Scholarship available

Folks in the Portland area. I have one scholarship available for my upcoming Anchor Scenes workshop that is happening this Saturday, May 11 in Southeast Portland.
Contact me for details.

On the radio

Today


9A.M. Pacific time ...talking writing with Susan Rich and AnneMarie Schuetz
on W4WN Internet Radio find it here

If you need a bit of a laugh

about the writing life go here to read How Not to Write a Novel (or much of anything)

A simple style is like white light. Although complex, it does not appear to be so. ~ Anatole France

All the fun is in how you say a thing. ~ Robert Frost

To plot means to navigate through the dangerous terrain of story and when confronted by a dozen branching possibilities to choose the correct path. Plot is the writer's choice of events and their design in time.  ~ Robert McKee

May

Lauren Kessler

A terrific Q & A with prolific author Lauren Kessler is posted here--the site for Summer in Words Writing Conference. Lauren will be teaching on Friday, June 21. I, for one, will be buying her newest book Counter Clockwise-- chock full of what she's learned about anti-aging. After all, lots to write so I want to keep going....

Quick Take:

Whether you're writing a short story or novel, the problem at the center of the story should be the biggest, baddest, scariest one ever faced by your protagonist. Which means if you're writing a series, things just keep getting worse and worse for your protagonist.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

You write in order to change the world…. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” -James Baldwin

Thought for today: Writer's Block

I've said it before and I'll say it again and again. There is no such malaise called writer's blog. It's just another way of saying (or perhaps not admitting)  I'm lazy. 

Perhaps you, too, have a coach of the interior like mine – bald and cruel, shaking his sweaty pate at your sloth, ridiculing your sentences, professionally contemptuous. Extremely foul-mouthed. A definite misogynist. A voice that reads over your shoulder and snorts with derision at your characters’ dialogue. A voice in cahoots with every other voice that has ever criticized your efforts and ambitions and haircut. He pretends to be all kinds of things: the Voice of Reason, the Voice of Tough Love. But he is a tyrant. He is the enemy of fiction writing. His “pep talks” are actually spells of paralysis, designed to rob you of all confidence and happiness. In order to write your novel, you must get rid of this sadist. Do whatever it takes to shut him up. Chloroform him; drag him by his white Reebox behind the dugout; bury his shrill, censorious whistle. Then return to your green, blank, mercifully silent playing field, and write. ~ Karen Russell

"Writing a novel is gathering smoke. It's an excursion into the ether of ideas. There's no time to waste. You must work with that idea as well as you can, jotting down notes and dialogue." ~ Walter Mosley Find the complete piece here.

D

eep Fiction: The Anchor Scenes

    Taught by Jessica Morrell

May 11, 9:30-4:30

Tabor Space, 5441 S.E. Belmont

Cost: $75

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.  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 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 how change is the basis for scene writing. As part of the lecture we’ll be discussing the anchor scenes in The Old Man and the Sea and the film Witness.   Comprehensive handouts will be included and space is limited.

Nonfiction query letters that actually  worked

find them here
I interviewed the great Betsy Lerner some years ago. I asked her what her number one advice for writers is and she replied, "Learn how to write a beautiful query letter."
Even in changing times this holds true. 

You might also be interested in Chuck Sambuchino's agent query series. 
And this reminds me, I have a few that need writing also....

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Realistic Pain: Hurting Your Darlings

It's an overcast in Portland, the sky the color of washed-out steel. Which means I might not sneak in any gardening today although I've got lots to put in the ground and plants to move.

I'm working on a fiction manuscript for a client and in it the protagonist suffers from chronic pain. It's written in first person and it's teaching me how difficult it is to portray chronic pain in that viewpoint. The writer is striving for accuracy, and it's got me thinking about how often a reader needs to learn about the physical  state of the character. We need to know if he or she is at half strength before and during an action or climax scene. But if your character has a ongoing condition, after a while, the reader will assume the pain persists.

Now I'm all for a deep point of view and realistic depictions. How often have you read a novel where a main character has been riding a horse for twelve hours, then is stabbed in the shoulder, only  to jump off the horse and take down a bad guy, with no repercussions of the wound for the remainder of the story? I don't know about you, but when an injury or medical condition isn't portrayed accurately I'm yanked away from the story, and find myself annoyed at the writer. There needs to be the injury, the immediate reaction to the injury, the treatment and ramifications.  

Here's a resource that I stumbled onto  that will help create realistic broken bones and injuries--in your  characters, that is.

23 fiction query letters that actually worked

Find them here

Hint from AgentQuery: “A query letter is a single page cover letter, introducing you and your book. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less … A query letter has three concise paragraphs: the hook, the mini-synopsis, and your writer’s biography. Don’t stray from this format. You won’t catch an agent’s attention by inventing a creative new query format. You’ll just alienate your chances of being taken seriously as a professional writer. A query letter is meant to elicit an invitation to send sample chapters or even the whole manuscript to the agent.”

"A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the - not always greatly hopeful - belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality."  - Paul Celan

Pulitzer Prize winners

A big congratulations to all the Pulitzer prize winners. Special appreciation for selecting the brave and powerful Sharon Olds for her Stags Leap.
Here is a lovely photo of her and information on Stags Leap in Vogue. Yes, I said Vogue.
Find all the winners here. 

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Quick Take: Your setting must induce tension

Check out Jack London's example: 

Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness - a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozenhearted Northland Wild. White Fang, Jack London

Quick Take: Protagonist

The protagonist in your story is the person who is going to be most hurt and changed by the events in the story. Protagonists must possess: purpose (a need,  desire, or goal, which provides motivation); credibility (proof that he or she is capable and deserves to achieve goal), empathy (enduring when encountering daunting obstacles so readers identify with his or her struggle) and complexity (a knowable inner life, combined with the flaws or contradictions that complicate the situation).