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Carl Rollyson's avatar

I like the structure you describe. It will allow you, as you say, to sometimes deviate from chronology. I think readers are attracted to biography because of chronology, but they also get tired when the chronology is slavish and amounts to just reporting one damn thing after another.

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Sydney Stern's avatar

Congratulations, Ruth, on all the milestones with your children as well as the big one of finishing your draft. And what a wonderful piece this was. Re finding the right structure for a book. Of all the challenges in writing a book, I've always found figuring out the structure to be the most interesting. And finding the answer to be the most gratifying. Furthermore, when I finally do figure it out what I believe it should be, it always feels as if it already existed and had been there all the time, waiting for me to discover it. Fortunately I've never had an editor tell me to change it. To me, once I found my structure, it seemed to exist apart from me, wholly formed. Sort of like our children, except while we're gestating a book, we get to reach inside and move around all the pieces.

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