How to Approach Research, with Mary Carroll Moore
Raise your hand if you love the researching part of writing a book.
Whether you do or you don’t, research is critical. How much you need is certainly dependent on what it is you’re writing, but regardless, it holds value in the way it can breathe life and fact into our work.
Author Mary Carroll Moore was struck with the desire to ensure her own was incredibly accurate for her newest book, which focuses on the life of a female pilot. And with a female pilot in her own family, how could she write anything less?
Luckily for her, Mary ended up knowing three people in real life who helped her and had the connections to help her do in-depth and accurate research—and she took full advantage of these people for the resources they were.
How to Approach Research, with Mary Carroll Moore
Listen to learn:
- How you can transition between writing fiction and nonfiction
- How to market cross-genre fiction
- Howt hybrid publishing works and its advantages
- How you can use your real-life connections to help with your research
Here’s a sneak peek:
[06:41] I had to learn about the complete opposite, and it was so valuable to me. Now I know what my tendency is as well as my strength, but I know how to balance them.
[10:15] So they sat for a whole weekend figuring this one out. And then Sylvia came back to me and said, “okay, here's what you do.”
[12:53] So in August, I think it was mid-August, I had my blog tour and the next day my book went into bestseller status and hot new release on Amazon.
[14:25] It's about the writing craft. I have to go into my own history of what I am as a writer, how I do my practice every day, what I'm learning, the things I have questions about, resources that I found, and share those.
[15:50] I never knew this ‘till I did the MFA. That fiction is so different in a language and its tone and rhythm.
[19:27] I had the idea for this other book, and a friend said, “the best way to distract yourself when you're waiting for news is to write."
[21:36] Indie actually makes as much money now as mainstream. It's a lot more effort and you have to kind of have the resources to do it, but you have all the control in the world.
[22:25] We got feedback from all the big guys saying, “we love this book, we have no idea how to sell it because it just doesn't fit.” And she came back to me and said, “here's an option for you.”
Links from today’s episode:
A Woman’s Guide to Search and Rescue
The Resilient Writers Radio Show: How to Approach Research, with Mary Carroll Moore -- Full Episode Transcript
Intro:
Well, hey there, writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas, and this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love.
Because—let's face it—the writing life has its ups and downs, and we wanna not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page.
This podcast is for writers who love books, and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who wanna learn and grow in their craft, and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books, and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them, writers who wanna spend more time in that flow state, writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community in this crazy roller coaster ride we call “the writing life.”
We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives, and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, writer, I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.
Rhonda Douglas:
Hey there, writer. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm excited to have with me today Mary Carroll Moore. Mary is an Amazon bestselling and award-winning writer of 14 books in three different genres. She has been a chef and a former cooking school instructor, and her latest novel is called A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue, came out in late 2023 and it's a cross-genre literary thriller that details a woman's escape, her fight for survival and how she flees to her estranged sister, who doesn't even know she exists.
So, Mary has an MFA and she's taught writing around the world, and her writing journey started after she attended Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, where she went on to write cookbooks for the California Culinary Academy and a culinary column for the LA Times for over a decade. That's quite a switch. Talk to us a little bit about how you went from cooking to writing.
Mary Carroll Moore:
So, I started my writing life as a food journalist from that experience in France. I lived there for a year and I came home with this huge passion for cooking, which is not unusual if anyone loves France. I was asked to write a monthly cooking column for the local magazine in Arizona where I lived, and that grew to books and that grew to the syndicated column for the LA Times that you mentioned.
I had a really steady and profitable career, but in 2000 I got breast cancer and I realized I needed to look carefully at what I wanted most with my writing, ‘cause the cancer was serious, and this sounds kind of, well, I don't know that it's blasé, but it's kind of a stereotype about not wanting to die without having reached my most important dreams as a creative artist. So I did the crazy thing of quitting my job and my food writing. I was in contract for two books. I finished those, went back to school for the MFA, and a couple of years later my first novel was accepted for publication.
Rhonda:
Wow, that's an amazing journey. Your first books were cookbooks, were they?
Mary:
Yes, they were. And one of them, the first one actually, which was written in conjunction with the California Culinary Academy, won a Julia Child Award, which was the biggest cooking award at that time. I didn't even know about it. I didn't know what it was. They invited me to the award ceremony in New York City and I didn't go because I didn't know what I was doing. I was so young, but my passion for food really came through in that book, I guess. That was exciting and that really launched the career.
Rhonda:
Wow. When did you turn your hand to fiction? How did that happen?
Mary:
Well, when I had the cancer and I went through the therapies, the treatment, chemotherapy, it took me about a year to really kind of sit back and look at my life and see, what was I missing? And I felt like fiction had always been rumbling in the background. I really, really wanted to learn it.
So I thought, “oh, it's easy. I'm a professional writer, so what if I'm a nonfiction writer? I'm a journalist, I know how to do it and I'll try my hand.” And I completely failed. That first attempt at fiction writing was so bad. It's still in the drawer, which many people actually have a book in the drawer—
Rhonda:
A drawer or two.
Mary Carroll Moore:
A drawer two, right. And I ended up realizing I needed to learn the language of fiction. It took me a lot of thought, but I decided to use some of my savings and take time off and make the career switch, go into writing full-time and see if I could make the fiction work.
Rhonda:
Wow. Where did you end up doing your MFA?
Mary:
I went to Goddard, which is a small liberal arts college in Vermont. And the reason I did that was because they were one of the first low-residency programs for MFAs, and I didn't have the bucks, really. I didn't have the funds or the resources to live on campus and attend a full-time school. I had just enough saved from my cookbooks to do the low-residency and keep working as a journalist as much as I could to keep the bills paid.
Rhonda:
I did low-residency too. I love it as an option. It's so flexible.
Mary:
I do too. Yeah, I mean, it's the way the world is right now. People have so much to juggle.
Rhonda:
And what do you feel like you gained from doing an MFA? Would you do it all over again if you had to?
Mary:
If I had to, yeah. I even considered going back again for another one, but they cost money, so I didn't. But the thing I got was really interesting. I tend to write in images. I'm a very lyrical writer, which is maybe why I found such a comfortable home in food writing for so many years, because as you know, food is all about sensory detail, the pleasures of smell, taste, and texture.
And when I went to grad school for the MFA, my fiction advisor, the first one I had, was a minimalist. She wrote short stories and she wrote kind of in a Raymond Carver style, very, very sparse wording, very few images. And she would take her red pen, on the pages I sent to her every three weeks, and X out whole pages of my work. And she scolded me. She said, “enough here, enough, too much description.”
So I had to learn to balance that very natural tendency, and my program included study of minimalist writers for a few years. I had to learn about the complete opposite, and it was so valuable to me. Now I know what my tendency is, as well as my strength, but I know how to balance them.
Rhonda:
It’s funny, isn't it? How our greatest strength can also be our greatest weakness and we have to kind of learn to reign it in.
Your latest novel is called A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue. Can you tell me where that originated? Where did the idea come from for that novel?
Mary:
Well, my mom was a pilot and in 1942 she got her commercial license. She was only 22 years old, and she applied twice and finally got into the Women's Air Force Service Pilots Program here in the States. It was during the war to relieve men, basically, for military duty. These women who were very skilled pilots took over the training and the fairing of aircraft from one location to another.
And my mom served in that Women's Air Force Service Pilots Program for two years at 22. And growing up with a mother who was a pilot when women never did that kind of stuff, was just a legacy I could not let go of. And even though she had four kids and stopped flying when she was pregnant with my older sister, it ended up being this background hum in our lives.
People ask me, “what does your dad do?” And I say, “well, my mom was a pilot.” It was just kind of like, I love this idea of living with this woman who was so amazing and yet an ordinary person every day. I couldn't see the pilot in her, what gave her that strength and that, I don't know, purpose. So I decided I'd researched the lives of women pilots and I wanted to write about them.
And my novel, A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue, is about two sisters who are estranged, who are both trained by their father, who is a stunt pilot. Flying is big in that book. The whole idea of what women need in order to be pilots, what kind of aviator personality comes through in a woman's life, if they're really fixed in the sky, they love the sky more than the ground. My mom was really the inspiration and I wrote the novel to kind of get behind the mystery of who she was. I even took flying lessons at one point to see what it was like.
Rhonda:
I was going to ask you that. How do you do the research for something that is quite complicated? I mean, other than brain surgery, it's a pretty precise skill. What kind of research did you do for the book?
Mary:
Well, it's a great question. I had, not just the piloting experience, but also these women are search and rescue pilots. You have the search and rescue process as well, the ground crew, et cetera. And I had the best resources in the world. One of my students when I taught writing in Minnesota was a flight instructor, Sylvia. Sylvia and I would get together regularly about my scenes because basically I knew nothing about it. So she'd say, “okay, well, send me one of the flying chapters, and let me look at it.”
And she took the chapters to her cohort of three other instructors, and they sat down and they brainstormed things like, “how do you crash?” Because I had an opening scene in my book as one of the characters has to emergency land and she ends up crashing. I wanted her to walk away. I wanted the plane to explode and her not to be hurt by it.
So they sat for a whole weekend figuring this one out. And then Sylvia came back to me and said, “okay, here's what you do.” And then I'd run the revised scene by her again just to make sure. I did the same with the search and rescue scenes. I was very lucky. I had two students who were search and rescue workers in California, so they got me in touch with the organization there, and I had a lot of help. Really, I did. I believe in research as being very accurate. It has to be accurate in a book like this.
Rhonda:
That's amazing. Wow. I've never heard of anyone using their writing students as resources like that. That's so great.
What's your writing life now?
Mary:
My writing life now? Wow. Well, having a book published is an all-consuming experience. I had probably about a year—once my book was finished and ready to be published—I had about a year of getting ready for that and to kind of balance my, I don't know, outreach. The outreach life for a writer is completely different than the inner creative work.
I've been working on some short stories. I have a collection of short stories I'm putting together, so I try to work every day on my writing. I also write a substack newsletter every week. That is a really great outlet for me during this publication time to talk about what I'm learning and all the things that writers have to face when they eventually decide to release their book into the world.
Rhonda:
And you're an Amazon bestselling author. What is that experience like? Does that make much of a difference?
Mary:
It does. It makes a huge difference. Early on in the process, I didn't really know much about promoting my book, and I hired a publicist who encouraged me to try pre-orders. Pre-orders are something that there's controversy about, whether that works or not. Major publishers usually use them, and the idea is that you set the book up for people to buy before it's actually released. And so I set my pre-orders up in August, and at the same time I hired a blog tour.
I don't know if this is something that your listeners know about, but there's Bookstagrammers and BookTok and all kinds of online social media people who have 50,000 followers, and they're all crazy about books. There's different blog tours that you can hire. They're not very expensive. And then your book will be read and posted by these bloggers. So in August, I think it was mid-August, I had my blog tour and the next day my book went into bestseller status and hot new release on Amazon just from that.
Rhonda:
Oh my Lord. It sounds like the blog tour is a really good tool.
Mary Carroll Moore:
Well, it's very effective. I did not know this. It was a real gamble, but like I said, it's not very expensive and it was very cool to see the numbers. My friend, who's a many-book published author, she called me the next day. She said, “you're a hot new release.” I said, “what's that?” And she said, “look, on your Amazon page, you're in three categories. You're number three and number five as bestseller.” So that was phenomenal. And the audiobook of my book has stayed in the bestseller list all these months till now. It's still on.
Rhonda:
Wow, that's amazing. Congratulations.
Mary:
Thank you. I think it generates interest. They call it “buzz”, of course, but I think it generates interest among readers to see, “oh wow, this person is getting a lot of sales. I might want to check their book out.” Or the blog bloggers that are on the tour say, “wow, I love this book.” And then their followers say, “well, I'm passionate about books too. I'm going to read it.” And then they pre-order it. It's a cool little system I didn't even know about.
Rhonda:
Yeah, there's a lot behind the scenes in book marketing to think about.
So Mary, you write across genres, right? You're writing in multiple genres. What is that like? It's something I do as well. How do you handle that in your life? Do you always have a few different projects on the go and switch between them or do you focus on one? How do you incorporate that?
Mary:
Well, I always have my substack every week, which is nonfiction. It's about the writing craft. I have to go into my own history of what I am as a writer, how I do my practice every day, what I'm learning, the things I have questions about, resources that I found, and share those. That's kind of my basic, I have to do this every week. I've committed since 2008 to run these newsletters, and that's kind of the first level of my writing. And then when I can, I switch gears into the fiction.
It's a really good question you're asking. It takes a different kind of internal state to move into fiction. I find that fiction requires kind of an inner silence. I have a lovely walk in our neighborhood. We live in the country, and I have a three mile walk that I do in most weather. I bundle up now and I do my walk and I start to muse over the story I'm working on. And that will be my way of switching out from the nonfiction into the fiction. I need that kind of inner incubation time. It's so different, fiction. I never knew this ‘till I did the MFA, that fiction is so different in a language and its tone and rhythm.
Rhonda:
And even in how it comes to you, that sort of internal sense, what it feels like before you can sit down and write. I work in poetry and I find that poetry is different. Do you write poetry at all?
Mary:
I've had two poems published, I think not much. I love poetry and I used to write it a lot. It's a wonderful form for entering that kind of deeper contemplation with your characters or whatever. So sometimes, one of my exercises in class was always to take a character and write a poem about them. And that was a Stuart Dybek, he was a short story writer, and he used that technique and I loved it because it'll switch you into that fiction-ish mode. You must know this from writing poetry yourself. It's just such a great way to get into that more dreamy state.
Rhonda:
Yeah, absolutely.
Now that you've done A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue, which is based on your experience with your mother and has its roots in real life, in history, is that something you're going to stick with or are you moving on to something else?
Mary Carroll Moore:
Well, actually I have another book coming out in the spring, in April, and it's called Last Bets. And it's about two women from different cultures escaping to an island in the Caribbean when their lives fall apart and then becoming kind of unlikely companions in this gambling world that's there. Some of the Caribbean islands are tournament centers for things like backgammon, which you'd never imagine to be a gambling hot thing.
But I am a scuba diver, and I spent time down in the Caribbean on this island, Bonaire, and found that people bet their yachts in a night. And so I thought, “how fascinating, what if someone got caught in that world and they didn't want to, and what would it do to them?” So this book, Last Bets, is coming out in April, and I'm already working on starting to spread the word about it. And it's kind of like too many books, too little time.
Rhonda:
Get those pre-orders in now.
Mary Carroll Moore:
In January, the pre-orders will start for that one. It's exciting. I love fast-paced stories with really strong women characters. That's the kind of signature that I work with as a writer. And this one is very fast-paced as well.
Rhonda:
Wow, I bet the research for that one was fun.
Mary:
Oh my goodness. Well, I knew scuba diving pretty well. I had no idea about gambling. I'm not a gambler, so I love backgammon just as an observer. Researching how incredible the tournaments are around the world and how they're kind of a cult, in a way, because people think, “oh, Las Vegas or poker,” or something like that, if you want to do high stakes. But backgammon has a huge following for that. So that was fascinating, that whole world.
Rhonda:
Wow, I had no idea.
Mary:
I had no idea either. Yeah, really, really unusual. I mean, people that think about backgammon and they think, “oh yeah, we play it like cribbage in the evenings by the fire.” But it's actually high-stakes because it's not based on luck, it's only based on skill, unlike poker, which can have luck. And here I am talking lik I know things about gambling and I know nothing except what I've researched.
Rhonda:
It's the writer's life. We know just enough to sound like we know what we're talking about. So, are you basically writing a book a year? What's your pace like? How quickly are you getting them done?
Mary:
I don't do that many that fast. A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue, my book that's just come out, took 10 years. That's my normal pace. I'm very slow. But it happened while my agent was working on A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue. I had the idea for this other book, and a friend said, “the best way to distract yourself when you're waiting for news is to write.”
So I put a lot of time into Last Bets. My agent's great, but she's slow. It took her months to get back to me about edits that she'd recommend on Woman's Guide. And in the meantime, I got this draft of Last Bets done and I thought, “hey, I really like this story.” It was almost like the two books got created in tandem. And when Women's Guide was ready to be published, I thought, “well, I have Last Bets almost done. What if I spent more time on it and got it ready too? And then what if they rode the momentum of each other?” That's a new idea. Completely different than my nature, which is to go slow.
Rhonda:
It's interesting because in the indie publishing world, people are counselled to do fast releases, to have one book come out after the other. And when you became an Amazon bestseller, have you ever been tempted to go indie now that you've had this kind of success in the traditional publishing world?
Mary:
Well, I have been in the traditional publishing world all my life, but this book that just came out is indie. I decided I really wanted control over it. I had my last experience with fiction, although I love my editor, the publisher was not as meticulous as I'd like, I guess that's the best word. I was very disappointed in the way it came out.
So I decided if I had the resources, I could save enough money to do it, I would do indie. I went ahead and created my own imprint and did Indie, and I'm going to do that with Last Bets as well. I love working with an agent, though, because I get a professional's viewpoint on how sellable the book is. And she's a hundred percent behind my indie venture.
And it's funny, other writers that I know have chosen to go indie between other books, do it with the main publisher and then go indie on your own to see the difference. Indie actually makes as much money now as mainstream. It's a lot more effort and you have to kind of have the resources to do it, but you have all the control in the world. And I love that. I really did.
Rhonda:
Yeah, I think the creative control is the main reason, really, people end up going indie. They just have an idea of what they want the book to be. But your agent is on board with that.
Mary:
Yeah, she's totally on board. She said, “let's try to sell it as it is.” And I had trouble with A Woman's Guide being available and accessible to mainstream publishers because it's cross-genre. It's a literary thriller, which means it's a literary fiction. It has women's fiction kind of as its base, but it has a thriller plot. And so they didn't know. We got feedback from all the big guys saying, “we love this book, we have no idea how to sell it because it just doesn't fit.”
And she came back to me and said, “here's an option for you.” So, I went ahead and took it. And I thought it was a very successful experience. And from sales alone, I think it's profitable as well. It's hard, though. I would not recommend it to everybody. You really do have to know the industry. And I've been published long enough to where I do, and I had my agent’s help. So yeah, it's kind of funny, isn't it? It's like a whole mix of options now for writers.
Rhonda:
It's very mixed. Wow, that's amazing. I'm surprised to hear you had an agent that was supportive of it. I think that's rare, and so great that you have that kind of relationship with your agent, that they were willing to be supportive of that. And Last Bets, you'll do the same.
Mary:
Yeah, I'll do the same. And truthfully, Rhonda, it's not as unusual as I thought, either. Several of my students who have agents have actually been published by—Epigraph is one, She Writes Press is another, and they're called hybrid publishers. They basically have the same setup as I'm doing and they're very respected now. So Brooke Warner, the head of She Writes Press, is a very respected industry professional and knows a lot about publishing. And I think it's a way of the future because traditional publishing is challenging right now. Really challenging.
Rhonda:
I'm sure it's challenging on the publishing plan, it certainly is if you're a writer, as you say, writing something that the marketing department doesn't know what to do with that works really well that writers want to read but the marketing department is like, “we dunno where we'd put this on the shelves.” And that becomes an issue.
Well, thank you so much for doing this talk with me, Mary, it's just been fascinating hearing about your process.
Mary:
I'm so glad that you asked me. Thank you very much.
Rhonda:
Thank you.
Outro:
Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of the Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes.
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