Want a shorthand formula for a successful story? Start with a heroic protagonist who is sane and moral, but, of course, flawed. Then create the world he or she operates in as crazy, chaotic, askew. Stir in antagonists who are immoral. Create conflict that’s essentially a test. Mix in at least a few sympathetic supporting […]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'Jessica Page Morrell' Category
Abandon Ship! Or why your readers might bail on you.
To name names or not to name names, that is the question? What the heck, the book is called Eeny Meeny by M.J. Aldridge. So far so clever, right? I recently abandoned this thriller about two-thirds of the way through. I know. It’s a weird place to stop reading. It felt spiteful, but was borne […]
Read the rest of this entry »Advice to Writers: Quit Whining
There’s a lot of whining among writers. I’ve never quite seen the like among other groups; say among plumbers or glass blowers or dentists. We seem to believe that kvetching is part of the writing lifestyle. We think wrong. And heaven knows there’s a lot of procrastinating and wasting time. Not to mention all the […]
Read the rest of this entry »Gather your support team
Writing, as we all know, is a sometimes glorious, but often lonely occupation. As if isolated on the raft of creativity amid a turbulent ocean, we struggle with words and ideas, plots and themes. Alone. At times this isolation makes us feel apart from the world, even abandoned. Sometimes our fight to bring a scene […]
Read the rest of this entry »Live outside your own head
I’ve met way too many reclusive writers, especially science fiction and fantasy writers, who spend all their time obsessively plugging away at a 200,000-word manuscript and reading only stories in the genres they’re writing. Or their idea of a night out is hanging out in a coffee shop with their laptop. It would seem that […]
Read the rest of this entry »Writing requires emotional risk
Bitter truth: Writing requires emotional risk. After the brilliant actor Bryan Cranston played the dark, devious and sometimes evil Walter White in the Breaking Bad series, he played Lyndon Johnson on Broadway in All the Way. His Walter White character arc was one of the most remarkable in our times. White, a high school chemistry […]
Read the rest of this entry »worthy
Your protagonist must be worthy of the challenges in the story. Because when things go wrong— which is what fiction is all about– the protagonist will somehow set them right. He or she acts and reacts, solves problems to bring balance back to the world that became unbalanced in the first story events. Your protagonist […]
Read the rest of this entry »What poetry reveals….
“It’s not that poetry reveals more about the world, it doesn’t, but it reveals more about our interactions with the world than our other modes of expression. And it doesn’t reveal more about ourselves alone in isolation, but rather it reveals that mix of self and other, self and surrounding, where the world ends and […]
Read the rest of this entry »“Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some hunger for more is in us – more range, more depth, more feeling; more associative freedom, more beauty. More perplexity and more friction of interest. More prismatic grief and unstunted delight, more longing, more darkness. […]
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