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Hello Loreates,

I had several topics rolling around in my head for you this week, but then I realized —in my personal work— that I needed to try merging two essays, which weren’t working, into one bigger project that might have more resonance. This realization pulled me out of a creative funk and gave me today’s topic, as I’m employing a strategy that I’ve used for years but not (I don’t think) shared with you here. I call it Quilting.

Quilting is a trick I devised two or three books ago as a ghostwriter for research-driven projects. As I discovered quotes or research findings that I knew I wanted to include, I’d cut/paste or summarize each one (with its source reference carefully noted!) into a dummy document that crudely represented the intended chapter. Once the dummy hit critical mass with all the general topics I felt the chapter would need, I’d rearrange the raw pieces to form a “quilt” of organically flowing ideas. The result gave me a very rough pattern for the chapter, similar to an outline but with substance, so I could see where I had enough material, where I needed more, and where information might be redundant.

The more comfortable I became quilting research projects, the more confident I felt that the same process could work for fiction and creative nonfiction. It’s especially useful for major restructuring that combines or moves existing passages or sections of material. One great advantage of quilting is that it forces you to step back, off the page, to assess the work’s core components from a distance. It allows you to eyeball the macro pattern without getting distracted by the prose.

Since I’m in the thick of quilting my trial merge, I thought I’d take you through the process step by step.

Especially if you’re restructuring a manuscript, read on!

Aimee

How to Quilt Your Story

I don’t sew, but I know that quilts are patterns pieced together from scraps of old material. At various stages in writing, I rely on a similar process to assemble and organize pieces of my stories and books.

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This is your monthly thank-you gift for being a paid subscriber to MFA Lore.

Your vote last month was a resounding Yes! to the prospect of a regular round-up of links to curated MFA Lore essays by topic. In effect, a virtual writing course every month. So forward we go.

This month’s topic: STORY STRUCTURE. Below, you’ll find links to related articles going back to the start of this stack. Peruse and file as you wish.

I am so very grateful for your time, attention, and trust. As you may know, everyone on Substack right now is seeing a plateau in new subscribers. Growth is harder than ever. So if you like what you find at MFA Lore and you know other writers who might join us, please do share this publication with them (you earn rewards for referrals!):

Refer a friend

And, as always, write on!

Aimee

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“We’re always looking for potential and really excited to work with authors to bring pieces into the best form possible... that is how we see our jobs.”

Thank you to everyone who tuned into Well Published! live with Jennifer Acker, founder and editor in chief of The Common literary journal. Our conversation was rich and far-reaching, from the grit that it takes to launch a writing life, to the stamina it takes to start a world-class literary journal like The Common and the unique combination of experience and imagination it takes to write exceptional fiction.

Check out The Common online

Watch the full recording above, and scroll through the takeaways below, including Jennifer’s tips for submitting to literary magazines!

is a writer, editor, and translator. She is founder and editor in chief of the global, award-winning literary magazine The Common. Her debut novel, The Limits of the World, was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. Her memoir “Fatigue” is a #1 Amazon bestseller, and her short stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Oprah Daily, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, n+1, Slate, and Poets & Writers, among other places. Acker has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and a BA from Amherst College, where she directs the Literary Publishing Internship and LitFest. She lives in Western Massachusetts and Portland, Maine. Her second novel, Surrender, will be released in April 2026.

Well Published! Takeaways* from Writer & Editor in the World Jennifer Acker

Jen is Founder & Editor-in-Chief of The Common | Author of the novels Surrender and The Limits of the World

My conversation with Jen Acker ranged across her path into writing and publishing, the making of her new novel Surrender, and the decade-plus project of building The Common into one of the country’s leading literary journals.

Jen’s Tips for Writers Submitting to Literary Journals

• Start with the short forms. The Common‘s online-only “Dispatches” — short place-based essays or poems — are, in Acker’s words, the easiest way into the magazine.

“If anyone is obsessed with some place and wants to write a little essay about it, I highly recommend you send us that work.”

• Study a journal’s actual editorial vision before you submit. Every magazine has its own “M.O.,” but not every one makes it easy to find. Submitting smart means figuring out what a journal is actually looking for, not just sending blind.

“It’s sometimes hard to figure out really what the M.O. is of a different magazine... I really appreciate the Common because it is—you make it so clear.”

• Make your sense of place work for the piece, not against it. At The Common, place isn’t a rigid checkbox, but it does need to feel essential. Editors will sometimes ask a writer to strengthen that element if the piece is otherwise strong — but a piece that can’t accommodate it won’t be a fit.

“We do really want the place to be palpable in the pieces that we publish.”

• Know that your work is being read closely, even if it takes a while. Every submission passes through two volunteer readers before reaching an editor, and only editors reject — nothing is turned down without that level of attention. That thoroughness is also why response times can lag.

“Editors are the only ones who reject... which is why we’re a little bit behind on our queue. If anyone else is waiting, we are very sorry, but it’s because we’re really reading.”

• Expect real editorial engagement if a piece is accepted. Acker frames heavy, collaborative editing as a hallmark of the magazine — writers should come in ready to work with editors toward the strongest version of the piece.

“We’re always looking for potential and really excited to work with authors to bring pieces into the best form possible... that is how we see our jobs.”

• For events like LitFest, a personal pitch goes further than a formal application. The Common‘s literary festival runs by invitation rather than open application, so authors and publicists are better served making a direct connection with Acker than searching for a submission portal.

Jen on building a writing life

There’s no linear path into a writing life — you take what you can get.

Acker’s early career was a patchwork of paid and unpaid literary work: a college magazine, a post-grad fellowship, $25 book reviews for Publishers Weekly, and a stint at Knopf.

“It’s not a linear path, I would say... nothing is guaranteed in the world of writing, certainly not writing jobs. And so, you know, you do what you can.”

Anthropology gave her a framework for writing across cultural difference.

Her college study of anthropology grew directly out of a gap year in Kenya and Mexico, and it shaped how she’d later approach fiction about communities not her own.

“I need a lens through which to think: how do I think about these experiences? And how do I think about the ways in which my life is different from another life?”

Her debut novel was “biographical” rather than autobiographical.

The Limits of the World grew from years of research into her husband’s family history — the migration of Indians to East Africa and then to the UK or US — a story she felt hadn’t been widely told.

“I think for a lot of people, their first novels are autobiographical, and mine was very biographical.”

Working with a small press meant real creative control over the finished book.

At Delphinium Press, Acker wasn’t “just one part that gets passed along as part of a system” — she had significant say over her book jackets and hired her own designer.

“I had a lot of input, like particularly about the jackets for both of my books... I really work to make the book look in the way that I had envisioned it.”

She tricked herself into plotting Surrender by writing in present tense.

Told early in her career she lacked “narrative tension,” Acker developed a structural workaround: each chapter ends with a character decision, forcing consequence and reaction to drive the next.

“The way that I tricked myself to do it in Surrender was I wrote in the present tense... a character has to make a decision at the end of every chapter... and then they’re going to have to react to those decisions.”

Managing chronic illness has made her a stricter guardian of her own limits.

Living with chronic fatigue syndrome for a decade — including having to cut short her Surrender book tour this spring — has taught Acker to protect her time fiercely, both for herself and across her small team at The Common.

“Learning to say no and learning to say enough are really tricky things to do, but very, very necessary.”

Jen on creating The Common

Founding a literary magazine required “fake it till you make it” persistence.

Acker started The Common in 2008 after a mentor’s offhand suggestion, with no MFA and no book to her name — pitching literary magazine editors at AWP who mostly laughed her off.

“Some of that is like fake it till you make it. You’re just like trying to present in a way that you look like you’re doing great stuff, even if behind the scenes you’re staying up at night and tearing your hair out and wondering where the money is going to come from.”

A journal needs a clear editorial vision — especially if it’s new.

Established magazines can coast on reputation, but newer ones have to be explicit about their identity. For The Common, that identity became a sense of place, something Acker felt every writer and reader carries in some form.

“If you’re a newer generation magazine, you have to be much more explicit about what you’re doing and work a little harder to carve out your corner of the publishing world.”

Literary magazines sit near the bottom of the funding food chain.

The Common has relied on NEA grants when available, Amherst College’s institutional support, and reader contributions — but public and private arts funding for literature lags far behind other art forms, and the NEA landscape has grown harder.

“Literary magazines are very low on the priority list of funders... all of those art forms received far more funding from the private sector and from the public sector than literature does.”

Deep editorial engagement is central to The Common‘s identity.

Every submission is read twice by volunteer readers before reaching an editor, and the magazine prides itself on collaborative, hands-on editing rather than a simple accept/reject process.

“One thing that we really care about and that’s really unique about the Common is how much editing we do.”

Bonus: Watch for The Common’s new book review section!

The Common is launching a new book review initiative to help fill the gap left by shrinking book coverage elsewhere (notably the closure of The Washington Post‘s Book World) — staying true, as Jen noted, to the magazine’s sense-of-place through line.

*Takeaways AI-generated by Claude

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Hello Loreates,

Belatedly, I’ve been listening to Michelle Obama read the audio version of Becoming. It’s wonderful on countless levels, but one craft detail stands out to me: the deft movement throughout the story, back and forth, between acting and witnessing. I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed this 1st-person shifting so clearly before, probably because few authors pay such close attention to its significance. Michelle Obama is an educator, a community organizer, a leader, a mom, and a First Lady. She understands that all action is predicated on observation, that everything we witness affects everything we do and believe, and that each of us is the product, to a large extent, of conduct and people we have observed. Over and over again, her book shows the pattern of cause/observation-and-effect/behavior that constitutes growing up, or Becoming. The very title embodies the twinning of the relatively passive Being + the more active Coming to engagement with oneself and the world.

I want to dive deeper into this concept, not just for the benefit of memoirists but also for fiction writers, especially those writing in 1st person. When you think of it, the balancing act between observing and acting applies to every character on the page, just as it does in real life.

Write on!

Aimee

Save the Date!

Tuesday, July 21 at 10am PT

Well Published! Live with

Jennifer Acker, Founder of

The Common Literary Magazine

We’ll be talking about the creation of a world-class literary magazine and Jennifer’s latest novel, Surrender, which Richard Russo calls “splendid…vividly drawn characters…a richly rendered place…and the kinds of impossible choices that the real world too often offers all of us.”

Join live, July 21

---

Saturday, July 25 at 9am PT

Take 5 Writing Workshop

This monthly workshop for Premium MFA Lore Subscribers allows us to take a close look at a different 5-page submission each month, tailoring feedback to the needs of each writer. To join, become a Premium Subscriber today.

Take 5 Program

Which 1st Person Are You Writing?

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Oscar Wilde’s Wild Letter*

By Victoria Nelson

On May 25, 1895, the celebrated playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde entered Reading Gaol (as “jail” is spelled in British English) to serve two years’ hard labor for loving men instead of women.

Wilde had dared to sue the Marquess of Queensbury, father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, for libel after Queensbury had publicly accused him of being a “Somdomite.” The resulting trial produced evidence of Wilde’s other homosexual activity and two more trials, attended by massive publicity, resulted in his conviction on a charge of “gross indecency.”

More than a hundred and twenty years later I rode the Great Western Railway from London to the city of Reading to view a major exhibition on Wilde at the only recently shut down prison. The show celebrated the centenary of the posthumous publication of De Profundis, the very long letter Wilde wrote from his cell to Alfred Douglas. It had to be a letter because three pages a day of letter writing were all a sympathetic warden allowed the most talented man of letters in the country.

The tiny, wretched cells in the four-story Victorian prison are crammed with extraordinary installations by more than a score of notable artists and writers as well as letters and memorabilia of Wilde himself. A reading of De Profundis was scheduled every Sunday in the prison chapel. The full letter takes five and half hours to read aloud.

I sat down with a big crowd on opening day to listen.

De Profundis is a love letter of a very particular sort, the sort we’ve all written at some time in our lives. And it is from this standpoint, the purely human one, I want to approach the work.

You wouldn’t know it was a love letter at first. “Dear Bosie [Douglas’s nickname],” Wilde begins. “After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without having received a single line from you, or any news or message even, except such as gave me pain.”

What follows is reproach upon reproach, accusations that Bosie’s profligacy and dissolute habits destroyed Wilde’s writing as well as his soul. There is no mention of happiness, only of the sorrow and pain brought on by the merciless behavior of a young lover who has shown only ingratitude for the innumerable kindnesses, monetary support, and unconditional love Oscar has showered on him.

By all this rage and pain we understand that Oscar is still deeply in love.

About twenty minutes in, however, I began to shift in my seat. Scolding myself for this restlessness, I listened on. The same content, the same martyred tone. You did this, you did that. How could you! The sole self criticism offered is that of having simply been too good to such a worthless scoundrel.

Unbidden, a voice rose inside me: Oscar, get over it.

I tried to suppress it. But couldn’t. And a short time later, with more than four hours to go on De Profundis, I crept out of the chapel and rode back to London, very unhappy with myself.

Oscar Wilde, if you’ve ever read the terrific biography by Richard Ellman, was a first-rate human being as well as a literary genius. He was just as kind and generous to people of all backgrounds as he describes himself being to Bosie in De Profundis. What he had to endure in Reading Gaol thanks to the vengeance of his lover’s father—six hours of treadmill per day and a plank bed for the first three months, no books till six months in, one visitor every eight months, not to mention a destroyed public reputation—was grotesque. And Alfred Douglas aka Bosie by all accounts was an unstable and immature young man capable of casual cruelty when he felt wronged.

But.

Oscar’s love was not as nobly one-sided as he makes it sound in De Profundis; there’s a back story to Bosie’s silence. These two men loved each other. Once Wilde had served his sentence, they reconnected in Europe. After their first night together, Bosie offered to live with him forever. Oscar wrote, “My only hope of doing beautiful work in art is being with you.”

Naturally, it didn’t work out. They split and Oscar died alone in Paris three years after his release.

But they had loved each other. In real life every love story has at least two versions, maybe more. De Profundis is only one version of the story of Oscar and Bosie. It’s the only one we pay attention to because no one reads the fulsome sonnets of the inferior writer who was his lover.

Here’s the point I want to make: On the page we writers control our stories, real or made up. Our “way with words” gives us an unearned edge in presenting real-life situations. When a painter friend of mine underwent an acrimonious divorce, her soon-to-be ex, a writer, wordsmithed a scathing hatchet job that moved the judge to lecture her sternly, “Time to clean your skirts, Mrs. X!”

In Hilary Mantel’s historical novel Wolf Hall, the hero remarks sardonically that the self-aggrandizing cleric Sir Thomas More, about to be executed by Henry VIII, presents himself as “a poor victim” with “better words” than his adversaries possess. More did not deserve to die, but he made sure he controlled history’s perception of him–a perception that, thanks to his writerly gifts, may not have been fully accurate.

So, a question: How honest are we writers when we deliver our version of a real-life story in our memoirs and autobiographical fiction? Do we tell the hard truth about ourselves as well as the other guy? Or do we, every now and then, use our art to justify ourselves and settle scores–we poor victims with better words?

Victoria Nelson is a writer of fiction, criticism, and memoir. Her books include the award-winning Gothicka and The Secret Life of Puppets, both published by Harvard University Press; two collections of stories, Wild California and A Bestiary of My Heart, a memoir, My Time in Hawaii; and On Writer’s Block. She was a Guggenheim Fellow for the 2016-17 academic year.

Save the Date!

Tuesday, July 21 at 10am PT

Well Published! Live with

, Founder of

The Common Literary Magazine

We’ll be talking about the creation of a world-class literary magazine and ’s latest novel, Surrender, which Richard Russo calls “splendid…vividly drawn characters…a richly rendered place…and the kinds of impossible choices that the real world too often offers all of us.”

Join live, July 21

---

Saturday, July 25 at 9am PT

Take 5 Writing Workshop

This monthly workshop for Premium MFA Lore Subscribers allows us to take a close look at a different 5-page submission each month, tailoring feedback to the needs of each writer. To join, become a Premium Subscriber today.

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*Originally published in The Writer in the World, Oct 10, 2016.

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Hello Loreates,

As many of you have noticed, for the past two months I’ve been posting daily notes with literary passages plucked from favorite books in my library. The only “rule” for selection of these quotes is their impact on me. Some strike me simply as beautiful. Some wow me with their mastery of metaphor. Some make me laugh out loud. Some move me to tears or make me feel as if I’ve physically moved across continents or oceans in the span of a few lines.

At first I gave little thought to the specific reasons they dazzled me. I simply wanted to use this practice to reacquaint myself with my library and to share examples of craft mastery. But I found that the act of physically transcribing these passages, rather than cutting and pasting them, gave me a deeper view into their musicality and meaning, a new appreciation for the dimensions of craft that they embody.

I’ve savored and studied passages like this one:

We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken.—Michael Ondaatje, Warlight (2018)

And the practice that began as a whim has expanded into an inquiry into this “confusing landscape” of “barely held stories,” specifically through the “invisible and unspoken” systems that do hold order within stories, one passage at a time. I want to share that inquiry with you here by annotating the collected quotes.

At first I thought this could be done in a single post under a pithy challenge like: Do Your Paragraphs Do More Than Show & Tell? But then I started sorting my collected quotes by technique. How, in a single post, could I do justice to the multiplicity of strengths, including irony, lyricism, metaphor, naked emotion, and intellectual bite, that these passages showcase ? No, I couldn’t. So, I’ve decided to turn this examination into a new occasional series on paragraph technique.

To be clear, I’m not going to be annotating paragraphs that typify the bulk of most books. Even the masters rely heavily on paragraphs that simply deliver lines of dialogue, description, or action to keep the narrative rolling. Not every prose writer is a poet, and not every passage in a story or essay needs to stun the reader with its glory. Propulsive plots, colorful characters, and explosive themes can drive novels and memoirs to success with or without breathtaking paragraphs. Arguably, prose written by poets like W.G. Sebald and Ondaatje can be so intense and relentlessly layered that it stops some readers from enjoying it. But most serious readers seek out literature that delivers a pattern of richly concentrated passages in tandem with more straightforward paragraphs. And, btw, spare language does not preclude a startlingly complex paragraph.

The first thing I noticed as I began this collecting practice was that many of my chosen passages end with a punch. They land in the heart, the gut, or the soul. And they build to that wallop with intense command and quiet calculation. How exactly do they do that? I wondered and so thought this would be a good focus to launch the series.

I invite you to continue the exploration with me below. And please do let me know what you think of this proposed series.

Read on!

Aimee

Leave a comment

Save the Date!

Tuesday, July 21 at 10am PT

Well Published! Live with

Jennifer Acker, Founder of

The Common Literary Magazine

We’ll be talking about the creation of a world-class literary magazine and Jennifer’s latest novel, Surrender, which Richard Russo calls “splendid…vividly drawn characters…a richly rendered place…and the kinds of impossible choices that the real world too often offers all of us.”

Join Jen Acker, July 21

---

Saturday, July 25 at 9am PT

Take 5 Writing Workshop

This monthly workshop for Premium MFA Lore Subscribers allows us to take a close look at a different 5-page submission each month, tailoring feedback to the needs of each writer. To join, become a Premium Subscriber today.

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The Paragraph with a Punch

Memorable paragraphs often take the reader on a journey that ends with a visceral explosion. Some vital quality builds, transforming quiet to noise, calm to terror, tranquility to violence, or thought to feeling— all in just a few lines. This rarely happens accidentally (never say “never,” but I actually don’t believe it ever happens accidentally). Yet to work, the effect must create the impression that the flow of words is purely organic, the building tension utterly natural, the final burst of ignition spontaneous. This illusion requires a narrative tour de force.

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Check out Everyday Ambassador!

Our conversation ranged from the power of literature to wage peace and the importance of bringing geopolitics down to a human scale through stories, to the urgent need for writers and peacebuilders to remember the moral complexity on all sides of conflict. If war is fueled by dehumanization of the enemy, then peace can only be achieved when humanity is mutually restored to enemy and ally alike. Literature can play a critical role in reminding us all of our shared humanity.

I was honored that Annelise wanted to focus on my novel Glorious Boy in our discussion. As one of my characters says in the book, “The most difficult thing is to remember that the enemy is human, but this is also the most important…especially when I find myself being my own worst enemy.” This became one of the anchors for our conversation.

Please read on for some of the advice we shared for writers and for peacebuilders, and watch the whole video above.

Buy Glorious Boy here!

Annelise Riles & Aimee Liu on Glorious Boy, War, and the Peaceful Power of Literature

Take-aways for writers and for peacebuilders

“The first step to war is to dehumanize someone.”

Dehumanization is the precondition for violence and war.

For writers: if your antagonist reads as pure monster, you’ve likely skipped a step. The most unsettling — and most useful — fiction shows the incremental process by which someone stops seeing another person as fully human; that mechanism, rendered on the page, is often more instructive than the violence it enables.

For peacebuilders: treat the language of dehumanization as an early-warning signal, not background noise. When a group starts being referred to in animal, alien, or vermin terms in public discourse, that’s a concrete point of intervention — not a rhetorical flourish to shrug off.

“The stories that we consider to be literature are much more nuanced, they’re much more complex... they get down through all of those surface layers, whereas propaganda really just sits right on the top layer of what people see.”

Literature counters propaganda by refusing simplicity.

For writers: complexity isn’t just an aesthetic choice, it’s a moral one. When you resist the urge to make a character simply good or simply bad, you’re doing the opposite of propaganda’s work — and that resistance is often where a book’s lasting power comes from.

For peacebuilders: complicate the narrative deliberately. Introducing nuance into a black-and-white public story — showing the humanity on a demonized “other side” — is itself a peacebuilding intervention, not just a communications strategy.

“These very human one-to-one decisions, one-to-one relationships end up literally saving the world.”

Individual relationships — not institutions — are what actually avert catastrophe.

For writers: scale your stakes down before you scale them up. A global crisis becomes legible to readers only through the lens of one relationship, one decision, one person choosing to act against orders — anchor the epic in the intimate.

For peacebuilders: invest in the unglamorous work of one-to-one ties across a divide — a single sustained friendship or collaboration can outlast an entire generation of official diplomacy. Don’t wait for institutional cover to restart a relationship that’s gone quiet.

“The perpetrator and the victim are both damaged in incalculable moral ways.”

Moral injury damages both victim and perpetrator.

For writers: sympathy for a perpetrator character isn’t the same as excusing them — it’s a craft tool. Showing what an act costs the person who commits it, not just the person who suffers it, adds a dimension readers rarely get from history books.

For peacebuilders: build moral injury into how you think about reconciliation work. People who were compelled into complicity — soldiers, low-level enforcers, bystanders — often need their own pathway to accountability and healing, not just blanket condemnation or blanket forgiveness.

Learn more about Moral Injury

“Writing Glorious Boy did change me... there were a lot of things that I knew when I started the book that opened up and took root in unexpected ways by the end.”

Writing fiction changes the writer, as well as the reader.

For writers: if you finish a draft holding the exact same beliefs you started with, you probably didn’t let the material do its work. Deep research and embodiment of a character should unsettle your assumptions somewhere along the way — that’s a sign the book is doing more than identifying a problem to fix.

For peacebuilders: stay suspicious of your own certainty. If years of dialogue or fieldwork with “the other side” haven’t changed any of your assumptions, you may be extracting rather than genuinely engaging — real encounter should leave a mark on you, too.

“One of the benefits of fiction is that it can reach people who otherwise aren’t thinking about it.”

Fiction reaches people in ways that history and journalism can’t.

For writers: don’t underestimate the reader who picked up your book “just for a good story.” A well-told narrative can smuggle in history, politics, and empathy to people who would never seek out a textbook or op-ed on the same subject — that backdoor is a real form of influence, not a lesser one.

For peacebuilders: partner with storytellers rather than treating culture as separate from your work. A novel, film, or memoir can move an audience your policy brief will never reach — build those relationships deliberately into your strategy.

“It’s the grandchild’s generation that is hopefully interested and feels safe enough that they don’t have the hang-ups or the fears that shroud it all in mystery, so they want to open up and solve the mystery.”

The grandchildren’s generation is often the one that can finally unearth what parents kept silent.

For writers: if you’re working from family history, notice where the silence sits — what wasn’t said is often more structurally important to the story than what was. Distance from direct trauma can be a craft advantage, not just a personal one, giving you access earlier generations didn’t have.

For peacebuilders: recognize generational timing in reconciliation efforts. Some truths can only surface once the generation that lived them has passed and the fear has thinned — design long-horizon truth-telling processes accordingly, rather than expecting disclosure on an institutional timeline.

“Culture leads and law follows.”

Culture often delivers the accountability that law and politics fail to.

For writers: a story can do reputational and moral work that courts and legislatures are too slow, too compromised, or too politically constrained to do. Don’t discount the real-world weight of simply telling a suppressed story accurately and vividly enough that it can’t be ignored.

For peacebuilders: don’t wait on formal justice mechanisms to move first. Public truth-telling, testimony, and cultural memory work can create the conditions that eventually make legal or political accountability possible — sequence your strategy with that in mind.

“The real pain of war is that you’re forced to make moral compromises... in a way that breaks you, and that you can’t quite put back together again.”

Family history reveals the moral compromises ordinary people are forced into during war.

For writers: the most honest war or conflict narratives resist tidy allegiances. Let characters make compromises that don’t fit a clean moral arc — the discomfort that creates in the reader is often the point, not a flaw to smooth over.

For peacebuilders: build space in your work for people who were neither clean heroes nor clean villains — the ones who switched sides, stayed silent, or complied to survive. Reconciliation processes that only have room for victims and perpetrators miss most of the population actually living through conflict.

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Make the two people, I now, and I then, come out in contrast. And further, this past is much affected by the present moment. What I write today I should not write in a year’s time. —Virginia Woolf

Hello, Loreates!

In our last Take-5 workshop, we had a spirited conversation about the importance of the Third I in memoir. In our test case, as in many, a mature narrator was needed to reassure the reader that the author did see the obvious Truth that was hidden from both the younger “remembering” self and the “remembered” child self. But no mature narrator was visible on the page, so how to make her perspective known? That was the nature of the conversation, which I thought I’d expand in this post by bringing in some samples from the MFA workshop I used to teach on The Third I.

Read on!

Aimee

Memoir Requires Three I’s

Memory is something that you do; it is not something that you have.—Tobias Wolff

What perspective do you bring to your subject? How you answer this critical question will determine whether your readers trust and believe you. It will shape your voice on the page and your narrative engagement with the story. And it will largely define the meaning that emerges through your prose.

The question of perspective applies, of course, to all literary writing, but it’s especially critical in memoir writing, which hinges on the reader’s belief that the memoirist is telling the truth. Truth not just as in, what literally happened back when, but much more importantly, what was going on beneath the surface of literal events and, ultimately, why is all that relevant and meaningful now?

Memoir is not diary, chronicle, or therapy

What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.—Vivian Gornick

You can use a journal to get your feelings down on paper. You can keep a diary to record the events of your life. You can narrate your dreams and memories to a therapist to exorcise your trauma and tell your version of what happened. All of those practices can help prepare you to write a memoir, but none, in and of itself, qualifies as memoir.

The mission of memoir is insight. Experience is the subject. Meaning is the theme. And a complete, ruthlessly honest and true understanding of the experience is the end goal.

It’s virtually impossible to understand the whole truth of an experience while you’re going through it. Insight often remains elusive for decades and might not dawn until the memoir is in its final draft. So, what then? Do memoirists simply write blind until the bell of insight rings, and then start the whole process over? Yes, and no.

Challenges of perspective in memoir

All your life you’ve had these truths in your head, and the truth lies elsewhere. —Lucy Sante

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"The very first page of the book is like being led to the dance floor by the author, and very early on you know whether or not this author is a talented dancer and you trust them to lead, or if this person is going to step on your feet."

Hello Loreates,

It was a special treat for me today to chat with my dear friend and fellow writing group member, about her extraordinary career, from writing her first novel at 14, to simultaneously becoming a lawyer and an actor, to building her debut novel from a modest paperback original into an international blockbuster, to following that up with a new novel that weaves race, politics, art, and privilege into a steamy cauldron of erotic suspense.

Robinne is a Jamaican-Chinese writer, actor, and producer [and former lawyer]. Born and raised in New York, she’s a graduate of Yale University and Columbia Law School. As an actress, she has credits in both film and television, including “Being Mary Jane,” and the “Fifty Shades” franchise.

Her debut novel, The Idea of You , published by St. Martin’s Press in 2017, is an international bestseller, with two dozen foreign translations. The film version, of which Robinne is a producer, was Amazon MGM’s number-one romantic comedy debut of all time.

Robinne’s new novel, Crash Into Me, is out from St. Martin’s Press on July 7. Time magazine called it “erotic suspense as glittery and sensuous as Tinsel Town itself.”

Buy 'Crash Into Me'

To show you why you’ll want to hear the entire hour, below are the top 10 takeaways from our conversation.

Read on!

Aimee

Robinne Lee Builds a Blockbuster!

1. Writing was the one art form that didn’t require anyone’s permission

Robinne spent years acting professionally, but described it as a craft that depends entirely on external approval — agents, casting directors, producers. Writing offered something acting never could: total creative autonomy.

“Acting, you’re always seeking permission to act... writing was something I could do anywhere at any time. I didn’t need anyone’s permission.”

2. A lifetime of private writing preceded her debut

Robinne wrote her first 884-page novel by hand at fourteen, followed by a 1,200-page manuscript at sixteen, all before ever publishing. The discipline of The Idea of You was built on decades of unpublished practice, not a sudden breakthrough.

“I want to say between the ages of 8 and 28, I missed almost no days writing about my life.”

3. The Idea of You was launched with modest expectations — and built by hand

The novel debuted as a paperback original with an average debut advance, no major publisher push, and no guarantee of success. Robinne spent nearly her entire advance hiring an independent publicist and treated the book’s success as a grassroots, door-to-door campaign.

“There were days that I felt like... I’m connecting with Instagram or Twitter, Facebook, and I thought, okay, I sold two books today.”

4. The book’s momentum came from readers and romance-community taste makers, not traditional media

Influential authors like Colleen Hoover and Taryn Fisher discovered the novel organically months after publication, well before mainstream press caught on. The pandemic — paired with a Vogue feature — became the true tipping point that led to the film adaptation.

"I had a relationship with E.L. James — she has such a devoted fandom, I got to know a lot of them. And so I was able to say, 'Hey, you guys, if you like sex in your books or love stories, I've got one coming out.'"

5. Fans demanded a sequel — but her agent and editor never did

Robinne emphasized that the pressure for a sequel to The Idea of You came entirely from readers, not from her publishing team. She built a dedicated Facebook fan community instead, which now numbers close to 10,000 members.

"I’d do Q&As regularly. I'd answer all their questions. I'd try to give as much of myself as possible in explaining what I was thinking when I was writing certain things... I gave them deleted scenes and I gave them merchandise."

6. Misreadings of her first book shaped how she approached her second

Robinne felt The Idea of You was miscategorized as a traditional romance promising a guaranteed happy ending, which led some readers to feel betrayed by its conclusion. That experience directly fed into years of writer’s block and shaped how she structured Crash Into Me.

"I didn't feel like I'd written a romance... to be fair, I think it's contemporary fiction / women's fiction. But the people who picked it up thinking it was contemporary romance are the ones who really, really wanted another book."

7. A real-life car accident became the new novel’s opening scene — and its central insight

A serious accident outside a Santa Monica coffee shop in 2016 left Robinne shaken but unharmed. A bystander’s offhand comment about how differently men would have reacted crystallized the emotional architecture of Crash Into Me.

“He said, ‘Women are so funny... this would never happen if it was three men. We wouldn’t be hugging each other.’... I thought, my god, this is a great way to start a book.”

8. Code-switching across class, race, and culture directly informs her fiction

Growing up Jamaican Chinese in an integrated Westchester school district, then attending Yale, gave Robinne what she described as “triple code-switching” — navigating Jamaican, Black American, and white/Jewish American social worlds simultaneously. That insider-outsider fluency became a core tool in constructing Cecilia’s character and class dynamics.

“It’s such a great tool. It’s a real benefit for a writer, I think, to have that inside-outside, insider-outsider point of view.”

9. Current events are deliberately woven into her fiction to anchor it in real time

Rather than writing in a vague or timeless setting, Robinne incorporates real news, politics, and cultural moments — referencing the first Trump administration, school shootings, and the war in Syria — to make her fictional world feel concurrent with actual lived history.

“It feels like this is real and it’s happening... not in a parallel universe but almost... it’s happening right now.”

10. Writing sex well means resisting both euphemism and unbroken intensity

Robinne traced her approach to writing eroticism back to reading nonfiction sexuality books as a teenager rather than traditional romance novels, which she felt relied on vague language. Her method blends technical accuracy, fantasy, and the mundane intrusive thoughts that interrupt real intimacy.

“I think the best way to write about it is to have these moments when our brains go off somewhere and it leads us to something else and then we come back.”

Interview conducted by Aimee Liu on Tuesday, June 30, for Well Published, Live! a production of MFA Lore. Robinne Lee’s novel Crash Into Me will be published by St. Martin’s Press on July 7.

Save the Date!

Tuesday, July 21, 10am PT/ 1pm ET

In the next Well Published! live video, I’ll be chatting with , founder of The Common, about launching and running an award-winning literary magazine while writing her own novels, including her latest, Surrender.

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Hello Loreates,

We’re done with our Robert McKee story review, at least for now. I hope the last 3 MFA Core posts have been useful. If you’d like me to unpack any more of McKee’s arcane rules, please let me know. But today, I’m going to dive back into a topic that was brewing before I got sidetracked, though like McKee’s rules, it’s sourced from Aristotle.

What does it mean to “command metaphor”? Why is this command a “mark of genius”? And perhaps even more importantly, if “good metaphors” are so great, what harm can bad ones do?

I’ll try to sort out the answers to these questions, along with some do’s and don’ts to help you maximize your metaphors, below.

Write on!

Aimee

Save the Date!

Tuesday, June 30 at 10am PT/ 1pm ET

Well Published, Live! with Blockbuster Novelist Robinne Lee

Join Live! June 30

Tune in Live for my chat with Robinne about her extraordinary journey to bestsellerdom with her “sleeper hit” The Idea of You and her arresting new novel Crash Into Me, which ignites at the intersection of race, eroticism, beauty, wealth, and celebrity. “As glittery and sensuous as Tinsel Town itself," says TIME.

Find all Well Published videos HERE

Master Metaphor as Literary Code

“The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.”
― Aristotle, Poetics

What is a metaphor? According to Aristotle, “Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.” In other words, metaphor is a system of codes, in which objects, ideas, and emotions are represented on the page by related but substantially different objects, ideas, or emotions. I’m using the term “metaphor” loosely, as did Aristotle, to include both metaphors, which are direct stand-ins for the literal thing, and similes, which are likened to the literal thing. Other forms of figurative language, like personification, idiom, and allusion, belong to this system, too.

Usually, metaphoric symbols are figurative, rather than abstract; they have concrete form, shape, color, or other sensory qualities that can be seen or touched. Why figurative? Because humans find it easier to relate to and remember experiences felt through the senses, rather than purely intellectual information. Also, sensory information adds dimension to ideas, broadening their implications and deepening their meaning.

Historically, metaphoric codes have been used to create secret languages that allow sensitive political information to hide in plain sight within literature. Classical Chinese scholars like my grandfather knew that a poem containing imagery of ancient ruins by a river in which a stork stood among small birds was meant to be understood as a message about the passage of time eroding a fallen leader’s glorious legacy. During periods of political tumult and fascism, symbolic poetry has often served as a tool for organizing and evading autocratic censorship. The ability to decode classical poetry turned many scholars, including my grandfather, into revolutionaries.

Whether or not this subversive aspect of metaphor applies (or appeals) to you, the concept of metaphor as code is essential to understanding the magic, menace, and intricacies of figurative language. Every metaphor contains associations that can multiply the meanings of your story. That power can be wielded expertly like a magic wand, but if used carelessly it can confuse readers in ways that undermine your story. If you don’t command the code, you are likely to send weak or misleading signals. So let’s unpack this system.

Metaphor’s magic

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Many forgettable stories never wrestle with the ultimate negative. Their characters may argue, fight, and reconcile, but their souls are never in danger. Their authors protect them and play it safe. And even if the play is colorful and engaging, it’s not about anything meaningful. Or memorable.

Hello Loreates,

This is Week 3 of the unofficial Robert McKee story breakdown. If you missed installments 1 and 2, here you go:

Today I want to dig into McKee’s concept of the “Negation of the Negation,” which translates, for those who actually want to understand it, as an Ultimate Negative, or worst thing possible within a character’s moral value structure. Not that McKee ever uses the word “moral,” but that is what he’s talking about. Morals being the beliefs or criteria that distinguish good from bad, desire from dread, in a character’s universe.

The Ultimate Negative concept is important for writers to understand because it supplies gravity and complexity to drama, plot, character, and meaning. I found McKee’s explanation of it needlessly confusing, so I’m going to try to streamline it here.

What’s the Worst that Could Possibly Happen?

You have doubtless heard that storytellers must “throw rocks” at their characters. A sequence of events that deliver exactly what the character wants in exactly the way she expects and with the outcome she desires—is not a story. Readers crave and demand struggle, ups and downs, delight and disappointment, triumph and catastrophe. Unexpected wins and losses capture the audience’s attention and keep them in suspense.

But, while stories have a lot in common with ball games, “winning” and “losing” in narrative terms does not mean making one of the same two baskets over and over. If the story’s about a robbery, the reader’s going to need more than physical trading of the stolen goods to hold their attention. Winning and losing will be defined instead by the positive and negative values that drive the characters, many of them subtle and dynamic.

A big part of the game for readers is figuring out what the story’s controlling values are, where they come from, and what winning and losing in this context truly means. To complicate matters, there may be multiple competing sets of values. The “rock” that cripples one character emotionally may be insignificant to another, so it’s imperative for authors to understand the full moral spectrum of concerns for every important character. And, yes, this goes for memoir, too. Every true story is, at its core, a morality tale. Like life.

Moral Values & Degrees of Negativity

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The substance of story is the gap that splits open between what a human being expects to happen when he takes an action and what really does happen… This gap is the point where the subjective and objective realms collide, the difference between anticipation and result, between the world as the character perceived it before acting and the truth he discovers in action— Robert McKee, Story

Hello Loreates,

I know, I know. The world is getting grimmer by the day. And this weekend would be particularly nauseating were it not for the resistance movement’s Rise Up, Sing Out parties happening across the country tomorrow. I’m going to one here in LA. If you’re looking for a party near you, go to NoKings.org . And keep the faith. We cannot afford to give up. There’s simply too much at stake.

Meanwhile, we write. I hope you enjoyed last week’s dive into my story structure notebook. If you missed it, have another look here:

I asked if anyone wanted further clarification on any of the pointers mentioned, and asked for more about Gaps— an extraordinarily important concept. So I’ll devote this post to that request, while it’s fresh. [FYI, in a future post I’ll take on McKee’s Negation of the Negation.*]

Read on!

Aimee

Every human being acts, from one moment to the next, knowingly or unknowingly, on his sense of probability, on what he expects, in all likelihood, to happen when he takes an action—Robert McKee, Story

Mine the Gap

Robert McKee’s explications on story structure are dry, didactic, and dull. They are also spot on. He stole his insights from Aristotle, after all, and the old Greek knew his stuff:

Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design.— Aristotle, Poetics

What McKee labeled The Gap is the difference between cause and effect in Aristotle’s formula for surprise. The greater the Gap, the bigger the surprise and the more pressure on the characters to change course. The larger point here is that stories require characters to continuously act and react in ways that produce unexpected, galvanizing, and meaningful change.

As Aristotle cautioned, unexpectedness alone is not enough to power a story. If your character walks through a hall of mirrors that produces a different shock around every corner and she just keeps walking like a zombie, your reader will quickly zone out, too.

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