Modernist manuals on writing often conflate every story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.
Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing. ~ Ursula K LeGuin
Ursula speaks:
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Mar•
06•25
Nurtured by Books: Laurie King
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
16•25
We had snow in western Oregon last week and it’s still melting around here. It was utterly lovely and created such a hushed, soft world. And I enjoy few things more than watching heavy snow tumble from the sky. Talk about a magic show.
I want to call your attention to a fascinating autobiography piece written by Laurie King, the creator of the rollicking, and well-researched Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series. Holmes is a retired detective and beekeeper in Sussex Downs when readers first meet him in The Beekeepers Apprentice. It’s the first year of the Great War and Holmes recognizes a kindred spirit and a great intellect in the newly-orphaned Mary. She’s a mere fifteen in the introductory adventure and mystery, and after reading this piece I’m aware of how much of herself King endowed Mary with. And, as I’ve always known, how bookworms, as we used to be called, are my kindred spirits.
Years ago I studied the first six or seven books in the series and learned so much about how to create living people on the page along with other techniques. And have since passed on this knowledge to my clients and students over the years. Here she talks about her childhood and states, “I am a writer because I love and have been nurtured by books.” I paused at that phrase ‘nurtured by books’ because it describes my heartfelt appreciation for all that books have given me. I’m sure you feel the same.
And her description of the Santa Cruz Public Library reminds me of the atmosphere in the Carnegie library in my home town in northern Wisconsin. She writes, “The Santa Cruz Public library was a tall, dark-shingled Aladdin’s cave of riches which I remember draped with vines though I suspect later imagination might have provided that decoration.” I paused on that sentence because I recall ivy vines on the red brick building of my childhood. I might call my cousin to verify. But I digress.
She goes on to write about the pleasures of “looking up during a signing and seeing myself in the back row. The book, which begins when the heroine is fifteen years old, yet easily capable of meeting the great Sherlock Holmes as an equal, is the story I wished I’d had when I was twelve or fourteen. Fantasy, affirmation, a hint of romance, a dash of adventure: along with those shy girls in the back row, I am Mary Russell. Or, I was at that age in my mind.
In truth, I was socially inept, physically awkward, excruciatingly shy, and always an outsider.”
I cannot recommend this revealing and delightful autobiography enough. And I’ll bet you just might relate to this sentence, “It’s extraordinary in life how often ideas or teacher reach out and grab a person.” It happened to me too. But do read this piece in its entirety which includes how she came to writing.
In summary: study author’s techniques, read their biographies, autobiographies, and articles about writing, attend writer’s conferences where you can meet them, or join their online classes. In the case of King, there are a number of You Tube videos where she teaches storytelling. She will astound you.
Be well. Fight for the truth. And have heart.
Poetry shapes the world
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
02•25
I wouldn’t be surprised if poetry–poetry in the broadest sense, in a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs–is how the world world. The world isn’t logical, it’s a song. ~ David Bryne
Happiness is Reading
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Jan•
20•25
Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things.
A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages.
And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent. ~ Virginia Woolf
I’ve never used a letter opener as a bookmark, but I’m sure we agree that a delicious story transporting us far from the ordinary world belongs on our happiness list. With the horrors of the L.A. fires and a rising oligarchy overtaking our republic, transporting is what I desperately need.
Girl with Needle-work, Pietro Rotari
A few days ago I read a short story that has haunted me. It’s from a contest held in conjunction with Roxanne Gaye’s Substack column The Audacity. The tagline is ‘writing that boldly disregards normal constraints.’ I highly recommend it for it’s mission, news roundup, and the twice monthly essay contest for up-and-coming writers. In the January 15 column Megan Pillow describes how her book group had read Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin and talked about how society treats people on the margins. And how these truths are more terrifying than the monsters under our bed. {For the record, I had monsters in the closet and tigers under the bed.} Cuckoo is about kids sent to a conversion camp in the 1990s and it sounds chilling. But then it’s a horror story and meant to be chilling.
This, in turn, begat a horror short story competition. The winner is “The Needleworkers” by Dyana Herron and it’s a fairytale meets a Shirley Jackson-type tale. Here is the link again and first paragraphs. And I cannot stop thinking about it.
The aunts keep the needles locked upstairs in a room of the common house. They knew otherwise the temptation might be too great for us nieces to sneak between mea
ls and chores to handle them –measure their weight in our palms, test the sharpness of their points, rehearse a threadless a stitch or two.
And how could we resist? The needles are beautiful. Most are true silver, polished to a perpetual shine from use. Some are wooden whittled thin. A few, the oldest, are carved from bone. They are all bright and smooth, unlike the dusky tin spoons we use at mealtimes and the rough, disfiguring mirrors in the hall. They are lovelier than anything that belongs to the community, and much more valuable, because they are what we use to stay safe from harm.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart
From Gretchen Felker-Martin
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Jan•
15•25
Horror is all about unspoken drives, desires, and fears. If you can sublimate that on the page, you can elicit a reaction from the reader, and you can give someone the relief of knowing they’re not alone with their forbidden thoughts or shock someone into wondering why these thoughts are forbidden in the first place. You can push people into a space where they have to start questioning the architecture of their own mind and the world around them.
Gretchen Felker-Martin is also the author of Manhunt
Gratitude, Ali Velshi’s Banned Book Club, Ray Bradbury, & Fahrenheit 451
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Jan•
14•25
I want to thank everyone who joined us this past Saturday morning for the Grand Canyon Sisters in Crimes panel on Self Editing. It was a lot of fun, especially hanging out with Christine Estes, Susan Budavari, Denise Forsythe, Yvonne Corrigan-Carr and other board members. As usual, I had much to say and I believe there is a transcript of the panel available. They’re headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona and do SO much to help writers get published and sell their books. I cannot recommend this organization enough. Here’s a link to their doings–they’ve got a bunch of opportunities coming up.
This January finds me thinking a lot about my contributions to our complicated world. I plan to shine more light on the whole damnable and corrosive horror of banning books. In a country with a First Amendment that affirms our rights to free expression. An insightful and delightful resource for learning about banned books is Ali Velshi’s Banned Book Club on MSBNC. He’s on Saturday and Sunday mornings and his penetrating analysis of the books featured, author interviews, and deep perspective about the role of books in our lives is invaluable.
Here is a link to the episode.
It’s also streaming on Peacock. You can also listen to his show via the podcast.
On January 11, Velshi featured Ray Bradbury –one of my writing heroes–and his iconic novel Fahrenheit 451. Ironically, a novel about the dangers of book banning. The segments that were highlighted were poignant and important and Lois Lowry author of The Giver (another banned book worth reading) and Professor Jason Stanley, of Yale discussed the implications of censorship in that the particular story. As Bradbury said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
And did you study Fahrenheit 451 in school? In the Banned Book Club segment Velshi mentioned that Bradbury died in 2012 at 91 and wrote every day of his life since he was 12. No wonder he wrote 27 novels and 600-some short stories.
Here is Fahrenheit 451’s opening paragraph: It was a pleasure to burn. It was a pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blacken and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with the great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, blood pounded in his head and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of burning and tatters to bring down the charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that colored the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparking whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.
Prose and power to strive for, isn’t it?
Here’s a delightful short film about him, NEA Big Read: Meet Ray Bradbury. It’s impressive because he was impressive. “The things that you love are the things that you should do and the things you do are the things that you love.”
Might I also heartily recommend Bradbury’s book for writers Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You. It’s full of timeless wisdom and I’ll be writing about it more in coming days.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart
And please fight censorship.
