Is My Idea a Book or an Essay? (or Both!)
The ultimate questions every writer should be asking themselves.
When I first started working on my memoir, The Mother Code, editors I pitched stories to would ask me if I thought I was writing a book or just a magazine story. And the answer was: I didn’t know. I had threads of ideas, but I wasn’t sure if they wove together like a tapestry or were a bunch of loose ends, frayed and untethered. The only way to find out was to keep writing.
I started with a series of exercises, which I often do with my 1:1 clients (and I’ll be sharing more about in my two-hour class How to Turn Your Idea Into a Book next Monday 6/17 from 3-5pm ET!).
First, I mapped my ideas to see the timeframe of my story (was I going to focus on 6 days or 6 months or 6 years?) and the moments that mattered to the narrative arc.