As the year draws to a close, writing coach Kevin T. Johns looks back on the fiction, nonfiction, business, and writer’s craft books he read in 2023.
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The Writing Coach Episode #183 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #183 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach, Kevin T. Johns here.
Christmas is right around the corner, just a few days away as I record this. It’s a fun time of the year. We’re coming up to the end of 2023, which means it’s time to start thinking about what you want to achieve with your writing in 2024.
If you want to kick the year off with an absolute blast, I encourage you to join my Story Plan Intensive program for January 2024. This is a program where I email you new writer’s craft training videos Monday to Friday for four weeks straight. On Fridays, you get creative homework assignments that help you brainstorm and solve problems for your story, and by the end of the month, you have an incredible rock-solid outline for your book. Whether you are in the planning stages, whether you are midway through a book, whether you’re beginning revisions, this outline is going to help, so get signed up for the January 2024 edition now.
As I said, we’re nearing the end of the year, and of course, that’s when we look back on the year, and the events that happened, and the books that we read. I thought it would be fun this week to take a look back over some of the books that I read this year and share them with you.
Now, of course, these are the published books that I read this year. I work with dozens of clients at any given time, and so I’m reading hundreds of manuscript pages every single week, entire novels. There’s been some great material from my clients that I’ve had the pleasure and the honour of reading this year, but what I’m going to cover in this podcast are the books that right now can click on the below Amazon affiliate links and purchase today.
Now, first off, I want to talk about my absolute favorite book of the year; this was gifted to me by my client Peter Sherwood, and it is the annotated Mrs. Dalloway—obviously written by Virginia Woolf, but annotated by Merve Emery. I just am in love with this book. The annotations are fantastic, and the forward is incredible. There are pictures, images, and maps throughout the entire book. The design is gorgeous. The page feel is wonderful. There are many fantastic things about this book. If you’re a Virginia Wolf fan, as you should be, I highly encourage you to pick up the hardcover of this book. It’s just delightful.
One of my favourite parts about it is in the foreword, where Emory includes a page from Virginia Woolf’s diary or journal, and it includes a list of five potential or six potential chapter titles for Mrs. Dalloway. And then, over in the margin, you see this math equation, and it says, “5,000 x 6 = 30,000” or whatever. I know what Woolf is doing there. What she’s doing is she’s beginning the story plan for Mrs. Dalloway. She’s outlining the six chapters that she has been thinking about thus far, and then in the margins, she’s doing the math for the word count. She’s assuming or guessing each of these chapters is going to be about 5,000 words long. She’s saying, oh, I have six chapters that are going to be about 5,000 words long, I guess that works out to 30,000 words.
This is exactly what we do inside of Story Plan! There’s this naive belief that writers just sit down and magic pours out of them, and I try to dispel that myth as much as possible. But at the same time, I think in my mind, some naive part of me still believed that Virginia Woolf sat down and genius just poured out of her, but the forward to this edition and annotations just demonstrate how absolutely thoughtful and meticulous Wolf was in creating and planning her masterpiece. And so the opportunity to actually see her notebooks and see her doing the exact type of prep work and planning work that I recommend in my programs was really exciting and refreshing and kind of a nice reminder that even an utter genius like Virginia Woolf is human just like the rest of us and her, just like all the other writers out there, had to sit one day and say, okay, what’s the shape of this book going to be and how many words is it going to be and what’s that going to look like?
And so, at a time when I’m promoting the next round of Story Plan Intensive, it was really refreshing to see Virginia Woolf, probably favorite writer, doing the same things that I’m recommending with folks. So that’s it.
That’s my number one book of the year, Mrs. Dalloway, the annotated edition by Merve Emery. Wonderful stuff. Pick it up.
Fiction Books
Now, let’s move on to some of the fiction I read this year. I think probably my favorite fiction book that I’ve read this year was the first book I read this year. Actually, I think I read this in February. I had some medical issues earlier in 2023 and so I had some recovery time in bed early in the year, and that was when some of these books were first read. That is when I read Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.
When I think about the type of writer I want to be, I really think about Bradbury and Nabokov. I feel like the two of them just hit that absolutely perfect balance between beautiful literary prose and edge-of-your-seat awesome commercial storytelling, and that’s really what I would love to achieve someday is obviously I’ll never come close to the Nabokov or Bradbury, but that’s certainly what I’m shooting for.
Pale Fire, if you’re not familiar with it, is a fascinating book because the structure of the book, actually it’s perfect. Coming off the annotated edition of Mrs. Dalloway, Pale Fire is actually a novel in the format of an annotated poem. So you get this poem at the beginning of the book and then the rest of the novel is actually the poem’s annotator commenting on it. And it’s fascinating. I have never read a book structured in this manner, amazing stuff, but no surprise from an absolute master like Nabokov.
Next up, I read Blood Meridian by Cormick McCarthy, obviously another master. I’ve read some other work of his The Road a couple other things, but I hadn’t gotten around to Blood Meridian. I’m not a American, so the Wild West, that doesn’t necessarily have a huge pull for me. That said, I’m happy to read anything McCarthy writes and so I took a look at Blood Meridian.
Again, a fascinating book largely in that it rejects most of what I recommend for my clients. Stuff like having a singular protagonist not telling the story about a big group, all sorts of really interesting literary techniques that McCarthy can get away with because he’s so brilliant.
I also read Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. I was a huge fan of American Gods and Anansi Boys is kind of a spinoff of Gaiman’s Book American Gods, but much lighter and a more fanciful fun story than the more heavy stuff in American Gods.
Of course, it’s dealing with African, well, we say ‘African-American’ in North America, is it ‘African British’ people? I’m so unworldly, I don’t even know what the proper term is. Anyway, the point is it’s dealing with African Gods and it’s set in England. I think they pop over to America for a little bit. Anyway, probably a book that Gaiman would take a bunch of crap for these days in terms of people saying he’s appropriating African culture or something, but it’s a great read. I enjoyed it. It’s always fun to visit Neil Gaiman in his wonderful mind.
I called this episode the “Best” 20 books I read this year, but I’m going to talk about some books that weren’t necessarily the best books of the year as well. I read Luda by Grant Morrison. Now, Grant Morrison is one of my favorite comic book writers. He has written just some absolutely incredible stuff that I’ve devoured over the years, and I believe this was his first big mainstream novel, and this was actually the one book this year that I didn’t finish.
I just could not get into Luda. Morrison’s prose seemed like he was trying too hard. I never get the sense that Nobakov or Bradbury are trying to wow me with their prose, whereas it feels like Morrison’s kind of jumping through some hoops to try to impress us with how smart he is, but it just kind of takes away from the story. And the story itself is about a drag queen in a pantomime production. Anyway, it was a bunch of kind of subcultures that just didn’t interest me that much and just wasn’t that into the prose style. So poor Grant Morrison. Well, no, not poor Grant Morrison. He’s got his millions! Maybe he should just stick with comics and appearing in my Chemical Romance videos. No, I’m kidding. I’m sure there are fans of Luda out there, but this one just wasn’t for me.
I’ll tell you what was for me, Pet Sematary.
I’ve been reading Stephen King since I was probably 12 years old, and the guy is just so prolific that even though I’ve been reading him for 30 years, there are still books out there that I just haven’t gotten around to reading; Pet Sematary was one of them. Maybe one of the reasons was the premise sounded a little cheesy or something. Oh, it’s a cemetery where you put animals in it and they come back to life. Of course, I read it, and it absolutely blew me away.
What this book is really about is a meditation on death. It’s a heavy, heavy piece of fiction, every element of it, touching on the concept of death in so many ways. It’s obviously appropriate for a horror novel. But as I get older, as I have my own medical issues, as people I know and love pass away around me, I’m glad, actually, that I waited until I was older to read Pet Sematary because I think the meditations on death that take place in this book, whether it’s a parent losing a child or whether it’s a senior citizen losing their partner, I think these are really things that resonate with you as you get older.
And so I was really stoked to read that book this year. Absolutely loved it, and devoured it.
Next up, I read Holes by Louis Sachar. So that’s funny: Pet Sematary is kind of about aging in death, while Holes is obviously a young youthful book about young people. I had seen the movie, I think my dad was a huge fan of the book, and he recommended the movie to us. So then we saw the movie, and then my daughter went and read the book and she was really pushing for me to read the book, and I didn’t necessarily feel like I needed to having seen the movie, but I read it to please her.
And boy, am I glad that I did! This book is just a little tiny mini-masterpiece. I love these kind of punk rock masterpieces where you don’t have to be giant and epic. You can be tight and focused and poppy and still be absolutely incredible.
Holes is now the book I really use to demonstrate the concept of setup and payoff. Thinking of your novel as having a mirror at the midpoint shift and the latter half of the book reflecting or existing in relationship to that first half of the book. And Sacher is just an absolute master in this book of setting things up in that first half and then paying every single one of them off in the second half in the most delightful of ways.
Writer’s Craft Books
Those were some of the fiction novels that I read this year. Let’s move on to the Writer’s Craft books.
I have a stack of probably 30 writer’s craft books on my desk, and I’m always going to them and looking up things in the appendixes and kind of revisiting concepts, but often new writer’s craft books come into my world, or I revisit something in-depth for a course I am teaching.
So the first one up here is The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker. This is a long, long in-depth craft book. I’d read it before, but this year I taught a course called “Story Types” where I was talking with different types of stories. And so I revisited Booker’s work. I have an ebook version, so I don’t know how many pages it is, but it’s got to be probably a 500-page craft book. Fascinating stuff. If you have a chunk of time you want to dive deep into it, I encourage you to check it out.
That said, I will flag for you that I was kind of curious about Booker. I didn’t know anything about him, so I looked him up, and it seems like he might be a bit of a wacko climate change denier, conspiracy theorist type. Just so you know, when I’m recommending Booker, it’s for his excellent, excellent analysis of story and of archetypical plots, not necessarily for his science on global warming and whatnot.
Okay, another absolutely great craft book that I’ve read this year was Seven Figure Fiction: How to Use Universal Fantasy to Sell Your Books by T Taylor. If you are a romance writer, this one is an absolute instant purchase. You should definitely check this out.
Taylor talks all about how a lot of fiction, especially romance, is about tapping into fantasies, universally shared fantasies that readers want to experience and want to escape into. For myself, for someone who tends to write much darker and horror and whatnot, I still found the book hugely useful because obviously, I can use it in reference to my romance clients, but I think a lot of the time what we’re doing in something like horror is we’re tapping into universal nightmare rather than universal fantasy. So even though Taylor is definitely coming at things from this romance angle, I think a lot of her ideas can kind of be flipped on their head and then apply just as well to the say horror or thriller side of things.
So a really fantastic and really readable craft book from Taylor. Kind of the opposite of Booker’s stuff. The Booker stuff is quite academic and hugely long. The Taylor stuff is just really easy to read, quick with a kind of poppy feel to it, fun stuff.
Another craft book I read this year is Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. Again, there are just these things floating around out there that you’re aware of that you never really get around to and Save the Cat was one of them for me. I’d had clients mention it over the years many, many times, but I always thought of it as a screenplay approach, as a book about how to write a screenplay. But when I saw that Jessica Brody had kind of taken the original ‘Save the Cat’ concepts from cinema and then applied them to the novel, I decided to finally check it out.
I mean, so many people were talking about it, so I said, oh, I better read this book. And wow, I was really pleasantly surprised as someone who had kind of, for whatever reason, avoided Save the Cat for many years. I just dove right into it and really loved a lot of the concepts that they were laying out in that book.
I do think, at times, the Save the Cat outline or Story Beat Sheet can get overly prescriptive, but in terms of their approach to genres, its a really, really interesting examination of story types.
Again, I used both Save the Cat and The Seven Basic Plots as research for that “Story Types” course, and the two of them exist in really interesting relationships to one another in terms of how they conceptualize similar types of stories and what they call them and whatnot.
Another great craft book I read this year was The Secrets of Character by Matt Bird. A client of mine had read it and just absolutely adored it, loved it, and then she gifted me a copy. So Sandy Day, whose book Odd Mom Out is going to be released on January 1, you can head over to Amazon and pick up a copy of it now. It’s fantastic. Thank you, Sandy. She gifted me a copy of Bird’s Secrets of Character Book. I read that and I really enjoyed it and ended up actually hiring Matt Bird to come speak to my FINAL DRAFT group coaching program.
I’ve got a few different programs on the go, but they cover different stages in the writing process. So we’ve got STORY PLAN at the planning stage, which then leads really nicely into FIRST DRAFT, my six-month program where we focus on getting a first draft of your book completed, and then folks who finish that program often graduate up to FINAL DRAFT, where we do all sorts of things including bringing in experts like Matt Bird to come speak to the group.
It is always fun to read someone’s book and then get to meet them and work with them. And so that was a great experience with Matt Bird.
And a very similar thing happened with JP Rindfleisch and their book Story Hypothesis: the Missing Piece of Your Fiction Puzzle. Again, a client of mine had read Rindfleisch’s book and loved it, and so I reached out to JP, got them on the FINAL DRAFT training schedule. Once again, we were able to read their book and then have them come in and speak to us about the concepts.
Rindfleisch’s book is about kind of dispelling the use of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I, like many other writing instructors have often pointed to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when we’re talking about what’s driving our characters, what do they want, and what do they need? But Rindfleisch flips that on its head and presents an entirely different theory of human desire, and what are the things that really drive us. JP comes at it from more of perhaps an outsider perspective or a more modern approach than something like Maslow’s Hierarchy that’s been around for quite some time.
We had a great time with JP going over the Story Hypothesis material, so definitely check out that craft book.
Those were some of the big craft books I read this year.
Star Wars Books
If you’ve been on any of my training, if you’ve probably spent 15 seconds in an elevator with me, you probably know I’m a huge Star Wars fan.
One of the Star Wars books I read this year was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed by Sean Williams. This is an adaptation of a video game, an old video game from over a decade ago. I checked out the video game and I absolutely loved the story, and I was like, okay, they’ve got to have adapted this, and they did. So I hunted that down, and I really enjoyed that book. A
s far as video games adapted into novels, you can’t go wrong with The Force Unleashed.
I had read Heir to the Empire before; it’s the famous Timothy Zhan Star Wars bestseller that came out in the nineties. It was a trilogy of books, Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising and The Last Command, and it introduced the villain Thrawn, who made his live-action debut this year in the Asoka miniseries.
In prep for that Asoka series, I decided to revisit the full trilogy, which I’d never read before.
Those three books are probably thought of as some of, if not the best, Star Wars spinoff books ever written. And I enjoyed them. I definitely enjoyed them.
Non-Fiction
Continuing with Star Wars, but moving into the world of nonfiction, I read a great book called A Disturbance in the Force by Steve Kozak.
You may or may not be familiar with the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. This was a variety special that aired in 1978, a year after the original Star Wars came out. It’s notoriously terrible and strange. For decades, Lucas was trying to bury it and pretend it never existed, but of course, with the internet, you can’t bury anything. You can pop over to YouTube now and watch the holiday Christmas special as I do with my family every year. Yes, I punish them in the most horrible way of making them watch that disastrous two hour long special that feels like six hours long.
Anyway, Kozak’s book is a fascinating exploration of how that terrible special came about. If you’re interested in seventies culture, if you’re interested in seventies television, if you’re interested in the idea of product licensing and taking intellectual property and spinning it out, star Wars was really the first film to do that in such a successful way. The book is kind of conceptualized around the idea that it was kind of a Wild West time when it came to spinoffs and licensing of things. And while things like the Star Wars toys ended up generating billions of dollars, other things, perhaps like the Star Wars Holiday Special, didn’t go quite so well.
A fascinating book, and that book is actually the result of a documentary. Kozak put out a documentary, and sometimes when you’re putting together a documentary, you get so much fascinating great material that you can’t fit into the movie, and so you put it in the book.
I have not watched the movie yet. I’m looking forward to watching the documentary, but the book was fantastic.
My favorite nonfiction book of the year was The Fund by Rob Copeland.
A few ago, on the Tim Ferris podcast, he interviewed this guy Ray Dalio, this billionaire who runs the world’s largest hedge fund called Bridgewater. He had just released this book called Principles that was kind of his rules to life. And he said that they had used these rules in Bridgewater and that’s why they were so, so successful.
Copeland’s an investigative journalist and his book just completely dispels this myth that Dalio was some sort of brilliant genius leader. The book is basically an examination of an utterly toxic workplace and totally sociopathic, egotistical leader.
I think anyone who’s ever been in a toxic workplace will love this book and will so resonate with it. Anyone who’s ever worked with a boss who’s self-delusional, sociopathic, abusive, all of these things, I think you’ll really resonate with this book.
Obviously, for some reason, we kind of love knocking celebrities down a notch, but I think in this case in particular, Dalio presented himself like he had life figured out, and that through these simple, clear, logical rules that overcame emotions, he had figured out the secret to success. As such, hearing the behind-the-scenes truth of what his success really looked like is absolutely fascinating stuff, and just a great reminder that anyone who presents themselves as some sort of all-knowing guru who can predict the future and make billions all through just his pure wisdom and genius, it’s great to question the validity of those claims. Just because someone appears on the Tim Ferris podcast doesn’t necessarily mean their claims are legit.
The Fund is a fantastic book and a really great investigative piece by Rob Copeland.
Business Books
As a small business owner, I’m always trying to stay on top of things and figure out how to better serve my clients and grow my business, so I did read Alex Hermozi’s book, $100M Leads, which was a book that came out a couple of years ago, and then $100M Offers that came out this year. I definitely preferred a $100M Offers to $100M Leads.
Advice is great, but only so long as it’s actionable. I think a lot of Harmon’s advice in Leads that sounds so easy actually requires a massive team of people and a lot of money, which is not something that a small business owner like myself can afford or have the people to do.
But $100M Offers was really great. At the end of the day, the takeaway, I think it’s the subtitle of the book, but it’s like, “How to make offers so great, people feel stupid not buying it” or something like that. I really took that to heart and this year with FIRST DRAFT, when I’m selling the program and what I’m delivering in the program, I’ve really tried to follow this idea of asking myself, “How can I make something so incredibly helpful, so amazingly priced and just so fantastic that when I presented to writers, they can’t say no, it would be stupid to say no because it’s such amazing offer?” That’s what I have tried to do this year with FIRST DRAFT, and it’s what I kind of took away from that book
It’s not about persuasion skills. It’s not about convincing someone of something. It’s not about specific wording. It’s just about creating a product that’s so damn great that people can’t say no. So that’s what I’m going to continue to do: just continue to try to create incredible programs, but then also be able to present that to people in an offer that clearly defines the value.
Going on a similar idea, I also read Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, which is largely a book about not bothering to try to compete with others in your marketplace. Instead, try to create your own marketplace. Try to do something innovative, try to do things that other people aren’t doing, try to offer things that other people can’t offer. And when you do that, you don’t need to worry about competition. You don’t need to worry about endlessly lowering your prices to try to compete.
Instead, you can just create new marketplaces by doing innovative, amazing stuff.
Again, like the Hermozi book, the Kim and Mauborgne book was just a nice reminder to try to create really, really amazing programs and products and coaching services. If I’m doing things no one else is doing, if I’m offering support no one else is offering, if I’m getting results no other coaches are getting, then I don’t have to worry so much about the marketing side of things. The marketing just becomes telling people about how great my stuff is. I’m going to continue to try to create Blue Oceans and do great fantastic work with my clients.
Closing
That’s the 20 or so books I read in addition to the hundreds of thousands of words and hundreds and hundreds of pages of manuscript material that I’ve read from my clients this year.
Next week, we will have another episode of The Writing Coach podcast. That said, this will be the last podcast before Christmas. Regardless of what holiday you celebrate during this time of the year, I wish you an incredible holiday season and a Merry Christmas.
What books did you read this year? Hit me an email or respond on social media. Let me know what books you thought were fantastic this year, and if you read any of the same ones I did.
That is it for this episode. I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
P.S. The above links are affiliate links, which means I’ll get a small amount of money should you choose to purchase any of these books using those links. Thanks!
