Hello Loreates,

recently likened Substack Notes to a river flowing past us all, while Posts are more like parcels delivered to each subscriber’s door. I found those analogies useful. But what, then, is a Substack Publication? More broadly still, what is a writing life?

For me, both my publication and my writing life serve as havens, the equivalent of daily retreats set apart from the flowing river of commerce, news, and distraction. A kind of home base for the soul. They give me the opportunity to step back from the madness, demands, and anxiety of the world around me. They allow me to reflect on memories and ideas that can help make sense of the senseless, while also providing emotional respite from the assault of external stimuli. They also allow me to cultivate — and share—the tools that deepen this process of reflection. Especially here in this publication, I’ve found the same kind of community and reciprocity that I’d expect in a physical writing retreat with other kindred spirits. There’s a healthy balance here between respect for the work and respect for each other, between writing time alone and social connection.

I just started reading Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent (reminds me of The Stone Diaries, and I highly recommend both!), and this line perfectly described what I’m aiming for here:

“It is the correspondence that is her manner of living.”

But this “manner of living” is not automatic (which is more or less the point of The Correspondent!). Any quick scan of Substack Notes will reveal that, for many, the writing life is not a haven but a hassle. Ditto, their Substack publication. Just yesterday I was counseling a friend who was so exasperated with her publication that she was practically screaming. Not a haven.

I’ve been on Substack now for four years. I’ve made writing my life— and career— for more than forty. And I’m not always zen about either enterprise. There have been plenty of highs and lows. I don’t for one instant pretend that writing is easy, fun, or relaxing for me. It’s often harrowing, usually frustrating, and always challenging.

Yet I keep coming back for more. Writing, and thinking about writing, give me solace even when they wring me out. I think this is the result of attitudes and expectations that I bring to my work here each day.

In other words, it’s not that writing provides me with a haven but, rather, that I turn writing into my haven. How? The longer I pondered this question, the more I began to see a pattern of commitments, almost like terms that you’d need to meet before qualifying for a physical retreat.

Let’s call these foundational commitments the 7 D’s.

Save the Date!

Tuesday, April 28, at 10am PT

Well Published: MEGA-Bestselling Author Christina Baker Kline

I’m delighted to invite you to my next Well Published, Live! with the formidable . We’ll be chatting about her star-studded writing career, her astonishing new historical novel The Foursome, and her vital work as Vice President of the Authors Guild.

Join April 28 live!

Prepare to Retreat into Writing

What is a writing retreat? I’ve been to some and led others. And in my experience, the best retreats are not relaxing or soothing. They’re not spas (even though some are held at spas). They’re time-outs for concentration, inspiration, and motivation. And active creativity, which may or may not produce written pages.

Good writing retreats also introduce us to new ideas and fellow creators. They prompt us to question and come at our work from unexpected directions. They challenge our assumptions and perspectives. They liven up the process of writing and thinking about writing.

If a great physical retreat is what you’re looking for, please consider The Solstice Retreat on the Goddard College campus June 11-15 with my extraordinary colleagues , , and .

Solstice Retreat Info

A physical writing retreat is a rare gift. But you don’t need to sign up, travel, or spend thousands of dollars to reap the benefits of a retreat. In fact, I think the mark of a true writer is the ability to retreat into the writing process every day.

Maxine Hong Kingston once told me that she began writing as a child at the family dinner table — surrounded by her parents and seven siblings. Each night when she finished eating, she’d retreat to her corner of the table to write, and when she finished, she’d emerge from her mind’s haven and read to her family what she’d composed. She didn’t need to escape her family to a writing retreat; writing was her retreat.

So, what’s the magic formula for a do-it-yourself-daily writing retreat? Hint: it’s not where you go but what you bring that matters most.

Desire to write

This may sound obvious. But there are many reasons why people go to physical writing retreats, and desire to write is not always among them. They might go to rub shoulders with famous authors or learn from legendary teachers or meet agents-in-residence. They might want to feel like “a writer.” They might want to find some mystical key to crank out a bestseller.

When those motives bring people to Substack, their publications are more likely to be enterprises than havens. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not the objective I’m talking about here.

If your publication is to serve as your retreat, you’ve got to want to write. Even when it’s hard or fills you with anguish, you still want to do it. The reward is not what you produce or the subscribers that follow, but the process of planning and thinking and writing itself. You’ll understand that reward if you view your publication as a somewhat addictive game that you get to play whenever you want. If you don’t have that passion, you’ll inevitably start to view your publication as a chore, an obligation, a burden. You’ll start to resent and hate it. Not a haven.

The same is true of your daily writing practice. It’s not what you write that matters. It’s not how “good” your pages are each day. It’s the feeling that you “get to play with language and ideas and stories.” That the act of writing is a personal privilege. That your writing life is perhaps the one place where you truly belong. Your haven and your home.

Detachment from distractions

My friend Susan Straight loves to describe the circumstances under which she’s written her many books. While folding laundry. While waiting to pick up her kids. Between her kids’ basketball games. In cars, planes, and check-out lines. On napkins, notepads, the margins of books and the back of receipts. The point is, Susan doesn’t need to get away to a special place for her writing haven, nor does she need the luxuries of time or money to make her retreat possible.

Read more

Body Language*

by Susan Kim

A Peter Steiner cartoon from the New Yorker: Two mutts are in an office. One, seated at the computer, says to the other:

”On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Body is everything: You can’t just section it off. According to recent studies on free will and determinism, there’s a lot less of a mind/body split than any of us might have imagine. And like it or not, that pesky, fleshy shell conveys so much… and not just the basic stuff like gender, race, disability.

Bodies also reveal clues about gender identification, age, health, what is considered attractive or not, class, profession, status, sexuality and sexual preference, what is considered culturally appropriate or not, religion, tribal affiliation, region, education, history of substance abuse, history of sunblock use, wealth, ancestry. Vanity. The lack of vanity. What era we’re in. What country we’re from. What planet we’re on.

Like I said, everything.

What’s more, neuroscientists discovered that the neurons that respond to gender and race are linked by stereotypes. Think about it. As one of the authors of a recent study wrote, “The moment we actually glimpse another person … [stereotypes] are biasing that processing in a way that conforms to our already existing expectations.” I.e. it’s all pre-conscious! The seemingly objective sight of a body can trigger responses that themselves have ramifications, real ones that can be a matter of life and death. The protagonist of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is in a sense the African-American male body: its historical and institutional theft, the constant danger it faces, and its subsequent lack of true agency. Perhaps one definition of privilege might be the freedom from having to obsess all the time about what messages your body is inadvertently giving off to the world.

Does body matter in what we write? Should words be removed from who and what we are? Can language be disembodied?

A personal anecdote: I am at a restaurant in NYC with the guy who will eventually become my husband. He orders. Then I order. Then the waitress – young, white – frowns, confused. “Excuse me,” she finally says to my husband, who is also white. “But can you tell me what she said? ‘Cause I can’t understand her accent.” Keep in mind that a speech coach once told me that I had one of the most boring dialects he had ever encountered. “American network TV,” he had said dismissively. “No regional specificity whatsoever. A mildly interesting “r.” That’s about it.” And yet this woman’s preconceptions of body apparently disrupted her ability to even understand my request for a Cobb salad.

In 2015, Sherman Alexie edited the Best American Poetry anthology series and chose a poem that seemed to have been written by a Chinese-American woman named Yi-Fen Chou. “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” was, in fact, the work of a middle-aged white guy named Michael Derrick Hudson. Hudson’s poem had been rejected forty times under his real name. And as he had apparently done in the past, he decided to play the race card, although in this case, his card happened to be forged. To be fair, he didn’t attempt a different voice as Chou; he would simply submit a poem under his real name and if that didn’t work, he would resubmit it under the Asian, female name – the name of an actual person and high school classmate, as it turned out. Anyway, this time, it worked. Alexie chose this poem influenced, in part, by Hudson’s purported ethnicity and gender.

There’s lots to unpack here. But one thing I found interesting was something that Native-American Alexie himself wrote about this whole mishegas: that he hadn’t sensed anything “inherently Chinese or Asian” about the poem. So what exactly is writing that is inherently Chinese or Asian? Or female for that matter? Or male? We are enjoined to “write what we know,” but is knowledge so heavily circumscribed by race or gender? Is it strange that a Japanese-born man wrote the echt British butler novel, The Remains of the Day, or that a white American guy wrote The Orphan Master’s Son? Is anyone surprised that female authors used to take male pen names like George or Isak or George or that they still use initials like S.E. or J.K.?

There are not only artistic and political considerations at play here, of course, but market ones, as well. In 2006, Nadine Aldred, writing under the pen name Millenia Black, wrote The Great Pretender, which Penguin subsequently acquired. However, Penguin also assumed – possibly because of the race of the protagonists — that Black was white. When they found out she was African-American, they changed the cover art to feature characters of color, against her express wishes. Black later sued, arguing that categorizing her book as African American effectively ghettoized it and hurt its sales.

Not everyone can write outside of the body, of course. In fact, I think most writers, even and maybe especially some of the best, have found it extremely difficult. Have you ever tried it? Have you ever created a character who wasn’t of your gender or your sexual preference, someone who was of a different race or class or age, someone with different convictions and beliefs? Have you ever written someone from a different time or culture? Doing so is a test of not only your skill, but also your empathy, imagination, powers of observation, research, and life experience. If you tried it, how successful were you? And if not, what were the results? If you’re like me, I bet some of were pretty hair-raising.

At its best, failing to write beyond the limits of who you are bores your reader. At its worst, you risk offending and hurting others who may conclude you are merely attempting to co-opt or exploit a narrative or historical suffering that isn’t yours for the taking. As for me, I just can’t stand to see characters used as plot devices and objects, devoid of complexity, believability, or even agency. It’s lazy, it’s usually childish, and it’s just plain bad.

Due to many business factors, mainstream Hollywood is a serious repeat offender. Did you read the Twitter thread last year that consisted of the descriptions of female characters written by male screenwriters? JANE stands dressed in a paramedic’s uniform – blonde, fit, smokin’ hot./ Or Like draping the Venus De Milo in a burlap dress, Jane’s sensational natural beauty fights through her plain blue Ann Taylor outfit. / Or A gorgeous woman, JANE, 23, is a little tipsy, dancing naked on her big bed, as adorable as she is sexy. And don’t get me started with the magical person of color – characters like the guy in The Green Mile to, I’m sorry if this hurts, The Karate Kid’s Mr. Miyagi. How about the saintly, usually sexless person with a disability? Or the tragic LGBT person who invariably dies?

Playwright John Patrick Shanley once told me that his pet peeve in modern drama was the character he called Killer Rapist Man. And in the world of comics, Women in Refrigerators.com has a seemingly endless roster of female characters who have been killed, tortured, or otherwise stripped of their powers – essentially ending up in refrigerators, literally or figuratively, to better serve the male protagonist’s heroic arc.

We writers are fairly timid folk. Posturing aside, most of us don’t like to offend and more than that, we really don’t like to look like idiots. I know I don’t. Yet critic Stanley Crouch takes this thinking to task in his 2004 essay, “Segregated Fiction Blues.” In it, he bemoans what he sees as the trend of serious American writers turning away from the “big sweep” of our “roiling, ever more surprising society” in favor of a kind of self-absorption that’s “broken up into ethnic, religious, sexual, class, and regional franchises.” He blames this trend on author cowardice, tracing it very specifically to the 1967 publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner. The idea of the story of a black slave leader being written by a white man, Crouch argues, was especially controversial in a time of the Black Power movement. In fact, Crouch believes that white authors “opted for folding instead of holding, convinced that the challenge of writing across the color line was too big a risk to their careers and their reputations.” The results, he says, resulted in work that was “both dull and dismal.”

So what are we to do?

I write a lot for kids and young adults. In addition, my sister is a lower school librarian. And one thing she and I know for sure: children REALLY need to see themselves reflected in their stories. They need characters that are their age and that look, act, and sound like them, ones that have the problems that they have, as well as families and homes and schools and streets that are familiar, too. “Diversity” is such an overused word, it’s diluted to the point of near meaningless; but this is not so in children’s literature, because it is developmentally mandatory.

Of course, childhood is finite. As kids grow older, they also grow as readers, at least in an ideal world. Eventually, they will learn to read past the boundaries of the kind of literary narcissism described by Crouch: past those stories that are pretty much about people who look and act the same as them. And that’s important for us, too: to continue to challenge our comfort zone by continuing to read books by and about people who are different from us, different in both their bodies and their life experiences. Because that is one of the best ways we can grow, and not just as citizens of the world… but as writers, as well.

Yes, of course, writing outside of the body is difficult… and risky. We risk getting it wrong. We risk looking really stupid. And we certainly risk offending, often the same readers we are trying to reach. But what is writing if not an attempt to expand our understanding of ourselves through our exploration of others… and vice versa? If we tackle the challenge with humility, patience, and not a small dose of bravery, I think we can succeed.

Susan Kim is the co-author of the YA dystopian trilogy, Wasteland, written with her husband, Laurence Klavan. She has also written two graphic novels and a nonfiction book on menstruation. She is an award-winning documentary producer and writer, and has written extensively for children's television. Her plays have been produced worldwide and are published by Smith & Krauss and Dramatists Play Service.

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*First published in The Writer in the World, July 13, 2016.

Hello Loreates,

While reading the historical novels of in preparation for our Well Published convo here on April 28 (details below), I was gobsmacked by her decision in one book to abruptly kill off a primary POV character. I won’t tell you which book or character, but it was not a murder mystery, and I was shocked at her authorial audacity in simply eliminating a character whose mind and life we’d inhabited for many chapters.

I remembered the anguish I felt when killing off one of my principal POV characters in Glorious Boy, and I could imagine her reasons being much like mine: it was historically accurate and necessary to prove to readers 1) how high the stakes were in the times we were describing, 2) that no one was immune, 3) that bad things really did happen to good people. I suspected Christina felt that the death was necessary to galvanize the rest of the plot.

And then I thought this business of killing off characters would make a good post for you, Loreates. So here goes.

Aimee

Kill, Cut, or Keep?

I can’t count the times students have told me they included their siblings in a memoir “because they were really there,” or named every character in a story, regardless of their relevance to the plot. For many writers, the decision to kill, cut, or keep a character poses a major conundrum. If they’re there in the scene in your head or in the cast of real life figures, shouldn’t they also be on the page? The answer is: it depends.

As usual, everything I’m going to say here applies to your choices in revision. I never recommend censoring or dictating your choices as you compose. In the first creative drafts, your job as author is to allow the characters to come and go, appear and disappear as they please. Let them have their way with you! They will often lead you in unexpected directions far more meaningful than any you’d planned.

But when you revise, you have to analyze and evaluate those directions, ruthlessly prune the dead ends and streamline pathways that lead to the heart of the story. That means getting rid of characters who only get in the way or who divert attention for no purpose. And it means activating characters who should serve a meaningful purpose but don’t yet.

Let’s take the options in the order you’ll most likely encounter them as you revise.

To Keep

It seems axiomatic that you’d keep your central POV characters. But your key characters won’t necessarily appear in every scene or for the entire duration of the story. And secondary characters are even trickier, since some are as important as protagonists, even if they’re hardly noticeable (I’m thinking of one of my favorite characters in literature, the young sheep dog in Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, who turned the entire plot upside down by being too good at his job in a single heartbreaking scene, and then had to be killed off. Do read it, if you haven’t!)

Here’s a checklist to help you decide if a character is earning their “keep” in the scene or chapter you’re revising:

• Do they push the scene toward change? Do they nudge, jostle, vex, challenge the other characters in ways that force movement toward a meaningful new direction, discovery, or decision? That’s the goal for every character you keep.

  For more on the kind of change I’m talking about, read this:

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This week Hampshire College announced that it would close at the end of this year, due to dropping enrollment and rising costs. Goddard College folded for the same reasons in 2024. Today’s post by Em Bowen is a reminder of the wonder and value that we lose every time one of these progressive institutions dies.

Catching the First Fish*

by Em Bowen

“When transcendence of our personal history takes precedence over intimacy with our personal history, spiritual bypassing is inevitable.”

-Robert Agustus Masters

For a second, I thought I would die on the front steps of city hall in Montpelier, Vermont. It was the winter of 2014 and only minutes before, I was warm and snug on a Greyhound bus, headed to my first Goddard residency. I’d traveled to Boston to spend New Year’s in a romantic relationship that I had to close my eyes to stay in and in that spirit of unknowing and blindness, assumed that the capital city of any state was sure to have a bus stop.

Wrong. Wrong in my Arizona-livin’ Mom’s department store pea coat. Wrong in my Justin Roper cowboy boots. Wrong with my now frozen hand that I’d ungloved from my stupid Walgreens mitten in order to call the taxi company. “Half an hour away,” the man on the other end of the line said. Oh, God—I can’t wait that long, I thought.

It’s funny to think about now. In Tucson, where I hail from, it sometimes snows for a night in the winter. School is canceled. Tucsonans can’t drive over patches of ice that sometimes occur on bridges over dry river beds. Snow comes with, at the coldest, twenty-five degrees above zero temperatures. It’s all melted away by mid-morning. Like it never happened.

When the taxi guy realized I was out, in Southwest chic, in a negative double digits winter night at the steps of city hall, he told me where the police station was and to go fast. I ran. Tromping through the snow until I arrived, breathless in the lobby. A cop stared at me from behind the glass.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” I gasped, “I’m from Arizona.”

At the end of that first residency I found myself in the Manor Oak room taking former Program Director Paul Selig’s “Writer’s Healing Workshop.” It’s fair to say I didn’t know what I was in for. Had I known that Paul was also a medium and that he channeled a consciousness, a group of voices who articulated in Old English, I may have built some walls around what came next. But I didn’t know, so in delightful naiveté I found myself cracked open when suddenly something said in that room got into me.

Up to that point I was fairly certain that I was alone in the world. A sense of the great beyond left me completely when I stepped into my queerness after a lifetime of Christianity. I no longer looked up to the stars at night because it didn’t feel like any of it was for me anymore. So you can imagine, stepping out of that room, having felt something—I was ecstatic. I’m free, I thought. Life is going to be so much easier now. I was right—and wrong. I struggled during my time at Goddard. I renovated my insides like you might an outdated kitchen. Stripped clean. I’d go to use what was once the coffee grinder of my internal being and panic when it was not where I had left it. I did not write all those “intelligent, queer theory essays” I thought I’d write. Instead, I wrote about myself. I was the I in my very personal essays and I was messy, annoying, stupid, and weak at times. I was a fool and a show boater. I had hurt others, myself included, and now I would figure out why. I was not alone in this.

That’s the good thing about what I consider good writing. You can’t bypass to do it. Annie Dillard tells a story in The Writing Life about an Aleutian mother who survives with her young child for a whole winter on fish she catches from entrails of other fish. Dillard writes, “How do you catch the first fish?” The woman cuts a strip of flesh from her own thigh to catch the first fish and so we the writers must start with ourselves. If you do it the right way, if you analyze the parts of the whole—all your guts, as my friend Gregg might say—you end up somewhere else and you didn’t fucking ascend to get there. You dug, you climbed, you swam, you tore.

Two and half years later, I was standing at the podium in front of the Haybarn Theater at Goddard’s Vermont campus about to give my two minute MFA graduation speech and I realized that I knew only a couple of things for certain.

One: I was certain that every hypothetical monologue I’d given to this audience I was now actually standing in front of—the long-winded, noble sounding, poignant combinations of words thought while running, while hiking, while driving my car and listening to some song that stirred up my more reverent and dramatic tendencies—was not going to happen.

Two: I was certain that I’d moved through something; actually touched it, had been in it, was now moving out of it, yet I didn’t need to understand exactly what it was that I’d done. It was that I’d moved and that pieces had been moved within me. I’d traveled through the versions of myself I was too young or too hurt to notice. The person on the podium was who I had come to be and I was just starting to get the sense of who this person actually was. For all that work, I was finally certain that that this whole writing thing was a little bit in—and out of my hands.

Em Bowen (he/him/his, they/them/theirs) is the former Executive Director of the Tucson Poetry Festival, a PhD student at the College of Education at the University of Arizona, a bilingual Waldorf educator, a storyteller, a writer, an essayist, a poet and a person who thrives and is always changing (much as we all are, whether we realize it or not). Their work has been published in the Tucson Weekly, The Atlantic, Zocalo, Wild Gender, The Feminist Wire, and most recently live on the stand-up comic stages of Tucson. Em earned their MFA from Goddard College and is the former producer of the Tucson Gender Identity Project.

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* First published in The Writer in the World September 28, 2016.

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Hello Loreates,

Another hell of a week, no? Even if we don’t live in a physical war zone, we’re all now subject to continuous psychological warfare. The Mad King’s genocidal ravings this week pushed many of us right up to the precipice. I know it’s hard to pull away from this vortex, but we must, for at least a few hours every day. If we don’t preserve time and focus for art, reflection, connection, and meaning, then we’ll succumb to the regime’s depravity and surrender what matters most.

Since I’ve been devoting my focused hours this week to my essay collection, I thought I’d share some of that process with you here. In my MFA program, many students were flummoxed by the prospect of assembling a collection — whether of poems, essays, or short fiction. They wanted a how-to workshop. Of course, there’s no one way to assemble a collection of anything. I might say that the secret is to honor the contents of the collection, but that’s like saying the secret to raising a family is to honor the truth of each family member. Sounds great, but how exactly do you do that?

When it comes to collected essays, poems, or stories, I believe that literary magazines hold several valuable keys. That’s why I’ve been doggedly submitting the essays from my collection-in progress. This week one of the central stories in my project, ‘The Lost Box,’ was published in The Common online:

Read at The Common

I was simply going to announce that news here, but then I thought, why not share with you the process of getting that piece published and the reasons why I think this small victory matters for the future of my collection. As Anne Lamott said, you do the work bird by bird. Or, in this case, essay by essay.

Read on!

Aimee

Generating a Collection With an Assist From Lit Mags

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Watch the recording of the entire hour above, and/or skim Jenna’s major takeaways below.

Publishing Today with Jenna Satterthwaite

Jenna juggles a corporate day job, agenting, authoring, and raising three children — none of which she treats as secondary. Her corporate role pays the bills while agenting builds slowly; industry estimates put the timeline to a full-time agenting income at seven to ten years. She credits a stay-at-home spouse, genuine efficiency at her day job (gained over eighteen years), and a tolerance for multitasking as the keys to making it work. Her honest bottom line: this particular balance is not replicable for most people, and she doesn’t pretend otherwise. But it’s working for her and her clients!

On the Path to Becoming an Agent

Jenna came to agenting through years in the query trenches and on submission as an author. She watched five of her own books die on submission before finally selling her sixth in a two-book deal. That painful education — learning which imprints suit which genres, absorbing editor feedback, and developing a feel for publishing strategy — made agenting feel like a natural next step. A personal loss (the death of her youngest sister) and the approaching milestone of turning forty catalyzed the leap. She started with internships and used them as a litmus test before committing fully.

On the Selection of Genres to Represent

Jenna opened to queries very broadly when she started — fiction, nonfiction, all age groups — on the advice of more experienced agents who told her not to pigeonhole herself too quickly. That turned out to be good advice, because she ended up gravitating toward genres she hadn’t expected.

Her biggest selling categories have been romance and horror, which surprised her since she hadn’t been well-read in either before becoming an agent. She has also sold thrillers (her own writing background), science fiction, and some literary and upmarket fiction. She mentioned having a harder time finding upmarket projects that successfully blend literary writing with a propulsive commercial plot — she described that combination as “the needle in the haystack” but said she’s hungry for more of it.

On the children’s side, she signed three YA authors last year, though the market has made those very difficult to sell at the moment.

Her general approach to deciding what to represent is to think of herself as a general reader: if something speaks to her broadly, she trusts that it will speak to others too, even if she’s not deeply versed in that particular genre.

It’s worth noting she is not currently open to queries, but plans to open again at some point later in the year. Her wishlist is on the Storm Literary Agency website.

On the Author’s Life Being Financially Precarious

Jenna views her own writing career as “a cherry on top” rather than a financial foundation. She describes successful long-term authors as squirrels who must leap from branch to branch — pivoting across genres, formats, and opportunities rather than betting everything on a single strand of work. She herself writes under both her own name and the pen name Sienna Sharp to access different markets and maximize income. Her advice: do not expect to rest financially on an authoring career unless you are among the rare exceptions.

On Pen Names

Jenna’s Sienna Sharpe pen name arose from a specific contractual situation: she was already under contract with HarperCollins when a UK publisher (Penguin Random House UK) came looking for someone to write a beachy thriller-romance. A pen name let her take the opportunity without violating option clauses and non-compete agreements. It also served a positioning function — the Sienna Sharpe books are lighter and require a guaranteed happy romantic ending, distinguishing them from her darker Jenna Satterthwaite thrillers. Crucially, the pen name is not a secret; both publishers know about each other, and Jenna promotes both lines openly.

On Submission Timelines and Persistence

Jenna tracks every submission in a shared Excel spreadsheet and does not officially pull books from submission. Her philosophy is to keep going until the editor pool is genuinely exhausted. From her first year of selling, she shared actual data: the number of days between going on submission and receiving a first offer ranged from as few as ten days to as many as 471.

One book went nearly a full year without an offer, then sold at auction — with the winning bid coming from an editor who had held it for twelve months. The unpredictable timeline is the only honest answer she can give authors who ask how long it takes.

Side note: Aimee mentioned a friend whose book had gone out on submission twenty-five years earlier without selling. Then, years later, there was a cultural revival of interest in Margaret Mead, and an editor remembered having seen this book — which was about Margaret Mead's young sex life — a quarter century prior. The editor tracked it down, and the book was ultimately published just a few years ago.

On When to Revise Between Rounds

Jenna recommends manuscript revision between submission rounds only when feedback from multiple editors is strikingly consistent and specific. She has done it once: a genre-blending book kept receiving the same critique from four or five houses, which she treated as a resounding signal. Otherwise, editorial feedback from acquisition editors tends to be inconsistent.

On Choosing an Agent

Her advice, which she acknowledges other agents dispute: query widely rather than obsessively vetting every agent up front. The real due diligence should happen when an offer is on the table. At that point, tap your network — writers’ communities, represented authors, private Discord groups — because the most valuable information about agents circulates through informal channels rather than public profiles. She also recommends the Authors Guild as a resource for understanding what a standard agency contract should look like.

One notable caution about high-profile agencies: agents at larger, more prestigious firms often submit exclusively to the Big Five, which means a book can exhaust its list of potential editors very quickly. For many authors, a newer or mid-sized agent with a broader submission strategy may actually serve them better.

On the Current State of Publishing

Multiple children’s imprints have closed or restructured in recent months — Dial Press for Young Readers, Roaring Brook at Macmillan, Little Brown for Young Readers, and several Simon & Schuster kidlit imprints among them. Young adult sales are down. Jenna signed three YA authors in the past year and has not yet sold any of their work.

On the question of political pressure and book bans: Jenna believes publishers are quietly adjusting their acquisition decisions in response, but that no editor will say so openly. The dynamic is that editors are often personally committed to diversity in publishing, but they are not the final word — the sales team has significant influence over acquisitions, and if a book cannot be sold into libraries or bookstores because of banning campaigns, publishers will register that commercially. The result is a gap between stated values and actual buying patterns that she finds discouraging but honest to name.

And yet, there’s still hope! Jenna’s client Alex Rittany’s young adult novel Maybe Tomorrow I’ll Know is about to come out from Norton Books for Young Readers. It’s a trans romance featuring a time loop and a body swap.

Jenna was particularly enthusiastic about the editor pairing — Kristen Allard at Norton — calling it one of the most stellar editor-author matches she had been able to bring together, saying Kristen “just gets it” and that the publisher was fully behind the book. She held this up as hopeful evidence that editors and agents are still actively championing books with diverse representation even in a difficult climate.

Bonus! Agent phrases, fyi:

• Sub= Submission to editors and publishers.

• Dead on sub= a submitted book fails to sell to any publisher

• R&R= Review & revise instructions from an agent or editor who’s interested but needs changes in a manuscript before committing.

• Whisper network= a community of industry insiders or well-connected writers who will tell you — off the record—the truth about agents, editors, and publishers.

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Hello Loreates,

Today is No Kings Day 3! I suspect you’re preoccupied with protesting the American Dictatorship (if you need to know more about that, go HERE). So instead of writing a new post that might get overlooked in the busyness of this weekend, I thought I’d pull a good evergreen out from behind the paywall.

Three years ago, when I was getting MFA Lore started, I offered a series of Write On! Roundups for paid subscribers. I invited craft and publishing questions and responded from my own experience as author and MFA advisor. The Roundup I’m sharing today focuses on the age-old question that every writer asks when they feel like they’ve finally finished a piece of writing: What Now?

Answers below!

As MFA Lore evolved, I replaced these Roundups with bimonthly Zoom gatherings for …

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Hello Loreates,

Hope you’re staying sane and steady as No Kings3 approaches [March 28, sign up HERE!]. I’ve decided that DJT is the ultimate Soul Thief/Looter in Chief who wants nothing more than to steal our sanity and profit off our loss. Stopping him requires a strange jujutsu on all our parts. On the one hand, we must actively participate in the fight against him and his thugs [cue No Kings3 ]. On the other, we must maintain the daily practices that support and preserve our mental health.

That’s why we continue to write creatively. For our sanity. For the society we hope to restore. For the future we mean to leave to our kids. Our fight must make room for art, understanding, breathing, curiosity, beauty, trust and love. Otherwise, all we’ll be left with is the hatred and violence of war.

After last week’s post about Interiority, asked me to dive into the issue of voice, especially the challenge of developing distinct and authentic voices for characters in fiction. Of course, this is a huge topic. At first I thought of approaching it through the different technical considerations that go into voice formation— such as syntax, dialect, education, class, geography, gender, ethnicity, era, and any of the other myriad factors that shape an individual’s voice IRL. Then I thought of annotating a selection of distinctive voices from classic literature or from one of the top literary magazines.

But then I decided to try a more personal experiment. I can’t speak to what’s on another author’s mind as they develop a character’s voice, but I have clear memories of creating my own characters, especially the ones that started speaking to me out of the blue. So, I thought I’d review some of those passages, compare them tonally, and see what “voice lessons” I can pull out of them for Amy and for you.

Read on!

Aimee

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Voice Lessons

Our characters are us. Or, as Flaubert famously put it, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” But that does not mean they all speak and think in the same voice.

Years ago, after spending a few days in Taiwan, I realized my mind was dreaming in Mandarin. This is not to say that my dream self could understand Mandarin, but it had recorded the sounds of the language around me so that I could hear them inside my head. In similar fashion, we carry countless familiar voices in our subconscious. Voices of parents, siblings, neighbors, distant relatives, forgotten teachers, TV characters, movie idols, cartoon figures, commercial spokespeople, jingo singers, crooners, rock stars, not to mention fictional characters that made such a vivid impression that their voices leapt from the page straight into our skulls. Holden Caulfield, anyone?

Our task as writers, then, is less creating the voices of our characters than echolocating them and bringing them up from the depths, that we might make them audible to others. To show you what I mean, I’m going to try something I’ve never done before. I’m going to revisit a few of the voices from my novels and try to trace their genesis, when they first spoke to me, where I think they came from, and how I represented them on the page.

One thing I will tell you about all these voices: they spoke to me well before I knew what their stories were about. The quotes are from novels that took me anywhere from four to seventeen years to complete, but most of these passages appeared in the very first drafts and remained close to their original form, right through final edits.

Test me, if you will, by reading each passage to see if you can hear the voice, picture the speaker or POV character, and gauge what their story’s about— before I unpack it for you.

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Against the surface, time blurs like an echo, shadow of mind.

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Hello Loreates,

The wars continue. We continue. Somehow even amid the atrocities, spring blooms. As of this week I have two new grand babies, and I’m trying to hold onto the joy and hope of their beginnings, just 4 weeks apart, in the thick of now.

I’m also trying to begin a couple of new writing projects, which feel as tentative and speculative as embryos themselves. One of them could lean heavily on interiority, which came up in our recent Take-5 workshop, as well. And since I just finished reading Sally Rooney’s extraordinarily interior novel Intermezzo, I thought I’d use this post to take a deep dive into interiority by annotating some key aspects of Rooney’s approach. For my own benefit and yours.

Thanks for taking this ride with me!

Aimee

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Writing the slippery, silent mind out loud

One of the greatest magic acts in creative writing is the mind-melding feat of “interiority.” In simple terms, this means that the author slips into the mind of the character (or self in a memoir) and creates the illusion of their thoughts on the page. Interiority allows the reader, too, to get inside the character’s head — or rather, to feel as if they’re inside the character’s head.

As with all magic acts, that distinction is crucial: the goal is to make the audience feel something that’s not actually happening. Interiority is like literary sleight of mind. The thoughts reported on the page must be carefully crafted to appear spontaneous and resemble actual thoughts, but transcripts they are not.

Interiority can take the form of a quick internal aside, an excursion in free indirect style, or a longer section— even a whole book — in stream of consciousness.

But like any magic act, interiority looks a whole lot easier than it is to pull off well. Not only do you need to know a character’s voice inside-out before you can write their thoughts, but you need to know when, how, and why they mentally lie to themselves. what their misconceptions are, what they’re selling and what they’re avoiding. You also need to manage technical challenges like infusing thought with telling details and transitioning in and out of interior perspectives.

Sally Rooney’s 2024 novel Intermezzo leans so heavily on interiority that it’s basically a master class in this technique. One way or another, the bulk of the book is written in prose that mirrors the words, images, and ideas flitting through the characters’ minds. Things do happen. Characters do speak. The POV occasionally pulls back to middle-distant 3rd. But most descriptions are embedded in mental wanderings. And many of the interior passages go on for pages. This infuses the whole narrative with intense subjectivity, which shifts from character to character as the baton of POV is passed around the cast.

Few authors would choose to rely this heavily on interiority for an entire novel. But it serves this particular story, which focuses on the ways self-consciousness warps morality and distorts self awareness. And Rooney’s technique in this book is worth studying because almost all of us will want to employ interiority from time to time in our writing.

Starting inside

The very first paragraph of Intermezzo will give you an idea of Rooney’s virtuosity. Note how much trust and patience she demands of the reader as she opens the book inside the head of a character who’s not identified for a page and a half— and who explains nothing about what’s going on or where we are or why we should keep reading (because who explains to themselves what they already know?):

Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent. On such occasions, one could almost come to regret one’s own social brilliance. Gives him the excuse, or gives him in any case someone at whom to look pleadingly between the mandatory handshakes. God love him. Nearly twenty-three now: Ivan the terrible. Difficult actually to believe the suit on him. Picked it up perhaps in some little damp-smelling second-hand shop for the local hospice, paid in cash, rode it home on his bicycle crumpled in a reusable plastic bag. Yes, that in fact would make sense of it, would bring into alignment the suit in its resplendent ugliness and the personality of the younger brother, ten years younger. Not without style in his own way. Certain kind of panache in his absolute disregard for the material world. Brains and beauty, an aunt said once. About them both. Or was it Ivan’s brains and Peter beauty. Thanks, I think. He crosses Watling Street now towards the apartment that is not an apartment, the house that is not a house, eleven or is it twelve days since the funeral, back in town. Back at work, such as it is. Or back anyway to Naomi’s place. And what will she be wearing when she answers the door. Slides his phone from his pocket into the palm of his hand as he reaches the front step, cool tactility of the screen as it lights under his fingers, typing. Outside. Evenings drawing in now and she’s back at her lectures, presumably. No reply but she sees the message, and then the predictable sequence, the so familiar and by now indirectly arousing sequence of sounds as behind the front door she comes up from the old basement staircase and into the hall. Classical conditioning: how did it take so long to figure that out? Common sense. Not that. Everyday experience. The relationship of memory and feeling. The opening door.

Hello, Peter, she says.

Inside voice

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Hi there!

I’m Aimee Liu, and I write novels, essays, and nonfiction books.

Here at MFA Lore, my mission is to offer you the essence of an MFA in creative writing, minus the tuition. As a subscriber, you’ll receive weekly creative prompts and literary craft and publishing advice culled from my long experience as a bestselling author, veteran ghostwriter, and MFA advisor. Paid subscribers receive intensive craft and business essays each Saturday, plus bimonthly zoom salons. And members of my Take-5 program get my personal feedback on their work, both in writing and at our monthly online workshops.

Why this work, and why now? I firmly believe that, in this historic moment of moral crisis, it’s more important than ever for writers of all stripes to learn the craft of literary writing, because that is the writing that ultimately conveys truth to hearts and minds and dismantles false assumptions.

We’re drowning today in superficial words that lie and distract and manipulate and delude. What thi…

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Hello Loreates,

How are you surviving this utterly surreal World War Trump? Between breaking news alerts and calls to my reps, I’m taking refuge in my work, revising essays for publication, setting up writerly interviews in the hope that the center will hold, after all. I fervently believe that literature still plays a vital role in strengthening the critical thinking that democracy and peace require. It’s never “just a diversion” or “entertainment.” All writing is political if it’s any good. And that includes writing about writing. If you’re new here, know that this sentiment animates everything I do at MFA Lore. That’s why I’ve decided to offer this global peace special: a year of Paid Subscriber benefits for just $30.

Become a stronger writer and use your words to save the world:

50% off Write for Peace discount

Now, on to the business at hand.

At our Take 5 writing workshop last month, I invoked the old adage that writing is like talking to the stranger on the next bar stool. Do you know it? The underlying idea is that you’re never just “writing a book,” you’re telling a story to a reader who doesn’t know you, and you’re telling it for a reason that you must communicate to grab their attention so they’ll stick around to listen. Or, as George Orwell put it:

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” — George Orwell (h/t )

To get that hearing, you lean toward your neighbor and whisper: “I have something to tell you…”

But this led to a much bigger conversation about the logic of the bar stool metaphor and the translation of “I have something to tell you…” into writing process. Having continued this conversation in my head over the past week, I thought I’d bring you into it here.

Read on!

Aimee

Save the Date!

Friday, April 3 at 11 am PT

Well Published: Author+Agent Jenna Satterthwaite

Please join my next Well Published, Live! on Friday, April 3. I’ll be chatting with about her life and work as both author and agent. How DOES she do both? Please register here:

Register/Join April 3

Well Published! is a monthly Substack Live feature of Aimee Liu’s MFA Lore, offering video interviews with recently published authors and publishing professionals about the nitty gritty of getting… well published! Subscribe now to access the full archive of videos and other essential insights about creative writing and the writing life.

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Unpacking the Who, Why, What, How, and Whom of ‘I Have Something To tell You’

Write as if you’re talking to the stranger on the next bar stool.

I have no idea when I first heard this writing advice, but I confirm it almost every time I scrutinize the first lines of a story— especially stories told in 1st or close 3rd POV. Have a look at these openers from the first four short-short stories listed at narrativemagazine.com, and see what I mean:

• I got this job where I sell snow cones from a cart in a petting zoo.

• TONIGHT I’M STANDING in the bathroom, in my nightgown, scrubbing my false teeth with a toothbrush.

• She fucks a sailor, a Turkish sailor, the summer she spends in Istanbul.

• “You’d be surprised how many of us there are,” she said, as if it were gossip.

Can you hear the personal urgency, the intense leaning, the confidential voice almost strong enough for you to feel the heat and smell the perspiration coming off the narrator? Maybe the speaker is full-on facing you, or maybe just speaking sideways, but there’s no doubt these words are aimed at you (the metaphorical stranger at the bar) to get a reaction. They’re almost like verbal hands gripping your lapels. And those hands all deliver a single unspoken message: I have something to tell you!

The secret prelude/promise

If your story were an actual conversation at a bar (or on a bus or train, at a resort pool, during a group hike — the bar is merely a convention with conversational lubricants), the stranger would need to hear a little more about your “something” before paying attention. This would take the form of a prelude/promise such as:

• Here’s what terror and grief will do to you…

• I know what makes war so seductive…

• What they never tell you about getting poor is that…

When you’re writing a story, you need that promise, too, but it probably won’t tumble out up front, the way it would in conversation. You might not be able to articulate the story’s promise until you’re several revisions in. And even then, you likely won’t want to state it so explicitly in your story.

So here’s a trick that can help you generate the same kind of heat and urgency on the page as you would if enticing that stranger at the bar:

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