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Hello Loreates,

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

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

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

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

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

Aimee

How to Quilt Your Story

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

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

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

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

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

Refer a friend

And, as always, write on!

Aimee

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Hello Loreates,

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

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

Write on!

Aimee

Save the Date!

Tuesday, July 21 at 10am PT

Well Published! Live with

Jennifer Acker, Founder of

The Common Literary Magazine

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

Join live, July 21

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Saturday, July 25 at 9am PT

Take 5 Writing Workshop

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

Take 5 Program

Which 1st Person Are You Writing?

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Hello Loreates,

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

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

I’ve savored and studied passages like this one:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read on!

Aimee

Leave a comment

Save the Date!

Tuesday, July 21 at 10am PT

Well Published! Live with

Jennifer Acker, Founder of

The Common Literary Magazine

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

Join Jen Acker, July 21

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Saturday, July 25 at 9am PT

Take 5 Writing Workshop

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

Take 5 Program

The Paragraph with a Punch

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

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

Hello, Loreates!

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

Read on!

Aimee

Memoir Requires Three I’s

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

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

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

Memoir is not diary, chronicle, or therapy

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

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

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

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

Challenges of perspective in memoir

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

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Hello Loreates,

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

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

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

Write on!

Aimee

Save the Date!

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

Well Published, Live! with Blockbuster Novelist Robinne Lee

Join Live! June 30

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

Find all Well Published videos HERE

Master Metaphor as Literary Code

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

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

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

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

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

Metaphor’s magic

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

Hello Loreates,

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

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

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

What’s the Worst that Could Possibly Happen?

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

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

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

Moral Values & Degrees of Negativity

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

Hello Loreates,

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

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

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

Read on!

Aimee

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

Mine the Gap

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

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

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

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

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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,

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!

Subscribe now

As a paid MFA subscriber you are welcome to our bimonthly Zoom gatherings, where I answer questions like these in person. But if you just have one burning question about writing or publishing that you’d like me to address in a future post, please let me know!

Leave a comment

For now, act up, speak out, and write on!

Aimee

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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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