I’ve coordinated a number of writing conferences and hosted best-selling and about-to-breakout authors as my keynote speakers. A few years back, above the sparkling Pacific the prolific and talented Chelsea Cain talked to writers about what she’d learned from writing bestsellers. One piece of her advice always stuck with me: Write the bare bones version of […]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'Jessica Page Morrell' Category
that ethereal moment…
Writers and artists know that ethereal moment, when just one fleeting something–a chill, an echo, the click of a lamp, a question–ignites the flame of an entire work that blazes suddenly into consciousness. ~ Nadine C. Keels
Read the rest of this entry »Writing consoles
Rhythm, repetition, making patterns–these are not only important devices for shaping the strange and abstract instrument/object we call a poem or story, but they are craved as well because of our primordial need for reassurance, the sense of security we get from moving over the known. A mystery doesn’t lose power in revisiting. Writing is […]
Read the rest of this entry »Writing a Potent Action Scene
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 »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 […]
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