This week gave me two unexpectedly joyful writing experiences.
The first was kicking off my Member Mentor series with Oak & Pine in Honolulu, where I taught a session on Why Your Business Needs a Book. I met new aspiring authors with truly fantastic ideas and interesting niches. Over the next three months, I’ll get to guide them through the process of birthing their first drafts of their books, and that feels like such a privilege.
The second experience caught me completely off guard.
I’m married to a TV producer, director, and unit production manager. Since 1996, when we met on a film set at the University of Oregon, my husband has been a constant force behind productions: pushing crews, protecting schedules and budgets, keeping actors and directors supported, and making sure writers see their words come to life on screen. Right now, he’s on hiatus from his latest show, Y-Marshals which airs March 1st, and he’s using his time off to pitch his own TV ideas to studios.
He has a strong lineup, some co-developed with writers he’s known for years, and a few that are entirely his own.
We have spent hours developing one particular pitch and we are at the point for feedback. A few trusted industry friends brought up some good questions regarding the character’s personal history. We were working on answering the questions that came up in the feedback and suddenly, I remembered something from a fiction writing class years ago: build a character timeline.
I teach nonfiction writing. That world feels intuitive to me probably thanks to my journalism background. Fiction, on the other hand, still challenges me. I’m about 30,000 words into a novel I’ve been writing on and off for years, and I’m still learning how to create a believable world.
So for this issue, we started at the beginning. When was he born? How old is he now? When does the story really begin? From there, we layered in college, early jobs, and all of life’s pivotal moments. My husband would suggest roles or experiences, and we’d fact-check reality, because while fiction allows imagination, it still has to live inside truth. You can’t casually invent championship wins or historical moments without consequence. Readers and viewers are smart!
And that’s where the treatment came alive.
We stacked fiction against reality and built a timeline the story could stand on and like magic, the character suddenly made sense.
It was such a simple tool and such a powerful reminder that whether you’re writing nonfiction or fiction, getting clear often begins with structure.
And it reminded me of something I see again and again: sometimes people don’t need more talent or discipline to write a book. They just need a plan.
When the outline clicks, writing a book finally makes sense. Come right with us on Fridays.