The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

How can deep research and real relationships bring authenticity to your fiction? How do you keep a long-running series fresh for your readers, and for yourself, after 22 books? Peter James shares his lessons from decades as a successful author, and why he stills loves writing.

In the intro, Saga of Seven Suns by Kevin J Anderson on BackerKit, and The Art of the Long Term Career; Refill with Rachael Herron; Creative Choices, Writing for Fun, and Book Marketing Shifts with Joanna Penn on Write Now Workshop Podcast [Audio, Video]; Vellum automation update.

Plus, Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI by Ethan Mollick, Pan Macmillan publishes human-originated, AI-facilitated book; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars in Dec;

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

Peter James is a multi-award-winning, internationally bestselling crime author with over 40 books, who has sold over 24 million books worldwide in 38 languages. He has recently been awarded an Order of the British Empire by the King here in the UK for services to literature and charity.

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

How a burglary and a police barbecue led to a career in crime fiction

Building research relationships through curiosity and six degrees of separation

Keeping a long-running series fresh, and why you should occasionally kill a major character

How a personal puzzle for Roy Grace kept readers hooked for 14 books

Why the best book marketing is still word of mouth

How to deconstruct bestsellers in your genre, and why writers must read

You can find Peter at PeterJames.com.

Transcript of interview with Peter James

Jo: Peter James is a multi-award-winning, internationally bestselling crime author with over 40 books, who has sold over 24 million books worldwide in 38 languages.

He has recently been awarded an Order of the British Empire by the King here in the UK for services to literature and charity, which is a really big deal to all the Americans listening.

So welcome to the show, Peter.

Peter: Thank you, Jo. Thank you.

Jo: I’m excited to talk to you today. Now, you have had a long career as a writer, but I thought maybe you could start by taking us back.

How did you first get into writing and publishing?

Peter: I always wanted to be a writer from the age of seven, but I didn’t really have a lot of confidence.

I kept a notebook by my bed, and I remember when I was seven years old, the first thing I ever wrote was, “Life is a bowl of custard. It’s all right until you fall in.” Haven’t used that line yet, but you never know.

Then when I was about 14, I won my school poetry prize, and I had one teacher at school that really believed in me, and he said, “You really must keep writing.” That’s lovely. We’re still in touch today. He’s in his late 80s, and we have lunch occasionally.

On my 17th birthday, my dad gave me the best birthday present ever, which was a portable electric typewriter, and this real battleaxe of a woman who came to the house every day for two weeks to teach me to touch type.

She’d literally cover the keys up with sticky patches, and she’d have a ruler in her hand, and if I looked down, she’d whack my knuckles with the ruler and she’d go, “Don’t look.”

Jo: That’s not allowed now.

Peter: Probably not allowed now. I learned to type faster than any secretary out of sheer terror, but it has stood me in great stead ever since.

I wanted to go to Oxford to study English, but I never believed I’d ever have any success as a writer. I went to film and television school, because I thought that I might make my career there.

I wrote my first book while I was a film student. I thought it was the great British novel. Luckily, nobody else did, and it never got published.

Although it did get me an agent. It got me an agent in New York, actually, a lovely guy called Kurt Helmer. I’d been turned down by every agent in England, and I thought, “Well, I’ll try America.”

He took the book, and he wanted to make editorial changes, and I made all the changes. He still didn’t get it published.

I came out of film school in 1970, and it was really hard to get a job in England in the film or television industry. There were only two television channels, amazingly, and the British film business was fairly flat.

I had an uncle in Toronto who said, “Come out here. It’s all happening.” So I went out to Toronto, and I got a job on a daily programme for preschool children called Polka Dot Door. It was in its early years. It went on to run, I think, for 20 years.

I was the lowest human life form on the television set. I was a gofer. Literally, “Go for this. Go for that.”

I’d been there about three months, and the producer came in a panic one day and said, “The writer’s sick. We don’t have a show today. I just read your CV. You won your school poetry prize. Could you write today’s show?”

Then they stuck me in a corner with an IBM golfball Selectric, and I wrote the show. They were really happy, and they hired me to write it three days a week. I was 22 years old, and that was how it all started.

Jo: Wow. That’s so cool that you leaned into opportunity there by going to Toronto, by saying yes to that.

How did you lean into opportunity to move into crime?

Peter: Well, what then happened was, I wrote to my agent in New York and I said, “Fantastic, I’ve got this job. I’m writing this daily programme for preschool children.”

He wrote back and said, “You really think you’re going to write fiction? You think you’re going to write television all day long for children and then go home in the evening and write a novel? Forget it.”

He said, “Go work in a factory. Do something where you’re not going to use your brain, and keep that for being creative.” He was quite prophetic, because for the next six years I worked in television and then more in the movie business.

In 1975/76, I wrote and produced a comedy film, a movie called Spanish Fly, which starred the actors Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips. When it came out, the film critic Barry Norman called it the worst British film since the Second World War, and the least funny British funny film ever made.

It came out the same week as Jaws.

Jo: Oh, dear.

Peter: Jaws was slightly better.

Half the backing had fallen over while we were making the film. We were filming it in the Balearic Islands in Spain, and I was stuck there with an enormous film crew, and I had to end up putting in every penny I had, and I had to hock myself up to the eyeballs to get it finished. When the film tanked, I was completely wiped out.

My family have a business making gloves. Primarily gloves, we also made neckwear as well, but gloves was our main business. We made the Queen’s gloves.

My dad was ill, he’d had a triple bypass, and they were going to sell the business unless I went into it. So I thought, “Well, I haven’t sold a book. The movie business has been a disaster.”

I was about to get married. I thought, “I’ll go into the business. At least I’ll earn some money, and I’ll be able to look after my wife, et cetera.” So I went into the business.

My dad said, “You’re going to have to spend the first six months on the factory floor.” So I did, and I was learning how to roll cloth and inspect cloth.

My wife then said to me, “Ever since I’ve met you, you’ve talked about writing a novel. When are you going to write this novel?”

Then two things happened. I suddenly remembered the advice that my agent had given me, which was, “Go work in a factory.” And I read an article that there was a shortage of spy thrillers, and Ian Fleming had just died.

I thought, “Oh, I can write a spy thriller.” So I did. I made it all up. It was a James Bond-esque novel. It was called Dead Letter Drop. I’m only giving you the title to make sure you never read it, because it was terrible.

I sent it to my agent in New York, to Kurt Helmer, eagerly excited. Waited a month, nothing. Six weeks, nothing. Two months, nothing. Then I found out he’d been dead for four years.

Jo: Oh. So you found another agent then?

Peter: I found an agent in England, and to my amazement, he got me a two-book deal. That phone call from him was probably one of the greatest moments of my life at that point.

A year later, one of the worst moments of my life happened when Dead Letter Drop was published. I rushed around all the bookshops, and it wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

I discovered that my publishers, and they’re big publishers, W. H. Allen, they’re American-owned, had printed 1,800 copies of the hardback, of which 1,500 went to libraries, and 300 for the whole of the UK. The book did really badly, and it did badly in paperback. The second book did even worse.

I was at a party, and I had too much to drink, and I poured my heart out to a lady called Elizabeth Buchan, who at that time was working for Penguin writing the blurbs for paperbacks. She became a very successful novelist herself.

She gave me a pitiful look, and she said, “Why are you writing spy thrillers?”

I said, “Well, I read an article. I thought there was a shortage. I thought I could muscle in.”

She said, “Darling, people who read are intelligent. They don’t just want a story. They actually want to learn something. What can you ever tell the world about spies? You know nothing, and you can’t access it to research. You’re up against people like John le Carré, who’ve come out of the security services.

“You need to find something that, A, you’re passionate about, and B, you can access.”

Anyway, I laughed, and I went home very hangdog, tail between my legs. Then two days later, we got burgled, and a young detective came to take fingerprints, and he saw these two books, and he said, “Oh, you’re a writer. If you ever want research help with the police, give me a call.”

He was married to a detective, a guy called Mike Harris, and his wife Renata. My then wife was a lawyer, and we just clicked with these guys, and they invited us to a barbecue at their house that summer.

They had a dozen friends there, all police officers. There was a homicide detective, response, there was a traffic officer, a police diver. Just talking to these police officers, I thought, “Wow, from a writer’s perspective, nobody sees more of human life in a 30-year career than a police officer.”

When they realised I was genuinely interested, not just out to get a story I could flog to the local rag, they started inviting me to go out and spend a day out on patrol with them.

I didn’t start with a crime novel, because I thought there were too many big names, successful names, already in the crime field, but I wrote a supernatural thriller called Possession.

The son of some great friends had just been killed in a horrible car accident in France, when a Frenchman drove the wrong way down the Paris–Lille autoroute, intending to commit suicide, and killed their son in a head-on collision.

They started going to a medium, and believed that they were really getting help, and they asked if I’d write a nonfiction book about their experiences of dealing with their loss and the help they were getting from spiritualism.

I spent about a year hanging around, going to seances, all kinds of stuff. I thought I didn’t have anything new to say. There was a lot that had already been written about that, but it gave me an idea.

I thought, what if a mother lost her son in a car crash, goes to a medium to try to communicate with him, and through the medium discovers that her son was a murderer and had killed his girlfriend?

I wrote that as a novel called Possession, which came out in 1987. Then to my absolute amazement, every single publisher, both in the UK and in America, bid for it.

It was a huge global success, although it actually didn’t take off in America at all. It did nothing in America, largely because my editor left before the book was ever published, and it fell through the cracks. It was Doubleday that originally bought it.

Jo: Then I guess we need to fast-forward because, for people who don’t know you, a lot of listeners are American and might not know, you are now pretty much the top crime writer in the UK.

The book that is coming out around when this goes out is Dead in Three Two One, book 22 of your popular Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series.

So how did that one barbecue turn into 22 detective novels?

Peter: Right. Now fast-forward. What happened was that I started writing supernatural thrillers and then psychological thrillers, and I was meeting all these police officers, so I started putting them in the books, and they really liked the way I portrayed them.

I realised that we tend to see just the uniform or just the sharp suit when we see a copper. I wanted to show what it’s really like to be a police officer.

You turn up to a horrendous crime scene. You maybe see a dead child or somebody mutilated, and then you go home to your family, and you have to bath your own kids and read to them. The impact that being a police officer has on police officers. We tend to forget that.

So I tried to write them really rounded, and the police liked the way I portrayed them, so my relationship with them grew between about ’85 and about ’97.

They’d start phoning me up and say, “Well, we’re going on a raid tomorrow. Do you want to come with us?” And they even smuggled me into crime scenes. I just became treated as part of the family of Sussex Police. I got to know so many officers, and they really fascinated me.

In 1997, I was introduced to a young homicide detective called David Gaylor, and I went into his office, and I’ve never seen an office so untidy before or since. Every single inch was covered in blue and green plastic crates bulging with manila folders, and there was this balding dome just visible at the back.

I said, “Are you moving?”

He said, “No. I’m a homicide detective inspector, but I’ve recently been tasked with reopening all the unsolved murders in Sussex where there’s still a chance of catching an offender, where somebody may still be alive. Each one of these crates is the principal case file of an unsolved murder. I am the last chance each victim has for justice and the family has for closure.”

I love that very human image of him. He said, “What are you writing at the moment?” And I was writing a psychological thriller called Denial. He said, “Tell me about it.”

So I started telling him, and he interrupted me. He said, “No, no, no. Why haven’t you got an outside inquiry team looking into this? Why is your detective not doing that? And that lady, I don’t think she’d do that. Wouldn’t she do this?”

I thought, “Wow, this guy’s got a really creative brain.” And he helped me on that book and on the next book, and we became mates.

Then in 2002, I was on a short holiday in Rome, and I was literally standing outside the Vatican, and my English agent, Carole Blake, rang me, really bubbling with excitement.

She said, “Oh, I’ve just come from a meeting with Pan Macmillan. They’ve lost their number one crime writer, Peter Robinson. He’s moved to HarperCollins, and they want to know if you’d ever thought of creating a detective as a central character.”

I said, “Give me five minutes,” and I phoned Dave Gaylor. I said, “How would you like to be a fictional cop?” He loved the idea.

At this point, he’d risen to become Detective Chief Superintendent, Head of Major Crime for Sussex, and he became my real-life Roy Grace. He doesn’t look like him, but in all other aspects, he’s helped me. We’ve worked together on every single book.

He reads every 100 pages, tells me how Roy Grace and the other police characters would actually think and act, and he’s introduced me to police officers all over the world, and quite a number in the States, in New York and Los Angeles.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time out with the police in America, in quite a few cities. That’s what’s helped me get the authenticity.

Jo: I love that. I think people listening are like, “Well, but I couldn’t do that. How could I develop those relationships?”

Do you think that it is your curiosity, or your networking? You’re obviously a real people person to be able to do that in an authentic way, because you’re not faking it. They’re doing it because you’re genuinely interested, right?

So how can people listening, if they want to go deep into their research, find and foster those kinds of relationships?

Peter: Obviously, to be a writer, you’ve got to be curious. I’ve met you a few times, and I know that you’ve got a lot of curiosity, and I think curiosity is an essential weapon in a writer’s arsenal.

I’m a great believer in that old adage of six degrees of separation. People say to me, “Oh, it’s all right for you going out with the police, because you’re well known.” But I wasn’t when I started.

With that old adage of six degrees of separation, you will know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who’s a police officer. Get an introduction. Get them to like you.

Bear in mind, pretty much everyone who does a job is, to some degree or other, proud of what they do, and they all hate to see it wrongly portrayed in a book or on television or in a movie theatre.

People, I’ve found, will go out of their way to help me get it right, and that includes the police. The police in most countries have public relations teams. They will help you if you ask.

Jo: That’s really encouraging. Well then, another question for those of us who have longer-running series. I have one that’s heading towards book 14, but you’re at book 22.

What are your tips for writers who want to design a character, but also don’t want to get bored? How do you keep it fresh?

Peter: There are quite a lot of ways of doing that, I think. One way to keep things fresh is to occasionally kill a major character. Seriously.

If people don’t think anybody’s ever in peril, then they’ll never believe somebody’s in danger. If they know you’re never going to kill a major character, they’ll never believe somebody’s in danger if you write them in danger. So I do think that’s important.

I liken it, in a way, to writing a soap opera. I never intended to write a long-running series in the first place. When I was first asked if I’d create a new detective, I had a two-book offer, and I thought, “Well, I’ll set up Roy Grace in book one, Dead Simple, and I’ll finish the series in book two.”

What I wanted to do was write a detective who was a little bit different to any of the others out there. There seemed to be a standard cliché of the detective with a drink problem and a broken marriage. The reality in the British police is that no police officer with a drink problem would last 24 hours.

I thought, what detectives do more than anything else is solve puzzles. Every major crime is a huge puzzle, hundreds, sometimes thousands of little pieces that have to be painstakingly put together, but often solved out of clear blue sky thinking.

I thought it would be interesting to create a detective, Roy Grace, who has a personal puzzle of his own that he cannot solve. So when we meet him in Dead Simple, he’s just coming up to his 39th birthday, and we discover that nine years earlier, his wife, Sandy, who he worshipped, vanished off the face of the earth.

He came home on his 30th birthday, looking forward to going out to dinner with her and their best friend, and she’s gone. He doesn’t know. Did she run off with a lover? Did she have an accident? Did she take her own life? Did she get kidnapped?

For nine years, he’s been trying to figure out, in all his free time, what happened to her, trying to find her, whilst continuing in his work to function as an effective homicide detective.

I thought I’d set up the mystery of what happened to Sandy in Dead Simple, in the first book, and I’d give the revelation as to what happened in the second book, and that would be the end of it.

To my happy astonishment, Dead Simple was published in 2005, and it became an instant global bestseller, and we were inundated with emails and letters from around the world, people speculating what might have happened to Sandy.

I thought, “Hmm, I could keep this going.” So I kept the mystery going for about 14 novels, from memory.

What I did with each book was I seeded in a little bit more about her, and I started giving hints that maybe she may still be alive, and also that she wasn’t quite the perfect wife that he thought she was. In fact, far from it.

So I seeded in bits like that in each book, a little bit more about her slightly dark side. I had that going for 14, 15 books, and then the tone of the letters started changing.

I had one which said, “Dear Mr. James, I’ve just worked out I’m a lot younger than you, and I imagine I’m much fitter, which means you’re going to die before me. So I hope you’ve left the secret of what happened to Sandy safely in your publisher’s vaults.”

Jo: Oh, okay. So that took you to book 14 or something.

How did you then come up with something else that would keep people going for another 10?

Peter: Well, I then started giving the resolution to Sandy. In fact, I wrote a standalone book about Sandy. It’s called They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story.

Jo: Ah, wonderful.

Peter: Which was fun. That was published as a standalone, but it’s part of the series. What I then did was, I created that Sandy has a son.

Jo: Aha.

Peter: And when she left, it was just possible that it could be his, just possible that it might not be.

Then, in fact, I don’t want to give a spoiler, but something happens to Sandy that results in her demise. And lo and behold, Roy has to go to Munich to meet this son that he didn’t know he had. I start a whole new strand with the boy, and various ongoing aspects around that.

Jo: That’s fantastic. I think, as you say, it’s about keeping the reader curious as well as you.

I’m also really interested because, I mean, you’re so successful. You’ve written so many books on different things, and I guess you could retire. You could say, “I’m not doing this anymore.”

You’re on this podcast. You’re still doing book marketing. I was like, why do you still do this, Peter?

Why do you still write, and why do you still do book marketing?

Peter: Because I love it. People keep saying to me, “Are you going to retire?” And I say, “Well, if I retired, I’d write a book.” So I might as well keep working. Honestly, I just love learning stuff. I love telling stories.

My happiest time of the day is 6:00 in the evening in England, when I make myself a vodka martini, put on music, sit down at my laptop, and I write for two and a half hours. I just love it.

I love the fact that people luckily seem to enjoy what I write. There’s nothing I particularly want to do if I retired other than that, I think. I seriously would still keep writing, so I might as well get paid.

Jo: Exactly. Well, I love that. I feel the same thing at 51, and it’s so encouraging to me that you say that, a few years later.

I also wondered what you thought of people who you’ve met along the way over the years, some people who were super successful at one point or another and then just didn’t want to do it anymore.

I wondered what your thoughts were on creative longevity, but also in the publishing industry and the business side of things.

Why do people last, and why do people leave?

Peter: I think a lot of the people I know who’ve left have either run out of enthusiasm or ideas, or just got bored.

Jack Higgins, he’s a brilliant writer. I think he just actually had enough and stopped.

I remember seeing Wilbur Smith at the British Book Awards some years ago, and he was being interviewed, and somebody said, “Are you ever going to retire, Mr Smith?”

And he looked and he said, “The day they put me in my coffin, just before they close the lid, my right arm will reach out holding a Sharpie, and on the side of the coffin I will write ‘The End.'”

Jo: I did get a selfie with Wilbur Smith before he died. That was at ThrillerFest in New York. I was so thrilled, because I just love his books.

Peter: I love it. Alfred Hitchcock famously said, and he said it about a man, but it could equally apply to ladies, “There are only three things an old man can do with dignity: conduct an orchestra, direct a motion picture, or write a novel.”

I remember meeting P.D. James. She invited me to tea when she was about 92, and she was just working on, I think, what turned out to be her last novel. She was so sweet. She said, “Everybody thinks we must be related. Why don’t we pretend we’re cousins?” She was writing into her 90s.

I think, on a serious note, something I touched on a little bit earlier, the mere fact that people are reading means they are intelligent, and they want to learn things. Not just about what the author’s writing about, although that’s obviously part of it, but they want to learn what wisdom the author can impart.

Hopefully, most of us, as we get older, get a little bit wiser. So what you have to offer the world at the age of 51, I’m sure, is a lot more than when you were 21.

Jo: Mm.

Peter: And it will be a lot more still when you’re 71. If you’ve got your marbles, you’ve got all that wealth of experience that you can share through your writing.

Jo: Absolutely. That’s so encouraging. I hope that encourages people, whatever age, for starting, let alone carrying on.

I also wondered, you’ve seen a lot of change in the publishing industry. When I came in 20 years ago, it was actually the beginning of the independent author movement, and you’ve always been very open to authors of every kind.

So I wondered what changes you’ve seen in publishing that you feel have changed the author’s job.

Peter: Well, the first big change is that when I was first published in 1981, there were 11,000 novels published in England that year. I have no idea what it was last year. The last time I had the figures, it was 10 years ago, and it was getting on for 300,000.

Now today, we have not just several hundred thousand novels conventionally published a year, we have literally probably several million self-published.

So in a sense, it’s become liberating for anybody who wants to write a book. They can write a book and they can self-publish on Amazon or wherever. The hard thing for them is getting traction and getting noticed in the herd.

Another thing that’s changed is the market itself. Audiobooks have gone from zero to currently being 20% of the book market in the UK. And there’s Kindle.

Not many people know this, but Penguin published my novel Host in 1993. As well as publishing it in print format, they published it on two floppy disks as the world’s first electronic novel.

Jo: Oh. We can’t even read that now.

Peter: I know, because the technology to read it is also in the museum, but there’s a copy in the Science Museum.

I remember when that book came out, it was a couple of students at Sussex University where I’d been doing research. It was a thriller about a computer scientist who wanted to live forever. It was before I wrote crime.

They said, “Why don’t you get your publishers to think about doing it electronically?” And we did.

It caused a furore. I remember being interviewed by somebody saying, “Who on earth would ever read a book on a computer?” Well, quite a few now. So that’s something that’s changed.

So in a way, it’s got much easier for anybody to write a book and publish it, but by the same token, because there are so many more people writing, it has got harder for people to get real traction and get into that critical top 10.

Jo: And from my perspective, it’s a lot more global. We have people listening to this in 228 countries, which is kind of…

Peter: My God.

Jo: Yes, I know. It’s kind of crazy. We’ve even had listeners in Antarctica.

Peter: Ah. Well, guten tag to the Germans, bonjour to the French listeners.

Jo: Oh, you could be there a while.

I think that’s one of the big differences. Not just ebooks and digital audio, obviously, but print-on-demand technology means that if people order a print book in their own country, it can get printed locally and sent to them. So, I guess for me, that’s what’s made it possible to be a global writer.

Also, again, this podcast, it’s global marketing.

So how has your book marketing changed? In terms of what your publisher wants you to do, has that changed?

Peter: I think social media’s been the biggest change. I now have a full-time social media agency doing videos for Instagram, Facebook primarily, and to a lesser extent, but trying hard, on TikTok. That’s become an essential part of my working week.

I think also, obviously, marketing has just exploded in all kinds of different ways. The idea of an author having an advert for a book on television 15 years ago would have been unthinkable, and now that’s pretty much commonplace.

I think the best marketing of all is still word of mouth. The books that really succeed are ones that have obviously come to people’s attention, but then people say, “God, I just read this great book,” and talk to friends about it. That’s really how a book ultimately takes off.

A publisher could throw any amount of money at advertising and marketing. It’s not going to get a book traction if that book hasn’t got the ability to catch fire with readers.

Jo: Yes, absolutely. You mentioned all the knowledge that you learn over the years, and—

I read that you have a book on writing coming out. Is that true?

Peter: It is, yes. It’s coming out on March 28th. It’s called Write the Damn Book.

Jo: Well, I know listeners will be interested in that, so any tips from that we might be interested in?

Peter: One of the biggest tips I can give any would-be author is to read, reread, and reread again, and then deconstruct any huge bestseller in the genre that you would like to write in.

If you were going to be a medical student, you’d be given a cadaver for a year, and you would spend a year dissecting your cadaver to learn how the muscles work, how all the organs work, where they are.

If you’re going to be a car mechanic, you’d take apart a car and the engine and put it back together to learn all the workings of it.

That might be a crass comparison, but I mean it sincerely. You want to deconstruct the book and say, “Well, what made me engage with those characters? What kept me turning the page? How did the author keep my interest going right through all the different parts of the book?”

We all learn from our peers. I’m sure you’re influenced by past writers. I certainly am, both modern and the far distant past. So many would-be writers I meet tell me they don’t really read much.

Jo: I never understand that.

Peter: I had a tennis coach, lovely guy, good mate, in Jersey. He said to me one day, about a couple of years ago, “Oh, I’m writing a book.”

I said, “Oh, great. What novels are your influences?”

He said, “Oh, I don’t read books.”

I said, “Seriously? How?” You can’t be a writer if you don’t read.

Jo: No, absolutely. I did actually want to ask you about changing genres, because obviously you’re very well known in the crime niche, but you’ve mentioned a number of other books that you’ve written, including supernatural, which again is quite different to a British crime detective book.

So what do you think about changing genres and doing different things?

Because your readers really want one thing from Peter James, but you also give them other things.

Peter: Yes, I think it’s a lovely thing at one level, in that if you happen to have any level of success in a particular genre, like crime with me, my readers primarily want crime.

I also enjoy writing other books from time to time, other standalones in the supernatural zone in particular.

Also, I’ve written about designer babies. I wrote a book called Perfect People about a couple choosing the genes of their unborn child. I also wrote a thriller about what would happen if somebody conclusively proved God exists, or claimed to have proof.

There are certain books that won’t work within, if you like, the confines of a crime thriller for me, in which I want to delve much deeper into the subject matter.

I think if you look at a lot of writers, they do move genres. I think Charles Dickens wrote ghost stories. I think that it’s good not to be completely pigeonholed.

Yes, in terms of my core readership, they love crime, but quite a few also love my supernatural stories. They’re constantly saying to me, “When are you going to write another House on Cold Hill?”

So I think it’s really important for a writer to keep fresh too. If you think, “Oh, God, I’ve got to write another crime thriller,” which I don’t, but if you felt that, then try writing something else just to have a change.

Jo: Fantastic. So we’re out of time.

Where can people find you and your books online?

Peter: They can find me on peterjames.com, and everything is on that website, including my latest, Dead in Three Two One.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, that is fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Peter. That was great.

Peter: Thanks, Jo.
The post Book Research, Creative Longevity, And Loving Writing With Peter James first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you audit your writing process so you get more words on the page and finish your books? How can you network at author conferences, even if you’re an introvert? T.D. Donnelly shares tips from 30 years as a Hollywood screenwriter and his book, Superdraft.

In the intro, memento mori, and updated dates for AI webinars.

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

T.D. Donnelly is a bestselling thriller author, and he’s been a professional screenwriter in Hollywood for 30 years. His first book for authors is Superdraft: The Art and Science of Better, Faster Writing.

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

How to network at author conferences, and why it works for introverts

The difference between craft and process, and how to audit your own writing process

Balancing the creator and the critic at each phase of writing

Dictation tips for getting words on the page with AI tools

What the rules of improv can teach you about writing

How to bring a professional mindset to your writing

You can find Tom at TDDonnelly.com.

Transcript of interview with T.D. Donnelly

Jo: T.D. Donnelly is a bestselling thriller author, and he’s been a professional screenwriter in Hollywood for 30 years, which we talked about on our previous episode in March 2025. His first book for authors is Superdraft: The Art and Science of Better, Faster Writing. So welcome back to the show, Tom.

Tom: It’s great to be here, Jo. Great to talk to you again.

Jo: Yes, indeed. Well, give us a bit of an update, because when we spoke last, and it was only, I guess, 18 months ago, you’d just launched Year of the Rabbit. I read it, and it was a fantastic book, but it was your first novel even though you’re so experienced. So give us an update.

How has your career developed, and what have you learned about launching and books?

Tom: Oh God, what have I learned? Have I learned anything, I think, would be the fairer question.

So I’m still a screenwriter. I still have a day job in Hollywood. It’s been a rough time in Hollywood, but I still get the occasional job there.

So my plan, in the first two or three years of my novel career, to put out six books has not quite gotten to six. I do have three out. I have Year of the Rabbit, I have Year of the Horse, and I have Year of the Serpent, and I should have Year of the Dragon out by Christmas. So that part has gone well.

Now, I have a lot of people that I’ve met through this community that know a lot more than I do, and I have to rely on them for learning about marketing, things like that.

In Hollywood, nobody wants to ask a screenwriter about marketing questions. They have a whole department with hundreds of people in it that are in charge of all of that sort of stuff.

The advice that I got overwhelmingly was, “Don’t even bother doing paid ads until you have three books out.” Because the odds of them being able to pay off and make sense aren’t there. So I have just started advertising this year, and everyone has said this is a really, really bad year to be starting advertising.

Everything is in flux. Everything is in question. What is going on with Facebook? What is going on with Amazon? Why are the things that we were doing not working anymore?

I have found a modest level of success with my ads, which I’m very, very happy about. I’m happy that at least I’m doing slightly better than breaking even on the ads, and I’m getting a lot more signups to my newsletter, which I have to admit has been… how would I put this? Inconsistent.

I will say I have an inconsistent newsletter. My New Year’s resolution for this whole year is to get more consistent with it.

I am loving it. The books have been very well reviewed. Year of the Rabbit was the one that I spent so much time just making it perfect. Then the next two I was able to do a little bit faster, and people seem to really love the series and to see these characters evolving. So I’m having a great time. That’s all I can say.

Jo: Well, I think you’re doing the things that are the right things to do. You’re writing books in a series, which is one of those things that everyone says you should do, and in fact, many of us do.

I’ve certainly never been very good at doing multiple books in a series one after the other. I tend to start a series and then start another series, and then another series, and then maybe write a second book.

So you’ve done things in a really good order, and I hope people are encouraged. I mean, you have 30 years, like we say, in Hollywood.

I’ve read Year of the Rabbit. I know you can write. But that’s not the only challenge, and I think that is so important in an age of AI, because whether or not anyone agrees that AI could ever write a book, the writing of the book is only one part of the journey, right, as you have discovered.

Tom: Absolutely.

Jo: Actually reaching readers is a real challenge.

Tom: Oh my God, it’s so hard. Just read a gosh darn book. This book’s great. You’re going to love it, okay?

I have a once-a-week golf outing with some old friends of mine, and there’s three of us, and the golf course we play on likes to go out with fivesomes, so they generally pair us up with one or two more people.

The number of times we have finished a round and I have not sold a book to one of the poor two hapless people that are paired with us… my friends are just like, “Oh my God, there he goes again. Oh my God. What, did he make it to the third hole before he started pitching them the book?”

It is one of those things, and it’s not easy to be good at writing a book and good at writing ad copy. These are very different hats you have to wear. Not everybody can be great at them.

That is why I think your advocacy for “let’s see what AI can do for us in these realms”, to maybe help us with the things we’re not so good at, I think is really key.

Jo: Oh, good. Right. Well, one thing you have been incredibly good at is pitching and speaking and networking at author events. You’ve spoken at lots of author conferences over the last few years. I’ve seen you speak.

You give a lot to authors, but also you’ve done a really good job at networking and becoming part of the community. There’s a lot of writers who feel like that’s something they want to do. Maybe they’ve written a book that would help other authors, but they just don’t know how to break in.

Now, I realise part of that is personality. You’re a friendly guy, right?

What tips do you have around networking and pitching, and how has that helped you?

Tom: It’s really funny. I’ve been talking to some writers. I was just speaking at NINC, and then before that at SPS Live in London, and at both conferences it came up. “You’ve only been in this business for two years, Tom, and you know everybody, and everybody knows you. How did you get to do that?”

Then I start talking to people about networking, and it’s like I’m speaking a foreign language to them. I guess in Hollywood you kind of have to. You’re trained up. It’s a relationship business. You have to have the goods. You have to be a great writer, but that alone… great writers fail in Hollywood all the time because they can’t do that.

So eventually I will have to do a talk at one of these conferences about networking. So here’s one thing that I do, which is going to sound mental. First of all, every conference I go to, I come up with three goals. What are my three goals? What are the three things that I want to accomplish going to this conference?

In the beginning they were all very me, me, me goals because I needed a lot of help, and I still do.

So I went to a conference, a conference where I met you actually, and said, “I’m going to find writers that are in my genre, and I’m going to pitch them and ask them if they would consider reading the book, and if they like the book, to blurb it.”

I wanted to get professional blurbs, and you were very kind to give me a fantastic blurb that is on the cover of one of my books.

Jo: Only because it was a good book, by the way, for anyone listening. I don’t normally do that, and I said that to you.

Tom: No, and I said it in the pitch. I said, “Listen, if you don’t love it, do not even worry about it. It’s going to be absolutely fine.” Jo is not a blurb factory, people. Do not bother her, okay?

Anyway, so I put together these three goals, and then once I have those three goals I think, “Okay, how am I going to approach those goals?” So before I’ve even gone to the conference… and what I do, it’s a weird thing. Do you know the app called Anki, A-N-K-I?

Jo: No.

Tom: It’s this tiny little free app that basically allows you to make flashcards for yourself, and you can test yourself with these flashcards. People use it for language learning all the time.

I get pictures of people that are speaking at the conferences I’m going to that I don’t know, and for about a week or two before the conference I flash those pictures twice a day on the screen, and I have to be able to identify who they are, something interesting about them, and something that they’ve written.

It’s one of those repetitive things where if I got it right away, then I don’t need to see that card again for the next 10 minutes. If I didn’t get it, that card goes right back into the slot. So I get to be on a first-name basis with a person I haven’t met yet.

So when I go to these conferences, I feel more comfortable because, oh, I know you, and oftentimes they’ll be like, “Have we met?” I’m like, “No, we haven’t, but I think you’re fantastic. This book looks really interesting. I haven’t read it yet, I’m sorry to say, but I’m dying to take a look at it.”

That helps break the ice. I’ve tried this with introverts—I am not an introvert—and they have said that it is way more powerful for introverts than it is for extroverts, because breaking the ice is the hardest thing, and if you know something about someone, you have a starting-off point to talk to them. Does that make sense?

Jo: Oh, that is genius. It’s so interesting, and I’m so glad you mentioned that. I’ve done this before as well, and still do at various things. I will look at the speaker list and I will look at their website or whatever, and I just take screenshots on my phone so that I have that there.

Then, like you say, if there’s somebody I want to meet, I will practise. Even sometimes I’ve been at conferences, I’ve seen somebody is there who maybe I didn’t even expect, and then I will duck into a toilet stall or something and I will go look them up.

I’ll often go look on their social media to see what they’ve been talking about, maybe something today or yesterday. Then I can use that, and then I’ll go out, and I’ll have something prepared. As an introvert, as you say, going up to people and just trying to strike up conversation is extremely hard.

So I love that you mention that, and I really hope that helps people listening.

In terms of how you got to speak, is that really because you have the Hollywood background?

As people immediately, like I did, go, “Oh, okay. You have some chops here.” So you leaned on your other career, basically.

Tom: I think so, yes. So three years ago we were in the middle of a Hollywood writers’ strike here, and for 10 months I couldn’t write movies or television. They shut us out, and it just happened to be when I had two kids in college. So lovely, wonderful. Perfect timing for that.

I was really starting to worry about no money coming in, only money going out, and then I decided I was going to write the first book in what is now a series.

I met this community, first at the last 20Books Vegas, and then at all the conferences since. You guys were so welcoming to me, you included me. You were so welcoming and positive and encouraging that I really feel a debt to you guys, because you are a second family.

I say that all the time. You are my second family, and it is a found family that I’ve discovered in the last three years. So I just want to give back as much as I can.

It turns out being a Hollywood screenwriter means a lot to a lot of people, but you still have to sing for your supper. You still have to prove it. But people hear “Hollywood screenwriter” and think, “Well, this person probably knows something about writing,” having done it for 31 years now.

The interesting thing that most people don’t know is that screenwriters are forced to talk about craft and defend their craft in a way most novelists never have to.

Novelists have, if you’re traditionally published, an editor or two that gives them feedback, and that’s about all the feedback they get. Indies, we get feedback from beta readers, from people like that as well, but once again, not a ton of feedback.

In screenwriting, oh boy, everybody who reads that script is going to be in a development meeting, sitting around a corporate boardroom table with billionaires saying, “Why are we spending so much money on this? Tell me what the hell is going on.”

They’re going to challenge everything. They’re going to tell you that they want to cut this, and you know that cutting this is going to destroy the story.

Can you explain why? Can you defend it? Can you talk about character? Can you talk about character arcs? Can you talk about thematic constraints? Can you talk about the setups and payoffs in a way that these people that are barely literate can understand?

It turns out that makes for a person that can give a really good presentation on things like craft, on story.

Jo: Yes, and just for people listening, of course it’s kind of obvious that your background would be relevant. So I just want to encourage people to pitch based on their background.

So for example, I had a wonderful lady, Johanna Rothman, on this show a while back now. When I met Johanna, she was like, “I’m project manager, business, entrepreneurial,” the management side of being an author, managing all these different tasks we have to do.

I was like, “Great, I want to talk to you about project management for authors and that kind of thing.” So I had her on the show to talk about that. I’ve got someone coming on who’s an expert in change management, and we’re going through a lot of change. So I feel like anyone listening—

You can take what you do in your daily life, and you can apply that to the author environment.

That can be useful, right? As you’ve discovered, there’s a whole load of things that are useful.

Tom: Absolutely. Yes. Sing for your supper. Our community is what I call stone soup. You know the myth of stone soup, where you put a stone in there, and everyone else is like, “Oh, the stone is going to make a magic soup.”

Yes, but we need a few things, so you go and get some ramps or some onions, and you go out and get some carrots, and then we all put in.

Of course, the stone has nothing to do with the soup, right? But the community that we have and the richness of it is the conglomeration of all the little unique things that we bring and put into it. That we all do.

So put things into it. You introverts, you’ve got to put yourself out there because you have a lot to share, and it’s really worthwhile.

Jo: Oh, yes, for sure. Right. Well, let’s talk about your book, Superdraft. What I found interesting is you say this is a process book (I guess you’d say “prah-cess”, but I would say “pro-cess”) rather than a writing craft book. I found this really interesting because it feels like you were making a point of this.

So what do you mean by a process book, and how can people audit their process in order to improve?

Tom: The vast majority of books you will read on writing are about, when you are writing, how to make the things that you’re writing artistically valid and meaningful and better.

Process is the nuts and bolts of how you get yourself up in the morning, sit down, or maybe in my case I don’t sit down, I walk, but write those words, get those words down, and do the thing that is writing. That is what the process is.

There are very, very few books on process. There’s Julia Cameron. Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones. Those are books on process. It’s very hard to find books that are specifically about what we do to write. Not what we do when we write, but what we do to write, and that is how I would define process.

Jo: So how can authors examine what their process is in order to improve it?

Tom: So I think first what we have to recognise is there’s a reason that there are so many books about craft and so few about process. That’s because if I told you that I have this great craft tip, you would, with no emotion whatsoever, look at it, listen to it, and potentially incorporate it into the next thing that you write.

If I tell you, however, that I want you to change your process, how you actually write, I see the deer-in-the-headlights look on people’s faces when they’re like, “Wait, what? No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” and that’s because writing is very, very hard. What we do is incredibly difficult.

There is a German author, Thomas Mann, who said, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for the average person,” and I think that’s absolutely true. Writing is more difficult for a writer than it is for a normal person because everything means something to us. It’s important.

If I asked a non-writer to write 20,000 words, and you get paid $10,000 when you have those 20,000 words done, I would almost always get a manuscript within two or three days.

If you tell a writer to do that, oh my goodness. Because, “Oh, but somebody’s going to read it. It can’t just be anything. It’s got to be good. It’s got to be this. It’s got to be that.”

I use an example: which is harder, running a marathon or writing a novel? And we have experience on this, right? I talked to marathon coaches, and they say 70% of the people who start a marathon finish a marathon.

We have stats from NaNoWriMo, rest in peace, that say 11% of people who start NaNoWriMo finish the novel. That is six times harder than it is to run a marathon. That’s how hard it is, and that’s all emotion, right?

There are physical things that are going to stop you from running a marathon. There’s nothing physical, for almost anybody nowadays, especially with all the different ways we can write, stopping you from writing.

So the key to process is going to be to get the mental and emotional roadblocks that are keeping you from your best way through this process out of the way so that you can write.

I think it comes down to the two parts of the brain that operate when we’re writing. I call them the two voices, the creator and the critic, and finding a way to harness both of them is very, very difficult.

Jo: Okay, well then—

Let’s get into some of those roadblocks that might be stopping people.

Tom: Sure. So, you are a discovery writer.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

Tom: In Hollywood terms, I am a discovery writer. In novel terms, I am very much still a plotter. In Hollywood you can’t be a pantser really. You really can’t do that, but I’m as close to a pantser as you can be and work in Hollywood.

I will hit a point in the outlining process where I’m like, “I know enough. Can I please just write? Can I please not outline anymore and just write?” Sometimes they accept that, and sometimes they don’t. But I would say that what these two things really are is which of those two voices is more dominant in your process.

For a discovery writer like yourself, you guys are great with that creator voice, that quiet, soft voice that is saying, “Go, try it, try it. Just let it flow. It’s going to come. Don’t you worry. I’m going to feed you when you need to be fed, but you’re not going to know what it is right now.”

You guys can write that way, and write forward, and write beautiful, amazing things.

Whereas for me, I need to see the buoys coming ahead so I know that I’m still in the channel. I need to have some amount of a road to follow in order to write.

That’s the critic voice being in there saying, “Nope, nope. You’re going off the path again. Nope, that’s not good enough. No, you can’t do that.”

Both are valid, and I think in an ideal writing process for anybody, what we really want to get to is a place where both voices get their turn at bat, so to speak. I don’t know. Am I using a baseball metaphor to a Brit? I apologise.

Jo: Cricket. I’ll assume it was cricket.

Tom: Yes, cricket. Exactly. There you go. Cricket. Step up to the wicket, right?

You need to use both of those voices. To some degree when I call myself a plotter, I am saying that I am going to be a heavy critic-voice process. When you say you’re a discovery writer, “I am going to be a heavy creator-led process.”

For most people, I think that the ideal process later on, when you experiment and you try things, is actually a process that is a little more balanced. I think plantser is the term we use, right? Plantser is not quite a plotter and not quite a pantser. You’re in between.

I think an ideal process is where both voices get their turn to speak, get their turn to share, and we’ve made peace with the voice we’re less comfortable listening to. Make sense?

Jo: Yes, I think it makes sense. Screenwriters, obviously you have to be a lot more controlled, I guess, because you’re writing for money, and you’re generally writing on someone else’s dime, and you need to get that done.

I feel like for a lot of us as writers, that’s not where we start.

For most people, you don’t start writing books as a job like that.

It’s not something that happened at the beginning. I know it doesn’t happen for many beginning screenwriters as well.

Tom: You make it sound so sordid. “I know that you’re writing for money. You’re writing for money. You’re out there in the street peddling your wares.”

Jo: No, but that’s a good thing. Well, you know I’m not saying it like that.

Tom: No, I know.

Jo: I would also say to people, it depends on the book. So for example, right now I’m doing my fourth edition of How to Market a Book.

Now, this is not an intuitive, discovery-written book. It is nuts and bolts, it is chapter by chapter, and it is very useful, and I’ve done a survey, and it is writing to my market for sure.

I’m still enjoying it. I can still get in places of flow, but it is not my fun, intuitive discovery writer process, which I will do next.

The next book I am just indulging myself with, and I’m sure it will not sell as many copies.

Tom: Don’t say that. Don’t manifest that. Come on. Just let it be what it’s going to be.

Jo: Oh, no. I’m trying to encourage people that you can do both on different books as well.

Tom: Absolutely. I believe that you should do both on every book you write, but the key is not that we’re going to write this book using just the creator and this book just using the critic. No, it’s actually both.

The only problem is that when the critic voice is operating, you cannot hear the creator. That is the real problem. The creator is very quiet, and the critic is a loud, drunken jerk, and it is very, very hard to hear them both at the same time, if not impossible.

So really what Superdraft is about is separating the writing process into phases. Creator-led phases like brainstorming and the actual drafting, and critic-led phases like outlining.

Stay with me, discovery writers. You don’t have to outline a lot. You don’t even have to outline at all if you don’t want to.

If you wanted to do a very, very minor outlining step, I have the smallest outlining step known to man in the book that you could use if you wanted to. And then editing, obviously, is a critic-led phase as well.

The reason so many people start writing a book and don’t finish it is that the wrong voice starts talking during the wrong part of the process. And more often than not, for a lot of people, that’s the critic. The critic runs rampant.

The critic comes in when the creator is supposed to have the talking stick, so to speak. There are ways that I’ve found over the years, through painful trial and error, to stop the critic in their tracks and to give the creator their due.

Jo: I feel like a lot of the time we talk about these things, and it’s just assumed that it’s easy to get words on the page and then edit them later. So tell us—

How do you write at the moment, and what are some tips for people who might be struggling to get words on the page?

Tom: Absolutely. All right. So I will say that this is not a book about dictation, but I am a little dictator here in Hollywood.

I go at 6:00 AM to the beach. I walk for between an hour and three hours if things are going really, really well. My bare feet are walking in the surf, up and down Santa Monica and Venice Beach, and I dictate the next chapter, or chapters, of the novel as I go.

What I do is the night before, either on a notes app on my phone or on a little index card, right before I go to bed, I will write the five things I know that I’m going to be writing about tomorrow. Just a little sketch so I know what I’m doing.

I do that for two reasons. One is, I don’t know if you dictate, Jo, but sometimes when you dictate you’re like, “I have no idea what happens next. I’m lost a little bit,” right?

Since there’s no keyboard, because there’s no screen in front of you, you can get a little lost, and having that little note card to give you, “Oh, I can just move on to the next bullet point and keep going,” can be very helpful for that.

Also I do that because I want to control something called my daily debris, and your daily debris is what your dreams tend to be made of. The last things you think about and worry about and stress about, and sometimes just think about, for the last half hour before you go to sleep tend to be the things we dream about.

If you get in a little dream practice and you practise writing down your dreams when you wake up, you will find that you start to recall your dreams in great and vivid detail.

Oftentimes, if the last thing you’re doing before you go to bed is writing down the next things that happen, you’re kind of dreaming your novel in front of you. Just as a tiny little tip, and by the way, this is one of the more out-there, woo-woo tips that I have. I have a lot more normal, basic, boots-on-the-ground tips as well.

So that is how I write, and oftentimes my pace is somewhere around 3,000 words an hour dictating on that beach.

I’m getting my endorphins, I’m getting my negative ions, I’m getting my relaxation, I’m getting my exercise in at the same time as writing, I would say on average, 5,000 words, 6,000 words a morning before anybody has even started their workday, which can be a real, real help.

The great thing about dictation, and the thing I tell everybody with this, is when you’re drafting, your enemy is the delete key, the backspace key. That is the key of the editor, and we don’t want the editor when we’re drafting. We want the creator only to be what we’re focused on.

It was so bad for me that I used to have to tape, with double-stick tape, a thumbtack upside down on the backspace key.

Jo: On the backspace. That’s a good tip too.

Just coming back to dictation, I have actually had a bit of a breakthrough on this, because I’ve tried dictation so many times over the last 15, 20 years I’ve been writing books. I’ve talked to Kevin J. Anderson. I’ve done all the courses. I tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I tried everything.

Then what has happened, really only in the last couple of months, is—

As the AI tools have gotten so much better, what I now do is I just talk to an app on my phone.

I used to try and do sentences. I used to try and do punctuation. You know, open quote, “Hello Tom,” comma, close quote, said Jo, full stop, new line. You used to have to do that.

Tom: Yes.

Jo: Now with the AI tools, you can just say whatever the hell you like. You can do a bit of dialogue, and then I give it to Claude and say, “Can you just tidy this up and add in the punctuation?”

Then of course I will go through and edit it. I’m like, “Don’t change anything, just tidy it up.” It is so much easier. So that has actually really helped me, and I’ve started to do that again.

Tom: Oh, it’s a game changer for sure. The thing that you said last is the most important. Do not change anything. Do not change any words. Just format it. The only words you’re allowed to change is if I say, “Scratch that,” then you can figure out what I meant to scratch and scratch that.

Jo: Oh, I don’t do that. I just leave it all. “Scratch that” I think is from the old dictation days. You could do that.

Tom: Yes.

Jo: I think now you can just record, and the transcription is saved as it is. So you can just have the plain transcription if you want.

Tom: Sure.

Jo: This is essentially free now, and you can do it just on an app. Even just on an app on your phone that’s native on your device. You don’t even have to be using an AI service that goes to the cloud if you’re worried about that.

I would just encourage people, if you’re like me and you have tried so many times to get into dictation and you just haven’t been able to because you’re more of an intuitive flow creator, this is a new way. So hopefully people will try that.

Tom: 100%. Let me just say real quick, because you’re talking about doing it cheaply, for all the people out there that are like, “Well, I don’t want to spend a lot of money,” I use Voice Memos, which, as Jo was talking about, is the absolutely free app that comes with your iPhone. That’s what I record on.

I do the transcription with something called MacWhisper, which is a $40 one-time purchase. You never have to pay a monthly fee. It is $40, and it’s the Whisper model, which is one of the best transcription models out there.

Then for, like, a nickel, I put it into ChatGPT or Claude and have it clean up the thing. So it could not be cheaper. I just wanted to echo that for you.

Jo: Yes, just a game changer, really.

Another thing you mention in the book that made me smile was improv, and it made me smile because I have literally booked and cancelled improv classes almost every year for years, because I’m like, “Oh, I really should do that. That sounds like a great idea,” and then I end up cancelling it, because it freaks me out.

What can we learn from improv? Why did you put that in the book?

Tom: Well, okay, so over the 30 years… I didn’t even mention this, but I told you the last time we were talking that I sold the very first script that I ever wrote, which is a huge blessing. I count it among my blessings all the time.

It also was a problem because I was suddenly thrust into Hollywood, and I was thrust into these meetings and these pitch meetings before I was ready to, right?

So I had a year or two there where every time I went in to pitch, I just didn’t know how to do it, and every time I had to write an outline, I didn’t really know what they were looking for. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing.

The feedback in Hollywood is absolutely brutal. Just absolutely awful. So I had tremendous imposter syndrome and tremendous writer’s block for years and years and years, and I was looking for any way to get out of that.

I’ve done stand-up comedy, Jo. I’ve done stand-up comedy at the Comedy Store, the famous Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard.

Jo: Oh.

Tom: I’ve done a lot of things to get out of my own head, and I found improv to be one of the best ways to really free up those creative impulses in you and just throw things out there and have faith that they’re going to be great.

The rules of improv are amazing for writing. They should be taught when we teach writing, right? The first rule of improv is say yes. Just say yes. Because when you say no, you stop the flow of the scene. You stop the flow of the moment. Yes, absolutely.

Second rule, say “yes, and”. Don’t just say yes, because while yes is welcoming more input, it’s not adding anything to the process. So “yes, and”. Always be iterating forward, right?

Third rule of improv, make statements. Put your flag in the sand and declare things, right? Create things. Do not equivocate. State things. Make things. You can always change it later. It’s not a big deal. By the way, you can’t always change things later in improv, but you can in writing, so I’m using this specifically that way.

Number four, be specific, right? Clarity, specificity, detail, those are the things that our creative mind grabs onto and iterates off of. If you’re generic and bland, your writing is going to wither and die when you’re trying to do it.

Rule five is the here and now. Be present. Be here. Don’t be writing backstory when you should be writing what the characters are feeling and experiencing right here in this moment. Be here now.

Rule six, establish a location. A little less important for writers. That’s really for people that are trying to get an audience to imagine the space around them. But still, it fits for that as well, right?

Don’t do the white room. Make sure that you’ve described where you are. What does it smell like? What does it feel like? What is the weather like?

Improv rule number seven, change, change, change. Constantly be looking for the thing to change. How many novels have you read where you just wish people would get on with it and get to the next thing that happens? Oh my God, I would love that.

Eight is play the relationship. Bring it back to character. Bring it back to the relationship between these people, because that is the great stuff.

Then nine, which is, there are no mistakes, only opportunities, which is less a rule and more of a motto. There are no mistakes, only opportunities.

Imagine if you went to your next writing session with that firmly in your mind, and you believed that there are no mistakes, only opportunities. How much more free-flowing would your writing be? Absolutely amazing.

Jo: Yes, I’m going to have to just book another improv class.

Tom: You’re going to book a class, and you’re going to fricking take it, all right? I will be your accountability partner here.

Jo: It does make me laugh though, because every time I hear somebody like you say this stuff, I’m like, “Yes, I’m going to go do it. Yes, and I’m going to do it.” So you never know, but just to encourage people, I feel like there’s a lot of things there that can help.

The other thing you have in the book, which I thought was interesting, is a chapter on amateurs and pros. Steven Pressfield’s book, Turning Pro, is a book I often reread, and of course, he’s come out of screenwriting as well. So I thought that was an interesting parallel, that you have it too.

So give us a few of the differences that you think between amateurs and pros, and again, why include that?

Tom: For me there’s no better praise word that I use than pro. I’m like, “Oh, that’s a pro right there. Look at that. Did you read that? That’s amazing. Oh, man, that’s a real pro.”

Which is weird because I love the word amateur. You’re doing it for the love of it, right? Whereas pro is you’re professing it. It’s a different thing.

When you really think about it, an amateur, to do it for the love of it, that’s a very internal thing, right? That’s a very, almost self-seeking thing.

Whereas a professional, a person that’s professing, or what I call my writing as a vocation, so to vocate, to say, to get those things out, is a very sharing, a very other-centred experience. So I think it’s a really good way to look at the process.

I think amateurs, for the most part, are paranoid about their ideas. They’re very, very precious about their ideas, and they hide them. They’re like Sméagol or Gollum. “My precious, my precious. I have this and I can’t share it.”

Pros are telling people their ideas all the time, right? They are sharing their ideas and getting feedback from other pros. “Oh, wow, that’s really great. Hey, have you ever thought about this?” And boom, yep, it goes right in there.

You know, Oscar Wilde said, “Oh, I wish I’d thought of that.” And someone said, “Don’t worry, Oscar, you will.”

We steal, right? But we don’t really steal. We share. We share, and when a person shares back with us, we take it, we incorporate it, we put it into our process. Ideas that are held and kept in the dark often die, and ideas that are shared and talked about often blossom and bloom.

Another thing—amateurs usually gild the first draft.

They spend so much time just perfecting that first draft. I don’t know about you, but I fell prey to this.

In my early career, the number of times I wrote the first act of my screenplay versus the number of times I wrote the third act of the screenplay had to be 10 or 20 to one. I just wanted to get it perfect before I moved on to the next section. Perfection, oh my God, what a creativity-draining trap is the word perfection.

Pros lay down the draft fast, and they put their faith in the rewrite. They put their faith in getting a good enough draft that they can see where it is, and they can read it and get a full view of the entire story.

Another one—amateurs often love what they wrote. Now, this one I like about amateurs. I like the fact that you write something and you read it, and you don’t think, “Oh, God, I’ve got a lot of work to do here.”

Pros, we almost never reach a place of absolute love, right? Sometimes we do. But oftentimes, the critic, who we have a good relationship with because we’re professionals, is going to tell us, “You know we can do better here, right?”

Was it da Vinci who said… or Michelangelo… “A great artist never finished, only abandoned.” Or was it Picasso? I can’t remember. So an artist said that, and I think that’s absolutely true for professionals.

We’re always trying to improve things just a little bit, and that could be a trap for the pros, right? Sometimes we don’t get our work out as early as we should be getting it out because we’re not quite ready to let go of it yet.

Then last but not least, amateurs treat a major change like it’s a death sentence. Whereas pros look at a big idea that’s going to change a lot of what we just wrote as, “Oh, wow, this is fantastic. What a great opportunity.” Because we’re not precious about what we’ve written as much as we are looking forward to what this can be.

Make sense?

Jo: I think it’s a really interesting way to think about things. As you were talking, another difference, I think, coming back to money, is amateurs are maybe not even intending to make any money with their book.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with writing a book because you want to write a book, and you love writing, and you just want to hold your book in your hand and say, “I made this.”

To me, the amateur doing it for the love of it is where I think a lot of us perhaps should be. That should be the thing.

If you’re a professional, there does have to be some aspect of business.

As you say, it needs to go out to somebody else. It needs to get to a certain professional point and be paid for.

So I think that is a difference, and these things can shape decisions around everything, not just the craft, but also the marketing and your brand and everything really.

Tom: Yes, obviously you are correct in the standard definition of amateur and pro. I’m really talking about amateurs versus pros in terms of mindset, and that’s a very different thing.

You could do exactly what you’re talking about. “I’m just writing this for me. I don’t know if anybody in the world except me wants to read this, but I’m going to write it.” You can still write it as a professional. You can still take a professional mindset, right?

With embracing major change, with not being so precious with that first draft, with sharing the idea and getting feedback. All of those things that pros do, you can do, and write something that is purely for the love of it, and you have no commercial prospects for this whatsoever.

You can still do that and be a professional in the mindset sense, and that’s really where I focus. That’s the key to me.

If you are writing because you love it, if you are writing because you want to make a million dollars, I’m agnostic as far as that goes. I say the reasons that you write are yours, and whatever they are, that’s fantastic.

Just don’t rule out the possibility that someone else might want to read and might fall in love with this amazing thing that you’re not sure you want to send to another soul, right? Share of yourself with the world, and the world gets richer. That’s what I believe.

Jo: Fantastic.

So where can people find you and your books online?

Tom: I’m on Amazon. My spy thrillers are T.D. Donnelly. You can find me at TDDonnelly.com. All my stuff will be at TDDonnelly.com.

If you’re looking specifically for Superdraft, because we have to separate our audiences, blah, blah, blah, Thomas Dean Donnelly is my full screenwriting name. Thomas Dean Donnelly is where you can find Superdraft on Amazon.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Tom. That was great.

Tom: I always have a great time talking to you, Jo. Thank you so much.
The post The Creator And The Critic: How To Fix Your Writing Process With T.D. Donnelly first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you sharpen your craft when the self-critical voice gets louder the more you learn? What kinds of literary devices might enhance your prose? And how do you write an ending that pays off the promise you made to your reader? Amy Jones shares her writing tips after 15 years of teaching storytelling.

In the intro, Kindle Unlimited rebranded as Kindle+, How to Market a Book Fourth Edition, and AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars.

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

Amy Jones is a writer, lecturer, and researcher who has designed courses and lectured for over a decade on literature, linguistics, and the craft of storytelling. She is the author of multiple books on writing craft, and today we’re talking about The Story Book: Plot, Character, Setting, Genre, Narrative and Literary Devices.

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

Why writing is like being an athlete, and why struggle is a good sign

The differences between academic writing and writing for a commercial audience

Endings, killing your darlings, and not underestimating your reader

Why Dickens could waffle and modern writers can’t

What Gen Z storytellers on TikTok can teach conventional fiction writers

Literary devices as a toolkit, and why reading aloud matters in a world of audiobooks

You can find Amy at WoodenBooks.com.

Transcript of the interview with Amy Jones

Jo: Amy Jones is a writer, lecturer, and researcher who has designed courses and lectured for over a decade on literature, linguistics, and the craft of storytelling. She is the author of multiple books on writing craft, and today we’re talking about The Story Book: Plot, Character, Setting, Genre, Narrative and Literary Devices.

So welcome to the show, Amy.

Amy: Hi. Thanks, Jo. Thank you for having me.

Jo: Oh, lots to talk about. First up—

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

Amy: Okay. So, I grew up in Somerset, which is where I live again now. There’s a strong literary history here, I think. I went to primary school in Nether Stowey, and was introduced to Samuel Taylor Coleridge very young.

So I think that’s had a strong effect on my interest in writing, which has really always been there.

As soon as I finished my undergraduate degree, I went into teaching, which has now been about 15 years. As you said, I’ve taught across A level and then undergrad. I started a course for undergraduates with a very good friend of mine with the University of Plymouth, and covered literature, linguistics, creative writing.

So I have been a bit of a jack-of-all-trades in the writing world, and loved it. My connection with writing has really been… it’s a lovely opportunity for me to download all of that teaching knowledge that I’ve had over these years.

I was in touch with John Martineau, who is my publisher at Wooden Books, and he was interested in creating a series of storybooks, or story writing books.

I was originally starting that with that friend, my good friend Emma Craigie, who is a writer. But she had other projects in mind, so the six small books and then the large Story Book all came to me, which has just been a delight. So it’s been one a year for the last seven, eight years, and that has culminated in The Story Book now.

Jo: Yes. So we’ll come back to The Story Book in a minute.

In terms of your writing history, has it all been non-fiction, or do you also write fiction?

Amy: I do write fiction, but I don’t tend to put it out there. I find the more that I have expertise in the craft of storytelling, the more I’m self-critical of my own work.

Jo: Oh.

Amy: I’m a really big fan of Horace, and especially the Ars Poetica, and he has a wonderful line in there about how he considers himself to be a whetstone, upon which, largely, fiction writers sharpen their craft. So I use that model for myself.

I spend a lot of time these days—as well as academia, which we’ll talk about—doing consultancy work for scriptwriting, media companies, but also novels and fiction at the same time. So that’s where I’ve found myself.

Jo: I think that’s really interesting, because that whetstone idea, and if people don’t know, that’s W-H-E-T-stone, right? Where you can use it to sharpen a knife. So essentially you’re helping other people sharpen their skills.

I actually really love that metaphor. I guess essentially you’re a teacher, but also a form of editor in that way. That is a role that editors play too, isn’t it?

Amy: Exactly, yes. It is a gorgeous quote, and that text is one that I come back to time and time again if I’m ever in doubt about my feedback.

Horace is my guy. Yes, I especially love that whetstone metaphor.

Jo: That’s great. It’s interesting.

You mention there the self-critical thing, in terms of the more you learn, the more self-critical you become. So how do you balance that for your students then?

Because I know I recognise that, and I’m sure many people listening also recognise that. It’s like you see your flaws more easily.

Amy: Yes, exactly, which is very valuable. I think what a lot of creative writers are looking for, in my experience, is someone to be that kind of critical friend.

You never want to rip somebody to pieces, but if you can put your finger on the one particular element which is bringing their story down, or which they haven’t recognised as an integral part which they need to blow up a little bit more, it’s a wonderful symbiotic relationship between that role and the writer themselves.

Jo: How do you encourage writers who want to publish more of their work? How do you encourage them past that point? Because let’s face it, the manuscript is never finished, just abandoned, right? Whoever said that. I mean, that’s true of so much of art.

How do you help other people get over that critical voice?

Amy: Mm, yes, the self-critical voice. I think to say, “Just get it down. Get it down.” It’s your idea, it’s your baby, and then use the critical friend.

I think it’s hard to entirely do that on your own, because we know that old adage of the need to kill your darlings, and a big part of my job is building that relationship with writers or creatives, to the point where it’s very easy to be defensive of elements of your story that you feel are integral or you’re really attached to.

If you have an outside voice which says, “I understand, and these are your great strengths, but this one thing just isn’t working,” that can be really valuable to the final piece.

I know the critical voice is always there when you’re creating, but—I’ve just said I’m a victim of it myself—as much as possible to ignore it, I think, and push through.

I think a lot of the time I find myself saying… people often think that writing should be easy, but it’s not. It’s like being an athlete.

You may be, I don’t know, naturally flexible and therefore a good gymnast, but if you don’t train, and you don’t know that mistakes are a really positive thing that will eventually lead to you improving your performance, then it’s not going to get there.

So I always say struggle is good. If you find you’re struggling and you’re wrestling with that critical element, that’s a good sign. Just push through it, keep doing it. Let the mistake be there, and then you can come back and revisit it, or someone will help you to address it. That’s my take.

Jo: I’m glad you said that. I mean, this whole “think it should be easy” thing. I feel like some people, as you say, they think it should be easy, and if it’s not easy, then they think they’re doing it wrong. Whereas what we’re basically saying is—

Writing is hard. Writing a book is really, really hard.

It’s hard work, and people are like, “Oh, well, if it’s not easy, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this.” I’m like, yes, it’s good work, but it is work. I mean, there’s these moments of happy flow or whatever, but to be honest, they’re quite few and far between in my experience.

Amy: Yes, exactly. There’s a lot of walking and thinking on your own, which is part of that training. Again, it’s that athlete metaphor, with the very best writers making writing look easy.

I’ve written in the introduction to this book that there is that common trick that Truman Capote used to say a lot, which was that he just started. He didn’t train.

Jo: Mm-hmm.

Amy: Which is part of an illusion that perhaps writers like to build around themselves. Truman Capote definitely did train, partly through reading a lot, and getting things wrong.

We see the best athletes at the Olympics, and they look fantastic. We see the best writers in their final products, and we don’t see the struggle, and that’s part of the skill. The struggle is there. It’s just silent.

Jo: Yes, and we’re comparing our first draft to somebody’s finished, edited, complete book. So it is really hard.

Then I also wanted to talk to you about the academic side. So you’re working in academia. You’re working on a PhD in English. I recently finished a master’s, and I was like, oh, my goodness, this wrestling with academic writing, it’s very, very different to commercial mainstream writing.

Now, I would say that The Story Book and your books on craft are pretty, well, literary and verging on academic, but still are commercial, right? There aren’t footnotes on every page and all of that kind of thing.

What do you find are the main differences between academic writing and writing in a more commercial way?

Amy: Hmm. In some ways, the similarities, I think, are stronger than the differences, but the differences are where we hit a wall sometimes.

I think academic writing is still storytelling. I think academic writing does suffer a lot from people feeling like they have to sound very clever. I think it shouldn’t be inaccessible. I’m a big fan of the plain English society, in that sense.

So, yes. I have got two excellent supervisors who are always telling me to be clearer, to be more concise, which is just how you want to be in storytelling. I think the two big differences for me when I’m doing academic writing is I have to slightly dial down the… I love playing with language, as I’m sure we’ll discuss later.

I really like, especially, sounds within language. So I do run away with the occasional whimsical sentence, which I have to then come back and edit. I’m just a real sucker for alliteration, and that doesn’t necessarily have a place there. Also, like you say, it’s the footnoting, it’s the referencing.

The Story Book is academic in that it draws on an awful lot of sources, but I’m not engaging in critical argument in the same way that academia requires. Which is a joy in many ways when you’re writing like that, actually.

Jo: I think the other thing I found sort of annoying, as someone who writes primarily commercially, for being read, is that these essays that I spent so long on have an audience of one. Well, I was one, I suppose, and then my professor was the other one.

Obviously academics aim to get published in some way, but the readership is so much smaller, whereas obviously with The Story Book it’s going to be read by far more people.

So how do you deal with that in your head, around who’s the audience?

Amy: Yes, that’s a really good question. The academia, mine is very niche. My PhD is on, how do I explain it? The Welsh March, the English-Welsh borders in the medieval period, and how the myths surrounding that went from marvels and wonders to more chivalric acts.

So that is a very niche audience of medieval Celtic scholars, essentially. So I can rely on the fact that some of the references I make, they’re going to be very, very familiar with.

Whereas with The Story Book, because I’m trying to cater to scriptwriters, even social media creators, there’s a page in there, and poets with the different literary devices, it is broad.

It also means that I can draw on far more variety. There’s quite a lot of classical scholarship in there, but there’s also Back to the Future, and that’s alongside Jane Eyre. I have a page on chiasmus, and that has a quote from Macbeth, and then a quote from Snoop Dogg in it.

So the range is far wider, and I’ve tried to go for a lot of popular culture alongside the classical. Obviously academia, especially my particular field, is not… I couldn’t bring Snoop Dogg into my medieval essay.

Jo: I’ll try. Well, I guess there’s…

Amy: I’m not sure how that will go.

Jo: Yes, I guess on the commercial side also, there’s the kind of permissions that you need for a commercial project, versus when you’re quoting things for an academic essay that’s not necessarily being published anywhere. It’s quite different.

The other thing I found was that I never really found a moment of flow when I was writing essays.

I was always questioning what I was claiming or what I was trying to say, and then trying to support that with other things.

So it was very stoppy-starty, versus when I’m writing, say, a nonfiction book, even on topics I know really well, I can crank through thousands of words, whereas the academic writing, it’s so dense. That’s really interesting.

Amy: Yes, and especially with master’s and PhDs, you’re almost formulating your ideas as you go, because they are these extended pieces of writing. So whereas if you have a plot in mind as you’re writing and you know you need to get from A to B, you can get into the flow.

Although I have found that the approach in the academic writing that has really worked for me has been to know my next step, and then to just dump every single piece of information I could possibly need, every reference, every person, onto a Word document, and then I can just pull from it and write as I go.

Although it’s not for the whole piece. I get temporary flow from, yes, a big vat of research before I start. That does help.

Jo: Yes, whereas I also love the research. I feel like the research… You must love research, because The Story Book is just packed with amazing stuff.

So does your research process differ between your PhD and this book, for example?

Amy: Yes. I mean, in that I know how many page spreads I have with the Wooden Books and with The Story Book. So I know broadly what my limits are, and then I do love research. I will just go down into a lovely big hole of research for a couple of days, and put in all the potential quotes I could use.

I do have, from that teaching and across those different fields, quite a large bank of things in my head. But discovering new things is a huge joy. So yes, it’s been a lovely thing to put together, actually.

It’s really brought me into more texts that aren’t necessarily my genre. I have always been a big fan of Gothic literature, but never too heavily into sci-fi, but I’ve dabbled in that for some of this research too. So yes, it’s gorgeous.

Jo: So much fun. Right. Well, The Story Book itself goes into every element of the writing craft. It is such a compendium, I guess, and you also teach these things with students. So we can’t get into everything, but I wondered—

What are the elements that you find are common issues with new writers, and any sort of tips for them?

Amy: Yes. Again, that’s a really lovely question, because it depends on the individual, but there are a few things that I find are my hills to die on, I suppose. One is endings.

That is a real point of fixation for me, because especially these days—and I see it not just in written fiction, but also in a lot of modern media and film—people tend to fall in love with a pitch or an idea or a concept, and then begin writing it, and then slightly panic and not know where the ending is.

The ending is, to me, almost the promise that you make to your reader or to your audience, that which pays for their commitment. You are going to give them a payoff. So I am always saying, “Okay, how are we going to wrap this up in a way that feels like it’s a whole cohesive piece, so that we’re not falling down at the ending?”

So for new writers, I think really thinking about your ending. Of course, come up with a lovely concept and do fall in love with your idea, but think about how you’re going to actually wrap that up in a satisfying way. I have a whole section on great endings in here, too.

As I mentioned earlier, killing your darlings, I think, is a common issue for new writers. Just getting attached to certain characters, or even certain lengthy descriptions, and having to accept that they need to be cut.

I think sometimes just underestimating the reader is a common mistake. I’m interested in the idea of the death of the author, and the idea that once you’ve written something, it doesn’t actually belong to you anymore, and people are going to make of it what they will, and you have to accept that.

That’s part of why people love reading so much. It’s a subjective experience. So not trying to spoon-feed your own agenda too heavily, but just weaving the story and telling it as best you possibly can. I think those are my top three. So endings, killing your darlings, and not to underestimate your reader.

Jo: Yes, I feel like readers are much more sophisticated now. I love James Michener. I used to read a lot of James Michener when I was younger, as a teenager, back in the ’80s and ’90s, and I went back to read one more recently, The Source, which was one of my favourite ones, about Israel.

I was quite shocked by the writing and some of the references. I just had not remembered a lot of that style that obviously he’d been writing decades before, and so it was quite dated, and it was quite different.So that happens, doesn’t it?

The way readers have changed and the way modern readers are, I think we do have to be aware of that.

For example, if you’re writing for people who love detective fiction, you have to be blooming good to stop them just being bored.

Amy: Yes. Yes, exactly. I think keeping people’s attention is undoubtedly much, much more challenging these days.

There’s an exercise I used to do with students, which was to give them a sentence from a Dickens novel and to try and make it a sentence which would be applicable today.

Dickens had the luxury of people who weren’t distracted by televisions and mobile phones and this fast-paced world that we live in, so he could have a good old waffle in his sentences.

So yes, I think recognising that is really important. I’m a big fan of more minimalist writers, like Cormac McCarthy. I really love how pared back a lot of his writing is. And yes, for crime, Raymond Chandler is a big influence for me, I think. He’s really good at keeping things minimal and writing really good dialogue, too.

Jo: Yes, just on Dickens, didn’t Dickens write a lot of serials for newspapers and was paid by word count?

Amy: Yes. Yes, exactly.

Jo: So…

Amy: That is very convenient, isn’t it?

Jo: That explains it. I mean, people are like, “Why is it so long?” And it’s like, well, it wasn’t so long. It was in the paper every week or whatever, and then put together into books later.

When people use older comparison titles for more modern books, it just doesn’t make sense, right?

Because it’s just a very different scenario.

Amy: Exactly, yes. I mean, Dickens was very canny in that sense.

Jo: Yes, he’s like, “Make more money by really long sentences.”

Amy: Yes, but as you say, it’s not going to work in this kind of market, unfortunately. I think he was arguably the first writer to go viral, right? I’m trying to remember which one it was.

I think The Old Curiosity Shop was one of the first novels which caused fights when the next serial came out. I think that’s the right one.

When the next episode, as it were, came out, and it was transported over to America, there were fights at the port to access the next one. So there are common links in terms of going viral, I suppose. But, yes, he had the luxury of much more time.

Jo: Yes, much more. Less competition as well.

Amy: Exactly.

Jo: No, it’s crazy. I mean, serial fiction is a thing again. Certainly in Asia, obviously the serial fiction on people’s phones is huge, and starting to come into the West, I think.

Just then coming back to tips, you’ve done a few for new writers, but then a lot of people listening have a lot of books. I have nearly 50 books, and there’s people listening who have a lot more than that.

So there’s lots of us who’ve been doing this for decades, but we still want to get better. We’re always looking to improve our craft. I was quite delighted going through your book and going, “Oh my goodness, I just haven’t even heard of that,” which is crazy.

So how can more mature writers improve, or even figure out where to improve?

Amy: Mm. Yes. I think the key is knowing what you’re good at, and also maybe recognising your own tropes as well.

I have a friend who writes screenplays, and she was saying to me the other day, “I just can’t stop writing about old ladies. They’re always the central character, and I need to break out of that habit.” So maybe experimenting in that sense.

I think just read, read, read, watch, watch, watch. Some of this book has little exercises at the back to help with playing with new things and experimenting, and, again, knowing that they’re not always going to work. But just trying it on, I guess, like trying on a different outfit.

Some things are going to work with your personal style, and some aren’t.

I’m very annoying to, for example, watch films with, because I will apply all of this literary analysis, and my poor partner sits next to me while I’m saying, “Oh, well, they haven’t done this inciting incident very quickly,” or, “That wasn’t a very convincingly developed character, far too static.”

So I think allowing yourself to read not just things which are notoriously good, but perhaps things which are not so good, and practising that evaluation, which then leads to the self-evaluation, is a really good exercise.

I think also reading classics again. Horace is my big one, but there is so much classical writing on writing.

Also, in some of the consultancy work I’ve been doing recently, I’ve been working with a lot of people who are interested in storytelling online, for example. I’ve been really gratified to see that there’s a big swing back towards storytelling in that medium.

There’s also a lot of criticism, or kind of snobbery, about it. But the younger generation, these Gen Zers, are telling stories in some quite interesting and innovative ways. In a lot of ways, they’re more multimodal, almost right back to the very origins of storytelling.

So I think even just keeping an eye on how the younger generation are modifying storytelling for their own usage is also really interesting. It’s something I’d avoided for years, but I’ve increasingly found myself, A, giving feedback in that world, and B, appreciating it a little bit more too.

Jo: Do you mean TikTok, for example?

Amy: Yes. Which is odd, because I really don’t use social media myself. I’m not a big poster of things, but I haunt the internet.

I think watching a TikTok video or an Instagram post, or even YouTube Shorts, is really interesting, because I can apply a lot of classical literary ideas to these things, but you can also see how they’re developing and moving storytelling forward.

So yes, reading backwards, but also looking at the next generation. They are doing some interesting things. It’s a mixed bag, obviously.

Jo: Yes. Well, I almost feel like… I went to a reunion back at Oxford earlier this year, and there were a load of us 50-year-olds.

We went to one of the clubs that we used to go to back in the day, and we were there in one of these clubs, and all the students had just come back from one of the terms, whatever it was. We just had this moment of looking over and going, “This is not our place anymore. What are we doing here?”

Just that feeling of “this is not my place”, that is how I feel about TikTok. Maybe we all just have our own space as well. So you’re kind of outside looking in, and you’re an academic and a researcher.

I feel like for myself, as a commercial writer, I just cannot do that. I just can’t be on it. I can’t speak the language, and I can’t seem to use it myself.

Amy: No, I’m exactly the same. And I’m not saying that everyone should be hopping on and getting a TikTok account. I don’t think that’s the way forward.

Jo: Excellent.

Amy: But I do think just watching them, and almost understanding that younger generation, is really interesting to me. Again, I certainly wouldn’t advocate for that being necessary.

Jo: Oh, good. Yes, everyone’s relaxing now.

Amy: Goodness me. I mean, I don’t do it myself, as I say, but just watching how they’re creating things. I think they’re getting quite good at telling stories in a very concise way, and almost, yes, going beyond the word.

I have this interesting theory, as I mentioned, which is that it’s taking us back to the very origins of storytelling, sitting around a campfire. Much more sound, much more visual. Ad I think that can pull through into some more conventional fiction. Writers could perhaps pull through some of those examples.

We’re not trying to emulate it, but it’s just as valuable, I think, as looking backwards.

Jo: Yes, and then coming to the part of the book on literary devices, I feel like… when I was reading that section, I was like, “Oh, yes, I know what that is. I just didn’t know that I would call it a literary device.”

So can you go through a few things that you like in terms of literary devices?

Amy: Yes. They’re so fun. I think the wonderful thing about storytelling in all forms is it’s half science and half art, and the literary devices are the really lovely, playful, artistic stuff where you can really show your true self.

There’s a quote I think I use from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a letter to Wordsworth, where he says that writing is about the truth of nature, but it’s also the power of giving the interest of novelty by modifying the colours of the imagination.

So literary devices allow you to give everyday objects a new, novel twist.

I think being playful with things like syntax. So that chiasmus example I gave earlier is the Snoop Dogg, with your mind on your money and your money on your mind. But also “fair is foul and foul is fair” in Macbeth.

So yes, playing with syntax, using things like anastrophe, where you change the word order in a sentence, or playing with sound.

As I mentioned, that’s something I’m really interested in. I sometimes do workshops where I encourage people to try and tell a well-known story just through sounds, and get people re-enacting the Titanic, for example, just through sound effects, and then people have to guess them.

I think, like you mentioned, a large part of the literary devices is they’re things that you may quite happily use regularly, or you come across and appreciate, and it’s quite nice to give them that little label and to understand the history of them and the effect they can have.

So again, I would certainly not suggest that everyone tries to jam in as many literary devices as they possibly can in their writing. It’s more about realising what you already know, and hopefully then putting that within your toolkit as a writer, to deploy as and when you think you want to add that little bit of novelty.

Modifying the colours of imagination, again, to come back to Coleridge.

Jo: Yes, it’s interesting. That sound thing, I feel, has changed a lot over the last, I guess, 10 years, but more so the last five years. A lot of books have moved into audio, and I certainly have re-edited some books, and now I do a lot more of my own audiobooks.

Sometimes when you’re reading in your head, you don’t notice the sounds. You almost don’t notice repeated sounds on a page. While you might notice repeated words, you don’t notice repeated sounds until you say them aloud. So when a book is an audiobook, some things really stand out that they don’t on the page.

Like the word “said”. We’re always told, “Oh, just use said. You don’t use a whole load of other words.” But in an audiobook, it sounds awful to just say “said” all the time, because it’s a repeated word. So have you noticed things changing? I guess you mentioned the multimodal, but—

Have you noticed things changing for the audio space?

Amy: Yes. And again, that is to come back to that advice for new writers. Reading aloud is a piece of advice we always give people. It’s not one that I necessarily always do myself, though it’s a really good way of working out the sound of your piece.

We live in a world of audiobooks where people might be listening while they’re pottering around, doing something else. That’s the thing that can really catch people’s attention. So yes, I think people are slightly modifying for that.

I just listened to the new Rachel Cusk book, actually, while I was trying to work on something else. I was distracting myself, and she certainly seems to have modified some of that.

She’s read it herself as well. I think when it’s your own work and you’re reading it aloud, as you mentioned, you notice these things a lot more. I’m noticing it a little bit, but not a huge amount. I wonder if that’s something that we need to pay a little bit more attention to as writers, actually.

It’s an interesting point. A little bit, I guess, is my answer, but not as much as perhaps we can. I’m racking my brains for any other contemporary examples which do it really well.

Jo: I think there’s a contemporary example of an audiobook that’s done really well. It’s zombie. World War Zed, or World War Z, by Max Brooks, which is an oral history of the zombie war. People might have seen the movie with Brad Pitt, but the book is excellent.

I saw the movie, then I read the book, read it in my head on a Kindle, and then I listened to the audiobook. The audiobook is, I think, the perfect way, because it’s an oral history, and every chapter is a different character from a different country.

So a Japanese survivor, and then, say, a British survivor or whatever. To me it’s meant to be an audiobook. It’s one of those kinds of experiences. So to have these ideas that the book is presented in different forms for different experiences, I think is quite wonderful.

Amy: Mm. You’ve just reminded me, there is a really gorgeous BBC, I think it’s 1960s, adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains, which is an incredible dystopian short story.

Similarly, it’s naturally designed for sound effects, and especially the fact that it’s a 1960s recording really adds to it. Sorry, I can’t remember what your original question was. I was really excited to talk about Ray Bradbury.

Jo: No, it’s all good. Well, then—

Is The Story Book in audio?

Amy: No, it’s not, but that’s a really good question, because it would work very well for that format, I think. Although, because The Story Book is designed to be concise, there are a lot of quite complex ideas which are represented in diagrams instead, which allows you to get that idea across in a really lovely visual format.

So an audiobook would require some kind of little description of those diagrams. But, yes, especially those literary devices would work. That’s a good idea. Thanks, Jo. I’m writing that down.

Jo: Yes. Write that down. Well, I think any audiobook can also be some kind of adaptation, so adapted for audio. Also, I’m sure you’ve seen this on any of the audio apps, you can usually attach a PDF for any things that you refer to in the text.

I think, obviously we’re all listeners here on this show, there’s a lot of people listening, and it is one of the things that many of us audio-first people do. We want to listen to books, and then we might buy it in other formats as well.

There’s evidence to show that a lot of audio listeners also buy another format. So I think it’s definitely something to suggest.

Amy: Mm. Yes. I’ll be emailing my publisher after this.

Jo: About that. I might mention it too.

Amy: Thanks, Jo. That would be great.

Jo: Well, just coming back to those highly illustrated visual elements, and you mentioned earlier that you had page spreads that made it clear what your word count would be.

So how much were you involved in the book design as the writer? Did you have to write differently in order to allow for those visual elements?

Amy: Yes. John Martineau and Steven Parsons—so John is my publisher and Steven is the editor—are really very good at involving you in those kinds of decisions, and also really good at turning things into diagrams.

So every now and again, they would turn something I’ve written into a diagram and then bounce it back to me to double check, just to make sure it’s conveying what I needed it to, and yes, they largely do.

As I say, in my PhD I’m doing a lot of work with maps, to try and visualise some of the detailed patterns that I’m seeing, which is helping me to convey those ideas more clearly. It’s the same kind of thing, really.

Especially in the later books, we got quite into… there are some lovely linoprints and hand sketches in there, which I’m a big fan of. So the design of it has been a group project, and it’s come together really nicely, actually.

Jo: So did that make it a much longer experience?

If you were writing a chapter and then iterating with the diagrams, how long was that sort of process?

Amy: These guys are relatively pacey, actually. And of course I overwrite tremendously, and then we go through an editing process to make it as concise as possible, because, as you say, there is an awful lot in there, because it’s trying to cater for a lot of audiences with a lot of exercises.

So yes, I think it was a book a year for the smaller books, and then The Story Book meant that we reviewed all of those smaller books. I have put in some new material as well, and taken out some things which maybe I felt weren’t as relevant anymore. So it’s been a relatively quick process.

I know in total I think we’ve been about eight years, but it’s felt fast.

Jo: Well, that’s great. It’s good you also have that ongoing relationship, because I feel like a lot of people have different relationships with their publishers. Sometimes it’s fantastic, and sometimes people are in massive publishing houses, whereas you’re with a small publishing house, right?

Amy: Yes. Yes, exactly, which is nice, because it’s been a consistent relationship all the way through, and quite an easy dialogue. That is a real privilege.

Jo: Mm. Yes. Just so people know, I’m going to have John hopefully on the show to talk about the publishing side, because I have a small publishing press, and other people listening also, many of us run our own publishing company, so we’re interested in that side as well.

So, for listeners, that will come along at some point. But in the meantime—

Where can people find you and your books online?

Amy: Well, having advocated looking at modern storytelling, I’m very anonymous online. The easiest way to find me is through my publisher, so that’s Wooden Books.

I think it’s just woodenbooks.com, and they will pass any kind of direct contact or requests on to me. The books are available in all good bookstores, online and on the high street.

Jo: Brilliant. So thanks so much for your time, Amy. That was great.

Amy: Thank you so much, Jo. It’s been a pleasure.
The post Writing Endings, Using Literary Devices, And Tips From The Story Book With Amy Jones first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you move from the starving artist mindset to becoming a creator CEO with multiple streams of income? And how can you get traction on Substack if you’re starting from zero? Amy Suto shares her tips as a former Hollywood TV writer turned author, Substack creator, and ghostwriter.

In the intro, Novel November with ProWritingAid; Book Marketing in a Changing World [ALLi Podcast with me and Orna Ross]; Navigating tough times in indie publishing [Wish I’d Known Then]; watch out for fake agent emails [Write Beware]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars for beginners and advanced.

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

Amy Suto is a former Hollywood TV writer and the bestselling author of books around freelance writing, as well as romance, fantasy, and detective fiction. She’s also a ghostwriter and a top 25 ranked Substack creator. Her books include Write for Money and Power.

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

How to take back power when your dreams are in the hands of gatekeepers

Moving from the starving artist mindset to creator CEO

The income flywheel of freelancing, a paid newsletter, and book royalties

How serialising fiction on Substack can build true fans and supercharge pre-orders

Getting traction on Substack, and how to manage comments and Notes

Using AI tools like a scalpel, and how to move past the fear of backlash

You can find Amy on her Substacks, Make Writing Your Job and Sutoscience.

Transcript of the interview with Amy Suto

Jo: Amy Suto is a former Hollywood TV writer and the bestselling author of books around freelance writing, as well as romance, fantasy, and detective fiction. She’s also a ghostwriter and a top 25 ranked Substack creator. So welcome to the show, Amy.

Amy: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Jo: Yes, lots to talk about. First up—

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

Amy: So I came up in Hollywood as a TV writer, and I was climbing my way up the ladder, starting as an assistant, working in Los Angeles, and then eventually, finally got to start to write episodes of TV.

When I hit what I thought was my peak, I was working with a CIA agent on a spy show. It was literally my dream, to be able to pick his brain about all the conspiracies that were actually true and be able to write TV around that.

I found myself a little bit disillusioned with the way the system was running. I found that I really wanted to spend more time writing my own original work instead of being work for hire on other people’s shows.

So when 2020 happened and everything shut down, I ended up being able to travel the world, ghostwrite memoirs for Olympians and CEOs, and have some crazy experiences as a digital nomad, which then inspired my first fiction book, The Nomad Detective.

From there I continued writing novels and also non-fiction books about my experience as a freelance writer, to help other authors and writers figure out how to have this balance of both being able to pay the bills as a writer while also having creative freedom to put together your own work.

Jo: I love that. I guess just to address the dream—so you hit this dream of Hollywood TV writing, which of course for some people, that’s their dream and they never got there, and then you left it all.

I mean, the strength to walk away from that. So if people have that dream, or there’s the dream of the eight-figure movie deal for a novelist and all this.

So can dreams end up not be the thing we really want, I guess?

Amy: This is a great question, and I think that the thing that I was running into is that I was putting my dreams in the hands of gatekeepers.

I think that when you hand over that power, then suddenly you are left without agency and you are finding yourself working for free or doing work for producers that maybe you didn’t sign up for.

People are dangling your dreams in front of you to get you to do what they want you to do.

That was a little bit of what I was beginning to experience, and seeing in other writers that I was talking to in the industry. So I knew that I wanted to take back that power for myself.

I also love books. Writing novels is something that is very close to my heart and part of my own dream as a writer as well.

So when 2020 was happening and everything was shutting down and the writers’ room that I was in went to a Zoom room, I thought, “This is a perfect opportunity for me to explore some of these other areas of writing.”

So basically there is this experience that I was having of remembering all of these novelists who started off as journalists, and they started off as journalists because some of the best inspiration for fiction is actually in non-fiction.

When I was starting to moonlight as a memoir ghostwriter in between projects in Hollywood, I found myself completely captivated by working with these incredible clients who’ve had lives that were beyond anything I could have ever imagined.

So my work as a memoir ghostwriter ended up feeding my creative work, not only being able to pay the bills with these really cool projects, but also being able to interview people about their lives and being able to understand humanity through a completely different lens.

I never would have had the experience to get flown out to Vienna and sit down with an entrepreneur who had changed the direction of the way that technology had been built in his industry, and be able to ask questions about what it was really like to be these types of people and to be in their lives and to grow up in Austria or Singapore.

So I think that memoir ghostwriting ended up being the perfect primer for me to continue to develop my work as a fiction writer, because I was able to meet so many different people I never would have had the opportunity to meet or work with or ask questions of before.

Jo: Yes, I love this empowered attitude to making your own career.

In fact, when you pitched me—and I’ve told you this, but for people listening—I had already bought your book, Write for Money and Power, and the reason I had bought it is, obviously, I’m a 20-year writer at this point, but it was your use of the word power.

I have not seen another writing book that says Write for Money and Power: The Anti-Starving Artist’s Guide to Becoming a Seven-Figure Writer. And again, the subtitle, other people have done that.

Let’s talk about power because why did you use that word, and what kind of power are you talking about?

Amy: So when I was coming up in Hollywood, a lot of the writers around me, we were all being funnelled into the gatekeepers’ world for us, and the vision that other people had for us. That meant that we were giving up our power.

So when I went on this journey of being able to travel the world, and ghostwrite memoirs, and being able to write my own novels and connect with readers directly, I discovered my own sense of power.

I think that for writers, you’re not really allowed to want to be able to have power over your career because it’s so discouraged by gatekeepers and society. You’re supposed to be a starving artist who is grateful for anything that comes your way because you get to make your art.

So I think that there’s a shift happening in culture where writers are being treated not just as artists that are expected to starve, but also as creative entrepreneurs, where we’re learning how to own all parts of our creative journey.

Both the creation of our books artistically, but also the marketing of them, and how we get them out into the world, and treating that like one whole entity.

I think that there’s a shift happening where writers are no longer wanting to write what gatekeepers tell them to, and are wanting to be able to have unburdened creative freedom.

That’s why so many authors like Brandon Sanderson end up self-publishing or independently publishing, because they want that creative power to be able to serve their fans and their readers better.

That’s so cool, and it also proves the fact that even with people like Taylor Swift buying back her masters, so many people who are at the top of their game are outgrowing the gatekeepers. If they’re not finding use for these older systems, then that also brings them into question for the rest of us.

Jo: I love that. Coming back to the book, so you mentioned the starving artist mindset, and in the book you also talk about the creator CEO, and I love that. I feel like I can claim those words, but I know some people listening will just find that pretty intimidating, I think.

So what do you think the process is for moving from scarcity to the more empowered author mindset?

Amy: When I first was starting my career as a writer, I never wanted to be a business person. I didn’t want to look at spreadsheets, I didn’t want to deal with accounting.

The thing is, if you want power over things like what does your book cover look like, or how is your book marketed, or how does your book enter the world, and even just what are the contents of what you’re writing, what are the subject matters, what is actually something that gets to reach your readers?

If you want that power, then it does come with some of the other elements of being an entrepreneur, which is understanding how to price your book. There are so many interesting mechanics of bookselling, which is what I really love that you’ve been covering on The Creative Penn Podcast and on your blog, Joanna.

It’s just so beautiful to see writers talking about the entrepreneurial side of what does it mean to sell books? How do you do it? What are the mechanics of that?

Today, with different types of technology, it’s gotten easier than ever for writers to be able to do a lot of things themselves, which can feel intimidating, but then you realise how much it unlocks.

Even something as simple as, if you sell one book to a reader who likes your work, your royalty percentage can go from 10, 20, 30% to up to 70%, because you’ve made that switch of being able to take on the cap of CEO and being able to own a little bit more responsibility.

With that, the number of books that you need to sell to have a beautiful life as a writer immediately drops. So for me, the added responsibility was worth it because I was able to have all this freedom, being able to write on my own schedule and set my own publish dates, and not have to wait two years for a book to come out.

I could wait instead six months and pick exactly how I wanted the book to come out.

So I think it’s reframing this step into becoming a creator CEO, not as a burden, but as an opportunity to flex your creative muscles in different ways, and to be able to have more flexibility in your own life on how your creative work comes out and is distributed.

Jo: Absolutely. It’s so great to hear. I just feel like so much of what you say is what I’ve been saying for years. When I started saying it back in 2008, this was not popular, and we were considered the early indie authors.

It was considered vanity. It was considered the worst form of publishing. You were not good enough to get published. hat’s not how you’re talking about it, is it?

Amy: No, and I think that—

A lot of people are shifting what it means to be “self-published.”

It’s not a vanity press thing. We’re just seeing so many examples of people using the internet to take their work and bring it directly to fans, and understanding that there are fewer barriers than ever to getting your books into your readers’ hands.

Actually working with a bunch of bureaucracy of a larger publishing house can slow you down, can dilute your ideas, and can potentially keep you from being the kind of author that has the career that you’ve always wanted.

So I think it’s an empowerment of the creator age and the creator economy, and this ability to publish more, to publish faster, to publish more creatively, to put out bolder ideas.

So, yes, I think that you are definitely a trendsetter, and I think that that’s so incredible, the trend that you were riding the wave of, and that you were originating, coming to fruition. I think that just proves that you were ahead of the curve.

Jo: Oh, well, thank you for that. I feel like one wave crested, and now we’re in another wave, and we’re going to circle back to technology. But just so people get a sense of your creator CEO self, what are your multiple streams of income?

How are you making your income with all these different ways of writing?

Amy: The income streams that I cover in Write for Money and Power are my own income streams as well as what I recommend for other authors, and it’s a trifecta of freelancing, a paid newsletter, such as a newsletter hosted on Substack, and also income from your books and royalties related to your work as an author.

These three income streams have helped me balance this side of both creativity and also commerce and the needs of being able to pay bills, so that I can travel the world and live in beautiful cities like San Francisco, where I get to call home. These three pillars are really great because they also support each other.

If you have an audience that subscribes to your Substack or your other paid newsletter, regardless of what platform you’re on, that audience can pay a subscription fee to access certain types of content, similar to platforms like Patreon.

Then you can not only get revenue from that, but that paid newsletter audience can then buy your book when your book comes out and become early readers of your book.

From there, the audience that buys your book on Substack can also serve as a point of proof for your freelancing.

So if you offer any services, like so many novelists I know offer developmental editing and things like that, then you can use the proof point of a community to become a freelancer and then sell your services that way.

So the three of them feed into each other, because then the money that you make from freelancing can fund your next book launch, or it can fund more time for you to go and write on Substack.

That flywheel is something that can help writers, and it is an alternative to what we’ve thought about in the past about a traditional day job, about going and working as a barista or a coffee shop worker.

There are so many other different careers that you could do, but these are nice because these three pillars feed into your future book launches and your writing as a whole, to create this holistic flywheel of income.

Jo: Yes.

I definitely think having another stream of income other than just book sales is important.

Obviously, this podcast, for example, has sponsors, and I also have a Patreon, although it’s not a paid newsletter.

I think what you mean is a subscription, some kind of subscription where you have,—not guaranteed income every month—but at least more regular income every month rather than the up-and-downiness, which books are so much so.

Amy: Definitely. There are so many different models, and the paid newsletter is one that I think is becoming more attractive right now because you are able to keep all of the email addresses of everybody who signs up, and you’re able to email them directly.

So compared to building an audience on Instagram or TikTok, you’re able to own your email list and take that email list with you from platform to platform, so you’re not dependent on these platforms.

I like the paid newsletter as a format for authors because you’re able to keep people in the loop about every book and your writing process, and give them a behind-the-scenes look.

It’s also just such a great format that’s built for writers. On platforms like Substack, the people who are doing the best are novelists and authors and writers.

So I think it’s also trying to look at the places where you already have the skill set to thrive versus having to build an entire audience on YouTube or TikTok. Some authors really take to that, but I know a lot of writers who are introverts and prefer to thrive in the written form.

So putting out a paid newsletter allows them to connect and build that fan base with their readers, and also thrive in the medium that they’re already in.

Jo: Fantastic. Well, let’s talk about Substack then, because you have two. I have two author names, and I know how hard it is to maintain two lots of everything.

So you’ve got Make Writing Your Job and Sutoscience.

So tell us about those Substacks—why two—and a bit more about using Substack in general.

Amy: Make Writing Your Job is our community for writers. We host a job board. We list different grants, contests, and residency opportunities.

We also do author interviews and try to find different ways to bring people cool resources on how to make writing their jobs, including some discounts on different products like Scrivener and things like that.

Make Writing Your Job was my first Substack that I built, and we have over 60,000 subscribers today, and we’re in the top 25 of business on Substack.

I built it as a place to try to help everybody else with the concepts of my books, and then also to be connected to other freelance clients that I was too busy to work with.

So it came from a place of wanting to just empower people to make writing their job through a myriad of different ways. That’s been a really exciting community to grow because it’s truly become something that I’m just so proud of. We do in-person meetups in Los Angeles and other cities.

We have such a great group of people that we’ve been able to put together on that Substack that it became something that I’m just so grateful to have.

Then Sutoscience is my own personal Substack where I share all of the behind the scenes of what it means to be a writer and an entrepreneur, trying to figure out how to stay connected to my creativity while thinking strategically about how to grow on Substack and things like that.

So on Sutoscience, I write about the behind the scenes of everything I’m up to, and I also have a monthly mastermind group with my founding members where we all talk about this. We’re basically a writers’ group for what we’re building on Substack and beyond with our books. So it’s been fun.

The reason why I have two is because Make Writing Your Job is something I run with my husband. It’s a community. It’s something that I’m building in service of a larger group, whereas Sutoscience is more my personal behind the scenes.

Jo: What about serialising your fiction? Talk about that.

Amy: This is something that I was really excited to get working on this year, and it surprised me in so many different ways.

A lot of writers who have serialised fiction on Substack have promoted it as a way to just bring in tons of paid subscribers, and it’s something that has unlocked so much for them.

I have found that the benefits of serialising fiction go even beyond paid subscribers. When you do the math on it, it makes a lot of sense.

When you sell a single book, then you are usually making around $6 to $7 of profit, depending on how you’re publishing, who you’re publishing with, if you’re going direct.

If you have a Substack that’s priced at around $8 a month, then if you have people sign up to read even the first few chapters, they’ll read the chapters, and then if they stay subscribed, you’ve already out-earned what you would have made on a book.

So the math already makes a ton of sense, but the thing that really surprised me when I started serialising my novel, Let Me Be Your Ghost, on my Sutoscience Substack, was that the readers that joined me on the journey so far, because it’s not completely out yet, the readers who have joined me are diehard fans.

I literally have had readers who have emailed me since the beginning when the chapters came out, telling me what they loved, telling me what they thought could be changed in the book.

Then they’re promoting the book to other people, and helping me get other beta readers, and championing the book, and then being the first to pre-order it when I opened pre-orders.

So what I’ve built unintentionally with the serialisation is not only another audience and a different type of digital product along with the launch of the book, but I’ve built a way to supercharge pre-orders and also connect deeper with my true fans, with the readers who are really invested in helping me make this book the best that it can be.

Serialising fiction is also really fascinating because I’m serialising what is essentially a rough draft that will eventually morph into the final draft.

So similar to other authors that I’ve admired, I’m really trying to bring my community in and see what they think of this story. Does it feel like something that resonates with them?

To have people be so ardently helpful has been really incredible, and I’ve gotten thousands and thousands and thousands of views on the chapters. That’s something that, as a fiction author, I’m so grateful for, to have those early readers, those early champions.

So far I’ve just been blown away by the reactions with the beta reader forms I put out. I’m going out to ARC readers this week, and my early readers have been driving that, as well as driving revenue to help me continue to spend more time on the book.

Jo: But then I guess I would argue that it doesn’t matter what platform you use. If you have an audience then that process works, whatever platform you use.

At the moment, a lot of writers are jumping on Substack because they’ve heard that they can do things like what you’re saying. But once again, they’re arriving at what is now actually quite a crowded platform, and putting up some chapters of their book, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, and then they’re like, “Well, nobody’s here.”

So if someone is in that situation, if they’re putting up their chapters or they’re putting up articles or whatever, and they don’t have any traction—

What are your tips for getting more traction on Substack?

Amy: The great thing about Substack—and I try to reveal these numbers as much as possible on Sutoscience—is that most of my paid subscribers, most of my total subscribers, are actually coming from Substack itself.

Substack has a lot of great built-in discovery tools, including recommendations, but also their algorithm that promotes you when somebody is signing up for someone else’s Substack.

There are a lot of really clever tools that Substack has that have ended up driving a ton of readers who maybe never would have found me on any other platform. The cool thing is, I don’t have to pay upfront to have those readers find me.

So a lot of the things that I break down on my Sutoscience Substack are how to make sure that your Substack is categorised correctly and shows up in discovery correctly, how to work with other Substackers on interviewing them or being interviewed on Substack Live, which then brings other people into your universe.

Substack just has all of these really cool creative tools that I haven’t seen any other platform use to support writers, in part because their incentives are aligned. Substack makes a 10% cut of all paid subscriptions, and they handle so much more in the back end that you would have to pay for otherwise.

So it’s really cool to be able to use their discovery tools to get in front of new readers, and the fiction category is something that is growing.

It is definitely a smaller category compared to the personal essay, how-to non-fiction categories. But I’ve seen that fiction has definitely been ticking up, including, most impressively, Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife has been publishing her fiction on Substack.

Which I found just so interesting, that somebody who is basically a billionaire, if not a hundred-millionaire, and she has every resource on the planet to go through traditional publishing, she’s picking Substack as a place to put out her work.

In part because the platform also has this brand of being very high-end, of having these journalists and these authors and these serious writers on the platform.

So you have this natural discovery of people who are coming to read War and Peace chapter by chapter on one Substack that’s doing an analysis. They’re reading journalists from these esteemed publications that have moved to Substack. Alongside those different incredible writers, they can discover your work as well.

So it’s not going to be something that’s easy to grow from zero, but I think it’s really cool to be able to take your work to a platform where you already know there’s an audience of really serious, interested readers that then will bring that energy to reading your work.

Jo: So if somebody does want to come over to Substack, I guess one of the things that puts me off another platform is that, for example, I don’t like chatting in comments. Substack, I believe, has now got its own social network as much as anything else.

How are you managing comments on Substack versus other social media?

Amy: I feel like the common thread here, the thing that I feel as well, is that it can be overwhelming to be, “I need to be on all these social media platforms, and I have to be present. People have access to me.” That can be a lot.

So I think that Substack has to be one of those platforms where there needs to be a level of understanding what is right for you and what’s not right for you.

For example, the subscriber chat feature is something that I think a lot of people would be better off just turning off and not having to worry about it.

The other feature is being able to have the comments on your posts be for paid subscribers only. So the only people that can comment on your posts are just people who have intentionally paid for your publication and want to be there.

I think that naturally gets rid of spam. It naturally gets rid of people who are lurking, or naysayers, or things like that, and it keeps it closer to a community.

The other piece of their social media platform, Substack Notes, while it can be helpful for growth, I think it doesn’t have to be something you have to go all in on to see growth on Substack. I very rarely am on Substack Notes, and I’m often scheduling things ahead of time and not necessarily engaging a whole lot.

I do think that compared to other social media platforms and other places where discussions happen around writing, I’ve found Substack to have the most interesting conversations. Also, I’ve met the most fascinating people in real life from connections that I’ve made on Substack.

So there is this neat community and neat pool of people, but you have to be intentional about how you interact with it, in the same way you have to be intentional about how you interact with other social media platforms or other spaces online.

Jo: Yes, it’s so funny, isn’t it? I think it’s also about what stage you are in your author career, because as you’re talking there, I’m remembering the early days of Twitter. I got on Twitter in 2008, and that was the golden era of blogging and Twitter.

A lot of the friends I have in real life now, I met on Twitter, and it built my author platform in those early days. I connected with people who changed the way my career went.

That just sounds very similar, and it just feels like every couple of years, a new platform rises. And that might not be brand new. Obviously, Substack’s not brand new. It’s reasonably mature now. But over the last few years, I think really since the pandemic, it’s grown. So I think maybe that’s the tip for people.

You don’t have to do all of these things, but there might be things that emerge at different points that work for you.

Amy: Definitely. I think that’s a good way to think about it, because ultimately, and this is something that I’m always trying to keep track of, we are writers and we should be writing first.

All of these platforms, all these tools, they should be in service of us finding time to write creatively and write work that our readers will enjoy. Everything else is noise.

So it’s trying to understand what is a distraction, what is actually getting you closer to your true fans, your true readers, and what platform features or things are just not worth it.

That, I think, is the question that we always have to ask ourselves, auditing. Is this actually useful, or is this going to be a huge time suck that I’m just going to spend doomscrolling or completely distracted from the actual core of the work that we’re here to do?

Jo: Well, then I guess the question relates to what topic people should do. You’re an interesting example because you have different fiction novels in different genres already. So you’re obviously a multi-passionate creator, and you’re not sticking with one genre. You also have this non-fiction content.

So if authors have lots of different genre books like you do, where should they start with their Substack?

What should they focus on in order to attract people who might be interested in their work?

Amy: The best advice that I have gotten, and that I’ve seen work for others as well, is to start with the thing that you’re most excited about.

That might be, for some writers, writing about their day-to-day life. What is it like to get up and write either before work or as their full-time job? For other writers, it’s writing an incredibly niche deep dive on Nicholas Sparks.

Everybody’s going to have their own way into what it means to enter this space and write something for other people and to share the things that they’re excited about.

There’s one sci-fi author who wrote an incredibly detailed piece about the types of pens that he uses, and how different fountain pens write best on different types of paper, what type of paper, what to write with on an airplane, because with certain pens, the ink gets stuck on the airplane.

I love this idea of people coming to share the thing that they are so passionate about, and that they could write forever on.

In the niche comes the universal. So in writing about something very specific, suddenly you’ll get other readers that are also fanatics of the types of pens, or different romance authors, or whatever it is.

I think that so often we try to mould ourselves to what we think people will like to read, but in reality, if we just write the things that we love, and then just tweak the framing so that it’s accessible for readers, then we’ll have made it, then we’ll have gotten there, and our passion will shine through.

So I think that the hardest part about Substack is trying to figure out how to write the thing that you love and just package it in a way where the headline is something that will speak to the piece that you’ve written, and that readers will know what to expect when they land on your Substack’s About page.

So you can have different multitudes. You just need to be able to walk people through it and frame it well.

That’s the thing that, as somebody who’s multi-passionate, who is writing all these different formats, I can come to my audience of people who are reading my non-fiction work and say, “Hey, I have a book coming out. It’s called Let Me Be Your Ghost, and it’s inspired by my memoir ghostwriting work.”

So I’m connecting my non-fiction work to the inspiration of my new romantic thriller book. I’m able to bridge across different audiences because I’m able to understand what they followed me for, and connect it to something that I’m doing next that I think they’ll really love.

Jo: Yes, that’s great. Again, it’s so funny because it does resonate with the early days of blogging on WordPress and all the things we used to do, which I still do. It’s really funny because it’s exactly the same with the SEO structures. But yes, I love it.

Let’s talk a bit more about technology. In the book, you do talk about AI. You say, “AI tools can be incredible amplifiers. They’re not replacements, they’re accelerators. I think that every serious writer who wants to stay competitive is going to use them in some way.”

Now, I agree with that, but of course, the author community is pretty split, and I think Substack has even incorporated Pangram or one of the anti-AI writing things.

So can you talk about your thoughts and use of AI and how you think it’s changing things?

Amy: I think that the analogy that I really love to use to think about this is to think about how some of the most successful writers in Hollywood, and then also in traditional publishing, put together a book or a show.

In Hollywood, you are the showrunner, and it’s your idea, and you bring together a room of five to eight really talented writers, and you bounce ideas off of them.

They shape the work, and then they often are the hands typing on the keyboard, and they bring work to you for you to review, and everything goes through your computer last.

Even in traditional publishing, even though you may be writing a book, your editor is going to give you tons of notes. Your agent is going to shape a lot of pieces of it. You’re going to have the publisher giving you a lot of feedback on what it should look like. Even if you’re self-published, you still need a lot of that support.

So the way that AI, I think, fits into a lot of this is that it helps with a lot of pieces of the process that are tedious and challenging, and that are not tied deeply to your creativity.

When I think about writing a book, especially a non-fiction book, it’s not just about, “Here, let me put everything down on paper one way.”

It’s about, “Oh, did I already use this anecdote before? Here is a 30-minute transcript of me talking through this chapter and how it should be laid out and all of the ideas in it. Can you help me shape this into something that I can then go and edit?”

For fiction, it’s also about the things that we would have used Google for before. What is the list of baby names that I should look through online to try to find the perfect name for this character? Let me do a deep dive on the history of this name, this first name, last name.

I think that for us writers, AI can help accelerate parts of the research process. It can help us find things.

One thing that I always love using AI for is, how many times have I used this word or phrase in the book? And then it’ll be like, “Oh, you used the word temperature 37 times in the last six chapters.”

So it surfaces the things that a good editor would surface, but it will absolutely not replace editors. I think that’s the thing that’s really helpful. I love the collaborative work of working with book editors on my projects.

AI helps me to get past some of the detail work, the cleanup of changing my word count or word changes, to make sure that I’m not repeating things. Then it also helps me do deep research on the locations and the places that I may have visited before, but I can’t remember.

What is the name of that small town in wine country? I think that this type of tree is in this region, but I can’t remember. Can you help me with that?

So much of the writing process is also fact-checking and researching and line editing, and AI can help with so many pieces of that, allowing us to think more freely about our characters and the people that we’re putting into our worlds, and how we’re constructing a non-fiction book.

Jo: Yes, I love that. It’s so funny, isn’t it? Some of us have incorporated AI tools into our work now in so many different ways.

There are literally tons and tons and tons of ways that we use AI tools, and we still know that we are using our creativity.

It just feels more fun as well. I use Claude mostly. I love brainstorming with my Claude around ideas for this, that, and the other, and as you say, at different points in the way we do stuff.

For example, Claude will be cleaning up our transcript here and putting it on the blog so people can read the transcript, making this accessible to everyone. So things like that, which, as you say, are not tied deeply to your creativity.

Amy: Yes, and I just put in a big order for red pens last night because I need a certain red pen. I’m planning on printing out the rest of my draft as soon as I finish, before it goes to ARC readers.

I know I’m going to need that analogue experience of sitting down with a red pen at a coffee shop somewhere in San Francisco, where I live, and just going through and having that tactile experience of writing in the margins of the paper and feeling the pen underneath my hand.

I think that those experiences are still going to be uniquely us. I think that there are some bad actors out there that are using AI to generate every single word of their book and not reading anything and leaving the prompts in and just publishing it as is. The slop epidemic is huge.

I think for us professional writers who come in and use these tools, we’re wielding them like scalpels. We’re coming in, and we’re having it help with the pieces that we know need to change, that we know we need help on, that are often mundane and challenging.

Like, “Hey, can you track this character’s eye colour across the whole book, because I know I changed it five times?”

So that stuff is really helpful, but at the end of the day, I think it’s the author’s responsibility to sit down with a draft and read and have their hands on every single word before it goes out.

Ultimately, we’re writing for other humans, so it is the human touch that will make it special and beautiful and unique to our experience.

I do think that these tools can help be your writers’ room in a lot of ways, just like you were describing. They can help with a lot of the different pieces.

Other professional writers throughout history have had whole teams around them, and therefore, like you were saying, it makes the writers’ room model more accessible for writers who can’t afford that.

Jo: Yes, or who just want to do it for fun. It’s funny, you were talking there about the eye colour. It makes me laugh because I do that all the time.

Also, I’m now writing book 14 in my ARKANE thriller series, and the first book I started writing in, oh, it must have been 2009. So it’s been a really long time, and—

I don’t want to reread every single book every time I do the next one.

My main character, Morgan Sierra, has been through a heck of a lot of battles, and so the wounds on her body at this point, and her scars. So I was saying to Claude, “Can you please just update my character bio for Morgan, and where she might be hurting in this fight scene?”

Amy: I love that. That’s so clever.

Jo: Which is just so fun. Oh, and also, “In all the fight scenes we’ve written for all the books, can we do something more original for the next one?”

Amy: Yes, and I think that this is such a great use case, because otherwise other authors have sometimes had teams that track their character bibles and things like that. Even when I was working in Hollywood, when I was getting started, I was the assistant helping my boss track those kinds of things.

I think that it’s very manual and also sometimes inaccurate, so having machines do some of these jobs that it’s more effective to use them for, I think, can then free you up to think about, what are the other ways to approach this fight scene?

You’re still having to curate, even if AI gives you suggestions of, “Oh, you could do this, this, or this.” You have to be the one saying, “Oh, I know that this is going to be the best choice, but I’m going to combine it with this and change this to make it true to your story and your series.”

So that curation is one of the deepest parts of creativity, and that’s even what James Patterson argued, because he’s worked with ghostwriters his whole career.

His whole point was that the work that was the most creative was when he was writing the outlines and deciding how the story was going to be told.

When he handed it over to his ghostwriter, he’s like, “The hardest part’s been done. The ghostwriter’s just going to carry out my vision, and I have already done the creative heavy lifting.” So a lot of writing is just making good creative decisions.

Jo: So then one reason that some writers are worried about this is because readers, or more likely other writers, are attacking them. As you said, there is a very literary community on Substack.

So for those writers who might feel afraid of using AI in any way—even with marketing tasks because they’re worried about being attacked—

How can you encourage them?

Amy: I think that this is just another wave. Every time there’s a new technology, there’s always going to be that moment of fear around, “Is this going to take our jobs? Is this going to hurt us in some way? What is this?”

I think that wave is starting to pass. I’ve even seen it with a lot of my Hollywood friends that were very anti-AI, who are professional working writers now. They’re starting to incorporate it into their process more.

I think that while there are still areas like traditional publishing where there’s a lot of fear-mongering around that, if you’re able to take your career into your own hands and have the power to be able to put out what you want, then you shouldn’t fear that.

You shouldn’t fear backlash because these tools have completely changed everything. You can’t put them back in the box now. So many authors are either using them publicly or in secret, and this is something that is already coming to revolutionise everything.

I say that as somebody who is in San Francisco seeing the future of these tools, seeing how people are using them, and if you want to publicly not use them, that’s totally okay.

But I think the writers who want to use them shouldn’t feel shame around it, shouldn’t feel like they’re going to be attacked.

There are always going to be people, fans, writers, readers, who are going to attack other authors on a variety of different things. Internet hate has always been around, even before AI.

So I think, for me, if you’re writing a good story that people love, they’re not going to care that it’s AI. They’re going to feel invested in the characters.

So I think ultimately it’s trying to stay away from all of those fights about what is good, what is bad, whether or not you should use it. Every author’s going to have to make that decision for themselves.

If readers don’t want to read certain things made with certain tools, that’s okay, but I think that at the end of the day, we’re all humans and we want to read good stories. I think that is going to win out over the purity battle of whether or not this has been used with AI. I think that is going to start to fade away.

Jo: Oh, thank goodness for that. I really, really hope so.

So where can people find you and your books and your Substacks and everything you do online?

Amy: So Sutoscience.com, spelled like my last name, S-U-T-O, and then the word science, is my personal Substack, and MakeWritingYourJob.com is our writing job board with resources for writers.

Also, I’m on every social media platform @sutoscience.

Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Amy. That was great.

Amy: Yes. Thank you so much for having me.
The post Write For Money And Power: Becoming A Creator CEO With Amy Suto first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can giving your characters two bad choices raise the stakes in your stories? And how do you ask for the feedback you need from a critique group, and disregard the rest? Erin Dionne shares her writing and publishing tips after more than 20 years as an author and professor.

In the intro, The Future of Listening Audible survey [Publishing Perspectives]; Spotify expand audiobooks globally; Audible announce immersive new AI features [Publishing Perspectives]; Writing Storybundle; SPS Live USA conference;
AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars in November.

Today’s show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn

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

Erin Dionne writes middle grade novels, picture books, chapter books, and nonfiction, as well as cosy mysteries under a pen name. She’s also a college professor, and her latest book for writers is Bad Choices Make Good Stories: Conversations About Writing.

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

Why two bad choices beat an easy choice and a hard one

How pre-writing in a notebook builds confidence in your characters before you draft

Giving characters dimension beyond the bubble of their story

How to ask for the feedback you want, and protect the core of your story

Forming an indie press with your critique group

How to get school visits through librarians and conferences

You can find Erin at ErinDionne.com.

Transcript of Interview with Erin Dionne

Jo: Erin Dionne writes middle grade novels, picture books, chapter books, and nonfiction, as well as cosy mysteries under a pen name. She’s also a college professor, and her latest book for writers is Bad Choices Make Good Stories: Conversations About Writing. So welcome to the show, Erin.

Erin: I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.

Jo: There’s lots to talk about. First up—

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

Erin: Sure. Like some of the other people that you’ve talked to on the podcast, I’ve been a huge reader and writer ever since I was a little kid, but when I was about seven, I realised that it was people that wrote books. I thought that they came out of a machine or something.

When I found that out, I thought, oh my goodness, I love reading stories, so being a writer must be the best job in the world. So I was single-mindedly focused on being an author as a career after that.

I wrote off and on in school. I wrote short stories and things. When I went to college, I got a degree in English and communications, and then I went and got my MFA in creative writing.

While I was in school, I also decided that I wanted to learn about the publishing industry, so I worked as an intern for a local magazine.

Then after I graduated, while I was in grad school, I actually worked in publishing for Houghton Mifflin in their marketing department. I became an editor for a magazine, and then ultimately, I became a professor, and I work at an art school.

It was at that point, finally, when I was surrounded by other creative people, that I thought, “Okay, I’ve learned all this stuff. I need to actually put it into practice.”

So I got serious about my work in 2005, and my first book came out in 2009, a traditionally published children’s book, and I published in the children’s book field for the next 11 years.

I released my first indie book in 2021, and now I consider myself a hybrid author. I do some books traditionally published, some books indie, and I really like being able to have control in different aspects of my career.

Jo: Well, that’s great. Wow, you’ve just done so much across the whole industry. That’s fantastic. I do want to ask you then, before we get into the book, you did an MFA, and obviously you love studying. I also love studying. I understand that.

I wonder where you stand now on whether people need to study so much. I found personally, as someone who also enjoys studying, that sometimes I make myself not do the practice. I’d rather sometimes be learning than doing.

So how can people balance learning a lot with actually writing the book?

Erin: Yes, I think that’s a great question. For me, my undergraduate degree in English was not creative writing focused. We didn’t have that. So I thought, “I need to learn how to write.” What I really learned in grad school was how to revise and how to teach.

I think now, 20 years later, with the cost of education, you don’t have to have a master’s degree to write. You don’t have to have a degree in English to write. You have to read a lot, and you have to write a lot.

I think the MFA is great for deep study on your particular genre if you feel like you need to learn more, and I think it’s great if you want to teach, but it’s not necessary to be a writer.

To be a writer, you have to write. So sometimes we can hide behind learning and hide behind all kinds of things to avoid doing the work, but what it comes down to is you have to put your butt in the chair and you have to write at some point.

Jo: It’s funny, isn’t it? I like the “hide behind the learning.” I still struggle with it because I love learning so much. I also just finished another master’s degree. I can’t help myself.

I do a lot of research for all my books, and I almost have to just pull myself up sometimes and say, “Look, do you really need to do any more research in order to write this novel?”

Erin: Exactly.

Jo: Okay. Well, let’s get into the book. So you start writing with characters first, and other people, like me, often start with a theme or a question or a place or something.

So talk about your process of creating characters and this bad choices idea as well.

Erin: Sure. Most of my books start with a character. Like you, I’m a discovery writer, but I love to do all my discovery work in pre-writing phases, and I pre-write by hand. I’m a big proponent of using a notebook. I carry a notebook with me wherever I go, and I have specific notebooks that are for specific projects.

Most of my pre-writing is character-based. I really want to learn about who this person is, what do they want, what are they going after in their life and in the story, and what do they need?

Wants and needs are always a big one for me, because I feel like a character should be able to articulate their want, but they don’t always know what their need is. That’s up to us as the author to identify that.

Then through the course of the story, I always think about it in terms of the character is going after what they want, but they’re going to get their need met by the end of the story. That brings satisfaction to the reader when a character gets their need met.

So I take a lot of time to try to figure out what that is, because for me, that’s going to drive the story. I really have to understand the character’s world before I begin.

When I feel like I have a really good handle on who these people are that the book is about, I’ll do a beat sheet, like what Jessica Brody was talking about on your show earlier in August. I’ll do a beat sheet to get some general ideas of plot points, and then I’m ready to write. Then that’s where the bad choices come in.

If you think about a character and they get to a crossroads in a story, lots of times the first thing that we think about are an easy choice and a hard choice.

So for example, if we have a character who’s 16 years old, and she’s grounded, and there’s a party on Friday night that she wants to go to, one choice is for her to just stay home and then hear about the party.

The other choice is for her to sneak out and go to the party, and obviously sneaking out and going to the party could have higher stakes and better consequences. But that’s also an easy choice, and both you and your reader know where the character’s going to go.

If you give your character two bad choices, that character is going to go to the party no matter what. So are they going to sneak out and have a friend pick them up, or are they going to sneak out and take their mother’s car and go to the party?

Now we have two bad choices, higher stakes, and more potential for story drama if they take that bad choice. So I’m always looking at ways that I can have my characters get into a little bit more trouble, make things a little harder.

For me, that comes with those decision points, and giving them two bad options so that the reader knows, ooh, they’re going to do something wrong. It’s just a matter of what wrong thing are they going to pick?

Jo: So it’s interesting, because you said you’re a discovery writer, and then you talked about your pre-writing phase and the beat sheet, and now these bad choices.

So are you coming up with these bad choices at the pre-writing, at the beat sheet phase, or do these emerge once you’re actually into the drafting process?

Erin: They come out in the drafting process. I have a general idea by the time I start writing of some of the highs and lows of the book, but I don’t know how the character is going to get there.

Because I know my character really well, I can write with confidence, and I know that I’m going to figure out the path that they’re going to take.

Jo: The word pre-writing, maybe you could talk more about that, because I feel like some people listening are like, “I don’t even know what that means.”

So what is pre-writing for you?

Erin: Brainstorming. I just throw down in my notebook all kinds of things about my characters. Everything from the way they look to what they think about, hobbies that they have, people that are important in their lives, people that have influenced them in some way.

I make lists. If I’m writing about a young character, I make lists of things that are in their backpack, or I’ll think about what their school schedule is, who their friends are, what their family situation is, and really try to figure out the dynamics of the world around their want, and why do they want this thing that they’re going after.

So I will spend three or four months just getting these ideas down on paper. I’ll write letters from my character to me. And all of this is building confidence in who my character is so that I can inhabit them fully when I start to write.

Jo: Wow, that is so interesting, and I have to say I’ve never done anything like that. Again, it’s so fascinating, isn’t it?

I might spend all my research time on the mythology behind a particular place. I’m often fascinated in places where there’s been a lot of death and killing and blood soaked into the ground, because these places have a historical and often religious depth to them, and then I’ll stick a character there.

Erin: Yes, it’s just two different ways of coming at the same problem, right? And that’s the beauty of writing, is we all do it in our own way, which is what makes our stories different and interesting.

Jo: Totally. Well then, if somebody finds their characters are not interesting enough, maybe someone is more like me and they want to become more like you, how might they address this? How could they look at some of the common issues with characters?

What are some of your tips if people want to enrich their characters before they write?

I mean, you’ve given us some things there, but I feel like what is in a character’s backpack, for me, just feels way too detailed.

Erin: I think a lot about the reader experience, and readers want to connect with characters, and they want characters to feel real. I think sometimes as writers, we confuse that idea that a character is interesting with making them angsty or having all of these heavy issues around them.

I like to think about characters in terms of dimension. What else exists in this person’s life outside of the bubble of their story? I don’t mean things that we don’t see on the page, but we all have different interests, and we all have different fears that may or may not come up, depending on what’s going on in our lives.

So creating a character that has multiple facets, and things then bleed into the story. I can give you an example. There’s a book by Angie Thomas, a young adult novel called On the Come Up, and the main character wants to be a rapper. She has a family history of performance, and that’s her goal.

She also characterises herself as a super nerd. She’s really into Pokémon and Star Wars and Marvel movies, and these things show up in the way that she sees the world and the analogies that she makes and the references that she makes.

All of a sudden you have this character that has so much more dimension, because she feels more real. So I’m always looking for things that I can pull in from other facets of my character’s life to give us a lens that they see the world through.

So thinking about, beyond what’s happening in your story, what do they do in their free time? What are the things that they would reference when talking to a friend?What are some of the inside jokes maybe that they have, or cultural elements that they would carry through?

Even just sprinkling in a couple of those things, all of a sudden your character becomes richer for your reader.

Jo: How do you take that further and turn that deep character into plot points on your beat sheet?

Erin: So I always think about, how is the character moving through their life and their story? What type of story am I telling in terms of genre? And then how do those things intersect?

So I have a book called Moxie and the Art of Rule Breaking, and the character is solving a mystery, but she’s also really good at math. So she uses geometry proofs as logical paths to help her solve the mystery.

I am not good at math, so I had to figure all of that out for her. Then all of a sudden, this character has a very different type of problem, and she’s literally using her logical problem-solving skills to solve it.

So there are those moments where we can see how these other elements intersect with our characters’ lives, just like they would if things were happening to us in real life. You use the skills that you have.

I think that also ultimately ends up making you more confident when you approach the page, and readers can sense that confidence in your work.

Jo: Yes. What are your thoughts on character flaws? This is another thing that everyone emphasises.

Do you focus on flaws, or is it more those wants and needs?

Erin: I think in creating characters, everybody has flaws, right? So I don’t so much think about what is their major flaw in this story, but in terms of getting their need met, usually their need somehow feeds into a flaw.

Maybe they’re a character who needs to be more generous, so by nature they’re behaving in a way that’s more selfish. Or maybe they’re a character who needs to have stronger relationships, and so their flaw would then come out of that need, and they are a little bit more withdrawn or standoffish.

So over the course of the story, the events of the story cause them to change, right? The experiences that they have cause them to move a little bit further over on the continuum to getting that need met.

Jo: Another thing I think about a lot is characters in series. As I said, I do character a bit different to you. I’m more of the Lee Child, Jack Reacher vein, or James Bond, where the characters stay similar in each adventure and the plot moves around them.

For people writing series, and you write cosy mysteries, sometimes there are little things we can do.

If people want to have a long-running series, how should they construct characters in that way so that you’re not running out of ideas for that character?

Erin: That’s a great question, and one that I’ve been wrestling with with my cosy mysteries. The way that I am addressing it is I’m acknowledging the experiences that she has from book to book.

So in the first book, she gets herself into trouble solving a mystery, and she gets captured by the criminal. Then in the second book she’s struggling with that. She’s having nightmares. She’s got a little bit of PTSD.

So now she has a new problem that she has to wrestle with for herself that has never happened to her before. So in that type of a series, where it’s not so episodic, where you do have a longer line, you can pull and build from book to book.

You can also build in overarching issues that take two or three books, or four or five books to resolve, whether that’s a larger external mystery or a larger character issue that you want to explore.

Lots of books have on-again, off-again romances, will they or won’t they, that add to the stakes, and that’s also a way that you can explore how the character is dealing with relationships.

What’s preventing her from connecting with that other person? Why is she skittish? What would cause her to trust? What happens when trust is broken again?

So I think that there are all different ways to come at it, depending on the type of character you’re creating and the type of book that you’re writing, and also what type of audience you have for your stories.

There are certain expectations depending on genre for certain audiences. So I think having an understanding of what your audience’s expectations are and what it is that you’re writing is also really important.

Jo: Yes, the longer the series goes on, I mean, if your character’s already been kidnapped and has PTSD in book two, by book 20, they’re pretty beaten up.

Erin: She’s going to be a mess.

Jo: Exactly, and then you have to keep thinking about how many awful ways they can be attacked. It can get pretty tough for our characters. But then, happy people in happy land, as I think James Scott Bell says, is not a story that anyone wants to read.

Erin: Exactly. You just have to come up with new ways to torture them.

Jo: Exactly. Now, just coming back to the book, you have a great chapter on the art of giving critique, and you also talk about receiving it as well.

A lot of writers go to classes or writers’ groups and get eviscerated, often by other writers, for whatever reasons. Personally, I don’t do group work. I hire an editor, a professional editor.

How can we give critique better and receive critique better, and also not even take it from people who we don’t value?

Erin: Those are great questions, and there’s a lot of things to unpack in there. In terms of the way that we give critique, I talk about in the book how I had an epiphany in my daughter’s second grade classroom watching their writer’s workshop.

I thought, “Oh my goodness, this is the way that I’ve been teaching writing and have been taught, to just read your story or hand your story over and just take whatever feedback comes for you.” It was the exact opposite of what I did in my real professional life.

I’ve been in a critique group for over 25 years, the same group. That’s pretty long. That’s a long time to share your work with people. What I realised is we ask for the feedback that we want.

Most of the time, those of us who are writers, we know where we’re struggling and what we’re not doing well and what we need help with.

So when I turn over a piece of writing to my group, or when I’m working with my students and we’re sharing work with one another, I always say, “Identify the areas that you feel like you’re doing well, identify the areas where you need help, and make sure you tell the person where you are in your process.”

I’ve been a professional writer for 15, 17 years, and when I’m working in a brand new draft, if I’m giving something to my critique group and I haven’t even finished the book, I don’t want to lose that momentum on the story I’m working on.

So I tell them, “This is brand new. I need some help figuring out this problem, but I also want your encouragement to finish.” And they deliver.

They also give me a little extra stuff on the side, which is great, but I’m asking for what I want. I’m not telling them, “I only want happy things. I only want to hear good things.” I’m asking them to be honest, but I really believe that guiding people into giving the feedback that you’re looking for is really helpful.

I think it’s incredibly important. So identifying those strengths and weaknesses is key. I also think giving and receiving critique is a skill that we all have to build. It’s not something that comes easily for us, and so practice, and practising with a critique partner that you trust, is really important.

In terms of receiving critique, I think the biggest thing we have to do is identify first, are we ready for feedback? Do you actually want feedback from somebody, or do you want them to tell you that you’re doing a great job and this book is awesome? Real feedback is not just sunshine and rainbows.

So being ready for that, I think, is key. Then understanding—I refer to it in my book as the core of your story—the thing that is so important to you that you would not change, but that everything in your story serves.

So whether that’s a theme or an idea or the thing that’s at the heart of your book, you have to be willing to understand that any feedback that goes to help you strengthen the core is valuable, and then feedback that’s taking away from the core of your story, you can disregard.

I’m not going to change this sister relationship in the story, or I’m not going to take that out. So I’m going to disregard anything that tells me I need to take out that portion of the story. If that makes sense.

Jo: Yes, I think a lot of that makes sense. Then again, we’re both experienced writers, and I feel like creative confidence is something that you grow into. Writers who are earlier on in the journey, they might have 20 years of non-fiction writing, and then they’re writing their first novel.

I think this is really common, where if you’ve written a lot of non-fiction or different forms of writing and then you try a novel, it’s such a different form of writing. Or even if you’re trying a different genre.

I feel like taste is such a big deal as well. I have a lot of writer friends, and some of their writing and my writing, they’re just not the same. I wouldn’t want their critique and they wouldn’t want mine when it comes down to it.

How do we get this creative confidence around taking critique?

Erin: I do think it’s a skill. I also think that practising advocating for your work is really important.

So if a critique goes off the rails, being able to say, “Whoa, this isn’t helpful.” Or directing somebody back, “Hey, I want to talk about X, Y, Z. I want to talk about plot and character, not about my dialogue.”

I think that that’s another skill to build, and I encourage people to actually practise and have some of that language ready when you go into a critique, so that you can say, “Hey, this isn’t helpful to me right now.”

Or if you’re in a group, make sure that the other people in the group, if they see something going off the rails and you get that frozen, deer-in-headlights look, that somebody else can step in and say, “Hey, let’s shift gears a little bit.” And you can stop a critique that’s not going well.

I think the difference, though, is understanding that feedback is part of the process in whatever capacity, whether it’s a critique group or an editor or a reader. This is part of what it means to be a creative person who puts work out in the world.

So developing this skill and practice is important, because it’s coming. Right? And sometimes in ways we can’t control.

Jo: Yes, there’s going to be a review eventually, and you’re going to have to take it. That 25-year group, that’s so interesting to me.

What have you and the other people in that group learned and done in order to keep that together so long? How can we all foster groups like that?

Erin: It’s pretty remarkable, and I’m so grateful to all of them. We’ve definitely grown together. I think the biggest piece of it is we all respect one another in our work.

We write very different things. Not everybody writes children’s books. Some of us write children’s and adults. We’ve had different phases where people have been doing short stories or novels, or they bring an essay.

So it’s being open and receptive and understanding. This might not be something that I am super familiar with, but I’m going to help you in the best way that I can.

Again, having that communication around what it is that we’re sharing, being able to say, “This is what I need help with.”

It’s really helpful to be on the receiving end of that and say, “Oh, okay, I may not understand the topic really well, or I may not read this type of book, but I can definitely look at your dialogue, or I can definitely look at the openings of your chapters and tell you whether or not I feel like I’m being pulled in.”

So being able to communicate with one another, respecting one another’s work, trusting one another, and all of that takes time. So putting that time in and respecting the work that other people are doing, I think, is really important.

Jo: Yes, and it brings up something else in the author community, which is the comparisonitis.

Someone else’s book has done really well and mine hasn’t. Why aren’t I as successful as that person?

So has that come up at all? Because I imagine in 25 years, some people have done really well with book deals, some people haven’t. How has that gone?

Erin: Yes, that’s a great point. My whole career I’ve been about creative community, and I really believe a rising tide lifts all boats.

So for years I was actually the only person in our group who was traditionally published. We’ve actually formed an indie press together now that we’re indie releasing our members’ books, which is another road we can go down.

I think it’s inevitable, right, to have those feelings of jealousy, or that you’re not good enough, and to just recognise that those feelings happen and that’s okay, and to bring it back to the work.

We’re learning together, we’re working together, and everybody’s running their own race. I’m going to help you as best I can run yours, and you’re going to help me run mine, and eventually we’re going to get across the finish line. It doesn’t matter what order we cross in, whatever that finish line is.

So having that kind of generosity, I think, trumps everything. That’s what I always go back to when I have those moments of, “Oh, I wish my book had,” or, “Oh, I wish I had done X or gotten Y.”

I think about the community that I’m in and how generous people are and what can I share with other people to help us all get a little bit further along, and that usually sets me back on the right path.

Jo: I think that’s good. I was going to say generosity is a good word to use.

So let’s come to that indie press then. What made you decide to go that way, and how are you doing that amongst a group like that?

I think it’s becoming a more common thing, but also the practicalities of publishing and marketing can be quite difficult.

Erin: Yes. It was during the pandemic. We were meeting on Zoom, and I may have had maybe one more glass of wine than I should have.

Jo: Excellent. We all did in the pandemic, right?

Erin: During that time… and I had been listening to you for several years at that point.

We were having just a regular critique meeting, and I said, “Hey, we all have these different skills.” One of our critique members is a copywriter, one is a former English teacher, one actually works in publishing in design. We all have these different skills. We’re all great critiquers.

I said, “Why don’t we learn how to indie publish together?” Because it seems really overwhelming. I wanted to release some projects on my own, and I thought, why not do it with a friend instead?

So we formed Table for 7 Press. They all went along with it. I don’t know. All the wine.

Jo: All the wine.

Erin: They got really excited. So we had a couple of conversations about how we would do it. Now what happens is we help one another prepare our projects. We are each responsible for creating our own accounts and uploading our books.

Last year we actually decided that we were going to create an anthology together, and so we each wrote a short story that takes place in one night at one Vietnamese restaurant. Everybody has a different character at the restaurant doing different things at their table. So we published that as a group, called Tonight’s Specials.

We used Draft2Digital to do the royalty splitting, and we all promote and we all market it and we all talk about it, and we all have work in the world and we made this thing, which is amazing. It was such a fun experience.

Jo: That is lovely. I think that is a nice way to do it, and having the royalty splitting is so good, because that is a pain in the neck, as you know. The amount of money that you’d be paying each other and trying to split is not tons. You’re not splitting a million dollars every month.

Erin: Exactly. We’re lucky if we can each buy a cup of coffee.

Jo: Yes, absolutely, and especially after the initial promotional periods.

So anything that you’ve learned in your indie publishing life that surprised you?

I mean, even if you were listening to this show, or you knew about it intellectually as somebody who studies a lot, obviously. What practically might have surprised you, or that you think people should know?

Erin: It’s really fun.

Jo: Oh, that’s good.

Erin: It’s so fun. I love having the control.

I was surprised at how much I loved doing interior design. I use Vellum, but have played with Draft2Digital. I’ve played with different formatting software, and that’s something that I never would have thought that I would have enjoyed. I’m not a graphic design person.

I’ve just been delighted. I love learning new things, and so there’s so much to learn and there’s so many options that it’s really exciting.

As somebody who also has had a traditional career and can continue to have one, it’s a really nice balance. I can produce works and share them with the world that I know wouldn’t fit in a traditional bubble. So I get to make those choices, and I love the control that it gives me.

Jo: Well, that’s great. I think the freedom and the creative control and the financial side of it, for me, is still exciting. And starting on a new project, I’ve just started another book this morning, actually.

Erin: Oh, fantastic.

Jo: You can’t stop us, right?

Erin: Right. There’s always something new to do.

Jo: Yes, there is. On that as well, I did want to ask you about your school visits and workshops. So on your website, because you do middle grade, you do picture books, chapter books, children’s publishing and children’s marketing is quite a different beast, I think.

So tell us about these school visits and workshops, and how do these play a part in your author business?

Erin: My school visits are definitely an important component of that. I love being able to go into schools and talk to readers and talk to teachers and librarians about books. They wax and wane for me because I am a full-time professor, and so I have to work around my teaching schedule.

So I’m not one of those people who’s doing 30 to 50 school visits a year. I’m a little bit more selective. I tend to stay maybe a little bit more regional with them.

It’s an important element for me, and I love being able to connect with readers, and that’s the best thing as a children’s book author, is seeing a kid who just falls in love with your book and is so excited to talk to you about it.

So it is a significant portion of my business at certain points when I have a new book out, or at certain times of year when I’m maybe a little bit more available around my teaching schedule.

Then the workshops that I do tend to be for writer organisations and talking about craft and craft elements, and those I do regularly all year long. I do a lot of them on Zoom or at conferences or on weekends, and so that portion of it is a little bit easier to fit into my schedule.

I love being able to share craft elements and talk about craft with writers at any level, because, again, that element of sharing and generosity and creating creative community is really important to me. So I’m always looking for opportunities to do that, and I really, really enjoy it.

So talking to readers and talking to writers, it’s the best job in the world.

Jo: Well, just back on those school visits in particular, how are you actually getting those in the first place?

How are you marketing to schools and librarians?

Erin: So there’s definitely legwork involved. I have presentations that I’ve refined over the years and practised at local library and school events. I do a lot of outreach to librarians. I join the local state library lists.

I live in New England, in Massachusetts, so the Massachusetts School Library Association, the Massachusetts Reading Association, they have conferences every year.

So I try to pitch myself to go to the conferences, and then you’re in front of people who work at a whole bunch of different schools, and you can get school visits that way.

I don’t do as much direct marketing out to individual schools anymore, just because typically it’s the parent organisations that would bring in authors, through grants and funding, and those parent volunteer leaders change. So I try to always go through the librarians, and then the librarians can take it to their school officials.

So working through those conferences and those organisations, they all have Facebook pages, and so being able to connect with them, and then things spread by word of mouth. So I’m able to get visits that way.

Then, on nice occasions, my book ends up on state reading lists across the United States, and then that’s another opportunity where librarians will see books that show up on those lists and invite authors to come in and speak. So I’ve been very fortunate to have that happen as well at different times in my career.

Then once I go somewhere, it’s like anything else. You keep track of who you meet, where you’ve been, get their email address, and then keep in touch with them and remind them that you’re here, and would love to come back to their school, and build those relationships.

Jo: It strikes me from everything you’ve talked about that you have very much had a long-term view of your career and your relationships and the generosity, and that your career is built because of that, as opposed to trying to achieve something at a specific point.

It’s almost like you’ve just had that long-term view.

Erin: I think it’s definitely emerged. I learned and realised very quickly in the traditional sphere that diversification is really important. I’m somebody who’s had a bunch of different books published, but I’ve also been involved in all of the turmoil in the traditional publishing industry.

I’ve had editors leave. I’ve had imprints close. I’ve had books go out of print. So, very quickly I learned that I can’t put all my eggs in one basket.

I’m also fortunate in that I have my skills as a teacher that I can incorporate in my writing life in sharing and talking about craft. So it became evident that being able to do lots of different things in the community was beneficial and important to me.

I love being able to talk to new writers who aren’t as established. It brings me a level of satisfaction that I did not even expect when I first started this. Being part of the writing community, and learning now about the indie community and being part of that community, I just find it so valuable.

I think that that contributes to longevity, is being able to adapt and change and diversify yourself, and give back.

Jo: Oh, fantastic. Well, it’s a great book, and that is Bad Choices Make Good Stories.

So where can people find you and your books online?

Erin: My website is the easiest place. It’s ErinDionne.com.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Erin. That was great.

Erin: Thank you, Joanna. It was so much fun to talk to you.
The post Bad Choices Make Good Stories: Character, Critique And Community With Erin Dionne first appeared on The Creative Penn.