What’s Your Story? (Part 2)

Last week, we talked about how the story you tell yourself about your writing helps us make it happen. This week, we’re turning to the second half of the “what’s your story” question: What story are you telling through your work? Or, what’s your book’s story?

Don’t worry, I’m not asking for your elevator pitch — that extremely brief, focused, and polished spiel that miraculously explains everything your book is about in less time than it takes to read this sentence. While it can be useful and professionally advantageous to be able to communicate the gist of your project quickly to interested people, that is outward-facing narrative, designed to immediately portray — with absolute confidence — the project’s hyperrealized potential. As professional armor, it does its job: to pitch your project and you to potential readers, presses, and professional audiences.

But as with all armor (and marketing material), the elevator pitch, and its variants, has limitations — especially when you turn to capturing and writing down your thoughts, or try to explain to an editor, mentor, or writing partner the often-messy reality of the writing and revision process.

You can be left with all the ways that what you are trying to tell with your book escapes those boundaries, perhaps doing more than you are trying to contain. Perhaps doing something even more interesting. Or even something else entirely.

Sometimes you can see these things. Sometimes they’re just outside your vision, teasing you and confusing articulation, muddying structure, argumentation, clarity of thought, and even sentences and paragraphs themselves.

For me, as your editor, and hopefully for you, as the writer, that’s exciting. That’s where the heart of your book as a living, engaging, developing form of communication thrives.

That’s where the story is and what we want to pull out more to make your beautifully honed argument and strong sense of field knowledge something that people want to hear, a compelling communication of not just what you want people to learn or change their minds about (your argument) but also the most logical and narratively accessibly way forward (the story).

Every book — every piece of writing — every intellectual project — tells a story.

Once we can uncover the way you narrate your argument to yourself, to me, to others, we can hear the intuitive connections between points you need to make and turn them into organic steps in your overall argument and the book’s phenomenology for readers, its arc.

Simply put, the story you are telling determines the way you need to tell it. That, in turn, determines the structure of your book, the way you order the process of learning and following your ideas, the experience readers have of being invited in to what you’re thinking and how you can explain it.

So what’s the story you are telling? And how can we make it clear, accessible, and pleasurable for your readers?