11 Things I Wish I Knew As A Writer
A guide to help you publish your story
Let me begin by stating very clearly, that I speak with absolute ZERO authority when it comes to Publishing a book. Erotic or otherwise. Realistically I only began calling myself a writer a couple of months ago. If you ask people who know me. They will tell you I used to be adamant that “I am not a writer”.
So– why the hell am I writing about writing?
Answer: I’m not. I’m writing about marketing. But that doesn’t sound as sexy, does it?
Where I can speak with some authority is Marketing. I will tell you I have not formally studied marketing. Other than those marketing quizzes on LinkedIn. My 15 years of experience derives from real-world experience. (#Trust_me_bro) And I have been adapting it to the writing medium. I’d like to share this with you.
So, with that out of the way — let’s begin.
Before you even sit down to write a story. I need you to honestly define what your goal is with the story. Are you genuinely writing for yourself? Or are you just saying that to feign humility or to hold back criticism?
I don’t care what the answer is. Just make sure you are being honest with yourself. If this is your genuine reason for writing, awesome! Crack on!
BUT — Do NOT have any expectations of selling the book at all. You will be incredibly disappointed.
Now, if your secret desire is to sell the story as a book, a published article, EPUB etc. Then be honest with yourself, and do what is needed to build a good foundation.
This is what this article is about.
Define your target audience.
Make sure you know who you’re trying to sell to. Are you selling to teenage girls? Are you selling to middle-aged housewives? Are you selling to the LGBTQ+ community?
All of these “Demographics” will change not only how you write the story. But, it will help you down the line when it comes to marketing.
Consider specific Sub-Genres. Are you going contemporary? Historical? Paranormal? etc. You will need to research the dos and don’ts at some point.
Familiarise Yourself With Your Genre
Read! I’ll say that again. READ! Read books, stories, flash fiction, and reviews of the genre you want to write in. This will help with learning about the environment, spark your creativity, inspire or downright make you roll up your sleeves and say “I can do that better!”
The key thing is to analyse the successful stories in the genre to try to identify what worked for the book and the bigger question. WHY?
Identify your Unique Voice
Why does your writing stand apart? And how are you going to inject it into your story?
This won’t happen immediately. It’s not a decision you can make as easily as picking what you’re going to eat for dinner. This is something you can only find once you have already written a lot.
Go back through your stories, what is your voice? Where are you coming from? Why do you say, what you do, the way you do?
This will help you find your style. Do you even know what your style is? Is your writing poetic? Comedic? Intense emotions? Aggressive action? What is the style readers will pick up on when they read your work?
This isn’t something you will find or figure out easily. This is something you have to develop and hone. The only way to do that is to practice, and then evaluate.
I’m going to give you my analogy, tweaked for my American friends.
Baseball!
Do you imagine the batter swinging his bat from sheer instinct? NO! We hear terms like batting average all the time. Because they swing that bat hundreds of times. They (The writer) evaluate what they did afterwards and tweak their swing for the next hundred swings.
Opposite the Batter will be the pitcher. (Marketing) He will study the pitcher. What are they known for? How fast, how high, do they curve the ball etc.
Eventually, they hone their skills to the point where they know what’s coming and they swing accordingly.
That’s enough about a sport I know nothing about.
Choose a compelling premise.
Find something original. Brainstorm, throw out ideas and see what is interesting and worth exploring.
One of the first lessons I’m sure you have learned as storytellers is a good story needs a good conflict!
Your premise needs to have built-in conflict and tension. The stories that are NOT appealing, are the ones where the author has tried way too hard to force a conflict where there isn’t one.
Conflict and tension are two absolutely crucial elements of successful stories. (Fight me)
Characters
You know what I’m about to say here: (dull monotonous tone) Create Complex and relatable characters.
I’m sure you have scoured the internet to figure out how to write good characters. So I’m not going to go on about this too much.
BUUUUUT…
Give your character a bloody arc! Please!
They need to grow throughout the story. A transformation of some kind! Do they start off as an asshole? Then end the story with them finding humility. Do they start the story as inexperienced? Show that they have learned and now have way more experience than they started with.
Ok, that’s enough.
I’m going to give you the buzzwords you’ve all heard and read about. Just make a list somewhere and YouTube it. There are far more experienced authors who can talk about “Characters” than I can.
- Personality
- Background
- Motivation
- Transformation
- Names
- Fears
On to the next thing!
Outline
I know! Statistically about 70% of you just groaned reading “outline” and said something like “But I’m a pantser”, “But I write as I go and see where the story takes me”.
Click click — Just focus! And pay attention for a minute.
You still need to outline your PLOT! Your character interactions, the emotional journey you want to take your reader through. Key romantic moments, key sex scenes (For erotica writer)
You do not want your conflicts to feel like they are being forced. They need to come up naturally. Use your characters, or a background story element to motivate that.
Plan 👏 it 👏 out👏
Conflicts
Look into all the different types of conflict within the genre, internal, external etc. Keep working at it to incorporate it into the story thoroughly.
Internal conflicts would be: a love triangle, emotional baggage, fear, and anxiety.
External conflicts would be: a villain, a missed train, the end of the world, or a werewolf shifting.
Use all the possible ways this conflict has an effect on the story. It will feel more emersed and the reader gets more bang for their buck. If you have to introduce multiple conflicts to keep the story going. The initial conflict was either not thoroughly explored and/or you’re just trying to force a square peg down a round hole.
Dialogue
Again, there are far more experienced and learned authors out there who could talk for hours about good dialogue. So I’m not going to say much on this other than:
Good dialogue has nothing to do with what is being said at that moment! It’s about undertones and reading between the lines. We do not speak that way in our real life, but reading it and watching it in movies is amazing!
There are plenty of resources on YouTube and Medium when it comes to good dialogue. No one is sponsoring me so I’m not even going to help you there. Google it.
Support Network
Connect with authors and readers in the genre. Look for people smarter than you, and learn from them. Ask for feedback! Ask for advice! And if you need it, demand encouragement!
Find a discord group, Facebook group or a Reddit community. There are a lot of resources and smart people out there. Interact with them, they will gladly help.
Let me just touch on this for a moment. Make sure you find people who are willing, to be honest with you. Blind encouragement and blowing smoke up your ass is going to help NO ONE.
Don’t be discouraged when someone finds a plot hole or a flaw in your writing. You would rather find out sooner before you’re published. Can you imagine, a bunch of people just blowing smoke up your ass and telling you to keep going; Then after you have published, there is a major plot hole in your story in the first 3 pages?
Build a good support network of people who will be honest with you with NO HIDDEN AGENDA.
Routine
This is one of those things, you have probably heard a million times before. You have looked into it, even invested in stuff to help you develop a routine.
But why?
It’s to make you more consistent. Get yourself a good writing environment. Something that quickly turns the writer’s brain on for you and limits distractions.
Can you imagine, writing 200 words every day for a year? That’s 73,000 words! That’s a bloody Novel and a half! Skew those numbers for yourself. 500 words a day, 1000 words a day, whatever you like.
Get yourself in a position to be able to sit and write for an hour or two every day! Whether you write 200, 500, or 1000 words. You will have words on paper that you can use! Use it for your story, use it for practice or use it to find your voice.
You’ve heard about the 10,000-hour rule. It will all add up!
Goals
Although I mentioned this first, I left this to last on purpose. First and foremost when you set goals, you’re setting them for YOURSELF. Not for anyone else. So please, be honest with yourself.
Define what this body of writing is going to be for. Is it to educate? To provoke emotions? Make money by selling a book? Make money by publishing on medium.com?
Understand the objective before you start. Build yourself a good foundation.
I’m going to call you out as a writer and say. Don’t tell people you’re writing for fun or just for yourself, then go and try to share your work on social media every 5 minutes.
Tell people, you’re trying to earn a living writing. You will be pleasantly surprised how that honesty translates to people genuinely wanting to help you succeed and actually reading your content.
Personally, some of my writer friends say they are writing for themselves. I have no inclination to read their content when it pops up on Twitter.
Whereas, My friends who are challenging themselves and are looking for feedback on their work are the ones who get their stories read by me. But that’s me, I’m not your audience. Figure out what your audience wants from you.
Until next time.
Sincerely and virtually yours,
Your Master’s Voice.
Ask me any marketing questions that I could apply to writing.
