How an Idea Becomes a Book, Part 6: How to Give Your Idea Structure

This is the sixth part in a series. You can catch up by reading the other parts here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five.

One of the most common questions I get as a book coach is some form of this: “Is my idea any good?” Sometimes it is posed slightly differently — i.e. “Do you think this book has a chance of landing an agent?” “Can you tell me if this is worth pursuing?” “Do you think people will care?”

The best answer is a quote by Lemony Snicket, the protagonist of the children’s book series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, who said, “It is never the story and always the way it is told.”

In other words, ideas are cheap. It’s how you handle your idea, how you present it, how you pin it to the page that matters. At a certain point, the way a story is told is about language and voice and craft, but before you get there — long before you get there — the way it is told is referring to structure.

How is your idea contained and constrained? What limits have you put around it? Where are the edges of the idea? Answering these questions is a key skill in book writing — one of the most underrated, in my mind. But the good thing about a skill is that it can be taught.

Seeing in Story, Seeing the Structure

I was taught how to see in story — how to know what makes a good one, how to choose a shape that serves it — when I worked at New York Woman magazine in the late ’80s after graduating from college and doing a stint at Random House. We put out a magazine every four weeks. It was a slick, beautifully designed, large-format city magazine, with articles about artists and business people and fashion and food. At any given moment, there were dozens of articles — which we called stories — being assigned, written, edited, scheduled, and laid out.

I was an editorial assistant — the lowest on the editorial staff — but I got to sit in on the meetings where stories were chosen — yes to this one, no to that one, not one we would ever do, one we should assign at 800 words, one we should assign at 8,000, one we should put in the front of the book, one we should put on the cover. We were constantly thinking about our audience, our mission, what mattered to us and our readers. We were a collective group, and a business, but just like an individual writer, we too were constantly honing our ability to see ideas and to trust them and to give them shape.

Shape comes from your why and your point and the ideal reader you are trying to serve. Shape is a container to hold the idea — to pour it into. You could pour your idea into one kind of shape or pour it into another and that will entirely change what that book will be.

Think of a book like Eat, Pray, Love — a book that is (in a very blunt analysis) about learning things that enrich your life by going to specific places — and how that story would have been different if it had been any other number of idea/place combinations besides three. If, say, it had been 1001, it could have become 1001 Places to See Before You Die.

At the magazine, I began to trust my instincts — to see that an idea looked at this way was a good story, but the same idea looked at this other way was not. It’s the instinct I rely on now as a book coach. When someone is talking about all their ideas and plans and visions for their book, I can hear it when they hit on an angle that has more heat than the others. I can see it in their eyes. Seeing the story is a way of envisioning the edges of the shape, the outlines of it, almost as if it was something you can literally see. It’s akin to cropping a photograph, zooming way in or way out, to see an image in a different way, a more compelling way, a way that resonates.

I believe it was in an early version of The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published that authors Eckstut and Sterry told the story about an editor who was out to lunch with a CEO. The CEO thought he should write a book about leadership and they were discussing it — without much enthusiasm or heat. Then the waiter came and the CEO pulled out a special card on which he ranked and scored beers on tap. The editor asked him what it was, and with great energy and excitement, the CEO explained his methodology, his research, and how he landed on the beer he ordered that day. The editor smiled and said, “That’s your book.” And the CEO wrote it and it went on to be a mega hit.

That’s what seeing in story looks like.

How to Teach Yourself This Skill

You can learn how to identify the shape of a good idea by studying the table of contents of books. You don’t even have to read the books — just read the TOCs.

Ask yourself:

• Can the arc of transformation the reader will experience be seen in this TOC?
• What is the logic of the way the material is presented?
• Why does it begin where it begins?
• Why does it end where it ends?
• If there is a list, why did the author choose that number of items?
• Does the TOC showcase the point of the book?

By studying TOCs, you can see the shape of the stories, the structure that underlies the books. You can train your eye and your ear to see the edges.

Here are some really good TOCs from a very wide range of nonfiction books that show what I mean:

• The Five Love Languages
• The Secret Lives of Color
• Stamped From the Beginning
• The Artist’s Way
• Untamed
• Truffle Underground
• Caste
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• The Faraway Nearby
• Steal Like an Artist

Speaking of Stealing…

You can adopt someone’s structure. Or as Chip and Dan Heath put it in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, “Don’t think outside the box. Go box shopping. Keep trying on one after another until you find the one that catalyzes your thinking. A good box is like a lane marker on the highway. It’s a constraint that liberates.”

What Austin Kleon (author of Steal Like an Artist) means by stealing like an artist and what I mean by adopting is not literal stealing. You can’t pour an idea about the work of becoming an artist into a 12-step process like Julie Cameron did for The Artist’s Way and call what she calls “morning pages” something like “first thing in the morning pages” — that would just be wrong and weird and possibly illegal, unless you were building on her work in a very specific way or satirizing it and acknowledging your debt to her idea.

But you can do something like this:

For my migraine book, I was struggling with my point and with my ideal reader, and with the structure. I was lost, for many years, but the idea of writing about migraine wouldn’t let me go. When I began to better understand my point — what I wanted to say, and why I wanted to say it — I was able to start thinking about the reader and why they might care. This set me up to think about structure.

One day, I was doing some research for a client, and I read an excerpt from Glennon Doyle’s Untamed. She has an unusual structure for her story about coming into her whole true self — three conceptual/ideological sections that tell a tale (cages, keys, free), with interior entries in those sections that are presented in a non-chronological way. This structure was like a lightning strike to my idea about migraines. I could immediately see how what I was trying to do would come alive with a structure like that — and if I numbered the migraines (which would appear out of order), that would lend another layer to the point and the structure and the experience for the reader, and the numbering also dovetails with some possible titles I am contemplating that have to do with the number of migraines I’ve had over nearly 30 years.

In other words, I could suddenly see the book I wanted to write, and so I adopted that structure for my own material and my own purposes.

Not all structures are as complicated as Doyle’s. The one that contains this blog series is a numbered series of lessons about a process. There are a million books that use that structure — but maybe that’s the one that’s right for your idea, that contains it, and helps you tell it.

That’s what you are looking for — the shape that brings the idea to life.

Next week, I’m going to discuss why you want to explore what other writers are doing in your space, and when might be a good time to do it.