LIVE! #74
2 November 2025
Agenda
- Why We're Here
- Literary Forensics
- - What do I bring?
- - What do I feel?
- - What do I notice?
- - What do I study?
- Next Month's Reading & Study
Why We're Here
We Writers want to improve our craft
by Reading like a Writer
through Literary Forensics
we learn from each other
Roundtable Rules
Always refer back to the book
We practice active listening & serendipity
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but not every conclusion
Always refer back to the book
Meet today's author: Liz Moore
- Moore grew up in a suburb of Boston, and earned a degree from Barnard College and an MFA in creative writing from Hunter College, both in New York City.
- Both sets of grandparents were from the Adirondacks, where Moore summered. She attended camp only once, aged 12.
- A folk guitarist, Moore fronted the Liz Moore band while in college, and she released a solo record titled Backyards in 2007. Her musical experience inspired her first novel, The Words of Every Song (2007).
- Moore was a winner of the 2014-2015 Rome Prize in Literature.
- Her fourth novel, the New York Times bestselling Long Bright River (2020) was a Good Morning America Book Club pick, a Barack Obama pick, and was made into a 2025 Peacock TV mini-series starring Amanda Seyfried.
- She is currently Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she lives with her husband and two children.
- The God of the Woods (2024) is Moore's fifth novel.
"The truth can be buried, but it will always find a way to resurface.”
—Liz Moore
What do I feel?
What in the book elicited that feeling?
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but every conclusion should be questioned
We practice serendipity
- nothing is too crazy
Always refer back to the book
What do I notice?
- • Language and Grammar
- • Context
- • Point of view
- • Voice
- • Character development
- • Horizontal structure
- • Pacing
- • Layering of themes
- • Overall effect
Writing The God of the Woods
- Moore has always loved reading mysteries, beginning with Agatha Christie, and continuing to Walter Mosely, Dennis Lehane, and Tana French.
- She is a pantser, interested in themes of found family, created communities with strangers introduced, wealth and class, and perceiving one's place in the world.
- She needs the questions she raises to be answered not just logically but thematically. She often pauses to ask: Why am I writing this book, and why now? What feels new and important? If stuck, she sometimes retreats to the most recent fork in the road of her writing.
- Moore began knowing only that the Van Laar’s daughter would disappear. Moore discovered the answers along with the investigators.
- Louise's POV occurred to her first. Louise originated from a similar character in a short story, Shy, Shy, that Moore wrote 10 years earlier.
- She keeps running chronology of birth, death, key life events to help as she jumps around in time.
- Started using Scrivener, but retreated to Word when Scrivener messed up all of her formatting.
- Alice's story was the key to unlocking end of the novel—the "first domino" leading to the ending that replaced many other logically satisfying endings which lacked emotional or thematic resonance.
- Hardest beat to write? How TJ & Barbara framed John Paul McClellan.
Stats & Background
- Marketing: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction (#1); Psychological Fiction (#5); Historical Literary Fiction (#7); Mysteries (#8); Psychological Thrillers; Literary Fiction
- Genre: Realistic Historical Long-Form Archplot
- Print Pages: 496; Word count: 129,478
Reading Grade: 6th; Avg. wds/sent.: 9.64
Lexical Density: 48.32; Flesch Reading Ease: 77.97 - POV: multiple; Person: 3rd; Tense: Past
- Publish date: July 2, 2024
- Publisher: Riverhead Books
- Audio book length: (14 hours, 35 mins)
- Narrator: Saskia Maarleveld
- Recognition: NYT: Best Seller, Notable Book of 2024, Best Thriller of 2024, Best Crime Novel of 2024; People Magazine's #1 book of the year; an NPR "Books We Love" 2024; Time magazine's must-read 100 books of 2024
January 2026
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December 7: We Solve Murders - Richard Osman (UK, 2024)
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