It’s funny to me that sometimes I start a blog post thinking, “I’ve learned this cool thing, and I want to tell others!” And other times, like today, I start a blog post thinking, “I wonder what I have to say about this.”

As it turns out, I have a lot! Today is part one of what (I think) will be a three part series.

Here’s why this is on my mind:

When I was at a workshop for writers earlier this month, I had four afternoons of one-on-one appointments. For each of them, I read an excerpt of their writing ahead of our meeting, and we discussed it during our time together.

One of the writers I met with is a young woman whom I’ve had meetings with for a couple years now, so I’ve had the chance to read a few of her pieces. She’s a very skilled writer, and her chapters are always polished and captivating.

She said something very interesting this time, which I didn’t write down because that would’ve been weird, so this is a paraphrase: “When I look at an individual scene, I feel like my writing works. But I don’t know how to tell if the story works as a whole.”

I knew exactly what she meant. Back in 2007, I reached a place in my writing journey where I didn’t benefit as much from chapter critiques. Yes, I still needed help with details like comma placement (I will always need help with comma placement, I’m afraid) but more than that, I needed a way to see the whole scope of my story and identify what worked and what didn’t.

While I think it’s impossible to see our own stories with perfect clarity, I do think there are methods you can use to at least get clearer.

We’re going to start by talking about what you can do BEFORE you write your book that will help you be sure your story will (mostly) work by the time you’re done. The amount of scenes I’ve had to cut from first drafts has drastically reduced since I incorporated these few steps into my pre-writing process:

Write a description of your book in one sentence. (Or maybe two.)

Yes, this is hard. After all, there’s a reason you’re choosing to tell your story in 75,000 words (or however many) rather than 25.

But many new writers try to put too much into their story. I was so guilty of this.

We know we need conflict, so we throw in family conflict, natural conflict, friend conflict, cat conflict, and whatever other kind of conflict we can come up with. But often it’s conflict for the sake of conflict, not intentional conflict that’s building toward the resolution, so we wind up with these convoluted plots. If a good story looks like a tree when it’s finished, these stories look more like bushes.

Yes, you can have subplots. Yes, you want all the characters to have their own lives. Yes, you want conflict. But all the story telling techniques only work if you know what your story is really about.

That’s the initial purpose of the sentence. To clarify to you what this story is about. To help you find the core of your story. But it’s also there to shed light on what your story is not about, so that when you have an idea for something that could happen in the story, you can weigh it against what the story is actually about.

Here’s my core sentence for The Lost Girl of Astor Street (This isn’t a sentence for pitching the story to publishers, mind you. This is just for me. And, as of now, the entire internet.):

The Lost Girl of Astor Street is about a teenage girl trying to find out what happened to her missing best friend.

If a scene in the story didn’t somehow relate to that core, then that scene had no place in my novel.

That might sound restrictive, but really, it’s clarifying.

Does this mean all situations/characters/conflict directly tie into this storyline? Not exactly. For example, Piper’s father announces early on in the story that he’s getting remarried. This has nothing directly to do with Lydia going missing and Piper trying to find her, but that doesn’t mean I can’t include it. What it does mean is that it should never be the focus of the scene. Rather, the remarriage issue should rumble in the background.

Piper’s father remarrying shows us different facets of Piper’s personality, gives her something she wishes she could talk to Lydia about, and provides some interesting backdrops for scenes. But at all times it’s wise for me to remember that Piper’s father getting remarried should never be something that I try to pull to the front.

Turn your sentence into a paragraph.

When my husband and I first got married, we knew we eventually wanted kids. (This relates, I promise!) But at that time, houseplants died as soon as I thought about buying them, so I felt a bit nervous about having to care for actual people. We started with a few potted plants, and when those survived, we got a puppy. When the dog was a couple years old, we had McKenna.

To be clear, I was still completely overwhelmed by motherhood, but the stair stepping of responsibility was very helpful training.

Similarly, it can be hard to identify your story’s core with a sentence and then dive into the storytelling itself. It can be done, same as how it’s possible to start with babies instead of houseplants and for everything to still turn out okay. But for me, I’ve found it helpful to gradually build up to the other details by limiting how much I’m allowed to say about the story.

So what I like to do after writing my core sentence is write a paragraph or two about what the story is. You can make it sound like back-cover copy if that’s helpful to you, but this can also be a story description just for you. I never write the endings into mine, because I don’t know them yet, but this is a tool for you. Do what feels best!

Here’s mine for The Lost Girl of Astor Street, if you’re interested:

Seventeen-year-old Piper Sail lives a life of luxury in Chicago’s prestigious Astor Street district. With her newly bobbed hair, Piper is sure the summer of 1924 will be one of carefree fun. That is, until her best friend, Lydia LeVine, vanishes from their neighborhood without a trace. Piper knows her sensible friend must have been abducted, and because she’s one of the few people who knows the LeVine family’s secret—that Lydia suffers from epilepsy—Piper is desperate to find Lydia before her next seizure.

Everyone warns Piper to stay out of the investigation, but they’re about to learn what the administrators of Piper’s school already know—that Piper is determined, daring, and perhaps too clever for her own good. Only the handsome young detective, Mariano Cassano, sees value in Piper’s knowledge of her friend, and the two work side-by-side in an effort to bring Lydia home. Piper is grateful to have an ally who tells her to trust her instincts, and if she wasn’t so focused on finding Lydia, she might act on her growing attraction for him.

But Piper gets an up-close education on the depth and breadth of the organized crime network in Chicago and how nobody—not even Mariano or her own father—are untouched by their power. Piper thought she would do anything to find out what happened to Lydia, but what will she do when the trail leads right back to her own front door?

When you limit yourself to a paragraph–or three–details naturally get added to your story core as you work to describe the flow of the story and the critical characters.

Write a couple chapters

It seems like the next step would be, “And then expand your paragraph into several pages of story description,” doesn’t it?

If that works for you, fantastic! Go for it. For me, and for many of the writers I know, this is the point where I need to be in the storyworld for a bit before I can figure out much more.

In addition to writing your chapters, this could also be a place where you pause to research or worldbuild, depending on what genre you write, so that you don’t end up writing lots of chapters you have to later cut because of a lack of research.

I’ve tried going straight from the paragraph(s) to the long-form description of the story (also called a synopsis) without doing the chapters, and it really doesn’t work well for me. Something vital to brainstorming the rest of the story happens for me when I muck around in the storyworld for a bit.

Now, these don’t necessarily have to be theopening chapters. Some writers write their way to the beginning of their story. Others are able to identify the beginning pretty easily. Either way can work.

Write a synopsis

I know that’s a loaded word. I’m sorry!

I love writing my synopsis before I write the book itself for a few reasons, as detailed in this post.

For our purposes today, suffice it to say the synopsis can be yet another stepping stone to figuring out what details matter to your story and what do not. This doesn’t need to be a full blown synopsis if that’s not helpful to you, but it’s a great way to explore character motivations, potential plot twists, and other elements that are critical to a story that “works.” We’ll talk more about those in part two!

Read part two here!

Can you relate to the struggle of my writer friend? Is it tough for you to know if your story works as a whole?