Hi, writers!

Congratulations on your acceptance into The Through Line. I am so excited to write with you! This workshop sold out twice and still left some disappointed writers who didn’t get a spot, so let’s make the absolute most of our time together.

What follows is everything you need to send me by September 15, and how to send it. Please scroll through this whole letter and read it in full before you begin assembling your materials. Each piece matters, and the word limits are firm. You can reach out with any questions! These are meant to be works in progress, not perfect final products, so please do not pressure yourself unnecessarily. This is a laboratory and the raw material is what we'll be transforming together in the workshop. We just need to start somewhere! 

And to note: You do not need to provide written feedback to the other participants in The Through Line—this is not that kind of workshop. I will not be providing that kind of feedback either—from me, you will receive a forensic strategy map on your project’s through line, which will be informed by the in-depth conversations we will be having about each of your projects. So, you do need to take the time to read all the manuscript excerpts along with the aboutness exercises and scene lists in advance so that you can arrive ready to roll up your sleeves and talk about everyone’s work in meaningful ways.

Submission Guidelines

• Please submit all materials as a single Word document attachment (in Times New Roman 12 pt font, double spaced) via the submission tool below.

• Please do include your full name as part of the title with which you save your document.

• Please combine your manuscript sample, your two aboutness exercises, and your scene list into one document, in that order, and send that one file.

• Please do not send separate attachments--combine everything into one Word document. 

1. Your Manuscript Sample

Ten double-spaced pages in standard format: 12-point font, one-inch margins. This comes to roughly 3,000 words, and you may draw it from anywhere in your manuscript. Choose the pages that feel most alive to you, or the pages that trouble you most. Both are useful in different ways.

2. Two Aboutness Exercises

Write two short statements naming what your memoir is about, using the two frameworks from our teaching materials. Each has a firm word limit. Please do not go over the word limit; concision is a major part of identifying a through line.

Jeannine’s Seven-Element Framework — 200 words maximum

Work through seven elements: Protagonist, Desire, Reason, Obstacles, Misbelief, Stakes, and Time. Then compress what you find into a single paragraph naming your memoir's aboutness. The elements are your scaffolding. The paragraph is what you submit.

Example, applied to Mary Karr's The Liar's Club:

"This is a memoir about a child who needs to understand her family in order to survive it, but who lives in a world where adults hide the truth from children as a matter of course. The protagonist is Mary, a girl in a chaotic East Texas household in the 1960s. She wants to see clearly through the smoke of adult secrets, because the not knowing terrifies her more than anything she might find. Her obstacles are a mother in psychological crisis and a community where children are treated as furniture. Her misbelief is that the chaos is somehow her fault, that if she is good enough, she can prevent the next eruption. The stakes are her own grip on reality. The story moves from her first sense in childhood that something is deeply wrong to her coming of age and the moment the worst things are finally spoken aloud."

Berg's Stakes Formula — 150 words maximum

After [event], [protagonist] must [action], or [consequence]. Fill in the formula, then let it stand as your statement. Do not soften it into summary. The formula wants urgency and a real cost.

Example, applied to the same book:

"After a night of incomprehensible violence she is too young to understand, Mary must spend her entire childhood assembling the truth about her family, or remain forever a child defined by secrets she was never allowed to know."

Please label each exercise clearly. You do not need to explain your reasoning or walk us through your process. Just write the statements themselves, as tightly and truthfully and concretely (concrete is always better than abstract) as you can, and stay inside the word limits.

3. Your Scene List

A scene is a moment in your manuscript where something happens. Not a summary or a reflection, not a stretch of backstory (though sometimes a scene does take place as a flashback—the way to know if it is a scene or just backstory is that something happens, something real that is set in a real place at a precise moment and that lasts for a defined stretch of time). List every scene in your manuscript, in the order each scene appears on the page, from the opening to the close.

Hint: see here for extra guidance.

For each scene, give us the following in a compact, consistent format:

–  Characters — who is present

–  Where — the setting

–  When — the time period, season, or moment in the timeline

–  Duration — how long the scene takes place (minutes, an afternoon, a single conversation)

–  What happens — one sentence, as brief as you can make it

–  Word count — an approximate count for that scene alone

Make every effort to keep your full scene list under three double-spaced pages. A scene list is not a summary of your book. It is an X-ray. Practice compression now, and the list will already be doing some of your revision work for you before we ever sit down together.

 If you have questions about any of this before September 15, write to me directly. Otherwise, I look forward to reading your pages and meeting you at The Through Line in October! 

Warmly,

Jeannine