If you want to immediately improve…
Written By: Jessica Morrell
-
Sep•
05•23
If you want to immediately improve your fiction writing, inhabit your viewpoint character, breath by breath, bone by bone. The more dangerous, momentous, and dramatic the scene, the more readers need to see, hear, and feel what your character feels. Their thoughts should land directly with no filters like ‘she thought’ or ‘she wondered’ or ‘she searched her mind.’ Internal dialogue needs to feel internal.
Act the part.
If you don’t know how your character would react amid danger or a painful recognition, then make certain you know his or her backstory. It should provide the emotional wounds that need healing, the regrets that need addressing, along with motivations, goals, and problem solving.
Backstory includes personality and ways of standing, walking, and hiding emotions and reactions.
Backstory will reveal the triggers that might set them off. The secrets they must keep.
Backstory + key personality traits are your basis for living within the characters you write. Come to know them intimately. Stalk them, sleep with them, dance with them, wipe away their tears.
And keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart
July, and…
Written By: Jessica Morrell
-
Jul•
04•23
The year is half over.
People are shooting off fireworks on this Fourth eve. Such resonant booms on a full moon night. And quicker, higher explosions some distance away. More gunshotty types closer. It’s the Buck Moon, and it’s still not risen above the firs. It’s also a super moon because of its proximity to earth.
Fireworks, even when they wake us {make that me} at 1 a.m., are so miraculous, arent they? Sometimes I try to squint to the long past at the those first Chineses inventors, the early fireworks manufacturers. Well, actually according to this great Smithsonian article on the history of fireworks, they came about accidently with overheated bamboo sticks in a fire. Thus an explosion. And who knew that Henry VII had them at his wedding in 1486?
But back to July fourth. Such brilliance was afoot back then in the Colonies, wasn’t there? And a brilliant madness. Lots of sacrifice, but oh, the optimism. Oh, the beautiful, truly historic dream.
My fellow writers and world citizens out there; it’s been a tumultious few years we’ve just wobbled or limped through. Some of us still don’t feel as balanced as we did five or ten years ago. But alot of us are finding our footing, looking ahead, digging in.
The way I see it, no matter where you live, the planet and future generations need us.
Which brings us back to writing. Because doesn’t digging in mean writing? Writer friends, how does the writing go?
Because if ever there was a time for telling stories, it is NOW.
And let’s all gaze up at the sky and search for the miraculous, shall we?
Are your fiction characters frustrated?
Written By: Jessica Morrell
-
Jun•
24•23
FRUSTRATION CREATES STORY
If you want to watch a film {make that rom-com} where frustration is woven into the storyline again and again, you can’t go wrong with When Harry Met Sally.
The child raised on folklore…
Written By: Jessica Morrell
-
May•
08•23
Fairytales are more than moral lessons and time capsules for cultural commentary, they are natural law. The child raised on folklore will quickly learn the rules of crossroads and lakes, mirrors and mushroom rings. They’ll never eat or drink of a strange harvest or insult an old woman or fritter away their name as if there was no power in it. They’ll never underestimate the youngest son or touch anyone’s hairbrush or rosebush or bed without asking, and their steps through the woods will be light and unpresumptious. Little ones who seek out fairytales are taught to be shrewd and courteous citizens of the seen world, just in case the unseen world bleeds over. ST Gibson
