Jess Wells

Justification to remove statues of Civil War generals is straightforward – there are no statues of Hitler in Germany so there should be no statues built to American proponents of slavery. (I was shocked to hear that 35 Confederate statues have been erected in North Carolina since 2000!) And we should take note that the Germans have taken a very thorough approach to removing visual reminders of World War II, as described here.

But I would also join the chorus of voices calling for the removal of statues that celebrate the racial oppression of Native Americans, perhaps starting with “End of the Trail,” a heartbreaking reminder of brutality

 Read More 

At first, I thought it was just because I was watching period dramas and that it lent verisimilitude to the piece to have a character smoke a cigarette, but the more frequent the occurrence, the more suspicious I became and yes, in fact it’s true: the incidences of tobacco use in movies has increased 72% according to a Center for Disease Control report issued in July 2017! And it is up 43% in the youth-focused films. Women are smoking as they sit on sofas, when they walk through the kitchen pondering. Characters are chain smoking, using cigarettes as a pause in the dialogue. Men smoke cigarettes in cars.

And the CDC again reiterated that “there is a causal relationship between depictions of smoking in the movies  Read More 

 I discovered The Ascent of Woman on Netflix, an excellent piece by Dr. Amanda Foreman that is quite unique in that it isn’t simple, flashy biographies of a couple of women through history, it is a clear, accessible, and well-written series on the overall rights of women through history as well as revelations of great women of the time, not as an anomaly but as key players in history who have been written out.

 

Dr. Foreman says that the condition of women is not a straight-forward march from darkness to light, from subjugation to freedom but a journey  Read More 

Journalists need a good advocacy program, some serious public relations efforts to remind people why journalism is important, why a free press is so essential. Here are some suggestions that aim to inform the public and change their attitude toward the press:

1. Fact checking:

Why doesn’t the New York Times and other newspapers make it clear front and center what they do to verify facts?

• Make it clear that there are multiple sources and statistics are always backed up.
• Make public the number of people whose sole job it is to check the facts.
• Make more prominent the relationship between newspapers and fact-checking organizations.
• Spell out the fact that journalists are not allowed to vote, protest, and remind people of how much they give up because of their work on our behalf in the name of truth.
• Let’s develop a way that it’s easy to compare publication to publication, some chart almost like calories on a package of food. PolitFact ranking of X vs. Fox News ranking of Y

2. And speaking of truth,

 Read More 

Most explanations for the difference between nonfiction and fiction have to do with the reality of the material in nonfiction. Nonfiction is true and fiction is from the imagination. I would suggest, though, that there are a number of other distinctions:

Fiction is a close-in view of life. Think of going from nonfiction to fiction like the process of Google maps as it zooms in from a position in the stratosphere, zooming down into your backyard. And even closer than your backyard, zoomed in to the exact expression on someone’s face sitting at your picnic table on a particular day. It is the close-in view of life. The buttons on a man’s shirt says something about his character that is germane to the story as opposed to an essay on the changing fashions in men’s shirts that may have referenced the same button.

Fiction is focused on emotion. Emotional acuity is probably the most important trait of a fiction writer. Fiction is the only artform that describes the internal thoughts of individual people. It hangs on the ability to describe subtle changes in internal beliefs. Journalism and nonfiction seek to move you to action by giving you information or describing patterns from a higher level -- in the whole city, the whole county, a part of the population, or a social trend. Fiction, on the other hand, wants to transform you, to make you a different person by participating in the emotional journey of someone else, by witnessing the unfolding of an emotional transformation. It doesn’t matter whether the character is real or imaginary: historical fiction focused on previously living people is still fiction.

Fiction actively courts the participation of all of your senses. It is not merely a conceptual or informative piece. Fiction’s goal is to make you feel the dust of the road on your face, to smell the flowers, to not inform you but to transport you.

Fiction’s theme is hidden. The concept or theme that is the purpose of the story is designed to be subtext, to be the hidden wiring, not the lead. The theme is still essential (and frequently overlooked by beginning writers.) Fiction, like all art, isn’t about an event, it’s about the human condition and your unique take on it.

How many arggghs are there in arthritis? What a drag – the thing I love to do most in the world is now so painful that every time I think of something to write I ask “is it worth the pain?” Every task around the house is judged according to its impact on my hands. (A friend called it ‘wrist cycles.’) Do I really want to spend my now-limited wrist cycles on pulling weeds, untangling that extension cord, chopping a big pile of carrots, peeling beets, sorting junk in the garage?

Admittedly, I'm still productive using the Dragon (speech recognition software that is perhaps more accurately described as speech approximation software) but sometimes I get sick of yammering on out loud and correcting ridiculous errors on the Dragon’s part. But there’s still something second-rate about dictating instead of typing. Typing feels more private, secretive, as if thoughts and words could be kept from parts of one's own brain, apparently. A microphone just doesn’t have the allure of the keyboard.

The keyboard has been my shield (if I write it down it can’t plague me); it is my segue into the world. It is my paint brush, my guitar. When I was a teenager I would watch television in a recliner with my hands clasped in front of me typing all the dialogue on the backs of my hands, including all the punctuation and carriage returns. For hours at a time. Not the ads, but all the dialogue of all the shows.

 

I was motivated in part by my mother’s typing speed-- legendary in the family-- so it felt like family tradition when I hit 120 words per minute. I have slowed quite a bit and last year sat in the office next to a much younger woman who typed that fast, nonstop, for hours at a time, as I once had. Unnerving. The contrast between how I used to type and how I type now was so disheartening that I asked to move desks.

My first typewriter was a small white manual Corona and as if it was yesterday I can see opening my bedroom door and seeing the desk lamp shining on the white typewriter, the only light in the room. Beckoning. Between one of my years in college I went to Washington DC on an internship with the National Organization for Women (NOW). At that time, I wanted to become a lawyer and advocate for women. I'm not sure what the other tasks were among the staff (this is a world before email that keeps us all at keyboards all the time) but I missed typing so much that I volunteered to type the NOW president’s speeches. I had to have a keyboard under my fingertips.

I only have a few objects that I consider heirlooms and two of them are typewriters. My mother had a behemoth of an IBM Selectric and the ball bouncing and twisting was one of the bright sounds of my childhood. I have it in the garage zipped in a plastic blanket bag. I also have my grandfather’s field typewriter, very small, that originally came in a black box with a self-contained stand – the legs folded out from a special compartment. It sits next to my mother’s, honored objects both.

#JessWells, #arthritis, #writerslife

Setting is not simple backdrop, like a green screen on which a film is shot. Setting in fiction plays an important role in plot and characterization. Whether you write sci-fi, historicals, or modern fiction, your setting can make or break your story. So, what are some of the keys to a well-drawn fictional world?

Four Major Mistakes with Setting
Setting is frequently considered the easiest and most fun part of writing. A writer seems happiest when describing rooms, clothing, smells in the air, the look of the lights, the weather. This focus makes sense, since we’ve spent a lot of our lives deciphering objects and their meanings. As fiction writers, we’re focused on the close-in vision of things. Big-concept people write essays. Fiction writers know that it says a lot when the curtains are torn versus curtains festooned with gold thread.
But I’m finding that there are at least four major mistakes with setting. Many writers:

 

1. Over-do it with too much explanation and description, getting lost in the wallpaper and descriptions of the light.
2. Make it inconsistent with theme or the characterization
3. Leave it too shallow by describing just the house. For all the time spent on descriptions of rooms, not enough time is spent on the geologic, geographic and structural underpinnings of the fictional world -- the rivers, bridges, tides, and swamps etc. We rarely take the time to step back and look at the larger landscape.
4. Most frequently however, we waste it. When it’s written as if you’re just painting a picture, you’re wasting the setting.

What Is a Setting That Works?

Setting is a mirror of the character: imagine a character who is immaculate in his dress but has a messy room (denoting someone who considers public appearance important while more genuinely being a slob), or an old man who lives in a basement hovel, invited into a ridiculously splendid mansion. Setting denotes social status and class background, as well as character attributes such as thrift, the tendency to hoard, forgetful disorganization, etc. For example: “On the last street in the village, down past where the earth bridge had caved in, Rebecca made her home amid the stubborn roots of an old bush.” What does this tell us about Rebecca’s class standing? Her inclusion in the community? How close to the edge she is living? How prosperous is a town with a caved-in earth bridge?

But most importantly, and most frequently overlooked, is the fact that setting can drive plot.

Six key ways that setting drives plot:

1. Provides congregation and diversity
2. Controls the movement of characters
3. Hightens tension
4. Establishes authority
5. Challenges the protagonist in his/her quest
6. Assist in disturbing the status quo

Let’s take each of those in turn:
1. Provide congregation and diversity: a setting can orchestrate the meeting of people who wouldn’t ordinarily congregate. Think of the crossroads where there is the unexpected arrival of travelers with no other connection. Or, think of the day care center where people from different classes, racial groups, age groups in different parts of town all meet in the same place. What about the barbershop, the post office, the communal garden? And then of course there is the neighborhood bar, frequently described in stories and film because characters emote heavily, and then leave.

2. Controls movement of characters: setting allows you to control the ebb and flow of action. If your story is set on a ship, for instance, there’s no way your character can simply walk away from difficulty. Subway cars that break down trap a small number of people together with no way out. Settings also present obstacles that keep groups of characters separate, simplifying your work. People in the village won’t see the mountain folk until the summer when the pass is open. Every time you have a geographic or physical barrier between characters, your plot is easier to manage than when everyone has total access to everyone else all the time. A physical barrier answers the questions: “Why didn’t she just leave? Why didn’t they know?” Physical boundaries can act as bottlenecks, which allows you to control their meetings, put them into conflict, or tie all the ends together (e.g. the storm abates, the supply ship arrives etc.)

3. Heightens tension: setting increases tension by adding deadlines to the completion of the hero/heroine’s journey. For example, the wormhole closes on Tuesday and the captives must extricate themselves in time; the tide goes out early in the morning and your characters must be on the ship or lose their chance at starting over in the New World. Setting can help you answer the key question in any story: “Why now?”

4. Establishes authority: setting can allow a single character or group of characters to have information that they can leverage. Think of the boy in the belfry and what he can see that no one else can. What about the shepherdess on the hill above town? Setting can also designate special routes for special people such as hidden caves, secret passageways, the hole in the wall gang protected by the obscure entrance to their hideout. And the sudden access to information or authority, created by a change in the setting, can be a powerful element in a story. Imagine a hole that is suddenly created in the floor of the maid’s room that allows her to hear secret conversations in the master bedroom below.

5. Challenges the protagonist: setting can also act as the goal for the protagonist’s journey. There was a reason that the ring had to be thrown into the fire of Mordor instead of any other fire. There’s a reason that apocalyptic stories frequently involve a journey to the radio station, or the last boat off the mainland. Setting can also create dependencies between characters that wouldn’t be there otherwise. For example, only Gollum knew the way through the Swamp of the Dead which made the Hobbits continue to rely on him. And setting is a great way to kill off characters when they have finished serving their purpose.

6. Assists in disturbing the status quo: setting can be an important catalyst that sets the story in motion. Think of the blizzard or the flood that cuts off parts of town and makes unlikely people band together. Think of the train wreck or the storm that sets your characters in previously unknown territory. A drought drives people off the land…and so on.

I was taught that a good story is like a machine: there’s no room for any superfluous cog, screw or washer. Likewise, setting isn’t just “atmosphere” – it has a job to do to move your story forward.



I teach a workshop in The Literary Landscape: Settings That Work Hard for Your Story at The Writing Salon, at the recent Rally of Writers, and elsewhere. Please join me if you can.

#JessWells, #TheWritingSalon, #writerslife,

I used to think I was too hyperactive for Buddhism. I have a visceral reaction to phrases like “clear your mind” and “treat thoughts like clouds that will pass by” (a lovely visual but one that devalues the thought.) It felt like yet another instance of the pressure I have been under all my life – sit still, stay on task, march in a straight line, don’t daydream, be more like an accountant and less like a dancer. The superiority of the quiet and contained, left-brained and linear! Arggh!

 

Even walking meditations were a struggle for me because my fellow practitioners were covering 3 feet in five minutes as I was sprinting around the retreat grounds. I found no joy in trying to go to an empty place. To sit still and drain my mind sounded like Orwellian hell, like Stepford spirituality. But then I was introduced to the power of the mantra.

Loving My Monkey Mind

In Buddhist practice one is encouraged to contain or suppress the mind that jumps from topic to topic, distracting you with a mind-bauble here and a silly thought there – the Monkey Mind. As an alternative, I think of a hummingbird, which I consider my totem animal. But I am an artist and in many ways, I consider my monkey mind to be the best part of me. New ideas come from mental wandering, from allowing your mind to jump from a grocery list to a new idea for water conservation, to a great idea about the organic food supply chain, to a child’s toy, and a remembrance of a store in France. Creativity comes in the spaces between two decisions, in the unusual combination of things previously unrelated. And that’s the way both daydreaming and the monkey work: they allow the combination of things previously unrelated.

(In contrast, a man I know insisted that his young children pack up all the elements of one game before getting out another. Hearing that made my monkey holler because a creative environment would let the child take Lincoln Logs and add them to a Lego house topped with doll clothing and stuffed bears. Creativity, in this case literally demands being out-of-the-box.)

Allowing my monkey the freedom of mental association drives my life. My monkey is responsible for all my art and my livelihood as well. She has thought up the plots and twists (and even the metaphors, I’ll bet) of every story and novel I have written. As a freelance marketing manager my monkey thinks up product ideas, TV scripts, odd ways to achieve a goal. My monkey has put food on my table for decades; she keeps the roof over my head and the joy in my life. I love my monkey mind. I would dress her up if I could, make grateful offerings to her and always encourage her to run wild.

Upon hearing this, I’m imaging that devotees will tell me that I am misinterpreting the concept, that there is a time and place for the monkey though not in the temple. But she is a monkey – untamable, unpredictable, somewhat annoying in her glorious unpredictability. Besides, it might be one of the only times you listen to her – in the gumpa, where the clutter of the world falls away and your monkey shows you wisdom. Your daydreams are tremendously powerful, metaphorical and visual communications with yourself. They have important messages. Why aren’t we encouraging one to breathe deeply, be calm, and then pull the thoughts to you, like trying to scoop falling leaves to your chest.

Still, the first time I got on the mat, 23 years ago, I was very pregnant and wanted tools to be a better mother, with better coping skills I could pass on to my son-to-be. So, I kept at my Buddhist practice, hoping for a breakthrough.

Every Mantra Counts

I moved from Vipassana Meditation (focused on the breath) to Mahayana Buddhism with its focus on the recitation of mantras. And not just a single mantra, chanted incessantly (the monkey will have none of that – she needs variety as well as action.) Tibetan Buddhism has at least eight core mantras that are each suitable for different situations. Mala in hand, I started memorizing them. Bingo! I found that mantras block out all other thoughts, focus the mind and calm the spirit. Vipassana Meditation and Mahayana Buddhism: same goal, different technique. With mantras, the hyperactive child is not told to sit still but is given a quiet activity requiring focus. I don’t have to renounce my hyperactivity and Monkey Mind when I can harness it. I can say mantras as fast as I can walk; I say them behind the wheel; I say them before going into a meeting with combatants; I say them for the health of our freighted world. It’s not something I do for five minutes in the morning and hope it will carry me through the rest of the day. I say mantras whenever I am challenged by strife, anger, injustice.

For the Betterment of Others

This brings me to another beef I have with the current trendy focus on mindfulness and the breath. In the New York Times article “The Price of Mindfulness Inc." the author suggests that “The people I know who take time to meditate – carefully observing thoughts, emotions and sensations – are sincere in their appreciations to become less stressed, more accepting and at least a little happier.” Described this way it seems to be a self-serving goal. At best, mindfulness sounds like “I will fix me and what’s good for me is good for the world.” In contrast, all Mahayana Buddhism mantras are for the betterment of all sentient beings. The outward focus is an important part of Mahayana Buddhism: you start mantra recitations by declaring that the motivation for them is to better the world; then you say the mantras and then afterward you dedicate the merits of the mantras to the betterment of the world. The article identifies mindfulness as “best understood as a skill, one acquired through hours of sometimes uncomfortable contemplation.” But if one is chanting mantras one not only gathers the benefits of mental focus but also can make a difference in the world by changing the cosmic vibrations. I believe that brain waves affect physical reality and so chanting for peace, compassion, health, forgiveness, and absolution make a difference. (I’m surprised that after the 60s there are still skeptics about the power of a “good vibe.”) To me to just sit and meditate to lose stress is to leave un-harnessed the potential of all that brainpower, at best, and is a self-cherishing pastime at worst.

I say there’s room for a raucous, Noisy Buddhism, with mantras said out loud with bells, shouted at the top of one’s lungs with joy, accompanied by Latin percussion instruments and terrific feet stomping, walking, dancing, and working. Honoring the Buddha in all of us, honoring the creativity of the Monkey Mind and staying dedicated to making the world a better place.

#JessWells, #Buddhism #monkeymind

I have seen it so many times: the look of a young writer who is calculating the odds that they will ‘make it’ in literature. They are checking the ranking of their book on Amazon.com, the hits to their blog, books sold, hours clocked, word count checked daily, tracking shares and likes or any other mathematical measure to give one solace, or some faint indicator that they are approaching their goal of success, at the same time that they practice an art that always raises the bar on quality and holds many in obscurity without reason.

It is akin to using a ruler to judge the taste of cake.

Since we do these numerical calculations while we know that the quality and impact of art cannot be measured with mathematics, I would like to offer some additional math about fiction and the writing life:
 Read More 

The key elements of good storytelling apply to writing the story of your family. I teach a five-week course or one-day workshop that focuses on the keys to storytelling, which I think are: 

• concentrate on the place where the action is greatest
• be very clear about the catalyst for change– the pogrom, the famine, the opportunity
• begin on page one with as much of a punch as you possibly can
• evoke many if not all the senses
• make sure that all characters are nuanced. Even villains must have redeeming qualities or flaws that can be understood.

The Personal Advantages of Writing Your Family Story
Anyone who writes, and anyone contemplating writing knows that it can be a daunting task. The New York Public Library article also reminds us of the personal advantages of writing this story: a better understanding of your family and therefore of yourself; the ability to see a common thread that has driven your ancestors and yourself. There’s the therapeutic nature of writing about your family and the sense of resolution it can provide. It is also an investment in yourself because of its reflective nature.

 Read More