But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking.
~ Mitch Albom

If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~ Leonard Cohen

Thought for the Day:

"What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers." Logan Pearsall Smith

A big thanks,
Steady rainfall here today in Portland. I wanted to thank again Monica Drake, Christina Katz , Adam O'Connor Rodriguez  and Emily Whitman for teaching at my first annual Making It in Tough & Changing Times  Writing Conference. Thanks also to Athena and Amy Baskin for their help and Amy Pulitzer for the fabulous cookies. Thank god I only ate a nibble. These post-conference days when I'm both exhausted and exhilarated are some of my favorites of the year.

Stay tuned for information on Summer in Words, 2012. Fifth annual to be held at the Hallmark Inn & Resort, June 15-17. I'm finalizing the line up of speakers.

Thought for the day:

I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil. ~Billy Collins

Thought for the day: 

Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing to do is shovel shit from a sitting position. ~STEPHEN KING

Quick Take: Listening in
The trope of overhearing a conversation or a plot hatching as when Huck Finn overhears Injun Joe's plot to murder Widow Douglas or when Tom and Huck listen in on their funeral exists in fiction. But here's the thing: Twain was spinning tall tales and he was writing for a less-sophisticated readers back in the 1800s. Contemporary readers want realistic devices in their fictional plots. So avoid scenes where your characters listen in or overhear other conversations, especially those told at a distance. This sort of thing is usually done for the author's convenience.  And the more realistic the storyline, the more realistic the means by which you deliver it.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Recommended for anyone longing to get more words on the page, better words on the page, and break into the new publishing landscape.

Last Chance

To register for Making It in Tough & Changing Times 1-day conference on January 28th

You know where to find me.

When Do You Need To Secure Permission

After I sent out my January newsletter one of my readers wrote and asked permission to use my article as an "outline" and then give it to her art students. She sent me the document she was planning to use as this "outline." Basically, she had cut and pasted my column titled True North in its entirety and then had changed a few details and words so that it was her story and not mine. I wrote back and politely told her that my column was copyrighted and her use of the whole document didn't fall under fair use. That she was welcome to quote a few lines, but that she needed to write her own blasted column. Well, to be honest, I didn't say blasted and the word I was thinking of didn't begin with B. Mostly I was baffled that she'd imagine that this sort of thing is permissible.

Copyright and fair use is difficult to explain and I don't understand all the intricacies of it. I always try to attribute everything I use here and use what's in the public domain. Again, difficult to define. Which is why this piece by Jane Friedman is so welcome. Here is the link.

Questions to ask yourself before you plot

I've been working on a memo for a client and created these questions that I thought I'd pass along. You can find them here.

Fog is thick and haunting this morning here in the Northwest.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Quick Take:

Just like dandelions, adverbs grow thick roots when left undisturbed. Serious weeding is needed if you plan to get those suckers out of your manuscript.
And that’s only if you can find them.
See, for many novice writers, adverbs are like miniature Klingon warships, zipping around your manuscript with their cloaking devices activated. They hide in plain sight until an agent or editor requests a partial, and then BAM—they drop their cloak and wave their little “-ly” appendages like pirates toting skull and crossbones flags. We hates them, precious.  ~ Heather Howland

Mark Twain’s Rules of Story Writing

1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.
2. The episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.
3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.
6. When the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it.
8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” by either the author or the people in the tale.
9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.

11. The characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

In addition to these large rules, there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:

1. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
2. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
3. Eschew surplusage.
4. Not omit necessary details.
5. Avoid slovenliness of form.
6. Use good grammar.
7. Employ a simple and straightforward style

Thought for the day: Noticing
"You know what I believe? I remember in college I was taking this math class, this really great math class taught by this tiny old woman. She was talking about fast Fourier transforms and she stopped midsentence and said, 'Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.' That's what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it - or my observation of it - is temporary?" ~ John Green

Just for fun:Handy Field Guide to Thriller Characters via Chelsea Cain
Trust me, this list is too good to be true from the ever-talented thriller author Chelsea Cain. If you haven't read her series set in Portland, you're missing a thrill ride.

Question for Writers: The legendary Etta James died today and I'm working with her songs playing in the background, giving me chills and stirring the deepest parts of me. What if we wrote the way she sang? That is, bringing in every part of us. What if we transformed all the pain, rage, angst, worry, faith, fragility, fierceness, and hope onto the page?

It's been raining, deluging, flooding around here and I'm home at my computer watching it all, working on a memo to a client. Phone just rang with cancelled dinner plans for tomorrow night--they cannot get out of their driveway since it's underwater. Like six feet of water.

    Quick Take:

      Everything a character does should not only forward the plot, but should also be designed to allow the reader to discover more about that character- -and in particular, to learn the vital elements (secrets, emotional needs, desires, inner conflict, attitudes)  that are relevant to the story.

Making It in Tough & Changing Times One-Day Writing Conference

What do Editors Want?

With the publishing world changing at a dizzying pace sometimes writers wish they owned a crystal ball or had more access to editors' thinking about the current marketplace. Here's a link to an article where British editors weigh in on the topic.

To find out what Adam O' Connor Rodriguez editor at Hawthorne Books is looking for in a query to their publishing house, join us on Saturday, January 28th for Making It in Tough & Changing Times. Contact me for information.

Update from Planet Published

Here is the livecast of LP O'Bryan's book launch in Dublin.  http://twitcasting.tv/lpobryan/movie/3478923. What a great crowd! In it he mentions how he began writing every day 12 years ago.

Planet Published

In the past year the number of writers I know who are now or are soon-to-be on Planet Published has risen dramatically. LP O'Bryan wrote to me from Ireland about a year or so ago after he read my book Bullies, Bastards, & Bitches, How to Write the Bad Guys in Fiction. I've been following his progress since then.

I remember the first day I started writing that book. I had gotten the contract from Writer's Digest in March, but I was finishing another book at the time, so I pushed the project off until May.  The morning came around that I need to start working on it and I walked into my office with such fear and worry. How the hell was I going to get across my ideas? No one had written a book about characters like the one I was proposing. I wanted readers to take risks with their protagonists, I wanted to really nail the role anti-heroes in contemporary storytelling, and talk about creating fully-drawn villains. I wanted to remind writers that all characters are vulnerable.

I was scared when I wrote the book and I stayed scared throughout writing it. The book got written,with lots of hiccups and back and forths with my great editor Kelly Nickell. She didn't like the early drafts, my logic, my organization. So there was a lot of rewriting and heart ache. But it was published and I hear from a lot of writers about how they learned from it. Back to LP O'Bryan. He writes:   

"On the 10th December 2010 I attended a crime writing workshop at Harper Collins' offices in Hammersmith, west London. While I was there I met an editor. She asked to see the novel I was working on.

One year, one month and nine days later that novel is out in mass market paperback format all over the UK and Ireland. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Turkey and Greece are all expected to release the novel this year. The name of then novel is The Istanbul PuzzleIt is the first in a series of novels featuring Sean Ryan and Isabel Sharp, being published by Harper Collins. The Istanbul Puzzle starts when Sean discovers a friend and colleague has been beheaded in Istanbul." O'Bryan risked so much to get this book published, since he's a husband and father. You can read Chapter 1 here. Also, check out his whole blog, author's site, noticing how effective it is at telling his story and selling his books.

You know the drill: Keep writing, keep dreaming, and support other writer's dreams and accomplishments.  Meanwhile,  I'll keep bringing more stories and interviews from Planet Published.



Photo by Bellen Drake

 Monica Drake on Writing

A few years ago I appeared on a panel about writing with Monica Drake at Marylhurst. I remember being impressed with her approach to writing, her vast curiosity about so many aspects of the planet, and her steadfast belief in the power of words. She's the author of a novel Clown Girl, has published short stories and essays, and teaches writing at Pacific Northwest College of Arts.  She has been the recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts Award, the Alligator Juniper Prize in Fiction, and a Millay Colony Fellowship, and was a Tennessee Williams scholar at Sewanee Writers Workshop.

Q: I recall you mentioning that your parents were poets, that you grew up with a mimeograph machine in your household, and writers visited your home. Since many of us didn't experience that sort of background, could you please talk about this and other things that influenced you to be a writer?


A: My father, Albert Drake, grew up in the Lents area of Portland, aka "Felony Flats." It was a working-class, mostly white neighborhood, the same area that later raised Tonya Harding, among others. For reasons he can't explain, when he was about six he started keeping a journal. Nobody around him was a reader, much less a writer. The basic act of writing things down changed my father's life. It's how he made a life.Writing brought him from poverty to college, the first one in his family to go to college, at Portland State, then to grad school at the University of Oregon. He landed a great job at Michigan State, where he ran a small press, the Red Cedar Review. 

My life wouldn't be the same if my father didn't start writing. 

My parents met in grad school, and I was born into the U of O writing program. 

We did have a mimeograph machine on the front porch. We bought what's called a "clam shell" letter press in California, and drove with it back to Michigan, and later brought it back to Oregon. If you know how heavy even a small letter press is, all that hauling it back and forth starts to seem like craziness, but my family valued this kind of thing. 

My mother is also a writer, a poet and essayist. She has a number of publications, including a how-to book, Writing Poetry, that continues to sell years after initial publication. It's the kind of book writers find and love, and carry around until its tattered.

When I was a kid, they taught Poets-in-the-schools programs, and they'd take us, the three kids, along. I had more poetry workshops than any other child in Michigan. We'd work on concrete poetry as a regular habit.

These days, my father still publishes work, now as Flat Out Press, with an emphasis on automotive history. My mother, Barbara Drake, recently retired from teaching at Linfield, in McMinnville, Oregon, and is writing, too.
Q: In Clown Girl, your protagonist Nita, or Sniffles is a professional clown complete with  balloon-tying skills and pratfalls.  What was your inspiration for this story and do you ever find clowns creepy? 

Clowns, creepy?
A: Ha! Well...I suppose sometimes they are, but sometimes ordinary people are creepy too, right? 

A long time ago I worked as a clown. I didn't set out to be a clown, didn't have "the calling" necessarily, but work came along and it paid well, and one job lead to another. After serving as a clown, every job I've had ever since has drawn on clown skills. A person might not realize it, but even teaching takes performance skills, and clown work is based on risk taking. Writing is all about risk taking. It's one and the same. I hope my novel shows the parallel in creative urges, and the urge toward possibly foolish self expression in the name of being known, in the name of finding love.

Q: Since you also teach writing at PNCA, how do you balance writing, teaching, and parenthood? I believe other writers would especially be interested in how you weave small increments of writing time into a larger project. 

A: This is hard. I've been working since I was fourteen, when I worked for the Michigan AFL-CIO on behalf of the Carter campaign when he lost to Regan. Since then, I've always had one or two or sometimes three jobs. My own creative work has been a way for me to hang on to my humanity at times when I've played a cog in the wheel, working at Burger King as a teenager, with late hours that caused me to drop out of high school. But stories I came across, like Updike's, "A&P," and Orwell's  "Down and Out in Paris and London," showed me how work could be the source of art. Later, in college, I moved into restaurant jobs, offices, traveling art auctions--anything to pay the bills. Some jobs were more fantastic than others, like interning at the Oregon Zoo, and working as a paid intern at the Smithsonian, but overall I've really never had much in the way of "time off." So I'm used to writing when I can, not to a strict schedule. I keep details and stories in mind and throw them on the page when I find time. Then I carry the pages around and return to them, making changes and adding details, ideas. Slowly, the work comes together.

Now that I'm a mom there's another aspect to the ongoing time struggle. Writing is important to me, so I fight to give it space when I can, without letting it become an added stress. 

I write late at night, and I still carry my pages with me, marking edits and ideas when I have a minute.  

Q: Can you offer any insights on finding or perhaps hearing a character's voice and then translating it to the page? 



 A:  I'm not really sure how to advise on that. For me, sometimes the voice just is apparent. The words, content and delivery appear as one character, a world view. 

As a child I was big on dolls. I know it's not cool to say that--girls like to claim they massacred their Barbies. But I played with all kinds of dolls obsessively, and I think it laid the foundation for writing. Dolls tell stories through voice and actions. When I get too serious about my work, I imagine I'm still playing dolls. It keeps it all in perspective, and grants me freedom to mess around. 

Q: What is your best advice to writers in 12 words or less?

Every sentence should set the tone, advance the plot, define the character.

Q: Sushi or pasta? 

A: Ha! That's a hard one. Sushi in the summer, pasta in the winter.

Q: What's on your night stand? 

Clutter. And a Kindle, I admit. I've got thrillers by Chelsea Cain, and I'm re-reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest right now.

Q: What's next for you?

I'm working on a novel set in Arizona, which I hope speaks back to a lot of what's going on there in terms of the environment and racial tensions. They've just banned all books by Native American and Mexican authors. That's incredibly backward. But the novel I'm writing is also a supernatural psychological thriller. Thanks for asking! 

Monica will be teaching on January 28th at Making It in Tough & Changing Times Conference Her workshop is called One Strong Sentence After Another. Here is the description: Editor Gordon Lisch  famously said that good writing is a matter of one strong sentence after another. In this craft workshop we’ll examine techniques that 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.

Thought for the Day:
"When I am taken by a subject, by a situation, the words tend to bubble up. Sometimes they stutter, but what you describe as the dance between thought and action is not at all conscious – it has to be a natural flow. Well, that’s not entirely true, I am so in the habit of measuring words that there is a little editor at the gates of wherever it is that the language comes out in my brain, and that little editor is kind of like a person hired to watch an assembly line of, say, beer bottles, and the bottles go rattling past him, and his job is to pick off the misshapen ones or the ones that are only half full – but it is important that he not stop the flow, if you see what I mean. So the process is not conscious, but at the same time there is a conscious witness to it who keeps the flow moving as best he can. The process has to be a natural flow. As Robert Coover said, the best stories he’s written were ones that he let happen. Or as Beckett said, about Waiting for Godot, it all happened between the hand and the page.

But as you also suggest, during the revision process, you have to take a certain control of it all – but you can take so much control that you destroy something. I’ve experienced that. You don’t want to take too much control of it – you have to let the creative impulse have its movement. You have to let it happen.

As Henry Miller said, “You have to listen when the Muse sings, or you get excommunicated.” And sometimes the Muse might sing a song you don’t want to hear. Miller, for example, talked about trying at first to resist the song of his tropics books. Like, “No, please, don’t make me write that, they’ll kill me.” But if you don’t listen, it goes dry.~ Thomas E. Kennedy

Update:
The full scholarship for the mini conference has now been taken by a deserving writer, but a half scholarship is still available. Tell your friends.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

2012 can be your break out year 

At last, a practical one-day conference filled with just the information that you need to propel your writing career to the next level and muscle your way to publication.  We’ll cover everything from creating potent sentences and writing irresistible query letters, to writing killer openers and making it as a writer in a media-saturated world. 

Making It in Tough & Changing Times Mini Writing Conference

 January 28th

Times: 8:30-5:30

Location: Tabor Space, 5441 S.E. Belmont, Portland, OR

Keynote by Christina Katz The Prosperous Writer: Tips For Navigating The Gig Economy

Workshops: One Strong Sentence After Another, Monica Drake; Killer Openers, Jessica Morrell; Anatomy of a Scene, Jessica Morrell; Paring it Down to the Truth, Emily Whitman; What Editors Want, Adam O’Connor Rodriguez.

Panel/Q & A: Risk It To Get Published with Christina Katz, Jessica Morrell, and Adam O’Connor Rodriguez

Cost: $99 includes continental breakfast and lunch

 ALSO: A scholarship and half price scholarship are available. Please

contact me with details about your circumstances.

To register: Contact Jessica Morrell at jessicapage (at) spiritone(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

Writers, we are a community. I work hard to support your endeavors and dreams with this blog, my website and newsletters, classes, and books. Please support me in return by telling other writers about this conference.

A new word is like a fresh seed
sewn on the ground of the discussion.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Food for Thought: Kids Books are Selling ...and Selling

Here's a list  compiled of the 100 bestselling books for 2011. A few things will jump out at you--that many familiar names are included in the list; that many of the books were written years ago; and that 25% of the books are written for kids. YA is still hot for those of you who doubt. And book number 100? Goodnight Moon first written in 1947.

Quick Take: Tone
"Tone is the personal attitude writers being to their work. Just as in music a note has a specific pitch that characterizes it as a C or D sharp, so a writer's work has its own distinguishing sound as well. This sound can be joyous or self important; it can be bland, aloof, scientific, tongue-in-cheek--you name it. Inappropriate tone tends to confuse and finally to repel readers; just as a dull tone bores them, a self-righteous tone angers them...Careful writers are aware of this fact, and they mold their tone to conform to their listener's ear." ~ David L. Carroll

One space rule

Fine, clearing sky this morning and it looks like another remarkable day without rain. This winter is setting records for the lack thereof.

I've mentioned in a previous post that only space is required after each sentence. This change has come about with the use of computers replacing typewriters in the writing biz. Here's an article from  Slate that explains the reasons in more detail, such as, "A space signals a pause," says David Jury, the author of About Face: Reviving The Rules of Typography. "If you get a really big pause—a big hole—in the middle of a line, the reader pauses. And you don't want people to pause all the time. You want the text to flow."

Keep writing, keep dreaming, punctuate using logic

Baby Steps

I believe in baby steps, especially when it comes to writing books. If you tackle the whole project head on, it's bound to be overwhelming. For more suggestions on taking baby steps go here.


Quick Take:

Avoid appending up to verbs as in hurry up, lift up,  stood up, climbed up, rose up, spoke up. Up is rarely needed as an adverb.Standing or lifting implies an upward cast...

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart