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.