On Excavating Your Work's Aboutness
Four prompts for writers in their search to find the thread
I’m excited to be over at Lit Hub today with a piece on one of my favorite topics: wrangling out what your creative work is ABOUT. Aboutness is tricky—it’s an absolute must-have for any work, but a writer rarely knows exactly how to name it when they begin writing.
So today I’m offering four prompts to help:
I’ve spent my career investigating what makes an angle work — first as a publicist pitching media, then as a magazine editor screening such pitches, and finally as an editor working with nonfiction authors to craft their book concepts. My favorite question to ask authors is: what is the boldest statement you have to make? But when I first felt the itch to write a narrative nonfiction book of my own, I was stumped on the book’s “about-ness” before I had even started.
I found myself in need of my own advice, a humbling position. Now it was mine to practice and not just preach: Writing what you know is a farce. Writing into the unknown is far more interesting.
Ultimately, not knowing your book’s aboutness as you begin to write is not a problem, but a prompt.
Your angle is not your starting point, but rather a finding at which you arrive only through a diligent discovery process. This discovery process is no straight line rising to the right. Most often, it is a spiral: a slow circling, and circling, until you finally come down for a landing on your book’s aboutness.
Here are a few guiding lines that helped me in the circling.
Free yourself to create from questions rather than settled clarity.
As Joan Didion said for all of us, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking.” In the end, writing from certainty makes for rather dull reading. What we as readers most connect with is not a flat, self-evident report, but an invitation to ride along in the writer’s discovery process, to experience the writer’s threshold moments by proxy. The churn of the questions may present itself as daunting, yet write from them, and you’re bound to be surprised by your findings. This surprise will carry to your reader.
So when you find yourself stumped, as I did, let your curiosity lead you. Let the tensions be trail markers along the way. The call of the creator is not total achievement but the ongoing work of excavation — there are always deeper layers for those who go looking. In the end, nothing will enliven your final work more than letting your discovery process show, and your surprise with it . . .
I want to hear from you:
What helps you find the thread in your writing? Let us know in the comments, you brilliant minds!
Take heart and stay feisty,
I wrote “what’s the boldest thing you have to say?” at the top of my book proposal a few months ago after reading one of your posts. This has been such a helpful guiding question.
Two things help me find the thread in my writing: 1) pressing in to the thing I most resist or feel afraid to express, and 2) sharing my work with others and listening to their impressions. A dear friend recently read my query letter and positioning statements and could immediately tell which of my themes was the strongest. 🧡
I loved your prompts, and the one about differentiating between the work's aboutness and its illustrative elements was particularly helpful to me! I do all of my writing longhand (it slows me down enough to think) and when I'm stuck, I just start a new paragraph with "What I'm really trying to say is..." or "What I really want to know is..." and see where that leads me.
I also want to say that it was very encouraging to read that it took you three years of writing and revising to get to the center of its aboutness! I tend to think I should know everything right away and forget that writing well is a long process.