Mary Carroll Moore's Blog, page 10

Finding the Rhythm of Conflict

In just 9 days, my new novel, Last Bets, will be published. Please consider pre-ordering a copy today. Thank you so much for supporting a fellow author!

Join me for great writerly conversation with AWP-award-winning author Ginger Eager at the virtual launch: Sunday, April 21, 2:00 p.m. eastern, on Zoom.

Register here!

Photo by Arisa Chattasa on Unsplash

As a writing teacher, I’ve read manuscripts so full of conflict, so much happening that I have to pause and breathe. The conflict overwhelms everything, and there’s no moment of meaning, where the reader understands the effect on the inner life of the character going through it.

I’ve read manuscripts equally devoid of conflict. Page after page of description or a character’s inner life, history; pleasant dialogue; setting that sparks nothing. Very little change is possible here too; there’s nothing pushing against the character externally. No conflict to make the character want to change the status quo that’s so comfortable.

The first kind of story is overloaded with external conflict. We do need some—and action stories have a lot. But there need to be moments where we readers witness the effect of that external conflict, how it creates internal conflict, which creates a decision. A change.

My husband dies (external) which makes me lonely and unsafe (internal) which causes me to marry a very different sort of man (change). (Olive, Again, Elizabeth Strout)

The second kind of story needs both external and internal conflict. Something needs to happen externally—we have to get outside the character’s head and feelings, see them objectively in the world, facing an event. Once the external conflict occurs, there’s a reaction inside, an emotional response. That generates the change.

My father remarries (external) and my new stepmother hates me (internal) so I have to prove myself even more (change). (Hang the Moon, Jeannette Walls)

Finding the rhythm of conflict

We’re about a week from home, making our way slowly, loathe to give up the camper van life of the past two months. I’m worrying I won’t continue some of the practices I began on the trip, especially morning yoga. I practiced on a small wooden dock overlooking a pond that was alive with snowy egrets, mallards, bass, turtles, and a carp named Big Bob. Each morning, before it got too hot, I gathered my yoga mat and my phone and went to the dock. One of my dogs usually came too, curling up under one of the dock’s benches. I practiced for about an hour, using videos. It was bliss.

Being outside made it all work. Breeze from the pond, a fountain splashing, the birds, leaves of the live oak above me when I lay on my mat. I created a rhythm that sustained me. But leaving broke that rhythm, so I’m wondering how to keep it going in a northern early spring.

My yoga teacher spent the first few minutes on the rhythm of the breath, and over the weeks I began noticing rhythm in everything. How to get it, how to follow and nurture it, how it supports me.

I’m creakier now than I’ve ever been, less flexible too, but the rhythm of the practice brought back some limberness. Good timing too, before gardening season hits.

Yoga is supposed to engender deep relaxation, but mostly it engendered conflict in me. Luckily, my teacher is my age and she complains sometimes, as she teaches, about stiffness or immobility, so I don’t feel so bad. But after the pure relaxation postures, the harder ones show me immediately how well (or poorly) my body is doing after a year of book launch.

The teacher stressed the rhythm, the flow, rather than perfection of poses, and I was grateful for that too.

Books take it out of you. There’s the actual writing, which is not a picnic. Then the revision, which I usually like better because it’s about finding the story in all those words. Then it’s the editor/agent relationship, where you get to swallow your pride and realize your mistakes. Then there’s the publishing and marketing.

The conflict grows, for me, as the book moves through these stages. The hardest one, like the more challenging yoga postures, is the last one.

I’ve learned I can’t live with the nonstop tension of any of it, not anymore. Can you? I have to take breaks from the writing, the editing, the publishing and marketing. There has to be a balance, like a sine wave, between tension and relaxation in my life. Between the fire of the creative urgency and the cooling water of the pause where you figure out what you’ve created, learned, realized.

It’s a lot like story rhythm, both the yoga I’m practicing and the book launch efforts I’m recovering from.

Yoga story is just an example of conflict in one person’s life. The external conflict of those poses. The internal conflict of feeling the aches and inflexible joints. There’s an effect, from these two. External leads to internal leads to change. What changes in me, from these weeks of yoga?

What is external and internal conflict?

When I was teaching, I’d ask writers to print a few pages of a chapter they were struggling with. I asked them to find two highlighters, in two colors—yellow and pink, for instance. They were to read through the chapter, first looking for external conflict. These got highlighted in yellow.

What are the signs of external conflict?

it happens out here, not in someone’s head or memory or feelings

it happens now, not in the past

there’s a real place, a tangible setting

someone is involved

Usually, there’d be some incorrect yellow highlighting—hopeful conflict, I called it. But it was just someone remembering an argument, perhaps. Or thinking sad thoughts. Or wishing for something. That’s not externally realized, you could say. It’s still in the unformed areas of a person’s interior life.

Then I asked writers to find the internal conflict in those same pages and highlight this in pink.

What are the signs of internal conflict?

it happens in the inner world of the character

it’s shown via thoughts or feeling

there’s an emotion created by it

this emotion is strong enough to make the character uneasy in some way and provoke change

A good equation in story is

external conflict + internal conflict = change

I started yoga on this winter getaway because after the intense work on my book launches this past year I felt growing stiffness and inflexibility. The body getting sore more often was external conflict. It created a feeling of worry, even fear, that I couldn’t afford that at my age. Because of this internal conflict, I made a change—I started practicing yoga again.

The external and internal conflict toggle. Sometimes the feeling comes up first, then something happens externally to prove it as real. Then the person changes.

When my students completed their highlighting assignment, we discussed what they’d found. Many (too many) had little or no yellow highlighting. Some had neither yellow or pink.

This led to the very reasonable question: is conflict necessary all the time in story? Does every page have to offer some? When this question came up, I asked them to research. Find a book they loved. Scan through a chapter. Better yet, make copies of a few pages and try the highlighting technique on this published work.

What will you find? The amount of each kind of conflict depends on the genre and how recent the work is. We all know that some conflict makes story work, and the two kinds must be present to evoke change, but how much and how often varies. I tend to downplay conflict in my early drafts (an echo from my desire for a low-conflict life), then I catch it with this highlighting exercise at revision.

I’ve come to believe you can’t have good engagement with character without them having a problem to solve, a fight to fight, a challenge to meet.

I’ve also noticed how much my outer life, and my personal preferences around conflict, affect my use of it in story.

Does where you live make a difference?

I’m going to make some terrible generalizations here, so please forgive. It’s just from living all over the U.S. during my teaching career and noticing trends among writers in different locations.

For eighteen years, I lived in Minnesota. I loved it, even the winters. At that time in my life, I was transitioning not just from a long-distance move, but also difficult business failure and a disappointing love relationship. Life was upside down. I was supremely grateful to come to a place where strangers gave each other smiles at the grocery store, I received regular greetings from neighbors when I walked my dog, and most of the driving conditions were (fairly) polite.

Minnesotans joke about Minnesota Nice. When I moved there, I was more than ready for Nice.

Of course, everyone struggled. We’re all human, after all. But I marveled at how kind this culture was, despite the hardships. Maybe the struggle happened privately. I didn’t know. I did know that at that time, before so many public tragedies, people didn’t tend confront each other in public. Where I’d just come from in my life, I knew all about confrontation, so it was such a relief not to live in the midst of it 24/7.

But here’s another thing I noticed: As much as I loved my new life of Nice, I became stalled out in my writing. I was unable to write external conflict. Only the internal world came alive. I taught writing classes each week and began to notice this in my students’ writing as well. I hesitated to mention it, being a newcomer to the area, but I wondered if there was any link between Nice and nada conflict on the page.

I wanted to spark up my scenes with more external friction, but I SO wanted to keep my own serenity of life. It was complex enough without rocking the proverbial boat just for better words on the page.

Years later, I taught writing again in New York. I’d moved from Minnesota to go back to grad school again. Suddenly my writing was replete with external conflict. Breathless, in fact. I noticed it in many of my students as well.

Where was the balance?

Must writing and life parallel each other?

My biggest fear about bringing more conflict into my novel—at that time, I was revising the manuscript which eventually became my debut, Qualities of Light—was that I would have to live it myself. After all, wasn’t that the tried-and-true writer’s experience, that brought authentic emotion and sensations to the page? The writer herself would go through the experience, distill it down to its essence and meaning, fictionalize or not, then craft it into scenes. I didn’t know any other way to write—I wrote what I lived.

Even if I didn’t actually live through the circumstances of conflict in my novel (a brother’s accident and near death, being ostracized from the family, falling in love during all of it), wouldn’t I need to access and experience the emotions, at minimum, in order to write them well?

It was a dilemma. I didn’t want to feel all that. But I couldn’t think of how to get my characters out of their stuckness. They mostly sat around and drank good coffee. Feedback was lukewarm. It was as if we’d all gotten tired of conflict—me and my characters—and we wanted a long rest. Which did not make an engaging story.

I had published quite a bit by that time, and I taught writing too. Other than my two writer’s group friends, many of the writers in my classes also had the problem of how to bring conflict to the page. They were quite good at creating internal conflict, the inner angst of characters, but their people sat around and drank good coffee too.

I’m not making fun of anyone here, except perhaps myself. Eventually I matured my view of conflict, and I discovered that it appears in many guises. I got to know people around me at a deeper level and I learned that everyone has it, in their own way.

It really doesn’t matter where you live or how nice or confrontive you are in real life. We are in a world of conflict and for writers, there are many ways to bring conflict to the page.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Try the highlighting technique described above, either on published writing or your own work-in-progress, to both learn about the rhythm of conflict and where yours might need more.

Share your thoughts about conflict. Do you find it easy to write? Difficult?

Leave a comment

Shout Out!

A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community.

(If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Mary Jo Hoffman, Still: The Art of Noticing (The Monacelli Press), May release

I’ve started a new First Sunday newsletter for paid subscribers that addresses your most gnarly writing and publishing questions. This month’s post was on how to get endorsements (blurbs) prior to publishing your book. If you’d like to receive First Sunday once a month, a yearly subscription is only $45. For it, you get access to the 700+ archives, the monthly Q&A of First Sunday, a safe space to ask questions, and my writerly gratitude for helping me continue to write this newsletter.

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I’m a lifelong artist, and I love to inspire and support other creative folk, which is why I write this weekly newsletter. My goal with these posts is to help you strengthen your writing practice and creative life so it becomes more satisfying to you.

I’m also the author of 14 books in 3 genres. My third novel, Last Bets (Riverbed Press), will be published April 21. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), was published in October 2023 and became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders alone. For twelve years, I worked as a full-time food journalist, most notably through my weekly column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.

First Sunday Q&A: Getting Endorsements and Reviews for Your Book

Hello, all you new paid subscribers! A flood of you came to join us these past months and I’m very glad. Honored to have your support as Your Weekly Writing Exercise became a Substack Bestseller!

Welcome to “First Sunday” Q&A, built on your most gnarly writing and publishing questions. I’ll share ideas, tips, and resources from my own experience. My intention is to make this a safe, generous place to exchange ideas and talk about the deepest writing and publishing issues on your mind. To share your question with me, simply message me here on Substack.

And if you’re a free subscriber, you’ll get a taste of the article below. Upgrade to paid (only $45 a year) to read the rest. Thank you for supporting this newsletter!

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Q: Exciting times! ’m finally getting close to the production stage for my first book. I know you’ve talked about how a writer can set up a network of potential contacts, quite far in advance of publication, to get endorsements and reviews. Please share more about the actual process and best timing—anything a first-time author might need to know. Thank you!

A: When I began publishing back in the 80s, I didn’t need to know much as an author. Back then, my publisher handled all requests for reviews and blurbs. It was a different era in publishing, for sure. And it wasn’t until my eleventh book that I began to understand how the author can help this process by planning ahead and setting up a network of contacts.

Reviews and blurbs are a given in publishing—it’s rare to see a book cover or inside “praise pages” without at least a couple of blurbs and excerpts of media or trade reviews.

I buy books based on recommendations. I believe that blurbs—especially from writers I admire—make me more inclined to read the new book myself. If this is true in general, blurbs and reviews definitely boost a book’s chances of success in the world. Because the goal, after all, is to widen your book’s reach to readers you may never meet, those outside your current circle of friends and family who would buy your book anyway.

But some publishing professionals are not as convinced about the blurb’s benefit in selling books. An August 2023 article in the Atlantic, “The Blurb Problem Keeps Getting Worse,” talks about the over-the-top praise of many blurbs, with books that fail to warrant them. Authors patting each other on the back, creating a kind of club for blurb exchanges.

So what’s a new author to do? Is it worthwhile to get blurbs/endorsements? And is it worth the extra work to go for reviews as well?

I’d say yes, and here’s why. And scroll down to the end for a sample blurb email that you can adapt and use, if you’re ready to request.

Read more

What Risks Will You Take?

My new novel, Last Bets, will be out in the world in just two weeks! It’s still available for pre-order here, Join me on April 21 at my launch party on Zoom (prizes, author Q&A, wonderful writerly community). Register with the link below.

Register for the launch party!

Photo by Florian van Schreven on Unsplash

Do you write only what you know? Or do you write to explore what you don’t know?

It comes down to the purpose of your writing, to you. Is it to expound on what’s known to you, to share your experiences or expertise with readers? Or is it to expand your horizons and examine new territory, let yourself dive into uncharted waters?

Joan Didion famously said, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Or do you align more with writer Amy Gustine, in Lit Hub: “One day I decided to stop letting fear prevent me from trying to write certain stories, specifically the fear of not knowing things. I didn’t disavow my penchant for realism, or deny the importance of accuracy. Instead, I resolved to find out what I could achieve with research.”

Gustine is talking about “deep research,” the kind of exploring of uncharted seas and the desire to make something previously unknown, known. Then to bring it into your writing.

The past years have seen a strong reaction to this, though, as writers from one culture have tried to bring other cultures into their writing. Men writing from a woman’s point of view. Straight writing gay. Almost anyone writing class or race different from their own. I’ve read so much on this topic. If you haven’t, here’s an article about the fallout from Stockett’s The Help and other books, and another about the reaction to Cummins’ American Dirt. Cummins received threats and her book, which sold 48,000 copies the first week, was pulled by the publisher. A Vox article said, “Cummins had written a story that was not hers — and, according to many readers of color, she didn’t do a very good job of it.”

Lately, I’ve been hearing more writers talk about this backlash as going too far. That the line isn’t so clear for many. One of my favorite discussions comes (again) from Lit Hub: how one writing instructor responded to a student’s concerns, showing how complex the issue is.

Do we write only what we know, as in this George Booth cartoon from The New Yorker? Or do we write to explore, to sail uncharted waters, to bring back new insights and ideas to enrich our lives?

Types of appropriation

On February 17, Becky Tuch’s Lit Mag News, a wonderful Substack publication for writers submitting fiction and nonfiction to literary journals, opened the topic for discussion. Her post, entitled “What does it mean when writers "appropriate" from other cultures? How can editors handle these works artfully?” presented both sides of this complicated picture in a lively conversation of 102 comments.

This and other discussions these past months show a growing question about the strict rules some are proposing: write only what you know personally. I’m struggling with that idea in my own work—how about you?

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While I can understand the huge risk of writing about a race or culture you don’t have a personal relationship with, because despite best intentions and good research you may create maligning stereotypes and present it in a reduced way, I also think writers need to explore beyond their own lives to bring new insights about the human experience. Art has always done this. To me, writing is all about exploring beyond your own life experiences. Yes, for me this includes being extremely aware of lines not to cross, of the potential that we may not authentically portray what is not our own experience (the dogs, above), but I strongly feel that each must decide the line’s location for themselves.

For me, I’ve worked it out into areas of unknown territory that I can and cannot manage honestly in my work.

What risks will you take?

To me, nonfiction books are easy to figure out where my line is—and their risk is a known one. I have worked too long as a journalist to venture into unfamiliar territory without extensive research and the attempt to give a full perspective on the topic. Even in my food journalism, I presented my own experience, the advice of experts I relied on, and tested information and recipes. When I wrote memoir and prescriptive nonfiction (how-to and self-help), I brought in interviews and experts again, to cover territory I was not personally familiar with. This was and is accepted.

Fiction took me to wide-open spaces, and into more risk, of course. I leaned on the story for ideas of where to go. But I never had the call to venture much outside known territory in terms of class, race, culture—the most tricky topics of the appropriation argument. I risk in topic, the subject of my stories. And I risk bigtime.

I couldn’t NOT explore situations I knew nothing about—so all three of my novels became simultaneously risk-filled and exciting propositions. I worried about doing enough research. I worried if I bolstered my unknowing with too many facts that dulled down the story tension. I relied on agent and editorial and proofreader examination to test my accuracy, but long before that I solicited help from experts who did have experience with what I wrote about.

Writing outside of my personal wheelhouse demanded a LOT more work than if I just wrote about dogs, which is a topic quite close at hand. Here’s a brief account of the areas of risk I chose for my three novels (my short stories are another story entirely).

In my first novel, Qualities of Light, the main character’s brother is in a boating accident and falls into a coma. I’ve never been in a coma, I don’t have any friends or relatives who have. I also don’t have any experience with boating accidents.

In my second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, there’s a small plane crash and a Search & Rescue operation. Flying is new to me—I just took my first lessons after my novel was in pre-publication, too late to change anything. I lived across the street from a SAR ground worker but we didn’t discuss her work; I never experienced SAR myself.

In my third novel, Last Bets, to be published on April 21, there’s a high-stakes backgammon tournament, a storm sailing scene with an accident, and portrait painting. I am not a gambler at all, I’ve played backgammon but never for money, and I’ve never sailed in a storm or painted a portrait.

Yet all these topics called to me. So much so, in fact, that I was willing to do the onerous work of making sure I stood on solid ground with facts about them. But I wondered, as I worked harder than I ever imagined, why I would do this? Why take the risk of writing about these foreign-to-me topics?

Emotional resonance

i can say now, looking back on these three novels, that each topic I explored had a certain emotional resonance for me. Even if I hadn’t personally lived through the situation I wrote about, I emotionally was drawn to it because of something similar in my life.

An obvious link was my mom being a pilot; I have always been fascinated with flying so I was able to make the leap to learn about it.

Another link: the week spent at a dive resort when I was in my thirties. The resort hosted small-time backgammon games with big-time stakes. A fellow guest told me the story of losing his yacht in such a game and that amazed me.

A third link: I lost my sister unexpectedly, so the accident that almost cost Molly her brother had emotions that were definitely familiar to me.

Behind each topic, I felt this emotional tug, pulling me to it. I couldn’t let it go. I wanted the easier job of writing those dogs, but I couldn’t stop wanting to explore these uncharted seas.

Isn’t that why we write, and how we come to write about something unknown to our personal experience?

When mistakes happen

Despite months of research, careful editing and proofreading, there’s bound to be mistakes. I’ve found them in two of the three books, one after publication and another just before.

The one post-pub was hard on me, the one found pre-pub was a great relief. I tell you this because mistakes happen. It is inevitable, really.

Not long after A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue was published, it was featured in a book roundup in Adirondack Life magazine—a thrill for me, since the story takes place in those mountains of upper New York state. Local libraries ordered the book and one came into the hands of a woman who was on the local Search & Rescue team. She wrote me about a factual error that had slipped by me, my editor, and our eagle-eyed proofreader. Her email was kind, but the mistake, as understandable as it was, caused me a lot of embarrassment for a few days.

I had consulted with three Search & Rescue experts, who had read the scenes and helped me get everything right. This mistake was in another section of the book—the choice of clothing that Kate wears to go out in the woods. We caught it with Red, the other main character, saving her from hypothermia by changing her jeans to nylon cargo pants which dry quickly. But from a Search & Rescue point of view, cotton (jeans) equals potential death in the wilderness. “Cotton kills,” so they say.

My first reaction was to ignore the email, pretend I hadn’t gotten it. But after a few days, I decided to respond honestly and acknowledge the mistake, tell the reader that we’d corrected the same error elsewhere but missed this one, and that kind of awkward oops! was terribly hard for any writer to learn about. Especially for me, an editor for two decades myself.

I also said I hoped that error didn’t ruin the story for her.

She wrote back immediately saying she loved the book and had read it over one weekend.

I mentioned how long and extensively I research when I am writing unknown topics. I also have to thank and rely on my experts, more than myself. I don’t know how many writers do this, but from my journalism yeas, I knew I had to.

Getting more help (at the last minute)

I was helped from an even more disastrous mistake by one of my launch team members, when Last Bets was first sent out in galleys.

Again, it had been through my own fact checking, editorial, and proofreading. But I hadn’t done enough research, it turned out, about storm sailing. I’d sailed, and in some bad weather, but never in the open ocean and never in a tropical storm. I won’t spoil the story by sharing too many details here, but my launch team helper put me in touch with a friend of hers who has sailed around the world and knows more about boats than anyone I’ve ever met.

She was kind enough to read through my chapters about the storm at sea. I expected to have a few suggestions but she sent pages of them—and a good thing too! There were errors of fact and timing and sequence. And also, my character who gets in trouble during the storm would not have lived, had I gone with my earlier version.

I was beyond grateful, properly embarrassed, and tried not to think what would’ve happened if the book went to print as it was. It showed me once again the value of expert advice when you reach into topics you don’t know that well.

But looking back I also know I could never restrict myself to writing only about topics within my own backyard. I write to learn, after all. And if I have experts on hand, I feel safe in venturing widely.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Read the discussion in Lit Mag News: “What does it mean when writers "appropriate" from other cultures? How can editors handle these works artfully?” You may need to subscribe, but that’s a very good thing—this is a wonderful publication (free options available too).

What’s the line you walk as a writer, in terms of writing what you don’t know? What do you need to stay clear of, what do you risk and try?

Leave a comment

Shout Out!

A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community.

(If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Mary Jo Hoffman, Still: The Art of Noticing (The Monacelli Press), May release

My 2023 novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, is now available at bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and amazon.

I’ve started a new First Sunday newsletter for paid subscribers that addresses your most gnarly writing and publishing questions. This weekend’s post will discuss how to get endorsements (blurbs) for your book before you publish. If you’d like to receive First Sunday once a month, a yearly subscription is only $45. For it, you get access to the 700+ archives, the monthly Q&A of First Sunday, a safe space to ask questions, and my writerly gratitude for helping me continue to write this newsletter.

I’m a lifelong artist, and I love to inspire and support other creative folk, which is why I write this weekly newsletter. My goal with these posts is to help you strengthen your writing practice and creative life so it becomes more satisfying to you.

I’m also the author of 14 books in 3 genres. My third novel, Last Bets (Riverbed Press), will be published in April 2024. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), was published in October 2023 and became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders alone. For twelve years, I worked as a full-time food journalist, most notably through my weekly column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.

Save the Date!

On April 21, I’ll have my online book launch for LAST BETS, my new novel. My launch features a good, provocative conversation with author Ginger Eager about how this novel got started, the inspiration and the way it shaped itself, what changed midstream, and what happened during publishing.

Register today!

You’re warmly invited to learn more about what happens behind-the-scenes of a bestselling novel. Join me on Zoom, April 21, at 2:00 p.m. eastern, for a provocative conversation about all things writerly.

Ginger Eager, author of The Nature of Remains (Winner of the AWP award) and Georgia Author of the Year in 2021, will ask some wonderful (and possibly difficult) questions about how my novel, LAST BETS, came about.

From beginning idea to all the changes made in umpteen rewrites to the end result which will be released on April 21, we’ll explore how a book is made. It’s not all pretty balloons, by the way, and we’re going to get real about that.

When: Sunday, April 21, 2024

Where: On Zoom

When: 2:00-3:30 p.m. eastern time (please translate for your time zone)

Join us--register today!

What: Bring your writerly questions too—we’ll have a live Q&A at the end. And bring your own beverage of choice, spring picnic, cupcakes, party hat, whatever!

Bonus: We’ll have a drawing for a free signed copy of LAST BETS, for you or as a gift for a friend. Enter during the launch. Ginger is also planning some fun and quite interesting questions for me and my life as a writer, considering I’m celebrating my big 7-0 birthday this month and over three decades of publishing.

Here’s how to register for this virtual launch event:

Register here

You’ll get an email confirmation from Zoom with your login and password. Then just join us on Sunday, April 21, at 2:00 p.m. eastern!

Look forward to seeing you there!

PS Pups are welcome, my dogs say, as long as they get their own cupcake and party hat!

Photo by Hamid Roshaan on Unsplash

Writing Your Last Chapter First

Less than a month until my new novel, Last Bets, is published. You can help me so much by pre-ordering your copy today. Thank you!

Photo by Majestic Lukas on Unsplash

On my road trip, I’ve been reading. We’re about to leave our friends’ property, where we’ve been camped all month, and head back north to home soon. I’m happily making my way to the bottom of the bag of books we brought. I’ll keep a few of them to reread and I’ll donate the rest to one of the free libraries we pass on roadsides or in campgrounds.

The ones I keep, the ones I read again, usually have endings that really delight me. Something unexpected is offered there, something I can track back later—looking through the chapters I’ve read for planted clues—but which delights me with what I didn’t fully yet realize. Endings are so important to a reader’s satisfaction. When I got my first trade reviews for my upcoming novel, Last Bets, publishing next month, more often than not, the reviewer gave a hat tip to the novel’s ending. That pleased me to no end (pun intended) because I put a lot of stock in how a story finishes.

There are a handful of key images in the story, metaphors for the characters’ emotions, really, and they come together at the end in what (I guess, from the reviews) is a satisfying way.

I learned this concept of writing towards a key image from novelist Roxanna Robinson, who taught at a conference in Connecticut many years ago and encouraged attendees to write towards a key image. This can create an entire book’s momentum and greatly inform which ending you choose.

Some of my road trip reads had deeply unsatisfying endings, even though I loved the book. The ending felt too pat; it wrapped up too quickly to do justice to the emotions developed in the story; it was too mystical.

But writing the last chapter isn’t a cake walk for most writers.

Writing your last chapter first

For over ten years, I taught weeklong writing retreats for Madeline School of the Arts in Wisconsin and other locations. The week was focused on learning to structure and develop a book. On the next to last day, I offered the most challenging assignment: draft your book’s last chapter.

I got astonished looks, real concern, almost rebellion some years. Especially if the room was full of beginners who hadn’t yet dreamed up their story’s trajectory, much less how it ended.

It’s not rocket science, I told them. You can write terrible drafts. The only goal is to play with Robinson’s idea of finding a key image and make notes about the last chapter based on that key image. 

We all went back to our rooms for the night. I prepared myself for disappointment the final day. Sometimes, nobody tried the assignment, but usually I walked in to lit-up faces, breakthroughs, and drafts of some very good chapters.

Those who braved the assignment felt more confident about their books actually happening someday.

If you know where you're going, even sort of, you may get there.

Questions about your last chapter

I always gave the writers six questions to start with. They are the prep for the draft. Even if a writer already had a last chapter—they were in revision, for instance—the questions helped them test the effectiveness of their choice.

I asked everyone to respond to the question in the order below. Don’t overthink it, just jot down ideas that come. Try not to discard anything. And if nothing comes, go on to the next question.

What feeling do you want your reader to have as they read the last page?  Immediately tell a friend, "You've got to read this!"?  Quiet, introspective pause to think about the intricacies of your story?  Motivation to change something or try something new?  Characters they can't forget?  An action plot that keeps them puzzling it out?

Like I found with the road trip reads, the feeling I had as I finished the book meant everything to my satisfaction as a reader. Sometimes, the book gave a call to action and that ending gave me the enthusiasm to text a friend or post a little review. Sometimes the ending left me thinking about the story for days, reliving it in my mind. Sometimes, as I said above, I was so intrigued with how the writer had achieved this ending, I read back to track the clues.

The feeling equaled my engagement. It’s important to leave a reader with some feeling about your story, not just a flatline.

Where might the last scene of your book take place? Describe the possible location. Then write a few ways it connects to the location of your first chapter.

There’s a technique I’ve worked with for years: creating a loop between the opening chapter and the ending chapter, via this key image. In my classes, we often analyzed published books. What location repeated from beginning to end? It was fascinating to see how often the story returned to—or cameoed—the opening location in the last chapter. It creates a very satisfying sense of closure, without being too neat or obvious. Check this out yourself, with your favorite books.

Who is in the last chapter?  Who is telling the story at that point?  Is it the same person as began the story?

Writers who lose the main character halfway through are risking reader disengagement. We invest. We want to follow through. I personally appreciate having the players onstage at the end whom I’ve gotten to love.

How has the opening conflict or dilemma resolved? What are possible scene ideas to show resolution or change in the character? 

There may be many questions still to ask and answer, but consider what will be wrapped up or at least addressed by the end. The road trip reads I won’t read again did not do this—they left too much hanging. I’m not talking about Hallmark endings; just closure to the primary question the book started with.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

If you’d like to try this, consider the questions above. Take twenty minutes and go through them, noting whatever you get.

Then, read through your notes and see if any image comes through as repeating, or primary.

Alternatively, if you already have a draft of your opening chapter, consider what the key image might be and whether you can loop it into the last chapter--a view, a smell or sound, a certain object that the person is holding or looking at, a kind of movement or gesture. 

Give yourself time to sketch out a very rough outline or scene(s) using what you played with above.  Write badly; that’s not as important as capturing some ideas on the page. Let yourself explore.

Share your experiences with this! Was it harder or easier than you expected?

Leave a comment

I’ve started a new First Sunday newsletter for paid subscribers that addresses your most gnarly writing and publishing questions. This month’s topic was complex and woven structures in fiction and how to create them, if you love reading that kind of story. Get First Sunday once a month and build your publishing toolbox! A yearly subscription is only $45. For it, you get access to the 700+ archives, the monthly Q&A of First Sunday, a safe space to ask questions, and my writerly gratitude for helping me continue to write this newsletter.

Subscribe now

Shout Out!

A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community.

(If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Mike Elliott, Escaping Limbo (Itasca Books), February release

Mary Berg, A Mystic in the Mystery: Poems of Spirit, Seasons, and Self (Bending Wave Books), February release

Mary Jo Hoffman, Still: The Art of Noticing (The Monacelli Press), May release

I’m a lifelong artist, and I love to inspire and support other creative folk, which is why I write this weekly newsletter. My goal with these posts is to help you strengthen your writing practice and creative life so it becomes more satisfying to you.

I’m also the author of 15 books in 3 genres. My third novel, Last Bets (Riverbed Press), will be published in April 2024. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), was published in October 2023 and became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders alone. For twelve years, I worked as a full-time food journalist, most notably through my weekly column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.

Recognizing Your Turning Points: Where Are You on the Journey?

Only a month until pub date for my new novel, Last Bets. It’s now available for pre-order! Already hit the Amazon bestseller lists twice. You can order your copy today. Release date is April 21.

Photo by Vlad Bagacian on Unsplash

This is a longer post today. It’s a primer, really, covering the essential tools I’ve learned for staying the course with a writing project. A kind of map you can follow if you want. Having a reliable map affects not only your writing practice, but what you bring into the world, creatively. Whether or not you fulfill your writing goals.

And I’ve used these guidelines equally for short stories, essays I’m drafting about my mother before her death, the nonfiction craft book I wrote for writers many years ago, long-form memoir and fiction.

Let’s begin!

I’m into maps this week. I’m far from home, along with my little family—spouse, two pups, and me. We’ve been traveling for a while and now we’re living in our tiny camper van on a friend’s property near the ocean.

Instead of a snowstorm out my window, there’s a pond with birds and a huge carp named Big Bob and about a dozen turtles. There are five fenced acres to roam. My pups are especially happy about this. They never get to be off leash at home.

If you’d asked me five years ago, I would’ve never planned to leave home in winter. New England, where we live the rest of the year, has brilliant, postcard-beautiful winters. We snowshoe and ski out our back door. We read inside by the fire. We take a lot of naps.

But somehow, time away in February or March is becoming a habit. It feeds me creatively in many ways—nourishment I didn’t know I needed. Age, perhaps. The relief of no longer having to keep house (except the tiny space we occupy). No house maintenance or care (our close neighbors and friends are doing that while we’re away). Dropping the thousands of details that ordinary life requires.

There are predictable stages to the journey. The gathering of stuff to take—endless lists, for us, since we travel for several months. Checking systems in the van, getting required maintenance, making sure we have emergency gear for all weather. Choosing our books (one suitcase of them, a la Mary Chapin Carpenter). Then there’s the actual day of departure. What’s been thought about and planned becomes reality. How do we do our first sleeping night in a strange place?

After we’re on the road for a few days, there’s a new rhythm. We get into a groove. We adjust more easily to the new landscape, the roads, the unexpected delays. We have our routine of when to stop for the night, when to make dinner, how the dogs will cope. Finally, we arrive at friends’ and figure out how to settle in for a longer stay.

Each of these stages demands a different rhythm and flexibility. Not unlike a book journey.

Some travelers do it full time. We couldn’t. I need more space, privacy. But for a winter break, weeks that stretch into a month or more, it’s a book of delights.

And like the book journey, when it’s done well, when we’re flexible enough to enjoy the changes and the surprises, we get joy. We get pure creative time.

Today, settled on to our friends’ land, I’m toggling between painting (pond studies in different light) and thinking over the many requests I’ve gotten, from readers and also my agent, to write another novel, continuing the story of A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue. I’ve written in past posts about this book and my astonishment (truly) at the reader response. And how many of those readers, of all ages and backgrounds, wanted more of these characters.

So on this road trip, this journey away from my “normal” life, I’m letting new ideas come in. I like doing that when I’m not so tightly in control of my time and space. When I feel relaxed enough to welcome the unexpected.

This week, in light of that—being again at the very beginning of the book-writing journey, tasting the options ahead, deciding if I really want to dive into any of them—I wanted to talk about the stages that are predictably awaiting the writer when an idea begins to shimmer.

Even if we’ve traveled that road, written and published before, I find that each book is a rare adventure. A new risk. What will happen? Will it turn out to be as good as the last one? Better, even? Do we really want to take on all that work? Is the fire for the idea strong enough inside?

What will we learn?

Five turning points

Maybe you’re still standing at the entrance to this particular road, considering your first book. So much is unknown, I know! It feels exciting but also like huge risk.

I often say that the main difference between so-called professional writers and new writers is that the pros have walked the book journey before. They have a kind of map. They know the stages of writing, revising, and publishing. Although it’s always new, there’s also certain key moments we can expect to meet. I take good notes during each book project, and these are great to encourage me with the next.

I’d like to share those notes with you, in an overview kind of way, with the intention of helping if you’re feeling in the swamp, overwhelmed with risk, or uncertain whether to begin.

I’ve written and published fifteen books now, in three genres, and I can say confidently that most of them had five predictable turning points. I use these points as a map to tell where I am, not unlike traveling through a foreign country. I would never take off on a long roadtrip without a reliable GPS or map. But beginning book writers rarely have them.

They often don't know about the major stops--these "turning points"--and what to expect. So how can they tell when they've arrived at a juncture, when they’re ready to move on, when that particular writing stage is finally complete?

It’s so helpful to know where you are, even approximately, because the tools are different for each stage, too.

If there’s no map, these five turning points are often where writers get stuck and frustrated. Moving to the next level requires new skills and a new approach, and without a map a writer will flounder, thinking the project has gone south, when it's just a matter of re-orienting to a new stage of the journey.

What stalling out really means

It’s usual for me to feel like I’m stalling out as I approach the threshold of another turning point. I get impatient, frustrated, confused, unsettled, panicked, or bored. I used to confuse these moments, I thought something was wrong with the book. But it’s more often when I’m about to reach a new gateway, a new turning point.

My old approach might not work anymore. I need new tools to be able to move forward.

Because of this, these five points become the "make or break" moments, often the point where writers quit or get blocked for a long time. Again, if you’ve traveled the route before, even with a new project you’re more likely to recognize this as a turning point. I've completed so many books, I now recognize the signs when I'm approaching another gateway.

Do these five turning points apply to all genres? Yes, in my personal experience. It doesn't matter if we're writing a novel, a children's book, a poetry collection, a memoir, or a nonfiction book. We all face these major moments at some time during the journey from idea to publication. It’s different for each person, though. We each set our own pace.

Rather than feel discouraged, or feel it’s indicating the project (or you) are not worth the time and effort, give these moments some respect. Acknowledge that you've passed a big marker.

At each turning point, reassess your project. Revisit its direction. Has it changed from when you began? Are you still writing the same book? If you’re happy with where you’re going, gather the new tools and skills needed for the next stage (see below for more about that).

I’d like to share each of the five points, as I know them from my own books, and what they require from the writer.

Be aware that many times the journey is not a straight path. We may move back and forth between the five points—they can overlap, yes, but they each have their own rules and signs.

I’ll go into each of them separately, and in more detail, in future posts. But here’s the overview.

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Stage 1: gathering phase

When we’re planning a trip there’s both excitement and dread. It’s been a year since we were away this long; how will we cope? What do we need to gather for the best possible journey?

With a book, same. Exciting, scary, exhilarating, all in one. Ideas come thick and fast. We’re not sure we can bring them into reality, but we’ve got enthusiasm to try.

A trip, or a book idea, might have been bubbling inside for a while, and this first stage is when it’s finally getting on paper, finally getting planned for real. I find the enthusiastic energy of this stage also makes anything feel possible, for a time. It’s a wonderful place to be.

Most writers have good "internal accountability" in the gathering stage, just from this enthusiasm.  You can’t talk me out of writing.

What makes it work: A good practice. Writing practice, or showing up regularly, is key to success in the gathering phase.  Our only task is to keep the channel open for new ideas and material. Our goal in this stage is to get enough written to be able to start forming a structure (next phase). 

Here’s an older but great article from Medium on professional writers and their practices, if you need some encouragement for this phase.

Professional attest that if even a new writer works regularly on gathering their ideas--each day, each week, each weekend for a certain number of hours--book pages will accumulate. To me, this is accurate. I’ve written every day (or five days a week) each morning, sometimes an hour, sometimes three, and I’ve produced books regularly from just this effort.

What you need to do: Write, and write regularly.  Explore ideas, keep open to new viewpoints, accumulate material.  That's it!  Keep yourself writing and inspired. 

One tip:  Writing practice is just that: it's not writing perfect, it's writing practice. You will turn out terrible stuff, good stuff, great stuff. Everyone does. You just write, because that's what writers in this gathering phase do.

During this stage, you'll have the option to play with a storyboard.  Storyboards are a key tool in stage 2, the structuring phase.  But a storyboard can help you brainstorm ideas about your  book:  what you might want to include, where different ideas might be placed, etc.  Approach it with relaxation, ease—the only a way to explore without censoring what comes.  Nothing needs to set in stone at this point.

How long does it take: Depends on how many hours you put in and how complex your project. I often take several years—up to five for my last novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue. Many professional writers take months, even years, in this phase.  I tell myself there's no hurry, unless I’m on contract for a book. 

Books take the time they take. 

When do you move on? At around 30,000 words, 100 double-spaced pages in 12 point type, most get restless for structure. (Some don’t, and that’s fine.) When the feeling of What do I do with all this writing? starts to hit, you are ready for stage 2.

Stage 2: structuring phase

Some itch to structure a book right out of the gate.  Some writers think through their books before putting anything on paper (Elizabeth Gilbert is one). Some need to make sure they have accurate, sufficient research completed. Plotters may want to outline heavily before doing any writing.

If that’s you, you are a writer who structures first and writes second, so your first two stages are reversed. But many of the writers I’ve worked with need the random freedom of the flow writing to get a feeling, a sense for, the book before any shape emerges.

However you approach it, structuring is the opposite of gathering.  It has nothing to do with the random, exploring part of creative self. It belongs to the linear, organized part of you.

I like to use a storyboard at this stage. Here’s a little training video I made, in case you aren’t familiar with this great structuring tool.

A storyboard can also be a useful tool for stage one: and if you've brainstormed your storyboard already, this is where you’d fine-tune it.  You might arrange things differently, based on what you learned during your early writing.  Or you might eliminate sections, refocus the book on a different place, time, or character.  You might bring up the level of drama in the conflict. 

Stage two is about standing back for a better look.

Some writers love this stage. Others hate letting go of the free flow. Most toggle back and forth--work on the structure for a while, then go back to gathering more material as you see what's still missing.

Side note:  I really disliked storyboards when I first worked with them. They seemed too limited, too loud in telling me what I didn't know about my book.  But when I learned to use them both as a brainstorming tool (in Stage One) and a gentle way to asses the book's best path (in Stage Two), I began to see how useful they were.  And I actually finished writing my books!

Books love storyboards. They allow a book to find its correct placement in time and space--where each of the "islands" will be located, where they will merge with other "islands" to become continents.

After the storyboard is intact, we need to go back to stage one for a while, fill the holes that the storyboard has revealed.

We learned in school to write from outlines.  This is the typical way most new writers approach books.  But it can be deadly--leading to instant writer's block.  I prefer the gathering and structuring approach.  It lets the whole brain play with ideas before nailing them down into a first draft.

What makes it work: Your practice becomes different in this stage—not as much writing, perhaps. More arranging, testing the flow, filling holes with new ideas.

What you need to do: Some need to take a break, in order to structure well. They need to get the linear self engaged fully. The move from random to linear can feel harsh. I often give myself a week or two to transition, if I haven’t already started a storyboard. Set aside wall space or table space and be willing to let it be your structuring platform for a few weeks, if you can. Each time you walk by your storyboard, you’ll get new directions.

When do you move on? When your storyboard feels complete to you, and you have at least 45,000 words drafted in snippets, notes, and ideas.

Stage 3: first draft completion

Completing a first draft, no matter how rough, is a moment of great celebration. I’m estimating that barely 30 percent of writers make it this far.

This is the first time you have a real book (or other completed draft) in front of you. to publish, you need to get here eventually, of course, but depending how long you wander in the gathering and structuring phases, reaching first draft completion can take months to years.  With A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, it took about five years. The complexity of that story—three narrators, cross genre between thriller and literary fiction—demanded the time. I didn’t know what the book was about until then.

First draft is easy-peasy if you have a solid structure, with enough workable "islands" written (scenes, snippets). You build the first draft by cut and paste with this kind of prep work—it’s not about sitting down and typing chapter 1 then hoping for the best.

If you have an electronic tool like Scrivener, it's a simple matter of clicking a few keys. Otherwise, you cut and paste into whatever word processing program you prefer.

This is why I am so enthused with having the map of a storyboard and the hundreds of islands of writing already completed.

Be forewarned that this will be a super rough draft!  That’s totally OK. Follow irreverent writer Anne Lamott’s advice. She says you can’t have a book without "a shitty first draft." Still, it's a huge step in the writing journey, and it tells us we've passed through another turning point.

How many pages in an average first draft?  Aim for about 250-300 double-spaced pages or 75,000-90,000 words. You may have more. Try not to have less, because in the next stage, you’ll be trimming.

What makes it work: Your practice becomes your best friend again. Set a daily goal of a certain number of pages or words. Or a certain amount of time. You will hopefully not feel any stall out if you’ve completed the first two stages—you’re just copying and pasting the material you’ve already written, following your storyboard map.

What you need to do: Don’t overthink this stage, don’t edit much, just create the worst first full draft you can. I can’t tell you how many writers stall here because they decide to rewrite chapter 1 a dozen times or more. Make it your only goal to complete the draft, get those pages done, however poorly. You’ll thank yourself later. Revision is not part of this stage. If you can’t stand not revising, start a notebook or document with revision notes. Write down everything you want to do, but don’t do it yet.

When do you move on? When you can proudly print out or save a complete first draft (goal of around 75,000 to 90,000 words or 300-350 pages for an average trade-size book).

Stage 4: revision

Did you make it through the draft? Bravo!! It’s a BIG gateway, a major turning point. As I said, so few writers do. Celebrate now, before you start the next stage. Some writers recommend a serious break here, about two weeks of not looking at what you’ve drafted. There’s good wisdom in that. Your drafting/creative brain and your revising/editing brain are very much opposites and often do not get along.

What happens if you read your shitty draft too soon? Well, the inner critic will get involved in a big way. Either you’ll think it’s all golden or total crap. Most likely, neither is true, but you can’t see that right away.

Revising is a two-part process, to me: getting the objective distance to clearly see the value of what you’ve created, and taking out what’s not part of the book.

What does that mean? Most times, as with any journey, we writers wander. As we draft and structure we often include ideas and scenes and research that we love but doesn’t really serve the story. Revision is my favorite time but also the hardest because it requires us to fish or cut bait, as they say.

A first step: Reading the entire draft aloud to yourself. Yes, all of it. And in as short a time as possible. This is, of course, after you’ve taken a nice break so you’ve gained needed distance. Your ego is calmed down. You don’t judge as harshly.

I like to read my drafts on my iPad. I send the manuscript to my Kindle and read it like a book. Beside me is a legal pad or notebook and I mark down every single time I stumble as I read. It can be small stuff—sentence fractures. It can be large stuff—a character goes missing in chapter 4.

After my read-through, I often have many pages of notes. These are golden. A new map to work from. I’ve learned a lot, too. I haven’t made any changes yet but I’ve learned whether the book is still going in the direction I intended or if it’s way off course, and how I feel about that.

Then I get to work. I work through the manuscript, making the changes I’ve noted. Sometimes—often!—this requires going back to stage 1 to write new material to fill holes, or back to stage 2 to rework my storyboard. That’s totally normal. I’m often delighted by the unexpected directions the manuscript has taken, so I don’t berate myself if I do have to backtrack. It’s simply re-creating the book from a stronger place gained through revision.

Revision requires staring down all mistakes and figuring out what path the reader needs to take through the book, then weeding anything that doesn't serve the story, as I said before. It reveals many things, including where we've gone to sleep. 

What makes it work: Not getting down on yourself for missed stuff, not pushing yourself to wrap stuff up too fast or discard interesting and unexpected directions. The story will begin to reveal other sides of itself. You’re there to listen and consider.

What you need to do: Again, regular steady work makes this all happen. Butt in chair, a schedule, and if you have an accountability partner or someone to track your progress, much help comes of that.

When do you move on? This is a hard one. I am not always sure, myself. But I do get signs, internally and externally, that I am revising too much and need to let the manuscript go into other hands. If I’ve revised out the heart of the story, I know it’s past time.

Stage 5: beta readers and other feedback

Revision can go on for a long time—I allow myself a year or more. I often work with my accountability partner or my writer’s group to test whether my revision work is working.

But there’s another turning point, after revision, where I recommend getting feedback at a higher skill and experience level than your own or your writing peers.

This is when I ask beta readers to go through the manuscript in its entirety and give feedback. I choose five, usually. People not in my family or circle of close friends, ideally. Writers in my genre are best, too.

I also hire a professional editor or a published writer to do a read-through and evaluation. Get a sense of where you need to focus for the final edit (line editing, substantive editing if needed).

The feedback at this stage is hugely important; it catches the embarrassing errors you wouldn’t want out in the world. You clean everything up now--make it sing.

What makes it work: Having done all you absolutely can yourself, and being willing to let it go into others’ hands. Choosing very carefully who sees it.

What you need to do: Cultivate a group of potential beta readers early in your book journey, research potential editors-for-hire as well. A great way to do this is to take online writing classes. Stay in touch with other writers you meet, with whom you feel sympatico, and see if you can ask this huge favor when it’s time (you may have to do the same for them).

When do you move on? When you get the high five from enough readers, plus your hired editor.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Review these five stages. Where are you right now, with your writing project, be it a book or something smaller? Choose your stage below and consider the key to keeping it going successfully. What might you refine in your practice or approach?

The Gathering Stage

How to keep going? Build a writing practice

Structuring Stage

How to keep going? Work with a visual map, such as a storyboard, to stay oriented

The First Draft Stage

How to keep going? Focus on simply getting the manuscript completed--no editing

The Revision Stage

How to keep going? Let go of what's not serving the book

The Feedback/Editing Stage

How to keep going? Accept help and advice

And as I mull over my book ideas and start the gathering phase, I’m revisiting one of my favorite inspirational TED talks by Liz Gilbert, created long ago but still so valuable to any stage of the book-writing journey.

Leave a comment

I’ve started a new First Sunday newsletter for paid subscribers that addresses your most gnarly writing and publishing questions. This month’s post was about complex and woven structures in fiction and nonfiction, what they require and how to consider creating one. Get First Sunday once a month and build your publishing toolbox! A yearly subscription is only $45. For it, you get access to the 700+ archives, the monthly Q&A of First Sunday, a safe space to ask questions, and my writerly gratitude for helping me continue to write this newsletter.

Subscribe now

Shout Out!

A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community.

(If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Barbara Carlier, Journeying Home (Booklocker), January release

Mike Elliott, Escaping Limbo (Itasca Books), February release

Mary Berg, A Mystic in the Mystery: Poems of Spirit, Seasons, and Self (Bending Wave Books), February release

Mary Jo Hoffman, Still: The Art of Noticing (The Monacelli Press), May release

I’m a lifelong artist, and I love to inspire and support other creative folk, which is why I write this weekly newsletter. My goal with these posts is to help you strengthen your writing practice and creative life so it becomes more satisfying to you.

I’m also the author of 15 books in 3 genres. My third novel, Last Bets (Riverbed Press), will be published in April 2024. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), was published in October 2023 and became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders alone. For twelve years, I worked as a full-time food journalist, most notably through my weekly column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.

The Benefit of Making Your Characters Sick

Only a month until my third novel, Last Bets, is published on April 21. Publisher’s Weekly/Booklife called it a “beautifully wrought story of two women artists outrunning their demons." You can pre-order a copy today, and this will help me so much in every way! I know you’ll love the story—thank you for your support of my writing.

Photo by Edgar Soto on Unsplash

In my life, I’ve been very ill twice, and it was no joke. It also changed me, forever.

A dear friend got sick on a trip and has lived with a resulting disability for years. It has changed everything about her approach to her life.

Some are born with fragile health, and they live in the “land of the sick” looking out onto the “land of the well.” Others have unwaveringly dependable bodies, emotions, and minds, and they can’t imagine anything else.

When I was facing my two life-threatening illnesses (I was fortunate to recover from both), I lived in the “land of the sick” for a year, very intensely, then for a number of years after that as I got used to a body changed by surgery and chemotherapy. I grew accustomed to my new residence, and the disability it contributed to my life going forward. I couldn’t assume anything, anymore. My new residence existed apart from the rest of the healthy world. I didn’t talk about my experiences after they receded into the past, but I was never able to forget them because of medication I now had to take every day and because of surgery that lost me a body part or two.

I didn’t put much attention on this, truthfully. My one job was to get well. And I did.

When a friend or family member faces illness or disability, I have more compassion now—that was a side benefit to going through it myself. I lost some of the arrogance that comes when you are strong and well all the time. Aging also does this—we move differently, we have to pay more attention to details we ignored before. We often get quite grateful for every additional day we live with mobility and relative comfort.

I got very ill again about a month before we began this winter camper-van trip. I got the latest strain of covid, which was fairly brutal. Being so ill reminded me of those two life-threatening times. I wondered if I would be well again—because when you’re very ill, normal health can feel impossible. But I got over it. And we packed and left.

During my bed-ridden days, I read. A favorite is Joan Didion’s famous essay, “In Bed,” about her life in the “land of the sick” due to chronic migraines that occurred several times each month. What intrigued me about Didion’s view of being so ill was how she came to recognize the gift of her migraines. Like a good friend, they gave her complete permission to shut out the world.

Maria Popova in The Marginalian shares a wonderful overview of Virginia Woolf’s essay on illness from her Selected Essays (1926) . “On Being Ill” is about how the body and mind get hijacked, but also how it primes us for quite profound realizations. We can respond to ourselves alone, and no one else.

To respond to no one else, that’s a brilliant gift indeed—and my realization came that this last bout with the nasty strain of covid brought me exactly that. Coming off a year of intensity and heavy lifting, promoting my second novel, I wanted to be more available than ever before—to readers, to interviews, to everyone. I felt it was appropriate, and I don’t regret being that open to the world, but to this introvert, it had quite an effect: I depleted all reserves. I developed and exercised a public-appearance muscle I don’t often use, and I knew my body—my entire system—was paying the price.

Healthy now, enjoying being away, I’m looking back on this topic to learn what I can about how writers view illness and disability, how they use it to create character conflict. Let’s dive into why making your character sick might be a great tool to include in your writer’s toolbox.

Photo by Jakub Pabis on Unsplash

Before our trip, I whittled down my huge TBR pile. One of the fun reads was Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Gaming isn’t a topic in my wheelhouse, usually, but Zevin creates such fascinating characters and situations, I was enthralled.

I also noticed the injury and resulting disability she foisted on one of the main characters. So I read as a writer too, looking for why.

Sam is half of the partnership that creates outstanding video games. In his youth, Sam was in a terrible car accident which virtually destroyed his foot (an interesting body part to choose!). He undergoes multiple surgeries but the foot, in his description, remains a mass of bone chips barely held together by flesh. Eventually it declines to the point where Sam needs help. The foot gets in the way of his life, eventually forcing a coast-to-coast move for the whole designing team. This is not a life-threatening illness, an episode of trauma. This is an injury that stays in Sam’s life, rendering him always different. He lives in the “land of the sick,” apart from anyone else, even though he tries hard to ignore it.

As I studied possible reasons Zevin chose to create this injury, I noticed Sam becoming the likeness of one of his video creations, Ichigo, the first game’s main character. They both walk with a sideways movement, Sam because of his foot and Ichigo, because of the environment he’s battling, perhaps (that’s never completely explained). “Sideways” becomes a metaphor for Sam’s life. It hampers any smooth forward trajectory. It creates mighty conflict—even when it is ignored. It reflects a profound loss that Sam always carries.

Another book I loved and thought about a lot was The Stars and the Darkness Between Them by Junauda Petros. Two girls, an African-American and a Trinidadian, become close after the terrible cancer diagnosis of one of them. Cancer is a terrific trauma, especially in Mabel’s life—she’s athletic, hopeful about the future, smart and well-loved. The story reminded me a lot of John Green’s novel, The Fault in Our Stars, about two young people who meet in a cancer-support group. I loved how Petros showed Mabel’s departure from the “land of the well” and entry into the “land of the sick.” How she didn’t want her life to be over. How the diagnosis changed her. The ending was beautiful and unexpected.

I came away from my illness fully recovered but struck by how our bodies reflect the loss of this kind of hijacking by disease or injury. And how we writers might well consider it for increasing character vividness and conflict.

How bodies reflect loss

A huge goal in drafting story, whether real or imagined, is to find and enhance conflict. Story doesn’t happen without it. So whatever conflict is available, needs to be considered by the writer.

Poverty, discrimination, bad choices, mental and physical health challenges, difficult relationships, karma—use whatever you can bring forward. It will likely make a stronger connection between your reader and your character. It certainly did for me, with the novels above and the essays listed earlier.

Illness and injury changes the character’s closest environments: not just their bodies but their home life, job, and relationships. Illness also makes a character more “embodied,” more present to how they feel, move, think.

The skilled short-story author, Allison Wyss (Splendid Anatomies), talks about why she writes about bodies: The characters “live in, on, and far beyond the periphery, learning to love themselves as they claim and reclaim their bodies.” I was fortunate to be interviewed by Allison for the virtual launch of my second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, last October. She asked some great questions about how bodies reflect loss, in story.

Allison: One of your main characters, Red Nelson, is in persistent pain from her crash and that is always pushing at her and challenging her. How does that serve the narrative? How does that put the reader inside the book?

Mary: Red’s injury came about in the story just because it was not reasonable that she wouldn’t be in some kind of physical challenge after the plane crash that opens the novel. But in a larger sense, I wanted something to hang her up, make it impossible for her to just proceed with her escape from a criminal that’s following her, and get to her estranged sister’s, business as usual. 

She also needed to be humbled, in a way, because pilots often feel invincible, or at least she does.  A strong woman with a lot of passion who needed to be pounded into the ground a bit, perhaps?  Also, literally grounded.  She can’t fly, she can’t walk, and she can’t run away. 

The author Caroline Leavitt once told me: you can’t have characters run away every time; you have to make them face each other and see what happens.  A valuable insight for me to practice in this novel. 

Allison: Your other narrator, Kate Fisher, is also dealing with something very real in her body. Her illness is of a kind that is very different than Red's injury, but it’s having a profound effect on her life, even though it’s much less tangible than an injured ankle. Kate’s trouble is not only in the symptoms, but in the not knowing what they mean.

How do you write about the unknown in the body? It can't be tangible in quite the same way as a visible injury and yet the story makes it tangible.

Mary: I started out giving Kate a more known illness: cancer.  In early drafts, I forced her to go through treatment, but it felt too neat to have such a firm diagnosis and course to follow. I wanted something less tangible: the unknown produces more unease. 

I got some criticism in reviews about that element of unknown, of her illness not being neatly wrapped up, but I believe the risk for Kate in not knowing what is happening is much more vital. Kate is a pilot too; she loves control and facts and reliable information—it’s her life as a Search & Rescue worker. 

To increase the conflict for her, hardest would be not knowing. Not knowing what is causing her disability (she has unexplained blackouts). And having to live her life with that unresolved. 

I worked with this trope in my first novel, Qualities of Light, as well, so I guess I’m a writer who is inclined to make their characters sick! In that first novel, a young boy is injured in a boating accident. At first, I had him die—but again, this was too wrapped up, too neat. Less of a story there. So I had him live but be in a coma. Again, not knowing if he will recover, created much more tension.

Buy A Woman's Guide to Search & Rescue

Embodying your characters

All of us have experienced loss. How does it manifest in our bodies? What do we carry with us, because of this? As I mentioned before, my older sister died unexpectedly at age 60. My family’s changes after my sister’s death were very noticeable to me. I got my second life-threatening illness not long after. Was this my body reflecting loss? I wondered.

Consider the people you write about: Are their bodies part of the emotional conversation? How do their bodies influence loss or grief, or rage or sorrow, in their storylines?

How do we writers bring the body forward in our work?

I’ve always placed my characters’ bodies squarely in their scenes. Possibly because I’m a very sensory writer, a visual map is necessary. Where is each person located onstage in the scene? What position are their bodies in? Once I have that somewhat established, I can go internal—asking what emotion each body is expressing.

I find it so helpful to communicate the meaning of a scene.

Allison Wyss says, “I love any book that acknowledges the bodies of the characters and also makes reading into an embodied experience for the reader.” In answering her questions, I thought about what “an embodied experience for the reader” meant. For me, it’s the sense of being in the character’s body, feeling what they are feeling, not on an intellectual level which can be quite deceiving—we present a certain way, we think of ourselves a certain way, but it’s not always the truth. But bodies don’t lie. They are more accurate representations of what’s really going on.

In your writing, count on this. If you embody your characters, if you make them fully present in their injury or illness or disability, they come forward in a new way for the reader. It’s a feeling I’ve always had in my own writing, but unconsciously until the interview with Allison.

How can you acknowledge a character’s body in every way, not just their spirit and mind and emotions, and put this body into real-time in the story?

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Listen to this short but succinct interview between myself and Alessandra Torres of First Draft Friday, where we talk about the lines between character and writer.

Consider one of your characters-in-progress, someone you’d like to make more vivid. Is there an illness, disability, injury, lurking in their story? Or a loss that could be manifested more clearly in their body? How might you use some of the examples above to do this?

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I’ve started a new First Sunday newsletter for paid subscribers that addresses your most gnarly writing and publishing questions. This month’s post was about complex and woven structures in fiction and nonfiction, what they require and how to consider creating one. Get First Sunday once a month and build your publishing toolbox! A yearly subscription is only $45. For it, you get access to the 700+ archives, the monthly Q&A of First Sunday, a safe space to ask questions, and my writerly gratitude for helping me continue to write this newsletter.

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Shout Out!

A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community.

(If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Barbara Carlier, Journeying Home (Booklocker), January release

Mike Elliott, Escaping Limbo (Itasca Books), February release

Mary Berg, A Mystic in the Mystery: Poems of Spirit, Seasons, and Self (Bending Wave Books), February release

Mary Jo Hoffman, Still: The Art of Noticing (The Monacelli Press), May release

I’m a lifelong artist, and I love to inspire and support other creative folk, which is why I write this weekly newsletter. My goal with these posts is to help you strengthen your writing practice and creative life so it becomes more satisfying to you.

I’m also the author of 15 books in 3 genres. My third novel, Last Bets (Riverbed Press), will be published in April 2024. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), was published in October 2023 and became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders alone. For twelve years, I worked as a full-time food journalist, most notably through my weekly column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.

How I Became a Substack Bestseller

Greetings from me and Piper. He’s just three and he loves to sit with me when I write. I love this picture because it shows how happy I am to be a dog mom again.

Right now, Piper is curled up on the cool clay tiles of our friends’ floor, in a little guest house on the property down south. We are still visiting in our camper van for a few more weeks, soaking up the sun. Even though more daylight is coming through every day, it’s still deep winter at home.

Today, I’m sending a special thank you to all of you, because a wonderful surprise gift came to me this week.

Woo-hoo!

My three goals

I first moved this newsletter to Substack to create a community I missed online since I stopped teaching writing full-time. I longed for a place to talk about writing practice, that most basic element of the writer’s life. I wanted to explore the more gnarly questions of writing and publishing I was facing. I wanted to start a dialogue with you, hear your questions and share some answers. I dreamed of a safe space (without trolling) where we could be vulnerable, creatively, and learn from each other.

That was my first goal. It was met almost immediately after I moved to Substack in April. The community here is tangible. Even though I’m a newcomer, relatively speaking, I still feel it. I’m not alone.

I already had a lot of years writing Your Weekly Writing Exercise each Friday. Since 2008! Never missed one. But I did miss the interactive online community I sometimes found in social media platforms and my online classes.

I came to Substack to expand my experience of writing community and help grow one.

My second goal was to continue to offer these newsletters for free as long as I could. I love sharing writing thoughts, inspiration, ideas, and exercises with you, but the cost of an email client (I used Constant Contact) to manage subscriptions was getting to be substantial. Substack is free. I knew I could continue to write more and longer if I moved here.

My third goal was to expand my readership. I got a lot of sign-ups for this newsletter at each class I taught. But when I retired from active teaching a few years ago, I didn’t know how to let people know about this newsletter. I think it’s very fun, valuable, a great way to keep a writing practice going.

Substack offers a lot of networking. Right now, quite a few other Substacks are recommending Your Weekly Writing Exercise. I get new sign-ups each week. I love that!

By November of last year, my three goals were met. We’d reached 3000 free subscribers, about 500 more than in April—which is marked growth. I loved most everything about this community. I worked harder on these posts than ever before. Often I spent 10-12 hours a week writing, researching, and revising these weekly posts. I felt they enhanced my own writing practice.

A natural next step

By November, I had been hearing for a while about opening up paid subscriptions. I wanted to consider it for two reasons. Quite a few of you free subscribers were asking how you could support me to continue writing these weekly posts. You said you felt the value strongly, in your own writing lives, and wanted to show your thanks. I loved that too!

I also wanted to branch out into an even more in-depth conversation for readers aiming to publish, who want some help navigating the rather crazy world publishing has become. I had just launched my fourteenth book (!) and I learned so much about marketing from a more authentic place.

I would’ve LOVED to hear war stories about self-promotion when I was starting out with my first book in the late 80s. I was relatively clueless back then, and it’s been a hard road. An online community, where I could ask questions and get full-bodied answers, would’ve been priceless. So I decided to open up paid subscriptions to answer this need, see how you would respond.

Maybe there would be a certain number of you who’d be interested in supporting this new idea.

Truthfully, I didn’t expect such an outpouring!

What I’ve learned and how I decided

Making the leap to paid subscriptions isn’t something to take lightly. When someone pays for what you offer, you have a different kind of commitment to them. With my free newsletter, I felt I could write it on my own timing, I could stop anytime, it was my way of paying back the writing community of students, clients, and colleagues who’d supported me with my own work by taking classes or asking me to edit their manuscripts.

So I waited. I wrote down the pros and cons of this new commitment. I thought about my 16 years of writing this once-a-week newsletter, before I moved Your Weekly Writing Exercise to Substack last April, and the loyal readership I’d grown.

I was already working harder on these Substack newsletters than I ever had before, because the quality of what’s offered here has raised the bar. I’m thrilled about this, by the way, because my writing has gotten stronger and my practice more solid. I ask bolder questions, take more risks. I guess it’s being received fairly well too, because I have the confirmation of those 500 new subscribers in six months.

But I waited til I felt I’d gotten the hang of it—both the raised quality demanded by my readers and the expanded topics. Then I began to think about what extras I could give to paid subscribers. Beyond those who’d subscribe out of gratitude (and I’m grateful for this!), those new to what offer would need something more.

I decided to start with a monthly Q&A, once a month on the first Sunday. This would be a longer post, using questions asked by my more advanced students (those aiming for publishing or already published). I’d focus in turn on the more challenging lessons I’d learned these past few years about where we are in publishing today. I’d also talk about revision, which I consider a task further down the road, showing a stronger commitment to a writing project. But the topics would be generated by your questions—and so far, they’ve been good ones, keeping me on my toes.

So in early November, I announced my new idea. I talked about why I was doing it, what paid subscribers could expect. I didn’t expect such a flood of subscriptions, though.

It means a lot to me

It took only four months for Your Weekly Writing Exercise to become a Substack bestseller, growing from 0 to over 100 paid members between November and the beginning of March. That total is increasing each week, and I’m beyond happy that my idea is being received.

When someone signs up for a paid subscription, they often send me a little note (there’s a place in the subscription form to do this). I read and reread these. “I look forward to it every Friday.” “It’s the only newsletter I read every week.” “You kept my writing alive during the pandemic.” This made me feel great about keeping going. This is astonishing confirmation. So much competes for our attention.

My free newsletter is how I give back to the writing community. I couldn’t have gotten here without you, my students, clients, colleagues, writing friends.

My paid newsletter is a way to dive deeper, share more intimately what I’ve learned in my writing journey, and give you a place to ask your gnarly questions and get honest, in-depth answers. It’s become an integral part of my writing practice.

I hope it enhances yours, if you decide to join us as a paid subscriber.

I’m hoping to offer more benefits to paid subscribers in months and years to come. Thank you again to those of you who value the newsletter enough to say so.

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Setting as Conflict

My new novel, Last Bets, will be out in the world on April 21 and is still available for pre-order! “Readers will get lost in Moore's beautiful prose, her impeccable plotting, and her outstandingly relatable and multi-layered characters. Beautifully wrought story of two women artists outrunning their demons,” said Booklife/Publisher’s Weekly who made it an Editor’s Pick. Preorder your copy today. With my BIG thanks for the support.

Photo by Raychel Sanner on Unsplash

Road trips, for most vagabonds, even older ones like me, are about the people you meet and the new places you see. Passing through unfamiliar landscapes, wondering who lives in that farmhouse or that crumbling building on the corner of a one-street town, engages my imagination and my creative self. As a visual artist as well as a writer, I can’t help but soak in the different colors, textures, and vibration of different settings. I capture some on my phone, burn the rest into memory (for later paintings, perhaps, or a story I’m mulling over).

That’s my tendency—a fascination with place and who inhabits it and why.

But I know, having taught scores of writers over scores of years, more than a few are bored by setting. Why is that, when it offers so much potential for conflict?

Maybe it’s setting’s relative slowness, compared to action. Maybe to certain readers any descriptive sections stall the momentum, dilute the tension. But I’ve also learned that immediate dismissal of setting as boring usually means a poor use of this tool—an author who is too dreamily enamored with it, writing in more than is really needed or placing it unsuccessfully.

There’s a keen balance of setting details and active elements in successful story. Random setting details, irrelevant information just to fill space, bores me too. Setting only works when it is considered a character, placed for emotional effectiveness and the conflict it offers.

The setting around me here, where we are camping in our van on friends’ property, is so utterly unfamiliar. It’s way tropical to my New England eyes. I’ve already gotten one weird rash (poison something) and fire ant bites on my flip-flopped feet. So I’m constantly thinking about where I’m walking, what I’m hearing, and how the air feels on my skin. That’s conflict, to me—stuff that makes me alert, making decisions to stay safe, or (in the fire ants’ case) avoid more trouble.

Setting, ideally, is something to fight against. Only then does it truly come alive. And I’m convinced it can truly increase conflict, as much as passionate action or heated dialogue.

But to achieve this, we have to broaden our definition of setting.

It’s not just the physical landscape, the looming weather, the cramped van we’re sleeping in. We must consider other levels of setting to create a complete “story atmosphere” that defines conflict. These include the bigger cultural, political, religious, family, and community settings that contribute to the physical one.

So many of the writers I’ve met over the years of teaching don’t effectively use these additional setting elements. Maybe they think that describing the weather or the street is enough. But if you’re curious to expand your skills, as a writer, and use setting more fully, I’d like to share some information about the various kinds of setting that are available in fiction and nonfiction. We’ll explore when to use each kind, how much to include, and where to place it.

Basic setting—the physical environment

Getting clear on the page about where your scene takes place is essential to make setting relevant for the reader. Even if you’re completely bored by setting in stories you read (skipping pages has become a norm!), you need to consider how grounded the reader will be in place in your own writing.

So here are a few basic setting questions I always ask first, once I have the basic actions and people set up in a scene. I ask this about every scene, eventually, during my revision process—no duds allowed!

Some writers start with these, setting the stage, so to speak, before they even introduce the cast and actions—it just depends on what you prefer.

Are we inside or outside?

What are some sensory details about this place (is it hot or cold, stuffy or airy, are there nice smells or awful ones, does it feel crowded or open, is the atmosphere menacing or comforting, what sounds might the character hear)?

What’s the weather like at this moment? Is there anything approaching that the character senses?

What’s moving in this setting—characters? Something else? How does that affect the tension in the scene?

Who experiences conflict in story? Characters, of course—they are the primary effects of conflict, and conflict makes them decide and change and move forward or backwards.

Our goal as writers considering physical setting details is to be aware of what will increase the conflict for our characters and to choose accordingly. If we want to intensify the tension in a scene, we don’t just look to the actions. We also look to the external setting, right?

Seems simple, but many writers don’t use this important tool. Those who do, get huge payoff.

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Choosing specific physical setting details for increased conflict

I remember teaching at a writer’s conference where the headliner on the program was Andre Dubus III, a writer I’d been following for years. At the time, I was enthralled with his latest novel, House of Sand and Fog. I taught it often in classes for the amazing tension he captured via physical setting details.

One pivotal scene especially showed this.

The two main characters are in a revolving restaurant high above the city. They are entering into an agreement, a contract, that will drive the rest of the story and result in death and serious loss, but they don’t know that—all they want is to join forces for revenge. The conversation escalates from flirtation to negotiation, both of them risking their lives and ethics. The setting, the restaurant windows that change views each time a new step is taken towards their agreement, that shows a disorienting view of how their future lives will play out, is so much a character in this pivotal scene.

I’ve read and taught these four or five pages at least two dozen times as a stellar example of the power of setting in skilled hands.

During a break at that conference, I approached Dubus with the question I’d carried since I first read the novel. Did he start writing that scene with the setting (the revolving restaurant)? Or did he start with the action (the two characters deciding to join forces, to the eventual destruction of both)?

Was this incredible scene birthed from external setting or from plot, in other words?

As I remember, he was very open about discussing this. He said he began with the revolving restaurant setting then built the scene around it.

Imagine a terrible turning point taking place in your story. Where do you place that scene? Dubus chose a revolving restaurant, so every time his narrator looked up, a completely different view paraded by, an experience that was both exhilarating and very disorienting. (As I remember, the female narrator slips into near-dizziness from all of it.)

So many writers I personally admire take setting into account, some from the beginning drafts, others during revision. Writer Elizabeth Gilbert said in a recent interview: “The first thing I get for my fiction is the place. As a traveler this probably makes sense. There's a geographical or cultural story that’s fascinating to me, and I want to know every single thing about it. I want to disappear into that place.” (Read her entire craft discussion with the amazing Jane Ratcliffe here.)

Place. Setting. Where we are physically located. It’s an easy way to up the conflict in your stories automatically. If you want to take the time to do the work of setting.

Before our trip, I read The Maid, by Nita Prose—a fun read, light and entertaining, with plenty of action. Without its setting, the Regency Grand Hotel—where murder, false accusations, heroic decisions, and the narrator’s eventual victory take place—there would be a lot less conflict. I can’t imagine it happening anywhere else.

Great settings are like this. But external setting isn’t the only element that writers can use to increase conflict via a story’s surroundings. The outer location you choose (or where you focus your camera eye) can also be amplified by what I call “internal setting.”

We’ll talk about that next.

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Internal aspects of setting

The internal life of your “setting” is its spoken or unspoken culture: the family history, the rules and beliefs and values people live by, the politics and religion they follow, the community they conform to or rebel against.

They also provide a huge potential for conflict in your scenes.

I research the internal setting as thoroughly as I research the physical landscape of my books. But these aspects enter my writing practice first through character research.

I look at my cast and ask who might be the clearest resource. Who cares the most about the family beliefs, for instance? Who fights them? Who carries the history of trauma or success? Who lives by their values or breaks free of them, even violently?

Once I’ve pinpointed a few characters for research, I ask them questions and write down whatever comes to mind as answers. This is actually fun—pretending they are real and pretending I’m a reporter sent to interview them. If I really get into this exercise, the answers often surprise me, which is the goal. Then I know I’ve stopped infiltrating the character with my own values, beliefs, and internal setting.

Questions I might ask:

Do you remember anything about where you grew up, what rules your family made you follow, what you loved about this or hated?

What was your best memory of childhood? Your worst?

Who was the person with the strongest beliefs in your family or community? Describe those beliefs.

What do you miss now, from that time? What are you glad to leave behind?

From this, I often capture details about the internal culture of the character, both the past and what the character lives now. Then I can make a list of those. I’ll ask myself which could be brought forward into the story to create friction.

An example: In my new novel, Last Bets, which will be published next month, Elly, the main character, was born with second sight, so she sees the moves of a game before they happen (think The Queen’s Gambit). Elly’s father learned of this when she was a young girl and trained her to help him cheat and win big at the gambling tables, which destroyed both her family and her health.

To answer the questions above, Elly might say:

My father’s rules were that I use my talent to help him cheat, which I hated. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it.

Her best memory of childhood was taking art classes at the museum nearby. Her worst were the headaches she got after helping her father.

The strongest beliefs in Elly’s family were held by her mother: Never lie, cheat, or steal because you’ll go to hell.

She misses her sister Lily, who left home early and died tragically. She is happy to leave her parents behind and her father’s addiction.

These were just the start—as I interviewed Elly and worked with her in scenes over the course of three years, I got a clear picture of the internal struggle between trying to please the charismatic father she adored and the tyrant mother she hated. She chose her father’s culture over her mother’s, even though it almost killed her. In the novel, Elly as the adult will face these two cultures again, represented by different people in a different place.

Her biggest challenge in the story: will she use her second sight for good, to help others, or for selfish reasons like her father used it when she was a child?

Pre-order a copy of LAST BETS

Echoing conflicts in external and internal setting

When I think of that revolving restaurant scene in Dubus’s novel, I am impressed with how he echoed the conflicts going on inside the two characters with the different levels of setting. These are just my reader suppositions, but I saw the “culture” of the restaurant as determinedly elegant. It’s high above the chaos of the everyday world. It offers oversized menus, white linen, crystal and silver. It creates a feeling of well-being, rules being followed, predictability expected. Completely contradicted by the criminal arrangements being discussed.

How brilliant is that! Our job with our own stories is to first get this clear sense of both external place and internal culture of setting. Once these are sketched out and researched, we can deliberately juxtapose the characters’ lives in such a way as to produce conflict.

This usually happens with me in later drafts, though. I don’t always remember to bring them in during early scene-writing, but as I revise, they become a serious tool for increasing tension.

A good start: look at the places chosen for each scene. Are they throwaways? A throwaway location is a fine placeholder to begin with, but we need to remember to think about the underlying meaning eventually. Maybe there’s not an obvious meaning in the external setting right off, but try this technique: pretend you’re a camera eye and zoom around the location. See if you can find something that could irritate or ruffle the character: a dripping faucet, the noisy train whistle, the sticky grit on the subway floor, the smell of sauerkraut in the hallway, the neighbor’s cat using the garden bed as a toilet. Then enhance that deliberately, as Dubus does with every aspect of his scene.

I find this step takes concentration. Slowing down. I have to stop being an action junkie and zoom in. What small details are coming forward?

When I’ve got a few ideas—say, the chronically awful smell in the apartment hallway—I’ll go back to the internal details I’ve taken down in my character interview. I’ll ask why this particular smell causes conflict. What echoes from the character’s past or present culture, beliefs, values are connected with this smell? Maybe it was the smell of childhood during a traumatic time. Or it smells like poverty that the character has worked hard to rise out of. That tiny external setting detail will trigger something, cause tension, even if it’s an unconscious tension.

That’s what we’re after.

When I first read Dubus’s scene of the revolving restaurant, I didn’t realize the trigger of the disorienting view—then I remembered the topic being discussed. The character is homeless. The lack of stable views echoes this. Where is she, actually? She has no place that feels or looks familiar. It’s a brilliant juxtaposition of external and internal setting, the conflict it brings out in the character who is placed there.

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Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Choose a scene you’ve drafted, one you’d like to bring more conflict to. Ask yourself what is missing: an external setting that shows conflict or an internal one?

Then scroll up to either the landscape questions or the character interview questions and try them out.

What did you find out?

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Shout Out!

A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community.

(If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Mike Elliott, Escaping Limbo (Itasca Books), February release

Mary Jo Hoffman, Still: The Art of Noticing (The Monacelli Press), May release

My 2023 novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, is now available at bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and amazon.

I’ve started a new First Sunday newsletter for paid subscribers that addresses your most gnarly writing and publishing questions. This month’s post was about complex and woven structures in fiction and nonfiction, what they require and how to consider creating one. If you’d like to receive First Sunday once a month, a yearly subscription is only $45. For it, you get access to the 700+ archives, the monthly Q&A of First Sunday, a safe space to ask questions, and my writerly gratitude for helping me continue to write this newsletter.

I’m a lifelong artist, and I love to inspire and support other creative folk, which is why I write this weekly newsletter. My goal with these posts is to help you strengthen your writing practice and creative life so it becomes more satisfying to you.

I’m also the author of 14 books in 3 genres. My third novel, Last Bets (Riverbed Press), will be published in April 2024. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), was published in October 2023 and became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders alone. For twelve years, I worked as a full-time food journalist, most notably through my weekly column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.

First Sunday Q&A: Complex and Woven Structures for Books

Hello, all you new paid subscribers! A flood of you came to join us these past months and I’m very glad. We hit the magic 100 this month; thanks for pledging your support for this newsletter.

Welcome to “First Sunday” Q&A, where we dissect and discuss your most gnarly writing and publishing questions. I plan to write this the first Sunday of each month for you, as long as you wonderful people send me your questions. I have a great selection from attendees at my virtual launch last fall, and I’ll lean on these as we get going, but please feel free to post questions in the comments or email them to me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com, and I’ll spend time on them, sharing ideas, tips, and resources from my own experience. I’m happy to keep you anonymous.

My intention is to make this a safe, generous place to exchange ideas and talk about the deepest writing and publishing issues on your mind.

If you’re a free subscriber, you’ll get a taste of the article below. Upgrade to paid (only $45 a year) to read the rest. Thank you for supporting this newsletter!

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Photo by Alecsander Alves on Unsplash

Q: I’m frustrated with my writing right now, because I love reading really complex literature with incredibly complex structures. But when I try to duplicate this complexity in my own memoir writing, it fails miserably. Can you give an overview of types of book structure and how a writer with complex tastes and simpler skills can approach structure sensibly but without boring herself to death?

A: This winter, we took a field trip to a crafts fair where one of my relatives shows her work. She’s a weaver. Not just that—she also raises sheep, shears them, cards the wool, and dyes it with homemade dyes. She loves it, too—she loves the complexity of woven patterns. I couldn’t resist buying a shank of wool in a beautiful gray-puce color, a combination of wool and angora (she raises rabbits too).

I like complexity in visuals—walking into our living space, you’d face a riot of color and texture and design. My spouse is also a painter so our paintings line the walls. Furniture is eclectic, mostly inherited antiques or vintage second-hand. Some shield their eyes when they enter. Too much complexity in color, shape, design. But to me, it’s inspiring and exciting.

Such a trend exists in books as well.  Books are getting more complex--not just in their storylines but also in their structures. I love reading books that make me work, just a bit, to figure out the woven layers. 

Could all of this be a reflection of how our brains are changing (remember the landmark study (2010) of The Shallows:  What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr).  Or maybe it’s our continued desire to reinvent literature that matches our cultural needs.

How have book structures changed in the last twenty years?

Scroll back to 1998. Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible awes readers with a story told by five (!) different narrators.  Five members of the Price family contribute their own version of the voyage from Georgia to be missionaries in the Belgian Congo.  Nathan, the father, is the only one whose voice isn’t primary. Instead, the circle around him, his family, is the chorus in this book. Back then, this kind of story structure was a shock to readers, at least to me.

Kingsolver was a finalist for the Pulitzer that year, deservedly, because she knew how to keep our attention during each transition between narrators—the first challenge of complex structures.

In 2008, we read Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, a whole new type of book, which some called "episodic" because it straddled the line between a group of short stories and a novel. To me, it paved the way for further experimentation. Think of The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, and Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries. Each offered another step, a new kind of complicated story structure.

Now we’re reading a woven plot that moves not just between multiple narrators but through different eras.  (The Stone Diaries even toggles from first- to second- to third-person voice.)

These are classics; you may have read them if you’re into literary fiction, you may not. I did. I was fascinated by how they worked out structural problems on the page. Because this stuff is exciting but it’s not easy.

Fast forward again to another wave of experimental book structure. 2005’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal is set up like an encyclopedia, moving through alphabetical listings of topics.  There are notes, bullet-point lists, ruminations.  Some listings are one paragraph, some as long as chapters.  It is entertaining and extremely random, as if you're visiting a fictional character's journal and peering in on her mind, heart, and daily life.  2008’s The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham is a bit more serious and the chapters look like real chapters, but the organization is fascinating.  It explores the author's experience after her dad's suicide.  Each chapter is a different way it affected her--but it is set up as an index.  Chapters fall under main and subordinate headings, like an index would.  An example:  "Suicide:  act of:  attempt to imagine."

Tommy Orange’s amazing There, There, published in 2018 organizes a dozen stories by different narrators, circling around an event that greatly affects a Native American community. I was riveted by how he pulled the threads together and kept the tension while so many balls were in the air. 2019’s Evidence of V by Sheila O’Connor is of a similar complexity, a mix of memoir and fiction, prose and poetry surrounding the author’s present-day search for traces of her missing grandmother.

All these books--and many others out on the market today--are showing us where we can all go, as writers, into a new kind of literary architecture.  If structure is the frame of a story, these authors are playing, often gleefully, with how this frame influences their narrative. They are making the structure a strong part of their stories.

If you’ve read this far, you may be a writer who’s intrigued by trying this. But let’s look carefully at the different kinds of structure—simple to complex—and what each requires.

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