Your Book’s Shape
Welcome to day two of the No Rules Book Sprint!
NOTE: This lesson will be available until the end of the day on Sunday, June 7th.
Transcript of Day 2
Yesterday I told you that today we’re going to take your one sentence book promise and start shaping your book. We’re not going to do a dive into the full on outline in this lesson, although you’re welcome to get started on that if you want, and there’s more information about that in the book organizer if that’s what you want to do.
And speaking of in the book organizer, today we’re going to be talking about signpost three, which is mind mapping your book, and what we’re going to do is to focus on your book’s shape, the thing that you need to know before you can start creating an effective outline.
Shape vs. Structure
So, what am I talking about? I like to think of nonfiction books as having both a shape and a structure. So, your structure is your outline, it’s the nitty gritty details, it’s the architectural blueprint. The shape is more like the overall vibe and genre of the reader journey of your book, the experience your reader is going to have.
So, my cousin’s an architect, and if you tell him to design a residence, he’s going to have an awful lot more questions for you before he gets started, because is it a summer lake house where the whole vibe is going to be like hammocks on the front porch, outdoor grilling, or is it an accessory dwelling unit in your backyard, where the whole vibe needs to be extremely functional and efficient. So each of those is going to have a different order of where you might put the master bedroom versus the kitchen versus entertaining area, right.
It’s the same with the book. First, you have to know the shape, then you can decide on the structure. Shape is the journey you’re taking your reader on. Structure is how you arrange the chapters to deliver that journey. You cannot pick the second one until you’ve decided on the first.
The shape is defined by your book’s promise, which we worked on yesterday.
What “Shape” Actually Means
So, let’s talk a little bit more about what I mean by shape. It’s partly genre. Are you writing a memoir? Are you writing a how-to book, is this a thought leadership book? Is it history? And if you’re not sure, head to that book organizer, because I linked to a great article that explores 24 different types of nonfiction genres with examples, so that can really help you nail that down.
Every type of nonfiction genre has its own common expected structure, so understanding your genre will inform your book’s outline, but for today we’re going to focus on the reader’s journey, that transformation that your reader goes through from the beginning to the end as a result of reading your book.
In other words, going back to your book’s promise, what do you want your book to do for them, and what are the steps or stages you will take them through to get them there?
Client Examples
Again, we’re going to talk through some examples, so you can see what I mean.
Client 1: The Framework Book (Just One Word)
The first example is pretty straightforward, so most coaches, consultants, and speakers tend to be working in a framework type shape of a book.
For example, my client, Erin, we just released her book on May 19. The book is all about the process that she calls the dig, which is a method she uses to help people explore their own stories and distill them down to a single word. She’s taken over 1000 people through this process one on one, and her why for writing the book was about scale. She’d seen what the dig could do in individual sessions, and she wanted to multiply that impact both for her business and for the world.
So her book had to teach a process that already existed with steps that already went in a specific order — seems pretty straightforward, right? That would make the structured decision pretty easy. Step one is chapter one, step two is chapter two, right?
Not quite, because there’s stuff her reader needs to know before the framework works for them. So she had to decide what that was and how to present that, and if I remember correctly, I think the first step of the dig process actually starts in chapter four. So chapters one, two, and three are setting up her philosophy, laying the groundwork, walking you through the different exercises and ideas to help you help prepare you to do that deeper work. And then she presents the framework.
But she didn’t stop there, because next we asked, what can people do now that they’ve gone through the dig, how can they use what they’ve learned and bring it back into their life? How can they integrate this work? Right, so the final chapters of the book are everything that you can do with your dig word, once you’ve found it: writing your manifesto, speaking your truth, walking away from situations that aren’t aligned.
That takes the reader through a journey of setup, framework, integration.
Client 2: Finding the Right Shape (The Doggy Daycare Owner)
Now, my second example is what happens when you try to force a great idea into the wrong shape.
So, if you remember from yesterday, I talked about my client, who runs the doggy daycare, and she’s writing a book on how to speak dog. So, she came to me with an outline. A well-meaning friend had told her to follow a W-shaped narrative arc, inciting incident, rising action, midpoint, climax, denouement. It’s a really great fiction structure, and it works well with memoirs, but the friend’s idea was that my client would tell her personal story of how she learned to speak dog and weave in business lessons along the way, and that is a great reader journey. It’s kind of more of a prescriptive memoir, where your story is the spine, and then the lessons are delivered organically along the way.
But it wasn’t the book that my client really wanted to write. She’s got a great story, but what she wanted to talk about was the dogs and what she’s learned over her 20 plus years of working with them. She wasn’t writing a prescriptive memoir, she was writing a how-to book.
As she just described it to me, it reminded me of the book What Everybody Is Saying, by Joe Navarro, which is a book about reading body language, human body language, by a former FBI agent. And while Navarro does share some of his story in the book, it’s organized around the human body, faces, hands, torsos, feet, with his career stories interspersed as illustrations, which is how we decided to organize my client’s book.
And then it totally clicked. She went from trying to figure out how to fit her story and all of the stories about the dogs into this outline that she’d been given to suddenly the book is writing itself. Basically, now that she has the right shape and structure, it’s just flowing. It’s amazing to watch.
Client 3: When Fiction Structure Works (The Real Estate Appraiser)
The third example does take a fiction structure, so yesterday I also talked about the real estate appraiser, who’s writing about home value as joy and creativity rather than market expectation, and he wanted to structure his book around the hero’s journey.
Now, when I said earlier that fiction structures aren’t usually for nonfiction, this is the exception, because if you’ve read Donald Miller’s Story Brand, you’re probably pretty familiar with this idea of your customer being the hero of their own journey, and you being the guide that walks alongside them and helps them uncover the treasure they can then take back with them. It’s a shape that is very conducive to transformation.
In fact, when I was talking about Erin’s framework book, you can see that the hero’s journey is there. There’s the setup, there’s equipping the reader for the journey of going through the dig process, then there’s the journey through the framework, then there’s preparing them to integrate that journey and re-enter the world.
But with this real estate creativity book, we really leaned into the specific beats of the hero’s journey — there was the call to adventure, the threshold, the temptations, the try-fail cycles — and it worked out really, really well.
The Key Question for Today
I’ve given you three examples of three different shapes, all of them take readers on a journey. So, here’s the question I want you to answer today: not which structure should I impose on my book, but rather what journey am I taking my reader on?
- Where is your reader starting emotionally, knowledge wise, etc.?
- How will you prepare them for the journey? What do they need to know, feel, or unlearn before the real work starts?
- Where do you want them to end? What transformation will they go through?
- What steps do they need to go through on the way to get there? How will you guide them through it? What are the steps, the sections, the threshold crossings?
- How will you equip them to apply what they’ve learned after the journey’s over?
- And how will you release them back into the world changed?
If you’re feeling stuck on this, think about a book that you admire that’s similar to the book that you want to write. Crack it open, study it. How does it take you through that journey, and what structure does it use to facilitate that?
Your Homework
What I want you to do today is this: define your reader’s journey from start to finish. Write it out as a sentence or two. For example, before reading the book, my reader is X. By the end of the book, I want them to feel Y. In order to lead them through this transition, I need to set them up with A, walk them through the steps of B, and help them integrate this work with C, something like that.
I don’t want you to take that as a perfect template that you have to fit, but just describe the journey that the reader is going on.
Your shape may feel a little different. Then drop your journey write-up in the Discord when it’s done. Those sentences that just describe your reader’s journey, and I will be in there giving you feedback.
All right, talk soon.