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 William Reichard

When I was 17 years old I discovered the film Cabaret while flipping through channels on late-night TV. Seven years after its premiere, I hadn’t heard of the movie.  Something about the film’s style and mood drew me in and held me. Although I usually didn’t enjoy musicals, I kept watching. Michael York’s character seemed so familiar, but I couldn’t articulate why, at first. A gay teenager in rural Minnesota in 1980, I was as clueless as Sally Bowles, and lacked her bravado. As the film came to the scene where Michael York’s and Liza Minnelli’s characters discover they’ve been sleeping with the same man, I experienced the revelation just as Sally did, in real time, and I was just as shocked. For me, however, the experience was also one of unmitigated joy, as this was the first time I’d seen a gay man portrayed on television, in the movies, anywhere. For a closeted and fearful teenager, the experience was profound. I’d never seen myself reflected in anything I’d watched or read before, and I was a voracious reader, an avid watcher. Or if I had, I wasn’t ready until that moment to recognize it. I was hungry for any kind of affirmation, any sense that I wasn’t alone in the world, and there was Cabaret, broadcast right into my living room by ABC late on a Friday night.

by Wang Ping

The first time I applied for a literary grant was an accident. That morning in 1992, Lewis Warsh, a New York school poet, said he was going to the post office to mail the NEA application. “What’s that?” I asked. He was amazed I’d never heard of it.

“Come on, Lewis,” I laughed. “I’m new in America, and new to the poetry world.”

Lewis explained that NEA stood for National Endowment for the Arts, that every year it gave $20,000 to artists, musicians, poets, and writers.

“That’s a humongous amount of money. What do you do with it?”

He laughed. “Well, you can stop working yourself to the bone for a year or two and concentrate on your writing.”

My eyes opened wide. I had come to America with $26 in my pocket, and I’d been working several jobs at the same time, but my income had never surpassed $10,000. I wouldn’t even know what to do with the money if I got it. But of course I wouldn’t get it, even if I had the nerve to apply.

by Paul Zerby

 “There is an old style of teaching where the teacher has gold bricks of knowledge, reaches back,” said Father Jogues, reaching back over his shoulder, “and hands them out to the students,” miming distribution. “We believe in the pizza style, where each of us puts an ingredient on the pizza, and the facilitator,” he looked at me, “is the crust.” We were beginning the second of a four-session workshop called “Writing Fiction from Life” I’d been engaged to teach the Storyweavers, a group of seniors who had been meeting weekly over the past year to work on their writing, on their own, thank you. Father Jogues looked at me and waited. 

by Bill Meissner

—After hearing that if a literary agent didn’t recognize your name in her e-mail inbox, she would “delete your query unread.”

Once upon an ancient time, I was in love with paper. I was in love with words, with the way they pressed themselves, just so, like close friends, on the page. Words mattered, once upon a very different time.

Once I was in love with trees. The years of my life equaled the rings on a medium-sized oak tree—each ring another imprint of a dry year, or a rainy year, or something in between—and I wrote about each one. I used to slide my arms around trees and whisper to them, knowing someday they would cradle my words in their pulpy palms.

by Michael Fedo

Fifty years ago, as a college sophomore, I enrolled in a short story writing course taught by Harry Collins (not his real name). It was the only creative writing class I ever took and I got a C in it. According to Dr. Collins, my stories lacked verisimilitude and were weak in character development. Heedless of my instructor, over the subsequent decades I’ve published eight books—including one novel—and scores of articles, essays, short stories, and poems, each one a refutation of Prof. Collins’s discouraging words. I may have become a writer to dispel his perception that I wasn’t one.

by Elizabeth Bourque Johnson and Ted Bowman
editors of The Wind Blows, The Ice Breaks: Poems of Loss and Renewal by Minnesota Poets

Smile.
Love what you love.
Take a deep breath.
Walk in the other’s shoes—poems, that is. ~Elizabeth Bourque Johnson

At a conference of the National Association for Poetry Therapy some years ago, we (Ted and Elizabeth) just happened to sit next to each other at lunch, and in the course of the conversation—where are you from? what do you do?—we learned that we were both from the Twin Cities, wrote poetry, and shared an experience with writing and grief. Before the luncheon was over, Ted said, “I’m going to find a project for us to do together.”

by John Schaidler

Adapted from a discussion with parents at Salk Middle School (a Manhattan public school) by Dr. Mary Ehrenworth, Columbia Teachers College.

According to Dr. Mary Ehrenworth, one of the foremost experts on teen literacy, there is a direct, quantifiable relationship between a child’s ability to read and his or her overall academic success. The correlation is so strong, in fact, that even the most basic reading test can usually predict a student’s SAT scores—both verbal and math—with surprising accuracy. Not that it’s surprising to Dr. Ehrenworth. As students get older, she points out, they’re expected to read and comprehend longer, more complex works, everything from the proverbial 400-page “classic novel” to daunting 15-pound science textbooks. If they can read well, great, but if they can’t, they won’t keep up.

by Jodell Thorsett

One of my first activities upon moving to Minneapolis was finding volunteer opportunities, to put down roots in my new hometown and form instant connections to people with similar interests. As an aspiring theater critic, I was especially drawn to the rich and multilayered arts scene, with everything from regional stars like the Guthrie, Walker, and Institute of Arts, to daring experimenters at the Fringe Festival. Minneapolis-Saint Paul consistently rates first in volunteerism among large US cities. This year’s National Volunteer Week was April 10–16, but any time is the perfect time to explore the treasure trove of local volunteer offerings, and do inestimable good for others and yourself.

Most of this article first appeared in March 2007 in A View from the Loft. It has been updated to reflect Carol Connolly’s latest award.

Saint Paul’s Literary Grand Dame

Just after she was named poet laureate in July 2006, the Irish Gazette called Carol Connolly “Saint Paul’s literary grand dame.” “I love being named poet laureate for so many reasons. It was totally unexpected. It gives me the chance to do meaningful projects in support of poetry and poets, and write official poems which might go on to have a little life of their own. I’ll continue to support other poets and writers.” She  curates and hosts a monthly Reading by Writers series, now in its 12^th year. “I’m taking my job seriously without being too mesmerized by it. I’m not it; I’m representing it.”