In this episode of The Writing Coach Podcast, I sit down with Rhonda Douglas, a Canadian writer and writing coach who is passionate about helping women and non-binary authors complete their first books.
Rhonda shares her journey as a writer, including the powerful impact that early feedback and recognition had on her as a young writer. She also discusses her experience in MFA programs, where she learned invaluable lessons about story structure and craft.
But the real heart of our conversation centers around the challenges that writers, especially women, face in actually finishing their books and getting them published. Rhonda discusses the fear, self-doubt, and distractions that can derail a writing project, and the strategies she’s developed to help her students overcome these obstacles.
Overall, this conversation is packed with insights and practical advice for any writer.
Listen to the episode now!
The Writing Coach Episode #209 Show Notes
Visit Rhonda’s website and check out her super helpful Resources Page.
Learn more about Rhonda’s core program, First Book Finish.
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The Writing Coach Episode #209 Transcript
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All right, today on the show, I have Rhonda Douglas. Rhonda, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much. I’m really happy to be here.
You’re Canadian. Is that correct?
I am. I live in Ottawa, Canada. I’m originally from Newfoundland. If anyone knows, if anyone has, like, read the Shipping News or seen that movie, that’s where I’m from, way out on the you can’t you basically you can’t get any further east in Canada without hitting Greenland or Ireland. So, yeah, a small fishing village in Newfoundland.
But did you just say you normally live in Ottawa?
I live in Ottawa. Yeah, for years,
Did you know that’s where I live?
You live in Ottawa. You’re kidding me.
I am in Ottawa.
That’s great. We’ve got to go for coffee.
We could be doing this interview over a coffee right now. I had no idea.
I know. I thought you were in Calgary for some reason.
And I knew you were Canadian, but I had no idea you were here in Ottawa.
That’s fabulous. Okay, great. Well, we’re definitely go for coffee. This is good, absolutely.
Tell me, have books always been a big part of your life, or was there a moment when you latched on to literature as meaning something special to you?
I was an early reader. Bobzie Twins. Remember those? And then the like Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, you know, I was an early reader, and loved it. My grandfather had this saying every time I look at you, you have your face in your book, and now you have that little girl doing it, you know. And so it was just a thing. And we just, we were a big reading family.
Then I started writing, you know, it’s one of those things where you write a little story in school and you get the like, gold star pat on the head. And I really like gold stars and pats on the head. That happened, I think, when I was about 10, and then I have this very strong memory, I would have been about 14, my grandfather was dying, and I wrote him a poem, and I took it to him in the hospital. And, you know, he got all kind of for clamped and like wet-eyed and cried and so on. And I thought, Oh, this is powerful stuff, making things with words. So I think, and then that poem, later on, won an award for which I got, like, real cash money. And so that, like, combo of a powerful response and real cash money, not that there’s always a lot of real cash money, but I think that probably did it for me, and I was ruined ever since.
I’ve been writing, you know, since I was certainly in my early teens, lots of bad, bad poetry, so bad, but then, you know, a little better and a little better, as you do the workshops and got some stuff published and won some awards and then branched out into fiction, and then the rest is history. So I’ve been doing it for a long time now.
It’s interesting that, on this show, people almost always say they received some sort of feedback on their writing very young that had a huge impact on them. Sometimes, it’s stories like yours where it’s this positive feedback, and then you’re chasing that gold star, as you said. But I’ve spoken to many people too, who got this negative feedback when they were young, and then they’re like so then I didn’t write for the next three decades.
Right, yeah.
It just speaks to the profound power of like feedback, and in this role that we play as coaches now, and how it can become a formative event in a young writer’s life.
And not even a young writer’s life. Like I speak to a lot of writers in their 50s and 60s, who, you know, were writing, and they were writing secretly, and they finally got up the nerve to take a workshop, and then, basically, you know, the professor, teacher, instructor, was a complete dick to them and said, like, some little either some tiny dismissive comment or something worse, and, and then they just gave up and put it aside for years. I think that getting you know the wrong kind of critique at the wrong time is really dangerous.
It speaks to the power of the coach and the editor and the teacher and parents and just anyone supporting another person pursuing something creative.
Yeah, absolutely.
Speaking of school, did you go on to study literature in school?
My dad was an English teacher, and so there was a lot of like, you know, he’d be wandering (and he still does this. I just came back from a visit) and, you know, he’ll, like, pull out a Macbeth quote anytime he thinks it’s appropriate, you know. So, I kind of grew up with it, and then I did go on.
Originally, the whole reason I moved to Ottawa, other than following a boy, was to do Canadian politics, to study Canadian politics, and then I just didn’t love it, like it was interesting, but I didn’t love it. And so I dropped out for a little while. I was working full time, and when I decided to go back and finish my first degree, I thought, I just want to be doing something I love. And so that was literature. So I have a degree originally in literature. Then when I was doing I got the opportunity to do a master’s my day job was in, was in, and still, to some extent, is in the charitable sector. I’ve done a lot of grant writing over the years. And so I did a master’s degree, and my thesis for that was all about using poetry in the workplace, you know, to kind of stimulate creativity in the workplace.
I did a lot of research for my master’s around creativity. What’s behind creativity, what drives creativity and so on, in order to, like, inform this organizational theory that I was building. But really, I just wanted to be talking about poetry, so I did that masters.
Then I did an MFA at the University of British Columbia, the Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing. And that was mind-blowing, even though I’m still paying it off in my line of credit. It was the best 25 grand I’ve ever spent on my writing. It was crazy. How just transformative, like I was not the same writer when I came out as I was when I went in. And that was amazing. I came out of it with two books. I came out of it with a poetry book and a book of short stories, and that was what I wanted. Ideally, I wanted three books. I also wanted to come out with a novel, but the novel turned in a half a novel in a drawer. But I did come out with two books.
Your undergrad and your master’s, was that a Carleton?
No, I did an undergrad in English at Ottawa. And then my first masters was at McGill they had a Masters of management for the in, like leadership for the voluntary sector, something like that. Then the other one was UBC, but it was optional residency. I love these MFAs, where you don’t have to root, uproot your whole life, move there and, like, live there for two years. So we went in the summer, and it was great. We did online study in these discussion forums. You know, this was, we weren’t quite into Zoom yet. We weren’t even doing Skype. We were all in these discussion forums during the year, and then in the summer, they would host for two weeks on campus, this great thing where you got to basically, you know, do a workshop all morning, write all afternoon, and go down to the nude beach and get drunk at night. Like it was great. UBC, it was a moment. So, yeah, that was really, really, really, just transformative for my writing. I think, yeah.
As you know, in literature degrees, we study literature and look at how to interpret it. My assumption was always that over in the MFA is where you’re really talking about craft. But I’ve spoken to a bunch of people with MFAs who are like, No, we don’t talk about story structure over there. So what sort of things are you covering in your MFA if not nuts and bolts craft?
We talked a lot about story structure. I think I really lucked out. There was a particular moment where there were two professors at UBC, Juji Gartner, who I studied with, really focused on this short story, and Catherine who was one of the teachers of the novel, along with Gail Anderson Dargas. And so there was a lot of focus on the novel, on the structure and the structure of story.
Our reading lists were huge. You had to be incredibly well-read in your genre. And then we were taking everything apart. And so there was a lot of focus on structure, quite a lot, I would say, particularly working with Juji, and what a story you know should be able to do, and also just kind of expanding your understanding, whatever, whatever understanding you came in with. Like I was drawing quite heavily from my own life. I was writing fairly semi-autobiographical short stories. And she really, like, I’m going to say, punched me out of that, like she really, you know, drew more from me than I thought I was capable of. So I had an incredibly positive, high, high literary standard, high craft-focused MFA and also made a few friends that I’m still friends with today. I can’t say enough good things about it. It was fabulous, but I am still paying off the debt like she was not cheap now, apparently, now they have some scholarships and things, but, at the time they didn’t. So, 25 grand later, and still sitting on my line of credit and paying it off every month. You know,
I think when it comes to things like education, it’s not all about the result. You know, as someone who sells education and marketing training, they’re always like, you know, you’re selling the result, you’re selling the solution. And I’m like, not always. Sometimes, I’m selling the experience of being part of that community, of creating something, of leaning into your writerly nature. It can’t be expensive, but sometimes it’s worth it for the experience.
So worth it. And you know, if I win the lottery tomorrow, I’d go do more master’s degrees like I’ve sometimes thought about, oh, that master’s of fine arts, sounds really fabulous. I’ll just pretend I don’t have one and apply to that one, you know, because they all sound like they’re, you know, incredible, many of them. I do think it can be worth it.
The thing now, and it wasn’t the case back in 2009 when I applied for my MFA, there wasn’t the incredible rich nature of online education that there is today, where you basically can build your own MFA like you don’t need to spend 25 grand and go away do an MFA. You can build your own MFA and something that’s much more accessible, you know, less expensive, and so on.
But it wasn’t the case then. It kind of really felt like the only option, I think, you know, you don’t necessarily have to take it all the way to the degree unless you wanted to teach. At the time, I did want to teach, I just didn’t know what form I wanted that to take.
Because, again, this wasn’t really the thing that you and I do online. It wasn’t really an option at the time. So yeah, so it was only, gosh, probably literally, a decade later that I was able to start doing that kind of work online. But so things did change, but I think it’s totally worth it.
I don’t think I’d be published now in book form if I had done the MFA, because it was about becoming the writer who could finish a book and get it out into the world. It was that process piece that you’re talking about, right? It was very much, who do I need to become? What kind of writer do I need to become? What kind of thoughts do I need to cultivate? What kind of approaches do I need to take? What kind of reading do I need to do? Who do I need to be in the room with? You know, how do I set up my practice and my my approach? Who do I connect with? Who do I invest in as coaches?
I did a lot of investing outside of the MFA in coaches and workshops and editors and so on. Even like tracking down, I won’t say stalking, but like tracking down some writers I really loved and saying to them, do you take private clients, like, would you edit my short story? Because I loved their short stories, and they said yes. And then the next thing you know, you have, like, this incredible writer you admire so much, editing your crappy little first draft of a short story to get it into, you know, a stage where it can be, can be published, and, and, yeah, so, and I did publish in some of those stories. I work with those writers on, you know, won awards.
I really did do that kind of investing, but it was all about how do I become the kind of writer I want to become, like I want to live this writing life. How do I do it? And somebody knows more than I do, so I’m going to go get access to that.
That’s such a great example of “Fortune favours the bold,” or “Fortune favours the brave.”
Or the stubborn!
You know trying to sell coaching and sell courses and workshops and whatnot, sometimes I’m like, just take the leap people, like, Have a little faith, you know, in yourself and in the program. Everyone wants guarantees and wants you know to know that it’s going to work for them, but to succeed at anything in life, you kind of have to put yourself out there and reach out to your heroes, or look at things, look at your weaknesses and see how you can improve. And I just love you reaching out to your heroes and getting results from that.
I was amazed when, like, when they said yes, it was, you know, it was like, you’d ask your crush to the prom, like, why was so excited, you know? And but I think a lot of a lot of writers, certainly in Canada, you know, I think it may be different. I think it is different for some writers, but many writers don’t make a full time living writing, and so they’re happy to take a little bit of work here and there, you know, giving feedback to emerging writers. And I was so grateful that they did.
I think writing is also a space where it’s not a zero-sum game. You don’t have to choose Pepsi or Coke. You could read all the vampire books. I think because of that authors collaborate a lot more in this industry than others. I think coaches and everyone does it. It’s a really good space to live in and to to spend your time in, because it’s not that cut throat zero sum game approach. We all benefit from better stories.
Yes, 100% and I think that’s very true. I think it’s, I find it to be very true in the online space, and I’m so grateful for that. I think it’s probably less the case in some of the more competitive MFA programs. You know, I have had friends tell stories of being in those programs and really being cut to shreds, not always by the professors, but sometimes by the students, you know. No one wants to end up in a toxic environment that that makes you feel worse going in than you than you did before because nobody learns well in that kind of environment. We all need a supportive environment to learn in, and if it’s true of our kids, and it’s true for us when we’re like 45 and 50, so I think that matters a great deal.
You talked about publishing your books and wanting to teach, but not quite knowing where you were going to do that. When did being a writing coach and writing instructor become a reality for you?
I was being asked locally to do different workshops. I spent a long time as an editor of a literary magazine and a volunteer with a literary magazine and kind of, you know, and I ran a local reading series, and so I was very embedded in, and still am in, my local community. And so I was being asked locally to do different workshops, and so I was teaching, but it was local.
Someone I went through the MFA program with, is Sarah Seleky. She has a writing school, and she had started something called Story is a State of Mind, which I loved, like just that phrase, love, but also love her approach. And I saw her do it, and I thought, gosh, if she can do it, I can do it like that. I can figure this out.
I have to say, I spent my whole background is in marketing, in the charitable sector. But marketing, the charitable sector is about, you know, getting visibility for things so that eventually you can ask for money for a donation, right? And it’s very different. And so, and also, I had been supervising teams of people who did things but not actually doing things. I had no hard skills, like, I knew WordPress was a thing, but I didn’t know how to WordPress. I didn’t know how to make the thing go. I knew email marketing was a thing. I knew the strategy behind email marketing, but I didn’t know how to, like, find an email provider and set it up and make one piece of software talk to the other piece of software. So my learning curve was pretty steep. It’s good for the brain all that stuff, you know, learning all that stuff. But it really was pretty steep.
And I was little tech phobic. I’m the person who justifies her fountain pen. I’m holding up the fountain pen. My fountain pen habit by writing analog, so I do all my drafts by hand. I was a little like tech phobic. And you know, you just there’s a lot of tech in being online and teaching online so but the thing that finally drew me to, it drove me to it is coming out of that MFA looking at the people that I had been in class with, people who had bowled me over with their writing, like I considered them better writers than I am, like, more talented, more naturally innovative and creative.
And then looking at how many people and I had been also to the Banff Center for the Arts in a like five week program and so on. And you come out of all these programs, and if you look at the percentage of people who finally finish and publish it was not as high as I would have expected it to be. I guess naively, I expected everyone to come out and have a book because in order to graduate with an MFA, you have to submit a thesis that is a book. So, you know, you had a draft, at a minimum, you had a draft, and probably a draft, you’d work pretty hard, but I was kind of shocked, and I felt that in particular, the women that I had been in these programs with were not publishing. I’m really obsessed with women in particular, finishing their books and getting them out into the world.
I feel like there’s something in how we’re raised, and the kind of culture that we all swim in that makes it just a touch harder for women. All humans have self-doubt, right? That’s not, it’s not a gendered thing, but there’s something about like feeling that making time for yourself is selfish because you should give all your time to your kids and your partner. You know, there’s, there’s just ways we’ve been acculturated to to be in the world that makes it just a touch harder. That really was the driver for me, and why I created the the program that I run called First Book Finish.
Tell me about that program.
Gosh, it’s gone through so many iterations. When it first started, it was all about finishing the draft. So I believe that if you could finish the draft, you could finish the book. Turns out, that’s not quite true. You finish the draft, you become paralyzed by the daunting task of revision.
So then I would have people come back and repeat the program. It was 12 weeks. They would finish the draft, and then they will come back and stay with me and do another kind of version of the course now, finishing their revision, and then they would finish the revision, and they would look at me and go, so, so now, like, now what so I, how do I find an agent? How do I find a publisher? I think I might want to Self Publish. How do I do that?
And so I realized last, about a year ago, I guess I realized that this needed to be a whole, one year thing. So it is now full year.
You come in with, well, you can come in at any stage, but many come in with a partial draft. We finish the draft. I have a method for drafting that I teach. I have a method for revision that’s step by step that I teach. And then I think the work that I do, I do a bit of work around, you know, making the strategy, what’s your personal publishing strategy? Because it’s different for everyone, depending on who you are and what you want out of your writing life, and the book, kind of book you’re writing.
And so I do that kind of work, but the marketing piece, I feel like I curate that a little more. So like I’m bringing in book cover designers. I’m bringing so this Thursday, we have an agent coming in is giving feedback on query letters, you know, that kind of thing. Its a little more curated where I’m bringing in external experts, because I don’t always feel like we just had my friend Emma in whom you know, and she showed everyone you know, here’s how you upload your book on Amazon, just you know, because you there’s a you know, you can do it. You know, other people do it, but like, what buttons do you press, you know? And what do you need to have in place before you even log into Amazon. I curate that more than than anything else, but so it’s a one year program. It’s drafting, revision, publishing and promotion, and it’s coaching, supported by an online course component,
It’s exclusively for women?
It’s women and non-binary folk. Yeah,
Do you find that allows you to teach in a certain way, or how does that focus on a certain group of writers allow you to get better results?
That’s really interesting, because I, I don’t know that, like, if you were looking, you know, if you were, like a bird, you know, looking in or a fly on the wall, I don’t know that you feel that it’s all that different, necessarily in terms of what’s taught, because there’s no gender to how you click the buttons on Amazon. You lick them if you are one gender, and you click them if you’re another gender.
The reason I started this, when I first did first book finish, it was open to everyone. I was attracting mostly women, and then I was attracting also some non-binary folks and, but occasionally, a guy as well. Then it just so happened that I had a cohort that was all women, and they said, Oh, we love this. Like you should do this all the time. We love this. And there just is something.
There have been tons of studies about the amount of speaking time that women get. So, you know, women are seen to be speaking twice as much as they normally speak because of our crazy socializations; both men and women and non-binary folk deal with all of these gender expectations, and it comes out in different ways in a group. And so the women themselves said, “This is amazing. Can we, can you just do this?” And I was like, “Yeah, I guess I can.”
Now what happens is, I’ll send out, you know, a note to my email list, and I’ll say, “Oh, and by the way, this is just for women and non-binary folk,” and I always get the men. I always get the men protesting, but I feel like there’s a lot of options. And you know, this is who I am, and this is what I offer, but you offer something different, and so people could work with you. And you know, there’s Alan walk, you know, there’s just so many people that we all have to find the place and the instructor, the coach, that we really resonate with.
I think I probably attract a certain kind of person who kind of wants that space, and people that don’t even think about that and that doesn’t even matter to them at all, including guys, can be in other spaces, so I’m not too worried about it, but I definitely always get the comments about how wrong I am to be doing it. But it’s the women and non-binary writers who give me the feedback that it’s what they needed, including I literally got a note this week from someone in the program about having been in another space, and experiencing something different, and then just feeling like this was the container she needed. So that keeps me doing it in this way, and I don’t know if I’ll change it eventually because I like working with men. And there’s a certain there’s a certain energy to a mixed gender group as well that’s kind of interesting. I don’t know if I’ll do it forever, but I’m doing it for right now.
I know that resiliency is a big part of your branding. Tell us about that. What does resiliency as a writer mean to you?
I’ve thought a lot about this because I stopped writing for a long time in my 20s, like several years in my 20s, even though I loved it, it was thing I loved most in the world. I had been had a couple of things published when I was young, and, you know, and won some awards. So you get a little cocky. You’re like, “Oh, well, I’m good at this.”
And then you start sending out to I was sending out to literary magazines, and of course, I was getting rejected because it is a numbers game, and I was just getting rejected constantly. And I stopped for a while, and I had another example: I was trying to get a book published, and I sent it out, and I get a really nasty rejection letter from someone I won’t, I want to name names, but from a smaller Canadian literary publisher. I even knew this woman socially, and she said some nasty things about like, she couldn’t, she wasn’t that like, Oh, this isn’t a fit for our lists right now. It was like, your characters are shallow, and, you know, all this stuff. It just shocked me so much.
So I’ve had a couple of experiences where rejection stopped me in my tracks, and yet it is the thing I love more than really doing anything else in the world. I often joke, they’re going to take the pen for my cold, dead hand, and so I knew I wanted to be doing it when I’m like, 85 and 92 and 97 you know, like I still want to be writing. And so I needed to figure out how to not have that happen, where some external thing could stop me from writing.
I had to do a lot of work and a lot of thinking and a lot of setting up a writing practice in a way that allowed me to bounce back from rejection, to be resilient, to keep going. Because it’s easy for us to say, “Don’t quit. Just keep going.” But like, how, when you’ve just had, you know, you feel really crushed. And someone suggested that, you know your work isn’t up to par, whatever, how do you keep going? I needed to figure that out.
What happened was, I stopped writing and because it’s so important to me when I’m not writing, I get depressed. Because it’s this thing where, like, I’m supposed to be doing it, I’m not doing it, and it just feel like, why am I not doing the thing that I’m here to do? And so I get kind I get depressed. And so I really had to do a lot of work to figure out how to be consistently writing in a way where the writing was one thing and the external world, which I have to engage in, like I have to let so right now I have a poetry collection I’m trying to get published. I literally, last week, got a rejection. So I just have to turn around and say, “Right, what’s the next best fit for this poetry collection?” And have enough faith to keep going no matter what.
And I’ve noticed that, you know, over the years, the writers that I see that are successful, you know that I have been in again workshops 15 to 20, years ago with they’re the they’re the ones that just didn’t give up. They just kept going no matter what.
But it does take some real work on yourself to get to a place where you can keep going no matter what, because these things hurt. Being rejected constantly hurts. If you’re trying to get, you know, let’s say you’ve got 12 short stories. You’re putting together a collection, you’re sending them out to literary magazines or poems, or whatever it is, a numbers game, you really could get rejected every single week of your life, you know? And, boy, that’s hard. Who else has that? You know, actors have it auditioning. But, like, it’s a thing in the creative world. But I don’t think accountants experience that. You know, you and I live in government. I don’t know how many government employees in this government town of Ottawa, Canada, how many of them deal with rejection quite so often for something that’s so close to their own sense of identity. “This is who I am. Please publish it.” Whoa.
So, I really had to do a lot of work on myself and a lot of I did a lot of research. I went crazy deep into, like, what is the social science, say, around creativity. And there is, surprisingly, tons of social science around creativity because it’s so important for corporate innovation; that’s why it’s funded. But it has really interesting things to say to us, as well as artists. I just I needed, desperately needed, to find a way to keep writing.
Your bio mentions that you help writers overcome fear and eliminate distractions. And I think that ties into the resiliency issue, obviously, but tell me a little bit about that, that idea of both the distractions and the fears that prevent writers from getting their words down.
I really believe that finishing a book, particularly a first book, when your brain doesn’t yet have evidence that you can do it—You know, whenever you tell yourself you’re going to do something, your brain always goes looking for evidence and it’s like, Nope, you haven’t done this. You can’t do it—So I think that really finishing a book, especially a first book and getting it out into the world. I always say it’s 80% mindset, 20% craft.
Most writers have been reading for so long that we actually have, if we would only let ourselves believe it. We have story structure embedded in ourselves,. Like we know, beginning, middle, end, Act One, act two, act three. Like we’ve just got it there. We even know some of the more complex structures like the hero’s journey, Star Wars, The Hobbit you know, like we, we know this so, and it’s embedded in us. So I feel like you do need craft, of course, but it comes in at a particular time in the process for me, anyway.
I think that so much of it is getting over your fears and your mindset struggles. You know, the fear of that I’ll put this book out there, and it will be seen as mediocre, and people will laugh at me, the fear that the book will be wildly successful, and I’ll have to be out in the world promoting it. And what will people think of me? The fear that the book is shallow. The fear that, you know, I’m writing romance and romance just isn’t all that respected, or, you know, all of that. What are people going to think of me? Am I going to be laughed at? I think, is at the root of a lot of fears for folks.
So there’s that, and there’s craft fear. There’s the fear that we, you know, we have this glistening, glimmering idea of the beautiful book, and we know that our skills right now are not up to realizing that beautiful book, and we see that gap, and it’s really hard to live in that gap. And so that’s why I say so much of writing that first book and finishing that first book is becoming the writer you need to become in order to do the book.
And then the distractions, I think, you know, we live in a very scattered world. My daughter has ADHD, folks who are neuro-spicy deal with their own neuro-chemical challenges, and there are things that are, you know, helpful for them in particular, but we all are living in this incredibly scattered world, and there’s tons of science around, you know, the impact of the cell phone and screens and so on, on us.
And so it’s really easy to be writing with 15 tabs open, and then what happens is you’re writing along. You have a little voice in the back of your head say, “Oh, that’s not so good.” And you experience fear. You have a moment of paralysis. And what do you do? You bounce. You bounce to a new tab. You say, “I’ll just do a little bit of research.” 45 minutes later, you know everything there is to know about, like, you know how to print patterns on a cotton I don’t know random thing, but you know you haven’t gotten any more writing done. And so I think it’s just really, really easy.
The easiest thing in the world is not to write a book, to be distracted away from writing a book, to numb out with Netflix to I mean, I love me some of Netflix, don’t get me wrong, but you know, to just not be the creative person and hear and respond to the creative calling that you’ve always had. It’s the world’s easiest thing right now because of how we live our lives in very you know, scroll, scroll, scroll bounce, scroll, scroll, scroll, bounce, kind of ways.
So I think that’s really a fundamental problem. And if they feed each other, right? Like you have the fear and so you bounce into the thing that actually fosters more fear. So you’re fearful. And then you go on Instagram, you see writers who more successful than you. I’m never going to be that successful. My book isn’t that good, you know? And then you’re in this like, little fear, bounce fear, bounce loop. It’s really, really problematic for folks.
Doom Scrolling is not the answer, folks.
It’s not the answer. No, it will not. There are no elves that are coming in the night to finish your book while you finish that lovely Netflix series. You know, sadly, have tried it doesn’t work.
You mentioned your ongoing program, First Book Finish. Does it have cohorts? Or what sort of things do you have on the horizon if folks are interested in working with you,
I tend to open it up in groups because I need to do that way. It’s a one-year program. It’s quite intensive in the time I give to the writers, so I have to limit it. I can take a maximum of 30 people at a time, fully integrate them, and understand who they are as writers and what’s going on in their lives, right? Because I just don’t believe in this, like real writers write every day when we’re all trying to make a living and have care responsibilities and got to get some damn groceries in the house. So I need to know what’s going on in their lives, and I need to understand also the book and what their challenge with the book has been so far. So I prefer to take folks in in groups, and so that’s what I’m doing now. That may change in the future. It may be that you can kind of rock up to my website, book a call with me, and we’ll talk. But for now, where I am with First Book Finish.
Any final thoughts or anything you want to leave folks with today?
I think I’ll just hearken back to what we were talking about at the start, which is just thinking about becoming the writer you need to be to get the work that the stories that only you can write, out into the world, and making the commitment, you know, whether it’s with me, Kevin, or any other writing coach, making the commitment to invest in yourself as a writer, I think that’s been it’s been transformative for me when I’ve done it, and I know it’s been transformative for the folks that I work with, I’m sure the folks you work with, there’s something about really getting serious about this. You know that that kind of gives the cue to your brain and says, right, we’re in this now. We’re doing it.
Thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show with me today.
Thanks so much for having me.
