How can you write science-based fiction without info-dumping your research? How can you use AI tools in a creative way, while still focusing on a human-first approach? Why is adapting to the fast pace of change so difficult and how can we make the most of this time? Jamie Metzl talks about Superconvergence and more.

In the intro, How to avoid author scams [Written Word Media]; Spotify vs Audible audiobook strategy [The New Publishing Standard]; Thoughts on Author Nation and why constraints are important in your author life [Self-Publishing with ALLi];
Alchemical History And Beautiful Architecture: Prague with Lisa M Lilly on my Books and Travel Podcast.

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 

Jamie Metzl is a technology futurist, professional speaker, entrepreneur, and the author of sci-fi thrillers and futurist nonfiction books, including the revised and updated edition of Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World.

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 personal history shaped Jamie’s fiction writing
• Writing science-based fiction without info-dumping
• The super convergence of three revolutions (genetics, biotech, AI) and why we need to understand them holistically
• Using fiction to explore the human side of genetic engineering, life extension, and robotics
• Collaborating with GPT-5 as a named co-author
• How to be a first-rate human rather than a second-rate machine

You can find Jamie at JamieMetzl.com.

Transcript of interview with Jamie Metzl

Jo: Jamie Metzl is a technology futurist, professional speaker, entrepreneur, and the author of sci-fi thrillers and futurist nonfiction books, including the revised and updated edition of Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World. So welcome, Jamie.

Jamie: Thank you so much, Jo. Very happy to be here with you.

Jo: There is so much we could talk about, but let’s start with you telling us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.

From History PhD to First Novel

Jamie: Well, I think like a lot of writers, I didn’t know I was a writer. I was just a kid who loved writing.

Actually, just last week I was going through a bunch of boxes from my parents’ house and I found my autobiography, which I wrote when I was nine years old. So I’ve been writing my whole life and loving it. It was always something that was very important to me.

When I finished my DPhil, my PhD at Oxford, and my dissertation came out, it just got scooped up by Macmillan in like two minutes. And I thought, “God, that was easy.”

That got me started thinking about writing books. I wanted to write a novel based on the same historical period – my PhD was in Southeast Asian history – and I wanted to write a historical novel set in the same period as my dissertation, because I felt like the dissertation had missed the human element of the story I was telling, which was related to the Cambodian genocide and its aftermath.

So I wrote what became my first novel, and I thought, “Wow, now I’m a writer.” I thought, “All right, I’ve already published one book. I’m gonna get this other book out into the world.” And then I ran into the brick wall of: it’s really hard to be a writer. It’s almost easier to write something than to get it published.

I had to learn a ton, and it took nine years from when I started writing that first novel, The Depths of the Sea, to when it finally came out. But it was such a positive experience, especially to have something so personal to me as that story. I’d lived in Cambodia for two years, I’d worked on the Thai-Cambodian border, and I’m the child of a Holocaust survivor. So there was a whole lot that was very emotional for me.

That set a pattern for the rest of my life as a writer, at least where, in my nonfiction books, I’m thinking about whatever the issues are that are most important to me. Whether it was that historical book, which was my first book, or Hacking Darwin on the future of human genetic engineering, which was my last book, or Superconvergence, which, as you mentioned in the intro, is my current book.

But in every one of those stories, the human element is so deep and so profound. You can get at some of that in nonfiction, but I’ve also loved exploring those issues in deeper ways in my fiction.

So in my more recent novels, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata, I’ve looked at the human side of the story of genetic engineering and human life extension. And now my agent has just submitted my new novel, Virtuoso, about the intersection of AI, robotics, and classical music.

With all of this, who knows what’s the real difference between fiction and nonfiction? We’re all humans trying to figure things out on many different levels.

Shifting from History to Future Tech

Jo: I knew that you were a polymath, someone who’s interested in so many things, but the music angle with robotics and AI is fascinating.

I do just want to ask you, because I was also at Oxford – what college were you at?

Jamie: I was in St. Antony’s.

Jo: I was at Mansfield, so we were in that slightly smaller, less famous college group, if people don’t know.

Jamie: You know, but we’re small but proud.

Jo: Exactly. That’s fantastic.

You mentioned that you were on the historical side of things at the beginning and now you’ve moved into technology and also science, because this book Superconvergence has a lot of science. So how did you go from history and the past into science and the future?

Biology and Seeing the Future Coming

Jamie: It’s a great question. I’ll start at the end and then back up.

A few years ago I was speaking at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is one of the big scientific labs here in the United States. I was a guest of the director and I was speaking to their 300 top scientists.

I said to them, “I’m here to speak with you about the future of biology at the invitation of your director, and I’m really excited. But if you hear something wrong, please raise your hand and let me know, because I’m entirely self-taught. The last biology course I took was in 11th grade of high school in Kansas City.”

Of course I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my process. But in many ways I’m self-taught in the sciences. As you know, Jo, and as all of your listeners know, the foundation of everything is curiosity and then a disciplined process for learning.

Even our greatest super-specialists in the world now – whatever their background – the world is changing so fast that if anyone says, “Oh, I have a PhD in physics/chemistry/biology from 30 years ago,” the exact topic they learned 30 years ago is less significant than their process for continuous learning.

More specifically, in the 1990s I was working on the National Security Council for President Clinton, which is the president’s foreign policy staff. My then boss and now close friend, Richard Clarke – who became famous as the guy who had tragically predicted 9/11 – used to say that the key to efficacy in Washington and in life is to try to solve problems that other people can’t see.

For me, almost 30 years ago, I felt to my bones that this intersection of what we now call AI and the nascent genetics revolution and the nascent biotechnology revolution was going to have profound implications for humanity. So I just started obsessively educating myself.

When I was ready, I started writing obscure national security articles. Those got a decent amount of attention, so I was invited to testify before the United States Congress. I was speaking out a lot, saying, “Hey, this is a really important story. A lot of people are missing it. Here are the things we should be thinking about for the future.”

I wasn’t getting the kind of traction that I wanted. I mentioned before that my first book had been this dry Oxford PhD dissertation, and that had led to my first novel. So I thought, why don’t I try the same approach again – writing novels to tell this story about the genetics, biotech, and what later became known popularly as the AI revolution?

That led to my two near-term sci-fi novels, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata. On my book tours for those novels, when I explained the underlying science to people in my way, as someone who taught myself, I could see in their eyes that they were recognizing not just that something big was happening, but that they could understand it and feel like they were part of that story.

That’s what led me to write Hacking Darwin, as I mentioned. That book really unlocked a lot of things. I had essentially predicted the CRISPR babies that were born in China before it happened – down to the specific gene I thought would be targeted, which in fact was the case.

After that book was published, Dr. Tedros, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, invited me to join the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing, which I did. It was a really great experience and got me thinking a lot about the upside of this revolution and the downside.

The Birth of Superconvergence

Jamie: I get a lot of wonderful invitations to speak, and I have two basic rules for speaking:

1. Never use notes. Never ever.
2. Never stand behind a podium. Never ever.

Because of that, when I speak, my talks tend to migrate. I’d be speaking with people about the genetics revolution as it applied to humans, and I’d say, “Well, this is just a little piece of a much bigger story.”

The bigger story is that after nearly four billion years of life on Earth, our one species has the increasing ability to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life. The big question for us, and frankly for the world, is whether we’re going to be able to use that almost godlike superpower wisely.

As that idea got bigger and bigger, it became this inevitable force. You write so many books, Jo, that I think it’s second nature for you. Every time I finish a book, I think, “Wow, that was really hard. I’m never doing that again.” And then the books creep up on you. They call to you. At some point you say, “All right, now I’m going to do it.”

So that was my current book, Superconvergence. Like everything, every journey you take a step, and that step inspires another step and another. That’s why writing and living creatively is such a wonderfully exciting thing – there’s always more to learn and always great opportunities to push ourselves in new ways.

Balancing Deep Research with Good Storytelling

Jo: Yeah, absolutely. I love that you’ve followed your curiosity and then done this disciplined process for learning. I completely understand that.

But one of the big issues with people like us who love the research – and having read your Superconvergence, I know how deeply you go into this and how deeply you care that it’s correct – is that with fiction, one of the big problems with too much research is the danger of brain-dumping.

Readers go to fiction for escapism. They want the interesting side of it, but they want a story first.

What are your tips for authors who might feel like, “Where’s the line between putting in my research so that it’s interesting for readers, but not going too far and turning it into a textbook?” How do you find that balance?

Jamie: It’s such a great question.

I live in New York now, but I used to live in Washington when I was working for the U.S. government, and there were a number of people I served with who later wrote novels. Some of those novels felt like policy memos with a few sex scenes – and that’s not what to do.

To write something that’s informed by science or really by anything, everything needs to be subservient to the story and the characters. The question is: what is the essential piece of information that can convey something that’s both important to your story and your character development, and is also an accurate representation of the world as you want it to be?

I certainly write novels that are set in the future – although some of them were a future that’s now already happened because I wrote them a long time ago. You can make stuff up, but as an author you have to decide what your connection to existing science and existing technology and the existing world is going to be.

I come at it from two angles. One: I read a huge number of scientific papers and think, “What does this mean for now, and if you extrapolate into the future, where might that go?”

Two: I think about how to condense things. We’ve all read books where you’re humming along because people read fiction for story and emotional connection, and then you hit a bit like: “I sat down in front of the president, and the president said, ‘Tell me what I need to know about the nuclear threat.’” And then it’s like: insert memo. That’s a deal-killer.

It’s like all things – how do you have a meaningful relationship with another person? It’s not by just telling them your story. Even when you’re telling them something about you, you need to be imagining yourself sitting in their shoes, hearing you.

These are very different disciplines, fiction and nonfiction. But for the speculative nonfiction I write – “here’s where things are now, and here’s where the world is heading” – there’s a lot of imagination that goes into that too. It feels in many ways like we’re living in a sci-fi world because the rate of technological change has been accelerating continuously, certainly for the last 12,000 years since the dawn of agriculture.

It’s a balance.

For me, I feel like I’m a better fiction writer because I write nonfiction, and I’m a better nonfiction writer because I write fiction. When I’m writing nonfiction, I don’t want it to be boring either – I want people to feel like there’s a story and characters and that they can feel themselves inside that story.

Jo: Yeah, definitely. I think having some distance helps as well. If you’re really deep into your topics, as you are, you have to leave that manuscript a little bit so you can go back with the eyes of the reader as opposed to your eyes as the expert. Then you can get their experience, which is great.

Looking Beyond Author-Focused AI Fears

Jo: I want to come to your technical knowledge, because AI is a big thing in the author and creative community, like everywhere else.

One of the issues is that creators are focusing on just this tiny part of the impact of AI, and there’s a much bigger picture. For example, in 2024, Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind and his collaborative partner John Jumper won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with AlphaFold.

It feels to me like there’s this massive world of what’s happening with AI in health, climate, and other areas, and yet we are so focused on a lot of the negative stuff.

Maybe you could give us a couple of things about what there is to be excited and optimistic about in terms of AI-powered science?

Jamie: Sure. I’m so excited about all of the new opportunities that AI creates. But I also think there’s a reason why evolution has preserved this very human feeling of anxiety: because there are real dangers.

Anybody who’s Pollyanna-ish and says, “Oh, the AI story is inevitably positive,” I’d be distrustful. And anyone who says, “We’re absolutely doomed, this is the end of humanity,” I’d also be distrustful.

So let me tell you the positives and the negatives, and maybe some thoughts about how we navigate toward the former and away from the latter.

AI as the New Electricity

Jamie: When people think of AI right now, they’re thinking very narrowly about these AI tools and ChatGPT. But we don’t think of electricity that way.

Nobody says, “I know electricity – electricity is what happens at the power station.” We’ve internalised the idea that electricity is woven into not just our communication systems or our houses, but into our clothes, our glasses – it’s woven into everything and has super-empowered almost everything in our modern lives.

That’s what AI is.

In Superconvergence, the majority of the book is about positive opportunities:

In healthcare, moving from generalised healthcare based on population averages to personalised or precision healthcare based on a molecular understanding of each person’s individual biology.

As we build these massive datasets like the UK Biobank, we can take a next jump toward predictive and preventive healthcare, where we’re able to address health issues far earlier in the process, when interventions can be far more benign.

I’m really excited about that, not to mention the incredible new kinds of treatments – gene therapies, or pharmaceuticals based on genetics and systems-biology analyses of patients.

Then there’s agriculture. Over the last hundred years, because of the technologies of the Green Revolution and synthetic fertilisers, we’ve had an incredible increase in agricultural productivity. That’s what’s allowed us to quadruple the global population.

But if we just continue agriculture as it is, as we get towards ten billion wealthier, more empowered people wanting to eat like we eat, we’re going to have to wipe out all the wild spaces on Earth to feed them.

These technologies help provide different paths toward increasing agricultural productivity with fewer inputs of land, water, fertiliser, insecticides, and pesticides. That’s really positive.

I could go on and on about these positives – and I do – but there are very real negatives.

I was a member of the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing after the first CRISPR babies were very unethically created in China. I’m extremely aware that these same capabilities have potentially incredible upsides and very real downsides. That’s the same as every technology in the past, but this is happening so quickly that it’s triggering a lot of anxieties.

Governance, Responsibility, and Why Everyone Has a Role

Jamie: The question now is: how do we optimise the benefits and minimise the harms? The short, unsexy word for that is governance.

Governance is not just what governments do; it’s what all of us do. That’s why I try to write books, both fiction and nonfiction, to bring people into this story.

If people “other” this story – if they say, “There’s a technology revolution, it has nothing to do with me, I’m going to keep my head down” – I think that’s dangerous.

The way we’re going to handle this as responsibly as possible is if everybody says, “I have some role. Maybe it’s small, maybe it’s big. The first step is I need to educate myself. Then I need to have conversations with people around me. I need to express my desires, wishes, and thoughts – with political leaders, organisations I’m part of, businesses.”

That has to happen at every level.

You’re in the UK – you know the anti-slavery movement started with a handful of people in Cambridge and grew into a global movement. I really believe in the power of ideas, but ideas don’t spread on their own. These are very human networks, and that’s why writing, speaking, communicating – probably for every single person listening to this podcast – is so important.

Jo: Mm, yeah.

Fiction Like AI 2041 and Thinking Through the Issues

Jo: Have you read AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan?

Jamie: No. I heard a bunch of their interviews when the book came out, but I haven’t read it.

Jo: I think that’s another good one because it’s fiction – a whole load of short stories. It came out a few years ago now, but the issues they cover in the stories, about different people in different countries – I remember one about deepfakes – make you think more about the topics and help you figure out where you stand.

I think that’s the issue right now: it’s so complex, there are so many things. I’m generally positive about AI, but of course I don’t want autonomous drone weapons, you know?

The Messy Reality of “Bad” Technologies

Jamie: Can I ask you about that? Because this is why it’s so complicated.

Like you, I think nobody wants autonomous killer drones anywhere in the world. But if you right now were the defence minister of Ukraine, and your children are being kidnapped, your country is being destroyed, you’re fighting for your survival, you’re getting attacked every night – and you’re getting attacked by the Russians, who are investing more and more in autonomous killer robots – you kind of have two choices.

You can say, “I’m going to surrender,” or, “I’m going to use what technology I have available to defend myself, and hopefully fight to either victory or some kind of stand-off.”

That’s what our societies did with nuclear weapons. Maybe not every American recognises that Churchill gave Britain’s nuclear secrets to America as a way of greasing the wheels of the Anglo-American alliance during the Second World War – but that was our programme: we couldn’t afford to lose that war, and we couldn’t afford to let the Nazis get nuclear weapons before we did.

So there’s the abstract feeling of, “I’m against all war in the abstract. I’m against autonomous killer robots in the abstract.” But if I were the defence minister of Ukraine, I would say, “What will it take for us to build the weapons we can use to defend ourselves?”

That’s why all this stuff gets so complicated. And frankly, it’s why the relationship between fiction and nonfiction is so important.

If every novel had a situation where every character said, “Oh, I know exactly the right answer,” and then they just did the right answer and it was obviously right, it wouldn’t make for great fiction.

We’re dealing with really complex humans. We have conflicting impulses. We’re not perfect. Maybe there are no perfect answers – but how do we strive toward better rather than worse? That’s the question.

Jo: Absolutely. I don’t want to get too political on things.

How AI Is Changing the Writing Life

Jo: Let’s come back to authors.

In terms of the creative process, the writing process, the research process, and the business of being an author – what are some of the ways that you already use AI tools, and some of the ways, given your futurist brain, that you think things are going to change for us?

Jamie: Great question. I’ll start with a little middle piece.

I found you, Jo, through GPT-5. I asked ChatGPT, “I’m coming out with this book and I want to connect with podcasters who are a little different from the ones I’ve done in the past. I’ve been a guest on Joe Rogan twice and some of the bigger podcasts. Make me a list of really interesting people I can have great conversations with.”

That’s how I found you. So this is one reward of that process.

Let me say that in the last year I’ve worked on three books, and I’ll explain how my relationship with AI has changed over those books.

Cleaning Up Citations (and Getting Burned)

Jamie: First is the highly revised paperback edition of Superconvergence.

When the hardback came out, I had – I don’t normally work with research assistants because I like to dig into everything myself – but the one thing I do use a research assistant for is that I can’t be bothered, when I’m writing something, to do the full Chicago-style footnote if I’m already referencing an academic paper.

So I’d just put the URL as the footnote and then hire a research assistant and say, “Go to this URL and change it into a Chicago-style citation. That’s it.”

Unfortunately, my research assistant on the hardback used early-days ChatGPT for that work. He did the whole thing, came back, everything looked perfect. I said, “Wow, amazing job.”

It was only later, as I was going through them, that I realised something like 50% of them were invented footnotes. It was very painful to go back and fix, and it took ten times more time.

With the paperback edition, I didn’t use AI that much, but I did say things like, “Here’s all the information – generate a Chicago-style citation.” That was better.

I noticed there were a few things where I stopped using the thesaurus function on Microsoft Word because I’d just put the whole paragraph into the AI and say, “Give me ten other options for this one word,” and it would be like a contextual thesaurus. That was pretty good.

Talking to a Robot Pianist Character

Jamie: Then, for my new novel Virtuoso, I was writing a character who is a futurist robot that plays the piano very beautifully – not just humanly, but almost finding new things in the music we’ve written and composing music that resonates with us.

I described the actions of that robot in the novel, but I didn’t describe the inner workings of the robot’s mind.

In thinking about that character, I realised I was the first science-fiction writer in history who could interrogate a machine about what it was “thinking” in a particular context.

I had the most beautiful conversations with ChatGPT, where I would give scenarios and ask, “What are you thinking? What are you feeling in this context?”

It was all background for that character, but it was truly profound.

Co-Authoring The AI Ten Commandments with GPT-5

Jamie: Third, I have another book coming out in May in the United States.

I gave a talk this summer at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York about AI and spirituality. I talked about the history of our human relationship with our technology, about how all our religious and spiritual traditions have deep technological underpinnings – certainly our Abrahamic religions are deeply connected to farming, and Protestantism to the printing press.

Then I had a section about the role of AI in generating moral codes that would resonate with humans.

Everybody went nuts for this talk, and I thought, “I think I’m going to write a book.” I decided to write it differently, with GPT-5 as my named co-author.

The first thing I did was outline the entire book based on the talk, which I’d already spent a huge amount of time thinking about and organising. Then I did a full outline of the arguments and structures. Then I trained GPT-5 on my writing style.

The way I did it – which I fully describe in the introduction to the book – was that I’d handle all the framing: the full introduction, the argument, the structure.

But if there was a section where, for a few paragraphs, I was summarising a huge field of data, even something I knew well, I’d give GPT-5 the intro sentence and say, “In my writing style, prepare four paragraphs on this.”

For example, I might write: “AI has the potential to see us humans like we humans see ant colonies.” Then I’d say, “Give me four paragraphs on the relationship between the individual and the collective in ant colonies.”

I could have written those four paragraphs myself, but it would’ve taken a month to read the life’s work of E.O. Wilson and then write them. GPT-5 wrote them in seconds or minutes, in its thinking mode.

I’d then say, “It’s not quite right – change this, change that,” and we’d go back and forth three or four times. Then I’d edit the whole thing and put it into the text.

So this book that I could have written on my own in a year, I wrote a first draft of with GPT-5 as my named co-author in two days. The whole project will take about six months from start to finish, and I’m having massive human editing – multiple edits from me, plus a professional editor.

It’s not a magic AI button. But I feel strongly about listing GPT-5 as a co-author because I’ve written it differently than previous books.

I’m a huge believer in the old-fashioned lone author struggling and suffering – that’s in my novels, and in Virtuoso I explore that. But other forms are going to emerge, just like video games are a creative, artistic form deeply connected to technology.

The novel hasn’t been around forever – the current format is only a few centuries old – and forms are always changing.

There are real opportunities for authors, and there will be so much crap flooding the market because everybody can write something and put it up on Amazon. But I think there will be a very special place for thoughtful human authors who have an idea of what humans do at our best, and who translate that into content other humans can enjoy.

Traditional vs Indie: Why This Book Will Be Self-Published

Jo: I’m interested – you mentioned that it’s your named co-author. Is this book going through a traditional publisher, and what do they think about that? Or are you going to publish it yourself?

Jamie: It’s such a smart question.

What I found quickly is that when you get to be an author later in your career, you have all the infrastructure – a track record, a fantastic agent, all of that. But there were two things that were really important to me here:

1. I wanted to get this book out really fast – six months instead of a year and a half.
2. It was essential to me to have GPT-5 listed as my co-author, because if it were just my name, I feel like it would be dishonest. Readers who are used to reading my books – I didn’t want to present something different than what it was.

I spoke with my agent, who I absolutely love, and she said that for this particular project it was going to be really hard in traditional publishing.

So I did a huge amount of research, because I’d never done anything in the self-publishing world before. I looked at different models. There was one hybrid model that’s basically the same as traditional, but you pay for the things the publisher would normally pay for.

I ended up not doing that. Instead, I decided on a self-publishing route where I disaggregated the publishing process. I found three teams: one for producing the book, one for getting the book out into the world, and a smaller one for the audiobook.

I still believe in traditional publishing – there’s a lot of wonderful human value-add. But some works just don’t lend themselves to traditional publishing. For this book, which is called The AI Ten Commandments, that’s the path I’ve chosen.

Jo: And when’s that out? I think people will be interested.

Jamie: April 26th.

Those of us used to traditional publishing think, “I’ve finished the book, sold the proposal, it’ll be out any day now,” and then it can be a year and a half. It’s frustrating.

With this, the process can be much faster because it’s possible to control more of the variables. But the key – as I was saying – is to make sure it’s as good a book as everything else you’ve written. It’s great to speed up, but you don’t want to compromise on quality.

The Coming Flood of Excellent AI-Generated Work

Jo: Yeah, absolutely.

We’re almost out of time, but I want to come back to your “flood of crap” and the “AI slop” idea that’s going around. Because you are working with GPT-5 – and I do as well, and I work with Claude and Gemini – and right now there are still issues. Like you said about referencing, there are still hallucinations, though fewer.

But fast-forward two, five years: it’s not a flood of crap. It’s a flood of excellent. It’s a flood of stuff that’s better than us.

Jamie: We’re humans. It’s better than us in certain ways. If you have farm machinery, it’s better than us at certain aspects of farming.

I’m a true humanist. I think there will be lots of things machines do better than us, but there will be tons of things we do better than them.

There’s a reason humans still care about chess, even though machines can beat humans at chess.

Some people are saying things I fully disagree with, like this concept of AGI – artificial general intelligence – where machines do everything better than humans. I’ve summarised my position in seven letters: “AGI is BS.”

The only way you can believe in AGI in that sense is if your concept of what a human is and what a human mind is is so narrow that you think it’s just a narrow range of analytical skills. We are so much more than that.

Humans represent almost four billion years of embodied evolution. There’s so much about ourselves that we don’t know. As incredible as these machines are and will become, there will always be wonderful things humans can do that are different from machines.

What I always tell people is: whatever you’re doing, don’t be a second-rate machine. Be a first-rate human.

If you’re doing something and a machine is doing that thing much better than you, then shift to something where your unique capacities as a human give you the opportunity to do something better.

So yes, I totally agree that the quality of AI-generated stuff will get better. But I think the most creative and successful humans will be the ones who say, “I recognise that this is creating new opportunities, and I’m going to insert my core humanity to do something magical and new.”

People are “othering” these technologies, but the technologies themselves are magnificent human-generated artefacts. They’re not alien UFOs that landed here.

It’s a scary moment for creatives, no doubt, because there are things all of us did in the past that machines can now do really well. But this is the moment where the most creative people ask themselves, “What does it mean for me to be a great human?”

The pat answers won’t apply.

In my Virtuoso novel I explore that a lot. The idea that “machines don’t do creativity” – they will do incredible creativity; it just won’t be exactly human creativity. We will be potentially huge beneficiaries of these capabilities, but we really have to believe in and invest in the magic of our core humanity.

Where to Find Jamie and His Books

Jo: Brilliant. So where can people find you and your books online?

Jamie: Thank you so much for asking.

My website is jamiemetzl.com – and my books are available everywhere.

Jo: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Jamie. That was great.

Jamie: Thank you, Joanna.

The post Writing The Future, And Being More Human In An Age of AI With Jamie Metzl first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In early November 2025, I attended and spoke at Author Nation in Las Vegas. It was a fantastic conference for authors at all levels, and in this episode, I share my lessons learned and tips from reflecting on the event.

In the intro, scam emails and what to watch out for; Spotify launches Recaps, and how I currently self-publish audiobooks; Successful Self-Publishing 4th Edition free audiobook; My audiobooks on YouTube The Creative Penn / Fiction/memoir audiobooks on JFPennAuthor; 22 ways to grow your author email list [BookBub]; Author Nation with the Wish I’d Known Then Podcast; and Your Author Business Plan on special.

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

Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, and memoir as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker.

• Double down on being human and the importance of connection in person (if possible)
• Constraints breed creativity
• What do you need for a long-term sustainable career as an author?
• How do you want your author business to run?
• What are your contingency plans for when things don’t go as planned?
• Money management tips — books and resources here
• How do you know when to work with a company as part of your author business? How to assess vendors and services.
• Thoughts from others

You can find Author Nation at AuthorNation.live. You can find my books on writing craft and author business in all formats at CreativePennBooks.com, or on your favourite online store, or request at your local bookstore or library.

Lessons Learned from Author Nation 2025

In early November 2025, I attended Author Nation in Las Vegas along with around 1500 other authors, and lots of vendors. There were about 80 different sessions over four days and a Reader Nation signing and book sales event. The sessions were on different tracks so you could go to basic craft and self-publishing things, or more advanced sessions on author business and mindset.

I spoke several times, once as part of a panel on long-term career strategies, once in my own solo session on collaboration with AI, all the things you can use AI for that are not writing, and once in a private meet up for my Patrons. 

Congratulations to the Author Nation team for delivering such a fantastic conference! I know how hard everyone worked and it went super well from what I could see. If you’re interested in learning more, just go to https://www.authornation.live/

Here are some of my thoughts from the 2025 conference, but of course, remember, I am a writing conference veteran and have been an author entrepreneur for a long time, so my takeaways will be different to someone who is at a different place in their career.  

(1) Double down on being human, and the importance of connection in person (if possible)

To be clear, I know this isn’t possible for everyone, because of time or money or health reasons, or caring responsibilities, as Donn’s recent interview illustrated. But if you can, it’s always worth going to conferences in person. 

If you attend, organise well in advance. Schedule meetings early, but also leave room for serendipity. Make the most of meeting people at your level; build your network. There were people I hadn’t seen for years at Author Nation, so much elbow bumping, human connection — and LOTS of coffee.

While I attended a few sessions, most of my time was back-to-back meetings and chats with other authors and vendors, and we had a great Patreon meet-up with over 100 people.

Author conferences are a great way to build relationships, and if you start with people at your level now, over time, you will all grow and change, and people will become successful in different ways, or disappear sometimes.

The longer you are in this business, and the more you join in and help others, the more people you get to know and social karma kicks in. Some of those relationships naturally turn into business opportunities, and other author friends will be your support crew over the inevitable challenging years ahead.

So if you feel like you don’t have any author friends, or know enough people at your level, then consider booking an in-person conference for 2026. It could be a genre conference, or a broader overall conference like Author Nation, but get away from your screen and do some peopling! As hard as it is, it’s worth it.

(2) Constraints breed creativity

Drew Davies did the opening keynote, and if you want to be a keynote speaker and get paid the big bucks, then it was a masterclass in professional speaking.

I’ve done a lot of speaker training and it was inspiring to watch Drew’s presentation and consider how he used multimedia, how he engaged with different mediums, how he made people laugh, and brought emotion in, as well as deliver a message.

If you’re ever in sessions or at events and you want to learn on a different level, consider the person and their skill — or lack of it — instead of the content. You can learn a lot from watching or listening to the person delivering, and how they speak or teach or react to the room.

Drew’s content was great too, and he spoke on the Cube of Constraints which can be the catalyst for supercharging your creativity. He had an actual cube too, which he built into a sculpture later, part of his multi-faceted teaching style.

In a world of unlimited possibilities, it’s hard to stick to one choice, and especially if you listen to author podcasts like this one, or go to conferences where you ingest a ton of sessions like Author Nation, you will have hundreds of ideas, and you can have popcorn brain with things firing off everywhere.

But if you don’t settle into one thing and focus, you might not achieve much, so Drew recommended deliberately constraining your work in 4 ways. 

(a) Eliminate the unnecessary

What can you stop doing in order to pursue the new thing? If you start something new, kill two things. Kill the easy one, then kill the hard one.

When I was writing my first book and trying to exit my day job to become a full-time author, I gave up TV and this was before smartphones and social media, so that wasn’t even a distraction. Giving up TV in the evenings gave me the time I needed to build a new direction. You have to make the time somehow.  

(b) Define the outcome

What single result defines success? For example, with my first novel, Pentecost, which became Stone of Fire, the goal was to publish it on Amazon by my birthday. I ended up falling short by about a month, but a birthday-related goal is always a good one as it’s so memorable and clear. 

(c) Limit your options

What unreasonable limitations can you apply to your project?

Give it a time limit, and a creative limit. That creative limit is a good one, for example, if you constrain the genre or the number of POV characters in your book, it will make it easier to achieve your goal.

(d) Raise the stakes

What specifically will happen if you fail?

This is a tough one, as it’s so personal. For me, I like achieving goals, and so failing a goal is a big enough stake for me. Some people talk about signing a cheque to a charity they hate or something and sending it off if they fail, but that doesn’t motivate me. Whatever floats your boat, but decide what the stakes are. As we know with writing fiction, high stakes are important to keep things moving! 

Drew also talked about turning constraints you already have, like time and budget, into positives.

This kind of reframing can help you embrace your situation. For example, if you only have 30 minutes per day to write while commuting, well, so be it. Try dictating or typing on your phone, and I know several authors who have written many books during a work commute. Or busy mums who dictate while doing chores.

Or again, coming back to Donn’s interview, if you’re a carer, raging against it may not help as much as adapting and changing your creative goals and being more relaxed about time.

I’ve embraced my constraints recently as I’m doing this Masters in Death, Religion, and Culture. It’s full-time, so I am doing at least 20 hours a week of study and online lectures and reading on some really interesting topics. I’m writing essays, so I don’t have time or the headspace to write books, too. I’m currently working on three essays — one on natural burial, one on the ethics of using dead bodies to inspire commercial fiction, and one on the depiction of hell in an area of art history.

I am clearly collecting ideas for when I am ready to write fiction again, but the constraint of study is focusing my mind on the bare minimum I need to do to keep my author business running and the money coming in. My Books and Travel Podcast is going on hiatus again soon, and I’m going to do fewer interviews here in 2026. 

What constraints do you have, and how can you reframe them? Or how can you add constraints rather than giving yourself unlimited possibilities? 

(3) What do you need for a long-term sustainable career? 

Becca Syme did a talk on sustainability for a long-term career, which tied into the theme of Author Nation, which was ‘Build your best life through writing.’

Becca was on the show recently – Loki is in charge – and she is always worth listening to as she will definitely say something challenging in any session.

Becca started with a need for basic self-knowledge. Do you know yourself well enough to understand what works for you, and what you’re capable of doing? Do you know what to say yes to and what to say no to? How are you learning more about yourself and your personality?

There’s always a lot of talk about the Clifton Strengths Assessment as that’s what Becca specialises in, and I have found that very useful. I also love Myers Briggs. I’m INFJ, which is uncommon in the wider population but very common in the author community. 

Some of the other things Becca talked about included understanding the limits of your energy so you don’t burn out, and making sure you reflect on and audit tasks so you know what to do more of and what to get rid of. For example, it’s more common now to find some authors who are not doing social media at all, or are reducing it because it doesn’t feed them, whereas others love it as the basis of their business. 

Becca also talked about the need for a ‘personal growth stimulator,’ a way to make sure you’re always learning and growing and finding community. For me, that’s mostly listening to podcasts and reading books, and at the moment, my Masters course, which is mostly reading a lot of sources and then writing essays on diverse topics. 

 Becca also said you need to do a business edit and/or a persona edit every now and then, as —

You are likely over-committed, either personally or in business.

You need to take things OFF your plate, not keep adding more. She said, “When you prune a tree, it grows more.”

Also, one very key point: 

If you can’t tell whether something is working or not, it’s not working. 

My take on this is about understanding ‘ease.’ What is easy for you? What do you love that other people think is hard? 

For example, people often ask me, how do I find time to learn so much about what’s going on, and input so much, so I can share with you every week? Well, my top 5 Clifton Strengths are Learner, Intellection, Strategic, Input, and Futuristic. By my very nature, I am constantly inputting and learning and thinking, and considering the impact on the future. It’s easy and fun for me as I live in the stream of input and I love it!

However, my bottom ‘strengths’ i.e. my weaknesses, mean that hard things include peopling and crowds, social energy in person or online, and doing things off the cuff (as I need to plan way in advance). 

If you do Clifton Strengths or any of the personality tests, it might help you figure things out, but you can also just pay more attention to what is easy for you, what brings you joy and energy and fun, versus what drains you and makes you unhappy. 

Becca also said that you need the ability to set boundaries and understand who to say yes to, and who to say no to. You also need a community for support, care for your physical body, and a source of hope for the future. 

I hope I can remain a part of that for you, as I remain hopeful and excited about so many things. Change will continue as ever, but there are more opportunities ahead. What do you need to have in place if you want a long-term sustainable career? 

You can find many more of Becca’s wise words in her books and also on her QuitCast and on her Patreon. 

(4) How do you want your author business to run? 

Katie Cross did a great session on SOPs, Standard Operating Procedures, which are just documents or spreadsheets with step-by-step instructions on specific tasks.

They also include sections on WHY things are done and why they are important to your business, and I feel like many people miss out on these important aspects, preferring to focus on the ‘how to’ rather than the ‘why’ which is more critical.

For example, selling direct is trendy in the indie author community, and some of the numbers thrown around are inspiring, but also need to be questioned, since it is not for everyone, at every stage.

I love selling direct through Kickstarter and Shopify in my limited way, but I don’t want a warehouse like Sacha Black or Adam Beswick or David Viergutz. I also don’t recommend selling direct if you don’t have an audience or a budget or a marketing funnel, or time to set up and/or test the technical side of it.

Selling direct is not a silver bullet to becoming a successful indie author. It’s also a lot of work, so you need a good reason to commit to it for the long term, and it needs to be part of a considered author business plan.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what platform you put your book/s on. You won’t sell any copies if you don’t do any marketing, and that is often the side of the author business that is missing.

Back to Katie’s talk, I went along because I’m interested in how we will work with AI agents in the coming years, and I want to have SOPs so I can give them to my AI partners, rather than human assistants. Katie didn’t even mention AI as she is a superstar at working with other humans, but the processes can be used for either/both. 

She also mentioned that “some SOPs are just for me,” which is a really good point. You can document your own processes, and put at the top:

Why am I doing this? Why is this important to my author business? If you can’t answer the question, maybe you need to eliminate that task altogether.

(5) What are your contingency plans for when things don’t go to plan? 

The team at Author Nation had to deal with lots of challenges. It’s extremely hard to run any conference, let alone a big conference, so congratulations to Joe and Suze, and Chelle, Jamie, Isabella, and the team for pulling it off and doing an amazing job. It went incredibly well, and it is a great conference that I highly recommend for authors.

But what happened on the last few days was also a good lesson for all of us in business.

James Patterson was meant to be the closing keynote speaker, and do a VIP evening thing, and then sign at Reader Nation the next day, and his attendance in person was a draw card for many. But he got sick and pulled out, only appearing on zoom for a short time instead. 

On top of that challenge, the government shutdown impacted flights, so many people changed their flights to leave early rather than get caught up in the expected delays. 

But the Author Nation team did a great job of “the show must go on,” bringing in James Patterson by zoom and then interviewing other successful authors, and the pivot in such a short time was impressive — but it also made me want to reflect on the bigger lesson.

Things will not always go to plan. 

People will disappoint you. So will publishers, so will your own marketing attempts. 

Readers will leave you one star reviews. 

People will say things about you that are not true. 

People will judge you — and that has always been my biggest fear, and yet, it continues to happen. 

If you are out in the world in public in any way, you will get criticism and rejection, and yes, there will be haters. 

If you hide and try not to attract any attention at all, no one will find your books, and you won’t sell anything, and you will moan about not selling instead. This is the reality of the author life, so you have to accept that. 

You can’t let these things stop you. The writing life show must go on.

Even if you have everything sorted, something may happen that is outside your control. 

Like James Patterson cancelling and flights being disrupted, and a political situation that makes people not want to travel, anyway.

Like the pandemic. 

Like the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). 

Like the dot com crash. 

All of which I have been through in my working adult life, as will many of you listening. These will not be the only large-scale disruptions in our lifetime, and there will, of course, be personal disruptions that will blindside you too.

So what do we do — in addition to keep creating?   

I talked on the long-term success panel about the biggest mistake I’ve seen authors make, and that is bad financial management. 

It’s the thing that destroys businesses regardless of what kind of business you run, or what job you have. I have seen many authors hit it big and then spend it all without saving for the inevitable down times, or who take on too much debt, or over-expose themselves to risk. Or those who have one stream of income instead of many, and when that one stream dries up, they have to start again. 

That’s what happened to me in the GFC. I had one stream of income — my job.

Then we all got laid off in one day and none of us had work, and that day, back in 2008, was the day I said I would build multiple streams and that no single company would ever be able to take away all my income in one fell swoop again. I now have so many streams of income, I need a pretty developed accounting system to keep track! 

Hard times will come; they inevitably do, so make sure you have a buffer to weather the storm. 

To be clear, this is not about the conference business of Author Nation, as Joe and Suze Solari are experienced business people and they know about managing risk and cash flow and all that. Joe has a consulting business that helps authors in that specific way. But many authors are not so experienced in business or money management. 

If you don’t feel confident in this area, check out my list of resources at www.thecreativepenn.com/moneybooks  

So the question for you here is, how exposed is your author business — or just your life and job in general — to disruption if it’s out of your control? What’s the worst that can happen? Can you build multiple streams of income? Can you make contingency plans? 

What can you do to de-risk? Within reason of course, but you need to have plans for when things go right, and when things go wrong.

(6) How do you know when to work with a company as part of your author business? 

We use the term ‘self-publishing’ alongside being an ‘indie author,’ but of course, we are not truly independent and you can’t be a successful author on your own. We need service providers and software vendors and publishing partners, and there are many of them trying to catch your attention. 

It’s always lovely to catch up with various vendors I’ve been working with for years, many of whom I consider friends now, and at Author Nation I spoke to people from Draft2Digital, Bookfunnel, Kickstarter, ProWritingAid, Reedsy, and BookVault, as well as my editor Kristen Tate, and others. 

There were LOTS of vendors at Author Nation, some with brand new businesses, many I had never heard of, and I wanted to give you some advice about deciding which companies to work with. There are so many these days online and at conferences, and I thought it might be useful to give you a framework.

Many of the companies are wonderful, but not all are worth it. Only you can decide for your situation, and it will differ depending on where you are in the author journey.

For example, it makes sense for an author working on their first book to spend money on editing, but to avoid vendors who want to help you sell direct as it is way too early for that. 

Here are some questions I consider when weighing up new vendors or services, or reconsidering them over time, as the industry changes, and my needs change, too. 

You could always paste these into ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini and ask it to help you evaluate a service if you don’t want to ask the vendor directly.
 

1. What purpose does this serve in helping me write, publish, or market my books, or as part of running my author business? What is the cost versus the return on investment? How do I make money with this? How quickly might I get my money back if that is a consideration? Are they asking for a one-off payment, or a subscription? (If you sign up for subscriptions, I recommend paying monthly, even if it is more expensive, so you can reconsider every month and change your mind if necessary). 
2. How does the company make money? Remember, if it is free, you are the product in some way, often through advertising. A company that lasts needs sustainable revenue streams, and it might run out of funding at some point and need to change the terms in order to make money. Does the business have a sustainable business model? Do they understand their competitors in the market — and how do they compare with them? 
3. Who are the team behind the company? How long have they been in business? Do I trust that they will be around for the long term? Why do they care about authors? If in doubt, are they a Partner Member of the Alliance of Independent Authors, which vets terms and conditions and contracts so we know companies can be trusted. 

Once you have all this information, you can make a more informed decision as to whether to sign up.

And of course, I say all this as I see authors getting excited and making emotional choices without considering their author business plan for the years ahead! Or signing up for so many things, they are overwhelmed.

As an example, let’s take BookFunnel — and full disclosure, Bookfunnel was a primary sponsor of AuthorNation, and they sponsor my podcast, and I am an affiliate — because I am a happy user of the service since the beginning and believe it is a great company and useful product (for many authors, but not all.) 

I’ve used BookFunnel for years to give away my free books, which was primarily a way of marketing to bring people into my ecosystem so they would buy other books, and now I also use them for direct sales of ebooks and audiobooks. I would struggle to make money selling direct without BookFunnel, so yes, they make me money and they are worth the cost. Of course, if you are just writing your first book, you don’t need them yet, so don’t sign up! 

I pay an annual subscription to use Bookfunnel, as do many thousands of other authors worldwide, so they have consistent cash flow. Damon Courtney, a wonderful coder and fantasy author, founded Bookfunnel a decade ago when he recognised the need in the author community for an easy way to deliver ebooks directly. 

Every year since, Damon has expanded the offerings, and I know he cares about authors because he IS an author. He also understands his responsibility to the community, and his business has already lasted more than 8 years. Considering most businesses fail within 5 years, any company that has managed for longer is doing well. They also have a succession plan in case anything happens to Damon, and I know this, because I asked him specifically! I’m always thinking about death as you know! 

I also wanted to mention BookFunnel as they launched personalised, signed ebooks at Author Nation, which is a fantastic feature where you can sign a copy of an ebook for a fan, or personalise it with a message.

Of course, I asked about personalised audiobooks which will hopefully come in 2026, as I definitely want to do both of those. Again, this is something for authors with an existing fan base, not brand new authors with no readers yet.

I wanted to talk about this kind of financial and market analysis of vendors since —

A big mistake of many new authors is getting ahead of themselves

For example, going to sessions on advertising or Kickstarter when they haven’t even finished a first draft of their first book, or signing up with a vendor or a service too early, and spending money too soon. The industry changes fast, so finish that book first! 

The biggest mistake of authors at my level is thinking that things will stay the same, that the way of making money that worked so well 5 or 10 or 20 years ago will still work today. 

The industry changes fast, so you will need to keep adapting, and keep letting go of things that don’t work anymore. Either they don’t work anymore because they don’t work for everyone i.e. the industry or the market has changed, or they don’t work for you personally because your life has changed.

I certainly have different goals at 50 than I did at 30, and back then, I hustled so much more than I am willing to do now. I am in a different life stage and my author business is mature and stable, so I can do things differently than I did when I was starting out.

I started writing seriously for publication in 2005, 20 years ago. I was 30, living in New Zealand and then Australia, and I had just met Jonathan. There was no iPhone, no Kindle or Amazon KDP, no TikTok, no mobile commerce. Ebooks were downloadable PDFs. Audiobooks were still mostly on tape or CD, or they were downloadable MP3s. There was no real infrastructure for an indie author business. The term ‘indie author’ was only starting to be used as a term to be proud of. It was a different world. 

We are so lucky now to have such a fantastic ecosystem for indie authors, to have so many companies who help us with our writing craft and our author business, and also our community and finding friends along the way. Author conferences are certainly an important part of this, so a big thank you to Joe and Suze Solari and the Author Nation team and all the vendors who supported the show, and all the authors who attended.  

7) Thoughts from other people 

My perspective is only one view, and I attended Author Nation primarily as a speaker and also as a Patreon host, and of course, as a podcaster, author of several decades, and veteran of many, many author conferences all over the world. I didn’t go to many sessions or take many photos, I didn’t keep a daily log, and most of my interactions were private one-on-one meetings, so I wanted to share a couple of other perspectives, and these people might be listening so hello to — 

Amber Field, who did a post on 5 overarching themes of Author Nation said,

“My hope was to meet other authors like me and to get inspired to do more book promotion — a task I hate and procrastinate on…badly. I’ve been a published author since 2023, but this was my first writing conference. It really paid off for me! I met amazing authors, got tips for every part of my author business, and just plain had a lot of fun.”

The themes she identified were: AI is changing how we work but not necessarily how we write. Absolutely, you can use it for so many things without ever using it for writing, and Amber shared how she got ideas about using AI in marketing from my session and others (and thanks for sharing the lovely picture of us, Amber!)

Some of her other themes: When it comes to marketing, you don’t have to do everything; as well as Be yourself. She says,

 “None of the most successful authors at the conference followed in another author’s footprints exactly. 100% of them followed a path that can only be described as “doing what they liked”, which often included hopping genres and doing side projects that they found fulfilling.”

So true, and this year, my short story collection and my Masters in Death and certainly evidence of that! Lots more detail and photos at Amber’s Medium post here. 

Pamela Hines, posted on Substack every day, and in her round-up piece with links to all the daily posts, she says,

“I went to Author Nation as an editor and coach, but also as a writer in need of reconnection. I wanted to learn, recharge, and see where this rapidly evolving publishing world is headed. I came home with a clearer vision for my work and a renewed faith in what happens when we gather.”

She also noted,

“The first day of any conference begins long before the first keynote. It starts with a decision: to show up. [It’s] the power of presence — of choosing to step back into community even when it feels easier to stay home. For many writers, the hardest part isn’t pitching or networking. It’s walking into the room in the first place.

Las Vegas may not sound like a literary destination, but Author Nation (following the tradition of 20BooksVegas) transforms it into one. Between the hotels, neon, and laughter, I found my people — fellow professionals determined to grow, learn, and connect. The first handshake, the first panel, the first “Oh, you too?” moment reminded me that creativity expands in the presence of others.”

At the end of the week, she says,

“This conference has reminded me never to forget that the thing I work on alone in my writing space is part of a larger whole. That whole includes small entrepreneurs, big corporations, innovative idealists, editors, consultants, and, most importantly, readers.

We write to share something meaningful. All of it exists to serve a single, simple act—someone reading a story and being changed by it. This conference allowed me to connect directly with that meaning and those individuals.

As an editor, book coach, and writer, I’m leaving with sharper tools and deeper clarity. But more than that, I’m leaving with gratitude—for the people who read, who believe in story, and who remind me that art isn’t finished until it’s received.”

Wonderful posts, Pamela, and I know how much work you put into all that, so thanks for sharing!

If you want to get a sense of what happened as well as notes on many of the sessions, and photos, check out Pamela’s Substack, or her main site with links here. 

As an aside, I asked ChatGPT to find me posts about Author Nation 2025, and both of these showed up, so Pamela and Amber, congratulations, you are discoverable! 

Conclusion

Author Nation is a fantastic conference, and I highly recommend the show whether you are just starting out, or whether you are a more experienced author. 

However, I won’t be attending in 2026 as I need a year off Las Vegas. I’ve done three years in a row, and I want to make room for other travel and other possibilities. I’m also doing this full-time Masters which goes through to next autumn, and I don’t know what conferences, if any, I will do in 2026. But as I said, I highly recommend Author Nation, and you never know, I might be back in 2027! 

The post Lessons Learned From Author Nation 2025 With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Today, I turn 40. Behind the scenes, I’m taking an intentional day to myself (no computer or phone) to celebrate the massive decade that is behind me and to lean into the excitement I feel for the decade ahead.

When I turned 30, someone told me my 30s would be the best decade. I often think about that because my 30s did turn out to be monumental. It wasn’t the best decade in the way this person meant. But, at the same time, it kinda was.

Before the first year of my 30s was halfway over, an event I now think of as “the Big Bang” knocked the ground from beneath me in ways I never saw coming. My 30s were a decade of great pain, but it was a strange sort of pain. I look back on it, and, honestly, it seems glorious. It was the sort of pain that brings change, transformation, liberation.

It was a portal. A Doorway of No Return—right on time as my First Act ended and the Second began. And what an Adventure World I entered.

It was a character arc.

It changed me, utterly. I grew up. I moved beyond narrow constrictions and definitions that I had thought were mine, but that were not. I stripped myself down to the very core—down to the shadows, down to the emptiness—and then out into unfathomable vastness, into the raw and unbearable glory that is life itself. I got to choose life in a way not everyone does.

It was a decade in which I moved three times, bought my first house, focused on healing, fell down more times than I can count, and rose and rose again.

It was a decade in which I came to understand Story on a deeper level than I ever had before.

Photography by Mackenzie Westphal.

As I stand here at this threshold between decades, I wanted to mark the moment with something a little lighter and more personal—a celebration, not just of my biggest lessons and transformations, but of the small, quirky, human things that make up the texture of my life. So, in honor of turning 40, here are 40 things you might not know about me. Some are serious, some are silly, all are pieces of the story that’s brought me here and the one still unfolding.

40 Things You Might Not Know About Me

1. I’m passionate about health and biohacking. Over the years, I’ve learned how much my creativity depends on my body’s energy and balance. I love exploring ways to support that, including eating as clean as possible, staying active, practicing yoga, minimizing toxins, and generally treating my body like an ally in the creative process. For me, it’s not about perfection, but rather curiosity and stewardship. I’m always seeking how to better live in harmony with the systems that sustain me. I’ve learned that creativity is life force, and as such it has to be cultivated, which very often looks like cultivating your health. It has to be honored and approached with reverence rather than control. It has to be listened to rather than dictated to.

2. My favorite “cheat” meal is mac and cheese. (My nieces and nephews even call me “Aunt Mac.”)

3. For guilty-pleasure movies, I always go back to Golden Hollywood. It’s what I grew up watching. So much good storytelling in those years, and I also just love the lightheartedness in so much of it. There’s a wholesomeness to it I really love. It always feels like home when I go back to old movies like Stagecoach and It’s a Wonderful Life, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn.

4. A belief I held that once protected me but eventually limited me was that my life was meant to follow someone else’s map. For a long time, that belief made me feel safe—until I realized the path I was on was leading me away from myself. The day I started charting my own course was the day my story truly began.

5. I cannot stand bananas.

6. My morning routine always includes skincare, meditation, and baked eggs for breakfast.

7. My theme song is “Eye of the Tiger.” (My dad started calling me a “tiger” before I was born. I still own the stuffed tiger in a little T-shirt says “I Katie” that he bought me when I was a newborn in the hospital.)

8. I was homeschooled in a small town in western Nebraska in the middle of nowhere. I owned two horses, and the highlight of my year was spending time on a friend’s cattle ranch in Wyoming every summer.

9. I started writing as a way to “not forget” the stories I would tell myself. My first writing gig was a family newsletter that eventually became Horse Tails with a subscribership of 30 people—of which I was very proud. I produced it for five years until I finished high school and started focusing on novels.

10. I’m secretly really good at swearing like a sailor (in three languages).

11. My coffee ritual: Chemex pour-over, dark-roast decaf, organic and water processed, with just enough cream to cover the bottom of the mug.

12. My favorite part of storytelling is the part before I even start writing it. I love to be in the daydreaming and the imagining. My second favorite part is outlining when I’m just having a conversation with myself longhand in a notebook.

13. I can’t start writing until I have some kind of food to ground me. I default to a cup of coffee. Music has always been key as well. In the past, I would listen to my soundtracks alphabetically because I liked that sometimes I would get weird contrasts—like when I’d be writing a love scene to Gladiator, or I’d be trying to write a battle to something really soft and contemplative like Cider House Rules. Sometimes, it totally didn’t work, but sometimes it would help me find interesting juxtapositions and emotions. Nowadays, I’m much more moody and spend way too much time trying to find exactly the right thing.

14. When I was twenty, I was in an ATV accident that cracked my skull. Just a few weeks before turning forty, I totaled my vehicle in another car accident. In both cases, I (more or less) walked away. Those moments remind me how fragile and miraculous life is. They made me more conscious of my health, my body, and the sheer gift of getting to keep living this story—as well as the sense that there’s a reason I’m still here and a purpose in each day I get to keep living.

15. My biggest ongoing life lesson is boundaries—learning not to front-load them from avoidance, but to work with them holistically in relationships. Telling people no.

16. I once tried to learn to bowl just to beat a boy at a bowling contest. I practiced for months and still mostly threw gutter balls, though weirdly I’d often get a strike on my very first try and never again after that.

17.  The quality I most admire in people is authenticity. It’s that capacity to be deeply in touch with your own truth and your own wholeness—and also a sense of what is broken and perhaps blind. It’s the cohesiveness of self that allows you to stand fearlessly in who you are. It’s not to say you never admit you’re wrong or never change, but there is a deep sense of truth about where you exist on your own cutting edge at any moment. I would say that is something I admire because it’s such a core quest for myself.

18.  I believe love is a state of being. It’s a frequency, a vibrational force. It’s not a feeling per se, although we do feel it. I believe most of what people say love is are just emergents from what love really is. To me, love is the same vibration as health, the same vibration as truth, the same vibration as beauty. When you’re “in” love, the world is right. There’s an alignment to who you are and how you move through life. You are whole; you are fulfilled. Love isn’t something you give or take. It’s like being in a swimming pool: love is the water that surrounds you. Being “in” love is a matter of bringing yourself into that vibration. You can literally learn how to flip the switch.

19. My favorite household ritual is going around the house first thing in the morning and opening all the curtains to see what the day is like.

20. My happy place is hanging out with my nieces and nephews.

21. The place that changed me most was probably Missouri. I lived there for three years. They were really hard years, but I learned and discovered so much about myself. They were really great years, too.

22. The timeline of my life has never matched what has been taught as normal. I’ve hit some milestones early, and others I hit late or have yet to hit. I’ve had to learn to surrender to the idea of “trusting the tide I came in on”—that I was born at the right moment for everything I’m meant to do in this life and that I have to trust the process, have patience with the profound amount of transformation I have embraced in this lifetime, and to acknowledge that while this creates a great deal of speed in some areas, in others it requires a great deal of slowness. I’m allowing my story to be what it is instead of insisting it has to be something else. There is a profound amount of freedom available in that discovery.

Photography by Mackenzie Westphal.

23. I always write with a black pen.

24. My ideal day off looks like taking a day off to just binge-watch something all day long. I don’t watch a lot of TV and movies every day anymore, but I take a day once a month to just binge-watch something.

25. I’d rather be a stand for something rather than against something. I’ve seen so clearly throughout my life that what we resist persists. On a personal level, I have always felt it was never enough for me to move away from things that weren’t working; I always needed to have something I could move toward.

26. One of the guiding principles of my life has been that old proverb that “if you want to change the world, change your country, if you want to change your country, change your city, if you want to change your city, change your family, if you want to change your family, change yourself.” It all starts at home. It all starts within.

27. I also believe even the smallest acts of integrity within oneself (even if they’re happening behind closed doors in your house and no one ever sees or knows what you have chosen, worked through, and overcome) have a ripple effect. Most of the pain in the world comes from a feeling of separation—of turning something or someone into the Other that must be defeated or fought against. Recognizing that starts within, because there are so many parts of ourselves we try to make Other—that we’re ashamed of or that we vilify or put into the shadow. I believe the most important work we can do is the work of the self.

28. I love the idea of inner callings—that we come into this life with certain things we are meant to fulfill, that some part of us already knows. To me, that offers a great deal of meaning and purpose, even when things are hard or don’t make sense. There’s always a lesson, always a teacher, always something for my good that’s meant to help me do what I’m here to do.

29. I believe life is ultimately about learning to come into integrity and wholeness within oneself, to bring back and heal and integrate the pieces that sometimes are shattered or lost. Inherent to that is the quest for each of us of learning to listen to who we are, to know what is true for us, and to gain more and more capacity to stand in that integrity. The only thing any one of us is asked to do in this life is to be true. I think we can get very easily distracted from that—not least because sometimes, the thing we think is the truest for us is really the loudest ego projection in our lives. For me, there’s this tremendous mandate to not just try to overcome my blind spots, but to accept with humility that I have them—and that, by their very definition, I don’t know what they are. I don’t think that should undermine confidence or conviction. But I do think it merits a tremendous amount of humility and a great deal of self-introspection.

30. I’ve often defined my own success only in retrospect. I’ve reached certain marks and realized that by certain people’s definitions, these markers would be defined as successes—whether it’s podcast downloads or books sold or making a living as a writer or winning some award or having a certain number followers on social media. All of that’s great, and I’ve always appreciated it. But I’ve never chased it. I’ve never really felt comfortable chasing end goals. I’m much more interested in being curious and playing and focusing on the job at hand. My goals are more about “I’m going to do this today” or “I’m going to put this book out this year.” I don’t much like being in the space or energy of worrying too much about how well things will do. I just do my best and put it out there.

31. I’ve dealt with imposter syndrome my entire career. I have faced it by looking it in the eye and being very clear about who I am, what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it. Sometimes that clarity might be about “how much money do I have to make to be a success?” or “how many books do I have to sell?” But it’s also asking, “Am I doing what I love? Am I being authentic? Am I showing up in a way I’m proud of? Am I making an impact? Am I putting something good into the world?” That’s not to say I don’t define my success by material things, because I totally do. If all of a sudden, I made zero dollars tomorrow and sold zero books, I would obviously face some pretty big ego deaths and fears. But here’s what I come back to all the time: I used to say about writing fiction that even if no one ever read what I wrote, I’d still do it. To me, I think that’s the definition of success. Is what I’m doing something I would do no matter what? Is it something I would move heaven and earth to do?

32. I  name all the important trees in my life. Right now, I’m making friends with Mr. and Mrs. Maple, the Owl Tree, and the Sentinel.

33.  My Myers-Briggs type is INTJ. My Human Design profile is a 6/2 Generator with emotional authority. My Enneagram type is a 3 (tritype is 351). Scorpio Sun, Scorpio Rising, Libra Moon.

34. I’m slightly paranoid about fire and sometimes have to go around and double-check that outlets aren’t hot.

35. When I was younger, I didn’t have a place for emotions in my life. I didn’t understand how sensitive and emotional I was, and I didn’t really learn how to cry until life cracked me open at 30. But life has been so much richer with emotion. It’s more difficult, but so much more dimensional too.

36.  The character I relate to most from my own books is 100% Allara from Dreamlander. I didn’t intend her to basically be me, but in a lot of ways she was. IYKYK.

37.  My favorite movie is The Great Escape. But the story that changed my life was Lord of the Rings.

38. To me, story is a primal force. I often speak of story in the singular. It’s capital-S Story. It’s an archetypal force. The more I study it, I just see it everywhere. And I don’t know if story itself is the reflection or if story is what everything else is reflecting. For me, story is a map. It’s the cartography of the cosmos. There is so much more there than we understand. Story is so much more of an initiatory force than we acknowledge most of the time. In my life, when I have gone through my hardest moments, it is story that has saved me. And I don’t mean specific stories, although they’ve played a role, but story itself and my own capacity to recognize it as this archetypal, immutable force in the world and in my life.

39. What I wish I could tell my younger self… I always think of the line from the movie The Kid (which has always been a meaningful movie to me, but especially now that I’m turning 40, which is what the story is about). In the film, someone is asked that same thing, and she responds, “I’d say, baby… it’s gonna be fine.”

What I’d tell my younger self is:

“It’s all going to work out.

I’ve got you.

All the things you think can never happen in your life—all the doors that you think are closed—they’re not.

By the time you get to 40, you’re going to have walked through almost all of those doors, and you’re going to be a version of yourself you will be so proud of.

So just hang on.

Keep doing what you’re doing.

Keep showing up.

Be honest.

Trust yourself.

Let yourself cry.

And, above all, keep listening to the stories.

Keep telling stories.”

40. The best thing about turning 40 is that it doesn’t feel like the beginning of the end. It feels like the beginning of the beginning. It feels like I am at the threshold of all the most important things that will happen in my life. I feel wide open to what it is I’m really here to do and to say—full of vitality and excitement and anticipation and gratitude for all that has been and for all that I know will be.

Photography by Mackenzie Westphal.

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The post Reflections on Turning 40 (+40 Things You Might Not Know About Me) appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

Why do so many memoir manuscripts fail to engage readers, even when the writer has lived through extraordinary experiences? What’s the hidden code that separates a chronological account of events from a compelling memoir that readers can’t put down? How do you know when you’re ready to write about trauma, and where’s the ethical line between truth and storytelling? With Wendy Dale

In the intro, Amazon Kindle Translate, and the Writing Storybundle.

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 

Wendy Dale is a memoir author and teacher, as well as a screenwriter. Today we are talking about The Memoir Engineering System: Make Your First Draft Your Final Draft.

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

Show Notes

• Why memoir is about connected events, not chronological storytelling—and how to transform random experiences into compelling plot
• The difference between scenes and transitions, and why structure matters in every sentence of your book
• How to write about trauma and family without crossing ethical lines or damaging relationships
• Why character arc is actually the easiest part of memoir writing (and what’s really difficult)
• The truth about dialogue, memory, and where to draw the line on fabrication — plus reflections on The Salt Path controversy
• Whether you can make money from memoir and why marketing matters as much as writing

You can find Wendy at GeniusMemoirWriting.com.

Transcript of interview with Wendy Dale

Joanna: Wendy Dale is a memoir author and teacher, as well as a screenwriter. Today we are talking about The Memoir Engineering System: Make Your First Draft Your Final Draft. So welcome to the show, Wendy.

Wendy: Thank you so much for inviting me, Joanna. It’s exciting to talk about this topic.

Joanna: First up—

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

Wendy: I think I grew up loving books and I always wanted to be a writer when I was a little girl. I really dreamed of being a writer. My mother said, “No, it’s just way too hard. So few people have success. Why don’t you become an actress?” So I actually moved to Los Angeles when I was 17 to become an actress.

I really did not like the film industry at all from an acting perspective. I was studying acting at UCLA and decided I was really going to be a writer. That was when I changed and really felt like I’d found my calling. That was always what I’d wanted to do.

So I tried writing a novel at 19 that didn’t go so well. But when I was 23 I started working on a memoir. From there, I have worked in writing in all different aspects, but really my first love will always be books.

Now having made that decision, I haven’t always done the kind of writing that I would always want to do, right? So sometimes I’ve done ad copywriting, which actually I did rather love. I’ve done screenwriting, I’ve done all kinds of writing, not always my first choice of the type of writing I was doing.

For the most part, I have made it work though. So being flexible, you can’t always get exactly what you want. I didn’t say I’m going to only earn my living publishing books. I don’t know if that would’ve been possible, but I have, for the most part, managed to earn my living as a writer.

Joanna: How did you get into memoir specifically?

Wendy: So I started trying to write this novel at 19, and it was very difficult and I didn’t know what I was doing. I thought, well, it would be so much easier to write about my life. Are you laughing, Joanna?

Joanna: Yes, sure. Writing a memoir, right?

Wendy: So another misguided idea. I thought, oh, memoir would be easy because you don’t even have to come up with the plot. You just write down what you lived through. Lots of misconceptions in everything I just said, but that was how I started writing a memoir.

Around this time my parents also made this decision that they were going to retire in their forties and take their life savings and move to a developing country. They sold everything. I mean, they really just fled the United States and moved to Honduras with the idea of retiring early.

So I went to visit them and I was like, well, this could be something to write about. So that actually wound up being the first chapter of my memoir.

Joanna: And you were telling me before you live in Peru, right?

Wendy: I do, yes. I’ve lived in Peru for almost six years now.

Joanna: Oh, right. So, why do that? I mean, a lot of people want to travel.

What is it that brought you to Peru?

Wendy: I lived in Peru when I was a child and really, it sounds kind of strange, but I think deep down I’ve always had this identity of feeling Peruvian, right? You look at me and Peruvians don’t think I am Peruvian, but really, my first memories as a child were growing up in Peru.

Coming back here has been really incredible. So I feel very much at home. I’ve actually lived by this point, almost half my life in Latin America. Not just Peru—Bolivia, other Latin American countries.

So, yes, I’ve lived half my life in the United States, the other half in Latin America. So I really do feel at home here, partly because my first memories were growing up in Peru.

Joanna: Well, I think this might segue into why writing memoir is not just “this is what happened,” because I feel like, as you mentioned, one of the misconceptions is almost that it’s just an autobiography. Like, this happened, this happened, this happened.

As you said there, for example, the fact that you spent half your life in Latin America, half in the USA, to me is immediately like a potential hook into stories about your life that aren’t necessarily in order.

Talk a bit about that issue of it’s not just “this happened, this happened” and how to think about memoir.

Wendy: Oh, I’m going to take a deep sigh here because I just think back to writing this memoir and all of the misconceptions I had.

Now, I love prose. I just love prose. I love putting words on the page. I think words are so beautiful. Sometimes I just want to eat them. I’m a prose writer. I don’t like structure, I don’t like plot, and I didn’t even realize the importance of plot until I thought I had finished this memoir.

So first chapter starts in Honduras. The last chapter ends in Bolivia because by this point my parents had moved to Bolivia, and all the chapters in between are all these different countries that I went to on my own.

I’d finished the book, or so I thought, and I started sending it out to agents and really wasn’t getting the response I had hoped for. Then finally I got an agent who called me up, and that was really good news, and she said, “You’re a really good prose writer.”

I was like, yes, I love writing prose. And she says, “But you know nothing about structure.” And I honestly—are you laughing?

Joanna: Yes.

Wendy: Right, and I remember the words that went through my head. I was like, what is this structure thing she’s talking about? I’d never heard the word.

So obviously I knew nothing about structure, and that was kind of the beginning of what I guess would become my life’s work—really comprehending memoir structure.

So that was a long time ago. That was the beginning of the process, but I didn’t even understand that plot plays such a huge role in memoir. I just thought you wrote about your life, and I think that is what a lot of people don’t understand, right?

It’s really easy to confuse the memories of your life with thinking that it’s plot, and it just isn’t. So one thing I tell my clients is you are not writing a chronicle of what you’ve lived through. You are taking true stories from your life and turning them into art. This is an art form for other people to enjoy.

It’s true, but you are creating art. It’s very different than chronicling your life. It took me a long time to learn that.

Joanna: Yes. Let’s come back to this word “art,” but first of all, I want us to tackle structure because, okay, I also learned this the hard way.

When I wrote my travel memoir, Pilgrimage, I had like over a hundred thousand words of writing, and I just couldn’t figure out how the structure of the book could work until I found another book that helped me figure out the structure.

Like, there are lots of different types of memoir structures and mine I found a sort of model and then I was like, oh, okay, this is how it works.

Talk us through how we can potentially structure a memoir.

Even if we’re someone like me who might be a discovery writer first, or like you by the sound of it.

Wendy: Oh, well, absolutely. So I hate structure, right? And that’s why I became an expert in it—in order to make it a lot easier for me to understand.

So I am not a planner, right? In fact, there’s a line in my memoir about there are two different kinds of travelers. There are planners and there are fun people, right? So I’ve never been a planner in any aspect of my life. So the fact that I would become this expert in structure is kind of ironic.

Let me go back to this idea of structure. So I think when people talk about structure, their first thought is three acts. Or are you doing a dual timeline? How is the big picture? How is your book going to play out?

When I use the word structure, I am referring to how structure plays itself out in every sentence of your book. I mean, it’s such a critical part of your story.

So there’s global structure, which is really referring to how you’re going to use chronology in your book, how you’re going to tell this story, and then there is structure on every page of your book.

So what happened is I actually started teaching after my memoir got published. Several years later, I started teaching memoir writing, and teaching is very different than doing, right?

I wrote my memoir by a process of trial and error. Eventually, this agent did sign me and kind of helped me understand what wasn’t working in the manuscript that I’d submitted, and I spent a year rewriting it. It eventually got published.

When I started teaching memoir writing, it was different because teaching someone how to do this is very different than this trial and error of doing it yourself. So as time went on, I would see the same mistakes over and over again.

I started to say, well, there are these categories of mistakes, and what if I reverse engineered this and kept people from making these mistakes? So in order to not make the mistake, there must be a principle that people need to follow. So that was the beginning of The Memoir Engineering System.

It took me 15 years to understand that — 

Plot can be summed up in two words and it’s connected events.

Now, why do I say that?

Well, the problem with memoir writing is that it’s very tempting to feel like the things that you did—the things that you’re including in your memoir—let’s say it’s a travel memoir.

So arriving in Paris and then going out to eat for the first time, and then walking down the Champs-Élysées, and then going to the Louvre. So I just mentioned several things that you might have done, that a person might have theoretically done in this memoir on Paris.

The problem with this from a reader’s perspective is that this is not plot, and the reason it’s not plot is that these things are not related to one another. So by relating them, it could be with an idea. What do all of these things have in common other than they are things that you did in Paris?

You need something a little deeper than that. You take these disconnected events—I went to the restaurant, I walked down the Champs-Élysées, I went to the Louvre—and you turn them into plot. So that really is the basis of everything I teach is that connected events equal plot.

A memoir writer’s biggest challenge is taking all these things that they lived through, whether it’s a travel narrative or different kind of narrative. It’s a bunch of stuff that happened to you, and that’s not plot.

How do you take a bunch of stuff that happened to you and turn it into plot? You let your reader know how these events are connected. So that’s really the basis of what I teach. Does that make sense?

Joanna: Yes. Well, maybe give us a concrete example with your own memoir, Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals: Adventures in Love and Danger, which obviously are connected events. They would be vignettes, I imagine, about these different adventures.

What is the connected event? Is that more about you as the character or is it the theme?

Wendy: So this is called The Memoir Engineering System, right? I really believe that there was this hidden code underlying memoir. I promise I’m not avoiding the question, Joanna. I’m going to get to it in a second.

In order to explain how this works, what took me 15 years of reading over a thousand manuscripts to understand about how memoir actually is doing, how it actually works, is that there are two different components in your book. You have scenes and you have transitions.

In your scene, you have the building blocks of plot and something must happen. In your transition you have an idea that shows what happens in one scene is related to what happens in the next.

So in my own book, I didn’t know this because I wrote this as a process of trial and error. If I were to go back to my made up example of, you know, I go out to eat on the Champs-Élysées and then I go to the Louvre, what do those things have to do with each other? Absolutely nothing. They’re not related in any way.

But you can ask yourself is, what was I doing in Paris? What was I searching for? Maybe I was searching for a sense of understanding myself. I don’t know, there’s no one right answer, right? It’s a fictitious example.

So in your transitions between your scenes, maybe this is a search for identity, maybe when you’re outside of your own country, you understand yourself better.

So the transitions in that chapter would all be about identity and this idea of identity would infuse itself through your chapter and it would take these disconnected things you did and it would turn them into a story. Does that make more sense?

Joanna: Yes. I mean, I know what you mean because I think this is where people need to get more personal. I feel like you can write a travel guide, and when I started writing my pilgrimage books, I thought I was writing travel guides.

Then I realized I actually had a deeper sense of the whole thing. I was lost and I was trying to find myself and all that like you do at midlife. Seeking faith and all of that.

I think memoir only really happens when you get a lot more personal.

So as you mentioned there, sort of the idea that something happens, but it’s your personal reflection and how your own personal transformation happens through the course of the book.

So you have to write at a much deeper level than you would if it was, say, just a travel guide about Paris.

Wendy: Oh, I think all memoir is more closely related to literary fiction than commercial fiction because you’re never going to have the plot twists and turns of a detective novel, for instance. So it’s really dependent on the depth of the prose, right? Your insights. That is why people read memoir.

So you need some plot, but you’re never going to have those twists and turns and surprises and unbelievable suspense that you would have in commercial fiction. In that way, it’s more like literary fiction.

So it’s so dependent on the prose, so dependent on the insight, the quality of the prose, affecting your reader emotionally with your words. So I tell my clients structure is kind of black or white. It’s either working or it’s not. So don’t stress over finding the best structure for your book.

Structure is there to keep your reader from being confused, to keep them from going, wait, I have no idea why you’re telling me this after reading this scene. I’ve no idea why you’re telling me about this other thing because they’re not at all related.

Structure is there to keep your reader from being confused. What makes them actually love your memoir is the quality of your prose affecting them emotionally, your insight, your point of view, how subjective your writing is.

Joanna: So what are some tips for people who are finding it difficult to get down to that depth? Because it is very difficult. I found writing memoir much more difficult than fiction, and I’ve written lots of other kind of self-help nonfiction. You really do kind of have to bare your soul.

What are some of your tips for people to write at a much deeper level?

Wendy: Well, so what I suggest, even though I hate planning, is that people start with an outline, but a very specific outline that really consists of figuring out what their scenes are. Now, this outline can change along the way, but starting with an outline so that they ask themselves, okay, what is each scene about?

When I’ve had people do that, the process of writing becomes so much easier because structuring your book is a very logical process. Writing your book really is this creative process. That’s the part I love. I love the creative part. I don’t love the structuring part.

But when faced with the choice, okay, you can spend seven years writing and rewriting and figuring this out by trial and error, or you can spend a month of your life creating this outline and then finish your memoir in a year, somehow that investment of time starts to seem worth it.

So when it comes to actually writing, I find that any kind of writer’s block, I find the reason that prompts work, I think, is that you push against limitations and that actually makes me more creative.

So I found that having the structure for my book before I start writing actually makes it so much easier to write and it makes me more creative.

If I have this outline for the book and I don’t feel like writing that depressing scene about that time I got in this argument with my mother, I feel like writing this fun scene over here because I’m in a funny mood today, I can do that because I have a sense of what the book is like globally.

So I really do believe in outlines, even though I hate actually creating them. I think it makes it easier to write. I think it makes it actually more fun to write once you’ve gotten through the drudgery of creating this outline.

Joanna: Yes, I must say, because like I said, I’m a discovery writer. I’ve never ever written a book with an outline. With my book Pilgrimage, I hadn’t finished the character arc until I had done three pilgrimages.

I feel like perhaps your method is more suitable for people who already have an idea of their story in mind.

Like they’ve already finished their transformation, whatever that may be, or that period of their life that they want to write about.

Whereas I think when I started writing, I still hadn’t found the meaning. I guess I hadn’t found the, what you are calling the idea in each of the scenes.

Wendy: So I do take a really different approach than most memoir coaches. So what you’re talking about, your character arc, I actually find the easiest part of any memoir, and I’ll explain why in a second. Plot is difficult. Plot requires thinking and figuring out your plot.

For me, your character arc is synonymous with the theme of your book. Is it about belonging? Is it about identity? Is it about coming to terms with your childhood?

I find that that actually comes out in the writing itself because that is the theme of your life, and I think that is so much a part of everything you do and everything you write, that it comes out in the writing itself.

That to me is the easiest part of writing a memoir, is this character arc, this internal journey, and that is one of the few things that doesn’t require structure because it’s in the writing itself. Now there’s a little bit of thought that goes into it, but I honestly find one of the easiest parts of writing a memoir.

What is actually difficult is taking a bunch of things you did in a country and connecting—this day I did this, and the next day I did this, and the next day I saw this place, and the next time I met this person.

All of that will bore your reader to tears if you don’t connect these events in some way, and if you don’t make them related to one another to tell a story. Otherwise you’re just telling them a bunch of stuff you did and you’re a stranger to them and they don’t care.

If you take all of these things you did and you connect them in some way, usually with an idea—usually with some thematic idea—you are creating plot in that chapter. That’s really a challenge for memoir because we don’t have the advantage of making things up as a novelist does.

Joanna: Yes, we should tackle the making things up aspect because you’ve used language like character arc, you’ve used plot, you’ve said it is more similar to literary fiction, so you have used a lot of fiction language.

So where is the line for truth? People might know of The Salt Path controversy, which is—if people don’t know—a travel memoir which is a lot of truth, but some quite core things have been challenged in the press. So there’s sort of been a feeling of betrayal by people who loved that memoir.

What are some of the lines around truth with writing memoir?

Wendy: I honestly think the bar is pretty low in the sense that the people who are getting in trouble—and this is not the first time a memoirist has been in trouble for fabricating facts of their life—it kind of is shocking to me, right?

So I would say that all memoirs take some license, and so there’s this ethical continuum and you have to feel comfortable with it. So I tell people you need to put a disclaimer in your book.

Most memoirs will play a little bit with the order of events. Now, when I’m saying that, what I mean is that I might have had a really funny conversation with my mother in October, and in the book it comes in March because that’s a perfect place to put this conversation in my book.

I don’t think that is being unethical, and I would also put a disclaimer in the beginning of my memoir that I have sometimes changed the chronology of the book.

Now making up huge things that never happened—so one thing I tell people I work with is I would never make up something happening.

So I had this conversation with my mother. I may not remember the dialogue exactly, but it’s to the best of my memory, it’s my representation of that moment in time, but I would never make up something happening.

The memoirs who are getting in trouble—so this is not the first time a memoirist has been in trouble—but all of the ones who’ve really had these public scandals have made up huge things.

So I don’t think it’s a complicated issue, to be honest with you. I think all memoirs take some license. The ones who get in trouble kind of deserve to get in trouble because these are big things they’re making up. I’m thinking James Frey, do you remember James Frey?

Joanna: Yes. Was it A Million Little Pieces?

Wendy: I think that’s what it was. Yes. I mean, I think Augusten Burroughs got in trouble too. There’ve been many cases, but people were making up big chunks of their life. They weren’t moving things around in time.

Joanna: I agree, but it is hard because, for example, if people are writing something from a long time ago. So I guess I was shocked at the end of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, because suddenly it’s kind of revealed at the end that she’s writing it decades later.

My first thought, I think it was one of the first memoirs I kind of read, and I was like, well, how can you remember those conversations? How can you write dialogue as if it was last week?

In my own memoir, like I wrote while I was doing my pilgrimages. Over three years, I was writing journals and I wrote the book very soon after. But a lot of people do write memoir from decades ago, so how do we keep that line?

Also, I wanted to ask you, you mentioned your mother as well. A lot of people are putting family members or people they met or whatever into books.

How do we make sure that our memory of something is right?

Wendy: Oh, that’s a much harder question, Joanna. Okay, to answer your first question, how do you recount dialogue? Let’s say you’re writing 30 years later and you’re trying to recount what someone said. You do the best you can.

What I want to say is that people who are getting in trouble, famous memoirs getting in trouble, are not getting in trouble because their mother comes back and says, “You know, I didn’t say exactly that 20 years ago.”

They’re getting in trouble for making up big things, making up illnesses that they didn’t have, making up criminal records that they didn’t have. So these are big things that can be fact checked. That’s what people get in trouble with.

I have never heard of a memoir getting in trouble because a family member said, “Well, I think the conversation was different.” Ever, have you? So we’re talking that’s a whole different level and you do the best you can. So that is not an issue for me. I have an issue with people who make up facts.

I’m doing the best I can to remember dialogue, and if I don’t remember dialogue, I don’t put it in my book. You don’t need tons of dialogue in your book. What you need is great point of view, great prose in your scene to make it engaging to a reader.

Joanna: Yes, that’s true. But on the family thing, it’s more like—

“Well, you portrayed this situation this way, and I don’t feel like it happened like that.”

Wendy: That is really difficult, right?

So first of all, one of the things I teach memoirs is that it’s really important to give us a point of view. I think some of my hardest clients are journalists. They’ve been taught to be objective. Objective, just the facts, right? That is not what a reader wants from memoir.

We really want this point of view. It’s really ironic that in being incredibly personal, you actually make your story universal. It’s the only way I know to make your book universal is being so personal that I see myself in the story.

So we need that point of view, and your point of view may be very different than your mother’s point of view. That’s true, right? I mean, life is that way. So you do need to be faithful to your point of view.

Now, having said that, you are writing about real life people and there are repercussions. Your mother may come back to you and say, “I’m never speaking to you again. How dare you portray me that way?” I mean, it depends on your relationship with the person, but it is something to consider.

So that, to me, is a very different question. I always write my truth. Now, once I’ve finished writing my truth and my point of view, I go through my memoir and I say, well, whose opinion do I really care about? Is my mother going to be so devastated by this that I’m going to damage my relationship and is it worth it?

So there were some people in my book, I’m like, oh, this person’s going to hate what I said about them. I don’t care. I don’t even like this person. So I left it.

With my mother, for instance, I said, “Well, mom, I’m going to tell you, this memoir is coming out.” This was a long time ago, by the way, kind of like Cheryl Strayed, right? So long time ago. a

I said, “Well, I say a lot of things about you, but we really needed this conclusion at the end. And in the end, this really turns out to be this character arc about understanding my relationship with my mother even better. So in the beginning, we needed lots of conflict to get there.”

Totally true, but a little out of proportion so that my mother would let me get away with talking about some of the things she probably didn’t want me talking about. She took this really well, and the way I handled it was I had her read the last chapter first, where she really does come across really great, right?

I know my mother incredibly well, and I also knew what would work with her. So she loved the publicity. She would do book readings with me. She went on television with me. She hammed it up in book readings. She would read her lines in the book. So it actually brought us closer together.

My father is very different. My father does not like publicity. I knew if I had said anything negative about my father, he wouldn’t speak to me again, and so I didn’t.

So it wasn’t that I lied, but I did take into consideration the relationship I had with my parents. They are different people and I knew they would take it in different ways. So that is a real life consideration that you do need to take into account.

Joanna: Well, I think that’s very respectful of you for both of them, and the most healthy way to do things for sure.

I think another thing that happens with memoir is people have far more damaged relationships than you clearly had. I think some people want to use memoir as a form of therapy or revenge. That’s another thing. Revenge, rage, anger, and a very negative emotion.

So absolutely people need to write their truth in at least the first draft, but where do you think the line is between therapy and what could be conceived?

What could go very, very wrong for both the person writing and also anyone on another side?

Wendy: I think a lot of people want to write their memoir for the sake of therapy and in the end, that’s really fine. I’ve always wanted to be a published writer.

I care about having an audience. I care about saying the truth. My truth, obviously not the truth. I care about saying my truth and creating art for an audience, and that really is a different consideration than journal writing, which is for yourself.

So if you are writing a memoir for an audience, you are writing it in a different way. So what I would say to people full of trauma and anger—yes, plenty of trauma, let me tell you, right? Plenty of trauma in my memoir as well. Even though it’s a humorous book, there’s plenty of trauma in there.

What I would say is that it depends on the tone you use. Let me give you an example of just talking to another human being, a stranger. If you start to talk to that stranger and they’re like, “My life has been so unfair, nobody has ever given me a chance,” do you really want to talk to that stranger?

So it’s a matter of tone. If that stranger says, “I have gone through so much. I was abused as a child, I suffered poverty and homelessness. Let me tell you what I’ve come away with.” You kind of want to lean in and you’re like, “Well, tell me about being homeless.” You want to hear that story.

So it’s not what you’ve lived through. I think it’s where you are in dealing with this. So if you are still processing trauma, and you’re at the stage where life is unfair, and you know, I’ve given up, you probably are not ready to write a memoir for other people yet.

Feel free to write to process that trauma, but if you’re writing for a public, we want to learn through what you’ve lived through. Living through someone else’s difficulties can be really therapeutic for your reader as long as you’re on the other side of them.

There’s a Tobias Wolff quote, and I’m not going to get it wrong—I’m paraphrasing it—but I heard this on an NPR radio interview many, many years ago. He was being interviewed, I think it might’ve even been for This Boy’s Life. So that would’ve been a long time ago. He said,

“You should write about what has hurt you the most, but only after it’s quit hurting you. So then you have that perspective. You have that wisdom.”

Joanna: Yes. I mean having written journals through dark times in my life, and then looking at it later, when you are going through these things, your writing is really repetitive and quite frankly, boring.

Wendy: “Poor me, life is so hard,” and that’s okay. It’s okay in the moment.

Joanna: Yes, but as you say, nobody wants to read a repetitive journal over and over again. That’s not a memoir. So it is difficult, isn’t it, to find that line between sharing enough and then not being repetitive. I feel like this is where you have to keep the audience in mind. It’s like, okay—

That was good for me as a writer, but what’s good for the reader?

Wendy: It is, and it really depends on your goals as a writer. It really does. Both are valid. If you are writing to heal from trauma, that is a really valid reason to write. It works. It really does work to write to heal from trauma.

If you’re writing for an audience, it is a different level. You might have to leave some things out of your book that really mattered to you. You are trying to take true events from your life and turn them into plot, so it is a different goal.

Joanna: Well, let’s just talk about that then. Definition of success is so important and I think with every genre there are books that hit big.

So everyone thinks they’re going to be Cheryl Strayed with Wild, and everyone did want to be like The Salt Path until quite recently. These books that become mega, mega bestsellers and have movies.

Should authors expect to make money with memoir, or how could success be defined?

Wendy: It really depends on how badly you want to be financially successful when it comes to writing. Let me qualify that just a little bit. So if you really care about making money, what you do need to learn is marketing and publicity. So a huge portion of your time is going to be spent getting publicity for your book.

So what makes for a successful book, I think is three things. It’s writing a book that readers love. Not every reader—some people are going to hate your book. In fact, that’s actually a good sign. Not everyone needs to love your book.

Some people need to love it, some should hate it. That means you’ve written a book that actually says something.

So you need to have written a good book. You need publicity because if no one hears about this really good book you’ve written, it’s not going to be financially successful. And then you need luck.

So I think the Cheryl Strayeds, the Wilds of the world, also had a little bit of luck. So you can control it to a certain extent if you are willing to put in the work to do marketing and publicity on your book.

I think you could count on a modest success if you’re willing to work hard on it, because the reality is, if you care about making money off of your book, the money comes from publicity and marketing.

If you don’t, and you’re writing a book and you’ve put it out in the world and it’s beautiful and you want to see what happens and who finds it, and that is your satisfaction, that’s valid too. It just depends on what your goals are.

If you want to make money off of a book, there really is this whole publicity and marketing side of it. That’s just the reality because there are books out there, and if no one has heard of your book, no one’s going to buy it.

Joanna: And that’s true for all books.

Wendy: Yes, unfortunately. We hate that, right, Joanna? Don’t you hate marketing?

Joanna: Oh, nobody wants to do it, but it just has to be done.

I think what’s interesting about memoir though, which is a very good thing, is that it’s kind of timeless. So I really think that like my memoir, Pilgrimage, and like your memoir, we can talk about them for the rest of our lives because they are part of life at a point.

Obviously there’ll be other books that we write about different parts of our life, but to me it’s far more timeless than other genres. I mean, you mentioned marketing. I have a book called How to Market a Book, and it’s on its third edition. It needs updating all the time because marketing changes, but—

Memoir is evergreen.

Wendy: It’s evergreen. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes, though I do have to say that I wrote my memoir in my twenties though. It’s been 30 years—I whisper that to you, right? So I think I wrote my truth then.

If I were to write about the exact same experiences, I would write about them in such a different way, and not in a better way. Just a different way. Hindsight is 20/20.

Joanna: Yes, but I feel like there are different times of our lives, so I feel like I will write another memoir at some point, but it won’t be about pilgrimage, it’ll be about something else.

Wendy: What is it going to be about? Do you know?

Joanna: I don’t know yet. I haven’t lived it yet. I think it will appear. Although, I’ve got this book around gothic cathedrals that I started out as a photo book and now it’s kind of turning into half a memoir. Because I’m a discovery writer, I don’t even know what happens until these things arrive.

Wendy: Fair enough. If you ever want help with an outline, you call me and I will help you with your outline.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, tell us—

Where can people find you and your books and courses online?

Wendy: I think the easiest way to find me is to go to GeniusMemoirWriting.com and you can find information about The Memoir Engineering System, which is my book on memoir structure. My own memoir’s called Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals. Or just Google Wendy Dale.

I also have a YouTube channel, so Google Wendy Dale and you’ll find lots of stuff.

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

Wendy: Thank you so much, Joanna.

The post Why Structure Matters More Than You Think. Writing Memoir With Wendy Dale first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Many writers discover that connecting the plot points of a story is far harder than identifying them. It’s easy enough to name the big turning points on a beat sheet, but when you sit down to write the pages that bridge those landmarks, the story can feel as if it’s stalling in the middle. The real challenge (and the true power of story structure) lies in shaping the in-between sections so they carry momentum. If you want to know how to keep your story moving between the big moments, it helps to look at those stretches as purposeful sequences that grow out of one turning point and drive the story to the next.

This is exactly what one writer asked me specifically about, wondering how to handle all the “in-between moments” without the story lagging. Here’s Stephanie’s question:

I’ve loved all your books about outlining and story structure. I feel as if, thanks to you, I have a sound grasp on the major plot points and the concept of scene and sequel, but I would love your thoughts on effectively linking those major plot points. My stories seem to have a lag in development between the major events. Is there such a thing as advice for all the “in-between moments” of a story? The subtle parts that thread the story along between the major plot points? Or am I just being too nit-picky?

This is such an important question. We can often lose sight of the fact that the real magic of story structure isn’t in the beats, but in the way the sections around them build, shift, and propel us forward. Part of the reason we might fall into this dilemma is that it can be easy to think of a story’s beats/plot points as distinct from the surrounding scenes. The truth is that the beats must be part of a seamless chain of story events, each one building into the next. The beats are distinct simply in that they represent important nodes of transformation.

If you’re one of those writers who enjoy plotting out structural beat sheets or outlining high-level plot skeletons, but then struggle when it comes time to write your way to the beats, today I want to walk you through a change in perspective. I’m going to show you how to integrate the idea of plot points into the plot itself, so that the entire story feels cohesive and resonant.

In This Article:

• Connect Plot Points by Thinking in Story Sections, Not Just Beats
• How Each Story Section Bridges the Major Plot Points
• Use the Intent-Reaction-New-Intent Pattern to Keep the Story Moving
• Think About Scene Sequences Instead of Just Isolated Scenes
• Give Each Section Its Own Thematic or Episodic Focus

Connect Plot Points by Thinking in Story Sections, Not Just Beats

Structuring Your Novel: Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition (Amazon affiliate link)

When we talk about “story structure,” most of the time what we’re really talking about is a shortcut method to help us easily visualize a story’s entire arc in order to ensure every piece contributes to a cohesive whole. No matter what structural methodology you ascribe to, the structure identified through various names and pacing/timing suggestions is there for the singular purpose of creating a story that works. It’s about the end product, not the pieces.

However, because story structure discussions unavoidably place so much emphasis on plot beats, what we end up with can often seem like little more than a checklist of beats. That’s where the trouble can begin.

Here’s the truth: however important the plot beats are, they’re not where your story lives. Your story lives in the spaces in between. Only by connecting plot points can we create story flow.

Although I have found it most accessible to learn story structure by memorizing and understanding plot beats, I actually find it most useful to interact with story itself as a series of sections. These sections are those that naturally emerge in the spaces between the plot beats.

Story structure, as I teach it, starts out as seven equally spaced plot beats (not counting the bookends of Hook and Resolution):

1. Inciting Event
2. First Plot Point
3. First Pinch Point
4. Midpoint (Second Plot Point)
5. Second Pinch Point
6. Third Plot Point
7. Climax

Although each of these plot points represents crucial story moments (and, likely, the story’s biggest and most important scenes), what they give us that is even more important are eight (more or less) equally spaced sections of the story. These “in between” sections are not empty spaces, nor are they arbitrary. They are thematically related to their connected plot points and exist to allow the story to fully develop each plot beat’s purpose and deeper symbolism of transformation.

How Each Story Section Bridges the Major Plot Points

When you start thinking about the “in between” moments as bridges between plot points, you can immediately get a sense for what might happen in what can otherwise seem a yawning blank space.

Plot points = turning points.

The sections in between = transitional spaces in which characters process the previous beat’s change and aim toward the next.

We place so much emphasis upon plot beats precisely because they are turning points. Turning points represent change. And change is the engine that moves a story’s plot forward.

However, change means little without context and causality. Although we could ostensibly jump from plot point to plot point—creating a very short story of only seven scenes—the depth and complexity available in storytelling becomes available when we emphasize cause and effect.

• What has caused this change? I.e., what has built up to the plot point?
• What effect does this change now cause? I.e., what consequences will dictate new choices and behavior from the characters?

From this causality, we also get to build context. In real life, change is less about singular causes and effects and more about systemic influences. The longer the sections between plot points, the more opportunity to develop thoughtful verisimilitude. The first step in figuring out what to write between major events starts with examining how characters would naturally react to what’s just happened. And how will their natural actions lead most interestingly to the next moment of change—the next major plot point?

Use the Intent-Reaction-New-Intent Pattern to Keep the Story Moving

The forward momentum of plot is constructed from two simple pieces: the characters’ intentions and the obstacles that complicate their forward momentum. That’s it.

From there, however, we can access all kinds of delicious complexity and nuance. When characters’ intentions are met with complications (aka, conflict), turning points of change necessarily arise as characters adapt to the circumstances and try to figure out new ways to progress. Some of these moments of change are story-altering turning points. These are the major structural points. Specifically, they are moments in which the change that results is so great it cannot easily be reversed.

However, many moments in a story show characters adapting and changing in ways that are not so dramatic. After their initial intentions are obstructed by the major consequences offered up in plot points, characters will then spend time reacting. They may experiment with certain methods, backtrack, try again—making many choices but none that yet represent “doorways of no return.” Most scenes in your story will offer some version of these smaller reactions as characters formulate the new or revised intentions that will lead them to the next major plot point.

You know your in-between scenes are meaningful, rather than just filler, when each moment exists in a continuum between the complications encountered by the characters’ original intention and the new intention that is formed in reaction to those complications. This ensures every moment in your story matters by contributing to the character’s progression to the next major turning point.

For Example:

In The King’s Speech, Bertie’s initial intention is simply to avoid public speaking because of his debilitating stammer. That goal is complicated when his brother abdicates the throne and Bertie must assume the crown (a dramatic Doorway of No Return). Much of the middle of the story is devoted to his reactions to each new challenge: reluctantly seeking out speech coach Lionel Logue, resisting Logue’s unconventional methods, making halting progress, backsliding, and trying again. Few of these scenes are decisive or life-altering, but each reflects the continuum of adaptation as Bertie’s smaller, immediate intentions evolve. Ultimately, they prepare him for the climactic wartime broadcast in which he fully embraces his role as king. These in-between sequences matter because they dramatize the inner progression from avoidance to acceptance, bridging the early setup and the later turning points.

A still from The King’s Speech, showing how character reactions in the in-between scenes build momentum between the story’s major turning points. (The King’s Speech (2010), Paramount Pictures.)

In the question at the beginning of the post, Stephanie mentioned “scene and sequel,” which is a useful way of structuring individual scenes to ensure they all matter and each builds into the next. In this approach, each moment in the story is divided into halves, one focusing on action (“scene”) and the other focusing on reaction (“sequel”). You can then further break down each half into three tasks apiece to further strengthen the story’s realistic progression:

Scene (Action):

1. Goal: Characters move forward according to their intentions.
2. Conflict: Characters are met with an obstacle that creates complications.
3. Outcome: This obstacle creates complications (i.e., a “disaster”) that demands characters alter their tactics.

Sequel (Reaction):

1. Reaction: Characters must reevaluate their approach.
2. Dilemma: They examine what is currently not working.
3. Decision: They formulate a new or slightly altered intention that allows them to respond to the complications and continue forward.

You can also think of these scene polarities in terms of:

• Cause and effect
• Question and answer

Regardless, the point is to create a realistic progression from plot point to plot point by following characters through their process of evolution in response to the obstacles presented along the way.

Think About Scene Sequences Instead of Just Isolated Scenes

Thinking of your story in terms of its scenes can be just as useful as thinking in terms of its plot points. However, both approaches have the drawback of potentially causing writers to think of their stories too much as “parts” rather than the larger “sum” that is created from those parts. In other words: we can lose the forest for the trees.

This is why I encourage writers to view the sections in between plot points less in terms of individual scenes and more in terms of scene sequences.

A scene sequence is a larger unit within the story, bringing together multiple smaller scenes in a unified episode. Usually, scene sequences can be identified by a specific focus within the larger story, such as “a battle” or “a negotiation” or “a birthday party” or “a funeral.”

For Example:

The movie adaptation of Seabiscuit features many sequences about a “horse race,” each one focused specifically on one important race or another, such as the “match race against War Admiral” or the “Santa Anita comeback.”

A scene from Seabiscuit highlighting how a focused sequence—such as the horse’s pivotal race—creates its own mini-arc and drives the story forward between the major turning points. (Seabiscuit (2003), Universal Pictures)

Scene sequences create a mini-arc of their own, featuring a beginning, a middle, and a defined end (as is obvious in the horse race example above, which ends with clearly defined winners and losers and therefore a clearly defined relationship between the protagonists and their goals).

Although any chain of interrelated scenes (aka, scenes and sequels) will certainly create a tightly woven plot that progresses cohesively toward its finale, scene sequences offer extra opportunities to create “shape” and momentum, particularly in the in-between sections. Even better, they can be used to their greatest effect by incorporating the plot points directly into them, usually climactically.

For Example

The Midpoint in The Great Escape features the German guards’ discovery of the POWs’ almost-completed escape tunnel. Although this Midpoint could conceivably have happened in any scene, the movie featured it as the climax of the lengthy “Independence Day” scene sequence in which the POWs drunkenly celebrate the 4th of July with potato-mash moonshine. The sequence is iconic because of its focused episodic nature and naturally leads into the decisive Midpoint in which (among other things) Steve McQueen’s previously uncooperative character resolves to gather necessary information to enable the eventual escape.

The 4th of July celebration scene from The Great Escape, featuring James Garner and Steve McQueen, is an iconic example of how a focused scene sequence can set tone and momentum for the Midpoint turning point. (The Great Escape (1963), The Mirisch Company.)

This is another reason it can be so valuable to think of your story in terms of sections rather than simply plot points or scenes. Instead of trying to build your way between plot points scene by scene, you can instead conceive of larger sequences that can easily and intuitively be filled with interesting scenes—all building upon one another toward the next major turning point.

Give Each Section Its Own Thematic or Episodic Focus

Beyond thinking of general scene sequences, you can also draw inspiration from the inherent themes of each section. Each of the eight sections in your story is defined by the plot points that precede and follow it. This is certainly true of the specific events in your story, and it is also true from the higher-level viewpoint of the thematic and symbolic purposes of each plot point.

Next Level Plot Structure (Amazon affiliate link)

I’ve discussed the deeper meaning and purpose (both functionally and symbolically) of each of the major plot points in many other posts (and in my book Next Level Plot Structure), so I will just mention them briefly here:

1. Inciting Event (Call to Adventure/Refusal of the Call)
2. First Plot Point (Doorway of No Return/Key Event)
3. First Pinch Point (Glimpse of the Beast / Stirring of Resolve)
4. Midpoint or Second Plot Point (Moment of Truth/Plot Revelation)
5. Second Pinch Point (Wrath of the Beast / Call to Defiance)
6. Third Plot Point (False Victory/Low Moment)
7. Climax (Sacrifice/Victory or Failure)

Example: How The Lion King Connects Plot Points Through Thematic Story Sections

By looking at a solid story like The Lion King, you can see how these turning points can be used to thematically create the eight discrete sections that exist between the major plot points.

Section 1: Hook to Inciting Event

The story opens with the splendor of the Pride Lands and the birth of the heir. This first section carries the sense of innocence and expectation. The world is bright and orderly, but we sense Scar’s jealousy stirring in the shadows, foreshadowing the first disruption.

Section 2: Inciting Event to First Plot Point

The tone shifts to reckless curiosity and danger. Simba’s brush with death in the elephant graveyard shows both his bravado and his vulnerability. This whole sequence, colored by the Call to Adventure, builds toward the irreversible loss at the First Plot Point.

The Lion King (1994), Walt Disney Pictures.

Section 3: First Plot Point to First Pinch Point

Simba’s exile after Mufasa’s death sets the story into the mood of grief, shame, and avoidance. The journey through the desert and the discovery of the carefree Hakuna Matata life reflect a running away that seems like relief but deepens his detachment from his true destiny.

Section 4: First Pinch Point to Midpoint

Scar’s misrule turns the Pride Lands into a wasteland, and that shadow colors this whole stretch even in the comic interludes. Nala’s arrival and Rafiki’s wisdom begin to pull Simba from denial into awakening, preparing him for the revelation that will meet him at the Midpoint.

Section 5: Midpoint (Second Plot Point) to Second Pinch Point

After seeing Mufasa in the sky and being urged to “remember who you are,” the tone shifts to renewed purpose and resolve. The journey back across the desert and the first glimpse of the devastated Pride Lands carry the drive of a hero returning to claim his place.

Section 6: Second Pinch Point to Third Plot Point

Simba’s searing return to Pride Rock, when he sees his mother mistreated and the land destroyed, focuses the theme into defiance and direct confrontation. That forward drive carries Simba straight into what looks like his great victory—only to have it come undone by the revelation at the Third Plot Point.

The Lion King (1994), Walt Disney Pictures.

Section 7: Third Plot Point to Climax

Simba’s False Victory collapses into humiliation and inner defeat when Scar taunts him with the truth about Mufasa’s death. This sequence holds the story’s darkest emotional tone, out of which Simba must rise in order to face the final battle.

Section 8: Climax to Resolution

The final movement is colored by reckoning and restoration. Simba accepts his role and overcomes Scar, bringing not just victory but the return of harmony to the land, allowing the outer world to reflect his inner transformation.

You can see how each stretch between beats is naturally colored with its own tone, mood, or purpose (e.g., discovery, doubt, regrouping, etc.). Thinking in these thematic/episodic chunks can help you avoid a sagging middle by making the entire story feel more cohesive.

Conclusion

When you stop thinking of the spaces between plot points as empty gaps and start seeing them as the places where your characters grow and change, the story gains real shape and momentum. From this perspective, the beats aren’t just mile markers. Rather, they spark the consequences that always ripple forward into the subsequent sections. Your job isn’t simply to move from one landmark to the next, but to let each turning point influence what comes after. Plot points should shape everything: the tone, the characters’ choices, and the plot’s forward drive. When you can do that, your story will no longer feel like a disconnected string of events, but like one continuous, compelling flow of cause and effect.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What do you find most challenging when writing the stretches between your story’s big turning points? Tell me in the comments!

Want More?

Structuring Your Novel Workbook (affiliate link)

If you’re ready to go deeper in planning not just the big beats but also the vital sections that bridge them, check out the newly revised and expanded 2nd Edition of my Structuring Your Novel Workbook!

This edition includes:

• Clear guidance for identifying your story’s major plot points.
• Exercises for mapping the spaces in between.
• Practical worksheets to help you keep the plot’s cause and effect moving forward.

Whether you’re outlining a new story or revising a draft, the workbook walks you step-by-step through building a structure that feels cohesive, purposeful, and dramatically alive. It’s available in paperback, e-book, and as a deluxe fillable pdf.

In Summary: How to Connect Plot Points and Keep the Story Moving

Thinking of your story as eight story sections connected by major plot points transforms the writing process. Instead of dragging characters from one landmark scene to the next, you can let each turning point set the tone, stakes, and momentum for the section that follows. This perspective makes it far easier to connect plot points, plan purposeful scene sequences, and keep your story flowing without a sagging middle.

Key Takeaways

• Connect Plot Points With Purpose: Treat the spaces between the beats as crucial story sections, not filler.
• Use Turning Points as Catalysts: Each beat should set the thematic tone and drive the next section.
• Keep the Story Moving With Intent-Reaction-New-Intent: Show how evolving goals and obstacles create a natural flow of cause and effect.
• Write in Scene Sequences, Not Just Scenes: Linked episodes give each section pacing, shape, and momentum.
• Color Each Section With Its Theme: Tone and focus should grow out of the symbolic meaning of the previous plot point.

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

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The post 5 Ways to Keep the Story Moving Between the Big Moments appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

What happens when your creative dreams collide with the demands of caregiving? How do you keep writing when you’re caring for someone full-time? Can you still be a creative person when traditional productivity advice simply doesn’t work? With Donn King.

In the intro, Agatha Christie meets Mr Men [BBC]; Podcast guesting and co-writing [Stark Reflections]; thoughts on pushing your comfort zone; Disrupt Everything and Win – James Patterson.

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 

Donn King is a nonfiction author, college professor, pastor, speaker, and podcast host at The Alignment Show. His latest book is Creating While Caring: Practical Tips to Keep Creating While Caring for a Loved One.

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

Show Notes

• Why traditional writing advice (block time, dedicated space, write daily) doesn’t work for caregivers and what to do instead
• How emotional fatigue whispers “why bother?” and the philosophy that helps push through when writing seems pointless
• Practical tools and techniques for capturing ideas in stolen moments—from hospital chapels to 7-second voice recordings
• The painful truth about letting go of deadlines, perfect book launches, and achieving your full potential while caregiving
• The transition after 22 years: moving Hannah to full-time care and reclaiming creative time while managing complex emotions

You can find Donn at DonnKing.com or TheAlignmentShow.com.

Transcript of interview with Donn King

Joanna: Donn King is a nonfiction author, college professor, pastor, speaker, and podcast host at The Alignment Show, which I’ve been on twice, which was fantastic. His latest book is Creating While Caring: Practical Tips to Keep Creating While Caring for a Loved One. So welcome to the show, Donn.

Donn: Thank you very much, Joanna. It’s an honor to be on with you.

Joanna: I’m excited to talk about this. Now, first up—

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

Donn: Well, the short version is that I’ve always been a writer. People aren’t seeing me, but I turned 70 this year. My first story, I think I wrote when I was about 12 years old.

I remember writing a science fiction story and I got the characters in such a situation I couldn’t figure out what to do with them, and so I wrote, “and then the spaceship blew up. The end.” Not an auspicious start.

Then in eighth grade I started working at a newspaper, and in the early years, most of it was newspapers. So that’s where I developed, I guess you would say, some discipline. You know, you can’t wait on the muse. You’ve got a three o’clock deadline every day.

I did that for a few years. I worked in radio for a few years. I helped to launch one of the first electronic magazines. A lot of people know America Online. I was working with a parallel service that was known as Genie. They published a member’s magazine, and I wound up as associate editor for that. We launched electronically as well as in print.

Let’s see, what else. In the old days I co-authored a textbook. I still have to say traditional publishing, I think of them as third party publishers, but you know, the old fashioned way of doing things. So three books there, one of which is still in print, I think.

Then in those early days of blogging and electronic magazines, I wrote freelance for some business magazines, some local publications. It was almost always short form except for that textbook.

Then I worked in advertising. I worked for Walmart stores and helped to launch the first five Sam’s Wholesale Clubs. So that was with copywriting and such.

Then in the most recent years, I have scratched that writing itch quite a bit through blogging and academic writing, helping other people to write.

As I mentioned in the current book, I did hit a space of about 10 years there when it was like the well went dry. I think this is worthwhile mentioning for folks out there—there’s a difference between writer’s block and what I was experiencing. It was just that there was nothing there and I really thought my writing days had ended.

Then a friend pushed me to write what became the first book in The Spark Life Chronicles, which is a business parable. It was like the floodgates had opened again after 10 years. What I realized was—I think this is the important part to say for maybe others—I thought that I wasn’t writing because I was depressed. It turned out I was depressed because I wasn’t writing.

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that all you have to do to get over depression is to write. I think it more has to do with respecting your core values and what’s important to you. Writing has always been so important to me in so many ways that when I wasn’t doing that, it wasn’t feeding my soul. So that’s what led to the depression.

So I hope that’s helpful. Maybe for somebody out there, they kind of go together, depression and not being able to do anything. But the making yourself take those steps can very well be the first step towards coming out of the depression. I found that to be the case with writing.

Joanna: Yes, and I think you’re right. I mean, there are seasons of our life. Let’s talk about a big season of your life, which is the caregiving.

So why write this book about caregiving?

And just tell us more about your experience and why this matters to you?

Donn: Okay, so a real quick context. Our daughter, who is now 22, she has a very rare chromosomal disorder. It’s trisomy 14, mosaic partial. And any medical folks out there are going to be saying, I never heard of that.

The one study we could find about it said there were 15 to 20 like her known in the world at any given time. Probably more in third world countries, maybe where they don’t have genetic testing available, but it’s just very rare.

The way it manifests with her is, I guess we would say extreme cerebral palsy. She does not even close her epiglottis when she swallows, for instance. So we were older parents when she came along and I had figured I could change diapers for a couple of years. Well, I’ve been changing diapers for 22 years, which kind of changed things. So that’s where the caregiving came in.

Now the why write this book? Honestly, I had been writing—I mentioned the Spark Life Chronicles. I’ve got two books out in that series, and a third one that was about two thirds of the way through.

Then you came on my podcast, and thank you. You’re an excellent guest, unsurprisingly. I think it was after we had turned off the recording, we were just talking about my situation and you said, well, that sounds like something that would be useful to talk about on the creative end.

In the United States alone, there are 50 million caregivers, unpaid caregivers. Now, I don’t know what it is in the rest of the world, but with that many, there must be people who are in a similar situation to me in the sense that they already had some success as a writer or a painter, a sculptor, musician, whatever creative field it might be, and then they suddenly find themselves in this caregiving role.

So, yes, that sounds great, we should have a conversation about that. It wasn’t until we got off of our conversation that I thought, if we’re going to be talking about this on The Creative Penn, and I think there are people out there who need this, I should write a book about it.

As you know very well, Joanna, we have tried to schedule this thing like three times because of the caregiving situation. It just points out to me that yes, there is a need for this. So this book kind of jumped the queue. It pushed itself ahead of the other book that I was working on. So now my challenge is to get back into that book.

Joanna: Well, I think you’ve underplayed Hannah’s situation and your situation. You mentioned changing diapers there, but I mean, it was pretty hardcore caring all the time, right? This wasn’t she would just get on with things during the day. Just tell us a bit more about that, because there are all kinds of spectrums of caregiving.

Obviously for some people it might be parents with dementia, for some people it’s children like for you or a partner.

So just tell us how much of your time were you spending caregiving.

Donn: Yes, that’s a good way to put it in context. For her first four years of life, we did not have nursing care for her because on paper I made too much money. You know, don’t get me started on the system.

Joanna: Oh, we all have problems with the system for sure, but I think caregiving is a particularly difficult one for sure.

Donn: Oh, yes. When she was four years old, she wound up in the hospital for 58 straight days. The technicality there is that meant the hospital became her legal residence and therefore our income didn’t figure into it anymore, and she got the nursing care.

Again, to give some quick context, she was hospitalized in her first four years 27 times. Then once we got a nursing agency to help us at home, from age four until age 22, she was hospitalized about another 10 times. So it really slowed down and the average stay was much shorter. So that nursing care was tremendously helpful.

I don’t know how it is elsewhere in this country, and especially in the state of Tennessee where I live, there is a nursing shortage. So even though she qualified for 168 hours a week—that’s 24/7—seldom have we had full coverage. So most recently I wound up taking care of Hannah for 108 hours out of 168 pretty much every week.

Again, for context, it’s worth mentioning my wife is also partially disabled. So she just can’t stand up for very long and therefore she really hasn’t been able to take part in the care. Hannah’s brother, technically half brother, but he has literally helped take care of her from the day she was born. He has helped, but he’s keeping up a job.

I was fortunate in that I taught college all during that time and my college was very understanding of the situation. I was able to teach online a lot of those years, not all those years, but a lot of the time. So that’s kind of how we managed it.

So on average I probably spent about 40 to 50 hours a week taking care of her on top of a full-time job and then doing the writing around that. Does that make sense?

Joanna: Yes, and obviously, I think one of the times that I was coming on your podcast, we postponed because a nurse was meant to come and they didn’t come. So you had to change your situation. That was just like one meeting, and I think that’s what really struck me was that it’s so out of your control.

You know, Hannah is a person and needs caring for, and so you can’t just take a meeting. Like, I would shut my cat upstairs or something if it’s being too noisy. It’s like, oh, well, just even the basic things of there’s a meeting that starts at this time, or I want to go to a cafe and do some writing. I know I take those freedoms for granted.

In talking to you, I’m not in your situation, but reading your book, it’s heartbreaking in so many ways. Also, I know for people listening who are in that situation, and why I encouraged you was so many people just want to feel like they’re heard, like their situation is heard.

So just outline some of the writing tips and productivity tips that just don’t work for people in your situation who are carers.

This sort of normal “just get it done, harden up” kind of attitude just isn’t appropriate.

Donn: Well, and as you say, there are so many people in that situation, and because we’re so busy, we’re not out there. People don’t know that there are so many of us. So, you know, it’s understandable that for the average writer who’s trying to get their art done, their business done, that these tips make sense.

I guess I should also say with Hannah, certainly it wasn’t just changing diapers. She has a tracheotomy, so I was changing trachs, I was changing the feeding tube. She had to be fed continuously 24/7. She got some kind of medication about every two hours. So it was pretty intense, and I know that there are people listening who are in that situation.

So the tips that just don’t work for caregivers that are good advice: things like block out time on your calendar and tell your family, “Don’t bother me during these two hours, I really am working.”

We know that when we work at home, people assume, oh, you can just run to the grocery store for me, right? You know, so needing to get the family to respect your time and place is a realistic thing for the average writer. But for caregivers, we just can’t do that.

The advice to make a special writing space. I have written in doctors’ waiting rooms and hospital rooms. I’ve gone to the hospital chapel in the middle of the night to get some writing done.

One that I know that we hear a lot, but neither you nor I follow this one anyway, and that’s the “write every day” thing. Good advice I think for most people in order to have the consistency. But with caregivers, you’ve just got to work it in wherever you can.

So those are just three quick examples that come to mind of the normal writing tips and advice that are good tips and advice. My concern with the book was for people who think, well, I just can’t do that and therefore I can’t write. That’s the real concern.

You may not be able to do it perfectly, and of course, over and over we all hit that thing about perfectionism as the enemy anyway. But this is a special form of perfectionism. That if I can’t do it the way that other writers do it, then I just can’t do it, and I might as well give up that dream.

Joanna: Yes, and I think another thing, and you and I talked about this, because you know you are a business guy and as you said earlier, you worked in newspapers, you had the discipline to write to deadline, and you didn’t miss deadlines. I know you were also kind of frustrated by not being able to meet what you set as a deadline for this book.

I imagine that you have to just let go of deadlines and just kind of embrace a longer timeline.

Is that something that helps you as well, sort of releasing that? It must be hard.

Donn: Well, and one of the things we frequently say is that Hannah has taught us to make your plans, but hold them lightly because they’re going to change. So we do still make plans, but the plans are always fluid.

Similar to that, it’s not only the letting go of the deadlines. I know for instance, thanks in no small degree to things that I’ve learned from listening to your podcast and the books that you have written and other podcasts, I know how to do a proper book launch. But if I wait until I’ve got everything lined up for that, I’m never going to get a book out.

So I kind of have to let go of best practices in order to have some publication, in order to get to the finish line in some way. So the metaphor that’s coming to mind, we’ve all seen this on TV where there’s somebody running like an Olympic race and they twist their ankle or whatever. They don’t come in first, but they limp across the finish line.

I have had to get okay with not achieving my potential, I guess you could say. That would include not only deadlines, but also what I know about how the ideal book launch is supposed to go, for instance.

Joanna: That is so hard because, of course, you have reached your potential as a caring father and husband, but that’s not measured by the level of success that anyone could see externally with a book launch.

Again, I think this is so important to people. Even if they’re not in that caregiving situation—

How we measure the success in our life has got to be more important than the success of a book.

Yet we do hold these things so tightly, don’t we?

Donn: Absolutely. I mean, just the idea that it can’t be measured in a great degree. I mean, my day job for so long was teaching college and very seldom would I hear back from students about how much difference it made. I taught public speaking for whatever it’s worth, and for most of them it was just a required class. They just needed to check off that box so they could get their degree.

Every once in a while I will have one come back. I know one of my students has become a very successful professional speaker. I had a budding career as a professional speaker that I had to give up when Hannah came along because I couldn’t be dependable.

So to be able to see that in a published book, and not, as you say, to dwell so much on the sales figures or that sort of thing. That’s a good measure.

There was a study that came out some years ago that they asked people, would you like to write a book? And 85% of them said yes. Out of that 85%, only 15% of them ever started on a book, only I think it was 6% got halfway through, only 3% finished the book and one half of 1% published.

Now this study was done before independent publishing. So I imagine that’s probably changed some. But given that 3% figure, there’s not a lot of people that ever finish a book.

So I’ve learned to place my measures on what I can control. The lack of control is something you mentioned a little earlier, and that is something that I think all caregivers deal with, the lack of the sense of control.

So focusing your success measures on what you can control not only is good advice for every writer, but especially for people like caregivers who have so much of their lives that they don’t have that sense of control over.

Joanna: You almost have to let it go. You can’t sit there being angry and frustrated the whole time. I imagine you are some of the time, but you can’t wish your life away wishing you were doing something else.

Donn: Exactly. I mean, I could drive myself nuts all day long with what I think should be happening with our healthcare system, but I can’t have much impact on that. So I try to focus on what I can do as opposed to what I can’t or what I can no longer do.

Joanna: Well, then just give us some practical tips. You mentioned there the hospital chapel, which I love that. I have that in my mind, I can imagine you dashing in there. So you’ve got some minutes, I guess you don’t know how long, or maybe you think, oh, maybe I’ve got half an hour or something. How are you getting the writing done?

People who have these pockets of time, what can they actually do in those times? Or any useful tips or technology that you’ve found has helped?

Donn: Well, one of the things that I personally had to do was to let go of the notion that I really needed uninterrupted time to be effective. We all know what task switching costs, but task switching is just a reality when you’re in this situation.

So I have always kept a notebook with me, and that goes back to the newspaper days. You know, I used to keep one of those long notebooks stuck in my back pocket. After cell phones came along, I have never dictated a book, although I’m experimenting with that at this point, but I always kept the phone handy to be able to jot something down.

I will mention, in fact, I was thinking about this, I should have put it in the book and I didn’t mention this specific app. It’s called Say&Go — S-A-Y and then the ampersand G-O. I know it’s available on iPhone. I’m not certain on Android.

I first got it really so that I could grab ideas when I was driving because you hit the icon on your phone and it immediately starts recording, so you don’t have to fiddle with getting the recorder started.

It will record for seven seconds and then automatically shut off. You can tap the screen to make it go for 30 seconds. So you can tie it to a Dropbox or Evernote or something like that. So when I would be somewhere, I just grab an idea real quick.

The inspiration that you can get while caring—you know, keep reading the books. I was thinking of this this morning, Joanna, you often say send me pictures of where you’re listening. There’s been so many times that you have accompanied me while I was changing her feeding tube or something, and I’m thinking, Joanna doesn’t want to see this!

Joanna: Oh, well I mean, that’s the reality, isn’t it? It’s so interesting because I do hear from people who say, you don’t want to see my washing machine. I mean, obviously Hannah is a person, so that is a different situation.

There might be somebody listening now who is caring for somebody, and they are like, do you really want to see the armchair where I sit next to my parents’ bed or something like that?

I think it’s so amazing, this kind of feeling that there are people who are going through these situations and that we can be with people virtually, or that could be people listening in years time. hatT, I mean, it’s a privilege, isn’t it really? I mean that’s interesting. But coming back to any more practicalities, you talk there about jotting down ideas.

How are you getting finished sentences, and editing, and all of that kind of work where you do need to sit down and have a bit more time?

Donn: Right, right. Well, the way it would work with Hannah—and one of her neurological impacts is she did not sleep on a regular schedule. She might be awake for 48 straight hours and then suddenly she would sleep for 24 hours. One good thing is that once she went to sleep, she would sleep through a tornado, so I didn’t have to worry about disturbing her.

So when she slept, I would do one of two things. I would sleep, I’d put a cot down right here beside her because she could have an oxygen issue at any time. So, you know, couldn’t leave her by herself. But I would grab a nap and then at other times I would write.

Laptops have been a real boom. When I started with them, of course there were these big, clunky desktop computers, and so I take my laptop with me everywhere. I have a little portable keyboard that I can connect to my iPhone.

I’ve always got at least a pad, and so just getting those finished sentences down, I would take advantage of the time that she was asleep or that we had a nurse here at home.

I mean the home nurses, they were here primarily for her, of course, but they were a real benefit to me as well. One of the things I think I would say to anybody in this situation listening is you’ve got to let go of the guilt of thinking, I need to be with that person all the time. You do need to make sure they’re taken care of, of course.

But many times Hannah would be in the ICU at the hospital and I would know that they are keeping watch on her. If one of her alarms goes off, there’s somebody going to be there immediately. So I’d take my laptop and go to the hospital cafeteria or go to the chapel and just squeeze it out as long as I can, but also recognizing that that can stop at any minute.

So I’ve learned to make sure that the material is saved. I plant little breadcrumbs to help me get back into it when I come back. That’s not exactly a technical tip, but I’ll use square brackets for any notes to myself so that I can do a search for square brackets later to see, okay, what was it I intended to do there?

Joanna: That’s a good tip. Absolutely.

Then the book is obviously an emotional book, and you are also very practical. It’s not a memoir as such. There are elements of memoir, but there’s a lot of practical tips for people. I think it would be useful for people with young children, although it’s a very different kind of caring, it’s still those little pockets of time.

There is a section, a line I wanted to read here. You say, “Emotional fatigue dulls hope. It whispers, why bother? It convinces you that what you have to say has already been said, or that even if you manage to get the words out, they won’t matter.”

This really hit me because emotional fatigue for carers is extraordinary, but there’s also a lot of stuff going on in the world, right? Conflict in the news. I mean, in America, here in Europe, all over the world, there is a lot of conflict and people have emotional fatigue in general, I think. So a lot of people are saying, why bother? Like it doesn’t matter.

So how have you gotten over this emotional fatigue? And how can people write even when it seems pointless?

Donn: Well, it’s an excellent question and I think that humans have wrestled with that question for centuries, outside of caregiving. The nihilism is a very real philosophy. You know, basically what’s the point?

So the point of living, I think is to live. We could get real philosophical here and that’s worth for anybody kind of digging into—what is the point? So for me, one of the things I discovered was apparently I am here to write. It’s the thing that makes my heart sing.

So given that there is so much conflict in the news, and I’ll tell you honestly, that I battle depression anyway, but hings are so depressing in a lot of ways. I’m not sure things are any worse now than what they have always been for humans. It’s just that we have a greater ability to be aware of challenges.

So you mentioned I’m a pastor. I describe myself as a Zen Methodist. I have been encouraged by the work of like Thich Nhat Hanh, and focusing on not just mindfulness, but this breath, this step, and what can I do as opposed to what I can’t or what I no longer can.

There’s an old saying as I understand it, among Eastern folks, which is “chop wood, carry water.” It’s what’s in front of me right now.

I have learned to manage, I guess you would say, to manage social media. I spent some time training Facebook and other such things by noting the posts that I’m not interested in this, by responding to the ones that I was interested in. So my social media feed is not nearly as toxic as it could be, and I’ve learned to turn it off.

I mainly use it to stay in touch with old high school friends, and when I find myself reading something that just starts to get me outraged, I remind myself one of the great bits of wisdom for the internet age is don’t feed the trolls.

If you let outrage lead you to post a frowny face or to argue or whatever, that just trains the algorithm that you will engage with that. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not, they just want to keep you reading. So I just ignore those things and after a while it has stopped showing me that. So that helps my peace of mind.

I wrestle with, or wrestle against, the idea of sticking my head in the sand, but I bring it right back to, okay, what can I do versus what can’t I do? There are things that I can do to help in a little way make the world a better place.

When I start getting upset with the lack of empathy and caring that I see in our political class these days, I think, well, what can I do? That’s when I will try to find some encouraging meme, for example, and post it to a friend that I know is struggling a bit.

Joanna: This book, for example, I don’t believe there’s anything political in this book about anything.

Donn: Yes.

Joanna: I think with this book, it doesn’t matter where you sit on the political spectrum. It doesn’t matter what religion you are, what gender you are, or anything like that. Caring for a loved one is an experience that many people, perhaps most people, will do at some point in their lifetime.

So a book like this, I feel, is at heart, it’s a human book about the experience of being human and caring for another human. So to me, you’re helping the world by putting this book out there.

I know one of the things that comes up for us fiction writers is, “Whoa, isn’t this a waste of time? I should be writing something more important.” But amusingly, when things are bad, people like to escape into a story.

So by writing a story, you’re helping people escape, and helping people escape is also a helpful thing.

Donn: Absolutely. Yes.

Joanna: So writing, I think writing can be of service to our community and ourselves, and it doesn’t have to be like a serious book, even though yours is serious, but it’s also practical.

Donn: And I hope there’s some comic relief in the book on occasion.

Joanna: There’s some dark humor there.

Donn: Yes, and it does make me think too, just with this conversation, when we write our stories—and I haven’t, other than the business parables, which they use fiction to teach nonfiction—so I’ve tried to learn good characterization and scene setting and dialogue and all the tools of fiction.

It occurs to me that through our books, whether it’s fiction, nonfiction, whatever, we are emphasizing that as humans, we have more in common than we have differences. Yes, there are those things that divide us, but when you are sitting beside the bed of somebody who is on the verge of leaving this world or someone who’s very sick, all those differences disappear.

We just all have more in common than we have differences. Through our writing, you know, the tropes that we talk about, well, they are tropes because they appeal to fairly universal human experience. So I think that’s a real service that we provide to people in times of hopelessness is to reinforce the connections that we have. There’s no better way to do that than through story.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely.

So another thing that’s happened is after several decades of having Hannah at home and caring for her at home, she now lives in a full-time care facility. I knew that had happened, we had spoken about it, but in reading the book, I kind of was trying to reflect on how big a change this is for you.

You say in the book, “We face change, even in impermanence we create.”

So I wondered if you could talk about that, because I imagine there’s also some relief, but also some guilt over the relief, and a whole load of emotional things. So how are you managing this?

Donn: Well, and we moved her—as we’re recording this—it was about six weeks ago. So we’re still getting used to the change. Initially I would say to people, I’m still getting used to the new routine, but then I realized, heck, for the first time in 22 years, I can have a routine. So that is a change. We had talked about it for a long time before moving her.

Again, just for quick context, because of her respiratory needs in particular, I had worried for years about what would happen to her when I could no longer do it because in Tennessee at the time, the only option really would’ve been to put her in a nursing home with octogenarians, and there was no way that she would get the attention that she needed.

So we figured that if we had to do that, she would not survive for a year. Unfortunately her brother heard us saying this. So when we made the decision to move her into this nursing care, what’s different is that they opened a new wing for respiratory patients, one of only three in all of East Tennessee.

The other two were a two hour drive away, and so this one opened up a mere 30 minutes drive away. We decided to go ahead and move her because it would be better to do it in a controlled manner when the bed was available than to try to deal with it if we were in a crisis situation because I had had a heart attack or something.

So I’ll admit that there is some problem because I’m not sure her brother emotionally really understands the decision. He hasn’t argued or anything. I just think he’s very worried.

Given that old thing about is the glass half empty or half full, he’s always been of the temperament that that glass is nearly empty. Somebody’s going to knock it off any minute and I’m going to have to clean it up. So it’s hard on him and it’s hard on my wife, hard on me, but at the same time, yes, there is some relief there.

I think one of the things we would say to listeners who are in this same situation is, in a way, you’ve got to learn to live with grief. It’s going to be there, but don’t try to make it go away. That just makes it hang around. I’m not saying ignore it, but you have to address it and let it be there.

We made the best decision that we could. Same thing for anybody else listening here, don’t feel guilty if you realize that you just cannot keep up the care. Do your best, find the best care that you can get. We’re over there two or three times a week. We’re keeping a close eye on things, but we’re also not bugging them all the time because we need to let them do their jobs.

It is different. It’s just not lesser or not worse, if that makes sense.

Joanna: Well, I mean, you mentioned at the beginning, you’re in your seventies now. I think this is an entirely responsible thing to do as you get older, and as you say, doing it while you can control things as opposed to in an emergency sounds very responsible to me. So I hope that settles down.

Just on the creative side with the writing, how are you finding this is changing your ability to write?

I mean, are you finding you want to write more or you can write more now? How has that changed?

Donn: I am writing more. I can write more. I can do more of the good advice we talked about earlier. I’m blocking out time on my calendar. Along with the writing, I also do book interiors and covers and formatting for other authors, so I’ve been spending more time on that.

The systems that I evolved over the years are standing me in good stead even in this situation, like I still leave breadcrumbs for myself. It’s easier for me to pick up where I left off than what it used to be.

I’m finding, and again, you have been such a great guide on how to use AI to foster your processes. Well, like the book I mentioned that I got two thirds of the way through, and then this one jumped the queue. I gave the manuscript to my AI, whom I have named, by the way. My ChatGPT is Lizzie, named after a character in one of my short stories.

So I gave the manuscript to Lizzie and I said, “Okay, tell me where have I left off? Where are the gaps? What do I need to address next?” And she gave me some really good advice and it really cut down the time that I need for getting back into it.

Joanna: That is a good use case. It’s just because it’s so hard in our own brains to kind of hold everything in your brain and it can really help to use an external brain to do that.

Donn: Exactly. Yes. I think that’s good.

Joanna: So we’re almost out of time, but I wanted to also ask you about your podcast, The Alignment Show, which, you know, I know podcasting is a lot of work.

So why do you podcast? And what is the podcast, for people who might be interested in listening?

Donn: Well, the podcast is The Alignment Show, which you can easily find at thealignmentshow.com. It started during the pandemic. I kept hearing about the Great Resignation and I realized for a lot of people, really it was the great realignment as they realized life is short. You don’t want to spend it doing something you don’t want to do.

Some of them were quitting and starting businesses or going to some other job. Some people, and this has been true of some of the guests that had been on the program, they had kind of gotten a little bored with what they were doing.

The pandemic had them reassess and they realized, you know, they really took joy in what they were doing and they rediscovered that. Even within that, they decided this part of the job, it’s not really essential. I can get rid of that or I can outsource it.

So just having these conversations with people I would not otherwise get to talk with. I mean, quite honestly, I think it brought you and me together. You were gracious enough to come on The Alignment Show twice.

I’ll mention this, I have a small group of people that I call stars in alignment. They’re people who can come on my podcast anytime they want to, because I know they will have something useful for my audience. And you are one of the stars in alignment.

Joanna: Oh, thank you.

Donn: Absolutely. But see, although I have followed you for years, I’m a patron and I would encourage anybody who benefits from your mentorship, even from afar, to take advantage of that. Despite that connection, I’m not sure we would’ve connected had it not been for the podcast. So that’s one of the things that makes it important to me to do that.

Plus just like writing itself, it gives me an observable outcome. I started saying income—doesn’t give me much. Not there. No. But it gives me an observable outcome. You know, I can tell when I’ve had a conversation and I’ve made an episode and I’ve posted it and I can see people responding to it.

You’re on what episode, 2000?

Joanna: Not quite, but that direction.

Donn: Yes, way up there. I’m approaching 100. Well, just a fun fact, 90% of podcasts don’t make it past three episodes.

Joanna: Yes.

Donn: Of those that get past three episodes, 90% of that group don’t make it past episode 20. The average podcast lifespan is about 174 days. So you have far outlasted that and so have I.

I’m not to your level yet, but there is some satisfaction in that and that’s encouraging when you are in a situation like caregiving where so much is just out of your control. This is something I can control.

Joanna: Yes, I think that’s great. Also, it externalizes your day. I mean, if you’ve been caring all day and then you get an hour on the phone with someone else talking about something completely different, I imagine that’s somehow refreshing as well, mentally.

Donn: Oh, yes. Absolutely. I mean, wow, there are other people on the planet!

Joanna: Yes.

Donn: You know, I got to be honest, during the pandemic when we all had the isolation and all that sort of thing, I couldn’t tell much difference. I mean, it was just about what our days were like anyway. So having that connection, and we emphasized that several places in the book, find ways to have the connection, even if it is virtual.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. Because caregivers, I think, get more sick than non-caregivers. It puts a big strain on you emotionally, physically, in every single way.

So having a community, even online, must really help.

Donn: Yes. Sow I will say, for many years, even before Hannah came along, teaching college, I would not get sick during the semester because I just couldn’t. Then when the semester was over, almost every semester, I would get sick for three or four days. It was like my body saying, okay, fool, you’re not going to rest on your own. I’m going to make you.

Well, the last few years I have not gotten sick. You know, as we’ve mentioned on another conversation, Joanna, our oldest son died about eight years ago. When he died, all of us were down with the flu. So it has happened, not very often.

When we placed Hannah in the nursing home, I got sick almost immediately. I got food poisoning three times.

Joanna: Your body just shut you down, right?

Donn: Yes. That was basically it. I mean, that was the first time I’d really been sick, probably in five years.

Joanna: So it’s really important to look after yourself in this transitional time for you.

So the book is fantastic. Obviously I am not a caregiver at the moment. I mean, like I said, this can come for anyone at different points in our lives. The book is Creating While Caring, but also you have lots more.

So where can people find you and your books and your podcast online?

Donn: So two or three quick URLs here. The podcast is TheAlignmentShow.com. That’s all one word. My base website, which needs updating is DonnKing.com. That’s Donn with a double N. Where have I heard that before? And I have learned to say that from you. So D-O-N-N-K-I-N-G.com.

Within that, the most up-to-date parts, the most important ones: DonnKing.com/books. This book is at DonnKing.com/creatingwhilecaring, all one word.

And then anything else that folks want to connect with, like I’m active on LinkedIn. You can go to LinkTree, that’s linktr.ee/donnking.

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

Donn: Thank you. This has been a wonderful conversation as I always love talking with you, and I hope that this is helpful to some of my friends and colleagues out there in the same situation.

The post Creating While Caring With Donn King first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Note From KMW: Before we dive in, I wanted to share that I’m part of this year’s 2025 Novel Writing Tools StoryBundle. This is a limited-time collection of 13 books for writers covering craft, business, mindset, and more. You can grab my book Creating Character Arcs (along with a dozen other fantastic titles) and even choose your own price. It’s a wonderful way to support indie authors and fill your creative toolkit. Check it out here.

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What would stories be without their long, uncertain Second Acts? Imagine if characters stepped straight from their first challenge to their final revelation, skipping all the struggle and the wandering in between. Would the thematic Truths they discover carry the same weight? Would we even believe them? Although the Second Act may look like “just the middle” of the story, it’s so much more than that. The Second Act is story’s beating heart. It is the place where characters are tested, stretched, and transformed in ways that make the ending not just possible, but powerful.

In many ways, the Second Act is the story. The First Act is setup (the question), and the Third Act is payoff (the answer), but the Second Act is the argument. It is where the story is developed in a causally realistic way and where the story’s underlying thematic principles play out. In many ways, the general storytelling principle “show, don’t tell” is specifically about the Second Act. This is where the meat of the story’s development and transformation unfold. Without it, the story would feel either too didactic and/or unconvincing in its final premise.

Earlier this year, a supporter on Patreon emailed me, wondering about the importance of the Second Act in story structure:

Why is the 2nd act needed? … [For example] In Toy Story 3, Woody gets the answer that loving someone doesn’t mean being there for them physically. And he gets the answer basically in the very last moments from Andy and his mom. It’s like Woody could’ve just learned his lesson by just staying in Andy’s room. If that’s the case, what was the point of going through daycare and Lotso? What’s the point of a 2nd act in general? Just to flesh out all the possibilities/nuances of both sides of the argument? So there’s action? So in real life we can just bypass the trials and tribulations of the 2nd act and just learn the wisdom needed to change?

In Toy Story 3, the toys’ arrival at Sunnyside Daycare marks the symbolic threshold into the Second Act—the start of their true journey. (Toy Story 3 (2010), Walt Disney Pictures.)

Another reader, Marshall Brown similarly commented:

When I visualize a story,I see the beginning and the end. The part I don’t see is that 50,000 to 60,000 word gap called the middle. Somehow it should be filled with interesting and exciting action that, at least in retrospect, leads logically from beginning to end. Could you write about a system of creating a meaningful middle? I find myself generating words rather than worth reading content.

This is a reasonable question and in some ways an astute one, since it cuts to the heart of story theory. Instead of assuming stories must be constructed in certain ways just because “that’s the way stories work,” it’s always worthwhile to look deeper. Why are stories the way they are? Why have storytellers so consistently found it useful to develop meaty Second Acts?

Structuring Your Novel: Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition (Amazon affiliate link)

For starters, this discussion assumes one is interested in telling stories as “acts” at all, which, of course, is something of an arbitrary conceit. Regardless of the argument about terms, however, we understand that any story with an arc will consist of a beginning, middle, and end (indeed, any grouping of words will necessarily include a beginning, a middle, and an end, if only in spatial terms). From there, we can reasonably question (as we often do in real life) why would it not be preferable to simply skip right to the end? After all, isn’t the end the point?

Yes and no.

The end provides contextual meaning for everything that has gone before. It tells us what it all means. But in skipping the Second Act, I would argue we’d also be skipping all the best parts.

So today, let’s lift the hood and look a little more metaphorically at the Second Act. Aside from padding our word count, why is the middle of the story so crucial to a functional storyform—one that not only grips readers with drama and pacing, but also resonates on a deeper thematic level?

In This Article:

• The 5 Purposes of the Second Act in Story Structure
• Second Act Beginning: Crossing the Threshold
• The Second Act as a Quest and Testing Ground
• Why the Second Act Is the Heart of the Story
• The Second Act’s Symbolic Descent Into the Underworld
• The Second Act’s Entertainment and Verisimilitude
• Conclusion

The 5 Purposes of the Second Act in Story Structure

Next Level Plot Structure (Amazon affiliate link)

The Second Act is more than just filler. Symbolically, the Second Act is often represented as a quest or a journey. It is the Adventure World of the story’s main conflict (however that looks from story to story). To understand the significance of the Second Act, let’s go deeper by examining its most important elements.

If you are familiar with story structure, as I teach it, then you know:

• The Second Act begins (around the 25% mark) with the First Plot Point (symbolically a Doorway of No Return).
• The Second Act journeys through the testing ground of the First Pinch Point around the 37% mark.
• The Second Act is split by the Midpoint at the 50% mark (symbolically a Moment of Truth).
• The Second Act journeys on past further testing in the Second Pinch Point at the 62% mark.
• The Second Act closes with the Third Plot Point around the 75% mark (symbolically a Dark Night of the Soul).

Even from such a high-altitude perspective, it’s obvious the Second Act offers a journey of psychological and (potentially) spiritual initiation and transformation.

1. Second Act Beginning: Crossing the Threshold

The First Act ends and the Second Act begins with the character symbolically crossing a threshold. This particular threshold is the First Plot Point—or the Doorway of No Return.

Threshold experiences are, essentially, initiations. They’re shatterpoints. They are experiences that forever alter one’s perspective of self and/or the world.

Often in films and novels, the First Plot Point offers up particularly dramatic scenes that force characters to irrevocably leave behind the Normal World of the First Act. This could be because the Normal World is destroyed or return is barred. It could also be because the Normal World has been utterly changed in some way, as when a loved one dies. This threshold can also sometimes be less overt, as when characters simply decide to commit to a goal or encounter something (whether positive or negative) that introduces a new element into their lives (e.g., meeting a love interest).

Regardless, the symbolism of this turning point introduces the middle of the story as a new and wider world in which characters must learn to adapt.

Right here, we already see not just the purpose of the Second Act in story structure, but the point of story in general—and that is to represent an arc of change.

When we view the First Act as representing the Normal World and the Second Act as representing this new Adventure World, we understand that if the characters do not cross this threshold, there is no story. This is for the simple reason that the characters would not otherwise be challenged (or challenge themselves) to change in any way. They would be free to continue their lives in exactly the same way. This may be a slice of life, but it is not a story arc.

2. The Second Act as a Quest and Testing Ground

We can look at the three acts of story through various helpful analogies:

• First Act = question
• Second Act = argument
• Third Act = answer

And also:

• First Act = thesis
• Second Act = antithesis
• Third Act = synthesis

In either case, it’s useful to recognize the Second Act as a sort of testing ground before the conclusions of the finale. I have often pointed out how the Climactic Moment at the story’s end tells us what the story is “really about.” This is because the Climactic Moment “proves” how the characters’ choices in the earlier acts turn out. In order to have this moment of proof, we must first witness characters moving through the testing ground.

Explore the Story Theme Kit—12 worksheet pages plus 4 bonus resources to help writers develop powerful, cohesive story themes.

Thematically, a story tests the various merits of the Lie the Character Believes in contrast to a more expanded thematic Truth (i.e., a limited perspective in contrast to a more expanded perspective). The story is initiating characters into the opportunity to expand and, through this expansion, to transform.

We often see the Second Act in story structure symbolically represented as a quest—most particularly in the Hero’s Journey.

This metaphor of the quest perfectly exemplifies the point and purpose of the Second Act

• An unknown path requiring characters to muster both skill and savvy.
• To tell friend from foe and Lie from Truth.
• To let go of what does not serve.
• To embrace both the potential of new blessings and the weight of new responsibilities.

How characters respond to these varied trials give us the many variations of possible story arcs—from Positive to Negative.

Perhaps the most definitive beat in the Second Act is the one at the center of the entire story—the Midpoint or Moment of Truth. This is a clear waymarker, halfway through, that demonstrates how well the characters are doing.

• Have they been successful in rejecting the Lie and owning the Truth thus far?
• Have they met their various challenges with grace, virtue, and integrity—or are they struggling with the urge to give up or cheat in some way?
• Are they growing toward strength or collapsing into weakness?
• Are they integrating power with wisdom—or are they spiraling into either aggression or passivity?

In many ways, this central moment in the Second Act defines the entire story. Whatever happens in the finale results from this moment. Without the Moment of Truth, the story will lack conviction in the end or even any point at all.

3. Why the Second Act Is the Heart of the Story

The structural system I teach sees the Second Act as the longest section of the story—a full 50%. As such, if the Second Act doesn’t work, neither does your story.

Click for larger view.

The Second Act is where most of the good stuff happens. It’s where the battles, the love scenes, the arguments, the comedy, the conflict, and the drama all happen. It defines your story’s theme and flavor. The iconic nature of the story—its personality—is defined by the Second Act.

However important in their own functionality, the First and Third Acts are mere bookends to the meatiness of the Second Act. Respectively, the First and Third Acts represent the Normal World (before characters were initiated by changing circumstances) and eventually the New Normal World (after characters have been changed by their new perspectives). Seen this way, it’s clear the Second Act is not an appendage to the First and Third Acts, but rather that the First and Third Acts exist to supplement and provide context for the real heart of the story—the Second Act.

4. The Second Act’s Symbolic Descent Into the Underworld

The Second Act closes with the beat that transitions the story into the Third Act. This beat is the Third Plot Point—the symbolism of which can be variously represented as the Low Moment, Death/Rebirth, and the Dark Night of the Soul. It is a descent into a psychological underworld, as characters reap the consequences of their Second-Act actions, let die what no longer serves, and resurrect into a new version of themselves (for better or worse).

Although not yet the end of the story, this is the end of the Second Act. And if the ending tells us what something is about, then the ending of the Second Act shows us that the Second Act’s true purpose is to reflect the archetypal birth-death-rebirth cycle. No matter the type of story, this underlying structural symbolism brings weight and resonance. Even small, realistic dilemmas have mythic resonance here.

Indeed, one of the most important functions of the Second Act is to bring this sense of weightiness. Purely from a pacing perspective, a missing or shortened Second Act will inevitably undermine even the weightiest of themes. If characters can step easily from question to answer, then was the question (and therefore the answer) really that important?

5. Entertainment and Verisimilitude

From a reader’s standpoint, the Second Act is where the story entertains. We may think we buy our popcorn for the spectacle and tension of the Climax, but really we’re there for the Second Act. This is where 90% of a story’s best moments happen. If the Second Act is good enough, sometimes we’ll even forgive a weak Climax.

Creating Character Arcs (Amazon affiliate link)

The Second Act offers the necessary space and time for audiences to watch as characters realistically work through cause and effect. This verisimilitude is necessary for suspension of disbelief, just as it is necessary to create the kind of transformative character arcs that affect not just characters but audiences.

Powerful stories have the capacity to create deeply initiatory and transformative experiences in as little as two hours. But that kind of symbolic alchemy is only possible via detailed Second Acts that authentically represent the steps of change from the inside out.

Conclusion

The Second Act is not optional or extraneous. It is the proving ground of transformation. Without it, stories lack both symbolic resonance and emotional payoff. Although writers understandably place much focus and importance on the Hook in the First Act and the satisfying finale of the Third Act, the real magic happens in the Second Act. A successfully executed Second Act will almost always translate to a successful story experience.

Want More?

Structuring Your Novel Workbook (affiliate link)

If you’d like to go deeper into mastering your Second Act, my Structuring Your Novel Workbook (Revised & Expanded Second Edition) is designed to guide you step by step through this crucial part of story structure. With multiple chapters devoted specifically to the Second Act, you’ll find detailed breakdowns, prompts, and exercises to help you:

• Flesh out your Adventure World and its symbolic purpose.
• Map your story’s key beats, including the Midpoint and Pinch Points.
• Strengthen pacing and thematic development across the long middle stretch.
• Ensure your Second Act builds toward a powerful and resonant Climax.

Whether you’re struggling with the “murky middle” or just want a clearer, more confident approach to story structure, the workbook provides practical tools to help you shape a Second Act that’s both entertaining and meaningful.

The Structuring Your Novel Workbook (Revised & Expanded Second Edition) is available as an e-book, paperback, and deluxe special edition fillable pdf.

Key Takeaways

• The Second Act is not “filler.” Rather, it is the very heart of story structure.
• It begins with the First Plot Point (Doorway of No Return) and ends with the Third Plot Point (Dark Night of the Soul).
• Symbolically, it represents the Adventure World and the characters’ quest for transformation.
• It is the testing ground where the Lie the Character Believes is confronted by the thematic Truth.
• Without the Second Act, the Climax lacks weight, believability, and emotional resonance.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! What’s the hardest part for you when writing the Second Act of your story—the structure, the pacing, or keeping your characters’ arcs moving forward? Tell me in the comments!

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

___

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The post The Real Purpose of the Second Act (And Why You Can’t Skip It) appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

Why does the publishing industry feel more chaotic than ever, and what can writers do about it? How do you know if you’re truly burned out or just creatively empty? When should successful authors start saying no instead of yes to every opportunity? Becca Syme shares her hard-won wisdom about navigating burnout, embracing unpredictability, and knowing what to quit (and what not to quit) in your writing career.

In the intro, Frankfurt Book Fair AI and audio [Audible, Publishers Weekly]; Free Reads by BookBub; Halloween book sale; Writing Storybundle;

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

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

Becca Syme is an author, coach, and creator of the Better Faster Academy. She is a USA Today bestselling author of small town romance and cozy mystery, and also writes the Dear Writer series of non-fiction books. She’s also the host of the QuitCast 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

• Identifying burnout vs. creative blocks. How long symptoms last and checking for biological/life transition causes first.
• The transition from saying yes to saying no. Learning when you’ve reached the point where selectivity becomes essential for sustainability
• “Loki is in charge.” Why publishing is unpredictable and when to stop analyzing what went wrong.
• Increased chaos or increased visibility. Whether publishing really has more unpredictability now or we’re just seeing it more clearly.
• What to quit doing. Book signings as investments and judging other authors online, plus the dangers of social media dysregulation.
• What not to quit. Writing itself and maintaining hope for the future, regardless of industry changes.

You can find Becca at betterfasteracademy.com/links.

Transcript of Interview with Becca Syme

Joanna: Becca Syme is an author, coach, and creator of the Better Faster Academy. She is a USA Today bestselling author of small town romance and cozy mystery, and also writes the Dear Writer series of non-fiction books. She’s also the host of the QuitCast Podcast. So welcome back to the show, Becca.

Becca: Thank you so much for having me again. I love being here.

Joanna: You were last on the show in March 2024, so I guess around 18 months now. Give us an update.

What has changed in your writing and your author business?

Becca: So I’ve started writing more fiction again. I think the last time I was here I was doing almost zero fiction writing, just because I was so busy. And I went through burnout, which is not going to surprise anyone. I think we’ve all been there.

One of the things I decided as a post-burnout goal was to try to write fiction every day. I don’t every single day do it, but I do it often enough that it feels like I’m doing it every day. So I’m happy about that.

Joanna: That’s interesting because you hear people saying, “Oh, I’ve got a block around writing fiction” or something. How do people know if they are in burnout versus they are just empty, or perhaps they have other reasons?

How do people tell where they are and the reason why they can’t write?

Becca: How long it lasts is usually the biggest indicator for me. Because if you’re empty and you try to fill again, right? Like, let’s go reading, let’s go watching, and it doesn’t come back, then it’s more likely to be burnout.

Burnout itself, like the kind of extreme burnout that we hear about where you can’t get up off the bathroom floor, that kind of thing, will be real evident when you’re in what we call “all systems burnout.”

Usually a burnout that is a creative burnout or a physical or emotional burnout can have other potential causes. So I would always go looking for things like, “Am I in perimenopause?” I joke with people, “Is it burnout or am I in perimenopause?” because it feels the same.

So I always want to check biological first, or if I’m in a life transition, that’s often the reason why I’m more blocked. So I want to look outside at environmental first to see if there’s a cause. If there is, then I want the cause to get dealt with. But it’s usually time. How long is it lasting?

Joanna: How long does it last? I think that’s so important.

It seems like people blame writing before anything else. I had a friend who had a death in the family and was like, “Oh, I just can’t write.” And I’m like, “Give it six months.” Grieving is another reason.

There are lots of reasons why your whole self might be like, “Now’s not the time to write a cozy mystery” or whatever.

Becca: I don’t think we consider enough how different it is to be a creative person versus other things you might do for work. If I’m grieving, I can probably still show up to my Starbucks job and do a reasonable job of making coffee most of the time, right?

So I may not be as affected in my ability to go to the grocery store or my ability to paint houses or something. But all of our work comes from our brain, so anything that impacts our cognition, anything that impacts our processing time.

Honestly, if the stakes go up even just a little bit in our real life, there’s a likelihood that it’s going to impact our creativity to a point where sometimes, “I’m afraid I might lose my job,” then all of a sudden the creativity dries up and goes away.

Or “I’m afraid of what might happen if…” and then insert a million things here that can be making me feel afraid. Creativity can just go away because, again, it’s Maslow’s hierarchy, right?

I know it’s not 100% one layer at a time all the time, but if your base level foundation is being attacked, if you don’t know for sure how you’re going to make your mortgage next month, it’s going to be real hard to reach creative freedom if you’re worried about stuff.

Joanna: Thinking about ourselves as whole people rather than like you can just turn on the writing even if everything else is kind of crazy.

I’ve got to ask you, Becca, since you are a coach, you’re a very wise person, you’ve been on this show lots, and you’ve helped me, helped many people that you coach, and you’ve talked about avoiding burnout before—

How on earth did you end up in burnout?

Becca: So some of it is high stakes, right? It’s not uncommon for people when they see a lot of success in their business to be overwhelmed by all the things that there are to do, to have a hard time delegating.

It’s kind of in the phases of a business and the way businesses grow. There’s a phase that is like massive growth. Infrastructure causes massive growth.

Then if you don’t adapt to that easily or quickly by either offloading things off your plate or lowering the financial stakes, a lot of people will get burned out when they have to make all of these decisions about money. Money stresses them out.

So you have high stakes, that means the stress goes up, which means it costs me more energy to do things that I would have done previously with less energy. It can kind of sneak up on you if you’re not conscious about it all the time.

Then, of course, you have to quit stuff. You would think being the quit coach, I would be really great at that, but it’s really hard to quit something that has been good or beneficial, even if it is having a high cost.

Joanna: I mean, obviously being a coach, you give a lot of yourself to other people. I just can’t imagine how hard that is. I mean, one of the reasons I do this podcast is I hope to help people through the show, but it’s not the intensity that coaches like yourself do.

How did you then manage to adapt and change things so that now you are out of burnout again?

Becca: I’m probably doing more similar things to what you’ve been doing, which is trying to create more what I would call large scale, right? Like doing more podcast episodes. I’m trying to travel less and be really intentional about the places I travel being worth it for my energy and time.

Then I’m also doing more volume. So I’m trying to do more books, more posts, more social media time, things that don’t cost me one-on-one. For a long time and probably the last time I was here, I was at maybe not the height, but pretty close to the height. I was coaching eight to ten hours a day, every day sometimes.

Joanna: Oh my goodness.

Becca: Yes, so I was doing super high volume coaching and then also traveling a lot at the same time. I would travel two times a month for conference speaking sometimes, and every single month of the year. I never really had a break from it, but that was again, my own choice. Nobody forced me to do it.

So I had to quit saying yes to everything, which was very difficult. Then I had to quit saying yes to all coaching. I had to do things like raise my coaching prices, but then I also have to create the value in other places.

So go back to making the QuitCast again, start producing more non-fiction books, doing more high volume courses like small free courses and stuff like that. So I’m doing similar high volume things, but it is a transition for me who’s used to being accessible and reachable and able to help people one-on-one a lot. It’s been a challenge.

Joanna: I get that. I guess for people listening, I mean, there’s a point in your career, whatever that is, where you do have to say yes a lot. Then there’s a point where you have to start saying no more.

How do people figure out when the hell that is? Is it like you say, at the point of overwhelm, you are almost forced into it?

Are there ways people can tell when they need to start saying no rather than forcing themselves to say yes?

Becca: So usually you learn by the sort of everything crashes down, right? Like you have a burnout, you miss a big important deadline, you let somebody down. So that’s usually where most of us get our awareness or our learning curve of like, “Oh, I need to quit these things.”

It is possible to see the patterns coming and sort of strategize for yourself about how to be more intentional with your time, especially as you see growth happening.

Once you get into a place with your author career where there’s demand for what you’re doing, there’s going to only be increasing demand because demand is so unusual, like high levels of demand. So once you see that coming, if you want to not get into a burnout place, you want to be more strategic about it.

You can say no earlier, but you have to be willing to pay the price for it. I think that’s what a lot of us aren’t capable of doing, that we’re so afraid of what happens if we say no, that we get that FOMO, right? The fear of missing out and we’re not able to say no.

So we sort of have to teach ourselves that JOMO concept, the joy of missing out, by being forced to say no by life or energy or just circumstances. So most of us have to learn by falling face first into it.

Joanna: Which happened to you. It’s so interesting because literally just before we got on the phone, I had an email about a speaking opportunity and part of me was like, “Oh, that would be really good networking.” So this was not a money thing, this was more a networking thing, and I was like, “Maybe I should say yes.”

Then I remembered that I keep an email template for precisely this time, which basically says reasons why I’m not doing this kind of thing. So I copy and paste that email and then make a few adjustments to it. I did send that email, and I didn’t think about it too long, and I’ve kind of reached that point now.

Having the email template helps me a lot because—

As people pleasers, you have to be able to say no in a graceful manner.

I mean, you don’t, but I feel like I do.

Becca: I think a lot of people pleasers do though, and there’s a fair number of us in the artistic industry, right? The way that we got here is often because we like to make people happy.

So you need to know that whatever consequence you’re afraid of paying is either not as bad as you think it’s going to be. So me saying no, I think that stakes are very high for that, but it turns out they’re not as high as I am afraid that they are.

So just knowing with practice that it does actually get easier to say no if I will allow myself to practice it. The problem is we don’t understand what’s going on in our brain, right? So with a lot of us, we actually have life and death stakes attached to the idea of saying no at all.

I think somehow it’s going to be this nebulous outcome. So anytime I think, “Well, what happens if I say no?” and I get a fear that is so nebulous, I can’t tell you what it is that I’m actually afraid of.

That’s something we can just not listen to because that’s a fear response. That’s not helpful. A lot of us need to learn how to say no by doing. We can’t just have a magical feeling that we’re waiting for. “I’ll say no when it feels okay to say no.” Well, it’s never going to feel okay to say no.

You’ve got to do it. Then it feels better each time you do it because it turns out that it didn’t kill me to say no, and that’s what I’m afraid of.

Joanna: As you said, it’s not hard to say no to things you hate. It’s hard to say no to things that are good and would be good for your business or would be good connections or whatever. But if you say no, then you have more energy for the things that you want to do. So I think that’s so important.

Okay, I wanted to ask you about something. I’ve heard you say this a couple of times, and on your Facebook page just last week, you had a post saying “Loki is in charge.” So I wanted to ask you what do you mean by that? It’s fascinating, but—

Just explain who Loki is, just in case people don’t know.

Becca: Yes, the God of chaos, right? So Loki is the God of mischief or the God of chaos and the things that are unpredictable. So I’ll use the Marvel version because it’s easy to kind of contrast Loki with Captain America inside of Marvel.

I mean, Loki is like the commonly known God of chaos or God of mischief. But inside of the Marvel universe, Captain America is the sort of logical… everything is logical, everything’s predictable, everything that’s good is good, everything that’s bad is bad.

The consequences seem to follow logically that if you do good, good things happen. If you do bad, bad things happen. That’s kind of the template that we have in our head about how we think the world should work.

So a lot of writers think, “Well, if I do the work, I’ll get the outcome. If I run these ads, I’ll sell books. If I do this thing, I’ll sell…” The logical follow of doing work is that it will naturally be the consequence of something sort of like one plus one equals two.

We think that that math is in charge of the publishing industry, that somehow good books will sell, or if I write more books, I will sell, or if I write to market, I will sell.

Captain America is not in charge of the publishing industry. Loki is in charge.

So sometimes the things that you do have no impact whatsoever, and sometimes they have all the impact. Sometimes you change covers and it makes the book sell, and sometimes you change covers and it doesn’t.

I think part of what I’m trying to say in this “Loki is in charge” is not about the future, right? It’s not to say, “Well, we should all be very afraid because Loki’s in charge and Loki’s in charge of the future.” No, no, no.

The question is if I am looking backwards and I’m trying to evaluate what I have done and I have come to the end of my evaluation and can’t find a reason why it’s not happening.

So I’m three months past a launch and the books didn’t sell the way I wanted them to sell, and my tendency internally is to say, “Well, the rules of the publishing industry are logical and therefore there must be a logical reason, a logical cause for why this didn’t happen that I could find and change, and then next time I will sell better.”

Sometimes the answer is literally “Loki’s in charge.” We don’t know what happened. It’s not worth trying to figure it out is essentially what I’m saying, right?

Like, yes, there’s a reason somewhere, but it’s not worth spending your time trying to figure it out or trying to iterate when the highest level of chance that you have at better results is starting a new thing. Right? So like writing a new book, starting a new launch, doing a new series.

The answer isn’t always start a new series, but it might be do the next book in the series you’re not enough books in. So many of us are trying to be so precious with each individual action that we take and figure out what it was that didn’t work as though somehow there’s this very easy to find causal reason, a one-to-one reason.

So often what I want people to do is just look backwards and be like, “Okay, well, sometimes the answer is Loki’s in charge and I need to not worry too much about it because I’m wasting my time trying to find the reason.”

When sometimes the reason is there are too many people publishing that day or you didn’t happen to take off on TikTok and that is not something you can control and do anything about. So a lot of it is just what’s in our control and what’s not, and trying to be more comfortable with things being out of our control.

So I use Loki because we all laugh when I say it, right? It’s like “Loki’s in charge. Oh, Loki. Stupid Loki,” right? Like whatever. It makes the cause be something that feels enough out of your control in a safe way instead of it feeling like, “No, I have to figure this out and fix it.” Right?

It’s sort of meant to be a tongue-in-cheek way of being like, “Okay, let’s just move on. You’re going to be okay. Let’s do the next one.”

Joanna: Who is this Kevin you keep talking to?

Becca: Kevin is like the John Doe, right? Like the sort of John Doe. I use George and Kevin and Carol sort of interchangeably when I’m talking to a random writer. Like trying to say, “All right, let’s go. It’s okay to move on.”

Joanna: I thought… and everyone, Becca does know my name. It’s not Kevin. This is not Kevin.

So, well, I think this is interesting and I wonder whether you feel that there is more chaos right now? As in we’ve always had chaos in the publishing industry, but it does seem like there is a lot of transition right now. There are things that were working even kind of last month, and now people are like, “Oh no, this is bad.”

Do you think there is more chaos, or is it just the same as normal?

Becca: I sort of go back and forth on whether there is more. Usually in transition periods there is a little bit more, right?

Like if you think about when you live in your house on a normal day, there’s very little unpredictable stuff that’s probably going to happen. When you’re moving, all of a sudden there’s probably more unpredictable stuff that’s going to happen, just because the added sort of transition causes more chaos.

So I do think it’s possible that there’s more chaos. What I think is happening is that the unpredictability is becoming more visible than it’s ever been before, because in the past it feels sort of like the people who were getting the unpredictable results were either not being heard effectively.

Just speaking objectively as a coach, there’s always been a high level of unpredictability in this industry. It’s just that the people who are teaching are often the ones who are getting whatever result and then saying, “Oh, this is what should be happening when you do this.”

So the people who are at what I would call that kind of expert level often feel like there’s a lot more predictability, ahat’s not always the case anymore.

I think there’s a lot of teachers and a lot of speakers and presenters who are feeling the unpredictability more than maybe they were in the past. So now we’re seeing it a little bit more visibly.

I don’t know that I believe there’s any more unpredictability other than the typical transitional stuff of like, “Well, that used to work and now it doesn’t work anymore.” But if you’ve been in this industry as long as I think some of us have who listen to this show, this happens every time there’s a transition.

It happened in the transition between when Facebook ads slowed down in their effectiveness or changed in effectiveness. It happened when Instagram changed in its effectiveness. It’s happened when KU first started, it happened in KU 2.0 launch. There’s always some transition feeling.

I think there’s additionally more transition globally and internationally and nationally than there has been in the past too. So less stability in other places makes it feel more unstable.

So I go back and forth about if there’s actually less predictability or if we’re just more conscious of it. But either way, we feel like there is more now, for sure.

Joanna: I was just reflecting as you were talking about the people who were teaching, but there’s quite a few who’ve dropped away. I mean, if you think about Author Nation, the speakers are quite different and new voices come in and teach new things, and I’m not going to necessarily pivot into others.

So for example, TikTok is always my go-to example of, I am not going to. I did not pivot into TikTok. I’m not going to, that is just not my thing.

So there’s lots of people who are starting now who I’m like, “No, no, you really maybe should try TikTok. Don’t listen to me. You can’t have my career in the same way.” People can’t have your career. Lee Child always says you can’t have my career. When you’re starting out fresh, you almost need to look for different people to follow.

What do you think about voices to listen to in a transition?

Becca: Ultimately, and this is why I said I think it might feel like there’s more chaos, is because we do get a lot of security out of people who are starting something new, right? Because they have a lot of brash excitement and they believe that things are possible.

It’s almost like a wave that crests on the shore. In order for us to maintain that level of progress as an industry, we need new people to always be coming up over the old wave and coming up over the old wave. The old wave might go out and then come back again.

There may be that I need to retreat a little bit and kind of regroup and then come back with new enthusiasm.

Sure, but in a creative industry, because so much of creativity happens when I am more secure, what we always need is to listen to people who make us feel like there is a security about what could be happening, like what could be possible.

The reality of the industry on just a one-to-one basis is not something that most of us need to be worried about because it is so unpredictable. Who will and who won’t? What will take off and what won’t? What will work and what won’t?

It’s so unpredictable. All you need to do is just have the resilience to keep going, and I think we need that new wave to come up every once in a while to remind us all and fill us all with this renewed hope of like, “Oh my gosh, think about what might happen if…” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Whenever I hear that there’s new people teaching new stuff, I get excited about it because I think authors need to have that excitement and enthusiasm and “this is what’s possible.”

Then they learn something new and it opens their mind, it helps them get through transitions, it creates more stability. We get more engaged, we have more fun. Like ultimately that is the way we thrive long term, that we have a sustainable career.

Joanna: I guess, obviously as you said, we’re both learners and there are things that we both have changed our businesses. Although I’ve been selling direct since I started in 2008, I only adopted Kickstarter a couple of years ago and now I love it. I absolutely love it.

It’s a really important part of my business financially, but also creatively. Like the things I create in my Kickstarters are so important to me in so many ways.

You are doing a Kickstarter. So tell us a bit more about that and why you are doing that. You’ve done them before too, haven’t you?

Why is it important to you to do Kickstarters?

Becca: So, I love being able to bring a new book to people and like, I usually do a book and a tool, right? Like some kind of workshop or card deck or like, something that I will do in addition to the non-fiction book.

There’s something that happens around when we infuse new learning into a community, and specifically my community is very learner focused in the sort of the Better Faster, QuitCast kind of arena.

So my first book that I sort of took off with was called Dear Writer, You Need to Quit. And I’ve become the QuitCast and quit books and quit coach and all those things. So the new book is called Dear Writer, You Still Need to Quit.

It is basically the same sort of structure as the first book in terms of one essay will be aimed at this group and the next essay will be aimed at a different group. I think I had 18 or 19 chapters in the first book, and this one has 40 so far.

Joanna: Love it.

Becca: There are probably more coming apart from that. What I’m trying to do with this book is sort of give us this… almost like these aren’t the droids you’re looking for moment, right? Like it’s okay to just let that go. It’s okay to not worry about that.

It’s okay to look away, and try to remind people like what is it that’s really important about maintaining forward motion in your career? And what are the rules that you actually need to live by? And what are the forms and functions you actually need to live by and what can you release and just stop worrying about?

So much of what I want to get across to authors is like we worry about so much that is just, you can’t know any of these things. Like you can’t know whether a book is going to take off until after you’ve released it.

So the more we worry that it won’t happen, instead of encouraging ourselves to practice the resilience that will allow us to see incremental growth as beneficial and also prepare us for larger growth when it happens. And to know that incremental growth doesn’t preclude you from having larger growth in the future.

So sort of things like, here’s how we might misunderstand what a career trajectory looks like, and we worry so much about following a particular pattern, not realizing that there are 300 other patterns that can also lead to the success that we want.

So I think a lot of what I’m trying to do is just remind us like, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for. It’s fine to ignore this stuff. Let’s refocus on what’s really, really important.

Joanna: It’s interesting that you said about we don’t know whether a book will take off. I just got to be realistic. I mean, I’ve written like nearly 50 books and I’ve never had a book like take off in the sense of like traditional media going, “Wow, this is amazing,” or number one on Amazon.

So just to encourage people, you can have a career just selling some books every month.

Becca: A fulfilling career, and not just a fulfilling career, but it doesn’t mean that you’re not successful.

I think we all look at these sort of success patterns of like, “Okay, this person went from selling 10 books a month to selling 10,000 books a month,” and now we’re like, “Well if I don’t hit that trajectory that somehow there’s something wrong with me.”

As opposed to, “Well, okay, but that’s just one story.” Joanna is a great example. You build over time or you get a little bit more each release and then you have a thing where you have a slump where you don’t sell as much.

Sometimes when people go into those slumps, they’re like, “Oh, well my career is over. I stopped growing. So clearly there’s a problem now.” Where I would say, “But if you look from a big picture at it, this is probably just a downturn that needs a creative upturn, rather than this is the end. I’m never going to be able to do this again.”

We just make so many pronouncements about things, or we’re afraid of those pronouncements in our heads because we don’t actually know what it is that could be happening.

We’re too ready to be afraid that it’s all going to be over, as opposed to, “You know what, I can weather this. So if I have to get a second job for a while so that I can continue to write, I don’t see that as a failure. I see that as resilience and progress and me being creative and still being able to write. Like I just want to never stop writing.”

We have these templates in our head that we get so attached to, and I just want us to remember that resilience is important and there’s more that could be possible than you would ever think because of what we’re afraid might happen.

That fear keeps us really narrowed and tight and stressed, and the hope really makes us more expansive and feel better in our skin.

Joanna: Well, I’m looking forward to all the 45-plus different things I need to quit. Obviously we’re not going to go through everything now, but just maybe—

Give us one thing that is a really common thing that we haven’t talked about that we should be quitting.

Becca: Yes. Quit going to book signings. This is my little bit of a soapbox about this. By all means go to book signings if what you want is to network, like if your goal is networking or if your goal is like, “I’ll take whatever new readers I can get and I’m not going to try to break even,” let’s say on book signings.

Because I think book signings are something that went through a phase in like 2014, 15, 16 as well, where we had a similar fervor about like, “Let’s start 55 book signings and everybody’s going to do one, and this is going to be it for me. I’m investing $5,000 into this and so in order for me to get out what I need, I have to break even because this is a business expense.”

And I’m like, “No. If you are a mid-list or low-list author, book signings are either ways for you to connect with the fans that you already have.” So seeing it as an investment with the fans and trying to increase your longevity of your career by keeping those fans around. Or it’s an opportunity for you to network with other authors.

Very rarely is it going to sell enough books at enough volume that it’s going to be a good investment of your time and money. I think a lot of us see book signings as something that we have to do in order to grow, but we just don’t understand that growth doesn’t happen that way.

You can’t create demand in that way unless demand is already visible in other places.

So what I’d rather see people do, if it was me, I’d rather see people have much lower price or free books if they’re low and mid-list authors paperbacks at the book signings and see it as almost like a lead magnet sample promotional opportunity rather than trying to feel like I have to.

I think we treat it like an investment when that’s not a great business decision for most of us.

I would rather see people do fewer signings or treat them like promotional opportunities and really invest in getting as broad of a reach as you can rather than trying to see it as an investment financially, like where I’m going to try to make all my money back, and then people price their books really high and they don’t sell.

Joanna: It’s interesting though because I’ve had quite a few people on recently who—I mean, I think you mean a different kind of thing—but people selling at fairs, people selling in person direct from a store.

Becca: Direct from a store? Like from a stall?

Joanna: Yes, like a market stall or a…

Becca: So I’m a fan of stuff like that if the person is going into it knowing that this is going to be a very high level of investment for one sale at a time, right? Or there are some people out there who adore hand selling.

Again, I think part of what happens when we look at other people’s stories is we have to say, “Was there already a demand for their books that they’re responding to?” Like, is there already a high level of demand for those books? And they’re essentially filling a demand that already exists.

Or if I think about like a fair or a farmer’s market or a craft fair or something where there is no one else selling books there, so they’re taking advantage of the blue water.

That’s a totally different thing for me from attending a book signing where there’s 500 authors and I’m going there assuming that if I can somehow compete with those top sellers, that I’m going to be able to sell all of my books at full price.

I see people signing up for four and five and six and seven signings a year, and I’m like, we disrupt our travel, we spend more time. Again, unless you love it—because my caveat for things is always, if you love hand selling, please do it. If you love festivals, please do it. If you love signings, please do it.

If you’re feeling pressured to do it because everybody’s doing it, please question the premise. Not everyone has the same experience. Again, Loki’s in charge, right? It doesn’t react the same when everyone does it.

Joanna: Or it’s just not your thing. I find it interesting talking to people who really enjoy hand selling because it’s not at all what I enjoy. I have a bit of a soapbox too, and I thought I’d put this in.

Quit hating on other authors and judging other independent authors.

Particularly because as independent authors, we are responsible for our creative choices, our business choices. We are independent.

At the moment there just seems to be a lot more hating on other authors and judging other authors, because of the AI stuff in a major way. So what do you think about this?

Becca: I feel like anytime there is a level of judgment with other people, there’s always a fear at the core of it, right? So if I find myself having really big responses to something, like I see people doing a certain thing online, whatever the thing is, and I get really up in my feelings about it, there are two options there.

One is I can do the work internally to try to figure out what that emotion is and walk away from the keyboard. I can let myself calm down first, and then come back and have a conversation that is less emotional about it.

I think the problem usually with people who are hating on other people online, like they’re getting very up in their feelings, is that they’re not pausing at all. When they feel frustrated or angry or judgmental, they’re just going along with the dysregulation and they don’t understand.

So if you think about Joanna and I in a room with 300 people, let’s just say we’re at Author Nation, we’re all in a room with 300 people in that room. We’re all listening to someone talk and we’re all feeling very safe and secure and excited and we’re having all these positive feelings.

Then there are people in the room who see danger somewhere, like let’s say there’s a bear in the back corner of the room. Most of the room can’t see it, and there’s like 10 people in the back of the room who can see it.

Then they can actually feel feelings that are big enough that they can dysregulate the rest of the room no matter what’s happening from the front. We won’t even realize that it’s happening until we all turn and look at the bear and see it and then run away, right?

So we mass dysregulate each other. When we’re online and we don’t realize that the exact same thing is happening, that we all feel like, “Oh, there’s this… I’m feeling a lot of fear or frustration and I’m going to the computer because I feel dysregulated. I want to express it.”

Usually we express emotion and then somehow we get regulated by that. But because when we dysregulate other people, they dysregulate us, it’s like this big dysregulation fest that ends up happening. When we’re all getting on, let’s say, Threads and complaining about something, right?

The goal in complaining one person to one person is that somebody listens, somebody talks, and then we regulate each other by coming to a conclusion of how we can handle the situation. What we don’t realize is if I feel really big feelings, the goal of me feeling those big feelings is to regulate the situation for me to feel secure again.

When we take it to the internet or we start complaining or yelling or getting frustrated or whatever, we’re looking for that loop close of that validation of those feelings, but then we end up just mass dysregulating each other.

The problem is because we’re not 300 people in a room, we are each in our own room with our own computer, there is no loop closed to that dysregulation pattern. It just keeps growing and growing and growing and getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.

There’s no end to the dysregulation until we get so overwhelmed that we have to walk away from the computer.

The reason I say I would like us to walk away from the computer first and then come back and engage after we have gotten rid of that emotion, rather than communicating in the middle of it, is that you cannot mass regulate people.

So I can’t say something, for instance, on Threads in a response to a comment chain that has gone sort of off the rails. Everybody that’s reading it is dysregulated. I can’t say something that will regulate all of those people because they want to be dysregulated in that moment, unless I specifically answer the one thing that they’re saying.

So I will say the judgment also frustrates me, but for a different reason. It frustrates me because it’s not helpful. Us all getting dysregulated together doesn’t actually help solve any of the problems. All it does is make us spend more time on social media or make us spend more time on Threads or TikTok or YouTube or whatever.

It takes us away from the thing that could regulate us, which is people actually listening and talking and coming to a conclusion and having a conversation. I’d rather see us call a friend than comment on Threads, because then at least we could have a conversation that’s relational and we could get somewhere productive.

I just wish people could understand, you cannot mass regulate people. You can only mass dysregulate them. So the computer and the phone are just an excuse for waiting to be dysregulated at some point. I wish more people would think about the fact that it’s not helping the way we think it’s helping.

Joanna: To engage with that.

Becca: Yes.

Joanna: So the answer is to walk away rather than…

Becca: I would rather have us walk away first. Yes.

Joanna: I mean, I do that. I just see so much misinformation, and you know how it is. I guess we started off by sort of saying no more. In general, I do just walk away. I really just take myself out of it rather than, as you say—

Trying to persuade people on social media of anything is just kind of pointless.

Becca: Yes.

Joanna: As you also mentioned, we are at a time in history where there’s a lot, a lot going on, let’s say. There’s so much going on. So as you say, if you are head up around whatever you are, head up around politically or wars and all kinds of things to get angry about.

Then you see another comment about something in the author world, I suppose it’s all just very triggering at the moment. So it would be good if we all walked away a lot more. It is hard. It is hard though, isn’t it?

Is that maybe how it feels at the moment, that Loki is in charge of the world, not just publishing?

Becca: Yes, it does. It feels so unpredictable and chaotic, but so much of that again is because we are not all in a room together. We’re each in our own rooms at the computer.

If you think about what benefits digital spaces is actually benefits all digital spaces for us to be dysregulated, not for us to be regulated. Because regulated people don’t need to spend time on social media. They can be like, “Oh, look at this cool thing, and oh, puppy,” and then they go about their life.

When I’m dysregulated, I have to spend more time there because I’m trying to close whatever loop it is. So it’s either the boredom loop that I’m trying to close that will never close because it keeps just opening more boredom loops, one after another. Or it’s an anger loop, or a sadness loop, or a fear loop.

heT Internet’s not going to close any of those for us. All it’s going to do is keep them open because it benefits when our loops are open.

This is why I end all of my QuitCasts now with “shut the computer down, turn off the phone, go open the manuscript,” because that has a higher percentage of ability to regulate you than anything you’re going to read on Facebook or Threads, or see on TikTok or whatever.

Including the positive stuff because the positive stuff is just anesthetic to keep you engaged until the negative stuff catches you and then it can suck you in.

So on some level, and I know I’m sounding very negative to social media, some of it’s really fine and beneficial, but the number one difference in people who easily and quickly are productive versus the people who aren’t, almost 2-to-1 is how much time they allow themselves to spend on social media.

It’s whether or not they reach for their phone first thing in the morning or whether they don’t. It’s so hard sometimes to convince people that it’s actually dangerous enough to be there, that we should really be avoiding it as much as possible.

Tt the same time, I understand we’re all adults, we’re going to make our own choices. Realistically, I think a lot of our productivity woes, our selling woes, et cetera, could be helped if we would just not reach for the phone first thing in the morning.

Joanna: I find going for a walk helps. Getting outside. Like, oh, there’s a world out there. The world is not in the screen. The world is actually a lot bigger. I find that helps.

Joanna: Okay, so we are almost out of time, but obviously, so the campaign is “Dear Writer, You Still Need to Quit,” but—

What don’t we need to quit? What can we keep doing?

Becca: So we do not need to quit writing.

Joanna: Yay.

Becca: That’s the key for me. I think no matter what happens on any level, no matter how bad the predictions get about whatever’s going to change, there is no need for us to quit writing or to believe that writing is going to be taken away from us.

Even if the capacity to sell in one way is taken away, there’s always going to be other ways. I feel like we need to just remind ourselves almost like that kind of motto or catchphrase that you repeat to yourself every time it comes up. Like the jingles, right?

There’s this “Save big money at Menards” thing that comes up a lot in the Midwest because we see Menards signs everywhere, and I always think “Save big money at Menards.” Like I sing it in my head.

I wish that people would sing in their head, “Open the manuscript, open the manuscript, open the manuscript” just over and over and over again.

So much of our fear can be combated by stopping ourselves from thinking about what might happen and just continuing to practice the opening of the manuscript and the disappearing into the writing and the enjoyment of the writing, as often as possible.

No matter how bad the predictions are, I still don’t believe that there’s a reason for us to stop hoping for writing and wanting to write more. On that note, I just don’t believe there’s a reason for us not to be hopeful about the future.

We might go through some hard stuff. We might have change, so learn how to be resilient, learn how to pivot, learn how to be flexible. There’s an element of learning that no matter what you think is being taken away, there’s always a possibility that we could switch back, that things could transition backwards, right?

I don’t mean to come off saying don’t be worried about. I’m not saying don’t be worried about anything. I’m specifically talking about it in the publishing industry.

I think we think about what might happen and we get so closed off about the future and there’s going to be so much fear and change and closing. So many of us don’t realize that we will be good at change when it happens.

We’re not going to be good at change now, but we can be more flexible and more hopeful about the future if we look for things to be flexible and hopeful about instead of focusing on the things that we’re not.

So there’s no reason for us to quit being hopeful about the future. There’s no reason for us to quit writing, and if we can just focus on that, there’s always some more interesting thing I could be writing, some manuscript that I could open, something that I could hope for.

There’s always possibility in the future. There’s always possibility of selling, there’s always possibility of new readers. There’s always going to be possibility. So if we can just focus on that, it’s going to be a lot easier to get through the hard things if we don’t lose our hope about the future.

Joanna: Absolutely. Brilliant.

So where can people find you and your books and the Kickstarter online?

Becca: betterfasteracademy.com/links will have everything. So all one word, all lowercase. That is the one-stop shop for Becca.

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

Becca: Thank you for having me.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic voices and insights of both speakers.

The post Loki Is In Charge. How Authors Can Thrive In A Time Of Transition With Becca Syme first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Note From KMW: The winner of the giveaway for the Freewrite Word Runner keyboard will be announced to my mailing list (and on Instagram) later today. Stay tuned!

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“Who am I?” is the question that echoes beneath every character arc. At the story’s Midpoint, that central query rises to the surface. This central beat—this all-important Moment of Truth in story structure—functions most symbolically as a moment of self-recognition. It is a mirror held up to the protagonist, often by the antagonist, that reveals both the Lie the Character Believes and the thematic Truth that can no longer be ignored.

From the perspective of plot structure, the Midpoint functions as the central turning point. Everything in the first half leads up to it, and it sets up all the outcomes that happen in the second half. It is perhaps most potently a moment of revelation. This is true practically in the external plot, in which a Plot Revelation opens the protagonist’s eyes to the true nature of the conflict and what will be required to overcome its obstacles.

This is also true within the character arc, as the Midpoint’s Moment of Truth deepens the character’s understanding of the inner conflict that is both driving and driven by the character’s attempts at forward momentum in the external plot. The Midpoint sets up a critical revelation in which the character clearly sees the value of the story’s thematic Truth—the more effective and/or expanded perspective that will be required in order to finally achieve success.

However, the rabbit hole goes deeper. This Moment of Truth is vital not just for supplying characters with useful information about themselves and others or about the nature of reality. Deeper still, it is a moment of self-recognition. The Truth the character encounters at the Midpoint illuminates all things—not just the nature of the antagonistic force or the conflict (on both the moral and practical levels), but also the protagonist’s own self. The protagonist sees both the self as the person who has, so far, acted according to the story’s central Lie, but also the person with the capacity to now grow into all the potentialities offered by the Truth.

The Midpoint shines a light on both who the character has been and who the character may yet become in either of the two obvious potentialities: refusing the Truth and clinging to the status quo or embracing the Truth and expanding into an unknown future.

So how does this beat actually work on the page? To understand the full power of the Midpoint, we must look at its three mirrors: the self the protagonist recognizes, the antagonist the protagonist confronts, and the Truth that stands between them. By the end, you’ll see how the Midpoint isn’t just a convenient structural beat, but the moment that fuses symbolism and function. It is where the protagonist’s self-recognition, the antagonist’s revelation, and the story’s thematic Truth all converge to drive the second half of the narrative.

In This Article:

• The Mirror Moment = Self-Recognition = Recognition of Thematic Truth
• The Plot Revelation = Recognition of Antagonistic Force = Recognition of Lie the Character Believes
• The Midpoint as the Moment of Truth

The Mirror Moment = Self-Recognition = Recognition of Thematic Truth

Creating Character Arcs (Amazon affiliate link)

At the level of character arc, the Midpoint’s most important role is that of revealing the thematic Truth to the protagonist (this is true whether the character’s arc will eventually accept or reject this Truth). James Scott Bell coined the term “mirror moment” to note the symbolic phenomenon in which the Midpoint both metaphorically and often literally presents the protagonist with a personal reflection.

For Example:

Sometimes, the mirror moment might literally be a brief moment in which the protagonist looks into a mirror or other reflective surface—or at least is present in a room that offers that symbolism, such as Mulan looking at her reflection in her sword before going into battle.

In Disney’s Mulan, the sword reflection symbolizes the Midpoint’s mirror moment — the beat of self-recognition in story structure. Mulan (1998), Walt Disney Pictures.

But the results can also be more creative, such as when actor Don Lockwoord must confront his own dismal acting onscreen when watching a preview of his new movie The Dueling Cavalier in Singin’ in the Rain.

In Singin’ in the Rain, Don Lockwood faces his flaws when witnessing his dismal acting in The Dueling Cavalier—a comedic yet poignant example of the story Midpoint beat as a mirror moment. Singin’ in the Rain (1952), MGM.

In my gaslamp fantasy Wayfarer, I was able to stage the mirror moment through a scene in which the protagonist is confronted by an army of hoodlums who have been spellcast to look just like him.

Wayfarer (Amazon affiliate link)

In other stories, in which the mirror symbolism is not blatantly obvious, characters will still face a poignant moment in which they must look inside and see themselves more clearly than ever before, such as in Stand by Me, which features a Midpoint scene in which the boys tell deeply personal secrets about themselves around the campfire.

In Stand By Me, the Midpoint unfolds around the campfire as the boys reveal personal truths. Stand by Me (1986), Columbia Pictures.

Another lovely example is found in Apollo 13, in which protagonist Jim Lovell stares longingly at the moon—the dream he is about to sacrifice—as the shuttle prepares to slingshot itself back into Earth’s gravity.

In Apollo 13, Jim Lovell faces the heartbreaking realization that he must give up his dream of walking on the moon. Apollo 13 (1995), Universal Pictures.

So what are characters seeing in this Moment of Truth? They’re seeing themselves, right? But they’re also seeing the story’s thematic Truth.

This presents an interesting juxtaposition. If the Truth is something characters supposedly have to learn over the course of the story, then why does the Moment of Truth feature all these symbolic representations of self-reflection?

In many ways, the mirror moment and the Moment of Truth can be thought of simply as characters “remembering who they are.” This is because the Truth has been, in many different ways, with the characters from the beginning of the story. Even though the character remains identified with the story’s comparatively limiting Lie up to at least the Midpoint, the Truth has, in fact, been with them since the beginning. It was that thinnest wedge of the Truth that instigated the journey in the first place.

For Example:

Writing Archetypal Character Arcs (affiliate link)

When I wrote my version of the Hero Arc for Writing Archetypal Character Arcs, I named the Hero’s Midpoint beat “‘Remembering’ Who He Is.” I never say those words without hearing James Earl Jones from the scene in The Lion King in which Simba is confronted by his father’s spirit, but only after the wise shaman Rafiki guides him to look into a reflective pool:

Simba [sighing]: That’s not my father. That’s just my reflection.

Rafiki: Look harder. You see? He lives in you.

Mufasa: Simba.

Simba: Father?

Mufasa: Simba, you have forgotten me.

Simba: No. How could I?

Hero Arc Archetypal Character Arc Workbook by K.M. Weiland

Mufasa: You have forgotten who you are and so forgotten me. Look inside yourself, Simba. You are more than what you have become. You must take your place in the Circle of Life.

Simba: How can I go back? I’m not who I used to be.

Mufasa: Remember who you are. You are my son and the one true king. Remember who you are.

Simba: No! Please don’t leave me!

Mufasa: Remember. Remember. Remember.

We find this in so many stories in which characters rally to return to a better version of themselves, such as Rick in Casablanca or the protagonist in the first Thor movie—both of whom must face humbling moments that remind them how far they have strayed.

The Midpoint comes when Thor fails to lift Mjolnir. By facing his unworthiness, he glimpses the Truth he must embrace to become worthy—an evocative example of the story Midpoint beat. (Thor (2011), Paramount Pictures.)

We also see this in growth stories in which characters grow into a new potential—but one that was always latent within them. They do not change who they fundamentally are. Rather, they make choices that allow them to, like Luke Skywalker, step into a “larger world” and therefore a wider version of themselves.

Luke Skywalker practices with his lightsaber aboard the Millennium Falcon as Obi-Wan tells him he has entered a “larger world.” This mirror moment foreshadows the Midpoint’s self-recognition and the Truth vs. Lie character arc. (Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), 20th Century Fox)

We also see this moment in tragic arcs, in which the latent possibilities for growth within a character are glimpsed but either never realized or outright rejected, such as in the overt example of Sméagol wrestling with his dark alter-ego Gollum—and losing in Lord of the Rings.

Gollum argues with his alter ego Sméagol in a symbolic mirror moment. This Midpoint beat forces self-recognition but also highlights his tragic rejection of the Truth. (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), New Line Cinema.)

The Plot Revelation = Recognition of Antagonistic Force = Recognition of the Lie the Character Believes

If the Moment of Truth is one half of the Midpoint, the other half is the Plot Revelation. This is the moment in which characters glean important practical information about the nature of the external conflict. Put most simply, this might be a clue or insight that allows the characters to now act more effectively in pursuing the plot goal. Most specifically, it is a revelation about the nature of the antagonistic force. This is true whether the antagonistic force is just that—a force—or personalized as another character—an antagonist.

At deeper levels of story, the antagonistic force represents more than simply a bad guy who gets in the protagonist’s way and/or acts as the face of moral reprehensibility in contrast to the hero’s goodness. When we go deeper, we can see how the Plot Revelation affords the protagonist the ability to recognize who the antagonist really is. And when we see the antagonist as a reflection of the protagonist, we can then also see how in recognizing who the antagonist really is… the protagonist is immediately given an opportunity to recognize himself as well.

This recognition of the antagonistic force can happen in a number of ways.

For Example:

• The antagonist’s heretofore unknown identity becomes known, as is common in many mysteries in which the prime suspect is finally given a name or face, as in Zodiac and Silence of the Lambs.

In The Silence of the Lambs, the investigators discover the name of the true killer, Buffalo Bill. (Silence of the Lambs (1991), Orion Pictures.)

• The antagonist’s true alignment becomes known, as when someone who was previously thought to be an ally, now becomes clear, such as in Captain America: The Winter Soldier when Steve Rogers realizes the bureau he works for is a Hydra sleeper cell.

In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the Midpoint arrives when Steve Rogers learns that S.H.I.E.L.D. is secretly controlled by HYDRA. This revelation reframes the entire external conflict and sets up the second half of the story.

• A previously known antagonist reveals a new extent to power or goals, such as when the size of the shark in Jaws prompts the infamous revelation, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

Brody finally sees the full size of the shark. His line, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” is both a plot revelation and a thematic turning point, reframing the conflict for the rest of the story. (Jaws (1975), Universal Pictures.)

Whatever the type of revelation, the deeper symbolism should present protagonistic characters with sobering reflections about themselves. From a psychological perspective, we might say that the protagonist has projected parts of him/herself onto the antagonistic force. This will always be due to a limited perspective or blind spot (i.e., the Lie the Character Believes) which means any revelations about the antagonist need to be thematically pertinent.

For Example:

In seeing the antagonistic force more clearly, the protagonist may be able to reclaim pieces of personal power, but it may also force the protagonist to conjure with deeply held connections and similitaries with the antagonist, such as in the Midpoint episode of the Harry Potter series, The Goblet of Fire, when Harry finally comes face to face with Voldemort and realizes their ever-deepening connection.

In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry is captured in the graveyard and faces Voldemort for the first time. This Midpoint-style beat reveals their deep connection and reframes the story’s central conflict. (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), Warner Bros.)

Although we often want to split the binary of Lie/Truth between protagonist/antagonist, the antagonistic force will not necessarily represent or personally believe the same Lie the protagonist does. Instead, the antagonist represents a force that stands between the protagonist and the Truth. Fundamentally, this because the antagonist represents the status quo (or some regression thereof). The antagonistic force is the tyrant king “Holdfast, Keeper of the Status Quo“—which ultimately is that very force within the protagonist that would cling to the comfortable old Lie and resist the expansive new Truth, no matter how necessary or effective.

The Midpoint as the Moment of Truth

What makes the Midpoint so powerful is that it refuses to let the protagonist look away. Up to this point, the Lie has offered a way to hide from the full power of the Truth—an excuse, a distraction, a way to keep stumbling forward without clarity. But in the Moment of Truth, that cover is stripped away. The Midpoint is where the symbolism fuses inner and outer conflict: the protagonist sees that the antagonist isn’t just an obstacle in the world but also a mirror of the Lie within. In this way, protagonist/antagonist dynamics embody the core of the character arc as the external force demands surrender to a status quo while the protagonist’s inner guidance pulls toward the Truth.

This recognition is what shifts the story’s axis. The Midpoint is not simply a divider between halves of the plot; it’s the story beat that transforms perspective. From this moment on, the protagonist may still resist or stumble, but cannot return to ignorance. The Midpoint doesn’t just hand the protagonist new information, it completely changes how the character sees things. The Truth, once glimpsed, forces the protagonist to act differently, whether the Truth is embraced or rejected. This is why the Midpoint works as both mirror and revelation: it clarifies not only who the protagonist is, but also what the story itself must become in order to reach resolution.

In Summary

The Midpoint is one of the most transformative beats in story structure. It is more than a convenient plot twist; it is the story’s Moment of Truth—a beat that forces both self-recognition and external revelation. Whether through a literal mirror, a symbolic confrontation with the antagonist, or a sudden escalation of stakes, the Midpoint unifies the inner conflict with the outer conflict. It clarifies the dynamic of the Truth vs. Lie at the heart of the character arc and shifts the axis of the entire narrative into the second half.

Key Takeaways

• The Mirror Moment highlights self-recognition, when characters see themselves (and who they could become).
• The Plot Revelation shows the protagonist the antagonist’s true nature, power, or alignment, reframing the external conflict.
• The Midpoint works as the Moment of Truth that unites symbolism with function.
• Protagonist and antagonist dynamics embody the Truth vs. Lie in character arc: the antagonist clings to the status quo while the protagonist is forced to glimpse the Truth.
• The story Midpoint beat permanently shifts the story’s axis, pushing the protagonist into the second half with new clarity.

Want More?

Structuring Your Novel Workbook (affiliate link)

If you’re looking for practical tools to map out these ideas in your own story, the revised and expanded 2nd edition of my Structuring Your Novel Workbook is designed to help. This comprehensive novel structure workbook walks you through all the major beats of solid story structure—including the Midpoint and the mirror moment—with step-by-step story structure worksheets. Inside, you’ll find brainstorming questions, scene-mapping guides, and exercises to help you identify your character’s Lie and Truth, chart the Plot Revelation, and align your inner and outer conflicts. Whether you’re outlining a first draft or revising an existing manuscript, the workbook gives you concrete tools to brainstorm your story beats, deepen your character arcs, and bring your plot into sharper focus. You can explore the Structuring Your Novel Workbook here: available as paperback, e-book, or deluxe fillable pdf.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What’s your favorite example of a powerful Midpoint—either one you’ve written yourself or one you’ve seen in a book or movie? 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 “Who Am I?” The Midpoint as Self-Recognition in Story Structure appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

How can authors write about climate change without preaching? What happens when your publisher goes under just before your book launch? How do theatre skills translate to better dialogue, readings, and author events? With author and theater director Laura Baggaley.

In the intro, Indie presses are in existential crisis [The Bookseller]; what to do when things are hard [Wish I’d Known Then]; Book marketing with garlic-infused ink [The Guardian]; Writing Storybundle; Halloween horror promo; Blood Vintage folk horror; My new author photos; Day of the Dead [Books and Travel];

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 

Laura Baggaley is an award-nominated children’s and YA author, theater director, and also teaches acting, writing, and literature at City Lit College in London.

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

Show Notes

• How to write climate fiction that embeds solutions in world-building rather than lecturing readers
• Dealing with publisher collapse and finding empowerment in regaining control of your books
• Using theatre techniques to write better dialogue and avoid clunky exposition
• Essential performance skills for author readings, interviews, and public speaking
• Practical tips for preparing workshops and managing nerves at literary events
• Building collaborative writing projects and the benefits of author support groups

You can find Laura at LauraBaggaley.co.uk.

Transcript of Interview with Laura Baggaley

Jo: Laura Baggaley is an award-nominated children’s and YA author, theater director, and also teaches acting, writing, and literature at City Lit College in London. So welcome to the show, Laura.

Laura: Thank you, Jo. It’s lovely to be here.

Jo: Yes, I’m excited to talk to you today. First up—

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

Laura: Well, I was one of those kids who always had their nose in a book, you know, loved reading. Whenever anyone said, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” I would say, “A writer,” like, straight away, no question about it. So that was always the plan.

In my late teens, I changed schools for sixth form. I went to this school that was really strong on performing arts. I started to get into drama and doing lots of acting and school plays. Then at university started directing plays, which was even more fun than acting.

I just found myself pursuing a different path and became a theater director for about 15 years. That was really creatively exciting, but after a while, I started to feel something was missing, I guess.

Of course the writing had been completely sidelined, but I came back to it and I started writing again.

First of all, I started working on a literary novel that I was trying to craft with extremely beautiful language and lovely sentences. When I got to the end of the draft and I read it, I realized it was incredibly boring because like nothing happened in the book. So I put that in a drawer and started again.

I started working on another one and I was sort of crafting my sentences. And anyway, fortunately about halfway through that one, I had this idea, this story came to me about a 15-year-old kid in a dystopian future. It had to be a young protagonist and it had to be a YA book. I just really wanted to tell this story.

So I chucked the boring literary half-written draft in that same drawer and started working on the YA book. So that’s where I really started to sort of find my voice as it were.

Jo: Where did it go from there? When was that?

Laura: Oh gosh, before the pandemic, which is kind of how we judge everything time-wise these days, isn’t it? I think it was 2019 that I was a finalist in the Mslexia Children’s Fiction Competition with that manuscript.

So I’d obviously written it before then, and then through that competition, got an agent and had wrote another book, and got a publishing deal with a small indie publisher called Neem Tree Press.

Jo: I wanted to talk to you about this. So you were a finalist, Mslexia, if people don’t know, is very prestigious magazine here in the UK. You’ve got an agent, you’ve got a deal. So what happened then?

What happened with the publishing experience?

Laura: Well, I think the term is probably rollercoaster. I was really excited to sign this contract and obviously to have this publishing contract. But what happened was, publication obviously takes a long time. So it was going to be 18 months or so before the book came out.

After about a year of this process, Neem Tree Press merged with a much bigger UK publisher called Unbound. And they were saying how great this was because obviously there were advantages of scale, like wider distribution to bookshops, that kind of thing.

I don’t think that Neem Tree Press quite realized how much financial trouble Unbound was in when they merged. Essentially Unbound folded and took Neem Tree press down with them. So the two books that I’d been so excited to get published with Neem Tree have not been published.

However, on the plus side, the rights have reverted to me, and now I can do what I want with them. So they will be coming out, just not with Neem Tree Press.

The good thing was, is that in the meantime I’d got on with writing another YA book and that has been published by Habitat Press. So I carried on writing.

Jo: The thing is we hear this over and over again. Like there’s pros and cons with small press versus big houses and one of the benefits of a big house is it’s very unlikely to go under. But one of the benefits of small press is you get a lot more attention and you know the people and you feel it’s a much more personal process.

There’s pros and cons every which way, but over the years I’ve been in publishing, almost 20 years now, so many small press companies either get bought or things happen. Things happen. Let’s just say things happen.

So this happened. How did you deal with this, like mentally and thinking about whether it was all going to happen? Because obviously writers look forward to their publication and you’re going through this process.

So how did you deal with all that time?

Laura: As I say, it was really up and down. There were some months early on where I was really down about it because I just didn’t hear anything.

So I think that was the most frustrating thing is I’d be sending emails saying, “When are we going to start on the edits?” and just not hear anything. So it felt like I was sort of being ghosted, you know?

The positive thing I think was that because of listening to your podcast and doing lots of research into indie publishing, I’d already decided that even if I had a traditional publishing deal, I was going to pursue my author business in an entrepreneurial way.

So I’d already decided, you know, why can’t a traditionally published author have a reader magnet, for example? So I got on with doing things in the meantime. I wasn’t just waiting, and I think if I just waited, it would have been really crushing.

As it was when I finally had the sort of confirmation that Neem Tree Press had closed and there was no chance of the books being published, what I felt was relief and a sense of almost kind of empowerment. As like, well, thank goodness the books are mine again. Now I can get on with publishing them.

Jo: That’s really interesting. I think that empowerment, it’s such a good energy. Being long time indie, I think that empowerment and that sort of, “I can do this” and like you said, “I got on with doing things.”

If you are a doer and you like doing things, then being an indie author is a good thing because you can move at your pace. Let’s face it—

Even if you do get a deal with whoever, the person who cares the most about your book is you.

Laura: Exactly. Exactly. I think just that feeling of I’m not going to wait for permission anymore. I’ve had enough of that.

Habitat Press, who brought out Dirt, my new book, they’ve been a joy to work with because they’re much more flexible and collaborative. So I don’t feel like I’ve given up all my power working with them, so that’s really nice.

Jo: But you are going to self-publish those other two?

Laura: TBC. I’m hoping that one of them might come out with Habitat Press and one of them will be self-published. That’s the current plan. I’m waiting for Habitat Press to read the greener one because Habitat Press is the green, environmental kind of publisher.

Jo: Yes. Well, let’s talk about that because your novel Dirt is eco fiction or climate fiction, and this is turning into a bit of a niche. So tell us what are the hallmarks of that genre.

How can authors write in important areas, but not bash people over the head with a message?

Laura: That is so important, isn’t it? Yes. So what climate fiction is, I mean, I’d say it’s any story with a focus on environmental or climate issues. So it could be a thriller, it could be a romance, it could be crime fiction. It’s a really kind of broad genre.

But from my perspective, when I think about it, the key thing is climate solutions. It’s about looking forward to joyful possibilities and about kind of normalizing positive action.

So not writing a book to tell everybody to buy an electric car or something, but just kind of in the world building embedding things like yes, solar panels or heat pumps or whatever as just normal parts of life.

Of course in my books, because I tend to write near future dystopias, it’s really easy to imagine a future where say everyone gets all their energy from renewable energy. So the eco element, it’s in the background and just taken for granted rather than trying to preach. If that makes sense.

Jo: That’s interesting because I know Habitat Press wants a positive spin on it, but I was thinking one of the books I’ve read, I guess a few years ago now, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, I don’t think of that as a positive book.

Laura: I know, I know that book. I love that book. Yes, I know what you mean. I mean, it has one of the bleakest beginnings, but it stayed with me. I have never forgotten that book. What I would say about that book is it is absolutely packed with ideas for ways of moving towards a better future.

He’s got all kinds of economic innovations and ideas about blockchain and how world banks could work together. So I would say although it’s in the action and the plot, there are bleak elements. I mean, overall, I would call it really quite hopeful.

I mean, I sort of got into all this through the Green Stories Project. They run free writing competitions, encouraging writers to explore embedding climate solutions into their work. And of course, Habitat Press kind of emerged out of the Green Stories Project. I think you interviewed Denise from Habitat Press some years ago.

Jo: Yes.

Laura: Another thing that they did, which I really thought was really fun, was the Green Stories collaboration with BAFTA on #ClimateCharacters.

Jo: I don’t know about that. Tell us about that.

Laura: They were comparing fictional characters with high and low carbon lifestyles. So they took like James Bond versus Jack Reacher. Jack Reacher, he spends his money on like coffee and public transport, whereas James Bond is all like jet skis and smart suits and expensive cars.

I mean, I love both those characters of course, but if you’re looking at what you glamorize in your fiction, it’s a choice that you can make.

So in one of my books, I have all the rich kids at school wearing CarPos trainers. And CarPos in my sort of future world is short for carbon positivity. So they’re carbon positive trainers that have absorbed more carbon in the manufacture than they’ve emitted, and that’s this massive status symbol.

So the cool kids all have CarPos. Then of course, my protagonist, who’s not a rich kid, his trainers are just neutral, which means like carbon neutral.

That’s not what the plot is about, but I like the idea that in a world where legislation has said that all manufacturing processes have to be carbon neutral, it becomes a status symbol to be sustainable. Like who can be the most eco.

Jo: Yes, I absolutely agree. So I think that’s a good sort of pointer is put it in the world building, don’t lecture.

You don’t have to have characters lecturing other characters about their behavior, which I feel like is one of the bad things with any movement is bashing people over the head with stuff as opposed to trying to put things into stories that it’s almost invisible, but yet still impactful, I suppose.

Laura: Yes, I think Denise at Habitat Press talks about smuggling the messages in. You know, that you want the book to be exciting because it’s got great characters and a great story, and that the eco stuff is incidental almost. But there’s just a little bit of a mind shift going on in the way that you construct the world of the book.

Jo: So I wanted to come onto your theater background. Well, first of all, I should ask—

So did you write any plays or were you more in the directing thing?

Laura: Mainly directing, but I did do some devised productions when I was directing, so I did write some scripts for those. I wrote several scripts actually for children’s plays, which were kind of adaptations.

Then it was in 2019, I devised and wrote a play for a London New Writing Festival called This Play Will Solve Climate Change.

Jo: Yes, that’s a bit more on the nose as a title.

Laura: It was, yes. It was a full on activist kind of physical theater, experimental production. It was really fun. It was perhaps a kind of a step back towards writing for me.

Jo: Well, because this is interesting, right? So I write a novel, you write a novel, and we can upload it to Amazon. Let’s say the very basic thing you can do is upload it to Amazon. People can buy it and you get some money.

With a play, it just isn’t like that, is it? I mean—

Is there anything like a sort of self-publishing scene in the theater world?

Laura: I have to say, not that I know of with scripts at all. In fact, with the climate change play that I wrote, well, I actually set up a little theater company around that time, and we called ourselves Reusable Theater. The idea was that our scripts could be reused by anyone, anywhere, because we wanted to to generate more of this kind of work.

I mean, there were theater makers all over the place generating their own productions and putting on work independently. So yes, but I don’t think anyone’s making any money out of it is the thing.

Jo: No, exactly. I mean there are obviously people who buy scripts to put on at schools and stuff, usually you have to buy the certain text or whatever, but people don’t really shop for plays, I guess.

Laura: I don’t think so.

Jo: So, yes, it is difficult. So I’m glad you’ve discovered the business of books.

In terms of if people are interested in adaptation—like you said there, you did some adaptations—

What are some tips for writing stories that could be more easily adapted into theater?

Or even just brought alive with marketing, with images and that kind of thing?

Laura: That’s a really interesting question, because I think in some ways, theater is a really expansive, inventive storytelling mode. So you can almost put anything on stage, but what I would say is, I think it’s primarily about theater and film being really visual mediums.

This is often the case in marketing as well, isn’t it? So it’s about finding those really striking images and just thinking about your plot does. Are there key moments that have really clear, vivid images attached to them?

I think I’m often really inspired by images. So there was a play I directed once simply because I loved the opening image on stage and it was a 18th century garden in Lambeth with an apple tree. There were two figures, a man and a woman sitting in the tree with their backs to the audience, both completely naked.

I just thought this was such a kind of striking image. Of course, we didn’t have a tree on stage. We had apples suspended from invisible threads. So the actors were sitting on a step ladder in this kind of cloud of apples. It was really beautiful. I guess that’s the kind of thing you are thinking about.

With Dirt, that whole book really started with an image for me. There’s an expansive desert, a single road running through it. A girl wearing a sun hat as big as a bicycle wheel cycling alone along that road towards us.

That was like the first idea for the story in my head. It was kind of like a western, you know, a stranger rides into town. So that’s where my inspiration, I think, often comes from. I think that does translate well into marketing, for instance.

Jo: Yes. I guess another thing is dialogue, because if you are on the stage, then you’re going to have to have some people speaking. So you’ve probably read a heck of a lot of very bad dialogue or heard dialogue that might look okay on the text, but then an actor tries to perform it and it sounds terrible.

So how can we identify bad dialogue? And any tips for writing it better?

Laura: Yes, I’ve certainly encountered some terrible dialogue. I think for me the clunkiest is when characters say things without motivation just to further the plot.

I get students doing this in my acting classes. Sometimes they’ll be improvising and they’ll say something like, “Oh, Uncle Bernard, how good to see you after you’ve spent 10 years in Australia” and I’ll be like, “Bernard knows he’s been in Australia and he knows it’s been a long time.”

So the character, like, there’s just no reason for them to say that. It always tells me that the actor is being super conscious of the audience, trying to convey information rather than getting into the character’s skin. I think with dialogue it’s about really immersing yourself, getting in there in the character’s head.

What is the character’s attitude to this situation? What’s the relationship to the other people? How are they feeling? And then you get that kind of, what would I say if I was this person in this situation? And that’s where the dialogue should be coming from.

I think you really hit on it, Jo, when you said, it’s reading it aloud. It can read well on the page, but to test it, read it aloud and better get other people to read it aloud for you.

I mean, in theater it’s standard practice. You’ve got a new script, you workshop it, get a load of actors, playwright sits with a red pen and their script and listens and scribbles all over the script while the actors read it out.

Jo: Yes, it’s funny, I’ve actually just yesterday finished the audiobook of Blood Vintage, which is my folk horror novel. I’ve done it with ElevenLabs using my voice clone, which is very, very good.

So it’s very strange because I’m listening to myself and then I direct myself, the AI, and—

I’ve actually rewritten bits and bobs of dialogue because even my own voice clone can’t do it properly.

Laura: Wow. That’s brilliant.

Jo: It is. It’s really funny. The other thing that I found, and again, like I’ve literally just sort of discovered this is at the end of chapters, sometimes I’ve rewritten things in order that they end on a with a certain sound as opposed to how they can end in the text.

You would have come across this too. There can be sounds that written down, don’t look like they match, but when you speak them, the sounds resonate with each other and then it just sounds wrong basically.

Laura: Yes. Yes, absolutely. It sound like ending a chapter sounds a bit to me, like doing what we call a button at the end of a scene or at the end of a musical number, you need that kind of finishing moment.

Jo: Yes. Finishing moment. Rather than with text, you can easily cut something and the reader’s going to turn the page. But if you are driving and you’re listening to an audiobook, there’s a few seconds of space.

So you almost need it to end in a certain audio way to make a point. Like you say, button’s a really good word. I’ve never heard it in that context.

Laura: Yes, absolutely. You need to navigate to guide them through the text because they haven’t got that kind of expanse of the blank bit of page at the end of the chapter or whatever.

Jo: So then I guess the other thing about theater is performance and I feel like a lot of authors think they have no need to learn performance because they’re just going to be in their rooms writing.

If you are successful or if you want to be successful, yes, you are going to have to do stuff. You have to speak on a podcast, you have to speak at a festival, you have to do a reading, you have to talk to media.

So what are your tips on performance?

I guess from seeing a lot of bad performances as well, what can we do? We want to be authentic, like we don’t need to be rah rah. How can we do it where we can deliver the best to the people who are listening?

Laura: Yes, it’s such a good question. I think for me there’s kind of two things. So I find—and this is probably my theater background—but I find it really helps to imagine a character who is a version of me and that’s who I’m playing in public.

The character is essentially the same. They’re me just a bit more confident, you know, a slightly shinier version. So like, I’m Laura and then there’s Laura Baggaley Writer.

If you ask those two people like, “How is your new book going?” Like, me, Laura sitting at my desk might say, “Oh, I’m really struggling. I’m trying to write in this new utopian genre. And I’ve got ideas for two characters, but the world isn’t clear at all and I’m just not sure which plot strand to prioritize” and so on.

But if you ask Laura Baggaley Writer, she might say, “Oh, it’s exciting. I’m experimenting with a new literary genre. I’m writing a utopian novel for young adults, and it’s about two teenage girls. They’re both outsiders in different ways.”

So like both of those statements are completely true. I’m not being inauthentic because it is exciting that I’m writing this book in this genre. But one of them, I hope you’ll agree, one of them sounds better than the other. It’s a bit like putting on a smart jacket for a book reading. It’s just getting into character. Does that make sense?

Jo: Yes, I totally agree. I think the smart jacket is a point as well.

Makeup for women, I mean, you don’t have to, but I remember I did professional speaker training back in Australia like 20 years ago, and I remember seeing these women and they wore, they didn’t have to be designer clothes, but they wore smart clothes on stage and they looked professional and their hair was done and their makeup was done.

I just learned a lot from that because it gives a professional impression and I feel that’s the thing.

If you want to be a successful author, then you are a professional.

So whatever that means, however you want to dress. I think again, whether it’s a smart jacket or it’s just different clothes, I feel it can really help.

Laura: That is so true. I mean, a lot of actors talk about needing to find the right shoes for a character. They put on their costume and then that’s part of the process of getting ready for performance. So I think that’s absolutely right.

Jo: This is terrible. I was just thinking then, so I’ve been to some of these pitch things, right? For film and TV and stuff. The last one I went to, they sent an email out and the email basically said, “please chew gum or use mints.”

Laura: Oh, oh no.

Jo: No, I mean not to me personally, but the email went out and it also said, “use deodorant.” And I was like, if you are emailing a group of people and telling them to use mints and deodorant, then what the hell happened last year?

Laura: That’s horrendous. Oh my goodness.

Jo: Yes, I know. I was just thinking about that. I think, again, as authors it’s fine to sit here at your desk in your tracky bottoms and your whatever and mess. Like, I basically don’t do my hair most of the time.

But if you are going to do a reading or you’re going to a conference or you are doing anything where you are Joanna Penn Writer or Laura Baggaley Writer—

When it is that writer side of you, you have to make an effort, right?

Even if it’s hard. And it is hard, isn’t it?

Laura: Yes, it is hard. I think it does boost your confidence to be wearing the right stuff. There are practical performance tips as well. I would say practice a lot out loud.

Sometimes with my students, I’ll see them rehearsing a speech in their head and I’ll say, “Come on. No, no, do it out loud because you need your mouth to practice saying the words, there’s a muscle memory involved.”

So if you are doing a reading of your own book, you might know the book inside out, but your mouth might not know it. If you read it out loud to the mirror to a friend multiple times, when you are feeling really nervous up on stage, your mouth will do some of the work because it already knows what it has to do.

It sounds really silly, but just practice, practice, practice and remember to slow down because adrenaline makes us all speed up.

Actors often say to me like, “Oh, what do I do about nerves?” When they’re just starting out, they might be doing their first ever acting performance. And I say, “Well, it’s part of performance. It’s absolutely natural. It’s a completely normal response to the situation.”

Even though you can’t just tell your brain to calm down, you can physically relax your body. So you can lift your shoulders right up to your ears and then drop them down and feel the difference. That is physical relaxation.

So even if your brain and your stomach are churning, you can consciously physically relax your body and do that breathing. My favorite breathing is in for two out for three. Just extend the out breath and doing that, it’s so obvious, but it does help.

Jo: Yes, and on that breathing and that practicing things with your mouth, that’s so good.

The other thing with our own writing, if you’re not reading it aloud or you don’t do anything with audio, especially with literary writing, you can get some really long sentences. Where do you breathe? Decide where you are going to breathe.

Laura: Yes, absolutely. In fact, audiobook narrators will. I’ve done a lot of my own audiobook, so you mark up your script where you’re going to breathe. So as an audiobook narrator, you prepare a document with that kind of thing if it’s a difficult bit.

Jo: So if someone’s got a reading coming up—I know you have got one coming up, you talked about that beforehand. So I guess another question would be, what do you pick?

Some people say, “Oh, well, I just start at the beginning,” but I’ve been to so many readings where I’m like, “I don’t think that’s the best section to read.” What bits do you pick?

Any tips for preparing a reading as opposed to an interview?

I think, you know, pick an exciting bit.

Laura: Yes, exactly. I mean, sort of obvious, but if the beginning of your book is really intriguing and gets straight into the action, then go for it. You want to excite people, don’t you? You want to inspire them to want to read more.

So you might even want to choose a bit that ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. Not right at the end, no spoilers, but choose an exciting bit and a bit that will be fun to read out loud, and then practice and decide how you are going to read it.

Really think about that performance element. How can you draw people in by varying the volume or the tempo of the reading? You know, you might want to just slow down a little bit on a suspenseful moment.

Are you going to do anything when you do dialogue? You know, I don’t think anyone should do silly voices, by the way.

Jo: Unless you are an actor, and well, yes you can.

Laura: Yes. But you probably do want to speak slightly differently so that we know it’s dialogue, for instance, you know?

Jo: Yes, I think, and also—

Videoing yourself practicing can really help.

Because I think you still have to, as if you were doing an interview. You are always looking out to the audience now and then, or if you are doing a professional speaking engagement, you are meeting eyes of the audience.

I feel with the reading, like the worst readings I’ve seen is the author literally has got their nose in the book and doesn’t even look up. They’re just like rushing through it. So you do have to look up, don’t you, to bring people in.

Laura: I couldn’t agree more. It’s so important. I mean, that kind of reading from a script while still connecting with the other character is a really basic part of actor training. Reading and connecting with the audience is so important.

It just comes from practice and knowing the text really, really well. Not quite memorizing it, but having such a clear sense of the shape of it and what happens in the sentences that you can look away from the page a lot.

Jo: Because at the end of the day, it’s that—is it Maya Angelou? People will forget what you said, but they won’t forget how they feel.

Laura: Yes.

Jo: So, you want people to go away feeling like, “Wow, that author was really great. I’m really interested in that book.” They might not remember what the hell you read, but if you read it in a way that connects with them. I think you just have to bring that energy, don’t you, in some form.

Laura: Yes, and the other thing to remember is that people who come to book readings come because they enjoy it. They come because they want to have a good time. So if you are scared to make eye contact with them, you are sort of pushing them away a bit.

If you look around the room as people are arriving, if you look and you make eye contact, they’ll probably smile at you because they’re excited to hear from your book. They’re probably excited to be there. At the very least, they want you to succeed.

So don’t be scared of your audience. Think of them as a group of people who just want to share in the pleasure of hearing your work.

Jo: Yes, and I think just to encourage people, obviously both of us, I have different experience to you, but—

I’ve been speaking for a long time and done a lot of events, and it just gets easier with practice.

Laura: It really, really, really does. I mean, I used to be terrified of directing, of teaching, of leading workshops, of all the things that I have spent most of my life doing, the first time I did it.

Not just the first time, for a while it was nerve wracking, but it’s a great feeling when you’ve done it, and then when you meet someone or they send you a message saying, “Oh, that was great.” You know, it’s just wonderful.

Jo: Well, you mentioned workshops there, and I think this is another skill that’s different to reading or speaking. A lot of writers teach at retreats and also attend retreats or doing classes.

So what are your tips for the more participatory things, where either the writer who’s trying to run the workshop is an introvert, or the people who attend are introverts?

Like, have you come across any particular challenges there?

Laura: Yes, I think for me, for like leading workshops, it’s all about preparation and knowing what the purpose of the workshop is. So what do you want people to go away with? You know, what skill or experience are you trying to convey?

If you’ve done lots of prep, and you’ve got discussion topics and activities fulfilling that objective, then that’s a confidence booster. Just knowing that you’ve got lots of stuff to fill the time.

Then if you are really struggling with nerves, make sure that you get the participants to do some of the work. Because you can set them a task. They’re there to learn to do, and people learn by doing. They learn by experience.

So you can even have a task that they get stuck into straight away so that they’re all busy writing while you are doing your careful breathing and getting command of yourself. Then get them to discuss. So try and structure it in a way that’s helpful to you.

Jo: Yes, I think preparation is a huge part of helping introverts in particular. I don’t know, I think it is correlated with introversion, like needing preparation. I sent you questions for this interview and we probably could have winged it, but I hate winging it. I need to have questions.

Laura: Me too.

Jo: We might not stick with them, but at least we both know that we are prepared and that makes me feel better, even if you don’t even look at them. Some people come on and say, “Oh, I didn’t even look at your questions.” Oh my goodness. No.

I love getting questions. I love being prepared.

Laura: I love getting questions. I love being prepared. I would never go into a workshop or a rehearsal without a really clear sense of what I’m going to do because that’s how the participants are going to get the best experience, I think, out of the workshop.

I think also just thinking about participants, if people who are introverted attend a workshop, they should think about how they can get their needs met because you don’t want to go and be too shy and not get value from the workshop.

So, for instance, things like if you hate the thought of reading your work aloud for it to be critiqued, get in touch with the workshop leader or the tutor in advance or speak to them on the day or just slip them a note and just tell them that. They’ll get someone else to read it out. You can find ways to mitigate your anxiety and still get the most out of it.

Jo: So we’re almost out of time, but I did also want to ask you, you collaborate with a group of authors on a Substack magazine—I guess online magazine—called Bending the Arc. I always find collaborative author things a challenge. You are in theater, so you’re used to collaboration. So tell us—

What is the intent in that magazine? What are the benefits and challenges of collaborating on something like an email newsletter thing?

Laura: Well, I sort of have to say where it comes from because Bending the Arc, it emerged out of my exploration of climate fiction that I’ve been doing. It led me to Manda Scott’s Thrutopia Masterclass, which was an online study course. So we were five of us teamed up in 2024 to study this masterclass for six months.

I don’t know if people are familiar with the term thrutopia. I think it’s still quite new. So it was a term that Rupert Reed came up with. He’s an environmental academic and it means telling stories that aren’t dystopias.

So not imagining how awful everything’s going to be, but not utopias where you’ve got a kind of magically perfect future, but looking at thrutopia. How do we get through from here to a better place? So it fits in a lot with the Green Stories idea and the climate fiction.

So for this masterclass, we met every week for six months, watched a weekly video, did writing exercises, and discussed it. When we got to the end of it, we didn’t want to stop. We didn’t want to stop meeting.

We had generated some new, some work in this new genre, and we wanted a place to showcase it. Also, probably as importantly, we wanted to invite other writers to experiment with this kind of work as well. So we thought a Substack magazine would be a good way of doing this.

Jo: Has it performed a function though?

I feel like a lot of the experimental writing we do and group writing and everything is great for a certain amount of time. But then having obviously podcasted for years and done various things, things do not continue unless there is a benefit to the people involved at some point. So, for example, marketing your own books or something.

Laura: Yes. Yes. I mean, I think there’s sort of two things. One is, I’ve made lots of really interesting connections with people that I just wouldn’t have met without this.

There’s five of us. So putting out a Substack with five people’s networks, we were very quickly reaching a lot more people than just I would reach on my own. I have used it to promote my own work in that an extract from Dirt was in the first edition.

Also I think what I get out of it is we are like a writer support group. We critique each other’s work, we champion each other, so it gives us a focus for our weekly meetings. We are meeting lots of other writers through it when we open up submissions so that it’s coming out in two editions at the moment.

We’re doing it twice a year, so we send out a flurry of posts. It’s not like we put out a post every week. So it’s a slightly different way of using Substack.

Jo: What other marketing are you doing for your book?

Laura: Oh, I would say I’m following all the advice on all the webinars and podcasts and Alliance of Independent Authors. I’ve got my author newsletter that I’m doing. Obviously Dirt is for children and young adults, so I’m going into schools, I’m doing talks in libraries, a blog tour, all those kinds of things.

Jo: Great.

So where can people find you and your book online?

Laura: So my website is LauraBaggaley.co.uk and that’s Baggaley, B-A-double-G-A-L-E-Y. I’m on Instagram, @LauraBaggaleyWriter.

The Thrutopian Magazine, Bending the Arc is on Substack. If anyone is interested in the thrutopian genre or Green Stories or anything else we’ve talked about, drop me a line. I love talking about all this, and as I said, I love connecting with other writers.

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

Laura: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

The post Performance Tips For Authors, And Writing Climate Fiction With Laura Baggaley first appeared on The Creative Penn.

When I first wrote Structuring Your Novel over a decade ago, I didn’t know it would become one of my most beloved books—helping almost 100,000 writers find clarity and confidence in their storytelling. Hearing from writers who finished their manuscripts or published their books because of it has been one of the greatest joys of my career.

Last year, I released a revised and expanded second edition of Structuring Your Novel to celebrate its 10-year anniversary. I added new chapters, refined explanations, and updated the material with everything I’ve learned in the past decade about story structure. But I knew that wasn’t quite enough.

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So today, I’m thrilled to share the Revised & Expanded Second Edition of the Structuring Your Novel Workbook—a hands-on guide to help you apply story structure directly to your own projects.

Celebrate the release of K.M. Weiland’s Structuring Your Novel Workbook, Revised & Expanded Second Edition. Packed with new exercises and prompts, this hands-on guide helps writers master story structure and craft powerful novels.

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If you have already read the first edition, I would totally appreciate it, if you’d consider leaving a review on the new one! Creating a new edition meant losing the over six hundred reviews the book collected over the past decade. I would totally appreciate it if you’d help me rebuild the review section!

More About the Structuring Your Novel Workbook (Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition)

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Winners will be announced Monday, October 20th (via email and on Instagram). Enter below! (Note: no purchase is necessary to enter.)

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How do you stand out as an author when thousands of books are published every day? What’s the difference between having a logo and having a real brand that sells books? Is it possible to maintain your authentic voice while appealing to genre readers who seem more loyal to categories than authors? With Steve Brock

In the intro, Baker & Taylor shutting down [The Bottom Line]; Holiday promotions for your books [Productive indie fiction writer]; Writing Storybundle; Updating Shopify metadata — Hextom app; Publishing and change [Publishing Perspectives]; Paying AIs to read my books [Kevin Kelly]; signing my special editions at BookVault; The Critically Reflective Practitioner; Deliciously twisted Halloween book sale.

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 

Steve Brock is a nonfiction author, photographer, and branding expert. His books include Hidden Travel, which he has talked about on my Books and Travel podcast, as well as The Creative Wild, Make Something Beautiful, and Brand Something Beautiful: A Branding Workbook for Artists, Writers, and Other Creatives.

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

• Brand vs. reputation. Why branding is about perception in readers’ minds, not just visual consistency
• Discovery vs. creation. How to uncover what makes you distinctive
• Standing out in crowded genres. Techniques for differentiating yourself while still satisfying genre expectations
• Multiple pen names. Managing branded houses vs. house of brands when writing across different audiences
• From brand to sales. Converting nebulous brand concepts into practical marketing confidence and clear messaging
• Beautiful book production. Creating workbooks and products that command attention in an AI-saturated market

You can find Steve at BrandSomethingBeautiful.com or brandsomethingbeautiful.substack.com.

Transcript of the interview with Steve Brock

Joanna: Steve Brock is a nonfiction author, photographer, and branding expert. His books include Hidden Travel, which he has talked about on my Books and Travel podcast, as well as The Creative Wild, Make Something Beautiful, and Brand Something Beautiful: A Branding Workbook for Artists, Writers, and Other Creatives, which we are talking about today. Welcome to the show, Steve.

Steve: Thank you, Joanna. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Joanna: So much to talk about. But first up—

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

Steve: I’ve written all my adult life, but it was more in the realms of school writing and then working in branding and marketing agencies, doing a lot of marketing copy and ad copy.

Then in 2007, I think, I had this sense of wanting to work on a book, which was the one that ended up becoming Hidden Travel. It only took 14 years to get that from idea to publication. Since then, as you mentioned, some other books, so I’ve embraced that.

The branding has come along actually in parallel, and it’s a great point of how one area of your life, particularly your creative life, affects the other. Branding fundamentally is about telling your story well. It’s understanding who you are, what you do, and what makes you different.

There’s a lot of storytelling involved. So the more I focus and spend time on writing, particularly in the fiction realm, which has been mostly just short stories for me lately, the more that it has improved the work of branding.

I find branding interesting because, like we’ve talked about with travel, branding is really about exploration. It’s diving deep into understanding something that is hidden and bringing that to light.

Joanna: Before we get back into branding—

You mentioned short stories there. Are you publishing those?

Steve: No, those have always been a sideline. I have a novel that I started when I got stuck on Hidden Travel, and it’s about maybe a third done, so that’ll be the next effort that I focus on for the fiction realm. But no, the short stories have always just been more for my own craft building and just the enjoyment of it. I’m looking forward to actually reading yours that’s coming out, or is it out?

Joanna: Well, as we record this, the Kickstarter has just finished. So depending on when this comes out, it may be available. The Buried and the Drowned is my short story collection.

I think it’s interesting because you can play with short stories and you can explore, as you mentioned there, exploring and looking at hidden things. I think it’s much easier to play around with short stories because you can just do such different things.

Let’s come to branding, because the word “brand” is really difficult and people are already flinching. They’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to think about author brand.” So you mentioned a little bit there, but—

How are you defining brand as it relates to authors? And why should we even care about this?

Steve: The word “brand” applies whether you are a major corporation, a nonprofit organization, a single solopreneur, or an author, because it’s all about perception.

A lot of people think of branding as being about your logo or your tagline, or maybe the colors that you use in the background of your Instagram reels and having consistency there. That’s part of it, but it’s such a small part of it.

Branding is fundamentally about the overall perception that people have of you or your creative work. If I say, for example, Stephen King, or James Patterson, or Toni Morrison, there are going to be associations you have with each of those people, and those associations are actually what make up their brand.

The brand is a tricky thing because we think we can control it, but we can’t. The brand exists in the minds of your audiences. So for writers, that means the minds of your readers out there.

Your job is to craft it, to know the story you want people to tell and be able to reinforce that over time so that they’re telling the same story. Because if you do not know the story you want to tell, someone else is going to do it for you, and most likely in a way that’s not going to be helpful to you.

So just think of brand almost like your reputation. What are you doing to build up your reputation? That’s maybe the simplest way to think about brand and branding.

Joanna: For authors, I mean for me, I have Joanna Penn and I have J.F. Penn.

So for anyone who’s writing under two names, are we thinking about two brands?

Steve: Yes and no. Because you show up in a lot of places. For example, on this podcast, you show up as both people, not your products necessarily, but you as a person that represents both of those brands.

When you have an author brand with multiple pen names, there are elements of that you may want to keep discrete and separate. But on the other hand, in your case, the real divide there is—to oversimplify—J.F. Penn for the fiction and Joanna Penn for the nonfiction.

You as the person and the brand that you represent, there’s a lot of consistency between those two. What you don’t want to do is if those two brand names or author names are different and they represent two completely different audiences that you really want to keep separate.

The example I give in the book is if you’re writing both children’s illustrated fiction books and you’re also writing erotica, you do not want those two audiences to even really know that you’re the same person. So you would keep those dramatically separate.

It’s the same in the corporate world where we talk about what the fancy jargony term is “a brand spectrum.” You have, for example, a branded house like BMW, and then a house of brands like Procter & Gamble, which has a whole bunch of sub-brands underneath that, and some people may not even know that Procter & Gamble is behind those.

If your pen names are really different genres, you’re probably more like a house of brands. Whereas if you have a consistent vibe or theme or thing you want to be known for, you would be more like a branded house, even if you have different pen names.

Joanna: I like “branded house” and I like “brand spectrum.” That feels more natural, I think. There are also two angles that potentially we can approach this from. Maybe we can take them separately.

One is new author or author wanting to start a new pen name, wanting to construct a brand from nothing, from scratch—actually control it and build it.

The other way is discovery branding, let’s call it, where you look back at your work and you go, “I guess I’ve somehow created a brand. I just can’t figure out really what it is, but I just keep writing stuff and it kind of gets created.”

Could you tackle those two ends of the spectrum, of creating it from nothing versus discovering it?

Steve: That’s a great question because I would say that discovering it is probably the more common approach.

One of the elements of your brand is your voice or your style, and I define those as three different things. Brand is the overarching perception. Style is the visual representation of the brand. Voice is the verbal or written representation.

I think that part of finding what your style and your voice are comes through discovery almost entirely. If you try to overthink it, it’s really hard.

If you start that journey of discovery, focusing on a consistent and distinctive voice, it kind of emerges naturally and it’s easy to step into that. There’s a point though, even on a discovery brand as you name it, that it becomes intentional.

That’s where you start to identify certain themes that have emerged that you want to be known for, and then you want to elevate those or amplify those. Honestly, that’s like discovery writing. I’m kind of a hybrid myself. I will do an outline, but then I’ll go off of it. Same thing here.

You’re discovering your brand, but once you find, “Okay, that really resonates, that element really resonates with my audiences,” then you want to amplify that and make sure that gets incorporated into everything you’re doing.

Now if you’re just creating from scratch, you can actually define what those elements are. That’s what the book is really about—how to create what we call a brand identity, which is just like a personal identity.

It’s who you are, what are the elements, what are your characteristics, what are your personality traits, what’s the promise that you make to your audiences? If you craft that from scratch, you can be very intentional.

I would say even there, just like a planner writer goes off script sometimes and starts going in directions they find that their characters have a life of their own, the same way here is you can map out that planned brand, but still be able to change it as you start to find things that resonate or that you want to lean into.

Joanna: One thing that I think of when it comes to brand is also book covers. Even if I used exactly the same name, if I used Joanna Penn for all of my books, my fiction would look quite different. Different color palette, different font, different design elements.

How can we relate book covers in particular to our brand?

Steve: It’s consistency. Consistency is the key to all branding, whether it’s for authors or anyone. As long as people can recognize you—think about branding, where it came from. It came from the American West and branding cattle to know that they belonged to a particular ranch.

A brand has evolved, but it is essentially about identification. I want to know what that brand stands for, who is it and who’s behind it, and what does it stand for? On covers, you want consistency, you want a through line.

Really that’s another way of thinking about a brand—what is that through line that you’re going to find?

Now this is a key for authors, which doesn’t exist completely in the same way in other industries: there are many, many readers out there that will always be more loyal to a genre than they are to a brand.

If you have a reader who absolutely loves your thrillers, and then all of a sudden you decide you want to start writing something in the romance category, well, they may still like you and get your books, but they’re not going to necessarily buy your romance because the brand’s not as strong as the loyalty to the genre.

Joanna: It’s interesting also because I feel like authors know publishers and know imprints, but most readers wouldn’t even know. They don’t know HarperCollins or they don’t necessarily know an imprint. Most readers are not loyal to those brand name publishing houses.

Secondarily, they may or may not care about an author brand, and as you say, they’re more likely to be faithful to a genre. Most of us can’t remember the names of the authors whose books we read. It’s a sad truth, but some people will remember, and those are the people who I guess we’re trying to connect with.

Is that right, or—

With our covers and our consistency, are we also appealing to those people who read by genre as well?

Steve: It’s a little bit of both because we’re dealing with that really wacky, crazy inconsistent thing called human beings. We’re all that way. Like Walt Whitman said, we contain multitudes and we do contradict ourselves.

What you’re really going after is not really like Kevin Kelly’s thousand true fans, but something close to that. It’s finding that super fan, it’s finding those people that are going to follow you no matter what you put out.

The nicest compliment I ever received was at a travel writer conference. I did a workshop and the head of it said he really liked the particular piece and he said, “You’re on your way to being that person of whom it is said, ‘Whatever Steve Brock writes, I will read it. I will read anything from him.’”

I am nowhere near there. I don’t know if I will ever achieve that, but that’s kind of the goal that you want to be for those particular super fans.

Here’s where the brand kicks in. You can still betray even the most loyal fan if you write something that doesn’t feel true to who you are as an author.

For example, let’s think of Richard Osman. Richard Osman, who wrote The Thursday Murder Club and all those—if he were to go and write a science fiction genre book, there would be a ton of people that would follow him and want to read that book.

If, however, that science fiction book had no humor in it, and the characters were downright mean to each other and it was really violent and graphic, he would not only lose those readers, but they would probably be hesitant to pick up the next book in The Thursday Murder Club series because he’s kind of wrecked his brand.

Joanna: It’s so interesting. I’m going to blame you Americans for this because we’re not so sensitive here in the UK, but swearing is a really interesting thing.

When I wrote my first book, in my private life, I do swear sometimes. In my first book, I had naturally written as a British person, had included some words.

The reaction I had from my American readers, who were not bothered by the violence—and I don’t write graphic violence, but I write thrillers, so there’s some body count—the reaction to the swear words made me decide, this is back in 2009 now, I was like, “Okay, I won’t swear in my books.”

So I don’t use swear words at all. It’s so interesting how there are a lot of different genre elements that might put people off, but—

If you use a swear word that you wouldn’t normally use in your books, that can make readers disappear and never come back.

Steve: Honestly, in today’s world—and again, yes, you can blame America, but it has spread everywhere in terms of just how divided we are and how prickly we are in terms of topics and issues—basically anything you do will upset somebody. So you can’t worry about that.

This is why you have to focus on that persona of that one true fan, your best fan, that you’re writing towards. Because if you try to write towards every possible criticism, you’re going to mess up. Just stick to that. Know that not everyone’s going to be happy.

The example we give in a lot of corporate branding workshops: there’s always a good number of people sitting around in the conference room with a MacBook or some Apple product, and I mention to them, “Do you realize that there are far more people in the world that absolutely rabidly hate Apple than there are people that love Apple?”

Just sheer numbers. If you look at PCs, for example, Apple has maybe an 8% market share. Is Apple a bad brand because so many people hate it? The reality is no, it’s a great brand because those who do love it are even more passionate about it.

You’re not going to be able to please everybody, but if you can please those who are in your tribe, then you’re going to succeed. After all, we’re in a “niches are riches” world. The more you niche down, the more profitable it is in today’s world.

So don’t be afraid of being true to who you are, but also being sensitive to who that audience is.

Joanna: I wasn’t saying don’t swear. I was saying if you decide to swear or not swear, stay consistent. The level of sex and the level of violence—if you’re writing fiction, those three things are things that people’s preferences generally stay pretty similar on within a brand.

So the mainstream thriller niche, those things—you could read a lot of mainstream thrillers and they would obey those rules as well.

You mentioned niching down and thinking about that, but one of the things you had in the book—and you have some really big questions in the book because one that is very difficult is: say you are writing action adventure thrillers.

So my Arcane series, a bit like Dan Brown. Dan Brown has a new book out, The Secret of Secrets, and I’m reading it at the moment and it makes me feel both happy because I write similar books to him, but also, “Oh no, I write similar books to him.”

You tackle this: how do I make my work distinctive and stand out amid all the noise? There is so much noise and I’m not competing with Dan Brown, by the way, but in terms of action adventure thrillers, there’s tons of them.

How do we stand out when we also need to please genre readers?

Steve: I would say by knowing what it is that makes you distinctive. Part of it is your voice, part of it is your interest, part of it is just the way you go about framing sentences and plots and so forth.

Take, going back to Stephen King as an example—part of it, for loyal fans, they know this and they don’t necessarily like it, but part of his brand is he doesn’t end his books well. He’s known in a lot of circles as just having pretty mediocre endings. But people don’t care because they know that the journey to get there was really rewarding.

I would say things like that—being known for just a surprise ending, being known for—you know, the O. Henry Awards, right? We look at O. Henry simply because he was so good at those surprise twists at the end that we actually use his name today associated with that. Or even like Hemingway, his style, the short, curt sentences.

There are elements of your book that are going to be unique to you. For example, your voice, your human voice that comes across in your brand here. That’s the main thing that I think people will identify with—separating out you and your products from you the person.

That can get kind of complex, but one of the key things to me is recognizing that your products are going to have a certain voice to them, and that voice in those genres may be different from genre to genre.

You as the author, as you’re interfacing with the public, will have a consistent voice, but it’s still different from you the person from Joanna Penn the person versus Joanna Penn the brand. Those are two different things, and that’s hard for a lot of people. If you think about like an actor playing a character, it works pretty well.

We as authors, when we’re publicly speaking or talking, there’s a character that represents our brand that is going to be, in some ways the best of our personal characteristics, but it’s not us. And that gives you some padding, some distance from it so that you can separate that out and be able to address it.

But going back to your point: knowing what the distinctives are of your own personality and the brand there, and being able to identify those and call those out—that’s what helps you be distinctive.

If you do not know what those distinctives are, how you’re different from Dan Brown in this particular case, it will be very difficult. And by just reading Dan Brown, it starts to seep in, and you might start writing like Dan Brown and you don’t want to do that.

Joanna: I don’t know, getting banned by the Vatican was the best marketing move he ever made! But on this, like you said there, if you don’t know what makes you distinctive—from the side of many authors listening—

I don’t think we do understand what makes us distinctive.

It is very hard. We have this thing in particularly the fiction community of finding your author voice. The reason we say “finding” it is because it’s so hard, it’s not obvious, and it takes practice writing lots of words and then something kind of emerges from it.

I think the question of what is distinctive—this is where AI can help. I’ve certainly done this: if people are happy uploading their work into ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini—read the terms and conditions as I always say—but you can then have a discussion with it as to what makes you distinctive, where do you fit in the spectrum of different authors.

I’ve actually found that the most useful tool, even though I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades, because it’s so hard to figure it out yourself.

Steve: I totally agree with your last statement there, and I think that is a really good tactic for doing that. I would just add to it another thing that seems obvious, but I know so many authors who have never done this: You ask your audience. You ask your readers.

You take a dozen readers of any of your series, and you ask them, “Okay, why is this book different? What do you love most about this? What makes it distinctive from others?”

Now, they’re not always going to be able to give you a clear idea, but pretty soon it’s really interesting how themes start to emerge there when you start doing that.

I mentioned Richard Osman, for example. I could just whip off those as just three characteristics that make his books different: he has a really good sense of humor, his characters are all caring about each other, and he addresses age from a fresh perspective.

Many, many other authors address those three type of elements, but not in quite the same way. So in the same way with you, there’s going to be elements that are going to be similar to Dan Brown and others, but that combination of those—that’s something that only you do.

Joanna: I guess we’ve been talking a lot about fiction.

Is there anything that nonfiction authors need to think about differently, or do all the principles apply?

Steve: I think the principles are even clearer and in some ways easier to manage for nonfiction writers because you can talk about the subject. If you’re thinking about nonfiction, it’s like, “How do I become the thought leader expert on this?” And then what are the distinctive ways I’m going to treat things?

I can speak to it. Let’s talk about from the standpoint of this book and from my own branding. I have been told by clients over the years—probably the best compliment I get is that “we’ve hired branding experts before, they come in, they tell us what they think our brand should be, and then we fire them.”

“We don’t like consultants, but you don’t act like a consultant. You came in and you listened and you heard us, and then you didn’t tell us what we should be. You told us what we already knew, but we didn’t have the words to use to explain that.”

So that tells me that my own brand is: there’s a high degree of empathy, there’s a high degree of listening, but there’s also an element of synthesis. I can start to unpack those and say, “Okay, this is why my nonfiction book or works, in particular this book on branding for artists and writers, is going to be different.”

Another element would be simplifying. I’ve seen too many organizations, particularly working with nonprofits, that fail because they’ve tried to take on too much. So a key part of this is making it simple.

You start to understand what those elements—simplicity, empathy, synthesis—those things can become brand points, characteristics, distinctives, that then I could apply to other nonfiction works that I do.

Joanna: So then once we’ve got these, I guess, quite nebulous words around branding, how do we turn that into effective book marketing?

How do we go from this broader idea to specifics that will actually sell books?

Steve: I would say listen to your episode from, I think it was in August, where you read from Marketing for Authors, and you have the entire list of the specifics there. So those are the tactics that you can do in terms of selling more books.

Marketing is downstream from branding. But here’s how branding can help you sell more books—two ways: internal and external.

First is the internal. Branding gives you the clarity of the messages that you want to communicate because it gives you a sense of what it is that you’re really about. There’s almost this idea of mindset that comes and the confidence that comes from having that clarity about what you stand for, what you believe.

One of the examples in the book is this exercise of “I believe… I exist to…” Just that simple sense of knowing what your purpose is and your beliefs and values are—that alone can help provide that clarity. So there’s clarity, there’s mindset, there’s confidence.

Externally, your messaging becomes so much clearer because you know how to talk about yourself. That’s the thing—authors, we are great at telling stories, but we’re terrible at telling our own story.

That’s what branding is about, is helping you to tell your own story better, so it builds the confidence, gives you the story that you want others to tell so that they can in turn tell others about you.

That’s a huge piece of it. It’s like the game of telephone. If you have a very clear and consistent message, they can tell others about you in a way that they couldn’t before.

I think another aspect about this is that quite frankly, most authors can go out there and ask ChatGPT, “Give me 20 tactics that I need to do to market my book,” and you’ll get them right away. There’s no lack of access to information on how to market your book out there. The problem is we don’t do it.

The reason we don’t do it is because usually we’re afraid. We’re either afraid of what might happen, what people might think. We don’t think we know enough to do it. We do all these things where we do not act.

Part of the beauty of the brand—you say it’s nebulous concepts, but I would say that the nebulous concepts, the intangibles of life: trust, relationships, love, friendship, hope, accomplishment. Those are all nebulous concepts, but those are also the most powerful drivers that we have in life.

I think the same thing is here. You get that nebulous concept of knowing what you’re doing and how you’re different and how to tell your story better, and that builds your confidence. So you are far more likely to engage in doing those tactics that are going to help you sell the books.

Joanna: I wonder if it’s also that in book marketing we do rely a lot on things like paid ads where the book cover is the thing that draws people in, and so having this sort of whole-self approach is less used.

Podcasting is a game, I think, where this kind of branding that you are talking about can really come across.

Is that a good way for authors to think about pitching different podcasts around elements of their brand—in terms of their story behind the books, the person behind the books?

Steve: Yes, I think podcast is one channel for that. I mean, your blog, if you have one, even your social media—all of those are ways for the audience to connect with you as the author, and you’re absolutely spot on.

Because the problem a lot of times with author marketing is we confuse the author brand—which is almost like the equivalent of an organizational brand, but you’re just a one-person organization—we confuse that with a product brand. The book itself is a product. It has in some ways its own brand, so it has to relate.

Just like I’m selling products on a shelf in a store, you’re going to have one reaction to the product itself, and you’re going to compare that to other products on the shelf.

Over time, if you find that there is a particular product from a particular manufacturer that you really like, you’re going to be more loyal and you’re going to start looking for other products in that line.

So the podcast, the blog, all these other touchpoints give people a way to engage with you so they know what other products… Here’s a key thing about all this: think in terms of ecosystems.

We tend to think in terms of one-offs, like, “Oh, okay, I’ve got to work on this particular book. I’m launching this particular book. I’m doing the Facebook ads for this particular book,” and not thinking about how it relates back.

To your earlier question or comment about having consistency in the book covers, same type of thing. You want people to know that there is this through line, that there’s this consistent connection back to something more.

If they can connect that to you as a person through the podcast or other ways of having more of the personality of you and everything else, all the better.

Joanna: I did want to also talk to you about the product itself, your book, which is this workbook. It’s more than a workbook though because I think I have called some of my workbooks—they really only just contain the questions, not the full text.

Mine are also not designed and laid out as yours is. It really is a beautiful product in the layout, in the way it’s done, and it makes me want to do better with mine. I wondered if you could maybe—

Talk about this product of a branding workbook because I feel it’s so much more than that. And any other thoughts on multiple streams of income?

Steve: Thank you for that. I would say thank you also because unbeknownst to you, you were actually one of the reasons for this particular format.

It was probably a year or so ago on one of the podcasts where you said, “Amazon’s pulling my workbooks because they’re pulling everybody’s workbooks because they’re finding that people are using AI to say, ‘Hey, Claude, give me 40 different questions about this topic and some exercises,’ and then they add in some fill-in-the-blank lines and publish it on Amazon.”

So the idea of that traditional fill-in-the-blank workbook, I think it made me hesitant to try something like that.

The other thing was I started this off as a course, and so the course creation—I had a lot of the graphics and different things in place, and it just ended up being that this became a hybrid.

So it’s both a workbook and a book, but I think this is key, and I would say for a lot of listeners, if you’re doing something particularly like this in nonfiction, to consider this approach.

It’s not just a hybrid from a formatting standpoint, it’s a hybrid in terms of the outcome or the goal of the book. Here’s the thing I say in the book: The goal of this book is not to make you an expert on branding. The goal of this book is to help you create your own creative brand.

So this book, I do not care. After you’re done with it, you’ve filled it in, it’s an artifact of your learning. Every other book I’ve worked on has always been about educating, and this one is about accomplishment.

I think people today—we have too much information out there. People want to achieve things and get things done, and so the more that you can think of formats that are going to help with that, I think the better.

The other thing about it is breaking it down to smaller bites and takeaways that people can use.

I’m also mindful of just the positioning of it. I think it was Jonah Berger in his book Contagious, who talks about venture capitalists and how when they’re evaluating a company, they look at it and say, “Is this company a vitamin or a painkiller?”

A vitamin is something that’s very good for you and very useful and very healthy, but you can put it off. A painkiller—if you got pain, you need it right away.

My previous book, The Creative Wild on creativity, it was very vitamin-like. I would actually say that even Hidden Travel was more of a vitamin. It’s good for you, it’s interesting, it’s about meaningful travel, all of that. But it’s not a pressing felt need for a lot of people.

I think this book on branding for those who are struggling with marketing and everything—I positioned this one, it really is more of a painkiller. So the question for all of you out there listening is—

How can you make your nonfiction work more of a painkiller?

Then look at other formats that are related to it. Another key aspect of this is that the workbook has a paper and a Kindle version, but then the worksheets—I call them worksheets—I have two versions: a Google Doc version and a fillable or editable PDF version that are on my website that have all the questions.

It doesn’t have all the explanatory text, but it has all the questions and all the fields. But what I’m doing is I’m sending people to my website and they have to sign up for it. So now all of a sudden you’ve got them into the broader ecosystem there. And there could be follow-ups, right?

You’ve already written the marketing book, so I don’t need to do that, but I could take any chapter and go into much more detail about it. I could do this and there’s a tiny element in this thing on choose-your-own-adventure.

There are ways of formatting a book so it’s more of a choose-your-own-adventure or a scavenger hunt, which is more of a guidebook that could help people. You can have additional merchandise that’s related to it. All these different things.

I have a friend, Naomi Kinsman, who has a “creativity in a box” type of thing. So these boxed elements, lots of ancillary products that you can add to that for multiple streams of income as well.

Joanna: Your book also leads to speaking engagements. It really is—it’s beautiful. I do want to emphasize that, but you’ve also made it harder on yourself. So one of the reasons that we as independent authors have done more basic workbooks and have done more basic books is because of the cost of production. I wondered—

Has this made it more complicated for you to sell?

Or are there different versions of the print edition for, say, Amazon print-on-demand versus selling from your website, for example? Because it looks very high quality.

Steve: Yes, but it is the same for all of us, right? The more heavy lifting you do upfront, the easier you make it for others. So yes, it has been a pain. I will not argue about that.

I think the writing of this was the easiest book of all because it’s just 27 years worth of expertise that I could just—I didn’t have to research anything. I just whipped it out. That part was easy.

Formatting it, getting into all that—pain in the ankle. But I think that it makes it more accessible for people, because a lot of people have the same reaction that you have. With the title, like Brand Something Beautiful, you kind of want it to look that way.

That has been actually an allure to people. I don’t think that a lot of the graphics got translated into the Kindle version of it. The tablet version that’s full color works, the Kindle version—I had to scale down a lot. But that’s okay because it still delivers the product as well.

Joanna: I love AI, everybody knows that, and I use it a lot, but I also don’t like the sort of mass-produced books that are coming out. So anyone who puts more effort into physical production of beautiful products is going to stand out.

I mentioned about what is it that makes you distinctive, and I’m at this kind of point in my career where I also want to be known for making beautiful books. So I love that you’ve used the word “beautiful.” We all love beautiful books and we buy stuff because we love covers and we love the foil, and we love all the cool stuff.

Just so people know, on your website, brandsomethingbeautiful.com, you can see examples of the interior pages so people can see how that is done.

Did you do this yourself or did you work with a designer?

Steve: I worked with the designer actually, though the full disclosure is my son is a graphic designer and a brilliant one. So he did all the graphic elements.

What I did was—and this is taking the extra step—I remember there was, I think it was Steve Zaillian, some producer in Hollywood years ago who’s been dramatically successful, and someone said, “How did you become so good at this?” And he said, “Because I looked around at the work that needed to be done and I looked at the level of effort that other people were making, and I just did a little bit more.”

I think on here, I upped my game using Adobe InDesign for the layouts and things like that. I would encourage people that there’s so much you can do in Canva these days. Just dive into it and get competent in it. But I think there are also times when you do want some professional design help on it as well.

Joanna: It’s interesting you mentioned Canva because I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about my gothic cathedral book, and over the summer I was looking at my photos,and obviously you are a photographer as well and you do travel stuff, and I was like, “Oh my goodness, there’s so many ways this book could go in terms of how the beautiful layout is done.”

It almost just opens up a completely different form of creativity, even though that’s not something I’m focusing on right now because it feels like a whole other area. I also feel like it does help set us apart. As you said, it’s that extra effort in terms of making a beautiful interior as well as a beautiful cover.

I think nonfiction, this is easier because, fiction, obviously the inside of a novel is plain text mostly—you can do some extra title pages or maps or whatever, but I think these nonfiction books can have all kinds of elements of design that help people: pull-outs and quotes and diagrams and all this kind of thing.

So it is a really creative process.

Steve: It totally is. I just read a book—we’re about to head off to Portugal soon, just for vacation—but I was reading a book that takes place in Lisbon called The Murderer’s Ape, like ape as in gorilla. It’s about a gorilla who can speak and is an engineer on this guy’s boat.

The long story of it is at the beginning of each chapter are just kind of these beautiful hand-drawn pen and ink illustrations, and just having that makes it such a richer experience. Little things like that.

So there’s a case where, if I had more time in my life and everything, I would be focusing on illustrated adult books, which are fictional like a novel, but that I illustrate.

What is it? The T.S. Spivet by… can’t remember his name. They made it into a movie, but The Life of T.S. Spivet. Anyway, he does that. It’s a brilliant book because of the illustrations that are on the margins of almost every single page. So there are ways of doing that even in fiction.

Joanna: We’ve all got to do more creative stuff in order to stand out, and for ourselves as well as for the readers. It kind of just brings the material alive. So I think that’s really cool.

But you mentioned there heading off to Portugal, and you and I connected around our love of travel. Hidden Travel I think is a wonderful book and you came on my Books and Travel podcast and we talked about that.

This is an interesting thing, right? Even for your brand, because brandsomethingbeautiful.com to me doesn’t look like the same person who did Hidden Travel. The conversation we had around that, to me, is very different conversation to the one we’ve had today.

So how does travel weave into your business? Or do you feel like those two things are quite different?

Steve: Oh, you called me out because it’s like, you know, do what I say, not what I do. Because I totally feel that way. Honestly, from my own brand and what I’m trying to do, I probably should. You know, what is it? The cobbler’s children have no shoes.

Joanna: The cobbler’s children have no shoes or something like that.

Steve: Right, exactly. Well, but the answer to that is, what you’re going to see over time is I start to build out more of particularly some of the social media stuff for Brand Something Beautiful, and this goes back to the idea of confidence.

Once the book is done, I’m into getting it out there. I’m like you, I do not like video, I do not like to be on video, et cetera. So I’ve never done anything, but I decided for this book I’m going to do Instagram reels.

One of the things I did was—I think it was either Gemini or ChatGPT—I just said, “Okay, here are the themes that I want to cover. These are going to be like blog posts and Substack type of things and LinkedIn articles over the next 12 weeks. Give me—and I’m going to be in these places in Portugal. I want to create reels that illustrate these points. Give me some ideas.”

It came out with some really wonderful ideas like the 25th of April Bridge in Lisbon. It said the point is that one of the points in the book is that the brand is the bridge between the making of something beautiful and the marketing of it.

Most people, artists especially, and writers, we hate marketing, but if you do the branding right, it’s the bridge between it, so it makes the marketing easier. And so then have a shot of me holding the book in front of the bridge and blah, blah, blah.

Joanna: Nice. That is great, actually, that’s a really good prompt. Thank you for that.

Steve: Yes. So those type of things. I’m definitely using those, so you will start to see a connection between the travel and the brand, but it will emerge over time because in a way, I have my brandwallop.com, which is the company, the agency I’ve run for decades.

That’s really more for corporations and nonprofits. So this Brand Something Beautiful is really more the individual brand type of stuff. It is exactly what you were talking about earlier. There’s some intentionality to it. I have not fully lived and leaned into that as much.

The travel and adventure—because the theme of my other book, The Creative Wild, was about what does it mean to create adventurously? It really is like a sequel to Hidden Travel in the sense of what do we learn from travel that we can apply to our creativity?

How do you create adventurously? What does that mean? What does that look like? How does discovery fit into creativity? All of that type of thing.

So that will all get woven in there. But the main thing of all is that even if it never shows up in my external artifacts and manifestation of the brand, it is affecting me as a person, as a creative.

As you know, in fact, one of the quotes—I paraphrase, I should say—from you, I think it was on the St… was it St. Cuthbert, the one you did in the southern part of England?

Joanna: The Pilgrims Way to Canterbury.

Steve: Okay, the Pilgrims Way. You said something after that in one of the podcasts, which I have told so many other people because it is so true. When I heard you, it’s like, “Okay, validation.”

It was this: “I went on this pilgrimage thinking I would have all this time walking and I would have all this time to come up with new ideas. And I had like virtually none on the trip itself.”

Joanna: Hmm.

Steve: But then two weeks later, after I got back, I couldn’t stop the ideas. I was overwhelmed with all the new ideas that came, and to me that’s the benefit of travel for all of us.

Yes, you can use the sites for, if you’re writing a novel, for getting the research. I know you love doing that and that’s a key piece of it, but just the experience of getting out of your comfort zone, being in a foreign place, particularly where your senses are picking up on things.

You notice things better, you pay better attention. All of that is going to help you as a creative.

Joanna: It’s so interesting and I’m glad we kind of finished with your own personal journey of growing into this other side of yourself as well, or trying to knit them together. I think that’s brilliant. It certainly shows that we’re all on this journey. This is a lifetime of experience and we just keep creating.

So people, if you are like, “Oh, I just don’t know,” just keep creating and something will emerge, won’t it?

Steve: It is absolutely true, and that would be one thing I didn’t mention earlier, really quickly, that relates to this in terms of those other streams of income: this idea of combinatorial thinking, where everything you do affects everything else in a good way.

To me in terms of multiple streams of income, the question is, rather than thinking of these one-offs, but this idea of ecosystems—how it all relates to each other and how can I leverage that?

I may do this, but I would say advice to anyone out there is: instead of selling individual courses—not instead of, in addition to selling like individual courses and books—start thinking in terms of membership programs.

There’s a ton of membership programs out there, but most of those memberships, or even like the subscriptions, like if you have a paid subscription on Substack or something like that, or even Patreon, is to treat those less as just like this gathering place for people to get additional content, but to make it more achievement-oriented.

What can I accomplish? Are there steps? Think in terms of the audience’s pathways and their journey through that, so that membership has these elements of like, “I’m gaining something and I’m growing through this.”

Key to that is gamification. Things like levels of rewards, of access, of just status. All these different things we can learn from gamification that you can be applying to that.

Quite frankly, I don’t think you have done this overtly or consciously, Joanna, but I think you do a great job of that. Like with your Patreon, you don’t just say, “Okay, I’m going to give you access to just additional content.”

Yes, you do that, but in addition, there’s a sense of belonging, there’s a sense of participation, there’s a sense of access that you get to you. And all those little elements really are about the key.

The last section of Brand Something Beautiful is all about creating experiences of delight rather than trying to see your audience as someone you want to sell to. It’s someone you want to delight. So what do you do? What can you do with every little touchpoint?

All these little touchpoints add up. So whether it’s travel and how that helps us to learn new things, or it’s intentionally using your multiple streams of income—all the different books, merch, all that stuff coming together. If you focus on it being about delighting your audience, it just changes the whole way you look at them.

Joanna: Fantastic.

So where can people find you and your books online?

Steve: Probably the easiest way for the purposes here would be BrandSomethingBeautiful.com or Substack, brandsomethingbeautiful.substack.com.

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

Steve: Thank you.

The post Brand Something Beautiful: How Authors Can Stand Out In A Crowded Market with Steve Brock first appeared on The Creative Penn.