Why is creative control and owning your intellectual property so important for a long-term author career? How can AI tools help you be more creative and amplify your curiosity? Dave Morris talks about his forty-year publishing career and why he’s still pushing the boundaries of what he can create.

In the intro, Writing Storybundle; Finding your voice and creative confidence [Ask ALLi]; Does ChatGPT recommend your book? [Novel Marketing Podcast]; Google IO expansion of AI search [The Verge]; Sam Altman & Jony Ive IO [The Verge]; Claude 4; my AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars.

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 

Dave Morris is an author and comic book writer, as well as a narrative and game designer, with more than 70 books and over 40 years in publishing. He is best known for interactive series such as Dragon Warriors and Fabled Lands.

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

• Keeping your IP for long-term earnings
• Working on your own projects to maintain creative control
• Benefits of AI tools for long-series authors
• AI as a research and brainstorming assistant
• How creative confidence leads to confidence in using AI tools
• Using AI to advise on marketing strategies
• The potential of AI to enhance emotional expression in writing
• The future of gaming with AI integration

You can find Dave at FabledLands.blogspot.com, patreon.com/jewelspider, realdavemorris.substack.com or whispers-beyond.space

Transcript of Interview with Dave Morris

Joanna: Dave Morris is an author and comic book writer, as well as a narrative and game designer, with more than 70 books and over 40 years in publishing. He is best known for interactive series such as Dragon Warriors and Fabled Lands. So welcome to the show, Dave.

Dave: Hi, Jo.

Joanna: It’s good to have you on. So first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing originally, and how you’ve managed to stay in it for so long when so many have disappeared.

Dave: The introduction was making me feel exhausted, because, yes, it is 40 years. I think the Dragon Warriors is having its 40th anniversary this year. So 41 years I’ve been publishing.

At the start of the 80s, there was kind of a craze for role playing, and those kind of choose your own adventure books, solo role playing. So part of it is kind of a luck factor, but you have to look for those opportunities.

All publishers at the time needed people who could do that, and there weren’t very many of us that could do words and equations and things, and I got lucky with that.

I think the why I’ve stayed in it is the early choices were whether to join the big series like Dungeons and Dragons, and Fighting Fantasy was a big one in Britain, or to do your own thing.

I went with smaller publishers and kept my own IP and kept control of it.

I think the difference there is, at first I thought, I wonder if this is a mistake. Like friends were making more and getting bigger checks than I was to start with, but then I noticed I was getting foreign rights checks a few years later that were really beginning to add up.

Of course, by keeping the IP, it means I’m still earning from those things 40 years on, because I still control them.

Joanna: That’s really interesting. That decision, you said that was hard back then. Of course, we have seen in recent years, some of those comic book artists particularly are sort of trying to come back to the big companies saying, well, it’s just not fair.

It seems a very strong decision to make back then, when being more independent was not really a thing.

Dave: Well, maybe I picked that up from comics because I was a huge Marvel comics fan. You know, I was 10, 11, 12, and I was aware of the problems of Jack Kirby, and even Stan Lee. I mean, he was paid well by Marvel, but considering that he’s spawned a multi-billion dollar industry, he wasn’t paid that much.

So maybe I just thought about creative control. I think partly it was just that I like to have creative control. You want to go in and be able to say the cover should look like this, and pick your own artists, and really just feel that it’s your work, not somebody else’s.

So although I have done plenty of hack work as well for other IPs, I think I bring my best game to my own stuff.

Joanna: Hack work. That’s an interesting phrase. Is that writing for hire, really?

Dave: Yes. I mean, I did the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle books, for example.

Joanna: That’s awesome!

Dave: I know, it is. I was a comics fan, so they said, “We want you to do these comics.” This was the kid’s department at what’s now Penguin Random, or whatever the hell they’re called.

I said, “You know, they’re not kid’s comics. They’re very dark, indie, underground comics.” And they said, “Oh no, they’re doing a complete reboot.” I was amazed, because I only knew the very violent original version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I enjoyed writing them, and I later discovered I was the only author they trusted to come up with new stories, for some reason. So I ended up doing a bunch of new ones. Which, again, I think if they just said, “Take a TV episode and adapt it,” I wouldn’t have been nearly as interested in doing that.

Although I did also do Thunderbirds and Stingray books, and that was mainly because I’d been such a huge fan of them when I was a kid that I would have done that for nothing. I didn’t tell the publishers that.

Joanna: That’s brilliant. How do you span all the genres and all the types of books?

Because you do game stuff, you do comics, you do book books. So how do you sort of see your projects, in terms of the work you choose to do?

Dave: That’s a very good question. I actually didn’t get into doing comics until about 10 or 12 years ago, and that was only after a games company I was working at had collapsed and a comic just came along. Random House was launching one, and they said, “Do you want to work on it?”

I actually discovered I really enjoyed writing comics, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, but I don’t know why I’d left it so long.

I think one of the things I probably bring is I always think that there’s the element of writing, but because I’m a game designer as well —

There’s an element to which —

I’m not just trying to create stories, but systems that create stories. I’m very interested in the world building and the means of having emergent narratives.

I saw an interview with Robert Harris, and he was talking about how he did all the research for his historical books, and he said 80% or 90% of it the reader never gets to see. Of course, if you’re writing a game, all the law might eventually become relevant, so you kind of have to put all that attention in.

You can’t just think, “Well, they won’t go around the back of the houses, so I can have a flat piece of plywood there.” You have to allow for the possibility that the story could go anywhere. I think that’s how I’ve come at stories, basically.

Joanna: I love that. Systems that create stories.

As you said that, I was thinking this is something that authors of series really need. I mean, like I’m looking at book 14 in my ARKANE series, and I have lots of ideas, but I feel like this system that can create stories.

Would you give some tips for people who want to write long series?

How would your lessons play into that?

Dave: Well, I think they’re very lucky to be alive in the era of AI. I mean, I have that all the time. The VulcanVerse series, which I finished about a year ago, was three quarters of a million words long, and it was one of these choose your own adventure types.

Painting the continuity without AI—I mean, at that time, there wasn’t a lot—but NotebookLM now would make that so much easier. Somebody asked me a question about the VulcanVerse books, where previously I would have had to go—

I got a French publisher said, “Is there a name for this mountain range?” I realized, looking for something that may not exist in the books, that’s an open ended problem that could take all afternoon, right? But NotebookLM was able to tell me, “No, you never gave a name for those.”

When I presented it to ChatGPT, it said, “Would you like me to come up with some names based on the names in the area that you’ve already named?” So those things, I think they’re really helpful because who wants to just wade through the text over and over again, looking for one specific detail of continuity?

It’s like having a bible. Like if we do a game, we used to have to have the game bible, and for one massively multiplayer game, the bible was about 250 pages long. It had everything.

The physics of the world, the history of the world, the social cultures, how the language worked, how it’s pronounced. Literally, everything that any designer on the team would need to access. Again, that now can just be put up effectively into an AI, and you can interrogate the AI for it. So those are very useful, I think.

Joanna: Well, then we’ll get into it then because, of course, the other side of that you said, “We’re lucky to be alive in an era of AI.”

I feel the same way, but some people would say, “Yes, but Dave, that means you don’t have to write that anymore. Like, why do we need a Dave Morris when I can use ChatGPT to write a 250 page world bible?”

How are you dealing with AI, as someone who has a degree in physics and has been into this whole space for a while?

Dave: I mean, the physics course 40 years ago, or 45 years ago, had AI as a tiny module. Now, probably physics is a tiny module. In fact, Nobel Prize winners can be AI specialists who happen to win the physics prize.

I do hear a lot of people saying, “Oh, well, you’re just saying the AI will do the writing, or the AI will do all the artwork.” Of course, they’re really speaking, I think, from a position of not having tried it, because that’s not how anybody really uses it.

You don’t just leave it running, go and get a cup of tea, come back and the book is written. It’s little things like the research that I was talking about. I had a little bit the other day where I needed to find a historical reference, and I thought it was in this book by Jean de Joinville, The Chronicles of the Crusades.

I was going through the book from my shelf, and it’s a big book, and you gradually begin to think, did I imagine it? I mean, the last time I looked at the book was 30 years ago, so maybe I’m misremembering.

Then I thought, well, he wrote it in the 13th century, so I can find it on Gutenberg, put it into an AI, have it read the whole thing and tell me if I’m hallucinating or not. It found it, and I thought, right, that could have been an afternoon wasted for a tiny point that I needed before I could move on to the next part of the writing.

It’s like an incredibly diligent, fast, patient, research assistant. A discussion brainstorming assistant. I can’t imagine how I managed without it, really.

Joanna: It’s funny you say that because I was talking to Jonathan, my husband, about this. I was like, this is one of those things a bit like Google. You know, when we all got Google, or the internet just in general.

Even my phone, you’ll remember too when we had those Nokias, the little Nokias, and you’re like, why would I ever need anything else? Like, I don’t need that smartphone. What is this iPhone thing? Then, of course, that’s all changed.

I did want to ask you then, because something I’m a little obsessed about at the moment is this idea of creative confidence. I hear you, and you and I both understand this, you said you don’t just leave it running. You’re driving it because you know you have taste.

You have your own taste, you have your own voice. You know what you like, you know things you’re interested in. You can trust that.

What about people who are earlier on in their career? Maybe they’re writing their first book, or maybe they’re writing their first game, or whatever.

How can newer writers have creative confidence in working with AI tools?

Dave: That is tricky, of course, because we’ve effectively trained our brains, our neural nets in our heads, to already do that work. We can see which bits are the heavy lifting we want the AI to do. I think people will just learn different ways of working.

I mean, every generation has new technologies that come along. I’m sure when the quill pen came in, people were going, “Oh, people won’t have the valuable time spent sharpening the quill pen, which is important thinking time.”

I don’t doubt, if I went forward 50 years, I’d find the way people are writing is very different from the way I do it. I mean, they would probably think how antiquated that I talk about it as like a research assistant.

In 50 years’ time, you might have a neural interface anyway, so it might actually be directly wired into the brain. I was more keen on that before Elon Musk went crazy because now I don’t want Neuralink anywhere near my brain.

Joanna: I’m sure there’ll be other brands.

Dave: I hope so. Maybe if Google would do one, I’d probably end up with that one anyway.

I think, yes, the patterns that people use. I mean, you look at, say, people like Trollope and Dickens, and they were building these huge worlds. When you see their notes, you think, how the hell did they have two pages of notes for a book, that if you drop it, you’d break a toe.

How did they keep all that in their head? Especially Trollope, when he’s only doing it before he goes to work every day. I guess they just train their memories really well.

One argument is we get lazier. That was the argument against writing when it was invented. People will forget how to remember stuff. They’ll just write it down. Well, we’ve only got so much brain space. We don’t need to clutter it with unnecessary tasks, I think.

I do think it’s going to be interesting. I’m sure I will be constantly amazed to see how younger writers are actually starting to use it.

Joanna: Yes, it’s interesting. I mean, I keep coming back to just curiosity and the tug that I feel towards things. So you mentioned a book written in, what did you say, the 13th century or something? I’m like, oh, I’m interested in that too because, you know, Crusaders and that kind of thing. Yes, I’m interested in that.

Like, you talk about role playing games, I am just not interested. Not my thing. So I think people, they just have to feel that tug towards whatever they’re curious about, and then let that be the guide.

These tools can generate lots and lots and lots of ideas, hundreds and hundreds of ideas, and—

You have to say, “that’s the one,” or “that’s not the one,” perhaps.

Dave: Well, we’ve talked about, I’m now calling it Banjo Duel Days. It’s like for the banjos in Deliverance, where they go so fast the strings break. I find the conversations where they exhaust me within minutes because it’s throwing so much stuff at you.

I think a lot of it is keeping it on track because it always says things like, “Hey, do you want another example of X?” Like no, maybe let’s not get into that because you’ll pull me off course.

If I was going to be a devil’s advocate about it, there is one thing about the old days where I’d find I needed to find something out, I’d get my nose in a book, and it might be an hour and a half later that I surfaced with the thing I wanted to find, but a bunch of other things I didn’t know I wanted to find.

Now I can go straight to the thing and get on with the big picture, but there is that risk that you don’t get that serendipitous discovery. I’m sure people will still read though. So it’s just that what I don’t want to do is end up researching for hours when I’m losing a bigger picture of the story.

I needed to find in one story a bunch of moral riddles. So not logic puzzles, but those kind of Porsches casket things that would have an emotional meaning, like Gawain and the Loathly Lady. It’s a riddle, but it’s more about feeling than fact, and it was for a medieval story.

So I asked Claude about it, and Claude goes straight to a bunch of 12th or 13th century medieval texts that I’d never heard of, and quickly found a whole bunch of these kinds of riddles. We could go through them, and 20 minutes later—it was only for almost a throw away scene—but it meant I had what I needed.

Otherwise I would have had to have gone into JSTOR and spent days looking for this stuff.

Joanna: Because we’re interested in that, like we are interested in finding these things. I was writing earlier a freediving story, and I needed to get the exact type of fish that they would see at this particular dive spot in this particular place. It’s very important to get the right thing.

I can use AI, but of course, there are hallucinations or whatever, which we like sometimes. I was like, no, I need to triple check this and everything. It’s funny because we care about those, and—

Perhaps that’s just part of it, the sort of trust that you will care about the things that are important to you.

Dave: You might afterwards. I mean, people might say, “Oh, well, you won’t spend the time just accidentally coming across stuff,” but maybe you will. I mean, having been told about it by Claude, there’s nothing to stop me when I finish my story for the day thinking, “Well, it’s on Gutenberg. I’ll go and have a look at all that stuff.”

So they’re worried in some way that it will kill curiosity, but I always wonder what kind of mindset frets about that.

You and I are so excited by it, and we don’t think it’s going to stop us being curious. We don’t think it’ll stop us being creative. Some people fear that, and I wonder where they’re coming from for that to be a fear.

Joanna: Well, like I said, I think maybe it’s this creative confidence that you and I have you. I mean, you have a lot longer than me, but I feel like I just lean into it. Obviously, you’ve mainly been in traditional publishing, small publishers—

Are you coming up against the anti-AI stuff in the work that you do in publishing, or are you seeing widespread adoption?

Dave: Oh, you see a lot of opposition to it in role playing, and comics too. I mean, in the end, I couldn’t continue my comic Mirabilis because it’s a lot of artwork, and the artists have to work full time.

There was no way that the book advance would be able to pay them to work full time on 100 pages of comics. To pencil them, to ink them, to color them, we just couldn’t have done that.

So I could now do that with AI, even if all we did was use the AI for the thumbnails, the layouts, which is quite a tradition in comics. The artist having got the basic composition of the shot, at least suggested to them, it saves 20% of the time. The coloring might be something, the inking, that the AI could do, but there’s a lot of opposition.

Again, people say you’re doing an artist out of a job, but I think, well, that’s a case where the artist didn’t get the job in the end because the economics of publishing just don’t make it possible. Similarly, in a lot of small indie role playing publishing, they don’t have a huge art budget.

Your choice would be no art or AI art.

I’m doing a Cthulhu app later in the year, and what we decided in the end was—because I did some AI art, and the guy who’s doing the coding was saying, “Oh, I don’t want any AI art.” So I sent him some stuff and he goes, “Oh, but that’s absolutely perfect.”

Joanna: Oh, but that’s good.

Dave: I said, yeah. I just know how to coax stuff out of this. So in the end, what we decided to do was we’d get the AI to do one set of artwork, we would also pay a human artist to do some very TRON-like artwork.

So basically the choice will be— because we’ll probably do it on Kickstarter—is you can choose whether you want AI doing human-style art, or human doing AI-style art.

Joanna: Nice.

Dave: So no artist was done out of a job.

Joanna: Hmm, this is interesting. You mentioned the economics of publishing then, and you mentioned you published first in the 80s. I feel like a lot of the myths around publishing and money, like, “Oh, if I sell my novel, I’m going to make seven figures,” come from the 80s and 90s, when people did seem to get these big deals.

What else have you seen with the changes in the economics of publishing and being an author? How has that changed?

Dave: I was, as I say, lucky, because I was going into publishers who didn’t know anything about game books and role playing and that kind of field. Consequently I could say, “Oh, this is the world I’m using, and I own it,” and I could get away with that. Whereas now they would try to own their own IP.

So if you’re not a celebrity who’s willing to do cozy murder, you know, if you just walk in off the street, you pretty much have to walk in with your IP already a bit established. So like The Expanse, or Hugh Howey with Wool Silo, as it is on TV, they’d already established there. Or The Martian, Andy Weir.

So they already established the IP, and then the publisher has to do a deal with them. If you walk in cold, you know, if I went back to being a 23 year old or whatever I was, walking into a publishing house now, they would be telling me, “We want you to use this IP, and we’ll control it,” and they want to be able to fire you.

So you pretty much have to make sure you go in with cards in your hand, which will be an established audience of some kind.

Joanna: What are some of the other things that have changed in the industry that today’s publishing myths are based upon?

Dave: If I went right back, publishing used to have very long lunches with lots of wine. It was very kind of genteel. You’d go into one of these old publishing houses, and a bottle of wine would be got out of the fridge during the meeting and chit chat. It was a very different kind of setup.

I think they’re much more aware, first of all, because they’re always late to the party. I went around the book fair, whatever the year that the volcano went off. Remember that one?

Joanna: Eyjafjallajökull, whatever.

Dave: Yes. So suddenly they had to talk to authors because all the publishers weren’t turning up from abroad.

I went around with an iPad, and I was showing them Mirabilis on the iPad and saying, “You see, you’d have apps,” which they didn’t really understand, “and you could have a publishing, effectively, portal and let people know the series they’re interested in. It would tell them there’s a new book coming, and they could go for extra info.”

I remember the publishers looking at me and saying, “It is not our business to have a direct relationship with our customers. That is for booksellers.”

Two or three years later, they were saying the future of publishing is to have a direct relationship. So you think, good Lord, you’re always late with these things.

I mean, they’re aware of that now, but it probably makes it harder for authors, as I say, to get established, but they’re always going to need good ideas and that. I’ve been at many of those publishing meetings where they create their own ideas in house, and it’s a rather deadening process.

Any committee creating stuff like that’s always going to be horrible, so they definitely need people to just come in.

Usually what makes an IP interesting is the uniqueness of that person’s mind, right? The rough edges that a committee would file off.

So I think sticking to your guns would be the major takeaway now. Believe you’ve got something that the publisher won’t bring to it.

Joanna: Yes, which comes back to creative confidence again.

Dave: Yes, absolutely.

Joanna: What about marketing?

I feel like maybe again, back in the 90s, it was like, oh, you don’t need to do any of that. But now that’s changed.

Dave: I’m terrible at marketing, but luckily, I’ve never really had to do it because, as I say, owning all my own stuff, all I had to do was write to the publishers, invoking the clause that says it’s out of print, I get it back. Then I can sell to 20 different publishers around the world on my own terms.

Again, AI is useful because, knowing I’m bad at publishing, I do occasionally ask the AI to advise me. It’s much smarter than I am about “Oh, here’s how you do a YouTube channel, and you’ve got to consider all these platforms,” that I’ve never even heard of, and it gives me links to them.

So I’m sure, again, I don’t need to tell, I’m really of a generation that didn’t know anything about that. So I mean, you know much more about it, I’m sure. People coming in right now will be fully up to speed with at least how to reach a wider market.

Joanna: Not that many people want to.

Dave: I mean, I was always of the opinion that I just like doing the creative stuff. I had publishers, game publishers or book publishers, who dealt with all the tedious bits. I mean, I’d have to go to meetings, but my job was to go there and be passionate about the ideas, not to explain it with a PowerPoint presentation.

So I kind of feel sorry for—well, unless people like marketing, there is always that problem that if all you are is very creative in writing terms, let’s say, or art, and you’re not good at marketing, there’s a risk that some really great stuff will get missed because you don’t know how to put it across.

Once we get the agentic AI, I hope it will clone me and go and do all the marketing on my behalf, with my face and my voice.

Joanna: Well, you can pretty much do that already, and that then becomes the question. I was literally looking at this the other day. I have a voice clone, even when I saw you a few weeks ago, it hadn’t happened. I now have a voice clone that’s done my latest audiobook, Death Valley.

I’ve said for years, when I get a voice clone, I’m going to license it. I’m going to make an income stream from people using my voice. I didn’t realize what would happen when I actually heard it. Now I’ve heard it, I’m like, I can’t possibly license it because it’s way too me. So this is really interesting.

Faced with AI Dave, I wonder how you might feel about it doing a YouTube channel for you, or whether you think you might change your mind a bit like I did?

Dave: You see, I might. I look at a lot of old blog posts, and I think, now, of course, I couldn’t just read them out as a script, because they’re for the eye, not for the ear. But then, of course, I could say to the AI, “Take that blog post. Make it more chatty, conversational. Do it in my voice. Make a YouTube video.”

It’s all my work, it’s just slightly changed some of the text to make it work better for speech. I think I might. I don’t know, would I find it weird? Maybe I’d have to get another voice. I think of it as my assistant, I don’t think of it as “mirror, mirror on the wall.”

Occasionally I notice it remembers something I’ve told it. It’ll say, you know, updating memory. Then I crack into that, and I think it’s strange what it’s chosen to remember of the things I’ve spoken to it about.

Joanna: It is very interesting. Although it’s interesting because, again, we say, oh, we’ll have a clone. We’ll have a Dave clone or a Jo clone.

I don’t want a clone. I want something that is a lot better than me at marketing.

Dave: Well, I’m sure it’ll be better than us. I mean, our last refuge may be the actual writing, because it won’t have had human—well, I say it won’t have had human experience, but that’s the curious thing about the degree of grounding that it’s getting just reading everything.

I mean, clearly it has got—I’ve got to be careful how I put it because of the consciousness claims—but it’s got a model of the world embedded in its language systems.

So, I mean, I would certainly use it to write a sympathy note to a friend. I’m terrible at things like sympathy notes because I only deal with problems by trying to solve them.

I don’t deal with problems by emoting with people because I always think, where’s the solution? Just telling you I feel bad because you feel bad, I haven’t added anything. That’s my neuro atypical way of thinking, I guess.

I think the AI is perfectly happy to be just there for you. So it would be the touchy feely version of me, I guess. Better at the emotional side.

Joanna: Which in itself is weird, right? People would say, “Oh, that voice is robotic,” meaning it has less feeling in it. Now, there are plenty of people who are robotic, or plenty of people who are not that interested in emotions.

It’s actually funny, one of my first-use cases was with some of my writing, it was—

“Okay, take this and make it more emotional.”

Dave: Yes, exactly, and sometimes because you’re just feeling a bit tired. Like doing a blurb, I say, look, I kind of want to do the blurb, but wow, I’ve just finished the 750,000 words of the book, and there’s a lot of stuff. You think, well, where do I start? I don’t want to summarize everything.

So I say, “Give me a really exciting blurb in the style of Robert E Howard,” or something. It’s way over the top, but it makes me think, okay, those are the bits it’s picked out are as exciting. So I can work from there.

Actually thinking about it, wasn’t there that movie more than 10 years ago now, the Spike Jones one, Her, where they’ve actually got an AI writing greetings cards and sympathy cards. So already, in that future, they imagined a future where the AI was better at that than people.

Joanna: Yes, and the people, I think, who object to that, are the people who already write emotional stuff really well.

One of the reasons I don’t write romance is because, you know, that’s not me. People are like, “Oh, but you must think that,” and I’m like, no, I literally don’t think that.

Dave: Yes, definitely. While I was doing the VulcanVerse books, there was a bit where I had—it’s a long story, but you can end up at Troy. I wanted the possibility, kind of in backstory, just hinted at, that Achilles, who’d never had a proper life, you know, he’d come there as a very young man, might be falling in love with you, as the main character.

I didn’t want to make it overt, so I said to the AI, “What tiny subtextual hints might indicate that I could work into the conversation?” Then it went through all the lists. “These are the things humans do when they’re hinting or when they’re trying not to indicate they’re falling in love with somebody.”

I thought, wow, I’m actually asking the machine, but it was very handy. Sometimes with just the 10 bullet pointed lists, you think, yes, okay, those are all good points.

Joanna: Yes, completely. I agree with that. So you’ve mentioned, what have you mentioned? Chat GPT. You’ve mentioned Claude. You’ve mentioned Google NotebookLM.

Are there any other tools that you use a lot?

Dave: I use DeepSeek quite a bit. I’ve been using Gemini. They released the 2.5. I have to say, it’s probably great for coding and maths, which is their real interest. I find it’s pretty bad for writing.

I’ll ask it for something, and it looks like it’s paid by the word because it just gives you the longest way around and in quite horrible prose. Whereas I quite like the chattiness, the easy conversation you can have with Claude, or Chat GPT is good at that.

Yesterday, it started spitting out a load of things with some adjectives in Nepali and Japanese and Russian. I had to say, wait a minute, what? I don’t speak this number of languages. What are you talking about? They go, “Oh, sorry. I’m probably getting mixed up in my training data.” So I’m a bit down on Gemini at the moment, but I use all the others.

Sometimes I’ll set them on each other. I’ll say, “Claude’s just given me this, but I think there’s probably some deeper insights. You’ll notice them.” I’ll tell Chat GPT. Of course, having been told that, it thinks I’m a very perceptive critic, and it role plays that.

So I always say to my wife, “Roz, you have to say please and thank you, for your own sake, to stay in the right mindset.” Don’t treat it like just a Google search because when you talk to it in a certain way, you’re getting it to lean towards a particular kind of response.

So saying at the start, “You are a really good book doctor, and you’re about to tell me the flaws in this plot line,” you’re much more likely to get some good flaws than if you just throw it at it cold.

Joanna: Absolutely. Although I am finding the ChatGPT o3 model just kind of extraordinary in that way, in that—

It will give me so much more than even I had thought to ask for.

Dave: I used to find when I first started working with teams on games—so I’d written for five or six years solo. You know, you’re alone with your blank page. Then working on teams of people, where even though I was the lead designer, there’d be other people who I’d have to trust to do bits of the story or the design of the game.

You get to a point where you’ve got them to understand the ethic of it, what you’re trying to do with the game, to such an extent that they will come up with stuff before you’ve even had to think about it. So working with teams is fun like that, and working with AI will be fun.

I had a horrible OCR scan of something I’d written 30 years ago, and it was totally garbled with percentages and question marks. The OCR just couldn’t make sense of the text.

So I gave it to Claude and said, “I need this cleaned up. It’s full of these artifacts. If I spend the afternoon on it, I can do it, but that’s what you are supposed to do. So don’t change anything, just write it as the original document without all the crap in it.”

So it took that, but when it came back it said, “I noticed that it was a scenario for this role playing game, and so I’ve also formatted all of the stat blocks for the NPCs using the standard notation from that role play game.” That’s fantastic. I didn’t even have to ask it for that, it was just bonus content.

Joanna: That is amazing. I think what’s interesting, when you and I have talked about this before — 

We’re just not threatened by something like this.

I feel like o3 has been another jump in my perception of the whole thing. It’s that I’m not threatened that it’s smarter than me, or comes up with things that I find interesting and take into other things.

I just don’t feel that because there’s always been people who are smarter than me. There’s always people who are stronger than me, and know more than me, and all of this. So is that part of also feeling comfortable? You were working in a collaborative team, far more than most authors would do. So you’re used to other minds, I guess.

Dave: Yes. I mean, it’s not a new experience that there’s another mind in the room that’s smarter than I am.

Somebody said to me the other day, kids born today will never have known a world in which you can’t talk to machines. I guess they’ll just grow up expecting it.

I think the other thing is, every criticism that people level is just going to go out of date almost before they finished saying it, because it’s such a quickly evolving field.

There’s this kind of absolute zero reinforcement training that they’re talking about now, where the large language models will create their own content and judge their own data. More than that, that they’ll create their own problems and assess their own response.

They can find the very edge of their ability so as to push themselves an extra couple of percent, and then you just leave them running because they don’t need a human being anymore. They found that’s working. They expected it to work for things like code, but it’s also working for natural, ordinary language.

So I think we’ll just get an exponential increase in those fields now. So like you say, the genie is out of the bottle, so there’s no point in having people writing papyri about how genies are bad for the economy of Baghdad or whatever. They’re there, so you’ve got to figure out how to get the good wishes out of them, not the bad ones.

Joanna: Yes, and I heard somebody use the term “the original sin” of training on copyright data, in the way that at some point something was done that a lot of people don’t agree with. Whether or not it ends up being legal or whatever, that may go on for decades.

We’re so way past that moment, that anyone who says, “Oh, well, once that court case is decided, all of this will go away.” I mean, you mentioned DeepSeek, actually, which is the Chinese model. I mean—

Even if all the American models disappear, that’s not the end of it, is it?

Dave: No. I know people don’t like this analogy, but they don’t like it not for the logical reason they say they don’t like it, which is when I was a kid and I used to read comics, then I would think, I’ll try drawing a hand like this artist does, or I see how he does faces. You’d study the style.

When I started writing—you know, thank goodness I’ve shaken it off—but I would try the style of HP Lovecraft, or whatever. I’d try those things out because that’s how we learn. Then we gradually form our own styles.

So I don’t think we should have one rule for us and one for the AI. Now, people will then say, “Oh, it doesn’t learn the same way we do.” Well, it’s training. It’s learning patterns. We don’t just learn patterns from public domain writing. Otherwise, all our writing would sound like we were Victorians. So it seems crazy.

If they aren’t allowed to use anyone else’s stuff — 

They can have all of my stuff and train on it, because I want to be part of it. You know, in 2000 years’ time, some tiny, tiny little drop in this massive ocean of training will still be something that we wrote.

Joanna: I totally agree. I’m uploading all my stuff all the times to all of the LMs. I want them to know me. Also, with book recommendations and shopping coming to generative AI, you want your stuff to be there so people can find it.

Last question because we’re almost out of time. So, obviously we had a bit of a laugh about Neurolink, but you’re a game guy, and even if you say they’re glasses, or VR, AR, like—

What are you excited about seeing in gaming and fiction worlds coming up in the next decade or so?

Dave: Oh, well, in gaming, I mean, I was thinking how about 15 years ago, I was working on a game for Microsoft, and it was like The Sims. We had thousands of lines of dialogue that were based on simple emotional and relationship states. So they were being accessed, and the characters would walk around.

If you weren’t doing anything else, they would have these conversations. Some of the developers would come over to the coders, and say, “What level of AI are you using? Because I just listened to a conversation about going to the hairdresser, and it was really good.”

I said, there’s literally no AI. It’s just the emotional states and the relationships are calling from a massive bank of data. We’re very good, as humans, at imagining there’s some intelligence behind it, but now there can be. That’s going to make, for example, NPCs in massively multiplayer games much richer.

There’s always been this tendency to think of them as kind of monsters or to pre-script chunks of story, you know, the cut scene moments in a game. Those can be very good, things like The Last of Us or Thaumaturgy have got great writing, but they’re really doing old writing. It’s like movie writing, but in little chunks.

As I said before, I like the idea of stories as atomic level. Stories that are a cascade of events, I call it. Where stories emerge one step at a time, and the AI can do that. It can become the storyteller in real time. So I think that’s going to completely transform massively multiplayer game.

You won’t even know if the character you’re talking to is a person or an AI, and so it means it’s a complete world full of intelligences, as it were.

Joanna: Which is why some people say we’re living in the simulation, right?

Dave: I heard a good argument by Yann LeCun the other day about why he didn’t think we were in a simulation, but I can’t remember the argument.

Joanna: It was so convincing!

Dave: Well, you know, it’s, “I think I just wouldn’t build it this way,” was pretty much the main argument.

Joanna: Whereas I think it doesn’t matter.

Dave: It doesn’t matter. No, it’s like the zombie argument. Like, how do we know about consciousness? What if you had a philosophical zombie? And I go, well, we have no way of knowing what is going on in anyone else’s head. You only know what’s inside your own.

What difference does it make? They behave as if they’re intelligent, that’s all you require.

Joanna: Exactly. Oh, well, look, this has been a super fun conversation.

Where can people find you and everything you do online?

Dave: Oh, wow. Okay, well, I’ve got a Patreon that’s called Jewel Spider. Jewel and spider, all one word, which is a kind of role playing thing. It picks up from Dragon Warriors 40 years ago. The artwork is by my godson, who’s the son of the guy who did the original artwork. So it’s no AI there, that’s all human art.

I’ve got a blog, which is on blogspot, believe it or not. FabledLands.blogspot.com. On Substack I’ve got a thing called Hallucinations and Confabulations, which originally started as a writing-type Substack, but increasingly starts talking about AI.

Later in the year, I’ve got that Cthulhu thing coming out, which is whispers-beyond.space. It’s kind of Cthulhu 2050. So again, it gave me the opportunity to imagine what the world of 2050 will be like, and how AI and robotics will have shaped it.

I’m on Bluesky as well. I’m still on Twitter, but I’m kind of hoping that somebody else will buy it at this point.

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

Dave: Thank you, Jo. Great being on here.

The post Crafting Story Worlds, Creative Control, And Leveraging AI Tools With Dave Morris first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Using the Enneagram for character development can be a game-changer for crafting layered, believable characters. This ancient personality typing system can offer deep insight into your characters’ core fears and motivations, which makes it a natural fit for building compelling internal arcs. Because the Enneagram inherently emphasizes personal misconceptions (aka, the Lie the Character Believes), thematic Truths, and both Positive and Negative Change Arcs, it becomes an extremely intuitive tool for creating complex and realistic characters. But there is a rub.

And the rub is that because the Enneagram features only nine personality types, it would also seem to offer only nine possible Lies, Truths, and character arcs. Zoe Dawson brought this up in requesting this post:

I use the Enneagram heavily in crafting my characters, so my question would be: What is your take on using the Enneagram nine personality types and constructing their Lies so that it’s not repetitious for each story? Examples would be great.

Although necessarily limited, the Enneagram still presents an incredibly comprehensive and complete framework for understanding human behavior. As such, there is a degree of truth to the idea that humans can only undergo a certain number of fundamental changes. This harks back to one of my favorite quotes, from Willa Cather:

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they never happened.

Creating Character Arcs (Amazon affiliate link)

Still, as Zoe points out, a prolific writer relying on the same framework for every character might find herself running into some repetition—especially when it comes to identifying the Lie each type believes. In previous posts, I’ve noted the fundamental Positive Change and Negative Change Arcs inherent within each core Enneagram type:

>>Click here to read 9 Positive Character Arcs in the Enneagram

>>Click here to read 9 Negative Character Arcs in the Enneagram

Today, I want to look at how to use the Enneagram to deepen your character work while keeping each journey distinct and emotionally resonant.

Avoiding Repetition When Using the Enneagram for Character Development

How can you avoid repetitive arcs when using personality tools like the Enneagram? If each type has a core fear and desire, doesn’t that mean every story featuring a Type One or a Type Nine will end up exploring the same emotional terrain?

Not at all.

In fact, using the Enneagram for character development can open up even deeper and more varied avenues for crafting emotional arcs. Although characters with the same type may struggle with the same core themes, the specific Lies they believe about themselves and the world can take many forms.

If you already know your own Enneagram type,  you can think about this from the perspective of your own life. For example, as a core Three, I can easily look through my life and identify how my own core wounding, coping mechanisms, survival tactics, ego identities, and even interests and obsessions are predominantly themed around a Three’s central concerns with identity, authenticity, and personal truth. Indeed, even the fact that my explorations of story theory have focused on character arcs and the internal conflict between “Lies” and “Truths” is arguably a direct emergent from my Three perspective.

When most people think of Threes, they think of the stereotype: hyper-competent workaholic obsessed with success and image. If that’s all you knew about Threes, you might struggle to write characters with personalities nuanced enough to reveal the spiraling fractal of depth hidden behind this simplistic archetype. A deeper understanding of how the Enneagram works (not to mention how people and stories work) allows us to access the functional simplicity of this nine-part system as a foundation for the realistic variation it reveals.

From there, the Enneagram can become a wonderful tool for noticing and exploring the specific flavor of insight and blindness each type brings to any situation. In moving beyond the simplistic stereotypes to acknowledge the deeper themes at play for each type, the sheer vastness of thematic possibilities also becomes clear. For example, if you wanted to explore a Three’s obsession with the subjectivity/objectivity of Truth, you would discover what are likely unlimited character arcs that can eventuate. This is, of course, equally true of all the types.

Using Instinctual Variants to Create Unique Character Arcs

Writing Archetypal Character Arcs (affiliate link)

With all of that said, the suggestions I’m going to share in the rest of today’s post barely scratch the surface of the possible Lies any one type may be challenged to overcome. Next week, I’ll be digging into this a little deeper in answering another reader’s question with an exploration of how Enneagram types function in the different archetypes of the Life Cycle. For today, I decided the most useful way to begin examining the variety available within Enneagram character arcs would be to note how each type’s core Lie may vary depending on which instinctual variant is dominant.

What Are the Three Instinctual Variants?

One of the most illuminating nuances in the Enneagram system is the concept of instinctual variants—what are sometimes called subtypes. These are the primal survival drives that shape how each of the nine types shows up in the world. Instinctual variants don’t change your core type, but they do flavor how that type expresses itself in everyday life.

For more on instinctual variants, I highly recommend Beatrice Chestnut’s book The Complete Enneagram.

The Complete Enneagram

There are three instinctual variants:

1. Self-Preservation (sp):

This instinct centers around safety, comfort, and physical well-being. If this is your dominant instinct, you’re probably highly attuned to issues like health, finances, routine, and creating a secure personal environment. You might notice yourself scanning your life for what’s missing or unstable before anything goes wrong.

2. Social (so):

This instinct is all about group dynamics, belonging, and impact. Social-dominant people pay close attention to how they fit into the collective. They’re often oriented toward their place in the tribe, their reputation, and their contribution toward something bigger than themselves. This doesn’t always mean extroversion; it’s more about their awareness of the system.

3. Sexual (sx):

Also called the one-to-one instinct, this drive is focused on intensity, intimacy, and magnetism. It’s about fusion: being fully seen, fully known, and fully alive in the presence of another. People with a dominant sexual instinct crave depth in relationships and experiences. They often have a kind of “charge” to them—an edge, an allure, a sense of passion that leads the way.

Countertypes

Even though each of us uses all three instincts, we tend to favor one, repress another, and let the third play a supporting role. (For example, because I am self-preservation dominant and social repressed, my instinct stack would be shown like this: sp-sx-so.)

Here’s the twist: the dominant instinct can sometimes override the “typical” behavior of your core type. This creates what are called countertypes—one specific orientation for each type that looks different from the core type, but which still lives out the same core fear and desire underneath. (For example, as you’ll see later on, the fact that I am a Three with a self-preservation dominant instinct makes me the countertype. In short: even though I always feel like a Three, I don’t always look like a Three.)

Understanding characters’ instinctual stacks can bring incredible clarity to what type of character arc and thematic journey they are most likely to undertake—and how that might evolve from story to story or even character to character, regardless of type.

Different Lies Each Enneagram Type Character Might Believe

Let’s look at how each Enneagram type can be used to explore a variety of Lies across different stories, genres, and voices. (Note that these examples should not be taken too explicitly—i.e., as the only way to express each subtype’s Lies. They are meant to spur your creativity, particularly in regard to the subjectivity of Enneagram types for the characters referenced. They are also not necessarily representative of a character arc that is completed in the referenced examples. As usual, I have relied on the typings from the site Funky MBTI.)

Type 1: The Reformer

Core Lie: “I must be good to be worthy.”
Core Fear: Being corrupt, defective, or wrong.
Core Desire: To be good, virtuous, and balanced.

Social Lie: “If I don’t set the moral standard, no one will.”

Example: Hermione Granger (Harry Potter): Hermione’s obsession with studying, rules, and doing things “the right way” stems from her fear of failure and need to be seen as competent and morally upright.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001), Warner Bros.

Sexual Lie (COUNTERTYPE): “It’s up to me to set the world right—no matter the cost”

Example: Catherine Freneau (Father Goose): Catherine’s intensity stems from a deep sense of personal mission. She pushes herself and others toward transformation, often coming across as driven, zealous, and unrelenting in her pursuit of what she sees as necessary change—even when it strains her relationships.

Father Goose (1964), Universal Pictures.

Self-Preservation Lie: “If I’m not prepared and perfect, I’ll be blamed.”

Example: Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird): With quiet resolve and unwavering principles, Atticus carries the burden of justice on his shoulders—believing that if he doesn’t stand strong, everything could unravel.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Universal Pictures.

Type 2: The Helper

Core Lie: “I must earn love through service.”
Core Fear: Being unworthy of love.
Core Desire: To be loved and needed.

Social Lie: “If I serve the greater good, I’ll be loved by all.”

Example: Padmé Amidala (Star Wars): Padmé sacrifices her personal desires to serve her people. She’s gracious and composed, always putting duty above self, but her deepest longing is to be accepted and loved for who she really is.

Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002), 20th Century Fox.

Sexual Lie: “If I am not needed by someone, I am not valuable.”

Example: Frances Stevens (To Catch a Thief): Frances is bold, alluring, and direct in her affections—flirting and pursuing while also deeply craving connection and validation beneath the surface.

To Catch a Thief (1955), Paramount Pictures.

Self-Preservation Lie (COUNTERTYPE): “If I act helpless or innocent, others will take care of me.”

Example: Robert Crawley (Downton Abbey): Robert often plays the helpless patriarch, relying on others to manage both personal and family matters while maintaining his sense of entitlement to care and attention.

Downton Abbey (2010-15), ITV.

Type 3:  The Achiever

Core Lie: “My worth depends on what I accomplish.”
Core Fear: Being worthless or failing.
Core Desire: To be valued and admired for success.

Social Lie: “I must be admired and respected for my success.”

Example: P.T. Barnum (The Greatest Showman): Barnum thrives on his ability to garner admiration and respect through his business success and the spectacle he creates, positioning himself as a charismatic leader and influencer in the public eye.

The Greatest Showman (2017), 20th Century Fox.

Sexual Lie: “My value comes from how attractive and charismatic I am to others.”

Example: Scarlett O’Hara (Gone with the Wind): Scarlett builds her self-worth through her attractiveness and the way she charms others, seeing her relationships and romantic success as a reflection of her value.

Gone With the Wind (1939), MGM.

Self-Preservation Lie (COUNTERTYPE): “I need to work hard and prove myself to secure my place.”

Example: Nancy Wheeler (Stranger Things): Nancy, driven by a need for accomplishment and approval, constantly works hard to prove her worth, even if it means compromising her personal needs for the sake of her career and goals.

Stranger Things (2016-), Netflix.

Type 4: The Individualist

Core Lie: “I must be unique to be significant.”
Core Fear: Being ordinary or not special.
Core Desire: To find themselves and their significance.

Social Lie: “My suffering makes me worthy of love.”

Example: Rose DeWitt Bukater (Titanic): Rose feels trapped and unseen, expressing her suffering as a way of asserting her individuality and longing for a more meaningful life.

Titanic (1997), Paramount Pictures.

Sexual Lie: “If I fight hard enough for what I want, I’ll finally prove I’m not broken.”

Example: Kylo Ren (Star Wars: The Force Awakens): Kylo is consumed by his desire to prove himself, constantly fighting to overcome his perceived weakness and claim a powerful, meaningful identity.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Lucasfilm Ltd.

Self-Preservation Lie (COUNTERTYPE): “If I keep pushing myself through pain, I’ll finally become who I’m meant to be.”

Example: Jess Mariano (Gilmore Girls): Jess hides his emotional sensitivity beneath a hardened exterior, relying on independence and quiet intensity to forge his own path in life.

Gilmore Girls (2000-2007), The CW.

Type 5: The Investigator

Core Lie: “I have to protect my energy and stay self-sufficient.”
Core Fear: Being overwhelmed or incapable.
Core Desire: To be competent and capable.

Social Lie: “If I master complex knowledge, I’ll earn my place in the world.”

Example: J. Robert Oppenheimer (Oppenheimer): Oppenheimer commands respect through genius, but remains emotionally withdrawn—even while standing at the center of a historical moment.

Oppenheimer (2023), Universal Pictures.

Sexual Lie (COUNTERTYPE): “If I fully merge with someone, I won’t feel so alone.”

Example: Scottie Ferguson (Vertigo): Scottie becomes obsessively attached to an imagined ideal of love, losing himself in his desire for a connection that will make him feel whole.

Vertigo (1958), Paramount Pictures.

Self-Preservation Lie: “If I hoard my resources and keep to myself, I’ll finally feel safe.”

Example: Ebenezer Scrooge (A Christmas Carol): Scrooge isolates himself and clings tightly to his wealth and solitude, believing this is the only way to feel secure in the world.

A Christmas Carol (2009), Walt Disney Pictures.

Type 6: The Loyalist

Core Lie: “Security must come from the outside.”
Core Fear: Being without support or guidance.
Core Desire: To have security and guidance.

Social Lie: “If I follow the rules and uphold the system, I won’t have to be afraid.”

Example: Willow Rosenberg (Buffy the Vampire Slayer): Willow clings to structure—school, rules, the Scooby Gang—to soothe her insecurity, only stepping into independence when surrounded by trust and purpose.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2001, The WB)

Sexual Lie (COUNTERTYPE): “If I’m strong and intimidating enough, nothing can hurt me.”

Example: Guy of Gisborne (Robin Hood): Guy compensates for his insecurity with aggression and dominance, trying to prove his worth through strength, loyalty, and desire.

Robin Hood (2006-2009), BBC Studios.

Self-Preservation Lie: “If I stay close to what’s familiar and keep others happy, I’ll be safe.”

Example: Bilbo Baggins (The Hobbit): Bilbo prefers the safe predictability of his hobbit hole and resists adventure, until trust in others helps him find his courage.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), Warner Bros.

Type 7: The Enthusiast

Core Lie: “Pain must be avoided at all costs.”
Core Fear: Being deprived or trapped in pain or deprivation.
Core Desire: To experience satisfaction and fulfillment.

Social Lie (COUNTERTYPE): “If I serve a meaningful cause and stay upbeat, I’ll be valued and protected.”

Example: Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice): Lizzy combines charm and cleverness with a sense of social justice and moral clarity, while using wit and idealism to sidestep vulnerability.

Pride & Prejudice (2005), Focus Features.

Sexual Lie: “If I follow my passions and chase the next dazzling experience, I’ll find what I’m missing.”

Example: Ariel (The Little Mermaid): Ariel dives headfirst into new worlds and romantic dreams, enchanted by what could be and driven by a restless hunger for something more.

The Little Mermaid (1989), Walt Disney

Self-Preservation Lie: “As long as I surround myself with the right people and pleasures, I’ll be fine.”

Example: Han Solo (Star Wars): Han seeks freedom, resources, and loyal allies to keep life pleasurable and self-serving, even while avoiding the emotional weight of deeper connection.

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), 20th Century Fox.

Type 8: The Challenger

Core Lie: “Vulnerability equals weakness.”
Core Fear: Being controlled or vulnerable.
Core Desire: To protect self and remain in control.

Social Lie (COUNERTYPE): “If I fight for others and protect what’s right, I can justify my strength and find belonging.”

Example: George Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life): George is a passionate, justice-driven leader who sacrifices his own dreams to protect his community but still struggles with the weight of responsibility and frustration.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1947), Liberty Films.

Sexual Lie: “If I can overpower and possess what I want, I’ll never be betrayed or abandoned.”

Example: Erik Killmonger (Black Panther): Erik’s aggression stems from a deep fear that trusting anyone will lead to his downfall.

Black Panther (2018), Marvel Studios.

Self-Preservation Lie: “As long as I can take care of myself and get what I need, I don’t have to rely on anyone.”

Example: Henry VIII (The Tudors): Possessive and forceful, Henry demands absolute loyalty and control in love and power—unwilling to surrender anything once he’s claimed it.

The Tudors (2007-2010), BBC Two

Type 9: The Peacemaker

Core Lie: “My presence creates conflict.”
Core Fear: Being overwhelmed by conflict and tension.
Core Desire: To create inner and outer peace.

Social Lie (COUNTERTYPE): “If I’m useful to the group, I’ll be safe and accepted.”

Example: Frodo Baggins (The Lord of the Rings): Frodo puts the fellowship’s mission above his own well-being, often losing himself in the needs of the collective.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), New Line Cinema.

Sexual Lie: “I only matter when I merge completely with someone else.”

Example: Bella Swan (Twilight): Bella dissolves her sense of identity into her relationship with Edward, struggling to separate her desires from his.

Twilight (2008), Summit Entertainment.

Self-Preservation Lie: “As long as I’m comfortable, nothing else really matters.”

Example: Queen Elizabeth II (The Crown): Elizabeth quietly clings to routine and the comforts of duty, avoiding emotional upheaval by keeping everything in its place.

The Crown (2016-2023), Netflix.

***

By integrating the Enneagram’s instinctual variants into your character development process, you gain access to a dynamic range of emotional and thematic possibilities, even within the same type. Far from boxing your characters into rigid molds, the Enneagram offers a flexible and deeply human lens through which to explore their varied struggles, motivations, and transformations. Whether you’re writing a single story or an entire series, the richness of these internal variations ensures that each character arc can remain fresh, specific, and emotionally resonant.

In Summary

Even when writing multiple characters of the same Enneagram type, there is a world of variety available. By identifying new Lies and the situations in which those Lies can arise, writers can deepen both the realism and emotional texture of their characters.

Key Takeaways

• Characters of the same Enneagram type share core fears and desires, but not identical arcs.
• The specific Lie a Character Believes can change depending on their environment, relationships, and inner development.
• Great storytelling often comes from exploring different expressions of the same psychological truth.
• The instictual variants that create the Enneagram subtypes open a window into the variety available for exploring many different themes and arcs.

Want More?

Outlining Your Novel (Amazon affiliate link)

Want to elevate your character development? Outlining Your Novel is the perfect guide to help you structure your plot and deepen your characters. It offers a plethora of tools for character development, including personality systems like the Enneagram. You can gain valuable insights into your characters’ motivations and growth, helping you create multi-dimensional figures that resonate with your readers. You can pair these frameworks with the outlining process in the companion workbook to craft compelling characters who feel real and dynamic. Start outlining your way to stronger, unforgettable characters today! It’s available in paperback, e-book, and audiobook

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! Have you ever used the Enneagram for character development in your writing? What insights has it given you into your characters’ motivations and growth? 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 Using the Enneagram for Character Development: Avoiding Repetition for Lies Each Type Might Believe appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

How can you embrace the process of change in life and author business, especially in an era of AI? How can you take control of what’s possible and be more comfortable with uncertainty? How can you develop a career portfolio that future proofs you in changing times? April Rinne shares her insights into how we can flux.

In the intro, KDP royalty changes and printing costs; The Pre-Launch Checklist [Draft2Digital]; Audible opens AI narration to some traditional publishers [Publishing Perspectives]; US Copyright Office Fair Use;

Plus, join me for a live webinar on The AI-Assisted Artisan Author; Signing Death Valley at BookVault; Successful Self-Publishing 4th Edition; Egypt with Luke Richardson on Books and Travel.

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 

April Rinne is a futurist, professional speaker, lawyer, and the international bestselling author of Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change.

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

• The human dimension of change
• The “flux mindset” — how individuals relate to and show up for change
• Changes we choose vs. those we don’t control
• Immediate changes vs. slower societal shifts
• The benefits of being proactive with change
• Uncertainty that comes with AI and technology developments
• The concept of the portfolio career — more resources from April here.

You can find April at AprilRinne.com or FluxMindset.com.

Transcript of Interview with April Rinne

Joanna: April Rinne is a futurist, professional speaker, lawyer, and the international bestselling author of Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change. So welcome to the show, April.

April: Thank you so much, Jo. I’m delighted to be here.

Joanna: I’m so excited to talk about this, but first up, just—

Tell us a bit more about you and why you decided to write a book on this topic when you were already reaching so many people with your message.

April: It’s quite interesting because I think a lot of people today do know me as a futurist, trained as a lawyer, business strategy, all of that. We can have that conversation around the need I was seeing in the business world around, frankly, just how bad humans are at change and uncertainty and the unknown.

Just to be clear, this predates the pandemic by a long shot. So I actually started germinating the book, I would say, in about 2014. It was like a long time in coming, and the thesis continued to grow and deepen. Obviously, when the pandemic hit, people are like, “Oh, flux. Yes, world is in flux. I don’t know what to do.”

So since 2020, there’s been a real zeitgeist around it, but for me, it goes much, much, much deeper and much further back in history. So one piece is, just in the business world, in the work I was doing, how fraught people’s relationship with change is.

Also, my entire career has been global. So I would work in different cultures, with different kinds of organizations, in different settings. I noticed this is a very universal issue as well. It’s not as though one place or one people is better at change or worse at change.

All humans are really good at some kinds of changes and really not so good at others.

So there was a cultural component. I really love getting into the cultures of change and what we can learn from one another, and the fact that everyone has something to contribute to this conversation, and everyone has something to learn. So there was that piece as well.

Then really, the real genesis—and I realize I’m getting pretty personal pretty fast, and we’ve just started this conversation, but I do want to kind of put it all out there. For many years, I didn’t share much of my personal story, not that I didn’t want to talk about it.

I was always an open book about it personally, but you have those filters between who am I professionally and who am I personally, and what parts of me do I show to what people, and all of that.

The fact is that my real interest in what do you do when you don’t know what to do, and what do you do when your entire world is thrown in flux, is deeply, deeply personal.

So if I think, like, how did I get into writing a book? This goes back more than 25 years.

My first really big experience with change and uncertainty happened when I was 20, and I was at university, and I got the phone call that no one ever wants to get or expects to get, which was that both of my parents had died in a car crash.

Imagine? Like, there’s my world totally flipped upside down. I was actually overseas. I was in the UK, and I got this phone call.

Everything changed and everything was uncertain. My family, my sense of self, my support system, my ideas about my career.

20 is a very interesting age. I was old enough to know how to care for myself, day to day at university and whatnot, but really had no clue what my greater connection was to the world, if you will.

So I put all of that out there because had you asked me when I was 20, would I write a book about change and uncertainty? I would have said, of course not. I just need to survive.

It wasn’t something that I was conscious of at the time, but it was absolutely where this journey began and where the process to ultimately write this book, and the research I did, and the perspective I have started.

Not just what I can contribute to the book, but the kinds of people and situations and changes that I can really relate to and hold space for and guide conversations around, that part.

Yes, the business part is important, the leadership, all of that. This personal piece is really deeply important to me as well. I love the ways in which Flux can reach a range of people and a range of different situations.

Joanna: I love that, and I think this is so important. As writers, there’ll be people listening who write nonfiction, and bringing this personal aspect into nonfiction is so important.

ChatGPT can write a book on change, but no one can write YOUR book on change and flux.

Then your personal experience, I mean, obviously terrible and awful situation, but you have grown from that and help people every day. I did want to ask specifically here, because the word “flux”, and you talk about, we need to learn how to flux in a world in flux, and you use it kind of as a verb as well.

Your parents, that situation that happened, that was like an immediate, you have to change, you have to adapt right now. Whereas I feel like what a lot of people feel at the moment in the world is almost like a slow train crash. These changes that we see coming and that are happening, but they’re not that immediate phone call.

What are the different kinds of flux and change, and how can we learn how to flux?

April: Yes, I love this, Jo. This is wonderful.

Also, just as a big picture—not caveat, but framing—I realize that my story, I mean, it’s tragic, it’s a bit extreme, it’s mine. I wouldn’t talk about it if I didn’t really welcome having conversations about it.

What I have found, and just as a little context going back to what we’re talking about earlier, is that while I had that trepidation about, like, “What will people think of me if I share this? I’m supposed to be the business person,” whatever.

Guess what? So I say this for fiction and nonfiction writers, the moment I shared that story, it was like the doors blew off. People were like, that’s what we want to talk about. Because, guess what? That’s what affects our ability to show up at work and in business.

It’s not about what do we do, it’s how are we relating to this? It’s fascinating, because for me, from that point forward, it’s all been about the human dimension of change.

Not the change management process or framework or checklist, but like, how are we showing up for this?

So that’s a really good segue to this question as well. I mean, I have to say, honestly, there are more filters on change and ways that we can parse through the different kinds of change and so forth, than even this conversation will allow for.

It gets broad and deep really fast, but let me share a couple different ways we might see change, a couple things I found extremely helpful for most people. So you are absolutely right that I hear from people pretty much every day, “I love change. It’s amazing.” “I hate change. It’s horrible.” You know, all of this.

I have heard from a lot of people in recent years around—you know, look at the pandemic. Look at how much we changed, look at how much we adapted and grew and what we knew.

I always have to give the caveat of, yes, because our backs were against the wall and we were forced to change. It was a global health crisis. We had no choice. Of course, we changed.

Guess what? After the immediate emergency and aftermath, did we regress in some of those habits? Did we kind of forget what we learned? You bet.

Humans are great at change or great at adaptation when it’s a life or death situation.

We’re not that good at opting into changes, even ones we know would be good for us, because we have this preference for stasis. We have this preference for like, well, if I’m still alive, things should be okay. I don’t want to create difficulty for myself. I don’t want to do the work. I don’t want to make myself uncomfortable.

Yet, guess what? In times of—and I’m not going to call it peace, I’m not going to call it stasis—but as you described — 

When we can see change out on the horizon, we know things are coming, and we still have the opportunity to make a choice as to whether and how we show up for it better.

That is the best time of all to do the work that my research and Flux focuses on. The pain comes when we don’t do it, and we wait for that train crash to happen, and then we’re like, oh no. It’s not just more painful and more fraught, but we actually have fewer choices.

So very big picture, I just kind of want to put this framing out there because it relates not just to day-to-day change. I know we’ll talk a little bit about AI. It’s all kinds of changes, right?

This idea that—and I realize I’m speaking in generalizations, and so I apologize for that, I’ll give kind of a caveat—but just observations and patterns I see around the world, across demographics, it’s not unique to one person or one place, but there is this sense that for a lot of people, if we followed the rules and did x, y and z, that the world would look in a certain way.

Whether that’s with your career, whether that’s technology, whether that’s relationships, happiness, satisfaction, whatever.

A lot of people are waking up and looking around and saying, the world that I was raised to believe I would inhabit looks very different than the world as it is today, and I don’t like that.

I’m angry about that. That’s not fair.

You kind of have to have this conversation and say none of this was ever promised to us. Yes, there are all kinds of things that we were led to believe we control, that we actually don’t. No single human controls, no single event controls.

Yet, at the very same time, there were a lot of things we were led to believe we don’t control that we actually do.

A lot of this gets into personal agency. It gets into what are those practices and skills, and I call them superpowers, that you do have control over that can help make you better adept, more aware and more ready for the changes that come our way.

I think that’s what we really need to focus on because social media has done a wonderful job of kind of outsourcing our beliefs around our responsibility for how we cope with change. It’s more like, “just go install this app and it’ll take care of change for you.” What? It doesn’t, right?

Or, “Just go buy this thing. Watch this, and your problems will be solved.” We’re really talking about doing the work and getting into it. I realize I’m going on a little bit here, but I do want to kind of drill down on one of the big ones, and maybe this is where we can pull the thread a little bit more.

Back to the whole like, what changes do we love and what changes do we hate, and how do we look at this better? One of the biggest, easiest filters you can think about is on the whole, though —

Humans tend to love or enjoy the changes we choose, the changes we opt into.

That can be a new relationship, a new role, a new book to write, a new restaurant, to try, you name it.

The changes we struggle with are the ones we don’t control, the ones we didn’t see coming.

Here’s where it gets interesting. It doesn’t mean that the changes we choose work out. I always use the example of like that haircut you got a few years ago, right? You picked it, right?

Yet we see those changes differently, and we appreciate them because we had a say in creating them. So I think that’s one place we could just start. You start pulling on that.

I think we see that again with career choices. We see that with new technologies. We see that with all kinds of disruption. For people to just pay attention to like, is there a pattern in how they feel around the changes that they do and don’t control?

Joanna: Yes, that’s great. It’s interesting, so you really mentioned there, choice and control. You also mentioned AI, so we’re going to have to talk about that.

This is one of the biggest things in the author community, and I’m sure you’re seeing this in the work community, the business community, is —

For most people with AI, they feel like there is no choice and there is no control. That these technologies are doing things that impinge, let’s say, or feel like they’re coming for something that we thought was sacred and human only.

This is difficult, right?

One of the things that I loved in the book is you say, “We can radically reshape our relationship to uncertainty,” and that you have this chapter on getting lost rather than knowing exactly what’s going to happen. So maybe you could speak to that because—

We cannot necessarily choose, and we cannot control, so how do we reshape this?

April: So I love this. I’m already coming up on at least three of the eight we could talk about here. Some of it around humanity, some around technology. This question, how you framed it, is just really rich and robust. So thank you for that.

So the book, and in particular the introduction, this concept of a flux mindset that I really am trying to open a new series of conversations around how we show up for change, how we relate to change, how we obviously manage change, and what we do about it.

As I mentioned and alluded to earlier, it’s less about traditional change management and like, “give me my checklist.” The implication of change management is that if something changes, I will put it into my framework, these six steps or checklists, whatever.

At the end, the implication is that the change will be quote, unquote, “managed, done, finished, we can move on.” You look around and you go, is that really how change works? Pretty much everyone today is like, no, of course not.

So we’re looking at, what’s the missing piece? The missing piece is this human dimension. It is this relationship to change. So acknowledging that how you show up for change, how you feel about it, how you see it, how you see what you are and aren’t in control of, really matters, and we can all get better at it.

So again, back to some of the changes. There will be all kinds of changes, actually more and more and more changes. I know this will make some people listening in not so happy, but there are more changes that we don’t control ahead, not fewer.

There are more sources of uncertainty, not fewer.

That’s not something that anyone controls. We don’t know if there’s more change today than in the past. There’s always been change. There’s always been a lot of it. You can as far back in human history, there’s always been change, but the awareness of how much is changing is off the charts.

That’s not really how human brains are designed to digest all of that. So the fact is, there’s going to be more and more and more things in the outside world that we can’t control, we can’t predict, we don’t get to decide whether or not they come to pass.

The more that happens, the more we have to be aware and harness and leverage all of the ways that we do control how we respond, and what we do, and how we feel, and how we think, and who we reach out to, and all of that. All of those things are 100% in our control.

We’ve never needed to harness those skills more than today, and it helps kind of reshape the relative balance between those things that we do and don’t control.

So AI, just as one example, what I think is really rattling people about AI—yes, obviously, in a community of authors, just the AI itself is very daunting and very threatening—but —

More fundamentally, it’s the uncertainty that AI represents. It’s the uncertainty of we just don’t know.

There are aspects of it that could be amazing for authors.

There are aspects that could be extremely dangerous and foreboding for authors. It’s all of these things at once.

So having the conversation around, what is it about AI that feels so threatening? For a lot of people, it’s just the uncertainty.

So, there you have to say —

Okay, if I can’t control the fact that AI exists, what can I control in terms of how I relate to it, and what I stand for, and what I do, and what I advocate for, and how I use it, or how I don’t?

Those are all choices we make. So there’s nothing that’s a foregone conclusion here, unless we decide to do nothing.

I think that too, it’s kind of this risk of complacency. It’s not that that AI is going to take someone’s job. It’s that someone who understands how AI works and can work effectively with it might take some of what you do, kind of thing.

I do think, and the other piece to this, there’s this sense of getting lost, and just really what that superpower is about is getting comfortable in that space of not knowing. The goal of getting lost isn’t to stay lost forever. It’s to be comfortable in that in between, in that messy middle that’s neither here nor there.

We know things are changing, but we don’t yet know what comes next. That the people who do that well are the ones that understand that that messy middle in that space of not knowing is actually the point of transformation.

That’s where the new insights happen. That’s where the new models come about. That’s the place we need to be good at being, because if we just try to race through it, we never get to the new that’s truly better.

So there’s that piece, and then there’s also—I just want to make a quick shout out to another superpower, which is “be all the more human.”

I do think, you mentioned it already, in the world of AI, where AI can write books just like that, the irony, the maybe counterintuitive, but the beauty also is that the more bombarded our lives are by technology of all kinds, the more valuable humanity, the human touch, the human script, the human authorship, the more valuable that becomes.

The more boiler plate the AI, the more distinctive, the more valuable the individual human touch.

So I just want to put that out there as well.

Joanna: Yes, and I talk about double down on being human.

At the end of the day, it’s not our ability to produce thousands of words, like producing words is not the point, it’s the connection with another person that is the important thing. I think that’s what I try to talk about.

I want to come back to something, you were talking there about the sort of the fact that it exists, you know, that AI exists, or whatever change is going on.

I wondered, you see so many organizations and so many people who are dealing with different kinds of change, and one of the aspects I struggle with in the community are the people who just say, “Look, this will go away. We will go back to how things were. The OpenAI court case with the New York Times will be resolved, and they’ll just cancel all this stuff. It will all go.”

I almost feel like this is the most concerning attitude, that we can go back. So I guess my bigger question is, can things ever go back?

How do you help organizations and individuals who are hitting this brick wall and are unable to accept change and move on?

April: Well, I’m afraid that my answer here is probably going to be on the one hand, unsurprising, and on the other hand, maybe a little dissatisfying. That is simply, you’re right. Unsurprising in that things aren’t going back. There’s never been a point at which we just go back to some sort of stasis that was before.

The pendulum swings, for sure. So you can go from one extreme to another. We’ve had lots of swinging back and forth, even in recent years, on many metrics. So it’s not like it goes back, but it’s not like the course of change is inevitable in one direction. I think that’s the way to put it.

It will zig and zag and go upwards and downwards and sideways and all of that, but it doesn’t really go back.

What I do think we find are sometimes when we go in one direction to an extreme, we’re like, oops, let’s not forget that some of this other stuff that we used to remember is also helpful.

Silly case in point, but the more addicted, I could say, we are to apps and technology and GPS, right? Running joke of like, just because we have GPS doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know how to get from point A to point B, just of your own reconnaissance.

So there’s this sense of, it’s a wonderful tool to have, let’s not forget the human element of knowing how to orient yourself. So is that going back, going forward? It’s combining both. So there’s a lot of the combining of both, which is you can have a change, but not forget what came before it.

That doesn’t mean simply going back to what came before, it’s more of a blending and an emergence, a combination that creates new realities, new futures altogether.

The piece about what do we do when we just feel like we’re hitting a brick wall, I will say—and I’m sorry to not give a better answer—there are so many people, so many organizations, struggling with flux, struggling with change. Exactly what you’re describing.

I am at a point in my career, in the development of Flux, where if that is a situation that I’m dealt with, there are so many people who recognize that the world is changing, that flux is a thing, and they want to lean into it and get help, that for me, what you’ve just described isn’t a place where I invest too much of my energy these days.

It’s a brick wall, and I know that ultimately they’re going to have to change. Those will be the people who are more like that train wreck, that at some point down the road, are in a much greater point of pain.

What I’m looking at are so many people, so many organizations, who do understand that things are changing.

They do have the humility to recognize that they need help, that they can improve, and they want to lean in.

So, for me, that that lower hanging fruit of where there’s heat and energy, and we might not have figured it all out, and we might have some rough edges that we need to work on, but we’re here and we’re willing to try. That’s a far better place to start a conversation around flux.

I know it sounds a bit harsh, but for me, if people aren’t ready to do the work, I’m not someone who can necessarily make them ready. What I do know is that everyone, in some capacity, whether it’s personal, professional, organizational, societal, is going to run into that kind of change.

I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s going to happen, that is that wake up call where they say I can’t just keep pretending that this isn’t changing, or that this isn’t an issue, or that if I just do nothing, it will go away.

At some point that will come back to kind of, not haunt you, but—well, haunt you sometimes—that will come back to bite you even worse than you thought. So it pains my heart a little bit to say that, but I do have to put it out there because I’ve seen that pattern play out too many times.

I know where the benefit and the value of flux work can happen. I also know that if people aren’t ready or open to even the idea of improving their relationship to change or that there’s anything wrong with what they’re currently doing, that that’s the work they need to do before my work can be really that impactful.

Joanna: That’s actually very helpful. More than you know!

I do want to come to another thing that you talk about, which is the idea of the portfolio career. Again, as old business models are changing, and even old ways of marketing—for example, book marketing has changed.

How can we, as authors and writers, embrace this idea of the portfolio career and protect ourselves?

April: So this one, and I love that it’s authors. In my experience, there’s already a more natural congruence to someone who’s been just like going for climbing the career ladder. There’s a different conversation.

Obviously, there are some authors that that’s all they’ve ever done, but for most authors, in my experience, they have a broader palette that they’re drawing from. They have a deep, rich, diverse, professional and personal history.

So very briefly, let me just describe the superpower itself. It’s unique amongst the eight because it’s the only one that focuses exclusively on kind of professional change, career change, that sort of thing. The others expand, I think, a bit further beyond.

This is really about, how do you design and own a career that is fit for a future of work in flux.

I’ve been working on the scene for more than 20 years, I have a portfolio career, career portfolio. We can use those terms interchangeably. Just for the record, some people like portfolio career as a tagline. Other people like this idea of a career portfolio.

We’re getting at the same general gist of the shape of the career of the future. It no longer looks like a ladder you’re going to climb or a path you’re going to pursue in one direction, which is up.

It’s something that’s much more holistic, much more diverse, and much more uniquely you.

So it’s interesting because I’ve been working on this for a while. It’s not a brand new concept. It predates AI by decades, and yet what’s fascinating is as AI becomes more and more present in the workplace, it’s actually giving more and more fodder to this idea of the portfolio.

So what we’re really getting at is, when you think about the shape of our career, historically, the metaphor of a ladder is something linear, something in one direction. Do A, then B, then C, and then somehow success is at the top or at the end. That’s been really lodged in our heads.

That comes from the first industrial revolution, by the way. So it’s only 250 years old. You might think that after 250 years we could use an update. Much of the workplace has moved on, but somehow we still have this metaphor of a ladder in our heads.

Yet, you look around and you go, is this ladder working? I want to be really careful to say, like the ladder metaphor, the ladder shape, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. It’s not bad. It works, but it works for fewer and fewer people. It’s becoming a smaller and smaller piece of a much bigger pie.

The fact is, today, there has never been more ways to work, to earn income, to contribute to society, than there are now. So the ladder is just one, but like there are a jillion other ways that you can have and create a successful, rewarding career.

So the portfolio is really this new shape to accommodate these other ways of working.

I think of your portfolio as everything, absolutely everything you can do, that adds value to society.

So the point here is that it’s way more than your resume, way more than your CV.

When you start looking at your career capabilities in this more holistic way—and I’ll come back to that in a minute—you start to be able to connect a lot more dots, you start to be able to pursue a lot more opportunities, and you start to see your career development in a much more kind of multi-dimensional way.

Let me just share a couple examples, because when you think about what’s on your resume or your CV, it’s a very select, identifiable set of skills. There’s a form for it, right?

What’s fascinating to me is that when you think about it, and when I think about the people that I admire and who are really successful at what they do—and again, success however you want to define it—many of their most valuable skills aren’t the skills I even find on their resume.

They’re human capabilities. They’re the things that AI can’t eliminate. The fact is that your resume, your CV, only contains a fraction of who you are and what you can do. So sometimes, not even the most interesting parts.

Probably my favorite example is—and I’m guessing there will be at least a few parents that are tuning in—parenting skills. Okay, parenting skills are super skills for time management, conflict negotiation, empathy. Parenting skills help us do so much in the world, and yet we’re not supposed to put them on our CV.

Like, not only that, we might get dinged for it. Why? I cannot figure that out, because the kinds of skills you learn when parenting are the kinds of skills that are invaluable in the workplace that employers miss out on completely if they don’t know this about you.

So that’s a really good example. It’s not on a resume, but that would be at the core of your portfolio. In my case, I lost my parents young. I’m really good at holding space for grief and loss. Again, you’re not going to find that on my resume, a traditional resume, but it’s at the heart of my portfolio, and it fuels what I do.

So I think authors are drawing constantly from a well of different experiences, perspectives, research, you name it.

Many authors also do more than only write. So already, as I like to say, everyone already has a portfolio. We often just don’t realize it.

We haven’t called it that. We haven’t seen our career in that way.

When we do, it’s kind of like a trap door opens up, and all of a sudden you just see this new universe of how you could pursue your career, and how you could combine those skills, and the kinds of roles you might be interested in pursuing, the kinds of things you might be interested in creating, and so on from there.

Just the final point is that, again, I’ve been working on career portfolios for more than 20 years, but we do find that for all of this, it’s about what are the skills we need to thrive in a world in flux, and that portfolios are just naturally more inclined to be helpful and help you thrive in times of uncertainty.

If you’ve been on a ladder your whole life, and for whatever reason, change comes and that next rung on the ladder isn’t there, it’s really hard not to fall. It’s really hard not to have a kind of career crisis or identity crisis.

Versus — 

A portfolio is something you create. It’s something that’s uniquely yours. It’s something you have agency over.

So even if career change happens, you have much more agency and control over those next steps.

Joanna: That’s so interesting. We’re almost out of time, but just quickly on that, I have a clarifying question. So most people, when they think about portfolio careers, it’s like, well, “April is an author, speaker, consultant.” You know, the words that mean other jobs. If you say something like “time management because of parenting” or “holding room for grief”—

How do we practically turn that into money coming in? Like you said, value for society?

April: So there are lots of ways, and each person is unique. What I want to do right now is tell people like, “I want you to read these two articles and listen to this interview,” because this could be an entire hour-long conversation.

Joanna: We can do that in the show notes.

[Here’s April’s Portfolio Career articles and other podcast episodes.]

April: Perfect, because I do want to keep this relatively brief. So there are different ways you can think about it. So if you have these skills, some people who are, I would say the more entrepreneurial end of things, where they’re like, “I want to go build a business, this is what I do.”

So you think about that, whether it’s time management, whether it’s grief and loss, there are all kinds of needs in society where this could fit an actual service-based offering venture.

It also can affect the things you write about, and the features that you write, and the things that you want to get placed, and the things you want to get paid for, and all of the rest.

It also, though, expands if you’re looking at roles within an organization for many people. Again, if you look at their resume, maybe they’re qualified in marketing, or maybe they’re qualified in finance and strategy.

Those things are super important, but what you will find sometimes is that when you have these skills, all of a sudden you start realizing, I would be really good at a job that probably lands more—and I’m just going to say one example—in HR. It’s the human dimension. It’s hiring and retaining people.

I mean, organizations across the board, I will say right now, not just with portfolios, but with flux more broadly, are realizing that many of their hiring processes are not fit for a world in flux because they’re not capturing the people who are actually good at change.

They don’t have a way to filter for someone’s, what I call, fluxiness. Their ability at navigating change well.

So there are opportunities within organizations where you’re like, I would have only thought of myself for a marketing job, but in fact, I might be really good over in this other department, this other function, because you’ve looked at yourself from that portfolio lens and realized you’re a lot more qualified to do jobs that go beyond just your resume.

Now one important piece, and again, we’ll put this in the show notes, I hear from people often that are like, “Well, great. I know I’m capable of more, but my resume still says I can only do X, Y and Z. How do I change that?”

There’s an important connecting piece here, and it’s what I call your portfolio narrative. So the fact is, you might know that you have all these skills. You might be able to draw your portfolio, cast it all out, all of that.

It is up to you to connect those dots, to tell your story as to what is on your portfolio that’s not on your resume.

How did you come to those skills, etc.? I say this because you can’t expect other people to know that about you unless you share it.

When you share it, though, you have the opportunity, the agency, to put that narrative in the light that makes sense to you. Where this comes up the most is people who have had many different jobs.

One narrative could say, “Oh, that person looks really distracted, scattered. They’re not sure what they want to do. They’ve done these 10 different things. We’re not going to hire them because they look disconnected.”

Another—same exact person—another scenario, though, is someone who looks at that person and is like, “Oh, my gosh. This is 10 people in one. This is amazing. No person typically has this much exposure or experience. We’ve got to hire them straight away.”

The difference between those two scenarios is that person’s ability to tell their narrative, and that idea of, like, “I did this job because I thought I was going to really enjoy it. Turned out I didn’t enjoy it, but it led me over here, where I learned this other skill. Then that opened this door that I didn’t expect.”

So you see how that story kind of cascades and flows. I just want to put that out there because it’s an important piece of the puzzle. When you tell people that they actually get to tell their own story, that usually makes people feel pretty encouraged as well.

Joanna: Brilliant.

Where can people find you and your book online?

April: So I have two websites. One is for all things me, like what do I do, and what’s my story, and where do I come from, and that sort of thing. That’s AprilRinne.com, so April, like the month, R-I-N-N-E.com.

Then for all things Flux, you can go to FluxMindset.com. There’s all kinds of things there on the flux mindset, the superpowers.

I also do have a page there with lots and lots of other—not just podcast interviews, but I’ve done podcasts just on career portfolios, for example—but a lot of things that I’ve written. Articles, shorter reads, things like that that are also easy to share with others. So those are the two places to go.

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

April: Absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you all for being here.

The post Embracing Change: How To Flux with April Rinne first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Today, I’m thrilled to announce Next Level Plot Structure is now available on audio!

I’ve heard from so many of you who were hoping for an audiobook from the very beginning—as soon as the print and digital versions launched last summer. Big thanks for hanging in there and cheering it on! I truly appreciate your enthusiasm and patience!

(And if you’re wondering, an updated audio version for the second edition of Structuring Your Novel is also coming soon!)

You can now listen to Next Level Plot Structure on all major audiobook platforms:

• Audible
• Apple Books
• Google Play
• Kobo
• Audiobooks.com

No matter where you like to listen, it’s ready and waiting to join you on your next walk, drive, or writing session.

Also, don’t forget that if you’re not already an Audible member, you can grab the book for free just by signing up!

About the Audio Book

Elevate Your Storytelling with Expert Plot Structure

Unlock the secrets of compelling storytelling with Next Level Plot Structure, a new guide from K.M. Weiland, author of the popular Structuring Your Novel. This comprehensive resource delves deep into the intricacies of plot structure, revealing the rich vein of narrative techniques and philosophical underpinnings that have shaped storytelling throughout history.

• Delve beyond plot beats to explore deeper symmetry and symbolism in story.
• Discover how every plot beat and scene is composed of two mirroring halves, contributing to the narrative arc.
• Introduce readers to chiastic structure, a mesmerizing mirroring technique that unites the two halves of a story.
• Master the dual beats of each major plot point to create dramatic scene arcs.
• Explore innovative ways to structure scenes to keep readers engaged and eager to turn the page.
• Examine the symbolic significance of a story’s four “worlds” and their influence on plot and character arcs.
• Evade formulaic story structures by understanding the deeper meaning and purpose of each plot element.

Whether you’re a seasoned writer or just starting out, Next Level Plot Structure provides invaluable insights and practical techniques to help you take your storytelling to new heights.

Want More Audio?

Check out all of my audiobooks:

• Outlining Your Novel
• Structuring Your Novel
• Creating Character Arcs
• Writing Your Story’s Theme
• Writing Archetypal Character Arcs
• Conquering Writer’s Block and Summoning Inspiration
• 5 Secrets of Story Structure
• Dreamlander
• Wayfarer (full-cast production!)

P.S. If you’ve already read Next Level Plot Structure and enjoyed it, I would so appreciate it if you’d leave a rating or review!

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What’s your favorite way to absorb writing craft info—reading, listening, or watching? And why? Tell me in the comments!

The post Now on Audio! Next Level Plot Structure appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

What can prose writers learn from poets about language, line breaks, and punctuation? How can we help people engage with our work in different ways? Abi Pollakoff talks about her advice from poetry.

In the intro, how to reframe success as a writer [Ink in Your Veins]; How I Write Podcast with Dean Koontz; Direct selling [SelfPublishing Advice]; Successful Self-Publishing 4th Edition; ElevenReader publishing.

This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com

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

Abi Pollokoff is an award-winning poet, editor, and book artist. Her debut poetry collection is night myths • • before the body.

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

• What makes a good poem?
• Balancing academic and fun elements in poetry
• Judging poetry on its purpose and impact, rather than on personal tastes
• Relevance of poetry techniques in prose writing
• The significance of punctuation in both poetry and prose
• The importance of page layout in poetry
• Tips for performance and spoken word poetry
• Creating and marketing a poetry collection
• Commercial realities and opportunities for poets

Find out more about Abi at AbiPollokoff.com or on Instagram @AbiPollokoff.

Transcript of Interview with Abi Pollokoff

Joanna: Abi Pollokoff is an award-winning poet, editor, and book artist. Her debut poetry collection is night myths • • before the body. So welcome to the show, Abi.

Abi: Thank you so much, Jo. I’m so excited to be here.

Joanna: Yes. So lots to talk about today, but first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing poetry, as well as making it part of your job, as well as your passion.

Abi: In terms of how I got started, really, I started with books. I always loved reading, and reading is such a big part of living a literary life for me. I read poetry when I was young, you know, Dr Seuss, Shel Silverstein. So I found myself reading language and story that just had fun in it.

I had always loved creative writing assignments in school, and I connected with poems. I think when I really first found my way into my current understanding and relationship to poetry was in my last year of university.

I studied at Tulane University in New Orleans, and in my last year, I took a series of classes that coalesced all around the same time period of study. So I was taking a class on the French avant-garde movements of the first half of the 1900s. We were reading a lot of Dada and Surrealism.

At the same time, I was taking a poetry workshop from the poet Andy Stallings, and we used a primary course text that covered around the same time period. So I was immersed in this area of literature that was concerned with the possibilities of language, of language without self-censorship, of linguistic freedom.

It was a time when I really needed that permission to play and to explore and to trust myself. So I gave myself that permission, and it’s transformed where I am today.

In terms of my job, I think I really believe deeply in the value of reciprocity. So I knew that if I wanted to have a book in the world one day to take up space on a shelf or in a mind, I wanted to be able to make space for other books to exist and for other writers to see their names in print.

I just wanted to give back into the community, as well as being a part of it.

Joanna: Oh, so much there. I’m really interested in this juxtaposition there of this academic side of poetry, and you studying it and studying literature. Then you also mentioned the word “fun,” which I thought was interesting, and also permission, and trying to get rid of that self-censorship.

I feel like poetry, in particular, has a real difficulty with academic snobbery around what is an acceptable poem. So I wondered, I mean, I know it’s a matter of opinion, but—

What makes a good poem? How do you balance the academic side with the fun side and letting loose?

Abi: I’m so grateful for this question because I think you’re right. I feel like for such a long time, Poetry with a capital P had very specific expectations and a very specific origin story. I don’t think that an academic poem is the only kind of a good poem.

Of course, everyone’s allowed to have taste and preference. One person might like chocolate ice cream and one person might like vanilla, and each flavor is equally valid.

For me, I believe —

A good poem is one that makes you feel something, full stop.

In your body, a good poem is one that comes alive off the page. So that can be a sonnet with the perfect volta, that turns, that twists just the perfect amount and it gives your knees a little quiver.

It can also be a five line meditation on Instagram that makes your heart stop just for a moment. Or a slam poem that just touches your pulse and makes it beat a little bit faster.

So I think, for me, that breaking out of an academic understanding of poetry is so important to acknowledge the diversity, the cultural diversity, and all of the different possibilities that make poetry beautiful and accessible and exciting for readers who themselves have varying tastes and preferences.

Joanna: How do you manage that as an editor, and kind of, like you said, making space for other writers?

It’s very hard to be an editor, in general, but I would think with poetry, it would be even harder. Of course, like you said about taste, you’re going to be reading a lot in your work that is not to your taste. I guess this is the thing—

How do you judge what makes a good poem if it’s not to your taste?

Abi: That’s a great question. I think if I were thinking of this from an editor’s perspective, when I’m approaching a poem as an editor, for me, the goal is to see if the poem is accomplishing its goals, rather than my goals.

So I try to actually take my taste out of it and think, well, what is the poem trying to do? Is it trying to deliver an image? Is it trying to create a metaphor or play with a specific form? If it’s part of a formal lineage, how is it accomplishing that?

Think about it from the goal of the poem and the reader’s experience of the poem, rather than whether I like it or not, because like can be so subjective from person to person.

So if I’m looking at it as an editor, I’m thinking about, what is the poem itself trying to do? What is the poem trying to tell me, and is it successful? If we’re playing with an image, does the image land in the ways that it needs to?

If you’re playing with form, and you’re breaking a form, what is the impact of that formal break? How does that change the meaning of the overall message of the poem? So if you’re a reader out there who is trying to experience poetry, but maybe not sure of what to make of it, I would say almost take yourself out of the equation.

Certainly consider whether you like the language, whether you like how it feels, the rhythm, but also think about, well — 

What is the poem trying to do? What is the poem trying to tell me? See if that gives it the space to do that.

Joanna: I just want to mention that we can hear your lovely cat in the background with the little bell. So I just thought I’d point that out to the listeners. I’m a cat person, so totally understanding. I just wanted to point that out.

Abi: That little bell is a brand new cat to my home, and he is exploring today.

Joanna: I love it. It’s a nice little backdrop. Well, let’s talk about this because a lot of people—I mean, I wrote some poetry. I even had a poem published back in the day, but mainly in my younger years of angst.

Like you say, about university and those teenage years, lots of very bad poetry, but it did what it needed to do at the time. Now, I and most of the listeners, we write prose.

What elements from poetry can be useful for writers of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, all of that?

Abi: I love this question because I feel like prose and poetry are both playing with language. Whether you’re writing fiction, or whether you’re writing nonfiction, or whether you’re writing poems, you’re using language to communicate something.

Whether it’s a story, or a feeling, or a moment, or a scene, those tools appear in all genres. So I would really think about, for prose readers and prose listeners who are out there but interested in what poetry can do, I think a really interesting tool that you might want to pay attention to or focus on is the line break.

The line break in a poem offers breath, and it gives breath and space and pivot.

It gives the opportunity for a change in a poem. So even if you’re writing in a prose sentence, you too have moments where you can think about, what is this pause or this break doing?

So in prose, you can do that with commas, you can do that with em dashes. You can think about how one sentence pivots from one to the next, or how a paragraph evolves from one to the next.

In a poem, you have that too, it’s just in a micro level.

So thinking about, how does the line break activate thought? How does punctuation activate thought and change what the reader is experiencing? You might be able to expand that onto the macro level in a prose piece and see if those tools can kind of go back and forth across the genres.

Joanna: Yes, line breaks are really interesting. Again, coming back to literature, I think older literature has a lot to answer for with huge, dense paragraphs with no line breaks, because I presume the cost of printing or whatever.

I feel like modern—I’m thinking particularly of James Patterson, who certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste—but it’s the master of the line break.

Pretty much every sentence in his faster paced sections, every sentence is a new line break. It’s a new paragraph, basically, for every line, and it moves you much faster through the text.

As a thriller writer, I pay more attention to that, but I certainly didn’t know about that as a newer writer.

What are some of the other things from poetry that might be useful?

Abi: Yes, I think James Patterson is a great example of speed and digging into the line a little bit more. In poetry, you have long lines and short lines. So you might think, oh, a long line will give you an extended thought, it’ll keep momentum.

I would actually say, from a poet perspective, that a short line will actually force the breath to break and give you a lot of speed. So I think there are some great parallels there between James Patterson moving from one sentence paragraph to the next, similar to a very short line moving to the next in a poem.

In terms of other tools, I would also say—to kind of drill into this even more and get even more micro with the line, and as an editor, this is also one of my favorite things to play with—but it’s punctuation.

Punctuation is absolute magic in both poetry and prose.

It gives you the tools as a conductor to make your lines a symphony, to build that metaphor. You can use punctuation to your advantage to build speed, to build rhythm, to build drama.

In a poem or in a piece of prose, the intentionality with which you’re using specific punctuation is going to give the reader a different experience. Think about how an em dash will cut off a thought. At its core, an interruption. Or how a semicolon will kind of give you this lulling legato way of connecting one line to the next in a description.

So maybe not in the first draft, but as you’re revising a piece of prose, don’t just think about the nuance of the words you’re using, but think about how the punctuation is connecting your ideas and how changing it will develop a different texture to the piece that you’re working on.

Joanna: I love that you’re geeking out around punctuation.

Abi: Oh my gosh, the best!

Joanna: Which I think is hilarious, and it possibly shows you as an editor, more than anything else. I mean, there are some poets who have zero punctuation. They don’t even use capital letters.

Abi: Oh, for sure.

Joanna: So there is freedom in that. The other thing I was going to mention is—and I find this very annoying because I use a lot of em dashes, always have—

There’s this thing at the moment saying, if there are any dashes of any kind, M dashes etc, then it’s clearly written by AI.

I don’t know if you’ve seen this?

Abi: I haven’t, but I also have big feelings about it.

Joanna: Yes, I have big feelings because I use them. I do work with some AI tools, but I’m like, no, that doesn’t mean it’s AI. I mean that is just something that we use.

I feel like the people who are maybe spreading that kind of thing—apparently, there’s this whole thing on TikTok about dashes, if anyone’s using a dash of any kind. I’m like, no, no, no. I think you just don’t know enough about this.

Abi: Oh my gosh. Oh, so many feelings. I’m so glad you mentioned this. I find this so interesting that the internet is claiming em dashes as an AI signature.

I would also maybe push on that and say, while I don’t know, of course, everything that has gone into training the language learning models that AI uses, but I know that there have been big conversations about how certain AI tools have mined literature for their uses of language.

Perhaps AI is using all these em dashes because humans have been doing it first, and thoroughly.

Joanna: Exactly.

Abi: So I think I disagree about this conversation on TikTok, but I’m not on TikTok, so I don’t know what everyone is saying.

Joanna: I only reacted to it, a bit like you, because it’s one of my favorite forms of punctuation, which, in itself, is kind of funny. I do want to ask you, so coming back to things like punctuation, line breaks, these things, to me, are part of the way words are laid out on a page.

So I do buy poetry books. Laying things out and using words in different ways, sometimes they’re made into kind of sculptures on a page, right, in a poetry book. There’s that. So maybe talk about that.

How important is page layout for poetry?

Abi: This is something that I think every poet will do differently, and so I don’t think there’s a right or a wrong answer here. I will say that I am definitely a poet who plays with the page and plays with space on the page.

If any readers out there are interested, you’ll see this a lot in my book, where I’m using the page to capture different elements of the story. I think that space on the page is so important because it gives the reader breath, and it also gives the reader pause and silence.

In my thoughts, I’m a bit of a maximalist, but on the page, you have the opportunity to give the reader a moment of what’s not there. To have a poem expanded in a way that makes the poem ask, and hopefully inspires the reader to ask, “Well, this is what’s being said, but what is not being said?”

What is the expanse of the page, and the page’s landscape, and the magnitude and difference between the quantity of words and the quantity of space, what is that doing for the overall argument of the poem?

For me, I like to use the page in different ways to indicate different speakers. So for me, placing a poem in one section of a page might help develop polyvocality, where I have multiple threads of conversations happening over the course of a project.

On the line, again, it’s about breath. It’s about space. It’s about giving the poem room to breathe and to find its way into the thought as the reader is also reading their way into the thought as well.

Joanna: Yes, it is interesting. I will open poetry books, and I have quite a lot of poetry books, and I will open them, and sometimes I will be drawn to something shorter or something laid out in a way that attracts me even before I read the words. So I find that important as somebody who primarily reads poetry.

The other side of this is the power of spoken word. You mentioned slam poems earlier. I have been to a couple of slam nights, and that is completely different. Sometimes it’s kind of more almost like rap kind of poetry.

It’s certainly a lot of performance. It’s just a completely different form of using your words. So what are your thoughts on that?

Does a poet who loves the words laid out on a page also do slam poetry, or are these different kinds of poets?

Abi: I would say yes and no.

I mean, there’s certainly poets who are drawn to a more capital P Poetry, academic style that we were talking about. There are also poets who are really going to be invested in the performance and in the live experience of poetry.

I love that you’ve been to some slams and have explored that because I think for a long time, there’s been a very strong division between what counts as “poetry” and how is slam a part of that.

For me, I think slam is an incredibly important part of the richness of the poetry landscape. I am not a slam poet, but I have been to many slams in the past, and I think they’re incredible.

Slam poetry and performance poetry, in that sense, takes an entirely different kind of craft and structure to deliver feeling to a listener.

I think the translation of a performance piece onto the page is so difficult because of the rawness and the humanity and the performance of it. I think that there are some presses that actually do a really great job of bringing slam into the page, and the one that I’m thinking of most is Button Poetry.

They have a very great YouTube channel where they have many slam videos, and they are a great tool and resource for slam poets, and all poets, but they do a great job of bringing slam poets into book form.

Sometimes that takes revision, and sometimes that’s just a matter of translating, but I think that it’s all part of the experience of poetry.

Prose readers out there, you might be listening and say, “Every time I’ve encountered poetry, I don’t get it. It’s not for me. I don’t see it. I don’t understand it.” Maybe an experience in school made you not like it, which is, of course, very understandable.

Joanna: Very common.

Abi: So common, yes. Maybe it’s just because you haven’t found the right type of poetry. Slam might be the poetry that gets you.

Joanna: Yes, and I mean, I guess the word slam is a kind of more violent word. Then there’s, as you say, performance poets. It’s a continuum, right? I’m thinking of a British poet, Kae Tempest. I don’t know if you’ve heard of her. She even does sort of epic, long epics.

Abi: Amazing.

Joanna: A lot of these performance poets memorize their work, it feels. So they’re not really reading from the page. This is something that totally freaks me out, by the way, and I have barely ever read any of my work in public, even on a podcast. I find it extremely difficult. So as a poet yourself—

What are your tips for doing reading or performance?

Abi: So, I’m so excited to check out this writer that you mentioned, and hopefully our conversation will inspire you to share one of your poems on a future podcast. That would be a challenge—

Joanna: Very unlikely!

Abi: Something to think about, maybe for the future. It is difficult. I think so many writers are introverts. I’m an introvert, but I still have to get up there and talk to people.

Something that I love about reading poems out loud is that I feel like a poem, it exists on the page, but going back to what we were talking about earlier, about what makes a good poem, a poem comes alive in the body.

I think reading a poem out loud is a great tool for revision, so you can feel where you stumble when you’re reading it out loud, or where your breath speeds up. Prose writers too, when you’re revising a paragraph, read it out loud. See how it feels, see how it lives out in the air.

Then stepping in front of an audience and doing that is a whole other level. It’s a whole other piece of the puzzle. I have maybe two ways of thinking about it.

The first is to give myself permission to take a deep breath and to just sink into the poem.

To not necessarily focus on the people who might be staring at me, but to think about the poem itself, its texture, and by diving deeper into the poem, letting it come out and reach an audience.

The other tool I have, very practically, is a tool that I have read about in terms of, if you’re ever giving a job interview, this is helpful. I saw this happen on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, if anyone is a Grey’s Anatomy water.

Joanna: I am. Yes.

Abi: Love it amazing. Okay, do you remember the episode where Amelia Shepherd was going to do the very intense brain surgery on another doctor, and she and her resident at the time did the super the Superman pose?

Joanna: Oh, the Superman pose. Yes, the strong pose.

Abi: Exactly. It’s where you’re standing, your feet are shoulder width apart, your hands are on your hips. You’re looking up into the sky as if you’re a superhero about to save a city.

It’s actually scientifically proven that it gives you, I don’t know if it’s adrenaline or just subliminal confidence, but it’s a tool that gives you the ability to back yourself.

So if you’re giving a reading, or giving a performance, or going into a job interview, or preparing for a hard conversation, take five seconds to stand with your hands on your hips, or sit with very good posture, and take a couple of deep breaths, and then begin. This might not work for everybody, but sometimes it’s helpful for me.

Joanna: Yes, and there’s actually a talk on that, a TED talk. I think it’s Amy Cuddy who did a talk on that, and it definitely sort of went around.

Again, I think for introverts, it’s whatever helps you get started. I often find that I’m most nervous just before I go on stage, and still, as a professional speaker, I still get very nervous, get like a bad stomach and all of that kind of thing. I think it’s also just a case of acknowledging this is just a human thing, but—

If we want to get our words out there, then it just has to be done.

Abi: Absolutely. It’s human. Whether you are delivering a poem or having a conversation, nerves are human. If you weren’t nervous, it’s you wouldn’t care, right? So I think it’s a beautiful sign to be a little nervous.

Something that I was always told when I was young was to slow down because when I get nervous, I talk fast. So slow down, enunciate, give yourself a deep breath, and let yourself be human and be vulnerable. Say, “I’m nervous.” Right before we started talking, I said, “Jo, I’m a little nervous.”

So it’s okay to be vulnerable. I think in today’s world, vulnerability is a really beautiful tool for connecting with people. So let yourself be human, and don’t force yourself to be someone that you’re not.

Joanna: Yes. So let’s get back to the collection. I’m thinking of doing a short story collection, so obviously a little bit different, but I was wondering about how did you choose the poems that went into the collection?

Did you come up with the theme and then write to it, or did the collection emerge from what you already had?

Abi: I’m so excited about your short story collection, so I definitely want to hear more about that.

For me, the collection, it started out kind of as a surprise, actually. I’ve been in a couple of writing groups for a few years now, and around the same time, two of my writing groups wanted to swap manuscripts instead of individual poems.

So everyone at the time had these projects that were clear projects, and I thought I just had some poems. I wasn’t quite sure if they were anything, but I pulled them into a file, and I realized that I had 50 pages, which is on track for a full length book.

For poetry, you often need 48 to 60 pages as a minimum, and so I was in that ballpark. I used this opportunity to get feedback from my writing groups because a set of 50 pages isn’t necessarily a “book”, but I was able to use these tools to identify the key themes at the heart of the project.

Then that set me down the path of writing and revising into the work that had already emerged. So for me, it kind of took my community to say, “No, this actually is on its way to being something. It has legs.”

Then once we were able to say, oh, well, I’m thinking about womanhood. I’m thinking about societal expectations. I’m thinking about self-actualization. Then I was able to go in and say, well, what are the holes in the story? Because even a poetry collection can have a narrative arc from poem to poem.

So what are the holes in the story? What images are popping up consistently that I might want to do a little bit more work with? From there, I was able to set on a path to revision into the book itself. So, for me, I kind of sidestepped my way in.

I’m curious for you, have you identified a theme first? Or are you just starting to look at a bigger set of short stories you’ve already been working on?

Joanna: Well, the main reason is because all of my short stories are in ebook and audio, and I really want to do a special print edition. A lot of us now use Kickstarter to do really gorgeous editions.

So I guess I’m more looking for a theme. I am thinking of writing a couple of extra ones that will be exclusive that are around the theme that has emerged.

What was really useful for me was to put all of them into NotebookLM—I don’t if you’ve heard of Notebook LM, Google’s notebook—and say, “What are the themes across these stories?” It was able to pull stuff out of my work that it’s really hard to see in your own work.

Like you said, you had a community do it. I’m not very good at groups, to be honest.

Abi: That’s fair. I mean, I think it takes sometimes extra eyes. It’s always harder to edit yourself than it is to edit other people. It’s harder to write marketing text for yourself than it is to write it for someone else, because when you’re doing it for yourself—it sounds like you may have experienced this too—you’re too close.

It’s too personal to be able to say, what is this actually doing? What does this actually mean? So I love it. If you’re not a person who writes with writing groups, which is, of course, a completely valid experience of being a writer, use the tools that are out there.

I think that AI can be a starting place for so many things.

I’m a pretty firm believer that it shouldn’t necessarily be the ending place, but I think if you’re using it to start and say, “Well, what are the themes that I’m I’ve naturally gravitated towards?” Use that as your 10,000 foot view.

Then you can go back in and say, oh, I see that happening here, but I want to expand it. Or I think this part of this theme is missing, so that’s what I’m going to write my way into.

I think that’s a great use of a tool that’s becoming very widespread and accessible for many folks who might not have a built in writing community, or choose not to have a group of people to have that feedback from.

Joanna: It came up with some great titles as well. This is the other thing, right? Doing a title of a collection, you could just say, “Poems about womanhood,” like you said. I mean, that’s just not good enough.

How did you come up with your title for the collection?

Abi: This was one of the last things that I found for my book. I went through many other titles before I landed on this one. What I did was, I actually wrote out on a piece of paper every single title of all of my poems, and I circled the words that came up and the themes that came up and the phrases.

So I kind of jigsaw puzzled my way into my book’s title. So if anyone out there picks it up, which I hope you do, the title of my book is night myths • • before the body.

So my challenge or my puzzle will be, when you’re diving into the book, where do you see these words popping up? Where do they come from? And how does that extraction into the book’s title reflect back on the body of the book itself?

Joanna: Yes, titles are tough at the best of times. Although I would say, just to be clear, like with poetry books, especially, I couldn’t tell you the title of most poetry books that I’ve bought from people.

One of my favorite poets is Ben Okri. He’s Nigerian-British, and I couldn’t tell you most of his book titles, but I remember his poems, and I know his name. So I think that’s probably more useful, right?

People remember your name and they like your poetry.

Abi: Absolutely, and that you’re remembering the poems. That’s clear that it’s a poem that stuck with you, and you know who wrote it. I hope if Ben’s out here listening—

Joanna: Very unlikely.

Abi: You never know. That’s beautiful because we’re doing this work, and we’re putting ourselves on the page, and the goal, the dream, is that our work impacts someone, and it resonates with them. It’s the piece of writing that they needed to read that day for whatever reason, for whatever is going on in their lives.

It’s clear that you read Ben’s poem at a time when it just hit you, you needed it. I think that’s the biggest gift of all.

So everybody is going to have a different mind, and you might be a person who has total photographic recall. You can see the book cover in your mind. You can see the book title. You might be able to read a poem once and memorize it. Many of us are not like that, and so if you can remember the poems and the writer, that’s gold.

Joanna: Well, on that, as you were talking there, I was thinking about Ben Okri, and I’ve seen him read his poetry a number of times. The particular occasion was back in 1999 and I didn’t know what to do with my life, and I heard him read some of his poems, and it really helped me make a change in my life.

It’s interesting because I have all of his poetry books in print, but it was actually hearing him in person and listening to his voice that made it resonate. So I just wanted to say that to encourage people, which is—

You don’t know how you impact people’s lives when you put your poems out there.

Abi: That’s beautiful. I love that. I love that it took, again, a human experience of being in a room and hearing a voice. I think that, of anything, is maybe the call to action of finding a reading in your local community. Maybe at the library folks are having a reading, or maybe at a bookstore.

I think right now, the literary community is in in such need of support. I would say, especially in the US, where it’s important to go out and support your local businesses, to support your readers and your writers.

So go to a reading, even if you don’t know the writers, because you never know what’s going to impact you and how you’re going to feel about it.

Joanna: Well, all of this is absolutely wonderful, and we obviously want people to write poetry for whatever reason, but I do have to tackle the sort of commercial side of it.

You work in the industry as a business as well. You work for a company, and you publish books, and people have to make money from books. Poets have to make money somehow, even though most of them don’t make money from poetry, obviously, but some poets are doing absolutely incredibly well.

I think Rupi Kaur, one of the sort of original Insta poets, her Milk and Honey collection, it’s everywhere. In the indie author community, we have Pierre Jeanty, who’s been on this show. Haitian-American, sells on Shopify. Both of these are seven figure poets, which is just incredible. They make far more money than I do!

What is the commercial reality for most poets, and what are some ways that they can perhaps make some more income from their poetry?

Abi: This is a great question, and it’s a hard one to answer because the commercial reality is not great. I would say that that Rupi and Pierre are incredible exceptions.

I love that their work has brought them commercial success and financial success because it’s also brought more awareness and more attention into the poetry landscape.

Prose books are so visible and so prominent, and poetry is visible, but it’s not quite as financially viable as prose. So it’s just not a great money maker most of the time.

That said, I would say that there are some ways that you can engage with poetry and find a form of supplementing your income if that’s something that is necessary for you. More and more journals are offering poets money for publishing poems, which is so important and beautiful.

So you might see a journal offering $50 for a poem, or $100. I’m not quite sure in the UK what that would translate into in terms of pounds, but I believe that there are some UK journals as well who say, “When we accept your poem, we’ll offer you some financial remuneration.” That’s on the poem level, the individual poem level.

Of course, when you’re publishing a book, there are a couple of avenues. You may receive in advance, which is an upfront financial sum that then when you sell books, you kind of don’t earn anything until you’ve made that money back.

Or royalties, which is where when somebody buys your book, a percentage of that goes back to you as the author.

Presses also have to balance their budgets, because the cost of paper has changed, the ink has changed, printing costs, the team for the press itself. So there’s a very tight budget when it comes to the publishing landscape in general, and I would say, especially for poetry.

There’s just less money exchanging hands, except in the case of maybe Rupi and Pierre, who have incredible breakthroughs, and they’ve done a lot, I think, to really change that landscape. They’ve made a big difference.

The best way to encourage presses to keep publishing and to be able to keep paying their authors is really to be buying books.

So if you’re a writer out there, even if you’re not making that money back by buying a book, buy the authors books because it lets the press keep going, and it lets the press continue to offer the funds to their writers. That’s maybe the biggest tip, I would say.

I think we live in a really creative economy world right now. We have people having multiple side hustles, or being able to monetize so many different aspects of their writing.

Get creative. If you have an idea and you haven’t seen it done, give it a try. I think there’s so many ways that folks can change their financial picture.

I think Pierre using Shopify is a great example of that, and Rupi on Instagram. So many different ways of getting that visibility that then can translate into financial success.

Joanna: Yes, I guess it goes back to what you were saying at the beginning around the permission to play.

It has to be the permission to play with the possibilities of the business, as well as the possibilities of the art — 

because I guess we create also because we want to share that with the world.

We do have more opportunity than ever to put our work out there. I guess the final question for you is, with night myths, what are you doing to get your work out there? Obviously, you’re pitching some podcasts, but you know—

What’s your plan for marketing?

Abi: Oh, that’s great. Here I am. I’m talking to you. Everybody is going to be different, and I would say, when it comes to marketing, whether it’s a poetry book or a prose book, there are so many ways to do it.

There’s no one right way because the right way is the way that’s going to work best for you, for your network, for your community, for the energy that you have, and the time, So many writers have other day jobs, have maybe their parents, have other commitments that take time out of your day.

So what I would say is —

If you are thinking about marketing a book, think about what your strengths are and what your time is.

Follow that thread because there’s never going to be an end date and nothing is ever going to be enough. So figure out what the right thing is for you, and then lean into that.

For me, I started by making a website so people know where to find me online. I think a website is a great place to start if you don’t really know where to begin. It can be simple. It can have a photo of you, a short bio, if you’ve published anything, links to those, and ideally a contact email or form.

This way, it gives you kind of a literary home base on the internet. There are great tools like Squarespace or Wix that have templates that are really easy to replicate and personalize. So don’t start off fancy, but give yourself a virtual presence and use that as your foundation to build.

So I started with my website, and I also have been thinking about a couple of different avenues that balance my skill set and then also my time. So I have been posting on Instagram. I would encourage poets to choose maybe one platform where they feel comfortable.

Social media can pose its own challenges, so it doesn’t have to be one or the other. It can be Substack. It can be Bluesky. It doesn’t have to be everything.

If you’re not a big social media person, start with one and just start being visible, because that’s going to be a way for people to get to know you as a writer, as a human. Especially if you’re an introvert, putting yourself out there in a way that gives you a little bit of breathing room.

So start with social media, and if you’re not comfortable talking about yourself, it’s a great opportunity to shout out other people, to talk about what you’re reading, who has an event that you’re going to, what book have you read recently. By building a community of readers, you’ll get people who are excited about your work.

So that is a tool that I’ve been leveraging. For me, as I shift into marketing my own book, I am working on setting up readings. So if there are any listeners in the US especially, I don’t have any plans to come to the UK yet, but the future is bright.

So set up readings wherever you like to shop for books. In your local bookstore, go to them say, “Hey, I have a book coming out,” or, “I’m a poet, I’d love to be a part of an event.” That’s a great way to very tangibly connect with people.

I’m also reaching out to the other networks of communities that I have. So, school affiliations, alumni groups, professional orgs.

I’m thinking about the ecosystem of like-minded people who might be interested in my work.

That could be practically, it could be thematically, those are great ways to talk about why you’re doing what you’re doing.

So with you, Jo, I was so excited to talk with you, because I love how you have this balance of writers talking about craft and also talking about the publishing arm and the business of being a writer.

I loved how that connected for me with my work as an editor, and working a lot with prose, actually, but writing poems on my own time. So I thought, thematically, I really wanted to speak with you. So thinking about what’s out there in the world, doing research.

AI is a great tool for this too, actually. To be able to say, “Hey, AI, give me a list of 30 podcasts that are centered around feminism,” or whatever your themes are, and then reaching out.

The worst that can happen is they say no, and that’s okay. It’s a numbers game.

Joanna: It is a numbers game, except that when you pitched me, like you found things we had in common, and so your pitch was effective. So I would say to people, it’s better to take those 30, then go and investigate those 30, have a listen, and then only pitch the five that actually resonate with you.

Every day now, I don’t know what happened, but I guess a year or so ago, traditional publishing discovered podcasting. I get five to ten pitches a day now, from most of which are completely inappropriate.

Then I got your pitch, and I’d never heard of you, and I was like, this is perfect. I accepted you really quickly. I was like, yes, I want to talk about this. So a good pitch where you feel something in common with the host is so effective. I’ve really loved talking to you. So let’s tell people—

Where can they find you and your book online?

Abi: Amazing. Thank you. This has been such a fun conversation, and I’m just so honored. As you said, we didn’t know each other before this, so it was so beautiful to get to know you and your work, and I’m so appreciative of it. I’ve loved getting to really dive in and listen even more to your podcast.

As for me, I am findable on Instagram. It’s going to be @AbiPollokoff, just my name. You can also, I would please encourage you to find my book out there in the world. It’s called night myths • • before the body.

It’s an eco-feminist look at womanhood, and the body, and self-empowerment. So I hope it will resonate. Find them from your local bookstore. If a book is too much, which, of course, I understand, you’ve got to balance your budget, please follow me on Instagram.

I also have some poems available on the web, which you can find on my website, which is AbiPollokoff.com.

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

Abi: Thank you so much, Jo. It’s such an honor and a treat to be here and talk with you today.

The post Language, Line Breaks, And Punctuation. Poetry With Abi Pollakoff first appeared on The Creative Penn.

[From KMW: I’ve got a quick post for you today—a little storytelling snack—on how to write better action scenes. Specifically, we’re talking about what not to do if you want to keep your pacing tight and your scenes crackling with energy. (Hint: it’s all about trimming the fat, not the flavor.) I’ll be back next week with a full post and podcast on a juicy topic in response to one of your questions: “Using the Enneagram for Character Development: Avoiding Repetition for Lies Each Type Might Believe.”]

***

If you want to write better action scenes, the key isn’t just what you include—it’s what you leave out. Nothing kills momentum faster than a poorly timed info dump or an overstuffed description that stops the action in its tracks. Pacing is everything, and knowing how to control it can mean the difference between a scene that crackles with energy and one that fizzles before it even gets started.

You want readers to be sucked into the conflict so entirely they forget to close their mouths and stop drooling. You do this by deftly structuring the length and variables of sentences and by trimming unnecessary info that might slam the brakes on your runaway freight train of action-packed excitement. This is true no matter what type of “action” your story includes—whether it’s a chase scene, a love scene, or just an intense conversation.

One of the quickest ways to destroy any scene’s pacing is by interrupting the action with large chunks of description.

For Example:

Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding (affiliate link)

Henry Fielding’s satire Joseph Andrews (usually considered one of the first examples of the novel) acknowledges this problem, tongue in cheek.

During a tense and furious scene in which the hero helps a friend fight off a pack of attacking dogs, Fielding breaks the third wall to cheekily tell readers he would like to include a simile about now, but that he dare not interrupt the action, which he says “should be rapid in this part.”

In so explaining his reasons for not interrupting the action, Fielding, of course, brought the action screeching to a halt just as surely as if he had actually stopped to impart his simile. He was writing a satire, so he could get away with it. Most writers, however, cannot.

Writers often trick themselves into thinking descriptions are vital, when they very often are not. Just as Fielding’s action scene survived admirably without his simile, much of the information writers want to explain to readers often turns out to be deadweight.

The next time you find yourself wanting to slow down for description or explanation, double-check whether this info is vital. If you determine it is necessary, your next step should be reevaluating whether the info can be moved so it doesn’t interfere with the action. For example, if readers need this info to understand the action, make sure they’re privy to it before the bullets ever flying, the dogs ever start barking, and the train ever starts rumbling.

Trimming unnecessary description doesn’t mean stripping your scenes of depth or detail. It just means being intentional about where and how you include them. If you want to write better action scenes, focus on maintaining momentum by weaving essential details seamlessly into the flow, rather than dropping them in like roadblocks. If you keep the pacing tight, the action clear, and your readers engaged, your scenes will hit with the impact they deserve!

Wordplayers tell me your opinions! What are your favorite techniques to write better action scenes? Tell me in the comments!

The post Want to Write Better Action Scenes? Cut This One Thing appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

How can you explore the edges of your creativity to find your next becoming? How can you turn the evolution of your life into art? Pia Leichter talks about her creative courage, different ways to rest, and intuitive book marketing in this interview.

In the intro, Lessons from Six Years Writing Full-time [Sacha Black]; Reflections on big shifts in life, creativity, and mindset; Spotify Transitions Select Audiobook Distribution Services to INaudio [FindawayVoices]; Death Valley fulfilment; and Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition; Writing memoir and non-fiction — I’m on the Writers Ink Podcast; plus Lindisfarne on Books and Travel.

Plus, AI can be used in films that could win Oscars [The Week]; and Executive Order to advance artificial intelligence education in the USA [White House].

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 

Pia Leichter is an award-winning creative director and coach, founder of the Kollektiv Studio, and the author of Welcome to the Creative Club: Make Life Your Biggest Art Project.

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

• What does a creative director do?
• Overcoming the fear of writing a book
• How to take control and not let life just happen
• Tapping into your next becoming
• Type 1 fun vs. type 2 fun
• The necessity of rest for creativity
• Marrying artistic expression and commercial objectives
• Changing the scarcity script around books and money

You can find Pia at kollektiv.studio.

Transcript of Interview with Pia Leichter

Joanna: Pia Leichter is an award-winning creative director and coach, founder of the Kollektiv Studio and the author of Welcome to the Creative Club: Make Life Your Biggest Art Project. So welcome to the show, Pia.

Pia: Thanks so much, Jo, for having me on. I’m excited to be here.

Joanna: Oh, yes. So first up, tell us a bit more about you.

What is a creative director, anyway? What part does writing play in your business?

Pia: A creative director typically can work in different creative fields, such as advertising, film, fashion, you name it. I came from the world of marketing and advertising, so in that landscape, a creative director oversees the creative vision for different brands and different projects in the studio.

They marry artistic expression with commercial objectives. They also manage a creative team and kind of blends magic and logic, strategy and creativity, to create an impact in our clients’ lives and the lives of their consumers.

Joanna: That sounds pretty cool.

Pia: It was pretty cool. It was good. It was really good. It’s where I spent well over a decade. So it was very rewarding work. I mean, as a creative director, at least in that world, you can have either a design background or a writing background. So I was like the copywriting background.

Joanna: Okay, and what is it you do now then?

Pia: Now I work as a creative partner, working with— Well, I think the simplest way of putting it is, I help people create. I help people create brands, businesses, dreams, art, what they’re being called to create. People who do things differently to make a difference, those are generally the people I work with.

I call it sort of a creative midwife. So I help people at different sticky junctures in life, often when we’re at this creative evolution point, when what we used to create was successful wonderful, whether it’s a business or a creative venture, but it’s just not floating our boat anymore.

We’re just being called to do something different, and that can be both thrilling and terrifying at the same time, because it’s like — 

What is going to come next? What is my next becoming? What is my next creation? I often partner with creatives that are at that point.

Then what’s great about it is I have different tools at my disposal. I’m also a certified coach, so I bring together coaching and creativity in the form of narrative development, storytelling, brand strategy, to actually help bring whatever it is they’re looking to bring to life into the world.

So I get to combine both of those things, depending on where people are in their journey.

Joanna: Why this book, then? Because it sounds like you’ve got lots of different strands to your business and your creative life.

Why write this book? What part does that play?

Pia: That’s a fantastic question. When I left my agency, the last agency I worked for, I think it was 2021, my mother passed away suddenly. She gave me the passing gift of courage and a reminder that this life is finite and we just got one, as far as we know.

I had been flirting with the idea of channeling my creativity into building my own business for a long time, but I was comfortable. Things were good, good enough. Good enough. So I think I was scared too, of like what would that next thing be? What would I even do? How would I survive? What does it look like?

So that kind of kept me stuck, speaking of creative evolutions. So when she passed, it was like, hey, what am I waiting for? If it’s not now, then when? So I left that job, and I launched Kollektiv Studio.

That was an epiphany moment for me, like, wow, I don’t just get to create other people’s dreams, I get to create my own. Then from there, it was just a wild and wonderful and weird journey into entrepreneurship.

Then the second epiphany with the book came from getting a call from my hybrid publisher, the founder, also great salesman and great writer. He asked, you know, have you ever thought of writing a book?

I believe everyone has a book in them, but I definitely have thought about it. I had a conversation with him, and he shared a stat like, 90-something percent of people that say no now to writing a book will actually never write that book because if not now, when?

So I had my second big light bulb moment of, “Wow, I don’t only get to channel my creativity into commercial endeavors. I actually get to channel it just to make art, to make things, to write a book that feels important or meaningful to me.” A whole new path opened up to me.

So that’s what led me to write the book, and I’m really glad I did. It was a really transformative process. It took me places I never thought I would go, I couldn’t even imagine going. That wasn’t necessarily the intention, but it was definitely a growth opportunity, and still continues to be.

Joanna: Yes, because it’s definitely a combination of self-help and memoir. I’ve also written a memoir, Pilgrimage, and it was also one of the, I guess, hardest books that I’ve written, and transformative, as you say.

For people who feel like they want to write something so personal, but they’re holding back because it is work in many ways, and it’s a journey, and as you say, transformative—

How can you encourage people to write their book? How can they get over the fear of everything that could happen because of it, both internally and externally?

Pia: Well, asking a really powerful question is, what happens if I don’t write it? What does life look like? What then? What happens if I don’t write it today, or in a year, or three years?

It could be writing a book, and it could also just be doing that thing that’s really calling you. Then what? Then you keep doing exactly what you’re doing. At some point, the desire to create that book, to write that book, to create whatever that thing might be, becomes stronger than the fear. That would be one thing.

The second thing is remembering that you don’t have to do it alone. I think what held me back was this thought, this myth of the lone genius writer in a cabin in the woods. Creating it all and their typewriter, and it’s just all of the words just flowing out.

I thought, oh my gosh, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to just do that, like just spit out a book. It turns out, just like creativity is collaboration, I didn’t have to. There are wonderful editors and people along the way that help us create a book, create anything. We don’t have to do it alone, and we often don’t do it alone. So there’s that.

Then the third thing that helped me was remembering that — 

We all have a hidden expiration date. Nothing’s guaranteed.

So we got this one life, we might as well live it in the way that feels most fulfilling, and whatever makes you feel most alive.

Often, what makes at least me feel most alive is also a little frightening but thrilling. I feel like, gosh, I’m doing it, I’m here, I’m living this thing. That feels really important. So those are three potential motivators for starting to write something deeply personal or vulnerable to you.

Joanna: I guess another reason is kind of taking control of things, looking back and kind of taking control of the narrative. As you say, you work with people in the narrative coaching side.

In the book, there was a line that said, “I used to think life was happening to me.”  I feel like a lot of people feel that right now. There’s some big political things going on, big historical things. There’s AI going on. It feels like history is happening to us. So if people are feeling that—

How can people take control and not just let life happen?

Pia: Well, it’s remembering that we’re always at choice. Even when it might not feel like we have a choice in the direction of our lives, we do. We get to choose. We get to choose what we want to do next at every point. I think that’s easy to forget in the overwhelm of information and the current political climate.

With all of the really fast paced changes that are occurring in the world, it can feel really overwhelming. I think just remembering that you get to choose. You also get to choose to not listen to the news in the morning, if that feels like sensory overload or too much.

You get to choose to pick up a pen, and you get to choose how you want to direct your next scene. You get to decide. I don’t know, for me, that feels like creative agency. That feels like creative power, knowing that you are creating your experience, that you are an active protagonist main player in this game called life.

I think taking some kind of action. First —

Get clear on what it is that you might really want to do —

and that can be something small or large, right? Then actually taking action to make it real is a way of creating evidence for yourself.

Like, yes, I get to choose. I can take a day off of work tomorrow and go finally see that art exhibit and eat that cardamon bun I’ve been dying to eat. I can do these things. That can feel like beautiful pockets of freedom. I think the more that we practice that creative director of our lives muscle, the stronger it gets.

Joanna: Yes, because, as you say, you can do small things. It doesn’t have to be changing everything. I do actually want to come back, because you said earlier about this sort of question, what is my next becoming? Then you just said you need to get clear on what you want to do. These are really, really big questions.

I recently turned 50. It was one of those moments like everyone has. I’ve been a writer now for nearly 20 years, and this sort of, “what is my next becoming?” is something that I’ve been thinking about. I know people listening, because the way the author life and the author industry is really changing, like—

‘What is the next becoming?’ How do we tap into that question? How do we explore that question?

Pia: Well, I think we get closer to what feels like fun. Sometimes these questions can feel so big, and it feels weighty and meaty and important, and yes, of course they are, but also we get to move towards what feels really fun, like what lights us up. It could be anything.

I feel like they’re insights into our own becoming within that, within the things that we gravitate towards that make us feel alive, or make us feel joyful. It can be either small or big, but just getting curious about what really feels like fun.

When was the last time you really had fun making something, doing something? Is there a red thread? Is there a pattern that you might be able to notice? I feel like there’s something in that.

For me, recently, I’ve been having a lot of fun working where there was like synchronicity. I started working with someone who actually read the book, who we became friends, who’s a fantastic musician and producer.

We decided to take the poems out from my book and create a spoken word album, and he’s creating tracks for each poem. That feels like so much fun. I don’t know, maybe the next becoming is just allowing myself to create what is lighting me up, and what makes me smile, and what feels good, what feels warm.

It’s like, ooh! It might not make the Billboard Top 100 list, but it’s really great to be able to co-create with someone who can take your work in a completely different direction, and the process of doing it makes it into something else. Like the poems now become something else.

So I don’t know, it’s just a small example of what feels like fun, and it was a nice reminder that, yes, move towards that. That feels fulfilling, and then let’s figure out what the next thing might feel like. Instead of sort of this big, definitive answer, like, what will the next 50 years of my life look like?

I think we are fluid, changeable beings. We will change, luckily. That’s the beauty. So maybe just reconnecting to what feels joyful right now can be a first step. I’m also turning 50 next month, so I feel you.

Joanna: Well, there we go. Well, I guess I find the word “fun” quite difficult, I must say. I think it’s my upbringing, but there are things that I enjoy. It’s interesting with writing. I don’t know if you’ve heard of type 1 fun and type 2 fun. Have you heard of this?

Pia: No, tell me, please.

Joanna: Okay, so type 1 fun is, like you said, it’s kind of joyful. You know, like having a drink with friends, having a dance. It’s fun. Type 2 fun is you do something that might be pretty painful at the time, like I walked these pilgrimages, and maybe at the time it’s not what you call fun, but you look back and go, yes, that was worth doing.

That’s like type 2 fun, and you smile as you remember it, but it was hard. I feel like writing books is type 2 fun. It is not necessarily a joyful process.

Was writing this book a ‘fun’ thing? or fulfilling?

Pia: Well, before I answer that, I just want to point something out. I think what I’m hearing you say is fulfillment because what feels fulfilling doesn’t always feel fun at the time. I really agree and align with that.

We could use the word joyful too, whatever word resonates most. Fulfilling, what feels like fulfillment is important because that means it’s connected to something that has really deep meaning for you.

Whether it’s your values or what feels like your purpose that you’re actually living and expressing. It feels really fulfilling when you’re living in alignment with what you value most. So the book was definitely fulfilling.

There were pockets of fun, but they were pockets. It was also challenging, definitely, but it felt really fulfilling. It felt like, yes, this is exactly where I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to be doing. It just felt that way, and that kept me going.

I think that keeps us going when we’re doing any kind of creative project that requires a long commitment, it’s when it’s connected to our big fat why, or what feels fulfilling, or what has meaning.

I think it’s really important to create from that place because it’s our light in the dark. It’s like those moments where you’re like, okay, I’m done here. It kept me going, you know, a reminder of why I was doing this in the first place.

Joanna: There’s another challenge in the book. It’s a provocative question that will trigger all the workaholics listening. You say, “What if my creative genius, and yours, lives on the other side of rest?”

I read this, and I was like, rest?! Who do you think we are?

Why is rest so hard for us, and yet so necessary for creativity?

Pia: I think, at least in Western culture, we’re geared to connect and believe that our value is based on what we produce, and hard work and work ethic is really prioritized. It’s just something that’s very important culturally.

Like, “you got to work hard,” and, “blood, sweat, and tears,” and, “give it everything you got,” and that there’s meaning in that.

I’m not saying there’s not, there’s space and place for passionate, focused work, but there’s also room, and it’s very important, for rest and ease. There’s a place for doing, and there’s a place where we get to also be because we are human beings.

There are a lot of insights to be discovered and dots that connect and eureka moments to be had in this daydreamy, restful, ease-filled place where we’re not so focused on a task or getting something done.

Neuroscience shows that this is also how our brain functions. We have the default mode network, which is also called our imagination network, which is really closely correlated with creativity. It’s the thinking that happens when we’re not consciously thinking.

The dots that connect in those moments, the illumination that happens when we’re just allowing things to marinate and just be and process, kind of percolating like coffee. It’s really, really important for our creativity and for ideas to be able to have that time as well.

So it’s not an either/or. Both the default mode network and the control network work together.

So creativity also requires that analytical mind, like the research and evaluation, but incubation and illumination are equally important. Yet in our society or culture, we tend to prioritize that which can be quantified.

You know, like, “Well, I have done this amount of research, so therefore I’ve been productive,” and — 

What if productivity was also based on allowing ideas to a bubble to the surface and emerge?

That’s just as valuable as focused, task-based activity.

Just to say, I’m a recovering speed queen. I grew up in New York City, so I’m not a Zen Buddha person. I am practicing. I am practicing slowing down.

I’m finding that when I do, when I catch myself when I’m rushing for no reason, or when I’m overdoing the doing, there’s a wealth of information and insight that emerges when I just give things space. Sometimes nothing emerges, but I feel my energy shift and different, and then I show up to the work differently.

It’s dangerous to start getting into the sort of equation of, well, I’ll rest so that I can be more productive. No, that’s not what I’m saying. We can get into that way of thinking, and it’s just the same way of thinking applied to rest.

So, no, not necessarily, but I find it incredibly important for the creative process and also just that energy of being alive. We also get to just be, and our just being, there’s value in us just being who we are. It might sound counter cultural, but that’s what I believe.

Joanna: Yes, I like the term active rest, obviously, because I find that exhaustion is when I’m kind of watching Netflix or whatever, and that doesn’t help my creative. Well, it probably does in some level. It helps my creative side because there’s a lot of story, there’s a lot of storytelling in great TV.

I walk a lot, get outside and go for really long walks, and I find that helps.

It’s the resting the brain kind of thing. I don’t want people to think that we just mean rest means lying on the sofa or like going to bed, although sometimes that is a good thing.

Also for me, I guess the filling the creative well. Which for me, involves travel and reading and all of that kind of thing.

What kinds of things do you include in rest?

Pia: I love that you’re pointing that out, Jo. There’s this wonderful article—and I can’t remember her name, you can put it in the show notes [Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith]—she writes about seven different types of rest, because often we just equate rest with laying on the couch and it’s not.

There are all different ways that that we can rest and regenerate. Some of them could even be like light socials and regenerate through relationships. It really depends on the person, on the individual. What makes you feel refueled and recharged?

I do feel that for most of us, daydreaming, and just allowing, just being, is an important part of the rest portfolio, if you will.

For me, to answer your question, rest looks like meditation, movement, and believe it or not, in a way, journaling—like just free writing—feels restful to me in the sense of, I’m just allowing thoughts to pour out and just kind of be rather than trying to write coherently, or make sense, or add value, or whatever the words are.

That’s really helpful, and movement, also. Even though I’m not resting, just moving creates a different space for ideas to bubble up. I often get strange thoughts, good strange thoughts when I’m moving my body. Also while I’m meditating, even though I’m able to see the thoughts that are passing by, I’m like, oh, interesting.

So I think it’s about finding what feels good to you, but it’s about also honoring that part of you that is not doing and working to produce something all the time. There’s a place for that, but there’s also a place for seven different types of rest, we can call it that.

Joanna: Yes, indeed. It’s interesting because there are some people in the writing community who say, “Oh, you must write every day.” I always say, no, I don’t write every day.

I’m a full-time author entrepreneur, but I don’t write every day.

I call myself a binge writer. So I do the book, and then I do the project, and then I launch the book. Like, right now as we’re recording this, I am in launch phase for my book, Death Valley. I’m not writing. I’m in the sort of restful, kind of exhausted, kind of like, oh my goodness, I’m never going to have another idea again.

But even this morning, I actually felt a little twitch. I felt that twitch of interest in other things. So that’s when I start going, oh, okay, maybe my brain is getting ready again. So, yes, this kind of going in and out, I guess, of the output phase. Input phase, output phase, rest phase.

Pia: Yes, cycles, just like seasons. We’re cyclical, you know, and things have cycles. I can really relate with, you know, after I wrote the book in December, now I’m still in launch mode. Launch mode lasts a year at least, which is interesting to me.

What’s great is it’s activating different aspects of my creativity. So it feels like there are different parts of my creativity that I’m applying in the launch phase. I think that’s interesting, and it also gives the book writing creative space some air, which I also need. So I can relate to that.

Also, self-doubt creeps in some time where it’s like, oh, I have a newsletter. It’s like, oh, I can’t possibly think of anything. Everything is so busy. What am I going to write about? I don’t know.

The minute doubt creeps in, just like you said, then the next day it’s like, oh, I’m going to write about doubt. It’s like an idea pops up, and it’s just trusting that you have a wealth of ideas within you, and when you give it some space and you trust that they’re there, they will emerge. That, I’m sure of.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. So coming back, right at the beginning you said about artistic expression and commercial objectives, marrying those two as part of being a creative director. So that sort of brings us to this. You mentioned there, launch mode happening for a whole year.

So you’re now on the commercial side of this book. So tell us about that and about—

What kinds of things are a challenge around the commercial side of the book?

Pia: Well, as you mentioned earlier, Jo, that writing the memoir was one of the toughest—I don’t want to put words in your mouth—I think you said one of the hardest ones?

Joanna: Something like that.

Pia: Something like that, yes. Well, I think marketing this book feels a little bit more vulnerable because I’m sharing very personal stories, in service of the reader and the book, within its pages.

So I am learning how to step deeper into the arena and be vulnerable and show up and ask and tell like, “Hey, I have a book. This is what I’m doing,” and to ask more people to get involved as I go through this launch process. So that feels vulnerable to me, and sometimes really challenging.

Getting reviews is challenging, especially when it’s about my life. So I feel like I’m building really important muscles for my creativity so that I can more freely express myself.

At the end of the day, people are going to experience my work and myself however they experience it. That’s their experience, and they should have whatever experience they want to have. Just like Mel Robbins says, “let them.” Let people have their own experience. It’s not mine, it’s theirs.

It’s that separation that is really important, I think, when you are showing up and sharing something that feels vulnerable and powerful and important, but vulnerable. So I’m learning. I’m learning to stand for my work, and also, in this case, it also means standing for my story.

I think that’s sort of the extra component that makes it more like the growth opportunity I mentioned earlier. So it’s been a wild ride, because even though I come from this world, I’ve never marketed a book before. So there is just so much to learn.

There’s actually so many things that you could be doing as an author when you market your book, and a lot of money you could be spending on it. So, to me—

It’s about finding what activities or actions I can take that feel most aligned and that would have the biggest impact for the book.

I’m still sort of figuring out what that looks like. I had a pre-sale community that was incredibly important to the success of this book, and I’m really, really grateful I had a pre-sale. It allowed me to build community, and it helped strengthen that asking muscle.

Like, “Hey, I’ve written the draft, but I’m not done yet, but I need your help to take the book to print,” and reaching out to almost everyone I knew to ask. That was a huge muscle builder. So now it’s reaching out into the wider world to share the story and to explore different avenues.

Next up, Amazon ads. Let’s see what happens. You know, reviewers. It’s just finding different avenues. I’m sure you have a lot of insight around this to bring the book into the world.

Joanna: You’re exactly right, there are so many things you could do. I actually love that you’ve talked about launch mode for a year because in the kind of indie author community that I’m part of, we tend to just move onto the next book.

We’re not so interested in launching. We’re just loving writing so much that we move on to the next book. I think having that commitment to pushing the book for longer is actually really good.

Especially with an evergreen book like this, it’s not going to go out of style. It’s not based on the news, it’s not political. So you can basically market this forever, which I think is great.

You talk there about aligned and impact. So, and I mean, then you mentioned Amazon ads, which is interesting. I would be interested how you feel that goes.

You are doing a lot of podcast interviews. How has that gone? How have you been pitching for those?

Obviously, you pitched me, and I was interested. So is that going well?

Pia: Yay! I’m so glad you were. Yes, it is going well. Here’s the thing, I think creativity can feel very uncertain, right? We don’t know what we’re going to create when we set out to create anything.

I think podcasts and showing up and sharing our stories is also uncertain. You haven’t met me before, I haven’t met you. That’s also the beauty because we don’t know what we’re going to co-create together in our conversation and what that could be like.

So I find it, again, it’s that combination of nerve-cited. You know, nervous and exciting, and thrilling and terrifying. I feel like, as we move further, I like to call it as Brene Brown says, like the arena.

That quote from Roosevelt: As we move further into the arena, it’s we make ourselves more visible, and we get bruised, and we get ripped and cut. People will see us more and have something to say, but at least we’re out there, like living. You know, we’re doing the things.

I think that requires courage and belief in what it is that you’re creating and in yourself, I suppose. Also I’m going to say the word you don’t like again, fun. For me, sometimes we forget that we also get to make it joyous, like it can be a fun experience.

So far, this is fun. I’m getting to know you, and we’re having a conversation, and hopefully connecting with your audience and people to share stories. So I don’t know, it feels good.

I was on social media for my business, very heavily for quite a number of years, actually. I was on X building a pretty large community for a while, and then not to get deep into politics, but with certain recent shifts in the social media landscape, it just didn’t feel aligned anymore.

Even though it was really counterintuitive, like, oh, really? I’m going to build my business and keep launching my book without it? Like, really? But it felt right. I was like, nope, it’s not feeling good for me. It doesn’t feel like this is my path.

People sold books and built businesses before social media. We can do it again.

We can keep doing that. So I’m currently exploring that, and that’s led me to podcasts. That’s led me to reach out to build and strengthen community, have more meetings one-on-one, exploring events.

What are different ways that I can meet people and share this story and hear their stories? That feels exciting, even though it’s a bit daunting, because it’s like, oh, I haven’t really seen how this is done before. So that’s what I mean by aligned, just to further unfold that.

Impact is, well, this feels like impact. Being able to have a conversation, being able to connect, and hopefully with other people. So impact is not only sales or reviews, which are, of course, very important in the life of a book, but also human impact, reaching people.

Joanna: Yes. I mean, I am having fun having a conversation with you. I think, and you talk about intuition in the book as well, I try to have an intuitive—you know, obviously I prepared and I sent you questions—but I feel like the conversation becomes quite intuitive, and we get into things as they come up. That’s what I enjoy as part of being a being a podcaster.

I did want to come back on the commercial side because I’m obviously making money from my books, and many of the listeners are, or they want to. You have a section in the book where you talk about this. You talk about your money wound and also your scarcity script.

I wondered how you think that appears for writers and authors? Because let’s face it, you have to sell a lot of books to make decent money.

How can authors change their script around books and money?

Pia: That’s a great question. Well, how we do one thing is how we approach everything. So it’s how you approach books and money, it’s also life, how you approach money and life generally.

The same speaks to ideas. Like scarcity could be, of course, scarcity of fun, scarcity of opportunities, but scarcity of ideas. Where am I ever going to get another idea? There’s not enough ideas. What am I going to do? Then that sort of becomes a block, or could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. So how do we start to shift?

Well, it’s trusting that there is an abundance of ideas within us. There’s proof of that. Like, look, Jo, you’ve written, did you say 45 books?

Joanna: Yes. Something like that.

Pia: If that’s not abundance, honey, I don’t know what is. I find that helpful to anchor into trust and into the process of actually creating. So I didn’t write the book from a place of “if I don’t make this book a financial success, I won’t survive.” I think that’s a difficult premise to write a book from, given the state of the industry.

I wrote the book from a place of “I want to share something that has meaning, and I want to give it the best chance at succeeding in the world and reaching people.”

The scarcity, I don’t know, when it comes to writing books, what I really think about more than money, is I think about trusting that you have the book within you, that you have the ideas within you.

Then the money part is releasing, hopefully, that you’re in a position that you can release the expectation of what it needs to deliver financially and just do your best to get it into the world and have different income streams. That’s been very important for me and my creativity.

So not having my only income stream be this book. That would feel very tight for my creativity, that would like start to strangle it, I think. Having multiple ways of creating income feels like abundance to me. Like, look, I can do this, I can do that.

It could also be this book, that maybe the income the book generates is not just through sales. There are other doors that it opens that become really interesting and fascinating.

I kind of try to detach from expectation and outcome, however hard that might be. That, to me, sometimes can feel like scarcity. Like, if I don’t get this, then what? It’s more like, well, I trust that I’m going to get the opportunities that I need, and then I’m going to receive what I need, and I’m going to do this for the love of doing it.

However utopian or whatever that may sound, it feels important to me and to creativity. I don’t know if I fully answered your question, but that’s what comes up for me, as you asked it.

Joanna: Yes, and I am absolutely into multiple streams of income and abundance of ideas. In fact, only this last week, I learned something new from someone that I’m implementing right now, and having another stream of income from that. It’s like, new ideas appear every day.

I actually love that you said about people sold books before social media, and so they can still now. I think that’s so important, because people are like, “Oh, well, if I can’t use this,” or, “I left this platform and went here, and there’s nobody here, and what do I do?” I’m like—

There are literally thousands of other ways to sell books other than social media.

Pia: Absolutely, and that’s where we can apply our creativity. If you’re writing a book— you are creative whether you write a book or not—but especially if you’re writing a book, then you acknowledge your own creativity.

So imagine just applying that in different ways. Like, hmm, what are different ways I could get this book into the world? So that’s what I’m playing with. There’s some that I might be able to see, and others I might not, and other ways people might help me see.

They go, “Oh, have you thought of that?” “No, actually, that’s really interesting.” I think people come into your life also to show you. I heard something, actually, it was from a tarot reader, full disclosure, but she’s wonderful. She said that the affirmation or the thought is, “allow me to recognize the opportunities.”

That shifted something from me. I really loved it, talking about scarcity and abundance. Like allow me to recognize the opportunities. Hey, wait a minute. That means the opportunities are already here. Oh, how cool. That’s like game changing for me. They’re already here. I just need to recognize them.

Sometimes if we get hooked to what something has to be. Like it has to wear this specific Yves Saint Laurent outfit, and if it’s not wearing that, then it’s not the opportunity.

Letting go of what it has to look like or exactly what it has to do or be, kind of frees us up to see, “Oh my god, look. It’s wearing a vintage Dior dress from the 70s. Wow, look at that opportunity.”

Sometimes opportunities can come to us in a lot of different shapes and forms, but we need to kind of release the grip a little bit and trust that they’re here. It’s available to us. We just need to recognize them. So that was something I found very helpful on my journey.

So it’s like, I don’t know what this will be. Let’s see. Let’s see what opportunities I might be able to recognize as I go journey through the process of marketing this book.

Joanna: Well, it is a great book. Welcome to the Creative Club. So tell us—

Where can people find you and the book online?

Pia: All the usual places. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, bookshop.org, are the three main ones. I am at Kollektiv Studio. So that’s Kollektiv spelled actually in Danish because I currently live in Copenhagen. I lived in London before I moved here, and before that, many other countries. So Kollektiv.studio.

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

Pia: Thank you so much for having me, Jo. It was a wild ride. I really enjoyed it.

The post Make Life Your Biggest Art Project: Pia Leichter On Writing, Creative Courage, And Changing Your Narrative first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In storytelling, few arcs are as gripping—or chilling—as the Corruption Character Arc. In this arc, characters don’t just fall, they choose to fall (although, of course, they don’t generally think of it like that). Whether driven by fear, pride, or desire, they trade their integrity for a Lie, believing it will give them what they want. Even when this is true, the cost is an ever-deepening descent into self-delusion and, often, self-righteousness.

In today’s breakdown, we’ll explore how to craft this final entry—and in many ways most insidiously dangerous—in the triad of foundational Negative Change Arcs. If you’re writing a story about a character who chooses the wrong path and justifies it every step of the way, this post will offer insights into creating a devastating Corruption Arc. Throughout this month, we’ve been looking under the hood of the three foundational Negative Change Arcs.

We’ve already explored how the Disillusionment Arc bridges the Positive Change and Negative Change Arcs by forcing characters through a revelation of the thematic Truth that is so powerful it is uncertain whether they will embrace it in a way that is ultimately redemptive or will succumb to the bitterness and resistance that can lead to ever-deepening negative spirals.

We’ve also explored the Fall Arc—in which characters refuse to take that journey into the Truth at all, instead doubling down on mistaken perceptions in a way that requires an initial Lie to be bolstered many times over with further Lies, leading the character to a much more benighted state than that of the beginning.

Creating Character Arcs (Amazon affiliate link)

Today, we culminate with the Corruption Arc, which presents as the mirror opposite of the Positive Change Arc. In a Positive Change Arc, characters will evolve their perceptions of themselves and the world from a limited Lie to a more expanded Truth. Oppositely, in a Corruption Arc, the character will begin in a relatively privileged and enlightened perspective, only to compromise this position through a failure in vigilance against the always present possibility of self-delusion. From there, they may well spiral ever deeper into the darkness.

In This Article:

• The Corruption Arc at a Glance
• It Starts With a Lie: The Moral Weakness at the Heart of the Corruption Character Arc
• The Fall Within the Corruption: Trading Truth for Power
• In the End: Self-Delusion and the Mass Spread of the Lie

The Corruption Arc At a Glance

Character Sees Truth > Rejects Truth > Embraces Lie

Graphic by Joanna Marie, from the Creating Character Arcs Workbook. Click the image for a larger view.

The First Act (1%-25%)

1%: The Hook: Understands Truth

The protagonist lives in a Normal World that allows for or even encourages the thematic Truth. As a result, the protagonist starts out with an understanding of the Truth.

12%: The Inciting Event: First Temptation of Lie

The Call to Adventure, when the protagonist first encounters the main conflict, also brings the first subtle temptation that the Lie might be able to serve the protagonist better than the Truth.

25%: The First Plot Point: Enters Beguiling Adventure World of Lie

The protagonist is faced with a consequential choice, an enticement out of the First Act’s safe, Truth-based Normal World into the Second Act’s beguiling, Lie-based Adventure World. Not realizing the danger, the protagonist is lured through the Door of No Return by the promise of the Thing the Character Wants.

The Second Act (25%-75%)

37%: The First Pinch Point: Torn Between Truth and Lie

The protagonist is torn between the old Truth and the new Lie. The Lie proves itself effective in moving the character nearer the Want. But the character wages an internal conflict in moving further away from old convictions and understandings of the world.

50%: The Midpoint (Second Plot Point): Embraces Lie Without Fully Rejecting Truth

The protagonist encounters a Moment of Truth and faces the Lie in all its power. The character recognizes the Want cannot be gained without the Lie. Although not yet willing to fully and consciously reject the Truth, the character makes the decision to fully embrace the Lie.

62%: The Second Pinch Point: Resists Sacrifice Demanded by Truth

The protagonist is “rewarded” for using the Lie. Building upon what was learned at the Midpoint, the protagonist will start implementing Lie-based actions in combating the antagonistic force and reaching toward the Want. The Truth pulls on the character, demanding sacrifices too great to give. The character begins resisting the Truth more and more adamantly.

The Third Act (75%-100%)

75%: The Third Plot Point: Fully Embraces Lie

The protagonist utterly rejects the Truth and embraces the Lie. The character acts upon this in a way that creates a Low Moment for the world (and for the character morally, if not practically). The character is now willing to knowingly endure the consequences of rejecting the Truth in exchange for the rewards of embracing the Lie.

88%: The Climax: Final Push to Gain Want

The protagonist enters the final confrontation with the antagonistic force to decide whether or not the character will gain the Want. Unhampered by the Truth, the character pushes forward ruthlessly toward the plot goal.

98%: The Climactic Moment: Moral Failure

The protagonist uses the Lie in an attempt to gain the Want. The character may gain the Want and remain senseless to the evil engendered by these actions. Or the character may gain the Want only to be devastated that it wasn’t worth what was sacrificed. Or the character may fail to gain the Want and be devastated by the realization that the sacrifices to the Lie were fruitless. One way or another, the character definitively ends the conflict with the antagonistic force.

100%: The Resolution: Aftermath

The protagonist must confront the aftermath of all choices. The character may turn away from the Lie, admitting mistakes and accepting consequences. Or the character may callously forge ahead, intent on continuing to use the Lie to further self-serving ends.

It Starts With a Lie: The Moral Weakness at the Heart of the Corruption Character Arc

All character arcs start with a Lie the Character Believes. This is a mistaken or limited perception of reality.

The Lie could be:

• Simply a lack of information (e.g., how to overthrow the bad guy).
• An outright delusion (e.g., “I am the smartest person in any room”).
• A perspective held about one’s self that is either incorrectly positive or incorrectly negative (e.g., “I am a kind person” or “I am worthless”).
• An over- or underestimation of others (e.g., hero worship of a flawed leader or demeaning put-downs of certain people).
• An expectation of how the world works (e.g., “the deck is stacked against me” or “I deserve to have the rules bent for me”).

Whatever the case, the challenge to this Lie catalyzes the beginning of every type of character arc—except the Corruption Arc. Instead, the Corruption Arc begins when a character is somehow tempted toward a more constrictive perspective. On the surface, of course, this doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone who consciously holds a relatively expanded perspective be foolish enough to willingly step into a more limited way of being?

The answer is as old as time and in many ways boils down to a Lie of its own: the characters believe they can use the Lie for their own purposes without allowing it to corrupt them. Hubris is always a factor.

Sometimes, hubris may be the main factor, in that characters feel so secure in their currently positive worldview that they believe they can risk taking a temporary step back into the shadows.

Other times, the primary motivator may be high stakes that cause characters to feel they are without choices; they understand they are not choosing an option that aligns with their integrity, but they choose anyway because they “have to” and because, again with a measure of hubris, they believe they can flirt with this seeming shortcut and still return with their integrity in tact. These characters make the fundamental mistake of believing that because they see some Truth, they are capable of seeing all of it. They believe they are capable of shining a light through the darkness they willingly choose to navigate in search of a treasure they need.

For Example:

Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars believes the Lie that power can prevent loss, leading him to embrace control as a moral justification. He also tends to conflate power with wisdom, overestimating his ability to wield power well.

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005), 20th Century Fox.

This is what makes the Corruption Arc one of the most complex character arcs. Why? Because daring the darkness in search of a healing treasure is also the heart of the heroic Positive Change Arc, in which characters risk everything—including integrity and perspective—to seek a better way of being. In essence, that is what Corruption Arc protagonists also do—or at least this is what they tell themselves they are doing. The difference is that when the character is presented with the choice between desire and Truth (i.e., power and integrity), the Corruption Arc character’s ability to recognize or honor the latter will increasingly fail.

Writing Archetypal Character Arcs (affiliate link)

The polarity of humility and hubris are present in both Positive Change and Corruption Arcs. Traditionally, Positive Change Arc characters (particularly Hero archetypes) start out with a certain measure of hubris (a form of the Lie), which they must exchange for humility as they progress the path. While Corruption Arc characters also begin with at least a hidden measure of hubris, they will end, at least in the abstract, in downfall and humiliation.

For Example:

Macbeth believes his destiny entitles him to power, which allows him to rationalize betrayal and murder.

Macbeth (2015), StudioCanal.

Ultimately, what the Corruption Arc shows us is the high cost of failing to hold our previous successes—whether material or spiritual—with the type of humility that safeguards our gains against our own capacity for delusion and regression.

The Fall Within the Corruption: Trading Truth for Power

Just as the Disillusionment Arc can be recognized as an abbreviated Positive Change Arc (stopping short before it is clear whether the character will be able to integrate a harsh Truth into a greater good), the Fall Arc (which we discussed last week) can be recognized as an abbreviated Corruption Arc. In this case, the Fall Arc represents the latter part of the Corruption Arc, after  characters have adopted the Lie and now must work double-time to bolster that Lie with even more Lies.

You’ll remember that the Fall Arc shows a character who refuses to accept the challenge of the Truth and from there devolves into a much worse Lie, all in an effort to protect that initial (often quite small) Lie.

Graphic by Joanna Marie, from the Creating Character Arcs Workbook. Click the image for a larger view.

The Corruption Arc begins before this point, revealing a character who likely has more mental or moral capacity for recognizing comparative Lies and Truths. This is a character who has achieved some level of personal integrity, which has now brought them to a place of testing. The central question is whether they will compromise their understanding of their own personal Truth (aka, their integrity) in exchange for a measure of power.

For Example:

Walter White in Breaking Bad begins manipulating, lying, and killing as he clings to power, convincing himself it’s for his family—when it’s really about ego.

Breaking Bad (2008-2013), AMC.

What always makes this invitation to power tempting is that it is, essentially, a shortcut. Whatever the practical mechanics of the plot, we know this is a shortcut on a character level because it prompts the character to take the “easy route” in defiance of a deeper sense of personal right and wrong. At some level, the Corruption Arc character will always know this, and in more nuanced stories, will often be shown to struggle with it. In short, they make an informed choice. They are not ignorant about what they are choosing. They understand it is against their deepest self, and they understand the possibility of untoward consequences to themselves, or more likely, to others. They do it anyway.

From there, the characters’ journey will begin to mirror the Fall Arc. In order to protect this one out-of-integrity choice, characters begin justifying their actions with an ever-deepening slide into delusion. From believing they “had no choice” or “no one would get hurt,” they will begin to adopt perspectives that insist “they were in the right” or even “they were acting in everyone’s best interest” or “they knew better than the ignorant masses.”

For Example:

Gollum in The Lord of the Rings slowly abandons his identity and humanity, letting the Ring reshape his very soul for the sake of possessing it.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), New Line Cinema.

In the End: Self-Delusion and the Mass Spread of the Lie

The tragedy of the Corruption Arc is its excruciatingly slow slide away from wholeness into delusion. Corruption Arc characters very often end by achieving their goals. Thanks to the devil’s deal in which they sell their souls, they may well gain tremendous power and influence within their personal spheres. In the end, some characters may retain enough sense of their personal Truth to wake up to the horrors they have wrought in their own lives and others, in which case the victory for which they have sacrificed so much will prove horrifyingly empty. In other stories, characters will end by fully embracing their new Lie-based identity. Not only will they become the monster they initially believed they could resist, they may even fully condone what they have become.

For Example:

Michael Corleone in The Godfather exemplifies a Corruption Arc character who justifies his increasingly immoral actions by convincing himself they are necessary for protecting his family. He eventually becomes fully immersed in the darkness he once resisted. By the end, Michael’s self-delusion is so complete he not only believes his choices are justified, he also pulls others into his moral decay, perpetuating the destruction of those around him.

The Godfather (1972), Paramount Pictures.

Those Corruption Arcs that do not end with the characters achieving a redemptive sense of humiliation at what they have become will instead end with the character in a state of grotesque self-righteousness. They will justify their choices by any means necessary, no matter the consequences heaped upon others. Like the Fall Arc, the Corruption Arc character’s self-delusion in the end may be so complete and compelling that it also warps the perception of others, pulling them down into the darkness as well.

For Example:

By the time we meet President Snow in The Hunger Games, he’s wholly consumed by the belief that fear is the only way to ensure social stability. He’s convinced himself that this Lie is not only necessary but noble. He enforces it with ruthless propaganda, manipulation, and death. He’s not just corrupted himself; he’s built an entire system on his delusion.

The Hunger Games (2012), Lionsgate.

***

The Corruption Arc reminds us that character arcs are not just about change but about choice. Of all the Negative Change Arcs, the Corruption Arc may be the most haunting. It doesn’t happen to the character; it happens because of the character. The central danger isn’t ignorance or even resistance to the Truth, it’s the conscious decision to turn away from it. When well-written, these arcs offer some of the most compelling, nuanced, and tragically human stories. As writers, exploring this arc challenges us not just to understand the psychology of our characters, but to confront the darker possibilities within ourselves.

In Summary:

The Corruption Arc is a powerful exploration of a character’s conscious choice to embrace a Lie, despite knowing the Truth. Unlike the other Negative Change Arcs, which often involve ignorance or self-deception, the Corruption Arc is chilling precisely because it requires awareness. The character sees the Truth, but chooses not to follow it. This makes the arc uniquely tragic, as it dramatizes not just a character’s fall, but the moral failures leading up to it.

Key Takeaways

• The Corruption Arc centers on a character who knows the Truth but deliberately endangers it.
• This arc is defined by conscious moral compromise in pursuit of power, security, or other personal goals.
• The arc usually starts from a place of strength or clarity, making the fall more impactful.
• Unlike the Disillusionment Arc (which involves a painful but authentic awakening), the Corruption Arc is about the willful embrace of the Lie.
• This arc creates deeply human and emotionally resonant stories, especially when the character’s motivations are understandable or even sympathetic.
• Writing a Corruption Arc challenges authors to grapple with the complexity of choice, consequence, and morality.

Want more?

Creating Character Arcs (Amazon affiliate link)

If you’re intrigued by the emotional and thematic power of the Corruption Arc, you’ll find even more in-depth guidance in my book Creating Character Arcs. It walks you step-by-step through how to craft compelling transformations—Positive, Flat, and Negative—and how to seamlessly weave them into your plot. Whether your characters are resisting change or spiraling toward it, the tools inside will help you bring their arcs to life. It’s available in paperback, e-book, and audiobook (along with its companion guide the Creating Character Arcs Workbook).

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! Have you ever written a Corruption Character Arc or considered one for your protagonist or antagonist? 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 The Most Dangerous Arc: Breaking Down the Corruption Character Arc appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

How can you implement ‘See, Do, Repeat’ in your writing and author business? How can you embrace optimism as a creative entrepreneur and move past fear of judgment to publish your book? Dr Rebecca White shares her journey and tips.

In the intro, Short form audio opportunities and tips [Self Publishing Advice]; Wiley’s guidelines for AI usage; Collective licensing for UK authors [The Guardian]; Entrepreneurship and writing, I’m on The En Factor Podcast;

Plus, Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition on pre-order, and I’m on the El Camino de Santiago Pilgrim Podcast talking about my walk along the Portuguese coastal route.

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. Rebecca White is an award-winning entrepreneur, executive board member, professor, and the author of See, Do, Repeat: The Practice of Entrepreneurship. She’s also the host of the En Factor Podcast.

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

• Rebecca’s entrepreneurial journey and background
• Actionable steps to embrace the entrepreneurial mindset
• The “See, Do, Repeat” framework
• Applying the “See, Do, Repeat” framework to author entrepreneurship
• The role of optimism in entrepreneurship
• Transitioning from academic writing to popular books
• Overcoming fear of judgement by peers

You can find Rebecca at DrRebeccaWhite.com.

Transcript of Interview with Dr. Rebecca White

Joanna: Dr. Rebecca White is an award-winning entrepreneur, executive board member, professor, and the author of See, Do, Repeat: The Practice of Entrepreneurship. She’s also the host of the En Factor Podcast. So welcome to the show, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Thank you, Joanna. I am honored to be here. I love your podcast, and I’m excited. I am reading your book Pilgrimage, and I just love everything that you’ve done. So it’s really great to be here and have this conversation today.

Joanna: Oh, well, thanks so much. So first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and what drives your interest in entrepreneurship.

Rebecca: I grew up in this small town in West Virginia. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but it’s quite rural. I always had these dreams and interests of doing other things rather than being in a small town.

I had a wonderful mother. Her name was Betty White. So great name, maybe not the Betty White most people think of. She had an entrepreneurial mindset back before we even had the words to put with it, and so I learned about this whole mindset from her as a child.

It’s really driven everything I’ve done. It’s kind of like it grabbed me, and I had to hold on. So I’ve really applied an entrepreneurial mindset in everything that I’ve done, from being an educator to a book author to a podcaster to even a corporate board member.

You mentioned all those slashes in my career, I think that’s part of being an entrepreneur as well, this whole idea that there’s always something new and a new opportunity to explore. So it’s really just been a part of my life, and everything that I’ve done, I think because I learned it from her.

Joanna: That’s cool. When you said West Virginia, I just had that song playing, “Take Me Home, Country Road.”

Rebecca: Yes, everybody knows that.

Joanna: Yes, that’s the only thing. I’ve never been there, but that’s what it brought to mind, which was quite funny.

So you were in the small town and you had this mindset, but how did you get out of the small town and get into work? How did you make it out of there?

I know some people listening, it might just be a life situation they’re trapped in, or a job. Many people are in a job, and they might want to be more entrepreneurial, but they didn’t have the mindset that your mom gave you.

How did you get out of that small town? How can other people get out if they feel trapped?

Rebecca: That’s a really great question. For me, it was education, and I just kept going. My parents valued education. My mom was very curious, and she was way ahead of her time, the way she approached life and saw things.

She had her own business. She was a florist. When I graduated with my undergraduate degree, she invited me to come back and take over the business, and that’s like the last thing I wanted to do. I had worked in that business all my years growing up.

It was great for her. It was a great opportunity for our family. It afforded my brother and I the opportunity to get an education. Once I left and went to college—and I didn’t go that far away at first—but once I went to college, I just knew that I wasn’t going to go back.

There wasn’t a lot there, and fortunately, my parents didn’t expect it. So for me, I was young, and so it was through taking my first job and then going back to school. There’s all kinds of stories in there that I could share, but really—

It was just taking one step at a time and having parents that supported that.

At a young age, I just had sort of a wanderlust, I guess. I felt like there were always opportunities out there that I wanted to check out and try.

I also got married in the process, later divorced. I went to graduate school, I got my masters, and then I got a job teaching with my masters and found that I did well with that. So I went back to get a doctorate, and after I got my doctorate, I accepted a teaching position in Cincinnati, Ohio.

I was actually educated in Virginia at Virginia Tech, and then went to Cincinnati, Ohio. By this time, I had two small children and I was divorced. It was quite a challenging time for me. I managed to write a dissertation with two small children as a single parent, it wasn’t easy.

Then I took that job in Cincinnati and started building programs and really became part of a movement in entrepreneurship education. Actually, my PhD is not in entrepreneurship, but that’s because they really didn’t have that kind of degree back then.

So I got a PhD in strategic management, and took my first job. There weren’t any entrepreneurship courses offered at that time. So I was very fortunate, I had a dean at the time that was very supportive and allowed me to pursue this interest in offering an entrepreneurship course.

We offered a course, and it was something the university had never offered, so I had to create it. I explored the field, the discipline, the few people that were out there doing this. I did my research and created this course.

Then we raised money. So just like any entrepreneurial adventure, we had to raise enough money to start a program. So I went through all the steps, really, of a startup to build an entrepreneurship program at this university in Cincinnati, Ohio.

In doing so, I really kind of launched my career as sort of the second tier pioneering group in entrepreneurship education. Since then, I’ve just had so many opportunities to work with programs and work with students around the world in this space of entrepreneurship education.

So really it was education that, for me—it’s not for everybody—but for me, it was the way that I was able to get out and build this career.

Joanna: If you don’t mind, you referred a few times to the past—

Can you tell people how old you are so that they get some sense of how long this period has been?

Rebecca: Yes, I’m in my 60s now. So I’ve been teaching and doing this entrepreneurship gig for almost four decades. It’s been a long time.

What I thought by now, Jo, would be that I would be retired, or at least close to retiring, but the opportunities just still come along, and they keep getting bigger, it seems like.

Joanna: Also, I wonder whether entrepreneurs ever retire!

Rebecca: I don’t think so.

Joanna: No, exactly. You want to start something else, right? Let’s get into the book.

What is the “See, Do, Repeat” framework, and why is it useful for authors to consider?

Rebecca: Teaching all those years as an entrepreneur, I saw a lot of change in our field. So when I first started teaching, it was all about starting a business. In fact, in the earliest years, it was more about small business.

Everything was taking what we had studied in business school, which was primarily around corporate business, and applying it in a miniature way, if you will. It really didn’t work, and so the field started to develop its own body of literature and research around entrepreneurship.

That direction was really interesting because although it started in this whole area of creating new companies and running small businesses, it really morphed, I would say, into a focus on the mindset of entrepreneurship and how it applies in almost virtually any context.

I started out my description of my background by just saying that I’ve applied it everywhere, and so that became really interesting to me. I’ve always been fascinated by the way people think and by the stories.

You mentioned my podcast, and it’s why I love my podcast. I just love to ask people lots of questions and find out about them and the way they think.

So this whole book is really, I would say, 20 years of research that I had been doing trying to understand what this entrepreneurial mindset was. We talked about it a lot, but it didn’t have a whole lot of definition. People always seemed to know it when they saw it, but they didn’t really know exactly how to describe it.

Entrepreneurship education became much more than just starting a business.

It’s applying it in so many other contexts. We’ve had students come through that have been interested in starting not for profits. They’ve started churches.

They’ve developed new products that then they licensed. They didn’t even start a company around them. I found I was always drawn to the creative students, and I think you and your audience would appreciate this, because I saw over the years that most creatives had to have some of these entrepreneurial mindset skills.

They were going to be in a position where they were taking advantage of opportunities, and they were going to have to raise money, or at least find a way to pursue their craft. That included maybe some marketing. It included maybe raising money from donors and investors.

So I became very interested very early on, for entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial mindset for students who are not studying business. So that’s been a lot of the focus of why this book was written.

I spent a lot of years trying to understand an entrepreneurial mindset. So this book was really an effort to bring all this academic literature to a popular audience and share the idea of a mindset in a very, very simple and easy to remember and understand framework.

So that, “see, do, repeat,” it’s based also in what we call competencies. A lot of fields, like nursing and healthcare, have used competencies for a long time to find a way to measure tasks that are challenging to define and measure.

So it’s identifying three competencies of an entrepreneurial mindset. Over the years, these are the three competencies, and then associated with each of them are multiple skills that I found have been repeated among all entrepreneurs.

It’s the ability to recognize opportunities, that’s the “see” part. The willingness to take action that’s “do.”

Then the perseverance and resilience to execute past failure because failure is definitely a part of every success journey.

Along the way, the people who are not successful as entrepreneurs tend to get stopped. They may recognize an opportunity. Multiple times a day, I have people reaching out to me with, “I have an idea. What do you think?” The difference is, do you take action on that, and then do you keep going and execute past failure?

So there are a lot of things we could talk about with that, but that’s the principles of the book. It’s really to take all this academic research of an entrepreneurial mindset and make it something simple and something that people can apply.

Joanna: Can you give us a concrete example of the “See, Do, Repeat” in the author entrepreneur space?

Rebecca: Sure, absolutely. I’ll use my own example if that’s okay. So what happened with me, I’ve been writing for a long time, academic writing, and it’s a completely different animal. I’ve also been a writer for, you know, always.

I write for fun, and I write for therapy. I know you’ve talked about The Morning Pages by Julia Cameron. My mom gave me that book many years ago because she was an artist. So I’ve written for therapy. I love writing.

This particular book, I was approached by a pretty well-known book publisher in the academic world write books, not for textbooks, but for faculty. Those books are much more academic and they combine research. So I was approached by a book publisher to write a book on entrepreneurial mindset for that audience.

So that was pre-pandemic, and so I started exploring that. I had conversations with an editor that was assigned to me, and so we were getting started on that whole process when the pandemic happened. So my editor lost her job, and I was assigned to somebody else, and we didn’t have a great fit.

So I stepped back from that, and I thought about it, and I said —

Am I really that interested in continuing to write for other academics? Because what I’m really interested in is how I can make this book different.

So the opportunity started to emerge for me, and I started to recognize in my world that there was probably an opportunity out there for people to learn more about this. So I think for any book author, it’s paying attention to the world around you.

I talk about this in my book, about how we recognize opportunities.

Really, curiosity is a big part of it, anybody who’s curious, paying attention, and then connecting the dots.

That’s a big part of the creative process.

So for me, a lot of it was there were messages coming from outside that maybe I had the expertise and the credentials to do this. There were also messages coming to me from other people that I was working with, or people that I was surrounded with, or things that I read that led me to believe there was an opportunity to write for a different audience.

So that opportunity came. The taking action, that was a really tough one because I started down this path, like so many others, without a clue about what it would take to write a more popular press book. So there’s a lot of lessons I learned there.

I had to overcome a lot of my own personal beliefs that I didn’t have the skills to write a book that would be successful and popular.

The more I learned about what it meant to get published by a traditional publisher, which was pretty much all I knew at that time, I just saw that it was going to be a monumental hurdle to overcome. So I just started doing my research and started taking action.

I could have stopped there. I could have gone back to writing what I was comfortable with or knew, but I didn’t. I continued to persevere, and I had lots of failures along the way.

In fact, this book was first published by, I wouldn’t say a traditional publisher, but an intermediary publisher, let’s just say that. I don’t want to say too much about them because it wasn’t a great experience, but I learned a lot along that process.

While I don’t necessarily think that publishing this book was a huge failure, it wasn’t the success that I had hoped

— or that it maybe could have been, and I had lots of failures along the way.

In fact, not getting paid royalties for a long time, and a lot of other things that just didn’t work out.

Also, not understanding, quite frankly, that I had to really put a lot of effort into marketing. That was probably my biggest lack of understanding.

I’ve never been an absolutely huge fan of social media, although I do more of it now, and I have people that help me. Students are great with that, by the way. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, and I feel like the “See, Do, Repeat,” it’s played out in everything that I’ve done.

I think for any book author—back to your original question, long answer—it’s really about once you see that opportunity, putting it out there and testing it, and then educating yourself as to what it takes to make it happen, and then continuing to persevere.

The repeat of the “See, Do, Repeat” model is sometimes the hardest one for people to understand because I am not suggesting that you never change course, I’m not suggesting that every idea that you have is truly an opportunity that should be acted on.

So it’s not that, but it’s about really recognizing that if you remain optimistic and you recognize the problem that you’re trying to solve, and you stay focused on that problem rather than the solution you had in mind, you will come to an outcome that will be favorable.

Out of the process, along the same time that I was writing this book, I was launching my podcast. What happened was —

My podcast really became research for my book.

I was able to take my research out of my office, so to speak, and make it available so everybody could hear the stories.

So as I was writing the book, I was able to use stories that I was capturing as I was doing the podcast. So it all came together.

I never could have envisioned that exactly. I knew where I was headed. I knew what the opportunity was that I thought was there, but I had to stay focused on the problem I was trying to solve. So that got me to where I needed to be.

Joanna: Yes, and I think what’s also interesting is some people—like you said you had a difficult time with the publisher that you had originally used—some people would have just given up on that book and maybe written another book or something.

You also clearly chose to keep focused on making this book more of a success. So presumably—

You went and got the rights back, and then got on with the publishing process yourself.

Rebecca: Yes. In fact, I’m an indie publisher now, and in large part thanks to you and what I’ve learned from you. So I published this book in ’21, and I still believe in it. I still believe it’s an important book, and I intend to continue to market it and sell it and use it in the model, because I still believe in it.

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about it, but I also decided that I wanted to have more control over it. I needed to walk the talk what I was teaching my students to do.

So I was Googling around, trying to find out how to get back the rights to my book, and I came across a podcast that you did a couple of years ago. I know you’ve got about 800 now, so it was in the 600s.

Joanna: This one would have been with Katlyn Duncan, probably. She’s got a book called Take Back Your Book.

[Check out the interview with Katlyn here.]

Rebecca: I think that’s probably right. It was a few years back, and I listened to that. Interestingly, I have a husband who’s an attorney, but in spite of that, this is a very specific kind of thing I wanted to do.

Getting out there and hearing your podcast was the beginning point for me. Then I started listening to more of them, and I still enjoy them.

I have really embraced this idea of being an indie publisher, and I love it.

I have other books I want to write. In fact, some fiction books I’d love to write, but that’s a whole other story.

Joanna: I love that. I think what you’ve done there is great. A lot of nonfiction authors who have—like, this is your whole career. This book is one of the magnum opus style books. It really does encapsulate a lot of your body of work.

So, of course, you’re going to keep promoting that, keep marketing that, keep doing other work around it. I think that’s really important to say, in the indie community, we often focus on having more books, writing more books, putting more out there, which is one way.

There’s also a lot of people, especially in nonfiction, who have one sort of key book, even if you’re going to write more. Then that’s the sort of focus of their talks and their career side. So I think that’s completely valid.

You did mention the word optimistic, which I wanted to come back on, because you have a whole chapter on optimism. I’m, by default, an optimist. I’m also a techno-optimist. I think humans will figure things out.

As we talk now, it’s April 2025, and we’re not going to get into politics and the world, but it is an uncertain time. With AI and all of this, authors can feel not quite so optimistic.

How can we choose optimism and foster optimism?

Rebecca: I love that question. I saw this modeled in my mom and my grandfather, in particular. I’m like you, I’m optimistic as well. I think every entrepreneur has to have some level of optimism because otherwise, why would you do it?

If you don’t believe that you have agency, if you don’t believe that you have some control over your future, if you don’t have some hope for the future, why would you do all the work that’s required? So it’s really, in my mind, optimism is about creating your own destiny through choice and action.

That, to me, is a big part of what an entrepreneurial mindset is all about. Optimism also sees opportunities instead of difficulties. I’ll give you an example.

When the pandemic caused us to have to go online with all of our classes and teaching, we had some graduate students at our university that were quite upset over the experience.

I understand everybody was upset. It was a very scary time, and you’re right, we still have a lot of uncertainty. I did a little video for them to talk to them about how that period in time was very special, and it was a unique opportunity for them to find opportunity.

It resonated with some of them. Some of them continued to be angry about the experience because, quite honestly, we have a beautiful facility on our campus for entrepreneurship, and they had signed up to be able to take advantage of all the events and programs and things that we run in person there.

The idea that they weren’t going to get that, they felt cheated, and I understand that. We did our best to create alternative opportunities for them, but at the end of the day, as we look back on it, I think we can all think of many examples of things that came out of the pandemic which were positive outcomes and opportunities.

Certainly many were not, but that optimism, I think, is something that is critical for entrepreneurs. I talk about it in my book, there are dangers of being overly optimistic, and there’s plenty of research that shown that, especially if you’re overly optimistic about your financial situation, that can be kind of dangerous.

Most psychologists agree that optimism can be learned.

So it’s not a static thing. It really has to do with the way you look at the world. Whether you personalize things, or whether you recognize that everything in the world is not about you. The pervasiveness of things and the permanence of things.

So you can really, if you feel like maybe, anybody that’s listening, that you would like to be more optimistic, there is something called learned optimism. There’s books out there and plenty of things that you can do.

I think it’s critical to have that trust in ourselves. What’s the alternative, really, Jo? Do we just stop and sit and complain? You know, that’s not much fun.

Joanna: No. I think that is a really good point. I’m sure there is a default level of optimism that people have, and I think obviously you and I have that. As you said, it can be learned.

I think one of the things I’ve discovered for myself as well. In the beginning of the pandemic—and in fact, I look at my photos, I took a lot of screenshots—in the first few months in 2020, from the January, because I was on Twitter looking at what was coming out of China and then Italy and all of this.

I took so many screenshots, evidence of my doom scrolling. I thought I was going to write a book on a pandemic, as many of us did at that time. Then I obviously realized that this wasn’t helpful.

My photos—I take a lot of photos and screenshots and stuff—but my photos change to pictures of flowers and the outdoors and walking a lot more, and I’ve avoided the TV news.

I haven’t watched the news on TV for over a decade, probably more like two decades.

I do read the news on some apps on my phone, but I don’t watch TV news. This is a challenge for people listening, like one of the things I think makes me more optimistic is just curating what goes into my head and being quite careful.

Some people think that’s denying what’s going on, but I’m very aware of what’s going on. I just don’t do it in an overly emotional way.

What are some of the practices you think foster optimism?

Rebecca: Well, I love that. Making that choice. I mentioned that it’s really about choice and agency. There’s a lot we can’t control. That’s just the bottom line, I’ve learned that, but there’s a lot we can control. That’s exactly what you’re talking about. You can control how much of that you let into your head.

It can be hard. I’m married to a news junkie, and it can be really hard because I want to know what’s going on in the world, and I’m like you, I tend to read it more than watch it on TV.

I also choose, for example, during the pandemic, I don’t know if it was the same in the UK, but for a while, every night, there would be this thing on the news about how many people had died that day. I’m like, I am not going to bed thinking about how many people died today.

I mean, there are plenty of people that, sadly, die every day, no matter what’s going on in the world.

Joanna: It’s life. People die.

Rebecca: That’s right, that’s right. There were people being born as well. So I made that choice. It sounds really weird, but when I made the choice to stop all of that, I remember I had this really vivid dream, and it was in color. I mean, this is going to sound so weird, but I had this dream that I was flying.

It was like I was leaving all that behind, and I was going to accept that whatever happened happened, and I could control what I could control, and that was it. I would suggest that it’s about taking control of what we let into our head, just like you said. Choice and action and agency.

Recognizing that there’s only so many things we could control, but within what we can control, we have so much power.

Joanna: Yes, in what we can control. Yes—

If I get too miserable, I will get off the computer, off my phone, and go for a walk in nature.

Rebecca: Nature is great, yes.

Joanna: It just gives you that perspective. I was thinking, because at the moment here in Bath, the sun is out, spring is here, things are growing again. Things in my garden that I seriously thought were dead have started sprouting and growing leaves. It’s another one of those, you know, this too shall pass, and the seasons will turn again.

That just makes me feel more positive and happy. It’s been a very long winter here. I imagine some people listening, it might still be winter by the time they hear this. I feel like that also makes me more optimistic is seeing how nature recovers every year. Things always get better.

Rebecca: Absolutely. I think I mentioned it in the book too, gratitude. That was something that my mom always believed in. I think gratitude, and just joy. I have to say, I always enjoy your podcast because you are always so joyful in the way you communicate with people. I just think that is very special.

We have that choice to be kind and to bring joy to what we’re doing.

It’s so amazing when I meet people that I know are struggling, but they’re still able to be kind and thoughtful to the people around them.

Taking, I guess, that pressure off by not focusing so much on ourselves and what’s missing, but opening up to the fact that there are other people in the world, and we can bring joy to them and ourselves at the same time.

Joanna: Well, coming back to the book, because you did say earlier that you’ve written a lot of academic writing as part of your job, and that this was your sort of trying to write something more popular. What I would say is that it is incredibly well researched and has a lot of references.

It is, I would say, more of a crossover to academic books. It’s certainly not a pop sort of book where there’s no references at all or maybe only a couple in the appendix. For example, the kind of things I’ve written. I wondered what your thoughts were.

So there are people listening who will be academic writers, and they will struggle with, I think, a lot of the relaxing that has to go into writing a more popular book.

Any tips for those who want to cross over from academic writing to more popular books?

Rebecca: Yes, thank you for that question. That was a struggle for me, and a lot of it has to do with how you’re trained, I guess, or prepped for whatever the opportunity is that you’re going to pursue with your writing.

For me, I had been living in this world where everything I had written, before it was published, it was going to be peer reviewed, and it was going to be evaluated for accuracy and legitimacy and reliability and credibility. So the idea that I could just write something, I could say it was totally, totally different for me.

I think you’re right. I mean, I worried a little bit about whether this book would be readable, but I felt like I really changed my writing style a lot.

Joanna: It’s definitely readable, just to be clear for everyone. This is a popular book, but I can also sense the amount of research, and you’re very meticulous about that. So I think you have managed both, but it is hard, I know.

Rebecca: Well, thank you for that. I really appreciate that. That’s a very high form of compliment for me because I think that fits with who I am and my background.

It was challenging because I wanted it to be readable. The name, as an example, coming up with that “See, Do, Repeat” name, I practiced what I write about in the book.

One of the techniques that I recommend to help get your creative juices flowing is to do something that takes your mind completely off of everything that you’re doing. It’s called the incubation period.

So I work out a lot, and I’ve been a runner. So I was working with my editor and publisher on the name, and we had gone through all these names. I went out for a run one day, and I was just really pushing it. I had all this research in my head that we’d been doing, and all of a sudden it came to me.

I’m like, what word—and I’m fascinated by words, I love words, but I guess every author is—but I said, what words would convey this in the simplest form? So that’s how I came up with “See, Do, Repeat.”

The whole book is really kind of taking my academic writing and reframing it and trying to think about it from a very practical, applied way.

I think one of the things that helped me most was to really focus on storytelling.

It was easy, again, because I was in the midst of my podcast. Although not every story comes from my podcast, most of them come from entrepreneurs that I have interviewed, either in my classroom or for my podcast, or that I’ve spent time working with.

I think that’s how I made that transition. I was able to reference books and other research that supported what I was talking about, and I tried to keep that, but only on a smaller scale, and then supplement that with stories. I thought that would make it more relatable.

Joanna: Did you have any fear of judgment by other academics?

Just that feeling, I imagine, would have been quite different doing this book compared to writing an academic paper.

Rebecca: Oh, my gosh. Yes. Did I have fear of judgment? Yes, on every count. That’s probably been the thing, if I were going to advise anybody about writing, it’s that you got to get over that. I had that very early on with my academic writing. I would hold on to things far too long.

I think this book would have been published many years earlier if I had allowed myself to get beyond that. So, yes. I mean, I had to let go of that.

I went to a conference, it was at Notre Dame University, and I had just published this book. I was among many of my peers that I had worked with for many years, and it was very scary to have my book there.

What’s interesting, for that conference now, ever since that—you know, I had books there, and I actually had a little table and sold some of them, not many, quite honestly—but ever since that time, the organizers of the conference have been buying my book for everybody that attends.

Even though it scared me to death to put it out there in front of my colleagues, they’re sharing it with other educators.

So it’s not the audience I initially intended it for, but I’m grateful that they’re doing that. I just had to overcome that fear of judgment, which it’s always out there if you’re doing something creative.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. So we are out of time.

Where can people find you, and your book, and everything you do online?

Rebecca: Oh, well, thank you for asking that, Joanna. I just have to say I’m working on a new book now. It’s called Choose Yourself, and it’s tied to the very last chapter of my book. I’m pre-selling that book on my website in a very different way, and I’m sharing parts of it as I go through writing it.

So it’s really a model to help people take that “do” step. So if you could visit my website, it’s DrRebeccaWhite.com. I’m also available on LinkedIn, same handle, @DrRebeccaWhite. Then on Instagram and on Facebook, @DrRebeccaJWhite. So I’d love for you to visit me there.

I have a new community which I’ve started, and I’m writing this new book. Again, it’s all to help anyone who wants to do something entrepreneurial or make a big transition in their life, pursue a passion. I’d love to help.

That’s kind of my legacy, to help as many people as I can have the joy of an entrepreneurial mindset as they go through their lives.

Joanna: Just also mention your podcast.

Rebecca: Oh, yes, my podcast. I’m sorry. It’s the En Factor Podcast, and you’ll be happy to know that I have the infamous Joanna Penn coming on the podcast. I think by the time this is aired, it should be available. It’s called the En Factor. It’s all about entrepreneurial mindset. So yes, please check out the En Factor Podcast and all my other resources on my website.

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

Rebecca: Joanna, thank you. It’s been an honor and such a pleasure.

The post See, Do, Repeat: The Practice of Creative Entrepreneurship With Dr Rebecca White first appeared on The Creative Penn.

When writing a Fall Arc, writers get to explore the slow, often heartbreaking process of moral or emotional decline. In this type of Negative Change Arc, the characters’ refusal to change or acknowledge their flaws becomes a central theme. They hold onto a Lie—a deeply ingrained belief or limited perception of the world—that drives their actions and decisions. Over time, this self-deception evolves into something darker, affecting not just their own choices, but their relationships with others. Understanding how to write a Fall Arc can help you create a character whose downfall feels deeply tragic and engaging.

In some ways, the Fall Arc is the darkest of the three Negative Change Arcs. Although not as potentially redemptive as the Disillusionment Arc (which hints characters may continue their growth into a completed Positive Change Arc sometime in their future) or as tragic as the Corruption Arc (which offers the character a true chance of recovery that is refused and which we will discuss next week), the Fall Arc is still, for my money, the quintessential Negative Arc.

The Fall Arc offers an extraordinarily powerful window into the dark possibilities for devolution found within humanity’s tremendous capacity for self-deception. More than that, it reveals our almost primal willingness to defend that self-deception even at crippling personal cost, certainly on a spiritual level, but often on a practial level as well.

Inspired by ponderings from my own life, I wanted to revisit this fundamental character arc to explore some of the nuances of the character’s fall from grace. What creates this fall? Why are even intelligent and “good” people susceptible to this insidious degradation? And how can you craft Fall Arcs in your own stories that ring true to the patterns of real life? Let’s take a look!

In This Article:

• Writing a Fall Arc: At a Glance
• The Catalyst of a Fall Arc: The Character’s Refusal to Change
• The “Worse Lie” in a Fall Arc: How Smaller Lies Protect the Character’s Self-Deception
• In the End: Character’s Self-Deception Decays Into an Outward Deception of Others

Writing a Fall Arc: At a Glance

Let’s start with an overview of the arc itself. Like its brethren, the Positive Change Arc and the Disillusionment Arc, the Fall Arc begins with the Lie the Character Believes. From there, it deviates into darker and less redemptive territory, as the character proves willing to take whatever measures necessary to defend that belief—no matter how increasingly dysfunctional it may prove.

Character Believes Lie > Clings to Lie > Rejects New Truth > Believes Worse Lie

Graphic by Joanna Marie, from the Creating Character Arcs Workbook. Click the image for a larger view.

The First Act (1%-25%)

Creating Character Arcs (Amazon affiliate link)

1%: The Hook: Believes Lie

The protagonist believes a Lie that has so far proven necessary or functional in the existing (often destructive) Normal World.

12%: The Inciting Event: First Hint Lie Will Not Save or Reward

The Call to Adventure, when the protagonist first encounters the main conflict, also brings the first subtle hint that the Lie will no longer effectively protect or reward the protagonist in the current circumstances.

25%: The First Plot Point: Lie Now Completely Ineffective

The protagonist is faced with a consequential choice in which the “old ways” of the Lie-ridden First Act prove ineffective in the face of the main conflict’s new stakes. The protagonist is given an early choice between old Lie and new Truth. The character passes through a Door of No Return, which forces the character to leave the Normal World of the First Act and enter the Adventure World of the main conflict in the Second Act.

The Second Act (25%-75%)

Structuring Your Novel: Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition (Amazon affiliate link)

37%: The First Pinch Point: Halfhearted Attempts at Truth Only Half-Effective

The protagonist may try to wield the Truth as a means of gaining the Thing the Character Wants, but does so only with limited understanding or enthusiasm. The character is stuck in a limbo-land where the old Lie is no longer a functional mindset, but where halfhearted attempts at the Truth prove likewise only half-effective.

50%: The Midpoint (Second Plot Point): Glimpses Truth, Rejects Truth, Chooses Worse Lie

The protagonist encounters a Moment of Truth, coming face to face with the thematic Truth (often via a simultaneous plot-based revelation about the external conflict). This is the first time the protagonist consciously sees the full power and opportunity of the Truth. However, the character also sees the full sacrifice demanded in order to follow the Truth. Unwilling to make that sacrifice, the character rejects the Truth and chooses instead to embrace a Lie that is worse than the original.

62%: The Second Pinch Point: Lie Is Effective, But Destructive

Uncaring about the consequences, the protagonist wields the Lie well and finds it effective in moving toward the Want. However, the closer the character gets to the plot goal, the more destructive the Lie becomes both to the character and the surrounding world.

The Third Act (75%-100%)

Next Level Plot Structure (Amazon affiliate link)

75%: The Third Plot Point: Complete Failure to Gain Either Want or Need

The protagonist is confronted by a Low Moment, experiencing a complete failure to gain the Want. This failure is a direct result of the collective damage wrought by the Lie in the Second Half of the Second Act. The “means” caught up to the character before the “end.” However, even when faced by all the evidence of the Lie’s destructive power, the protagonist still refuses to repent or turn to the Truth.

88%: The Climax: Last-Ditch Attempt to Salvage Want

Upon entering the final confrontation with the antagonistic force, the protagonist doubles down on the Lie in a last-ditch attempt to salvage the Want.

98%: The Climactic Moment: Total Destruction

Crippled by the Lie (in both the internal and external conflicts), the protagonist is unable to gain the Want (or gains it only to discover it is useless). Instead, the character succumbs to total personal destruction.

100%: The Resolution: Aftermath

The protagonist must confront the aftermath of all choices. The character may finally and futilely accept the inescapable Truth. Or the character may be left to cope, blindly, with the consequences of choices.

The Catalyst of a Fall Arc: The Character’s Refusal to Change

Like the Positive Change Arc and the Disillusionment Arc, the Fall Arc character’s story begins when the protagonist is prompted to examine the limitations of the central Lie the Character Believes. Although this may be a literal deception in some senses, the Lie is most properly understood as a limited perspective. As such, it begins as an entirely normal and germane part of any human’s life.

For Example:

In Les Misérables, Inspector Javert’s inability to accept moral complexity leads him deeper into his own self-deception, ultimately making him incapable of seeing a world beyond his rigid belief system.

Les Misérables (2012), Universal Pictures.

We all hold countless limited beliefs. Indeed, arguably, all our beliefs about ourselves and reality are limited. To the degree we accept this and are willing to embrace change as new information and experience allows us to refine and expand those beliefs, this is simply part of the regenerative cycle of life. However, when this cycle is derailed by an unwillingness to accept corrections to our perception of reality, the result can be increasingly destructive for both the individual and, eventually, everyone in the vicinity.

Creating Character Arcs Workbook

Although Fall Arcs often look, at first glance, to be huge stories of great downfalls, they often have humble beginnings. The initial Lie the Character Believes will likely be something quite small and innocuous.

For Example:

The original Lie could be something as simple as refusing to accept responsibility in a relationship spat: “It’s not my fault.”

From there, characters who are truly doomed will find they must bolster this initial Lie with further arguments: “It’s her fault. I’m in the right. I’m righteous. I’m a victim. She’s selfish. She’s a narcissist. Etc.”

From here, the corruption can grow to truly staggering heights, as characters’ resistance to reality may even lead them to become the worst version of the very thing they are denying: e.g., the character becomes the narcissist.

Varying stories tackle this downfall to different degrees. Some may reveal the more mundane face of the Fall Arc, in which the character’s Lies are “small” enough not to interfere greatly with everyday functionality. In other stories, the character will be shown to fall all the way into the very pit of dark possibilities.

For Example:

In Nightmare Alley, Stan Carlisle begins the story as an ambitious, though morally compromised, man. He wants to climb out of his working-class roots and build a life of wealth and influence, but he’s driven by the wrong motivations: greed, ego, and a desire for status. At first, he tries to justify his actions, believing he’s in control of the people around him. However, his increasingly manipulative behavior, deceit, and manipulation spiral out of control, leading him further down a path of moral decay and self-destruction. His delusions of grandeur and the belief that he can outsmart everyone are his undoing.

Nightmare Alley (2021), Searchlight Pictures.

In either case, the Fall Arc reveals a deadly spiral. As the character devolves from Lie to worse Lie, the possibility grows ever greater that the spiral will continue with the character veering further and further into delusion.

The “Worse Lie” in a Fall Arc: How Smaller Lies Protect the Character’s Self-Deception

For simplicity’s sake, I refer to the end state of a Fall Arc character as the “worse Lie.” As you can see, however, what this worse Lie really amounts to are many “smaller” Lies eventually built into a grand illusion.

For Example:

In Black Swan, Nina begins with the small self-deception that she must be “perfect.” This Lie snowballs into a worse Lie: that she must destroy herself to achieve perfection, something that happens piece by piece and moment by moment throughout her story.

Black Swan (2010), Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Understanding this important nuance makes it possible to write a much more compelling and realistic Fall Arc. In real life, it is rare for a person to grandiosely self-delude except in situations of tremendous trauma or high stakes. Most of the time, the slide into delusion is the result not of one bad decision or perception, but of a continuing refusal to accept and confront reality.

The character may do this for any number of reasons. Almost always, those reasons amount to a primal need to protect the status quo. One of the great ironies of human life is that even though change is requisite for survival, our brains and nervous systems are wired to preserve the status quo at almost any cost. We do this not just to maintain the equilibrium our nervous systems desire, but also, by extension, to preserve the ego identities we use as coping mechanisms.

Not only are we are capable of believing in just about anything, but we also tend to incorporate those beliefs into our very identities—so that to challenge the belief feels like a threat to our very existence. This is why we appreciate heroic stories of Positive Change Arcs; they demonstrate the tremendous courage required to accept challenges to our beliefs, identities, and ways of being. In most instances, it is much easier to stuff away the cognitive dissonance whenever we are presented with a piece that doesn’t fit. It is easier to ignore the (millions) of nuances that challenge our tidy narratives every single day.

The catalysts that create stories of all types are those that interrupt a character’s life with such force that change becomes inevitable. Characters must either courageously face the catalyst and learn to expand themselves—or refuse the call and instead, inevitably, change negatively by increasingly restricting their view of reality and their capacity to expand.

For Example:

In Gone Girl, Amy Dunne begins her deception by crafting a small Lie—that she’s the perfect wife. Over time, this self-image morphs into a grander fabrication, where she not only deceives herself but manipulates everyone around her into believing her version of reality.

Gone Girl (2014), 20th Century Fox.

Powerful Fall Arcs show us the peril of refusing to claim courage and Truth. They also show, poignantly, how even the smallest of initial denials can eventually snowball into “worse Lies” that utterly crack an individual’s personal integrity.

In the End: Character’s Self-Deception Decays Into an Outward Deception of Others

In the worst scenarios, the Fall Arc character’s warping of reality can become so insistent and powerful that it harms others. Sometimes, this can be the result of others being similarly deceived by the protagonist’s insistence that the Lie is, in fact, true. Most often, the negative effect will result from the protagonist’s unwillingness to maintain crucial integrity in relationship with, first, themselves, then others, then the world at large. Depending on the power the character wields, the effect of one character’s insistence on a Lie can have truly horrifying effects upon an entire community—or even the world, as witnessed in the demagogues of World War II.

For Example:

A media mogul obsessed with power and control, Kane in Citizen Kane starts off deluded by the belief that wealth and influence can buy love and happiness. His inability to confront emotional truths and his manipulation of public opinion leads him deeper into isolation. As he clings to a distorted version of reality, his relationships deteriorate, and his empire collapses.

Citizen Kane (1941), RKO Radio Pictures.

How far you decide to take your Fall Arc will depend on the needs of your story. The effects can range all the way from characters who simply “miss the boat” because they lack the courage to hop on, to characters who severely limit or even destroy their lives, to characters who sway others into mass delusion.

In the end, the Fall Arc is a slow unraveling into self-deception. Characters cling ever more desperately to a Lie that will ultimately destroy them. The Fall Arc is a story of tragic inevitability. The character could have changed—but failed to embrace the courage of honesty before it’s too late.

Understanding this arc allows writers to craft deeply compelling character journeys that feel heartbreakingly true to life. The best Fall Arcs resonate because they reflect something deeply human: our resistance to change, our desperate need to justify our choices, and the ways in which small Lies, if left unchecked, can spiral into something far more destructive. Whether your character’s downfall is quiet or cataclysmic, mastering this arc can add powerful layers of complexity to your storytelling.

In Summary

The Fall Arc is a Negative Change Arc that follows characters’ gradual descent into destruction as they cling to a Lie that ultimately undoes them. Unlike other Negative Arcs that allow for redemption or a conscious embrace of darkness, the Fall Arc is defined by missed opportunities for growth, making it one of the most tragic and compelling character journeys.

Key Takeaways

• The Fall Arc is a slow unraveling, marked by a character’s increasing self-deception.
• Unlike the Disillusionment Arc, there is no ultimate redemption.
• Unlike the Corruption Arc, the character is not making a conscious choice to embrace darkness, but rather resisting “the light” of a difficult Truth.
• The tragedy of this arc lies in the fact that the character could have changed but refused to.
• This arc reflects real human struggles—resistance to change, justification of bad choices, and the compounding consequences of small lies.

Want more?

If you’re fascinated by the darker sides of character arcs, check out my email course Shadow Archetypes: Writing Complex Fictional Characters. This course dives deep into the psychological underpinnings of morally gray characters, tragic figures, and antiheroes. Learn how to craft compelling, multi-dimensional characters who wrestle with their own inner demons.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What challenges have you encountered when writing a Fall Arc? Do you struggle more with crafting the character’s moral descent, keeping them relatable, or nailing the ending? 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 Writing a Fall Arc: How to Show a Character’s Moral Decline appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

How can you shift your writing and publishing process to focus on YouTube and podcasting as a primary audiobook focus? How can you use AI tools to help you create, publish, and translate your books? Derek Slaton goes into his indie author process.

Inspired by Derek, you can now find my audiobooks on YouTube: Books for Authors on YouTube @thecreativepenn; and my fiction, short stories, and memoir on YouTube @jfpennauthor.

In the intro, Spotify has expanded audiobooks into Germany, Austria. Switzerland and Liechtenstein, and Publisher Rocket has introduced more country stores;
Second Edition of The Business of Being a Writer by Jane Friedman;
T. Thorn Coyle on the MidList Indie Author [Wish I’d Known Then Podcast];
What if AI replaces me? [Claire Taylor What If Podcast]; plus, my Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition is underway, coming June/July!

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 

Derek Slaton is the author of the Dead America epic zombie series, with more than 100 books in the main series and many more spin-off stories. I heard Derek on the Brave New Bookshelf Podcast and wanted to ask him some more questions.

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

• Zombie book tropes and settings
• Utilizing AI audio tools to efficiently output audiobooks
• Finding keywords and creating thumbnails for YouTube audiobooks
• Manualling adding ads to monetize your audiobook on YouTube
• YouTube audience vs. Audible audience
• Publishing audiobooks on podcast platforms
• Using AI tools to overcome the cost barrier of production

You can find Derek at his YouTube Channel @DerekSlatonHorrorAuthor.

Transcript of Interview with Derek Slaton

Joanna: Derek Slaton is the author of the Dead America epic zombie series, with more than 100 books in the main series and many more spin-off stories. So welcome to the show, Derek.

Derek: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Joanna: I’m excited to talk to you, but first up—

Tell us a bit more about you, and how you got into writing, and why you love zombies so much.

Derek: So I started writing many, many years ago. When I was in high school, I rented Dawn of the Dead on VHS, and the movie itself didn’t really scare me, but it was when I went to bed that night and started thinking about, “Hey, what would I do in a zombie apocalypse?” It was like a light switch was flipped.

So it’s like I had to start writing down what I would do, and over the years and decades, it just sort of grew from there.

I used to be a photographer. I was a concert photographer traveling the country with bands, and then I moved over to commercial real estate. When I was on the road, I would have my laptop so I would just write.

Over about four or five years, I built it up enough that I could go full time. I went full time with it in January of ’24, so I’m a little more than a year into it.

Joanna: Brilliant. Then I want to come back on the zombie books, the tropes of the zombie books. So I read some zombie, like Jonathan Maberry. I’m sure you’ve read some of Jonathan Mabery’s stuff, but he says, “It’s not about the monsters, it’s about the people who fight the monsters.”

I wondered if you could talk about the tropes of zombie books and why you just have an unending number of zombie stories in you?!

Derek: The great thing about the zombie apocalypse, is that it’s happening to everybody everywhere, and everybody has their own story. So there’s a million stories that can be told in the zombie apocalypse.

It’s not just the strong military type fighting. It’s the waitress having to deal with zombified customers, and the high school students having to deal with classmates, and just on down the line.

There’s just so many different scenarios. I’m three and a half million words into my series, and I still have another hundred stories plotted out that aren’t really repeats of what I’ve already done.

Joanna: So you’re writing about America, but obviously it’s very, very big.

Are you writing about places you’ve been to or you know yourself?

Or are you putting in different places? Because place makes a difference, doesn’t it? Like it’s different whether you’re in the Florida Everglades versus up in the mountains?

Derek: It’s a combination. I have been all over, but a lot of the places I haven’t been, Google Maps of all things, has really helped me out. I’ll look at the town, and then I’ll drop myself into street view and just kind of walk around the area and see what my characters would be seeing and write it from that perspective.

Also it comes directly from places I’ve been. I had to make the drive from El Paso back to San Antonio, which is about nine straight hours of driving through nothing. That spawned the idea for the “El Paso: Creeping Death” series, just a million zombies marching towards them.

So it’s been a nice mixture of both, and just about every single story has been set in America. I have done one story set in London that’s only on YouTube at the moment, but it’ll eventually be released in print. Something I want to explore more as the series goes on is how it’s impacting other countries around the world.

Joanna: Then I guess I have a question about worldbuilding because with that many words, I mean, I barely remember what I was writing last week.

Do you have a world document where you keep all the rules of your world, all the characters, or is it just out of control?

Derek: It’s a combination. I have the rules for my zombie universe, how the zombies are formed, what they do, their timeline and all that. Thankfully, I mean, it’s very simple. So if I drop in on a story a week into it, I know how the zombies are, so I’m able to just jump right into it.

I have a have a story bible for the main series, but all of these side stories that are mostly one-offs, I don’t really worry about as much because half the time nobody lives through them, anyway.

Joanna: The benefits of horror! I think that’s really interesting because when I was thinking about your different places—

People in your position sometimes open up their world to other people to write in. Is that something you’re thinking about?

Derek: No, just because I have so many stories that are in the pipeline, and just have stories I want to tell. I produce them so fast, I mean, I’m releasing a story of a week.

Even if I had somebody else writing stories, I really wouldn’t have a place in the schedule to release them. An hour and a half to three hour story every week is, I think, about as much as my fans can handle.

Joanna: So let’s go into your process then. So you said a story a week for an hour and a half, which is funny because most people talk in terms of word count, but you talk in terms of time.

Tell us about your story process for creation and publishing.

Derek: So it really changed about a year and a half ago, when I started focusing more on YouTube. I changed how I write because it used to just be free flowing, the word count’s the word count, the chapters are however long they need to be.

With YouTube being ad-based, I had to change to almost a television mindset of, okay, I need a break every 12 to 15 minutes, which turns out to be about 2000 words.

So I started writing 2000-word chapters, which really, really helped with the speed of the writing because I knew the beginning and end of each chapter. So if I was short on the word count, now I can go back and just add a little bit of banter, then bam, we’re there.

As far as the week to week process goes, half the time I’ll know what I’m writing the next week on Friday, so I’ll plot it out. Sometimes I’ll have just a great idea for a story on Sunday night and completely change track and wake up Monday and just dive right in and see where it goes.

Generally speaking, I’ll spend two to three days writing out the story, refining it a little bit, and then going straight into the audio, which is where I do the final edit. I’ll edit it as I’m producing the audio. So at the end of the day, I’ll do the video, upload it to YouTube, and move on to the next one.

Joanna: Okay, well, we have to get into that in more detail. So I heard you on the Brave New Bookshelf podcast, and you really inspired me about YouTube.

For people who might not understand the AI audio piece, how are you doing those audiobooks so quickly?

Derek: I use a software called PlayHT. It’s pretty much the direct rival with Eleven Labs, which is the big AI audio. The biggest difference is that PlayHT offers an unlimited plan. If you’re producing as much audio as I am, that’s vital, mainly because I need to keep a roof over my head.

I’ll produce it chapter by chapter. So I’ll paste it into their studio thing, render it, and then listen to it, then make whatever changes I need to make because you can re-render by line. So if I don’t like the inflection, I can change a word. It’s just quick click, and 30 seconds later that has a new audio generation.

Once I have the finished audio, because I export it by chapter, I’ll pull it over in the Final Cut Pro. I’ll drop in motion background, so I know where the chapter breaks are when I’m putting it in the ads and YouTube, and export it. Then it’s just straight to YouTube and on the schedule.

Joanna: Okay, so a few questions there. For people who haven’t done audio with AI—I know what you mean by make some changes—but what are some of the most common issues that you found with using AI voices. I think we’re calling it “producing” now.

When you produce the audio, are you having to change specific things regularly? Or is it quite a quick process?

Derek: Honestly, it’s gotten better as time goes along. I just produced eight chapters this morning, so it was a full hour and a half book. Nine times out of ten when I have to redo a line, it’s a glitch in the software or it mispronounces a name. Other than that, the instances are few and far between.

So it took me three hours to produce an hour and a half worth of audio content today. So it goes really quickly.

Joanna: Well, that’s good, though, because that’s still twice as long. I think some people think you just upload the file and you hit output and that’s it. Like yourself, I also listen to the audio as I go through, so that is an important part of the process.

So let’s say it’s this hour and a half book. You then upload it to YouTube. I’ve been trying to model you, although my channel has lots of different things on it. So when I upload it to YouTube, I’ve got a description field, I’ve got the title field, I’ve got a thumbnail, I’ve got some other things.

What are the most important things that you need to put into those YouTube fields?

Derek: I mean, really the most important thing are the keywords for people to search and just having a thumbnail that grabs people’s attention.

This went back to the winter of December of 2023 when I was switching over to AI audio, I decided to throw up an AI thumbnail, just a random zombie scene.

I put it up there in place of my book cover, and my views doubled overnight. So just having that dynamic thumbnail is bigger than really anything else because that’s the first thing people see.

They don’t look at your title, they don’t look at your description, if they don’t click on the thumbnail. If they don’t click on the thumbnail, they’re never going to see anything else.

Joanna: That is a really good point. I put up my Mapwalker series, my Mapwalker trilogy, which is three books. I did actually make character thumbnails and I put them up, but because the rest of my channel isn’t the same, they just look really weird. So I’ve replaced them with the book covers again. Now your channel, if people go to it— Just tell people where your YouTube channel is.

Derek: Just type in my name in the YouTube search. It’s Derek Slaton. It’s the first channel that pops up. It’s just “Derek Slaton Horror Book Author” or something along those lines. Just below the channel will be about 40 different zombie story thumbnails you can click on.

Joanna: They’re all very consistent. I think that’s what’s interesting about your channel, it really is super consistent. So I feel like there’s two different authors who are listening—well, more than that—but people like me who’ve had a YouTube channel for ages, and it’s full of a lot of different stuff.

Then people who want to do something like you, where it’s something very consistent in look and feel. So I feel like your thumbnails are clear, your genre is clear, and you’ve done all the things that you’re meant to do, which is fantastic. You did mention keywords there—

Are you using any specific tool to find the keywords specifically for YouTube?

Derek: Yes, I subscribe to something called TubeBuddy, which is all one word. It’s actually integrated with YouTube, they’re an official partner.

It’ll analyze your thumbnail. It’ll provide keywords for your type of video. It’ll help you pick out shorts, and a whole host of other things. For $3 a month, it’s worth every penny.

Joanna: I’m definitely going to get that. That’s very helpful. Then you also mentioned putting ad breaks on. So my fiction channel at JF Penn Author is not monetized. As we record this, I’m desperately trying to get it there.

My Creative Penn channel is monetized, and I just click the box that says “yes to ads,” and I’ve never done anything manually.

What’s the difference between just letting it do its own thing and doing it manually?

Derek: It is very important to you and anybody who is listening, make sure you manually put in ads where you want them, and to turn off automated ad placement.

Especially now, because they are updating their system to automatically analyze your video and put ads where they think it should go.

Especially if you’re using AI audio because there will be occasional pauses in there between lines, and YouTube will read that as, “Oh, that’s a natural break. Let’s throw an ad in there.”

I checked it on one of my videos, and it went from eight ads that I had placed to about 75. That’s not going to work.

Joanna: Okay, that’s a lot. Okay, so that’s something to do for that longer form content. Okay, so in that one and a half hour book—coming back to this one that you’ve done today—you’d expect to have seven ad breaks in that?

Derek: Yes, this book was eight chapters, and I do an ad between every chapter and one at the end. So it’d be eight ads altogether.

Joanna: Okay. Obviously, this is hard to know, but—

Approximately how much revenue do you expect to make for that kind of length book?

Derek: I mean, generally speaking, you make your most money in the first two to three weeks because that’s when it’s popular, and that’s when you get the most views.

The way I view a video being a success, an hour and a half video, is if it makes $100 and gets an extra 25 to 35 subscribers in that first week. That’s about where it typically falls. I mean, I know $100 for a video doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s just in that initial week, and then it continues making money essentially forever.

Having that fresh content bringing in new subscribers, new viewers to the channel, they’ll click on the playlist like, “Oh, there’s 350 hours of stuff here. Let’s go listen to older stories.”

So after a while, it just snowballs. So just having that fresh baseline, $100 and 25 to 35 subscribers in a week, that’s what I deem to be a success.

Joanna: So is there anything else you do? So you do the TubeBuddy, but—

Do you do any other form of marketing for the channel? Do you do paid ads or anything else?

Derek: I do absolutely no advertising, period. Everything I have across every platform is just natural growth. I have done ads in the past. I stopped in January of last year because I wanted to try it out to see how it would go.

I was releasing weekly content across everywhere, Kindle, podcasting, YouTube. With just that constant stream of fresh content, it’s like, okay, I know because I write in a niche, I have a limited amount of fans that are out there.

Sooner or later, if I keep putting content out there, they’re going to discover me naturally.

I was at a point financially where it’s like, okay, I’m well above where I need to be to be comfortable. So rather than focusing hours upon hours each week on trying to tweak ads and spend a bunch on that, I’m just like, I’m just going to let it build naturally.

So far, I mean, it’s worked great. Last year was my most profitable year, and I didn’t spend a dime on advertising.

Joanna: That’s why I got excited when I heard you on the Brave New Bookshelf, and people definitely have a listen to that too. It covers a slightly different angle to this episode.

I’ve always been a fan of content marketing, always. It’s how I’ve built my business. This is another form of content marketing, but it’s also revenue, because people can listen for free.

Obviously, I’ve heard it before, and people listening are like, okay, but indies have been talking about putting audiobooks on YouTube for years. So why now?

I was thinking about this, why I was so resistant to it, and I think it’s that I thought that YouTube audiobooks would cannibalize my audiobook revenue elsewhere.

So what do you think about that?

Is it just an entirely different audience? Or do you also put your stuff elsewhere?

Derek: I mean, honestly, it’s a completely different audience. Because I switched over to AI a year and a half ago, I haven’t released anything on Audible or Findaway Voices because for the longest time, they haven’t accepted anything but their own AI voices.

So, I mean, my Audible sales were kind of flat lined before I made the jump to YouTube, and they’ve remained at that level ever since.

What I’m finding is the people who buy audiobooks are one audience, the people who listen on YouTube is a completely different audience, and the people who listen to audiobooks via podcasts are yet another completely different audience.

Joanna: Yes, after hearing you, I was like, of course they’re a different audience. I mean, even with my husband, my husband does YouTube, and I don’t watch YouTube myself. Yet, he also watches videos.

He doesn’t listen to audiobooks on YouTube, but I know other people who do. So I was like, this is crazy. What was stopping me?

So if people listening are feeling like nothing’s happening — or I will say, so my channel, JFPennAuthor, is not monetized. So right now, lots of people are listening to the audiobooks, and I am not getting paid.

Any tips for people who want to get into that monetized bracket?

Derek: Honestly, just have consistent uploads. It’ll keep you in the algorithm, and it feeds back on itself.

Recently, I think maybe within the last year, YouTube changed how they promote their videos, what they deem to be a good thing to promote. It went from number of views to how long people listen, and more importantly, how long your subscribers listen.

So last week, my story was three hours long, and my average listen time was right at about an hour, which fed back to it being promoted to new people. So just having those long stories that your fans will listen to.

One thing that helps me is I release my stories every week at the same time. Noon Eastern Time on Saturdays. So within the first hour, I have 400 or 500 people tuning in, and it boosts the algorithm.

Joanna: Which is great. You’ve become a habit. I mean, this show is a habit for people. It goes out at 7:30am UK time on a Monday, and the same thing happens. So I completely get the habit.

It’s just not something I can see happening for my fiction at the moment. Although, it’s so funny, because you’ve definitely inspired me around thinking about all this stuff.

I also wanted to ask you about the podcast thing because, again, I have two podcasts. They’re mainly interviews, solo shows, that kind of thing. They are not fiction or audiobooks.

Tell us about how you do audiobooks for the fiction.

Derek: It’s really the same thing that I’m doing on YouTube, only just in pure audio form. So there’s no video attached.

I just take an mp3 file of the audiobook, and because I write in novella format, most of the episodes are an hour and a half, two hours long. That seems to be the perfect length for a podcast, so I just release a book as an episode.

I tried it on a whim, and within a month, I was monetized. It’s grown over the last year and a half now, and it’s grown to the point where, financially, it’s just a slight step down from what I’m making on YouTube. So it’s just another revenue stream for the same content that I already have.

Joanna: What service are you using for that?

Derek: I use a company called RedCircle. They’re a podcast distributor. They distribute to Spotify and all these other places. What’s great about them is that they have a sales team that will go out and find the ads that will populate within your podcast.

So just like YouTube, I go in, I set where I want the ads to go, and whenever somebody downloads it, if they download it for later, the ads are already inserted into the podcast. So I get credit for all those.

Joanna: Is it one podcast feed with all the stories on it? Or is it a separate feed per book?

Derek: It’s all one podcast feed. So there’s just a new story every week.

Joanna: Okay, right. So that is also called Derek Slaton, is it? Or is it called like Dead America, or something?

Derek: It’s called Dead America.

Joanna: Okay, so it’s called Dead America. So let’s take my Mapwalker trilogy, so it’s about 20 hours of audio in total, across three books. I would make that a podcast feed for that series, for example?

Derek: Right. You could break it up into two hour chunks or hour-long stories, however you want to do it, and just have them as weekly releases. Let it build up. The great thing is, once it’s out there, once it’s monetized, people will come across it, listen to it, and more income.

Joanna: Okay, and can you schedule them? So if I did that, let’s say I split them into two hour chunks or whatever—

Can I schedule them all at once?

So it’s almost like a piece of work to upload all the files, schedule it, do the ad breaks, and then I just let it go.

Derek: Absolutely. I mean, I have the next three months’ worth of podcasts already scheduled. So I sit down one day a quarter and just upload 20 – 30 books to it, and place the ads, and let the auto scheduler do its thing.

Joanna: That is cool. Again, it’s so funny the kind of blocks we have in our minds. Of course, again, I’m very aware of fiction podcasting. I just didn’t think about that from the case of putting an audiobook up.

I always feel like fiction podcasts have multi-cast and they’re very full of actors and pro narrators and stuff like that. So I guess we should tackle that.

Are you getting any kickback around the use of AI?

Derek: When I started doing AI on YouTube, I had the initial string of protest. I was very open and honest with them, with my fans. Like, here’s why I’m using AI, because if I use humans, I could release a story every three to four months. Using AI, I can keep doing it weekly. Almost immediately, everybody bought in.

I’ve had a fraction of that level of kickback on podcasting, but I was honest with them, responded to their comments with what I just said, and for the most part, it’s been smooth sailing.

I even released two shorts back to back. One was human narrated, one was AI-narrated. Despite having the negative AI comments on the AI episode, I actually had 20% more views on the AI episode.

Joanna: Are you using different voices?

So do you use a variety of men and women and accents and stuff, or do you just use one narrator?

Derek: I have one narrator for all of them. The only time I changed narrator with the AI was when I did the story in London. I used a narrator with a British accent, just because it felt right.

I played around with doing multiple voices, and even polled my subscribers on YouTube. In about a three to one margin, people were like, no, we like the one voice.

People care more about the story than having multiple voices talking to them.

Joanna: Yes, and this is another thing.

To me, when I listen to audiobooks, I want the content. It’s not about the voice. In fact, I’d rather the voice disappeared. I think the voice disappearing is when people get used to the voice, so that, I think, is what your listeners are saying, which is that we’re after the story.

The fact that they’re listening to it rather than reading it doesn’t make any difference.

You’re also publishing those as ebooks—on Kindle only, or elsewhere?

Derek: Just Kindle. I’m in Kindle Unlimited because with the size of my series, nobody’s going to buy all the books.

Joanna: Do you use AI covers as well?

Derek: Yes, I started using AI covers with releases that started coming out like last summer. Mostly, they’ve been well received.

Joanna: I’ve been using a lot of AI imagery for the last couple of years. Again, a lot of people listening are just scared. You know, when you upload a book to Kindle, you have to click the box that says, “How did you use AI?” I’m like, it’s not a problem. You just click the box and you say you’re using it.

Do you have any issues at all about using any of the AI stuff?

Derek: Oh, no.

It’s been life changing for me. That was a big reason why I was able to go full time last year, just because it cut my costs down by about 99%.

Joanna: I love that. I love that. This is, again, why I encourage people to listen to the Brave New Bookshelf podcast, in general, because I think everyone who goes on that show is also AI positive, as you are. They find it just amplifies their creativity. You’re a story machine. It’s incredible.

Derek: One of the big things anti-AI people say is like, “oh, it’s killing creativity,” and it’s actually the opposite, at least it has been for me.

If I wanted to do a new story, a new plot line, do anything before AI, I would have had to have risked thousands of dollars for the editing, the audio, and advertising for it.

With AI, I essentially have no cost barriers. So I can write whatever I want without fear, without worrying about, okay, if this fails, I’m going to lose thousands of dollars.

With having a built in audience, as long as it’s in the horror/sci-fi/action genre, I know I’m going to make money. It might not be a lot of money, but I know I’m going to make money and not lose money.

It has really opened up creativity and allowed me to tell stories I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to tell.

Joanna: I totally agree. It’s such a spark for me when I have a creative session with AI. If I’m just thinking about a new book—like yesterday I was thinking about something—and I just get on Chat or on Claude, and I’m going backwards and forwards, and it’s sparking ideas.

Like you, I feel like it makes me more creative, and it just gives me bigger horizons for what’s possible.

Derek: Absolutely, and especially with Claude with the new 3.7 Projects, I can upload one of my previous stories, and it’s like, “This is how I want the story to sound. This is what I want you to emulate,” and I can go back and forth with it.

It’s like having a writing partner, basically. It’s speeding up my process. I bounce ideas off of it and stuff. It’s like talking to myself, but a more intelligent version.

Joanna: Exactly. I also feel like the word “co-writing” is becoming more and more true, because it is a sort of true collaborative creative process. Although I’ve worked with co-writers before, and I’m actually a terrible co-writer because I’m so controlling.

So with Claude, [co-writing] actually works a lot better. How about you?

Derek: Yes. If it does something I don’t like, I can be like, “No, don’t do that.”

“Okay, sorry.”

Joanna: Yes, and it’s very helpful.

I think you’re also using AI for translations. Is that right? What’s your process?

Derek: I am. I use ScribeShadow, which is AI translations tailored towards fiction. I was one of the early adopters of it. When it first came out, I was like, sure, let’s give it a shot, see what happens.

They had like six languages, mostly European languages. It’s like, okay, let’s throw it up there and see what happens. Italian and Spanish were kind of like, eh, okay, but Germany just took off immediately.

I was just putting up a handful of stories, no advertising still. My first book even got a KDP All Star bonus in German. I’ve never even had that in America.

Joanna: You didn’t have any proofreading? You just went straight from ScribeShadow?

Derek: I went straight from ScribeShadow because at the time, that was before they had partnered with a human translation service that gives them a heavily discounted rate to check everything.

By the time that came along, I had probably 40 books out in German. I went and looked at my ratings and reviews, and I think I had like a 4.3, 4.4 out of five, across all the books.

Then I went and looked at my American versions, and it’s like, huh, the German versions are actually higher. So it’s like, whatever problem people have, it doesn’t appear to be the translations. So I just kept that up because it seems to be working okay.

Joanna: I realize some people listening are just going, “No, no, don’t do it!” I have used ScribeShadow, but then I also paid for the proofreading and all of that kind of stuff, but I’ve only done it for some nonfiction. Oh, I did a short story as well.

I haven’t jumped in because, of course, when you pay for all of the other stuff, the costs add up. As you were saying, you wouldn’t be able to release at the pace you release, like in German, if you were paying for all of that.

Derek: Right.

I grew up loving B horror movies. So, low budget. They had the creativity, but they didn’t have the budget to pull off everything they wanted. I latched onto that mentality.

So releasing in German, with the way that I am not paying for the extra translation or editing, like just embracing that B movie mindset. Get it out there. As long as it’s entertaining, you’ll find an audience.

I know full well I’m leaving 15, 20% of my potential audience on the table who don’t like the AI translations, but it’s not worth the extra time and money that I would have to spend in order to potentially get them.

I seem to have a regular audience that tunes into my books every week in German because, I mean, I’m profitable within seconds of releasing. So it’s like if they’re happy, I’m happy.

Joanna: I love that. You mentioned there the 20% you’re leaving on the table. I literally wrote down before you said that, 80/20 rule, because that is what you’re doing. You’re doing the 80/20 rule pretty much for everything. That attitude of like the B movie, which, of course, people love.

I think this is what’s so interesting. Listening to you, I feel the freedom. I feel the sort of indie vibe in you, which I just love. I was saying to my husband, listening to you, I caught almost like a flame, I feel. That’s why I wanted to talk to you and just say thank you.

I feel like sometimes I get bogged down by so many expectations because I’ve been doing this a long time.

I’ve been doing this since 2007, 2008, and I lose track of that flame. So I wanted to say thank you to you for kind of lighting that again. I mean, you’re like a proper indie, Derek!

Derek: Well, I’m a huge Iron Maiden fan, and one of the things that struck me interviewing Bruce Dickinson, the lead singer years ago, he’s like, “We’ve never gone for radio play. We play music that we like to listen to. We do what we like, and we found an audience.” They’re one of the biggest bands in the world.

Like that B movie mindset, like them, it’s like, you know what? I’m going to write something that I would want to read. I’ve just kept pushing it out, and it’s taken a little while, but I have an audience, and I’m enjoying every moment of it.

Joanna: Well, great. I think maybe there’s some more of your audience coming over.

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

Derek: The best place to find me is on YouTube and on Spotify as well, The Dead America Zombie Podcast. My books are available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, not only in America, but Germany, Italy, and Spain.

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

Derek: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

The post Expanding Audiobook Revenue Through YouTube And Podcasting With Derek Slaton first appeared on The Creative Penn.

The Disillusionment Arc is one of the most powerful and emotionally resonant transformations a character can undergo. At its core, this arc is about awakening—shedding comforting illusions to face a stark and often uncomfortable Truth. While it shares similarities with the Positive Change Arc, the Disillusionment Arc doesn’t always lead to a hopeful resolution. Instead, it challenges both the characters and the audience to grapple with the weight of reality. However, despite its seemingly bleak nature, the Disillusionment Arc isn’t inherently negative. It reflects a fundamental aspect of human growth: the process of seeing the world as it truly is and deciding what to do with that knowledge.

Although I have always classed the Disillusionment Arc as one of the three primary Negative Change Arcs, in many ways it is more of a bridge between the two heroic arcs—Positive Change and Flat—and the two decidedly Negative Arcs—the Corruption Arc and the Fall Arc (more on the Fall Arc next week!). Because of this, the Disillusionment Arc is the “lightest” of the Negative Arcs, not only because it is the only Negative Arc to end with the protagonist’s awareness and acceptance of the story’s thematic Truth, but also because it is the only Negative Arc to end with the characters standing at a crossroads that may eventually allow them to return to a holistic and life-affirming perspective. Indeed, the comparative “negativity” of various Disillusionment Arc stories depends largely on the degree to which characters are embittered by the disillusioning new insights they have recognized.

I tend to focus most of my teaching on Positive Arcs, not only because I am more drawn to writing them, but also because they form the foundation from which the deviations of the Negative Arcs emerge. However, lately, I have been considering the intrinsic importance of the Disillusionment Arc to the human experience.

The Disillusionment Arc is unlike the other Negative Arcs, which are arguably unnecessary for growth (i.e., with awareness, skill, and arguably a little luck, they can be bypassed). In contrast, the Disillusionment Arc is another face of the Positive Change Arc—a more difficult version of the Positive Change Arc. Even though we call it the Disillusionment Arc (mostly to indicate its darker and more depressing tone), it offers a transformation that can sometimes be even more heroic than the Positive Change Arc, since it involves recognizing and accepting a Truth that does not directly benefit the protagonist.

In This Article:

• The Disillusionment Arc at a Glance
• Awakening to Truth: How the Disillusionment Arc Resembles the Positive Change Arc
• A Bitter Truth: Where the Disillusionment Arc in Storytelling Takes a Darker Turn
• In the End: How Characters in a Disillusionment Arc Face Their New Reality

The Disillusionment Arc in Storytelling at a Glance

Character Believes Lie > Overcomes Lie > New Truth Is Tragic

Graphic by Joanna Marie, from the Creating Character Arcs Workbook. Click the image for a larger view.

Creating Character Arcs (Amazon affiliate link)

The First Act (1%-25%)

1%: The Hook: Believes Lie in Comfortable Normal World

The protagonist believes a Lie that has so far proven necessary or functional in the existing Normal World, which is often a comfortable and complacent place.

12%: The Inciting Event: First Hint Lie Is Untrue

The Call to Adventure, when the protagonist first encounters the main conflict, also brings the first subtle hint that the Lie will no longer serve the protagonist as effectively as it has in the past.

25%: The First Plot Point: Full Immersion in Adventure World’s Stark Truth

The protagonist is faced with a consequential choice, in which the comfortable “old ways” of the Lie-ridden First Act prove ineffective in the face of the main conflict’s new stakes. The protagonist will pass through a Door of No Return to enter the Adventure World of the main conflict in the Second Act, confronted by a stark and painful new Truth.

The Second Act (25%-75%)

Structuring Your Novel: Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition (Amazon affiliate link)

37%: The First Pinch Point: Punished for Using Lie

The protagonist is “punished” for using the Lie. In the Normal World, the character was able to use the Lie to get the Thing the Character Wants. But in the Adventure World, this is no longer a functional mindset. Throughout the First Half of the First Act, the character will try to use the old Lie-based mindset to reach important goals and will be “punished” by failures until the character begins to learn how things really work.

50%: The Midpoint (Second Plot Point): Forced to Face Truth, But Unwilling to Embrace It

The protagonist encounters a Moment of Truth and comes face to face with the thematic Truth (often via a simultaneous plot-based revelation about the external conflict). This is the first time the protagonist consciously recognizes the Truth and its power. However, the character is horrified by the implications of this dark new Truth. Although no longer able to deny the Truth, the character is unwilling to fully embrace it or to surrender the comparatively wonderful old Lie.

62%: The Second Pinch Point: Growing Frustration With Old Lie and Disillusionment With New Truth

The protagonist is forced to confront consistently increasing examples of the Lie’s lack of functionality in the real world. The character grows more and more frustrated with the Lie’s limitations and begins to accept the horrible Truth. The character is profoundly disillusioned by this new worldview, even as there are “rewards” for using the Truth to reach for the Want.

The Third Act (75%-100%)

Next Level Plot Structure (Amazon affiliate link)

75%: The Third Plot Point: Accepts That Comforting Lie Is Now Completely Nonexistent

The protagonist is confronted by an irrefutable Low Moment, in which it is no longer possible to deny that the dark Truth is not true. The character must not only accept this new Truth, but also admit the comforting old Lie is now completely nonexistent.

88%: The Climax: Wields Dark New Truth in Final Confrontation

The protagonist enters the final confrontation with the antagonistic force to discover whether or not it is possible to gain the Want. Directly before or during this section, the character consciously and explicitly embraces and wields the dark new Truth.

98%: The Climactic Moment: Fully Acknowledges Truth

The protagonist uses the Truth and all its lessons to gain the Need. Depending on the nature of the Truth, the character may also gain the Want (only to discover that, in light of all this new knowledge, it is diminished or even worthless), or the character may sacrifice the Want for the greater good. As a result, the character definitively ends the conflict with the antagonistic force.

100%: The Resolution: Disillusioned With New Truth

The protagonist either enters a new Normal World or returns to the original Normal World, but with a jaded eye in light of the new Truth.

Awakening to Truth: How the Disillusionment Arc Resembles the Positive Change Arc

As you can see, the Disillusionment Arc looks very similar to the Positive Change Arc:

Character Believes Lie > Overcomes Lie > New Truth Is Liberating

Graphic by Joanna Marie, from the Creating Character Arcs Workbook. Click the image for a larger view.

Apart from Disillusionment Arcs’ darker tone, the major difference is the character’s response to the newly recognized Truth at the end of the story.

From this, we can see how the Disillusionment Arc isn’t as inherently negative as it may sometimes feel. Certainly, to anyone going through a Disillusionment Arc, it can feel quite negative, since the dismantling of cherished and comfortable personal perspectives can be excruciatingly painful. Little wonder we may fight tooth and claw to avoid change, rather than courageously and consciously embracing it. Indeed, the very fact that evolution must move from unconsciousness to consciousness makes it more likely that catalysts will initially be greeted with the ignorant resistance we see embodied in Disillusionment Arcs.

In fact, we can think of the relationship between the Positive Change Arc and the Disillusionment Arc as that of nesting dolls. Within every Positive Change Arc is a Disillusionment Arc.

The Third Plot Point in a Positive Change Arc (i.e., the Low Moment) is where the character fully faces the disillusionment—and then rises above it into integration.

For Example:

In The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne is torn apart by the Joker’s systematic attacks upon his ethos. In the end, he embraces all he has learned at great cost to himself, in order to incorporate these tragic new Truths into his larger commitment to using the Batman identity to protect Gotham.

The Dark Knight (2008), Warner Bros.

In contrast, the Disillusionment Arc’s psychological evolution ends at the low point of disillusionment, postponing future integration, perhaps indefinitely.

For Example:

In Silence, the missionary protagonist’s worldview and faith paradigm are systematically destroyed until finally he must accept that denial of his faith is the only way to survive. This is not a Truth he ever fully integrates, as he is shown to struggle between the inner and outer dissonance of these two perspectives for the rest of his life.

Silence (2016), Paramount Pictures.

A Bitter Truth: Where the Disillusionment Arc in Storytelling Takes a Darker Turn

As you can see, the major difference between the Positive Change Arc and the Disillusionment Arc is that the Truth the characters learn in the latter turns out to be distasteful and perhaps even personally destructive.

Although the Truth in a Positive Change Arc may require deep commitment and even sacrifice, the story will end with characters having fully integrated that Truth as a lost piece of themselves—allowing them to end in a place of greater wholeness.

For Example:

In Glory, Captain Shaw sacrifices his life fighting alongside his men in one of the first Black regiments in the Civil War. Despite his tragic death, he ends as a more whole and noble person, having evolved his own narrow views.

Glory (1989), Tri-Star Pictures.

In contrast, the Disillusionment Arc ends prior to integration. Characters have accepted the Truth and perhaps even acted upon it, but they have not embraced or integrated it into a new identity. Their previous worldview and ego identity have been shattered, and they have not yet been able to put the pieces back together.

For Example:

Training Day shows its idealistic rookie cop shattered by the corruption he has witnessed. Because the character was able to keep his moral core intact throughout the movie, viewers may extrapolate that he will find the strength and courage to use the difficult Truth he has learned to eventually rise into a better version of himself. But the story ends on a downbeat while the character still suffers from the destruction of what had previously seemed an intact worldview.

Training Day (2001), Warner Bros.

In the End: How Characters in a Disillusionment Arc Face Their New Reality

At the beginning, I mentioned that the Disillusionment Arc may be seen as a bridge between the Positive Arcs and the Negative Arcs. One of the reasons for this is that it is the most unfinished of the arcs. It ends with the character at a crossroads. On the one hand, they have learned something “positive”—in that Truth is always an avenue of growth and therefore healing. On the other hand, they have experienced something “negative”—in that the Truth shredded their lives and/or seems to be saying something completely undesirable about the nature of reality.

Most Disillusionment Arcs end with the character’s disillusionment. That emotion is the final beat. Where the character will go from there is left open.

There are two possibilities for the character’s future:

Option #1 is that the character will eventually integrate the difficult new Truth into a more expansive and holistic identity and ego container. In this case, the character will be primed to finish a Positive Change Arc and perhaps even move into a Flat Arc role, in which they will be capable of inspiring others who are struggling on the same path.

For Example:

We can see this in the movie Promised Land, in which Matt Damon’s character accepts what he has learned about the corruption of the natural gas companies he works for—leaving behind his well-intentioned but naive belief that he is accomplishing something positive in people’s lives. Although disillusioned, he maintains enough faith in himself and others to join a new community and keep moving forward toward a new way of being.

Promised Land (2012), Focus Features.

Option #2 is that the character’s disillusionment will sour into bitterness. Instead of integrating the new Truth and expanding into a new personality large enough to grapple with it and ultimately use it positively in the world, the character will instead resist the Truth—leading to denial, even more limited perspectives (i.e., Lies), and eventually worse corruption still. This sets the character up for a subsequent Fall Arc (which evolves from Lie to worse Lie—and which we will be exploring next week) or a Corruption Arc (which evolves from Truth to worse Lie).

For Example:

The plot of Memento is literally a search for the Truth—as the protagonist, a man suffering from short-term memory loss—struggles to remember enough to solve the mystery of his wife’s murder. By the end, he learns the Truth that he is perpetuating his violent revenge even though those responsible are already dead. The final scene indicates he will refuse to record this Truth for his future self to remember, instead sliding into an ever-deeper spiral of self-deception and corruption.

Memento (2000), Summit Entertainment.

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In conclusion, it’s important to remember that even though this arc may end in disillusionment, it still offers a crucial space for growth. The Disillusionment Arc serves as a profound exploration of the human experience. It challenges characters—and by extension, the audience—to confront uncomfortable Truths. These uncomfortable Truths, and the realistic portrayal of how difficult it can be to integrate them, reveal transformations just as impactful as those in aspirational narratives.

Disillusionment Arcs pave the way for deeper understanding about potential transformations. The emotional depth of this arc lies in its ability to expose the fragility of our beliefs—and our own personal resilience in the face of that ongoing fragility. Ultimately, whether characters move toward integration or toward bitterness, the journey offers a powerful reflection on the complexities of facing painful Truths.

In Summary:

The Disillusionment Arc in storytelling revolves around a character awakening to an uncomfortable thematic Truth, often at great personal cost. Unlike the Positive Change Arc, the Disillusionment Arc doesn’t always lead to a hopeful resolution. Instead, it challenges the protagonist—and the audience—to confront the stark realities of life. Although dark and difficult, this arc plays a crucial role in human growth, offering a transformation that involves painful yet profound insights. It serves as a bridge between the Positive and Negative Change Arcs, in that characters who face these harsh and disillusioning Truths are left at a crossroads from which they may either integrate the lessons or spiral into bitterness.

Key Points:

• The Disillusionment Arc in storytelling involves characters realizing a painful Truth that shatters previously held beliefs.
• This arc is not inherently negative, as it reflects essential human growth through facing difficult realities.
• It typically ends with the character at a crossroads, poised for either positive change or further resistance and denial.
• The Disillusionment Arc can bee seen as a bridge between the Positive Change and the Negative Change Arcs, with the potential for characters to evolve into more complex versions of themselves or to sink into corruption.
• Characters in Disillusionment Arcs will struggle with integrating the new Truth, leading to either deeper growth or deeper bitterness.

Want More?

Creating Character Arcs Workbook

If you’re fascinated by the nuances of character development, including the Disillusionment Arc, my Creating Character Arcs Workbook is the perfect resource to help you craft complex, compelling characters. Packed with exercises and practical tips, it will guide you through detailed beat sheets and exercises for five primary character arc types—the Positive Change Arc, the Flat Arc, the Disillusionment Arc, the Fall Arc, and the Corruption Arc. Whether you’re exploring a Disillusionment Arc or another iteration, I designed this workbook to help you structure your characters’ journeys for maximum impact. It’s available in paperback and e-book (along with its companion guide Creating Character Arcs).

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do you see the Disillusionment Arc in storytelling impacting your characters’ growth? 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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