"Start with a big love of words, add a generous helping of Mary Carroll Moore, mix with leavening from your peers, knead vigorously, and voila! Your book has risen!" --Eric Utne, founder of Utne Reader and author of Far Out Man (2020).
WINNER! 2011 NH Literary Awards--Reader's Choice Award
“The endeavor of writing can be long and lonely. Mary Carroll Moore, master writing instructor, to the rescue! Moore packs How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book with years of gritty good sense and big-picture perspective. Her techniques for drafting, organizing, and polishing a book are practical and time-tested. Here is a first-time book-writer’s best companion.”
--Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, author of Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir
My Favorite Writing Books
A Writer's Time by Kenneth Atchity
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler
On Writing by Stephen King
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
Story Matters by Margaret-Love Denman and Barbara Shoup
Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanna Paola
The Art of Slow Writing by Louise DeSalvo
The Art of Time in Fiction by Janet Silber
The Passionate, Accurate Story by Carol Bly
The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick
What If? by Pamela Painter and Anne Bernays
Word Painting by Rebecca McClanahan
Writers Dreaming by Naomi Epel
Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway
Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark
Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular by Rust Hills
Sample Writing Exercise from My Online Classes: Dialogue with Your Book
Pretend you’re a reporter for the New York Times. You’re going to interview your book idea.
List some questions you’d love to ask your book about its form, content, goals. You can start with something nonthreatening, as you would if you were a real reporter.
Ask your book some very good questions. Some ideas from my class are below, or you can make up your own:
What do you want to tell me about yourself? What form suits you best? Who is your readership and how will they access you? What are you most eager to say? What are you most afraid to say? What genre are you?
Imagine the book answering you. Write everything down--no matter how odd, silly, or irrelevant it seems.
When it runs out of things to say (or you get nervous about the answers) ask a different question.
The goal of this book-writing exercise is to surprise yourself. You’ll tap the hidden parts of yourself as a writer, the parts we often censor. You can strike gold--if you maintain the attitude of no-assumptions and anything can happen.
Books for the Blocked--These'll Get You Moving Again!
Escaping into the Open by Elizabeth Berg
Listen to Me by Lynn Lauber
Marry Your Muse by Jan Phillips
Pencil Dancing by Mari Messer
The Art of Slow Writing by Louise DeSalvo
Thinking about Memoir by Abigail Thomas
Write Your Heart Out by Rebecca McClanahan
A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened. Albert Camus
A good friend just recommended, and another just purchased, the most beautiful writer's notebook, so I am posting this article from two years ago about how to use them to the fullest as you create and craft your book. If you'd like to salivate along with me, check out the Leuchtturm writing notebooks. I'm off to order mine right now.
Writers produce writing. And if you're a writing geek like me, you love to write longhand in notebooks, not just on the super-fast computer.
Writing notebooks let the right brain ramble slowly, and the writing I do longhand is often pensive, full of imagery. I notice things I'd breeze over. It has a certain
Today it is wet outside, the start of our fall rains. Everything looks saturated with September sun and now the moisture of this gentle rain, and it's a good day for sitting still. Something I don't do very often, but which my books crave at this time of year, as the heat of summer downshifts into colder weather.
Today I'm giving myself the gift of visioning. Simply listening, and waiting. Visioning brings
A common question in my book-writing classes is the difference between chapters and scenes. Both are pathways, bridges between one moment and the next. But what makes a chapter work? What makes a collection of scenes warrant it
Storyboards, the visual map that filmmakers use, save my books. They are my primary pathway through my piles of material. They are my best tool for organizing and structuring my novels, nonfiction books, and memoirs so that a reader can make sense of the story.
I love them. I couldn't make publishable books without them.
I also hate storyboards. They are like bossy mother-in-laws, telling me what I'm doing wrong. They point out exactly what I don't want to look at about my book-in-progress: where I have too much blah-blah-blah, where I've skipped a juicy opportunity for conflict, where I've stayed on track or gone on a tangent.
Essentially, it becomes clear as day where my book isn't yet working.
I teach storyboards, I have several hanging on my office walls, and I barely tolerate their linear know-it-all attitude. But I think they're gold.
The Golden Opportunity of Storyboards
A big question as you begin your book is this: How are you going to know if your story flows when it's outside of your own inner worlds?
You can craft a draft, of course. Get it typed out and printed, read through it. But it's still hard to see if the idea you presented on page 31 will thread through to page 231 in a way your reader will track.
Some writers make long lists. I do this too. Facts to check, threads to follow. The lists on my desk are as numerous as my printed drafts, after a while, and I start to go crazy under all that paper. Here's where storyboards present a golden opportunity, like a good map out of a swamp.
A writer needs to know the structure of her story flow, the placement in time and space of each idea or plot point. It's not just enough to churn out the words. The sequence matters, a sequence that readers can follow, and you need some method to clearly see sequence. Filmmakers use storyboards to provide this.
What's a storyboard look like? Check out this video where I demonstrate a storyboard.
Each choice we make, each change we bring into our lives, requires a certain level of attention. Normal activities that are in a groove require a different kind of attention, because they are on a maintenance level.
But if we're tackling something new, like health or family changes, a shift in job responsibilities, a new exercise plan, new financial goals, it becomes like
My new book, Your Book Starts Here, is now a finalist for the New Hampshire Literary Awards in the nonfiction category. Pretty thrilling!
It's also up for a People's Choice award. If you'd like to help me out by voting for Your Book Starts Here, please feel free to click here.
Mary Carroll Moore is an award-winning, internationally published author of thirteen books in three genres, writing teacher, editor and book doctor for publishing houses. For thirty years she's helped thousands of new and experienced writers plan, write, and develop--and publish!--their books.
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If you believe you have a book inside you just waiting to come out, here is a guide that will ensure your book’s arrival in the world. In clear, accessible prose, Mary Carroll Moore leads the aspiring author through every step of the challenging, rewarding process of developing and completing a full-length book.
--Rebecca McClanahan, author of In the Key of New York City
Encouraging Words--Well-Known Writers with Large Number of Rejections--But Published!
Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo--397 rejections (and it became a movie) A Wrinkle in Timeby Madeleine L'Engle--97 rejections (and it won the Newbery Medal for best children's book of 1963; it's now in its 69th printing) Cinder Edna by Ellen Jackson--40 rejections (and it has won multiple awards and sold 150,000 hard copies). Judy Blume says she received "nothing but rejections" for 2 years. Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot--17 rejections Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling--rejected by 9 publishers The Diary of Anne Frank--16 rejections (and now more than 30 million copies are in print) Dr. Seuss books--more than 15 rejections Jonathan Livingston Seagullby Richard Bach--140 rejections Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell--38 rejections Watership Down by Richard Adams--26 rejections Dune by Frank Herbert--nearly 20 rejections
To all book writers: Believe in your story. Keep trying. The right home for your book is out there, waiting for you to discover it.
Book writers (and any writers) need to know how to engage the creative right brain that "writes" in images. Think of any wonderful book that's left you swimming in a setting or characters--the writer has successfully used the image-creating part of the brain. But our normal workaday lives short-circuit this part. Check out this cool video of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist at Harvard Medical School, recounting her personal experience of a left-brain stroke and her awakening to right-brain reality. Pretty amazing fusion of brain science with what it feels like to a brain scientist having a stroke: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229
Flying Squirrels Bring Creative Jolt to Novelist
Flying squirrel gets into house--disrupts routine, gets novelist thinking differently. This happened to me! For two days, as I chased the squirrel (actually, it was all night since they are nocturnal), I slept very little. And got many new ideas for my novel-in-progress.
Go figure!
Maybe...book writers need creative jolts? Routine dulls our imaginations?
How has an unexpected interruption actually been a gift for your creativity this week?
At the Loft Literary Center, I can always tell which students in my classes have taken Mary Carroll Moore’s class on book-writing. They talk about writing their book in "islands" and using storyboards to figure out how those sections relate to each other. When another student confesses to feeling overwhelmed by the material her memoir might include, they readily advise, “You should try Mary Carroll Moore’s method.” I second that. --Cheri Register, author of Packinghouse Daughter and American Book Award winner
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