Writing coach Kevin T. Johns explains how to-do lists, checklists, standard operating procedures, and calendars can help writers and artists get organized, stay motivated, track progress, prioritize tasks, and achieve a flow state easier.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #160 Show Notes
Get Kevin’s FREE book: NOVEL ADVICE: MOTIVATION, INSPIRATION, AND CREATIVE WRITING TIPS FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS.
The Writing Coach Episode #160 Transcript
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Hello, beloved listeners and welcome back to the Writing Coach Podcast. It is your host as always writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
I’ve got a question for you: Do you have a burning desire to bring your book idea to life but find yourself struggling to create a structured and compelling outline? Have you pantsed your way into a manuscript only to find yourself unable to complete it? Are you already a published author but you’re looking for a quicker and more replicable way to plan your stories? If so, I invite you to join the STORY PLAN INTENSIVE program that we kick off the first week of June. The doors are open right now. This is a four-week free program focused on helping you write a rock-solid outline in four weeks or less. To get signed up, now head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/story-plan.
All right, I got a weird one for you today. We got a weird topic, but it is something that I am just nuts for . . . that is lists. I know it’s a weird thing to be excited about, but it all goes back to when I was a teenager the American Film Institute released a list of the top 100 films of all time. It was the early days of the internet, but I was able to print out that list on my home printer. And I made this commitment to try to watch every single film on that list, and it was a multi-year project. I don’t think ever finished it. I never saw the Treasure of the Sierra Majra, I think that’s what it’s called. And I never saw Shane, and I still haven’t seen The French Connection. I think those were the three movies for whatever reason, I just never got a chance to view them. But the point being, I had so much fun learning about cinema and learning about the history of cinema and just watching this incredible list of movies, and every time I watched the movie, I would get a yellow highlighter out, and I would cross that movie off the list, and it was so much fun. Watching that list go from a black-and-white list of movies to this fluorescent yellow old beat-up document that I had so much fun working my way through a year or two later.
I did the same thing with the James Bond movies. I think it was right before Die Another Day which was some sort of anniversary or maybe that was like the 20th movie or something like that for whatever reason Die Another Day had me wanting to go back and rewatch all the James Bond movies are in order. And so that’s what I did. I printed out my trusty list of all 20 movies and I watched them all in chronological order. In that case I did it over the course of one summer. It was my James Bond summer and I loved every minute of it.
And again, getting to cross those movies off the list with that yellow highlighter was just a process I loved so much, and I think it’s one of the reasons why lists are so popular and why if you look at any book, or course or anything on productivity, they’re always talking about pulling together your To Do lists, and it makes perfect sense. It allows you to kind of track your progress against an accomplishment. I wanted to see all the James Bond movies and by checking off that list I was able to visually track where I was at in the course of my project and stay motivated to complete it.
And I gotta tell you, every single time I cross something off a list, I get such an endorphin rush. I think it’s like the nerd version of the runner’s high. You know, you see these runners, and they talk about just feeling so amazing after a punishing run. Well, that’s how I feel after 20 James Bond movies, I get that movie watchers rush, and I just think rewarding yourself by getting the cross something off the list and getting a little shot of those happy hormones is really a good thing and a great way to go about your day.
It’s also really useful for just structuring and organizing information in a clear manner. Our lives are so busy if we’re writers we probably have a few projects on the go or we have a big novel with all these different components involved and so creating lists around your to-do items for your life, but also your to-do items for your art can be really really important.
Another type of list I think is your calendar. And my calendar is so important to me. I’ve got group coaching calls, I’ve got one on one coaching calls. I have so many projects and jobs that I need to get done, and when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I look at is my calendar, because who I’m meeting with that day determines what projects or what pages I need to get read or what pages I need to get edited or what research I need to do to prep for a presentation or whatever it is. I really use my calendar as a list of to-do items. And I allow it to help me prioritize what work needs to get done. When you have a listing of all the meetings you have that week, you’re then able to reorder and prioritize the order that you’re going to tackle work in so that you can address them by order of priority and get the firm the most important things are the things that are due soonest done first. You’re like triaging your workflow in a world where we’re all balancing a zillion different tasks, it’s really nice to know okay, here’s the list of tasks and here’s the order of importance. And usually in my case that’s in relation to my calendar of meetings for the week.
Another way lists can be really useful is for something like say this podcast or other art forms that you might be working on is just creating those SOPs, the standard operating procedures for anything that you’re doing in life repeatedly. You know, this is episode I think like 160 or 159, or something of the writing coach podcast. I’ve done this 160 times, and there’s a certain order and flow that takes place in order to get this work done. It’s well I have a list of standard operating procedures where I say do this, do this, do this. And I know that if I do it in that order, it’s going to be the quickest and smoothest way to get through the work.
And what I think is important is when you’re not worrying about the steps when you know you’re doing the steps in the most efficient order you’re quicker to be able to get into that flow state. As creatives that’s really the state that we’re trying to get into where I where ideas where words into a microphone, where words on a page are just flowing, and it’s flowing out of us in this you know incredible manner without blockages and without challenges and getting into that state isn’t easy. And so if we can set up standard operating procedures that will allow us to get into that state all the quicker, then all you know all the better. In the case of a writer, this might just be a simple pre-writing process. This could be pouring yourself a cup of coffee and putting on a certain robe and eating a piece of toast and then sitting down at the cube computer at 7 am every morning.
You start doing those things over and over again. They become habits you don’t have to think about them anymore. You just do them. And then you’re able to concentrate your energy and your focus on the actual task at hand which is working on your book.
I think lists can also be super helpful for writers in the revisions process, a tool that I have for the folks inside of my group coaching program, FIRST DRAFT and FINAL DRAFT is a revisions checklist and that’s just a simple list of about 20 questions. You can ask yourself about any given scene in order to see whether it needs to improve or not. So for example, one of those questions is, is the scene between 1500 words and 2500 words? If it is, well we’re probably good to go if it’s not. If we’re under 1500 words, why is that are we perhaps not being as detailed as we could be? Are we perhaps missing out on opportunities for drama? Are we not being clear enough on the character geography, the blocking where people are in location to each other? Are we too focused on dialogue? Are we too focused on inner narration? All these things might be at play if your word count is coming in a little short for any given scene. That said it might also just be a scene that needs to be that short. But by having a checklist we’re able to ask ourselves this question in an organized manner. Same with if it’s over 2500 words. In my mind, when scenes are starting to get that long, we risk losing the reader’s attention we might be providing unnecessary details we might be drawing things out longer than we need to. And so again, just use the checklist that helpful list to take a look at the scene and ask yourself that question and then revise accordingly in response to that question, and of course, that’s just one of 20 questions or more that you could ask yourself when looking at a scene.
All of which probably brings us to the idea of a beat sheet or an outline for your novel. If you’ve listened to this podcast at all, if you even heard the little intro talking about STORY PLAN INTENSIVE, you can probably imagine that I am not a pantser and I do not think that pantsing is the most effective way or efficient way or most fun way to get a book written. I am a very very big proponent of creating an outline for your book as part of the planning process.
I’m also a proponent of revising that outline keeping it evergreen throughout the revisions process. When I’m working with my clients. I don’t know how many times I’ve said okay, okay, let’s take a step back from this scene. Let’s look at the outline. Let’s take the macro view and make some decisions here based on where this scene falls in the macro level story structure and what an outline does after all, it’s what is that line it’s just a list of scenes for your book. What it really does is enhance the readability of a really big package of information. Trying to think about a book trying to manage all the ideas trying to track all the character arcs can be really challenging especially if that means scrolling through hundreds of pages of prose or flipping through hundreds of pages of your printed-out material. When we have an outline we have this concise and easy-to-digest version of the story that allows us to scan things really quickly and get that step back right step back from the microanalysis that we so often use as writers and editors and revisers step back into that macro-level view and say how is this story working as a whole and looking at that macro level making sure that things are solid at the macro level I think is so important throughout the process, but especially at the beginning. I think there is so much confidence that comes into the drafting when you know that at least on the fundamentals level, the story works. If you’ve done a solid outline for your novel, you know it’s probably going to be pretty good before you’ve even written a single word. The process just becomes getting the story out rather than getting the story out and hoping that it works or getting the story out and making changes on the fly to make it work. Set yourself up for success before drafting by creating an amazing list of scenes or an outline for your book.
And if you’ve never planned before, or if you have a planning process that you don’t think works or if you’re looking for a quicker and better way to develop an outline for your book in a concise period of time, then I do invite you to come join us in the June round of STORY PLAN INTENSIVE. The registration is open right now. We’ve got 160 folks registered already and I would love for you to join us on this adventure this June.
We are going to spend four weeks thinking learning about writer’s craft and then making decisions executing on your story development, putting together a story plan and finishing the month with a beautiful rock-solid outline for your book so that you can sit down and write it with success. And so yes, I told you it was a bit of a weird topic, right? Kevin and his weird obsession with lists, but at the end of the day, what is the story plan? What is an outline? It is a list of scenes. It is a list of ideas. It is a list of concepts that flow in a chronological order that have causality between them that control the pacing of your narrative, and tell you that you are about to write an incredible book before you’ve written a single sentence.
If that sounds like fun for you, if you want to join us in the STORY PLAN INTENSIVE program. Head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/story-plan and get signed up. We’ve got one more week to go. We kick things off Monday, June 5, 2023. It’s going to be amazing. We’re going to have fun, and I want to see you there.
All right, that is it for this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button so that I can see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
