Write a Story Capsule

Above: Detail of a painting by Mireille Davis Texier, author of A Provençale Childhood

When your story gallops away from you and you can no longer get your head around it, here’s one way to shrink it down to a manageable size.

Try writing your story in three sentences. Each sentence addresses a specific question:

1.    What is the protagonist’s central problem?

2.    How does he or she attempt to resolve it?

3.    How does that effort change her internally?

Here’s my attempt at defining my mother-in-law’s story, a handwritten memoir that I transcribed, translated, edited, and published in paperback in 2019:

A Provencal Childhood, by Mireille Davis Texier

1.    Once upon a time there was a country girl who longed to escape her small village and lead a glamorous life.

2.    At age 15, she married a guest of the local hotel, a Frenchman ten years her senior, entering married life at a time when glamour and wealth were unattainable in occupied France.

3.    Over time, she and her husband built a solid middle-class life and enjoyed many luxuries, but in the end, it was her native village that remained closest to her heart and that she wrote about with feeling when she was eighty years old.