I signed up for an outdoor Yoga camp last month and I’ll admit I was skeptical.

You see, I happen to hate yoga. I’m about as flexible as a 100-year-old man, and I don’t do quiet spaces at all. I am notorious for trying a yoga class once every 2-3 years, getting somehow both bored and anxious around the 3-minute mark, and then watching the clock tick for the rest of the hour (or – horror – 90 minutes 😱)

But I needed a mid-Summer reset. And I got an email in June from an old email list I had somehow joined who-knows-when (hint: join my email list at the bottom of this page ⬇️⬇️⬇️).

This email landed in my inbox at just the right moment and I thought, why not! What have I got to lose!

It turns out I had so much to gain.

Over four remarkably lovely weeks, I discovered that all I needed to find my zen was… the sounds of the trash trucks in the alley, the construction on the corner, the dogs barking down the street… all the sounds of everyday life in the city. Keep your wind chimes and chill music; give me toddlers shouting in their strollers and loud music thumping through passing car windows.

I also discovered that yoga doesn’t have to be rules and chants and perfect Madonna-esque poses (the Like a Virgin one, not the Virgin one 😉). My two fabulous yoga teachers, Terry and Beth, welcomed un-flexible, skeptical me into their lovely, loud, perfect yoga yard and introduced me to a practice that is all about taking space in a way that fits you (well, me… you know what I mean).

They encouraged us “campers” to find our balance by listening to how our body does it already; they coached us to move at the pace that our breath set without worrying about it; they motivated us to find what’s already there and work in that space.

In short, despite the fact that I hate yoga… I’ve learned that maybe I don’t actually hate yoga anymore because I found a pair of teachers who pushed me to (re)discover what I was already capable of doing. And in that space, I found the strength and the balance and… dare I say… the calm to do more.

My one confession is that as I was laying there in my savasana each day, my mind would start to wander to you fabulous writers. (I’ll call it a win that my mind didn’t wander until then 👍)

And I thought, how is what I’m doing and learning this Summer like writing a book?

How are the lessons I’m learning from Beth and Terry something I can draw from as a coach?

And I started trying to connect the dots…

So here’s my result: some yoga poses that I’m not particularly good at, but that’s okay. I’ve paired them with some tips on writing challenges that you might not feel very good at… and that’s okay, too! That’s the whole point. You just do it at your pace, and with your breath, and voice, and balance… and that’s the right way! You’ve got this!

Downward Dog

(See, I’m starting with an easy one!)

Downward Dog is like the (re)set and (re)anchor yoga pose. With your hands and feet firmly on the ground, you’ve got the strength of it all underneath you and the space to stretch out all at the same time. Bend those knees, take a few breaths, stretch it out. This is something that your body just knows how to do.

In writing, think of your downward dog moment as that moment where you pause just before you begin writing. You trust that your hands will instinctively recognize the click of the keys under your fingers or the drag of the pen on the page. It’s the excited anticipation, letting go of the fear of the words not coming. They will. They will emerge on the page. Take a deep breath, stretch it out, and begin. 

Warrior 2

In your sun salutations, you might move and breath through a warrior sequence. Pause in Warrior 2 as you open your chest and heart up. Keep your weight balanced in both feet, wide in front and behind you. Stretch your fingers forward and back and turn your hips back just a bit. Stay strong in that core. This pose is noble, powerful, active, and engaged.

In writing, you have to be all these things as well. You are the warrior bravely facing down the words on the page. And you are the author conscious at all times of the beginning and ending of the process. You are firmly planted in the middle at all times, your core (plot) is strong and your possibilities expansive. Here is the space to be bold with your writing and face down any imposter syndrome thoughts sneaking in. You are noble, and powerful, and active, and engaged. You are a writer.

Chair Pose

As you ease into Chair Pose, keep the balance through your body as your arms lift forward and your hips drop back. You’re going for length and balance here, as you adjust through your feet for support. Your neck wants to tense up, but you take a deep breath and stay in control. You sink a little lower.

I think this is the ultimate methaphorical pose for writers. First of all, most of us write in chairs 😉 But this pose is so much more challenging than it looks at first. This is the pose that starts out with all those people who tell you that writing a book should be easy. You just write. (If only!) So then you have to ignore them and embrace the challenge of writing. You ease carefully and purposefully into the space of your book. You have to dig deeper than people expect, and be stronger, but stay firmly committed to your work. Once you’ve got it, thought, you make it look easy and relaxed as you reach out and sit with your story.

Tree Pose

Like Chair Pose, Tree Pose requires you you channel the earth underneath you so that your body can balance confidently on top of it. In Tree Pose, you seek your center on one leg as the other pushes you off balance. Your hands lift, changing your center of gravity, extending you beyond yourself. You need to embrace both the lightness of your body as well as its strength. Working on this pose helps bring stability to both mind and body. 

What Tree Pose makes me think about for writers is the centrality of YOU to your book. Yes, writing is a wonderful and creative act, but the reason your story matters is because you are at the center of it. You are the only one who can tell this story, and tell it this way. This is true for all writers – fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and everything in between. Ultimately, writing comes down to one center every time – the author. By choosing to write, by giving yourself the permission and attention to write, you are channeling that tree. The story grows with you.

More Yoga?

I can’t believe that I am looking foward to more yoga in my life. I’m going to commit this Fall to working more of it into my routine, so that I can try to hold that calm space for myself once September begins.

How about you? 

Will you channel your balance and strength onto the page? Will you find the quiet times (or loud ones) that work for your writing zen? Will you let your story flow and embrace your possiblity?

I hope you do.

And when you need someone to coach you along, to help you hold the focus, and remmeber to breathe, let me know.

When I was in grad school, one of my seminars spent an entire class on what I like to call the question of “The Box.”

We aspiring Historians (unknowingly in-training to become jaded Academics) were presented with the following challenge:

If you found a box of photographs and postcards from 100 years ago in your closet, what would you do? Would you use them to write a book, or would you put the box back?

Does the story matter?

The question revolved around the issue of truth. Without the ability to authenticate some sort of “true” story about the items in the box, are they worth our time? Do they matter to History? Should someone bother piecing together their story?

You may not believe this, but intense debate ensued – for nearly 2 hours if I remember correctly! Arguments twisted and turned around the room over the responsibility of telling a story from what was in the box.

One group argued that the postcards and pictures – because we didn’t know who collected them, or how, or why – should just go back in the closet. They should maybe be dusted off now and again for family memories or the like, but they shouldn’t be shared publicly. They shouldn’t be valued for the ideas and emotions and meaning they embody. They shouldn’t lay the groundwork for any story from the Past.

Another set of students argued that we should track down the story of the objects, and then we could begin to consider writing our book about them. If we had letters, maybe, or other forms of “official” documentation, then telling a (hi)story based on the boxed artifacts would be okay.

YES, the story matters!

I was in a third (very small group).

Like you (I hope), I was ready to start writing! How exciting to find a box full of some mysteries of the past that could give a little hint into how someone lived their life, or what they liked and collected. This was “real” enough for me – evidence that some average person (like me) once collected things (like me) and then forgot about them in a closet (also like me – ha!)

I couldn’t understand how someone could find something so fabulous and conclude it did not offer amazing insights, flashes of life, hints of personality, and all the other important sparks of a great story.

Where to begin?

So, my Nonfiction Friends, Memoir and Narrative alike, where would you begin with this treasure box? Where would you start and what stories would you tell?

As with any story, you need to know your WHY. And there are two big “whys” here: Your WHY and the box’s WHY.

WHY? is a key question for any story you write, but it is especially important if you are working with artifacts from the past, or source materials like journal entries and articles.

• WHY is this a story that you must write? Be as specific as you can be about why the story here calls to you and why you can do to bring it to life. Think about what motivates you to write, and to write about this collection in particular.
• WHY do the contents of the box go together? What is the central factor that creates a story from the chaos or the haphazard collection? As a nonfiction writer (narrative & memoir alike) you have the tremendous honor and power to make order out of chaos. With a stack of artifacts, this goes from a theoretical to a very material and exciting opportunity. Embrace it!

Let’s begin.

If you have pieces of the Past that are calling to you, inspiring a story, let me know.

I’m here to listen and help you talk through the story these artifacts are telling you.

And if you need a plan, I’ve got those, too.

Plot seems like an easy thing to identify. We follow plots in the novels we read, the movies we watch, the TV series we binge. But when it comes to writing memoir and narrative nonfiction, plot can be a little harder to find.

This handy quiz will help you find your plot in your memoir memories and nonfiction notes. Check your work against this list and remember that your nonfiction story will have a plot, an adventure, a change for your protagonist (even if it’s you) over the course of your story. It’s there, somewhere, waiting for you to find it.

That’s what plot is, after all. Change over time. And whether you are writing your own story or sharing your expertise, your book needs to show your reader that something changes. That’s what makes it worth turning the page.

Plot or Not: A Timeline

Many writers start with a timeline.

You’ve worked long and hard to organize your stories and information. You’ve mapped out the dates and put everything in the correct order. You pored over old journals and documents to make sure that your timing is correct. Everything hinges on the reader knowing how things happened and when and why and you’ve got it ready.

This feels a plot… Look, you say! Change over time, literally, I wrote a timeline! I used colored markers and everything!

So, is this a plot?

Sadly, NOT a plot!

A timeline is a lovely way to organize your thoughts and ideas, and is often a very necessary step in developing your story. However, a timeline is simply a list of things that happened. That change occurred to move from Point A to Point B is not inherently obvious.

A timeline is also a great way to make order out of chaos, but a plot can be messy (and often is). Change is rarely easy, rarely predictable, and rarely obvious. As a writer, it is up to you to work through the cause and effect from one point on that timeline to the next.

Plot or Not: A Family Tree

Admit it, you love Ancestry.com

Or you’ve taken one of those DNA tests and opened a conversation with “I’m 7% French – would you believe it!” and it started a fabulous conversation.

(True story: I once had dinner with the guy who dressed in Lederhosen in the Ancestry commercial. It was his true story – he really was shocked to find out about those ancestors! And he’s a really great guy, too!)

That family tree that you’ve worked so hard to build, and those stories you’ve collected from great-great grandparents who braved the unthinkable has inspired you to tell their stories. You are the one to preserve their legacy. And I am so impressed by you already!

But, is gathering all those stories and people on that tree a plot?

No, NOT a plot!

A family tree is just a list of people. Their stories need more than branches to connect them. As an author, it is your joy and privilege and incredible opportunity to pull out the story that weaves throughout that tree. Your reader wants to know more than that these people lived. Your reader wants to know how their lives came together to change something in an enduring way.

Think of your family tree instead as your cast of characters. They details and experiences are essential to your story so it’s fantastic that you have them organized already. Now it’s time to set the protagonist in the middle and build that plot through the branches. What are the changes that happen to your protagonist through encountering these other incredible people at important moments in their lives?

There’s where your plot begins.

Plot or Not: Data Set

You’ve gathered all the info and carefully organized it in that massive excel spreadsheet or folder of word docs.

For a researcher like you, this feels like the beginning. You have the pieces of the puzzle. You know what message they combine to tell.

But is it a plot?

No, NOT a plot!

A spreadsheet, like our lists and trees, is just a list of things. They sing to you. You see all the beauty of their interrelationships and outcomes. But your task, your challenge, your great honor and responsibility as a writer is to translate that wonderful data into a story that best expresses the way the data will change the reader’s life.

It may be that your protagonist heroically takes your reader through the journey to make sense of all that you have researched. Or it may be that for this nonfiction story, you need to remember that the person who changes the most from page one to page 250 is the reader themselves.

Your organization is so necessary to your story.

Now it’s time to begin to put it into action.

Plot or Not: That Graph from High School

Who remembers this one?

We had tests on it in my high school. It was one of those things that was both incredibly fun (I mean, who didn’t feel cool because you now knew the word “denouement?”) and incredibly annoying (did we really need to fill in exactly what scene was the climax of The Crucible?).

So when you think plot today, perhaps this basic school memory floats in. But maybe you think this was just some basic quiz information, not really applicable in “the real world.”

Is this old-school graph really a plot?

YES, it is a plot!

It may feel basic, but you can use something like this to guide you through any book. It doesn’t matter if it’s The Great Gatsby, Wild, or The Devil in the White City. If you’re not sure, go back to your favorite book, that one that you someday want to write (and if you’re wondering, every single memoir writer I’ve ever worked with has referenced Wild, and every nonfiction writer brings up Devil… because they’re that good!). See where the points on this chart fall. Trust me, they’re in there.

So when you are starting to translate your idea, or your timeline, or your list of people and things into a plot, ask yourself where will these points be for your protagonist?

That uphill stretch? Those are changes. That fancy denouement? You get to write one of your own.

edPlot or Not: This Wild Vonnegut Graph

Kurt Vonnegut famously explain how stories take shape. He drew this. Shall we call this a plot? 

His weird squiggles look very different from that high school chart we just talked about.

So is this zig-zagging roller-coaster really a plot?

YES, it is a plot!

Take a moment and listen to Vonnegut explain it himself.

If our high school chart was “Plot 101,” then Vonnegut’s theory of charting a plot is your upper level advanced grad course. It takes into account the fact that plots have nuance, change is never, in fact, a steady line uphill, and every plot turns and reveals change in different ways all the way to the final page.

If you’re looking for some great writing advice, he has a whole book, that I heartily recommend.

In the short term, it’s time to add momentum and authenticity to that basic school chart. How would you graph your story this way? Try it out.

Plot or Not: Pixar Rule Number 4

Our final consideration comes from a now-famous list of storytelling genius set forth at Pixar (yes, that Pixar). These rules for storytelling have supposedly been used to map out every single Pixar project.

Rule No. 4 is a graph of a story. It starts with “Once upon a time…” of course.

But before you tell me, “Caroline, I’m writing nonfiction. There’s no once upon a time…” or “Caroline, my memoir is real, not a fairy tale…” let me ask you to look closer at the steps in Rule 4.

If you fill in this Pixar madlib, do you have a plot?

YES, it is a plot!

This is my favorite way to find a plot in a hurry, in fact. And it works every time!

It doesn’t matter how data-heavy your story is, if you lean into this idea that everything happens because of the previous thing, you have a plot!

Because of is a promise to yourself as a writer that you are only including the next story or the next detail because something has changed from your previous chapter or moment.

Because of is a promise to your reader that they will learn something new based on the information you’ve already given them. It makes them trust you because you’ve promised no surprises. The story will make sense and at the end, they will learn something totally new.

Now it’s your turn.

I challenge you to try it out.

Fill in that Pixar madlib, even if your instinct is to say “No, this isn’t for me!”

And, if you need help making your plot bigger and better and filling it out into a whole amazing book, I have even more ideas in my back pocket I’m happy to share.

So, tell me, what is your plot?