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.
In episode #120 of The Writing Coach podcast, I speak with author Mia Romero.
Born in Spain with a far too long and unpronounceable name, Mia Romero’s proudest light-bulb moment is shortening her name so readers wouldn’t have such a hard time asking for her books! Immigrating to the U.K. at the age of four, her love of stories began the moment she picked up a ‘Rupert, the Bear’ book and still shows no sign of waning. Educated in London and New York, she is an avid fan of both British and American cultures.
Mia’s debut novel, Otherkind, with its British characters, landscapes and humour, as well as new and original supernatural beings, was inspired by her love of American books and shows, and her desire to help build the ever-growing British supernatural & paranormal fiction industry.
During our discussion, Mia describes:
- How American and British culture influences her work
- What she learned from writing in Charles Dickens style as a ten-year-old
- How she approaches scene-writing like a film director
- Why she recommends writing even if you don’t feel like you know what you are doing
- How she went from being a pantser to a story planner
- And more!
Listen to the full podcast episode:
The Writing Coach Episode #120 Show Notes
Want to learn more about STORY PLAN INTENSIVE? Email me at kevintjohns (at) gmail (dot) com.
Connect with Mia on Facebook.
Grab your copy of Mia’s novel Otherkind.
Episode Transcript
Welcome to the show.
Thank you, Kevin. Lovely to be here,
Let the listeners know a little bit about who you are and what you have going on in the world of writing.
Okay. So I probably started more in the romcom area and strangely enough, it was actually when Buffy finished back in 2000 that I suddenly realized to myself, oh my gosh, one of my favorite programs is off the air now. And I’ve got nothing to watch. And, of course, my being a writer, I started thinking, well, I’m just going have to start writing some form of supernatural, fun, horror comedy, you know, something that can keep me going. And that’s when I started working on my supernatural British supernatural mystery with a little bit of comedy horror.
That’s so amazing. The ending of Buffy was like a big moment in my life as well. I think it’s when I kind of gave up on TV. Growing up, I taped every episode of The X-Files. Then I taped every episode of Buffy and Angel. Then when Buffy ended, it ended so perfectly. I think I was mid-university at that point and I kind of turned my attention elsewhere to like literature and books and, and other things. It felt like that was as good as television could get.
Yes, no point going back there again.
Yeah. But in the next 20 years, television completely reinvented itself, of course. But anyway, that’s interesting that it had such an impact on both of our lives and probably many other writers out there as well.
Yes. I think Joss Whedon has so totally changed the traditional way they used to write supernatural books and tend to shove it into horror. Whereas now you can join it with so much, you know, the paranormal romance, the, the, the, the, the urban fantasy, it, there are so many niches that you can create either a fantasy world or create your urban world with mythological Creek is living amongst us, you know?
He really drew from that comic book, pop culture tradition. I just think about, you know, Spider-man one week, he’s fighting a wizard, the next week he’s fighting an evil robot, the next week he’s fighting a mutant. We’ve been seeing this in comic books for, you know, 50 years, but Weedon and Buffy was really the one who brought it into mainstream storytelling and into popular culture via television.
Yes, absolutely. I totally agree with you. And as a writer, I’m very influenced growing up. I, you know, I watched all the British shows, but I also watched all the American shows. So I was very heavily influenced by the, the sharpness, the tightness of dialogue, the, the, the speed of pictures, you, the way the directors would work on a, what’s essentially a 40 minute show because of the adverts. It may take it to an hour, but it’s really a 40 minute show. And that very much influenced how I write my books. I’m very directorial. When I look at my scenes, I’m constantly thinking about how would open this chapter. Well, I see it pictorially as if I were looking at my story within the context of a series, and I don’t mean a book series. I mean, you know, a TV series, and that’s because of the influence of the American of the American shows that I grew up with.
I’m Canadian, you’re British. We both appreciate American art, and yet, we’re outsiders to it to a certain extent. So you’re looking at American culture as a fan, but also as an outsider, but then you also are coming from England where you have this great tradition of English literature. How has that kind of modern American pop culture mixed with like 500 years of British literature?
Quite nicely, I’d say. We’re, we are entrenched in, in the romance of say the 18th century, 19th century star writers the poets as well. But at the same time, you can easily write something. Especially within dialogue, you get away with so much, so you can easily really have a character say, you, you know, say, oh, hell he, no fury like a woman scorned at the end of a situation where he is seen a girl really call out her boyfriend or something, you know? And at the same time another character would say, Hey, that <laugh>, so it is, you are constantly influenced and you know, that you can play with the, I think even subconsciously whether you play with the, the English classes that you have learnt or not subconsciously they come into your, your world, they come into your books, everything that you experience as a writer, as you probably, no, you are gonna find it creeping into your stories. And it’s nice because it just gives a little nod to different, to different styles of writing
When I look at Hollywood, it’s like another world. And when I think of great British writers, you know, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Virginia Wolf to Wordsworth and Coleridge and Byron and Shelly, and you know, this great tradition . . . to me its like these people are like from another planet. To you, like maybe you’ve been to their house. Right? Do you think being there rooted in England, like the fact that these people, these great stars of literature, aren’t aliens to you, but someone who lived on the same ground that you live on, empowers you in some way and makes it all seem more possible?
I like to think it’s interesting because we can place them on a pedestal and rightly so, because they have done amazing work for literature in general, but I tend to find that when I think of them, I think to myself, oh, they’re just my friends. They’re my, they’re my writer friends, you know, because back in the day they were just the and Kings and you know what I mean, the popular writers of their genre of their era. So they weren’t considered at that stage in their lives. As you know, the last word in, in, you know, perfect literature, they were considered fun literature, great literature to read, you know? So for me, when I think of them, I really do think of them as old, as writing pals, as old friends, as opposed to feeling slightly in awe of them and wondering, oh, I shouldn’t even try and emulate them even in a, in a, in a fun emulating way because they good.
But the truth is when I was 10 years old, I used to write like Charles Dickins on purpose <laugh> but you know, they say painters emulate the masters don’t they? Of course, absolutely. So I guess in my own way, I was trying to understand what it would feel like to write in the style of Charles Dickins. And I used to do that as a, as a, as a young girl and it was great fun. It also taught me there are such demands when you make the decision to write in the style of somebody that it really teaches you not to draw out of the lines basically. And by doing that, you either like what you’re doing or you absolutely hate it. And that, and that gets you that little bit closer to who you are as a writer. I hated it. <Laugh> <laugh> I realize that’s not me. I’m not a wordy girl. I don’t put that many words in <laugh>.
In my first book, I had three book-within-books. My characters in my novel were reading these other books that there’d be chapters from within this novel. And one was kind of Tolkien-like and one was Virginia Wolf inspired and one was kind of like a pulp goth vampire type thing. My experience with it is exactly like you said, by writing in someone else’s style or trying to evoke a different style, it made me understand my own, all that much more.
I think it’s a great exercise.
You mentioned doing this exercise as a young girl. Were you all always writing? We talked about how after Buffy ended, you kind of started taking your novel and your career seriously, but had you always been a writer?
I had, but I was more the journalistic writer. Oh, you know the young girl that says, oh, I’ll write, but nobody’s going to read it. <Laugh> I’m just going to write, write, write. So I’d always written whatever, whenever inspiration hit me. And that’s also interesting as well, because these days when writers decide, I want to write a book, the first thing that they do is go off and read all about writing rather than just let go, write, write a book. You, you don’t know yet, but right, because you now have a skeleton of something or you may find when you, you hit three or four chapters and you don’t know what, where else it can go. But perhaps at that point you might want to read a bit more about understanding planning or stuff like this. But yes, in different stages, you know, as a teenager, I was very much into writing historical books.
So I did some historical chapters, but again, I on purpose, I was the type to decide. I’m going to write and see how it lies. You can always throw it away. You can always improve. It can always go find out. You can find out about the era afterwards and actually add in era type information that fleshes the book better and makes it sit comfortably within the historical area. But obviously at the same time, I wouldn’t be writing about a teenage person in, in historical, you know, in the Regency period, who’s having a tantrum because she can’t go out that night. You know, obviously you have to have some understanding of the history in which your writing, but you’ve got to make your heroines a bit anti the establishment anyway. Otherwise they’d be very boring. So that’s where you can re as a writer, you can go, I don’t know everything about that era, but I know enough about that era that I have my stops for her, but I can still give her a voice. So coming back to what you were saying, yes, I do feel that if you’re are going to be a writer start, don’t worry about reading books about how to write, because they might stop you from ever writing.
You know, obviously as a writing instructor, I’m a little biased on the value of instructional books and whatnot. But this is what I say, this is the metaphor I give… I’m from Canada, so we always think about things in hockey terms, right? I say, “You can sit in the stands and read 20 books on hockey and on how to play hockey. You could know every single rule. You could know how set up a power play perfectly. None of that’s going matter when you put on skates for the first time and get down on the ice.” Yes, learn your craft, study your thing, but you also have to be doing it.
Exactly.
It doesn’t matter how many books you’ve read. If you’re not on the ice skating, touching the puck, taking shots, falling down, getting back up, it doesn’t matter much. Doing the thing is absolutely as essential as knowing the instructional craft side of things or whatnot.
Absolutely. And I obviously, I, I should have expanded more. What I meant to say was start, but then once you’ve completed something or, or you’ve got as much as you can get out of it, start then learning what it is that will make this into an actual full book, you know, and a book that will be interesting for others to read and that they’ll, you know, there will be a page turn up for them that they’ll want to read it.
Tell me a bit about the process of writing your first novel. Around the early two-thousands you decide to take your writing very seriously and start your novel. What did that look like?
Well, interestingly enough, no, that’s where I had the kernel of the idea.
Okay.
Yeah. And it’s interesting because if you are, I started working out some characters at that point, you know, my main character, I certainly didn’t want to have her, you know, we know that Buffy is the chosen one it’s accepted before she’s even come into the, into play. There’s something special about her. And I wanted to take a character that didn’t necessarily have anything special about her, but had to work by the seat of her pants to handle were situations to do with supernatural beings. So even though that was my original idea, I also did in the end, have her have a, a, a slight ability, which was just handed down from her gypsy father in that she was empathetic, that she could actually feel the feelings of other people, which to the point where she could see some pictures as she got, as she gets better at it. And it certainly helps her to know when someone’s being honest, when someone’s not what they seem, but I didn’t want to make them make her, I still wanted to make her have to work out how to get it out of difficult panic situations as a human being. And not as someone with a lot of power that can just stop the baddies <laugh>.
What’s that book called?
That book is actually called Otherkind, it’s a series.
And is it available on Amazon and everywhere?
It is available on Amazon and yes, I’m currently working on book two of the series and this particular series will be three books, but the Otherkind range will actually continue.
The larger universe itself?
Yes. Exactly
Very cool.
It would just not have the same characters in these characters will continue for the first three books and pretty much introduce the Otherkinds Universe.
Now my understanding is you largely pants your away through the first book or kind of discovery wrote it.
Yes.
But I know you from my recent story planning program, so I’d love to hear what, as someone who really successfully pants their way through their first book, what led you to considering and actually making the decision to be part of STORY PLAN INTENSIVE?
Well, as you say, you have to keep learning about your craft and your craft. Isn’t just about the book. You also learn constantly the techniques that are going to be more useful to you. You, you have to try different techniques in how you approach your, your, your writing in order to see whether that’s a technique you enjoy. That’s a technique you like, or that’s a technique that’s very alien to you and you find it difficult to work with. But you don’t know until you’ve tried it. So with my first book, it actually took me in terms of starting to write. It took me about four years to write book one. And I honestly think you can afford to be like that if you are Stephen King, perhaps <laugh>. But if you are looking to make writing your full-time job, you cannot possibly spend four years is writing a book in this day and age.
We have the ability. And for me, the truth is that there is plenty of room for every kind of writer and every new emerging writer, because people who read books did vow them within 24 hours to a few days. So they are constantly looking for the next one, the next one, the next one, we are feeding an animal out there that will always love stories, and they’ll want it from lots and lots of writers. So if you want to become a full-time writer for me, I personally feel you can be, but you have to start writing quicker, knowing your art form better. That means you’ve got to start learning to plan P was a great system for me. And I really enjoyed, you know, going off on a tangent and going over there and going over here. But when it came to doing the revision, that took a long time because I had to remove stuff.
When you’re pantser you tend to do so much work, cause there’s nothing inhibiting you. There’s nothing telling you. And you know, and these are to quote an English game. These are the tennis lines and you can’t get, you can’t leave. You can’t move out of your tennis lines, but in pantser then, you can move out of the tennis lines. <Laugh> so, yes, my next step, before I decided to fully work with my book, two is I decided to find a planning style that I could relate to that felt comfortable, that I could work with, which Kevin happened to have been your program, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Fantastic. Having gone through the program, what were some of the surprises for you or lessons learned over the course of the month?
In the first lessons we really worked on just pulling out of ourselves, all the scenes that we can think of to go with this, to work on this story. I’d never thought of that. And yet as writers, we are doing the cooking, we’re going on errands. We’re constantly thinking about these scenes, but we don’t write them down. Well, not all of us do some of us think, oh, I’ll just get more organized in my head before I actually put anything down. And that exercise in itself quite surprised me because I hadn’t realized how much I had of the book, just sitting in my head. And if I hadn’t had done the planning and done the program with you, I don’t know at what stage I’d be sitting down going it’s time because none of it connected until I just wrote everything down in little paragraphs and had, oh, what’s this, I have quite a lot here.
And even if you don’t have it, because I remember some of the other people going through your program, the act of writing, it forced them to suddenly go, oh well, because of that scene, I know what the next scene should be. And they were writing another scene down. So yes, my first great experience was you got scenes, write them down. You don’t have to put them in audio, just keep writing them. You know, it’s, it’s almost like dumb doors, pensive, you know, you, you pull it out of your head and you put it in that ball. <Laugh> you just leave it there until you’re ready to put them together.
It’s funny. I think of it as being like getting in shape. We know what to do. It’s doing it that’s hard. And so something like about a program like this, it’s like, I know, you know your story, but by being part of a program that says, do your homework, get it down, then you’re actually doing the things that you know you should be doing or that you’re like carrying around in your head. Like you said, getting it out of your head and onto the page. And then suddenly it’s there and it’s solid and it’s something to build upon.
Yes, absolutely. But I found that each week there was something new to understand about the craft of putting a story plan together that constantly tightened everything, you know, the week before it made more sense to do this now with the week before the, because you were learning something new. So I did like the way that the program was graduated to the point of, you know, by the time you got to the end of the program, you really did understand how you were using all the different elements of story planning, because I know some people can be very resistant to, to planning and they can, and they can just go, oh, well, I’m really a Aster and that’s going to, that’s going to infringe me infringe upon me too much. And, and, and force me to work on too many bar barriers. Yeah. but I say actually, there’s, there’s scope to be Aster within the planning. There really is. You, you know, you can write one sentence lines to remain or you can write whole paragraphs it’s up to you.
And either way, if you have a paragraph or a sentence that says “The protagonist and her love interest go on a date and then soup gets poured on her lap and the date ends early.” There’s a whole lot of creativity in turning that into a 2000 words scene. It’s all discovery.
Yeah. I do think that there is a way to P it all the way around a plan, but a plan gives you, gives you what is truly needed as that great quote that you said for Orson Wells. Do you have its hand?
Yes. It’s “the absence of limitations is the enemy of art.”
Absolutely. And I absolutely concur. I, I having written a book purely as a pastor, I lost a lot of time, you know, and the vision was most of my hard work to bring the book back into something that was more leader friendly, writing a book with planning gives you the enough limitation that I actually find is more inspirational. The more limitation I have, the more I’m thinking, well, no, I’m not going to go that route. I’m going to go this route. I’m not going to go with the usual meet cute. I’m going to try something different, but it’s still inside my parameters. Totally. So yes, I do think that limitation is, is a very, very useful tool. Whether you go the patch to route or not, you can still give yourself limitations by just fully understanding your genre.
Okay. Let’s tell the listeners how dedicated you were to this program because we were meeting at 7:00 PM Eastern time for our coaching calls. What time was that for you?
That was midnight for me.
<Laugh> Now that is dedication. You stayed up until midnight to be on our calls!
Oh. But they were great calls. So it was so much fun to, to have those calls. And it was as it was a group call as well, which was nice to, to see how everyone else was coming along with their, with planning on their own books as well. So that was wonderful. To be honest, just and also because writing is, as you know, such a solitary action mm-hmm <affirmative> you do always need some personal some the way I always understood art is that someone creates art, but someone needs to receive it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. And in that instant of receiving the art, the person who created it can fully be acknowledged for the fact that they’ve created it to create it and show no one, actually doesn’t complete for me the action of art, because it needs to have an originator and a recipient. And that’s the action of art.
So, because it’s such a solitary thing, it’s also lovely. If you find yourself, someone who even at draft level is willing to be the one that’s receiving, they kind of create a vacuum. I did that with a, a close friend of mine. She basically said, come on, because I hadn’t written, you know, you go up and down and you stop writing for months. And she was great. She said, I don’t care what state it’s in. You just keep sending me the chapters. And by sending the chapters, I was creating a vacuum that forced me to go, oh, she’s going to walk all chapters up to <laugh>. So yes, it was lovely in the program to have all these other people talking about the same areas that you were having difficulty with or that you were winning on, you were seeing the same light bulb switching on with other writers. And so that is also something I very much enjoyed about the program. The fact that you got to collaborate with other writers,
I think there’s something really interesting about group programs. For one-on-one coaching, I think one of the real benefits is we develop a safe space where the client knows I’m 100% on their side. In that anything we say is between the two of us and that we’re a team working together to help that person excel. So it’s a very safe space. Whereas I feel like in a group program, there’s a chaos element. <Laugh> You never know quite how things will go. It’s different, but I think in order to excel in your writing and have these sorts of deep conversations, you do need a safe space, but I also think you need some chaos in your art and in your life. And that’s what I kind of love about these group programs. You know, other people bring in resources and say, “Hey, here’s a cool video. Everyone should check this out.” Or someone takes the conversation off on a tangent, but sometimes that can be really interesting and exciting. So for me, it’s so different from one-on-one, but I would say they’re both unique and special in their own way. And I think you, you need both of them to really thrive. You need safety and comfort, but you also need some discomfort and some unpredictability that comes from being part of a group of people instead of this really tight like collaborative relationship.
I totally agree with you there. Absolutely. And yes, you definitely you’ve hit the nail on the head there. It, it feeds you as a writer in a different way. I had, I sparked with, you know, when you finally saw my, my plan, my outline, and it really was complete as a story. It is, it was also because of the fact that I’d listened to what others were saying about their books and what they were doing. That was sparking ideas in me. That was making me thinking, ah, I know where I can go. I know which way to put this. I know which, you know, structure would suit me, you know, out of all the different structures, but you, you, you taught us, so the chaos from chaos comes creation. So bud, it says absolutely.
Absolutely. Okay. Well, if people want read your book, where can we send them to get the book and find out more about you?
Best place to read it is Amazon. I write to under a pen name, Mia Romero. Definitely, definitely riding on George Romero’s coattail <laugh>, but it’s also my single name from before I was married. Otherkind is one word as like mankind other kind. And it’s written by Mia Romero.
Fantastic. All right. We’ll link to that in the show notes for this episode. Any final thoughts on STORY PLAN INTENSIVE, or where you’re taking your writing into the future?
Well, final thoughts on Story Plan Intensive is that it has given me a wonderful template, which I know I can use every single time for any book. And I have so many sitting in here which need to be thrown into my pensive bowl. <Laugh> So that’s definitely, I’m, I’m very happy and excited about having that template. Now, though, I can really impose on anything and, and my last words are, watch this space. I’m not just a supernatural writer. I know I am very much a writer that enjoys Rom Coms enjoys Gothic horror. And this is writing in term in terms of not just watching or reading, but writing as well. So yes, I’m sure that I’ll probably end up with many different pen names <laugh> and that’s a podcast in itself. Isn’t it? The idea is certainly is of creating pen names for your different style of writing. So your audience doesn’t may wish to cross over, but they may not, you know, so but yes, rest assured Mia Romero is the name I will be using for all my supernatural works.
Well, Mia, thank you so much for being on the podcast today and for being part of the STORY PLAN INTENSIVE program.
Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. I really, really enjoyed it.
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