Welcome into Flight School:

In this post, and I talk about the Foundations Intensive I’ll be teaching for her Conscious Writers Collective this September.

First about Maya: She is a terrific lady. Whip-smart (as Tay Hohoff said about Harper Lee). Funny. Bursting with style, energy and purpose. And, last, no-nonsense about the art and craft of creative writing.

Then comes her professional credits: The author of If You Love That Lady (W. W. Norton, 2026), Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, and American Faith. Her work is published in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Granta, The Guardian, and elsewhere. And, she’s the Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly, a teacher in the undergraduate and MFA in Paris programs at NYU.

Maya and I found each other here on Substack, where I’ve been generally cheering on her honesty and hard work. One day, we got to talking about my foundations program and pretty soon, I was building a version for her remarkable Conscious Writers Collective. How could I not?

In short, CWC is a new kind of institution built around the life of the writer rather than the duration of a degree — combining live programming, an ever-growing archive, and a global community of serious writers committed to the work.

Bottomline: CWC overflows with talent and Maya’s integrity.

In this interview, Maya asks some key questions about my journey as a writer and a teacher.

I was delighted to answer.

Where it all began:

When Blackbird came out in 2000, my then-agent elbowed me to write fiction. I wasn’t ready. “But your career,” she said. “Think about your career.”

So, I wrote an awful novel all about dreams.

“The worst piece of drivel I’ve ever read,” the agent said had me fly to New York and meet a developmental editor at the Algonquin. Yes, that Algonquin.

There I sat in that beautiful old lounge surrounded by the ghosts of some of the most interesting writers, and the editor talked about the rewrite using terms I’d never heard and didn’t understand. While I took copious notes, all I could think was, “No. I can’t do this. I don’t get a word of what she’s saying.”

I wrote and published three more memoirs and eventually signed up for an MFA in hopes I’d finally learn everything I needed about fiction.

When it was over, I learned how to rid myself of $50,000 but still knew nothing.

Never give up:

Post MFA, I started a story “think tank” with a group of talented fellows in various stages of their own projects. In a dank upper room of a freezing cold building—the very opposite of the Algonquin—we tore down novels and memoirs. And soon they brought in teaching texts on structure, antagonistic forces and plot.

“Let’s talk about this,” they’d say. And we did.

Those fellows included Lindsey Lee Johnson, Kate Hope Day, Ruth Warnier, Jody Little, and Becky Ellis. All published now.

After about four years, the teachings formalized into the Bones of Storytelling which became the core of my own school, The Blackbird Studio for Writers, founded in 2015.

What I’ve learned over the course of the journey is that the spirit of the Algonquin—that is, the collective thinking and gathering and talking—is what matters. And I’ve never stopped with that approach. Over these years, I’ve taught Bones at least two hundred times around the US and in Paris. I love Bones for one reason: It answers EVERY question I have about story. Finally.

Take Foundations at CWC this Fall:

September 12 through December 19, 2026 is a semester of learning on Saturday morning. 8 a.m. PST.

CWC classes will be live on Zoom with lessons, handouts, slides, group discussions and work time.

And again, I built the teaching specifically for CWC. This Bones will be unlike any version of this course I’ve taught before because Maya’s writers are unique: Poets who want to write fiction. Novelists on their second and third books. Writers who are serious about the long game.

If you’re a CWC member, I’ll see you in September.

If you’re not, think about becoming one. And use the above link adding in the the coupon BLACKBIRD for $25 off your first month’s plan.

Flight School Sign Up Discount

Alternatively, you can always take Bones with me on the regularly scheduled Studio program:

No matter what, the first class of Bones is always free (below). Watch and see what happens when this teaching lands on your story.

Thanks to Maya and thanks to everyone here on Flight School. I hope to see you in one of these terrific classes very soon,

Jennifer 🐦‍⬛

Take First Bones Class for Free Now

Welcome to Flight School:

Ten weeks of thinking and we arrive here, at the final post which invites you to do one thing: Look closer at your own work and ask the questions you are not allowed to ask.

From Iowa to NYU, terms like antagonistic forces to structure to plot becomes dirty words.

Not officially. No. You’ll not see this attitude in the program description. But spend any time inside formal literary culture and you will often feel it in the form of the slightly raised eyebrow when someone mentions these words or such mechanical things. And this perspective has produced a generation of writers who can describe damage without moving through it, can render a system without illuminating the soul inside it and who have been taught every tool of observation but almost none of the tools of transformation.

Harper Lee was not one of those writers.

Go Set a Watchman is a Rebirth story. To Kill a Mockingbird is a Voyage and Return. These are two of the seven basic plot shapes that Christopher Booker identifies in his study of storytelling across world literature and across centuries, and that I teach with great passion and conviction.

Let me be clear: I am not saying Lee sat down and consciously chose these two plot structures. I am saying that when you hold these books up to those shapes they fit — not approximately, not with some squinting, but exactly. Because the Rebirth shape is the shape that human experience takes when a borrowed identity collapses and something real is built from the ruins. Lee didn’t choose it. It chose her. Because it was true.

That is the difference between plot as formula and plot as recognition. The tools don't limit the story. They find it.

Two Books. Two Plots.

We have spent the summer inside these two books that demonstrate the beginning and the end of a truly inspired and brilliant writer. And through our study we’ve learned much. And, the last thing I want to push hard on is this question of plot.

Jean Louise arrived in Maycomb with borrowed certainty. The story could not end until that certainty had been shattered and something real had been built from the wreckage. Every scene in the book is in service of that. The slow pacing that frustrates readers — the apparently endless social scenes, the conversations that feel circular — is the pressure cooker of Maycomb holding Jean Louise in place until she has become something. The story knows where it is going even when the reader is about to give up.

Atticus went somewhere he could not survive intact and came back knowing something his magnificent mind had never reached. Everything before the final scene — the jailhouse door, the trial, the verdict, Tom’s death — was the journey out. Heck Tate standing between Atticus and another terrible righteous mistake is the return. The shock. The changed man.

To take a closer look at these plot conversations, check out these links:

1. Plot of To Kill a Mockingbird

2. Plot of Go Set the Watchman

And again, these shapes are not imposed on the stories, they were always the stories. Booker found them the way a geologist finds strata — by looking carefully at what was already there. And I just keep saying it again and again, through stories we are reading, because it’s something I’m not allowed to say. But why not? Why can’t we talk about plot? Why can’t we know it?

✍️ Your turn:

What shape is your story already taking? What is your hero losing, or gaining, or both? What does the story require of your hero that she is currently avoiding — and am I, as the writer, avoiding it with them?

Because we do that. We protect our characters, let them stay in the comfortable scenes, delay the floor dropping and even write around the confrontation. The story slows and we blame the pacing when what we mean is we haven’t followed our own recognition all the way down.

Harper Lee did it too. She spent two and a half years in revision because her editor pointed at the truth in the margins of the first draft and said: go there. That is what plot recognition can do for us. It points at the truth in the margins of what you’ve written and says: the real story is here. Go write it.

This is what we are here to build — not writers who can observe and describe, but writers who can imagine transformation. Writers who can take a character from one kind of person to another, follow the recognition all the way down, and return the reader changed.

That is the work. That is what these ten weeks were about.

Again, can you see this in your own writing and can you share this seeing? Drop your observations in the comments.

Thank you so much for being with me, Jennifer 🐦‍⬛

PS: Learn about these basic building blocks of your own story: Plot, structure, antagonistic forces, character development, setting and more.

Two options this fall:

Over at The Conscious Writers Collective’s Prose program, I’ll teach my foundations class starting Saturday, Sept. 12th. And you can use this link for a discount when you sign up.

Or with me directly, Tuesdays at 10-noon PST, starting Oct. 12th. If you are a subscriber, you get a 20% discount.

Take the first Bones Class Now

Welcome into Flight School and our last live conversation about these two amazing books. One we all know, one most of us cannot finish. Go Set the Watchman and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

What was Watchman about?

In our live meet up, Patricia said it cleanly: Jean Louise built her house on what she thought she knew about Atticus — not on what was real, not on what she had tested and earned — and she was fully prepared to live there. She was prepared to build her little house on that rock, Patricia said. And so yeah, there would be tremors and there would be roof collapsing.

When the tremors came Jean Louise pulled the ripcord. She was ready to destroy the most important relationship of her life based on a single week of new information, without grace, without debate, without allowing the full human being of her father to exist alongside her disillusionment.

Uncle Jack stops her. Not because she’s wrong to be hurt. But because she is cutting herself off from the very information she needs to build something real.

Pamela, who came to the book already knowing To Kill a Mockingbird by heart, said the hardest part was trying to unsee the Atticus she already loved, Gregory Peck, in order to read the first draft clearly. But when she could, she found something unexpected: hope. Not for Atticus. For Jean Louise. Because Jean Louise refuses to marry Henry Clinton — not for class reasons, not because Aunt Alexandra wins — but because he is not her kind. His values are not hers. And that refusal, Pamela said, is the first thing Jean Louise has decided entirely for herself.

She did get values from Atticus, Pamela said. But she was able to form her own by refusing to marry Hank.

That is the Rebirth. Tentative, painful, incomplete. But real.

To Kill a Mockingbird’s craft revelation and what makes a book endure:

1. In Watchman we are told about Atticus’s goodness but in To Kill a Mockingbird we are shown. And that changes everything about how we understand our own writing. Lee, in her first draft didn’t do the work. But in the second (Mockingbird), she did and we will never get those images out of our mind.

2. To Kill a Mockingbird will be read a hundred years from now. So will A Tale of Two Cities. So will the Brontës. So will A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. Why? Because they hold values that press against the flawed human self and ask it to go further. Most books on the bestseller list this year will be gone in one or two. Not because they aren’t well written but because they don’t press hard enough on the thing that doesn’t change.

Atticus at the end of Mockingbird. Heroic? Or not?

In one of the last scenes of To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus is sitting in his living room, having a drink, while his children are being attacked on a road in the dark. He didn’t know. He couldn’t have known. But when it is over and he stands in that room, his magnificent code tells him his own son killed Bob Ewell. And the code says: turn him in.

Heck Tate has to stop him and he does: I’m the law, Heck says. And I say Bob Ewell fell on his knife.

And Atticus — shaken, humbled, defeated in the best possible way — accepts it. He lets the code bend in the hands of a plainer and wiser man. He comes back from the end of this book knowing something his magnificent mind could not have reasoned its way to.

Patricia closed it with the image I want to leave you with:

Harper Lee knew these people. She knew her conscience. She knew where it came from. She knew the bands around it. We’re all like trees. If you cut us in half you can see exactly where our conscience began to form. But we’ve got all these rings.

Those rings are your story.

🤔 Your Turn

Ten weeks later: who formed your conscience? And has anything shifted in how you understand it? Drop it in the comments. This conversation doesn’t have to end here.

One more post coming that wraps up our Summer of the Finch.

Thank you for being with me and I hope you enjoy the video replay,

Jennifer 🐦‍⬛

PS: I’m delighted to be teaching a foundations program, the most updated of my Bones series for Maya Popa’s CWC program. Click the link below and get a $25.00 discount!

Join Bones w/CWC Discount

Welcome back into Flight School:

Most people think they know how To Kill a Mockingbird ends—with the verdict. Tom Robinson convicted. And Atticus Finch walking out of the courthouse with the Black community in the balcony rising to their feet as he passes. That image is so powerful, so final-feeling, that most readers close the book there in their minds even though there are chapters left.

But this book doesn’t end there. And what happens after the verdict is the point the whole novel was building toward from the first page — from that epigraph that everyone reads as a charming literary flourish and almost no one reads as the thesis it actually is.

Harper Lee put that line at the front of this book for a reason. Not decoration. Not a gesture toward literary respectability. A thesis. Because To Kill a Mockingbird is not, at its deepest level, about race in Alabama in the 1930s. That story is present and it is real and it must be named. But running underneath it, quietly, the full length of the novel, is a story about what a man loses when he becomes a man. What gets left behind in the long difficult formation of a brilliant mind and an unshakeable code. What it costs to stop thinking and feeling like a child. And what it takes to be reminded.

Atticus Finch is the finest mind in Maycomb. The most formed conscience. The most unshakeable code. He stands in the jailhouse door, calm and unarmed, and faces a mob. He dismantles Mayella Ewell’s testimony with surgical precision. He argues for justice in a room that has already made its decision, and he argues beautifully, and it doesn’t matter.

He expected that. He took the case knowing the verdict was already written. That is not optimism. That is a formed conscience doing what it requires regardless of outcome.

But here is what Atticus cannot do. He cannot feel his way through a dark night the way Boo Radley can. He cannot protect his children from Bob Ewell on a road in the dark. And when it is over, when Scout is safe and Jem is unconscious and Boo Radley has melted back in the shadows, Atticus stands in his own living room and believes his son killed Bob Ewell. And he is prepared to turn his only son in.

This is the moment most readers miss entirely because they are still, emotionally, at the verdict. But this is the real ending. This is the sacrifice the book has been building toward. Atticus — the man of code, the man who cannot be one person in the courtroom and another on his front porch — is prepared to apply his principles to his own son. Because the law is the law. Even when it costs you everything.

Heck Tate has to stop him.

Heck is not a complicated man. He doesn’t have Atticus’s mind or formation or code. He can’t even shoot straight, which we see when he hands Atticus the rifle rather than taking the shot himself earlier in the book. But Heck can see into the shadows. And at this crucial moment, Atticus cannot.

Heck knows it was Boo. And he makes the merciful decision — the decision that lives where the code cannot reach — that Bob Ewell fell on his own knife. That is the story. That is what happened. End of it.

There are kinds of knowing that intellect cannot reach. There are kinds of reading of a situation Boo Radley possessed and Atticus Finch did not. Because Boo never lost the child.

Atticus comes back from the trial shocked. Not by evil — he knew about that. Not by the failure of the system — he knew about that too. But by a locked-away young man operating not from code but from pure unmediated love, who stepped out of the dark and did what Atticus could not. And was shocked into knowing something his magnificent mind had never quite reached.

That epigraph is a lament as much as an observation. The thing that was lost in the making of Atticus’s magnificence is exactly the thing that saves his children. And he had to stand in his own living room and let a plain practical sheriff give it back to him.

Then Scout takes Boo Radley home. She walks this man the whole town feared — the monster at the end of the street her entire childhood — to his door and delivers him home. She stands on his porch and looks back at her street and sees for the first time what he has been seeing all along: the children playing, the summers, the small dramas of the neighborhood. The world he watched over from behind a curtain because he could not survive inside it but could not stop loving it from the outside.

Atticus told her at the beginning: climb inside another person’s skin and walk around in it. She has been learning that for three years. And now she does it, simply and completely, without code, without argument. She just does it.

That is the completion of everything the book was teaching. Not the verdict. Not the closing argument. This.

✍️ For your writing:

What did your hero lose in becoming who they are? What childlike knowing did they leave behind in the long formation of their competence, their code, their certainty?

And who in your story is the Boo Radley — the character everyone overlooked, the one you may have written as minor or background or atmospheric, who turns out to be operating from something simpler and truer than your hero can access?

Because that character may be the one your story has been quietly building toward all along. The hidden king at the end of the street. The one who was capable from the beginning — you established it early, in a detail you may have thought was just color — and who arrives at the right moment to do what the hero’s magnificent code will not.

Look for them. They are already there.

Thank you for being with me and be sure to join me in the final Zoom of this fabulous series.

Live Zoom Conversation: Get Your Spot

Saturday, August 8th at 10:30 a.m. PST - Sign up now

XO Jennifer, 🐦‍⬛

Free Bones Class: Get Going Now

Welcome into Flight School:

I’m delighted to continue this transformative conversation about the work of Harper Lee that now takes us into a book most have read, or at least heard about. To Kill a Mockingbird which is what emerged from a rejected Go Set a Watchman.

In 1957, Harper Lee brought a manuscript to her editor at J.B. Lippincott. The manuscript was called Go Set a Watchman. An adult woman returns home to Alabama and discovers that her father is not who she thought he was. It was rough. The pacing was slow. The protagonist was difficult. But whenever the prose moved into memory — whenever adult Jean Louise drifted back to her childhood, to those summers, to that father as she remembered him — the language did something different. It opened. It breathed. The images sharpened. The feeling arrived.

Tay Hohoff was a Quaker, a serious reader, and one of the great editors of her generation. She saw it.

She told Lee, in effect: the real story is not in the adult narrative. The real story is in the flashbacks. That child. That father.

Lee went back. She revised for two and a half years. What emerged was To Kill a Mockingbird.

And this is one of the most important editorial stories in American literary history. Not because of the happy ending, though the ending is extraordinary, but because of what it teaches us about the relationship between a first draft and a masterpiece.

In this post, it’s my job to show you that nothing was wasted. Get out your Watchmen and page through for yourself:

The town stayed.

The courthouse.

The balcony.

Calpurnia.

The Cunninghams.

The class tensions.

The particular moral temperature of people trying to be decent inside a system that makes decency very difficult.

Lee didn’t choose to write about childhood. She was writing about adult Jean Louise and conscience formation and the South in the 1950s. The childhood just kept appearing in the margins. Her editor pointed at the margins and said: that.

And all of it was lifted, almost unchanged, from the first draft and carried into the masterpiece. Not recycled as much as transformed. It was taken back and put in real time. As it happened. Three years in a child’s life, vs. one week in a woman’s. Same Maycomb, seen through entirely different eyes and twenty years earlier.

So what changed was the seeing.

Adult Jean Louise saw Maycomb and was outraged by it. Child Scout saw Maycomb and loved it with the clear eyes of someone who doesn’t yet know what she’s supposed to see or what she’s supposed to look past. That double quality, the child’s eyes with the adult’s understanding just barely visible behind the curtain, is what Hohoff recognized in the flashbacks. It was where Lee’s genius shown forth.

What this means for you, the hard working writer:

Your first draft is not a failure as much as a vault. And somewhere inside the thing that isn’t working yet: That pacing that drags. The protagonist who isn’t quite right. The scenes that feel off. That’s where the real story lives.

Your editor’s job, your teacher’s job, your own job as a careful reader of your own work, is to find where the language comes alive. Where the images sharpen. Where the feeling arrives.

I have been teaching long enough to have said some version of this to almost every writer I’ve worked with. What is the part of this that’s working? Go there. Write more of that. And it is almost always in a place the writer dismissed or undervalued. It’s some digression or a flashback or a memory that they didn’t think belonged in the main story.

For your writing:

Read your draft and ask: where does the language change? Not where is the best scene or the most dramatic moment. Where does the writing itself feel different — looser, more alive, more specific in its images? Where do you stop managing the reader and just see?

That is your vault. That is what Hohoff was pointing at.

And whatever you wrote in the early drafts that you later cut, archived, abandoned— don’t delete it but log it somewhere you can find it. Lee’s editor found the masterpiece in the material Lee had already written. The balcony in To Kill a Mockingbird, that scene of a child watching her father try to do the right thing in a room full of people who have decided against him, existed first as a memory in Go Set a Watchman, written years before Lee knew what it was.

You may have already written the scene your book is built around. You may have cut it. Go look.

Nothing is wasted.

Our live Zoom on is Saturday, July 25th at 11 a.m. Join us here:

Live Zoom 3 Sign Up Here

🤔 Your turn:

What is the thing you’ve shared in class, or with a group, that you thought was “no good,” that the group adored? Can you remember that moment? Did you listen and go back and develop it!

I’m listening.

Thanks for being with me, Jennifer

PS: To read the original post for the Blackbird Studio Writers, it is Lit Lesson #60. click here.

And to learn more about the Blackbird Studio vision of creating writing that stands the test of time, click here.

Welcome into Flight School and this deep conversation I was lucky to have with Pamela who is the President of WICE, a Paris literary program, a former New York magazine editor, and one smart lady.

When we met in Paris, a few years back, she passed me the little book on conscience examination and I have it still. I’m not as rigorous about this examen as she is but the fact that she is a woman of deep conscience makes our conversation perfect.

It was just Pamela and me in the room, too.

Calling in from Paris at eight o’clock on a sweltering Monday night, Pamela was still thinking hard about Watchman, which she’d already read year ago but now listened to as a performance, in order to get through to the end.

Together we did what good literature demands: We worked hard, we thought harder, and we let the questions go all the way down. It is a deep, therapeutic how do I live my life conversation. How do I bear the discomfort of the unbearable?

This is what we found.

On the book that changed you:

Think about the one book you’ve read over the course of your life that moved something in you. What was the title? What did it ask of you? And looking back — does it still? Why? Or why not?

These are the questions that literature, good literature, have been nudging out of human beings since pen was put to papyrus. Not answers. Questions. The kind that live in you for decades and keep changing shape.

Pamela and I, in this conversation, used our time to push those questions about Go Set a Watchman. It is raw, unfinished, exposed, and yet inside live gems that cannot be gathered without going the full distance and finishing it.

Who was your Atticus?

Pamela has been turning this question over since she registered for this series. She can’t land on a single person. What she named instead was a moment.

Robert Kennedy. Campaigning in the South. Stopping at a sharecropper’s farm. Asking a group of children if they’d had lunch. The children, aware of the camera, said yes. And she watched his face — the blank moment when he knew they were lying. When he understood they hadn’t eaten. When the crusade stopped being political and became personal.

That, she said, is when he became sincere.

She has never forgotten that quiet moment. Years later it still lives in her — the standard for what authentic engagement with another person’s reality actually looks like. That is not a borrowed conscience. That is a formed one, built from a single witnessed moment of genuine recognition.

I took that and turned it around for anyone watching, because the question works both ways. Jean Louise projected a kind of perfection onto Atticus — his view became her view, his certainty became hers, and she didn’t have to think too hard because she could always go to him. That is the borrowed conscience. But the reverse is also true: we have all been someone else’s Atticus at some point. We have all been the person someone projected their ideal onto, and then disillusioned, and then condemned.

When I was writing Blackbird and evidence showed me a different father than the one I’d believed in, I went from idealization straight to villain. Just like Jean Louise. It takes time to find the full human being in the middle. Jean Louise has less than a week. That’s what makes the book so uncomfortable to read. That teeter-tottering, with no processing time, compressed into seven days.

The question Jean Louise, and all of us, are being asked:

I put it to Pamela directly: what do you think the end of this conversation is? When you are standing in a room with someone whose position you find monstrous, whose words eliminate the humanity of entire groups of people — what do you do?

Pamela: You accept them. Not superficially — not ‘I’ll pray for you’ which often just means go to hell. But a real acceptance. I can’t understand you but I agree to be in this difficult uncomfortable middle space. Where hopefully something will illuminate between us. A way forward.

And that is exactly what Uncle Jack is pointing Jean Louise toward. Not agreement. Not forgiveness. Not pretending the horrible man at the Citizens’ Council meeting didn’t say what he said. But the recognition that she has a gift. Jean Louise doesn’t see color, she never has, because of how Atticus raised her and entrusted his children to Calpurnia and stood in a courtroom for Tom Robinson. Uncle Jack offers that Jean Louise’s gift needs to come back to Maycomb as a voice, not a judge.

On serving wittily:

We landed, near the end, on a quote from A Man for All Seasons. Thomas More, on the brink of being beheaded by Henry VIII, speaks to his daughter:

God made the angels to show him splendor, he made animals for innocence, plants for their simplicity. But he made man to serve him wittily, in the tangle of his mind.

That is what this book is asking of us. Not to resolve the tangle. To serve wittily inside it which means to use the mind that was given to us, connected to the heart, connected to the soul, and asking the hardest questions without looking away from the answers.

(24.25) “You walk through Paris. I walk through Portland,” I said. “We see the suffering. We ask what we can do.”

“We surrender. We accept,” she said.

A note on faith: Yes, this conversation steps into the terrain of God and we make no apology for that. We are not talking about religion or pushing a particular belief system. We are talking about the greater consciousness of the human heart and soul. Land where you can. Let it move you toward the biggest questions you can ask.

Three questions:

1. Who formed your conscience?

2. If that was shattered by disillusionment, how long would you need to process it? (I’ve personally needed forty years after my father disillusioned me.)

3. And — can you arrive on the other side changed enough to withstand someone you detest, in order to add your own voice to the conversation

That last one is what Uncle Jack is asking of Jean Louise. It is what this book, never meant to be read, is asking of us.

Coming July 21st: Post Three of this series drops about the editorial miracle performed by Harper Lee on Go Set a Watchman. The miracle that produced one of American’s foundation literary masterpieces. Watch for that.

AND, you are reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Same town. Twenty years earlier. Through a child’s eyes that see everything clearly, precisely because she doesn’t yet know what she’s supposed to look past.

If you want to catch up, here’s your map:

Post 1: Summer of the Finch. The Beginning

Post 2: Summer of the Finch: Zoom Launch

Post 3: Go Set a Watchman: Post

Live Zoom 3 Sign Up Here

🤔 Your Turn

What is the one book that changed you? And what did it ask of you that you are still answering? Drop your answer in the comments. I’m listening.

Thanks to Pamela for thinking so hard with me and thanks to all of you for being with me on this journey,

Jennifer, 🐦‍⬛

Start here: First class of Bones, free

Welcome into Flight School and the continuation of our Summer of the Finch:

If you finished Go Set a Watchman, you belong to a small and stubborn company. Most people don’t make it. If you are in that company (like Jennifer in Oklahoma): well done. The slog was worth it. Here is why.

Watchman has a turning point most readers misread. They think the turning point is Jean Louise discovering that Atticus is a racist. They leave angry, dismiss the whole book, and move on.

That is not what happened.

Let’s back to the pages and the scenes.

Pg. 108 —> When Jean Louise climbs to the balcony of the Maycomb courthouse—the same balcony she sat in as a child, watching her father defend Tom Robinson—and looks down, there is Atticus at a Citizens’ Council meeting with men she despises, listening to a speaker say things she finds monstrous.

Her world ends.

But here is what she does next, and this is the key to everything: she goes to his office and accuses Atticus of things he never said. Read this chapter carefully. Study the language on the pages 236-253. She puts positions in his mouth he does not hold. She calls him every name she can think of. She prepares to sever the most important relationship of her life. And she treats her own devastation as the final moral word.

Now go to pg. 256 on —> Uncle Jack has to stop her flight and when she will not speak with him, will not be rational, he slaps her the way a doctor slaps a newborn. Jean Louise is being born.

And then he says the most important thing in the book on pg. 267 which is that she’s a bigot.

Jean Louise grabs a dictionary and looks it up: “Noun. One obstinately or intolerably devoted to his own church, party, belief, or opinion. Explain yourself, sir.”

Here, Uncle Jack points out that she is the bigot in this situation because she’s failed to see the nuances of Atticus’ position. And here, her lazy conscience formation is goosed awake by her good mind.

Pg. 267 —> “Oh God, what have I done?” she asks, realizing her core mistake.

This is the core question every hero worth being called a hero must ask themselves, and we as people who write about such heroes must ask about ourselves: What have we done?

Jean Louise’s shattering is not the discovery that Atticus is evil. It is the discovery that he is human.

This is the Rebirth plot and one of the seven basic story shapes Christopher Booker identifies in The Seven Basic Plots.

In a Rebirth story, the hero falls under the shadow of a dark power. The shadow doesn’t come from outside her. It springs from her own personality. Jean Louise’s dark power is her own unexamined certainty, her borrowed identity elevated to absolute truth. She is frozen inside it without knowing she is frozen. Everything seems fine until it isn’t. until the week in Maycomb when the floor drops and the freeze becomes visible.And then the reversal. The warmth that breaks the cold.

Atticus says three words: As you wish

She has just called him a double-dealing, ring-tailed old son of a bitch, told him she is leaving, cutting him off, and walking away from Maycomb permanently. And he says: as you wish.

This is not defeat or indifference. It is 1 Corinthians 13 love, the kind that does not insist on its own way, that bears all things. It means: your freedom matters more to me than my vindication. And something in that act of pure uncoercive love breaks the freeze.

And we she awakens to what he’s given her, she awakens reborn, renewed and on her way to a fuller version of herself.

Jean Louise will not leave Maycomb a monster’s daughter. She’ll leave her own person for the first time.

For your writing:

The Rebirth structure is not a template you impose on a character. It is a shape you discover your character is already living. Ask yourself: What has your protagonist been certain about that they have never actually tested? Not a small certainty but a structural one. The kind that, if it collapsed, they would not know who they were without it.

Who gave them that certainty? A parent. A tradition. A mentor. A culture they didn’t choose. How long has it been functioning as their conscience when it was really someone else’s?

And what is the thing: the event, the scene, the moment that will force them to find out?

The Rebirth is not about destroying the hero. It is about building one. Jean Louise walks out of Maycomb at the end of Go Set a Watchman for the first time in her life a Finch, not Atticus’s daughter, not Henry Clinton’s future wife, but a person with her own formed interior. Marked by the thorn. Alive.

Your character can do the same. But they have to go through it first. You have to let them.

To read the full, original teaching from Lit Lessons, it’s Lit Lesson #59: The Shattering and the Gift. Pay particular attention to the comments that were on fire with minds working and hearts changing.

🤔 Your Turn

Think about your protagonist. What certainty are they living inside that they have never actually tested? Whose is it really — theirs, or someone they loved and trusted completely? And what would it take for the floor to drop?

Drop it in the comments. Let’s find out what your character is made of.

Thank you for being with me for The Summer of the Finch. Don’t worry if you are joining late. You can start anytime. See our full schedule and links below,

Jennifer. 🐦‍⬛

PS: Finish Watchman. You’ve got time. Just keep going and read on. We meet and talk about it on 7/7/26

Live Zoom 2 Sign Up Here

Full Summer of the Finch Schedule:

6/27/26: Live Zoom Meeting 1: The Live Launch/Conscience (post 6/28) ✔️

6/29/26: Post Two Drops on our Deep Watchman Teaching (PAID ONLY)✔️

7/7/26: Live Zoom Meeting 2: Debrief Watchman & Assign Mockingbird

Live Zoom 2 Sign Up Here

7/14/26: Reaction Posts Drops: Our conversation from 7/7/26 + on editing and what Harper Lee took from Watchman and dropped into Mockingbird

Bonus: How this impacts you and your writing

7/21/26: While you’re reading Mockingbird in Review Post Drops (PAID ONLY)

7/25/26: Live Zoom Meeting 3: Debriefing your read of Mockingbird

Live Zoom 3 Sign Up Here

8/3/26: Post Drops: Our edited 7/25/26 conversation + Mockingbird and Plot (PAID ONLY)

8/8/26: Live Zoom Meeting 4: Wrapping the Finch teachings

Live Zoom 4 Sign Up Here

8/17/26: Final Post Drops: Our 8/8 edited conversation and last thoughts

Start here: First class of Bones, free.

Welcome into Flight School for our Summer of the Finch:

We had a full house of writers signed up for this meeting and then, come Go Time, we only had two and then one and then two again. That’s summer for you so I’m delighted to bring you this follow up conversation from our launch.

I opened with an exercise. Close your eyes. Imagine your unfinished manuscript — the one that isn’t ready, the one in the drawer, the one you know needs more work. Now imagine you drop dead.

And someone publishes it anyway.

Jennifer from Oklahoma put it perfectly: It would be like someone just pushing you out of a plane.

That is exactly what happened to Harper Lee. Her first draft, raw, unrevised, the book she locked away and said would never see the light of day, was published fifty-five years later while she was deaf, nearly blind, and living in an assisted care facility. Her protector, her older sister Alice, had died months before.

Holding that context in your hands changes everything about how you read Go Set a Watchman. It is not just a difficult book. It is an exposed one. And as writers we feel that in our bones.

Who Formed Your Conscience?

That’s the question to hold. Not who taught you manners. Not who gave you rules. Who had a moral certainty so complete that you absorbed it as your own — a parent, a priest, a teacher, a tradition, a belief system — and trusted it so fully that you never had to build one yourself?

And NOW the harder question: What happened, or what would happen, if that person or institution turned out to be wrong? Not wrong about something small. Wrong about something that sits at the very center of what you both believed.

Jean Louise Finch built her entire moral life on Atticus. His certainty became hers. She called it her conscience when it was really his. And then she comes home to Maycomb and the floor drops.

That is not a story about race politics in 1950s Alabama, though that context matters enormously and we’ll sit with it. It is a story about any person — any writer — who has been living inside someone else’s certainties and suddenly has to find out what they actually believe.

Patricia (New Mexico):

She walked into Go Set a Watchman already knowing To Kill a Mockingbird by heart. And so she couldn’t help but see, the whole time she was reading the first draft, what was going to be lifted and transformed into the masterpiece. Jean Louise becoming Scout. The difficult, annoying, self-righteous adult becoming the child every reader fell in love with.

The transformation, she said, is just amazing.

That observation is the heart of where we’re headed. Lee didn’t abandon her first draft. She went back inside it and found the real story hiding in the margins. Her editor Tay Hohoff, a Quaker, a serious reader, pointed at the flashbacks, the childhood memories, the child’s clear eyes looking up at her father, and said: go there. Write that story.

Two and a half years of revision later, To Kill a Mockingbird emerged. One of the most perfectly constructed novels in the American canon. Built from the bones of the book everyone says is unreadable.

Nothing was wasted.

Jennifer (Oklahoma):

This is a writer who gets the Harper Lee Award of the day. She finished Watchman nine minutes before our Zoom. And her honest response? I didn’t think it was bad. I liked it. I went along with it.

That is the right response for a newer writer, and a genuinely important craft observation. When you haven’t yet spent years learning what makes a novel great, you don’t feel the weight of the telling, the exposition, the pages of interiority that exhaust the experienced reader. You just ride it. The audio helps too. When a book is being read to you, the telling washes over you the way a song on the radio does.

If you are listening, that’s great, but to capture the feeling I’m pointing to, that drag in this book, go back and read that first chapter on the page to feel how inside Jean Louise’s head we are rather than in a room with other people. That is the craft lesson. And it is exactly what Hohoff saw and why she sent Lee back to revise.

The Full Teaching: Lit Lesson 57

This lives on my Blackbird Studio site, where the advanced writers in the thirty week program go. You’re invited in now, too. This post lays the groundwork for our Summer of the Finch.

If you are just joining the challenge: Start Here with that teaching. Then go read Go Set a Watchman if you haven’t. And if you have started and stalled —> keep going. The gold is at the end. I promise.

Summer of the Finch Schedule:

6/27/26: Live Zoom Meeting 1: The Live Launch/Conscience (post 6/28) ✔️

6/29/26: Post Two Drops on our Deep Watchman Teaching (PAID ONLY)

7/7/26: Live Zoom Meeting 2: Debrief Watchman & Assign Mockingbird

Live Zoom 2 Sign Up Here

7/14/26: Reaction Posts Drops: Our conversation from 7/7/26 + on editing and what Harper Lee took from Watchman and dropped into Mockingbird

Bonus: How this impacts you and your writing

7/21/26: While you’re reading Mockingbird in Review Post Drops (PAID ONLY)

7/25/26: Live Zoom Meeting 3: Debriefing your read of Mockingbird

Live Zoom 3 Sign Up Here

8/3/26: Post Drops: Our edited 7/25/26 conversation + Mockingbird and Plot (PAID ONLY)

8/8/26: Live Zoom Meeting 4: Wrapping the Finch teachings

Live Zoom 4 Sign Up Here

8/17/26: Final Post Drops: Our 8/8 edited conversation and last thoughts

🤔 Your Turn

Who formed your conscience? A parent, a teacher, a tradition, a belief system — whose moral certainty became yours before you ever had to build your own? Drop it in the comments. This is where the real conversation starts.

I’m looking forward to this terrific series. And your insights on a story about a Finch who touches the thorns and lives to sing about it,

Jennifer 🐦‍⬛

Start here: First class of Bones, free.

Welcome into Flight School and our summer challenge:

Here is a nightmare scenario for any writer:

You finish a book.

You know it isn’t right yet.

The bones are there but the flesh isn’t.

Into the drawer it goes.

You write a second book, a better one, and it becomes one of the most beloved novels in the English language.

The first draft stays in the drawer, where you put it, where you want it.

Decades pass. You are now 88 years old, deaf, nearly blind, living in an assisted care facility in Monroeville, Alabama. At the same time, the person who has protected you your whole life — your older sister, your lawyer, the one who kept the wolves away — dies at 103.

Within months of this sister’s death, that first manuscript is suddenly discovered. You give your consent to publish it but people who know you well, people who love you, express serious, and documented concern about whether you understood what you were agreeing to.

The book comes out anyway. It sells 1.1 million copies in its first week.

Seven months later, you die.

That is the story of Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s first draft, published in July 2015, fifty-five years after To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize.

The publication history is genuinely contested. I am not going to render a verdict on it. But I am going to tell you that as a writer who believes the integrity of an artist’s work matters, hold that context in your hands as you engage with this book. Because what Lee called a first draft, raw, unfinished, locked away, now perches on shelves worldwide next to the masterpiece she spent her life crafting from it.

That fact, that sickening fact, changes how we read both books. And almost nobody has read both books. Here’s why:

Go Set a Watchman is slow

It’s true. It is difficult in places. Its protagonist, adult Jean Louise Finch (Scout, all grown up) is the kind of character modern readers find almost unbearable. She’s opinionated, self-righteous, and absolutely certain she is the most morally clear-sighted person in every room she enters.

Go Set a Watchman asks you to spend a week with her in Maycomb, Alabama in the mid-1950s and to do it almost totally inside her head. Most readers can’t make it.

I know this because I’ve taught it. Almost nobody finishes. I didn’t at first.

But now I have: And buried inside this slow, difficult, frequently exhausting book is one of the most precise and devastating portraits of conscience formation I have ever read. Not conscience as a political position. Not conscience as cultural programming. Conscience as the thing you either build carefully, truthfully, at real cost, or borrow from someone you love and mistake for your own. And this is the goal of great literature: It forces the reader to think, grow, evolve. Interesting timing then, for Watchman. This is a book written for exactly the kind of moment when everything you thought you knew gets forced into the open.

A similarly hot time in American history was right there, dead center, in the south in the 50’s, when the Supreme Court overrode states right and forced integration at gun point. Sound familiar?

At that time, Jean Louise borrowed her conscience from Atticus, building her entire moral life on his moral certainty, and then hopped up to New York City to go modern. Borrowed conscience meets borrowed morality = explosion of everything known and beloved.

Some might say this is a book that outs Atticus as a racist. That’s not true, IF you read closer. That misguided conversation happened in 2015 and it was mostly heat and very little light. Watchman is a story about what happens to any person who has been living inside someone else’s certainties and suddenly has to find out what they actually believe.

That question is not political. It is not historical. It is yours, right now, if you are willing to ask it and face the truth.

This summer, that is what we are doing:

The Summer of the Finch is a ten-week reading, and thinking, challenge for writers. We are going to read both of Harper Lee’s books. Her first draft and the masterpiece. And we will read them slowly, with tools, and in a community of writers who are willing to ask hard questions about books and about their own work.

Here is the plan:

1. We start with Go Set a Watchman. You have two weeks to read it. Yes, all of it. I am going to give you every reason to finish it, and then we are going to meet live to talk about what you found on Saturday, June 27.

2. Then we move to To Kill a Mockingbird, which you think you already know, and you are about to discover you may not. At least not the way we are going to read it.

Over the course of the summer there will be five posts and four live Zoom seminars. The posts carry the teaching. The seminars carry the conversation. And the reaction posts I’ll write after each live session will carry whatever the room gave us. Those moments that couldn’t be planned.

The live seminars are intimate by design: eight to twelve people, pre-registration required, paid subscribers only.

Save Your Spot Now

The full teaching — posts, live sessions, reaction posts — lives behind the paid wall. If you’ve been sitting on the free tier, this is the summer to come inside.

The first live session is Saturday, June 27th 10 a.m. PST. We are going to talk about the publication scandal, the two books, and the question that threads through all of it.

Before then: go get Go Set a Watchman. Start reading (or listening). And resist the urge to put it down.

The gold is at the end. I promise.

~ Jennifer, 🐦‍⬛

Start here: First class of Bones, free.

Welcome to Flight School:

When Heide Island emailed asking for a blurb on her new book Romp!, I almost said no. I’d worked with her briefly, years ago, when I was just starting to build what would eventually become The Blackbird Studio and this fabulous tributary: Blackbird’s Flight School. She was a science writer. I wasn’t sure what I had to offer.

But she was insistent. So I read the book. And I wrote her a blurb:

Romp! (Tarcher/Penguin) is the kind of book that sneaks up on you. It’s about otters, yes — all fourteen global species, anchored in one family on Whidbey Island. But it’s really about community. About how nothing survives alone. About how the same thing that’s true in a Pacific Northwest estuary is true at a writing desk.

Heide is now a published author with a second book already in proposal. She teaches at Pacific University. And she got here, not through luck (though there’s a great Cinderella moment in this conversation) but through years of showing up, building a platform, learning to take critique without flinching, and finally, finally, asking for help.

I wanted her on Flight School because her story is your story. Or it can be. Enjoy this conversation.

Time Stamps:

• [3:00] What it means to muscle it alone

• [17:00] The Cinderella publishing story —> and why she resists it

• [20:30] Critique vs. criticism: the rolling out of bed analogy

• [26:30] Crisis in Higher Education

🤔 Your turn:

1. Heide talks about the difference between criticism and critique. One is a judgment about you. The other is someone pulling the toilet paper off your shoe before you walk out the door. This is one of the best framings I’ve heard for what we do in this community. How are you with feedback? Does it hurt? Can you take it? What have you learned about the two and the difference?

2. Where are you still muscling it alone? Is it the writing itself? The submission process. The belief that you need to figure it out by yourself?

See you in the comments,

Jennifer 🐦‍⬛

Start here: First class of Bones, free.

Welcome into Flight School and it’s my delight to continue this conversation about the inner-workings of story that we are too often denied in our high end literary learning experiences. Which is a shame.

In my MFA program, stakes were discussed in an oblique way but without comprehensible definitions. And the idea of defining an antagonist was scoffed at. Three years and thousands of dollars later, I left thinking an antagonist was one thing—a bad guy outside the protagonist. The villain. The evil stepmother. The corrupt system.

What I needed, which we all need if we intend on writing a memorable, life changing novel or memoir or short story, is hard look at the multi-dimensional layers of antagonism and systematic breakdown of what actually creates conflict that matters in our stories that looks less like a single deep eye’d villain and more like a complex human being with light and dark qualities. That looks more like this:

Did you know that every character in your book, both antagonist AND protagonist as well as sidekicks dark and light, work at nine dimensions of antagonism? They do and that’s why you are pulling out your hair trying to get your balance just right.

When I wrote memoir, antagonistic forces were clear

I was a child against the world. There were the parents who hurt me and the systems that failed me. These were the outside forces pressing in and so easy to see and somewhat easy to write. But as I aged up in my stories, and as psychological complexity—and personal accountability deepened—it was vital I learn about internal forces and the shadow part of me sabotaging my own survival.

But when I worked on a novel, it took years to understand that antagonistic forces are complex and crucial. They are where the story lives and dies.

Here’s what they won’t tell you in your MFA program:

To be a great writer, you must first be a great diver into the human experience and that means your own first. Flush out your own antagonistic forces mess:

Your relationships.

Your community.

Your body.

The state.

The educational system.

Your boss.

Whatever eats at you, has you make the wrong decisions again and again requires exploration, examination, and resolution—or at least some attempt of these things— before can do the same for your characters. In the end, you can’t write what you haven’t lived and what you’ll end up writing, without this work, is a portrait of your own dysfunction in the form of a memoir or novel that drags or cuts short at the wrong place or is one long expositional diatribe. You don’t want that and the world doesn’t need more of those books. Look around, they are all over the place.

Antagonistic forces operate on three layers:

Layer 1: Innermost Self (body, mind, emotions)
The hero at war with themselves. The shadow. The wound. The thing inside that sabotages what they want most.

Layer 2: Personal Conflicts (family, friends, lovers)
The people closest create the deepest pressure. Think Sophie’s Choice—values meeting impossible pressure.

Layer 3: Extra-Personal (society, institutions, physical environment)
The world itself as antagonist. Systems. Culture. Nature. Forces so big the hero can barely see them.

These layers don’t replace each other. They stack.

Early life = innermost. Childhood = personal. Adulthood = extra-personal. But all three keep running. The innermost wound affects every relationship. The relationships shape how you face the world.

Stranger than Fiction:

A real example is from the movie with Emma Thompson and Will Ferrell. Ferrell plays an IRS auditor named Harold Crick who lives a rigid, routine life in Chicago. One day, he hears a disembodied voice narrating his actions and thoughts, revealing that he is the main character in a novel and is destined to die. Seeking help, he consults a literature professor who helps him identify the narrator as the reclusive author Karen Eiffel (Thompson). Harold hope to find Eiffel and change his fate, he also starts to fall in love with a baker he is auditing and learns to embrace life. The story culminates in a confrontation between Harold's desire to live and Eiffel's need to complete her literary masterpiece. It’s an an amazing writers movie worth watching.

Here is Harold Crick’s multi-dimensional expression of antagonistic forces.

Your Turn

Your assignment (5 minutes): Open your manuscript.

Step 1: What is your hero fighting FOR?
Love? Justice? Freedom? Truth? Pick one core value.

Step 2: Name the three forces pushing against that value:

• Internal: What inside your hero sabotages them?

• Personal: Which relationship creates the most pressure?

• External: What system/world/environment makes this impossible?

Step 3: Now do this for yourself. Your own life. Right now.

What are YOUR three antagonistic forces? Name them. Write them down.

If you can’t name your own, you can’t write your character’s: Again, this is the work MFA programs won’t make you do. They’ll workshop your prose. They’ll discuss your themes. But they won’t ask you to dive into the mess of your own pressure points. I am sick of talking about why but would rather tell you that there is a way out and this post is your start.

Antagonistic forces aren’t there to make your hero suffer. They’re there to reveal who your hero truly is when everything they want is threatened.

Pressure doesn’t break your hero. It shows what they’re made of.

And you can’t write that truth until you’ve lived it yourself.

Drop your three forces—yours or your hero’s—in the comments.

Jennifer 🐦‍⬛

PS: You are reading the third part in a series.

Structure is not a Dirty Word Pt. 1

Plot is Not a Dirty Word Pt. 2

And you can learn much more about antagonistic forces in the Hero Series.

Start here: First class of Bones, free.

Hi and welcome into Flight School:

I made muffins over the weekend. Huckleberry lemon. Yum. And then screwed up the recipe adding too much lemon juice and then compensating by adding more flour. The result: A goopy bleck.

It happens. We screw things up.

And that brings me to a bungle in a high level workshop last week only it wasn’t muffins. But people. My people. Who I love.

Let’s just call it an off class. Not because of anything the students did. It was all me running on fumes, my body doing strange things, and hard news about my son sitting on my chest like a stone. I said something about story instincts that landed wrong. Then I tried to fix it with more talk (adding more flour) and made it worse.

You know how that goes. And…

I keep this verse close for exactly this reason. Not as punishment but as a standard. Teaching is a calling I take seriously and when I miss, and sometimes I miss, I want to own it cleanly and come back better.

This week I’m backing out of it properly. Because what I was reaching for actually matters and it deserves a cleaner landing.

Here is what story instincts actually are:

The unconscious, automatic sense a writer has for what a story needs next — before they can articulate why. The gut that says this scene is too long before the brain can explain pacing. The part of you that knows a character wouldn’t do that, not because of craft logic, but because that character has become real enough to have their own gravity. The radar for when a scene is earning its place and when it’s just occupying space.

Story instinct is built from two things: deep reading over a long time, and writing enough pages that pattern recognition goes below the level of conscious thought.

It’s not magic but more like an level of internalized craft.

Here is what I should have said in class:

We are all, me included, at different technical levels. Not you have it or you don’t. That framing is wrong.

What every writer in my Studio and here at Flight School has is material. The heart and soul of story only you can tell. The experience, the wound, the question you can’t stop circling. That’s already in you. Nobody gives it to you. And more, nobody takes it away. And it cannot be screwed up by adding or taking away or starting over.

What we build together, in every class, every draft, every consult, is the technical instinct for how to release it. How to feel when something is too long, too explained, too careful. How to trust the line that arrives before you understand why.

That takes time. It’s a moving target with every new project. It is genuinely, exasperatingly hard. But hard is not the same as impossible. And different is not the same as lacking.

✍🏻 Your turn:

Where do you feel your instincts working, even faintly? The moment you knew a scene was wrong before you could say why. The line that arrived before you understood it. Drop it in the comments. I’m listening.

Thanks for being with me, XO

Jennifer 🐦‍⬛

Start here: First class of Bones, free

Welcome into Flight School:

The MFA world’s dismissal of plot has a history not entirely without reason.

The reaction against formula—the three-act structure applied mechanically like paint-by-numbers—comes from real encounters with real bad teaching. And from writers who learned beat sheets in a formulaic way and produced scripts that hit every mark without writing a single living sentence.

From Iowa to NYU, these tools became gauche. Dirty words.

And in formal literary programs, the ones producing the next generation of “serious” writers, plot now gets tossed aside with barely a second look. Easier to dismiss than to understand which is a shame because in the right hand, plot is a remarkable tool. When taught with focus and clarity. Good luck finding such teaching.

Here’s what you need to know:

What I teach is not plot as formula but plot as recognition which is also the shape certain human experiences inevitably take. It’s the truth underneath the story the writer discovers rather than imposes.

Plot isn’t a costume you dress a story in after the fact. Plot is the spine the story grows around. Structural. Biological. In the bones whether you knew it or not.

The seven basic plots (what they’re really about):

Overcoming the Monster: When the threat is bigger than you and survival means saving everyone

Rags to Riches: The long climb from unworthy to claiming what was always yours

The Quest: You can’t get there alone—and the journey changes what the prize means

Voyage and Return: Falling into strangeness and coming back fundamentally altered (or not)

Comedy: The mess of ego untangling into clarity and connection

Tragedy: Refusing to let go of what’s destroying you

Rebirth: Trapped under shadow until love breaks you free

Real work example:

Take James by Percival Everett. Hot book right now, trying to replace Huckleberry Finn as the foundation of American literature.

It’s a Voyage and Return.

Jim, now James, falls down the rabbit hole of true slavery when he runs away. The horror. The violence it forces him into. He saves his wife and daughter in the final moment and brings them to freedom in Iowa.

But he doesn’t return whole. He returns shocked. At himself. At what he became. At this world.

That’s Voyage and Return: you fall into strangeness, and you escape fundamentally altered or unable to reconcile who you were with who you’ve become.

💫 Check out that longer teaching here.

Your turn. Which plot are you writing?

Your assignment (5 minutes):

Read through the seven plots outlines here.

5 Seven Plot Handouts Class 2

105KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

One will make your stomach drop. One will make you think, Oh. That’s what I’m writing. Which one? Don’t think about it too hard. Your body knows before your brain does. Write it down.

Now ask yourself: Is my hero actually fulfilling this plot’s promise?

If you’re writing Overcoming the Monster: Does your hero save the community, or just themselves?

If you’re writing Tragedy: Does your hero refuse to change all the way to the end?

If you’re writing Comedy: Does confusion become clarity?

See the gap?

That’s where your work lives. Not in prettier sentences. You can write those all day long but until you, the writer, recognize the plot you’re meandering in circles. Not because you’re a bad writer but because you never studied plot in a way that made sense to you.

Your literary program may have told you plot doesn’t matter. That “real” writing transcends such concerns.

They were wrong.

Every story that lasts has a plot. Every single one. The ones whose writers claim they “don’t believe in plot” are just working blind.

Drop which plot you’re writing in the comments. Let’s see what shows up.

Jennifer 🐦‍⬛

Start here: First class of Bones, free

Welcome into Flight School:

It’s 2010 and I’ve enrolled in an MFA program. I’m eager to learn. I have a solid publishing history behind me—three memoirs out in the world and fourth on the way—and I’m in the program to learn how to write a novel.

Teach me. Teach me how to nail this form.

What happened?

Nothing.

Oh sure, there were lovely lectures by lovely men and women about lovely aspects of craft. A lovely group of published novelists also workshopped a submission and said lovely things about my ability: Great writing. Totally compelling. Couldn’t stop reading. And my advisor, a novelist herself, said still more lovely things and after reading my historical novel suggested I kill all but one character, turn back time about a hundred years and start over. Lovely.

$40,000 of my lovely money gone. And I left my MFA knowing nothing.

So I started my own literary arts program and built my curriculum on this pyramid:

Structure is the heart of story . . .

. . . not a dirty word. It’s a framework you drape your creativity over.

It’s the spine that holds your story up and keeps it moving fluidly forward.

It’s a powerful and transformative tool that can change everything.

Let’s break this down:

Part One: Meet the orphan.

Part Two: The wanderer responds.

Part Three: The warrior attacks.

Part Four: The martyr resolves.

Or even tighter: Setup. Response. Attack. Resolution.

Let’s do it now: 5 minutes

1. Open your manuscript. Find the moment when everything falls apart for your hero. Not action. Not a car chase. The emotional crisis. The moment when they lose what they’ve been fighting for. The moment they’re forced to change.

Got it? Write down what happens in one sentence.

2. Now flip back to the first quarter of your book.

Look for the moment that made this crisis inevitable. The setup. The choice your hero made, the lie they believed, the person they trusted, the thing they wanted.

3. Can you see the line connecting them?

If yes, you’ve got structure. The crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. You built toward it. The reader might not have seen it coming, but looking back, they’ll say, “Of course. It had to happen.”

If no, that’s your work. Go back and plant the seeds. Make the crisis feel earned, not random.

This is not about beats. This is not about page counts.

This is about cause and effect. Setup and payoff. The moment everything changes—and the earlier moment that made the change inevitable.

Structure is just another word for inevitability.

Find those two moments. Connect them. That’s your spine.

If you’re a writer from a high-end literary program, I understand. The culture tells you that books are simply written, rolling onto shore pre-created like Venus out of the sea, arriving on a shell, fully formed and perfect.

But that’s not true. It’s not magic. It’s not something you can’t understand either. What we have is a culture of secrecy around anything that demystifies the creative process. It’s the hushing of such implications. It’s acting like the foundations of story are dirty words. They are not.

Looking forward to what you’ve discovered in the comments.

Start here: First class of Bones, free.

Welcome into Flight School:

Week 1: What your hero fights for (and which level your story actually reaches)
Week 2: Which plot you’re actually writing (not the one you wish you were)
Week 3: The egoic trap you can’t see yet (but your writing will reveal)

Over these three classes we had fifty people sign up. WOW. Unheard of. And yet, as you’ll see from the classes themselves, only four to six showed up in person each week. And those who did show up did a great job thinking together.

In this last meeting, we had a great conversation that was raw and personal. I shared fresh material from a tiny book called Born Only Once by Conrad Baars, a Dutch psychiatrist who survived Buchenwald.

I hope you get a lot out of this group with two novelists and two memoirists who covered the full terrain of story.

The question that drove this entire class:

The Setup: Marilyn Monroe and Hitler

Marilyn Monroe: abandoned by her mother, raised in a house of horrors by mentally ill caregivers, never knew her father, beaten with religion. She had spunk, determination, a strong will. But she was the tragedy of the unaffirmed person attempting self-affirmation. Walking around saying “I’m okay, I’m okay” when she had never been shown her basic goodness.

Adolf Hitler: raised by an authoritarian father (one shot, that’s it) and an indulgent mother (no limits, no boundaries). Average intelligence, failed entrance exams, years of poverty and unemployment. Emotionally deprived at the key formative years. Also had a strong will.

Same foundational wound. Different manifestations. Both destroyed themselves in the end.

The six egoic traps Konrad pulled from the text:

1. Amassing material possessions

2. Becoming a millionaire many times over

3. Success in studies, oppressive array of degrees and titles

4. Reaching the top of the ladder

5. Attaining fame (or associating with famous people)

6. Gaining power over others through authority, dictatorship, gangsterdom

7. Promiscuous behavior (there were actually seven)

These are the compensations for feeling worthless, lonely, inferior. And after class, Konrad sent me this terrific chart:

The Counter-Example: Pope John XXIII

Considered unattractive by the standards of the world, yet anyone who met him walked away feeling their own goodness.

Why? He was affirmed. And he carried these qualities:

• Sensitive (not discouraged sensitivity, but awareness of what’s happening in every moment)

• Open to the goodness of life

• Calm, unhurried way of life

• Unselfish and humble (the humility to be wrong, to say “I’m wrong and I’m okay with that”)

• Moral self-restraint (meeting people where they’re at, not expecting them to be beyond that)

I gave my daughter these qualities on a 3x5 card when she was struggling: Be yourself. Stop repressing emotions. Don’t hang on your fears. Be assertive. Don’t put people down to make yourself important.

The Example That Landed: Cast Away

Tom Hanks. Go-go-rush guy. Time is his God. Gets stranded on a desert island. Talks to a volleyball for years. Wants to take his own life because he can’t control anything (same egoic trap as Marilyn and Hitler: Control).

But nature affirms him. Survival tests him. He comes back a quiet man. At the end, he’s at a crossroads. Literally. And it’s enough. He doesn’t need all the answers. He’s been freed from the egoic trap.

Then We Worked on Real Stories

• David (tragedy): “My hero longs for power. Gets it. Blows it. Betrays himself and everything else. Which prompts the rise of an antagonist who becomes the hero in the second book to defeat him.”

Clear when it’s tragic.

• Konrad (novel): “My midwife wants to write the first book about midwifery by a woman. Her husband says women don’t write books. So she becomes unaffirmed by her husband and pushes her daughter to become a doctor instead.”

I gave him the Jung quote: “Children are driven unconsciously to fulfill everything that was left unfulfilled in the life of their parents.”

Konrad: “I never thought of it that way till this piece. Crazy.”

• Chrissy (memoir): “I’m befuddled.”

Me: “It’s almost impossible when it’s about yourself. The lines will show you. Don’t worry.”

• Sarah (memoir about adoption): “My trap was a desire to appear fine. Everything is fine. We were a successful adoptive family. We were fine. We were NOT fine.”

• My own trap (from Blackbird): Blind loyalty to the point of self-sacrifice. So loyal to my mother and father that I created truly dangerous circumstances for myself. Why? Years later in therapy I discovered my father tortured me with cold showers if I didn’t take good care of my mother. I was three and four years old.

That loyalty was a three-year-old’s interpretation, not a grown woman’s understanding.

The Revelation

A woman told me yesterday on a podcast: “I read your book so many times and it gives me courage to recontextualize my own experience. I felt like I was the only one.”

My heart soared. Because that’s the job. We bring forth the human experience. Truth. Goodness. Or in David’s case, a cautionary tale about abject awfulness—but written in such a human way we go, “I know that guy.”

Remember, this is a long-game art form: Your book could last fifty years. A hundred. I just celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary and nothing is more powerful than knowing I wrote something that asked the tough questions and pushed beyond what was comfortable in my era.

All handouts and teaching materials below.

We Have Room in the Live Bones of Storytelling

When: Wednesday March 25 at 5 to 7 p.m.

These three classes are a taste. Bones is the full meal deal. A direction-changing class that will inspire you to go the distance. If you’re a subscriber, you get 20% off. Check the footer of your last email.

Get a Spot in Bones Now

Handouts:

Born Only Once Hero

3.34MB ∙ PDF file

Download

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✍️Your Turn:

What is the egoic trap YOUR hero is caught in?

Don’t panic if you can’t answer yet. The writing will show you. It showed me ten years after I wrote Blackbird. It showed Patricia in this very class. It might show you on page 200 of your draft.

But start asking the question now. Watch for it. The lines will reveal it.

Drop your thoughts in the comments.

Thanks for three weeks of this work. You showed up. You engaged. You’re on your way.

Jennifer 🐦‍⬛

Start here: First class of Bones, free.

Hi and welcome back to Flight School:

Class two of our series was so different from class one. We weren’t just learning framework now, we were applying it to real stories in real time.

I opened with a review of Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots and asking them to think about: Which plot best fits what I’m writing?

Don’t be fooled, these aren’t old-time templates, they’re living structures for what’s happening in contemporary literature and in your life right now.

Case in point: James by Percival Everett.

This new novel is trying to replace Huckleberry Finn as the foundation of American literature. And it’s a Voyage and Return plot. A close look at the template and it’s a story as old as time. Jim, now James, falls down the rabbit hole of what true slavery looks like when he runs away. The horror. The violence it forces him into. But in the final moment, he grabs his wife and daughter and brings them to freedom in Iowa.

He escapes the rabbit hole shocked at himself, at what he’s become, and at this world. He saves his family, which is the redeeming moment, but he’s unable to embrace his identity.

This is a Voyage and Return that doesn’t end with the hero transformed and whole. It ends with him fundamentally altered and unable to reconcile who he was with who he’s become. I wrote a whole post about that here. Check it out.

Plots are not formulaic. They’re archetypal. And nested within one another: The Quest contains Overcoming the Monster, Tragedy is Overcoming the Monster in reverse, Rebirth is comedy turned on itself.

Then we worked on Patricia’s novel

Patricia has been studying with me for four years. I know her story inside and out—the tests she’s been through, the companions she’s gathered along the way i.e.,: the “band of merry brothers” she finds in a pantry meeting I mention in the class.

She thought her book was one thing. But as we talked, it revealed itself. Her novel might be a Quest.

Why? It’s test after test after test. A long journey. Companions. Ordeals.

“You have seen so much in my work that I had no idea,” Patricia said. “I just turn around all the time and go, what? what? You just see so much.”

That’s the power of having someone who’s done the work, has cultivated great tools (like these about the heroic hero) and who asks the right questions. I’ve been an investigative reporter for years. I’m always going to say, “Wait a minute. Are you sure? Let’s dig a little deeper.”

This is a long-game art form.

Why this depth of work and these questions matter: Your book could last way beyond you. It could be literature on the shelf somebody picks up in fifty years.

I know, I just celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of my first book. Nothing is more powerful than knowing I wrote something that asked the tough questions and pushed beyond the realm of what was comfortable in my era.

All handouts and teaching materials are below.

One more shot: Class 3 - From Ego to Other

When? Saturday, March 21, 10am PST

The truly heroic hero sheds ego and inward hungers for a greater good. Christ. Gandhi. King. What is the egoic trap your hero is caught in? What will it take to set them free? Or if writing tragedy, how can you deepen that trap?

I’m bringing brand new teachings from Born Only Once by Conrad Baars—a concentration camp survivor who examines Marilyn Monroe, Hitler, and Pope John XXIII to understand what makes someone truly heroic versus tragically lost.

Class #3: Get Your Spot Now

P.S. Bones of Storytelling starts March 25

These three classes are a taste. Bones is the full meal. A direction-changing class that will inspire you to go the distance. If you’re a subscriber, you get 20% off. Check the footer of your last email from me.

Tell me more about Bones

5 Seven Plot Handouts Class 2

105KB ∙ PDF file

Download

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✍🏻Your Turn:

As you watch the recording, ask yourself: Which plot am I actually writing? Not which one I want to be writing—which one is my story naturally following?

Drop your answer in the comments.

Thanks for being with me. See you next Saturday.

Jennifer 🐦‍⬛

Start here: First class of Bones, free

Hi and welcome into Flight School:

Fourteen writers signed up for this first class and all had one question to ponder: Who is your hero, and what do they want most?

The answers came fast: A 19-year-old seeking to assuage existential guilt (Carrie). A 12-year-old girl navigating grief and secrets (Kristen). A medieval midwife fighting for equality in Islamic Spain. An anti-hero chasing unlimited knowledge and power (David). A memoir about survival.

Then we asked the harder question: What’s pushing against them?

Because here’s the truth: Your hero is only as compelling as the forces of antagonism working against them. Not just external obstacles but the layers that run deeper.

• The innermost self (body, mind, emotions).

• Personal relationships (family, friends, lovers).

• The extra-personal world (society, institutions, environment).

This is why writing a big project (novel or memoir) feels impossibly hard. You’re not just telling a story, you’re capturing the extraordinary complexity of being human.

The four levels of value progression

Most stories operate at level two: hero wants love, faces indifference. Hero wants freedom, faces restraint. It’s conflict, but it’s not enough to carry a whole book.

Push to level three (love vs. hate, freedom vs. slavery) and you’ve got real stakes. Push to level four—the negation of the negation—and you’re writing stories that devastate: hatred masquerading as love, slavery perceived as freedom, self-deception instead of truth.

Then one of the writers, David, asked about ambition which isn’t on McKee’s list. We worked through it together: ambition → hubris or laziness → indifference → vengeance. Conrad added: “He harmed himself to achieve his ambition. Or harmed those he loved.” That’s when we saw it—the tragic arc, the hero who throws away everything he believed in and joins the evil force.

Now the writers were co-creating. The breakout rooms continued this and were where the real breakthroughs took place. Three writers—Chrissy, Carrie, Conrad—all discovered they were working with justice as their core value.

We closed by looking at examples: Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, Till They Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, the films Missing and Big. And I shared a Blackbird Lit Lesson breaking down C.S. Lewis’s value line (truth/wisdom) and introduced the outlier plot “Rebellion Against the One”—for stories like 1984 and Brave New World where a solitary hero confronts an immense power and is crushed, forced to recognize the limits of their perception.

All handouts, slides, and teaching materials are below.

Do not miss the next class. Get your spot now.

Class 2: Seven Heroic Journeys

Save the Date: Saturday March 14, 10am PST

We’ll map how heroes transform differently across the seven basic plots—and help you identify which journey your hero is actually on (versus the one they should be on).

Class #2: Get Your Spot Now

Class 3: From Ego to Other

Save the Date: Saturday March 21, 10am PST

Christ, Gandhi, King—what they have in common with Marilyn Monroe and Hitler. The egoic trap and what it takes to break free (or if writing tragedy, how to deepen it). Plus: Pope John XXIII through the eyes of a concentration camp survivor.

Class #3: Get Your Spot Now

Bones of Storytelling starts March 25

These three classes are the framework. Bones is where you build the complete structure. Ten weeks, live teaching, draft plan for your finished book. If you are subscriber, you get 20% off. Check the footer of your last email from me in your mail box.

Tell me more about Bones

Handouts:

Mckee Chapter 14 Class 5

15.6MB ∙ PDF file

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Principle's Of Antagonism

103KB ∙ PDF file

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🤔 Your turn:

As you watch the recording, work through your own value line. What’s your hero fighting for? Where does your story currently reach? Where could it go?

Drop your answer in the comments. Let’s keep working the problem together.

Thanks for being with me and I’ll see you all next week,

Jennifer 🐦‍⬛

Start here: First class of Bones, free

Welcome into Flight School:

Our Mini-Master Class series on the hero in your creative work is three days away:

Sat, March 7th at 10 a.m. PST

Sat, March 14th at 10 a.m. PST

Sat, March 21st at 10 a.m. PST

All stories have a hero…

…but not all heroes are truly heroic, though marketing and hype often confuse us about this.

Let’s correct this dilemma. In this Master-Mini series, we’ll leap right past hype, fan favorites, and following the crowd and I’ll pass over a few practical, smart and easy tools of discernment. You’ll leave these teachings with a much clearer idea of your hero, the plot they are running in your story, the trajectory of their journey, and as a bonus, a glimpse of what all the other characters around your hero need to do in order to either hinder or help.

Class 1: The Values Your Hero Fights For

Your hero isn’t heroic because they’re brave or strong. They’re heroic because they fight for something that matters.

This class unveils what’s called Value "Progressions that give your story depth and breadth and shows you how to identify exactly what your hero is defending. In this class, you’ll move past superficial outcomes that leave your story reading like a sitcom and elevate it to the highest level of human experience. Transcendence.

Class #1: Get Your Spot Now

Save the Date: This Sat, March 7th at 10 a.m. PST

Class 2: Seven Heroic Journeys

Building out of Class 1, we’ll now map how heroes transform differently across the seven basic plots—a tool that helps writers identify which journey they’re actually writing.

You’ll leave this class with a clear map of the journey your hero is currently on and the one you realize they should be on. And how to correct the problem which is also a fix for your structure challenges.

Class #2: Get Your Spot Now

Save the Date: Sat, March 14th at 10 a.m. PST

Class 3: From Ego to Other.

A truly heroic hero sheds his ego and his inward hungers for a great good. Think Christ. Gandhi. Martin Luther King, Jr. What is the egoic trap your hero is caught in and what’s it going to take to set them free, or if you are writing a tragedy, how can you deepen and complicate that trap.

This class provides brand new teachings I’m eager to share about truly heroic people and those who were the opposite. Marilyn Monroe as a case study and Hitler. And a man who is surprising hero of our time. Pope XXIII. And the surprising reasons why according to a concentration camp survivor who writes about him.

Class #3: Get Your Spot Now

Save the Date: Sat, March 21st at 10 a.m. PST

Looking forward to spending time talking about the most important aspect of anyone’s creative writing life, what makes the hero heroic. I guarantee, you will leave this conversation changed.

🤔 Key question:

What’s your biggest challenge with your hero right now? Get the conversation started by posting your answer in the comment box below. Looking forward to reading, and seeing you on Zoom March 7th!

See you then, Jennifer 🐦‍⬛

Start here: First class of Bones, free

Welcome to this speedy, but deep, masterclass on the core image that holds your entire story.

You’ll be watching an excerpt from an advanced writing workshops at Blackbird, where I share a prologue titled Boxes that opens my new memoir Revert about my three-years in a self-imposed retreat on the wild coast of Oregon escaping not only Covid madness but a long madness of control long imposed on my life.

The prologue, Boxes, is a moment at seventeen where I’m drawing boxes on notebook paper in a first attempt to both organize but also control my entire life.

I’d lost both my parents by then and was living in a crowded split-level with my aunt, uncle, grandparents, and my niece DM. While Bonanza blared on the TV and life hummed around me, I tried to contain everything—money, school, college, housing, my car, my boyfriend Danny—into neat little boxes with to-do lists.

The whole piece is full of details: the cheap laminate desk my dad gave me, the ponderosa pines outside my boyfriend’s house across the street, my niece hopping around outside my door calling,“I’m a bunny. Look at me.”

Key teaching moment:

After I read the prologue, I explain that I was using it as a prologue because that image of boxes was the singular image that contained my entire life as a woman trying to organize everything into manageable boxes, while fate knocking them over and scattering me and my stuff everywhere.

How I know this is a core image? It’s from testing the flow of the following chapters. Does the image fix, can I keep hauling it forward, repurposing and recycling, progressing and escalating. And 13,000 words in the answer is yet. It’s perfect. It’s it. This singular image delivered me a core truth and now I ride the wave of a draft that’s pretty much writing itself.

The key image in Blackbird:

Yes, there was a similiar thing that happening in my first memoir that we’ve been talking about here on Flight School for the last couple weeks. That image: A house. Open the book and go part by part, and you’ll see the depth of description around each house young Jenny lives in. While I didn’t write a prologue for Blackbird, I did write this opening line: The only house I’ll ever call home was the one on Mary Street.

This is also called The Attack Sentence, as taught by Gordon Lish and is part of consecution.

At the time I wrote Blackbird, which is now enjoying it’s 25th Anniversary, that line delivered what I needed. The key image: House. And while writing, it was perfect. Jenny would be moving a dozen times and once would find herself near homeless.

Prologue or Attack Sentence? It’s really up to you. Decide what works best but first, start looking for yourself.

• Find the one image that defines your whole life

• Make it concrete and visual, not abstract

• See if it naturally recurs through your writing

• Write scenes about your image instead of explaining it

My students start finding their images right here in class—the medical caduceus, the hole in the soul, the pack of dogs. It’s pretty magical when it clicks.

✍️ Your Turn:

Like the writers in the teaching, have you starting thinking about an image? What’s popping up. Comment in the chat and let’s see if we can suss this out.

Thanks for being with me, Jennifer 🐦‍⬛

PS: I’m gearing up for three mini-master teachings, live, titled The Heroic Hero. Interested? Here’s a sneaky first shot at signing up and locking in your spot. More coming soon.

Start here: First class of Bones, free

Welcome:

In this post, I tease back the outer wrappings of my first book and share where I got things right and where I missed the mark.

Yes, Blackbird did well. 500,000+ in sales. Oprah. International publication in 20+ countries and languages (I personally love the Japanese edition most).

But success doesn’t make me, or my work, immune to closer examination. In fact, I miss out on serious growth by not looking closer. As Jane Smiley writes in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel: “All books have problems.”

True. True.

There are pros and there are cons in all creative writing, but to believe that even the most successful Pulitzer Prize Winner doesn’t have issues is missing a huge growth opportunity. This is demonstrated here on Flight School again and again with closer examination of works from Anthony Doerr and Percival Everett, to name a few. Check them out, and see how I lean into the classic tools literary discernment: Value. Structure. Plot.

Go to this link for foundational teachings on all of these or simply get started with Bones. It’s a class that will change your writing life.

More about Bones Here

The video on this post is a discussion among SII writers (a long term workshop) which asks the question: Did this book go the distance or not?

Value. Structure. Plot.

In the study of a memoir or a novel, the first step is focusing on the primary character or the protagonist.

In Blackbird, it is “Jenny” age 6-11, and I’ve laid the forward moving story on the W chart I use in class. It’s not the only structure tool but it works when we are getting started:

Value

Based on the setup in the first few chapters, the core value (loyalty) can be seen in Jenny’s motivation. Double checking myself, I pull up the Principle’s of Antagonism from Bones of Storytelling.

If loyalty is the core value it will drive the story through split allegiance, betrayal, and self-betrayal. And it does: We start with loyalty to the sick and dying mother, and when the mother dies, loyalty continues through protection of objects left behind (jewelry and a photo album). When the step-mother enters, Jenny goes into split allegiance, giving her loyalty now to her father via a rationalization that he is well-intended but lost, even blind, by grief. Then comes the father’s profound betrayal of Jenny when he sends her to a summer camp and leaves her there after she tries telling him about abuse she’s experiencing. Because this betrayal cannot be born by the child, she tips into self-betrayal after the father dies by telling herself the story of his being a “good man” despite how he’s left her (and her brother) at the mercy of the step-mother after his death. The stepmother tried to break through this blind loyalty and tells Jenny “Your father was not a saint,” but again, Jenny continues her path of destructive loyalty.

Blackbird ends with Jenny “betraying” herself in the final scene when, on a Greyhound bus and shipped to an unknown future, she fantasizes her dead father rescues her—something he didn’t do when alive and with ample opportunity to do so. Why then, would he rescue her in this fantasy? This is the last, brutal tell. She cannot, will not, face the truth about her situation for doing so would likely shatter her more than events have already done.

Structure

Now I have the core value, I can study the structure of the book I wrote and in doing so, spot the core issue which is that overall, the story drags. Translation: It’s slow. Why? What went wrong? Based on the value, the answer is easy now.

The inciting incident—the mother’s death needed to happen by pg. 100, but instead I get there at pg. 173 (28 pgs. from the mid-point).

The mid-point (the father’s death) should happen at pg. 200 but is pushed down to pg. 287. It is then on pg. 321 that the stepmother ditches Jenny in the commune but it should have happened between pgs. 200-250.

Interestingly, the climax (Jenny witnessing the birth scene) comes “right on time” on pg. 370 when she lifts above her own “loyalty fog” and the stories she’s telling herself to experience the profound grace of ultimate truth which is that—despite her personal sorrows (and she has many) everyone is interconnected by this powerful love that she feels in the room at that moment new life enters the world before her.

Plot

Now we have value and structure, what is the plot of Blackbird? This becomes the litmus test of going the distance. If it hits the basic plot structure (below), I have my plot.

I feel confident Blackbird is Voyage and Return—Jenny falling down the rabbit hole when the family moves from Nevada to California and emerging “shocked,” like Peter Rabbit. Let’s double check.

Corresponding to the above chart, the story lays out in this way:

1. The death of the mother is the launch, directionless, for Jenny and it is violent and shocking.

2. Life with step mother is puzzling and unfamiliar and yes, identity starts to disappear when she’s abused at the summer camp, continues at the death of father.

3. In Northern Ca. she faces worse and worse situations with collective abuse and rejection

4. Left to fend for herself in Central L.A, she gets sick, hears voices, things getting worse and worse

Birth of babies awakens her, then rescued by aunt and uncle and sent back to family in Nevada. She’s circling back to the idea of father as rescuer and then grandfather confirms it.

In sum, Blackbird did “go the distance” in two categories. Value and plot. Where it dropped short was structure. That’s two out of three and so, I’ll give it a C+ or a B-. Where it excels, without doubt, is in the application of scene (here’s that conversation) and voice. These two elements, as the video conversation shows, helped the reader overlook the structural challenge and stay connected to Jenny and the overall story. So, in the end, not bad.

✍️Your Turn:

Are you able to name the core value and track how it manifests (in your scenes) in the contrary, contradictory and negation of negation line? If you cannot, what’s keeping you from getting there at this time? Answer in the comments below. Let’s talk.

Thank you for being with me and if you’ve made it this far, consider how these kinds of depth teachings might serve your own work. This entire project, here on Flight School, is to spark your deepest hunger for solid, smart, accessible teachings that help you take your own creative writing project the distance. I’m ever on the hunt for earnest writers. If you are one of them, let’s talk.

~ Jennifer, 🐦‍⬛

Start here: First class of Bones, free