. Adding your characters’ names to it won’t make it any better, but people will still buy it if you put a shiny enough wrapper on it.

Writing

Writer Tips: The Beginning Pt. 2

April 27, 2025April 26, 2025 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

In last week’s blog post, we talked about how the opening of a book needed to include a hook, establish the main character, establish the setting, and establish the conflict. In this week’s blog, we’re going to talk about the potential pitfalls when writing the beginning of a book, how to avoid them, and how to make them work.

Keep in mind that these pitfalls aren’t absolute rules; they are merely things to look at more closely while writing and editing the beginning of your book because they can often be weak, boring, or cause other issues. My hope is that these will make you reexamine ideas for the beginnings of your works and figure out innovative ways to make them exciting, interesting, and smooth.

Starting With Characters Waking Up

The problem: this is usually not an interesting place to start the story. While you do need to establish the “before” for your main characters early in the story, you don’t necessarily want to start with them waking up and getting ready because it might not be when anything interesting is happening. You can incorporate what the character looks like without having them look in the mirror or put on clothes. It often comes off as clunky or that the writer is just warming up. Another sign of a new writer is writing every single time the characters wake up or go to sleep. Time skips are your friend in regards to flow, and 9/10 starting with the character waking up is warm up rather than the right place to start.

How to make it work: have the character wake up for an interesting reason. Olivia Waite’s Murder by Memory has the main character waking up in a brand new body that isn’t hers during a blackout on the space ship she’s on. This sets the scene, introduces some conflict, and punches up the excitement from the first sentence. You could also have an explosion wake them up or something crash. Those would be interesting things that would get your reader engaged immediately. If there’s something very odd about the character, having them get ready could be a way to show this. For example, in Metamorphosis, the main character wakes up and only while getting ready do we realize he has turned into a bug. If you were writing from the perspective of a spy getting ready for a job or an assassin suiting up, those would be interesting getting ready montages, especially if they start normally and quickly become more weird or unexpected.

Starting With A Dream Or Flashback

The problem: these can be incredibly disorienting to your reader. We have no context, no idea what’s going on, who is who, where we are, etc. A lot of newer writers like to start with dreams because they’re a way to add mystery or create a cool image, but readers often get annoyed when they’re suddenly dumped out of the dream and nothing they just read is real. Flashbacks are usually less disorienting than dreams, but they can often be a place where writers info dump or give the reader too much info too soon. It can also be info the reader doesn’t even need, and the story can start somewhere else or the info can be worked in elsewhere.

How to make it work: I think it helps to make it clear at some point that the character realizes it’s a dream to make it less jarring for the reader, so they don’t feel cheated. I still caution against using a dream sequence to start unless the dreams will happen repeatedly throughout the story. Much like a flashback, you still need to make sure that you aren’t using a dream to info dump because your reader won’t remember all the details you cram into there. With flashbacks, the big question is, do your readers need to know this right now? If the flashback is of something that has caused the story, that’s fine. An example of this working is showing an accident that happened months before the story starts, and then the next chapter is the character getting out of the hospital. This works because the accident will be the catalyst for whatever turmoil the character is going through, but we don’t have to sit through months of recovery. Basically, the flashback works because it is the reason for the story. If the flashback isn’t serving a major purpose, skip it.

Starting With Info Dumping

The problem: your readers aren’t going to remember 90% of what you are telling them in the opening chapter, so info dumping is wasted in the opening. Your reader has no idea what’s going on, who is who, where they are, what the conflict is, etc., so it’s very hard for them to figure out what they need to pay attention to and remember. We also see this in fantasy or scifi stories where the writer tries to give the reader an intense amount of world-building right at the beginning. Again, your reader isn’t going to remember 90% of this. They have context for the lore, so they aren’t going to remember most of it, and it’s sort of a waste.

How to make it work: save the world-building and background info for moments where it is needed or can be naturally introduced. Your readers don’t need to know everything all at once, so pepper it in. The best way to do this in the beginning is to show the world through the character’s eyes. If they are always in this world, they won’t be introduced to things they live with every day. Just introduce things naturally. For example, you can have a character open the door to their daughter’s room to wake her up, and we will know it’s their daughter’s room because if they’re appearing to be in a caregiver role and you described the room as a child’s, readers will assume that is their child. If you have a character in a steampunk world get into a vehicle called a steamer, readers will assume it’s like a car. You can always briefly describe the outside of it in passing rather than being like, “I got into my vehicle, a steamer, which I take to work.” That was very pointed, but you get the idea. A better way would be to say, “I pushed past the persistent, gap-toothed newsboy on the corner and cranked my steamer to life. In the quiet of the steamer, I let my head rest against the wheel before pulling away from the curb and heading toward Independence Square where the royal zeppelins hovered in the distance.” We can cram a lot of world-building into a few sentences without being too pointed.

Starting by Introducing a Ton of Characters

The problem: your reader won’t remember everyone you introduce at the beginning. As I mentioned several times so far, your reader won’t remember most of what you tell them at the beginning because they have no context and therefore no way to know what is important yet. If you introduce too many people at once who are important, your readers will struggle to keep them all straight. This is also a problem later in the book in something like a party scene where readers get a whole new crop of characters all at once, but even three or four characters in rapid succession might be hard for readers to contextualize in the opening chapter. A lot of writing advice tells you that you need to hit the ground running, so writers will try to toss everything in at once. Hitting the ground running with action is far better than doing so by muddying the waters.

How to make it work: introduce two important characters at once at most. It’s one thing to mention a character with a minimal amount of context, but it’s another to give a full description early on. You want to make sure that your main character(s) are getting the greatest amount of description and fleshing out early on to make it clear that they are the main characters. With side characters, give enough context early on to figure out their relation to the main character rather than giving us their entire history or a long description. It’s far better to give us their description and backstory in dribs and drabs to make things less confusing. An example of introducing a bunch of characters early on without bogging it down might go something like, “Stephen took a steadying breath before pushing out of the tent. Leroy, Cassandra, Mikail, and the other knights were sitting around the campfire waiting for him, but when he drew closer, Mikail’s light eyes ran over his rumbled grey hair and the bloodied bandage wrapped around his shoulder.” Note how we establish the main character, Stephen, by staying in his head/following him out. We pepper in the names of a few side characters and give the context that they are all knights. From this description, we might also surmise that Mikail is closer to Stephen or of high importance than the others within the narrative.

While these aren’t all the pitfalls you might encounter while writing the opening of your book, I hope these examples were helpful for you in figuring out how to strengthen your story.

Writing

Writer Tips: The Beginning Pt. 1

April 20, 2025April 20, 2025 Kara Jorgensen3 Comments

This week I thought I would talk about writing the beginnings of books since I am working on the fourth Reanimator Mysteries book. Opening chapters are often the hardest to write and the thing we spend the most time fixing/fiddling with. Part of this is because we put so much emphasis on attracting readers and keeping them hooked from the beginning. They are the first impression of the book that our reader has, so we need to make sure we use that chapter to set expectations and capture the general mood of the piece to avoid disappointing readers later. As a side note before we start, I think first chapters/openings are often something to worry about in the second draft rather than the first. Things often become clearer once we’re farther along. Remember, don’t get hung up on the opening when you start. You can always fix it in a later draft if you realize there is a better place to start the story. That’s what editing is for.

The Pieces

I really like the way Sarra Cannon lays out the structure of a novel (you can check her out at Heartbreathings.com). Let’s take a look at her Act 1 outline to remind ourselves what we need in Act 1/our opening

An interesting image/hook

Introducing our characters

Introducing the setting

Introducing conflict/mystery

The Hook

When you open a book, we want to put something interesting at the very beginning to keep the reader intrigued or entertained. We want to create this opening image in a way that sneakily introduces the character and the setting. What we do not want to do is put too much information into the opening because our reader won’t remember it’s important later. The opening is meant to be a brief image that gets us intrigued before diving in, and your reader will remember more of the feel of the scene than the information you give or the words you say, which is why we want to nail the vibe but not info dump.

A prologue can be used instead of an opening scene in order to introduce a mystery- like showing someone getting murdered or a god dying, but we have to be careful with prologues because they can become info-dumpy rather than intriguing. Save info/specific world-building for when you have the world more established and the reader can appreciate it. You also want to be careful with starting with dialogue as the reader doesn’t know who these people are, the context of their relationship, etc. It may be better to save it for half a page in when the reader has been grounded by the mood or setting.

Introducing Our Characters

During your opening chapter, we should be introduced to at least one of the main characters. If you have multiple POV characters, obviously that will be spread over multiple chapters or we will only get them from one person’s POV (aka don’t split the chapter in two with different POVs). You want to ground your reader, so e should get the character’s “normal” before the conflict really kicks in. This is important because we need to establish where your character is before they change over the course of the book. You can do this by showing us the character’s world, which also helps to incorporate the setting, and showing them interacting with others while giving us their thoughts and feelings.

At the same time, there should still be a hint of something being amiss during the opening scenes. Some examples:

If the MC is a workaholic, show them missing a holiday due to a work trip.
If a character has a gambling problem, show them checking their bank account and seeing all of the micro transactions.
If a character is lonely, hint at it by having them be alone or mentally commenting on the silence.

Your reader will connect with your main character first and foremost, so spend time fleshing them out by giving them thoughts, feelings, ideas, opinions, clothes, rooms, things, etc. By the end of the opening, the reader should understand what this character is going through, where they live, who they are, etc. Once again, is is often something that is strengthened in the second draft once you understand them better. The bigger point is that at the beginning of the story, these characters are wounded and/or missing something that they need. We need a hint of that wound/issue early on because it will drive the internal and potentially the external conflicts.

Introducing the Setting

Apart from your character, you also need to establish the setting, mood, and genre of your story. I lump these together because you’re doing all of the above at the same time. As you are writing, keep in mind that not every genre cares as much about setting as others do. Small town romances require you to create a realistic town while fantasy and scifi require a much greater level of world-building, so you will need to do this proportionately to the genre you are working in. At the same time, even if setting isn’t as prominent, like in contemporary romance, it is still important to ground your reader in a place by describing what the character is experiencing from a sensory perspective.

In this opening chapter, you are giving us hints of the world, the foundation and first glimpses of it. Only give us lore if it’s absolutely necessary, as in, we need to know this right now or we will be totally confused. Even then, I suggest doing so with caution and consider in your next draft if it is necessary. In your opening, we should be moving through the world via your main character’s eyes. Only give us things they would see or know. They take lore for granted since they exist in this world, so your opening should reflect that. You can also hint at fantastical things without being overt, like showing us bits of magic by offhandedly mentioning someone stirring a cup with telekinesis or a magical animal talking with the main character. You don’t need to give the reader explanations. They can suspend a little disbelief early on.

Having your character physically move through a space is a really good way to pepper in that world-building naturally. That way we follow their eyes over doors and paintings where you can add in little bits of detail that characterize the setting. During this time, we still need to set up the mood as well, and this should be baked into the setting and thoughts of the characters. Keep in mind that your genre can dictate the mood based on reader expectations. While a paranormal romance can be silly or serious, subgenres of mysteries or romances have more distinct moods. A cozy mystery can’t be too heavy, and a noir detective story has to air on the side of dark. Your world-building, thoughts, feelings, sensory words will all imbue the world with a mood. You need to establish that mood during your opening paragraphs, so you don’t pull a bait and switch on your reader.

The Conflict

As mentioned in the character section, your reader should get a hint of what the internal conflict is early in your book. Chapter one or the prologue can’t be aimless, so by having the internal conflict rearing its head, we give the book a bit of direction. There can be hints of the external conflict, mentions of money troubles, a bad guy looming, newspaper headlines, etc., but the external conflict shouldn’t quite appear in the opening. That should be saved for the inciting incident, which is at the very end of act 1 and pushes the main character into the meat of the story. This is sometimes called the call to adventure. The main reason we don’t want to do this is that we want to build up the world and the characters before shoving them into the main part of the story in order to build up the stakes or what the character could lose if things don’t work out for them. Without that build-up, the story can feel very flimsy or your reader isn’t engaged because they haven’t connected to the main character yet. This doesn’t mean there can’t be a murder or something intriguing, it just means that the thing that really forces the character to move hasn’t happened yet. If we don’t establish the internal conflict, the stakes, and the characters, the story will feel rushed, and we don’t want that.

I hope this break down on the opening of your book helped you! I would consider the opening to be the first 10-15% of the story with the inciting incident happening at the 25% mark. Next week’s post will talk about potential pitfalls in the opening of your story and how to avoid them.

The Reanimator's Remains · Writing

“An Unexpected Evening” (TRM #3.5) is Out!

March 16, 2025March 16, 2025 Kara JorgensenLeave a comment

If you’re part of my newsletter, you have already received your copy of “An Unexpected Evening,” but I also wanted to release it officially to my non-newsletter readers.

You can grab your copy through the freebies section on my website or through this link. “An Unexpected Evening” (TRM #3.5) is a 16,000 word novella that takes place a few weeks after the events of The Reanimator’s Remains (TRM #3), so I would highly recommend reading that book (and the ones before it) first.

The cover of "An Unexpected Evening" is in the center (black with green text and a masquerade mask). An Unexpected Question TRM #3.5. Oliver and Felipe, Things go wrong, food, seances, ghosts? a halloween party, an ominous prophecy, 16k words

The Paranormal Society’s All Hallows’ Eve party is the highlight of the magical social season, and after years of going alone and ducking out after an hour, Oliver is hellbent on having a good time with Felipe this year, even if it kills him.

While Felipe is more than willing to wear a costume and dance the night away to make Oliver happy, an ominous prophecy from a sybil only hours before the festivities puts him on his guard. Unfortunately, the sybil’s warning isn’t Felipe’s only concern if the feelings coming across the tether are any indication.

Will Oliver and Felipe make it through the masquerade in one piece or will the prophetess’s warning be their undoing?

CW: discussions of past sexual trauma, sexual content, and panic attack

If you would like to grab your copy of “An Unexpected Evening,” you can do so by clicking the button below. You can also pop over to my freebies page on my website to grab the other 2 in-between stories for the Reanimator Mysteries series.

Grab “An Unexpected Evening” here

Writing

Join Me on Weeknight Writers

March 9, 2025March 2, 2025 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

On Saturday, March 15th from 1-3 pm EST, I will be participating in a virtual panel on writing trans characters! I am super excited to have been invited by Weeknight Writers to participate in this panel along with authors Felix Graves, Georgina Kiersten, Vaela Denarr and host Dianna Gunn and Jade Benjamin.

Trans stories are more important than ever. This two-hour panel will feature four trans authors sharing how they approach writing trans characters and what trans folks should keep in mind when writing their own stories. We’ll also touch on how cis writers can create trans characters without perpetuating stereotypes or causing harm and how everyone can support stories featuring trans characters.

This event is hosted by the Weeknight Writers Group, a social enterprise dedicated to providing affordable and accessible support for authors. The first hour and a half will be devoted to questions from our Sustaining Members and the panel moderators. The final half hour will be devoted to live audience questions.

You can purchase a ticket on their website for $15 or you can join their newsletter in order to get half-off your ticket. I also believe that being a sustaining member of the Weeknight Writers will also get you access to the panel and others before/after it.

I hope I will see you there or that you will support this fantastic writers’ organization that continues to bolster marginalized writers.

Writing

8 Things New Authors Should Know

February 23, 2025February 23, 2025 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

I’m the first to admit that I do not have the answers when it comes to writing or being an author. Hell, I’m still shocked they let me teach students, but after ten plus years of being an indie author, publishing ten books and a bunch of short stories, I have learned a thing or two. It’s funny because I posted a similar blog a year or two ago, but after teaching my novel writing class this past semester, I realized there are a few things I really think new authors should know.

You have to be your biggest fan. I often see writers who come from a fanfic background get down about the lack of validation and encouragement when they come nonfanfic writers because your stories go out when they’re finished rather than as they work on them. You are probably never going to get that same validation on your work unless you post the draft live on your blog or on Patreon, so my suggestion is to become your biggest cheerleader. You need to love what you’re working on and light your fire for your characters. That isn’t to say there aren’t going to be hard days where you are frustrated or hating the process. You just have to be excited to see these characters go on their journey more than anyone else. Write for yourself first and foremost to keep that excitement alive.
Take care of your body. My partner and I are both from artistic backgrounds, and the number one thing they always remind me of is to take care of my body. If you want to have a long and sustainable career as a writer, you need to take care of your hands and your back. Resist the urge to curl up like a shrimp while you type, make sure your wrists are in an ergonomic position to avoid carpel tunnel, stretch those fingies and wrists, and take breaks. I’ve been stressing this to my students lately because what you can do at 18 or 21 is infinitely harder at 34.
Avoid burnout. Something we all need to know the warning signs of and try to prevent is burnout. Burnout is basically when you run your brain into the ground by overtaxing it and not giving yourself enough rest. It can also be caused by compounded stress. Sometimes, it is unavoidable due to bad things intersecting all at once, but if you can help it, be on the look out for suddenly feeling run down, actively avoiding your work, everything suddenly being far harder than it normally is. This can be due to other health issues, but if this feels more mental than physical (or is mental and turning physical), it may be burnout. Radical rest is the best medicine. Your deadlines and readers can wait for you to take care of yourself. Being burnout for a long prolonged period can lead to permanent damage, so please rest when you feel it coming on.
Learn about taxes early. I know this is probably not as big of an issue outside the US, but please learn about how taxes work for independent creators in your state. I always thought taxes were very scary, but the IRS is not going to bust into your house like the Kool-Aid Man and arrest you. What you can figure out is what counts against your taxes (losses/things needed to create your products), how to do quarterly taxes (which will save your money in the long run if you make a decent amount per year), and what the threshold is for upgrading to an LLC or having a professional handle your taxes and advise you. I know it is stressful and varies from state to state, but figuring this stuff out took a lot off my plate. If you want to sell things on Etsy or from a storefront online, you should also figure out how to do sales tax and such as well.
Learn that authors are not your competition. They are your coworkers. No reader exclusively reads one author and no one else, so there is no reason to treat other authors like the enemy. I know that often this comes from a place of jealousy, but treat the people who are doing better than you are inspiration or case studies. See what they are doing in terms of marketing or interactions and try to apply that to your work. Don’t copy people; learn from them. Other authors are your community, and they are often the ones who step up to help out newer authors. Fine supportive people. It may take a bit, but also don’t be afraid to leave groups that are catty or mean spirited. They aren’t your friends, and you can do better.
Be true to yourself and your vision. This is sort of similar to point one, but it can be easy to get caught up in doing what everyone else is doing. Authors see people are making book boxes or Tiktoks or book trailers, and suddenly, you’re worried that these things are the key to success. No one thing is, and if doing Tiktoks isn’t something you want to do because you hate video, then don’t do it. It’s best to stay focused on what you want and how you want your writing life to look and focus on how to make that work rather than fling spaghetti and do everything while hoping something sticks. If you try to do everything, you will burn yourself out and get less done.
Remember that not everything you see online is real. People lie. Shocking, I know, but yes, people on the internet lie about their success or pull a Wizard of Oz to make their success look grander than it really is. There are a lot of people online who are grifters who just want to sell you their course or get you to listen to their money-making podcast, so they tell you what you want to hear. They have the secret to make a million dollars or how to make four figures a month. Someone can make a million dollars over fifteen years and call themselves a million dollar author, or they might make $50k in a month, but what they don’t say is that they spent $30k in ads. You might also see authors who claim to have personal assistants when, in reality, it’s a chatbot or them under a different Facebook or email account pretending to be someone else. Trust me that it is more common than you would think, especially from people who try to act like authorities online.
Don’t use AI. There are also a lot of people who will tell you AI can help you write faster or that it can help you with research. It can’t. AI is basically the mediocrity machine. It picks the most common dreck and smooshes it together on command, but it cannot think, it cannot create emotional depth, and it isn’t consistent. There are TONS of resources online that can teach you to become a better writer, but AI isn’t it. It isn’t a shortcut to success, but it is a shortcut to losing your career because most readers do not want to read AI written or aided stories, and yes, you can tell. From a creative writing teacher perspective, every bit of AI writing I have seen has been far worse quality than anything newbie writers in my classes have turned in. It’s soulless. If you can’t convince yourself to write and have to turn to AI in order to do it, you are in the wrong field and should leave to make room for those who do give a shit about craft and their readers.

Writing

Plot? Character? Both? Both. Pt. 2

February 16, 2025February 16, 2025 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

Last week in part 1, we talked about how to build characters in a way that makes it easier to build the rest of the story structure around their growth and change. I highly recommend reading that before reading part 2 if you haven’t yet.

A caveat before we begin is that I am using my writing process as a scaffold for this. Everyone has a different writing process and there is no one way to write a novel. My hope is that you will adapt my advice to what works best for you by taking what works and leaving what doesn’t. Also, this post will have very minor spoilers for The Reanimator’s Heart as I use it to show how I construct the basis for my characters/plot.

A few key reminders before we start

your main characters must change from the beginning to the end of the story (this can be positive or negative growth, but there has to be change)
if you’re writing a romance or a character driven story with more than one protagonist, you’ll need to have more than one character change, so they will all need a journey tied to the plot
if you are planning to write more than one book with the same characters, you will need to have them change incrementally across multiple books, usually by shifting different traits in each book
the hierarchy of building a story goes character > plot > world-building > everything else

Let’s ruin their lives

The big difference between a character driven story and a plot driven story to me is that character driven stories focus on the change in the character first and make the plot work toward that. Plot driven stories have the characters serve the plot, meaning you could hypothetically swap out the characters without changing the major beats of the journey. In real life, we might be going through a midlife crisis without something in our external life making it worse, but because this is fiction, we can make things far more convenient than reality in our character driven story. Think of the external plot as a trigger for the inner journey of your characters. They are already feeling this way, but the external plot has kicked off a lot of feelings and made things more complicated for your character. I think a lot of writers tend to think of the internal journey and external plot as being separate, but if they are intrinsically intertwined, you can really heighten the character’s turmoil and strengthen both the character development and the plot at the same time.

I’m not going to go into a specific beat sheet or structure, so if you’re a plotter, feel free to use whatever plot structure works best for you. Personally, I like Sarra Cannon’s beat structure, which you can find in her HeartBreathings channel on Youtube.

Last week, I mentioned that we need to figure out what your character needs most to be a happier or better person (or feel free to ruin them; it’s your book) in order to figure out the internal journey. For Oliver and Felipe in my book The Reanimator’s Heart, they both need to work on their issues with isolation in order to be happy. Oliver needs to step out of his bubble while Felipe needs to let Oliver into his. How they deal with their isolation and interact with each other will be informed by the past and personality we crafted earlier. As a reminder, Oliver is autistic and a necromancer, which has contributed to his isolation and getting stuck in a rut after years of pining after Felipe who also works at the Paranormal Society. Meanwhile, Felipe is seen at the society as almost a demigod. He is a self-healer, a hero, someone who takes the worst cases and can survive the harshest conditions. This has set him above and apart from the other investigators who like and respect him but also low key fear him. This along with his daughter going off to college has caused him to pull away from most people because they expect him to constantly be that untouchable hero.

My question to myself while constructing a plot is how can I ruin my characters’ lives in a fun and inventive way? This is why we want their issues to be similar, so that we can ruin their lives efficiently while plotting. Ultimately, since this is romance, we want Oliver and Felipe to get together by overcoming their loneliness together. Now, let’s combine this with a worst case scenario for them personally. Oliver is a necromancer, and Felipe is a hero with nearly supernatural abilities. What if Felipe gets killed, and Oliver reanimates him? That’s pretty messy. Oliver is also a rule follower by nature and going against the laws of nature by keeping people alive long after death is definitely against the rules, so if he were to reanimate Felipe, that would cause him some angst. Felipe is–was–nearly immortal, so the whole being dead thing would also cause angst and an identity crisis.

Note how all of this is picking at wounds or character traits/history that was already there. As you’re writing and brainstorming, it’s fine to tweak the backstory to make this work more smoothly. This is also why I think you should give yourself some vagueness or breathing room with a character’s history; it allows you to tweak things to better serve the character-plot symbiosis while plotting.

Constructing the plot

Now that we’ve ruined their lives, we’re probably at the end of act one in terms of plot structure. This life ruining should kick us into the story proper, which means the plot should unfold logically from there. Keep in mind as you go from the kick off to the finale that your characters need to grow or change by the end of the story. In Oliver and Felipe’s case, it’s overcoming their isolation. Since it’s a romance, we can assume that means they get together as a couple in a happily ever after. There needs to be a logical progression from lonely to together that builds over the course of the story.

As I said, I’m not going to go into too much detail regarding plot structures, but the four acts of a story should go as follows:

act 1 (0-25%)- introduce the issues (and if it’s a romance, entangle them)
act 2 (25-50%)- we’re exploring the new world and showing how these issues are a problem
act 3 (50-75%)- at the beginning there’s some moment of recognition of the flaw and they spend the rest of the act trying to rationalize it or shy away from fixing it all while being more conscious of it
act 4 (75-100%)- things come to a head and the character(s) are forced to confront their issues and finally overcome them, usually while overcoming the external plot

As you brainstorm the plot and overall external conflict of your story, you need to think of a plot that will poke at the wounds your character already has while still being interesting. This way you are constantly touching the internal journey rather than weaving it back and forth into the story as a subplot. With Oliver and Felipe, I decided that a way to intertwine the inner journey and outer plot was to have Felipe die by being murdered. This forces the characters to go solve his murder (along with another murder I grafted onto the plot for cohesion after this initial brainstorming). By solving his murder, they are forced to spend a lot of time together, look for clues, get to know each other, and do things that tackle their loneliness issues while complicating their relationship. If he had died naturally as opposed to being murdered, the two plots of the story wouldn’t be linked together as tightly.

Throughout the story, but especially in acts 2 and 3, you have the perfect opportunity to use plot points to deepen or explore the internal journey while they do things for the external plot. These can be large plot points like when Oliver is nearly killed, which reveals the true depth of Felipe’s feelings and some clues for the external plot, or they can be quieter plot points, like where the characters discuss the case while having dinner and by sharing a meal, they’re also no longer isolating. You want the majority of the major plot points to do double duty in serving the internal journey while also moving the external plot forward. This is also why I suggest having the main characters in a romance have the same issue in a different flavor (like loneliness). If they have opposing issues or ones that very different, figuring out how to riff off the main plot while balancing both may be difficult or come off as disjointed.

As you are writing your story, I want you to make sure that you don’t lose sight of the most important part: the characters. They are the key to making a compelling story or series that sucks your readers in. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the fun and games of the plot, but if you’re writing a character driven story, they need to be front and center in your mind and on the page from the opening to “the end.”

Uncategorized · Writing

Plot? Character? Both? Both. Pt. 1

February 9, 2025February 9, 2025 Kara Jorgensen5 Comments

One of the most common arguments I remember hearing in my MFA program that I still online is whether genre fiction is character or plot focused. The answer is often both, especially if you write romance or something with a heavy emphasis on character development. A question I hear a lot when I’m teaching creative writing or with friends who want feedback on their books is how do I construct a plot that is character-centric but still fun and tightly structured? This week and next week’s blog posts will be about how to do create character driven novel that is heightened by an external plot.

How to build a character

I think the biggest piece of prework for writing a character-centric story with a plot that enhances the characters is knowing the characters really well. In order to create the plot of your story, you need to know where the characters are at the beginning and end of the story, aka how they change over time. The plot will help to move them toward that goal, but first, you need to figure out where your characters are before the story starts.

I’m a gardener (a loose-ish plotter), so I like to spend a lot of time before I start truly writing getting to know who my characters are. I do this by brainstorming, ruminating, making notes about what I think their backstory is, their personality, what they look like, etc. Let’s use Oliver from The Reanimator’s Heart as an example. I really wanted to write a character who is autistic, so I knew that was going to factor into his personality and overall design because your neurotype influences how you act and behave. I was inspired by the show Pushing Daisies, which had a main character who could raise the dead in order to solve murders, so it made sense that Oliver would then be a necromancer. Autistic + necromancer = Oliver, so what does that mean in terms of character traits? I decided that I wanted him to be an autistic who isn’t very good at masking or hiding his traits, so he’s quiet, a bit weird, not socially adept, and if necromancers are stigmatized in this magical world because it’s a rather morbid power that can cause very bad things, it would make sense that he either self-isolates or is isolated within the Paranormal Society (the setting of the story). I asked myself, does he have family? I decided that I didn’t want him to have living family members (upping the isolation), but he does have a really good friend that he’s close to, Gwen, who also works at the society. What job would make sense for a necromancer at the Paranormal Society? Being a coroner or medical examiner would meaning he can talk to the dead with little oversight as people typically avoid dead bodies. I researched medical examiners, and you need to be a doctor to be one, so now, Oliver has a medical degree.

Ultimately, I decided Oliver is an autistic necromancer who tends to self-isolate due to his social difficulties and his necromancy being stigmatized. His backstory is that he is without living family, has a medical degree but for some reason is no longer practicing medicine, and works as the medical examiner for the society’s investigative wing. This is where we find him right when the story starts. If you’ve read The Reanimator’s Heart, you know how all of this plays into the story line.

For me, physical attributes always come second as I use them to highlight or heighten the character traits rather than the other way around. I wanted Oliver to look dead, so I made him very pale (he’s white) and gave him dark hair to make the contrast even starker. He’s tall because autistic looming can make people uncomfortable. I also wanted him to be accidentally scary to people who don’t know him (his looks might also intimidate people who might try to mess with Gwen/his best friend). His grey eyes fit the monochromatic theme and gave him a little enigmatic flare because why not. This is a romance after all.

PS- make sure to write all of this sort of brainstorming somewhere you can find it again. Do not trust yourself to remember because you won’t.

Now, if you’re writing a romance or a multi-POV book with more than one protagonist, you will need to do this for two characters, and for romance, you will need to figure out a way to make them highlight or contrast with each other. The Reanimator’s Heart is a romance, so Oliver needs a love interest/romantic partner. That’s where Felipe comes in. If Oliver is a necromancer who works as the medical examiner and isn’t very social, who might he run into often at the society? An investigator. That’s how Felipe ended up with his job. From there, I decided he is going to be one of the best investigators, the kind who go on the longest, toughest missions. I hadn’t initially decided what his power is, but I knew his background had to be in monster hunting and fighting. I had toyed the year before with the idea of a character being Zorro adjacent, but the story idea fizzled out for many reasons. Ultimately, Felipe ended up being born from that spark of inspiration, so he ended up being a heroic monster hunter known for his fighting prowess who also comes from a family of monster hunters in California. To make him a foil for Oliver, Felipe would have to be sort of his opposite, which would make him more outgoing, social, and well-liked by the people at the society. Felipe ended up becoming a charming, more extroverted, levelheaded monster hunter/investigator. His physical traits had to fit someone of Mexican-American descent since he is from California, and I decided it would make sense for him to be Latinx. Felipe became a short king because I wanted a little size difference with Oliver and because heroes are tall way too often.

Even if Felipe is a foil for Oliver, they have to have something in common, and since Oliver is isolated and lonely due to his autism and powers, it would make sense for Felipe to also be dealing with loneliness of a different flavor. In a romance, a good way to have the main characters interlock and play off each other is to have them struggling with the same internal problem in different ways and have them make up for what the other lacks.

Where did you come from? Where did you go?

Something I want you to pay attention to in regards to the construction of characters mentioned above is that they were not constructed by squishing together a bunch of character traits. I’ve seen a lot of blog posts or videos that suggest focusing on traits, but I think it makes more sense to take a holistic approach and work backwards and forwards to figure out how a character acts and why they act this way. The why is the important part. If you want your characters to come off as real people, you have to think of the psychology and cause and effect behind their traits. Our personalities aren’t made in a vacuum, and neither should your characters be built in a vacuum.

Our pasts and upbringings inform our identities, so I think it’s important to figure out how you want your character to be at the beginning of the story. Once you have that, you have to ask why they behave this way? Some of it will boil down to things like neurotype, gender (and the societal expectations of that or the subversions), sexuality, class, trauma, religion, disabilities, the culture they were raised in, etc. All of these things have an effect on how we behave or interact with our world, so your character’s personality also will be affected by the world building in your story. By starting with the current person and working backwards, you are more likely to have a cohesive character who is more than a hodgepodge of traits, and when you need to figure out how they’ll react in your story, you can look back at that history for the answer. I suggest being flexible or loose with this past history in case you need to tweak or change something as you write the story, but knowing the basics and overall journey of how the character got to this point is helpful.

Next week we’re going to talk about making the plot work with the character development in more detail, but before we get into that, we need to figure out how the characters need to grow from the beginning to the end of the story. Keep in mind that if this is going to be a series with the same characters in multiple books, you should only fix one trait or problem at a time. I tend to see most writing “rules” as guidelines, but if you want to have a character-centered story, the character has to change or grow throughout the story. Before you start working on the overall plot, you need to figure out how you want them to change. That journey will be the scaffold upon which the rest of the plot is built.

A good way to figure this out is to think about what your character needs most to be a happier or better person. For Oliver and Felipe, they both need to work on their issues with isolation in order to be happy. Oliver needs to step out of his bubble while Felipe needs to let Oliver into his. How they deal with their isolation and interact with each other will be informed by the past and personality we crafted earlier.

Stop by next week to see how we integrate their internal growth with the external plot!

Writing

My 2025 Goals

January 12, 2025January 1, 2025 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

I’m not always a fan of yearly goals. Truthfully, I prefer to do 90 day/quarterly goals, but since it’s the beginning of the new year, I thought it would be good to post my overall goals for the year. I have divided the goals into writing, publishing, personal, and other goals. In a perfect world, I will be able to write two full books this year, but these goals will probably be aspirational, and that’s okay. Something I’ve been trying to be better about is not beating myself up when I don’t accomplish everything I set out to do. As long as I do my best at the time, it’s fine, and it will eventually get done. Without further ado, let’s take a look at my goals for 2025.

Writing Goals

Write, edit, and publish “An Unexpected Evening” (about 10k, started it at the end of 2024)
Write, edit, and publish The Reanimator Mysteries #4 (100k+ words)
At least start writing Ansley and Joe’s story (80k? words)
Write, edit, and publish an epilogue short story for book 4
Write consistently throughout the year
Try writing two books at once (maybe)
Have 10 2k writing days
Have 3 5k writing days

Publishing Goals

Publish the audiobook of The Reanimator’s Remains (TRM #3) with Jack R. R. Evans as the narrator
Publish/send out “An Unexpected Evening” (TRM #3.5) to newsletter subscribers
Publish 1-2 books
- Definitely publish TRM #4
- Potentially publish Joe and Ansley’s book, though that may be next year
Make more money than I did in 2024
Potentially get a new cover for Kinship and Kindness (this may get pushed back to next year if Joe and Ansley’s book ends up being worked on late in the year)

Personal Goals

Work on my office since I stalled out on this
- Get rid of the old furniture
- Paint the walls
- Set up the new furniture
Get healthier
- Make more veggie-heavy dishes
- Continue to lift weights consistently
- Work up to 10 lb weights when I’m ready
Maintain my mental health
- Be social with my friends online and in-person
- Play games and/or refill the well
- Be cognizant of when I’m burning out and take steps to stop it

Other Goals

Read 100 books
Play/finish 3 video games (I will consider prolonged playing of an open-world game like Stardew as “finishing”)
Learn a new craft
Learn new cooking techniques/recipes
Blog weekly
Send my newsletter out monthly

More than anything, I hope 2025 is boring. I know we’re heading into turbulent times in the US and around the world, but I want everyone to reach out to those around them and find people to support them. Change starts with us, so I hope you all turn to the trans, disabled, and marginalized people in your lives and make decisions with their best interests in mind.