Liz Moore has not lost the plot

The master of literary mysteries talks constructing a story and how she would write the fat character in her second novel differently now.

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Main Meal

Dear friends,

I’ve written before about how I don’t understand plot and I don’t think a lot of writers do. It’s barely taught in MFA programs, yet as a reader it’s voice and plot that I usually crave, by which I mean that ineffable thing that grips you inside a story rather than pushing you out of it. What’s often missing though, I think, from the conversation about plot is an understanding that it is more than just a series of incidents AND more than the mind of a character. A fuller, more holistic vision of what a plot is and why one works or doesn’t is something I’m always chasing. And who better to ask than Liz Moore, the author of five novels, including recent mega hit The God of the Woods and Long Bright River. Obama is a fan, and so is

Melissa Febos

and so am I. Below is my interview with Liz, lightly edited for clarity. We got into how she constructs the plots of her books and the regrets she has over how she wrote the fat character in her second novel, and a tidbit about TGOTW that she hasn’t told anyone (!). I hope you enjoy.

Emma Copley Eisenberg: Welcome Liz Moore! You are my friend and writing buddy here in Philly and I am such a fan of your books and it is a great pleasure to have you aboard the Frump Feelings van. I for one cannot wait for the Long Bright River TV series to drop, which we just learned will happen on March 13. I hope we can watch it together while eating delicious fancy popcorn. My first question for you is one I also annoyingly shouted at you at your Philly launch for The God of the Woods. And that is: what to you is a plot?

Liz Moore: Plot at its most fundamental level is story, and story is something that we as a species have been doing since the dawn of human civilization. I never would have identified myself as someone who was “good at plot” when I was first starting out as a writer. My first book was a collection of interconnected short stories which I did because I was so afraid of writing a novel length plot. In that format, I was able to develop a set of characters I let crop up in different ways in different stories and it just felt much more manageable to me. It’s a format I recommend to a lot of people who are still working to develop the stamina to complete a full length work.

With my second book, it was so character driven that I basically just decided to tell it from two different points of view without knowing exactly how they were connected. I just bounced back and forth and let the characters kind of talk to each other until I figured out what their story was. Even though that book wasn’t marketed as a mystery, I still think of it as one, sort of, because the central mystery is a mystery of genealogy. But it took me about three published books to think of myself as somebody who was very story forward. Now, a fundamental part of how I write is asking a big unsolved question, whether it’s a mystery of identity or a mystery of genealogy or personal history or whether it’s a more traditional there’s been a murder or disappearance. So, a plot to me at the end of all of this, is a big unanswered question that has to be answered by the end of the book.