Jessica Lourey > Quotes

“Clive Barker, Stephen King, Angela Carter, and Anne Rice. King's Cujo, the story of a rabid St. Bernard that traps a mother and her dying son in a car, and Rice's Interview with the Vampire, the wildly popular tale of a modern-day Dracula, epitomize the genre.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“To add to the problem, it turns out your neural pathways cement themselves in the case of traumatic events. The result is that some people respond to reminders of stimuli, a condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This trauma-induced reprogramming of the brain explains why it's impossible for many veterans to enjoy Fourth of July fireworks, for example. Their limbic system, the creamy nougat center of the human brain where our memories and emotional lives are housed, has coded “explosion” with “danger,” and so when these veterans hear fireworks, they react as they would, as any of us would, to a bomb going off nearby. From the outside, this condition may appear simple to correct. They're fireworks, not bombs, after all. But neuroimaging proves that when people are merely reminded of trauma, blood flow ramps up in the brain structures associated with extreme emotions and decreases in the areas associated with communication. The sufferer essentially becomes trapped in their own fear, at the mercy of neural patterns. The good news is that writing therapy, along with other mindfulness practices, including dialectical behavior therapy, art therapy, yoga, Qigong, tai chi, Alexander Technique, and meditation, allows you to reprogram your brain. You can literally change your mind.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“Hundreds of studies have since been conducted to figure out how writing heals, because it does mend and transform. Social scientists have established that expressive writing decreases anxiety and depression; reduces pain and complex premenstrual symptoms; improves the body's immune functions including boosting antibody production; enhances working memory, physical performance, and social relationships; reduces illness-related doctor's visits; improves the”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“Francine Prose's exquisite Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them for a deeper guided practice on the art of reading like a writer.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“Let's pause for a simple, shorthand reminder: at its most basic, a novel says “no” to the main character. Repeatedly. Decide what your protagonist wants more than anything and throw ever-larger obstacles in their path until they either reach their goal or realize that they had a different goal all along. Within that framework, only include supporting characters who either help or inhibit your protagonist from reaching that goal.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale,”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“The event or conflict I most want to explore is: _______________ _______________________________________________________________ The qualities (age, gender, one or two personality traits, name if it comes to you) of the character I most want to experience this event are: _______________”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“People who live unexamined lives write boring stories.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“Here's an example. Think of your life ordeals as zombies trying to get in through your front door. You spend all your energy shoulder-to-the-door trying to keep them out—inhibiting the zombies' arrival—which doesn't leave much time or attention for anything else. Your very survival depends on keeping that door closed, but you're exhausted; you can only keep this up for so long, so you finally let down your guard. The zombies charge through, and—what??—you realize there were never any flesh-eating monsters on the other side of the door. It was memories of zombies you were holding back this whole time.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“Prepare with pen and paper. Always have your notebook and something to write with nearby when you read. Your goal is to be prepared for insight. In addition to reading for pleasure, you will now use words as research and write down what you learn. If you prefer, you can dictate into a recorder or type into the Notes section of your phone. Immerse. Get inside the words, the sentences, the story arc. Don't simply stay on the surface of what you're reading, no matter how shallow it seems. Go deep. Examine. If that cereal box makes you excited to eat the sugar doodles, ask yourself what it is about the words and their formatting is doing that for you. If you read that redwood plaque and walk away feeling smart, ask yourself how it pierced your busy mind. If—especially if—you're reading a novel, and you connect with a character, or you find yourself yanked out of the story, or you read a sentence twice to savor the citrus taste of it, or anything else of note happens, study that situation like a lover's face. Write down what you think is happening (“ main character makes stupid choices,” “too many adverbs,” “lots of smells make me feel like I'm right there,” “each chapter ends with a hook,” etc.) because transcribing information flips a switch in our brain, waking up the records guy who then goes over to pick up what you wrote and file it somewhere so you can access it later.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“_______________________________________________________________ The primary setting that best fits this event is: _______________ _______________________________________________________________ The recurring pattern in my life that I want to break free from is: _______________ _______________________________________________________________”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“That is the power of stories, to work on our psyche, to serve as anchors and guideposts in our lives.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know is inspired by the real-life, unsolved mystery of twin sisters Sheila and Kate Lyon. Lippman first heard the story when she was sixteen years old. Never able to shake it, she fictionalized the tale thirty years later.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“The Things They Carried has sold over two million copies internationally, won numerous awards, and is an English classroom staple. Isabel Allende was the first writer to hold me inside a sentence, rapt and wondrous. It's no surprise that her most transformative writing springs from personal anguish. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather whom she could not reach in time. Eva Luna, one of my favorite novels, is about an orphan girl who uses her storytelling gift to survive and thrive amid trauma, and Allende refers to the healing power of writing in many of her interviews. Allende's books have sold over fifty-six million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and been made into successful plays and movies. Such is the power of mining your deep. Jeanette Winterson acknowledges that her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her own story of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian household in the 1950s. She wrote it to create psychic space from the trauma. In her memoir, she writes of Oranges, “I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.” Sherman Alexie, who grew up in poverty on an Indian reservation that as a child he never dreamed he could leave, does something similar in his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, named one of the “Best Books of 2007” by School Library Journal. He has said that fictionalizing life is so satisfying because he can spin the story better than real life did. Nora Ephron's roman à clef Heartburn is a sharply funny, fictionalized account of Ephron's own marriage to Carl Bernstein. She couldn't control his cheating during her pregnancy or the subsequent dissolution of their marriage, but through the novelization of her experience, she got to revise the ending of that particular story. In Heartburn, Rachel, the character based on Ephron, is asked”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“Have a pen handy so you can sketch notes about anything you learn about character development as you watch, paying particular attention to how you are first introduced to the protagonist and antagonist, how you are asked to empathize with them, their strongest personality traits, main goals, main obstacles, fears, the manner of their evolution or devolution, and how you feel about them and why. Your goal in taking these notes is to pull back the curtain on what makes for a nuanced, compelling fictional character so you can employ those qualities in your own writing. If you prefer a table to guide your note-taking as you view the films, please refer to Appendix B.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“Think Gone with the Wind as an illustration of historical romance. Nora Roberts' The Obsession, the love story between a woman abused when she was young and a good-hearted mechanic with the added mystery of an outside obsession running through it, is a great example of romantic suspense, and Jennifer Crusie's Welcome to Temptation, described as “blackmail, adultery, murder, vehicular abuse of a corpse, and slightly perverse but excellent sex,” as an example of a humorous romance.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“Writing makes everything better. It's tied to how our brains are wired. We are creatures of habit, evolved animals who perceive stimuli, run it through our limbic system, attach significance to it, and then respond. Stimulus—significance—response. Here's an example. Let's say you're stuck in traffic. The traffic jam is a stimulus. It's the job of your amygdala, an almond-shaped glob of neurons housed deep in your brain, to process stimuli, organizing events into emotional memories. Your amygdala codes this particular experience with frustration, which is the significance you attach to it. You respond to this emotion by swearing and mentally squishing the heads of the people in the cars around you. This swearing and mental-head-squishing response becomes your established action pattern any time you perceive a stimulus that your amygdala has classified as frustrating. Stimulus—significance—response. Traffic jam—frustration—mental head squishing.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“As Baca tells it, that's our job as writers, to strip away the artifice and expectations of life and talk to the world in the dark. Honestly. Authentically. With vulnerability and fear and hope. This is nowhere more important than when you're crafting the people who will populate your novel. The motivations and desires of your characters drive your story and are the engine of your personal transformation. Crafting believable and compelling fictional characters turbo boosts real-life empathy and strengthens social skills as well as coping mechanisms because it guides the writer to consider other people's motives and desires, the consequences of choice and of action, and the complexity of life.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“In Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, expressive therapy pioneer Dr. James W. Pennebaker devotes several chapters to the history and power of personal honesty. According to his extensive studies, all humans have inappropriate thoughts, fears, and uncomfortable memories. The best way to move past them is to travel through them.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“If you still believe you need a pass to enter the writing club, I offer you this: transgenerational epigenetics strongly suggests that a sense of trauma can be passed down to you from your ancestors up to four generations back. That means if Great-Grandma Esther had a rough time of it, you can feel emotionally sapped even if your life is relatively good.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“Writing fiction allows me to distance myself, to become a spectator to life's roughest seas. It gives form to our wandering thoughts, lends empathy to our perspective, allows us”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“Organize Reread your five freewriting entries (or mentally revisit them if you burned them) and your nine surprise visit entries. Underline what stands out to you, using it to create a personal sketch as I've done on the previous pages. It's for your eyes only. Be candid. At the end of each sketch, write at least two sentences speculating how you could use what you've discovered as either a character trait or a plotline in your novel, similar to what I've done in my Step Three example. Don't worry if you're vague at this point. Each exercise in this book builds on the one before it, so you'll be guided toward how to develop your novel at each step in the process.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“He broke plot structure into three acts, coinciding with the audience need for intermission. The first act includes the story setup, popularly referred to as the “inciting incident.” The stakes continue to rise in the second act and include a false victory, that point where you think the story is over but it turns out it's not. The false victory is referred to as a major reversal because the trajectory of the story reverses. The climax comes in the third act, followed by the denouement, a French word meaning “to untie,” which perfectly describes the cleaning up of any loose ends that happens at the end of a narrative.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“My Struggle series by Karl Ove Knausgaard.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“physical and mental states of Alzheimer patients' caregivers, cancer patients, and people with HIV; reduces the symptoms of asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and eating disorders; and positively addresses a host of PTSD symptoms. In fact, a recent pilot study of eleven veterans diagnosed with PTSD found that after a dozen sessions of narrative therapy, not only did over half of the veterans experience a clinically significant reduction of PTSD symptoms, but a quarter of them no longer met the criteria for PTSD.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“The novel you will craft will function as both your lighthouse and the Viking funeral boat upon which you get to burn your garbage once and for all.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“devote a page to “Childhood,” and include where and when you were born along with seminal memories. For example, a driving emotion of my childhood was a sense of spiritual power and connectedness.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“In addition to increasing empathy, neurobiological research proves that reading fiction changes the biology of the brain, making it more receptive and connected. Reading novels also makes you more creative and open-minded, gives you psychological courage, and keeps your brain active and healthy. The therapeutic value of reading novels is so profound that it has birthed something called bibliotherapy, in which clients are matched with a literary fiction designed to address what is ailing them, from mild depression to a troubled intimate relationship to a desire to find a work/ family balance. Anyone who belongs to a book club has likely experienced a version of fiction's healing powers. The value of reading is even more significant if you're a writer. Imagine being a chef who eats only chicken nuggets, a carpenter who refuses to look at buildings, or an orchestra conductor who doesn't listen to anything but commercial jingles. Such is the problem for a writer who doesn't read regularly and widely.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“Literary or mainstream fiction: a story in which the protagonist wants to better understand a universal human truth or their place in the world. Romance: a story in which the main character wants love. Western: a story set in the Old West and in which the main character wants things to be fair, and black and white. Horror: a story in which the main character wants to over-come fear and survive. Science fiction: a story in which the main character wants to better understand a universal human truth or their place in the world, plus often find an escape, set in the future. Fantasy: a story in which the main character needs an object and an adventure (whether they know it or not), set in a fantasy world. Mystery (including all its subgenres, such as thrillers and private eye novels): a story in which the main character wants justice. Young adult: a story in which the main character is twelve to eighteen years old and wants at least one of the above (the same applies to middle grade, except the main character is eight to twelve years old).”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction

“Choose an idea that speaks to you, one that is borne of personal experience and authentic emotion; flesh it out so you know who the main character is, where it will take place, what the central conflict is, and its theme; use every single good idea that comes to you; and plan on writing this book to one person. Carry that powerful potion forward to the next four chapters, where I'm going to show you, step-by-step, how to transform it into a novel that heals. Chunk. Everything is going to fall into place. 1 I'm going to call him Dale here, to protect the guilty.”
― Jessica Lourey, Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction