New Writers, How To Write Five Stories After Reading One Book

To squeeze all the juice from that book

Follow your passion.

I don’t know who said this first, but it applies to how you can write four or more stories about the last book you just finished reading.

The key is, to look for different themes in the book that relate to different audiences, and then publish your stories in different publications.

It’s that simple.

This strategy works best with memoirs where an author covers different aspects of their life. But I’m sure it can work with fiction and any genre.

How to do it

I read Kate Swenson’s Forever Boy after being contacted by a book publicist who noticed I mentioned a blog post by Kate in a story I wrote on Medium.

Cool, right? I like free books.

Swenson’s main subject, parenting a child on the autism spectrum, is a passion of mine, but she also writes about many other subjects as well.

And I loved the book: that’s a key to writing four stories about one book.

My first story was published in ArtfullyAutistic. It focused on the main storyline in the book: A mother going through the five stages of Elisabeth Kubler Ross’ grief cycle on the path to accepting her son’s autism diagnosis.

My second story focused on a video she posted that went viral. The video was focused on her struggles with depression and the challenges of adjusting to becoming a special needs mom, and it was published in Invisible Illness.

What you can see I’m doing is looking back at pages or sections in the books, ones maybe I annotated that spoke to me, that relate to different themes.

That’s how I noticed how Swenson’s first IEP meeting with her son’s school district was very strange, and so I wrote a story in Age of Awareness about it.

One story introducing another

Sometimes, I wrote a story in one publication to introduce these readers to my linked story at the end from the other publication. The key to doing this is you have to make your story relate to the other publication's main focus.

This is what I did in my story for Know Thyself, Heal Thyself. As I wrote in the story, I mentioned how my story was a better fit for this publication because my linked story was all about a woman being vulnerable with other people.

My fifth story was published in Inspired Writer. It focused on an issue I’ve struggled with in writing a memoir and probably many other writers have too: How to write about your spouse without also wrecking your marriage.

A quick recap

To review how you can write five stories from one book, you just need to look for themes in the book and then write separate stories on these themes.

If you’re planning to do this, I suggest choosing your book wisely. It has to be a book you have a strong interest in or you will not want to write five stories.

Just remember…focus each story on a different theme, choose a different publication for each story, and backlink your previous stories at the end.

It’s that easy.

Thanks for reading my story.

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Or check out my YouTube video on 10 Great Publications to Write for.