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Sometimes the best thing I can do as a coach is take a step back

12/20/2022

I just heard from a writer I’d worked with three years ago. I always hesitate to check in when someone is still writing – so I love it when a writer gets back to me.

This time it was a complete surprise. The writer, let’s call him Bob, wanted to let me know his book is being published. Last I heard, he wasn’t sure what he was going to do next.

It’s always exciting to hear that a writer I worked with completed their book and it’s going to be published. I hate it when I’ve read a good story and can’t tell other people to read it because it’s still in manuscript.

I’m all in on author-publishing so I don’t ask writers how they’re published. In fact, I don’t even count getting a book published as the only way to keep writing. One author has had a lot of interest posting her chapters on Facebook. Another has won a prestigious grant to work on an entirely different book. A few have switched careers and now post regularly on social media – showcasing their talents to more readers than they might have found with a book.

But Bob.
He’s a whole other story.

Before we started working together we had a pretty intense conversation about religion. Something I usually don’t talk to writers about but, in this case, it mattered. Bob was writing a quasi-religious book and his religion was different from my own. Would this be a problem? He decided it would be an asset because I could tell him if the book had merits for a general readership.

We agreed to go ahead with the understanding that he would also find readers who would be more familiar with his subject matter once the book was finished.

Bob was right - coming at his book from two different perspectives gave us both a chance to learn the best way to shape the book.

He was sure from the beginning that even though his personal story might add another layer – he didn't want to write about it. My job, as I see it, is to help writers write the book they want to write. Not try to steer them toward the book I think is there just under the surface.

So we went along for a few months, trading chapters back and forth. His writing was strong. His concept was good. I could see the appeal for a religious audience.

And then . . .
Two things happened.

He had a bit of a midlife crisis. He read a book he thought was brilliant.

He realized he wanted to write a book like that one. He knew in order to do that he’d have to write his personal story. The crisis had opened him up in such a way, he was ready to do that.

This all happened outside our monthly meetings. I didn’t know about any of it until he told me - weeks later. The breakthrough he needed came from his life, not from our work together.

When you’re coaching or teaching it’s often a little too easy to overestimate your influence. To think that just because you’re on the scene, you can direct its outcome.

Bob has been way too kind thanking me in his acknowledgments.

The truth is – all I did was step back and get out of his way.

An Author Success Story: Annie Seyler

12/14/2022

What did you do to celebrate the achievement of publishing a book?
I've celebrated many milestones along the way with my book coach, Michele Orwin, and with close friends and family. I haven't yet reached a singular moment that feels like I can stop and rest and say "wow, I did it". There's always a next phase — more learning, more stretching, more magic.
How long did you work with a book coach on this project?18 months.

Which publishing route was taken for the book?
Hybrid publishing.

What are you most proud of in terms of this book’s journey?
I'm proud of the moment when I decided to trust the story — as if it was its own entity. Because of this, the expert editorial feedback I received felt like a gift. As if the story had been asking but I couldn't hear it. The editors could. And they clearly loved the story. The editing process was therefore joyful for me. The rewrites, the cutting . . . it was all about tuning the story to its highest potential.

Was there ever a moment of doubt about the book?
Someone in the book publishing world read the opening chapters of the initial draft and said the book likely needed to be overhauled from start to finish because they didn't know why they were in the main character's life. Since no other human had read the story at that point, the feedback felt like absolute truth. I thought I'd failed. I doubted myself as a writer. I doubted the value of the story. Came close to shoving it under my bed and leaving it there.

What’s next for The Wisdom of Winter?
Get the novel on local book shelves. Strategically market book online. Pursue targeted book award opportunities. Prepare to maximize forthcoming professional editorial reviews. Expand my social media presence in a sustainable and authentic way. Encourage consumer reviews. Field inquiries via my website.

Would you recommend book coaching to get to this point in the writing journey?
Yes! Fit is key. And timing. Michele Orwin has been a phenomenal mentor and ally from the get-go. Her love of the story and her belief in its place in the world has helped fuel me through countless moments of doubt and fear. She's authentic. Honest. Kind. Smart. Experienced. She's been my Obi-Wan. Her voice floating in my head saying "Feel the force, Luke . .. you got this".

What are the next steps in your career?
Steward this novel out into the world to the best of my ability and when I get the internal nudge, begin a new book.

Congratulations, Annie!Preorder The Wisdom of Winter through Indiebound, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.

Quotes, Aphorisms, and Clichés

9/11/2022

I used to write speeches. I would pour through books – what we call original sources – for hours looking for just the right quote. If I found one, it could set up the whole speech.

Then a friend gave me a book of memorable quotes. Unfortunately, many of them – from Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Albert Einstein - were either inappropriate for the topic or else overused.

And then. The Internet. All I had to do was plug in – quotes about change – and thousands would appear. Later we all learned not all of them were what they appeared to be. It got to the point where you could make up something, attribute it to Albert Einstein or Kurt Vonnegut, and no one questioned it.

As with almost everything – inspiring quotes have become way overdone.

I politely delete when anyone sends or posts something inspiring about empowerment, success, following dreams, becoming a writer . . . the list is long.

So I was surprised this morning when I read a piece by Joe Bunting, 50+ Inspiring Quotes About Writing and Writers on The Write Practice site and found five quotes I wrote down and wanted to pass along.

Forgive me if you’re as sick of inspiring quotes as I am and don’t find these any better.
If you’ve got some you do like, please post them below.

“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” Issac Asimov

“Write even when the world is chaotic.” —Cory Doctorow

“The best way to be a writer is to be a writer.” Augusten Burroghs

"Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any." —Orson Scott Card

"Good books don't give up all their secrets at once." —Stephen King

What are your favorites?

Writer Coaching Special - Summer Edition

6/26/2022

Photo by Ethan Robertson on Unsplash

It’s summer and you know what that means: You’re going to write that book you’ve been meaning to write because:

You’ve got a few weeks of vacation
The kids are in camp all day
You’re working remote and can squeeze in a few hours in the morning
If you don’t do it now, you never will

Except here’s the thing. Even though it sounds good – for some people writing in the summer isn’t easier. Even if you’ve got the perfect house by the beach or in the mountains or overlooking a lake – a lot of writers stall out.

Maybe all you end up with is an idea, an outline, the first 25 or 50 pages. You don’t have to struggle alone. I’ve been there. I know what it’s like to feel you’ve got all this time and so little to show for it. And why do all your best ideas only come in the middle of winter when you’re busy with other work?

My summer project is to help as many writers as I can who need to feel like they’re on the right track. With a novel or a memoir. A short story or a letter. Something manageable.

I’ll work with you on an outline or a blueprint. I’ll look at those early pages. I’ll give you suggestions in writing and on the phone. And we’ll see how far we can get.

My advice is usually pretty decent and my prices are usually pretty reasonable. So if you’d like some help throughout the summer, please let me know.

Contact me and we'll set up our own summer program.

It Doesn’t Always Have To Be A Book

4/17/2022

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

Maybe you start out determined to write a book and get it published. But if the rejections from agents pile up and the silence from publishers is unnerving – you might want to consider changing lanes and doing something else with your talent and your material. Something writerly.

Miss Piggy used to say, “If you can write a check, you can write a book.”

She'd have made a great book coach.

I come at it from another angle - if you can write a book, you can write a blog or a newsletter or an article or a podcast or a TED talk or whatever comes next. It doesn’t always have to be a book. Or it doesn't have to be a book right now.

I was reminded recently how important it is to get beyond the fantasy and the movie version of what it's like to get a book published. And to celebrate any and all of your achievements.

I don't mean to make light of what it takes to put a book aside. I know rejection can be crushing after you've put your heart and soul, imagination and intellect - not to mention years of your life - into a book that you realize may not get published.

I just mean - don't let that make you feel like you're not a writer. Like what you have to say isn't important just because an agent or twelve didn't fall in love with your story.

A good friend used to say that writing is such a tough business, you need to celebrate every accomplishment. Even if it's the courage to set the book aside for a while and do something else.

Confessions of an Incorrigible Pantser

3/18/2022

Photo by Ben Berwers on Unsplash

Let me explain.

Sometimes I just start writing. I’ll hear a sentence in my mind and then . . .

And yes, sometimes I write in circles and never get to the point. Or I bury the lede. Or I do too much vamping or warming up. And very often I toss the whole thing.

And yes, I know, I should practice what I teach. Follow a blueprint. Make an outline. Maybe just a mind map.

But the truth is – I always have to start by writing.

When I ran workshops, I loved to use a snippet of eavesdropped conversation. And let the group go from there.

My favorite – once on a very bad date, I was hiding out in the ladies’ room when two very tall, very thin, young women came in to comb their very straight blond hair. Swedish most likely. Leather pants. One said to the other – “I’ve got to talk to Hans alone tonight.”

Then what? I said to the workshop.

One writer came back immediately. The other woman said, “Anything you want to say to Hans, you can say in front of me.”

And he took the story in a whole new direction. Pantsing.

In a class called Living Writers, the teacher asked me – What was the song you heard while you were writing your novel? How did he know I kept hearing the rhythm of Simon and Garfunkel’s “We’ve all come to look for America”? Pantsing set to music.

I love to show writers Jennie Nash’s Blueprint for a Novel. It’s brilliant and helpful and just what a writer needs to get started or to fix a novel that’s gone sideways.

I especially like the early questions. Why are you writing this book? Who are you writing for? And what’s the point?

Too often I find myself 20 or 30 or even 50 pages into a manuscript and I still have no idea what the story is about. That’s not good.

With Jennie’s Blueprint the writer would have sorted all that out before writing the book. Saved time, cut down on frustration.

Right now I’m learning how to use the Story Arc structure for Fictionary. Five points -the inciting incident, the first plot point, the middle, the second plot point, the climax. Brilliant as well. With the help of AI writers can make sure they don’t wait too long to start or rush in too soon to wrap things up.

You need a finished draft. But like the Blueprint, it may save you from writing 5 or 6 or 7 more drafts when all you need are three.

And yet.

As I’m thinking through this next novel – I’ll start with the title. And probably won’t do anything until I’ve got that first sentence. And I hear the characters talking. And I can see where they live.

I probably won’t know what it’s about or who it’s for. I probably won’t know the first plot point or where I’ll put the climax.

After I flounder for a while, I’ll probably take out the Blueprint and give it a shot. Finish a draft and try the story arc.

But I’ll do an awful lot of pantsing first. Because that’s just how some of us write.

It's the end of November and you've got half a novel - now what? Get a free evaluation.

9/28/2021

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

You're exhausted. And excited. You've got 30- 40 - 50,000 words of a novel but you're not even sure it's a book.

Congratulations! You've just written your way through National Novel Writing Month.

What's next? How do you know if it's any good? Does the story make sense? Do the characters?

Maybe I can help. I've been reading other people's novels for more than 25 years. Helping them figure out if there's a story and just what exactly that story is.

For the first two weeks in December, I will read and give you a brief evaluation of the first 25 pages of your novel. For FREE.

Contemporary fiction for adults preferred. No serial killers or gratuitous violence.

Manuscripts should be industry standard:
Word
12-Point Times New Roman
One-inch margins all around
Double spaced
One space after a period and other ending punctuation.

Please contact me first to let me know you'd like to take me up on this offer.
You can write me at editor@baconpressbooks.com

I will be accepting writers until December 15, 2021

All About . . . My Backstory

9/8/2021

I always wanted to be a writer. But I was sure everyone else wanted that too. How could they not? Wasn’t telling stories what life was all about? I was five.

My first real assignment was a column in the camp newspaper. Sleep-away camp. All girls. They enjoyed my letters home so much; they reprinted them – complete with crude drawings about camp activities and the occasional melodramatic – if you really loved me, you’d take me home.

This was followed by my minor success as a playwright. I wrote and staged a play in my backyard, invited the neighbors and raised $12.00 for Jerry’s Kids. I was six.

The years between first and third grade are murky. Too much time practicing piano (badly), ballet dancing (badly), tap dancing (not so bad), and dodgeball (very badly). But then in third grade I wrote the all third-grade play, directed it, starred in it and got my picture in the local newspaper.

Success came more slowly after that. Yes, the cover of the 6th grade yearbook featured my poem. The teacher read my essays in English class in 7th grade; my 10th grade teacher said one of my papers was “worthy of publication”; and in my one creative writing class in college, my teacher devoted a whole class to my stories. And then I stopped.

A teacher in my MFA program once said – “It takes 10 years to live down your promise.”
I confess I took a lot longer.

I'd always been a very good reader. I often read more than a book a week. Even though I never really loved Little Women or Jane Eyre or that whole Cherry Ames series – I read widely.

Which I was sure meant the minute I finally got up the courage to write, I’d be able to write a novel. I knew, in the deepest part of me I’d absorbed all these books, so even if I didn’t know it consciously, subconsciously my brain was primed for novel writing.

Only it wasn’t. I didn’t have a clue. Everything I wrote was too cute or too boring or too short. Now what?

I’ve since learned we introverts have our own way of tackling problems, mostly by doing things on our own. So every morning I sat down to write ‘a novel’ (ironic quotes). Then I’d read a book about craft. There weren’t nearly as many books then as there are now, so it was easy to do a whole library shelf of craft books. Then I’d read about psychology. I was the first to admit I was sheltered, naïve, and unable to look too critically at people.
I spent the rest of the day with my family.

Somehow with this clumsy routine I wrote a novel. (In pre-computer days this meant renting time at an office with a Word Processor – if you’re old enough to remember Wang. Spending hours correcting and printing. ) I had it professionally printed and took it over to whatever FedEx was at the time. I’d spent more than $100.00 on computer time, printing, postage. But I knew it had to get out right away.

The agent returned it two days later. Less than one dollar in postage. He was going to pass – I needed an agent who was hungrier.

These days the line is – I didn’t fall in love.

One agent and one former editor were kind enough to read the book. None of their comments were good. I told the editor I tended to over write. She said – Faulkner overwrites. You write sloppy. And the agent said the book would never sell.

Brenda Ueland in her book If You Want to Write – gives two excellent pieces of advice. Avoid boring people. And the best way to fix one story is to write the next.

We held a wake and farewell for the sweet first novel, and I wrote the next. More books on craft. More novels for inspiration.

I gathered my courage and attended a summer writer’s workshop. The teacher said I had very good verbs, but the problem was my structure.

Structure? I had no idea what that was.

I’d gone as far as I could on my own. So I applied to MFA programs.

A year later, I asked if we were going to study structure. The teacher scoffed. That’s not what we’re here for, he said. If you want to learn about structure, pick up a book at the drugstore.

Believe it or not, this was a time when my local drugstore actually carried a book called something like How to Structure Your Novel. (Don’t try looking for it at CVS today.)

Thanks to the teachers in the MFA program and my terrific classmates, I wrote a novel. Got a super-agent and had it published by a respectable NY publisher. My lovely editor even indulged me by meeting at the Algonquin for lunch. Earned a few reviews, not much money, but I had the book party I’d always dreamt of, only it turned out to be way too stressful.

The secret no one tells you is that after dreaming all these years of getting published, even though it’s exciting - it can also be a big letdown in a lot of ways. Half the writers I knew either went into therapy or went on Prozac. Or both.

Stuck on what to write for the second novel, I thought – why not take everything I’ve learned and use it to spare other writers from going through the long, tedious, learning process that had taken me years?

And that’s how I got here – Book Coaching. First teaching – University adjunct track – Freshman Comp; then adult fiction workshops; then college workshops; then individual sessions with writers. A few detours to do what used to be called book doctoring; some professional proofreading; and of lot of editing.

When I found out I could use it all, every messy bit of it, for book coaching, I’ve been smiling ever since. I feel like I’ve found my niche.

One more thing: While I was waiting to find my real calling, I learned about indie publishing and started what’s probably called a micro-press. But I’ll tackle that story somewhere else.

If you’d like to work with me – I promise I’ll share my years of accumulated wisdom.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

Why Should I Hire You?

6/2/2021

How do I choose which book coach?

Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash

Back in the very dark ages when it seemed like I was job hunting every other year, there were a few interview questions that always had me stumped.

Yup. That one about Tell us your faults or Give an example of one of your mistakes. In other words, Please take a few moments to humiliate yourself.

But the one that always got to me was -
Why should I hire you instead of xxx?
What makes you any better than xxx?

Just to illustrate a mistake I often make – I answered honestly.

I said Washington was full of terrific writers. They could just as easily hire any one of them. I wasn’t at all sure I was any better but
I have a pretty good sense of humor. And I almost always meet deadlines.

I know. Pretty lame. It’s a wonder I got any jobs.

I was reminded of that ordeal this afternoon when – as part of an exercise for a course I’m taking – I looked at about a dozen websites for other book coaches.

Not only do they have websites that move and dance and pop up with chances to subscribe to newsletters or schedule phone calls – so many of them are award-winning, industry-savvy book coaches with wonderful head shots, and – no guarantees of course – they’ve coached dozens of writers onto the best seller lists.

I’m pretty sure they’re all very good. They can fill up pages and charts and lists of what they can do for an author. Something I can’t do. It’s so much easier to just say – I can help you write your book.

So I’m back to that tiresome question.
Why should you hire me to help you write your book?
The answer is still the same – I’ve got a pretty good sense of humor.
And I almost always meet deadlines.

The Myth of the Magical Editor

5/18/2021

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

I loved fairy tales. I knew what I’d do if offered three wishes. I was sure I’d be nice to the king’s youngest son – even in disguise.

I wanted to be a writer because you could tell stories all day. Live in a house by the beach. Never work in an office.

Best of all – you’d have an editor who understood exactly what you wanted to say and fixed everything you wrote and made it better.

But. Becoming a writer means not only learning how to accept criticism, it also means killing your darlings, and letting go of the fantasies.

No matter how many novels or stories I wrote or tried to write, no matter how many jobs I had working as a writer, the magical editor never appeared. I’d always be faced with marked-up copy that left me with days of revising.

So when someone sends me a manuscript that’s a bit of a mess and I know they’re hoping I’ll send it back all polished and perfect. I try to break it to them gently.

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Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash​

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash