When that answer is fuzzy, every page turns into a negotiation. Should this story go in? Is this too technical? Too personal? You end up arguing with yourself line by line, and after a few months of that, the draft simply goes quiet. When the answer is clear, most of those questions answer themselves.

Writing to one person

Your book will reach plenty of people, but it should sound as if it were written to one. Picture a real person, ideally someone you've worked with, advised, or raised. Write down who they are, what problem they're living with right now, and what they've already tried that didn't work. Then answer the question that matters most of all: when they finish your book, what will they be able to do, believe, or decide that they couldn't before?

The second decision is what the book should do for you. A book can do several jobs, but one of them has to lead, because that choice shapes the length, the tone, and the very last page.

• If you mainly want clients, show your method in enough detail to prove you know it, then point readers to the next step with you. Shorter is often better.

• If you want to get booked to speak, build each chapter around a story you could tell from a stage. Event planners read the table of contents first.

• If you want to be the person your industry quotes, lead with a point of view people will argue about. A book that agrees with everyone is easy to forget.

• If it's for your family, give the stories room. They'll care about the scenes far more than the lessons.

If more than one of those feels true, choose the one you'd keep if you could only keep one.

Your one sentence

Fill this in, then rewrite it until it sounds like something you'd actually say to a friend:

This book is for ______ who ______. Through the story of ______, it shows them how to ______. When they finish, they'll ______.

Keep it right next to you while you write. When a story doesn't serve it, that story belongs in a different book. When you feel stuck, read it aloud, and if it needs rewriting, rewriting it counts as progress.

This sentence is the first step of The Manuscript Map, my seven-step method for writing the book yourself, in case you want a guide for the six that come after it.

See The Manuscript Map

What stuck sounds like

Nobody has ever said to me, "I don't know who my book is for." What they say sounds more like this:

• "I've got three chapters from two years ago and no idea how to restart."

• "I've got too much material. Is this a memoir or a business book?"

• "Every time I sit down, I rewrite the first chapter."

• "My calendar fills with things that have deadlines, and the book never does."

Every one of those traces back to the missing sentence. Without it, there's no way to tell which stories belong or when a chapter is finished, so the book loses every contest for your time. With it, a free hour comes with an obvious next task.

I'll show you what that looked like for one client. Her book had been "in process" for almost a decade, and she'd been stuck on Chapter 3 for more than a year. She had the story, what happened to her health and how she got herself well again. What she didn't have was a way for readers to do what she'd done. She could tell them about it, but she couldn't yet show them how. Once we saw that together, her sentence came together too: the book was for moms who didn't feel like themselves anymore, and when they finished, they'd have a protocol they could follow to heal the way she had. We built the second half of the book around those protocols, each one laid out the same way so a tired mom could pick it up and use it. We finished nine months later.

"When I met Nikki, I had been stuck on Chapter 3 for over a year and the book had been 'in process' for almost a decade. With her guidance and expertise, we finished the book in nine months. I count it among my greatest accomplishments."

Business leader, hybrid memoir and success principles for life and business

Would you send me your sentence, even a rough one? Reply with it, and I'll tell you whether it's specific enough yet.

From my desk to yours,
Nikki

P.S. The Manuscript Map is my client method, laid out so you can work through it on your own. It comes as a Google Doc workbook with a manuscript tracker and a starter file, for $397, and you can see everything in it here. Paid subscribers also get the step-by-step worksheet behind today's essay later this week. And next Tuesday, I'm sharing five of the questions I ask clients before we ever start recording.

Somewhere on your phone there's a note titled "book idea," and it has been sitting there for years. You've told the story inside it at parties, to old friends, and to at least one stranger on a plane, and every single time, someone says you should write a book.

You agree with them. You may have even started. Most of the people who come to me have a half-finished draft, a folder of notes, or a story they've told so often they could recite it in their sleep. They assume the problem is discipline, and they feel a little embarrassed about it, because they're disciplined about nearly everything else.

In all my years of ghostwriting, I've met very few authors who lacked discipline. I've met so many more who were trying to do a craft job when no one had ever shown them the craft.

Telling a story is different from shaping one

When you tell a story out loud, the room does half the work for you. You can see faces. You notice when people lean in and when their attention starts to drift, and you adjust without even thinking about it. You skip the part about the second meeting because you can feel it dragging, and you slow down right before the line that always gets a laugh.

On the page, nobody leans in. You have to make every one of those decisions in advance, alone, with no faces to read, and three of them decide whether a reader keeps going:

1. Which moment opens the book. Usually it's later in the story than you'd think. Readers will happily wait for the background if the opening scene makes them care first.

2. Where the tension sits. A reader needs to know what was at stake before you tell them how it turned out. Many first drafts announce the lesson in the first paragraph and leave the reader nothing to wait for.

3. What to leave out. This is the hardest one for accomplished people, because everything happened and everything mattered. A book that keeps everything reads like a résumé.

Each of these is a decision, and there are reliable ways to make them. Helping you make them, one Tuesday at a time, is what this newsletter is for.

Your spoken version is already a draft

The version of your story you tell out loud has been edited by every audience that ever heard it. You've already cut what bored people and kept what made them react, which puts that spoken version closer to a good chapter than anything you've typed.

That's why the very first thing I do with a new client is record them talking. The best sentences in most of the books I've written were spoken long before they were typed. The questions I ask in those recordings are in The Story Vault, the full set of 48 I ask every client, if you want to try them on yourself.

If any of this feels familiar

The people who come to me usually describe the same handful of frustrations:

• Someone asks when the book is coming out, and you change the subject.

• A colleague with less to say publishes first, and you feel it more than you'd admit.

• You've started twice, written a few chapters, and stopped both times.

• You've thought about hiring help, then worried the result would read like a brochure with your name on it.

None of these mean you're short on discipline or material. Each one is a symptom of trying to shape a story without the craft for shaping it, and each one goes away once the decisions above are made.

Before next Tuesday, if you have a quiet moment, open the voice memo app on your phone and tell the story you tell most often, start to finish, the way you'd tell it to someone hearing it for the very first time. Try not to plan it. Then listen back and jot down two things: the moment where you sped up, and the line you said with the most energy. Those two spots are where your book's first chapter is hiding.

If you feel like sharing, hit reply and tell me which story you chose.

Next Tuesday, I'll show you the words and sentence habits that make a page sound machine-made, and why readers stop trusting a book that has them, even when they can't quite put their finger on why. I can't wait to share that one with you.

Take a look at The Story Vault

From my desk to yours,
Nikki

P.S. If the voice memo exercise opens something up for you, The Story Vault gives you 48 more questions to record your answers to, for $47.