Start with the Tangible
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Sep•
16•15
I was corresponding with a client a few days ago about his opening paragraph. In it there was a sentence bloated with abstract terms that just sort of hunkered or sprawled flattened on the page. Instead of abstractions, here’s a foundation from where you can begin most writing: with the artifacts of everyday life. You see, if the reader can somehow enter the world you’re describing in the same way he lives in the real world, then he will become seduced, immersed in the ideas, emotions, and truths you’re revealing.
Thus fiction and nonfiction writing starts with the tangible because it is immersive, the writer breathing life into the story. The real world is made up of things we’re always noticing—Cumulus clouds, paperback books and armchairs, an old person’s tottering gait, marching bands, Sharpie pens, red boots, a worn purple sofa, a belching city bus, the metal-colored winter sky. Details pull in readers, create a sense of place, reveal people, action and tension, making experiences and thoughts poignant, sensory, and alive. Include the tangible to anchor your words, to give a reader a place to visit, invite him or her into the story world.
When I emailed the writer I told him this: Imagine the opening as if your readers are walking into your story world like they’re first arriving at a new destination far from home. Before they reach the hotel, they need directions to find it, need a key to their room, then they can settle in and unpack their suitcases. If the world is thinly-drawn or doesn’t have a threat or conflict to pull in the reader, those suitcases never get unpacked. And fiction set back in time or far from our current reality such as the future on another planet, require even more tangible details.
As an example: Here are the opening paragraphs to Alice Hoffman’s historical novel The Dovekeepers. Notice how it whisks back to another time and place:
We had been wandering for so long I forgot what it was like to live within walls or sleep through the night. In that time I lost all I might have possessed if Jerusalem had not fallen: a husband, a family, a future of my own. My girlhood disappeared in the desert. The person I’d once been vanished as I wrapped myself in white when the dust rose into clouds. We were nomads, leaving behind beds and belongings, rugs and brass pots. Now our house was the house of the desert, black at night, brutally white at noon.
They say the truest beauty is in the harshest land and that God can be found there by those with open eyes. But my eyes were closed against the shifting winds that can blind a person in an instant. Breathing itself was a miracle when the storms came whirling across the earth. The voice that arises out of the silence is something no one can imagine until it is heard. It roars when it speaks, it lies to you and convinces you, it steals from you and leaves you without a single word of comfort. Comfort cannot exist in such a place. What is brutal survive What is cunning lives until morning.
My skin was sunburned, my hands raw. I gave in to the desert, bowing to its mighty voice. Everywhere I walked my fate walked with me, sewn to my feet with red thread. All that will ever be has already been written long before it happens. There is nothing we can do to stop it. I couldn’t run in the other direction. The roads from Jerusalem led to only three places: to Rome, or to the sea, or to the desert. My people had become wanderers, as they had been at the beginning of time, cast out yet again.
I followed my father out of the city because I had no choice.
None of us did, if the truth be told.
See more here.
Act one: Disturb the equilibrium
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Sep•
14•15
If you don’t understand the underpinnings of fiction, you’ll likely suffer and bumble when you try to create it. Without some knowledge of the why, when and how things work, your story has little chance of success. Writing something as complicated as a novel without a plan is like building a house without an architectural diagram. This might have worked in the old days of one-room log cabins, but these days with wiring, plumbing, central heat and other necessities, a plan is a must.
Act 1 is essentially the set up of your novel, novella, or screenplay. It establishes the story world, the tone, introduces the main characters, and starts off the central conflict. But more importantly, it features an event that kicks off the story called the inciting incident. Stories start with trouble so begin your tale by disturbing the equilibrium in your story world. This event should be a threat. Openings always feature the ordinary world being disrupted and someone (not necessarily your protagonist) being thrown off balance by this action. So forget ‘once upon a time.’ This inciting incident is a catalyst or springboard that starts the story moving along because the ordinary world has been disturbed. It’s the sparks the action and sets the trajectory for the story. Once things are catapulted off balance, this state of imbalance will continue until the climax when it is somehow restored, however shaky and strange.
Also, and this is important, someone must be under stress or thrown off balance. No 
stress, no tension, no reader sympathy. In The Hunger Games, Prim, a naive and sweet 12-year-old, is chosen to represent District 12 in the annual deadly games. In a few deft lines the reader has learned that Prim is hardly up to the gruesome battle to the death since she still climbs into bed with her mother on nights she’s frightened.
In John Green’s The Fault in our Stars we learn that 16-year-old Hazel Grace Lancaster is depressed and has terminal cancer. At her mother’s urging she attends a support group for kids with cancer. And she doesn’t want to go. In the opening scenes of Shrek we see the ogre as an uncouth slob living peacefully in his beloved swamp….but then….Lord Farquaad settles fairy tale creatures there disrupting paradise, stressing him out, and destroying his ogre version happiness. Lord Farquaad promises to remove the fairy tale creatures after Shrek rescues Princess Fiona from a dragon-guarded castle. Notice how the stress comes from outside the protagonist.
Start with a threat–even your character meeting her true love should represent a threat. Or to quote an old bit of wisdom, ‘shoot the sheriff on the first page.’
Quick Take for writers: Remember your Scars
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Sep•
09•15
Stephen King once said, “A little talent is a good thing to have if you
want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is to remember every scar.”
Fiction is based on a dramatic situation where interesting people experience interesting problems that seem unsolvable. As the story progresses important events will unfold until the problem is resolved. Pretty simple, right?
But what of you is in the story? Each of us mines from within. Do you have a story that has nestled within you for years? We all have our own truths, passions, ghosts, and worries. Most of us have had our heart torn open, have felt grievous loss and unfairness. Many of us hold secrets we dare not share.
If you’re a writer, start from self knowledge. What scares you? What makes you angry? What keeps you awake in the lonely hours before dawn? What are the themes in your life? Why did you start writing in the first place? What passion called you to storytelling? Our most potent writing comes from our deepest fears and darkest secrets.
If you want to create a novel you won’t abandon mid-story, write toward your fears. Crawl into the shadows and uncover ghosts. Ruminate about your grudges, pet peeves, hungers, enemies. What has shamed you? Make sure the feelings you bring to your writing desk are deep and real and powerful.
Writing is how we come to understand things. If you can’t remember your scars it will be difficult to imbue your characters with deep emotions. We all use these parts of life in our writing. Trying to forget the blistering parts of your past—trying to repress or deny reality—will weaken your creative vitality. And it takes sooo much energy to hide your pain and scars. Better to write it out, to unearth the restless dead. Better to endow your scars onto a character than to keep picking at them.
Lia Purpura on teaching writers:
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Aug•
27•15
Here, I walk into class thinking, Really I have nothing to say to these people, the proper study of writing is reading, is well-managed awe, desire to make a thing, stamina for finishing, adoration of language, and so on about reverie, solitude, etc. Here, sitting down, I’m going over my secret: I don’t want to be inspiring, I just want to write and they, too, should want that – let’s all agree to go home and work hard.”
– Lia Purpura
Quick take: Use Weather Verbs
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Aug•
20•15
We’ve been suffering through a series of punishing heatwaves 
here in the Pacific Northwest and I’ve been longing for a rollicking thunderstorm to sweep through, spit out icy rain, drench the place and cool the air. Oh, to be able to change the weather.
Which brings us to verbs, because they add oomph to your sentences. Use verbs that typically describe severe weather, including clouds, storm fronts, waves, and natural disasters. TIP: Search out nouns that can be used as verbs.
Thunder, storm,scorch, blaze, scorch, freeze, boil, cloud, bloom, flood, heat, glare (as in sun), shower, rumble, slash, burn, billow, surge, morph, drip, roil,loom, sting, flash, unleash, splinter, thresh, splinter, echo, singe, sting, crash, pour, tumble, churn, flood, chill, creep, crash, drench, flare, numb, storm, bluster, blind, soak. Vivid verbs have muscle.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Aug•
07•15
It’s like my whole world is coming undone, but when I write, my pencil is a needle and thread, and I’m stitching the scraps back together.
Julia Alvarez
Quoting Margaret Atwood
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Aug•
03•15
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
Margaret Atwood’s 10 Rules of 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. (from Brain Pickings) And more on Margaret Atwood here.
Quoting Saul Bellow
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Jul•
22•15
DCF 1.0
“There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for.”
“Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, in the eye of the storm… Art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.” ~ Saul Bellow
“Art and literature — what of them? … We are still able to think, to discriminate, and to feel. The purer, subtler, higher activities have not succumbed to fury or to nonsense. Not yet. Books continue to be written and read. It may be more difficult to reach the whirling mind of a modern reader but it is possible to cut through the noise and reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone we may find that he is devoutly waiting for us. When complications increase, the desire for essentials increases too. The unending cycle of crises that began with the First World War has formed a kind of person, one who has livd through terrible, strange things, and in whom there is an observable shrinkage of prejudices, a casting off of disappointing ideologies, an ability to live with many kinds of madness, an immense desire for certain durable human goods — truth, for instance, or freedom, or wisdom.” From his Nobel acceptance speech
Quick take: Aim for Messy Emotions
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Jul•
09•15
Storytelling must give readers an 
emotional experience. To bring about emotions in your readers stir in thorny situations that bring up messy emotions. By messy I mean the ones your characters have difficulty managing, perhaps would prefer not to feel or even acknowledge. Messy can also means complex–the character is feeling a troublesome brew of emotions, possibly difficult to sort out.
This means you’ll be orchestrating scenes and scenarios that are difficult for your characters to survive on some level. Not every scene needs to be life or death because that would create an implausible melodrama. Instead keep in mind that most scenes are based on change and humans are most off-kilter during change. Loss and leave taking are especially difficult–leaving home, leaving behind a lover or friend or homeland, saying good-by to a dying person. Sometimes messy emotions happen amid disasters or chaos. At times they’re caused by moral ambiguity. In turn these scenes bring about tension….a crucial ingredient in storytelling. Since your story must appeal to a broad range of readers, a range of emotions should be brought to life.
Everyone has a different definition of difficult emotions but this brief list will get you started: panic, fear, jealousy, anger, rage, guilt, disappointment, frustration.
Here’s the key technique to making them work in your stories: when the emotions occur in your character readers need to be able to identify the source. A wife who freaks out/overreacts when her husband lies to her is insecure because her former husband cheated on her. A child who feels bereft when left at boarding school has a cold and unfeeling parent.
The second trick to making it all work: No matter how ravaged or heartsick or worn your characters become in the course of the story, your readers still find them knowable and fascinating, and possibly want to meet them.
The third trick: Give your characters rich inner lives and strong interpersonal relationships, whether romantic, family relationships or friendships, or work partnerships. This means loyalty will be in the mix and loyalty can often become complicated.
The Homesman was adapted from Glendon Swarthout’s novel, 
and stars Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank joined in a remarkable undertaking. I’m mentioning it because it explores the ravages of heartbreak and mines deep and sometimes uncomfortable and stark truths about women’s lives. It’s a dark and darkly funny revisionist Western about a claim jumper (Jones) helping (out of desperation) a determined woman (Swank) transport three utterly broken women back East. The women have descended into psychosis after facing unbearable losses and will leave behind the barren prairie, bleak sod houses, and their mystified and frustrated husbands. It contains remarkable acting and a series of strange twists, and most of all, messy emotions. I recommend the novel also.
keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart
