In this episode, we get started with a conversation about resistance, and how that operates in our creative process. And then we tackle building complex characters, and increasing conflict in our stories with special guest—bestselling author Eileen Cook.

Counselling psychology has a lot to offer writers when it comes to getting to know your characters really well, and helping ensure they are well developed and consistent. Conflict is a key piece of good stories, and we discuss many ways to develop and increase it. Internal vs external conflict, environment, beliefs, roles and the “hole in their soul”, how to be mean enough to our characters, how to smooth out conflict once you’ve built it up, and how your characters can solve their problems in new ways. And always, always put your reader first.

We wrap things up with a discussion of indie vs traditional publishing, and what similarities there are between the two routes.

This site contains affiliate links to products that we have used and love, and that we think may be of help to you on your authorpreneur journey. We may receive a commission on sales of these products, which is how this podcast stays independent and free of advertising. Thanks for your support! Click here for a full list of recommended tools and resources. 

Connect with our guest Eileen Cook

Website: EileenCook.com
@EileenWriter on twitter
@EileenCookWriter on instagram

 

Visit our websites

• Crystal Hunt (Non-fiction)
• CJ Hunt (Romance)
• Michele Amitrani (Fiction)
• The Creative Academy for Writers (Community/Resources)

Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 010: Conflict and Character Building with Eileen Cook

Eileen Cook: Hello, you’re listening to Eileen cook and I’m with the strategic authorpreneur podcast, where today we are talking about character development, conflict and the difference between indie and traditional publishing.

Crystal: Hey there strategic entrepreneurs. I’m Crystal Hunt

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

Crystal: Welcome to episode nine of the strategic entrepreneur podcast. On today’s show, we’re going to dive into the writing craft. And we’re talking with the bestselling author, Eileen cook, about increasing conflict in your books and building better characters.

But before we get into that, we’re going to take a minute and just check in with what we have been up to. So my Italian friend, what have you been up to this past week?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele: So many things! I don’t know if I have enough time to say everything I want to say, but, I wish to start with the resource that I think might be very valuable for people that are interested in writing something and finishing it.

So putting the period ending things, and then passing to the next thing. And this resource is actually a book. And this time I’m going to tell you the title and also the name of the author. I’m not just going to show it if you’re not on YouTube and you can listen. So thank you for a last time, crystal. I now know that I have to actually say the title of the book.

So the title of the book is The War of Art and is from Steven Pressfield. Now, this is an amazingly short book, but it’s incredibly, let’s say like, it’s filled with value for me. And long story short, why I believe it is useful, it is because of the message that the author says and wants to convey. Which is basically as a writer and as artists in general, we need to realize that that manuscript, or that business, if we are business owners, is not going to happen by itself.

There is something that he calls a fundamental enemy that every person that wants to achieve something has to face every single day. And he gives the name resistance to this obstacle. And all the book is about is establishing what resistance is, why it is important to understand why can stop you.

And it gives you some tools to understand that work, where to go from point a to point B and how to basically face it. And it is impossible he says to completely defeat resistance, but you can definitely understand the genetic of this obstacle making machine. And you can be inspired to do something that is really valuable for you and eventually also for the world.

So the War of Art by Steven Pressfield, that was the resource that in this past few weeks, I read like a couple of times and I do think it’s very valuable for people, again, interested in not exactly how to do something, but why they should finish what they started. I dunno if you have something on this line, but I really, really, really recommend this book. I really enjoyed it. It was very, very useful.

Crystal: Yeah, I love that book. That’s one of my go tos. It’s behind me on the shelf there. It’s, an interesting way just to look at finishing things and to try to lift that. I think we do all have really a lot of resistance. That is something as a creator that you’re trying to overcome your own background, you’re trying to overcome all your doubts, your fears, all of the things, and sometimes you’re trying to overcome a lack of skill. Like you have this vision in your brain of what you want to create, but you can’t get the words to come out onto the page the way that you are trying to get it to work.

So you can see the story. You can tell. Feel the story. You can taste the story, but you can’t get it onto the paper in a way that makes sense to other people, which just creates a whole other level of resistance. So yes, I, I think that is a fabulous resource. I tend to reread it maybe about once or twice a year, just flip it open and work through things.

It’s a really good one.

Michele: And just full disclaimer, like see when he’s not paying us to talk about the book or just the volume is very, very great. Then if I have just one second, I would like to just read one paragraph out of the book that I think it’s very interesting for the listeners.

And here, Steven is talking about for love of the game, and he’s describing what a writer is and he says, and the writer is an infantryman. He knows the progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at the time, and paid for in blood.

Crystal: And so I’m curious, in terms of your own artistic life in resistance, what is it that you maybe came up against that prompted you to pick up that book or what have you had going on that’s related to that?

Michele:  Well, so I would say a couple of things. So now that I’ve read that book a couple of times, when I do the work, as Steven describes it, I just sit, I set the timer and I don’t really care all of the words. If they are amazing or if they are part of art. I guess so like now my understanding of what I’m doing is shifted from art to craft, which is something that also Stephen King says, you don’t have to think of your work as art because if you think about that art and then you’re going to be paralyzed because you want something to be perfect.

But if you shift your focus in this case, you don’t listen to resistance that once you’ve been think of your work as art, but you think of it as craft, you actually can get the work done. Because that’s something that is giving you a direction to follow. That’s a job that can be a vocation and everything you want.

But if you inject in this thing too much love, if you think of this as something that comes from the sky, you’re not going to be able to do anything. So one of the things that I realized was like, you just have to sit, do the work, and then recheck it the day afterwards. It’s not something that needs to be perfect the first time.

And the second thing I will say, it really showed me that this resistance, you can call it resistance, so you can call it with other names, but as you were saying Crystal, you were saying like, it is something that we face. Every single person that wants to do something in their life, they’re going to have a push from herself.

Mainly the battle is fought here, in the mind. And you have to realize that every single time you feel this resistance, that’s a compass because if there is resistance to something, it means it’s worth something to you, so you should pursue it.

Crystal: All right. Excellent. That’s solid advice, I think.

Thank you, Steven. And Michele. Both. And what have I been up to? I have, well, I’ve been digging back into my own fiction writing, actually. So in the fiction side of things, I went on a research trip last year, spent the whole month of June in France and Ireland and traveling around, which was amazing. One of my mini-series has several of the characters who live in Ireland, and one of my Rivers End folks travels to Galway, which is a place that I lived for a couple of years when I was doing my master’s degree, but I wanted to go back. I mean, when I went to school, it was 17 years ago almost. So I started there almost 20 years ago and came home about 17 years ago. So I wanted to go back and just see what had changed.

What was the same, what was different if, if a character was traveling, you know, in, I think my river’s end timeline is in about 2017. So I wanted to make sure that however things would have been, I was somewhat accurate in terms of where things are and how the place feels and you know, how are people speaking?

And just to get all of the language stuff resettled. And I wanted to remember how did things smell, you know, how do garlic cheese fries from supermax taste? How does that work? Like, and all the Irish people are now groaning because that’s like the Irish equivalent of McDonald’s. But when you’ve been to the pub for a few too many pints, and it’s really, really late at night, they have like a bouncer in the lobby, lets people in at about 2:00 AM to get these chips that are amazing.

So anyway, I wanted to just go and refresh some of that and see the countryside and just, you know, see what was going on. So I spent the whole of last summer writing. There’s three interwoven books in that series that take place in that area. So I made a good deal of headway before the fall hit, and I switched gears to nonfiction for a little while.

So I’m just revisiting those manuscripts and seeing where I got to with the stories and kind of getting my brain back into fiction mode. So that has been a big focus. And then my current nonfiction project is I’m working on a book about the author business with Eileen cook.

Michele: What is it called, what’s the title?

Crystal: And we haven’t decided yet actually. So I will keep you posted. For the moment it is, we’re just calling it the author business book. We’ll see. It may be strategic authorpreneur in fact is the title of that. We are in negotiations at the moment. So that is the nonfiction project that has been keeping me entertained.

I do try to have, you know, some of each on the go at any given time, so. Yeah, working on those, which is why it’s extra perfect that today’s interview is in fact with Ms Eileen cook, who is a business partner of mine, and also a very fantastic author in a variety of genres and has written a couple books, one of which, Build Better Characters I have right here.

And we will add to your resources list and the create story conflict book as well, which I don’t yet have in my hot little hands, but should be getting published a week or two after this interview airs actually. So we’ll make sure there’s a link beneath the episode for you and you’ll be able to check out the cover and all the details of that as well.

All right. Without further ado, let’s see what Eileen has to say and then we’ll regroup on the other end and chat about it.

About Eileen Cook

Crystal: I am very excited to have here today, Ms Eileen Cook, who is an author, extraordinaire as well as co-founder of the creative Academy. So I am lucky enough to get to work with her on a regular basis.

And today we’re going to talk a bit about how to write good books, basically. Basically, since that is the foundation of any excellent author strategy, if your books are crap, nobody’s going to read them, and that means they’re not buying your stuff. So before we dive into that, I would love Eileen, if you could tell a little bit about yourself and your kind of publishing history and what you do so people have some context for what follows.

Eileen Cook: Well, I’m also thrilled to be here with my co-founder, because that’s always fun to work with you. So I’ve been a writer for quite a while. I had my first book sold in 2006, and  I have over a dozen titles published since that time. I’ve written up primarily a little bit of romantic comedy.

I did two books indie that are sort of romantic, and then as the rest of my career was done in YA. And where it was traditionally published, and then to round things out: I’ve also recently done some nonfiction indie . So going a little bit to full circle that sense. I did work with an agent. My agent is Barbara Poelle from the Irene Goodman agency. So a shout out to her and all the good work she’s done for me.

And I’ve written in quite a few different genres. So even within YA, I’ve done sort of contemporary, a little bit of sort of, science fiction stuff, and also some thrillers.

Crystal: You like to kill people in your books.

Eileen Cook: You know that revenge you always had where it was like someday, if I could ever get someone back, I would kill you in my book. It is as satisfying as it sounds.

Crystal: Excellent. And I know you have some background that also informs your being a writer. I think we have that in common and that we both had a backup career in air quotes, which was being a psychologist. And so I think that gives you a really interesting perspective on some of what we’re going to talk about. So can you tell us a little bit more about that history piece as well?

Eileen Cook: Sure. So I have the world’s most practical parents on the world. So when I told them I wanted to be a writer growing up, my dad’s ongoing quote was, well, you know, the English factory is laying off these days. Which is prime dad humor.

So he strongly suggested that I have a backup field. So I went into the field of what’s called rehabilitation counseling, which is working with people with catastrophic injuries or illness. I just sort of make that transition from their new lives for whatever has happened to them and to kind of what they’re going to be doing next.

And I actually really enjoy a lot of parts of that field. I didn’t like, you know, getting up, getting dressed and going to work every day. So writing was much better in that. While I still go to work every day, I can do it from my pajamas. But what I did love about counseling was actually figuring out what it is that people do.

And I think good writers are observers. So there are people who are interested in people and what other people do and why they do it. Why did they make the decisions that they make? So having sort of a counseling psychology background is really helpful to writers. And if it’s something that you didn’t study in school, the beauty is there about 1 million different books out there, parts of the topic. So understanding real people is a lot of help when writing your imaginary friends.

Crystal: Yes. And I think the value of a day job that does pull you out of your own world and exposes you to a lot of different realities. I would think you came into contact with a lot of people during some really tough moments, which it gives you a unique kind of peek into what is usually a transition phase for a lot of people.

When you do have a catastrophic situation or your life, it gets shaken up in some really dramatic fashion. That’s usually when we’re most primed to make a change in things, whether it’s by choice or by necessity. Which is, change is a big thing for characters, right? If we’re looking at story arc, that’s definitely a recurring theme.

And you have written a book, which. Well, you’ve written a few books obviously, but one of the books, building better characters really dives into the psychology of our fictional friends. And so can you tell us a bit about why you wanted to write that book and what kind of things you dive into in it.

Eileen Cook: Well, the book was really interesting for me because I love public speaking and I do a lot of talks at writers conferences and I teach for the local university here as well as offering courses online with our creative Academy, and often what I’ve called my courses around has been taking various psychological theories, such as the stages of change or emotional intelligence, kind of trying to break them down into some easy steps and then talking about how they can be relevant for characters.

And I think, you know, when you talk about change and conflict and you know, friction points in people’s life, you’re exactly bang on. It’s sort of a saying like, you don’t really know anybody until they’ve been through a difficult time, because that’s what pushes our buttons. And so I think it’s interesting to dig at that a little bit.

And so if we can understand what real people, are going through, I think you can create more three dimensional characters. To be honest. I think what a mistake a lot of writers make is they’re often very good at kind of plot ideas. So they’ll have a great like, well, what if this thing happened. And they’re really excited and then they don’t understand why readers just don’t seem to be engaged.

And it’s often around character motivation, which is for the reader, they have no idea why that character is doing something. So it seems stupid. And if you ever had that moment in your life, when you’re meeting a book and you want to throw it against the law, cause you have no idea why a character do that thing, that’s motivation. And I can always recall talking once to a student that I was working with. And I said, well, I’m not understanding why the character would do this. And she said, well, I need them to do this because of X, Y, and Z related to the plot. I said, that’s why you need them to do, but it doesn’t tell me why that person would need to do it.

So I wrote the book basically for that reason, so that people could truly understand their characters and then make readers understand their characters, which make us emphasize with them.

Making better characters with conflict

Crystal: Yeah. I think it’s an interesting exercise in making better humans, but in working through the exercises thinking it will also make you a better human, right?

As a an author, we spend so much time diving into other people’s realities. It does actually train us to have more empathy for real people, I think not just the ones we’re creating in our stories. Now that often though, being attached to our characters and having that empathy leads to some problems.

And I know I get review notes back from my editor constantly that are like, you are not mean enough to these people like that. You’ve got to make them work for it. So maybe you can talk about some ways to generate a little bit more conflict, tension, things like that in our stories.

Eileen Cook: Yeah, I think it helps if you’re just this tiny bit sociopathic as a writer. Doesn’t hurt at all.

I think often you’re right, that conflict is not enough. And in fact, that’s why I’m just finishing up a book now on conflict and how to increase conflict. And I think that’s because we don’t go far enough. So asking yourself “what’s the worst thing that could happen”? And then asking yourself, is that bad enough?

So you have a character who’s about to get married and two months before the wedding, their partner comes to them and says, I don’t think I can go without through with it. That’s bad. If they do it the night before the wedding, that’s worse. If they do it when you’re standing at the back of the church, that’s even worse if they wait until basically you’re standing in the room front of the church and all your family and friends and grandma and everybody else, and then say it, maybe that even worse. So kind of always pushing our characters to say “what is the point?”, that would make something worse and will allow us to kind of go that extra mile.

I mean, I encourage people, they say, well, that doesn’t seem realistic. It looks through book and see how much happens to a character. The example I give in a lot of classes that makes people laugh is even just looking at Scarlett O’Hara where the book opens with a man she loves, decides he’s going to marry someone else, so she married someone she doesn’t love.

And then war breaks out and then her first husband dies, and then she’s moved to the city away from her family. Then her second husband dies, then she married her sister’s husband. Then she starts a business. The business fails. She marries the third husband, her child dies, like it goes on and on, but I don’t think anyone in the book thinking like, gosh, Scarlet O’Hara is the unluckiest woman alive.

They’re just caught in the narrative of what will happen next. So when in doubt, I think it’s much easier to add conflict to your writing and take out some if you’re going a step too far than it is to try and add it back in.

Crystal: Yeah, and I mean, people are not looking for straight up real life when they read fiction, right? They want more. They want the dial to be turned up. If we just wanted to live our own lives, we can do that every day. We’re looking for escape from our fiction. That’s the point. So if we don’t turn up the dial a little bit, then why are we going to be more engaged in that than we are in what’s going on in our reality around us all the time?

Eileen Cook: It’s conflict with a purpose, you know, so depending on what story I’m writing, I’m not necessarily going to be like, well, what would make this worse, a hurricane that would make this worse? I’m thinking about what is going to push this individual character? What’s going to test them more than something else?

So, for example, I might feel great with hurricanes, and be very calm in the face of a storm. But I might fall apart in a situation of a heartbreak. So what is the thing that’s going to push your individual character? And that’s the conflict you want to amp up.

Crystal: So when you are thinking about building characters or when you’re getting to know the characters in your stories, what are some ways that you can kind of ramp that upas you’re developing things.

Eileen Cook: Well, I actually had a lot of fun in writing the book and thinking and talking to people to find all the different ways that people could sort of play with characters. And so I suggested everything from some very simple things like writing diary entries from your character’s point view. On the timeline of sort of events they happen.

So what did they think of that when they happen? What would they think of it if they reflected back on that event? And I found that really fun to do, doing mind maps about looking about who are the other people in their life and how are they different. So even think of yourself and think about how you interact with a coworker versus a parent versus maybe someone you knew 10 years ago, how would each of those people describe you and how would they say that you’re different? I have the readers of the books to a timeline of major events of their character. So what’s happened to them over the course of their life before the book ever starts?

I think one of the important things to understand is with rare exceptions, most of the time our characters aren’t born on page one. Most of the time on page one, they’re already coming with a life history that has somehow impacted them. Michael Hague, who’s a screenwriter, uses the term the hole in your soul, which is a fancy way of, one: determining if you’re sober cause it’s hard to say if you’re not.

And two is the idea that all of us have had something that’s happened to us that has impacted how we see the world. So if you’re someone like Harry Potter, you have his parents’ die very young and had to grow up with the Dursleys that’s changed who he is and the trajectory of his life. If you were very young and you moved multiple times because your parents were in the military, and so you were changing schools at every couple of years, that changed who you are.

It doesn’t mean that you’re a necessarily a tragic figure or that you have a lightning bolt scar on your forehead depending on what those things were. But it sort of changes who you are. If your parents divorced when you were very young, that sort of probably shook up how you see the world and your issues around trust potentially, or any of those.

So it’s useful to know where your characters came from and how they understand the world, before you throw everything at them.

Crystal: And I think people talk a lot about upping the stakes, and that kind of ties in where, you know, the end of the world. In your character’s point of view, it could be that the lucky tie that you needed for that job interview has just had coffee spilt on it.

Not necessarily that the alien ship is going to blow up the entire planet if you don’t do X  in the next three minutes and 42 seconds. Right? So there’s, the stakes for the characters are really different and really different times. And it’s not, the conflict isn’t always about the fights, right? It’s often about the roles that people have. So what, what are some ways people could kind of brainstorm sources of conflict for their characters?

How to make conflict for your characters

Eileen Cook: I think it’s important to understand that conflict coming from a whole bunch of, of different areas. So even just at the most basic level external, the internal.

So external is that idea that it’s anything on the outside. So that can be everything from weather, it rains on the day of that big interview that you have. And so the buses are all running late and someone slashed you and all of those things, it can be nature. So you’re being chased by a rabid raccoon through the rain, can sort of add to those kinds of things. Thanks. It can be the setting around you. So the office is…so say the floors have made of lava, but do you know that idea? But this thing in the office covered in clown paintings and clowns give you phobias. And so all of a sudden you’re freaking out about that.

It can be other people. So it turns out the person who is interviewing you is the person that you’ve dumped last night in the bar who tried to pick you up and you didn’t realize that was going to be your interviewer. But there’s also what’s happening to you internally? And I think that’s often fun for people to play with because that’s often connected to that hole in the soul.

It’s connected to maybe some internal beliefs that you have. That “Oh I’m not good enough.” Or “I never do well under pressure” that comes to play. So external things are often just challenges we have to work around. Internal challenges are things that we fundamentally believe and changing those belief structures is hard.

And anyone who’s ever tried to make a big change in that their life, eating healthier or, you know, getting more exercise. You can know logically like, Oh, I want to go to the gym every day and be more fit. And you know how to do it. It’s not like it’s a challenge. It’s not like the gym is necessarily 15 miles away through the sleet and the snow. And the only way you can get there is by walking. It’s usually internal.

It’s the idea that like, Oh, I also really want to sleep in, or I want to spend time with my kids in the morning. That means I can’t do that if I’m going to get up and go to the gym. What was walking those 15 miles uphill. So in that understanding, both of those things, and then feeling free to kind of think about what are those external and internal things that are gonna provide some friction for your character.

Crystal: And for you, I know you read a lot of stuff. You have a lot of students, you teach in a lot of different contexts. You do a lot of blue pencils and things like that at conferences. So I’m curious, what are the top handful of kind of mistakes that you see people making as newer writers around conflict and character development that other people listening to this might be able to be aware of and therefore hopefully avoid in their own writing?

Eileen Cook: So the first is one that we’ve kind of already talked about, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say it again, which is. They just don’t put enough conflict in. So they ended up backing away and letting their characters off easy. And I think that’s, cause we kind of liked them, which is fair. We did create them. I get that. Oftentimes characters are a little bit of ourselves, so we are afraid to do that.

The second is, I think sometimes people don’t put in enough conflict because they doubt their ability as a writer to get the character out of the situation. They’re almost afraid to make things too hard cause they’re like, I don’t even know how I’ll solve it.

So I’m just putting a call out there, the best thing about being a writer versus a real person in a conflict situation is you can go to bed, you can think about it, you can come back the next day and you can figure it out. Which obviously if you’re trying to diffuse that bomb in two minutes, 42 seconds, your character may not have that luxury of time.

So give yourself the room for that. Another thing that I see quite often is that conflict is all external. So it’s everything happening on the outside, but that the character themselves, it doesn’t have any internal friction. And again, I think for most of us, the way around most of our external things is a challenge or a problem solving. It’s the internal that’s really quite hard because we’re often not aware of it. So what’s that limiting internal beliefs that we’re doing? Another thing that I see quite often, because a lot of conflict shows up in dialogue, and what I’ll indicate to people is it looks like your dialogue is almost script like, so what they’ll have is:

Crystal says X,

Eileen fires back.

Why. How dare you, says Crystal.

Eileen comes back -and it goes back and forth, and so there’s the, you know, Crystal said, Eileen said. But that’s all it is, is lines of dialogue all kind of in a row. And what you’re missing there is a couple of different things. So the first thing that I’m missing is some visuals, like, let me see that in action, right?

Does Crystal thump her hand on the table, do Eileen’s eyes flashed with rage, like what is happening and don’t use flash with rage, that was bad. We’re not seeing a chance to sort of seeing that interaction, which can often add so much to it. So you know what’s happening in the setting? Is there anything around them that might help amplify or kind of show that friction in any way?

Also, kind of the last part, the last thing I see left out, which is hints of internal emotion or subtext. So the thing you need to understand is most of us read, nearly all of us do not say what we actually think and feel all the time. And so you will entreat the characters to solve their own problems.

You will intrigue the readers to figure out what’s going on if sometimes you’re laying clues. So if you have a character, say, I love you Crystal. Eileen said, looking deep into her eyes, the reader will be like, okay, it sounds like she really likes Crystal. If I say, I love you, Crystal, I leaned, said staring down at her hands and twisting her ring madly on her finger.

For the reader, that’s just a clue of like, Oh, that’s interesting me thinks Eileen has some different feelings about Crystal that she isn’t willing to share, or maybe even isn’t aware of. I think all books to some degree are mysteries. Even if you’re writing a romance or a science fiction story, it’s a mystery in what is the character going to do and why are they doing it?

And readers are reading to figure that mystery out as much as the mystery of who done it, if it is in fact ministry. So leave them some clues and lead them some subtext where they feel engaged like a detective. And sort of parsing your dialogue and looking through your descriptions to see like what else might be going on

Crystal: Yeah. And I’m going to probably butcher the statistic, but something like 80% of our understanding of a conversation or an interaction with another person is actually body language and only the remaining 20% of that is actually our words that we’re using, and so that’s partly why I think, you know, things can go so awry when we’re only text messaging and emailing and why emojis are so much used as you can’t, in a short text or a tweet indicate irony except by saying *irony*.

Or you can include an emoji that indicates, but we don’t have tone of voice in our basic communication. And so that’s an interesting, I think a thing really to think about as writers. So for some people who don’t happen to have a psychology background that we both paid and practiced for where might they go to get some help with some of these things because we don’t just understand how all of this works. So what are some of your favourite resources to help with understanding emotions and the hole in your soul kind of stuff?

Eileen Cook: So I have one that I just, I have to recommend because I absolutely love it. If you are going to the bookstore and the library and you’re only looking in your favourite genre or the writing craft section, you are missing out because get thee to the self-help section.

Not for yourself, though feel free to pick up something if you like. But whatever it is that your character is struggling with, whether it’s addiction, being a teen parent, adoption, dealing with trauma, anything that they’re dealing with, there’s a self-help book about it. I guarantee it. And that book is going to dissect what are common emotions? How do people cope? How can they move through those things? And that’s going to provide you with a blueprint of a lot of great ideas, so I really encourage people to kind of check out those sections.

You could think about taking a psychology class. There are certainly tons of them. There’s also tons of just understanding emotions. There’s some wonderful books on things like emotional intelligence that will help people and sort of give you an idea of kind of what people are thinking or feeling. And if you like it, do it yourself as you’re reading a book that’s not your own, pause for a second. And if you find yourself feeling any kind of emotion, ask yourself what on the page is making me feel that? What does the author have on there that made me angry at that character? Or if I’m feeling sort of like, well, hello there. What is it that she has done that has made me feel that’s stirrings of romance.

Because if it’s well-crafted, it’s on there on the page. There was something that was done and I guarantee it wasn’t like… “Crystal was really hot”. That’s not telling me anything. So it’ll be something in the description that will make me see that. I don’t know, a smooth Italian accent. That might go a little further. That might just be me. But those kinds of things that’s come together and sort of build a picture for the reader.

Crystal: Yeah. I think the most interesting textbook- one of the psychology courses that I took a million years ago in university was about evolutionary psychology, but one of the assigned textbooks was called the anatomy of love. And it’s, it’s like an analysis of sort of mating rituals basically, and, and how we indicate interests to the opposites sex. And it was a sort of a gender divided interpretation of that where, you know, there was like 14 steps in this courtship ritual and you know. If you ask the men versus the women, like who made the first move? And you know, how did you know they were interested? Things were we’re on like step 14 before the guys sort of kick in with the, Oh, and then I went up to talk to her, so it was really interested. That was the first move. So it was just fascinating for a romance author to look at this like evolutionary psychology book.

And see how I could use that, that, because that’s pretty funny. And it’s got a lot of room for conflict. If you know you think you’re making moves, then it’s super obvious. But somebody just not picking up what you’re putting down. And you know, there’s all these different stories you can tell yourself about why.

And so there’s some great fodder in there for making your character’s lives more complicated. Do, do your characters speak the same language? I mean, literally or metaphorically? How are they communicating? What are their skills? So yeah, that’s some interesting stuff to play with.

Eileen Cook: And there’s so much up for interpretation, like you pointed out the stat that neither of us actually remembers if it’s right, but it’s close, which is that 80 20 principle, which is, if I pick up that you’re really nervous and so you’re behaving in a certain way. But if I pick that up as you not being interested in me, I might think you don’t want to be my friend. So you know, this is a running joke about so-and-so has resting bitch face or that kind of idea, which is, it may be something that’s coming across in a nonverbal way, which is in no way meant to communicate that, but whatever my internal beliefs are, so if I got picked on by the popular girls in my school, if there’s a pretty woman that I’m a meeting as an adult and she seems at all cool, I might have the automatic thing of like, Oh, she thinks she’s better than me, and it simply could be that she’s shy, but we’re going to then have conflict because we’re not seeing things on the same page.

Crystal: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s, it’s interesting that a lot of people say the challenge with books about conflict is they always tell you what it isn’t, but they don’t tell you what it is. Right? And so that’s a, an interesting exploration. And I do think you’ve tried, do you address that directly in the conflict book. Which is Create Story Conflict if anyone’s looking for it. And I think that’s an interesting way of just positively defining something, not just. It’s not just a fight or a car chase or a thunderstorm or whatever, but it’s, it’s the meaning of those things and the interpretation of those things to the character, which is really interesting.

And to see that change over time is also part of the characters arc is you know, often we cycle back around at the beginning of a story to at the end, we cycle back around to a similar kind of situation, but now that the character has grown, changed, learned, evolved, all these good things, they can respond differently to whatever that stress is, situation, whatever it is. So that’s interesting.

Eileen Cook: One my favourite things to talk about when I do a writing class is to talk about, and you might remember this, Rational Emotive Therapy by Ellis as a psychologist. And one of his things that I think about all the time is he used something called the ABC. So ‘A’ was the activating of it.

‘B’ is your belief about that event, and ‘C’ is the consequence as a result of that belief. So if I walk into a room and you and a group of people are laughing, and when I walk into the room, you stop laughing, that’s the activating of it. That’s what’s actually happened. B is my belief about that. So given that I’m a writer and have raging insecurity, my belief will no doubt be that you were all making fun of me and have stopped because I just walked into the room. The C of the consequence of that is I may no longer hang out with you. Or maybe I storm out. Maybe I say, how dare you? Sweep the table of glass objects and then storm out.

Crystal: And then we do make fun of you.

Eileen Cook: You do, because that was a weird reaction to things because of course, the activating event may have been, I just missed the joke. It could be as simple as that, but it’s interesting to me that your belief about something can then change the consequence, which then alters reality in a lot of ways. Like once you believe that to be true, that is your reality. And every romantic comedy is built on this idea. You come downstairs, you see the object of your affection, hugging someone else. She gasped, right?

Your belief is, Oh no, they’re in love with someone else. The consequence is that you avoid them. And of course what we’re going to find out at the end of the movie, or the book, is that that was your cousin or your sister, and you were simply comforting them. And in fact, they have loved you all this time.

That is every romantic comedy, that’s every mystery novel that you see a clue, you make a belief about that clue, which leads you down a certain path. And the course that turns out to not be that red herring, it’s something else, and you have to go back and start again. So that’ll be Albert Ellis. He was onto something with that rational motive therapy. It’s darn handy for writers to think in those terms.

Crystal: And so how do you, now that we’ve set our characters up with these conflicty situations and we’ve got them all wound up and in these awkward moments with these things happening and stories are being told and emotions are escalating, how do we get them back out again? So let’s maybe talk about a couple of techniques of how do you smooth out conflict in real life and, and apply that to your characters as well?

Eileen Cook: So first, I’m gonna put a plugin to, do you make it as bad as you could or did you let them off easy? So assuming that you have in fact made it all the way through, then I think there are a couple of different options that you have in sort of resolving or dealing with conflict.

So the first is there’s some kind of problem solving. So the character actually pieces together information in a new and exciting way that makes them realize you know, I thought I had to go down this street and there’s a, you know, a big giant wall now across the street, but now I realize I could back up and I could go down an alternate path.

And often this idea of problem solving comes about because they either have met some people who have provided them with an alternate map. And I’m using that to kind of fill in for anything that they’re solving around, or the fact that they have learned things about themselves, provided them with an alternate maps.

Do you ever remember some of those riddles? Like, you know, there’s this thing, what do you do? And it’s like, well, could you crawl over that wall? Could you climb underneath that wall? So it’s something around the idea of your character problem solves in a way that is new and fresh for them. Which is probably the most common thing that we’re doing because hopefully our characters have grown and changed.

And what seems like an insurmountable object at the beginning of the book now has a way that they can approach it and fix it. If you think of Luke Skywalker in Episode Four, which is the first of the Star Wars movies, if you know he’s of all things, a moisture farmer, just possibly the most boring thing anybody could ever be.

The guy farms moisture at the very beginning of that film, and then because of the experiences that he has, the interactions he has the chance to meet with Obi Wan Kenobi, all of those things. At the end of it, he’s someone who’s in a fighter jet and it’s up to him to blow up the Death Star. And of course the way he can do that is by using the Force. So what he’s been through allows him to solve the problem, resolve that conflict in a way that wouldn’t have been possible before. And that’s really often the same with emotional conflicts.

So something that might have been in between two people that seemed insurmountable. Now that they have grown and changed, they can talk in a way that maybe they couldn’t, they can understand that maybe this isn’t happening in the way that I thought that it was. What you want to avoid is solving that conflict by having someone else do it.

So it would have been far less exciting in Star Wars, if Obi Wan hadn’t died and had been like, you know what, Luke, why don’t you let me take this? Because it would have just felt like, Oh, Oh, okay. It wouldn’t have had the same emotional resonance. So making sure that your character is the one who ultimately solves that solution, even if it is with the help of others, that’s they’re the ones taking the action to do that, I think is pretty important.

Crystal: And extra important with children’s books, I think because you know, so often the child is not the agent of change. Like the young character is not the agent of change. And if you look at a lot of really successful kids’ books, there are no grownups. Like they either don’t exist at all or so much, sort of YA fiction, especially the post-apocalyptic stuff or whatever, the adults are just all dead and we just don’t have to worry about them stepping in, trying to fix things or solve the problems. And that’s a way of the circumstances ensuring that the, the kids will have to solve the problems because that keeps it immediate and they don’t have another choice.

But as authors, they do have choices. And so we need to make sure that we do set our characters up regardless of how old they are. You know, there’s still, and I think the default is sort of the younger the audience or the younger, the main characters, the more people default to not giving them that agency, which they really do need. And we need for them to have their agency so that we can relate to that as well and cheer for them. We want to be their cheering squad through that dark night of the soul piece where, you know, all this conflict and stuff just keeps smacking them down and they so desperately want to go get to where they’re going. We want to be so riled up on their behalf and wanting them to get there that we are cheering them on, and kind of waiting for that triumphant moment where they leap across the finish line of whatever it is they’re trying to do and we get to clap  and jump up and down and feel that victory for ourselves too.

Eileen Cook: Well, and I think that’s important to understand, like in YA fiction sometimes people say, why do you always kill off the parents? Or why are the parents always so dysfunctional? And it’s exactly that reason because if they were functional loving parents, then the child would go to them and be like, Hey, I’ve gotten myself into a sticky situation here, can you help me. And their parents would of course leap into assist them. And even in adult fiction, understanding that in most cases, your main character is not. The most capable person of solving that problem, at least certainly at the start of the book, they’re someone with a lot of flaws and weaknesses and they’re growing into that role and they have to change that.

And one of the things that you said really excited me, cause I don’t know if people know this, but of course our psychology stuff, we get excited with this, but your brain actually can’t tell the difference between a story and experiencing something. So if I put you into a story that has, it’s a romance, so there’s really exciting stuff happening.

The parts of your brain that would light up if you were really about to kiss someone will light up when two characters are about to kiss. If I stuck you an MRI, you would see the same thing. If I put a character in a high tense situation, you’ll actually see the body release cortisol, which is the stress hormone.

Like these kinds of things are actually happening. And I think for so many of us, we read because we want to see characters have that trial. Because, two things. One, it actually gives our brains that of joy and excitement as if we had done it. And also for so many of us, I think even though we may never face down a zombie apocalypse or you know, have to win love from, you know, a count in a castle and all of those kinds of things, the chance to go through that with the character, gives us a chance to live vicariously and kind of reminds our brain those things are possible.

And I think when things are as negative as they can sometimes be in the world, remembering that true love is possible, that victory is possible, is really, really important.

I’m often asked about the difference between being traditionally published and doing indie published work. And I think what I’m excited about is there’s a lot more overlap than I think people are aware of. In both industries, the number one skill set that you can have is persistence and flexibility. So your ability to get back up when things don’t go well, whether that’s that you don’t get another contract or your editor leaves the house or your agent dumps you, or whether that is that Amazon changes the uploading rules, or your newest book just tanks and doesn’t sell any copies and disappears without a trace.

So it’s your ability to kind of keep going to remain flexible. This industry changes, readers’ tastes change. So what’s your ability, the kind of flex to those things. The need to be professional. Publishing, if you’re in traditional, it is a small business and those people do know each other. So if you’re going to burn bridges, you’re burning a lot of bridges. And if you’re indie, you can burn those too. They may not be with editors and agents, but you can burn them with other writers and so forth. People have a long memory and the most important thing, again, for both sides of those. Is that you absolutely must remember that your reader comes first.

You’re creating a story for someone and you have to make sure that you are thinking of them. And how that’s going to work. The differences are buried. I certainly think having dipped my toe into both. You have to be self-disciplined in both, but you really have to be self-disciplined in indie publishing.

Because unlike traditional publishing where there’s an external deadline and someone who will actually call you and harass you for that book, in indie publishing, you’ve gotta be on that and yourself. And I think the second difference is if you’re indie publishing, you have the ability, but also the responsibility to choose your team.

And traditional publishing, while you may be selecting your agent, whoever is at the publishing house, is kind of coming along for the ride. You probably don’t have a choice of who your editor is and so forth. But if you’re indie publishing, one, that’s a great freedom to have, but with great freedom comes great responsibility.

And please choose wisely and choose someone who’s going to have really kind of help you move that forward. So those are some of the differences I wanted to highlight.

Crystal: I think it’s interesting too, to think of conflict as a motivator for change in the context of choosing your team. Like you said, you need to make sure that you choose a team that’s going to help you move things forward, and that doesn’t always mean just agreeing with you, right?

I think are our biggest moments of learning and growth and change come from people forcing us or circumstances forcing us outside our comfort zone. And if we only choose to surround ourselves, like if you picked an editor was only going to tell you the story’s great, like, good job, go for it. Yeah. You might feel warm and fuzzy for a few minutes, but only until the terrible reviews start rolling in because really, you, you can always do better, right?

Like there is always a way to stretch yourself, to improve your skills, to move things forward. And I think, I think. Yeah. You don’t want a conflict riddled situation on a daily working basis,

but I think you do need people around you who aren’t just going to avoid conflict, but who are going to, when it matters step up because they have your back and they want the best for you and they want your books and your business to be the best it can be. So I think sort of embracing a certain amount of conflict as something that’s going to help you be the best version of yourself, the best strategic authorpreneur that you can be. That’s going to force you outside of your comfort spot just a little right, which is really actually good for people.

Eileen Cook: I have to laugh because my first agent left the business. And so I was shopping around for a second agent and I was in the fortunate position where I had several that were interested. And so I had phone interviews with them and one of them said to me, yeah, I really liked your books, but she was like, I feel like you’re kind of the smart girl in class who instead of doing your homework, goes out and smokes with the boys behind the gym. And I want to know what would happen if you really pushed yourself. And I got off the phone and I remember thinking, “You bitch.”

How dare you like I have over 10 books published. I am under contract with Simon and Schuster. How dare you? And then I just kept sitting on it and sitting on it, and I was like, she’s right.

And in fact, that was the agent I signed was that Barbara. And she pushed me hard. And that was when I came out with, With Malice, which was probably my bigger breakout book, and it was exactly that. She pushed me. I’m into not accepting just good enough, but even better. And so I couldn’t echo your point any more. Push yourself just a little bit harder.

Crystal: All right, on that note, if people are going to look for books like With Malice and they want to read some of your conflict and tension filled stuff, where should they go to find you?

Eileen Cook: You can always find me on my website, which is eileencook.com makes that nice and easy. I hang entirely out too much on Twitter where I am eileenwriter and on Instagram, where am eileencookwriter. So you can find me on both of those.

Crystal: And if you are looking for more good stuff to help you boost your conflict and build your characters, you can find the creative Academy guides for writers on Amazon, et cetera. And there’s a build better characters and create story conflict both there along with several other titles in that series. So that’s a good way to absorb some of this stuff, which has also been packaged with a bunch of exercises for you, so you can actually work your way through a whole bunch of those techniques and ideas. With homework, because that’s how we like to roll.

And you can also join us at the creative Academy because it’s free to come and join the community. Eileen hangs out there also entirely too much, just like Twitter. And I can say that without judgement because I hang out there too. But there are some courses and some resources and some great character interviews and all kinds of stuff, a huge library of office hours. So all of those things, we’ll let you pick Eileen’s brain a little bit more about how to ramp up those aspects of your writing, because as we said at the beginning, ultimately if the book sucks, nobody’s going to buy them and that’s going to take your business before you even get started.

So it is an excellent area to spend some energy and some effort and too level up your craft because as we have talked about before, everything you learn now that goes into every  other book you write from the rest of your career is going to get you exponential returns on time and effort invested. So those are smart ways to spend our time.

Eileen Cook: And I’d love to see you at the creative Academy because they do some fun things like the blue pencil sessions where you can have your take your work, taking a look at it and we’ll kind of give some feedback. And then in the office hour sections, we’re talking kind of more general, so not just your pieces, but everyone’s about how you can kind of strengthen everything from dialogue to characters to conflict and everything in between.

Crystal: Thank you so much, Eileen, for taking time out of your busy schedule to chat with all of us and save everybody from having to do an entire psychology degree for themselves. You can just get the highlights from Eileen’s books. So thank you so much for that.

Eileen Cook: Thanks for having me!

Post interview discussion

Michele: So that was it. That was the gold that came from Eileen’s mouth, and now we are here discussing about what she said.

Now, I would you like to take the time to just say that way she framed the discussion of the subject was interesting because of the way she decided to underline each and every single point. So one part of the interview, Crystal was dedicated 100% to, wow we as a writer can make basically more believable and more interesting characters, which is one of I would say one of the most important feature that we as authors can understand in our books. Because if there is one thing that she said, is that she has mentored a lot of writers in her career.

Plot and structure is not necessarily the number one problem. The thing that she found to be the flow of the majority of the writers is characters. And pacing is one of the things. The way sometimes dialogue, which is basically one representation of how characters are made, are done.

And the other part of the interview was more directly related to the publishing business side of things. And it was so interesting to hear her point of view because she’s one of those authors that has a foot in both camps.

So she’s been in the self-publishing business, and she still is. And she also operates in the legacy publishing, so like traditional publishing. So that’s the second part of the interview. And both of them were very helpful and meaningful. But going back to part one, she starts with that describing where is she he’s coming from, which is something very similar to the place you’re coming from, Crystal, because her background is more about understanding people’s problems. So psychology, that kind of field.

And she said that she worked on the catastrophic injuries and illness, which means like, people that really had big situation, big problems. What she says is that good writers are observers, and that’s, I think, one gold nugget. It inks to the fact that she was able to speak and help so many people.

In doing so, she understood what made them tick, what was the important things for these people. And she said 100%, if you observe people, you can translate this understanding toyour characters.

And that was the first a golden nugget because like, you can do this exercise. Not necessarily working in the catastrophic injuries and illness industry, you can do that in the street.

You can literally go into the street and ask to a person that you don’t know question. So while we are waiting in line, you can have a conversation with a person. Every single interaction that you have can go in your books. That’s something that she took very much time in explaining. And I do believe that to be true.

So good writers are observers. And she also said something else that I found quite interesting that understanding real people is helpful when writing imaginary friends. And that’s basically linked the what she was saying, like we are making up stuff, Crystal, so we’re making up words. And these words are populated by people.

If we don’t understand how people behave, if we don’t understand that, as she said, most of the people we write about, they’re not born on page one. You can understand all of the rest of them. It’s like something that started from the beginning of things. It goes on the observation, and then you can translate what you’ve learned from your experience into pages. So that was basically the bedrock.

Crystal: Yeah, and I think something that’s really important to keep in mind is. It’s like reading a book. You can just read a book, but that doesn’t mean you understand it. You have to actually think about and process what it is you’re seeing or hearing.

And one of the things Eileen mentioned is, you know, when it gets interesting is when your character’s actions do not line up with what they’re thinking, or when their motivations may not be clear from what they’re doing and it’s those breaks, right?

You might. Say, Oh, I’m fine, I’m totally comfortable. But you’re wringing your hands and you’re fiddling with the ring that’s on your finger or whatever which is giving it away. So I think it’s the discrepancies. It’s the things that don’t line up that cause us to ask questions that are the most interesting part.

And so as an observer. You can’t be a passive observer because you won’t. If you’re just watching things and replicating them, you don’t know why they were important or when they would be important. So you actually have to do the work of thinking about the people, you have to think about what could their motivations have been. Why might they be doing that. And you can make up stories. I did this in coffee shops or when I’m like on the bus or wherever all the time. If I’m watching people, I will make up stories about their situation for myself and just practice. Like how could I up the tension here or what’s really going on, or you know, this is the surface conversation they’re having. What if it wasn’t about this at all? What if it was about, and I will assign some other random topic that makes it a much more like nuanced and level of things.

So I think that’s just something to keep in mind, is you cannot be a passive observer. You have to dive in and be analytical. You have to think about everything. You have to break it down into pieces and really dig a little deeper than just watching what’s happening on the surface.

Michele:  And what you just said, connects with another point that she makes immediately after, which is about motivation, characters, motivation. She was like a mistake many writers commit or make is that, even though they’re good at plot ideas, they don’t have a good grasp of the character’s motivation. Why a character is doing something. So readers need to be able to empathize with these book characters.

And one problem, and she so many, many, many, many, many, many writers was that the motivation of the person that they were creating out of thin hair, wasn’t strong or there wasn’t at all. They just needed them to do something. And then when Eileen asked them, but why are they doing that? It’s because of the plot. The mindset. That’s basically that for your book because it doesn’t make much sense. You have to have motivation and this motivation can come from an internal thing or an external point or character conflict.

But there needs to be a reason, and this is one of the mistakes that Eileen was saying many writers that she’s coaching or mentoring still make.

Crystal: And it’s often the author’s motivation that is making the character do a thing. The term we use at our hosts is ‘plotadvancium’ as a reason for something is the plot requires that the character is motivated to do this thing.

And so that’s our code word for like bad writing is, Ooh, there’s a good case of plotadvancium right there. Just something to remember, it cannot be because you want them to do it. That is not a good motivation for our character to do a thing.

Michele: I mean like, it’s totally fine if the first draft has something like that. I’ve seen writers that are best sellers, will do the first draft and then if there is something they don’t know, it might be character motivation. They write “to be decided” TBD. And I’m talking about like very famous New York Time bestseller authors. It’s fine. It’s completely fine if you can’t get it right the first time.

But then you have to be aware in the background if your idea is working. Motivation needs to be strong. That’s that Eileen says on that point. That’s why I brought it up because I thought it was super, very important to say. And another thing other than motivation is conflict.

Conflict is huge. She spent a good fifth of this episode talking about this subject or something orbiting it. You have to ask yourself, she says, what’s the worst thing that could happen in general to your character and to the plot itself. Is that bad enough?

So it’s not only the question that she’s asking you to ask yourself or your character, she’s also asking you, can you be even more bad with your character? Because the reader is gonna thank you for that. Maybe you don’t want your character to feel like bad. I know a lot of authors like that, but you kind of like torture them under a certain point of view because you want people to empathize with them. So that’s difficult. Sometimes, especially if you are the kind of author that just wants to see his or her character to be happy. They can be happy again before, make them suffer.

Crystal: True story. Shonda Rhimes is a master at this. I’ve just re-watched all of Grey’s Anatomy, but I’m a few seasons into Scandal as well. And so I think those are both great examples of how you can just keep it piling it on. And I think also like Telenovelas or like daytime television, what we used to call Soaps back in the day are a great place to look for inspiration of how you can make it worse because they’re not so worried about is it believable that this person who’s already had 20 bad things happen to them is going to have another bad thing happened to them. It’s all about what would make this worse. And they do it every episode and they’re constantly facing interesting challenges. So I just signed up for a masterclass with Shonda Rhimes, so I’m curious to see if she gets into some more of how that all comes together.

I think it is that. Just asking your question with every single scene, how can we up the state that’s here? What would be absolutely worse? And Eileen talked about that, it’s you just turning up the heat on your characters with every single choice that you make. Because even though you’re looking for an easy out, because you could solve an easy problem easier as the creator of all of this, challenge yourself, make it a little harder for you to sell, be more creative.

You’ve got a good brain in there, you can figure it out. And that pressure, that upping of the stakes will just make your readers that much more engaged and that much more likely to cheer for the happy ending. Your character gets, assuming you write the kind of books with happy endings,

Michele: Assuming, because there might be other authors who write more on the darker side.

So we talked about that conflict, the motivation, and that she spent a great deal of time in talking about characters. And that is was one of my favorite parts of the interview. She gives a few suggestions on how to make your character more interesting.

Now. There is a book that she wrote and we’re going to put that on the show notes and the links. Build Better Characters if you want to dig a bit deeper on that side, but I’m just going to give you some pearls that she distributed. In the interview, she says how can you make your character more interesting?

So you can give them a, what she called the diaries entry, like a diary really you can, from a character of your book, from his or her point of view, you can just make him or her write something about their day or profession or religion or race, anything that makes you understand more about herself or himself.

The other thing she said that I’ve never thought about is something that she called mind maps. So looking at other people in our life or in his life, depending on your character, and understanding how they are different and how their relationship with the character that you’re writing interests them and how this relationship influenced his or her life?

Never thought about the mind map. It might be definitely something to check out, if you’ve never tried it. And then the third thing was a timeline. So do a timeline of the major events that happen in the life of that character. Most of our characters, as we were saying, are not born on page one. What happened before the starting the beginning of our book? I think these are interesting points that she raises and if you don’t know what you’re doing or you don’t have any idea of how to progress the plot or the character, just try to do this.  Remember what we thought about in other episodes, that toolbox. You try tool from the box. Maybe it works. If it doesn’t work, you just tossed aside and try something else from the box. We’re just giving you resources here. And it’s interesting that Eileen mentioned these three ways, because you can bet that there will be a point in your writing career that you will be stuck or maybe you will have tried every single tool that you know, we just gave you 3 more. If you are interested in dipping a bit more on your characters, motivation kind of things.

Crystal: So yeah, if you are looking for great books on motivation, I think we mentioned, I default back to the Emotional Wound Thesaurus from Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi because that’s, for me, that’s one of the key pieces in understanding any characters, motivations, and in developing potential sources of conflict or making things more awkward.

I mean, you might have a situation where your character needs to swim from a boat to shore. Well, if your character is a strong swimmer, that’s a very different situation than if you’re a character or has a definitely fear of water or nearly drowned as a child. And the stakes of that scene or that situation become much, much, much higher.

But if you don’t understand your character well enough to know which buttons you can push of theirs, or if they are trapped with somebody who is a brother they have never gotten along with versus somebody who had a great sort of history with that family member, these are going to be very, very different.

So in order to up the stakes, you have to know what the stakes are and you have to know where those sources of conflict are. So I think it’s a really interesting opportunity to just, use those tools and get to know your character. If you’re the type who likes to get all techie with your planning process, you can use Scapple, is an interesting kind of mapping tool that you can put to work for you. It’s by the same folks who made Scrivener. And I think when I bought it, it was about $12 but it might be as much as $20 for a lifetime license now, but it’s not too prohibitive. And MindNode is another one that I use sometimes for doing some mind mapping because it just reshuffles things. You know I can’t read my own handwriting, so I could do it on paper, but then I can’t tell later what the heck I was talking about.

So I do tend to default to the technology because then it’s legible. And when I changed my mind, or I move things around, if I’m using Mind Node or Scalpel, I can just move stuff. And it shuffles all the branches to make sense. And so for me, that saves a lot of time in redrawing things.

It just depends what makes your heart happy and what lights up your imagination in terms of format. Sometimes colored markers on a big old piece of paper, or I have a whiteboard wall and sometimes drawing on the whiteboard wall is what I need to do to unlock my brain. And that is fine too. So just follow the process in whatever way it makes it fun for you and helps you get to know your characters better.

Michele: One thing that I love is the dialogue sounds too much like a script. Make the characters describe the world they’re living in or what’s inside their head by moments of their bodies. So just try to use everything you can, even to do word building. If you are writing a science fiction novel, a fantasy in the dialogue, you can build up your world in the same respect.

There is a fantasy author, Patrick Rothfuss who does that very well. For example, The Name of the Wind. You can do that too. Definitely doesn’t matter the genre. Just don’t make the dialog sound to flat. The last thing that I found to be viable on this first part of the interview before the self-publishing and the legacy publishing differences and similarities is how do you smooth out conflict when you have built up that in your character? And she basically says that there are several ways. The character can smooth conflict by having good problem solving abilities. Somebody can help them in giving and answer that is necessarily for the plot to go on, but, and this, she’s stressed this very much: there can’t be a character that’s solves 100% the problem for the main character, because that’s feeling like cheating a lot.

That’s something I never thought about. I don’t know what you’re thinking about that Crystal, but I thought that was amazing. And this is interesting. I don’t know, like maybe you can explain that feeling a bit better thanks to your background, but when she said your brain can’t tell the difference between a story and experiencing something.

She told me that we have a power as writers. Like we can literally make people feel stuff that nobody else can basically. And so I just thought like, it’s an interesting way of finishing this part suggestions for writing. In our own huge understanding, Eileen basically told us that we have the power of gods because like nobody else can do that through anything else that is not storytelling.

A beautiful note was absolutely remember that your reader comes first . And that’s something huge. And I was very grateful that she finished with this because it’s true. Like our business is based on that. Our stories are based on that.

So that’s why it’s so important. Like you have to be respectful of your readers. And it doesn’t matter if you are self-publishing or in a traditional publishing. Those are the pillars, the bedrock of everything you’re doing. So if you’re self-publishing, make sure that your book is edited, it has a nice cover, it’s respectful.

And I think it’s important for us as authors to reiterate that, to remember that even between us. So it’s important that the presentation of the package and the story it is sat on a professional level. And I do believe for a reader nowadays, 2020, if you give them indeed published a book and a legacy publishing book, they should not see what is the difference between the two of them.

If you put the craft and the work and resources and even the money yes, on both products, because that’s you. And your product, your book, your story deserve to be represented in the best state, the way possible.

What do you think is the hardest part about writing a novel?

Crystal: Amen to that. All right, so now it’s your favorite time, the time for the curious jar to make an appearance. So here we go. The lid is off. I’m going to shuffle it up. He tell me when to stop.

Michele: No, no, no, no, no. Now, stop now!

Crystal: That was really fast, okay. A yellow one today. You’re literally biting your nails.

Michele: Those are dangerous. I already said that. I stated that.

Crystal: These questions, yes, they are like ticking time bombs a little bit. Okay, so here’s today’s question.

So it’s not so bad. What do you think is the hardest part about writing a novel? I can go first if you want. I got this. I know exactly-okay

So for me, the hardest part about writing a novel is actually sitting in the chair and getting started. Well, there’s two hardest parts for me. One is getting started and one is like the last little bit, like the first little bit in the last little bit are the two equally hardest parts.

The sitting down one, I think because I know that that’s the point where it stops being the perfect thing it is in my head, and it starts being the imperfect thing that it will be on the paper. Like that’s where I start to see the breakdown between what I can envision and what I can make.

And so for me, that is a very, very good, tricky moment, to get into that stage to get out of the research part and into the writing part is definitely very, very hard. And then once I’ve been in it for a while and I’m all used to that, it’s that transition out because when I hit the end and I’m done, then I know it’s time to send it off to my editor who’s going to send it back and tell me how badly I failed at what I was trying to achieve, which is her job.

And she does it very nicely and she put smiley faces in the comments, which is why we still work together. But those are two times where it’s like a major challenge to your sense of self and your capabilities as an author. And so there’s pretty high resistance tied to fear and disappointment and perfectionism and all of those lovely things.

So yeah, for me, the hardest part of writing a novel, starting and stopping.

Michele: I would say nowadays at the point that I’m at in my writing career, is letting go of projects. I was talking with you Crystal offline, there is a story that was driving me crazy and I want to be completely transparent because like, this is a transparent podcast.

We already stated more than once and it’s going to be hurtful, but I’m going to just say it. So there was a story that I was writing for my 12th 12 story challenge for these 2020 and I put into this story so much of my time and energy and heart.

It just wasn’t working for some reason and I was going into a loop, like writing and re-writing and re-writing and I started feeling bad. There was a point in which I almost wanted to crush my head against the wall, because I was like, I have a deadline, man. I need to finish this. And so again, for the story to be completed I asked Crystal to make me accountable. And I was like, I need somebody to let me have like a couple of days to write the story and that’s it. You need me to send you at least half of the story in like two days’ time. And she did. And now I have this story.

Crystal: To be clear, I said he had to send it. He wrote the story.

Michele: But long story short, letting go of projects. Why is it the most difficult thing for me to do at this point? It’s because I felt like I invested so much of myself. I want that son of a gun for work. But it’s not always the case. And I’m telling this to myself in this case and to all the listeners and viewers: sometimes you just have to let that story go for the moment. And you can pick it up in the future, and you have to start something new.

Bear with me. Not always. You don’t have to be a quitter. You have to sit in front of the mirror and read the story out loud. And if it’s not working, it’s okay to put the story aside aside for a moment, and concentrate on something else. And get whatever it is done. So letting it go. I don’t know if it sounds like a defeat or something. But I just feel like one of those tools from the toolbox. Try this one sometimes. Just let go that project. And just concentrate on another one. Make sure you finish that. Then you have a project you all finished, so you can go back to that again.

Crystal: True story. Right? Well, our curious jar is getting a little low on questions. So if you would like to be the one to send us a question to make us sweat while we try and figure out answers to them, then you can email your question to ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com and we’ll add it to the mix. And we want to get to know you as well. So if you can go to strategicauthorpreneur.com find this episode, which is episode nine and leave us a comment in the show notes for the episode, and you can answer the curious jar question there because we want to know what do you find is the hardest part about writing a novel.

Michele: And folks for show notes, links, two resources that we mentioned and for coupons or discounts or tools we love and we recommend, you can visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com and you can subscribe to our newsletter and each week we will send you just one thing, that we think will help you on your authorpreneur journey and a link to our latest episode.

Crystal: And if you leave us a review, wherever you are listening to this podcast, you will get a gold star and a million bonus points in the game of life. We are a shiny new podcast and we need your help because nobody’s going to find us if we don’t have any reviews. So if you can help us out, we will be forever thankful.

Oh, look at the little tear. Such a dramatic Italian.