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

The First Act (1%-25%)

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%)

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%)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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

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%)

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%)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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?

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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The post Disillusionment Arc in Storytelling: A Powerful Tool for Character Growth appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

What are the different ways you can distribute and monetise your ebooks and audiobooks through Kobo Writing Life? How can you market them more effectively and reach more readers? With Tara Cremin.

In the intro, the potential impact of tariffs and what to do about it [Self Publishing Advice]; Pep talk for authors during chaotic times [Publishing Confidential];
8 ways to get more value from your backlist [BookBub]; Death Valley Kickstarter — and writing thrillers webinar.

Write and format stunning books with Atticus. Create professional print books and eBooks easily with the all-in-one book writing software. Try it out at Atticus.io

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

Tara Cremin is the Director of Kobo Writing Life, Kobo’s independent publishing platform.

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

• Changes in the indie book industry over the past decade
• How Kobo Plus compares to other subscription models
• Catering to different audiences by offering different book versions
• Tips for maximizing income from ebooks and audiobooks on Kobo
• Applying for promotions to expand your potential audience
• The payment model for Kobo Plus and library books
• Kobo’s stance on AI-assisted books

You can find Tara and the Kobo Writing Life team at Kobo.com/writinglife or email them at writinglife@kobo.com.

Transcript of Interview with Tara Cremin

Joanna: Tara Cremin is the director of Kobo Writing Life, Kobo’s independent publishing platform. Welcome back to the show, Tara.

Tara: Thanks, Jo. Thanks for having me.

Joanna: Oh, it is great to have you back on the show. It’s actually been four years, which is crazy.

Tara: I can’t believe it.

Joanna: I know. So I thought we’d go back to the beginning. Tell us a bit more about you.

When did you get into the book business, and what are some of the changes you’ve seen for authors since then?

Tara: Sure. So I’ve been working for Kobo since 2012, which feels like a lifetime. When I started, the company had created some great, but kind of relatively simple, eReaders. They were just starting to dip their toe into really expanding what physical devices could do.

Then you fast forward to 2025, and we’re the second largest manufacturer of eReaders, after our friends in Seattle.

So part of the work that I do on Kobo Writing Life, I’ve been working on it basically since day one.

Kobo Writing Life was created as a platform for authors who wanted to publish directly to Kobo readers.

So I’ve been kind of working on that. The biggest change on the author side that I can really think of is just the expansion of the tools. I think it’s easy to not always think back to 2012 because things move so quickly. I’ll be like, “Oh, that was ages ago,” but it’ll be like four years ago.

When you’re actually thinking about 2012, authors were uploading a Word doc and publishing their ebook, and then that was it. There wasn’t a lot of different things available or more opportunities.

Now, authors can really easily create accessible and like really beautifully designed ePubs with tools like Vellum and Atticus. They can publish audiobooks to Kobo, they can reach libraries, join subscription programs, and take advantage of all the promotional tools that are available.

So I think the biggest change is just that there’s more opportunities now for authors than when I started working in the book business.

Joanna: Oh, and—

What about the growth of Kobo for indies?

I mean, we’ve heard before some of the stats around the number of self-published books on the Kobo platform. That’s grown as well, hasn’t it?

Tara: It has. I have some stats for you. When we look at self-publishing on Kobo, it makes up about 25% of the units for single copy sales. Then if we think about the subscription reading, it makes up about 60% of English language subscription reading is all self-published content. It’s huge.

Joanna: Wow, that’s incredible. So indie authors are important to Kobo, I guess we could say.

Tara: Yes, and it started with somebody wanting to email a Word doc and get it published, which is why Kobo Writing Life was created as a platform. We’ve really been able to expand it and add additional features.

Kobo has always taken a global stance of the digital book market, and I think we realized pretty early that the indie authors were really integral to that.

Something that I don’t think we talk about a lot because I’m primarily focused on the English language side, but we also have a portal that’s just for users in Japan that’s very self-contained in Japanese.

Last year, we actually localized in traditional and simplified Chinese for our friends in Taiwan and Hong Kong. So the Kobo Writing Life platform is now available in eight languages. So we know how integral the independent authors are to the global book business.

Joanna: Kobo originally was Canadian, right? Then it was bought by a Japanese company.

Tara: Yes, so we’re still headquartered in Toronto. We have a global presence, where we have offices in Taiwan, in Tokyo, Darmstadt and Dublin, and with a generous sprinkling of people throughout Europe.

We were acquired by Rakuten, maybe prior to me joining, 2010, 2011, and we’ve been sort of their digital book area of that ever since then. So having this enormous company backing has been really, really helpful, but we do maintain quite a Canadian-centric grassroots focus with the HQ being here in Toronto.

Joanna: Absolutely. So one of the changes you mentioned has been the subscription model. As you mentioned, our friends in Seattle have one that’s quite famous that is an exclusive program. Kobo Plus is not exclusive, so people can be in that as well as selling their ebooks elsewhere, which I love.

How does Kobo Plus subscription compare to some of the other subscription models for ebooks and audiobooks?

Like, what is it for readers and listeners?

Tara: Sure, I think it’s maybe important to see why people have gone down the subscription route, for people that are potentially a little bit hesitant of that.

So when we’re thinking about the book business as a whole, or Kobo’s history, I think in about 2015 we could see that there was a whole generation of consumers that were coming that were consuming most of their media by not purchasing it once at a time, and they were signing up for subscriptions.

Whether this be music or movies or TV shows, I think we knew that books and audiobooks were going to go this way.

As a retailer that was really doing a great job at selling books one at a time, we wanted to reach this subscription consumer without disrupting the business we had built and doing it in a way that benefited us, the publishers, the authors, but also the readers who were looking for this.

So we tested this in a contained market. So it was launched back in 2017 in the Netherlands. This is because we had a really great market share there. A strong, willing partner, Bol, who wanted to test this out.

One of the also key factors was that there’s some of the biggest piracy rates in Europe were found in the Netherlands. So we wanted to see if we could convert those users who were already sometimes using Kobo devices. They’re reading, they’re just not paying for the reading.

So we wanted to see if we could make this very easy, self-contained platform, could we convert them to paying users? Then what we found from that is that it really didn’t cannibalize the a la carte sales.

We had new customers signing up, and we could kind of see where they were coming from. Some of them were coming over from Kindle Unlimited, some of them coming from piracy. Some of them had been maybe just library users that had been moved into this kind of easier one click model.

Some of them had never read an ebook before, but used it as a way to step their toe into the digital reading. What we found is that — 

Publishers and authors, they all earned more as a result of the new readers [on subscription].

So what we looked at with these findings was—gosh, it’ll be almost 10 years now, which is wild. Time doesn’t exist anymore, Joanna—but with the findings from the Netherlands, we’ve been able to expand Kobo Plus. As of this recording, we are currently in 23 countries, which is including all of our core markets.

There’ll be more to come, probably shortly after this comes out, actually, but I can’t quite say where. So 23 countries right now.

Like you’ve mentioned, we’re not the only subscription model out there, but what makes us a little bit different is the focus on the importance of the authors and wanting to give them flexibility, while also trying to reach this subscription reader. So it was really important to us that we didn’t lock any authors into exclusivity.

Our ethos around KWL is really trying to encourage authors to publish widely on as many platforms as they can, to reach as many readers as they can.

We just want to make sure that the Kobo experience of you publishing widely is really easy and that you’re not spending too much time on it because you’re balancing all of these other platforms.

So we built this out so authors can pick and choose the country. They can choose all of them if they want, which is what I would always recommend.

If you’re a wide author that’s publishing globally, I don’t know why you wouldn’t put your books in, but perhaps you didn’t want to hit up your main markets, like the US or Canada. You do have the option of like excluding those, or you can select all of them.

What’s a cool way about selecting all of them is that it actually includes future territories. So as we’ve been rapidly expanding Kobo Plus, you don’t have to do anything. Your books are already there when we add to new places. So that’s been pretty cool.

We’re not locking authors into any timed period.

You can put your books in, and you can take them out if you’re not happy with it. I always encourage people to leave them in, to really try to reach that readership.

Again, we wanted to give authors as much control as possible, and really just get authors to try it out. Like try out an older series, maybe try it out in the Netherlands, where you haven’t really thought about selling books before, and eventually get really comfortable adding their catalog to Kobo plus.

So for us, it was really all about building author trust over time when it comes to subscriptions. I feel people are more comfortable with it now than before, and I think it’s easy to get people comfortable when the revenue is increasing, I think.

Joanna: So all my books that are on Kobo are in Kobo Plus. I also agree, I think there’s a group of readers for whom—readers and listeners, we should say—because this is audiobooks as well, right?

Tara: Yes, it is. Depending on the territory, but primarily they all have ebooks and audiobooks. So from a customer perspective, you can either pay for all you can read for a month, all you can listen for a month, or all you can read and listen. So those are the options.

Joanna: Exactly. So this is the thing, I think as authors, we have to think about different groups of readers. So even as we record this, I’ve got a Kickstarter happening. There is an ebook, there is an audiobook, which will eventually be on Kobo, but for now, they’re just on Kickstarter.

Then there’s a gorgeous hardback with foil and ribbon and all of that kind of thing, which Kobo doesn’t sell beautiful hardbacks, right? I mean, and neither does Amazon, neither does Apple.

[The special hardback vs subscription.] They’re different audiences.

It’s a completely different audience, someone who’s going to buy that hardback to someone who’s going to borrow the audiobook in the Netherlands.

Tara: Yes. I mean, I love seeing what authors are doing with these. That must be so satisfying for you to get that copy of this beautiful book.

So, yes, we really wanted to just focus on the digital experience, especially when it comes to our devices as well. We make some of the best e-reading devices—I mean, I would say they are the best—but like, we’re making the best eReaders that are available.

We launched our first color eReaders last year, and the reception to them was just tremendous. So our eReaders have integration with ebooks and audiobooks. You can connect via Bluetooth to speakers or headphones.

We also have Overdrive capabilities, like Overdrive is built into the e reader, so you can access the library from within Kobo.

One of the things that we’ve been doing, l think we’ve just launched it maybe last year. You can tell I don’t work on the device side, I’m not quite as sharp with my dates.

It’s always been very important for us to have it be this open platform. So having users be able to just use the eReader to read books, and if we can make it easy for them to purchase books with subscriptions and convert them to paying users, that’s awesome, but we do have integration with Dropbox.

With our newer eReaders, you can actually write notes with the Kobo Stylist, and you can mark up the files themselves, and there’s integration within that.

We’ve recently added Google Drive integration, which is super easy. I just used it the other day when I was giving a presentation, and I had my notes that I was able to convert over and read from my Kobo, which was really helpful.

I was actually able to mark up and make changes as I’m going along on the Kobo eReader itself, which is pretty cool.

Joanna: Of course, if people buy my ebook from the Kickstarter, they can read that on Kobo because it doesn’t have to be like DRMed into—that’s too technical. It doesn’t have to be a specifically Kobo ebook is what you’re saying.

Tara: No, no, no. We always just use the ePub standard. Actually, I shouldn’t be saying that because you can also add PDFs and things like that. So, no, it’s not a locked system.

Joanna: I think that’s really good too. So let’s get into some of the other things. I mean, like we mentioned, the gorgeous hardbacks that are the current trend in the indie community. I mean, they really are kind of all people are talking about.

You and I were talking about doing this episode because at the end of the day — 

The bread and butter income for most indie authors is still digital.

It’s like, we move on to the sexiest thing. In 2012 ebooks were pretty sexy, right? I mean, they were like, “Oh, we can do this, and we can do this.”

Then it was audiobooks and print-on-demand and all of that, and now it’s gorgeous hardbacks. So let’s just go back in to the sort of bread and butter.

What are your tips for maximizing income from ebooks and audiobooks on Kobo?

I know that’s a massive question, but let’s pick a few things.

Tara: I think it’s still really important to make beautiful books, even if it’s digital. I mean because authors are primarily digital first. A lot of publishers are not. They’re still really focused on the print.

So I think it’s really important to think about making a really great digital file, which, like I mentioned, it’s just easier than ever now. You actually don’t even have to think about it that much, the tools just do it for you.

I think it’s important to have a file that can be read easily because the last thing we want to do is have some sort of technical glitch that is interrupting somebody’s hard won reading time.

We really just want the person to be always trying to get the next book, so making sure the file itself is beautiful and working perfectly, I think is really important.

I think it’s important to consider making accessible files so that everyone can read your book. Digital reading opens up a world to people that might have limitations around physical book reading.

There are a number of people that can only read digitally, and it just allows for a more inclusive reading experience. So something to be mindful of as well.

Joanna: Just on that—

Is there something special we need to do for accessibility for an ebook?

Tara: So I have a book recommendation for everyone called Content For Everyone, by Jeff Adams and Michele Lucchini. We had them on the Kobo Writing Life Podcast, and it was just a great conversation.

I would say to check out their book because it has a lot of practical advice for authors on making accessible content. So not even just the ebooks themselves, but also author websites and newsletters. It’s really full of actionable tips. They are far more versed in this than I would be to try and reiterate some of their stuff.

Joanna: Jeff’s been on this show, and we talked about it then. I got the impression that if you use, let’s say, Vellum or Atticus for your ebook publishing, that does cover the content, at least, of an ebook.

Tara: Yes, yes, perfect.

Joanna: Okay, great. So just to be clear, there wasn’t anything extra we were missing.

Tara: No, no. Just to make sure that that is kind of being done, and you’re not creating files that are inaccessible.

Joanna: Which, to me, it means that Kobo is still getting a ton of badly formatted files, which I thought we were way past that.

Tara: It’s not that it’s badly formatted, I think you have to consider the millions of books that exist, and especially the older catalog. So newer books might be accessible, but the older books that you’ve created back in 2012 might not be.

So a lot of the work we’re doing is just an education around making sure that your book files are of the best content or the best quality that they can be, like before vellum existed.

Joanna: Oh, yes. I used to use Scrivener back in the day. I know some people still do, but Scrivener, I used to get errors all the time. I love Scrivener for writing, but for listeners, I would say Vellum or Atticus is the best in class these days. Okay, back on to maximizing income.

Tara: So I would say that — 

For Kobo, box sets are super popular.

So when you’re thinking about selling books one at a time, and authors primarily are writing in series, or that’s sort of the trend that we see through Kobo Writing Life, you definitely want to bundle your books.

Something to remember is that on Kobo, we don’t have a higher price cap. So you can go over $9.99, and still earn 70% on each sale.

So with the box sets, again, you want to make sure that you have an easy to navigate table of contents because this is a larger file that readers are browsing through. So you want to make sure that they’re able to do that with ease.

Which I’m sure, again, these tools can kind of easily create this for you, but just something to be mindful of when you’re bundling the books together.

Joanna: Yes. I think bringing up box sets is really good because the KWL promotion tab is great. I go in every three weeks, and I apply for as much as I can get. Although, just so everyone knows, I don’t get every promotion. Like nobody gets every promotion, right? You just have to apply for a ton of them.

There are always box set promotions going on.

Tara: Yes, we rotate around pretty regularly with them because our readers are just so interested in having box sets. It’s funny because I think we think about box sets as like a discounted opportunity to have these books, but that’s not really how readers are taking them.

They’re taking them as like this is a convenient way to have this one series in this one book. So I’d always recommend pricing them for their value and just making sure that they’re available for the reader who doesn’t want to like click on books one by one, and just have this bigger box set.

Something to keep in mind with the covers is that we do accept the 3D box sets with the plain white backgrounds, but if you’re thinking about promotions or applying to promotions, we might be a little bit less inclined to accept those, just because it makes your cover really small and it makes it harder to read.

You already have limited space on a website in terms of a cover, so I really like to —

Think of box set covers as they’re almost as an ad for your series.

So you can kind of use it as an opportunity to encapsulate the theme of your series within your box set cover.

Joanna: Then just on that, just on Kobo Plus, we didn’t say—So a lot of authors are used to the ‘pages read’ idea. How is that done on Kobo Plus for reading and listening?

Tara: The biggest difference, I guess, between Kobo Plus and some of the other platforms is that we base our payment on—well, it’s a very similar revenue share model—but it’s based on the minutes that your book has been read versus the page reads.

This allows us to treat ebooks and audiobooks the same, and it kind of reduces a little bit of the gamification that we’ve seen on some other platforms. So we’re really taking into account the time that somebody is spending on your book.

Joanna: Yes, because some people were able to game other systems by sort of getting bots or paying people to click through pages and stuff like that. Oh, but it’s funny, isn’t it? I mean, whenever humans can find a way to game a system, they will.

Tara: We’re very clever people.

Joanna: We are. We are very clever people. Okay, so—

What about some other ways of maximizing income?

Tara: So I would say with audiobooks that we’re talking about, so you can publish audiobooks to Kobo as well, through Kobo Writing Life.

You may not see the tab right away, and actually the same with the promotions tab, but you just have to send the team an email to enable this for you.

If you email writinglife@kobo.com you can ask for audiobooks and for promotions.

Just as we were talking about the box set covers there, I think something to keep in mind with audiobooks, we will crop the cover for you. If you want to make sure that you’re making the best cover, audiobooks are square and not rectangular, so sometimes we do see kind of like a really squished cover.

That would just be something to be a bit mindful of when you’re publishing audiobooks, to just make sure that you’re selling the book because we are unfortunately always judging books by their covers.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. I guess—

One of the things I’ve noticed with Kobo is that the vast majority of my Kobo income is fiction rather than nonfiction. Is there a split like that?

Tara: There probably is, but I feel like the nonfiction market for us is definitely growing, especially with our new devices. We’ve done a lot of work to try to cater to the nonfiction reader, and what we call like an immersive reading experience.

You can see this with the writing within the book itself. There’s easy ways to flip back and forth between the pages. We basically have the digital version of like a thumb in the side of the pages, so you don’t lose your spot, but you can actually flip through the book and then flip back again.

So it’s definitely growing, but I think what we see, especially on Kobo Writing Life, it would be fiction that would be primarily what people are reading right now.

Joanna: Well, I’ll put another sort of ask in for the promotional tab, which is mainly fiction focused, I find. I do always look for nonfiction promotions there. To be clear, again, for people listening, I do think to sell books on Kobo, it is good to be part of the promotional opportunities. You can really get in front of new readers that way.

So that would be one of the things I would like to see, is more nonfiction and memoir promotional opportunities.

Tara: For sure. I will take this to the team.

Joanna: Yes. Take the feedback!

Let’s talk about libraries because some authors are worried about libraries. I mean, obviously authors want libraries to have their ebooks and audiobooks, but they’re also worried about the money.

If an author goes with the library and Overdrive, how do they get paid for that?

Tara: So it’s really easy to opt your books in. It’s part of the publication process, so it’s in the rights and distribution section. So you just have to set a price in USD, and that’ll be your library price for the book. The general rule of thumb is roughly around the same as a mass market paperback.

You just want to make sure that you’re not putting the same price as your just straight up digital book because of the loaning factor when it comes to the library books.

Sometimes we have authors that want to appeal to libraries by putting it in at a lower price, and I always kind of remind them that the librarians have two ways of purchasing the books through Kobo Writing Life.

So they can publish on a one copy, one user. This is kind of like when you think of a traditional book, that we have this one book and that can be loaned out multiple times. So that’s why you want to increase the price because you want to cover the loans that are happening with that.

They also have the opportunity to buy your book on a cost per checkout option, and that’s for a one-time loan for 10% of the price. So if your library book is $19.99, they could also just buy your book for a one-time loan for $1.99. So that can really appeal to them.

We have a lot of the library sales that are demand driven, so it’s people actually going in and asking for your book. So it’s really great to be able to offer to a librarian, like actually, you can buy it just this one time, and maybe you’ll buy it a few times for the lower price.

Then if it’s really popular, then you’ll buy it for the higher price again. So we see that happening quite a lot. Authors that distribute to Overdrive through Kobo, they earn 50% of any sale that happens.

Joanna: Yes. So just to put people’s mind at ease —

You can support libraries and get paid.

So this is one of the ways you can say to people, you can listen or read my books for free. Just ask the librarian to stock them, or just go to your library app. I think that’s a good one.

I wanted to come on to the authors who do really well on KWL.

What are the commonalities that you see amongst top selling authors? What do you see working that we can model?

Tara: Well, like you’ve mentioned, the promotions tool that we have. I was trying to think about instances of authors that have moved widely in the past couple of years and are finding success on Kobo, and they’re honestly the ones that have leveraged their promotions.

It can take a little while to build a Kobo audience, and I just always recommend applying to the promotions that are relevant to your books and applying regularly.

I like to think about it as, like, the worst case scenario is that you’re putting your books in front of the right eyes. It can just be quite competitive because there’s a lot of people applying, but it’s our merchandising team that are going through them.

So I definitely would say the ones that are building the audience and finding success on Kobo are really leveraging the promotions with us. Then also, that’s audio and library promotions that we have too.

I think if you’re publishing audiobooks, and I know this can be really tricky to balance, but if you can make sure that you’re publishing your ebook and your audiobook on the same day and do those same releases, I think that’s really important to building sales.

We found authors that have kind of reported that it’s a bigger impact for their audio when they do that versus when they release it at a later date or anything. So you can try and line them up as the one book release.

Joanna: Well, then that brings me on to something, having obviously done audiobooks for many years. Sometimes I narrate them myself, sometimes I have paid people, but recently, and in fact, my Death Valley audiobook—I haven’t told you this—but it is narrated by my voice clone, my AI voice clone.

Today, as we record this, I put a couple of chapters up on The Creative Penn Podcast, so people can have a listen. I’ve already had comments that say, “I would not have known this was an AI. It sounds exactly like you.”

This will be, I think, the first time in however long I’ve been doing this now, 2007, I’ve been able to publish ebook and audiobook on the same day.

Tara: Oh, wow.

Joanna: Because, as you said, it is incredibly hard to do that because most of us, in the past, we’ve maybe sold the ebook first, made some money, then eventually been able to pay for the audiobook.

Before Kobo, when you could put it up there, you put them on another platform, they never went live on the same day. There was a long time we couldn’t do preorders.

So, I guess we’re coming onto the AI discussion because AI-narrated audiobooks, certainly for me, ElevenLabs, the difference in the amount of work and pain for me as an audiobook narrator is incredible. So I don’t know if I’m ever going to human-narrate again. I mean, it literally is fantastic. So let’s come on to AI.

What is Kobo’s stance on AI-assisted ebooks, AI-narrated audiobooks, AI-created covers?

I know this is a tough question, but we have to cover it.

Tara: AI is definitely the biggest thing that is disrupting the book industry at the moment. When it comes to us at Kobo, we kind of go back to the core principles of what makes a reader’s life worse, and can we avoid it? And what makes a reader’s life better, and can we take advantage of it?

So AI, we know, will open the floodgates to lots of books being published that are like purely machine generated, which really impacts organic discovery, especially for indies. Part of the upside of this is that it becomes a curation problem, and that’s something that we’re here for. We’re here to solve that problem.

So with Kobo Writing Life specifically, we accept AI audiobooks, and we just ask that they’re clearly labeled that it’s machine read. It’s really just a customer expectation or just have something that’s mentioning that it’s a machine read audiobook.

We do discourage the publication of ebooks that are solely generated by AI, and this is just trying to root out the bad actors. We’re not trying to root out any authors who are serious about making a career with their works, but we’re just trying to discourage the people that are bad actors within this space.

So when we think about it from an indie author perspective, I think it’s good practice to include disclosure, which I think is something that you do, Joanna. I think of you as like a leader in the best practices in this space.

Joanna: I do try. Just on the audiobook, so I have a button, like a yellow button, that says “digitally narrated.” It’s so funny because I see now in the traditional publishing industry they’re saying, “Oh, we need labeling,” and I’m like, I’ve been labeling my books for years.

I mean, come on. Like before it was required, I ticked all the boxes and talked about it. Also, I don’t have an issue with that. I think honesty is really important. Also, I feel like all these things make my work better. I’m not doing it to try to scam anyone or be worse. I’m trying to be better.

I do think, though, we are in a transition period. I think this will be so pervasive within a year or two that it won’t make that much difference. For now, I guess, as you say, it’s marking this. So I will be filling in whatever I need to fill in.

Tara: Yes, I think it’s good practice. I mean, it is a personal decision, and I think you just have to think about the reader. You just don’t want to disappoint the person that is buying your book. Like, that’s what it ultimately comes down to for us.

Then we also know that it’s okay to use AI as a tool, especially with indie authors who have to balance writing with the entire business of also being your own publisher.

So whether you’re using it as a tool to create you a calendar or spreadsheet that makes sure that you’re hitting all your preorder dates. There’s things that can make your life easier because you have to wear so many hats. So we understand that as well.

So when I think about AI, like from a book selling perspective, I think the interesting opportunity comes in how we can leverage AI in some of our recommendations, like summarizations and curation.

So I can’t really go into too much detail on what we’re working on yet, but we’re really excited about better recommendations and curation that really benefit us all.

We just want to keep people’s attention on long form reading by putting really good stuff in front of them, and we can do this without using books as training data inside an LLM. So, yes, we’re excited about this.

Any Kobo Writing Life authors that are listening, you can expect some changes for to the Kobo Writing Life terms to come. I hope that things aren’t seen as anything that’s too scary. We’re really trying to just support some new initiatives and be really, really clear about what we’re asking for.

We’re not interested in making new content. We don’t want to make things from books that authors entrust us with. What we do want to do is make reading better and keep people reading more and for longer.

We’re trying to earn a space in reading amongst everything else that’s going on in the digital world, and we really believe that we can do this.

Joanna: Yes, I like that. It’s interesting, though, because you mentioned there about—and this is obviously important—that you’re not going to just upload everyone’s books to some big LLM and do stuff with it. You’re not going to do that.

It’s funny because for many, many years, I’ve said, ‘why is the book itself not the metadata?’

So we’ve had to come up with categories, keywords. We’ve had to have genre-specific covers.

The thing is, if I have a book, say Death Valley—it’s like 70,000 words, it’s a full length thriller—and I have to write a sales description, which is—well, in fact, Claude writes my sales descriptions now—but it’s not long enough.

What you want with some kind of AI curation recommendation engine is the emotional promise of this, the characters in this, the feeling you get by reading this, matches these books over here, which just will not be surfaced in a normal book recommendation engine. In fact, for the last year or so—

I’ve been using ChatGPT as my main book recommendation engine because it can do this much more nuanced search.

I found really some quite old books as well have come up. So is that something that—I know you’re not going to read everything in—but what do you think about that?

Tara: I think you’re spot on in the kind of way that the book recommendations can be going and can be leveraged. We just want to make more thoughtful recommendations.

It’s interesting that you’re saying that it’s older books too, because that’s something that we see with the subscription with Kobo Plus when I look at some of the top read books. They’re often coming from like 2017, 2018.

So there’s ways to resurface things that exist that people want to read. We can do this in a thoughtful way and an easier way than us having to rely on metadata that’s been provided. If I want to be able to find a list of like Canadian authors, it’s not as easy as potentially it can be. There’s instances like that.

It’s all about, again, trying to find the right book for the right reader and just keeping them reading. That’s what we’re focused on.

Joanna: At the end of the day, I mean, we’re book people, and it kind of drives me up the wall when authors get annoyed with other authors. I’m like, look, let’s get upset about how much time people spend gaming or how much time people to spend on TV.

We just want everyone to read. Whatever they read is good.

We just want people to read books. I know, obviously, that’s what Kobo wants as well.

Tara: I think it was like on Threads or a meme or something that I read recently, where it was like, reading is almost radical now.

In a time where we just want faster content and we’re consuming things faster, it’s a bit radical to be like, actually, I’m going to sit down for two hours and just be immersed in this world and really think about myself and expand my thoughts on other things because I’m not going to be distracted by four things at once.

It must have been some meme that, ironically, grabbed my attention for this radical thought process.

Joanna: That’s ironic.

Tara: I know, but I was just like, that’s right. It’s something that we don’t do. I mean, it’s, I guess, comparable to going to the movies and like actually sitting there and not being distracted. It’s the same sort of thing where it’s radical to take that time for yourself, and we want people to be able to do that.

Joanna: We’re almost out of time, but I just wanted us to mention the Kobo Writing Life Podcast. Since this is a podcast, people might enjoy the KWL Show, and that has been going for many years now.

What can people find over on the KWL Podcast if they want to click over and have a listen?

Tara: We just released episode 366, which is wild. So you can find us anywhere where you listen to podcasts. We release an episode every week, but we rotate between new interviews, and then we’ve been resurfacing some of our great content from our backlist with a little thing we’re calling the Kobo Rewriting Life Podcast.

So there’ll be a new episode, a Rewriting Life new episode, and so on and so forth. There’s a wealth of really good information. We focus on the craft and business of writing. It’s a mix of traditional authors and indies. Jo, you’ve been a guest, and we’d love to have you back. I think you’re going to come on soon.

Joanna: Yes, at some point.

Tara: I think for anyone that is interested in Kobo, or maybe you’re new to what we do, at the end of 2024 we released an interview with Michael Tamblyn, who is our CEO. He is probably a little bit more eloquent than me in explaining the things that we’ve just talked about.

He really gives a great outline of Kobo, Kobo Writing Life, and I just really like being able to spotlight that because it really informs the fact that Kobo is a book company, and we’re being led by a book guy. I think that’s something to be celebrated, and just kind of shows our overall focus into the reading space.

Joanna: Well, we should also remind people what Kobo is an acronym for.

Tara: Literally, it’s the word ‘book.’

Joanna: I feel like we forget to say that because we know it, but there might be people listening who didn’t know.

Tara: I worked there for years before I realized that it was actually an anagram of the word book. I think I was definitely three years in before it hit me. I was like, oh, right.

Joanna: Oh, yes, that’s what it is.

Michael Tamblyn is—I’ve been at London Book Fair—and he’s often the very best speaker in publishing. I mean, he really is very entertaining and very positive about indie authors, which I really appreciate. I’ve heard him defend indie authors to the publishing industry. So I love that, and I’m obviously a happy KWL user. So Tara—

Where can people find the Kobo Writing Life team if they want to connect?

Tara: So you can email us at writinglife@kobo.com. We’re on most of the socials. We haven’t quite ventured into TikTok yet, but you can find us on Facebook and Instagram and Threads and YouTube. If you are interested in creating an account or learning more about it, you can go to Kobo.com/writinglife.

Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Tara. That was great.

Tara: Thank you.

The post Ebook Sales, Subscriptions, Audiobooks And Book Marketing With Tara Cremin From Kobo Writing Life first appeared on The Creative Penn.

[From KMW: I’m taking a quick sabbatical this week. I’ll be back next Monday with a post/podcast about “The Disillusionment Arc in Storytelling: A Powerful Tool for Character Growth.” Until then, I hope you enjoy this short post on the important topic of how to write subtext in fiction!]

One of the most powerful tools in a writer’s arsenal is subtext. This is the art of letting readers figure things out for themselves. When you know how to write subtext in fiction, you can create deeper, more engaging stories that invite readers to lean in, pick up on subtle cues, and connect with your characters on a whole new level.

But how do you strike the right balance between clarity and mystery? Let’s take a look at how to write subtext in fiction in a way that keeps readers hooked without leaving them in the dark.

It’s the writer’s job to make sure audiences have no trouble understanding what’s going on in a story. If the antagonist is ugly, maybe you make that plain by showing off his hairy wart and leering grin. If the protagonist has lived a hard life, you make sure your audience knows that by showing the fireplace your character had to sweep out and the cinders all over her dress. And if the protagonist has come up with a brilliant plan to save the day, you need, at the very least, to hint to your audience that the cavalry is on the way.

Keeping your audience in the loop is vital to presenting a pleasant and rewarding reading experience. But there are times when you do yourself a disservice by telling your audience what’s what—particularly when whatever it is may already be evident to an insightful reader.

How to Write Subtext in Fiction the Right Way

Fantasy veteran David Eddings obviously knew. About halfway through his book Pawn of Prophecy, he offers a prime example of why refraining from telling the audience something can sometimes pull them into a deeper collusion with the writer—sort of like a conspiratorial tap on the nose between writer and audience.

For Example:

In Pawn of Prophecy, Eddings makes it clear one of his characters is in love with a woman he has no hope of marrying.

But Eddings doesn’t actually say that. After having the narrating protagonist describe the lovelorn character’s interaction with the woman, all he writes is that a “self-mocking smile” flickered across the character’s face and that the narrating character then “saw the reason for Silk’s sometimes strange manner. An almost suffocating surge of sympathy welled up in his throat.”

That’s it.

But that’s enough for readers to clearly understand what’s going on beneath the surface of this scene and these characters’ interactions.

The trick to making this kind of subtext work is based primarily on the author’s ability to show readers what’s going on. If you’re able to suitably dramatize your characters’ actions and reactions, you audience will often glean such a vivid and personal picture of what’s going on that they’ll understand, without being told, exactly what characters are thinking.

However, you must also be careful not to go overboard, since you don’t want to leave your audience confused. Make certain all the pieces are in place, so your audience will be able to put them together to form a flawless picture.

Mastering how to write subtext in fiction is all about trusting your readers. When you give them just enough information to piece things together on their own, you create a more immersive and rewarding reading experience. The key is striking the right balance. You want to show enough to make your meaning clear without over-explaining. When done well, subtext draws readers deeper into your story, making them feel like insiders rather than just spectators. The next time you’re tempted to spell something out, take a step back and ask yourself: what can you show instead of tell?

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do you approach writing subtext in your own stories? Tell me in the comments!

Love Helping Writers Become Authors? You can now become a patron. (Huge thanks to those of you who are already part of my Patreon family!)

The post The Power of Unspoken Words: How to Write Subtext in Fiction appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

What’s the difference between telling a story on screen and on the page? How does indie film production overlap with indie publishing—and what can writers learn from the world of filmmaking? Why might a producer choose creative freedom over big studio deals, and what does that mean when it comes to book marketing?

Gretchen McGowan talks about her memoir Flying In: My Adventures in Filmmaking, navigating the independent film world, and finding her voice as an author.

In the intro, NaNoWriMo shutting down [The Verge]; Amazon introduces AI-generated Recaps; Thoughts on the creative cycle; How to Write a Novel audiobook on YouTube; Mapwalker fantasy novels on YouTube.

Plus, Death Valley, A Thriller Kickstarter and thriller writing class; J.F. Penn on The Adventure Story Podcast; Death Valley expert Steve Hall on the Books and Travel Podcast; My photos from Death Valley.

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 

Gretchen McGowan is an award-winning independent film producer, filmmaking lecturer, and the author of Flying In: My Adventures in Filmmaking.

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 an indie film producer actually do?
• The isolation of writing a book vs. making a film
• The fear of underserving your audience
• Tools for writing the “truth” in memoir
• Seeing a new place for the first time through the eyes of a filmmaker
• The parallels of self-publishing and the indie film world
• Utilizing your network to help market your book
• AI tools being used in this democratization of film

You can find Gretchen at GretchenMcGowan.com and GoldcrestFilms.com.

Transcript of Interview with Gretchen McGowan

Joanna: Gretchen McGowan is an award-winning independent film producer, filmmaking lecturer, and the author of Flying In: My Adventures in Filmmaking. So welcome to the show, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Thank you so much, Joanna. It’s a dream to be here.

Joanna: Well, it’s going to be so fun talking to you today. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and what you actually do in the indie filmmaking industry, and what even is that?

Gretchen: Yes, well, I’m an independent producer. I come from a freelancing background in the independent film world. We make largely films that are kind of under $15 million, although that fluctuates all the way down to the really almost no budget kind of film.

When you’re a producer on those kinds of films, you wear many, many hats, because your footprint is small, your crew is smaller. So you have to be good at many things, or at least pretend to be. A lot of that is trial and error. So that’s been largely my background.

I’m now at a company called Goldcrest Films. They’re based in London, but we have a branch here in New York, and there I oversee film. So I’m a little less hands on at this point with each film. We also do documentaries, and on those, I’m very, very hands on.

Joanna: You said that you wear many hats, so just be a bit more specific.

What are the actual things that a producer does?

Gretchen: Sure. So in the early stages, you’re, of course, approving scripts, making script changes with writers. You are casting with the casting director and the director of the film. Then you’re location scouting at distant locations, even nearby locations.

You are involved in really every decision that is made, and you’re trying to help tell a story with your director. The director really is king in this case, or queen, and you’re there to facilitate that. To make sure that their vision of this script is seen on screen by you.

Joanna: Do you manage the budget, or is that somebody else?

Gretchen: You do. That’s one of the less glamorous things, but I still enjoy it because every aspect of that film is reflected in that budget. You have to make sure going into it, it’s a little bit idealistic what your budget might be at that point, but it’s based upon experience.

So it’s not a fantasy of what that budget will be. You’ll look at similar budgets where you ultimately landed to create that budget, and to know what it takes to get the film actually to market.

Joanna: Then once the film is made, are you involved in the editing at all?

The actual sort of what happens after the filming?

Gretchen: Definitely. To me, the editorial process is the final chance to write the script again. I come from editing, actually. I started out kind of through the back door, in the finishing process in editorial. So it’s close to my heart, I would say, the editorial process.

I feel like we can talk about AI and all the ways in which people make films now, but there’s still like a gestation period to getting a film completed. It takes a little bit of time to find the story, to find the best takes, to edit out what doesn’t belong, and to complete the film.

Joanna: Then before we move on, after this film is finished, is your job done?

Or are you then involved in distribution and marketing?

Gretchen: Well, that’ll depend on the distributor that we find for the film. Sometimes we have a distributor already when we’re in pre-production, so we know what our deliverables will be, what the release date will be, what cast we need in place to go to certain festivals and that kind of thing.

Often we are much more indie-minded, indie-spirited, in that we finish that film, we edit it, we do all the beautifying of it, and sound and picture and visual effects, and then we take it to a festival and hope to sell the film.

Now, those days are kind of disappearing because there are fewer and fewer films being made and being sold for many, many reasons. In an ideal world, you would sell that film at a festival, and then they would say to you, “Here’s the way in which we plan to distribute it.”

A producer is very, very involved in organizing that, in getting them all their deliverables and making sure the film really has everything it needs to go to market. That probably means going to a lot of festivals and being involved in the campaign as it’s rolled out across the country and across the world.

Joanna: It’s incredible to me. I’ve really been learning a lot more about the film business. I think on the other side, obviously, it doesn’t look so difficult, but there’s so much that goes into a film.

Even, as you say, “a smaller budget of under $15 million,” which people are like, what? That is a huge budget. Of course, it’s not really, is it?

Gretchen: It’s true. In all these films, probably like any book that you would write, the life of it extends long past when you put your pen down. So you have several films that you’re kind of in maintenance mode and continuing to push out there, even though you stopped filming many, many months ago.

Joanna: So let’s get into the book. So why did you decide to write a book after focusing primarily on the visual media?

What were the challenges of writing a book versus making a film?

Gretchen: Oh gosh. Well, it was all alone, that’s for sure. I didn’t have my team around me.

I wanted to write the book because I felt like I was involved in filmmaking at this really special time in the 1990s and into the 2000s, a lot of it here in New York, but also around the world. Making films, we just did it in a slightly different way than we do today. I was afraid we were sort of losing sight of how we used to do things.

I was teaching up at Columbia University a class in pre-production, and then a class in production for directors. I was having so much fun, and the questions that were coming at me made me think, this is really a book, isn’t it?

These are stories that they’re enjoying. They’re getting a lot out of it. They’re still relevant. I feel like this could translate nicely into a sequence of stories that could be really entertaining.

How is it different from working on a book? So working on the book, of course I’m carrying all these characters in my head, so I never feel totally alone when I sit down to write.

It’s just a completely different thing to be motivated for yourself to write a book, as opposed to these constant deadlines that are coming at you when you’re making a film. You have a schedule, you must meet that. Other people are depending upon you.

With a book, I was on my own. There was nobody saying, “You have to finish chapter seven by April 1.” It was just a made up scheme for myself. So the made up scheme continued to shift, as you can imagine.

Joanna: That’s so interesting because I chose to be a writer, one of the reasons was to be alone. I know people listening, I think we’re all serious introverts in the sort of full-time writer mode, but that was the first thing you brought up there as a challenge, was being all alone.

So do you think people who work in film are just much more sociable and enjoy the collaboration and the teamwork and that kind of thing?

Gretchen: That’s so funny because I feel like I’m a forced extrovert. I feel like I’m an introvert, like you, by nature. Being involved in the film business, I think many of us are just kind of forced into the world of an extrovert.

There’s a role on set called the first assistant director, the first AD, we call them. I always think of them as the extrovert for the director because the director doesn’t want to be shouting out when the next take is and when we cut. They want to have this person by their side.

So maybe it’s just another version of my personality that I’m able to tap, but by nature, I’d rather be sitting at a desk or writing a story like you.

Joanna: Oh, that’s great. On that, you said you didn’t have any contracts or anything.

So you decided to write the book and then look at publication later?

Because with nonfiction, you can look for a book deal first.

Gretchen: Well, I’d never written anything long form before. I was a playwright in college, so I had experience writing. As far as a commercial venture to get something out, I said, let’s see what we’ve got first.

I took Marion Roach’s class, and she was just really helpful to that end, as far as kind of setting a schedule, having realistic expectations. I took a couple of her courses too. I felt like those things helped me motivate my own schedule.

Joanna: Marion’s been on this show several times. A fantastic memoir teacher, so that’s brilliant.

So let’s get into some more of the book. So you write in the opening about the fear you get as a filmmaker of underserving the film and the audience, which I really loved.

Did you find that fear mirrored as you wrote the book?

Gretchen: Oh, yes. I only know my own experience in making films, and it is varied. I’ve worked with so many different kinds of directors, so many different genres, but it’s not going to be anybody else’s experience.

So as I’m writing, I’m trying not to have the fear of being judged, of someone else saying, “Well, that’s not really the way it is,” or, “It was never like that for me,” and I’m sure I’m getting a lot of that as people read it and work through their own experience of making films.

At the same time, I can only tell the stories that I lived, and then try to make it as universal as possible. So for me, that was the challenge.

Okay, here’s the core story—and this is something I learned from Marion in reading her book, The Memoir Project—how do I make that ripple out to be a story that’s relatable on a universal level.

For somebody who works in print advertising, or somebody who works in any other industry really, it should feel relevant, this experience and the arc of a producer story.

Joanna: Yes, that fear of being judged, that is what I have, absolutely. Everyone’s got their fears, and this one is a big one.

It’s tough with memoir. I wrote a memoir about pilgrimage, and it was kind of midlife and all of that. I was like, if I put this out there, everyone’s going to know more about me. That’s really scary, right?

Do you think you’re over that fear yet?

Gretchen: Well, now is the interesting time, isn’t it, because now people are reading it. People who I’ve worked with, people who I’ve been friends with for years, and they’re having their own experience.

The dialogue that’s coming out of that is another book probably, too, because they’ll say, “Oh, I read the chapter about having made Buffalo ’66, and I got caught in that situation. Mine was a little different.” So then I get to hear all these wonderful stories and bring up these memories of what it was like to make films in the 90s.

Joanna: Yes, which is cool. I mean, the 90s, such a great time. Before social media. Oh, could we go back? That’s the question.

Gretchen: I know, but it’s great to sort of be sparking something in other people that they feel compelled to write me a note or text me and say, “Oh, this reminded me of something.”

So that really was the goal of the book, to say, “Here’s my experience. This is what I went through. What was it like for you?” Like your pilgrimage, everybody’s had their version of a pilgrimage, and to be able to think, “Oh, the way Joanna climbed that mountain or surpassed that, that reminds me of when I did X.”

That took a long time for me to figure out the universality of things.

Joanna: If you’re writing about decades ago, how did you tackle truth?

In terms of, did this actually happen in this way? Did you keep notes? Have you got notes from back then, or journals? Or how did you recall those things?

Gretchen: Well, I think I have the mind of a steel trap when it comes to certain stories that just are never going to leave me. I do have a lot of friends. Of course, I’m still friendly with a lot of filmmakers and crew members who I worked with back then.

So we can sit down and we can reminisce, and things will come flying back, and I’ll say, “Oh, I hadn’t thought about that in a long time.” They’re the ones that just stay with you, the stories you kind of tell over and over again, even if just to yourself.

I didn’t keep a journal back then. I just kind of kept all this tucked away. Then I think also, when you work on one film, of course, you’re informed by that experience on the next and the next. So they get buried in you, and they get kind of endemic to your process, as far as how you proceed.

I think about what I said about budgets, you don’t go into the next budget of making a film, looking at the going-in budget the last one. You look at the cost report, you look at where you actually landed, what it really took to make it.

Even though it’s reduced to zeros and ones, that was the experience of that movie. Every line item there has a story.

Joanna: Oh, I love that. I’ve never seen the line items on a movie, but I imagine there’s some really random stuff on there that ended up needing to be used, or people who were hired. I think that’s interesting in itself.

I wanted to also ask you, the book has lots of different places, as you’ve traveled so much with the filming. I wondered, as a filmmaker—because you’re always looking through a lens or you’re thinking of how people are seeing it—

How do you see a place for the first time? What do you notice? Then how do you turn that into writing on a page?

Gretchen: Well, as a producer, when you land in a place, you’re thinking like a location scout. You’re thinking, honestly, what can be useful to the movie? What angles will be useful?

Then, of course, when you’ve got the added challenge of filming an historical drama, you need to put greenery in front of certain standpipes and that kind of thing. You’ve got to think like, what’s it going to cost to shoot in this direction? And if I turn the camera 40 feet to the left, what’s going to be a problem there?

So what am I restricted by is often what you’re thinking about, too. I love the location scouting, especially with the director, because for them it’s really when the film really starts to take on life.

When we went to Andalusia to film The Limits of Control, a Jim Jarmusch film with Jim, we were at this beautiful site, looking at the ocean into the sea, but the house that he wanted was up on a hill on the opposite side. If you watch the film, you would never know the sea was across the road because that wasn’t part of the story.

So sometimes you forget, which is where your editor has to come in handy. They’ll say, “You never did shoot the sea,” but we weren’t intending to. We wanted it to feel like an isolated home.

So to how that translates into the book, I’m trying to think about ways in which the location comes up. I guess, the thing that’s important to me about filming on location, and what I like about the process of filmmaking, is it kind of ramps up.

You location scout, your crew gets bigger and bigger. You’re the constant. The script is the constant. You’re the last one to leave, probably, too, but you’re there for a good four or five months often.

So if you go to Jordan, or if you go to Costa Rica to film, you’re not like a journalist, for instance, or for other roles that might travel to these places for their vocation, you’re not just parachuting in and out. You’re there to tell their story as well.

Many of those people will become extras, many of the people you meet will become crew members or will lead you to a location. You’re going to be going to their homes for dinner.

So all these things, of course, are in the book. Everyone becomes a character in your story, and you in theirs for a longer period of time.

Joanna: When you write a memoir, in the same ways you make a movie, you have to edit out a lot of it. You can’t write everything. In the same way with a film, you can’t shoot everything, but you don’t want to because you’re crafting this story.

I always feel like with films, there is a sort of, “This isn’t real. This is made up.” I guess you do documentaries and things, but you still have to edit for your own story. So how did you manage that with your book?

Did you edit out the really bad stuff, or did you leave the bad stuff in?

Sometimes we edit to make things more beautiful, I guess.

Gretchen: I didn’t do that. I would say I edited to make sure that the arc of becoming a producer is really in there, and that is the good, the bad, and the ugly. That’s everything.

If I told a story and it didn’t quite fit, or I felt like I’d already addressed that in a previous chapter or wanted to later, then I had to cut it out, right? Maybe some bits of that got folded into a later story, but there was no use in telling it twice.

We had to see this character growing as a producer and learning from all her ugly mistakes along the way. There’s a lot on the cutting room floor, I would say.

Joanna: Well, on that, how much is on the cutting room floor when you make a film?

How many hours of film do you have compared to what’s left at the end?

Gretchen: We try to, especially in the independent world, because we usually only have about 25-30 days to shoot an independent film at these budget levels, maybe fewer. Two Girls and a Guy we shot in 11 days, with Robert Downey Jr, but that was also on one location with three characters.

So there are exceptions to that, but you’re very, very lean and very efficient when it comes to how many pages a day you shoot, and your coverage is going to be very limited too. So you need to make sure the way in which you cover a scene is enough for an editor to be able to do their work with.

It’s probably a ratio of around five to one, whereas when you work on a documentary—or five to one to ten to one, I would say, how much film goes through the camera versus what the 90 minute film becomes—but when you shoot a documentary, we could have 500 hours of film and whittle that down.

Usually you’ll need several editors to be able to pare that back. You’ll get everything transcribed. You’ll do a paper cut. There are all sorts of ways of trimming back on that, but these films take a long time to edit when you’ve got so much footage.

Honestly, that’s an interesting question you posed, because since digital, the camera tends to keep rolling a lot too. Rather than cutting, we’ll keep going and go again, again, again. Often on a narrative feature even, just keep going.

So the editor ends up with a lot more material than they used to. Not all of it is good, but they’ve got a heck of a lot more to wade through in order to find the gems.

Joanna: I know there’s a lot of the stuff on AI around that editing, which we’re going to come back to that in a minute.

Going back to the book, I love that you structured the chapters around film types. So like the urban fantasy, and the rogue movie, and the meet cute, which I thought were brilliant. So what were the challenges of structuring it, given the book spans a lot of time?

Where did you get that idea for the film types?

Gretchen: It’s one of the kind of novelties of my career, is that I’ve worked across so many genres. So I thought it would be a fun idea to do that. I wasn’t sure it was going to work. I moved the names around, and they’re not always a spot on.

What happens in each chapter is not always a spot on reflection of that genre, but it’s close enough to have inspired what happens in the story, and as you say, kind of what didn’t belong in that story too. So it was a fun kind of device to be able to play with.

The stories, though, are largely sequential. Sometimes I’ll pop in a relevant story from before or after, but only in as much as I say, as it helped with the arc of becoming a producer, becoming a more responsible producer in that character. You’re seeing her evolve a bit.

Joanna: Yes, and in your pitch email, you said, “The actual journey to getting the book out there is taking a lot of grit and perseverance, a lot like indie film distribution.” That made me laugh.

So tell us about those parallel processes.

Gretchen: So I’m working with a wonderful publisher, but they’re not a big Simon and Schuster kind of company. They’re a smaller company, and I enjoy that because there’s a lot of freedom in it.

Probably because I do come from the independent film world, I’m used to doing a lot of work myself and putting a lot of myself and my own kind of grit and sweat equity into the project.

So that means I did hire—although they have their own in-house publicist—I did hire a PR individual to help me. He is familiar with film, so there’s some kind of a nice crossover there. So there are out of pocket expenses that I kind of always knew I would have to put into it.

I make a lot of films with Sebastian Junger, who will write a book for Simon and Schuster on commission, or what have you, and he’ll have a lot of muscle behind that from, of course, the organization.

I knew I wasn’t going to live in that world, so I was prepared to put a lot more of my own kind of time and effort into it, just the way I am doing with several of our films right now.

Joanna: So, I mean, you mentioned Sebastian Junger there, and I’ve recently read his In My Time of Dying, and read several of his books. They’re really interesting. You have contacts like that, you have lots of contacts in the film industry. I mean, you presumably could have pitched to a bigger publisher.

Did you always just want to have more control?

Gretchen: Well, I found an agent pretty quickly, but she was realistic about, you know, this isn’t the indie film world. This isn’t Hollywood. This isn’t like a tell-all kind of story that exposes certain characters. That wasn’t what I was setting out to do. Although she loved the writing, she was excited about the book, she felt like the more realistic option is probably going to be going with an indie publisher.

I heard that, so we gave it a little bit of time, but when we didn’t hear back within a month, I said, you know what? Let’s just switch gears and go indie because I know I can make it work. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time falling down that rabbit hole of waiting, the waiting game. I’m an impatient person.

Joanna: Oh, that’s so true. I mean, but—

Then you still went with the small press instead of self-publishing?

Gretchen: Yes, I did that. It’s interesting, I’ve been thinking because I am working on something new, I’m thinking that it would be so much fun to—because I listened to your podcast, and I’m highly motivated by all your stories and your guests—and I would love to try publishing the next book myself, but I’d have to finish writing it first.

Joanna: True, but it’s interesting to think about that. I think you’d do great. I mean, with your attitude, I think that’s the point. Also having impatience, which I think is a hallmark of so many of us in the indie community.

Gretchen: That’s great. I mean, how do you get that next podcast? How do you get that next gig? I’m going out to Seattle in June to do sort of a mini tour there.

So how do you make that happen by depending on a large behemoth of an organization that has so many more important authors to pitch and that they can make so much more money from? So you really, like a producer, you really just kind of must do things yourself very often.

Joanna: Yes, exactly. I guess if we think about the budget as well, and about how you make money, if you make a movie for 200 million, and it costs 200 million, you have to do a lot more in order to make the money back. When you have a smaller budget, you know…

So I feel it’s a bit like that. People say, oh, you don’t make as much money as an indie author sometimes, although a lot of people do make a lot more money. The point is that your costs are so much lower as well, so you can make more profit.

In the end, it’s about profit, right?

Gretchen: Absolutely. You’ve been so smart to kind of create this audience who keeps wanting to come back for more. I’d love to be able to do that, to be able to cultivate an audience that knows where to find you, and is saying, what’s next?

Joanna: Well, I think that’s definitely something you can do.

Let’s come back on the marketing because you said you hired a PR person.

So what are some of the things that you’re doing about book marketing? Anything you’ve brought over from the indie film promotion world?

Gretchen: Well, podcasts have become so big as a means of reaching an audience that you maybe otherwise wouldn’t reach. A crossover, if you will. We do a lot of that in the documentaries that we make, especially to reach an audience, to make people aware of it.

Then with a lot of the docs that we do, we tour them. So it is reminding me of what I’m doing upcoming in Massachusetts and Seattle and hopefully down in DC, and I did here in Brooklyn, and will be doing in Manhattan. Just kind of independently showing people what it is.

I cut a trailer for the book that shows people a lot of behind the scenes fun of putting together a movie. So that’s a lot like a teaser to show people what’s to come, right? What you’re about to read about and what’s fun about it.

To be able to get that out on a website and use all those tools that we do in the filmmaking community, by creating an audience, by getting the digital aspects of things going. Then physically getting out there, and getting the word out, and listening to people, and doing the live Q and A’s.

Also, really listening to other people’s journeys about what they’re doing, because everything is copy, isn’t it?

Joanna: So you mentioned a tour there. So what are you actually doing with that?

Have you booked venues, or what are you doing for that?

Gretchen: Well, I’ll be going out to Seattle in June, and I kind of connected with a lot of old friends who happen to be in Seattle. That will be like an audience. It’s a theater. The International Film Festival there has their own venue there. So it’s a connection with the local International Film Festival Seattle, which is a big, one. Big, big film festival.

So that’s a good opportunity for crossover, isn’t it? When we’re making a political film at Goldcrest, we’re crossing over by connecting with the senators, with the Congress people in DC, and bringing them into the fold. Here I’m doing the same thing with the film world and the book world.

I’m going up to Massachusetts to talk to a couple schools, including the school that I went to high school. They have a new initiative there that’s like a trailblazer initiative to get students more involved in their future as they’re in high school.

So they’re doing externships and they’re learning about various careers. So I’ll be going up there to speak with them, and I’m looking forward to that because that’s just the kind of audience I love.

Joanna: Oh, that’s great. So you’re basically sort of melding it with your existing work, which makes sense because of the topic of the book, and also using your network.

I think people underestimate using your network for book marketing. Of course, it has to be done in an appropriate manner, but sounds like you’re tapping into a lot of things from your film background.

Gretchen: Absolutely, and it’s hard to know when you are talking too much about the book. You don’t want to overwhelm people with those stories, but I like to kind of bring people into the fold and make them a part of it.

Joanna: Then we’ve got to get into the AI and technology, because in the epilogue of the book you say, “We make films differently now with more digital and technical support, and you can shoot a live action film in your pajamas, edit it, market it, and distribute it without leaving your apartment,” which I thought was fascinating.

How has technology made things easier and cheaper? What do you think about the potential of AI?

Gretchen: Oh, I think it’s really exciting. AI has presented so many opportunities already. I think largely they will be positive, and there will be some that will be negative, but that’s like any tool.

We’ve seen the handwritten ink-to-paper evolve into a laptop, and that’s been a tremendous change. I never would have been able to write this book without that.

Then when it comes to filmmaking, there’s the great democratization of making a film. As I say, somebody can do it on their own, virtually create a movie on their own.

I’ve always liked the team aspect of it. AI probably means that could be getting slightly smaller because there are certain tools that can be employed in the editorial process. As we say, maybe 500 hours could be pared down a lot faster.

The human element is always going to be necessary for telling stories. We’re not going to be able to remove ourselves entirely, to me anyway, if the stories are compelling.

Joanna: Well, and I don’t think it’s about removing us entirely. This is kind of the thing. People say, “Oh, it’s an AI-generated thing,” and it’s like, well, no, it never is. Or not until they’re sentient in some way, and have their own ideas.

These are our ideas and our vision, our creative vision, and then we use the tools to help us make the vision.

What tools have you heard about that are being used in this democratization of film?

Gretchen: There is a tool—and I’m not sure I’ll know the names of all of these—but there is an editorial tool that will help you with a lot of sound editorial, with voices and being able to do a temp voiceover for someone.

I know there’s been a lot of controversy over that with regard to the Screen Actors Guild, but they will be protected is the idea. It could be a good temporary solution as you’re just trying to get the film screened and approved by the studio, or what have you.

There are editing tools that will cut back on the workflow process, and have already cut back on the workflow process. From getting the film in camera, all the way to the cutting room for what we call the dailies process. That’s already being employed so much of it.

Even just across being able to shoot, the cameras are now digital, the lights are a lot cheaper and a lot lighter. So even just like the physical aspect of being able to make a film has been simplified.

If going in, you haven’t fine-tuned your story, you haven’t looked at all your options, did you run it past ChatGPT? Which isn’t an option I had when I was writing this book—but is there an idea that might have come out of that that would have inspired eight more ideas that you could actually look to employ?

I think that’s the exciting part of it, is it will only elevate everybody’s work.

Joanna: I’m so glad you feel that way. I also agree. I think the more I use it, the more I feel I am getting better. I feel like the potential is so much more than it ever could have been.

What did you use to make your trailer?

Gretchen: Oh, I worked with an editor on that. An amazing woman named Jen Wolin. I’m on the board of New York Women in Film, and she cuts all our sizzles for the highlight reels for the muse honorees that we have each year.

Joanna: That’s good. I imagine you have all the contacts possibly needed. I made a trailer with RunwayML, which is a generative AI tool, which was a lot of fun. Did you use lots of photos and things from history?

Gretchen: Yes. So I went back and I pulled all the behind the scenes work from each of the films that had them. We didn’t always have that kind of crew shooting behind the scenes. It’s something I really encourage filmmakers to get because they will regret it later.

Even on the busiest day, or even the most mundane day, it’s good to have a crew following you because that’s going to be your memory of having made that film. I used a lot of photos from the set, a lot of images, and I did an interview as well.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, we’ll link to those in the show notes.

Where can people find you and your book online?

Gretchen: Well, I have a website. It’s GretchenMcGowan.com. It’s G, R, E, T, C, H, E, N, M, C, G, O, W, A, N. So everything’s there. It links to where you can buy the book online. It’s available as an ebook, and hopefully someday soon it will be available as an audiobook, but not yet.

Also at GoldcrestFilms.com.

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

Gretchen: Thank you so much.

The post Writing Memoir From A Life In Film With Gretchen McGowan first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What are some ways you can market a book during a launch period using audio, video, and text? What does my JFPenn voice clone sound like narrating the first two chapters of my thriller, Death Valley?

J.F. Penn is the Award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, horror, short stories, and travel memoir. Jo lives in Bath, England and enjoys a nice G&T.

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

• Examples of multimedia book marketing for a book launch — Death Valley Book Trailer; Books and Travel interview with Death Valley expert, Steve Hall; also on YouTube; Video of Death Valley pictures, and more
• Two chapters of Death Valley, a thriller, written by J.F. Penn and digitally narrated by my JFPenn voice clone on ElevenLabs, produced by Simon Patrick, 10XB

You can find DEATH VALLEY at JFPenn.com/deathvalley. The Kickstarter runs until 15 April, and then the link will redirect. It’s also available on Amazon for pre-order (available in June).

Transcript

Hello Creatives, I’m Joanna Penn and this is episode #802 of the podcast and it is Wednesday 2 April 2025 as I record this. In this extra inbetweenisode, I’m sharing the first two chapters of my new thriller, Death Valley, which you can listen to after this introduction.

Of course, I hope you enjoy the story and want to join the Kickstarter at JFPenn.com/deathvalley  but I also thought it might be useful for you in several ways: 

Firstly, it is made with my voice clone on ElevenLabs, so if you have had your doubts about digital narration with AI, then perhaps this might help you think about it some more.

I have found it quite strange proofing the story and listening to my voice, but I love it, and the amount of time it saves me, and effort, is well worth it. My audiobook narrator voice is different to my more casual podcasting voice so you will notice that, but I hope you agree that it really does sound like me. I am planning on licensing it as well in the hope of creating another stream of income. 

If you notice points where you think, that’s sounds strange, or that’s wrong, well, the same thing happens when you listen to human narration. I think this is within the same levels I’d expect from a human.

Why else might this be useful for you? Well —

It’s book marketing, and we all need reminding of different ways to market a book.

I am trying to combine audio and video as well as text for this launch. If you go to the Story page on the Kickstarter, you will see I have a video of human me talking and showing you the book —

As well as a book trailer with images generated by Midjourney and brought alive with RunwayML, and also text about why I’ve always loved deserts.

I also have an interview about Death Valley on my Books and Travel Podcast with Steve Hall, a Death Valley expert, and that’s out now. It is an audio podcast – just search Books and Travel on your favourite app, or you can watch our discussion on video on YouTube @jfpennauthor.

Plus, I have made another video with my photos also on YouTube, and of course, I have social media posts every day scheduled with BufferApp, and some paid ads, all underpinned by email marketing.

Yes, I am putting in the marketing effort, because none of us can just stick a book up on a platform and expect it to sell. You have to do something, and you have to push your comfort zone about what you do.

I hope this has given you some ideas, and if you love fast-paced thrillers, or if you want some ideas for your Kickstarter campaign, check it out at JFPenn.com/deathvalley 

The post Death Valley Audiobook Chapters And Book Marketing Tips With J.F Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Great character arcs are built on transformation, and one of the most powerful frameworks for understanding this journey is the four stages of knowing in character arcs. These stages map a character’s growth through initiation to enlightenment to integration in a way that feels deeply satisfying to readers. Why? Because it is yet another way in which the shape of story mirrors the patterns of real life. Once you can see how plot structure challenges characters to grow (sometimes successfully, sometimes not), you can more consciously craft resonant character arcs.

Attributed to many sources, the four stages of knowing have long been one of my favorite tools for charting growth—and, often, for combatting unrealistic desires for immediate perfection. Only recently, did it occur to me these four stages map perfectly onto the four quadrants of a classic story arc. (I discuss plot structure in depth elsewhere on the site and in my books Structuring Your Novel and Next Level Plot Structure, but if you’re unfamiliar, no worries, keep reading!) If you’ve been following this site for any length of time, you know there are endless parallels between story structure/character arc and models of human development (some of which I’ve discussed here and here).

In This Article

• What Are the Four Stages of Knowing in Character Arcs?
• 1st Act: Not Knowing That You Don’t Know
• First Plot Point: Initiation
• 1st Half of 2nd Act: Knowing That You Don’t Know
• Midpoint: Enlightenment
• 2nd Half of 2nd Act: Not Knowing That You Know
• Third Plot Point: Integration
• 3rd Act: Knowing That You Know

What Are the Four Stages of Knowing in Character Arcs?

The four stages of knowing originate from a well-known concept in learning and personal growth, often paraphrased as:

You don’t know what you don’t know.

Then, you know what you don’t know.

Next, you don’t know what you know.

Finally, you know what you know.

This idea has been widely used in psychology, education, and self-improvement to describe the path from ignorance to mastery. It illustrates how awareness and understanding evolve, often through experience and struggle. So it’s no surprise that, in storytelling, these stages align perfectly with the protagonist’s emotional and intellectual growth, making it a valuable tool for crafting (and double-checking) meaningful arcs. Let’s take a look at some of the parallels.

1st Act: Not Knowing That You Don’t Know

The First Stage

The first stage—not knowing that you don’t know—indicates unconscious ignorance. You’re ignorant of your ignorance. There is a sense of innocence and, often, a seemingly harmless hubris associated with this stage. This can feel like confidence, complacency, or simply an absence of curiosity. Without the knowledge that there’s more to learn, you have no reason to question what you think you know.

It’s impossible to be aware of the gaps in your knowledge until you first encounter a catalyst that challenges your current understanding. Only when something disrupts the seeming “wholeness” of your perspective can the journey toward deeper awareness begin.

The First Act — 1%-25%

In story structure, the purpose and symbolic intent of the First Act perfectly align with this state of seemingly blissful ignorance. The First Act represents a story’s Normal World, in which the character may feel safe, familiar, content, or at least complacent. Even if the character dislikes aspects of the Normal World, it is still a lifestyle that functions reasonably well.

However, despite this basic functionality, the Normal World may be very broken indeed, as in Jane Eyre.

In other stories, the character may be utterly satisfied with the Normal World, as in Toy Story.

In still others, the character may be dissatisfied with aspects of the Normal World but see no possible way of changing anything, as in Star Wars: A New Hope.

Whatever the case, the character is stuck, hemmed in by the status quo. This stage of “not knowing” represents the thematic Lie the Character Believes, which creates the foundation of all types of character arcs. The Lie is a limited perspective characters hold about themselves or their world. The story to come will offer them the opportunity to challenge that perspective and grow beyond it.

First Plot Point: Initiation

The stage of “not knowing they don’t know” ends with the story’s first major plot point—the First Plot Point. This moment responds to the Call to Adventure that initially challenged the characters’ worldview. A sliver of doubt is introduced into the complacency of their cohesive worldview. Perhaps all is not as it has always seemed.

Not only does this present the shocking possibility of their own ignorance, it also shines a light on areas of their lifestyles that lack functionality. If a character was previously aware of dysfunction, this moment turns the dial up until it becomes clear something must change. Even if characters adamantly wish to maintain their formerly ignorant mindsets, from here on that will become increasingly difficult. Characters will either bravely begin a slow and difficult journey into growth and expansion—or they will succumb to cowardice and resist the Truth in increasingly dysfunctional ways.

1st Half of 2nd Act: Knowing That You Don’t Know

The Second Stage

In the second stage—knowing that you don’t know—awareness begins to dawn. Now that you’ve encountered something that reveals a gap in your understanding, for the first time you begin to recognize the limitations of what you know. Depending on the gap created by this cognitive dissonance (i.e., the gap between Lie and Truth), this stage can be uncomfortable and even overwhelming. Even small challenges to one’s perspective and worldview create destabilization and uncertainty.

However, this stage also represents the beginning of real learning. Once you’ve recognized you don’t know, the door opens upon vast possibilities for growth and deeper understanding.

The First Half of the Second Act — 25%-50%

In story structure, the first half of the Second Act represents a stage of “reaction,” as the character struggles to respond to a new status quo without yet having all the necessary knowledge, skills, or tools. This is a stage described by Terry Pratchett’s quote:

Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.

This is a stage of fumbling around in the dark. The only advantage characters have at this point is that at least they know it’s dark—ergo, they better find a match. Previously, they didn’t even understand that much.

>>Click here to read “A Reactive Protagonist Doesn’t Have to Be a Passive Protagonist! Discover the Difference“

Even though the character’s unquestioning belief in the Lie has now been irrevocably challenged, this is a stage in which the character is still very much identified with the Lie. Because the new way of being—the Truth—is not yet clear, the character will understandably continue trying to return to the old ways. By now, however, there’s no going back. Determined ignorance or a retroactive adherence to the Lie will prove less and less effective—effectively “punishing” the character for any lack of progression.

Characters moving toward the Truth will learn to embrace the necessity and the opportunity of growth. They will (eventually) learn from their mistakes, humbly accept their ignorance, and begin gaining the knowledge, skills, tools, and experience they require in order to move forward.

This may be ideological, as in Promised Land.

Or it may be practical, as in Cast Away.

Characters may willingly embrace the change, as in Harry Potter.

Or struggle against the hard knocks, as in Toy Story.

In stories in which the character will fail to fully progress through the four stages into positive growth, they will begin inventing stronger and more dangerous Lies in order to maintain the original Lie, as in Hamlet.

Midpoint: Enlightenment

Halfway through the story—and the stages of growth—the character will encounter the Second Plot Point—or Midpoint—which represents an all-important Moment of Truth. Although this moment does not represent complete illumination, it does provide the character clarity that was so far lacking.

I like to put it like this: this is where the character recognizes and embraces the Truth but does not yet fully reject the Lie. In other words, characters do not yet understand that to step fully into this new way of being, they must first be willing to fully relinquish the old. At this point, they think they can have the best of both worlds.

What is important here is that the character is offered the opportunity to begin shifting out of ignorance into the beginnings of competence.

2nd Half of Second Act: Not Knowing That You Know

The Third Stage

In the third stage—not knowing that you know—this new knowledge is becoming second nature, but you haven’t yet fully realized or integrated your own growth. Up to now, you’ve absorbed lessons, internalized skills, and navigated challenges successfully, but you have not yet shifted your own identification with your ignorance. You may still feel uncertain, questioning whether you truly understand. This stage is often marked by imposter syndrome, doubting your competence despite clear evidence of your growth. It’s a transitional phase in which competence is building, even if you don’t fully see it yet.

Another way to look at the four stages is to see them as a journey from unconsciousness to consciousness. At this third stage, you are becoming consciously competent in this new way of being, but because these conscious skills have not fully integrated into your deepest self, they may still feel awkward, like a suit of clothes a size too big. And yet you are wearing the clothes. Although you may feel like you’re faking it, more and more you’re genuinely making it.

The Second Half of the Second Act — 50%-75%

In story structure, the second half of the Second Act contrasts the “reaction” of the first half as the character moves into a more proactive and effective state of “action.” Characters are increasingly able to not just react to situations but to choose, based on their increasing stash of experience, how they want to respond—and even to initiate actions that now require responses from others. Thanks to their growing understanding of themselves and the world, they are able to make better choices—for which they will be increasingly rewarded.

However, mistakes still happen, for the primary reason that characters have not fully integrated their new Truths. You’ll remember at the Midpoint, they had yet to fully let go of their old ways of being. Now, even though they are becoming increasingly effective in their new mastery, they are still tripping over the remnants of their old ignorance. Eventually, true mastery will require them to fully embrace their new roles, represented by the Truth—which requires them to fully relinquish the old, as represented by the Lie.

If characters are to succeed in completing a successful growth arc, this is where they will become increasingly aware of the effects of their remaining pockets of ignorance or apathy. They will prove willing to continue their journey toward the Truth, sometimes at great cost, as in Jane Eyre.

This is your characters’ last chance to embrace the opportunities offered them. If they fail, they will spiral into even more destructive methods for maintaining the limitations of their initial perspectives, as in What Happened to Baby Jane?

Third Plot Point: Integration

The Third Plot marks the final major catalyst in a character’s arc. Here, the character will either succeed or fail in the vital task of fully integrating new knowledge and experiences. Either way, this is a crucible. The old ways must burn away to make room for the new. This is true not just on a practical level (e.g., new job, etc.), but on the egoic level of identity. However much better the new way of being may objectively be, it is never easy to surrender ego identities. Sometimes even just accepting one’s own prowess can feel dangerous to the self.

At the Third Point, characters are given the opportunity (perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime chance) to step up. They’ve been learning all along. They have, in essence, been given many gifts, by dint of their own effort and courage. Now all the chips are on the table. Will they prove capable of fully integrating and owning both the blessings and the responsibilities of everything they’ve learned?

3rd Act: Knowing That You Know

The Fourth Stage

In the final stage—knowing that you know—awareness and confidence align. You no longer question your understanding; you trust it. What once felt uncertain is now second nature, allowing you to apply your new knowledge with clarity and purpose. This is the stage of mastery, in which you recognize how far you’ve come and use what you’ve learned with intention. It’s the culmination of growth, the point at which experience transforms into wisdom.

This is the turning point where one’s conscious understanding becomes so fully embodied as to become subconscious. There is no longer a struggle to understand or implement knowledge; there is only right instinct and the ability to act on it. You no longer have to puzzle out how best to do something; you just know. And you trust this knowledge because, by now, you have gained enough context to understand you’re not missing anything important. You can see the entire battlefield and command your troops accordingly.

The Third Act — 75%-10%

The Third Act “proves” your character’s arc. Either your characters will succeed in transitioning into broader and more effective ways of being; or they will fail. Either they will fully embrace the story’s thematic Truth; or they will cling ever tighter to the Lie—even though it will by now have proven itself not just ineffective but destructive.

Although certain revelations are often left until the story’s Climax, all of the groundwork will culminate with the Third Plot Point. In many ways, the Third Act and its Climax is simply the proving ground for what has come before. This is where your audience gets to see not just if your characters will succeed, but how. How will your characters use what they have learned (or not)? What choices will they make and what actions will they take now that they have fully integrated a new way of being?

In Positive Change Arcs, characters will respond in notably more effective ways than they were capable of in the beginning. Often, the change will be even more significant, as the character is shown to fully embody an entirely new identity, as in Iron Man.

In Negative Change Arcs, characters will have failed the test. They will have stagnated and probably regressed in their attempts to avoid confronting deeper Truths and the challenge to grow. Here, the audience will experience the full consequences of the characters’ failure, as in The Searchers.

***

The four stages of knowing in character arcs is a handy, intuitive guide for shaping compelling stories that mirror the universal process of learning and transformation. Whether your characters courageously struggle toward growth or cravenly resist it until the very end, these stages can provide a roadmap for ensuring their arcs feel both meaningful and inevitable. By weaving this psychological truth into your storytelling, you not only strengthen your characters but also invite your audience into a journey that mirrors their own paths toward greater self-awareness and mastery.

In Summary:

Because great character arcs mirror real-life transformation, the four stages of knowing provide a powerful framework for understanding this journey. These stages—unconscious ignorance, conscious ignorance, unconscious competence, and conscious competence—align perfectly with the four quadrants of classic story structure. As characters move from not knowing what they don’t know to fully integrating their newfound wisdom, they undergo a satisfying arc of growth. By using this model, writers can craft arcs that feel authentic and emotionally resonant, ensuring plot structure and character development work in harmony.

Key Takeaways:

• The Four Stages of Knowing provide a structured approach to character development, mapping ignorance to mastery.
• First Act: Characters exist in a state of unconscious ignorance, unaware of their own limitations.
• First Plot Point: A catalyst challenges their worldview, forcing them to acknowledge their ignorance.
• First Half of the Second Act: Characters react, struggling with their newfound awareness and the discomfort of change.
• Midpoint: A crucial revelation brings enlightenment, although full mastery is still out of reach.
• Second Half of the Second Act: Characters begin taking proactive steps, demonstrating unconscious competence but not yet fully realizing their growth.
• Third Plot Point: Full integration occurs as charactera consciously embrace their transformation.
• This framework ensures a natural and compelling progression for character arc that is both relatable and deeply engaging for readers.

Want More?

Want to learn more about story structure mirrors real life transformation? My most recent book Next Level Plot Structure goes beyond the basic beat sheet of plot points to explore the deeper symbolism of how the foundational beats of storytelling reveal the way we grow, change, and face challenges in the real world. If you want to craft stories that feel deeply meaningful while still delivering a tightly woven plot, this book will show you how! It’s available in paperback and e-book (audiobook is coming soon; still waiting for Amazon to approve it).

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How have you used the four stages of knowing in character arcs to shape your protagonist’s transformation? Tell me in the comments!

 

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

___

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The post How Writers Can Use the Four Stages of Knowing in Character Arcs appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

What’s the difference between writing a book and writing a screenplay? What are the different business models? If you’ve written a screenplay, how can you get it read? TD Donnelly talks about the challenges and rewards of screenwriting, as well as his first thriller novel.

In the intro, ProWritingAid spring sales 25% off; Key takeaways from the Future of Publishing conference [Written Word Media]; Curios for authors; Indie author’s scam survival guide [Productive Indie Author]; Writer Beware;
OpenAI’s 4o image generation model launch [OpenAI];

Plus, check out Death Valley: A Thriller by J.F. Penn.

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 

T.D. Donnelly is the author of the thriller The Year of the Rabbit. He’s also been a screenwriter for more than 25 years, with credits including Sahara with Matthew McConaughey, Conan the Barbarian, and adaptations for the works of Ray Bradbury, Clive Cussler, Stan Lee and others.

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

• Challenges of being a screenwriter
• The competitive nature of the film industry compared to indie publishing
• Payment structure for screenwriters — stages of payment, production bonuses, and residuals
• Regaining rights to old, unpublished screenplays
• Writing differences between screenplays and novels
• Craft and pitching advice for aspiring screenwriters
• Why Tom is not worried about AI in the film industry

You can find Tom at TDDonnelly.com.

Transcript of Interview with Tom Donnelly

Joanna: TD Donnelly is the author of the thriller The Year of the Rabbit. He’s also been a screenwriter for more than 25 years, with credits including Sahara with Matthew McConaughey, Conan the Barbarian, and adaptations for the works of Ray Bradbury, Clive Cussler, Stan Lee and others. So welcome to the show, Tom.

Tom: Hey, Jo. How are you today?

Joanna: Oh, I’m good. It’s really fun to talk to you about this. So first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into screenwriting and, particularly, into adaptations.

Tom: Okay, so I grew up in New Jersey. My father was an accountant in Manhattan, and my mother was a housewife raising three boys, which is not easy, and sometimes doing a little bit of real estate. So nobody in my family had ever been in a creative field.

I had no connection, but what I did have was a 20 minute bike ride from my house growing up, sometime around 10 years old, they built a multiplex, like a 10-movie theater. Back in the 80s, that was quite something.

I figured out that on a Saturday, I could ride my bike down like four blind alleys and along the median of a six lane highway for a little bit. It was probably not a good idea, but I could ride my bike to that movie theater, chain it up, spend three or four bucks for a matinee ticket, and then sneak into at least two other movies after that.

I was absolutely hooked. I was like, oh my god, this is the best. This is the 80s. This is Raiders of the Lost Ark and Empire Strikes Back. I was transported every weekend into other fantastical worlds. I feel like it indoctrinated me into story and into the scope of story and the power of story.

It was all the idea that the Japanese, they have a 100-year plan. When you want to become something in Japan, you apprentice for 10 years, and you just spend all those 10 years learning everything you can so you can become an expert. I guess we call it the 10,000 hours now.

I realized at age 15 hearing this, I had like a brainstorm. It was like, hey, if I did that, that’s about 10 years of my life. I would still only be like 25 or 26 if I spent all my time just trying to be a screenwriter.

If I did that, I would be 25, and if it doesn’t work out, I could still do something else at that point. I’m still really young and all that sort of stuff. So I kind of set out with that goal in mind.

I told my guidance counselor in high school, I was like, “I would like to be a screenwriter in Hollywood.” The guy just looked at me like, where do you think you are? What planet do you think you are on? Just had no idea what to do with me.

He kept trying to suggest other careers that were reasonable, and I just was adamant. So he was like, okay, I’m just going to wash my hands of you and let you go. I’ve never reached back to contact him, but that would have been funny.

Anyway, I got my undergrad at Vassar with an English and Drama double major. Then I got accepted to USC Film School for a master’s degree in the directing program, actually.

My thesis script—this never happens, okay, I want to preface that this never ever happens—was the first feature length script that I ever wrote, and it ended up, two or three years later, being sold in a bidding war.

I ended up getting hip-pocketed. Hip-pocketing means that an agent says, I’m not going to put you on my official roles, and we’re not going to go through the official channels and stuff like that, but I will help you. I will read your stuff, and I will give you notes. If something happens, then we’ll talk about me representing you officially.

Anyway, I had an agent that was hip-pocketing me, and at the time I was editing to pay the bills. I was editing film and television, in particular television at that point. The producer I was working for wanted to hire me immediately onto another television project.

I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”

He was like, “What? I thought I thought we had a good relationship.”

I said, “No, we have a great relationship, but I’ve saved up enough money to write for six months, and whenever I’ve saved up enough money to write for six months, I always don’t take an editing job because I don’t want to just be an editor. I want to be a filmmaker. I want to be a writer.”

He was like, “Oh. Oh, do you have anything to show me?”

I said, “Well, I have my thesis script that I wrote in college.”

He was like, “Can I check it out?” And he read it, and he said, “I’d like to send it to a couple of my friends. Would that be all right?”

 I said, “Sure.” So I called the agent that was hip-pocketing me, and I said, “Hey, great news, this producer, this guy, he wanted to share the script.”

My agent was like, “What? He can’t do that. When he does that, he’s attaching himself as a producer.” I’m like, oh no. So he’s like, “Who did he give it to?”

I said, “I don’t know.” So long story short, too late already. So sorry, so sorry.

He finds out the three people that this producer sent them to, and it ends up it’s the head of 20th Century Fox Production, the head of another—like three very big people—and calls up the first one and says, “There’s a script that came to you last weekend. It should not have gone out. I just want to claw it back until it’s ready.”

They’re like, “Oh, we were just about to call you. We’d like to put in a bid on it.”

After that, everything changed. Suddenly, we’re in a bidding war. There ended up being three different bidders, and the script sold for—well, let’s just say this. At the time, I had over $100,000 in student debt from grad school and undergrad, and with that sale, I paid off every single debt that I had. I was free and clear. It was amazing.

Joanna: So first of all, you seem very mature as a child to decide that you want to—or as a teenager—to sort of decide, yes, I’m going be a screenwriter. Then obviously you making the choice to study it, and then everything falls into place.

I guess by the time you did that major deal in, I guess it would have been the, what, late 90s by then?

Tom: No, early 90s. Yes, early 90s.

Joanna: Early 90s, okay.

Tom: No, ’95. Sorry.

Joanna: ’95, and you’ve stuck at this career since then.

This seems incredibly single-minded to me.

Tom: It’s weird, but I basically came at it from this viewpoint. I love storytelling. I love stories. I love movies. I love books. My mother would, when I was a kid, she would drop us off at the public library, sometimes all afternoon as she would go out and be doing real estate things. So we read everything in the library. We were indoctrinated in story from a very early age.

I said, if I’m this fortunate to be able to try and fail things, I better do that because I don’t want to have regrets. I don’t want to have regrets in my life. I don’t know why I realized that at such a young age, I don’t understand. If you ask my wife, I’m not a wise person. I’m really not.

Joanna: Maybe you’re just single-minded.

Tom: A little bit. I said, if I could do this as a career, I think I would be happy for my whole life. That thought, once that got in my head, it kind of never left, and it has absolutely been true.

As difficult as the writing life can be, it is such a joy each day to know that I’m making something that’s never been and I’m putting into the world. There are people that are reading the stories or watching the movies that I’ve been a part of.

For some of them, it’s exactly what they needed at a low moment in their lives. Or for some it’s like it spoke to them in a really deep and human way. I just think that’s magic, and if I could be a part of that, I love it.

Joanna: Well, then you mentioned were difficult there. This is really interesting because, of course, I’ve talked to screenwriters over the years and sort of dipped my toe in and backed off.

People hear negative things in the author book industry as well, but what are the difficult things about being a screenwriter? I mean, as in, has just everything been amazing, and like you said, you’ve been happy for your whole life?

What are some of the challenges of being a screenwriter?

Tom: Okay, so one thing, I’ll phrase it this way, Craig Martelle in 20Books, they say, “A rising tide raises all ships.” In that my success does nothing to harm you. If anything, it might even help you. If I’m putting out a good book that’s in a genre that you’re in, it’s going to make people want to read more, and probably read your stuff as well.

In the film business, in the television business, that is not the case. It is a knife fight in a phone booth. It really is.

So let me give you a number here, 50,000 screenplays. That is the number of screenplays that are registered with the Writers Guild of America, of which I am a member, every single year. Of those, there’s 20 times as many that are written every year.

So that is a million scripts a year, and that’s just in the US. That’s just scripts that are in the North America market. A million scripts every year. Do you want to know how many films were made in North America in 2023?

Joanna: Go on, then.

Tom: 500. So taking the, “a rising tide raises all ships,” if you end up getting one of those 500 slots to make a film, that absolutely affects me and everybody else. It is not a “we’re all in this together,” it is very much cutthroat. The industry is built that way.

A lot of times when there is an assignment, people don’t just come to me with a book and say, “Hey, would you like to adapt this?” More often than not, they’re going to four or five writers that are just as experienced, just as talented, just as right for the material as I am.

I have to go in, and I have to pitch, and I have to somehow convince these producers and these multi-billion dollar conglomerates, international conglomerates, that I have that special spark that is going to get this project over the line and is going to make this something that is going to make them a ton of money.

That’s not easy. That is super hard. In some ways, selling my very first script I ever wrote was an impediment to that because I suddenly was thrust into the lunch meetings, and the getting to know yous, and all that sort of stuff. I was thrown into the deep end before I really had figured out a lot of this sort of stuff.

So I had on the job training, as opposed to make all your mistakes in private, in the dark when nobody can see you. I had to learn a lot of these things the hard way, and it was really, really difficult.

Joanna: I guess of those 500, as you say, I mean, a lot of those are from existing screenwriters, like yourself these days, and also existing franchises. So of that, let’s say—

Of those 500, how many are like original screenplays that people pitch?

Tom: Not many. Not many at all. I can’t really give you a number, but I would probably say only 10 – 20% are completely original material. The reason being, the film business in particular, is the last truly gate kept industry.

Back in the 70s and 80s, the music industry was a gate kept industry. If you wanted to put out a record, you had to have a record deal with a major label.

They would have the fancy studios, and the backup artists, and everything you needed to succeed, but they would take the majority of the profits. You would still make a fortune, so you wouldn’t be too unhappy about it.

Then when digital recording equipment came out, all of a sudden, everybody could do it. They could record in their garage something that was good enough and good enough to get on air. Suddenly, within 10 years, the record industry collapsed.

The same thing with Kindle for us. The stranglehold that the big publishing houses has had over the industry collapsed.

For film, it’s a collaborative, very difficult experience. It takes a lot of people to make a film. It takes a lot of equipment. It takes a lot of time. So the lowest entry price you can make a film for is still very expensive.

Listen, I’ve worked with Robert Rodriguez, who made El Mariachi for $7000, $8,000. Amazing guy. I love him to death. It’s not easy to do that. It’s super hard to be the exception that can make things at that low of a budget level and really do it indie. It can still be done.

There are more and more opportunities do the to do that now, but because everything is so expensive that affects what people buy as well. People want assurances in this industry.

They don’t want to buy a spec script. No matter how good that spec script is, they know that spec script has only been read by 10 people, 15 people.

They would much rather have a book series that they know have sold a million copies worldwide because that has pre-awareness.

That has a promise of, hey, a large part of those people are going to want to come and watch this movie. So we can afford to spend the $50 million, the $60 million, the $200 million on that project, to get it up and going. That’s just the reality of the business.

Joanna: Although we should say, so you are a screenwriter in LA. You’re obviously in the US Hollywood film industry. There is obviously the indie film market. There’s film industries here in Europe, there’s film industries in India. There’s film industries all over the world. So, just for people listening—

You have a particular perspective based on these very big budget films, right?

Tom: Yes, I absolutely should say that. Not only do I write in Hollywood, I also write on the very high end of Hollywood productions. I did a lot of work on Marvel’s Doctor Strange and Cowboys and Aliens and like these big, big, big, big, $200 million pictures.

I know what the budgets are for BBC productions. I know what the budgets are for ITV, for Canal+ in France. I know what they are. They’re lower. There’s more opportunities in some of those places.

There is a kind of universal understanding that for most projects that end up getting made and end up getting distributed, the price to get into that, the minimum cost for most of these films is still, even if it’s not $100 million, $200 million—hey, guess what? $5 million is a lot of money.

That is still a barrier to entry for a lot of people, and it’s a barrier to raise that amount of money in the hopes that that is going to make that money back for a lot of people.

Joanna: You know, I was at the Berlin Film Market, and I learned a lot about all of this, and a lot of the networking is about finding all the different ways you can fund things. So you get a little bit from here, a little bit from there, you get a bit over there, and a grant from that location. It’s just incredible to me how this works.

Let’s talk about the business and the money side. We’re going to come back to your thriller writing books in a minute. In terms of the business and the way the money works as being a screenwriter compared to owning and controlling your own intellectual property. So can you give us a bit of an idea about that?

Are you essentially a very highly paid freelance writer?

Tom: Yes, that is exactly right. All work in Hollywood is work for hire, meaning when I sell a script, they buy the script outright. They own it, they own the rights to it. They can do what they want with it. I have certain—because I’m in the Writers Guild of America—I have certain rights that are reserved to me.

So if they want to make a sequel without me, they still have to pay me for it. I still get credit on the project, etc, etc, but they do own the things outright. Maybe my deal has licensing money for toys or all of this sort of stuff, but usually not.

Generally, I get paid in stages. I get paid a certain amount for the first draft, a certain amount for the rewrite, a certain amount for any polishes that I do after that. When the movie goes into production, I get a production bonus in the first day of shooting.

When it’s completed and the credits have been established and negotiated and dealt with, I get a credit bonus. Then you start to get residuals after that. My wife calls them the green envelopes of joy.

Four times a year, the green envelopes of joy appear on my doorstep, and you never know what they’re going to be. You have no idea until you open it. Now you have some idea because it’s a big film that came out, and there’s a good chance that that first envelope is going to be huge.

It tails off fairly slowly, actually, but over time, it tails off. Eventually you start getting green envelopes of joy that are for $2.50.

Joanna: It might have been a coffee once in LA. It probably isn’t anymore.

Tom: Exactly. It feels a little like Patreon. It feels like the studios are now just contributing to my Patreon.

So which is to say that you don’t own it, which is a painful reality. Now, though you don’t own it, the amount that they pay you to write it is embarrassingly big. The industry compensates writers, or at least writers at my particular area, very well. It is a well-compensated business.

A famous author who came to Hollywood and started writing for Hollywood couldn’t believe what they paid until he saw how he was treated, and he said, “Oh, they’re not paying me for the writing, they’re paying me for the indignity,” which I continue to believe is true to this day.

The writers are not treated the best in my side of the business. I will say that when I hired an editor from Bath, England, who was editing my first novel, she was apologizing and giving me all these caveats as she was giving me the sweetest, nicest notes I’ve ever received in my life.

She was thinking I was going to be offended by her suggestion of changes. I’m like, oh my god, you have no idea what notes in Hollywood are like. Oh my god. It’s just so awful in comparison to this.

Everybody on the indie publishing side of the business, you guys are so sweet and so nice. I feel like I’ve left the real world and I’ve entered, I don’t know, the world of the Smurfs or something. Everyone’s super nice to each other. It’s amazing.

Joanna: That is so funny. Well, then let’s come back to—

Why the hell write a novel?

If it’s all so wonderful and unicorns and roses in Hollywood—maybe they treat you badly or whatever, but they pay you well—why write The Year of the Rabbit? Which I should tell people I’ve read. It’s very, very good. So obviously you can write, you can tell a story, but why bother when you’re just doing all this amazing work?

Tom: Well, okay, so here’s one little fact. Hollywood buys between 10 and 20 projects for every one that gets made.

So that means, over the course of my career, they have bought so many projects that I have spent six months to a year writing, and rewriting and rewriting again, and honing to the best of my ability to compete in that knife fight in the phone booth that I’m talking about, and to make it like, just sing, just perfect.

Then it still does not get made, and that project ended up being seen by 15 people in the world. 15 people ever know that that thing existed, and it’s gone. It’s just out there.

Well, guess what? I’ve been writing for almost 30 years now. Those rights have reverted. Those projects, there’s nothing saying that I can’t take those projects and give them a second audience, give them a second chance at life.

Even other ones where it’s my work on that project didn’t end up get getting used in the final project, but god, I love the idea that I had for that. So what could I do? I decided that now, you know, I’m in my 50s. Congratulations, 50, Jo.

Joanna: Thank you. What a wonderful decade.

Tom: It really is. I’m loving it so far. I am absolutely loving it. It’s a time when, for me, I was like, okay, let me look at the latter half of my life, and is there anything I want to do different?

I decided that I wanted to take some of those stories that I was well compensated for writing, but never got a chance to be in front of an audience. I could put these in front of an audience now.

I can have a second bite of that apple, and I can explore this space where I have total creative control, as opposed to almost no creative control over a project. I thought that was fascinating.

Joanna: So just on that, this is the 30-year copyright for scripts?

Tom: It’s actually less than that within the industry. I wish I had the number in front of me. Within the Writers Guild, there’s a negotiated point at which you can regain the rights to a project.

Sometimes you have to pay what they paid you, but in a lot of cases, you can literally call them up, talk to them, and say, “Hey, I kind of want to do something with this. Do you guys mind at all?”

A lot of times, they’ll just say, “We haven’t thought about that in 15 years. No, go ahead. Do whatever you want.”

Joanna: Take it away.

Tom: Exactly.

Joanna: Okay, so that’s cool. Okay, so then how did you find the process?

What is the challenge of writing a novel to writing a screenplay?

If people haven’t read a screenplay, just explain the difference.

Tom: Sure, sure, sure. Well, how should I put this? What you guys do as novelists—and I’m saying you guys, even though I’m a novelist now, I’m still a little bit on the outside looking in—it’s cheating. It’s not right. It shouldn’t be allowed.

I’m very, very mad that you guys get to write the way you get to write, and I’m stuck in screenplay format having to do it the hard way. You guys get to write the characters’ interior thoughts and emotions and journeys, and that is cheating and it is wrong.

I have been trained since I was a young person that, no, you can’t do that. You have to imply a character’s emotional state through very carefully crafted dialog and situation and moments. The entire structure of a scene is designed to elucidate a character’s internal state that cannot be understood any other way.

That’s screenwriting. That’s what that is. I mean, that’s why we’re so good at dialog. We’re so good at dialog because we can’t tell you what a character is thinking. Yes, people could do voiceover sometimes, but that is a pitfall of its own accord, unless it’s done very, very well. So you have to be careful about that.

So you’re stuck to two senses in screenwriting, what you see and what you hear. That’s it. No thoughts.

There are heavy structural demands. A screenplay has to have a—there could be a 3-act structure, 5-act structure. You can make a lot of arguments for how it needs to be structured.

Tons of times I’m reading a novel, you know, I get sent several a week from my agents who say, “Hey, check this out. People want to consider you for this.” Lots of novels, their structure is such that it would need a lot of heavy lifting to become a film.

Even Sahara, for instance. In Sahara, the bad guy, all the villains die, and there’s still 100 pages left in the novel after that point, 80 pages left at the end of that. You can’t really do that in a film.

I mean, Peter Jackson, God bless him, tried to do the ending of Return of the King, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There’s still jokes flying around the internet about how many endings that thing has. It just keeps going on and on and on.

I think he did a great job and won the Academy Award, so kudos to him. In general, you can’t do that. So structure is something that is very, very important.

Pacing demands, right? Film travels at 24 frames a second through that projector onto the screen, and it does not stop, it does not pause. It does not allow you to go out and get a coffee.

I guess now with streaming, you can pause anytime you want, but it is still designed for you to watch in one go to be sitting there and experiencing that.

Then there’s the length issue. Sahara was a 193,000-word novel. The screenplay for Sahara was 23,000 words.

How do you take a 193,000-word experience and create a similar story experience in just 23,000 words?

In order to do that, no scene is about one thing. In a novel, scenes are about one thing all the time. In a screenplay, every scene is about four or five or six different things stacked on top of one another, very artfully folded in on each other.

So we’re advancing this plot element here. We’re advancing this character conflict here. We’re hinting. We’re doing setups and payoffs for this and that and the other thing that are going to come 15, 20, 45 pages later. All of these things are happening in one scene, and that creates a need to rewrite a lot more than novelists sometimes do.

Some novelists rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, I get that, but for the most part. It makes it hard for discovery writers, frankly. There are not many discovery writers in Hollywood. It’s a very difficult thing.

First of all, because you’re constantly having to share your work with the producers. So you’re sharing outlines and pages and all of that sort of stuff. Just saying, “I’m not really sure what the story is going to be about. I have some ideas, but let me just see where it goes.”

Joanna: I’m just going to make it up.

Tom: You don’t get a very good response for discovery writing. Now that said, there are some. Like Greta Gerwig famously said that she has to start writing to understand what her story is, and I love that. I love that there are, even in Hollywood, there are discovery writers.

Her and Noah Baumbach, when they wrote Barbie, did a lot of discovery writing. I think it shows in the work that the depth of the theme of that movie is so evident, and I feel like it doesn’t come from an outline. I think that comes from discovery writing, to some degree.

Joanna: I mean, as we record this, even just this morning, I’ve been editing my Death Valley script again. I guess in terms of editing as a discovery writer with the novel, it’s a different process, but it is actually much easier to edit 110 pages, 120 pages, or whatever, of quite spaced out—because of the way screenplays are formatted.

It’s much easier to edit a script than it is to edit a whole book.

Tom: I mean, it kind of is, but maybe you’ll find in some ways, it also isn’t. In a screenplay, because things are so dense and so layered, you have a lot more of the “pulling on a thread and the entire sweater falls apart.”

That can happen a lot more in a screenplay sometimes, whereas the spaced out editing of a novel gives you more on ramps and off ramps to get out of the story problems you’re creating for yourself in the rewriting process. Maybe. At least that’s what I’m finding.

So, yes, I am finding editing my novel is very difficult, and I’m very happy to have somebody doing it with me and kind of for me. I’m in that process right now on the second novel, and every time I go in to fix something, I end up adding new chapters.

I’m like, oh god, what am I doing? Am I ruining this? All my film instincts are yelling at me, “Don’t! What are you doing?”

Joanna: I think that’s interesting because readers of books, of novels, are a lot more forgiving. When you think about the target market for a screenplay, it is a very small group of very, very picky people.

Whereas the target audience for a novel is a lot wider, and they’re not necessarily people who are picky about—or they are picky in some ways—but they’re not the same. So it feels like the target audience is so different, even though, obviously, eventually you hope your film will be shown in front of people.

Most people will never see your script, right? It’s a very small audience.

Tom: It’s so true. The way I describe it is, when you submit a screenplay, you’re giving it to readers who are paid to say no. When you write a novel, you’re giving it to readers who have already paid to say yes. That’s a radically different experience.

Joanna: And they paid lot less, by the way. Or nothing in Kindle Unlimited.

Tom: It’s unreal. Exactly, exactly. That is a major, major difference. In screenwriting, you are writing to a hostile audience, like an incredibly hostile audience, that is all trying to figure out how not to lose their jobs if this thing gets made and fails. That is the sad truth of the matter.

Joanna: So you mentioned there about submit your screenplay, and this is obviously one of those interesting things. For me, and maybe other people listening—

We’ve maybe written an adaptation of a novel, or we’ve written a spec screenplay, and where do we submit it?

Now, I’ve obviously been to some pitch things. I am now looking at some competitions. So what are your thoughts on our scripts, if we do write them and obviously try and make them the best they can be first, but where should they then go?

Tom: Okay, so you’re getting really into hard questions now. I was told this would not be an ambush interview. This is not fair.

Joanna: It’s so not.

Tom: Let me ask you a question, Jo. You asked me for some advice when you were about to go to Berlin, to the film festival and to the film market. Did you take my advice?

Joanna: Well, you said, don’t even write a script.

Tom: I was very specific about how you had to pitch yourself, and you were like, “Oh, but we’re British. We don’t do that. This is Europe, we don’t do that.”

I said, “No, they still do it in Europe, just maybe not quite as brashly as the Americans do.”

Joanna: No, I didn’t. I don’t think I’m very good at that. I am feeling a lot better about that. Now I know a lot more about the industry. I think I needed to be there to kind of understand. As you said, what was so funny was how much, not contempt, but they don’t think much of writers, as you said. It’s crazy to me.

Tom: No, I mean, from an indie writer’s point of view, it’s shocking, because all you do is run into people that are, “Oh my god, I love your podcast. I love your book. I love your this. I love your that.”

They’re like, “Oh geez, another writer. All right, fine. You’ve got three minutes. Tellme what you want to say.”

Joanna: So what can we do?

Tom: There is no way to break into Hollywood, and yet it happens every day. There is no way to get a film made in Europe, and yet it happens every day. The sad fact of the matter is, as I already mentioned, because of the cost of making these things, it is very difficult to get scripts read and seen and accepted.

Every step of the process is a struggle because of the time and effort and cost involved in the endeavor in and of itself. So, that said, there are things you can do to increase your chances of having success here.

If you ask me before you write anything, what can you do to up your chances? I will say, if you can write a high concept, low budget, contained-space story with powerful characters and theme, you are going to leapfrog over 90% of all other scripts that have ever been written and put yourself into contention.

Those are projects that are eminently producible. When I say contained, I mean one or two locations. I mean really, really contained, simple ideas.

I was on the screenwriting panel at 20Books Vegas two years ago, at the last 20Books Vegas, and a romance writer said, “Yeah, well, that’s all great and good, but I’m a romance writer. You can’t write a contained romance.”

I said, “Sure you can,” and I was like, “What about this? Two people—a man or woman, or depends, man and a man, whatever your genre is, whatever your tropes are—are invited to a ski weekend. They’re the first two to the chalet. They immediately hate each other. An avalanche snows them in, completely closes them in.”

“The romantic comedy is these two people at each other’s throats stuck here, who gradually fall in love as they always should have. Wouldn’t that be good?”

The person was like, yes. I think she was writing it down.

Joanna: She wrote it down.

Tom: I think she did. So you can do that with anything and create that, but that is the kind of projects that have the greatest odds because they’re producible. It doesn’t take a lot.

The lower the price becomes, the lower the difficulty of making something becomes. The easier it is to say yes, and the harder it is to say no, to some degree.

That said, have a log line, number one. A log line is just a couple sentences, two or three sentences.

You know how we all hate writing blurbs? Okay, take that blurb that you have on the back of your book and that you have on your Amazon page, and cut it by two thirds, cut it by three quarters, and that is all you can say about your film.

Until you have that, you’re not really in the game. You need to have something super small and super simple.

Joanna: Just a little tip there for people. Just like we now can for sales descriptions, you can upload it to Claude or ChatGPT, and it will give you 20 log lines, 50 log lines, whatever you like. So that’s what I do. Only do that if you’re happy with the terms and conditions of these sites, but—

I certainly am finding this a lot more useful for my pitch material.

Tom: A great thing that AI can do, for sure, is to summarize something that you’ve already written. It’s very, very good for that. I totally agree with that.

So there are some other ways that you can have your project get more visibility. Some people talk about screenplay competitions. I am going to tell you that very few mean anything. Okay, and I will tell you the ones that do.

So ScreenCraft is closing down, Launch Pad, WeScreenplay. Those are all closing down. These were owned by a company called Coverfly, and it’s restructuring the way it does its business.

So a lot of screenplay competitions are dying, and a lot of the ones that still exist, like nobody in a place to buy a screenplay and to make a film are reading those scripts.

The ones that do matter, number one is the Nicholl Fellowship. That is the absolute number one. The screenplay that wins will be read by a lot of people in this town and a lot of people around the world.

Screenplays that even make it into the semi-finals or finals, that is a feather in your cap. That is a calling card that you can use to go out there.

There’s a website called TrackingB.com. The TrackingB, which stands for Tracking Board Contest, is absolutely legit. Hollywood, in particular, pays attention to scripts that win that or make it to the top of that.

The Austin Film Festival, the AFF, that screenplay competition is very well regarded and does mean something. There’s a screenplay competition called The PAGE.

Then there is Sundance and Raindance, both have competitions and fellowships and all sorts of things. They’re a fantastic resource. You should familiarize yourself with them. Also South by Southwest.

Those are the ones that are legit and have some amount of people that are legitimately looking for scripts to produce reading. So anything else, I would say, save your money. Don’t give them the entry fee because I don’t think it’s going to mean a lot.

Joanna: There’s a lot of them that charge. What about these pitch things? So obviously, I’m going to London Screenwriters’ again next month, and there’s a PitchFest, and there’s sort of 50 producers, execs, agents. It’s like speed dating, five minutes. It’s absolutely terrifying.

Last year it was ridiculous, and I was just the complete rabbit in the headlights. It was very out of my comfort zone. This year I’m going again, and I think I’m going to be a lot more relaxed.

So do you think those [PitchFests] are worth doing?

Tom: They vary just as much as screenwriting competitions. Some of them, like nobody on that panel is going to have any interest. I’ve been on those panels, and I can tell you, I’m doing a favor for somebody to sit there and listen to people pitch me.

Joanna: Oh, they’re not a panel. It’s like, you get five minutes one-on-one, and you do that as much as possible.

Tom: Okay, okay. I know that. I know that format as well. You never know, so I can’t really say no, but I’ll say that, much like speed dating, it’s a low percentage game.

Joanna: Fair enough. Fair enough. I did speed dating back in the day.

Tom: You’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs. So I wouldn’t say no to that, even if it’s just to have the pressure of pitching and pitching repetitively, which helps you learn how to do that. Pitching is absolutely a skill that you are not taught as a novelist, and you must learn as a screenwriter.

I went to 20Books Vegas two years ago, and this year I was a speaker at Author Nation, and I’m going to be a speaker at a bunch of other things this year, and people are like, “Well, you have one book out? How are you all of a sudden doing all this sort of stuff?”

I said, well, I’m used to pitching. I can pitch myself. I can pitch things. I have training in that, really. That’s super important.

Joanna: Also you’re incredibly successful, and everyone wants to talk to you.

Tom: That’s fine. I mean, sometimes you get blown off by people like Jo Penn, who says, “No, I don’t have time for lunch,” and then figures out, “Oh, wait, I know who you are.”

Joanna: “Oh, yes, maybe I’ll hang out.” Just for people listening, I didn’t know who Tom was. Luckily, I read his book, and it was amazing, and that’s how we kind of connected. Then I realized he was this big name screenwriter, so it was an interesting connection.

That’s unlikely to happen to me multiple times, and I’ll just suddenly meet this director. Although here is a question, I am getting pitched by so many screenwriters turned novelist, and I was wondering—

Is this because of the writers’ strike a few years ago and everyone just decided to write their novel?

Tom: Yes. I was I was going to say that. I actually got sidetracked at one point, but I was like, the Hollywood studio system did me a huge favor in shutting down and preventing me from writing screenplays for six months last year during the Hollywood Writers’ Strike.

It closed down the entire business. People lost homes, people lost apartments. People had to leave the business. It was a really, really tough time.

For me, I was like, oh, my God, I can actually finish the novel now. I can actually start moving in this direction that I’ve wanted to move in for so long. Thank you very much. It was very kind of you to do that.

Joanna: There is a lot now. You must have been quick off the mark because I’m getting them every day now. Every single day, people in various Hollywood things sending their novels. It is very, very interesting.

We don’t have much time left. I could talk to you forever, but I do want to ask you about AI because obviously part of that writer strike was around the clauses and use of AI.

Film has used different technologies for many, many years. James Cameron is famously working with Runway. There’s special effects. Film already uses AI, but it’s moving into a lot more areas. So what do you see ahead in terms of opportunities?

Will cost come down? What will happen? Any thoughts [on AI in the film industry]?

Tom: Yes, I have a lot of thoughts on the matter. I think that we are in a time of profound technological change. We’ve been here before. We’ve been here many, many times before. I’m young, and I’m old enough to remember the advent of the word processor and the explosion of the personal computer.

Everybody who worked in the white out factory, they had to find another job. Everybody who worked building typewriters had to find another job. There is going to be people that are going to lose jobs because things are being automated out of their purview and automating them out of space.

It’s not really something that we need to fear as creatives. Almost everything that we’re looking at is not a thing that is going to replace us, it is a new tool that we’re going to be able to use in creating art and creating great art.

If you go to YouTube and type in “Hedra” and watch what they’re doing, you will see some stuff that is scaring a lot of people in my business. It’s a company that is doing amazing video production that is completely AI-generated.

Amazing facial animation and voice cloning work that is giving fairly photo realistic performances of AI actors. I know some actors that are like, there will be no human actors in the next 100 years.

I was like, no. Look at this and see how good can this get. It can get only so good. It can deliver a life-like performance, but it can’t give an earth shattering performance. It’s not going to change your life. It’s going to be good enough. It’s never going to be at that level of exception. At least that’s my belief.

The same thing goes for writing. If I had a job writing copy for websites, I would be very worried about my job. I think that is definitely something that AI can replace.

Crafting the stories that I can craft with my voice and my weird, twisted sensibility, I don’t think AI is ever quite going to be able to do that. As you’ve said many times on this podcast, it’s what you bring that is the differentiator. That is the thing that AI will never replace.

That is also why your readers buy your books. They’re buying it for that special JF Penn factor, that special thing. I think the same thing goes for my industry.

Joanna: I’m glad you said that. I do hope that it will bring down some costs in production. For example, I know here in Bath where they film Bridgerton and all of this kind of thing, they’re building these sort of digital interiors, or scanning the interior of the Georgian buildings so that the actors can be somewhere else.

They’re still acting in the room, but it’s just projected onto that green screen. So the future for actors may be that you don’t get to travel so much, you just have to act in another green room. A lot of them are used to that, I guess.

Tom: I mean, if you look at all of the Star Wars television series that are out recently, they all use the technology similar to that. Where not only are you acting on a 360-degree cyclorama screen, but you are in real time.

You’re not having to imagine what the green screen is showing. You’re seeing what the actual surroundings of you are. Absolutely amazing.

There are AI right now that can already dub into foreign languages and do great work with not just subtitling, but actually dubbing projects into foreign languages. That’s going to be a cost cutting exercise. There’s going to be a lot of stuff that can really, really bring down the cost.

The fact of the matter is, you are maybe going to take a 100-person crew and make it an 80-person crew. You can maybe take a 50-person crew and make it a 30-person crew.

There are still so many jobs that are still going to require people and skilled artisans in their particular fields. I think there’s a limit to how much AI is going to be able to save us, but it will be able to save quite a bit.

Joanna: Fantastic. So just briefly—

Tell us about The Year of the Rabbit. Also, where can people find you and your books online?

Tom: Listen, my first novel out of the gate, I’m super happy that it’s gotten the response that it’s gotten. Jo, you were very kind to blurb the book for me. I really appreciated that.

Joanna: It’s a great thriller, for people listening.

Tom: I will say that I’m Amazon exclusive. So it’s T.D. Donnelly, D, O, N, N, E, L, L, Y. Year of the Rabbit is the name of the book. If you like action thrillers, if you like spy thrillers, if you like thrillers with a lot of character and a very unique lead character, I highly recommend you check it out.

Should I give a quick blurb of it?

Joanna: Yes. Why not?

Tom: Year of the Rabbit is about Malcolm Chaucer. Malcolm Chaucer is the world’s greatest interrogator. He is a human lie detector that can read every micro expression on your face to know whether or not what you’re saying is a truth or a lie.

He knows this because he is a deeply broken man who, for eight years, was tortured in North Korea and suffers extreme PTSD. That is his super power. That is why he is hypervigilant and able to notice all of these things.

Well, during a routine interrogation in New York, he finds out that the person that these people are looking for is his ex-wife. That starts him down a road of suddenly being hunted himself, as well as she is, by nameless assassins.

Actually, everybody in New York that that has access to a computer is suddenly told a million dollar bounty on his head. Can he figure out truth from lies? Can he figure out who wants to kill him? And can he figure out the secret that is the Year of the Rabbit?

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

Tom: Oh, let me just say, TDDonnelly.com is the website. That’s the other thing. Thank you.

Joanna: Thank you.

The post From Hollywood To Novels: TD Donnelly On Screenwriting, Adaptation, and Storytelling That Lasts first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Need a writing buddy? A critique partner? A beta reader? Here’s your stop!

Writers need feedback. And friends! But sometimes it can be difficult to find someone willing to read your work who is also a good fit for you and your writing.

There are many different forums and groups online designed to help writers link up with each other for beta reading and helpful feedback. You can find some of those groups listed in this post. You can also reach out right here in the Wordplayer community!

Once or twice a year, I post a “writing buddy linkup,” which opens the comments to anyone looking for a critique partner or accountability partner. It is always massively popular, and I always hear from writers who have successfully found writing partners. I’ve even heard from people who connected in the first link-up I hosted years ago who have become lifelong friends!

If you want to join the fun, keep reading.

Need a Writing Buddy? Here’s How

Just leave a comment! Tell us:

• Your genre
• A short summary of your current story
• Your level of experience (i.e., how many years you have been writing)
• What you’re looking for in a writing buddy
• Your email address (I recommend formatting it as follows to avoid spam: kmweiland [at] kmweiland [dot] com)

You can subscribe to the comments to read additional entries as they come in (however, be aware there could be hundreds of comments!). If you see someone you think would be a great match for you, drop them a line!

The writing life works best when we’re able to reach out and offer a helping hand to one another. Jump in, meet someone new, and start taking your writing to the next level!

Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! What are you looking for in a writing buddy? Tell us in the comments!

The post Find a Writing Buddy (2025 Edition!) appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

How can we avoid the mistake of comparing our first drafts with the finished books we love? How can we improve our manuscripts? Kristopher Jansma gives his tips.

In the intro, Finding your deepest reason to write [Ink In Your Veins]; London Book Fair, AI audio and ‘vibe coding’ [Self Publishing with ALLi]; Pirated database of books used to train AI models [The Atlantic]; Fair use and copyright with Alicia Wright; The Guardian strategic partnership with OpenAI; Trump Administration’s AI Action Plan and potential around fair use [Ars Technica]; How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed by Richard Susskind; Death Valley, A Thriller by J.F. Penn.

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 

Kristopher Jansma is the award-winning author of literary fiction novels, short fiction and essays, as well as Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers.

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 mistake of comparing first drafts to finished works
• Dismantling the notion of genius
• How to turn our manuscripts into masterpieces
• Knowing when it’s time to walk away from a book, or push through and persevere
• Seeking support from editors and friends
• Balancing the joyful side and business side of being an author
• The importance of social media in developing your personal brand
• Drawing boundaries and protecting personal information in your writing

You can find Kristopher at KristopherJansma.com or The Nature of the Fun on Substack.

Transcript of Interview with Kristopher Jansma

Joanna: Kristopher Jansma is the award-winning author of literary fiction novels, short fiction and essays, as well as Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers. So welcome to the show, Kris.

Kristopher: Thanks for having me on, Jo.

Joanna: I’m excited to talk to you about this. First up—

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

Kristopher: Well, I have been a writer pretty much my whole life. I’m one of those writers who, as a child, you couldn’t get a book out of my hand. I have a whole storage unit somewhere full of school journals that are full of little stories and things. It was just something that I took to really early and always really wanted to do.

As I got older, I started taking it a little more seriously. Then I went to school eventually and studied writing. So it’s always been a lifelong love of mine.

Joanna: So are you a full-time writer? We’re always interested in how people make a living writing on this show.

Kristopher: I don’t know very many full-time writers, sadly. So I’m an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY New Paltz College here in New York State.

So I’m teaching creative writing, which is wonderful because I get to talk about what I love all the time and help students with their writing. I’m the director of our creative writing program up there right now.

Joanna: Well, that’s fantastic. It makes me understand a lot more why you wrote this book, Revisionaries. So let’s get into that. Why is it sort of just a number one mistake of writers, which is comparing our first draft efforts to the finished books we read?

Why is comparing our first drafts to the finished books we read a mistake?

Kristopher: I think it’s natural, but I think it’s a mistake. I mentioned before, I was a big reader as a child and all through my life, and I think that’s how most writers get started.

We fall in love with books at some point, and reading, and I think it’s pretty natural at some points to start to wonder if we could do it too. You know, how much fun it would be to do and give somebody else the great experience that we’ve just gotten.

We model our efforts on the things that we’ve read before and the things that we admire, of course. Then a funny thing starts to happen, of course, as we get more serious about it, and —

We start to realize there’s a huge gap between what we’re able to do and what our heroes have done in the past.

Then I think a lot of people, after having a lot of fun with it at first, start to get really frustrated because they feel like, okay, well, what’s the point if I’m never going to be as good as someone like F Scott Fitzgerald. In my case, he was like my hero growing up, or JD Salinger, or somebody like that.

I think what we miss, what most of us don’t really learn much about, is that those writers only achieve these kind of great masterpieces after tons of failure, rejection, screw ups, mistakes. A lot of them had a lot of help from other people, like editors and family, and all of that.

So I think then we just have this misconception about how it works. What I think we tend to believe is that there are just certain people who luck out in the genetic lottery or something, and they’re just naturally gifted, talented writers, and that they’re geniuses from day one.

That was really what I wanted to try to dismantle in this book, was this idea that these great writers—not that they’re not geniuses, not that they’re not so great—but just that it’s not all natural.

They didn’t get there on their own, and it didn’t come without a lot of failure along the way.

Joanna: As you were talking now, I was thinking about also the difference. I mean, as an associate professor in creative writing, you naturally teach—well, maybe you have to teach—specific books, things that are considered classic. There are books that are considered classics.

I almost feel this is another problem is that we compare ourselves to the classics. Whereas take someone like Isaac Asimov, who wrote over 400 books, people always compare themselves to the ones that were most successful. Whereas most books are not those classics, are they?

Could we compare ourselves to normal books instead of these ‘classics’?

Kristopher: Absolutely. I talk about this a little bit in the introduction to Revisionaries. I took a class when I was in college, but I snuck into a graduate class, and we read Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. It was all these amazing works by amazing American writers.

I talked about in the book this lesser known work of Fitzgerald that he didn’t finish before he died, called The Love of the Last Tycoon, and realizing it was actually pretty bad.

I was finding it kind of depressing at the time, but then realizing later in life that actually that is something that was good. In my mind, I was able to realize, okay, this shows that even somebody that could write The Great Gatsby might write another book that’s not so wonderful.

Then, of course, and I did mention this in the introduction, but I think of this a lot. With Faulkner, we started with and the Sound and the Fury, and I didn’t know for years and years after that that wasn’t his first novel. I thought it was his debut book.

A friend of mine said, “Oh, if you’re ever feeling intimidated, go read one of Faulkner’s first two novels.” I think it’s Mosquitoes and Soldier’s Pay or something, and he said, “You’ll feel a lot better about your own writing,” and he was right.

Joanna: Yes, I think that’s important. Now, you did mention the word “genius”, and you use it in the book to anchor each chapter, but genius is a really hard word. I mean, it’s a word many people are uncomfortable with, and I think it’s interesting.

Why did you choose the word “genius”, and how did your definition change over the process of writing?

Kristopher: I’m glad you mentioned that. Each chapter has a little section called “Fail Like a Genius” at the end that kind of gives you some tips on writing, or exercises you can do that are inspired by the chapter.

The word genius was floating around for me in the very beginning because what I was wanting to do, I realized, was dismantle the notion of genius. As you mentioned, it is such a problematic idea.

As I was mentioning before, if we see other people who are successful, we can just tell ourselves, “Oh, they’re just a genius. They were born with some talent or some ability that other people aren’t. I’ll never succeed because I don’t have that thing.”

I think that’s where a lot of us begin the writing process, and that this idea that we’re trying to figure out if we have what it takes somewhere within us. When the reality is —

What it takes is a lot of persistence, a lot of practice, a lot of stubbornness.

Also mixed in, and I think this is where it gets hard, an ability to learn from your mistakes and see where you’ve gone wrong, and then make corrections the next time.

When you look at these stories of these writers, you realize that this is what they’ve done as well. It’s not like they just sat down one day wrote a masterpiece because they have some magical abilities that you or I don’t.

Joanna: This is what kind of annoys me with writing, compared to something like visual art. So here in Europe, if you go to Malaga, you can go to the Picasso’s early museum where he was born. You can see some of the pieces that he did when he was a child and then when he was a young man, and you can see the development.

In visual art, they appreciate the development of the artist, and also have this idea of periods.

Like, that’s the blue period, then that was this, as visual artists experimented. It wasn’t like, oh, they suddenly arrive on the scene with a perfect novel, which seems to be the expectation. Even now in modern publishing, it’s like, “oh, this debut author.”

I guess we don’t have this “show your work” thing in writing, do we? We don’t really accept that.

Kristopher: No, we hide those drafts, and we hope that nobody ever sees them because we want to perpetuate this myth that we did just sit down and this wonderful thing came out. There’s this mystique around the writer that way.

Debut writers are often fairly young, and you haven’t read anything else by them before, so it creates this sense that they just decided to write a book one day, and then this great thing came out. So that’s a hard thing to live up to.

A lot of debut authors don’t end up publishing a second book, I think because the expectations are so high that the second book will be just as seemingly effortless to do as the first one was. Where, in fact, the first one probably took a decade, sometimes longer, of a sort of effort.

I had the same thought about the visual art as I was working on this book, and music too. Collectors will get demo tapes and rough tracks of artists that they love, and they enjoy going back and listening to the rawer sound of an early version of a song before it got all produced and polished and everything else.

There’s something really authentic and cool and fun about that, to be able to hear this is what it sounded like when he was just in the garage with the guitar and the drum machine or whatever. With writing, we tend not to do that.

What we have instead, which is almost, I think, more problematic—I talk about this a little bit in the chapter in the book about Louisa May Alcott with Little Women—what we have instead is, every once in a while, publishers will put out a new book that they say they’ve discovered by a writer that was never published before.

What it turns out to be is what we would in academic worlds call like juvenilia, or here’s a short story that Hemingway wrote when he was eight years old, or something like that, and published in the local newspaper.

They’re often quite bad, or they’re fine, I’m sure, for an eight year old, but nothing like what they’re going to be able to do later. But the publishers, I think, wanting to kind of trick people into believing that they’ve discovered some new masterpiece that no one’s ever read before.

They’ll hype it up, and they’ll say, “Okay, this is an amazing book by Louisa May Alcott that you’ve never read before,” and it turns out to be it’s a book that she wrote and realized wasn’t very good, and so she never published it.

Joanna: Didn’t they do that with Harper Lee?

Kristopher: Yes, Harper Lee’s story is one that I really love. I talk about this one in the book as well. This, again, was a very confused roll out by the publisher. They claimed that they had a long, lost second novel by Harper Lee, and it made it sound like it was a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird.

The new book was called Go Set a Watchman. When it came out, it was very shocking because it involves characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus and Scout and all of them, but as older characters. So it did seem like something that she wrote later about what would happen to them after To Kill a Mockingbird.

People were very scandalized because it turned out that Atticus Finch, who in To Kill a Mockingbird was the snowball lawyer who takes on this case to defend a Black man from the mob. Anyway, in this sort of sequel, he turned out to be like a racist and like a Ku Klux Klan member, or had gone to meetings or something.

People were horrified. How could this happen? How could she write this book about him? What it turned out had happened, finally, we worked it backwards, and we’ve discovered that that book was actually not even really a prequel.

It was a rough draft, or you couldn’t even really call it a rough draft. It was a book that she wrote before To Kill a Mockingbird. She wanted to write about this woman, and she came up with these characters.

When she submitted that book to her publisher, their publisher said, basically, “No, thank you. I don’t like this book, but I do like this character, and I do like this world in Alabama that you’re writing about. So if you want to go back and write a completely different book now, I would take a look at that.”

So that’s the moment when most writers would say, “Okay, this is a sign. I obviously don’t have what it takes. I got so far, and this editor still said no, then sent me back to the drawing board again.”

That’s, I think, when a lot of people would sort of give up, but Harper Lee had that persistence where she said, “Okay, great. There are a couple of things here that this editor said she liked. I’m going to go back, I’m going to start over. I’m going to take those elements, and I’m going to work with them.”

Then she wrote one of the greatest novels in the 20th century. So she was just so close to it, she just didn’t know yet that that’s where she was going with it.

Joanna: But then, classic example of someone who then didn’t write. I mean, I write a lot of books, and I feel like every time I write a book, more ideas come.

I just can’t imagine stopping writing. Maybe Harper Lee had a paralysis of success or something.

Kristopher: I wonder about that with her. She talked a lot in her interviews afterwards that it was so successful, and she got so much attention, and I don’t think she was somebody that particularly desired that kind of attention.

It’s a funny thing, a lot of writers—maybe there’s some ego to it—we want to share our thoughts and ideas with people, and we think that others should hear or would enjoy them, at least. But we’re not really necessarily people that want to be in the spotlight.

Being a writer is an art form that really has to be done alone for the most part.

A lot of writers are pretty introspective and kind of quiet people who wouldn’t mind sitting alone at their computer for hours and hours and hours.

So I think Harper Lee and JD Salinger. I didn’t end up talking about Salinger in this book, but I wrote an earlier column about him. I think they had that response to the fame that followed their books coming out, that they sort of retreated away from it.

We do know that Harper Lee worked on at least one other project after To Kill a Mockingbird. She was working on a crime novel. So it was sort of a true crime novel or based on a true crime that had happened. That’s never been published.

I don’t think she finished it, or at least we don’t know that she’s finished it. It’s never been published, as far as we know. When they found Go Set a Watchman, originally that’s what they thought they had found, was the finished crime novel. I don’t believe that she ever did finish it.

Joanna: Yes, it’s interesting. All right. Well, let’s go a bit deeper into how we can turn our books into something better. You have a good quote in the book. You said, “I’ve seen how messes metamorphosize into masterpieces.”

So how can we do the same thing? Like, when you have students and they’re like there’s something in there, but it’s a bit of a mess—

What are some ways we can improve our manuscripts?

Kristopher: There’s a couple of things that came up over and over again in the book, and there’s sort of a persistence theme that runs through several of the chapters.

Like with Harper Lee, where sometimes what needs to happen is that we just need to kind of stick with the project a little longer and try something else there and see how that works.

So sometimes that’s how the mess turns into a masterpiece. It’s just that we continue to dig in deeper and have some faith that we’ll get there, trying out some different ideas along the way.

I think a lot of times for most writers, we get to a place where we’ve done everything we know how to do, and it’s still quite a bit of a mess. I think that’s when it helps a lot to get some help, basically. This also comes up over and over again.

So a lot of these writers had people in their lives that they were able to turn to for advice, or just to be a helper, a reader. F Scott Fitzgerald’s first version of The Great Gatsby, Trimalchio, was not nearly as good as The Great Gatsby, for a number of reasons, and also had a horrible title.

He got it as far as he could on his own. At that point, he had an editor that he’d worked with on his first book, and Max Perkins read it and gave him some feedback on it that was really helpful. He also needed the help of his wife, Zelda, who gave him some ideas about how to better define Gatsby as a character.

So that’s another thing that I often recommend, which is —

Is there anybody that you can give the book to that might be able to give it a fresh read?

Then the important thing is then you need to be open to the feedback that they give you.

[Click here for editors!]

I think a lot of times we give the book to somebody, and we hope that they’re going to tell us it’s perfect. That always feels good, but it’s not going to really help us get it where we need it to go.

Kafka, I talk about Kafka in the book, never finished any of the books that he started writing. He always undermined himself and had all this doubt, but luckily, he had a good friend, Max Brod, who had basically pushed him all the time to keep on going and try to finish things. So I think that helps a lot, like bringing it to somebody else.

Then the last thing I would say—this came up a few times too—it’s sort of the flip side of persistence, in some ways.

Sometimes you need to know how to walk away from a project that just isn’t working.

It’s very hard. Of course, we spent a lot of time on these books, sometimes years, and we just can’t get it to work right.

I really wanted people to see through the project here, through Revisionaries, that this happens to all the writers that they love as well. They work on a project that just can’t, for whatever reason, doesn’t come together the way that they wanted to.

The best thing they can do is take a step away from it and just start trying to work on something different for a while.

Joanna: But as you said about Kafka there, like I know someone who has 15 books that are not finished. The thing is, sometimes, like you say, you might need to walk away, but maybe you actually just need to go for a walk and walk away for a week and then come back and finish it.

If you keep walking away from projects because it’s hard—I mean, the point is, this is hard.

It is hard to write a book. How do you know where’s the balance between persisting or walking away?

Kristopher: Yes, it is hard.

I wish there was an easy way to know when you’re in too deep on something that just isn’t working. I was just reading this the other day, Mark Twain, prolific writer, finished lots and lots of things, and wrote wonderful classics.

He tried to write a book about Joan of Arc, I think he said six times in 12 years, and every time he got into it and just realized he wasn’t going to be able to finish it. It wasn’t going to be able to get any further.

When you’re in a situation like you’re talking about, where you have somebody who never finishes anything, or starts many things and never finishes them, I do think that is a different problem.

With Kafka, it was an issue of just a lack of confidence. He would finish something and then he would rethink it and decide, “Oh no, no, no, actually, I don’t think it’s good enough. I have to go back and change it again,” even when other people were telling him, “No, no, no, it’s great. Let’s go.”

Kafka tried to claw back the manuscript for The Metamorphosis, probably his most famous short story, probably one of the most famous short stories in the 20th century. He tried to get his editor to send it back to him so that he could keep making more changes to it, even right before it got published.

So that is a different kind of problem that comes up sometimes where you’re just never satisfied with what you’ve done. You have to be able to decide, “Okay, this is good enough the way it is. I’m going to let it go and move on to the next thing.”

Joanna: Yes, and so often—well, I mean, obviously sometimes there are some big structural problems, but that is what editors can help with—but often it’s the little tweaks. I mean, we all read our work that’s published, and we’re like, “Oh, I would change that now. I would change that now,” but—

It’s probably not even something that a reader would notice or care about.

Kristopher: Exactly. I think though, again, as writers, we’re always going to have some self-doubt, and we’re always going to be, to some degree, our own worst critic. We also have to balance that out against the moments where we feel optimistic and we feel like what we’re writing is actually good.

This is, again, kind of a moment when I think having somebody else on the outside give you a pat on the back and some encouragement is helpful.

Jane Austen was a great example of someone. She wrote a few books when she was young, like very young, 16, 17,18 years old. They were finished, and she thought they were good, and other people that read them liked them, but she just wasn’t sure. She felt like they weren’t as good as she wanted them to be.

Then one of them she waited on for about a decade almost, I think, and then eventually wrote it completely and turned it into, I think it was Sense and Sensibility.

She had a sense that she had more to learn, or she needed more time to become a better writer first before she wanted to put that work out there.

Joanna: Yes, I think we do get that sense. I wrote a book on the shadow, Writing the Shadow, using Jungian psychology. That took a couple of decades, really, before I was ready to do that. I had to write a memoir first, because memoir changes your writing, and then I was like, okay, now I’m ready to write that book.

Kristopher: Yes, it is hard. Although I think when you love the process of it, and you can get to a place where you’re enjoying the writing part a lot, that that can be very freeing. Then you’re not as concerned about, you know, okay, which one happens first? Or how does this get done before that one? That kind of thing.

Joanna: It’s interesting. You said, “enjoying the writing.” In the book, you say, “Take the time to write for its own sake again.” I feel like this kind of simple joy is difficult. I mean, I’m a full time author, and many listeners write for a living, and it’s like the industry drives us into faster output.

Publishers don’t put as much editing into things as they did back in the day of those classic authors. We have to do a lot more marketing. You’re on the show, you are doing book marketing, not writing. So how can we do this?

How can we balance taking the time to do that joyful stuff and the business of being a writer?

Kristopher: Yes, this is, I think, really the biggest key for writers today. Like you say, I don’t know that it was as big of a struggle for writers in the past because this world of self-promotion that exists for writers today.

Even 10-20 years ago, I don’t know that it was quite as all absorbing as it can be now in this landscape of social media, but also wonderful things like podcasts that I find really fun to do.

We started this by asking about, how can we keep fun alive in our writing? I think I enjoy talking to people about what I’m working on. It actually helps me think about what I want to write next and gets me excited to write more. So I try to keep that in mind as I’m doing these promotional engagements and things like that.

I don’t feel like it is, or I try not to feel like it’s a distraction from the writing itself. At the same time, eventually, you have to be able to log off of Instagram or TikTok or whatever.

You have to actually sit down and write and not feel distracted by the desire to go back in and check and see if anyone else is talking about you or responding to your video or something like that.

So I’ve started setting up a time in my day when I can turn off all those devices, when I can turn off social media, when it’s just me and the computer. That’s something that I’ve had to really push hard for the last couple of years to really carve out time away from the rest of it.

Different writers have different ways of doing this. If there’s a room in your house that you can go into and you can leave the phone on the outside, or you can use a computer that’s not online, I think those things can help a lot.

I set modest goals for writing.

Usually, my goal is to do something like 3000 words in a week, which sounds like a lot, but ultimately is maybe like 500 words a day. Maybe a little more during the work week, which doesn’t take all that long to do in the course of a day, but it really adds up over time.

Over the course of a couple of weeks, you start to really feel like you’ve made some progress, finished a chapter or story that way. I think when you can build that into your life, this separate time that’s sacred from the other parts of being a writer, the other business of being a writer, I think that’s really the key.

I often talk about with my students —

There are times when you have to take off the writer hat and put on your author hat.

The author is the one who is on the podcast, who is talking to readers on social media, kind of doing that part of the job. Then the writer is almost like a separate identity.

Joanna: I’m not really into golf, but we’re watching the Netflix series on golf at the moment, and it’s mainly about characters, it’s not so much about golf. They’re excellent at their commentaries.

These young golfers were talking about how much they have to do social media in order to build up their brands. I was like, oh my goodness, it’s the same for everyone now. Golf is what they do, like we do writing, and then they still have to do social media and all that.

It feels like this is just the reality of being some kind of personal brand now. You have to do that side of it.

So as part of teaching your students, that is what you tell them, right? It’s not just the writing.

Kristopher: Yes, so we talk about it a lot. It’s funny, my students, some of them are very online and really enjoy all of those things, and they’re excited about that part of it.

To some degree, I almost worry more about those students because they’re the ones who I suspect that I don’t know that they really want to write, I think they want to be famous.

I try to tell them in as nice a way as possible, if what you want is to be famous, there are better ways to go about it than writing, probably more lucrative ways too.

So I do try to make sure that they remember that it is important, but it’s not as important as actually writing something good and taking the time to master the craft that you’re trying to master.

I think there’s an idea out there, another myth maybe that needs to kind of get dispelled, which is that the brand is more important than the writing. We’ve all picked up a book by a flashy author, and felt like the writing wasn’t all that good.

I think that leads to this idea that, okay, well maybe that part’s just not as important, creating a persona that people want to follow on online. Again, the reality is that I don’t think that that works for most people.

There are always great examples of writers who are quite successful and really don’t have a strong social media presence at all, and are still able to do it.

So I try to remind them that it’s fine to be excited about that side of things, and if you’re good at it, then you should go ahead and do it, but that it’s not a shortcut to succeeding in the writing part of it. In fact, I think it’s often a distraction.

Joanna: Yes, there’s definitely pros and cons. You actually have a chapter on keeping secrets, and you do write there about where’s the line between what we do share. I mean, I podcast because I don’t really do much social media.

Podcasting is one way that I can be a brand and sell books, but also share some things, but there are lines that I don’t cross with my own brand. So what are your thoughts on when we share, when we stay silent, or even in our writing—

When do you write your truth, and when do you keep it quiet?

Kristopher: This is something that is funny. I think fiction writers, like myself, I was really drawn to fiction early on, partly because I felt like my own life wasn’t all that interesting. So I thought it’d be better writing in a way that I can make things up.

Since I’ve gotten older, I’ve felt the other way around about it. There are things in my life now that I feel this need to protect, that I don’t want to share with other people.

As a fiction writer, I have that option. I can always kind of hide things, or I can change them in such a way that there’s still an element of privacy around them.

This comes up in Revisionaries in the chapter on Patricia Highsmith, who was a very prolific crime writer and wrote some fantastic novels. The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Price of Salt, etc., that are still classics today.

What I found was that she had tried a few times to write about her personal life. She was a lesbian, and she was having relationships with women in the West Village as openly as she could at the time, but she was living in a time when writing openly about lesbian relationships could have actually gotten her in legal jeopardy.

It certainly could have ruined her publishing career. Publishers weren’t able to publish stories about those kinds of relationships unless they ended in tragedy, because otherwise, it was considered immoral.

So one of her great victories was writing The Price of Salt, which is a novel about these two women, and the relationship at the end is not really a tragedy at all, or arguably is a happy ending. She couldn’t publish it under her own name. She published it under a pseudonym, which was a common practice at the time.

It was really difficult for her, personally. She almost fell apart completely in the lead up to it because she was so worried about the exposure that might come from it. The more that it seemed like the book was about to become a big hit, and then it was, the more that she felt like she had just shared way too much.

I ended up reading another book of hers, I had to fly all the way to Switzerland to go to the library and the archives there to dig up an unfinished book that she tried to write about that was also a woman reflecting on her life and her relationships with women in her life.

She abandoned the book after, I think, about 80 pages, and just realized that she just can’t do it. She couldn’t write about it. It was tearing her up. So I kind of think, and I talk about this in this chapter, that we have to be able to draw those same lines for ourselves.

Like we were saying before, I think it’s particularly tricky in today’s writing environment where a certain confessional impulse can actually be a big draw. It can help sell books.

My most recent novel came out in the fall, and it’s a novel based on my grandmother’s stories during World War Two. Everywhere that I went to talk about it, that was the first question people asked.

How much of this is real, and how much of this is based on her real story?

Which parts are real, and which ones did you make up?

It’s like, well, it’s a novel. You’re not supposed to know necessarily which parts are real and not.

I went through a series of interviews, I was listening to other authors, I think maybe it was like interviews on NPR or something like that. I just was checking for a while to see how many times was the author’s own personal life a part of the conversation surrounding the novel that they were publishing.

It was well over 50% of the time that was like one of the first questions being asked. How is this book authentic because it comes from your own experiences?

These are novels, so again, I feel like we should be able to appreciate the beauty of a piece of fiction without having to be reassured that it came from a true story first. Of course, that’s exciting to know about, so people want to share it.

Joanna: I mean, I write horror and thriller and crime, and you get a lot fewer questions about, like, how much of this murderer is you? But then I do a lot of research.

So for example, my next thriller is called Death Valley, and it’s set in Death Valley in California. There’s all of the truth of the place, but then it’s fictionalized.

I feel like with literary fiction, that is something that’s an obsession with so many. Obviously, there’s been some very high profile novels that have been ripped apart because they haven’t been, so called, someone’s own story. So I don’t know, it’s difficult.

Kristopher: Well, I think the trouble is when a novel is marketed on the basis of some sort of authenticity, suggesting that the writer’s own experiences are informing it, and then it turns out not to be the case.

We’ve almost turned novels and fiction into nonfiction, and we have that same obligation that a memoirist does, to be fully honest about everything that goes into the book.

When James Frey had his big scandal around A Million Little Pieces, that book was originally written as a piece of fiction. It was supposed to be a novel, and nobody was interested in it. He then it changed it over and basically said, “Oh, what if I just pretend it was a memoir?” Then people loved it.

That’s because you’ve given people this assurance that it’s real. Going back to my earlier point, I think as fiction writers, we should try more often not to do that. So it’s an easy way to get attention for the books that we’re writing because, of course, people want to know that.

Even earlier books of mine, the very first question I would get asked at every event was, “How much of this is based on your real life?” I used to know a little better than I do today. I used to know to kind of demure a little bit at that question and say, “Oh, well, you know, that’s personal. That’s private.”

Joanna: That’s great. Well, the book is super interesting. We’re almost out of time, but—

Who is Revisionaries for? Who are the people who are going to get the most out of this book?

Kristopher: I really wrote it for writers in the earlier part of their lives. I really wished it was a book that I could have read when I was trying to write my first novel and feeling very frustrated.

I wrote three books before the first one that actually sold. Two of them had agents, and then couldn’t find a publisher. All through that process I was feeling like, okay, maybe I’m just not good. Maybe I just don’t have what it takes.

So this was the book that I wish that I had been able to read at that point in my life when I was worried that the fact that I was failing, or what felt like failure, was not some sign that I would never be as good as I wanted to be, or that I would never be as good as the other writers that I admired so much.

The only reason I hesitate to say that it’s just for the writers trying to find a way to break out, is that when I was writing this book over the last five years, I was in the same position again.

I had published two novels. They both came out and did well, and then for whatever reason, I couldn’t get the next one sold. Then I wrote another one, and that one didn’t sell in the US. It only sold in French translation, which was a whole other story.

Joanna: Random.

Kristopher: Delightful. I hope the French enjoyed it.

Once again, all these years into my writing career, I hit a moment where I thought, okay, maybe that was it. Maybe I lost whatever I had, and now I can’t do it again. Then writing this book was a nice way to remind myself that, actually, yes, this happens to lots of other writers.

Richard Wright had this huge hit and then his publisher rejected his next book. There are other stories like that in here about other writers like that. It’s not a constant climb, higher and higher. It’s an up and down experience.

Joanna: Yes, it’s not a straight up-and-to-the-right graph.

Kristopher: Exactly, and there’s nothing wrong with that being part of the way that it works.

Joanna: Indeed.

Where can people find you and your books online?

Kristopher: Well, KristopherJansma.com is my website. I’m on Instagram, and these days, Threads. Those are both great ways to find me.

I have a Substack called The Nature of the Fun where I post a short piece every month that’s all dedicated to finding ways we discover the joy in our writing process and making it more fun again.

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

Kristopher: Thanks so much, Jo.

The post How Ordinary Drafts Become Extraordinary Books. Revisionaries With Kristopher Jansma first appeared on The Creative Penn.

From KMW: If you’ve been following my work, you know how much I emphasize the power of Flat Arc archetypes in storytelling—characters like the Child, Lover, Ruler, Elder, and Mentor, who don’t undergo drastic change but instead remain true to their core nature, influencing the world around them.

That’s why I’m excited to share today’s post by Oliver Fox. He introduces an alternative narrative structure to Joseph Campbell’s powerful and ubiquitous Monomyth—one that complements the quiet strength of these archetypes. Oliver dives into what he calls the Unitive Myth, a framework that emphasizes internal growth, community, and the feminine energy behind these stories.

As he explores, you’ll see how the Unitive Myth aligns perfectly with the essence of the Flat Arc archetypes I teach in my book Writing Archetypal Characters. If you’ve ever felt like your stories didn’t quite fit the mold of the traditional hero’s journey, this is the alternative you’ve been waiting for! Oliver’s insights will help you embrace a storytelling approach that allows your characters to remain true to themselves while still creating deep, impactful narratives.

***

In This Article:

• How to Write an Alternative to the Monomyth
• The First Act: Invitation vs. Initiation
• The First Half of the Second Act: Departure vs. Disruption
• The Second Half of the Second Act: Achievement vs. Revelation
• Third Act: Return vs. Stasis (Harmonization or Rejection types I, II, or III)
• Conclusion

If you’ve been writing for any significant amount of time, you’ve probably found yourself haunted by Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth. Wherever you turn, you’ll encounter some iteration of it touted as the ultimate plot structure. Even purported alternative structures can look suspiciously similar when subjected to sufficient scrutiny. Love it or hate it, the Monomyth does effectively describe many of the world’s most famous and beloved stories, from Lord of the Rings to Star Wars to Harry Potter.

So, is that it? Is this truly the one plot available to us if we are to succeed as writers and storytellers? Well, given you’re here, you’re already likely aware of at least a few of the other options available to you. Still, I’d like to offer one more—one I think you’ll find surprisingly familiar, yet rarely discussed or consciously implemented, and therefore still quite fresh. It may also be familiar because it was inspired in no small part by Katie’s exploration of Flat Arcs, Flat Archetypes, and Impact Characters more generally.

I call it “The Unitive Myth.” Others have identified it by such names as “Feminine Mode Narrative” (Michael Hauge) and “Carrier-Bag Fiction” (Ursula Le Guin). I first discovered it while trying (and failing) to fit some stories I teach in literature classes into a Monomythical framework—stories such as Anne of Green Gables and, yes, even that pinnacle of Westerns, Shane. But try as I might, I just couldn’t get Anne to contort herself to fit into the Monomythical box.

And I found that fascinating.

If you’re like me, sometimes these grand, dramatic, spectacular stories driven by high stakes conflict don’t do it for you; you might prefer a story that’s quiet, subtle, and cozy instead. That’s what the Unitive Myth is all about, even in its more adventurous forms (more on that later). Anne Shirley isn’t on an epic quest to retrieve a great boon. She doesn’t face impassable hordes of mooks arrayed against her, blocking her goal. Nor does she ultimately slay a dragon or a dark lord to save Prince Edward’s Isle, let alone Canada. And yet, an account of her attempt to bake the perfect cake to impress her new schoolmarm captivates me, and I’m truly devastated along with Anne when she fails.

Why?

I wanted to know. The prospect of describing a narrative mode that could allow me to emulate these kinds of narratives in my own work was too enticing, so I set out analyzing them, looking for shared tropes and structures.

How to Write an Alternative to the Monomyth

Interested in learning how to write such captivatingly cozy stories for yourself? Read on, and I’ll share what secrets I’ve uncovered: the subtle Yin to the Monomyth’s bombastic Yang.

To better understand the Unitive Myth, let’s contrast it with Dan Harmon’s simplified Monomyth, the “Story Circle,” beat for beat.

First Act: Invitation vs. Initiation

Monomyth: You, the protagonist, are going about your ordinary, everyday life when something disrupts your routine, making you realize you badly Need some object of desire. Implicitly or explicitly, you’ve been invited to go on an adventure.

Unitive Myth: You have left a previous life behind and entered a new milieu. Perhaps you’re moving into an entirely new community, or maybe you’re just taking on a greater role within your existing one. Regardless of the circumstances, you step into this new situation confident in who you are and what you’re capable of. You Are Whole already.

Example:

Anne Shirley (Child): I can hear you clamoring already, shouting invectives and objections as you sharpen your pitchfork and light the torches. “Anne? Whole? Puh-lease! Isn’t that the point of her story—that she needs a family?” To which I would counter, “not according to the book itself.” At one point, Matthew Cuthbert, the father figure of Anne’s two adoptive parents, tells his sister Marilla he suspects they need Anne more than she needs them. This isn’t some schmaltzy throwaway line. Rather, it’s borne out as the plot unfolds: Anne remains steadfast in her core characteristics: passionate, curious, and whimsical. By the end of the story, she hasn’t fundamentally changed so much as she has more fully embodied these characteristics, albeit with more control.

First Half of Second Act: Departure vs Disruption

Monomyth: Driven by your desperate need, you Go, venturing forth into the wide world to Search for the object of your desire.

Unitive Myth: You Join a new community (or an old community in a new capacity). However, as you make the rounds and engage with each member, you discover your mere presence and habits create disruption. Perhaps your appearance, bearing, and modes of interaction are simply foreign to the community, but they interpret such things as transgressive, maybe even dangerous. So, for a time, you feel it necessary to partially Conceal your true nature.

Example:

Elizabeth Bennet (Lover): Elizabeth enters the high society of Netherfield and Rosings, quietly confident and brimming with acerbic wit. Each member of this society expects her to behave decorously and with deference, but during each encounter—whether with Darcy, Miss Bingley, Mr. Collins, or Lady Catharine De Bourgh—Elizabeth upends this expectation. Her disruption is unintentional; Elizabeth is just being herself—keen and witty, traits unheard of in a woman within polite society of the time. After provoking the ire of some of these sociocultural elites, Elizabeth feels pressured to conceal her true self. The stakes are too high to risk further provoking their disapprobation. For now…

Second Half of Second Act: Achievement vs. Revelation

Monomyth: Eventually, you Find the object of your desire, which you believe to be your deepest Need. Through great effort and sacrifice, you overcome the obstacles and forces of antagonism so you can Take it as your own.

Unitive Myth: You cycle through several interactions with all the core community members: including Allies, Challengers, Romantic Mirrors, Guardians, Guides, and Libertines (more on these in another article, perhaps). One meeting at a time, one piece at a time, you Shed the culturally conditioned armor and masks you donned upon first facing rejection. The more you unveil yourself, the more you can Give of yourself, healing individuals within the community and inspiring greater harmony in the whole.

Example:

Atticus Finch (Parent): Long seen as a man apart by the denizens of Maycomb, Atticus reveals his true ideology throughout Tom Robinson’s trial. He remains steadfast in his convictions even in the face of increasingly hostile societal pressure to conform. By treating everyone, including his greatest critics, with dignity and compassion, Atticus softens their opposition just enough to sow seeds of social change.

Third Act: Return vs. Stasis (Harmonization or Rejection types I, II, or III)

Monomyth: After achieving your need, you Return to your normal life in your original setting. You’ve been utterly Changed by your journey, and you’re prepared to share what boons and wisdom you’ve received during your travels with your community. (If you’ve noticed any interesting parallels to the beginning of the Unitive Myth, you’re on the right track).

Unitive Myth: Now that you’ve revealed your true self fully, you commit to Remain in the community, your essence Unveiled to all, leading to one of several conclusions. You might be fully integrated as a respected and admired member of the community, free to be yourself and give what gifts you have to offer (Harmonization). However, you might be spurned, instead (Rejection). You might be compelled or impelled to don your mask and armor once again, living in occlusions until the community might finally be ready to receive your gifts (I). However, they might banish you to the margins or exile you altogether (II) or even attempt to destroy you (III).

Examples:

In the Superman (Ruler) mythos, he is eventually accepted and looked up to in Metropolis almost as a benevolent lord, despite Lex Luthor’s ceaseless attempts to depose him.

In The Last Airbender, Uncle Iroh (Elder) is banished from the fire nation for his dissenting views, but still creates positive change in the Fire Nation through his subtle, compassionate interactions with his nephew, Zuko, the future Fire Lord.

In the Harry Potter series, Dumbledore (Mentor) experiences all four scenarios across different books: he is initially accepted and beloved, then must hide his true intentions, and is eventually banished and, finally, marked for death.

***

I began this article by referring to the Unitive Myth as the Yin to the Monomyth’s Yang, and I meant it. The Unitive Myth’s protagonist is receptive where the Monomyth’s is active; its protagonist is often female (or archetypally feminine) where the Monomyth’s is male or masculine; its journey is internal where the Monomyth’s is external.

And, yes, you may have noticed the Unitive Myth begins where the Monomyth ends. They are not merely inversions of one another, but complementary opposites. Each archetypal character’s journey spiraling into the next. From a Flat Arc to dynamic Change Arc, the cycle repeats from Child to Mage.

But don’t take my word for it. Give the Unitive Myth a spin. I look forward to reading your cozy self-revelatory tales!

In Summary:

Introduces the Unitive Myth as an alternative to the Monomyth, highlighting a narrative structure focused on internal growth, community, and the feminine energy within storytelling. This approach aligns well with the Flat Arc archetypes (Child, Lover, Parent, Ruler, Elder, and Mentor) by emphasizing characters who remain true to their core natures while influencing the world around them. The Unitivte myth can offer a refreshing alternative to the Monomyth of the traditional Hero’s Journey by opening up new possibilities for writers who seek subtle, character-driven narratives.

Key Takeaways:

• The Unitive Myth is a narrative structure that contrasts with the Monomyth, focusing on internal growth and community instead of external quests.
• It aligns with the Flat Arc archetypes, in which characters remain true to their core identities, influencing the world without undergoing drastic personal transformation.
• This alternative framework is particularly fitting for writers who prefer quieter, more introspective stories that still carry emotional depth and impact.
• Exploring the Unitive Myth can help writers craft stories that feel fresh and resonant, especially for those who feel confined by traditional plot structures.

Want More?

Want to learn more about the subtle power of the Flat Arc archetypes Oliver talked about in this post? Check out my book Writing Archetypal Character Arcs. In this book, I dive deep into six core Flat or “resting” archetypes—Child, Lover, Parent, Ruler, Elder, and Mentor—and explore how they can remain true to themselves throughout their journeys while still profoundly impacting the world around them.

Whether you’re wanting to learn how to craft “static” protagonists or just seeking a fresh perspective on how to approach character arcs in your stories, Writing Archetypal Character Arcs offers tools and inspiration to help you create compelling, character-driven narratives with deep thematic resonance.

It’s available in paperback, e-book, and audiobook.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do you think the Unitive Myth, as an alternative to the Monomyth, could reshape the way we approach storytelling with Flat Arc archetypes? Tell me in the comments!

The post Is This the Alternative to the Monomyth We’ve All Been Searching For? appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.