I talked to a woman recently. I’ll call her Lidia, which isn’t her real name.
Lidia had a story. She’d survived a major natural disaster that displaced her family for months. Years later, she quit her corporate job and moved to Portugal alone. No contacts, barely any Portuguese, just a gut feeling she’d carried since college that she’d live there someday. She’d built a successful career in documentary filmmaking before that.
People told her constantly to write a book. Nobody told her how to find the book inside all that material, and that search is what a discovery intensive is for.
So she tried.
She sat down and wrote. Pages and pages about her experiences, her reflections, the moments that shaped her. She felt like she was getting somewhere.
Then she showed it to a friend. A writing professor she’d known for years. Someone she trusted completely.
He asked her: What’s this about? What are you writing about? What’s the point?
She stopped.
More than ten years went by.
When she called me, she said she’d been carrying this around the whole time. Every new person she met would hear a piece of her story and say the same thing: you should write a book. And she’d think about that manuscript sitting in a drawer.
Her friend wasn’t wrong to ask the question. “What’s this about?” is the right question for any memoir. But the way he asked it landed like a verdict instead of a direction. One piece of harsh feedback cost her a decade.
A single careless remark can do that to someone. The question was fair. The way it landed shut her down, and everyone who kept telling her to write the book lost the chance to read it.
Do you need to know what your book is about before you start?
You don’t have to know what your book is about before you start.Share on X
You don’t have to know what your book is about before you start. You have to figure it out along the way. For more, see how to know if you need a ghostwriter and cheap ghostwriters, stolen bios, and bestseller scams.
Most people who say “I don’t know what it’s about” have written something. They’ve started. They have pages, chapters, notes, fragments. What they mean is: I wrote a lot, and now I’m lost. I can’t see the shape of it.
That’s normal. That’s the process.
Memoir vs. Autobiography
| Autobiography | Memoir | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Everything that happened in your life | One through line from beginning to end |
| Structure | In order | Everything connects to that one thread |
| What gets cut | Nothing; it covers everything | Everything that does not serve the thread |
| Example from the post | Arnold Schwarzenegger’s autobiography, a tome | Lidia: “the woman who never waited for permission” |
| Common trap | Keeping every story turns it into a tome nobody finishes | Writers lose their nerve when it is time to cut |
A memoir isn’t an autobiography. An autobiography says: here’s everything that happened in my life, in order. Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote an autobiography. It’s a tome. It covers everything.
A memoir has one through line. One thread that runs from the beginning to the end. Everything in the book connects to that thread. Everything else gets cut.
Cutting is where most memoir writers lose their nerve. Every story feels important because they lived it, and a book that keeps all of them turns into a tome nobody finishes.
Lidia knew her through line. She just didn’t recognize it.
An old colleague had once described her as “the woman who never waited for permission.” When Lidia heard that, she said it stopped her cold. Her whole life in one phrase.
That’s a through line. It was hiding in plain sight.
How does Richard Lowe find the thread in a book?
Through lines are often right in front of you. You know your story. You’ve lived it. But you’re so close to it that you can’t see the shape. You need someone outside your head to find it with you.
A critic who hands down a question like a verdict can shut a writer down for years, and I have no use for feedback delivered that way.
That’s what I do. I interview my clients. We talk. Sometimes for hours across multiple sessions. I ask questions, they tell me stories, and somewhere in those conversations the thread appears. Being outside is the whole advantage. I can hear the pattern they’re too close to see, and that listening is what the book discovery intensive is built around.
Lidia didn’t need someone to tell her what her book was about. She needed someone to ask the right questions and listen to the answers.
A critic who hands down a question like a verdict can shut a writer down for years, and I have no use for feedback delivered that way. Working the answer out together is collaboration, and it’s what gets a stalled book moving again.
What “I Don’t Know” Really Means
When Lidia and I talked, she said she wanted someone to give her focused assignments. This week, focus on this. She wanted honest feedback that wouldn’t kill her motivation, and help figuring out what to cut.
She wasn’t asking for someone to write the book for her. She was asking for someone to help her see it.
That’s what “I don’t know what it’s about” usually means. Not “I have nothing to say.” It means: I need help finding the shape.
The book is in there, and a question asked the wrong way shouldn’t get to keep it in a drawer for another ten years.
My take
Plenty of stalled writers have enough material and haven’t spotted the shape of it yet, and that’s normal. Someone close to the work can’t hear the pattern, so get someone outside it to ask questions and listen. Ask for focused assignments and feedback that keeps you moving. I’ve got no use for critics who drop a question like a verdict and walk away. Find the thread together, then cut what doesn’t serve it.
Ready to Find Your Story?
If you’ve got pages sitting in a drawer, a draft that lost its way, or a story you can’t quite pin down, let’s talk. No pressure. Just an honest conversation about whether your book is ready to be written.
Book a free consultation: https://thewritingking.com/booking-form/
This is Part 1 of a 10-part series on barriers that stop people from writing their books. Tomorrow: “I Don’t Have Time.”
A story without a thread is where most of my projects start. The Ghostwriting Advantage shows how a ghostwriter turns a pile of stories into a book with a point.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Arnold Schwarzenegger: a memoir to tell us why he and Maria broke up, The Christian Science Monitor
