Before the First Word

What I Look for in a Story Before I Commit to Writing It

April 1, 2026

Hello friends,

There’s a moment that every writer knows.  It comes before the research, before the outline, before the first sentence. Something grabs your attention and won’t let go. A name in a newspaper. A conversation that’s overheard. A character who shows up uninvited and refuses to leave.

This is where everything I’ve written begins.  But not every such moment becomes a book.  What I’ve learned to do – in both nonfiction and fiction – is ask myself five questions before I go any further. They’re not a checklist exactly.  More like a conversation I have with myself, in no particular order, sometimes over months.

The first question is the hardest to explain: Does it have sufficient pull?

I don’t mean interest.  Lots of things interest me. It’s more than that.  It’s an imperceptive draw towards the material, as if the story has value, as if it really matters.  With fiction, it often arrives through a character with a problem.  Take Coop, for example, my dachshund protagonist of Coop the Great and Coop for Keeps.  I met a real dog like him on a hike up a steep and rocky mountain trail.  As I climbed, I worried about that dog. Will he make it to the top with those short legs of his?  That was the seed that started the story. 

With non-fiction, the pull is different. I’ll have a sense that the story is unfinished, that there’s more to unravel, and it’s mine to tell. Take Andrew Brash, for example. He was climbing Mount Everest with his team when he encountered Lincoln Hall, another climber.  Lincoln was in trouble, near death, abandoned by his teammates, frozen and starving for oxygen in Everest’s so-called Death Zone.  Rather than leave Lincoln to die, Andrew and others on his team gave up their chance to conquer Everest and saved Lincoln’s life. Who does that?  Why?  I had to know. In writing Andrew’s story, I found the answer and also the theme to At the Edge: Daring Acts in Desperate Times.  Andrew’s story is in the book, along with others of people like him who had the moral courage to act even when the odds were stacked against them.

If the pull isn’t there at the beginning, I’ve learned not to trust that it will arrive later.

Is there actually a story here?

The second question is more practical, but it matters just as much: Fascination isn’t enough.  You need tension – something at stake, something unresolved, a transformation.

In fiction, I look for those things.  Can I feel the beginning, middle and end. even loosely? Is there something the character wants, something blocking them, and some change – however quiet – waiting on the other side?

In nonfiction, it’s more complicated. Real events happen the way they happen.  History doesn’t organize itself into tidy narratives. That’s the writer’s job. So I ask: does this subject have the bones of a story? Is there loss, or discovery, or reversal?  Are decisions made under pressure?  And if the historical record is thin, can I work honestly within those gaps?

Will the research hold?

Not just whether there’s enough information to tell the story, but whether the research process itself will sustain me through the long months when the writing is hard and the end is not yet visible.

With nonfiction, this is partly about primary sources. Are there letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, or people to interview?  Take the book I am writing at the moment.  The main characters are dead, and the information is sketchy and confusing. Fortunately, there’s a personal account, too – a lengthy recorded interview of a primary character who lived through the experience.  Now, that I can work with.

With fiction, ‘research’ means the interior world – the period, setting, psychology of characters. Do they have enough depth to warrant a book?  I’ve abandoned projects because the trail has run dry after six chapters.  The air was too thin to sustain the story, the terrain too flat. There were no mountains to climb and no one capable of climbing them either.

Am I the right person to tell the story?

This isn’t about permission – it’s about fit. With fiction, I ask whether the emotional territory is territory that I actually know. Can I write this character’s particular loneliness, or joy, or fear with something true behind it?  Coop, for example, was a character I knew.  I could feel the hurt he was feeling even though he was a dog. I could speak for him because I’d been there too, facing bullies, facing doubt, and feeling alone.

With non-fiction, it’s about angle of entry. History can be told from many directions.  The question is whether my direction also serves the story and its readers.  When the fit is right, you feel it.  When it isn’t, you can work hard and still feel you’re climbing Everest, one slow step at a time.

Is this story right for them?

This is the question that marks me as a middle grade writer. Not whether the subject is suitable – that’s the easy part – but is the emotional core of the story one that a reader between nine and thirteen can genuinely enter.

Middle grade readers are at one on the most emotionally alive periods of a human life – navigating identity, loyalty, loss and courage for the first time in conscious ways. A story that speaks to that aliveness doesn’t need to be scrubbed clean of difficulty.  Whether its nonfiction or fiction, the story needs to be honest in ways they can hold.

Can I craft this for them without watering it down? Without softening the edges? Without cutting back when I should move forward, or censoring the material?  This question governs everything – the language, the details, the moments I linger on and the ones I trust the reader to complete

The longer I write, the more I trust the answers to these questions.  A book is years of your life. Before the first word, it’s worth asking whether the story warrants that time and effort, and whether you are the right person to write it.

What do you look for before you begin? I’d love to hear from teachers, librarians and parents reading this – do you have a version of this instinct when you choose which book to read aloud, recommend, or teach?

Note:

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