I Had a Plan Before I Had a Single Box

Notes from the week as the Mother of the Groom

This week, my spare bedroom is filled with boxes, and each one is labeled—appetizer table, buffet, dining table, and dessert display—for my son’s wedding rehearsal dinner. It’s organized, with a detailed event plan with pictures and corresponding numbers so the dinner setup is seamless.

But the event didn’t start with the boxes. It started with a mood board of images that evoked the feeling I wanted for this celebration. Once I knew that, I curated the pieces that matched the vision. Then I made a sample layout for the tables and sorted the materials — moving pieces around so they fit best. Only after that did I pack the boxes, each one labeled and organized around that plan.

If I hadn’t started with the vision, my brother and sister-in-law (my wonderful setup crew!) would have opened the boxes at the venue to find a mess of materials with no order or reason. It would have made everything harder — unpacking box after box with no idea what any of it was for. Instead, because I sorted with the end in mind, they could unpack each box and know exactly where it belonged and why.

Subscribe. You may not love sorting boxes, but you know someone who does.

Most of you aren’t planning a rehearsal dinner, and you don’t need to sort through every box you’ve collected before you can start.

You just need to know what you want to say and who you’re saying it to.

Once you have that, you’re not staring at piles of journals or years of memories and wondering where to begin. You’re asking whether each memory supports what you want to say. Will the reader need to know about that incident, or is it the equivalent of explaining why your second cousin couldn’t make the wedding, which may be true but is beside the point.

Your reader will never see your boxes either. She won’t know about the years you spent sorting, the drafts you scrapped, or the stories that didn’t make the cut. She’ll only experience what you put in front of her — the version that’s been sorted with her in mind, the way my rehearsal dinner guests only experienced the tables, not the boxes that got them there.

That’s why I like working in a linear sequential fashion—starting with the end in mind. What do you want to say? What should your reader learn or feel by the end? What pieces will help them see that transformation?

You still need to know what you’re building before the sorting means anything.

So before you touch the next box of your own material, ask yourself what you actually want someone to feel when they finish your story. That question is the difference between a great memoir and a book that no one reads.

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This originally posted on my Substack.