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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nikki, giving away the lesson in the first paragraph can leave the reader with no reason to wonder what happened. It’s easy to do when you’ve told a story for years and already know what it means. The reader still needs a chance to find that out.