Unlocking Creativity: How Writing Islands Became the Secret to Building My Memoir’s Hidden Archipelago
Once I allowed myself to stop forcing some kind of specific organization on my book, I was able to push through the obstacles holding me back from publishing. A main concern was that a tender-hearted reader going through fertility treatments would pick up my book only to get to the end and discover I did have a baby. When I was going through treatments, I would have thrown that book across the room with the happy ending. Now that I was in charge of forming my archipelago, I didn’t need to follow a traditional plot structure, so I moved the ending to the beginning. I even called it the epilogue, putting that island exactly where I wanted the reader to find it. Because I can put the islands wherever I want in my archipelago. A reader could know from the first pages that the story ends with a baby, and if that reader didn’t feel safe reading such a book, they could put it down and maybe return to it when they felt safer in its presence.
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