The last piece argued that ordinary material works. This one is the evidence, because an argument about this is considerably less convincing than a list.
None of these felt like anything at the time. Several I didn’t recognize as material for years. Each one ended up carrying a chapter, and in two cases most of a book.
A brick in a doorway
A company spent thousands on card readers, cameras and alarms. An employee got tired of digging out his badge for smoke breaks and propped the door open with a brick. That’s the entire story. Nothing happened to me, nobody was hurt, and I watched it from across a parking lot.
Nothing happened to me, nobody was hurt, and I watched it from across a parking lot.Share on X
It went into Family Cybersecurity because it’s the shape of nearly every security failure, compressed into an object anybody can picture. The technical controls were fine. A person made his day slightly easier. Ten years of explaining that idea in the abstract did less work than one brick.
The book on this: Family Cybersecurity is where the brick and the microwave ended up, and both carry more weight than the argument they illustrate.
A microwave on the wrong network
A family called me about odd activity on their router. We checked every computer, phone and obvious smart device and found nothing. It turned out to be their two-year-old microwave. That had never been set up for internet access and had attached itself to a neighbor’s unsecured network to phone the manufacturer each night.
Funny, small, and completely undramatic. Nobody lost anything.
It works because it’s the most extreme version of a point readers resist: you can’t protect an inventory you’ve never taken. Argue that and people nod. Tell them about the microwave and they go and look at their router.
This is exactly the kind of material people throw away when they sit down to write about their lives. They skip the microwave, reach for the biggest thing that ever happened to them, and end up with a chapter that sounds like everybody else’s biggest thing. I’d take the microwave every time, because only one family has that story.
The book on this: The Dead Don’t Need Stuff is 168 pages built out of afternoons like these: a display case, two storage units, and a decision not taken.
A metal folding chair
I was seventeen and bored at Christmas. My grandfather was in the kitchen dicing onions. Later, in the sitting room, I took one of the folding chairs from the hall closet, the kind with vinyl padding that sticks to your legs, and asked him about the war. The chair was uncomfortable, and being uncomfortable felt suitable, because I was the one asking for something.
That detail is why the scene works, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that disappears from a story after a few retellings. The war material is extraordinary. The chair is what puts a reader in the room.
The book on this: Party Planning for Introverts came out of one evening of running out of ice and being wrong about what was happening.
A display case of pins
The Dead Don’t Need Stuff starts here: I had a plan to break up a collection of Rose Parade pins and sell them individually. Two hundred listings, two hundred photographs. I checked what they were selling for first: two or three dollars each, about a dollar after fees. Two hundred hours for two hundred dollars.
I closed the case and put it back on the shelf. Nothing happened. The story is a decision not taken, and decisions not taken are almost never written down, so the ones that are stand out.
It frustrates me how often memoir writers cut exactly this kind of moment. They assume a chapter needs an event, so the evening they spent deciding not to do something never makes the draft, and that evening can say more about who they are than any event they kept.
The book on this: Sell Your Books begins with the twelve copies, because a failure is checkable in a way a success isn’t.
Running out of ice
I threw a housewarming party, invited far too many people, attempted a menu I’d never cooked, and ended up hiding in my bedroom eating leftover cheese and crackers because we’d run out of ice and somebody had spilled wine on the carpet. My friend David found me there and told me it was a great party, and Party Planning for Introverts came out of it. I asked whether we were at the same one.
The reason this carries a chapter is the gap. What I believed was happening and what was happening were two different events, and the reader gets to see both at once. Nothing about it required anything interesting to occur.
The book on this: Behind the Wire is the one where the vinyl padding on a folding chair does more work than the war.
Twelve copies
I quit a director’s job at a sixteen billion dollar company, moved across the country to become a writer, published my first book, told a few people, and waited. It sold about a dozen copies, and that’s where Sell Your Books begins. This one is a failure, and I use it constantly. A success story about a book launch teaches nobody anything, because the reader can’t tell which part was the cause. Twelve copies is specific, it’s checkable, and every person who has published into silence recognizes it exactly. Authors who scrub the embarrassing numbers out of their stories think they’re protecting their credibility, and they’re spending it. A reader who can’t find a single thing that went wrong has no reason to believe the things that went right.
What makes an ordinary story worth writing?
None of them would survive a filter set to find drama, and all of them contain a gap between the expected and the actual.
The brick defeats a system it shouldn’t have. The microwave is on a network nobody gave it. The pins were worth less than the labor. The party was fine and felt like a disaster. The book was good and sold twelve copies.
The other shared feature is a physical detail you can picture. A brick. Vinyl padding. A plate of crackers. Those are what make a story portable, and they’re the first thing to go if you wait too long to write it down.
That’s why I get impatient with the advice to write about the big moments. The big moments are where everybody’s story looks the same. If you want a book that sounds like you and nobody else, go looking for the brick, the chair and the crackers, and give them the space you were saving for the big moments.
If you’re still convinced your own life is thinner than this, is my story worth a book and I’ve started my book three times are the neighboring arguments. The Memoir Hub collects the rest, and my memoir ghostwriting work is mostly the business of noticing which of somebody’s ordinary afternoons is the one the chapter needs.
