Action is eloquence. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus There are a few techniques it seems like I’m always passing on to my clients: amp up your verbs; use language and details to create more tension; and force scenes to rise. By rise I mean writers need to thrust the drama level to a crisis, a confrontation, an […]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'Jessica Page Morrell' Category
Adrienne Rich on Why Poetry Matters
Every year when April rolls around and the landscape is nodding with new, soft blooms National Poetry Month happens. I spend the month reading poems, starting my mornings with a poem I haven’t read before. Reading about poets’s lives I’ve newly discovered while searching out these poems, and jotting down small glories and discoveries in […]
Read the rest of this entry »Ron Carlson: stay in the room
The most important thing a writer can do after completing a sentence is to stay in the room. The great temptation is to leave the room to accelerate the completion of the sentence or to go out to the den where the television lies like a dormant monster and rest up for a few days […]
Read the rest of this entry »Join me in Bellingham, WA at the Chanticleer Authors Conference, April 20-22
I’ll be teaching on Saturday and Sunday, April 21 & 22 at the Chanticleer Authors Conference in Bellingham, Washington as part of a stellar lineup of presenters and experts. The conference begins Friday, April 20. You can find the schedule here and details for registering here. There are a number of options for attending, including the […]
Read the rest of this entry »Take Care with Minor Characters, part 2
In fiction there’s a hierarchy when it comes to characters: the protagonist, antagonist, secondary characters, minor, walk-on, and stock characters. Let’s focus more on minor characters, shall we? Writers who neglect minor characters are neglecting an essential ingredient, like omitting garlic or oregano from pasta sauce. Minor characters, like secondary characters operate in a strictly […]
Read the rest of this entry »Language is a Freedom
For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them […]
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