A pantry is full and the person standing in front of it says there’s nothing to eat.
That’s nearly every conversation I have about material. Somebody tells me they have no stories, and in the next ten minutes they tell me three, and they don’t notice they’ve done it because none of them felt like a story while they were saying it. The supply isn’t the problem. Nobody gets to sixty without accumulating decades of usable material. The filter is the problem, and the wrong thing has calibrated the filter.
Why do people think they have no story to tell?
The material an executive dismisses is exactly the material a business book needs.
Because they’re measuring against published memoirs, where somebody climbed a mountain or survived something. Against that standard, an ordinary working life looks like nothing happened. No war, no catastrophe, no dramatic reversal. Just decades of turning up and doing things. That doesn’t sound like a book. What that comparison misses is that the mountain isn’t what makes the memoir work. Specificity is. A reader remembers a detail they can see, and a detail from an ordinary Tuesday is as vivid as one from a summit, sometimes more so because they recognize it. The second reason is proximity. Your own life is the one thing you can’t read as a stranger. The story you’ve told forty times sounds worn out to you and is completely new to everybody else, and you have no way of feeling that from inside.
The book on this: Behind the Wire exists because one man in a family was asked, once, by a bored teenager on a folding chair.
What makes an ordinary thing usable?
That something in it didn’t go the way it should have.
A gap between what was supposed to happen and what did is enough: a rule that turned out not to apply, an assumption that broke, a small thing that mattered more than it should have. Drama is optional. I’d take a good gap over a good catastrophe any day, because readers have lived through gaps of their own and feel them the moment they read one.
A brick propping a door open defeats a security system worth thousands, and that’s where Family Cybersecurity starts. It’s a gap, and everybody who has worked in an office recognizes it instantly. Once you look for gaps instead of drama, a normal life turns out to be full of them. The search was set to find something that almost never happens to anybody, and I blame the celebrity memoir shelf for setting it that way. It has trained a lot of capable people to believe their own lives don’t count.
The book on this: Family Cybersecurity is built almost entirely from ordinary afternoons: a brick, a microwave, a router nobody had looked at.
Do business book authors have more material than they think?
Yes, and it counts for more, because business books are starved of it. The material an executive dismisses is exactly the material a business book needs. The negotiation that nearly failed for a stupid reason. The hire that didn’t work and why you missed it. The project that succeeded for reasons nobody predicted. Those get left out because they’re not achievements. They’re the parts where somebody was wrong, and the instinct in a business book is to present a record of competence.
What a reader wants is the opposite. Writing the book already tells them you’re competent.
What they can’t get anywhere else is the moment it was uncertain, and an executive who cuts every one of those moments ends up with something that reads like an annual report with a nicer cover. I’d tell any executive to leave those scenes in.
How do you find the material you are throwing away?
Ask other people what you’ve told them.
This is the most reliable method I know and almost nobody tries it. Your own filter is broken by familiarity. Somebody who knows you doesn’t have that problem, and they’ll name three things you’d never have volunteered.
The second method is to look at the decisions instead of the events. Every significant decision has a story attached, because you decided under uncertainty and something tipped it. Those are usually more interesting than the outcomes, and they’re the part that gets summarized out.
The third is to look at what irritates you. A long-standing irritation is a position you hold, and behind the position there’s nearly always an incident that installed it.
The book on this: The Dead Don’t Need Stuff came out of a decision not taken, the sort of material nobody thinks to write down.
What should you do with the material once you have it?
Write it down badly and immediately, in whatever form you can manage.
The material degrades. The fact of what happened survives, and the specifics go, and the specifics are where the value is: what somebody wore, the exact sentence, the smell of the room. They go without warning, and once they’re gone the story becomes a summary of a story. That loss is the worst one in this work, because nobody can fix it later.
I’ve watched this happen at close range more than once, and the version I think about most became Behind the Wire, from a man who could have told anybody in his family what happened to him and whom only a bored teenager ever asked. The stories that got written down are the ones that got asked about in time.
You don’t need a plan for the material. You need it out of your head and somewhere it can’t fade, and the shaping can happen years later.
| Method | What to do | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| Ask other people | Ask what you’ve told them | Your filter is broken by familiarity; theirs isn’t |
| Look at decisions | Find choices made under uncertainty | The decision is usually more interesting than the outcome |
| Look at irritations | Trace a long-standing irritation back | Behind the position there’s nearly always an incident |
| Look for gaps | Find where something didn’t go as it should have | Readers have lived through gaps of their own |
| Keep the uncertain moments | Leave in the hire that failed or the near-miss negotiation | Readers can’t get those moments anywhere else |
| Write it down now | Capture it badly and immediately | Specifics fade without warning and can’t be recovered |
My take
Your life isn’t short on material. Your filter is set wrong. People hold their days up against some memoir about a mountain and throw out everything that counts. The hire that failed, the decision you almost made, the thing that still irritates you, that’s the book. Ask a friend which stories you’ve told them, and write each one down badly tonight. The details fade fast, and nobody can get them back for you later.
What if your life feels too ordinary for a memoir?
Test it on somebody, and watch their face instead of asking their opinion. People are polite about writing and unreliable about assessment. What they can’t fake is attention. Tell the thing you think is boring and watch whether they stop doing what they were doing. That reaction is more accurate than any answer they’d give you.
Almost every time I’ve run this with a client convinced they had nothing, the reaction has been the opposite of the prediction.
If this is where you are, is my story worth a book and I don’t know what it’s about both sit alongside this one.
The Memoir Hub has the rest, and my ghostwriting service exists in large part because the person with the material is the worst placed to judge it. Plenty of people with a lifetime of usable material decide they have nothing, and that decision is how their stories end up never getting written. It frustrates me every time I hear it.
Years of photographing dancers taught me that every frame tells a story. In The Ghostwriting Advantage I explain how a ghostwriter draws your overlooked stories out of you and builds them into a book.
