Live outside your own head
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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May•
31•16
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 an impressive page count might also equal an impressive story. Alas, this is rarely true. And it’s so disheartening when a rambling tome is thin and undistinguished.I’m not just talking about a sputtering storyline. Writers need a bigger life so their readers can enter a specific, enticing and sensory world. When a world isn’t fully rendered readers never feel the characters’ emotions. Never smell the air or feel the pebbly ground under the character’s feet.
This lack of sensory participation happens because the writer spends most of his or her time looking inward, when a trip to Scotland or just some fresh air, is needed.
It’s difficult to write about castles if you’ve never visited one. Touching the centuries-old stone walls is so inspiring, especially if you’re in a tower room gazing down at a river where humans have traded and paddled past since the Vikings arrived.
Now, lots of writers write strictly from their imaginations and never leave home. It can be done. But if you can manage travel, do so.
I interviewed Diana Gabaldon a few years back. She’s the author 
of the mega-selling Outlander series set in the 1700s. The series is a meticulously researched and racy portrait of life in the 1700s and seems to have it all: a great love, epic battles, political intrigue, smugglers, time travel, pirates, and men in kilts. She’d just returned from a trip and had “ spent a delirious afternoon wallowing in battlefields.”
JM: Do you walk around? Take photos? Buy postcards?
DG: I almost never take photographs of any place because I find that stops me from actually seeing what I’m looking at. I just look and develop a strong sensory portrait, not only of what I’m seeing but how the air feels. Am I hearing trees in the wind? I have a very vivid memory of being on the Yorktown battlefield late in the evening. The light was failing and the trees were just beginning to move overhead as the sun set and this deer came out of the field on the far side and stood there looking at me for awhile. That deer will turn up in the next book, but probably not in Yorktown.
You develop all these things that stay with you if you’re paying attention in a more concrete way than just looking at a photograph. Now sometimes I’ll buy postcards because they’re often historical paintings of people who were present at this or that battle. Because I find it very helpful to look at the actual faces or at least a simulacrum of the actual faces of the people who were there. I go to museums whenever I can. Artifacts are extremely moving, especially seeing an actual object that was handled by a person of that time.”
If you can meet new people, do so. Interact with someone besides your mother and your few mega-nerd friends. If you cannot travel far, a walk in a park or forest or visiting a waterfall will bring your senses to life.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart
Writing requires emotional risk
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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May•
23•16
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 teacher, is handed a terminal cancer diagnosis and is desperate to provide for his family. His solution: to brew potent meth amphetamines and become a drug lord. And to enlist one of his druggie former students to help. Of course this took many steps, but the transformation from the guy next door to a murderous thug was convincing. Or as the show’s creator Vince Gilligan said, “Mr. Chips to Scarface.” And the show lasted for six seasons as the body count grew.
When the series ended Cranston needed distance from his meth-brewing character and he needed to wipe eradicate Walter White from his persona. LBJ was a perfect foil, brilliant, devious, but concerned about the good of the country. The play’s run was successful, Cranston’s portrayal uncanny and HBO adapted it into a film.
In an interview Cranston revealed that he used his father who abandoned him in childhood as inspiration for White’s character. He turned his pain into someone devious and pathetic and desperate. He even adapted how his father carried his body, rounded his shoulders.
Just as in acting, our best writing will require revealing something about ourselves that might be stored in a rarely-opened closet. Because the best writing reveals an emotional truth only the writer knows. Perhaps it’s that aching loneliness that has never dissipated since your divorce or your mother’s death. Perhaps it’s rage at a childhood scarred with abuse. Or desires that never came true.
Trust in the honesty of your body. Feel yourself deeply, down to your core when you write. Go where the pain is. Your words that are most alive, most vivid will emerge. And you’ve earned that dark forest of memories.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart
worthy
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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May•
14•16
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 must bring it.
His/her capacity for solving the story problem will come from his/her primary personality traits. Master detective Sherlock Holmes is observant, smart, analytical, and fearless. He’s the perfect man for the job. To defeat Moriarty, to venture into the moors to uncover the truth of mysterious happenings, to help the King of Bohemia recover incriminating photographs.
Your protagonist’s main personality traits are always showcased when he or she is at work on the story problem. This is a really simple method for creating and thinking about your main character.
What poetry reveals….
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Apr•
28•16
“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 we begin, where we end and the world begins.”
– Mark Strand
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Apr•
22•16
“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. More saturation and permeability in knowing our own existence as also the existence of others. More capacity to be astonished. Art adds to the sum of the lives we would have, were it possible to live without it. And by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share.”
– Jane Hirshfield Ten Windows
Bitter Truth: Writing cannot save you from yourself.
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Apr•
21•16
Sure it can heal some old wounds and that vast emptiness inside you that was once your marriage or your best friend who dumped you for no good reason. It can make you proud and even make your never-lavish-with-praise mother proud. It can fill you with joy and feel like the best kind of fever and the sweetest dream within dreams.
But if you’re a depressed recluse who cannot bear to throw out Pepsi bottles or newspapers, if you’re failing all your freshman year classes, or you’re so obsessed with our vapid pop culture or you’re hooked on computer games so that you scarcely have time to make a living, or you need to lose 200 pounds, well, writing cannot help all that. If you’re depressed you need help. Right now. If you’re failing you need to go to class and hand in your assignments. And consider more sleep and caffeine and less pot and beer. If you’re obsessed with all the versions of Desperate Housewives, with online gossip sites, and the Kardashians you probably don’t have much to say. You’re probably mostly paying attention to other lives, not your own. Not to mention this glorious and ailing planet. Computer games should be a hobby, not a way of life unless you’re a game designer, and then storytelling is a great asset. If you’re obese you need help because life is better when you’re healthy and not addicted to some form of soothing. Besides, obesity is a slide toward early death. I’ve known too many people who died before they wanted to and strongly suggest you take care of yourself more.
Writing is balm, writing is joy, and writing is almost holy on a good day. But on those bad days when you feel washed up or pissed off or just disenchanted it helps to not depend on writing to make it all better. You need to make it better.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart
Reality Check
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Apr•
10•16
