“But I contain multitudes! How can it truly be about my life when so much is left out?”
What we’re doing is crafting a story with a thread running through it that captivates the reader, keeps them turning the page, and delivers an emotional climax. To do that properly we need to find that core.
The film about Johnny Cash was built on the thread following the death of his brother. Cash, as it was portrayed in this film, was striving to come to terms with that loss while filling the role of the older brother that he idolized. The theme of a brother’s death was also at the core of the film about Ray Charles. Man On The Moon about Andy Kaufmann left out huge parts of his life – that he was a father was completely cut from his story – in order to focus on the key thread about Kaufmann’s artistry.
If you were to discuss Johnny Cash you would not point to his brother’s death as the defining point of his life. But when developing a tight film script it serves as a powerful core for the personal journey of the Cash character.
The first months of working on a ghostwriting project are spent discovering what the story is, and outlining these points in the arc. What is the core theme and value? How does this build to a powerful conclusion? How do we structure your story to bring out the emotion in this for the reader?
With that in place we start to pool the parts of the story and journey that support this. Part of this is deciding what doesn’t make it. What parts of the journey distract from the story.
For one client, I structured his story in a non-linear approach to emphasis the way he’d overcome set backs at each part of his journey from Brooklyn to Silicon Valley. For another client, I structured her story as a journey, an adventure, into the wider unknown world as she discovered a larger industry from her small town.
Helping writers come define and refine this core is a key part of my coaching and developmental editing work. We work on identifying those essential elements of the foundation. What is the core theme? What in the story supports that? And what can we cut off to sharpen the story?
When that’s in place, the page is set for a powerful story.