I just spent the morning with Kate Moses on the official publication day of her compelling new memoir, Cakewalk. We filmed our interview in the sunny kitchen, glass door open onto a backyard, three white cats circling and purring.

I read Cakewalk in the days before our meeting, laughing out loud and also sobbing. Yes, sobbing. It’s a wild and delicious ride, replete with recipes. Kate’s sentences are delicacies themselves–rich, abundant, generous and exquisite.

Rooted in a history of generations of Californians, White Russian treasure burning in a San Francisco dump, children tied to trees after the earthquake to keep them safe, Kate’s is the story of the making of a writer–for without waving any banners, this is a key part of the story and one that my writer self thrilled to read.

I don’t envy Kate her harrowing childhood, even with its flights of sugary beauty, and I suppose many writers have a cauldron of a past that boiled us, left us raw, tender and observant. But what a memory–what prose, what images–drives this narrative. What characters people it and what a journey creates the writer who can transform the whole thing into a delicacy.

I’ll be posting my video interview with her soon. Come join us in her kitchen!

This is a magical time of year. Everyone in my family has a cold; I can’t hear anything except the sloshing in my head. It snowed this year, but most of us in Berkeley weren’t dreaming of a white Christmas, and the idea that global warming might in fact be leading to strange climate change haunted the ecstasy of building small snow-people with my children a mile from our house. My clients are panicking, packing, moving (more than one!), trying to pull of being Santa (even the Jewish ones because everyone’s in an interfaith relationship) and vaguely wondering how writing is supposed to fit into all of this celebrating.

Here are five sure-cure tiny miracles, when the colorful lights glimmering in the distance hail from the top of a police car:

1) Write a sentence. Just one. You can do it on a post-it if you want to. Or in your journal, if you can find it. Or on a napkin. Just. Write. One. Sentence. Ah . . .

2) Give someone a sentence as a gift. Say, “I wrote this sentence for you. Here.” Then read it to them.

3) When your hands are full–of groceries, plumbing tools, children, tissues, moving boxes–daydream about your book. Ask your storyteller for a little tale about your characters and let it wash over you. The world in your head is still growing even if your manuscript is not.

4) Ask for time as your holiday present. An hour in a cafe with your laptop. A bubble bath with your journal and favorite pen. Ask your partner, ask your children, ask yourself. Take the yes and run with it!

5) In any given moment when your story world seems miles away, take a moment to discover three things:

1) human passion, right there in the room with you, in the fight between your kids, in your partner’s insistence on checking email, in the way the dishes stack up because of our ceaseless and delighted appetites.

2) obstacles, the meaty stuff of plot, right there in the street with you, in the bus that doesn’t stop, the parking place that doesn’t emerge,

3) human dilemmas, the choices that seem insurmountable in the grocery store, in the few minutes and many responsibilities of your day, in the way that you are pulled in so many directions because you want to write and want to pull of your holiday celebrations and even want something to make for dinner tomorrow night . . .

You are learning and growing as a writer all the time. See? To master creating trouble you have to live through some and keep connected to your writing self  . . .

What miracles do you want? What miracles have you stumbled across?Please post a comment and let me know!

Amy Truncale is a self-described “wife and mother in the Bay Area who loves to write and dream.” She dreamed up an amazing story last year, and here she tells us about the experience of writing a book in less time than it takes to make a baby:

Last year I wrote a novel in the month of November during the annual NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I was seven months pregnant and had been stuck on a book I started writing six years before. I hadn’t even looked at it in a couple of years, so I decided to write it over from scratch without referencing the old material in any way. I wanted my original inspiration back.

NaNo sounded challenging, fun, scary, impossible and wonderful, and it inspired me. A door banged open in my soul with the fresh air of possibility. That may sound a bit dramatic, but the thought of doing NaNo made my eyes wide with anticipation. It was an opportunity I had to take. There was another very important reason I wanted to undertake this task at that time. Simply put, I wanted my daughter (still in utero at this point) to have a mother that would model having the courage to do what she loves. That was a powerful motivation for me. I’m wise enough to know that she’s much more likely to do what I do, rather than what I say. So with that arsenal up my sleeve, I set out on a journey of creativity.

As I mentioned previously, I had been stuck in my writing for a long time. I needed to do something different, something I had never tried before. I had employed different techniques to move my writing forward in the past but always seemed to end up in the same place – inertia. I was looking for a new internal paradigm. NaNo happens in the 30 days of every November. Coincidentally, it is said that it takes 30 days to break a bad habit and replace it with a healthier one. I wrote a never-ending river of words last November that created a new mental pathway. The flow of momentum broke through little dams of dry twigs (I’m stuck) and brambles (I don’t know how to do this), rats’ nests (I can’t) and garbage that was previously creating blocks and distractions, making it difficult to write anything. Plus, I gained confidence as I experienced success! The goal was to write 50,000 words, and I did that. It doesn’t say to write 50,000 perfect words that create perfect sentences that make a national bestseller (although that possibility is open to you), it just says 50,000 + new words, period (well, not just random words – but you know what I mean).

In retrospect it still amazes me how easy I was on myself during this process. I always thought taking on a commitment like this would be painful, that I would have to chain myself to the desk and force myself to do it at knife point, sweat beading on my brow. Maybe being pregnant had something to do with this new gentle feeling towards myself. It forced me to slow down and take it easier than I ever had.

All I did each day was read what I had written the day before and then keep going. I did not critique anything. Previously crippled by my perfectionist left brain, I embraced the idea that it could be as bad as it needed to be – and sometimes it really was – but occasionally it was even good. My main goal was to KEEP GOING, not to write well. I had never let myself off the hook this way before. It was more than a revelation. Once I had accomplished the goal of just getting words on the page, I could shift my focus to creating quality through revision.

There are many books on writing on the market. I know because I own quite a few of them. There is some great advice for how to go about writing a book, yet most concede there is no direct ‘how to’ guide. I suppose it’s because of the nature of novel writing; that is, it is a different path for everyone. What Elizabeth Stark has created in her Book Writing Cycle is nothing short of revolutionary, and I have never heard of anything else like it. I honestly could never have done it without the support of this class/group, specifically designed to coincide with NaNoWriMo. It’s a tremendous resource for writers, and I am grateful to be a part of it. Writing a novel is about following your dreams. Whether the path is symbolically straight as an arrow, meandering through meadows or jumping into the abyss with arms stretched like an eagle, all that matters is that you take a step, and then another…

Devi Laskar is an old friend of mine from graduate school. She took last year’s Book Writing Cycle course: planning, writing and revising an amazing novel. (I just got to read a good chunk of it, and I was blown away. You’re sure to get a chance to read it yourself in a few years when it’s a NYTimes bestseller. You heard it here first.) While Devi has not one but two master’s degrees, including an M.F.A. in Writing from Columbia University, she faced her own challenges while writing an entire book last year, as you shall see:

I think moms are some of the most creative, resourceful people on Earth. They are able to multi-task (it is practically a prerequisite of being a modern mother to be able to talk on the phone, make a sandwich, change a diaper and tie a shoe simultaneously!) and accomplish so much for their families during the day. Every day. But it is a thankless job and if you’re successful at it, you’re taken for granted. Unfortunately, it is the same in the vast world of creative writing – some of us are able to multi-task and get “things” done but we (the writers) often take ourselves for granted at the end of the day, and leave our most creative ideas swirling inside our heads and not on the page.
As a mom of three girls, I have found it to be challenging to get my brilliant future-Pulitzer-prize winning thoughts on to the page some years. Yep, I said it: years. When my oldest was merely an only child, I was writing so much – especially when she took naps and at night when she was asleep. I was organized, I was motivated, I was in charge. I was making time for myself, even if that time meant a half-hour here and a half-hour there. A few years later, I had three little girls and I was lost in the vacuum of diaper duty and late-night feedings, and chained to the vacuum cleaner, too.
My daughters are now a little bit older, they go to school and I’m back to writing again. It is a matter of consistency. Just like we make time to eat and sleep and take showers, we writers must make time to write. I was very proud of my family last year when I told them I was going to participate in NaNoWriMo – they knew I had to write 1,700 words a day and they left me alone for those few hours when I did it. If they caught me slacking off, they’d offer me alternatives: “Hey mom, can you fix A….” or ,“Hey mom, can you make B….” or, “Hey mom, why don’t you drive me to C…” and quickly I’d scurry back to my writing table and churn out more sentences. I finished NaNoWriMo, got my 50,000+ words and gained so much more confidence – I felt I could go back to older projects that had been languishing in my desk drawer and finally finish them.
I feel the Book Writing Cycle was a real asset. It was great to be on a schedule and to have a community to commiserate with – we checked in with each other frequently and our conference calls with Elizabeth helped immensely. I felt as though I started friendships, and the course helped me to focus on the book at hand.
And that leads to me to my most important point: it’s about quality, really, not quantity (although if you have both, it’s great to have both). There are plenty of writers out there who are lucky enough to be writing full-time and they are constantly stuck. If you are a busy mother, like me, eek out that 30 minutes or one hour during the day and make it YOUR TIME. Put it on the schedule of your busy day, sometime right after the early morning shower and before the dinner dishes are put away. Start slow. Buy a cheap spiral notebook and a pull out a ballpoint pen that comes in a package of ten. Tell yourself that all you have to do today is write 10 sentences in the notebook, and then you can go do something else. After a month, you’ll find your notebook is full and you have a wonderful go-to source of inspiration that’s all your own.

I offer a free call for writers on the third Thursday of each month, 5 – 6 p.m. PST. Each call has a topic. Every call is also be an open coaching session, offering answers and encouragement to writers. Anyone looking for daily momentum, craft mastery and marketing success is welcome. Come get some support!

Register now for the JULY 23rd call, click here. (Please note: this is actually the 4th Thursday in July.)

Click here to listen to July\’s free call.

These calls are really fun with amazing, insightful writers sharing their experiences, frustrations and answers. Plus I always have a thought (or three) to help you get excited about your writing and plunge back into it. This is a free call; please join us!

What makes a blog both exciting and dangerous is the immediacy of the format. Confessions, passions and urges are typed onto a little box on a screen, one rectangular button with the corners worn off is clicked with a tap of a key, and those confessions become public.

I’m a person with three novel manuscripts waiting perfection. I’m not impulsive about getting my work out before the public eye because I’ve been wounded by the public eye, been overly-sensitive to what others wrote about my work or thought about it. The blog format, therefore, is good for me. In many ways.

But it is still dangerous, and right now I’m aflame, in a quiet and deep way.

I just crawled out of bed after a long “nursey-nappy” with my family, a nap I spent finishing Po Bronson‘s excellent What Should I Do with My Life? The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question. He’s got quite a target market there: anyone who’s ever wondered, Is That All There Is?

But what made me LOVE this book was first, the excellent writing. It’s just so well-written. If you want to know what good writing is, read this book. It’s not flowery, pretentious, or even poetic. It’s honest, articulate, driven by a voice of intelligence and integrity.

If I knew Po Bronson better, which is to say if I’d ever met him or met his cousin or seen him do a live reading, say, I’d call him up right now instead of blogging, and I’d run my ideas past him. But you, dear reader, are being asked to stand in. Here’s what I’ll do to help you out. I’ll quote a few lines, and you see if you can take up the spirit of the voice of this book and answer me back, okay?

He writes:

So finding your calling is not “the answer.” Callings are vehicles that help us let our real selves out; callings speed up the process. You can find your calling, or you can find your people, or you can find an environment that nurtures you–they all lead to the same place. Many people get there without ever finding their calling. Head in that direction. (p.390)

And then he writes:

A calling is not something you know, it’s something you grow into, through trials and mistakes. Work shouldn’t just be fun. Work should be like life–sometimes fun, sometimes moving, and defined by meaningful events. Attack your fears, rather than shy away from them. Bring what you do in alignment with who you are. (p.391)

And just one more:

You can get good at what you need to to serve what you believe in. . . . Nothing helps like knowing you are not alone. (p. 391)

Okay, go buy this book! And then come back here and listen to me confess.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve been studying marketing with Michael Port, and that I appreciate that he emphasizes love and integrity. In fact, our last class, in which he made good use of a book called Love is the Killer App, by Tim Sanders was mind-bogglingly wonderful. It focused on the idea that networking is the process of taking care of other people by sharing your intangibles.

What are your intangibles? Your network, your knowledge and your passion.

Meanwhile, I’m reading Po Bronson at night, surrounded by babies, with my little clip-on reading light fading mightily. I got to the end of Ch. 46 last night and it was late for someone with two little guys who wake up before the birds around here, and so I switched off my sputtering little clip-on light, but I couldn’t sleep for two more hours. I was thinking about what he wrote at the end of Ch. 46.

And I’m working out who and how I want to teach, who and how I want to edit. I love teaching and editing; I love being good at making connections, pushing people toward their strengths, teaching what doesn’t seem to be taught much–craft, for example, close attention to words; how to write the books you write best, better. And how to finish things . . . write a whole book and then rewrite it, and write another one. What if people left an M.F.A. program with two complete, book-length manuscripts?

So I’m thinking about how to build my teaching and coaching and editing business, how to serve the people I’m meant to serve. But at the same time, of course, there’s something else: I want to be a writer.

I’ve known this for a really long time and it keeps not changing. I don’t like growing in public or marketing my wares-cum-deepest creative efforts. But I keep pulling past those blocks, changing my mind, being willing to figure out a new way to be willing to grow in public and to see selling my wares in a different light.

Add to the mix that I’m raising two kids, and that I want to raise them. I want to be there for the rolling out of the new words, for the jokes they make and the dance moves they invent and the art they create that, frankly, blows my mind.

So that’s business, writing, kids, in no particular order, and not to mention my relationship, my friends, and my voracious appetite for reading . . .

And each of these items has a few sides to it.

Because besides the amazing sentences my boys utter and the laughs they earn and the hugs they give, there are also endless meals to cook, surfaces to wipe down (counters and bottoms and floors) and dishes to clean and toys to pick up off the floor–again–and laundry to do and baths to be given and hair to be washed and no one likes to brush teeth, it turns out . . .

And writing comes with building a platform and collecting rejection slips, which means addressing and stamping and mailing envelopes (or is anybody even doing that anymore?) and researching markets and proposing articles and books and then convincing other people to buy them . . .

And building a business comes with letting other people know about it and developing products and courses and trying methods of outreach that fail, and doing taxes, and keeping books and records and mailing lists and returning phone calls and emails . . .

Everybody else just woke up, and I was planning to drive the point home if I could, but then people needed dinner and a lot of attention.

So . . . where was I? Oh yes, all the pieces of a whole and the many wholes that compete for attention.

Here’s my immediate, not-yet-digested idea after finishing Po Bronson’s book: I am going to structure my courses and coaching to support my–and hence my clients’–writing life. Perhaps a first-thing-in-the-morning group check-in to rev us up and get us going? Followed by a three-hour writing block. A lunch hour course rotating between planning your book (Mondays?), writing your book (Wednesdays?), revising your book (Thursdays?).(Clients can move among them as needed.) The craft course to keep all of us in the best shape possible for writing great prose . . . And then afternoon coaching sessions for people who are ready to soar.

This is a work-in-progress, but at its heart is my belief that serving others can be done best when I am serving myself. And as I learn about building a platform using all of the exciting media options available, as I create tours and promote books, I will share this information. I want to help apprentice writers become professionals, and professional writers become stars. Myself included.

What do you want? What is your driving passion? What should you do with your life?

The title of this post is a quote from a conversation with a wonderful coach named Sharon Sayler (check out her radio show), and I think it’s the perfect description of what writing demands of us.

Someone was saying to me this week that it’s not the writing she minds, but the voice in her head that accompanies the writing. The voice that says, “This is not good enough; this is terrible.” That’s what makes writing hard.

I see my kids creating so joyfully. Charlie loves typing at the computer. He’s 18 months old! And we don’t let him watch any television (except inauguration), but we’ve not been able to shield him from our own obsessions with the computer, and he’s hooked. Leo loves to draw. “More drawing,” he says if he has to leave the blank page to, say, eat. And when one page fills, he says, “New page.” With delight.

That voice that critiques the writing as we go is the sum of all that is wrong with the world. It’s a voice that lacks empathy, artistry, depth (other than the depths of despair), compassion, curiosity (what might come of following this line, this trail of words?).

If we heard this voice directed at anyone else–on the political stage or at a restaurant or on television–we would know that we’d sworn enmity to this voice and all it believes in. But in the privacy of our own offices or journals, that voice becomes an ambassador from the land of common sense. It’s Carl Kasell, and you can win him recorded on your answering machine.

The most important thing to remember about the voice that tells you anything at all about the wet new writing you’ve just laid upon the fibers of your page is that that voice is wrong. Plain wrong. That voice doesn’t know. It’s the loudest kid on the bus arguing about whether or not there is a Santa Claus or who is the best softball player. But it doesn’t know the truth; it doesn’t even know how to pause softly and fumble for the truth. It’s a bully. Don’t let yourself be bullied.

You won’t know the worth of the writing until later. Much later. After the draft is finished and some time has been spent recovering yourself and engaging with other things, you will curl up with it and get to know it, this thing that you’ve created. You will have the distance from it so that you can treat it as a friend, not someone you snap at to take the garbage out, not all the shame from the worst moments of your childhood heaped upon the thin thread of your attempted sentence. It will be something else: its own being, separate from you, alive and flawed and wonderful and fixable.

You, at your kitchen table, at your neighborhood cafe, under a blanket on your couch, waiting in the car for your kid to come out of gymnastics. You are working miracles. You are leaping from the trapeze without seeing the net. You are soaring, caught in the currents of air, in the uncertainty that gifts us with new possibilities we could not have imagined otherwise.

Treasure that act. Trust it. Silence the voice. Laugh at it. Shrink it down to size. Write down what it says and put those words in the mouth of your villain. Copy out the opposite of the voice’s evil message and post those words around your house and in your notebooks (computerized or not).

I, and hundreds of thousands like me, are waiting on the other side of a page for that miracle you grind out with so much labor and hesitancy and recklessness and terror and joy. I know a world of people who are not supposed to exist–freaks and queers and manly girls and girly men and all manner of others who are not, anywhere, described or anticipated. If someone is trying to add “readers” to that list, I defy them. We are everywhere, waiting, for the next story that will change our lives.

[Thursday, Feb. 26, I am offering a FREE TELE-CLASS on dialog. Dazzling fun that will grow your writing in ways you won't believe. Email me for information about how to join us.]

There’s a reading series in San Francisco called Writers with Drinks, but I’ve been thinking lately about the ingredients that make someone a working writer or a professional writer–whatever you want to call it in a country that does not recognize the existence of, let alone the profound need for, professional writers. A way with words helps. A sense of story, storytelling, or having amazing stories to tell helps. A work ethic helps profoundly. But what pulls all these out of thin air, what makes something from nothing? Deadlines. What takes the esoteric task of creating something “good” in writing and forces each of us to the page to do the dance and see what happens? Deadlines.

I hope you are hearing this in the grovel-y, growl-y voice of the Cowardly Lion doing his own call and response with the word “Courage!” Deadlines and courage are much the same thing in the life of the writer. The one forces the other, round and around. You have a deadline, you find the courage to produce. You have courage? You create deadlines for yourself. Sign up for readings, enter contests, submit your work, create a group, take a class, hire a coach, sign a two-book deal, whatever it takes.

My friend Kendra told me the Something from Nothing story at Habitot Children’s Museum the other day. The small underground museum was crowded with toddlers running and playing with trains, paint, water and baby dolls, plastic groceries, farm equipment. Not so far from the clubs where Kendra and I first met a dozen years ago, trading stories in the din and passing dates back and forth the way we now pass babies. Drinks instead of snacks . . . Anyway, she told me that she had two copies of this book Something from Nothing, about a grandfather who makes his grandson a jacket. After a while, the jacket is worn out, but the grandfather says, “There is just enough material left to make a vest.” So he makes a vest for the grandchild. When the vest wears out, there is enough material to make a scarf (say–not remembering exactly, as fatigue has replaced drunkenness in these new “clubs”), and when the scarf wears out, there is just enough material to make a button. Then the button falls off and is lost. “That’s okay,” the grandfather says, “for I think that there is just enough material left to make a story.”

That’s it, folks. You work with what you have and you stretch it in service of those you love. Kids form a kind of deadline. They make you realize that you have precious and limited time, that life is its own deadline.

There’s a great twenty-minute talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on genius at TED. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote the hit book Eat, Pray, Love, which Angie calls Eat, Pray, How Barbie Got Her Groove Back. This is a talk about doing your part–doing the work. She’s had enormous success, and now, she says, people look at her with an expression of . . . doom. What can she do to top this success? The talk is worth listening to. It builds to a point much related to my own point today, but rather more joyfully and with a large audience and a standing ovation at the end. But I guess the bottom line here is you’ve got to do it in the back room of a strange cafe with E=mc2 (don’t actually know how to do squared on my computer keyboard!) painted across a black brick wall of planets and DNA structure with only the cell phone conversation of the guy in the corner as accompaniment. Take the evidence of life, your own waking and sleeping dreams that keep telling you stories, the richness of what’s around you as encouragement. Take the growing word count (what as a child I  fantasized would be a stack of pages beside a typewriter), the hours clocked, the clicking of the keyboard as applause.

And find, force, create a deadline. A real one. Invite your friends over to a party to hear your latest story . . . and then write it. Do what it takes to make the work urgent, and then do the work. Cut your judgment about how great or terrible it is out of the loop until you’ve got a productive rhythm that serves you and can’t be broken. If you aren’t writing, it really doesn’t matter how good the writing that you’re not doing is, does it?

Declare your deadline here. Let’s have it now.

Yesterday my family played ball together. This sounds trivial, but it was the first time, really, that we’d tossed a ball around: Charlie to Mommy to Mama to Leo to Charlie . . . It took some doing to convince the boys to play. Leo, especially, wanted only to hold the ball, as if it were a teddy bear, and Charlie was willing to throw, but not to Leo, since that seemed too much like handing the precious commodity over to his brother wholesale. In fact, Leo went off to play with sand, and we ended up forming our rhombus around him. Angie and I taught the boys that the great good fun of playing ball is in letting it go, again and again. It seems obvious to adults, now, but why, when there is so much meant to be held close, does this toy create more fun when you keep pushing it away?

As we cheered the throws and attempted throws, it occurred to me that there is a parallel here–as there usually is–to writing. So many people want to write, and I think it is because reading a great book makes you want to toss it–and maybe your own addition–right back into the world. The story exists between the reader and the writer, just as the fun with a ball exists between the players, not in grasping the object itself. Movement, energy, force, intent, connection, misses. Zoom. Leap. Catch. Throw.

It’s a funny thing. People take drawing classes and painting classes without long portions of the time given over to discussions of how to interest galleries in your work or get into the Whitney Biennial. But I don’t think that writers are so much more commercially oriented than other artists. I think the sometimes crass focus on “getting published” has to do with the desire to throw the ball. After all, your family probably wants to leaf through the pictures you’ve drawn in your live nudes class. But do they demand that you read your latest novelistic efforts at the dinner table?

There are multiple layers to the application of this metaphor to writing. You throw the ball when you take an idea and toss it onto the page. You throw the ball when you edit this work and renew it, and again when you show it to someone else, and again when it bounces out and back to various publications, agents, editors. You throw the ball when you blog, too, or comment on a blog. It’s a handy little game of catch, not the World Series, but a friendly back and forth while you chat about what is going on in your life.

I’ve been listening to a book on tape that Angie stuck onto my MP3 when I was going to London. It’s called Book Yourself Solid, and it is amazing if you are a service professional building a business. Maybe someone who hates marketing . . . It’s made me excited about thinking about the language that describes what I do. I work with people who love books and want to write them. I assist in transforming people into writers, ideas into manuscripts, manuscripts into books. I’m interested in clients who have a way with words or an amazing story or a powerful work ethic. If you have any one of these, I can get the other two up and running. If you have more than one . . . watch out, baby.

Okay, this is in the rough stages. Probably too early to share. But I like the bounce that comes from throwing something out into the world. I like the joy on my boys’ faces when they lobbed the ball away from themselves, learning that holding on tight is not the only, or the best, way to play.

January 20, 2006 My day started listening to Aretha Franklin sing, My Country ‘Tis of Thee, and it will end singing the Internationale while my grandmother is interred.  By then it will be tomorrow in the place I am traveling to.

A premise is a journey. It’s the itinerary of a journey, more precisely. It says, if you get on this plane in San Francisco, you will get off in London. It does not say that all planes go from San Francisco to London nor even that all planes that leave San Francisco arrive in London. It just talks about this plane, this journey. But what it says is true.

A premise is not the flight itself, not the play list you listen to or the memories each song evokes. Not the two seats that you try to lie upon, legs folded against one armrest, head propped on pillows, blankets, jacket at the too-close other armrest. A premise is not the orange juice you drink, the articles you read in the New Yorker, the way you laugh at Eddie Izzard and wonder if the people around you notice. It is not the freelance golf writer on her way from Maui via Los Angeles and San Francisco and London to Scotland who does not like to fly. It is not the view of the ocean cliffs and the Richmond Bridge that you point out to her, feeling that you have been drafted to distract her as the plane takes off. It is not the baby boys you have left behind, the nap they are supposed to be taking and the park they will go to afterwards. It is not your questions about what they make of your absence. It is not your grandmother’s funeral ahead, the dawning realization that she died of old age and is only twenty years older than your mother, her daughter.

The premise takes all of this and more and kneads it as your reader’s mind will knead it, until it joins together and rises, and the journey becomes clear, the specific journey–San Francisco to London, child to adult, a person who feels outside a family to a person who feels inside a family, perhaps. Your premise looks at where you started and what kicked you over to where you landed, and it makes a claim:

Commitment leads to connection.
Ritual triumphs over daily life.
Responsibility conquers division.

Not always. Not all commitment leads to connection. Not all ritual triumphs over daily life. Not all responsibility conquers division. Not all planes that leave San Francisco arrive in London. But this journey went that way, and showed us something about these qualities: commitment, ritual, San Francisco.

Once you have made the journey–written the book–you read back over it and you dig out your premise. What does this journey teach you? Name the qualities that characterize the book’s movement.

This becomes the lens through which you revise. It is the unity that pulls your book together, and anything that does not support your premise belongs in another book.

Now, just to be clear, this does not mean that scenes, actions, characters and events that directly oppose your premise should be excised. On the contrary, your premise requires a good fight, a fair fight, to prove itself. Let it do battle with ideas and forces that suggest it is wrong. Just don’t wander off on a little Los Angeles to Los Vegas loop when you are going SFO to Heathrow. See?

When someone dies there is, I’ve found, a kind of internal reckoning. Their premise becomes clearer, once the whole arc stretches–rainbow-like–before you. Not that I can see anything like the whole of my grandmother’s arc, but I see that she lived a single life, after all. My father used to talk about how life zigzagged while you were living it, but looking back, it turned into a straight line. What is remarkable about a human life is that its conflicts and contradictions and layers all unite, in the end, into a single strand of days, years, decades–nearly nine, in my grandmother’s case.

Near the end of her life, my uncle asked my grandmother what the purpose of life was, and she mouthed one word: “Love.” Now, this is not the most original idea, but if you’d read the whole book, you’d know that there was a distinct character arc, that that moment and that insight represented a journey and an arrival.

Love conquers even politics.
Bitter memories and eccentric independence lead to the embrace of love.
The revolution of the heart conquers even a family whose spine looks like the post-1988 Berlin wall.

What’s the premise of a book you love? Of your own book?