How can writing help you through difficult times, whether that’s a change you didn’t anticipate or an experience of grief? How can you differentiate between writing for yourself vs. writing for publication? Karen Wyatt gives her tips.

In the intro, Amazon opens up AI narration with Audible Virtual Voice on the KDP Dashboard [KDP Help]; Voice Technologies, Streaming And Subscription Audio In A Time Of Artificial Intelligence; Spotify announces short fiction publishing for indie authors [Spotify]; Audio for Authors: Audiobooks, Podcasting, and Voice Technologies — Joanna Penn; Writing for Audio First with Jules Horne; Writing for Audiobooks: Audio-first for Flow and Impact – Jules Horne. BookVault.app is now printing in Canada, as well as Australia, UK, and US.

Plus, Measure your life by what you create: 50 by 50; and Reykjavik Art, Northern Lights, and The West Fjords: Iceland, Land of Fire and Ice; Books and Travel Podcast returns this week; Writing the Shadow on the Biz Book Broadcast with Liz Scully; ElevenLabs speech to text for dictation.

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Dr. Karen Wyatt is a retired hospice physician and bestselling author of books about death, loss, and grief. She’s also the host of the End-of-Life University Podcast and an inspirational speaker.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Different types of grief that we deal with throughout life
• Why write about grief and end of life?
• Using writing to deal with the complex emotions around grief
• The role of control in grief
• Transforming personal writing into publication
• How spirituality plays a role in the grieving process
• How to approach writing about family members

You can find Karen at EOLuniversity.com.

Transcript of Interview with Karen Wyatt

Joanna: Dr. Karen Wyatt is a retired hospice physician and bestselling author of books about death, loss, and grief. She’s also the host of the End-of-Life University Podcast and an inspirational speaker.

Today we’re talking about her book, Stories from the Dark Night: Writing as a Tool for Grief. So welcome back to the show, Karen.

Karen: Thank you, Joanna. I’m so excited to be talking to you once again.

Joanna: Yes. Now, it’s been a while, so first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.

Karen: Well, like so many of your guests that you interview here, I’ve always been interested in stories. I started writing stories when I was seven years old. I wrote a three act play when I was 10, which my school ended up producing. So I guess I could say I’m a published playwright, my one and only play.

I’ve always loved writing down my thoughts and ideas and telling stories and writing them down. I kind of got waylaid in terms of writing by becoming a doctor. So I had a number of years there of intense schooling, and then I was a doctor and a wife and mother at the same time.

I had very, very little time for writing. It was precious time if I ever could just sit down and jot down a little story that was in my head.

Still, the creative juices kept flowing, as I know you’ve talked about. Like, just ideas, ideas, ideas every day for stories or things I wanted to write, but I always had to put that aside. I was just too busy.

So I finally retired from medicine early, and I was a hospice physician for a number of years. I retired early so that I could write because I’d been gathering all these stories while I worked in hospice. Amazing, beautiful stories from patients I worked with. I just knew it’s time for me now to shift into writing mode.

I retired early 15 years ago, and I started writing then. I hadn’t really thought about what it takes to publish a book, I didn’t know that. I finally started delving into that, and through you and your podcast, I learned about independent publishing.

I’ve been able to publish my books myself most of the time. Though, I worked once with a hybrid publisher and then most recently with Watkins Publishing from the UK.

It’s been a really fun journey for me of finally having a chance later in life to get into the writing that I started when I was seven years old.

Joanna: That’s wonderful.

Just on being drawn to the darker side, I mean, obviously as a doctor, you could have gone into many different areas and ended up being a hospice physician, and—

You’re writing about end of life. Has that always been an interest?

I mean, I guess I’m saying this from the perspective of someone, as you know, I have always thought about death. Like from a very young age, I remember thinking about death and dying. So it’s always been on my mind. I wondered if that was true for you.

Karen: I did have some interest in death and dying. A classmate of mine died when we were 16 years old, and that kind of really woke me up to the idea that, oh, my goodness, everyone dies, and you could die at any age.

I started really contemplating my own mortality at 16. Like, you know what? Nothing’s guaranteed. I could die at any time.

So I will say death has been on my thoughts since a young age.

Then early in my medical career, my father died by suicide, and I was really plunged into this whole world—and I call it my dark night of the soul, in a way—of grief after his death.

This is what led me into working for hospice because I realized, even though I had thought about death, I didn’t really know anything about it. I didn’t know anything about grief, even though I was a doctor. I hadn’t had any training in that area.

So I started volunteering for hospice to help me understand what I was going through. What am I going through here as I’m grieving my father’s death?

Ultimately, I shifted my whole career to hospice because I found it was just a rich, very spiritual, sacred place to be.

A sacred way to be a doctor with working with patients and families, and it was very powerful for me. So it was really grief itself that shifted my path as a doctor, initially.

Then, again, as I said, I started gathering so many stories and learning so many things about this process of loss and how we navigate it and cope with it in life. I really felt inspired to start writing and talking and teaching about it because at that time, it seemed like a very taboo subject. I think it still is, in many ways.

Joanna: It’s so weird. You said there that as doctors, you didn’t really get into the death side of things. It just seems so crazy to me because it happens to 100% of people, and it’s like a physical process—obviously, much more than that.

Why aren’t doctors trained on death?

Karen: It’s so bizarre. I still can’t wrap my head around why that is.

It’s partly because modern medicine focuses so much on curing illness and saving lives that death has become the enemy. So we don’t want to think about that or talk about that because we don’t want it to happen for our patients.

It’s ridiculous because it does happen. I think back to when a patient was approaching death in the hospital when we were in training, suddenly that patient was taken off our service.

We didn’t follow them anymore because, well, they weren’t a good teaching tool now because they’re going to die. We’ll move on to the patients that we can cure because that’s what we’re here to learn about.

It really doesn’t make any sense, but it’s part of why we have a problem with how we take care of people at the end of life. I think that’s why I just felt inspired. I want to help do this differently, and that’s why hospice was so appealing to me.

Joanna: And why books and writing and talking about these things are so important. As you say, there’s a lot of taboo, and perhaps even more taboo around the way your father died.

Before we get into that, I just wanted us to talk about the word grief, because it feels like there are many forms of grief. It is not just if we are dying, or if our partner is dying, or our family is dying, or if someone is dying.

What are some of the other ways that grief might come up for people?

What might help them if they’re feeling certain ways?

Karen: I think it is important for us to recognize that —

We feel grief whenever major changes take place in our life.

I had a mom tell me she grieved when her child no longer used baby language. Like started talking and saying words normally, and they lost all the cute little expressions that their toddler used to say.

When that was over with, she felt grief because it was a big change. Something shifted, and she lost something. So we can feel grief even in times of happiness, when good things are happening.

If you think about it, life is one series of loss and change after another. So it makes sense, in a way, grief is kind of an emotion that’s always present for us if we really look at it.

Joanna: Is it a change that is out of our control, rather than something that we can control?

I’m thinking, personally, I feel like when I went through menopause, I felt a lot of grief over losing a sense of who I was as a younger woman, I guess.

Then I feel like a lot of anger, as we record this in 2025, there’s a lot of political anger in different sides, and also anger around AI maybe taking people’s jobs. All of these things are not choices that are made deliberately. They’re things that are almost out of our control.

How much does grief and loss of control go together?

Karen: I think definitely. I mean, I think the way we cope with grief or navigate grief has a lot to do with control.

If we have any sense that I can control my surroundings, I can change what I need to change, that gives us a little bit more resilience and more ability to deal with the losses that we experience.

When it feels outside of our control and there’s nothing we can do, I think that is the deeper form of grief that’s very hard to manage.

As you said, because it’s associated with a lot of anger. From the ego level, especially like anger, how is it that all of this can happen to me and I can’t do anything about it?

Joanna: Well, let’s come in to writing then. When these feelings overtake us and we really just don’t know what we’re doing—

Why is writing so useful when it comes to grief? How has it helped you, in particular?

Karen: Well, I think grief, as we already said, it can contain such a mixture of emotions. We typically think of grief as just being sadness over a loss, but as you pointed out, there’s a lot of anger within grief, and guilt and regret, sometimes resentment. Sometimes there’s even relief. There’s sometimes a joy that’s present within grief.

It’s a very complex situation with lots of emotions bubbling up all at once, and yet, we don’t know what to do with all of that emotion. So writing gives us a place to express it, to ventilate the emotion, and put it down on paper.

We sometimes hesitate to express verbally to other people all of these things that are going on with us, this mixture of emotion during grief, because other people don’t necessarily understand it and may not want to listen to it.

It’s why writing is our place to communicate all of these crazy thoughts we have and confusing feelings that we have. It’s a safe, non-judgmental place.

We can just put it down on paper and validate ourselves that we’re going through this difficult time.

It doesn’t always make sense, but we can express it at least. So we can give voice to what otherwise can be hidden or repressed inside of us.

Joanna: So with your father, how did writing help you? Like was it just, “Oh, things are bad. I’m going to write this essay or this poem, and then suddenly I feel better.” Is that how it worked?

Karen: No, not at all.

Joanna: Obviously not!

Karen: I mean, I didn’t even think of the idea of writing itself. I didn’t even recognize that that could be therapeutic in some way.

At the time of my father’s death, I happened to be reading Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, where she talks about doing Morning Pages every day. I had been intrigued by that idea before of doing Morning Pages.

I found I was waking up early every morning. I couldn’t sleep, dealing with this insomnia. I was actually really busy, as I was a mom and a wife and a doctor. I was so busy, I felt like I don’t even have time to deal with grief or to deal with my emotions during the day. I’m just busy having to do all these things.

I would wake up at four in the morning and couldn’t sleep, and I remembered Morning Pages. I started just getting up early every single morning and writing. Morning Pages, it’s stream of consciousness writing, where you just write down anything that’s in your head.

Much of what I wrote down dealt with, “I’m angry, I feel guilty.” I dealt with all these confusing, conflicting emotions I felt inside around my father’s death.

I didn’t even know for sure that was all happening inside until I started writing the Morning Pages, and it was all coming out of me.

It gave me a place to just, as I said, to ventilate and release those emotions. It actually became a place where I was processing grief without even realizing it, every morning, writing those three pages of stream of consciousness.

So that’s how I began with that type of writing, and I highly recommend it. I don’t know if you’ve ever done it. I’m sure you’ve read the book, The Artist’s Way.

Joanna: Oh, yes. I’ve always kind of been a journaller, but I don’t do Morning Pages like every day.

When I got divorced, my first husband left me, so it was out of my control. It was not my choice. The three journals that I have from that time are full of—and it’s so repetitive. You know, there’s no point in me reading it back. Maybe it’s the same with you.

It’s like that is just raw emotion that every single day sounds exactly the same. There is this period where that just happens.

For a period of time, you can’t really get past those initial emotions in your outpouring.

Karen: No. There’s so much of it inside of us that needs to come out. That’s what I find, that I’m writing the same thing every day.

Julia Cameron mentions about writing these Morning Pages, it helps us eventually get out of our logic brain. Which, in grief, the logic brain, she calls it, is always trying to figure out why this happened. It’s always trying to figure out an explanation. It needs an answer for all the questions.

Once you can move past the logic brain, you actually awaken the creative side of your brain, which can start to express things more in symbols and stories start coming alive.

The creative brain is actually figuring out, oh, this grief experience, this is interesting. How can I use that in a creative way to make something else?

I think, for me, when I felt that shift happen, that’s when I started to move into a more productive aspect of working through my grief. That’s when I was really able to start processing it better and get past all these ruminating thoughts that just came over and over again.

Joanna: I think that’s what’s interesting in your Stories from the Dark Night. It isn’t just that stream of consciousness grief. In fact, it’s not that at all. There’s all kinds of different sorts of writing.

Tell us what happened when you moved into that productive side of it, and what are the types of writing that came out?

Karen: Well, I started writing whatever came to me, and I guess the Morning Pages opened that up a little bit. After doing that for months and months, one day a poem came into my head, and I just wrote it down, and it happened to be about my dad’s death.

Another day, a story came to mind that I wrote about. It seemed that everything I started writing, even though I didn’t think it was related to my dad’s death, ended up being about my dad’s death in some way or another, symbolically or in some way or another.

Gradually, I just started having these creative impulses to write some little thing. I would write down whatever came to me. I was still doing the Morning Pages every day, but at other times of day, something else would pop up for me.

I would write a story, or sometimes it was an essay. Sometimes I read a guided writing prompt that actually really helped me dive deeper into a subject. Some of the prompts were as simple as someone said, “Write something about the word ‘leftovers’ and what that means to you.”

I’d think of the word leftovers, like how is that inspirational? And yet, I ended up writing a whole piece on leftovers. It was just being able to get into that creative part of my brain and writing whatever came to me.

I also then went on to more intentional writing. So I started writing letters to my dad and expressing some things that I didn’t get a chance to say before he died, expressing some of the deeper emotions that I felt around his death. That was very therapeutic as well.

Joanna: On therapy, I think this is really interesting, because when my husband left—I’m very happily married people, if you’re listening now, I am on my second marriage—but at that time, I didn’t see a therapist. Even though we’re doing a podcast, I’m not a talker. I didn’t want to talk about my issues.

Writing it down, I feel like writing all of that over the years it was, really, and sort of recovering, helped me heal. So I didn’t need a therapist, in some way.

Where’s the balance for people between writing helping with healing and maybe needing to see a professional?

Karen: I’m much like you. I’m not much of a talker. I’m not always wanting talk with another person or looking for that kind of external help. I’m much more internally oriented. So I want to dive into my own psyche. I want to look at that. I want to explore it for myself.

I think for certain, whenever someone feels like they are just stuck and not getting anywhere and beginning to have very hurtful thoughts going through their minds, or thoughts of feeling hopeless and that they may never be able to move forward, never be able to find a way through the grief. Then they might need an outside person who can come and help them reflect.

For me, it’s like my journal felt like a therapist to me. I guess I was, in some ways, dialoguing with my higher self in the journal and serving as my own therapist.

I could read back through what I wrote and see, oh, here’s something I hadn’t thought about before, but it’s right there in what I just wrote. So this insight is there for me, but some people may not be able to do that.

They may not be able to access that higher wisdom or a different perspective through writing alone. They may really benefit from talking to someone else. So I always encourage people to seek out counseling, find a therapist, especially if talking is beneficial for them.

Joanna: I think the other thing there is—I mean, you mentioned insomnia earlier—and I do feel like there is a period of grief that is closer to mental illness, which insomnia doesn’t help, obviously.

At one point, I think, in the DSM, grief was actually a mental illness, considered to be very bad, but then it was recognized as a part of the human condition.

So I guess, just to encourage people, if you’re feeling like it is completely, completely mad, then sometimes that is normal. It’s just a case of how long that goes on for. I guess, a bit like insomnia. You have to get that sorted out at some point.

Karen: Yes, because at some point it becomes destructive to your physical health.

If you find that you’re not thriving, and that you feel, in fact, that you’re falling apart in many ways, I think it’s really good to get input from an outside person and get help for that.

It’s funny, grief reentered the DSM this past year. They created a new category, pathological grief, that they defined so that they could include severe grief.

I think they realized, first of all, it was a mistake to say any kind of grief is a mental illness because it is actually a normal part of all of our lives.

Then when they took it out, they realized, oh, but wait, some people actually do get into a severe state of grief for which they need help. They may need medications, they may need therapy and counseling. So they made up a new diagnosis and put that back in.

Joanna: I’m glad you brought that up then, because I thought it had gone, and now it’s back. So, of course there is a difference.

I think also some religious traditions, there are periods of time and ways of addressing mourning and death. Where it’s like for a certain amount of time you are expected to grieve, and then at a certain point of time you are expected to—not forget it all—but to move on with your life.

It’s almost like those rituals of death and dying can help. In fact, you’re a spiritual person, and you do put a Matthew chapter five, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,” into your book.

How does a spiritual perspective help you in your life, in your writing, and for people who are grieving?

Karen: It has been important to me, and it’s one of the things I gained through my work, or deepened through my work in hospice.

Observing people and families who were dealing with death in general, and how they all grappled with these universal concepts that I would say are not limited to any one religion, but actually present in all religions. Love and forgiveness and finding meaning and purpose in things.

So I gravitated toward these spiritual concepts that, again, I’m not attached to any one religion, but I like the spiritual teachings and the concepts that are universal and apply to all of them.

So those ended up being the things where I found the most comfort is being able to focus on love and just bringing more love into my life. Acting with love, through love, and finding ways to love myself even though I was feeling broken and in pain.

Then forgiveness became especially powerful as well because I realized one thing that held me back in grieving my dad was not being able to recognize how angry I was at him and that I needed to forgive him for the choice he made to end his life.

I was in denial of that for many years, and when I finally saw it like, oh, I’m hanging on to this really deep seated resentment toward him for the choice he made. I have to be able to forgive him, because for whatever reason, that’s what he chose, and that’s what his life came to. I’m hurting myself by not forgiving him.

So that spiritual concept of forgiveness really changed everything for me. I work with that all the time now, remembering like, oh, don’t hold on to grudges. Don’t be resentful. Just get over it. Just find a way to forgive because holding on to that kind of anger can be really toxic.

Joanna: Well, that is the other side of anger, isn’t it? Anger is such a huge part of death and dying, no matter which side of it you’re on. It’s something I think about a lot.

There’s so much anger at the moment in the world, and I feel like some kind of forgiveness is so important because it is just so toxic when everything is angry all the time. I guess you would have seen that idea of a good death, where—

There is acceptance of what’s happening, as opposed to anger at what’s happening.

Karen: Yes, and I think the anger is normal and it has a place, so we need to accept it and embrace it. Yes, of course, we feel angry. Life didn’t go the way we hoped it would, like we’ve lost all these things, but it doesn’t serve us to stay stuck there if we can hold our anger, and then see a bigger picture beyond that.

I guess that’s the other thing, the spiritual perspective, for me, has become what I call it —

The galaxy view of life. Where you step back and look at everything from a bigger perspective, like looking down on planet earth where we live.

How does this experience I’m having fit into the cosmos, into everything that’s happening here? How do I accept it as this is just part of life, of this vast mystery of life?

I choose to move into curiosity sometimes, instead of anger. Like instead of doubling down and being angry about what’s happening, being curious about how did this arise, and what will come of it. What will happen next? What will come from it?

Then that puts me back into creative brain again.

Once you’re curious, you become creative, and you can find ways of making the best of the situation that you’re in.

Joanna: So we’ve talked a lot, I guess, about the writing we do for the self. You can put whatever you like in your journal, and it can be as repetitive as hell, and frankly, quite boring for anyone else to read.

Then, obviously, you’ve published several books about death, and Stories From the Dark Night has personal writing, but it is not that repetitive original work, I guess. It’s different. It’s been transformed.

So if people want to publish, obviously people listening are authors, how did you know when you were ready to share some of your writing about your dad and things that were difficult?

How can people move from personal writing to writing for publication around these difficult topics?

Karen: For me, I understood that I couldn’t share this writing until I had clarity around it.

I needed to be free of anger and blame. I understood a lot of the things I was writing early on were filled with those mixed emotions, but just ventilating anger and blaming other people, blaming everyone, blaming life.

I realized that is not productive. I’m ventilating it. It’s helpful to me to ventilate it. It’s not productive for other people to read that. I want to get to that place of this higher view, where I’m not looking at it through the lens of anger or blame, I’m looking at it really more through the lens of love.

How could talking about the pain that I experienced, is there a way that could be helpful to other people? How can I express that in a way that could foster healing and growth for someone else?

That took me years to get to a place where I felt like I’m not writing out of anger. I’m not writing because I want to use my writing to hurt someone. If that makes sense to you, that’s what I needed to get past. Making sure I had healed enough and I had enough clarity that I had the right reasons for putting my work out there.

Then I chose very carefully what to share. There are lots of things I didn’t share.

In that book, I was trying to share examples of what I wrote. Not that the writing itself is great, but I wanted to share examples of different ways that I wrote that ended up helping with my grief, different stories or essays or poems that I wrote that were helpful to me, just to inspire other people to do their own writing.

Joanna: There are writing prompts within the book in each chapter. So, I guess the main focus is — 

When we write for ourselves, it is all about us. Then if we’re going to publish something, it has to be a focus on the other person.

Karen: Yes, that’s primarily what I was feeling. How will this impact others? Can it be a positive thing, if I share it, that could inspire someone else and make them want to do their own writing and do their own work?

Joanna: So also in the book, you talk about lifelines, and I thought it was a great term. So what do you mean by that, and—

How might people hold on to lifelines when they’re going through grief or other life changes?

Karen: For me, when I was really deep in grief, I had this image of being caught up in a tsunami, in a sense. Just like these massive head waves, like rushing over me and feeling like I was drowning at times, but somehow I would always come to the surface.

There was always something I could hold onto, just some little thing, like someone had thrown me a rope. It was keeping me afloat, and it was helping me find my way back to the shore.

Instead of getting lost and thinking about, “oh, I’m so overwhelmed with grief,” to thinking, “oh, what was it yesterday that helped me get through?” Then I would remember, oh, I heard that amazing song on the radio, and that reminded me of something Dad and I did together.

Or I would find something. I found just a little note that my dad wrote to me when I was in college. I found it in a box somewhere, and seeing his handwriting, it was so touching to me. It actually brought me joy. That little moment was like one of those lifelines.

I started just paying attention to all kinds of things that were happening. Oh, and another thing was a bird song. My dad loved the Meadow Lark. We grew up in Wyoming, and it’s the state bird of Wyoming. I would, from time to time, I would see a Meadow Lark or hear a Meadow Lark sing.

I started watching for those little things, those little, tiny things. I’d be paying attention to the bird song, and I’d hear the Meadow Lark, and that was one of my life lines. Like, oh, there’s dad. There’s a connection with my dad.

When I started searching for the lifelines every day and just noticing and paying attention, every day there was something. Every day there was some kind of reminder that helped me feel connected to him.

Those little things I felt like were just enough to keep me afloat, when it seemed like, “Oh no, here comes the wave again. It’s going to wash me under,” but I would know there will be something. There’ll be something I can hang on to that will help me get afloat again.

Joanna: It’s interesting because, of course, specifics, like the sound of the Meadow Lark, are what also bring our writing alive. So it’s not just bird song. You know, I heard a bird sing. It’s always the specifics and paying attention. I guess, again, that gives you an external.

You’re looking outside of yourself, not just being stuck in your head.

Which can, again, just help you keep going.

Karen: Yes, definitely. Looking for all the little symbols and little signs outside of myself that reminded me of dad, sometimes even in a painful way. Oftentimes it was just poignant and sweet, the little reminders I would find.

My dad sometimes smoked a pipe with this cherry-scented tobacco in it, and the smoke always smelled like cherries. One day I smelled that. Someone was smoking a pipe with that scent, and I smelled it, and it was like, wow. It was amazing being transported, in a way, back into my childhood and being next to my dad.

It’s incredible when I started paying attention just how many little reminders there were. For me, they were always very positive. Some people describe that they don’t like having reminders because it makes them feel sadness over again, but for me, I always felt a mixture. I always felt the sweetness as well.

Joanna: Yes, that bittersweet, I think is the word. What about your family and other people who knew your dad?

One thing that people worry about sometimes if they publish work about family members, a memoir or something, is that other people feel differently about the situation.

So what are your thoughts on that? Did other people read it?

Was that not a concern? What are your recommendations for people?

Karen: When I started writing about it, the thing I was most concerned was my mother and how she would feel about it. Initially, I told my mom I had written some stories and they have to do with my dad’s death.

She said to me, “I don’t want to read them. Don’t tell me anything about it. I don’t want any of that. Don’t talk about it or tell me anything.”

Then I was really worried, like, oh no, if this is out in the world and other people comment to her, or other people read it, it will be upsetting to her. Then the very next day, she called me, and she said, “Read the story to me.” So she had to get to a place of comfort.

For me, it was a real dilemma. Do I put this out in the world if my mom can’t bear it, can’t bear that this information is out there? So I read her the story, and the story was just my story of my experience.

That’s what I told her. I’m not writing about what I think my dad experienced. I’m writing about my experience with grief when I found out my dad died and what that was like.

So I really did keep it true and honest to my own experience, without trying too much to conjecture on what my dad felt, or what anyone else felt, or anyone else’s actions at that time.

I kept to writing about what I experienced.

Anyway, I read the story to her. We cried together. She loved it. It was actually this incredibly positive healing moment for the two of us because we hadn’t been able to speak so deeply about our grief together in all these many years since my dad had died. That story is what unlocked it for us.

Joanna: Oh, that’s wonderful. Sometimes it can be a way to bring you together. I mean, again, we both said we’re not really talkers. I sometimes feel like I wish my family could read my books, or would be interested in reading my books, so they might understand how I feel.

I wouldn’t be able to say it out loud, whereas I can say it in writing.

It’s funny because I used to write a lot of letters, like up until a decade ago, or maybe two decades ago now with email—gosh, time flies.

I used to write so many letters in my teens, and then when I was backpacking in the early 2000s. I feel like maybe that’s something we don’t do so much anymore.

Karen: Yes, that’s so true. Like you, I think talking is difficult sometimes. To talk together about a painful subject, it’s sometimes really hard to find the words. We’re in our left brain all the time try, and we’re censoring ourselves constantly when we’re trying to talk.

It’s hard to have a really deep conversation with another person, but you can just write with honesty and integrity, and be real and raw on the page, and put it down.

Again, for me, it’s like I described before, I waited a long time before writing the story and then sharing that story. It was until I knew I did not write this to try to hurt someone, to try to blame my mom or hurt her, or my brother, or cause them any pain.

I made sure what I was writing felt pure to me. So I think that’s why it had a positive impact for her.

Joanna: Well, we say we would rather write, but we both have podcasts, and as we come towards the end, I wanted to just ask about your End of Life University Podcast, which I’ve been on. So tell people about that and—

What can people find on your End of Life University podcast?

Karen: I started the podcast after publishing my first book, 7 Lessons for Living from the Dying, and realizing nobody really wants to buy a book about dying. People don’t talk about this. Nobody wants to hear about it.

I realized it’s not enough to write a book, I have to do something else to try to change this conversation around these topics. So I got the idea then. I started listening to podcasts myself, and thought there needs to be a podcast on this subject.

So I started doing interviews, and I discovered your podcast shortly after that. I loved your style. I love the fact that you have a more eclectic podcast, that you go in lots of different directions, and you’re just interested in everything. So you have lots of different guests, a variety of guests with a variety of topics.

I decided that’s what I’m interested in, too. So I kind of modeled my podcast after yours. Inviting lots of different guests and having different types of conversations, thinking whatever we put out there should be helpful to someone.

The more people are able to hear conversations about difficult topics, the more comfortable they may get with having these conversations themselves. So I’ve been doing it for, well, I actually started in 2013 with my first interviews back then. So it’s been a while, like you. Not as long as you have been, but a while.

Joanna: That’s amazing. You do have so many different interesting topics and angles and different kinds of people. So has the reception been what you wanted?

I mean, you’ve obviously been doing it for so long, it’s still of value to you and your community.

Karen: Yes. I don’t really even know what I expected in the beginning. At first, I only attracted people who already worked for hospice, people who were already in the field and already had an interest.

Over the years, I’ve attracted more and more people who are just being themselves introduced to grief and death in their own lives.

I’ve received some amazing feedback and wonderful stories from people.

One young man told me a friend of his was dying, and he drove across the country to be with his friend. He listened to the podcast all the way there in the car so that he would understand death and dying and grief. He said it made all the difference.

He said, “I came to his bedside and I knew what to say, and I knew how to be with him and how to be comfortable with my own pain and grief because of all the interviews I heard.”

It was like, oh, wow, that’s why I’m doing this. That’s why I’m doing this, so — 

It’s a resource for people in a time of need who need to learn about something and want information.

So when I get feedback like that, it tells me, okay, this is why I’m doing it. It keeps me going, really, because it’s actually hard doing a podcast. It’s such hard work.

Joanna: Wow, you gave me goosebumps there. I know people listening will be affected by that because every single person is going to be affected by grief at some point. Whether it’s ourselves or other people, it’s going to happen. So I absolutely recommend your podcast and your books.

Tell people where they can find you and everything you do online.

Karen: If they go to the website, it’s EOLuniversity.com. EOL stands for end of life, but EOLuniversity.com. A link to the podcast is there, and to my books, and pretty much everything they need to know about me.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Karen. That was great.

Karen: Thank you, Joanna. I’ve really enjoyed it.

The post Writing As A Tool For Grief And Dealing With Change With Karen Wyatt first appeared on The Creative Penn.

I’m 50. It’s a big number!

I’ve had a sign on my wall for years now: “Create a body of work I’m proud of. 50 books by 50!” Did I make it? My calculations are below.

To put this in context, I’ve been writing seriously for publication since 2007, so this is the result of almost 18 years of consistent work.

I also have another sign on my wall that I made in a letterpress workshop: “Measure your life by what you create.”

This idea sits behind everything do and stems from my old job as an IT consultant implementing systems and processes into different companies in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

Although I was ‘successful’ in many ways and making a good living, I felt like everything I did back then was wasted energy. That everything I worked on would be blown away with the next software release. Time ate up everything I did and I hated that feeling.

Writing books and stories is almost the opposite way to spend my time. Time compounds everything I do, and as each year passes, and I keep writing and publishing, my pile of intellectual property assets grows.

I absolutely can measure my life by what I create these days.

Did I manage 50 books by 50 as Joanna Penn and J.F. Penn?

People often ask, ‘how many books have you written?’

But does that include multiple editions under the same title, which often are complete rewrites? Does that include short stories and novellas? What about co-written books? You can see the difficulty!

So, I’ve decided to calculate this with points. A full-length book or novella, even if co-written = 1 point. A short story or subsequent editions of a book = 0.5 points.

[TL;DR — Yes, I made it according to my points criteria! Breakdown below.]

You can find my books on the usual online stores in all the usual formats, and I narrate many of the audiobooks. You can also find my books for writers as well as workbooks and bundles as Joanna Penn at CreativePennBooks.com and my fiction and memoir at JFPennBooks.com.

Joanna Penn — Writing Craft Books

How to Write a Novel — 1

Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words — 1

How to Write Non-Fiction, Second Edition — 1.5

Sub-total: 3.5

Joanna Penn — Healthy writer books

The Successful Author Mindset — 1

The Healthy Writer, with Dr. Euan Lawson — 1

The Relaxed Author, with Mark Leslie Lefebvre — 1

Sub-total: 3

Joanna Penn — Writing Business Books

Author Blueprint — multiple editions over years, Ebook for free at TheCreativePenn.com/blueprint — 2

How to Make a Living With Your Writing, Third Edition — 2

How to Market a Book, Third Edition — 2

Public Speaking for Authors, Creatives, and Other Introverts, Second edition — 1.5

Business for Authors: How to be an Author Entrepreneur — 1

Co-Writing a Book, with J. Thorn, Second edition — 1.5

Productivity for Authors — 1

Audio for Authors: Audiobooks, Podcasting, and Voice Technologies — 1

Your Author Business Plan — 1

Sub-total: 14

Others and unpublished

Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Virtual Worlds: The Impact of Converging Technologies on Authors and the Publishing Industry — 1

How to Enjoy Your Job or Find a New One – Rewritten and re-published as Career Change — 1.5

Successful Self-Publishing, 4 editions, but it’s short! — 2

From Idea to Book (unpublished) — 1

From Book to Market (unpublished) — 1

Sub-total: 6.5

J.F. Penn — ARKANE Action Adventure Thrillers

Stone of Fire #1, 3 editions — 2

Crypt of Bone #2, 2 editions — 1.5

Ark of Blood #3, 2 editions — 1.5

One Day in Budapest #4 — 1

Day of the Vikings #5 — Ebook for free at JFPenn.com/free — 1

Gates of Hell #6 — 1

One Day in New York #7 — 1

Destroyer of Worlds #8 — 1

End of Days #9 — 1

Valley of Dry Bones #10 — 1

Tree of Life #11 — 1

Tomb of Relics #12 — 1

Soldiers of God, A Short Story — 0.5

Spear of Destiny #13 — 1

Sub-total: 15.5

J.F. Penn — Brooke & Daniel Crime Thrillers

Desecration #1 — 1

Delirium #2 — 1

Deviance #3 — 1

Sub-total: 3

J.F. Penn — Mapwalker Dark Fantasy Trilogy

Map of Shadows #1 — 1

Map of Plagues #2 — 1

Map of the Impossible #3 — 1

Sub-total: 3

J.F. Penn — Travel memoir and stand-alone books

Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways — 1

Catacomb — 1

Blood Vintage, currently on submission — 1

Death Valley, finished and launching on Kickstarter here — 1

Risen Gods with J. Thorn — 1

American Demon Hunters: Sacrifice with J. Thorn, Lindsay Buroker, Zach Bohannon — 0.5

Sub-total: 5.5

Short stories

A Thousand Fiendish Angels (3 short stories in a themed collection) — 1

Blood, Sweat, and Flame — 0.5

The Dark Queen — 0.5

Beneath the Zoo — 0.5

A Midwinter Sacrifice — 0.5

Blood, Sweat and Flame — 0.5

With a Demon’s Eye — 0.5

De-Extinction of the Nephilim — 0.5

Seahenge — 0.5

Sub-total: 5

Total points: 59

This is made up of 12 full-length non-fiction books, 8 short non-fiction books, 18 full-length novels, 6 novellas, 12 short stories, and a memoir.

I’m going to take this as a win, and say yes, I did manage 50 by 50!

What’s next?

Well, I’m not setting any further specific number goals, but I still have a lot of books in me waiting to come out. Most of them are under J.F. Penn these days — either fiction or non-fiction related to that side of me.

Who knows whether I will make it to 100, but I will certainly keep writing until the words stop flowing — hopefully for many more years to come!

Thanks for being here, and let me know your thoughts in the comments.

The post Measure Your Life By What You Create. 50 At 50 first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Nothing pulls readers into an epic story quite like a fantasy world that feels real—a place so immersive, it seems to extend beyond the page. The best fantasy worlds feel like they existed long before the story began, with deep histories, dynamic cultures, and internal logic that makes every detail feel inevitable. So how you can make your fantasy world feel real?

As one of the hottest genres on the market right now, fantasy seems to be everywhere. So many writers are interested in introducing fantastical elements into their stories. But even though it can seem as if fantasy authors can simply do whatever they want in their stories, since bending reality is the point, this isn’t actually the case. Exactly because of its potential for sprawling possibilities, successful fantasy requires a sure hand at the helm. This is nowhere truer than when it comes to worldbuilding.

I decided to write this post in response to a request from Timothy Joseph Coakley:

I would like you to write about fantasy/worldbuilding.

In fantasy, worldbuilding isn’t just about settings. Fantasy worlds play a much larger role than simply a physical background. For starters, a good fantasy world provides the necessary verisimilitude to help audiences suspend disbelief and invest their interest and sympathy in stories set in far-flung landscapes.

More than that, as perhaps the most symbolic of all genres, fantasy does best with worldbuilding that upholds a deeper level of meaning and metaphor. This can be done through parallels and references to real-life historical contexts, as well as by developing the “natural” laws that govern the story’s magic system.

Fantasy also requires a great deal of originality in its settings. Although Singapore or San Francisco can be used over and over in realistic fiction, fantasy requires a fully original setting for every new story. Although motifs emerge—usually via historical periods (such as the Middle Ages) or popular aesthetic trends (such as steampunk)—every fantasy world requires its own original social, historical, and sometimes even physical (as in the law of physics) context.

That’s no small task. But crafting all these details is also one of the chief joys of fantasy and one of the main draws for many authors.

However, by its very importance, authors also can’t afford to overvalue their fantasy worldbuilding. The world—including its magic system, creatures, history, language, landscape, and more—must exist to serve the story. In fantasy, perhaps more than any other genre, the worldbuilding becomes a key part of the plotting process—just as the plotting process becomes key in informing the worldbuilding.

Similar to weaving together a story’s plot, character arc, and theme, fantasy authors must  employ what I call the “bob and weave.” This is a flexible method that recognizes the integral symbiosis of all story parts. Instead of plotting (or worldbuilding) in a strict, linear fashion, this technique encourages you to move back and forth between different elements—and returning to adjust earlier sections as new ideas take shape. The goal isn’t to lock yourself into a strict blueprint but to build a framework that evolves naturally as your understanding of the story deepens.

>>Click here to read: Genre Tips: How to Write Fantasy

In This Article:

Want to Make Your Fantasy World Feel Real? Start with These 6 Pillars

Although in some ways historical fiction has always been my true love, most of my own stories have landed in the fantasy genre. Worldbuilding has always been one of my favorite parts of the process, not least because integrating the setting into the plot allows it to become a vibrant and thematically pertinent character in its own right.

My absolute #1 resource for fantasy worldbuilding has always been and remains Patricia C. Wrede’s bravura list of Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions, which organizes its hundreds of pertinent prompts into every useful category you could ever think of. If you have no idea what to do with your fantasy world, start there. If you’re already deep into your worldbuilding, circle back around at the end and use her questions to make sure you haven’t missed anything.

>>Click here for a shorter list: Are You Asking These Important Questions About Your Fantasy Settings?

For a more organic approach, start your worldbuilding with the following six pillars. These will show you how to make your fantasy world feel real.

1. Start With the Symbolism (and the Theme—and Character Arc)

Your choices for your fantasy world should never be arbitrary. Every piece of the setting should be intentionally chosen to support what’s most important: the story arc. Ideally, the fantasy world and its magical (i.e, non-realistic) aspects will act as an extension of your thematic metaphor by creating external events that catalyze and resolve your character’s inner journey.

This doesn’t mean your setting’s symbolism should be obvious. At its simplest, the setting should function to create the story’s conflict—which in turn will evolve the protagonist’s arc, which in turn will reveal and prove the story’s theme. (This means that if you have a really cool idea for a setting, but it doesn’t directly interact with your characters’ personal crises, then it probably isn’t an integrated choice.)

For Example: Star Wars setting of “a galaxy far, far away” felt particularly appropriate in a story about an intergalactic war, featuring a protagonist whose personal journey integrally connected him to that galaxy’s tyrannical rulers.

You can look to your theme for initial ideas about how to create or strengthen your setting. If you’re uncertain, turn to your understanding of historical, mythological, or archetypal stories. Is there a motif that feels catalytic to your plot or character ideas?

For example: The erupting classism of the Victorian period provided a potent backdrop for the fantasy Carnival Row, which played out themes of racism by exploring the relationships of different fantasy creatures—Pix (fairies), Pucks (fauns), Marrocks (werewolves), etc.

2. Exploring Magic and/or Religion

Perhaps the single factor that sets true fantasy apart from alternate history is its inclusion of fantastical elements—most often in the form of magic. How this magical element alters the rules of nature (as we know them) opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities. Because fantasy magic represents unfamiliar forces, it automatically becomes a type of metaphor, as audiences seek a real-life parallel through which to understand this story element. Most commonly, magic represents power, creating the opportunity for thematic explorations of power’s cause and effect, both for good and evil.

For Example: Lord of the Rings‘ primary example of magic is simply the existence of the demonic One Ring—through which are explored questions of the corrupting influence of power and the countering possibilities of devotion and grace.

Throughout the decades of fantasy worldbuilding, magic systems have become notoriously more complex and sophisticated. Magic maestro Brandon Sanderson sets the bar for thematically cohesive magic systems based on logical laws of use, usually created by organizing the system around a unifying catalyst, such as metals in Mistborn.

However, it bears saying once again that the story doesn’t serve the magic system; the magic system serves the story. Although complexity can be fun, “complicated” is not. Cohesion and a tidiness of focus are hallmarks of magic systems that enhance their stories rather than taking away from them. Audiences (not to mention you) should be able to explain how your magic system works in a few sentences. You can layer complexity on top of that, but the basics should be clear.

For Example: Rebecca Yarros’s staggeringly popular Fourth Wing and its sequels offers a complex magic system full of revelations and twists, but the basis of its magic system is clear enough to describe in one sentence: dragons bond with riders and give them unique powers.

One of the best ways to integrate your magic system into your world is to look at how it appears from within your world. Magic systems will often be established within a story world as either scientific (e.g., Fourth Wing) or spiritual/religious (e.g., Lord of the Rings, Blood Song) or a little bit of both (e.g., Mistborn, Black Prism, Star Wars). Even if you don’t feel your magic system naturally arises from one of these angles, examine how both institutions interact with the magic. Plenty of metaphors waiting to happen right there!

For a handy guide to creating a cohesive and complete magic system, check out C.R. Rowenson’s Magic System Blueprint.

3. Connecting the Antagonist and the Climax

One of the most important parts of making your fantasy world feel real is integrating it cohesively with your plot. One of the best ways to do that—whether you’re creating, double-checking, or troubleshooting—is to consider your story’s finale.

Remember: your story’s ending proves what it’s about.

Whatever happens in your story’s Climax—however it decides the conflict—is your story. Everything leads up to that.

Although fantasy can focus on smaller more relational stories, the genre is best known for epic confrontations between forces of good and evil. A good battle is de rigeur for a fantasy Climax. As such, fantasy is also usually known for its strong antagonist characters. Like all parts of the story, the antagonist should never be an arbitrary decision.

Apart from the usual requirements that the antagonist be formed as a worthy foil to challenge the protagonist on both the outer and inner levels, a fantasy antagonist should also be chosen to fully represent the opposing aspects of the thematic premise. In fantasy, as we’ve already discussed, it’s even more important than usual for the theme to be sewn into every part of the worldbuilding. This means crafting the antagonist is fundamentally a worldbuilding decision (even more so, in some ways, than crafting the protagonist).

Think of it this way: if your story’s magic symbolizes the theme in some way, then the antagonist must interact with that magic in a way that opposes or challenges the protagonist’s own use of it.

For Example: Almost all of the great fantasy stories offer obvious examples of thematic antagonists, including Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. One of the best examples is Harry Potter, in which the protagonist’s evolution into his full magical ability is continually contrasted by, compared to, and challenged by the antagonist’s relationship to that same magic. This story is a particularly good example of tight plotting, thanks to an antagonist who, even in his absence, is never an arbitrary opponent or simplistic representation of evil—but rather is a mirror to the protagonist’s own character arc as he explores the potential of magic as a metaphor for both corrupted power and love.

4. Shaping History, Culture, and Government

The fun of fantasy is that it allows us to explore scenarios that look like things we are familiar with, but without needing to worry about getting all the facts right. The flipside is this means you have to make up everything. And you have to do it in a way that feels just as real as real life. In some ways, it’s actually more work than research!

It’s tons of fun though. As long you’re focusing on several key areas, you can easily create a facsimile world that feels utterly real and convincing. Start with your world’s history, culture, and government. These three will be intertwined (more bob and weave, anyone?). It should go without saying they should also be intertwined with your intentions for your story’s plot, theme, and character arc.

If you’re like me, early ideas for your fantasy may give you a sense of what its world looks or feels like. Perhaps, in the genre’s oldest tradition, it seems to take place in a pseudo-medieval setting. However, you might just as easily base your setting on modern-day social structures and mores.

Either way, this provides a basis for exploring questions that can flesh out an entire world in a way that feels compelling and convincing. You can ask how the circumstances of people’s lives in this period would have influenced their views. What historical developments—either positive or negative—might have led to these circumstances? You can also retcon this by examining what you know about your characters’ plights or actions, then examining what kind of history and culture would have created such a scenario.

From there, you can advance to what is often an important decision in fantasy: government. Not all stories will focus on government-level conflict, but because of the scope of their stakes (and their frequent thematic discussions of power), many fantasies create elaborate governments, usually based on something more than a little bit familiar.

For Example: In many ways, Game of Thrones is as much alternate history as fantasy, since it utilizes relatively little magic, while exploring the history, culture, and themes of medieval succession, explicitly based on England’s War of the Roses.

5. Crafting Language

Although not all fantasy stories will feature multiple and/or foreign languages, many do. Again, this is largely due to the scope of the stakes in many fantasy stories, which deal with the fates of one or more countries at the national level. Another attractive reason for indulging in special languages for your fantasy is that doing so can foster the impression your story world is as vast and varied as our own.

A little language goes a long way in fantasy. Tolkien’s linguistic genius aside, most audiences (especially readers) don’t find much joy in skimming over long sentences (or, God forbid, paragraphs) they can’t understand.

As with every intentional decision in your story, your inclusion of made-up words should always further the story in some obvious way. One of the most obvious reasons for including a foreign language is when it makes no sense for one group of people within your world to understand the language of another.

However, unless you’re a linguist yourself, there’s no reason not to keep your language creation relatively simple. One of the easiest approaches is to choose an existing language (one that fits the motif of your story world) and use its conventions to construct a language that follows similar rules. For example, the story I’m currently working on is set in Dark Ages Great Britain, where it made sense to create a language that looks a bit like Gaelic.

For a heavy-duty resource, check out The Art of Language Invention by David J. Peterson (who developed the languages for the Game of Thrones HBO adaptation). For a slightly more intuitive tool (which you can customize to the complexity you desire), check out VulgarLang.

6. Weaving Backstory

When you focus on backstory, you narrow your focus from the general history of your fantasy world to the specific history that informs your story and your characters. Discovering characters’ backstories can be one of the most important tools for developing your fantasy world.

Why?

Because it tells you a) what you need your story’s world to do in order to best further the story and b) what events in your world’s historical development are truly important.

In working through your story’s backstory and then plotting it, you will discover the richest and most pertinent details. This is where you will learn how to make your fantasy world feel real.

This is also an important part of the “bob and weave.” As you’re developing your characters and plot, you will inevitably get stuck as you realize you don’t know how (or why) to get your characters to do something important. Perhaps you don’t fully understand what would motivate such a person. Or perhaps you need characters to accomplish something magical but don’t know quite how your magic system will pull that off.

This is where you stop what you’re doing and move over to worldbuilding. Then after a bit, you’ll get stuck again. Perhaps you don’t know what kind of antagonistic government might best oppose your protagonist’s personal journey. Or perhaps you’re worried your magic system is starting to get too complicated. Stop again and return to ask your characters. What do they need? What best serves them?

***

Worldbuilding is one of the greatest joys of writing fantasy, but it’s also one of its greatest challenges. The best fantasy stories aren’t just set in immersive worlds; they’re shaped by them. Every detail, from the magic system to the antagonist’s philosophy, should serve the greater whole of your plot, theme, and character arcs. The key to making your fantasy world feel real isn’t in how much you invent, but in how seamlessly everything fits together. By approaching your worldbuilding with purpose and flexibility, you can craft a setting that breathes with life and resonates with readers long after they turn the final page.

In Summary:

Creating a fantasy world that feels real requires more than just imagination. It demands cohesion, intentionality, and integration with your story’s plot and themes. From magic systems to history, culture, and government, each aspect of worldbuilding should reinforce the story’s conflicts and character arcs. By weaving these elements together with a dynamic, evolving approach, you can build a world that captivates readers and elevates your storytelling.

Key Takeaways:

• Worldbuilding isn’t just about setting—it must serve the story’s plot, theme, and character arcs.
• Start with symbolism to ensure your world reinforces the deeper meaning of your story.
• Magic, religion, and science shape the world’s internal logic and can serve as powerful metaphors for your themes.
• Antagonists should be deeply intertwined with the worldbuilding, particularly if magic plays a central role in your conflict.
• History, culture, and government provide realism that makes your fantasy world feel as deep and layered as our own.
• The “bob and weave” approach allows for flexibility, letting your world evolve naturally alongside your story.

Want more?

If you want your story to resonate on a deeper level, theme is the thread that ties everything together—from your antagonist’s motivations to the climactic choices your protagonist faces. In my book Writing Your Story’s Theme, I break down how to craft a theme that emerges naturally from your story’s elements, rather than feeling forced or preachy. If today’s discussion got you thinking about the deeper layers of your plot, you’ll find insight inside the book. It’s available in paperback, e-book, and audiobook.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What are your favorite techniques for how to make your fantasy world feel real? Tell me in the comments!

Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or Spotify).

___

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The post How to Make Your Fantasy World Feel Real: 6 Pillars of Organic Worldbuilding appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

How can you release more creativity into your writing — and your life? What are some practices to foster creativity in a time of change and overwhelm? Jacob Nordby gives his tips.

In the intro, tips for spring cleaning as indie authors; Death Valley – A Thriller Kickstarter; Death Valley book trailer; Footprints Podcast – Bath in Literature;

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Jacob Nordby is an entrepreneur and author of several books, including The Creative Cure: How Finding and Freeing Your Inner Artist Can Heal Your Life.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Indications we might need a “creative cure”
• Practices to strengthen your connection with creativity
• Journaling as a tool to work through mental and creative blocks
• Practices around the physical body
• Tapping into your intuition
• Overcoming the fear that holds you back
• Time and effort involved in changing career directions
• How to keep pivoting, changing, and moving forward

You can find Jacob at JacobNordby.com.

Transcript of Interview with Jacob Nordby

Joanna: Jacob Nordby is an entrepreneur and author of several books, including The Creative Cure: How Finding and Freeing Your Inner Artist Can Heal Your Life. So welcome to the show, Jacob.

Jacob: Thank you so much. I’m so glad to be here, Jo.

Joanna: I’m excited to talk to you. So first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into creativity and writing.

Jacob: Well, I was born … We won’t start there! When I was 10 years old, I came out into the living room, and I’d been reading a book, which I did mostly. We didn’t watch television or see movies or anything like that. So books were my very best friends.

So I came out of the living room and told my parents that I want to be a writer. Of course, I had told them before I wanted to be a spy or firefighter or something. This was the first thing that really hit for me, and I could really feel it.

Then fast forward into adulthood, and I promptly forgot that, and plunged into starting businesses and really trying to secure my place in the American dream. I woke up around age 35 realizing that this was all feeling very hollow.

After a series of events that turned my world upside down, I moved to Austin, Texas. It was there, working two or three part time jobs and trying to figure out what was next, that I remembered that I really wanted to be a writer. So I began to write about 15 years ago.

One of the things that helped me get started was The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Are you familiar with that work?

Joanna: Yes, absolutely.

Jacob: Okay, well, I was sitting in this warehouse and was writing away and began to go back into this book my father had given me, The Artist’s Way. It really broke me open. I longed, at some point, to be able to share the process of not just writing, but of discovering who we really are and expressing that.

Fast forward about five or six more years from there, and I had the great pleasure of meeting Julia, and she’s become a dear friend. So that’s one aspect of the work I do, is I work with her and share these things.

Also, in my own world, I hold workshops and do one-on-one work with people, guidance work, with both writers and non-writers. It’s just something I love because —

I see creativity as our vital spark, as our life force energy, and it’s meant to flow in every part of our lives.

Often, when people will show up saying, “I’m creatively blocked,” we will pull that thread a bit and discover it’s not just “creatively blocked.” I’m doing my air quotes fingers right now. It’s feeling blocked in life.

So, often as we work through what are some channels in life that need to be opened up, they discover maybe it was “I need to clean my garage.”

Then they go clean the garage and come back in two weeks and say, “Oh my goodness, I had no idea how much I was boxing up my emotions, my sense of possibility, and everything. I found old boxes from my divorce or from when my mother died. I went through there, and all of a sudden I feel emotionally open and able to express again.”

So I love working with people in so many ways and helping them realize that expression is meant to be as natural as breathing for the creative spirit.

Joanna: Well, let’s get into the book then, because it’s called The Creative Cure. I find this an interesting title because the word “cure” implies a sickness where we start from. So I guess you mentioned feeling blocked there.

What are some of the things in our life or our writing that indicate we might need such a cure?

Jacob: You know, it’s interesting. I wrote a previous book called Blessed Are the Weird, and that was this very direct sort of manifesto for creatives. I was surprised how many people showed up and raised their hands and said, “I’m one of this group,” whatever this group is.

There were a lot of other people, Jo, who would tell me, “I’m not that creative. In fact, I don’t know if I have a creative bone in my body.” My heart just said we need to change this idea, what the idea of creativity has become.

In a lot of cases, I feel like it’s been affected by the industrial era of production and distribution, which are wonderful things.

A lot of artists find themselves stuck because they can’t see how what they have to create and share will ever become widely viable in that way.

So, cure. Here’s what I feel very deeply about our creative spirit is that it can’t be broken or damaged, but the process of becoming adults in the modern world often fills the connection between who we are out there and our true inner creative self with static. So, for me —

The cure isn’t curing the essence of who we are as humans or creatives. It is curing that connection.

I feel like we are all susceptible to it in some way. Our attention spans are fractured. We have a rate of change that is, I feel, really unsustainable for the human psyche to absorb in our lifetimes.

In this era, we’ve absorbed more change than previous generations might in two or three generations. So I feel like a lot of us can feel hurried and frantic and just out of sorts, and that will become evident in our creative work.

So, for me, it’s not so much curing the true person. It’s looking at what practices can I bring in that will strengthen and revitalize that connection.

Joanna: Yes, I get you on the pace of change. On the day we’re recording this, just yesterday, Microsoft announced this new quantum state of matter. I was like, seriously, haven’t we got enough going on? Do we need something else again? So it does definitely feel like that.

So you mentioned there’s some things that can help us maybe break through that static to fix that connection with our creativity if we’re feeling like we’ve lost it. I like the word static, actually. I think sometimes it really does feel like that, just a bit disconnected.

What are some of the creative practices you recommend?

Jacob: One thing that I love to recommend as a starting point is a ritual. Ritual can sound kind of mystical or complicated. To me, it’s really a state of awareness. So let’s just say we make our cup of coffee in the morning and run out the door and gulp it as we drive, that’s one way.

Another way would be to slow down and say, “I am creating this cup of coffee,” and bring all of our attention and intention into the process of it, which changes our experience of it.

I love to invite people who are sitting down to write to create some version of a ritual, so they realize they are entering a different state of awareness. Our awareness is so yanked in different directions. We jump on social media, and we see distressing things.

We see all these things coming around, and we often don’t realize that we take that fractured or static-filled state of being or awareness into what we’re doing, which means that we’re not really allowing the pure stuff to come through as easily. It can feel harder.

So I love creating these personal rituals. Whether it’s as simple as lighting a candle, it can be almost anything. The real keys here are the attention and intention that I bring.

It’s an interesting shift, like to invite ourselves in there and notice that, oh, in this space, I feel quite different.

I feel I have access to different ideas, a different way of expressing.

I’ll just use this morning as an example. I woke up, and it’s really cold here in Northern USA. It’s gray outside, and I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired. So I went to my favorite little coffee shop with my journal, and this will be another practice I’ll talk about in a moment, but asked myself to enter a different state of awareness.

So, for me, one item is creating these small rituals that help us intentionally shift into a different state of mind.

Joanna: Well, since you mentioned journals, maybe talk more about that.

Jacob: Well, you’re aware of The Artist’s Way and Morning Pages, and that’s where I started with that, really in earnest. I also realized that many people don’t find a whole lot of value in just long form, sort of dumping it out on paper. I do. I’m a writer. That’s one of my favorite ways of expressing and exploring.

So over time, I developed a set of three questions, and I’ve shared this. When I first created this years ago, Jo, I put it out and was pretty sure it was way too basic and didn’t have a lot of value.

Then I had people get a hold of me. Therapists were saying, “Oh, my goodness. My clients are journaling for the first time using this practice.”

So the three questions are, the first one is, “How do I feel right now?”

I’ll come back to that. The second one is, “What do I need right now?” The third one is, “What would I love to create right now?”

If I’m going through a lot of emotional turbulence or something, I’ll often switch that question up a bit and say, “How would I love to feel right now?”

So going back to that first question and the second, early in life, many of us internalize the messages that our needs don’t matter and our feelings don’t matter. In fact, how many of us have been told you can’t trust your feelings?

So by asking these questions and really grounding them, really coming into the moment, how do I feel right now? Oh, I feel grouchy and tired. I feel uninspired. Or, I feel great. Whatever it might be.

The fact is, we send a signal to our psyche by asking that question and answering it that says, “I matter. My feelings matter.” Then we move on to the, “What do I need right now?”

Again, often it’s prosaic for me, “Oh, I’m thirsty. I need to get a drink of water.” “Oh, I’m tired. I should take a small nap.”

Or it might be something larger or more existential, but in any case, again, it sends that message to the inner self saying, “I matter.” There’s something wonderfully calming about that, is what I’ve discovered, Jo.

Joanna: I wonder if that’s also grounding in the physical body. I mean, I walk a lot, so if I need to ground myself, I often will go for a walk out in nature, and that really helps. Or I do lifting, lifting heavy objects, powerlifting. Again, anything that grounds me in my physical body actually takes me away from the screen.

Most of what stresses us is beyond the screen and isn’t happening right now, I guess. Do you have those practices around grounding in the physical body?

Jacob: Oh, yes. I love that you mentioned walking. That’s one of my favorite practices. I also teach, and use as often as I can, just really simple breathing techniques, like box breathing. Often, to your point, I find that —

We are often quite disassociated from our bodies. We spend so much time up in our heads and in concepts versus what’s in reality.

So, yes, I feel like these things can be incredibly simple. I do love going to the gym and lifting heavy things as well.

The walk thing, you know, if I can just put my phone in my back pocket or leave it home, which, frankly, I don’t really do very often, but go out and take a walk. Things change. There’s this bilateral stimulation that’s happening when we’re walking. It’s almost like an EMDR effect, if you want to put it that way.

I’ve found that walking can often help us process deeply and open things up. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve taken a long walk and come back with the solution to some challenge I was having in my writing work that day. I would love to hear if you’ve had those experiences too.

Joanna: Oh, absolutely. It’s one of my go-tos. I walk every day. I live in Bath in the UK. It’s a very walkable city, and I live near a canal. So I walk an awful lot. I’ve done pilgrimages and all of this. So walking, for me, is like a core thing for mental health and physical health and creativity.

As you say, sometimes you just go for a walk and you come back—and, I mean, I take my phone too, for writing all the notes down that come up as I walk. So, yes, I think that’s important.

I do want to come back on the journaling because, and this is very interesting, you mentioned earlier about this industrial era, production and distribution. Keep in mind that I’m a professional author. I write books for a living, and many of the listeners, we write books.

Let’s say we have half an hour to write, the feeling is, “I must be writing words for my book.” Whatever that book is, and there’s always another book, right?

How do you suggest people balance this need to write words for the next book versus journaling for the need of expressing yourself?

Jacob: I love that. I want to be very clear that I’m not throwing rocks at the industrial era. Civilization has really benefited from so many things that have happened there. I think that sometimes, especially people who are just getting started as writers, they can feel all this pressure.

You know, Jo, you’ve written many, many books and bestsellers, and just had that experience. So that’s such a different thing than most people have who are just getting started. I think there can be this intense focus on, “How do I write a best seller?” So that can often become its own block.

Back to the journaling piece, I think that a lot of times people conflate those. It’s like, well, if I’m going to write, then I need to write on my project, and journaling feels like writing.

I really love to think of journaling more like emotional, mental, spiritual yoga.

So it’s a practice, but it’s not the same as what we’re doing when we sit down to write. In fact, I would challenge anyone who is feeling a little creatively blocked but also doesn’t feel like journaling would have much value, I would suggest trying it for a week.

Spend 10 minutes, just 10 minutes. It’s 10 minutes a day, writing out—using my three questions is fine, or anything else—but just writing out, “This is what’s up for me. What is coming up for me? Okay, this is what’s up. This is what’s really bothering me.”

So often, I find when I sit down to do that, as I pull what looks like a very small dangling thread, it leads to much deeper things that are going on in my life. The act of acknowledging those things does something freeing. It opens up the channel.

So when I sit down to write, I’m no longer also trying to multitask by having three different conversations with people I’m having difficulty with in my head, or sorting out my taxes in my head, or whatever. There’s something really wonderful about putting it on the page and acknowledging it.

I think that there are parts of the psyche that come forward and say, because you paid attention, and we know that you’re going to pay attention to this as needed, now we’ll relax. We had to get your attention. Now we have your attention. You’ve acknowledged it.

Now we’ll relax so you can go on and do these other things that are important to you. I find that to be tremendously valuable, versus just trying to power through with all these prose flying around my head.

Joanna: Yes, I think for me, it’s just that it is a completely different thing. I feel like the issue is people think writing is writing, but it’s not. I call myself a binge journaler, and this is one of my issues with Morning Pages, is that kind of “it must be every day.”

Of course, we don’t like shoulds and shouldn’t, so we’ll come back to that.

I definitely do not journal every day, but it sort of builds up and builds up and builds up, and then I will go to a cafe and I will journal, and all this stuff will come out.

Then it might be three weeks or something until I feel that need again.

In the meantime, I do my job, which is writing words for publication, which is like a completely different thing. So is it just the feelings that we have and learning to tap into where are those feelings going?

Is it a “making up a story” kind of feeling, or is it an “I really need to sort out my life” kind of feeling?

Jacob: I really love that distinction, and I’m glad you brought it up because I don’t believe in dogma either, so shoulds and shouldn’ts. I really love that you’re so in touch with your intuition or your feelings, that you’re able to go, “Oh, I need a different version of this today.” I feel like that’s really wise.

Joanna: Oh, that’s very kind. Well, you mentioned intuition there, and you do talk about intuition and also joy around our writing in the book.

If people feel like they’re not very intuitive, how can they tap into that and also find more joy?

Jacob: I would love to hear your definitions of intuition. When you hear that word, and not just the straight up definition, but any connotations, like what comes up for you when you hear that word?

Joanna: I guess we’re coming back to feelings again. I just sense that I should do something. I am an intuitive writer, so I don’t plot, necessarily. I write the next book with whatever kind of comes up for me. So it’s just sort of tapping into what my creative self wants to do, I guess.

Jacob: I love that, and I didn’t expect a lot different. I was just curious. Some people have a pretty negative connotation, or feel a negative connotation, in that word. They feel like it’s really mystical. They feel like, oh, it’s just sort of woo or out there. I would suggest it’s extremely grounded.

I mean, I think you articulated it really well. You know, this is the feeling of this thing.

I have a friend who’s a neuropsychologist, and he wrote a great book called No Self, No Problem. We were having this wonderful conversation one day, actually, while I was writing The Creative Cure.

I said, “Well, Chris, it feels like what you’re saying is in our modern world, it’s almost as if we’ve told a body builder to only work out the muscles on the left side of their body. Like that’s the only thing that has value. Don’t even bother with the right side. Then after 20 years of following that advice, the body builder has a hard time even walking down the road because there’s no functional balance or muscle.”

He got all excited. He said, “Oh, yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.” I think we have to be aware that in our current paradigm, the left brain activities are so highly valued and rewarded that we tend to distrust what’s happening in the right side.

This includes our experience of creativity in a more free flowing way. It includes experience of intuition, of feelings, of imagination.

So, for me, it’s never the idea that we need to get rid of the left brain activity. It’s like we really need those to finish a book, to put it out there, to take these steps forward, but we’ve over emphasized it. So what I like to encourage us to do is play little games.

Notice throughout the day what synchronicities come up.

We don’t have to attach any particular meeting to them. If you see repeating numbers, or you’re driving down the road and you just have this nudge to take this road versus the other road on your way to your destination.

I like to just play with it without going, okay, I’m going to have some miraculous thing, or an epiphany, or something dramatic is going to happen, or I’ve just avoided a horrible death. It doesn’t have to be anything dramatic like that.

Just the noticing of the interoception, the signals that are coming up from our bodies and from our other senses, and tuning into them a little bit more. We can find that there is very interesting guidance available to us at all times. People can interpret that mystically, or people can be very practical with it.

There’s some brain science here, where when we settle down from our fight or flight response, from our higher anxiety levels, we enter that ventral vagal state, Jo, and that’s where all the good stuff happens.

I love to call it the Green Zone, or the creative zone, because as we settle more deeply, we become more aware. Our tunnel vision begins to fade, and we become aware of the answers and the ideas that are all around us.

So I love to invite people to play with it and actually really use it as a game, so it doesn’t have to feel so serious. Like, what am I feeling right now? If I totally listen to my body and to my senses, what would I do this morning for breakfast versus what I always do, for example. Again, it can be very simple.

Joanna: I feel like maybe people have a problem with trust and are afraid of getting something wrong.

I’m very creatively confident now after many years of being a writer, but at the beginning it was like, well, I feel like I should do this thing, but what if I’m wrong?

What if I spend the next six months working on this book, and then nobody wants it? Or what if I choose to spend some money on this particular marketing thing, and then it just doesn’t work?

This fear of making a choice based on intuition, it holds people back. What are your thoughts on that?

Jacob: If you don’t mind, I’d love to ask a question in response. I’m curious if you can think back over your career, or just general life, and think about a time you did make a mistake?

Something you look back on later, and were like, “Oh, I would never have done that again,” but that it actually led you into experiences that actually became very important parts of your life. Can you think of anything like that?

Joanna: Yes, well, obviously there’s lots of them because we all make tons of mistakes.

I mean, the big one that I often talk about is back before print on demand, I did a massive print run. Back in 2007, I did a big print run of my first book, and then they all sat in my garage because I didn’t know anything about book marketing.

I didn’t realize that if you wrote a book, nobody would buy it unless you did some marketing. So that actually led me to start The Creative Penn, to start this podcast, to learn about book marketing. What really sort of jump started my career was this massive failure. So, yes, absolutely.

I mean, we all do these things, don’t we? But—

Fear holds people back.

Jacob: Always. I mean, I don’t know if there’s one other factor that holds us back more than simple fear. I feel like it’s very primal. We have this wiring that includes a negativity bias, and that’s such a survival thing. It serves us, right, so there’s nothing wrong with it. I think we just have to be aware of it.

Our imaginations are tuned, and often from a very early age, to begin imagining scenes in which we are experiencing rejection or failure or something painful, disappointment, and so we often use our imaginations primarily for that cause.

So I love to invite people to begin just taking a recess, even if it’s only five minutes, and imagining themselves in scenes of what they would really love to experience.

I just love the story you just told. I know that it’s completely like imaginary, but I’m just curious, if you hadn’t printed all those books and had to learn how to market, and perhaps got picked up by a different publisher, and everything just kind of went swimmingly, I’m just curious what you wouldn’t be enjoying in your life right now. Can you imagine what that might be?

Joanna: What I wouldn’t be enjoying?

Jacob: Like you have such beautiful work in this podcast, and all that you do, and the way you serve and teach the writing community. So I’m just curious, if things had worked out better, you know, like a garage not full of your books, I’m just curious what you wouldn’t have now if you hadn’t made that mistake.

Joanna: Well, I think what happened was because of that failure in print publishing at that time in history, it just also coincided. You used the word synchronicity earlier, and I know Jungian psychology, so I absolutely love synchronicity.

It was the same year that the Kindle launched and the iPhone launched, and when I failed in this print publishing, traditional media, you know, I got on national TV—I was in Australia at the time—but then none of it worked.

Then I saw the Kindle, I saw the iPhone, and I saw Americans, and I was like, what if I can use this technology and I don’t have to use print books?

I can reach these people through digital means.

So I got on the Kindle, and the iPhone, and podcasting very, very early, and have kind of surfed that technological wave since then. So that “mistake” led me into so much. But you keep putting this back on me, Jacob—

I think you need to tell us about one of your mistakes that has turned into success.

Jacob: Oh, my god. Well, you know, I alluded to it earlier, but I had built these businesses, and I was waking up at 3am every day absolutely terrified. Everyone around me, all they saw was this big new office I had built. All they saw was the influence I had around town or whatever.

They couldn’t see how terrified I was.

That was around 2007, actually. So I had a pretty big breakthrough. I went to what I thought was a meditation retreat. It turned out to be a shamanic initiation, and I didn’t know what a shaman was.

I had a medicine journey during that that was like this massive moment of clarity, and I had no idea what to do with it. I went back to my life, to my office, and scrambled as hard as I could.

All I knew is that I had experienced some aspect of me that was free, that wasn’t afraid, and that would actually love to have created something very different with life. I also had no idea how to rearrange my life. I just I felt so responsible.

The next year or so, the financial meltdown, the mortgage meltdown, came along and just wiped me out. So, of course, I don’t like to sugar coat these things and go, “Oh, you know, everything happens for a reason, and it was exactly what I needed.”

It’s like, no, it was absolutely terrifying and turned me upside down, but that was the event. I could look back and say, “Oh, I made so many mistakes. I got in so far too deep into these projects and all that.”

The truth is, though, that experience—and I love that you’re familiar with Jungian work—that’s where I began to really learn about the Jungian work during that time, Jo, and that was what really cracked me open and allowed me to find out who I was under all those previous layers.

It was like I was wearing this really heavy, ill-fitting armor for so long, and so that was one of those really big “mistakes” that led to me finding the path I was really meant to be on in the first place.

Joanna: That’s interesting. I think we might be like almost exactly the same age. I think we’ve gone through things at exactly the same time.

Time is a really important thing here because both of us are talking about experiences. I also got laid off in the financial crisis, and it took a lot of time, but that also shaped the way I run my business now.

So let’s just talk about the perspective of time because it feels like both of us have said, “Oh, this really bad thing happened, and then I changed my life.” How long did it take you to extricate yourself from the situation you were in and be in a life where you were more happy and fulfilled? Not that we’re ever completely there.

I feel like that’s what people need, is this sort of perspective on—

If you want to change direction, how long does it take? What’s the effort involved?

Jacob: Do you want me to give a comfortable story, or do you want me to tell what I feel is the truth?

Joanna: The truth, absolutely.

Jacob: I love what you said on your website. You know, it hasn’t always been this way. No, and I would never want to discourage anyone by saying it can be a really lengthy process.

I will say that, at least in my experience, I had so much I was carrying when it comes to my beliefs about myself and the world and what I was capable of, and all of that, that that big, sort of terrifying event that shook everything up, it was like I had some years of simply going.

I’d been running so fast that I haven’t ever looked under the hood, if you will. I’m mixing my metaphors there. My mother is a therapist, and she likes to use the idea of skating on a frozen river. She said I skated on this frozen river and I was terrified that if ever slowed down, I would fall in, the ice would crack and I would fall in.

She’s like, one day the ice just broke open, and I fell in, and I had no choice but to do all this inner work and examination. I think that’s a really beautiful way to look at it.

So once the process of self-discovery really gets underway, I would like to say it’s exactly 16 months, in my experience. It can take longer, but if we’re willing to see it as that, and not just numb it out or try to run away from it or do whatever over the top of it —

If we’re willing to go into that exploration, what we’ll find in there is ourselves.

What we’ll find in there is our authentic voice. What we’ll find in there is our sense of purpose. So I’d love to give, well, it’s a range of one to seven years, but in my experience, it was several years before I even began to feel that my footing was coming back, Jo. I would love to hear what your experience of that was.

Joanna: Well, again, pretty similar. It’s funny, I was just reflecting then because you’re reminding me of those early days. This book, The Creative Cure, I feel like now I’m not in the place where I need this, but this is the book I needed back in 2005 when I was 30 years old and thinking, “What the hell am I doing with my life?”

I read, then, and I listened to a lot of audios. Tony Robbins, a good self-help guru. Jack Canfield, The Success Principles. Those are the books I was reading, and I was trying to change my mindset. Then I figured out that I wanted to write, and then I got into writing.

It was a process of years. So between 2005 being really super miserable, to 2007 I really sort of put that first book out. Then 2011 was when I finally left my job to go full time. [Check out my timeline here.]

I always talk about it taking five years, so it’s kind of good that you put it in that ballpark, too.

Jacob: Well, I think otherwise, Jo, it’s easy, and god knows I tried to do this, I tried to shortcut the process as often as I could. Like, get me out of here. This is not comfortable. It’s not fun.

I think that being aware that short-cutting it can—I’ve seen it happen a lot of times. I wasn’t actually writing, but I got really sort of springboarded forward a bit. I entered this thing called The Next Top Spiritual Author Competition. That was when I was living in Austin, and there was this publishing deal as kind of the big carrot.

Of course, I didn’t win that competition, but I got to witness a lot of other writers, and this is my first time of really being in the space with a lot of other writers. This was kind of a global thing, and there were a lot of people who had entered it. Many of us got to know each other, some of whom are still my friends to this day.

I also got to witness a lot of people, Jo, who had had some kind of experience, and they wanted to write about it. They wanted to share their wisdom with the world. They also hadn’t given it the time to really cook, to mature.

So I’ve watched some of them get a little bit frozen there, to where had they been willing to keep going in their own process and let it grow deeper for a while, let it really mature, they would have been able to keep going.

I’ve seen some of them kind of freeze frame there, and they’ve never been able to move beyond that one thing.

They reformed their identity a little too quickly around, “oh, this is who I am,” you know.

I don’t want to make fun of that at all because I think it’s very natural. Anytime we’re feeling out of sorts or out of balance, we want to recover our sense of equilibrium.

So I have a lot of compassion for that, but I would encourage anyone going through what feels like being turned upside down and shaken, give yourself some grace. Realize that jumping on it too quickly and saying, “This is now who I am,” might actually rob you of some real benefits that will enrich your work down the line.

Joanna: This interview is certainly going in a different direction than I thought it would be, but we’re leaning into that.

You talk there about moving beyond the one thing, and those people who were stuck. This is something I think about a lot, and my listeners will know this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while because, obviously I started in this independent author career back in 2007.

For the last few years, I’ve been really thinking about how to make sure everything stays fresh and new, rather than go into a rut.

Every industry, although being an independent author was new in sort of 2007, and there was a lot of new things, things have changed a lot since then. Technologies, obviously.

What we don’t want to be is stagnant in our creativity, in our writing, in our lives. I know there’ll be people listening who have been writing for decades as well. Some people listening will be writing for 30 to 40 years.

How do we keep things fresh?

How do we keep pivoting, changing, and moving forwards, when we have a career that we love, when we do something we love, but we know we can’t get stagnant?

Jacob: I feel like that’s a ten million dollar question.

Joanna: You must be in a similar position, right? I mean, you’ve been doing what you do a long time, and you work with people who’ve been doing it a long time. What you don’t want to be is the jaded person.

Jacob: I was looking over your work, Jo, and I just love how diverse your work is. I feel like you have a lot to teach me about this, actually, in terms of just really being a little more prolific and writing these different types of things.

I feel like every creative endeavor, anything that’s truly original, there is this required uncertainty.

I don’t know how this will work out. Without that, often we find ourselves sort of repeating ourselves.

I’m thinking of some massively famous writers in the US. One in particular comes to mind for some reason, whose work has become so formulaic, but it’s always a blockbuster.

I want to be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing to formulas. I think we all do it to some degree, but I just look at some of these things and realize, oh, the production distribution has become more important than the art, in some cases.

So to step outside of that, to step over the line of, this is what I know. This is what I know works for me in terms of bringing me financial security or whatever it might be. I think there’s that itch.

I think it goes back to what you were talking about earlier, about intuition, Jo. It’s that sense of, okay, I know I’m being called outside of this familiar sort of routine. I don’t think there’s a point at which it’s like, okay, this is wrong. So it’s not, to me, about right or wrong.

Maybe a person decides I really just love writing according to this template or formula. I just really love doing this, and I love knowing kind of what to expect from it and all of that. So I wouldn’t say everyone needs to always be leaping off into the abyss and building their wings or something.

I would love to hear your thoughts, since we’re exploring this together. I definitely didn’t expect the interview to go this way, either. So I’m in the deep end.

Joanna: Well, I think it is about taking risks. It’s funny because between like 2005/2006 and then when I left my job in 2011, I was working a day job. So I was working as a business consultant, and then I eventually went part time. So what I was doing, I was doing on the side, and that’s how I think about it now.

So right now, for example, I’m writing a screenplay, and it’s a risk, and it’s not making me any money. So it’s almost like I’m doing it on the side. So I feel like the taking risks, where we both started, we took risks to unwind one career and start another.

Maybe it is about doing things on the side, whether you love your job or whether you’re stuck in a job.

Jacob: Ooh, I love that. There were people who asked me early on as I was writing and putting things out there, why I wouldn’t just take the full leap into trying to earn my living right from the written word.

One thing that I told them then is I didn’t want to put my process under that kind of financial pressure early on. I’m like, if I can look at the job that I’m doing, the day job to pay the bills, if I can look at that as a funding source rather than, “It must fulfill my creative needs.”

Those things are very important to me in life, but there was a period of time during which it was just important for me to look at the work I did for pay as a funding source and not try to make it more than that.

For some reason, that actually freed up that energy I would have used in being miserable about having to work this stupid job for money. It freed that energy up to go, oh, this is how I fund being able to take my time and really grow as a writer.

Joanna: Well, we are almost out of time. I think you and I could do this for a lot longer.

Tell people where can they find you and your books online.

Jacob: Well, you can go to JacobNordby.com, that’s probably the easiest way.

I would love to just say how much I love the world of writers, Jo. You’ve been doing such amazing work in this space for a really long time. I just want you to know, I’m so grateful that you invited me here. Thank you for doing the good work you’re doing.

Joanna: Well, thanks so much for your time, Jacob. That was great.

The post Intuition, Journaling, And Overcoming Fear. The Creative Cure With Jacob Nordby first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Most writers understand that strong character goals are essential to a compelling story. But did you know that within every plot, three distinct types of goals shape every character’s journey? These are fundamental, primary, and secondary goals. In exploring these character goal examples for writers, you can gain a clearer understanding of how character, plot, and theme work together seamlessly. Inspired by Robert Fritz’s concept of human choice-making, these three types of goals offer a practical framework for crafting characters whose decisions resonate deeply with readers.

At the heart of every memorable story is a character driven by choices. Some of those choices are grand and overarching, others are small but significant. Robert Fritz’s framework (found in his book The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life) identifies three types of choices we all make in real life. As writers, this can help us better understand the cause and effect of our characters’ motivations and plot actions, not only to discover their most prominent plot goals, but to also understand the deeper motivations and perspectives driving those goals.

As defined by Fritz:

• Fundamental choices define who characters are at their core
• Primary choices shape characters’ immediate journeys.
• Secondary choices influence the actions characters take along the way.

Understanding these layers allows you to build characters whose desires, conflicts, and growth feel authentic, providing a solid foundation for powerful storytelling.

More than that, we can see a parallel between each of these layers and the three most important engines of story: plot, character, and theme. Each of Fritz’s “choices” corresponds to one of the “Big Three.”

In This Article:

• The Three Different Choices That Create Character Goals
• The Fundamental Choice = Your Story’s Theme
• Fundamental Character Goal Examples for Writers
• The Primary Choice = Your Story’s Character Arc
• Primary Character Goal Examples for Writers
• The Secondary Choice = Your Story’s Plot
• Secondary Character Goal Examples for Writers

The Three Different Choices That Create Character Goals

When crafting strong character goals, it’s important to recognize not every choice characters make carries the same weight. Fritz’s framework of fundamental, primary, and secondary choices provides a practical guide for writers looking to create well-rounded characters. Each type of choice serves a distinct purpose, establishing characters’ core identities and driving their moment-to-moment decisions. Let’s break down each of the three choices to examine how they work together to create dynamic characters.

1. The Fundamental Choice = Your Story’s Theme

On his website, in an article titled “The Fundamentals,” Fritz says:

There is [a] type of choice upon which all other choices rest, and that is the fundamental choice….

Fundamental choices are about orientation, states of being, the ground you stand on. There are four major fundamental choices we recommend to people. They are:

• The choice to be healthy
• The choice to be free
• The choice to be true to yourself
• The choice to be the predominant creative force in your own life

As the foundation of the other choices, the fundamental choice is the underlying motivation for all subsequent choices and actions. Think of it as your characters’ prime directive. This is their guiding principle, their deepest reason. As such, it can sometimes be buried so deeply, it isn’t consciously obvious even to themselves.

The fundamental choice will usually align with the deepest and most thematic layers of the Lie the Character Believes and/or the story’s thematic Truth or the Thing the Character Needs. Most likely, it will exist on an abstract level. For example, if a story’s thematic Truth is Fritz’s “choice to be free,” characters may not be conscious of it as such. Rather, they may personally frame this thematic Truth as something more practical to their specific lives such as, “I choose not to submit to my tyrannical boss.”

Of course, this practical, more specific choice could also be the emergent of a different fundamental choice (i.e., it could emerge from any of the fundamental choices cited by Fritz). This is where we start to discover the wonderful complexity available within the seemingly simplistic concept of a story’s Lie/Truth. Even though life seemingly points to only a very small handful of absolute Truths (all of which are abstract to at least a certain degree), the ways they can play out in the specifics of individual lives and stories is infinite.

Note, too, that in contrast to Fritz’s examples, a character’s fundamental choice need not always be a positive representation of a story’s Truth. It may just as likely represent the Lie itself, such as when a pessimistic character bases subsequent choices on a fundamental belief in the worthlessness of society. It is also possible that characters who hold positive fundamental Truths will have to work through Lies manifesting on lower levels that are holding them back from fully embodying the positive choice. This might be the case with a character whose positive fundamental goal is to be free, but who holds a lower-level Lie, for example, that “aggression is the only way to escape.”

Fundamental Character Goal Examples for Writers

Band of Brothers: The soldiers’ fundamental goal is to serve their country and what they believe is the greater good. This is based on their fundamental choice to be loyal to each other and committed to their duty no matter the cost. This is their core state of being—brotherhood and honor above all.

Pride & Prejudice: Although largely in a reactionary role throughout the story, Elizabeth Bennet’s plot goals emerge from her fundamental choice to stay true to herself and her values, prioritizing integrity and genuine connection over societal expectations.

Coming to America: Prince Akeem’s fundamental goal of honoring true love is based on the fundamental choice to be true to himself and find genuine love, rather than simply fulfilling royal expectations.

2. The Primary Choice = Your Story’s Character Arc

In The Co-Creation Handbook, Alida Birch describes the primary choice like this:

A primary choice is a choice which supports the fundamental choice. For example, if happiness is one of your fundamental choices, then you might take time out from your usual routine to do something that reminds you of your choice to be happy. Or you might choose to be employed in a meaningful job thereby fulfilling your fundamental choice to create a purposeful life. Or you might choose to commit to a more healthful diet to support your fundamental choice to be healthy.

The primary goal that results from this choice will likely represent your story’s overall plot goal. This is the Thing Your Character Wants, which will motivate all subsequent actions in the plot. For example, if a character’s fundamental goal is to be free, then the primary goal—the plot goal—might be to overthrow the tyrannical boss and restore worthy leadership to the company (a Queen Arc!).

Depending on the type of character arc your story features, the primary goal can ultimately be aligned with either the Lie or the Truth. As mentioned above, even if your characters hold a positive fundamental goal, the primary goal might still represent the foundational Lie they must overcome in order to be successful in achieving the worthy purpose represented by the fundamental choice. For example, in a different story, a character with the positive fundamental goal of freedom might have to work through a misaligned primary goal resulting from a Lie such as “the only way I can assure my own freedom is to control others.”

In most stories, the Thing the Character Wants (and therefore the primary goal) will start out aligned with the Lie. This doesn’t necessarily mean the Want itself is negative, but it does mean the characters must learn to adapt more effective and positive primary goals on their way to gaining (or sometimes giving up) the Want.

Primary Character Goal Examples for Writers

Band of Brothers: The soldiers’ fundamental commitment to their duty translates into the more specific plot concerns of doing their part as paratroopers and, hopefully, winning the war. Each episode in the story focuses on a specific primary goal—usually various missions, such as Normandy, Market Garden, and Bastogne—that support the larger fundamental goal. Each soldier chooses to endure the hardships of war—physical exhaustion, fear, and loss—because of their commitment to each other and the mission.

Pride & Prejudice: Elizabeth makes difficult primary choices based on her fundamental commitment to her own values and integrity. She chooses not to marry for convenience or wealth, even when pressured, because it would compromise her self-respect and beliefs. She also demonstrates how primary goals can evolve over the course of the story: as her perspective of Mr. Darcy becomes more accurate, she alters some of her specific decisions while coming into deeper integration with her higher Truth (e.g., she initially rejects Darcy’s proposal of marriage, but then changes her mind).

Coming to America: Prince Akeem solidifies his fundamental goal of marrying for love into the specific plot goal of traveling to Queens, New York, and pretending to be a poor immigrant in order to find a partner who loves him for himself rather than his wealth or status.

3. The Secondary Choice = Your Story’s Plot

Fritz explains the secondary choice:

Once we know what is primary… we may need to make strategic secondary choices in support of our primary choice. If we want to create health, we may need to make a series of secondary choices such as eat a healthy diet and exercise. We might not make these secondary choices if we didn’t have health as a primary choice, but we gladly do them when we know our higher order organizing principle: in this case health.

Secondary goals are where things get real. If the fundamental goal is a nice abstraction and the primary goal is a specific intention, the secondary goal is the determination of actionable steps that can be taken in pursuit of those higher-order goals.

Within a story, these are the scene goals. This is where and how plot unfolds on a moment-to-moment basis within the story (which is also what evolves character arc).

In pursuit of a conscious primary goal and a (perhaps) unconscious fundamental goal, characters will choose the specific actions they believe will lead them to their ultimate goals. With a fundamental commitment to personal freedom and a plot goal of unseating a tyrannical boss, characters might then choose scene goals that involve petitioning management, organizing a workers’ strike, or speaking to a journalist. Whether or not these scene goals are effective will prove how aligned they are with whatever overall Truth is necessary for success.

As characters learn and grow in the effectiveness of their secondary choices, they will also evolve their character arcs—refining any limiting beliefs or Lies that are keeping them from acting in full integrity with their fundamental Truth. If their fundamental goal is, however, not ultimately worthy or true, they will also have the opportunity to learn how to exchange that faulty fundamental belief for one that is more accurate and advantageous.

Secondary Character Goal Examples for Writers

Band of Brothers: The characters’ fundamental and primary goals translate into day-to-day, scene-by-scene decisions for each man, such as following orders, protecting comrades, storming enemy positions, and offering emotional support to one another.

Pride & Prejudice: Elizabeth’s pursuit of her fundamental and primary goals creates scenes in which she undertakes specific actions and responses, such as rejecting Mr. Collins’s proposal, challenging Darcy’s initial arrogance, and defending her family’s honor.

Coming to America: Akeem enacts his primary goal of finding a worthy queen by undertaking specific scene actions, such as working at McDowell’s, cutting his prince’s lock to hide his royal identity, and pursuing his boss’s daughter despite their cultural differences.

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Although you shouldn’t take the correlation of each of these choices to theme, character, and plot too literally (since they are all intertwined), this exploration of fundamental, primary, and secondary choices can be a useful tool in creating a cohesive foundation for your story. Understanding the three types of character goals can help you better understand your characters’ inner workings and how to realistically explore the evolution of choices and actions that create compelling character arcs.

By clearly defining each layer, you can craft characters whose decisions, motivations, and growth feel authentic and meaningful. This framework not only supports your characters’ internal journeys, but also enriches plot and enhances theme. With these distinctions in mind, you’ll be able to dig deeper into your character’s desires and motivations, ensuring their journeys remain consistent and powerful from start to finish.

In Summary:

Understanding the three types of character choices—fundamental, primary, and secondary—can provide writers with a deeper insight into how character goals drive plot and theme. By exploring Robert Fritz’s concept of human decision-making, writers can craft characters whose motivations resonate with readers on multiple levels, creating compelling stories with authentic character development.

Key Takeaways:

• Fundamental Goals define a character’s core values and motivations, often reflecting their deepest beliefs or the thematic truth of the story.
• Primary Goals are the immediate objectives that create the character’s character arc and drive the overall plot arc.
• Secondary Goals are the specific actions or scene goals that support both the fundamental and primary goals in creating the plot.
• By understanding and applying these three types of goals, writers can create dynamic, multi-layered characters whose decisions feel grounded in both the story and their personal journeys.

Want more?

If you’re looking to dive deeper into the heart of character development, my book Creating Character Arcs is the perfect guide. In this book, I break down the essential elements of crafting character goals and show you how these layers shape a character’s transformation and tie into your story’s broader theme and plot. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned writer, this book can help you develop characters who resonate with readers and drive a compelling, cohesive narrative. If you’re ready to transform your characters into unforgettable, dynamic forces, you can check it out at retailers like Amazon or via the store on my site.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What are some of your favorite character goal examples for writers? Can you identify their fundamental, primary, and secondary choices? Tell me in the comments!

Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or Spotify).

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The post Your Character’s Three Choices: Character Goal Examples for Writers appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

What are the tropes and reader expectations for action adventure thrillers? Why publish into KU and what are some of the ways to market there? How can travel enrich your writing? Luke Richardson gives his tips.

In the intro, ProWritingAid launches their Manuscript Analysis tool;
Navigating legal risk in memoir [The Indy Author]; Social media for authors in 2025 [BookBub]; Amazon relaunches Alexa, now Alexa+ which is now powered by Claude AI; Scribe, the world’s most accurate transcription model [ElevenLabs];
ElevenReader Publishing to the Reader app; Death Valley, A Thriller by J.F. Penn.

Today’s show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Luke Richardson is the bestselling author of the Eden Black Archaeological Thrillers and the International Detective thriller series.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Taking the leap into full-time indie authorship
• Reasons for unpublishing books and maintaining your author brand
• Researching the tropes and market of your genre
• The purpose of a prologue and when to include one
• Tips for writing characters that are unlike yourself
• Turning travels into stories
• Why publish in KU instead of wide?
• Selling non-book items or experiences

You can find Luke at LukeRichardsonAuthor.com and his new podcast at AdventureStoryPodcast.com.

Transcript of Interview with Luke Richardson

Joanna: Luke Richardson is the bestselling author of the Eden Black Archeological Thrillers and the International Detective thriller series. So welcome to the show, Luke.

Luke: Hi, Jo. Thank you for having me. This is wonderful to be able to talk to you.

Joanna: I’m excited about it. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and self-publishing.

Luke: It’s been one of those sort of roundabout ways that a lot of people talk about, but I often cite—this is something I’ve written on my profiles and written emails about. I often cite my first arriving in India in 2011 as the reason I wanted to write.

It was just this transformational moment of being totally culture shocked in a completely different place in a way that I couldn’t describe and couldn’t really explain. We’d come out of the airport, we’re into this taxi going past the slum villages on the edges of this freeway that’s sort of 16 lanes wide. There’s donkeys, and sports cars, and tractors, and all of this going on. It was just so overwhelming.

Although I didn’t write for several years after that, it was that excitement about stuff, and the world, and discovery, and adventure that lodged in me. Then when I started to write, those things started to come out of me. Do you know what I mean? They started to come out in my writing.

Joanna: That’s so funny. We’re going to get into travel because you and I are travel geeks. I also remember arriving in India, would have been about five years before that, in the middle of the night in an airport in—it wasn’t Delhi—but it was one of the biggest cities. It was like crazy, crazy. So that culture shock is really interesting.

How did you then get into indie publishing, as opposed to maybe going traditional?

Luke: I was an English teacher in a high school for several years, under the illusions that it would be a creative thing to do because I’ve always been very creative. I’ve always loved that. For the first couple of years, it actually was quite creative. Then, I think as I’d done the same classes four or five or six times, over and over again, it became less so.

Then I started writing. I came up with this idea for a book, and I was like, great. It was actually set in Kathmandu, and it’s the first book in my International Detective series.

Someone who’s like me in 2011, in the back of that taxi, totally overwhelmed, tasked with finding a missing person in this city that they’ve never been to. They don’t speak the language, they don’t know the culture, and they’ve got to go and find this person.

I came up with that idea based on my travels, based on the things that I’ve done.

It was really just a creative outlet. It was a passion. It was something I wanted to do outside of work.

Then I finished the book, and I did that thing which we’ve all done, I think, and you fold your arms, and you go, huh? Half of us is really impressed that you finished this thing, and the other half’s like, what do I do now? What do I do with it?

I gave my mum a copy and a couple of other friends, and then I went down the rabbit hole of learning about publishing and how to get it out in the world. Your podcast, and other podcasts, and online courses, and YouTube videos, and all this sort of thing.

I never tried the traditional route. I was far too impetuous. I wanted to get on with the next book.

So I learned about indie publishing and published it in 2019.

Joanna: Are you still a teacher?

Luke: No, no. I left just before the pandemic. So I quit then. I needed a change, which was great, actually, because it meant I had the whole time of those few years to really focus on my writing.

It built up slowly, as these things do. So the first year was quite tough. I had to do some freelance work on the side and do some other writing, sort of freelance writing and things.

Then, when was it? I think it was two years ago that it became the job, and now we’ve surpassed the teaching. It’s become more successful than the teaching was, so I’m really excited about.

Joanna: I think this is a really good point.

You left your job in 2019, and it was 2024 when your income surpassed your old job?

Luke: Yes, income from books.

I mean, we couldn’t travel anyway because travel was off the table at that time, so it was a good time to not spend much money anyway. So I’ve lived quite a frugal life whilst I was doing that and did some freelance work on the side.

I really just started again, I suppose you’d say, in a professional capacity. Built up the mailing list, built up the socials, learned about all these things.

What I decided, I think, is that I needed to give it a proper chance. I think if I wanted to do it as a hobby, writing in the evenings and the weekends was fine.

If I wanted to do it as a job, and I wanted this to be my life, I needed to give it space.

So that was the decision.

I didn’t love teaching at that point. I was ready for a change. So, yes, I think that was a good decision. It’s worked out well in the end, obviously, too.

Joanna: So you mentioned the word job there. I feel like this is so important, and I’ve talked about this before. Having a hobby is amazing, and for most people, writing as a hobby is brilliant and probably what most people should do. As you mentioned, the word job, and that is how we make our living with books or word-adjacent things. So what does that job entail for you?

That perhaps when you wrote that first book, when you were a teacher, you didn’t even think about?

I feel like a lot of people coming in don’t understand what the job of an author is, or let alone the job of an indie author.

Luke: That’s true. There’s so much to it. There’s the production side, which is obviously the writing, the researching, the actual making the book. I don’t just mean research in terms of what’s in the book, I mean research of what does the market need.

Now, I’m not saying you need to write to market necessarily, but you need to—I think not need, that’s the wrong way to say it. It’s not prescriptive, but it helps if you have an understanding of what the market likes, if that makes sense. You don’t necessarily have to follow tropes.

This is an issue, isn’t it, I think with indie publishing. You can do whatever you want, but with that comes great challenges as well because whatever you want is massive. No one wants to read a book that’s everything, right?

It needs to be something. It needs to pin its colors to the mast.

Some colors to one mast or another. It can’t be everything to everyone. So you need to decide at some point where that is, and who your reader is, and what they like and those sorts of things.

It’s easier if you’re writing in a genre that is popular, that is easy to communicate, that is easy for people to understand. I suppose that helps as well. So, yes, that’s production.

There’s also sort of the business side of it. We’re at the end of January now. I’ve had a really boring week of tax returns and these sorts of things.

There’s the marketing side. There’s running the newsletter and the social media and all of this sort of stuff, which needs to be done and should be enjoyed, if possible.

Joanna: I love that you said earlier that it took almost five years, I guess, for the money to get back up to where it was. It was the same for me.

When I left my original consulting job in 2011, I took a massive pay cut. It took until 2015 before I started making more than I used to make, and have done ever since, by the way. So hopefully that encourages you.

Luke: Thank you. Yes, I hope so.

Joanna: So how many books do you have now? Like when you talk about the job and the production—

What’s your schedule for putting books out?

Because you are writing genre fiction, basically.

Luke: I have written around 20 now. A couple of out of print because they didn’t really match the brand that I was going for, so I’ve taken them out for now, and perhaps we’ll republish them later.

So I’ve got six in my International Detective series, six in the Eden Black series, and then there’s obviously novellas and other such things. So it’s probably less than 20, actually. It’s always a hard question, and I wonder if you feel the same, in that you don’t know. You don’t know exactly. Almost 20, I’ll say that.

Joanna: Well, what’s funny, I’ve got on my wall here, “50 books by 50,” and as we record this, I’m 50 in six weeks.

Luke: Oh, congratulations.

Joanna: Well, the achievement of living to 50, I guess, is one of them. I’ve actually started a blog post—I can’t remember when this goes out—but I will be doing a blog post on my 50th birthday, which is calculating how many books I’ve actually written, including all the different editions.

Well, you said you’ve unpublished some of those and may republish them. So my first three novels I rewrote, so they’re in second edition. Some of them are in third edition. A lot of my nonfiction is in multiple editions.

So those ones you unpublished, so people know, when you wrote them originally and published them, you must have thought they were fine, and then you decided to take them down. So why did you decide to do that?

Is that something people can prepare for in advance so that they don’t have to unpublish things?

Luke: I would like to put them out again, and it’s probably just me being too perfectionist, actually, because I know people have read them and enjoyed them. They’re a good series. I wrote them with Steven Moore, who I know you know as well, and it was a collaboration project we had.

My books now are very family friendly. They’re very clean.

They’re sort of in the vein of Indiana Jones style. Whereas those books I wrote with Steve are a bit darker, they are a bit more nefarious.

Unless I do a rewrite, which I would like to do when time allows, because I think they could be changed to bring them into the same sort of world as the books that I have.

People ask me why I write the books in the way that I do. I want someone to have my book and put it on their coffee table proudly with the bookmark in it, and if their 12 year old daughter or niece comes up and picks it up and flicks through and takes an interest in it, they are happy for that person to go and read it.

Or their grandma comes in and picks it up and flicks through it, they are happy for that person to read it. I don’t want them to have any sort of, “Oh, that’s a bit this for you,” or, “That’s a bit that for you.” Do you know what I mean by that?

I felt that those books, because of the way they were, I wasn’t quite happy for them to be in that situation. I didn’t want someone to recommend me and then go, “Oh, read Luke’s books, but don’t read those.”

Joanna: I do feel like that is very much a personal decision, though. As in, I remember the stuff I was reading at age 12. I mean, I do think that different people like different things, but I get exactly what you mean. So you’ve decided on family friendly action adventure, basically.

Luke: Yes, that’s right.

Joanna: I love that. Okay, so let’s come back to action adventure thrillers then. You and I both write around, we use the word thriller, I think, quite loosely, and it is a very big genre.

As a sub-genre, what are the hallmarks of your books and the action adventure thriller genre that you (and I) write in?

Also, how do you vary them in the books in the series? I feel like this can be a challenge for people.

Luke: Yes, it’s a good question, and something I only started to understand when I wrote my second series. It has become much more successful than the first, and I think it’s because I took time to understand this, actually.

It’s what I was saying a minute ago about it can help if you do a bit of research in the market before actually sitting down to write. So there’s certain ingredients that my books need.

They’re all based on an ancient legend.

So I’ve done one set in the Pyramids of Giza, one about Atlantis, one about a mummy on the Titanic. That’s a proper rumor, I’ll have you know. Whether it had anything to do with the sinking or not, they’re not sure. One about the Templars.

The one I’m working on at the moment is going to be set in the Sahara, and all to do with a hidden city under the Sahara and this sort of thing. So those sorts of interesting settings, locations.

Obviously there needs to be a race against time before something happens. The classic one is “this thing can only happen on the summer solstice or when the planets are aligned.” Or, I know this is one of your favorites, “because there’s a storm.”

Joanna: I love a good storm.

Luke: Or, “The storm is coming in six hours, and we need to solve this thing before the storm.”

Joanna: Right now, writing Death Valley, I am actually editing the big storm scene.

Luke: I love it. Yes, so they’re generally set in the present day as well, but the present day can be quite loose because Clive Cussler wrote his in the present day, although that was the 80s. So it can be quite loose as to when the present day is, but they sort of track the events of pre-history.

One of the tropes is you have this prologue that takes place in like 5000 BC, and then what happened there relates to the present day when that relic is uncovered.

There are other strands too that sort of happen, sometimes a romantic element.

A relatable villain is another one, which I think is more of a modern trope, actually. I like this in my books, a pinch of the supernatural. Think like the Ark of the Covenant in the Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Indiana Jones films. It’s just there.

We don’t know quite what it is, or why it had that strange effect on the people at the end, but it did it, and it could be true. There’s a tiny element that it could be true that I like to put in mine as well.

Joanna: Yes, and we overlap in so many ways. I think I definitely have slightly more supernatural than you and more religious elements because I’m obsessed with religion, religious relics and stuff like that. You and I both kind of cover similar areas.

This is what’s interesting, isn’t it, in terms of what you love as a kid and then what you enjoy writing.

I do want to come back on the prologue, especially because you were an English teacher. Now, I love a prologue. I write prologues in my action adventures as well, but a lot of people have issues with prologues. You explained a bit what a prologue was there, but—

What purpose does a prologue serve in a book?

When should people use one? When is it not a good idea, do you think?

Luke: I had this conversation with a writer who I’m working with at the moment, and they had put it as chapter one. I said, this is not chapter one. This is a prologue because a prologue is clearly delineated from the book itself, in my mind. I’m not asking Google this, this is just what I think.

It’s clearly delineated from the book itself. It isn’t part of the story. So the story can be read without the prologue, should you want to. It just add some context.

It puts some root in the history of the book that tells you a little bit about where that book is going to go based on sort of what happened before the event, if that makes sense.

Joanna: I think it’s like a foreshadowing. Often in my one, the ancient relic is there or discovered by someone thousands of years earlier, and something very bad happens. This then kind of foreshadows the present day, where obviously something very bad is about to happen, and then they have to stop it.

A prologue can be foreshadowing.

Luke: Yes, and I think it helps the reader know the passage of time as well, because they’re clearly not at the same period. That’s one thing that I like that I find useful with it as a writing technique.

Joanna: Yes. I’ve definitely written some that are only a couple of weeks earlier, but sometimes a thousand years ago or whatever.

Luke: Yes, but that’s the convention, isn’t it? The thousand years ago one. I’m not saying that can’t be a prologue, but I’m saying the convention, in my mind, and I could be completely wrong, is that it’s sort of someone putting the capstone on the Great Pyramid, and then it cuts to black.

Then we see someone, in the present day, driving through the pyramids on a Jeep or whatever.

Joanna: That’s cool. I personally do like a prologue. Actually, just coming back to your English teacher side, many authors have to fight the sort of snobbery that some English teachers instilled in them, including myself.

I certainly look back and was told by my English teacher that I couldn’t write such things, that I should write something acceptable for a young woman. That definitely stopped me writing for a long time.

So if people do feel sort of hamstrung by this, by the comments from their English teachers in the past—

Is there anything that you say to people to help them get over comments from a teacher about their writing?

Luke: It’s a hard one, isn’t it? That teacher, certainly in your experience, did the wrong thing. That’s not an encouraging attitude to have, and I wouldn’t have had that attitude with one of my students.

It’s a challenge because, and without getting too political, the school system is very sort of dictating in what you can teach and what you can’t teach.

I didn’t want to teach certain students 19th century literature. That’s a very difficult thing to teach to students who would be better off with something more modern, with something more relatable to them. that’s a struggle for all English teachers, and a lot of teachers generally, actually.

So I think that gives a perception to young people about what books should be, that you’re in this place, and it is just books that are important and that have sort of stood the test of time. There’s no fun in it, or there’s certainly less fun in it, which was one of the reasons I ended up getting fed up of it and moving on at the end.

Joanna: Well, I love that you, as an English teacher, are writing genre fiction. I think that you must have had to put aside some of that snobbery yourself, I guess.

Luke: I don’t think I ever had that snobbery, to be honest.

I think writing should be fun. I’ve always thought it should be fun. There’s no reason for it not to be. That’s why people open a book.

That’s why they get involved in this imaginary world for an escapist adventure. it’s our job to make that fun.

Sometimes we put a bit of history and a bit of social commentary, perhaps, or one of our opinions, we slip that in there as well. That’s fine because we’ve honored the contract with the reader to make them enjoy themselves as well.

Joanna: Well, that’s great. Then just coming to your books, like one of your bestselling series is this Eden Black Archeological Thrillers. Eden Black is a woman, a female protagonist. So some people will say, I don’t, but some people say you shouldn’t write a character that is not like yourself.

People have said this to me writing male characters or people of different persuasions in whichever direction. So how do you deal with this? Like, did it even come up in your mind that you shouldn’t write a main female character?

Luke: No. Of course, it didn’t.

Joanna: No, exactly.

What are your tips for authors who might be concerned about writing characters different to them?

Luke: I know. I had some people comment—not people—I had a comment about this on a Facebook ad saying, “Who are you to write?” It was actually from a bloke. I was surprised that it was from a man. I don’t know why I was surprised it was from a man.

He said, “Who are you to write strong female characters?” And I said, “I’m married to one. I was brought up by one. I have many friends who are them.”

Joanna: And do you think the rest of it is true? I say to people, I’m like, seriously, do you think I’m all my characters? Like the villain and the murderer and, you know, whoever? It’s crazy. So I’m so glad you did that. So it didn’t come up in your mind before you started?

Luke: No, not at all. One thing to say is that —

Every character in your book is you in a weird sort of way, even the villain. They’re all parts of you that you’re projecting into the page in some way.

Also, you’re inventing in some sort of way.

Actually, I feel that we as humans, without getting too meta about it, are more similar than we are different. Regardless of whatever. Race, gender, age, anything, we’re more similar than we are different.

We feel the same things. Of course, there are differences, but my books are about things—like we’ve talked about getting the relic and all of this—but beyond that, they’re about fitting in, and loss, and grief, and understanding each other, and belief, and hope, and all these feelings.

It’s quite generic to being human, regardless of whether you’re female, male, whatever. So I believe that by writing them in that way, that it really doesn’t make a difference.

Joanna: No, and I love it because when I started writing my ARKANE Series with Morgan Sierra, I mean, there really weren’t many action adventure books with female main characters.

That is why I was got excited about the Lara Croft movies and stuff like that because that was kind of the only option. Now, what’s great with indie is there’s so many. It’s brilliant.

Luke: Wasn’t there an article saying that they’re a dying trend or something recently?

Joanna: Oh, everyone always says action adventure is dying. The thing is, there’s always a group of people who still like that, including us.

Well, let’s also talk about your travels. You will be coming on my re-booted Books and Travel Podcast, and if people want to geek out with us on travel, come on over there. So let’s just talk about it as a writer. How do you turn your real life travels into the stories?

What are your tips for authors on turning real experiences into story?

Luke: That’s true, isn’t it? Generally, the way I do it is I go to a place without a preconceived idea. I just get immersed in the place, and I walk around the place. I don’t worry about creating content particularly, or anything about taking photos or taking notes. I just sort of fall into it.

I’m going to let you into the secret behind my book that I haven’t written yet, actually. I’ll do that because I think this is really exciting.

So in the 70s, they created this pattern called quasi crystalline tessellation, and it was created by scientists in the UK and in America. Now, they realized that this pattern exists in two places in the world.

It exists in meteors, the molecular structure of meteors that come from out of space, and it exists in the sand upon which a nuclear blast has happened. The heat has been so intense that it has formed the sand into a rock that has this molecular structure.

Then they discovered it existed in a third place. It’s on the walls of 13th century mosques in Morocco and Iran and other countries in the Middle East. I was walking around Marrakesh, where we were traveling about a month ago, and I read that, and was like, this is amazing.

It’s nuts, isn’t it, to think that these cutting edge scientists were doing this thing in the 70s, and yet it was there already in this mosque in Marrakesh, and there’s one in Iran and somewhere else. There’s these places with this pattern on the wall of the thing.

Of course, because I’m a writer, that gets me going. I’m like, whoa, maybe the Islamic scholars of the 13th century were trying to communicate something to us in the modern era.

Joanna: Before you go on, let’s stop there because that exact point, I call this ‘the seed,’ because people are always like, where do your ideas come from? I’m like — 

These seeds of story are everywhere. You just have to notice them.

Luke: That’s right.

Joanna: I feel like you and I, because we travel, that we find our seeds while we are traveling. You may never have stumbled—you might have stumbled across that on a YouTube video somehow—

But because you were in that place, I think it evoked story in your mind.

Luke: Yes, exactly right.

Joanna: So how do you then—I know that this is a book you’re going to write—but how do you get from there? People are like, okay, sure, but that’s not a book, is it?

Luke: Yes. So now this is the stage I’m at with this book. So I’m just sitting on the idea, really. I’m not putting too much pressure on it. I’ve got a few ideas now about how it will fit into what will happen, and also fit it into the series as well.

I know the characters that are coming into this. I obviously don’t know the villain and some of the other villains, sort of henchmen, that are going to come in, but I know my characters. So I’m sort of jiggling it together.

I want part of it to take place in the United States, as well, because my characters haven’t been there for a while, for a few books. So that’s important. It’s a case of picking it together, but I’ve got a couple of scenes, and for me, that’s how it starts.

Stephen King writes about writing like discovering a dinosaur skeleton. I love that idea. I’ve discovered a bit, and I’m now there with my brush, brushing off this part. I don’t know whether it’s the face or the back or the leg or the tail, you know.

I’ve just got this one bit, and slowly I’ll work in one direction, and maybe that will lead me to another part. Or I’ll go, nope, it’s not over there. Then I’ll come back and go over to the other section, and the story will emerge in that way.

Joanna: Do you write in order or out of order?

Luke: I’ve got better at writing in order, but it’s still not totally chronologically.

Joanna: I feel like this is also because we use multiple places. Like for Spear of Destiny, I’ve been in Washington DC like a couple of years before, and I was like, I have to use it because I expense that trip. Then I was like, I need to put it in a book. How on earth am I going to tie it to Vienna and Nuremberg and all of this?

So I knew I had those scenes somewhere, but I didn’t know what was going to happen. It’s almost like when you know you want to set things different places—like you said, I need some scenes in America—you almost can write different things and then figure out what on earth links them.

Luke: What I tend to do is —

I write the hero’s part first, and then put the villain in afterwards.

I don’t know if you do the same? I think your books are similar, where you have two or three scenes from the hero, and then like a cut scene from the villain where they’re scheming in a dark lair somewhere.

Joanna: Or doing bad things.

Luke: Yes, whatever. They sort of offset each other, and so I’ll quite often come back and put those in afterwards.

Joanna: Well, that’s good. I think it’s important for people to know that you don’t have to write everything in order, and you can just figure it out. Also, some authors are worried about using real places in their books.

Where is your line between using real places and then fictionalizing things?

Luke: The place is almost completely real in my books. I tend to be as real as I possibly can. Not down to like the building, though, because I think you’ll understand this as well. It winds people up if you say, “They walked for five minutes down the street and then they were outside the coffee shop.”

I won’t say that because someone will email and say, “There’s not a coffee shop on the street. That closed in in 2004.” So I don’t get that specific.

In terms of the place, I try to get things specific, like what sort of public transport it is. I wrote a book in Riga, and in Riga, they’ve got these wonderful old school, Soviet-esque trams that clang and rumble around the city. So they had to feature in the book there.

There’s sort of what the air is like. Is it a sea sort of air? Is it cold? Is it warm? Is it sandy? Desert-y? What’s the sensation you’ll get?

To set that book apart, I want the reader to know, if they’re interested, that I’ve been there.

They see something more than I could have gleamed from a cookie cutter explanation of this place.

I suppose that’s going to become ever more important, isn’t it, that we’ve been to this place. You write great authors’ notes as well, and that’s something that’s really important to me, is delving behind the story.

Joanna: I think that’s important because, actually, I do think ChatGPT and some of these other models can write very good descriptions of places. The Author’s Note, as you say, and our connection with our readers when we’re kind of, “Look, here’s me,” which is why selfies are important, “Here’s me with the pyramids of Egypt.”

Luke: Exactly right.

Joanna: So this was me.

Okay, well, talking of audiences, let’s get into the publishing and marketing side. So on publishing, so I’m really interested in this because you are in KU for your ebooks, and this is something I still find difficult after all these years. So why make that decision? How does that work for you?

What is your main marketing in KU?

Luke: So why make that decision? It’s an 80-20 decision for me. I have got X number of hours a day, not very many, same as everyone else, I suppose. I want to do other things too with my time.

So actually, the best use of my time is to write the best book possible, and let Amazon do what they are really good at, which is distributing the book to people. They do a great job at that. They’ve proven it for years and years and years, with thousands of data sets and all this sort of stuff.

I would love to not be exclusive, of course, and that would be fun to go on the other platforms. Yes, it does bother me that my book isn’t available in every single country and these sorts of things.

I believe that in terms of getting my book into as many hands as possible, and as such, sustaining this as a career, etc, for now, that’s the best way, if that makes sense.

Joanna: I will tell people that your books have a lot of reviews. This is something I say to people —

If you want a lot of reviews on Amazon, then being in KU is one of the ways to do that.

I see, obviously, that on all the books that are action adventure that are in KU, which is most of them, have a ton of reviews. So there are pros and cons.

You do have print books, you have audio, and you do have your own store for these other formats. So tell us about that.

Luke: So I sell print books on the store. I don’t sell particularly many. I sell most of them in the UK, I think because when people outside of the UK see the delivery cost, it puts them off.

I like the idea of having a store, more than actually make any money from it or make anything from it at the moment. I don’t feel like I’ve completely cracked it yet. Actually, that’s probably the reason.

There are frustrations from it, which I’m sure you have as well. Customer service is one. People are like, “How do I get my book? Why haven’t I got this?” Sales duty is another. My friend bought a book in Spain.

Joanna: Oh, Europe is the worst.

Luke: Oh, this book has cost him 70 euros in total, including the duty. He says he hope it’s a really good one. Sorry, mate, you bought it now.

Joanna: It is, and that’s actually something for people to keep in mind. For example, I had someone in Canada and there was a problem with something, and their duty they paid was ridiculous. So in the end, I paid that back from them.

It’s exactly what you said. There are problems—well, let’s say challenges—with it, but clearly you wanted to do something.

Is it that you’re not doing any marketing to your store, which means it’s not getting much traction?

Luke: I’m not doing any paid marketing to my store. I do paid marketing to the first in series on Amazon, and I try and keep that as simple as possible, so that I can see what the return on investment is very clearly.

I still sell a fair number of audiobooks. I sell the other series, which I do know my International Detective series has no direct marketing to it.

I sell quite a lot through Ingram Spark as well. I can only think that is because people see the advert on Facebook, they don’t want to shop on Amazon, so they take it into Waterstones, or they look on Barnes and Noble or whatever, and they buy it there. That is great. It is a good way to do it, really.

With regard to the store, I’m looking at people outside the author space and trying stuff. I want to see what YouTubers, podcasters, and influencers are selling on their stores.

I’m thinking it’s not books, if that makes sense. Like bespoke, unique experiences, stuff, things, I don’t know. A few ideas, nothing yet. I’m going to test a few things this year and see what comes out.

Joanna: That’s great. I also have had this on my list for a while, instead of trying to sell books. The crazy thing is, like I just bought a necklace, they got me on Instagram. It’s a really nice necklace, and it wasn’t expensive, but it was still more than the price of a book. I just bought it.

It was a one click purchase from a store. I didn’t know them. They had good reviews. So I was like, okay, I’ll buy that. It came and everything.

I was like, what makes people buy something that costs you 50 pounds from somebody they don’t know, and then resist paying 20 pounds for a book from an author they like? Like, it’s crazy.

Is it easier to sell non-books to people, and then upsell them on a book?

Luke: That is what I’m thinking. I’m trying to look at it in the way that a YouTuber would. Now, a YouTuber puts all their content on YouTube, and they don’t bemoan the fact that they’re exclusive to YouTube. They just put their content on there, and they get their payment from their ad clicks, or whatever it is, every month, and that’s fine.

What they do have is, underneath the video, they have this bar. I’m following various people, and they’re selling coffee, tin openers, hats, all sorts of things. Then I’m like, this is cool. This is great. I like this. I like this coffee.

Joanna: I do like the idea of selling coffee because I drink a lot of coffee!

Luke: Yes. So at the moment, I’ve got this idea of potentially some of the sort of stuff you might find in one of the markets. The cool, bespoke jewelry and funky textiles. There are small things that you can post, or whatever. A few things like that I’m going to try, and see how it goes, really. That’s the testing phase.

Joanna: I like that, and I think we do need to think differently. One of the basic things, I mean, with KU for example, and in fact, page reads and sales. So with sales, Amazon hasn’t changed the $9.99 cap ever.

We’ve had a $9.99 cap on ebooks since the beginning. So even with inflation, we can’t charge more for a book.

Then the page reads, obviously generally trend downwards.

Then you think, well, look, with inflation, just the cost of living, we should be able to put prices up. But because of all the reasons, books remain the price they are. So therefore, as you’re looking at it, it is about, well—

What else can we offer people that’s interesting, where the price isn’t so fixed?

Luke: That’s exactly right. You might only get 0.1% of people want that thing, and that’s fine. That’s great because they’re the person who’s really interested in whatever that thing happens to be.

It could be, I don’t know, an event, an online event, or something. There’s a few ideas. I haven’t pinned them down yet, but there’s many ideas.

Joanna: I get that. Well, talking about marketing as well. So obviously, as I mentioned, you’re coming on my Books and Travel Podcast, but you also have a new podcast. So tell us about that.

Why did you start the podcast, and what are you hoping to achieve?

Luke: Yes, it’s called The Adventure Story Podcast. It’s basically, if you like that idea that I told you about, the crystalline tiles in Morocco and how they preempted the breaking of the atom—or whatever you think it might be, the splitting of the atom—then this is the podcast that you will like. It’s all about the stories behind my stories.

So episodes in series one, which will start in March, are on things like—and this is a true story Jo—the cursed Egyptian ghost on the London Underground. That’s one. The truth behind the legend of the crystal skulls.

There’s an episode on Cambodia from a guy who grew up there. In fact, he’s really excited about that. There’s one about lava tubes. The truth behind lava tubes. Oh, there’s a few I’ve planned this week. A couple on the Templars as well.

It’s all this sort of history. It’s like an extended author’s note in podcast form. That’s what I’m going for.

Joanna: So why are you doing that? You said you do paid marketing to your first in series on Amazon. You have a business. You’re doing well.

Why a podcast?

Luke: I think trying to be more authentic is important to me. I want people to know me as the person behind the stories.

It’s important to for me to tell people, and I do this in my emails quite a lot, that by buying my book, by reviewing my book, by sharing my book, you’re not just having the story, you’re supporting me and my family and this house I’m standing in now.

That still blows my mind, that the mortgage is paid by people buying books. It’s wonderful. It’s an incredible thing. I want the people who read my books to be able to see that and see the real human me behind the story, and share on the adventures.

This podcast will share some of the travels my wife and I go on. We’ll share some of the adventures we’ve had. We’ll share the inspirations behind the books. We’ll have other authors on as well to talk about the inspirations behind their books, too.

Joanna: Fantastic.

Where can people find you, and your books, and the podcast online?

Luke: By the time this goes out, The Adventure Story Podcast will be live as well. It will be on wherever you listen to podcasts, but also AdventureStoryPodcast.com. My website is LukeRichardsonAuthor.com.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Luke. That was great.

Luke: Thank you.

The post Writing Action Adventure And Traveling For Book Research With Luke Richardson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Note From KMW: One of the big debates in writing is whether great writers know the ending first before they ever start drafting. Some writers thrive on the certainty of a clear destination, while others prefer to let the journey unfold organically. But which approach leads to the strongest stories?

Personally, I’ve never sat down to write an outline, much less a first draft, without at least thinking I knew the general ending. However, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. This is why understanding the pros and cons of each method can help you find the right balance for your own process. A solid ending can provide direction and focus, but some writers find that too much rigidity stifles creativity. On the other hand, writing without a planned ending can lead to exciting discoveries—but also to meandering plots and frustrating rewrites.

Today, I’m pleased to share a post from Daryl Rothman, who shares convincing examples from both sides of the road. Whether you’re a meticulous plotter or a spontaneous discovery writer, his insights can help you understand how knowing (or not knowing) your ending will shape your creative process.

***

In This Article:

• Famous Authors Who Knew Their Endings
• Do All Great Writers Plan Their Endings? A Different Perspective
• Plotter vs. Pantser: Which Writing Method Works Best?

John Irving once noted:

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

Hard to poke holes in his rationale, or his success with The Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp, to name but a few. Irving elaborated that he types the words and sends them as postcards to close friends (some who noted that not nary a punctuation mark evolved from conception to publication). Irving added:

You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

This topic evokes some immediate lines in the sand. I remember being called a pantser years ago. “Hey,” I recall protesting, in homage to Larry Fine, “I resemble that remark.” Of course, the moniker referred not to any propensity for yanking down the trousers of a mortified fellow human but rather, my tendency to favor a measure of spontaneity over assiduous plotting. In truth, I typically end up somewhere in between, or a little of everything, but the matter of pantser vs. plotter has its ardent adherents, including many who stand squarely with Irving.

Margaret Mitchell famously wrote Gone with the Wind backwards, penning the saddest parts of the Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara saga before adjudicating the details of their tumultuous relationship. Mitchell wrote the book’s final moments of grief and loss first. She said:

I left them to their ultimate fate.

In a 2011 NPR interview, Joanna Arietta, director of historic houses for the Atlanta History Center and Margaret Mitchell House, noted:

She knew at the very beginning that Rhett wasn’t going to care that much and that Scarlett was going to live for another day

Mitchell shared:

“I had every detail clear in my mind before I sat down to the typewriter. I believe… that is the best way to write a book—then your characters can’t get away from you and misbehave, and do things you didn’t intend them to do in the beginning.

Even my beloved Edgar Allan Poe believed the finest writers composed their work with an understanding of the story’s end and the impact it should have on readers. Inclined toward the short story, Poe’s lone completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, contains an italicized trail of phrases for the reader to track, foreshadowing the story’s end. These impart the feel of a conceptual short story and further illustrate that the end of his tales remained always front of mind.

JK Rowling wrote the last chapter of the seventh and final Harry Potter book, The Deathly Hallows, around the same time she conceived the idea for the first:

I’ve always planned seven books. These books have been plotted for such a long time, and for six books now, that they’re all leading a certain direction.

Once again, tough to argue with the staggering success her roadmap yielded.

There are countless more adherents, yet this is hardly a decided debate. Rather, it is freighted with the impassioned druthers of some dissenting heavyweights.

Do All Great Writers Plan Their Endings? A Different Perspective

In 2011, The Guardian revealed Great Expectations as readers’ favorite Dickens novel, yet his original ending may well have evoked a different sentiment. The initial version sees an unmarried Pip briefly reunite with Estella in London, finding she has been widowed and remarried, dashing all hope of ending up together.

Roald Dahl’s first iteration of Matilda was something of a cautionary tale, and didn’t even feature the bookish heroine readers came to know and love. Matilda was a naughty, unruly child (Veruca Salt anyone?) who pranked those around her and perished in the end of the book as penance for her cruelty. Fans may give thanks that Dahl’s final version changed course, softening our beloved protagonist.

And then there’s Hemingway’s 47 potential conclusions to A Farewell to Arms. This classic famously ends,

After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

Simple and sparse, inimitable Hemingway. But it would not have been had he rigidly held to one of his myriad previous conclusions.

Stephen King, one of the most prolific authors of all time, recoils at the idea of obedient plotting, feeling it extinguishes creative embers, and stunts the organic growth of the characters you have brought into the world. Most of his ideas arise from simple questions he posits, often beginning with “What if?,” and building from the possibilities that subsequently manifest. Salem’s Lot clawed its way to life from one such query: “What if vampires invaded a small New England village?” So too with Cujo: “What if a young mother and her son became trapped in their stalled car by a rabid dog?”

Plotter vs. Pantser: Which Writing Method Works Best?

It is said that a friend once visited James Joyce as he wrote, inquiring upon arrival the source of the scribe’s obvious vexation. Of course it was the work, as always. “How many words did you get today?” queried the visitor. “Seven,” replied Joyce. “Seven? But James… that’s good, at least for you.” “Yes,” Joyce at last assented, before lamenting, “But I don’t know what order they go in!”

I think many writers can relate to the challenge of determining sequence and structure across an entire manuscript.

So, who’s right? Pantsers or plotters? Is it better to set down your stakes straight away, finish line forever in sight, or at least in mind—or to wing it, to breathe life into your story and its inhabitants and sit back and enjoy the ride?

The question, of course, is flawed. Hopefully, all writers have learned, even if they harbor a preference, that there is no one right way. We have heard here from only a smattering of notable scribes who have found smashing success on either side of the fence. The achievement of one approach clearly cannot be said to belie that of the other. You must find what works for you (and it might not always be the same, project to project, or as your literary journey progresses).

I wrote a piece questioning blind adherence to some of writing’s “rules,” and referred in the piece to Dr. Steven Pinker, noted Harvard linguist, author, psychologist, and cognitive scientist, who in his The Sense of Style challenges some of these sacred cows. My article focused on the great debate around word choice, and in an email exchange with Pinker, he agreed that the “Puritanical advice” which tends to undergird many style manuals and writing rules “is overdone.”

>>Click here to read The Rules of Fiction: What They Are and What They’re Not

So don’t box yourself in. Experiment.

I like to have an overall idea of story and perhaps the endgame or some goalposts, but leave the road along the way uncluttered by excessive plotting. I credit King’s practice of posing key questions. From that ember of a possibility can ignite a roaring blaze of story, character, and conflict.

King’s “key question” approach has worked well for me, especially if I further the “What if” inquiry to include something like, “but is prevented (from main objective) by….” But even if I fancy knowing the result, I humble myself sufficiently to remain open to a change, perhaps even a big one. Our stories and our characters are our babies, yes, but sometimes you must “kill your darlings,” as King famously said. Or at the very least, follow their lead.

I remember as a kid reading and then watching Shane, and when little Joey is running through the graveyard toward the climactic showdown of the film, my father said softly, “And a child shall lead them.” (A little Isaiah 11: 6 for you.)

Truth be told, it stuck with me, more for the literary lesson. My story is my baby, just as is each character. I have breathed life into them and must ultimately follow their lead, providing what guidance I can. I am not their puppet master, nor they my obedient marionettes, dancing upon my every pull of the string or punch of the keyboard. Give your characters life. Imbue them with some defining traits, build out your world a bit, and set them free upon it.

I do outline a bit, though at the beginning I keep it fairly broad and flexible. I may outline further as I go along and I see where the story and the characters are taking me. I may jot reminders or ideas for upcoming scenes. But I try not to be intransigent: if upon arrival those ideas or scenes no longer fit, or need some tweaking, I make a course correction.

Everyone has an ego; I definitely do. Writing is one of the few things I believe I do well, and it has transpired more than once that I pen something, even a paragraph, I think to be well-written, even masterful, but there is that gnawing sense it simply doesn’t fit. It isn’t true to the story or perhaps the character. I hem and haw, grumble and groan, perhaps let slip a few nice expletives (talk about word choice), but know in my heart to leave out the misplaced verbiage.

On the other hand, I don’t like to start with nothing, rudderless, no notes, no ideas, my writerly trousers tugged down to my ankles. I typically conjure something of a roadmap but remain open to the number of detours I’m apt to encounter along the way. Flexibility within structure.

Best wishes finding the approach best for you. No better way in the end than to keep working. Good luck in your journey. Write on!

In Summary

The debate between plotters and pantsers—whether to plan a story meticulously or allow it to unfold organically—has been central to many famous authors’ writing processes. Writers like John Irving, Margaret Mitchell, and J.K. Rowling have spoken about how knowing the ending first can help inform their writing. However, authors like Stephen King emphasize a more spontaneous approach, allowing the story to develop naturally. Ultimately, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Writers must find what works best for them and adapt as their creative process evolves.

Key Takeaways

• Plotting vs. Pantsing: Some writers prefer to plan their endings first, believing it guides the rest of the story, while others discover the ending as they write.
• Famous Authors’ Approaches: John Irving, Margaret Mitchell, and J.K. Rowling all believed in starting with the ending to ensure a cohesive narrative, while authors like Stephen King take a more exploratory approach.
• Flexibility is Key: Whether you plot or pants, remaining flexible allows your story and characters to evolve naturally.
• No Right Answer: The best method depends on the writer and the specific project. It’s important to experiment and find what works for you.

Wordplayers, tell us your opinions! Do you think great writers plan their endings first, or do you prefer to let the story unfold organically? Tell us in the comments!

 

The post Do Great Writers Know the Ending First? appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

How can you use Kickstarter to help bring your creative vision into reality? What are some of the biggest mistakes authors make? What are some tips to ensure your campaign is a success? Oriana Leckert shares her expertise.

In the intro, AI-narrated audiobooks from ElevenLabs will now be accepted on Spotify through FindawayVoices; A Midwinter Sacrifice by J.F. Penn with my voice clone for the Author’s Note on Spotify; BookVault introduce boxsets and slipcases; Managing your finances [Becca Syme]; How to write non-fiction [EOLU Podcast]; Thoughts on the Berlin film market; Death Valley – A Thriller.

Today’s show is sponsored by my patrons! Join my community and get access to extra videos on writing craft, author business, AI and behind the scenes info, plus an extra Q&A show a month where I answer Patron questions. It’s about the same as a black coffee a month! Join the community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Oriana Leckert is the head of publishing at Kickstarter, as well as an author, freelance writer, editor, and consultant.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Types of Kickstarter campaigns for authors
• Unique rewards to offer your backers
• Biggest mistakes authors make for a campaign that doesn’t fund
• Bringing your own backers vs. discovery from Kickstarter
• Tips for creating a visually pleasing page
• The importance of a pre-launch page
• Making sure your Kickstarter gets approved
• Creating a detailed budget for your rewards

You can find Oriana and more about Kickstarter at Kickstarter.com/creators/publishing and Kickstarter.com/publishing.

Transcript of Interview with Oriana Leckert

Joanna: Oriana Leckert is the head of publishing at Kickstarter, as well as an author, freelance writer, editor, and consultant. So welcome to the show, Oriana.

Oriana: Jo, I’m so excited to be here talking with you. Thank you so much for having me.

Joanna: It’s great to have you on the show. So first up, just in case—

What is Kickstarter, for anyone who doesn’t know? What is your role there?

How did you become involved in the publishing side of things?

Oriana: Absolutely. So Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform. We are unique in the crowdfunding landscape for a few reasons. We are only for creative projects, so you can’t use Kickstarter for medical bills, investment funding, charitable donations.

Every Kickstarter project has to create something new to share with the world.

Kickstarter is also a public benefit corporation, which is a sort of legal and business charter that turns us basically into a mission-driven for-profit organization. So our mission is to bring creative projects to life. Everything we do comes back to bringing more creativity into the world through that structure.

We are also quite a progressive company. We do 5% after-tax profit donations every year to organizations fighting systemic inequality and doing music and arts education. We are very transparent about our tax contributions, the salary difference between our CEO and the median staff salary.

So we do all sorts of things that make us, what I believe, a really ethical place to be and a force for hopefully good in the world.

My role is head of publishing. So I’ve been a Kickstarter six years, which is the longest I’ve been at any company, actually. I came here to grow our journalism category at the very end of 2018. I have done journalism, I’ve done comics, I’ve done publishing.

It, sort of unexpected to me, is the best job I’ve ever had. Which is slightly corny, but worth saying. I can’t believe I get to do this work all the time. My background is about half and half digital media and traditional publishing, so I’ve spent most of my career fully focused on books and the written word in one way or another.

I generally describe my job here as one part literary industry expert, one part crowdfunding consultant, one part life coach, and one part cheerleader. So those are the various roles I get to play for my creators.

I also get to be out in the world all the time doing wonderful things like this, just kind of talking about Kickstarter and helping people get a better understanding of what it’s for, how you can use it, the benefit for authors and creative people of all stripes.

Joanna: Oh, that’s great. You are a cheerleader. I love your energy. You bring such a great energy.

I do feel like Kickstarter, obviously, is a company, but it does have that very creative feel. So I really appreciate that.

I’ve also met you a couple of times in Vegas over the last few years, and so I thought we’d start there. What have you seen in terms of the changes in the author community over the last few years?

What are the types of Kickstarter campaigns that authors do?

Obviously, we’re not all Brandon Sanderson (whose campaign made over $41 million!).

Oriana: That’s a great question. It’s been pretty exciting. So I was hired by Margot Atwell, who held this role, also, for five or six years. I really see a pretty strong through line from her work to mine.

The amount of change in perception from authors, publishers, illustrators, toward Kickstarter, the shift has been absolutely massive.

I mean, certainly when Margot started, and even when I started, there was a lot of sort of bewilderment, hedging toward distrust, and people thought Kickstarter was just for desperate people who couldn’t get a book deal through the traditional systems.

The change has been so dramatic of people understanding that —

Kickstarter can be transformative for an author’s career —

and that it can work for traditional publishing, indie publishing, hybrid publishing, all kinds of authors. 

I mean, obviously I’m in the bag for Kickstarter, but there are so many ways that it can be tremendously helpful. Kickstarter is really about collapsing the boundaries between a writer and their readers, a publisher and their fan base, any creative person and their audience.

There’s so many benefits to doing that. You get to thrill your backers with new and exciting rewards. You get to turn what can be a sort of, not boring, but like just a standard book release, into a moment.

You get to build your brand, your profile, get press.

You get to test out ambitious projects. You get to understand so much more about your audience — 

and what they want and how you can give it to them.

So, yes, going to shows like Author Nation, formerly 20Books, was a real revelation for me. Margot’s work was mostly concentrated on the traditional publishing industry and getting to know the people who are really driving forward indie publishing and self-publishing and owning their own author careers.

It’s been really marvelous getting to make a lot of inroads into that world and seeing the great success that people can have on our platform and outside of it.

Joanna: You mentioned there that you can thrill backers with new and exciting rewards, but I feel like many people listening might not even know what kind of rewards they would do. The word “reward”, it’s quite a different word if people haven’t been involved with Kickstarter.

For an author, what are the kind of rewards that people are doing?

Oriana: I love that question because, to me, the rewards are really like at the heart of the Kickstarter proposition and what makes this kind of fundraising so interesting and kind of thrilling.

Basically, Kickstarter, your process is that you’re inviting people on a creative journey. You’re saying, I’m going to make this cool thing. I want your support, and in exchange, you’re going to get stuff. You’re going to get to be part of my process.

Your main reward is going to be your book, or your series —

or, if you’re a publishing company, your season. Whatever it is, that’s your main tier, and then you’re going to build everything else out above and below that.

Then a lot of people think the rewards means swag or merch, which is fine, but merch can really add a lot to your production costs. It’s causing you to learn how to produce all kinds of things that maybe you’ve never done before.

So that’s not the only way to do it. If you’re going to do some merch, I think it’s nice to come up with some custom items that feel really related to the work that you’re doing.

If you’ve got a romance novel with a pivotal scene on the beach, maybe you make some candles that smell like the ocean. Maybe you do some kind of handkerchief that’s printed with the pattern of the dress that your heroine is wearing.

You can really think beyond merch, into digital rewards, experiential rewards. There’s a lot of parts of the writing process that can be sort of like pulled out and packaged as rewards. Things like notes from the field, outtakes, deleted scenes.

I’ve had people write bloopers, as if it were like a comedy movie, like added new scenes or novellas, other pieces from different works that you’ve done. Certainly, your back list and other books that you’ve written, those can all be included. We’ve seen people do tours of the writer’s studio, things like that.

Also think about what skills you have in addition to your writing. Perhaps you are excellent at marketing, or social media, or poetry. You can offer webinars on those sorts of things, other kinds of ways that people can experience the creative practice that you have.

Then you can get into like high-end exclusive one-off, crazy rewards. One whole section of rewards I love is naming rights. We’ve seen all kinds of “We’ll name the dragon after your dog. We’ll name the illness after your mother in law. We’ll name the hero after your son.”

There’s a LitRPG novelist named Matt Dinniman, who did this really well. He writes these big cast, you know, there’s dungeons, and you’re in an intergalactic reality TV show with hundreds of characters. So in his last campaign, for $666 he will kill you off in his next book, and for $777 he’d let you live. He’ll write a whole scene around you personally and that sort of thing.

So those are just some. I mean, you can do book release parties. You can do book clubs. If you’re writing children’s books, you can do coloring pages or supplemental material for teachers or other educators.

The sky is really the limit, and it is based on your creativity —

and the things that both you can make and that your audience wants. So this is another opportunity to talk to them.

Ask them, if I’m going to do a piece of swag, would you rather have an enamel pin or makeup bag? If I’m going to do alternate covers, would you like the blue cover or the red cover? See what your people are interested in, and then figure out whether it’s possible for you to deliver it to them?

Joanna: Wow, so many ideas there. I feel like this is part of the game, is that if someone’s listening and they’re like, “oh, that sounds great,” well—

You need to get on Kickstarter and start backing things and understanding how it works.

It’s quite different. People think, oh, it’s just like an Amazon or whatever, it’s just not.

Oriana: My number one piece of advice for anyone who’s even a little bit Kickstarter curious, get on the site and back some projects, even just for a buck or two. Follow the creators out in the world, watch what people are doing.

I often say this, but I am an expert in Kickstarter because I stare at Kickstarter all day long. You too can stare at Kickstarter all day long. You can follow everybody. You can look at what people have done and what’s worked and what hasn’t.

Find all the best tricks, steal them for your own.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery and all that. It is absolutely the best way to get good at Kickstarter, just like immerse yourself in this strange and lovely world and see how everybody else is doing it, and do it better.

Joanna: I mean, I now buy a lot of just ebooks.

I mean, I buy a lot of beautiful print with foil and all this, but I also just buy ebooks. They’re kind of a similar price as you might get on some of the other platforms. So people can do that.

I think you mentioned the book being the main offering, and people might think, well, that’s the paperback. But you can do ebook, you can do audiobook, you can do bundles, you can do series, as you said. So there’s so many options.

So obviously things have changed over the last few years, but—

Have you got any numbers on how big the Kickstarter industry is now with publishing?

Or anything you can share around that?

Oriana: I would love to tell you. So first I’ll tell you, Kickstarter overall, by the numbers since our inception, there have been 273,000 projects funded, eight and a half billion dollars pledged, from more than 24 million backers.

In publishing specifically, we’ve had 69,000 projects launched, 3.2 million unique backers, and over $380 million pledged to campaigns. I have lots of other stats, but a few things I’ll share here.

The publishing category has grown year over year, every year since 2017, in terms of number of projects launched, number of projects successful, and the overall percent of success rate. There has never been a dip since 2017, so for over a decade.

Another stat that I really love about the publishing category, if you look at campaigns that have at least 25 backers, the overall success rate is 84%. I think that’s really telling because 25 backers, that’s like a little bit more than your mom, your best friend, the folks who are essentially obligated to support anything that you do.

So if you can get a little bit beyond that sort of inner circle, your chances of succeeding on the platform are tremendously high. Another thing that I wanted to call out, I just got some new numbers around this, the average backing amount per backer across the whole category has nearly doubled since 2020.

So we used to see an average backing around $40, and it’s currently at $72 per backer. I think this is clearly around the trend of special and deluxe editions, but it’s a great indication that —

The backer behavior on Kickstarter is just very different than your general book buying public.

People don’t come here looking for 99 cent ebooks, the lowest bargain basement prices.

Folks are really willing to pay more because they understand that this is a different kind. It’s not exactly a purchase, it really is supporting bringing a strange and wonderful new thing into the world that wouldn’t exist before.

People are also much more forgiving about timeline. If you buy something from most online booksellers, you’re expecting to have it in your hands within a couple of days. People wait months, and sometimes years, to get their Kickstarter rewards, and they don’t mind if the creator is clear and transparent.

You’re also doing the work of demystifying the publishing process. Why does it take so long? Where are books printed? How long does it take them to ship via freight over the ocean? What do all these things really look like?

So it’s really interesting just figuring out what your backers want and will bear, versus the general book buying public out in the world.

Joanna: Absolutely, and that’s why we have fewer backers than we might sell total books on other platforms. As you said, they do spend more money and we can do higher quality and more interesting products. Obviously there, you mentioned that not every campaign actually funds.

What are some of the top mistakes you see that mean the campaign doesn’t fund or there are other issues?

Oriana: The biggest mistake I think authors make, or any creator, is overestimating their abilities to reach their crowd. I think making sure that your ambition matches your reach is the number one most important thing to like come close to guaranteeing that you will be successful.

If you are an emerging writer, and you’re still building your audience, and you don’t have that many followers or subscribers out in the world, you should not try to fund a multi-volume, leather bound omnibus.

Do a real, honest assessment of who’s in your crowd, how to find them, what percentage of them are likely to support what you’re doing —

and then find a project that feels realistic based on those numbers. That’s really the biggest thing, sort of conceptually.

As far as tips for a project page, again, back campaigns, look at what other people are doing.

A project page can be either as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. You definitely want, obviously, to talk about the book, what is in it. Do a trope card, if you want. We’re seeing those all over the site.

Just what kind of book it is, and like specs. Also, page count, trim size, cover design. Obviously, if you’re doing a special edition, exactly what sorts of bells and whistles, with a prototype, if you can.

Then you can be really expansive from there. What are your inspirations? Who are your collaborators? What brought you to this work? What are some of the things that make you excited about your writing practice? Your timeline, your budget. What made you choose these rewards and how are you going to produce them?

All those sorts of things will make backers feel both more trusting that you will do the things that you’re promising, and just more excited to be part of your journey.

Joanna: So just to be clear with what you said at the beginning. So somebody, they’re a new writer—and I’ve seen several authors fail this way—they want to do some gorgeous book, and they put a level of $25,000 is what they want, but they don’t necessarily have an email list or anything.

When I saw this particular person I’m thinking of, I saw that and was like, there’s no way that’s going to fund. So what is the problem with people that are kind of expecting Kickstarter to bring people? So maybe just talk about—

What’s the split between what Kickstarter does with discovery and then what the author has to bring?

Oriana: Yes, absolutely. So we track backer behavior, obviously, all across the site and category by category.

In your Creator dashboard, if you run a campaign, you will see a breakdown of what percentage of backers are coming through your efforts and who are coming through the Kickstarter ecosystem.

In publishing, an average is about 30% are coming through Kickstarter. That can be like 20% to maybe 40%, depending on how much exposure your project winds up getting. So that’s not nothing.

Being on Kickstarter will help you grow your audience, but it’s definitely not everything. You really do need to bring your people first.

Our algorithm works on attention.

So any project that’s getting clicks, getting backings, getting comments, our algorithm says, “Oh, people want to look at this. We will expose it to more and more people.” That means raising it up in search results, slotting it into various of the macros and carousels around the site.

Our recommendation engine powers recommended projects on the top of campaigns, at the bottom of emails. We are doing a lot to make sure that projects are being surfaced to folks who want to see them.

We actually are doing some significant backer-focused work this year on improving our search results, improving our recommendation engine. We’re really working to make sure that people are finding the projects that they are going to be excited by.

Joanna: So, I mean, and this is something I think is quite different, it is very visual. The story page, the sales page. There’s a main visual.

There’s kind of two fields, the header field, and then a very small description field and then the image. That’s what’s really surfaced around Kickstarter, isn’t it?

Any tips for the image and those text boxes for SEO purposes?

Oriana: Yes, totally. So SEO is important, but it is not as crucial. We can always tell when people are coming to us from KU because rather than the title of the book, their project subject says, “Reverse harem, lesbians on Mars, with an enemies to lover subplot.” You know, you don’t have to do that on Kickstarter.

Keywords are important, but it’s not the same. It’s much more about, what is this project? Who is it for? So I would, of course, absolutely maximize your title and your subtitle to get as much information as possible.

Then exactly as you said, I mean, imagine somebody looking at your project on their phone. They’re going to see the title, subtitle, the project image, maybe one sentence. That’s also what they’re going to see in a tweet, in a search result, in a newsletter thumbnail.

So those elements are really, really important, and you want with just those four items to sort of bring everybody in and get them excited to click through.

For the project image, we recommend one full bleed image. Maybe it’s your cover, your cover image, or like one gorgeous illustration from the book.

Or if you’ve got a series, maybe a stack of books.

We don’t recommend larding up that image with a whole lot of text. Remember it’s going to show up next to your title, the title of your project.

So if the title of your project is the title of your book, and the title of your book is also written on the book cover, you don’t also need a text bubble that says the book title on top of that project image.

Sometimes people try to cram a whole lot of very salesy text onto that image. It not only like makes the image pop less and makes it less interesting, it also is very difficult to read when that shows up thumbnail sized on a search page or a social post.

So concentrate on making like a bright, exciting image that isn’t too overloaded with many tiny elements.

Joanna: And then the video. I wanted to ask about this because on Kickstarter it says you really should do a video. So why is that?

Any tips on the sales video?

Oriana: We definitely do see a preference for videos. It’s, again, probably the tiktokization and the pivot to video all around the internet. Kickstarter is on the internet. It’s a visual medium. People like videos these days.

That said, if the video is the main stumbling block keeping you off the platform, I am here to tell you that you don’t have to do one. Plenty of projects fund extremely well without having a video. So if that’s the calculation that you’re making, just have beautiful imagery and you’ll be fine.

That said, if you are going to do a video, it needs to be short, bright and compelling. Especially on the publishing side, we see about 50% of potential backers stop watching after one minute, and everybody else is gone after the second minute.

So you don’t need to undertake some massive Hollywood production style situation that’s going to cost you tons of time and money. Much better to do just kind of like a direct to camera. It is nice to show your face if you feel comfortable doing so.

Just a teaser. Talk a little bit about who you are, what you’re doing, ask for people’s support, and say that you hope they click in and read through the whole rest of your story.

Joanna: So, and this is a tough one, because I’ve done different kinds of videos, now coming up for my fifth campaign.

For the fiction, I did do one for Blood Vintage which is like a book trailer. So it goes straight into the sort of thriller book trailer, and then I put on my face afterwards, and I’m telling them about the book.

On my nonfiction ones, I’ve really just done, sort of as you said, a face to camera.

Is there any data on what kind of video people prefer? For fiction, is a book trailer better than a direct to camera, or vice versa?

Oriana: That’s not the kind of data that we do or possibly even could collect. I think it’s more a question of knowing your audience, knowing what they want, and what is going to fit the best. I mean, I think that’s really smart that you’ve done it slightly differently for your fiction versus nonfiction.

Whatever you think is going to be the best representation of this particular work, that’s what you should go with.

Joanna: I guess I think about it from my perspective as a backer. With fiction—and it’s terrible to say, but it’s true—I often don’t care so much about the author, I want the story.

I’ve bought a ton of fiction off Kickstarter without knowing the author, whereas I feel like the nonfiction I’ve bought, I’ve actually known the author, so I’m more interested in the author. So that’s just, I guess, my personal behavior.

Oriana: Sure, but your personal behavior is probably fairly telling about a broader book buying population. So I think that makes a lot of sense.

Joanna: It’s good to know though. I mean, for people listening, look, there’s no structure for it. In fact, the very first video I did, I went to Russell Nohelty’s bestselling page and I deconstructed his video. I literally wrote it down, and then I followed his script with my stuff.

Oriana: That’s a great way to do it.

Joanna: I think to find someone who’s successful and model them, I think that’s always a good trick.

Oriana: Yes, absolutely.

Joanna: Okay, so let’s just talk about some of the other aspects. So the pre-launch page, this is something that seems to be very important.

Talk about the pre-launch page.

Oriana: Absolutely. It’s a new feature. We’ve released it—gosh, what is time—last year or the year before. It has really changed the way that people are doing the kind of period before they launch.

[Check out my pre-launch page at JFPenn.com/deathvalley — which will become the main sales page on launch.]

So a pre-launch page, it’s a cover page. It lives at the same URL where your campaign will ultimately go. It’s simplified, and it is designed to generate followers.

So anybody who follows the pre-launch page is going to get a system email from Kickstarter as soon as you launch. We see a very high conversion over the life of the project, from pre-launch followers to project backers, sometimes 40 or 50%. Most of them tend to do it right away.

The work that you do to promote that pre-launch page and get your follower count up is going to pay off very handsomely once you launch.

It really helps you have a strong first day, which is excellent for morale, excellent for messaging, good for the overall percentage chance of success on the project.

So, as I said, this is still new-ish. We don’t have a huge amount of data about it, but I recommend a pre-launch period of at least two weeks. We’ve seen some people do it for weeks, months, even in a few cases, over a year.

I think in the best case, that pre-launch period is sort of a crescendo into the burst of launch. So if you urge someone to get excited and follow this page, which they do, and then six months later they get an email that the campaign is live now, I think you’ve really diluted the excitement that they had when they first came on board.

Everyone should do what works for them and their timeline and their project, but definitely don’t skip that as a step.

Spend some time promoting that pre-launch page, getting up your follower count. It will really, really, really help once you go live.

Joanna: For people listening, my pre-launch page is at JFPenn.com/DeathValley. Depending on when people are listening, it might well be live, or it might be in the future.

So when I did my first campaign, obviously you don’t know when you first start all the things you kind of have to do. There’s obviously KYC, know your customer, that Kickstarter has to do. So if people are going to set up their pre-launch page, how long will it take and—

What do people need to set up so that Kickstarter knows they can be approved?

Oriana: So there’s two different approvals.

The KYC stuff is done by Stripe, our payment processor. I would give yourself lots of extra time for these approvals. It usually only takes a day or two. Sometimes you get an automatic approval, but don’t leave that to the very end.

Make sure you get your bank details, your ID, all of that information up and sent over to Stripe well before you need to, well before it comes to crunch time.

As far as the Kickstarter approval process, that too can be automatic or it can take up to a few days. We do want, especially for first time authors or first time creators, the trust and safety team who reviews the projects wants to see pretty much a final draft when they’re approving it.

You can’t put up your pre-launch page until the project is approved. For serial creators in good standing, we are making some allowances where people can get that pre-launch page up before the approval process.

Especially when you’re starting out on the platform, it’s good practice to like have your campaign more or less finalized, so that the reviewers can see everything that you’ll be doing. Then you can get that pre-launch page up at that point.

Joanna: Yes, because — 

When you put up the rewards and things, you have to have costed it all out.

You have to say, like, how much people need to pledge, and you need to know things like your shipping details. So let’s get a bit more into those finances.

Earlier, you mentioned that adding merch can add a lot of money and lot of cost to a campaign. Of course, if you don’t know how much it’s going to cost even just to print your book, say, with foil or sprayed edges, or whatever, you can’t cost it out either.

What are some of the issues that people find with finances around Kickstarter?

Oriana: I cannot stress enough the importance of doing a full, real, detailed budget. That doesn’t mean vaguely guessing how much you think it might cost to print a book. Really, actually get samples, figure out all of your processes.

Budget, not just for print production, but for bubble wrap and tape, for pens and stickers. For all of the things that you are going to be producing in your rewards and also budget contingency plans.

Think about all the things that might go wrong.

Make sure you’re doing a really, really detailed job of understanding all of your costs. It’s good that you mentioned Russell before. There’s a publishing creator tips page, that’s kickstarter.com/creators/publishing.

There’s a whole lot of resources there for all kinds of different projects and different elements of the crowdfunding process. One piece is a budgeting article by Russell. It’s got a worksheet in it and details all of these things that we’re talking about. So I absolutely recommend using that as a guide when you’re setting out your budget.

One thing about it that I love is that he also says, “Include a little bit of money to do a nice thing for yourself.” For him, he gets a tattoo of one of his characters after every successful campaign.

So maybe for you, that’s getting a manicure or a massage or a nice dinner or a new book, but do do something sweet for yourself. That’s a nice way to give yourself a reward at the end of what can be a pretty intense process.

Joanna: Yes, it is intense. It’s funny because I was scared about it before I pressed that button on the first time, but I feel like what I love about the Kickstarter thing is that it’s a real launch period.

I feel like one of the most tiring things for authors is the constant need to do marketing, whereas with Kickstarter campaign, you can be like, okay, I’m going to really push hard for this couple of weeks, or a few weeks before that. Push hard, do all my marketing, and then I can go into fulfillment, and I can ease off a bit.

I feel like this is more surge marketing, isn’t it?

Oriana: Yes. I think that’s an excellent way to describe it, for sure.

That’s definitely the Kickstarter proposition. You know, look, I will be screaming from the rooftops about this project for 30 days, and then I will stop talking about it.

Joanna: Yes, and you can’t have it. Well, there won’t be a thing anymore.

Oriana: Exactly, exactly.

Joanna: Well, then on that, I guess once we have finished, the campaign closes, and Kickstarter collects the money, and we get the money in a couple of weeks’ time.

We also have to fulfill the stuff, which is, all the shipping and all of that. One thing that I’ve seen people be confused about is around taxes.

So any clarification on who pays the tax?

Oriana: So I am actually not allowed to give tax advice, as I am absolutely not an accountant. I would say you should certainly talk to your accountant about what you’re doing on Kickstarter and how you should report that and what that’s all going to mean.

This is a reasonable point to note that, as we are recording this on February 13th, yesterday, Kickstarter announced a whole bunch of new features that we have been working on for a long time, and we are in the process of rolling out. Including a lot of post campaign tools that we’ve never had before.

We’re doing an internal pledge management system. That is something that people have been asking us for probably over a decade. There are many elements to that, but one thing that we are going to be doing in the future is we’re going to be helping everybody with tax and VAT collection.

So that’s something that’s coming soon, and we’re going to do our best to help demystify a massively complicated process.

Joanna: It is. Well, then I’ll say, from my perspective, I know what taxes I have to pay, and I make sure I pay them after I get the money from Kickstarter. So as far as I’m concerned —

Paying tax is my responsibility as the creator.

What else then is coming? Or things that perhaps authors aren’t using enough yet?

Oriana: Well, so last year, we released late pledges. This means, as like it says on the tin, once the campaign is closed, you can still collect additional backing. There’s some caveats with that. We don’t want to undermine that sort of now or never, all or nothing, do or die situation.

So our recommendations for late pledges, they’re most effective in two to seven days after the campaign has closed. The final 48 hours of a campaign are really strong. You know, that’s when all of that FOMO really kicks in. So a lot of marketing happens, a lot of outreach, a lot of just like traffic.

So inevitably, no matter how hard you have been pushing this project, the day after your campaign closes, three people are going to email you and say, “Well, I didn’t know you had a live campaign.” So late pledges are really for them to still be able to get on board, even though they missed all of the main part of the activity.

We also recommend you do not have all of your rewards available in late pledges, and those that you do, cost more. So again, you want to make sure that all of that talk you’ve been doing during the campaign of like, “This is your only chance to get this book, at this price, at this specificity,” has not been made into a lie by late pledges.

Then also with late pledges, they don’t get to stay up forever. At some point you do say, now I am going to press, so I’m going to turn them off. So that’s how late pledges are designed to work.

Some other really cool features that we’ve just announced, and again, as I said, we announced this yesterday. So I don’t have a ton more information, although I should tell you where to go to find it. I mean, we’ve got pop ups and things all over the site about it.

Well, it’s a slightly cumbersome URL, updates.kickstarter.com/kickstarters-2025-product-roadmap with some hyphens. I don’t know if you have show notes.

Joanna: I’ll put a link in the show notes.

Oriana: Excellent. That would be great. That’s where we lay out the sort of overview of all of the stuff that we’re working on this year.

Some things that I will just call out, we are in beta currently for a payment plan. It’s called Pledge Over Time. That allows backers for rewards above a certain dollar amount, I think it’s $125, to make their pledge in four payments, rather than all at once.

We are working on secret rewards, which, this is also still in beta. Creators can get a direct link to a reward that’s not listed in the campaign and send that to specific groups of backers.

So we have a lot more features planned for this year. We’re trying to make things that people have been asking for. This also means, if there’s a feature that you want Kickstarter to have that we currently don’t, write into our support team and tell them.

A lot of the things that we have developed over the years have come directly from so many people asking for it that we realized we just had to do it. So please tell us what you want, and maybe it’ll come to life.

Joanna: Brilliant.

Where can people find Kickstarter for Publishing and any other help online?

Oriana: Yes, kickstarter.com/publishing is where all of the publishing projects are. I mentioned that creator tips page, kickstarter.com/creators/publishing. We are all over the socials. We are everywhere that you can find us.

Oh, another thing we also just rolled out is a whole new learning lab curriculum, which is a video series of every element of your Kickstarter project.

It is probably geared a bit more toward like larger sort of design and tech and gadget and games creators, but I’m sure that there are really, really relevant tips for publishers and publishing folks in there as well.

We’re trying to give as much help as possible. We want everybody to succeed. Of course, a rising tide lifts all boats, which is foundational to the Kickstarter ethos.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Oriana. That was great.

The post Kickstarter For Authors With Oriana Leckert first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Self-doubt is one of the biggest obstacles a writer will ever face. It creeps in at the worst moments—undermining confidence, stalling progress, and making you question whether your stories are even worth telling. Conquering self-doubt in writing isn’t about eliminating it altogether; it’s about learning to work with it. The key is recognizing self-doubt for what it really is: not a stop sign, but a challenge to grow.

Not long ago, Louis Scenti wrote in about a personal challenge many writers face:

Perhaps this is a condition that many people struggle with but I feel quite alone. I can’t seem to shut off the critical voice, the saboteur, if you will, that says things like “why bother, nobody id interested in what you write,” or “you’re old and coming back to writing in your sixties—well, you just don’t have time to improve, it’s too late.”

In other words, I cannot seem to shut off my rational/critical brain and fully access the child-like part of me that finds writing pure fun; pure flow. Sometimes I can’t even sit down in my chair and face the keyboard. Any thoughts or ideas?

If you’ve ever found yourself battling a relentless inner critic—the voice telling you your writing is worthless, you’re too late, or you don’t have what it takes—you’re not alone. In fact, I’d argue all writers face this at some point (usually at multiple points) in their careers.

The inner critic often masquerades as a rational voice. It tells us that it’s just looking out for us, that it’s saving us from embarrassment, failure, or wasted effort. To a point, this is true, since the inner critic is often a highly sophisticated (and in some ways autonomous) manifestation of our inner protector—a voice we developed early in life to guide us to the safest choices. As a very young child, safety was paramount. But often this limiting protector/inner guide/critic doesn’t evolve apace with our maturing capabilities. Uncalibrated, it can remain with us our entire lives, even as its advice grows progressively less helpful and increasingly self-destructive. We could argue that the out-of-control inner critic is on a mission to destroy what it sees as our greatest enemy: ourselves.

Therefore, this voice is usually rooted in fear—of not being good enough, of being judged, or of spending time on something that may not lead to immediate validation. One of the most important things to understand about this voice is that it’s not an objective judge of your abilities. Instead, it’s a deeply ingrained response to past experiences, external pressures, and personal insecurities. The more power you give it, the louder it becomes. Alternatively, the more you recognize it for what it is, the more likely you can transform it back into a force that can legitimately guide, protect, and enhance positive growth.

In This Article:

• Proven Ways to Conquer Self-Doubt in Writing Your Fiction
• Embrace Your Inner Critic as a Necessary Archetype for Conquering Self-Doubt in Writing
• Face Your Fears to Overcome Self-Doubt and Unlock Your Creative Potential
• Recognize Ebb Periods in Your Writing Flow
• Expand the Child Archetype with Creative Freedom
• Why It’s Never Too Late to Be Creative

Proven Ways to Conquer Self-Doubt in Writing Your Fiction

Because self-doubt in writing (as in life) is all but ubiquitous, advice is everywhere. Most focuses on practical steps for either muscling past the self-doubt or building better habits to contain or redirect it. Most of this advice is good:

1. Give your inner critic a name (such as my favorite “Judgy McJudgerson”).

2. Set a timer and write anyway.

3. Open a dialogue with your inner critic by writing it a letter.

4. Change up your writing environment.

5. Find a creative ritual that supports you.

6. Remind yourself why you write.

I’ve written much in the past about dealing with the challenge of the inner critic. You can find some of those posts linked below. Today, I want to examine five ways to conquer self-doubt in writing that go deeper than just practical tips, so you can learn to address the underlying factors and motivations that keep the inner critic coming back time after time. Particularly, I want to examine each of the different “flavors” of self-doubt that Louis articulated in his query.

>>Click here to read Imposter Syndrome for Writers Is a Real Thing (+ the Key to Slaying It)

>>Click here to read Judge Yourself Less, Trust Yourself More, and Write Better Stories

>>Click here to read Afraid to Let Anyone Read Your Writing? 5 Steps to Move Past Fears

1. Embrace Your Inner Critic as a Necessary Archetype for Conquering Self-Doubt in Writing

You can’t destroy the inner critic. You can’t cut it off. You can’t stuff it inside some mental compartment and forget about it. It will always come back.

Why? Because it’s you.

Even though the toxic inner critic generally speaks in the voice of someone outside of ourselves (often an authoritarian voice, whether specific or generic), it arises from within. The only way to “get rid of it” is to integrate it—to make peace with its purpose for existence, recalibrate it into better functionality, and absorb it into our higher consciousness where we can exercise control over it.

In describing his inner critic, Louis used a key word. He wrote:

I can’t seem to shut off the critical voice, the saboteur, if you will….

In her book Sacred Contracts, archetype maestra Carolyn Myss posits four “archetypes of survival” inherent to every personality. One of these archetypes is the Saboteur. She writes:

The Saboteur archetype is made up of the fears and issues related to low self-esteem that cause you to make choices in life that block your own empowerment and success. [Y]ou need to face this powerful archetype that we all possess and make it an ally.

Rescued from the shadow, the Saboteur/Inner Critic can once again become the Protector it was intended to be. Instead of acting as a negative voice of self-sabotage or -destruction, it becomes a neutral ally highlighting pitfalls and recommending actionable choices.

>>Click here to read The Writer’s Inner Critic: 11 Ways to Tell if Yours Is Healthy

2. Face Your Fears to Overcome Self-Doubt and Unlock Your Creative Potential

FDR’s quote has become a cliche, but it’s truer than truth:

We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

In my own adventures, as I have circled the things I want and the fear that stands in my way, I have realized that is rarely the thing itself that frightens me—it is dread of my own fear response that holds me back. I recently shared a quote I have found profound in my own creative (aka, life) journey:

Everything you want is on the other side of fear.

Here’s another one I ran onto recently, from Mary Kate Teske, which is even truer:

No one ever tells you that bravery feels like fear.

The next time you sit at the page (or feel dread at the thought of doing so), take a moment to lean into what you’re feeling in your body. Instead of naming it fear and trying to move away from it, recognize it as your instinct toward bravery. This is your creative self in its very essence—desiring growth, transformation, experience. The very fact you are experiencing this deep inner tension and discomfort signals you are unwilling to settle for the status quo. Your inner self wants more—knows you need more. Via the very discomfort that may make you feel you are not big enough or good enough to continue, you are already proving your own profound courage.

Frankly, writing is scary. I’d even go so far as to say it should be scary. At the very least, congratulate yourself for pushing your own edges.

>>Click here to read How to Overcome Fear as a Writer and Embrace Your Profound Courage

3. Recognize Ebb Periods: How to Conquer Self-Doubt in Writing

In general, writers tend to put far too much pressure on the act of writing. Yes, that part’s important (obviously), but there are many other aspects of the creative process that are equally valid and, in many instances, impossible to do without.

Some days are typing days, and some are thinking days, but both are writing days.

When we’re not actively writing every day (or sometimes even after missing just one day), our toxic inner critic’s algorithm tends to lean heavily on themes of productivity equaling worth. But just as we gain more by fully welcoming and integrating the inner critic back into a healthy role, we also achieve our best creative states when we are able to welcome and use both sides of our brain. Some people tend to emphasize intuition and emotion to the point nothing ever gets written, structured, or edited. However, many people who struggle with the toxic inner critic tend to overemphasize logic and willpower to the point they need to be reminded that sometimes not writing is actually the most creative thing you can do.

Louis wrote:

Sometimes I can’t even sit down in my chair and face the keyboard.

Each author must look within to determine whether such a circumstance is the result of running away from fear instead of moving bravely into it—or whether, in some instances, a deeper and wiser voice is offering what turns out to be a good point. Very often, the resistance to sitting down to write at least partially results from the writer’s unreadiness. Sometimes that unreadiness is best dealt with by simply diving in and creating your way out of it. Other times, inner wisdom dictates something is missing:

• Perhaps a bit more time daydreaming is necessary to fully flesh out the characters.
• Perhaps a bit more research is required to understand how to execute the scene.
• Perhaps a bit more study into the mechanics of storytelling and writing would smooth the process.

Rarely is it productive to shame ourselves for legitimate feelings of not wanting to “sit down and face the keyboard.” Rather, allow what is to be. Take a moment to sit with it; listen to it. There is a message of truth there if only we can learn to recognize it. Once recognized, it often transforms from an obstacle to an ally.

But how do you know if you should be listening to your resistance to sitting at the keyboard—or resisting the resistance and moving forward anyway?

The answer is probably: whichever requires more courage.

Sometimes not writing can feel like the scarier option. If so, take a look at that. But if not writing feels like an escape, then turn around and sit at the keyboard once again. Wherever you are facing your fears—wherever you are feeling your own bravery—that is where the most answers will be found.

>>Click here to read Do You Have to Write Every Day? 10 Pros and Cons

4. Expand the Child Archetype: Conquering Self-Doubt with Creative Freedom

At the heart of the struggle against self-doubt is the desire to reconnect with the joy of writing and the childlike sense of play that allows creativity to flow freely. The Child is another innate archetype, one intimately associated with creativity (I’ve written about in-depth about the Child here and in my book Writing Archetypal Character Arcs). One of the main quests of my own life has been the desire to understand why accessing my childhood experience of creativity became so much more difficult in adulthood and, most importantly, how do I get it back?

That saga is ongoing for me (although I made an interesting breakthrough the other day, which, if it pans out, I will share in the future). One of the keys, however, is simply remembering tenets of childhood creativity and rewiring our well-meaning adult habits to return to them.

For example:

• The Child creates for the fun of it. No deadlines. No focus on productivity.
• If the Child doesn’t feel like creating, it doesn’t. If it feels like napping or eating or crying or laughing instead of playing, that’s what it does.
• The Child does not (naturally) feel guilty for not creating or for creating “badly.”
• The Child follows its joy (the disconnect most adults experience from embodied joy is one of our greatest creative blocks).
• The Child has no (or little) ego and approaches the world with the simultaneous humility and hubris of ignorance.
• The Child is a wide-open canvas of possibility and curiosity: it sees everything as new and potentially interesting.

The list goes on. Returning to childhood is no small feat. Indeed, in Carol S. Pearson’s cycle of archetypes, she begins with the childlike Innocent and ends with the Holy Fool—the culmination of that lifelong quest to return to untamed wonder.

If that culmination feels a bit out of reach as yet and if your writing feels heavy, you can try the following practical approaches:

• Write badly on purpose. Give yourself permission to write nonsense, knowing you can always revise later.
• Separate creation from evaluation. Draft first, critique later. Mixing the two is like trying to drive with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake.
• Reframe writing as exploration. Instead of thinking, “I have to write something good,” try “I wonder where this sentence will take me?”

>>Click here to read Not Feeling Creative? 4 Ways to Reignite the “Wonder” in Your Writing

5. It’s Never Too Late to Be Creative

Louis brings up one more important aspect of the inner critic—its ability to weaponize time against us. Writers returning to their craft after years (or decades) away, or those first picking up the pen after a lifetime of other pursuits, may feel an intense pressure to “catch up.” The critic whispers they don’t have enough time to improve, that they missed their chance, or that they should have started earlier.

But creativity isn’t a young person’s game. Many successful authors didn’t publish their first books until their fifties, sixties, or later. Frank McCourt published Angela’s Ashes at 66. Laura Ingalls Wilder published Little House in the Big Woods at 65.

Every chapter of life brings its own challenges and opportunities. Creativity and its expression remain our most important asset at every stage of life. In each chapter of life, we are someone new. In each chapter, we have something to say that is important. The stories and archetypes of the Third Act of life are not the same as the stories of the First Act. Experience is a writer’s greatest asset. You have lived more life and gained more wisdom and perspective. You bring something to the page younger writers simply can’t. The fear that it’s “too late” is an illusion designed by a dysfunctional inner critic to keep you from taking action.

More than that, I believe everything you write adds value to the world. The very act of writing changes reality. It changes you. It’s like investing advice: the best time to start is today.

>>Click here to read The 3 Acts of a Writer’s Life—Or How Your Age Affects Your Writing

***

Although the inner critic isn’t likely to ever fully disappear, it doesn’t have to be in charge. You don’t have to wait for permission to create, and you don’t have to prove your worth before you start.

Writing is an act of courage at any age, in any season of life. The only way to silence the voice that says “why bother?” is to sit down and write anyway.

In Summary:

Self-doubt is a common struggle for writers, often stemming from fear of failure, perfectionism, or external criticism. Overcoming these doubts is possible through intentional mindset shifts and strategic habits. By recognizing negative thought patterns, setting realistic goals, and cultivating a supportive creative environment, writers can build confidence in their abilities. Ultimately, the key to conquering self-doubt lies in persistence, self-compassion, and a focus on growth rather than perfection.

Key Takeaways:

• Self-doubt is a challenge, not a stop sign. Recognizing it as a natural part of the creative process allows you to work with it instead of against it.
• Your inner critic is not your enemy. Reframe it as the Protector archetype and transform it into an ally that guides rather than hinders you.
• Fear signals opportunity for growth. Instead of avoiding fear, lean into it as a sign you’re stepping beyond your comfort zone.
• Creative ebbs are natural and necessary. Not every moment needs to be productive. Sometimes stepping back leads to deeper insights.
• Reignite your childlike creativity. Approach writing with curiosity, playfulness, and a sense of wonder rather than pressure.
• It’s never too late to start writing. Your experiences add richness to your storytelling, no matter when you begin.

Want more?

As you can see from what we’ve been talking about today, understanding archetypes—and their shadows—is a valuable resource that can help you break free from creative self-doubt and write with greater depth and confidence. My eight-week email course Shadow Archetypes: Writing Complex Fictional Characters explores how these deep psychological patterns shape both your characters, by extension, you as well. In recognizing and working with shadow archetypes, you can uncover new layers of complexity in your storytelling that can help you transform inner obstacles into strengths. If you’re interested in joining me in bringing your most compelling characters to life, you can find out more here.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do you conquer self-doubt in writing, and what strategies have helped you stay creative even when the inner critic gets loud? Tell me in the comments!

Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or Spotify).

___

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The post 5 Proven Ways to Conquer Self-Doubt in Writing appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

How do you keep the happiness and joy in your writing practice, along with managing the business side of being an author? Marissa Meyer gives her tips.

In the intro, How authors can price their books for profit [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; How to recover from author burnout [Self-Publishing Advice]; my Brooke and Daniel crime series in KU; Day of the Vikings; Outback Days and City Nights in the Lucky Country – Books and Travel; replanning with Calendarpedia.

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Marissa Meyer is the New York Times bestselling author of fantasy romance and graphic novels, including The Lunar Chronicles. The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond is her latest book for authors.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Finding joy and happiness in your creative process
• Tips for finishing a first draft when you hit a wall
• Ways to fill your creative well
• How to make your research methods more fun
• Coming up for new ideas within a series
• Managing your to-do list and learning when to say no
• Remaining positive when querying and pitching
• Finding joy in book marketing

You can find Marissa at MarissaMeyer.com or on Instagram @MarissaMeyerAuthor.

Transcript of Interview with Marissa Meyer

Joanna: Marissa Meyer is the New York Times bestselling author of fantasy romance and graphic novels, including The Lunar Chronicles. The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond is her latest book for authors. So welcome to the show, Marissa.

Marissa: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Joanna: It’s great to have you on. So first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.

Marissa: Oh, goodness. I always wanted to be a writer. I am one of those. I was a huge reader growing up, loved stories, had a big imagination. So, really, from the time that I was a little kid, I started making up stories and telling them to my parents, asking them to write them down into little books for me.

Then as I got older, I, of course, started writing them myself. Then —

At some point I realized that this is a job. This is something that people actually can get paid for.

You could actually get paid to come up with stories and get your name printed on a book.

I think I realized really early on that that was for me, and that’s what I wanted to do with my life. So I kept writing.

As a teenager, I got really into fan fiction and credit that a lot with learning how to tell a complete story. Beginning, middle, end. I got my bachelor’s degree in creative writing and a master’s degree in publishing because I thought writing might be a difficult career to break into.

I wanted to have a backup plan, and thought, well, if this writing thing doesn’t pan out, maybe I can be an editor, maybe I can be a publicist or an agent or something.

The deeper I got into learning about publishing, the more it really just cemented how passionate I was about writing and how much I just really wanted to be the writer in this publishing equation.

So I wrote many multiple manuscripts that went nowhere, but eventually got the idea for a Cinderella retelling about a cyborg, a futuristic retelling. So that became my debut novel, Cinder.

Joanna: Wow. Okay, so it’s really interesting that you did publishing as a degree, as well as writing.

Did you have a job before you became a full-time author?

Like did you work in the publishing industry? Or did you just go straight from uni into full-time writer?

Marissa: No, I did. From university, I got a job as an editor at a very small publishing house in Seattle. That publisher focused mostly on fine art books. So those beautiful coffee table books that you get at museum exhibits and art galleries. You know those books.

So it had virtually nothing to do with my ultimate career of being a fiction writer, but it taught me a lot about just the behind the scenes, what goes into creating a book, and the actual production of it, the marketing of it, all of these various aspects.

So I did that for five years, and then I spent about a year as a freelance typesetter and proofreader. At which point my first novel sold, and I got to become a full-time writer.

Joanna: That’s very cool. I love that you did typesetting and stuff like that. We’ll come back to the business side, but let’s get into the book.

So you use the words “happy” and “joy” in the book title, but I feel like many writers think suffering and pain is more of a hallmark of the creative process.

If writers are not feeling the ‘joy’ and the ‘happy’ right now, what are some tips for getting back to that?

Marissa: Thank you so much for asking this question. It is so funny to me that we do have this stereotype of the writer. That you must be struggling in order to create art, and you must be suffering some way. If it’s not painful, then how can you possibly call it quality?

This stereotype really bugs me, and I’m really trying to dismantle it with this book. But that said, we’re also not shying away from the fact that writing, it’s not just fun and play all the time. There are struggles, there are challenges, no matter where you are on your journey.

Whether you’re suffering from writer’s block or burnout, whether you’re in the query trenches and you’re facing rejection or criticism. There’s a million things, of course, that can be roadblocks in our path to being happier writers.

That is largely what this book is about, trying to refocus our attention, not on all the things that can go wrong, not on all of the struggles that we face, but looking at the things that we really do love and enjoy about the craft of writing. The hobby, the career.

We get into it because we do have a passion. It’s not the sort of job or hobby that most of us take on just for the heck of it. I mean — 

You start writing because you love to write.

So I really encourage writers to find what it is that appeals to them about this. Do you love the process of taking a messy, complicated plot and fitting it together like a big jigsaw puzzle and that satisfying feeling when everything comes together?

Or do you love that you have the freedom to go to a cafe with your laptop and sip lattes all day and stare out at the people and let the world inspire you? Or maybe you love the research process and learning about things that you are so curious and interested in and just want to do deep dives into it.

There’s a lot of things that we can find joy and satisfaction in. So that’s going to be different for every writer, and that’s going to be different based on where you are, both in the process of writing a particular book, but also where you are in your overall career.

I always encourage writers to go back to that. What can I find joy in today?

Joanna: I love the research. I also love saying with a finished book, “I made this.” I always enjoy holding that book in my hand. You, coming from this fine art books thing you did early on, I guess you must love the really beautiful special editions and all that as well.

Marissa: Oh, I love it, and the smell! I love the smell of a new book. You don’t always get it when a lot of books these days just come in like a cardboard box, but some of these special editions will come wrapped in plastic, and so they still maintain the smell of the ink and the binding glue. Ah, I just nerd out over it.

Joanna: Well, and that is important too, isn’t it? I feel like we’ve come around to that. Like there was a lot of focus on digital for a while, especially for independent authors, but now it’s really come round to beautiful, physical products.

That, to me, is a very exciting part of the process, finishing the whole thing with something beautiful. That satisfaction is really part of it.

Marissa: Absolutely. I’m really big on celebrations.

I think it’s so important to take a moment and say, “I made this thing. I accomplished this. I had a goal. I had a dream, and I kept moving. It took months or years or decades, but I did it.”

That is such a huge part of the process.

It’s really easy—and especially like for me, I’m about 20 books now into my career— it can be easy to be like, “Oh, just another one. Set it on the shelf, and keep on working on the next deadline.” I really have tried to be very conscientious about it.

No, let’s pause. Let’s pop some champagne. Let’s take a night off. Let’s get a massage. Like, what is it that’s going to make me feel like, yes, I’ve done it again, and I’m really proud of this moment.

Joanna: That’s great. Well, you do have a section on the writing process in the book. Of course, every author is different, but if people haven’t got to that 20 books place—

Tell us how you get that first draft done. Any tips for actually finishing a book?

Which I know some people have an issue with.

Marissa: Finishing is hard. I think it’s important for people to know that everyone struggles with finishing. We talk a lot about the siren song of the next project because at some point in every book you’re going to reach that point where you’re in the murky middle and it feels endless.

You’re confused about the plot, you’re frustrated that things aren’t going well, and suddenly you get a sparkly new idea for the next thing.

It’s so easy to think, “Ah! That one’s going to be really easy and really fun, and it’s not going have any of these other problems that I’m dealing with right now.”

It’s very tempting to switch over and to follow that path of least resistance. I think it’s important to know that that fantasy of the next one being so easy, probably not reality. Probably you will get to relatively the same point in the process and, once again, be hit with, “Ah, this is hard. It’s work. What else can I do?”

For me, one of the tips that I started using fairly early in my career is when I am at the start of a project, and I’m really excited, and I’ve got lots of ideas, and you can feel all the potential for it, and there’s a reason that you’re choosing to write this thing out of all your other ideas. Why am I focusing my time on this one?

I will write down either a list, or I will write a little letter to myself detailing all of the things about this project that I cannot wait for.

Maybe it’s the romance that I’m really excited to write, or I just love the protagonist, or there’s a really big twist in the plot that I can’t wait to see how readers are going to react to.

Whatever it is, I will write down everything that I really love about this idea. Then when I’m a third of the way or halfway through the book and suddenly hating it and feeling like this is the worst thing I’ve ever written, and I can’t believe that I chose this, what was I thinking, I’ll go back and I’ll read that list.

I will remind myself why I chose this one in the beginning, and what do I love about it? What do I still love about it? Then I will take those ideas and I will try to incorporate them into the next scene or chapter, or couple of chapters that I’m going to write.

“All right, I love the romance.” Well, let’s have a romantic scene. “I think the villain is so cool.” Well, let’s have a scene where we really get to see how cool the villain is. You know, whatever it is, focus on that, and that will hopefully help you get over that bad period.

Joanna: Do you write out of order if you get to that point?

You’re like, I’m just going to write the climax scene because I know that will be fun, or do you write linearly?

Marissa: It really depends on the project. I have done both, and I think both processes work. Some books are more difficult than others.

The books that I’m struggling with more, then I will tend to jump around and go ahead to write a scene that I’m really excited about, but not always.

Some books have very complicated plots that are very interwoven, and in those cases, it can be less of a mental gymnastics challenge if you do write it linearly. So it really depends.

I think, for me —

Momentum and forward progress and consistency. Whatever you need to do to keep moving forward and keep on top of your goals — 

whether it’s a word count goal or a chapter goal or whatever it is, anything you can do any day to keep moving forward is going to be helpful.

Joanna: Sometimes that moving forward might not be getting new words down. You also have a section about filling the creative well. Sometimes, especially when you’ve written as many books as we both have, it can be like, okay, do you know what I need? Some more input.

What are some ways that you fill your creative well?

Marissa: Absolutely, and that’s such an important thing to note. Like you say, sometimes getting words down is not the answer.

If you’re facing some amount of creative burnout, or if you’re just really stuck in a plot and feel like things just aren’t working, or maybe you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere and you’re not really sure how to fix it, sometimes the best thing you can do is take a step back, and do it intentionally.

I think there’s a distinction between saying, “I have writer’s block and I can’t possibly write anything today,” versus, “I am choosing not to write today because I recognize that I need a moment and need some space to refill the well and tap into that creative spark again.”

So, for me, when I decide I’m going to take a day off, there’s a myriad of things that I might choose to do with that time. I think getting outside, going for walks, or if you can go to a park or go on a hike somewhere, if you can go swimming. Anything like that tends to, for me, really generate some new ideas.

Spending time with my family is always good. A lot of times I will use those days off to tackle other projects, things that have kind of been looming in the background. Maybe they’re taking up more mental space than they should be.

That could be things like getting your car washed, or that could be like reorganizing your pantry, just things that have been really bugging you lately.

Maybe it’s time to take a day and clear some of those things out because that will help clear your mental clutter as well.

Or you might take a day and be like, I’m going to do some really fun research about this project. Or I’m going to take a day and spend some time brainstorming or reoutlining my plot.

So you can also take a more hands on approach to writing. There’s really no right or wrong here. Whatever you feel like you need, give it a shot and see if it helps break something loose.

Joanna: You mentioned fun research there. What does that look like for you?

Marissa: All of it. I really enjoy research. I love reading. I love doing deep dives, you know, going on Wikipedia and clicking the little further reading links at the bottom and seeing the rabbit holes you go down.

Also, if I can find a way to do a hands-on or more of an experiential research, that’s the best. Of course, we all fantasize about being able to travel. If you can go to the place where your setting is inspired by, that is worth gold.

It’s not always an option, of course, for different reasons, but if you can get out and see the world and take in these really great sensory details, it is so helpful.

It could also be talking to an expert on something about your story, something about your protagonist or your plot, because they’re going to have just the best insights. They’re going to clue you into things that you never would have even known to look up to research.

I’ve crawled under cars to see how they work because I don’t know anything about cars, but I had a mechanic character, so I better learn something about cars.

I love cooking. If there’s a dish that my character has to cook or bake or is served, I’ll find a recipe and give it a try myself. Just little things like that to just kind of give you that hands on experience. I think it adds a lot to the authenticity as you’re writing.

Joanna: It also makes it more of a fun process.

Marissa: It’s more fun. Why not? We’re all about trying to make it more fun.

Joanna: Yes, exactly. Well, then coming to writing series, because it feels like, obviously we need tropes in the books. If we’re writing different books in a series, we need to make sure the characters are consistent and all that.

How do you keep coming up with new ideas for series?

I feel like a lot of people now are sort of like, okay, is it the same thing, the same thing? What stays the same in a series book and what changes? How do you get ideas for that?

Marissa: That’s a good question, and it’s going to depend on if your series follows one main protagonist versus if it’s more like a loosely connected series with maybe different protagonists or different love interests in each book. Generally, I think it’s more common that you’ve got the solo protagonist who has a complete character arc.

So when I’m thinking of the entire series as a whole and trying to step back and see kind of a big picture, I will give a lot of thought to the protagonist’s arc. Where do they start page one, book one? And where am I hoping they’re going to end up?

Within that, depending on how many books you have in your series, there’s probably going to be some reversals. There might be that in book one, your protagonist might end on a really high note.

Book two, it might be the opposite. They may be way down at the bottom now. Something terrible has happened that they have to claw their way out of.

Or they learn something about themselves in book one, but then book two, you flip it on its head and say, “They thought this thing, but surprise, actually, it’s a negative in some way.”

Playing around with these different moments as the character is changing, developing, learning about secrets, exploring their world.

Generally speaking, we tend to think of character arcs as being upward, but I think it’s helpful to think of it more as a roller coaster. There should be dips, there should be lots of places where things are going wrong.

So that’s one thing that I’m thinking about as I’m putting together a series. Then I’m also thinking about my antagonist and my conflicts. I have often likened it to like old video games, where every level ends with a boss, but then the very end of the game has the big boss that you’re really trying to defeat.

So the first boss, you have barely enough skills to defeat that first boss, and maybe it takes a few tries to beat that first level, but you do it. Oh, but now you have to do the second level, and that next boss is going to be even harder.

As you go, you’re getting better. Your characters are picking up new skills, new weapons, new allies. So at the end of every book we have a conflict, a climax, something that we have to face, and everyone is going to be a step up, a little more difficult than the last one.

So that we know by the time our character is finally ready to face that big conflict, the big struggle, the antagonist, villain, whatever it is you have at the end of the series, that you have given them the skills that they need to actually defeat them.

Joanna: There’s some great advice there. So let’s come into more of the business side because you do have this section on the to-do list. I love this because the to-do list is never ending. For indie authors, we’re publishing, as well as marketing and writing and everything.

How do authors say no and reduce that to-do list, in order to stop being so overwhelmed?

Marissa: Oh, my gosh. It is hard, and I will admit this is something that I personally have really struggled with. I’m a yes person. I like to say yes. I like to please people. I like to feel like I am doing everything within my power to make a book a success, to further my career. So I get it.

I absolutely get how difficult it is to recognize when we need a little space, or we need some downtime, or when we need to take a step back. For me, and I didn’t come up with this, I read it in some productivity guide, self help guide, a long time ago, but it really resonated with me.

Every time you say yes to something, you are also saying no to something.

For example, if you say, yes, I will be on this panel at this book festival.

Okay, let’s say you have to travel there. Let’s say it’s a full day being on the panel. There’s probably going to be a signing. Maybe there’s an author dinner. Another full day of travel going back home. So we’ve got essentially two to three days for that yes.

There’s lots of times when, great, I can’t wait. I’m looking forward to this. I’m going to meet some readers, I’m going to network with authors.

Maybe you recognize that by saying yes to that, I’m saying no to three days with my family, or I’m saying no to three days of working on my novel, or I’m saying no to a day where I could relax and spend a day reading a book and refilling my well.

So none of these are the right option, none of them are the wrong option, but just recognizing that there are pros and cons, and give and take, and be really picky about what you’re spending your time on and what you are making your priority at any given point.

Joanna: It is interesting. You mentioned a panel there, and I feel like conferences and conventions are one of these things that is quite difficult. Now, you and I, again, have been doing this a while, so we have a community, like we have author friends.

There are people listening who might be introverts. They might feel very uncomfortable about going to writing conferences, and they’re like, should I just say no to that? I guess that the question is—

When should you go to something, even if you feel you want to say no?

When do you have to push yourself as an author, and when should you give into those feelings? I know it’s tough, but when have you done this as an early writer and then later stage?

Marissa: This is one of those things where I really think people have to tap into their own psyche and recognize, what are my limitations, what are my goals? For me, early in my career, I did it all. If I was invited to something, it was an automatic yes.

I also did not have children at the start of my career, so for me, when it really started to change, as far as recognizing my time is limited, my energy is limited, I have to step back and say no to more things, was when I had kids.

Then it really became that balancing act of, when do you focus on the writing and the career? When do you focus on family?

That said, I mean, the publishing process, the writing process, there’s ups and downs. There are times when you are really focused on selling a book, on marketing a book, promoting. That’s both with in-person events, doing book signings, doing the festivals. There’s also social media, sending out newsletters.

There’s going to be periods where you’re trying to get your book noticed by readers, but that doesn’t have to be all day, all the time, for years and years and years.

You can really focus on it for one, two, three months, whatever your capacity is, and then step back. Maybe take a hiatus on social media.

Maybe say, for these next five months, I need to write a new book, and I need to focus on being with my family and do some self-care. So for these five months, I’m saying no to all other requests. I mean, whatever it is. I’m just throwing out numbers. Of course, this is going to be different for everybody.

So really think about — 

What are my limitations? Know that you really can’t do it all.

I hate saying that because I am one of those people where I feel like I can do it all, just let me try. But you really can’t.

You have to make choices sometimes and recognize that if you’re trying to do it all for too long, then that’s a recipe for burnout. That’s the last thing we want.

The last thing we want is to get to a point in our career where we dread the writing, or we dread the travel, or we dread the book events.

So whenever you start to feel like it’s too much, listen to that and give yourself some space. Realize that the world is not going to fall apart if you take a little bit of time off.

Joanna: I love that. Actually, I prefer this sort of campaign focus, which is what you were really saying there. It’s like, go hard for, say, three months, and then take a couple of months off. I do that. I kind of step back from social media.

Some people feel like they have to do, I know the TikTok authors in particular, are doing a lot of videos every single day. They feel like if they stop, it’s all going to end.

The race never stops, does it? It never stops unless you stop.

Marissa: It’s true. There’s always going to be the next goal post. There’s always going to be that next thing that you’re thinking, “Oh, if I just get this many followers, then I can slow down.”

Then you get that many followers, and you think, “Oh, but I’ve got a book coming out in two months, so I’ll keep going until then, and then I’ll slow down.” “Oh, but now I’ve got this other thing.” I mean, it’s always going to push back. It’s always going to be something else.

It’s hard to recognize when you do need some personal space, but it’s also really important. Not just for our mental health and wellbeing, but for our creativity too.

Joanna: Okay, so another thing that some people are not that happy or joyful about is pitching publishers and agents. Mostly people are quite stressed about that.

Now, you work with traditional publishers. I’m primarily an independent author. There are pros and cons.

Tell us a bit more about your experience with traditional publishing.

Any tips for people who want to position themselves in a world of publishing flux, as ever?

Marissa: Definitely one of the most stressful periods in a career is the pitching to the agents, the querying trenches, the submission trenches. It can do some damage on your confidence, on your everything. So it’s a really difficult period.

If your goal is to be traditionally published, as opposed to independently published, and as you say, great options. There’s so many great directions that we have available to us today.

If you really think you want to be traditionally published, of course, number one, just make sure you’ve written the best book that you can. Get some feedback. Have some critique partners go over it.

Edit and polish it to within an inch of its life.

Then when you feel like, okay, I’ve done the best I can do, write your query letter. Again, get feedback there, because query letters are particularly tricky, and there is a science and an art to them. Do your research.

Then send it off, and, number one, celebrate because it’s so huge. It’s such a huge accomplishment to get to the point where you’re querying. So regardless of whether you get 10 agents interested and it goes to auction at publishers, or if no one bites, like regardless, you have written a complete book and submitted it.

That’s so awesome, so like take a moment to congratulate yourselves and go out for pizza or whatever, whatever you do to celebrate. Then start writing the next thing.

The worst thing that we can do is have this book sent out, and then just spend all day, every day, worried about it and stressing about it and having that anxiety building up and checking our email 100 times a day, which like you’re probably going to do anyway.

If you can, try to refocus your energy on something new, what is the next project you can be excited about?

Then dive into it, body and soul and spirit, and try to immerse yourself in a new story.

This is for a number of reasons. One, because it’s going to be a great distraction. But two, when and if your book on submission gets picked up, your agent is going to ask you, what else you got? So it’s great to have something else that you can talk about.

Joanna: Then what I do like in your book—I mean, I like lots of things—but you do also —

Talk about what might happen if you break up with an agent, or lose an agent or an editor or a publicist.

I like that you covered this because so many people think, “Oh, if I get an agent or a publisher, that’s it forever. My whole life is amazing, and I’m rich and famous, and everything will work out.”

So why might some of these things happen over a career, and what’s the kind of attitude you need to survive it all?

Marissa: This was one of the big surprises for me, as I started to expand my group, my network of writers, how common it is to break up with an agent or to switch publishers, publishing houses, to switch editors. It happens all the time.

This was shocking to me because I very much felt like, no, when you’ve got an agent and a publisher, you are set forever. That is your career, those are your people. So I was really surprised that that is not the case.

There’s so many reasons why one of these relationships may not work out. I’ve had friends whose agents have retired, whose editors have moved to different publishers. So it might be something rather innocuous. Life just happens.

Or it could be a matter of just not being the right fit for each other. Maybe your agent only represents kid lit and you want to move into adult. Or you really want to start writing romance, but they don’t represent romance.

It could be a matter of my agents not communicating with me. Or I feel like they’re no longer focused on me and my career, and I feel like I’m not getting the attention that I really need and want out of an agent.

Again, there’s so many reasons, but it does happen. It’s not the end of the world, it’s just a little blip, another blip in your journey.

By and large, the friends I have who have left an agent, or whose agent has left their career or whatever, then when they find someone new, more often than not, they end up feeling like, you know what? This was the right thing.

I really took my time, I found someone new who is a great fit for me, who is excited about my career and my upcoming projects, and who is really working it and making things happen, and making book deals happen.

So I know it’s really hard in that moment because you can feel like I worked so hard to get this agent, why would I ever leave them and go back to querying?

So really try to take a big picture look and think, well, I might be going through a bad spot now, but what is the potential payoff in the end? What do I stand to succeed and to gain in doing this? So it’s a tough decision. It’s not a fun part of the career, but it is a reality for a lot of us.

Joanna: If you want a long-term career, you’re the one who is in charge.

So you just make some more choices and carry on. We don’t let that end our careers.

Marissa: Absolutely, and you’re always going to be your best advocate.

We think of our agents as our advocates, and we think of our editors as our advocates. They absolutely are, but ultimately, no one is paying as much attention to your career as you are. So we really have to speak up for ourselves, first and foremost.

Joanna: We’re almost out of time, but I have to ask you about book marketing because it is a part of every author’s life, and again, something where happiness and joy might not be such a big part. So how can we make marketing more fun?

What do you enjoy most about book marketing?

Marissa: Oh, my gosh. If you figure it out, you let me know.

Joanna: Well, I like podcasting. So, there you go.

Marissa: I also really enjoyed podcasting, although I did just retire my podcast because, again, too many things, too many spinning plates, and you have to make some tough choices sometimes.

For me, you know, find the things that you do enjoy. I learned early on, I don’t like Facebook, and I don’t like Twitter/X. It was difficult pulling back from those because I had a fair amount of followers, but when I did, it was clearly the right decision. I wish I’d done that a long time ago.

Then it allowed me to focus my energy and my attention on Instagram, which is the platform that I just naturally gravitate toward best. I just enjoy it the most.

Pick and choose the things that you do get some enjoyment out of, and then set boundaries around it.

We were talking about the TikTokers who feel like they have to make multiple videos every day. Figure out what—again, back to limitations— what is your capacity?

Have a plan in place and say, okay, I’m going to post three times a week, or five times a week. Or maybe I’m going do Fan Art Fridays, and I’m going do New Book Tuesdays or whatever it is, and then maybe I’ll have one fun family post, or one fun “this is a quirky thing about me” post every week.

So you can kind of have a plan and break it down so that you’re not every morning looking at your phone thinking, “Oh, I have to post on Instagram again,” or, “I have to do a TikTok video. Now, what am I going to talk about?”

I also think it’s helpful to maybe once a month, or maybe at the start of a big promo season, spend some time doing your big brainstorming and kind of like batch.

I like batching things, like the things on my to-do list.

So I’ll spend a day brainstorming what I want to post, and then I’ll spend a few hours taking the necessary photos and trying to put together the captions or trying to put together the graphics or whatever. Then that’s done, and I don’t have to worry about that for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, if you’re really productive.

So it’s a really nice, efficient way to tackle that and then be able to move back to writing, which is, for most of us, the thing that we would rather be doing.

Joanna: Absolutely. Now, the book is The Happy Writer.

Where can people find you and all your books online?

Marissa: Thank you so much. I can be found on Instagram at MarissaMeyerAuthor, or on my website at MarissaMeyer.com. Books are available pretty much wherever you like to get your books.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Marissa. That was great.

Marissa: My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

The post The Happy Writer With Marissa Meyer first appeared on The Creative Penn.

When is it worth writing a Second Edition of a book that already sells well? How might elements of memoir impact non-fiction self-help books?

What are the challenges and opportunities of a second edition, as well as practical tips? I discuss these things and more with Matty Dalrymple on The Indy Author Podcast, a fantastic show that covers the craft of writing and author business.

You can get How to Write Non-Fiction, Second Edition in all formats, on all stores now.

You can watch the video below, or here on YouTube, or listen to The Indy Author Podcast on your favourite podcast app.

Show notes:

Joanna shares insights into the changes in nonfiction writing, especially the inclusion of personal elements influenced by her memoir writing. The conversation delves into the challenges and benefits of creating a new edition versus updating an existing one, the impact of technology, including AI, on the writing and publishing industry, and the importance of storytelling in nonfiction. Joanna also discusses practical strategies for updating nonfiction books and shares her experiences in podcasting and book marketing.

• 00:00 Introduction and Initial Thoughts on Writing
• 01:06 Joanna Penn’s Background and Achievements
• 01:56 The Evolution of Nonfiction Writing
• 02:40 Personal Elements in Nonfiction
• 04:41 Business Perspective on Writing
• 06:27 Restructuring and Craft Changes
• 07:51 Memoir and Personal Insights
• 10:02 Challenges and Considerations in Updating Books
• 15:49 The Role of AI in Writing and Publishing
• 26:25 Stratification of Audio Rights
• 27:47 Current Audio Platforms and AI Narration
• 29:10 Selling Direct and Revenue Models
• 30:28 Blogging and Alternative Platforms
• 40:20 Podcasting as a Marketing Tool
• 42:31 Second Editions vs. Updates
• 49:20 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript:

Matty: Hello fellow Creative Voyagers. This week on The Indy Author Podcast, I talked with Joanna Penn about the evolving author and second editions, including the release of the second edition of Joanna’s book, How to Write Non-Fiction.

Joanna discusses the changes in her nonfiction writing, including the importance of storytelling, which led her to apply some of the personal elements and insights she’s used in her memoir into this new edition.

We delve into the challenges and benefits of putting out a new edition versus updating an existing one, the evolving landscape of self-publishing and the impact of new technologies on the writing business. And now let’s hear from Joanna Penn about the evolving author and second editions.

Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast today my guest is Joanna Penn. Hey, Joanna, how are you doing?

Joanna: Hi, Matty. I’m great. Lovely to be here.

Matty: It is lovely to have you here and for anyone who’s may be very new to the indie author space. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Joanna Penn writes Nonfiction for Authors and is an award-winning New York Times and USA today bestselling author of Thrillers, Dark Fantasy, and Memoir as J.F. Penn.

She’s also an award-winning podcaster of the wonderful The Creative Penn Podcast, a creative entrepreneur and an international professional speaker. Joanne was last on the podcast in episode way back in episode 54. Futurist Trends we can prepare for now, and that was in November of 2020. And so I’m gonna go back and re-listen to that, see how that turned out.

The futurist things are always fun to look back on, you know? Yeah. Then sometimes quite embarrassing. Obviously I, I doubt it will be embarrassing. I suspect it will be very prophetic of what we talked about back then. But Joanna came back on the podcast. We’re gonna be talking about sort of two things.

One is writing nonfiction because Joanna’s second edition of the How to Write Nonfiction is going to be out right around the time this airs. And also talking about her thinking behind doing a second edition. So Joanna, the first How to Write nonfiction came out in 2018, I think, right?

Joanna: Yes. I know. It seems like another world at this point.

Matty: Yeah, well it was sort of surprising until, you know, you announced that you were gonna have a second edition and I started thinking about it. But writing nonfiction, I think at a glance would be one of those like, how much can it change? Um, so I’m just, uh, curious to hear from you, what did change —

What changed so much that made you feel like a second edition was something you wanted to put out?

Joanna: Well, this question is so great because I actually think the biggest thing that is important in nonfiction is how much personal stuff we put in it.

Because let’s face it, AI can write generic nonfiction. And so when I was thinking about a second edition, and there’s various reasons, but the main one was I’ve written a memoir since then.

My book Pilgrimage, which is a travel memoir / midlife memoir. And that changed the way I write so much. And memoir of course is a form of nonfiction.

So I wanted to include all my thoughts and experiences of writing memoir into this book. I decided not to change the title to How to Write Nonfiction and or Memoir ’cause that just would’ve been a bit much. So that was one of the biggest changes.

I have changed, and my writing craft has changed.

I wanted to include all this craft stuff I’d learned around writing memoir. So that’s one of the biggest additions and changes to the book, but also to myself. And I could not have written in that before. And I was very struck when I read the first edition, you know, as I was sort of preparing for the second one was like, ‘oh my goodness, my writing has changed so much.’

I think sometimes we have periods, you know, it’s not a linear up and to the right. As we get better over time, if we keep practicing and keep publishing, it’s more that there are these books that sometimes we write that make such a big difference to us, and Pilgrimage did that for me.

And then also Writing the Shadow, which I wrote directly after Pilgrimage. So I actually feel like two of the most significant books in my creative career were written in the last couple of years and the pandemic obviously made a big difference to our mental health. And I put a lot more of that in there.

I feel like the mindset stuff has changed. All that to say that, the writing craft was actually one of the reasons I wanted to address it.

From the business perspective, ’cause you cover both on this show as well, from the business perspective —

How to Write Non-Fiction is one of my top sellers.

How to Write a Novel, How to Write Non-Fiction and How to Make a Living with Your Writing. Those three books, they are my 20% with the 80/20 rule, which I know you know about. It’s like the 20% of books which make 80% of the money.

And so I was looking at my business thinking, hmm, I’m getting to the point where I’m a little bit less happy about promoting it as the first edition because there’s a lot that has changed in our business.

As well, even down to things like I wanted to change the publishing and the marketing tips and thoughts and make them more evergreen, change some of the affiliate links and of course also add in AI.

I have added in AI prompts in different parts of the book to help people use AI tools in an ethical and practical way.

And then finally, is the audiobook. So this is both business and craft, is that in 2018, I paid a narrator to do the audio book. Of course one of our double down on being human and being a voice brand, you are a voice brand as well, is that people do like to hear the voice of the author.

I wanted to record the audio book myself and in looking at it, it was like, okay, no, I need to do a new edition in order to record the audio book.

So that’s like loads of reasons why, I guess.

Matty: You talked specifically about the fact that you wanted to add in memoir. If you look across other differences between the first and second edition, are there areas where the subject matter was the same, but the approach you used had differed based on some of these experiences that you’re describing?

Like where were the biggest changes, do you feel?

Joanna: Yeah, so I guess the first thing is —

I restructured the book.

Just a sort of practical tip for people. I exported the addition from Vellum, so, which is a formatting tool if people don’t know. And then imported that into a new Scrivener project.

So I did start with practically the first edition. I didn’t start from scratch and the first thing I did was reorder things. That was really strange. I was like, Ooh, why is that in that order? And I felt that even my creative process had changed. In that sense, I also, there were I think five parts in the old one.

And now there’s only three parts in terms of before you write and then the actual writing and editing process. And then the business of nonfiction.

It’s interesting ’cause originally I had split kind of publishing marketing business and now I just feel like that’s all one thing. And so I amalgamated some of those things the other.

The other big shift I sort of feel is that —

I don’t wanna write specific how-to things that people can get from other places. It needs to be more personal.

So I kind of mush together a lot of the publishing stuff in order to write a more evergreen approach. And sort of again, the more mindset side, the more emotional side, the more feeling side that people can’t necessarily get from something else.

So that was a big shift, is that reorganization and then . Obviously, as I said, adding in more personal elements, I put more of the personal side around writing memoir. And also I think when I first wrote the book, I was mainly writing more prescriptive self-help. And so it was practical for me to say, this is how you structure a non-fiction book.

And these are, you know, you can use subheadings and you know, you write nonfiction too. It’s some, sometimes it’s like, okay, just write, I’m writing this chapter and you just write it.

Whereas with memoir, it can just take a lot longer. So I think I include a lot more allowance for self-doubt and for experimentation, and I’ve also really embraced being a discovery writer since 2018, being an intuitive writer, things that I was slightly maybe embarrassed about in the past.

My own creative confidence is stronger and that comes through.

I pretty much rewrote almost every single sentence in the book, even though if people have the first edition, the topics, I mean, like you said, how much changes in that way. You still do a lot of the same things. But I do feel like to me it is a very, very different book.

And I’m actually narrating the audio book [as we record this].

[Note from Jo — The audiobook is out now, along with all the other editions, of How to Write Non-Fiction, narrated by me.]

As I’m reading it, I’m like, oh, this sounds a lot more like me than the 2018 version of me. I mean, you have your Writing Short book that’s a few years old now. Do you ever have a sense of I should rewrite anything ’cause you’ve got more experience?

Matty: Yeah, for sure. One of the things is that I’ve spoken on that topic a lot, and so I have a better sense of the things that I can see an audience responds to or the questions they ask. Also there was just a certain amount, like Mark and I tried to keep it fairly evergreen, so we tried to limit references to particular services or particular platforms, but you can’t really write a book on nonfiction without mentioning some of those.

And some of those, like, some of the names of the platforms have changed. I think probably at least one of the platforms has gone away. So yeah, that is definitely, it’s definitely on my list. It’s been on my list to re-look at for a while, but it just hasn’t bubbled to the top because of some other nonfiction work that I’ve been looking at.

Joanna: Yeah. Well, I was gonna say on that because there are other books that are older of mine, like Career Change.

Some people have asked me for new versions of my other books.

The last time I rewrote Career Change, that was 2012, or Business for Authors, which was 2014, even like How to Market a Book. But these are books I don’t want to touch, at least at the moment.

I’m not interested in revisiting those topics, at least at the moment. But also, like I said about the money side, as authors, we have to consider —

Do I spend the time reworking this older book, or do I spend the time writing a new book? There has to be a really valid business reason to do it.

And as you say, if it’s just that Twitter is now X or you know, different sites of changed, you know, Smashwords got bought by Draft2Digital, and you know, these are the types of things that happen that date books.

But as a nonfiction reader, and I know you read a lot as well, it’s like some things make a difference and other things don’t.

And so it’s where’s the balance. But I would say to people listening, if you are feeling like, desperately feeling like it’s not me anymore, that’s kind of what I was feeling. That book doesn’t represent me and it sells enough copies that I need it to. That’s kind of why I made that decision.

Matty: I think that idea of what is your goal for the book is really important because I don’t know that I went into writing, Taking the Short Tack with this goal, but my evolved goal is that it’s really a calling card for me to pitch myself as a speaker on the topic of short fiction, and I’ve definitely made more money from speaking engagements than I have through the book.

And so that book is gonna be out there as my calling card forever. And so I don’t have the same impetus as if I were saying to myself, oh, I really have a whole different perspective on short fiction. I really have a whole different bunch of different things to say about short fiction. So yeah, what the book is doing for you is an important consideration for sure.

When you realized that you wanted to incorporate a memoir as part of your offerings to people in the nonfiction area —

Did you think about doing a book specific to memoir?

I did. And it may come up at some other point in my life. When I did Pilgrimage as part of the Kickstarter for it, I had a stretch goal, which was that I would write a little book on writing memoir, and that was, it’s about 10,000 words, so it was about an hour of audio narration, which I did for backers.

And so I had that material and I had thought I could expand that. So for about a year I sat on that thinking I would expand it into how to write memoir. And then I looked at the other books on memoir and I thought, I don’t have the chops for this. You know, I really did just think, no, there are some already.

You must feel the same way too. Because our books, there are other books on, like both of us have books on public speaking. Right, right. We both have completely valid things to say and neither of us, you know, have any issue with the other one having a book on it. Right. And neither of us feel bad about that.

But when I looked at some of these other memoir books, I was like, I’m not even on the same level as those people because they’ve been doing it for so long. Like professional speaking. Both of us have been doing that for more than a decade, like probably two at this point. And so we know that topic.

And with nonfiction, you know, I’ve written what 15, 17 nonfiction books or whatever it is. So I feel like I can do that with memoir. I’ve only written the one and although it was probably one of the most difficult books I’ve ever done, I don’t feel like I had enough experience.

But it’s such a great question because originally back in the day, if I learn, as soon as I learned something, I would write a book on it, but it’s almost like —

Memoir is this very particular thing that is so emotional and can be so life changing for people that it takes a lot more work

— and I almost feel like it might be something I do later in my life, but I think I need to write some more memoir first. I don’t know. What do you think about memoir? Because you, you know, nonfiction is such a big category.

Matty: I am realizing like memoirs, the kind of thing that when I’m thinking of nonfiction categories, I don’t think of it because I think of memoirs like its own thing. It’s not, it’s not fiction, but I don’t really categorize it as nonfiction either.

And honestly, I’m not a big memoir reader and most of my exposure to memoir has been talking with people to an extent for the podcast, but also I have a video series called What I Learned, where I asked people what they learned from their latest book that they’d like to share with their fellow readers and what they learned that they would like to share with their fellow writers.

And a number of the people I interviewed for that were Memoirists. And I almost felt as if the, the impetus for people writing a memoir was much more personal than either with nonfiction or for fiction.

I mean, I think a lot of people dive into fiction because they think, oh, I really wanna explore this idea of, uh, somebody coming of age in a certain era and they face this certain challenge or whatever it might be, whatever sort of drives the plot or drives the characters or whatever the impetus is.

But I think that all the memoirists that I spoke with were writing from a very personal perspective, like it was triggered by a personal event or triggered by a personal revelation or something like that.

And I thought, man, if I were to try to look for the commonality, like if I were providing advice, I don’t know what I’d provide because that really would be kind of a mindset book and, and it would almost be like a psychology book in a way.

Joanna: Yeah. Well, and that’s why I think there’s a lot more in there, but I also think that’s why I’ve very much emphasized the personal element. But I think it’s also important for us in our more general nonfiction books, as I, as I said —

One of the things that generative AI, ChatGPT etc, are very, very good at is providing generic advice.

That is completely fine. And there’s a sort of rising number of people who are using these tools as coaches, you know, to answer questions about how to live and how to date and how to cook.

I use it quite a lot for that and all these things that, so when I was revisiting this, and also just on your point on memoir, it, it, you are having to face this challenge of how much do I share about my struggles?

How much do I share about my life? So in the book, and this chapter was actually in the first edition. You know, I talk about how a nonfiction book changed my life and it was a memoir, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. And in the first, in the first edition, I had not written a memoir. And then obviously now I have and I can almost —

I appreciate so much more how important it is to share those personal moments in our nonfiction work.

So even with our, with our public speaking, for example, in my book I share the physical things that happen when you’re about to go on stage and you’re like, you know, having to go to the toilet for the 10th time. And, you know, and the real gut stuff that people assume is just them, but is actually, most people have these reactions.

And so being more, talking more about physical sensations, about mental things, I think these are just so important for making our books stand out and for this idea of doubling down on being human and just connecting on a much more personal level. So I’d urge people listening —

Please, if you’re writing nonfiction, even if it is more self-helpy or not memoir, try and include aspects of yourself and your life and your personal thoughts into your books.

And sometimes that can be journal entries.

I often use journal entries, which, you know, I mine my own journals in the past for things that I can put in that helps or doing a survey. And asking for people’s permission to use quotes from real people. It, ’cause then you get more different voices into the book.

So anything we can do to bring all material alive with more human content, I think,

Matty: yeah, I think that that idea of the importance of storytelling in, even in kind of instructional nonfiction, obviously in memoir.

I’m thinking back to some of the advice that Michael and I shared in From Page to Platform, and part of that was definitely the importance of incorporating stories into presentations.

I just got off a call with Mark because he and I are gonna be co-authoring a book on, it’s called The Podcast Guest Playbook, and we were talking about the, yeah, yeah. We could send it to all our podcast guests. We were talking about the importance of story. So it would be cool. Here’s a book idea, just the idea of how best to tell stories.

I mean, I know that this, this won’t be a new book, but a new take on it, especially in the context of ai, the importance of telling stories in all these ways, telling stories and making them personal, and having that be the way we double down on being human.

Joanna: That book on being a podcast guest is great because I spend a lot of time, I’m sure you do, educating people on how to be a good podcast guest, but here is a tip with ai, which I found super, super useful, is you can —

Use AI tools to do research on podcast hosts, and then you can also get ChatGPT or Claude to write you a pitch email directly targeting that particular host.

You can, even, if you are happy to upload your book and say, What are the 20 podcasts I should pitch for this book? Write me a pitch to the host of The Indy Author so this would fit her show. And part of me is like, oh no, that means we’ll get a ton more pitches.

But part of me is like, yes, please, because the number of terrible pitches we get, and I’m sure you do as well. It’s like, I would really like some better pitches. So I’m excited about your book.

Matty: Oh, good. Good. I’ll let you notice it too. And it’s out there. Yeah. I think my, one of my biggest gripes in that area is people who pitch, who should really be pitching a book tour type of podcast, you know, who just wanna come on and talk about their latest book, not a sort of share more give tips, And not give tips.

More general information for, so I’m going to, I wanna use that discussion about AI because I was looking through your, your catalog of books and . Some of them just based on the title and based on me having read them, seem very evergreen. I think in general there’s sort of historically a recommendation that the more evergreen you can make the book, the less often you have to think about revisiting it for factual reasons as opposed to personal mindset reasons.

But one of them, which I imagine is, is the most time-bound one, is Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Virtual Worlds. Assuming that you’d have to go back to frequently to update, did you do it just as like a snapshot in time and figured it would, that’s what it would be. What is your thought about future editions of that book?

Joanna: Well, what is classic, because I am usually five years early, so that book, that must have been what I came on last time to talk about in 2020.

That came out in November, 2020, and is only now coming true.

So it’s actually right now it’s incredibly correct. At the time the interviews I were doing, people were saying, you are completely mad and what are you talking about?

But actually it’s, it’s starting to come true. For example, data licensing deals for our work. This is now finally starting to happen. Only a couple of months ago, or even perhaps a month ago, the Author’s Guild said they are gonna work with Created by Humans to do data licensing. And of course we’ve got tons of companies signing data, licensing deals.

I think Harper Collins, As well as some of the other big publishers like Time Magazine and all of this signing deals. News Corp certainly did that. So also in there things like blockchain technology and we don’t need to go into that, but that is now really having a resurgence.

Generative ai, certainly around nonfiction. I talked about AI for voice and that is also now going mainstream. So amusingly, that book is exactly now on time almost. Well, that’s four years later.

People could read that book now and they’d be like, oh, that’s exactly what’s going on. It’s not futurist at all. (But it’s 5 years old)

So I think what’s interesting, the virtual world hasn’t happened so much.

I was, you know, looking at the early days of metaverse, but I think that is gonna come with some of the world building AIs, which are starting to develop now. So we saw in the last week the release of OpenAI’s, sora.com, which is generative video. And there’s a lot of these ones where it will generate a world as you move through it.

That’s what we need for metaverse. A lot of these technologies are only now just starting to happen. So if I was to write another one like that, it would be another sort of futurist look forward into where we might be in another five years. But to be honest, I think that where we are, even just now, we’ve got enough to be working on. I’m not planning on updating that.

I think one of the biggest shifts for authors is going to be audio books with AI voices.

Now, you and I have practiced, you know, obviously professional speaking, but also we’ve both been podcasting for a long time, and so we are more happy with voice and we’ve had a lot of practice and I’ve done voice training for narration and all of this.

I also want to narrate my books, but most people are not in our situation. And so most people want to get their book into audio. I would love to have my books in lots of different voices as well, accents and languages. And that is only possible with AI.

No one can afford to have their audio books in every language, in every accent, in every country in the world. It’s impossible without AI.

And yet what we have is in the West, in English, we have this total dominant world, whereas in some countries, they have nothing because there’s no audiobook market.

So if we want people to be able to listen to audiobooks in their own language or their own dialect, then we need AI to help us leverage that with translation and with AI narration. So I think all of those things are super exciting.

I actually think that even just using our, the existing AI technologies we have today, we have a lot more to do over the next five years.

Matty: I think AI audio is such an interesting topic and I am just waiting. I keep checking in with, you know, platforms like ElevenLabs and things like that, and seeing how things are going there because I would love to be able to make AI generated, audio trained on my own voice.

And as for my co-authored books with Michael LaRonn and Mark Leslie Lefebvre, we all have plenty of audio that an AI could be trained on to, you know, it would be fun for short t There were certainly chapters that Mark contribute to more, and some that I contributed to more.

It would be super cool to have each of us read the chapters that we were more driving. And even for like my dream scenario for my fiction, I also just keep checking in and seeing how it’s doing on fiction. I’m like, yeah, I’m still not there yet.

We actually have, like Michael and I have AI generated audio, Google Play generated audio for From Page to Platform, but I keep checking back in on fiction and it’s not quite there yet, but the woman who narrates my fiction, which who I love, she doesn’t really do this as a full-time gig anymore.

She’s just kind of fitting me in as a favor. And so there’s often many months between the time and ebook and a print book go become available and when the audio becomes available.

I think the dream scenario for all of us would be she trains AI on her voice and we do some kind of royalty split — 

or I pay her some amount for the benefit of using a voice that sounds consistent with my other books and brings all the things that I love about her.

And so, uh, that’s another thing I’m waiting for.

Joanna: Yeah. Well, just on that audio again, in that 2020 book, one of the things I said is —

We need stratification of audio rights — 

for the reason you just said is that, um, at the moment when people license their audio, they’re licensing the whole book. It’s just like audiobook rights, It’s just one thing and that’s designed for an old world now where there’s one voice or multicast reading one book, so it might be audio book in English or whatever.

But what we need is like you said, you might pay your human narrator a particular thing, and we might sell that at a higher price, human narrated audio.

Then we might have AI generated audio where we can license that separately, maybe to an auto translation narration app for different languages and then maybe we have multicast.

And what I also think is a kind of hybrid model where on a multicast audio, let’s say there are two main characters, Matty and Jo, and we are human, but there are 20 minor characters that we can then use AI for.

And then we stitch those together into a multicast human AI audio experience, which I think is very, very, very cool and will save time and money and enable more production to go ahead. So that’s, that’s just on one thing on the platforms.

Where we are right now with AI audio is —

— and you are in the US and you always get the best things. So what we do have is Amazon actually do have their own audio, and that’s still in a private beta. It’s in the US only. It’s invitation only.

So there are quite a lot of mainly romance authors doing AI audio through Amazon, not through ACX, but through Amazon audio. Then we’ve got Google Play Audio, which you can do if you have an ebook wide. You can then do Google narration.

And then we’ve got ElevenLabs. I mean, there’s a whole load of them, but ElevenLabs really is the sort of best in class, and a number of traditional publishers are now doing deals with them to do the different translation and narration type ideas With Spotify and FindawayVoices.

At the moment, they still only allow Google, but there are rumors that they will allow something like ElevenLabs files in the future if they can sort out the verification of the ownership of the IP. That’s the main issue.

It’s not the quality of the AI narration that is the issue, it’s the ownership of the IP.

So I think where we are in 2025 is we’re going to see — the dams will be broken and this will all start happening and be much more open.

But for authors, what we have to remember, and this is why this stratification thing I think is important, the revenue model of audio has shifted dramatically and one of the very good things now with selling direct, which is another thing that’s really kind of come of age over the last five years is that — 

Selling audio direct is much more profitable.

If somebody listening decides to buy How to Write Non-Fiction, second edition from me at CreativePennBooks.com, with me narrating, I get a much higher profit than I do if you get it on your Audible subscription or on Spotify or whatever.

Now I’m happy for people to get it wherever, but for authors to have revenue and for narrators to have revenue, we need these different stratification of rights and the different ways of selling.

So that’s just to encourage people to think wide is not just not Amazon. It’s also things like selling audio, selling bundle deals.

People pay decent money for an audio bundle because, you know, nonfiction, particularly people love audio. I listened to tons of audio nonfiction, so there’s a few things to consider.

Matty: Yeah, I’m definitely someone who likes to read words on a page when I’m reading fiction, but I like to hear it when I’m absorbing nonfiction.

I dunno why my brain works in different ways in that way, but for people who do like nonfiction, reading words on a page, nonfiction, I’m wondering about other platforms like, blog sounds so old fashioned, but, you know, sharing, especially mindset driven nonfiction on things like Medium or Substack or something like that.

Is blogging on SubStack or Medium something you considered as an outlet for what you’re sharing for nonfiction?

Joanna: It’s interesting. I used to blog as in, I used to put articles on my own website and I used to do guest articles for other people’s websites. Then what happened probably about five years ago, maybe, maybe a bit longer.

The Alliance of Independent Authors, of which we are both members and advisors. And your campaign manager I think. Yeah. So the Alliance of Independent Authors SelfPublishingAdvice.org blog started I think around then, anyway, that was one of the reasons I stopped blogging. Also, Kindlepreneur and a whole load of other sites where there were more than one writer involved.

And so I just felt like I cannot compete with article writing in a world where there are multiple people writing very good articles, I guess Medium and Substack maybe came around the same time, and I felt like, how do I compete in this space for a long time?

I started so early in self-publishing. I started in 2008. My website was one of the very first.

I didn’t have to compete then because there were very few people doing that, and then things started to change. So then I went really hard into audio-first.

So mainly the only articles now on my website is the transcription of the podcasts. I’ll sometimes do extra ones, but I do share articles in my Patreon, which is behind a paywall.

So that is something I do still do articles on. But in terms of Substack and Medium and all that, I also felt like I didn’t want to be part of the kind of mass article making machine that I felt almost was a big thing between 2008 to 2018 maybe.

So it was like a decade there of blogging, like you said, we called it blogging and people did blog tours and redid all this, and now I feel like things have shifted. That’s how I feel. I don’t know. I mean, how do you feel about this?

Matty: Well, it’s not something that I pursued because I do sort of feel as if I have a certain number of words in my head to share. And if I’m gonna expend them, I’m gonna expend them on my own books. Certainly not on other people’s blogs.

But I just don’t think in a way that I think would lend itself to platforms like Substack and Medium, I don’t read those things myself. And so I always think venturing into something that you don’t enjoy as a consumer is tricky. You know —

Trying to create things that are in a style you don’t consume yourself is tricky.

And it is interesting because I think all those informational sort of, you know, do I need an ISBN kind of questions, those are becoming so easy to answer with ai. And I have started just always tacking on at the end of my ChatGPT questions, please give me links to all your source material to make sure that that it’s right.

But those things that are just sharing information, I’ve gotta believe, are eventually gonna start going away. Because if people can get it easily through something like Chat, GPT or Claude or whatever, then there’s gonna be less impetus for that. But then I think it goes back to what you were saying before about leaning into our humanity and sharing stories and being personal because.

Those are the things that people are gonna be going to an individual person for. And I kind of feel like the people I’ve spoken to on the podcast who ha, who are active on Substack or Medium or outlets like that are doing it because they feel like they themselves have a particular perspective that they want to share with people.

Not that they’re sort of educating people, they’re like connecting with people through those platforms.

Jo: And in that sense, if it’s personal, then that’s great. And I do read a few of them. I guess. I also come from the old school of — 

Don’t build your platform on rented land.

And so when I saw Medium that’s just blogging on someone else’s platform, and Substack is building an email newsletter on someone else’s platform.

And so why would I do that when I already have my own website and I already have my own email list? So I think that’s the other thing. And I know that’s, people have changed their minds a lot on that, but I certainly haven’t, I’ve been paying for hosting since day one for the podcast and for the website.

And I mean, when I came into this, it was when there was still, friends reunited and you know, there was still these really early social media things, MySpace. People forget that these things disappear.

Let’s say you build and build and build on one of these platforms and then it goes away, how does that affect your backlist?

I guess so, yeah. I mean, it is, it’s very, it is an interesting situation. Some people will say, oh yeah, but you can download your list from Substack or whatever. So you still own it. To me, I guess I have this old school view that if you are not paying for something, then you are the product .

Matty: Yeah, I guess it would depend, and this is totally a question ’cause I have no opinion to the extent that people go on those kinds of platforms saying, oh, I’m going to, I’m gonna use this as a discovery method for finding everybody who’s writing about authoring nonfiction, or everybody who’s writing poetry or everybody who’s whatever.

If they’re doing that, then that could be a benefit to going to a platform rather than on your own website. But the comparable thing I’m thinking of is that —

I wouldn’t ever have thought of Kickstarter as being a book discovery platform, but it’s clearly becoming that.

And so, I always just thought of Kickstarter as being, it’s a way of tapping into your existing pool of, uh, fans in a different, more direct way.

I’ve spoken to a number of people who say, no. People go on Kickstarter and they’re just like looking for a book to read, and that’s how they’re finding their books now. I was like, well, that’s pretty cool. I would’ve never seen that coming.

Jo: Oh, yeah. I buy a lot of things on Kickstarter. I mean, you and I both write short stories.

I buy a lot of short story anthologies on Kickstarter. I think it’s actually a great discovery platform for these kind of weird end of the niches. And let’s face it, short story anthologies and collections. They’re not super, super mainstream in in anybody’s book, but just just on the kind of subset. I don’t want anyone to think that I’m kind of saying it’s a bad idea.

I think in, in a way, it’s similar to social media in that you are putting stuff out on someone else’s platform.

The most important thing is that you’re bringing people back to somewhere. Whether that is to sign up for your email newsletter, or to buy a book.

At the end of the day, we’re authors, we want people to buy a book.

So Kickstarter people discover you, and they buy a book. So it is a very short journey from being interested. Are you interested? Yes or no? And then there’s a button to press and you spend some money.

And, TikTok, for example, is done this very well. It’s very much a shopping channel, basically. A shopping channel, which is why people do so well.

They’re selling books. Selling all kinds of things. Whereas some of the other platforms haven’t got a real direct link between chatting and social and selling. It’s like that wasn’t the culture. And I feel like Substack and, Medium and some of those platforms, they’re not really designed to sell books.

They do have this subscription model where you can, you know, subscribe to someone’s SubStack. But I think like many of these things like books in general, or we said the 80:20 rule, most people in most areas are not gonna make a ton of money from subscriptions on these email platforms. So I think the main thing for authors to feel is —

You can’t do everything.

You and I have chosen not to do Medium or Substack. We have chosen to podcast, and both of us know that this is, this takes time, this takes investment. This is our chosen platform that we spend time on and effort on. I have stuck with X.

I don’t do TikTok, I rarely do any other social media, but —

We’ve got this splintering.

It used to be that there was a pathway to being an author and doing marketing, and now there’s so many options that authors have to decide —

okay, what am I going to do? You have to do something. But it could be Substack, it could be TikTok. It could be podcasting, but probably not all three.

Matty: Oh, yes. Yeah, for sure. I always like the, for everything you pick, you choose to do, you’re defacto choosing something you’re not going to do.

And also the idea that don’t do things that you, you don’t like as a consumer. So when TikTok came out, I spent like 35 seconds on TikTok just looking at it, and I was like, I, I just can’t even stand looking at this as a user. So never gonna be good at providing content to this as a creator.

Jo: That’s exactly right. And hence both of us listen to podcasts, listen to audio books. We’re kind of audio, almost audio first.

And again, I guess with this book. For my book for book marketing, you know, I said, can I come on people’s podcasts?

Hence I’m on your show and yeah, so I’m doing maybe —

In the old days people did a blog tour and now those of us who like doing podcasts to do more like a podcast tour

— or not so much a tour, but just try and talk about books and podcasts certainly sell books. So for people listening, you don’t have to have your own podcast, but you can certainly pitch to be on podcasts and you can buy Matty and Mark’s new book when it comes out.

Matty: And another idea specific to podcasts that I actually didn’t think about until I was co-presenting a presentation at International Thriller Writers Craft Fest with Jerry Williams, who’s the host of the FBI Retired Case File Review podcast.

We were doing a presentation on podcasting as content marketing, and we were working on the slides and we were talking about the pros and cons.

Like if people were thinking of starting a podcast, you know what, what would be a sign that they should, what might be a sign that they shouldn’t? Uh, jury said, well, of course it doesn’t have to be forever. Like maybe you just go out there with a six episode podcast around the topic of your book, for example, your nonfiction book.

You know, another alternative would be you just decide to do a six episode thing on writing nonfiction. And for people who are writing nonfiction, I think that would be a pretty cool, uh, way to sell some books and make a short-term commitment.

Jo: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I keep thinking of ideas for other podcasts, but I’m just like, oh, how, like you said about the number of words we have and how much energy you have in a week.

I do sometimes think about that, about how could I do a short podcast series. I did have another podcast called Books and Travel, which is still there. It’s about 90 episodes. I love that show and I think about it all the time and I’m like, oh, I would love to pick that up again.

Books and Travel is coming back!

I think there’s a lot to weigh up, but as we said, definitely go with what you enjoy consuming as as a person rather than kind of faking it.

Matty: Well, I had one quick question, and this was specific to the second edition of How to Write Non-Fiction.

And I think it’s a good tie into that idea of you only have so many hours in the day, what are you gonna spend them on? And can you just talk a little bit about —

What are the pros and cons of putting out a second edition of a book versus just continuing to update the book you already have out there?

Jo: To me, it has to be that under 10% thing.

So for example, back matter is something that people update. I have gone back in and removed. You know, in their long career as an author, things happen and you think, oh, I’m not sure I want that quote by that person anymore. So you go back in and you might remove something small like that. So updating.

I am thinking, so for example, Audio for Authors, part of me knows that it could, it could use a new edition, but I’m not going to do that. I will. Uh, but what I definitely want to add is Hindenburg narrator. Here’s a tip for everyone listening. The software,

Hindenburg Narrator has a one click button to master the files for ACX. It’s going to save you hundreds of dollars per book.

Just the one button for mastering for ACX, and it’s like, okay, that has to go in there. But that’s an update. That’s like a paragraph that I need to put in the book and it’s on my list. But to, so it’s really, in terms of updating it, updating versus a whole new edition, it really has to be how much is going to change.

And sometimes you might not know, ’cause you might remember things in a certain way. I do think also if people have got their rights back from a traditional publisher, this is happening quite a lot. You know, people are like, they’ve got a book back and people, people say, I get these emails.

People are like, oh, I wrote it 15 years ago. It was published 10 years ago. And I’m like, you need to reread that. So for example, gender is something that in 15 years, the terms around gender have changed a lot. Right. If you read a book from 15 years ago, it’s something that can really date the the book.

So I think that’s an interesting, and I’m not saying that’s everything, I’m just saying that’s one example of things that change and you might find whatever your topic, that your examples are dated or that kind of thing. And also, of course, as I mentioned, you have changed. So I think the main thing is how much needs to change.

How can you market it in a way that people are going to be interested in the next edition?

So like I’ve said, for me the big edition is memoir, which I didn’t, I don’t think I even mentioned it in the first edition, or I might have mentioned it as a type of nonfiction. But until you write, sometimes, until you write something, you don’t really know what you don’t know.

I suppose so those would be a few tips. Also, I feel like just sometimes you just get this overwhelming sense that it needs to be done. And in that case, have a listen, listen to that intuition.

Matty: And it is like putting out a new book. I mean, the, the pro is that you can, you know, do a, do a podcast tour. Talk about it in the same way you would talk about a first edition book.

I guess that the downsides to me have always felt like having to change, ISBNs, having to lose your reviews, and I guess in some cases you can sort of appeal and have them brought forward if you work with the platform manually. I don’t think so.

Jo: No. Okay. Not, not for a new edition. In my mind, the new edition is a completely new book. Yeah. So it must have new ISBNs, a new Kindle page, no reviews because it is a new book. It can’t be both. It’s either one or the other, and so a second edition, or I’ve got third editions of some of my books. This is a new, completely new book.

So yeah, with updates, as you say, you don’t need to change anything. You can upload a new file and there’s not even a problem. The keeping your reviews, I just think is not necessary. And also on the podcast tour type thing. I think it is harder to get press on a second edition, so that would probably be a challenge.

This is an evergreen book in my business and it gets marketed all the time.

I do Amazon auto ads on it, so I know that it’s not about a launch, it’s about the kind of maybe the next 6, 8, 10 years before I might decide it needs another go.

Matty: Well, I also think, especially after having this conversation about the importance of how important mindset was, this was not just an update of factoids.

In fact in, in the books I’m working on with Michael and Mark, the things that seem really time bound, we usually put in a publicly available appendix, which is kind of a nice giveaway too.

You know, we’ll have the page up on our websites for the book. And then we’ll have a downloadable attachment saying, you know, these are the, these, this is the podcast technology we would recommend today.

And it might not be the podcast technology that we would recommend tomorrow, but what I like about that mindset thing is that, it’s beyond just the facts. It is a new look. And then I think ultimately it’s, would people who got the first edition benefit from getting the second edition? And based on all the things that we’ve talked about.

I own the first edition. I will be happy to sign up for the second edition too, because I recognize that the changes that have been made make it a valid addition to my library.

Jo: Thank you. Well, on that and on that, I obviously agree, I think it is useful, but what I am doing, and I certainly, this doesn’t have to be done, but for people who have bought direct from me in the last six months, the old edition, I am happy to, you know, I’m gonna email them and say, would you like a free ebook or audiobook of the new edition?

Because I feel slightly guilty. But we all know that people put out new editions and the timing of the day that you withdraw the old edition is really hard, so you obviously have to unpublish the old editions and that, that you can do that quite quickly with eBooks. Well, for some platforms, with audiobooks, with print, but with print books never go away.

Right? There’s always secondhand editions out there. What I have done is change the color of the, the title, so it’s above me there on the video. It’s, it is now a teal. Color as opposed to a red color. So I’ve tried, you know, and it’s got second edition on, so I’ve tried to make it really obvious, but I think communicating with people is important.

Like you say, you want people to want another edition. You don’t want them to feel like, oh, well, you know, I thought I could get everything from the first. So yeah, this is one of the challenges I think, of doing second editions. But again, I feel like it’s been a real worthwhile thing. And yeah, I hope it’s useful for people.

Matty: Great. Well Joe, it was always lovely to talk to you. Let’s not let four years go by until our next conversation. But thank you so much for coming back to the podcast and please let everyone know where you, they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.

Jo: Yeah, sure. So TheCreativePenn.com with the double n.com and my podcast is The Creative Penn Podcast and you can get books everywhere.

And my store is CreativePennBooks.com. Great. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Matty.

The post The Evolving Author And Second Editions. Joanna Penn On The Indy Author Podcast first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Artificial intelligence is changing the way we do just about everything these days, and the impact of AI on fiction writing is no exception. As a writer who cherishes the creative process, I have spent the last few years grappling with both the possibilities and pitfalls this new technology brings. On the one hand, AI offers tools that can make our lives easier—such as helping with research, marketing, and even ideation. On the other hand, it raises questions about originality, authenticity, and the integrity of human storytelling.

Almost as soon as ChatGPT and its brethren were unveiled in November 2022, writers started emailing me for my opinions—most with an (at least) subtextual request for reassurance that AI wasn’t as potentially disruptive as it seemed to be. I have been cautious in sharing my opinions, since my own contextual understanding of the functionality of AI and its big-picture ramifications weren’t yet formed. More than two years later, it has become clear that AI is simultaneously not as apocalyptic as some may have originally thought while also being, in some ways, even more disruptive, particularly in the long term, to the systems that undergird nearly every part of our modern lives. This includes the impact of AI on fiction writing, which continues to evolve as new tools and capabilities emerge.

I need to be clear that my own experience with and opinions of AI are ever-evolving. In contemplating this article in the weeks leading up to writing it, the ideas I thought I might be sharing have already changed multiple times—sometimes daily. The utility and causality of AI is vast and, in itself, constantly evolving. In truth, I don’t think most of us will truly understand our relationship to AI until many years, perhaps even decades, down the road. My own opinion in this moment is that the best approach is one of cautious practicality.

In This Article:

• Why Writers Need to Embrace AI… to a Point
• Concerns About the Impact of AI on Fiction Writing: What Writers Should Know
• How AI Can Be Useful to Writers
• The Single Greatest Threat AI Poses to Fiction Writing (Hint: It’s Not What You Think)
• Is AI Going to Make Writers Extinct?

Why Writers Need to Embrace AI… to a Point

The writers I have talked to about AI have largely fallen into two camps—those who find it terrifying in its capacity to change comfortable, time-honored, and beloved systems and structures (both in and out of the creative pursuits) and those who find it giddyingly delightful in its potential for play, innovation, and convenience.

Concerns about the ethics of AI’s origins in training, without permission, off the works of untold authors (myself included) have been thoroughly discussed by this point. Lawsuits and regulations are still unfolding, all of which will be crucial to navigating this brave new world in which we find ourselves.

My own first reactions to AI were sober. I wasn’t someone who jumped in with both feet like I have with past technologies. However, I’m also not one to cry over spilt milk. At the very least, I feel the presence of AI in our world is now irreversible. I’m not sure yet if the proper analogy is that of a wish-granting genie having been let out of the bottle or of Pandora having opened a box of shadow-horrors. Either way, it’s here, and there’s no getting it back into the bottle or the box. Certainly, there is the argument that even if we could, that might not be the best choice anyway.

Therefore, I believe it is important for writers, just like everyone else, to embrace the new future in which we find ourselves. Resistance born of denial ultimately harms no one more than ourselves. Just as the Internet was a shatterpoint that forever altered the world in my early teens, AI will certainly unfold in ways both good and bad. The point is: the world has changed. How can we best respond so that we both survive and thrive, not just collectively but as individuals and, particularly in this context, as writers?

To do so, we must use AI. As it becomes more integrated into everyday functionality (such as Google searches), this will become more and more intuitive and less and less optional. More than that, experimenting with AI—ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc.—is important not just in understanding this new world and forming educated opinions about it, but in gaining entry-level skills that will likely become increasingly important to our ability to succeed as technology evolves.

Think about writers who did not or would not adapt to the opportunities the Internet brought 20+ years ago. Those who did are currently thriving thanks to their ability to navigate related software, retail sites, and social media. AI represents a similar seachange, and the truth is we don’t yet know which AI-related skills will be not just optional, but crucial, in future years. Resisting the urge to stagnate in a comfortable status quo is the essence of character arc and therefore story. We’re in the midst of quite a story right now. It’s best to be an active protagonist, rather than a passive sidekick.

Concerns About the Impact of AI on Fiction Writing: What Writers Should Know

That said, of course, AI must be embraced with awareness and caution, since its full impact is constantly unfolding and therefore not entirely knowable. Many writers are already seeing the impact of AI on fiction writing in the ways books are discovered, marketed, and even created.

Some concerns include:

• Ethics of AI Training

The ethics surrounding how AI learns, etc., and what it produces will continue to be a topic of interest for writers. My own take (again, as someone whose books were used for training the original models) is that although it would have been preferable to have had a conversation before rather than after, the way AI learns and creates isn’t really any different from how any one of us learns and creates—just on an unlimited scale. I’m not going to put any more effort into resisting AI’s extrapolation of my work than I am the thousands of human writers who learn from me and then go on to write about their own integrations of “my” theories.

• Resource Consumption of AI

One of my greatest concerns about AI—which is spoken about regrettably seldom—is its tremendous resource consumption. The energy and computational costs of of AI systems, especially during training, is staggering. For example:

• Water Usage: Training large AI models can consume significant amounts of water. Training GPT-3 in Microsoft’s U.S. data centers required approximately 700,000 liters (185,000 gallons) of water for cooling purposes.
• Energy Consumption and Carbon Emissions: The energy demands of training AI models are considerable. A study from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that training a single large AI model can emit over 626,000 pounds (approximately 284 metric tons) of CO₂, which is nearly five times the lifetime emissions of an average American car.

Although usage for individual tasks (such as you or I using ChatGPT or a Google search) seems insignificant in comparison (i.e., each query or interaction may consume a few kilowatt-seconds of energy, roughly comparable to the energy used to power a light bulb for a few seconds), the cumulative effect of billions of queries worldwide adds to the toll.

• Discoverability Challenges

AI has already—and will continue to—evolve how books are discovered. Although, in itself, this is not a problem, as search discoverability is always evolving, there are legitimate fears that as AI search begins to dominate, opportunities for discoverability will narrow. Obviously, this affects not just writers wanting to be discovered, but also all of us who, as consumers, are trying to discover new and interesting books (among other products) that may exist beyond the obvious top tier.

• Two-Dimensional and Sometimes Erroneous Info

Much has also been written about AI’s fallibility. From notorious Google searches that recommended running with scissors to obvious programming biases, AI’s ability to control how we see the world is cause for unequivocal concern. As we become more and more familiar with large language models (LLMs) and companionable chatbots, the challenge to remain vigilant about the validity of information and our own perceptions of it will become more and more crucial.

The Single Greatest Threat AI Poses to Fiction Writing (Hint: It’s Not What You Think)

Most of the above applies to anyone interacting with AI. What about writers?

We are only at the cusp of the possibilities for how AI may integrate into fiction writing. Already many writers are embracing its capabilities to help them learn, research, outline, plot, edit, and publish. AI has already proven its ability to be of tremendous help in the creative process. To the degree AI legitimately makes us more creative (which is not necessarily to be conflated with more productive), it will ultimately prove to be a positive and expansive tool. But in this process, it is important for each artist to consciously and consistently perform the personal gut check of acknowledging the line where AI becomes the creator rather than the creative tool.

As we explore a future in which we will increasingly collaborate with AI, I would encourage all humans to question whether or not we are choosing to interact with AI in ways that makes us less human or more. This is particularly important for writers, artists, and creatives of all types, as it is our act of creation that most defines our humanity, first individually and then collectively.

AI is a decidedly “mental” tool. It is designed to think. As such, it is uniquely positioned to help us with all mental tasks. (Perhaps someday it will dream and emote, but even then, do we want it to dream and emote for us?)

For instance, some of the ways AI can be most useful to writers is by:

• Relieving the mental stress of busy to-do lists.
• Helping with administrative duties, copywriting, ads, social media, etc.
• Helping with research.
• Helping with search engine optimization.

It can be tempting sometimes (especially for plot-oriented or outline-forward writers) to think storytelling is a mental process. However, the mental aspects of writing are just a small part of the overall experience and, often, the last aspect to fully emerge. Story is not just a mental game; it is a deeply felt creative embodied process. As such, I am cautious about advocating the use AI for story creation without significant caveats.

How each writer chooses to use AI (whether in brainstorming, outlining, co-writing, etc.) is ultimately as individual and personal as each person’s writing process was before AI popped out of the box. That said, I encourage every creative to carefully consider how you implement AI into your creative process.

Ask Yourself: Why Are You Using AI?

What are your specific goals and reasons for bringing AI on board?

• Perhaps you enjoy it.
• Perhaps you feel the necessity of the changing times.
• Perhaps you recognize obvious ways AI can simplify the always difficult process of creating a story.
• Perhaps you seek greater productivity.

All of these are valid responses as long as the results are not inhibiting or distracting from the deeper experience of creation. Stories are a conversation first with our own subconscious and eventually with the greater shared subconscious of the collective. It is not too great a stretch to say that our interaction with the deep archetypes of story itself and the characters who populate it is what shapes our very existence. Story is not just communication; it is communion—with ourselves, with each other, and with the infinitude that lies beyond immediate understanding.

The Sacredness of Stories

Stories are sacred. This does mean we can’t (or shouldn’t) bring in AI tools to aid us. Indeed, insofar as AI is an extension of ourselves or an aid to our own deep subconscious creativity, then it can only be a positive. But honoring the sacredness of story does mean we must be careful not to allow AI’s easy answers to bypass the depth of our creative processes. For me, the storytelling process has always been a conversation with my deep subconscious—my dreaming self, if you will. I’m not interested in what AI comes up with; I’m interested in what I come up with; I’m interested in what you come up with.

More than that, although AI may enhance creativity, productivity, and efficiency, it also risks diminishing our own skills. For instance, can AI help you learn how to write a book? Can it teach you story theory? The short answer is: yes. But only as an aid.

Why? Because, again, story is not simply a mental skill or the ability to recite certain storytelling formulae. It is an embodiment. Indeed, some of our best authors couldn’t recite a formula or articulate story theory to save their lives—and yet they have written deeply embodied works of art that have not only connected with the collective subconscious but evolved it.

In many ways, the purpose of AI is to offer shortcuts. Obviously, there are both good and bad aspects of this. Just as the Internet has rewired our brains, AI will undoubtedly change the way we think. As creators, we are the life force of society. As writers, we are its voices. The choices each one of us makes in how we use AI to, first, live our lives and, second, to write our stories will ripple far beyond ourselves. What each of us does at this epochal moment in history and how we choose to interact with technology matters.

The specifics of how we make these choices are extremely personal—not least because there is no clear “right” path. What is most important—and what I challenge every writer—is to remember we are the sovereigns of our own lives. We are responsible for our choices. Therefore it is incumbent upon each of us to remain aware of what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how our choices and actions are impacting our relationships with our deepest selves and therefore with our storytelling.

***

Someone once asked me if it was even worth becoming a writer in this rapidly changing age of AI.

First, let me comment on the pitfalls of pinning too much despair (or, equally, hope) on the impact AI has on fiction writing. Writers have always been anxious about publishing (really, getting published and not getting published are equally scary). These days, it can be easy to project our anxieties or fears onto AI and use it as a convenient scapegoat for throwing up our hands, saying “what’s the point?”, and not doing the thing that scares us (whether that’s writing or publishing). Often, new technologies like AI can become bogeymen that conveniently distract from more personal fears.

Now, as for the specific question of whether AI will render novelists and other creatives obsolete—who knows? But my personal opinion is absolutely not. Although AI and other tech will inevitably change the way we create, the single most important dynamic in art is the artist who wants to say something and the audience who wants to experience communication in this way from a fellow human. The impact of AI on fiction writing will not change the fundamental human need to create and to experience human creation. So keep creating! We’re all in the midst of a tremendous story right now, and, as it should be, that is both terrifying and exciting!

In Summary:

AI is revolutionizing fiction writing, offering both exciting possibilities and daunting challenges. While its integration into creative processes can enhance productivity, it also raises concerns about originality, ethics, and the sustainability of resource use. Writers must strike a balance—embracing AI as a tool for efficiency and exploration, while remaining conscious of its potential impact on their creativity and humanity. The future of writing lies in navigating this technological shift with care, ensuring AI serves to enrich rather than overshadow our deeply personal and emotional journey of storytelling.

Key Takeaways:

• AI tools are changing the landscape of fiction writing, offering both opportunities and challenges for authors.
• While AI can assist with brainstorming, editing, and productivity, it lacks true creativity and emotional depth.
• Ethical concerns arise regarding AI-generated content, originality, and the potential impact on human writers.
• Writers can benefit from AI by using it as a supplement rather than a replacement for their creative process.
• The role of AI in publishing and discoverability is still evolving, requiring authors to stay informed and adaptable.

Want more?

In a world where AI is reshaping the landscape of storytelling, it’s more important than ever for writers to tap into the deep, timeless forces that make our stories resonate on a profound level. If you’d like to move deeper into that, you might enjoy my book Writing Archetypal Character Arcs. I wrote it to help you understand and harness the power of archetypes to create characters that not only drive your plots but also connect with the universal themes that speak to our shared human experience.

While AI can be a valuable tool in the writing process, the true heart of storytelling lies in our ability to explore and express these archetypal depths. If you seek to create stories that stand the test of time, Writing Archetypal Character Arcs is a guide to crafting characters who speak to the most important human transformations. You can check it out at retailers like Amazon or via the store on my site.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do you think the impact of AI on fiction writing will shape the future of storytelling? Tell me in the comments!

Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or Spotify).

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The post Exploring the Impact of AI on Fiction Writing: Opportunities and Challenges appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.