EP 128 Writers Helping Writers

Pencils&Lipstick podcast episode

with Becca Puglisi

How can I find another word for happy? What kind of conflict would a childhood of excess create? How can I describe a rural setting with real language?

Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman have the solution for you! Their Writers Helping Writers Descriptive Thesaurus Guides are best-selling writing guides that have helped authors and professionals alike. Today I talk with Becca Puglisi, one of the founders of the website Writers Helping Writers and One Stop For Writers as well as the co-author of the thesarus series.

Transcript Starts here:

Kat (00:14)

Welcome to the Pencils and Lipstick Podcast, a weekly podcast for writers. Grab a cup of coffee.

 

Kat (00:21)

Perhaps some paper and pen, and enjoy an interview with an author, a chat with a writing tool creator, perhaps a conversation with an editor or other publishing experts, as well as Cat spots on the writing in her own creative journey. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. Well, hopefully not actually cry, but you will probably learn something. And I hope you’ll be inspired to write because as I always say, you have a story. You should write it down. This is Pencils and Lipstick. Hello, all you writers. It is another episode of the Pencils and Lipstick Podcast. This is episode 128. And I am Kat Caldwell, your hostess with the Moses. And no, you don’t. Just get me. Today we have a lovely interviews. You with Becca Puglisi, who I find really interesting. And you wouldn’t think, well, I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought that there would be a market for what she and Angela Ackerman do. I mean, in the sense that I wouldn’t have thought to do it, except that there is a huge market for their thesaurus, and I use them as well. I wouldn’t have been smart enough to make them, let’s just say.

 

Kat (01:38)

But I am so glad that they make them so they create these awesome visoraces where you can let’s talk about the emotional one, where you open it up and you’re talking about different emotions and they describe what they are and what characteristics come with it and body movements come with it and what repercussions might come with it, how they might react your character or all that stuff. And they have The Occupation Thesaurus, they have the Conflict Thesaurus. I think that has two parts. We talk about all of them. They have been sort of in the writing business for a decade or more. And they also have two really useful websites, which one of them I knew about and the other one I did not know about. So One Stop For Writers.com is a really cool website. It has a lot of writing tools on there, and you have access to an interactive Visaris. Don’t tell me how the code behind that needed, but it’s pretty impressive how you can jump from one thing to the other and see if it integrates and you can put in your character. Anyway, Becca talks more about it in the interview.

 

Kat (02:56)

I think you’re going to want to check it out. It’s pretty fun to play with. So we go through how they came to this idea of the sarse is and how many they have and how they did it and all the research that goes through it. I think you’re really going to enjoy this show. Now, if you like the show, if you’re a new listener, would you please subscribe on whatever app it is that you are listening to that just helps you get every new show that comes out. The show comes out on Monday, but it will automatically download and it’ll pop up on your phone and show you there’s a new pencils and lipstick podcast episode that you can listen to. And if you could rate it, that would be amazing. And if you are new or not new, if you would share it with your friends, tell me what you’re listening to, what you like hearing. I would love to see you tag me in Facebook or Instagram or Twitter and I will respond to you. Let me know who you want to have on the show. We have tons and tons of people coming up.

 

Kat (04:06)

I’m actually working with the VA. And yes, finally trying to get my life together and myself together. I am such a writer brain. Everyone. Like, I will just sort of go with the flow and figure things out. And so many last minute things. I do so many things last minute. My poor editor Christie. I love you, girl. So I’m trying to get things, you know, set up for the summer and I’m actually accomplishing that. So we have episode set up through May and end of June at this point. But if you want somebody to come on the show, let me know and I will check them out and I’ll let you know and it’ll be a little bit later in the summer, but totally possible. The episode comes out every week and we talk to authors and publishing and writing experts alike. If you want to become a patron of the show, you can head over to Patreon. Compencilscorelipstick. And we will be having sponsors of the show as well. We are going to keep them private because I just find it really weird to have sponsors of the show that have nothing to do with writing or nothing to do with maybe marketing a creative business or really, I don’t know if we’ll ever have something outside of that.

 

Kat (05:34)

So if you are listening on an app that inserts commercials about CDs, I am so sorry. That’s not me. That is your app.

So today I wanted to talk to you guys before we get into the interview. And I’ll be pretty quick. I just want some thoughts out there. I picked up this book and now I’m not going to tell you the name of the book because really what it made me think about is first person versus third person. Now, this is a way of writing. First person is writing directly from the point of view of the character. So it’s I write. I woke up and got dressed. I went downstairs and saw that Billy was laying pass out on the floor. Whatever. So you’re really walking in the shoes of the main character and seeing everything from their eyes. And usually you only see what’s unfolding from their eyes. You don’t typically get a view from anyone else. Sometimes in certain books, they’ll switch that view per chapter. So you might get the first person view from one of the couple, one half of the couple, I guess, and then the view from the other half of the couple.

 

Kat (06:57)

And usually it’s in first person both times. I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule. So here’s the thing. First person is pretty popular. It is one of the easier ways to write. And I say that quote unquote because as the author, you can really immerse yourself in the character. You can really kind of get into their view of the world and really know that character really well. It’s easy to write and yet it’s difficult to write well. So one of the biggest problems with first person and one of the reasons a lot of people stay away from first person. And I will admit if I know that it’s in first person, I typically won’t pick up the books traditionally published or indie published. Now, I have picked up other books. People have suggested the books and I’ve picked them up and they were pretty good. Then I’ve picked up some other books suggested or not. And here’s the issue that happens. It can get really overwhelming seeing everything from the point of view of the one character. And what really happens a lot of times is just constant dialogue. One person said, it’s like being locked in the closet with the main character and they just never shut up because they’re not only talking to you, but you hear their thoughts.

 

Kat (08:30)

And so they’re analyzing constantly and you hear their thought process constantly. So you’re reading it constantly, and then you’re reading the dialogue that’s happening between the main character and the other characters in the book. Now, somebody who writes first person really well is Kurt Vonnegut. I always have to think about how to say that last name, Kurt Vonnegut. He writes it really well. This is not a new way to write. A lot of short stories are written in first person, so I just want to put out the warning now. It’s perfectly fine. I know some of you out there are getting like on pins and needles because you want to defend first person point of view. That’s fine. A lot of people I’m sure it’s not like I’ve picked up every single book in the world. It’s totally possible that I’ve only ever picked up the books that are tiring. It’s totally possible. This one book that I’m reading, it’s actually an audio and it is a lot. It is tiring. It leaves most of the scene to me to imagine half the time that’s just almost like these floating bodies because it’s just constant dialogue, like a lot.

 

Kat (09:55)

I mean, the author does throw in sometimes they’re standing in specific spots or whatever, but it is a lot of dialogue. And so, you know, it could just be me and that one other reviewer. But if you do like to write in first person and I have written in first person. I do my short stories, and I’m not saying that I do them super well either. I just think it’s one of those pods that we need to be careful with. And the best way to continue learning and continue being aware of the pitfalls of a POV is to read some of the greats, right? Neil Gaiman writes a couple stories from a first person POV, Kurt Vonnegut. And if it’s a really well written story or book, you actually don’t really even notice what POV it’s in, you’d just fall into the book. And so being aware of when you really start, like, your brain almost pulls back from the story and you become super aware of the fact that it’s in first person POV. Like, that is when you know something is kind of happening. So if you do write in that genre, I would encourage you to read people who you consider doing it really well.

 

Kat (11:25)

And I would encourage you with your beta readers to ask them, is there any point in which you almost feel tired of the story where you feel almost overwhelmed of this character’s description and talking? Especially because you can give a lot of inner dialogue and because we like our main characters and we want them to be sympathetic. A lot of times the inner dialogue is about making them funny or kind of like pedestalish, like better than the average person. So you’re kind of making up with maybe what’s going on in the plot, maybe the relationship that they’re having with these people. This book is all about she’s analyzing her friends and she’s always thinking about how much she loves her friends, even if she’s like telling the reader about their flaws. Right. And it’s interesting and she’s funny as a main character. And yet because my brain has pulled out because it’s like, oh, my word, move on with the story. Like, I want to hear what’s happening with the other characters and not just constant analyzing because my brain has pulled out, I started thinking, well, actually, if you don’t get along with this one person because they are selfish and because they’re acting the way that you claim you the character main character, claiming you’re really impressive person to love them anyway.

 

Kat (13:09)

So I think we have this. One of the pitfalls is that we almost overcompensate and making that character really lovable. Now that can happen in third person POV. Don’t get me wrong, we a lot of times make them just like this Golden Child almost, right? Because we like them so much. We really want people to like our main character, otherwise they won’t read the book. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about that first person POV very popular. Some people do it really well, and it is one of the easiest ways to get into writing. But that crutch of inner dialogue and outer dialogue and you thinking that you’re immersing the reader into it more, you can actually be doing the opposite. So just be aware of that doesn’t mean that you need to change the way that you write, but be aware of that as you’re writing it. Asking your beta readers, is there any time that just got to be too much or like you wish that there was more details? Maybe in a different way, not just as inner dialogue. It can’t always come from the inner dialogue. Right. And being aware of how people think.

 

Kat (14:24)

We don’t constantly think, oh, let’s talk about kids. Oh, they’re doing this and this, and they’re kind of irritating. Oh, but I love her, though, being aware of how humans think. So we talk about dialogue. And again, one of the great places to go for help with your dialogue is dialoguedoctor.com Jeff Elkin and Laura Humme are really great over there, and they have a podcast, so check them out. Dialogue Doctor podcast. But outer dialogue. You also need to study inner dialogue. There are rules about it, and sometimes we break those rules correctly, and sometimes we break them just because we don’t actually know how to follow them. So there’s a difference there. So if you want to learn a bit more, they also tackle inner dialogue over@dialogdoctor.com I would highly encourage you if you are writing in the first person POV, to study dialogue and to study inner dialogue and then to study how to not use that constantly as the only way to tell the reader what’s happening and to read other people and some of the greats on how they use first person pub. So I tried not to make that a rant.

 

Kat (15:43)

I hope that that was okay with you guys. Just some thoughts that I had. I think that it’s good for us to always sort of analyze and look at things, and that’s how our own writing gets better, to see what doesn’t work and not just like emotionally. Okay, I’m not connecting with that story, but actually figure out what is it that isn’t working between me as a reader and that story and then come back to your own writing and be like, okay, how do I avoid that and whatever that is? So just remember, you have one more week to sign up for the Story Clarity workshop. It is this coming Saturday. We are opening up the creative writing community as well. In May, we have some amazing people coming in. We are going to do more workshops, more brainstorming. We have marketing. Every Friday we are going to do a little bit of editing. We have some great people coming in to talk with us and workshop with us like Amadesi, Nick Thacker, Lauren Davis. We have Jay Thorn coming and a couple of others who are going to talk to us. We’re really focusing on kind of the mindset of the indie author and the business part well, and also the writing part.

 

Kat (17:09)

So hey, there you go. We’re focusing on everything if you join the Story Clarity workshop, which is not free, but your payment can go towards joining the creative writing community. So it is a six month membership. You can renew it as many times as you want, but that is in order to really get to know each other, to really have a safe environment in which we can share our stories, our writings, workshop them, get feedback from them, get our writing Sprints in, get our marketing done, learn from each other. I think this Friday we’re going to focus on newsletters and marketing and especially for those who are newer at it. So we do lots of things. We do all the things we write together, we workshop together, we learn together so you can find all the links in the show notes. And if you don’t want to join the creative writing community, we also have just the Creative Writing Code writing membership, where you can just have access to the Sprints. We have 20 hours a week, every week of Sprints. That’s a lot of writing that you can get done. We have them across the board on the hours.

 

Kat (18:23)

We’ll be adding a few more after the summer. We added in a Sunday and an evening to try to find those of you who have to get back to work after the whole Covet thing. So there are new hours. I think there’s something for everyone. And join us this Saturday at the Story Clarity Workshop, if you want. The link is in the show notes, and we’ll have another one in about six weeks from now. So without further Ado, let’s get to the interview and learn about Becca Puglissi and Angela Ackerman how they came up with this idea of the writing the Sarsis.

 

Speaker 2 (19:08)

Becca Puglisi lives in sunny South Florida, where she can be found beaching with her family, baking in the kitchen or reading on the couch. As an author, Becca loves nothing more than coming up with new content for helpers writing, helpers descriptive the SARS collection, including the best selling Emotion The SARS, A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression. She is also cofounder of One Stop for Writers, a unique online resource containing many helpful tools, craft tutorials, and the entire hyperlinked insertable Thesaurus collection to help writers elevate their storytelling.

 

Kat (19:46)

Hello, everyone. This week I have with me a very special guest that I’m excited about. I have with me, Becca Puglisi. Hello, Becca. How are you doing?

 

Becca (19:54)

Hi there. Thanks for having me.

 

Kat (19:56)

Thanks for coming on. I’m excited to have you because as I said before we started recording, I recommend your books to everyone and we’ll get into why and what kind of books they are. But first, could you tell everyone a little bit about you, where you’re from?

 

Becca (20:13)

Yeah, I’m actually in Florida. I was born and raised here. I was born in Orlando and got married, moved to Georgia, moved back here, moved to New York, moved back here. So that’s where I am. I’m very excited because it’s not, like, sweaty today. Like all year long. It’s hot. Everybody who lives here, they love the weather because it’s always warm. And I’m like, dude, just give me a change. Can I wear a sweater? I’m a little jealous of your scarf right now because I had the whole wardrobe when I lived in New York, and now I can’t use it all. But you take the good with the bad.

 

Kat (20:48)

True. That is true. I am loving living in Virginia right now because of the seasons, but it’s gone crazy. I don’t know about Florida, but we got, like, freezing temperatures last week.

 

Becca (21:01)

And then it’s warm.

 

Kat (21:02)

And now it’s cold again. And I’m like, please make up your mind. It’s ridiculous this year, but it’s not the freezing weather of New York. The New Yorkers can keep that one. So I wanted to have you on because you have this amazing collaboration with Angela Ackerman. You guys have, I guess, the writers thesaurus is that how you called the whole series? Because there’s, like a ton of them? Yes.

 

Becca (21:29)

It’s the writers helping writers descriptive to source collection. It’s like the official title, which we hardly ever use because it feels a little pretentious, but that’s really what it is. It’s a collection of books that each cover a different area of writing. A lot of it is descriptive writing and just telling people how you can show that information instead of telling it. So how do you show your character’s emotions? How do you learn about and reveal their emotional wound? How do you share their personality through their traits? Each one kind of focuses on a different area.

 

 (22:00)

Yeah.

 

Kat (22:00)

You guys have quite a few, over a dozen, I think, at this point. How did you guys get into this? So how did you and Angela meet and how did this idea come to fruition?

 

Becca (22:10)

Yes, it’s actually a really cool story. We both started writing at the same time. She’s in Canada, by the way, so we’re, like, very far apart. And we both started writing at the same time. And we both joined Critique Circle, which is an online critique group where you go and you can submit, like, portions of your story, and other people will read it and tell you what they think, and then you read theirs and you tell them what you think. And we found each other out of the thousands of people on the site and love each other’s work. And so we started as critique partners, and we did that for gosh for years. I actually was going to take a break to have my first child. I was going to take a break from writing, and she sent me an email and she’s like, listen, if we’re ever going to publish, we have to have an online presence. We have to have some kind of something online. So I want to do a blog, and it would be so much easier if we did it together. Why don’t we do it together? And I’m like six months pregnant.

 

Becca (23:01)

I’m enormous, and my whole life is about to change. I’m like, okay, well, not the greatest timing, but she was totally right, and it was absolutely the right decision to go in together and kind of share the load. So we started our blog in 2008. It was called The Bookshelf Muse back then. And then we’ve since changed it to Writers Helping Writers. So, yeah, we’ve been blogging then for 14 years.

 

 (23:23)

Wow.

 

Becca (23:23)

On lots of different areas of writing. And when we started it, we were trying to figure out what the focus was going to be and kind of what we were going to be writing about. And we both were obviously very interested in writing. So we thought, OK, well, you know, let’s do topics about writing, which is kind of funny because it’s, like, not really a great decision for fiction writers. It was kind of I call it like our beautiful mistake because we really should have been focusing on content that would bring in potential fiction readers. But we were writing about what we were excited about. And it started with this list that we had created when we were critique partners, where we were both seeing repetitions in our own writing, where my characters were always shrugging their shoulders and frowning and shuffling their feet. That was like they were constantly doing that. I could not think of any other way to show those emotions. And so I got frustrated, and I’m like, there’s nothing out there that can help me with this. So I started keeping lists. Okay, here’s what I can write about when the characters mad, and here’s what I can write about when they’re sad.

 

Becca (24:21)

And Angela and I then started kind of working on it together and building up these lists. And we were just at that point using it ourselves in our own writing. And she said we should blog about it. Like, every week we’ll just do a different emotion. We’ll call it the emotions Thesaurus. And people will if they like it, then they’ll come back the next week to see what’s new. And maybe we’ll get repeat customers that way. And we’re like, oh, great, this sounds like a great idea. And we started blogging about the emotion thesaurus and it just blew up. Like, everybody who read the posts were clamoring.

 

Kat (24:54)

Yeah, we need more.

 

Becca (24:55)

And can you do this in motion? And are you going to put it all into a book? I really like to have this in book form. And it just kind of took off at the blog. And we thought, wow, this is like a universal problem that people have. It was a problem in our own writing where we know how to show emotion in kind of fresh ways, and it’s a real problem for everybody at some point, writers have to kind of figure that out, how they’re going to show their characters emotions in a way that’s really going to connect with readers and be really effective at conveying that emotion. And so we decided, you know, everybody saying they really want a book, maybe we should write a book. So we took that information and we expanded it. We wrote it, published it ourselves in 2012. And that was the beginning. It just took off.

 

Kat (25:39)

That’s amazing.

 

Becca (25:39)

We did really well. And so we decided, well, what else do we need help with on our writing? Started looking at what’s my biggest problem area, because that’s how we decide on what we’re going to write about our own writing. And, like, where are we struggling? Because we’ve seen that so many things are common to different writers. So if we can focus on what we’re struggling with, maybe we’ll hit on things that other people are struggling with, too. So the next ones we did where we did one on negative traits and one on positive traits, talk about where different traits come from and how you can show those instead of just coming out and saying, my characters like this. And that’s really where it all started. We have nine books now. We have actually 17 thesauruses that we’ve written at the blog. Not all of them are like, not all of them are really suited for a whole week. So we kind of take that case by case.

 

Kat (26:29)

Some of them are a couple of volumes. So the conflict thesaurus two volumes and three volumes.

 

Becca (26:39)

It’S going to be two. There were so many conflict scenarios to write about, and it was really hard to narrow the field. And we had so many. And we thought, well, we’ll just do two volumes for this one. So the front matter is a little bit different for each of those. One of them focuses on the purpose of conflict in characterization and how we really use it for a character arc and driving our characters forward in the story toward the choices that we want them to make that they need to make in order to grow and change. And then the other one focuses on how conflict contributes to plot and how it’s important in story structure and scene structuring and things like that.

 

Kat (27:14)

Yeah.

 

Becca (27:15)

The second one is actually not out yet. It’s coming out this fall, but the other one came out in October. Perfect. That’s the latest one that we have. And we did do a set with the treat thesaurus books. One is split up into negative traits and one is positive traits. And then we also did a set for the settings of sources where one is urban settings and one is rural settings.

 

Kat (27:35)

Yes.

 

Becca (27:35)

And those talk about different all the different what you can see, taste, smell here at those places. You can write your descriptions in a multi sensory way.

 

Kat (27:42)

Yes. And one suggestion that somebody from my group has is they now need a historical.

 

Becca (27:51)

We get that a lot. We have had a lot of people, but that’s a really big task. The research involved in all the different historical areas that people would want to write about. And the problem with it is that it’s not set. It’s different depending on you change a decade and things have changed drastically or you move an hour away. And things are totally different in the different regions. And so there’s a lot of challenges with that one. I think we probably are not pointing.

 

Kat (28:23)

I think it’s mostly the writers wanting you to do the work for them. I don’t want to do this research.

 

Becca (28:29)

I don’t blame them. Oh, gosh.

 

Kat (28:32)

So what was it like? I mean, you started one out as a blog post, but the other ones, I would assume, included a lot of research, just trying to figure out how to categorize them, how to find all those just traits, positive and negative traits. I’d be like, oh, there’s five and six. I don’t know. How did you fill up a whole book on you have the occupation? What was that process like?

 

Becca (28:55)

Yeah, we start with an idea, and then we come up with a list of possibilities, the possible topics that could go into that, thesaurus and we just list literally as many as we can. And then we go through when we start trimming out, all these are too similar or we’ve got repeats here. This one is not really like the emotions. It was hard because things like attraction, I feel attracted to somebody, but attraction is not actually an emotion. It’s something a little bit different. There’s always, like, a process that we have to go through of narrowing the list to where it’s ones that are really burned, the right to be in the book, they’re not too close to something else. And we’ve kind of covered all the really important ones. And then we make a template of what we want to cover, and we try to think, okay, what do writers need in relation to this topic? What can we share that is going to give them what they need in order to write this thing better? And then we just draft out a couple of sample entries to see if it works. And sometimes some of the fields were like, this is going to be the same on everyone.

 

Becca (30:01)

So we’ll get rid of that. And, oh, I really think it would be helpful if we included this. And it’s really just a completely joint effort of one person kind of takes the lead on creating something, and then the other person starts editing it and tweaking it, and then we get together and we both go back and forth until we’re both happy with the final product. That’s how it works for all of them.

 

Kat (30:21)

And so you guys have been working together for over a decade then?

 

Becca (30:24)

Yes, in two different countries, 2008. Yeah.

 

Kat (30:27)

Wow. That seems to me like that’s pretty unique that two people who live so far apart that you’re getting these books out together in the relationship and the blog, that’s pretty cool that you are able to connect and continue that relationship.

 

Becca (30:47)

Yeah. I think it’s a lot more common now with all of the Zoom and Google meet and I mean, so many different ways that you can connect and actually have meetings online. Even before COBIT, it was becoming much more common. When we started, it was all email. We were just using email back and forth. Here’s a Doc and you Mark it up and then I’ll Mark it up and that’s challenging because I have a Mac and she has a desktop. So a lot of times things don’t totally translate back and forth and we have to fix stuff. And it was a challenge at the beginning, but it’s weird. We never even thought, this is not normal, not the way most people would do it. We’re like, this is what we want to do and it’s a good idea.

 

Kat (31:30)

That’s really cool, though. I mean, the Internet has its good point where you can meet somebody that you never would have met if it were just normal settings. So even though the blog was taking off when you first came up with this book, I assume that it wasn’t enough to get the book out there to everyone. So how did the marketing for that go? And once everyone who wanted it and knew about it bought it, how did you decide that you were going to continue to market it out elsewhere?

 

Becca (32:02)

I guess Angela is like, we each have our strength, which is one of the reasons our partnership works, because she’s really good at some things that I don’t have a clue about. And then I’m very good at things that she’s not very good at. So we filled the gaps and she is a marketing genius, in my opinion. She will argue that and be very annoyed that I would say it, but she just has an act for it and she knows intuitively what’s going to work. And so we decided at the very beginning that we were just going to be very grassroots. We were going to market through relationships. So we have this blog reply to every comment. She would share a lot of stuff. She’s on social media everywhere, talking to people, answering questions. People will send us questions and we feel them. And so it’s been a very relational and so people feel like they know us and because they’ve spoken to us and they’ve had conversations with us and that has built a level of loyalty in our customers, which has been really what you want when you’re trying to sell a product and you’re trying to grow a business and a brand, especially with our brand being writers, helping writers.

 

Becca (33:06)

And it’s very important that we were really helping people and being able to talk to people, which it does take a lot of time, but it has paid off because that’s a lot of the success that we have had. It’s all due to word of mouth. I mean, that’s really how we have grown. When we first sold the book, we had a base already at the blog. We did a big launch, seeing extravaganza that Angela put together with prizes and sign ups and all different kinds of things. And people bought it and then they got it and they were excited about it. And so they would take it to the writing group, like you were saying, and they would say, oh, my gosh, I got this book and you have to get it. It really spread that way. And we’ve just been very deliberate in the time since then, again, to just keep building relationships and to keep as in touch as we can be. It has become harder and harder as we have grown, obviously, and have more responsibilities. It’s still just her and I, we have brought on somebody to help with stuff at the blog, and she’s been wonderful.

 

Becca (34:04)

We need to branch out a little bit more and be better about sharing the load. But it is hard. But that’s really how we did. And again, she has headed up all of the marketing and just done a really great job of coming up with really interesting launch ideas for us, things, ways to celebrate different milestones. The emotion of the source is going to be ten in May.

 

Kat (34:28)

Okay.

 

Becca (34:28)

So she’s got this whole thing prepared for how we’re going to celebrate that. And she has a lot of resources on the blog to help people help writers with marketing, because she recognizes I’ve done a lot here and a lot of it has worked really well and writers really struggle. It’s a specific skill set that definitely not everyone has. I know I don’t have it.

 

Kat (34:49)

Yes, maybe a marketing facility.

 

Becca (34:53)

Maybe. But if you go to the blog and you search for marketing, there’s a lot of information. And we have, I think, a whole page just with marketing information for writers because it kind of goes against the writer green. I think for most writers to put yourself out there and really be selling it’s just not something that most of us are comfortable with. So she’s got a lot of good resources that can help.

 

Kat (35:19)

Absolutely. Well, we will definitely have the links in the show notes. This website has so much information, basically, like over a decade of just information of how you guys have continued to help writers, which is awesome because these books are I’m sure they’re ebooks as well.

 

Becca (35:36)

Right.

 

Kat (35:36)

But they’re kind of nice to have it’s. Print books. So what do you think? Has anything changed, or has it changed from marketing in 2012 to now, like in ten years? So many things have changed in the indie author, and I mean, this is, I guess, more nonfiction, right. More than fiction, but it’s a different size. What has stayed the same and what has changed with that? Right.

 

Becca (36:02)

Well, what’s funny is when we first started, it was all about blogging. You had to have a blog and you had to do certain things to make successful. And now there’s a shift in a lot of people thinking about that because there’s so many blogs now that are writing focused. So it’s kind of the market is full there in terms of people you need to writing blog. Well, here’s all of these choices. So people are doing lots of different things now. They’re doing podcasts, they’re doing blogs. They’re using YouTube as their main route to get to people because YouTube is so insanely popular now. So there’s a lot of newer ways that people are connecting. And if somebody was getting started or just starting to build out their brand, I would definitely say to look into the newer techniques because those are working. I mean, we have people who are on TikTok, we figured out how to make TikTok, worked for them to sell other books. I have no idea.

 

Kat (36:55)

Yeah, I’m totally into that.

 

Becca (36:58)

Right. As my daughter would tell everybody that’s I think the biggest change, it’s just the method for finding people and for building your audience. It’s going to be different than it was back then.

 

Kat (37:07)

Yeah, that’s definitely true because especially your blog. I think Jane Friedman’s, blog writer Sigis, has been there since the beginning. They’re very established. And like you said, there’s pretty much everything that you might need to know starting out on a blog. We always have this conversation in our group to be like, do I need a blog? Do I not need a blog? And forth constantly. And it’s interesting how so many times writers end up writing about writing and that, like you said, doesn’t pull in the fiction, it pulls in the office.

 

Becca (37:43)

Right. I know. It’s crazy. I mean, that totally worked for us because we ended up in a totally different place than we were envisioned, but a place where we found a gap that needed to be filled. It worked for us. Yes. It’s hard for I know fiction writers really struggle because you have to find areas of things to write about that are going to connect with your audience. And that requires you to know your brand. So you have to have a really clear view of what your brand is, of what you offer and who you are writing for. And once you have figured all of that out, then you can kind of narrow your focus to things that are going to pull in the people that are going to want to read your kind of book. I know Kristen Lam does a lot of branding information. She was kind of way out ahead of the game back when we were first starting out, too. She was talking about branding and social media and all the stuff that we were all kind of like, oh, you know, this is all new and we don’t know what to do.

 

Becca (38:40)

But she’s a really good resource for branding yourself and figuring out who your audience is. And she’s a big proponent of find out what the little niche things that are specific to your book that other people are interested in. Those are the people who are going to want to read your kind of book because it’s got the things that they’re interested in. Maybe it can be something silly, like crocheting or knitting a cozy mystery, and that’s part of it. You tap into those communities online, and then they want to read your book because it’s about the things that they’re excited about. That’s awesome.

 

Kat (39:12)

Yeah, for sure.

 

Becca (39:14)

Just lots of different ideas. She’s actually a really good person for branding.

 

Kat (39:17)

Oh, wow. This is turning into a great marketing and branding. Everyone’s going to be exciting writing down their notes, because, as you said, we’re not that great at this. We like to write our stories, and we wish people would just automatically find out there’s a new book in the world. So have you guys ever gotten any feedback on how people have used your thesaurus? Does anyone ever tell you maybe it saved their life on their character? I don’t know. Something like that. Do you have any stories to share?

 

Becca (39:47)

Yeah. It’s actually really surprising. Like the things that because we know that it’s helping writers. We get lots of comments from people saying that it has kind of opened the door to them understanding their character. Like the emotional wounds of sores the front matter. It breaks down the whole wounding process, and it’s based on psychology of what happens to real people. So if you can figure out that process and then apply it to your character, they become really real and authentic. And people reading relate to the character because even if it’s not the same winning event, they recognize kind of the journey. Something bad happens and you start to doubt yourself. You start to believe something that’s not true about yourself or the world or how things work. And then you start building up emotional shielding in the form of laws and biases and dysfunctional behaviors that are meant to protect you from that thing happening again. And this is where your character is at the start of the story. They’ve gone through this whole process and they’re wounded. They’re broken in some way. And so now the rest of your story is going to be about how they overcome, like coming to the realization that, oh, this isn’t something that’s good, that I’ve adopted this flaw or this habit.

 

Becca (40:55)

This is holding me back, keeping me from getting what is going to make me happy. And so I have to change it and fix it. And that’s how they end up at the end of the story, completing their goals and being fulfilled. So that one in particular. A lot of people have said light bulb. Like, I figured out my character because I was able to figure out that whole process.We’ve had people with most of our books saying this has helped me in a very specific way. But what has been really most rewarding is hearing ways the books are being used, like, in ways that we never anticipated or intended. I mean, for the emotional source, we had a special Ed teacher who contacted us and said, I work with autistic students who don’t recognize emotions. They can’t read other people’s emotions. And so we use the emotion of the source to show them this is what it looks like. If someone is doing these things, it means they’re angry, or it means they’re frustrated, or it means they’re sad and helping them on a basic life level to be able to better communicate with people and understand people’s emotions and be able to read.

 

Kat (41:53)

So that’s really good situations.

 

Becca (41:54)

That was incredibly rewarding. We had somebody who was visually impaired who said that the same thing. Like, they have never been able to see what grief looks like on another person or what happiness looks like. They know some of it because of their own bodies, but they’ve never been able to see what it looks like. And just having a breakdown of the different physical cues really help them to be able to visualize it and to be able to write their own character.

 

Kat (42:20)

Oh, wow.

 

Becca (42:21)

We also had a psychologist who said that she uses certain pages from the emotional dystrophy with her eating disorder group to recognize triggers. When you start feeling this, when you start seeing these symptoms, this emotion is coming on, and this is your trigger that’s going to cause you to do things that you know you don’t want to do. So see it coming and recognize the signs, and then you know where you’re headed and you can take the steps. It’s just stuff like that that had no idea that it could be applied that way and actually help people in their own personal lives in the real world. It’s incredibly rewarding.

 

Kat (42:59)

Yeah, that’s amazing. And I think the more you write, the more you need different characters, obviously. So you need them all to have a different flaw, worldview mindset, whatever. There’s, like, so many ways to say that.

 

Becca (43:15)

Right.

 

Kat (43:15)

But you’re right. There’s like, this flaw, something that’s happened in the past that makes them guarded. And, man, it’s hard sometimes to figure out once you use, like, all your family members up and yourself cycling through, like, there can’t be any more emotional wounds in the world, and yet there are many. And what I love about these books is you don’t go down that Google rabbit hole that is so dark.

 

Becca (43:42)

That was the hardest one to write the emotional wounds because it’s basically 120 traumatic events that are real you know, happened to real people and they’re carrying them around with them every day and trying to research them and write about what they do now because of the things that have happened. And it was exhausting. We actually had to we had to push back our guns and we had to schedule more time when we were drafting because we found that we couldn’t just turn out an entry or two a day. We really had to kind of take our time and take a break in between because it was really heavy just recognizing that these are real things that real people deal with in the weight of needing to get it right and not misrepresent any of that, which is hard when you’re writing it for fiction purposes. We want to get the real psychology out there. But it also needs to apply in kind of a more dramatic way.

 

Kat (44:37)

Right.

 

Becca (44:38)

There are going to be things that you do in fiction that probably aren’t as realistic as we would get people to vet some of the entries that we write just to make sure that we get the details right. And a lot of times they’ll go, well, yeah, this is possible, but often is that going to happen? And I’m like, I know, but it’s for fiction. You have to kind of put those out there ideas in there.

 

Kat (44:57)

That’s true, though. I mean, we write stories. I think Lisa Crohn talks about this. We read stories to try to learn or how we should react or what we should do if the case were to happen. That right. But I think it’s an amazing tool to have, especially with empathy, like if you don’t know what that person might do because your childhood is great and that’s awesome if it was nothing too traumatic has happened to you. You can delve into this without, like you said, going down these kind of terrible stories and getting bogged down by it because you’re trying to write a creative story that’s fiction and probably an uplifting ending, but at the same time, you kind of realize your own problems.

 

Becca (45:48)

Oh, no doubt. We have some interesting conversations when we were writing a book where she would say, I think I figured something out about myself writing the century. Or I would say, I think I figured out somebody else’s moon who’s in my life and does a certain thing. I think now I know why they’re doing that. Yeah. It was very therapeutic in a lot of ways.

 

Kat (46:09)

Yes. And not to say like emotional wounds just for listeners who might be new. They don’t have to be traumatic. Right. They can sort of manifest in the adult life as something. I mean, I think of our generation. There was probably at one point our mothers or grandmothers called a fat. And so then if you’re writing Ya, maybe that manifests in something else, but it helps you to understand why they’re reacting and then how they should then react always. Like you said, almost not going over the top all the time, which sometimes fiction writers can do, but making sure that it’s like those little hints like how are they reacting to food? Why are they getting mad when their pants don’t fit? And it’s all triggering back. It’s kind of a silly example, but still it doesn’t have to be a giant thing.

 

Becca (46:56)

Right. It is a good example because emotional wounds aren’t like the big melodramatic kind of wounds that we think about someone being murdered or someone being attacked, things like that. Sometimes it’s things that happen very often, not all the time by any means, but very often in childhood, things that happen just repeatedly. If you’re neglected, it may not be huge neglect. You’re not starving, but you’re not giving enough food to eat. And that happens over and over and over again over time. It’s going to cause you to do things differently because you are going to be sensitive about that, and you’re going to have to take steps yourself at an age when you shouldn’t have to be thinking about that. And other things take a backseat. And those things start to be impacted because you don’t have enough to eat. And it’s things like that where a lot of times it’s a repeated thing that happens over and over that turns into this formative event. I don’t know that you would call that kind of situation traumatic, but I would call it formative.

 

Kat (47:50)

Yeah.

 

Becca (47:51)

And that’s really what emotional wounds do, is that they transform us and our characters. They change us from the person that we were into the person that we are who has experienced this and is now living basically trying to keep it from happening again or that same kind of vulnerability from happening because nobody wants to be vulnerable, right?

 

Kat (48:09)

Yeah, exactly. And it helps you write the story in a way that drops those hints and the reader is like, why is she always grabbing a grain Oliver bar until you get to the climax? And she’s like figuring out she has to deal with her emotional wound, never being fed when her mother was always out or whatever, instead of it just being like, here’s this person and here’s the climax and here we are. You really help us do that. But I think that also taking that Visaris and tearing it up with, like, the conflict, thesaurus and finding the right occupation for your character, all these things can be linked together because they’re actually more important than sometimes we think they are when we start writing.

 

Becca (48:56)

Yes, I agree 100% that everything that we know and learn about our character really should have. It should be part of a bigger picture. It shouldn’t be random. It should, first of all, it should come from somewhere, but it also needs to fit in with the other pieces. You talk about occupations, and that one is not as heavy as a lot of our other topics because it’s occupations. But when you start thinking about why might a person what makes them choose a certain occupational, sometimes it comes down to wounding events. Sometimes it comes down to flaws that they have that they don’t want to accentuate and to keep having to see people, to see that. And then sometimes it’s influencers in their lives who pushed them towards a certain occupation that may be perfectly good, but it’s not really something that they’re excited about or particularly gifted on. It sometimes comes out of a fear that they’re avoiding certain things, are never going to do that job because it requires them to take risks or to be a leader or to be around other people. There’s all kinds of reasons why. So if your story doesn’t require a certain job, some are very easy, like Rich a lot.

 

Becca (50:01)

Stark, he’s got to be an archeologist. But if your story, if you have lots of options, pick one that does something else in a story that provides characterization, that ties back to backstory, that is really part of who your character is and has a real reason why. So that’s something that we talk a lot about when we’re writing and we’re coming up with ideas for our books is where it fits in overall, the characterization, because so much of our books, they’re not all about characters. I mean, settings are not about characters, but you can use settings to characterize. Also, the character setting can say a lot about who the character is and how they interact with the setting. Can say a lot about who the character is. So characters, I believe I’ve said this before that good stories are created by good characters. It’s the characters that make a story really good. So we have to get the characters right. And so tying whatever we’re doing into characterization and how we convey that element of the character is super important. We actually created at one step for writers, a character builder, because characterization is hard.

 

Becca (51:05)

When you start looking at all of these things, like, I have my character’s emotional wound, and then the lie that they believe because of that, and now all their character traits, they come out of it and their emotions and how they react to things, all of this, I have to know it, and it has to tie together. And so people get overwhelmed. I mean, when they’re trying to think of characterization and creating a character, how much do I research? What do I need to research? How much of it is really important, how do I organize it all? So we created this tool that takes you through each of the areas of characterization, and you can explore different aspects. So you have the backstory part, and we have the emotional Olympus chorus, all of the entries, and you can look through all the winning events and see which ones might be making sense for your character. And then you can based on what you choose, it tells you what lies that character might believe because of it. Then you can choose personality, character laws, and attributes that might come out of that wounding event or might come from other things that you’re exploring.

 

Becca (51:57)

And it takes you through every aspect of characterization. And based on what you choose, it creates a personalized character arc for your character that basically says, here’s what happened to your character. Here’s what they believe. Now, here are the problems that they are having because of it. And now this is a story goal that you have chosen, but that the character has chosen because they think it’s going to fulfill them in some way. But their fatal flaw keeps getting in the way. And so this is what they’re going to have to overcome throughout the course of the story so that they can be fulfilled and achieve their story goal. So it’s really cool because it takes all of the pieces and it organizes them in a way that is manageable. And then it pulls the ones that you deem important. And it creates this character arc that changes for every character. Whatever it is you choose, it’s specific to that character in your story.

 

Kat (52:41)

That’s amazing.

 

Becca (52:42)

That one, actually. It’s really pretty cool. We both have used that to build characters from scratch and super excited because it works for any process. It works wherever you want to start. If you don’t know anything about your character, but you know that your story is about a character who has to stop the bad guys, well, you start with that motivation and then you work backwards. What kind of character traits with somebody picking this goal might they have? Where might those character traits have come from? What kind of wounding event? So you can start anywhere in the process and kind of work back and forward because they all fit together.

 

Kat (53:15)

That’s pretty cool. I’m going to have to check that out. That is over at your other website, One Stop Providers. Can you tell us a little bit about why you started another one after having success with we have the blog.

 

Becca (53:30)

And it has all of our sources on there. There’s 17, some of them published, some of them not. And then we had actually a developer come to us and say, I’m a developer, but I’m also a fiction writer. I use your sources all the time. I’d love to create a database like where all the sources are there, and they’re cross referenced and they’re hyperlinked just to make it like all your stuff in one spot. And we thought, wow, that would be great. So we joined with him and created one spot for writers thinking it was just going to be like Arthur sources and some worksheets and a few little things that could help. And just as we had got into it, we realized, oh my gosh, we could make this then we can make that. And writers need this. Basically, one step for writers takes the information in our books, and it creates tools that uses that information. Like in the character builder. It has the emotional wounds. It has all of the character traits from our books. It has the occupations. You can choose your character’s occupation. It’s all kind of related. So that’s what we created that one.

 

Becca (54:33)

Initially, it was just to create an easier way for people to access all of our content. But then we started thinking, let’s make it more practical and actually create some resources that are not out there using the information that we’ve created, which we know people like and are using. And it has grown over time. We have the character builder, we have a scene, a story mapping tool, so you can map out the structure of your story from start to finish. We have actually a storytellers roadmap that takes people from story idea to publishable novel, like, from planning through writing, through revisiting. That’s the latest thing, because people were saying, gosh, there’s so much good stuff here, but I just don’t know what to do. I have this idea, and I don’t know how to write it. I don’t know how to turn into a book. And so we thought, okay, well, come up with a road map for telling people we should do this. And I do this, and I do this. It’s two distinctly different offerings, but they’re really right.

 

Kat (55:28)

But you have idea generators in case you’re just looking for an idea. Scene maps, timelines, timelines are tough, especially if you’re doing a series and you’re like, what happened, when and why? Wait a minute. How long have they been pregnant? What day is the day? And all these things to keep together. And honestly, $11 a month. And then, of course, you have prices that sort of adjusts if you buy a bigger that’s an awesome amount where you can just play with it and see if it’s right for you. It works on everything. So we will definitely have the links in the show notes. And I think I’m going to have to play around with this just to see, because you’re very right. The character is what drives your story. And then, of course, you need a good plot. That’s interesting. But sometimes our characters get away from us. I really like that character. To make the character builder, you have to make sure that you’re writing in a way that is consistent to whatever you’ve built.

 

Becca (56:32)

Yeah. It’s like a target that you want. Here’s what I’m shooting for. And every once in a while, you can go back and play in my own target. And sometimes where the character takes you is better than what you had planned. It’s a new direction. It’s something that you didn’t anticipate. It’s something totally new that nobody’s ever done before. And so then you adjust your plan, but it’s really good. Just as a way of keeping yourself on track and seeing okay, I’ve gone off course. Is what I’m doing actually good or am I just on track? And if so, then you go back to your roadmap and you just use that to get yourself back and reaction.

 

Kat (57:06)

Absolutely. So we’ll have these links in the Show Notes. Do you guys do any other writers conferences or anything like that? I don’t know if we do live. I want to say live, but are we meeting in person this year? I’m not sure if we’re doing that anymore.

 

Becca (57:21)

Is there a way for people to see you face to face or we do speaking engagements just by request. If somebody has a writers group or they have a conference or they’re doing a workshop and they are looking for writers, they’ll just contact us through email and say, hey, we want somebody to speak at our meeting. What are your prices and what can you teach about? And we have a brochure that we send them that gives them all the information. So we do as many as we can. Awesome.

 

Kat (57:44)

So people can find that probably on writers helping writers.

 

Becca (57:49)

Yeah, there’s information there, and they can just send us an email or leave a comment on any blog post and it’s going to find its way to it.

 

Kat (57:56)

That’s pretty amazing that you guys are still that involved in the blog post. I think that’s also something that we should remember as writers to respond to the people who are commenting. It’s a good yeah.

 

Becca (58:08)

You get to a certain point where it’s not sustainable. I mean, I see some people with the blogs where they’ve got hundreds of comments and you obviously can’t respond to all of those or you need to hire somebody to do it. But I think most people are at a level that they can actually do that, and it’s very often it’s just saying, thanks for reading. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m glad that you found this useful. I mean, it doesn’t have to be like a treatise on whatever they need help with or whatever you have written about. To me, it’s kind of like it’s like a conversation. I mean, you say something and they say something back and you respond. It doesn’t have to be.

 

Kat (58:44)

Yes, exactly. And if you guys pretty much started this by word of mouth, that’s just a good reminder to everyone that it’s always good to build those relationships with your readers. They’re there. They took the time to respond to you. Well, thank you so much. I am so excited for people to hear about these services, if they don’t already know about them and honestly, to collect all of them because I think they’re awesome cross references. But if they want to also go over to one side for riders, we’ll have that link in the Show Notes as well. Sounds like they can just have it all and all of our stores are going to be awesome now. Thanks to Becca and Angela so thank you so much Becca for coming on.

 

Becca (59:25)

I’m so glad. Thanks for having me.

 

Kat (59:41)

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