Ep.2/ From Manuscript to Masterpiece: How book coaching can transform your Writing
Many authors don’t understand what story is or how character drives story. They don’t know how an outline can help them write, revise, and polish their story. They don’t understand the reader’s responsibility in their story—and they don’t know what they don’t know. Book coaches are here to help.
LISTEN NOW
Last time, I talked about how every aspiring author needs a book coach, and today I want to expand on how book coaching can transform your writing.
Often, as new writers, we just sit down and write. While there’s nothing wrong with discovering your story in that way—and some people absolutely never move past that sort of discovery writing—that process can be one of the longest, most roundabout ways to discover your true story. (Sort of like that sentence—meandering and roundabout.)
Let’s be honest—writers like to write. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be trying to write books. We like to read—or we wouldn’t be writers. We want someone else to connect with our stories—or we wouldn’t be sharing them with others.
Sharing your writing with another author can be a quick way to get some skilled feedback. It can also be a gamble that doesn’t pay off.
Why? Because some authors are great at writing a story and horrible at encouraging others to write theirs. Some authors want to change your work to resemble theirs or to mimic what they read. Maybe this is an award-winning author giving you this advice. It’s wrong.
Your story is not meant to be written by another. Your story is yours. Unless you’re a ghostwriter writing someone else’s manuscript, you’re writing this story out of your own head and with your own intentions. You have your own reasons and your own themes and morals and ideas that only you can contribute to your story.
Don’t fall into this trap that gets so many new authors bogged down. You need someone who can see what you’re trying to do and encourage you to achieve it. That’s where a book coach comes in handy.
Ep.2/
from manuscript to masterpiece: how book coaching can transform your writing
Some common problems new authors experience:
Just “pantsing” it
What is pantsing? It’s a term that authors use to express that instead of outlining their stories, they “fly by the seat of their pants.” Another term would be a “discovery writer.” These writers figure out their story as they write it. They may know a little about the next scene or a lot. But one thing they haven’t done? Outline.
Let me clarify for some readers if you are a pantser and you’ve tried outlining before. Some people will always pants their books. At some point, though, an outline can be an incredibly useful tool in revising and polishing your story.
However, some genres will almost always emerge more clearly and quickly if you outline a little. For example, if you’re writing a mystery, it helps you as the author if you know you need to plant clues about the murderer in the first scene. Or maybe you need to plant a murder weapon in the first turning point.
While some authors can avoid outlining entirely, even a four-point outline will help clarify their story before writing.
A book coach can introduce you to the power of outlining at different stages in your story. While I firmly believe that outlining before writing the first chapter will help every writer, not every writer needs to outline the same amount.
Truthfully, most writers that don’t outline, instead revise abundantly; and most authors that outline immensely have their first drafts turn out more like second or third drafts. Outlining will not guarantee that your first draft is amazing, but it will most likely cut down on the number of revisions needed.
Book coaches can help you outline and check your outline for flaws—especially fatal flaws, or flaws that are going to make the story fail. This alone is worth your time and money spent perfecting your outline.
Confusing story with action or events
What is story?
If you check trusty Google or even the Oxford English Dictionary, it will tell you some nonsense about “an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment,” or “a description of events and people that the writer or speaker has invented in order to entertain people.”
While neither of these is inherently wrong, if you’re trying to plan a captivating story, these definitions aren’t going to help. If you’re confused about the necessary things your story needs—these aren’t going to help you.
What you need to understand is how story relates to character and how character drives your story.
A story may be comprised of events, but they aren’t random events. The events in a story are specifically crafted for the character in your story. If you have the wrong character or the wrong events, then your story is going to fall flat for your reader. They will not understand the message you want to share when you ask them to read it. And what’s worse—they’ll either stop reading entirely because they can’t make sense of it, or they’ll close the book and never again pick up a story you wrote.
Story is important. Understanding what makes a good story is vital.
New authors struggle over story for far too long in their journey. It’s one reason new authors can benefit from a book coach’s guidance.
Thinking your sentences have to be grammatically correct
Time for unfettered honesty here. A lot of us authors enjoy language. We enjoy (in this case) the English language. I even have a shirt that says “Grammar Police” on it and the three forms of “there.” I’ve gotten a lot of comments on that shirt, but that’s another story.
New authors are often mistaken about the English requirements for writing a book. You don’t have to be an English major. You don’t have to be an excellent speller. And you don’t have to write grammatically correct.
Why? Because you get to edit, and you can hire an editor or a proofreader to catch your mistakes. Story trumps grammar every time.
You can write the most beautiful prose and descriptions of a tree and the way the frost glistens on it. If that description doesn’t have a story attached to it and it’s just that beautiful description, your reader is missing the point of the book—if you even have one.
An author these days has many advantages we didn’t have ten years ago. You can run your work through ProWritingAid or Grammarly, and a lot of the mistakes made will be caught. (Not all—and AI is no replacement for humans, but it is a nice tool to use.)
If we know we struggle with spelling or with grammar, we can use editors and proofreaders and AI grammar checks. The problem with getting help is that sometimes we don’t know we need it when we do. If we don’t know, well, we can’t ask for help. Then the reviews pour in, destroying your confidence in your writing ability. Some readers can’t get past poor grammar and sentence structure.
The advantage of having a book coach is that you can learn things you never knew, you never knew. If we see that your work has a great story but it would benefit from an editor’s hand, we make that suggestion. If we see that you would do well to research a subject in more depth before writing about it, we suggest that. Or if we see the opposite—you’re procrastinating with research when you’re ready to write. We point that out too.
Believing that the story will turn out as vividly on paper as it is in your head
Oh boy. There are so many times when I sit down to write and what comes out is nowhere near what I imagined. The colors are dull and the descriptions pathetic. Or maybe what I thought worked doesn’t. It’s a mess, honestly.
That’s why we have second, third, fourth, even fifth and sixth drafts. And why, after we’ve improved our writing as much as we can, we ask readers and other writers to point out what still needs work.
In some ways, a story is never finished—you slap an ending on it and when you’re so sick of looking at it and know that you can’t do anything more with the skills you have right now, you send it away to an agent or a publisher or you self publish and you move on to the next.
But how can you publish something that just doesn’t do your mental image justice? Well, just like if you were trying to describe a movie scene in words, you can’t ever capture the brilliance of what you first imagined. That first spark of inspiration and beauty.
The amazing thing about reading, though, is something I was describing to my six-year-old the other day. We’ve been telling her she’s ready to have chapter books read to her at night before bed. She’s been fighting us on it because she believes that books need pictures. Last night her dad finished a multi-night story he’d been making up for her, and this morning it clicked. She imagined what he described even though he didn’t use pictures, just words. And that’s what a good story does for your reader. A good story with enough description to spark the reader’s imagination will create an image in their mind that maybe you didn’t intend, but it’s an image that makes the story come alive for them.
That’s all we need to do as writers. We just need to spark our reader’s imaginations. So simple—and yet so difficult.
Believing that the first draft should compare to a published novel
Here’s another truth bomb for you: you should NEVER compare your first draft to a finished work of art.
And a novel is a work of art.
If you were going to paint a portrait, maybe you would sketch out the image first, and sometimes you’ll erase. You might try to paint it three or four times before you can get the lighting right and highlight those shadows under the new mother’s eyes. But the viewer rarely sees that first sketch. And that first sketch? It’s nothing like the finished product, I guarantee you.
So why should you believe that the first draft should be anything like the draft shared with a reader?
Unfortunately, a lot of new authors get stuck in the midst of that first draft, believing that it has to be perfect or polished when they first type “the end.”
Remember: a first draft is just about getting the story out.
Sometimes authors need help getting that story out at first. Sometimes there’s something that isn’t quite working and they don’t know what it is. It could be a plot device, or a character, or even the genre or point of view. But if you can’t see it and can’t pinpoint it, it’s time to bring in help.
Did you connect with these misbeliefs? Either now or when you were a newer writer?
It’s easy to fall into comparison traps and imposter syndrome.
It’s easy to believe that you’ll never be able to publish a book like your favorite author’s.
But you can.
Book coaching will reveal your strengths and your weaknesses. Now we may not like to hear about our weaknesses—I know I secretly want to be told my every scene is perfect and amazing and flawless. But we don’t grow by being told that we’re awesome. We grow by realizing our mistakes and our weaknesses and correcting or improving them.
A book coach doesn’t just point out your flaws or weaknesses, but they guide you in how to improve them.