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

Publishing Today with Jenna Satterthwaite

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

On the Path to Becoming an Agent

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

On the Selection of Genres to Represent

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

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

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

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

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

On the Author’s Life Being Financially Precarious

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

On Pen Names

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

On Submission Timelines and Persistence

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

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

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

On When to Revise Between Rounds

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

On Choosing an Agent

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

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

On the Current State of Publishing

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

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

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

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

Bonus! Agent phrases, fyi:

• Sub= Submission to editors and publishers.

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

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

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

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!

Powerful writing is a form of resistance. That’s why I’m offering a year of MFA Lore paid subscriber benefits for just $30. Become a stronger writer and use your words to save the world:

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!

I was deeply honored this week to welcome award-winning fiction author to Well Published, live!

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in. You can watch the whole video, above.

Well Published, Live! is an occasional video feature of Aimee Liu’s MFA Lore. These conversations with acclaimed authors, agents, and book industry professionals is meant to help you get… well published!

View all WP videos here!

Aimee’s MFA Core essays on the craft and business of creative writing drop each Saturday.

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My conversation with Rachel is a cornucopia of inspiration, advice, and wisdom for fiction writers and creative artists of all stripes. It ranges from the challenge of finding focus and motivation amidst geopolitical turbulence, to specific tips for using short stories to develop ideas for novels, with stops along the way for approaches to writing about race and incorporating science into fiction when you’re not a scientist!

For those who aren’t familiar with Rachel’s work, allow me to introduce you:

Los Angeles writer Rachel Khong is the author of two award-winning novels and a new story collection. Her debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction.

Her second novel, Real Americans, was published by Knopf in April 2024, and was an instant New York Times bestseller. [I had the privilege of reviewing Rel Americans for the LA Times, and you can read that review HERE.]

And her newest title, My Dear You, will be out from Knopf this April.

I urge you to watch and savor the entire conversation, but in case you’d like a quick rundown first, below are a few of my favorite things that Rachel had to say.

Takeaways from my conversation with Rachel:

On writing amid political turbulence “I really am such a firm believer in carving out that creative space. . . . We have to hold the reality close to us because that’s where the writing comes from—what we’re feeling, what we’re living through, and our reactions to whatever injustices.”

On short stories vs. novels “I write stories when I’m writing novels because they remind me that I can finish something. A novel, for me, takes years and years. It’s often really frustrating. I’m banging my head against the wall. I feel a lot of despair.”

On not knowing where a project is headed “I never know at the beginning what anything is going to be or what form it’s going to take. I’m very attuned to what the project wants to be. And often the characters will tell me.”

On assembling a story collection “As I was putting these things together, I realized the book was about one’s limits as a person and the reality that the life you lead is likely the one life that you’re going to lead and that you don’t get to live all your possible lives and go down all possible paths.”

On race in her fiction “I was interested in writing about the racism that’s a little bit more insidious and kind of subtle even, and often very funny because it is so random. . . . I don’t wake up in the morning and think, like, oh, I’m going to go about my day being Asian. . . . That’s not on my mind every single moment of the day.”

On writing about science without being an expert “The cool thing about writing is that you could just learn about stuff and you don’t need to be an expert in it. . . . I think it’s valid to learn as much as you can and not be an expert, to just let your curiosity guide you and to be open to the fact that you might be wrong about anything.”

On revising old work “I didn’t want it to reflect who I am now. I wanted it to have the energy of who I was back then. . . . The book that you write is a document of all these different versions of yourself, right? And the person who starts the book is not the same as the person who finishes the book.”

On the MFA and literary community “Even if you’re not in a program, I think just finding other writers who care about writing as much as you do is so invaluable because really most of the world doesn’t care. . . . I think it’s so hard to write over many years, to have that kind of stamina, without a community of people who understand why you do what you’re doing.”

On journaling as a writing practice “I often will journal before I start writing my fiction because sometimes it helps me clear my throat a little bit, helps me figure out, okay, here’s what I’m interested in today. Because we’re not machines. Every day we’re coming to the writing a little bit differently and interested in different things.”

On imagination and love “Imagination can be fueled by . . . love—applying love to your imagination. And when you do that, then it sort of expands outward and you can imagine these different worlds, a different way of doing things.”

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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”

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“I had an easier time getting published via contest than I had trying to go the traditional publishing route.” — Toni Ann Johnson

Happy Valentine’s Day, Loreates,

I want to open with a huge thank you to for this conversation, which is an absolute goldmine of intel, insight, and encouragement for literary writers. Thanks also to , , , , , , and others who tuned in live!

My life is a little discombobulated by the birth of my first grandchild last weekend, so I’m posting this video in lieu of an essay today. But it is well worth your time.

Our topic is GETTING WELL PUBLISHED VIA CONTESTS… because Toni Ann Johnson has won THREE writing contests that led to publications of her books.

She won the 2024 Screen Door Press Prize for Fiction with her just-published story collection, BUT WHERE’S HOME? ( University Press of Kentucky, 2026). In 2021, she won the Flannery O’Connor Award for her linked short story collection LIGHT SKIN GONE TO WASTE (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2022)-- edited by Roxane Gay! That collection was shortlisted for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, and also shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize. A novella, HOMEGOING, won Accents Publishing’s inaugural novella contest in 2020 and was released in May of 2021.

Toni Ann is also a screenwriter with a number of produced projects, including, Ruby Bridges (ABC) and Crown Heights (Showtime).

Scroll down for key takeaways from our conversation.

This discussion offers a cornucopia of inspiration and advice, especially for writers of short fiction and essays who submit to literary magazines. We also dove into the highly charged content of Toni Ann’s books, which confronts racism in suburbia and the telling of family secrets.

Speaking of which, you are invited to join Toni Ann and me again online Wednesday, Feb. 18, at 6:30p PT. We’ll be focusing exclusively on family secrets, along with and .

Free! RSVP

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Saturday, February 14, 2026, at 10am PT/ 1pm ET

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All paid subscribers are welcome for this Valentine’s Day special as we discuss the role of LOVE in our writing life. To receive your link, please RSVP below, and include your email address:

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Takeaways from Well Published via Contests, with Toni Ann Johnson

Using Contests as a Pathway to Book Publication

Contest Success Over Traditional Publishing Toni Ann found contests easier than traditional publishing. After her agent submitted a 500-page manuscript to 26 Big Five editors (all passed), and the agent asked for revisions through an assistant after five years of collaboration, Toni Ann decided to take control of her own publishing path through contests.

Strategic Manuscript Adaptation When she saw the Flannery O’Connor Award had a word limit, she cut her manuscript in half, returning to her original vision of linked stories rather than the novel format her agent had preferred. This strategic downsizing and refocusing on one character’s trajectory (Maddie) led to her winning the contest.

Building on Contest Success Her three contest wins came sequentially: Accent Publishing’s inaugural novella contest (Homegoing, 2020), the Flannery O’Connor Award (Light Skin Gone to Waste, edited by Roxane Gay, 2021), and the Screen Door Press Prize (But Where’s Home?, 2024). Each publication came from material originally part of the same 500-page manuscript.

Persistence Through Rejection Toni Ann submitted to multiple contests without placing before her wins. She entered But Where’s Home? in many contests while tinkering with the manuscript until it finally won Screen Door Press in 2024.

The Role of Previously Published Stories Many stories in her collections had been previously published in literary journals (including Fiction Magazine alongside Joyce Carol Oates), which likely strengthened the manuscripts’ credibility for contest judges.

University Press Benefits Winning these contests connected her with quality university presses (University of Georgia Press, University Press of Kentucky), which provided professional editing, distribution, and prestige without requiring an agent.

Writing Literature About Race in Suburbia

The Setting as Character Monroe, New York serves as the central location for Toni Ann's collections. Unlike the typical narrative of Black families integrating white neighborhoods (working class families moving into higher class communities), her family's experience was different - her highly educated father (psychologist/psychoanalyst with two master's degrees) and her mother from Sugar Hill in Harlem (a debutante whose father was a post office supervisor) moved into a predominantly working-class white suburb.

Class Inversion and Racial Assumptions Toni Ann's work explores the bizarre dynamics where she was automatically deemed "lower class" simply for being Black in the 1960s-70s, even though her family was more educated and cultured than many white neighbors. She describes white kids from the trailer park acting superior to her because of race, despite her family's professional status and her own worldliness (having lived in Ankara, traveled to Japan and West Africa).

Generational Trauma and Secrets Toni Ann’s work explores how racial shame and family secrets compound across generations. Her own mother hid her biracial heritage (her father was a Russian Jew, her mother a live-in maid) and refused to acknowledge her Jewish ancestry, maintaining she was simply Black despite being 50% Ashkenazi according to DNA testing.

The Cost of Assimilation and Passing The stories examine what gets lost when families hide their true origins to fit into suburban environments. Toni Ann’s mother’s deep shame about her background—being born out of wedlock, mixed-race, adopted after becoming a ward of the state—led to emotional unavailability and inauthenticity in parenting.

Writing as Truth-Telling Despite Family Resistance Toni Ann faced significant family fallout for revealing family secrets in her fiction. Her mother, who didn’t even share her true background with close friends, was deeply opposed to these stories being published.

Would you like an MFA-level response to your work?

Becoming a Premium Member of the MFA Lore community will entitle you to Aimee’s written feedback on your query and up to 5 pages (1250 words) of your creative work, plus a follow-up phone call. Your “Take 5 Packet Letter” will highlight both the Strengths and the Opportunities in your work, helping you determine whether it’s time to “press send” to agents or reorient your revision. In addition, Aimee now leads a monthly zoom workshop just for Premium Loreates. To join, subscribe or upgrade to Premium and claim your Take-5 Packet today!

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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.elenaelen

SAVE THESE DATES!

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

Writers In The World, Live: Create to Survive

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

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

Well Published, Live: Publication via Contests

RSVP/Join Live

Tune in to MFA Lore’s free Well Published! Substack Live on Tuesday, when 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 this month by Screen Door Press, an imprint of The University Press of Kentucky. Join us to find out how she did it!

Saturday, February 14 at 10am PT/ 1pm ET

Loreate Zoom for Paid Subscribers

RSVP for Feb 14

All paid MFA Lore subscribers are welcome for this Valentine’s Day special as we discuss the role of LOVE in our writing life. Please RSVP in the chat using this link:

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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“We all really, really, really need each other right now.”

Welcome to Well Published, Live! the Substack video series were we talk about all aspects of getting and being… well published! And thank you to , , , , , and the many others who tuned in live.

Today’s conversation on Writing Fellowship is the first in what I hope will become an occasional series of chats with fellow authors who helm stacks on creative writing and the writing life. The wealth of these publications can be overwhelming for readers, and the competition for attention can be equally challenging for writers on Substack. But I’ve also found this space to be incredibly generous with high-level expertise. Most of us offer different sorts of insights and “services.” So my aim is to highlight both our goals and approaches in our stacks – as well as our different MFA and writing journeys.

My guest today is fellow Substacker, author, and professor .

Christine’s novels include Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, Little Known Facts, and Paris, He Said, and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry and The Virginity of Famous Men (Bloomsbury USA & UK). She is also the editor of the short fiction anthology, Love in the Time of Time’s Up, and her seventh book, Direct Sunlight, is a short story collection published in 2023 by Northwestern University Press. Christine lives in Pasadena, CA and teaches for the graduate writing program at Northwestern University in the School of Professional Studies and for Stanford University Continuing Studies.

Her Substack, , focuses on literary and literature-adjacent topics including the craft of writing, the publishing and entertainment industries, and making a life as a writer.

Read the takeaways from our discussion below.

Save the date

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

Our next Well Published, Live: Publication via Contests

We’ll be chatting with , 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!

Aimee Liu & Christine Sneed on Writing Fellowship: Takeaways

On Substack and Building Community

Christine’s Journey to Substack

• Started in March 2023 after conversation at AWP with poet

• Felt she needed “a new address in Writerland” despite publishing multiple books

• focuses on author interviews (especially small press writers), craft lessons, and highlighting literary voices

• Posts every 6 days

• Sees it as extension of teaching work

Aimee’s Approach

• Started five years ago, transitioning from Medium

• Began with personal essays, evolved to teaching-focused content (”essence of an MFA education”)

• Posts 3 times weekly: Monday prompts, Wednesday curated pieces, Saturday craft essays

• Finds Substack provides structure and deadlines that help keep protect sanity in the current political climate

Publishing Realities

The Mid-List Author Experience

• Christine: Published four books with Bloomsbury, one a Kindle bestseller, most recent books with small/university presses

• Discoverability remains chronic problem, especially for small press books

• Bookstores often don’t carry small press titles unless there’s established relationship

Submission Strategies

• Persistence is key: Christine submitted to Ploughshares for 10-12 years before acceptance

• Quality over speed: Both emphasize not rushing work out

• Most literary journals won’t publish work previously posted on Substack

• Editorial preferences vary, but dogged submission to journals you admire pays off

• Christine has published nearly 100 stories in journals but written twice that many

The Importance of Writing Community

Mutual Support Networks

• Aimee’s “Lockdown Lit” group during pandemic provided crucial support when her novel launched in 2020

• MFA programs (Bennington, Goddard, Northwestern) create lasting professional relationships

• Writing groups essential for feedback and perspective

Current Political Climate

• Recent reports of publishers stopping acquisition of manuscripts with politically incorrect “liberal” themes

• Greater reliance on small presses and literary journals anticipated

• Community support more critical than ever for writers facing uncertain publishing landscape

Craft and Process

On Revision

• Christine: After 30 years and extensive teaching, can usually tell when work is ready

• Aimee: Still need distance—”put it in drawer for a year” approach

• Both emphasize importance of reading widely, especially Best American anthologies

Creative Approach

• John Gardner’s advice: fiction needs “necessary strangeness,” so, as Aimee says, “interrogate the weird.”

• Keep notebooks of ideas (Christine has used same one for 25 years)

• Balance ego and humility in assessing own work

Practical Wisdom

• Comparison is “the death of joy”—celebrate others’ success even when envious

• Not every book you write will or should be published

• Maintain strict division between Substack content and work intended for traditional publication

• Find joy and meaning in the work itself, not just outcomes

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Would you like an MFA-level response to your work?

Becoming a Premium Member of the MFA Lore community will entitle you to:

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

• Monthly zoom “seminars” just for Premium Loreates.

• And all other benefits of a paid subscription.

Subscribe at the Premium level or upgrade today. Details HERE.

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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Dear Loreates,

Before I begin, I want to take a moment to honor Renee Nicole Good, the award-winning poet and 2020 graduate of the College of Arts and Letters at Old Dominion University in Virginia, who was senselessly murdered by ICE this week in Minneapolis. I know we are all reeling from this crime, which sends the unmistakable message across our country that each and every one of us is endangered by henchmen of the current occupant of the White House. We are not protected by the color of our skin, religious beliefs, legal status, or even our political affiliation. The mere perception of opposition against this regime will mark us as “fair game.” But/and we must not allow the killing of Renee Good, a white Christian mother of three, any more than we’ve allowed the deaths of more than 30 immigrants in ICE custody, to silence us. As creative artists, we have a duty to speak, write, and defend the truth through the peaceful power of our art and voices. No matter what.

, , have already written poignantly in Good’s memory. I’d like to share those posts HERE and HERE and HERE.

Apart from the Federal felonies of the week, I want to warn you about a new spate of crimes that are likely to target you specifically as writers. Probably thanks to AI, indie and small press authors are being pummeled by increasingly sophisticated scams. I’ve received several over the past week that floored me. Because I fear predators like these could seduce many authors who are desperate to get their books “taken seriously,” I’m going to share my experience with you.

For a variety of reasons, I’m going to paywall my actual “conversation” with one of these con artists but not my takeaways below.

Please read on and be careful out there.

Aimee

It’s a New Year for Con Artists

If you’re an indie or small press author, I’m sorry to inform you that you have a special target on your title. Con artists know that, unlike Big 5 authors, you don’t have many seasoned publishing professionals advising you. They know you’re probably fighting on your own for every reader. They know you’re scrambling for any word-of-mouth you can possibly attract. And they know you’re hungry and susceptible to “sincere praise.” So if you receive “quiet compliments” via your website from self-described “publicists” or “book group moderators” or “media consultants,” beware!

I do not mean to demean your work. You may have written the greatest novel since War & Peace, but chances are minimal that these sharks have read a single word of it. Thanks to AI, they don’t need to read it. Hell, they don’t even need to write the honeyed BS they shower on you. If, like most authors, you give them a way to contact you, they will try to con you.

Exhibit A

I received this note via my author website a few days ago. Note the phrasing I’ve boldfaced:

How Did You Hear: Medium
Comments: Hi Aimee, I’ve been spending time with your work across fiction, nonfiction, and your writing on psychology and wellness and I was struck by how coherent the voice feels across such different forms. It also feels like the kind of body of work that continues to deepen over time, where readers might benefit from encountering it as a more intentional whole rather than as individual entry points. I work quietly with authors at this stage, helping shape digital spaces that honor complexity and longevity without flattening the work. No pitch at all, I simply wanted to share the appreciation and the thought. Warm regards, Emily

If this sounds seductive and innocent, that’s entirely by design. The phrasing is classic AI flattery— soft, “appreciative,” utterly vapid and insidious. After you receive a few of these come-ons, you’ll see that certain tells recur:

• “spending time with your work” does not mean they’ve read any of it

• generic praise like “coherent voice” and “continues to deepen” is totally meaningless but must sound sweet to a robot

• “quiet” seems to be a buzzword that these creeps believe will open doors for them. A kind of “Aw, shucks” approach to embezzlement.

• “Shape digital spaces that honor complexity?” WTAF! These words sound like they’ve been processed in a New Age blender.

• Excruciating, almost unctuous politeness. If you’re old enough to remember Eddie Haskell on Leave It To Beaver, you’ll get the picture.

• “No pitch at all”? Like hell. This phrase is the definitive tell that this is nothing but a pitch. HIT DELETE.

Exhibit B

Unfortunately, not all scams are so easy to spot and spike. There seems to be a whole new underground economy in exploiting the hallowed territory of book groups. You can read about it HERE and HERE and HERE.

This new tactic is particularly galling because of the respect and gratitude that true book groups deserve. Most authors absolutely depend on these reading communities to spread the word about their titles. And most authors routinely receive legitimate invitations to make personal or virtual visits to book groups. Especially during the pandemic, zoom book groups were lifesavers for readers and authors alike. That contract between book groups and writers is sacred.

Money does sometimes change hands, when book groups pay authors for their time or to buy signed copies directly. But no author should EVER pay money to have their book read or discussed by a book group. The mere suggestion is a blazing red flag.

Most of these scamsters, though, are smart enough not to mention payment up front. They frame their lure much like any book group invitation, with effusive praise and descriptions of a large and eager community of readers who are serious about giving each title the respect and attention it’s due.

The other new wrinkle that makes this so nefarious is Identity Spoofing. Scamsters now use email addresses (NOTE: all use Gmail addresses!) and aliases that connect to legit book and reading groups. And/or, they create verification sites that appear to prove they’re legit.

This is what happened to me this week. I received an email that claimed to be from the founder of the San Francisco “not quite a book club” Book Club. There is a Meetup page for this group. There appear to be 4K members who run their book group meetings like other book groups. And there’s no hint on the page of any direct involvement from authors. But I decided to play along, just in case my suspicions were unfounded. Identity Spoofing is convincing.

Here, then, is the correspondence that unfolded. Again, I’ll boldface the warning signs. And pay attention to the time stamps:

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This one’s personal!

Have you ever found yourself home alone, tears streaming and mind spinning with revealed truths that you’ve been seeking in your writing for years? That was me the other day. And the catalyst was music.

Afterward, I thought of the research I’ve read about the power of music to unlock memory, emotion, and meaning. And I realized the connection between music and writing, especially for memoir writers, deserved more of my attention.

So here’s my story and my understanding of what happened to me and why my experience might be worth your attention, too.

Read on!

Aimee

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If You’ve Walled Off Your Emotions, Let Music Set Them Free

Some people can write with music playing in the background. Not me. Some households are filled with music all the time, but not mine. If anything’s playing in the background at ours, it’s usually the news. This week I started listening to an old playlist, and a few minutes later I sank, weeping, into an emotional puddle where I remained for the duration of a dozen songs by:

• Henry Mancini

• Miriam Makeba

• Harry Belafonte

• Mozart

• Glenn Miller

• Vivaldi

• Ella Fitzgerald

• More Henry Mancini

It was Mancini’s “Two for the Road” that took me down, as it always does to a greater or lesser degree. The chords and changes mirror the melancholy in the 1967 Stanley Donen movie of the same name, with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney playing a couple who’ve lost the tenderness that once made them mad for each other. I was fourteen and already a confirmed devotee of Audrey Hepburn when the movie came out. I felt the universality of this story of neglected love. I saw my parents in it, and my own future romances. The sweet sorrow in the music confirmed all these associations.

Now, though, the resonance was amplified by an essay I’m writing about my relationship with my mother. It was a hard relationship, so marked by emotional whiplash that I built a nearly lifelong shell against feeling too much for her. But she was the one who first loved every artist on the list above. She was the one who taught me to embrace stories and art, to read a painting and to swoon at certain kinds of light. My essay honored that appreciation, but my writing group confirmed that it lacked tenderness. The tenderness that had made me mad for her as a child but that I’d lost in adolescence and never reclaimed.

“Two for the Road” gave me sudden access to that lapsed feeling. But that’s not all. As the tracks shifted and “Moon River” began to play, I realized that my identification with my mother went far deeper than I’d ever admitted before.

“Moon River” was Mancini’s theme song for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the movie that first anchored Audrey Hepburn in my psyche. As a teenager I adopted her character Holly Golightly as my alter ego: I longed to live in Manhattan as a “wild thing,” daring to explore society, high and low, maintaining an exquisite balance between tender vulnerability and invincibility. After college, I fashioned and lived my own version of Holly Golightly over four years in New York— until I could no longer bear the loneliness that accompanied her untenable balance.

Only decades later did it occur to me to wonder how this film had lodged so deeply in my sense of self, given that I was only eight years old when it was released. I can’t remember the first time I saw the movie, though I know every scene by heart (yes, including the cringe-worthy Mickey Rooney in yellowface). I memorized every song on the album we played on the living room stereo. I made this movie — and Audrey Hepburn — my own as a teenager by emulating her style and starving myself to match her figure. It’s not an overstatement to say that I adored her then as I could not adore my mother. Yes, transference.

But here’s the thing. My mother must have been the one who introduced me to Audrey Hepburn, who took me to her movies and purchased the soundtrack albums. My mother in her youth looked more like Audrey than I ever could. She loved to tell stories about her early years of marriage in Greenwich Village, where she was living when Hepburn debuted on Broadway as Gigi. And years before “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Mom would have inhaled “Roman Holiday,” “Sabrina,” and “Funny Face.” In personality, my mother more closely resembled Kate than Audrey Hepburn, yet her whole adult life she wore her chestnut hair in the same French twist that Audrey made iconic in her signature scene, window shopping alone at dawn in evening dress at Tiffany’s.

I once interviewed a woman who recalled being deathly sick at the start of each school year until therapy revealed that her mother had found her father’s body on the first day of school when she was a child. The mother had transferred her remembered dread to her daughter without either of them realizing it.

Now, in my living room more than sixty years after I heard “Moon River” for the first time, I understood that the ache and yearning unleashed by this song belonged not only to me but, first, to my mother. What I’d always felt when watching this film or listening to the soundtrack was a longing for freedom and individuality that my mother, for various reasons, could not grant herself— but imagined experiencing through me.

And then, as I recalled my mother swaying and smiling to the clicks of Miriam Makeba’s “Pata Pata” or growing glassy eyed over Belafonte’s “Try to Remember,” I understood that her truest and most complicated gift to me was her yearning.

I got up and made a list, then, of all that she had taught me to yearn for: art, independence, natural wonder, literature, laughter, intelligence, style, adventure, scintillating conversation, riveting stories, and, yes, gorgeous music.

The tension between us had grown over her insistent attempts to control my expressions of these yearnings, especially the contents of my books. When my version of freedom contradicted her expectations, she’d react with emotional daggers. The resulting roller coaster made me alternately embrace and reject the cravings that I’d absorbed from her. But they shaped me as an artist and deepened my soul.

Witness my cathartic response to the music she loved. I was crying for her, with her, both. This, then, was the missing source of tenderness for my essay: more than anything else, she taught me the power and beauty of yearning.

The science of music and memory

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Happy holidays, Loreates!

I’m thrilled to welcome more than 40 of you who’ve joined us this month! And special thanks to new Premium Loreates , , , , and . What an honor to get acquainted with your work!

I didn’t expect to add a third part to my series on Staking Out Your Story, but after last week’s post, asked me to drill further into the intricacies of “beats.” I aim to please, so beats are our focus for today. And in honor of the season, I thought I’d turn to O. Henry’s holiday classic “The Gift of the Magi” to serve as our example. If you wish, you can read the whole story HERE. [Note, too, that “Magi” serves as a sly example of 2nd POV, explored a few weeks back in my post This Story’s for “You”.]

If you missed the first two parts of the Stakes series, you can catch up here:

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Beats, or Breaths?

What exactly is a “beat”? That depends.

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