Word by Word

Needed: Milestones that Create Change

Written By: Jessica Morrell - Apr• 22•15

As your story moves along, each milestone the protagonist encounters will test, stress, and shape him or her in a new way. It will force a reconsideration or recalibration of who he is. A milestone can be an emotionally-charged event or life passage such as a wedding, funeral, a harrowing childbirth, or death bed scene. A milestone can involve a decision or moral dilemma. A series of milestones are the basis for the story’s structure. Milestones are a way to measure the protagonist’s progress toward his or her goal and highlight key events.

They can also be set pieces such as a battle or fight or chase. Set pieces require a buildup, provide a lot of drama, emotional intensity, and change the direction of the story. Think the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind.

Often the set piece scene will show the character’s new realization as the scene progresses.

Milestones, no matter their size or scope should force change and growth in the main character.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, a coming-of-age story, the trial of Tom Robinson is the milestone and set piece the whole story evolves around. Once Atticus Finch decides to defend Robinson and the trial unfolds, nothing will ever be the same in Maycomb and the Finch family will be forever tied to and changed by the events.

Tom Robinsin, a black man is wrongly accused of raping a white woman. The case is based on the false testimony of Mayella and Bob Ewell. Robinson seals his own doom by telling the court that he felt sorry for Mayella—something unheard of from a black man. The arrest and trial reveals all the simmering racism, hatred, and injustice in a small Southern town. A game changer. After a milestone no one is left unscathed.

What are the milestones in your story?

keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

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Resource for writers: Winningwriters.com

Written By: Jessica Morrell - Apr• 21•15

In case you’re not familiar with winningwriters.com it’s a boon to writers trying to break in or break out. You’ll find all the latest contests, deadlines, and literary journalists to submit to along with tips and bits and pieces about the writing life. Some of the contests offer real money, it’s just plain inspirational, and was again voted as one of Best 101 Sites for Writers by Writers Digest. You can sign up for their newsletter here.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

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Jeanette Winterson: Language is freedom

Written By: Jessica Morrell - Apr• 17•15

“For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience, and it worries me that more and more people are learning not to use language; they’re giving in to the banalities of the television media and shrinking their vocabulary, shrinking their own way of using this fabulous tool that human beings have refined over so many centuries into this extremely sensitive instrument. I don’t want to make it crude, I don’t want to make it into shopping-list language, I don’t want to make it into simply an exchange of information: I want to make it into the subtle, emotional, intellectual, freeing thing that it is and that it can be.” – Jeanette Winterson

Keep writing, keep dreaming, keep reading poetry

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Ray Bradbury: Living is the center of your life

Written By: Jessica Morrell - Apr• 16•15

“The intellect is a great danger to creativity because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things instead of staying with your own basic truth – who you are, what you are, what you wanna be.

The worst thing you do when you think is lie – you can make up reasons that are not true for the things that you did, and what you’re trying to do as a creative person is surprise yourself – find out who you really are, and try not to lie, try to tell the truth all the time. And the only way to do this is by being very active and very emotional, and get it out of yourself – making things that you hate and things that you love, you write about these then, intensely. When it’s over, then you can think about it; then you can look, it works or it doesn’t work, something is missing here. And, if something is missing, then you go back and reemotionalize that part, so it’s all of a piece.

But thinking is to be a corrective in our life. It’s not supposed to be a center of our life. Living is supposed to be the center of our life, being is supposed to be the center, with correctives around, which hold us like the skin holds our blood and our flesh in. But our skin is not a way of life. The way of living is the blood pumping through our veins, the ability to sense and to feel and to know, and the intellect doesn’t help you very much there.

You should get on with the business of living.”
– Ray Bradbury

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Written By: Jessica Morrell - Apr• 15•15

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Really quick tip: Bring on the clowns

Written By: Jessica Morrell - Apr• 12•15

I’ve mentioned this before: a portion of your story’s scenes need to rise, to explode, to provide surprises the reader never saw coming. In these pull-out-the-stops scenes your characters can fumble, make mistakes, stage confrontations, discover dead bodies or that their beloved is sleeping around. Feature them stooping to new lows or achieving new highs.

Give your characters actions to regrets and why-did-I-open-my-big-mouth remorse.Give them triumphs, but make sure they’re hard earned. Emphasis on the degree of difficulty. That’s what causes sympathy and empathy, not playing by the rules. Not keeping quiet.

If you’re not willing to maim and cripple your characters, you’re not ready to write fiction.

keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

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Ted Hughes on investing heart

Written By: Jessica Morrell - Apr• 09•15

“That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armor, and the naked child is flung out into the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells – he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realize you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self – struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence – you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenges, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”
– Ted Hughes

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

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Ray Bradbury on feeding the muse

Written By: Jessica Morrell - Apr• 09•15

“It isn’t easy. Nobody has ever done it consistently. Those who try hardest, scare it off into the woods. Those who turn their backs and saunter along, whistling softly between their teeth, hear it treading quietly behind them, lured by a carefully acquired disdain.

We are of course speaking of The Muse.

The Feeding of the Muse seems to me to be the continual running after loves, the checking of these loves against one’s present and future needs, the moving on from simple textures to more complex ones, from naive ones to more informed ones, from nonintellectual to intellectual ones. Nothing is ever lost. If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theatre, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compound to Kafka’s Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day. To be a child of one’s time is to do all these things.”
– Ray Bradbury

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April is National Poetry Month

Written By: Jessica Morrell - Apr• 02•15

“…When people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers — a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.” ~ Jeanette Winterson

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