by Mary Carroll Moore

That first phone call came on a busy day at work. I was preparing 700 stuffed cherry tomatoes for a catering job that night and here was a publisher on the phone asking if I would consider authoring a book. It would be based on my cooking school, which had just been written up in USA Today. Of course I said yes—who wouldn’t? I didn’t tell the publisher I knew nothing about organizing a book manuscript.

That was the early 1980s, when authors worked under the careful counsel of editors at publishing houses. Back then, we were coached, and lucky to be so. Times changed in the 1990s, houses shrank their staffs, and I was still authoring books. But I suddenly found myself completely at sea: my first contract for a memoir in hand, and no help with how to structure it.

Back then, writing classes didn’t teach structuring or organizing a book manuscript. I searched for any guidance on how such books were put together. What did you leave in? What did you leave out? And most important, how did you combine the organic flow of writing with the necessary scaffolding that made a book coherent?

Outlining had served me well in nonfiction. But with this new book—in the newly popular genre of memoir—even chapter 1 seemed impossible to write.

It embarrassed me, a published author, to give up, to renege on my book contract. Before I finally made that phone call, a friend rescued me by lending me her well-worn copy of Kenneth Atchity’s A Writer’s Time.

I’d never heard of Atchity. I was already good at time management. I needed book management.

“It’s not about time management,” my friend told me. “Read.”

Former director of the UCLA writing program, Atchity was one of the first to detail a two-part process of book creation. Natalie Goldberg delivered the first step in her “freewriting” exercises in Writing Down the Bones. Atchity took it further. He proposed that books demand two sides of the creative self, both the random and the linear. Freewriting lets us craft random “islands” of writing. Then when we’ve created sufficient “islands,” we form them into continents using a storyboard.

I somehow knew this was correct. It was an organic approach for the writing process with an organization technique—storyboards—for the structure. I knew storyboarding from my work as a hired consultant at publishing companies. Storyboards were routinely used by small presses to plan work-for-hire manuscripts that would be produced in-house. Could a storyboard really organize the unwieldy mess that was my memoir?

I devoured the first five chapters of A Writer’s Time, then using what I’d learned, drafted the complete memoir in 45 days. Thanks to my storyboard, chapter 1 flowed together beautifully—a profound relief. That first memoir was published in 1991 and is still in print.

Storyboarding became the glue that held my manuscripts together as I wrote more books in more genres. I liked its organization, simplicity, and logic. But I still wondered how to craft a storyboard to show versus tell. Most storyboards were event trackers, and they did not reveal the emotional arc of a book.

As I transitioned into the genres of memoir and fiction, which demand an emotional arc, I was noticing that strong events weren’t enough. And sending my characters into their heads to ruminate the meaning of those events was not effective. I needed to show emotion, not talk about it. But how could I take my beloved organization tool to the next level?

Another friend to the rescue: a screenwriting buddy shared her discovery of the three-act structure. A method born in Aristotle’s time, the three acts delivered something called rising and falling action. These movements in story are primarily outer events, but they can also reveal the inner story—the emotion or transformation beneath an outer event that gives that event its meaning. Vivian Gornick’s dense little book The Situation and the Story gives marvelous examples of this phenomenon in memoir. Gornick excerpts passages from well-known writers, including Joan Didion’s essay “In Bed,” about that writer’s persistent migraines, which taught me new ways to “search out the link between a narrative line and the wisdom that compels it,” as Gornick writes.

Combining storyboarding with the three-act structure, referring to Gornick’s prompts on how to reveal deeper meaning, my book-writing approach slowly evolved. If you’re curious to see for yourself, here’s a short video you can watch. It shares the method I use to organize a manuscript, the same one I teach in my book-writing classes at the Loft.

Mary teaches storyboarding: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMhLvMJ_r0Y

In the end, books are all about organization, not just about sitting down and letting it flow. Good organization rescues us when we’re sinking into confusion about how to delve for meaning, it brings us ideas on how to infuse our manuscripts with emotion, and it gives us ways to structure outer events into a logical sequence that a reader can track.

That’s why storyboards work. They are an essential tool I wish I’d known about back in the 1980s (and I’m glad I know about now).

This essay originally appeared on A View from the Loft on March 7, 2011.

Mary Carroll Moore is the author of 13 published books in three genres, including the PEN/Faulkner Award–nominated novel Qualities of Light and the 2011 release Your Book Starts Here: How to Create, Craft, and Sell Your First Novel, Memoir, or Nonfiction Book. 

by Michael Fedo

When was the last time you received a rejection note from an editor? If you’ve been routinely getting editorial turndowns during the past few years, consider yourself lucky—not because you’ve been rejected, but because you were informed of those rejections.

It’s been my recent experience that many editors no longer notify writers that a submission didn’t pass muster, and I’m left wondering whether my manuscripts were lost in transit or, if submitted electronically, went missing in cyberspace.

I’ve made more than 50 submissions in the last three years and have been fortunate enough to place most of my writings eventually. But during this period I assume I’ve often also been rejected, since I’ve never heard about some of those submissions.

To be fair, a number of publications state on their websites that they only respond when interested in a submission. Others add that a piece should be considered rejected if the author hasn’t received a reply within a specified time period—usually two weeks to six or more months. Other editors announce they’ll respond to queries and manuscripts, but many fail to do so.

About ten years ago a friend who had completed a literary biography received a letter of interest from a major university press. The editors stated that the manuscript would be considered only if they were granted exclusive refusal. My friend acquiesced, but the press took more than a year before returning his manuscript, albeit with an apology claiming their outside evaluators had dallied in reviewing the text. Not a legitimate excuse.

Discouraged, the man abandoned the project for several years before finding a receptive editor at another publisher, where the book won an award for biography. The lesson here is not to guarantee an exclusive unless the editor agrees to respond within a specified time that seems fair to the author.

Because many editors either don’t acknowledge or hold manuscripts for months, I almost always make multiple submissions. And yes, on a few occasions I’ve received more than one acceptance. One book received three offers to publish within a week. I chose the best financial arrangement.

A few years back I made multiple submissions of a short story, sending one copy to a long-established literary quarterly. The story also was read by more than a dozen other magazines over the next 14 months before a small journal agreed to publish it. The next day the previously cited quarterly also accepted the story and offered a $250 payment. I obviously chose the $250 offer, but that magazine had held the manuscript for 14 months before making a decision. Since this editor had not responded to an inquiry regarding the status of the story months earlier, I assumed he had passed on it without informing me.

Even editors who have previously published my work sometimes have not gotten back to me when my submissions have been declined. It seems that for every dozen stories or essays I send out, I’ll only see three or four rejections, when in fact, all the pieces have been nixed.

There was one exception of sorts that maybe set a record. Late last year I opened a handwritten note in which the editor apologized for the “inordinate delay” in returning my story. Although this one hadn’t worked out, he hoped I’d send him others in the future. I had forgotten that I’d mailed him the story six years earlier, but it had been published two years after that by a different magazine.

I suppose I should cut him some slack because he at least responded.

So what are we to make of editors who fail to advise of a rejection even with a form notice?

For me the multiple submission is a partial solution, and I’ll make them unless I have a prior publishing relationship with an editor. I’ll do this even when a publication may insist on exclusives, especially if editors also indicate they may hold the manuscript for six or more months.

I allow that editors may be overworked; literary quarterlies or annuals may be operated by one or two persons. But how difficult can it be to slide a rejection slip into a self-addressed stamped envelope, or type “No thanks” and hit return on an e-mailed submission?

Having gotten this off my chest, I recently received a 180-degree turn on the form rejection—a form acceptance. While not a delight per se, it certainly beats its sister notification of “Thanks but no thanks,” and is clearly better than the implied rejection of an article or a story by an editor who doesn’t inform the author at all.

This essay originally appeared on A View from the Loft on November 8, 2010.

Michael Fedo‘s eighth book, A Sawdust Heart: My Vaudeville Life in Medicine and Tent Shows, by Henry Wood as told to Michael Fedo was published in May, 2011 by the University of Minnesota Press.

by Karin B. Miller

If the ladies would only realize that they are the torch-bearers of civilization, which, as the great philosopher Confucius has said, is the art of being civil, the world would be a more pleasant place to live in. (Book of Etiquette, 1923)

I can’t remember which volume in my large collection of turn-of-the-century etiquette guides first got me hooked. I only know that its unintended humor—not to mention sexism and classism—compelled me to search for more.

One hundred years ago, etiquette books proliferated—most filled with words of wisdom for young women. Subjects included what to wear (“Dress for comfort, not fashion”), what to say (“Never take a man to task about anything”), how to act (“Never laugh or talk loudly in public”), where to go (“Never visit unfavorable cabarets”), and much more.

Here’s a great definition from the Book of Etiquette (1923): “Etiquette will make you dignified. It will make your actions and speech refined, polished, impressive. It will make you a leader instead of a follower, a participant instead of a looker-on. It will open the doors of the highest society to you, make you immune to all embarrassment, enable you to conduct yourself with ease and confidence at all times, under all circumstances.” Phew. What young woman wouldn’t want to master etiquette?

Above all, the guides taught conformity, propriety, and rules for living—how to write letters, properly visit neighbors, and leave calling cards (the number of rules regarding calling cards alone is mind-boggling); which books to read (and to avoid); which household skills to learn; how to make conversation, behave at a dance, and meet, date, and wed young men. It was enough to make a girl’s head spin. 

A few bold voices of the era stood out, aiming not to keep women in their place but to help them recognize their own smarts and savvy. Take this example: “As a rule, women are better conversationalists than men, being endowed with a readier talent for repartee, a quicker wit, and a keener intuition of the fitness of things.” That’s a quote from 1891 in the Jenness Miller Monthly, a popular women’s magazine.

And this one from Tokology (1897) by Alice Bunker Stockham, a Chicago obstetrician and gynecologist: “The nation not only needs strong men but strong women, strong in physical as well as mental development. This strength is required for prosecuting a persistent warfare against prevailing and existing wrongs, as well as for transmitting health and vigor to the coming generation.”

But these writers were rare. Most etiquette books held up an idealized young woman—sweet, quiet, content, hardworking, and virtuous. And some etiquette books—like Beautiful Girlhood, published by the Gospel Trumpet Company, and The Mirror of True Womanhood by the Rt. Rev. Monsignor Bernard O’Reilly—were girded by religiosity. O’Reilly was a rare male etiquette writer; and no wonder: while men were required to know how to bow properly and ask a woman to dance, it was women who had thousands of such rules to live by.

Today, a good deal of the advice in these books would be considered dated and often offensive. But most books offered some advice that still holds true. For his part, O’Reilly warned mothers of both daughters and sons against “giving their boys . . . so large a place in the house that their daughters either seem in the way or are obliged to devote themselves to the pleasure and caprice of their brothers.” Unfortunately, it was also O’Reilly who advised mothers to “impart to every one of your girls a deep horror of the licentious and romantic literature of the day” and “to turn [your daughter’s] eyes and her whole mind away from an indecent engraving or painting or sculpture, as she would withdraw her hand or arm from the contact of red-hot iron.”

Into this mix of myriad etiquette guides came Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home (1922) by Emily Post, a journalist, fiction writer, and high-society gal—really a society insider who was willing to share the secrets of etiquette with everyone. She was also a divorcée—not that that hurt her sales: in 1923 her book topped Publishers Weekly’s sales list for nonfiction.

Unlike other etiquette books’ often-uninspired content, covering such scintillating topics as shaking hands and using a napkin, Post infused her copy with lively characters and gave them tongue-in-cheek names such as the Richan Vulgars, the Toploftys, and the Kindharts.

In addition, Post suggested in her introduction that anyone could be a gentleman or a lady simply by following proper etiquette: “Best Society is not a fellowship of the wealthy, nor does it seek to exclude those who are not of exalted birth; but it is an association of gentle-folk, of which good form in speech, charm of manner, knowledge of the social amenities, and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members.” What welcome words these must have been for newly arrived immigrants, society’s up-and-comers, the increasing numbers of young people moving to cities, and many more.

Still, rules were rules, and as I continued to find more etiquette volumes, I wanted to know how people, especially women, followed them back in the day. I started delving into turn-of-the-century newspapers to learn more about the time, and what I found were stories not about etiquette- and law-abiding girls and women but about the rule breakers.

One hundred years ago, women made headlines when they did the unexpected: suffragists led New York City police on a chase, working women protested unsafe working conditions, a teenage debutante worked to improve the lives of poor immigrants, female entrepreneurs built million-dollar businesses, and so forth.

I found the juxtaposition of what was expected of girls and women and how they actually acted in their everyday lives fascinating. That’s when I knew I had to start writing about all of this—both the rules and rule breakers of the day. 

A year ago, I launched a blog titled AttaGirl, circa 1900, with the tagline: “Not a good-old-day salute, AttaGirl, circa 1900, is more of a cheer for how far we’ve come.” Since then, I’ve written roughly 30 main entries—covering topics from turn-of-the-century interracial dating to corset controversies, plus lots of brief items, like recipes for homemade beauty concoctions, fashions of the day (i.e., shorter skirts to accommodate bicycle-riding girls), and quizzes to see if a modern understanding of etiquette would suffice back in 1900.

Over the year, the blog has experienced more than 8,000 page views, belying my small but loyal group of followers. Of course, you have to ignore a few hundred of those views as a whole bunch of Russian men (blogspot keeps track of reader geography) seemed to gravitate to my entry titled “Swimsuits and high heels.” It was not at all what they thought they’d find.

Americans still seek etiquette advice. The Emily Post Institute has obliged by publishing the 18th edition of Emily’s guide in October 2011, blogging, tweeting, and more. And just as at the turn of the century, the advice reflects the times. These days, however, the content offers not so much a listing of rules as “courteous behaviors and gracious actions.” Something that’s good for everyone.

You can find AttaGirl, circa 1900 at attagirl1900.blogspot.com. Karin B. Miller is also the editor of The Cancer Poetry Project, a Minnesota Book Award winner for best anthology. She is currently accepting submissions through December 31, 2011, for the second volume at www.cancerpoetryproject.com.

by Martin Cozza

People think a lot about getting an MFA in creative writing. Then sometimes they take the plunge and quit the job, accept the austere living, do what it takes to set aside two or three years, and enter an MFA program. Then they go through the program: reading, writing, reading, writing, critiquing and being critiqued, basking in the praise and stinging from the anti-praise, hoping for that faculty member or visiting writer to slip them the name of an agent, trying not to be too disappointed when they don’t. Then, it’s over. The diploma comes in the mail, maybe (like mine) in a cardboard tube. Open it. Unroll it. Ta-da!

by Karlyn Coleman

The Zamboni slides around the curves in the rink. The smell of propane lingers in the air. The gate opens. Skate blades scratch against the ice. I watch my son skate around the rink, crossing one foot over the other, so effortlessly. Gliding. Flying. Long legs pushing him forward. A blur of blue and orange. Number 14. I wave to him behind the glass, and just as the game begins, I head out of the arena doors.

Out in the lobby, I find a table by the confession stand. I can’t help but call it anything else. When my son was six, the year he first started playing hockey, he came off the ice thirsty and asked if he could have a dollar for the confession stand. I laughed and gave him two. Bring me back some absolution, I said. A dollar’s worth of grace. He bought a blue Gatorade instead.