Word by Word

Practical insights for writers from Jessica P Morrell

Archive for the 'writing inspiration' Category

Reality Check

There will always be a gap between your ideal self and your real self. There will always be a gap between your ideal writing and the writing you can actually accomplish. Write anyway. Your aim is to decrease the distance between these gaps.  Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

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Quick Take:

Stories are about change. The more painful the better. These difficult changes are going to happen to your protagonist–he or she will always be the character most hurt and changed by the story events. The effect of all these changes? A character arc. Proof that your protagonist has come through the fire, has been somehow […]

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Details to heighten conflict

Our daily lives are filled with insipid details, background sounds, and habitual responses. There is both sameness and comfort in the dailiness of our routines, the furnishings and clutter in our homes, the alarm clock buzzing each weekday morning. And our storytelling needs bits of this day-to-day normality to establish an authentic and breathing world.  Within […]

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Advice from the brilliant Margaret Atwood

 When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion, dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood.It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you’re telling it, to yourself or to someone else. ~ Margaret Atwood […]

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“As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker’s feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a […]

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Thought for the day by David Bohm

“Between where you are now and where you’d like to be there’s a sort of barrier, or a chasm, and sometimes it’s a good idea to imagine that you’re already at the other side of that chasm, so that you can start on the unknown side.” ~ David Bohm

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2016 Beckons us Forward: Notes to Writers

Around here the sun has made a welcome appearance and 2015 zipped past at a blazing pace. If I was the pinching-myself type, I’d have been pinching myself these past few months.  Where did all the hours and days and weeks fly away to? Some mornings I woke feeling robbed by time’s velocity, but then […]

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it all matters

“It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, waits at […]

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Quick Take: Tough Choices

People are defined by their choices. This applies to poker players and politicians, world leaders and criminals, parents and coaches. Fictional characters are also defined by the choices they make. Choices start off a story because a character needs to respond to the inciting incident and first plot point. In Act two when the protagonist’s […]

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NaNoWriMo Hacks & a Bit of Tough Love

Thirty days has November and for thousands of writers around the globe, that means NaNoWriMo or National Writing Month, a giddy, exhausting yet exhilarating, marathon and  communal activity where writers jam on the page, producing a 50,000-word novel in a month. It teaches writers discipline, commitment, and how to survive on not much sleep. A […]

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