Is Your Spine Strong Enough To Support Your Story?

The narrative core has to power, carry, AND deliver the goods

Photo by Andrei R. Popescu on Unsplash

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Your narrative spine is the conduit that leads readers from the abiding question, raised at the start of your story, to the conclusion, which ideally will answer that question. Having a strong, proportionally balanced spine is critical.

Hello Loreates,

Today’s post is about an issue that cost me years of work on my memoir. I’m going to try to unpack my sad tale in a way that can save you from the same mistake. It’s a slippery topic but so important.

I also want to make sure you all know about my upcoming Live event next Thursday, Sept. 18, at noon PT, with book publicist extraordinaire

Megan Beatie

. It’s part of my series Well Published!

Megan launches both fiction and nonfiction and got me on the Today Show and NPR ! We will tell that tale and offer tips. As always, the full video and takeaways will post the following Saturday. You can read up on Megan at meganbeatie.com and register for next Thursday’s event here:

Finally, I’m looking forward to seeing many of you paid subscribers at our Loreate Zoom Gathering, on Saturday, Sept. 20, at 10am PT. Since I’ll still have book publicity on my mind, please bring any questions or comments you might have about book promotion, and we’ll talk them through! If you haven’t already, please RSVP below so I can send you the Zoom link next week:

These pieces of my father were pieces of me. On some level, I was writing about myself. I just had to figure out how.

How Strong is Your Narrative Spine?

I believed my father was giving me the gift of a lifetime when, just days before he died, he asked me to find a missing box worth $2 million. No one in my family had ever understood what made my dad tick. I’d spent decades prying details from him about his childhood in China, and I’d used those tidbits to concoct two novels, but the man himself remained taciturn and elusive. His secretiveness was a source of frustration for everyone in the family, including my mother, his wife of more than 60 years. So, this deathbed request for a long-lost box seemed like it might be an answered prayer. Maybe, finally, he was telling me where to find the key to his soul.

My hunt and eventual discovery of this box also promised to give me a slam-dunk story line for the memoir I’d long wanted to write about my dad. Especially when I discovered the box contained not cash but photographs of a little girl, who would have been my foster sister had my parents not returned her so they could move to Connecticut and build their house, now worth — you guessed it — $2 million:

The Chinese-Swedish Sister I Replaced

Surely the human pathos and mystery, the emotional sleuthing I would invest in connecting this lost child to all the other mysterious clues that emerged in the wake of my father’s death—pictures and letters of relatives Dad never mentioned, shameful secrets about his complicity in the abandonment of his father to the communists in China, persecution by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI during the McCarthy Era— surely my narrative through-line to all of this was my search for the lost box.

Spinal quest