What is The Story Catalyst newsletter about, and why should you subscribe?
Join our intellectually rigorous and emotionally supportive writing community.
Live the life written!
It’s a drag to live the life unwritten—constantly feeling nagged (by your own self) about what you haven’t written* but you know, deep in your soul, you must write.
(*Or living the life with the book in a drawer, only submitted to other eyes once, maybe twice…)
Take the courage walk with us and join other Story Catalysts who will love you and support you and your writing vision.
How subscriptions work
We’re cool here. We want you to check us out for free and feel like you belong. If you want to belong a little more, we welcome you in.
(Because you already belong. If you write, you’re a writer.)
Free subscribers receive occasional posts and access to the free Story Catalyst community on the Mighty Networks platform.
Paid subscribers receive full access to the newsletter and three months of free access to Story Catalyst and Uncommon Hours live calls and classes.
Founding members receive one year of full access to all Story Catalyst and Uncommon Hour online offerings, as well as access to the archive.
If you’re on a tight budget—let’s remember that part about being a writer in America, which doesn’t love writers, especially marginalized voices, the way that other countries do—then we can work with you to provide scholarships and assistance.
Founding members are part of that. Know that there are many people who have their benevolent eyes on you and want you to succeed.
Talk to us! Tell us what you need to get where you want to go.
What do you get with a subscription?
News about writing craft, as well as motivational techniques that boost your focus and tools to super-power your attention.
Access to live monthly calls so you’ll meet other writers who are right where you are and going where you want to go.
Previews of Story Catalyst classes with resources, links and early access discounts. So you gain the skills you need to finish and get published.
With the Uncommon Hours track, which is included for paid subscribers, you’ll receive guided visualizations, uncommon productivity hacks and leading-edge success tools from thought leaders who understand creatives, what they need and how they work.
Uncommon Hours understands most particularly voices that have been marginalized, whether that’s because you are BIPOC, a woman, young or old.
I call Uncommon Hours the ultimate self-care for writers. These practices are what keep you from getting tossed away.
As a subscriber, you won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.
Be on the leading edge
Be the first to hear about writing craft courses that will turbo-charge your skill.
Be the first to hear about our writing retreats in places like Scotland, Ireland, Taos, Tuscany or the Utah canyonlands. And who doesn’t want to do that?
Be the first to get publication tips about how to prepare your work and find your perfect match.
Join a community of Story Catalysts
This is the most supportive community you’ll ever know.
The co-founder of my MFA in Writing program (Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University) would remind us, each time we returned to “home,” our traveling international campus of great writing, that the competition was not in the room—it was in the library.
And we’re all trying to get into the library.
We’ll get there together.
Maintain your focus, energy and attention with encouragement, vision and inspiration.
What kind of content can you expect from The Story Catalyst
Newsletter subscribers get monthly tips that help them move from idea to outline, from idea to first draft and from revision to publication.
Paid subscribers get discount codes on all offerings.
You’ll get tried-and-true tips that bypass all the garden variety “show, don’t tell” and “write what you know” advice. I can tell you what’s wrong with your writing—and here’s the best news: I can tell you what’s right.
What no one else ever quite tells you about your writing
Stop spinning your wheels. Stop hopping from writing workshop to writing workshop.
You can hold your vision—and execute it beautifully with The Story Catalyst. Because you’ll gain mastery over skills such as:
Narrative structure
Point of view
Character
Dialogue
Plotting and Pacing
Great first pages*
*Super-important, because this is how literary agents decide if they’ll ask you for a full manuscript submission and take you on.
What are examples of past offerings?
Outlines that Work, Outlines that Live
Voice and Character, two essentials for finding the heart of your story and creating a plot and a path forward
A Dialogue Series on how to write dialogue, including: Dialogue Is Where It's At, Ensemble Scenes, Dialogue Essentials on Punctuation, Pacing and Style
An Essay Series on how to write personal essays, lyrical essays, op-eds and our favorite, hermit crab essays
At the Sentence Level, for first draft writers and revisioners on how to make every sentence shine
Why Plot is for Shyte
Atmosphere + Texture, the two elements that set your writing apart
Scene vs. Summary: When to Show, When to Tell
What’s Wrong with Your Memoir: The Double Perspective in Memoir*
How to begin, where to begin, a class on the Occasion of the Telling and Beautiful First Lines
*What’s wrong with your memoir is not that “memoir doesn’t sell” — it’s that you haven’t perfected the double perspective, the balance between narrator and character, between Remembering Self and Experiencing Self.
What’s the most exciting online offering in the works?
How about: The Tarot as Muse: Metaphors, Archetypes and Plot-Makers.
Or how about: Food, Music and the Soul. Because I always write about food. And music. And post playlists that inspire you to write.
Or how about: Fairy Tales and Myths: New Frameworks, New Interpretations, New Voices.
What’s the most exciting retreat in the works?
Stories and Songs, a retreat for writers of fiction, creative nonfiction and songs, to be held in the Tuscany region of Italy. Coming October 2024.
What’s this Uncommon Hours thing about?
What is the No. 1 thing that stops writers? Emotion. Like fear, doubt, loneliness. But the science of emotion can show us how to construct new emotional frameworks that support productivity hacks, time management, micro-disciplines and best practices like meditation and visualization. That's Uncommon Hours.
Who are you?
Memoirist, novelist and essayist Carolyn Dawn Flynn is the author of Boundless, a becoming-of-age memoir to be published in 2024. The memoir was longlisted for the 2021 Mslexia International Memoir Prize and the 2022 First Pages Prize.
She is the founder of The Story Catalyst, which provides book coaching and publication consulting for authors who want to build a book, a brand and a business.
She is a single mother of Ukrainian-Irish-American twins and was the longtime editor of a life-giving magazine called Sage. In her TEDx Women talk, “Tell a Better Story, Live a Better Life,” she has inspired countless others to live their sacred yes—even in a world that may split open, as the writer Muriel Rukeyser once famously said, if one woman spoke the truth.
Her novel Searching for Persephone, shortlisted for the Elixir Press First Novel Prize, is on submission. Her work has been published in Fourth Genre, Under the Gum Tree, Arts and Letters, The Colorado Sun, The Tampa Review, The Whitefish Review (Montana Prize for Fiction), Albuquerque Journal, Sage Magazine, Albuquerque the Magazine and Wilde Frauen.
She is a 2012 graduate of the Naslund-Mann Spalding MFA in Writing program and a native of Lexington, Kentucky, where she grew up near Red River Gorge. She now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she is a hiker and a pilgrim and a desert dweller who is an appreciator of horizons. Find out more at carolynflynn.com.
