Rachel Toalson wrote a wonderful blog post for Writer UnBoxed. It’s about getting to the heart of your story — why you wrote it and why readers will remember it long after they finished reading it.
Sometimes it’s really hard finding the heart of your story. If you start with a what-if situation, an idea for a plot, or simply just your main character, it’s so easy to get caught up in developing that situation, plot, or character, I mean, that’s what you’re writing, right? You’re writing a story.
But your story can be so much more—and without getting preachy. For a book to be memorable, something must touch the reader. They need to be moved, to relate, to really see themselves on the page. Or there must be a lesson they can take away.
But you’re just writing a tale! In fact, you may have already written it or are half-way through. It’s all right. You may have made the heart of your story something that will touch a reader without even meaning to do so.
So, how do you find the heart of your story—and, again, it doesn’t matter at what stage of writing you are? Toalson had some good ideas, but there was one which I truly believe in, which I think is an essential question that every author must ask themselves with every book they write:
Why should I care? Why does this story matter?
I once asked that of a writing student and I could see on his face that he was trying to decide whether to break down into tears or punch me. He didn’t know. And even worse, his book was fictionalization of a true story that happened to his daughter (who was then in jail for vehicular manslaughter — she got drunk and killed someone). This was a story that mattered a great deal to him. It was the story of his daughter’s life. But that didn’t mean that it mattered to me or would matter to anyone just picking it up.
There had to be more to his story. It couldn’t simply be about his daughter, it needed to be about the reader, something the reader could relate to. He needed to put in something to make the reader sit up and say, “hey, that could have been me.” It could have even been something as simple as beginning the book with the sentence, “Have you ever been so mad that you just had to go out and do something?” His daughter was so angry that she dove headfirst into a bottle of whiskey.
But I had to know why, why I should care. And you need to know why you are writing your book and why your reader should care. It is that which is the heart of your story. It is that which your reader will take away with them and remember days, months, perhaps even years later.