A Surprising Tool For Finding Your Story's Core Aboutness

Lit Salon on why it's so hard for us to know, let alone come out and say, what our work is really about ... and a particularly direct and useful method for getting a little closer

Isn’t it odd—unnerving, even—to travel from one climate to another? While walking in sixty degree sunshine on this wide open beach this late afternoon headed straight toward the falling sun, I heard from a neighbor back home via a Facebook post that their pipes had frozen. It’s all so incongruous. And for a moment this morning, I believed—without consciously understanding that I was believing anything at all—that I could hear a distant hum of traffic, like a freeway just over the jumbly roofline of the houses across the street. Except there are no houses across the street now, and no freeway, either. It was ocean waves I was hearing, the waves on the other side of the island off shore—St. Vincent’s, a nature preserve—that we look out on from here. We plan to visit that island soon. It’s a bird sanctuary and the swooping and landing and taking off and so forth throughout the day is rather mesmerizing. I’ll share more photos as soon as my mind and body get all the way caught up with one another. It takes time to acclimate. The world is so vast and miniature. Meanwhile, the sun rises and sets over this water, unbroken.

And tomorrow, I begin my work on my novel. Major revisions require a kind of hovering between sleeping and waking. I wrote about such hovering several years ago for Eckleburg Review, in a strange, experimental essay called Emergence: Sleeping and Waking in Our Times, in which I said this:

Sleeping and waking are distinct states of being, but they sometimes overlap. Complete escape is impossible. And yet, being awake in the dark is like an altered state, a borderland of consciousness. We take our children to the ocean—a beautiful stretch of island beach famous for its shells. Shells are a protective outer layer for certain animals. When empty, they wash ashore. They become empty because the animal has died and the soft parts have been eaten by another animal or have rotted out. The shell is what is left. Shelling is best at low tide. How otherworldly to comb the wet sand at four in the morning, a time when the sea breathes all the way back into itself.

Tomorrow, the sea of my novel breathes all the way back into itself, and I climb onto its sands in the dark. I am a excited, curious, and a little scared.

The shell is what is left.

Meanwhile, I hope that the remainder of this post, which I’ve updated and substantially expanded from almost exactly one year ago, might provide a crucially helpful tool for finding your work’s aboutness (and possibly this tool will feel quite timely for those of you who are entering into the second half of the Story Challenge with me later this week—because although we’ll circle back to aboutness in Week Eleven, this preview might get your juices flowing as we crest the midpoint!).

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 to this particular mystery. After all, nothing is more invigorating than a steep challenge, and we certainly seem to face one in the question of how we really get at, really pin down once and for all, the core aboutness in our work.

Why is it so hard to identify and articulate aboutness in our essays and stories? I mean, really articulate aboutness. Which is not the same as theme. It is relatively easy to say, I am writing about grief. Or, this story is about resilience and connection. But if you are reading a book you love, and want to tell me about it and why you love it, those are not the words you would use. For example, let’s take The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan, which I read last winter. I would not say to you, “It’s a dystopian novel about misogyny.” Even though it is. I would say, “It’s a dystopian novel about an average mother who makes one bad decision, then must spend the next year desperately trying to prove to the authorities that she can be a good (enough) mother to get her daughter back.” Or something like that. The point is, I would almost surely tell you, if sharing my enthusiasm for this book, something about its protagonist and her plight (at minimum) versus a more abstract theme.

And yet, we writers often struggle to speak in such clear, concrete terms about our own essays, stories, and books. But nudging (and even pushing) ourselves in this area helps us write our truest, clearest, most powerful work by bringing us closer to the center of our work’s core aboutness.

It can be hard, yes, but it’s also easier than we think. So, where do we start?

It may 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.

This is the basic tool I used to articulate the aboutness of The Part That Burns, both in the query letter (which performed extremely well with agents and editors) and with the jacket copy. I’ll break down how I applied it, too, but first let’s go over the basic components, and how they work together to help you chisel out a clear, compelling aboutness in your story (and avoid a fuzzy, underdeveloped aboutness lost in “theme” or “idea,” both of which are important, but do not make a story a story).

Here’s how I think protagonist + desire + obstacles + misbeliefs + time work together to form a clear aboutness—and a very clear method you can apply again and again until you get to your story’s heart center. Start by identifying and considering these five elements: