Letting the Real Story Emerge

A few months back, I agreed to help a friend—we’ll call her Sarah—with her book. She’d paid a ghostwriter a ton of money, got a draft, and ended up hating it so much she just let it sit. I figured it couldn’t be that terrible. Maybe just a messy structure or a weak metaphor here and there. No big deal, right?

Wrong. I moved out to San Diego to get into it, and once I looked closely, I realized there was no saving this thing. The voice didn’t sound like her at all, and the attempts at narrative cohesion felt forced, almost gimmicky.

I kept trying—highlighting sections, rearranging paragraphs—for days, then weeks, maybe even months, hoping something would click. It never did.

At some point, I had to admit: we had to start over. The whole draft had to go.

That decision wasn’t fun. It meant going back to Sarah, re-interviewing her, and drawing raw material straight from her life: a strict, cultish upbringing, a marriage tangled with addiction and heartbreak, big-business drama, losing people she loved—layer upon layer of complexity.

Writing directly from all that would’ve been a nightmare. So instead, I put together a system—a giant table where I logged every snippet of usable material (moments from interviews, scenes from her past, insights that came up along the way), tagging each one with themes, emotional tones, narrative roles, and potential spots it might fit.

At first it was simple, but as I worked through the interviews I added more detail—timeline notes, recurring motifs, possible transitions—until the table became a dynamic map. I wasn’t brute-forcing a final product anymore; I was creating conditions that would let the “right” book emerge over time.

To test this, I took one tiny moment from the table and turned it into draft prose. I showed Sarah, and she loved it. That small success told me I was on the right track. Instead of wrestling the story into shape, I watched it take form through careful organization and step-by-step understanding.

I didn’t start with a predetermined shape. Instead, I let the system evolve as I uncovered more material, refining columns and tags as I went. I haven’t begun weaving these elements into chapters yet, but I’m already spotting connections I would’ve missed if I’d jumped in blindly. Rather than forcing the material into a neat arc, I’m letting the structure reveal how it might align.

This table isn’t just some static sheet of data—it’s an evolving framework that shows me which entries are ready to become draft prose, and which ones need more context.

By the time I shape these fragments into something cohesive, I won’t be stumbling in the dark. I’ll have a clear, data-backed sense of where each element belongs, a process that respects complexity and lets meaning emerge naturally.

When I finally sit down to assemble this book, I’ll follow that evolving logic, letting the story define itself one piece at a time—at least, that’s the plan.