Villains: Color them Dark and Dastardly, part 1
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
23•16
Look into the meanings and the history of those who’ve shared the
Your villain’s first impression on the reader is do or die.
Fiction is about the most interesting events in your protagonist’s life
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
20•16
Fiction is about the most difficult and interesting events in a protagonist’s life. Fiction is also designed to push a protagonist into new physical and emotional territory. People read fiction to escape dull meetings, mindless chitchat, and infuriating bureaucracies. Give them a story. A fictional story needs to make the reader feel more alive even it takes place down the block.
Think Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit: he was leading a fairly humdrum life when he’s whisked out to journey through the Shire. On his quest he encounters dangers and faces a dragon guarding a treasure. And he discovers the bolder, brasher parts of himself that he’s quashed. Much more interesting than napping by the fire.
Think Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. She’s working at graduating from Quantico when Jack
The Silence of the Lambs (1991) Blu-ray Screenshot
Crawford, the head of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, pulls her into a serial killer case. She’s young, untested, and in over her head. The reader worries about her youth and inexperience and the ghoulish killer’s hunger and deviousness. And then and there’s crazy, scary Hannibal Lecter and his riddles and head games.
Think Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games: she’s mostly just trying ts help her family survive in dismal District 12 when she’s yanked into a crisis of enormous importance, life-or-death stakes, and national scrutiny. She’ll make deadly enemies, find allies, and also find love under the most vicious, treacherous and inhuman conditions imaginable.
Think the Finch family in To Kill a Mockingbird: Atticus is raising his children without their mother when a kind-hearted black man is wrongly accused of raping a white woman. Life or death stakes, small town racism and ugliness revealed, his children put in real danger.
The circumstances of your story should test your protagonist’s courage, strength and wisdom. It should reveal his or her morality. It should also test his or her limits of endurance. If your story is not the most dramatic, intense, and difficult circumstances in your protagonist’s life, why then are you writing it? If your characters don’t learn something important about themselves often the story isn’t worth telling. Fiction isn’t life; it’s artifice.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart
Quick Take: Plan for Turbulence
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
20•16
Beginning fiction writers I’ll make this quick: In fiction characters do not get along most of the time. Tension comes from fractious relationships, power struggles, disagreements, love or hate or longing that cannot be expressed. Plan your stories for turbulence, not sweetness. Fiction is a world of unease. I told you I’d be quick.
Advice from the brilliant Margaret Atwood
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
16•16
When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a 
story at all, but only a confusion, dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood.It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you’re telling it, to yourself or to someone else. ~ Margaret Atwood
And her 10 Rules for Writing:
- Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
- If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
- Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
- If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.
- Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
- Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
- You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
- You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
- Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
- Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualization of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart
Write first drafts on paper…
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
11•16
“Write first drafts on paper. This cancels self-criticism immediately; unless you have truly ugly, banged-up handwriting, everything you write will be visually and stylistically unified by ink. Better still, in an age of Internet-rehab apps like Freedom and SelfControl, nothing approaches the uncluttered nondigital quiet of a page. Take confidence in the fact that much of our canon was composed on paper. But mostly, when you achieve a flow, you’re much less likely to break it on the page than on a screen—you’ll be less tempted to double backwards into revision, checking e-mail, opening a tab. I found this to be true when I wrote the first complete draft of my second novel, The Association of Small Bombs. For years I’d been struggling to make progress, only to lapse back into revision. The minute I committed to paper, the story ribboned forward, inventing itself. I had never felt anything like it.”
—Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs (Viking, 2016)
Quick take: Skip the “took a”
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
10•16
Like many editors I’ve collected my own gaggle of words and phrases that I find annoying. I can become curmudgeonly if I spot certain words in a manuscript, especially when they’re abused and appear over and over. Now, I realize that taste and preference are highly subjective and chances are I might stand alone on this peeve, but writers you do not need to append “took a” and “take a” to verbs. As in:
Took a step
Took a bite/drink/sip/gulp/swallow
Took a breath
Took a swipe
People and characters can simply step, drink,sip, gulp, swallow, and breathe.
And by the way “took a deep breath” is probably the most abused cliche in writerdom.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart and write in the active voice.
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
04•16
“As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker’s feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream.”
~ Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
Join us in Portland on February 20
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
03•16
For
Write, Rewrite, Repeat
It’s a one-day conference jammed, and I mean jammed, with insights, tactics and genius ideas you can you use to catapult your writing career into a higher gear and greater visibility.
Keynote speaker is Fonda Lee. Martial artist, inventive author, whip-smart and savvy marketer. She’ll be talking about The Strategic Author. I can’t wait to hear what she has to say.
All the details are here. And it’s only $99
What a bargain. Seriously.
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
02•16
And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can’t really share the enormity of our lives. ~Diane Ackerman
