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 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 Ben Obler

Writing a novel is a ridiculous task. If we can stop and recognize that fact every once in a while, we can ease our burden. Yes, nose to the grindstone for much of the time, scouring for the profound, the heartening, the heart-rending, the enlightening. But this effort is taxing on the constitution. We have to stop from time to time, set the keyboard on end, and take a deep breath. In these moments (in the colossal time frame of novel writing, moments may be weeks), we step back and try to assume the attitude that Buddhist writer Pema Chodron calls “no big deal.” Easier said than done.

by Mark Herwig

I have purchased hundreds of articles, photos, and illustrations for the three outdoor magazines I’ve edited the past 13 years out of White Bear Lake, Minnesota. I’ve also sold quite a few freelance articles, including this one, so I know the game from both sides.

The writers I consistently buy from always have good ideas. People can be good writers, but if the ideas they shoot me don’t work, that’s the end of it. If I like an idea, but the writer is new to me, I ask for the story on “spec” (speculation); that is, I only agree to buy it if I like it.

If someone is a known entity or has done good work for me on several occasions, and if I’ve given the assignment or accepted the query, I’m paying for the article, period. I make one exception: if I get a great, unique idea from a rookie writer, I’ll let him or her write the article knowing I’ll end up doing a lot of editing to make it usable. I like helping new writers, and they are so grateful.

by Pat Dennis

I first became aware of the waif-like woman with the warm, big eyes at Once Upon a Crime Mystery Bookstore. Theresa Weir was one of 50 or so authors scheduled for the annual Write of Spring daylong book signing. When I shook her hand, she introduced herself as “Anne Frasier.” Embarrassed, I mumbled that I hadn’t read any of her novels. Her subsequent laughter made me feel so welcomed.  I immediately purchased one of her books. After reading her thriller Hush, I decided to read all of this author’s work—a daunting task because Anne Frasier’s real name is Theresa Weir.

Theresa Weir/Anne Frasier is the best-selling author of 19 books in multiple genres, including suspense, mystery, thriller, romantic suspense, and paranormal. Theresa was born into a blue-collar family and when divorce hit she grew up in poverty. After high school, she worked as a waitress, then at the Levi Strauss factory and ended up tending bar in rural Illinois. There she met an apple farmer and three months later, they were married. After moving to the farm, Theresa, a natural-born storyteller, decided to write a novel. At the time, she was so unaware of the writing process she didn’t know if a manuscript should be single- or double-spaced, or what she should do with the book once she finished it. A year later she mailed her manuscript to the address of a publisher she’d found inside a book. As happens with most novice writers, her manuscript was sent back with a rejection notice. She sat down, rewrote the story, and mailed it off again and again. Three years later, the cult phenomenon Amazon Lily was published.

The McKnight Artist Fellowships turn 30 this year. McKnight Fellowships for Writers have been administered by the Loft for all of those years. The fellowships allow writers to devote time to their craft. The Fellowships for Writers guidelines are posted for the next round of winners.

In reflecting on the success of writers and this anniversary, the View asked a recent judge and two winners of McKnight fellowships what the judging/being judged process is all about. Bernard Cooper‘s and John Reimringer‘s responses are below. You read Wang Ping’s answer last week.

Now you, gentle reader, can see the ins and outs and be inspired to apply, apply, apply. All the best to you. –Ed.

Here are the questions answered by Bernard Cooper and John Reimringer. 

• Do you get into a certain mind-set as a judge?
• How do you choose winners? What is your system?
• What influences your decisions? (One judge in the Loft’s history of contests encouraged          people to keep applying. She intimated that what applicants can’t know is the state of mind and emotion the judge is in. Did she just have a fight with her partner? Did her child fall ill? Judges have normal lives, too, and just because you got a “no” this time . . .)
• As teachers, you’ve all had the “OMG, this is great/has potential” moment when you’re reading a student’s work. What do you say/not say to that person?
• What do you wish someone had said/not said to you in your early writing days?
• Why keep applying? Is math, strategy involved?
• Are some people more likely than others to want their work judged? How do you get to that point? Is it a personality trait?

And Bernard Cooper says:

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 Patricia Weaver Francisco

My mother and my brother had a running battle about the existence of what she called “true facts,” a species fundamentally different from its less glamorous, less noteworthy cousin, the fact. A true fact is a slippery character, she was first to admit, but she knew one when she saw it. My brother countered that a fact is a fact is a fact because a fact is simply true. A true fact makes no more sense than a near miss, he’d say, calmly claiming victory. Ah, my mother would smile, my point exactly. A miss and a near miss are entirely different matters . . .

by David Housewright

Despite what you might have been told in grade school, people are not the same everywhere. They are different, and where they are from and how they live are part of what makes them different.   

This is why setting is so essential to a book or story.   

An important goal of any writer is to achieve reader identification. We want readers to see themselves in the lead character, to share the leader’s thoughts and emotions. Certainly, this sort of identification has a great deal to do with whether or not we find a work of fiction involving enough to stay with it and what we’ll think about it once we’ve finished reading. The more we feel that the lead character is a person like us, that he thinks and reacts like we do, the more involved we will be in his story. 

by Kimberly J. Brown

As writers, how do we achieve a breakthrough? Is it possible to surprise and delight ourselves with what we write? Yes, but the question is how. We can sit at a desk and write, but how can we access the uninhibited images lurking beneath our consciousness?

For me, it’s writing in the dark. In the liminal state.

The liminal state is that transitional state of consciousness that’s half awake, half asleep. The name comes from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold.