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Are you continuously seeking out new information, updated techniques, and evolving writing styles so you can stay relevant in the industry?
If not—you’re falling behind.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been writing for three minutes or 30 years. There is always more to learn. Writing is a lifelong craft. If you're not growing, you're shrinking. If you're not learning, you're becoming outdated. If you're unwilling to change, you’re the literary equivalent of Blockbuster in a Netflix world.
🚨 This is your wake-up call. 🚨
I’ve been writing for over 30 years, and you know what? I still learn something new every single day. Case in point: I just recently figured out the difference between “sat” and “set” when writing in third-person past tense.
Sat – Past tense of sit (e.g., He sat on the bench.)
Set – To put or place something (e.g., She set the book on the table.)
I had been using them interchangeably for years. When did I realize the difference? After my ninth book. That’s not a typo. Nine. Books. In.
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A writing coach is a person that helps you through the process of writing and revisng your novel, according to your goals. This person may or may not be a writer, editor or author, but they should have experience in the industry, preferably on how to write, edit and publish novels. It's important to note that most writing coaches are authors.
What Does a Writing Coach Do?
You can think of your writing coach as the life coach for your novel. This person will take you through every stage of the novel planning and writing process until you complete your novel and are either ready to find an agent or publisher or are ready to self-publish your book.
They Help You Set a Writing Schedule, Including a Completion Date
One of the biggest things a writing coach does is help you set a schedule for writing your novel. One of the biggest problems many new and established authors have is finding time to write. A writing coach can help evaluate your current schedule and lifestyle as well as your writing goals in order to help you find a novel completion timeline that works for you.
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Starting Your Fiction Book
I’ll start off by saying that I have a minimalist style when it comes to starting and writing novels. This means I do not write outlines or detailed notes prior to beginning any novel. I may do those things later in the process, but I don’t do it when I’m staring at a blank page that says: Chapter 1. It also goes without saying that the fastest way to start a book is to start writing it.
I also think the fastest way to never start or finish your novel is to bog yourself down with detailed character biographies, notes and plot outlines. After all, you’re going to think you did an amazing amount of work if you wrote 50 pages of character biographies that included primary and secondary emotions, height, weight, tattoos and disabilities along with their back-stories, primary driving forces and personality traits. The truth is that you didn’t write a word of your novel, and I believe that in most instances, those descriptors and features will come out in the text as you write.
Read more: How to Quickly Start Your Next Fiction Book/Manuscript/Writing Project
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When you’re writing a new novel, you can choose to do all the writing, drafting, editing, proofreading, polishing and formatting yourself, or you can choose to work with an editor. What you decide will depend on your budget and whether or not you feel editing services are something you want to utilize.
1. The Developmental Edit
Developmental edits are designed to find large flaws in your manuscript. This is typically where the editor goes through and points out things that are missing and things are unclear. It could be description. It could be a dropped main plot of a dropped subplot or a scene, section or chapter that you forgot to finish. When it comes to developmental edits, you want to get them done fairly early in the process. I recommend no later than after draft three. At this stage, your plots and subplots should be in and any description you're going to add should also be in the manuscript. I recommend getting developmental edits done at drafts two and three because you should be about halfway finished with the writing process, but you shouldn’t be so far along that major changes really send you into a tailspin and delay the publication of your work. It’s worth noting that these are one of the most expensive types of edits, but they can save you months when they are performed correctly and utilized correctly.
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If you have two books that you want to release at roughly the same time or two book ideas, you may be tempted to write them at the same time. While there are some good reasons to do this, there are also some downsides. Read more to learn if working on two books at the same time would be right for you.
Pros of Working on Two Books at the Same Time
There are a couple very valid reasons for working on two books at the same time. The biggest reason is that you’ll be able to control your release dates. If you want to release a book every two or three months, you can do that once you have multiple books finished, assuming you are self-publishing.
Read more: Pros and Cons Of Working on 2 Books at the Same Time