The Author Alchemist

Trust Your Instincts (033)

What happens when you get in a fix and a story stalls out on you? Or runs away from you? Or forgets to that that left turn at Albuquerque? 
In this episode I talk about the metamorphosis of my in-progress novel, The Bones & Brews Café, which was originally envisioned as a trope-tastic rom-com novella. Turns out it was anything BUT, and because I did not sit down and really look at what I was working with, didn't trust my instincts, and stalled myself for over a year on it. A sordid tale! Come enjoy my misery! And hopefully grab some advice you can use in your own writing life!
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Transcript
Promo Intro:Welcome to the 12th episode of the Author Alchemist podcast. My name is KimBoo York, and today I'm going to be talking about trusting the process, specifically how to deal with your story when it starts to run away from you. I talk about some personal experiences and my kind of perspective on both the good and the bad of when that happens. So thank you for joining me, and let's get to it.
Main intro:I'm KimBoo, the host of The Author Alchemist podcast. I'm bringing my years of experience as both a fanfiction writer and a professionally published author to the problem we all love to hate: the act of writing. You can't improve on something that doesn't exist, which means the most important thing you can do is simply write. Anything! Just write something. I'm here to help you do that.
Podcast:Hi, it's KimBoo, and I am back. I'm recording this on a Thursday, which is kind of new, now that I've got my own schedule and I complete control of my own schedule. This is being recorded in late March, where I'm about the third weekend into being not employed by Florida State University anymore — by choice, which as regular listeners will know all about that story. Won't go into it now. So I've switched up the schedule a little bit, I don't have to give up my Saturday mornings to recording a podcast. But I do have to give up my Thursday mornings to recording a podcast. Here we are! 
As I said in the intro, today's topic is about trusting the process. And there's a lot of different levels to that trusting the process is trusting yourself, right? So there is the fact of trusting how your brain works or trusting how you approach writing, trusting the skills that you have — you could go into impostor syndrome with this, but I'm not here to do any of that. I'm here to talk about trusting the process when your story goes off the rails, and I'm going to use a personal example of a story I'm currently working on. So if you want a little sneak peek about what might be coming up in the publishing world of KimBoo York, or specifically Cooper West, as this happens to be under that name, under that pseudonym, then stay tuned. So here we go. 
And how am I starting this off? I'm talking about the way a story can get away with you. And this happens, not just a Pantsers, but it does...or discovery writers, I think it's the new term...It also does happen to planners or outliners. People who spend a lot of time trying to figure out what their character motivations are, and what happens after they cross that bridge and come through the new door to the castle, whatever. You get my point. They deal with it too. And I know this because I hear this from writers all the time, when we're talking about our stories, a writer who has carefully outlined everything will sit there and go, "Oh, my character just did X. And I don't know why it wasn't in the plan. And now I don't know what to do gonna have to shuffle things around!" 
The approach might be different between discovery writers and planners, but in a lot of ways, we're dealing with the same issue, which is learning to trust our creativity to not be wrong. And that's a hard one, even for Pantsers. Because we still have ideas about where we wanted the story to go, at least for me as a pantser. I know that's true. I know, there are probably some pantsers out there who have just a completely blank slate on how they want to do it. But even then, I think they can get surprised, and they can end up writing themselves into a hole, which I've certainly done plenty of times as a pantser. And you're sitting there and you're in that hole, and you're like what now? If you're a planner, you could go back to your outline and start figuring out, well does this change things remarkably? Does this have a lasting effect on the plot? Is this just a little by play that gives me some character development? For Pantsers it might just be railroading through it and going to the next scene, or skipping three scenes and trying to find out where they end up and then going back and filling in the holes. Or it could be, as I often do, which is just kind of let it percolate for a while. Just let it sit there trying to figure things out. And sometimes that percolation takes a few days, and sometimes it takes a few months. And it has actually taken years in some cases, but those I think are outliers. Usually within a few months, at the most, I'll figure out what the problem is. And that's the story we're going to talk about today as kind of case review of the problem, which is my current book, Bones and Brews. As I describe it, it's a diesel punk urban fantasy romance novel, male/male romance. But it was originally, way back in 2021? 2020? 2020! Yeah, because it was, it was during the summer of the lockdown. Here in Florida, we only had one and it was that summer, that spring and summer. I started writing a personal challenge to myself a novella rom-com based on the trope fake dating. I figured, let me see if I can just hit that mark. 
Readers, I'm here to tell you, I failed to hit that mark. I was 25,000 words into it when I realized this is not a rom-com trope-tastic novella, this is much more than that. That derailed me pretty hard. I remember sitting back from the story and thinking, I don't know what I'm writing, actually. My characters aren't being very revealing, either. What are they doing? They're not helping me at all. It's their job to help me, what's going on? I sat on it for a long time. A few months, not not years, but a few months. And I realized, Oh, I get it! I'm doing lots of world building. I've got some subplots going on. Yeah, this is an epic fantasy novel. I mean, sure, diesel punk, fantasy novel urban magic, but it's still epic style, right? I'm like, okay, this is going to be at least 100,000 words, it's going to be possibly twice that. And there's going to be a lot of political intrigue, and there's going to be a lot of mystery involved and all these other things. And I started lining up the domino's, you might say. Obviously, as a pantser, I don't create outlines, but I started thinking about these characters a little bit more grandly, shall we say. And that actually worked, I got about another 10 to 15,000 words written with that goal in mind. 
And I hit the scene...when you get one of the book gets published, I think if you've listened to this episode, you're gonna laugh because this scene has actually become the final scene in the book, and I'll get to why in a second. But when I was writing this one scene, where it was a garden party, the start of the social season, it was supposed to be an introduction of some other characters. And it just kept turning into kind of like a grand reveal type of scene and I just could not whittle it down, I could not make it less important, is what I couldn't do. This is a very important scene, and I did not know why. It wasn't supposed to be important scene when I started writing it. So again, I hit that wall. 
And I think it is a good, you know, metaphor to use here, talking about these kinds of things as a wall. Because walls aren't deadends, right? Walls, just stop things like if there's a wall in the middle of the trail, or there's a wall around the house, you can't walk through the wall, which is not true, you can walk through the wall, you might have to break the wall apart to do it. But you can. Or you can go around the wall, if you're in a house, you can go, you know, through the doorway to the living room, you can go around, walk down the wall until you get to the next field over where the wall ends, or changes into something you can climb over. Or you can look for a door. You can look for gate, however you're imagining this wall in your head, whichever one works. So there's multiple approaches to take to it. I was really trying to take a sledgehammer to this wall. I do know that there are authors for whom when they hit walls like this, that works. And honestly those authors do generally tend to be planners/outliners. They know where they want to go, they know where they're going. They just need to get there. They take a sledgehammer to whatever wall is blocking them, fight their way through it and get back on the trail that they have already defined as the route that they're taking. That wasn't working for me, I didn't have a route to get back to. It was like I'm breaking the wall down and on the other side is this big ocean. I'm just like What? What? Huh? Cue another long break in writing this story now, I didn't stop working on this story, my friend Kim McShane, who I often do plot development with. We spent many a Sunday brunch over mimosas, or actually KIMosas, which is the Mimosa without the orange juice, because neither one of us likes orange juice. So it's just champagne. So we spent many a brunch over KIMosas talking about the plot to this story and the characters. What I could do, to figure out what was going on. We ran through a whole series of different plots and ideas and events and other characters. Nothing was gelling for me. It's not that those ideas weren't good, but they weren't for this particular story.
A year passes at this point, more than a year, but a year from the time I thought it was an epic fantasy novel. Moving on. Still talking about it with people who I'm sure were very sick of hearing about it. They're just like, yeah, it's not working, why don't you just let it go? I couldn't let it go. I love the characters. Do you have that? Do you have, I'm sure you do, where you have a story that's not working, but you love the characters so much. You just don't want to give up on them. I love the worldbuilding. I loved everything that I was doing with it except what I was doing with it, which was obviously not what I was supposed to be doing with it. 
I wasn't trusting the process of the story. I was really caught up with the idea that I need to know what's happening. As a pantser, that can be a bad thing to do if you start getting too granular with it. And of course, every writer is different, so I don't want to sound like that's true for every pantser out there. But I think a lot of times with people who are writing into a story and letting in a role as it happens if they start focusing on the little things, as well as the big things, then you might as well just sit down and write an outline because you're not actually trusting the story anymore. I think maybe this logic goes for outliners in that you need to trust your outline. I don't know, I'm not an outliner. But I'll ask my friend Gina, Gina Hogan Edwards whom I do the podcast Around the Writers Table, I will include a link to that in the show notes for this one because it's a new podcast, we just started it. It's a lot of fun. Not like this one at all. It's not just me rambling on.
I finally put down the story or rather put down my expectations for the story, and stopped trying to force. I stopped breaking down the wall more and more and more and just seeing more and more ocean ahead of me. And if we want to kind of visuallly I kind of think of it as I instead of trying to go through the wall over the wall, I just sat down, put my back to the wall. And look where I came from. I wish I could give you the inspiration for the insight I had on this story that made me realize what was really going on. I'm pretty sure it was a YouTube video. I don't know if it was... Yeah, I can't say but I do watch a lot of YouTube videos about writing different, lectures, different YouTubers talking about planning and development. And for some reason, for some reason, I was watching something about cozy mysteries. And if you imagine me sitting there at that wall with my back to it facing where I'd come from, and I look back over the horizon of my story, imagine me jumping up and going, Eureka! Because I realized everything I had set up, every element of the story was perfect for a cozy mystery series. And I'm seriousl, every element was there the sleuth main character — the quirky sleuth main character, the funky funny sidekick, the junior sleuths who act as comedic relief a little but also can act as ways to get to different parts of other characters' stories or backgrounds that our sleuth wouldn't have access to write. The love interest, who is a themselves an important person, who is looking... is not really an investigator, I'm getting into world building there, but let's just pretend like it's an investigator who works with our amateur sleuth to solve these crimes. I did not have anybody murdered as of yet when I had this eureka moment, but it was very easy to murder somebody because I had the setup completely in place for why a murder would be taking place at this point in the story. It was all there, it was all there, it had always been there. I was too busy trying to break through the wall and not fall into the ocean to step back and really look at what my brain had come up with, what my brain was telling me. My brain, the independent organ, telling me to write.
So yes, Bones and Brews is now the first book in a cozy mystery series, I think it's probably going to be at least three, possibly five stories. There's bigger love story arc, going into it. There's a lot of politics in the background that our main sleuth, whose name happens to be Abby, he is trying to avoid getting involved in those politics. There's a lot of world building and backstory. As I said, this is diesel punk, urban fantasy set in a completely speculative fantasy world not set in our world. So it's just just a lot of fun. And I hope people really love the characters as much as I do now that I'm not as frustrated with them anymore. 
So maybe that metaphor might help you — instead of trying to break through the wall or even trying to find a door or maybe sit down, put your back to the wall, look at where you come from, figure out maybe what you missed, that your story is trying to tell you that it wants to be, whether you're at the outlining stage, or as a pantser, discovery writer, the stage where you're actually putting words into the page, and making things happen. It's worth the time when you hit these humps, walls, whatever you want to call them, to stop fighting for a little bit. And that could be a day, it could be a month, it could be much longer. Unfortunately, that's just sometimes how it has to go. But if you could do that, if you could take that time, maybe watch some YouTube videos about writing, watch series that you haven't watched in a long time that you know you love, you never know where that inspiration is going to come from. And that's why you have to trust the process, even when it feels like you're banging your head against that wall. It's there for a reason. That's part of the process. And perhaps I haven't made it clear, but if you don't hit those walls, sometimes you're not going to have the insights and the eureka moments that will improve your story. It's all part of the process as much as we hate it. It's kind of like exercising, you know, it's like if you want to get stronger, you do have to exercise even if you hate it, that's just what you have to do. So sometimes you have to work really hard at the exercise. And sometimes you have to take a rest day and let your muscles recover. Yeah, you could do the analogy every which way you want. Very true for writing as well. 
As always, my goal is to convince you that maybe you're not always wrong about everything. And maybe things aren't hopeless. Maybe just give yourself a break. Allow for the fact that this is what needs to happen right now. And follow it through until the wall isn't there anymore, whether it's because it's a gate, or you did break through it with a sledgehammer, or you just found a way around it, or you backtracked like I did, and found a completely different road going in a different direction! Might be the solution to all your problems.
So thanks for joining me here today. I appreciate you taking the time to listen to me ramble on. Always glad to have listeners. If you want to be updated about new podcasts that are going out, please visit my website, author Alchemist and sign up for my newsletter. It doesn't go out very often but it does go occasionally. I send updates to people about new podcasts, although this is available on most podcasting platforms so you can also subscribe there. I have the course Out from Fanfic use what you know to write what you love available. That is live. I've got a couple of ideas go in and brewing for courses I've talked about before  that's ongoing. Also the freebie "Write to Market or Not" if you are a fanfiction writer who is going into writing original fiction and concerned about how to write to market, then that's the freebie for you! 16 pages of free advice and insight that might help you. So go to my website and sign up for that as well. Again, thank you for listening, but you can't drag it out any longer my friends: it is now time to get to writing. Have a good day. Thanks for listening to me ramble on about writing here on the Author Alchemist Podcast.
Outro:I'm KimBoo York and I hope this episode has helped clear away the cobwebs from your inspiration. For more podcasts and other tools including self paced online courses, please visit my website at www.authoralchemist.com (no dashes )or email me at KimBoo@authoralchemist.com. I'd love to read your questions and feedback. Now, time to get some writing done!
 

Why Are You Outlining? (032)

A deep look at outlining from the perspective of whether it is actually helping you or not, and why it is helping you (if it is!).
NOW WITH TRANSCRIPTS! Thanks to otter.ai I am getting easy, fast, quality transcripts for these podcasts now. whew!
Links discussed in this episode:
10 Different Outlining Techniques
Brian Sanderson's BYU 2020 class lectures
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Transcript
Promo Intro:It's KimBoo! Welcome to the 11th episode of the Author Alchemist podcast, season two, where today we're going to talk about outlining. Specifically, we're going to be talking about the type of outlining that works for you, that keeps writing fresh and interesting, and helps motivate you, as opposed to weighing you down with the burden of doing something the way other people tell you should do it. Let's get to it.
Main Intro:I'm KimBoo, the host of the Author Alchemist podcast. I'm bringing my years of experience as both a fanfiction writer and a professionally published author to the problem we all love to hate: the act of writing. You can't improve on something that doesn't exist, which means the most important thing you could do is simply write. Anything, just write something. I'm here to help you do that. 
Podcast:So yeah, good morning! It is morning, as I am recording this beautiful gray morning. That's really the last of the Florida winter here, we're into mid March, and so temperatures are creeping back up. Which means that summer is right around the corner, and I try not to think about that too much. But despite the fact that the humidity is also creeping back up, it's still really nice out. So I have all my windows and doors open, letting the air run through my house. I know a lot of people in the rest of the country live in the USA, but they open their windows when spring comes. Because they're warming up, they're wanting, you know this, the warm spring breezes to come through their house and chase out the chill. Whereas for me, I usually do the opposite. I started opening up my windows and doors in October there abouts, and keep opening them up until March or April hits, and then everything shuts, closes, and we keep the air conditioning running as much as possible without going bankrupt for the bill. So that's where I am right now, enjoying the day as much as I can. 
Today we're going to be talking about outlining. And as usual, I'm not going to focus on the craft of it too much. I will talk about different styles of outlining a little bit later. But one of the reasons I brought this up as a topic is because you hear so many pieces of advice and so many different experts telling you how the perfect way to outline a story should happen. And usually I'm pretty dismissive of all that because I figure once you've been writing for a while, and if you're a fanfiction writer you've been writing for a while, then you pretty much know how things work for you. But unfortunately, what tends to happen whether people are previously writing fanfiction, or have not previously written anything, so they get into original writing, and suddenly they feel like they don't know anything. And they go looking at the books and they go looking through the blogs and YouTube videos and they stumble across something that sounds like it might work for them or that an expert they trust tells them they should do it. And then they try it out and maybe it doesn't work. 
So here I want to talk about outlining as a motivational tool, because I think that is the key that's really missing. We talk a lot about in the community, in the writing community, the using templates, certainly Scrivener has templates, plotr has templates, world anvil, and camp ire. They all have built in templates that you can just plug and play for using, and there's save the cat for novel writing as well as script writing. And there is the hero's journey, which if you're in the fantasy and science fiction genres, is used a lot. So there's lots of different ways to do it. 
I was listening recently to Brandon Sanderson's 2020 lectures, well it was a course he taught at Brigham Young University. Great series, I'll post the link to the playlist, it's on YouTube for you to watch, he really does a fantastic job. The man is prolific and he's good. Those two things that don't always go together, but with him they do. And I think a lot of people, if you aren't in the science fiction fantasy community, you might know him, at least from the recent Netflix adaptation of Wheel of Time. He was the person who finished that series after the original author, Robert Jordan died, and the series was finished. He was hired to finish it by the family estate of Robert Jordan. And I believe he's a producer or executive, somehow he's involved with the Netflix show. So a lot of people know him for that. It's really a good series. And recently, he was talking about different ways of outlining a story. He gave a couple that he uses personally. But I think the important thing that he brought up, which is just, it struck me because you don't hear it too often, is that he said, "You have to outline in the way your brain works." 
And I really think that is crucial. I'm saying this as a pantser. I don't do outlines in the traditional sense, I don't sit down and figure out the first scene and figure out the next scene, and then do the little, you know, one, point A, B, C, D, and I don't, I don't do that. I instead tend to prefer to work with very loose beats. Or you can say, acts, but either way, you're like this is the, you know, character introduction act, or arc or beat and gives me a lot of freedom and say, Okay, well, I need to get from this stage to this stage. But as a pantser, and this is true for a lot of pantsers or discovery writers, I think they're being called these days, you know, because panters are, I guess, is unprofessional sounding, but whatever. Pantsers, discoverers, it's all the same. When we outline something too much, our brain does this weird thing where we feel like we've already told the story, so we don't want to write it anymore. 
The first time that happened to me, I spent so much time on this outline for this absolutely epic fantasy novel that I was not qualified to write. At the time this was in the 90s. So it was like in my late 20s, nowhere near experienced enough or had put in the time to write something as epic as I was envisioning, and I wrote this three page outline, single space, very detailed. I, you know, parts were being pulled out as it was. It was a mess. But by the time I got through to the end, I was like, "All right, now I'm gonna sit down and write this thing out!" and I just couldn't. I was done. 
Because wasn't this what I was supposed to do? Isn't this how you're supposed to write? And of course back then there wasn't a YouTube video of Brandon Sanderson telling you that you don't have to do that. I was in the woods. I was going through, back then it was Borders bookstores, prowling the writing section looking for advice on how to do this and and realizing, you know what, my brain does not work this way. Wasn't until years later that I fully embraced the idea that my brain works a certain way and that I need to follow that. I think it really hit home for me with one of my most popular fanfiction ever — is a Clint/Coulson Marvel Comics Universe fanfic called Bureaucratic Nightmare. A little bit of an AU, won't go into details, won't bore you with that. But it was literally written by the seat of my pants, I did not know at the point that I got to the end of a chapter what was gonna happen in the next chapter at all. I think it's pretty obvious when I go back and read it now, to me anyway, it's like, yeah, the pacing is not great. But it's one of my most popular fanfics I've ever written. People who don't even like that pairing, that ship as we call it, still read that story and love it and leave comments for it. And it really, that was the culmination, I think for me, embracing the fact that my brain does work in a storytelling way. And that if I trust myself a little bit, but then you know, go back and clean up afterwards, I can have a really damn good story. And that is how I've been writing. 
That said, for instance, as I'm looking at this podcast right now, I actually have an outline of the podcast beats that I want to hit open in front of me. Outlining isn't a bad thing in in doing a podcast or doing blogs. I use outlining pretty extensively. But for fiction, I can't do it.
The important thing, always, always to remember is to pay attention to how your brain works. There are lots of options for outlining story arcs that you can use: the three act structure, the five act structure, the seven beats structure, the save the cat, as I mentioned before, you know, I just there's there's lots. In fact, there was one I really liked, I found on Tumblr years and years ago. And it listed 10 different methods for outlining or pseudo outlining, as you might want to call it. There was the snowflake method, where you start with a one sentence description of the novel, there was the reverse method, which I really liked it, it's like write a description or actually write the chapter, that is your story. Like actually sit down and write the denouement of your story, the characters, what they've been through, what they're talking about, if it was a mystery, talking about the clues that they saw, or if it was a science fiction, epic adventure, the recovering from the trials and tribulations they went through, and then work backwards from that. I've actually done that a couple of times in my fanfiction writing. And it's just a really good resource. 
And a reminder, that however you choose to outline, and I even hate the word outline, I wish there was a structure, however you choose to structure your pre-writing tools, and we're gonna have to find a better term than this. But however you choose to do that, it needs to be in a way that engages you with the story. Don't be me in 1998, writing this massive outline, not even thinking about what I was really doing, just doing it because the books I read, the magazines I read, were telling me that this was the correct way to do it. And that's what I did. And I wasn't paying attention. And then the story was done, over, whoops, sorry, no can do, I was like...what? Don't...don't be me. Do as I say, don't do as I do, but actually do as I do now, don't do as I did then, I guess I would be a more accurate description of that. Try them out, try different ones on for size, take the same story, possibly, and try different ways of approaching the structure of it. 
See, maybe you do beats, well, maybe you really do like full outlining, what you really need is to have each piece broken out specifically. Maybe you just want to start with a group of words and kind of like a poetry slam, just split those words into a certain structure, and then go from there. 
I'll link the blog post or the Tumblr post that I talked about earlier in the show notes. And along with the link to the playlist for Brandon Sanderson's series of lectures, or course, whatever... you want to call...I need  more coffee, y'all it's too. It's a beautiful morning, but it's a little still a little too early. I'm just... my brain is just now starting to come awake. 
Find the way that engages you. That's the point I'm trying to make here. Because motivation and inspiration are really magical, trippy, weird things in our brains. And I think we can tap into them at will if we train ourselves to do so. But we can very easily squash them and choke them off inadvertently by doing things that aren't designed to help our creativity or assist us in expanding our creativity. And as you know, I am less worried about the craft of writing, which there's lots of guides out there for you to do for check. There's lots of guides out there for you to check all your, you know, grammar and structure and character development issues. I'm concerned about you actually writing the thing.
If you're a true true pantser or discoverer, Dean Wesley Smith is one, Stephen King has talked about how he's embraced that as well, where you just sit down and do like I did on my fanfic Bureaucratic Nightmare and just write from one to the other to the other until you've got a full story then you go back and fix it. Or if you're somewhere in between, where you... those are the called the gardener's I believe, they're they're more like people who either have a general rough outline or a beat sheet that they plugged in some some scenes, and then they kind of garden in between them. I used to call it bridging as a technique because I would write a late scene or a final scene or a big showdown, and then I would write the introduction and then I would bridge scenes between them to create a full story. Like, how did this scene get to this other scene? You know, how do we get from a picnic in the park to people, you know, hanging off a cliff face for their lives. I was bridging it by writing the scenes in between, knowing where I had to go, in a way was kind of sort of like outlining, I guess, you know. But it worked for me, because it still allowed me a lot of the creativity and the freedom for my mind to just reel off the scenes, which is what I personally need.
Try out different methods not to find the one that's correct, but to find the one that works for you, and the find the one that inspires you, that gives you energy, makes you excited about writing this story, not the one that's just the way you're supposed to do it. 
Okay, I think I've hit that theme a lot over the head for this podcast, and so I'm going to wrap it up for today. It's not too long of a one, but hopefully it helped you or maybe expanded your perspective on outlining. Like I said, I'll include those links in the shownotes. Meantime, I would love it. If you checked out my course that's for sale, if you're a fan fiction writer who has been struggling to write your own original fiction, then the course is designed for you. It's "Out from Fanfiction, use what you know to write what you love." That's right here on my website. So check it out. Also, if you're just wondering if what you want to write as original fiction is marketable at all, I have a freebie for you! I'm going to delete that as well. It's called "Write to market...or not?" and it's about looking at your fan fiction and what you love to write about and what you love to read to see if you already have marketable skills, which I suspect you do. You're just reading a lot of those how to write to market blog posts and don't do that, that's corrupting influence. I mean, yeah, writing to market is very important if you just want to become an incredibly prolific and big selling author. But you know, if you're just wondering if that story you love in your heart is marketable? Yeah, then this is the this is the freebie for you. It'll help you look at that in analyze and see if maybe, yeah, might be a little bit more marketable than you thought, and in what ways so really hope you check that out if that's something that interests you. 
Meantime, I'm wrapping this up. spend enough time talking your ear off about writing and motivation. And now guess what that means. It's time for you and for me to get to write and talk to you next week. 
Outro:Thanks for listening to me ramble on about writing here on the other Alchemist Podcast. I'm KimBoo York and I hope this episode has helped clear away the cobwebs from your inspiration. For more podcasts and other tools including self paced online courses, please visit my website at www.authoralchemist.com (no dashes) or email me at KimBoo@authoralchemist.com. I'd love to read your questions and feedback. Now, time to get some writing done.

Trust Your Obsessions (031)

(FYI: I recorded this back in January, and it was originally supposed to be the 7th episode, which is what I say in the opening, but nope! It's really truly the 10th episode of season 2!)
Inspired by part of a graduation ceremony speech Neil Gaiman gave wayyyyy back in 1997, this episodes starts from there and spirals out into talking about the value of your obsessions to you as a writer, not just as "things that you can talk about in a story" but as things that inspire you on a daily basis to practice your creativity.
“Go where your obsessions take you. Write the things you must. Draw the things you must. Your obsessions may not always take you to commercial places, or apparently commercial places. But trust them.” ~ N.G.
Along the way I mention a couple of books I was reading, which you can find out more about here:
Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey of Quantum Gravity
The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe(Bonus! Co-author David M. Perry's twitter account)
NOTE: This are affiliate links, so buying from Bookshop.org helps not only independent booksellers but also me! And we could all use the help, yeah?
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TRANSCRIPT
The Author Alchemist PodcastEpisode 10, Season 2Title: Trust Your Obsessions
Intro:I'm KimBoo, the host of The Author, alchemist podcast, I'm bringing my years of experience as both a fan fiction writer and a professionally published author to the problem, we all love to hate the act of writing. You can't improve on something that doesn't exist. Which means the most important thing you could do is simply write anything. Just write something. I'm here to help you do that. Good morning. 
Podcast: It is Saturday, and I'm recording the podcast like a dutiful podcaster. on schedule. Will this get posted on Monday? That's an entirely different story. And I'll keep you posted. For sure. You know that I am absolutely devoted to y'all because I had to turn off the heater to record this podcast because my mic was picking up the noise of the heater running in the background. So I had to turn it off. And it's very cold, I think it's just under 40 degrees, despite the fact that it's 10:30am. And for me, as a Floridian that's pretty much Arctic temperature. So heater is off, but I am wearing a hoodie. I've, of course fully dressed, got a blanket wrapped around my legs to keep my feet warm. I have socks on. So I'm about as bundled up as I can be and actually not have my teeth chattering while I tried to record this. So moving on, this is episode seven, of the author, alchemist. And today we're talking about trusting your obsessions. This podcast idea was inspired by actually the confluence of two different things. One was an old tumblr post that I had saved, that was quoting an old, even older speech by Neil Gaiman. What is it 1997 or so about trusting obsessions in the value of going down research rabbit holes. And I'll get to that in a sec. But the other part of the inspiration of this was me on Twitter. Of course I I'm Mutual's or follow a lot of writers who talk about writing, that's what we do. And there always seems to be a theme, when writers talk about writing, of how we're not writing, how we are not actually doing the thing, how we are doing something else, how we're tweeting, instead of writing, how we're writing a book, instead of writing, how we are learning some new obscure trade or skill, and we're learning how to cobble shoes, instead of writing. Alright, that's all fair. We do need to write at some point. But I think sometimes we tend to get away from the fact that writing is energy intensive, brain intensive, and we can't do it 24 hours a day, as much as honestly, I would love to. We can't, brains just don't work that way. Even writers with incredibly high output on a daily basis, two to 10,000 words a day -- And it's possible to do -- to need breaks scheduled into their life, whether it's a day off, or they write long and hard for three months, and then take another full month off. Breaks need to happen. Distractions need to happen. And we spend all this time and energy focusing on things we're doing instead of writing. And it just made me think of this pullout from Neil Gaiman speech because he was saying that even though you don't always use your obsessions, sometimes they can become really valuable, and turn into something that is useful, usable, enriching, for your writing. So that's why I wanted to talk about this. The quote that really grabbed me from his speech is this part of it: "Go where your obsessions take, you write the things, you must draw the things you must. Your obsessions may not always take you to commercial places, or apparently commercial places, but trust them." If you are doing something that is not writing, please allow yourself the grace and the freedom to do that thing. Not long ago, I was seem to a book that I was really enjoying. And as I was walking the dog, I listen to audiobooks as I walk the dog, just because it's a way to keep myself from being incredibly bored, while Keeley stops to smell yet another bush along the way. So listen to audiobooks. And interestingly, I only listen to nonfiction audiobooks. I've tried to listen to fiction, audio books, I really just can't get into it. I have listened to some podcasts, not audio books that are produced stories that can be really good. And I've enjoyed those because those are really harking back to the old radio shows, right or even further back, you know, to storytelling around the fire in the the early stages of humanity. When all stories were oral traditions, though, in that sense, I do enjoy listening to fictional stories, but for some reason, audio books, fiction, audio books, I've never been able to grab onto that is something I enjoy. Nonfiction though, gosh, I've read a lot of nonfiction and a broad spectrum. It's not like I just listened to memoirs, or I just listened to science textbooks or biology books or reviews of archaeology or something like that kind of all over the place. I'll grab whatever interests me, something that sounds really good, has a good narrator. You know, I've read about Occupy, I've read about Noah, several books about the actual historical analysis of what Noah's Flood might have been. One of my favorite ones was about quantum gravity, beautiful, beautiful book by an Italian scientist. And I will actually leave the link to that one in the show notes. Because it's just a mesmerizing story I know about quantum gravity, which I can't even claim to be able to explain what quantum gravity is, even after listening to this book, but it's worth a read. And I was thinking, you know, I listen to all these nonfiction, I should listen to some books about writing. You know, there's some books out there that should be really useful to me, as a writer about craft, or as, you know, self publisher, which I primarily am at this point, marketing, branding, even the tradesy part of it, like formatting books and, and distribution channels, things like that. And so of course, I did that. And I was so bored. I was so bored, y'all, I was just like, you know, even if this is useful information, I am not ingesting it, I'm not enjoying it. I'm like listening in to five minute increments, and then getting impatient and switching back to one of my nonfiction books. And if you're curious, my most recent nonfiction book is the bright ages. A new history of medieval Europe by David Perry  and Matthew Gabriel. I follow David and Perry on Twitter and have for a long time, really great guy to follow. Very interesting book like this isn't a deep scholarly, you know, PhD thesis book. It is written for a mass audience mass consumption, and some of it I already knew, but it's really just very enjoyable to, like, pull the covers back and really look at the real history of medieval Europe, as opposed to a lot of the lies and mythology and ridiculousness that's built up around it over the years. So anyway, I'm gonna plug that one a little bit. Back to my point, though, then in trying to push myself to do something productive. I was actually making things worse, because I was inhibiting my creativity. One of the things that I've realized as I read this little post, and I'll link to it in the show notes, from the excerpt from Neil Gaiman speech, and thinking about my obsessions, and the things that I love to explore, is that I was feeling guilty because I couldn't figure out how it applied to my work my job, both as a writer and as somebody who's writing or creating online courses for writers. I feel guilty about something that brings me joy. And you know, that is no way to live. That is no way to live as writers. I'm certainly not opposed to doing research and study of craft. I think it's very important, obviously. But I think we do have a tendency to get swamped by our experts. that that's what we need to be doing all the time. I need to be writing all the time, I need to be studying about writing all the time, I need to read books about writing, I need to listen to podcasts about writing, I need to only talk about writing. And it's just antithetical to the creative impulse to try to corral it 24/7. And to try to only focus on this one thing that you feel is a requirement for you to be a better writer. You know, if you listen to my podcast, at least, I hope you know. But now that my focus is on getting you to write. There are a lot of other resources out there for helping you to write better. And I certainly do want you to write better, because I want to read what you're writing. And, you know, you need to be at a point where you feel comfortable putting it out into the world, either as a blog post, or, you know, an archive of our own. If it's fanfiction, or self publishing, or sending it to an agent, writing better is crucial to all of those goals. But the first thing you need to do in order to write better is to write ironically, sometimes, when we get into these obsessions, they can also serve as a distraction from writing. And I admit that too, sometimes I would rather listen to an audio book all day, then sit down and write sort of a different issue than what I'm focusing on in this podcast. But I think it's important to realize that maybe that instinct to procrastinate that instinct to, you know, not right might be born out of trying to corral yourself too hard trying to whip yourself into shape, so to speak, to the point where you're exhausted and you just can't do it. Trust your obsessions, follow your obsessions, but also understand why they're there. They're there as part of your creative urge. And it can be anything I include knitting, and crochet and the fabric arts, woodworking, anything doing with your hands cooking, if you want to explore a lot of different recipes, baking anything where you're using different parts of your brain, different parts of your experience, and engaging with something that is giving you that kind of learning Hi, oh, my gosh, you know, I'm doing this thing and I'm, and I'm succeeding at it, maybe I'm not where I want to be. But well, this cake looks great. Or, you know, this knitted cap is really neat, I can't wait to give it to my significant other or one of my family members or my friend. All of that is energy, all of that is juice for your creative impulse. And going back to what Neil Gaiman's pointed out, it can also be something that you pull into the creative work that you're doing. It might be a character who loves to cook. And so you love to cook. And you're like, Well, you know, I don't, I don't want to make this character into a self insert type of well, you don't, you don't have to, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about creating richness and depth to your characters. Somebody who learns knitting as a way to perhaps understand math, you know, to me, knitting is math made large, real, you know, concrete, three dimensional. And so I don't understand it at all. But I could see where somebody who does knit a lot, or sews or something like that can pull their understanding of that craft, into a story into the idea of knitting a story or character who's knitting their life together. I mean, they could go on there. There's a lot of shallow metaphors that we can pull into this discussion from there. And I'm trying to be a little deeper than that. But my point is, trust your obsessions. allow them time to breathe. Focus on what is giving you joy, and inspire you creatively. Because you can't write all the time. And you can't study writing all the time. Because if you try to do that, it's actually going to be counterproductive to writing the stories you want to write. Am I encouraging you to procrastinate on writing? Maybe a little bit like sometimes you do need a break as I was saying earlier. What I'm really encouraging you to do, though is to trust yourself. You can't put words on the page until you trust yourself to be able to put the words on the page. Vicious Circle, but a breakable one. That's what I want you to think about. Next time you sit down to do a puzzle, or read a romance novel, or bake a cake, or garden Outback is not necessarily think about, well, how can I use this in a story, but think about how this is creating much more complex tapestry in your life, that can be fuel for your creativity, which of course means fuel for writing. I hope I gave you a little bit of insight today into trusting yourself trusting your obsessions, the joys of writing, the importance of actually getting words written. That's, that's always the goal, right? So if so, thank you for listening. Please subscribe if you haven't. If you can give me some nice votes up on the different platforms of Spotify, you can give a thumbs up or something to nowadays, and of course, Apple, you can leave a review. So we'd really love it. If you could do something like that. I am trying to make this business a success. And keep having time to write my own stories. Anyway, coming up soon out from fanfiction might even be live by the time this podcast gets posted. And then after that when I'm working on whip into shape secrets of an alpha reader, that's about halfway done. And so that'll probably go up in February. And then after that I thought of a new course I'm really excited about it, the percolator method, which is going to be advice for Pantsers on how to organize their writing life in their writing goals. A lot of times we get told as pantser. So if you get stuck, just create an outline and like, you know, that's the whole, that's the whole reason I'm a pantser is because I don't want to create an outline. So I'm going to be working on that I'm not really solid on how that course is going to go. Might be really short one, but I'm excited about it. So stay with me, subscribe and all that sort of good stuff. And I will talk to you next week. Thanks for stopping by now. Go get you some writing done. 
Outro:Thanks for listening to me ramble on about writing here on their author Alchemist Podcast. I'm KimBoo York and I hope this episode has helped clear away the cobwebs from your inspiration. For more podcasts and other tools including self paced online courses, please visit my website at w w w dot author alchemist.com no dashes or email me at KimBoo KIMB o at other alchemist.com I'd love to read your questions and feedback. Now it's time to get some writing done.

1 Million Words (030)

1 Million Words! Have you written that many? Do you know, or are you guessing?
Thanks to the stats page for my first fandom account at AO3, I knew pretty close to the day when I went over the 1 million word mark officially. However, I'm fairly certain I had hit that mark years ago, given how many stories I have written since I was a kid. My first "book" was a Jack London rip-off titled Timber Trails and Wolf Wails (I was super proud of that title, dontchaknow) and was 40 single-spaced type written pages...I think I was nine or ten? Or so?
Unsurprisingly, most authors I know have similar tales about the stories they wrote when they were young! But then we get older and start believing that we need to write better before we can write more, which is a complete reversal of reality. In this podcast I talk about how setting any kind of quantitative goal (hours, word counts, timed sprints...whatever!) is the secret to honing your craft and finding your voice.
The parable of the "quantity vs. quality" pottery experiment/class is in the book Art & Fear by David Bayles.
Transcript:
The Author Alchemist PodcastEpisode 9, Season 2Title: 1 Million Words
Main Intro:I'm KimBoo, the host of The Author Alchemist podcast, I'm bringing my years of experience as both a fan fiction writer and a professionally published author to the problem, we all love to hate the act of writing, you can't improve on something that doesn't exist. Which means the most important thing you could do is simply write anything. Just write something. I'm here to help you do that. 
Podcast: And yes, this is KimBoo York, wide awake early in the morning. Actually, it's about 10 o'clock in the morning. So it's not that early, but it is for me. I am welcoming you back again to the Author Alchemist podcast. 
For regular listeners, I know there must be a few of you out there, this is going to be something that I've kind of alluded to in previous episodes. It's an idea I have about possibly forming a membership group down the road, that's later for 2022. The genesis of this and if you've read the title, you know that you write 1 million words as in the title so you know where we're going with this. 
The conversation always comes up over and over again, on book-twitter, on writer-twitter, on Tumblr, in, you know, writing groups I've been a part of: how much do you need to write? The answer, of course, is always "you need to write every day." That's been a popular answer for as long as I've been a writer. If you've read the Artist's Way, then you know that the daily morning pages are a critical component of that philosophy, that approach, to creativity for writing. And if you don't know, if you aren't familiar with them, it's simply the idea that you write first thing when you get up and first thing. That don't mean after you've gotten up and had your coffee and walked the dog and used the bathroom or brushed your teeth, it means literally sitting up when your alarm goes off, grabbing a notebook and a pen or a pencil and writing three pages in your journal or your notebook. I think the assumption too, is that it's a full size notebook. It's not like one of those teeny tiny, you know, A-5 little notebooks. That's actual three pages of something like a legal pad. 
Over and over again, as a writer, you hear the refrain: write every day, write every day. I'm here today on this podcast, which you may not be listening to anytime soon but hopefully, you are rolling along with me as we go through all of these podcasts, I'm here to say that your goal should be write 1 million words. I prefer this to the "write every day" goal. And they may work together as well. Although they do work well, in tandem, after all, you can write every day to get to 1 million words. 
But not everybody can write every day. And I mean that in a very factual way. There are people who are dealing with mental health issues, or they're dealing with chronic physical body health issues. They're dealing with disability. They're dealing with having young children in the house, they're dealing with moving, they're dealing with elderly parents, they're dealing with, you know, life in general. It is a privilege to be able to write every day. And so we have to look at the practice of writing sometimes through the lens of what would work best for as many people as possible. 
And truly, yes, writing every day will get you to your goal. It will make you a better writer, de facto, because you are practicing it every day. That is true for any art. But again, if you can't practice every day, if your brain doesn't work that way, if your life doesn't work that way, what is the goal you can aim for? And I think writing 1 million words is a great one. 
I built this off of my own experiences. I'm not just pulling this number out of a hat. And I think I probably wrote 1 million words long before I had the math to support the fact that I had actually written 1 million words. After all, I've been writing stories since the time I could start actually reading, which I guess is about six years old. As we've gone over before in the past, I was a late bloomer! So I know I wrote a lot prior to actually keeping track of how many words I was writing. And in fact, to be honest with you, I wasn't keeping track of how many words I was writing. The Archive of Our Own (AO3) was doing that for me. I was astounded the day I discovered the statistics page on my original AO3 account. I know some people are kind of obsessed with that page, and numbers and things like that. I'm not. I checked it a few times as I went along, like, "Oh, I've written 200,000 words, oh, I've written 500,000 words." And then one day I checked, and I'd written a little bit over 1 million words. 
And when I had done that, at the point where I tipped over into 1 million words, was also roughly about the time I was starting to publish, or have published at the time through a publisher, my own novels. I do not think that was a coincidence. I've talked before how going into fanfiction, or re-entering the fanfiction world, like coming like coming back or re-entering into orbit or something like that, really set me on the path of becoming a writer, as a person, not just somebody who writes sometimes, which I really was before that even though writing was an important part of my identity, and I'd written fanfiction, and written original stories. That was all just kind of on the side and reasons I didn't pursue it professionally. 
After I spent all that time writing all those stories, I realized I had a voice. I had come into my own writing, with my own style and my own practice. And my own perspective. I really do believe that writing 1 million words was what got me there. Does it really matter at which point precisely in time, I hit the 1 million word mark? As I said, before I hit the 1 million word mark — definitely long before those numbers showed up on my AO3  profile statistics page — but knowing at that point, that I'd written that many words, gave me the confidence. 
And trust in my own writing that had been absent before then. It's like, I wrote 1 million words, I can write another 1 million words, I can do this. And people will read my stories and love them — which is important to me, may or may not be your goal. But that was important to me. 
An alternative metric, of course, is the 10,000 hours metric, which was really popular a few years ago when it was first, you know, revealed into the world. As you know, you become a "master" of something after you have 10,000 hours of practice. It's been debunked a little bit over time, I think. Honestly it's still a pretty good rule of thumb, you can't do something for 10,000 hours and be bad at it. Unless you're working really hard to be bad at it, you're going to learn something over the course of time. 
There's also the experiment that was done that a lot of people talk about, "the quality versus the quantity", where a researcher gave people a task to create clay pots, and they broke it into groups where one was going to be judged on quality, how good the final clay pot was. And the one other group was judged on quantity, not just how many clay pots they made, but actual weight. I thought that was interesting when I read about it, that what he used as the metric was how many pounds of clay did your clay pots weigh. That was the quantity not just the number, but the weight. So very, very, you know, precise measurements of what is the quantity involved here. And in the end, it was decided, it was seen, I guess judged by people who do pottery, that the people who did the quantity, who were just making pots one after another to try to use up as much clay as possible, actually ended up making better pots, better designs, better stability, just better clay pots overall than the ones who spent a lot of time in the theory and the design and trying to make the one perfect pot. 
So yes, there are lots of ways to quantify your progress. By quality, by quantity, by hours, by how many words you write, by whether you're writing every day. Any of those will do. I'm not saying that my 1 million words goal is the perfect solution, but I think for writers, it is easy to quantify, especially if you're using tools, digital tools, such as Google Drive, or Scrivener or AO3, posting your work there. There are ways to count those words and figure out how many you've written. 
And of course, it's going to take a while. I did the math that I think is like, if you do write every day, and you write 500 words a day, it'll take five and a half years to get to 1 million words. If you write 1000 words a day, of course, it will take two and a half years, give or take to get to 1 million words. And that can be a little defeating. But I think the goal here is to remember, kind of like 10,000 hours, it's not necessarily that you're trying to hit that particular mark, but you're aiming in that particular direction, of whether you write every day 500 or 1000 words, or whether you write once a week, and you write 500 or 10,000 words in that setting. The point is that you're moving forward to the goal, not because it is an end goal in and of itself. But the act of going there is what's going to improve your writing, give you more confidence in yourself, and allow you to expand your creativity, to explore a bunch of new things that you had never even contemplated, when you first sat down to write your first fanfic, or your first original short story, or your first original poem. I don't know, whatever gets you off, my friend. 
That's what you need to be doing. Whatever you decide to do as a goal, whether it's to write every day, or to aim for 1 million words, I don't want you to think of it as your only goal for that reason, like it's easy to get really wrapped up in hitting the numbers. And in that sense, just the idea of writing every day is kind of low key, except for when it isn't, and it's really stressful. Even I don't write every day. And I try to, for me writing every day works really well. But again, it's a little ephemeral, and it's not as concrete of a goal have something to aim for, that I feel like will make a difference. So of course now at this point, I'm working on my next 2 million words, whether it's actually made me a better writer or not, I'll leave for others to decide. But for me personally, I think it has made the writing process easier and it has (subjectively of course) I think being by writing better, it's allowed me to move on to more complex stories that I want to tell. And to me that's important. 
As I said at the start, this is something that I eventually want to turn into a group project or a membership project, the 1 million words club where you know, we come together as a community and aim for writing 1 million words, however you want to track that. Kind of a more low key ongoing thing than NaNoWriMo which is 50,000 words over the course of one month. Which is obviously very doable. I think that comes out to a little bit over 1300 words a day, which once you get in the groove is actually not hard to write that much. But to write that much every day is a challenge,  I'm not gonna say it isn't. So with the idea of creating a community where our goal is to write 1 million words together and I'd even be willing to start from scratch and and just you know, jump in like everybody else with the number zero or possibly you can count your fanfiction numbers to that...and I could possibly, that's an interesting thought because like I could...I have my old AO3 account which is under Cooper west but my new AO3, which is KimBoo York, and I haven't been anywhere near that much for that account. A few "Nirvana in Fire" fanfic and things like that, but nothing, nothing quite as intense and long range as my original fanfic fiction archive which goes back to I think 2007 at this point, truly some humiliatingly embarrassing fanfic on that account. And, but, you know, it's up there. I wrote it. It got me where I am today, so I can't be too upset about it. Right. Think about it. 
As I close out this podcast, just please think about what kind of goals you are setting for yourself, if they really fit the way you live and the way your brain works. If writing every day is a challenge for you, and not accomplishing that, is defeating you, and making you feel like you're not a writer and feeling like you're, you're just, you're not, you're not living up to your potential and feeling shame for not meeting that one goal, it's time to consider changing the goal. If writing every day isn't going to work for you, think of the 10,000 hours metric. If that doesn't work for you think of the 1 million words metric. Go back to the experiment I was talking about earlier, I tried to find a link for that for the show notes. But about the pottery, where quantity versus quality, sometimes the quantity, oftentimes the quantity will get you to the quality faster than just focusing on writing the one perfect sentence. And then going on to writing the next perfect sentence. 
I have friends who have spent decades writing a single book because they are looking for the perfect words. Maybe that's what you want to do, too. I'm not saying that that's the wrong way to go about it. It's working for them. Again, think about your own personal goals. Think about what you can do, what you're willing to commit to, and what makes you feel good about writing. You can't write if you coming from a place of shame, and anger and frustration. I mean, you could write a journal entry about that about how angry and frustrated you are and how that makes you feel ashamed. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about writing fictional stories, and using your creative energies in a positive way. So let's keep the focus on that for now. Do some journaling and talk to your therapist about all the other stuff. That's not what I'm here for. But certainly, I'm here to help you pull out of that and get on to writing 1 million words. 
So that's it for today's episode. Thanks for listening along. Trying to kick these out a little bit more regularly. I say that every single time don't I? It's terrible. By the time this goes live, though, the course that I've been working on and working on and working on working on out from fanfiction will be available for purchase. That is love child of mine, I've been working on it, but the idea came to me years ago, but I've actually been working on putting it together. All last fall. It's the first online course I've ever done. So if you do take it, please be a little forgiving. I'm trying to figure out how to do all of it. But it is pretty intense. It is for people who are having difficulty with the writing aspect of jumping from fanfiction to original fiction. It's not a marketing thing. It's not telling you how to self publish. It's about the writing and how to make writing original fiction as much fun and as engaging and as rewarding as writing fanfiction because writing original fiction can get frustrating really quickly. And you don't have those automatic rewards centers such as immediate reader feedback that will help you get over the humps and fanfiction. So if that's where you're at with your original writing, I hope you check out the course. I'll be having some specials on it. And if you like it, let me know. If it's not for you then tell me what kind of course you are looking for. Again, I'm not necessarily the craft maven, I am the motivation maven. So let me know what you're looking for. Maybe we can get a course together for you and help you out. So take care be well and you know, go get some writing done. 
Outro:Thanks for listening to me ramble on about writing here on their Author Alchemist Podcast. I'm KimBoo York and I hope this episode has helped clear away the cobwebs from your inspiration. For more podcasts and other tools including self paced online courses, please visit my website at www.authoralchemist.com or email me at KimBoo@authoralchemist.com I'd love to read your questions and feedback. Now it's time to get some writing done. 

The Hidden Life of Prompts (027)

Prompts often get a bad rep in writing circles, considered as nothing more than teaching tools at best. In the fanfiction community, though, prompts are often tools of inspiration, motivation, and community building.
In this episode, I dive into the value of prompts not just as "tools" but as little sparks of creativity! The discussion ranges from the inherent value of prompts to the different ways to use them.
Places to find prompts:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/
https://thinkwritten.com/365-creative-writing-prompts/
https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/500-writing-prompts-to-help-beat-writers-doubt/
https://self-publishingschool.com/writing-prompts/
https://writing-prompt-s.tumblr.com

Writer, Know Thyself (026)

This episode discusses the importance of self-awareness and vulnerability for writers. I share my experiences giving up on my dreams of publication in the 1990s due to a perceived lack of interest from agent and publishers, and how I later found joy in writing through fanfiction, which helped my embrace my unique stories. I use these experience to help show writers how to invest in self-reflection to understand their vulnerabilities, which can strengthen their writing, and to pursue stories they truly love rather than rigidly following industry standards.
Know what you love to read and write, and write what you want to read!

Negativity is Bad, Actually (025)

"If you want to be a Real Writer you need to toughen up!" ...that's what we are told, anyway. But do we? Do we really? I argue that no, that's not what we need to do, and in fact, "toughening up" makes us worse off as writers and as people. We're a sensitive bunch, and toughing it out when faced with harsh criticism won't make us better — it'll only make us bitter. 
I discuss why vulnerability and empathy are so important for our craft, and how walking away from online fights and bad reviews is often the healthiest choice. I also touch on when criticism can be useful, like from trusted editors and beta readers who want to improve our work, not tear us down. Overall, my message is simple: don't internalize negativity. Focus on the writing, and on surrounding yourself with supportive readers and fellow authors!

Fighting Insecurity, Developing Self-Confidence (024)

In this episode, I discuss fighting insecurity by building self-confidence and a growth mindset. I explain that mastering skills alone don't lead to self-trust! We must take chances, fail, and keep trying new things because true confidence comes from challenging ourselves, not just from success.
I share my own struggles, and the goals I set in order to keep improving. Focusing on the process of writing every day, meeting goals, and pushing through setbacks can help build the resilience to overcome fear. While skills can be learned, developing faith in oneself requires consistent effort over time!

Write what you WANT to write! (023)

Why aren't you writing what you love to write? Is it insecurity? Fear that no one will read it? A belief that you need to "write to market"? In this episode KimBoo talks you through the hurdles you put in your own way so you can sit down and write what the stories you want to tell!

Who are you writing for? (022)

The story behind the story of my oft-used quip, "Write what you love to read!" I read a LOT of things but I don't necessarily want to write them; on the other hand, the stories I NEED to write are definitely filling the void of stories I want to read that don't exist (yet). How about you!?