On Monday, April 24, 2023, I’m hosting a webinar called First Draft Secrets: How to Write a Fun and Focused First Draft, and it got me thinking about my first book and the role protocols played in helping me get it finished and published.
Writing and publishing a book sure isn’t easy, which is why learning from those who have already achieved what we want to accomplish is so important.
In episode 155 of The Writing Coach podcast, I dig deep into the concept of protocols and how they can help you write your book.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
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The Writing Coach Episode #155 Show Notes
Get Kevin’s FREE book: NOVEL ADVICE: MOTIVATION, INSPIRATION, AND CREATIVE WRITING TIPS FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS.
The Writing Coach Episode #155 Transcript
Hello, beloved listeners and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
Next Monday, April 24th, I will be hosting a live webinar training called First Draft Secrets: How to Write a Fun and Focused First Draft, and I’d love for you to be on that training. Head over to my website at www.kevintjohns.com. Find the show notes for this episode, and I’ll have the link in there where you can get signed up to attend the webinar.
Now, because I’m teaching this webinar on writing a first draft, it got me thinking about my experiences writing my first book. And like so many people out there, it took me a very long time. I finished university, started writing that book, and seven or eight years later I was still writing it <laugh>.
Meanwhile, some other things were going on in my life that ultimately led to me being able to finish and publish that book and launch my writing career.
Largely, it was an interest in minimalism. Growing up as a punk rock kid, I never had that drive for material wealth or things at all. And I’ve also just never been a fan of clutter. I like my desk super organized, I like my computer desktop super organized. And so, for whatever reason, I started exploring minimalism a little bit and reading articles and things. And it led me to the author Tim Ferris. And at the time, Tim Ferris had just released his book, The Four Hour Body. Now Four Hour Body is a book about a lot of things, one of which is nutrition and exercise, but from a minimalist perspective. “Minimal Viable Dose,” I think is the terminology that Tim Ferris uses in that book.
But anyway, this is a long time ago and I remember I was riding a bus somewhere and I was at the bus station waiting for the bus to arrive and I kind of saw myself reflected in the glass of the bus station and I was wearing a tie, and I noticed that the tie was kind of curving <laugh>. It wasn’t going down straight over my belly. It was curving. And I realized I had developed a belly.
I was always someone who was pretty lean, pretty athletic, and never thought much about what I ate other than I was a vegetarian for a very long time, but I wasn’t doing that for nutritional reasons. I was doing it for moral reasons.
Anyway, <laugh>, I noticed I was getting a little bit fat. And so I’m interested in minimalism, I found Tim Ferris, he happens to have a book that includes a weight loss protocol so I decide to try out the protocol. I think it’s called the Slow Carb Diet. It was really kind of a standard Atkins low-carb diet, but where you’re adding legumes to every meal so that, it’s not as hardcore as a traditional low-carb because you’re still getting carbs, but they’re coming from things like peas and beans primarily. Anyway, <laugh>, I start this crazy diet and the weight just falls off, and there’s all sorts of protocols related to the diet. You know, there’s some little exercise things here or there, and there’s also a cheat day.
So one day a week you just go insane and eat anything you want, <laugh>, which was perfect for me, because it’s not like you’re never going eat pizza again. It’s not like you’re never going to eat Kit-Kats again. You know, you eat whatever the heck you want, you just gotta wait till Saturday to do it.
So the weight just started pouring off. Like, I was losing tons and tons of weight, like 40 pounds in four months, maybe. Like something unbelievable like that. And of course, I was getting so skinny that then I started getting really interested in exercise and I’d had this huge success following a diet and losing all this weight. And so I thought, well, there must be a protocol for putting on muscle. I’d never been to a gym, I didn’t know anything about lifting weights, but this became my new interest.
And I started reading about exercise and I started reading about weightlifting. And surprise, surprise, there’s a ton of protocols out there, all sorts of different protocols depending on what your goals are. Do you want to get, you know, strong and, and nimble that you’re better at hockey? Or do you want to get big and bulky so that you look like a bodybuilder? Or do you want to just lose more fat and gain more lean muscle? I mean, if there’s something you want do, there’s a protocol out there for it. And so I picked a couple of protocols, followed them and found huge success.
So you’re probably wondering like, Kevin, we’re five minutes into this podcast on writing and all you’ve talked about is weight loss and exercise.
Well, here’s the thing, as I said, I’d been writing that book for like seven years, not getting anywhere, banging my head up against a wall, not quite understanding why it wasn’t working, but I’d followed a protocol and lost all this weight. Then I followed a protocol and learned how to exercise and gain muscle and feel really great.
And I was like, well, maybe there are protocols for writing.
Like so many people, I thought writing was kind of, you sit in a cabin in the woods, you type up your book and it’s brilliant. Or not <laugh>, but this experience with protocols has kind of made me realize, oh, there are some people out there who have already done what I want to do. And a lot of them have laid out the advice, the steps, the things you need to do to achieve what they achieved. And so I thought maybe I could apply this to my writing and to being an author. And I started exploring the internet, and low and behold, there’s endless amounts of advice, of support, of step-by-step processes and protocols.
And I really discovered this whole world of writer’s craft.
I had studied literature in university, but I had studied it from an academic perspective, looking at literature, and thinking about it. No one had ever taught me the mechanics of actually writing fiction.
So I educated myself on it. I looked at what other people are doing, I looked at the protocols, and lo and behold, in no time at all, I published my first book.
And from there everything changed.
My author career launched, and I started meeting all these other authors. I started pumping out books because they were so much quicker to write once I had a protocol in place. I got work as a ghostwriter. I got to meet all these amazing leaders through that job. Eventually, I ended up coaching and teaching. And, again, how did I launch that business? I followed the small business protocols that are out there. I joined coaching communities. I ended up hiring an amazing business coach, Jason Billows, who taught me the protocols for how to build a small business.
And so what I’m getting at here is there are protocols to writing a great book and doing it in a fun and frustration-free way. But not only are people often not taught them, people actively resist them. And I think this is why a lot of people have trouble with say, weight loss as well. They don’t follow the protocol to a T and then they’re surprised when they don’t get the results that the protocol offers.
So going back in time, this whole protocol idea is how human beings learned. Elders passed on their wisdom to their family and children or apprentices. Apprentices worked under masters who taught them the protocols of the trade. But I think somewhere . . . you know, I love Bob Dylan so much, but I think I’m going blame Bob Dylan for this <laugh>.
I think somewhere in the 1960s there was such a disconnect between generations. The teenagers of the sixties had so little faith in the protocols of their elders, of the preceding generation. And there was really 20 years of kind of rejecting wisdom and embracing freedom and weirdness, and you know, kind of figuring things out for yourself.
And I think Nixon — it’s not all my hero Bob Dylan’s fault — it’s also the evil villain Nixon’s fault. People lost faith in authorities, in the government. When your president is a criminal and is being caught in doing that, people lose faith in authority. And so I really think the sixties and the seventies were really this age of, “You gotta do it your own way, man. You gotta forge your own path. Don’t trust the elders.”
And while I don’t think that attitude wasn’t as much there in the following 40 years, you know, eighties, nineties, two thousands, I still think there’s a certain resistance to protocols. And I think that’s one of the reasons why so many people don’t find the writing success that they’re after.
There’s so many writing books out there. I have a writing book called The Novel Writer’s Blueprint that says, “do these five things to write your first book.” And I guarantee if you do them, you’re going to be really pleased with the results. But the thing is, we don’t do them. We don’t follow the protocols, we follow some of the protocols, or we combine six different protocols, and then we’re surprised when we don’t get the results that we’re after.
I guess what I’m trying to get at in today’s podcast is that almost anything you want to achieve has already been achieved, has already been done.
And so stand on the shoulders of the people who came before you. We don’t have to be so suspicious of the wisdom of our elders, of the wisdom of the people who came before us. Yes, “the times are constantly a change-in” like Bob Dylan says, but fundamentals stay the same. What makes a great story isn’t all that different than when Shakespeare was writing stories. We still like the same stuff. We still like sex and violence and comedy and drama and character arcs and cool settings and intriguing characters, and all of these things are not going to change.
Our last episode was about Artificial Intelligence. Even if AI takes over and starts writing all our stories for us, guess where it’s going to be its ideas from? The stories that came before it. That’s all AI is. It’s a tool that really quickly sorts through the existing wisdom and output of the people who came before us.
And so that’s what’s on my mind. There’s so many people struggling to write a first book and taking years and years and years to get it done just like I did because they either don’t know that the protocols are out there or they’re not following the protocols.
And so that’s what I’m going be doing his webinar on Monday night, First Draft Secrets: How to Write a Fun and Focused First Draft. I’m going to go over how you can avoid all that frustration that I went through and that so many writers go through when writing a first draft. I’m going lay out some protocols that you can follow to write a quicker, more fun, higher quality first draft of your book.
Now whether you follow those protocols or not are up to you. But I urge you to attend the webinar and take a look at what I have to say about how to get your first draft of your book written, and consider applying these protocols, consider taking what I learned and what I learned from the people who came before me and what they learned from the people before them to make life a little bit easier. You don’t have to be the lone wolf out on your own figuring everything out from scratch. Most of this stuff has already been figured out.
And when you’re working from the protocols, it frees up your creativity. It frees up your ability to discover and play and have fun and express yourself in your art because you’re not struggling to execute on the basics. You’re not struggling to figure things out as you go.
So don’t figure it out as you go. Come to my webinar Monday night, learn the tricks and secrets of the trade to writing a really great first draft of your book and make the process fun along the way. To get registered for that webinar, just head on over to www.kevintjohns.com, hit the show notes for this episode, and I’ll have a link there where you can get signed up for the First Draft Secrets: How to Write a Fun and Focused First Draft webinar.
All right, that is it for this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
