Noah Henry Morriss

  • Returning

    I’ve been rereading Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love collection. His fiction meant a lot to me in college, but I really only read his stories once. I’ve read Cathedral a few times, I’ve listened to it too, but for the most part it’s been one and done. I notice that it makes an impact on me, I note it, but what are you supposed to do with that?

    I’m rereading the collection now. The stories are so short that I’ve been reading them a few times over. Two or three times in a row. Trying to figure out both why I like them and what they “mean.”

    Meaning is supplied by the reader. I firmly believe that. I believe that the writer has something, sure, but that’s not so much meaning but intent. They’ve got a feeling that brings them to the end, which may be a transformation of what their intent was, and then the reader takes that and translates it to their own experiences.

    But reading the stories a few times over, they start to change. They start to talk to each other. Themes and ideas are repeated and a structure is formed. The collection takes on a cohesive, lined form. It is not disparate. It is not wandering. They all feel like they come from the same tree.

  • Challenge

    To get things done there must be a mix of challenge and uncertainty. If there isn’t, then boredom sets in and then nothing gets done at all.

    Being bored and finding something to do is one thing. A positive thing. But being bored while doing the thing is entirely another.

    Implementing challenges to creative or non-physical tasks can be confusing.

    If you’re lifting weights, you could just add more weight. If you’re running, you could add another mile.

    But what about writing? You could increase your output, I guess. But that doesn’t sound all that exciting.

    If you were a painter I suppose you could try a different medium, some different kind of tools. Or if you were a musician you could try different instruments or styles.

    But writing? There is genre. There is structure. There is style.

    Challenges must be specific. They are restrictions, confines, weights. They are things that are difficult to reach, solve, accomplish.

    I’m reading Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar at the moment. It’s a novel of sorts. Experimental. Its chapters follows a pattern of 3x3x3 for a total of 27 chapters. Things are broken down into sections but everything mirrors each other and talks with one another. It’s almost mathematical.

    I’m also thinking of this article by Jane Allison which describes the shapes of fiction. Spirals, fractals, waves… different ways of experimenting.

    Challenges are ways of experimenting. Ways of going past the familiar. Going into new territory. Going head on with a problem and finding a way to solve it.

  • On Deciding Where To End Your Day

    The question of when to leave something has been on my mind recently. When does a project end? When does a day’s work end? When have you done enough to feel proud of yourself?

    I’m figuring out that you cannot decide these finalities once you’ve begun, especially in terms of a day’s work.

    If I begin my day’s work without deciding when a good place to stop will be I’ve set myself up for intense feelings of disillusionment and unfulfillment. If I don’t decide what to aim for, I’ll be aimless all day and the day’s work will feel useless even if I did some good stuff.

    Once I sit down I need to tell myself where I’m headed, otherwise it just doesn’t feel right.

    I’m in a revision process for a project right now. It always feels like I’m in a revision process, but I definitely am right now. Moving freely and exploring is great for ideation, it’s great for being in the pioneer phase, but not for the edit.

    In the editing phase I know where I am going. The characters and their situations are familiar to me.

    The key to a day’s work is specificity. When is your day going to end? It could be 5:00. It could be at exactly five pages. It could be at a certain, specific point in the story.

    Whatever works for you. But when you sit down in the morning, your first decision should be when are you going to stop.

  • Don’t Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

    Here’s a quick lesson in drama that’s been prevalent in my current project: Don’t Let Sleeping Dogs Lie.

    What’s this mean? It means, when two characters have a conflict occurring between them, don’t let either of them take the easy out. There should be no taking the high ground, at least not without immediate consequences.

    During an argument in the real world it is the socially conscience thing to try and diffuse the argument as quickly as possible. To let bygones be bygones, or to at least let out a grumpy “fine.”

    People recognize, or at least I recognize, that things escalate really fast and that it’s smart to stop things before it’s too late.

    If you do this in fiction, you’re in trouble.

    Always let things escalate, that’s where the fun is, that’s where the story is. Recently in my writing I’ve noticed a habit of letting one character give up just as things are getting interesting. I’m trying to quell that habit, and it’s a first step to recognize that it’s there.

    So, all this to say, let things go too far. Keep the argument running, keep feeding the flames. You aren’t your characters, so enjoy pushing them farther and farther and farther. Right over the edge.

    Let ’em get angry for once.

  • 2024

    Inspired by people I admire, here are some of the awesome things I found out about this year.

    Everything is only in the order of when I found it during the year. There is no ranking.

    Movies

    Viewings that were particularly meaningful.

    Some were for the first time, some were rewatches, all were impressive and inspiring.

    Books

    I thought I’d read a lot more this year. Apparently not.

    There’s always next year, I guess.

    Podcasts

    I don’t do a ton of podcasts, so this was really it.

    The Director’s Commentary is one of the greatest things on the planet. Check it out.

    Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend is also not listed, though I mainly watched that via Youtube.

    Youtube

    It’s so easy to find great stuff on Youtube. And it’s so easy to get lost in all the crap. Here’s some good stuff:

    Sesame Street- Don Music, Conan’s Family Wasn’t Cut Out for the Country Club, Young Stephen King Talking to a College, Limping Lotta, Nosy Bear Making Of

    My Stuff

    I’ve had a fairly productive year.

    My pal Zach Trent and I began our own production company to create are own projects and produced a few shorts this year including DiscBros.

    I created a few short animations at the beginning of the year, No Light and Seems, which were a ton of fun to make.

    I’ve been blogging a lot more and have a handful of scripts in various stages which I am very proud of.

    Reflection

    It was a great year. I learned a lot about writing, the biz, and general adult things. I drove across the country, held my first full time job, and moved out of my parents’ house.

    2025 is just around the corner and I can’t wait to see what’s in store. I’m hoping to blog more, finish more projects, and share more with cool people.

    Anyways… happy holidays, happy new year, and happy everything in between.

  • On Using Inspiration

    On the left is the inspiration. On the right is what I came up with.

    Inspiration is an odd thing, I don’t know if I’ve ever fully understood what to do with it. Obviously it’s usually the thing that spurs me to begin, but how does it shape and mold what I do?

    I needed to create a one-page for a story that I was planning on pitching, and I wasn’t too sure on how I wanted it to look.

    Scrolling through some of my old twitter likes, I came across this post which contained the above image. I liked it and decided to get to work.

    The original design for my one-page was much more in line with the inspiration, but as I am not that same designer nor is the project the same as the example, my design evolved into something different.

    To look at the two images, there is a clear correlation between them. They share a number of the same building blocks, but at the same time they are different. The flair and decoration is different, although the structure and foundation twin each other.

    I think this is how you use inspiration.

    It’s sort of about recreating what you like. Not creating something identical, that would be plagiarism, but trying to remodel it in your own way.

  • On Making Anything

    I read this post by the TTRPG creator Luke Gearing the other day and it got me thinking about the phases of a project, which is a dangerous, anti-productive thing to do, but in this case I think it was actually helpful.

    Gearing explains that his newest project was broken up into three phases.

    1. A barebones spreadsheet that detailed each element minimally.
    2. A handwritten ideation/barf draft phase.
    3. The final typed writing phase.

    Each phase was kept separate, and Gearing only allowed himself to move on to the next phase once that last one was completed.

    Reading this made me think of this video I’d seen perhaps a year ago on planning video game development

    The video explains the prototyping phase and the production phase, and how the two are kept separate. It also talks about how you cannot have one without the other and how the two bounce off of each other bringing projects to new heights.

    In other words, you have to switch from one to the other in order for the project to progress. Each phase solves the problems that the other phases confront.

    On my current project I’ve found that I’ve absently been following a similar path.

    I was using the things that I’d learned from the last script I’d worked on, and think I’m starting to develop a good system for myself.

    This is not to say that it is foolproof. Challenges will always arise, issues will need to be confronted, no puzzle is ever identical in how it can be solved.

    But I do believe that processes are a good thing, and that they do help me think.

    I’ve begun the project with a strong ideation phase. I didn’t really know what the story would be. I had an idea for the problem, but not on who the characters were, what they would talk about, how they’d go about solving problems.

    In a fresh notebook I just started writing scenes. They wound up being semi-sequential, but not completely. If I found myself getting stumped somewhere, I’d jump to another point and start from there. Then I’d jump back again.

    The characters started to develop, voices started to emerge, motifs presented themselves.

    But the story still wasn’t quite there.

    What I had was a mixed bag of puzzle pieces that if read through from start to finish would not make any sense, and that’s okay.

    The fun of this first phase, and having fun is the most important part, is not understanding the story. It’s not understanding the themes, characters, or plot.

    The fun is the spontaneity. The discovery. The “flow” state that you find yourself getting into when writing a new scene because you aren’t quite sure how it’ll end.

    If you think the fun part of this phase is the understanding of the story, you’re in trouble. Don’t mix up where the fun is.

    The next phase, the one I am currently on, is the organization phase.

    This is the spreadsheet, notecard, stationary explosion phase.

    This is where you take the macro-view of what you’ve written and do some detective work. I’m spending this time finding the motifs, figuring out the sequence of events, defining the characters, and laying out the story.

    For someone who does need some order and sense of organization in his life, this is much needed.

    The fun here is connecting the dots. Finding meaning. Constructing the story.

    I’m still in the midst of this phase, and it’s a breath of fresh air. It forces you to look at what you’ve written differently and that is always much needed.

    The final phase will be putting together the typed out script.

    I’m going to find the gaps in this phase, and those will need to be filled in. But the real fun of this phase will be getting to share what you’ve worked on with someone else.

    The feedback phase will either be a nightmare or a lot of fun. If it’s a game you’re working on, it’s letting other people play it. If it’s a script, the fun could be getting some people together to read it out loud.

    You’ll notice things that need to be tweaked, but it’s sure to be fun.

    I’m not here with the project yet, so I may make another post later on my thoughts on it but for now that’s what I’ve got.

    1. Ideation phase: Spontaneous play. Writing by hand. Making a mess.
    2. Organization phase: Stationary. Spreadsheets. Order. Detective work. Research.
    3. Construction: Building. Adjusting. Decorating. Sharing.

© Noah Morriss 2023–2025

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