My group coaching programs First Draft (for writers working on their first draft) and Final Draft (for writers in the revisions process) include weekly question and answer sessions and group discussions.
These are agenda-free office hours group calls where the writers in the group are given the opportunity to discuss whatever writing-related challenges they are dealing with or topics they have on their minds.
In this week’s episode of The Writing Coach podcast, I thought it would be fun to give you a glimpse behind the curtain and share with you fifty (!) different topics the group has discussed over the last two months.
What types of things do writers talk about when they come together? Listen to this episode to find out now!
The Writing Coach Episode #129 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #129 Transcript
Hello beloved listeners, and welcome back to the writing coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T Johns here. The summer days are flying by here in Ottawa, Canada. We have bad weather for most of the year. These nice, wonderful summer days are so rare. Summer for us is really only July and August. We get two months of nice weather and then it starts cooling it down again, pretty swiftly. And then by October by Halloween, sometimes we send the kids out in their snowsuits for Halloween. We often have to our Halloween shopping strategy, that costume strategy needs to involve wearing a costume, either over a snowsuit or under a snowsuit, or perhaps it’ll still be warm and you have no snowsuit need at all. You never know. You never know in an Ottawa autumn, but here we are. We’re still in summer and the days are nice.
Now, if you’ve listened to the last few episodes of the podcast, you probably heard me talking about First Draft and Final Draft. My group coaching programs. First Draft is a program for writers looking to get the first draft of their manuscript done in six months or less. And our model in the program is fun and focused writing. So we are very serious about getting our work done, but we also have a lot of fun doing it. And then Final Draft is for people who finish their first draft, they can graduate to Final Draft. Final Draft includes all of the features within First Draft, as well as several other additional resources, coaching sessions, all sorts of things. But today, today, what I wanted to talk to you about was our first draft office hours calls. So we have two coaching calls, two office hours calls every week within this program.
The second call of the week is a hot seat call. And what this means is one member in the program submits a scene about 2000 words to me a couple days before the call, and I go over it and I provide a critique. I provide advice. I provide developmental editorial advice, and we hop on a call and, we talk about these things. We go over them. It’s the same format I primarily use in my one-on-one coaching session. Someone gives me pages. I go over them, we meet, and we discuss the pages, and we use the scenes in someone’s manuscript as the launching pad for our craft discussions. I very rarely come into a hot seat or a coaching session saying, I’m going to teach this. Instead. We look at what’s there and we say, what topics arise? What craft elements arise from reviewing someone’s work in progress.
So that’s our Thursday calls. They’re very structured and very organized. It’s largely just me and the hot Cedar discussing everyone else kind of follows along and learns. I mean, that’s the thing you learn so much from hearing these scenes analyzed in detail, whether it’s yours or other people’s, but for the large part, it’s mostly me and the author of that piece, talking in other folks chiming in here, or there are Tuesday calls, however, are open discussions. It’s a question-and-answer format we go in with no agenda. And we just talk about things that are on people’s minds. People ask me questions, and I provide my response, but again, this is big group of really talented, experienced, diverse writers. Some are extremely experienced, some are very new, but so many of them have such great knowledge to share. And so certainly I’m in there coaching, asking questions, but we also have a great group of people who provide their perspective.
Now you’ve probably heard me talk about all of this before, but I know it’s kind of hard to get your mind wrapped around these things when you’re not part of the community. So when I say, yeah, we have an open Q and a discussion on Tuesdays, you might have a hard time actually picturing, like, what does that mean? What sort of things do you talk about? Don’t you run out of things to talk about? So in this episode, I thought it might be kind of fun to go over some of the topics that we’ve been talking about in First Draft, so that you can see the type of questions that are being asked and just the sort of craft discussions that are taking place within the group. What I’m going to cover here is just an array of topics that I jot it down while we were talking about them.
This only begins to scratch the surface of things that we’ve talked about. But I think if you listen to this episode, you’ll get a sense of the types of topics that writers discuss while working on a manuscript while trying to get a first draft written while trying to revise a manuscript while getting ready to publish a manuscript this is the nuts and bolts discussions that we’re having on each one of these office hours calls. So let’s kick it off.
Your music in writing some of the people in the group like to write to music. Some people like to write the silence. Other people like me, I actually have this certain sound, this noise, this focus app thing that I use. And so we talked about that, this idea of how can sound and music distract you from your writing. And more importantly, how can it contribute to it?
We’re always talking about various aspects of point of view, especially when people are new to the group. Point of view is so important to your narrative, and there’s really benefits and drawbacks to every point of view, whether it’s first, second, third, or omniscient, all of them make certain things easier and certain things harder. So we’re always talking about those sorts of things. We talked about the importance of sharing wisdom through your writing. This is something I really believe in. I don’t think writing’s just about entertainment. I think it’s also about sharing something you’ve learned about the world or what it means to be human. We’ve talked about the big read. This is what you do. When you finish a draft, you sit down and read the entire book, and there’s certain things that you’re looking for and it, it really sets the road for the revisions ahead.
So we often talk about the big read approaches to developing maps and building out locations for your book. This is applicable to the fantasy writers in the group. There’s different, cool apps out there and different techniques for building Lord of the ring style maps for your books. But we were also just talking about for the historical writers in the group. How do we find old maps of old locations and things that we can use for our writing? We have a member in the group who previously worked with a literary agent. So we had a great talk with her. Thank you, Helen, who shared all her experiences about what it’s like working with a literary agent. We talked about techniques for creating book titles, how you come up with the title for your book. We talk about reviewing your work in a different format than you write it in.
Whether that’s printing it out, changing the margins, changing the font, or sending it to your Kindle, how you can get this different perspective on your writing. By changing the format. We talk about connector scenes. These are those little scenes. We see them all the time in Harry Potter where we’ll have a potions class and we’ll have quidditch class. And those scenes are real robust, full scenes, but then there’ll be these weird little connector scenes where the kids will like go eat some food, talk about some exposition and then head to the next class. So we talked about the role, those connector scenes play and how they can be used in marketing and website keywords and Amazon keywords. Those sorts of things are always coming up, even though this is a craft program and we’re really focused on writing. Obviously, everyone has marketing and publishing on the mind. And so we inevitably end up having conversations about those sorts of things.
We’ve talked about flawed characters, and if flawed characters can be likable, if characters need to be likable, how to make characters likable, if you do want to make them likable, how to make fully robust, well rounded antagonistic characters in your book, we’ve talked about the value of beta readers. <Laugh> the big man with a gun technique. This is a scene, a technique that Phil in the group, a friend of his shared in order to never feel like he’s leaving a scene unfinished, if it’s the end of a work session and he wants to call it a day, his next sentence, he just writes his and then a band with a big gun walked into the room and he hits period. And he feels like he’s resolved that seed for the day. It could let his mind relax. We’ve talked about the challenges of coming up for new ideas when you’re writing a series.
Now, when you’re writing book five or book six, what can you do different? How can you not just repeat yourself? We’ve talked about writing books with a multipoint of view novel cutting from one scene to another different characters. Again, lots of benefits to that. Also lots of difficulties and challenges presented by it. We’ve talked about the benefits of beat sheets and putting together your outline. If you guys know me, I’m, I’m a huge fan of planning. And, and prepping before you sit down to write something, we’ve talked about how research and reference materials can stimulate ideas during the drafting process and the revisions process and the planning process romance is the topic that’s come up a lot. We’ve talked about techniques for writing romance. We’ve talked about the use of sensitivity readers and this idea that in today’s modern world, we might want to reach out to certain people of certain groups to read our work.
Before we send it out into the world to ensure we’re being appropriately sensitive or not doing that, I believe there was some people who felt like that was perhaps a, a corruption of your artistic vision. And so a lot of these things, it’s not necessarily me just explaining a technique. It’s a real discussion that we’re having about what is the best way to go about things. And we don’t always agree. Different writers have different goals and different ways of going about things, but that’s, what’s so great and interesting about a group program like this. We’ve talked about how many spaces to put there’s the endless debate of whether it’s one or two. We got, I went to did some research on that one, and that was always fun. We’ve talked about the use of Itals about the importance of the ergonomic setup in your office or in your workspace or wherever you’re writing.
These are the things that aren’t necessarily as sexy. You don’t see a lot of blog posts or YouTube videos necessarily about how to get your workspace set up for a healthy working environment. But the people in this program are serious writers, and most of them are working full-time jobs as well. So this is a lot of time sitting at a computer and working, and especially in COVID world and work from home world that can literally be physically dangerous. Oh, I mean, you probably listed the last week’s episode. We talked all about this last week. So if you want more information about techniques for risk health and, and avoiding back and neck pain and all these things that come along with sitting at a computer, check out last week’s episode, we’ve talked about working with typesetters to get your print copy of your book, ready, writing sex scenes was something that came up recently, how to do it when to do it, how explicit to be, how to go about approaching the drafting of it and planning of it.
We’ve talked about whether it’s a good idea or not to revise a book after it’s been published. We’ve talked about approaches to writing a scene when you’re stuck. If say you have an outline and you know, the character needs to get from a to C, but you’re not quite sure what that B is. We came up with at least half a dozen different ways to break through that block and figure out what needs to happen in that next scene. We address the topic of epigraphs that who puts them into books, and where are they used? How are they used again? These are the sorts of things that writers think about writers care about, and you might not see a ton of discussion about it out in the blogosphere or YouTube or whatever, because, again, it’s not, it doesn’t make for a, a cool YouTube title, or there’s nothing crazy about it.
It’s just epigraphs, but epigraphs matter, they’re a tool that we can use as writers, and it’s worth talking about. And so, as other things we’ve talked about, like approaches to world building, how do you craft a character arc over the course of an ongoing series? We’ve talked about launch day strategies, always, like I said, even if it is craft program, we’re thinking about that day when the book is going to be published because the people in this program are serious. We’re here in this program to get books finished, to get books published. So it’s certainly worth thinking about how we’re going to get those books into as many people’s hands as possible. We talked one day about book marketing and publishing scams and things to watch out for and how to look out for scammers and criminals and other sorts of people who prey on writers, who might not be that knowledgeable about the publishing industry.
We’ve talked about working with freelancers and also the value of attending in-person book events, where you can join a community or meet other writers or artists. I guess in the context of that discussion, I was asked my picture book, rocket princess versus snaggle tooth, the dragon. They, I think they were asking me how I found the artist, rich loon that I worked with. And I said, I was back in the day I was going to book conferences. I was selling my book. Rich was there selling his books and I met him and I got to know him. So it’s not some internet hack it wasn’t through re Z. There wasn’t, you know, a, a job freelance forum. It was through real-life interactions. And, of course, that’s more difficult than ever. And perhaps for us introverts more intimidating than ever as well, but that’s absolutely something worth discussing in a writing group like ours.
This idea of going out into your community and meeting other people, doing the same thing you are doing, going through the same struggles you are going through, but also having the same passions, the same goals that you have is really interesting stuff and well worth discussing. We’ve talked about this speaking of my picture book, we talked about making picture books and what an interesting side project children’s picture books can be. We’ve talked about using visual references while writing. I find that in the world of fine art, it’s almost assumed you’re going to look at something. You’re going to look at a noon model. You’re going to look at a bowl of fruit. You’re going to look at a landscape and then you’re going to try to recreate it in your art. But strangely in writing that isn’t the go-to assumption. There’s some sort of assumption that everything in your story needs to come out magically from your mind and your imagination, but of course, writers like any artist use reference material.
And so we talked about that, where to find it, how to use it, all of those things. We’ve talked about larger things too, like the difference between tactics and principles, what are the things that change from year to year, month to month? What are the principles that, you know, stand sturdy through time and that we can use in the crafting of our narratives or in the selling of our books, talked about using photos and illustrations in books. We’ve talked about copyright and the use of cover photos. We’ve talked about taking breaks from writing and then the challenge of returning to it afterwards. That’s never easy, but first draft and final draft are ongoing programs. And as I always say, if you’re a part of something for a few months, something’s going to happen at some point in there. You know, if you’re part of a group coaching program for six months, somewhere in there, at some point you’re going to get sick, a loved one’s going to get sick.
The car’s going to break down. Something’s going to happen. We’re going to have to step away from the manuscript for a little while and then come back to it. And that’s not always easy. And so we’ve talked about how techniques and challenges for getting back at it after having stepped away for a while, we’ve talked about using emotional memories in our writing and how drawing upon trauma can both be rewarding and taking something bad. That’s happened to you and turn it into something good, but it can also be very risky. And could perhaps leave you feeling worse as opposed to better. I think there’s an assumption that writing about trauma is always cathartic. And I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. And so we’ve talked about that and, and about how we can both use the bad things that’s happened to us in our art, but it’s also okay to not do that because sometimes stirring up those emotions aren’t as effective as using our imagination to come up with something we’ve talked about returning to theme, when you’re stuck on an idea and the importance of theme and thematic patterning and controlling ideas.
We also talked about the five-element technique for describing character locations and character appearances. This is something my client Daniel taught me. He was so great at writing descriptions of characters and of locations. I was like, man, how do you do this? And so he laid out the five-element technique for me. And so I shared that with the group. Thank you, Daniel. If you’re listening to this and so much more, we do this every single week, every Tuesday, we’re digging into these topics. I’m answering questions, we’re sharing ideas. We’re helping each other out. I would love for you to join us. If these things that we’ve talked about here, if these are the types of questions or topics that you’re thinking about, or that are going through your mind, come join us. We’re talking about these things on a weekly basis. When you join first draft, you don’t just get these question-and-answer coaching calls.
You don’t just get the hot seat. There are 20 weeks of training mini-courses. There’s all sorts of material and things and resources and community and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I would love to tell you all about it. I’m not going to do that on this podcast. Just reach out to me, email me. If you got the link to this podcast episode via email, just hit reply. You can get back to me. If you don’t already know me or in contact me, head over to my website. That’s www.kevintjohns.com. There’s a free book there. If you hop onto my mailing list, then you’ll have emails from me. You’ll be able to hit reply and respond. But in there you get a free book in the process. My book, novel advice, motivation, inspiration, and creative writing tips for aspiring authors. That’s an entire ebook free just for you. Go to Kevin T johns.com at the top.
There’s a tab that says free book, click that you get the book, or there should be a popup as well. Just fill your email address and name into that popup. Get the book. And then email me say, Kevin, this sounds so good. I love talking about this stuff. I love learning about this stuff. I’m a passionate writer. I want to get my first draft written in the next six months or less. I want that first draft to read like a third draft because I’ve learned so much from the program and I want to do it in a supportive creative community. That also gives me with coaching and the direction that I need. That’s what we can give you in first draft. And if you’re done that first draft and you’re working on the revisions process, same thing, reply to this, let me know. I’ll get you all the information about final draft and you can get in on these, these great discussions.This is the fascinating stuff that is the life and talk of writers. I remember while doing my master’s degree in English literature, one of my professors once said something about by studying English literature, we study all the sciences. We know science, we know history. We know math to a certain extent, but mostly the social sciences. We’re able to learn about geography, history, cultures, philosophy, all these things by studying literature. And in First Draft and Final Draft, we’re not just studying literature, we’re creating literature. And so these are really intellectually stimulating conversations and I’d love for you to be a part of it. So there you go. This week, I thought I’d give you a little glimpse behind the curtain, a little glimpse into what’s happening in my group, coaching programs, the types of conversations we’re having and how you can get involved. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, make sure you hit that subscribe button so that you don’t ever miss an episode of the show. And I can see you on the next episode of the writing coach.
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