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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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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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.

A…

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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 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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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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Hello Loreates,

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

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

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

Aimee

Kill, Cut, or Keep?

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

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

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

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

To Keep

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

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

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

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

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Hello Loreates,

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

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

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

Read at The Common

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

Read on!

Aimee

Generating a Collection With an Assist From Lit Mags

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Hello Loreates,

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

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

Answers below!

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

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Hello Loreates,

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

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

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

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

Read on!

Aimee

Save the Dates!

Saturday, March 28 at 9am PT

Take 5 Writing Workshop

This workshop for Premium Subscribers allows us to take a close look at one submission each month, tailoring feedback to the needs of each writer and developing our craft together. To join, become a Premium Subscriber today!

Take 5 Program

Friday, April 3 at 11 am PT

Well Published: Author+Agent Jenna Satterthwaite

I’m pleased to invite you to my next Well Published, Live! with . We’ll be chatting about her life and work as both author and agent! Please RSVP and tune in live using this link:

Register/Join April 3

Saturday, April 11 at 10am PT [US time]

Paid Loreate Zoom Salon

All paid subscribers are welcome as we discuss the thorny issues bedeviling our collective writing life.Please RSVP in the chat, and note any topics you’d like us to discuss:

RSVP for Ap;ril 11

Voice Lessons

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

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

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

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

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

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Hello Loreates,

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

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

Thanks for taking this ride with me!

Aimee

Special offer!

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50% Write for Peace Offer

Writing the slippery, silent mind out loud

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting inside

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

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

Hello, Peter, she says.

Inside voice

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Hello Loreates,

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

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

50% off Write for Peace discount

Now, on to the business at hand.

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

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

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

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

Read on!

Aimee

Save the Date!

Friday, April 3 at 11 am PT

Well Published: Author+Agent Jenna Satterthwaite

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

Register/Join April 3

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

50% off Write for Peace discount

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The secret prelude/promise

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

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

• I know what makes war so seductive…

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

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

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

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Hello Loreates,

When I was Susan Cheever’s MFA student at Bennington, she taught me a number of terms that illuminated my understanding of literary craft. One was “unpack,” which I now consider a core concept in both writing and reading literature. Another was “the fallacy of form and content,” which has stuck with me for decades, even though I’ve never heard anyone else use that exact phrase. This is the notion that you should make writing move quickly when writing about speed and boring when writing about boredom, etc.

I’ve been meaning for some time to unpack the fallacy of form and content for you. Today’s the day!

Kindly read on,

Aimee

P.S. Today’s also the day of our very first Take 5 Writing workshop for Premium subscribers here at MFA Lore. I’m so excited by this new addition to the Take 5 program. It allows me to offer even MORE of the essence of the MFA experience in a true workshop setting. And you’re invited to join us! Get all the details here:

Take 5 info

Well Published: Short Stories with Rachel Khong

I’m absolutely thrilled to invite you to my video chat with Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans, about the release of her new intriguingly speculative story collection My Dear You:

Well Published w Rachel Khong

The Fallacy of Form and Content

I was once in a workshop with a writer who tried to convey the tedium of an LA freeway commute by narrating every turn, exit, traffic jam and interchange between Irvine and Silverlake. Nothing else, just the interminable road. That vicarious ride was tedious, all right, and unforgettable, but not in the way the author intended. It had fallen prey to the fallacy of form and content.

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Happy Lunar New Year, Loreates,

Welcome to the Year of the Fire Horse— get ready to rock and roll. According to my sources, horse years are more motion than pause, more momentum than contemplation. And the Fire Horse, in particular, is energetic, determined, action-oriented.

Let’s hope, pray, and work to channel that energy into restoring sanity, science, and democracy to America — and supercharging your writing life!

As you know, I’m here to help with the latter goal. And I’ve been wanting for some time to write about one magical key that many of us overlook when striving to bring deeper meaning into our work. That key again came to mind recently as I was listening to the audio version of Sally Rooney’s wonderful novel Intermezzo (likely to be mentioned in multiple posts here in coming weeks). There’s a single word that recurs in this story, over and over in dialogue, exposition, internal monologue, and each time it surfaces it shows a new facet, a new way of interpreting and understanding the characters and their core dilemma.

This key is called a literary trope, the very topic I want to unpack with you in today’s post.

Read on!

Aimee

Tropes are Treasures…“Obviously”

I was well into Sally Rooney’s novel Intermezzo when I realized that the recurring tic of the word “obviously” was an essential trope. It popped up in every character’s dialogue. It punctuated their thoughts. And its appearance ebbed and flowed in barely noticeable but significant patterns throughout the book.

At first the usage seemed reflexive, a habitual, awkward space-filler like “um” or “like,” delivered with an implied shrug of abdication. “Obviously” the character wasn’t in full control of their words or thoughts, because they were saying and doing the obvious: conforming to general convention. But as the story progressed, their conformity became less obvious. In fact, doing the obvious became a source of pain, even anguish. Toward the end of the story the characters used the word far less frequently and when they did, they delivered it ironically, flipping its meaning upside down and inside out. Because, in fact, the whole point of the novel is that nothing true and important about life is “obvious,” and the insistent pretense that it is can break you.

That’s when I realized this trope had been working its magic on me from the very beginning, turning the key this way and that with every repetition, tumbling ever new hints and clues in a highly strategic pattern to guide me toward the novel’s true meaning.

Just like a good trope should.

But not all tropes are good. Even the dictionary definition suggests as much:

Trope: borrowed from Latin tropus "figure of speech" (Medieval Latin, "embellishment to the sung parts of the Mass"), borrowed from Greek trópos "turn, way, manner, style, figurative expression."

• a word or expression used in a figurative sense : figure of speech

• cliché

• a common theme or device : motif

Clichés are no good in literary writing. Nor are overused, “common,” themes or devices.

So, how to navigate the wide world of tropes, to make these figures of speech work for, instead of against, your writing? First, let’s take a closer look at the mechanics of this device.

What exactly is a literary trope?

Tropes are chimerical agents. They owe their impact to the natural human tendency to make associations. We hear one word and think of the object it represents, the qualities of that object, the people who use that word and how it sounds in their throats, what they do with the object, what else they mean when they use that word, whether it has a moral dimension, whether it signals something appealing or negative, complicated or simple, and on and on and on.

We don’t put in all this work for every word we read or hear. We’d be paralyzed if we did. But we do put in this work whenever a word or phrase attracts our attention, when it sends up a quiet flare of significance. We notice that a word or image recurs in a story in particular situations, and we instinctively wonder why, what it means, what the invisible operator inside this language is trying to tell us.

A literary trope is the phrase, term, or image that sends up the flare.

Other metaphors suggest themselves… Tropes aren’t just keys to a story’s hidden meaning, they’re also literary Easter eggs tucked throughout the work, each revealing a new clue when discovered and untucked. They’re ear worms that burrow into the reader’s mind, planting memorable hints of the author’s true intentions. They’re verbal transformers of ideas into narrative trail markers. When used effectively, they signal what the story is really about.

Cheap tropes litter our everyday language. We talk about the “fox in the hen house”, the “bug in the machine.” We say, “All hands on deck,” and “You get what you pay for,” when no hands, decks, or payments are anywhere in sight. Often we use tropes like “pig,” “cougar,” “doll,” and “hunk” as prejudicial stereotypes. Whether innocent or offensive, cheap tropes function as automatic shorthand. Because they’re widely used and familiar, they’re easily interpreted. Too easily, if you use them in your writing without giving their meaning a distinctive twist.

Literary tropes work by surprising us, opening a new way to consider a character or subject, suggesting a thematic dimension that’s bubbling in the subtext, forcing the reader to consider the story from an unexpected angle. Effective literary tropes are shortcuts to meaning and understanding, but they’re not easy shortcuts. They require thought and care on the part of the author, and they make readers think.

Almost any feature that represents an idea or interpretation of the work can be considered a trope, but the term most often refers to figurative images or phrases that repeat the way Rooney used the word “obviously.” Here are a few common types of these tropes:

• Metaphor: one thing equals another. The sun = a raging demon.

• Simile: one thing is likened to another. This martini is dry as the Sahara.

• Oxymoron: two parts of the whole contradict each other. Open secret.

• Synecdoche: one part represents the whole. I need new wheels.

• Metonymy: one example stands in for a larger category or concept. Wall Street had a bad day.

Tropes can also be structural conventions, like the chase scene in a thriller, the red herring in a mystery, or high noon in a western. Used lazily, they can feel manipulative and cheap, but if subverted with imagination they can produce novel new forms, like the film One Battle After Another or the faux detective story "Death and the Compass" by Jorge Luis Borges.

Lazy writing can turn characters, too, into tropes. The sleepy old woman. The mustachioed bandit. Goody two-shoes. Take any of these figures at face value, and they’re as phony as paper dolls. But give the tropes an innovative twist, and you suddenly have an old woman with lifelong narcolepsy, a bandit who’s too ashamed of his harelip to shave, a goody two-shoes who shoplifts stiletto heels (stiletto heels = synecdoche, btw).

Tropes can be a useful starting point in developing characters, but never stop until they surprise you with some condition or problem that makes them interesting and unique. Otherwise you’ll be trafficking in stereotypes, and unless you have a solid experimental reason to do this, your readers won’t forgive you.

Tropes can work wonders

I think it’s rare for an author to identify the central tropes in a story when composing early drafts. Most often they emerge in the writing, pushing up like little green shoots from the subconscious, and we only notice them when re-reading what the subconscious has planted. The image of a goose in Gish Jen’s Bad Bad Girl. The girl wearing a man’s fedora in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. The characters in Intermezzo constantly saying and thinking the word “obviously.”

Spontaneous tropes are often the most fruitful Easter eggs of meaning. Once you’ve identified them, you can study and play with them. Turn them over and inside out. Look at every possible association they might hold for your characters, your thematic spine, your story. Do these connections align with your intentions? What are they telling you that you hadn’t realized before? Are they perhaps directing you toward a new and deeper truth? If so, you may have struck literary gold.

The question you need to ask of each trope is: Are you telegraphing something important? Because tropes are only useful if their signals point readers to a meaningful association. A recurring image of a fruit bowl might strike you as promising, but if it fails to connect to your story’s deeper themes, it’s no use to you.

To work well, tropes need — or you need to imbue them with —multiple dimensions. Their implications need to expand and turn and multiply each time they reappear on the page. A good trope never means the same thing twice.

Patterns play an enormous role in showcasing these dimensions. Tropes rarely appear in isolation. Most often, they repeat. Music might play whenever a particular character comes onstage. Birdsong could function as an omen. Or maybe bursts of sunshine are woven into the overall tapestry like jewels that cluster around signal moments then recede until they’re needed to illuminate another critical turn.

The best pattern for your tropes will depend on their function in your overall story. You might need them only in certain sections. You might change tropes as the story progresses. You might tuck them into the background, like a patch of wallpaper. Or you might enshrine them in the title.

By layering his central trope into the title of his novella Memory Wall, Anthony Doerr gives readers a heads-up that walls hold the key to this story. At first, the reference seems to be literal, a physical wall of notes and cartridges that contain what’s left of the main character’s memories. But the wall also represents the boundary of her memory. Then, as the story extends into other characters’ experience of a socially and economically segregated future South Africa, the wall takes on racial and class connotations. The trope thickens and dissolves, divides and connects, working all the time to introduce new story angles, new ways in to meaning.

What turns a trope into a magic key?

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Hello Loreates!

Despite the miserable state of our so-called union, I have good news for the MFA Lore community. Last week at the very first meeting of our Take 5 subscribers, we decided to make this monthly premium session a writing workshop!

I’m thrilled with this group decision because the writing workshop is central to the MFA experience and, while my MFA Core posts mimic lectures, it’s high time we added the benefits of a good real-time workshop.

Every month we’ll focus on one participant’s submission of 5 pages alongside a parallel selection of published work that deals with similar craft issues. Our goal is developmental, not commercial. Our purpose is to provide constructive, helpful, honest feedback that stresses both the literary strengths and opportunities for improvement in each work.

For more about the Take 5 program for premium subscribers, look HERE.

As you might imagine, a good writing workshop requires careful planning and ground rules. When I began to lay out the blueprint for our Take 5 workshop, I thought it might be worth sharing more broadly.

Many, if not most, writers participate in a writing group of some kind. And stories are legion of groups that dissolved in tears or recrimination over thoughtless, cruel, or arrogant remarks that have no place in a well-run workshop. So, especially if you’re launching a new group that plans to workshop pieces, it’s a good idea to review practices and policies that help other workshops prosper and survive.

Hence, today’s post.

Tips from a Writing Workshop Veteran

I formed my first writing workshop around 1990. The late great and I had taken a UCLA prose writing class with the aging Leonardo Bercovici, who simply disappeared one day, leaving the class to fend for ourselves. Cai and I tapped the fellow students whose work we respected the most, and started our own workshop. I’ve been in workshops ever since.

Not all writing groups are workshops, and not all workshops follow the same format. But most of the workshops I’ve joined or led have followed what’s called The Iowa Model , after the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. These include the workshops I attended as an MFA student at Bennington and those I led over 15 years as a Goddard MFA advisor, as well as the women writers’ workshop I’ve attended almost every month for the past dozen years.

I’ve also witnessed workshops that went sideways — and the emotional toll that can take on participants. I’ve comforted students who were personally savaged by peers who lost the distinction between the author and the work. I’ve reassured colleagues whose work was so badly misunderstood in workshop that they felt unmoored for months afterward. And I’ve collected tips and guidelines to prevent such mishaps in the workshops I lead.

Here, then, are those tips and guidelines. They’re not carved in stone. Every group has its own particular goals and priorities. But IMHO, mutual courtesy, respect, and generosity are absolutely fundamental. The suggestions below are meant to safeguard those basic elements of compassion while also encouraging honest, beneficial feedback.

I hope this step-by-step guide will help your workshop grow and last!

1. Workshop organization:

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Hello Loreates,

Been another banner week for the history books. We’re feeling all the feels, I know. Meanwhile, we trudge forward, trying to get our “regular” work done. Whatever regular means anymore.

In this space, “regular” means trying to help you finish and get your work published well. One way I do that is by sharing the lessons I learn as I struggle to write, sell, edit, and promote my own work. This week that struggle leads me into the realm of op-ed pieces.

Every author needs to learn how to write op-ed pieces. Getting these essays published is more challenging today because so many newspapers have folded, but they’re still one of the best ways to promote a book and raise your profile, whether as an expert in your field or as a literary virtuoso. An op-ed piece in a major outlet like the New York Times not only gives you credibility but it reaches thousands of readers who likely would not find you any other way.

When you write for a major newspaper, you get paid a nominal fee (usually around $200) in exchange for the rights to publish and syndicate the work. The paper can change the headline at will and sell the piece for republication under your byline. This can get your words in front of readers around the world in the space of hours. And if your bio mentions your book title, all those thousands of readers will also learn about you and your book.

Over the years, I’ve published many op-eds, mostly in my hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times. I’ve written about my Chinese grandfather’s experience at UC Berkeley in 1906, about vaccination , real estate porn, and anti-Chinese racism. As far as I could tell, the opinion piece that reached farthest was “Hello Today,” about the daily email system that my brother and I established with my mother after my father died. I got mail from readers of small newspapers I’d never heard of in towns I’d never heard of.

Those successes taught me that the formula for a winning op-ed is not that different from the formula for a bestselling book — the UUU formula I’ve described here:

But today I’m working to formulate an op-ed piece related to my ghost project, which will be published this spring. It’s not a slam dunk. Opinion pieces right now must be short, tight, compelling, and perfect for the news cycle of the day they’re published. It sometimes feels as if you need a crystal ball to be able to write one that the NYT will accept.

When struggling to write in a particular form, I find it helpful to deconstruct successful models for what I’m trying to do. So that’s what I’m going to do in this post: deconstruct an op-ed that caught my eye recently, held my attention, and left me with a richer perspective for reading it.

Before I begin, you might want to read this exemplary op-ed in full for yourself. Here’s the NYT gift link to “They Were Ordinary Germans. We Are Ordinary Americans” by . You can also read it on his Substack here.

SAVE THESE DATES!

Monday, February 9, 2026, at 10 am PT/ 2pm ET

Writers In The World, Live: Create to Survive

Please join WITW’s Substack Live MFA faculty reunion, as Elena Georgiou, and discuss the essential role of creativity as an engine for solace, hope, and resilience in today’s tormented world.

RSVP/Join

Elena Georgiou is the award-winning poet and fiction writer who formerly directed Goddard’s MFA in Creative Writing Program and currently teaches in the PhD program at the Rubenstein School at the University of Vermont. is an award-winning author of fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels for young adults and kids, and a faculty member of Hamline University’s MFA in Children’s Writing.

Tuesday, February 10, 2026, at 11am PT/ 2pm ET

Well Published, Live: Publication via Contests

RSVP/Join Live

On Feb. 10, I’ll be chatting with Toni Ann Johnson , who’s won FOUR writing contests that led to publication of her books. Her next is a story collection, But Where’s Home, to be released on February 10 by Screen Door Press, an imprint of The University Press of Kentucky. Join us to find out how she did it!

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Wednesday, February 18, 2026, at 6:30 pm PT

Telling Family Secrets Author Panel

Free! RSVP

The Making of an Opinion Piece

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Hello Loreates,

Thank you to those of you who joined and me this week for a rich conversation about literary fellowship and survival as an author in these dire times. If you missed it, catch up with the video HERE.

Our next Well Published, Live! will be Tuesday, February 10, 2026, at 11am PT/ 2pm ET to discuss Publication via Contests, with . Toni Ann has won FOUR writing contests that led to publication of her books. Her next is a story collection, But Where’s Home, to be released in February by Screen Door Press, an imprint of The University Press of Kentucky. Join us to find out how she did it!

Engineering Narrative Integrity

Have you ever read a book or story that seemed to fall apart midway through? Have you ever written a book or story that seemed to collapse before you could finish writing it?

I’ve written before about the structural imperative of a strong narrative spine:

But recent frustration over a couple of unnamed books in my reading pile has led me to ponder other structural concerns that are too often overlooked.

It’s tempting for us as artists to focus on the longing and pain and beauty that we feel as we work. When our emotions are running strong, we want to believe that all we have to do is open the floodgates and get out of the way of the words pouring onto the page. Isn’t that what that magical state of flow is all about? Yes!

And yet. All art is subject to certain rules of perception, proportion, communication, and laws of physics.

I will never forget my first sculpture class as an art major at Yale. The class was taught by the legendary Erwin Hauer, a gentle creative giant, in a dank and musty basement that smelled of the mountain of clay awaiting us. In the center of the room lay our model: a yard-long bone from some huge animal. After listening to Professor Hauer extol the many surface qualities, planes, angles, and dimensions that made this bone a worthy subject of our creative attention, I expected to dig into that clay and let the inner artist in me get to work. Instead, Hauer shifted into an even more emphatic celebration of armature, the hidden framework, or skeleton, that would support the clay in our renditions of the bone and provide the underlying shape of the whole piece. The armature, coupled with the right consistency and application of clay, would provide the tensile strength for the sculpture to stand and hold together. If we didn’t get the metal wire armature right, the rest of our work would fall apart (as many of our student bones did).

What I learned that day was that art needs to be deeply engineered, as well as deeply felt. In a physical construction, tensile strength determines the structure’s ability to bend or stretch without breaking. In a narrative construction, it determines the story’s integrity: its ability to expand and contract and unfold without losing either the reader or its central purpose and coherence.

The elements of Narrative Integrity

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Hello Loreates,

The careless cruelty continues. As the ICE murder rate keeps climbing, with targets now including unarmed citizens in addition to law-abiding immigrants, it becomes ever clearer that the current DC regime intends to turn America into a police state. How did we get here, and how can we possibly beat back this monstrosity? As always, books hold many of the answers to these and other critical questions of the moment.

One book in particular has recently galvanized me. Careless People, by Facebook’s former director of public policy, traces one of the most powerful vectors that led to the Trump takeover of America. More importantly, it traces the moral disintegration of leadership among the billionaires who converted the tech industry into one unstoppable propaganda machine.

For that, Sarah Wynn-Williams has been silenced. She gave just one interview about the book before her former employer, Meta, won a temporary injunction against her. Because she had signed a non-disparagement clause, Wynn-Williams was ordered to stop promoting her memoir. But you can still buy and read it.

Everybody should read it. The revelations it contains are that important. They’re not the reason I decided to devote this post to Careless People, though. No, I want to unpack the craft of this book for you because it’s an absolutely stellar example of a particular type of memoir that I’ll call Memoir With A Message, or MWAM.

MWAM is its own genre of narrative nonfiction, distinct from family memoirs or trauma memoirs or most celebrity, travel, or business memoirs. At its core, MWAM is less about the author’s personal story than it is about ideas, policies, beliefs, scientific or political or academic lessons learned.

Although I’ve just coined the term for this post, I’ve been writing and ghostwriting MWAM throughout my career. My very first Substack post was about one of these titles:

Other examples of MWAM include books like Rebecca Claren’s The Cost of Free Land, The Punishment of Virtue by Sarah Chayes, and the notorious memoirs of Greg Mortenson, which helped raise millions of dollars for his supposed schools in Central Asia— until Mortenson was accused of falsifying his story and diverting funds.

I include Mortenson only as evidence of the power of this genre. When a personal story awakens readers to an urgent message, mission, or cause, the impact can radically change opinion, policy—and the flow of funding. MWAM’s subjective narrative approach is vastly more persuasive and far-reaching than dry white papers or polemics. Which is why grifters sometimes exploit it. And why authoritarian forces like those exposed by Careless People will go out of their way to block these publications.

This is a formidable genre. If you write any kind of nonfiction, you need to understand how MWAM works.

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