11. Q&A Session from the Day of Inspiration Summit (Part 3)

"Every story has already been written. It's just never been written by you. And the way that you do it is going to be different." - Suzy

In this episode, originally recorded during the Day of Inspiration Summit in July, Suzy fields questions from writers at all stages of the writing process, giving insights based on her own publishing journey, writing knowledge, and years of working with clients on their own manuscripts.

Some of the Listener Questions Answered:

• What is an action beat?
• How do I make my main characters different in each story?
• Should I be concerned if my story has similarities to a book that has already been published?
• How do I find comparables for my book when preparing a query letter?
• How do I get started writing my memoir?

Resources Mentioned: 

• Vellum Formatting Software (affiliate link)
• Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing Podcast (Mark Leslie)
• Is Writer's Block a Myth?

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Intro and Outro Music is Daisy by Zight and used under a CC by 4.0 DEED Attribution 4.0 International license. For more music by Zight visit https://www.youtube.com/zight

Transcript

0:49

Welcome to Show Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction and nonfiction that will wow your readers, broken down step by step. This show explores writing techniques and shows you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writing careers and coaches writers live on their pages so you can learn and transform your own storytelling. Whether you're just starting out crafting, editing, or currently rewriting your first book or maybe even your 10th, this show will help you unlock the writing skills you didn't know you needed but you definitely do. I'm looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas for from your mind onto the page in an exciting way for both you and your readers so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams while having fun doing it. Let's dive in. Friday, July 19th, I held a live day for hundreds of writers in order to celebrate the launch of this podcast. It was so much fun. I had the most amazing guests that you're going to get to hear on this show. And I also held this live Q& A session, which was a Full hour of answering all the writers that attended, burning writing questions. I had a great time sharing everything that I know about writing in these sessions. And I wanted to make sure that you got to hear them too. Here's part three of three, an excerpt from that live Q and A session, because if those writers had those questions, you might have them too. Enjoy. What is an action beat? Okay, so an action beat, Deb asked what is an action beat? Thank you, Deb, because I just mentioned that and I didn't explain it. I explained the dialogue tag, but I could say, Oh, wonderful writers, Suzy said. And then she hit the balloons. I don't know. So what we've got there is we've got some dialogue. Then we've got Susie said, which is the dialogue tag. And then we've got an action beat, which is I hit the balloons, right? Um, so, Oh, that was kind of fun. Um, so in that instance, what we could do, and for those of you listening on the podcast, I have some balloons here when I'm recording it live and I just hit them. So what you could do instead, if you wanted to drop the dialogue tag and you already have an action beat, it doesn't change the sentences at all to Hello, wonderful writers. Susie hit the, hit the balloons, right? So you're just including that action beat there, and it makes it very clear, it's immediately following, it's on the same line, uh, after the closed quotation marks, it's on the same line, it's called an action beat. Um, so that could be anything at all. Could be Susie smiled, or, or whatever that is, right? Cart W. If your story focuses on a group of characters, or a friend, group with different arcs, how do you know or figure out which is the main character? Yes, good question. Part was probably in one of my sessions where I talked about there's only one main character in this story. It doesn't matter. How do you figure it out? I would go back to what it is that you're trying to say to the world with that story, right? What is your takeaway? What do you want the reader to take away? I would choose the person who, whose change that they're going through best emulates what you want the reader to experience and build it all around that. You could also just change it to the strongest one, or the one that you like the best, the one that you want to use the most. Because that point of view character should be the person who opens the book. So that point of view character should be the first person that we meet, because that's who we're going to bond with as a reader, or that's the assumption that we're going to make. Is that this book is about them and I'm going to follow their and we need to, I'm going to follow their journey and you want your reader to connect with them immediately, immediately. So yeah, it might be as simple as picking who you have, who you introduced first. And if that isn't the strongest character, and you pick somebody else, then I would suggest reorganizing those chapters. Or telling that first one from their point of view. Shelby, I have another question. Okay, great. Sometimes I find my own main characters from two separate stories or books are almost the same person, resembling each other strongly. How do I make my main characters different for each story? It takes a little practice, Shelby. And, and you know, we all have our sort of defaults that, that go all the way through. And that's, that's usual. It's okay. I mean, you don't have to always make them completely unique. There are very successful writers who use a formulaic or use a certain type of protagonist in all of their books and if people like one then they're going to like another. So it's not necessarily a bad thing. If you want to stretch yourself creatively each time you write another book, that's a different story and then I would take the time to craft You can use personality types or you can just give them some different traits and what that does is it, it helps you think through how that character would react differently in a situation. It also helps you make their voices really unique. So hopefully that helps. Definitely you want your characters to be different within a book. In two books, having a similar main character isn't necessarily bad. Okay, how do I find comps? Okay, so for those of you who are querying or wanting to go the traditional publishing route, Then one of the things that you want to put into a query is comparables or comps is what we call them. And that means my book is exactly like blah, blah, blah, right? Whatever that is. And so how do we find them? It can be really tricky because we're so close to our book and we know it so well. And we think it's completely different from everything else. The problem is an agent needs to know right away. They want to know where this book like what the audience for it is and what it's about and whether or not it's the right book for them to represent. And so one way is really quickly to do that is to pick comps. Now, if you find a book, that's exactly right. It's come to me all the time when we're working on the queries. And they say, okay, I found a book that's exactly like my book. It's set in the same town. It has the same kind of characters and whatever. And they show it to me and it's the self published book, which there's nothing wrong with the self published book. But a self published book that sold, you know, we can't tell how many it sold, but has five reviews. Well, all you're doing then, so it didn't do very well, and there could be lots of reasons for that. It could be because the author didn't promote it, as simple as that, right? They just posted it and hoped people would find it, and nobody found it. It could be just as simple as that. But the problem with that is, is you're telling an agent, you've basically got this big billboard on your query that says, My book isn't going to sell, because it's like this book, but didn't sell. So you don't want to include one like that. So what we're not looking for is a book that's identical to yours. That's what we're looking for. What we're looking for is a book that's similar in different ways to help them position it in their mind. There might be something similar about it, right? So it has the complex romance or the complex characters of this book, and it has the action, adventure, and pacing of this book. Or it has the dual timelines of this book. Pick something specific. And then that will help you kind of get it in your mind. One thing that I like to teach writers as well is we don't have all the information that, that agents have. They have access to publisher's weekly data and they have access to sales data, all that stuff. So they can tell how big a book was that you're comparing to, but we can't, we don't, that's not public. But what you do have access to that is public is the number of reviews. So you can go on Goodreads or Amazon or any site and see sort of the range of how many reviews. If you've got, you know, 500, 000 reviews on a book, I'm going to tell you it's probably too big to include in your comps. And the reason is because you just seem silly, right? Like, like it's one of those things where it marks you as a newer And Trent that hasn't done a lot of research, you're like, I'm going to write the next Harry Potter. I'm going to write the next Untamed in the memoir space. I'm going to write the next, you know, whatever that big blockbuster is, don't compare. Do a little bit more soul searching, but don't compare it to the one with five reviews either. So find that happy medium. Most genres, a thousand reviews or more is pretty good. But, you know, it depends on the genre. So. Okay, so Rebecca M. this afternoon in the Facebook group asked, she was talking about her character getting out of the photography studio where she had been stuck for some time. So I wanted to share a quick story with you about being stuck and, and writing, trying to write forward when you don't know how to write forward. And sometimes we overwrite something and we know that it can't stay in the book, or hopefully you guys know when you're doing that, that it can't stay in the book. And when I wrote my second book, the Westwoods, I had a scene like that. And I think it was probably, I was working full time as an operations executive, as chief operating officer at a company at the time. And so I probably had my lunch hour or something, and I knew that I needed Courtney to go somewhere that she hadn't been before, and I hadn't made enough decisions, right. So what I did was I sat down and I wrote anyway, and I wrote like four pages on her going up to this house that she'd never been in before, when I hadn't decided what was gonna happen and what the house looked like on the inside. I had no idea. And so I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and killed my lunch hour, which is when I wrote at that time, writing this four pages of her going up to the building. And I knew it was terrible. It was rambling. It was like lots of showing, sure, but it was boring. And so I ended up cutting it down to about, once I figured out, she got inside, it was all good, I made some stuff, and then, and then I ended up modeling the apartment that she was going into, actually after my grandmother's home, which has a lot of interesting things in it. So if anybody's read that book, you can go see what it might be like to be inside my grandmother's home. And there are some really cool things that happened inside that apartment. But I gotta tell you that I cut down that piece where she walked up to the door to about a paragraph. Wow. And I didn't tell anybody that I'd done this, it's kind of embarrassing that, you know, I'm a professional writer and I sat and wrote this terrible four pages where she'd been stuck walking on this path for four, four pages, right? But there were some gems. And so what I did was instead of just thinking of it cut as cutting it, just say, okay, well, I can't use that four pages. What are the best pieces? And I took in those two or three sentences. And when I got this back, I sent it to my publisher and I got it back from the editor. And he said, Okay, Susie, I have no idea what happened, but can I ask you, how did you write that paragraph? He picked out out of this entire book, 80, 000 words, he picked out that paragraph and said, what did you do? Cause it's like amazing. It's like the clearest writing I've ever seen from you, and I was like mortified because I had to tell him well, I actually wrote four pages of drivel, and then I took the best parts. And for whatever reason, that paragraph, we probably should have cut it if it was that much better than everything else in the book, because it'll put the rest to shame, but yeah. So I wanted to share that quick story because it happens to all of us, but you just have to be mature enough or be objective enough to know that when that happens to not be like, I'm not giving up that four pages cause I wrote it and it's good darn it. And I'm going to spell check it and I'm going to rewrite it. No, if you know that it should go, then be ruthless, please. But it might not all be for waste because it might be the best paragraph in your entire book. Okay, cart. Should I be concerned if my story has a lot of similarities to a book that has already been published? Okay. Now, first of all, somebody asked earlier, how much should you read as a writer? Read everything, especially in your genre. Read recent works, if you can. Read everything that comes out. I have a habit of reading all bestsellers. So even if it's not a genre that I'm interested in, even if it's something that people hate, people hated Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, I read them. You know why? Because, not now, but I did when they came out. And the reason is because I want to know something about that series worked, whether it was the marketing, whether it was the idea, whether it was the character building, even if it's not the best book in the world, in literary circles, it sold. And so what was it? What was it that readers loved about it? Right? So read everything that you can to get a sense of what, what is working, what isn't working in your genre. But you do need to be careful, obviously we don't want to copy everything, but I will say as long as it's unintentional and you're not literally like plagiarizing or coming up with something like fan fiction where you're writing in somebody else's world, if it's still original and you're worried, it's going to happen every single time. Movies come out in pairs from rival houses all the time, right? So what happens is, just remember that you're not in competition. If something similar comes out that's similar to your book, you might just be on the right track. Because guess what happens? It doesn't mean if they read that book, they're not not gonna read your book. In fact, if they read your book on, on traveling around the world on a blimp or something, And maybe they're going to want to read another book that's just like that, right? Or, or a book on World War II that, that deals with a certain topic. I think Jenny Nash, when I interviewed her, came up with that and said, Oh, the light we cannot see. And then the next time around, we're going to want to read another book on World War II. It piques our interest. So don't, it's not necessarily a bad thing. And don't panic, because there are definitely lots of books out there, and your idea, every idea has already been written, every story has already been written. It's just never been written by you, and the way that you do it is going to be different, I promise. Okay, Jeannie. All right, I hope you all can help guide me how to go about starting my biography. Okay, Jeannie, I'd be happy to, I'd be happy to. We've talked a little bit about this, but a biography in today's terms is usually called a memoir. And what that is, is it's a documentation of your life. But it is true. It just happens to be true. And the thing is, it actually follows the exact same steps. So the bootcamp is appropriate for memoir, um, definitely. And all of my courses that are fiction based, I recommend that memoir writers take those as well. Because the storyline and every single thing about it is the same. The only difference is that the protagonist, or the main character, is you, and it happens to be a true story. And so, when you're writing that memoir, it's called narrative memoir, if you want it to read like a novel, those are the kinds of books that are selling the best, in terms of, it is hard to sell a memoir to a publisher, but the ones that people want to read, are definitely written in that style. So, the place where you would start is to decide which piece of your life, uh, I mean, biography has a lot more sort of attached to it. If you think of this memoir and you think of it like you want to entertain or lead people through like a novel and share a piece of your life. So, which change in your life are you going to share, right? Where were you at the beginning of the book and where are you at the end of the book? And put those bookends in place early on because what we don't want is a cradle to grave everything that happened to you all over the map because readers will get lost and they won't be interested. They want to see a particular moment, a particular sequence of events that drove you to grow as a person. And so in order to do that, pick your bookends and stick to them. People, I write memoirs with writers all the time and they'll come back to me and say, Well, now I feel inauthentic because I'm writing about how great my life is or whatever, or how I got to this place, and then I had a setback. And should I include that in the book? Do I have to? Number one, writing a memoir or biography or whatever you want to call it is not an all access pass into your life. It does not mean that you have to share everything. You do not. You get to choose. You can't lie, but you don't have to share everything either. So you get to pick and choose which moments in time. And what happens is, if you do that, and you do it succinctly, and you do it in a way that shares that, stick to your bookend. You don't have to share later, because it is still true that at that moment in time, you achieved what you achieved. You could talk about it later, how yeah, you know, at that moment in time, I was on top of the world, and now I've had these setbacks. You can talk about that later, but it doesn't mean that your book is any less valid. Hopefully that's helpful. Okay, Beth, I am interested in learning about self publishing formatting for ebooks and editorial formatting software and programs. I am eager to learn and would love some advice. Okay, so there's a lot, you can definitely learn this yourself if you're interested in learning, which you are. Vellum is one of the biggest softwares that you can use. It does cost, it isn't free, but it is, does make that formatting really a lot easier. There's also lots of forums. A good friend, Mark Leslie, La Brevra, he shares a ton of information on self publishing. Go check out his site. Tell him I sent you because he also offers some consultations. So if you're interested in learning that and getting some advice on self publishing, he's amazing. I'm going to have him on my podcast soon. Go check him out. Okay, Swansea, I've got writer's block with plenty to write and to learn everything I can about building successful, building a successful career and eventually becoming a published author. Thank you for sharing that. I don't think there's a question in there other than you've got writer's block, but you want to be successful. There is actually, I did a YouTube short a long, a while back on writer's block because it's a free tool or it's a free video, go through it, figure out where your writer's block is coming from. It's called, is writer's block a myth? Because some writers believe it doesn't exist. I believe it exists because people believe it exists, um, because people feel it and you're blocked. But there's always a reason, there's always a good and valid reason why you're not writing, and I share a bunch of different reasons why that might be. If you can identify it, you can tackle it. There's lots of different reasons why you might not be writing, so without having a conversation, I'm not sure what it is, but if you truly want to get it done, go figure out what that writer's block, what, what you're calling writer's block. It's actually a group of things that just means that you're not writing and see if you can figure that piece out. Sometimes it's because you don't have the skills. Yet, or you're missing something and then you can go and get the skills. Sometimes it's because you're not sure what you want to write, and sometimes it's because you think you want to write and then you put it away and then you feel guilty for not writing it, but actually you're okay with not writing it and that's okay. It's okay to walk away from a book project sometimes too, definitely okay, and the test for that will be Is if you're wondering if you should actually finish that book, try putting it away, put it away for a little while. And then if you forgot about it, then you don't have to write it. But if it still bugs you and you wake up in the middle of the night wondering about it and wanting to do it, then go do it and get, get yourself that, get yourself those pieces that you might need to bridge. Okay, Grace, how do you deal with people trying to scam you? Oh, I think that was from before. That was from Jenny Nash, right? And, and she had been talking about people pirating her books or copying her books. And so she just shared that, you know, there is one case where she did a cease and desist or a lawsuit. There are some remedies, but in most cases, it's probably not worth the effort. People are going to know and just be out there, be your authentic self. And people want to buy from you. They don't want to buy a pirate. They want to buy from you. Okay. Thank you guys. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to show. Don't tell writing with me, Susie. Help me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you're writing, planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. Also visit SuzyVidori. com forward slash newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list. To stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training events and writing courses in my community. You're feeling brave. Check the show notes and send us a page of your writing that isn't quite where you want it to be yet for our show. Don't Tell Page review episodes. Remember, drop book, your writing is gonna open doors you haven't even thought of yet. I can't wait to help you Make it the absolute best to convene. You're feeling called to write that book. Keep going and I'll be right here cheering you on. See you again next week.