In this episode, we’re going down the rabbit hole of stories. We’re talking about where ideas come from, how you capture those ideas, and how you can turn them into a story or series of stories. And as a bonus, we talk about what inspires us, and what scares the heck out of us. Oh, and for those of you who stick it out to the very end, there’s a true tale of a wizard and a magic ring too…

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• Crystal Hunt (Non-fiction)
• CJ Hunt (Romance)
• Michele Amitrani (Fiction)
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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 003: Inside Story Inspirations and the Writing Process

Crystal: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. I’m Crystal Hunt

Michele: And I’m Michele Amitrani. We’re here to help you save time, energy, money and to level up your writing career.

Crystal: Welcome to episode number three of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show, we’re going to take a detailed look at the writing process itself, how do you actually go about writing a book? Well, it’s different for everyone and there’s no right way to do it. So let’s dive in and see if there’s anything about our processes that could be useful to you.

So what are you writing right now before we dive into the how? Let’s talk about the what.

Our writing processes

Michele: Wow. Wow. Wow, wow. Okay. So the answer to the question is multiple things and the reason is because I have a different strategy writing wise, compared with my previous year. My previous years, what I did was concentrating on one thing, one thing, make sure to finish that you finish the story.

You’re done with that thing. You don’t have to worry about anything else, but just go all in on that project. Completely different strategic wise, this year. I decided to do something that I’ve never done before and I would say that Crystal has some of the fault. Because, she kind of pushed me in that direction to do something I’d never done before.

Crystal: We call it credit when it’s good, just the record! It’s only fault if it’s bad. And since we know this is going to have an excellent outcome, we’re going to say, I’m going to take some credit, not fault haha!

Michele: Hahaha okay! And the credit actually spawned from an idea she had, I believe like a couple of years ago or three years ago, and very briefly, long story short, she wanted to publish 40 products by 40 years of age. Is that correct? Am I saying it right?

Crystal: Yes. No, that’s true. I only turned 40 last year. So it wasn’t so very long ago.

Michele: Yeah. And so I was thinking like that was still in January 2020, so there was no pressure. But I do need that new year resolution. So that, what can I do you know, to match that “credit” that she gave me and I was like, okay, I’m going to write and publish 12 stories this year.

So one story every single month. So what am I writing now? I’m writing four different things. Four different stories. One is a story that is already done and it’s going to be published in a few days. I’m going to be publishing in March and at the same time-

Crystal: You need to give us titles because otherwise we can’t go and find these stories.

Michele: So the story that I published in January, it’s a science fiction, short story, called Glass Into Steel. I’m going to release a dark fantasy, which is, as you can see, like a different genre. But that’s another part of the of the challenge, which is basically, based on the Little Red Riding Hood world, and is going to be called Not That Fairy Tale.

And this time it’s not going to be a short story. It’s going to be a novelette. Novelettes are stories between 7,500 to, I believe 17,000 words. Anyways, I didn’t plan it to make it this long, but here we are. And the third story that’s going to be published in March is going to be called The Umbrella Paradox, which is another fantasy, but it’s more like on the urban fantasy side.

And then I’m working on a different other things. But basically that’s the way I’m going to write this year. That’s why the way I’m writing is so much more different than more, like I would say, over the place, because at the same time, I’m not just writing a book and writing the story. Editing another one, publishing one as I’m like revising ideas and things and exploring. What are you writing, Crystal?

Crystal: Well, and also writing a multitude of things. I have split personalities going on in that I, as Crystal Hunt, I write nonfiction. So Crystal is currently working on a couple of things. The book called strategic authorpreneur, which goes with all of this and is kind of an updated version of a book about self publishing and setting yourself up for authoring in business success that I wrote the first time almost a decade ago, and a lot of it’s still really interesting stuff, so I pulled it all back out. Pulled it apart. So started again, mix and matching everything up with all of my new knowledge to add to the old knowledge.

And so I’m excited for that, which will be not too long, probably after you’re all seeing this episode. So you can go check for Strategic Authorpreneur on Amazon, see if it’s out yet. And also on the fiction side, CJ, since I write fiction as CJ Hunt. CJ has been working on a combination of things because I do these novellas that are kind of all linked together in these story cycles.

There are mini series, and so the mini series I’m working on right now in the River’s End romances is, is the O’Donnell family, and we had to go to Ireland and do some research in June for one of these books. And so that was, you know, one of the things we do for our craft, right. So my husband and I spent a couple of weeks in Ireland where I used to live doing some research to make sure that the places were still somewhat as I remembered them and brushing up all of that contextual knowledge.

You got to know what the food tastes like and what the people sound like. I had to get my Irish ear back. I lived there for a couple of years, but the accent and the way that the words flow, it’s different. And so it was a really fun exercise to make sure my dialogue was going to be on point because some of my characters are, uh, from the West coast of Ireland. So I was researching that. So there’s one, it’s called Charmed, which is part of that series. But it actually shares a timeline with three other books in that series. And so I’m actually simultaneously writing Class Act, Charmed and His and Hers. And they are three different siblings in the same family.

But because what happens in one book flows into another one, and they, the plots all impact each other because they are happening at the same time. So I started and I found I couldn’t just finish one than the other than the others. So I’m moving all three of the stories along kind of together, and they’ll all be done quite close together in time.

I think so, yeah. Just juggling three sets of plots and characters that are all interwoven has been a fun challenge for how do I track the timelines on that stuff when I make an edit in one? How do, how does that ripple out to impact the others? And they will all have to go through substantive editing at roughly the same time because if my copy editor and my developmental editor says, you know, I really think we need to shift this, or something’s got to change here, it’s going to ripple out to all of the books. So I want to make sure that I, am able to ripple that in a way that doesn’t create consistency errors, and that really feels authentic for the family and the characters and everything else.

Michele: What was something you said, about characters and stories that makes you think of a question that it’s like just going immediately after. So if that’s what you’re working on, generally speaking, how does the idea of a story sound like, how do you get to the idea of that book or how do you come about crafting and shaping worlds?

Writing craft and where to get ideas

Crystal: The ideas come from really different places for me and in different formats I have kept, and I mean, I’ve had notebooks. You can see there’s a whole row of solid color notebooks behind me on the shelf there. I’ve been keeping that style for years, but since I was I don’t know. Since I was 17 since the last time my computer melted down, I’ve been keeping story ideas in notebooks and computers and wherever, and I have kind of a central space where I was dumping all of the things that came to mind. And sometimes it’ll be that I see something that sparks an idea.

Sometimes I’ll have like fragments of an idea, or I can see a character, or I can see a scene. There’s one book in the River’s End series that I’ve got to work my way up to writing it because it’s, it’s pretty heavy. I think it’ll be like, I dunno, five into, the Martinez families miniseries, but it’s called Ruffled.

They often come as titles. So that’s the thing. You’ll notice I have covers and titles for most of the books I plan to probably write in my life already. But the picture that I have that came to mind just as I was walking one day, I just clear as day, could see a picture of a firefighter kneeling in the middle of a road with a baby in his arms and just a wreck of a car on fire behind them. And I can’t say any more without giving away the plot points,

Because there, I know there’s, there are some for some folks out there who are following along and they don’t want to give anything away. But, um, but that’s what came to me was that image to the point where I was like standing in the middle of a trail sobbing in the middle of the forest because I could feel everything he was feeling and it was awful.

And so I know how it fits in. It turns out very beautifully and it’s all okay in the end, but I’m not ready to write that yet. So there’s pieces like that where all I can do is just, I journal the heck out of it and I record all of my thoughts that I’m having. And then I wait to see how that piece connects into the bigger fabric because I, all of the stories are in the same town.

And so it’s just like a real small town where I come from. The people are walking around having their lives all the time. I just feel like I’m focusing in on moments of those and kind of pulling the stories out in those key turning point moments where our lives really change or we. Find that person that we love that sort of helps us be our best self, or sometimes it’s in this horrible moments that eventually turn into something great.

So, yeah, it is. It’s very interesting. And I never really know. And even the story Charmed, I had an idea for, who the characters were going to be and how they fit together, but when we actually got to Ireland. You know, when we went out to Inismore and we were looking at the graveyard and we were standing in a graveyard on this tiny Aran Island, and it just, something about the story shifted and the direction things take are very different than I intended for them to be.

The book was outlined for two years before we went back to Ireland. But everything changed once I was actually standing in the place I needed to shift a few things. So I did. So, you know, I like to think that it’s like making, you know, soup or stew, you just, you put all this stuff in the pot and then it has to blend for a while and it, you know, you can eat it at, three hours or nine hours and it’s going to be good either way, but it’s a very different meal depending on how long you let those flavours soak in and how things connect and what you eat with it. So anyway, there’s my metaphor for the episode. Apparently we’re going soup and stew today.

Michele: Yes. Yeah. That’s interesting. It’s just be goes like when you say like, you have an idea, but it seems to me like what sounds like, it’s like you have the idea and it’s clear in your mind. But it is easy for you, like, to change that, that as you need it to fit in the overall plot, which I think is something that is super important and meaningful and I don’t think it’s something you can do easily if you don’t have like a, a number of books that you already wrote because like, you know, you understand the system, right?

That is something that is like, you know, a musician. That plays the violin for like 10 years, is going to have  almost no problem in a replicating, a very different and very difficult music. And if you’re a musician that maybe you are using the instrument for three months, it’s going to take you much more effort to do the same song.

So I think what you’re saying is super interesting because like, it’s something that I also kind of do especially nowadays when I have to write and concentrate on three to four books or stories at the same time, the ideas that I have come, I would say 60% from the book that I read, 30% for things that I see or the from interaction from people.

So it can be like an online course. So it can be any conversation with you. Maybe I have a book idea or maybe I have a character idea. And then there is like a, 60 30. So there is like a, a 10% remain, which is basically completely random stuff.

It’s like, something on this line. When you work down the street, there are like literally thousands of stories unfolding around you. If you’re a good driver, you’re going to catch four or five. And so I think that’s kind of meaningful. Because like sometimes I do get stories by maybe looking at somebody on the street or maybe, the way the conversation goes. So that’s the 10% from where my ideas come from. But mainly I would save on things that I read because when I read, I feel way more, I feel alone.

Crystal: Well, I get a lot from music actually, so when I’m walking I will be doing one of two things usually I will usually be listening to music or audio books or podcasts, or I will be talking on the phone with my ear buds in sneaky little ones here. So I probably look like I’m talking to myself but I will be chatting with other people cause it’s, I find it’s a good way to kind of multitask. I’m getting some exercise and I’m also staying in touch with the people I care about in my life so I can double up that way. But listening to music while walking in nature is shocking how many stories there are in songs. And I, I definitely genre hop in music where I bounce around all over everywhere.

And I love picking a song in Spotify and saying, okay, go nuts. Like, what do you want me to listen to next? I actually made a playlist on Spotify for my town and my book series, and they’re all the songs that have kind of spawned stories or that I’ve listened to, and listening to the song was like, Oh, this is this book.

So I have a theme song for each of my books, sometimes two, depending if there’s two storylines running together. So that’s just kind of a fun other source of inspiration. It’s, you’re actually listening to lyrics, they are very short, tight stories in a song and the bridge often completely changes the story that’s being told in the song.

So I love that it’s like a haiku, right? Where the last line changes the meaning of what came before it. And that’s often the case in music as well. So how do you, how do you capture the ideas when they come? Like when, when they fly into your brain, then what do you do with them?

How to capture ideas when they come

Michele: So you said, like you mentioned before, that you use notebooks to take notes. I have to say I have my notebooks, and it not here, but I will show you, you know what? I’m going to show it to you one second.

And I thought it was meaningful because it’s like a, it’s like a, this kind of thing that’s kind of weird. It was like the paper, it’s very, very thick and it’s not white. It makes it so much of a difference from any other thing. The way I touch it. I can’t write a story on these kind of things. I don’t use it stuff for writing stories, but it’s small enough for, so that I can put in small things of an idea. Small trickles. And it would be like data and the place where took the idea, that’s the main, the main way I basically frozen or freeze an idea. And it also encompassed the symbol. And the reason why I’m so excited when I show you this is because really these are like basically chunks of things that can mean completely nothing.

Or can spawn and can become like a fleshed out stories. Each and every single one of my books start from a note like this. Omnilogos for the science fiction Lord of Time. I still have like the books, and I remember, the notebooks where I put like the first idea. I remember the day that idea was jotted down on that notebook.

That’s the way I basically keep track of things. After that, like if you were wondering if I put this in on a like a screening app or like a, on a software of any kind. I don’t do that because what I would do is if I have an idea here and I’d write it maybe once or three or four pages. I understand the idea is more than an idea.

So I immediately start to write a story. And so I don’t need to translate them. The paper notes into a softer notes as I know lots of writers do because I take action almost immediately, especially with short, shorter stories. When the idea is fresh for me, and I can see like there, there are several ideas on that story, on that notebook.

That for me, is a direction to follow. See it, it says to me, you have to write something. You start something, write something. That first draft. It’s the indicator for me that I need to write that story. It’s like a critical mass. You would say. If there is a lot of stuff, a lot of ideas, I’d say three or four pages of those, that notebooks are stuff with ideas about that story, I need to write it. And it doesn’t matter if it’s the first draft, it doesn’t make a kind of sense. But what I’m doing at that moment is I’m jotting down the idea and then I can edit afterward. So that’s why I, that’s how nowadays I capture my ideas. Always in longhand, always with the pen and always on a notebook that it’s just designed for that purpose. I just put my idea in there. What do you do?

Crystal: I do have an obsession with notebooks. Let me just pull a random one from here. Let’s see. So most of them have sayings on them. I got, these are like, the series is from Indigo, so I go in when I’m ready for a new one-

Michele: That is so weird because I use the same kind of thing. But this one, I use them for writing my stories. I would write the longhand. Yeah, exactly. Exactly the same thing, that’s amazing.

Crystal: Yeah! So I will randomly just jot ideas, thoughts, whatever, as they come trying to see. I often sketch things, which is hilarious because I’m, I’m not a particularly great artist.

Crystal: Well, I’m trying to find some, I am not seeing pictures in this one though. I have a map some. Okay. Here’s one. Which is not much. I was drafting up an idea for some, Oracle cards or tarot cards that I want to make for my magic series at some point. So I will draft up ideas like that.

One time we were camping up in golden years, and we drove past what I think is, I think there’s a prison up there and there was like school buses and those forest fires were going on and it was so smoky and we couldn’t really, we couldn’t go hiking. We couldn’t do most of the stuff you normally do camping.

And it felt very post-apocalyptic and there’s no power or anything where we were so we ended up- I had my notebook and I got this idea for a series of interlinked stories of different people’s experiences of a really bad forest fire that comes through this public campground area. And so in rivers end, there’s a nearby place that’s kind of like that.

It’s called Spirit Lake. And we’ve encountered it in a couple of books already and it will be reappearing in more, but I sat there with my notebook for most of a week and I mapped out the entire, like, pretend area in in my story world. And then went in there and just, yeah, sketched all up and did all that stuff.

But, but then you do have to choose like, okay. Well now what am I going to pay attention to and how am I going to map that back into things? So like you, I don’t take everything and write it out in a different way necessarily, but I use the inspiration or the ideas from that, and I will open a Scrivener document as soon as something is clear enough for me that it has a title.

Or that it fits somewhere that I can think of then I opened a Scrivener document with that title and I start dumping ideas in, and I have a template that I’ve made, which is a mashup of all of the structure for stories that I found the most helpful, and with each craft book that I’ve read and really loved and found the pieces that work for my process, I’ve created myself a Scrivener template so I can open a Scrivener file that auto-populates with all of my structure notes for how I’m going to outline a romance novella, particularly like I’ve, I’ve really refined that one I’ve written.

I guess 13 or 14 romance stories now. And so with each one, I’ve refined it a little bit more. And so I start with that for each of them so that I have a structure and built in there are, you know, the fields I fill out for each of the characters as I get to know them and whatever else. So I start with just a single notes document at the top of that.

That’s like ideas or possibilities. And so when I first start that Scrivener document, I just start filling in that possibilities field. I don’t worry about flushing out everything yet, but I have a, a huge, Dropbox full of different story sparks. I called them and then, um, I’ll take a spark and I’ll start flushing it out when I feel like there’s enough pieces and when I can see how it connects into the bigger picture, if that makes sense.

Michele: So basically, that’s basically how you pursue one idea. It was like, I thing I was wondering is how do you decide the, how do you mash all your resources on one idea. How do you decide, okay, now I’ve reached that critical mass. How do you decide what to pursue and why?

Crystal: Well, when I first was starting, I just, I, I was in kind of a slump. I hadn’t really been writing for a long time, you know, following the whole kid’s book publishing company and closing that down and then sort of digging out of debt and dealing with all of that stuff. Writing, once you become a writer and you’re paid for it. Um, I took a lot of writing contracts. I did a lot more children’s books after we closed our company for other people.

And so once it becomes your job, it changes things. And my husband and I both were like, Oh, we want to, we want to be writers when we grow up. And so we got to that point where we were actually making our whole living from writing things on contract for other people and whatever else. And it turned out he was like.

I’m out. I don’t want to do this for work. He’s like, I thought I would love this, and I, I don’t, you know, he’s like, it’s, it’s very limiting to have to do things for money specifically when it’s also your creative passion. It gets very complicated. And so he was like, Nope, not for me. He’s like, I’m going to do this as my hobby still, but I don’t want to do this as a job.

And for me, I need a little bit of time to like regroup and figure out what were the parts that I loved and how do I get those back. And so he said, okay, like enough already. Just follow the fun. Just do whatever feels like fun to you. So I said, okay, well, all right. Um, and I wasn’t really sure what that was, and I was feeling, you know, kind of blocked because it had been awhile.

And writing is a muscle. You don’t use it and you’ve got to get back in shape before you can keep going. So I ended up doing NaNoWriMo in 2014 and I decided, okay, well this will be part of what gets me unblocked. So I did that, I had this story outlined, it was called Whistle While You Work, and I’d started it and it was all good.

I could see pieces of it and the characters were talking to me and I sat down in front of my computer and I typed in Silver Bells and then I started writing a completely different book. I didn’t do what I intended. Which any of you out there who are now laughing and nodding in agreement. Yep. Nando has that impact on people.

We’re talking about NaNoWriMo for those newcomers who are wondering, it’s national novel writing month where you try to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. And I had been struggling because I had so many story outlines in my folders and like I’m great until about 20 or 30,000 words and then I get stuck. And so I had hundreds of books that stop at 20 or 30,000 words. I was like, I’m never finishing anything. This is terrible. So I, you know, the counselor in me was like, okay, well, what do we do if we’re not hitting an end goal? Let’s look at a different end goal. Maybe we just need to shift the goalposts a little bit. So I was like, well, if I stopped between 20 and 30,000 words on every book, what if my goal was to write a 20,000 word story?

What about then? So I just started writing and that’s what happened. I ended up with a novella and then people downloaded it and then I ended up with another one in the same series, and then I started sort of testing out different series or different characters to see what people would respond to and what I was having fun writing.

And so I ended up and like, don’t do this, this, this is not a good way to do this. But I ended up writing basically five book ones. So I have like five mini series that are set in River’s End. And the first thing I did was right book one in each of those because the timelines are interwoven and I wasn’t sure which ones I would really get into, and I was still just trying to follow the fun to sort of re find my writing voice.

And so I’m not the best strategically because when I finally, I had written all those book ones and I just had a lot of angry readers who were just like Yeah. But when are you going to write book two in this one? I don’t want to meet new people. I want more stories from the old people. So I went back and I finished the next few in a row in the McAllister family.

So the ones that follow Silver Bells and I kind of closed out that story arc. And gave them the happily ever after they were looking for in the big wedding and the whole bit. So that story arc was kind of closed. And so now I’ve moved back to the other ones where I have book one. So, you know, I know that the vision I have in my head is going to take five to 10 years to execute. Even the basic, uh, storylines and story sets that I have already outlined and envisioned and I have covers for, and all of those things. So it is an interesting exercise. So at first it was just pursue whatever was fun, but then once it did become a business, then I looked at, okay, well strategically, like, yes, it’s fun and exciting to work on something new and shiny. But also I need to finish the next books in my series. And so as I have been developing the process, I’ve been choosing which projects to keep going with. And basically looking for reader reaction. You know, if the readers are emailing me constantly, like when am I going to get so and so’s story?

Then I’m more likely to prioritize that because I know that there’s an audience already waiting for it. And so that, I mean, as a writer, that does add to the fun. If you know that people are excited about reading the next one and you’re getting emails, about what happens? You got to tell me. Then it does make it a lot easier to kind of prioritize that thing because yes, financially, you know, there’s not the incentive creatively.

It’s just fun to have somebody else playing with your imaginary friends to a company in there. So, yeah. That’s really cool. What does your process look like in terms of what are the actual phases of writing that you go through? Is it the same each of these stories? Are you finding it’s really different as you’re evolving? What’s going on there?

The phases of writing

Michele: No, as I was mentioning, I’m starting and trying different things. So the one story per month thing, which is my challenge for 2020, completely, completely, changed my writing style. The way I’m approaching to a new project. I found though I need to tell you this, Crystal-

I put a lot of pressure on my shoulders by deciding that no matter what I needed to publish a story. And you know very well that this time I put a penalty if I didn’t do so, which keeps me more accountable. So I pledge like to pay a certain amount of money each month if I don’t publish that story.

And this changed completely my writing process from this year to the previous year. The previous years the process of deciding and pursuing and deciding, which are the steps to take to writing this story or project were, okay, I need to write this thing.

And the moment I started and I decided to write an English that became even more difficult because English is not my first language. So I put so much pressure on me, to write as I was writing in Italian. Right? It’s completely stupid. It was a stupid decision, which didn’t work in English, how it worked in Italian. I would write to like 200,000 words novel is in one year, maybe in a, and even less than that. So I had to rethink everything. The way I’m writing now, it’s completely different from what I was doing in the past. So. Since I have to write short stories novelette or novella on a monthly basis,

That pressure of the length is off my shoulders, which is super, super important. And you Crystal mentioned that the moment you realized that your sweet spot was 20,000, 30,000. It changed everything. It literally revolutionized the, the way you are writing and crafting stories. And now you’re rocking it.

Now, I had a similar realization. My skills as a storyteller and as a writer in English are nowhere close to where I want to be. I cannot write a full length novel without using an aspect of resources, energy, and money and time that I simply don’t have. And I know this for a fact because writing Lord of Time, which is a 47,000 words, a dark fantasy novel, took two years.

That’s not sustainable. I just can’t do that. And it was difficult to say no to that because it meant like, it’s like you failed. It’s like you can’t do that anymore. You can’t allow yourself to do that. So I was forced then, as you were forced to rethink everything. And now what I’m finding is similar to what you found for yourself is I’m listening to the thing I can do.

So I know I can write a short story. There is maybe 5,000 words long in like five days, so I’ll do that. I’ll keep all the pressure out. I just focus on writing that story and the steps are the following: If I had ideas over a word or over a scene, there are very, very insistent. They’re very pressing on me,

I would write them. And this guy over here. If those ideas reach the critical mass, let’s say two to three pages are filled with ideas about that world, I need to write a story about that idea. Ideas on this notebook. And this is basically the way I have been writing stories since the beginning of this year is the way I am consistently producing and shipping stories.

I’ll disclose this story is going to be published in like a couple of days. I know that’s going to happen because it’s already done. And I would never have thought this is possible. Rethinking completely the way I was writing the story.

So that’s my step by step way I do things. You kind of hinted at yours, but I want to know a bit more if possible. How do you go about that title thing of, which is, to me was amazing too.  Because the title…it’s the most difficult thing for me. I can’t figure out the title. I don’t know which, which is the title of my story in the very end until usually the end.

How do you come up with that? How do you understand like that’s my first step. That’s my second step. And most of all, how do you get to know the title as one of the first things?

Crystal: I think. I think it’s because I don’t think the stories, I feel the stories, like it’s, it’s often, I don’t know how to really explain this, but it’s like I get, I can feel the whole thing and emotions.

I’m a psychologist by background, so that’s maybe part of it. Maybe it’s some sort of, I don’t know kind of nonsense. I have no idea. But I, I can feel what it wants to be, which sounds totally flaky and I’m normally so like strategic and business like, but we’re talking to CJ here, not just Crystal.

So CJ is a little more open to whatever’s going on out there in the universe. Sometimes it is that, I’ll see an image, I do a lot of the cover design myself, and then I just for bring in a graphic designer as I need to for pieces. And so I spent a lot of time searching stock image databases. Sometimes it is, I’ll hear a song and a phrase or something will pop into my head.

Often there’s a certain amount of irony or, or like a the source of conflict maybe is woven into the title. There is like an essence. So there’s this, this idea I went to as part of my got to get back into writing thing. I went to a happiness retreat in Mexico that was run by a lady called Laura Lavigne, and I was in a pretty low spot.

Nothing was going very well. I applied for a scholarship to go, a former student had offered to pay someone else’s tuition because their life had changed so much for the better from attending this. And so this email came out, I didn’t get a big work contract I had applied for like, I think found out hours before this email about a scholarship came out and they would’ve been at exactly the same time.

So I was an interesting twist of fate or serendipity or whatever. But this email landed in my box. I applied, I went to the retreat, and it was a very interesting experience. But one of the things that Laura taught us all about was this idea of essence versus form. That you have an essence to something.

So our essence for our podcast might be connection and sharing and generosity and fun, and playfulness, whatever. Those could all be essences. The form is a podcast right? But our experiences are more than just the form they take. And so thinking about writing as that, often the, it’ll be the essence of a story that comes to me.

So we would call that theme in the writing world, right? It’s a theme. But I always really had trouble when they were saying, you know, in school, I did a lot of university around stories, and it was like, what’s the theme of this piece? And it was like, Ugh, I don’t know, but, but what is this piece feel like?

Okay that I can do. So It’s just a different way of looking at it. But I think for me, if I know the central thread that’s going to tie that story together, like what is at the center of all of that, um, then I can kind of ripple that out into the story itself. So it is often a single scene I see in my mind, or a character or a snippet of dialogue.

Like sometimes I will actually hear the characters talking, and that’s usually what that title is drawn from. They’re Almost all single words. Some of them are two, but they’re almost all single word titles. Um, so it’s just that that focus on distilling something down to its essence before you can expand out.

Like you have to know where you’re going. Well, and not everybody does. So let me rephrase that. I have to know where I’m going in order to get there. Like I need to know the essence of the story I’m trying to tell because everything else I say in the way I say it is going to be impacted by what I’m trying to communicate with that thing.

And because my story world, and I’m going to like do hand gestures for those of you listening right now, my story world is really in 3D in my head. It’s not that one book is linearly connected to another book, which is connected to another book. It’s a  3D map in my head of different nodes. Like when you look at a graphic of a network, you know, it’s, it’s all of these pieces that are interconnected in, in 3D.

So That that maps out to the titles. And if I could see the titles and I can see how those essences connect from one to the next, or how that might transform or how they might interact with each other, then that’s what makes sense for me, which is probably more complicated than most folks needed. But once I figured out the title and the cover, then I can write the story.

But I, I can’t seem to get past, if I don’t have a title in the cover. It’s not ready yet. So then I will go, and like I said early, I’ll meet the characters, which means you can see some of the books on the shelf behind me. But, the emotional thesaurus or the Emotional Wound Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi is one of my favorite resources.

So once I feel like I have a sense of who the characters are. And in most romances, there’s, there’s two primary characters, right? So once I know who those two characters are, I will go and map them. And what happens is, I have to be able to place them. You can see these are tabs with names. These are all the characters in the written books because that’s my next step is once I have a rough sense of who they are, I will go into this book and I will find their emotional wound, right, the hole in their soul, because that’s what the arc of the story is going to be about and that’s going to be the source of the conflict in the books and the source of the happy ending as well.

And it really is about getting that partnership right because it’s a romance. You need both of those characters to be going to push each other’s buttons and challenge each other and also in the end, be good for each other. And so figuring those things out with my psychologist hat on is sort of the next piece for me.

I can’t go any further if I don’t understand those people because I do plot, but I don’t plot everything. I’m a very high level plotter in that I will know the characters inside and out. In the important pieces, anyway, the big structural details. And then I’m actually what people call a discovery writer.

So I don’t plot all the little details. I will sit down and just start writing and get in the flow and the details will come and often. Characters will show up who I wasn’t really expecting, but they connect into another story I’ve sort of had in the back of my mind. And the pieces sort of start to fall into place, but only once I hit that flow state where I’m in it enough to be just writing and not holding anything back.

I just have to like open up the valve on my brain and let all the words pour out. And that’s when I find out the really interesting stuff. And some of those connections are made. So that’s the actual writing process is I, I spend most of the time actually getting familiar with the world and how it’s going to fit.

the actual writing I write very fast. Like I, I think my biggest writing day was 13,000 words in a single day, which was like 6:00 AM till midnight. Let’s not get ourselves. It was all of the hours in the day. But I do, I do write quickly. Only because I need to know well enough, the people who are acting in the story to know what they would do next and to feel comfortable sort of inserting words into their mouths and people into their lives and all of those things.

So yeah, once I’m, I’m comfortable enough and things have settled enough, then I dive into the actual writing. So that’s why I usually have so many stories in the development phase at the same time is because it takes a long time to know all of how they fit before I can actually sit down and put the words on the page.

That to me is the smallest piece of the storytelling, actually. It’s the most important because nobody else can read it and it’s only in my head, but it is the least big piece from a creator’s perspective.

Michele: You said like the step by step. What’s your process like? Why you said this works for you and what’s the difference between you and me and what can work for other people? But I think there is a question that is like almost cold by all of this. This is how it works for you, but like there are things that maybe in your career as they’re older, like you tried…

Maybe really hard because maybe it was working for somebody else, but they didn’t work. And if you had tried some of these, what kind of things, what were they? Were they resources? Were they suggestions from other writers? Something that you, maybe you can say that was one of the tools that was in the toolbox that didn’t work for me.

What hasn’t worked for us

Crystal: Yeah. There’s a lot of tools in the tool box and haven’t worked for me. To be honest, I’m a big one for trying everything that people say works for them. I test everything I hear people talk about that might be an improvement on my current process. I will try it and then analyze it. So I have this, um, acronym that.

If you’ve read Strategic Series Author, which is my book on writing series for writers, it’s, there’s a whole section on talking about being a careful author: K. A. R. E. and so my thought is you gather knowledge. Then you take action. Then you reflect on that, and then you evolve your process. Right? So for me, that’s what I do with every book, every story, every time I do the same piece of the process again, I will do that.

I will learn everything I can about what’s changed since last time I did it, I will analyze the experts who are doing it and then go forward. So the stuff I have discarded in my evolution, I have discarded the idea that you have to write every day because I don’t do that. Well, I shouldn’t say that. I do write every day, but I don’t work on a fiction book every day.

Small amounts spread over time is not how I am effective for me to really get into that story where to the point where I can hit my flow state, I need a clear block of time and I need to drop into it and I need to not come back out again until that story is done. Which is partly why it’s really good for me to have shorter stories, because if I was doing that at the fulling, the novel, I think my family and friends would not be thrilled with me, and I would probably.

I would forget to eat, I would probably not shower, like it would just get ugly. My husband might be real sad about all of that. So, so mostly I, I do things in chunks. It’s just like everything else. I block off time and then I will do a deep dive. So if I have blocked off, you know, a week of writing time, then in the weeks building up to that, I will make sure that I’m doing all of the story development stuff.

And I’m deep in figuring out those characters. And, and, you know, we’ll, we’re basically, we’re dating, I’m dating that story, and we are getting to know each other and seeing how things feel and what we like and don’t like and what’s going to work, not work. And we’re negotiating our story, relationship. And then,

When it comes to writing time, that to me is like, that’s the honeymoon. Basically. It’s like, okay, off we go. We have a vacation week booked and we’re going to do this thing. So that, that I would say is, is kind of what that process is like, and I have thrown out that putting pressure on myself to be like anyone else because I’ve tried to write longer.

I just did try to write longer again because I thought, okay, I’ve been writing novellas now for a couple of years, surely I’m ready to write a longer book. Can you guess what happened? I have four books at 30,000 words right now. They’re not done, so I just need to reset that again. So yeah, that’s what doesn’t work.

Another thing that doesn’t really work for me is bouncing in and out of being a creative. So. I find the switching back and forth and that pulling between my, my other work and my writing work to be very difficult to navigate. And the closer you get to being able to go full time with your writing, I think the harder it is to be pulled back and forth.

And so for me, the thing that doesn’t work anymore is dividing my focus. And I think actually when this podcast episode goes live, we’ll be in day two or three of my official fulltime writing career because I, I did make the decision, a few months ago actually, that I would phase out my consulting company and I would go full time

To creative work, which is including teaching in the podcasts and things like that, because that, those are all things that I love, but that I would no longer do corporate work or do client-based work for other people’s projects. I was going to actually do my own creative stuff. So, it’ll be interesting to see what does or doesn’t work in that new context because most of what I developed as far as my systems and processes were all built to support

me staying in the job that was making enough money to pay the bills and to put the money aside for the writing. But now I have a little stash. I’m like a squirrel. I stashed away my royalties from the last few months so that I would have those to reinvest in my writing business. And I have the time as well, and the freedom to be able to make that decision to leap.

So I don’t know what’s going to work or not work for, for new Crystal. So you’ll have to ask me that again in a few months. How about you? What are some things you have found did not work for you?

Michele: Uh, I’ll tell you one thing that didn’t work for me.

Although I really wanted it to work like I, I wanted it very bad, which was like a learning how to like see the plot all the novel, like a plotter, and then just write the story. And I’ll tell you more. I took actions in order for me to become a plotter. I bought books like for example, the Plot Whisperer, Save the Cat Writes a Novel

Amazing books, great books. Very interesting books. Those are the interesting things that are explained and said in those books and other books, that advocate the importance of course, of the plot and the pacing and the way the plot is structured. I tried it really hard for months, and for months I couldn’t come up with the story. Zero.

It was like a dry desert, and I remember the moment that was a dry desert. It was like from the moment I published The Lord of Time, until basically a couple of months ago. Well, I would say, yeah, a couple of months ago when I decided to do this yearly challenge, so I want to be a plotter and I wanted to learn how to be a plotter.

And I found out that I couldn’t, and then it made me sad. Very much saf because I was like, but if I become a plotter, it’s going to be so much easier to write like a 100,000 word book. Like it’s going to be easy and it’s going to be actionable. And I would be able to do that maybe two or three books per year.

The problem is this, Crystal, and all the people that are listening to us is that I simply was not that kind of writer. And maybe it’s something that is just at this stage of my writing career, maybe stuff that I didn’t master. But if there is one thing that you maybe should take away from it is that-

If you’re not that kind of person, if you’re not that kind of writer, you can’t push yourself into being that in a few months or in a few weeks. The mistake I made that was that I looked at other authors and I said, it’s working for them. Why is it not working for me? I re shifted everything in 2020 I was like, I want to use that 80% 20% parties or principals.

I know I can write a short story in a week. Why don’t I write a short story in a week? Boy, you did that in the past. You can replicate the process. And so I did that. I put all those interesting books aside and I learned from them because I learned stuff like about tension pacing and the importance of the want and the need and the wound of the character.

I took everything that I knew. That I knew was going to have me in this other project and I re shaped it based on the person and the writer that I am. And now I’m writing as I wasn’t writing before.

Because I’m using what I know and I’m using what I understand on my writing style into starting the project, finishing the project and shipping it, which is something I absolutely wasn’t doing because of the simple mistake.

Because of him or her is doing that, I should’ve been able to do that. So that’s basically what I’ve learned, and I hope it’s not a mistake I’m going to make. I know Thy self as a writer, use that as a resources and don’t ever compare your starting points with someone else’s middle or someone else finishing.

It’s something I, I can’t stress enough. Like I completely, and utterly can’t stress enough. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you.

Crystal: Yeah, for sure. It is really easy. I mean, now with the, with the access of, podcasts and stuff, you can hear all about people that you normally would never come into contact with. So I know. You know, for me, you meet so many people who are writers now, I didn’t know anyone who was a writer when I was young.

I didn’t meet my first person who was a writer until I was in college. And now we get to meet a lot of really cool people speaking at conferences and traveling around and being on podcasts and having people on podcasts and all of these things means you have some conversations with some folks who are rocking it, which is amazing.

But if all you listen to our stories and advice from people who are 15 years into their writing career, you know, that’s very different. That’s not your next step. Their next step in their process is going to involve tools and paid services and so many books worth of experience You don’t need to swim in that pool. You don’t need to play that game, and they didn’t get there by doing that. That is what they do now.

So I think it’s so important to remember also that what works for someone else. It was a different time. They were different people than you. Their stories were different stories.

Their readers are different readers. There may be some overlap, but it’s not going to be all, and so it really is. Figuring out what’s going to be fun for you, because if you don’t love it, you’re not going to do it over time. And I have to say, I have listened to thousands, like actually thousands of podcasts and interviews with various authors.

I’ve read books, I’ve listened to conference talks and workshops over the past 20 years, and there is only one consistent thread through- okay, two- to put your butt in, the chair and write the words. You cannot get anywhere if you don’t do that. And the second thing is do it for a long time. You have to be so stubborn that you don’t give up until you hit that tipping point.

I remember a professor in a university would be talking about the, the 1% thing where there’s like only 1% of people don’t give up when they’re trying to do a thing. I have no idea where this research came from. They may have just pulled the number out of thin air. I don’t know. And I actually don’t care, but his point was just by showing up, you are already 99% ahead of everybody else and you keep that advantage until the day you choose not to show up.

And so the only way to confirm that you will not be successful in this business is to not show up. Everything else is success. It’s just happening more or less slowly, depending on where you’re at in the track. And I can say from experience that if you stick with it a little while, what you’ll find is that at the beginning it’s like

You’re just starting to roll this giant boulder up a mountain and it’s really heavy and no one is helping you, and everybody’s like, what’s that idiot doing over there? Why is he pushing that rock towards the mountain? That looks really hard. That’s going to suck. What if you get crushed? Right? Pretty much what we face when we’re telling people I’m going to be a writer when I grow up and they’re all like, yeah, okay, nice.

Yeah. Good luck with that. Be pretty heavy and hard and you might get crushed and someone’s going to give you a bad review. There’s all these bad, hard things, right? But you get stronger as you keep pushing and people join you eventually they’re like, Oh, they’re not giving up. Okay, maybe I’ll lend a hand for a little while.

And so you accumulate people who are supporting you. The rock starts to feel a little lighter cause you’re getting stronger as you push it. You get better at learning about angles and leverage and tools you can use to help you roll the rock, like all of the things. Right. So the only way to ensure you’re going to make it up that mountain is by not quitting.

Michele: Yeah, that’s definitely important. There’s another thing, this one is more on the story side. On the process of studying writers that really are changing the world with their stories. And that’s one of the reasons, I don’t know if I mentioned that before about the master class, because it gives me access to an idea.

Crystal, they are like…I don’t have a word! I don’t even have the word for it because it’s more than—I don’t know if there’s something more than that, but you literally get inside the head of Neil Gaimon, Dan Brown, Margaret Atwood. There’s one thing that Margaret Atwood said, and this is on the trailer of the master class, and she said something very close to what you said.

She was like, every year, come up with a new theory. The novel. Just one theory of the novel and she just going, “Hold my attention”. And she does in the way that she, you know, can convey things. And basically that’s reason on writing a story. It’s like making the person on the other side interested in what you are doing.

And I think this boils down to that we have discussed in today’s episode. Pacing, it boils down on the way we craft our own ideas on what works and what doesn’t and “Hold my attention” these three words, if you understand, if you understand like the truth behind them. I think you are on the 99% of that 1% that is going to make it big. Because it really, it boils down to that.

It’s like knowing you, knowing yourself, know your strengths. Know, what you can do good. Double down on that. And keep readers attention up. That’s what I think like, it’s basically in a nutshell what we’re saying. Like it’s like really showing up and be consistent about that. And the only way you’ll be able to do that is by holding people’s attention over and over and over.

Crystal: And I think by holding your own attention, like you have to be passionate and excited about what you’re writing. Because if you’re not, that communicates itself through the pages, through the words you can feel it. If an author has like clearly signed a contract to write the next book, but they really don’t want to like, that comes through, right?

The story falls a little flat. You’re like, huh? Okay. Um, and it’s interesting to bounce around to different books at different points of people’s careers or, you know, you hear the backstory behind some of these things where it’s like, well, you know, I didn’t really want to write that last one, but the previous ones in the series did so well and needed a new roof or whatever.

Like it’s when it boils down into just the business side and the passion part is gone and the fun and excitement is all gone, then it is hard to keep that momentum going. So you’ve got to keep things fresh. And. In the interest of keeping things fresh. We are going to dig around in the curious jar and see what question we are keeping things fresh with.

So usual procedure. You tell me when to stop. Oh, Oh, two no. Okay,

What is one story that scared the living heck out of you?

Michele: Well that’s a light green. Is it that a light green?

Crystal: It’s a green one.

Michele: I’m sweating.

Crystal: You should be. Okay. What is one story that scared the living heck out of you? Since we’re going PG for this episode?

Michele: Okay… Oh, okay. Okay. I can think of one. This is by Neil Gaimon. And it was out of one of his anthologies, if I’m not mistaken.

Small spoiler, super short story, but at the same time it freaked the heck out of me. Like, do you say that kind of thing? So like, it scared me a lot. If I have to just summarize the idea, which was I thought, was brilliant, but at the same time, very simple and he made in like, I think in a few pages, so.

Again, spoiler alert. But if you’re not going to read that, it’s basically starts with a person going to hell and he finds himself in such a room with a demon. Just nobody else but the demon and the human being. And the demons starts to torture him. And he started to torture him in a very effective ways, like both mentally and psychologically and physically.

And he does that, it seems like an eternity. At the end, the demon goes away from the room and the human being, which has been brutalized for an age, probably both, like physically and mentally, finding yourself, the himself in this room, the door is open and another human being comes and he, he understand he’s going to be the next demon that is going to torture to hell this person.

And I found it like so powerful and so meaningful because it’s like, there is a heck of things you can convey just in one short story. And at the same time, it’s something that I’ll always remember because it’s like a, a person can shape and change you that much, that you can fundamentally change the way you act or change the way you feel and live life.

This person was a decent person before, but, because of all the things that the demon did to him, he turned out to be a demon himself and he’s going to do the same to the next person. So I find that like, it’s, it’s also, I love it because it’s like a story that goes full circle.

You can literally start the story from the end of that story, like a new story. So I always found it fascinating and scary at the same time.

Crystal: Nice. I went through a phase, I think when I was 11 I picked the Tommyknockers off of my mom’s bookshelf, and I don’t know how it got there in the first place. I can’t imagine her ever reading that, but somebody must’ve given it to us and it was on the shelf.

So it was Stephen King. I read that. I don’t remember all the details. I remember being terrified. Yeah, I, I had the lights on a lot at night and I could not walk past- we owned a hotel in campground at that point. And the office was on one and of the seven acre property. And the house we lived in was on the other end of the seven acre property.

And if I had to walk in the dark, there was a bunch of like really tall hedges and like different buildings and this old tree in the middle of a bunch of cabins that we called the haunted tree because somebody had nailed shoes up the trunk. So there was like, shoes- and there are all these gnarled like crabapple, kind of trees.

They were creepy, covered in cobwebs. The whole deal. It was like I could not walk alone. I couldn’t walk. I had to run full speed as fast as I possibly could, mostly trying not to breathe or look at anything and definitely not stopping for anything no matter what I heard or saw. So the Tommy Knockers was a large part of that for me. Um, yeah. And then I read nothing but horror for like 3 years. Oh, and like scifi kind of suspense stuff. The darker the better. Yeah. So that was a phase.

Michele: That’s interesting. So there was a darker side of you before the romance side of you?

Crystal: Oh yes, yes. Uh, she’s still in there. That darker me.

I have a series, one of the mini series and river’s end is called the touch of magic. And so it, it’s a little bit of magic, but also a little bit of dark stuff and it blends over with our, some security, romantic suspense kind of stuff. And so, the dark, my fascination with serial killers and crime, investigation stuff.

I took a lot of criminology courses in my psych degree and I was fascinated by like forensics and yay, I could not get enough of bones or CSI or whatever. So all of those things are going to resurface at some point. That’s why I made a really big world to plan so that I can write all kinds of things with all kinds of characters, but I, uh, you know, keep the the dark, a little bit leashed for the most part, there’s a guarantee of a happy ending and the romance right.

Michele: Let me know when you start unleashing the dark.

Crystal: Okay. Yeah, I’ll keep you posted. Alright, so for watchers out there, listeners out there, depending on whether you’re watching the YouTube channel or whether you’re listening to us on your favorite podcasting spot, we would like to hear what you answered to the curious jar questions. So what is a story that scared the living heck out of you? And, um, tell us a bit about that and maybe a bit about where you were at in your life and why it was so scary. And if you want to send us a curious jar question, you can email ideas at strategicauthorpreneur.com and we’ll add it to the mix.

You can find links to the resources we mentioned, show notes, coupons and discounts to tools, all the good things at strategicauthorpreneur.com and you can also subscribe to the newsletter and each week we’ll email you just one thing that we think will help you on your authorpreneur journey and a link to our latest episode,

Michele: And you’ll get a gold star and a million bonus points in the game of life if you leave it review for us. Whether you listen to this podcast, we are a shiny, shiny new podcast, so we do need those feedback from you. We need these, those stars just keep them flowing.

Crystal: Thanks so much for taking time out of your busy life to get to know us and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on our next episode, we are going to take a deep dive into what happens when you finish drafting the stories.

So we’re going to talk a little bit about editing and revisions. Every author’s favorite subject we know, but we do have some good tips and strategies to share with you and we’ll hopefully connect you up as well with some great people who can help out if you’re looking for communities.

We’ll talk a little bit about feedback and critiquing and beta readers and ARC creators, and all of those good things. So how do you get your work perfectly polished and ready for market? So we will see you in the next episode and until then, take care.