In this episode we define generation and transformation in the context of creativity, and our writing businesses. How do you make time for both? How do you set yourself up for daily success? Everyone’s process is different, and we explore which kind is more challenging. What are some of the manifestations of transformational creativity in the writing world, and how do you work on that? How do you collect baseline data to see if your transformations are working, and what questions do you ask yourself to help drive that process?

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 009: Generation vs Transformation in your Writing Business

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

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

Crystal: Welcome to episode nine of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show, we’re going to talk about generation versus transformation in your creative life and in your business.

Last week’s episode was a long one, but a good one, with Liza Palmer. We had our first guest interview and we were talking about social media. Some highlights; “We’re not boiling the ocean”, and as my daughter texted me after listening to the episode, that her absolute favorite quote was that “authenticity is the little black dress of social media”. Looks good everywhere.

This week, we are back to just us for this week and that’s what you can expect from us. We’re going to alternate. Every other week will be just the two of us diving into some topic in depth discussion and the alternate weeks will be a special guest interview and then a discussion off the backside of that about how we’re going to apply whatever we learned from those experts.

But before we get started with today’s topic, let’s do a quick check in. So Michele, what have you been up to this past week?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele: We always start with places we’ve been and stuff like that for the past few weeks. So I feel like I need to suggest another book, if you don’t have enough. So the book that I’d like to suggest this week is Tools of Titans by Tim or Timothy Ferris, whichever you prefer.

And it’s a huge, huge book. And I don’t know if you can see this on the video, but Crystal also has this, and this was not coordinated, she didn’t know that I was going to present this, but I was very happy that she also knew I was familiar with the book. It’s a great read.

And it’s basically, Timothy Ferris, which is a super famous blogger, slash podcaster. And he is basically interviewing like dozens of successful people from actors to entrepreneurs to explorers, even. And the book is divided in three parts. And one is health, then there is wealth and then there’s the wise.

And every single time he asks questions, feel like I get out with something. A piece of information that is more useful for me, even though it’s these people are doing completely different things that I’m doing, I always find them to be very motivational. And there is a couple of times that I’ve read interviews in this book. One was with Paolo Coehlo for example, is one of the people in the book. There’s Seth Godin.

I like Seth Godin, if you are familiar with his blog, with his podcast Akimbo. Every single time I read the struggle and the teaching that these people have, I found that I came out with something of value. In this book, you’re going to get a dozen of them and Tim did a very good job in asking the right questions. I will totally, definitely suggest you to read this.

Crystal: I am just getting started with this book. It only arrived a couple of weeks ago, so I am poking around and seeing what is what, but yes, it’s a nice giant doorstop of a thing. This past week I’ve been really focused on thinking about with all the changes going on in the world and with us all being at home.

And a lot of the events were usually part of not really happening, due to the social distancing movement. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what I want my days to look like, what I want my weeks to look like, which projects I really want to focus on over the next year. And just thinking about how I want all that to work.

And two of my favourite books on kind of narrowing things down: Essentialism by Greg Mckeown I think that’s how you say his last name, maybe not. And the other one is called the One Thing by Gary Keller. And what’s really interesting, for those of you who are not looking at the video right now but are listening to us:

The covers are black, white, and red, and both have really different designs, but have some similarities between them. So I think it’s just really interesting when you get that, and actually I was looking at other possibilities of what to read next. And the War of Art was the third one that I thought of in all three of these have white covers with black and red writing.

It was just an interesting kind of coincidence. But I like to group books together and I will pick two or three of my favourites on a topic if I’m in a particular phase for something, and then I will read them all and then kind of compress all the notes from all of them. So for me, right now, I’m just thinking about, what is the one thing I want to concentrate on for this next few weeks period here and what do I want to get rid of and, or narrow down to make space for the one thing that I’m going to do? So for me, that’s where I’m at is just really clearing the decks and yeah, about being very intentional in terms of rebuilding things and  part of where today’s topic came from.

Michele, and I have a Monday standing appointment to do a coaching session. And we were talking about what he’s doing in his business and how that works. And this kind of came out of it. So I don’t know if you maybe want to introduce that, and just tell everybody, where did the concept come from and, and why was it so interesting to us to get started into.

Transformation vs generation

Michele: Yeah, I’d love to. So I’ve mentioned this before, I like to think of myself as a sponge. And one of the latest sessions that I had with Crystal, I asked her a question about a side of my business that I’m working on, which is basically to- not as much as rebranding, but I would say like to re-paint a series that I published in the Italian market, and make it a bit more professional. And she came up with a couple of words that I didn’t actually know.

She basically explained to me first, that what I was really wanted to do as a book make-over, not as much as like a changing or rebranding or completing, repackaging. And then from that discussion we came to- and these two words are going to be the bedrock of this episode. One is generation and the other one is transformation. I didn’t know that those words meant.

So I asked her to just give me a simple definition of what they are. And she did. And I think this is a very interesting starting point for today’s conversation. What’s the generation and what’s transformation? Because the moment I realized what they were, I bombarded with questions and she gave me a lot of interesting examples. And then when the conversation was done, I started researching and I started doing my thing and applying what I learned on my day to day things.

And I can honestly tell you, that after she explained to me what they meant and why they were important, I was able to use my time in a better way. And I’m going to tell you exactly what this generation versus transformation mean. If you are as interested in making it as an author, as an entrepreneur, in the longer run, you’re going to have to deal with a couple of different kinds of creative endeavors.

It’s like when we say generation and transformation, they kind of sound similar, but actually they are very, very different. When you’re generating content, you’re using a part of your brain and resources that you’re not using when you’re transforming content. So a simple example of generation will be like, I personally wake up at 6:30 AM and from usually 7 to 7:30 I sit for one hour or two and I write new content. It can be like anything from a short story, a novella. Maybe it’s a free writing session. I just know that from seven to eight or from seven to nine, if I have a deadline to meet, that’s a moment in which I have to generate content.

I need to give to those two hours the at the very best. I have to basically giver everything I’ve got. Most of my creative energy is spent in those two hours. There is no way for me to like keep writing for four to five hours. I know there are people I can do that, but it’s just not my thing, if we can say that, a simple explanation of what generation is for me creating new content, can I do that for three to four hours per day? No.

Might be able to maybe in a year or so of training to kind of do something similar. But it’s not the point of today’s episode. The point of today’s episode is understanding that once you know that, that’s basically the amount of time you can allocate to generate new content, then you have freedom to pass to the second part. Which is basically transformation.

And what is transformation? Expanding my simple term. It’s like taking something you already did and make it better. Oh. Or make it shine a bit better. So for example, in my case, I have a science fiction series in Italian, and I really wanted to add more value. And I wanted to change the back matter, the front matter. I wanted to basically take away all the typos. This kind of endeavor is time consuming, but it’s a different kind of approach than of generation. I’m not using as much energy, mind the energy spiritual energy, brain power, as I would when I have to come up with a new character, a new situation, a scene.

You are basically allocating time to revamping something. And the way you do it is by being very conscious of what you are doing and why. So if you want to revamp your series, maybe you want to allocate 10 hours to that. You know you’re not going to use any creative power to do that. But, and this is something that I just want to underline as much as possible, I really, really think that generation part of the day, it should be something that you kind of create as a daily routine, even if it’s just 30 minutes per day.

Because, based on that, the new content is where your career is going basically be based. So on the generation of new content and it’s difficult, I have to say. It’s not a piece of cake. Sometimes it’s so daunting. And we spoke about this, like as writers, like, it’s not that difficult to write, the difficult part is sitting down to write.

And I don’t know about you, I haven’t told you this, but when I sit at7 or 7:30, I would say I work around the chair I would say a couple of minutes, three minutes. Because sometimes I’m scared. It’s not as much as me not wanting to, it’s more like I’m scared that I’m going to lose two hours, that I’m not going to do anything valuable.

And this is something that I discussed already, when talking a bit about the book, The War of Art, which you spoke about briefly today, it’s really a battle with generation kind of content. It’s a battle against yourself if you don’t put your 100% all of you, that game, right. It’s very simple, resistance is going to kill you. It doesn’t mean that you have to wake up at 6:30 or right at 7. That’s not your thing. What I’m saying is, if your creative power comes at midnight, do that. But try to do it on a daily basis. I don’t know if the process sound the same for you, but I thought like when you first familiarized me with the concept of generation and transformation, and I started to think about that. I think my daily routine improved drastically from one day to the other because I could distinguish the two. Right?

Crystal: Right. Yeah, I think getting over the resistance is an interesting thing because psychologically. The more times we have been successful at doing it in the past, the more likely we believe we are to be successful doing it again. And so I think the value in a daily routine is often in training yourself to have those successful times to look back on. So if I have a daily routine and five days in the week, I sat down and I wrote even for 10 minutes, then I have five instances in my recent memory where I did that thing successfully.

And so when I go to sit down the next time, my mind starts to believe that I am a person who is capable of sitting in the chair and making the words when I have that appointment with myself. And so if you have a series of successful past events, it trains your brain to have faith in your abilities to do it again.

And so I think especially if you’re a newer writer, it’s extra important to have that regular reinforcing experience, right? It’s like anytime you’re learning a new thing, if you do it a whole bunch in a row, then you get reasonably good at it and then. If there’s a gap between when you do it next time they say it’s like riding a bike, right?

If you know how to ride a bike and then you have a bit of a break, you can get back on the bike and you still know how to ride a bike. And writing is the same thing. I think we get into a flow in a pattern. We start to understand and really feel on the inside that we capable of doing this. And it’s positive reinforcement is what it is.

It creates a bit of a success cycle for us, and I think that makes a big difference. I am not a good everyday writer. That is not really how I work. I’m a binge writer and I am the opposite of Michele when it comes to my patterns. I’m very bad at sitting down and only writing for an hour or whatever it is.

In my world, once I get in the zone, I just want to stay there until I’m finished, whatever I’m doing. So, you know, I’ve had a week where I started working on something on like a Thursday morning, and I really didn’t come up for air until the next week when I had written 30,000 words. So for me, I do best when I really dive deep.

And so that’s partly also why I really notice a difference between generative creativity and transformative creativity. Because once I have that first draft out, I can take weeks to edit it and I can polish it and I can change it into something that is worth showing to the world. But the initial fear, I find I get past that better just by knowing I have nothing else to devote myself to accept that thing and that I can just go all in on that.

So everybody has their own process, but for me, I train myself to do regular writing with my nonfiction because it’s a very different mindset than with the fiction. And so I am working on that over the next little while of making that an everyday habit instead of being so sporadic about it and having it be so project based.

So I’m looking to find some balance in there by writing two different kinds of things because then I have thinking time in between the creative projects that are fiction  go ahead and do some of the other nonfiction stuff. So I think it was really interesting that you said it’s often the fear that kind of stops you from just sitting down and diving in because generation, we’re taking something that doesn’t exist yet, that is ours and ours alone. And we are taking it from the inside of our brains and imaginations, and we’re putting it on the outside world where it is then subject to criticism.

So it is very much that part that’s really hard and there’s nobody else blame but ourselves, if we don’t get those words out the exact way that we wanted to. So I think, you know, anytime in our lives, when we are 100% responsible for a thing, it can be really, really intimidating. And so practicing getting things out of your head and onto the page does build that confidence a little bit. But then also practicing transforming things from their original state of how they came out of your brain into something better. It also helps feed the cycle of being able to generate things with less fear because you have experience at transforming it. You know that you can take whatever you got out of your head and make it better.

So I think the two phases work really well together, kind of in cycles, and that that’s- thinking of it in those two different ways is very freeing.

Michele: Do you find like you’re a fiction writing to be more difficult than you’re nonfiction? Do you find it to be like easier for you to write in that kind of style than the others?

Because I’m very fascinated with this. I know, people that are listening to us maybe do both things. What do you do and what do you feel when you’re approaching one side of the writing process on the nonfiction side and on the fiction side.

Fiction vs nonfiction writing differences

Crystal: I think I’m definitely more confident in the nonfiction because after 15 years of working in indie publishing and working in this zone, I understand how it works, and so it’s not generative content for me.

When I’m writing nonfiction, it is transformational content because I have all of the information stored in my head. I’m just extracting it. I’m just taking it from my brain to the page, but it’s very different than writing fiction because in fiction, I’m creating the world that the characters live in. I’m creating the people. I’m creating the dialogue. It isn’t a matter of just taking what I know and putting it on the page. I have to create what I know and then put it on the page. So yes, I am way more comfortable, or I find it way easier to sit down and do the nonfiction. So whenever something is challenging in my life where things are very disrupted or there’s a lot of stress from other places, I will find it very difficult to write the fiction.

But I can often do the nonfiction because it’s using a different piece of my writing skills. It really is just taking the knowledge from existing up here in my head, and it’s making it into words on a page. So I think that there’s definitely some differences. And I also have been playing around with not actually sitting all the time.

So when I’m looking at dictation as an option. So using a speech to text software to actually help with the writing process. Cause then I can walk around the park or I can sit outside on my deck or I can, you know, even just be in my office, but I can be sitting in a different chair or standing or walking around.

So I think there’s a lot of opportunity in that to kind of change things up. But I’ve been experimenting. And I am finding it’s much, much easier to dictate nonfiction as well than it is to dictate the fiction. So I’m finding it kind of disruptive actually, that there’s a certain learning curve in the fiction side for dictation that the way I’ve trained myself to get the stories from my brain to the page has to be transformed into something different in order for me to be able to dictate them. So for now, I’m just looking at getting comfortable with dictation for nonfiction, and then once I see how all of that works, and then I get really comfortable with it, and that becomes not so much of a learning curve, then I will transition into the fiction trying to dictate more so that I can be more active and more out and about in terms of what I’m working on and what I’m doing.

Gerenation and muses

Michele: Going back to the generation kind of thing. There’s something that I wanted to ask you. It might be interesting because it’s something that I got from a different source, and you know how much I like to kind of study other writers and see what they’re doing.

I have masterclass, and I’m reading as much as I can. So there was something that I found to be like a common trait in some writers. And these are writers different in different cultures. I was talking with my wife and she told me that even a Japanese writer had this kind of process, so I’m just going to tell you what it is. The other times that I find it was from the War of Art that talking about that. It was basically saying something similar to what you mentioned. The more you write the more you find like yourself to be in the story with your characters and both of them, Pressfield and this Japanese writer, were talking about the muse. I’m just genuinely curious. How do you explain that?

The more you are in the story and you do the work, the more the story makes sense. And the more you write, the more the writing is easy. I don’t know how to explain that, but it’s not something that is just happened to me. I know it happens to you. And she was talking about that and then I had this conversation about the Japanese writer. And it seems that it’s something that many writers have.

If they just put in enough work, do you think it has something to do with the generation kind of thing? Do you think it’s something that particular? It seems interesting to me

Crystal: Well, I think whenever we’re in a state of flow, this is something that is talked about in a bunch of different books. We’ve talked about a Deep Work by Cal Newport and he talks a lot about flow. It’s basically when you get in a state of concentration where the rest of the world ceases to exist and you’re so into what you’re doing, that your attention is not distracted by anything else, you are just in the zone is another way that we talk about that.

And so I think sometimes when we talk about the muse. I think we’re actually talking about this state of flow. I mean, you can be inspired and you have a great idea, but it’s actually focusing in enough to do the thing without having your attention pulled away, that really makes a difference of how it feels.

You know, we talk about like a runner’s high when you get into that state of just pure concentration. And I think that we have a writers high like that as well a bit too. When you hit that state of flow and the words or just kind of pouring out of you, you feel like everything is going really well and you’re not having yourself constantly interrupted.

So I read a lot about attention and productivity and I’m a bit of a geek that way. My background is a health psychologist. I did most of my training stuff was like attention and memory and stress and productivity and how all that stuff kind of comes together. And so I’ve always been fascinated with how our brains work.

And one of the things that is very consistently shared is that we do not switch gears well. So when we’re looking at our attention and how we focus on one thing, and then another thing, and then another thing. We don’t multitask, we switch quickly between things, right? So there is no true multitasking.

And we use energy every time we switch our focus points in our brains with our eyes, all of those things. And there’s a residual energy loss every time we do that. You can only pull so much of your focus towards the thing you’re working on, and there’s always a little bit of a lag, right. So you end up with some of your attention that hasn’t quite come with you and it has to catch up.

So the faster you’re switching focuses, the less active attention you actually have to work with. It’s kind of like working memory in your computer. If it’s all being used up in, in saving something in the background, you’re not able to open the current program you want to work on quickly. Right? So with that same idea with our minds and with our energy.

And I think when you’re trying to get into the generative state of creativity, it is about flow. And it’s about energy. And because it is hard. It’s a thing where we are, we are creating something out of nothing that is not easy and it takes all of the bits of our brain to be really focused on that.

We can’t be worried about, you know, is our toddler in the next room pouring the cereal all over the floor, not into the bowl. And that’s the tinkling sound we hear in the background. You know, we can’t be thinking, Oh I just have to jot this one thing on my to do list or I really need to let the dog out cause he’s scratching at the door.

Any little distraction is going to disrupt your state of flow and concentration, basically scare off the muse. So I think that’s the key. The key is a lot of the transformative stuff because something already exists and we’re just changing it a bit. When you come back to it, there’s still something to anchor you to where you were like, if we are working on an editing project and you got to paragraph two before you got interrupted, when you come back, you may need to read a couple sentences to re anchor yourself, but you have a thing to anchor you to where you were and then keep going from there. If you are in generative mode, you don’t have it quite the same way because in generative mode, we’re straddling two worlds, right? We’re straddling the world, we’re living in our head and the world of reality, and we are bridging the two.

And that takes a fair amount of energy. It takes a fair amount of willpower. It takes a fair amount of, you know, belief in our own abilities and any interruption to any of those things, I think can kind of derail us really easy. So maybe let’s talk a little bit about what we do ourselves to help not get pulled out of that state of flow because I think if you are trying to protect some generative time every day, there are some things that you can do, and I know we both have developed a few of them that we can share and hopefully they will be helpful for you also. So for you, what are some things you do because you’ve got that time set aside in the morning, what are some things you do to protect that time or to set yourself up to use it well?

Michele: There was actually something you said on the thing about protecting. Protecting your writing time is paramount and it’s important and everybody should know that. What I do is kind of put the system in place how to protect those two first couple hours of the day. And one is, believe it or not, is weird, but it works.

I don’t have breakfast before writing. Because I know it’s going to take time out of that routine. What I need to do when I wake up is just like a wash myself, dressing and then going downstairs or in a coffee shop when it was possible and just jot down those two hours and then hear me out.

This is weird, but as a prize, I get breakfast. So I would get breakfast between 9:30 to 10:30. And it’s not like you have to do it like me, but I found the system in place that I put up, reward and kind of punishment, although punishment is a very strong word, works. Although I’ve been told that I’m very good at punishing myself, but not like giving me praise.

So even if I achieve something I will not give myself anything. So breakfast, you get breakfast. Okay. But yeah, but this is, it’s just another story. It’s the way I’m made. But yes. Is in the system. My system says that you’d have to wake up, when the alarm clock sounds. And more often than not, I will wake up for a reason over another before even the alarm will go off.

I don’t know why. Maybe I’m wired that way because I’m eager to. And even though I have those two to three minutes that I’ve told you about, of fear, it’s almost always overcome immediately because I know, okay, this is the work. This is what I’m supposed to do. This is the generative is part of my day.

My entire career is based on those two hours right now. So if you don’t give it everything you got, you’re dead. Doesn’t matter how many books you already have, and that kind of stuff. It’s important, like you have to be there. You have to be able to generate the new content.

And new content, most often than not, and this is just me. Is not good. So I need to generate even more than that. I would say 75% of the content I write, never hopefully, luckily, you’ll never see that stuff. So you always see like the 15 to 20% polished stuff that I, write and rewrite and rewrite.

But again, that’s the way I protect my writing time with the process that I follow. And the second thing that I do is telling myself the right story. We mentioned this a few episodes ago, but we didn’t really talk about that a lot. So what does it mean, telling yourself a different kind of story?

It means that you believe in yourself, basically. I believe that the novella that I’m going to publish in a couple of weeks is going to be better than the first three short stories that I wrote. Why? For a couple of reasons because I’ve sweat blood over this. And I’ve learned stuff.

So that’s the story I repeat to myself, as a mechanism in place to protect myself and creating content. Slowly, but surely, you are getting better. A bit better, a bit better. And this is not delusional, hopefully. It’s because people are telling me that after stories that they’re reading.

So it seemed very important, the story you tell yourself. I don’t know if I told you these, but these are stories from Tools of Titans, which is a book that I was mentioning. And I really hope I’m not screwing this up? But Timothy Ferris went to Kanye West- Kanye West and the singer, house. And it’s a huge Vila, right? It’s a mansion. It’s huge. And Timothy Ferris was going around and at some point he saw a huge poster of Kanye West. Then he was like, what is that? Why is there a huge poster of yourself in your house? And Kanye said, because if I’m not my first fan, what was going to cheer for me when I’m not ready or when I’m not feeling it.

And I thought that could be exactly what I’m trying to say. Kanye telling himself his own story in the right away, and that doesn’t mean that you have to like Kanye West or not, the point is this, if you tell yourself the right story, I believe that the generation part is going to be easier for you because you’re going to be removing your most effective kind of resistance that you have in place, which is fear.

It’s fear of yourself, that you’re not going  between able to achieve your potential. So again, it’s routine for me, and then it’s telling the story. Very important stuff. That’s what I set up. And hopefully as I go forward with my writing career, I want to have some other systems, in place.

I’m sure you have something else, but for now, can the main set, I have these two tools, what kind of tools do you have?

Crystal: My tools are almost an absence of tools in that I find to get into that generative mode, I really need to not have inputs already. So for me, I write earlier in the day, not because I like mornings, I don’t necessarily like mornings, but because I need to do the output before I have all the inputs from other places that are kind of derailing where my brain was going or causing me to make choices about things or causing me to think about things.

So I think of generation as it’s coming from inside of me. And so I try to make sure that anything that happens in the day before I’m sitting down to do the writing, is only me putting things out to the world, not the world putting me towards me, right? So my rules for myself are in the morning, I cannot check social media or check my email or do any of those other things that would bring the world into my head until after I’ve done my writing time.

If I’m going to have a shot at being focused, I can’t let the news of the day or what someone else has posted on Instagram or you know, the two emails that people send that I check that will say, Oh, I just need your help for a minute with this thing. It just switches the track of your brain and it immediately puts you into a place where you have to get your attention back from that, which is making it harder than it needs to be.

So if I am going to do other stuff before I write in the morning, then I will get up. I will maybe go for a walk around the park where I’m just soaking in some oxygen and getting the blood flowing, and I’m thinking about the scene I’m going to work on, or I’m thinking about the chapter I’m going to write in the nonfiction book so that I can get my brain working and I can figure out what I’m going to say before I’m sitting down to say it, because that also helps me avoid that point where you first sit down at your computer and you’re like, right, this is my writing time.

I’m going to write, and you’re like. What should I write? And then you’re processing. But if you can have the least amount of time between when your butt hits the chair and your fingers start typing, or your voice starts dictating the smaller that amount of time, the least likely you’re going to suddenly need to get up and go do something else or fill your water bottle, or, you know, whatever it is.

And you get more practiced at that. I think the more often you do it, but really just being aware that you don’t want too much incoming stimulus before you’re sitting down to write. If you can arrange it. Obviously there’s going to be people who don’t have that as an option if you’re, you know, my kids all grown up, so she’s not even home. She has her own place.

So there’s no like worrying about little people in the morning, none of that stuff. So if your life does not allow for that, that’s okay. It does not mean all hope is lost. It just means that maybe you need to spend the first five to seven minutes, five to 10 minutes of your writing time doing a focus meditation.

Maybe you need to throw some headphones on. You need to close your eyes. You need to get comfortable and just get yourself centered and back in the zone so you can leave all those other distractions behind before you dive into the writing. Different things work for different people, but having a little bit of a break beforehand, whether it’s a walk, some fresh air, or just doing some meditation, sitting right in your office chair will often be enough to kind of reset things for people. So that’s one of them.

I also, I find I have to be in at a certain level of mental wellness and mental health to be able to work on the really generative stuff. And I find when I’m going to write fiction, it’s all about creating conflict in your characters’ lives. And so I often find I need to feel settled enough in myself and my world that I can make things more conflicty without feeling like I’m pushing it all over the edge.

And so for me, when I’m trying to get into that state or I’m trying to protect that creative state, I often need to take a break from the news for a few days, or I may take a break from reading certain types of book or watching certain types of TV that I find kind of trigger my emotional feelings of like not being very safe.

I love like thrillers and CSI and like murder investigation stuff. And I used to read a lot of horror. But if I’m sitting down to like work on a romance novel, I need rainbows and puppies and kittens, and I need to feel like I firmly believe in happily ever after. And so if the world around me is filled with chaos, it may mean that I have to watch a romantic comedy before I’m in the right head space to be able to do that. And that’s okay.

So I think just knowing for yourself, what are the criteria for you to feel creatively generative and then looking at, is there anything in my environment I can adjust to make that possible? So, you know, my office, one small window that has a curtain on it, so I can literally close out the outside world when I need to.

And I have colours I like and soft, cozy blankets and things that make me feel safe and happy, and that remind me of good things in the world. That’s what I have that surrounds me when I’m trying to get into that zone of doing the writing. So I think, yeah, just knowing what are your conditions, and then trying to replicate that to a point where you’re not completely dependent on those things to feel like you’re able to. It’s not that you have to have them to be able to do it. Those are the optimal conditions. And as we all know, sometimes things are not optimal, but we want to train ourselves to have the help, but not be completely dependent on it.

Because if something happens, like when our house got flooded, my office basically disappeared overnight. And I needed to still be able to keep working on things even though all my patterns and my habits were, were kind of shook up. I needed still to know which were the actual key pieces.

And so I talked a bit about that in one of our other podcast episodes, which was just knowing that I had my laptop, knowing that I had the two craft books that I really depend on for creating my characters and the cozy, magical blanket that my mom made for me. Those are my three things I require and I can then write anywhere as long as I have those three things.

Michele: Yeah and as we’re saying like the process is not really important. It’s important that it works for you. If you can stand, Crystal, another writer’s story. This one is about Paulo Coelho, the writer of the Alchemist. I think it’s a good simplification and explanation of how every writer has a different process. This again is from Tools of Titans from Timothy Ferris.

Tim was asking Paulo Coelho, so how does your writing process work? So like, what’s your routine? And so Paulo Coelho answer is I procrastinate until I feel guilty. And then I sit down and write for hours. So that’s his process. It’s completely different from mine, for example, or other writers. He shows you how powerful this is.

This idea that doesn’t matter what you’re doing, it matters why you’re doing it. It matters for sure for all along you’re doing it, but it doesn’t matter like the calendar. You don’t have to check. For me, it works better to just the work every day. For Crystal, and many other authors, it works like on a different scale.

Listen to the story. Like Paulo Coelho is one of the most famous crafters out there in the writing world, and he says, and he has to procrastinate to write. You can say this gives you an amount of liberty. It keeps the pressure off your shoulders in a sense, and I think it means you own the freedom of just giving yourself permission to fail. Just write something. If it doesn’t work, write something else. Because every writer has his or her own process. There is no right process or the wrong process. Just sit and write. That’s the only thing that matters. Generate new content.

Crystal: Yes, absolutely. And I think if we shift our focus a little bit, so what happens when either that just doesn’t work or when you get to the point in your day, if you are lucky enough to have enough hours in your day that you’ve got some time for writing, but you still have more time that you could put towards things, it is great to have, then your list of transformative things that you can do that don’t require quite as much energy.

Maybe you don’t require quite as much focus, or attention, and those are great to know what those tasks are so that when you have those moments or when you have the extra time in your day that you can devote to them, you are able to transform things. And so let’s talk a little bit about what are some of the manifestations of transformation, like if we take it out of the concept into the physical world of a writer, what are some of the ways we could see transformation or transformational creativity in the writer’s world?

Transformation

Michele: Yeah, and I do that with like very concrete examples and I’m going to tell you exactly what I’m doing now on the transformation side.

So one of the things that I’m doing is like, I have a story, a science fiction story in English Glass into Steel, I’m translating it into Italian. That’s a very good example though, of transformation. Like, I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I actually started today doing that and my objective, my goal is to make it like candy, if you will.

A prize for people that, in Italy, are going to subscribe to my Italian newsletter, science fiction newsletter. So it’s something that is going to take time and energy. But I don’t really have to think about that too much. I just need to translate a sentence after the other. That’s very transformative.

I think it’s as transformative as it gets. One of the things that I’m doing is I’m a looking at my website right now and trying to improve it. So what, I just did a few hours a goal before these recording. Well, it’s like I went over my website and see, okay, how can you, can I make it more user friendly?

So I removed some links. I removed some images, I adapted it to my new strategy of the book cover. So that’s another example of transformative things. The website is already there. I don’t need to think about that. I just need to remove things to change it then.

Another thing that I’m doing, this is more on something related to myself. I’m trying to read more books that I believe might be useful for the transformative kind of phase and kind of things. And those books are productive. If I can, in a couple of weeks double down my effort on this new kind of knowledge and I can reduce the timing of transformative thing of 20% of 30% in the long run is going to make it so much difference for me.

So I’m investing that time in learning the transformative. How can I do the transformative things better? It’s something that I did before knowing the name, but now that I know the name and the family name of this thing, I can really dig the deeper to it. I can search up a book that is talking about this concept, maybe with a different name, but a book that is going to- how do you say leap frog? Like when you do a jump? Leap frog, and I think it’s important for the generational and transformation. I think like you can definitely learn by doing this. Like, there are resources out there, productive side. They can’t help you those things faster and better.

I suspect it’s a bit different with the generational kind of thing. But it can be done. And if you are reading a book on the craft of writing, it’s definitely going to help you. It’s going to give you some tips. So, I would say those three examples that I gave on what I’m doing right now for real.

Might give you an idea of what transformation means and why it’s important for me to learn as much as I can on how to do it better day to day. And I’m sure Crystal, you’re going to have more way more than three examples and because you are constantly transforming things not only for you, but also for other people because you also have or you used to have some clients works then I guess like there was a lot of that there right?

Crystal: Yeah, pretty much my entire business, my consulting business and also all of the stuff that I do with the organizations I work with, and I’m some boards, but really everything we do is transformation. It is examining what exists. Asking ourselves, what’s working? What could we be doing better? How could we be doing it better?

You know, what are the options? And then narrowing down the options to what’s the next thing we’re going to do? And then looking at what are the steps we need to take to do that? And then carrying it out and then repeating that process again. So, you know, for me it’s really looking at what are the questions we need to ask ourselves.

Because I think the questions in a transformation process are the same, really, regardless of what you’re doing. And if we apply it specifically to our writer business, when we’re looking to transform something, we could ask ourselves the following questions. We could say how is this working for us right now?

And so you might look at book sales, you might look at a reviews, you might look at your data in your mailing list, but this is going to be external feedback or data that’s coming in through whatever way you’re measuring things for you to look at. Okay, how is it working so that you have a baseline?

Because you need somewhere to start. You need to know what you’re working with right now. And then you can ask yourself, could this be working better? If you know, the industry average for open rates for mailing lists is 15% and you’re at 10%, then you know, it could be working better, right? And when we’re not big on being average, we like to be above average.

And so if we take the industry average, then we want to shoot for something just above it. But most important is that you’re moving upwards from your baseline. So if you are at the point where your book is selling, maybe. Five copies a week and you want to shift that needle up even to six copies a week then you need to transform something.

You need to look at, okay, is it my book cover? Is that where my book is placed? So our third question is, what could I transform to make a change here, what could I change to get a better outcome? And then making a list of all of the possibilities. So, okay, for my book sales, it might be the cover. It might be the book description.

It might be that I’m not running any ads. It might be that I’m not doing any kind of promotion. It might be that my book is in the wrong category on Amazon, right? There are lots of different things that could be contributing to why that book isn’t selling. Maybe you need more reviews. Maybe you need the reviews that are there to be better.

Maybe you need five more pages to be in a different length category, right? You just need to make a list of all of the things that you could change. And then when you look at those. Pick one. And when you’re kind of new to this, it’s tempting to change everything at the same time, but then you don’t know what worked.

And if you are looking at being able to replicate this again later on a different book, or you want to know which pieces were the key ones so that when you do your next project, you can do those. Or if it’s a situation where you could level up something and level it up again, if it’s working, you need to know if it worked.

So just like, you know, high school biology class, when you’re doing experiments with things or any kind of science class, really from school, you change one variable at a time because if you change two things, you don’t know which thing it was that worked. Even if there’s only a week or two between pieces that you change.

Sometimes that makes sense. Now, it may be really clear to you looking at something. Let’s say your book cover, maybe you did it yourself a long time ago, and it’s really not quite where it wants to be to be marketable and competitive, and you also maybe wrote your book description before you learned all this stuff about how to write a good book description.

You can go ahead and change both of those things at once. Um, if you know that they need to be better and you know how to make them better, go ahead and make them better. Right? That’s part of your book sales make-over process, which we’ll do a whole separate episode on a book sales make-over so we can deep dive into all the steps in that process.

But you want to, you want to make what changes that you know, have to be made right away. And then if there are things you want to experiment with, like ads or doing newsletter swaps or things like that, you want to make sure that whatever you transform first is the thing that will have the most ongoing benefits for you.

So when you’re weighing different options, and this was something that we talked about at our coaching session on Monday, it was, okay, well if you fix your advertising first and you’re driving more traffic to your book, but you haven’t fixed the cover and you haven’t fixed your book description and you haven’t cleaned up your insides of your book.

The chances of that person actually purchasing it when they land on your book are much lower, so you’re wasting a lot of energy in ramping up your ads, and then you don’t really know how well they’re working because if people get there, the ad worked, it brought them to the book, but they don’t purchase, then you’ve lost an opportunity.

So when you’re doing this, you want to kind of work backwards. So you want to know, okay, I want my. Reader too.  click on the ad and then I want them to come to my book, a listing on Amazon, and then I want them to read the description and decide to buy the book and then read the book and loved the book and join my newsletter list.

So there’s a lot of different stages in there. But you want to transform the thing first that will have the best ongoing consequences for you, right? Or transform the thing that’s going to become a stumbling block in a successful reader journey or a successful aspect of growing your business. Does that make sense?

Michele: It does. Like you have to take one bird at a time? I think. Like you have to take one thing at a time. You have to concentrate on one thing. You don’t have to give anything for granted. If you think like there something that might be better, that’s just one person on the planet, which is you. And you are biased. So you shouldn’t have told yourself as a very good a market indicator, if you will.

And I think like everything you said can be conducted to the word testing. Like you need to do a lot of testing. You need to gather data. And this is very important for the transformation kind of thing. Like you can definitely do it by yourself. But it’s better if you ask around and by asking around, I mean like, not necessarily going out and shouting for help.

But doing ads is one of those ways that when you get a cold shower. When you get thousands and thousands of impressions, for example, on your Amazon ads and nobody is clicking, you start maybe understanding there is a problem with your cover. Or, for Amazon ads, you get a lot of impressions, you get a lot of clicks, but nobody is buying your book.

What is the fix? Probably the description. That’s important. That’s basically one of the way for you to understand your data is talking, and these are people that don’t know you, so they’re not biased. They are acting as a customer, as a client that has no relation with you. And that’s valuable. They are basically telling you in indirect way that your cover doesn’t work maybe for that kind of genre.

The description doesn’t take them and you have to listen to them. That’s the most difficult part I can tell you, because I’m in this process now, of the transformation thing. And I think it’s human. Like, Crystal, if somebody comes to you and say, Hey, your book cover sucks, or hey, it’s not very good.

And you got some of these stories to tell. I think you told me like there’s sometimes you used to sell someone your books to people and maybe some people don’t have a filter. And they had no idea that you were the author, they just thought you were a lady or a girl just selling this stuff.

I don’t think that you felt like it’s not important, you probably wanted to punch them in the face or something like that. But you don’t have that luxury especially when you are broad, and you have hundreds, if not thousands of people seeing your books through ads for example. You just simply have to be serious. And you have to study the data. You have to give it enough time to the data to speak to you. Because if you’re running Amazon ads, for example, for three days, that’s not too good a way to make a decision. You need to at least a couple of weeks, 10 days.

So transformative is important, but that data. Give yourself some time and don’t rely on what you think is the best choice for your product. Let other people tell you what’s wrong and what’s not wrong. I would say this is important to remember.

Crystal: Yeah. Yeah. I would absolutely agree. Transformation, even though it seems easier on the front side when you’re just looking at, okay generation creating something out of nothing, very challenging. The fear is all right up front because you’re like, well, if I’ve put myself in this chair and I go to tell this story and it doesn’t work, I’m going to feel like an idiot.

But transformation is really hard in a different way. Because you do, as you said, you have to be brutally honest with yourself and you have to know your why. Because I think it’s one of those things where you need to know what you want. As an outcome and you need to know why you want that change, and then you can make decisions accordingly because yes, it’s true in opening yourself up and doing the transformative process, whether it is getting editorial feedback from a paid editor, whether it’s having beta readers read your book and tell you what they don’t love.

Your transformation process is an invitation to the negative because you have to invite in what is not working in order to change it into something that is working. And that is hard when what we’re dealing with, it’s our business.

It’s our books, it’s our stories, it’s our passion, all of these things. You are inviting someone to tell you what doesn’t work. So yes, it can be quite emotionally intense to go through that. And you do have to be brutally honest, and you have to understand, it may not matter how much you love something. If it doesn’t work for your market, then you need to change that.

And I have been in those situations and I, you know, I have many things that are currently in those situations and it won’t just be a matter of choosing, Oh well I’ve got the option to do this with a cover or do that with a cover. Maybe there’s $1,000 difference in the price to do those two things.

So sometimes we are not going to choose the thing that we know would be the ideal thing for our business. Maybe we can’t afford yet to hire that cover designer that we are absolutely lusting after their images. Maybe we are just not there yet. So I think it’s really important to be aware when you’re transforming something, okay, here’s my end goal.

This is what I want. Here’s how far I can take it right now. Every incremental change you make is going to increase your chances of getting to that end goal eventually. And so I think knowing where we’re at. Making the changes we can afford to make the changes we know how to make the changes we can learn to make and then re-evaluating and then looking at it again.

And if the changes are working at that low level of investment, then you’re able to take the revenue that you’re going to see as an increase over what you had before and you’re going to be able to reinvest that. And I think doing it that way, not necessarily, you know, taking out a big loan and going all the way to the end zone with that cover designer or whatever.

You don’t have to do that in order to still move forward. And you know, we’ve talked about this a couple of times. Sometimes it’s actually better if you don’t go all the way at that early stage because you haven’t perfected all your other processes in your reader journey. You haven’t perfected your onboarding emails.

You haven’t perfected, maybe your story still needs a little bit of finessing and you’re just now getting enough feedback because just like with the ads until you have enough. Data to work with. You don’t actually know where that story is positioned in the market, so you need a certain amount of people to have read your books before your reviews are really reflecting what the wider market thinks about those stories.

So yeah, I think just be gentle with yourself, but also don’t be afraid to make those small improvements. Even if you can’t get to where perfect is yet or where the ideal would be yet, just that one degree of change towards where you want to go will eventually get you there and you know, every one little thing you can do will make a difference in the outcome overall.

So on that note and in the interest of repeating things, so we’re less afraid of them. I am going to bring out the curious jar, which tends to evoke some interesting reactions in my lovely cohost. It’s comes. Something wicked, this way comes. Something curious, this way comes. So I’ve refilled the jar.

I know so many questions. It’s like filled with rainbow papers for any of you who are watching out there. I’m gonna rifle my hand around in here until you say, stop.

The one thing I’d like to change about my writing is:

Michele: Keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it. Stop.

Crystal: Okay. It’s green, the green one today. Okay.

Michele: Okay. Bring it on.

Crystal: All right. This is like, this could not be a better question for today’s episode. The one thing I’d like to change about my writing is. I swear that is what it says. Yeah. You can’t read my writing, but that’s okay.

Michele: This is one of the difficult questions. This is the kind when you really have to explore to open your heart and just stab it.

Crystal: Do you want me to go first? I mean, besides just doing more of it, which is kind of the thing, I would always like to change about it. I would, the thing that I struggle with is not enough description in my writing.

And it’s something that came really to my attention when I started doing audio books. And I think that translation of transformation from a story on the page to a story that’s told out loud was really interesting for me. Part of the process of making an audio book is I hired professionals.

I did not narrate them myself. So once the voice actor has recorded everything and you’re at the part of the process where you’re reviewing it, it’s kind of like editing a story. After you’ve written it, you have to listen to the whole thing. Word by word, by word, by word, and you have to compare it to your manuscript and make sure that it’s accurate or the whisper sync breaks for Kindle. So that’s a thing.

But it was fascinating to sit there and listen to your own story being read back to you. It highlights everything about your writing that’s wrong. So from a transformational perspective, it was very, very interesting to see where I wasn’t using enough physical description and where I wasn’t quite capturing enough of the detail in the scene in what was going on physically around the dialogue.

Maybe it’s because I picture everything so clearly in my head that I sometimes forget to say it out loud, as in put it in the story. And so that is something I would like to change about my writing after having listened to, I dunno, eight or nine audio books. With each one it just kind of highlighted more and more like, okay, I need to think about the people who are listening to the stories, not just the people who are reading them on the page and filling in the blanks that way. So I am going to work on that. That is a project for my next book. I’ve been trying to amp the descriptions of characters and settings and action all over the place.

Was that enough time? Did I buy you enough minutes?

Michele: It was. So, it was description. That’s interesting.

Okay. If you had asked me that question two years ago, I will have told you this: I wish I were born an English native speaker. So I wouldn’t have these problems every single time.

Not only am I talking to people, but I’m also writing. Because every single time, as you know, I have to translate everything in my head and it’s very frustrating. But I now know that it is part of my process. And I think like the way I write is because of this what I consider to be a deficiency.

The fact that I didn’t have any grammar information or I didn’t go to an English school. You know, like, this is something that I always fear that I’m not good enough because of that, because I didn’t have that. I didn’t go through that process that you, Crystal did and, or basically the other people did.

I don’t know how it’s going to sound. Hopefully not in the wrong way, but answer to your question. What would I change about my writing. Nothing. And the reason is because I know my writing now kind of, I don’t want to say sucks, but I want to say is very weak. It’s like a starting point.

Okay, it’s a very basic starting point. It’s very difficult for me to go down so I can just bounce up and I’m learning every single day. Something new. But if I tell you now, I really wish like my dialogues were better, or I wish that I understood more of English, the constructs and rules.

But the way I’m writing now is just because I have these two backgrounds. The Italian background and the English background. And if I change anything, I’d be much afraid of telling different stories. Genetically different, not cosmetically different. And I don’t want that to happen because that wouldn’t be Michele Amitrani anymore?

So if you read one of my stories now, that isn’t the first draft. I don’t think you will understand what I’m trying to say. They’re that bad. But the thing is, I’m very stubborn so when I write a story, I would write once- and because I like to give concrete examples, I’m going to tell you the April story that I’m going to publish in a couple of weeks.

So the very first draft was 6,000 words. I’ve wrote five drafts. Then the fifth draft became 15,000 words. So it was three times as much. But I assure you, if I handed you on the first draft, I don’t think you would have understand what I was trying to say because it was like English written thinking Italian.

So it’s, it’s super weird and you would think like, okay, I’m giving you the option to change that. Right? The today’s paper was about that. Right. But like, change something, change that. Right. I don’t, I don’t want to do that. I enjoy the process of rewriting the story like multiple times.

And I think that’s what makes me, me. So again, I don’t know how it sounds, but this is the truth. So I wouldn’t change anything. What do you think about that?

Crystal: Yeah, I mean I’ve read your writing and I think you are correct in that your voice comes from the the lyrical Italian flow of language being translated into English sentences.

I think that is part of what makes your voice. So I agree. Like I don’t see changing that as a good way to go. I think you’re already looking at changing your writing. You’re taking masterclass classes, you’re all of those things, but that’s building skills as opposed to fundamentally changing who you are as a storyteller.

So yeah, I think that’s, that’s an important distinction.

Michele: That was a sneaky one. That was a sneaky one, right?

Crystal: There’s a whole bunch more, but we also need more sneaky ones because we can never have too many questions. It is a curious jar. It wants to know all the things. So if you could come up with a question and email us at ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com then we will add your question on a rainbow paper into the jar.

And we would like to get to know you as well. So in our show notes, we have repeated the curious to our question and there’s a section where you can leave a comment telling us the answer to that question for you. So what is the one thing you would change about your writing

Michele: And for the show notes, links to resources that we mentioned today and coupons and discounts on tools we love, you can visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com. And you can also subscribe to our newsletter and each week we’ll make sure to send you just one thing that we think will help you on your authorpreneur journey, as well as a link to our latest episode.

Crystal: And if you are a competitive player in the game of life, you will get the gold star and a million bonus points in the game of life if you leave us a review wherever you listened to this podcast. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy life to join us today and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on our next episode.

We will be talking with Eileen Cook about building better characters and about increasing the conflict in your stories. So you know, now that we’ve talked about how to calm things down, we’re gonna teach you all about how to ramp things back up. So we look forward to seeing you then.

Michele: Bye bye.

Crystal: Take care.