How the Story Unfolds: Chapter One
Angry storm clouds, pregnant with rain, screamed with lightning as I gripped the seat handles and stared out the window of the plane, willing this trip to Montana to be over. The dark, tumultuous sky seemed to mirror our family’s last two and a half months. I gazed at my thirteen-year-old daughter, Katie, as she…
I wrote an entire memoir but needed an editor to see that it was really eight different stories
The proximity problem is real. You can’t see the architecture from inside the material. A story and a book are not the same thing. A story is what happened to you — the events, the sequence, the actual details. A book is different. A memoir is organized around a specific theme and an undeniable change:…
The Gap Between Dreaming of a Book and Actually Writing One
How a Candle Shop Illuminated Me Why I Do This Work You’re here because you have a lot of material and no table of contents. You know something is in there, but you just can’t see its shape from where you’re standing. So let me tell you about a birthday, my college roommate, and a…
Having a Story is Not the Same Thing as Having a Book
My husband is wearing a continuous glucose monitor right now, not because he’s diabetic or even pre-diabetic, but because he’s working on improving his health. This data will give him information to make decisions. I’ve been watching him navigate it with the fascination of someone who has been doing this for forty-six years. He’s smart,…
Why Does Your Hardship Get to Matter?
The Voice Underneath “Before you write a memoir, there is often a question underneath the writing: Does my story matter enough to tell?” Steven Pressfield calls it “resistance” (The War of Art). That force that whispers you’re not ready, not talented enough, and definitely not the kind of person who writes books. That you should…
Wait… who’s Kate?
Hello! If you’re thinking, “Dear Kate? Wait… who’s Kate?” — fair question. Don’t worry, you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. There’s a fun little origin story behind the name, and I can’t wait to let you in on it. The Story Behind “Dear Kate” Kate was the wife of a former (and favorite!)…
Is my story really enough?
Don’t join the comparison Olympics team. There’s a belief most women carry when they think about writing their story. It has to be big. Dramatic. Resolved with a neat redemption arc that feels Hallmark complete. Then they think: Mine isn’t any of those things. So maybe I don’t have a story to tell. Or even…
Prepared in the wrong ways
Freshman year, 1985. San Marcos High School newspaper. That’s me in the polka dots, interviewing President Reagan’s press secretary, Larry Speakes. I was terrified. It was the nicest outfit I could pull together at the moment, and maybe it matched exactly how unprepared I felt. Fourteen years old, holding a tape recorder and a notebook,…
Permission to take your time
On the cost of moving fast before you’ve decided anything Isn’t it interesting how many appeals to potential writers rush you? It starts before you even open a document. “Just write a bad first draft.” “Don’t overthink it, just start.” “You’re thinking too much — you need to do.” Forward motion matters in most things…
What Are You Actually Afraid Of?
I’ve been thinking about fear a lot lately. My own, mostly. The kind that shows up when you’re doing something new — stepping into work that feels bigger, or different, or more visible than what you’ve done before. The kind that keeps asking: what if this doesn’t work? And I’ve been sitting with that question long…
What I wish someone had said to me before I began
I had been writing for years before I wrote the book. Personal journals. The Katie blog, which I’d been writing publicly for almost 25 years. But that was a carefully edited version of the story — the portion I could share without exposing too much. I was protecting everyone (the facade was alive and well),…
