An Exacting Tool For Finding Your Story's Aboutness

I have been thinking about aboutness because a lot of you wrote to me with thoughts on it after my Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things I Have Learned From Reading Thousands of Manuscripts post. You admitted that aboutness is hard (it is), which made me want to dig in deeper. Nothing more invigorating than a steep challenge, after all, and certainly we face one in the question of how we really get at, really pin down once and for all, the core aboutness in our work.

It may or may not surprise you to hear that one of the most effective routes to expressing clear aboutness is to think like a salesperson. That’s because while art and commerce can often seem in conflict, because they should be in some amount of conflict!, the skills required to market our work are not irrelevant to the skills needed to finish our work. In other words, it can help, when you’re struggling to home in on your work’s aboutness, to think like you’re pitching, whether at a pitch conference or in a query letter—it doesn’t matter which, because both require you to state aboutness in concrete language that is both succinct and compelling. (I’m going to talk more about query letters later in this post, after I say more about aboutness).

One of the most effective tools I use to coax writers (of memoir and fiction, both) toward aboutness in their work is a simple combination of a protagonist, desire, obstacles/misbeliefs, and time. A protagonist, because, well, unless your work is wildly experimental (which is not what we’re talking about here today), you need one. Desire, because desire drives plot. (As Kurt Vonnegut said, “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”) Obstacles, because as the brilliant Janet Burroway says (and I’m paraphrasing here), a picnic on a sunny day with delicious food and delightful company plus a lovely clear stream for wading and no insects is terrific in real life but boring on the page. Misbeliefs, because external obstacles alone are not enough—protagonists must also get in their own way. Obstacles and misbeliefs interact with the protagonist’s desire to create what we call “stakes” — though that’s a topic big enough for its own essay. So only briefly here, stakes are related to aboutness, because ultimately, stakes are simply a question of what happens if the protagonist gets what she wants, and what happens if she doesn’t. Finally, the formula includes time, because humans are deeply time-bound animals. Therefore, it’s crucial that—whether the work is chronological or fragmented or somewhere in between—the writer is in complete command of time. As Jennifer Sinor writes (as part of a deep dive into narrative structure while discussing flash) in her fantastic Writer’s Chronicle essay, “Brief But True”:

The first thing we think when we awake in the morning is “What day is it?” or “What time is it?” We orient ourselves in relation to time before we even open our eyes. Time is ingrained, even biological, to the point that if you put people in a room without clocks or windows within days they will wake when the sun rises on the equator and go to bed when it sets (no matter how far away from the waistline of the Earth they are).

Combined toward the aim of expressing aboutness, these elements of protagonist + desire + obstacles/misbeliefs + time might sound like something like the following:

This is a story about ________ who wants ________ because ________. But [obstacles]. And [misbeliefs]. The story starts ________ and ends ________.

Here’s how I worked with this kind of structure for the jacket copy for The Part That Burns, which was originally part of my query letter:

Caught between the dramatic landscapes of Lake Superior and Casper Mountain, between her stepfather’s groping and her mother’s erratic behavior, Ouellette lives for the day she can become a mother herself and create her own sheltering family. But she cannot know how the visceral reality of both birth and babies will pull her back into the body she long ago abandoned, revealing new layers of pain and desire, and forcing her to choose between her idealistic vision of perfect marriage and motherhood, and the birthright of her own awakening flesh, unruly and alive. The Part That Burns is a story about the tenacity of family roots, the formidable undertow of trauma, and the rebellious and persistent yearning of human beings for love from each other.

So, what does Ouellette want? To become a mother and create a safe family. Why does she want that? Because of her childhood full of groping and erratic behavior. What gets in her way (obstacles/misbeliefs)? Her childhood of groping and her resulting misbelief that she can get through marriage and her entire adulthood without living in her own body and, though this is not stated explicitly in the above, without experiencing sexual pleasure (in other words, that she can continue to survive in a disassociated state). If you notice that this jacket copy does not say when the story begins and ends, you are right—it doesn’t say that directly, but it does point to the fact that it takes place during the narrator’s early years of marriage and motherhood. The actual time span of the main narrative thread (it’s a fragmented memoir so there are numerous threads) is about ten years, from the time of the narrator’s wedding to the time of her divorce. As I’ve said, knowing your precise time period is crucial to fully articulating your story’s aboutness.

I hope this helps to demonstrate why thinking like a salesperson—that is to say, in the language of pitching and querying—can help you engage with aboutness in highly productive ways that are more likely to lead to breakthroughs than circling around vague themes like “grief” and “healing.” This is why it’s helpful—even if you are not ready to start querying yet—to know what a query letter entails.

And if you are now or will in the foreseeable future be ready to start querying your work, or are at least at the stage where you need to clarify its aboutness, Elephant Rock has an offering specifically for you: Query Clinic, a two-part workshop, Tuesday evenings, January 17 & 24 taught by Jill Swenson of Swenson Book Development.

Let me tell you about Jill. The telling starts with The Part That Burns, because so many of you have asked me, with regard to the wildly successful (my publisher called it "bananas") launch of The Part That Burns from a micro indie press in the middle of a global pandemic—just what I did and how I did it. And a huge part of the answer is Jill. I couldn't afford a publicist or PR campaign, so when I called Jill (because of her excellent reputation with Swenson Book Development) and explained my budget (lack of), she was like, no problem. She was like, you’re smart and can do this yourself, just hire me for one hour a month to coach you on what to do and when to do it, and you’ll be fine. And that’s exactly what I did, and it was so much more than fine. Jill’s knowledge of the industry is wide and deep, her skills and instincts are tremendous, and her kindness and generosity are unparalleled.

I highly recommend Jill’s Query Clinic! She’s also teaching a course on Scaffolding Your Manuscript later this spring. You can see our whole roster of Winter/Spring courses here, and more will be announced next week. January’s session of Writing in the Dark sold out (as it always does), but I hope to offer it again sometime in spring/summer and would love to write with you then!