Making It in Tough & Changing Times
A Mini Writing Conference

January 28th, Portland, Oregon
At last, a practical one-day conference crammed with just the information that you need to propel your writing career to the next level and muscle your way to submission. We’ll cover everything from creating potent sentences and writing irresistible query letters that capture attention, to writing killer openers and making a living in a media-saturated world.
Time: 8:30-5:30
Cost: $99 Includes Continental breakfast, catered lunch, workshops and keynote address by author Christina Katz.
Location: Tabor Space, 5441 S.E. Belmont
8:30 Registration, Continental Breakfast, Introductory Remarks: So What do you Mean Writing is a Life?

9:00 One Strong Sentence After Another, Monica Drake Editor Gordon Lisch famously said that good writing is a matter of one strong sentence after another. In this craft workshop we’ll consider techniques to build muscle and cut the fat in each sentence. Participants may join at any level of experience. They’ll leave with examples and ideas to improve their own work quickly. This may be applied to any genre of literary fiction and nonfiction.

10:30 Killer Openers, Jessica Morrell All writing lives and dies by the opening lines. The opening paragraphs have a huge job — to hook the reader. We’ll discuss how killer openers immediately set the tone of the story, quickly raise questions that need answering, and hit the reader right between the eyes, often by being surprising or shocking. Of course we’ll also talk about how to kill openings with common blunders and missteps. Examples and discussion will amplify this important topic.

12:00 Keynote: The Prosperous Writer: Tips For Navigating The Gig Economy, Christina Katz Writing well, closing sales, narrowing your focus, continuous learning, and a career-long willingness to self-promote—these are the five qualities of prosperous writers. But how will you sustain your creative productivity and juggle all of these skills at once? These are the creative productivity secrets that most writers rarely share. Myths will be busted. Truths will be bared.

1:00 Anatomy of a Scene, Jessica Morrell Scenes are basic units of storytelling that dramatize both everyday life and key moments. In scenes something significant happens that has not happened before and will not happen again. A scene brings the story to a new place in the narrative, it offers something fresh and somehow stirs reader’s emotions Thus scenes are the intimate moments in the story that create emotional involvement with the reader

2:15 Paring it Down to the Truth, Emily Whitman “Make every word count.” You hear it all the time, but how do you do it? Whether you tend to write long and then slash, or pithy and then add, you need to cut the dross in that final draft. Paring it down doesn’t always mean cutting it short: pacing and rhythm matter. Years of writing educational passages with strict word limits have taught Emily a thing or two about trimming down to the essentials. This workshop will look at the tricks and tools at your disposal, from the concrete to the conceptual.

3:30: What Editors Want in Query Letters, Adam O’Connor Rodriguez An editor will discuss cover letters and manuscript presentation. He’ll reveal what editors love to see in a submission and what they hate to see. Workshop participants are encouraged to submit their cover letters and before hand for insightful feedback. Adam will also answer questions about the submission process.

4:40 Panel/Q & A: Risk It—to get published Q & A with Christina Katz, Jessica Morrell, Adam O’Connor Rodriguez

5:15 Book signing, closing remarks
To register: Contact Jessica Morrell at jessicapage(at)spirtone(dot)com
Space is limited so early registration is recommended. Payments can be made by check or through Paypal. Mailing address is: Jessica Morrell, P.O. Box 820141, Portland, OR 97282-1141

Know Your Character

Long after the intricacies of a fictional plot fade from a reader’s memory, the characters linger with an almost physical presence, a twinkle of personality, unforgettable actions, and their happy or sad fates. Character, not plot, is what chiefly interests the reader because he or she translates and feels the character’s actions, desires, and passions from his/her own databank of experiences and emotions.

To create unforgettable characters, you need to explore, brainstorm, and borrow (a bit) from characters you love. Why did certain characters stay with you long after you finished reading the story?  Rely on your memories and observations about human nature and quirky people you’ve met over the years. And, of course, slip into your character’s skin.

Writing fiction that catches an editor’s attention requires taking risks, especially when you embroil fascinating characters in an unbearable situation. While creating your main characters and especially villains, keep this in mind: While you’ll shape characters based on what you’ know or have experienced, your characters will always range much farther than you. They will have more adventures and deeper sorrows, their desires will burn flaming hot, their desperation will cause them to resort to trickery and deceit and their failures will mean a personal  doomsday.

And don’t only write about characters you’re fond of.  Don’t impose your own values, thoughts, and beliefs. Write about story people who screw up way more than you do, take much bigger risks.

To write unforgettable characters you need to know them with the intimacy of a longtime lover. Even if this   Here is a checklist that might help with this knowing.

Techniques for revealing character:

• Conflict with their environment–workplace, family, country, culture.
• Action
• Dialogue
• Self-discovery, self-realization, change
• Reactions of other characters
• Relationships with other characters
• Pets and vulnerable co-stars.
• Goals, desires, motivation
• Making hard decisions and choices, especially moral dilemmas.
• Epiphany
• Attitudes
• Values
• Possessions including car, home, office, yard.
• Contrasting characters
• Profession

Character tags: identify and define

• General appearance
• How does your character enter a room?
• What sort of first impression does your character make?
• Walk, posture, body language, way of being in the world.
• Voice, reveals the character’s roots, include favorite expressions and tone
• Mannerisms, gestures, body language. Fidgety? Gestitculates? Makes eye contact?
• Hairstyle
• Clothes
• Accessories
• Habits–fidgety? Gesticulates a lot

Questions for character development:

Obviously as you start out, you’re not going to know all there is to know about your main characters, but over time, they’ll start whispering to you, surprising you, maybe shocking you.

• What is your character’s worst fear? This is often what’s most at stake in fiction.
• What secrets or parts of himself or herself would your character prefer to hide?
• What is your character’s emotional bandwidth–as in highs and lows and in between?
• How does your character act when angry?
• What regrets does your character have?
• What is your character’s basic temperament? Even-tempered and imperturbable?
• How would your character describe himself/herself in one sentence?
• How does your character react when snubbed or overlooked? Slandered? Misunderstood?
• What does your character do with his/her hands when he/she talks?
• How does your character feel about his/her body?
• Are his/her clothes well made, high end? Eclectic thrift store finds?  Do they fit well? Snug? Baggy?

First Impressions
There is another aspect of character building that’s important to keep in mind; first impressions. A reader wants a rough sketch of major characters when they appear on the page so he can classify them in his imagination. But something else must happen in these first meetings. In your story opening, the opening scenes and inciting incident will always portray at least one character under stress. Because there are so many ways of beginning a story, this doesn’t necessarily mean that your protagonist will be under stress, but it’s usually a major character in the story. When a reader first encounters a character under pressure, he begins building sympathy for the fictional person and then over time, this sympathy becomes empathy and involvement.

A terrific example of this technique can be found in Agatha Christie’s What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! She evokes sympathy for her character in the first paragraph:  Mrs. McGillicuddy panted along the platform in the wake of the porter carrying her suitcase. Mrs. McGillicuddy was short and stout, the porter was tall and free-striding. In addition, Mrs. McGillicuddy was burdened with a large quantity of parcels; the result of a day’s Christmas shopping. The race was, therefore an uneven one, and the porter turned the corner at the end of the platform while Mrs. McGillicuddy was still coming up the straight.

Notice how we’re immediately sympathizing with the character, especially after we read panting, because as we all know, when we’re panting, we’re often in difficulty. We then learn that the train station is especially crowded and “Mrs. McGillicuddy and her parcels were buffeted to and fro.” Again, most of us have experienced a crowded train station or airport and know the difficulty of navigating while carrying a lot of packages. Christie then adds a raucous announcement of a train leaving and readers understand that the station is a cacophony, an onslaught to the nerves. Added to this, we all know how tired a person can be after a day of Christmas shopping.

Next, we discover that her bored-looking porter mistakenly leads her to a third class carriage when she’s paid for a first class ticket and when she tips him, his miffed expression of disappointment indicates that the tip is better suited for a person traveling third class. She settles into the plush cushions and opens a magazine and the train leaves the station. Within three minutes Mrs. McGillicuddy is asleep and wakes refreshed. She looks around the carriage, pleased with her purchases. By this time, the reader is also experiencing empathy with her because we also know what it’s like to take stock after a successful shopping trip.

Then, events on the train turn distressingly interesting. This happens when her train slows down and at the same time a train traveling in the same direction slows also. At the moment when the two trains gave the illusion of being stationary, a blind in one of the carriages flew up with a snap. Mrs. McGillicuddy looked into the lighted carriage that was only a few feet away.
Then she drew her breath in with a gasp and half rose to her feet.
Standing with his back to the window and to her was a man. His hands were round the throat of a woman who faced him, and he was slowly, remorselessly, strangling her. Her eyes were starting from their sockets, her face was purple and congested. As Mrs. McGillicuddy watched, fascinated, the end came, the body went limp and crumpled in the man’s hands.

Next, the train sped away and she tries to explain what she has witnessed to the ticket collector. He doesn’t believe her, and although he remains polite, suggests she had been dreaming. Then, adding to her growing distress at not being believed, his eyes drop to her magazine with a garish cover depicting a woman being strangled. Again, readers all know what it’s like not to be believed or to be considered foolish or imaginative. By the time Mrs. McGillicuddy arrives in St. Mary Mead at Jane Marple’s home, we’re thoroughly in sympathy with her and wondering who was murdered and why.

You cannot write words without learning the alphabet, you cannot write sentences without words, and you cannot write fiction or memoir without scenes. Scenes are the building blocks of fiction and memoir where you stage drama in a continuous unit of action taking place in one location, depicting characters up close.

Scenes are built from a goal and then the conflict which arises when that goal is opposed. Scenes always have an outcome– a win, lose or draw– and portray some form of change in the story, and if possible, emotional reversal. Scenes also drive the story forward, dramatize events and conflicts, provide context for the unfolding drama, and information and characterization.

And scenes are always based on change.

Components of Scenes:

All scenes will contain some combination of the following elements. Not every element will appear in every scene, but most scenes will feature most of these elements.

Action: Something happens, movement is going on, the narrative is progressing.

Character: Scenes involve people acting and although most scenes involve more than one character, occasionally scenes can depict one character alone up against some obstacle, and sometimes a nonhuman obstacle as in The Old Man and the Sea.

Conflict: Threat always hangs over your main characters. It’a staged through struggle and  opposition. Typically the story says no to the protagonist again and again. NO, you cannot solve the murder by suspecting the people closest to the victim. NO, you cannot get out of rehab and easily slip back into your old life. NO, you cannot return to your hometown and find warmth, welcome, and ease. Conflict often involves two characters vying for the same prize, an antagonist trying to stop the protagonist from achieving a goal, a character trying to enter a place he’s been warned away from, a character trying to avoid a dangerous move or confrontation and failing.

Description: All scenes need immediacy, visual elements, and atmosphere. And don’t be afraid of using props as proofs of the storyworld. Where are your characters standing or sitting? Is the room dimily lit, the echoey warehouse shadowy and smelling like rat crap? The overhead thunderheads threatening to burst? And don’t forget you’re delivering the scenes through a viewpoint character’s distint lens as if the chaacter is filming a movie.

Dialogue: People interacting with each other by speaking or arguing. Dialogue is not a copy of real speech, rather it is tighter and more intense, usually contains conflict or tension, subtext, and some sort of power exchange.

Dialogue tags: The ‘he said, she said’ that attributes words to specific characters In contemporary fiction they’re not used a lot once readers understand who is talking.

Emotional Reversal: In simplest terms, this means the viewpoint character is experiencing much different emotions at the end of the scene than when the scene commenced.

Exposition:  Information and data that is strictly necessary for understanding some aspect of the story and scene, written so that it doesn’t sound like a report. So, if your detective is stepping into a factory and spots a wicked-looking piece of information, the scene might pause for a few sentences to explain it’s uses. Let’s say the detective visits a junkyard and amid the racket, it’s explained how much force the car crusher exerts to pancake a vehicle.

Gestures, movements: Characters don’t merely stand still, blank faced. They react, twitch, move about the room, run from a pursuer, and wash the dishes because they’re too nervous to talk while motionless. Gestures and movements add the visual elements, subtext, and emotions necessary to make the scene realistic and potent.

Goal: The goal and the difficulty in achieving it is the engine of every scene. In every scene a character, usually the protagonist, wants something. A goal is immediate and the reader witnesses the character acting to achieve that goal. In every scene something or someone will oppose this goal and the results will be a win, lose or draw.  The protagonist can want to acquire an object or result, want to escape or relief from some force, desire revenge, search for information or answers, uncover a secret, ask for something, etc.

Inner dialogue: Scenes can also include inner dialogue or character thoughts as a character muses or considers things in the story or actions in the scene. In general, keep inner thoughts to a minimum and employ a variety of methods to reveal characters.

Intimate detail: Intimate detail, told through all the senses makes your scene seem real.

Point of view: Scenes are filtered through a specific viewpoint. In first person the protagonist is relating events; with a limited third person you are within the thoughts of one character; while an omniscient narrator can roam and express many characters’ thoughts and a large view of the world.

 Setting: The specific location where the action unfolds.

 Subtext: The river of emotions that runs beneath the spoken words or actions, but are not spoken out loud.

Transition: Words that indicate that the story has moved on from the previous scene or is passing into the next scene.

Questions to evaluate your scenes:

• Does the scene make the reader worry?
• What does the protagonist want in the scene?
• Does my character have choices or decisions to make at this point?
• Have I surprised the reader somehow, and if so, does the surprise work or is it contrived or melodramatic?
• Are there visual details in the scene?
• Do my sensory details stir the reader’s emotions?
• Is there enough at stake in this scene?
• Have the conflicts/obstacles/motivations in the story grown in complexity or evolved in unexpected ways?

The Story in All

Examine human nature and you’ll find a primitive creature, afraid of the night, spooked by unexplained noises, and troubled by the mysteries of nature and death and heartbreak. To be human is to need answers and solace. And ever since there was a fire and a circle gathered round its warmth and protection, there have been stories.
Stories explain birth, death, love, loss, and longing. Stories keep the roaming beasts and night away. Stories sweep us from our small lives into something grander and more powerful than our own imaginings. Thus, a writer must start with the ancient and oh-so satisfying concept of story, if you’re writing fiction or nonfiction.

Story is for luring readers, not peacefully, but gracefully or perhaps forcefully into another place, involving them emotionally, and thrilling them vicariously. Story is also a powerful, soothing ritual we’ve known since we were small. It has that “Once upon a time” unfolding and that delicious promise that the words come from the practiced hands of someone who appreciates the art of story.
No matter what your genre—nonfiction article, essay, memoir or novel, somewhere in those words lies a story. And when I say story, it means that events in the story cause other events to happen; there is a thoughtful exploration of themes, and all the elements MATTER to someone, especially the reader.
Sweep the reader into the story world with authority so only the story exists beyond the dailiness of the room or plane where the book is propped open. Effective openings blend conflict, vivid details and an authentic, compelling voice.

Stories are meaningful, but don’t allow themes to bury them and know the difference between teaching and preaching. Don’t rant, but instead show us the consequences of unfairness or injustice, without resorting to melodrama or sentimentality.
Most writing, whatever the genre, is revealing a person’s life so that a reader muddles amid his or her burdens, sorrows and dilemmas. In fiction, a reader wants to on take these burdens on as if they’re her own.
Readers read for entertainment, information, for distraction, but also to understand the nature of humanness. Create moments of truth that pierce their bruised hearts, force them to peer deep inward.Writing is about revelation—shows readers how people or characters think and feel by staging scenes.
And finally, somehow, sprinkle a bit of fairy dust into it all. Use artful language and fresh images. Transport your reader to another realm or a gritty reality. Remember that stories were first told to keep the night away, to escape the hungry eyes beyond the safe ring of firelight. Remember that stories live on.

Last week I taught an all day workshop on voice and as I was talking to my friend about it he mentioned that the workshop was just what people who are taking part in NaNoWriMo needed. You see, writing, especially writing fast and furious during November for NaNoWriMo, comes much easier when you find your voice. Voice is the glue that holds a story together. No voice and you just have a bunch of words on a page.

So what is voice? It’s the identifiable, authentic, and memorable sound of your narrator or viewpoint character on the page. It’s the personality, sensibility, and truth of the character bubbling through. It contains the attitude and mood toward the events in the story and a persona. Voice makes the story feel real. Voice creates trust in a reader. Voice is what readers connect with before they connect with all the happenings in the story.

No voice, no story.

Peter Elbow says, “People often lack any voice at all in their writing because they stop so often in the act of writing a sentence and worry and change their minds about which words to use. They have none of the natural breath in their writing that they have in speaking. . . .We have so little practice in writing, but so much more time to stop and fiddle as we write each sentence.”

Develop Your Voice:

• Describe yourself or your character in three-four adjectives. Example: witty, serious, driven, fun, and flirty, excitable.
• Ask (and answer) the question: Is this how I (or my character) sounds like on the page?
• Recall the most successful piece (s) you’ve written. What made them successful?
• Identify the qualities and tone of the voice in those pieces.
• List your favorite (or your character’s favorite) artistic and cultural influences. (Impressionist paintings, Breaking Bad,  Shakespeare, Steam Punk) Are  these inextricable links references in your stories, or are you avoiding them, because you don’t think people would understand them?
• List the socio-economic influences that identify you or your character: Southern, small town, world traveler, prep schools and Ivy League college, working class, rural upbringing, etc.
• List adjectives that might apply to your voice. (lively, thoughtful, conversational)
• List attributes that you don’t want to convey (long-winded, dull, arrogant)
•  If you’re writing fiction write in the character’s journal even if the journal isn’t part of story.
•  What is your character’s emotional bandwidth? That is how does he or she act when depressed, happy, confronted by unfairness or rudeness, or enraged.
•  How does your character talk when in the midst of lovemaking?
•  What words or expressions crop up often in your everyday conversations? What about your character’s favorites?
•  Prune words that don’t add enhance the voice.
•  Write down three of your favorite authors or books. Now list qualities of their voice. How is your voice distinct from theirs?

Storyline summary:

In the story opening, your protagonist, a person with scars, shortcomings and a deep wound caused by a previous trauma (s) is affected by a troubling change in his life. This change of the status quo forces him to choose a goal or direction which he pursues. But a series of ever-increasing obstacles stand in his way, causing him to doubt himself and for his inner demons to surface. As he struggles to overcome  obstacles, his inner demons make it harder to reach his goals and fight off trouble. But somehow, by perhaps learning a new skill and drawing on his inner resources and strengths, the protagonist manages to face down his inner demons and solve the largest obstacles.  As the story ends, the obstacles are overcome; problems, large and small are solved, and the protagonist has been changed by his successes and by new knowledge, confidence and stature. Thus, his wounds are now not as painful, his scars less noticeable.

“I am an artist. It’s self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the opposite of saying, “I know all about it. I’ve already found it.” As far as I’m concerned, the word means, “I am looking. I am hunting for it, I am deeply involved.”
~ Vincent van Gogh

“Then, at last, sitting on her stretcher-bed, she took from the very bottom of her pack an old peacock-blue scarf folded around a heavy, square book. She unwrapped it and opened it very carefully, as if guilty secrets might fall from between its pages like pressed flowers. This was Harry’s secret. She was a writer.”

-from The Tricksters, by Margaret Mahy