Writing a book part 3: Keel and cargo

The wind was low when I woke up sprawled half-naked on the weather deck of a tall ship somewhere off the coast of Maine. The whistling had tapered to a drawl, and it was this downshift into quiet that finally roused me.

Someone had dragged me out on the wood from the bunks to collect some sun, with bare legs and a long-sleeved windbreaker strapping me to the bridge like a Posey vest, and as I lay there pieces of the last few days gurgled on the grease slick of my brain, catching me up to the reality I was now in—me, bent like a doll over the gunwale, cutting open water with my own guts, dialogue wrapping like eels around my head, something about letting it pass.

Sea sickness had flattened me immediately after leaving port in Woods Hole, and I was just regaining consciousness there on the deck when I heard the broad lowing, as if in slow motion, of a woman’s muffled voice:

“We’re really out here now, huh?”

And another, closer to me, who through my smeared vision I recognized as the captain but whose voice I heard in the cloud of my skull like echos through a hall of marble:

“Aye,” she said. “We’re closer to the bottom than to land on any side.”

Oh shit. I passed out again.

Fifteen years later, sequestered safely in the Sangre de Cristos 🏔 and a thousand miles from the nearest beach (somewhere around Corpus Christi), I think of the stern certainty in the captain’s voice, I laugh nervously, and I cringe. Oh how the past is present! Oh how like writing this position can feel!

When you’re working on a book, somewhere along the way you’re going to look down and realize you can sink farther than you can swim—the journey is well underway. Luckily, by the time the birds stop swooping at the deck, when you cast your gaze to the horizon and see nothing but air, when you find yourself out in the big wide nowhere, you’ll have the vessel that will carry you. To be “all at sea” is to be troubled and confused, wary and uncertain. This is when you rest on the faith of your craft—there is something between you and all that water. You’re safe enough. Maybe your ship can even climb out of the ocean altogether, cross suburban towns and highways, cover ragged shelves of desert, and shatter the clouds as it comes to dock at the top of your mountain home.

If you’ve read “writing a book” editions 1/ looking for a ship and 2/ anchoring, you know why you’re here—you want to write or are trying to write a nonfiction book, and need some help getting everything going. If you’re new here (welcome all new subscribers!), I suggest visiting those posts first.

This week, you’ll identify your ship’s keel, or basic structure, and begin to take inventory of the cargo—what it carries.

Keel

Loosely, be thinking about structure—the keel of the ship is its most basic structural element. The book’s force and central question will help you determine the best structure for your book—there will almost always be options to consider.

Cases in which your book has a very clear structure: any how-to or guide starts with the most basic thing the reader needs to know and grows in complexity, bringing the reader along, building step by step to whatever promise of mastery your book has made.

Or, your book may cover a big topic by breaking it into subject categories—if these are all of equal value, it’s totally up to you how to organize them, and right now you just want to list out what those categories are. (When you get to organizing your Table o’ Contents, think of your book like a concept album—the arrangement of tracks tells its own story.)

If your book is a reconstruction of past events, it’s likely chronological, where you are deciding the beginning and ending points and filling in the middle. An investigation of past events may or may not be chronological, and may involve multiple timelines. For example, there might be a chronology unfolding which the narrator’s reflection interrupts, or the narrator’s current timeline is interrupted by flashbacks, so that the structure bops between past and present.

That’s all I’ll say about this now—more detailed outlining comes later. Now you just want to know, loosely, what’s the keel of your book? Step by step, chronological, or boppy? If you’re writing a boppy book, or are intrigued by the idea of a book that bops, you’re going to have a ton of super fun work to do figuring out how each piece will fit together. Truly, you can write any book you want! And it’s more than likely you’ll unlock the structure as you go, like one of those special bank locks where you solve a series of puzzles until you get to the innermost, core key moment.

Cargo

You’ve already experienced the power of lists in looking for a ship. Making lists is one of the most obvious, least-used writing tools out there to identify what you know and what you need to know, what you’ll definitely use and what you might use.

Your lists shouldn’t lack context. After you’ve added an item to the list or after you feel ‘finished’ with a list, go back and fill it in with some detail that points to its relevance for the book. This might mean fleshing out the item with 1-2 sentences or adding bullet points below the item.

Here are the lists you should make:

1. Characters

   1. Your book might have real-life characters (mom, dad), or it might lean heavily on the works of Gertrude Stein, so she or her oeuvre are a character. The city in which your story is set may be a character, as the house where you grew up may be, or the car you rode around in. Anything you as the narrator are “in conversation with” is a character.

   2. You are definitely a character, too. How much can you say about your character as the narrator? What does he believe? Are you all-knowing or on-the-ground, the holder of all knowledge or a helpful moron? Are you also the subject? Do you appear in the book at different ages or stages? There may be multiple characters within the single ‘you’ of the book.

2. Scenes

   1. No matter what kind of non-fiction book you’re writing, it’s got scenes—stuff that happens that moves the action forward. A book dealing with a lot of research or guiding us through a complex topic will still have scenes—from history, the annals of science, the personal story of the writer as he learns about his subject, for just a few examples. If you’re writing this kind of book, you may not know what scenes will go in there yet, but starting the list will give you a place to put them when you find them.

   2. If you’re writing a book about your past, you probably already have a few key scenes that you know are going in the book, like the catalyzing event or moment of high conflict—writing these down now in a quick 1-2 sentence sketch or in 2-3 bullet points will give you plot points you’ll use to build your outline. Sketching out these key scenes will bring up other memories to add to your scene list, too.

   3. Some scenes will just be anecdotes! You may not know how big a role some scene will play in the book, and that’s totally fine. Just write it down, marking ‘anecdote?’ where you think something you put down might not be worth the space of a scene.

3. Examples

   1. Depending on the book you’re writing, ‘examples’ may not be applicable at all. But if you’re working on a how-to or anything to teach the reader a skill, you need stellar examples of how the thing you’re teaching applies in the real world.

   2. You may or may not be able to list examples at this point in the process, but beginning this list now will give you a place to drop examples when you come across them. Trust, it’s way harder to come up with examples that demonstrate complex topics than to explain complex topics based on real examples. Recording examples as they come up—oh! that’s a great way of explaining X!—will actually bring structure to your work in a major way.

4. Big Ideas

   1. Whatever you ‘want to make a point about,’ list here.

5. Resources

   1. List all the resources you know right now, like books that cover key aspects of your subject or things you need or want to study in the writing of this book. If you don’t know any yet, spend an hour on the internet until you have a few resources that will help support you in writing this book.

Look at what you’re creating with your lists! It’s the beginnings of a detailed outline and research plan! That’s next :)

Final note

These editions are coming out quickly and cover a lot of ground, and if I were your personal coach I probably would not expect you to be ‘finished’ with one set of exercises before moving on to the next.

If you are urgent, ready and industrious, you absolutely can be following along week by week, but remember that these lists and prompts are meant to be added to over time, as you work and discover new things.

If you are just making a bit of progress on these exercises over time, that’ll be just fine. There is no expectation whatsoever that you move on anyone’s timeline except your own. Maybe your book isn’t urgent and you don’t mind when it’s finished, you’ve boarded a small private vessel and you’re going where the sea takes you. Or maybe you’re setting yourself up for the book that you won’t be able to write until three years from now—that’d be just fine, too.

All of this work (it’s what I call ‘book prep’—everything that precedes drafting) will help you no matter how you are pacing yourself or what your timeline is. If you just read through each post and spend the next year pondering, “What question does my book answer?” or “What is the promise of my book?” that’s great. What else would you be doing?

If you are making cool progress on your book prep and unlocking new insights and excitement about your book, I’d love to hear about it at rachel@racheljepsen.com or in the comments!

Next week, I’ll be writing about inspirations—for your book if you’re working on one, and for your writing in general if you’re not, how to use them and why we need them. After that, we’ll get to writing a book 4/, which as I said above will cover outlining and organization. Comment or email me with questions. Happy writing!