There is no one way to write a novel, and no matter what your approach is when you set off to craft a story, the best way is the one that gets you to finish what you started.

Join us as we talk about the joy of writing from the seat of your pants and about the many advantages of plotting your novel strategically before you even start writing the first sentence.

With NaNoWriMo fast approaching, there is no better time to talk about what it means to be a discovery writer or a plotter, and the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches.

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Complete Episode Transcripts

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. 

Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 035: NaNoWriMo Prep for Plotters and Pantsers

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

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

Crystal Hunt: Welcome to episode 35 of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show, we are talking about plotting, panting and all things related to prepping your author authority world for NaNoWriMo, which is coming right up on starting November 1st, but first, let’s talk a bit about what we’ve been working on this week Michele what have you been up to?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele Amitrani: Okay, so first the book of the week, this time it’s a lovely book called Mythos by Stephen Fry. And, this one was recommended by a person that reads these kind of things and, If you, if this is not the first time that you’re listening to me, I am writing a lot of mythological fantasy this time and I really wanted a resource that explains a lot mythos and the genesis of the Titans and the gods and the primordial gods and the Olympians, in a funny way, and I don’t think there is a better human being that Stephen Fry to explore the subject. So I’m going to dive in. But … look at this cover! I’ve never seen anything like this, so I’m very excited to read it, and look beautiful images, so okay, if you’re not on YouTube, don’t hate me. Okay? But, the book is Mythos (by Stephen Fry), The Greek Myths Retold, and, I really am looking forward to this one and, regarding what I’ve been up to. I am trying to levelling up my writing, as I usually say in the beginning of the episode, Crystal knows that I’ve been struggling a bit in order to write a story that was longer than usual.

I’m trying to push myself out of my comfort zone in that, I’m trying to write a novel, basically. That’s what I’m saying in my second language English and I was successful in the last couple of months in writing something that was longer than a short story. I wrote a novellette then I clawed my way up through a novella size story.

And now I’m really working on try and see in a couple of months I can write a novel. Again, a mythological fantasy, it’s proving to be of course more difficult than I expected. Lots of hours have been dedicated in this venture and, okay, let’s say this is driving me crazy, but I gave myself a couple of months, hence why I divided the novel in two parts so there us one part of story, and then the other. And, I really want to give it the best shot that I have, because if I can write potentially even a short novel, I’d say 40,000 words. I can basically say I can write a novel in a couple of months, which is awesome and hopefully I don’t go to the hospital immediately after that. I can enjoy the moment, but that basically that’s what I’ve been working to: writing a longer, more solid work, keeping the story and the characters, the space they deserve. And, maybe I’m going to reward myself at the end of this couple of months. Maybe Crystal is going to give me an idea, I’m not very good at thinking of a way to reward myself.

Last time was donuts, she suggested me donut, I gave you the proof of those dollars, I sent you a picture and they were good. I also took the gluten-free one, no pun intended by it was good that one too. So that’s basically me and now it’s your turn Crystal, what have you been up to?

Crystal Hunt: I have been, clarifying my business plan for 2021, because I have an assistant coming on board. So I need to make sure I know exactly what direction I’m headed and what goals I want to achieve. And I’ve been really turning all of my instructions that I would normally follow myself into a manual. So it’s really hard when you switch from doing everything yourself to having a helper, you have to externalize a lot of your processes and really explain all those bits and pieces in a way that makes sense to somebody who’s just coming on the scene. So I’ve been living in this world in my head for 20 years, and I’ve been learning about indie publishing for about 15 years.

And turns out, there’s a lot of stuff that I just know after that period of time. And so taking it out of my head and putting it into a sort of ‘how to guide’ for my assistant, who’s actually my daughter, is an interesting experiment just in making sure that I simplify things as much as I can.

So we’re not doing any extra steps and really upping the efficiency of everything and do that for just one year project, the going wide project. I’m giving myself one year from my birthday in January to the following January to really see what I can do with just focusing on being an author for that whole year in a fiction way in a really different way than I have been over the last few years where the focus has been really heavily on teaching and nonfiction. So it’s going to be a big shift for me and I need more days that are like Sunday. If you caught last week’s episode, we had to talk about our favorite day of the week and mine was the freedom of Sunday and how much I actually get done on my creative projects on Sundays, because there’s no pressure to do any of it, which makes me instantly want to do it. My little rebellious personality kicks in. And so I’ve been working on just making every day as close to Sunday as I can get it. So reducing the number of meetings that we’re having for things, making sure if time is booked for stuff that it’s really stuff I want to be spending that energy on and really reorienting everything around my primary focus and one of the… there was a workshop that I took last week from, Laurie Schnebly and she was talking about personality types and how to adjust your marketing plan for different personality types. And she had mentioned this book, which is The Enneagram Made Easy, and this is a philosophy around nine basic personality types. And so it helps just understand what those different types are and break it down into how those personality types work. So that in conjunction with The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin if what I’m using to tailor my business plan around my own personality as well.

And then I’m also finding it really helpful for character development. So our whole episode here, we’re going to be talking about plotting and planning and how you prep for nano, because nanos, for those of you who don’t know NaNoWriMo is all about diving into trying to write a 50,000 word manuscript in one month.

And a lot of people, do some prep so they try to figure out what their story is about so that they can really just drop into the writing and they’re not doing all the world-building and all of those other pieces during that month as well. That’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s episode is what our creative process is like a bit plotting versus pantsing versus somewhere in between and how we prep for nano so that you can maybe steal some for ideas and apply those to your own projects. If you are going to participate in national novel writing month. So Michele, I’m curious. I know you’ve been trying to level up your plotting game over the past while and I’m curious, what are some of the things you’ve tried and how are those experiments going? Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Plotters vs Pantsers

Michele Amitrani: Yeah. So you know that I’ve been taking a long time, in order to I to try and understand how basically professional writers do their thing.

There is a book that I’ve read, by Donald Maass. And, he’s a famous, very famous agent. The book is Writing the Breakout Novel, if I’m not mistaken, which was suggesting by the way, by Eileen Cook and it was very interesting, but it’s interesting because it’s basically telling you how the business works.

And even though it’s a few years old, I think most of the things that he says are still applicable today. And basically usually what an agent asks is like a, or a publishing house, it’s okay, we want to see the plot. We want to see the outline. And if they ask me something like that, I have no idea how to create ad outline that I’m going to use to write the book, because as Crystal was mentioning, I’ve been trying to allocate a number of hours into the studying of the outline.

I think professional, writers at least at some point, the use a fairly big amount of time in crafting an outline. I know of probably a couple of, pantser kind of 100% … Well, there is not nothing like a pantser 100%, maybe 90%, but they are exceptions to the rule. That’s what I think. What I think is that most people that are starting out writing they start as pantser and then if they go on about this for long enough, again, that’s my 5 cents, they evolve into grading a system and the system is the thing that is going to save you on the days when you don’t know what to do. And that’s basically what I’m trying to build up in this, I’ve been trying to be adopted the past nine months, building a system that is sustainable.

Have I been successful? The answers, easy, is: no. I’ve been trying hard, but, I still, I am, I would say 70 to 75, pantser. I will attack a story and if I don’t get into the, how can I say? Into the woods immediately, I just can’t write an outline because I’m like, I’m planning the story, but I want to write the story If I don’t write the story, I’m not going to get excited. And so I will ended up writing an half-formed outline, and then I will have to go back and rewrite several times the same passages, same problem that I’m having with my mythological fantasy novella. I don’t have a theme, which is something major, if you read the book, Take Off Your Pants. that’s huge, it’s something is basically the last one that I’ve read about, plotting. Very useful. I’ve read it twice. There are still so many things that I can’t actually put into my writing. I think I’m not good enough, I don’t have enough hours under my belt. That’s basically what I’m thinking now.

Crystal, you know I’ve been reading the Plot Whisperer, I’ve been reading Save The Cat is not like … an of course the last book that I was mentioning, it’s not like I’m not trying to, but it’s really that difficult. So since I have this challenge and, I have, I’m forced to produce at least new content on a monthly basis, I am studying, but I don’t have enough time to implement what I’m studying in longer projects. The only way I can make it up and for now, it’s just banging my head to a wall and just writing and rewriting my stories. If you read the first version of the story that I basically published on September and that I’m gonna finish on October, there’s basically nothing there in the first version that is going to end up in the last version, except for the name of the main characters. Maybe, if I didn’t change those. And that’s all hours that I’ve basically been bleeding out. I want to relate a story, that the author of that book Take Off Your Pants says. She had a deadline, okay? It was a huge deadline. She was supposed to, I think, to write the 90,000 words novel in something like a month and a half.

And the publisher was like, hey, we need this time in order to promote, to edit, your book, you really have just this timeframe, do you think you can do that? And she was like, sure, I have no problem with that. And she then starts the story of how she was able to craft the book in like less than two months and one a month and a half, a full length, mind you, not a novella. It’s a full length novel. And the process is fascinating. I’m a bit worried at this point,  after this book that I’ve read and after all the attempts that I’ve done and failed, I don’t know if I actually can do something like that, and I really want to have your opinion on that.

You’ve been following me on the, behind the scene, for some times, you know how I craft content nowadays, you know I’ve been trying the heck out of trying to master this thing. And, you know because you told me how important is the plot stage, but I’m very lacking. And I would like to actually have, some, advice if you have them on that point because I, and the people that are listening to you, they need those.

Crystal Hunt: I think one of the most important things you just brought up is that not everything is going to work for everybody. And I think that when we use terms like plotters, and pantsers, I don’t really love those actually, because I think that they are very reductionist and the idea of a pantser when you just think of that as somebody who’s just flying by the seat of their pants and they just sit down and write, I much prefer a term that I think I might’ve heard the first time on Joanna Penn’s podcast, which is a discovery writer. And so I think some people come at a story from a very timelined, linear plot based perspective. It’s the actions that is going to happen throughout the story that are what they hang the story on, in their mind and for other people, like for me, I know my characters and I get to learn my characters very well.

My plotting process, and I’m showing that in air quotes, involves setting the emotional wound for the characters, understanding their positive and negative traits, understanding what jobs they have and what their family structure is and how they fit in their family order, things like that. And then I really just do a very basic series of single sentences.

Maybe one per chapter that I’m going to have, or one per scene that I’m going to have. If I do a detailed plot, I never write the book. It’s just, it’s like you said, it sucks all the fun out of it. And if I know exactly what’s going to happen, why would I bother writing the book? Part of it is for me to enjoy the process and so I think acknowledging you don’t have to use the plotting structure from a beginning to end kind of way. You can retroactively apply what you know about plotting to your story afterwards. And, my husband used to teach workshops on this, which is like reverse engineering your story. So you write it and your first draft is your plot actually that you’ve, that’s your outline, and then you look at it. I don’t think I’ve ever known a theme of something I was writing before I started writing it. I have to write my way through the first draft and then I will realize that: Oh, this theme of family or forgiveness or whatever it is, has popped up in five places in this book or in three different ways and then you identify the theme and then you go back and see if you can amplify that anywhere else.

But it doesn’t always come up front. I think you really do have to sometimes write your way into the story and almost every book I’ve ever written, I have discovered that my characters take things in a direction I wasn’t really expecting.

And if I had forced myself to stick to the plot, it never would have connected into the wider story in the way that it does now and so for me, it’s really about knowing, I know that in a series which characters are the main characters of each of the books. I will plot that beforehand. I will know what their jobs are and what their roles in their families are and I will know where they live and how they fit in. And then I will know where that book sits on the timeline of the larger sets of stories, but I don’t know everything that’s going to happen in that book. So if I had to describe myself with one of those terms, I would probably say I’m a plotser in that I do high-level plotting and then I just dig right in and I follow the emotions and the reactions of the characters, but my background is a psychologist, so that makes sense for me. I understand the world through people, not through events, I’m hopeless at tracking when events happen in the real world, just as much as I am in my stories, I have really elaborate systems and spreadsheets and tracking tools for a reason, it’s because I remember all the things about the characters, but I have a really hard time with events based stuff, but I do have an internalization of story structure.

So I think that’s… when we talk about learning about plotting and things like, Save the Cat or the hero’s journey or the snowflake method. It’s all using a framework to understand story and you can collect pieces of those that work for you, and you can make your own kind of tool, which is what I’ve done over the years with each story that I write, I reflect back when the story is finished and I think, okay, what worked really well in this process?

And then I add that step into my own little list of what I do in what order as I’m developing a story. And I think understanding that there’s no right or wrong way is really important, but just paying attention when you’re writing to what are the parts of the process that cause you to stall out and lose the momentum?

Because once you get in there, like for me, I front-load all of the research and the getting to know my characters and there’s a lot of what looks from the outside, like not doing anything, but really I am figuring out how everything fits together and I’m getting to know the people who are going to drive that story.

And then when I actually sit down to write the pieces all come together quite quickly, I can write very fast once I figured out all the pieces, but the figuring out takes time. And I find if I sit down to write before I have figured out some of those pieces, it’s very counterproductive in that I get frustrated and I get stuck and then, the fun comes out of it and I just abandoned it.

So for me, my writing process is about 80% researching and learning my world and my characters and getting to know my way around so that when I sit down to let the story pour out, I know what they would say or wouldn’t say, I know how they would react when somebody did a certain thing that impacted them.

And I don’t have to think about that. I can just react I’m that far into it. So yeah, I think it’s really, there is no right or wrong. I don’t think it’s that it doesn’t work for you. I think you’ve just worked it into your revision process. Because you do several rounds of revision on each story. And I think that’s really important for people to remember.

There’s no right point in the process to do it. Now, obviously, if you are learning how to sell a book on spec, like if you are pitching to a traditional publisher, an outline of a book and they have agreed to give you money in exchange for writing that book, you probably want to get better at outlining.

But most authors will tell you that they have signed contracts for books that evolved over time and they did not deliver the manuscript that was what they initially talked about, but they will have talked to their agent or their editor throughout that process and made sure that those changes were approved by their publisher before they turned in the final manuscript.

So I think just remembering there’s more than one way to do it “correctly” and there is no actual rights. The best, most effective process is one that gets books out of your head and onto the page. And you can always fix a draft of something, but you can’t fix nothing. It really is just where in the process you’re going to apply those skills.

Michele Amitrani: Yeah and I think there is also something that, for example, Brandon Sanderson says, the epic fantasy author, between the many things, that is basically every single time you listen to a writer or an author who says, this is the way it’s done, you should retake what he’s saying or what she saying as: this is the way it works for me, and that doesn’t mean that it works for you too. So I’ve been actually watching some of his lectures on YouTube, Crystal, and I like the way explains things because right off the bat, he says, I’m going to tell you a number of things. And I want you to think of these things as tools in a toolbox.

I want you to listen to all of these tools, take the one that you think can work for you, apply them to your process. The moment you see their work, toss them aside. I’m not going to cry. And you’re going to do yourself a favor because you’re going to learn what is that it works for you, and that it doesn’t. So true story.

I was talking with an author before Covid, there was a writing festival, and she basically described to me that the way she writes book is like a movie. She can see the beginning scene, the second scene, the intermediate, until they end, she can see them like a plot. And I realized in that moment that she probably had a different way of organizing, how a story works.

And that process is something that she consistently used throughout her career. She wrote like 15, 20 different books. And she said, okay, if I know that I have to deliver that book, the 25th of January, and I know the movie inside my head, the movie of the book inside my head, I can write that book in three weeks and that’s basically going to that book that I was talking about, about the pantser and the plotters Take Off Your Pants. It really depends because in that moment I felt like, I didn’t feel good because I was like, I can’t do that. There must be something wrong in me. I’m not mastering this correctly. I’m probably not going to be able to make it as an author because I can’t do exactly as other people are doing it.

But I think what Crystal said, there is lots of wise words in that because you can’t compare yourself to other people, even in the process, not only in their success, but in the process of the writing. And I’m listening to you Crystal and you’re saying there is a lot of research that you do beforehand, and there is a certain amount of plotting. My process, if I think of it like your standards, it’s a mess compared to you because my process is I just go into the story when I feel like I have a scene, one scene, I don’t know anything else. I have basically no research whatsoever. I am writing a scene and then I see what happens. And then from that scene, usually, or one character, the stories, the sprouts.

But again, hours-wise, I’m bleeding out a lot of them because imagine writing something … can be free riding on a like notebook or a scene on a piece of paper, like something very weak, if you think about that, it’s not, the plot is really a scene, or it’s a character, it’s a dialogue, even less. But that’s the way, for example, I wrote Soul of Stone.

I basically free wrote it. I was okay you have actually seven days to finish a story and you don’t have one. So what I did out of panic, I took my notebook and I basically free wrote a page and a half because that’s what I can write in one 10 minutes. And I add my timer 10 minutes. And then there was a scene of, Medusa that was taking care of a baby.

And I was like, that’s odd, Medusa is supposed to be a killer and she basically doesn’t have a very good charismatic figure in the mythological realm. Or if you think about Medusa you, think that’s not going to go well for me. But I wrote a story around that character in a different light. And all started from that scene and that’s not a short story, even it’s like a novella length.

So that’s basically still to this day, Soul of Stone was my March story, if I’m not mistaken. So months and months, and I’ve been writing other two novellas and almost one full length novel. I didn’t really change a lot of my writing style, but I’m learning a bit more. So one of the things that I’ve learned is that I don’t panic as much.

So for example, in September, I had four days and I didn’t really have anything, so less than the six days from Soul of Stone, I was like, you know what? I think I can do this. I can write something in four days. I can write something in 25 minutes if I really put myself, my mind into it. So I didn’t panic because I’m learning my process a bit better and that just comes from repetition and repetition.

So it’s difficult to explain, but I don’t know if that makes any sense to you, also, we have been talking of plotters and pantser, and not really off, is it planter? Like the hybrid between the two things. I don’t know if I am that, but I do like more of the word discovery writer, which by the way, first time that I’ve heard that was again in one of the Brandon Sanderson lectures, actually.

So discovery writer, I like it because it seems like, okay, you have no idea where you’re going, but it’s cool to hear, discovery writers. That’s basically my 5 cents on the whole thing. And, one thing that I actually wanted to ask you since we’re talking about plotting and writing in general and, NaNoWriMo, it’s like, something of a big deal for writers and authors in general.

I personally, that’s just me, I never did one in the close sense. So like writing a novel in one month, 50,000 words, I’m not even sure if I’m good enough to do that, but I want to know if you did it and if you would suggest doing that to every single person that is listening to us.

Crystal Hunt: I have done it multiple times, but I have never written 50,000 words in the same book before.

I don’t think so. I am what they call a nano rebel, because most of my stories, when I was writing children’s books, I would do nano, but I wrote chapter books. And 20,000 words is a finished book. Or if you’re doing like an early reader book, then 7,000 to 10,000 words is a finished book. So one year I did nano and I wrote three 13th floor stories in one nano chunk.

And so I did write 50,000 words but it didn’t count properly because I was doing them in three different books. And another year I wrote three short stories during that, that added up altogether to about 50,000 words, but it was like, one was 10, one was 21 was 15. and I have done novellas at various years for that as well.

I did a non-fiction book one year, so it’s really, I think the interesting experiment part is just that it’s like having permission from all your other writer, people to just focus for that month. And I think you, the expectation during NaNoWriMo month is that writers are writing. And so there’s no pressure to be on forums or to be doing all this extra stuff.

And a lot of people will arrange their marketing efforts and things around focusing on their writing for that month. And I think that permission is very useful and it’s really interesting to unlock your brain as to what you think is possible or not possible. So I think it’s very useful for everybody to try once just to see what you can do when you focus and when you give yourself permission to just do that one thing for a whole month, that is really quite fascinating to see what happens. Yeah, variably successful, I think in order to be successful, there’s a few things you really need to do to prepare yourself. One is telling your family and friends what you’re doing and really making it clear upfront: this isn’t forever, this is a focused events that lasts for the month of November. I promise I will emerge. There will still be Christmas. It can be overwhelming for folks on the outside of that adventure if your family and friends are not also writers, then that makes it a little bit more challenging, they may not quite understand what’s going on. So in advance of nano, I will often book things with friends for December, so that I have that already on the calendar and they know that things are coming up. I will make sure that I’ve booked a little bit of time to hang out with my husband or to see my daughter during November. You’re not writing all day every day and really just being smart about how I organize the other things that fit into that month. I think also some practical stuff, you can make a batch of something in the slow cooker that you can eat for multiple meals. And that’ll free up a little bit of both time and dishes.

If it’s all done at once. There’s that kind of thing that can help facilitate a little more time in your schedule on a daily basis and that is really good. And then I think if you are just preparing your story a little bit and your brain a little bit to know that can be really helpful.

Although I do have a slight cautionary tale on that front, in that, in 2014, I prepped an entire story. It was called Whistle While you Work and I had everything ready and I sat down and started typing and I wrote Silver Bells, which was completely off the cuff, not planned. I had no intention of doing that.

And I had a real conflicted day at the start where I literally didn’t write anything because I was: but I prepped this whole of the thing and I should be working on that. This is what is ready, but my instincts and my muse was like: no, we’re going to do this thing instead, cause it’s going to be fun.

And I just had to learn to trust myself. And so I think that is really important if you find that you’ve prepped for something, which makes all the logical sense and when you sit down, there’s some other story that’s just like: me, me. I’m ready. Then maybe you just roll with that and trust your instincts and just ride the fun and ride the motivation and have a good time with it and just see what happens.

I know lots of other authors who are friends who have written something that’s totally off genre for them, or really just let themselves play in a different way than they would normally as part of their regular publication schedule. So if you have the freedom for that, it can be a fun way to fall back in love with your writing and put some joy back into it and let it be an adventure and just see what happens. So that is my plan for this year’s nano. I do have a specific story that I need to write first because it’s on the publication schedule for December and it is a key cornerstone of my business plan for the next year, so that book has to get finished first, but it’s novella length. So that leaves me the second half of the month to write whatever I want. So we’ll see what pops up. Something always does in that moment. And how about you, Michele? Are you going to nano this year, or what’s your focus?

Michele Amitrani: I’m considering the option of doing it although I have to see what kind of, mental status I’m going to be in November, is going to be like just 60 days before the end of the Challenge, my 12 by 20 challenge and I feel like I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo for already nine months, not 50,000 words, but probably what I’m going to do a lot is, I want … every single time I was not using my keyboard—That’s something just that I’ve noticed on my writing, but I was using like a note back and notebook and I was just free writing—I don’t know, something different happens. I don’t know if you haven’t tried it Crystal, but it’s I don’t see the words as they are on the paper, I just see the story and I write faster also because I can’t see all the typos and the mistakes that I make when I write in English, which you don’t want to read the first draft of whatever I write in English because it doesn’t make sense. It’s a mesh up between Italian and English, book what I’m trying to say is that I’ll probably use that month in November to do more, free writing than usual on my notebook. That’s why I bought, actually a new one, a big one. And if you can see it from there.

It’s a black one. It’s the third one, and it’s the tickets, the wall. And I didn’t touch it yet. So I’m very excited to use that one because it’s just different the way I write most of the time, bear with me, I am not using the stuff that I’m writing freehand. Okay? Just between the two of us, okay? Don’t tell anybody.

But something that I found is that some of what I think to be my most, interesting, not better work, but interesting for me, for example, Soul of Stone, they were almost entirely, freehand. So I’m just very curious to see when I let my imagination go. They’re probably going to be no plotting or very little plotting.

And again, I feel every single time I write In that way. It’s I’m one of those guys in California in like 200 years ago, whatever it was, they were searching for the gold, that would go in a river, most of it would be mud and earth. And then if they’re lucky, they said small stone of gold and I feel, I feel the same feeling, so you have to go through a lot of crap for finding something that is actually worthy, but I really found that some of the best gems, I produce them when I’m free-writing, at list at this stage. So I’m probably going to use November, both for translating some of my stories from English into Italian, but also to attack that notebook, with as many words as I can, and try to see if I can come up with some of that gold. So that’s basically my plan for NaNoWriMo, this month. And I just wanted to ask you, for me, basically at this point there was no difference, but do you have any difference in the kind of setting even mentally, physically, spiritually, between NaNoWriMo and a normal month? You already spoke about your organization, you are more organized, like you already probably will have a material prepared, but is there anything else that you do except for telling people not to bother you that month, that you prepare yourself a bit better for NaNoWriMo, some suggestion you can give to our listeners?

Crystal Hunt: Yeah, for most professional writers, they’re just like, yeah, nano’s just what we do all the time so it’s not really that different, but I think the difference is an energetic one. It’s that there are hundreds of thousands of writers all around the world focusing at the same time, which is just really cool.

And I think if you… depending on where you are and what the situation is, but, traditionally I would go to a coffee shop and look around and see 50 people writing in November and you don’t see that all the rest of the time, some of them are there, but I think it just… has a whole different sort of feeling of possibility to it, and I think it’s easier to find your tribe. If you are a new writer and you haven’t established yourself in some communities yet, and you don’t really know a lot of people, I think nano is a really good opportunity where you can go on some of the forums and you can find other authors in your area who are writing and you can meet people at all different skill and experience levels who are interested in building a community and I think there’s a lot of opportunity to really work writing into your lifestyle.

So I think the newer the writer you are, the more you probably get out of nano. But even for a lot of experienced writers that I know it is just that global permission, like not a lot of conferences are booked during nano month.

There’s less teaching that happens. So for those of us who are in that world, we have a lot less commitments during November. Like September, October, always just crazy with all the events happening. And so even now with them being online, it’s still, it takes up those hours in your day and you’re mentally preparing workshops instead of writing books.

And so I think there is a seasonal shift there. And we’re going into the busiest book sale time of the year as well, like between American Thanksgiving and mid January when everyone is getting Black Friday deals and all of the folks who get new e-readers for Christmas and then fill up their books.

It’s a really busy, exciting time in the book world. There’s a lot of new releases in the late fall, early Christmas period. So it’s just a fun buzz that gets going on. And it’s nice to feel like you’re part of something that’s bigger than yourself. And so I think for most folks, and for me, that’s definitely something that I, definitely think is worth that bit of effort and worth timing things in the same way as other people do, just to have that extra little energy hit to support you while you plow through a draft of a project or edit or do whatever it is you’ve set as your own goal. I will be the first one to say they: can’t make you follow the rules. All you have to do, choose to participate and then pick a goal that works for you and do that. You’ll be in good company, there’s lots of us rebels out there even have our own organizational groups and things that you can join.

So, don’t feel like you’ll be left out in the cold if you pick your own thing to do. All right, so it is time for the curious jar to make its end of episode appearance as always, I will rifle around until you say, stop.

Excluding your home country, what is the most fascinating place you ever visited?

Michele Amitrani: Stop now.

Crystal Hunt: The red one says: excluding your home country, what is the most fascinating place you ever visited?

Michele Amitrani: That’s interesting. You can go first.

Crystal Hunt: Okay

Michele Amitrani: No pressure.

Crystal Hunt: Okay and it can’t be in Canada. Man, I’ve been to some really cool places in Canada. I think probably the Aran Islands in Ireland, I think are some of the most interesting place to visit just the history and the energy and like the way the…the culture has really been preserved in a cool way in that you can see this mixture of old and new. And, it’s such a small community that there’s a really interesting dynamic, but so much is based on tourism.

It’s like there’s two realities existing simultaneously there. So I think, yeah, the Aran Islands and sort of the West coast of Ireland would be to me, the history of the castles, like all that stuff, the crumbling ruins that are just in people’s back yards and nobody even takes notice of any more, all of that is just really fascinating to me and the I’ve always felt like the countryside was magical in some way. And I find it, unlocks all kinds of interesting stories and my family is from there, so that might be part of it, but, I’ve just always felt a real affinity there. And it’s really interesting, I of course have a large list of places I still want to visit, that are on the list, but they will have to wait until we are able to travel again.

And, Yeah, I guess there’s one other place that I would mention, which is … I can’t for the life of me remember the name of it, but it is a really abandoned old city in the South of France and it was basically an Island that was defensible and gotten mostly destroyed in the crusades and they, It’s just really fascinating countryside and the history of the town.

And again, it’s this tiny little population that still lives there, but there’s a fair amount of tourism. So it’s this weird combination of deserted and full of people, if that makes sense and just the history there and. Yeah, it’s really interesting. So I will dig up the name of the city and put it in the show notes for you, and then you can go check it out on Wikipedia, but, that was also a very spectacular and interesting place to visit.

How about you?

Michele Amitrani: Three years ago now, when I was 30, I decided to give myself a gift, which was a 30 days trip in Southeast Asia. And, I’ve seen some cool places there, completely different from or everything that I’ve seen before. I mean like the, I’m talking about Southeast Asia, so I’m talking about, Thailand, Malaysia, I’m talking about Singapore.

And I was about to say, Singapore was definitely one of the winner. I personally, I really liked the city. I really think it’s a good blend between traditions and when, I mean like traditions, tradition from a bazillion different culture because there’s really everything there, and technology, and it’s everything at least seem to me very well organized, and it seems like a futuristic city at the same time but I’m going to go actually with Japan, which is the country where my wife comes from. And, I just I’d been there for 3 times and I still remember the first couple of weeks I spent there. I was like, this is like landing on a different planet because there was so much that was different and I am interested and I was always interested in Japanese culture, anime and manga, between the many things, it’s not only that, but once you are there and, you are in contact with that culture, it’s really, it seems like a… I don’t know a person from Vulcan meeting a Klingon. It’s really so much differente in the way they think in the way they react. And so for example, so many times there is this, element of the politeness.

People are very polite there, and I will always remember when, there was a day in which my wife and I went to … it’s something simple, but I think it’s a story that’s really, describe this culture in a very beautiful way. So she needed to fix her, glasses, they weren’t fitting very well and there was the owner, which was also the master of the store that was like taking time, and really tried to in doing everything we could to make the experience better for my wife and when he was done with that, I still remember he had solved the problem and the issue, and so that was, if I’m not mistaken in Osaka, he went outside of the store and he basically stood there and bow to us until we were basically going away with the car.

So he made sure that we were basically fine. And I was like, this is not something that would have it happen in either here or even in Canada. And this is just one of many things, but it’s really something that made me realize how these different was that the culture, how difficult was to understand it, but also how …it basically, our word is beautiful because it’s rich of these kind of things. And I think we acknowledge this diversity, if you will, Crystal, we have a Canadian slash Irish and we have a Canadian slash Italian in the podcast, and I think it’s always something that is good to bring up: diversity, we are stronger with that. So I really liked the question of today’s: definitely Japan was one of the most interesting place I’ve being Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto. I’m looking forward to explore way more, when we will be able to do as. And that being said, as always for show notes, links to resources that we mentioned, and for coupons and discounts on all the tools we love, please visit us at the strategicauthorpreneur.com.

Also remember we are relatively new as a podcast, we would really appreciate if you would leave a review of this podcast in whichever platform you’re using to listen to, if you are on YouTube, you can push that like, if you are not subscribed, please subscribe to the YouTube channel. We’re looking forward to meet you again for the next week.

Crystal Hunt: And if you have already left your review, thank you very much, the other way you can support us you may have noticed we are ad-free and currently without corporate sponsors, which means we pay all the costs for the podcast ourselves. So if you are finding them helpful. And you’re in a position where you can contribute a small amount there is a buy us a coffee button on our website, so at strategicauthorpreneur.com, you can click the buy us a coffee button and, contribute a bit towards the hosting of the podcast and the distribution costs and transcription, all that kind of stuff. That would be amazing. Also be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on our next episode because we have a great interview where we’re talking with author Sam Wiebe about crime and detective fiction. So we’re going to get into the gritty side of Vancouver and talk a little bit about that specific genre as well as Sam is a writing instructor too, so he’s got some great tips, even if you’re not into the crime and detective fiction that you will not want to miss out on until then we’ll see you next week and happy writing.

Michele Amitrani: Bye bye, see you.