“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”
—Enid Bagnold
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Oct•
25•13
There are still spaces available for The Anchor Scenes Workshop
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Oct•
09•13
Deep Fiction: The Anchor Scenes
October 12, 2013
9:30 – 4:30 p.m.
Tabor Space 5441 S.E. Belmont, the Library
Portland, OR
The task of a novelist or memoirist is to tell a story so riveting that it will hold a reader’s attention for hundreds of pages. This requires intimate knowledge of the characters, their inner lives, and central dilemma. It also requires an understanding of plot; the sequence of events that take readers from beginning to end.
These events won’t hang together without a compelling structure or architecture that underlies the whole—the essential scenes that every story needs to create drive, tension, conflict, climax, and resolution. These must-have scenes in your story, especially the plot points and reversals, power stories forward.
The anchor scenes we’ll cover are: Inciting Incident, First Plot Point, Mid-point Reversal, Dark night of the Soul, The Point of No Return, Climax, and Resolution. We’ll discuss how they’re linked to protagonist’s character arc, how they’re emotionally charged, and build the plot. By the end of the workshop participants will have outlined these crucial scenes and know how change is the basis for scene writing. As part of the lecture we’ll be discussing the anchor scenes in The Hunger Games and the film Witness. Comprehensive handouts will be included and space is limited.
Claim Your Story Writing Conference
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Sep•
05•13
Claim Your Story Writing Conference
Lithia Springs Resort, Ashland, Oregon
October 19, 9-5
Whether you write fiction, essays, or memoir, there is an art to stringing together words to elicit an emotional response from your readers. The first annual Claim Your Story Writers Conference, October 19th at the Lithia Springs Resort in Ashland, centers around the idea that all good writing emerges when writers possess the heart of an artist and are willing to step up and tell their tale. This one-day event provides an opportunity to focus on the craft and breathe new life and color into your writing. Our aim is that writers produce work that is more vivid, true, and powerful than they’ve been able to produce before. Workshops will be taught by talented authors who are also distinguished writing teachers: Lidia Yuknavitch, Alissa Lukara, and Jessica Morrell.
You can find the complete schedule here: http://claimyourstory.com/claim-your-story-schedule/
Saturday’s keynote speaker will be Lidia Yuknavitch author of the acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water, Dora A Headcase, and other collections and books. She will be speaking about The Worth of Risk.
The Lithia Springs Resort in Ashland is an exceptionally charming setting in a charming city. Conference attendees will be able to tour the gardens and enjoy the peaceful surroundings. Discount rates are available for conference attendees and include breakfast.
To register: Cost for the conference is $125 and includes a catered lunch and beverages. To register or for more information about the conference including the schedule, visit the conference website at http://claimyourstory.com Payments can be mailed to Jessica Morrell, P.O. Box 820141, Portland, OR 97282-1141. PayPal payments are also accepted.
Conference participants who will need hotel rooms are encouraged to reserve accommodations as soon as possible at http://www.lithiaspringsresort.com
The instructor’s websites are located at:
www.lidiayuknavitch.com
www.jessicamorrell.com
http://www.transformationalwriters.com
Jessica Morrell, the conference coordinator, is the author of six books along with the upcoming No Ordinary Days: the Seasons, Cycles, and Elements of Writing. She works as a developmental editor and is the founder of the Summer in Words Writing Conference in Cannon Beach, Oregon and Making it in Changing Times Writing Conference in Portland, Oregon.
It’s August….
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Aug•
27•13
And the year is spinning away. Days are growing shorter and the glittered-up glories of summer are fading. If summer has weakened your writing practice or made you foot draggy; if no splendid hopes keep you at your desk, take heart. Forget all those writerly maxims and get back at it. Here’s how:
- Put writing first. Nothing replaces the sanctuary of a writing practice. The solace of knitting words to a page. Writing goals will never be accomplished if you write with leftover scraps of time and energy.
- Remember that difficulty and anxiety are normal.
- Don’t wait for inspiration, or a blast of energy, or a fresh idea, write anyway. Listen to that something inside of you that longs to be named, longs to be heard.
- Don’t give in to distractions.
- Associate with serious writers who have like goals.
- Take charge of your thinking.Your head is your domain and thoughts can turn into emotions, so guard against the subversive.
- Keep going despite your moods. Write as if you write for a living, because no matter what you’re paid, you do.
- Take breaks. Writing is hell on the body. Stretch before the cramps start, the neck or back aches.
- When the going gets tough, take a vacation, not a bail out. Feel time melting in a new place; watch the night sky, tussle with kids, forget your worries.
- Figure out what you really want and start living as if you already have it.
- Experiment. When you’re stuck or procrastinating, try another medium. Haul out crayons, paints, collage materials, clay, and express your ideas. Draw a sketch of a character or thumb through decorating magazines and create a collage that represents the home and lifestyle of your wealthy, eccentric protagonist. Grab a camera and snap photos focusing your writer’s eye on the world. Go to the garden and plant flowers or bulbs or herbs. Or, slip into the kitchen and make a pot of soup or stew, bake a cake, experiment with a lasagna recipe. You might be surprised at how many ideas for your stories will begin simmering as you dabble in another medium.
- When you return to your desk, as if you’re waking from a fever dream or fresh with morning clarity, stay focused. Work on one paragraph, one scene, and one project at a time during your writing session. While outlines or elaborate plans can be immensely helpful as a map for our projects, each day as you begin your writing, focus on a single goal for that day and don’t let the whole project crowd into your head. Often the enormity or complexity of a project can be intimidating.
- Don’t scare yourself. Sure the marketplace is loud and crowded. Sure you’re a small player or burned out or too-often rejected. Sure there are days when writing feels like the corner of Bitter and Sweet. Write anyway. What else could you do that feels so right?
- Ignore trivial worries. Don’t worry about trivial concerns—such as other people stealing your ideas, how to spend your book advance, and what outfit to wear on The Today Show. Stop obsessing about copyright issues. Other writers are worry that someone will make them change their words. Some writers are nitpicky perfectionists and tinker with every comma and adjective afraid to declare ‘the end’. Write first, then edit and polish what you’ve written, then worry about getting it published.
- Conserve your writing energy. Don’t squander your creativity talking or fantasizing about your writing. Keep the details to yourself and write instead of gabbing about what you plan to write. Talking too much about you’re writing can dissipate its power. Or sometimes well-meaning friends or family will have so many suggestions that we get confused about the true direction of our work.
- Just write.
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Jul•
25•13
“Start with a blank surface. It doesn’t have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but it’s true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can’t remember.”
– Stephen King, Duma Key: A Novel
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Jul•
17•13
“There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And in whatever place by whatever name or by no name at all, all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.”
– Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
Panhandling
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Jul•
05•13
“Along with a great deal of sensitivity, you need to develop and practice the habit of noticing: a flicker of a facial muscle that suggests anger; the tone beneath words being spoken; the movement of wind in the linden trees; the bagging at the knees of a pair of pants; what your grandmother’s apron smelled like when she pulled you in for a hug; how, when you bite your cheek, the blood tastes in your mouth. You need to study your species and your habitat, and then you need to be like my daughter, Julie, when she was three years old and saw tannish sand from the snow plows covering the white. “The snow looks just like crumb cake,” she said, and she was absolutely right. You need to notice all the time, and then tell what you saw in a new way. As for the notion that everything has already been said, maybe it has, but life is like meatloaf: there are so many different ways to present it. What’s unique about you is what makes your writing interesting, and what makes it shine. It is yet another reason why you should never try to imitate other writers.
You need to be a panhandler: you need to collect all you notice and then sift through it for the gold; you need to be discerning. You need a sense of restraint, a sense of timing. You need to know when to hold back and when to put those nuggets in; your writing should be like a river, flowing, changing, bringing the reader along on an unpredictable ride. “ Elizabeth Berg
Brutal Truth: The so-what factor matters. A lot.
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Jul•
01•13
Recently I got into a kerfuffle with a writer about an essay she’d written. It was a heartfelt chronology about a loss that was mostly a step-by-step medical report. Before I go further, you need to know that this person is lovely, intelligent, and tender. But she forgot about the so-what factor and I called her on it, which is when things got ugly.
The so-what factor (also known as who-cares?) means that whatever topic you choose to write about has relevance to readers and makes the reader care about your story. Readers are time-pinched, media-overloaded, and ruthless. They’re your customer and the customer is damn-near always right. Readers demand a fair exchange: if they invest precious minutes or hours in your story, then you’ll reciprocate by making that experience meaningful. It’s especially important in nonfiction, particularly in memoir unless you’re famous. If you’re famous, your readership is already invested in your life story. But I’ve read far too many memoir manuscripts written by people with an ax to grind, a hurt to air, a grievance to vent. But just because you’ve experienced pain doesn’t mean other people want to read about it.
The so-what factor is also a great measuring stick for fiction writers. When they don’t use it their chapters start like this: Megan woke up to sunshine streaming in through her bedroom window. She looked at the clock. 6 a.m. She’d woken before the alarm went off. Her day was off to a good start. Without a backwards glance at her inviting bed, she left the bedroom while pulling on her robe. Trouble was, she’d need to reset the timer on her coffee pot since it was set for 7 in the morning. Megan was already looking forward to the smells of fresh-brewed coffee filling the apartment and her first delicious sip of her favorite beverage.
You get the picture. 
In fiction, every scene must keep threading back to the central dramatic question that shapes the story. No connection? Then dump it.
In memoir or essay, every sentence threads back to your themes. It’s all about your reader, my dears. Not your heartbreak, bad breaks, sad aches.
Now carry on and write true.
Bitter truth: Being a late bloomer means you’re in a fight against time.
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Jun•
12•13
Last month I met with a writer who is about my age. We were chatting about a novel she was working on and the conversation turned to aging. We fall into the over fifty category much as this shocks me to write. She is working on a novel and is involved in a critique group with other members who are a few decades younger than her. She feels the pressure of aging slamming against the need to get published. Trouble is, the other writers in her group don’t. She almost wants to shake them, explain that time whips by so fast next thing you know another season will pass. And then another.
When you’re young, often ignorance can be salvation, especially when it’s married to hope. When you’re young there is plenty of time to get published, become famous, or just get noticed. But then there comes a gloomy day when you just need to admit that not only are your thighs and ass getting a bit doughy with age, so is your reputation. When consolations are no longer found in visions of the future or your critique groups’ praises. Especially when you hear about the latest wunderkind landing a mega book deal. Especially when you’ve sacrificed a lot on the altar of the writing gods.
It seems like the literary world is forever fawning over hip young writers. It makes sense, of course — there’s something extra impressive about pulling off a cool literary feat when you’re twenty-four. And it’s true that agents are more prone to sign them because they can establish a partnership and make money together for the long haul.
Now, I’m not knocking young writers. Sometimes when I read books such as Like Water for Elephants I wonder how the 20-something Sarah Gruen could possibly know so much about the humiliations and loneliness of aging. Could possibly inhabit an elderly character’s sensibilities. But she did and her insights are remarkable.
Yet maturity counts. A lot. That said, if you’re over 40, don’t waste another moment. Write as if the graveyard is looming. To help makes this bitter truth go down easier discover or reread authors who made it after their 30s: Charles Bukowski, Donald Ray Pollack, Henry Miller to name a few. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn was published when he was 49 and had failed at several professions. Then here are other late bloomers you might want to rub elbows with.
Helen Hooven Santmyer, author of Lady’s of the Club which was published when was 88. It took her 50 years to write—perhaps a record. I’ve talked to the publisher who discovered her–in a nursing home and his delight over this has never diminished.
Laura Engells Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie was her first novel and was published when she was 64.
Frank McCourt’s wonderful memoir Angela’s Ashes was published when he was 66 after retiring from teaching. He kept notebooks for years, jotting down memories, neighbor’s names and street corners. It also won the Pulitzer for biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was turned into a movie in 1999. In the process, Angela’s Ashes propelled its author from obscurity to fame and fortune.
You might want to check out Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on Late Bloomers in The New Yorker. In it he says: “We’d like to think that steadfastness (has) nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.” – From the New Yorker’s “Late Bloomers” by Malcolm Gladwell.
You might also want to visit Bloom a website dedicated to the discussion of writers who published their first major work at age 40 or later.
