How Story Structure Sells Books
Writing Advice Remix with HOLDING author Karleigh Frisbie Brogan
It’s time for another Writing Advice Remix, the interview series where we take common writing advice and remix it for practical application. Today, we’re sitting down with Karleigh Frisbie Brogan to talk about the role of craft, who we learn it from, and how we apply it to our own stories. Karleigh is the author of Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts. I first met Karleigh at the 2021 Sewanee Writers’ Workshop. After the conference, Karleigh and I ate an early lunch on the floor of the crowded Nashville airport and chatted about our upcoming writing life plans. It’s been such a joy to follow her book’s journey to publication, and I’m so excited to share her practical, business-minded takes on the role of craft within the context of traditional publishing.
As always, you know what to do: take anything that’s useful to you and your writing life and leave everything that’s not behind.
1. What’s the worst piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? What problem is it supposed to solve? And why is this advice actually unproductive?
First of all, I think it largely depends on the individual writer’s goals, but assuming the goal is to go the standard route of getting an agent and selling a commercially viable book, the worst piece of advice came to me while I was doing my MFA. Not to throw shade on my program or my professors, they were all very fantastic. But they encouraged us, generally speaking, to eschew conventionality and embrace weirdness and inventiveness. Structure and form, in the traditional sense, were, at best, boring and at worst, patriarchal, capitalist, and colonizing. I completely understand where they were coming from! The likelihood, statistically speaking, of getting an agent and publishing a book and making money off of that book are relatively low, and perhaps they didn’t want to create false hope so, instead, they encouraged writers to consider other non-commercial yet soul-fulfilling avenues. But the truth is, we’re paying thousands of dollars for an education; the university system itself exists within the very capitalist structure we are then taught, obliquely, to dismiss, or dismantle with our small gestures. Don’t get me wrong, I hate capitalism. But it’s the economic system we’re in. Agents don’t work for free. Books are not free. And, yes, I’d like to make some money, too.
I’ll admit, I had a blast writing all this weird, hermit-crabby, hybridy stuff. I roped it all in: interstitial poems shoved between pages of lyric prose, bits of erasure—I went full kitchen sink with the first version of my book. It was a hot mess. I queried and queried and queried and every agent said the same thing: that it wasn’t commercial enough. But I was so convinced that I just hadn’t found yet the right person to represent it, so I tried for much longer than I probably should have, ignoring the consensus of the agents.
2. Now that you’ve written, revised, and published your book, how would you reframe that advice into something that’s actually helpful for writers?
Once I’d rewritten my memoir, giving it a traditional narrative structure (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, denouement), I got an agent, and my book sold. Now, to be sure, this is not in spite of the advice from the MFA professors, but because of it. My book certainly wouldn’t be what it became without all that generative play my professors gave me permission to do. Even though almost none of the original manuscript can be found in the final product, it exists, still, somewhere behind it. Like how cells regenerate every, whatever it is they say, seven years(?), yet, the body is still recognizable.
So, my advice would be to have fun and play and try out all sorts of modes and forms because this is from where all the good, yummy material is going to come out. It’s not a step you can skip at all. It’s a vital part of the discovery process. I heard a quote from Wes Anderson about how writing stories is more like excavation than architecture. I happen to think it’s both. This first part is the excavation. But without the second part, the architecture, the book is less likely to sell should that be your goal. I think if you don’t know that, if you think a book can be purely an archeological dig and you’re trying to agent it or sell it that way and having no luck—and I see this happen a lot, as it almost happened to me—you give up. You shelf the book. You shelf the whole dream. It feels like wasted time but it wasn’t wasted at all. It was, maybe, the childhood of your book. And now you will write the grown up.
3. What are three concrete steps a writer can take to incorporate this revised advice into their writing process?
The first step is to start with a very baggy outline—nothing too granular, just the major beats. Beginning, a few mid points, end. And keep in mind that it’s subject to change. The second step is to go to any point on this outline and zero in. Expand it wide. Find different ways you can dilate it. Maybe it’s through a poem, or a stream-of-consciousness run-on sentence, or an exercise in constraints. Just fuck around—it’s how you’ll find out what the moment is about, what wants to emerge and take the spotlight. It’ll maybe tell you how to enter a chapter, which is always the hardest part, in my opinion. And the third step, and longest step, is, now that you’ve done all the discovery and you know a little more clearly what you’re writing about and how you’re going to approach it, rewrite another outline, a more detailed outline. A Virgo outline, lol. I like to put each point on its own flashcard so I can shuffle them around or throw away ones I no longer want or add in new ones. It will be with this new movable outline that you will start your draft.
4. Let’s talk about Holding. How did you integrate this advice into your own writing process?
In some ways, I was forced to put this advice into Holding because I wasn’t having luck finding an agent. What’s more is that I had a lot of agents asking for the full manuscript, a lot of close but no cigars. So I wasn’t so quick to shelf it, thank god. I finally took the commercial advice some of the agents generously gave, and took a class through Catapult (shout out to Lilly Dancyger) about outlining your book. And I started to look at planning and order and logic in a positive light. Not as an endorsement of colonialism! But I also didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. It actually behooved me to have written an 88,000-word manuscript of wackiness. It became sort of the invisible soul of my book.
Holding is a memoir that examines addiction and recovery as it relates to mother/daughter relationships—my own and writ large. I knew, while constructing that first loosey-goosey outline, that, at the start of the book, the main character would be addicted to drugs and have a fraught, complicated relationship with her mother. I knew along the way, things would get worse and worse until the character was about to hit an event horizon, and that, in the end, the character would be off drugs and would have a new understanding of her mother and thus a repaired relationship not only with her mother but with herself. Once I got to the flashcard stage, I knew all the major timeline events I needed to hit, and how they spoke to the greater aim of the book.
5. Looking beyond this specific piece of advice, what's the most important lesson you've learned about craft?
Firstly, I want to say a word about the word craft. It’s always hand-in-hand with the word art. Arts and crafts. I used to think they were interchangeable. But, without consulting a dictionary, I’ve come to think of art as paintings, poems, installation, dance—forms of expression and creation, whose value is purely aesthetic. And I think of craft as things that have function—a knitted sweater or a piece of woodworked furniture. I know those definitions are kind of crude and aren’t exactly right. But a book is both art and craft. It’s a means of mass communication with a specific goal beyond the lyricism of its words or its stunning syntax. Back to Wes Anderson’s quote: if the excavation is the art part, maybe the architecture is the craft part.
And there is no one way to build a house, to extend the metaphor. So, I think it’s wise to take in all the craft advice we can, even when it’s contradictory! The diversity of craft advice ensures our books all don’t sound the same and that there is an appropriate way for each individual.
Karleigh Frisbie Brogan is a writer from Santa Rosa, California who currently resides in Portland, Oregon. She was a 2024 Oregon Literary Fellow and the recipient of the 2023 George Pascoe Miller Scholarship for the Community of Writers Workshop, a 2022 Rona Jaffe Scholarship for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a 2020 Regional Arts and Culture Council grant, and the 2019 Tom and Phyllis Burnam Award in Nonfiction at Portland State University, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing. Her essay, "Two Piece," was a 2019 Best American Sports Writing Notable. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Huffington Post, Entropy, Nailed, and is forthcoming in Poets & Writers and Lit Hub. Her debut memoir, Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts is now available everywhere books are sold.
Where to Find Karleigh Frisbie Brogan:
So, what’s your take? Should the publishing industry dictate a writer’s craft choices? Or should a writer experiment and enjoy the art of creation? What are your writing goals? How do you decide which writing goals influence your craft?
Let’s chat in the comments:
Until next time,
Kat
Yes, great advice. Thanks Kat and Karleigh.
Great advice. Looking forward to reading your book 🫶