Welcome to The Writing Coach. On this podcast, I speak with the instructors, editors, coaches, and mentors who help writers and authors create their art, build their audience, and sell their work.
Welcome to episode #100 of The Writing Coach podcast.
In this special milestone episode of the show, host Kevin T. Johns answers questions from listeners and clients!
During the episode, Kevin answers questions about:
- How to keep your story realistic
- When to approach beta readers
- How to avoid falling into ruts with your writing
- The most common mistakes he sees in his clients’ writing
- How to know if a subplot is contributing to, or distracting from, the main story
- His thoughts on writing software
- How to work backstory into your narrative
- How to get a writing coach certification
- And much more!
Click below to listen now:
The Writing Coach Episode #100 Show Notes
Episode Transcript:
First up we have a question from author V.L. Stuart. V.L.’s the author of The Orb and Arrow series. They write, “A reviewer has told me that my battle scene is unrealistic. It involves archers, some of whom are elf and non-human species and magic users against orcs, undead, and a couple of nasty humans. How realistic can I be under those circumstances?”
That’s a great question. Obviously, you’re writing a fantasy novel and so by mere nature of writing in that genre, you take a step away from reality. What I think is usually going on when people say that they feel like a story or a moment in a story is unrealistic is not actually that the story doesn’t feel like the real world, but actually that the story isn’t being true to the logic in physics and the laws created within the story world of the noel itself.
To give you an example of what I’m talking about, I always remember the moment in the very first Mission: Impossible movie. That movie… As those movies went on, they kind of got more and more fantastic, but if you go back and watch that very first movie, it’s actually very much based in reality. It’s not superheroics, it’s much more of a traditional spy movie where people have normal skills and their technology isn’t too over the top.
There is a moment about three-quarters of the way through that movie or something, I don’t remember the exact details, but it’s something along the lines of Tom Cruise… I think he’s hanging onto like the front of the helicopter. The helicopter flies into like a train tunnel, it’s chasing a train. The helicopter explodes and Tom Cruise is blown… The force of the explosion blows Tom Cruise off the front of the helicopter and onto the roof of the moving train. I believe that’s it, and to me I thought that was a perfect example of a moment where people are going to roll their eyes and go, “That’s not realistic”, because nothing else in that movie has led us to believe this character could survive something like that or that the physics of the universe work in that manner.
If you go and watch Mission: Impossible 2, stuff like that’s happening all over the place. People are flying through the air and like karate chopping each other off of motorcycles and stuff like… It’s a John Woo movie and he’s clearly established this universe, this story world where fantastic things can happen, and so you don’t roll your eyes. You just roll with it because that’s the story that’s being told, whereas in that first movie, up until that moment, everything the storytellers have shown us has led us to believe the universe works a certain way. Then, in that moment, suddenly it works a different way and the viewer’s left feeling like, “This is unrealistic.” Unrealistic in comparison to the story universe that we have been led to understand having experienced the story thus far.
Via long story short, what that reader or what that reviewer might have been hinting at was not that your story needs to be more grounded in reality as we understand it in our real world, but rather that there’s some moments in that battle scene that don’t seem realistic within the story world that you have built in your novels. I would take a look at that moment and see if there is anything happening during the battle that hasn’t been properly foreshadowed or that isn’t coherent with everything else going on in the story.
Hi, Kevin. My name’s Lorraine, your client, of course, and I was wondering, how has your writing changed since you started coaching other people?
Thanks for the great question, Lorraine. You know, one of the interesting things about teaching writing, right from the beginning when I wrote The Novel Writer’s Blueprint, my first nonfiction book on writing and started teaching that material via workshops and then eventually an online course, was this process of having to learn how to articulate all of these things that I had done intuitively. That’s really an important part of being a teacher and an instructor. You have to be able to put into words these things that for someone who wasn’t a teacher wouldn’t necessarily have to come up with words for. They would just say, “You know, I”… They don’t have to have a six-step process for developing a character, whereas when you’re teaching these sorts of things, those sorts of stepped processes and templates and frameworks and language, and all those things become really important.
I would say one of the ways that my writing has been changed the most via teaching writing is just I’m very, very conscious of the tools and the techniques that I’m using. Like all writers and artists, I do get into a flow state and there are times where the story’s just kind of flowing through me, but most of the time I’m extremely conscious of where I’m at in any given scene, what I’m trying to achieve, how I want to achieve it. I’m hyperaware of the process of writing, not just kind of the creative experience of it, but rather the intellectual kind of nuts and bolts process of getting things done.
I know there’s always the concern that getting too technical or even be too knowledgeable on a subject can kind of remove the magic or whatnot, but for me, I really feel like the more I feel like I know what I’m doing, the more it kind of alleviates the fear of that blank page of the fear of, “I don’t know what to do next”, or the fear of, “What if this isn’t good enough?” I have a pretty strong and confident foundation for what’s good and what isn’t in other people’s writing and in my own writing now. I would say that is one of the ways that my writing has changed the most. I would say it’s easier. It’s easier because I’ve got a whole tool kit ready for me to use any time I do run into a problem, and I also have the confidence to know what works and what doesn’t.
Next we have a pretty easy question here from Pam Rienhardt. Pam asks, “Is there a list of all the past podcasts?”
Absolutely there is. I told you this would be an easy one. Head on over to kevintjohns.com/thewritingcoach, and there’s an archive listed there with links to all 100 episodes, so going right back to the very beginning. You can click through and read the show notes and listen to every single episode of the podcast going back right to the beginning.
Frank Angus writes, “I have trouble weaving a character’s backstory into the plot without losing the forward momentum of the story. My question is, what are some ways to give characters backstories?”
I’ve a pretty simple process for this backstory issue, so bear with me here, I’m going to walk you through it. Stories need to have controlling ideas. Controlling ideas are ultimately the message of your story. What is the lesson you want readers to take from the story? It could be something as simple as love conquers all. If you want the reader to take away from your story that love conquers all, generally that’s also going to be the lesson that your story’s protagonist learns over the course of the narrative because the reader’s going to identify with your protagonist. It makes sense for the protagonist to go on the learning journey that you want your readers to go on.
Stories are also about change, which means they need to end at a different polarity from where they began. If we know that your story is going to end with your protagonist learning to understand that love conquers all, that means we need to reverse engineer that and start the story with your character believing that love doesn’t conquer all. Now, this is something… I think it’s K.M. Weiland calls this misbelief… She calls it The Lie. Some other people call it The Wound. The point being your character, your protagonist, is going to start your story with a misunderstanding of how the world works.
Now, where did this misunderstanding come from? It came from the backstory. Something happened in your character’s life that led them to believe The Lie, led them to misunderstand the way the world works. Long story short, that is what backstory is all about. Backstory is understanding what led your character… What formative event is the term my friend writing coach Doug Kurtz uses. He calls it The Formative Event. What was the formative event in your character’s backstory that gave them this Wound that led them to believe The Lie that’s going to allow them to go on the journey and learn the lesson that is ultimately the controlling idea of your book?
When it comes to how you weave in that backstory, well, that backstory should be driving your character’s actions. The decisions your character makes for at least the first half of the book are going to be driven by their understanding of The Lie, by their misconception of how the world works. That’s how you weave the backstory into the story. It is what leads your character to take the actions that they take.
Let’s review all of this again, okay? Know what your story is about, know what the message of your story is. Make sure that your protagonist ends the story having learned that. Reverse engineer the opposite of that to the beginning of the story. Then, think about what was The Formative Event prior to the story that led to your protagonist misunderstanding of the way the world works. That’s backstory in a nutshell there. That’s how you work backstory, things that happen before the story, into the story itself. I hope you’ll find that helpful.
Hey, Kevin. It’s your client, Malinda Foster. I just wanted to know, what is the one or two things that you find most often in problems with your new clients and new authors? What is your coaching advice to those problems?
Hey, Malinda. Thanks for the question. I would say two of the things that I see as being the most common problems in the clients that I work with and the manuscripts that I look at is quite often people aren’t clear about the geography of the scene, the environment that the scene is taking place in, as well as the blocking of the characters in that scene. They just often dive right into the plot focus stuff without really establishing what the room looks like or what the landscape looks like, or even… Say you have a scene and there’s three characters in the scene, where are they? If they’re sitting at a table, who’s sitting across from whom? Those sorts of things might not seem that important, but it can actually get really confusing for a reader if the reader doesn’t understand where people are in relation to each other as well if they’re unclear on what the environment is.
Where is the scene taking place? Sometimes it can feel like it’s just heads floating in space. I often see people not quite nailing it when it comes to the physicality of the location of any given scene and where the characters are within it. The other major thing I would say is people just not diving into the emotions enough of a scene. I’ve been using this metaphor lately of the wringing out of a towel or like a face cloth. Like say you get a face cloth and it’s soaked with water, and then you wring it and you’re like wringing every last drop of liquid out of that face cloth, that’s what I really want people to do with the emotions within their scenes. I want you and all of my clients and all you writers out there to really wring every last drop of emotion and drama out of every situation in your novel.
Those are the two most common things. Like more than anything else, I say, “Hey, let’s be really clear about the environment this scene is taking place in. Then, also, let’s get more emotion in here. Let’s really draw out the emotions of this event. Then, in terms of how I get people to work on that, it’s normally pretty easy because it normally just requires a little more words. When it comes to environment and the blocking of characters, the movement of characters, I just need to encourage the writers. Say, “Hey, go back here and just make sure that you’re really clear about where this scene is taking place.” With the emotions, it’s the same thing. I often say, “You got to dig into those emotions”, but ultimately what digging into those emotions means is just using more words. Slowing down a bit on the external plot and just taking the time to make sure that as a writer you’re hitting all those emotional beats that you can.
Those are really common problems that I see, but they’re also really easily solved problems, and so nothing anyone needs to really worry about too much. It’s not a big deal, you just got to make sure that you are using your word count wisely and dedicating them to clarity in terms of environment, but also emphasis on the emotions of the things. Stories are about emotions. We need great external plots. We need fast-paced, exciting stories for commercial fiction, but we also need stories to mean something emotionally, and so we want to make sure that we get the emotional depths out of every scene, that we mine those emotional depths.
Audrey Hughey of thewriteservices.com wrote a question. Audrey has been a guest on the show a couple of times, and what Audrey asked was, “What’s the biggest lesson for you? Or what aspect has presented the greatest learning curve over the course of the podcast?”
I think the biggest lesson for me is actually the transferability of skills. By that I mean having recorded the podcast allowed me to develop some skills such as interviewing, audio editing, workflow management, some web stuff. Figuring out how to get audio onto iTunes or loaded onto a website, so the kind of tech side of things. Also, the network development.
There’s a lot of different skills that go into having done a hundred episodes of a podcast. What that meant was when I decided to do The Writer’s Craft Summit last spring, it was so much easier for me than if I’d been doing that Summit from scratch because, one, I had a huge network of writing coaches and marketing coaches and all of that who had already interviewed for the podcast. I ended up having like 28 Summit guests and I think 25 of them had been on the podcast already. I wasn’t searching out new people. I just emailed my network and said, “Hey, do you want to be a part of this?” The other three people who ended up being a part of it where recommended to me from people in my network.
Every single person who was part of that Summit was there because of the podcast, and then in addition, I had all of this experience interviewing people and I had all of this experience editing audio. Throwing the video element of that isn’t… It doesn’t add a whole other layer in terms of the Summit being a video, not just audio, but long story short, I think sometimes when we think about something like a podcast, we think of it as being its own little project. Like, “Oh, this was a cool project where I did a hundred episodes of this show.” It’s like life doesn’t work in these little packages. The podcast allowed me to develop skills that then allowed me to do other things in a really, really fun and easy and kind of transferable way.
I mean, I would say that’s my biggest takeaway, and I would say this from doing a podcast, but also from writing a book or going on a diet or learning to build a cupboard. Whatever these projects are that we as human beings kind of take on, they don’t just exist in a bubble and they don’t just exist in and of themselves, but rather it’s part of your learning process as a human and your growth. The things that you learn along the way are going to be applied elsewhere. The writing skills, the skill set, the storytelling skill set, the clear thinking, all of that that you develop in writing a novel, that is going to be so useful in other aspects of your life as well. I would say that’s my biggest takeaway. I’m glad I did this podcast because, if not, I never would have been able to do the Summit.
Hey, Kevin. It’s Jesper here, your client and here’s my question. Say you are a beginner author with a particular idea that you are highly emotionally invested in and see large potential in. If you don’t think you can do the idea justice as your first novel or story due to lack of experience, do you think it’s ever a good idea to shelve the idea for later when you’ve gained more experience in writing?
Thanks for the question, Jesper. To answer it, I’ll tell you a little story. When I first started my coaching business and I was learning about how to run a business and how to run an online business and how to market and all these things that I didn’t really know anything about because I studied English literature in school, not business, I joined a community called fizzle.co, which is a membership site that has all sorts of training programs for online entrepreneurs and independent entrepreneurs as well as a forum and some coaching as well. It was a wonderful program that I really enjoyed being a part of. I ended up actually doing some writing work for them as well over the years. I love those guys over at Fizzle.
The story I wanted to tell you was that in the forums, I always remember it, in the forums people trying to start their own businesses or trying to learn how to improve their businesses, everyone’s posting comments and stuff in the forums. This one time this guy posted. He said like, “Hey, hey, listen guys. I don’t really have my own business at the moment or whatever. I haven’t got anything up and running, but I am amazing at ideas. It’s like if any of you need ideas, you just come to me. I’m the idea guy and I’ll help with sharing my ideas.” All I could think was, “Dude, we’re all the idea guy.”
Everyone has an idea. Coming up with an idea isn’t the hard part. Executing is the hard part, which is to say I don’t place that much value in a great story idea. You and I could both write a story. Say let’s come up with an idea, like an idea… A story about a talking dog. That’s our great idea. You and I could both go write a story about a talking dog and my version of that story and your version of that story are going to be completely different because the way you see the world is different. The way I see the world is different.
The things that interest me as an artist are different than the things that interest you as an artist. It’s not really about ideas to me. It’s about execution. I think of Mrs. Dalloway and I think of Ulysses, two of the greatest works of modernist literature, often used as some of the greatest novels of all time ever written. Both of those books are just about a single day in the life of a regular person. That’s what Mrs. Dalloway’s about, that’s what Ulysses is about, but it’s the way Joyce and Woolf execute those stories that makes them such masterpieces.
I know I’m focusing on the idea aspect of your question right now, and I’ll get to the other part here in a moment, but I do want to just lay it out there that I think most people overvalue the ideas and undervalue execution. Now, coming back to your other idea of if you’re aware of your own abilities and you kind of think you’re not going to be able to pull it off. Should you put off that really cool story until you feel like you’re able to execute? I don’t think you should. I think you want to give every story you tell your all and you want it to be the best story you can possibly think of.
You don’t want to be like, “This one is practice for the big one, I’m saving the big one in my back pocket”, because for one, you could die tomorrow. Do you want to die without ever having at least tried to write your great story? I mean, I always live with this thought that, “If I died tomorrow, where would I be at in terms of executing the stories that I wanted to tell?” I would hate the idea of you, or any writer, never getting to the story they really want to tell because they’re worried they don’t have the skill set to execute it. One, that skill set will develop in the process. Maybe when you start that novel, maybe you’re not quite ready to write it yet, but by the end of it and by the time you’ve revised it, you’re going to have grown as an author.
I think about the James Bond movies from the ’70s with Roger Moore, and those movies, in almost all of them or all of them, James Bond would get himself into a series of situations and you’d be like, “Oh my God, how is he ever going to get himself out of this one?” Then, he finds a way to get out of it. My favorite one is he’s trapped on a little island in a pond surrounded by crocodiles. You’re like, “How’s James ever going to get out of this one? He can’t get back to land, there’s crocodiles everywhere. What does he do? He runs across the heads of the crocodiles using them as like a bridge to get back to land.
It’s amazing and I think of that as a metaphor for writing. I think you want to give it your all. Abandoning yourself on that island and then challenge yourself to get off it. Challenge yourself to rise to the occasion and figure out a way to pull it off. No, I don’t think you should hold off on telling the story that you want to tell and pursuing the idea that you want to pursue regardless of your current talent levels. Or not even talent levels I should say, ability levels.
Doug Turnbull, who’ve I known for years, he’s a freelance writer in Kingston, Ontario. He asked me, “Kevin, when will the third book in The Page Turners series be released? Are you working on a new book? Really curious, such a big fan.”
For those of you who don’t know, I’ve released three novels. The first two were the first two books in a trilogy, The Page Turners Trilogy. Doug’s asking, when will that third book be out? Well, Doug, at this point last year, I was working on the book really hard.
After M School, my last novel… I released M School and I got to work on the third Page Turners book and I was working really hard on it about a year ago. Then, last December, I landed a big ghostwriting gig and so all of my writing focus went to that early in 2019. Then, I did the Summit, and as a result of the Summit, I’ve got some new coaching clients and so basically for all of 2019, I haven’t touched the book. Actually, your email, it kind of stirred up some longings to return to it, so after getting this question I actually went back. I read the draft of the manuscript that I hadn’t touched since last November. You know what? It’s looking in pretty decent shape.
It’s looking actually better than I ever remembered where it was at. You know what? I think after a year away from it, I’m kind of eager to return to it and get it finished up. It’s absolutely the… It’s the fiction book I’m working on right now, and I think maybe I’ll put it out there and I’ll commit that that book will probably be released in the next year. I literally finished up reading through it this morning. You know what? There’s certainly lots of work still to go, but there’s a pretty decent book there already and I’m sure I can whip it into shape in maybe the next six months. Yeah, you probably won’t have to wait that long.
It’ll be really, really exciting to finish that trilogy. In the same way that I’ve been doing this podcast for five years and finally reached episode 100, I’ve been working on that series for a long time. It’s exciting to think about reaching its conclusion. Thanks so much for asking about The Page Turners.
Hey, Kevin. It’s your client, Val. All right, so I’m getting towards the end of my book and I am curious, when do I bring in beta readers?
Hey, Val. Thanks for the question. This is something I get asked a lot. I’ve written some articles about it and I think about it sometimes. I think the most important thing to say up front is that I think a lot of the time people go to beta readers way too early and they go to them for the wrong reason. I’ve seen so many writers finish a first draft of a book, and it takes a hell of a lot of work to get a first draft of a book done. They’re excited but they’re also exhausted, and they tell themselves… They’re like, “Okay, I’ve written this book. Now, I want to get some feedback. I should go to beta readers.” Like 90% of the time, they don’t actually want criticism of the book at that point. What they want is positive feedback. They’ve poured so much heart and soul and blood and sweat and tears into this manuscript. They just want to have someone read it and say, “It’s really good. You should keep going.” What they are looking for is that positive feedback that’s going to give them the momentum to get back in there and start working on revisions, but they tell themselves they want criticism. Then, they’re going to beta readers for the wrong reasons and they’re not even clear with themselves about what they want.
This is something I’ve spoken about before. Really early on or fairly early on in my manuscript process, I do go to my wife with my books, with my manuscript, but what I say to her really explicitly is, “Please read this and tell me that it’s good”, because that’s what I want. That’s what most writers want early on. They want that feedback that the work you’ve done is worth it and it’s worth continuing to pursue and to continue to put energy into that. That works out fine because my wife reads it. Parts that she likes, she puts little check marks next to it and then she says, “This is great, Kevin. Keep at it.” I know what I’m asking for. I know what I want, and she knows what I want, and so it works out and it does motivate me. I’m able to dive back into it.
If you can be clear and up front first about why you’re going to a beta reader, that’s the most important thing. Now, if you are going to a beta reader not just for emotional gratification but for genuine feedback on the manuscript, I suggest going as late as humanly possible. The whole spouse issue gets into it again or partners or friends or family. What I always say is, “When a beta reader reads your book, you’ve burned them.” By burn them, I mean that’s it. There’s almost no one in the world who’s going to read your manuscript more than once, and so you want to be really careful about when you go to people in your circle of caring, your family, friends, loved ones, and ask them to read the book. You probably want to get them as good a copy as you possibly can, as good a manuscript, as polished a manuscript as you can, because they’re never going to read it again. If you go to them with a crappy first draft, they’re never going to see that beautiful, polished final draft.
What I say is go to beta readers when you’ve exhausted your ability to improve the book, when you feel like you’ve done every possible thing you can to make it as good as possible. You’re exhausted and you really fee like, “There’s nothing more I can do.” I think as writers we all kind of have a sense sometimes of when we’ve reached that stage, and usually it’s pretty far down the line. I mean, a lot of the time a lot of us can look at our writing and say, “Oh, I know that paragraph still needs to be worked on”, or, “I know that chapter still needs to be tweaked a bit.” I would say once you’ve addressed all those little things that need to be tweaked, you feel like it’s as good as you can get it on your own and you need that outsider feedback, that’s when you go to a beta reader.
There’s a funny line, too. Neil Gaiman has a line where he says… He’s talking about… I don’t know if he’s specifically talking about beta readers, but he’s talking about editors and… Or, no, I think he is talking about beta readers, but basically what he says is, “When beta readers tell you something is wrong with your manuscript, they’re almost always right, and when they tell you how to fix it, they’re almost always wrong.” I think what he’s getting at there is big problems, plot holes or areas in a non-fiction book where things are confusing or not fully thought out, they jump out at readers. If you have several people say to you, “Oh, well, this part really doesn’t make sense to me”, then it probably doesn’t make sense to readers and you need to address it.
The other thing to keep in mind is your beta readers are probably not writers or editors or writing coaches. They probably don’t have the expertise to… They’re able to diagnose a problem, but they’re not able to prescribe the best solution necessarily. What I would say is be really clear about why you’re going to a beta reader, and then be really conscious of the feedback that you get, but also take their advice with a grain of salt. I hope you find that helpful, Val.
Next up, we have a question from Sian Staley who writes, “Capturing facial expression is essential to adding dynamics to dialogue so that it doesn’t sound flat, but if I see another character bite her lip or crack a smile for the hundredth time, I will go all Fahrenheit 451 on that book. When I try to convey how a character said something, I will literally stare into a mirror and try to describe facial expressions and body movements, but ends up sounding like an instruction manual. ‘Insert Finger A against Temple B and drop Jaw C.’ You understand. How do you add good, unique character expression to dialogue without repeating yourself or writing tired dialogue like ‘She bit her lip’?”I never bite my lip. I don’t know anyone who does, but we all know what it means when it’s written in a book, but after two bites, it becomes a bit distracting.
All right, well, actually, my client Michael asked a somewhat similar question, so let’s cut to Michael’s question, and then I’ll answer Sian and Michael’s question kind of in unison.
I think my question… Yeah, it’s sort of is how… Maybe it is assuming the broader question, but I find that I tend to… Once I do something, I can get into a rut, it gets repetitive. I get like, “Okay, I did this once. I described her emotions this way and then I follow the same template throughout.” How do you break that and find a different way of doing things that nevertheless sort of moves things along the way you want them to?
As you can see, Sian and Michael both had somewhat similar questions, which were basically, how do you avoid being repetitive? How do we avoid falling into a rut with your writing? I think a pretty simple answer to this is vocabulary. If you are always describing things in the same way, well, click that right-click in Microsoft Word and start checking out that synonym list and start building out different words that you can use to describe the same say facial expression. You can say “Bite your lip” probably 20 different ways if you get some synonyms going in there, but I think the question you guys are asking is a little more expansive than just synonyms.
I think what you’re talking about or what you’re alluding to is something that I see a lot with my clients, and that is authors falling back on the sense of sight, especially Sian in her question is talking about describing facial expressions and how many different ways can you describe facial expressions. Well, you could have the best vocabulary in the world, but at the end of the day, you’re still describing facial expressions. You’re still kind of falling back on the same storytelling technique, which is what Michael was asking about. How do you avoid falling back on that same storytelling technique? I think one of the really simple ways to avoid that is to look at senses other than just sight.
As authors, our go-to sense for our point of view narration is always what things look like, what our POV character is seeing, but as human beings, we have other senses. We have smell, we have taste, we have touch. We have all these other senses, five senses that you can fall back on. If you find yourself always describing a character’s facial expression, well, maybe you could describe the way that character smells at that moment. Maybe that is actually going to better communicate the emotion of the scene or what is going on at that moment.
In fact, as I was thinking about the answer to this question, the great author, Seth Godin, sent out a blog post. He does these really short daily blog posts and they’re kind of about business, but really they’re just about art and creativity and humanity in general, kind of, how can you contribute to something that matters in the world? He sent out this email that touched on this topic really nicely. Step one, make sure you’ve got a good vocabulary, but step two, expand beyond just the sense of sight to incorporate the other five senses, but in walks Seth Godin.
Here’s what Seth Godin had to say:
“We have far more than five senses, and people communicate with us using many of them. We receive a message via visual inputs, sound, text, smell, taste, touch, temperature, pheromones, subsonic rumblings and/or subtle facial gestures. You can feel comforted or jostled, part of a trusted circle or all alone. You can absorb the confidence radiated by a professional or fuel the insecurity in someone who is overwhelmed.”
What Godin is alluding to here are that we communicate with each other as human beings and we experience the narrative that is our lives on a number of different levels.
If you’re sick of your character always biting her lip when she talks or when she’s feeling nervous, well, look at that list of things Seth Godin just went through, so much more than just the five sense. Getting into these intuitive feelings that we all have about people and about life and about experiences. Really dig into those alternative ways of experiencing a moment. I think that is the best way to avoid falling into a rut as an author, and it’s the best way to avoid every time a character’s angry having them frown or grimace. There’s a lot of different ways that we experience life beyond just the facial expressions we see on other people’s faces.
Nicola MacCameron of micandpen.com asks, “What event in your books comes closest to your own personal experience? How did that event end up in your writing?”
I think something that immediately comes to mind is the fact that my whole I’ve played hockey and I’ve always been a goalie. I think being a hockey goalie is a very interesting and very different position. It’s certainly different than any other position in hockey. It’s a very mental-focused position, unlike other sports where it’s primarily physically focused. A lot of goaltending in hockey is focused on mindset and really about being like technically solid because you don’t really have these big, huge acts of athleticism. It’s much more playing your position properly and executing under really, really high-pressure circumstances and kind of controlling your emotions and not letting say a bad goal kind of throw you completely out of whack.
I’ve always had this kind of crazy theory. I’m not a very spiritual person, but when it comes to hockey, I’ve always felt like there’s this thing called like goalie energy. It’s like this magical energy that makes you play well, and I believe there’s only like a certain amount of it. There’s like a finite amount of goalie energy on the ice in a hockey game, and I feel like every time you make a big save, you kind of steel a little bit of that goalie energy for yourself. Every time the opposing team’s goalie makes some big saves, it kind of steals some of that energy away from you. You could really feel these crazy weird momentum swings all based around the big saves that goalies make.
I’ve always wanted to kind of get that experience of being a hockey goaltender into a book at some point. When I wrote my last novel, M School, I wanted the book to open with a sports competition, a game of some kind, and I decided to make my protagonist a goalie. I changed it from hockey to soccer, so it’s a little bit different, but she’s a soccer goaltender and she’s kind of standing there watching the game play out in front of her and the kind of cool-headedness required of goaltending is very key to that character.
It’s not just a sports scene. It’s a scene that’s actually meant to really establish how my protagonist in that book, M School, sees the world and how her control of her emotions is really an essential component of who she is. That’s kind of a fun little way that my life experiences as a goaltender finally made it into one of my novels at the beginning of M School.
All right. Alex P. asks, “Kevin, could you give me your assessment of the effectiveness on a line editing level of writing programs such as ProWritingAid?”
I mean, for a long time when people asked me about writing tech… I get a lot of questions about Scribner, but increasingly other software and programs as well. My kind of canned response has always been, “Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway with a pen and paper. If she can write the most beautiful, gorgeous novel of all time with a pen and paper, Scribner is probably not the thing that pushes your writing over the edge.”
Virtually any novel that you’ve read, any truly great novel that you love was probably written without writing software at all. Word processors have been around for like 30, 40 years and that’s about it. Some of the greatest stories ever written were written on typewriters in the mid-twentieth century and written with pens. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century they were written with quills and whatnot back in Elizabethan times. I’ve always felt that tech and the physical tools don’t make that big a difference. It’s like… Let’s go back to hockey for a moment. Is having the same hockey stick that Wayne Gretzky has going to make you as good as Wayne Gretzky? No. That said, once you’re playing at Wayne Gretzky’s level, does having the best stick possible maybe give you a little bit of an edge over the competition? Maybe.
Certainly, there are some things that can make a little bit easier for a writer. I have never used ProWritingAid, so I can’t speak to that one specifically, Alex, but I’m certainly a user of Grammarly. I purchased Grammarly several years ago and have been using it for many years now and it’s certainly a component of my writing. Well, primarily my editing of my writing or of my clients’ writing, but I have to say I’m increasingly doing more and more reading of my clients’ work. In years past, I was dealing with some more beginner writers and we were often spending a lot of time in coaching sessions focusing on the mindset side of things and the habit formation side of things and all of that.
These days, the writers that I’m working with are deep into their novels. They’re very dedicated and focused to getting tons of writing done or revisions done in any given week. As a result, I’m reading lots and lots of material and doing lots and lots of editing every single week. Because of that, I’m increasingly kind of wondering if there’s more writing software out there that could speed up the review process or just give me a different angle to look at people’s work. I know there’s one called AutoCrit that I’m quite interested in. There’s tons of these programs and softwares out there.
For a long time I’ve kind of been dismissive of them, but the more I work as an editor of my clients’ work as opposed to just being kind of a mindset coach, the more I’m interested in exploring what is out there. I think actually on this podcast I’m probably going to do some outreach to some of these companies and see if they want to come on and talk about how ProWritingAid or AutoCrit or any of these different things out there might aid in the editorial process. I’m increasingly curious. Stay with the show, Alex. Hang with me and I’m going to do hopefully some cool interviews upcoming where we can get some more insight into these types of tools and how they might be able to help writers.
Hey, Kevin. This is your client Brenda. My question is in regards to subplots, specifically, when does it help build the character? When does it derail from the story?
Hey, Brenda. Great question. I think when it comes to subplots, first off, we have to ask ourselves, “Are they necessary at all?” I think most of the time they are, and I think one of the reasons why they’re so necessary is because life is really complex. I’m a writing coach, but I also have other things going on in my life. I exist beyond just a voice talking into a podcast, just like you have a rich and diverse life beyond just being a writer or a Mom or whatever. When we have a story that’s just focused on just one plot, it feels like it doesn’t accurately represent the complexity of life.
With that in mind, when I think about subplots, I often note for my clients that you kind of have two options with your subplot. Either way, your subplot is always going to exist in relation to your main plot. I like to think of that relation in thematic terms. Your main plot has a controlling idea. It has a main theme that it’s trying to communicate. When it comes to your subplot, you have this option of telling a similar story that reflects that main story’s plot, or that contrasts it. Let’s say the controlling idea of your book is love conquers all. In your main A plot, your main plot of your story, your protagonist is likely going to come to learn to understand that love conquers all through the challenges that they overcome in the book.
You can add a subplot, then, where a different character learns that love conquers all, or your protagonist learns it in a different manner than they do in the A plot. Or, you could actually have a story in which love doesn’t conquer all, and this helps with that complexity that I was talking about by having a main story that kind of proves one point, but then having a subplot that kind of throws that main point a little bit into question. It can add that complexity to your story.
Now, your question was, “How do you know when it’s taking away from the main plot?” I think in novels there’s a little bit of leeway to go on tangents. In film, you got to stick to the plot. I mean, there’s an A plot and there’s a B Plot and anything that doesn’t contribute to moving that story forward is going to get cut, but with novels, we have a little more elbow room to kind of move around and go down the odd rabbit hole. When I think about tangents, I always think about… There’s a storyline in To Kill A Mockingbird where Scout is… There’s like a mean lady and as punishment for something she did, Scout ends up having to go and read to this lady. This lady’s always falling asleep and Scout just kind of thinks it’s a bad punishment that she has to go and do this thing.
The big revelation ultimately is that this old woman is actually a morphine addict and by having Scout there reading to her it’s actually helping her with withdrawals. It’s a really powerful little mini-story within To Kill A Mockingbird that really has almost nothing to do with the greater plot, the plot around Boo Radley and the rape trial and all of these things that kind of make up the main components of that novel. It’s its own little story, it’s its own little tangent, but thematically it works. Thematically it speaks about understanding people and not judging people on surface value and understanding the value of compassion. Even though that little subplot isn’t really directly tied plot-wise to the main story, it works, as I said, on a thematic level to kind of communicate something that’s going on in the main plot in another way.
I don’t know if that answers your question, actually, in terms of how do you know it’s taking away. I think maybe that’s my answer there is that you return to plot, or sorry, to theme. You say, “Does this tangent work thematically? Does it contribute to the overall message of the main story?” If it doesn’t, then it probably needs to get cut. It’s probably just too much information or it’s probably going down a path that doesn’t really have a resolution. I would say the other thing to take a look at is, does that subplot have a full arc unto itself? By a full arc, I really just mean a beginning, a middle, and an end. That subplot with Scout reading to the old woman who ends up being a morphine addict, I mean, it certainly has a beginning, it has a middle, and has a really powerful ending.
When you’re looking at a subplot, you’re saying, “Is this actually worth keeping?” Ask yourself, “Is there an arc here? Is there a beginning, a middle, and an end?” If it has those three things, and if in the process of going through those three things it contributes to the greater thematic message or controlling idea of the book, then it’s probably worth staying in. If it doesn’t do those things, then it might have to get cut.
All right, our final question for the podcast comes from Ann Harrison-Barnes. Ann asks, “What did you have to do to be a certified writing coach?”
Well, Ann, I’m not a certified writing coach in the same way you can become a freelance editor or freelance writer or a freelance writing coach. That’s what I did. I started offering my services and people started hiring me. I built a client base and built a business over the years and became a writing coach.
There is no National Writing Coaches Organization that offers out certifications. I just started doing the work. I did my Master’s degree in English Literature. I wrote a couple of books. I wrote a couple of novels and wrote a couple of books about Writer’s Craft, and then started teaching some workshops on Writer’s Craft. Those workshops evolved into an online course, and then in the process of selling of the online course, I started packaging it as a coaching offer and then ended up coaching. It kind of took off from there. I never did get any sort of certification, but that said, there are several organizations out there beginning to offer some writing and editorial-related certifications.
Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid is offering some certifications on The Story Grid process for editing. That’s not necessarily a writing coach certification, but if you were interested in getting some really great training from really smart people and then being able to call yourself a Certified Story Grid Editor, there’s The Story Grid stuff out there. Then, Author Accelerator is actually offering a writing coach certification program. That is something that they started like… I think they kind of beta tested it last year and I think they’re really kind of going full steam ahead with it right now. In fact, I believe they’re having a writing coach summit this December maybe. I’ll do some research for you and I’ll put the links in the show notes. They are offering a writing coach certification.
The thing I would just say is make sure if you are spending tons of money on a certification that you’re really clear on your reasons for why you’re doing it. I think as artists and as freelancers, we so desperately want someone to ordain us as real, right? We want someone to come down and say, “You are a writer. You are a writing coach.” The reality is we become those things, we become writers by writing. We become writing coaches by coaching authors, and I think a certification could potentially be helpful for educational purposes. Like if you’re just really interested in improving your skills as a writing coach, then I would certainly think The Author Accelerator Certification could be a great way to just expand your skill set and continue to learn to be a better coach. I think The Story Grid Certification is probably a really great way to work on your editorial skills and develop all of those things.
I don’t know if at the end of the day, though, any of those things are going to help you get clients. For me, it’s like, “What makes someone a writing coach?” Well, writers pay them to coach them! It’s not a certificate that some organization has handed you, it’s just doing the work. Does being a Certified Author Accelerator writing coach help get you clients? Potentially, so yeah, I mean, if you want to get certified, there are a couple of organizations out there doing it, but that said, don’t feel like you need any one to kind of ordain you as real.
We go through this education process from kindergarten right through the university to degrees in everything, where we kind of follow the rules and do as you’re told and prove that you’re capable via testing. Then, at the end of the day, someone hands you a grade or they hand you a degree and you kind of feel proven or acknowledged. Unfortunately, that’s not how the real world works. No, in the real world it’s about doing work and getting results for people. The better job you do probably the more money you’re going to be able to charge and the more clients you’re going to draw in and it grows over time.
The real world isn’t someone handing you a certificate saying, “You’re certified”, and now you’re set. The real world is hustle, the real world is marketing. The real world is experience and ongoing training. I really encourage anyone interested in becoming a writing coach, do explore those certification opportunities, but my take it would be it would just be largely an educational experience to improve your skill set, which I think we all should be doing. In any profession, we always want to be improving and developing and getting up to date on the latest techniques and whatnot, so certification is probably a great way to do that. Just don’t think that having someone hand you a certificate is going to build your career or have clients knocking down the door to work with you because that’s not how it works.
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