How You Structure A Book Can Change Your Manuscript (And Life)

Structuring a book is overlooked, but you must consider how you do that very carefully, both from an artistic and marketing standpoint

One of the most overlooked — and important — aspects of writing a book is structure.

When we hear the word “structure,” we often think “rigidity.”

In books, when we (as authors or readers) hear the word “structure,” we tend to think “linear.”

These terms couldn’t be further from reality when it comes to structuring a book.

There a million ways to approach structuring a book — be it fiction or memoir — and you need to consider how you do that very carefully, both from an artistic and marketing standpoint.

When I wrote my first book, America’s Boy: A Memoir, I believed there was only one way to go: In a straightforward, birth through life, very biography way. I was a starting writer. It seemed the simplest route, and it did make sense, as I was writing about the major moments of my life from childhood and how they made me who I am.

When I got to the end, though, it seemed a bit … dull.

So — rather than leave things at Chapter 1, 2, etc. — I began to add short, clever chapter titles. The memoir was heartbreaking AND humorous, so I thought it gave readers an early glimpse at what to expect. And it worked.

I loved it, my (future) agent loved it, my editor loved it, marketing loved it.

And that changed the way I began to view structure.

My next three books would be memoir (before I started writing fiction … MUCH more about memoir and fiction writing in the future!), but each were vastly different from one another.

Here’s how I approached structure in each book and why I did it that way:

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Memoir

CONFESSIONS OF A PREP SCHOOL MOMMY HANDLER-My second memoir was about my tenure as the PR director at an elite prep school (where I was known as the “mommy handler”), and I was struggling with a way to consolidate my years of struggle into a sensible structure. Then it hit me: Structure it like a school year, Fall Semester and Spring Semester, which every reader understands, and which provided a perfect timeline in which to tell my story.

AT LEAST IN THE CITY SOMEONE WOULD HEAR ME SCREAM-This was a memoir about quitting my job to write full time and moving to the woods of rural Michigan (in February!) to become a modern-day Henry David Thoreau (and largely failing). This is an absurdly funny memoir, and I used the foundational tenets of WALDEN for each chapter (very serious, btw!) and then torpedoed them with honesty and humor.

IT'S ALL RELATIVE-My fourth memoir is all about family holidays … the beauty, traditions … and dysfunction. This one was easy: It progressed from New Year’s Day through Christmas (and the death of my mother), holiday by holiday, and showed a family that ages, fights, comes together, and always, always, finds a way to love.

MAGIC SEASON-This memoir — last year’s Michigan Notable Book of the Year — is about the tumultuous relationship I had with my Ozarks father. The only thing that bonded us was our love and baseball and the St. Louis Cardinals. It was while watching a baseball game with my dad that the structure came to me: Inning by inning. After all, baseball is like the game itself: There is no clock on it. You play until the end, until someone wins. This book takes place over the last ballgame I ever watched with my father, the tension ratcheting up as the game nears its finish. I’ve never been prouder of a book (or structure) in my life.

Fiction

Fiction is a very different animal than memoir. As a writer, I approach writing my novels in a more linear way than I do memoir (essays that I begin to “puzzle piece” together). But I brought what I learned about structure from nonfiction to fiction, and it changed my writing in huge ways.

THE SUMMER COTTAGE-This novel about a woman going through an ugly divorce and being forced to sell her family summer cottage — the place where she was always the happiest, where she believed all her dreams would come true — came together from my initial stages of writing. The novel was inspired by my childhood summers at my grandparents’ log cabin in the Ozarks. It was seminal to me growing up, and I mourned its loss when my family sold it. By the front door of that cabin, my grandma had a homemade sign of “Summer Cottage Rules” that read: NAP OFTEN! ICE CREAM IS REQUIRED! GO JUMP IN THE LAKE! EVERYONE MUST BE PRESENT FOR SUNSET! … and so on. It made the perfect structure for this novel, and it also created the ideal marketing campaign for the book.