How can you balance creativity with business in order to have a profitable, long-term author career? What were the successes and challenges of the Author Nation conference? Joe Solari shares his perspective.

In the intro, the money episode [Ink In Your Veins]; WISE for multi-currency banking; creative planning tips for 2025 [Self~Publishing Advice]; Surprising Trends Authors Can’t Ignore in 2025 [Novel Marketing Podcast]. Plus, an update on Death Valley, A Thriller, and reflections on seeing live theatre vs online & stream/subscription models.

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 

Joe Solari helps authors build great businesses through books, courses, and podcasting, as well as strategy and operations consulting. He’s also the managing director of Author Nation, the biggest conference for indie authors in the 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

• Maintaining sustainable balance between writing and marketing
• Creating an author business that fulfills you
• Utilizing your time effectively in 2025
• Navigating social media and business goals
• Learning to say no and focusing on what you really want
• Author Nation 2024 Highlights
• The logisitics of running an author conference
• Catering to different experience levels at an author conference

You can find Joe at JoeSolari.com and AuthorNation.live.

Transcript of Interview with Joe Solari

Joanna: Joe Solari helps authors build great businesses through books, courses, and podcasting, as well as strategy and operations consulting. He’s also the managing director of Author Nation, the biggest conference for indie authors in the world. So welcome back to the show, Joe.

Joe: Thanks for having me on again. I really enjoy the time we get to spend together. It seems like we talk more on the show than we do at events that we meet each other at.

Joanna: Absolutely. Well, we’re often both very busy. You’ve been on the show a couple of times before—and I’ll link to those in the show notes—so we’re just going to jump in today.

Now, as we head into 2025, authors are assessing their priorities for the year. Now, in your experience helping authors build profitable businesses—

How can we balance writing and marketing so that both are sustainable?

Joe: That’s such an awesome question. I think a lot of folks that are used to hearing me on your podcast or other podcasts are going to think that I’m going to go right into talking about profitability or budgeting, but I’m going to actually get a little different approach for you on this whole thing.

Let me give you some context first, and that is—

Where do you have your best ideas?

Joanna: Personally, a lot of my ideas come from traveling and places, in particular. So I have to go and visit things and input in order to have ideas.

Joe: Yes, and that doesn’t surprise me. I’ve asked the question of a lot of creatives, and what I’ve discovered in asking that question is there tends to be two different things that come up. Like, it’s when I do something like go on walks. Or a lot of times it’s things like driving or a shower.

Why that is, there’s science behind this, and it’s you have two distinct networks in your brain that you need to use for creativity.

One is the default mode network. That’s what your body goes into when you daydream. It’s when you were sitting in class and getting bored by your teacher, and it would make you go off and think into your imaginary world. That’s a natural place for you to go.

The other system is your executive functioning system, which is what helps you focus and get words out and hit deadlines.

They’re two distinct systems that sometimes will overlap, like in a venn diagram. When that happens, that’s your flow state where you feel like the ideas are coming and you’re getting them down on paper.

The interesting thing about that is that it’s completely counter to what you’re told to do as an entrepreneur and hustle culture. You’re just supposed to produce. You’re supposed to produce words. You’re supposed to sit in a chair. You’re supposed to produce.

So what you do is, when you are only focused on that one side, the executive function side, you detach yourself and you distance yourself from your creative well.

So my answer to your question is that — I suggest that authors start to build into their process in 2025 more time to tap into that default mode network and spend time thinking about how they can spend some real quality time and —

Protect that creative space, because that’s where all your good ideas come from.

When you feel like you’re being blocked, it’s because you’re disconnecting yourself from that default mode network. So it’s sound business advice, in the sense of there’s this process that’s core to your business that we need to get more efficient and think about how we can improve its performance.

Joanna: I really like that, and I feel like this is something I’ve always done is that I separate my time into creative time and business and marketing time. I find like I can’t do both in the same time period.

When I had a day job, first thing in the morning—you know, I’m a morning person—so I’d write before going to work. Then in the evening, I could do business and marketing. This podcast was started after my work, back in the day.

So perhaps that fits into what you’re saying is that you have to schedule different types of time, some for input and creativity and thinking and not doing much sometimes. Then other time for business and marketing.

I feel like maybe authors sometimes try to do everything all at once, and maybe that’s why it doesn’t work.

Joe: Absolutely, you’re really getting into the core of this.

There are different systems, and they have to be honored in different ways, and you need them both. We’re on The Creative Penn show, come on, we have got to talk about creativity. It’s like, we forget that’s the source of the product.

We get very focused on, oh, it’s a business. You have this product you have to put out. You have these customers you need to serve. All that stuff, it has to be done, but what you asked was —

How do we make this sustainable process between the marketing and the writing?

What I’m getting at is there’s some things that we can do to make that process easier. What it means is understanding that this isn’t up and to the right like a business chart of sales. It’s an undulating cycle.

Let me give you another context for this. If we look at creativity as a profession, you have this natural talent as a creator. We’ve identified that you’ve got this active imagination, and you love to spend time in the story world, and it’s fulfilling to you. That’s no different than if we noticed some natural athletic talent.

So what would we do around that if we saw that you were a really good tennis player? Well, we would work on your endurance and your speed. We would work on racket skills. We would work on all these different things to supplement that natural talent.

One of the big things we would also do for an athlete is we would have a recovery cycle.

We wouldn’t just say after you finished winning Wimbledon to go play the French Open. We’d put you in an ice bath, we’d stretch you out, we’d go into some kind of a process that would get you to be ready for the next time you play.

I think that goes, again, back to that first question of yours, what could you do to make 2025 better? It’s like, how do you build a recovery process?

How do you give yourself that space to let the well refill?

There’s a lot of things right now in the world that are really, really detrimental to you refilling the well. We’re talking about this really powerful default mode network and that time where you just need to be bored to let it kick in.

What do we do? Well, we get on social media, and we doom scroll, and we do a bunch of stuff to fill in that time that really deteriorates. It does two things, right.

You lose that time that you need, and it deteriorates your capacity because you’re doing really horrible things to your neuro-chemical system with these dopamine hits from scrolling.

I’ve been doing this research, and it’s kind of scary to see what could potentially happen with this. It’s destroying all this creative capacity out there that we need to have new ideas come up, whether it’s a new story or the cure for some disease.

Joanna: Yes, it is tough. In fact, one of the things I do is try to be active in my open time. So you said there be bored, and being bored is really hard, as you say. So I go for a walk often, and going for a walk means I can’t look at my phone while I’m out walking. I’m looking at nature.

You mentioned the shower. We cannot stay in the shower for hours at a time, but I can walk for hours at a time. Most people, wherever they are, there should be somewhere you can go and walk.

Although, perhaps not at a gym. I don’t know, a gym is also very stimulating in terms of the screens. Particularly in your American gyms, there are so many screens everywhere.

This is also really hard for people, and I know there will be people saying, “but social media is how I”—not me particularly—”but how I might be selling books.”

So this is the hard part, right? This is what it comes down to. I love what you’re saying, but then people are like—

“But I have to be on social media because how else do I meet my business goals?”

So let’s talk about that, about the business side as well.

Joe: So again, you have to put it into context. So let’s use this perfect example of a bunch of folks out there that are listening that are seeing really amazing success with their strategies on TikTok. So they’re going to say what you just said, “I have to be on this platform.”

It’s like, yes, you do, but how are you on the platform? Are you on this platform to develop meaningful relationships with your audience? Because also this thing is about, how do you make your business fulfill you?

If it’s just about hitting business goals, that gets you on that hedonic treadmill where you always have to be hitting goals to feel like something’s happening. Versus like, no, I’m really trying to help an audience connect with work that’s meaningful to me and will be meaningful to them.

So in that process, I need to carve out some specific time to be on TikTok, and I need to do these specific things on TikTok. That’s all executive functioning kind of stuff.

Now, they may be like, “Well, I need to come up with some creative stuff for TikTok.” Well, maybe you need to spend some time in that default network space to think of those ideas.

Just sitting for an hour and a half scrolling on TikTok instead of being on a walk or doing something that gets you into that space, is going to hurt your business, not help your business. So I think that —

You have to really think through those compartments of social media and where it makes sense.

Then you get into the whole other side of how social media can make us get into comparison and all kinds of other horrible things. We could talk about that for hours.

Joanna: Yes, and it’s interesting because we also do have to make decisions about time. You mentioned time, and we only have limited time. You and I are older now, and time gets more and more limited, unfortunately.

When TikTok blew up, and I’ve looked at it several times, and every time I go, “I choose not to do this because my time doing other things is more valuable.” Like I’m doing calisthenics and practicing doing handstands. At this point in my life, practicing doing handstands is more important than TikTok!

Other people make a different decision, but I think it’s very interesting. So this is one thing is we have limited time, and we have to make a choice over the time. Also, we do have to schedule downtime.

What are some of the mistakes that you see authors making?

Again, back on the profitable or for business, but also the fulfillment that you mentioned?

Joe: So I think that—and again, this plays off of what you just said—is we think that we have to do it all.

Whatever comes into our feed or starts to trend with whatever place where we’re getting information, it’s like, “Oh, I have to do this thing now. Like, I have to do TikTok. It’s obvious that I’ve got to do TikTok because I see these people that are making all this money at this.”

To your point, you chose to do something different. I think this is —

One of the hardest things in any business is saying no.

The reality is, if you look at something like venture capital or private equity, they’re in the business of saying no.

They have a process that they evaluate what they’re going to invest in and what they’re going to do because they know they have a finite amount of time and capital. If they don’t say no to 99% of the things that come over the transom to them, they’re just going to run out of money and have bad investments.

So they have to have a system where they evaluate what is the best use of time and money. The reality is that for authors, that time component is the real finite resource.

There’s so many authors that have figured out how to get a business ramped up and make money with no money. Like this is the land of bootstrapping, right? Whereas a lot of other businesses, you can’t even get into the business unless you have capital.

So here’s one where people have figured out ways to do that, but if you’re not looking at the best use of your time. What we talked about earlier is now we’re saying you need to think about a chunk of that time in a different space that isn’t necessarily doing businessy stuff. That means you have less time, right?

How do we best use that time in 2025?

I think that you’re better to pick one or two things and really invest and do them well than try to do 10 things halfheartedly.

Joanna: So how do people pick one or two things?

I remember this, back in 2009 when I started this podcast, I’d never done a podcast before. It was very, very new, actually, in podcasting era. I was like, I’m just going to try this. At the same time, I started a YouTube channel, again, quite early on in that time.

Although I still have a YouTube channel, it didn’t become the thing that I enjoyed, or that actually is part of a profitable part of my business, but I didn’t know that before I started.

So if people listening, they’re like, okay, well, should I try TikTok? Or should I do Facebook ads? Or should I use a subscription service? How do they know, or—

How do authors pick the one or two things that might work for them and might help make their author business profitable?

Joe: Again, this is where you have to kind of step back and ask yourself these questions. What is my natural curiosity leading me to? When do I feel that it’s being fulfilled? So we can just use your examples.

Of course, you’re going to want to try these things as they come up. You’re going to see, oh, this is a new thing, but what is it that I want to get out of it? So from a personal standpoint, am I feeling energy come to me?

Am I getting something out of it? Or is it feeling like it’s draining me? You have to honor that.

Number two is, how does it align with your business practices? When you step into something like TikTok, there’s the how-to. There’s courses. There’s all kinds of people that have talked on shows like mine about how to do this, but is that the audience you’re looking for. Is that the kind of interaction you want to have with your audience?

Using you as an example, you’ve been very deliberate and said no in instances that probably have pissed some people off. It’s because you understand that in the long run, it’s not going to work out well for anybody because you’re not going to be getting fulfilled. Is that a fair statement?

Joanna: Oh, yes, but I also annoy myself sometimes. I’m like, why can’t I do video? As you say, curiosity, and also what drains you. Video drains me, and it always has. Some people say, oh, it’s because you’re getting older. I’m like, no, it always, always has.

Also, I don’t listen to music. I don’t do noise. I like silence. I like quiet. I think, as you say—

We have to tap into these things and learn to say no, otherwise you can burn out.

Joe: I think when we go back to thinking about where your creative well gets filled is that them going to a coffee shop is a place of creativity. I go there and I’m eavesdropping on people’s conversations, and thinking about the coffee, like it’s not a place where I can do that.

So part of this idea is for you, as a listener on the show, thinking about these ideas, what is it for you? Not, what is the community saying?

There’s no shortage of ideas on ways to make money as an author or to monetize your creativity, and there’ll be more coming.

There’s going to be a bazillion new ideas that come with innovation, you’re not going to be able to do them all.

You need to be really deliberate and pick the ones that do two things, in my view, and that is to connect you with the audience that you want to connect with. Because, again, if this is about making money, you need to have people that see that your creative content is worth more than the cold, hard cash in their wallet.

Then two, it fulfills you, and fulfills you in the right way.

Okay, what do I mean by that? Not that it makes you get your ego pumped up or gives you a bunch of status in fake things like rank, but that it fulfills you by like, “I am now truly in touch with my meaning.”

It helps you understand why you’re on this planet. This helps you to feel like a full human being. That’s the part that I think is getting lost in this whole hustle culture, is that you’re going to feel good when you hit this particular monumental thing like making seven figures. No, you won’t. You won’t.

I know this because I’ve worked with so many people that have done that, and they come to me and they’re like, “I’ve worked harder. I’m more burnt out. I have the mantle. I won the trophy. I sold a million dollars’ worth of books this year. But you know what? I can’t keep this up.”

What ends up happening is —

The ones that are successful going forward find themselves in a place where they end up becoming most likely more profitable, selling less books, but doing something they love.

They find that sweet spot because they’ve changed their focus.

They’ve gotten to be like, “Hey, wait a minute. If I do some things with my business, tune some things up here, I can make more money than I’ve ever made before. I can feel good and I can tap into things that I was missing out.”

“I can connect with my family more. I can travel more. I can feel that I can leave certain parts of my business and not think that it’s all going to crash into a heap.”

Joanna: Yes, exactly. That’s why we were emphasizing ‘profitable.’ I know you talk about this a lot because a lot of the numbers that you can see, screenshots on various social media or whatever, are the above-the-line figures. They’re not necessarily the profit figures. They’re the income or the revenue, but not the profit.

So that’s where we like to focus. Profitable life, I think in general, just having a happier life.

I want us to get into Author Nation now. 2024 was the first year, and I was there. It was fantastic. I bought my ticket for 2025 before I even left Vegas. So I was one of those that as you were talking about it, I went on and bought it. Let’s just, first of all, from your perspective—

What went well about the Author Nation conference?

From, I guess, you and from Suze and the team, but also from feedback that you got.

Joe: Oh, well, I don’t even know where to start. There’s so much. I think the funny thing was, so many people were like, “Oh, you have to be really stressed out. There’s got to be a lot of stuff going on.” The feeling was more like being the host of a party or your wedding.

Like you have this big event that you’ve planned, you want to make sure everyone’s having a good time, but it wasn’t like there were fires to really put out.

We had been working on this thing for over a year. We have a team that really did an amazing job at putting together the programming and building a system like that. Like people don’t understand this is where my creativity really was able to come out and take a business and work on it.

The show as a whole was surprising to people at the things that we focused in on. Like, we spent a lot of time with the space. We made sure that the space was open and inviting. We had rented a bunch of furniture, couches and stuff, so people had these conversation pits to hang out in.

That came out of observing other shows that tended to, in my view, make authors feel anxious and confined and claustrophobic. So we didn’t want that to be the case.

We wanted to make sure that there was different facets for authors. So the folks that were really there to kind of fill their well with information, we had a lot of great sessions. Yours was a great example of that.

We also know that there’s a lot of people that they never go into those sessions. They just need a place to hang out, and do deals, and talk, and network. So we had different spaces for that. We had, like I said, these conversation pits. We also had a bunch of tables around where people could sit and work together.

All of that stuff was designed to hit the needs that we kept hearing people say when we asked them about what they want out of a show. Now, the feedback we’ve gotten, that’s the other thing—we built a system so we were able to collect reviews off of every single session and about the overall show.

So we ended up with 866 reviews of sessions. We reviewed on two things: were the objectives clear and where the objectives met? We had, on the first one, it was like a 4.6 out of 5, and the objectives met was like a 4.55.

So we had a really, really good feedback system, and we had good feedback. The great thing was, is we then—like, I’m sure you were sent your reviews.

Joanna: Yes, that was great. Yes, really good.

Joe: So it’s funny, when we did that, there was some people that, again, we can all be self-conscious. It’s like, no, those aren’t bad reviews. You got to filter out some of this stuff.

Joanna: Yes, for sure. Actually, this would be a tip for people if they are coming, if you’re using that app again, I didn’t make the most of that app until towards the end of the week. Then I realized that there were slides on there from people’s talks.

If you missed a talk, you could go get the slides, and you could sync it with your laptop —

and all of that kind of thing, as well as doing the ratings. So, yes, that app, I think next time I’ll be using that. Are you going to use that same app again?

Joe: Yes, we’re going to use that again. I actually had somebody come up at the show that’s a programmer, and he talked about programming something specific for us. So we’re going to look at that as a potential, but the idea is having something like that.

We were really happy with the tool we used. The only thing we were hoping to add into that was better group communication, so a way for authors that are there to have a single platform to network between themselves and message each other. So that’s the one thing that we’re trying to figure out.

All those pieces, we spent a lot of time on. If you noticed, we have a numbering system that tells you what room something is in, what day it is, what session during the day.

That all feeds back into our system because this year what we’re really working on is all the stuff that was kind of manual processes that we hand carried through the building. It’s like we’re automating all that stuff. We’re using agents and tools that are now available to us.

So you’ll see this, for folks that are submitting to speak, that starts you in a process that will eventually feed all the information into the contract we send you. Then that’ll push information into our system so that our folks don’t have to be typing stuff in.

Joanna: That is good. I actually did submit mine—because I knew we were talking—I was like, right, I’m going to submit my talk. So I did actually go through that process, and I noticed it was very organized, and there were all the things I could put in. So that was that was super useful.

On that, I guess you mentioned there the automations and agents and AI. There was a lot of AI sessions at Author Nation 2024. There was also a lot on direct sales. There was lots on Kickstarter and people selling on Shopify. These are some big trends that are coming or are here.

What are your thoughts on some of these big, overarching trends, like AI and direct sales?

Will you continue to cover them in the show in 2025?

Joe: I think we probably had the single most comprehensive track on AI that anyone’s ever put together in the creative community, while at the same time having a massive amount of information on how to be an artisan.

So the idea for us isn’t to be one thing to everyone, other than the place you come to get exposed to everything.

The idea that there’s one way to do this is ludicrous. This kind of gets to some of the stuff you and I have talked about—how we do things today is very different than how we’ve done things in the past.

As a human being, if you’re going to be an author for 30 years, you’re going to change.

You’re going to make decisions. Hopefully, you’re getting to a point where you’re saying there’s some stuff I’m not going to do.

I think one of the best examples of all of bringing that change is we had Johnny Truant at the show, one of the co-authors of Write. Publish. Repeat.

Here is like the OG of like fast publishing doing a session on being an artisan and how his focus is now on creating meaningful relationships around his work with a small, intimate group of fans that can support him.

There’s two parts of that. One is like, how does he do that? But also that bigger message of like, yes, I’ve matured and changed what I think is important for me to be fulfilled. So that’s what we want the show to be about.

The hard part can be is if you’re newer and you come in, it’s like, oh my god, there’s too much stuff on the buffet. That’s our responsibility to try to help people manage and absorb this content.

Joanna: Yes, and on that, you have tracks, don’t you, for people who haven’t written a book yet. For different genres, for people like me who want the much more advanced content, but—

There’s stuff for people who haven’t even written a book yet, as well.

Joe: Yes, it’s so that if you’ve never written a book, you can come.

Frankly, if you haven’t written a book, you’re in that part of your publishing career, there isn’t a better thing to do. Why is that? Well, there’s more people on the planet in that one room for that five days that have done what you want to do than anywhere else.

So why not be there and ask them questions, and learn from them, and see what is their way of doing it. Because in the beginning, you just need to get that book out. Then you can start understanding some deeper things about what your business will look like.

You and I are a long way away from that first published book, but that was a massive endeavor. We forget about that sometimes of what a massive endeavor that first book is.

So once that does happen, then it’s like, oh, well, that wasn’t that bad. I can do that again. Now, how do I want to do that? How do I want to connect with people? There’s so many different ways now, that’s the other thing. It used to be, oh, well, you just have to get on Amazon.

Well, no, maybe for you, the best thing because of your writing style and the way you work is that you’re building your business on Kickstarter. So we’ll have people there, like we have the Kickstarter people, right?

Joanna: Yes, Oriana.

Joe: What we’re doing is, now that we’ve gotten the first one under our belt, we’re going out to folks. I had a conversation with Oriana just before the New Year for next year. Like, okay, what if in our online community, you come in and coach a cohort of people to do Kickstarters?

So instead of having a session at Author Nation that is educational, “hey, you should do Kickstarters,” you have a session where you meet with those people and talk about what worked and didn’t work in those Kickstarters that you ran over the year.

That’s a whole different way that we use the idea of community and a week-long show to get the support mechanism that people really need.

Sure, we can run a great show and take out our firehose and just drowned you in ideas, but — 

What happens afterwards to help you implement those ideas?

The first part is what we’re talking about, picking the ones to implement.

Joanna: Very important.

Joe: Sitting in front of a notebook with 60 great ideas can be paralyzing. So how do we get you to the ones that are going to have the—and it’s something we talked about at the show—high impact, low effort.

Joanna: Yes, and I think —

One of my tips for people is to plan in advance.

So even though it’s not up there yet, towards November the schedule will be around. So people can kind of see, all right, well, what do I really want to go to?

What I had in my schedule, which I planned ages in advance because I was arranging meetings and all of that kind of thing was, this is a session I have to attend, and then there might be other sessions I’m like, that will get a two, and if I’m around, I’ll go to that, and if not, I’ll figure it out later.

So really, planning in advance. Then, as you say, afterwards, like reviewing your list at least a week later and seeing what still resonates from what you went through.

There might be a ton of stuff you wrote down that a week later you’re not so enamored with. So I think that’s really useful, is putting the extra time in to do the scheduling and then do the thinking later.

Joe: Yes, and there’s two things that I want to touch on that.

The first is, is one of the areas where we recognize that we can do a better job, and that is when there were lower reviews on sessions, the trend seemed to be that we didn’t do a really good job at helping the audience understand that topic.

The way we did our reviews is we also asked what level you were in as an author. Then what we would see is these stratifications where it’s like, oh, look at all the high reviews from these people that were beginners, and all these low reviews from people that were advanced.

We screwed up and we made this thing seem like it was for everybody. So one of the things that Chelle and I were talking about is that if you want to get your session approved, you’re going to have a higher chance of doing that saying, “This is for this specific group,” than saying, “Oh no, this is for everybody.”

We really want to make sure that we’re identifying the right experience level to make that work.

The second thing is, if you went to the show and you were a maniac and went to a session every time there was a session open, the best you could have seen was about 23% of the content that we put together. So I mean 70% of the sessions you miss.

Now, let’s put a little math on that. You’re probably not going to look at all those because of, again, what level you are. So let’s say you missed half of what you should have seen. Well, that’s why we’re doing this whole thing about the after party that starts the 11th.

It is this idea of like, hey, we’re going to have all these videos in an area. You can watch the videos that you didn’t see. There’s a spot where you can go and put in questions. We’re going to submit those questions to the presenters, and then we’re going to have hour-long Q&A sessions on Zoom to get those questions answered.

So you get a couple things out of this that never has happened at a show before. One is — 

We can pull this virtual and live community together so we can make a more cohesive author community.

Two is, you get a way to get more value out of those sessions that you missed.

Three is, even with a session you went to, you now had time to digest it and look at your notes and think through some things on your business without being at a crazy show with all your friends.

So you may have some more questions that you want to get clarified with the speaker, and now you can get on there and say, “Hey, now I’m looking at my business. What about this or that?” And they’ll be able to give you really good feedback that’s pertinent to your business.

So we’re really trying to think how this is a community of communities that gets results.

Joanna: Now, we do have to say that there are inevitable challenges with every business, and in fact, one of the challenges was my session, the recording didn’t work. So I am actually redoing my session as part of this after party.

I’m actually going to give the session again with some updates because, of course, my talk was on AI, and it was in November, and we’re two months on, and things have changed. So I’m going to be doing that again. So, yes, the challenge is sometimes things don’t work.

What were some of the other things that were challenges or that you’re changing and improving?

You’ve talked about some of them, but anything else?

Joe: So on that particular subject, out of 160 sessions, I think there were eight that we had technical issues with. So like, we want to have zero fault on that, but fortunately, we’ve got a solution. In your case, you don’t have to record video. You just show your slides. I know this is not a thrill for you!

Joanna: No, definitely not a thrill, but I’m happy to update the slides and do it again. Like you said, you’re doing the after party, so it might actually work really well.

Joe: Yes, the point is having this situation where we can interact around that material. Frankly, we have to get that session done because you were one of the highest rated sessions there were.

I think we had a fundamental difference in how AI was seen at the show, and why was that was how we were approaching the subject matter. This wasn’t about how it is just used in creation of content, we were talking about all kinds of stuff.

The good and the bad of it, and as well as how this is going to be able to do things for you and your business that you don’t want to do, or frankly, you’re not that good at, and the machine is going to be better at it than you. So that’s part of it.

Your question was about what could we do better. We have the reader event, and we’re always going to struggle with that until we get to the point where we can do that on a full weekend. We know that having a Saturday for that means we get a lot more people to show up.

We rolled out some technology at that event. It was the first time it was ever used. It went pretty well, but we’ve got a whole list of stuff we have to improve with that. We wouldn’t have had that list unless we went and did that project, right?

So the idea of us creating a way for us to sell print books at a show, and authors not have to figure out how to get the books there. We’ve got the first part of that solution. The readers could order books, we had them printed on demand and delivered to the show.

Now that we have that system working, and we know that it works, we need to get it so that it’s a really pleasant experience for everybody. So those kind of things are marginal things that we need to adjust to make things better.

Again, this is stuff I enjoy.

Now that I can see where we need to improve things, then we’ll figure out how to improve them.

Joanna: It’s only year one!

Joe: I think that that was for us, this first year was a lot about like, okay, I’ve never run a show before. It’s the first time I’ve done this.

There were people on our team that were involved with the previous show and knew what to do at the show, but we were making so many changes that there was a lot of moving parts that were new and had to be watched.

The beauty of something like this is to see the impact that it has on the community, while at the same time being able to work with people on making it happen.

So it’s very fulfilling for me because this is how my creativity comes out in working on a business. It’s even more rewarding because I’m doing it with people, and we’re having fun. We’re a very high performing team.

Joanna: Well, fantastic. So if people want to come—

Where can they get tickets for Author Nation 2025? Is there any way they can access what happened at 2024?

Joe: Sure. So right now, early ticket sales are open. So we have a deeply discounted ticket that you can buy in the month of January. So if you came to the show and bought your ticket at the show, they got the best price, and that was only available to those people that came to the show.

Now we have our early bird special, and you can go to AuthorNation.live and sign up for that.

We also have another offer there called the Regret Remedy Bundle. So what is that? There was a lot of people that were like, well, I’m going to just wait and see how this show went.

Then they lost their mind after they saw all the fun and their friends were who were at the show that were like, “Oh my God, this thing is amazing,” and all over Facebook are people sitting on these big white leather couches with smiles on their faces.

So if you, for whatever reason, didn’t come, you can buy this Regret Remedy package. It includes the after party, so you’ll get all the videos from 2024. Also, it’s bundled with a ticket for 2025.

In both cases, we offer an installment plan, so we’re trying to help you manage your cash flow as well. If you can’t afford the full ticket, you can break that up over a six-month period to manage your cash flow better.

So again, go to AuthorNation.live to learn more about those. We’ve got some examples of the sessions from 2024 to give you a feel for what the show is like and all the fun testimonials from people.

I can say this, as far as the 2025 show, we’ve got some amazing stuff lined up. We haven’t announced it yet because we’re contracting things right now, but when you look at last year, we had Kevin Smith—did you stay around for the Kevin Smith?

Joanna: Yes, I was there. I’d never heard of him. Then I was like, oh, this dude is funny.

Joe: I think that a lot of people were like, why Kevin Smith? He’s this old director from the 90s. One, he was so generous with his time. The session alone was almost two hours, and then he hung around with people. More so, he honestly spoke about being a creator and talked about major issues that he had in his life.

He had a severe heart attack that almost killed him. He had a nervous breakdown. He spent time in a psychiatric hospital. He talked about all those issues and was really motivational to people.

So those are the kind of people we’re bringing in to have authors see, like, you’re not the only ones that are having these kind of issues. Here’s a dude who’s a big Hollywood movie guy, and he’s dealing with the same stuff as a creator getting words on the paper.

Joanna: Yes, fantastic. Also, we should say, since this is a podcast, you have a podcast.

Where can people find your podcast?

Joe: Sure. So you can find me at JoeSolari.com. If you’re interested in some of the stuff I’m talking about around how your creativity works and this up-spiral concept of designing your business around your creative cycles, that’s where that information will be.

One of my things is that I do a paid newsletter, and each year I have 45 emails on a specific subject. This year, all the research I did last year on this is being pumped out in those emails.

I talk about, like, how do you honor your default mode network? How do you work on your executive function? How do you think about becoming a creative athlete?

Oh, and then the Author Nation Podcast. That’s another thing. That’s on all the major channels. We have a YouTube channel as well, that way you can watch the video.

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

Joe: Well, thank you. I just want to put out a special thanks to all the folks in your community that came to the show. It’s not lost on Suze and I the time and effort it takes to come to an event like that. I want your community that comes every year to feel welcome and that we really love having you there.

Joanna: Oh, well, thanks so much.

The post Balancing Creativity With Building A Business, And Author Nation With Joe Solari first appeared on The Creative Penn.

No lie—it feels strange to be sitting here writing you this post. Every year, I open the new year with a reflection on everything I learned in the previous year and a look forward into my intentions for the year to come. When I first started this tradition, I focused mostly on the specific lessons I was learning in my own writing, but as time has gone on, the writing lessons have had such an impact on my life and the life lessons have had such an impact on my writing, that these retrospective posts have expanded into something much broader and more personal.

One year ago, I sat here and wrote to you about how I felt the previous year had been the culmination of an important Flat Arc period for me. I talked about what this period had taught me about the importance and complexity of Flat Arcs—character arcs in which the protagonist does not change but builds upon previously integrated Truths, as the foundation for eventually evolving the status quo yet again in future Change Arcs. I hinted I was coming to the end of this particular Flat Arc in my own life and standing on the brink of something new and momentous.

Creating Character Arcs (Amazon affiliate link)

On this blog, I don’t share too much about the personal details of my life, since the main focus is, of course, helping writers become authors and authors become artists. But art draws from life, just as life builds upon art. If you’ve been following along in these New Year posts over the last half dozen years or so, you know I’ve been on quite a transformative journey, one that has challenged and evolved me in just about every area—not least in my relationship and perspective on art and story. In many ways, the First Plot Point of that journey was when I took the leap on a huge and, in many ways, traumatic move in 2018. I moved to a little farmhouse in Missouri, where I stayed and learned and grew and experienced pain and joy on levels I had never even known were possible. That was my last Change Arc.

Then circumstances dictated I move back. My intentions were to pitstop with my parents for a few months, then move to the West Coast. I ended up staying two plus years, caught partly between the throes of my own indecision and the housing market and, partly, in my deepest wisdom, the knowledge that I needed to take a minute to let myself fully live into my Flat Arc, as I processed and integrated the changes that had so radically altered my life not so very much earlier.

During that time, I made significant progress in healing my burnout and my relationship to writing fiction after four years of terrifying writer’s block. The last two years were a period of tremendous peace and blessing, but also years wracked with frustration, doubt, and uncertainty. At the end of last year, I decided to spend my birthday month in the mountains on the border of New York and Massachusetts. I have always believed that when we feel stuck, sometimes it is better to do anything—even if it is a mistake—rather than to do nothing at all. Just the act of moving the energy can change things up enough to evolve perspectives and reveal new possibilities (incidentally, this is also good advice when plotting a story).

That trip (I called it my Scorpio portal) changed everything for me. I came home and did what I do best: made a plan. I finally got super clear on the sweet spot where exactly what I wanted met up with exactly what options were open to me. I made the commitment that either I was buying a house in state by August, or I was giving up on the local market ever giving me what I wanted and moving out of state to rent once again. For the first time, instead of waiting around for something to happen (aka, the perfect situation to be offered to me), I started moving forward with intention, doing everything I would need to do if I was going to move.

I knew my ideal moving month was April, so I worked up a tight but (mostly) manageable schedule to do all the work I possibly could in the first four months of the year. By Christmastime, something happened that hadn’t happened in the previous two years: a house I really liked came up on the market. I looked at it, loved it, put a contract on it—and then the whole thing fell through after house inspections revealed major problems. A month later, the realtor let me know the owners might be willing to get everything fixed, so I went back to look again—only to have someone else put a contract on it first.

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

So I went back to work. I wrote 90% of the year’s blog posts, recorded and edited podcasts, filmed videos, created the Shadow Archetypes email course, edited the second edition of Structuring Your Novel, and prepared for publication its “sequel” Next Level Plot Structure.

Next Level Plot Structure (Amazon affiliate link)

Then, in March, my brother-in-law texted me a link to a house that had just come onto the market. As soon as I opened the link, I knew exactly what I was looking at. It was my “dream house.” It was a house that had first come onto the market three years earlier, when I was still in Missouri and just starting to look. It was everything I wanted, but at the time I wasn’t in a position to pursue it (not least because I wasn’t sure where I wanted to move). Throughout the long process of struggling to find anything in the area that I liked, this was the house I kept coming back to. Every time I got discouraged because

another house I didn’t like came onto the market, I would go back to the old listing for this one and remind myself that if it was there, then something else I liked would be as well.

And then that house itself came onto the market! I was the first one to see it and the first one to offer on it. A friend who already lived in the neighborhood told me later that when they had first moved in many years ago, they had driven by this house and randomly commented, “And that is Katie Weiland’s house.”

I felt so held and led by the synchronicities, so blessed to be given not just a house, but the house.

My Flat Arc was officially over. The status quo was forever changed. Cue the next Change Arc. Once more unto the brink, my friends!

The 6 (Biggest) Lessons That Changed My Life in 2024

Obviously, this was a huge year for me. As a first-time house owner, I was learning or experiencing something new around every corner. As someone who relies on schedules and routines, and who struggles to acclimate to new spaces, it was a year that stretched me nearly every single day. Truly, it has been a portal. I am still not quite sure who I am on the other side, but I know I am not the same. Who I am will unfold, helped no doubt by everything I will write to you in the coming year.

So much of the year passed in a blur. I look forward to re-reading my journals from this year, because honestly I have no idea what I wrote in them! Every day, I was feeling and thinking something new. For me, this move was not simply a new place to live; it was adamantly the closing of one chapter and the opening of the next. It was an epoch (because, let’s be honest, I don’t know how to do it any other way). Necessarily, it is difficult to take such a life-changing experience and distill it into a short list of pertinent lessons. But as I scan back over the twelve months since I last sat down to write to you like this, these are the six lessons that particularly jump out at me.

1. Take the Leap

For many years, I have kept on my nightstand a small framed quote. It says:

Everything you want is on the other side of fear.

For many reasons, making this huge life change scared me. In the intervening years as I tried to figure out what I wanted to do, I knew part of what was holding me back was fear—fear of the unknown, fear of the responsibility and risk, fear of revisiting old trauma. I read somewhere that the three most stressful life events are major illness, death of a loved one, and moving. As excited and aligned as I felt about the decision, I was terrified. About a week after closing, I spent a solid twenty-four hours shaking and crying. Once I actually moved in, it felt like I’d jumped into an abyss.

For years, I have worked with the discipline of feeling into pain and fear as a way of moving through them. But now, I was truly in them—truly feeling them in my body… and moving them through. The limited perspective of my logical self believed the shaking and crying meant something was wrong. But my body knew better. My body was doing what it did best—like a dog shaking itself off—moving all this stuff through my system.

For years, I have been faithfully showing up to the personal practices that have asked me to confront my own limitations, constrictions, and shadow. Now, that work was paying off. The resources were there for me draw on, and I was able to keep moving forward—to “do what is front of me”—because underneath all the chaos, there was, for perhaps the first time in my adult life, the certainty that everything was okay, that this was all just part of the process, and that I only needed to be faithful to it and to remain present to myself.

And then something happened. There were moments where I felt… amazing. I felt better than I have felt ever. I felt such gratitude. Such joy. Such pleasure. It just bubbled up out of me. And then the hard parts would come again. But I began to gain the perspective that this feeling of joy was always there. Finally, I had cleared enough of my own junk to be able to see it, and in seeing it, I knew that this was a truer and deeper part of myself than anxiety or grief could ever be.

A few months in, it dawned on me: So this was what was on the other side of fear all along?! If I had known that, I would have blasted through it a long time ago! I realized I had been believing a Lie—the belief that on the other side of fear was just more fear, endless terror, and pain. But the Truth? The Truth was that the fear just needed to be moved out—in a painful process that certainly required bravery and resourced discipline—but after it was out, it was out.

I never would have learned that if I hadn’t been willing to take the leap in the first place.

2. Plan Ahead

Another quote I have kept somewhere handy for a long time is:

Do something your future self will thank you for.

Most of the time, I think of this quote in respect to the big things (like buying a house), but this year, it became clearer than ever to me that sometimes the future self I’m serving isn’t too far removed from my present self.

Without question, the greatest thing I did to help myself through this transition was putting in the work before I ever put a contract on the house. I worked like a crazy person during the first quarter of the year, doing a year’s worth of work—including the blog/podcast and three major projects—in four months’ time. The first couple of months went really well and felt manageable. The second two—after I put the contract on the house—admittedly pushed the redline pretty hard. This was something I had done my utmost to avoid in previous years, since I had pushed myself to burnout previously and definitely didn’t want a repeat performance.

But it was a sacrifice I made that my future self was endlessly grateful for throughout the year, since it allowed me to focus all my energy on not just the practical stresses of physically moving and making a home, but on my emotional needs in processing the tremendous changes I was creating in my life. Today’s post is the first post I’ve written since February 2024. The break—although hardly a sabbatical—was welcome in its own right and has brought so much space into my ability to think about what I want to share and how I want to serve this community going forward.

As for fiction, after closing, I decided to set it aside until I was settled in. My writer’s block was triggered the last time I moved, something I definitely didn’t want to repeat. This time, I also tried to honor my future creative self by giving her permission to focus her creative energies on building the foundation of a creative life to come.

3. Accepting Help

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse by Charles Makesy (affiliate link)

This summer, I ran across a beautiful quote from the book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charles Makesy:

Asking for help isn’t giving up. It’s the opposite.

I was blessed to be deeply supported by others throughout this transition, particularly by my parents and by my brother who was able to come down and spend six months with me, helping me move. The last time I moved, I felt very alone, for many reasons (some of which weren’t, in fact, true). This time, I was humbled and healed by not just the help that was always on offer, but by my own ability to reach out and ask, in ways I had never let myself do before.

The last several years have been the saga of my heart’s opening—something that in many ways was initiated by the birth of one of my nephews and has been, ultimately, the journey of learning to love and accept myself ever more deeply. It has been a quest to understand what it means to love and be loved, to explore the endless complexity of the query, “What is Love?”

Something I learned this year that seems utterly simple to recount, but which was profoundly life-changing is the realization that a true experience of Love is as much, if not more, about receiving as it is about giving. When it was growing near time for my brother to return home, I was remembering and recounting all the ways he had blessed me this summer, feeling into the true depth of his love for and service to me—and as I spoke my gratitude to him, I could see in his eyes how loved he felt by my recognition of his love for me. I realized that the love I was often trying to “push” out of myself toward others was a pale reflection of the love that emanated when I simply sat and received and recognized the essential lovingness of those in my life.

Counter-intuitive as it may seem, perhaps it is not untrue to say that when we cannot receive, we cannot truly love.

4. Surrendering

“Be Ground
Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are.
You’ve been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender.”
–Rumi

Here’s maybe the biggest and most ironic thing I learned this year. For a long, long time now, I thought buying a house would give me a sense of security and stability in this life. Almost right away, however, it became clear to me that the exact opposite felt much truer. This year has challenged me with one of the most profound practices of surrender in my entire life.

I thought having a piece of ground to call my own would make feel rooted and proof against the changing times, but so far, nothing could be farther from the truth. Anxieties I either thought I had long laid to rest or didn’t even know I had came roaring out of the shadows. Everything felt so much more uncertain. The future suddenly seemed full of tripwires and a host of potential tragedies and misfortunes.

Instead of feeling like I now had something substantial to call my own, it felt like now I had something to lose. And my instinct was clamp down as hard as I could in a futile attempt to comfort myself with the conviction that I could control what happened to my future.

When I was young, I often felt my life was a straight road to the horizon. The older I get, the more I discover it isn’t a road at all, but a wide-open wilderness. Ultimately, I count that a good thing. But it’s scary as hell. And so, this year has been—and continues to be—a practice in surrender, a practice in opening my hand and letting life flow through my fingers. If there is one thing I keep coming back to in my deepest heart, it is the commitment to living to my highest path and purpose in this life—whatever it takes. In the abstract, I already know that “what it takes” is listening for the truth that “whatever each moment brings is my highest path and purpose.” That is the lodestone I always return to. House, no house, failure, success —whatever—it’s not the point. The point is listening for and living into my deepest understanding of Truth in each moment.

5. Gratitude

When the bursts of anxiety grabbed me especially hard this year, I would look around at this amazing opportunity I had been given, and I would tell myself, “Girl, what are you doing? You couldn’t possibly be more blessed.” I would tap into my longtime practice of feeling wherever gratitude was in my body—and wherever it was there, too, was space and peace.

In re-reading an old journal entry, I ran on to a quote I had saved:

Thank you for everything; I have no complaints whatsoever.

That simple little meditation has become the mantra of my year. “Thank you for everything. I have no complaints whatsoever.” I look around me right now, and it is true. I have no complaints. And as I sit in that feeling and think of all the things my anxiety wants me to be afraid of, I realize this will be just as true even if every single one of those things (improbably) did happen.

Thank you for everything. I have no complaints whatsoever.

My gratitude for this journey overflows. I am filled with so, so much gratitude for the fulfillment of a dream I have dreamed for so many years. I overflow with gratitude for the journey that has brought me here, for the person I have fought to become, the person who was brave enough and committed enough to keep going, to keep believing, to not give up. I am grateful for the experience I get to have right now—for this new home and all the experiences and lessons it has already brought to me.

That gratitude will remain no matter what comes next. Whether I am here for a year or ten years, I will always have gotten to live this and to have been the person who made it happen. If my life so far has taught me nothing else, it has taught me that however hard things may sometimes be, everything always happens the way it is supposed to. All I have to do is listen and trust and do and open my heart into the gratitude for the all that is life itself.

6. Reflection and New Directions

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.–Victor Frankl

These retrospective New Year posts are always quite long, and I know they’re not to everyone’s tastes (don’t worry, we’ll get back to the writing next week!). But I want to close with this powerful quote from a powerful man.

Writing Archetypal Character Arcs (affiliate link)

Good storytellers are always aware of the power of the pause. That moment of pregnant possibilities between action and reaction is where all of story—and life—is born. I would argue that this quote ultimately points, once again, to the power and importance of Flat Arcs. After the great flurry of a Change Arc comes the moment where you get to stop and look back at the road behind you and see how far you have come. In a truly transformative arc, you will no longer be able to even see where it was you started from.

And then you look forward once more—to the road ahead. Perhaps it seems to be straight for a while—Flat—as you catch your breath. You are in Frankl’s “space.” This is the foundation for all that is yet to come. How will we integrate all we have learned? What will we build next?

For me, honestly, I have no idea. I’m still catching my breath. In fact, perhaps I have not yet reached the Flat part of the road. My Change Arc may not be over. Certainly, I feel the dust is still settling, and I’m still looking alongside the road for a nice clear pond in which I can view my reflection and see just who it is I have now become. I do know that the year ahead will be one of yet more integration and many more lessons. It will be full of more stories and more musings on story, and I look forward to sharing it all with you!

Whether you currently find yourself on a Change Arc or the Flat part of the road, I am wishing you a momentous 2025 and thanking you, always, for being my fellow travelers.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What were your biggest growth moments in 2024? What are your intentions for the New Year? 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 Reflecting on 6 Life-Changing Lessons in 2024 appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

Are you curious about the hidden structures that turn ordinary manuscripts into irresistible page-turning stories? Wondering how to shape your characters, scenes, and chapters so readers can’t put your book down? Kristen Tate shares her tips.

In the intro, key book publishing paths [Jane Friedman]; sub-rights and why it’s important to understand how many ways your book can make money [Renee Fountain]; the innovation of the indie author community and biggest changes in publishing with Michael Tamblyn [KWL Podcast];

Plus, 10 publishing trends for 2025 [Written Word Media]; Unveiling 2025: Indie authors gear up for AI innovations and craft renaissance [Indie Author Magazine];
How to Write Non-Fiction, Second Edition is out now; and join me for a live webinar: 7 steps to write your non-fiction book in 2025, 15 Jan.

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 

Kristen Tate is an editor and founder of the Blue Garret, offering editing services and advice for authors. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, focusing on novels and publishing history. Her latest book is Novel Study: Decoding the Secrets and Structures of Contemporary Fiction.

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

• Most common mistakes authors make with openings
• The differences between scenes and chapters
• How to plot a page-turner
• The continuous development of an author’s writing process
• Balancing reading for pleasure and reading for research
• Inadvertent plagiarism and the boundaries of fair use
• Benefits of working with a human editor
• Utilising AI tools while maintaining your author voice

You can find Kristen at TheBlueGarret.com.

Transcript of Interview with Kristen Tate

Joanna: Kristen Tate is an editor and founder of the Blue Garret, offering editing services and advice for authors. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, focusing on novels and publishing history. Her latest book is Novel Study: Decoding the Secrets and Structures of Contemporary Fiction.

Welcome back to the show, Kristen.

Kristen: Oh, thanks. It’s great to be back with you.

Joanna: Yes, and you are primarily an editor, and you’re actually my editor. So we’ve talked about that before. So it is very interesting having you on the show to talk about this book.

Why write a book on the craft of writing fiction when you focus so much on editing?

Kristen: So I think for me, and I think this is true to some extent for you and other people who write nonfiction, but I really write to learn. It’s just one of the ways I understand the world. So this book was one that when I started editing fiction, I wanted to be able to find this book, and never did find it.

We were talking a little bit before the interview started about my first book. It’s a collection of book reviews of writing craft books. At the end of writing that book, I realized that all along I had secretly been hoping to find like the one true formula for writing an amazing novel.

I did find formulas, they are out there. They can be really useful, especially for beginning writers who are just starting to feel out what it takes to shape a plot or something like that.

From an editing standpoint, they don’t really fit a lot of books. Each book is kind of its own, you know, it’s kind of like children. They’re all pretty unique.

So I decided that I really wanted to start from the other end, and start from novels that I thought were successful in different ways, and just take them apart and figure out how they worked. So I just kind of did that through writing.

It started as a blog, and then it eventually turned into a book so I could formalize it and share it with a wider audience.

Joanna: You mentioned there that you focused on books that were successful in different ways. What I actually appreciated is you didn’t go to the common classics. I think so many writing books use older books that I feel in many ways aren’t so relevant to modern fiction writers.

How did you choose the books that you focused on in this book?

Kristen: So this is one of the beauties, actually, of being an indie author. So it was partly my taste. I didn’t have to do this strategically. I didn’t have an editor or a publishing house saying, “We want you to cover these books,” or, “It would be more saleable if you covered X, Y and Z.”

I really started from books that I knew I wanted to learn from and thought were doing something interesting. I also really deliberately chose a big range of genres, in part because I wanted mystery writers to find something there for them, and romance writers to find something there for them.

Also, I feel really strongly that if you’re writing genre fiction, it can be really helpful to learn from other genres. And so I wanted to give readers a way, even if they don’t read a lot of mystery novels or fantasy novels or whatever, I wanted them to get a sense of just what the different opportunities are in that genre.

Joanna: I actually ended up buying one of the books.

Kristen: I keep hearing that. I think that’s lovely.

Joanna: Yes, and just to be clear, there were no spoilers in the book. You managed to avoid that. So that was quite a feat as well.

Kristen: Well, for most of the books, there’s a big chapter on like the overall structure, but there’s a spoiler alert. So you know that if you want to read the book first before getting the spoilers, you have to hurry up and do that before you read that chapter.

Joanna: Yes. So the book is full of common questions that writers ask, or perhaps don’t even know how to ask, so we’re just going to go through a couple of them. You say, “Having edited hundreds of novels by this point in my career, I can tell you that the opening is the most challenging section for most writers.”

What are some of the most common mistakes you see with openings, and how can we improve them?

Kristen: So I think there are two big ones that I see over and over, and it’s mostly just a misunderstanding of what readers want to know first.

So I often see newer writers try to give us all the information, all the kind of surface information about their protagonist. Things like their full name, like their last name, their hair color, their eye color, and all of this detail about physical appearance.

While we want to know about that eventually, the thing that readers really want to know is what is this character thinking and feeling. What’s their story? What are they up against? What do they want? What do they need? What’s standing in the way of them getting that?

All of this other stuff that I think writers are very anxious about, like, how do I get my character in front of a mirror so I can have them looking at themselves and describing themselves? You know, that’s not a problem you have to solve.

Just wait for a moment where it’s going to come up organically. Maybe it doesn’t even ever come up, and it’s just less important.

Then the other common problem I see is that, especially for a character-driven work, I’ll see writers try to front load the character’s backstory.

So they want us to know all of this really important information about how this character came to have the problems or the weaknesses that they have and that they’re going to have to get over.

Like that’s the really important part of the character arc. We need to know what’s holding them back and how all of that happened, but rather than starting with it, you really want it to come more in the first third of the novel, or maybe in the halfway point. We just don’t need it up front.

Again, what we need up front is what’s happening right now because that’s the thing that’s going to pull us into the novel and give us a reason to keep reading. Everything else is kind of old news, right? The character still needs to wrestle with it, but it’s already happened. So it’s just not as interesting to us as a reader.

Joanna: On that, I remember taking ages to understand what a scene was. I think it was Larry Brooks’ Story Engineering book that I finally learned what it was, like about four or five years into writing fiction. I confused it with a chapter.

Of course, there are writers like James Patterson who has one scene per chapter, and that might work with a lot of thrillers.

What is a scene and what is a chapter? Why are these things so important?

Kristen: Yes, that’s a great question. I like to think of scenes and chapters as being just different size containers. It’s really important to remember that readers experience your book across time.

I think when we are deep inside a book, like we’ve been in it so long and we know the whole story. This happens to me as an editor too. We forget that the readers are understanding the story sequentially.

So part of what’s important about scenes and chapters are the white space breaks, like getting to the end of that container. The size of the container conveys different messages, so a scene break is a smaller break and signals to the reader that there’s some kind of shift happening.

We might be doing a time jump, maybe we’re switching to a different point of view, any of those kinds of things. Whereas a chapter break is much more emphatic and gives you a chance, as a writer, to use that extra white space to underscore something like a theme moment.

I really like writers to pay a lot of extra attention to the few sentences right before a chapter break because they get to resonate over that white space. So it’s this extra tool that you get.

Then within the container, those are all kind of little mini stories in there. So they have a beginning and a middle and an end. It’s not just like you’re taking this big, giant stretch of material that is your story and arbitrarily breaking it up into pieces that go in these different containers.

The scene is where you really get to be thoughtful about how those pieces work. It’s a way too of communicating to the reader in a subtle way what the structure of your book is.

So you can see this where many authors will include part breaks, and that’s just a way of waving a flag to the reader and saying, okay, we’re having an even bigger shift here. We’re going to move to like a whole different act two of the novel.

Joanna: I think also when I first was writing, I liked to end the chapter with something that wraps it up. Whereas, what I think I learned from James Patterson is that you can include a cliffhanger to make readers turn the page.

I know you said there’s some nice white space there, but if you want to increase the pace, you can split a scene across a chapter. So it carries on as if there’s no time difference, no person difference, but it gets them into a new chapter.

As you say, some people might read two chapters before bed or something like that. So it just keeps reading. So you can play with these containers as well.

Kristen: Yes, and I mean, that’s a good thing. You don’t want every chapter to be a cliffhanger. You want to mix it up. Thinking about those containers as ending in different ways is a really useful way to do it.

Joanna: So another thing I think is really interesting in the book is you go through how to plot a page-turner. You know that I’m a discovery writer, and this is something that I have really thought about.

In fact, it might be something that I could achieve working with ChatGPT or Claude or something to help it corral my chaos into some kind of order.

Tell us a bit more about plotting a page-turner.

Kristen: Yes, I mean, this was one of the big questions I came into the writing of the book with. How does a writer go about constructing these complex plots, and just how do they work?

I think a lot in metaphors and visual metaphors, they really helped me. So I think for a page-turner book, I really think about roller coasters. So a lot of it is about managing the kind of tension and expectation for readers.

So if you think about a roller coaster, one of the key experiences is that very slow, steady climb up to this big height. You’re building the anticipation, and you know you’re going to go over that cliff, but a good roller coaster, that’s not the only thing that happens.

You might have one of those at the beginning and another really cool one at the end, but in the middle, you have to provide other fun experiences. So there have to be some like loop-de-loops and like an unexpected curve.

So I think that’s really what’s happening in a page-turner, where you’re trying to maximize the reader’s investment and get them to leap over those white spaces at the end of the chapter. So that’s one part of it.

I think the other part is really characters.

For a page-turner to really work, we have to care so deeply about your characters that we have to know what’s going to happen to them.

Often too, I think you need very high stakes. So it really needs to be life or death. Or I think romance authors can tap into this sometimes, the happiness of the whole rest of your life is at stake. So I think those are the two qualities.

Then in terms of writing one, I think this part is hard. I didn’t do a lot of research into the writing process for the books I studied, but I did look at some interviews and tried to find some detail about what these authors said about revision.

I think one of the takeaways is it can take a lot of revision, especially if you’re a discovery writer. You really have to go back and spend some time engineering your story once you know what it is, and maybe building in some extra turns or adding some extra suspense through different techniques.

So I think you can, as a discovery writer, get it all down on the page and then go back and retool.

Joanna: Another discovery writer friend said to me that perhaps the only way to do it as a discovery writer is to think that anyone could have done it. Let’s say it’s a murder, you have to kind of write as if each of these characters did it, and then decide much later in the process who actually did it.

Kristen: You might just find in that case that you have to go back in and drop in your red herrings or your extra clues or something like that. So I think revision can be the key. I think it’s really hard to plot a book like that with that kind of complexity and with characters that we really care about.

I think it’s really hard to plot that without getting into the writing. I have not found an example, and maybe you’ll get people writing into this saying that they know an example, but I haven’t seen an example of someone saying, “Yes, I have been able to plot one of these very complex page-turner type novels from the outline stage.”

I think it’s hard because I think that doesn’t give you time to develop the characters that we care about and know what they might do.

Sometimes it is about the surprises.

I think often the best moments in a novel are where a writer will say to me, “Yes, like this character actually surprised me, and I thought they were going to do X, and they did Y.” I think that comes through in the writing, so I think it’s good to tap into those discovery elements when you can harness them.

Joanna: Yes, it is interesting. I do remember seeing a picture of JK Rowling’s spreadsheet for, I think, one of the Harry Potter’s, or it might have been one of the Cormoran Strike books. I was sort of looking at the picture going, okay, that’s how you plot something complicated with all of these different things.

I know some people use different software and all of that kind of thing, but it does feel like to do this kind of thing, sometimes you do need to plot a lot more in advance. I don’t know, I feel like I go back and forth on wanting to try to change the way I write, and then just not doing that. I don’t know.

You’ve worked with so many authors. Do people change [their writing style] over time?

Kristen: Yes, I think they do. I think a lot of it is knowing what your strengths are. If you’re trying to make yourself do something you hate, that’s just never going to work. I have definitely seen authors who have started out writing their early books, really from instinct.

Once they see the kind of revisions that I ask them to do—and I use a story spreadsheet, it’s basically a reverse outline, really, as part of my developmental editing process.

Once they start to get those back and get the skill of seeing their novels from the top down, they start to learn how to build some of that stuff into the initial writing process. They also learn that, okay, this is something I can do during revision.

I’ll see what happens when they’re basically doing their own developmental edit at that point. So they’ll write a draft just as they have always done, they’ll do this reverse outline, and then they’ll do their own revision round, and then be able to come to me and go straight into copy editing because they just built that in.

I definitely have seen that happen, and I think you learn new things with each book. I think there’s something that happens after you get 10 books in or 20 books in, and some of that story sense just becomes really intuitive.

You don’t have to think so much about things that you had to think a lot about at the beginning, like what is a scene? That just become second nature.

Joanna: Yes, definitely. I mean — 

Why do we bother if we don’t learn something with each book?!

Kristen: Right, it’s no fun then.

Joanna: Exactly. One of the things that I do hear from some people—I mean, I read a lot of fiction, I know you obviously do—but some authors say they can’t read fiction in a niche, or just in general, because it affects their work or that they’re worried about plagiarism.

Then the way you’re writing about fiction here is in a much more deconstructive way. So how can authors read fiction, I guess, in one way to learn and structure and all of that kind of thing, but also sometimes turn it off and just try to enjoy a book. It’s really kind of hard to balance both.

Kristen: I have people ask me all the time—

How do you still read for pleasure when you’re also an editor?

I am able to just turn off the editor brain. I think it helps that I don’t read books that I’m working on on my Kindle, and that’s what I read 90% of my for pleasure reading is on the Kindle now.

I do understand this concern about the inadvertent plagiarism, and I think it’s one of those anxieties that is not a real thing. Especially if you are putting your heart and soul into a book and weaving your own experience into it, I think writers are going to be less influenced than they fear by what they read.

That’s especially true if you read a lot. I could see if you are doing a deep dive into James Patterson or something, I could see being influenced by his style. If you’re reading a different author every couple of weeks, I just don’t think that that’s going to happen.

I think when you are not reading, especially like very recent fiction—and this is why I picked very recent books—you’re not getting a sense of how style is changing, of other like tips and techniques and tools you might be reading.

I just feel really strongly that novels, I mean, going back to that child metaphor, they’re all so different.

So the second you see a technique that another writer has used and pull it into your book, when you apply it to your own characters and your own plot and your own style, it’s not going to be really recognizable as that same technique. It’s going to feel really, really different.

I just think reading is one of those ways where we get to like writing —

We get to kind of intuitively let that story structure sink into us, and it’s really the most pleasurable way to learn how to write.

I really advocate for writers reading more, and like I said, reading outside of their genre.

I guess if you really can’t get over that kind of anxiety of influence, that would be what I would recommend. If you’re writing genre fiction, go read some literary fiction. Or if you’re writing mysteries, start reading fantasy novels. You’ll pick up some really cool techniques to bring back into your genre that could be exciting.

Joanna: Or it can actually just really help you on voice. I do think about author voice. I don’t know if you read Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club?

Kristen: Yes. Oh, they’re so fun. I actually had COVID a couple years ago, and I had such a terrible headache that I couldn’t read. So I listened to them all on audio, and I still have a positive memory of my COVID experience because I spent a week just listening to those books.

Joanna: Oh, fantastic. There’s going to be a movie, so if people haven’t read the books. I was really resistant to the book because he’s very famous here in the UK. So I kind of thought it was one of those cases of a celebrity who got a book deal, and it was going to be bad. It’s so not bad. It’s just fantastic.

I read all of them, as you have, and I’ve started his new series and everything. When I was reading it, I was like, wow, this is so different to a book that I could ever write or would want to write.

I’ve read a few kind of cozies, and they haven’t come across in the same way. I think I learned from that that you can enjoy books, because I mostly read darker books. I was like, wow—

You can just love these different types of books and learn from them, even if it’s a realization that this is not something you’re ever going to write.

Kristen: Yes, absolutely. I think, too, that’s a lesson to put more of your own personality, and humor, and weirdness, and all of that into your books.

That’s the thing that’s so unique to you and is going to distinguish yourself from all of the other books that might have very similar plot moves. Often, they do, and readers just don’t care.

Joanna: Or they want that, often.

Kristen: Yes. I mean, that’s what tropes are all about. They want to see that familiar roller coaster move coming around there, it’s exciting, but they want to see your spin on it.

Joanna: We talked a bit there about inadvertent plagiarism. I wanted to come back to the quotes in the book because, of course, you’re quoting writers and the chapters are also themed around certain books and authors.

There’ll be people listening who are writing nonfiction books and who are collecting quotes. So how do we both use quotes within the bounds of fair use, and maybe we need to explain what that is, and also—

How do we make sure not to plagiarize accidentally?

Kristen: I have an academic background, and that really got pulled into this book. When you’re writing an English Lit paper, you’re taught to do close reading and use textual evidence. So it’s second nature to me to, if I’m making a point about the way something works in a book, to pull in a passage and take a look at it.

Let’s step back a minute and talk a little bit about fair use. So the way I often see this pop up as an editor is authors wanting to use song lyrics in their books. I can’t even count the number of times this has come up, and I think you’ve had legal advisors on your show, and it’s a tricky issue.

It’s a little bit different for songs because they’re so short. So part of what the fair use principle is you’re using a very tiny percentage of a work. We’re respecting other people’s copyright and IP and all of that. Songs are very, very short. Something that’s a book length work is a lot longer.

There’s kind of rules of thumb out there. This is one of those gray areas in the legal context, which is frustrating, I think, for those of us who want to follow the rules and have it be very black and white.

One figure I’ve seen floating around is not to use more than 10% of a work. So for an 80,000 word novel, that’s actually a really high number. I didn’t even come close to that.

In terms of writing nonfiction and using things deliberately, I think some of it is ethical. What I do see out there that I think crosses an ethical line are these things that are study guides of popular nonfiction books where it’s kind of encouraging you to buy this shortened summary version in place of buying the actual book.

Joanna: They drive me mad!

Kristen: Oh, yes. I mean, that’s one of those things where I see them out there, and I think this doesn’t seem right, and how is this allowed? That’s certainly not what I’m doing. It’s not what you’re doing. You often use epigraphs, I know, in your nonfiction books, and all of that’s fine.

What we’re doing when we’re quoting authors in that way is really encouraging readers to go take a look at these books. You include a resource section at the end of all of your nonfiction chapters, actually pointing readers to those sources that you’ve quoted from. So that’s really important.

If you’re writing nonfiction and you’re doing research, the rule is really to just take meticulous notes.

I use the highlighting tool on Kindle or transcribe notes. I don’t paraphrase when I am taking notes because I want to be able to go back and check exactly what the original quote is.

So I want to know when I’m quoting and when I’m not, so I can make sure I flag that in the book. It’s just about really keeping records, making sure it’s all in one place, and you can go back and check that later. Or your copy editor can check it later and make sure it’s accurate, and make sure that readers can find what you’re quoting.

Joanna: Yes, so just basically —

Don’t use song lyrics and don’t use poems, as well, unless they’re out of copyright because they’re often very short as well.

I think some of the other things around fair use are parody. So you can use things for parody, but parody is very difficult. It’s not something we’re particularly doing.

Also as part of education and commentary, which is what you’re doing. With your book particularly, I feel like it is commentary. When you’ve quoted things, even though they’re within the fair use boundaries, it’s still commentary. So it’s transformative as well.

Kristen: Exactly. It’s really just a matter of, as an author, you want to treat other authors with respect. If you’re doing that, you’re not going to go wrong.

Joanna: Yes, and also context. So somebody did this to me once, and I’m still sore about it. They took a line from one of my novels to make a case that I was some kind of fascist. I was like, that is a character saying something in a novel that you’ve taken completely out of context.

I feel like that is part of, like you said, about respecting other people. You can probably find quotes in people’s books, like people picking quotes out of the Bible and things out of context. I feel like, as you said—

It’s about respecting the person whose book it is and doing that in a positive way.

You don’t want anyone to happen upon your book, or for you to share it and just be really upset that you’ve quoted them in some way.

Kristen: I really think of nonfiction books in particular as part of a conversation, but actually, I think you can think of fiction books the same way. So just in a conversation with another human being, you don’t want to mischaracterize what they’re saying. That just doesn’t lead to a productive conversation.

What I’m trying to do in this book is show how these books work and encourage readers to read them. So I’m kind of extending the conversation that these authors have already started by publishing their novel.

Joanna: Nonfiction books, to me, have a lot of elements that might come off the page in some way.

How are you taking the book and the material off the page and into people’s minds in other ways?

Kristen: This is something I feel like you do really well in your nonfiction as well, is you and your chapters with often questions, and as I said, your resources list.

I think, for me, this happened in two ways. As I said, I’m a very visual learner, and so when I was wrestling with, especially a lot of the kind of structural elements of these novels—

There’s a chapter on N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, which is such a great book. She has, I think, six or seven different point of view characters and narrators. So to wrap my head around how that worked, I ended up creating figures for a lot of these things.

They’re kind of graphical, so I could wrap my head around it. So that’s something that I have used as a learning tool. They’re on my website, and so that’s something that kind of comes off the page and can help readers.

Then another thing I’m getting ready to do in the new year that I’m super excited about is I’m going to start a Novel Study Book Club. So we’re going to kind of keep this reading going. The theme for next year is going to be bestsellers.

There’s going to be a Patreon community. We’re going to vote on a recent bestseller to take apart and study this way each month. So I’m really excited to see how that’s going to work and just use it as a way to encourage people to read more.

I think if people can do it in a community, and hopefully get some kind of resources around how to unpack the structure and how to understand it, that it might be more profitable and just feel a little bit less lonely.

Joanna: Yes, I think it is interesting to do that, and often when someone else points things out. Well, in my fiction, for example, sometimes you say things in the edit and I’m like, oh, I didn’t even know I thought that, or I didn’t even know that that was there.

When you read in a group like that, it may be that you find things within the text and it helps other people see things that will bring out new ideas.

Kristen: I think this can really help authors be better editors of their own work. If the way another reader is experiencing something surprises you, that’s really a learning experience right there. That’s a way you might come back to your own work and think, oh, well, how can I apply this here?

As a reader, I might experience this this way, but now that I know that another reader experiences it in a very different way, I can play around with my choices here.

Joanna: Yes, it’s all about learning things and then putting it into practice. I was thinking about this, and obviously as we’ve mentioned, you’re my editor, but I also use ProWritingAid, and we are in this time in the writing and publishing history of generative AI.

It feels like an author could put all the craft books into practice, including yours, and then work with ChatGPT or Claude and ProWritingAid and say, do I even need a human editor? Like, why would someone hire Kristen or hire another human editor?

What are the benefits of working with a human editor in an age of generative AI?

When does it add more than software, basically? I know it’s a super leading question!

Kristen: Well, I mean, it’s complicated, and I think the answer to this is going to change. I mean, I think the part that’s not going to change is that ultimately, you’re looking for human readers. As good as these tools are, and many of them are quite good, they just are not a stand in for a human reader, and that’s what your editor is.

I think the other thing that I see happening in particular right now with these tools is that they tend to move people towards the most common solution or answer. That’s a plus in many ways, but often if you’re writing fiction, that’s actually not what you want.

So especially if I’m working with an author who I know has used one of these tools, either in the planning process or maybe in part in the generating process, then as a human editor, my role is to help them be even more human.

If I can kind of then tease out an element that I can see, “Oh, I think this is your voice versus the AI voice, and let’s figure out how to heighten that.” Or, “Here’s a place where you took the most obvious next step in your plot. What are five or ten ways that you could just make a left turn here, and how would that impact the reader’s experience?”

The other piece is really the human coaching element. I find this becomes a bigger and bigger part of my editing practice is that writers, it doesn’t matter how experienced they are, there’s going to be some kind of emotional or psychological stumbling block in a book.

They may run into imposter syndrome, or they just get stuck, or they encounter writer’s block or something. You really need a little bit of, I think of it as book therapy, to get a writer out of that.

It’s a mix of encouragement and reminding them of the elements that are already working in their book and trying to give them a layout of a reasonable path in front of them for how to do the revision work that they need. An AI cannot do that very convincingly yet.

I think you really do need a human being on the other end of the screen, or the phone, or just in the Microsoft Word comments to help keep you going.

Joanna: Yes, which is that real value added side of things. I still think perhaps early writers believe that editing is just fixing grammar and typos, whereas that’s a tiny, tiny piece of it. I mean an important piece, but still, as you say, it’s not necessarily the most important.

You did say that sometimes when you’re working with people who use AI tools—obviously, I’m very honest with you about my usage, and you’ve not had an issue with that, and obviously I use things in an ethical way.

So can you tell then, if someone hasn’t told you, do you notice? Also, do you have a problem with AI use? Also, you’re part of an organization for editors.

Should editors have a problem with AI use? Where’s the line around usage?

Kristen: I think everyone’s got to decide this for themselves. People have really strong feelings on this issue, and I understand them. I have the advantage of I live in San Francisco, and my partner works in tech. He told me, probably three years ago, these LLMs are going to be able to write a novel.

I was horrified, and said absolutely not, I don’t believe you. I kind of had a mini tantrum. It prepared me for the fact that actually, now they can.

Now I definitely don’t have people coming to me who have just spat out an entire novel using one of these tools. The fact is that they are not good at that. Yes, it can be done, but they’re just going to be cliched and boring and generic.

Again, these models, they’re geared not towards creativity and uniqueness and all of that. That’s just not what they do. I think also you can detect when that human element isn’t there.

So I don’t have any problem with writers using them.

I can often tell, especially if it’s a writer I’ve worked with a lot, and then they’ll send me a synopsis or something, and it’s just in a really different voice. The AI voice tends to be quite flat. It’s very correct, but it’s very flat. So that is something I’ve started to notice.

I think the thing that we have to do on both sides of the editor-author relationship is just be really upfront about how we’re using these tools, when we’re using them, and experiment with when they’re helpful and when they’re not.

I am absolutely 100% sold on using these AI tools to write book descriptions, for example.

Or for example, in my own book, what I did use it for was to help me with the takeaways that are at the end because they’re really good at summarizing.

I then had to rewrite them in my own voice because they didn’t have my voice, but even that part might come. So I think it’s just going to be a matter of communicating with one another. I think being really upfront with what we’re doing.

One of the things I’m adding to my contracts for 2025 is having a clause in there that makes it really clear that I’m going to ask for consent before I use one of these tools on anyone’s novel.

Many of my clients are going to say no. In fact, I would say probably the majority of them really don’t want me using any of these tools, and that’s absolutely fine.

I think on the other side, just authors coming to me, they can tell me, “Okay, well, I’ve used this tool for outlining.” Certainly, some authors are not as good at a dialogue, or they’re not as good at setting, or they don’t think about smell or whatever.

They have a weakness that they know that they’re trying to compensate for, and they can use one of those tools to provide ideas. If I know how they’re using it, then I can, again, make sure that human element doesn’t get lost.

I can make sure we’re finding all of the opportunities to get their own voice in there and get rid of that kind of AI flatness that can creep in.

Joanna: Yes, interesting times indeed. We’ve been working together quite a few years now, and I use the tools more and more for different things, but as you know, I work with you on every book and every short story, and I don’t feel like there’s any detriment to the process.

I feel like it’s almost improved a lot of areas of my business and my writing, and using ProWritingAid I hope takes a bit of the basics off your shoulders so you can focus on the more interesting side of editing and the more human element side of editing, I guess.

Kristen: Yes, and I think this is kind of where we’re heading, where a lot of these tools are actually not very good at some things. You know, some of the things like commas and all of that, and there are a lot of false positives. So I actually don’t use those as an editor, myself, because it slows me down.

If an author uses ProWritingAid before they come to me, that’s fantastic.

Just like you said, then I can focus on the really important stuff, like line editing. That’s where the real magic of editing comes. I think for a lot of editors, like that’s what they want to do as well.

Like commas interest me, but they’re not quite as thrilling as taking a line that’s a little clunky, or just flat, or the author is missing an opportunity to introduce a really beautiful parallelism, or sharpen up a metaphor. Like, that’s where the real magic comes, and that’s the stuff I love, and I know most editors love that as well.

It’s much more exciting than fixing typos. The typos are important to me, and I’m a perfectionist, and I want you to have a perfect book, but let’s focus in on the stuff that’s really about the art. Let some of these tools do the heavy lifting in terms of things like fact checking, and for your books, in particular, checking quotations.

There are things now that these tools just make so much faster and easier, and we can use our very limited human time to focus on the stuff that will make a big difference.

Joanna: Fantastic.

Where can people find you, and your books, and editing services online?

Kristen: So my business is the Blue Garret, and you can find me at TheBlueGarret.com. Then if you’re interested in joining that Novel Study Book Club, you can find me on Patreon at Patreon.com/BlueGarret.

Joanna: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Kristen. That was great.

Kristen: That was a lot of fun.

Takeaways:

1. Focus on Character and Present Action Over Details Upfront: Instead of front-loading physical descriptions and backstory, engage readers by showing what a character wants, feels, and faces right now.
2. Think in Scenes and Chapters as Story Containers: Use scenes to create mini-stories within the narrative and chapter breaks to control pacing, highlight emotional resonance, and keep readers turning pages.
3. Approach Plotting as a Process, Not a Formula: Complex, page-turning plots often emerge through drafting and revision. Embrace discovery writing and then retool the story’s structure once you understand its shape.
4. Read Widely and Deliberately to Improve Your Craft: Studying contemporary, diverse genres broadens your repertoire of narrative techniques and helps you integrate unique elements into your own voice.
5. Use Tools But Keep It Human: While AI and grammar software can streamline parts of the process, human editors bring insight, emotional support, and voice-cultivation that technology cannot replicate.

The post Writing Tips: Craft, Structure, and Voice With Kristen Tate first appeared on The Creative Penn.