Getting to the Meaningful Heart of Your Story

Having a pitch, a thirty-second response to “What’s your book about?” is an important back-pocket item for an author. I’m going to explore the art of the pitch in an upcoming newsletter, as it’s also one of the hardest tasks for most of us pre-submission and again pre-launch. It takes work to figure out the meaning behind your book—which is the real answer to “What’s it about?” There are great techniques and steps to discover that.

But today, I want to go beyond that casual question and its necessary answer and share thoughts on those amazing moments in a book tour when a questioner or interviewer probes your understanding of your book, its origin and its meaning to you. When an interview offers provocative questions that make you think—in a good way.

If you’re lucky, as the author, you’ll be asked such questions often. Maybe on podcasts, maybe during “in conversation” events, maybe at your launch. I realize the word provocative can imply confrontation, but I use it to mean confrontation with the self, with your own limits around how you talk about your book.

We all encapsulate our story’s meaning. We often are no longer surprised by it, after years of working to get the book written, revised, and out to readers. We feel we know it completely, almost to the point of too much familiarity.

But I want to challenge that. I can say in full honesty that each book I’ve published became a new surprise to me when seen through a thoughtful reader’s eyes. Even more, when a skilled interviewer got at it.

I’ve been interviewed many times since my launch in October. Two key interviews were the in-person conversation with Kate St Vincent Vogl at the launch; Kate’s questions unraveled my journey to create the story and the audience questions, when Kate opened it up to the crowd attending, helped me learn even more. I discovered stuff, as I sat there and formed answers. I dug into myself and faced my own limited knowledge of my own story, and I learned!

Last Friday on Zoom, it happened again. I sat in front of the largest crowd I’d ever seen online (88 registered, over 50 attended my virtual book launch). Allison Wyss, author of the short-story collection, Splendid Anatomies (finalist for the 2022 Shirley Jackson Awards) was “in conversation” with me. We’re both teachers at the Loft Literary Center, have taken each other’s classes over the years, and I admire her edginess in all things, both writing and teaching.

Note-taking before an interview is something I like to do, whenever I’m lucky enough to preview the host’s particular approach (from listening to another of their recorded shows or from questions they send with the booking). I took notes before my interview with Kate and again for Allie’s questions. (I do like winging it, too; the notes provide a fallback in case I get brain freeze.)

The process of note-taking is a free write, essentially, that prompts interior research before a podcast or other interview. I want time to decide the boundaries around what I feel comfortable sharing. Yes, I will share about my mother, the pilot, her being the inspiration for the novel, and I’ve gotten more comfortable with talking about how mysterious she was to me, growing up, living with such a legacy, a woman who broke through the male-dominated world of flying and became an aviator. I’m OK with listeners knowing that I am still unraveling this mystery of who she was, doing it via my writing now that she’s passed. I’m also more comfortable talking about my deceased sister, the reason I wrote about estranged sisters finding each other. I can talk about found family, the family you discover outside of the one you grow up with.

Note-taking lets me sift all the possible answers, draw some lines between personal and too personal.

But I also have come to appreciate, even look forward to, the questions that make me feel a bit on edge in an interview. Because I want to learn, too—I want to learn more about my own path as a writer. I want to discover more of the meaningful heart of my story, and I believe these conversations allow that.

Today I want to give you a taste of the provocative questions Allie asked me on the virtual launch. I felt they were both in-depth and intricate. A kind of nourishment that a writer needs. Like with Kate’s interview, they took me new places.

Allie: One thing I love about A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue is we have immediate and exciting stakes. We begin the story inside a plane as it is about to crash! But I still think it's a book that is as much or more about relationships and emotions as it is about action. Can you talk at all about the balance of those elements?

Me: I started writing the novel as a story about these two estranged sisters, Kate and Red, who have never met because of their father’s betrayal.  I was fascinated with these kinds of internal questions: What would it mean to be unwanted, to search for family but never be sure you’d be welcomed into it?  Who might rescue you from your loneliness? 

My agent loved the novel but she said I needed a plot! 

I worked for a year with a thriller writer, an instructor at UCLA, who helped me build the whole thriller plot, including the plane crash, escape, and chase.  Then my agent said, you have too many murders.  You’re not a thriller writer, dial it back now.  So I had to take out some of the more violent scenes, focus on developing the relationships. 

It sounds like a convoluted journey; many books are. You don’t know your strengths in the particular story you are telling, at first. You try one thing, it doesn’t work, so you try another. Many times it’s a one step forward, two steps back experience.

My agent was right. My real strength in storytelling is women’s emotional lives.  From this meandering path, I learned that even a rich, interior life doesn’t make a strong story, by itself. It has to have an outer structure to hold it.

Allie: I was talking with another writer recently about the theme of found families in your book. And I'm thinking about Red's friends, her band, the way she surrounds herself with people she loves. But then she has to flee and she goes to this more traditional family of people who are biologically related to her--and she is hesitant, but she finds love there too. I love this idea, that we find family and we build family--whether or not the biology is there.

Sometimes when people talk about found families, there is an implied rejection of biological families. And sometimes that rejection is called for! But I think the point is not who we reject, or that we have to reject certain people, but that we always choose our true families. It's the choosing that matters. How do you think about building families in your stories? What is it that draws your characters together into families? And how important is it to you to do so? Red is on her own for much of the book, but also she never really is. Even when she's isolated, she's thinking about the people she knows will always support her.

Me: I hadn’t really thought about this too much before my novel was published but the whole aspect of how to build a family is very important to the story.  I guess it came into my writing a bit subconsciously—I am fascinated with all the different ways that family can manifest in someone’s life, functionally or not. 

I believe that within a lifetime, we create and leave many families, as they help us evolve personally. I feel very close to my siblings and extended family at this point in my life; they are wonderful people and I love spending time with them.  Perhaps this appreciation has come because I have gone far from them and come back on my own accord, once I was ready.

I grew up an artist in a family of scientists and intellectuals.  I learned a lot from them but I often felt a little lost, as a kid and young adult, even though my parents were supportive of my artistic leanings.  My dad loved classical music and we’d sit and listen and identify instruments.  My mom painted when she was younger, as well as did very risky and brave things like fly in the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots program for two years.  But I felt I needed to move away to find who I was, so after college I drove by myself across county to California in my little VW bug, and I lived there for 13 years, started a food career, and wrote my first book. 

But as I grew older, as my parents passed and we lost my older sister, I meandered back to my family of origin, to my aunts and cousins and extended family, to be with them and get to know them again as an adult with more perspective. 

I think this is a fairly common journey.  It can bring much more acceptance and understanding and appreciation of both your origin family and the found families you’ve discovered. 

Allie: A theme I notice is the characters persistently asking questions of "did I bring this on myself" and generally wondering why trouble has come to them, if they are to blame for that trouble. And I think it's tempting to make fiction say that we do bring it on ourselves--that makes a tight little sense of causality to tie the plot together. But it can also lead to the idea that justice is real--that the world is fair--and it's very clearly not. I love how the book sort of questions that idea and I wonder if you have thoughts about that. How much do your characters control their destiny and how much are they fighting against circumstances that are necessarily beyond their control? 

Me: All of them start by fighting outside forces that they feel no responsibility for—like Kate’s husband’s affair or her blackouts, or Red being framed for murder, or Molly losing her love just when she was starting to trust the gift of that love.  But I generally don’t believe in victimhood, or I don’t engage with characters in fiction who have no agency or belief in their ability to create a life.  All three women evolve from that lack of agency to an increased ability to shape their destinies. 

There’s always going to be forces that challenge us, which is life.  Challenges force us to become creative and ask what we can change to move forward.  So there are points in the story where each person is facing that decision or turning point.  It’s not a straight line.  More like that one step forward, two steps back that I mentioned earlier. 

Red, for instance, is selfish because she’s always had to rely on herself, and she’s been an outcast for too long.  She isn’t aware in the beginning of the story how her decisions will affect others, the new family she’s hiding with, when she’s a fugitive wanted by the law. 

Gradually, her choices become less self-focused and more aware of these new people she loves. 

Allie: There is a song that Red writes in the book. And we can get the words, but we can't get the actual notes--just the feel of it. What is it like to describe a song that way? Could you hear it yourself? And of course, what was it like to hear it actually played? I know that has since happened! At your book launch! Did the actual song match your idea of it?

Me: There are two songs, “Night Flight,” which Red writes as a tribute to her mom and dad and a way to heal her relationship with her dad, and “Sky Song,” which is her band Sleek’s big hit.  Two of my band members came to the launch party on October 24 and one of them proposed that he write the song, and we sing it.  I was terrified.  Our band was actively performing a decade or more ago, and although I still love to sing, my chops are just not there, while they are practicing and performing musicians.  But I did it. 

It was the biggest risk of the evening for me and I can still hear a few sour notes on the recording, but it was great fun.

Talk about found family—these guys helped me though chemo and I sang with them when I had no hair.  They were determined that I live and thrive, and I have.  Music saves us. 

When I was writing the novel, I heard a different version of “Night Flight,” more mournful actually, not the James Taylor style we sang, but the song moved me tremendously and I was so glad we did it.  I posted the recording on my social media.

Allie: And yet, we do get really magical scenes of music. How did you think about making that music heard in just the words?

Me: Music has always been a translator for my deepest feelings.  I wanted the book to contain sound as well as the light of art and setting. 

Allie: And "Night Flight" is more than a song, it encompasses the mystery of the whole book. It is what she is writing in the beginning. Her journey IS a night flight. It is the recorder with the song on it that clears her name. It is her adventure and struggles that shape the song. And when she re-emerges after her hideout, it's with that song. Was working this song through the book in this way an obvious choice for you or did the idea come later? Basically, was the importance of this song there from the beginning or did it emerge as you wrote?

Me: The idea was late in coming.  I knew Red was driven by her music, but in earlier drafts I didn’t have a sense of how or where it would turn the plot. 

Molly is also a ready rescuer because of Red’s music and how it influences Molly’s life. 

Kate ends up rescuing Red by finding her recorder, even though Kate represents the non-artistic side of the equation, the facts and evidence side, the search for Red’s recorder was Kate’s turning point, where she decides to let down her guard and embrace the music that Red creates and become her sister at last. 

Allie: This book has a very tight structure that wraps around Red's adventure and marks time very clearly. (Though I guess it spins a bit past the adventure at the end.) And then it reaches into the past through memory and into the future a bit through aspirations. How did you find this structure? How important to you is the structure of a book? Did you ever try to start this story earlier or later or use a different form?

Me: Structure is everything to me as a reader.  If a book has sloppy structure, I have a hard time entering and enjoying the story.  I taught book structure for 20 years using the storyboard diagram, the W, in my classes at the Loft Literary Center and Grub Street and elsewhere. 

So yes, I did deliberately create structure as I worked on the book.  But I also did my usual structural preamble and had several useless chapters in early drafts before the plane crash chapter that actually starts the book now.

On timelines: I am fortunate to be a member of an awesome writer’s group who kept me honest about this aspect of the structure.  I think that was one of their biggest concerns in early drafts, so I paid a lot of attention to it. 

I worked with the present, chronological, time first.  Made sure that worked.  Then I wove in the flashbacks, memory time.  Then the hints of future time through the character’s longings and hopes.

Allie: You have these alternating storylines of these two incredibly strong women with some of the same struggles, though they play out in different ways. And they're even sisters. It's hard not to see them as foils for each other--as shadow selves, even. I keep thinking about how in a different sort of book that built up tension around getting these two parallel lives to come together--getting the characters to meet--that the moment of lines crossing would be a fight of some sort! And I think about traditionally masculine ways of telling a story--that a character must challenge and overcome this other version of self. But that's not realistic or healthy. And this book instead uses what I tend to think of as a more feminine form of storytelling. That it's a final conflict we're building toward, but a moment of connection.

This book obviously contains a lot of conflict (with the law, with Billy, with nature/weather/storms, with the body), but the pivotal moment of the entire story--the moment we build to and that changes everything--is not one of conflict but of connection. It's the meeting of the sisters. I wonder if you have any thoughts about this more positive strategy for building a narrative. (I have a theory that conflict and intimacy can do the same work to drive change and action in a story. I also have a theory that we need more stories driven by connection, instead of always by strife.)

Me: \I started with almost no fights, the conflict almost all internal, and a clear lack of outer plot.  That was just how I entered the story and what I thought worked. 

The thriller writer-editor i mentioned above helped me get tension in the plot. His approach was more of the masculine one, where I was encouraged to build in outer conflict in the form of fights, bad guys doing very bad things, life-and-death confrontations, burning buildings, murder.

Finally, I circled back. I like the more feminine approach, as you say.  I had to add a few anger scenes to find the right balance, something fiercely broken and something seriously hurt when the sisters do connect to find their mutual history.   

I wasn’t aware of these different approaches to structure until I took a writing class with author Beth Gilstrap, who introduced me to Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative. Now I realize my real strength as a writer has always been a more feminine structure. Not the straight-line plot, with its more predictable rise and fall dependent on outer events, but the more unpredictable, emotionally threaded plot lines that depend on internal changes. I’m glad for this; I’d rather be an author who writes stories driven by connection, as you say, rather than by strife.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

First, a prompt. Set a timer and write for 10-20 minutes on this: What questions would you most like to answer about your writing or your book?

Pick 3-5 of most interesting questions from your freewrite. Spend another 20 minutes writing your answers. Don’t worry about how intelligent they sound; try to get to the meaningful heart of why you write what you write. If it’s helpful, imagine being on a podcast, where an interviewer asks you these questions and your answers are warmly welcomed.

Finally, if you’re interested in exploring the world of podcasts or reacquainting yourself after being away for a while, check out Michelle’s website and download her free resources on how to be a good podcast guest. It can help make your interview fascinating to listeners.