Today’s post is by book coach, editor, and author Joshua Doležal.
In another lifetime, while I was still finishing graduate school, I spent my summers clearing wilderness trails in Idaho. I kept a handbook for trail maintenance, but I preferred to follow a simpler rule that I learned from a friend.
Connie had been a wilderness ranger for forty years by the time we met. She was good at simplifying complex things, and I’ll never forget what she said: “A good trail should simply unfold.”
I knew instantly what she meant. A hiker comes to the wilderness to anchor into the place, to dream and grieve and let go of whatever they carried up to the trailhead. The last thing they want is branches slapping their face or fresh sawdust piles where a fallen tree was cut.
I wanted a hiker to get lost in her thoughts, accepting each bend in the trail as the best way to go, never noticing the work that made the path passable.
Podcasters follow a similar logic when they turn piles of tape into stories. A good episode of Radiolab or This American Life feels like a good wilderness trail. It casts a spell, and you never wake up to wonder how they spliced all those clips and voiceovers together so well.
It turns out that the best producers use one simple tool to keep their complex stories on track. It’s the same tool I use with clients when we begin building a book map. Meet the Focus Sentence.
Focus Sentence
If you can fill in these blanks, you’ll have found the core of your story. It works just as well for a trade book as it does for a literary memoir.
Somebody ____ does something ____ because ____, but ____.
You need a protagonist with a goal. Somebody does something in your book. They undertake a quest, chase a dream, or try to answer a set of questions that keep haunting them. But there has to be a deeper “why” driving that quest, a motivation larger than mere self-interest. If you end there, you might have a good mission statement, but if you want a story, you’ll need to add believable obstacles to that goal: hence, the “but.”
Consider these two Focus Sentences for Masumoto’s Epitaph for a Peach.
Version A: David Masumoto tries to save his farm because it’s been in his family for three generations and he truly believes his Sun Crests have superior flavor, but consumers care more about cost and shelf life, so he faces steadily decreasing demand.
Version B: David Masumoto begins grieving the inevitable loss of his farm because he wants to honor both his ancestors and his beloved Sun Crest peaches (he also doesn’t know how else to face his failures), but his love for the place proves so strong that he surprises himself with redemption.
It’s easy to find the core of a good book because the author and editors have done the hardest work for you.
It’s much harder to wrangle a book idea that you’ve carried for years into such a simple formula. But if you can do it, you’ll have a solid core. Then the rest of your book can simply unfold.
Memoirs
One of my clients had a killer idea that she had already turned into an award-winning exhibition. I’ll call her Elena. She wanted to turn her museum piece into a memoir, so we got to work with the Focus Sentence. I’ve anonymized details to protect her identity.
First attempt: At a labor rights symposium in Chicago, a 46-year-old photographer suddenly realizes that the crisis her peers debate in abstract is unfolding in her own hometown, a place she vowed never to return to because of its mining industry. The shock sends her back to Harlan County, where she confronts her family’s entanglement with coal and the deeper legacy of damage she carries within herself.
Clear protagonist, clear action, clear motivation, and built-in suspense. The stakes are clearly higher than Elena’s own interests. What’s missing? The “but.” We know that she’ll confront her own trauma and her family past. We don’t need to know what answers she’ll find, but we do need some formidable threats to that goal. Without that tension, the momentum will die.
Second attempt: At 17, Elena fled Harlan County to become a photographer in Chicago. Thirty years later, her past and present collide when the mountaintop removal protest movement brings her hometown to the center of national debates on environmental justice. She’s called to go home to examine the deep wounds in her family and community, and confront the question of how we live with the damage we’ve done.
Getting closer, and we have a compelling larger hook with the protest movement and national debates. There’s also a clearer sense of the “after” stage of the book, when she’ll have some answers about how we live with the devastation we’ve wrought. But what is standing in her way? Time? Resources? Corporate thugs?
Third attempt: At 17, Elena fled Harlan County to become a photographer in Chicago. Thirty years later, her past and present collide when the mountaintop removal protest movement brings her hometown to the center of national debates on environmental justice. At the same time, Elena realizes that photography, the profession that was supposed to save her, has instead sold her a lie in much the same way that the coal industry lured her family and neighbors into belief in a limitless future. She’s called to go home to examine the deep wounds in her family and community, and to try to reconcile the girl who left with the woman she’s become. But there is a high cost to speaking out about coal, and she wonders if she can ever truly come home again: to Harlan County or to herself.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Whistleblowers pay a price. They burn bridges with family and friends, they attract lawyers and death threats, and justice demands that they relive their trauma all over again. Those are external obstacles to her quest.
Final: 46-year-old photographer Elena Vasquez travels back to Harlan County, the birthplace she left at age 3, because it has become the center of national debates on environmental justice and because she needs to understand her family’s entanglement with coal, particularly familial and cultural silence about the damage that coal conceals beneath promises of wages and opportunity. But examining coal’s violent history causes her to dig deeper into the myths she’s accepted about her artistic career. As a result, she struggles to reconcile her professional self with the working-class culture she left behind.
In this final iteration, we kept the bones of the story intact. There’s still a before, middle, and aftermath, and we kept the national debates. But this is a more nuanced story where the inner struggle maps onto external obstacles. Elena is searching for more than justice now. She’s searching for part of herself that she’s lost.
Trade books
Trade books commonly frontload a thesis, add evidence and case studies, and then draw clear takeaways. If you don’t want your book to read like a 5-paragraph essay, the Focus Sentence can help you center the story.
When Gertrude Nonterah first came to me, she’d been writing for nearly ten years as a medical communications professional, blogger, YouTube creator, and LinkedIn influencer. She had a book idea, but she knew it needed a different framework from the ones she used for shorter content forms.
Here were our first two attempts:
First attempt: Gertrude (or another PhD) follows default career paths because educational and social conditioning leads to a narrow set of roles, but with fast changing technology (and eroding institutions) predetermined pathways are no longer stable and the more resilient course is taking ownership of designing an individual career.
Clear arc of change from passivity to ownership, but the protagonist is unclear and the primary action is not the one that the book will promote.
Second attempt: Gertrude (or another PhD) designs an individual career path because fast changing technology, shifting institutions, and rapid cultural upheaval is transforming traditional career pathways, but established norms and mindsets and an absence of clear models make the independent path more difficult.
We can’t have two competing main characters, but this Focus Sentence centers a quest for freedom and purpose. Fast-paced change is the “why” and default mindsets and models are the obstacles to overcome.
Final: A PhD who wants to leave academia designs an individual career path because fast changing technology, shifting institutions, and rapid cultural upheaval are transforming traditional career pathways, but established norms and mindsets and an absence of clear models make the independent path more difficult.
Now the “doer” in the book is Gertrude’s target audience. Instead of centering a self-help book on herself, she’s shifted the core to the reader whose pain points she will ease. There’s still a place for her own anecdotes, but they serve a more focused quest: a successful pivot from academe to industry, but most importantly, freedom from disempowering mindsets.
Gertrude’s title emerged from this active framing. Navigating the P.I.V.O.T. is now available wherever books are sold. It was selected as one of the Nine Books to Shape Your Science Career in 2026 by Nature Magazine.
Parting thoughts
My friend Connie was wiser than she knew. A good book, like a good trail, simply unfolds. It has such a clear logic that the reader never stops to question the path.
But just as I rubbed dirt on every fresh cut, carrying clipped brush far out of sight, you’ll need to sweat a little before the core of your book feels that effortless.
Joshua Doležal writes The Recovering Academic, a Substack newsletter, and has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Kenyon Review, and The Missouri Review. He is the author of a memoir, Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging, shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize, and a poetry collection, Someday Johnson Creek. To learn more about his coaching and editing services, visit www.joshuadolezal.com.