Path of Least Resistance

What's the path of least resistence, when it comes to writing and publishing a book?

I've found you need three things: persistence, support, and inspiration. This blog was started to provide them all--the accountability that comes from regular writing, showing up at the page (whether in your notebook or on the computer) with practice; a forum for book writers to gather online; and inspiration via stories from those who've published.

But sometimes you need another step, a real-time gathering of writers like yourself.

My next round of weekly book-writing classes begins Monday, September 21, at the Hudson Valley Writers' Center near NYC. These three-hour classes meet Monday afternoons for 6 weeks each fall and spring. We go through the basic steps to organizing and manifesting a book in any genre: writing "islands," storyboarding, editing, theme--all the keys you'll need.

Plus you get weekly feedback on your writing from me.

Cost is $355 for 6 weeks, 3 hours a week. The Writers' Center is a beautiful writing school in Sleepy Hollow, NY, near Tarrytown. Sound like a good fit? Please email me (mary@marycarrollmoore.com) or call the Hudson Valley Writers' Center at 914-332-5953. You can also email them (info@writerscenter.org) or visit www.writerscenter.org for more details.

Hope to see you there!

Keeping It Contained--Why Writing Short Can Help You Write Long

Sometimes we have to get small to get big, with our books. But it can also feel like a sidetrack away from the "important" writing. A writer from one of my book-writing weekend workshops wondered about this. She wasn't sure if the short stories she was suddenly drawn to were valuable detours or derailments.

"I'm working on Week 7 toward a January 1 rough draft date," she wrote, referring to a goal-setting plan each writer sets up for herself in my workshop. "I have a nag buddy, which has been a great driver for me and for her. I'm doing well meeting my committment but I veered off into writing a short story, which will somehow end up as part of the book. I wonder if this has happened to you. Have you gone to something else just to keep writing? It irks me to have to ask this question, but I don't want to be diverting myself from the book writing, and I don't want to kid myself. On the other hand, all writing can go toward something, and I don't know where this book is going."

Are you a memoirist who's working on essays as a relief from The Book? Even publishing a few in advance of finishing your longer work? A novelist noodling around with short stories? Believe me, this is normal--and a lifeline during the book-writing journey. I began my writing career as a newspaper columnist. Columnist write each week, on deadline, and their output is intense but brief. When I slid into fiction, I started with short stories. They were also intense but brief. Short pieces of writing taught me so much--about pacing, dialogue, the tension arc, the beginnings and endings.

Lessons I learned for my novel Qualities of Light, which began as a series of short stories about the same group of characters. I was working from small to large, and an agent gave me timely feedback, pointing out the most compelling of the stories and saying the manuscript could become a novel centered around it. And so it did.

In the long years of writing my novel, I needed breaks of brief intensity. I consciously diverted to short stories each summer. It was too much during the hot weather to think about 350 pages, so I thought about 20. Each summer I'd come back from my "vacation" into short form fiction refreshed and ready for the long haul.

So short is good. It's not derailment, it's valid detour. Most writers need to write short in order to stay with the longer work. So I'll propose this writing exercise--which will seem to some like a total diversion. It's not. It's going to inform your book, I'm sure of it.

Poem Exercise

Create a haiku or short poem about your book, as it is now. Try to have the beginning, the ending, and the main conflict included in a few brief words. Then add a line about the main setting. And a line about the emotional container (see post below, two weeks ago).

Like short stories, poems are great ways to refresh yourself, get new perspective, take a much-needed break for the creative brain. Thanks to writer Stuart Dybek for the idea. And to answer my student's question: Yes, by all means write short stories. Dive into them for a month or two, then bring what you learn back to your book.

Persistence--What You Learn When Your Book Is Finally Published

This week my long-awaited (to me, at least) novel will be published. I began writing it nine years ago while vacationing at a lakeside cabin with friends. To acknowledge the hard work it took, today I listed my activities of persistence--what it took to finish it.

1. I hired two coaches

2. I went to five series of writing classes

3. I enrolled in two years of an MFA program

4. I joined three writers' groups

5. I wrote every day for many months

6. I found a great weekly writing partner

All this helped. But in the end, it got finished--and published--because of one small writing exercise, which I'll explain below.

Belief and Persistence

I've worked with thousands of book writers. Many finish their books. Some don't. They are sometimes very talented writers with great stories to tell. Stopping mid-process puzzled me. But as I worked with more writers, I learned how persistence shapes creative work. How book writers need to keep going, even when the going is very tough.

I learned to value persistence and a healthy belief in oneself and one's creative expression. Unless you love your writing, who will? This isn't to say you are ego-driven. You acknowledge what's not working as well as what is. But to constantly doubt, that's dangerous. That will lead to endless revising, endless questioning, and not holding your published book in your hands.

This week's writing exercise is a list. It's a belief-boosting exercise that a fellow MFA student once gave me. We'd just left our morning workshopping session and I was beyond discouraged about my novel (the one that's being published this week).

"I'll never finish this," I said. I was quite certain. "I'm not meant to. I don't have it in me."

"Nonsense," she said. (I love people who use this word.) "You'll finish and you'll publish. It's a good story. It just needs your love."

She told me to go back to my dorm room and start a list of anything I liked about the book so far. Keep the ongoing list in my writing notebook. Add to it, look at it as a reminder. Like a Valentine card to my emerging creative work, it would help me remember to love it.

Here's what I wrote that day:

Molly (the main character)

Zoe (her best friend)

when they first meet at the Boat House (the local dive)

Chad's glasses

the still life painting

how Molly felt driving the motorboat that morning

the lake at sunrise

This exercise reversed my discouragement. I went back to work. I regained my persistence and belief. Since that day, I added to my list as I learned more about my book and fell in love with it again.

Start a list about your writing. What do you especially love about it, believe in? What gives you the persistence to keep going?

If you'd like to join me in celebrating my novel, please consider visiting amazon.com today. They're offering a special pre-release price of $10.17 plus shipping. Hard to beat. Click here to read Molly and Zoe's story.

Your Book's Container--And How to Write It

A coaching client with a great story to tell is working on her memoir. She asked a very good question about her book's container. It sparked this week's writing exercise.

I had asked her to incorporate more container in her chapter, by taking out the sections of thinking and feeling. Whenever the author talked about her feelings and thoughts, the writing grew abstract and distant and the container was lost. This confused her--as it does many writers. "It was my understanding," she told me, "that 'container' is the place where everything happens."

That's true. I call it "container" because it's much more than just setting. It's both inner and outer atmosphere, both physical and psychological/spiritual/emotional environment of your story.

That's also where her confusion started. "Outwardly as setting and inwardly as emotional or cultural environment," she said. "Therefore, it is two part. If I take out all feeling and thinking it would seem that one part would be missing. I don't know what to put in its place."

Such a good question--and a situation that stumps many writers, especially in memoir and fiction. How do you create emotional container without telling us what emotions are being experienced? How do you create a psychological container without telling us the thoughts of narrator or character?

You show. It's an old axiom in writing: show, don't tell. Showing reveals container as subtly as a butterfly landing on a late-summer dahlia--without any interpreting. It just presents the situation and lets the readers perceive the effect.

A pretty hard thing for us writers to do! But not impossible. Here is how I suggest this talented writer go about refining her story's emotional and psychological container (feelings and thoughts).


First, Do Your Outer Container

The first container you need to always address is the outer container. This is what is traditionally called setting--and it's shown to readers via outwardly felt things. Such as weather, time of day or night, where we are in a room or garden or other specific location, how the light falls on an object or a wall or someone's arm, what smells and sounds surround us. Amazing how many writers omit these details, thinking they're boring or slow or unnecessary. But they actually are the main transporters of emotion for a reader. They set the stage.

Imagine a play set on a blank stage--no backdrop, no furniture, no atmosphere. OK, maybe nothing is an atmosphere, but only if the actors are very talented and can create something from that nothing. It's much easier for the audience to perceive, say, an 1850s interior farmhouse if there are furnishings and a woodstove and windows with eyelet curtains.



Same in your story. Outer container is shown via your surroundings, what your narrator notices. It's transmitted to a reader most easily via the five senses: smell, sound, taste, touch, sight. And it's best done without interpretation, no qualifiers, nobody telling us what the sights mean. In other words you may write, "The dahlia was pink and gold and filled with summer light." You don't have to add "It was beautiful." We already get that.



Outer container is used by all kinds of book writers--even nonfiction writers who share ideas and techniques via personal stories need to make use of container to engage their reader in the setting. We engage most when we can "be" in the place you're describing.

Then Do Your Inner Container

We also want to "be" in the emotional, cultural, and intellectual container of the situation, but we want to be shown (not told) this as well. Readers are smarter than the writer thinks, most of the time. They can perceive inner container via nuances of gesture, body sensations felt by the narrator or character, memories.

Say we're writing about a woman looking at a butterfly on a late-summer flower. She's sad because her father just died. The writer might choose to tell this sadness by having the woman think, "Looking at that perfect flower makes me so sad." Or, in third person, "Joan felt sad suddenly, not knowing why." But these statements are abstract. They tell, they don't show. So the emotion of sadness is not conveyed. The emotional container is a blank stage.

To convey the emotional container, the writer needs to find a way to demonstrate Joan's sadness. Not speak it or tell it, but show it. Maybe the woman picks the flower and shreds it in her fingers. Maybe she creates a trail of flower pieces along a sidewalk or windowsill. Maybe she goes outside at the same time each morning to watch the flower as it fades and dies.

Much harder work to notice these actions and write them, than to just say "Joan was sad." But that's how good books are made. By hard work, by good noticing, by careful writing.

When I'm stumped on how to write emotional container, I go back to Pulitzer-Prize winner Robert Olen Butler's wonderful book on writing, From Where You Dream. I use two of his suggestions for enhancing emotion in story. This works in every genre, although Butler's book is geared to fiction writers. Here's a recap of his two suggestions, in my own words:

1. Have the narrator feel something in their body. This is a physical sensation that's not interpreted. It has to be felt by the body, not thought or observed by the mind, to convey emotion to readers. "Joan's throat tightened and her eyes stung." "Flashes of heat traveled across my skin." "My stomach was suddenly hollow."

Specific and felt sensations, these happen in the body and are not interpreted. Let the reader perceive what this means. Most of us would understand what emotion is experienced by tight throat and stinging eyes (sadness) or flashes of heat on skin (fear, excitement). We'll read on to find out if we're right!

2. Have the narrator access a brief memory of a similar time that contrasts or connects in some way with the emotional container now. "Joan remembered her father's hands picking dahlias from the garden, arranging them in a cobalt vase, bringing them to her room. Only three dahlias, but always perfect." We don't need to add "He loved her very much." We read on to find out if he did--because the emotional container hints at it--or if he was obsessed with her or what. No interpretation needed.

This Week's Exercise
Take a thought or feeling--any sentence in your work where you've written the "told" feeling or thought, such as "Joan was sad."

For 10 minutes, brainstorm all the ways the surroundings could reveal this sadness. How can you transmit sadness without using the word sad?

Then replace the telling with showing. See if the emotion is heightened.

Writing past the Summertime Blahs

When I first came across Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, I loved her morning pages but was stymied by Artist Dates. Cameron recommends we stuck creative artists spend an hour a week out and alone somewhere new, exploring a museum or craft store, walking in a park or by a river, just to fill the creative well.

Sometimes writers face a flatness in summer, when it's hot and the writing is not. I've found NOT writing a great way to get started again--but the NOT writing has to contain something to fill the well, a la Julia Cameron's Artist Dates.

This week's exercise encourages you to go on an hour's vacation from your normal life--work, family, home, endless to-do lists--and visit a creatively inspiring place. Let your racing mind slow down. Stare at museum exhibits or paintings. Watch the breeze in the trees. But don't write. Not a word. Force yourself to stop your output and just input for a while. Instead of all the endless exhaling of energy, fill yourself with new breath.

Sounds silly, simple, stupid? Not at all. Your right brain will start engaging, seeing and hearing and smelling things your busy left brain has forgotten to notice. These small details are what fills the creative well.

Part two of the exercise: After you come back from your Artist Date, sit for ten minutes and record impressions. Nothing big, just little ideas, sensations, thoughts, memories that come now that you're refreshed. Scribbling is good. Drawing is even better. Let the images flow onto the paper. Make it fun, easy. No pressure here.

I've come to my best writing ideas by doing this deliberate break. It takes me off the production wheel and really fills the well.

See if it works for you! It might help you write past the summertime blahs.

Linkage--A Great Technique to Beat the (Writer's) Block

Like boards on a fence, sentences tie together thoughts. But too tied up, they lead to blocked creativity. Enter linkage, a technique that beats the block and keeps the gate open.

I learned about linkage years ago. Maybe in a writing class, maybe from a colleague. Since I heard this simple technique, I've read that it's used by many professional authors. Try it this week--it'll help you keep momentum between writing sessions. Here's how it works: Simply leave your last sentence of the day unfinished.

For example, instead of ending a writing session with a complete sentence, which leaves no "linkage" to the next day's work, I leave the sentence hanging.

Not "Molly looked out the window and saw the blue Ford Escort." But "Molly looked out the window and saw..."

Why does linkage work so well? Because the mind hates a vacuum. Overnight (or over several days, if you write less often) your creative mind will explore options for ending this sentence. It will drive you a little crazy--a good thing! You will itch to get back to the page to finish the thought.

Simple, huh? Harder than it looks. You'll want to finish the thought and wrap it up. Clean as you go. But repress the urge and leave it hanging.

Along with a little crazy, linkage will drive you back to your writing faster than anything I know.

Entering Your Story through the Smallest Detail--an Exercise with Buttons

I'm moving to a new home and office this month, so I'm cleaning out forgotten closets and cupboards and files. I found a large jar of buttons collected from friends who love to sew.

So when a writing colleague passed along this great exercise, I had to try it. It's by writer Roz Goddard, and it uses the tiniest of ojects--a button--to get deeper into a story. I tried it in my classes and many of the writers found it helpful for uncovering aspects of character that had eluded them.

Click here to try it out.

Imagine using it for one of your main players in your book. Let your limitations go, and see what comes. For memoir or nonfiction writers, use your imagination while trying the exercise, then ask: How is this person I've just written about similar or different to someone in my book? (This brings your freewrite back to factual truth, which is essential for these genres. But the imaginative qualities of fiction-writing will open doors you won't believe!)

Dilemma, Players, Container--Three Essentials for Chapter One

My summer session writing class is climbing mountains! They're working on chapter one of their books--perhaps the hardest chapter to write. It has to establish three essential elements that pull the reader into your story. These elements are key to successfully placing your manuscript with an agent. If you don't have them securely in place, you won't get a contract. They exist in any genre of book, if you know how to find them.

Three Steps to an Eye-Catching Chapter One

Chapter one is often the chapter agents request, if you're lucky enough to write an eye-catching query letter. So this initial chapter is a make-or-break experience. If an agent loves it, they'll ask for more. If not, "Sorry, it's not for us."

I've found most great books--in any genre--hint at these three elements in chapter one. Dilemma (the conflict, the question). Players (who's on stage, who should we care about). Container (the place everything happens, both outwardly as setting and inwardly as emotional or cultural environment).

These elements create a kind of tension cord. It pulls the reader through your book to the last page. If they are not all in place, the cord is slack.

Entering Your Book via Your Natural Strength

Every writer has one of these as a natural, almost unconscious, strength. A mystery writer might think up plots--dilemma. She would enter her story from the question What happens? But she might overlook the place it happens, and the characters who are complicating things and getting deeper into trouble. So her story is interesting but the agent or editor might say, "Your prose needs tightening." Read: "Two elements are missing here; plug them in." Or, most important: "Make us care!"

A medical memoirist might also think of dilemma first--the accident that left him in a wheelchair, for instance. Event is what matters most to him, but the reader engages through first caring about his dilemma--or character. So the memoirist must begin to reveal himself on the page, more and more. Not always comfortable, but essential.

A psychologist writing a book on mental illness might think first of players--the people she counsels at the clinic or hospital, their personalities. She presents their background, their case histories (disguised or with permission), but she can't figure out how to place them in a setting that's believable. She begins to write the setting--a hospital--and suddenly we see the frailty of these people because we smell the antiseptic or hear the intercom paging doctors.

Your job is to think of all three, no matter which strength you build from. And they all must appear in chapter one.

How Does Chapter One Reveal Dilemma, Players, and Container?

I just read the opening chapter--only three pages long--of Judy Blundell's What I Saw and How I Lied. Blundell won the National Book Award for this novel. Her first chapter made me want to buy the book. Because it covers all three elements.

We learn of the main players first--a mother who smells of cigarette smoke and My Sin perfume, the young daughter who pretends to be sleeping beside her, the brother who may have died tragically, the father who left, the mysterious friend. We learn of the dilemma--a small reference to the beach town and how everyone knows the family's faces because they've been in the news recently. Blundell also creates an amazingly engaging container, both physically and emotionally, with lines like "The match snapped, then sizzled, and I woke up fast" or "I heard the seagulls crying, sadder than a funeral, and I knew it was almost morning."

This Week's Writing Exercise

Want to join my writing class--at least virtually--this week? Try focusing on chapter one. Can you draft it--or look it over if it's already written--and check it for these three elements. What's missing? What's already present?

Then find a favorite published book in your genre. Read it to learn how the writer presents dilemma, players, container in the first chapter. How were you hooked into reading on?

How can you change your chapter one to be as successful?

Keeping Your Book Project Alive--While Living a Normal Life

Michelle Goodman is the author of two really good books, helpful to writers and anyone seeking a creative life. First, she quit the 9 to 5 and wrote a guide on how to do it--The Anti 9-to-5 Guide. Then she wrote another book on how to be a successful freelancer--My So-Called Freelance Life--that gives practical advice to anyone trying to earn their living by doing what they love.

I interviewed Michelle about her book-writing journey. Hopefully some of her ideas will be useful to you too--as they provide the idea for this week's writing exercise.

MCM: What do you do to keep your faith in your book projects during the tough times that hit every author?

Michelle Goodman: Enlist a couple of close writing friends to read my pages for major gaffes or holes and to talk me off of the ledge as necessary. Tape reminders of what I want to accomplish with the book to the wall behind my computer, along with any pep talks and publishing-related jokes friends have sent me along the way.

Get out of the house for some blood-pumping exercise to clear the creative mental cobwebs that seem to appear at least once a week.

Make sure the house is stocked with really tasty health food that requires little preparation, as well as several pounds of chocolate. When too spent to complete another sentence, hit the hay, even if just for an hour.

MCM: What's the funniest learning experience you've had while working on a book?

Michelle Goodman: I'm not sure how funny this will be to anyone other than me, but YouTube really saved me while writing the last book. I'd watch my favorite Buffalo Springfield, Woodstock-era CSNY, and early 70s Genesis videos as a reward after finishing each section of a chapter. Who knew Steven Stills and Peter Gabriel would play such an important role in the book-writing process?

MCM: When you are working on writing a book, how do you juggle your bread-and-butter work (regular job) around creative time?

Michelle Goodman: My regular job is being a full-time freelance writer (articles, columns, blogs, and sometimes, corporate copy). When I was working on my two books, I had to clear the decks of all other projects. It's too difficult for me--and most people--to write/edit a book 6-8 hours a day and think that I'm also going to have the time, energy, or brain juice to write something else that day.

For my first book (The Anti 9-to-5 Guide), the advance was so small that I just lived off savings during the six months or so I spent writing it. Fortunately, the advance for my second book (My So-Called Freelance Life) was a bit more substantial. Of course, things never go quite the way you plan: I landed both a regional and a national column while writing My So-Called Freelance Life and had to work on meeting weekly deadlines for both during the last couple months of writing the book.

I was working all the time, sometimes not even sleeping more than four hours a night. It was hell, but I'm glad I did it. Those columns now help sell both my books.

MCM: Thanks, Michelle, for this real-world advice. To learn more about Michelle's books click here (My So-Called Freelance Life) and here (The Anti 9-to-5 Guide). You can also read her great ideas on using a blog to boost a book proposal by clicking here.

This Week's Writing Exercise
Making your writing dream happen--what does it take? Magic, hard work, belief, all of these? From Michelle's comments, you saw how much a professional writer supports her dream--with music, chocolate, reminder notes that boost the spirit, good writing friends.

It takes a willingness to put into place this kind of good support. But it also takes a willingness to let go of something that might be blocking you, taking up too much time, or wearing down your energy.

This week, look at your life. Either chart one day, as one of my coaching clients does, to see where support is and where time is disappearing into stuff you really don't get much out of (her support list included a weekly writing group; her energy drainers were nightly evening news, long phone calls with her sister, and too many potato chips).

What are you willing to put into place for support?
What are you willing to let go of?

Stop the magical thinking about your creative dream with this book. You can do it. Just make room for it in your life.

What do you think of this? Do you agree with Michelle's suggestions--or have ideas to share with other readers about your own experiences with juggling your writing and your life?

Emotional Punch in Your Writing--Why Setting and Show-Don't-Tell Deliver Emotion

A memoirist in my writing workshop was refining a passage in her story about the effect of her father's early death on the family. She wanted this passage to be especially impactful for the reader--convey the emotion of this difficult day.

After her father dies, she is in the kitchen with her aunt, watching breakfast cleanup and trying to absorb the grief that's descended on everything. "It's a really important moment in my story," the writer pointed out to us, "so why do I feel like I'm writing it from another room?"

Since the passage wasn't delivering the emotional punch she wanted, we started analyzing her description of her aunt that morning. "Well, her hair was messy, her clothes didn't match, and she picked at her fingernails while we ate breakfast," the writer said.

Our class agreed these were good details to describe the upsetting moment, and they were specific. But we were still not getting the impact of grief. It wasn't a "felt" emotion, only a thought. The writer wasn't yet putting us in the container of the story.

"Is it because you're telling us about her," one student asked, "and you need to show us?"

For a Reader, Emotion Comes from Demonstration, Not Description

Showing and telling are familiar terms to many writers. But what do they exactly mean? The writer in my class selected a key emotional moment to demonstrate the family falling apart. She felt the bewildered grief because she had been there, watching. But we didn't, as readers.

That meant that she hadn't yet succeeded in demonstrating the emotion. She'd only described it.

I asked this memoirist to close her eyes and put herself back into that scene, if she could. What did she notice, what small details came forward now? "Watch your aunt move around the room," I suggested. "Is she cleaning up from breakfast? What do you notice--smells? sounds? anything odd that stands out?"

Setting Details--Small but Essential Transmitters of Emotion

The writer jotted down four things:

A rotten smell came from the garbage can.

Her aunt's lilac sweater is buttoned funny, and she was usually the fashion example in the family.

Her aunt's hands shook--they were so unsteady she dropped a glass in the sink.

She didn't clean up the broken pieces.

The writer looked up from her page. There were tears in her eyes from that final image of the broken pieces of glass in the sink.

I asked her why.

She said the glass pieces remained in the sink all morning--and sun from the window made them sparkle enough to catch the attention of anyone coming into the room. But nobody did anything. It was a touchstone for her from the emotion of the day, one she'd forgotten until now. It demonstrated the disorientation the family felt.

Bingo. She got it. She rewrote the scene and it sang.

We all felt the emotion now.

This bit of "shown" story--via a setting detail--transmitted (demonstrated) the emotion of grief and loss directly into the hearts and minds of her readers. She'd been unsuccessful with description, but demonstration succeeded.

This Week's Writing Exercise

Read a passage of your writing where you want to convey emotion, where you want a punch. Now close your eyes and put yourself in the scene (if writing fiction, imagine your character in the scene). What setting details, tiny ones especially, do you notice? What smells or sounds?

Make a list, as the writer above did. Add one to your passage. See if it helps! Let me know.