I’ve heard people describe writing a book as being like running a marathon – an endurance event that requires stamina, focus, discipline, and a commitment to being in this thing for the long haul. All of that is accurate.
I would argue, though, that there’s an important difference between an event like a marathon and a mission like a book: a marathon really does require training. Training for a marathon and running it aren’t the same thing, and they can’t be. You must put lots of time into one before you can begin the other. But you don’t necessarily have to be at peak writing strength with excellent technique when you begin working on your book. Writing a book can be a marathon, but it can also be a lot more like taking up a general daily or weekly fitness program. With the right support, you can improve your technique and build your strength as you go. It’s like combining your marathon training and the race itself into one. If you’ve decided you want to hit your fitness goals but you’re not sure where to start or not convinced you’ll stick with it on your own, what do you do? You hire a personal trainer. A trainer holds you accountable to your commitment to your fitness, checks your form, helps you get the most out of each session, and makes sure you don’t do yourself more harm than good. A trainer guides you toward greater skill, tailors their instruction to your specific needs, and helps you reach your personal goals. A book coach is just the same. So why hire a book coach instead of diving into the writing process on your own?
Working with a coach means personal attention from a professional, someone holding you to your commitment and making sure the hard work you are putting in is actually going to get you the results you want. And although writing without experience isn’t likely to do you the same physical damage as working out with poor form, it can certainly cost you time and energy and ultimately leave you less satisfied with your finished product. And I’m guessing that’s not what you want. Is it time for you to consider hiring a coach to guide you through your writing process? Have a look at my book building page and see if we might be a good fit. I can’t help you perfect your pull-up, but I can definitely help you get your manuscript across the finish line.
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When you set out to write your book, did you put some time into working out whom you were writing for?
Yes, your topic may be universal. Your themes may be as well. Maybe everyone, no matter their age or field, can benefit from the material you’re sharing. But even with the most broadly useful business topic – or a multigenre crossover work of fiction – your book simply isn’t going to be for everyone. It can’t be. Consider the most lauded, iconic books you can think of. Maybe you’ve come up with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey or Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. Who were their target readers? Everybody, right? Well, no. They were writing specifically for entrepreneurs, businesspeople, people who aspire to leadership, and people who want to break the mold and live a different life than what you get with a nine-to-five job. That’s nowhere near everybody! Or consider the most successful writers of the modern age – let’s take J. K. Rowling and Stephen King as examples. Is Harry Potter for everyone? Thinking even more specifically about the first book in the series, was that for everyone? No – it was for teen and preteen readers of fantasy novels (and probably their parents). That’s not even the same people Stephen King, another mass-market fiction author, was writing for, let alone the people Tim Ferriss was writing for! Of course you want your book to appeal to as broad a range of readers as possible. And you certainly can reach a wide audience with the right material. But if you try to reach absolutely everyone – ages nine to ninety-nine, college students and CEOs, homemakers, office workers, construction workers, people who only ever read business books, people who only ever read romance novels – you’ll be stuck before you begin. To know how to approach your subject or your story, you have to know who your reader is. Why will they want to pick up this book? Why are they browsing in this section in the first place? Which section of the bookstore or online marketplace does your book actually belong in? These are vital questions for marketing, but they’re key long before you get to the stage. You can only give your readers what they need from you if you know what that is. And you can only know what they need from you if you know who they are. Identifying your target audience is a crucial first step to a successful writing and publishing process, from the very beginning of brainstorming or outlining right through to your launch or release. There's no one reason people decide to write a story. Sometimes they have a message they want to get across, sometimes an issue or a question they want to explore, sometimes a world they want to build. Sometimes they have a burning idea for the story's main plot or conflict. Any of these is a perfectly good place to begin the writing process.
But you know the single biggest mistake I see fiction writers make again and again? Believing that the issue or question or conflict or world they want to explore is the core of their story. This applies regardless of the length of the work, from 100,000-word novels to six-page shorts. Your story is not about any of that, ultimately. It's about the characters. If you only have one point-of-view character – one person whose head you are in and whose experience the reader is sharing – the story is specifically about that person. If you have more than one POV character, it's about each of them. The true core of your book is these people and how they react to and are affected by the plot you conjure up for them. Now, your goal as a writer may be to make your readers think about the issues of your story or look at questions from a new angle. No problem. But your readers will do that on a much deeper level if you grab them from the heart and not just the head, and you do that with character. Anyone remember the 2010s TV show Leverage? It's about a group of con artists who band together to steal from the evil rich and give to the deserving poor. If you watch the first season and you look at the timing, it's clear that the show's creators wanted to talk about the 2008 financial crisis and how white-collar crime so often goes unpunished. Each episode is wish fulfillment; we get to watch the wrongdoers get their comeuppance and the people they've hurt find some relief. But is that what the viewer is thinking about while watching? Mostly not. Sure, every so often the point is driven home and we remember that this is a response to 2008, but mostly we're enjoying watching the characters struggle with their own demons and their relationships with each other, fighting not to let their personal challenges hamstring their efforts to take down the bad guys. That's what we tune in for – to watch these people we've come to care about face their flaws and ultimately triumph. The fact that there's a heist or con in every single episode doesn't hurt either, of course, and you may be thinking, "But the point of my story isn't a social or political message, it's just a really exciting, gripping plot! Can I just concentrate on the plot, and let the characters follow?" Well, no. A gripping plot is essential to a good story, particularly a full-length work like a novel, but unless your plot is a vehicle for richer character expression, readers just won't stay interested. You can bring them in with external conflict, but you keep them with internal conflict. As humans, we care much, much more about people than we care about events. You can use that to your advantage in your writing. As you plot out your novel or story, make sure you're building in your main characters' reactions, internal conflicts, and growth as human beings. Those elements should be knitted as tightly into the fabric of your story as any external events or situations your characters face. That's how you keep us hooked from beginning to end. I've been editing for over ten years now, and in that time, I've worked with a lot of first-time authors. A lot. It's fairly common for my new clients, especially those who are just starting out as writers, to be very nervous to send me their material. Of course I understand that -- it's downright scary to hand your words over to someone else. But you know what single thing comes up most often when people tell me they're anxious to show me their writing? What one thing people are most worried makes them a bad writer?
Commas. Where should you put them? Where should you not put them? Does your sentence need one comma to be grammatically correct or four? If you've ever been nervous to send your writing to an editor because you're not confident in your use of commas, please put your mind at rest. If you're hiring an editor, it really doesn't matter how correct or incorrect your commas are. The rules of comma usage in English are long, complex, and bordering on arcane. Yes, there are some simple rules that we learned as kids -- but there's so much more to the comma than lists and separating independent clauses. Do I expect you to know all those details when you're not an English language professional? Absolutely not. But Stephanie! I hear you cry. I want to know all about this stuff! I want to bring my writing to as high a standard as I possibly can before anyone else sees it! I'm a professional perfectionist, so I can certainly understand that. Have no fear -- I'll get through as many of the rules of commas (and other punctuation marks and grammatical nuances) as I can in this blog. Stay tuned. Nonetheless. Tackling your first writing project is hard enough without worrying about the fine details of comma usage. Write your story, finish your dissertation, get your novel out of you and onto the page -- and then hire a professional to tidy up the particulars. Please don't ever be nervous to send me or another editor your work because you're not sure whether the commas are perfect. They won't be. That's what we're here for. |