Mary Carroll Moore's Blog

What’s new in my writing room: Honored to be included this year n the wonderful “How We Spend Our Days” series by author Cynthia Newberry Martin who has interviewed so many amazing writers (the likes of Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond and Dani Shapiro!) about a day in their writing life. It’s an inspiring look inside the process and imagination of each working writer, and I loved contributing. You can read about my (not-so-typical) writing day here.

Photo by John Murphey on Unsplash

I first learned about short self-assignments from Natalie Goldberg's well-known primer, Writing Down the Bones. Goldberg introduced the concept of "freewriting" to us with that book, and many writers discovered new energy to sail past writing stall-outs by giving themselves freedom to write small, short, and random.

Working on a book project often brings me a sense of being so overwhelmed, I can't think of anything to write about. I make brainstorming lists of topics, and this helps. But sometimes I have to write outside my story, just to get the momentum going again.

Short self-assignments help tremendously.

In another Natalie Goldberg book, Thunder and Lightning, I read her story of a time when she and a friend were stuck, unhappy, and unable to think of how to move forward creatively. They tried talking. They tried taking a hike. But nothing worked until they both sat down and did a timed writing session. As I remember the anecdote, they picked a topic outside their current writing projects, something that had less importance or weight, and this freed up the stuckness.

I wanted to share this idea if you’re finding yourself in need of a boost this week. For me, getting stuck is a normal process that helps me work my way out of repeating the same thing over and over. I’m forced to try something new and use my creative imagination.

One way I do this is by writing outside my story.

Writing your way back in from outside

In both painting and writing, I can become too timid—afraid of “messing up” what I’ve started but not realized fully.

Often, this leads to stuckness. I become overwhelmed with the importance of what I’ve already done and don’t want to risk! When this happens, I write outside my story by giving myself a very short self-assignment.

I use a list of random words. I set a kitchen timer for 20 minutes and let myself blah, blah on paper without worrying about quality or quantity. I come up with nothing, sometimes, so I try it again the next day. Eventually, the trick works. I come upon an idea, something completely new.

It might be a small idea, not really big enough to mess anything up, but enough to intrigue me. To mull it over, I take a walk.

This evening, when I tried it, I looked at the field behind our house, where the farmer just hayed, and the huge rolls of hay in the late sun reminded me of a Claude Monet painting. Somehow the image of that field and the thought of this artist gave me an idea for my struggling chapter.

I set the chapter aside and wrote for two hours about that field, that light, that idea.

At first, it seemed a detour. But as I wrote, I found it connected very subtly to my story, and there was a cool way to weave it in.

Felt like a miracle. Want one for yourself?

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

1. Pick one of the following words:

red
lamp
wicker
sparrow
gutter
fingernail
bottle
rusty nail

2. Set a timer for 20 minutes. Write anything that comes, using the word as a trigger. Don't think about your story. Write outside of it.

3. Put the writing aside and take a walk. Let the scenery around you bring something to your imagination.

4. When you get home, set the timer for 20 minutes again. Go back to a stuck place in your story. Bring what you've just experienced to the page.

Leave a comment

Shout Out!

I love to give a shout out to writing friends and former students who are publishing their books and encourage my newsletter community to pre-order or order a copy to show your support of fellow writers. Be sure to let me know 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! Just email me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! (I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Mary Walerak, Finding Alineade (Kirk House Publishers), August

Karen Lueck, The Green Thread: Reclaiming Our Spiritual Authority (Goodness Press), September

James Francisco Bonilla, An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness (University of Minnesota Press), November

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), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. it was also a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2024. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. 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.

What’s new in my writing room: if you haven’t read my latest novel, Last Bets, check it out—two women artists try to escape their lives by fleeing to a Caribbean island, but paradise isn’t what they find. About female friendships and morality, and how we rescue each other’s hearts in unexpected ways. Last Bets was selected for Kirkus Reviews' Top 100 Best Indie Books of the Year!

Check out Last Bets

Photo by Mario Dobelmann on Unsplash

How connected is your story’s plot with the characters that journey through it? Surprisingly, many writers, especially in early drafts, keep the two remarkably separate. And that’s not going to engage the reader, so what do you do about it?

First step is to find out exactly where your character and plot take separate roads. This isn’t always evident, so I’ve devised a couple of techniques to figure it out.

Then you have to mend the gap, fix the disconnect between storyline and character arc.

I’d like to share my process with my recent novel, Last Bets, and how this might help your story structure.

Structure keeps readers engaged

Not every writer believes in structure. I believe good stories, those that keep the reader engaged, structurally connect the plot and the character’s journey through it. In other words, what you choose for your plot is always, always related to some effect on the character.

No plot point exists without some effect—right? Otherwise, why is it there? Maybe you write a very cool scene, you want to include it, but are you asking the question: How does this relate to or affect my character?

Until you have an answer, that plot point is literally unanchored in your story’s structure. If it doesn’t serve the story, via the character, it may not belong.

Charting the plot points

Plot points are the dramatic moments that create your story structure. There are dozens of ways to chart them. I have used so many—and I keep coming back to the W storyboard because it’s versatile and nonlinear.

The storyboard is a tool favored by screenwriters but quite popular with writers of all genres. Below is a video where I explain the basic W storyboard and there’s a lot more about it in my book, Your Book Starts Here.

This video describes a simple one-narrator storyboard, but what if you are working with multiple points of view? More than one character narrating scenes or chapters? That’s the complication I chose with my last novel, Last Bets, and here’s how I used the storyboard to solve the plot-character connection.

Multiple characters equal multiple W’s

Two characters narrate Last Bets. They alternate chapters, each telling part of the story, in separate tracks, which converge by the end.

Trust me, it’s not the easiest road to follow. But it was the road I chose for this novel.

Plotting these two stories started on a huge storyboard with two separate W’s. I chose Post-It notes in two different colors, one for each character’s scenes. I started with one character and noted the main plot points, writing each on a Post-It note. Sometimes there was just one per planned chapter; sometimes a chapter would have several scenes that were all important plot points.

Once I had the first character’s main plot points, I placed them on the storyboard W. Then I did the same for the second character, on her W.

This showed me the individual storylines. I could see where they intersected or echoed each other. This was just the plot analysis, though. Next I had to see if the characters actually changed, or were forced to react, because of these scenes.

The effect of plot on character

I happen to have a lot of colored Post-It’s on hand, so I was able to choose a third color for the character arc. I used the same color for both W’s.

For each plot point, I asked myself how it affected the character. When it did, I wrote a new Post-It in the new color and placed it under that plot point on the character’s W. I did this all the way through for the first character, then continued with the second.

I tried to be very honest with myself as I did this, only adding the character change Post-It when it really was evident in the manuscript already.

A sad and dramatic lesson: Many plot points that I’d drafted—that I loved—had zero effect on the character involved. In fact, only about one-third of my plot actually worked, in terms of the character. That was sobering.

Reading aloud and asking questions

I’ve been down this discouraging road before. I have a handful of favorite “get unstuck” techniques when my plot and character are living in separate rooms.

Telling the plot points aloud. I went through each character's main plot points, talking them out loud as if telling the story to a listener. Hearing my own words often summoned up ideas that hadn’t yet appeared on the page. I used yet another color Post-It (to represent ideas that weren’t yet in the manuscript) and jotted notes then posted them next to the plot point I’d rework.

Asking a question. Questions trigger my creative mind, my imagination. I asked, What does she really want right here? and often, I could answer that question. It just wasn’t written yet, but the scene provoked it.

By the end of my plot-character analysis, I had many new ideas posted on the storyboard.

Longing starts a story

One of my two characters. Ellie, always felt a bit distant to me, even though her plot points seemed to track. So I asked a different question of her: What longing starts your story?

Longing is a magical key in story structure. Something the character desires will often drive their journey and make them face challenges that grow into crises.

When I asked Ellie about her longing, I had to travel way back in time. Diving into her backstory showed me the wounds she’d gained from an experience as a young girl, trying unsuccessfully to protect her sister who eventually died. This was the loss that drove all of Ellie’s choices, including those in this story.

So I was finally able to understand her elusive character and rework the plot points, to knit her journey with how she’d grow as a result.

When to try this

I recommend trying this kind of structure analysis when you’ve already got a lot of pages drafted, when your story feels fairly solid in terms of what’s happening (the plot), but you feel stuck or uncertain about how your characters intersect with it.

Again, I find the W storyboard an excellent tool for testing out your plot-character relationship. It’ll take you away from the actual writing, but when you return, it’ll be to a much stronger story structure.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Try the plot-character chart described above for one of your story’s narrators. See what you learn about how the plot intersects with the character’s growth—and where it doesn’t seem to have any relevance and needs rethinking.

You can try a storyboard for this exercise, using the video above or my book.

Or you can simply list your plot points then write the effect on your character next to each point.

Where do you have plot points that orbit nobody? What can you do to connect them to your character’s journey?

Share your thoughts and questions!

Leave a comment

Shout Out!

I love to give a shout out to writing friends and former students who are publishing their books and encourage my newsletter community to pre-order or order a copy to show your support of fellow writers. Be sure to let me know 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! Just email me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! (I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Mary Walerak, Finding Alineade (Kirk House Publishers), August

Karen Lueck, The Green Thread: Reclaiming Our Spiritual Authority (Goodness Press), September

James Francisco Bonilla, An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness (University of Minnesota Press), November

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), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. 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.

What’s new in my writing room: Honored to be included this year n the wonderful “How We Spend Our Days” series by author Cynthia Newberry Martin who has interviewed so many amazing writers (the likes of Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond and Dani Shapiro!) about a day in their writing life. It’s an inspiring look inside the process and imagination of each working writer, and I loved contributing. You can read about my (not-so-typical) writing day here.

Photo by Ian on Unsplash

Plot is the most basic outer-story structure your book can have. Fiction and memoir plots are all about action--what happens, where it happens, who is involved. It's always external, never inside someone's head. We see plotted events onstage, in front of us.

Nonfiction writers also use plot. Their outer story is about the method or ideas they are delivering.

Obviously, in both cases, plot that's predictable is boring. How many books have you picked up where you can foresee the ending so easily it's not even worth reading? Plots must surprise the reader, and therefore also surprise the writer. Again, nonfiction writers attend to this too--they have to present their material (their "plot" or outer story) in a way that shows its uniqueness.

Like agents will ask you: How is your book unique, different, a twist or a surprise? Plots give you this opportunity.

But most of us stay safe with our plots. We keep to the knowns rather than venture into material that will surprise. How do you get out of this rut, as a writer? How do you stop repeating yourself with predictable plotting?

Learning from Screenwriters

Some of the best outer-story writers are screenwriters. Movies must have interesting plots. Twists are normal coinage among filmmakers and the writers need to explore what WOULDN'T be expected.

Quite a few years ago, a friend sent me a great article by a storyboard artist who worked for Pixar. The article was published in the Wall Street Journal (a surprisingly good resource for craft information via its Word Craft column). Emma Coats, a storyboard artist on the movie "Brave," talked about what she'd learned about plot in her years developing animated characters.

Even if you're not a screenwriter, your characters may feel like they could use Ms. Coats's help to get more animated! These tips are universal.

I enjoyed all of them, but my top favorite for teaching plot is this simple formula:

Once upon a time there was ___.

Every day, ___.

One day ___.

Because of that, ___.

Because of that, ___.

Until finally ___.

A person (your character, yourself, your reader) is in a certain stasis; maybe a longing develops and a fire starts to burn. Often there is a triggering event that starts craziness, exacerbates the longing, and begins the hero's journey of your story. That breaks up whatever the "every day" life is, turning it into "one day" and changes.

Polar opposite

What are your characters good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

I've used this approach a lot (see the exercise at the end of this post for the way I teach it in my classes). It's called "working with opposites" and it's a perfect way to get out of a rut with your plotting. My favorite example was a writer from my class who used this exercise and suddenly found her story in a completely different city. It was true material, but she'd forgotten (discounted) it as a possible location. Made her writing perk up tremendously and got her completely unstuck.

A variation on this might be (again from Emma Coats):

When you're stuck, make a list of what wouldn't happen next. Often the material to get you unstuck will show up.

Although the Wall Street Journal article is no longer online, you can read more about Emma Coats’ 22 Pixar Rules here.

Stay in the Room

But my favorite piece of advice for good plotting comes from short-story writer Ron Carlson in his marvelous little book, Ron Carlson Writes a Story. If you were to have one inspiring book to keep your writing going, this would be it.

Ron's main tenant: Stay in the room. The coffee in the kitchen will call, the bed and TV will call, you'll worry that the rug hasn't been vacuumed in seventeen days, but stay in the room with the story when you're writing forward in plot.

I worked with Ron's book for one week, to see if I'd write more. I read a short excerpt before I began working on my chapters each morning. Then, predictably, I would get stuck (I always do) about twenty minutes in. The kitchen and snacks would call, the unvacuumed rug would leer at me. I picked up Ron's book again at each of those moments and read how he stays in the room, how he doesn't leave the story.

Like he says, the best writing he's done comes within twenty minutes after his first desire to leave the room.

I found that very true.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

1. Make a list of 10 things your character, you, or your reader (if you're writing nonfiction) would never do.

2. Pick one.

3. Set a timer for 30 minutes. Write a scene (fictional) where the person does that thing they'd never do. Imagine it thoroughly, and see what emerges about your plot that you'd overlooked. Maybe some unspoken longings and desires leak through this free write that give you new insight on your character, real or imagined, that you'd overlooked.

4. List your main plots points in your book so far and see if any of them address this new information you've discovered.

5. If not, consider how you might incorporate it.

Leave a comment

Shout Out!

I love to give a shout out to writing friends and former students who are publishing their books and encourage my newsletter community to pre-order or order a copy to show your support of fellow writers. Be sure to let me know 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! Just email me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! (I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Mary Walerak, Finding Alineade (Kirk House Publishers), August

Karen Lueck, The Green Thread: Reclaiming Our Spiritual Authority (Goodness Press), September

James Francisco Bonilla, An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness (University of Minnesota Press), November

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), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. it was also a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2024. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. 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.

What’s new in my writing room: Honored to be included this summer in the wonderful “How We Spend Our Days” series by author Cynthia Newberry Martin who has interviewed so many amazing writers (the likes of and Steve Almond and Dani Shapiro!) about a day in their writing life. It’s an inspiring look into the life of working writers. You can read about my (not-so-typical) writing day here.

Photo by Franco Antonio Giovanella on Unsplash

Short stories, for me, are a welcome break from long-form fiction and nonfiction. Books take so long, and stories are a quicker reward—although not necessarily easier. I’ve worked on my short stories over the past ten years every time I need a pause from the heavier lifting of novels. I’ve published around ten, won some awards, and generally enjoy the whole world of shorter work.

When my last two novels were released, I wanted a longer break so I dug out my short stories and looked them over.

You know that feeling when you revisit a piece of writing you wrote ages ago—and love it? It’s almost as if someone else wrote it. I fell in love with my short stories again last fall, and I decided to try putting together a collection.

I knew nothing about collections. But that didn’t stop me.

Looking for help

Whenever I stumble into a new writing area, a newbie again, I take a class or find a mentor. And I read. A lot. But there aren’t that many guides on curating a collection—or classes, for that matter.

First, I spoke with two writing colleagues who’d won contests with different small presses. Their collections were well published, and they loved the process. Both emphasized how different collections are now. Not a surprise, since publishing is vastly different too. They also said that there existed a lot of room for different approaches as well.

Both suggested I research small presses and what they’ve released in the last five years for short-story collections. Find the collections that fit my style and interest. Read widely, internationally, and begin taking notes on how collections are put together.

I tried. I floundered. I needed more structure. I decided to look for a class.

Finding a class

I’ve already been down the MFA road—I didn’t want another. So I scanned the online catalogues of writing schools I love. Classes on collections are few! Maybe because they are geared more towards writers who have already published individual stories or essays and have experience?

But in December, I learned that Grub Street in Boston was offering an advanced class, application-only, on collections. It was a five-month class, taught by an instructor I knew and liked. I applied, was accepted, and the class began in January.

Classes are a quick way to immerse and learn a lot in a short amount of time. My goal was to answer some basic questions about how to curate a collection. I also wanted to have my collection, in very rough form when I began the class, workshopped. Finally, I wanted to do that broad research and reading of collections from diverse cultures, to get more of a sense of what’s being published now.

There were nine of us, plus the instructor, and we met online each week for three hours. It grew into a strong and supportive cohort.

Questions to ask

When you’re very new to something, it’s almost hard to figure out what questions to ask, right? As we moved through the first weeks, reading a new published collection each week, I began listing the questions I needed to answer before I could curate my own stories.

What does a writer include in a collection—or not—and why? How would I select the right stories?

Did I need any overarching theme or focus of exploration (for instance, are all the stories about loss or grief or relationships or a small town)?

Do I need to link any of the stories (feature the same characters or place) or is it OK if they are completely separate?

What order should I choose to present them?

Do I follow the standard format of strong beginning and ending, and a strong middle that I’ve learned with my W storyboard work (see video here)?

Making a chart

I began creating a chart in Excel that listed the working title, page count, voice (first or second or third person narrator, etc.), tone of the story (light, serious, humorous), topic, and theme or message if I had one in mind.

I added a column for first and last line of each story, just to see how that varied (it did, a lot, but a few stories were boringly the same in how they started which gave me good clues for revision). I also noted if they’d been published, were finished in my mind, or were still in process.

I learned a lot from this exercise! It helped me take the first steps towards answering my curation questions, above.

What to include

I wanted to include my very best stories. I have about 30 in different stages, and as I said above, about 10 have been published or won awards. So those 10 were put aside as strong contenders.

I wanted to have a total of 15-20 stories, about 250 to 300 pages. Collections are usually shorter than novels, but the actual length varies so much! In class we read collections of less than 100 pages and much longer ones.

I guess the choice of stories came down to what they said, to me as the writer. And how they spoke to each other.

I chose 20 to start, then as the class went on and I began to seriously revise the unpublished ones, I narrowed it down to 15 that I really felt were successful.

Theme?

As I read more collections, I saw a real difference between those with an overarching theme or message and those that felt completely random.

Personally, I was drawn to the ones with a theme. It felt as if the author was fascinated with a topic and wanted to pass on certain questions or understandings about it, and I was happy to be part of that exploration. It also meant I was more apt to read the stories in sequence, rather than hopping around.

I decided I would curate my collection in rough form, then see if there was any theme that held the stories together, even loosely.

Linking the stories?

It’s fascinating to see how different authors approached the next task—whether the stories should be linked or not.

If the stories are in any way linked, that linkage can come from place, one or more characters, an event, an object (think The Red Violin), just as some ideas.

Usually, readers have to guess the reasons an author chose their stories for the collection. A lovely exception, one of our assigned books, was Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler. Butler is well-known to many readers for her novels and essays, and for being one of the few female African-American science-fiction writers at the time of publication.

In the new edition of Bloodchild, Butler includes an afterword for each story which explains why and how she put it together. Where the idea came from, in her own life. And what she was trying to achieve by writing the story.

Choosing an order

How you flow your stories is a big question if you intend for the reader to move through them in any sequence (see Theme? above). If you’re creating a very random collection, you still need to grab interest with the first story. So, as I learned in class, the order matters.

I grew up in journalism, using the W structure that many magazines use: a strong opening story, a strong middle-of-the-book story, and a strong ending. I developed this structure even more in my study of novels. The idea worked well, so I wanted to see if collections used it too. Many did. Sometimes, the opening story was the best story in the collection, sometimes the middle story was.

How can you tell? Feedback helped a lot, but it was quite subjective. I looked at my stories for their topic, trying to see if any particular issue or narrator would introduce the collection best. My collection-published colleagues suggested submitting the collection to presses using the absolute best story first. That editors would rearrange the order anyway, and you didn’t have much time to grab interest on submission.

I also looked at that column of first and last lines, thinking I could link them—create a flow that moved the reader naturally from one story to the next.

Finally, I asked if there were groupings within the collection. I have a number of stories about Paris—should these all be together? One beta reader suggested I group by natural element: air, earth, fire, and water. That was a cool idea to try.

All of this is part of the curation process. As I read more story collections by other writers, I get more of a sense of what appeals to me, particularly.

Workshopping

It’s hard to find readers who will take on a complete manuscript, but I’m lucky in my writers groups and others who have exchanged with me over the years. I could definitely get feedback on individual stories, which is always helpful, but I really needed it for the collection as a whole.

I wanted a reader’s take on how I tackled the questions above.

My class was generous—they read the unpublished stories and gave good feedback on them individually. A few of them, and the instructor, also read the whole collection for its order and flow and possible theme. And my beta readers are now diving in, so I hope to get responses from them to work on this fall and winter before I approach my agent with this new work.

In the meantime, I’m sending out the unpublished stories to see if any get accepted for individual publication. Some authors had all the collection stories previously published; some had none. Most had at least half.

And I continue to read to learn. I’m very grateful for this process—and still learning about it!

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Do you have any stories or essays that become part of an interesting collection? Do you have a longing or an interest to see them published in a group?

Here’s another author’s take on how to curate a collection, Vanessa Onwuemezi from the UK, writing in Writers & Artists.

And another one from Lit Reactor.

What are your biggest questions about curating a collection of essays or stories? What have you learned along the way?

Leave a comment

Shout Out!

I love to give a shout out to writing friends and former students who are publishing their books and encourage my newsletter community to pre-order or order a copy to show your support of fellow writers. Be sure to let me know 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! Just email me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! (I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Mary Walerak, Finding Alineade (Kirk House Publishers), August

Karen Lueck, The Green Thread: Reclaiming Our Spiritual Authority (Goodness Press), September

James Francisco Bonilla, An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness (University of Minnesota Press), November

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), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. it was also a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2024. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. 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.

What’s new in my writing room: if you haven’t read my latest novel, Last Bets, check it out—called “the perfect beach read,” it’s about two women artists on a Caribbean island known for its gambling tournaments, and how they each get into their own brand of trouble. Last Bets was selected for Kirkus Reviews' Top 100 Best Indie Books of the Year!

Check out Last Bets

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

Memorists have it hard, when it comes to characters. We may know these people so thoroughly, we unconsciously make them bland on the page.

Years ago, I got an email from one of my students who had a mini-breakthrough about the cast of characters in his family saga. It’s a mixed-up, even dangerous, family, in his view, and the players onstage were very individual, with unique quirks and tendencies, but he knew them so well, he'd not written that individuality onto the page.

Hard enough just to write the story, he told me. Decades later, he was still coming to terms with their effect on his adult life.

And bottom line, many of them were still around. So he’d decided to write what happened, not who’d done it.

Memorable memoir characters

We all have our reasons for blurring out how real people appear on the page. But characters in memoir must be as memorable as those in a good novel for readers to really grasp their importance and impact.

Yes, they are more than familiar to you, the writer. But they are still strangers to your reader.

I suggested this writer built a chart to track the growth of each of his main players, people who mattered to the story. During this (often tedious) chart work, his breakthrough arrived.

Charting the individuality

I have many versions of the character chart I shared with him. On his chart, I asked him to list three to five of the players along the left margin, then create columns with specific questions along the top. For each character, he’d answer these questions:

Favorite item of clothing

A physical habit

A tic

A gesture

Something they long for

Something they fear

As he completed the chart, he realized why certain people in his memoir appeared flat.
"I know them so well," he said, "but I didn't include any of these specific details.” He was amazed by this. “I didn't know how much I was leaving my characters open for guesswork by the reader.”

If the reader has to guess, if they have trouble picturing the person, if the character isn't different from other characters, they may not care about that person in the story.

Bypass your knowing

If the writer can bypass what they "know" about the character, basically treating them as a stranger, they begin to bring in the qualities that cause reaction and engagement by the reader. Because what's obvious to us, because of our long history with this person, is never obvious to the reader.

You can get this insight via feedback. Writer's groups, writing partners, agents, and editors are all helpful at pointing out where characters feel undeveloped. Memoirists can benefit from the same character development exercises that fiction writers use. As my student learned, this doesn’t mean you make up stuff about your familiars. You just learn to present them with vividness and uniqueness.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Pretend you're a reporter assigned to interview this person. Imagine asking your character questions--about things you know and take for granted or don't know. Write down the answers you get without second guessing them. Sometimes this taps into subconscious memory and things emerge that are helpful to your book.

Check out these character questionnaires from Writers Write. Spend time with them--you might be surprised at what you've omitted from your writing that winds up on the questionnaire. What did you discover?

Leave a comment

Shout Out!

I love to give a shout out to writing friends and former students who are publishing their books and encourage my newsletter community to pre-order or order a copy to show your support of fellow writers. Be sure to let me know 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! Just email me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! (I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Mary Walerak, Finding Alineade (Kirk House Publishers), August

Karen Lueck, The Green Thread: Reclaiming Our Spiritual Authority (Goodness Press), September

James Francisco Bonilla, An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness (University of Minnesota Press), November

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), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. 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.

What’s new in my writing world: I’m sharing links from the 35 podcasts I was privileged to be on during the promotion of my recent novels, including this interview on John Vogel’s show, Talking Writing, where we talked about finding connection through fiction. I share the logistics of publishing, what it was like to work with a marketing coach, and how I transitioned from professional food writing to novels and short stories. You can hear the episode here.

Photo by Tyler Callahan on Unsplash

In college I was a great fan of the writer Ayn Rand. Do you remember her, if you’re of a certain age? I have very worn-out copies of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, her two most famous novels, which I read and reread mostly for the female characters, who were stern cultivators of their personal freedom and never took no for an answer.

Rand is a controversial author, with a background you may not want to look into. Kind of like talks about in her book, Monsters, Rand is someone whose work we may admire while not quite admiring the artist behind it. (Check out this interesting piece on the Ayn Rand controversy from PBS, if you want to know more details.) Rand’s a quirky read, no doubt.

The real reason I’m bringing her into this week’s post is that she loved a soapbox. Without fail, one of her main characters launched into a soapbox rant towards the end of each story. If you’ve read Atlas Shrugged, you may remember the mysterious John Galt who takes a dozen pages to describe why he thinks the world is a misery and why he has taken control to create something else. Although it fits Galt’s character in the story and his mission, the rant takes us totally away from the story, in my view.

I always skipped those pages in the dozens of times I’ve reread Atlas Shrugged. I never once read the rant. Not even out of curiosity. Maybe because I don’t like being talked to, when I’d rather be enthralled.

Granted, it served Rand’s mission as a writer to preach her philosophy to readers who were already captivated by the story. Her reason for writing the books may well have been delivering this message.

When you have an agenda

Readers are often suspicious when a soapbox speech interrupts our regularly scheduled programming—the story itself. Agendas become a commercial break from the story, where the author takes the platform, sets the story itself aside, and promotes a cause.

Some readers may love these—if that’s you, don’t read on.

And surprisingly, more than just a few writers I encountered as a teacher and editor believe that their stories are simply platforms for their message. Yes, that works in some genres. But having an agenda is death to others. And learning how to deliver your message without breaking the reader’s engagement with the story—that’s the real magic act.

It’s not wrong to enter a writing project with a purpose. Many of us write to prove something, to share some truth, to encourage a reaction. Choosing your genre and weaving in the agenda, in a way appropriate to that genre, shows your skill and understanding of your reader’s needs.

Let’s look at the different genres and how this works.

Nonfiction

I’ve published a good handful of nonfiction books in my career. All of them had an agenda. That was the point.

In nonfiction, the purpose needs to be clear. We read the book because of the specific flag the author waves. Maybe it’s a flag of their expertise. Maybe of their experience. I’m talking about prescriptive nonfiction now, like that last how-to book you read. Do you recall how it presented a certain idea or method to fix or figure out some question you were exploring? Or that book of information you keep referring to. There’s a clear desire to share certain information.

That’s what the reader comes for. Nonfiction is the genre for agendas.

To qualify, the author must either be the knowledgeable one or present others who are. There’s a weight to nonfiction agendas; they must be backed up by expertise we can trust.

Memoir

Memoir is less about expertise, more about experience, as the truth it’s sharing.

Memoir, certainly, can have a mission to show some truth the author has discovered, but memoir by definition is more than just standing up and delivering that truth. It tells a story, it takes us on a kind of journey where we readers share in the discovery as it unfolds. We learn as you learn, in a way.

I personally feel memoir can still be outspoken about its agenda. The author’s beliefs can be clear on the page. But not in the soapbox format, if you want to keep your reader, because in memoir the story is paramount. You have to keep us in the “dream” of the story.

Often, too, in memoir (and in fiction) the agenda will change. Some of my favorite memoirs start with one authorial belief in life and end up with another. It’s the natural trajectory of growth.

So agendas can definitely be part of memoir as long as the agenda is a natural part of the story.

Fiction

In fiction, agendas are tricky, unless you’re an author who cares more about the message than the story. Rand, in my view, tells a marvelous tale until the point where she channels her book’s agenda through a character we’ve come to admire, and the agenda becomes what’s called soapbox writing.

Soapbox writing has certain elements which are all present in Rand’s work. I’m listing them here, so you can check if they are present in yours.

It usually speaks directly to the reader.

It’s often passionate, opinionated, persuasive.

It interrupts the flow of the story—it feels like a commercial break.

In early drafts of a novel or story, you may find yourself speaking from a soapbox—the reason you’re writing is front and center. The story itself hasn’t become alive on its own yet, perhaps. You’re still directing the show.

I say: go for it. Get it all out on paper, all the persuasive arguments of what you believe. Tell it through a character, if you want, like John Galt’s dozen pages of treatise. That’s the nature of early drafts—we get to rant freely.

As the story evolves, fiction writers have some work to do, to get down off the soapbox.

How to step down from the soapbox

My biggest learning around soapbox writing tendencies is to let them happen, as I said above, and get them out of the author’s system. Then—and here’s the most important clue—expect that you’ll need to go in and revise them into story.

Here’s how I step off my soapbox during revision and check my agenda at the door.

Figure out what my message might be, direct or subtle, and where it might lurk in the story. Am I revenging for someone in my past by creating a stereotyped character that meets a terrible end? Do I feel author rage or preaching in the dialogue? Are any of the characters a facsimile of John Galt, where they rant for paragraphs or pages?

Read for any direct address where author is talking to reader—this is always a clue of soapbox writing.

Check the interiority of characters (their thoughts and feelings) and ask if it really fits the character or if it’s the author (me) inserting my opinion and agenda.

Try making a case for something I am opposed to. Create a character who believes the opposite of my beliefs, test how they might fit into the story. Opposing views, presented realistically, often take a soapbox moment away.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

For more ideas on how to comb your writing for soapbox tendencies this week, check out this interesting discussion on Reddit about authors and their agendas. Test some of their ideas, or the ones above, and see if they help you balance your need to make a point with your desire to make a story.

Then share below:

What are your thoughts about this?

Have you struggled with soapbox writing now or in your past, as a writer?

What do you think of it, as a reader?

Leave a comment

Shout Out!

I love to give a shout out to writing friends and former students who are publishing their books and encourage my newsletter community to pre-order or order a copy to show your support of fellow writers. Be sure to let me know 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! Just email me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! (I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Mary Walerak, Finding Alineade (Kirk House Publishers), August

Karen Lueck, The Green Thread: Reclaiming Our Spiritual Authority (Goodness Press), September

James Francisco Bonilla, An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness (University of Minnesota Press), November

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), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. it was also a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2024. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. 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.

My Friday-morning newsletter resumes today. So strange to be away from all of you, this creative community, for a full thirty days, while I took my first break in writing this newsletter since 2008! I learned much by retreating, it was quite challenging in unexpected ways, and I came back with new ideas to share. Read on . . .

My plein-art painting setup, as I study water reflections.

Retreats and I have a love-fear relationship. The love is all that time, space, and possibility. That’s also the fear generator—like the blank page, I often don’t know how best to do my best. I’ve taught retreats and watched other writers hit this wall. But I also know how incredibly valuable they can be, with some planning, some courage, and a lot of luck.

I planned a courageous 30-day art challenge for the month of August. My latest manuscript, a short-story collection, rested in the hands of beta readers before going to my agent. I couldn’t mess with it anymore. So I scanned my creative life for what needed juice. It was my painting.

I’m a passionate plein air painter and writing and publishing two novels in the past two years had taken me too far from it. I needed to get back into gear.

So I decided to leap. Right into a retreat. Here’s what happened each of the four weeks and what I learned.

Pre-retreat: preparation

I thought for weeks about what I could commit to, on this retreat. What would be exciting and not too scary?

I decided that I’d do something connected with art every day. It didn’t have to just be painting. I wanted to get the creativity flowing and get my hands on the paints, of course. But I also knew I’d need warm-up time, and I didn’t want to shame myself if that took a few days or longer.

So I told myself I could explore all facets of art: creating with my hands, heart, mind; filling the well of inspiration, because inspiration fuels momentum, in my experience. Play with my art stuff. Go to a summer crafts fair. Read an art book or magazine. Talk with other artists. Go to a museum. Go online and take a workshop.

I knew that momentum came from immersion, and the love would begin to trickle back in. Love is a great fuel for artistic momentum, in my view.

Here are the “rules” I came up with:

Although I did not require a certain amount of time each day with my art, I had to do something connected to it each day of August.

I wanted to honor my best rhythm for when I work most creatively: usually in the early part of the day, especially when it’s hot.

Art came first each day, whenever possible. Some art activity before other tasks took me over.

It had to be portable. In August, we often travel to see friends. How could I take my art challenge with me? I wanted to set myself up for this, so it wouldn’t become a road block.

Whatever I created would be on display in my office or studio all month, so I could get satisfaction from how my efforts were manifesting.

I also kept a log of each week, what I did, what I struggled with, what I felt satisfied with, as notes in my journal.

Rules are just what you know at the time. I learned which of these worked and which needed adjusting by week four. More on that below.

Week one: getting the juices flowing

Week one was all about getting the juices flowing: gather my supplies, gain inspiration from other artists, begin to play.

First stop, my studio. I’ve had this creative space for ten years, use it a lot sometimes and neglect it other times. As you might know from this article on ’s “How We Spend Our Days,” my studio consists of a high-ceilinged room plus a storage loft in an artists’ collaborative, a restored mill building overlooking a river in our town. It’s about five minutes from home. Two easels are set under big windows next to my painting supply table. There’s good lighting, air filtration, storage shelves, music, and a round oak table for writing.

My only frustration is that I’m not painting outside. But generally, it works most of the year.

I first went to my shelves of art books and spent an hour browsing for ideas. I immediately pulled out an all-time favorite: Art Before Breakfast, by Danny Gregory. I planned to start my creative engines with a daily drawing exercise from Gregory’s book so I found a small sketchpad and a fine-point Micron pen.

Although I mostly planned to paint (I work in soft pastels, usually en plein air—outside), I knew it was more scary to paint every day than doodle or draw. So Gregory’s book would give me courage.

I found my travel easel, travel paint box, and painting “starts” (rough unfinished paintings started on location, waiting to be completed). Painting has been sporadic these past two years, as I said, because my two novels gearing up for publication took all my energy. So I had accumulated a good stack of starts to work on. A wealth to begin with!

What I took away from week one

Art before Breakfast drawing every day lubricates the gears.

Ditto, reading an art magazine.

I love our state’s annual crafts fair, so much amazing art!

Finally set up my outdoor painting easel—and I try to work on a start but get discouraged.

Getting started on any art challenge can be discouraging at first. I looked at my starts, thought about how well I might have captured a scene on location, then went immediately into fear of messing it up now! The light was completely different. I was trying to remember and reproduce from something I saw months ago in a different place and time. Even with a reference photo, it can be tough to capture.

So week one, I let myself get warmed up. I sorted through the starts and imagined what I’d do when I actually got outside, painting. But, of course, we happened to have a terrible heat wave that week, so painting outside was out except very early in the morning when I watered my garden.

Bummer. I reminded myself it was all OK, part of the plan, but I still felt like I was cheating not to actually paint.

Week two: take the show on the road

I had two trips planned for week two. One was a weekend at Tanglewood in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts where we hear beautiful music each summer. Two was a visit my sister’s family cabin on a lake in the Adirondacks of northern New York State.

I was excited to start actually painting outside the weekend of Tanglewood. I had a few hours between concerts. I set up my easel next to our camper van and got out the video I wanted to study from my favorite online teacher. But campground wi-fi was abysmal; the videos didn’t load. Even our Mi-fi took forever.

I gave up for that day and did some drawing.

Day two, I planned to work on a rough painting I’d started the previous summer. But when I sat in my camp chair to chat with my family, I promptly fell off the deck onto a pile of very sharp roots, nearly missing the circle of campfire stones! I didn’t notice the camp chair was perched on the very edge of the deck, with one leg unsteady, so when it toppled over with me on it, it was totally my fault.

The music, however, was outstanding.

We returned home early, me feeling even more frustrated about not moving ahead on painting. It was a good lesson, though. I am goal oriented and retreats are sometimes about giving up goals. I nursed my sore hip (grateful I hadn’t hit my head on the campfire rocks or broken anything). A few days passed, and I healed enough to pack for our second trip to the Adirondacks. It’s one of my homestead places on this planet, two of my novels are based there, and I’ve painted hundreds of scenes over the years of those particular mountains and lakes. I had high hopes of actually getting some outside painting time at last.

We arrived at our lake in pouring rain. The next morning was beautifully clear and I was excited to set up to paint on the big screened porch of the cabin. By midday, I knew another heat wave had swept in. Determined to paint anyway, I made ice cubes and a batch of fruit popsicles to help me stay cool. There was always the mountain lake, colder than you could imagine.

This is what I’d hoped for, although it took almost two weeks of my art challenge to manifest: uninterrupted time, painting outside, feeling totally immersed in my art. I even managed to have a few hours of magical flow where I lost track of everything but the painting process.

And on the edge of my awareness, even as I was swept into that flow, part of me was aware that I felt a tiny bit bored by what I was doing. I didn’t stop to analyze this, at the time. Realizations—good ones—came the next week.

I came away from our second vacation with three paintings in progress that I love. Halfway through my retreat, I could finally say I touched my art in a deep and mostly satisfying way.

What I took away from week two

Definitely got momentum week two, despite ouchy fall and bad heat.

Consistent painting practice (something every day!!).

I’m inspired by the landscape, I try new ideas: water reflections! Hard but fun. I give myself permission to make terrible art during that learning curve.

The second afternoon, I click into a flow that I always crave with writing and art—I forget where I am and stay immersed in painting for hours. Bliss.

Week three: new home routine

After our trip to the Adirondacks, I felt very satisfied with what I’d managed to do so far. I was definitely deep into my art again, despite that tiny (and growing) awareness that I needed something new that I couldn’t pinpoint. The art challenge was happening: I thought about the paintings constantly, and I was excited to get going each day.

But coming home means taking on all the responsibilities of home life that aren’t present when you’re on a trip—right? Especially true for women artists I know. When we arrived, there was laundry, grocery shopping, pet care, cleaning, and a thousand tasks in the garden. Home again didn’t automatically mean the painting continued to flow smoothly. I also wanted to paint outside, since I loved it so much from our trip. To make the rest of the month work for me, I needed to be in plein air, not in my studio.

But where? I’d gotten spoiled at the cabin, keeping my easel and paint box set up all the time on the screened porch. I wanted that ease and simplicity at home too. The biggest realization so far from my month was this: Location is vital to my continued practice of my art. I need air, light, and a view.

Before our trip, we’d finished some needed house painting on a small and sheltered side porch. It’s not used much except for storage but it had gotten run down. In a burst of energy we’d cleaned it out and my spouse painted the latticework. When we got home, I scouted for a sheltered outdoor location to set up my easel. The porch was perfect.

I painted almost every day, with this wonderful new setup. Not all day, like I had at the cabin, but enough to keep me quite satisfied.

What I took away from week three

I get a rhythm and routine that worked at home, outside, in the perfect spot.

I work on three more paintings, continuing my water reflections with what I learned at the lake. Got them to an almost-finished state and set them out to study and think about.

I studied a few tutorials from an online teacher I like. Especially on water reflections. New ideas and tips, practiced!

I really feel in the groove now, successfully transitioning my daily art to the home environment.

Week four: realizing next steps and creating an ongoing practice

Practice is everything to me, with my creativity. One reason I’ve written this newsletter for seventeen years! I believe all creators need a sustainable practice, and when we stall out, it’s because the practice needs revamping. Either the time, the location, the steps we take are no longer working for us. Or we’ve plateaued and need new inspiration.

My writing practice has always sustained me, but I worked for decades to get it so, adjusting and renewing as needed. This month was all about doing that with my art, but I didn’t know it at the start. I didn’t yet see what had stalled me out. I thought it was the lack of time, but really, it was much more complex.

The final week of my challenge, we were blessed with 70-degree days. Everything calmed down—the garden wasn’t constantly SOS-ing me for water, the harvest was up to date, and I could let the outdoors rest. I walked in the early morning, thinking about my painting. Then I painted on my little porch. By the end of week four, I had five paintings at an almost-finished stage.

Best of all, I no longer worried if I only painted for a short time any one day; I knew I was hooked into practice, I knew I’d get back to it. Because of the lovely weather, I could leave my easel set up and available any time I wanted to paint. I loved seeing my almost-completed work hung around the house.

A huge ah-ha for me: location mattered to my art practice! I am primarily a landscape painter, I paint outside where I can see the landscape and feel it entirely. Some plein air painters paint in winter; I’ve tried it, and it’s difficult. But thanks to my retreat, I now know the importance of where I paint. So that’s a question to be pondered and worked on in the next months as fall and winter arrive to New England.

What I took away from week four

The practice became more solid. Less fear of dropping it completely, even if I skip a day. More permission to “waste” time on reflection. Everything counts.

I feel completely pleased with the paintings I did, and I know they’ll get more attention as I get ideas on what else they need to be finished. I love the freshness of many of them, and that’s something I don’t want to overwork.

I’m completely comfortable with my outdoor painting setup on the road and at home now; I’ll try to carry this into my studio when it’s time. But I’m also newly aware that I’m very influenced by the space where I create. I found the perfect outdoor places to set up this month, so I painted regularly.

I came away from my 30-day art challenge with many joys and a couple of uncomfortable realizations. One was: I think the tiny hint of boredom is a sign I’m plateauing in my painting skills. I’m repeating what I already know more than venturing into new territory. I need a boost to the next level: a class, the online lessons I’ve tried to follow, something.

I also realized my indoor space, however incredible, is nowhere near as inspiring for me as the outside.

It’s always possible that immersion will reveal something that needs rethinking or reshaping. And that’s not a bad outcome at all.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

How does this post translate to your writing practice? Or any other creative activity you long to do more of? See if any of these “learnings” from my art month relate in any way to your creative practice, writing or otherwise.

Let us know in the comments below.

And if you joined me in the art challenge, what else could you add from your experience?

Warm-up time looks like wasting time but it’s internal work that helps me get my creative bearings before I start.

The right space, time, set up means everything.

A solid rhythm in practice makes less fear of losing the momentum. More trust that I’ll return easily to what I love.

There are going to be obstacles. It’s a given. How they are faced and moved past is the make or break. Allow for the delay or detour, then resume the practice.

Leave a comment

Shout Out!

I love to give a shout out to writing friends and former students who are publishing their books and encourage my newsletter community to pre-order or order a copy to show your support of fellow writers. Be sure to let me know 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! Just email me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! (I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Mary Walerak, Finding Alineade (Kirk House Publishers), August

James Francisco Bonilla, An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness (University of Minnesota Press), November

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), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. it was also a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2024. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. 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.

Vacation time! I’ll be pausing my posts for the month of August, to take some much needed time for my own writing and my family and just lazing through the last of summer here in New England. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll automatically get an extra month added. Posts resume the first Friday in September!

What’s new in my writing room: Honored to be included this year n the wonderful “How We Spend Our Days” series by author Cynthia Newberry Martin who has interviewed so many amazing writers (the likes of Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond and Dani Shapiro!) about a day in their writing life. It’s an inspiring look inside the process and imagination of each working writer, and I loved contributing. You can read about my (not-so-typical) writing day here.

Photo by Juan Jose on Unsplash

Summer is a great time to renew your perspective about your writing. Maybe one reason so many writers attend workshops and retreats in summer, or try challenges like ’s #1000words. We need to occasionally retreat from our usual life. We need to try something brave and new.

Creative practice works best, I’ve found, when it comes from love, not pressure. This may be a surprise to those who feel they need more discipline to get stuff done. Yes, discipline helps you get in gear, no doubt about that. But after a while, a discipline-motivated practice gets stale. At least to me. I begin to resent the pressure.

What else might work? For the past year, I’ve been trying love. Not the Hallmark variety but the type that emerges from the inside and makes the best kind of changes on the outside.

I didn’t come by this naturally. It came from freedom born out of a kind of trauma.

Unexpected freedom from trauma

In February, my spouse had a long-avoided hip surgery. I’d been the caregiver for six years, as we tried every possible option to avoid this surgery. Some surgeons said it would be incredibly difficult, given the circumstances. We found a surgeon who believed it would be simple and totally right, and the procedure was a huge success. A life-changing one.

As my spouse got mobile again, my own life became completely different too. No longer was I the only one taking care of our daily lives. (If you’ve ever been a caregiver through a major illness or disability and come out the other side, you know what I mean.)

I was astonished by the new freedom I had, freedom to pay attention to myself.

Of course, I’d taken care of my work life during those years. I’d finished and published two novels. We adopted two special-needs puppies. I grew my garden. But all of this happened along with the daily pressure of caring for someone who was becoming more and more disabled.

When the change happened, when we got our lives back (in better shape!), I realized how depleted I was. I needed rehab too! I thought a lot about what that might look like, and I saw two areas of great need: exercise and creative risk.

My 30-day creative challenge

I tackled the exercise first, even though it was still winter here in northern New England.

I set up a plan: I’d walk for 45 minutes each morning, as slow and easy as I wanted. I’d go, no matter the weather. We have a great walking route on our country road, although it’s not easy (some killer hills) and I love being alone in nature.

Killer hills don’t automatically mean slow and easy. The first day I panted up the big hill, vowing I’d never try this again. No clue how out of shape I’d become this past year as my spouse’s disability grew more severe. I staggered home, mentally quitting then and there. But a tiny voice said, Just wait til tomorrow morning, see how you feel then.

After a night’s sleep, a good one thanks to my efforts outside, I put on my walking shoes and bundled up and tackled the hills again. It was a tiny bit easier, not much. Again, I didn’t decide about tomorrow. I slept, then walked again. Days grew into weeks. Each morning I asked myself if I wanted to try a little walk, then I did it.

Without meaning to, my success came from an approach that was no pressure. Each day was a new decision to walk my country road. To date, I’ve walked every single morning, with only three missed due to pouring rain. A lot more challenge than just 30 days. My stamina and strength have increased; the hills aren’t easy but they are quite manageable now.

I began enjoying my daily practice so much, I didn’t want to stop.

And that’s exactly how any kind of successful practice is built. One small step, then another. Deciding each day to take the risk. Keeping the pressure low, building from love.

Building from love, not pressure

Pressure isn’t a friend of sustained practice, in my view. And after six years of caregiving, it certainly wasn’t a motivator for me. I’m super responsible but the thought of another “to do” deflated any enthusiasm for a new challenge like walking.

I walked each morning from love, not pressure. I built my exercise plan from my love of being outside and how my body feels with regular movement in nature. I rode on that love as momentum, rather than any external pressure or internal “have to.”

Structure helped. I learned to set out walking gear the night before. I chose a routine to follow—get out the door by 7:00 a.m., walk only 45 minutes, stretch before and after. The simplest of structures but valuable.

I also made sure I didn’t self-sabotage by scheduling competing stuff early in the morning. All too easy to do!

The litmus test was my unexpected unease when I got an invitation from dear friends to visit for the weekend. I was very amused to realize that the unease came from fear of missing my walk. Once I figured out how I’d walk around their neighborhood and get in my 45 minutes, I said yes.

A writing practice from love, not pressure

So many writers feel they need pressure, that good self-discipline, to write regularly. This may help jumpstart a writing practice, for sure. But sustain it? I haven’t ever seen pressure work long-term, unless it’s the good kind, like a signed contract with your agent or publisher. And even then, some writers fold under such pressure.

When I try love instead, I find it sustains me longer and I’m much happier with my writing practice.

If you love writing, if your writing gives something back to you, it’s going to keep you committed. I’m so convinced that this love is a true generator of enthusiastic engagement, I decided to test it out for myself as part of my “rehab” from caregiving.

My current writing project, a collection of short stories, had also been put aside when I felt so depleted from attending to my spouse’s needs. I loved the stories and I wanted to get back into them.

Just like getting my walking gear together and deciding on a route, I knew I needed a structure for support with this creative challenge. So I signed up for an online class specifically on how to curate a short-story collection. My perspective got expanded as we read different published collections, analyzing them for the order and flow and cohesion (or lack of) of topics. I learned a lot more about what was missing from my collection as I got feedback. I fell in love with the stories again, and I got excited about revising.

Each week, the instructor offered prompts and ideas, so I took them into my daily writing sessions. I began using charts and graphs, studying first lines and last lines of each story, pulling the ones that didn’t really fit and adding new ones that did. Eventually, a cohesion among the topics emerged, a way to thematically thread them as a book.

How I’ll use this in August

My collection is revised and I’m both excited and proud about it. It’s now with my three beta readers, and I’ll hear more in September. Which frees up August for another challenge.

I thought a lot about what I wanted to renew this month. Two of my biggest goals have been met this spring: regular exercise and the revision of my short-story collection. So what else waited in the wings for me, creatively?

Turns out, art. I was a painter, a visual artist, long before I became a writer. And although writing is my main squeeze in this lifetime, I love art. I have a dedicated studio as you might have read about (and seen) in this interview on “How We Spend Our Days,” with , and although my creative days often include painting, I wanted to give it more space and attention. Now I could.

August will be my art month. With love, not pressure, I’m dedicating my month to a daily dabble in art in some form.

It might be as simple as sitting on our screened porch with a journal and colored pencils for half an hour. It might be as formal as taking another painting lesson from my favorite online teacher, via Epiphany. It might be all kinds of handwork, making stuff. Or immersion in a magazine series I subscribe to, What Women Create and Where Women Create.

What will you start loving this month?

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

If you have the space and time to join me for all or part of my 30-day challenge, start with these questions:

What in your writing or creative life could use more love and less pressure?

Is there a languishing project or desire that you haven’t been able to embrace fully?

What might be one small first step to relaxing the pressure around it and loving it more?

Share your challenge with our community, if you wish. No pressure, just love!

Leave a comment

Shout Out!

I love to give a shout out to writing friends and former students who are publishing their books and encourage my newsletter community to pre-order or order a copy to show your support of fellow writers. Be sure to let me know 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! Just email me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! (I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

James Francisco Bonilla, An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness (University of Minnesota Press), November

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), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. 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.

Vacation time! I’ll be pausing my posts for the month of August, to take some much needed time for my own writing and my family and just lazing through the last of summer here in New England. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll automatically get an extra month added. Posts resume the first Friday in September!

What’s new in my writing room: If you haven’t read my latest novel, Last Bets, check it out this summer—called “the perfect beach read,” it’s about two women artists on a Caribbean island known for its gambling tournaments, and how they each get into their own brand of trouble. Last Bets was selected for Kirkus Reviews' Top 100 Best Indie Books of the Year!

Check out Last Bets

Photo by Explore with Joshua on Unsplash

Last week’s post discussed the idea of power positions in story. (If you missed it, here’s the link.)

We looked at . . .

Who is the character with the most agency, in the entire story, in a specific scene?

Does that change or stay static?

Considering power positions allows the writer to do something called “revising up.” Not always possible in early drafts but definitely necessary in later ones.

In essence, revising up is about adding elements that increase the heat of the scene or story.

How to revise up

Let's say you write a first-draft scene where a character (or real person--if you're writing memoir) sits drinking coffee in her grandmother's kitchen. The talk might have undercurrents, subtext, but nothing is overt. No fights, no arguments, no stomping out of the room. Nothing yet to raise the stakes.

Nobody’s in a power position—they are just trying to keep the peace.

When revising up, you might:

1. Introduce a third person who presents a challenge (three often is a stronger number in scenes than two, and this third person could be the power player in the scene, thereby changing its direction).

2. Raise the narrator to a level of more agency—for instance, they decide to go ahead and meet a challenge that they have been avoiding.

Camera shifts

Sometimes revising up is just as simple as changing the camera’s focus, what the reader sees.

Focus the camera on a challenging part of the setting, placing the power in that location. Something is broken and suddenly noticed, for example. Something is missing. Someone has left something out on the counter, which tells a whole story in itself.

It can be small

I remember a student who was working with revising up, using a scene for her memoir. The scene took place the day after her father died unexpectedly.

The household was in terrible grief. She and her aunt were having breakfast in the kitchen. There was essentially nothing happening, but all that grief was a heavy atmosphere. She needed something to ratchet up the tension because the draft was sluggish.

Interestingly, the writer herself felt the scene was already full of tension. She was speaking of the deep misery inside each of them, via long silences and sighs, wasn’t she? But to me, and her writing group, it came across low key and almost ho-hum.

I asked her to look at her smallest details, what she’d included both about the location and the two people in it.

Ask herself if there was a power element in these details. Something that could become a challenge. Something that she'd been ignoring or downplaying because she knew the scenario so well.

She found two. Her aunt's sweater was buttoned wrong and her aunt was always a snappy dresser. The writer had not included the narrator's reaction to this. Once highlighted, it showed the deep confusion in the aunt's heart about her brother's sudden death.

Also, a broken glass in the sink stayed there all morning--no one cleaned it up.

When she expanded these two power elements (both were tense to her, challenging the norm), the scene's tension exploded. She’d successfully revised up.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

This week’s exercise is unexpectedly potent if you’re revising a story or book manuscript and want to increase the heat. Try it this week and share your thoughts!

1. Make a list of all the main players in your current story.

2. Rank them in order of power--power means they cause change in the story, in a big or small way.

3. Make another list of locations--rank them according to their ability to enact change.

4. Pick a scene or chapter that is not tense enough. Ask yourself if you've followed the power rules above. What can you add, change, or move to increase the power elements and raise the tension?

Leave a comment

Shout Out!

I love to give a shout out to writing friends and former students who are publishing their books and encourage my newsletter community to pre-order or order a copy to show your support of fellow writers. Be sure to let me know 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! Just email me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! (I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

James Francisco Bonilla, An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness (University of Minnesota Press), November

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), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. 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.

What’s new in my writing room: Honored to be included in the wonderful “How We Spend Our Days” series by author who has interviewed so many amazing writers (the likes of and Steve Almond and Dani Shapiro!) about a day in their writing life. It’s an inspiring look inside the process and imagination of each working writer, and I loved contributing. You can read about my (not-so-typical) writing day here.

Photo by Ian Stauffer on Unsplash

Power isn’t something I think of in story, either as a reader or writer. But when I first learned about power positions in scene, it radically changed the amount of tension in what I was writing.

Who is the power person in each scene of your story?

Who is the character that holds the control over present and future outcomes?

Who will most easily score the home run?

Once I identify that character, I can begin to work the elements of tension in my fiction and memoir more skillfully.

Two or more elements

To create tension or “heat” in a scene, two or more elements of power must face off. One wins out, usually, just like drivers jockeying for first position at a lane merge. How many sit back and let the other driver in? Hopefully, a few. But more often than not, I witness the push of power.

Why? Because we are trying to exert control over our lives, when it might not be offered elsewhere.

So must characters on the page. Story is even more about that give and take of power, that gain and loss of control over oneself and one's circumstances.

What does power in story mean?

"Power" in a story means that character has the ability to evoke change in the status quo. The one who achieves this, drives the story forward. Characters who are powerless do not.

And the character who starts out powerless but somehow gains power, or agency if you want to use a more palatable term, is the most interesting to readers.

Many years ago, I read a novel that featured three main characters, three different women who loved the same man. The first woman was powerless; she became an alcoholic and couldn't take care of her children for most of the novel. The second was more powerful; she was a journalist with money and smarts. The third started out very powerless, living with a serious disability, but she figured out her life and ended up better off than any of the others.

Guess who was the most interesting character to me, the reader? The one who gradually increased her control over her life. Her power.

Safe is not great for story

Many writers want their characters to stay safe, to not risk. This is fine in real life—we all crave a measure of safety and security, especially in turbulent times. But in story, it’s a downfall.

If good remain good and the nasty, fall, it can be boring. Safe in literature, essentially, is boring. Why? Because power never shifts. That kind of predictability causes a tension stall out.

Who fights whom for what?

Power positions work with characters internally--how they feel about their own ability to change their worlds. It also operates between characters. Who controls whom? “Who fights whom for what,” to paraphrase screenwriting guru John Truby.

If a character isn't willing to fight to gain more control over their life, if they stay safe within the known boundaries of their power or lack of it, the tension drops.

So it pays to look at the power balance in your scenes. Ideally, the power balance within and without should shift from beginning to end--as characters realize things, make decisions, grow. As they fight for what they want.

Too much difference isn’t interesting, either

Here's another cool rule I learned:

Not much tension arises when I pair a high-power player with someone completely not in power. There's no mystery as to who will win. Each stays safe within their known world, where the rules are familiar. The weaker person is always dominated. Ho hum.

Interest skyrockets when the weaker person suddenly begins to change, get more strength, find more clues, work with more tools--as that third character in the novel I just finished reading. The outcome is unexpected, I got more engaged.

MG and YA stories are super examples of this, maybe because their plots are simpler or the desires of young narrators are more straightforward. I think of Katniss in The Hunger Games or Harry Potter. Weak to start, gathering strength as we go, the power shifts and they become the heroes by the end, affecting everyone. This makes for an exciting story.

Setting as a power player

Power elements aren't only played out through characters. A hostile setting, or location, in your story can be almost a character in itself and shift the power balance. Think rivers that flood, tornadoes that sweep through a town, fires. Even a sinister object (a jackknife) in an otherwise normal location (rest-area restroom) brings an element of power that will affect the story.

Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River, once said in an interview that if he notices his characters are in the same room for more than a page, he gets them out of there. I wrote that down. The location that's not generating conflict is not a power location.

When we feel stuck and see that nothing's moving forward very well, it's likely we're neglecting the power rule. Ask who the power person is in the scene, and change it up. Ask what the power location is, and have it act upon the characters.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Look carefully at a scene or story where you get that ho-hum reaction, even as the writer. Who is the power player in the scene? (Is there even one?)

Play with these ideas:

Rework the scene to increase the power or agency of one character while perhaps decreasing another’s.

Add a powerful element of setting that influences the story considerably.

Bring a powerless character to more agency by giving them a secret super power they may not have ever valued.

Leave a comment

Shout Out!

I love to give a shout out to writing friends and former students who are publishing their books and encourage my newsletter community to pre-order or order a copy to show your support of fellow writers. Be sure to let me know 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! Just email me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! (I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

James Francisco Bonilla, An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness (University of Minnesota Press), November

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), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. 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.