In episode 151 of The Writing Coach podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns covers three techniques writers can use to create and benefit from momentum with their writing.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why writing a book is like recovering from surgery
- What writers can learn from Jerry Seinfeld
- The power of visual representations of success
- Why not every scene needs to be a smash hit
- And much more!
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #151 Show Notes
Get Kevin’s FREE book: NOVEL ADVICE: MOTIVATION, INSPIRATION, AND CREATIVE WRITING TIPS FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS.
The Writing Coach Episode #150 Transcript
Hello, beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast.
It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T. Johns.
We are just a little bit over one week away from the latest round of my Story Plan Intensive program. This is a program focused on getting you to a completed outline for your book in 30 days or less. It involves daily training videos, weekly homework assignments, and it’s all free to get signed up.
Head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/story-plan.
Now, if you listen to last week’s episode, you might have heard that earlier this year. I had some surgery earlier in 2023, so not that long ago, and that I spent some time recovering and to a certain extent, I’m still recovering. And this whole idea of recovery, it really got me thinking about how similar it is to writing a book. <Laugh>, it is a long-term project that you really wish went quicker.
You know, you come out of surgery and you’re hoping that a day later or a week later, a month later, you’re going to be back to a hundred percent. And the reality is that it takes a little while. It takes some time to get your body back to where it was. And it’s that same frustration you can feel especially first time authors. This idea that I want the book to be done tomorrow. I want it to be done in a week. I want it to be done in a month. And not only do I want the first draft to be done in a month, I want the first draft to be the final draft. I want everything done and completed and ready to go in a month’s time. And whether we’re talking about recovering from surgery or whether we’re talking about rec writing a great book, either way, that is not a realistic timeline.
The way we write a book and the way we recover from something like surgery or illness is one day at a time. It’s tiny little incremental improvements and progress day after day, week after week, and sometimes month after month. And so, I mean, you have to embrace that <laugh>. You know, I can’t will myself into being a hundred percent healthy tomorrow, and you can’t will your book into final publishing quality tomorrow. What we both have to do is take things a day at a time and make sure that we’re making progress day after day. And that’s all you can do. And yeah, it would be great if the progress was quicker, but most of the time it can’t be. And so what you do is you embrace forward progress and you do what you can to utilize momentum. Momentum when it comes to writing a book is so important.
You see the same thing actually in exercise and going to the gym. If you are going to the gym one or two or three days a week or whatever your schedule is before long a month or two in, it just becomes a habit. You just get up and you go to the gym. But if you miss a session or you miss two sessions, or you know, heaven forbid you take a year off from exercise or something like that, it is so tough to get back into it. And this is why so many books go unfinished. The author will write an entire first draft or write, you know, five drafts, but they know it needs a sixth draft and they’ll take a little time off, and that little time off becomes a long time off and suddenly the project is abandoned. So it’s really important that we make regular progress with our writing and that we stick to it.
So in today’s episode, I wanted to talk a little bit about some techniques that you can use to create that momentum in your writing.
NON-NEGOTIABLE WRITING TIME
The first technique, I highly recommend all of my clients have heard me talk about this. It’s non-negotiable writing time, non-negotiable writing time is writing sessions that you schedule into your calendar. And as the name suggests, they’re non-negotiable. It’s not about writing when you feel inspired, it’s about writing on Tuesdays at 7:00 PM because that’s your non-negotiable writing time. Now, what this does is it helps create that habit. Like we said, it’s like going to a gym. It might be hard the first dozen sessions, but at some point it becomes habit. At some point, your subconscious and even your physical body kicks in and getting down and doing the work becomes easier than not doing it. The other great thing about non-negotiable writing time is you can communicate it to those around you.
How many times have you been really stoked about a writing session only to have your spouse or your kids or your job or something get in the way? If you have non-negotiable writing time, you say to your spouse, you say to your Hi kids Tuesday at 7:00 PM from seven till late, mom is writing. And there’s an understanding that you can develop with your family, your friends, your workplace, that this is non-negotiable time. And the more you do that, the more you get that into your calendar, the more you’re going to be able to build that momentum and the easier everything gets. And then one day you wake up and you’re healed from surgery, or one day you wake up. And that book is so far down the road towards publication.
VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF SUCCESS
Now, another thing that I really like are visual representations of success. What does this mean?
Well, I think there’s a famous story. I think it’s been proven to be apocryphal at this point, but someone once said that Jerry Seinfeld told them that he writes a joke every single day, and when the joke’s written, he crosses it off on his calendar. Now, I want to reiterate, I’m not saying you need to write every day. I’m saying you need to write on a regular schedule. And whether that’s Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or five or seven days a week, that’s really up to you in your life and the speed at which you want to get things done. But something as simple as crossing off that writing session on a calendar can be so powerful because you can look at that calendar and you can see the streaks that you’re on. You can see, oh, I haven’t missed a writing session in two months. And that sort of visual reminder both rewards you for your success, but also helps you stay hungry to keep on track and to not miss any sections.
And of course, putting a big X on a calendar doesn’t have to be your visual representation of success. You could be putting a sticker in your daily planner, you know, it could be whatever the point is, it’s something that you can look at and see, and you can get that little endorphin rush that comes from visually representing what you’ve achieved. Word count trackers can be so great for this. This is something we use in my First Draft group coaching program where writers come in and we focus on getting an incredible first draft of their book written in six months or less. And one of the tools that we use in that program is a word count tracker. And the word count tracker allows you to identify how many words you got written on your first draft, each writing session. And again, it’s about that little endorphin rush.
It’s about going into that file and dropping, you know, I wrote a thousand words today. Hey, that’s the best writing session I’ve ever had. Oh, I’m getting quicker. These sorts of little reminders that you’re making progress, that you’re having success can be so powerful to keep you moving forward and to keep you energized about your project. Another way to do this, we see this a lot once you’re into the revisions phase, is it could be simple, something as simple as a list of scenes that need to be revised. You know, act two, scene seven, act three, scene two and act four. Scene 12th <laugh>. These three scenes, you are the final three scenes you need to revise in your book. And so when you’re done revising that scene, you cross it off that to-do list. I gotta tell you guys, I love crossing things off lists.
This goes back to when I was a teenager. I was so obsessed with movies and with cinema and with comic books and with novels obviously. But something I really loved it, it came from, I think the first one I did was the American Film Institute released a list of the top 100 films of all time. And I decided I was gonna make it a project for myself to watch those hundred films. And so every time I watched one of those movies, I’d get outta highlighter. I had this single page that I had printed out, and I’d cross off that movie. And it always felt so good. It didn’t feel like I was wasting time. It felt like I was making progress on a project. And where this was really powerful was when I got into James Bond. I saw a James Bond movie or two. I grew up in the nineties, so it was the Pierce Brosnan films.
I saw them here or there, but I was never too into them. But at some point I got that list, I think there was like 22 James Bond movies at the time. And I printed off that list. And one summer when I was about 18 years old or 19 or something, I spent the summer watching all of the James Bond movies in chronological order. And every time I watched one, I’d cross it off with that yellow highlighter. So I know I’m going a little bit off topic here, but the point is something as simple as crossing off a calendar, dropping a word count into a tracker, crossing off a scene, or a movie with a highlighter. These little ritualistic acts can be so rewarding, and they can be the type of things that can keep you engaged in a long-term project, make you feel or remind you of the progress that you’re making, and allow that momentum to continue so that you can get all those amazing benefits that come from momentum.
GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION TO SUCK
Now, this final tip, this is one that not nearly enough people use. And again, I often work with first-time novelists. And this is something I have to say to them again and again and again. And it’s that you need to give yourself permission to suck. Not every writing session is going to be mind-blowing. In fact, not every scene in your book, even in its final version, is going to hit the ball out of the park. You know, it’s a rare album from a musician where they get four or five singles off of it. I could think of, you know, something like Nirvana’s Nevermind or Pearl Jam’s Ten, you know, these are all albums, my generation. These are rare albums where you get 3, 4, 5 singles off of it. Most albums, at least back in the day, I mean now they don’t even do albums, but back in the day, you know, if you had two or three hit singles off an album, that usually meant it was a hugely successful album and the other eight or nine songs on that album, it didn’t mean that they weren’t worthwhile. It didn’t mean that they were filler. It meant that they were good enough, <laugh>, right? Because the hits bring everything up with it.
And the book is the same way. If you have half a dozen mind-blowing scenes or ideas or characters or moments in your book, it’s probably going to be enough. And the other, you know, 40 scenes maybe can just do what they need to do to get the narrative where it needs to go, or to take the character on their arc or to have them make progress on their journey. And again, writing is iterative. If you’re absolutely focused on a certain scene being as good as it can be, give yourself permission to do a crappy first draft.
Like Anne Lamont talks about in Bird By Bird, come back and revise work on it again and again, literature is a complicated art form enters many different levels that you’re working on, whether it’s blocking or dialogue or environment or internal narration or big voice narration or sensory descriptions or manifestations of emotional states or metaphors, symbolism or thematic patterning. I mean, these are a lot of techniques and elements to layer on. And to try to do it all at once is usually too much. So give yourself permission to come in and say, Hey, I’m just going to do the best I can with the time that I have on this scene today. You know, it’s like what Gandalf says to Frodo. You know, we don’t get to choose what writing time we have or how inspired we are during that writing session.
All we can do is make the most of the time that’s given to us, or in our case, the time that we carve out via non-negotiable writing time.
HOW TO CREATE MOMENTUM
All right, so momentum is so powerful. How do you benefit from it? You do it by creating non-negotiable writing time by turning your writing sessions into a habit and starting that ball rolling down the hill so that you can ride that momentum. Then you reward yourself with visual representations of success, whether that’s crossing something off on a calendar or putting a sticker off something or highlighting something off a list, or using something like the word count tracker that we use inside my First Draft group coaching program.
Finally, give yourself permission to suck. I’ve done 151 episodes of this podcast and were they all the best podcast episodes ever? Was I insanely inspired each and every time I hit record? No, but I came in there and I did my absolute best — just like I did this episode, and just like I did every episode. And I know that I’m going to come back next week and do it again and try to do it a little bit better next week and improve on my sound editing or improve on my writing of episodes or techniques or whatever. So the point is not everything has to be a smash number one hit. Not every line you write needs to sound like Virginia Wolf wrote it. Not every book has to have the pacing of Dan Brown or every scene. You know, give yourself permission to get in there and do the best you can. And that’s how you develop momentum, and that’s how books get written.
STORY PLAN INTENSIVE
Now, if you are at the very beginning of this journey, or if you’re done with a book and thinking about your next book, now is the time that I’d really encourage you to consider joining Story Plan Intensive.
Story Plan Intensive is my free program with four weeks of training videos, and homework assignments that are focused on getting your outline written in or created in 30 days or less.
It’s all free. You can head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/story-plan.
Now, if that sounds intimidating to you, if it sounds like you don’t know if you could come up with the outline for an entire book in a month, if you’re not sure, you could stay focused on those training videos. Like I said, there’s one or two videos a day for four weeks. It’s a lot of work. If you do need that additional support, I do offer the option of purchasing group coaching along with the program. So as I said, it’s free. You can sign up, you get everything for free, no worries. But if you do want that extra help, and from what I’ve seen, the people who really nailed this program are the ones who work with me throughout the month via live group coaching calls. So those coaching calls take place once a week for five weeks on Wednesdays at 7:00 PM Eastern Time.
And we spend an hour talking about that week’s material, brainstorming ideas for people’s outlines, pushing through blocks helping each other with our homework assignments. And that’s another thing. Folks who join the group coaching element, they do have the option to choose an add-on where I’ll actually review your homework. I’ll go over all five weeks of your homework material and your outline and provide you with comments and feedback and advice and support and ideas to get that outline to as good as it can be.
So do you have to purchase group coaching? No. The program is free. As I said, head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/story-plan and get signed up for free. But if you really want that extra help and support that comes not just from me as your writing coach, but also from being part of a community of authors who are going through this experience together, I really encourage you to sign up and then consider purchasing the group coaching.
We’re going to have an amazing time. I’ve done this many times now, and it’s always so much fun, and it’s always amazing to see the progress that people make week after week.
All right, that is it for this episode. Here’s to lots of great momentum and progress in both your writing and my healing, and I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
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