How can you find your voice through writing in different genres and mediums over the years? How can you shift your mindset around book marketing, whatever your age? Betsy Lerner shares her experience of writing and books over decades in the publishing industry.

In the intro, Going Local: Authors on the payoffs and pitfalls of hometown sales and promotion [Self-Publishing Advice]; Selling Books in Person at Live Events;
Artist = Entrepreneur [Steven Pressfield]; Ecosystems come and go [Seth Godin]; 1000 True Fans [Kevin Kelly].

Plus, Exeter Cathedral, Death Valley, a Thriller; Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition; and The AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinar.

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 

Betsy Lerner is an award-winning editor, literary agent and the author of fiction, non-fiction and memoir. Her book for writers is The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers.

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

Show Notes

• The publishing hierarchy—and the love of books that brings us together
• Tips to overcome your perception of writers vs. your own potential
• Balancing the desire for success and the fear of failure
• How writing can help one cope with grief
• Balancing editorial feedback and maintaining creative confidence
• Why publishers want their authors to have a pre-existing platform
• Embracing TikTok and BookTok at any age
• Navigating the current publishing industry

You can find Betsy at BetsyLerner.com or on Tiktok at @BetsyLerner.

Transcript of Interview with Betsy Lerner

Joanna: Betsy Lerner is an award-winning editor, literary agent and the author of fiction, non-fiction and memoir. Her book for writers is The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers.
So welcome to the show, Betsy.

Betsy: Thank you so much.

Joanna: Oh, it’s great to have you on. So first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you have managed to experience almost every aspect of publishing across your career.

Betsy: Publishing was actually not my first dream. I went to NYU for film school my freshman year, and I was “invited to leave” after the first year. That was devastating.

I was not kicked out of school completely. I finished and got my degree in English, and then, like most English majors, was at a complete loss of what to do. I could not get a publishing job because I couldn’t pass a typing test, which was required back in 1982.

So I did a stop gap, and I worked at an investment bank for a couple of years in the library. I got it together to apply to graduate school, and I went for my MFA in poetry.

At that time, I interned at a literary agency. That was really my first bite into the publishing world. I absolutely loved it.

I loved being around writers and books and book jackets and galleys and all the accoutrements of that world.

So when I finished my MFA, I went into publishing. I climbed the editorial ladder, as one does in the States. I’m not quite sure if it’s the same in the UK. You go from being an editorial assistant to an assistant editor, editor, senior editor, etc.

I really thrived and loved it very much. I became an agent when I had my child, and pre-pandemic there was no flexibility in the publishing houses. You couldn’t even work at home for a half a day, let alone remote work. So I eventually crossed over to agenting, really for the flexibility of my time.

Over these 40 years, I managed to write a few books every few years or so. I think the writer in me always sort of played second fiddle to the editor or agent in me. It always sort of came out one way or another.

Joanna: I love that. You said how much you found a home in publishing because you love books and all the things of being around books.

That’s what I wanted people to remember. Often, there’s always this stuff about, oh, this editor or this publishing house or this agent, or whatever. People always want to moan. We’re just all book people, right?

We all love books. That’s why, despite all the ups and downs, we all want to be in this industry.

Betsy: Absolutely.

There’s, in my mind, sort of this hierarchy where everybody wants to be the writer. Then next best is the editor. Then next best is the marketing, publicity, sales person.

Also, all the wonderful designers and illustrators and people who make book jackets. Everybody is all in it together, but I’ve often found that the people behind the scenes get very little credit.

I always, as an editor and even as an agent, always really loved and respected all the people all up and down the chain who contributed. Yes, all book people, big readers, movie goers, pop culture people.

I’ve had a wonderful 40 years in the industry, even with all the ups and downs, and there are many downs.

Joanna: Yes, we’ll come back to those. You said that everyone wants to be the writer, like that’s the first thing. In the book, you have this wonderful line:

“When I entered the business, I believed that writers were exalted beings.”

That made me smile because I remember feeling like that. I always was a reader, and I thought I could never be a writer, because they’re so special, and it stopped me.

So what can you say to people listening to encourage people, like if they’re still feeling the separation between what they think a writer is and the truth of it?

Betsy: Well, the answer is very complex, but it’s also very simple.

You have to write.

There are so many people who say they want to be writers and dream of being writers and have stories inside them, etc, etc.

The fact is if you aren’t actually writing, whatever form it takes, it’s not going to happen.

It’s a craft and it takes a lot of time and practice.

So I always tell people, do you write diaries? Do you keep notebooks? Are you writing blogs? Are you doing Substack? What writing are you actually doing?

It doesn’t all have to be prose. I wrote screenplays for years. I blogged for years. All of that was in the development of my voice and in my ability to story tell. Then, of course, all the editing that I did, I really learned what goes into making a book.

The key thing is simply writing and understanding that all the writing you do is either in practice of the professional writing you might do, or it’s just who you are and how you express yourself.

Joanna: Well, it’s interesting there. You talk there about you have to write and the different types of writing, but, of course — 

You were 64 when you wrote your first novel.

You’ve written loads of different things. Tell us about that. There’s this idea that you have to be young and beautiful to do your debut novel, right?

The people who seem to get all the press are the young debut writers. So tell us a bit more about that experience.

Betsy: When I was in my 20s, if I could have published a book, I’m sure I would have. I did not have it together. I went into publishing really, as I said, sort of as a default.

I did have my MFA in poetry, and many of my fellow poets were going off to write and teach. I just didn’t have access to any of those opportunities, nor did I think I would be particularly good at it.

Fast forward, it was the pandemic. I did have more time on my hands. I had also just come through an extremely traumatic time in my life. My niece and nephew were killed by a drunk driver, then my mom passed away, and then my best friend committed suicide. Those tragedies all happened in the space of four or five months. I was in some sort of shock.

I was in deep grief, and I guess I wrote my way out of it.

I just sat down one day, opened my laptop and wrote the first words of the book, which are: “Here are the ways I could start this story.”

I wrote for seven months, four or five hours a day, really until my hands cramped. I just poured this book out of myself. I don’t think magic happened and I wrote a novel, I do think it is based on 40 years of keeping diaries, blogging, developing my voice. Writing those screenplays really taught me how to write plot.

So I think all the writing I did came together in this novel in my mid-60s. I was very fortunate that I was able to get it published. I found a small publisher who was able to say, instead of being a hot, young debut novelist, I was a senior, late bloomer. I had all this experience.

We were able to do a bunch of publicity around the fact that I was a literary agent turned novelist. So my age sort of worked for me, both in the experience of writing and the attention I was able to get.

Joanna: That’s a great way to put it. Obviously those tragedies are awful, and it’s amazing that you managed to write your way out of it, as you said. Just for that, is the book about surviving tragedy?

How did those things that happened to you emerge in the writing?

Or do you think it was just an entirely different thing? You better tell us the title as well.

Betsy: Well, the title is Shred Sisters. It’s really a book about two sisters. The older sister has bipolar illness, and the younger sister is the narrator.

It’s coming-of-age and how she lived under the shadow of this very destructive, and yet charismatic sister. It doesn’t involve the tragedies at all, except for the fact that a number of people do die in the book.

It is a way, I guess, that I really coped with a lot of grief, but it’s a separate story from that. I feel that all of those events are deeply connected to my writing fiction for the first time.

Joanna: Well, it’s interesting because you’ve also written several memoirs, including Food and Loathing, which I saw that title and was like, oh my goodness, that is such a powerful title. That’s about disordered eating.

The Bridge Ladies is about your mum. You’ve clearly delved into really personal things before. This book, The Forest for the Trees, is also really personal.

So how do you do that? I do it now, but I know how hard it is for people to really put themselves out there in words.

Fear of judgment is a big thing. How did you get over that for your memoir and everything you write?

Betsy: I think because I kept diaries from the age of nine or 10, daily diaries for my whole life. Then when I became interested in poetry, it was the confessional poets who really drew me in. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell were among my favorite writers.

So I’ve always been interested in first-person writing, in intimate writing, and confessional writing. Then as an editor, I really became known for working with authors on their memoirs.

I worked on Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy. I eventually became the agent and editor for Patti Smith’s Just Kids and all of her memoirs. It’s really what I most love and gravitate towards.

When I started to write The Forest for the Trees, I didn’t see that as an entirely personal book. I was writing in my persona as an editor. Then when I did write Food and Loathing, I think I just felt that it was my time to write.

I wanted to write my story. I felt bold. I didn’t want to pull back, really, If I was going to do it, I was going to do it—I guess is what I was thinking.

Do I now sometimes regret some of the things I wrote in that book? Possibly. I had a lot of bravado, I guess. I had worked on so many memoirs, and I just thought I wanted to tell my story. I was lucky that I had the chance to publish it.

Joanna: It’s so interesting. You keep saying that you’ve been lucky to publish or you were lucky to find a publisher. You’ve been in publishing for 40 years, and you’re an agent.

How is it that somebody like you would even struggle to find a publisher?

Betsy: Well, I guess it’s more that my ego, my self-esteem, all come from being an editor and an agent. If you meet me on a plane and you say, what do you do? I’ll say, I’m a literary agent. I would never say I’m a writer.

It doesn’t matter how many books I have published. It’s just not my identity, and I don’t know why that is. I mean, it’s a shame, I should own it. I still feel more comfortable behind the desk.

I do feel very lucky. A lot of people in publishing write and want to be published. I just don’t take it for granted. Yes, I had connections. I was able to find an agent more easily than someone who’s not in the business.

I still think it’s a privilege to find people who are willing to actually pay you and work with you and put your work out there.

Joanna: Interesting. Well, then coming back to your work editing memoirs. If you have a writer who brings you a manuscript and you’re like, they have not let it all out—

How do you encourage a writer to be more personal in their writing?

Betsy: If I’ve accepted a book and I’m working with the person, we have an understanding that I would expect certain revisions from them. I would be very clear about what they would be.

That might include going deeper in certain parts and investigating certain questions that are left clearly unsaid or holes in the manuscript.

I recently read a manuscript by a woman with a child with a disability, and she never described what the disability was. Yet there was something very moving about the book, and I said to her, this can’t be a question mark if you’re going to write this book. So that was a very obvious one.

Sometimes it’s just more subtle. Sometimes you say too much, actually, and understatement can be more effective. It’s not necessarily saying more, it’s just crafting. Memoirs are crafted. They propose to be the truth, but they’re really a work of art, in my opinion.

The quality of the writing is what makes people invested and believe in the story that they’re being given.

Joanna: Well, in another aspect of the book, you say —

“Most writers have very little choice in what they write about.”

You talk about the obsessions, and themes returning, and this finding your voice.

I remember finding this very difficult at the beginning of my career. Like, what is this finding your voice? So there might be people listening who feel that way. So how can writers identify these things?

Betsy: That’s such a good question. I think it’s organic, and it starts probably with what you gravitate towards as a reader. If you sit down to write science fiction, my guess is that you’ve read a ton of it as a kid and as a teenager.

You’ve immersed yourself in that world. It’s a world you love. It’s a world that sparks your own imagination.

I think I did a lot of personal writing because of how much I connected with books like The Bell Jar and Diary of Anne Frank and things like that when I was a girl.

So I think your voice is part of the world that you immerse yourself in. Becoming good at it really just takes a lot of practice, and getting feedback, and doing revisions, and putting in the hours, putting in the hard work.

It’s very unusual that somebody who’s never read in a certain genre is suddenly going to be great at that genre. At least in my experience, people write out of the worlds that they know.

Joanna: I guess with author voice, so this idea of creative confidence as well—like, I’m pretty confident in what is my J.F. Penn writing, which is my fiction and memoir brand. I know what is me, and I work with an editor, but she also knows me.

Now, I hear from people who work with editors, and there’s a real line between an editor trying to make your book better and an editor who you feel might be affecting your voice.

How can people listening ascertain where an editor would sit on that continuum and when an editor is a good fit?

Betsy: I’ve had many editors, and I would say everybody has added something of value. Certainly there were people who also stymied me with their notes, or even frightened me or put me off completely. I’ve had every experience.

Then with my novel, I had the most wonderful editor who completely helped me make the book better. They actually really taught me how to be a better writer in the process, which is something that has stayed with me even beyond working on that book.

It’s very intimidating if you’re a new writer and your editor tells you something, you think you have to do it. It takes a bit of spine to not do it.

Then are you doing that at your own peril? Are you being defensive? Are you not really listening? Or is the advice bad?

When you’re a beginning writer, it’s very difficult to parse all of that. It takes time and experience and even a little bit of luck to find the editor with whom you feel you’re really a hand in glove in what you’re doing.

I think a lot of people do suffer at the hands of editors. Then, of course, many people are extremely helped, then everything in the middle.

Joanna: Well, I think that’s the point—it’s not like the first editor you ever work with is it for the rest of your life. You will have different editors in your life. The relationships will be different, a bit like our friendships or partners or whatever. So yes, I think you kind of touched on that.

I also was interested, you have a lot in this book, The Forest for the Trees, around mindset. I particularly like this line: “The desire for success and the fear of failure run along a continuum.” So talk about that from your own perspective.

How have you balanced desire for success and the fear of failure?

Betsy: I love that question. It’s something I think about probably on a daily basis. I think that the act of writing, the desire to be in your own mind, in your own sort of playground, and the beautiful solitude of it all, is really what the heart of writing is all about.

At the same time, I would say most people are writing, even in a diary, with the hope of being read. So they’re very connected. When you read writers’ diaries, you can tell that they’re not just writing for themselves. It’s almost as if they have an audience in mind.

So I think that when we’re writing, it is about the desire to communicate, even though we really are writing alone, and in many ways for ourselves.

The ego can get very tied up in that. There are some writers who are obsessed with success. I work with one writer who’s a complete and total recluse, and never reads her reviews, and doesn’t want to know anything besides just getting her contract and getting her book out there. She does no publicity either, by the way, which makes it very difficult to publish her.

That’s what I mean about the continuum. There are some people who are so blinded by the desire for success that their work almost seems to be secondary.

Obviously, the best is to find some balance between your discipline, and love of writing, and the outcome for any book that you create, and how much energy you’re going to put into that, and how much the world is going to welcome it or not.

So many books get published with no fanfare at all, and it’s always just a very few every season that seem to get all the attention.

Writers have to learn how to live with those outcomes and see if they’re willing to keep going.

Joanna: How have your books gone in that way? Have you hit the success as a writer? I mean, you said before that you didn’t identify that way.

Do you feel like you are a successful writer, as well as an award-winning editor and all the other things you are?

Betsy: Yes, but I work very hard at it.

Part of why I was so drawn to your podcast, in fact, is that —

I love marketing. I love publicity. I love figuring out how to get the work out there.

I’ve mostly done that for my clients and my authors, but when I have published my books, with each consecutive book, I’ve gotten better and bolder at doing the marketing.

So with this novel, for instance, I pulled out all the stops. I did everything I humanly could. I even got on TikTok and befriended book influencers. I made fortune cookies with lines from the book inside and gave them out at readings.

I wrote hundreds of note cards to librarians and booksellers and people in the media that I had even the most tangential relationship with. I’ve been helping my authors for all of these years try to get attention for their books in every imaginable way possible.

With Forest for the Trees, with my first book, I did write to a ton of writing conferences and MFA programs and offered to give talks and send free copies and do that sort of thing. I am very proud of it because it’s still in print all these years later. I still hear from people that it’s helped them, and that’s so rewarding.

Joanna: Wow, everyone’s still reeling at your comment, “I love marketing.”

So yes, obviously you’re full of ideas of different kinds of things. Then you also mentioned this writer before who’s a recluse and doesn’t do any marketing. So how can writers listening change their attitude?

How can people learn to love marketing like you do, and be creative with it as you’ve obviously been?

Betsy: Well, it’s really difficult, since most writers do enjoy their solitude and may not be the most social people going. Some people just turn their nose up at marketing. People have such a strange idea of marketing and sales.

In my mind, what it all boils down to is communicating and figuring out that one-line pitch that can get people interested in your book, then just putting a lot of elbow grease into it.

I often use the metaphor of, if you were to open a store and you lovingly furnished it with all sorts of goods that you’ve hand-picked, and you’ve made the store so beautiful, but then all you did was put an open sign in the door—nobody’s really—maybe one or two people might walk in.

If you wanted a lot of customers, you’d have to do some outreach. So it’s just outreach.

It is a different head.

You have to be very sensitive to be a writer, but you also have to be sort of thick-skinned to get out there and sell your book and market your book.

These days, even the big publishers often don’t do all that much, and it really is up to the author if they want to get the word out.

Another thing I often ask writers too is, what are your goals? What do you want this book to do for you? How many copies do you think you want to sell? Do you want to use it as a calling card to get a job or to get speaking engagements?

Do you have a political agenda? Why are you writing this book? What do you want it to do in the world?

A lot of writers say, “I hadn’t thought about that.” So I say, think about that, and then let’s make a plan that’s commensurate with your goals.

Joanna: Yes, you said there that a lot of publishers don’t even do much marketing for books anymore.

I think certainly in the self-publishing and the independent publishing side of things, I hear often people say, “I don’t want to do any marketing, so I’ll just get a traditional publisher, and then they will do it all for me.” Right? Is that just not true anymore?

Betsy: It’s not true anymore. It’s not true at all. In fact —

Publishers these days are most drawn to authors who come with a platform —

either a large social media platform or an institutional platform, because that helps them sell their books. They’ve identified the market already.

It’s disheartening. I remember the first time I was agenting a book, and the editor, before even asking, “What is the title? Who is the author? What’s it about?” said, “What’s their platform?” I was so taken aback.

Another time, I heard an author, an editor, I was pitching a book, and I heard clicking, and I knew the editor was looking up the sales figures for the author rather than listening to my pitch about my passion for the book.

That’s when I knew—and I’d say that was about 10 years ago—the landscape had completely shifted from content-based material to platform-based material.

Joanna: I think people, even though we’re all book people, like we said at the beginning, people still have to make money in a business. I think it’s important that we think about that sales side, even though, as you said, it’s like a different head.

I do have to come back to TikTok, because I did actually go and look at your TikTok channel. I have basically refused to do TikTok. I’m like, I do audio as my main marketing channel, and I do a little bit of social media.

You’re on TikTok, so tell us about that. Why did you decide to jump in?

What kind of things do you do? And are you still doing it?

Betsy: Yes, I’m still doing it. I love it.

I went on out of curiosity, because as I said, the landscape was changing. As of about somewhere in the middle of COVID, people began saying that BookTok was the only thing moving the needle for selling books. Everyone saw the Colleen Hoover phenomenon, and then romantasy.

I started to recognize that it wasn’t just genre and romantasy, but literary books were also getting a big bump on BookTok. I decided I had to see what this was that everyone said was moving the needle, even though most people in publishing were not going on BookTok at all or getting their marketing teams excited about it.

Just a couple of publishers were at the vanguard. In any case, I wanted to learn about it as a literary agent to help my clients, but also because I had a novel coming out and thought maybe I could get some of these book influencers to talk about my book.

So I got on the platform, started learning, and started became part of the community by leaving comments on other BookTokers’ videos. Some dialogue started happening, and I reached out to many book influencers, asking if I could send them my galley.

A lot of them said yes and many posted about my book. So that was really exciting for me watching young people with tattoos and nose rings holding my little book and saying why they liked it so much. It was fantastic.

I also thought maybe I could create some content. I started reading snippets from my diaries from my 20s.

I found very quickly that I could build an audience, and many young people resonated with my diary entries and made them feel less alone in the world.

Most of my entries are all about being someone in their 20s who is sad and lost. Turns out there’s still a lot of lost and said people in their 20s out there.

Joanna: I was so impressed with your videos.

I feel—I don’t know, and this is totally about me, this is not about anyone else—but that I somehow have to do my hair and makeup. I know it’s not meant to be scripted, but to turn on a video and start talking or share bits of your diary as you do.

You have your face there and everything. You’re there. It’s not just your diaries. If people are worried, like me—

What would you say to people like me? Is it really worth it? Do people have to get over themselves?

Betsy: That’s a great question. When I first started trying on BookTok, I refused to be on camera. I was just posting these little literary tidbits of books that I liked. I was just messing around.

One of our clients, who’s big on BookTok, called me and said, “Your stuff is adorable, but you’re not getting any traction. You won’t get any unless you get on camera.”

I said, “No way, no way, no way.” About a month later, I saw her somewhere. She said, “So how are you doing on the platform?” I said, “I’m not getting anywhere. “

She said, “Are you going to get on camera or not?” I said, “I don’t think so.” She explained how my posts were all random and that —

To get traction, you have to pick a lane, and do something people know you for. Think of it as your own little TV show.

That’s when I thought, all right, maybe I’ll try it. What the hell?

By the way, nobody I know is on TikTok, so I had nothing to be worried about. That night, I went home and realized I have all these diaries. Maybe I can do this. That first post that I did went viral, so that was very encouraging. Not all posts go viral—many don’t.

I have built an audience. I have over 30,000 followers. My posts generally get a good reception. Every now and then, one goes viral. I find it extremely exciting. I’m a child. What can I say? I love attention. I love the app.

I’ve made some very good friends. Even in real life, I’ve met some of these BookTokers. They’re all young, and I just think they’re fantastic.

Joanna: I love that. It’s interesting because I got on Twitter, as it was back then, in 2009. For those first few years of being in Twitter, a lot of my friends in real life are people I met on Twitter back then. I built a lot of my business on Twitter.

Obviously, that platform has changed. That almost feels like what you’re talking about there with TikTok and BookTok. So I love to hear that. Hopefully, that encourages people of different ages. I always hear people say to me, it’s only for people in their 20s and 30s.

There really are a lot of different ages and demographics now, aren’t there?

Betsy: Absolutely. Also, I’m a big science person. Within TikTok, there’s everything under the sun, including STEMTok. I watch a lot of scientists talk about their work. I’ve even found clients on TikTok. We represent this incredible linguist called Etymology Nerd and sold his book.

I’m working with an ornithologist who has a fantastic following and is a wonderful communicator. Yes, there are a lot of cowboys dancing without their shirts on and kitten videos, that’s all there.

If you have a real interest, you’ll probably also find people making content, either there, or on YouTube, or even on Instagram now people are doing videos.

It is sort of the Wild West. There’s a lot out there, and it takes some time to figure out how to use the platform. I’m really happy to hear you found real friends through Twitter. I think people don’t understand that social networks are also about connecting.

The BookTokers who I’ve become friends with are people who, if I’d met them at a party, I would have loved to have met them. They’re young, vibrant, read tons of books, and have tons of opinions. Yes, and they’re not just talking about their knee replacements, and mortgages, and Medicare. I really appreciate that.

Joanna: I love that. You are really fun!

What I actually really enjoyed about your book is it’s very ‘voicey.’ I can hear your fun and your opinions, which I really like. I think that’s great. Obviously, people can check you out on TikTok.

I wanted to come back to publishing because in the book, you say,

“The cyclical nature of the publishing business, the brutality of the media, and the vagaries of the marketplace are things that we all have to get used to.”

So I wondered if you could maybe give us a perspective on the changes of the publishing industry that are still happening, and, in fact, even more so with AI. How can authors now navigate the industry?

Betsy: That’s such a big question. It’s so difficult. At least in the States, the biggest problem is when I entered publishing, there were about 40 publishers. Now they’re called the Big Five. It’s all been conglomerated.

There are many imprints within each major publisher, but they all basically run the same way and have the same mindset about publishing. People want either the hot, sexy debut author, or the author with the big platform, or the celebrity, or the CEO. That’s what the world really wants.

If you’re a literary writer or genre writer, you might have to make your way not looking at the big publishers in the beginning, as you develop your audience and grow as a writer.

Getting published by a major publisher isn’t the end-all and be-all anymore.

Even someone like Colleen Hoover started by self-publishing. There’s a real path outside of traditional publishing. I still work within traditional publishing. I still am able to break writers in, but it’s much more difficult that it used to be.

There’s much more scrutiny before a book is acquired. Authors just have to have a bigger platform or some real literary fairy dust that’s been sprinkled on them, either by other famous writers, or an MFA program, or publishing in a very high quality magazine.

I would just say that — 

You better really love writing, because it’s a long haul and it’s very difficult to sustain a career. So it just has to be what you have to do.

I’ve always written part time. I’ve always had my day job. I think most writers have to survive by also doing other jobs, unless you really break through.

So you just have to understand that you’re probably going to have to do other work to sustain yourself, but if writing is what you have to do, then you’ll find a way.

Joanna: You said earlier, every couple of years, you end up writing another book. So you clearly can’t help yourself.

Betsy: Exactly. For all the books I’ve published, I have many unfinished notebooks. I have many projects that have never seen the light of day. I’ve got seven screenplays—if there are any producers listening. I have an MFA collection of poetry that will never see the light of day.

That’s all fine, because that’s all of what you do to develop as a writer, and that goes into the books that you do eventually publish. All of the unpublished work is, to me, I’m as proud of that as I am of the published work. More than that, it sustained me and kept me going, because that’s really how I live.

Joanna: Fantastic.

Where can people find you and your books online?

Betsy: Well, there’s always Amazon, of course. I love to direct people to Bookshop, which basically is also an online a bookseller that taps your local booksellers, which is fantastic. Also Indiebound.

I’m on TikTok at @BetsyLerner. I have my blog, which is BetsyLerner.com. That’s really a community of miserable writers coming to check in on the misery that I post.

Now, only maybe every few weeks, but I had posted for many, many years, and that’s all there in the archives. For any writing lonely hearts, I have a wonderful community of malcontents who read my blog.

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

Betsy: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

The post Finding Your Voice, Writing Across Genre And Loving Book Marketing With Betsy Lerner first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How will generative AI change search and book discoverability in the years ahead? How can you make sure your books and your author website can be found in AI tools like ChatGPT? Thomas Umstattd Jr. joins me to discuss Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and how it will replace traditional SEO marketing.

I first covered this topic in Dec 2023, How Generative Search Will Impact Book Discoverability in the Next Decade. As ever, I was early, but those changes are now starting to happen. Thomas recently covered the topic on his Novel Marketing Podcast on Does ChatGPT Recommend Your Book?

This episode is supported by my patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Thomas Umstattd Jr. is the CEO of AuthorMedia.com, as well as an award-winning professional speaker, non-fiction author, and host of the Novel Marketing Podcast and the Christian Publishing Show.

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 authors can benefit from AI optimization
• Principles authors need to keep in mind as search is changing
• Different AI models and their capabilities
• Making your author website LLM-friendly
• How to utilize Goodreads to improve your GEO
• The future of AI agents in book buying
• Staying positive and curious in the ever-changing AI landscape

You can find Thomas at AuthorMedia.com.

Transcript of Interview with Thomas Umstattd Jr.

Joanna: Thomas Umstattd Jr. is the CEO of AuthorMedia.com, as well as an award-winning professional speaker, non-fiction author, and host of the Novel Marketing Podcast and the Christian Publishing Show. So welcome back to the show, Thomas.

Thomas: Thanks, Joanna, for having me.

Joanna: It’s great to have you back. Now, for everyone listening, you were on the show a few years back. So we’re going to dive straight into the topic today, which is based around a recent episode on your Novel Marketing Podcast on “AI Optimization For Authors: Does ChatGPT Recommend Your Book?”

I was like, yes, I really want to talk about this. Why did you decide to get into this topic now?

What did you see in the author community that made you want to help authors see AI differently?

Thomas: Well, what triggered this topic was actually the Google I/O Conference, where one of the features they were demoing was the ability to take a picture of a stack of books and then get recommendations on additional books that were like that book.

As somebody who spends a lot of time in tech world, books and authors are often the example that the tech people use to demonstrate new capabilities of AI models.

Often, unless people listen to your show, that new tech does not actually get translated to the author community. Most authors are not watching the Google IO Conference or even summaries of it.

Joanna: Except you and me!

Thomas: So I was like, oh, I need to do some tests with this. So I started testing different models to see how they would recommend books. I kind of realized, oh, this is already happening. People are already asking AI all the questions of their life.

Google search traffic is way down.

People are moving those big questions of their life conversations away from traditional search engines and towards AI interactions.

If you can get the AI to recommend your book, you’ll be well-positioned for ongoing sales in this new era.

If you’re holding on to ranking on Google search, or even Amazon search, as your only way of finding customers, sales are going to keep slipping, and you won’t understand why.

Joanna: It’s interesting. I have been using ChatGPT primarily since November ’22 when it first came out. I use it instead of Google.

So I have started to use Gemini again, but I mainly use ChatGPT. Also on my phone, it’s what I use. So what about your personal behavior?

Do you use a lot of AI for normal life that you once would have used Google for?

Thomas: I do.

In fact, AI has boosted my productivity so much that we’ve been able to launch a new podcast, a whole additional podcast, called Author Update. It is a news podcast once a week, just covering publishing news.

So much of the pieces of that, like taking the transcript and turning it into a blog, creating the timestamps for YouTube, creating the thumbnails for YouTube, creating the titles for YouTube. That’s all done by AI.

Different AI tools that I’ve built for each one of those pieces that two years ago would have been incredibly time consuming. There would have been no way we could have added yet another show to the mix.

Joanna: I didn’t know that. Interestingly, I have also brought back my Books and Travel Podcast, which I stopped doing a couple of years ago because it was too much work, and it’s not one that’s monetized.

I also brought it back in the last few months, because I was like, do you know what? I can now do so much of this with AI that it doesn’t matter so much.

Actually, one of the things with that show which is interesting, is a lot of the times I’m interviewing people with different accents. A lot of the speech to text, the transcription previously, has been very good with American men, but it hasn’t been so good with British women or anyone else of any nationality speaking English.

Now I find it’s all very good. So it’s like people who maybe last year might have said, “Oh no, this still isn’t not good enough,” it really is now, isn’t it, for a lot of use cases?

Thomas: Yes, there’s a kind of person who tried ChatGPT when it first came out. They tried GPT 3.5, they played around with it for a couple of hours, they weren’t impressed, and then they came to a conclusion.

The conclusion that they came to was not that this particular tool isn’t ready, but instead, the category of AI is no good.

What they haven’t realized is that so far in 2025 a new model that’s the best in the world has come out almost every 10 days.

Almost every episode of Author Update we’re like, “And there’s a new AI model on the top of the benchmarks.” It’s like they all take turns, and now they’re starting to snipe each other.

So Gemini was number one for like two days, and then Anthropic is, like, “Here,” and pushed them off.

Joanna: “Here’s Claude 4.”

Thomas: “You want to be number one. We’re going to take that away from you.” If you were to go back and use GPT now, even the free version, it would be dramatically better than that first experience you had.

Really where the power is once you start paying for the AI models. Once you’re using GPT-4.1 or -4.5, or Gemini 2.5 Pro. I really like Grok for research. I found that Grok’s Deep Search functionality is unbelievable.

It has real time access to knowledge and real time access to X. So for doing research on basically any topic, Grok has won in every test that I’ve done.

Joanna: Oh, that’s interesting. So I use o3.

My primary model is ChatGPT o3 for pretty much everything, unless it’s just something very basic that I would Google.

Then I use Deep Research on ChatGPT with o3, and also Gemini 2.5. So I do use Grok, but only when I’m on X. This is interesting—we’re going to come back to search—but interestingly, with all the stuff with the Deep Research, for example.

People listening, you get like, a 20- to 30-plus-page report on what you want to research with loads of sources and links, and most of them never, ever surface social media links. Grok on X obviously does, but that’s the only one. So I find that really interesting, too.

Thomas: Yes. In fact, that was one of the things I researched for my episode on AI optimization. I was curious which social networks affect which AI models, because some social networks affect all of the models, and some social networks have impacts on basically none.

TikTok and Bluesky don’t touch anything. You can be the biggest deal on TikTok, and none of the AI will know you exist.

YouTube influences Gemini. X is exclusively for Grok. Facebook and Instagram supposedly are tied to Llama.

Joanna: Who uses Llama?!

Thomas: Llama is so bad, it doesn’t matter if it’s connected to Facebook. Talking to all AI is like talking to a child, but talking to Llamas is like talking to a toddler that hasn’t quite figured out how the words work and how the sentences work.

You can learn to understand it, but it’s like, why bother when all the other AIs are like talking to middle schoolers who can now do research reports and are actually quite smart?

Joanna: I was going to say, yes, it depends on the context. Well, let’s bring it back. You mentioned the Google IO Conference, and I also went to the overviews of that.

Sundar Pichai said a few things. I’ve just got a quote here. He said,

“AI overviews have scaled to over 1.5 billion users in 200 countries, driving over 10% growth in the types of queries that show them.” Sundar Pichai

So if people have used Google, I guess in the last six months, really, but a lot more in the last month or so, is if you ask something on google.com and then you will get this AI overview.

So you don’t necessarily have to click into the article. So given that, I’ve heard it also called GEO, generative engine optimization, instead of SEO.

What are some of the principles that authors need to keep in mind if search is changing this way?

Thomas: So one of the fascinating things about AI is that it’s very much a last shall be first and the first shall be last technology. So it’s taken a lot of things that didn’t used to matter very much, and it’s making them suddenly matter a whole lot.

The two biggest winners of this new era is the author website, which has been kind of declining in popularity, particularly amongst indie authors because most indie authors are all in on Amazon all the time. They’re not wide. They dream of maybe someday going wide, but the KU money is just too good.

So if your only existence is on Amazon, it’s very easy to ask the question, why does my website matter? Now, the website did matter, right? Being able to sell direct was important. Being able to build your email list was important. Being able to communicate directly to readers was important.

There was a kind of author who’s like, “Eh, I’m just on Amazon. I can ignore the website.”

Now your website is your primary way of influencing large language models that train on the open web.

You can’t fully control Amazon, you can’t fully control anywhere else on the web, but you can control your own website down to the robots.txt file. You have full control over it.

That is really, really important for educating an LLM about your book, and about your book’s relationship to your other books, and about your book’s relationship to the other books in the world.

So it’s like, “This book is like this other book by this other author,” and your blog, on your website, is a really useful tool for that.

Joanna: You mentioned the word control, and that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about. Now, I’ve had my own author websites since 2008. You know, old school like you.

I also have Shopify stores. Shopify is actually interesting in that they are going AI first, and there are rumors of some kind of collaboration between OpenAI and Shopify in terms of surfacing direct links, which is interesting in itself.

So, yes, your control, your author website. Also we’ve seen—well, we’re going to come back to Amazon—but they’re doing a lot of things with their own AI.

What are some specific things that we can put on our author websites? I mean, if I say, okay, so I’ve got an about page, which is about me. Then do I have a book page?

On a book page, what are some of the things that I might add that the LLMs would be interested in?

Thomas: So here’s the classic mistake.

An author gets started writing, and they have “Home”, “About”, “Book” and “Contact”. It’s kind of the classic author website. Then they write a second book, and they’re like, oh, well, I need to put this new book at the top of my book page, and I’ll rename it to “Books”.

Well, that is a blunder, believe it or not, because now you no longer have a page dedicated to either one of the books. So you’ve done the new book you just wrote a disservice, and you did your existing book a disservice.

So one really easy change that many of you listening can do right now is you just create a new page for each book, and you copy and paste the content from your Books page into each individual’s book page.

Then you make your Books page just a bunch of thumbnails for your covers. Big, beautiful covers, even bigger and more beautiful than the thumbnails on Amazon. They click on that cover, and it takes them to an entire page just about the book. So that’s step one. You can do that in 15 minutes.

Step two is now realizing this page isn’t just for my readers trying to decide about the book. This page is for large language models trying to understand my book. So you want to actually make that page as rich and as in-depth as possible.

You also want to make it really good for humans, right? So put discussion questions, have sample chapters, have your audio book resources. So I’m a big reader of fantasy, but I listen to fantasy books, and I really want to see the map.

When I go to an author’s website, it’s some low res garbage map, and I can’t see the towns, and it makes me very sad. All I want, fantasy authors, please, for the love of good maps, just upload a five gigabyte version of your map to your book page.

I will love it. AI will love it. Your readers will love it. It will make everyone happy, and it already exists on your hard drive. It’s what you put in your book. It’s not going to keep anyone from buying your book, the fact that they can get the map of your fantasy world for free.

That’s just one example of the sort of thing that you can put on your site. Also, frequently asked questions. If you do frequently asked questions, there’s a Schema, Schema.org that you can add to a page through Yoast SEO. So if you’re using WordPress, it really is the best for this sort of thing.

It’s called a Question Schema, where it will actually surface that question, not just on Google search, but also to the to the LLMs, where they’ll see the question and then see the answer. This will really reduce the likelihood of the LLMs hallucinating if somebody else asks that question, or a similar question to the LLM.

Joanna: So just on that frequently asked questions.

We just mentioned the AI overview on Google, if you have a frequently asked question on your website that it can easily pull from, it is more likely to do that.

Also useful is NotebookLM, where you can upload your book and it can actually generate those frequently asked questions for you.

So this is another thing I would say. I mean, again, read the terms and conditions but NotebookLM, in particular, says it doesn’t train on the data you upload into a Notebook, if people are worried about that. You can actually use the AI tools to help you build this material.

The other thing I was going to say on images, one of the things I was reading about is the alt text. Now, the alt text on images, we’ve been encouraged to use for accessibility reasons. So if somebody is blind or partially sighted, the alt text gets read when there’s an image.

Alt text is used by the LLMs when they’re going through a website.

Yes, they can “see” now, but they use the alt text. So is that something that you’ve considered? Because I guess I didn’t think about that before.

Thomas: So this is one of the techniques that I think is helpful right now and won’t be helpful in two or three years, because this is purely a way of you adding human labor to your website to save the bot from doing bot labor.

You can upload an image to GPT’s Image-1 Engine and ask it to describe it, and it can describe that image with paragraphs and paragraphs of detail, but for GPT to do that, it requires a lot of compute. They don’t have the compute to do that for all of the images on all of the websites on all of the internet.

Now, the compute cost is going down. You know, more efficient chips are coming out. The models are getting more efficient.

So several years from now, the AI will be able to just go to a page, look at the image, and generate a much more useful understanding of that image than what it can currently get with alt text.

In the meantime, adding some descriptive alt text could help before it’s understanding the image. Also, not all LLMs are multimodal, which I realize is a big term. So multimodal is being able to interact with text and image at the same time.

So GPT is, I would argue, the most multimodal. It’s just unbelievably good with images. I’m not a big fan of GPT in general, I find that the other models are better at most of the other specific use cases, but for images, it is just hands down the best.

It’s often the second best in every other category. So it’s a good one if you’re only using one.

Some of the other engines aren’t very good with images yet. I haven’t been impressed with Claude’s handling of images. Grok is only kind of so-so. Gemini has made some big steps forward, but I still think it’s behind GPT in image rendering.

So you’re also helping these other models more because, you know, Anthropic may not be able to describe the image in a very suitable way right now. It will in a few years, but right now, maybe not so good.

Joanna: It’s interesting you say that. I think ChatGPT o3, that is my favorite model. I don’t really use the 4-models. I also think where if people are saying, “Oh, well, you know, Thomas doesn’t rate it,” well, I think everyone prefers different models as well because of personality things.

A lot of writers like Claude, for example, for the more creative side of things.

As we’ve also said, If you don’t like a model this week, try again in a couple of weeks, and it may well have changed.

I mean, GPT-5 is rumored to be coming out, which I think will be interesting. One of the things is, you and I are quite technical, so we’re like, “Oh, this number and this letter,” but GPT-5, apparently it will do that for you. So you’ll just put your query in, and it will choose the best model for you, which I think will really help.

Thomas: Yes, one thing to help simplify this, because GPT has probably the worst naming schema in the history of naming. So they have GPT-4o and GPT-o4, which are entirely different models and have almost nothing to do with each other. Then they have 4.1, which is actually better than 4.5. So the numbering doesn’t work.

Then o3, which is based off of 4, is actually better at a lot of reasoning tasks. It’s very confusing. So let’s simplify it in a way that actually will help across all of the companies.

There’s kind of three main flavors of LLMs in terms of main features, and that is the kind of default model, default model with reasoning, which is what o3 does really well because it can actually think about your question.

So if you think about if somebody asked you a question, you can answer off the top of your head, or you can sit down with a piece of paper and kind of think about it a little bit. That left brain slow thinking is what we mean by reasoning. When you’re interacting with a reasoning model, it’s slower to get back to you because it thinks about it.

Then the third kind of model is deep research, where it will actually go and do research. I don’t know if you ever do this, Joanna, but on a live call, somebody will ask a question, and you’ll do a quick Google search to refresh your memory about that thing that they’re talking about. That’s kind of how the search functions.

It’s called Deep Search on Grok. I think it’s called Deep Research on GPT [and on Gemini]. Those three features are rolling out to all of the different models, and they’re useful in different ways.

So if you want a quick answer, you just want to talk to the core model, but if you want some deep, in-depth analysis, you want to turn on research, or maybe turn on thinking as well.

That’ll simplify it to make it not quite so confusing because if you’re not following this every week, the numbers and the letters and the models and the companies will just make your eyes water. It’s so complicated.

Joanna: Absolutely.

Or my tip is, whatever your favorite model is, you just say, “I want to do this. How can you help me do it?”

Most people aren’t as technical as we are, so they won’t necessarily be driving the machines in that way.

Let’s come back to the website. So I agree with you that sort of the last shall be first. So the author website has sort of fallen out of favor in many ways. For example, blogging.

I was blogging from 2008, and then about five years ago I stopped because there were some really, really good websites doing the kind of content I was. So I was like, right, I’m just going to do the podcast.

Of course, for our podcast, we have transcripts and all that. I thought, well, that gets indexed, and my site does still rank for lots of good things because of the podcast transcript.

So if people are now thinking, okay, well, if these AI engines want this rich content, but we don’t want to upload our books onto our website, for example, what are some of the other things they could put on the website? Is it just the book page, or—

Could people be thinking about other forms of content on their sites?

Thomas: So blogging is really powerful, and I will share this with your audience. I left it out of the blog version of my episode on AI optimization, but it’s in the audio and video version.

One of the big things that the LLMs look for when it comes to ranking a book is something called context, where it’s in relationships, specifically. So relational context is really important for LLMs, and you can guide that with a blog post.

So you can say, “The top 10 posts on such and such trope” or, “The top 10 authors who are similar to JF Penn.”

“So if you love JF Penn, you’ll love…” and you just got these other nine authors and includes JF Penn. So if I’m writing books that are similar to JF Penn, I would include my name in that list, and then train the LLMs to start associating our names and putting them in a semantic cluster. A blog is really powerful at this.

The other really good thing to do with blogging has been the best thing to do with blogging for the last 15 years, which is just answer questions. Your inbox fills up with questions, and so you just write one really good answer, you email it to that person, and then you copy and paste it to your blog.

Take out all the personal bits, add some bullets, add some headings. Now you’ve got a really good blog post that already existed in your outbox, that you know for sure a real human being asked. If one human being asked it, probably others asked it. If they’re not asking Google, they’re asking the LLM.

It’s not that much more work to have a blog of some kind, the topics of which are driven by your own readers.

Joanna: You mentioned there, it’s easier with nonfiction because people will ask questions about that. For example, on my Books and Travel, I did the Camino de Santiago, and people email me all the time saying, like, “What shoes did you wear for the Camino?” I mean, just a question like that.

It is in my book, and I have actually put it on the website now, but it’s interesting because that’s easier for nonfiction/memoir. For fiction, like you said, I have done blog posts in the past like, “10 Action Adventure Series with Female Main Characters,” stuff like that.

This is what I was also wondering, because if you use any of the LLMs, and you say, for example, “What do you know about author JF Penn?” and it will kind of look at everything.

I found that Goodreads is actually incredibly highly ranked.

I wonder if that’s because a lot of those posts, like you’re saying, are often on Goodreads, their blog. That’s literally what their blog is. They’re always posting lists of relational things, and obviously they’re owned by Amazon. What do you think about fiction authors in particular?

Would it be better to be posting lists of that kind of thing on Goodreads and/or their website?

Thomas: I love Listopia. That’s Goodreads’ list feature. I don’t think authors are allowed to add their own books to lists on Listopia, which means you’d have to work with a compatriot to add each other’s books into the list, which adds a little bit of friction.

Goodreads has become incredibly important because Goodreads is one of the only places on the internet that has Schema.org information on books. There’s actually no good way to add this to your website right now.

This is making me feel like I shouldn’t have given away MyBookTable, which is a WordPress plugin for making book pages that I developed years ago and I’m no longer a part. Yoast SEO doesn’t support the book schema, but Goodreads does.

So Goodreads has become like the go-to source for metadata and context and information about books. It also has reviews and rankings and relationships. It can look at shelves and which books are connected with which other books and shelves.

It’s actually really rich data, and unlike most other social networks, it doesn’t have a login wall to access pages. So you can go to any page on Goodreads without being logged into Goodreads, which means there’s no good mechanism to keep the bots away.

Having a Goodreads profile at 100% is really important.

You’re like, “But I never use Goodreads, and my readers don’t use Goodreads,” like, well, some of your readers do. The mega-readers, the readers who take chances on new authors, they’re all over Goodreads.

If somebody reads 300 books a year, they need Goodreads to find that 301st book. If somebody reads one book a year, they just go to the bookstore and buy whatever the James Patterson book is that’s facing the door.

So if you’re new to writing and you’re still just getting started, Goodreads was always important to you, but now it’s even more important, because now Goodreads is informing all of the networks.

So when I was doing my research, every single large language model—I don’t know about Llama, I don’t really care about Llama—but all the ones that matter, they all look at Goodreads quite a bit for informing their context about books.

Joanna: That is quite shocking for some people. You know, when I started in 2008, Goodreads was a separate company. It was really big. It still looks the same as it did.

Thomas: It’s like a time capsule to the days before social media got toxic.

Joanna: It really is. It’s quite horrible. So I guess maybe a decade ago, I was like, okay, I don’t really want to use this anymore. Also, a lot of us were focusing on going wide and building Shopify and all this. Then a couple of years ago I saw that, oh my goodness, Goodreads is becoming more important.

So I’ve really been making much more of an effort and asking people who buy direct to also review on Goodreads. Of course, let’s say you read on a Kindle, you read an Amazon device, if you rate a book at the end, that will automatically appear on Goodreads if you’ve connected your account.

Even if people aren’t writing reviews, all these ratings is another data point that does all the linking, like you’re saying. So I can’t see that another site can be as rich as Goodreads in the English language, I guess we should say. I think Goodreads is only in English, as far as I know.

So would this be more important than the author website updates? If people are like, oh my goodness, you two, you’ve just given us too much work—

Should people be thinking about updating Goodreads first, or the website?

Thomas: I think for most people, starting with Goodreads might make more sense because chances are your Goodreads page is already half built because Goodreads pulls data from Amazon.

So if you did a good job with your metadata and having a good Amazon page—which if you’ve been listening to Joanna Penn’s podcast for any amount of time, you’ve heard her harp on.

Joanna: Harp on?!

Thomas: You’ve heard me. I feel like I’m mentioning my metadata episode every single episode. I’m like, “Please. This is so important.” I don’t know if you if you harp on it, but I definitely harp on it.

So if you’ve been doing a good job with that, a lot of the Goodreads stuff is already done. So it’s just logging in, making sure account is attached to your author account, making sure all of the information is correct, tweaking the things that need to be corrected. You could be done in an hour.

Building out these web pages could be done in an hour or two if you’re savvy, but if you’ve never edited your website before, there’s actually a bit of a learning curve to do it the first time. If you had somebody build you your website, now it’s more complicated because you’ve got to go find that person and pay them.

So the website could be a higher amount of work, but it’s still really important. So don’t hear me say, “Oh, Goodreads, start there,” as an excuse to then stop there. Do your website as well.

Joanna: I guess we should also say that it’s early days. In 2008, do you remember back then it was, “It’s the year of mobile,” or, you know, 2010, 2012 was still the year of mobile. Like it was the beginning of mobile commerce and all that.

Nobody believed it for years, until one time everybody woke up and were like, “Oh, yes, you buy things on your phone. I suppose that’s what they were talking about.” This is the same thing. I mean, this is going to grow.

So right now, we’re still early, I think, on this. So yes, have a look at your Goodreads. Have a look at your website.

Let’s carry on. So you did mention norobots.txt earlier, which everyone’s like, “Oh no, no, that sounds complicated.” Or they’re saying, “Well, I don’t want things to search my site. I’m against AI, or I don’t want them to see my website or to search things that I’ve spent time doing.”

What will definitely stop the AI search engines? Why should we not do that?

Thomas: I think that some of the “all AI is evil all the time,” is actually being advocated by people who themselves use AI and don’t want other authors to have the competitive advantage that they have.

I don’t think it’s all of that, but I think that some of the most vocal people secretly have pen names where they’re making a lot of money with AI everything. It’s kind of like you’re the first farmer in town to get a tractor, and you’re way more productive on your farm than all the other farmers who are still doing it with their hoes and their backs.

If you can convince the other farmers that tractors are evil, or if you can get somebody else in the town to do that for you, then you can buy the fields from everyone else who’s doing the work with their backs.

So I’m not convinced that this fear is all in good faith. There is some of it. You know, some people all they know about AI is they watched The Matrix and they watched The Terminator, and it’s really scary.

Those people tend to not be very vocal because they don’t know the difference between a large language model and machine learning. Like in AI, it’s all just a bunch of jumble for them, and it’s all scary and evil and strange. That kind of person isn’t going to know how to put a norobots.txt file on their website.

I don’t think that LLMs.txt or norobots.txt are going to go anywhere. I think what’s going to happen with AI is the same thing that happened with mobile. So back in 2008 when it’s like the year of the mobile, if you remember, we were building mobile versions of our websites.

So you had the website, and then you had a completely separate website for mobile. Then in the early 20-teens, this new approach to web design called responsive web design was developed, where everything had percentages instead of fixed number of pixel widths. Pages could get big and they could get small.

Now you only had to build one version of a web page for both mobile and for web. The robots.txt file has plenty of space for instructions to LLMs and what you can and cannot do. We don’t need other txt files on a website to accomplish those purposes.

I think it’s simpler for everyone to just use the page we already have for talking to robots, rather than having other pages to also talk to robots, but say different things. So I may be wrong on this, but I don’t think the alternate files, norobots or LLMs, are going to take off.

I do think people are going to add instructions to robots.txt, and some of them will be encouraged by other authors, well-meaning or not, to start blocking the LLMs. I don’t think that’s going to work. For one, I don’t know how you block Google without blocking Google. It’s like, “Are you the Google search bot or the Google Gemini bot?”

“I’m the Google bot,” right?

Do you really want to block Google? You can. It’s your right, and Google won’t surface your website, but you have to be found if you want to be read.

You can’t hide in the wilderness and not let anyone read your book and then complain that no one’s reading your book.

You either want to be found or you don’t.

I think for some authors, they’re afraid of being found, and they may be using AI as an excuse. I think pretty soon, people are going to be paying money to get AI to learn about their books, this fear of AI doing it for free, I think, is going to go away pretty quickly.

Joanna: Well, yes. We should just come back to Amazon because people are like, “Oh, well, I don’t need to know any of this because I am just on Amazon,” but of course, Amazon is also moving to generative search.

I’m kind of annoyed because this mobile app that you have in the US with this Rufus shopping bot is now using it, and you can ask really detailed follow up questions, and it’s more granular, but I can’t see that because I’m in the UK.

I mean, I’m really pleased about this because I am sick of loading seven keyword terms into my metadata. If I give Amazon the whole book, I mean, surely they can do useful things and do all that themselves. It’s very rich data.

Is there anything that people need to do specifically with Amazon, other than listen to your metadata episode?

Thomas: So one advantage you have being in the UK is that you can still be blissfully unaware of how not great Rufus is. So I would rank Rufus above Llama and below all of the other LLMs.

I know that Amazon has a bunch of different AI models that they’re developing. I was doing some experiments with one of them—I forget what it’s called, started with an A—and it had the most delightful hallucination about me I have ever seen an AI do in my life.

So I got this tool where I had access to all the AIs, so I was asking them a lot of the same questions to see what answers they would give. It was like, “Thomas Umstattd is a professor of book marketing at Texas State University,” and then it started listing all of these book marketing books that I had written.

They were all vaguely associated with podcast episodes that I had done. It was all close enough to be believable, but none of it was true. It hallucinated an entirely different Thomas Umstattd. Like, oh, Amazon is behind on this AI thing.

So right now, Rufus, in my tests, is somewhat better than just a pure review search for answering product questions, but just barely. It’s not where the other AIs are at yet.

Now, Amazon, just this week as we’re recording this, signed a licensing deal with the New York Times. So they’re now the only company that has an agreement with the Times for licensing data for AI models. It used to be the New York Times didn’t matter for AI training because they had walled it off.

Joanna: They were suing OpenAI and all kinds of things. Microsoft.

Thomas: They were suing for big money, and Jeff Bezos is like, “Big money? I have big money.” So now they’ve got this really good source of data—or mediocre source of data, depending on your view of the New York Times—but they’re the only ones that have access to it.

That’s not going to fix Rufus’s ability to find the needle in the haystack in a bunch of book reviews. So Amazon will get there. If it worked better, you would have it in the UK.

People don’t want to give you the kind of mediocre stuff. They want royal quality for the UK. It’s like, “This isn’t good enough for the king, and the Brits aren’t going to take this trash. We’ll just keep it for the Colonials right now.”

Joanna: Oh, fair enough. Well, we should also say Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic, which does Claude. So it would be nice if they could use some of the Claude juice or something.

I mean, again, all these things are going to get better. So if people are like, “Oh, well, I don’t like the Amazon automatics review overviews,” or whatever, it’s like, look, all these things are going to get better and better.

Again, I want to stay really positive about this. As I said, I think we’ve been in the long tail for like 20 years already, right?

Now we’re in the very, very, very long tail when we’re thinking of generative search and the conversational search.

So I do a lot of book recommendations through ChatGPT, and often I’ll have gone backwards and forwards several times before I’m happy with the level of granularity I’m at.

No longer do we have the sort of basic keywords, but we’re having a whole conversation about what we like.

Or like you said, I sometimes just upload a screenshot or a picture of my whole bookshelf. I did this the other day, like with my bookshelf with probably hundreds of books on.

I said, “Here’s my bookshelf. What else might I like?” It can read all the books on the bookshelf and all of that. So I think, again, all of this is going to get better.

Thomas: I think it’s also going to reward good writing, especially that kind of relational stuff. So you have a really deep relationship with your o3 mini model, right? Like it knows you really well. You’ve spent months, maybe years, building its context window. So it has a good sense of your preferences.

This is one area where GPT really shines, as like a per user context window that persists across conversations. So when you ask your o3 for a recommendation, it has really good knowledge of books.

The GPT book recommender is already really good, and it has really good knowledge of you. So it’s going to make very likely very good recommendations, and those recommendations are likely going to be the kind of books that are well written.

So as we talk about Schema.org and all these technical things, don’t forget the fact that none of this will fix a bad book. None of this will fix a bad book.

If your book is not fun to read, if it’s not engaging, if it doesn’t pull readers in, if it doesn’t leave them happy at the end, or they’re leaving a good review, if it doesn’t deliver on its promises, then it’s not going to matter.

Like these things are great tiebreakers, and they can be really helpful if you’re obscure, to move you from obscurity to notoriety. You can’t make that move if your book doesn’t thrill readers.

Your book has to thrill readers first.

I probably should have started with this. This is not like a “get out of learning the craft of writing” free card. It’s just the opposite, actually, because the AI is much more discriminating on quality than the search engines were.

You type a search into Amazon, and it’s going to surface whoever paid the most first. Then it will pick, based off of the very limited information you gave it, some books to rank.

None of that really had much to do with the writing. Some of it was connected. You know, it would look at review data and sales data and things like that, but a lot of it just became self-reinforcing. Popular books got more attention, which made them more popular.

My hope is that these new AI recommendation engines will have more nuance and make better recommendations.

It will also be better for people on the fringes of society.

So I’m not sure how it is in the UK, but like conservatives got pushed out of publishing. There’s hardly any conservatives in the traditional publishing world. If you’re writing a book for a conservative audience, it’s hard to find your readers right now. Whereas I think AI is going to help bridge that gap.

Conservative authors and conservative readers are going to be able to find each other and they’re going to get really excited. That’s true with every kind of niche group of readers and authors that were really limited by the search engines that were really reductive.

Now all this nuance is going to be like, “Oh, you’re interested in this kind of unique sub-genre that doesn’t have a category in Amazon. Well, guess what? I’ve read all of the books in that, and here’s the best one that I think you’ll like really well,” and suddenly you’re reading more books.

I think this is going to be good for the industry overall.

Joanna: Yes, I think so too. It should reduce, or hopefully reduce, that sort of paid ad effect.

Although, inevitably, these companies are going to have to monetize more than they are now. So it’ll be very interesting how it changes.

So I’m also really interested in what else is coming. Now, people have been kind of saying agents and agentic AI for a while, but mostly these have been assistants.

So something like Deep Research reports, they’re kind of an agent. You give them a task, “go research this,” and then it goes away and it will come back and bring you a report. So it’s early days.

What is really interesting to me is zero-click. So zero-click with agents. So, for example, I just booked some trips in the US to Antelope Canyon, and I got my Deep Research report, but I still had to go buy the tour. I did go with its recommendation.

“Zero-click,” I say to my agent, my travel agent, let’s say, “go and find me the best trip to Antelope Canyon. Here’s my budget, and just arrange it. You know what I like in terms of hotels and the brands I like and all of that. Go do it.”

People are like, “Oh, no, that’s years off,” but Visa, the Visa card, now has intelligent commerce. So they actually have a card you can use with an agent, so you essentially task it with buying for you.

I was thinking about this with books. It’s like, “Here’s my bookcase. This is what I like. Here’s my budget per month. Just send me a book a week, or buy me some cool books and deliver them to my house.” I’m like, actually, that’s quite fun.

With ‘zero click’ + agents, the human never does the browsing, the human never clicks, and things turn up.

So what do you think about this?

Thomas: I think AI agents are going to start creating zones of the internet that are devoid of humans, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. So the first place we saw this was actually about two decades ago, and it was the stock market.

So if you’ve ever seen an old 1980s video of the stock market, there’s actual men in suits with pieces of paper, and they’re all shouting at each other. Then somebody was like, “Oh, we’ll connect it to computers.” So then somebody had to type on the computer to place an order.

Then there was one company that literally created a robot that just typed on the keys because the NASDAQ wouldn’t allow automated orders, so something had to push the keys on the keyboard. Then they’re like, “Okay, this is stupid. You can just place the orders.”

Then they’re like, okay, well, let’s create AIs that will evaluate a stock’s price and make purchases. Now almost all of our stocks are managed by agentic AIs. So we moved away from mutual funds into something called an exchange traded fund, which is entirely run by an AI. It’s algorithmic. This has been around for 10 or 15 years.

Now the New York Stock Exchange is a film set, and if you go there today, it’s just a bunch of reporters reporting on what the computers are doing. Stock trading is no longer the getting the call from the pushy salesman about this really good scoop on such and such stock that you’ve got to buy and this real scammy thing.

We were taking a lot of our really smartest people and putting them in a room and having them shout at each other to buy and sell. I don’t think that was the best use of those really smart people.

Now those smart people are doing other things that are more beneficial for the economy than shouting at each other to buy and sell shares of IBM or whatever. So that’s what we’re going to see with these other agents and these other sectors.

So you buying a ticket for a train, that’s not a very emotionally rewarding experience for you to buy that ticket. For the person selling you the ticket, it’s not a very emotionally rewarding experience for them either.

Nobody wanted to grow up, like when they were a kid thought, “Like all I want to do when I grow up is sell tickets for trains and answer questions from tourists who are all asking the same stupid questions over and over again, and I’ve answered this question 500 times this week.” Having an AI handle that is going to be better.

I think it’s going to be slow. I think right now we’re in the phase where early adopters like us are playing with it, but right now we’re building our own agents.

I think a good model to look at is the spreadsheet. So back in the 80s and 90s, we’d have Microsoft Excel, and you could build your own spreadsheet. The 2000s have all been about taking features that you could do yourself in Excel and building a whole product around it.

Now there’s a website that does that thing that Excel could do, but the website is for just one purpose, for one kind of user, and it does that same sort of thing. I think we’re going to see that same thing with AI because most people don’t want to create their own agents.

They don’t want to create their own personal AI butler. They want to buy an AI butler off the shelf that does just one thing. So don’t feel like you have to learn how to build your own agents in order to use them, you’ll just have to wait. Who knows, maybe Joanna Penn will build some AI agents that she can rent out in the future.

Joanna: I mean, it is interesting to think where it’s going to go. I tend to put this in the general category. For example, we’ve just talked about updating your Goodreads pages or updating your website. Hell, I don’t want to do that, so I will just get my admin agent to do that.

Right now, there isn’t one particular thing that can do that. I can do it with AI, but I’ll still have to drive it. Whereas, I don’t know, I mean, let’s talk about ads as well. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that all you’ll need to do on Meta—because, let’s face it, Meta ads are just awful now. They’re so complicated.

What he said is, you’ll be able to say, “This is my book. This is the page I want to drive traffic to. Off you go. Meta will do all the creative, do everything, and here’s a budget.” I don’t have to do anything at all except say, “This is what I want to sell.” That will be great. I think authors will be all over that.

Most people want to do the writing, and they do not want to do the marketing, as you know.

So I think there are some great use cases. I don’t know how long that’s going to take. I mean, Zuckerberg has said end of next year I think, 2026.

Thomas: Well, it’s already here for websites, actually. So if listening to Joanna and I talk about websites stressed you out, if you get Divi from Elegant Themes, it has AI built in, and you can just tell it to build you a homepage and what you want on it, and it will just do it.

I played around with this a couple of weeks ago because I was like, can AI really build a web page? And it did. I was kind of flabbergasted. I went in and tweaked and added, and I would copy what it did and add more things to make the page longer, but it’s like it’s already here.

It’s already here a little bit for advertising too. The Amazon auto-targeting has gotten a lot better.

Joanna: I do use that.

Thomas: Yes, and it’s self-reinforcing. So if you want to understand what machine learning is, there’s some really good like cartoons on YouTube you can look up, but machine learning is the computer kind of getting better on its own, like improving itself.

These ad engines are using machine learning to get better every month. So if you tried auto-targeting on Facebook or auto-targeting on Amazon a few months ago, just realize that they’re now better because the machine learning is training the algorithm.

There’s not some developer at meta going, click, click, click, to tweak the algorithm. The algorithm is tweaking itself. Facebook’s algorithm has been tweaking itself for over a decade. For people who are against AI and they complain about it on Facebook, I hate to tell you this, but you’ve been using AI on Facebook.

Joanna: Or buying on Amazon or using Google.

Thomas: It’s like, Facebook particularly, the entire experience is AI, start to finish. It’s like, “Oh, but I don’t want you to have AI. I only want this powerful Californian to have AI, not the regular people.” Like, okay, now we’re getting to a class conversation. This isn’t really about AI anymore.

Joanna: Well, I mean, we could talk about this forever because you and I geek out on this. There are some people who are like, seriously, how is everything changing so fast, and how are you two so relaxed about the fact that everything is changing?

So how are you staying positive and curious? Obviously, there are bad things about AI, which, you know, we try and stay on the positive side of things.

Any tips for people who need encouragement to keep going in this time of change?

You know, they thought they knew the rules, and now it seems like the rules are changing yet again.

Thomas: You’re not going to believe this answer, but I’m actually going to encourage you to study history, because we’re not actually living in a time of rapid change compared to what our great great grandparents went through.

My great great grandfather was born in 1880, and the steam engine was new, that we were just starting to have the Industrial Revolution. When he was a child, the first car rolled into his town, a horseless carriage. Then suddenly there was electric light bulbs.

The telegraphs that had already existed when he was a kid, now there was lines that would go to people’s houses, and they could actually hear a voice of somebody on the other side of town, and even the other side of the country.

It didn’t stop there. Then a few years later in his life, something flew over the town that was heavier than air, and yet floating in the sky. Then before this man died, there was an American putting an American flag on the moon. That’s not to mention radio, and the nuclear bomb, and like so much innovation.

Then we invented the semiconductor in the 1960s, 1970s, and then the innovation basically ended. After that, it was all of this really slow iteration where the transistors got smaller and smaller, the computers got faster and faster.

There wasn’t this big, life changing technology, like what we were getting every two years in the late 1800s and early 1900s, until you have kind of critical mass of the transistors where they get cheap enough to enter people’s homes. Then we have computers, and we have the internet.

We’ve had the internet for a long time. Like the internet’s not new. It goes back to the 70s in the States. The World Wide Web was developed by a Brit in the 1980s. Then we didn’t have much innovation, right? Web pages got a little bit more complicated, animation got a little bit better. Really slow evolutionary change.

Then the phones came around, and the phone was a big shift, but from a technological perspective, the phone wasn’t that different than a computer. It’s just smaller. So that same trend of smaller and lighter.

So in this way, AI is the first time for me to experience the kind of transformation that my great, great grandfather went through, but on a much smaller scale.

Like the tractor was unbelievably disruptive. One man in the town with the tractor could do the work of 10 men, which meant that those other nine men had to find something else to do to provide for their families. What it was doing things for the farmer, because the farmer was now making almost the same money.

So this is the flip side, the people who use AI—there’s actually a report that just came out yesterday about industries where —

People are using AI, they’re three times more productive and they’re making 50% more money on that individual worker perspective.

So just like what happened with the tractor, there’s nothing new under the sun. The guys who left the farm and started doing jobs for the farmer, those jobs are actually super rewarding. It’s things like being a podcaster.

Like, I could not have my job of being a podcaster if there wasn’t some blessed farmer somewhere in the sun and toil on his tractor making food for me, because I can’t make food. I can hardly keep my grass alive. I realize in the UK, grass just grows on its own, but in Texas, it’s a fight. It wants to wither and die in the sun.

So I’m really thankful that I’m not working in the fields like my ancestors did. So, yes, there’s going to be some disruption, but the history of technology shows us that technology creates more jobs than it destroys.

95% of us were working in the fields back in the day, and that was awful, awful work for little pay. It was back breaking. It killed us, literally killed us. I don’t think anybody wants to go back to that.

Technology isn’t good or evil. People are good or evil.

So I’m not afraid of AI. I am very afraid of humans and what humans will do with AI, but I’m too much of a Texan to let those humans have AI and me not to have AI, too. The only thing that can stop a bad man with AI is a good man with AI.

Joanna: Or a good woman!

Thomas: Or a good woman.

Joanna: No, I mean, I think so too. We need to be on the side of the angels, and the more we’re involved, that’s the other thing. Obviously, people listening, Thomas and I are interested in the technical side, but you don’t have to be super technical anymore to get involved.

The more creatives and other types of people who are getting to grips with these tools, the more they will represent the whole of humanity.

So that’s why I try and encourage people. But also, you’re right, it does make you more productive.

Also it’s a lot of fun, so I have fun with my AIs like every day. So, yes, lots for people to think about. We’re out of time, so—

Where can authors find you and everything you do online?

Thomas: So my website is AuthorMedia. That’s where you can find all three of my podcasts. I have a suite of over 30 AI tools that are really easy to use. They’re very specific things like an About Page builder, where you answer a few questions about yourself, and it will write a very interesting about page for you.

Or you upload your book cover, and it will analyze the cover and give you tips on how to make it better. Or create a chapter summary.

I even have a tool here called “Not a Literary Agent” that can review contracts and even write a rights reversal letter based off of the contract that you signed with that publishing company 10 years ago. And creating book blurbs. There’s a bunch of different tools that are there.

My hope with these tools is that they’re kind of training wheels for using AI, because they’re really easy. You just answer a few questions, and you push a button, and that’s it. So you don’t actually have to be good with AI to try using these tools.

I’ve gotten just incredible feedback from folks who’ve tried these out. One, you just upload your book, and it creates a strategy for advertising on Amazon. Like a five page strategy based off the content of your book, including who to target and how to target them.

So my hope is these will help make you more productive. They’re almost all focused on marketing. So they’re not going to help you write the book, they’re going to help you sell the book because that’s my focus. If you want to learn how to learn how to write the book, listen to Joanna Penn.

Novel marketing is more focused on getting more sales for the book you already wrote.

Joanna: So those tools, is that on AuthorMedia.com?

Thomas: Yes.

Joanna: Okay, so that’s fantastic. Definitely have a listen to Thomas’s podcast as well. Well, thanks so much for joining me today, Thomas. That was great.

Thomas: Thank you for having me.

The post Book Discoverability In An Age Of AI. GEO For Authors With Thomas Umstattd Jr. first appeared on The Creative Penn.

One of the most interesting challenges of writing a series is figuring out how to create different character arcs for the same character, without it feeling repetitive or forced. Whether you’re writing a progressive arc that unfolds over several books or you’re exploring entirely different arcs in each installment, the goal is always to keep the character’s journey fresh and meaningful.

Last month I shared a post about developing different character arcs using the Enneagram personality system. However, after writing that post (and its follow-up about how to unite the Enneagram with the archetypal Life Cycle for even deeper character arcs), I realized I hadn’t quite got to the heart of the question that inspired that original post, from Zoe Dawson:

What is your take on using the Enneagram nine personality types and constructing their Lies so that it’s not repetitious for each story?

Although Zoe’s question was specifically about the Enneagram, the deeper underlying dilemma is one any author writing more than one story will eventually face: How can you make sure you’re writing varied and interesting character arcs—rather than just repeating yourself?

This quandary may ring true in a number of different scenarios:

• You’re writing a series in which each book features progressive character arcs that all tie into a larger overarching arc.
• You’re writing a series that features a thematically new and independent character arc for each story.
• You’re writing multiple unrelated books and want each one to be fresh and different.

Today, I want to dig deeper into the big picture of how to construct Lies the Character Believes, character arcs, and themes that don’t repeat from story to story. This week, we’ll dig into some specific tools and frameworks that can help you shape varied arcs; next week, we’ll explore some general principles to keep in mind.

To get us started, here’s an idea I’ve always found resonant and that can be helpful to keep inmind when seeking to vary your writing:

We all have one story to tell and we just go on telling it in different ways.

Now, is that explicitly true?

Certainly not.

I, for one, have written one novel after another that is completely different from one another. And yet, I do feel that every story in an author’s body of work must ultimately point to the deeper truths and themes of the foundational story that is the author’s own life. No matter how much you may (or may not) change the outer trappings in your story (genre, setting, plot focus, etc.), the underlying thrust and focus will always be you.

I don’t see this as a drawback. I see it as the most compelling offering every author brings to their readers. In fact, I would suggest you might be most successful in varying your character arcs across books once you can realize the thrust of your own underlying interest and intention. For example, no author was perhaps more famous for writing a legion of staggeringly quirky and unique characters than Charles Dickens, yet even a cursory familiarity with his stories shows the underlying cohesion of the author’s focus on social issues, particularly the plight of the city’s poor. As you brainstorm new and different character arcs for your stories, it might be worthwhile to start by first identifying what actually makes them the same.

In This Article:

• 6 Progressive Personalities and Development Systems to Write Different Character Arcs
• The Five Foundational Character Arcs
• The Life Cycle of Archetypal Character Arcs
• Enneagram Map of Health
• Spiral Dynamics
• The Four Stages of Alchemy
• The Four Stages of Knowing

6 Progressive Personality and Development Systems to Write Different Character Arcs for the Same Character

Let’s start where this question is trickiest: How to write different character arcs for the same character?

One powerful way to write different character arcs for the same character is to ground the character’s growth in a larger developmental framework. Just like real people, characters evolve through recognizable stages—emotionally, psychologically, and even spiritually. Mapping your characters’ journeys to a progressive system can offer a shortcut for creating arcs that feel both fresh and cohesive across a series.

The following models can offer useful blueprints for tracking your characters’ inner evolution and continuing to shift the lens through which they experience the world.

1. The Five Foundational Character Arcs

The basic “shape” of foundational character arcs can, in themselves, guide you to resonant variations. These foundational arcs (which I talk about in-depth in my book Creating Character Arcs and elsewhere) are:

Heroic Arcs

1. Positive Change Arc
2. Flat Arc

>>Click here to read more about the Heroic Arcs.

Negative Change Arcs

1. Disillusionment
2. Fall
3. Corruption

>>Click here to read more about the Negative Arcs.

You can mix and match these arcs from story to story to create vastly varied experiences. The simplest approach is to observe the natural connections among them, especially between the two Heroic Arcs and the three Negative Change Arcs, respectively.

The Positive Change Arc—in which the character overcomes a limited Lie-based perspective and gains a broader Truth-based perspective—leads naturally into a subsequent Flat Arc—in which the character can stand upon this newly gained Truth to inspire change in others.

Likewise, the Negative Arcs can be crafted as part of a larger cycle. The character might undergo a Disillusionment Arc—in which a difficult new Truth creates a vulnerability that may lead to resistance or resentment. This can then easily lead into a Fall Arc, in which the character bolsters resistance to the Truth by investing in greater and greater Lies. This easily leads into the still worse Corruption Arc, in which a character who once had the opportunity and advantage of recognizing the Truth instead opts to reject it utterly.

2. The Life Cycle of Archetypal Character Arcs

In my book Writing Archetypal Character Arcs, I fleshed out the mythic lens of storytelling beyond just the Hero’s Journey to explore the full gamut of the human Life Cycle. Each of these six foundational archetypal character arcs naturally leads one into the other, making them perfect for a series in which you wish to explore an ever-maturing character.

These six foundational archetypes are:

1. The Maiden (Individuation)
2. The Hero (Service)
3. The Queen (Leadership)
4. The King (Sacrifice)
5. The Crone (Surrender)
6. The Mage (Transcendence)

You can find even more possibilities for variation—while adhering to a solid thematic throughline—by also exploring the six Flat archetypes and the twelve shadow archetypes that accompany each of the primary archetypes.

3. Enneagram Map of Health

Last month, I offered quite a few new tools and perspectives for using the Enneagram personality system to develop your character arcs. One particularly useful aspect I did not touch on was the stages of growth inherent to each type. In their book Personality Types, Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson map nine stages for each type, ranging from healthy to average to unhealthy. Each of these stages could be fleshed out into a full character arc with the stages advanced in either direction, depending on whether you wanted to ultimately tell a story of a character who changes positively or negatively.

For example, the nine stages of Type Eight (the Challenger) are listed like this (from healthy to unhealthy):

1. The Magnanimous Heart
2. The Self-Confident Person
3. The Constructive Leader
4. The Enterprising Adventurer
5. The Dominating Power Broker
6. The Confrontational Adversary
7. The Ruthless Outlaw
8. The Omnipotent Megalomaniac
9. The Violent Destroyer

4. Spiral Dynamics

Created by Don Beck and Chris Cowan, Spiral Dynamics is a model of human development that maps how individuals and societies evolve through increasingly complex value systems. Each stage—represented by a color—reflects a particular worldview, from basic survival to tribal loyalty to achievement and beyond. In character development, Spiral Dynamics can help you explore how a character’s core motivations and beliefs shift over time. As they move up (or regress down) the spiral, they may adopt new values, question old assumptions, or clash with characters operating from different stages, all of which can offer rich material for varied arcs across a series.

The currently recognized stages or “memes” of the spiral are:

1. Beige (SurvivalSense): Basic survival priorities (e.g., food, water, shelter, safety).
2. Purple (KinSpirits): Tribal loyalty, superstition, tradition.
3. Red (PowerGods): Dominance, ego, power, and asserting control over others (also called the Warlord meme).
4. Blue (TruthForce): Order, rules, morality, and obedience to a higher purpose or authority.
5. Orange (StriveDrive): Achievement, success, science, and rational progress.
6. Green (HumanBond): Equality, empathy, community, and consensus-driven values.
7. Yellow (FlexFlow): Integration, systems thinking, flexibility, and personal responsibility.
8. Turquoise (GlobalView): Holistic awareness, unity, and spiritual consciousness.

5. The Four Stages of Alchemy

Originally developed in the Middle Ages as a supposed process of turning lead into gold, the stages of alchemy are now recognized as a symbolic representation of … you guessed it, character arcs! (Aka, psychological development. Potato. Potahto.) A few years ago, I shared a post showing how the four stages of alchemy map perfectly onto the four quarters of story structure and, therefore, character arc. However, you can also choose to represent each stage as an entire arc of its own, allowing a four-story cycle to reveal the final alchemy. For that matter, many explorations of alchemy posit many more stages than just four, which could allow you to both lengthen and deepen your story arc.

The four basic stages of alchemy are:

1. The Nigredo (The Blackening): Descent into darkness, confusion, breakdown, ego death.
2. The Albedo (The Whitening): Purification and clarity, recognizing truth, separating from illusion.
3. The Citrinitas (The Yellowing): Insight, illumination, integration, growing wisdom.
4. The Rubedo (The Reddening): Wholeness, rebirth, final transformation into the true self.

6. Four Stages of Knowing

Earlier this year, I similarly explored how the popular “four stages of knowing” also map neatly onto the four quadrants of a story’s development. Just as with the alchemical process, you can also stretch these stages to explore each aspect of the transformation more deeply in multiple evolving character arcs.

The Four Stages of Knowing are:

1. Not Knowing That You Don’t Know: Unconscious ignorance.
2. Knowing That You Don’t Know: Conscious ignorance.
3. Not Knowing That You Know: Unconscious competence.
4. Knowing That You Know: Conscious competence.

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All of these frameworks—whether psychological, mythic, philosophical, or symbolic—can offer powerful scaffolding for exploring different character arcs for the same character without losing cohesion or authenticity. Not only can they help you avoid repetition, they can also support you in uncovering the deeper throughline of meaning that connects your stories to each other—and to you!

Next week, we’ll zoom out for a big-picture look at some guiding principles and narrative strategies you can use to vary your character arcs across multiple books or series. We’ll explore how to make your arcs feel intentional and fresh without straying too far from the heart of what makes your storytelling uniquely yours. Stay tuned!

In Summary

When writing multiple stories—whether within a series or across a body of work—one of the most powerful ways to ensure fresh and meaningful character arcs is to root them in the natural evolution of human development. By drawing on progressive models like the five foundational arcs, archetypal Life Cycle, Enneagram growth stages, Spiral Dynamics, and other systems, you can create nuanced journeys that build upon one another rather than repeat. Recognizing your own thematic throughline as an author only deepens the authenticity of these arcs. Next week, we’ll look at broader storytelling principles that can help you vary arcs across books, even outside of progressive systems.

Key Takeaways

• Repetition in character arcs is a common challenge for writers of series or multiple books, but it can be overcome with intention and structure.

• Developmental models like the five foundational character arcs or the archetypal Life Cycle can offer a roadmap for evolving your character’s journey meaningfully across books.

• The Enneagram and Spiral Dynamics can offer deep personality and value-system frameworks that naturally lend themselves to transformation over time.

• Alchemy and symbolic systems can add depth and metaphorical resonance to character progression.

• Discovering your own thematic signature as an author can be a compass for creating unique yet unified arcs across your body of work.

Want More?

If you’re looking to deepen your understanding of character development and ensure your cast evolves in meaningful, thematically resonant ways, my book Writing Archetypal Character Arcs offers a powerful framework. It explores six foundational arcs—Maiden, Hero, Queen, King, Crone, and Mage—that reflect universal patterns of growth and transformation. Whether you’re crafting a protagonist’s journey or exploring contrasting arcs for supporting characters, this resource can help you weave rich, symbolic layers into your storytelling. It’s perfect for anyone wanting to write dynamic character arcs for different characters across a standalone novel or an entire series. It’s available in paperback, e-book, and audiobook.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do you approach writing different character arcs for the same character in a series or across multiple books? Tell me in the comments!

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

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The post How to Write Different Character Arcs for the Same Character (Part 1 of 2) appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

How can you ‘cast a wider net’ and reach more readers with your books? How can you embrace the best of publishing options for your work? JD Barker explains how his publishing business works.

In the intro, How Authors Measure Success [Self-Publishing Advice]; Creating through Grief [Go Creative]; Death Valley; Successful Self-Publishing, Fourth Edition; Gothic Cathedrals; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinar.

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 

J.D. Barker is the New York Times and international bestselling author of thrillers and horror. He co-writes with James Patterson, as well as other authors. He’s also the co-host of the Writer’s, Ink Podcast.

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

Show Notes

• Weighing up what is worth licensing, and what is worth doing as an indie author
• The importance of making connections in the publishing industry
• Why traditionally published authors are more open towards the indie framework
• Co-writing with James Patterson and others
• Writing across different genres and mediums to “cast a wider net”
• Tips for effectively pitching podcasts
• Benefits for an advanced author coming to Author Nation

You can find J.D. at JDBarker.com.

Transcript of Interview with J.D. Barker

Joanna: JD Barker is the New York Times and international bestselling author of thrillers and horror. He co-writes with James Patterson, as well as other authors. He’s also the co-host of the Writer’s Ink Podcast. So welcome back to the show, JD.

JD: Hey, Joanna. It’s great to be back. I was looking at the timeline, so like this was pre-COVID, I think, the last time we talked.

Joanna: Yes, I know. It’s crazy. I also had look. It was 2020, which does seem like another life. So back then, we did talk about your background, so we’re just going to jump straight into it today.

So the last five years, JD, how has it been like? Give us an overview. Well, not of the last five years, but—

What does your business look like now?

I almost feel like five years ago you were almost relatively new on the indie author scene as such, but now you’ve really cemented your position.

JD: I was. So let me think, like five years ago, so that was about the same time that I called my agent and said, “I don’t want you selling my English rights anymore. I’m going to do it myself.”

Joanna: Yes, basically.

JD: The publishing professionals, I think they hate me, because I tend to pull the rug out from under them quite a bit. Honestly —

I indie published my first novel, and I got a taste of what that was like.

For better or worse, that was a deal breaker for me.

It’s something that’s always been in the back of my head, and I weigh it against every contract. At one point, I had a book coming out called A Caller’s Game, and I called my agent, and like I just decided I’m going to indie publish it in English, and I’d let her go ahead and sell all the foreign territories like she usually does.

I wanted to see how that would play out. Honestly, I liked it a lot because it gave me the freedom and control that I had as an indie to get that title out there. I got the economics benefits of being an indie.

So I did that for a couple of different books, but I still ran into one particular problem. You know me well enough, I completely gloss over all the good stuff, and I just focus on the one or two things that aren’t working right and that’s where I tend to try and come up with some kind of solution.

I couldn’t get into the big box stores. I was still having trouble getting into airports. I couldn’t get into Target or Costco or Walmart.

So that’s something that weighed on me for a couple of years.

I guess about a year and a half ago, I sent my agent a copy of Behind a Closed Door, which was my latest thriller. We sold foreign rights on that almost immediately, and the book was going to auction with the traditional publishers—or not foreign rights, film rights.

I got a phone call from a friend of mine that worked at Harper Collins, and she said, “We’re about to offer on this book, and when that comes in, you need to turn it down.”

I got a similar phone call from somebody over at Random House, and I asked why, and she said, “Well, the editor who wants your book is about to get laid off or about to cut a lot of people.” Then a week or two later, all those industry cuts that we all saw happened.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a position where you’ve had a book at a traditional publisher where you lost your editor, but like that book can sit there in limbo forever, depending on your contract. Without somebody to champion it, it may not come out at all. So that really scared me.

So I kind of reached back to my corporate days. My last real job I had, I worked in finance, and I got a hold of some of the people that were involved in the purchase of Simon and Schuster at the private equity firm. I started some conversations, and ultimately —

I created my own imprint at Simon and Schuster, which is what I’m doing today.

So I, basically, get the freedom of being an indie author. I can put out what I want, when I want, but I’ve got Simon and Schuster as my backbone. So they handle my print sales and distribution. So that’s what I’m doing today.

Joanna: So you still upload the ebook yourself to KDP, but then you give the print to Simon and Schuster? Or does everything go through them?

JD: No. So the way I signed the contract, I’ve got my own LLC—well, it’s an S Corp, I guess, at this point—but it’s called Barker Creative. So the contract is actually between Simon and Schuster and Barker Creative.

So what that means is, when I have a book, I can pick and choose whether JD Barker is publishing it or Barker Creative is publishing it. If it’s a Barker Creative book, it has to go to Simon and Schuster. If it’s a JD Barker book, I can put it out on my own.

So legally, I basically created the wiggle room that I needed. So I can take that book and I can say, “I’m going to put out ebook on my own. I’m going to do audiobook through somebody else.” I can farm out those pieces. So that’s kind of what I’ve been doing.

So I signed a contract with Recorded Books. They handle all of my audiobooks.

I just keep ebooks for myself because really there’s no point in handing that off to anybody. It’s so easy to do. Then I’ve been doing print through Simon and Schuster.

Joanna: So how do you make the decision?

You said your biggest problem there was the big box stores, airports, which is why you wanted to do a kind of print deal press. How do you make a decision as to what you then keep as a JD Barker book versus a Barker Creative book?

For people listening, where is the line? Because a lot of people, let’s face it, won’t get the contract offers you do, but they do get offers. So I know people who get offers, maybe for a couple of thousand advance. Some are no advance, but royalties, plus maybe some marketing.

A lot of authors listening do get the chance for some kind of deal. Also, audio deals are coming up a lot.

How do people weigh up what is worth signing and licensing and what is worth doing indie?

JD: I basically look at the book when it’s finished, and I decide, what is going to cast the widest net?

What is going to cause this to get out in front of the largest group of people and possibly bring in more people into my reading audience? That’s kind of my goal at this point.

A couple years ago, I was told that my audience was women 45 and over. So I wrote a young adult book, and started roping them in a little bit younger, and I continue to do that. One of the books I’ve got coming out—do you remember a movie from the 90s called Flatliners?

Joanna: Yes, you told me about this, but tell everyone else.

JD: Flatliners is one of my all-time favorite movies. It came out in 1990, and it’s got this crazy cast. It had Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, Billy Baldwin, and Oliver Platt, and all of them kind of at the start of their career. So people knew their names, but well before they became the household names that they are today.

It’s about a group of medical students who kill each other one at a time, and then bring each other back to try and discover if there’s any type of afterlife. I love that movie. I honestly still think it holds up today, and it’s been a favorite of mine.

A few years ago, the guy who wrote it, his name is Peter Filardi, he got attached to one of my other projects. I wrote a prequel to Dracula for Bram Stoker’s family, so he got attached as the screenwriter on that with Paramount.

We got to talking about Flatliners, and I told him, “Listen, I’ve got an idea to reboot this franchise.”

At the time, he didn’t have control of the rights. The studio still had those. So I just kind of planted the seed. A couple of years went by, and then I got a phone call back from him, I guess about a year and a half ago.

He said, “Listen, I just got the rights back if you still want to do something.”

So ultimately, we ended up writing a novel—which I’m literally finishing the final edits on today—to reboot this franchise. So it’s going to come out as a book first, with film later. So we have this project basically done.

So going back to your original question, how do I decide who is going to get what particular book?

I could take this book, I could indie publish it, I could put it out on Simon and Schuster if I want to do that.

With a book that’s got a high profile like this, I know the best possible place for this to go is one of the other traditional publishers, somebody who’s willing to put a lot of marketing dollars behind it.

So somebody is going to do something that I can’t do on my own.

So we’re going to let this book go out to auction. The film rights look like they’re going to happen again very quickly. So my agent’s going to hold up the book, we’re going to see who bids the highest on it, and it’s going to go that route. Again, this is mainly so I can get it in places that I can’t on my own.

Joanna: I love that story, and I think that would be very cool. I’m very interested in in seeing that again. I remember that from the 90s.

The bigger thing here, when I was listening to you there, so there was this dude, and you met him years ago, and you connected. Then there was Bram Stoker’s family that you connected with, and this guy in finance.

I remember from when you talked about your history, you were in the music industry and used to drive really famous people around. This is one of the things about you, it seems you have absolutely no fear in talking to anyone, however famous.

A lot of your bigger deals come from your connections. Is that part of your personality, or is that just something you fostered over time?

I guess, for people listening, how can we be more like that?

JD: Well, it’s tricky, because as writers, we’re all introverted. I’m autistic, which kind of adds another whole level to this mess. I hate talking to other people, just like most authors do. I go to a conference, I want to sit in the corner and hide.

It’s gotten to the point that if I go, I usually don’t take my wife with me, because I would just hang out and talk to my wife the whole time. So I try to force myself out of that comfort zone.

At the same time, like, I’ve got a degree in business. I’ve spent a lot of time working in marketing.

Everything in this world, it doesn’t matter if you’re selling books or you’re selling glasses or you’re selling cars, it’s all about who you know and cultivating those contacts.

So every time I meet somebody, their name, what they do, who they are, all that goes into my mental Rolodex, and at some point I may call back on it. You never know when these kind of things are going to play out.

When I talk about this in front of writers groups—like, one year I was at ThrillerFest and I was in the elevator with Lee Child. So I got Lee Child standing five feet away from me. I’ve got 15 seconds.

I can either talk to him and possibly start up a conversation, maybe get a blurb from one of my books, or I can stand there and stare at the numbers like everybody else does. In my head, I’m thinking, well, what harm can come from making that ask?

I will always ask the question. I am a lot more afraid of the outcome of not asking the question than I am of hearing no.

So I will always ask.

Joanna: Yes, but it’s something I struggle with, and I know a lot of listeners struggle with as well, is that moment. So as you say, if you’ve only got a few minutes, can you push yourself past the uncomfort zone, as such, to at least try?

Do you think being autistic gives you more, I don’t know, ability to take what others might feel as embarrassment or shame—I mean—

Is that something that you would ever feel? Like I would feel embarrassed, and then if he snubbed me, I would feel ashamed.

JD: I think that’s a big part of it. I don’t feel a lot of those emotions the same way a, quote, unquote, “normal person” would. I’m just not afraid of it.

At the same time, somebody like Lee, Stephen King, all these different guys, like they’ve all stood in that same position that we are at the beginning of our career.

Everybody started somewhere. They’ve all been there fairly recently, and they still have memories of that. So I think when you do ask that question, as long as you can come up with a unique way to do it, I can stand out a little bit, I don’t think there’s any harm in doing it.

I’ve got plenty of people that come up to me and ask similar questions now, and I pull from that same knowledge base. I was doing this a couple of years ago, they’re doing it to me now. I think in a lot of ways this, this entire author profession, we pay it forward as much as we can, and everybody does.

Joanna: Yes, and a lot of them are just—well, most people are nice, in general. I think that would be my thing.

Certainly going to ThrillerFest when I first went in like 2012, I was just starstruck by these authors who I’d been reading for years. I remember meeting Doug Preston and like Clive Cussler, and I was just a wreck.

Okay, well, here’s the other thing, the indie thing. Back then in 2012, it was very early in the indie world, so I felt definitely kind of second class. Have you ever felt that? Or do you think things have changed? You network with lots of traditionally published people.

Do you think “the stigma” that some traditionally published authors used to tar us with, is that gone? Or do you come up against that anytime?

JD: I don’t know if it’s gone.

So when I published Forsaken, my first book, it was 2014. So we were still very much in the thick of it. Because I had worked in the publishing industry for so long, I worked as a book doctor and a ghost writer for 20-some years, I knew a lot of people in the industry.

When I wasn’t able to get an agent on Forsaken, I seriously considered indie publishing. I started talking to a lot of authors that I knew that were regularly on The New York Times list, and I would run it by them, you know, the whole indie versus traditional thing.

Every single one of them pushed back and said, “You don’t want to go indie. If you do that, you’re going to be stuck in that world forever. You’re never going to get a traditional deal.” Like they completely tried to talk me out of it. I’m honestly glad that it didn’t happen, that that didn’t work.

Now you fast forward a little bit, like, I was just on the board for ITW, so I was working with all those names that you just mentioned, and many other ones. I can’t tell you how many phone calls I’ve gotten over the last four or five years from big name authors who got their rights back on this title or that title, something in their back catalog.

They’re like, “I really think I should try to indie publish this, but I’m not sure how to do it. Can you help me?” You know, like they are all looking at that.

What ends up happening is that title comes back, their agent gets it, their agent resells it again, typically for a lesser amount than they got the previous time. So it’s a dwindling asset. Then it gets locked up for another five to seven years or so, and then they rinse and repeat.

They’re seeing that they’re just not making the kind of money that they used to. Every one of those deals is getting smaller. Some cases, those books aren’t reselling at all. So they’re ending up with all this back catalog.

Other authors, they haven’t resold their back catalog at all. So books went out of print 15, 20 years ago, and they are sitting on those Word documents on their computer, not sure what to do with them. Today, 2025, they are all looking at indie publishing in one way or another.

Joanna: Well, especially if some of the publishers, like you said, Simon and Schuster, and there’s quite a few people who were getting these print-only deals and having their own imprints.

It’s interesting, the last time I was at ThrillerFest—I think it was 2017 the last time I was there—and I remember then people were also asking me about this. One guy said, “I used to get advances that were seven figures, and now the advances are maybe six figures,” and these are big name people.

So that almost feels to me why they’re interested. The only reason is because all the money is—you know—

The long tail is where we live now.

JD: Yes, they all see it, and they all feel it.

Regardless of the number of zeros in the dollar amount, it’s all relative. They see that that industry is drying up. What kills me is, like, I don’t see a lot of the traditional publishers making any changes.

The last book that I had traditionally published, they sent me the marketing plan. It had a substantial advance to it, so there was a marketing team behind it. The PDF document they sent me was literally the same marketing plan I saw from the same company five years earlier for a different book.

They just swapped out the cover images and a couple keywords here or there, but everything else was the same. It was this 30,000-foot view that really told me nothing as far as what they were doing.

If you step into a bookstore and look at the best-selling names that are there, the names that are out in front, on the end caps and the very first table and stuff like that, all these people are getting older.

The biggest name authors out there are all in their 70s, at this point. They’re aging out.

The big publishers haven’t come up with a way to replenish that stock.

In the old days—and when I say old days, you know, 15 years ago—they would spend a lot of money cultivating a new author. They would find somebody who had a solid voice that knew how to write, and they would sign them to a five or six book deal.

As long as each book sold better than the previous one, they would continue to re-up that, and they would keep it going, knowing that they could turn that person into one of those big name authors one day.

In today’s world, that’s not happening anymore. They’re signing people for one-book deals, two-book deals, and if they don’t see the kind of numbers that they need to see at the end of that contract, they let you go.

Then you end up leaving one of the top five, and you go with a smaller press, or you indie publish or whatever. A lot of people don’t know how to recover from that, and a lot of them are just dropping out of the industry altogether.

Joanna: Yes, funny you should say that. I saw a blog post from an author—again, you know, not mentioning any names—but it basically said, “I’ve seen the income go down, and I’ve just decided it’s not worth it anymore.” This was another reasonably big name.

I was like, wow. It’s very interesting if that’s the way it goes. I almost feel like for a lot of indies, like myself, for example, I’ve never had a truly breakout book. I’ve just built up.

When you build up from a low number per month to a bigger number per month, you feel, I don’t know, perhaps fine, compared to somebody who might have started on a massive deal for book one and then has just spiraled downwards. You know what I mean?

That feels like the difference in energy between the indies who are clawing themselves up and then the big name trad authors who are now spiraling down.

JD: I think it’s almost like a tortoise and hare thing.

If you come out of the gate and you have this enormous, big seller, you’re going to be chasing that forever. Every book you write is going to be compared to that.

I would honestly rather be in your shoes, like a situation like you just said. Gently increase your revenue and your business model, everything just kind of raised just a little bit year after year after year. I think that’s better because then it’s a gradual thing.

As long as each book that you’re putting out is selling better than the last one, you know, everything is constantly improving in a nice and slow and steady way. It’s almost like the stock market. You’re building a nice, solid base beneath you. If something goes wrong, it’s not going to just fall out.

If you take somebody who has a big seller, all of a sudden they have these giant numbers that they have to try and hit every single time. Even if they have another big seller, if it doesn’t hit those original numbers, it’s seen as a failure. That’s a tough position to be in.

I hate picking on people, but like, look at like Gillian Flynn. She had a three book deal. So her first two books did okay, but they didn’t really sell that great. Then all of a sudden, Gone Girl hits. Imagine having to follow up Gone Girl. She has been at home writing the follow up to Gone Girl for years, and she hasn’t put anything out.

Joanna: She wrote the screenplay. She moved into screenwriting.

JD: Yes, she she’s moved onto other things. It’s fantastic that she’s actually got her hands in multiple pots. I think that’s key, too. You talk about diversification all the time. That’s something from this industry, and I think life, in general, I think a lot of people should take that away.

Joanna: I do want to just point out there, you said about the stock market and up into the right slowly. I mean, you have to zoom out. I think that would be what I would say. Nobody has that every book sells better than the last.

I mean, there’s always books that come out that are just creative, and are not necessarily ones that hit the market. So if you zoom out, I think that’s the point with the stock market, too. As an investor—

If you zoom out far enough over time, it does go up and to the right.

JD: It does. Yes, you’ve got to look at the big picture, and as long as it’s improving, you’re in good shape.

Joanna: Exactly. So I want to come back, you mentioned there the big names, all in their 70s. Of course, one of the biggest names in the world, James Patterson. You co-write with James Patterson. Then since you’ve been doing that, you’ve also moved into his model of co-writing with other people.

You’re the second name under James Patterson, but you’re the first name when you’re co-writing with others. So tell us about that. Why did you decide to do it? Because, frankly, I have heard from some authors who’ve done this that they didn’t end up getting the sort of sales that they thought they would get.

What has been your experience co-writing with James Patterson?

JD: Yes, so working with Patterson has been huge. I tell people it’s almost like taking his Masterclass online, except he calls you and tells you everything you’re doing wrong and gives you some advice.

We’ve had just as many phone calls on the business side of publishing as we have on writing side. He’s been helping me kind of create the Patterson 2.0 with my own career.

I think I’m a lot of ways it’s because he’s older. He would probably do these things himself if he was in his 50s, but I think he’s in a comfortable place right now. He doesn’t see any reason to rock the boat, but he’s getting some enjoyment out of helping me create a business model in today’s world based on what he’s learned.

From my standpoint, there’s no way I’m going to turn down that advice. So he was largely responsible for me moving to Simon and Schuster the way that I did, the way the co-author titles are coming out, the people that I’m choosing, the countries that these books are dropping in.

He’s been involved in a lot of those decisions, at least as an ear, a sounding board that I can run some of these things by. I hear you, like I know other people that have tried to do this before, and I’ve seen it not work, I’ve seen it work. In my model, it seems to be working okay.

People are buying my solo titles in a lot bigger numbers than they do the co-authored stuff. That being said, I’m pricing the co-authored stuff at a lower price point and getting it into places that my bigger titles may or may not get to.

I’m using it just like I do everything else. I’m using it to cast a wider net. I’m trying to rope in people that may not be able to afford a $10 ebook, because now they can buy a Barker book for $5.

Joanna: I like the idea of casting a wider net.

I think this is also something you do, you have deliberately not written the same thing over and over again. I mean, you do have a series, but it’s not a massive series. Like, it’s not a 25 book series, like some people. Well, like James Patterson has huge, long series.

How are you writing different kinds of books in order to cast a wider net?

JD: Yes, I made a conscious decision at the get-go that I didn’t want to write the same book but different over and over again. Being in the publishing industry, I had seen people get caught up in that.

Before you know it, they’re 10 books in and they’re dreading the writing process because they just don’t want to have to do that same thing again. So I came out of the gate, my very first novel was horror, the next one was a thriller, then I did another horror novel. So I bounced back and forth on purpose.

This frustrated the hell out of my agents and the publishers because they weren’t quite sure how to market all that. What I’ve been finding is it’s allowing me to build brand, like people are basically seeing my name as the brand and knowing that they’re going to get a particular type of book.

Not necessarily the same book, but they’re going to get the same feeling, the same kind of pacing and those types of things. So when I go look for co-authors, I’m trying to find people that can add a little something to my mix that I may not be able to do on my own.

I’ll give you an example. I had a book out about a year ago now, called Heavy Are the Stones, that I wrote with Christine Daigle. I think you know Christine. In real life, she’s a neuropsychologist.

So I can fake my way through that in a book. I can do enough Google searches and watch documentaries, just like any other author. I can come up with something that seems realistic and plausible, but having a real neuropsychologist in the writing room is priceless. It allows us to take that to a whole other level.

So when I seek out co-authors, I’m really looking for that.

I’m trying to find people that can bring something to the table that I can’t necessarily do on my own.

At the same time, I take that book and I make sure the pacing matches my pacing, and make sure the language and everything is on par, the story is as compelling as any of my other titles.

So I kind of take something that they’re working on and take it to another level. I dial it up a little bit so my audience will react to it. I think by combining all those different things, it seems to be working.

Joanna: Well, I can hear people in the audience who are like, “Oh, well, maybe I could pitch JD.”

Do you take pitches? And who are you looking for?

JD: I do all the time. Where it honestly came from is I used to mentor a lot of authors. It was the whole pay it forward thing. I feel like helping other people really helps me recharge my batteries.

I love finding an author that was doing like 80% of the things right, but I spot like 20% that could be fixed, and I like to help them get through that. At the time, I was charging people for that, and I always felt icky about having to charge people for mentorship.

It was a good gatekeeper because it got rid of the people who weren’t really serious about it. Ultimately, what I ended up doing is I flipped that when I started bringing in co-authors.

So I find somebody who, again, has about 80% of the skill set that I think they need, that needs a little help on one part or another. I bring them in and I walk them through the entire writing process. So we come up with the idea for the book, the title, the tagline, the back-of-book blurb.

I hold their hand through the outlining process. I hold their hand through the writing process. I’d make them do the bulk of the work because I want them to walk away from this a better writer.

Then in the end, I own the book, because from an accounting standpoint, it’s near impossible to do co-authored stuff on a royalty split. It seems to work really well for everybody. So I’m constantly looking for co-authors. I have people that send me stuff all the time.

If somebody in your audience is into that and they want to reach out, they can find me on my website.

Joanna: To be clear, that’s not brand new authors.

You’re looking for people who have written books, so they actually know what they’re doing.

We’re not talking about newbies.

JD: I mean, I get plenty of stuff from newbies too, and I’m waiting to find that gold in there. The truth is, this is just like any other profession. If you want to be a brain surgeon, they’re not going to just throw you at the operating table. There’s years’ worth of study and practice and things that go into play.

Writing is no different. To me, it’s like a muscle. You have to work it out every day. Most people have to write maybe a half million words before they really figure out what they’re doing.

So most of the people that find me that I end up signing, they’ve got one or two books they’ve written. Maybe they were with a small press, maybe they were with one of the big publishers, but it didn’t work out. A lot of times that’s a discoverability issue.

You could have the greatest title in the world, and Random House can put it out for you, but if the marketing plan doesn’t hit just right, that book will fizzle and die. That doesn’t mean the writer doesn’t know what they’re doing. So those are the kind of people that I’m looking for. I’m trying to find those hidden gems.

Joanna: Well, let’s talk about marketing then. Of course, we’ve known each other years now, and I know stuff about you, but I was like, I’m just going to like Google JD to see what he’s been doing recently.

This column came up in Rolling Stone and I was like, what is JD doing blogging on Rolling Stone magazine? Then I was like, oh, right, you used to kind of work tangentially in the music industry.

Why are you blogging for Rolling Stone magazine?

JD: You know, I think it was just a call back to the early days. Back when I was working then in the music business, I would have loved to write for Rolling Stone. That was like the Holy Grail back then.

They approached me a couple of years ago, and they said, “Hey, would you like to do a column for us?” So it occasionally shows up in the print, most of the time it’s just online, but they let me write whatever I want.

So I write two or three columns a month on whatever topic I feel like talking about, which is fun. I mean, and it’s good exposure. From a marketing standpoint, it gets my name out there on a regular basis. So it seems to work out.

Joanna: Well, it’s funny though, because this seems to work out. I know you do ads and stuff. With an ad, you pay for an Amazon ad or whatever, and you get some clicks, and you can tell that it’s working. With the Rolling Stone, maybe online they let you have a click-through or something, but—

How do you know that it’s worth it?

JD: Well, it comes down to, again, this being a business and branding. So your brand, your name, needs to show up in front of people on a regular basis before they really recognize it.

So somebody may see a Rolling Stone article written by me. They may not buy my book for years, they may not buy it at all. But if they see my name once, twice, four or five, six times, just popping up in random places, all of a sudden, I’m a known commodity to them.

So they walk into a Barnes and Noble one day, and they’re browsing the shelves, and all of a sudden my name jumps out at them. They recognize it. They don’t quite understand why, but it speaks to them a little bit, and they pick up that book.

From a brand standpoint, anytime you can get your name out there, it’s good. Try to do it as often as possible.

I do Facebook ads, I do Amazon ads, I do all those different things. I also do tons of podcasts. I do tons of radio. I do tons of television. Any opportunity I have to get my name or voice out there and talk about the book process, I do it.

Joanna: Yes, I noticed that. As I said to you, your team pitched me like multiple times, and I’m like, stop it already! I thought it was interesting because they did also pitch me from different angles and different companies.

I feel like what you’ve said there, that some of these things are branding, and some of these things are sales. So the ads are trying to link directly to sales, and then the branding is a sort of nebulous. I haven’t got a clue how this is going to work, but maybe somehow it will if it’s all together.

What percentage of your time are you doing between those two things? Have you outsourced all the ad stuff as well?

JD: The ad stuff I’ve got pretty much dialed in.

I tried outsourcing it, but then I found that the people that I talked to, like they are more than willing to take my money. They will put the ads out there, but the click-through rates that they were getting just weren’t that great.

So I’ve done the same things that that that you have, and probably everybody in your audience has. I studied up on Facebook ads, and I post my own, and I just tweak them a little bit.

I do a lot of AB testing to figure out what images are working. I play with the text a little bit. I’m constantly changing them. I’m finding that my click-through ratios or rates are really low. Like, I get, like, between around five, six cents, sometimes. 11 cents, I think, is my average that I’m paying per ad on Facebook.

I like doing that. I think it’s the autistic side of me too. Like I enjoy messing with something like that, coming up with a way to make it better. When I stumble into something that’s working, I double down. I enjoy that process.

Joanna: Is your day half writing, half marketing?

JD: Pretty much. I mean, I start at seven in the morning. I turn off the internet first thing, and I just knock out whatever words I’m working on for my latest projects. I do about 2000 to 3000 words.

Then I turn the internet on, that’s usually about 10:30 or 11, and let my inbox fill up and just kind of deal with the business side of stuff. Afternoons, I do interviews from around noon until three, and then my quitting bell rings at three o’clock.

Joanna: Oh, okay, because you have a daughter, don’t you?

JD: I do. One of the things that started happening very early on is when my book started to sell in foreign territories, I would get interview requests at crazy hours, like 11 o’clock at night, two o’clock in the morning, because you’re basically dealing with their schedule. I took all of those, and I quickly started to burn out.

I was like there’s no way I can sustain this. So in today’s world, I just kind of force everybody into that little box, 12 o’clock to three o’clock. I’ve worked with tons of publicists, too, on the promo side. It’s funny, you said that they contacted you a lot of different times.

I had one publicist that I had paid a huge amount to on a monthly basis, a retainer, and they hardly got anything. The publicist that actually contacted you that I’ve been working with recently, like I pay her for podcast that she gets.

So if she gets me a podcast, she gets a certain percentage. If she gets me a newspaper review, she gets a certain dollar amount. Everything is a la carte, and she’s been hustling. So I try to find publicists that are willing to work on those terms, rather than just a flat dollar amount where there’s no guaranteed results.

Joanna: Yes, I think those people are quite rare.

JD: They are, but if you keep looking, you will find them.

Joanna: Well, it’s also really interesting because I’ve been podcasting since 2009, and for many, many years, a lot of people used to talk about the traditional media stuff. Then book blog tours was a thing for a while. Then a lot of social media.

Then what’s happened, really in the last 18 months, I would say, is that I get pitched a lot every day, from a lot of traditional publishers. So all the big houses pitching, and all they do is just send a press release directly to my email and say, you know, “Opportunity to interview JD Barker,” and then just a blurb from your book.

I’m just like, will these people stop it already? Because this isn’t a pitch. So for people listening—I know you have done some of these yourself, although you work with people like—what are you trying to do when you pitch whatever podcast, media, newspaper, whatever?

What are you pitching that’s more than just “here’s my book sales description”?

JD: Well, we get them on Writer’s Ink, too. So I totally get it. What kills me is when you get the ones that have absolutely nothing to do with the type of show that you do.

Joanna: Oh, yes. “Here’s a credit card company.”

JD: Yes, or, “This guy is a business entrepreneur, and he can tell you all about real estate.” I’m like, that’s not what our audience is looking for.

Again, I scatter shot this stuff. So I’ve done podcasts and interviews on autism. I’ve done it on the business of writing. I’ve done it on my latest book that’s coming out.

I do all of them, because it’s one of those things, like I’m honestly not sure what’s working and what’s not working, but I do know that that brand and name recognition is important. So the more places I get, the better.

It’s funny where I get feedback from. I hear from a lot of parents that heard about me on an autism interview that have then went out and bought one of my books. So it all kind of crosses over.

I think if you talk to anybody who works in advertising, for the most part, they can’t tell you what’s working and what’s not working, so they tend to do everything, which is sort of old school.

In today’s world, I mean, you’ve got Facebook and Amazon ads, you can monitor metrics and you can kind of track it that way, but that only works for those types of ads.

One of the things that’s always stuck with me, you know, Patterson told me this story years ago. His very first book, it was called The Thomas Berryman Number, and like, literally, nobody bought that. I don’t even think he’s got a copy of it.

His second book was Along Came a Spider, and the sales on that were decent at the beginning, but they weren’t where he expected them to be or where he wanted them to be. So he spent $500 of his own money and created a television spot.

If you’re old enough, you might remember this. It was just a graphic, and it said, “Your wait for the next Silence of the Lambs is over,” and a tiny little spider crawled down from the corner of the screen, and then it morphed into Along Came a Spider and the cover of the book.

So that was 500 bucks, but that’s what actually launched that book and caused it to become a mega bestseller. He’s constantly doing that, even in today’s world when we’ve got a book coming out.

We just had one called The Writer, it debuted at number two on the New York Times list. He approved every single ad, television spot, Facebook ad, Amazon ad, whatever. Every one of them crossed his desk and he approved each one of them. I try to do the same thing.

Joanna: Well, he came from marketing, didn’t he? Advertising?

JD: He did, yes. He actually wrote the Toys R Us theme song.

Joanna: I love this. I really respect him, obviously, as a writer, but also as a businessman. He was just doing something with Mr. Beast, right?

JD: Yes, he called me actually right after that meeting happened, and this was, geez, maybe about two months ago. He sounded as excited as a teenager. It was crazy. He’s tried to explain this to me, and I honestly didn’t know who Mr. Beast was until afterwards.

So that’s the thing. Like, nobody expects him to do that book. Nobody expected him to write a book with Dolly Parton or Bill Clinton.

Joanna: Dolly Parton, after doing it with Bill Clinton.

JD: Yes, but that’s what keeps him going.

Think of how that expanded his audience. Dolly Parton is huge on a worldwide basis.

All of a sudden they’re reading James Patterson thrillers because he wrote that book.

Joanna: This is the thing, right? I mean, everyone, even if people don’t “like”, in inverted commas, James Patterson’s books, and I’m sure there’s people listening who are like, “Oh, I’d never read a James Patterson.” It doesn’t matter, because he is in his 70s, he’s still hustling, he’s still writing, he’s still doing author business.

I mean, that is just impressive. That, to me, is very inspirational. It’s interesting, because I’ve read bits and bobs of his over the years, you know, a book here, a book there. I don’t read every one of his books. It’s hard to read every one of his books because there’s so many of them.

I recently read Eruption, which he did with the late Michael Crichton estate. What was so funny was I picked it up because I’ve read every single Michael Crichton, and I imagine a lot of other people out there did the same thing.

So this collaboration and co-writing, which you’re now doing as well, is a really interesting model.

Is it marketing, or is it just a way of writing to a different market segment?

JD: Well, I think ultimately, he’s using the books as marketing tools. Every one of them is a business card that’s reaching out to a new segment of people. That’s what I’m trying to do, too.

Joanna: The difference, I guess—and I mean, obviously, you build your name bigger and bigger every year, so I’m sure you’ll be in a position to co-write with an ex-American president at some point.

I’ve co-written a couple of books, and I found it a very difficult process. In the kind of thing you’re doing and what James Patterson’s done, is there’s a primary and there’s a secondary, right? There’s like a primary name and a secondary.

What he seems to be doing is also finding other primary brands, as such. Are you looking for other brands to collaborate with, rather than just authors who were kind of secondary? Do you know what I mean?

JD: I’m using every opportunity to expand my brand.

So if I can work with somebody who’s going to take me into a different place. I’d love to work with a science fiction author at this point, because I could take a science fiction book and turn it into a thriller, and all of a sudden we’re capturing people from both of those audiences.

That’s really what a lot of this is about. I keep going back to the “casting a net” thing, but that’s what you’ve got to do, I think, in order to become one of those household names. It’s not something that happens overnight. It’s done gradually over time.

Joanna: Yes, and I like that perspective, because I feel like in the indie community, we’re pretty obsessed with having direct ROI. Like we have to see the ROI on the ad. So a lot of indie authors don’t do the bigger brand building because it’s so hard to measure. So that’s a really good perspective.

I realize that we’re almost out of time, but I did want to ask you about Author Nation, because you and I were on the same thriller panel last year. You’re back in 2025, along with James Patterson, who is keynoting. Now, you’re very successful, so why come to Author Nation as a successful author who knows what he is doing?

What are the benefits for a more advanced author coming to Author Nation?

JD: Well, I roped Jim into coming, so I’ll give you the same pitch that I gave him. So I have gone to all the big conferences. I’ve been to ThrillerFest a bunch of times, I’ve been to Bouchercon, and my takeaway from a lot of those is, I literally had no more takeaways.

They were helpful for me for the first year or two, when I was first getting started, but after that, there was really no new information that I could utilize anymore.

They are very good at helping people get off that diving board with their debut novel. They’re fantastic at promoting the big names that are out there. But they literally had no content for the rest of us who are basically in that muddy middle of trying to get from that debut novel to the household name status.

So when I went to Author Nation, I saw something a little different. I saw people not only marketing indie titles, but using a lot of the things that I feel the traditional markets could benefit from.

Those waters are getting very muddy at this point.

I don’t really think there is indie and traditional anymore. I think everybody is somewhere in the middle, or should be somewhere in the middle.

They’re all stealing from each other. I think indie authors look at the traditional publishers and they take what’s working. Traditional publishers are doing the exact same thing. They are looking very closely at the indie market and taking what is working there.

That’s why you see all these big name titles all of a sudden on BookBub and these places that they didn’t do a few years ago. They’re utilizing whatever they see working on the indie market.

So I see Author Nation as basically the next version of conferences. I think, properly done, they can create the content that the rest of us need to get from A to Z. To fill in that void in between and teach us how to keep their career going for the long term.

Joanna: I also feel that. As you say, I mean, there is a lot of content at Author Nation. If you’re listening and you haven’t written the first book, or you have written a book and you’re just starting, there’s a lot for those people. Then as you say, there’s also a lot for us. A lot of meetings too, right?

We don’t necessarily go to all the sessions. We’re there for the meetings.

JD: I mean, again, it’s comes down to contacts. There’s plenty of people you’re going to meet at Author Nation, and four or five years down the road, you may be able to help them, they may be able to help you, but all those contacts come into play.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. So we’ll be there, occasionally hanging out in the public spaces, although both of us struggle with a lot of people. Well, I feel like maybe everybody does at these things. There’s just a load of introverts and probably a lot of autistic people all in the same room being scared of each other,

JD: Yes, but there’s also alcohol. I force myself to get out there and talk. I won’t stay in my hotel room as much as I want to. I try to get out on the floor and talk to as many people as I can.

Joanna: I agree. All right.

Where can people find you and your books online?

JD: Easiest place to find me is at JDBarker.com. I’m on all the social medias at @JDBarker. My latest title is called Something I Keep Upstairs, which just released on May 13.

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

JD: Thanks for having me.

The post Casting A Wider Net: Author Brand And The Writing Business With JD Barker first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Note From KMW: This week’s post is a quick one—but it covers a sneaky little habit that can creep into even the best of stories: overexplaining in dialogue. I’ve seen it in books I’ve read, and I’ve definitely caught myself doing it too. It’s easy to do when we want to make sure readers really understand what’s going on, but often, this dialogue mistake just ends up slowing the story and undercutting our characters.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re trusting your readers enough, this one’s for you! The post was inspired by an example so bad I’m paraphrasing rather than directly quoting it. :p I’ll be back next week with a longer post (and podcast), the first in a two-part series I’m really excited about. Stay tuned!

***

As writers, we work hard to earn our readers’ trust. Nothing shatters that trust faster than treating them like they’re not smart enough to keep up. One of the most subtle and common ways authors do this is by overexplaining in dialogue. This usually doesn’t happen intentionally, but out of the fear readers won’t “get it” unless you spell it out. Unfortunately, when you overexplain or repeat yourself, especially in dialogue, readers can feel like the story is talking down to them or even, simply, below their level. That’s a fast track to losing their interest.

Consider a fantasy novel I once read. The author wrote some good dialogue that effectively explained situations while also conveying attitude, nuance, and subtext. Unfortunately, she submarined the dialogue’s inherent buoyancy by having the narrating character explain everything that was said, almost to the point of paraphrasing the dialogue.

For example, in one particular scene, the narrator worried another character might react violently if awoken. This was made clear in the narrative, then repeated, almost word for word, in an immediately subsequent dialogue exchange. The story was otherwise a smart, funny romp. But the author’s penchant for explanation added deadweight that slowed the book down and made me, as a reader, want to start skimming.

Here’s a paraphrased example of how dialogue that repeats the narrative (and vice versa) can feel condescending to readers:

Marcella hesitated outside the bedroom door, clutching Marcus’s supper with both hands. Her fingers tightened around the clay bowl. The last time she’d tried to wake Marcus when he was having one of his episodes, he’d come up swinging—half-conscious and convinced she was someone else. She’d ended up with a sprained wrist and a bruised cheek.

She looked at Angelina. “I don’t think I should go in there,” she whispered. “Last time he had one of these nightmares, he thought I was someone else and attacked me. I hurt my wrist pretty badly.”

This version needlessly repeats the same information in both the narrative and the dialogue. The reader is told twice about Marcus’s violent outburst and the character’s fear—without any additional depth or emotional layering. It slows the pace and makes Marcella sound like she’s explaining the situation not to another character, but to the readers—as if the author doesn’t trust them to retain or interpret what they just read.

The best fiction respects the intelligence of its readers. When your narrative and your dialogue work together, rather than redundantly repeating each other, you create a more immersive, efficient, and respectful reading experience. Before you hit publish, take a pass through your dialogue scenes and ask yourself: “Am I letting the story speak for itself, or am I explaining things that are already clear?”

Trust your readers. They’re smarter than you think—and they’ll thank you for believing it!

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! Have you ever caught yourself overexplaining in dialogue—or spotted it in a book you were reading? Tell me in the comments!

The post The Danger of Overexplaining in Dialogue—and How to Avoid It appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

How can creativity be expressed in both writing and music? How can you improve your creativity by being more mindful of your physical body? How can you manage anxiety when speaking or performing? Jennifer Roig-Francoli gives her thoughts in this interview.

In the intro, Taylor Swift buys back the rights to her first six albums [The Verge];
Understanding the rules of self-publishing, Becca Syme on the Bookfunnel Podcast; Multiple Income Streams for Authors, Beyond Just Book Sales [Publishing Performance];

Melania Trump’s memoir audiobook using her AI voice clone with ElevenLabs, which she is selling direct from her website; my own voice clone AI-narrated thriller, Death Valley; AI narration in publishing [The New Publishing Standard];
The New York Times has struck an AI licensing deal with Amazon [The Verge].

Plus, my Fourth Edition of Successful Self-Publishing; Desecration, a British crime thriller, on special; and my AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinar;
The Geography of Belonging and Finding Home [Books and Travel].

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 

Jennifer Roig-Francoli is an international prize-winning violinist and certified Alexander Technique teacher. She’s also a high performance coach and the author of Make Great Music with Ease!: The Secret to Smarter Practice, Confident Performance, and Living a Happier Life.

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

Show Notes

• Creativity in music and writing
• Timing and readiness when approaching a book
• How perfectionism can hinder your creative process
• Tips for performing and public speaking, and tackling anxiety
• How the mind-body connection relates to both music and writing
• Dealing with physical pain as a musician or a writer (and in the intro, I recommend DeskBound by Kelly & Juliet Starrett)
• What is Alexander Technique?
• Integrating music and writing into a creative business

You can find Jennifer at artoffreedom.me.

Transcript of Interview with Jennifer Roig-Francoli

Joanna: Jennifer Roig-Francoli is an international prize-winning violinist and certified Alexander Technique teacher. She’s also a high performance coach and the author of Make Great Music with Ease!: The Secret to Smarter Practice, Confident Performance, and Living a Happier Life. So welcome to the show, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to talking with you.

Joanna: Oh, yes. I’m pretty excited about this. We were just saying before the recording, this is my first podcast that’s really around music. I don’t know why I’ve missed it so much after like 15 years of doing the show.

Jennifer: Well, I’m honored to be the first.

Joanna: Yes, indeed. I am interested because why write a book? I tend to think that people have this primary mode of creativity, and yours is clearly music.

Why write a book? (when music is your first mode of expression)

Jennifer: I’ve wanted to write a book for a long time. My dad was an English professor, so my favorite class in school was writing. I used to keep journals. I wrote poetry and stories from the time I was really little.

I just always loved writing. It’s also been therapeutic for me as an adult, just writing for myself. So writing a book was a thing I always wanted to do.

The main thing was to get my ideas across about, specifically, the work I do with the Alexander Technique, music making, and creativity. I just have a lot of ideas, and I wanted to get them out there. So a book made sense.

Joanna: So your dad was in the literature field. Were you also encouraged into music as a child?

Again, because your primary method, I guess, is music, so writing was second. Did you do that from childhood?

Jennifer: I’m told by my mother that when I was two, I declared that I needed a violin. My parents are both musicians, so it makes sense. They would sit around our living room in the evenings when I was a baby, playing quartets with their friends.

I vaguely remember sitting in the rocking chair, listening to them and watching them. So when I was two, I fell in love with a violin. My mom is a cellist, and my dad is a violist, but I liked the violin.

When I was four years old, my mother discovered the Suzuki method and got me started. So I’ve been playing the violin since I was four.

Joanna: Yes, wow. It’s so interesting, isn’t it? I think, clearly, when you were a kid, it was fun for you, and it was all around you.

I said to you beforehand that I don’t really listen to music. I think part of that is my mum likes silence, so we were never really allowed to have sound around. I’m a very quiet person as well and often wear noise-canceling headphones. So it’s so weird to imagine your childhood with all this music.

Which then sort of brings me to a question about, if that’s your main thing that you do—

How did you face the challenges around writing when you’re used to doing something so different, something so noisy?

Jennifer: Funny, I don’t think of it that way at all. To be totally honest, I don’t listen to much music myself either. I really enjoy making music even more than listening to it. Yes, it’s pretty loud to have a violin right next to your ear.

So I don’t think of it as something different, in a way. A lot of my work and what I’m most interested in is how we get inspired and how do we take that creative inspiration into ourselves? Like how do we let it flow in the mind, the body, the soul, the whole that we are? How do we take these ideas that we have and then express them?

I feel like I have these ideas, whether they are musical ideas or thought ideas, concepts.

There are ideas in my mind, and somehow they need to get out. They can be expressed through music or they can be expressed through writing.

Since I’ve always been writing, it was actually very easy for me to start writing this book, when it was the right time. I tried three times to write this book, and the first time I attempted it was maybe 15 years ago.

I sat down to write the book one summer on vacation, and I think I probably sat down two or three times to try to write the book and realized I was not ready at all to write this book. My ideas were not ready. They were unformed. It just was really hard. So I left it for more than a decade.

Then a few years ago, I got back to it. I felt like it was time. I got further into the process, maybe three or four months. Then life events took over and prevented me from continuing. So I took another break for maybe two years or something before I said, okay, third try’s the charm. I’m going to try again, and I was determined to make it work this time.

It was actually really easy to write most of the book. It just sort of flowed out of me. It’s no different from making music, really.

Joanna: So that had been kind of incubating. I think that’s interesting. I’ve had that experience with a couple of my books, particularly one called Writing the Shadow around that darker side of ourselves and expressing that. I’d thought about that for a couple of decades, really.

You said the third time you tried again. There will be people listening who may well have put off books or tried to write books. How did you know this time it was going to work? Or did you just start again with hope, and then it started working?

When do you know the right time to pick a project back up?

Jennifer: Part of the reason I wrote the book, one of them, to be completely honest, is that it fit into my business plan. I run a coaching business for musicians, and it would serve a number of purposes for me from a business perspective to have a book out.

For one thing, there are so many people in the world that I feel could benefit from my services and what I teach, and yet so many people in the world can’t afford my services. So one reason I wrote the book was to offer something really low cost to a much broader audience so they could benefit from the teachings.

It just felt like at this point in time, I knew clearly what I wanted to teach. My system was formulated. I had been teaching it a certain way for a number of years already. I really knew my stuff in a way I didn’t before.

I went through certain life experiences too along the way that fed into the book. That’s why the first time I tried writing it, I was just not ready. It wasn’t the right time. Even the second time just didn’t work because of other life events that ended up giving me more material for the actual book when it was the right time.

So I can’t really say other than that it just fit.

All the pieces fit at that time. It was right for my business. It was right in my life.

I had gotten to a point in my business, financially, where I felt I could make my book number one for a whole year, which is what I did.

I really decided that it would be okay for me to focus mostly on the book for a whole year, and that would mean probably bringing in less income from other sources. It was seeing that I could go through this process for a year and still be okay, and not have to worry too much about working hard on other stuff, if that makes sense.

Joanna: I love that you said it was the right time in your business as well. I think what that does too, is that helps you get out of your own head and think about other people. Sometimes that’s what we need.

You can get lost in so many words, and then when you think, okay, who is my audience, and who am I trying to serve?

That also helped you because you knew how this fits with the people you coach, and the people who can’t afford coaching can afford a book. I think that’s fantastic. So often with these deep and meaningful books, we can get lost in our own heads, right?

Jennifer: Yes, I think I was completely lost in my own head the first time I tried.

Joanna: And it’s making it out. So you said it took about a year. How did that year go? Was it a lot of rewriting? Or you said it kind of flowed. Was there a lot of editorial?

What was your creative process like during that time?

Jennifer: I have to say, there was one piece of advice that made it possible. Without that piece of advice, there’s no way I would have finished the book in the time I did. The advice was to not edit as I was going along.

I tend to have perfectionistic tendencies. I tell my students I’m a recovering perfectionist. My old way of writing would be about the process of writing and getting it right as I’m writing. That wasn’t going to work for me because that would take way too long.

It also meant that if I started writing that way, there are a thousand different ways to say something. So if I kept finding a better way to say something or saying, “No, this isn’t quite the right word here, let me find another one,” and then I’d have another idea, and it would take me off into tangents. Pretty soon, I’d have no idea what I was writing about.

For me to censor myself and give myself a rule, you’re not allowed to edit while writing, you just write. You’re going to write this chapter today, or whatever it was. Sometimes I did a certain number of words. Sometimes I just said, okay, this is the chapter. Sometimes I didn’t even have a plan.

For the most part I would just write and not let myself edit. That saved me. That saved that book.

Joanna: I totally agree with you, and that’s how I do it, too. Everyone has different processes, but I think that is really important.

So let’s talk a bit about some of the aspects of being a musician, and you cover some of this in the book. In the subtitle is “confident performance.” I was thinking about this, now you’ve performed at Carnegie Hall, which is kind of one of those amazing things.

As authors, we need to become more comfortable with performing. Many of us are introverts. We just don’t want to get on stage and do this.

What are some of your tips for performing our work or reading our work in a way that engages audiences?

Jennifer: Oh, that’s a great question. I just have to say that even though I’ve been performing since I was a really young child with the violin, it took me a really long time to be brave enough to speak in public.

The fact that I’m here doing podcasts and interviews and speaking from stages is just mind-blowing to me because I was an extremely shy, introverted child. Somehow, because I started performing with the violin very young, it was just a natural thing that was easy for me. That was no problem, but speaking, I really had to work on that.

The breakthrough for me was, to give you an example, I actually knew how bad I was at speaking in public. In college, I signed up for this class on public speaking, and we needed to memorize a poem for the second class. I thought, Oh, this is fine. I can memorize music, no problem. So I memorized the poem, but I freaked out. I was so terrified.

So I got to this class, and I stood up, and I think I got maybe the first two lines out, and my mind went totally blank. There was no way I could retrieve anything else from that poem. Unfortunately, I was so mortified that I dropped the class and never went back.

Long story short, I actually didn’t work on speaking intentionally, but as a result of my Alexander Technique teacher training—which takes three years, by the way, so like 1600 hours to get certified as an Alexander Technique teacher—through that process, I opened up in my whole self.

In opening up in my whole self, including speaking with other people in the class, it became much, much easier for me to expose myself and be myself in public through words.

So just speaking off the cuff like we are now, I can do it now, and I find it really fun, but it was mortifying earlier. So I completely understand what you’re talking about.

I do have some tips. Performance anxiety is a big thing that I help my musicians with. Through the way that I teach the Alexander Technique—which is actually called Primal Alexander—we’re really learning how to connect how we’re thinking with how we’re feeling in the body.

So it’s really important when you’re feeling nervous or anxious, it’s really important just to notice that without judging it to begin with.

Self-observation is one of our best tools.

It’s a human gift to be able to self-reflect, and for you to see yourself from outside, and observe and watch, and ask yourself, “What’s going on? What’s actually happening to me right now in this moment?”

I’m doing this for myself right now, and anybody listening, I invite you to just ask yourself, “What’s happening to me right now? What am I noticing?”

If you’re nervous, you’ll probably notice symptoms like the heart racing or sweating or shaking or shrinking, getting tight. All these things that happen in a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. There’s a tightening, a constriction going on in the system. It’s uncomfortable. We don’t like that feeling.

So what we usually do is try to fix it, make it go away, or mask it somehow. None of those things really work. They can work to a point, but the best way I’ve found that is really foolproof—and it works for everybody I’ve worked with—is if you really just stop and get curious like a little kid, like you’re a Martian with no idea what’s going on.

Or you’re just a scientist taking observations, and you are your own science experiment. Or you’re a detective, and you want to find out. You want information. Like, what is happening to this human being right now? What’s happening? “Oh, my heart is racing,” or, “Oh, I’m shaking.”

Then if we can develop the response of, “Oh, that’s interesting. What else is happening?” and to keep asking “what else?” without and rush and without any judgment. Just be with the experience. That in itself is incredibly powerful.

When you really stick with it, with that attitude—and —

Attitude is everything. It’s that childlike curiosity where you’re giving yourself time to notice and be curious and not trying to change your experience.

Except you don’t get fixated on it, so you keep asking yourself, “Okay, interesting. What else?”

Joanna: Yes. Obviously, your Alexander Technique is a physical practice, and this idea of being in the body, I feel like so often, as authors, is different to musicians. Especially with the violin, your body is making the sound. Like you’re moving with an instrument.

Writers, so much of it is in our heads, and yet, as you say, going on a stage or speaking is physical. You are a physical human in this experience. So I like that you talk about that.

I also find, because I do a lot of speaking, I always do sort of writing beforehand, and I just write “thank you that I can serve the audience.” Again, like we said at the beginning — 

I’m here for them. This isn’t actually about me.

This is what I can help them with. Is that similar to you, as a musician, that you’re really thinking about serving the people who are listening?

Jennifer: Yes, that’s a beautiful way to think of it. I love how you do that before you go out.

Joanna: It just changes my perspective from being obsessed about how I feel to trying to help other people with whatever they’re looking for.

Jennifer: That’s really a great point. It is so good to include both. Ultimately, the way I look at it is that I want to be open and responsive to both what’s going on inside me and what’s going on outside of me.

Ultimately, I feel like I can best serve the world around me when I’m making sure I take care of myself first. When I’m at my best, that’s when I have my best to give.

So it’s interesting what you said. Also, you might be surprised because I never thought of playing the violin as a physical activity until I ended up having physical problems. I really thought of it as a mental thing.

I really had a mind-body split, where I had this false notion, first of all, that there is such a thing as a mental activity that’s just mental or a physical activity that’s just physical. That’s just not true.

Even as a writer, you do have an instrument because you have a pen or a pencil or a computer, and you need to use your physical body to get those ideas out of your brain. It’s really not so different from a violinist who has a violin and a bow to get the ideas out.

So I actually always used to think it was a mental activity, and I had this prejudice against what I thought of as physical activities. My brother, for example, was really into sports. I liked sports when I was really little, I didn’t have a mind-body split when I was really little.

The older I got, the more praise I got for being more intellectual, getting good grades in school —

and all that kind of thing. The violin was included in there for me. So then I didn’t think much of sports.

There was a whole dynamic in my family too that was, in me, kind of messed me up. It caused problems down the road because if you don’t recognize how you can’t really separate the mind and the body, ultimately something will suffer.

Joanna: This is so funny because this is exactly the same for me. My brother also was the sporty one and played basketball. He snowboards and skateboards. In terms of physical intelligence, he is physically intelligent, in terms of just amazing physical awareness.

It took me, also, probably 25, 30 years, and then you hit 35, right, and your body starts hurting. Then you hit 40, and it gets worse. Then you have to start doing something. I ended up damaging myself and getting help for that.

You talk in the book about chronic pain and your own physical stuff that led you to the Alexander Technique. Tell us a bit about that, because—

People listening, if they’re not already in pain from writing, they’re probably going to be.

Jennifer: Oh, dear. Yes, so I found the Alexander Technique because I had neck pain. It wasn’t directly from playing the violin because at that time, I had young children, and had not been playing the violin seriously for a while. I had a major career that I cut short when I was 19 and got married at 20.

I stopped playing as a soloist. Then I spent quite a few years playing the violin in other capacities, but my heart wasn’t really in it. I’m just, by nature, a soloist. I loved doing that. It made me happy. It was exciting.

I stopped all of that, then I got married at 20. I started playing in orchestras and teaching violin—things I never really wanted to do—just to earn money.

It was good because I kept up my skills, but ultimately I was suffering because I didn’t have a creative outlet other than my family. Of course, having children is a beautiful creative outlet. But carrying toddlers on my hips, my alignment was completely off. It was really stressful, like I didn’t have family around to help.

I got progressively less happy. As I got less happy, I had more stress, and the physical stress of lifting my children and carrying them around. One day, I ended up with neck pain that wouldn’t go away.

I ended up going to doctors and chiropractors, and nobody could really help until I finally ended up at an Alexander Technique teacher’s studio. That completely changed my entire life. So I went for pain, but it was actually a deeper, creative kind of pain. It wasn’t about the violin, it was about blocked creativity for me.

Joanna: I guess if people don’t know—

What is the Alexander Technique?

Jennifer: Sure. You mentioned earlier that it’s a physical technique, but actually I think of it as a whole-person technique. I know why you’d think that because if people look up Alexander Technique, they’ll probably find things about posture. You’ll see a practitioner touching the student gently with gentle manipulation, and moving, sitting, and standing.

It can give the impression that it’s about the physical body only, but it’s much deeper than that. I’ve been fascinated since the beginning of my Alexander journey to know what was underneath. For me, the Alexander Technique is a way to connect how you’re thinking with how you’re feeling, both physically and emotionally.

When you learn how to connect and integrate your whole self—your mind, body, emotions—when you are more integrated and whole, you bring that whole of you into activity, you can learn to do whatever you want to do with much more ease, much less effort, much less tension, and much more joy.

So that, to me, is what the Alexander Technique is. That’s also why I teach it with that touch, so I can empower my students to learn to think differently to get different results.

Joanna: Yes, I’ve definitely found—I do a lot of weight training—and I felt like I’ve learned so much about what the body and mind connection is, just from being much more present in my body, which I wasn’t for so long as an author.

Obviously, you work with musicians who are suffering pain, and some people listening might also be musicians, but—

What are the things that people come to you with that relate to the mind and body connection or the creativity that some people listening might recognize or find useful?

Jennifer: Yes, I’ll just say as an aside, I’m always open to working with non-musicians. In fact, when I first started teaching Alexander technique, I wanted to work with anybody but musicians, believe it or not. I spent quite a while working with firefighters and journalists and teachers and all kinds of other people.

So I’m always open to that. Recently, I had a photographer join one of my classes. Ultimately, we’re all just human. We are all working on the same things. We’re working on how do you bring your whole self to whatever activity it is that you’re engaged in, that you’re interested in? Whether you’re a musician or a writer or whatever it is that you do.

The specific things that people come to me for generally have to do with improving their skills to get better at whatever the activity is, or they have physical pain. A lot of musicians end up with tendinitis, neck pain, back pain, carpal tunnel—real physical issues where it’s career threatening. If you have tendinitis, you can’t play the violin or the piano. You have to stop.

There are a lot of famous musicians in the media, like recently, there have been quite a few people who have had to just take long breaks. It happens with athletes too. Ultimately, musicians are athletes. We just work with fine motor skills, and obviously what we’re producing is different. We are producing music. Athletes are producing a football game.

It really doesn’t matter because we are human. We need to learn how to think in a way that—well, here’s something I always come back to. It’s a favorite quote of mine from Frederick Mathias Alexander, who is the originator of this technique. He said, quote, “Mine is a method for the control of human reaction.” End quote.

“Mine is a method for the control of human reaction.” We are reacting to stimuli in our lives all day long, unconsciously or consciously.

For me, this process is about learning to be more conscious of how we’re reacting to things. Noticing, okay, if I react to XYZ by getting tight, for instance, if I react to speaking in public by getting tight and my body’s getting stiff, do I like that result?

If I don’t like that result, then maybe I could examine my attitude or how I’m thinking and think differently. Alexander started all of this, the Alexander Technique originated in his performance issue of getting hoarse when he was speaking in public. He was an actor, not a musician.

So everything we’re talking about is really pertinent for writers who need to speak in public too. That’s what Alexander had to do. He would get hoarse, and then he wouldn’t be able to recite Shakespeare, which was his love.

He went to specialists and nobody could help him. So he figured he had to either quit and not speak in public, not be an actor, and do something else, or solve the problem himself. So that’s what he did. Thanks to him, we have this method that is amazing.

Joanna: Yes, I find this so interesting. For people listening, you mentioned carpal tunnel. I know loads of writers who end up having that operation for carpal tunnel. Or people with back pain who are just on a lot of meds. I feel like people think that it can’t be solved in any other way than medically.

I pretty much gave myself a shoulder injury from hunching over my keyboard and basically tore my rotator cuff from hunching.

Jennifer: Sorry. Very common, though, I’m sure.

Joanna: Exactly. I went to a specialist. I got the steroid injection to immediately stop the pain. The shoulder guy said to me—this was about six years ago, I was 44 years old—he said, if you don’t sort this out with your posture, do weight training, reverse this, you will be back here and I will have to keep seeing you.

It was good. He gave me a real talking to and basically said, get out of here and sort this out. It’s so interesting to me because I know some people listening will be like, well, no, this is clearly just a physical thing that I have to fix with an operation or drugs or whatever.

Do you incorporate the medical side into your practice, or is it very much that this takes time to work on your body?

Jennifer: I don’t diagnose. I don’t have that training. I’m not trained to diagnose anything physical like that. Alexander Technique, there’s actually quite a bit of research on it. Unfortunately, it’s like the best kept secret in the world. It really does help anybody with anything.

It’s hard to get people to believe that. If you’re saying, I can help you with anything, but that’s been my experience.

Of course, thank goodness for surgeons, thank goodness for doctors, and thank goodness for drugs that are helping people and saving lives. I’m in no way saying we shouldn’t have all that. However, there are so many surgeries performed that are unnecessary, in my opinion.

In my experience, I’ve worked with many people who were about to have surgery and then came to me as a last resort. Or they had the surgery, and it wasn’t getting better, and it didn’t solve the problem. Or they had the treatment, and they had to keep going back again and again.

It’s pretty clear to me that there’s a purpose and reason for the medical profession. They serve a very important purpose. Yet, there’s a huge aspect that’s completely missing that they are not trained in, which is seeing the whole person and treating the whole person.

Of course, there are alternative practitioners and people who do that. That’s great. I don’t think of myself as a medical practitioner of any kind, in any way. It’s remarkable that I’ve had many people come to me, primarily because they had pain.

I’m thinking of one person in particular that comes to mind immediately, now another one. Two people actually, who were told by their doctors they would always be in pain because the issues they had were so severe. Like from multiple car accidents, from broken vertebrae, from slipped discs.

These were very serious physical things you could see on a scan, they’re real things. Yet, through practicing the awareness etudes, those are studies, like little awareness exercises I give my students. I have them do just a few minutes every day.

I tell them, take these like they’re antibiotics. Don’t skip a dose. Prioritize this. It’s really easy, really simple, but you have to stick with it.

There’s a kind of paradigm shift that happens when you start to look at life a little differently.

You notice everything’s related. You start noticing how you react to things and get curious.

You keep observing, wondering, experimenting with thinking differently. Then your pain starts dissolving. It’s amazing. I’ve had so many people actually use the word “miraculous.” I don’t know what’s going on. I do believe there are mysterious forces in the world.

It’s also a very practical technique that people don’t have to believe in it. They just need to be curious enough to try something different. If you keep doing the same thing, you’ll get the same results.

That’s what we do when we go to the computer, for example. We open up the computer and we typically do the same things. We have the same attitude. We are not aware of the rest of the world. We shut out our peripheral vision. We forget about space behind us. We forget about the rest of our lives.

We become so narrow-minded that our bodies just follow the mind. The body becomes narrowed because it follows the narrow-mindedness and the narrow focus. We’re taught that in school. It’s drilled into us that we need to focus and concentrate. The way we’re taught to concentrate is to narrow how we’re thinking.

The body is innocent. The body just reflects what we’re doing with the mind. That’s why we end up in pain.

Joanna: Yes, and particularly, like circling back to what we were saying about what we were rewarded for as, you know, good girls who were doing well at school, and doing what we were told, and doing well on exams. I feel like I spent 30 years denying my body and what my body needed.

Then I’ve essentially had to change direction.

Now a lot of what I do every day is physical movement in order to help fuel my creativity and everything else. I’m much happier when I move.

If I start to be in pain, I will get moving. So I love what you’re doing. I think it’s fascinating.

Just one last question before we go. So at the end of the book, the subtitle is “living a happier life.” I wondered, how do all these things come together for you now, with the writing and the music and your business?

Do you still have your music as a separate thing to your business?

Jennifer: I love that question. I’ve basically spent my whole life working on integrating everything. Actually, it is pretty integrated, I have to say. I do my own marketing, for example, for my coaching business, which entails a lot of writing.

When I first started this business and realized how much time was going to go into marketing, it was overwhelming, and the last thing I ever thought I could enjoy doing.

Selling anything was far from my artistic beliefs about life. But it’s either market yourself, or have somebody else do it, or starve.

So I learned how to market. I realized if I need to do this, I might as well figure out a way to enjoy it. I do love writing. So I actually have done a lot of training. I’ve bought courses, had coaches, and had a lot of coaching in copywriting.

My writing is definitely a part of my day every day. My music is what I write about. Even though I’m not necessarily performing much anymore these days, it’s been a few years since my last real performance—I’ve performed live on Facebook, if that counts.

I still play my instrument, but I don’t need it to feed my creativity. That’s what I realized when I was 19, honestly, that I didn’t need it to be a creative person. I don’t need to write, but I enjoy writing and I enjoy making music. I also enjoy going for walks in nature.

Ultimately, it’s really about—and this is what I’m really working on—how can I be really myself, authentically myself, right now? Being who I am includes connecting with people. That’s a form of expression, and that’s creative.

If I can get out of my way and allow inspiration to guide me, that’s a really creative process. I’m doing that right now, and I hope to get better at it as I go through life. That makes me happy. That’s where the happy comes in.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely.

Where can people find you, and your book, and everything you do online?

Jennifer: I have a website. It’s www.artoffreedom.me. That’s my website. Facebook is my main way to connect with people. I’m very accessible. People can also contact me through the website.

I have a YouTube channel. If anybody wants to hear my music, just look up my name on YouTube and you’ll have plenty of music to listen to, as well as teaching videos talking about these kinds of things.

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

Jennifer: Thank you so much.

The post Music, Writing, And The Mind-Body Connection With Jennifer Roig-Francoli first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Note From KMW: Before we get started today, this is just a quick note to let you know that today is the final day you can save 25% off my entire store during my Memorial Day weekend sale. This includes all the e-books, workbooks, courses, and brainstorming guides. If you need some new writing tools, now’s a great time!

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The Enneagram is often thought of as a personality system, but at its heart, it is an archetypal map of human motivation and transformation. Each of its nine types represents a universal pattern of behavior rooted in deep emotional truths (what we, as storytellers, might think of as thematic Truths). Like the Life Cycle of archetypes I explore in my book Writing Archetypal Character Arcs, the Enneagram reflects the evolving inner journeys we all undertake throughout our lives.

Although this archetypal similarity makes the Enneagram and the six Life-Cycle archetypes intuitive partners, it can also be difficult to sort the complexity of the two systems in a way that is actually useful for developing characters. Last week, we explored some of the innumerable possibilities for character-arc variation available within each Enneagram type. This week, I’m answering another reader question—from Elisheva–that points to this central conundrum of combining the Enneagram with the archetypes of the Life Cycle:

I love archetypes and I love the Enneagram, but when I try to use both tools when writing a story I get confused about how they interact. Both of them have their own Lies and conflict dynamics. And yet, they both are true. As a person, we go through the archetypical life stages, but we also have our personality to contend with. So, essentially, we are juggling the Lies and conflicts that come with each stage while also juggling the Lies and conflicts from our innate natures. How does this work when writing a story, so as not to confuse ourselves and others and get tangled in a conglomeration of themes, Lies, and conflicts—but to have it come through cohesively?

The shortest answer is that you don’t need to understand or combine both systems in order to create dynamic and dimensional characters. Often, the simplest approach is best, in which case focusing on either an archetypal approach or an Enneagram approach might be best. However, if you enjoy the complexity of examining how different systems combine to reveal even deeper insights into human behavior, then this is your stop!

In This Article:

• What Happens When You Combine Archetypal Arcs With Enneagram Insights?
• Enneagram Lies for the 6 Archetypes of the Life Cycle
• Type 1: The Reformer
• Type 2: The Helper
• Type 3: The Achiever
• Type 4: The Indiviudalist
• Type 5: The Investigator
• Type 6: The Loyalist
• Type 7: The Adventurer
• Type 8: The Challenger
• Type 9: The Peacemaker
• Best Fit Enneagram Types for Each Archetype

What Happens When You Combine Archetypal Arcs With Enneagram Insights?

As I’ve explored in other posts (linked below), the Enneagram is a system of nine archetypal personality types, each representing a different core motivation and strategy for navigating the world. It maps surface behaviors, as well as the deep emotional patterns that drive our actions, fears, and desires. Unlike many personality systems, the Enneagram charts a path of growth, showing how individuals can evolve toward their healthiest, most integrated selves—or fall into patterns of stress and fixation.

>>Click here to read 5 Ways to Use the Enneagram to Write Better Characters

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

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

>>Click here to read Enneagram Types for Writers: Types 1-4

>>Click here to read Enneagram Types for Writers: Types 5-9

>>Click here to read Avoiding Repetition for Lies Each Type Might Believe

Similarly, the archetypal Life Cycle I explore in my book Writing Archetypal Character Arcs (and the Archetypal Character Guided Meditations) charts the universal phases of transformation we experience as we move through life. From the individuation of the Maiden, through the personal expansion of the Hero, the leadership of the Queen, the sacrifice of the King, the acceptance of the Crone, and the surrender of the Mage, the cycle demonstrates how archetypal energies evolve as we mature, confront challenges, and step into new roles within both our inner landscapes and our outer lives.

Combined, these two systems offer a richly layered view of human development. The Enneagram helps us understand the why behind our individual journeys (i.e., our motivations, blind spots, and inner work), while the archetypal Life Cycle provides a broader view of the when (i.e., the inevitable seasons of growth and change we all encounter). Together, they can create a powerful framework for writing deeper characters, as well as living more conscious, authentic lives.

Enneagram Lies for the 6 Archetypes of the Life Cycle

What follows is, as ever, a limited and subjective list of suggestions for how the themes of the Life Cycle and the Enneagram may mingle. My hope is that it will spark your own intuitive knowing about these deep archetypes, so you can find your own best interpretations for your characters and stories.

Type 1: The Reformer

Core Lie: “I must be good to be worthy.”

• Maiden’s Lie: “I must always be perfect to earn a place in the world.”
  Book/Movie Example: Hermione Granger (Harry Potter) constantly seeks academic perfection to prove herself, but must individuate beyond the system of authority to learn which rules are worth breaking.

• Hero: “I can only defeat evil if I never make mistakes.”
  Theoretical Example: A police cadet learns that true bravery lies not in flawless actions, but in showing up and serving despite imperfections.

• Queen: “Leading means upholding impossible moral standards.”
  Book/Movie Example: Jean Valjean (Les Misérables) burdens himself with living a perfectly moral life after his redemption.

• King: “I must be flawless to maintain my authority.”
  Theoretical Example: A legendary mob boss, feared and respected for his rigid moral code and flawless control, must face the devastating truth that his need to be untouchable is tearing his empire apart.

• Crone: “I failed in life because I was never perfect enough.”
  Book/Movie Example: Judge Danforth (The Crucible) struggles to evolve with the times, clinging to his rigid beliefs and refusing to acknowledge his mistakes.

• Mage: “True wisdom is reserved for the flawless.”
  Theoretical Example: A beloved professor, on the brink of retirement during a critical crisis facing his school, must confront his fear of leaving his students vulnerable and step back to let them take charge, trusting that their own mistakes will lead to the growth they need—while he comes to terms with the fact that his time as their guiding force has ended.

Type 2: The Helper

Core Lie: “I must earn love through service.”

• Maiden: “If I am not useful, I will be abandoned.”
  Theoretical Example: A young woman on the brink of adulthood believes she must constantly care for others and meet their emotional needs, even it means sacrificing her own dreams.

• Hero: “I can only save others by sacrificing myself.”
  Theoretical Example: A young paramedic, eager to prove his bravery and worth in service to his community, believes he must always be the first to respond to emergencies, even at the cost of his own well-being.

• Queen: “I must care for everyone, even at the cost of my own needs.”
  Movie Example: Mufasa (The Lion King) rules with compassion, but his inability to fully confront and neutralize the threat posed by his brother reveals his failure to assert the tough authority needed to protect the kingdom.

• King: “Real authority is earned by serving everyone else first.”
  Theoretical Example: A veteran football coach, beloved for always putting his players first, must confront the painful truth that his need to be needed is holding the team back—and that the greatest act of service might be letting someone else lead.

• Crone: “Without someone to care for, I have no purpose.”
  Theoretical Example: A retired teacher, disheartened by the loss of her former vitality, is coaxed back into the community by a group of former students. She must reconcile with her own aging and accept that her contribution may now look different.

• Mage: “Wisdom means knowing how to fix everyone’s pain.”
  Theoretical Example: An aging master carpenter, watching his apprentices struggle with the pressures of their craft, must confront his deep need to fix their problems and allow them to endure the pain of their mistakes in order to grow into their own skill and wisdom.

Type 3: The Achiever

Core Lie: “My worth depends on what I accomplish.”

• Maiden: “I must earn the approval of my authority figures.”
  Theoretical Example: A high school senior, eager to prove herself, constantly overextends her commitments and sacrifices her personal needs to earn the approval of her teachers and parents, believing her worth is defined by their recognition.
  

• Hero: “I must win at all costs to prove my worth.”
  Movie Example: Lightning McQueen (Cars) believes winning races is his only value.

• Queen: “My reign will only be respected if I am admired.”
  Movie Example: Regina George (Mean Girls) seeks admiration above authentic leadership.

• King: “My value lies in my success and productivity, so I must stay in control and maintain my position, even when it’s no longer serving the greater good.”
  Play Example: Shakespeare’sRichard II clings to his throne, seeking personal validation and glory, but is ultimately forced to sacrifice his throne for the greater good of the kingdom when he realizes his inability to lead effectively has caused more harm than good.

• Crone: “Without accomplishments, I am nothing.”
  Book/Movie Example: Miranda Priestly (The Devil Wears Prada) clings to her influence and refuses to advance her loyal employees.

• Mage: “I must prove my worth by making sure others succeed according to my standards, or I will be seen as ineffective or irrelevant.”
  Theoretical Example: After decades of groundbreaking work, a renowned scientist hesitates to retire, fearing that stepping back will make his life’s achievements seem less significant if the next generation surpasses him.

Type 4: The Individualist

Core Lie: “I must be unique to be significant.”

• Maiden: “I must be unique and different to be truly valued, and if I don’t stand out, I’ll never be understood.”
  Theoretical Example: A sheltered artist, struggling to believe her voice matters in a noisy world, is unsure how to break free from the expectations placed on her by family and society.

• Hero: “I must prove my worth through my struggles and pain, or I will never truly be seen as special or important.”
  Theoretical Example: A struggling musician determined to make it big must learn that personal growth comes not just through artistic expression, but by accepting himself and others.

• Queen: “No one can understand the pain of leadership like I do.”
  Theoretical Example: A compassionate community organizer fears that if she imposes responsibility on others, she will be misunderstood and rejected for being too rigid or impersonal.

• King: “My uniqueness sets me apart from everyone, including those I lead.”
  Theoretical Example: An aging founder of a successful nonprofit, believing his uniqueness is what made the organization thrive, fears his departure will cause the loss of his individuality and the purpose he’s created.
  

• Crone: “I was always too different to truly matter.”
  Book/Movie Example: Miss Havisham (Great Expectations) isolates herself after heartbreak.

• Mage: “My wisdom is irreplaceable, and no one else can truly understand my unique insights.”
  Theoretical Example: A once-celebrated maestro watches his protégés follow their own unconventional paths, overcoming his fear that if he doesn’t guide every decision, his unique vision and legacy will be forgotten.

Type 5: The Investigator

Core Lie: “I have to protect my energy and stay self-sufficient.”

• Maiden: “I must have all the answers and fully understand everything before I can be valued or take action.”
  Theoretical Example: A refugee teenager feels she must handle every challenge on her own, fearing that asking for help would put her at the mercy of unfeeling authorities.

• Hero: “I can’t act until I know everything.”
  Theoretical Example: A young environmental activist believes that to make a real difference, he must single-handedly lead every initiative and never show vulnerability, fearing that depending on others will expose his lack of knowledge or authority.

• Queen: “Leading requires complete control over information.”
  Theoretical Example: A respected scholar must come to terms with the limitations of her intellect and find a balance between reason and the emotional needs of others, ultimately discovering that leadership requires vulnerability.

• King: “I must hold onto control at all costs because if I let go, everything will fall apart and no one will be able to manage without me.”
  Theoretical Example: A long-serving mayor of a small town struggles to step down, convinced that without his detailed knowledge of the community’s history and past decisions, the town’s future will unravel.

• Crone: “My worth ended when I stopped learning new things.”
  Book/Movie Example: Ben Weatherstaff (The Secret Garden) is initially withdrawn and resigned to his age and solitude, but must learn to open up and connect with the younger generation.

• Mage: “True mastery requires total detachment.”
  Theoretical Example: An admiral who has led his fleet through countless battles must now nurture younger officers as they begin to oversee their own missions.

Type 6: The Loyalist

Core Lie: “Security must come from the outside.”

• Maiden: “I can’t trust myself; someone else must guide me.”
  Movie Example: Rapunzel (Tangled) clings to Mother Gothel’s authority even as she grows suspicious.

• Hero: “I must rely on rules and authorities to survive.”
  Theoretical Example: During the American Revolution, a young militia leader, determined to prove his worth in battle, hesitates to take command in the face of danger, fearing that if he fails, he will not only let down his comrades but prove he was never truly fit for leadership.

• Queen: “The crown is safest when I control everyone’s loyalty.”
  Theoretical Example: A new President, obsessed with maintaining unwavering loyalty from every member of her Cabinet, begins to micromanage their actions and decisions, believing any hint of dissent could unravel the entire country.

• King: “I must eliminate all threats to maintain stability.”
  Theoretical Example: A seasoned detective, revered for keeping his city safe through rigid oversight and paranoia, begins to unravel his own team with distrust and overreach, forcing him to realize that his need to control every threat is eroding the stability he built and that stepping aside is the only way to restore trust.

• Crone: “I only mattered when others needed me for advice and support.”
  Theoretical Example: An aging fairy godmother, long retired and forgotten, sinks into despair believing her worth ended when the kingdoms no longer needed her contribution—until a young, reckless princess unexpectedly seeks her out, forcing her to confront her fear of irrelevance and rediscover a deeper purpose in passing on her wisdom.

• Mage: “True wisdom comes only from following tradition.”
  Theoretical Example: An experienced blacksmith who has spent decades perfecting his craft allows his apprentice to explore modern advances.

Type 7: The Adventurer

Core Lie: “Pain must be avoided at all costs.”

• Maiden: “I can’t commit to anything serious because if I do, I’ll be stuck and miss out on all the exciting possibilities life has to offer.”
  Play/Book/Movie Example: To avoid sorrow and responsibility, Peter Pan (Peter Pan) refuses to grow up.

• Hero: “Winning means staying one step ahead of pain.”
  Movie Example: Tony Stark (Iron Man) masks his trauma with wit and invention.

• Queen: “If I take on too much responsibility, I’ll lose my freedom and the joy of spontaneity that I crave.”
  Show Example: Louis XIII (The Musketeers) refuses to face the mounting pressures of his reign, instead distracting himself with pleasures and escapism, believing that avoiding harsh realities will protect him from the pain of responsibility and prevent his kingdom from unraveling.

• King: “If I step down, I’ll miss out on all the excitement and adventure, and my life will lose its purpose.”
  Theoretical Example: The aging sheriff of a small frontier town refuses to retire, convinced that without the daily thrill of chasing outlaws and dispensing justice, his life will become empty and meaningless.

• Crone: “If I stop chasing fun, I’ll face regret.”
  Theoretical Example: In her twilight years, a once-vibrant grandmother convinces herself that if she keeps distracting herself with new hobbies and adventures, she can stave off the emptiness that comes with facing her mortality.

• Mage: “I must keep my proteges entertained and excited with new ideas and challenges, or they’ll lose interest and never grow into their full potential.”
  Book/Movie Example: Gandalf (The Lord of the Rings) sometimes feels the need to inject excitement and challenge to keep people engaged, especially during moments of stagnation.

Type 8: The Challenger

Core Lie: “Vulnerability equals weakness.”

• Maiden: “If I don’t stay tough and in control, the world will crush me before I get the chance to grow up.”
  Show Example: Haunted by the loss of her mother and consumed by shame over a secret mistake, a young Beth Dutton (Yellowstone) learns to weaponize her vulnerability—driving away Rip, the boy who loves her, believing that needing anyone will only lead to more pain and make her unfit to carry the Dutton legacy.

• Hero: “Victory demands total dominance.”
  Book/Movie Example: Achilles (Troy) prioritizes glory over collaboration.

• Queen: “I must crush weakness to lead effectively.”
  Movie Example: Princess Leia (Star Wars) believes that if she doesn’t keep absolute control over the Rebellion and shield everyone with her strength, everything she has built will fall apart.
  

• King: “Power must be protected at all costs.”
  Theoretical Example: An ancient dragon-king refuses to name a successor, believing that if he releases his hold on the throne, chaos will consume the realm and erase everything he’s built.

• Crone: “If I show any weakness now, the world will forget me.”
  Theoretical Example: An aging private investigator, weary from years of solving crimes, struggles with the belief that if she doesn’t stay ahead of everyone, she’ll be left behind and forgotten.

• Mage: “If I don’t control everything around me, everything will fall apart.”
  Theoretical Example: A dying inventor must accept that without his direct involvement, the future of art and science will fall into the hands of the next generation—whether they are ready or not.

Type 9: The Peacemaker

Core Lie: “My presence creates conflict.”

• Maiden: “If I assert myself, I’ll anger those in authority.”
  Movie Example: Cinderella (Cinderella) silently endures mistreatment to preserve fragile peace with her step-family.

• Hero: “Keeping the peace is more important than fighting for what’s right.”
  Book/Movie Example: Frodo Baggins (The Lord of the Rings) hesitates to act against Gollum despite danger.

• Queen: “A ruler must maintain harmony at any personal cost.”
  Theoretical Example: A single mother must reconcile with her teenage son’s drug use and her struggle to impose discipline.

• King: “Leadership means erasing my own desires.”
  Theoretical Example: An aging carnival owner, long seen as the heart of a beloved traveling show, must confront the truth that true harmony sometimes means letting go.

• Crone: “My life mattered only when I avoided conflict.”
  Theoretical Example: A retired diplomat refuses to enter the fray again even though she is needed.

• Mage: “Wisdom is found only in silence and noninterference.”
  Book/Movie Example: Professor Dumbledore (Harry Potter) initially withholds vital truths, believing noninterference safest.

Best Fit Enneagram Types for Each Archetype

Understanding which Enneagram types align best with each character archetype can offer further insights for writers looking to craft psychologically resonant stories. Below, we’ll explore which Enneagram types can be the best fit for each of the six major archetypal arcs. As seen above, every Enneagram type will have the opportunity to embody each part of the archetypal Life Cycle. However, for the purposes of storytelling, certain Enneagram types more obviously align with the innate themes of certain life archetypes.

1. Maiden Arc

The Maiden represents youth, innocence, and the early stages of growth. This archetype often involves a journey of self-discovery, in which the character confronts fears of inadequacy.

Suggested Best Fits:

Type 2 (The Helper): Twos seek external validation and approval, often believing they must be useful to be loved or accepted. This aligns with the Maiden’s journey of proving her worth.

Type 4 (The Individualist): Fours often feel like outsiders and believe they’re too different or broken to belong. This aligns with the Maiden’s struggle to find her place.

Type 6 (The Loyalist): Sixes struggle with self-doubt and trust issues. This aligns with the Maiden’s early dependence on others.

2. Hero Arc

The Hero is the archetype of the individual who goes on a quest to prove himself, often facing trials that push him beyond his limits. This arc typically involves growth through challenges and the development of inner strength.

Suggested Best Fits:

Type 3 (The Achiever): Threes are motivated by the desire to prove their worth through accomplishment. This aligns with the Hero’s need to confront the difference between authentic self-worth and success-driven identity.

Type 7 (The Enthusiast): Sevens seek excitement and avoid pain. This aligns with the Hero’s lessons in embracing hardships and responsibility, as well as the adventurousness found in many Hero stories.

Type 9 (The Peacemaker): Nines prefer to avoid conflict and maintain harmony. This aligns with the Hero’s lessons in standing up and taking action for what is right.

3. Queen Arc

The Queen archetype represents leadership, responsibility, and the balance of power with wisdom. The Queen must confront the tension between personal desires and the needs of others. She often faces internal conflict over whether to uphold idealistic values or to compromise for the greater good.

Suggested Best Fits:

Type 1 (The Reformer): Ones seek perfection and uphold high moral standards. This aligns with the Queen’s responsibility to govern with justice.

Type 2 (The Helper): Twos may take on leadership roles out of a need to care for others. This aligns with the Queen’s struggle to balance the needs of the people she leads with the equal necessity for justice and fairness.

Type 3 (The Achiever): Threes are driven by a desire for success and admiration. This can align with the Queen’s desire to lead effectively while also ensuring she is loved and respected.

4. King Arc

The King is an archetype of mastery, authority, and moral leadership. Kings must balance power with compassion, making decisions that affect others, while also grappling with personal doubts about worth and legacy.

Suggested Best Fits:

Type 1 (The Reformer): Ones value moral integrity while desiring to fix the world. This aligns with the King’s role as a ruler who holds the kingdom’s best interests at heart.

Type 6 (The Loyalist): Sixes seek stability and security, often taking on leadership roles when they believe they can protect others. This aligns with the King’s desire to shoulder the tremendous burden of total responsibility for his kingdom.

Type 8 (The Challenger): Eights possess a drive for control and strength; they must learn that real power comes from wisdom, not domination. This aligns with the King’s focus on authority and leadership.

5. Crone Arc

The Crone represents wisdom, reflection, and acceptance of life’s consequences. This archetype is concerned with legacy and the knowledge gained through life’s experiences.

Suggested Best Fits

Type 1 (The Reformer): Ones must learn to accept imperfection. This aligns with the Crone’s need to forgive herself and embrace her flaws.

Type 4 (The Individualist): Fours often feel like they are misunderstood or disconnected. This aligns with the Crone’s need to reflect on her life choices and embrace her true self.

Type 5 (The Investigator): Fives search for knowledge and detachment. This aligns with the Crone’s focus on intellectual wisdom and the perspective gained over a lifetime. Fives can also align with the Hermit archetype, the negative aspect of which the Crone struggles with in her passive shadow form.

6. Mage Arc

The Mage represents mastery, transformation, and the passing of knowledge. The Mage has the wisdom and skills to guide others, but may struggle with the isolation and surrender needed in the role of mentor.

Suggested Best Fits:

Type 1 (The Reformer): Ones desire to fix and improve the world through wisdom and example. This aligns with the Mage’s role as a wise leader who desires to guide the young.

Type 3 (The Achiever): Mature Threes can provide guidance to others on how to achieve success while also needing to confront their need for external validation. This can align with the Mage’s role as a mentor who passes on knowledge.

Type 5 (The Investigator): Fives are natural learners and seekers of knowledge. This aligns with the Mage’s ability to impart wisdom to others.

Understanding the best-fit Enneagram types for each archetypal character arc can offer powerful insight into your characters’ internal journeys. When you align your characters’ Enneagram-driven fears and desires with the core themes of their archetypal arcs, you create a narrative with emotional resonance and psychological depth.

Whether your character is a Hero learning to face his limitations, a Queen learning to lead with integrity, or a Crone reckoning with her past, the Enneagram can add nuance and authenticity that helps bring the character arc to life. By thoughtfully pairing archetypes with Enneagram types, you can gain a dual lens through which to craft stories that both captivate and transform.

In Summary:

Both the Enneagram and the archetypal Life Cycle systems are powerful tools for understanding human motivation and transformation. When combined, they can offer a deeper layer of insight into character development. The key challenge is balancing the complex dynamics of both systems without creating confusion in the story. While it’s not necessary to merge both systems to create dynamic characters, those who enjoy complexity can use them together to enrich their writing. Each Enneagram type brings its core Lie and conflict dynamics into the phases of the Life Cycle, influencing how characters evolve.

Key Takeaways:

• The Enneagram provides a framework for understanding a character’s motivations, fears, and desires, while the Life Cycle tracks universal phases of transformation.
• Combining both systems can deepen character exploration. However, it’s important to avoid overwhelming readers with too many conflicting themes and conflicts.
• Focusing on one system at a time (either Enneagram or archetypal Life Cycle) is a simpler approach, but integrating both can lead to more complex and nuanced character arcs.
• Using the core Lies and conflicts of each Enneagram type within the phases of the Life Cycle can help to create multidimensional characters that evolve through their internal and external struggles.

Want More?

If you’re ready to dive deeper into your characters and their journeys, my Archetypal Character Guided Meditations can help unlock fresh insights and inspire new creative possibilities. These guided meditations are perfect for dreamzoning, brainstorming, and exploring your characters’ core motivations from the inside out.

Whether your character’s story is best suited to the archetypes of Maiden, Hero, Queen, King, Crone, or Mage, these meditations will guide you to understand the heart of your characters and bring them to life in new and exciting ways. It’s like having a personal guide to help you dig into the soul of your story! Start exploring today: Archetypal Character Guided Meditations.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do you merge archetypal characters with the Enneagram types in your writing? Which Enneagram type fits best with the archetypes you use, and how do their core motivations shape the journey? Tell me in the comments!

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

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The post Crafting Archetypal Arcs With Enneagram Insights appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

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

Transcript of Interview with Dave Morris

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

Dave: Hi, Jo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joanna: That’s awesome!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s an element to which —

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

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

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

Joanna: I love that. Systems that create stories.

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

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

How would your lessons play into that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your choice would be no art or AI art.

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

Joanna: Oh, but that’s good.

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

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

Joanna: Nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joanna: Eyjafjallajökull, whatever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dave: Yes, absolutely.

Joanna: What about marketing?

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

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

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

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

Joanna: Not that many people want to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are there any other tools that you use a lot?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re just not threatened by something like this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joanna: It was so convincing!

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

Joanna: Whereas I think it doesn’t matter.

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

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

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

Where can people find you and everything you do online?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avoiding Repetition When Using the Enneagram for Character Development

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

Not at all.

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

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

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

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

Using Instinctual Variants to Create Unique Character Arcs

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

What Are the Three Instinctual Variants?

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

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

There are three instinctual variants:

1. Self-Preservation (sp):

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

2. Social (so):

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

3. Sexual (sx):

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

Countertypes

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

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

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

Different Lies Each Enneagram Type Character Might Believe

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

In Summary

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

Key Takeaways

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

Want More?

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

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! Have you ever used the Enneagram for character development in your writing? What insights has it given you into your characters’ motivations and growth? Tell me in the comments!

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

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The post Using the Enneagram for Character Development: Avoiding Repetition for Lies Each Type Might Believe appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

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

Transcript of Interview with April Rinne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is difficult, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are more sources of uncertainty, not fewer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, there you have to say —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Versus — 

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

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

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

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

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

Joanna: We can do that in the show notes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joanna: Brilliant.

Where can people find you and your book online?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Audio Book

Elevate Your Storytelling with Expert Plot Structure

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

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

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

Want More Audio?

Check out all of my audiobooks:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

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

Transcript of Interview with Abi Pollokoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For me, I believe —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Punctuation is absolute magic in both poetry and prose.

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

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

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

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

Abi: Oh my gosh, the best!

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

Abi: Oh, for sure.

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

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

I don’t know if you’ve seen this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joanna: Exactly.

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

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

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

How important is page layout for poetry?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abi: I would say yes and no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joanna: Very common.

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

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

Abi: Amazing.

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

What are your tips for doing reading or performance?

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

Joanna: Very unlikely!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joanna: I am. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People remember your name and they like your poetry.

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

Joanna: Very unlikely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your plan for marketing?

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

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

So what I would say is —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where can they find you and your book online?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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