Is Your Book Trying to Be (Do) Too Many Things at Once? Why You Need to Pick an Identity—and Stick with It

“Tell me what your book is about.”

Every writer’s least-favorite networking or agent/publisher pitch-session question. And without a doubt the question that everyone is going to ask you when they find out you’re writing or have written a book.

By the time you’ve published, you should definitely have an answer. But early on, when I speak to a new writer about their work, I expect to see most people squirm a bit.

This isn’t the easiest question to answer. Some writers run through the blow-by-blow of their plot, but that’s not what I’m looking for. The plot is what happens. The story is what that means.

The story usually makes itself known in short order. If it doesn’t, I know we have work to do.

Almost always, their book is suffering from an identity crisis. The work is trying to be too many things at once.

How to tell if your book’s having an identity crisis

A book is like a house: the home for one particular story (for the purposes of this post, I am not going to be talking about anthologies or collections, which are a different animal). Everything that lives under that roof should be related.

By related, I mean two things:

1. Like a family: the different pieces make sense in relationship to each other.
2. Sharing a basic structure: the walls and the beams, the floors and the ceilings, all hold each other in place.

There must be one through-thread. Something that ties everything together, from page one through to the end of the book.

The through-thread is the bigger idea that all the other ideas relate to, the big lesson that your characters (or you, if it’s a memoir) learn along the way.

Sure, different chapters can address different sub-topics or characters. They can show different facets of the same idea diamond. But what’s the one thing that goes all the way through?

If you can’t find the one thing, or there’s more than one thing, your book has a problem.

The three types of identity crisis—and what to do with them

Crisis #1:

Let’s deal with the worst-case scenario first. None of these ideas are truly related—maybe they bumped into each other at a convention at some point, but they don’t live side-by-side with each other the rest of the year. This problem is most common for nonfiction or memoir.

Solution: Time to clear the desk and start from scratch. Which one of these ideas most intrigues you? Which one of these ideas generates the most follow-up questions and related concepts?

Crisis #2:

Another possibility is that you have a lot of threads that are somewhat related, but none of them is strong enough to be your through-thread. This difficulty plagues nonfiction, memoir, and fiction.

Solution for Nonfiction and Memoir: You need to reverse-engineer your big idea. What is the larger concept, the umbrella that covers all of these smaller threads? What do they have in common?
Solution for Fiction: Sounds like your characters need work, or perhaps you’ve got the wrong main character (MC). Whose story is this? What is the MC trying to achieve? What’s getting in their way? How does the MC react when they fail…or when they succeed?

Crisis #3:

Yet another possibility—one I see the most frequently—is that you have several big ideas fighting for the same space. If you gather together all of your pieces, you actually have the materials to start more than one house/book. This can happen if you have elements of a memoir that also could be used for self-help, for example. Or a novel that is competing to get into more than one genre (one genre always takes precedence).

Solution: You’ll need to pick one idea. If you try to cram them all in there, these ideas are going to ruin each other’s structural integrity. And your audience is going to be confused—is this the book for me? Consider using one of the other ideas for another book, if you really want to.

The key that opens all doors

The key to unlock whether your book is having an identity crisis, and to figure out how to solve it, is the question, “Why?”

Have you ever met a toddler? This is one of their favorite questions. Can’t lick the kitchen table? Why? Have to go to bed now—but why? Why is our next door neighbor so grouchy?

Asking “Why” isn’t just for toddlers. “Why” gives us everything we need, if we’re honest.

How come is this part of the story? Why does this person behave this way? Why do I think these ideas belong together?

In the meaning, you will have your answer to the question “What is your book about?”
…and your book’s identity.

Bottom Line

Ever see a house that is a hodgepodge of various architectural styles? A previous owner or owners added to the original structure without considering the wholeness of the design. The colors or the materials are different; the aesthetic definitely doesn’t match up with the other parts of the building; stuff is jutting out at weird angles, and generally the different eras don’t want anything to do with each other.

There is no way to keep all of the different aesthetics, and still have something with any hope of competing on the market. One of them, at least, needs to go.

But you do need at least one. Remember that your book is not your plot, or the events that you describe, but what it all means. Your plot is how you deliver on that promise.

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Want help sorting out your book’s identity crisis? A book structure intensive may be for you.

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