October 20, 9-5
Manzanita, Oregon, The Center for Contemplative Arts
Cost: $80

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 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 that underlies the whole—the essential scenes that every story needs to create drive, tension, conflict, climax, and resolution. We’ll pay special attention to the architecture of scenes and the plot points and reversals that power stories forward.

Since scenes are those parts of your story where the excitement happens we’ll dissect the core ingredient of each scene: change. 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 the protagonist stars in these scenes, how they’re emotionally charged, and build the plot. By the end of the workshop participants will have outlined these crucial scenes and know where flashbacks should be placed to deliver the most potency. As part of the lecture we’ll be discussing the anchor scenes in To Kill a Mockingbird, The Old Man and the Sea and the film Witness. Story maps provided as part of the comprehensive handouts.

Space is limited and payment is required to register. Payments can be made by check or through PayPal
Contact me for more  registration details.

©Jessica P. Morrell

A poem is a way of life. Eloise Klein Healey

        Writers are given myriads of advice: how to plunge into the deep water of writing; how to craft beautiful sentences; how fiction or film structure holds a story together; how voice must be distinctive; how in all writing every word counts. But the advice that I keep circling back to again and again, is how reading like a writer enhances your skills on every level.

In Stephen King’s book of writing advice, On Writing, he compares the tools a writer needs to those a carpenter uses. He differentiates among the tools stored on the top shelf of your toolbox with fundamentals such as vocabulary, grammar and solid nouns and verbs with those on the lower shelves as instruments like description, dialogue, and theme. Before King elaborates on these instruments, he proclaims: “Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.” And so while we read because we love getting lost in a story and because it’s as if we’re living two lives while we’re reading a novel or memoir, we also read with our critic’s sensibilities fully engaged.

I’d been planning on writing this column about what reading teaches writers when I found a new book by Francine Prose, Reading Like A Writer, A Guide for People who Love Books and for Those who Want to Write Them. Prose writes fiction and her fourteen novels include Blue Angel and A Changed Man. She is also an essayist and has written nonfiction books and children’s books. There are many reasons why you might want to read this book. First, Prose is a passionate reader and gifted writer so the language is gorgeous. She knows her way around a metaphor and anchors understanding with solid examples from her life and dozens of excerpts from published works to make her points.

Second, she has taught a lot and the book is chocked full of techniques and wisdom she’s passed along to her students such as, “The two most important things I told them, were observation and consciousness. Keep your eyes open, see clearly, think about what you see, ask yourself what it means….in most cases the fact remains: the wider and deeper your observational range, the better, the more interestingingly and truthfully you’ll write.”

In her humorous chapter about what she learned from reading Chekov, she passes along fiction lessons from a class she taught in the late 1980s while she was reading Chekov’s short stories on her commute home. The chapter describes how his stories continually disproved the lessons she was teaching, until finally, she confesses, “By now, I had learned my lesson. I began telling my class to read Chekhov instead of listening to me.”

Third, she’s a brainiac, with thoughtful and in-depth explorations of topics. She’s also amazingly well read and quotes a diverse array of writers including the most enduring writers like Samuel Beckett, Jane Austen, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert and George Elliot. But she also uses a segment from J.D.Salinger’s Franny and Zooey to illustrate the importance of specific details, she quotes John Le Carre´ on using dialogue to advance the plot; a David Green story for how dialogue creates subtext, and a Philip Roth story for the effectiveness of a gestures.

There are so many things reading teaches us—the most important is how we should slow down and savor the author’s language and words for their raw power. It teaches us the impact of individual sentences and how we can build them to tumble out of control, meander, or stop us short with their brief and startling brilliance. We learn the many options available for viewpoint and distance and how a character’s voice rings true. Reading teaches us how to choose a few painstaking details to paint large canvasses. Sometimes it’s the exact color of an object, or a character’s bath robe, or a particular song convincing us of the story’s truth.

Or, we notice how an anecdote woven amid a larger world lends it veracity. Or, how small gestures speak volumes about a person or betray the unconscious. For example, in Amy Bloom’s short story Silver Water, I’ve never forgotten how Rose at 15 is exhibiting the first signs of schizophrenia and her psychiatrist father doesn’t want to believe it is happening even as Rose begins licking the hairs on her forearm, first one way, then the other.

Close reading teaches us how to use ordinary moments to ground a reader in a fictional reality or the memoirist’s past. By reading carefully you can observe how a writer implants tension in a scene by delaying a drink order and setting the scene in a loud bar.

By carefully reading dialogue we learn how regional expressions create authenticity and a sense of place; how characters sometimes hide their true thoughts and feelings; how dialogue can be a sort of choreography when difficult subjects are at hand; and how a character’s simple or poetic speech patterns create credibility for a living, breathing being.

In my workshops I often emphasize the power of details in fiction or memoir because if a reader believes in the kitchen with it’s stove top greasy with bacon spatters and a coffee mug with a cigarette extinguished in it, then when a meth addict shows up and starts ransacking the place for drug money, we’ll believe in the incident because we believe in the stove and mug. I’ve also learned from reading books such as Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River that whenever possible, to choose specific details not only for a shorthand into a larger truth or to characterize, but also to cause things to happen in the story and to evoke a reader’s emotions.

Sure you’ll read for fun, but reading is grounded in a study of technique since each novel, memoir, or short story that you read is a miniature writing course. So dissect and ask questions about secondary characters and subplots, surprise endings or prologues. Count how many chapters a writer uses and the time frame of a novel or short story. Ask yourself what you remember most from everything you read and try to emulate those techniques. And, oh yes, read Chekhov.

Finally, Prose tells us that reading like a writer lends courage. There are so many jobs that require real courage—firefighting, police work, oncology. Compared to facing an inferno or a shoot-out or telling a young patient that she has a terminal disease, writing is a tame pastime. Compared to nine months of pregnancy, then bringing a fragile baby into the world, well, writing is a cakewalk. Reading acquaints us with our community of scribes, teaches us that we too can conquer sentences, difficult topics, and time spans that zigzag back and forth between several decades. Often reading between the lines we note that other writers are afraid of writing badly, of being exposed, or discovering something about themselves that they’d rather ignore. Since the world is filled with brave and original and potent works we can borrow courage from this fact.

Reading like a writer is a treasure hunt where you’ll uncover gem after gem and veins of gold. It will also ignite in you the desire to write a book, an essay, a poem. Prose’s last words are: “If we want to write, it makes sense to read—and to read like a writer. If wanted to grow roses, we would want to visit rose gardens and try to see them the way a rose gardener would.”

Bitter truth # 5: Don’t pop that champagne cork too soon.
Just because you finished writing a book doesn’t mean it’s done. In fact, the real work of writing might just begin. Writing is rewriting, my friends. Fixing the pacing, tweaking the character arcs, scrutinizing the manuscript scene by scene, line by line, making sure that it all sings.
Once your first draft is complete (hurray!) approach revision with the same openness to inspiration with which you began writing the first draft.

I urge you not to become enamored of your first manuscript. Few of them get published. For most of us, it’s an investment in learning. Most published writers move on to their second, third or fourth novel to get published.

Here’s what works for me: edit briefly as you go along, while ideas are fresh. Begin each day’s writing process by editing what was written the previous day. You might want to print out each day’s work and revise on a print-out then make the corrections on the computer. Thus, when you’re printing out a first draft, it’s actually a second, fairly polished draft.

Once you have that draft ready for revision (seeing with fresh eyes) remember that revision has four parts: Read the manuscript. Find the mistakes. Correct those mistakes even if they seem to outnumber the good pages. Improve content, rational, and flow during your first run through.  Once you have a solid third draft, enhance style and voice.

Jessica P. Morrell©

“A strongly motivated need or desire sets in motion actions and revelations that return to dramatically affect a character, resulting in the final cry from Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove: “We will never again be as we were!” The plot has worked from disorder to order, from an unstable situation to one at least temporary rest, to success or renunciation.” Oakley Hall, The Art and Craft of Novel Writing

     Plot is perhaps the most often heard term when discussing fiction. It is also considered to be the essence of fiction writing. There are many definitions of plot: It is a unified, designed structure or arrangement of events. In most stories these events involved a protagonist facing some form of conflict.
I would like to add to the common definitions and suggest that plot is movement and a record of change. These changes—usually inflicted on the characters—alter their fortunes, emotions, and beliefs. Plot is also a push, a force, called narrative drive. This drive is the inexorable forward movement of related events that pile high until the whole teetering tower collapses into the final conflict, the climactic scenes that make the story worthwhile.
When considering a plot, ask yourself if there is momentum behind the elements you’ve selected. Here are seven key ingredients in an effective plot.

A plot begins when the status quo, the ordinary world the main character occupies is disrupted by a significant event. This event—called the inciting incident– pushes the story forward like a rocket launcher. Once this event occurs, there is no turning back, the character who is sometimes caught off-guard, is propelled into action, forced to make decisions often based on self protection.

The plot focuses on a character or group of characters who are worth following through the pages of your story or novel. Your characters can be neurotic or despicable, vain or shallow, but they must always be fascinating and believable and their actions, decisions and motives must propel the story to an inevitable conclusion.

A plot is made of a series of events that are somehow linked. A plot is not a line up of random or unrelated events. I like to compare plot to a pearl necklace where each pearl is a scene, linked to the next, which is linked to the next. Notice that you need a sturdy string to connect all the pearls—they are not scattered around the room, hiding under the sofa, tucked into a corner. They are strung together because fiction is causal—events cause other events, which cause more complications, which cause more events.

The plot builds by adding on complications, surprises, and developments, and new elements that add more tension and forward motion. Plots are not drawn as a straight line; instead there are zigzags, dead ends, sidetracks and crooked paths. Each of these elements adds more obstacles, more decisions to be made, paths to be chosen. At each turn, chaos, disorder, arguments, struggles, bewilderment, dilemmas should result.

At the heart of a plot the protagonist has a goal that he or she is pursuing throughout the story. No matter where the plot veers, or how complicated the story becomes, this goal is always clear, compelling and forceful. The goal forces the character to act, react and fumble.

A plot simmers, boils, and then finally explodes in the final scenes. You cannot write a story where the plot is merely simmering –their needs to be increasing tensions, terrible pressures building, options disappearing as your character is thrust forward.

A plot satisfies. The final scenes, when the tensions are red hot and the character has reached a point of no return, must deliver drama, emotion, yet a logical conclusion. This is not to suggest that every plot ends with a shoot out or physical confrontation, because some stories are quieter, more thoughtful. Sometimes much of the conflict is internal, not external. But nevertheless, the ending delivers a payoff; the tension and conflict are resolved. Decisions are made, goals achieved, plans drawn for a new life, a victory achieved. Something important has happened and the ending is like pressure released from that simmering pot. The release is real, palpable, and most of all, pleasing.

Bitter Truth: the publishing world is not a fair playing field.
At some point in childhood most kids learn that life is often not fair. No matter how that realization comes about, when that lesson is learned, it’s rarely learned through observation, but rather experience. Perhaps you were a major acting talent in 10th grade, but a prettier girl was chosen for the lead in My Fair Lady; or your throwing arm wasn’t deemed good enough to make the team although the coach’s kid did and he had an arm like limp spaghetti. Or maybe a terrible injustice happened and someone you loved died much too young.

Unfairness and injustice has always chafed me and then I became a professional writer. And I learned that fairness and success don’t always coexist. Which brings us to The 50 Shades of Grey phenomena. By now you’ve heard the clamor about this runaway success sexcapade. Last I heard it was selling 25 percent of all book sales. No matter that the storyline is littered with worn out tropes: Beautiful young virgin (apparently there are a few left in America) thaws the heart of cold, powerful, older man. Make that a billionaire older man. No matter that her main characters are named Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey. No matter that the protagonist is undeveloped, the message to women is creepy, and sentence per sentence the writing is just plain crappy and drowning in purple prose.

While there is nothing wrong with escapist fiction, as readers we deserve better.

So along with the fact that your parents always loved your older brother more than you, you need to accept that weakly-plotted, shabbily-edited, poorly-written dregs get published every day. Sometimes these dregs make a whole lot of money. Some writers have more luck than talent, more chutzpah than skills. None of this is fair. And now that the gatekeepers of the publishing industry are no long in charge, this happens way more often than it should. My friends, get used it and keep writing. And remember Tom Clancy’s words “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”