A new author wrote me this week. She'd read my writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, and it helped her realize which book project she needed to focus on first: a self-help/memoir hybrid. But she was confused by my chapter on finding the primary environment of your story. How did this apply to her book?
Every book has an environment that it lives in. I think of it like a lab where the experiment lives in a beaker or container. Everything happens within that container.