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I talked to a woman recently. I’ll call her Lidia, not 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.
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 is 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 is 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.
You Don’t Have to Know Before You Start
You don’t have to know what your book is about before you start. You have to figure it out along the way.
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
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.
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 I Find the Thread
The thing about through lines is they’re 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.
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. Not because I’m brilliant, but because I’m listening from the outside. I can hear the pattern they’re too close to see.
Lidia didn’t need someone to tell her what her book was about. She needed someone to ask the right questions and actually listen to the answers.
That’s not the same as being told your work is garbage. That’s collaboration.
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. She wanted 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. You just need help getting it out.
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://contact.thewritingking.com
This is Part 1 of a 10-part series on barriers that stop people from writing their books. Tomorrow: “I Don’t Have Time.”