M.L. Jirasko

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The website of M.L. Jirasko, writer. (writing young adult fantasy, writing inspiration, writer's health, writing resources, brainstorming, freewriting, outlining strategies, first drafts, revising) by Milenka Jirasko

April 03, 2017

Prague, and heraldry, and beasts, and finding your style of travel

April 03, 2017/ Milenka Jirasko

Some people travel for food.

They eat local dishes, in local restaurants, and feel like they know a place. Some people travel for pubs. Some people travel for museums. Some people travel for selfie shots.

I think I travel for stories, and for words.

I love guided tours, and broken conversations with local shopkeepers, and spying on locals’ lives, but more than that, I love learning the stories layered in old spaces, and collecting the myths of a place, and walking where legends once walked. If I learn the story of some past tragedy or some local’s hopes and dreams, I’ll remember that place forever. Stories make it real.

And I love using real places in stories.

Especially real places in fantasy stories. Especially gritty, specific details that I know will make a fantasy story seem real. In Prague, I’ve been deliriously recording statues that show part-humans part-beasts, and recording all the shield-symbols of medieval heraldry I can find, scurrying about the city’s old town like a delighted sketchbook-clutching crab. I don’t have money, but this doesn’t cost any; I love finding pastimes that give me an excuse to go weaving around an old historic city, anything that lets me look busy for free. Imagining histories for characters. Imagining how particular old symbols or etchings or cobblestone patterns could be clues to some archaic magic system. I’m imagining all these underground cellars used by characters in hiding, and the heraldry shields painted on ceilings identifying ancestors of old.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, I hope you find the style of travel that suits you best, and don’t worry if it’s a strange one.

Happy scribbling.

-mlj

M.L. Jirasko

M.L. Jirasko writes Young Adult Fantasy in Montana

M.L. (Kali) Jirasko writes Fantasy in Montana

Quotes for writers:

"If you are going to step on a live mine, make it your own. Be blown up, as it were, by your own delights and despairs." -Ray Bradbury

"Pick dreams that scare you." -Daniel Sax

"Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens." -Wendell Barry

"When writing a first draft, write with abandon. Write fast... In a way, writing asks that you be young, that you be fearless in the way you were before the world taught you caution, and diffidence." -Leigh Bardugo

"Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time- you have to write up, not down." -E.B. White

"Unless you believe something is possible, there is very little chance of experiencing it." -Dr. Andrew Weil

"Attention without feeling is only a report." -Mary Oliver

"If you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up... Tell kids you can fight back; tell them you can win." -Neil Gaiman

"Most children and young adults are born with a taste for honesty before a taste for sweetness (in characters)." -Cheryl Klein

"Write like you. The only way to unlock the hearts and minds of your readers is by unlocking your own." -Jandy Nelson

"Description means nothing without examples." -Susan Sontag

"Writing a novel takes endurance." -Jandy Nelson

"...(My younger self, my childhood self...) She taught me magic, and the love of storytelling, and those are two things that do not die unless you let them." -Patricia A. McKillip

"(YA fantasy) is about the havoc our decisions can wreck, the damage we do and the damage done to us. Sometimes the world is a post-apocalyptic dystopia, sometimes it's a glittering palace full of schemers, sometimes it's Brooklyn. But the goal is almost always the same: survive, become better, live unafraid." -Leigh Bardugo

"Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored." -Patricia A. McKillip

"Someone will always be offended, no matter what you write. So you have to make sure what you write is the truth about that character, even if the truth is offensive." -Malinda Lo

"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -C.S. Lewis

"If you don't give up, you will win. If you really freaking dig in your heels and swear to yourself that you are going to find a way, and you show up day after day and try, you will win." -Laini Taylor

"Controversy is what mediocre people start because they can't communicate anything meaningful. I want to generate consensus." -G. Willow Wilson

"And as if in a trance I cried, 'Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.' Thus I became a madman." -Kahlil Gibran

"The cure for loneliness is solitude." -Marianne Moore

"Simplicity in all things is the secret of the wilderness, and one of its many lessons." -Sigurd Olson

"Rejection has nothing to do with whether a book will make it or not, or whether it will connect with readers." -C.S. Pacat