Quick Take: 

Story equals problem.

Every story is about a problem that needs to be solved, and the protagonist is the only one who can do it. In short stories the problem is often the inciting incident. In longer fiction, the inciting incident typically leads to the problem. The inciting incident upsets the order of the fictional world and leads the protagonist toward the problem. No matter when the problem begins in the story (and it’s always in Act One) the problem needs to be weighty and vexing. It should also be personal, often creating a bond between the protagonist and antagonist.  So a handy definition of plot is the constant struggle of the protagonist to solve an intolerable problem and reestablish order.

Thought for the Day:

“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.” ~ Ishmael Reed

In Case You Missed It

A few items to get you thinking.
I'm still cleaning up after the holiday and alas, eating Christmas cookies for breakfast. Looking forward to a winter of productivity and quiet. I've missed blogging, but the previous weeks involved a flurry of gift buying and wrapping, baking,cooking, and decorating. One more dinner party to host on Sunday for my book club, then on to the new. I love the week between Christmas and New Years because I can enjoy the Christmas trees (we put up two this year and now that I'm not baking when I walk downstairs in the morning the house smells like the trees) and slow down and think ahead to what I want to accomplish next year.

Here are a few posts to nudge us all to ponder our writing goals and publishing plans. And then more to help us look back at the successes, trends, and good things of 2012.

From the all-around smart guy  Nathan Bradsford, go to this link for knock-out advice on doubts and pain that come with the writing life. He calls it Living on Edge of Confidence and Self-Doubt. He writes: "Terror and joy. Confidence and self-doubt. The best artists live right in that uncomfortable middle."
Doubt and terror are indeed normal--it's all about how you handle those bedeviling emotions.

Agent Rachel Gardner is a font of sound advice. Here she answers the question about querying an agent twice. 

The digital world is hard to keep up with.  For those of you who plan to self publish, it's not only about good writing, but also discoverability. Here's some helpful information on the state of ebooks and self publishing: Discovery Landscape Becomes More Complicated as Reader Behavior Fractures

As for looking back: There was, of course, The New Times list of 100 Notable Books for 2012. Find the list here in case you haven't seen it.


From The Virginia Quarterly The Media Consumption List for 2012 Edition. Not a "best of" list, but this one is comprehensive and original.

Time Magazine has a lollapalooza of compilation of top ten lists here called The Top Ten of Everything. You will not be disappointed.


Keep writing, keep dreaming, step forward

A lovely Solstice to All

And if like me, you've been heavy hearted in the past week from the terrible violence and carnage in this country, please remember that writers are the lights in the world. Never before has this planet so needed our songs, stories, poems, and truths and what it means to me human and alive and compassionate and real.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

"If you don't torture your characters with hardship and suffering, you're torturing your reader with boredom." ~  ThinkBannedThoughts

Making it in Changing Times Conference

January 26th

Portland, Oregon

the complete schedule is here

A Simple Way to Create Suspense

Lee Child has the answer here. And I agree with every word.
He writes: Readers are human, and humans seem programmed to wait for answers to questions they witness being asked. I learned that fact in my first job. I worked in television production from 1977 until 1995, and the business changed radically during that time, mainly because of one particular invention. It was something that almost no one had in 1980, and that almost everyone had in 1990, and it changed the game forever. We had to cope with it. We had to invent a solution to the serious problem it posed.
 

For more on creating suspense and tension you can find chapters on both subjects in my book Between the Lines, Mastering the Subtle Elements of Fiction. Which is on sale here and here. And from me.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Quick Take: plot points

When writing  fiction , it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between a plot point and an event. Events or actions stand alone; they build scenes and flesh out the story. The best actions have consequences. If your action doesn't have consequences, then you need to ask yourself why it's part of your story.

A plot point, on the other hand, couldn’t exist without everything that came before it, and if you remove that plot point from the story, everything that happens afterwards would fall apart. Plot points are game changers. Once the plot point happens, there is no returning to the way things were before.  Each point is a link in a chain. Break one, and the whole shebang collapses. Fiction is causal.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

"To this day you can take me to a room with my eyes closed and my ears plugged, and I can tell at once, without the slightest doubt, if it is a room full of books.  I take in the smells of an old library not with my nostrils but through my skin, a kind of grave, pensive laden with book dust finer than any other dust, blended with the savor that emanates from old paper, mingled with the smell of glues ancient and modern, pungent thick almond scents,

sourish sweat, intoxicating weed and iodine, and undertones of the lead smell of thick printer’s ink, and a smell of rotting paper, eaten away by damp and mildew, and of cheap paper that is crumbling to dust, contrasting with the rich, exotic, dizzying aromas emanating from fine imported paper that excite the palate."

~ Amos Oz

Short Story Contest news

Great News. The deadline for entries has been extended to December 17th.

Do you have a winning short story of 1,500 words or fewer? Would you like a shot at national recognition for your work? Imagine the effect winning or ranking in a highly respected story competition could have on your résumé and publishing career. The 13th Annual Writer's Digest Short Short Story Competition is on now.

Enter your short short story today and you could:

• Win up to $3,000 cash-Plus, more cash and prizes awarded to the top 25 entries
• Get national exposure for your work-The winner will be featured in Writer's Digest magazine, and the top 25 entries will be published in the 2013 Writer's Digest Short Story Competition Collection
• Win a paid trip to New York City-The first-place winner will be sent to the Writer's Digest Conference in New York City!

 Polish up your manuscript of 1,500 words or fewer and enter the Writer's Digest Short Short Story Competition today.

According to the Writer's Almanac, today is the birthday of Rainer Maria Rilke. He wrote: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue [...] Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers."

In Case You Missed It

a small compilation of writerly news.
From Media Bistro: 5 Ways to Find an Agent is here
I especially like their suggestion to follow agents on Twitter.

Simon and Schuster has now joined the self publishing industry with Archway Publishing.  The FAQ page is here.  But writers beware: this is essentially vanity publishing. The writing world is in a hubbub about this for good reason. And vanity presses have been around  a long time.

And here is Porter Anderson at Writing on the Ether weighing in on the whole controversy of Vanity Presses, back lists, social media and a slew of other topics.

Stuck? Dial 911 at webook You can find tips on setting,endings, characters....and it's fun.

"We are so in love with our words and ideas that we forget the direct experience from which they arise. We build concept upon concept. In the end we have abstracted our contact with life into the rote regurgitation of thought-bound ideology.
We have fallen victim to the great curse of human existence of the tendency to misconstrue language (words, thoughts, ideas) for actuality. We are entombed in our brains.
We are thinking our lives, not living them.

Think about the problems all this thought is creating. We pick up a self-help book, a book of spiritual advice, a religious book, thinking it might help with our thought-bound world. We read. We think it quite interesting. We think we will read more. We are not sure where all of this is going, but we think we will read more and find out.
It is not going anywhere.

Thought has nowhere to go but its own isolated, endless fragmented repetition.

Without the obsession of thought we are the recognition and the expression of the energy of consciousness and space in which we and others coexist in such profound contact that there is nothing that definitively divides us.
We search for this relationship of profound openness, without guile or armor, vulnerable, trusting, and at the same time, intimate, intertwined, boundaryless - but this transcendental relationship constantly slips from us as we experience it and then try to institutionalize it.

When our minds are absolutely quiet, when thought is still, this relationship is the natural state of our being. Then thought, the ego-center, enters immediately to catalog, analyze, and capture the beauty of the vision.
We seek the rare butterfly. Upon glimpsing its beauty we stalk it, catch it, drive a pin through its head to mount it, and put it on our wall with its Latin name. We trade the moment of beauty for the endless stultification of a dead symbol, an artifact, a word, a concept.

We can use language to approach that which is beyond language. We can use language to amuse ourselves. We can use language as poetry, as music. But we forget that these words, any words, bring us nowhere in actuality, only somewhere in the mind, in thought. We are in a bubble. We are staring in the pond admiring the reflection of our own thoughts." ~ Steven Harrison

Making It in Changing Times 2013

 We all know that there are major changes happening in the industry, many of which are working against authors going after traditional publishing deals. We all know that there are also other opportunities available for authors at all levels, but these opportunities require professionalism and know-how. That’s why its so important to take advantage of every opportunity to improve your odds.Here's your opportunity:

A one-day conference jammed with helpful information.

Learn from a stellar line up:

Jessica Morrell

Deborah Reed
Gigi Rosenberg

Kevin Sampsell

and keynote speaker Lidia Yuknavitch The Worth of Risk

This is an event you shouldn't miss. Seriously. 

Date: January 26th
Place: Tabor Space, Portland, Oregon
Cost: $99

The complete schedule will be available soon.

Just for Fun

“This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with a Pisces rising. This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagrammed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish... This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called "Speedoo" but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence may be pregnant. This sentence suffered a split infinitive - and survived. If this sentence has been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And this little sentence went wee wee wee all the way home.” ― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Shaped from the Past

Understanding your protagonist’s psychology, including his deepest fears and yearnings will result in a fictional person who acts in ways that are logical, fascinating, and believable. And the seeds of his or her psychological make up will always be found in the past. And likely that past will include some troubling or scarring times and events.

In fact, all your protagonist’s actions, choices, and emotional needs in the front story are shaped by the back story. Fiction characters do not spring fully grown like Athena from Zeus’ head—their pasts, particularly their socioeconomic circumstances, and traumatic events, cast a distinct, complicated and powerful shadow over present events.

While you’re creating your character’s past, be sure to include physical characteristics including any unusual features and inherited traits—an odd blue-grey eye color that in certain lights has tints of silver. Sculpted cheekbones from Cherokee heritage. Capable-looking hands. Hairy chest, propensity for early male baldness, flat feet. Smallish breasts, freckles like constellations, shapely feet.

Add psychological quirks: attention deficit disorder, dyslexia, restlessness, obsession with details or compulsively neat and orderly—so much so that it irritates other characters who are always requested to take off their shoes when entering your protagonist’s domain. Keep adding or subtracting if needed-- rodent phobia, problems with authority figures, mom/dad never loved him or her, mama’s boy, daddy’s girl. Which can be not so cute if your character is 30-something.

Just as in the real world, these are factors which provide the foundation for your character and his values, which in turn affects how he acts or reacts badly and changes and has trouble changing/coping/succeeding in the story.

What is new adult fiction?

From Media Bistro: 
YALitChat.org founder Georgia McBride interviewed JJ, an editorial assistant who worked on the St. Martin’s writing contest. Here’s an excerpt:

there is a gap in the current adult market–the literary fiction market–for fiction about twentysomethings. You never stop growing up, I think, but little in the market seems to address the coming-of-age that also happens in your 20s. This is the time of life when you are an actual, legal adult, but just because you’re able to vote (in the US, anyway) that doesn’t mean you know HOW to be one. This is the first time when you are building a life that is your OWN, away from your parents and the family that raised you. It’s a strange and scary place to be. Just as YA is fiction about discovering who you are as a person, I think NA is fiction about building your own life. (Very generalised, of course.) I hope that the creation of this category will allow the adult market to develop and expand in similar ways the children’s market did.

Free Samples of New Adult Fiction Authors Who Landed Book Deals
Losing It by Cora Carmack
Because of Low by Abbi Glines
Slammed by Colleen Hoover
Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire
Easy by Tammara Webber

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

"I think that whenever we give our pen some free will, we may surprise ourselves. All that wanting to seem normal in regular life, all that fitting in falls away in the face of one's own strange self on the page." ~ Sharon Olds from The Writer's Almanac

I would rather see words out on their own, away
from their families and the warehouse of Roget,
wandering the world where they sometimes fall
in love with a completely different word.
Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever
next to each other on the same line inside a poem,
a small chapel where weddings like these,
between perfect strangers, can take place.
~ Billy Collins
from Thesaurus

"Isn't all art irreverent? It is irreverent to create that which doesn't exist; the newly made thing flies in the face of the already created and as such is based on negation (what already exists is simply not enough!), but born also out of the greatest reverence for all that already is. When Borges, visiting the Sahara, picked up a little bit of sand, carried it in his hand and let it fall someplace else, he said, "I am modifying the Sahara," and he wrote that this was one of the most significant memories of his stay. What Borges did is what we do when we write poems after millennia of poem writing. We aren't saving the Sahara, we are modifying it, and you have to be irreverent to think you can modify the Sahara in the first place, and sincere in your attempt to do so." ~ Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

"A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions." ~ William Edgar Stafford

Something to ponder: 

"Writing is a very, very unnatural act. Most people are out living - their bodies are, they're walking and they're talking and they're working and playing and they're interacting. Writing's very unnatural because you are not living when you write. But at the same time, what a great paradox - because you're all writers so you all know. You're all going, Oh but no, no, I'm most alive when I write. So are you more living or less, we can't use "more" or "less," it's just different. And this is the crux of any writer's life. It is the essential paradox and question and torment and joy. Are you writing or living and what's the difference and where's the line and how do we divide those activities?

I've spent my whole life thinking, Is this unnatural? Shouldn't someone be parading outside my apartment with a cardboard placard saying, "Insanity's taking place on the inside?" They really should, there'd be a point to it. And then, in other moods, I go, No, no, no, the insanity's taking place out there. And I waffle back and forth. And this waffling back and forth, when you yourself experience it, it's called life. And you are going to experience this waffling back and forth for the rest of your life. And whenever you do, don't think you're unnatural or broken or different. It's life, and we're living it, and that tension is life." ~ Mary Ruefle

Scholarship 

I have a $cholarship available for my Line by Line workshop on Saturday.
Contact me via email so we can discuss details.

VoiceCatcher’s journal to reopen for submissions
VoiceCatcher: a journal of women's voices and visions will accept submissions for the Winter 2013 edition between November 1 and December 15, 2012. Managing Editor Helen Puciloski and Co-Editors Ginger Duncan, Lisa Maier and and Celina Wigle are eager to read your poetry or prose and view your art work for the online journal’s second issue.

If you haven’t seen the Fall 2012 edition, go to www.voicecatcherjournal.org. Take a look at our mission on the "About" page. Read our contributors’ work for a taste of what we’re publishing. Click on "Submissions" and follow the guidelines (a few of which have changed).

We look forward to sharing your voices and visions in our new publishing venture

Thought for the Day

"I once had a friend. He had been teaching a long time when I was just starting. He liked telling his students he'd seen them before. In another life, at another school, the same hairline, the same kid brother back home in eighth grade. In class, he gave them obituaries to read. And though we're no longer close, here is consolation: I still believe in what he was up to: seeing if he could make them dizzy. Suggesting they write their way into or out of the disquieting facts he offered up. Offering the chance to find themselves breathless, to consider themselves a point on a circle falling and rising, falling/drawn up, as the wheel moved, moves, is moving relentlessly on. He wanted them to feel conveyor beneath their feet, when all along they'd assumed they were walking. To consider they might, somehow, for another, be a mark and a measure of vastness. A site.

What does my friend want his students to say, what does he want them to stumble into, considering those obituaries? "Nothing in particular," he'd answer, meaning "I have no plan." No one thing in mind. Only for them to skid to a halt, to go breathlessly forth, for here is their chance to see: the patterns keep coming, all the lives theirs resemble - in the newspaper photo, the deceased at age twenty, the jaunty tilt of that head so like the tilt of their own. That they share the same name, the same birthday and interests. That the most basic, seismic events daily converge and include us."
~ Lia Purpura, On Looking

Quick Take:

When you're writing scenes you'll want to nail the action, weave in setting, create dialogue that dazzles. But you also need to know the emotional content of the scene. What is each character feeling at the beginning, middle, and ending? Why? Can you use subtext to communicate these emotion?

November

If it's November first that means NaNoWriMo has begun.

Write on......

Join in

Lose yourself in your writing practice...

Thought for All Hallow's Eve

"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from traveled ways, usually squatted upon some damp grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things."
~ H. P. Lovecraft, The Picture in the House

Line by Line: How to Rewrite, Rework & Reword taught by Jessica Morrell
November 10, 9-5 Tabor Space, 5441 S.E. Belmont, Portland, OR Cost: $75

Every good writer is also an editor. The tough thing about self-editing is learning what to keep, what to lose, and what to leave well enough alone. This workshop will give you perspective on all of that.  We’ll cover the all-important level of line editing—or how to make each sentence and paragraph sing, how to choose words for potency and resonance, and how to transform clunky sentences and paragraphs into smooth beauties. You’ll learn how to tighten baggy sentences, turn weak verbs into strong ones, and use parallel construction. We’ll be line editing examples throughout the workshop including the participants’ first paragraphs since everything hinges on them. The aim is to polish so the pages are not only easy to read, but a pleasure to read. Generous handouts and cheat sheets will be supplied.  We’ll cover:

• How to line edit for elegant, powerful sentences.
• How to edit so that your manuscript appeals to today’s agents and editors.
• What to leave unsaid and how context shapes our decisions about language and imagery.
• 10 ways to give less than perfect sentences a makeover.
• How to wrangle word usage, looking out for misused words, overused words, crutch words, and words which do not belong.
• When to chop clutter and excess prepositions, amp up language, learn where to place emphasis and word grenades.
• How to spot flatness, lack of variety and lack of verve.
• How to retool the language throughout so that it’s more evocative.
• How to correct basic grammar and punctuation problems.

Space is limited and registration is required.

Payments can be made by check or through PayPal  (below)