Birthday Special: The All-time Best of MFA Lore's Craft Essays for Creative Prose Writers
The most important writing insights I've collected over decades as an MFA prof and bestselling author
No matter how alone or lonely we may feel, everyone on this planet is connected, not only to each other but to space, time, nature, and to everything we’ve ever felt or experienced deeply enough to remember. Those connections are what make great writing powerful.
Hello Loreates!
Exactly four years ago today, I published my first post on Substack. Since then, MFA Lore has found its primary focus as a resource for creative prose writers looking for “the essence of an MFA education, minus the tuition.” We’ve rebranded, zoomed out, gone live, added Writer In The World and Metaphortography Prompts to our MFA Core offerings, introduced Take 5 Packets, and steadily grown the wonderful community of Loreates who gather bimonthly to share questions, answers, and concerns about the writing life.
Today, for this birthday special, I’ve reviewed all the posts published here since MFA Lore’s launch, and selected 10 that I believe contain the most essential insights of an MFA education. Our crowded inboxes make it impossible to keep up with every Substack post that comes our way, but if you’re serious about your writing, I urge you to review these fundamental craft tips. If you don’t have time to read them today, perhaps bookmark this roundup for future reference.
If you’re not a paid subscriber, you can read all of these posts with a trial subscription or by taking advantage of the MFA Lore Holiday Upgrade Special to receive full paid benefits of MFA Lore for one year for just $30, a 50% discount offer available until December 15, 2025.
Top 10 MFA Lore posts for Creative Writers
I’ll be honest. Picking these top 10 posts was tough. I had to think hard about which insights I’ve found as an author and teacher to be both vital and rarely taught. I decided to concentrate on craft, peeling away the posts that focus on the nitty gritty of publication. I also tried to select lessons that speak to prose writers of both fiction and nonfiction.
Then I had to decide how to organize this curation. Rather than simply present the posts in chronological order, I decided to arrange them like a mini course in becoming a serious creative writer. Beginning with reading like a writer and progressing generally through the process of composition and revision.
This collection, then, contains the educational highlights of my own journey as an author, MFA student, MFA professor, ghostwriter, and editor. Writing and assembling them for you has given me great pleasure. I hope you find them useful.
CORE LESSON: Annotations teach us to read like writers. Simply reading for pleasure, or even like an English major, will not do the trick. Writers need to cultivate the particular focus on craft that goes into every annotation. Only through this process will our reading make us better writers.
CORE LESSON: Unfortunately, exposing and examining ugly truths is the whole point of the exercise known as literature. Without ugliness, without emotional distress, without secrets and problems, there’s rarely a story. Much less honesty about the human condition. And without honesty, there’s nothing for readers outside the family to trust.
CORE LESSON: First, determine which macro prose form is best suited to your material, your intentions, and your constraints. These forms include memoir, personal essay, journalistic essays, and fiction. Each attracts audiences with different expectations. Which is right for your material? That depends on you.
CORE LESSON: The Abiding Question is the conundrum that lies at the heart of your story. It’s the hidden mystery that gives the work its raison d’etre — its ultimate reason for being. And once clarified, its motivating urgency serves to bring all the pieces of the story into focused connection. Then, it’s transmitted to the reader, who feels the need to address the AQ even if not consciously aware of it.
CORE LESSON: Disconnection in writing is usually self-indulgent, if not downright lazy. And it’s false. No matter how alone or lonely we may feel, everyone on this planet is connected, not only to each other but to space, time, nature, and to everything we’ve ever felt or experienced deeply enough to remember. Those connections are what make great writing powerful.
CORE LESSON: Writers must understand the workings and variability of personality so they can make sense of their characters’ interactions and responses to each other. If you’re writing nonfiction, this science can help you unpack the thinking, say, of an abusive relative, or a confounding criminal, or your own reactions to a traumatic past. If you’re writing fiction, knowledge of temperament and character can help you deepen the individuality of your characters while also enhancing the authenticity of their behavior on the page. The most simplistic reason to make a study of personality is to avoid the fatal pitfall of writing all characters in your own mirror image.
CORE LESSON: Scenes, stories, and characters with depth and authenticity are rarely, if ever, created in a single burst. Like great paintings, they come to life bit by bit, as the artist approaches from different angles, bringing a different focus with each pass. Even if only in our mind, we have to sketch out each scene several times, entering it first from one direction, then another, before it begins to gel.
CORE LESSON: The name of the game in storytelling, whether you’re writing fiction or memoir, screenplays or personal essay, is emotional engagement. Information may be a desirable bonus, but readers don’t read stories for information; they read to be moved. That means you’ve got to hook their feelings quickly, and then keep producing new and changed feelings so that they’re constantly in suspense about what’s going to happen next.
CORE LESSON: Readers’ brains are constantly, instinctively searching for the subliminal coordinates as their eyes move over the page. Because attention is a precious commodity, the brain’s natural M.O. is to zero in on the most meaningful signals and tune out the rest.
CORE LESSON: Forster famously wrote in Howard’s End, “Only connect.” That’s the goal of all great writing, not only to connect the narrator’s inner and outer lives but also to connect the author’s insights and character with the reader’s heart and mind. Confiding accomplishes this connection. Confessing does not.
Please let me know in the poll below if you’d like more roundups like this. I limited the selection here to ten because I didn’t want to go long, but I could do another along the lines of MFA Lore’s Top Posts on Getting Well Published? You decide!