What is your story really about?

I did not read for a few years as a child. I am not sure why, exactly. And then I picked up The Animals of Farthing Wood, and something changed in me that I did not have words for at the time. I only knew that I felt different by the end of it, and that I wanted more of whatever that was.

From that point on I was looking for it in everything. Books, films, magazines. I read The Ghost of Thomas Kempe during my parents' divorce and returned to it again and again as an adult, still finding something in it I needed. I read Lord of the Rings at university with a ferocity that made my essays perpetually last-minute. And since becoming a mother, it has been women's stories I have turned to most - for comfort, for wisdom, for the quiet reassurance that others have navigated what I was navigating and come through it.

Stories have always done this. They let us experience what we could not otherwise reach. They hold us when things are difficult. They change us in ways we sometimes only understand much later.

I trained as a book coach because I believed that the book you are writing has exactly this potential - not just for the reader who will one day hold it, but for you, the writer, in the making of it. But I have noticed that the writers who struggle most are often the ones who have not yet been able to answer this single question about their manuscript.

Not a question about plot or structure or pace. Something quieter than that.

What is this story really about?

Not what happens in it. What it is about. The thing underneath the events that made you want to write it in the first place, that has kept you returning to it even when it has been difficult, that gives it its particular emotional gravity.

If you have never sat with that question before, I would gently invite you to try it now. Complete this sentence, without thinking too hard: This story is really about...

Whatever comes is worth paying attention to.

If you are working on a manuscript and would like help finding its emotional heart, a Story Clarity Session might be exactly what you need. You can find out more and book here.