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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“I keep thinking, and believing, that if we continue to hear each other’s stories, and to write stories for the world, that we might see each other better. That it is harder to demonize someone if you have walked in their shoes. That stories—small, beautiful, alchemical non-physical strings of words and breath—can have an impact. A small thing, but essential it seems to me.”

Ten years ago, my friend and colleague Micheline Aharonian Marcom wrote the following post about The New American Story Project, a nonprofit she’d co-founded to document the stories of children who were then still coming to the United States in search of the safety, freedom, and welcome that America had advertised since its founding. That advertisement was already going dark under the menace of Trump & Co. Today America’s welcome mat has been pulverized by the regime’s deportation orders, concentration camps, and armies of violent thugs who target new and old arrivals alike. The young people who shared their stories with Micheline are now severely endangered by the government that calls itself “ours.”

New American Story Project

Every word that Micheline wrote a decade ago is still true. Please read and consider all that we’ve lost in these few short years— and all that every one of us must fight to recover and rebuild before everything we love about America is gone.

Thank you for caring what becomes of our vast and fragile world.

Aimee

Seeking Asylum: 100,000 Stories*

by Micheline Aharonian Marcom | Jan 18, 2016

You could say I lost my belief in our politicians. They all seemed like game show hosts to me. — “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You,” Sting

I. Empathy and the Iliad

In 2012 Scientific American published an article stating that empathy had declined 40 percent among college students in the US since the 80s. The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research concluded that college students of the current generation were less likely to agree with statements such as “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective,” and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” The researchers didn’t know what to attribute this decline in empathy to, although according to yet another study sited in the same article, narcissism is on the rise. The article concluded that “the American personality is shifting in an ominous direction.”

When we listen to stories, and when we read, the consciousness of the listener/reader and the consciousness of the story meet in the wild place of the human imagination. In that place, the I is not only the I, she is Achilles as he drags Hector’s body around the castle walls in revenge for his best friend’s death; she is King Priam when he afterwards goes to retrieve his son’s body from his enemy and kisses “the terrible, man-slaying hands that had slain his many sons.” She is the victor’s and the vanquished’s rage and sorrows. She is more than herself and more than her own tribe or nation even.

II. Donald Trump, 1 Fact, 1 Newspaper Comment, 1 US Law

“A nation without borders is not a nation. The border is a disaster…people are pouring in. There must be a wall across the southern border. America will only be great as long as America remains a nation of laws.”— Donald Trump

“Illegal immigration flows have fallen to their lowest level in at least two decades.” — Pew Research center

“I DON’T CARE WHERE THEY CAME FROM OR WHY THEY CAME HERE. IF THEY ARE HERE ILLEGALLY, THEY NEED TO GO ASAP!!!” —Anonymous Comment, Washington Post

“Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance.” — U.S. Code § 1158 – Asylum

III. 100,00 Stories

In the last six months I have been working on a digital oral history project documenting the stories of children who have fled violence in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador and sought asylum in the US. I’ve been listening to the kids and also interviewing immigration attorneys, policy makers, teachers, gang experts and historians to try and understand the situation better both here and in Central America.

The stories are ominous. As Elizabeth Kennedy, a regional expert told me when I spoke to her:

This is a refugee crisis; it is not just a humanitarian crisis. Children and families are leaving these countries because they don’t have state protection. And gangs and cartels have become far more powerful than what government exists. El Salvador is the second-deadliest country in the world, it is second only to Syria. Honduras is third-deadliest in the world, third only to Syria and El Salvador. That means that people in El Salvador and Honduras are more likely to be murdered than people in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Sudan: all these places that we recognize as war zones. Kids in El Salvador tell me things like, “I go to bed every night not knowing if I’ll wake up in the morning.”

More than 100,000 unaccompanied minors surrendered themselves to Border Patrol in the last year and a half seeking protection.

This is an excerpt from an interview with a 17-year-old Salvadoran girl I spoke with last summer in Oakland, California:

My dad came here several years ago because the gangs threatened him repeatedly and they tried to kill him. He was afraid. Every neighborhood is controlled by one gang or another. We moved frequently after that, but they always found us. It was the same guys who had tried to kill my dad.

One day going to school after I got off the bus, a man in a car approached me. He told me to get in the car with him. I got really scared. I kept walking. He kept following me.

“Get in the car,” he said, “I know everything about you and your family and your father.”

The police told us they would give us protection, but they never did. Then gang members started showing up in front of our house and riding by on bicycles to see who was there. They “controlled” the house. Sooner or later they were going to kidnap me or kill me. I couldn’t sleep. I never went out or talked to anybody because of the constant fear. I was so afraid they would force me to be their “girlfriend.” Many young girls can’t do anything about it. And what happens is they are killed or raped or their bodies are left on the road. People don’t have any recourse. The whole country is the same everywhere. There’s no security or help, if you look for help there’s none.

As I continue work on this project, I keep thinking, and believing, that if we continue to hear each other’s stories, and to write stories for the world, that we might see each other better. That it is harder to demonize someone if you have walked in their shoes. That stories—small, beautiful, alchemical non-physical strings of words and breath—can have an impact. A small thing, but essential it seems to me.

Micheline Aharonian Marcom is the author of eight books, including a trilogy of books about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the 20th century. She has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the US Artists’ Foundation. In 2022, she was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Her first novel, Three Apples Fell From Heaven, was a New York Times Notable Book and Runner-Up for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Daydreaming Boy, won the PEN/USA Award for Fiction. In 2008, Marcom taught in Beirut, Lebanon on a Fulbright Fellowship. Marcom now directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia.

Loreates’ Corner

Each week I try to introduce you to a few of the wonderful stacks by writers in our community. This week I want to share two stacks with a similar mission to Micheline’s. Please read and support all these important projects.

spearheads :

All-American Story

All-American Story celebrates the beauty, strength, & wisdom of ALL Americans and our shared humanity by sharing our stories.

Tony Hernandez writes :

The Immigrant Archive

Filmmaker, Storyteller, Oral Historian, Author CEO - Latino Broadcasting Company Founder, Immigrant Archive Project

*Originally published in The Writer in the World, Jan 18, 2016.

Hello Loreates!

Three years ago this month, I launched MFA Lore to share the wealth that I’ve gleaned over more than four decades of writing and ghostwriting bestsellers and teaching creative writing as an MFA professor. Since then, this community has grown and grown! I’ve added regular writing prompts, Writer in the World posts, and bimonthly salons for paid subscribers, as well as video conversations with industry pros in my Well Published, Live! series. I’ve also been thrilled with our robust Take 5 Program for Premium Loreates, which meets as an MFA-level writing workshop every month.

To celebrate, I’d like to offer you this Anniversary Special:

Get 30% off for 1 year

With an annual paid subscription for just $35, you’ll receive:

• Full access to weekly MFA-level insights, advice, and hard-earned lessons in literary craft, publishing, collaboration, and the writing life.

• Invitations to meet me in our bimonthly Loreate Zoom salons.

• My new roundup newsletter with links to archived posts on one crucial topic each month, like landing an agent, structuring your story, or working with a Big 5 publisher. Each roundup is like a targeted course on a key aspect of the writing life.

I am a prose writer, so my posts focus on fiction and creative nonfiction. If you’re working on a novel, memoir, short stories, personal essays, or other prose project, MFA Lore is for you.

Here’s a sample of the essays and interviews you can find here*:

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Why the MFA focus?

I know there’s some dispute about the value of graduate degrees for writers who “just want to write.” I shared that hesitation for years, publishing more than three novels and four nonfiction books before getting my own MFA in The Bennington Writing Seminars. But the knowledge, insight, and community I gained at Bennington reignited my writing life and improved my work in more ways than I can count. My goal here at MFA Lore is not to motivate you to get an MFA (unless you’re so inclined, of course) but to give you a taste of the wisdom I’ve absorbed while studying and teaching at the MFA level.

It was my good fortune to join the faculty of Goddard College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program immediately after I graduated from Bennington. Each month, I sent my students packed editorial letters with writing advice and general conversation about literature. Here’s a snippet from one of those exchanges:

Our narrator, presumably, is a girl nobody respects and who would rather die than ask for anybody’s respect.  Why?  What makes her tick?  How does her clockwork get rearranged in the course of this day?  What does she learn that she never knew?  What preconceptions get overturned?  What price does she have to pay?  How will this day change her life?  You need to have all this in mind as you rewrite.  MAKE EVERY LINE MATTER.  MAKE EVERY ACTION CHANGE SOMEONE.  MAKE EVERY CHANGE CAUSE AN EFFECT IN SOMEONE ELSE.  THINK STIMULUS, RESPONSE.  AND SURPRISE.

What was good for my students, I suspect, just might be helpful to you. That’s why MFA Lore unpacks and distills wisdom like this and sends it each week directly to your inbox. And if you want even more of the MFA experience, complete with written feedback on your work and a monthly workshop, please consider MFA Lore’s Take-5 program!

Take 5 Program

Join the Loreates’ Corner!

This anniversary card wouldn’t be complete without thanking the many Substackers who’ve helped me build this network. I’m particularly grateful to the following Stacks, and I urge you to check them out:

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If I’ve missed anyone’s publication, please let me know, so I can recommend you in my weekly Loreates’ Corner!

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As I sign off every letter to my MFA students,

Write on!

Aimee

Hello Loreates!

I was cleaning out a cabinet to make space for (more) books the other day, when I discovered a time capsule from 1992: my notes and materials from the story structure course I took with Robert McKee while I was struggling with my first novel [and where I first met author !]. The course was aimed at screenwriters, but I devoured every word and applied McKee’s lessons to rewriting my moribund novel, which sprang to life as Face and sold a few months later to Warner Books (now Grand Central). I credit McKee with helping me (like many others) to launch my career as a novelist.

I have written before about the most fundamental lessons I learned that day: how to turn a scene and how to raise story stakes. You can read those posts here:

But as I leaf through my bursting McKee notebook, I now find a host of additional insights that inform every story I write — whether fiction or nonfiction. Some of these rules have become second nature, while others will always be challenging. But no matter how seasoned you are as a writer, they’re all worth reviewing. The same goes for the charts McKee provided, like this one, which confoundingly incorporates his most essential lessons:

I’m going to try to deconstruct this chart and some of the other pointers that jumped out at me from my notes. At least one rule I’m going to save for another post, because it’s just too complex to fold in here; please let me know if you’d like me to further unpack any of the following in a separate post.

Leave a comment

So, to misquote Shakespeare, Read on, MacDuff!

Aimee

Robert’s Rules of Story

Story is a metaphor composed from facts*

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“What are we being told when we’re told to write a certain way, especially as young women, and what does that mean and how can we challenge those things?”

Thank you to , , , and the many others who tuned into my live video with ! What a rich conversation we had about living and writing the moral complexities that woman navigate in the #metoo era. Julie offered many great tips, too! You’ll want to watch the whole video if you missed us live, but for your convenience, I’ve recapped some of the wonderful take-aways below.

For those who don’t know her, is the author of FAMOUS MEN, coming on July 14 from Random House. It’s already received Starred reviews in Kirkus and Booklist!

Pre-order Famous Men!

Julie’s debut, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Her writing also has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New York Times,

Julie was an editor and director of writing programs at Catapult. She has taught creative writing at NYU, Columbia University, Marymount Manhattan College, the Yale Writers’ Workshop, Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Lit Fest, and now, she is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

AND in September, Norton will publish Julie’s collaborative nonfiction project, Notes to New Mothers, co-edited with Rebecca Dinerstein Knight. In our conversation, Julie reflected on how she and Rebecca had dismissed their postpartum writing as “not real work” — only to discover it was some of the most resonant material either of them had produced:

Pre-order Notes to New Mothers!

“We thought these notes and jotted-down things, these texts people were sending to each other — the breastfeeding logs and records of ways that bodies were changing — were actually this amazing view into the creative change that happens to women writers postpartum.”

Julie Buntin on breaking the rules to make your literary work stronger

On finding your story

Find the story that hasn’t quite been told in that territory

Julie was drawn to the professor-student dynamic precisely because she wanted to approach familiar tropes from an unfamiliar angle.

“Famous Men is playing with a lot of tropes. We’ve seen stories about professors and students before. And I became really interested in this idea of what it would take for someone to have to find a kind of backdoor into this world - not as a student, but as a witness - and what would it feel like to always be on the outside in this particular way.”

Let privilege give you permission to critique the system that granted it

Julie reflected that having published Marlena and been admitted to MacDowell gave her the standing to write a novel that questions those very gatekeeping structures.

“Having access to relative privilege as a writer — being taken seriously as a writer — gave me permission to write a book that is in some ways a critique of the systems that decide who gets taken seriously as a writer.”

Consider giving your protagonist outsider-insider status

Rather than making Will an MFA student, Julie placed her just outside the program — close to its world but never fully of it.

“Having Will be a character who isn’t officially in the MFA program, but still very much witness to it — because of her close relationship to Nathaniel — offers an interesting lens on the workshop. What else might she notice that the others can’t see?”

Resist reducing female characters to victims or heroines

Julie built Will’s contradictions deliberately, pushing back against the impulse to make her either purely sympathetic or purely culpable.

“What made Will interesting to write is that she is a person who is full of contradictions, like all of us are. She is naive, but she’s also kind of calculating at the same time.”

Let your setting carry emotional charge

Both of Julie’s novels draw their settings from places she was longing for while writing. Homesickness for a charged place was part of what unlocked her imaginative energy. She wrote Marlena while missing northern Michigan and Famous Men while missing New York, and in both cases the longed-for place became vividly present on the page.

Span time ambitiously if the story calls for it

Julie was deliberate about writing a novel that followed a character across decades, inspired in part by Great Expectations.

“I wanted to take on the challenge of writing a big sprawling story where you go on a journey with a protagonist and when you get to the end you are like, I’m surprised we’re here but also not surprised we’re here — how did we get here, what are all the things that led to this point?”

On writing a novel

Sense your ending before you begin

Rather than plotting in advance, Julie emphasized holding an emotional or sensory sense of where the book is going. She also noted that she abandoned another novel mid-draft when she lacked that orienting sense, suggesting it matters more than writers might expect.

“I would describe it as a feeling, like a sensation, almost like a physical or spatial awareness of what that was going to feel like when I got there. I knew where the books were going to go or what feeling I wanted to leave readers with.”

Start from a personal emotional truth, then follow the story wherever it leads

Julie described beginning from something deeply felt but then releasing any obligation to autobiographical fact.

“I start from something quite personal and then have no faithfulness whatsoever to the reality of my own life once I start writing. I start with the truthful feeling and then I do whatever feels right for the story until by the end I almost don’t recognize it.”

Use a physical condition to carry multiple thematic threads at once

Rather than stating themes directly, Julie built Will’s heart condition into the novel as a way of embodying gaslighting, class precarity, and the cost of self-silencing all at once… not merely a plot device but a way of making several ideas visible simultaneously.

“It’s a way of talking about class. It’s a way of talking about money. It’s a way of talking about desperation and precarity. But it’s also a way of highlighting a character who is receiving messages from all sides not to trust what she perceives…I was very interested in kind of creating a narrative counterpoint or a physical manifestation of some of the kind of issues around gaslighting and harm that we experience in her relationships with men.”

Let an open ending serve the book’s larger argument

Rather than resolving Will’s story tidily, Julie left certain questions in the reader’s hands — and saw that openness as thematically necessary.

“The ending does leave certain decisions in the hands of the reader — decisions about what’s next for Will and whether she’s really escaped this situation and if she has taken control or claimed her own agency, whether the sacrifices she made were worth it. I hope these are questions that readers will argue about.”

Wait until the draft is done to fully reckon with its thematic context

Julie described keeping the larger cultural conversation — Me Too, the Alice Munro revelations, Claire Dederer’s Monsters — somewhat at arm’s length while drafting, then allowing those pressures to inform revision. She began from character and only later recognized the larger ideas at work.

“A lot of us have this experience as writers — we don’t actually know what we’re talking about until we write the story and then we’re like, oh yeah. A lot of those questions were coming in more once the draft was done and I was revising, because I think that’s a time when I’m starting to think about thematics a little bit more — how those things are working once the story is mapped out and the characters are shaped and formed.”

On breaking the rules

Write toward what you don’t understand

Julie talked about gravitating toward subjects that felt morally unresolved or narratively unfamiliar. She said the questions driving both her novels remain unresolved even after writing them — and that’s the point.

“The books are just ways of getting into the question, I think, and looking at it from different ways and trying to figure out something I can’t quite grasp.”

Be willing to subvert received writing advice

Julie discussed using Famous Men as an opportunity to question the rules she had absorbed in her MFA.

“What are we really being told when we’re told to write a certain way?”

The MFA is not the only path — community is what writers actually need

Julie was direct that an MFA is neither necessary nor sufficient for a writing career. What matters, she said, is finding your people:

“I don’t think you need an MFA to publish a book. I don’t think you need an MFA to become a writer… Writers need community, and you can find that in a lot of ways.”

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TENDERNESS

Touch, all skin and sensation, sublime attention, like light spilling, tracing, igniting our most deeply hidden secrets. With you, there was always that dueling pull of care and caution, so easily mistaken for reluctance, those sweet yet maddening hesitations, palms poised as if to strike but stilled to the verge of anguish before gliding to their destinations, finding purchase in the nape of a neck or the fold of a knee, the softer valleys and runged ladders of our mutual landscape. So familiar, those gentle motions, like the silk of water streaming between thirsty lips—eloquent, necessary, fleeting. What do they mean? Can they be trusted? Do I detect danger in this beautiful seduction? Such fierce attraction to the doomed enterprise of becoming one.

TENDERNESS: a tender quality or condition

a: gentleness and affection

b: the quality of being succulent and easily chewed

c: sensitivity to touch or palpation

Here is your writing prompt:

Try a Little Tenderness

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Hello Loreates!

This week, I was delighted to have the chance to ask bestselling supernova a few questions about her latest novel, Murder Your Darlings. This tongue-in-cheek thriller came out in January from HarperCollins, and it marks a genre change for Jenna, since most of her previous fiction was historical. So I had lots of questions. And she was most generous — and, of course, funny —in her answers about the book, her writing process, frustrations, and epiphanies during the creation of this novel.

Buy 'Murder Your Darlings'

Jenna is the New York Times and # 1 internationally bestselling author of novels Those Who Save Us, The Stormchasers, and The Lost Family; memoir Woodrow on the Bench; audiocourse “The Author at Work: The Art of Writing Fiction” and WWII podcast The Key of Love. Murder Your Darlings is Jenna’s fifth book and first psychological thriller.

As CEO of the online author interview company A Mighty Blaze, which she cofounded with during the Covid-19 pandemic, Jenna earned a reputation as a publishing industry community builder and innovator. As on-air host, she has conducted hundreds of interviews for the Blaze, from literary legends to new voices. Now it’s her turn to be interviewed!

Do read on!

Aimee

Save the Date!

Tuesday, June 2, at 10am PT

Well Published, Live! with novelist Julie Buntin on her new book ‘Famous Men

You are invited to my next Well Published, Live! with novelist Julie Buntin, whose new novel, Famous Men, is forthcoming from Random House in July. Her debut, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.

Join Live, June 2

Murder Your Darlings!

Q&A with Jenna Blum

Q: Your first three novels were historical, and most of your fiction has related to World War II and the Holocaust. Your last book was a memoir about losing your beloved dog Woodrow. So what gives with the switch to a comedic thriller?

A: I love this description of Darlings…! And yes, although I hope all of my previous books have what Stephen King called “The I-Gotta” structure–”I gotta stay up until I find out how this book ends”--which a thriller MUST have, Darlings is definitely a different flavor. My previous topics were not exactly a laugh a minute.

Why the pivot? I was working obediently away on an historical novel my agent and editor loved and…it was awful. I’d write every scene (as my protagonist in Darlings, Sam Vetiver, does in Chapter 3), then back out thinking: What was the point again? Meanwhile, the idea of this book about murderous writers was sneaking up the back stairs of my mind, and one day, I read Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel The Plot, which is a thriller about the publishing industry, and I thought: Hey, wait a minute. I got Jean’s number from a mutual friend and called her to ask: did she get pushback when she switched from writing “literary” fiction to thrillers? Jean said, “I just write what I want and other people market it. You should write what you want.” Fine–I decided to write Darlings and if it went badly blame it on Jean Hanff Korelitz.

When I had 100 pages, I sent them to my agent and waited an agonizing week while she read. She called me and said, “You know, Zhenna–” (like Sam’s agent Mireille in Darlings, my agent is French) –”I think this is the smartest thing you’ve ever done. Because it’s the first time in 25 years of working together that I‘ve heard you use your own voice.”

I loved writing every word of this book.

Q: The title of this new novel, Murder Your Darlings, makes a pun out of the advice from British writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in his 1916 book, On the Art of Writing:

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

It’s often misquoted as “kill your darlings” and misattributed to Faulkner – all of which you use as fodder for sparring between characters in the novel!

I won’t divulge the many ways this phrase plays out in the plot, but suffice it to say, it’s central! Did you begin the project with this title, or did it rise up out of a later draft?

A: This was always the title–except originally it was the PURLOINED “Kill Your Darlings”! Truth be told, that was going to be the title until my agent informed me, amid a shower of my F-bombs, that a writer from my own publishing house was coming out with a book called Kill Your Darlings a few months before mine. We kicked around a bunch of other titles, and when I looked up Murder Your Darlings, I realized that this was the OG saying and Kill Your Darlings was an appropriation…which considering that the book is about the ultimate form of appropriation, murder, was, well, appropriate! I love my title.

Q: There’s a lot of tender humor in your earlier books, but this one is a murderous lark. Although there are some serious issues woven throughout, it feels like it was written for sexy fun– both your own and the reader’s. How did you stop taking yourself seriously and let your guard down enough to write funny and with lots of sex?

A: Oh, I’m SO glad you think Darlings is funny! I do too. I snort-laughed my way through Every. Single. Scene. But you know how it is: you don’t want to be the only person sitting in a room in her yoga pants thinking her book is hilarious, then getting out there to hear…crickets.

All my books have had lots of sex in them. (Although Darlings is admittedly Five-Chili-Pepper spicy!) The characters in this one are just wearing different clothes. Or lack thereof.

And when I switched genres to writing something really contemporary, I gave myself permission to use my own voice, which includes–I hope!--being funny. There’s nothing I love more in the world than making people laugh. (Except maybe my dog. Who also makes people laugh.)

Q: Speaking of taking things seriously, one of the aspects of the book world that you lampoon is the degree to which writers take themselves and their work seriously enough to die – or kill - for. The novel does a number both on the deadly serious business of MFA and other writing programs, and also on the to-die-for competition for commercial success among established authors. Do you think writers would be better off if we lightened up across the board?

A: Ha ha, no. I don’t think it’s possible. Good writing requires passion, which doesn’t couple well with laissez-faire. Not that I’m advocating killing people or slicing through your colleagues’ Achilles heels. My personal and professional life are founded on the idea that the rising tide lifts all boats, and I’ve dedicated myself to nurturing and growing literary community. But a writer who takes it easy? Yuck. Nope. (Literally when I see men on dating apps say “I’m looking for somebody who doesn’t take life or herself too seriously,” I’m like NEXT!)

Q: Simone “Sam” Vetiver, your protagonist, is a dead ringer for you, Jenna Blum. Which means that you’re both describing yourself physically to a T and at least appearing to expose your innermost vulnerabilities and quirks, while simultaneously making fun of yourself. What prompted you to make Sam such an overtly obvious doppelganger for yourself?

A: Oh yeah, Sam is 1000% me. Let’s just get that out of the way. The things that happen to Sam in the novel have not happened to me, or I’d be in much worse shape. But she is otherwise so me, from her career EKG to her writing process to her love of touring to her Dress Like a Book Cover red dresses and the cheeseburgers she eats from room service after an event–not to mention her writing workshop, agent, and editor–that one day I was doing a podcast for the novel and the interviewer looked over my shoulder and said, “Isn’t that Sam Vetiver’s fireplace?” And I thought: Right, I forgot I put my apartment in the book.

It was a joy to write about myself and my own life, honestly. I mean, what would be the point of a writer writing about a writer who wasn’t her? The meta-ness was part of the nudge-wink fun. And I love my writing life— the ups, downs, miracles, uncertainties, and fears. Well, maybe not the fear and uncertainty parts, but they go with the territory. I have been so privileged and blessed to be a writer my whole life, and despite the very real difficulties, I intended Darlings to be a love letter to this existence, to lay it all out on the table for readers and say, “Look, this is what it’s really like. Enjoy!”

Q: The story is told by alternating POV narrators, all speaking in 1st person, and none of them reliable witnesses or confidantes. One is slyly named “the Rabbit,” with mystery identity and motives. How did you arrive at this circular narrative device?

A: I love the way you put this–that I “arrived” at the device. People often ask how I chose to include three narrators, and in fact I did not! The novel was supposed to be all Sam, originally. I knew she would fall in love with a male novelist who had multiple stalkers and that her subsequent stalking of them would turn her into somebody she didn’t like.

What I didn’t anticipate was that about halfway through Part I, I’d be lying on my couch feeling sorry for myself the way writers sometimes do, and suddenly I thought: What if one of the stalkers had a voice? I got up and went into my study and wrote what became the Darlings prologue, and it was like sticking my hands into an electrical socket. That was the Rabbit.

So fine, I thought; I’ll have two narrators: Sam will do things and the Rabbit will comment on them, and I’ll striate the story like that. I love those Rashomon stories, like The Affair on Showtime, so I loved that idea. And the Rabbit’s first-person voice, which is SO not mine, was so clear and accessible that every time I sat down to write her, I thought: Oh, thank God it’s a Rabbit day.

What I did not anticipate again was getting to Part II and having William pop in to say, “GREETINGS AND ADORATIONS, IT IS I, WILLIAM CORWYN!, here to tell you what my female counterparts cannot: THE TRUTH.” And I thought, Oh Jesus, William wants to take the whole second act of the novel. And….he did.

Q: You skewer so many aspects of the book industry, from the dynamics of writing workshops, to author-agent relationships, to the realities of book touring, to the love-hate interactions between authors and fans, to the economics of life as a published author. How did you organize all these spotlights? Did you use a master bulletin board to figure out which industry beat to match with which plot beat? And which of these industry scenes was the most fun to write?

A: Thank you! I really wanted Darlings to be the one-stop shop for all things writer life. I did use an outline, I always do, but it featured only the plot of the book: what happens to Sam, the Rabbit stalking, what William is doing behind the scenes. I used only story plot in my outline, in other words. Because the book is about writers, all elements of writing life fit neatly into the story.

I loved writing SO many of these scenes. Writing the MFA program scenes was a relief, since I’d been carrying that subset of feelings and experiences around since my own grad school days. And the Rabbit as a bookseller, since I once worked at a Borders. I think my favorite writing-life scene, though, is when William goes to the publishing house, Hercules (which is actually HarperCollins), to meet with his editor, whose office is next door to Sam’s editor. I cannot get through that scene (as with so many William scenes) without crying with laughter.

Q: Satire doesn’t always sit well with thin-skinned subjects. Did your “revelations” ruffle the feathers of anyone in your real-life publishing world?

A: Not at all, thank God. I was a little worried about it in the aftermath of writing (during the writing, as always, I was cloaked in a sort of merciful amnesia, my #1 obligation being to the story and the characters). But after I pushed away from the desk and handed the book in, I thought: Oh yeah, I did put my agent and editor in there. (And my writing workshop–the Cocktail of Novelists. And my MFA buddies. And my publisher. And readers and libraries etc etc etc.) Luckily, my friends–who all chose their own character names–thought this was a lark, and my agent and editor, who now refer to themselves as “Mireille” and “Patricia,” their Darlings alter-egos, argue about who is more important in Sam/ Jenna’s life: the agent or the editor.

Q: This plot revolves around the issue of intellectual property theft. It doesn’t broach AI theft, but it certainly does inject enough money into the plot that readers can see how certain authors might steal ideas or outright plagiarize to “make a killing.” Your villain pretends to write for the love of it, but that’s just an act. Is this conniving character based on anyone you’ve ever met? Do you share my fear that this motive is looming larger and larger over literature as AI makes it easier and easier to cheat?

A: Ha, what a great question. That’s probably the ONLY writer-life thing I didn’t tackle in Darlings: AI theft!

I will push back gently and say the villain does indeed have a very real love of writing–all the characters in Darlings do. (Which is probably what makes them so dangerous.) I never met IRL a writer prepared to go to such lengths as to steal outright–via AI or not–at least, not that I know of! I do think every writer now has to grapple with his or her own conscience to figure out what he or she will tolerate in terms of AI use, what’s the Rubicon. Myself, I will not use it. It’s like sending yourself to extinction and bringing your species with you. Anthropic stole my books. Andi Bartz is my hero.

Q: Where do you go from here, Jenna? Are you heading back to historical fiction? Writing another memoir? Or, are funny sexy thrillers your new jam?

A: Great question. The only sure thing I can say here is: no more memoir! Not because I have anything against the genre–I love reading them–but because I never intended to write one in the first place, and if I hadn’t loved my old dog Woodrow so much that I had to honor him in writing, I wouldn’t have. (Woman plans, God laughs: I’m sure I’ll be out with a memoir next week.)

I have two thrillers and a historical novel rolling around in my head like marbles right now, and I plan to spend the summer developing them and seeing which disappear into the mouseholes in my brain and which one remains. I will say that the historical will be written like a thriller. And I hope to NEVER write anything again that isn’t sexy and funny! Thank you for saying that.

Q: Finally, In a few weeks (September 1!) as part of my Well Published, Live series, I’m going to be interviewing you and your co-conspirator Caroline Leavitt about your spectacular creation A Mighty Blaze, and especially about plans for the Blaze Substack. Do you want to say a few words about the role that A Might Blaze plays in your life these days?

A: The Blaze!!! A Mighty Blaze, which has put authors on-camera since March 2020 to feature their new books for our beloved readers, has been a chief joy of my life since Caroline and I joined forces to ignite it at the beginning of Covid. (Yeah, my life is all about the fire metaphors.) And Blaze is blazing right along, with 1500+ interviews, five different genre shows, a newsletter, a podcast, and yes, a new Substack! Some of the irons in the Blaze fire include a national book club, a Coming of Rage show, and a show for speculative/ dystopian fiction. Stay tuned!

It has sometimes been a challenge to balance my Blaze life with my writer life. But I do a lot of author interviews myself–for Friday Frontliner, which is for high-visibility career authors–and whether I’m on camera or producing behind the scenes, the Blaze reminds me for a few blessed hours a week of what’s most important: it sinks a deep taproot down past the marketing and business noise into the writing. What could be better for writers –and readers– than that?

Would you like MFA-level feedback on your work?

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• Written feedback on both your query and up to 5 pages (1250 words) of creative work, plus an optional follow-up phone call. Your “Take 5 Packet Letter” will highlight both the Strengths and the Opportunities in your work, helping you determine whether it’s time to “press send” to agents or to reorient your revision.

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Hello Loreates,

The events of this week are so unspeakably egregious that I’m tempted to go on a verbal rampage here. It’s Grand Theft America week, from the Looter in Chief’s $1.8 Billion heist of your tax dollars to reward his thugs and exempt himself, to the ongoing depletion of the nation’s water reserves to quench the billionaires’ insatiable thirst for AI profits. If you haven’t already called your representatives to DEMAND ACTION, I urge you to do so now.

But our collective sanity requires us to learn how to write our stories and scream bloody murder at the same time, and writing is the business of MFA Lore, so I’m going to pivot now from my political panic to one of my pet peeves as a reader: disorientation.

I recently read an early draft of a story that had excellent bones. Strong characters, complex motives, powerful backstory, and an intriguing premise. But for several pages, I could not figure out where I was, when the story took place, or who the main characters were, much less what was at stake. This was understandable in a piece that was still in its formative stages, but it reminded me just how essential it is to orient readers as soon as possible, and to check every page to make sure you don’t accidentally disorient them.

So that’s what we’ll focus on today, using excerpts from stories by Lauren Groff, Graham Greene, Katie Davis, and for illustration.

Read on!

Aimee

What Does It Take to Orient Your Readers?

When you write a story, your goal is to transport your readers. In other words, you must take them on a trip. But you’re not just the driver. You’re also the conductor, the navigator, and tour guide. It’s your job to welcome your readers aboard, get them situated, introduce them to the narrative amenities, and identify the important landmarks and signals they should watch for as the story gets underway. If you neglect this orientation, your readers will soon feel lost. And you never want to lose your readers.

At the same time, you don’t want to bombard them with complicated maps, irrelevant details, and insignificant trail signs. Too much information, and readers will get so overloaded, they won’t remember any navigational markers, much less the important ones.

Effective orientation primes memory to both notice and remember what will matter going forward. If handled deftly, your first lines will transport readers so swiftly and efficiently that they’ll never need to stop and look back to get their bearings.

Just as you orient yourself in space and time and social circumstances when setting off on a journey, so must you orient your reader in these same dimensions. But the emphasis required in each story will be different. Memoirs generally have a single easy-to-identify narrator but multiple timelines that need to be signaled. Mysteries must quickly gesture to an event that’s already happened, while suspense must hint at a danger that looms ahead. Novels often have large casts of characters to locate and trace. Sagas usually navigate historical eras that must be represented.

Macro/Micro Orientation

One principle that’s important to remember, even if it never rises to the reader’s attention, is the fact that stories take place on both macro and micro stages.

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Hello Loreates,

I hope you caught my Well Published interview with author & essayist Karen Shepard this week. It was such a rich one, ranging from the benefits of writers’ conferences, to the experience of getting published by The Paris Review, to the unique intricacies of epistolary writing, to writing about difficult mothers, and most of all, to the pros and cons for writers of having a “different” background like a mixed-race family. ICYMI, catch up HERE.

In the rest of my writing life, I’m in the struggling phase of revision on an essay that I’m trying to deepen, to reveal more of myself and what this slice of family history honestly means to me. (Yes, thank you, I am working on this post to avoid facing said essay!) But I went back into my archives and found an MFA letter I wrote to a student who was at this juncture with her thesis memoir. It held a lot of useful reminders that I thought might benefit you, too.

This post is an abridged version of that letter. If you’re staring down a completed first draft that you don’t know how to edit, maybe it will help.

Write on!

Aimee

Save the Dates!

Saturday, May 30 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

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Tuesday, June 2, at 10am PT

Well Published, Live! with novelist Julie Buntin on her new book ‘Famous Men

I’m delighted to invite you to my next Well Published, Live! with novelist Julie Buntin, whose new novel, Famous Men, is coming from Random House in July. Her debut, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.

Edit Toward the Deeper Meaning

Congratulations! You’ve completed your first draft. A well-deserved sense of accomplishment comes with this milestone, whether the work is flash prose or an epic novel or memoir that you’ve agonized over for years. Savor the moment. Take a break. But do not— repeat, do not EVER—succumb to the temptation to send that first draft out into the world.

That temptation is powerful. Every seasoned writer has felt it, and most of us have succumbed more often than we’d like to admit. It’s always a mistake.

I don’t care what a genius you are, or how essentially topical your story is right now, how many books you’ve published to acclaim, or how big a wave you’re racing to ride. Your first draft needs developmental editing before it’s ready for anyone else’s eyes. And this kind of editing takes time, patience, focus, and distance. Shortchanging this process is like sending a child directly from preschool to high school; you’re asking for failure.

Please note: I am not talking here about copy editing for grammatical errors and typos. That work is vital, too, but it’s not the kind of surgical editing that will transform your work from a shitty first draft (because, yes, even the best of them are shitty) to a finished piece of writing.

What is the ultimate goal of developmental editing?

Take this to heart: The purpose of developmental editing is to make your words matter.

By “mattering” I mean, your words leave an impression on readers that affects and changes them in some palpable and positive way:

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“It was when I was going through all the papers that I had from her, and made some discoveries that I hadn’t known would be in there, that the form of the essay and just the desire to write the essay came about.”

Karen Shepard is a Chinese-American writer, born and raised in New York City. She’s the author of four novels, An Empire of Women, The Bad Boy’s Wife, Don’t I Know You?, The Celestials, and the collection of stories, Kiss Me Someone. Her short fiction has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction has appeared in More, Self, USA Today, and the Boston Globe, among others. She has three children, and teaches writing and literature at Williams College in Williamstown, MA, where she lives with her husband, novelist Jim Shepard, and their two beagles.

We talked about the complexities of epistolary memoir writing, in general, and the specifics of her extraordinary epistolary essay, “The World Is an Easier Place Without You In It,” recently published in The Paris Review.

Read Karen's essay!

We also talked about difficult mothers, the ways our mutual mixed-race identity informs our writing, why and how writers’ conferences are valuable in a writing life, what it takes to get published by The Paris Review, and how Karen and Jim Shepard manage their two-author marriage!

You can watch the whole video above, and/or read the major takeaways below.

Takeaways from Karen Shepard

On the Paris Review Essay and Its Origins

“It was when I was going through all the papers that I had from her, and made some discoveries that I hadn’t known would be in there, that the form of the essay and just the desire to write the essay came about.”

The essay grew from a specific discovery process: after her mother died by assisted death in Switzerland, Karen went through her mother’s papers and found a trove of saved correspondence — letters between her mother and grandmother Han Suyin, and crucially, letters her mother had salvaged from Han Suyin’s apartment. The essay’s spine came from Karen’s own email exchange with the Swiss clinic’s caseworker, who followed up to ask how she was doing. That email prompted her to “accordion out” the story.

On Finding Structure in Memoir

“What do you need to know from the past to understand the moment we’re in right now? I don’t need to tell you everything. I need to tell you enough.”

Karen uses a “need-to-know” principle for backstory — give readers only what they need to understand the present moment, not a full biography. She likens it to pulling someone into a car before a party and giving them just enough context to navigate the room.

Her structural model for the essay was the progression toward Switzerland as a narrative spine, with past material woven in to show readers who these two people were — and why their late-life connection was so unprecedented. She wanted readers to feel the same simultaneity she lived: the sixty-year-old Karen trying to manage the four-year-old Karen during hospital visits.

On Selecting Material

“Which of these forces me to see something that I would prefer not to have to see? That tends to get put in.”

Karen describes casting a wide net through primary documents and trusting a physical sensation — a “frisson” — to identify what’s emotionally resonant, even when she doesn’t yet know why. She also notes that she initially excluded letters showing her mother’s psychological astuteness because she wanted a particular portrait of her — and then had to confront what she was protecting herself from by doing that. That self-interrogation became a guiding principle.

On Memoir’s Particular Pitfall

“I am writing, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, to discover things. Something new about myself, not in an epiphanic way necessarily, but just, I come out slightly different than I went in.”

Karen identifies the urge to protect oneself as a larger risk in memoir than in fiction, because the stakes are higher with real material. She distinguishes sharply between blame (accusatory, shame-based) and responsibility (agentive, empowering), arguing that good memoir requires the latter — asking how the writer is complicit in the situations she’s unhappy with. The trope of well-meaning people buffeted by the world — is what she most wants to avoid.

On the Unsent Letter

“It felt a little like a gift from beyond, from the future and the past. It was heartbreaking for a lot of reasons. One, the need, her own need, that was so beautifully articulated in it.”

Among the most affecting discoveries in her mother’s papers was a typed, unsent letter in which her mother asked: What did I do with you that you didn’t like? What would you have liked me to do that I didn’t do? Karen describes it as a “heartbreaking gift” — evidence of emotional astuteness her mother rarely expressed, and of a need she could never voice directly. Karen’s conclusion, reached partly through writing the essay: her mother was capable of connection with others but found Karen “structurally terrifying” and couldn’t get out of her own way with her.

On Publishing in the Paris Review

“The Paris Review’s fact-checking is — I’m reading all these mainstream media news stories that are insanely wrong, and I’m going, well, if only they had the Paris Review fact checkers.”

The pathway was through her agent’s subsidiary rights person, who submitted the essay. The Paris Review accepted it quickly. The editorial process was rigorous — thorough fact-checking, requests to see all original documents in full, and substantive cuts. The main cut was family text threads and voice memos from Switzerland, removed to maintain narrative acceleration toward her mother’s death. Karen plans to restore that material in the longer book about her family.

On Writing as a Mixed-Race Person

“I felt quite powerful being mixed race. I felt like I had a foot in both worlds, in a kind of very stable stance — like my legs were sort of hip distance apart. And I felt stable as a result of it.”

Karen felt her mixed-race identity gave her a slight outsider perspective on both worlds — which she experienced as advantageous rather than destabilizing. She contrasts this with Han Suyin, who suffered considerably from being mixed race in an earlier era and responded by asserting control over her own narrative in multiple, often contradictory versions. Karen notes that the narratives imposed on you shape the kind of storyteller you become — you either bow to them or push back.

On the Two-Writer Household

“To have a partner, a life partner, who absolutely believes in the value of going off and locking yourself into a room and sitting at a desk for many hours a day — is really extraordinarily helpful. And priceless, really.”

Karen and her husband, fiction writer Jim Shepard, function as each other’s first readers, calibrating their feedback to the stage of the work — looser responses to early drafts, rigorous line editing later. She explicitly rejects the zero-sum view of literary success: when writers she admires get attention, she sees it as good for literature broadly, not as competition.

On Writers’ Conferences

“You’re spending time with people who don’t question in any way what you hope to do with writing and what you value about reading and writing.”

Karen sees conferences as valuable for the same reasons as MFA programs: time with people who share your commitment, exposure to diverse feedback, and the formation of lasting communities. She notes that many students from Sirenland and Tin House have gone on to become long-term reading partners, blurb-givers, and collaborators.

Save the Dates!

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Saturday, May 30 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

---

Tuesday, June 2, at 10am PT

Well Published, Live! with novelist Julie Buntin on her new book ‘Famous Men’

I’m delighted to invite you to my next Well Published, Live! with novelist Julie Buntin, whose new novel, Famous Men, is forthcoming from Random House in July. Her debut, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.

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It was just one of these things where I started this exercise of letters. The writing of a long literary novel is such a heavy, dense process. It can feel very stodgy or like a sort of plodding through the story. So, there was something that felt very light about writing the book in letters. The form felt so different and it felt—if not easier—lighter, I guess.

—Virginia Evans, on writing The Correspondent

Hello Loreates,

Today’s post serves two purposes.

First, may it encourage you to read and ponder Virginia Evans’s wonderful epistolary novel The Correspondent, if you haven’t already. [DO listen to the audio version, if you can! It’s masterful.]

And second, this post is prep and encouragement for you to tune in to my conversation next week with novelist and essayist Karen Shepard about her extraordinary epistolary essay “The World Is An Easier Place Without You In It” in The Paris Review and the nexus between her mixed-race Eurasian family and her writing more generally. Link to reserve/join below.

If you’ve ever wondered about the pros and cons of using correspondence as a narrative device yourself, please read on.

Aimee

Save the Date!

Tuesday, May 12, at noon PT

Well Published, Live! with Karen Shepard on her Paris Review publication and writing about mixed-race families

I’m delighted to invite you to my next Well Published, Live! with novelist and essayist Karen Shepard. We’ll be chatting about her latest publication — an epistolary essay!—in The Paris Review and about the challenge of writing mixed-race stories.

Reserve May 12

Some Why’s and How’s of Writing in Letters

Epistolary writing is in vogue again. This happens every few years when a book-in-letters tops the bestseller list. Here are just a few epistolary titles from the past that you’ll recognize:

• 84 Charing Cross Road

• A Woman of Independent Means

• The Color Purple

• Possession

• The Stone Diaries [not entirely, but largely epistolary]

• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

• We Need to Talk About Kevin

• Beautiful World,

• Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

The latest epistolary hit is The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans. This novel-in-notes was released a year ago last April and gradually picked up readers all summer until its “slow burn” fans propelled it to the top of the New York Times hardcover best-seller list in December. Since Evans had seven failed books in the drawer, it seems fair to wonder if there was something about the form that gave her “debut” its charm.

In interviews, Evans has described the book as an “exercise of letters” that she practiced between projects, only to realize that this exercise was producing something deeper and truer than she’d realized. That describes the ideal experience of reading an epistolary story, too: it can feel more authentic and direct than other narratives. At the same time, as Evans says, the form feels “lighter,” less demanding, than a typical novel. But why is that the case, and how does an author pull off this exercise?

Additional questions occurred to me as I read Karen Shepard’s recent epistolary essay encircling her mother’s planned suicide, “The World Is An Easier Place Without You In It” in The Paris Review . I’ve been wrestling with my late father’s archives for years, struggling to shape a collection of essays out of the artifacts and my interstitial commentary. How, I wondered, did Karen decide to rely exclusively on correspondence, which specific pieces to include in her essay, how to cut and arrange them, how to balance the arresting and the mundane in a way that reflected the ordinary nature of letters and emails and texts while also shaping the arc of a meaningful story?

I’ll ask Karen all those questions when we chat next week, but with her essay and The Correspondent rolling around in my head, I thought I’d use this space to sort out my own thoughts as a reader and sometime writer of epistolary prose.

The epistolary puzzle

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HELD

Hers is the voice in my head, the sound in the night, the arms forever reaching, pushing, encircling. What? Me? My life? My choices?

More. My very being. My coming and going, both. She bore me. Carried and contained me, never let me go. The cursed elastic never stretched far enough, the blessed bond never broke. Our ages bled into and through each other, radiant with the heat of devotion, the impossible light of longing, the incandescent rage of possession. Ours was a covenant of frustration. We were each other’s but not each other. Connected but not the same.

I thought it would be ever thus, my mother and myself. It is, now that she’s gone. And it never was.

HELD: Old English healdan "to hold, own"

1. a: Controlled

   b: Kept in one's possession

   c: Possessed by right

2. a: Kept or restricted by force

   b: Restrained or kept back

   c: Delayed

3. Embraced

4. a: Supported

   b: Carried or cradled

   c: Protected

   d: Secured

5. Lasted without breaking

6. Contained

7. Judged or asserted

8. Convened

Here is your writing prompt:

As you contemplate the image above, consider what it meant to be held by your mother when you were younger. Ask yourself:

• How did you respond to her embrace, and why?

• Who supported whom?

• What did you need from each other?

• What did you take from each other?

• What did you freely give to each other?

• What could you never get from each other?

• What did you love most— and least— about your mother’s touch?

• What would you do differently now, if you could go back to her in time?

Now write that do-over scene with your mother. Tell her something that you always needed to say but didn’t. Confront the misunderstandings or secrets between you. Exchange confidences and ask the questions you were always too embarrassed or afraid to ask. Test the boundaries. See if you can find a new, closer way to hold each other, if only on the page. Or, if that’s not possible, see if you can find a new way to react and hold the truth of your embrace.

P.S. For more inspiration, read ’s gorgeous essay on being Held, which shared with me after reading my prompt!

Loreates’ Corner

I’m delighted to introduce you to a few of the wonderful stacks by writers in our community. Please read, subscribe, and share! And if you’re an MFA Lore subscriber with a great writing stack that I haven’t mentioned, please drop the link in a comment, so I can add you to our Corner.

writes

Publishing Confidential

News and analysis about the book publishing industry that you won't read anywhere else.

By Kathleen Schmidt

writes

Rebounding

Essays about artists and other adults I admire. But also poems, recommendations, and serializing a memoir I'm writing called "Happiness Ruined Everything," chapters of which I'll post probably once a week. Oh, and I don't believe in trigger warnings.

By Michael Klein

Save the Dates!

Tuesday, May 12, at noon PT

Well Published, Live! with Karen Shepard on her Paris Review publication and writing about mixed-race families

I’m delighted to invite you to my next Well Published, Live! with novelist and essayist Karen Shepard. We’ll be chatting about her latest publication — an epistolary essay about mothers!—in The Paris Review and about the challenge of writing mixed-race stories.

Reserve May 12

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Saturday, May 23 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

---

Saturday, June 13 at 10am PT

Loreate Salon for Paid Subscribers

All paid subscribers are welcome as we discuss the thorny issues bedeviling our collective writing life.

Please RSVP in the chat, and include any topics you’d like us to discuss:

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Christina is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including Orphan Train and The Exiles, and she currently serves as vice president of the Authors Guild. Her new novel The Foursome will launch on May 12!

Buy The Foursome!

We talked about everything from the invaluable advice she got by confronting her worst editor, to the astronomical success of her surprise bestseller Orphan Train, to the challenge of writing 19th-century sex scenes about Siamese twins in The Foursome! And, of course, we talked about the many reasons every writer on the planet who is serious about having a writing career must join the Authors Guild.

Check out the Authors Guild

You can watch the whole video above, and/or read the major takeaways below.

Takeaways from Christina Baker Kline

On Career Resilience and Surviving Difficult Stretches

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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.

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