What if I don’t plot? No outline, no problem

Lisa Kessler talk.

What to think about before starting a draft.

Pantser – discovery writer.

Uses tarot cards a lot in her writing.

Pull past, present, future for characters.

Backstory, how they react in opening scene, growth arc.

What happens when you don’t know what to write about? Pull a tarot card, or if that doesn’t help, get up and move around. Mundane activities to put your brain in Park, and let your subconscious work on the problem.

Allow to write chapters, then go back and edit, which allows for ‘oops, wrong direction’.

Write short stories to learn to trust your writer’s intuition.

Ray Bradbury – write a short story a week for a year, and watch how your writing changes.

To learn to love writing again.

Post to a blog? That gives you a deadline.

Notes from The Australian Fairy Tale Society conference 2026

Lucy Cavendish: “We’re Not Your Wicked Witch”.

Everything filled with the Awen.

Fear of the crone – fear of the ‘old’.

Call a woman witch – careers end faster.

Why is the word ‘witch’ an insult, a threat?

Hansel and Gretel oven – Country Women’s Association cake stalls.

Little Mermaid – giving up voice for hurty feet – high heels.

Malleus Malificarum – copy behind glass at Melbourne University. Wakes at night, leaks killing energy because it’s been the cause of so many deaths – Egregore stumbling about.

An entire industry based around being the fairest in the land.

Wolf as witch tempting Red Riding Hood and Grandma.

Wolf skin – cloak of initiation.

Fairy tales have the potential to be gateways – creative alternatives; lead you into further mysteries.

Scared of giving up beautiful parts of self for nothing but pain and men who don’t really see us – Little Mermaid.

Fairy tales allow us, through imagination, to work through fears – death, abandonment, etc, so we are prepared for the world.

Fairy tales that re-introduce the strangeness, the mysterious. Be child-like, cynicism drops away. Grow young in the best of ways because we can journey.

Historical folklore and the transformative power of fairy tales – Arianna James.

Fairy tales rewrite women into the historical narrative.

Books about women owning their power – attractive in a time of attempted disempowerment. Reminders that we have endured.

Witchcraft as conduit to righteous anger.

Kissing The Witch – Emma Donahue.

What is possible when women own their power.

Jo Henwood – Merely the Shadow of Her Cape – witch, and fairy godmother characters in Australian classic literature.

No witches overtly appear in Australian literature until the late 20th century.

The Witches of Milendella – folklore.

Story started with indigenous people and the story was given to white people. Spirits in the mountains of Milendella.

Lila Widdell – Scarlet Woman.

Rosaleen Norton.

Rhiannon Ryall.

Teacher through adversity – Teacher Nanny: Getting of Wisdom; I Can Jump Puddles(nurse); Mary Poppins.

Scarmaker – mother, stepmother, ex-friend, explorer: The Eye of the Storm; Getting of Wisdom.

Elemental Power – external environment. Internal environment – sex, anger, ambition: My Brilliant Career; Getting of Wisdom.

Evil – external – Freedom taker. Shadow – internal: Term of His Natural Life; Sister Ligouri; Barbara Boynton.

Travelling witch – midwives, nurse, doctor, herbalist, gravedigger.

Dr Lillian.

Travelling in time: fortune teller.

Mystery of The Hansom Cab – Mother Guttersnipe.

Traveling Through Space: Aviatrix, astronaut, bushranger, pirate: Phryne Fisher; 1st female Australian astronaut.

Write Your Own Australian Fairy Tale.

Choose a witch character: cauldron brewer – herbalist, poisoner, cannibal, cook, (traveller).

Where: choose location in Australia.

When: era. ie: an imagined contemporary setting.

Who: choose a witch-type character, and choose a main character.

Wants; home, position, love, fortune. To be elevated from where they are. Thwarted by power: person or organisation. Journey through the dark woods.

But: witch character activates plot, will be the one who turns things around. What will they do to make things happen: make something, prevent something.

So: main character reaction. Fulfil requirements asked of them.

Then: fairy godmother or true love helps/intervenes. Or a magical animal.

Optional: 3 challenges, or 1, but never 2. Escalate in levels of difficulty.

Optional: magical helper.

Optional: witch imprisons or kills main character.

Rescue by: fairy godmother, true love, or main character rescues themself.

Optional: as escaping, do you want to have magical flight – transformation flight or do you hppen to have 3 magical objects that can be used as obstacles in the way of the witch.

Ending: happily ever after. What does your main character see as a happy ending?

The Book Finishers’ Summit – The Audacious Author Method

Talk by Ainsley James (book coach, mentor)

Finishing isn’t the goal.

Goals are about your identity.

Willpower is the worst tool we have.

Planning for small outcome doesn’t make you a realist. It makes you a woman whose nervous system has decided wanting is dangerous.

You know you’re meant for more.

Humility is for Disney princesses.

When the goal you say out loud doesn’t match what you actually want, you get burnout, frustration, and the gnawing sense you’re on the wrong path. The fix isn’t to want less. It’s to tell the truth about what you want.

What do I really want?

Big goal. Small identity. Small result every time.

Permission slip to want whatever you want in your heart.

I plenty to be my most audacious self.

How do I set goals that work for me?

Same input, same output.

Same thoughts. Same feelings. Same actions. Same results.

Feel it before you see it.

Believe that this book is already written, is a best seller. Feel the feeling of it already being done.

I’ll se it because I already feel it.

The ‘how’ isn’t your responsibility.

Your job is these three things on repeat:

Believe the goal is possible for you. With your face, your circumstances, your story.
Feel the feelings you’ll feel when you’ve already done it before any proof shows up.
Take the next aligned action (aka the milestones) in service of the bigger dream. Act.

The psychology of becoming Her. Know who you are becoming in order to set goals that you feel in your soul. Continuing to stay committed. Believe it long-term.

Milestones aren’t goals. They are practical steps you take in service of the goal.

What is your destination?

Who are you becoming?

The strongest identities are tied to service. Ainsley’s identity: I am a lighthouse for women with stories to tell. I write my own books, and demystify the writing process so that women everywhere realise her book is possible, too. My visibility is permission slip.

For memoirists: “I turn my deepest wound into medicine. Every reader who recognises herself in my story gets a little less lonely.”

Tie what you are writing to service.

Who is the woman who has already finished this book?

What does her morning look like?

What does her inbox look like?

How does she talk about her work?

What is she no longer tolerating?

What does her bank account look like?

What does she let herself want out loud?

What’s her next big goal?

Your book is a vehicle, not the destination.

If this book did everything you secretly hope it will, what does your life look like three years from now?

What did the book change for the people who read it, and about you?

Present tense, first person to answer this question.

Thinking small – shame. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What goal feels too embarrassing to say out loud?

Who am I afraid will be mad if I succeed at this level?

Where did I learn that wanting big things makes me a bad woman?

If shame had nothing to do with it, what would I be writing?

What would I let myself receive, if I trusted I deserved it?

The four moves of the audacious writer method:

Name your ridiculous dream.
Choose your identity.
Feel like her first.
Tactical serves identity.

Lame, vague goals are the best way to live a lame, vague life.

Program: Becoming The Heroine.

Talk by Ainsley James for the Book Finishers’ Summit.

Modern Magic Realism – Tabitha Bird

9/4/2022 Notes

Tabitha began writing 14 years ago. ‘A Lifetime of Possibilities’ – 11 years to write.

“What does the pain look like?”

If you could describe it as a person, being, entity – asked by a therapist.

“The Emporium of Imagination”.

Dare to ask yourself what you wnat to get out of writing. What do you write? What are your goals?

There is always space on the bookshelf for your own book and story.

How to create safe space, using magical realism.

Any time we’re forcing anything, including word is abusive to self. Stop wording for a while, play with play-doh, to create something that represents you. Kinaesthetic experience.

What do you think when I say MAGIC?

Spell Sparkle Shift Swift Wings Consciousness Lightning Tingle Sap Water Snake Wordless

Play Smoke Cauldron Shade

Environment influences our collection of words. The words would be different in a garden, on the floor, beside a river.

Where do I collect words and they flow, and where do I collect words and they do not flow?

3 things that define magic realism:

What it is
What it isn’t
Why do you think authors use it in their books?

Everyday magic. Not removed from normal world. Not fantasy. To give a hint of a whole other world or consciousness. To lift a book out of the ordinary.

What is it? Happens in the real world + a bit of magic.

As humans, we don’t believe anything that does not have a seed of truth. The author takes that seed and expands on it.

Think about times in your life that you believed a lie. What was it that hooked you in, and you bought the whole thing?

What do authors use it in their books? Ordinary magic exists in the world – love, grandmas. Transformative. Human connection. Rain. Rainbows.

To get around difficult and sensitive topics. To put the reader in a familiar world but with unfamiliar happenings.

Not just using storytelling to explore, but an element of magic to open it up.

Story must be set in a realistic environment. Include one or more fantastical elements. Takes the normal and twists it. Magic or impossible has rules that stay consistent. Presents the impossible as part of everyday life.

An otherness. “The Colour of After” – birds show up and become magic.

Modern Magic Realism takes those normal elements and twists them.

What if…

Play.

“What’s for dinner?” What can I make with what’s in the pantry? That’s playing what if…

Not every element of the magic needs to be explained, but enough needs to be. You need to explain where the reader will engage with the magical world.

You cannot change your magical sysgtem to solve a plot problem.

Present the impossible as a part of everyday life, even if, for your characters, it’s new and shocking.

Writers Toolbox – begin accessing your imagination

Exercise – ‘Impossible Bubbles’.

Blow bubbles, what else could they be besides bubbles? Fairy brains, shiny worlds, engine for an impossible machine, transport, butterflies, moons, satellites, fly eyes, magic storage, round potions for inhaling, storage for incense smoke; wishes, air elemental laughter, thoughts of crystals, domes, habitats, stripper bubbles, foam, the air released from cracking knuckles, Santa beard, fairy children, spit.

Use that magic to explode truth about humanity.

What do you find fascinating? Overwhelming? Scared of?

Do something where you get through that first round of ordinary. The 8th, 16th, 22nd thing you say will be powerful. More interesting as you dive furhter into association.

Pixar writers spend 3 days brain dumping every way the story could go. Scrub first 2 days. Expand capacity to hold play.

When you come across the magic/interesting idea, stop asking and run with it. Write until you understand that magic.

MMR often doesn’t include folklore and fairy tales or myth.

MMR is accessible. It’s character and plot driven. Not heavily literary.

Flick through a magazine, write 5 words you like.

Write down interesting words you see everywhere.

Writing mash-up game – Carina Bissett

Mash-up game to generate ideas.

Column A:

What is your favourite book from childhood?
What is your favourite movie?
Name a beloved myth or legend or fairy tale.
What is your favourite true story? (memoir, lore, news)
What mystery intrigues you? (it can be scientific, historical, true crime, book, or ‘what is he building in there?’)
What is your favourite book, or if you have many, the best book you read in the past 3 years?

Column B:

What monster intrigues you? (animal, human, or supernatural)
What do you love the most?
What do you fear the most?
What is the funniest thing that has ever happened to you?
What is the best premise from the worst movie or book that didn’t fulfil its potential?
What is the title of your favourite song?

Roll 2 dice.

Use one die to select from Column A and the second from Column B. Mash them up.

Alternate question: if you eschew any of the above questions, here are some you can substitute:

What is your favourite musical or play?
What is the strangest thing that has ever happened to you?
What is your favourite comic book character?
What is today’s headline from your newspaper of choice?
What scares you the most?

Pamela Anderson talk – Second Acts

Plant a new garden

Who am I? What did I want to do when I was a little girl?

Garden as metaphor for life.

I’ve nothing to lost. I’m nearly 60 – I’m at the beginning of my career. I’m at the beginning of my careeer.

The safest place I can be is dancing and singing.

Do things you love – you can always find a way to talk yourself out of them. Don’t do that. Or do it before the voice starts.

I’m going to make my life beautiful, no matter what.

Start with not criticising ourselves.

I reserve the right to fall in love with my co-stars.

Heartbreak is the first awakening.

Freedom is nothing to be taken for granted. Be free, but be smart.

When I was growing up, I loved Louise Hay.

I’m just a baby.

I have cracked the code – I look like my Instagram photos.

My sons are perfect gentlemen in spite of the gene pool.

I’m not taking my foot off the gas. I’m going to see what I’m made of.

Keep filling your pocket with skills because you don’t know what opportunity is around the corner.

‘Hiding From Love’. Ellen Burstyn – poetry.

Poetry communicates before it’s understood.

People aren’t judging us the way we judge ourselves.

I don’t want to chase youth. Youth can chase me.

The fun part of life is being courageous.

Happiness isa choice and a practice.

Malignant narcissism in our leadership. Have empathy!

Wanderlust.

Get up early, and write.

Good skin care.

Compassion is in fashion.

Be yourself authentically. Remember what you love. Peel everything back.

That five year old is who you really are. That’s who you’re working for.

Writing Compelling True Stories – Sian Prior talk

Reality hunger – ongoing interest in true stories.

Consistent clear voice. Clear understanding of the story you want to tell about the situation you are describing.

Life writing – umbrella term

If you have repeatedly tolde a story verbally, it is worth writing about. If a memory troubles you, it’s worth writing about.

What is in it for the reader? We want our readers to relate to something we’re writing about.

Identify the situation and the story. ‘The Situation And The Story’ – book by Vivian Gornick.

Situation – context, plot, circumstance.

Story – the insight, wisdom, the thing one came to say.

Emotional experience that preoccupies the writer.

Universal ingredients.

What’s it about? Situation.
What’s it really about? Story, universals.

“I’m not shy, so why should I care about your memoir? I don’t know you so why should I care?”

Fear, weakness, wanting to be someone you’re never going to be, loneliness, shame, coming to terms – universals.

Interrogate yourself – what’s it REALLY about?

‘A Snail’s Pace’ – Eleanor Limprecht.

Finding your voice or writing persona. What kind of character we want to be in our own pieces of writing.

Not limited to one style or one voice. You are not a fixed thing.

You can choose the voice to suit the story you’ve come to tell.

Ingredients of voice: tone, mood, language/mood, texture(length of paragraphs/sentences/words, attitude to self, structure, other formal elements such as lists and interviews.

Sorrento Writers’ Festival 2026 – notes

HOW DID I COME UP WITH THAT?

Bri Lee – ‘Seed’

Murray Middleton – ‘You Want It Darker’

The Blank Page

Stare it down. Shoot off in any direction. Stolen moments because he has 2 young kids, which makes him hanker after writing time, and actual writing.

Pre-purchase writing time – Bri. Planner, not pantser.

The ideas phase is the most exciting part.

Who are these people and what am I going to put them through?

A lot of pre-prep of planning.

Plan as much as you can so that you’re eager to get to the page.

‘Seed’ – most creative and satisfying of her books. Went to Antarctica and the human stories were what became more important than the scenery, the continent, the history.

You have to be driven by a project to sustain it.

Why does it vitally matter to you?

It has to matter to you to have blood in it.

Writing from what’s troubling you, questions you have.

What material is yours to use, and what isn’t?

What’s the most enjoyable to write?

Play as the antidote to despair.

Writing hot button topics – what deeply matters to you? What are you asking and don’t necessarily have easy answers for? A bit ugly problem.

If the issue is one each of us has to answer for ourselves – fiction is the vehicle.

Novels create an entire universe.

Engage in the real world to find what impassions you.

What are you fertilising your mind with? Diverse imput from the real world, different opinions, variegated reading.

‘Seed’ – written by hand in the school exercise books with 3 lines, and a particular pen.

Me, Stripped Bare: Why Writers Need To Tell Their Story

Tara Moss – The Italian Secret, The Fictional Woman. Sarah Arachi(sp?) – Brown Female Doctor (fitting in, women in medicine). Kate Halfpenny – ramshackle wander down midlife fuck ups.

The vulnerability of writing, stripping bare. Vulnerability in the writing. Exposure. People respond to the truth and vulnerability. Writing authentically.

Using personal experiences as a jumping off point for bigger issues.

Menopause is about entering a rich and empowering time of life.

Writing your truth an dit makes a difference to other people’s lives, but you can’t write as if that’s what you want to do. Just write your truth, and let people have their relationship with the work.

Show the humanity. Emotion.

The Art of Telling True Stories: writing creative non fiction and how it lifts our hearts.

Sean Kelly – The Game(question of the gap between why we weren’t interested in Scott Morrison, and how he hides). Malcolm McKenzie-Murray – A Murder Without Motive; Sirens(ptsd). Sarah Krasnostein – Mushroom Tapes.

What question is in me that I want my CNF to answer?

The obstacle becomes the door: eg: traumatic memory loss. ‘Eloquent lack’.

Overlap of observations about literature of observations about politics.

What to put in – what serves the work?

The qualities of what you share with the subject.

Dilemma about what to include or exclue. Safeguarding the dignity of others. Is it relevant, necessary, and true?

Are you okay with presenting as truth?

Accountability afterwards. You have to live with what you include.

Don’t be cruel or facile.

What do you hope a reader will take from the work emotionally and intellectually?

Examine your own complicity in things.

NaPoWriMo 2026: Day 1

I didn’t think I’d be doing National Poetry Writing Month this year. I’ve been in the weeds with creativity. Everything feels soggy hessian bags of oatmeal.

Nevertheless, moping and endless doomscrolling is not a solution.

I checked the NaPoWriMo, and the Poetic Asides websites this morning, 6 days in to the writing month, and wrote down the two separate prompts. NaPo offered up the idea of a tanka, and not being a form fan, I went to Poetic Asides, where Robert Lee Brewer suggested a ‘seed’ poem. Good seeds, bad seeds, feeling seedy, being seeded in a competition, as well as good old garden seeds.

I cast around as I sat up in bed, ginger tea at hand. Ginger grows from rhizomes, not seeds btw. I moved my left knee. Hello arthritis. Well, there was a seed….

Seed

The kernel of my arthritis

was sown thirty years ago,

as I squattesd to vaccuum under a bed,

and could not willow myself far enough

to reach the dirt and dust bunnies

that teemed and bred like rabbits,

that spread like dandelion fluff.

I planted my left knee

and a sharp trowel-point of pain

grew from lightning to steady blaze.

I was known to the cleaning agency

as needing tending:

fussy about workers’ rights, work conditions,

mouthy clients who saw us as servants.

I was on a grow-or-go list,

feed-or-weed.

So I shut my mouth,

kept my injury to myself,

made do with painkillers and ice packs.

On the barren ground of poverty and need,

I let whatever grew in my bones

run as determined and free as ivy.

*****

A Weird Few Months

Like the title says, it’s been a weird few months. I got super-sick. We have a long list of what it wasn’t, including: flu x 3, covid, RSV, whooping cough, and the like. So I dubbed it the Dread Virus Cough.

I coughed for three months, and fractured four ribs.

It’s been a long road back and I’ve only just gotten the okay to go back to the gym, armed with new osteopenia and high cholesterol diagnoses. Ugh.

Doing NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo(National Poetry Writing Month/Global Poetry Writing Month) in April took my mind off things, sort of. As did the launch of the collaborative poetry book PAPER BIRDS. Ten years ago, 4 poets including me, did NaPoWriMo and put together a collection of our poems titled SHE TOO.

Ten years later, we did it again, although it really became 11 years by the time all of us edited, were edited, and got the book sorted out.

I honestly thought that May and June would be rest months before my husband and I travel in late June. But….snakypoet, my bff, Reiki Master, pseudo mum, and poetry mentor, is finally writing her psychic memoir, because of all the people who have asked her to write it. So naturally, ADHD self arcs up and yells: “I wanna do that too.”

I did try a first info dump draft back in 2013, but that seems to have disappeared into my computer, and is not uttering a peep about where it might be. Okay then, beginner’s mind, beginner’s page. I start again, from scratch, with no more idea of what I’m doing than I ever do. What works for one project doesn’t work for another.

I had stage fright and page fear for over a week, unwilling to commit, and make marks on a page, because this is a Big Project, not a series of poems, or short stories.

So, scrap narrative arc, scrap linear storytelling. Make it mini-essays on a theme.

My mind still grumbled, and delayed by insisting on the perfect notebook(which I didn’t get, but I’ve come to love my Paperblanks A4 decorated one anyway, the perfect pen(always a Quirky Cup Collective one), and a title. Plus, if I wouldn’t mind, a complete structure, note from the gods, and permission slips from Elizabeth Gilbert and Marge Piercy. Maybe a more skilled psychic than myself to take the knotted wool of my brain and write it for me.

I’ve made some scribbles, and have a working title. Are you ready? LOVELY THORNS AND SINGING VULTURES, because it’s a glorious quote from Morticia Addams, and she was, and is, my domestic goddess, mother goddess, and all-round role model for how to be in the world.

What on earth am I doing, kicking this off before I travel? Nuts.

Ah well, it’s keeping me off the streets at night. Onwards with more mini essays. So far I have: The Very First Ritual. Today, my task is to make a list of turning point moments in my life, and also turning point moments within the sphere of my psychic life, and see what comes of that.

Eep. Here we go.