Carry a writer’s notebook. Always. A writer’s notebook trains you to be a relentless observer. Using the notebook forces you to capture the endless ideas, phrases and stories that pop into our heads but are lost unless we jot them down immediately. So many of our ideas are lost unless we note them as soon as they occur.  So pause and record those sudden insights and flashes.

Then look around; pay attention to weather, recording the first breath of spring or the muffled magic of a snowfall.  Write about people, a co-worker who drives you crazy, your high school sweet heart, your in-laws and childhood bullies. Write about your memories, beliefs, and questions, but remember this is not a diary. It’s a canvass, a safe, deep place to throw words together with Jackson Pollack abandon.

Practice characters sketches, scenes, outlines and poems. Write about grief, loss, jealousy and other strong emotions. Write about bugs, trees, gardens, vistas, creatures, and flowers. Collect scents that you can later infuse into a story.  Write about how you imagine life in the West of 1800s or England in the Middle Ages. Write about places, worlds far from your own, populated by cowboys, sheiks, philanthropists, gypsies, Arctic explorers, royalty, conquerors, and orphans. Jot your observations of people you spot at the county fair, supermarket, or shopping mall. Write about the weather, the lighting at dusk, the night sky awash in silver light, a dinner party that lingered on with laughter and secrets and warmth. Write a scene or a description of an old couple holding hands. Write a conversation, a letter, a diary entry told in a character’s voice. Never go into the world alone; arm yourself as a writer.

“Today you will say things you can predict and other things you could never imagine this minute. Don’t reject them, let them come through when they’re ready, don’t think you can plan it all out. This day will never, no matter how long you live, happen again. It is exquisitely singular. It will never again be exactly repeated.”
~ Naomi Shihab Nye

I wrote a book that was published in 2008 by Writer’s Digest Books called Bullies, Bastards & Bitches, How to Write the Bad Guys in Fiction. In it I’m urging writers to take risks when they write characters; to know their character’s moral stance; and to consider who is the best woman or man for the job in your stories.  I talked about the growing popularity of anti-heroes in fiction and discussed the difference between anti-heroes and heroes.

A quick tip:

Both heroes and anti-heroes come into the story with some kind of wound, some troubling or difficult circumstances in their past. These always result in an emotional need that must be fulfilled. Without these wounds, emotional needs, troubles, they cannot fulfill their role and arc. 

What do your dreams say? Jessica P. Morrell

            My dreams are cinematic, meaningful and sometimes frightening. Celebrities pop in (I recently was heading out for a date with a young JFK in a convertible) and my dead family members appear. My dream life is entertaining, deepening, and provides many lessons.

I woke this morning from a long and vivid dream session. Last night before I fell asleep I was thinking about the upcoming workshops I’m going to teach in the next months. One is called Brave on the Page. So the dream was an answer to my thoughts and plans. In it I was teaching in a high school. We weren’t situated in an ordinary classroom—in fact the space was crowded and another class was only a few feet away. So I was always improvising and physical. Walking around the room, standing next to students, bringing them into the center of things.

The first thing I asked them to do was write down their immediate writing goals. When that task was over I asked them to write down their lifetime writing goals—as in to be a novelist, to become a journalist. There was a lot of complaining, a lot  of confusion as if I was asking too much of them. Then, before they left the classroom for the day, I asked them to stand up before the room and claim what behaviors they were going to change immediately or what they were going to do differently to make room for writing. Students were starting to freak. They wanted an everyday English class where they could pump out essays on Ben Franklin or economic injustice. I wanted to shake their souls.

Three girls scuttled out of the room together claiming they were going to the rest room. About four more people bailed. I held my ground and made the students declare how they were going to get the writing done. It was like wrestling it out of them. They were unhappy, felt pressed, protested.

 Gradually the class thinned, but the declarations came…..the three girls who had bailed out slunk back into the room, but I told them they couldn’t re-enroll in the class—it was only for the true hearted. Outrage followed with threats made. I said, “Go ahead. Tell the administration. You cannot come back into my class.” They left to complain to the principal and I shouted that I’d work on getting them suspended. We got through the class and one by one they left declaring intentions.

 The next day we met again in the odd, cramped space and nerves were high. The assignment of the day was to explain why they need to write. More grumbling and fear. Again, I walked around the room, cajoling, encouraging. Many of the kids were stumped. I asked the students if any of them studied martial arts. Hands were raised. I asked them to stand and demonstrate a martial arts pose where they’re strong, defensive and unassailable.  I got into a pose too. We were all crouched a bit, our thighs at a slight angle. I say, “The point isn’t to stand straight, the point is to stand strong.” I demonstrate, my thighs strong as a tree in the forest. “This is where we write from. Feel your legs. Feel your strength.”

They’ were sneaking worried glances  by now and were  having problems. My teaching methods were baffling them, scaring them. I stood in the middle of the room and start telling my story. I say, “I’m from a big family—I have five brothers and sisters. We lived in a small town and when I was young, my parents didn’t have enough money. We never ate between meals because there wasn’t a lot of food. My mother was always stretching a pound of hamburger or a ham bone.

Her favorite person in the world besides my dad was her father. Sometimes he’d drive over in the middle of the day to visit her and in those moments with her dad in the room she was alight and heard.

One  morning when I was six, almost seven, I woke up and huddled near the stove,  and learned that my grandfather had died suddenly. He was 53. I remember the day as grey, grey pressing in the windows, and as if a light had gone out.  Mostly I remember the sharp and the acute grief  around me that I couldn’t quite grasp. My grandmother in her bedroom weeping for hours.Hushed meals in my grandmother’s usually boisterous kitchen.

His funeral happened a few days later in our beautiful Lutheran church. It’s a place with huge, glorious, stained-glass windows so the light inside is always jewel-like. I sat in the second or third row with my brother and my mother and her sisters were seated in the pew ahead of us.

 My mother had six sisters. She’d had a brother who died when he was three, Paul, named for his father. That child’s death seemed to still hang over the family, though it had happened more than twenty years earlier. It was the sixties and my aunts, all young women, wore there hair off their necks. What I remember is the casket near the lovely altar, the sunlight through the stained glass, and the sight of my aunts’ tender necks bent over weeping. I remember their limp, white handkerchiefs, but mostly the ache and vulnerability of those necks, shaking with tears. I have never since seen such keening.”

 Now I’ve thought and written about this image before. The students were all watching me, silenced, and by now I was weeping too, hard, from a place of deep, old pain. And I said, “I write because of this long-ago grief has always lived inside of me and because I’d give anything to have one more day with any of my grandparents, and because sorrow is part of all of us. It teaches us most. I write because I know what it’s like to be vulnerable. Now why do you write?”

 There was a stunned silence in the room and I swiped at my tears, struggling to control my choked voice. An older, suburban-type woman got up and headed for the door. She was carrying a portable sewing machine and walked outside where her husband was waiting for her in a black, oversized SUV. I asked, “Why are you leaving?” She said, “I never realized writing could be this hard.”

 The rest of my students wrote about why they write and left the classroom one by one, crossing the road in front of the school, into a world where the trees were a spring green. I was wrung out by emotion, realizing how much my grandfather’s death affected me and I never quite knew it. Realizing how vulnerable I’ve always felt to loss and how writing sorts through the gnawing grief, the pains of being human.  

I know and you know that our writing rarely needs adverbs, especially those that end in ly. Instead of walk slowly, plod. Instead of walk quickly, stride.

Disgust is a whole ‘nother matter. If you write she looked away in disgust. Or “Stop that!” she said disgustedly, the reader isn’t going to get a sense of disgust.  It’s the old problem of telling. Disgust and disgustedly just don’t have the power to reveal that emotion.

Disgust is a universal emotion so readers can relate to it. It can be revealed in body language as when a character recoils or steps back, turns his head away; facial expressions;  in dialogue (Ew! You’ve got to be freaking kidding me); or small, harsh interjections (Ugh. Ack. Phew. Ick.)

Emotions are dynamic, not static in fiction so don’t describe them.

…First of all, everybody has a memory when you were eleven years old and you were walking down a particular street on a certain day, and the trees—there was a certain wind blowing through the trees and the way that the sound of your feet made on the stones as you came up the drive and the way the light hit a particular house. Everyone has memories they carry with them for no particular reason and these things live within you—you had some moment of pure experience that revealed to you what it meant to be alive, what it means to be alive, what the stakes are, the wind on a given day, how important it is, or what you can do with your life. That’s the writer’s job…to  present that experience to an audience who then experience their own inner vitality, their own center, their own questions about their own life  and their moral life…and there’s a connection made. That’s what keeps you writing, that’s what keeps you wanting to write that next song, because you can do that, and because if I do it for you, I do it for me.”