A chapter is a building, and most writers treat the story as the paint.
They put up the frame first, the three principles or the five stages, and once it stands they look for something to make it less bare. A story goes in somewhere in the middle, usually after they’ve made the point, to illustrate what they’ve already told the reader.
That story is decoration. It can be removed and the chapter still stands, and that’s the problem, because a reader can feel it too.
I’ve built books both ways, and I’ve lost my patience with the principles-first kind. The ones that work put the story in as the foundation. When I interview a client, the stories are what I’m after, because they’re the one part of the book nobody else could write.
What does it mean to build a chapter around a story?
The story goes first, the teaching hangs off it, and if you removed the story the chapter would collapse.
Concretely: the chapter opens with something that happened. A specific person, a specific afternoon, an outcome. The reader arrives inside a situation before they’re told what it shows. Then the teaching emerges from that situation and keeps referring back to it.
The test is removal. Take the story out. If the chapter still makes its point in full, the story was decoration and the chapter was always a lecture. If the chapter no longer means anything, the structure is right. Readers skim decoration, and they can tell when a chapter is a lecture wearing a story as a costume. I’d cut a chapter before I’d ship one that fails the removal test.
My Boss is Insane is nineteen chapters and I tied each one to something that happened, with the names changed. Nine kinds of difficult boss. The taxonomy is useful and it’s not the book’s core, because a list of nine manager types is a blog post. The core is that each type arrives attached to a person doing a specific thing on a specific day.
The book on this: My Boss is Insane is 19 chapters built this way, each anchored to something that happened before any principle gets named.
Why do writers put the teaching first?
Because the teaching is the part they’re confident about, and confidence is where drafting starts. Somebody who has spent thirty years in a field knows the principles cold. They can write those in order without effort. The stories require choosing one, remembering it properly, and deciding how much to reveal, all of which is harder and slower.
There’s also a status worry underneath it. A book of principles reads as authoritative. A book of stories can feel like anecdote, and experts are trained to distrust anecdote. So the structure goes in first and the stories get added later as seasoning, and the finished book has the right ingredients in the wrong order.
The same instinct shows up in interviews. Clients hand me the principles and would happily skip the part where they got it wrong, so I go looking for the failures and setbacks on purpose.
Readers want the ups and downs and how somebody recovered, and a sanitized arc bores them. When a client swings the other way and turns every story into self-punishment, I talk them back toward the middle, where the real person usually is.
The irony is that the principles are the part readers can get anywhere. Nobody else has your Tuesday.
The book on this: Behind the Wire had no structure available at all: it’s a sequence of things that happened to a man, in order.
Can a whole book be built this way?
Yes, and the clearest example I have is a book that had no choice.
My grandfather spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war and wrote a journal after he came home. When I turned that into Behind the Wire, there was no structure available.
There was a sequence of things that happened to a man, and the book is those things in order. Twenty-two chapters, no names changed.
Nobody reads that book for a model of resilience. They read it because a specific person went through a specific thing, and whatever a reader takes from it, they assembled themselves out of the events.
The interesting part is that story-first works even when the material comes with a ready-made list of principles. Street-Smart Management Wisdom follows three managers through the situations a new manager meets, instead of listing the principles those situations show. That was a deliberate choice about load bearing. You watch somebody make the decision badly and see what it cost, and the principle arrives without being announced.
The book on this: Street-Smart Management Wisdom follows three managers through the situations instead of listing the principles those situations show.
How many stories does a chapter need?
One that supports it, and possibly one more that complicates it.
Two stories doing the same job is worse than one, because the second tells the reader the first was insufficient. What works is one story that makes the argument and, where the material warrants it, a second that shows where the argument gets difficult. More than that and the chapter becomes a collection. I’ve read manuscripts with six anecdotes in twelve pages, each perfectly good, and the effect is a slideshow. The reader stops holding any of them because a new one keeps arriving. The discipline is choosing, and most experts resist it. They’ve got plenty of material and the instinct is to include all of it. I’d cut four good stories to let one carry a chapter properly, because a chapter that uses one story well beats a chapter that mentions five.
The book on this: The Ultimate Bug Out Bag Guide opens inside a fire on a mountain road and reaches the practical material afterward.
Where should the story go in a nonfiction chapter?
Early, and earlier than feels comfortable. The common instinct is to set up the concept first so the reader understands what the story illustrates. That’s exactly backwards, because it tells the reader the answer before showing them the situation, and once they have the answer the situation is just confirmation.
Open inside the event. The Ultimate Bug Out Bag Guide opens with a fire that jumped the road behind me on a mountain, and the practical material about what to keep in a car comes afterward. Reverse those and the fire becomes an example of why bags matter, a much smaller thing than a fire.
A reader who’s already inside a situation will follow you into quite technical material. A reader who has been given a principle first is being asked to care about an illustration.
The book on this: Ridiculous Things People Actually Believe is sequenced so the entertaining chapters come first and the medical ones come last, for reasons this piece explains.
How do the stories work across a whole book?
They should build. That means sequencing them instead of distributing them evenly.
A book where every chapter opens with an equally weighted anecdote develops a rhythm the reader stops noticing by chapter four. What holds attention is escalation: the stories get more consequential, or more personal, or more difficult to tell, as the book proceeds.
When the stories drive the book, the person whose book it is can feel it. One memoir client read each chapter as it arrived and kept coming back to tell me what he liked, and that I’d caught him in the moment, his real voice and the real agony he was under in certain parts. That kind of response comes from building the structure on stories, and it’s why I fight to put them first.
In Ridiculous Things People Actually Believe the early chapters are the entertaining ones, flat earth and secret societies, where the cost of being wrong is a few hundred dollars and some embarrassment.
The later chapters are the medical ones, where children are involved. That ordering is deliberate. A reader who arrives at the medical chapters in chapter two puts the book down.
The other sequencing question is what you hold back. The strongest story you have should usually not open the book, because everything after it is a decline. Put it two thirds through, where a reader needs a reason to keep going.
What if you have a story with no argument?
Then you have material, not a chapter, and the honest move is to admit it. Writers fall in love with a story and build a chapter around it that never quite arrives anywhere. The story is good. It’s also doing nothing for the reader, and readers can tell the difference between a story that deserves its place and one the author wanted to tell.
The fix is to work out what the story is evidence of. Not what it means to you, which is usually a lot, but what it shows that a reader could use. If there’s no answer, the story belongs in a different book or in no book. The reverse case is more common and easier to solve. An argument with no story attached is usually an argument you haven’t tested against anything, and going looking for the incident that would prove it often reveals that it needs adjusting.
If you want the persuasion side of this, my post on why your book needs your stories covers why readers respond to them at all. This piece is the construction manual.
The Ghostwriting Hub has the rest, and my ghostwriting service exists partly because pulling the right story out of somebody and putting it in the right place is difficult to do on your own material. Paint the building afterward. Build it out of what happened.
Nonfiction that treats its stories as garnish frustrates me, because the author’s own experience is the one thing in the book nobody else could have written. Put your best material where it bears weight, and if a chapter can survive losing its story, rebuild it until it can’t.
