New Episode - How do you sell audiobook rights? You asked, Pamela Cook answers.
Episode notes
Join Pamela Cook as she navigates the final stages of editing her current manuscript, OUT OF THE ASHES, shares her best tips for crafting a strong manuscript and answers reader questions.
Writing is hard, but growth and learning can make it an enriching experience. Pam shares insights on how to stay motivated and positive, even when facing challenges.
Pam also delves into the world of publishing, selling audiobook rights, and finding inspiration in other creative outlets. Whether you've been writing for years or just picked up a pen, you'll find encouragement and practical advice in this episode.
Episode Chapters
(0:00:05) - Editing Tips for Creating a Strong Manuscript
(0:11:27) - Techniques for Generating Writing Ideas
(0:23:05) - Importance of Continuing to Grow and Learn in Writing
(0:35:24) - Recommendations for Writing Craft Books
Transcript
This week is something a little different, although I have done it before, and this is a solo episode where I am answering listener questions on their writing and on writing in general. So that's coming up in this episode and I'm going to get through some of the questions that I wasn't able to get through in the last solo episode earlier in the year, and I also have a couple of additions to throw into the mix for that.
Stay tuned if you'd like to hear my answer to some of the listener questions on writing craft. Before we get to that, a little writing update from me. I am in the very last stages of doing the final tweaks to my current manuscript, which is OUT OF THE ASHES (that is a follow-on book to BLACKWATTLE LAKE - which I am now turning into a series). There are going to be three books in the BLACKWATTLE LAKE Series. These are all coming out on audio. BLACKWATTLE LAKE–the revised anniversary edition–is already out. I've already talked on the podcast about the process of going through and updating that a little bit to get it into line with my current writing style, which is a bit more deep point of view than it used to be.
And I've been working on OUT OF THE ASHES, this second book, probably really for the last year. But as you'll know if you're a regular listener to the podcast, I did lose my mum earlier this year and it has been a really topsy-turvy year for me. So getting that finished has been a real marathon and I'm very happy to say I'm now in the final stages where I'll be sending that off on Friday to my publisher at Bolinda Audio and that will be coming out on audio sometime in the new year and I'll keep you posted about that.
So actually at the stage where it's already had numerous revisions and I'm really going back and making sure that I have got all the word repetitions, that the timeline is right and just doing those final tweaks. So a couple of writing tips or things that I have found have worked for me during this edit. The first, of course, was doing that dreaded find and replace thing where we have word repetitions and we need to really cut down on some of those repeated words and phrases.
Before I did this last review of the manuscript, I actually went through and what I'd done was when I realised, of course, that this was going to be coming up because that's part of the editing process for all of us when we get to this final stage is cutting out those repetitions and I thought, as I went through it the previous time, I thought I'm going to actually make a list of any words or phrases that I think I repeat or that I know are a bit of a crutch for me. We all have those repeated words and phrases that we use, and also the same with similes, because I've gone a little bit simile while lately I think it's after reading Emily Henry and loving the way that she just saw so many great similes in there, so I've let my hair down, if you like, on that and really pushed that a little bit further with this book, and I've really enjoyed that aspect actually of really finding the right simile and the simile or metaphor that comes from the character's voice, so it sounds like something the character would say or think.
What I did was and here, if you'll see this, if you're actually watching this on video I did list, so I ended up with 13 pages that looked like this, which were just basically a chapter heading, bullet points under each chapter heading, and then I copied and pasted words or phrases or even sentences that I thought I think I've got something similar elsewhere in the manuscript put that into that document and then went through the laborious process of actually going back to chapter one.
I did all this in Word. I've exported at this point from Scrivener and am doing this in Word and so then I just basically typed into the little search with the magnifying glass up in the top right hand corner of the search. In the manuscript, for instance, I might have typed in heart. Now there were a lot of heart variations there, so it could be half hearted, heartache, broken hearted, beating, heart shaped. So I typed heart as the kind of base word into the finder thing and it, brought up in the manuscript, highlighted all of those variations.
So I just went through, basically, and then it really forces you to focus on whether the word is the right word for the sentence, rather than thinking I have to replace every single one. It really is a way of getting you to focus in on each example of that word or phrase, thinking do I need it? Cutting it if it is the absolute best way of saying whatever it is you want to say there, or varying it, changing it, mixing it if you think no, there's a better way to say that there. And, of course, what I did with some of the ones that I used a lot more and you'll see again on that page.
There's a lot of scribbles on these pages that I printed out, some of the ones that I used a lot more, or some of those words that we tend to use a lot, maybe like gaze. So it's a little bit like said. Some of them become invisible. But you don't want that kind of constant repetition where a reader thinks this is getting a bit boring. It's a bit of a cue to the reader, a signal that this writer can't really come up with a better description and it just isn't giving you writing the tightness and the strength that it needs.
That was a long process. It took me quite a few days to get through that, but I have to say that now, reading this final version, it is a lot stronger, a lot tighter and I'm not having to, at this very final stage, go through and weed out all those word repetitions and those phrase repetitions, even though that did take me quite a while. I highly recommend that cut and paste process where you know, at one of your revisions you go through, find the words you think you've used a lot, highlight them, paste them into a separate document and then use that document to go through and do the culling. So I'm now in the next stage where I'm doing that final read through and I'm really happy with how the manuscript's gone.
Actually, it's been so great to revisit Eve's story, to take her to the next stage of her journey, and she was one of those characters at the end of BLACKWATTLE LAKE, because that was my first published book. She was one of those characters who I really felt had there was more to her story. There was more to tell. Hence, 10 years later, 11 years later, I'm actually continuing her story and there will be a third book coming out next year as well, currently untitled, which will finish that trilogy of Eve's story of BLACKWATTLE LAKE. So really, that's me at the moment.
That is really taking up all my time also doing little bits and pieces of promotion for my current release, which is an anthology that I am part of with Alyssa Callan, Penelope Janu, Lily Malone and Stella Quinn - A COUNTRY VET CHRISTMAS and that has actually the first print run of. That has sold out, so we're over the moon about that, and it's all now been reprinted. So it is available at Big W, Target and Kmart in Australia, as well as independent bookstores, and you can also get it as an e-book. If anybody overseas would like to grab a copy of that, we'd like to recommend it to an overseas friend or family member. It's a great collection of fun stories set in the country with either romance or romantic elements. My own story, A Christmas to Remember, has a romantic element, but it is set on the South Coast in a bushfire setting, so there's a lot of drama and, yeah, and a character development there for my main character, darcy Horton, who is a vet who returns to the town where she grew up. And, in good news, we're also doing another one of those next year, to also to be still titled, but we'll keep you posted on that. I'll be.
Turn Up the Tension Writing Course Update
Actually, when I finish the editing on OUT OF THE ASHES, I'm actually going to be starting another novella. So other things that I have in the pipeline on the writing related stage, my current session of the Turn Up the Tension online course is in its final weeks.
We're up to week five, so it's another couple of weeks after this to go. I will be running that again in February, so look out on social media for enrollment dates for that. I'm really happy with how the course is going. People that are doing it are loving it and giving me great feedback and, as I've mentioned before on the podcast, it's my signature course. It's a combination of lots and lots of things I've learned over the years about writing all put together into this online course, turn Up the Tension, which also includes weekly Zoom meetings, feedback and being part of a group of writers all trying to improve their craft.
So watch out for that coming up in February and I'm also in about to start planning a retreat for next year and I have said the last couple of years that I was gonna do a retreat but because the family matters and things going on, life being busy, I haven't been able to do that.
Pamela is organising a writing retreat
But I'm definitely going to be organising a retreat for some time next year. If you're interested in that. It's probably gonna be in New South Wales somewhere. I have tossed around the Fiji idea as well. But if you're a listener and you're interested in that, it'd be great if you could drop me an email, because I'd like to get expressions of interest on the types of retreats that you would like to do, the sorts of things you wanna cover and maybe places that would suit. Obviously I can't please everyone and it's gonna have to come down to where I can organise and cost and all that sort of thing. But if you're a listener and you would love to be find out more about a retreat, please email me at W4Wpodcast@gmail.com or Pamela@PamelaCook.com.au and let me know that you're interested and just give me a little bit of a vibe for what sort of retreat you would love to do and what sort of help you'd like with your writing. That's all happening in the next couple of months. The planning for that is anyway.
Let's get on to today's episode, which is the Ask Pam Anything About Writing questions. And one of the questions that came up in the list earlier in the year was I'm gonna try and get through these so I'm not gonna ramble too much for each question, hopefully.
What do you do when the ideas just aren't flowing?
Now this is quite apt for me, because many writers have lots and lots of ideas and they just can't wait to get to the next one. They've got a massive list of ideas for books. That doesn't happen to me. I'm the one idea kind of girl. I have one idea I work on, think about that, I write that and then generally at some point during the writing of that manuscript, another idea might come up. Sometimes it doesn't. I have been thinking about this a bit lately because I'm thinking about what projects I wanna work on for next year and I have got a couple on the back burner that I haven't yet gotten to.
But I think there's a whole lot of things we can do. I think that it's important to really give ourselves suffice time to create in other ways than writing. So whether that's through drawing. It could be walking and daydreaming in the bush. It could be listening to music. I think music and listening for me. I love country music and they're full of stories. So listening to country music for me is a great way of developing ideas or thinking about character, coming up with a character. So another great resource, which is one that I absolutely love and use nearly every day when I'm writing, is the www.onestopforwriters.com resource. These are the people who brought us THE EMOTION THESAURUS, which I know a lot of writers out there use, but you may not know. They also have this website where there are a lot of other resources and they do have a character builder I think they call it on there where you can go through and it gives you options for so many different things.
When you come up with a starting point for your character in terms of how old the person is, then you can develop things like their occupation, what's their wound, what's that thing that happened to them earlier in their life that is still reverberating for them. Maybe it's given them this kind of lie that they believe about themselves. What is their flaw? So there's all these things on there positive and negative traits, these lists and lists of things. So it's giving you a little bit of a formula for creating a character. But what I generally find is that just by looking at those things and immersing myself in really just thinking about the character, by doing that, it does trigger ideas. For me, that, I would say, would be a great way to start if you are stuck and you're not sure where to go with an idea, or this kind of leads into another question that's in the list, which is what comes first, plot or character?
For me it's always character, and generally I think that the plot comes out of the character's problem. So if you can create a character who has got some kind of wound from their past that they're trying to deal with, it could be something super dramatic that has had a major psychological impact on them. It doesn't have to be that heavy. It's up to you to decide how far you wanna go with the true mistakes but and then give them another problem that they currently have to deal with which is really triggered off by that inciting incident in the story. You've already got some things happening because you have to have this internal and external conflict and you really need to have a backstory that you can at least draw on, even if you're not including it in the story. I really highly recommend that character builder.
On One Stop for Writers, I say giving yourself time to think, daydream, create. Just recently actually reading Holly Ringland's book and talking to Holly on the podcast and Holly's book, THE HOUSE THAT JOY BUILT, which is the pleasure and power of giving ourselves permission to create and this has come up a few times with various people, including Kelly Rimmer when I've interviewed Kelly is the importance of allowing ourselves to play and be creative and just to have fun and to do things other than just be stuck in front of a computer and trying to zone in on that.
One thing is to really allow ourselves to do other things to walk, to sing, to go to cafes, to people watch, to spend time in the outdoors, which is a really important way for me of getting ideas. Poetry is another great way of tapping into ideas and themes and emotions and images. Pinterest is another really great resource. Just to browse through some photos on Pinterest. So if you think I want to set it around an old house, go into Pinterest type in Spooky Old House or Gothic houses or country houses, whatever kind of vibe you want and just look at a whole series of images.
Watching movies can be a great way of triggering new ideas for you. It doesn't mean that you're copying or plagiarising or anything, of course, but just you might think, oh yeah, I could do a story like that, or one thing that you watch in the movie or the TV show could trigger an idea for you. So I think when the ideas aren't flowing, sometimes it's good to take a step back and to do some of those other things, but other times, when the ideas aren't flowing, it's because we really don't want to sit down and make ourselves do the writing, because of that fear factor that we've talked about so many times on the podcast. So doing some actually sitting down and just doing a little character description or a little character profile, writing something outside of your genre, perhaps writing a little short story, doing a brainstorm with pen and paper or pencils and paper or textures Just allow yourself to be creative and always keep a list of ideas as ideas do come to you. Keep a list somewhere. I tend to keep it in my phone, because that's generally what I have on me, but either on a notebook or on your computer or on your diary.
Keep a list of possible ideas for stories and anything that keeps recurring for you or you keep thinking about. You know that's something that is drawing your attention and that is the one to go with. So I hope that helps for things that you can do when the ideas just aren't flowing. Another great idea and I have talked about this recently on the podcast is talking through any kernels of ideas that you have with a writing friend or even just a partner or a friend, just talking through, hey, what do you think of this idea, or something like that. But talking and brainstorming out loud as well as on paper can be really helpful. So I've covered the plot or characters.
How do I stop adding more words when I'm editing?
First question this is an editing question: how do I stop adding more words when I'm editing? This is from Kate. Kate was one of my students at the Australian Writers’ Centre. Shout out to Kate Hamill if you're listening, and I'm really happy that Kate has continued on from her course your novel at the Writers’ Centre and is just going gangbusters with her writing. How do I stop adding more words when I'm editing? I think when you are in the early stages of editing, adding more words is great After you've done that first draft and let it sit, hopefully for a while.
Come back to it, go back and read it, get a general idea of what is happening, what you think needs to change, any structural issues that you have, maybe move things around. Then do your next run through with you where you're basically adding and taking away. Because what you're doing in that process is you might be adding description, you might be adding dialogue, you might be adding kind of more emotion to the story. So adding words to the page is part of that early revision process. As you go through and you really want to have a few runs through with your editing, when you get to the final stages and I can talk about this quite easily at the moment because I am in the very, very final stage of revision, not after having sent it to the editor, but before sending it to the editor you have to say to yourself okay, enough, I've got to draw a line, say you've done four, five, six revisions, whatever, whatever it is that works for you. There's no magic formula in terms of how many revisions. Some people do 20, 30, some people do three or four.
But when you get to that stage that I'm at now, where you're not far off sending it, you've got to really give yourself a talking to and you've just got to say okay, pam, it is what it is. You've done everything you can to this manuscript. You could work on this for years and it would probably still never be as perfect as you would like it to be. But you have to draw a, put a line under it and say this is how this manuscript is now. It's as good as I can get it for now and I don't have any more time to work on it. I've got other things I need to get on to.
The editor is waiting on it, and I think that is the point at which you have to say to yourself okay, stop with the additions. That doesn't mean that you might not change a word or change a phrase, or cut out a sentence, or even add one or two sentences here and there, but when it comes to adding whole scenes, whole reams of description, you've just got to stop yourself. Hopefully you've, by that point, got it to the stage where it really is as good as it's going to be for now. As I said, we can work on things forever and they're still never going to be right, but you've got to have a finishing line. You're running a race. There is a finish line and you can keep running after that if you want, but no one's going to really take any notice because that story has come to an end and that writing process has come to an end.
Hopefully you've learnt something through the writing process for that particular manuscript that you can then take into your next book and step up to the next level in some way in the next story that you're writing. But really I think it's just accepting that the early stages of revision go for your life, with the additions and the deletions and the changes. But in those last two definitely in the last one just give yourself a talking to and say sorry, you're not allowed to do that. That time has gone.
It might help you to come up with a process for yourself. It's very hard because for me it's been different with each book because you're at a different stage in your life, different things are happening, each story tells itself differently. But if you can come up with a process for yourself that says OK, first read through, I don't write anything, I just make some notes on the side. Second, read through, I'm looking at the big picture, the structure, I'm moving scenes around, I'm adding scenes or chapters if I need them.
Third read through I'm consolidating character. I'm looking at dialogue and emotion and point of view. Next read through I'm really focusing on description and making sure that's right. Then you might get to this kind of fifth or sixth revision and start to say, okay, enough with all that. Now I'm just tightening, I'm taking out words I don't need, I'm getting rid of repetitions and I'm really pulling it all in Last read through hardly anything. So if you can come up with a process for yourself that you think, okay, if I stick to this process, then I know that in those final stages I'm not really allowed to add anything new and hopefully that will work. Let me know how that goes, Kate, or let me know how it's going for you currently, because I know you sent in this question some time ago and I'd love to hear back from you and other listeners on how the revision process and that editing process works for you.
How do you get through your darkest times as a writer when there just doesn't seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel?
Okay, another question that came from Georgia, and once again Georgia. I'm really sorry that this has taken me so long to get to, but the question was along the lines of how do you get through your darkest times as a writer when there just doesn't seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel. I have to say I've been there. I have been there and many writers that I know have been there. I've been at the point in my career where I have thought I just don't think I can do this anymore. What's the point? It's got to do with rejections, the possibility that what you're writing will never see the light of day in terms of being in the hands of a reader Horrible fear that grips us that we are just writing rubbish. And who are we to even be putting words on a page in the hope that somebody might read them? A lot of the time I know in my personal circumstances, this has come as a result of rejections from publishers after being traditionally published and then having a book rejected many times over, and that has happened a few years ago. It's happened in the last 12 months.
The thing is for me that I have to allow myself to feel that and experience that emotion, and it's not nice. You have to allow yourself to have the tears, to do the wallowing, but at some point you have to then sit down and say okay, and this is what's always worked for me. If I stop now, what has it all been for? What are all the years of learning and writing and growing? Because I know that my writing has helped me. I've grown as a writer and that writing has helped me grow as a person. If I stop that now and if I just say no, I'm sick of this, I'm not putting up with this rejection anymore, I'm not taking it, I can't do it anymore, what's it all been for? I'm someone that likes to continually grow and learn and, I guess, not to get too heavy. But I guess for me it's about becoming the best person that I can be and for me, part of that is becoming the best writer that I can be. So I've had to separate myself and my writing to some extent from the publishing process.
So if you can look at your writing craft and your writing journey as one track that might divert off into a publication path, but you still keep following that writing and growth and learning path and taking from that what you can, that's going to feed your soul, connect you with other writers, connect you with readers, push you to learn and to grow and develop as a person. That is the path, that is the most important, that's the path that we want to stay on and if we have a little sidetrack or a bigger sidetrack, and for some people they continue off on that tangent or run in parallel to that road where they are being published. And that's fantastic and it's amazing. But there are downsides to being published too. There is that constant threat lurking in the background that at any point your publisher could drop you, that at any point your book sales could tank.
So having that path run parallel to this really important path on writing that is about learning and growing and feeding your soul and connecting to other people who are doing the same thing, that's the one that is sustaining us. That is the one that is going to keep us going and that's the one that, even when we go off on these other tangents and whether they're successful or ultimately not so successful so I just keep coming back and following that same path and for me, the people that I've met over the years, the things that I've learned, the emotions that I've tapped in myself and then worked at getting onto the page, they're the things that are important.
Yeah, I think that's probably all I can say about that. It's not actually all I can say about that. I could ramble on about this for hours. But that helps Georgia and hopefully that helps anybody else out there listening who is maybe at a point where they just think what's the point? The point is learning, growing, evolving, improving, meeting and connecting. That's the point. I'm going to leave you with that.
How do you sell your audiobook rights?
I had a question, also from Mary Lou, and I know Mary Lou and I have discussed this separately but because it was quite a while ago that you asked Mary Lou, but about audio books, regular listeners may know that I have an audio book deal with Bolinda, an Australian audiobook publisher, who bought my backlist which I got the audio rights back from Hachette for, and also contracted me to write two new books, the first of which is OUT OF THE ASHES.
So that deal actually came about because I did get the audio rights back separately to my other rights for ebook and print and they were just sitting there. I'm a huge audiobook listener and I was talking to my agent and said do you think that we could maybe try and sell this backlist and maybe see if anybody's interested?
So she reached out to both Bolinda and Wave Sound, who are another Australian publisher. They're the ones that I'm familiar with. Of course there's Audible and there are definitely others, but I was really lucky that I was just so happy that Belinda came back and said they really wanted the backlist. And then when I mentioned I am writing another two books in that BLACKWATTLE LAKE series, turning it into a series, they said yes, please. I was really happy about that and really lucky.
I've had three books come out so far in audio. So ALL WE DREAM, CROSS MY HEART and BLACKWATTLE LAKE. CLOSE TO HOME, which was my third published print book, is coming out soon and then OUT OF THE ASHES and then, following on from that, later next year will be the final book in the BLACKWATER LAKE series. Two of those are going to be audio first, really, which is interesting.
But audiobooks are the fastest selling segment of the market. They have continued to be for the last kind of year or two and I think if there is anybody out there sitting on audio rights it would be really interesting for you to maybe reach out to, particularly if you're in Australia Wave Sound or Belinda and just see if there's a possibility.
You can organise your own audio books through companies like Findaway Voices and of course, you can also hire individual narrators. Many actors are now working as narrators on audio books and I do actually get to choose who the narrator is. They send me usually three samples of the actors reading from the actual book that they're going to record. And, funnily enough, with the last book that I had to choose for, CLOSE TO HOME, the without Me realising, I actually chose the same narrator as I had chosen for CROSS MY HEART, Alicia Bennett, so obviously somebody that his voice I really could have sort of was drawn to and warmed to. Yeah, I would highly recommend that anybody out there who has got audio book rights does investigate that. It's another source of income, it's another way of keeping your books out in the public domain and, yeah, why not go for it?
What do you do when you've written a book or are working on a book and another author?
Ok, also have a more recent question from a lovely writer, Nancy Cunningham. Shout out to Nancy. I know she's a regular listener and a Patreon supporter to the podcast, so thank you so much, Nancy, for your support for Writes4Women. And thank you for this question, which is what do you do when you've written a book or are working on a book and another author, sometimes a quite well known or highly regarded or well published author comes out with a book with a very similar storyline or theme or issue. This is a real bummer. It can be really devastating because it's just depending on how far you've gone with that story. It can be hours and days and weeks or years of your time that you have put into it and you can think that's a waste of time. Why am I bothering?
That's on the one hand, and it's going to come down to how similar really the story or idea or plot is to the book that's come out. On the surface things can sound very much the same, but really when you dig down there might be one or two similarities and you've done something completely different with the story.
When I teach writing classes, you'll often give people in the room a writing prompt. So it could be a line from a poem, for instance, the starting line, or it could be write a story about a woman who finds a letter from her husband written to a lover. So you could start with the same premise. You would. I would guarantee you that everybody in that room would write that in a completely different way. No two of those story starts would be the same and no two of the stories when they wrote them would be the same. Some might be a little bit similar to the others, and that would be where your problem would come in.
With a published book it could become a problem because publishers might say I've already got a book like that on my list. There's no point me publishing that book. I've already just published one by Pamela Cook that’s the same. So there is that.
But equally, you could go to another publisher who's looking for books that are similar to something that's come out and has done really well, and you could really catch their attention with that. So sometimes there's a bit of a zeitgeist out there. There might be stories about people with a certain disability, or there might be stories out there about a missing child, and there seems to be a bit of a run of them. And that's because it's in the zeitgeist. So I wouldn't discount continuing with that story.
If you find yourself in that situation, I'd maybe do some investigating into how similar the stories are. If you feel that they're too similar, you could maybe look at yours and go OK, how can I change this to make it fairly different to that story that's already being published or is coming out? If you feel that it is just too similar, it might be a matter and this is one of the hardest things you're probably going to do of putting it to the side and going OK, I'm going to shelve that for now. Never, ever, throw anything away, never, ever, say never on anything, and I'm going to work on a new idea, just so that, if that does get published one day, it's not coming out around the same time.
I do remember, actually, when I first published BLACKWATTLE LAKE, I had an email from someone in Australia wanting to know where I got the idea from, because they had written a story that they felt was almost exactly the same premise (a woman returning to the property of her childhood after her mother's death and after being estranged from her mother for 20 years was a horse property). That was just a random idea and it really just started with an image of a woman standing at a gate, and the gate in my head was the gate of the horse property where we just did our horses at the time. So it was not an idea that I got from anywhere else, and I of course, felt sympathy for this author, but I had to reassure her that I had not taken that idea from anywhere and really, when you look at the nuts and bolts, there are really very few story ideas.
You think of all the tropes in romance lovers to enemies, close proximity, fake engagement, that sort of thing. So we have set stories that we tell and tell again. It's just that we put a new character into them, we put them in a new situation, we put different people around them. You could even move your story if you thought it was. You wanted to keep the essence of the story but move it to a different time period. That could be another option.
So yeah, I'm sorry, Nancy, I don't really have an actual answer to that, other than to really investigate how similar the story is. Keep in mind that you're not going to tell the story in the same way. If you do feel that it's just too close, then you are sadly going to maybe have to put it aside. But if it's not, I really think about other elements in your story that you can change just to make it even that little bit more different, and also maybe just get on the bandwagon. If it is something that's in the zeitgeist and that you're almost ready for publication, maybe it's a great time to start sending it out. So I hope that helps.
What are Pamela’s top three writing books?
The last question that I am going to do today for this episode is my top three writing books. I have done episodes in the past where I've talked about my favourite writing books. You can find that I'll actually put a link to that in the show notes that episode where I go through my top 10. But at the moment I'm just going to talk about three very quickly that I have recently used and found very helpful. The first one and I won't go on about it too much because Holly was recently on the episode we talked about this book but THE HOUSE THAT JOY BUILT.
This is a book about creativity. It is for writers, but it's also for artists of all kinds and it is about fighting the fear that comes with any kind of creative pursuit. It's from the heart, as Holly's work always is, and it has some great suggestions or really just things that worked for her in her writing. There are a few short writing exercises in there that will get you to think about where you are at with some of these things, but there's a couple of things that Holly's set in here that I found really helpful, the main one being when she really just was paralyzed with fear about writing a scene and she just thought to herself okay, I'm just going to write the first bit, the bit where Alice looks out the window. So she wrote a paragraph about Alice looking out the window and I'm paraphrasing this. It might not be exactly what Holly said, but it's the idea. And she thought okay, I've done that. Maybe I can write Alice walking down the stairs, writes that. Maybe I can write her overhearing a conversation. She writes that by tackling little bits at a time, it gets you to the next step in the writing process.
It's a little bit like that E.L. Doctorow quote “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
I really enjoyed the audio book of THE HOUSE THAT JOY BUILT, which is read by Holly herself. So it's always lovely to listen to, and I subsequently went and bought the book because it's hardcover and it's gorgeous and it's got recycled paper and why not? I don't have the other books with me to show you, but the other book that I found really helpful in writing OUT OF THE ASHES was one that was recommended on Instagram, I believe, by Natasha Lester, and Natasha might have even mentioned it in one of our chats and that is THE ANATOMY OF STORY by John Truby, so that one's been around for a long time and I've heard about it forever, but I just had never really got myself a copy, which is bizarre because I've got nearly every other writing book in existence. But anyway, I bought it on ebook and when I got stuck at a few points, because I realised I just didn't have a proper through line for this story, I wasn't really sure what the inciting incident was. To be honest, and even though I'd written a lot of the story, I hadn't really nailed that.
And so I went back and I read I haven't read all of it, but I read the first part of THE ANATOMY OF STORY by John Truby and I actually made notes on my book using the points that he's brought up about making sure what is the character's flaw, what is that thing that they believe that lie from their childhood. So it's a little bit similar to some of the things that are on the One Stop for Writers website, but it's really helped me.
He's all about planning a story out before you start and making sure you've got your head around all these things before you actually start, so that you don't waste time and have to keep coming backwards and forwards. I didn't use it that way. I actually used it to help me when I had already started and done a number of revisions and it helped with my revision process. But I think I'm going to actually use it to help me plan my novella, THE ANATOMY OF STORY by John Truby, I highly recommend.
Of course, the other one that I just can't go past I haven't got it to show you a copy but I've talked about it on the podcast before and that is THE EMOTIONAL CRAFT OF FICTION by Donald Mass. For me, someone writing in deep point of view, where I really want to mine the character's emotions and get that emotion on the page, it really goes hand in hand with that writing process. At the end of each chapter it delves into the psychology of the character and I'm all about that and it has exercises for you to do at the end of each chapter where you use your own characters to develop and think about further. So they're my three recommendations at the moment, and I'd love to hear about some other books out there that people are enjoying in terms of writing crafts. So if you have any suggestions, send them in and I'll mention them in coming weeks on the podcast. That would be great.
Okay, that is all for this episode of Ask Pam Anything About Writing and I hope you've gotten something from it. I hope I've covered all the questions. If anybody has any other questions out there, please send them in. I can always throw them in at the beginning of an episode as a kind of writing tip or writing discussion before we get to the main app, and once I get a few together, I can do another Ask Pam Anything episode. I hope that your writing is going well as we get towards the end of the year.
Anybody out there doing nano? I was going to do it, but it's got too many other things to juggle. Well done on you doing nano and I hope that you do get to the end. I hope that you make the 50,000. But even if you don't, any words that you get on the page are valuable. Have a great week, everyone. Catch you next week on Writes4Women.