One nagging question aspiring writers have can often hold them back from starting–do I even have enough material to write a book? Is this idea big enough? Do I have enough stories to tell or points to make? It’s not a completely unmoored question, as some ideas are better for short form models. A full-length book does need several major turning points, minor development, and nuanced ideas you can explore from different angles. But then again–so does life. Watch the video below or scroll to keep reading for advice on how you can work through some development steps to see if you have enough to fill a book.
An idea is a wonderful thing—a shining ball of promise and possibility and light that you can carry around in your head and heart. It can also start to feel like a burden, because as you carry it, you can start to wonder—what exactly am I supposed to do with this thing? Expressing it and sharing it through writing a book is one thing you can do—perhaps it can help people, either to understand and develop empathy for what people go through or find the resilience and strength to go through the journey themselves.
But is the idea and the stories you want to tell enough material to write a book?
As Flannery O’Connor said, “”Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his life.” I absolutely believe this, but with one caveat. You have enough material, but are you ready to bring it together and make it into a cohesive narrative? That is really a secondary question.
Brainstorming is not outlining
One way many writers start to test whether they have enough material to write a book is to start writing an outline. But you want to be careful not to confuse the process of brainstorming with outlining. Nothing against brainstorming—it’s a fantastic practice to do regularly to get out all the floating possibilities in your head out on paper to evaluate it. That resulting document, however, should not be mistaken an outline.
Brainstorming is likely to pull in all the maybes, possibilities, and what-about-when’s floating around in your head. It’s natural to want to chase down every angle. But that doesn’t mean they’ll naturally come together as part of a cohesive book. Keep your brainstorming notes, but if you’re looking to start on an outline, you want to start with a clear and functional structure.
The Start-Stop Cycle
When you’re carrying that idea around in your mind, it may not leave you alone. It nags at you, pestering you to keep thinking about it. You might get a burst of energy one day, feeling renewed confidence that yes, it is enough material to write a book so and you just start writing it. It feels great for that day, maybe even that week, and then you feel like you’re losing the thread. You start to question it again, and then try to pull in whatever exciting story you might could or maybe possibly add. You can feel it going off the rails right from under you—so you stop. You don’t make progress for weeks or months. But that idea—and now those pages and words you wrote—still won’t leave you alone. So you go back to it and start again. You start over from a different place or you try to fill in gaps, but before you know it, you’ve stopped again.
If this feels like you, it might not be that you don’t have enough material to write a book, but simply that you don’t have a clear enough plan and structure.
The Forest and The Trees
This might be obvious to say, but one of the reasons that writing a book is hard is that you can’t do it in a single sitting. That’s true of many difficult things—you can’t build a house in a day, etc. Writing a book that, when finished, feels both cohesive and nuanced requires the ability to consider both the forest and the trees. It can be very difficult to flip between them, seeing the big picture versus the details, especially when you have no concrete plan in place. When you’re writing, you need to be in amongst the trees, showing the details and feeling immerse in that element of your idea or that scene of your story. However, if you stay among the trees the whole process, you can’t see where you’re going. When you get the feeling of being lost and unsure where to go next, it brings your whole project to a slamming halt.
Outlining with Purpose
So, instead of doing a “brainstorm” style outline that doesn’t show you if you have a cohesive theme and enough material to write a book around that cohesive theme, we encourage you to try this exercise in writing a bare-bones outline with a purpose. This process is not a single-sitting task, but it will give you something focused and structured to think about as you carry that shiny, but nagging, idea around for a few weeks.
Core topic and Key Message
To start your bare bones outline, you can start very simply by numbering a document or piece of paper with 1-5. Numbers one and two will be filled in with your core topic and your key message.
We have talked about the importance of having a key message often in this blog. When you sit down to create your bare-bones outline, these are two crucial pieces. Establishing these first will help ensure you’re not filling in irrelevant stories or developing points that don’t fit into your forest. Often we find that writers might have one very clearly in mind, but not the other. You might know your topic—a break-up, surviving cancer, establishing your independence—etc. Or you might know your key message, the big truth you’ve learned in your life that you want to share with others, but you’re not sure what event or series of events in your life to focus on in order to share it. It may take some time—even a few weeks of hard thinking—to fill in both. You want your topic and message to work as a clear pair. It might help to talk about it with trusted friends and hear their responses to your framing. Once you have them both, then you can move on to the next step.
Working backwards to find the milestones
We call the point in a narrative in which the protagonist (in the case of a memoir, you) fully learns the message the “epiphany.” Look at the key message you’ve written. You had a moment where you realized what you needed to learn from these experiences, when you understood your key message fully and completely. What was that event? What was that moment? It might be a scene. It might be a series of scenes. We want to know, when did that happen? When you feel like you know the moment, fill it in number three.
From that point, think about an earlier time. What was a major choice you made before you learned this lesson? What choice would you have made differently if you had already had your epiphany? Again, it can be a single moment in time or a series of events that lead to a decision. Fill in number four.
Finally, think about an even earlier time. What was a moment or event that forced you to react and make decision that would eventually lead to both the misguided choice you made in number four and the moment you learned your epiphany.
Again, it may take some time to really feel confident in these choices, so don’t rush it. Walking away and considering is part of this process. Each point should lead straight to both the core topic and key message.
Reflect on what you have
When you look at those five elements, what you’ve put together is a blueprint for the theme and major turning points of a narrative. When you put the major moments in order, you have key stones that will pull your story forward while still keeping it on track to relay your key message and focus on your core topic. If you consider those events in chronological order, ask yourself if you can fill in about 3-4 chapters worth of material in between them. The material might be chronological or in flashback. If you feel like you do, you’ve come a long way to answering the question of if you have enough material to write a book.
Finding support for your process
Writing a book is a long process and it takes deliberate planning and focus, especially when you are switching from moving among the trees to considering your forest and back. Having support as you go through this process, especially the first time, can be a game changer for whether or not you actually follow through.
Our Memoir Method program has enrollment open now for our next cohort which starts April 1. We have designed our program to specifically balance the needs of memoirists. In publishing, memoirs straddle the line between trade nonfiction and narrative fiction. The Memoir Method is the only program (that we know of) that gives you guidance advice for both Amanda’s nonfiction experience and my fiction experience and training. We want you to feel empowered to finish your specific book idea, not be burdened with all the pedantic intricacies that might not actually help you get your book on the page.
You can check us out by going to pageandpodium.com/memoir-method, or if you are ready to apply, head over to pageandpodium.com/apply
Amanda and I both can’t wait to help you see your book come to life.
